Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 9 August.
Top stories
A historic bill to decriminalise abortion in NSW has cleared its first hurdle after passing the state’s lower house. The reproductive healthcare reform bill passed 59 votes to 31 just before 11pm on Thursday, though not without amendments. Doctors will now have a statutory requirement to gain “informed consent” before performing abortions, to assess whether it would be “beneficial” to discuss counselling with the woman, and to provide them with options for accessing it if they were interested. The bill will be scrutinised by the parliament’s social issues committee before a vote in the upper house.
The Hong Kong casino magnate Lawrence Ho bought almost 10% of Crown Resorts from James Packer at the same time as he was a director of a company banned from involvement with Crown owing to its links with Ho’s father, Stanley, documents show. The NSW parliament has launched an inquiry into the $1.75bn purchase, and will also look at various matters raised in media reports relating to Crown Resorts. These include that the AFP had been investigating allegations of money laundering at Crown’s Melbourne casino at the time the NSW regulator was conducting its probity review into Crown’s suitability to operate a high-roller casino at Barangaroo.
Labor’s health spokesman has called into question the government’s progress in tackling HTLV-1 in Aboriginal communities in central Australia, which have the world’s highest rates of the fatal virus. In April last year, Guardian Australia revealed that in five communities around Alice Springs, more than 45% of adults tested have the virus, a rate thousands of times higher than for non-Indigenous Australians. After that reporting the federal health minister, Greg Hunt, announced an $8m taskforce to look at HTLV-1 and other communicable diseases in remote communities. But Labor’s Chris Bowen says the issue is at crisis levels. He wants the taskforce to provide regular updates to parliament, “so we can assess and review efforts to tackle the disease”.
World
Boris Johnson has said he hopes the EU will “show common sense” and agree a new Brexit deal, as his aide refused to rule out scheduling an election in the first days after leaving the EU on 31 October if the British PM loses a confidence motion.
The unprecedented communications blackout imposed on Indian-administered Kashmir could signal a departure in the way democratic states clamp down on information in contentious areas, the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression has said.
Two people have been killed and radiation levels reportedly rose after a rocket engine exploded during a test in northern Russia, prompting authorities to close a portion of the White Sea to civilian ships for a month.
The Trump administration has reauthorised government officials to use controversial devices – dubbed “cyanide bombs” by critics – to kill coyotes, foxes and other animals.
The merciless dogfight between Mexican drug cartels has produced its latest macabre spectacle, with the discovery of 19 mutilated corpses – nine of them hung semi-naked from a bridge – in a city west of the capital.
Opinion and analysis
Shayna Jack’s positive drug test has thrown the spotlight on supplements in elite sport. But supplements are not just taken by Olympic athletes and AFL players. The primary market for sports nutrition products is men aged between 19 and 30. The Australian gym and fitness industry is now worth about $2.5bn, and the market share of vitamin and supplements stores has grown alongside it, with bricks and mortar stores worth about $533.5m and online sales worth $159.2m. Together they represent a corporate juggernaut fuelled by the idolisation of sports stars, the cultural obsession with fitness and a particular Instagrammable aesthetic. So what is in those barrels? Who uses such products? And how dangerous are they?
I was poor while all of my friends were rich – the hardest part was the lack of freedom, writes Brigid Delaney in this week’s diary. “When I went on Newstart I knew it would be hard, but I wasn’t prepared for the mental load. The line is the thing that separates those with good financial padding, who might not think much about the $30 taxi or the unexpected bill, or a $70 meal in a restaurant or putting a round of drinks on their cards – and those who are fearful when the bill comes, when the groceries are rung up, when opening the mail. On the other side of that line there are no shock absorbers. And of course, the journey is more jarring and perilous.”
Sport
After decades of silence, hushed conversations and careers quietly ended before their time, the AFL has finally pushed the mental health and wellbeing of players to the foreground with the appointment of Dr Kate Hall as the AFL’s head of mental health and Dr Ranjit Menon as chief psychiatrist.
European football’s summer transfer window has just closed and the Guardian has compiled an exhaustive interactive detailing every major deal. Major transfers include Ryan Sessegnon moving from Fulham to Tottenham for $50m, Kieran Tierney from Celtic to Arsenal for $50m, and Romelu Lukaku from Manchester United to Inter for a staggering $140m.
Thinking time: Intelligence warnings of rising white supremacists in US ignored
Ten years ago the Department of Homeland Security sent US law enforcement agencies an intelligence briefing warning of a rising threat of domestic rightwing extremism, including white supremacist terrorism. The economic recession and the election of America’s first black president would create fertile ground for rightwing radicalisation, the 2009 report concluded. Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, would be attractive targets for recruitment. Republican politicians and conservative pundits reacted with outrage and demanded a retraction. The report was politically motivated and unfairly demonised conservative views, they argued. “Americans are not the enemy. The terrorists are,” the head of the American Legion, a veterans group, wrote.
The head of the Department of Homeland Security apologised. The small team of domestic terrorism analysts who had produced the report were reassigned to study Muslim extremism, according to Daryl Johnson, the career federal intelligence analyst who had led them. By the next year, Johnson says, he had been forced out of the department. Since then, Johnson has watched a rising tide of white nationalist terrorist attacks around the world. This year, he published a book, Hateland, on US extremism, and has given an in-depth interview to the Guardian. “If the message I sent out had been heeded, and people took it seriously, we would have had more resources. That could have tempered the growth of what we have seen over the past 10 years. There would be fewer extremists, and fewer attacks.”
Media roundup
The new Asio director-general, Mike Burgess, will lead an overhaul of the domestic spy agency’s digital capabilities, focusing on improving technology and cyber spycraft in an attempt to combat influence from China and Russia, the Australian reports. The ABC explores the “bulletproof” hosting platforms that keep some of the internet’s worst and most dangerous websites online, including the far-right website 8chan, linked to mass shootings in the US. And the Courier-Mail takes aim at what it calls Queensland treasurer Jackie Trad’s “coal-killing” climate plan, which it says is trying to override federal policy.
Coming up
The Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Australia for the first time, begins with speakers including Tony Abbott, Mark Latham and Nigel Farage.
Scott Morrison and state premiers will meet in Cairns for the Council of Australian Governments.
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