Just this weekend, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and US President Donald Trump sat together in New Jersey for the World Cup final – a send off to a joint North American tournament that has, despite criticism over ticket prices and travel costs, been widely viewed as a success.
British hygiene brand Dettol has apologised for an advert in China that it claims was meant to call out sexism, but has instead backfired. The five-minute long advert for a multipurpose disinfectant, styled like a micro drama, starts out with a man looking for a partner who is “clean” and “not tainted by other men”. A plot twist comes late in the advert when his new girlfriend calls him out for his misogyny and breaks up with him. Dettol is then presented as the solution against “toxic men [who] are just like bacteria”. The advert sparked an uproar on the Chinese internet, with some users saying it objectifies women and others calling for a boycott of the brand. Dettol said the advert, which has been removed following the backlash, was intended to criticise gender stereotypes, but that snippets of it that later circulated online distorted its core message. “We recognise that it has offended many people, especially women. We take responsibility for any negligence in creating and reviewing the content of the advert,” Dettol said in a statement on Monday. The company also said it would review its content moderation processes. Dettol was founded with a mission to “protect the health” of families, it said, adding: “But we are well aware that true protection also lies in safeguarding the dignity of every individual and their right to be treated equally.” The advert has sparked heated discussions across Chinese social media platforms over the last few days, with many people angered by its attempts to compare a person’s “purity” with the disinfecting abilities of Dettol products. “What a trashy advertisement. It’s left me speechless,” a user wrote on Weibo, China’s X-like platform.
A group of Australians have accused the government of violating their human rights by continuing to export coal and gas and are asking the UN to take action. The group say their lives have been harmed due to extreme weather in Australia – bushfires, floods, heatwaves, rising sea levels and toxic algal blooms – and the government’s support of fossil fuel companies is to blame. It is the first legal claim taken to an international body or court since 2025’s ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that countries can be sued over climate change. Any decision by the UN is not legally binding but Australia – one of the world’s largest coal and gas exporters – would be expected to respond. The BBC has contacted Environment Minister Murray Watt for comment. Dr Barry Traill, a wildlife ecologist and volunteer firefighter, is one of the ten litigants. In 2009, several of his friends died during the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, despite being prepared and experienced, he said. “That deeply changed me,” Traill said, and “it became clear that the old rules around fires and survival no longer applied”. In 2019, he was on the frontlines battling severe blazes in Queensland during the so-called Black Summer fires where he saw that climate change was not a future problem. “It is already killing people and hurting lives, landscapes and communities across Australia,” he said. “Continuing to allow coal and gas companies to increase pollution, while people face worsening disasters, is a profound failure of responsibility.” Brendon Donohue has also joined the legal claim, describing how he was trapped in his home for 10 days in 2022 when floods in Brisbane damaged the power supply of his apartment block, meaning the lifts, intercom and exits were not accessible. “Because I live with blindness and mobility challenges, climate impacts affect me differently and can make everyday life much harder to navigate safely,” he said. Rebecca ParkerBrendon Donohue was trapped in his Brisbane apartment for 10 days due to floods in 2022 Another case is that of Prof Anne Poelina, an Indigenous woman from the Kimberley region in Western Australia, who describes being displaced from the area around the Fitzroy River, one of the state’s most important waterways, because of catastrophic flooding. “When the river is healthy, our people are healthy,” she said, and “when the river suffers, our people suffer.” “What concerns me most is the intergenerational loss of cultural knowledge,” she added as “so much of our knowledge is not written down”, but passed on by being physically present on the land. One of the lawyers helping the group with their claim said that “climate harm caused by Australia’s coal and gas doesn’t stop at a border, and neither does Australia’s responsibility for it”. “They are asking the United Nations Human Rights Committee to declare that it’s unlawful for Australia to continue approvin