Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 12 April.
Top stories
The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, faces extradition to the US and up to five years in prison after he was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The 47-year-old was arrested after Ecuador revoked his political asylum and invited police inside the embassy, where Assange has stayed since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations. Later on Thursday he was found guilty of failing to surrender to the court and faces up to 12 months in a British prison. The judge labelled him a “narcissist” and said Assange’s claim that he had not had a fair hearing was “laughable”. Assange will appear in court again in May in relation to the US extradition charge of conspiring with Chelsea Manning to break into a classified government computer and disclose sensitive documents in 2010. Asked about the arrest, Donald Trump said: “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.” That is not what he said during the 2016 presidential election campaign, when he frequently praised the organisation.
It’s day two of the election campaign and the government has released what it says are new Treasury numbers concluding that Labor’s “tax hit on the economy” will be $387bn, not the $200bn figure it has been spruiking for months. Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten spent Thursday settling into their campaign selves. Labor stuck pretty close to Shorten’s home in Victoria, while Morrison made western Sydney his first stop. Both choices were telling – Labor believes it is in with a chance in at least five Victorian seats, while the Coalition is hoping to pick up Lindsay. Morrison stressed the importance of a “strong economy” while Shorten emphasised that “it’s about you, your family, your health”. If those messages already sound well-worn there is something Guardian Australia readers can do to change the subject, and to enrich and deepen our coverage of the campaign – contact us here if you want to be involved.
Israel Folau is to be sacked by Rugby Australia after his latest social media posts, leaving the Wallabies facing the prospect of heading to the World Cup in Japan without one of their best players. RA released a statement on Thursday night saying it had failed in its attempts to contact the player over the past 24 hours and its intention was to terminate his contract unless he could prove there were “mitigating factors”. Folau’s playing career in Australia was placed in jeopardy after an Instagram post on Wednesday in which he proclaimed hell awaits “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolaters”. Last year the NSW Waratahs player made a series of similar posts, including one that said: “God’s plan for gay people was hell.”
World
Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi/EPA
Protesters in Sudan have vowed to continue their campaign for democratic reform, just hours after the army announced that the 30-year rule of the country’s president, Omar al-Bashir, would be replaced by a military-led transitional council.
Switzerland’s supreme court has overturned a nationwide referendum for the first time in the country’s modern history, on the grounds that the information given to voters was insufficient.
The UK government has stood down an army of 6,000 civil servants who had been preparing for a no-deal Brexit, at an estimated cost of £1.5bn. The civil servants who had been seconded from elsewhere will now return to their normal duties but there is no clear role for an estimated 4,500 recruits after article 50 was extended until 31 October.
Europe can expect even greater migratory pressure from Africa unless action is taken to prevent global warming, Sir David Attenborough has said in a warning that time is running out to save the natural world from extinction.
Hundreds of priceless manuscripts and documents believed to have been looted by Belgian soldiers from a German library at the end of the second world war have been returned. The works, which were thought to have been irretrievably lost, include rare medieval manuscripts, early 15th-century prints, historical maps and 19th-century illustrated bird books.
Opinion and analysis
“In the 1980s, the implementation of ‘workplace flexibility’ began – like most neoliberal reforms – with a certain rhetoric in which the award system was associated with blokey trade unionism,” writes Jeff Sparrow. “By contrast, deregulation would, we were promised, be a boon to women and other oppressed groups, who would be able to work in ways that better suited their familial and other obligations. In practice, the flexibility has only gone one way.” Sparrow argues that instead of an empowering freedom, Australia has ended up with debilitating insecurity, which disproportionately affects the country’s most vulnerable workers.
There’s an upside to Britain’s Brexit humiliation, writes Tony Blair’s former media guru Alastair Campbell – a second referendum is becoming ever more likely. Europe has seen to it that May’s deal or no deal are fading fast as possible options. A people’s vote is the best bet, argues Campbell. “Hope comes in the growing sense that there is now only one way out of the mess we have created for ourselves – a fresh referendum. Its time is coming and yesterday was another big step on the way.”
Sport
Since switching to rugby union in 2013, Israel Folau has undoubtedly been the highest profile player in the game. Given his status, and the fact that he would have been an integral part of Michael Cheika’s plans for Japan, Rugby Australia’s intention to sack the fullback has thrown the Wallabies’ World Cup preparations into disarray.
It’s been a mixed week in the shifting battleground of Australia’s code wars, as our football cartoonist David Squires highlights, including the unifying quality of the SCG pitch and the AFL’s groundbreaking venture into Asia.
Thinking time:
Why is Donald Trump obsessed with Bane in The Dark Knight Rises? “There are many superheroes an ailing American president might choose to associate with in an effort to pick up some much needed kudos,” writes Ben Child. “But with so many virtuous options available to him, it seems bizarre that Donald Trump has chosen the Batman supervillain Bane to cosy up to.” Child writes that observers first noticed Trump’s fascination with Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, in which Tom Hardy’s hulking, masked brute seizes Gotham, when the president stole one of the villain’s lines for his 2017 inaugural speech. And this week Warner Bros threatened legal action after Trump borrowed the film’s score for a 2020 campaign video featuring a number of famous figures he has figuratively crossed swords with. We can ask ourselves why Trump is such a big fan of the movie, which he reviewed positively on his YouTube channel on its release in 2012. But the more interesting question is why the president thinks this is the film score to soundtrack his fight for re-election?
“The problem with cosying up to Bane is that the he epitomises everything Trump’s critics accuse him of being. He is the false prophet who spouts populist rhetoric in an effort to convince the people he is on their side, but in reality only holds their worst interests in his cold, black heart.”
Media roundup
Geoffrey Rush’s defamation case against the Daily Telegraph ended with no winners, an ABC analysis piece says, but there was definitely one loser – Eryn Jean Norvill. The Australian says real-estate agents are “at war” with Labor over Bill Shorten’s negative gearing overhaul and plan to mount a four-week campaign. Northern Territory taxpayers are forking out $21m a year for the cost of high staff turnover in primary healthcare in remote communities, the NT News reports.
Coming up
Thousands of pages of court documents relating to the Lawyer X case will be released today in Melbourne.
Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten are both heading to western Sydney for day two of the election campaign.
