The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who has been accused in France of straining the country’s secular foundations by seeking to mend ties with the Catholic church, has held an unusually long meeting with Pope Francis.The two men spoke for nearly an hour in the official papal library in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, the longest time the pontiff has spent in a meeting with a head of state.

The Vatican said the pair discussed protection of the environment, migration, and multilateral commitment to conflict prevention and resolution, especially in relation to disarmament. They also spoke about prospects for resolving conflicts in the Middle East and Africa and the future of Europe, it said. At the end of the private audience, Macron gave the pope a rare copy of Georges Bernanos’ 1936 novel The Diary of a Country Priest.

“I’ve read this book many times and it has done me good. It is a book that I have always loved very much,” the pope told Macron, who was accompanied in the public part of the meeting by his wife, Brigitte. The pontiff gave Macron a medallion of Martin of Tours, a 4th-century saint who is depicted cutting his cloak in half to give to a beggar in winter. “This means the vocation of those who govern is to help the poor. We are all poor,” the pope told Macron as he gave him the medallion.(theguardian)…[+]

Nine EU member states are set to sign off on the establishment of a joint European military intervention force, an initiative which has won the backing of the UK as it seeks to maintain defence ties after Brexit. Spearheaded by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the European force will be designed to deploy and coordinate forces rapidly to deal with crises around the world.

Defence ministers from France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, Spain and Portugal were expected to sign a letter of intent in Luxembourg on Monday. Since the election of its new government, Italy has backtracked on its initial support, but Rome has not ruled out the country’s future involvement. Macron outlined his vision of strategic autonomy for European defence in a keynote Sorbonne speech last September. The development has caused some anxiety within Nato, where officials are concerned about any duplication of roles and distancing from the US. Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, is in Luxembourg for discussions on European security and defence, before a summit of the military alliance in Brussels next month.(theguardian)…[+]

Health authorities in Australia have launched a major inquiry into a disgraced gynaecologist who mutilated and performed unnecessary operations on dozens of women over decades. One patient died after Dr Emil Shawky Gayed operated on her and failed to administer appropriate treatment. The New South Wales (NSW) Department of Health has announced that it has set up an independent special counsel investigation and a dedicated telephone line at each of the hospitals where the surgeon worked. It encouraged women affected by Gayed – who has been banned from practising for three years – to get in touch.

What has become a burgeoning public health scandal in Australia’s most populous state follows an investigation by Guardian Australia into the conduct of Gayed at one of the hospitals where he worked in the regional town of Taree, 310km (190 miles) north of Sydney. Dozens of women in and around the mid-north NSW coastal town have sustained infections, psychological trauma and other complications because of treatment they received from Gayed at the Manning Rural Referral hospital. Gayed performed a hysterectomy on one woman even though she could have been offered treatment of painkillers and bed rest. The woman never consented to a hysterectomy, an investigation by the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) found.(theguardian)…[+]

Allies of Angela Merkel have called for the German leader to be given more time to set up new bilateral migration deals with other European countries, as she returned empty-handed from an emergency mini-summit in Brussels. Sunday’s gathering of 16 European leaders had been hastily assembled to offer a lifeline to the German chancellor, as her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, is threatening to unilaterally turn away migrants already registered in another EU country at German borders unless the chancellor can come up with a European solution to the problem by 1 July.

But with the unorthodox meeting failing to reach concrete conclusions, senior members of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union have rallied around their party leader and called on its sister party, the Bavarian CSU, to adjust their expectations. “I believe there will be progress by the time of the EU summit on Thursday and Friday,” said Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for budget and human resources. “But there won’t be an agreement of the dimension that some in the CSU are expecting.”(theguardian)…[+]