What happened on Friday 18 November, 2022
Thanks for following the day’s news with us. With that, we’ll wrap up our live coverage.
Here’s a summary of the day’s main news developments:
Australian economist Sean Turnell has been reunited with his wife in Melbourne after his release following two years of detention in a Myanmar prison.
A North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile that landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone on Friday had the potential range to strike the US mainland, Japanese officials say. Anthony Albanese has called for an emergency session of the UN security council to respond to the launch.
Albanese has also shrugged off a fresh declaration from the French president that the Aukus submarine deal risks a nuclear confrontation with China, while confirming Australia will not support Taiwan’s entry into a key regional trade pact.
The crisis at Twitter reached new heights on Friday as hundreds of employees were reported to have rejected Elon Musk’s ultimatum to keep working for the business, threatening its ability to keep operating.
Covid cases are continuing to surge, doubling in New South Wales and Victoria in just a fortnight, prompting the former’s health authorities to mandate a limited return to mask-wearing to curb the rise in cases. Meanwhile, a major global cruise operator has reintroduced vaccine and mask-wearing mandates on its Australian ships due to a “rapid rise” in Covid cases across the nation.
Perth schoolboy Cassius Turvey has been laid to rest, with hundreds of mourners gathering to farewell the “beautiful” 15-year-old.
Have a great evening and weekend.
Updated
MH17 guilty verdicts give ‘some justice’ for families of victims
For Matthew Horder, in an Amsterdam court to hear three men finally convicted of responsibility for the shooting down of commercial airline flight MH17, there is, finally, a sense of justice, tempered by the knowledge the men responsible for murdering his parents are not likely to see the inside of a prison cell.
Three men convicted over the fatal shooting down of MH17 on 17 July 2014 – Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko – have been sentenced to life imprisonment. A Dutch court held them responsible for the Buk missile launch that downed the passenger jet, killing all 298 people on board.
Horder, still coming to terms with the death of his mother, Susan, and father, Howard, said the finding of guilt against the three men was a vital accountability for the families of those killed.
“Overall it’s a positive outcome, it’s what we came to hear, the missile downing mum and dad’s plane is true,” Horder said outside court. “There’s some justice – it’s not lost on us the three found guilty are unlikely to serve time behind bars – but we’ve known that since the beginning, they were tried in absentia…Still, something feels different.”
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