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A consumer group is urgently calling on the federal government to follow other jurisdictions in the U.S and Europe and bring in legislation to stem the slide toward a cashless society.

A recent online poll of some 1,500 people commissioned by a different group, Payments Canada, found that a majority of respondents were worried about the prospect of cashless stores and want to maintain the option to use cash — which is free from bank fees, isn’t susceptible to privacy breaches and can be used during internet outages.

“For many — such as Indigenous peoples, unhoused individuals, older Canadians, victims of domestic abuse and others who are vulnerable — cash is a beacon of economic security, a source of financial autonomy, an emergency lifeline and an emblem of cultural traditions,” Ahmed wrote.

In 2019, Philadelphia became the first city in North America to prohibit “a person selling or offering for sale consumer goods or services at retail from refusing to accept cash as a form of payment.”

In New York, the regulation proposes fines of up to $1,500, with the councillor who sponsored the rules declaring that a ban on cashless businesses protects privacy, equity and consumer choice.

In Ireland, the law would require a cash option at businesses like pharmacies and grocery stores that sell essential products and services.

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BANGKOK (AP) — China’s space officials said Thursday they welcomed scientists from around the world to apply to study the lunar rock samples that the Chang’e 6 probe brought back to Earth in a historic mission, but noted there were limits to that cooperation, specifically with the United States.

“The source of the obstacle in US-China aerospace cooperation is still in the Wolf Amendment,” said Bian Zhigang, vice chair of the China National Space Administration.

The Wolf Amendment was enacted in 2011 and prevents direct U.S.-Chinese bilateral cooperation except in cases where the FBI can certify that there is no national security risk to sharing information with the Chinese side in the course of work.

It worked with the European Space Agency, France, Italy and Pakistan in the Chang’e 6 mission.

“I’m afraid this matter will not be revealed until tomorrow, so I hope everyone can wait patiently for another day,” Chang’e 6 chief designer Hu Hao said at the news conference.

The probe had landed in the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, an impact crater created more than 4 billion years ago.

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French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is urging voters to give her National Rally an “absolute majority” in parliament after estimates showed her party won 34% of the vote.

With France’s next parliament set to be decided in the runoff vote next Sunday, leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon said his New Popular Front (NFP) is ready to tactically drop election races if it helps beat far-right RN.

Melenchon is one of the most divisive figures in French politics, enthusing and horrifying voters with his unrestrained tax-and-spend proposals, class war rhetoric and controversial foreign policy positions, probably most notably his longstanding call for France to pull out of NATO.

Earlier in the day, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally (RN), which is favored to take most of the votes in the poll, also cast her ballot in her party’s stronghold in northern France.

Macron’s party has said it is committed to cutting the budget deficit to the EU ceiling of 3% of GDP by 2027, but the possibility of achieving this has been called into doubt by institutions from the national auditor to the International Monetary Fund.

Its president, Jordan Bardella, has said that if chosen as prime minister, he would not allow French missiles to be delivered to Ukraine that can strike targets within Russia itself, let alone send troops to the conflict, an idea floated by Macron.

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The situation where a full-time worker still can’t find an affordable rental option is becoming more common, said Annie Hodgins, executive director of the Toronto-based non-profit Canadian Centre for Housing Rights.

A recent CBC News analysis of more than 1,000 neighbourhoods across Canada’s largest cities found that fewer than one per cent of rentals are both vacant and affordable for the majority of the country’s renters.

In October 2023, across the 35 metropolitan areas CBC News analyzed, only 1,400 bachelor or one-bedroom homes were vacant and located in neighbourhoods that full-time minimum-wage workers could afford.

The number of people who work full time and can’t afford rent is a “major concern,” Aled ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist of the CMHC, told CBC News.

People will make sacrifices to ensure they can pay their rent, including cutting their budget for food and medication, Hodgins, of the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights, said.

And younger people may struggle to pay their student loans, or delay going back to school or starting families — all to make rent or because of lack of space, she said.

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“I think the fact that we have different police forces taking different steps raises concerns [about] inequities and how people are treated across the country, but [it] also highlights the continuing importance of some kind of federal action to be taken,” she said.

Last month, York and Peel Police in Ontario said they had begun implementing facial recognition technology provided by multinational French company Idemia.

Kevin Nebrija said the tools “help speed up investigations and to identify suspects sooner,” adding that in terms of privacy, “nothing has changed because security cameras are all around.”

Yet in neighbouring Quebec, Montreal Police Chief Fady Dagher says the force will not adopt such biometric identification tools without a debate on issues ranging from human rights to privacy.

While the federal government doesn’t have jurisdiction over provincial and municipal police forces, it can amend the Criminal Code to incorporate legal requirements for facial recognition software in the same way it updated the law to address voice recording technologies that could be used for surveillance.

In 2022, the federal, provincial and territorial heads of Canada’s privacy commissions called on lawmakers to establish a legal framework for appropriate use of facial recognition technology, including empowering independent oversight bodies, prohibiting mass surveillance and limiting how long images can be retained in databases.

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The infamous photo of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford University’s elitist Bullingdon Club emerged in 2007, 20 years after it was taken.

Cameron’s “coalition of millionaires” was crammed with private school alumni, including the chancellor George Osborne, who wielded the austerity axe.

More recently, a majority of Rishi Sunak’s first cabinet were from private schools, according to figures published in 2022 by the Sutton Trust, a social mobility charity.

Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy echoed this last week when he criticised “a certain kind of public-school smallness” he witnessed among Conservatives.

“I think they’re scared of a backlash, aren’t they?,” said Charlotte Hughes, a campaigner against poverty and benefits cuts, who is also active in her local Labour branch in Greater Manchester.

Their recent experience of precarious work, benefit claims and mouldy housing will be from people turning up at their constituency surgeries.

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A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

The Shirion Collective is an online operation that since late 2023 has appeared on platforms including X, Telegram and GoFundMe to coordinate the spread of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda, and the harassment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the west.

The move attracted the attention of critics including Representative Ilhan Omar, who spoke out in Congress against Shirion’s screening of the footage to the University of California, Los Angeles protest encampment.

And since late last year, it has claimed to have developed an AI technology, Project Maccabee, whose goal it has described as “Hitting and creating AGI for the PROTECTION and survival of our people”, and “EXPOSING these putrid antisemites”.

On Amazon, Linden is credited as co-author of a Spanish-language ebook whose title translates as Master OnlyFans in just 7 days!, and whose blurb promises to show readers techniques to build “an account that will give you an average of 2,000 dollars a month”.

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Sadly, Biden’s stiff, halting, withered delivery, coupled with his slack-jawed expression and frozen stare when not trying to form sentences, made him seem not just old but on the decline.

I have a hard time seeing how this could happen, unless Jill Biden, along with others of his closest and most trusted advisors, and Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries, all teamed up and told him he must exit the race.

The only people I can think of as possible nominees are Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Gavin Newsom and (my personal favorite) Sherrod Brown.

Yet, if it’s not Biden, a failure to nominate Harris might upset lots of Black people, women and younger voters.

All of the national, state and local party machinery, advertising, and internet capacity now designed to get out the vote for Biden would have to be totally redesigned.

But he can also reveal something else, as he did at the debate – a man who in many respects seems older than 81 years, who has trouble walking and speaking, and who, at least in those times and moments, doesn’t seem to stand much chance of being re-elected president of the United States – even when his opponent is a twice-impeached convicted felon, pathological liar and dangerous sociopath.

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The fight to stop climate change is slowly creeping from the environmental front lines of land and sea to the hallowed halls of Australia’s courtrooms.

But then a group of Tiwi Islander traditional owners, led by Dennis Tipakalippa, took the regulator to court, saying the approval was unlawful as they hadn’t been properly consulted.

But following its win, Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher stood in front of reporters in Darwin and said the company wouldn’t pursue the Tiwi Islanders for costs.

Santos applied to the court for subpoenas seeking a wide range of documents from four environmental charities: The Environment Centre NT (ECNT), Jubilee Australia, Sunrise and Market Forces.

“Santos is using the potential of seeking costs against third parties … to go after groups who merely offer moral or solidarity support to public interest litigants,” Mr Watson says.

The subpoena issued to ECNT disrupted the organisation enormously, Ms Howey says, forcing them to hire lawyers and divert staffing resources.

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Mr Dowden told Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that Moscow allegedly using Facebook pages to spread support for Nigel Farage “is a classic example from the Russian playbook”.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) says it has been monitoring five co-ordinated Facebook pages which have been spouting Kremlin talking points, with some posting in support of Reform UK.

Mr Dowden earlier told The Sunday Times: "These revelations reveal the real risk our democracy faces in this uncertain world.

“Malign foreign actors, promoting British political parties, policies and views that fit their agenda is just another example of the challenges in the increasingly volatile cyberspace of the 21st century and is gravely concerning to see during an election campaign.”

The newspaper reported that Conservative chairman Richard Holden has written to Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Tim Barrow, the national security adviser, asking for the claims to be investigated.

The network of pages has a combined 190,000 followers, each featuring criticism of several UK political parties, including the Conservatives and Labour, the ABC says.

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But with Reform predicted by some pollsters to win more than a dozen parliamentary seats next week, Kinnock said Labour needed to start taking the threat seriously.

Kinnock added that if Labour was overly cautious in government, it would play into Reform’s narrative that there was little difference between the two main parties.

Labour was this week accused of failing to fight against Farage in Clacton after the party’s candidate was instructed to leave the constituency over a belief that he was “distracting” from Keir Starmer’s campaign.

An MRP poll by Electoral Calculus and Find Out Now this week showed Reform heading for 18 seats, with Farage, the former party leader Richard Tice and the former Tory MP Lee Anderson all predicted to win.

Rob Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, said Labour needed to be alert to the appeal that Reform had among voters in “red wall” constituencies in particular.

Labour officials say they are alive to the risk that Reform poses and say they plan to confront Farage and his politics “from day one” if they make it into power.

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A Panamanian court has acquitted all 28 people charged with money laundering in connection with the Panama Papers scandal, concluding a trial that began in April.The secret financial documents were leaked in 2016, revealing how some of the world’s richest and most powerful people use tax havens to hide their wealth.Among those exonerated were Jurgen Mossack and the late Ramon Fonseca, founder of Mossack Fonseca, the defunct law firm at the centre of the scandal.Judge Baloisa Marquinez said the evidence considered by the court was “not sufficient” to determine the criminal responsibility of the defendants.During the trial, the prosecution sought the maximum sentence of 12 years for money laundering for both Mr Mossack and Mr Fonseca, who died in hospital in May.Both Mr Mossack and Mr Fonseca denied they, their firm or their employees had acted illegally.The trial, which took place in Panama City, lasted 85 hours, took testimony from 27 witnesses and considered over 50 pieces of documentary evidence, according to local news reports.

After an extended period of deliberation, the judge said evidence collected from Mossack Fonseca’s servers had not been gathered in line with due process and dropped all criminal charges against the defendants.The biggest data leak in history, the Panama Papers, saw 11 million documents released to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and shared with an international team of journalists.In 2017, Mossack Fonseca said the firm had been the victim of a computer hack and that the information leaked was being misrepresented.Foreign Secretary David Cameron, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Argentinian football star Lionel Messi were among those whose affairs came under scrutiny following the leak.In total the data revealed links to 12 current or former heads of state and government, including dictators accused of embezzling money from their own countries.

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The judge noted that other evidence in the Panama Papers case “was not sufficient and conclusive to determine the criminal responsibility of the accused.”

“We feel satisfied in the midst of mixed emotions, because many lives were affected along the way,” Guillermina Mc Donald, who was the defense attorney for Mossack and Fonseca, told The Associated Press.

Judge Balaoisa Marquínez had decided to combine the Panama Papers case with another known as “Operation Car Wash,” a major anti-corruption investigation that began in Brazil.

On Friday, she ruled that in the car wash case, “it was not possible to determine the entry of money from illicit sources, coming from Brazil, into the Panamanian financial system with the purpose of hiding, concealing, disguising or helping to evade the legal consequences of the preceding crime.”

The investigation in Brazil began in 2014, with the Mossack & Fonseca firm later coming under scrutiny after 11 million financial documents tied to the company were leaked.

The repercussions of the leak were widespread: it led to the resignation of a prime minister in Iceland and brought scrutiny to now former leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, Chinese politicians and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.

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Didn’t Harris flame out in the last Democratic presidential primary, leaving just in time to avoid an embarrassing loss in her home state, California?

But to win a primary you must thread the needle of introducing yourself to the base of the party while burnishing the case for your ideas and dissing the talents of your rivals, all while keeping your options open, because your opponents are also your future surrogates and allies.

She can use her true superpower: She will be a relentless prosecutor of the very clear political case against Donald John Trump, a felon, a man found liable for sexual abuse, an inveterate liar, a demagogue, a threat to our democracy and to our Constitution.

Unlike Trump’s previous female debate rival, Hillary Clinton, nary a whiff of scandal has besmirched Harris.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the first Trump administration she drew blood with her tough, calm and deliberate questions, managing to score viral moments without seeming like a theatrical showboater.

It would have been satisfying to watch her face off against Trump on Thursday, not just for progressives but also for suburban women who wanted to see a full-throated fight for their reproductive rights, an issue on which Harris has been especially — and passionately — outspoken and Biden, a devout Catholic, has been more muted.

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“This was like a champion boxer who gets in the ring past his prime and needs his corner to throw in the towel,” said a Democratic lawmaker, adding that he meant Biden should exit the race.

The options for a switch are limited: If the president doesn’t choose to leave of his own volition, there would have to be a revolt among Democratic National Convention delegates, the vast majority of whom were elected on their pledge to nominate Biden.

The fear among these Democrats is that the version of Biden that showed up to the debate — one bearing a likeness to the caricature Trump and his allies have portrayed of a man unequipped for the job — cannot win in November.

The last time a president who was eligible to run for re-election didn’t appear on the November ballot was in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson, facing certain defeat in the Democratic primaries, chose not to seek a full second term.

“I look forward to being in Chicago when Gavin Newsom is nominated from the floor,” a Democratic strategist said after the first 20 minutes of the debate, adding about Biden: “Should have gone on offense on abortion.

“If we lose this election to Trump because we were too afraid to admit we were wrong about his age or too worried of an open convention, we can no longer call our party the defenders of democracy.”

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The Biden administration said this week that it opposed gender-affirming surgery for minors, the most explicit statement to date on the subject from a president who has been a staunch supporter of transgender rights.

The White House announcement was sent to The New York Times on Wednesday in response to an article reporting that staff in the office of Adm. Rachel Levine, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, had urged an influential international transgender health organization to remove age minimums for surgery from its treatment guidelines for minors.

Levine shared her view with her staff that publishing the proposed lower ages for gender transition surgeries was not supported by science or research, and could lead to an onslaught of attacks on the transgender community,” an H.H.S.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday upheld a state law banning all gender-affirming medical treatment for minors.

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a challenge — brought in part by the Biden administration — to a Tennessee law that bans treatments including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery for transgender minors.

In contrast, Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, announced a plan in a video posted in 2023 on Truth Social to pass a federal law banning all gender-affirming care for minors, which he described as “child sexual mutilation.”

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The fight to stop climate change is slowly creeping from the environmental front lines of land and sea to the hallowed halls of Australia’s courtrooms.

But then a group of Tiwi Islander traditional owners, led by Dennis Tipakalippa, took the regulator to court, saying the approval was unlawful as they hadn’t been properly consulted.

But following its win, Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher stood in front of reporters in Darwin and said the company wouldn’t pursue the Tiwi Islanders for costs.

Santos applied to the court for subpoenas seeking a wide range of documents from four environmental charities: The Environment Centre NT (ECNT), Jubilee Australia, Sunrise and Market Forces.

“Santos is using the potential of seeking costs against third parties … to go after groups who merely offer moral or solidarity support to public interest litigants,” Mr Watson says.

The subpoena issued to ECNT disrupted the organisation enormously, Ms Howey says, forcing them to hire lawyers and divert staffing resources.

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It was the armoured vehicles circling the Plaza Murillo - the normally tranquil central square in historic downtown La Paz – that initially set Bolivians on edge on Wednesday afternoon.

By 2.30pm, a small tank was repeatedly ramming the gates of the neoclassical building known as Palacio Quemado until troops forced their way in and, in an extraordinary scene, the coup leader – disgruntled former army chief Juan José Zuñiga – faced off against the president, Luis Arce.

It lasted just three hours, during which time Arce rallied Bolivians to “mobilise” to defend democracy, apparently defused the mutiny in a one-on-one confrontation and appointed a new military command which ordered mutinous troops back to their barracks.

Just before he was detained on Wednesday, the alleged plotter Zuñiga sowed seeds of doubt, telling journalists – without providing evidence – that Arce had ordered him to stage a sham coup in a bid to boost the president’s flagging popularity.

In Arce’s defence, Deisy Choque, a legislator for the governing Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party, warned that the coup might have been successful “had it not been for the position taken by the president, the ministers and Bolivian society as a whole in immediately repudiating these actions”.

Amid plummeting gas exports and dwindling foreign reserves, there are growing protests over rising food prices and the scarcity of fuel and US dollars, as well as deep divisions within his political party.

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When Mr. Duterte left office, his administration said 6,252 people had been killed by security forces — all described by officials as “drug suspects.” Rights groups say the overall death toll stands at roughly 30,000.

Mr. Duterte is unlikely to face any consequences from the congressional hearings; this week he was asked to testify before the panel but through a spokesman declined to do so, invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination.

That has left many looking overseas, to the International Criminal Court, which is investigating the drug war and is expected to be nearing some action against Mr. Duterte.

Mr. Duterte burnished his law-and-order credentials as the mayor of Davao, a city in the south where hundreds are thought to have been killed by gunmen linked to the authorities, acts that the I.C.C.

On a recent Thursday, Dr. Fortun was trying to piece together what could have happened to Jay-Ar Jumola, a 21-year-old construction worker killed by unidentified men in an alleyway in the city of Navotas in June 2019.

He was found with masking tape around his head and a sign on his body that said, “Don’t imitate me, I’m a drug pusher.” Nearly five years later, Angelo Ocdin, 28, was shot in the back by four men in Manila’s Tondo district.

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But the classic and in some respects parallel case was Reagan’s 40 years ago, as he faced Democratic nominee Walter Mondale in Louisville, Ky.

Reagan was comfortably ahead in the polls that fall, cruising toward reelection, even if his age of 73 made him older than any previous president in history.

Cannon noted the staff had limited that document to 25 pages after first lady Nancy Reagan insisted her husband not be “overworked” prior to the debate.

The Wall Street Journal ran a headline stack asking: Fitness Issue – New Question in Race: Is Oldest U.S President Now Showing His Age?

The two candidates met in Kansas City, Mo., where most of the evening was pro forma until one of the moderators, Henry Trewhitt of The Baltimore Sun, noted that Reagan staff had observed the president was “tired” on the night of the Louisville round.

In 2012, Obama easily cleared the hurdle erected by his first-debate shortcomings much the same way simply by showing up and turning in a solid evening in the second debate with Romney.

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