Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 29 March.

Top stories

Theresa May will ask MPs to vote only on the withdrawal agreement element of her Brexit deal on Friday, challenging parliament to back it on the day the UK was originally meant to leave the EU. Ministers will argue that passing the withdrawal agreement, while setting aside the political declaration governing the future relationship, would allow the UK more time to try to pass its full Brexit deal. It still looks extremely difficult for May’s deal to pass because the Democratic Unionist party is still not backing it and up to 30 Conservative Eurosceptics remain hardened against it. Meanwhile the EU is entering full crisis mode in preparation for a no-deal Brexit.

Women with breast cancer have secured commitments from both the major parties for additional funding for MRI scans – $32.6m from the Morrison government coming in next Tuesday’s budget, and $47m from Labor if it wins in May. The Coalition will use the budget to create two Medicare items for MRI of the breast, to be available from 1 November 2019 – scans that will enable more accurate diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. If Bill Shorten wins the election, Labor promises to “work with experts” to finalise the design of the new Medicare items that will allow subsidies for scans.

Penny Wong has warned that the Canberra classes have not isolated One Nation as well as they did in the 1990s, as the revelations about the far-right party dominate the political debate. The Labor senator, who will make the remarks in the McKinnon oration in Melbourne today, warns that hate speech and extremist views in parliament and a “lack of unity in response to these” have harmed democracy. She points the finger in part at the Coalition for its tardy response to condemn One Nation in the 45th parliament. Pauline Hanson’s brand of “hyper-partisanship” threatened “the social cohesion and mutual respect needed for a tolerant, pluralist democracy”, Wong will say. She is accepting the McKinnon award naming her political leader of the year alongside the Greens senator Jordon Steele-John, who is designated the emerging political leader of the year.

A deadly fungal disease has wiped out 90 species of amphibians across the world in the past 50 years and led to the decline in populations of more than 400 frogs, toads and salamanders, scientists say. A global study led by the Australian National University and published in Science journal today has quantified the impact of chytridiomycosis, or chytrid fungus, a disease that eats away at the skin of amphibians. It was first discovered in 1998 by researchers at James Cook University in Queensland investigating the cause of mysterious, mass amphibian deaths. It is thought to have originated in Asia and has been spread by humans through activities such as the legal and illegal pet trade.

World

Children wait to receive food at an evacuation centre in Dondo, about 35km north from Beira, Mozambique. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images

The Mozambican government failed to warn people in the areas worst hit by cyclone Idai despite a “red alert” being issued two days before it struck, said Daviz Simango, the mayor of the city of Beira, who is also the leader of an opposition party. More than 460 Mozambicans have died in the disaster, official numbers show, although the final figure is expected to be far higher when flood levels recede and bodies can be found. The effects are still unfolding: about three million people across Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, more than half of them children, urgently need humanitarian help, Unicef said on Wednesday. “Governments can only do so much,” writes Lucian Msamati. “What is really needed now is cash to help people survive and rebuild their lives.”

Nicolás Maduro has asked Venezuelans to pray for the country’s recovery from another crippling nationwide blackout, in a crackly and foreboding telephone interview that reinforced the mounting sense of crisis.

New York state has sued the billionaire Sackler family behind Purdue Pharma and its prescription painkiller OxyContin, joining a growing list of state, county and city governments, alleging the drugmaker and its owners sparked the nation’s opioids crisis by putting profits over patient safety.

Half a billion more people could be at risk from mosquito-transmitted diseases within 30 years as a result of the warming climate, a new study has found. Canada and parts of northern Europe could be newly exposed.

Opinion and analysis

‘The latest projects chosen are clearly a captain’s call, designed not to meet a need in the electricity system, but to meet a political need of the Morison government.’ Photograph: James Gourley/Getty Images

Scott Morison has announced his government’s intention to potentially underwrite 12 gas, pumped hydro and coal projects. This is a stunt, writes Nicky Ison – and it’s a stunt that follows a dangerous trend with the Coalition government of putting “captain’s calls” ahead of policy. Morrison is an ad-man not an electricity expert, and he shouldn’t be making these types of decisions.

Since it’s rather difficult to know where to start on what happened on with Brexit on Wednesday, writes Marina Hyde, let’s begin in the future: “I want to assure you that when the apocalypse has come and you’re living in the bombed-out remnants of civilisation, clad in rags and distilling drinking water from your own urine, the one crackling radio in your resistance bunker will still be bringing news of Conservative party leadership contests.”

Sport

The Trump administration has come under fire for a budget proposal that would eliminate federal funds for the Special Olympics. The education department’s budget would cut the $17.6m that the federal government grants to the organisation, which runs Olympic-style athletic competitions for children and adults with intellectual disabilities.

There can be no denying that Adelaide go into Sunday’s AFLW grand final as flag favourites. But what has come before means nothing. Win-loss ratios, percentages, ladder positions: they are all irrelevant. What matters is who steps up, who works harder and who wants it more on the day.

Thinking time: naivety, watchfulness, insight and fearless action

‘Tiffany’s novels draw their central metaphors from earlier texts rescued from obscurity. As a former park ranger in central Australia and as a long-time agricultural journalist, she reads the kind of arcane, practical publications she works into her fiction.’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Today, Guardian Australia launches our brand new books series, The Unmissables, in which we highlight our picks for the 12 most significant new releases of 2019. Our first featured book is Exploded View from the Stella prize-winning writer Carrie Tiffany, a concise and pungent novel that carries a great weight, writes Susan Wyndham.

In its early pages, we are introduced to an unnamed girl who is obsessed with cars. She lives with her mother, brother and stepfather, known as “father man”, and a mechanic who repairs cars, often shoddily, in his home workshop in Perth’s outer suburbs. The girl hasn’t spoken for 17 days, and the foreboding of the novel’s early passages intensifies in a mosaic of naivety, watchfulness, dissociation, insight and fearless action.

While its themes are timeless, Exploded View is precisely placed in the 1970s of Tiffany’s childhood, when children watched The Brady Bunch and Matlock Police on television, when traditional gender roles were starting to be overturned but not in the back blocks of Western Australia. Tiffany has said elsewhere that there was abuse in her youth and that this book, taxing to write, is her most autobiographical. We can feel that in the weight of the words.

Stay tuned on Saturday for a companion essay from Carrie Tiffany.

Media roundup

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Al Noor mosque’s electrical lock system may have trapped Mosque shooting victims who were trying to escape, resulting in as many as 17 deaths, says a survivor, Khaled Alnobani. Labor plans to scrap negative gearing concessions for new investors by 1 January next year should it get into power, the ABC reports. The Washington Post has revealed how Donald Trump inflated his net worth to lenders and investors.

Coming up

Scott Morrison will attend a memorial service in Christchurch this morning for the victims of the mosques massacre.

The inquest into the disappearance of William Tyrrell continues.

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