Australia bushfires: Record number of emergencies in New South Wales - BBC News

Australian authorities say an "unprecedented" number of emergency-level bushfires have threatened the state of New South Wales (NSW).

More than 90 blazes were raging across the state on Friday.

The fires - many in drought-affected areas - were being exacerbated by gusty winds and up to 35C heat.

There are reports of people trapped in their homes in several places, with crew unable to reach them due to the strength of the fires.

"We are in uncharted territory," said Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons, with at least 17 blazes at the highest threat level.

"We have never seen this many fires concurrently at emergency warning level."

Authorities warned some people to seek shelter from fires rather than flee, as it was now "too late to leave".

Emergency warnings were also issued on Friday for bushfires burning in Queensland and Western Australia.

In NSW, the worst-hit state, crews have fought hundreds of fires since September. Last month, two people died while trying to protect their home.

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Last week, one blaze burnt though 2,000 hectares of bush which contained a koala sanctuary. Hundreds of the animals were feared to have died.

The state is in the grip of a long-running drought and authorities warn that many fires will continue to burn unless there is rain.

"We just cannot overstate the profound impact that the drought is having on fire behaviour," Mr Fitzsimmons said.

Officials said spot fires - caused by embers travelling in the wind - were breaking out up to 12km (7.4 miles) from fire fronts. This was three times further than average, they added.

Accessing water in dry areas to fight the fires was also proving challenging, with water-bombing aircraft often being forced to fly long distances.

In some cases bores were being drilled to keep up with demand, authorities said.

"We've very mindful of the scarcity of water and how precious it is but the reality is we can't do firefighting without water," Mr Fitzsimmons said.

Last week, Sydney was blanketed by smoke for days due to fires in Port Macquarie - a region 380km away.

The poor air quality prompted health warnings for those with asthma and other respiratory problems.

Authorities said they were concerned about the severity of the fires ahead of its hottest months, a year after the nation experienced its warmest summer on record.

Australia's fire season risks growing longer and more intense due to climate change, according to scientists.

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2019-11-08 08:12:20Z
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Girls as Young as 12 Were Strip-Searched in Australia - The New York Times

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Girls as Young as 12 Were Strip-Searched in Australia

A police official said, “I’ve got young children, and if I thought that the police felt that they were at risk of doing something wrong, I’d want them strip-searched.”

The Splendor in the Grass music festival in Byron Bay, Australia, in July.Credit...Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

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• Nov. 6, 2019, 3:19 a.m. ET

SYDNEY, Australia — Girls as young as 12 have been strip-searched by the police in Australia’s most populous state in recent years, according to data released on Wednesday, a revelation that spurred new criticism of a tactic frequently used to hunt for drugs at places like music festivals.

The police minister for the state of New South Wales, David Elliott, acknowledged that officers had not always abided by standard procedures in conducting strip searches of children, which are legal if the circumstances are urgent and a parent or guardian is present.

But he said that if drugs were uncovered in the process, parents would nonetheless be happy. “I’ve got young children, and if I thought that the police felt that they were at risk of doing something wrong, I’d want them strip-searched,” he said.

Civil liberties advocates strenuously disagreed. They called the searches an invasive overstep of paternalistic police powers that leave psychological trauma. They also said laws allowing the tactic reflected a zero-tolerance drug policy that is doing more harm than good.

“It’s the only form of legislation that allows an adult to tell a young child to take off all their clothes,” said Samantha Lee, the head of the Police Accountability Practice at the Redfern Legal Center, which obtained the data through a freedom of information request. “If it was any other circumstance, the law would come down hard and heavy.”

From mid-2016 to mid-2019 in New South Wales, a state of 7.5 million people, 122 girls under the age of 18 were strip-searched in places outside police stations. Among them were two 12-year-olds and eight 13-year-olds. Searches of boys were not included in the data.

The new statistics follow months of increasing scrutiny of the growing practice of strip searches by police officers. From mid-2005 to mid-2018, such searches in New South Wales, which includes Sydney, increased almost twentyfold. In about two-thirds of cases, the police did not find illegal drugs.

While strip searches occur in most of Australia, festivals in New South Wales have become infamous for them, with police officers often patrolling with drug detection dogs. But critics said that such searches, which have also occurred at parks and train stations, should not be routinely conducted for the relatively minor offense of drug possession.

“It’s highly likely the vast majority of strip searches are being conducted unlawfully,” said Vicki Sentas, a senior law lecturer at the University of New South Wales who has researched strip-searching statistics.

In an inquiry conducted last month by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, a 16-year-old girl who attended a festival said she was asked to squat and cough in front of a police officer. She had no drugs.

“I could not stop crying. I was completely humiliated,” she said, according to her complaint. An officer who worked at the festival admitted that some of the searches he conducted may have been unlawful.

Mark Speakman, the state’s attorney general, said that strip searches in general were an “important investigative tool” but that the police needed to “get the balance right.”

Tyson Koh, the leader of Keep Sydney Open, a political party critical of strip searches at festivals, said it was time to scrutinize such arguments.

“For the longest time, people have been willing to put up with it because it’s been sold as being for the greater good,” Mr. Koh said. “More people are really starting to question police and government in these situations.”

Ms. Lee, of the Redfern Legal Center, has called for changes to legislation that would specify under which circumstances strip searches could occur and require court orders for children to be searched.

“The problem has been left to fester for many years,” she said. “It’s time the police force caught up.”

Sasha Gattermayr contributed reporting.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/world/australia/strip-search-children-drugs.html

2019-11-06 08:19:00Z
CAIiEGPEksjt0HBJbAtCwUbt6EsqFwgEKg8IACoHCAowjuuKAzCWrzww5oEY

Why Is Australia Trying to Shut Down Climate Activism? - The New York Times

SYDNEY, Australia — One climate activist halted train service by chaining himself to the tracks. Others have glued themselves to busy roads, causing gridlock. And just last week, protesters locked arms to stop people from entering a mining conference before being forcibly dispersed by police officers with pepper spray.

A surge of climate activism is flooding Australia as the country falls behind on its promise to reduce emissions — effectively ignoring the Paris Agreement the Trump administration just abandoned. And Prime Minister Scott Morrison has responded with a threat that’s alarmed scientists and free speech advocates, arguing that the government should outlaw “indulgent and selfish” efforts by environmental groups to rattle businesses with rallies and boycotts.

“The right to protest does not mean there is an unlimited license to disrupt people’s lives,” Mr. Morrison said, adding, “I am very concerned about this new form of progressivism.”

Australia’s “climate wars,” once confined to election campaigns, are now spilling into the streets with some of the biggest protests the country has ever seen. An increasingly outraged public is demanding action while the conservative national government refuses to budge, relying on the police to squelch dissent.

Australia, of course, is not alone. There have been large climate protests around the globe this year. But while many nations seem willing to tolerate the boycott campaigns and civil disobedience, Australia appears determined to suppress the activism, even as heat waves, drought and fires make the country’s vulnerabilities to climate change ever clearer.

Why has Australia become such an intense climate battleground? The forces defining the conflict are wrapped up in national identity, economics and a growing divide between government and public opinion.

Coal-loving politicians

Two years ago, when Mr. Morrison was Australia’s treasurer, he stood up in the House of Representatives with a hunk of black coal in his hand.

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared,” he said. “It won’t hurt you.”

His shiny prop had been shellacked to keep his hands clean, but the point he made then is one he and his governing coalition stand by: Coal is good.

Scientists strongly disagree, warning that the world stands little chance of averting the most dire effects of climate change without ending its reliance on burning coal for energy. But Australia has an emotional and historical connection to it that continues to shape its politics.

The combustible rock was first mentioned in government records soon after British settlement. Now, Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter. It is also a major exporter of natural gas, making for a resource-driven country that is “rich, dumb and getting dumber,” according to one recent headline summarizing the findings of a Harvard study that ranked Australia’s economy 93rd in complexity, behind Kazakhstan, Uganda and Senegal.

Still, defending coal has, for some, come to be equated with defending the country.

Even the opposition center-left Labor Party is hooked, pushing for emissions cuts while continuing to support more coal mining.

“They’re trying to play both sides,” said David Ritter, the chief executive of Greenpeace Australia. “They’re avoiding the work that’s necessary to create a clean energy economy.”

An increasingly angry public

Poll after poll shows growing concern about climate change among Australians of all ages and political persuasions.

In September, a survey by the Australia Institute found that 81 percent of Australians believe climate change will result in more droughts and flooding (up from 78 percent in 2018). Two out of three Australians agreed that the government should plan for an orderly phaseout of coal, while 64 percent said Australia should aim for net-zero emissions by 2050.

And researchers continue to sound the alarm. A paper co-written by an Australian scientist and signed by 11,000 other experts warned on Wednesday of a clear “climate emergency.”

“There is high concern in Australia about climate change, but the political process doesn’t seem to be responding at all,” said David C. Holmes, director of Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub, which focuses on climate literacy.

As a result, he added, “certain segments of the population get very frustrated — more and more of them are willing to come out and march.”

The so-called climate strike in September, part of a global effort led by children, was the largest mass demonstration in Australian history.

It was quickly followed last month by the Extinction Rebellion protests, and then came last week’s anti-mining protests in Melbourne.

“Decades of lobbying have gotten us nowhere,” said Edward Plowman, one of the anti-mining organizers. “So we’re committed to using direct action.”

Protests designed to disrupt

Mr. Morrison is not alone in noticing that disruptive acts have become increasingly common.

Extinction Rebellion encourages activists to get arrested so they can use the courts as a platform to call for climate action.

Some delay their removal and draw the news media by locking or gluing themselves in place. In Brisbane, one activist harnessed himself below a bridge with a “climate emergency” sign.

Other countries have dealt with these tactics through persistent arrests. Over 10 days of protests in London, the police arrested more than 1,700 Extinction Rebellion protesters.

Australia aims to go further. A law passed last year allows the military to break up protests. The Labor government in Queensland is fast-tracking a law to add new fines for protesters who use locking devices to prevent their removal.

Mr. Morrison has also focused on an indirect form of disruption: boycotts or other efforts to pressure businesses, including banks, to cut ties with companies that environmentalists oppose. He said he was looking to prevent boycotts from spreading to any industry with a significant carbon footprint, such as airlines.

Robyn Eckersley, an expert on the politics of climate change at the University of Melbourne, said Mr. Morrison’s statements fit the government’s playbook of deflecting and dividing to preserve policy inaction.

“When they talk about climate change and criticize protesters, they tackle it not in terms of the problem,” she said. “What they do is aim for the person and what they stand for in a way that will appeal to their people, to their base.”

Exaggeration and ignorance

As the climate conflict intensifies, activists and their opponents are fighting hard to win over public opinion — often with misconceptions used to maximize alarm.

Take coal. Reduced coal mining would not hurt the economy as much as people think.

According to the Australia Institute poll from last month, Australians believe coal mining accounts for 12.5 percent of Australia’s economic output and employs 9.3 percent of its work force. “In reality,” the report says, “coal mining employs only 0.4 percent of workers in Australia and is 2.2 percent of Australia’s G.D.P.”

Of the roughly 238,000 jobs that mining provides in Australia, only around 50,000 are tied to coal, according to government figures.

“The government relies on ignorance,” Professor Eckersley said. “It’s a very toxic politics.”

Portrayals of extreme activism are also exaggerated. The vast majority of protesters demanding climate action are not radical disrupters.

They are more like Jemima Grimmer, 13, who asked adults to “respect our futures” at the Sydney climate strike in September, or Vivian Malo, an Aboriginal woman attending last week’s protest in Melbourne, where she said the experience of being pepper-sprayed felt like chemotherapy “on the outside.”

Here in a country rapidly losing its laid-back image, the future of Australia’s climate battles could be seen in her bloodshot eyes as she stood near a line of stone-faced police officers, describing their use of force as “scary.”

“The insatiable drive for resource extraction,” she said. “It’s out of control.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/world/australia/australia-climate-protests-coal.html

2019-11-06 06:42:00Z
CAIiEArjpUzVeAP5f9Sb-Y4KO4kqGAgEKg8IACoHCAowjuuKAzCWrzwwsLGmBg

Australian drought: Farmers and families rejoice in the rain - BBC News

Australia is seeing one of its longest dry spells, and farmers have been particularly hit.

But a series of rainstorms broke out in New South Wales over the weekend, bringing much-needed relief to parched lands.

The country needs much more water to end the current drought, but that didn’t stop some farmers and their families revelling in the rain.

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2019-11-04 07:47:58Z
CBMicGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vbmV3cy9hdi93b3JsZC1hdXN0cmFsaWEtNTAyODYwNTMvYXVzdHJhbGlhbi1kcm91Z2h0LWZhcm1lcnMtYW5kLWZhbWlsaWVzLXJlam9pY2UtaW4tdGhlLXJhaW7SAQA

Australian drought: Farmers and families rejoice in the rain - BBC News

Australia is seeing one of its longest dry spells, and farmers have been particularly hit.

But a series of rainstorms broke out in New South Wales over the weekend, bringing much-needed relief to parched lands.

The country needs much more water to end the current drought, but that didn’t stop some farmers and their families revelling in the rain.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-australia-50286053/australian-drought-farmers-and-families-rejoice-in-the-rain

2019-11-04 07:41:32Z
CBMicGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vbmV3cy9hdi93b3JsZC1hdXN0cmFsaWEtNTAyODYwNTMvYXVzdHJhbGlhbi1kcm91Z2h0LWZhcm1lcnMtYW5kLWZhbWlsaWVzLXJlam9pY2UtaW4tdGhlLXJhaW7SAQA

Australian drought: Farmers and families rejoice in the rain - BBC News

Australia is seeing one of its longest dry spells, and farmers have been particularly hit.

But a series of rainstorms broke out in New South Wales over the weekend, bringing much-needed relief to parched lands.

The country needs much more water to end the current drought, but that didn’t stop some farmers and their families revelling in the rain.

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2019-11-04 07:31:15Z
CBMicGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vbmV3cy9hdi93b3JsZC1hdXN0cmFsaWEtNTAyODYwNTMvYXVzdHJhbGlhbi1kcm91Z2h0LWZhcm1lcnMtYW5kLWZhbWlsaWVzLXJlam9pY2UtaW4tdGhlLXJhaW7SAQA

Australian drought: Farmers and families rejoice in the rain - BBC News

Australia is seeing one of its longest dry spells, and farmers have been particularly hit.

But a series of rainstorms broke out in New South Wales over the weekend, bringing much-needed relief to parched lands.

The country needs much more water to end the current drought, but that didn’t stop some farmers and their families revelling in the rain.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-australia-50286053/australian-drought-farmers-and-families-rejoice-in-the-rain

2019-11-04 07:01:09Z
CBMicGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vbmV3cy9hdi93b3JsZC1hdXN0cmFsaWEtNTAyODYwNTMvYXVzdHJhbGlhbi1kcm91Z2h0LWZhcm1lcnMtYW5kLWZhbWlsaWVzLXJlam9pY2UtaW4tdGhlLXJhaW7SAQA