Palaszczuk resigns as Queensland premier

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has paid tribute to Annastacia Palaszczuk, who today announced her resignation as Queensland premier.

In a statement, the prime minister said that Palaszczuk “retires as a Labor hero, a three time election winner, Australia’s longest serving female premier and – above all else – a champion for Queenslanders.”

Albanese said Palaszczuk’s legacy would lie in “the strength of her Labor convictions”, citing housing, hospital funding and progress on workers’ rights.

“Annastacia’s leadership brought Queensland Labor back from the political brink and on so many occasions since then her government has put Queensland in a position of national leadership.

“At national cabinet, Annastacia was a Queenslander first, second and third, but her experience, her leadership and her ability to find common ground so often helped drive action across the Commonwealth,” Albanese said.

“Annastacia leaves office rightly proud of all she has achieved and – as ever – thinking of what is best for Queensland and its future. I wish her all the very best for her future.”

A Philippine coastguard official on Sunday accused China of ramming and firing water cannons at its resupply vessels in the South China Sea, with one of the ships suffering “serious engine damage”.

Jay Tarriela said on the social media platform X that the Chinese coastguard “water cannoned” two Philippine resupply vessels in the South China Sea on Sunday morning.

Egyptians head to the polls on Sunday for a presidential election in which Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is poised to win a third term in power as the country grapples with an economic crisis and a war on its border with Gaza.

Victory would hand Sisi a six-year term in which immediate priorities would be taming near-record inflation, managing a chronic foreign currency shortage and preventing spillover from the conflict between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

Voting is spread over three days, with results due to be announced on December 18.

Critics see the election as a sham after a decade-long crackdown on dissent. The government’s media body has called it a step towards political pluralism.

Three candidates qualified to stand against Sisi in the election, none of them high-profile figures. The most prominent potential challenger halted his run in October, saying officials and thugs had targeted his supporters – accusations dismissed by the national election authority.

Authorities and commentators on tightly controlled local media have been urging Egyptians to turn out to vote, though some people said they were unaware when the election was taking place in the days before the poll. Others said voting would make little difference.

“I was aware there are elections happening but I had no idea when. I only knew that because of the massive Sisi campaigns around the streets,” said Aya Mohamed, a 35-year-old marketing executive.

“I feel indifferent about the elections because there will be no real change,” she said.

As army chief, Sisi led the 2013 ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, before being elected to the presidency the following year with 97 per cent of the vote.

Since then, he has overseen a crackdown that has swept up liberal and leftist activists as well as Islamists and that rights groups say has seen tens of thousands jailed. He was re-elected in 2018, again with 97 per cent.

Sisi and his backers say the crackdown was needed to stabilise Egypt and counter Islamist extremism. He has presented himself as a bulwark of stability as conflict has erupted on Egypt’s borders in Libya, and earlier this year in Sudan and Gaza.

But economic pressures have become the dominant issue for Egypt’s fast-growing population of 104 million, with some people complaining that the government has prioritised costly mega-projects while the state takes on more debt and citizens struggle with soaring prices.

“Enough of projects and infrastructure, we want the prices to go down, we want for the impoverished to eat and people to have a living,” said Imad Atef, a vegetable seller in Cairo.

Some analysts say the election, originally expected in early 2024, was brought forward so economic changes – including a devaluation of an already weakened currency – could be implemented after the vote.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Thursday it was in talks with Egypt to agree additional financing under an existing, $3 billion ($4.6 billion) loan programme that had stalled due to delays in sales of state assets and a promised shift towards a more flexible exchange rate.

“All indicators suggest that we’re going to move quite quickly after the election in terms of proceeding with the IMF reform,” said Hany Genena, chief economist at Cairo Financial Holding, an investment bank.

The Biden administration faces mounting pressure over its provision of powerful weapons to Israel, with the spiralling death toll in Gaza deepening questions about whether the United States, as the country’s chief military backer, must do more to ensure civilians’ safety.

Rights groups, along with a growing bloc from within President Biden’s Democratic Party, are intensifying scrutiny of the arms flow to Israel that has included tens of thousands of bombs since Hamas militants’ bloody attacks of October 7. Local authorities say that more than 15,000 people, many of them civilians, have been killed in Israel’s operation to dismantle the Palestinian group.

At the heart of the debate, as Biden seeks billions of dollars in additional military aid for Israel’s Gaza operation, are the administration’s own rules for arming foreign nations, which indicate weapons transfers must not take place when the US government assesses that violations of international law are “more likely than not” to occur.

Administration officials, offering the first detailed account of their approach to navigating those guidelines, say they have held extensive discussions with Israeli counterparts to ensure they understand the country’s obligations under international humanitarian law. But they acknowledge the United States is not conducting real-time assessments of Israel’s adherence to the laws of war.

A senior US official, who like other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions, said the administration was unable to make a contemporaneous evaluation of Israel’s compliance in part because officials lack access both to the intelligence Israeli forces use to plan their operations and to commanders’ intentions.

“What we can do from here in real time, feasibly but still rigorously, is to talk about the framework, the legal principles, talk about even some pretty nuanced, particular points of it,” the official said, referring to international norms governing conflict.

In certain instances, administration officials have posed specific questions to the Israelis, as they did following an October strike that killed more than 100 people in a refugee camp. In such cases, Israeli officials have shared information about their targeting and legal analysis, affirming US officials’ conclusion that Israel shares their understanding of its obligations.

“We’re having some very rigorous and at times very tough conversations,” the official said.

A humanitarian aid group warned on Saturday (Sunday AEDT) that thousands of children in the Gaza Strip are at risk of dying from malnutrition after two months of war that have decimated the territory’s economy and destroyed its infrastructure.

Save the Children, a global charity, said that it had documented the cases of at least 7685 children under the age of five who were so malnourished that they required “urgent medical treatment to avoid death”.

The children are experiencing “severe wasting”, also known as “severe acute malnutrition”, a condition in which children are classified as too thin for their height as a result of recent rapid weight loss, the charity said in a statement.

“I’ve seen children and families roaming the streets of what hasn’t been flattened in Gaza, with no food, nowhere to go and nothing to survive on,” said Jason Lee, a Save the Children official in Gaza. “Even the internationally funded humanitarian aid response – Gaza’s last lifeline – has been choked by Israeli-imposed restrictions.”

Gaza has been reliant on aid since 2007, when Israel and Egypt imposed an economic blockade after Hamas seized power, and humanitarian groups say that aid is now even more essential because of the war, which has displaced 1.9 million people and killed more than 15,000.

The United Nations has said that Rafah, on the border with Egypt, is the only place in Gaza that aid has been able to reach for several days because the fighting and Israeli military restrictions have made other areas inaccessible.

Rafah has struggled to accommodate the tens of thousands of people who fled there after Israel ordered them to evacuate other parts of Gaza. The area has also remained subject to Israeli airstrikes because Israel says that Hamas has fired rockets from there.

On Friday, Philippe Lazzarini, director of the UN agency that assists Palestinians, said in a public letter that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was “on the verge of collapse” and that its overcrowded shelters had created a “high risk of epidemic illness”.

“In these overfull and unsanitary conditions, over 700 people use a single toilet, women give birth (an average of 25 per day) and people nurse open wounds,” he wrote. “Tens of thousands sleep in streets and courtyards. People burn plastic to stay warm.”

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who came under fire for her stance on antisemitism on her institution’s campus, has “tendered her resignation”, according to a message sent on Saturday (Sunday AEDT) by the chairman of the Ivy League school’s board of trustees.

Magill was one of three presidents of top universities who were criticised after they testified at a congressional hearing about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

She has agreed to stay on until an interim president is appointed, Scott Bok, chairman of the Philadelphia-based university’s board of trustees, said on Saturday (Sunday AEDT).

“I write to share that President Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as president of the University of Pennsylvania. She will remain a tenured faculty member at Penn Carey Law,” Bok said.

Magill, Harvard University president Claudine Gay, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth all testified before a US House of Representatives committee on Tuesday.

They have been criticised by their schools’ Jewish communities for their handling of clashes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators since the Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. That attack prompted a massive counterattack by Israel.

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten says mandatory registration of providers within the scheme will allow for a greater “line of sight” in terms of quality and will cut down the risk of fraud.

This year, he said, there 154,000 unregistered providers compared with 16,000 registered providers.

“We don’t have a line of sight,” Shorten told the ABC’s Insiders program.

“We want to make sure that people on the scheme have choice and control over picking their independent support workers if they want. We don’t want that to change.

“But I know it’s reasonable because I see the scandals and the rorts … you can’t have two currencies in the one system. The idea that we have no line of sight to see what the invoice is for, and what people are doing, and how you can check people out, that’s not a sustainable option.”

Labor will move to have the agency managing the $42 billion NDIS pay for the individual assessments of participants in order to stop it becoming a “two-class” system.

“The scheme is in danger of becoming a two-class scheme,” NDIS Minister Bill Shorten said on Sunday.

“If you’re from a wealthy professional family in the middle of the big cities, you can afford the reports, but there’s a lot of people who don’t have access to the same resources.

“So one of the propositions is that the agency would pay for the assessment so that there’s no economic barrier to people at least investigating their rights.”

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten says greater funding for the agency managing the $42 billion scheme will allow more in-depth assessments for participants.

Shorten said that instead of a “Byzantine structure” where the people making assessments would often never meet the participant, or interview them for less than half an hour, there would be a more detailed, thorough assessment process.

“The NDIS will receive more resources, we will get allied health professionals to do assessments, people trained in disability, to do the assessments,” Shorten said.

“But the only thing in common with the previous government’s proposition is the word ‘assessment’.”