Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 28 August.

Top stories

An expert panel has warned ministers that the controversial scientist Peter Ridd is misrepresenting robust science about the plight of the Great Barrier Reef, and compared his claims to the strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubt about the impact of smoking. The warning, in a letter to the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, and the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, follows Ridd launching a lecture tour in which he has repeated his claim that farmland pollution does not significantly damage the natural wonder.

Jeffrey Epstein was called a coward and a “depraved human being” in a New York courtroom on Tuesday by women who accused him of sexually abusing them as teens. At a special hearing in Manhattan, alleged victims of the disgraced financier – whose political and royal connections have come under fresh scrutiny since his arrest in New York, and who killed himself in a New York jail this month – were able to give voice to their anguish. About 20 spoke in Manhattan federal court.

References to wealth inequality reaching its peak in 2017-18 were removed from an Australian Bureau of Statistics press release to help craft a “good media story”, according to internal documents. The emails and drafts show the ABS issued a separate income inequality media release in July to create a narrative of “stable” inequality despite wealth inequality being on the rise.

It’s hard to put a price on what Bob Hawke meant to Australians but at an auction of the former prime minister’s possessions in Sydney on Tuesday night they did their level best. A few hundred bargain hunters and true believers gathered in an upstairs room at the Paddington RSL to bid for a piece of the people’s prime minister’s private life.

World

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jair Bolsonaro at a meeting with governors of the Amazon region on Tuesday. Photograph: Marcos Correa/AFP/Getty Images

As deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon surges to break August records, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has escalated his row with Emmanuel Macron, attacking the French president’s “lamentable colonialist stance” as fires continued to rage in the world’s biggest rainforest. As Brazil said it would reject a US$20m (AU$29.6m) G7 contribution to fight the fires, Bolsonaro spurned Macron’s criticism of his environmental record and flaunted Donald Trump’s support for his far-right administration.

CEOs claim Joe Biden’s brother promised them the 2020 candidate would help their companies. James Biden is facing renewed claims that he lured potential business associates with promises his brother could be influenced to adopt their business model.

British MPs have pledged to form alternative parliament in case of prorogation, at a cross-party meeting where Boris Johnson was described as a threat to the “very nature” of British democracy.

The regulator of global wildlife trade has decided to impose a near-total ban on sending African elephants captured from the wild to zoos. The decision met with strong opposition from Zimbabwe, which along with Botswana is the main provider of wild African elephants to zoos outside the continent

The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has quit Twitter after daring a critic to “call me a bedbug to my face”. Stephens, an advocate of free speech, emailed the tweet author David Karpf’s boss to complain about a “bedbug” joke – and then quit Twitter after being widely mocked.

Opinion and analysis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shopkeepers at a pharmacy at Bhagirath Palace’s pharmaceuticals market in Old Delhi, India. Photograph: Saumya Khandelwal/The Guardian

As India loosens its stringent narcotics laws, US companies are rushing in, writes Sarah Varney. “For-profit pain clinics like Delhi Pain Management Centre are opening by the score across Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore and other cities in this nation of 1.3 billion people. After decades of stringent narcotics laws, borne of debilitating opium epidemics of centuries past, India is a country ready to salve its pain. And American pharmaceutical companies – architects of the opioid crisis in the United States and avid hunters of new markets – stand at the ready to fuel that demand.”

Planting an apple tree represents the investments we make in our futures and those of our children, writes Anthony N Castle. But, after a record hot Adelaide summer burned his tree’s first fruit, he wonders if the climate crisis will put an end to all that. “We had planted the tree for the children we didn’t yet have, knowing it could come to bear fruit as they grew. It was an investment in our environment for the good of our children, an investment in their future, but we found that apple among the stones of the garden bed not long after. It had fallen, burned on the branch.”

Sport

Australia has been a powerhouse nation in women’s basketball for some time but, despite sharing the same talent production line, Australia’s men have failed to reach the same heights. Now buoyed by a record number of Australians in the NBA – a total of 13 in the 2018-19 season – the men appear on the cusp of international success.

Depending on who you follow, Victoria Park was the holy grail or hell on earth. When Collingwood played its final home game at the beloved Lulie Street venue 20 years ago on 28 August 1999, it ended an era of tribal footy, writes Cheryl Critchley.

Thinking time: Long spring

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lulu Wang, who directed The Farewell. ‘Every time I go back to China, I feel more American than ever,’ she says. Photograph: Elias Roman

The Farewell, Lulu Wang’s second feature film, is set in Changchun, the capital of China’s north-eastern Jilin province, whose name translates to “long spring”. For Wang, who grew up there, it was close to idyllic. In the film, however, it’s foreign and alienating, as if the city of her memories was merely imagined. “Every time I go back, it’s a completely different place, and all the things I once knew are gone,” she says.

This sense of absence permeates the film, based on Wang’s own life. Billi – a Chinese-born, US-raised writer who serves as Wang’s onscreen proxy – returns to Changchun to see her nai nai (Mandarin for grandmother) one last time. Nai Nai is dying, but doesn’t know; in keeping with traditional values of collective over individual suffering, the family keeps her in the dark about her stage-four cancer diagnosis, orchestrating a last-minute wedding as a guise under which everyone reunites. “There’s this feeling of sand slipping through your fingers, of being unable to hold on to past memories and feelings. Unable to find anything concrete that represents home,” Wang says. It’s a trauma instantly recognisable to any diasporic audience – the feeling of suspension between two cultures, and the knowledge that to fully embrace one is to sacrifice the other.

Media roundup

The Australian reveals that “Critical literacy and numeracy skills of Australian students are languishing,” before preliminary Naplan results are released today. Iran says Australia’s standing in the Middle East has been damaged by the decision to join the US in patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, according to the ABC. The Australian Financial Review’s homepage splash is Does Scott Morrison think this is the trade war we have to have?

Coming up

The boss of the NSW Labor party, Kaila Murnain, will give evidence at an anti-corruption investigation.

Officers who arrested Victorian woman Tanya Day before she died in custody will continue giving evidence at an inquest.

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