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Similar logos, different views: Australia’s peak health body for men distances itself from conservative group’s International Men’s Day campaign

A group that espouses anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments is running an International Men’s Day (IMD) campaign that is similar to a government-funded campaign aimed at “supporting men and boys”. The Australian Men’s Health Forum (AMHF) is the government-funded peak body for men’s mental and physical health and has coordinated IMD, an annual event on 19 November, since 2017. This year’s theme is “supporting men and boys”. Meanwhile the Fatherhood Foundation, trading as Dads4Kids, says it is the “global digital driving force and the coordinating charity for IMD”. It is a conservative Christian organisation focused on reinforcing traditional gender roles and has “celebrating men and boys” as its theme. The domain names and logos of both sites are very similar, but the AMHF is not affiliated with Dads4Kids. “AMHF is not affiliated with any International Men’s Day website that does not support this inclusive approach to marking the date,” AMHF’s chief executive officer, Glen Poole, said. It was not clear which group came up with their logos or domain names first and there is no suggestion that either group has deliberately copied the other, just that the two campaigns are similar. AMHF says it was invited to coordinate the Australian day by international founder and University of the West Indies academic Dr Jerome Teelucksingh, while Dads4Kids says it works with Teelucksingh. Much of Dads4Kids’ public material promotes anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments and it has pushed for the rights of fathers in family custody battles for more than two decades. Warwick Marsh is the founder of Dads4Kids and the self-described global digital coordinator of IMD. In a post about this year’s IMD, Marsh wrote both masculinity and femininity are under attack, but the greater danger is to masculinity. “The attack against men is so ferocious that masculinity is in danger of extinction,” he wrote. Sign up: AU Breaking News email In a tribute to conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this year, a post (reposted from a different group) quoted Kirk as saying “feminism must be defeated for the west to be saved” and that “having children is more important than having a good career”. In 2024, Marsh’s son and Dads4Kids chief executive officer, Nathaniel Marsh, wrote that his takeaways from a clip he had watched were that “feminist ideology is a cancer on society” and that the men’s rights academic Janice Fiamengo made “a strong case for being ‘anti-feminist’”. Warwick Marsh has written submissions to government inquiries referring to a document he published called “21 reasons why gender matters”, in which he said “extreme feminists and homosexual activists” have sought to minimise the differences between the genders. He described transexuality as a “deceptively fierce disorder” and uses quotes describing homosexuality as “perverse”, falsely blaming it for a range of social ills. He wrote that “healing is possible” and “many have left the homosexual lifestyle”. He was fired as a health ambassador in 2008 for the document, with then health minister Nicola Roxon calling it “quite abhorrent”, but he continued to refer to the document in submissions. In a submission to a 2009 bill, he talked about the “lifestyle choice” of those who “want to engage in unnatural homosexual sex”. In a submission to a 2023 bill on a family law amendment aimed at protecting women and children from family violence abuse and at elevating the safety and needs of children, Marsh said it was “based on a father-phobic, radical feminist ideology”. In 2017 the group was accused by LGBTQI+ activists of trying to politicise fathers day and trying to claim victimhood in the same-sex marriage debate. Poole said that in 2011, the UK IMD co-ordinators developed a diversity and equality statement clarifying that the objectives of IMD applied “equally to men and boys irrespective of their age, ability, social background, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, religious belief and relationship status”. Professor Michael Flood researches men, masculinities and gender at the Queensland University of Technology. He said he was initially “hostile” to IMD because “in many ways it represented anti-feminist perspectives on men, women and gender”, implied a parallel with International Women’s Day and framed men as victims. But he now speaks at IMD events. “In the last decade I’ve seen a growing number of events and discussions about IMD that acknowledge issues of mental health, suicide, other genuine forms of disadvantage that some men face but without the broader kind of anti-feminist framing that had trouble me,” he said. “So while I still have some ambivalence about the day, I’m also happy to speak at IMD events talking about, for example, men’s health, and the links between men’s health and the Man Box or broad social expectations of masculinity and the harms they can impose on men and those around them.” Flood said it could be “tricky” for some to spot whether an IMD event was anti-feminist or not, but that most of them these days are “well-intentioned efforts to address genuine forms of harm that men face”. He said while the day had been a “vehicle for legitimising anti-feminist views”, it is “redeemable”. Multiple IMD events are not affiliated with Dads4Kids or AMHF. Guardian Australia contacted Dads4Kids for comment.

British woman among four tourists killed in blizzard at nature reserve in Chile

A British woman and four other foreign tourists have been killed in a blizzard at a nature reserve in southern Chile. Nine people went missing on Monday in the Torres del Paine reserve in Patagonia, a popular tourist destination, amid heavy snowfall and winds reaching up to 120mph. Four were rescued alive from a remote area in the mountains, but it was confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that two Mexicans, two Germans and a British woman had died. A total of 24 people were involved in the search – including police officers, soldiers, mountain rescue, and a search dog – but helicopters were unable to fly due to the adverse weather conditions. The presidential delegate of the Magallanes region, José Antonio Ruiz, said: “We are in the process of evacuation and consular procedures, due to the nationality of these people.” He added that preparations were under way to evacuate the bodies by air, when the weather was good enough for helicopters to operate safely. The national park in southern Chile featuring mountains, glaciers and rivers is a popular spot for explorers. In 2024, more than 367,000 tourists visited the reserve, a rise of almost two-thirds compared with the previous year. Guillermo Ruiz, presidential delegate for the province of Ultima Esperanza, told reporters that the tourists became lost near the park’s Los Perros camp, reachable only by a four- to five-hour trek from the closest accessible point by vehicle. November is late spring in the southern hemisphere, with the busiest months in Torres del Paine coming in the summer months between December and February. Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, offered his condolences to the victims’ families in the “tragedy”, and paid tribute to the rescue teams who had “worked tirelessly from the very beginning in the search, rescue, and now evacuation efforts”. A spokesperson from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office could not yet confirm the identity of the woman, but said: “We are in contact with the local authorities following an incident in Chile.”

Trump defends Saudi crown prince over Khashoggi killing, threatens ABC News in White House meeting – as it happened

And I’ll leave you with my colleague Julian Borger’s report on the visit:

Caribbean slavery reparations body calls for ‘mutually beneficial’ restorative justice from UK

The Caribbean’s slavery reparations body has decried misleading press reports that suggest their aim is to “break the British Treasury” by demanding trillions of pounds, as they call for a mutually beneficial restorative justice programme. Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC), which was set up to progress the Caribbean’s pursuit of justice for centuries of enslavement and colonisation by European nations, made the comments during the body’s first official visit to the UK. In a press conference on Tuesday he said the conversation and debate around reparations was important, but stressed that it was critical to raise awareness of the enduring harm caused when African people were kidnapped, enslaved and oppressed – and when Caribbean countries were later left, after independence, “with no resources, bankrupt treasuries [and] no economic strategies”. “We have spoken historically about how Britain has extracted wealth from our societies, our communities … All dimensions of our civilisation have been subject to severe extraction of wealth that has helped to build out the institutions of this country and to build up the nation that is Great Britain today,” he said, adding that the Caribbean was not “seeking to offer the same extractive agenda”. The reparations movement, he said, was about collaboration between former colonies and former colonisers, justice for crimes committed against humanity, and reparations for the resulting human suffering that still persisted today. It was about cleaning up the “mess” left by colonialism “so that we can all go forward together”, he said. Speaking at a lecture in London on Monday, he said the CRC’s ultimate aim was for the UK and its former colonies to identify “mutual strategies for mutual benefits”. “Every week, we open the newspapers and we hear the most terrible things about these reparations people from the Caribbean. Some have said that we have come here to break the British Treasury by demanding millions and billions and billions of pounds. And they have consistently tried to discredit what is an ongoing moral and ethical argument for justice, the right to justice,” he said. During the lecture, Sir Beckles pointed to the consequences of enslavement, which continue to hamper the Caribbean’s development, including unfair debt accumulation, health and education challenges, and the struggle to build the resilience needed to face worsening natural disasters. This week, he is a leading six-member CRC delegation, which has been meeting with UK parliamentarians, Caribbean diplomats, academics and civil society groups to “raise consciousness, provide information to the public, provide historical knowledge and contemporary understanding” and facilitate a future dialogue between Caribbean and British governments. Between the 15th and the 19th century, more than 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped, forcibly transported to the Americas and sold into slavery. Caribbean governments have been calling for recognition of the lasting legacy of colonialism and enslavement, and for reparative justice from former colonisers, including a full formal apology and forms of financial reparations, such as debt cancellations. David Comissiong, ambassador to Caricom and vice-chair of the Barbados National Taskforce, told reporters on Tuesday that “the overburdened debt situation” facing many countries in the region resulted from centuries of European nations siphoning off and plundering Caribbean resources. This, he said, was linked to modern-day challenges facing the Caribbean, such as dealing with the climate crisis. “If we don’t, with proper goodwill, and the understanding that we are all in this together … address these lingering situations of injustice and fragility, then what happens? The climate crisis only gets worse. Developing countries only suffer more because they don’t have the resources to respond. The climate refugee situation only worsens. “Yes, we are looking for justice for ourselves. But by seeking justice for ourselves, we are also seeking universal justice. We are also seeking to cure and to heal wounds and inequities and unsustainability … [that] will wreak havoc not only on us but will wreak havoc on our entire world,” he said. The region is part of a growing global movement for slavery reparations. At the ongoing UN Cop30 climate conference in Brazil, hundreds of human rights groups and environmentalists have urged delegates to put reparations on the agenda. In their open letter they argued that “global warming began with the industrial revolutions that were made possible by the resources provided by imperialism, colonialism and enslavement, [and] that colonialism and enslavement skewed the global economy in favour of the material and financial interests in the global north”. The issue was also prominent when Commonwealth leaders met last year. At a summit, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the slave trade was abhorrent but that countries should be “looking forward” and addressing current challenges such as the climate crisis. But the UK was among the leaders who issued a statement saying that “the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity”.

China in ‘covert and calculated’ effort to recruit MPs and peers, minister says

MPs and peers have been told they face “a covert and calculated” attempt to recruit parliamentarians through two LinkedIn profiles linked to the Chinese intelligence service. After MI5 issued an espionage alert on Tuesday, saying that two people were operating on LinkedIn to obtain “non-public and insider insights”, the security minister, Dan Jarvis, told MPs the effort was focused on those “with access to sensitive information about parliament and the UK government”. With the Chinese embassy in London dismissing the accusations as “pure fabrication”, the diplomatic dispute appeared to be a new flashpoint in the increasingly tense relationship between China and the UK over alleged espionage. MI5 said the profiles were under the names Amanda Qiu, from BR-YR Executive Search, and Shirly Shen, who is linked to Internship Union, and told MPs and peers they were using LinkedIn to “conduct outreach at scale”. The spy agency sent its warning to the speaker of the Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, and his Lords equivalent, John McFall, on Tuesday morning, both of whom relayed its contents to the members of their houses with a cover message. In his email to peers, McFall said the individuals, linked to China’s ministry of state security spy agency (MSS), were aiming “to collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants acting on their behalf”. Qiu’s profile on LinkedIn, written in English, describes her as having been the chief executive of BR-YR Executive Search for more than six years and says she is based in Beijing. Her listed interests include the UK’s Department for Transport and the Tony Blair Institute. Shen’s profile, also largely in English, describes her as a co-founder of Internship Union, based in Hangzhou, eastern China. She says it “has helped hundreds of students come to China” and she describes herself as “a positive Asia girl” who would “welcome friends all over world join us to get a magic Chinese experience”. Both appear to be young women but it is not known if the photographs are genuine. Chinese spies often use false personas, MI5 said in its alert, with a frequent archetype that of a young woman with an anglicised first name. The Labour MP Josh Simons was connected with Shen on LinkedIn, although he said they did not exchange any messages. He removed Shen as a contact on Tuesday. The security minister, Dan Jarvis, confirmed the alert had been sent out in a lunchtime Commons statement. “This activity involves a covert and calculated attempt by a foreign power to interfere with our sovereign affairs in favour of its own interests, and this government will not tolerate it,” he told MPs. He said MI5 had warned that the espionage campaign was “being carried out by a group of Chinese intelligence officers, often masked through the use of cover companies or external headhunters”. China’s embassy in the UK accused Britain of engaging in “pure fabrication and malicious slander”. A spokesperson said: “We urge the UK side to immediately stop this self-staged charade of false accusations and self-aggrandisement, and stop going further down the wrong path of undermining China-UK relations.” It is understood that the rare decision by MI5 to issue the espionage alert was taken because of the intensity of the ongoing threat rather than because of any particular episode – though relations with China remain sensitive despite efforts by Labour to foster a positive trading relationship with Beijing. Earlier in the autumn, a political row about the scale of the threat posed by China followed a surprise decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to drop espionage charges against Christopher Cash, a parliamentary researcher, and Christopher Berry, a friend based in China, a month before their trial. A similar parliamentary alert was issued nearly four years ago, warning MPs and peers about Christine Lee, a high-profile Anglo-Chinese lawyer, who had donated more than £500,000 to fund the office costs of the Labour MP Barry Gardiner and who had received a special award from the then prime minister, Theresa May. MI5 has previously warned about Chinese spies seeking to obtain information by using LinkedIn to recruit Britons working in sensitive areas. Posing as recruitment consultants, the agents, normally women, have sought to lure at least 20,000 Britons with potential job offers. The MI5 alert, a single-page slide, explains the recruitment methodology used by Chinese spies on LinkedIn. Targets “will typically be approached to work as freelance consultants authoring geopolitical reports”, though sometimes people are offered a job with a company, though the person hiring is in fact a spy. Red flags, MI5 said, were requests for details that were “‘non-public’; ‘timely’; ‘off the record’; ‘sensitive’; and ‘insider information’” – while preferred forms of payment were cash, for those willing to go China, or crypto currency. Last year, Qiu’s BP-YR Executive Search posted a job advert on LinkedIn for a “part-time adviser” who would be paid up to €20,000 (£17,600) a year to write five to 10 reports on “the ongoing policy which may affect foreign business in your country (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy etc)”. The advert said the reports would be for Power Glory Battery Tech, a Chinese lithium battery company. It asked for a person who was “an expert or an ‘insider’ regarding to either politics or the economy” and who had previous experience in government, colleges or thinktanks, and offered them one to two free trips to Asia each year. Jarvis also told the Commons that he would ask MI5 to provide security briefings for political parties, issue guidance for election candidates and tighten rules on political donations as part of a plan to counter political interference. Countries such as China often focused on people “one step removed” from their ultimate target, MI5 warned. The British government had also completed a plan to remove surveillance cameras supplied by Chinese companies “from all sensitive sites we maintain in the UK”, Jarvis said. Though he did not name the companies involved, the principal supplier is Hikvision, which makes CCTV cameras. Qiu and Shen have been approached for comment.

Ukrainians working for Russia were behind rail blasts, alleges Polish PM

Polish authorities have identified two Ukrainian men, allegedly working for the Russian intelligence services, as the key suspects in two cases of rail sabotage, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, has said. The men are alleged to have planted a military-grade explosive device and attached a steel clamp to rail tracks in two incidents on a strategic rail route used for aid deliveries for Ukraine. The explosive went off on Saturday night under a freight train, which suffered minor damage to its undercarriage, and damaged the tracks, posing a risk to other trains taking that route, Tusk said. Speaking in the Polish parliament on Tuesday, Tusk said the two incidents were “unprecedented” and “perhaps the most serious, when it comes to the security of the Polish state, situation since the beginning of the full-scale invasion on Ukraine”. “We are dealing with an act of sabotage, the consequence of which could have been – and here the perpetrators’ mistake also helped us – … a serious catastrophe with casualties. That is why I am saying that a certain line has been crossed,” he said. “In both cases we are sure … that the attempt to blow up the rails and the railway infrastructure violation were intentional … and their aim was to cause a railway catastrophe,” he said. He said that they were part of a broader pattern of “acts of sabotage and actions of Russian services across the whole of Europe, not only in Poland, [which] are unfortunately gaining momentum”. The suspects, whose identities are known to Polish authorities but have not been made public, are thought to have arrived in Poland from Belarus shortly before the attacks and returned to Belarus shortly after. One of the two men had previously been convicted for sabotage in Ukraine, and the other came from the Russian-occupied Donetsk region of Ukraine, Tusk said. The prime minister said the recruitment of Ukrainian citizens by Russia served to “stir up possibly radically anti-Ukrainian sentiments”, which he said were “particularly dangerous” in countriessuch as Poland, which hosts large Ukrainian migrant and refugee communities. The claim that the suspects fled to Belarus came just a day after Poland opened two border crossings with the country that had been shut for years due to political tensions. Poland cited economic reasons for opening the checkpoints. At the Bobrowniki crossing on Tuesday, several dozen trucks were waiting on the Polish side to cross into Belarus. Poland has suffered a wave of sabotage attempts and cyber-attacks in recent months, with authorities in the country usually blaming Russia. Polish authorities had detained 55 people in relation to such offences, Tusk said, with 23 arrested for acts of sabotage. Court files seen by the Guardian have shown that the perpetrators are often recruited on the secure messaging app Telegram by accounts believed to be operated by Russian intelligence, which promise them money for carrying out arson or other tasks. After hundreds of Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover were expelled from Europe after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it is believed that Russia increasingly turned to this kind of “one-time” operative. The Russian services also use the tactic in Ukraine, where teenagers have been recruited as unwitting suicide bombers, paid to carry packages with explosives which are then remotely detonated when the courier is close to a police station or other sensitive site. However, the nebulous chain of command for such attacks and the difficulty of working out who exactly is on the end of the Telegram chat has often made it difficult to prove beyond doubt that Russia is involved. In the case of this week’s attacks, authorities have not yet explained what evidence they have gathered to support their claim that Russia is responsible for the attack. Poland is understood to be working on strong diplomatic reactions to Belarus and Russia, with the foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, saying he would demand that the countries work with Polish authorities and surrender the suspects. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied the accusations and said they were just an another example of Poland’s “Russophobia”.

EU confirms it wants UK to pay into its budget in exchange for closer ties

The UK must pay into the EU budget for future participation in the European single market in electricity, it has been confirmed, in what could become a major test for the post-Brexit reset. Ireland’s Europe minister, Thomas Byrne, said EU member states had decided the UK should make a financial contribution for closer ties: “Ireland wants to see Britain getting the benefit of closer engagement with the European Union. “Ultimately there is a cost to a lot of that and there are discussions to be had in terms of the cost to Britain, and certainly some other member states would see that as a priority issue. I think that is just being politically realistic.” In an unexpected move, the EU decided last week that the UK should pay towards its budget in order to join the European electricity market. It would mean the UK paying into the EU budget, although Britain already pays EU membership legacy costs. The two sides are also deadlocked over the EU’s demand for an entry fee of up to €6bn (£5.3bn) to allow British companies to maximise benefits from a €150bn (£132.1bn) EU defence programme. In more welcome news for the government, Byrne said he hoped both sides could strike a deal to ease food and animal checks at the border in the second half of 2026, during Ireland’s presidency of the EU Council. Last week, the EU agreed a mandate for the European Commission to negotiate this veterinary agreement. “I think that could be a gamechanger,” Byrne added. During a landmark summit in May that launched the government’s EU reset, Keir Starmer and the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, agreed the two sides “should explore in detail the necessary parameters for the United Kingdom’s possible participation in the European Union’s internal electricity market”. The text did not spell out that the UK should pay for access – but since then, a large majority of EU member states have decided this should be the case. Several countries, including Belgium and Germany, have warned against allowing the UK to “cherrypick” the best bits of the European single market without abiding by common rules. Commission officials briefing EU ministers on Monday described the UK as a “complicated and challenging counterpart” and said “nerves of steel and unity” would be required through upcoming negotiations. The central challenge would be financial considerations, they added. Tensions over money have already emerged in negotiations over UK participation in the EU’s €150bn security action for Europe (Safe) fund. EU officials have suggested an entry fee of up to €6bn, far higher than the administrative fee the government had envisaged paying. Peter Ricketts, the veteran former diplomat who chairs the European affairs committee in the House of Lords, has described a rumoured €6.5bn fee as “so off the scale that it suggests some EU members don’t want the UK in the scheme”. Some media outlets have reported the entry fee could be between €6.5bn and €6.7bn, but the Guardian understands the commission has proposed a fee ranging from €1bn to €6bn, proportionate to expected UK benefits. Sandro Gozi, an Italian centrist MEP who co-chairs the EU-UK parliamentary assembly, said it was imperative to show voters that the reset meant something. “We have to exploit this time window of opportunity to show to citizens [and] business that working together again through this partnership makes a difference, and to persuade, especially UK public opinion, but also the public opinion in our union, that it is worth to put energy, effort time in our renewed bilateral relationship,” he said. A UK government spokesperson said Britain was “committed to a broad and constructive relationship with the EU” and work was ongoing to implement the package agreed at the UK-EU summit. “We will only agree deals that provide value to the UK and UK industry. Nothing has been agreed, and we will not give a running commentary on talks.” Barry Andrews, an Irish delegate on the EU-UK assembly who is a member of Byrne’s Fianna Fáil party, said progress had been “terribly slow” since the May summit and political energy was absent. “Given the current geopolitical situation, we should be absolutely racing towards agreement with the UK, and particularly on defence,” he said.

Two Ukrainian men believed to be working with Russia identified as suspects in Polish rail sabotage attacks – as it happened

As we are closing the blog now, here is a summary of what we know so far: Two Ukrainian men have been identified as main suspects behind the rail sabotage incidents in Poland over the weekend, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk said (13:34). The perpetrators are believed to be working for Russian intelligence services, who had crossed into Poland from Belarus this autumn and fled to Belarus following the attacks. The main incident in the village of Mika involved the use of a military-type C-4 explosive intended to blow up a train, Tusk said (13:40). Speaking in the Polish parliament, Tusk said the two incidents were “unprecedented” and “perhaps the most serious, when it comes to the security of the Polish state, incidents since the beginning of the full-scale invasion on Ukraine” (13:46). He further warned that “these acts of sabotage and actions of Russian services across … Europe, not only in Poland, are unfortunately gaining momentum,” calling it “an escalation” and an attempt to sow chaos and anti-Ukrainian sentiment (13:58, 15:05). But Russia dismissed the Polish accusations, saying it was another example of Warsaw’s “Russophobia” (15:09). Elsewhere, Ireland’s longstanding finance minister Paschal Donohoe has stepped step down to join the World Bank (11:52), triggering a government reshuffle with deputy PM Simon Harris taking Donohoe’s old job, and Helen McEntee taking over as the foreign minister (16:01, 16:10, 16:53). French president Emmanuel Macron said that Europe does not want to be a “vassal” that is dependent on US and Chinese tech companies, calling for a “European preference” in the sector (17:51). Czechs (10:45) and Slovaks (10:34) took to streets last night to protest against populist leaders Andrej Babiš and Robert Fico as they marked the 36th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Over in Greece, mass rallies have been held to mark the 52nd anniversary of the student uprising at the Athens polytechnic (17:21). And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa, for today. If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.