The Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu has called on Aung San Suu Kyi to end military-led operations against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority that have driven 270,000 refugees from the country in the past fortnight. The 85-year old archbishop said the “unfolding horror” and “ethnic cleansing” in the country’s Rahkine region had forced him to speak out against the woman he admired and considered “a dearly beloved sister”.

Despite Aung San Suu Kyi defending her government’s handling of the growing crisis, Tutu urged his fellow Nobel peace price winner to intervene. “I am now elderly, decrepit and formally retired, but breaking my vow to remain silent on public affairs out of profound sadness,” he wrote in a letter posted on social media.

“For years I had a photograph of you on my desk to remind me of the injustice and sacrifice you endured out of your love and commitment for Myanmar’s people. You symbolised righteousness. “Your emergence into public life allayed our concerns about violence being perpetrated against members of the Rohingya. But what some have called ‘ethnic cleansing’ and others ‘a slow genocide’ has persisted – and recently accelerated. “It is incongruous for a symbol of righteousness to lead such a country,” said the 85-year old anti-apartheid activist. “If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.”(theguardian)…[+]

The strongest earthquake to hit Mexico in a century has left at least 26 people dead, sparked mass evacuations and prompted warnings of tsunamis across the region.

The magnitude 8.2 quake struck 100 miles (165km) west of the state of Chiapas just before midnight on Thursday local time. The governor of the southern state of Oaxaca said that 20 people were killed in the region. A further four people were confirmed dead in Chiapas, and two in Tabasco state. The Tabasco governor, Arturo Núñez, said the two dead were children. One died after a wall collapsed and the other, a baby, died in a children’s hospital that lost electricity.

Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, tweeted: “Sadly, there are reports that people have died. My deepest condolences to their families.” The president said he had asked for updates from the National Disaster Prevention Centre, and the authorities were monitoring the situation and would meet immediately to coordinate their response to the quake. He said at least 1 million people had been left without electricity after the quake, but power had since been restored to 800,000 of them. He urged people to be vigilant and to check gas supplies as well as walls and columns.(theguardian)…[+]

Kate Millett, the wayward artist, thinker and activist whose 1970 book Sexual Politics became a keystone of second-wave feminism, has died at the age of 82.

Perhaps aptly for someone who wrote widely and fervently of her pursuit of love, she succumbed to a heart attack during an annual holiday in Paris to celebrate her birthday with her wife and longtime collaborator, the photojournalist Sophie Keir. “Let’s always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year – let it always be an affair,” Millett wrote in Sita, her 1976 account of an earlier lesbian relationship, which, like subsequent autobiographical works, became an exploration of forms of love. Lena Dunham was among those who paid immediate tribute to her cultural importance, and its continuing impact on a new generation of readers.

Born in Minnesota in 1934 to an alcoholic father and a mother who worked as a teacher and insurance saleswoman to support her three daughters, Millett went first to the University of Minnesota. A rich aunt paid for her to go on to Oxford, where she became the first American woman to receive a first-class degree from St Hilda’s College.(theguardian)…[+]

Israeli jets have reportedly bombed a Syrian government facility in north-west of the country believed to be associated with Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons programme. The strikes were initially reported by Hebrew and Arab media sources on Thursday morning. A Syrian military statement appears to confirm the reports.

The airstrike on the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre was reported to have taken place overnight. Western intelligence reports have linked the centre near the town of Masyaf to Syria’s chemical weapons programme. A statement from the Syrian military said the attack had occurred early on Thursday and hit a facility close to the Mediterranean coast. It said Israeli warplanes fired several missiles after entering neighbouring Lebanon’s air space.

“Israeli warplanes at 2.42am fired a number of missiles from Lebanese air space, targeting one of our military positions near Masyaf, which led to material damage and the deaths of two members of the site,” the army said in a statement. It warned of the “dangerous repercussions of such hostile acts on the security and stability of the region”. Syrian opposition sources said four Israeli warplanes were involved in the strike. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, along with others, identified the target as the al-Talai facility, a site that had been subject to US sanctions for its role in the Syrian non-conventional weapons agency.(theguardian)…[+]

In his eight months in office, Marco Minniti, the austere Italian interior minister, has overseen a huge reduction in the number of African migrants and refugees reaching Italian shores from Libya. At the last count in August, the figure was 87% down on the previous year. A former communist with deep connections with Italian intelligence and the levers of the Italian state, Minniti is one of the most controversial politicians in Europe. His success in reducing migrant flows has won him praise and popularity on the right and notoriety on parts of the left.

There have been rumours of deals struck in the desert to induce tribes and militia to end the business of human trafficking. It is claimed his methods are fragile, and leave unresolved the fate of the tens of thousands of migrants trapped in Libya in inhumane detention camps unable to reach Italy and unwilling to return to their country of origin on the other side of the Sahara desert. Minniti offered a stout defence of his methods in an interview in Italy this week. His country had faced an unprecedented moment in the history of migration, he said. In June, on the way to a meeting in the US, he stopped at Shannon airport to find his phone full of warnings that in the space of 24 hours there had been 12,500 arrivals in 25 vessels operating across the Mediterranean. He feared for Italian democracy. “I had a problem. Should I continue my flight to Washington on the basis of showing the show must go on, or should I go back and by doing so dramatise everything?(theguardian)…[+]

One week after the record deluge in Texas, the biggest hurricane ever measured in the mid-Atlantic is tearing through the Caribbean. Hurricane Irma, a category-five storm, is destroying homes and threatening lives in the Leeward Islands with 185mph winds and 11ft coastal surges, and in the coming days it is forecast to hit Puerto Rico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Florida. The governor of Florida has already declared a state of emergency.

For Donald Trump, these twin megastorms are a source of awe. “Hurricane looks like largest ever recorded in the Atlantic!” he tweeted of Irma on Wednesday. “Even experts have said they’ve never seen one like this!” he posted of Harvey last week. But for many scientists they are a worrying sign of a “new normal” in which extreme weather events become more intense as a result of manmade climate change. Rather than expressing astonishment, they say policymakers need to strengthen long-term countermeasures and act more effectively on reducing carbon emissions.(theguardian)…[+]

As 15 states and Washington DC filed suit against Donald Trump over the rescinding of protection for young people brought to the US illegally as children, House speaker Paul Ryan said such “Dreamers” should “rest easy” as Congress tackles the necessary immigration reform.Nearly 800,000 “Dreamers” are currently shielded from deportation under an Obama-era directive, most of them living in California and Texas. The lawsuit, filed in New York, was announced by Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson, who said Trump’s act had created “a dark time for our country”. On Tuesday, Barack Obama called Trump’s move “wrong”, “self-defeating” and “cruel”. With DC, the other states in the lawsuit are New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.

Ryan was speaking a day after Trump challenged lawmakers to “fix” the issue before the policy, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), expires in March. In a press conference, Ryan said the president was “right in his decision” to cancel the program because Obama had “overstepped his constitutional bounds” by enacting the policy in 2012.(theguardian)…[+]

EU citizens living in the UK have spoken of their disbelief, heartbreak and fear following the leaking of a Home Office document setting out post-Brexit immigration proposals.Workers in both highly skilled and low-skilled jobs who contacted the Guardian said they now felt they lived in a “hostile environment” with no trust the government would allow them stay in the country beyond Brexit.

Alexandrine Kantor, a French engineer in Oxford, said: “I almost regret coming and settling in the UK. Professionally it was a good move but not on a personal level. If I had known that in the future I would only be allowed to stay for three years I would not have come.” The tone of the document has left a strong impression with EU citizens that the Home Office cannot even be trusted to secure the lifetime rights of those already settled in the country, despite negotiations in Brussels for a deal.(theguardian)…[+]

Palestinian security forces have arrested one of the most prominent human rights activists in the occupied territories after he criticised the arrest of a Palestinian journalist in a Facebook post. Issa Amro, who lives in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, is the highest profile victim of a growing campaign by Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, against journalists and dissent on social media.

Amro is the founder of Youth Against the Settlements, which has long-documented alleged abuses by the Israeli military and settlers in Hebron. He was already facing charges in an Israeli military court for his activism. According to Amro’s brother Ahmed, the activist was summoned by Palestinian security forces for questioning after posting on his Facebook account about the arrest of Palestinian journalist Ayman Qawasmeh, who had called on the unpopular and increasingly autocratic Abbas to resign.(theguardian)…[+]

Photographs of a topless Duchess of Cambridge taken by paparazzi while she was on holiday in France were an invasion of privacy, a court has ruled.Just 24 hours after news that the Kate and Prince William were expecting their third child, the couple were back in the news when the court in Nanterre, west of Paris, delivered its verdict on the five-year-old case.

The court awarded the royal couple €100,000 in damages and interests and ordered the editor and owner of the glossy magazine Closer to pay the maximum fine of €45,000 each. The awards, while high for a French court, are considerably lower than the €1.5m the couple’s legal team had demanded. Six people, including three photographers, were tried earlier this year after long-lens pictures of the couple on holiday in France were published in the French celebrity magazine and a local newspaper, La Provence. The photographs were taken in the summer of 2012 and show the royal couple on a terrace by a swimming pool at a private chateau owned by Viscount Linley, the Queen’s nephew, in the Luberon, Provence.(Theguardian)…[+]