Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 18 January.
Top stories
Queensland looks set to be overrun with federal politicians as the major parties make the state battleground central ahead of the federal election. On Thursday, Bill Shorten announced, “For the next nine days, the headquarters for me is Queensland” as his “Bill bus” took off on a 1,400km odyssey across more than half of Queensland’s federal electorates. Meanwhile, the Coalition has moved its campaign headquarters to Brisbane and Scott Morrison will hold a cabinet meeting in the sunshine state within the next couple of weeks.
Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has insisted he “never said there was no collusion” between Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and Russia – only that Trump himself was not involved. Giuliani told CNN he did not know if others involved in the campaign had worked with Russia, and said: “If the collusion happened, it happened a long time ago.” But he once again defended the president. “There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you can commit here, conspiring with the Russians to hack the DNC,” he said, referring to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and leaking the emails of senior Democrats during the 2016 campaign.
As the royal commission into aged care begins in Adelaide, personal carer Kim Barwise has appealed for it to recommend improving staff ratios in aged care facilities, recalling how she felt while scrambling to serve breakfast to 16 elderly nursing home residents, while also trying to comfort a dying woman. “She had no family or anyone in the room,” Barwise told Guardian Australia. “It just seemed so heartless. There was no dignity.” When she had formerly worked as an enrolled nurse, staff to resident ratios were 1:5. As a personal carer today, the ratios are 1:16. Slater and Gordon’s general manager for civil liability, Nunzio Tartaglia, said poor staff ratios were often a factor in aged care-related litigation cases coming across his desk.
World
Theresa May has told the UK Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, his demand that she rule out a no-deal scenario before any Brexit talks is “an impossible condition”, and called on him to join cross-party discussions immediately. May has been meeting other party leaders in the aftermath of the resounding defeat for her Brexit plan earlier this week, as the public urges Britain’s politicians to “stop messing about”.
At least nine people have been killed and another 22 injured in a car bombing at a Colombian police academy in Bogotá, recalling the high-profile attacks associated with the bloodiest chapters of the country’s guerrilla and drug conflicts. Authorities have yet to suggest who was behind the attack, but attention has focused on leftist rebels from the National Liberation Army, ELN.
The Trump administration may have separated thousands more migrant children from their families than previously known, with a damning report saying the practice was going on for more than a year before it became publicly known. “The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown,” the report said.
The Italian town of Sambuca is selling homes for less than the price of a coffee. The deal is a bid to revive an area that has undergone depopulation in recent years, with residents moving to bigger cities. New owners must commit to refurbishing their new homes within three years.
The Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen has hit back at the country’s agriculture minister, who called her a “bad Brazilian” for her environmental activism and said she did not know “the facts”. Bündchen said the “bad Brazilians” were those responsible for Brazil’s worst deforestation figures in a decade.
Opinion and analysis
Australia’s beaches haven’t always been a safe space for the LGBTI community, writes Gary Nunn, and are still conservative compared to European beaches such as Sitges in Spain. But people like DJ Dan Murphy have certainly made their mark in “camping things up”. Murphy is one of more than 1000 Lifesavers with Pride and has made two viral videos on Bondi beach featuring drag queens. Nudist beaches in Sydney such as Little Congwong, Lady Jane and Obelisk have long had a gay subculture, but Australia has a way to go before becoming as uninhibited as Berlin, “where you can shed all your clothes in the Tiergarten” and no one bats an eyelid.
Uber Pool is riding in cars with strangers – for Brigid Delaney this offers the potential for new friends, business partners, maybe even marriage. Instead she finds herself sitting in car after car with silent strangers scrolling their phones. Is the problem actually Sydney? “After the fifth ride, the atmosphere in the car was so consistently frosty that I downgraded my pool expectations from ‘creating a new start-up together’ and ‘perhaps marriage’ to ‘a hello would be nice’,” she writes. “The experience was really getting me down. Yes, it was only $3.50 to get from Bondi to Redfern, but my fellow passengers were awful.”
Sport
The first time Alex de Minaur played Rafael Nadal, at Wimbledon last year, he was walloped in straight sets. The 19-year-old Sydneysider will be hoping for a different outcome when the pair meet again tonight in the second round of the Australian Open in Melbourne. On Thursday two more Australian men kept their hopes alive, with Alexei Popyrin beating Dominic Thiem and Alex Bolt knocking out Gilles Simon in five sets, while Britain’s last hope, Johanna Konta, went out in three sets to Garbiñe Muguruza, in a match that absurdly began at 12.30am and finished at 3.12am.
The British ultrarunner Jasmin Paris is celebrating after becoming the first woman to win the gruelling 268-mile Montane Spine Race along the Pennine Way. Paris shattered the course record by 12 hours – while also expressing breast milk for her baby at aid stations along the route.
Thinking time: Road kill – the truest free-range?
Alaskans have been enjoying free, organic meat for the past 50 years: is it time for other societies to stop turning their noses up? Every year, between 600 and 800 moose are killed in Alaska by cars, leaving hundreds of pounds of organic, free-range meat on the road. State troopers who respond to these collisions keep a list of charities and families who have agreed to drive to the scene of an accident at any time, in any weather, to haul away and butcher the body. In Alaska, not eating the meat is viewed as an embarrassment, and a waste of precious resources.
“Alaska’s geography, demographics and can-do spirit make it uniquely fit for salvaging roadkill. It is far from the contiguous 48 states, and shipping food can be prohibitively expensive … salvaging large roadkill is nothing if not practical. One moose is dinner for a year.”
Media roundup
The Australian Financial Review characterises Bill Shorten’s election stump speech as an attack on big business and the super-wealthy, calling it a “populist tirade” that shamed one of Australia’s most iconic companies, mining company BHP. Among extensive coverage of the death of the student Aya Maasarwe, the Age says a “brutal, opportunistic” killer is roaming the streets of Melbourne, with police calling her killing “as horrendous as you could get”. And Lleyton Hewitt has accused Bernard Tomic of blackmail and making physical threats against his family, the ABC reports. Hewitt slammed Tomic as a “clown” and said the tennis star would never play in the Davis Cup again for Australia while he was captain.
Coming up
The royal commission into aged care opens in Adelaide today.
Australia will seek to win their first ODI series in two years when they face India in the third and final game at the MCG this afternoon. Follow every over with our liveblog from about 1pm AEDT.
Supporting the Guardian
We’d like to acknowledge our generous supporters who enable us to keep reporting on the critical stories. If you value what we do and would like to help, please make a contribution or become a supporter today. Thank you.
Sign up
If you would like to receive the Guardian Australia morning mail to your email inbox every weekday, sign up here.
