Good morning, this is Richard Parkin bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 8 June.
Top stories
An obstetrician and gynaecologist has been accused of performing an unnecessary hysterectomy and other irreversible surgeries on women without their consent, a tribunal has heard. Dr Emil Shawky Gayed allegedly carried out multiple procedures that fell “significantly below” professional standards, including on women whose conditions could have been managed with painkillers and bed rest.
NSW civil and administrative tribunal was told this week that Gayed allegedly failed to detect a patient was pregnant before performing surgery on her that could have affected her foetus. When he discovered her pregnancy after the surgery, he paid for her to fly to Sydney to have an abortion. A verdict will be handed down at a future date.
The attraction of the Great Barrier Reef to Australian tourists has “fallen dramatically” since the onset of coral bleaching events in 2016, a new report finds. Fewer domestic visitors are heading to north Queensland to visit the natural wonder, with the review advising towns to develop “new tourism experiences” to compensate for lost visitors and the likelihood of further damage to the climate-threatened reef. The report also warns that further bleaching may lead to a significant decline in international tourism, “with resultant economic impacts”.
Emmanuel Macron has called on G7 members to stand up to Donald Trump’s trade policies, in the face of what he described as the threat of a new US “hegemony”. Macron spoke alongside the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who is hosting the summit in Quebec amid sharp disagreements between the US president and the six other leaders of industrialised liberal democracies over trade, climate change and the nuclear deal with Iran. Macron urged leaders not to water down a joint communique at the end of the summit, warning that a “G6 plus one” outcome was possible.
The government has slashed access to the disability support pension in the past eight years, cutting the approval rate from 63% to about 30% this financial year. Successive governments have implemented policies to tighten access, with data provided by the Department of Human Services showing only 24,809 of about 84,000 claims have been granted so far in 2017-18. The chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Services, Cassandra Goldie, has condemned the move. “These policies increase rates of poverty in Australia,” Goldie said.
Nasa’s Curiosity rover has found complex organic matter on Mars, the most compelling evidence yet of an ancient potential fertile environment. Buried and preserved in sediments that formed a vast lake bed more than 3bn years ago, before the red planet became the parched world it is today, the matter suggests Martian lakes were a rich soup of the kind of carbon-based compounds necessary for life. Researchers cannot tell how the organic material formed and so leave open the crucial question: are the compounds remnants of past organisms or were they brought to Mars in comets or other falling debris that slammed into the surface?
Sport
The former Socceroos boss Ange Postecoglou has delivered a withering assessment of the state of Australian football in an exclusive interview with Guardian Australia before the World Cup. “In terms of development I think we’re going backwards, to be honest,” he says. “We just have too short-term thinking, there just aren’t enough people with a broader vision as to how we can actually we can make Australia a force in world football.”
Simona Halep and Rafael Nadal have continued their winning runs at the French Open, with the Spaniard completing his rain-delayed quarter-final against Diego Schwartzman, and the Romanian comfortably defeating Garbiñe Muguruzu to set up a final showdown with Sloane Stephens.
Thinking time
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Cure’s first concert, but as they prepare to record their first album in 10 years, Robert Smith opens up about drunkenly talking over his hero, David Bowie, the Meltdown festival he is curating, and bursting on to the punk scene in the 1980s. “It is weird looking back,” Smith says. “Everything was done at an incredibly fast pace. Life was whizzing by. Most of the punk bands were fucking awful. I thought we were all right and we were getting better. A lot of it was bluff and bluster at that age.”
The agriculture minister, David Littleproud, has little time for climate scepticism among his National party colleagues, saying the move to renewable energy is “exciting – not only for the environment but for the hip pocket”. As debate rages in his party about Malcolm Turnbull’s alleged “politicisation” of the drought in parts of NSW and Queensland, Littleproud tells the Guardian the climate has been changing “since we first tilled the soil in Australia” and he does not care whether the change is due to human activity or not. “Listen to the scientific evidence, because this should be predicated on science, not emotion.”
Almost four decades on from their triumphal deposition of Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s Sandinista rebels have a new tyrant in their sights – their former leader and now president, Daniel Ortega. Tom Phillips travels to the guerrilla hotbed of Masaya to find out why. “He’s been attacking the people, killing the people. Now the people want him out,” says one 20-year-old mutineer with a black mortar slung over his shoulder. “Daniel must go,” insists Rosa Caballero, a mother of three. “I don’t think there is any way out. All this repression. This whole struggle. It cannot be in vain ... I hope other cities join us so it is total pressure against the government.”
What’s he done now?
Donald Trump has welcomed Japan’s Shinzo Abe to the White House before the potentially tempestuous G7 summit in Canada, managing to squeeze in an Alanis Morrisette reference, but the bigger question remains: “When will people start saying, ‘thank you, Mr. President, for firing James Comey?’”
Media roundup
Members of Australia’s special forces allegedly committed war crimes in Afghanistan amid a “complete lack of accountability” from the military chain of command, Fairfax papers report. The future of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation continues to preoccupy the Australian, focusing on the ABC’s retraction of “a mass-murder slur” against Greg Sheridan and Chris Kenny in an opinion piece. And the Mercury reports that a supposed crackdown on Airbnb in Hobart by the Tasmanian government has been criticised as nothing more than “tinkering around the edges”.
Coming up
Federal and state attorneys general meet in Perth today, with national security, counter-terrorism and responses to the child sexual abuse royal commission among the matters to be discussed.
Four men are due to appear in a Melbourne court charged over incidents during a visit by Milo Yiannopoulos.
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