Good morning, this is Richard Parkin bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 1 May.
Top stories
Parents are being encouraged to dob in childcare centres they suspect of profiteering from Covid-19, with the education department emailing providers warning them they could lose their government funding if it is found that they have excessively limited their capacity. But critics say the Coalition is attempting to shift the blame for its own policy failures. The government estimates childcare attendance is running at between 40% and 60% of previous levels.
The World Health Organization has confirmed that the coronavirus pandemic is increasing across Africa, with the regional director saying the WHO was “very concerned about west Africa”, based on rates of community spread. The full extent of the disease is unknown, with official statistics reporting just 34,000 known cases, but the WHO warned that medical shortages, both of staff and provisions, remained a major concern for the months ahead. The Russian prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, has confirmed he has contracted Covid-19 and will begin self-isolating, as infections pass 100,000 in his country. The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, has said Britain is “past the peak”, with 674 deaths recorded overnight.
US national intelligence officials have put out a statement saying they do not believe coronavirus was human-made or genetically modified, after the president reportedly asked officials to investigate whether China had created the virus. Donald Trump has repeatedly accused China of failing to act to prevent the global spread of Covid-19, claiming Beijing “will do anything” to see him lose the next election. Meanwhile, reports have emerged that Trump has threatened to sue his campaign manager after a drop in his poll ratings. Some 3.8 million more US workers lost their jobs last week, bringing total layoffs to more than 30 million over the past six weeks.
Australia
A shareholder majority has called upon Australia’s largest oil and gas company to do more to combat climate change, with Woodside Petroleum urged to set emissions reduction targets in line with the Paris climate agreement in what shareholder activists are calling “a breakthrough moment”.
Legal experts have dismissed claims that green tape has risen in Australia by “445%” as politically motivated, saying the figures proffered by the Institute for Public Affairs are based on a “flawed” methodology developed by a US conservative thinktank.
A leading Australian federal government agency has denied it sought to threaten a transparency website after its chief legal counsel sent a letter to the non-profit Right to Know website demanding the site remove “defamatory material” relating to its former boss.
A new study has cast doubt over the government’s $4bn Murray-Darling irrigation efficiency program, with academics revealing that irrigators who received the subsidies extracted up to 28% more water than others who did not.
A company part-owned by the energy minister, Angus Taylor, and his brother, Richard, illegally poisoned critically endangered grasslands in the NSW Monaro region, the federal environment department has concluded. The company has been ordered to restore 103 hectares of native grassland but avoided a fine and criminal finding.
The world
Libya’s government has rejected a Ramadan ceasefire offer from the renegade general Khalifa Haftar, with the nation’s six-year civil war set to continue. Haftar, who has his base in the country’s east, has suffered a series of military setbacks amid reports he may have lost key allies in the eastern city of Tobruk.
France has announced it will sell some of the nation’s antique furniture to help its health system, with reports that some 100 objects dating from the 19th century will go under the hammer.
The veteran South African anti-apartheid activist Denis Goldberg has died aged 87. A close associate of Nelson Mandela, Goldberg spent 22 years in prison on treason charges after he was arrested in 1963 alongside Mandela.
A 72-year-old UK man has claimed the world record for the oldest person to row solo across the Atlantic. After three months at sea, Graham Walters says he’s relieved to be back on dry land – though coming back to the coronavirus pandemic feels like “an alternative universe”.
Recommended reads
Having travelled the globe to exotic destinations in search of “stillness and contemplation”, Brigid Delaney writes that Covid-19 has presented the chance to explore interiority much closer to home. “Underneath the noise, movement, entertainment, drama – the days – of our lives, is something deeper, more quiet. It’s the mysterious element that lives beneath the surface of things.”
Seventy-four-year-old Jillian Cheetham’s book club has just had its first meeting via Zoom. “I used to look at some people using WhatsApp video and think, I wonder what that’s all about,” she says. But the need to connect is driving seniors to adapt to new technology, and often quite comfortably.
Listen
On today’s episode of Full Story, Gabrielle Jackson talks to two doctors – an oncologist and a GP working in a Covid clinic – about how their practice has changed and what this means for the future of healthcare in Australia.
Full Story is Guardian Australia’s news podcast. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting app.
Sport
With Tokyo 2020 delayed by 12 months, national sporting bodies now face an additional headache – do they honour previous selection processes, or pick again on form? As Kieran Pender writes, for many sports there is “no perfect solution”.
It was the new form of the game that was set to shake up cricket, but The Hundred will be pushed back to 2021, the England and Wales Cricket Board has confirmed. Officials are adamant though that the 100-ball game remains a key “long-term strategy”.
Media roundup
The mining magnate Andrew Forrest looms as a potential bidder for the beleaguered airline Virgin Australia, writes the Financial Review, with a consortium potentially involving Richard Branson also being mooted. The NSW deputy premier, John Barilaro, has declared his ambition to become the Nationals’ federal leader, indicating his intention to contest the forthcoming Eden-Monaro byelection, according to the Australian. And a former industry regulator has called on the government to make private health insurers return record Covid-19 windfalls to their members, reports the ABC.
Coming up
The funeral services for Constable Glen Humphris and Senior Constable Kevin King, killed alongside two colleagues by a truck, will be conducted in Melbourne.
The Christchurch mosque shooter is due back in a New Zealand court after pleading guilty to the March 2019 terrorist attacks.
And if you’ve read this far …
It’s been suspected, but now it’s confirmed: the coronavirus is “having a toll on the number of intimate occasions”. That’s the word from the makers of Durex condoms, who note that not only are young people having less sex, established couples are too, owing to Covid-19 related anxiety. Some 200m fewer condoms were produced between mid-March and mid-April.
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