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Flying Julian Assange back to Australia on a private charter cost taxpayers $781,480.30, plus an extra $47,000 in commercial travel for the two ambassadors who accompanied him, according to documents provided to the Senate.
Foreign minister Penny Wong has confirmed that a private organisation, Wau Holland Foundation (WHF), will be invoiced for the charter flight portion of the bill. The non-profit foundation based in German is an advocate for freedom of information.
A condition of Mr Assange’s bail was that he would be accompanied by High Commissioner Smith to a United States jurisdiction, while Ambassador Rudd has played a central role in bringing the two sides together and travelled to Saipan to ensure arrangements with the Department of Justice proceeded as agreed.
The Australian Government facilitated all arrangements for the flight following an agreement for the costs to be reimbursed by the [WHF]. [DFAT] expects payment to be made by the end of August 2024, which is in line with the terms of the payment schedule.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
07/18/2024 - 16:52
07/18/2024 - 11:04
Driven out by hunting and habitat loss, the birds are now nesting and breeding in a few pockets in England
With their long, spoon-shaped beaks, it is perhaps little surprise that the RSPB has nicknamed the offspring of a spoonbill a “teaspoon”.
It has been a bumper year for the snow-white wading birds, which have been found nesting and breeding in Cambridgeshire for the first time since the 17th century.
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07/18/2024 - 11:00
As the climate crisis causes heavier and more frequent floods across the US, one in four small businesses are one disaster away from shutting down
Alejandra Palma lives in perpetual fear of the next storm.
“We are constantly checking the weather,” said Palma, who co-owns Root Hill Cafe in Brooklyn’s low-lying Gowanus neighborhood. “If we see that there’s a hurricane in Florida, it’s like, oh my God, please let it not come here.”
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07/18/2024 - 10:29
Union says members being ‘kept up at night’ over failure to commit to continue payments at current rate
Farmers are facing a “cliff edge” as the Labour government refuses to commit to maintaining the agriculture budget for England, the president of the National Farmers’ Union has said.
The issue is one of the first pressures Labour is facing over its tight fiscal rules, along with a rebellion on the party’s refusal to remove the two-child benefit cap.
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07/18/2024 - 09:55
Organisers working to ensure safe environment for attenders in October after guerrillas’ warning of disruption
Colombian authorities have insisted it will be safe to attend a UN biodiversity summit in Cali later this year, after a dissident rebel group threatened to disrupt the event.
This week Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, said the UN nature summit Cop16 would “fail”, in a post on X addressed to the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features.
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07/18/2024 - 09:37
Campaigners receive longest ever sentences for non-violent protest after being convicted of conspiracy to cause public nuisance
Five supporters of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign who conspired to cause gridlock on London’s orbital motorway have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms by a judge who told them they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”.
Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the M25 over four days in November 2022.
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07/18/2024 - 07:00
Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication
The corporate predecessor to America’s largest refiner of oil, Marathon Petroleum, explained in a company periodical nearly 50 years ago that global temperature rise potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day cause “widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities”.
This decades-old description of climate breakdown is from a 1977 issue of the magazine Marathon World and is attributed in the article by an unnamed author to several experts including a scientist working for a top US agency.
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07/18/2024 - 06:00
Some scientists want to stop naming new species after public figures, especially as it can threaten an animal’s survival, but others say it can be a helpful conservation tool
When Lady Gaga held a Q&A on Reddit for a 2014 album release, there was one question that took the botany world by storm: what’s it like to have a genus of ferns named after you? “Pretty cool,” she responded, “especially since it’s an asexual fern.”
The 19 fern species of the Gaga genus are found from Bolivia to the south-west US, and were named after the singer partly for their G-A-G-A genetic sequence. “All sexless, judgeless,” she added. “How I wish to be.”
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07/18/2024 - 01:00
A team of scientists are trying to find the cause of what is becoming an increasingly common event – and the answer may be hidden deep in the whales’ skulls
A mass stranding last week that led to the deaths of 77 pilot whales on the Orkney island of Sanday was the largest ever recorded of the species on British shores. Initially, 12 of the animals at Tresness beach were still alive – but sadly did not survive.
The event occurred almost exactly a year after the stranding of 55 pilot whales on Tolsta beach on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides on 16 July 2023. All but one of those whales died. According to Dr Andrew Brownlow, director of the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) at Glasgow University, this may not be a coincidence.
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07/18/2024 - 00:00
A sustainable project aims to repurpose encroacher bush to create building blocks to solve Namibia’s housing crisis
“People think the house would smell because the blocks are made of all-natural products, but it doesn’t smell,” says Kristine Haukongo. “Sometimes, there is a small touch of wood, but otherwise it’s completely odourless.”
Haukongo is the senior cultivator at the research group MycoHab and her job is pretty unusual. She grows oyster mushrooms on chopped-down invasive weeds before the waste is turned into large, solid brown slabs – mycoblocks – that will be used, it’s hoped, to build Namibian homes.
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