Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 30 August.

Top stories

A judge has granted a last-minute temporary injunction to stop a Tamil asylum seeker family being deported from Australia. The family of four were put on a non-commercial flight from Melbourne to Sri Lanka about 11pm on Thursday. But the plane landed in Darwin early on Friday and Priya, her husband, Nadesalingam, and their two Australian-born daughters were taken to accommodation. The couple, who came to Australia after Sri Lanka’s civil war, have been held in a Melbourne detention centre since March 2018 after being taken from their home in Biloela, Queensland, during a pre-dawn raid. The injunction prevents the family being removed until noon on Friday. A hearing will be held at 10am in Melbourne’s federal circuit court.

Thousands of public servants want to quit Peter Dutton’s home affairs department, with a new report finding staff are suffering low morale, poor engagement and high levels of bullying and harassment. The annual employee census, which gathered information from almost 10,000 workers in the mega-department, has ranked it as the worst agency for staff engagement across the public service. Only about half of home affairs employees believe their direct managers are of high quality, a slight improvement compared with 2018, but 13% lower than the public service overall.

A growing number of senior Tory rebels have signalled they are prepared to back urgent legislation to thwart a no-deal Brexit after Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend the UK parliament. David Gauke, the former justice secretary, became the latest senior Conservative to urge his colleagues to act immediately rather than wait to see if the PM could deliver an alternative deal in the 30-day period offered by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. A significant number of Conservative MPs said they were now prepared to back legislation to prevent no-deal in the Commons next week.

World

A firefighter in the Amazon basin in Mato Grosso state. Photograph: Mayke Toscano/AFP/Getty Images

Fires have been reported in protected indigenous reserves of the Brazilian Amazon, raising fears that loggers and land grabbers have targeted these remote areas during the dramatic surge in blazes across the world’s biggest rainforest.

A vast new study has quashed the idea that a single “gay gene” exists, scientists say, instead finding homosexual behaviour is influenced by a multitude of genetic variants which each have a tiny effect.

The German government has said it will ease the process for descendants of people persecuted by the Nazis to regain citizenship, after a campaign by a British-based group.

Archaeologists excavating what is thought to be the world’s largest child sacrifice site have unearthed the skeletons of 227 young victims in the coastal desert of northern Peru. Experts believe the children were sacrificed by the Chimú culture to placate the gods as rains and floods caused by the El Niño weather pattern.

Israel has positioned mannequins of soldiers in jeeps along the Lebanon border, according to Lebanese and Israeli correspondents, as the army braces itself for an expected attack from Hezbollah.

Opinion and analysis

A triptych portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

Comparisons between Boris Johnson and Charles I aren’t just lazy rhetoric, writes John Rees. Johnson may not be the absolutist king but he is isolated and autocratic – and we’ve seen that before. “But that’s only the beginning of the story of the isolation of the Boris monarchy. The Tory Brexiteers don’t even rightly represent most people who voted Brexit. Those voters didn’t vote for a Trump-Johnson no-deal Brexit, nor to have an even more vicious free-market version of the establishment imposed on them without election. So the Johnson regime is doubly isolated, both from its natural base in the political establishment and from the popular base that it’s trying to misrepresent among ordinary people.”

Ripple effects of George Pell’s trials have spread beyond survivors to anyone who identifies themselves as Catholic – more than 5 million people in Australia. A nation is now confronted to reckon with the sins of the church, writes Brigid Delaney: “For those like me, who were already drifting away from religion, the last years of the church’s trials have turned ambivalence into anger and disgust but also something more complicated. Leaving your religion can leave you with a void, particularly if you grew up marinating in the church’s beliefs and rituals.”

Sport

Fans in Derby wanting to see Steve Smith had to content themselves with autographs at stumps on the first day of Australia’s tour match, with the opening batsmen, Usman Khawaja and Marcus Harris, compiling 77 unbeaten runs after Derbyshire were bowled out for 172. As Australia ponder who will make way for the returning Smith in next week’s fourth Test, England have selection puzzles of their own.

Super Netball’s bonus point system may have added interest and excitement but it is down to good fortune that it has not yet cost a deserving team, as the league heads into the finals series.

Thinking time: How fashion’s love of leather is fuelling the fires in the Amazon

Amazon fire Photograph: Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty Images

The level of destruction is almost impossible to fathom. About 41,000 fires have been recorded by scientists in the Brazilian Amazon since January, with more than half of those in the past three weeks – hence the apocalyptic headlines. Every minute, the equivalent of a football field and a half of the so-called lungs of the Earth is incinerated. The rainforest isn’t just totemic, we know that the future stability of the climate rests on preserving it. To be an onlooker to this burning triggers the type of overwhelming anxiety that probably won’t be soothed by wearing a “save the rainforest” T-shirt like we did in the 1980s. In fact, that’s the last thing we should be doing, because the Amazon burn is very much a fashion crisis, writes Lucy Siegle. Beef and soya aren’t the sole culprits for the chaos; the west’s insatiable demand for shoes, belts and handbags is also driving rainforest destruction.

This has been evident for a decade. In 2009 Greenpeace published Slaughtering the Amazon, a report that should have changed everything – and nearly did. The report concluded that the demand for leather was fuelling the destruction of the Amazon in its own right, not just accidentally as a byproduct of beef. This week the fashion industry made a move, as LVMH, the world’s top luxury goods firm, pledged €10m to fight the Amazon burn, adding to the $20m pledged by the G7. But could it be too little too late?

Media roundup

The security firm Paladin was fined more than 1,000 times by the home affairs department, the Financial Review reports, even though officials insisted they were happy with the company’s $500m refugee services contract and work on Manus Island. David Jones will “aggressively close stores”, the Age reports, as its profits slump amid lukewarm consumer spending. And the ABC investigates whether edible insects could be Australia’s next export success story.

Coming up

Scott Morrison is visiting Timor-Leste for the 20th anniversary of its independence vote.

A Senate inquiry into whether Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne breached ministerial standards will hear from the outgoing head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson.

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