HellsBelle

Almost 40 million sq kilometres of ocean around south-east Asia and the Pacific – an area five times the size of Australia – was engulfed in a marine heatwave in 2024, a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report has revealed.

WMO scientists said the record heat – on land and in the ocean – was mostly driven by the climate crisis and coincided with a string of extreme weather events, from deadly landslides in the Philippines to floods in Australia and rapid glacier loss in Indonesia.

Satellite measurements showed sea levels were rising almost 4mm per year – “significantly higher” than the global average of 3.5mm, the report said.

Australian federal and state governments have approved a wave of fossil fuel developments over the past six weeks, sparking accusations Anthony Albanese and other leaders are “gaslighting” the public – claiming they take the climate crisis seriously while pushing up emissions.

Peter Dunn, a former commissioner of emergency services for the Australian Capital Territory, says the Albanese government is “trashing its integrity” and has “lost their licence to lead, days after the election”.

Dunn, a member of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action who lived through the 2003 Canberra bushfires and the catastrophic 2019 fires at Lake Conjola on the New South Wales south coast, is furious about the government’s decision to greenlight Woodside’s extension of the North West Shelf gas processing plant.

“I’m bloody angry, bitterly disappointed, and I see a government that I was really hopeful for doing great things trashing its integrity,” he says.

The US supreme court made it easier on Thursday for people from majority backgrounds such as white or straight individuals to pursue claims alleging workplace “reverse discrimination”, reviving the case of an Ohio woman who claimed that she did not get a promotion at a state agency because she is heterosexual.

The justices, in a 9-0 ruling, threw out a lower court‘s decision rejecting a civil rights lawsuit by the plaintiff, Marlean Ames, against her employer, Ohio’s department of youth services.

Ames argued that she was denied a promotion within the Ohio department of youth services because she is heterosexual. A lesbian was hired for the job instead, and Ames was eventually demoted to a lower position with lower pay, with a gay man taking her previous role.

A10-year-old girl showed up for a routine check-in about her immigration case – and agents cuffed and detained her mother on the spot. A 14-year-old boy was shaken out of bed at 6am when plainclothes officers showed up, unannounced, at his door for what the agents claimed was a “wellness check”. A 17-year-old girl has been detained for months with her newborn baby due to new restrictions on who can sponsor unaccompanied minor immigrants.

Hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children have arrived at the US southern border in recent years, seeking refuge. The Trump administration is now targeting them – and their caregivers – for deportation.

In the past few months, the administration has enacted a series of punitive policies to expedite the removal of unaccompanied minors and strip them of legal representation. It has attempted to tear down the basic rights and protections for children under the government’s care, while simultaneously issuing new restrictions on who can take custody of them – leaving children to languish in detention. In several troubling cases across the US, advocates say the children are being used as “bait” to arrest and deport the adults around them.

Taken together, advocates and lawyers say the changes represent a terrifying new strategy in the government’s crackdown on immigrants, designed to instill fear and chaos in families.

Tataco grimaces and braces for impact as his canoe hurtles towards the banks of Brazil’s Jordan River into a blizzard of branches, vines and leaves. In the bow of the boat, his Indigenous comrade, Damë Matis, shields his face with his arms as he is swallowed by the vegetation, twigs gouging his muscular shoulders.

“We’ll get there,” Tataco says with his trademark bonhomie, despite the countless natural obstacles blocking the way. “It’s just going to take us a little while.”

The group’s destination is the south-eastern tip of Brazil’s second-largest Indigenous territory – the Javari valley – a colossal wilderness the size of Scotland, where the British journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira vanished three years ago this week, on 5 June 2022.

Since Pereira’s death, his collaborators have dramatically stepped up Evu’s (an Indigenous patrol group) activities, working tirelessly to train Indigenous activists to protect the Javari’s rainforests and rivers from illegal poachers, fishers, miners and drug traffickers.

NEWLY UNSEALED RECORDS provide new details about the Trump administration’s failed effort this spring to obtain a search warrant for an Instagram account run by student protesters at Columbia University.

The FBI and federal prosecutors sought a sweeping warrant, the records show, that would have identified the people who ran the account along with every user who had interacted with it since January 2024.

Between March 15 and April 14, the FBI and the Department of Justice filed multiple search warrant applications and appeared numerous times before two different judges in Manhattan federal court as part of an investigation into Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, a student group. A magistrate judge denied the application three times in March, a decision which a district court judge later affirmed in April.

Gaza has become worse than hell on earth, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross has told the BBC.

In an interview at the ICRC's headquarters in Geneva, the organisation's president Mirjana Spoljaric said "humanity is failing" as it watched the horrors of the Gaza war.

Speaking in a room close to a case displaying the ICRC's three Nobel Peace Prizes, I asked Ms Spoljaric about remarks she made in April, that Gaza was "hell on earth", and if anything had happened since to change her mind.

"It has become worse… We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It's surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.

When The Goonies was first released in 1985, the swashbuckling kids’ adventure became a resounding box office hit. Audiences were charmed by Mikey (Sean Astin), Data (Ke Huy Quan), Chunk (Jeff Cohen) and Mouth’s (Corey Feldman) rambunctious personalities as the self-styled Goonies, who were desperately trying to save their homes in Astoria, Oregon, from being sold off by a property development company.

Steven Spielberg is rumoured to have come up with the idea for The Goonies when he wondered what kids got up to on rainy days. Apparently the answer was daring exploits worthy of Indiana Jones involving a dastardly family of ex-cons and a hidden shipwreck heaving with jewels. It all combined to make a touching film about the power of friendship that was also rip-roaring good fun.

Forty years later, the franchise lives on with the announcement by Warner Bros earlier this year that a sequel is finally in the works. We look back with the cast and crew to find out how the film has endured as a cult classic.

The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has assembled a “rogues’ gallery of extremists, conspiracy theorists and C-team political operatives” to promote Donald Trump’s crackdown on non-government organisations (NGOs), a congressional watchdog has claimed.

The House of Representatives’ Delivering on Government Efficiency (Doge) subcommittee, chaired by Greene, is due to hold a hearing on Wednesday entitled “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild”.

The subcommittee said in a press release that the hearing will “expose” the use of federal funds by NGOs to advance “radical” agendas such as “open borders and the Green New Deal scam”. It frames its work as an investigation of the alleged funneling of taxpayer dollars to politically motivated groups while “lining the pockets of their friends and allies”.

In Denmark, we like to think of ourselves as being in the vanguard of freedom of expression. We were the first country in the world to legalise pornography. We insisted on the right to publish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Rather than marginalise so-called rightwing populists in parliament, we invited them in to political cooperation. We pride ourselves on being unafraid of controversy and we’re good at making authorities who try to tell us what to do – and especially what not to do – look ridiculous.

Danes also like to think of our country as a role model for democracy. As such, the national elections for children aged 13 to 16 are a cherished tradition, considered a part of civic education and a preparation for democratic participation. All schools are invited to take part in the exercise, which is held every other year. Students debate 20 issues for three weeks before casting votes for the parties that are also eligible to stand in real general elections.

Over the past few weeks, however, the national school elections have been dragged into controversy after the decision to ban one theme from the list of issues for the 2026 vote: the question of Palestine.

Should Denmark recognise Palestine as a sovereign state? This specific question is arguably a defining issue of our time and one that mobilises political engagement among young voters. Excluding it is a remarkable act, which has been attacked from the left and right of the political spectrum. This is the opposite of properly preparing young people for Danish democracy, critics say, and goes against what we as a nation stand for.

Officers were also urged to increase apprehensions and think up tactics to “push the envelope” one email said, with staff encouraged to come up with new ways of increasing arrests and suggesting them to superiors.

“If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” another message said.

The instructions not only mark a further harshening of attitude and language by the Trump administration in its efforts to fulfill election promises of “mass deportation” but also indicate another escalation in efforts, by being on the lookout for undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.

The smell of smoke hung over the Minneapolis-St. Paul area on Tuesday morning despite rain that obscured the full measure of the dirty air. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency issued an alert for almost the entire state into Wednesday, but the Twin Cities area got the worst of it in the Midwest on Tuesday.

“As the smoke continues to move across the state Tuesday, air quality will slowly improve from northwest to southeast for the remainder of the alert area,” the agency said. “The smoke is expected to leave the state by Wednesday at noon.”

Canada’s wildfires are so large and intense that the smoke is even reaching Europe, where it is causing hazy skies but isn’t expected to affect surface-air quality, according the European climate service Copernicus.

“That’s really an indicator of how intense these fires are, that they can deliver smoke,” high enough that they can be carried so far on jet streams, said Mark Parrington, senior scientist at the service.