Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 13 March.

Top stories

Theresa May has suffered a second humiliating defeat on her Brexit deal, as MPs rejected the last-minute reassurances she won from the EU27 on Monday and voted it down by a crushing majority of 149. With just 17 days to go until the UK is due to leave the EU, MPs ignored the prime minister’s pleas to “get the deal done”, after the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) said it could not support the agreement. The prime minister immediately gave a statement, saying she was “profoundly disappointed” that her deal had been rejected again. She said the government would table a motion, so that MPs can debate on Wednesday whether the UK should leave the EU without a deal on 29 March, and that she would offer her MPs a free vote on that decision.

Prominent rural women expressed their anger at a potential return of Barnaby Joyce to the Nationals leadership, with one accusing the party of turning a blind eye to his past behaviour in order to raise funds and votes in some quarters. Farm succession planner, farmer and 2013 New South Wales Rural Woman of the Year, Isobel Knight, said Joyce was not the right person for the job of leadership and it was a common view in his seat of New England, where she lives. “I don’t think he is the right person to be in leadership regardless of which side of politics you support, because of his personal integrity and lack of respect for women as well as his adherence to mining interests over farmers,” Knight said.

Queensland is poised to repeal the police disciplinary system established after the landmark Fitzgerald corruption inquiry, prompting concerns from civil liberties experts that the proposed changes have “fundamental” flaws. The president of the police union, which has driven the change, hailed the demise of “the old punitive police discipline system”. Renee Eaves, part of the Queensland police accountability taskforce, said the new system appeared to be a “backflip on Fitzgerald’s recommendations”. “The police have given us no reason to trust that they can investigate themselves impartially,” Eaves said.

World

Facebook Twitter Pinterest US federal prosecutors have charged Hollywood actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin along with almost 50 other people over a $25m scheme to help wealthy Americans buy their children’s way into elite universities. Photograph: Christopher Polk/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images via Getty Images

US federal prosecutors have charged dozens of people in a years-old $25m scheme to help wealthy Americans buy their children’s way into elite universities including Yale, Georgetown, Stanford and the University of Southern California. Thirty-three parents, including Hollywood actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were charged, as well as 13 coaches and associates involved in the scheme. Two hundred FBI agents were involved in the investigation, dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues”.

Extraction industries are responsible for half of the world’s carbon emissions and more than 80% of biodiversity loss, according to the most comprehensive environmental tally undertaken of mining and farming.

The UK, Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands and Ireland have joined a number of other countries in banning Boeing 737 Max planes from operating in or over its airspace, following a second fatal crash involving the plane in less than five months. US regulators, airlines and the manufacturer have become increasingly isolated in maintaining that the plane is safe.

A Malaysia-bound plane had to turn back after a passenger realised she had left her baby in the terminal. The pilot, en route to Kuala Lumpur, made the unusual request to return to the airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, shortly after takeoff when the passenger told cabin crew she had forgotten her child.

Opinion and analysis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s time to cut through the rhetoric and political posturing and get back to facts,’ writes Lenore Taylor. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

‘We knew we had to do something about climate change almost three decades ago,’ writes Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor, launching a new reader-funded series on climate change. “Children have grown to adulthood and had their own children during the time we have known, and done not very much. It’s time to cut through the rhetoric and political posturing and get back to facts. Enough scandalous time-wasting on climate change.” To support The Frontline: Australia and the climate emergency, go here.

Khaled al-Nairab, a 22-year-old from Gaza City, describes his home as: “A cemetery of talent”. He is from a generation of Gazans, now finishing their education, who have spent their entire lives in the fenced-off territory. Nairab and his peers are thrust into in an economy with more than 70% youth unemployment, a healthcare system that has collapsed, and a society in which people drink poisonous water and face relentless power cuts. Naraib wrote poetry at a young age, leading him to rap. Now, about to graduate from a multimedia course, he faces listless Gazan life. “Imagine going somewhere every day at the same time, meeting the same people. If you want to travel for any reason, you cannot,” he says.

Sport

A few days before the Australian GP, F1 fans are greeted by a slightly different scene to what they may expect. The race is preceded by a V8 Supercars round on the same circuit. F1 is to wine and cheese as V8s are to beer, fries and pies – and the combination of motorsport cultures is fantastic, writes Yassmin Abdel-Magid.

Bagging back-to-back NRL premierships has proved a tough task in recent times, but with an improved roster, Sydney Roosters could be the team to break the hoodoo, writes Nick Tedeschi.

Thinking time: Thirty years of the internet

Facebook Twitter Pinterest World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters

Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, then a fellow at the physics research laboratory Cern on the French-Swiss border, sent his boss a document labelled “Information Management: A Proposal”. The memo suggested a system with which physicists at the centre could share “general information about accelerators and experiments”. It didn’t really go anywhere. Berners-Lee’s boss, Mike Sendall, took the memo and jotted down a note on top: “Vague but exciting …” But that was it. It took another year, until 1990, for Berners-Lee to start actually writing code. In that time, the project had taken on a new name. Berners-Lee now called it the World Wide Web.

Today, Berners-Lee’s invention has more than justified the lofty goals implied by its name. But with that scale has come a host of troubles. Berners-Lee breaks down the problems the web now faces into three categories. The first is what occupies most of the column inches in the press, but is the least intrinsic to the technology itself: “deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour and online harassment”. More concerning are the other two sources of dysfunction affecting the web. The second is when a system built on top of Berners-Lee’s creation introduces “perverse incentives” that encourage others to sacrifice users’ interests, “such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation”. And the third is more diffuse still: those systems and services that, thoughtfully and benevolently created, still result in negative outcomes, “such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse”.

Media roundup

The chief executive of Sydney Trains says the network could carry up tp 40% more passengers if its signalling system was modernised, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The Australian reveals that negotiations have started over the future of radio broadcaster Alan Jones, ahead of his contract expiring on 30 June. The Trump administration is planning to close its international US Citizenship and Immigration Services offices, the Washington Post reports.

Coming up

Cardinal George Pell will be sentenced in Melbourne’s county court at 10am today after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two boys in the mid-1990s. Follow the Guardian’s live coverage from 9am.

Michael Daley, the NSW opposition leader, will address the National Press Club in Sydney.

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