Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Monday 4 December.

Top stories

Donald Trump’s tweets blasting his former senior aide Michael Flynn may point to an obstruction of justice, according to legal experts and senior Democrats. The US president said in a tweet on Saturday that he fired Flynn as national security adviser in February “because he lied to the vice-president and the FBI” about his discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the US last December. Flynn pleaded guilty in court on Friday to lying to FBI agents. This would mean that Trump knew Flynn had committed a serious crime when, according to the former FBI director James Comey, the president asked Comey the next day to halt an FBI investigation into Flynn. On Sunday Trump, who later fired Comey, again denied making such a request.

“He could be tweeting himself into an obstruction of justice conviction,” said Richard Painter, a former ethics counsel to the George W Bush administration. Laurence Tribe, a professor in constitutional law at Harvard University, concurred. “That’s a confession of deliberate, corrupt obstruction of justice.” Moving to limit the potential damage, one of Trump’s attorneys, John Dowd, claimed he had written the tweet, which he described as “sloppy”. The latest frenzy of activity from the White House followed Flynn’s guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with a sprawling criminal investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, who has already indicted two other Trump campaign officials for alleged crimes and accepted a guilty plea from a third. Experts told the Guardian the wording of Flynn’s plea agreement left open the possibility that Flynn had already worn a wire or otherwise recorded conversations with other associates of Trump who are under investigation.

In the early 1980s Roy Moore, the scandal-hit would-be US Republican senator – then an ambitious 37-year-old assistant district attorney – left his life in Alabama behind and relocated to outback Australia. As a Senate candidate and one-time chief justice of the Alabama supreme court, Moore has in recent months been accused of abusing numerous women and underage girls in a period spanning the late 1970s to 1991. But in 1984 he ended up at Telemon, a sprawling cattle station nestled in the foothills of the central Queensland highlands. The Guardian spent a week in central Queensland, seeking out those who knew Moore to find out what he was doing so far from home. What emerged was a portrait of a man overcoming his own personal demons, but one who never left the impression on those he met that he was “anything but a gentleman”.

The former British prime minister Tony Blair has confirmed he is working to reverse Brexit, arguing that claims made by the leave campaign are now clearly untrue, and British voters deserve a second referendum. In an interview with the BBC, Blair said what was happening to the “crumbling” National Health Service was a national tragedy and it was now clear that the Vote Leave promise about Brexit leading to higher NHS spending would not be honoured. “When the facts change, I think people are entitled to change their mind,” said Blair. There was a significant group of people, particularly Labour voters, who backed Brexit because of economic and cultural worries, he said, and they could be persuaded to change their minds if their concerns were addressed.

The Turnbull government has warned it could start referring Labor MPs to the high court by the end of this week once all MPs and senators have disclosed information about their family citizenship history. Senators’ family history and citizenship details are being published on Monday. The same details for House of Representatives members are due on Tuesday evening and could be published as early as Wednesday. Staff in the prime minister’s office told Guardian Australia that Labor MPs Justine Keay and Susan Lamb would be in the government’s sights.

Pollution has forced a cricket match between India and Sri Lanka to be repeatedly stopped mid-play, after players struggled to breath and some vomited from the toxic Delhi air. Commentators said it was the first recorded instance of an international match being halted due to the smog, that afflicts much of north India year-round but worsens to hazardous levels during winter months. Airborne pollution levels 15 times the World Health Organisation limits challenged the Sri Lankan players particularly, and as the haze worsened, many Sri Lankan players returned from lunch wearing face masks before complaining to umpires, who halted play to consult with team doctors and match officials. The match resumed but was interrupted twice more as two bowlers left the field with breathing difficulties. “We had players coming off the field and vomiting,” the Sri Lanka coach Nic Pothas told reporters after the match. “There were oxygen cylinders in the change room. It’s not normal for players to suffer in that way while playing the game.”

Sport

With the retirement of Cooper Cronk from international duties, the era of the “big three” of Cameron Smith, Billy Slater and Cronk is finally over. England and NSW must be drawing their collective breath. But from Australia’s “invincible” era of 1982 to now, the local talent pipeline shows no signs of letting up, writes John Davidson.

Batsman Shaun Marsh’s century has placed him squarely at the centre of Australia’s Ashes domination, writes Adam Collins, with his effort at Adelaide on Sunday perfectly judged to put Australia in a strong position to win the series.

Thinking time

Peter Polites, a western Sydney-based writer, whose first novel Down the Hume is praised as ‘queer noir’. Photograph: Stelios Papadakis

Who do Australian literary insiders think are the emerging writers to watch right now? Guardian Australia asked them for the scoop. Michaela McGuire, artistic director of the Sydney Writers’ festival, praises Peter Polites’s “queer noir” Down the Hume. “Peter is a true original,” McGuire writes. “He’s celebrated for writing dark realism in the tradition of the early works of Christos Tsiolkas and Luke Davies, but I think he’s funnier than either of them.” Marieke Hardy, artistic director of the Melbourne Writers’ festival, praises poet Eddie Paterson, whose “thrilling potential can’t be ignored”. She writes of his latest collection, Redactor: “What’s interesting to me about Eddie’s writing is the visual aspect: while these works exist as pieces of pure poetry (and translate effortlessly to spoken-word performance), they command attention on the page by blacking out and ‘redacting’ slabs of text.”

“You all know that you’re not loved in jail and the place is no good for you. Go back to your place of love, your hometown and take your place as strong Aboriginal men/women.” Nioka Chatfield wrote a letter two months after her son, a Gumbaynggirr and Gomeroi man, was found unresponsive in his cell at Tamworth Correctional Facility. It is now being delivered to every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoner in New South Wales. The letter calls on the incarcerated Indigenous population to remember their community roots, to care for each other in a system that doesn’t, and to remember the legacy of Indigenous incarceration. “This is our message: in the spot where you stand or sit right now ... think about all the Aboriginal warriors lost to black deaths in custody, think about all the families left home grieving and suffering.”

The Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has been staggered by the scope and scale of sexual harassment and abuse in the Australian media industry that has been revealed over the last week. “Some of what’s been reported has been an ‘open secret’ for decades,” she writes in a comment piece for Guardian Australia. “From what I’ve been told, there’s plenty yet to come. I’ve been told directly from women in the industry that these stories are credible, commonplace and even widely known.” Hanson-Young says the media has a responsibility to be the “best responders” to rot within the industry. “It cannot continue to be a culture where there’s no penalty for sexual abuse but there’s a penalty for drawing attention to it. It cannot be a workplace that treats the price of success as silence.”

What’s he done now?

Donald Trump appears to believe attack is the best form of defence over claims he asked the former FBI director James Comey to halt an investigation into his former national security adviser Michael Flynn. In a series of tweets overnight he has blasted the agency for incompetency and being “phony”.

“After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters – worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness,” he tweeted.

“Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI ‘agent’s role in Clinton probe under review.’ Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge.”

Media roundup

The Courier Mail’s front-page exclusive reveals cleaners, waiters and bartenders are being recruited by police in the fight against terrorism with the force holding workshops for staff employed at nightclubs, sports stadiums and shopping centres, telling them they should be prepared to handle knife-wielding or truck-driving terrorist.

Front page of today’s Australian Financial Review. Photograph: Fairfax Media

The Australian Financial Review splashes with an exclusive about a former intelligence officer saying disgraced Labor senator Sam Dastyari was likely to have been recruited by the Chinese government as an “agent of influence”, to advance the superpower’s interests in Australia.

The ABC has a helpful explainer on everything you need to know about the royal commission into the banking sector. It delves into questions such as: What can a royal commission do? Who pays for it? And, who’s going to be in charge?

Coming up

Barnaby Joyce is expected to attend the Nationals party room meeting in Canberra after his thumping victory in the New England byelection. Joyce secured more than 60% of the vote in what the prime minister declared was “the biggest swing to a government” in an Australian byelection.

A class action by more than 6,000 Queenslanders against the state government and its dam operators over the devastating 2011 floods will begin in the New South Wales supreme court. The action by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers is being brought against Seqwater, Sunwater and the state of Queensland as operators of Wivenhoe and Somerset dams.

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