Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 27 July.
Top stories
More than $110bn has been wiped off Facebook’s market value, which includes a $16bn hit to the fortune of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, after the company told investors user growth had slowed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook’s shares had plunged 18% by Thursday afternoon in New York, a day after the Silicon Valley company revealed that 3 million users in Europe had abandoned the social network.
The collapse of Facebook’s share price puts the social network on track for the biggest ever one-day drop in a company’s market value. David Wehner, Facebook’s chief financial officer, said the company’s move to give its users “more choices around data privacy” after the Cambridge Analytica scandal “may have an impact on our revenue growth”. Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? Absolutely not, writes Olivia Solon.
The One Nation candidate for Longman, Matthew Stephen, sold his tiling company and disclaimed its debts less than three weeks after it received a $66,000 payment from a long-running legal dispute. Stephen had promised unpaid workers and other creditors they would be reimbursed from that settlement. Aus Tile QLD agreed the $66,000 settlement deal in August 2016, in relation to the 2014 refurbishment of the Darwin Hilton hotel. Stephen’s preferences may help decide the result in Longman, one of five electorates where byelections take place tomorrow.
The peak body for general practitioners has called for major changes to My Health Record to ensure it can only be used for medical purposes. Malcolm Turnbull has signalled the government will make “refinements” to the scheme, but there are growing calls for further changes, including requiring law enforcement agencies to get a warrant to access the records and dramatically narrowing the grounds to release information. The president-elect of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Harry Nespolon, said My Health Record “should be used for your health and shouldn’t be for anything else”.
The former international cricket star Imran Khan has declared victory in Pakistan’s general election, hailing what he described as “the fairest” vote in the country’s history, despite widespread allegations it was rigged in favour of his Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. In a televised address to the nation Khan struck a unifying note, pledging to rise above personal attacks and lift up the poor. Shahbaz Sharif, the leader of the second-placed Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, said his party would “wholly reject” the result. “It is a sheer rigging. The way the people’s mandate has blatantly been insulted, it is intolerable,” Sharif said.
Grief has turned to fury in Greece, where victims of the deadliest wildfires in more than a decade are blaming an inept state apparatus for the scale of the disaster. In Mati, the coastal village almost entirely obliterated by the blaze, the defence minister, Panos Kammenos, was heckled on Thursday as authorities announced that the death toll had risen to 85. Residents who had lost relatives and homes rounded on the politician, telling him: “You let us burn. You left us to the mercy of God.”
Sport
Frenchman Arnaud Demare has won stage 18 of the Tour de France, telling reporters after winning that he rode so fast because he was still feeling angry about an argument with German Andre Greipel earlier. Geraint Thomas remains in yellow after keeping out of trouble.
“Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony Soprano once said. Or perhaps it was Tony Antrobus. Whatever the case, an exception can be made for the 1993 AFL season, for that really was a season like no other. Jonathan Horn takes a sepia-tinged look at the season that made many fall in love with the game 25 years ago.
Thinking time
There have been as many as 500 massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, and mass killings occurred well into the 20th century, researchers have said. The evidence is released today by the University of Newcastle as part of the second stage of its online massacre map, which now covers frontier violence that occurred from the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 until 1930. The map now details about 250 massacres that meet strict criteria of standards of proof. The estimated death toll from those incidents is about 6,200 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and fewer than 100 colonists, with an average of 25 Indigenous people killed in every massacre.
In the British drama The Escape, Gemma Arterton stars as a mother who walks out on her family, unable to cope. It’s one of a wave of new films that unflinchingly portray the silent agony of being a parent in the modern world. “In an odd way, The Escape is more terrifying. There’s nothing abstract or metaphorical about its portrait of motherhood, the mental, emotional and physical cost of having kids.” writes Cath Clarke.
In Brigid Delaney’s diary, her brother comes to visit and presents her with a fancy North Face puffer jacket he found in an op shop for $10. But there’s a catch. “The thing with this jacket,” her brother says, “is that you cannot wear it outside the house.” Nevertheless, she decides to go to a documentary film festival that evening ... in the puffer jacket. Hours later, her style decision is turned into a meme by the cinema owner.
What’s he done now?
Donald Trump has lashed out against his favourite social media platform, Twitter, accusing it of discriminating against Republicans. Trump wrote (on Twitter, needless to say): “Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”
Media roundup
The Canberra Times reveals public service commissioner John Lloyd faces an inquiry in relation to a second complaint about his links to the Institute of Public Affairs. The West Australian reports that 140 foreign nationals – including seven paedophiles and a murderer – face deportation from the state for committing crimes or failing the federal government’s strict character test in the past financial year. And the Australian splashes with a rather oversized headline in full capital letters: “THE DAY FAIRFAX DIED”. The paper reports that staff at both Fairfax and Nine are angry about being kept in the dark over the merger, and the journalists’ union has called for the deal to be blocked.
Coming up
The Alliance for Gambling Reform director, Tim Costello, will speak to media about the latest figures on poker machine losses for Victorians.
Christopher Pyne will oversee the handover of the Royal Australian Navy’s second air warfare destroyer at the Osborne shipyard in Adelaide.
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