Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Monday 3 June.
Top stories
Hopes are fading for eight climbers, including an Australian, missing in the Himalayas. Two Indian air force helicopters have been searching around the Nanda Devi mountain, India’s second-highest peak, which the group were attempting to climb on a previously unused route. However, the operation had to be suspended because of poor weather and it will take days to trek to the last known location of the group. Four are British, two are from the US, one is Indian and one, named as Ruth McCance, from Australia. Local authorities said there had been a number of avalanches in the area.
Western Australia’s new police commissioner says the “vast volume” of Aboriginal children should not be in custody. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Western Australia are 27 times more likely to be put under youth justice supervision than non-Indigenous children, second only to the Northern Territory, where every child in custody is Aboriginal. In an interview with Guardian Australia, WA police commissioner Chris Dawson said many children facing youth detention could be dealt with in a community justice arrangement, similar to a model being trialled in the Kimberley community of Bidyadanga, 185km south of Broome.
The Victorian government has been criticised for spending almost $2bn on prisons while neglecting social housing. Victoria spends about half the national average per person on social housing. There are about 80,000 people on the public housing waiting list, including 25,000 children. “For $2bn, we could have built tens of thousands of social housing units to fight homelessness,” the Victorian Council of Social Service’s chief executive, Emma King, said. RMIT academic Libby Porter said of the government: “It’s just laughable they think 1,000 units is anywhere near close to what we need.”
World
The mayor of Venice has said cruise ships must change their routes after a huge holiday vessel crashed into a wharf and tourist boat, injuring five people, including two Australians.
Apple is expected to close iTunes after 18 years. According to a report by Bloomberg, the tech company will announce that three separate apps for music, TV and podcasts will supersede iTunes, as Apple seeks to reposition itself as an entertainment service.
More than 50 congressional Democrats reportedly back impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. But House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff, said on Sunday that neither he nor the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had reached that conclusion.
Human Rights Watch has accused France of “outsourcing” Isis-related trials to Iraq, where they may face the death penalty, after 12 suspects of French origin were handed over and charged under Iraq’s sweeping counter-terrorism laws.
South Korea is considering ending its arcane age system to match rest of world. In South Korea a baby is one on the day it is born, and turns two on New Year’s Day, even if it is the very next day.
Opinion and analysis
“I never wanted to run an ultra marathon,” writes Adharanand Finn. “I’ve always loved running, the freedom of it, the childish abandon, but I was a 10K and half-marathon runner, a ‘real’ runner (in my eyes), someone who pushed the pace and gunned for fast times. Ultrarunning, with all its backpacks, poles and food, was not really running. It was running with all the joy bludgeoned out of it. So when an editor asked me to run the 165km Oman Desert Marathon to write an article about it, I said no: 100 miles across sand, in the heat of Oman. It sounded like hell.” But, Finn writes, as the days went by he began to become obsessed by the idea. “The more I thought about it, the more I began to see it not as a running race, but as an adventure. And who knew what I might discover about myself along the way?”
Social media platforms are no longer innovators in terms of speech, publication and the public sphere, writes Emily Bell. “They are incumbents, gatekeepers, publishers, however you want to describe them. In other words they are done with disruption, and will therefore inevitably become perpetuators of incumbency themselves.” Despite the clumsy and often self-serving arguments by social media companies over whether to remove content such as the video manipulated to show Nancy Pelosi apparently slurring her words, the debate is a sign of how close we are to a return to mainstream “normality”.
Sport
The cricket World Cup has had its first nerve-jangler – and its first upset – as Bangladesh beat South Africa by 21 runs. Faf du Plessis’s men needed a record run-chase to defeat the Tigers. They did not make it.
For the Matildas, the intense scrutiny of the World Cup has already begun, forged in the furnace of a 3-0 defeat by the Netherlands in Saturday’s warm-up. “It’s a delicate balancing act to ensure that too much experimentation against key World Cup rivals doesn’t leave the squad psychologically deflated,” writes Richard Parkin.
Thinking time: the radical joy of Keith Haring
Keith Haring lived and worked in New York from 1978 until his death, aged 31, from an Aids-related illness. In his final few years, he was invited all over the world to make work, and if you want to see some real-life Keith Haring art, you still can. There is public work by Haring in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Antwerp, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne; on hospitals, at schools (often made with children), in an LGBT community services centre. His work – the radiant baby, the barking dog, the dancer, the three-eyed smiling face – is simple, cheerful, upbeat, instantly recognisable. But Haring did much more than provide cute cartoons. He was publicly minded. His art faced outwards. He wanted to inform, to start a conversation, to question authority and convention, to represent the oppressed. Those cute figures are political.
“People forget that back in the 1980s, he was talking about socially important issues: apartheid, Aids, environmentalism, how capitalism increases inequality – and he was using very accessible language,” says Darren Pih, co-curator of a major Keith Haring exhibition in the UK. And there’s a renewed interest in the artistic era in which Haring operated – that collaborative time in New York where pop and rap and art met and mixed, a time that started in the mid-to-late 70s and ended, in essence, with a trio of deaths: first Warhol in 1987, then Basquiat in 1988 and finally, Haring, in February 1990.
Media roundup
China is prominent in the headlines this morning, with the Australian Financial Review reporting on its front page that China has escalated the trade war with the US by taking aim at FedEx. Scott Morrison has pledged $250m for infrastructure projects in the Solomon Islands, the ABC and the Australian report, in what the Oz calls “a bolder strategy to counter the expansion of China’s influence in the Pacific”. The Sydney Morning Herald leads with a declaration from Chinese defence minister Wei Fenghe that “China was ‘correct’ to send the army into Tiananmen Square in 1989 because it led to ‘stability’.”
Coming up
The federal court trial between state-owned timber company VicForests and Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum begins today. The group alleges logging in Victoria’s central highlands is in breach of federal environment laws.
Ashleigh Barty takes on unseeded Sofia Kenin of the US at the French Open tonight, hoping to secure a place in the quarter-finals.
