New York City has approved an ambitious plan to combat climate change by forcing thousands of large buildings to slash their greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation passed on Thursday by the city council puts caps on carbon emissions for buildings over 25,000 sq ft – requiring a 40% overall cut in their emissions by 2030….

Income “insufficiency”, not inequality, is to blame for the widening gap between rich and poor, private equity titan Steve Schwarzman said on Thursday, becoming the latest billionaire to publicly worry about the issue. The CEO of Blackstone and former Trump adviser outlined what he called a Marshall plan for the middle class on cable channel…

A toddler is in hospital with a fractured skull and cuts to his head and neck after a dingo dragged him from his bed on Queensland’s Fraser Island. The boy’s family were camping in a remote area of the island – known as K’gari to the local Butchalla people – on Thursday night when two…

A UN-appointed expert on breaches of the Libyan arms embargo has been arrested and kept in a Tunisian jail for nearly a month. Moncef Kartas, a Tunisian-German dual national, was arrested on 26 March. He is one of six UN experts appointed to investigate breaches of the UN-imposed embargo on arms to Libya first introduced…

Three people have been put on remand for a month over an Extinction Rebellion protest in which activists climbed on top of a train at Canary Wharf station in east London. Cathy Eastburn, 51, from south London, Mark Ovland, 35, from Somerton in Somerset, and Luke Watson, 29, from Manuden in Essex, were charged with…

Donald Trump’s claims of vindication after the release of Robert Mueller’s report on Thursday were quickly drowned out by furious Democrats, who pointed to a wealth of evidence the president attempted to obstruct justice and demanded fresh hearings into potentially criminal conduct. Republican hopes of drawing a line under the affair were dashed as the…

In February 1719, two months before the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe proposed in the Weekly Journal that the South Sea Company – founded just eight years earlier to manage the national debt and awarded a contract to supply the Spanish colonies in Latin America with several thousand African slaves per year – should…

One of four women who was recently subjected to a brutal public lashing by armed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan has spoken about her experience, amid an increase of violent punishments given to those violating its strict interpretation of religious law. Aziza, who like many other Afghan women only uses one name, was rounded up by…

Three women in Malaysia who held an event discussing their decision to stop wearing the hijab are being investigated by Malaysian Islamic authorities. The event, hosted over the weekend at the Gerakbudaya bookshop in the Petaling Jaya area, was held to mark the launch of Unveiling Choice, a book documenting the author and activist Maryam…

For a saga that’s made a lot of capital out of people dying over the past four decades, it was somewhat surprising to hear Luke Skywalker reveal to the assembled Jedi masses that “no one’s ever really gone” in the debut trailer for The Rise of Skywalker. However, Star Wars has dropped more than a…