Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Thursday 18 January.

Top stories

Two Queensland councils have reversed earlier statements and say they won’t own an airport serving Adani’s coalmine despite announcing they would spend $34m on it. Townsville and Rockhampton councils said in October that they would spend $18.5m and $15.5m respectively on an airport hundreds of kilometres away at the Carmichael coalmine as part of a funding deal with Adani. At the time, officials from Townsville council said the $34m was to “build and own the airport”. But after Queensland’s corruption watchdog referred allegations of wrongdoing to the state’s local government department, the councils have admitted that if the mine went ahead they would not own the airport.

The Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission has referred the funding deal to the state’s local government department because of “alleged corrupt conduct” relating to a tender to build the airport. The complaint hinges on whether Townsville and Rockhampton councils own the airport, and are thus responsible for tenders, or are funding its construction for Adani.

Reconciliation Australia says asking Indigenous people to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January “is like asking them to dance on their ancestors’ graves”. The independent organisation argues changing the date is “a relatively small task” that would demonstrate a willingness to address past wrongs. “We’ve changed the date before – in fact January 26 has only been a national public holiday since 1994 – and will have to do so again if we want to achieve a national date that unifies all Australians,” said its chief executive, Karen Mundine. Reconciliation Australia was joined by the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples and the Healing Foundation in pushing for a date change but neither the federal government nor the Labor opposition support growing calls for a date change.

US border patrol agents routinely vandalise containers of water and other supplies left in the Arizona desert for migrants, condemning people to die of thirst in baking temperatures, according to a shocking new report by two humanitarian groups. Tucson-based groups said the agents committed the alleged sabotage with impunity in an attempt to deter and punish people who illegally cross from Mexico. Volunteers found water gallons vandalised 415 times, on average twice a week, in an 800 sq mile patch of Sonoran desert south-west of Tucson, with the damage affecting 3,586 gallons of desperately needed supplies. The report also accused border patrol agents of vandalising food and blankets and harassing volunteers in the field.

Cotton growers in Walgett in north-west New South Wales are facing complete crop loss after a serious incident affected nearly 6,000 hectares of cotton farms reaching as far as Burren Junction and Rowena. The culprit is believed to be a giant plume of 2-4,D, a herbicide that is used to kill broadleaf weeds in fallow fields and in some cereal crops. The spray, possibly used at night, is believed to have been trapped in an inversion layer in the atmosphere and then drifted over the highly sensitive cotton plants. The herbicide was also breathed in by farmers and their families and entered waterways. In this case, cotton might just be the agricultural equivalent of the canary in the coalmine, screeching a warning about the effect of spray drift on bushland, national parks, waterways and population centres.

A UK man found guilty of stealing mailbags more than 40 years ago has had his conviction quashed after googling the name of his arresting officer. Stephen Simmons, now 62, was arrested with two friends in Clapham, south London, in 1975 by DS Derek Ridgewell of the British Transport Police, and spent eight months in borstal. Four years ago Simmons was given “friendly advice” by a barrister on a radio program to google the name of his arresting officer if we wished to overturn his conviction. He did so without expecting to discover anything but what emerged was that Ridgewell himself had been jailed for seven years for mailbag thefts totalling £300,000 in 1980, and had died in prison in 1982. “I was gobsmacked,” Simmons told the Guardian.

Sport

Nick Kyrgios stayed calm amid numerous distractions to beat Viktor Troicki at Australian Open yesterday, 7-5, 6-4, 7-6 (2) on Hisense Arena. Kyrgios faced noise trouble, umpire’s shouts and over-excited fans at his match, which proved an embarrassment for tournament organisers.

The cricketer Ben Stokes will be back in the fold and playing for England within four weeks. But the ECB ruling raises more questions over its decision-making, writes Vic Marks. Its decision to reinstate the all-rounder for the series in New Zealand, even though he faces a pending trial for affray, highlights many puzzling aspects.

Thinking time

Kylie Minogue discusses her transformation into an alcoholic agoraphobic living in a sex-obsessed neighbourhood for Stephan Elliott’s outrageous comedy Swinging Safari. “Once we were on set, oh boy,” Minogue says. “So much of what we were doing was so non-PC. We would say, ‘Are we going to get away with this?’ Minogue says her character in the film – the taciturn, mousy, hard-drinkin’ Kaye – was originally even wilder than the version that made final cut. “There were parts which kind of got changed around in the edit, about how she would pass her time in the bedroom,” Minogue says. “That took a tiny bit of convincing on Stephan’s part. He said, ‘Trust me, trust me!’ So I went for it.”

The runaway success of Michael Wolff’s takedown of the US president has led to a sales bump for many other books on The Donald, old and new. But the explosive, tell-all nature of Fire and Fury may make it hard for other, less sensational accounts to compete. The Guardian takes a look at the publishing agenda and wraps up what’s coming up on your Trump reading schedule; from the political to the personal, the rabidly anti to the cultishly devoted, the scholarly to the profane.



In her debut memoir, Getting Off, writer Erica Gaza confronts her experience of overcoming sex and porn addiction, and the shame that still surrounds it. Despite growing recognition of women’s sexual appetitities (“porn for women” was the top search term on Pornhub last year, increasing by 1,400%) Gaza tells the Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi that frank discussions about sex are still rare – and a sex addiction can happen to anyone.

What’s he done now?

“Eric Trump on @foxandfriends now!” Thanks to Fire and Fury, we now know Donald Trump has three televisions in his bedroom and retires at 6.30pm to watch them, accompanied by an array of fast food. But it’s still surprising when the president of the United States tweets telling you to tune in.

Media roundup

The Canberra Times reveals that rents in the capital city have skyrocketed, increasing by 8% last year, making Canberra Australia’s third most expensive city – just behind Darwin and Sydney. With the Australian Open well under way, the ABC delves into a study on what science says about the unusual – and sometimes very funny – habit of tennis players grunting during play. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on Essential poll on Australia Day, which finds that the majority of Australians do not care what date Australia Day is celebrated on. The poll, which was commissioned by the Australia Institute, also finds only 37% are aware that holding it on 26 January is offensive to many Indigenous people.

Coming up

Malcolm Turnbull will meet with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, during a single-day visit, to discuss trade between Australia and Japan, and attempts to keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal alive. He is being urged to refuse to deepen Australia’s security ties with Japan until it stops whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Donald Trump’s much-vaunted fake news awards for “the most corrupt and biased of the mainstream media” may or may not be announced today. The plan is a bit confusing, like many White House communications.



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