Australians faced Christmas 2019 with dread as bushfires blazed through millions of hectares of land, destroying wildlife, homes and lives. Last Sunday an area half the size of Belgium was evacuated in the state of Victoria. The wildfire crisis in the country is unlike any faced before, and the decision by Scott Morrison, the prime minister, to holiday in Hawaii as some of the worst fires reached a peak caused a national furore. With the planet at a climate tipping point, will large-scale disasters such as these help push even climate-sceptical governments into taking major action? Don’t bet on it. In this week’s cover story, reporters from the Guardian Australia team analyse the impact of the bushfires and look at how ordinary lives in towns in New South Wales have been upended.
For the latest reporting on the bushfires from the Guardian Australia reporting team, click here.
After weeks of congressional testimony and months of evidence gathering, Donald Trump was finally impeached by the US House of Representatives in late December. While it’s almost certain the Republican-majority Senate won’t convict the president, the question over the political repercussions of impeachment remain. Tom Perkins reports from Michigan, the key swing state where Trump grandstanded on the evening of his impeachment, while our US national affairs correspondent Tom McCarthy considers the political price the Republicans may or may not pay for falling so firmly in line behind Trump.
In other reports from around the planet – we hear good news from Darfur, where a water scheme is helping end the first “climate change war”. Emma Graham-Harrison heads to Finland to see what equality means in a country governed by 30-something year-old women and Philip Oltermann meets Robert Habeck, the co-leader of the German Greens who has high hopes to succeed Angela Merkel next year.
In opinion, Peter Geoghegan wonders how long the British union will hold after Brexit and December’s election; Mari Marcel Thekaekara finds hope in the young, secular Indians protesting Modi’s citizenship law and Nathan Robinson wonders why the Trump impeachment feels like such an anticlimax for progressives.
As millions across Europe head to the mountains for the winter ski season, hotels and resorts have a big problem: melting snow. Simon Parkin heads to the Alps to talk to the makers of the fake white stuff to see how they’re planning to cope with a warming world. Then Tom Lamont meets Harry Styles, who found fame in the British boyband One Direction, but – as his solo career takes off – has become one of the world’s more interesting pop stars.
