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- COLIN PACKHAM
Sydney, Australia
Reuters
Australia's second-most populous state Victoria said on Tuesday that anyone breaking COVID-19 isolation orders will face hefty fines, as high as $A20,000, and that more military personnel will be deployed to fight the spread of the virus.
Australia, once heralded as a global leader in
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- EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Jackson, Mississippi, US
AP
Magnolias and stars. Crosses and guitars. Beer cans and crawfish. A Gulf Coast lighthouse. Elvis Presley and Kermit the Frog. All appear on proposals the general public submitted for a new Mississippi flag.
Mississippi recently retired the last state banner with the Confederate battle
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- ALEJANDRA MOLINA
Los Angeles, US
RNS
Every year in August, tens of thousands of people fill the seats of Angel Stadium in Anaheim, not for baseball, but for the weekend-long Harvest Crusade.
A tradition for more than three decades, the Southern California evangelistic event, founded by Harvest Christian Fellowship Pastor
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- KIM HARRISBERG
Johannesburg, South Africa
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Strict enforcement of South Africa's coronavirus lockdown by police and the army has placed the spotlight on official brutality, a cause of anger among the majority Black population for decades.
Now a coalition of human rights organisations called C19 is seeking to
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- KAREN MATTHEWS
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- YONAT SHIMRON
A life-sized statue of Rev Billy Graham will be installed in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall collection sometime next year, replacing a statue of a white supremacist that both the state of North Carolina and the US House want removed.
Last week, a North Carolina legislative committee approved
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- A CORRESPONDENT
Updated: 12.30pm (AEST)
Managua, Nicaragua
AP
Nicaragua's National Police on Monday declared a fire inside Managua's Metropolitan Cathedral accidental shortly after the Vatican's top diplomatic envoy to the country said he had requested a “serious, careful and transparent investigation".
What the Managua archdiocese and Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes had
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- A CORRESPONDENT
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- EDITH M LEDERER
United Nations
AP
Six years after Islamic State fighters launched an attack on Iraq’s Yazidi minority, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad and human rights lawyer Amal Clooney accused government leaders and the United Nations on Monday of failing to bring the extremists responsible for the genocide to
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- A CORRESPONDENT
Paris, France
AP
Pipe by precious pipe, the organ that once thundered through Notre Dame Cathedral is being taken apart after last year's devastating fire.
The mammoth task of dismantling, cleaning and re-assembling France’s largest musical instrument started Monday and is expected to last nearly four years. It
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- David Adams
Thousands of people are at risk as cases of COVID-19 soar in war-torn Syria, aid agency World Vision has warned.
Graham Strong, acting CEO of World Vision Australia, said the "spectre of COVID-19" was yet "another devastating blow for children and their families in Syria, who have been
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- KELETSO THOBEGA
Gabarone, Uganda
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Dozens of traditional leaders in Botswana will take part in a UN training program that aims to help them tackle high rates of gender-based violence in the country, officials and leaders said last week.
Nearly 70 per cent of women in the southern
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- A CORRESPONDENT
Vatican City
AP
Pope Francis called on politicians to create jobs so that economies can relaunch from the lockdowns imposed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
The Pope, speaking after the traditional Sunday blessing, said that ‘’without work, families and society cannot go forward. Let us pray for this,
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- LAURIE GOERING
London, UK
Thomson Reuters Foundation
From spray parks in water-short Cape Town to heat-reflecting pavements in Tokyo, cities around the world that face worsening heatwaves as the planet warms are rapidly adopting innovations to try to beat increasingly deadly heat.
But ensuring the measures help those most at risk
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- CATE CADELL
Beijing, China
Reuters
Global social distancing rules targeting coronavirus have pushed influenza infection rates to a record low, early figures show, signalling that the measures are having an unprecedented impact on other communicable diseases.
In China, where the earliest wide-scale lockdown measures began, new reports of diseases including
