From sound systems to flat parties, Notting Hill carnival remains Europe’s biggest street festival and London’s greatest celebration of music, heritage and intimacy – even as questions about its future loom

It’s the best weekend in London – a reminder of the city at its most open, vibrant and welcoming. After two days immersed in Notting Hill carnival, eating too much food, bumping into old friends, and skanking to reggae and dancehall, I’m left smiling at an event that fosters a rare sense of connection in a city so often accused of being cold.

Smiles on Golborne Road.

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• Porepunkah shooting: two Victoria police officers dead, one injured in attack at rural property

• What we know so far about the shooting in rural Australia

Wangaratta police have confirmed there is still an “active incident” ongoing and are continuing to urge people to avoid the area.

In a statement published to its social media page a moment ago, the local police service said Victoria police “continues to respond to an incident at a property in Porepunkah”.

This is still an active incident and we will provide more information when it’s operationally safe to do so.

We ask people avoid the area.

Tonight’s Ordinary Council Meeting has also been postponed, and will be rescheduled for two weeks’ time. Further details will be provided at a later date.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.

A blaze on Tuesday night destroyed the parliament building, archives and library

A fire has destroyed the national parliament building of the Marshall Islands, according to officials in the Pacific Island nation.

The Marshall Islands fire department said half of the parliament building – known as the Nitijela – had been burnt down, in an interview with Reuters.

The Argentinian writer maps a journey through fear, healing and the terrifying permeability of our boundaries

Horror, in essence, is about porousness. Our terrors take varied forms but horror probes their single, existential source: the terrifying permeability of our boundaries. If spirits can swim back from the world of the dead, if the living body can degrade to the point where it becomes malleable or parasitically possessed, what hope can there be for our fantasy of security and selfhood?

Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s most recent collection of stories, her third in English, may not be categorisable as “horror” in the traditional sense, but it shares with the genre its spiritual core. In Schweblin’s vision, the barriers that separate one thing from another – the wanted from the unwanted, the environmental from the bodily, the unthreatening from the violent and chaotic – are so porous as to be nonexistent. True horror, she reminds us, is neither otherworldly or supernatural, it is simply the acknowledgment of life’s fundamental conditions.

It is more than a century since Joyce crossed Europe by rail but there is still inspiration to be found on the overland journey to Trieste

When James Joyce first travelled from Dublin to Trieste in 1904, he went via Paris, Zurich and Ljubljana. Zurich, because he mistakenly believed a job to be awaiting him there, and Ljubljana because – groggy after the night train – he thought they’d pulled into Trieste. By the time he twigged, the train had departed and, without ready cash, Joyce and his partner Nora Barnacle had to spend a night on the tiles.

Preferring to travel by train, when I received the invite to be writer-in-residence at the James Joyce summer school in Trieste, I wondered if I might follow Joyce’s route. But repair work on Austria’s Tauern Tunnel prevented me from taking the exact route. Besides, today’s TGV tears through France at nearly 200mph, in comparison to the 25-60mph speeds at which Joyce would have navigated Switzerland and Austria. A night on the town in Milan is just as good for the muse.

After six months I only got it back after I’d reported it stolen

In January my car wouldn’t start and I called the AA. The patrolman diagnosed a faulty engine control unit (ECU) and towed it to an AA-approved garage, RCS in Deeside.

I didn’t receive it back until July and, only then after I reported it stolen to the police. It was coated in bird dirt, with a missing number plate light lens and faulty digital display, and there were 15,000 extra miles on the clock.