Despite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange being kept in his prison cell for up to 23 hours a day in London's high security Belmarsh jail, it has not stopped him winning a major award.

The Catalan Dignity Commission has honoured him with its 2019 Dignity Prize for raising awareness around the world about the plight of the Catalans in the lead up to the 2017 independence vote.

Announced on Friday, the prize recognises his efforts to correct misreporting of events and to provide live video updates to the world of the peaceful Catalan protesters and the brutal crackdown on them by Spanish police.

In one of the most revolutionary moves we've reported on to date, the Atlanta Police Department announced this week that they are disbanding their narcotics unit so they can fight actual violent crime. This move is both revolutionary and heartening and is another nail in the war on drugs' coffin.

According to a report from WSB-TV Atlanta, the massive change was confirmed on Tuesday. The department confirmed with WSB-TV reporter, Mark Winne, noting that all the officers in the drug unit will be assigned to other areas.

At least 450,000 demonstrators marched in towns and cities across France on Thursday as teachers, district nurses and lawyers joined strike action over pension changes, as the country's longest transport stoppages in decades entered their 36th day.

By morning rush hour, there were more than 124 miles (200km) of traffic jams in the greater Paris area as public transport was badly disrupted, leaving millions of commuters struggling to get to work.

More than a third of teachers stopped work across the country and dozens of schools closed in the capital. Rail services across France were severely hit and there were warnings of potential delays and disruption to flights. Energy workers were also striking, with refinery stoppages. Thousands of police officers were poised for a protest march in the centre of Paris.

Phil Sheppard watched with trepidation as a giant blaze approached his beloved Hunter Valley property outside Laguna, near Cessnock.

The 66-year-old had poured his heart and soul into Ngurrumpaa - an isolated 160-acre bushland property with a main house and several huts, offering cultural camps for tourists and Indigenous youth.

Three weeks ago, he and other owners were forced to evacuate, helplessly watching online as the Gospers Mountain fire converged with the Little L Complex fire and appeared to engulf the property.

Presented in no particular order.

A lot has happened in the last decade — including a lot of things being called racist, sexist, offensive, or insensitive.

Here, in no particular order, are 24 of the most absurdly politically correct moments of the decade:

1. A college diversity-training course taught that it was culturally insensitive to expect people to be on time.

A Clemson University training course taught its attendees that it is offensive to expect people to be on time, because "time may be considered fluid" in other cultures.

Surveillance video footage from outside the jail cell of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein during his first reported suicide attempt in July has been inadvertently deleted, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday.


Prosecutors, in a filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said the video was deleted as the result of a jailhouse computer error about the location of Epstein's cellmate at the time Epstein tried to kill himself.

A lawyer for Epstein's former cellmate said that it was "deeply troubling" to learn that the footage no longer exists. That lawyer, Bruce Barket, has been trying since July to obtain the video.

The Report, a new film from Vice Studios starring Adam Driver, feels somehow both timely and late. It tells the story of American Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Driver), who was tasked with investigating the U.S. government's "enhanced interrogation" program in the late 2000s. The program, which many denounced as torture, was used to extract intelligence from suspected terrorist detainees at CIA black sites after Al Qaeda's attack on September 11, 2001. It ended years ago and is no longer even legal — the McCain-Feinstein Amendment restricts prisoner interrogation techniques to those listed in the United States Army's field manual, and it passed the Senate with a 78-21 vote in 2015, backed by majorities in both parties.

Among the general public, however, the topic remains controversial, with almost half of Americans saying they think torture could be used to obtain "important military information" from "a captured enemy combatant" and only a little more than half saying they think torture is "wrong." During and after his 2016 campaign, President Donald J. Trump, ever-sensitive to divergences between "elite" and "popular" opinion, promised to revive and even expand enhanced interrogation, claiming that waterboarding is a "minor form" of torture and that "we should go much stronger than waterboarding."


Jones worked for Senator Dianne Feinstein (played in the film by Annette Bening) and was deputized by a bipartisan Senate committee to lead a team of six — three Democrats and three Republicans — to find out exactly what the CIA program had entailed. In the flash-forward that opens the film, we learn that his obsessive dedication to the report cost him his romantic relationship, but as we return to the report's inception and watch events unfold chronologically, we also see that this kind of personality was required to pursue the investigation to completion and release. "Do you ever sleep?" a security guard asks Jones at one point. "I used to," he replies, "but it got in the way of the work."

One person was injured and thousands evacuated as a huge blaze occurred at an oil refinery in the Republic of Komi west of the Ural Mountains. The fire and a column of thick black smoke could be seen for kilometers around.

The fire at the diesel processing unit of the plant in the city of Ukhta, population circa 100,000, was preceded by "two bangs of a technological character," a source in the Emergencies Ministry said.

The blaze spread quickly, covering around 1,000 square meters at its peak. It was assigned the highest category of difficulty, with around 80 emergency workers and 15 firetrucks involved in extinguishing it. A fire train was later sent to help put the blaze out.

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp's revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California's fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world's almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp's hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. "My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives," he says.

Deep snow drifts, skating along frozen rivers and weeks of sub-zero temperatures used to be normal features of a British winter, but they are rare today. However, in an ironic twist, global warming may help conditions like this to return in the coming decades, by disrupting the Gulf Stream - the warm ocean current responsible for taking the chill off north-west Europe.

The Gulf Stream is part of a larger ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), which moves warm water northwards in the upper layers of the Atlantic Ocean, and colder waters southwards at lower depths. Previous research has shown that a slowdown of Amoc appeared to trigger a global cold snap 13,000 years ago. In 2018 scientists revealed that the Gulf Stream was at its weakest in 1,600 years.

By investigating the impact of Greenland meltwater and rainfall on Amoc, researchers found that thankfully there is very little chance of a complete shutdown in the next 1,000 years, but instead they show there is a 15% chance of a temporary shutdown in the next 100 years, which would likely trigger cooler conditions in north-west Europe. But acting fast to limit global warming will reduce the chances of being thrown into a chill.