Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 21 November.
Top stories
Donald Trump says the US is “standing with Saudi Arabia” and questioned whether the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, knew about the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In the extraordinary statement issued on Tuesday – which begins with the words “The world is a very dangerous place!” – Trump quotes Saudi officials as describing Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” and suggested he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The 649-word statement appears to be a presidential act of defiance against the CIA, which has reportedly concluded that the Saudi prince ordered the killing, and the Senate, which is considering bipartisan legislation that would suspend weapons sales to Saudi Arabia among other punitive measures. Trump wrote: “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” As he has in the past with Vladimir Putin, Trump put official denials of wrongdoing from Riyadh on a par with US intelligence assessments.
More than 600 people turned up to a GetUp information night in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah on Tuesday night – a sign that the former prime minister is facing a highly organised and well-supported campaign against his re-election from within his own community. The mostly middle-aged crowd at Manly Senior Citizens Club, who came to hear what they could do to unseat the former prime minister, applauded enthusiastically when one activist warned Abbott: “If you don’t represent the values of your community there is no such thing as a safe seat any more.”
A suicide bomber in Kabul has killed more than 40 people and injured dozens more after targeting a crowd of religious scholars marking the birthday of the prophet Muhammad. There are fears the death toll could rise, as hundreds were packed into the large hall near the Afghan capital’s airport, more often used to host weddings. No group claimed immediate responsibility for the attack – the worst in the capital for more than two months – which was likely the work of the Taliban or the regional affiliate of Islamic State. The birthday of Muhammad is celebrated by Muslims around the world, but extremists believe marking it is sacrilegious. Civilian deaths hit a record high in the first half of this year, and parliamentary elections in October were the most violent Afghanistan has seen, according to the UN. The Taliban also controls more of Afghanistan than at any point since it was ousted from government in 2001.
Australian international aid groups have reported 76 incidents of alleged sexual misconduct over the past three years, including one case in which a humanitarian worker impregnated a local woman. The peak body for the aid sector, the Australian Council for International Development, commissioned an independent review into sexual misconduct earlier this year following revelations that Oxfam UK staff had hired prostitutes in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. The report, released on Wednesday, found 31 substantiated sexual misconduct cases involving aid workers at 20 organisations. Most incidents involving an aid worker and individuals from the local population involved children or teenagers.
Australians work an average of two months a year in unpaid overtime, in what an economist at the Centre for Future Work called an “epidemic of time theft”. The Australia Institute survey of 1,459 people to mark the 10th anniversary of Go Home on Time Day, found rates of unpaid overtime increased to an average of six hours a week in 2018, from 5.1 hours in 2017 and 4.6 hours in 2016. At the same time, there has been an increase in those wanting more paid hours, up to 40% from 34% the year before.
Sport
They came to bid farewell to a legend but as one hero departed, did Australia witness the arrival of another? Goodbye and good luck Tim Cahill. Hello and welcome Martin Boyle.
Super Netball has a new “brains trust”. While the gender balance of the competition committee unveiled on Monday has raised eyebrows (just three of the nine members are women, with a coaching representative still to be named), the move will see a greater diversity of opinion filtering through to the Netball Australia board.
Thinking time
Growing up in Albany, Western Australia, Tim Winton saw plenty of dead whales. Cheynes Beach Whaling Company was the last whaling company in Australia and over its 30-year history the whalers killed 14,878 whales. That all came to an end on 21 November 1978, when the last boat returned to port. “Albany took a hell of a hit,” says engineer Bob Reeby. “It was a job and it was accepted back then. I don’t regret it. It was part of Albany’s history. But yes – attitudes change. If whaling was going on here now, then I’d probably be campaigning against it.” Forty years on, anti-whaling activists remember the moment commercial whaling ended in Australia.
At a leafy cafe in Frankston, Melbourne, a play is taking place. The cast: one struggling small business owner; three politicians, including a prospective premier, the Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy; and the prospective premier’s wife. Cafe owner Mariam Jamil plays her part admirably. “Tell me, your power bills, out of control, are they?” asks Guy. They are, Jamil agrees. “The difference to make up for that increase of the energy is 700 cups of coffee a month,” she says. “Seven hundred cups of coffee a month,” Guy repeats. “Seven hundred cups of coffee a month is what you have to sell, extra, just to cover your power bills, the increase. That is unbelievable.” In the final week of the election campaign, the Coalition team cannot risk anything going off script. A pity, then, that it soon would.
The unmade Sex and the City 3 film was a meditation on grief after the death of Mr Big. Fresh details of the third Sex and the City film – on ice after star Kim Cattrall refused her contract – have been revealed. A podcast has uncovered that one of Cattrall’s reported sticking points was that the script for the third film gave her character, Samantha, little to do. Podcaster James Miller says that the script “calls for Mr Big to die of a heart attack in the shower relatively early on, making the remainder of the movie more about how Carrie recovers from Big’s death than about the relationships between the four women.”
Media roundup
The Sydney Morning Herald reveals that China “hijacked” Australia’s emails, diverting internet traffic heading to Australia via mainland China over a six-day period last year, which may have enabled targeted data theft. The Australian is leading with allegations that Samed Eriklioglu, one of the three men charged yesterday with planning a terror attack, posted a quote attributed to “hate cleric” Anwar al-Awlaki on social media. The NT News wins headline of the day with Palmed and Dangerous, a story about an “idiot driver” who could “barely see the road for the trees” after he filled his Subaru Forrester with palm fronds.
Coming up
Labor’s Daniel Andrews and the Liberals’ Matthew Guy face off at a leaders’ forum with only days to go before the Victorian election.
Australia’s cricketers take on India in the tourists’ first T20 of the summer. We will have a live blog from 6pm AEDT.
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