Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Thursday 3 May.

Top stories

The Commonwealth Bank has admitted losing backup data on more than 15 years of customer statements, affecting almost 20 million accounts. The statements, stored on magnetic tapes, contained customers’ names, addresses, account numbers and transaction details from 2000 to 2016. The CBA’s acting group executive for retail banking services, Angus Sullivan, has assured customers their information has not been compromised and no action was required. “The tapes did not contain PINs, passwords or other data that could enable account fraud,” he said.

The bank said it had confirmed there was no evidence of suspicious activity involving the 19.8m accounts affected following the incident. CBA said it had been unable to confirm the destruction of two magnetic tapes containing historical customer statements. “We take the protection of customer data very seriously and incidents like this are not acceptable,” Sullivan said.

The political consultancy group Cambridge Analytica is shutting down, after becoming enmeshed in the Facebook data scandal. The company has been plagued by scandal since the Observer reported that the personal data of about 50 million Americans and at least a million Britons had been harvested from Facebook and improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, which is now closing and starting insolvency proceedings. Cambridge Analytica denies any wrongdoing, but says that the negative media coverage has left it with no clients and mounting legal fees.

Tony Abbott’s political future could be under threat from a group of environmental activists who are recruiting like-minded people to join Liberal party branches in the former prime minister’s northern Sydney seat of Warringah, in an effort to have him deselected. Billing themselves as “the counterweight” to the pro-coal power Monash Forum, the North Shore Environment Stewards have held at least two recruitment functions asking people to tap up friends to join the party in the Sydney northern beaches electorate. Meanwhile, Abbott has said he isn’t demanding an apology from the ABC over the Andrew Probyn affair, but the “least they could do” is make one.



Former Melbourne school principal Malka Leifer will face extradition charges in Israel later this month, a court in Jerusalem has ruled. She is wanted on 74 counts of child abuse by police in Australia but fled to Israel in 2008 before the case could be heard. An Israeli police undercover investigation found “indications” that Leifer, who was head of the Adass Israel school, was “pretending to be suffering from a mental illness to avoid the extradition process”. The prosecution was ordered on Wednesday to hand over evidence it claims shows Leifer is mentally fit to be extradited.

Police in Sydney are trying to piece together the last hours of a Brazilian mining executive, Cecilia Hadda, whose body was found floating in water by kayakers on Sunday a few kilometres upstream from the Harbour Bridge. The 38-year-old left her red Fiat car at West Ryde on Saturday but failed to meet up with friends later in the day. Detectives are scouring CCTV footage for clues and have several “persons of interest” they are speaking to, but how the logistics worker met her fate remains a mystery for now.

Sport

Football teams are usually defined by their star players, but with a coach who understands the crucial necessity of man-management, a CEO who grasps the importance of community and identity, and an owner who’s smart enough to trust and back his staff, the Newcastle Jets have a readymade template for A-League success, writes Richard Parkin.

Serena Williams should be seeded at Wimbledon for the good of the game, writes Kevin Mitchell. Making a comeback after a difficult childbirth, Williams has won Wimbledon seven times, and the All England Club must do the right thing or risk being seen to punish a player for having a baby, Mitchell argues.

Thinking time

Documentary Border Politics charts the plight of refugees seeking a new life in Australia and around the globe, and provides a devastating and heartbreaking insight into the issue that has come to resonate throughout politics worldwide. Refugee advocate and prominent lawyer Julian Burnside is particularly troubled by Australia’s stance: “If you gradually make it acceptable to behave monstrously to other human beings, then you are on a very dangerous path.”

This personal essay by Indigenous academic Sana Nakata is an affecting meditation on how children are central to Australia’s struggles, and none more so than Indigenous children. “As an adult, when I’ve seen deeply controversial political moments take hold, I’ve always noticed the children at the heart of them: the children not thrown overboard, the children of the Northern Territory intervention, the kids of same-sex parents during the recent marriage equality plebiscite. Because though they are rarely seen and rarely heard, children are never far from the political struggles of a nation.”

Peter Hutton is the former principal of Templestowe College, or TC, a government secondary school in Melbourne’s suburbs with individualised learning plans for students but no year levels, bells, compulsory uniforms or detention. According to Hutton, David Gonski got almost everything right in his second report – except one thing: “You made an effective case that the current system is based on an industrial model and then set an industrial, one size fits all, production target. It simply doesn’t match the neuroscience, David. Learning is not linear.”

What’s he done now?

Donald Trump has attacked the justice department and threatened to use his presidential powers to intervene. “A Rigged System - They don’t want to turn over Documents to Congress. What are they afraid of? Why so much redacting? Why such unequal ‘justice?’ At some point I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!”

Media roundup

The ABC has revealed ex-Australian navy officer Alex Gillett is caught up in the Fat Leonard US navy corruption and fraud scandal. Gillett is alleged to have leaked secrets in exchange for meals, hotel stays and sex workers.



The Courier Mail splashes with chaos at the Ipswich council, with mayor Andrew Antoniolli arrested on Wednesday and facing seven charges of fraud. Antoniolli is the second Ipswich mayor to face charges within a year, the paper reports.

And the Conversation reports that DNA facial prediction techniques could make it increasingly difficult to protect your privacy.



Coming up

Environmentalist Bill McKibben will this morning launch a blueprint to make Australia’s energy system fully renewable by 2030.

Roofing businesses are starting a class action against the government for cancelling the pink batts program in 2009.

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