Good morning, this is Richard Parkin bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 19 June.
Top stories
Eric Abetz billed taxpayers to attend a glitzy mining industry event, Guardian Australia can reveal. The Tasmanian Liberal senator says his attendance at the dinner – which attracted industry heavyweights and was headlined by John Howard – was in the interests of his electorate and part of his parliamentary duties, which justified taxpayers picking up the tab. The rules state that expense claims can only be made when the dominant purpose of a trip is parliamentary business.
Donald Trump has defended the police officer who shot dead Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, as a number of officers called in sick after their colleague was charged with murder. Brooks’ death has sparked further protests in the city, after it emerged that the African American man was more than 5 metres from officer Garrett Rolfe when he was shot fatally, twice in the back. Trump told Fox News that police “have not been treated fairly in our country”, criticising Brooks for resisting Rolfe.
A push to create more “job-ready graduates” could see arts degrees double in cost, with law and commerce degrees also facing a fee hike, in a plan to be unveiled today by the education minister. In excerpts from the speech, seen by Guardian Australia, Dan Tehan promises an additional 39,000 university places by 2023 and 100,000 places by 2030. Students undertaking agriculture or maths will have their fees reduced by 62%, those enrolling in teaching, nursing, clinical psychology, English and languages by 46%, and those studying science, health, architecture, environmental science, IT and engineering by 20%.
Australia
Claims that major developments are being regularly held up by environmentally motivated legal challenges have been greatly overstated, research suggests. Ministers have repeatedly levelled the claim but, according to GreenLaw, there were only six challenges to 2,161 decisions listed in 2018-19.
The Labor party’s federal president, Wayne Swan, has urged colleagues to desist from factional tit-for-tat attacks, saying acts of revenge are “entirely counterproductive”, as the fallout from the Victorian branch-stacking scandal continues.
Months of evidence has “unmasked” a 51-year-old man as the Claremont serial killer, prosecutors allege. Bradley Robert Edwards stands accused of the murders of three women in 1996 and 1997 in Western Australia. His defence has suggested vital DNA evidence may have been contaminated.
The world
The Indian government has pledged to block investment and increase tariffs for China in the aftermath of the deadly border clash in the Himalayas that left 20 Indian soldiers dead and 76 injured. Anti-Chinese protests have broken out across the country since the casualties were revealed.
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has labelled the US president “stunningly uninformed” as administration lawyers seek to have Bolton’s memoir suppressed. Bolton has doubled down on comments from his book, telling media his former boss is “not fit for office”.
The cruise giant Carnival is set to sell six of its ships after losses of $4.4bn over three months due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the company’s vessels remain stranded offshore, with 21,000 staff still onboard.
Dutch police are investigating two apparent “proof of life” photographs of a $9m Vincent van Gogh painting, stolen from a museum during the coronavirus lockdown. The photos had been “circulating in mafia circles” before being passed to police by an art detective.
Recommended reads
It’s a semi-musical, semi-satirical, semi-historical, semi-mythological and completely brilliant comedy, but is O Brother, Where Art Thou? the stand-out gem in the Coen brothers’ glittering crown? Luke Buckmaster thinks so, and as the film turns 20, he revisits a movie that “entangles history with mythology and spills over into magical realism”.
After a quiet period during Covid-19, physiotherapists’ clinics are now full of people whose bodies have marked the end of lockdown by breaking down. Brigid Delaney is supposed to start writing a book with her friend, but one morning she wakes up with a dead arm: “Literally … It has died. I cannot use it. I try to text but there is no strength in my forearm or wrist.”
It’s one of the strangest, most compelling books from the first world war, but why hasn’t Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Forum become a classic of Australian Anzackery, asks Jeff Sparrow. “The problem might be traced to Manning’s marked divergence from the rugged Digger archetype… Where militarists like Ernst Jünger show the conflict redeeming men through violence, Manning sees wartime suffering as facilitating a peculiar authenticity.”
Listen
Donald Trump’s incendiary comments after the killing of George Floyd divided two social media giants: while Twitter hid the president’s post, Facebook took no action (although it has since removed Trump campaign ads featuring a Nazi symbol). On this episode of Full Story, the Guardian’s technology editor, Alex Hern, looks at what happened next.
Full Story is Guardian Australia’s news podcast. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting app.
Sport
It was the tournament that launched a superstar but exactly 25 years since Jonah Lomu steamrolled England in the semi-finals of the 1995 World Cup, Paul Rees revisits the summer when an unknown Kiwi teenager almost single-handedly put rugby on the global map.
The United States’ leading health expert has poured cold water on any hopes of a 2020 return for the NFL, with Dr Anthony Fauci telling CNN “football may not happen this year”, even with daily testings and players isolating.
And, it wouldn’t be Friday without David Squires … on the return of the once-forgotten A-League.
Media roundup
Australia’s big four banks could be poised to shell out billions as an industry settlement to victims of the systemic fees-for-no-service scandals, the Australian Financial Review reports. The federal government is said to be in support of the plan, which offers much-needed liquidity to a struggling domestic economy. Internal advice has revealed a near $7bn funding shortfall for signature infrastructure projects in NSW, the Sydney Morning Herald says. And senior government ministers are reportedly furious that plans to salvage Virgin Australia have been badly mismanaged by administrators, according to the Australian.
Coming up
The Fair Work Commission is due to release its annual wage review decision.
Arsalan Khawaja, the brother of the Australian cricketer Usman, is due to be sentenced over an attempt to frame a co-worker with a fake terrorism hitlist.
And if you’ve read this far …
A rogue Russian priest has seized a convent in the Urals. A former police officer who spent 13 years in prison for murder, Father Sergei Romanov changed his name to match that of the country’s last imperial family, and heads a cult of “tsar worshippers”. Romanov stands accused of violating public health orders but has refused to leave the convent because of a “pseudo-pandemic”.
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