Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 1 May.
Top stories
An attempted military uprising has erupted in Venezuela’s capital, with opposition leader Juan Guaidó urging supporters to take to the streets to force his rival Nicolás Maduro from power. A day of high drama and profound uncertainty began shortly before dawn on Tuesday when Guaidó – who has been spearheading a three-month campaign to topple Maduro – posted an online video in which he appeared surrounded by dozens of armed troops near a key military installation in Caracas. “The time is now,” Guaidó said outside the La Carlota airbase. “We are going to achieve freedom and democracy in Venezuela,” Guaidó added, urging supporters to take to the streets. It was unclear how many soldiers had joined Guaidó’s cause, but hundreds of civilian supporters gathered at the airbase, where troops loyal to Maduro fired teargas rounds, prompting a brief exchange of gunfire. The US has declared its support for Guaidó, with the national security adviser, John Bolton, calling on top members of Maduro’s government to defect. Follow all the latest updates live.
Seven potential lower-house independents have signed a joint statement pledging to stop the controversial Adani coalmine, as well as pursuing a number of other climate change actions in the event the election makes them kingmakers in the next parliament. The pledge, coordinated by the Australian Conservation Foundation, sets out 10 measures the independents will pursue in the next parliament in the event they win their seats. The statement contains explicit commitments to oppose the development of the proposed Adani coalmine; to “reinvigorate and restore funding to the national Climate Change Authority”; to work to exceed the current Paris target and ensure Kyoto credits are not used to meet the emissions reduction commitment; and to “develop a roadmap to power Australia from 100% renewable energy, aiming to achieve at least 50% by 2030”.
Almost 40% of United Australia party candidates do not live in the electorates they are standing for, and the party has recruited senior executives from Clive Palmer’s mining interests to fill its ranks. Guardian Australia has analysed the vast pool of 173 candidates fielded by Palmer’s UAP, crosschecking current residential addresses on the electoral roll against the seats each is standing for. It reveals that 68 lower and upper house candidates don’t live in their seats, according to the roll. At least four live more than 1,000km from their seats. Lynda Abdo, UAP’s candidate for the NSW electorate of Hume, which covers outer Sydney suburbs and the southern tablelands and highlands, lives in Cairns, Queensland. That’s roughly 1,970km away from Hume’s centre. Scott Feeney, the party’s candidate for the north-western Sydney electorate of Greenway, also lives and works in Cairns, according to the electoral roll, his social media and LinkedIn profiles.
World
Jeremy Corbyn has faced down a challenge spearheaded by his deputy, Tom Watson, for Labour to signal its unequivocal backing for a second Brexit referendum in the forthcoming European election campaign.
Australian-born cricketer Alex Hepburn has been jailed in the UK for five years for raping a woman he found dozing in his teammate’s bedroom. Hepburn carried out the rape in a dark bedroom during the first night of a sexual conquest “game” described as pathetic, sexist and foul by the sentencing judge.
The propaganda video of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was released in an attempt to convince Isis followers that the elusive leader remained in control and unfazed by increasing dissent within its ranks, intelligence officials believe.
Google’s share price has had its biggest fall in nearly seven years, wiping $77bn (AU$109bn) off its market value, after disappointing sales figures sparked investor fears that advertisers have been shifting their business to digital rivals such as Facebook and Amazon.
Opinion and analysis
Dior’s latest show was its second coming, writes Jess Cartner-Morley. Taking place at dusk, lit by candles floating in the water, stone benches plumped with cushions especially embroidered by a local collective of female weavers, it was a jaw-droppingly ambitious event, even by the standards of the ever-showboating luxury industry. As well as being bombastically showbiz – the after-show entertainment was Diana Ross – this was also, as Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri put it the day before, “an intellectual reflection on fashion”, which addressed the industry’s red-button issue of cultural appropriation.
“Today’s Pentecostals aren’t tongues-talking, snake-handling hicks in rural American outposts,” writes Elle Hardy. “They’re Justin Bieber and various Kardashians singing uplifting songs at megachurches in cosmopolitan cities such as Los Angeles, Seoul, Lagos, São Paulo and Sydney. Fire and brimstone sermons have given way to Spotify playlists, self-help courses, stadium spectaculars, and Instagram posts which are, above all, designed to serve as an inspirational reflection of yourself.” They’re also among Australia’s most successful exports to the United States.
Sport
“I grew up in an era in which we were told that ‘girls could do anything’,” says Johanna Wood, the recently elected first woman president of New Zealand Football. Wood says that with the upcoming World Cup on the horizon, “it just feels that this is the right time for women” in sport.
It is a case described by the court of arbitration for sport as “one of the most pivotal” it has ever heard. And after months of legal wrangling and highly charged debate, Olympic 800m champion Caster Semenya will finally find out on Wednesday whether she has won her discrimination case against athletics’ governing body, the IAAF. Sean Ingle explains the case.
Thinking time: ‘They are popping up like daisies all over the place’
It’s the middle of the night and the roar of a massive truck echoes through the tiny village of Uki in northern New South Wales. The prime mover, hauling large stainless-steel containers laden with groundwater, is headed north, down narrow country roads, to bottling plants across the border in Queensland. In recent years, the number of water trucks moving through Uki has exploded as people buy up farmland across the shire of Tweed for its water allocation.
Bores, originally issued for irrigating crops or watering livestock, are being cheaply converted to commercial extraction permits, allowing landowners to extract millions of litres of groundwater a year for the booming $700m bottled water industry. Pat Miller lives about 800km north of Sydney in the fertile northern rivers region of NSW and two years ago he joined the Tweed Water Alliance, a group fighting to stop groundwater being trucked out of their community. Angry Tweed residents have compiled a dossier of complaints about water tankers operating day and night through the rural tropical fruit and sugar cane-growing region. Miller fears that while bores are now monitored, there isn’t enough data to predict how water extraction will affect aquifers in the long term. “There was a glitch in the environment plan in the Tweed shire that allowed this to happen in Uki, it allowed water extraction for bottling purposes,” Miller says. “Then greed took over and now they are popping up like daisies all over the place.” Much of the treated bore water is sold by big multinational companies such as Asahi and Coca-Cola Amatil for 2,000 times the cost of its tap equivalent.
Now, lawyers for a northern NSW council are investigating claims that some bottled water businesses have broken the law with recent groundwater extractions.
Media roundup
A candidate for Clive Palmer’s United Australia party (UAP) “tried to trade favourable coverage in a regional newspaper for a slice of the party’s multimillion-dollar advertising budget,” the ABC reveals. The Greens will appeal to Labor to work “in a Gillard-era inspired coalition after May 18”, the Australian reports, with Greens leader Richard Di Natale “warning the Labor leader he will never reach a bipartisan position with the Coalition”. On the Australian Financial Review’s front page is the headline Labor “two-faced” on coal, following news that the CFMEU has “accused the Palaszczuk government of double standards by approving an expansion of a thermal coalmine in Queensland, but still blocking Adani’s own $2bn Carmichael thermal coal project in the Galilee Basin.
Coming up
Greens leader Richard Di Natale will outline the party’s election platform at the National Press Club in Canberra.
A federal court hearing continues for Sarah Hanson-Young’s defamation case against David Leyonhjelm.
Morning mail election extra
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