This is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday October 31.

Top stories

The FBI has been asked to investigate a suspected double hoax against Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Several journalists and bloggers in the US were sent an email this month purporting to be from a woman who had been offered money to smear Mueller with bogus claims of inappropriate behaviour decades ago. The sender of the email to journalists and bloggers claimed to be a woman in Florida who had worked with Mueller at a law firm in the 1970s. She said she had been offered $30,000 and other benefits to make false allegations against Mueller. But, she said, Mueller was in fact “always very polite to me, and was never inappropriate”. The woman identified herself by a name that could not be matched with public records and efforts by journalists to contact her were unsuccessful.

After Mueller’s office was told about the email, it referred the matter to federal investigators, who are now likely to examine whether the hoax scheme described in the woman’s email is real – or if the email itself contains false information. Peter Carr, Mueller’s spokesman, said in a statement on Tuesday: “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the special counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation.” This statement was rare for Mueller’s office, which has built a reputation over the past 17 months for almost never making public remarks about its activities outside of court hearings and legal filings.

The independent inquiry into disgraced gynaecologist Emil Gayed has been extended for a second time with the findings now due to be tabled in 2019. The head of the investigation, the high-profile barrister Gail Furness, who was one of the child sexual abuse royal commissioners, was originally due to report her findings to the New South Wales government on 31 September. This was then extended another month, with her report due on Wednesday. But hours before the report was due, the secretary of NSW Health approved a further three-month extension until 31 January. The extension comes a day after Gayed spoke for the first time about the accusations against him to Guardian Australia, saying his patients are “misinformed” and that “complications can arise from any surgery”.

Donald Trump has suggested he will use an executive order to end birthright citizenship, the right to American citizenship for the children of non-citizens born in the US. It is a pledge he made frequently throughout the 2016 campaign and one often dismissed as legally unfeasible by scholars. Trump has suggested in a TV interview with the news site Axios that he would move unilaterally to sign an executive order that ended the right. In the interview with Axios, Trump falsely claimed: “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits.” In fact, dozens of states around the world, including Canada and Brazil, endow the same right, while countries such as the UK and Australia restrict those rights.

The Lion Air plane “flew erratically the day before it crashed”, reports reveal, as investigations continue into Indonesia’s second worst air disaster. An air accident investigator said there had been technical issues on the plane on Sunday, including unreliable airspeed readings, while passengers recounted a “rollercoaster” flight – backed up by data from flight tracking websites showing unusual changes in speed and height. Hundreds of rescue workers had retrieved debris and personal items from the Java Sea on Tuesday, with human remains collected in 37 body bags, according to police. Relatives had gathered at a police hospital in Jakarta to provide DNA samples to identify victims.

New research shows the route most likely taken by the first people to arrive in Australia. A study led by Australian National University PhD candidate Shimona Kealy and published in the Journal of Human Evolution has modelled the most likely route from southeast Asia to the Australian mainland based on which pathway would have required the least expenditure of energy and resources. Her modelling identified the least-cost route as sailing east from Borneo to Sulawesi and island hopping to Misool Island off the coast of West Papua. “The visibility and the shorter distances between the islands is what really makes [this route] much more feasible for travel,” Kealy told Guardian Australia. “Most of the time that visibility is shore-to-shore visibility.”

Sport

Six days. That’s how long the best netballers in the world will have to recharge their batteries between playing a gold medal match at next year’s World Cup and being back on court for round 10 of Australia’s Super Netball competition.

A stunning double from Craig Goodwin delivered Adelaide United the FFA Cup with a 2-1 victory against Sydney FC. Goodwin produced a top-shelf brace in Tuesday night’s final in Adelaide as the Reds became the first club to win the cup twice.

Thinking time

The commuter-belt seat of Cranbourne could decide the Victorian election. Will it be transport pressure that tips the poll? It is in the rapidly growing suburbs of Melbourne’s south-east that the Victorian state election on 24 November will be won or lost. With 60 new families moving to the area each week, it’s a Sisyphean task to keep infrastructure ahead of population growth. In the latest instalment of Guardian Australia’s On The Ground series on the Victorian election, we take a close look at a booming but gridlocked population.

With a week until the US midterms, take a dive into the Democratic party’s identity crisis. Since the 2016 elections, the party’s centre of gravity has shifted sharply away from Washington, toward an emboldened activist base, as its politics drift to the left. Across the country, a rising coalition of women, young people and minorities are crashing the gates of the Democratic party and demanding a seat at the table while liberal insurgents rattle the establishment in a forceful rejection of politics as usual.

“Nearly every weekend for quite some time, my partner and I would Bunnings,” writes Paul Daley. “My partner did so with purpose. I, however, enjoyed a bit of a wander among the shelves. Not aimlessly so, but more in wonder that the blokes purposefully picking out merchandise all around really were going to hang their own doors, build their kids a tree house that didn’t collapse or inflict nail injuries when the neighbour’s kids climbed it (ahem!).”

Media roundup

A government survey of more than 65,600 health employees has revealed that bullying pervades the NSW public health system, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Immigration officials are secretly shifting asylum seeker families from Nauru to Adelaide as part of an operation to remove all children from the island’s regional refugee processing centre, according to the Advertiser. The Australian is leading with a letter signed by the heads of the 34 Sydney Anglican diocese schools urging MPs to resist pressure to protect gay teachers by overhauling anti-discrimination laws.

Coming up

The Geoffrey Rush defamation trial against the Daily Telegraph continues in Sydney.



Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott will address the National Press Club.

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