Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 8 January.

Top stories

Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun has been temporarily admitted to Thailand and is under the protection of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees as she fights to prevent her repatriation to Saudi Arabia. Qunun, 18, who was in transit on the way to Australia, where she wants to claim asylum, barricaded herself inside a hotel room in Bangkok airport on Monday to prevent immigration officials putting her on a flight back to Kuwait after she was denied entry to Thailand. Qunun said she would be killed if she was returned to Saudi Arabia and vowed not to leave the hotel until she could see UN representatives. Late on Monday Qunun said on Twitter she had left the hotel and her passport had been returned, but also that her father had arrived in Thailand. The Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young had earlier led calls for the Morrison government to to help get Qunun to Australia.

Hundreds of thousands of fish have been killed in the Lower Darling River at Menindee Lakes, including native species such as golden perch, Murray cod and bony herring. After 10,000 fish died in a nearby part of the river before Christmas, local fish experts have said conditions could all but wipe out some populations. Two years ago the lakes were almost full, but WaterNSW has been releasing water and allowing extraction upstream for irrigation at a rate that has now left the lakes almost completely dry.

GetUp is asking the public to nominate which conservative Coalition MPs are “the worst of a bad bunch” to help it prioritise targets for the federal election. Eighteen Coalition MPs have been chosen as targets by the activist body, with participants asked to choose three. Not all are marginal seat holders but were chosen by GetUp for what it considers “out of date” views on climate change, “heartless positions” on immigration policy and those who “blatantly discriminate” on social justice issues. GetUp has already committed to campaigns against Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton.

World

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kevin Spacey, left, attends his arraignment on sexual assault charges. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images

Kevin Spacey has attended court in Nantucket on an indecent assault charge. The 59-year-old Oscar-winning actor is accused of groping a then 18-year-old man at a restaurant in 2016. The charge is a felony. If convicted, Spacey would face a maximum of five years in prison. He would also have to register as a sex offender.

In the UK, Labour is backing a cross-party amendment to block a no-deal Brexit. The amendment to the finance bill, tabled over the weekend, is one of the first of a slew of parliamentary tactics expected to be adopted by MPs to try to prevent a no-deal Brexit. Its effect would be to restrict the government’s freedom to make Brexit-related tax changes without parliamentary safeguards.

Adam Schiff is the new chairman of the House intelligence committee – and the public face of the investigation of Donald Trump’s finances. He’s also, unlike Robert Mueller, someone Trump cannot fire. Schiff says he plans to drive directly at an area the president has sought to fence off: the details of his businesses, his lenders and his partners in the US and abroad.

Jim Yong Kim is to step down as the head of the World Bank, sending shock waves through the international aid community. His term was not due to expire until 2022, but he will now stand down by 1 February. Kim’s decision to quit for the private sector was described by sources close to the bank as a “personal decision”.

Cyntoia Brown, a woman serving a life sentence for the murder of a man who hired her for sex when she was 16, has been granted full clemency by Tennessee governor Bill Haslam. Last year celebrities including Rihanna, Cara Delevingne and Kim Kardashian West called for Brown’s freedom.

Opinion and analysis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heidelberg Heights from Suburbia - The Familiar and Forgotten. Photograph: Warren Kirk

The photographer Warren Kirk has been documenting Australia’s suburbs for 30 years. He describes his new book, Suburbia, as part-social history, part-archaeology, part-storytelling. He has a simple desire to capture what he perceives to be beauty in the ordinary and commonplace. This photo gallery captures the beauty of suburban scenes from Footscray, Alphington, Coburg and others, as the old is replaced by what Kirk believes is an uglier, modern built environment.

A reliance on the mistake of fact defence is a common feature of Queensland rape trials. Law professor Jonathan Crowe believes it needs to go. The defence is a legal argument that a person who makes an honest and reasonable mistake about the facts should be criminally liable only to the extent that they would be if the belief had been true. As well as being used to excuse the rape of a 13-year-old girl, the defence has been relied on by a defendant who brutally beat his partner with a knife, a chair and a stick for allegedly cheating on him, drawing blood and causing serious injuries, before having sex with her.

Sport

No play on the fifth day of the Sydney Test meant that the finale of the match and series was an anticlimax, but the substance of the series remained deeply significant. After 71 years of trying, India had finally won a Test series in Australia. The manner in which it arrived was scarcely relevant.

After the physical battering of a three-set defeat in the final of last year’s Australian Open, Simona Halep will return to Melbourne a more relaxed person, having finally won her first grand slam tournament, the French Open. Melbourne 2018 was “too much … it was a warning”, Halep tells Donald McRae. “Everything I did in life, until now, was just for tennis. Nothing else mattered. That’s why it became too much, maybe. That’s why I suffered.”

Thinking time: Slow TV has a point

Facebook Twitter Pinterest SBS’s slow summer shows reveal the history of Australia’s vast geography. Photograph: SBS

Last year The Ghan, Australia’s first foray into the Norwegian genre of slow TV, wound its way for 17 hours from Adelaide to Port Pirie to Alice Springs to Darwin and into Naaman Zhou’s heart. Now SBS has launched its “slow summer” programming, featuring a swath of extended, slow-moving slows filled with gorgeous cinema and mind-numbing nothingness. But stare a little longer at Australia’s vast geography and it’s not hard to see the history – or the politics.

“The thing about slow TV – specifically, as it is done by Australia’s own Mint Pictures – is that it is actually a genius, and quite powerful, act of historical revisionism. Through informative text, these journeys show you the history of Indigenous nations that colonists tried to wipe out, and the migrant history that, without fail, stretches back further than you’d think. This is not just 12 hours of a sweater being knitted. It has a point,” Zhou writes. “Slow TV is an experience that you yourself shape. It’s undemanding and forgiving. You get what you put in. It’s a serene, stunning journey into parts of the country we neglect, and the history we mostly never learned. If you’re interested, then it’s interesting.”

Media roundup

The independent senator Fraser Anning, who was widely condemned for attending a far-right rally at St Kilda at the weekend, billed taxpayers thousands of dollars to attend two more far-right events, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The Australian leads with two Labor policy stories: a planned overhaul of the job welfare system, and its tax plan, which would mean more than a million Australians paying the top tax rate, according to the paper. The Age reports that Melbourne house prices are expected to fall by as much as 11% this year.

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