Good morning! Did you have trouble accessing websites last night? We’ve got all the info on what caused the outages across the globe and what it means for internet security, plus plenty more – including dinosaurs – in today’s morning mail.
Scott Morrison is resisting international pressure to lock in more ambitious climate commitments, declaring Australia opposes setting targets for certain parts of the economy or “false deadlines for phasing out specific energy sources”. Before he sets off for the G7 summit in the UK later this week, the prime minister will use a foreign policy speech in Perth today to say that “ambition alone won’t solve the problem of actually reducing emissions”. Morrison is also expected to address tensions with China, saying Australia is “far from isolated” despite Beijing rolling out a series of trade actions against Australian export sectors over the past year.
There were just three staff members working in the health department’s aged care Covid-19 branch early in the pandemic, freedom of information documents show. The department insists that the branch was “in the process of scaling up resources” at the time in March 2020, but critics say the lack of staff is evidence of being underprepared. Prof Joseph Ibrahim, a leading geriatric medicine specialist, said the level of planning was “quite clearly” insufficient. “I think this is evidence that they didn’t have any real resources dedicated to it.”
Did you have trouble accessing some websites last night? It wasn’t your dodgy internet – a global outage took down websites including Amazon, Reddit and the Guardian as well as the streaming services Twitch, Spotify and Hulu, among many others. The outage was traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly, which began at about 11am, UK time. Security experts have warned the outages should act as a “wakeup call” that internet infrastructure has become dangerously over-centralised and lacks resilience.
Australia
Police in Australia and the US struck a blow against organised crime, resulting in hundreds of arrests. Now, an FBI affidavit reveals how authorities were able to pull it off.
The “deeply concerning” secret jailing of an Australian intelligence officer has sparked a call for a minimum standard of transparency in sensitive national security cases. Witness J was prosecuted and jailed in complete secrecy in 2018.
Almost 12,000 Australians received permission to travel overseas in May, a 10% jump in monthly exemptions, despite the federal government promising to look at tightening exemptions.
Vaccines won’t give you Covid – that’s the official word from health officials who are battling anti-vaccination messages in northern NSW. Several businesses in the Byron Shire have been asking vaccinated customers not to enter their premises under the misapprehension they could shed the virus.
The world
Ratko Mladić, known as the “butcher of Bosnia”, will spend the rest of his life in prison after a UN court dismissed his final appeal against convictions for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Emmanuel Macron was slapped in the face by a man during a walkabout in southern France. The president’s security detail immediately pulled the man to the ground and moved Macron away from the crowd, though the president appeared unhurt.
The US Capitol attack was “planned in plain sight” but intelligence failures left police officers exposed to a violent mob of Trump supporters, a Senate investigation has found.
Police constable Wayne Couzens has pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and rape of Sarah Everard, whose murder initiated a national debate about the safety of women in the UK.
Recommended reads
Picturing western Queensland as the floor of an ocean takes imagination – but it doesn’t take long to find evidence of prehistoric plenty, says Bronwen Scott, who grabbed a hammer and brush and set to work unearthing fossils along Australia’s dinosaur trail. “We had started early to avoid the heat. At morning tea we laid out our hoard of treasures: bones, belemnites and the bulbous blocks of prehistoric poo known as coprolites. Then we grabbed our hammers and brushes and went back for more. Fossil fever had captured us … It is hard to squeeze 100m years of the Earth’s history into a 10-day trip but it was worth the effort.”
In rehearsal studios at Sydney’s Walsh Bay, 16 dancers are recreating the experiences of the traditional owners of the West Australian Kimberley. The work by acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre, called SandSong, is set against the region’s extreme seasons: the dry, the wet, and the build-up to the cold. These stories were once carried in the metaphorical “knowledge dilly bag” of a late stage and screen actress who built a career in classic Australian films such as Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bran Nue Dae. She seeded some ideas for SandSong shortly before her untimely death at 52 in Edinburgh. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the article contains the name of someone who has died.
Nataša Ciabatti moved her grandmother to Melbourne to be closer to family as she entered aged care. They would see each other twice a week, but then Covid hit and aged care facilities went into lockdown. “I started questioning my entire plan of bringing her to Melbourne,” Nataša says. “Will she survive loneliness once again? And to make things worse, I found out some elderly people in private aged care were still waiting to receive their first dose, while the majority were yet to receive their second one. If the elderly were not a priority, the staff taking care of them were not a priority, who was? We take lockdowns so seriously here, how could we take vaccinations so lightly?”
Listen
Today’s Full Story explores love, fear and Covid failures in Australia’s aged care. The Covid outbreak in Melbourne’s aged care sector has multiple cases linked to one facility: Arcare in Maidstone. For young carer Ai-Lin, whose 86-year-old grandmother, Ann, lives at the facility, this outbreak raises serious questions about Australia’s aged care system and the federal government’s vaccination rollout. Laura Murphy-Oates speaks to Ai-Lin about her experience as a young carer living through the pandemic.
Full Story is Guardian Australia’s daily news podcast. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting app.
Sport
Former Sydney Swans champion Adam Goodes has rejected an offer from the AFL to be inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.
Tamara Zidansek and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova are through to the finals of the French Open.
Media roundup
A fully vaccinated couple separated from their newborn baby by quarantine restrictions has called on Queensland Health authorities to help repatriate the family to Melbourne, reports the ABC. Meanwhile the restrictions in Melbourne are expected to ease later this week, according to the Age, but residents will only be able to travel within 25km of their front door.
Coming up
The National Press Club will hear from AMA president Dr Omar Khorshid and more from Scott Morrison’s speech to be delivered in Perth this afternoon.
And if you’ve read this far …
The set of Raphael tapestries on display in Madrid’s royal palace has survived five tumultuous centuries of wars, rebellions, bombs, bullets and fire – only to find itself menaced by the more quotidian threat of opportunistic pigeons and their droppings.