The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, has set the British government a deadline of two weeks to give “vital” clarification on the financial commitments it is willing to honour, at the end of a sixth round of Brexit talks that offered scant evidence of any progress.

The issue of the border on the island of Ireland has also emerged as a serious challenge for the UK government, with the Irish demanding an urgent and definite commitment that a solution in effect keeping northern Ireland in the single market and the customs union will be found to ensure there is no return to a hard border. At a joint press conference in Brussels on Friday, the UK’s Brexit secretary, David Davis, implored Barnier and the EU27 to be flexible and move on to discussions about a future relationship, adding that there was a need to “build confidence” in the talks on the UK side.(theguardian)…[+]

Gondolas and water taxis will never again have to vie with big cruise ships for space in front of Venice’s St Mark’s Square, an Italian governmental committee has decided. Venetian residents and environmentalists have long voiced concerns about floating pleasure palaces sailing close to the fragile city, dwarfing its Gothic and Byzantine churches.Under the new rules, which follow a temporary limit imposed three years ago, the largest ships weighing 100,000 tonnes or more will take a less glamorous route to the industrial port of Marghera, far from the Grand Canal.

Almost 99% of the 18,000 Venetians who voted in an unofficial referendum in June supported the ban. The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, hailed the plan as answering the requirements of residents, the lucrative tourism business, and conservation groups who have raised the alarm about damage to the shallow lagoon and canals.

“We want it to be clear to Unesco [the United Nations cultural agency] and the whole world that we have a solution,” Brugnaro said after the meeting of the governmental committee charged with saving Venice. “This takes into account all the jobs created by the cruise industry, which we absolutely couldn’t afford to lose, and we can start to work seriously on planning cruises.”(theguardian)…[+]

Uber has taken a step forward in its plan to make autonomous “flying taxis” a reality, signing a contract with Nasa to develop the software to manage them.

The company’s chief product officer, Jeff Holden, announced the new service contract at Web Summit in Lisbon, alongside its intention to begin testing four-passenger, 200mph UberAir flying taxi services across Los Angeles in 2020, its second test market in the US after Dallas.

Uber said its flying taxi service would be purely electric and that a journey that would take 80 minutes by car in rush-hour traffic could be reduced to as little as four minutes. Uber intends to have some form of its air service operational for the 2028 LA Olympics, but experts remain sceptical as to whether autonomous flying taxis will ever become a reality.

Holden said: “Doing this safely and efficiently is going to require a foundational change in airspace management technologies. Combining Uber’s software engineering expertise with Nasa’s decades of airspace experience to tackle this is a crucial step forward.”(theguardian)…[+]

Complaining to police about her gang-rape was the beginning of a new nightmare for Kajal. Officers detained the young woman from Madhya Pradesh state in central India. They beat her with a stick, she says, until she agreed to drop the charges. She was abandoned by her husband and threatened by the accused men. “I have lost everything and everyone blames me,” said Kajal, an assumed name.

Five years since a brutal gang-rape that galvanised a movement against sexual assault in India, women who report the crime are still routinely harassed by police or bullied into silence, according to research released in Delhi on Wednesday.

The Human Rights Watch report found that willingness to report rape and other sexual offences had significantly grown, but was often stymied by regressive community attitudes, particularly outside big cities. In one case highlighted in the report, a “low-caste” woman from Haryana state was pressured by her village council to sabotage a trial against six men from a more powerful caste charged with raping her.

“[She] didn’t have another way,” a relative of the woman told HRW. “If you want to live in the village, you have to listen to the [councils].” Implementation of laws intended to protect women, passed after the 2012 attack on student Jyoti Singh, was also patchy, activists said.(theguardian)…[+]

The editor of a satirical magazine is due to appear in court in Spain over a tongue-in-cheek article that suggested the riot police deployed to stop the Catalan independence vote had snorted the region’s entire supply of cocaine. On 5 October, four days after the Catalan government’s unilateral independence referendum was marred by police violence, El Jueves published a story entitled: “The continuing presence of riot police exhausts Catalonia’s cocaine reserves – Colombian cartels have warned they can’t keep up with such high demand.”

The piece included quotes from a made-up drug dealer, who complained: “I haven’t got a gram left, mate. No speed either. They’ve had it all. And you can’t sell this lot any old shit – they’re professional junkies!” It also said officers billeted on the famous Tweety Pie ferry – a ship featuring a painting of the cartoon character that was used to house the police – were appealing for grateful Spaniards to send them cocaine rather than ham, and reported that Spain’s interior minister was worrying that police might turn to MDMA instead: “How are we going to maintain order if some officers are more interested in stroking their own bodies?”(theguardian)…[+]

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has accused Iran of “direct military aggression” by supplying missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen, raising the stakes in an already tense standoff between the two regional rivals.

Mohammed bin Salman linked Tehran to the launch of a ballistic missile fired from Yemen towards the international airport in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on Saturday. The missile was intercepted and destroyed. Iran has denied the accusations as baseless and provocative. Saudis and their Sunni Arab allies view Yemen’s Houthi rebels – who belong to the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam – as Iranian proxies and have accused Tehran of giving them military backing.

“The involvement of the Iranian regime in supplying its Houthi militias with missiles is considered a direct military aggression by the Iranian regime,” the Saudi prince said on Tuesday during a phone conversation with the UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. He added that the move “may be considered an act of war against the kingdom”.(theguardian)…[+]

A public health emergency has been declared by doctors in Delhi as air quality in the world’s most polluted capital city plunged to levels likened to smoking at least 50 cigarettes in a single day. Slow winds and colder temperatures have been blamed for a surge in airborne pollutants beyond what instruments in the city could measure with some recording an Air Quality Index (AQI) maximum of 999.

The Indian Medical Association said the country’s capital was suffering a health emergency and called for an upcoming half-marathon to be cancelled to avoid “disastrous health consequences”. Residents were warned to avoid leaving their homes as smog enveloped streets and landmarks on Tuesday, sparking road, rail and airport delays and renewed calls for Indian state and federal governments to act. The Delhi chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, said the city was a “gas chamber” as his government met on Tuesday afternoon to consider a response to the crisis. Primary schools, already asked to keep students indoors, will be shut on Wednesday and possibly longer if the poor conditions persist.(theguardian)…[+]

2017 is set to be one of the hottest three years on record, provisional data suggests, confirming yet again a warming trend that scientists say bears the fingerprints of human actions. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said temperatures in the first nine months of this year were unlikely to have been higher than 2016, when there was a strong El Niño weather system, but higher than anything before 2015.

Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the WMO, said: “The past three years have all been in the top three years in terms of temperature records. This is part of a long term warming trend. We have witnessed extraordinary weather, including temperatures topping 50C in Asia, record-breaking hurricanes in rapid succession in the Caribbean and Atlantic reaching as far as Ireland, devastating monsoon flooding affecting many millions of people and a relentless drought in East Africa.”

He said further detailed scientific studies would be carried out, but that it was already possible to say many “bear the tell-tale sign of climate change” caused by increased greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities, such as burning fossil fuel and deforestation.(theguardian)…[+]

Donald Trump has blamed Sunday’s deadly mass shooting at a Baptist church in Texas on the mental health of the perpetrator and claimed that gun ownership was not a factor. Asked during a press conference in Tokyo what policies he would support to tackle mass shootings in the US, the president said: “I think that mental health is a problem here. Based on preliminary reports, this was a very deranged individual with a lot of problems over a very long period of time.

“We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries, but this isn’t a guns situation … we could go into it but it’s a little bit soon to go into it. Fortunately somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was, it would have been much worse. “This is a mental health problem at the highest level. It’s a very sad event … these are great people at a very, very sad event, but that’s the way I view it.”(theguardian)…[+]

The son of actor Richard Dreyfuss has accused Kevin Spacey of sexual misconduct, alleging that the House of Cards star molested him while his father was in the same room. Harry Dreyfuss, who was 18 at the time of the incident, made the claims in an essay published by Buzzfeed. In it he described Spacey as a “sexual predator”, who felt “safe” to abuse him, knowing that he “wouldn’t say a word”.

The claims contribute to a growing sexual abuse scandal against Spacey, who has been dropped by House of Cards producers Netflix and is currently the subject of an investigation by police in London. Dreyfuss claims that the alleged encounter happened in London in 2008 while his father was rehearsing for the play Complicit, which was being directed by Spacey during his tenure as artistic director of the Old Vic theatre.(theguardian)…[+]