World News

Police have seized art posters from a Canberra music venue and bar that depict world leaders and others, including Donald Trump and Elon Musk, wearing Nazi uniforms, and are investigating whether new federal hate symbol laws were broken.

David Howe, the owner of Dissent Cafe and Bar in Canberra’s CBD, said his venue was shut down for about two hours on Wednesday night as police investigated a complaint about hate imagery relating to five posters in the window.

“I think it’s ludicrous to be perfectly honest,” he told Guardian Australia, describing the works as an “anti-fascist statement” and noting the shut down had caused the cancellation of an interstate band’s performance.

By Thursday afternoon, less than 24 hours later, the posters were placed back in the windows, with the contents covered with the word “CENSORED” in red. Howe said he hoped patrons appreciated their return, describing them “absolutely” as protest art.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office by police investigating the former prince’s dealings with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Photographs of unmarked police cars and plainclothes officers at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate emerged just after 8am on Thursday. Mountbatten-Windsor has been living at Wood Farm for almost three weeks after leaving the Royal Lodge in Windsor.

A statement from Thames Valley police said: “We have today (19/2) arrested a man in his 60s from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk. The man remains in police custody at this time.”

Norfolk police confirmed they were supporting Thames Valley’s investigation.

Speaker is Nina Black... I think I got her name right? Ceisteanna o Cheannairl Freasúra - opposition party.

Transcript:

"I raise the case of Seamus Culleton, the Irish citizen and Kilkenny man who has now spent five months imprisoned in an ICE detention camp in Texas. Yesterday, the country was silenced, listening in as Seamus phoned "Liveline" to speak about his ordeal. Last night, I spoke directly to Seamus's sister Caroline and heard more details about the appalling conditions in which he is detained. There are 72 men packed into a single tent, with filth everywhere and a lack of sanitation, violent guards, alleged strangling, three men dead already, and conditions so brutal that detainees are gambling on who will be the next person to take their own life. They are deprived of fresh air. Seamus has seen the sun only a handful of times in his five months there. He calls it a hell and a concentration camp and he fears for his life.

Seamus is a man who has lived in the US for 17 years. He runs a successful business in Boston and married his American wife, Tiffany Smyth, last April. However, he has now spent more than half of his married life behind barbed wire in this camp. Why? Because he was lifted off the streets by ICE on his way to the shops after he had been kept waiting for his green card following long delays. As Caroline said, it is deeply ironic that one arm of the US Government is processing him for permanent residency while the other has locked him in a cage. To describe his testimony as shocking would be an understatement. It appears beyond doubt to breach American commitments under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

What is the Irish Government doing about this? On his way to Cabinet today, the Taoiseach told the media his officials had contacted Washington. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, has said that consular assistance is being offered, yet I understand that no Government Minister has contacted the family directly. This is an Irish citizen about whose plight the Government has known for some time. Reports of his treatment hit the press days ago with Karlin Lillington's piece in The Irish Times. The Taoiseach must commit now, on the floor of the Dáil, to pulling out every stop and using every diplomatic lever at his disposal to secure Mr. Culleton's release. There can be no delays and no waiting for St. Patrick's Day.

Unfortunately, Mr. Culleton's is not an isolated case. Parliamentary questions from my Labour Party colleague Deputy Duncan Smith reveal that the number of deportations of Irish citizens from the US has quadrupled in a year. We have all read articles about the detention of innocent people like Donna Hughes-Brown, a grandmother who has lived in the US legally since she was 11 years old. Immigration lawyers in America tell us Irish citizens are watching the news and fearing for their own futures. We do not know if any more Irish citizens have been detained in the same manner as Mr. Culleton. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, says it is fewer than 12. Is it 10? Is it 11? In five, weeks, the Taoiseach plans to hand a bowl of shamrock to the man responsible for all this. He plans to offer a symbol of friendship to the man who humiliated Ireland on St. Patrick's Day last year when he snubbed the Taoiseach in favour of a photo op with Conor McGregor. The Taoiseach knows the expression, "with friends like these", what will he do today to ensure the release of Seamus Culleton and to ensure the safety of other Irish citizens being detained by ICE or in fear of being detained by it?"

China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole.

This extends a “flat or falling” trend in China’s CO2 emissions that began in March 2024 and has now lasted for nearly two years.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that, in 2025, emissions from fossil fuels increased by an estimated 0.1%, but this was more than offset by a 7% decline in CO2 from cement.

Other key findings include:

• CO2 emissions fell year-on-year in almost all major sectors in 2025, including transport (3%), power (1.5%) and building materials (7%).
• The key exception was the chemicals industry, where emissions grew 12%.
• Solar power output increased by 43% year-on-year, wind by 14% and nuclear 8%, helping push down coal generation by 1.9%.
• Energy storage capacity grew by a record 75 gigawatts (GW), well ahead of the rise in peak demand of 55GW.
• This means that growth in energy storage capacity and clean-power output topped the increases in peak and total electricity demand, respectively.

Felix Valdés García was nine years old when the revolutionaries came to blow up his trees. It was the verge of the 1970s and his father, Felin, was losing the family farm to Cuba’s 10-year-old communist regime. A push called the Revolutionary Offensive was under way, mobilising the people to sow, clean and harvest 10m tonnes of sugar cane in an effort to make Cuba financially independent. The land needed to be cleared.

For decades the family had nurtured their 800 hectares of rich loam alongside the meandering Sagua River. Eight couples, all related, worked the fields, while Felix and his sister had fruitful adventures among the royal palms, avocado, mango and magnificent ceiba.

“The sappers arrived,” Felix writes in his family memoir. “A gang of agile men who opened holes in the roots and placed charges of dynamite. There was a terrible roar and the trees flew into the sky, defying gravity, then fell shuddering with broken branches.”

Felix is my father-in-law, and I recall this moment when I think about Cuba’s revolution, which is often as the country spirals into tragedy around me.

thediplomat.com/2026/02/chinas…

Palmerston, a rescue cat who became the chief mouser of the Foreign Office, has died in Bermuda.

The cat, adopted from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, retired in 2020 after four years of service in Whitehall.

In February 2025, a post on a popular social media account in Palmerston’s name said he had come out of retirement in order to start work “as feline relations consultant (semi-retired) to the new governor of Bermuda”.

Announcing his death, a post on Palmerston’s X account read: “Palmerston, Diplocat extraordinaire, passed away peacefully on 12 February. “Palmy” was a special member of the government house team in Bermuda, and a much-loved family member, it added.

No indication government will face consequences, sky still blue.

theregister.com/2026/02/06/rom…

Amid questions over how Van Rootselaar was described in alerts, McDonald said police “identified the suspect as they chose to be identified” in public and in social media.

“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately six years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” he said.

I guess the right has their angle now.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Inflation in crisis-prone Argentina accelerated more than expected and for a fifth straight month in January, the country’s statistics agency said Tuesday, a closely watched report whose outdated methodology in recent days stoked political turmoil and created a headache for libertarian President Javier Milei.

Consumer prices rose 2.9% last month compared with December, said the statistics agency known by its Spanish acronym INDEC, largely owing to increases in the prices of food, restaurants, hotels and utility bills.

Economists say that the formula that INDEC used to calculate the inflation rate still underestimates real price rises in a country reeling from Milei’s harsh austerity program that his close ideological ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, has backed with $20 billion and championed as a model for downsizing federal bureaucracy.

US sales are also down, but that Canadian drop is brutal.

Norway, the world’s leading country in EV market share, still managed to maintain high EV market share right after retiring EV incentives, showing the world a path to resilient electrification of the auto industry.

Norwegian auto sales numbers are out for the month of January, and after a record December, there was some nervousness about what could happen once EV incentives were reduced.

Norway has had generous incentives for EVs over the years, including tax exemptions, special access, free parking and the like. These were all meant to work towards Norway’s world-leading goal of 100% EV sales by 2025, a number that it has basically met despite many thinking only a few years ago that it would be impossible.

Many of Norway’s incentives have been pared down over time as EV momentum became inevitable, but the biggest change in a while just went into effect.

EV market share did drop slightly, but by such a small percentage as to be negligible. In January 2025, EVs made up 95.8% of the Norwegian market, and in January 2026, they made up 94%. In December, they were 97%. Needless to say, these are all high numbers.

The actual numbers show that there’s nothing to be concerned about here: In January 2026, only 98 diesel cars were sold across all of Norway, alongside 29 hybrids and 7 petrol-only cars. In a nation with nearly 6 million vehicles on its roads (the plurality of which are now electric). And that actually represents a decrease in fossil car sales from last January, not an increase.

Meanwhile, 2,084 EVs were sold in January – which is also a big drop from December and from last year, but we’ll get to that.

Talks between the US and Iran scheduled for Friday have been brought back from the brink of collapse after the US initially rejected Iran’s request to move them from Turkey to Oman without the presence of a group of Arab states.

Iran’s foreign minister said late on Wednesday that the talks would proceed in Oman after reports of a last-minute effort by Arab states to convince the White House not to walk away from negotiations.

“Nuclear talks with the United States are scheduled to be held in Muscat on about 10am Friday,” wrote the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. “I’m grateful to our Omani brothers for making all necessary arrangements.”

US officials have also indicated the talks in Oman will go forward. They will take place amid a massive buildup of US naval and airpower in the region and appear to be a last chance for Tehran to avert a US strike against the country’s leadership and nuclear programme.

The world is in a “democratic recession” with almost three-quarters of the global population now living under autocratic rulers – levels not seen since the 1980s, according to a new report.

The system underpinning human rights was “in peril”, said Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), with a growing authoritarian wave becoming “the challenge of a generation”, he said.

Speaking before the launch of the human rights watchdog’s annual country-by-country assessment, published on Wednesday, Bolopion said 2025 had been a “tipping point” for rights and freedoms in the US. In just 12 months, the Trump administration has carried out a broad assault on key pillars of American democracy and the global rules-based international order, which the US, despite inconsistencies, helped to establish. It was now working in the “opposite direction”, he said.

Citing Donald Trump’s calls on Republicans this week to “nationalise” the US voting system and revelations that a member of an Emirati royal family was behind a $500m investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, Bolopion said: “Every day you see confirmation of this trend, but when you step back you see an organised, relentless, determined assault on all of the checks and balances that are meant to limit executive power in US democracy – a system designed to limit power and protect rights.”

Another link that's difficult to categorize. There's little opinion here, so this seems like the correct placement.

At any rate, this is roughly an hour going through the history of nukes and treaties, and if you don't already know of Tom Nicholas, you really should.