Author: Morgan

Eight skydivers leapt out of a light plane minutes before it crashed and killed experienced pilot Paul Smith.

The light plane crash landed in thick bush near to Moruya airport on NSW’s south coast on Saturday afternoon, with Smith the only remaining occupant of the aircraft.

The 54-year-old pilot and skydiving instructor died at the scene.

“He was a very well-respected, very experienced, and very well-liked local resident,” Det Insp Justin Marks told reporters on Sunday.

“The death or sudden death of anyone in a small community is very tragic.”

Police are preparing a report for the coroner.

The crash happened roughly two minutes after the skydivers exited the plane at roughly 14,000 feet to start their descent. All eight landed safely within the airport grounds.

The chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Angus Mitchell, said investigators were yet to speak to the skydivers but other witnesses had observed “unusual sounds and flight pattern” shortly before the accident.

Investigators were also seeking information on weather and conditions from the Bureau of Meteorology.

Mitchell said the plane, built around 1980, was subject to a “fairly substantive maintenance check” prior to being brought into Australia about six weeks earlier and had done a number of flights before the incident.

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He said the investigation was still in its early stages and a preliminary report could be expected within eight weeks.

Smith had more than 20 years’ flying experience and piloted more that 20,000 supervised parachuting jumps. He was awarded the Australian Parachute Federation’s highest honour last year – the master of sport parachuting – for his achievements and contributions to the sport.

For almost four decades Nick Lowles has been trying to push back against the far right. First with the research magazine Searchlight and later with the campaigning organisation Hope Not Hate that has helped foil bomb and murder plots, as well as working in communities to combat far-right propaganda.

He tells Helen Pidd about growing up in the 1970s with the National Front on the rise and how in the 1980s he helped infiltrate organisations such as the BNP and Combat 18. More recently Hope Not Hate’s work helped lead to Tommy Robinson being jailed. Through it all Lowles has had death threats and abuse.

After the huge far-right march in central London, he says, this is an exceptionally dangerous moment, but we must remember that the majority of people are still in favour of our multicultural society. “The far right have their sights on our multicultural society, the idea: can people of different faiths, different religions, different backgrounds live together peacefully and happily? Things that we never thought would be contested territory 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago, are now contested.”

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New Zealand’s fastest bird, capable of flying 200km/h in its pursuit of prey, has been crowned bird of the year – a long-running annual competition that has previously been a lightning rod for scandal and hijinks.

The threatened kārearea is New Zealand’s only falcon. It is small and tawny, with impressive talons and large dark eyes. Kārearea are powerful aerial hunters and watch other birds, lizards or small mammals – sometimes larger than themselves – from a high vantage point before diving at high speed to snatch their prey.

“The kārearea is just a stunning bird,” Emma Blackburn, the chair of the Karearea Falcon Trust said. “It’s our only remaining endemic raptor and a really important part of our ecosystem.”

There are between roughly 5,000 to 8,000 kārearea left, according to the Department of Conservation. They live in forests around the country and nest on the ground, typically under boulders or fallen trees. The birds are “very vulnerable” to predation by introduced mammals such as cats, hedgehogs and stoats who feast on their ground-dwelling eggs, Blackburn said.

Habitat loss through tree logging and the conversion of tussocked grassland into pasture has also likely reduced populations. Meanwhile, the birds sometimes fly into power lines, buildings and nets over vines and trees, Blackburn said.

The bird of the year competition – run by conservation group Forest and Bird – was scandal-free this year but New Zealanders still took to social media to plug their preferred candidates. Each of the 73 contenders had their own campaign manager.

The contest was launched 20 years ago to raise awareness about the plight of New Zealand’s native birds, many of which are threatened, on the brink of extinction or already extinct due to the introduction of pests, human activity and declining habitats.

New Zealand’s only native mammals are bats and marine species, putting the spotlight on its birds, which are beloved – and often rare.

The two-week competition attracted more than 75,000 verified votes from 123 countries. The kārearea, which also won in 2012, joins last year’s winner, the hoiho and the kākāpō as the only birds to have taken out the poll twice.

New Zealand’s only alpine parrot, the cheeky kea came second, while the tiny karure, a small “goth” black robin found only on New Zealand’s Chatham Island came third.

Over the years, the contest has been subject to scandal, from crowning a bat the winner in 2021, to accusations of Russian interference in 2019, and claims Australians attempted to rig the contest in favour of the shag in 2018.

In 2023, British-American comedian and talkshow host John Oliver ran a global campaign for the threatened pūteketeke – a grunting, puking bird with an unusual repertoire of mating rituals. His efforts were rewarded when the pūteketeke was crowned the 2023 winner.

“Behind the memes and mayhem is a serious message,” said Nicola Toki, Forest and Bird’s chief executive.

“This year’s top 10 [birds] matches the statistics exactly – 80% of them are in trouble,” she said, adding climate change, habitat loss and predators are pushing species towards extinction.

“People fall in love with these birds – and once they know their stories, they care, they advocate and they act.”

The state of Oregon filed a lawsuit in federal court on Sunday seeking to block the deployment of 200 national guard troops to Portland, arguing Donald Trump’s characterization of the peaceful city as “war ravaged” is “pure fiction”.

Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, said at a news conference that she had been notified by the Pentagon that the US president had seized control of the state’s reservists, claiming authority granted to him to suppress “rebellion” or lawlessness.

“When the president and I spoke yesterday,” Kotek said, “I told him in very plain language that there is no insurrection, or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland.”

A Pentagon memorandum dated Sunday and signed by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, obtained by the Washington Post, said: “200 members of the Oregon National Guard will be called into Federal service effective immediately for a period of 60 days.”

Trump’s action, in asserting federal control of the state’s national guard troops, is clearly “unlawful”, Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, said, given that it was not taken in response to a foreign invasion or mass anarchy, but one small protest by dozens of activists outside a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland.

“Let’s be clear, local law enforcement has this under control,” Kotek, said. “We have free speech demonstrations that are happening near one federal facility. Portland police is actively engaged in managing those, with the federal folks a the facility, and when people cross the line, there’s unlawful activity, people are being held accountable.”

The state’s lawsuit notes that the president’s false claims about the Ice facility being “under siege”, and life for Portland resident being “like living in Hell”, appear to be based on a single Fox News report broadcast earlier this month, which mixed social media video from a conservative journalist of the current protest with video of much larger protests in 2020, in another part of the city.

“The problem is the president is using social media to inform his views,” the attorney general said, either because he was trying to mislead the public intentionally, or is “relying on social media gossip” about the actual conditions in a US city.

Kotek added that she had tried to inform Trump, during a phone conversation on Saturday, that he had been badly misled about current conditions in Portland, which is once again a vibrant and peaceful city a half-decade on from the pandemic-era racial justice protests.

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“What I said to the president is: ‘I don’t understand what information you have.’ When he says to me that the federal courthouse is under attack, that is absolutely not true,” Kotek said. Video featured in the recent Fox News report on Portland did show images of a 2020 protest outside the federal courthouse in downtown Portland that were wrongly described as recorded during the current anti-Ice protest.

“Some demonstrations happening at one federal facility, that are being managed on a regular basis by local law enforcement, if that is the only issue he’s brining up, he has been given bad information,” Kotek said.

“We cannot be looking at footage from 2020 and assume that that is the case today in Portland.”

Pet Shop Boys and The Prodigy helped the Isle of Wight music festival increase its profits last year, generating a £2.6m dividend for its parent company, a division of the events industry’s biggest player, Live Nation.

In a year when many smaller music festivals lost money or were cancelled amid wet weather and soaring costs, the summer showpiece on the island, a ferry ride across the Solent from England’s southern coast, managed to prosper.

Despite a 4.5% decline in attendance to just under 144,000, the 2024 festival made a profit of £3.4m. That was an increase from £2.8m the year before, when Pulp and The Chemical Brothers headlined the Friday and Saturday night lineups.

The 2026 headliners will be The Cure, Lewis Capaldi and Calvin Harris, organisers announced on Monday.

The festival began in 1968 and achieved worldwide fame – and notoriety – two years later when an estimated 600,000 people descended on an island whose permanent population numbered just 100,000.

The 1970 lineup featured the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull and Sly and the Family Stone, as well as a set by Jimi Hendrix just weeks before his death, in which he played a heavily distorted version of God Save the Queen.

One of the attenders that year was John Giddings, who has run the festival since 2002. Since 2017 the festival has been part of a sprawling corporate network of UK live music events all ultimately owned by the vast and sometimes controversial US events and ticketing business Live Nation.

Accounts filed at Companies House show that Isle of Wight Festival Ltd paid a £2.6m dividend, up from £1.9m in 2023, to its immediate parent, UK Festival Holdings Ltd, a holding company that also runs festivals such as Reading.

That company is too small to publish detailed accounts. The firm immediately above it in the ownership chain, LN-Gaiety Holdings Ltd, is a conduit for dividends from Live Nation’s UK events. LN-Gaiety Holdings has reported nearly £34m in dividend income over the past two years for which accounts are available.

In 2023 it paid out nearly £49m in dividends to LNGH Ireland Ltd, a holding company in Ireland, where corporation tax rates are lower than in the UK.

Los Angeles-based Live Nation, which also owns Ticketmaster, bought the Isle of Wight festival in 2017 during a period of expansion. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) cleared the deal, saying the event was not a rival to the company’s portfolio of about 20 UK festivals including Reading, Leeds and Download.

Live Nation is facing a lawsuit in the US for allegedly allowing ticket touts to make millions of dollars at fans’ expense. It is also the subject of legal action from the US department of justice over an alleged dominance of the live events industry that “suffocates” competition at the expense of fans.

In the UK, the competition watchdog has forced Live Nation’s subsidiary Ticketmaster to change how it advertises concert tickets, including ending “misleading” information about the seats they are buying, after a fan backlash over its handling of the Oasis reunion tour.

Tropical Storm Imelda formed on Sunday and was expected to become a hurricane on a forecast track that could take it away from the US east coast in the coming days. The storm was causing disruption in the Bahamas and Cuba on Sunday, and a tropical storm watch was posted in parts of Florida.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Humberto weakened very slightly but remained a strong category 4 storm in the Atlantic, threatening Bermuda.

At about 2pm ET, Imelda was located about 95 miles (152.89km) west-north-west of the Central Bahamas and about 370 miles (595.46km) south-east of Cape Canaveral in Brevard county, Florida, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said. It was headed north at 7mph (11kph) and its maximum sustained winds were 40mph (65kph).

The center said the system was expected to move across the central and northwestern Bahamas on Sunday and turn east-northeastward, away from the southeastern US, by the middle of the week.

A tropical storm watch was in effect for the east coast of Florida from the Palm Beach-Martin county line to the Flagler-Volusia county line, the center said, urging residents along the south-east US coast to monitor the system. A tropical storm watch means tropical storm conditions are possible within 48 hours.

South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, urged people to monitor the weather closely and stay alert. And in North Carolina, governor Josh Stein declared a state of emergency in advance of the system.

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The storm could bring high winds and heavy rain, which could produce flooding, he said. The state was prepositioning search and rescue crews over the weekend.

Humberto weakened slightly on Sunday but still had maximum powerful sustained winds of 150mph (240kph), according to the hurricane center, making it a Category 4 hurricane. It was located about 535 miles (861km) south of Bermuda and was moving west-north-west at 13mph (20kph).

A tropical storm watch could be required in Bermuda later in the day, forecasters said, and swells could reach the US east coast on Monday.

There were rains in the Dominican Republic on Friday, leading authorities to evacuate hundreds of people and declare a red alert in five provinces.

Swells generated by Tropical Storm Narda, formerly a hurricane, were affecting coastal Mexico and Baja California Sur, forecasters said, and life-threatening surf and rip current conditions are possible in southern California. It was, however, rapidly weakening and was expected to become post-tropical on Sunday evening or Monday.

Police have arrested protesters on suspicion of supporting the banned group Palestine Action outside the Labour party conference in Liverpool.

About 100 people gathered silently on Sunday to hold signs reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, according to protest organisation Defend Our Juries, who said there were dozens of arrests.

Palestine Action was banned as a terror organisation in July after it claimed responsibility for an action in which two planes were damaged at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire the previous month.

A Merseyside police spokesperson said: “We can confirm that officers are in attendance at a Defend Our Juries protest near to The Wheel of Liverpool this afternoon, Sunday 28 September.

“Some of the people in attendance have displayed material in support of Palestine Action.

“Officers are in the process of making arrests on suspicion of wearing/carrying an article supporting a proscribed organisation.”

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said: “We’ve come to remind everyone that the Labour party is in breach of its duty to act to prevent genocide under international law.

“Instead it made the cowardly decision to ban the direct action group that was trying to prevent genocide.

“Labour members and trades unions are overwhelmingly against their party’s complicity in genocide and the ban on Palestine Action.

“Yet party officials have shut down all the debates that members wanted to have on these issues during their conference.

“Labour also reneged on Jack Straw’s promise that the Terrorism Act he introduced would never be used against a domestic protest group.”

Earlier this week the Guardian reported that more than 1,600 people have been arrested and 138 of them charged for allegedly expressing support for Palestine Action since the ban came into force on 5 July.

The proscription makes membership of the group, or inviting support for it, a criminal offence under the Terrorism Act, carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.

It is the first time a direct action protest group has been classified as a terrorist organisation.

One of the protesters, Keith Hackett, 71, said: “I’m risking arrest today under terrorism legislation because as a former Labour councillor in Liverpool I am deeply ashamed of how Labour are acting.

“If they want to start turning the party around and win back the support they have lost they need to stop their complicity in this genocide and end the ban on Palestine Action.”

Tayo Aluko, 63, an actor, writer and singer from Liverpool, said: “This government, like all authoritarian regimes in modern times, wants to plant fear in the citizens so that it can continue to let their friends and paymasters get away with genocide.

“I feel I have no choice but to stand up and be counted.”

Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International UK’s director of communications and campaigns, said: “These arrests should not be happening.

“It’s clearly both ridiculous and seriously disproportionate for police to be targeting and arresting people for sitting down, quietly holding a sign.

“There are serious human rights concerns around not only the proscription of Palestine Action, but also the chilling consequences this decision has had.”

Andy Burnham has said there is a climate of fear in Labour and it needs to change, as he defended his actions in “launching a debate” about the future of the party – seen by many as a challenge to Keir Starmer.

The Greater Manchester mayor has prompted outrage within No 10 and among cabinet ministers after he said last week that many MPs had urged him to run as Labour leader and questioned the government’s economic approach.

No 10 had hoped Burnham would stop criticising the party at its Liverpool conference, with Starmer warning that navel-gazing and introspection was not the way to fight a generational battle for the soul of the country against Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Alan Johnson, a former Labour cabinet minister, told the BBC that his advice for Burnham was: “Go and find a television camera, stand in front of it and say ‘I have no intention of standing against the elected leader of our party’.”

However, Burnham defended his actions and continued his criticisms of Labour at a fringe event on Sunday, saying: “I’ve been accused of all things in the last week, as you can probably see.

“I’ve done nothing more than launch a debate. And what I would say to those who say that I’m speaking out purely for my own ambition, I can say to you all tonight I am speaking out for the thousands of councillors here at this conference who are worried about going to those doorsteps next May, speaking for the members of the Senedd who, again, are working hard to keep Wales Labour, that’s what we want to do next year.

“And, of course, members of the Scottish parliament as well, who want a stronger story about Labour to go to those doorsteps. I’m speaking out for the millions of good people around Britain who want a more hopeful direction for the country.”

He called for Labour to end a “climate of fear” in the party, saying there should be more room for debate and people should be able to express a broader range of views.

“One thing I am worried about, and I think we do need to debate at this conference in my view, is how can you have an open debate about all of those things if there’s too much of a climate of fear within our party and the way the party is being run,” he said.

He criticised a situation where “a party member is suspended for liking a tweet by another political party, or a member of parliament loses the whip for trying to protect disability benefits”.

He added: “If that is the way we’re doing things, where debate is being closed down, that to me is what we’ve got to change.”

He also spoke out against demands for “simplistic statements of loyalty”, saying: “If that closes down the debate we need, I think it’s at risk of underestimating the peril the party is in as we get to the polls next May.”

Senior party figures have been privately furious with Burnham, particularly over comments questioning the economic approach of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” he said in an interview with the New Statesman.

They last week compared the Greater Manchester mayor’s attitude to the cavalier approach taken by the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss, in a sign of how low relations between No 10 and Burnham have plunged.

Speaking at a different fringe event, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, called for the party “to get behind our team captain”, but also offered a coded attack of his own, saying the government should be more open to debate and internal criticism.

“We would have avoided some of the mistakes of the past year if we’d listened to our MPs. We’ve got to have the humility to listen,” he said.

“We do have to be able to create space for us to engage in a battle of ideas,” Streeting added. “Especially when things are this tough, and where we’ve got an existential fight on our hands against Reform at the next general election, we have to be self-confident in our ideas, our vision and direction as government ministers, and be open to challenge, and open to critique and engage in the battle of ideas ourselves.”

Last week, UK borrowing costs surged to the highest level since early September, in what may have been market unease at Burnham’s comments. One official said the rise was equivalent to half of what it would cost to scrap the two-child benefit limit, which Burnham has called for.

Starmer is also understood to be furious at Burnham’s admission, in several interviews, that he would seek to challenge the prime minister for the leadership if there was a path to do so.

Burnham would need a Westminster seat to challenge for the leadership and there is currently no vacancy. But he is seen by a number of Labour MPs as an opportunity for a change in economic strategy and a more robust challenger to Reform UK.

Israel has pressed on with its offensive in Gaza as Donald Trump claimed again to be on the brink of a breakthrough in negotiations for a ceasefire in the devastated territory.

Witnesses and medics said Israeli tanks were advancing through central and western neighbourhoods of Gaza City towards crowded coastal areas where hundreds of thousands of people are sheltering.

The Israeli military launched a long-threatened ground offensive in the north of Gaza 12 days ago after weeks of intensifying strikes on Gaza City, the biggest urban centre not under its control.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have complied with repeated orders to evacuate but many others have been unable to flee, often because they are ill, disabled, too frail or unable to afford expensive transport to safer areas.

The Israel military said the air force had struck 140 military targets across Gaza in the last 24 hours, including militants and what it described as military infrastructure.

At least five people were killed in an airstrike in the Nasser area of Gaza City, local health authorities said. Medics reported 16 more deaths in strikes on homes in central Gaza, bringing Sunday’s death toll to at least 21. The Gaza health ministry said later that Israeli fire had killed at least 77 people in the previous 24 hours.

Hamas’s armed wing urged the Israeli military to halt airstrikes temporarily and withdraw from part of Gaza City on Sunday to allow it to locate two Israeli hostages it said it had lost contact with there.

“The lives of the two prisoners are in real danger and [Israeli] forces must immediately withdraw … and halt aerial operations for 24 hours … to allow attempts to rescue the prisoners,” the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement.

There was no immediate response from Israel, where Hamas has previously been accused of exploiting the hostages to wage “psychological warfare”.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is expected to visit the White House on Monday, has not yet reacted to Trump’s recent announcements suggesting that a peace deal is imminent. Hamas has said it has not received any new proposals.

Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Sunday: “We have a real chance for GREATNESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, ALL ARE ON BOARD FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL, FIRST TIME EVER. WE WILL GET IT DONE!!!”

He promised at the start of his second term in office a quick end to the war but eight months later a resolution remains elusive.

Speaking at the UN on Friday, Netanyahu vowed to “finish the job” against Hamas, days after Britain, France and other western powers recognised a state of Palestine.

Trump has floated a 21-point proposal for an immediate ceasefire that includes the release of all hostages within 48 hours, the disarmament of Hamas, freedom for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, according to news reports in the US and Israel.

A Hamas official said the group had been briefed on the plan but had yet to receive an official offer from Egyptian and Qatari mediators.

Israel is likely to come under new international pressure in the coming days as an international aid flotilla nears its territorial waters. The flotilla stopped for several days in Greek waters for repairs but set sail on Sunday for Gaza, where activists including Greta Thunberg intend to challenge Israel’s naval blockade and deliver aid to the Palestinian territory.

On Sunday Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani,repeated a proposal made last week for the flotilla to take the aid to Cyprus for eventual distribution in Gaza by the Roman Catholic church. The flotilla, which was struck in international waters off Crete on Wednesday by drones armed with stun grenades and irritants, rejected the suggestion.

Israel has previously said it will use any means to prevent the boats from reaching Gaza.

The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 incursion into Israel during which militants killed 1,219 people, mostly civilians. Of the 251 people abducted during the attack, 47 are still held in Gaza, including 25 whom the Israeli military says are dead.

The ensuing Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed more than 66,000 people, mostly civilians, and injured more than 160,000. Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble and famine has been declared in parts of its some northern areas.

In the occupied West Bank on Sunday, Israeli security forces shot dead an alleged attacker in a car-ramming incident in which an Israeli man was seriously injured at a junction near Nablus. Hamas praised the attack.

Violence has surged in the West Bank, which alongside Gaza and East Jerusalem was captured by Israel in the six-day war in 1967 and which the Palestinians want as their future state.