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Barbara Butch said she had been the target of "cyber-harrassment". Photo: Instagram, @BarbaraButch By Steven McIntosh of the BBC A French DJ who performed during the Paris Olympics' opening ceremony has filed a legal complaint after receiving abuse online. Barbara Butch took part in a drag queen sequence during the event which sparked controversy as viewers interpreted it as a reference to The Last Supper. The ceremony's artistic director, Thomas Jolly, denied this and some art experts said the scene shared more similarities with a painting of Greek gods. A lawyer for Barbara Butch said the DJ "has been threatened with death, torture and rape, and has also been the target of numerous antisemitic, homophobic, sexist and grossophobic insults". Butch said she had been the target of "cyber-...

Floral tributes and soft toys are laid following a vigil in Southport, northwest England, on 30 July 2024, a day after a deadly child knife attack. Photo: ROLAND LLOYD PARRY / AFP "Thugs" were to blame for the violence that saw 39 police officers injured in Southport, the town's MP has said. Unrest broke out in the Merseyside town hours after a vigil to remember the victims of Monday's knife attack at a dance school in which three young girls were killed. Officers were pelted with bricks, a police van was set on fire, and eight officers were seriously hurt, Merseyside Police said. MP Patrick Hurley described the violence - close to a mosque - as "horrific". Hurley told BBC's Radio 4 Today programme that the "riot" was "led by people from outside the town". Police said the violence was b...

Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Green New Deal Network/AFP By Andrew Hay, Reuters At least 973 Native American children died at Indian Boarding Schools from 1819 to 1969, according to a federal report that calls on the US government to apologise for the 150-year-long forced assimilation policy used to separate children from families and destroy tribal identity. Many of the children who died were buried at 65 former schools across the country in at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites, according to a US Department of the Interior study released on Tuesday. It was the second and final report on the schools commissioned by US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the United States' first Native American cabinet secretary. Haaland, a member of New Mexico's Pueblo of Laguna tribe...

By Tiffanie Turnbull for BBC Photo: 123rf Babies with peanut allergies in Australia will be offered treatment to build immunity to the potentially life-threatening condition, under a world-first program. Supervised by select paediatric hospitals, eligible babies will be given gradually increasing doses of peanut powder each day for at least two years, to reduce sensitivity. Oral immunotherapy has been available in clinical trials and some specialist allergy centres around the globe, but this is the first time it has ever been adopted as a national model of care for peanut allergies. Australia is often dubbed the "allergy capital of the world", with one in 10 infants diagnosed with food sensitivities. Peanut allergy affects about 3 percent of Australians at 12 months old and - unlike o...

The United Nations is reporting human rights violations on Palestinian detainees. Photo: JAAFAR ASHTIYEH / AFP By Emma Farge for Reuters Thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly removed from Gaza, sometimes from bomb shelters, and dragged into detention in Israel where some have been tortured and dozens have died, according to a UN human rights office report on Tuesday. Many of those seized in Gaza since the war began on 7 October were taken at checkpoints as they fled Israel's military offensive or from the schools and hospitals where they were sheltering, said the 23-page report based primarily on interviews with released detainees and other victims and witnesses. Often, they were blindfolded and shackled before being transported to Israel and placed in "cage-like" military centre...

By Simon Smale, ABC Belarusian athletes, seen here at the Tokyo 2020 opening ceremony, will not be flying their flag at the Paris Olympics. Photo: BEN STANSALL / AFP Watching the Olympic Games often boils down to understanding who is representing whom in each event. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has a helpful code of acronyms that it uses to help determine who is who. Most of the time these codes are pretty obvious: AUS is the three-letter code that represents Australia, PNG is Papua New Guinea, NZL is New Zealand, for example. Others can be slightly more confusing: CHI relates to Chile while CHN is China, and Moldova is MDA with the Maldives represented by MDV. Even more confusingly, the IOC lists Bahrain as BRN, which is what the International Organization for Standardi...