Morning mail: NSW water emergency, Trump 'needs time out', US charges Assange

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/24/morning-mail-nsw-water-emergency-trump-needs-time-out-us-charges-assange

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Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 24 May.

Top stories

Towns in western and central NSW, including Dubbo, Nyngan, Cobar, Walgett and Tamworth, face a water crisis within few months unless it rains. And on properties throughout the Murray-Darling basin, irrigators are bracing for their water entitlements to be reduced to about 10% of their usual allocations. A week before the election, the basin authority issued a “sobering assessment” of the system’s outlook. In the 114 years of record keeping, this is among the nine or 10 driest years. And it’s getting worse.

Nancy Pelosi says the White House is “crying out for impeachment” and called on Thursday for Donald Trump’s family to intervene to ensure the president’s wellbeing “for the good of the country” after an extraordinary 24 hours in Washington. After Trump stormed out of a meeting with Democrats, Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, suggested of the president: “Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence.” Trump’s administration, meanwhile, has sparked outrage by delaying a move to put the anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

Australians won’t know who bankrolled the major parties’ election campaigns for eight more months, owing to a weak donations reporting regime that experts say is feeding “secrecy and distrust”. The major parties have repeatedly ignored calls for improvements to Australia’s donations system, which will not disclose campaign financing until February 2020. It now lags far behind Queensland, where technology introduced in 2017 requires money to be declared within seven days. In Victoria, donations are now revealed within 21 days, and NSW requires funding to be disclosed within 21 days during elections.

World

Julian Assange has been charged with violating the US Espionage Act. US prosecutors have unveiled 17 additional charges against the WikiLeaks founder, who was previously indicted on a charge of working to hack a Pentagon computer system. The new charges raise profound questions about the freedom of the press under the first amendment of the US constitution. They may also complicate Washington’s attempts to extradite him from London.

Greta Thunberg and leading youth strikers for climate action from across the world have called for all adults to join a global general strike on 20 September as young people prepared for what organisers have claimed will be one of the biggest student strikes so far on Friday, with protests expected in 1,594 cities and towns in 118 countries.

Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign was gathering steam on Thursday with two significant endorsements – Johnny Mercer, who had been considered a leadership hopeful himself, and Gavin Williamson, the former defence secretary – with others poised to make themselves known in the coming days.

The UK government is facing calls to launch an urgent investigation into the treatment of EU citizens in the European elections after many people reported being denied their democratic right to vote.

Narendra Modi, the man who once sold tea at a railway station, has become the most influential Indian leader in a generation. The opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, was convincingly beaten in his own parliamentary seat – a north Indian constituency that had sent three of his family members to parliament in the past half-century.

Opinion and analysis

The message of Dark Emu – and its “truer history” of Australian landscape and Indigenous land management – has only got more urgent since it was published in 2014. Young Dark Emu – a kids’ version of the book – has been selected by Guardian Australia as the fourth in our literary series The Unmissables: 12 essential Australian books. In this interview with Lorena Allam, Bruce Pascoe talks about how researching the book required a big shift in his own thinking; and explains why it continues to be so relevant now, as the traumatised Australian landscape desperately tries to repair itself. “Australians are much more ready now to look at these things,” he says. “My generation is in total denial.”

“You can tell a lot about Moby’s second memoir, the follow-up to his 2016 effort, Porcelain, from its title: Then It Fell Apart,” writes Elle Hunt, adding that the globe-spanning “morality tale” (as his publisher describe it) has “so many dropped names that the index, if it had one, would make the book half as long again”. Here are its worst moments.

Sport

Rafael Nadal could hardly have asked for an easier entry into the French Open – two qualifiers to lift his spirits while Novak Djokovic has a far tougher time of it at the other end of the draw. But the real conundrum of the draw ceremony on Thursday night was the surprise appearance of Katie Boulter, only 17 days after announcing her withdrawal.

Our cartoonist David Squires takes a look back at an A-League grand final – one that upheld all the glorious traditions of the occasion, such as they are.

Thinking time: Complicated Queensland

After the shocking – for some – results of the federal election were revealed on Saturday night, it didn’t take long for hashtags such as #Quexit and #MakeThemLeave to start trending on social media, calling for Queensland to be kicked out of Australia. Many unleashed their anger on regional electorates that delivered huge swings away from Labor, and that are home to some of Australia’s largest coalmines.

Amanda Cahill has spent the past five years working in coal regions across Australia, from the Latrobe Valley and the Hunter region to the heart of Adani country in central and northern Queensland, helping people understand what a transition from fossil fuels to a zero-emissions economy looks like. She dismisses the idea that coal communities are not interested in or aware of the need to move towards low-carbon job creation and investment opportunities. People know that regional economies need to become more diversified and resilient. But virtually every coal-dependent community faces the same challenges that are stopping many decision makers from backing the transition, even when they believe action is needed.

“And as for the rest of us? Let’s save our anger for the vested interests who block meaningful climate action, renewable energy uptake, and who perpetuate harmful, polarising untruths in the media – not the ordinary Australians who, like most of us, are just trying to do the best they can for their families.”

Media roundup

One of Australia’s biggest thoroughbred horse owners, Damien Flower, has been charged with importing more than 50kg of cocaine, the Sydney Morning Herald reveals. Barnaby Joyce has told the Australian he understands that he has “zero prospects” of having a cabinet position after Scott Morrison’s reshuffle, which the paper reports may be announced on Sunday. The ABC reports that three Australian orphans of an Islamic State fighter from Melbourne are being held in a Syrian refugee camp, with the Australian saying that the children “are likely to be among the first children of the terror war returned to Australia”.

Coming up

Scott Morrison is visiting Cloncurry in Queensland for an update on this year’s flooding disaster.

The case of Adriana Rivas, 66, wanted in Chile over the alleged kidnapping of seven people during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, returns to court in Sydney.

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