Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 10 October.

Top stories

Nikki Haley has resigned as US ambassador to the United Nations, in a move that stunned allied diplomats and other senior officials. The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the national security adviser, John Bolton, are reported to have been taken unawares. But the president claimed he had been informed well in advance. At an announcement at the Oval Office, it remained unclear why Haley did not complete two years and pulled out of the job before the midterm elections. She rejected speculation that she was leaving to take a run at the presidency, saying she had no plans to stand in 2020 and would be campaigning for Trump.

Asked about Haley’s successor, Trump said there were a “number of people” who were interested, saying that Haley had made it “a more glamorous position”. Among the possible candidates is the president’s daughter Ivanka. Haley went out of her way to praise her and her husband, Jared Kushner, saying “they do a lot of things behind the scenes that I wish more people knew about. Because we are a better country because they are in this administration”. Other leading contenders include former deputy national security adviser Dina Powell and Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, who spent eight years at the mission to the UN.

Gay students and teachers could be rejected by religious schools under changes to anti-discrimination laws being recommended by a federal review into religious freedom. The former attorney general Philip Ruddock, who chaired the review, said the right of schools to turn away gay students and teachers should be enshrined in the Sex Discrimination Act. “To some school communities, cultivating an environment and ethos which conforms to their religious beliefs is of paramount importance,” the review says, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald. “To the extent that this can be done in the context of appropriate safeguards for the rights and mental health of the child, the panel accepts their right to select, or preference, students who uphold the religious convictions of that school community.” The review was commissioned after the 2017 same-sex marriage vote and handed to the federal government five months ago. It is still to be officially released.

Hundreds of demonstrators “torched” the Sydney Opera House last night, shining lights on the building to disrupt the Everest Cup horse-race ad being projected on to its sails. The protest came after almost a week of heated debate about Racing New South Wales’ planned projections, which were backed by the NSW government last Friday after concerted pressure from the Daily Telegraph and 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones. More than a quarter of a million people signed a petition calling on the state government to reverse its decision. The protest was mostly good-spirited, with chants of “not for sale” and “whose house? Our house”. When the sails lit up at about 7.40pm, the crowd erupted in a chorus of boos, shouting “not a fucking billboard”, “boring” and “the graphics are shit”.

John Hewson is urging a protest vote in Wentworth over climate change inaction. The former Liberal Leader has called on voters in his former seat to vote against the Liberals. He suggested it might take “a drubbing” in the byelection on 20 October to force the party he once led to respond to “the urgent challenge” of climate change, and that Liberal voters should consider voting for others before returning to vote Liberal at a general election in six months’ time. “If the Liberal party doesn’t stand up and argue the case on this, I think people should be encouraged to vote against them,” he told Guardian Australia.

Bill Shorten has pledged increased funding for every public school in Australia, announcing an additional $14bn investment in public education over 10 years if Labor wins the next federal election. After the Morrison government sought to end the Catholic and non-government school funding stoush – by announcing a $4.6bn funding package over 10 years, including a $1.2bn fund to be used at the sector’s discretion – Labor argued public schools were being left behind.

US voter registrations spiked following Taylor Swift’s Instagram post announcing her support for two democratic candidates. Kamari Guthrie, the director of communications for vote.org, said there were 65,000 registrations in the 24-hour period after the singer posted her statement to Instagram on Sunday. Of the 5,183 voter registrations in Tennessee this month, at least 2,144 occurred after Swift posted her statement to Instagram on Sunday, said Guthrie. The state’s deadline for voter registration is 9 October, which may also have contributed to the rush. There were 2,811 new Tennessee voter registrations in September. “Let’s just say I like her music about 25% less now,” said Donald Trump.

Sport

The Matildas are playing England in a friendly match at Craven Cottage. At half-time, England was in the lead 1-0. Find out the latest on our live blog.

Whatever happened to Octopus wrestling and ski ballet? A lot of us talk about the sports we love as if they are endangered, but let’s look at the ones that really were, writes Andy Bull.

Thinking time

Whistleblowers tell us why they spoke up – and whether they’d do it again. The Guardian interviews 12 people who have taken great personal risk to expose everything from warmongers to tax dodgers and sexual and physical abuse. Take Katharine Gun, who was just 28 when she tried to prevent one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century. While working as a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, Gun and her colleagues received an email from America’s National Security Agency requesting that surveillance operations be stepped up in order to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the Iraq war. She leaked the email.

It’s time for a publicly owned national grid, writes John Quiggin. A renewed appetite for public ownership has been accompanied by general recognition that the national electricity market has been a complete failure. Unfortunately, no one has much of an idea what to do about the problem. Restoration of public ownership will help but the system needs to be redesigned from the ground up. Before putting forward blueprints for a redesign, it’s important to consider, at a more fundamental level, what went wrong.

Here kitty. Need to catch a tiger? Try perfume. Wildlife authorities in India trying to catch a tiger thought to have killed at least nine people say they are considering the use of an unconventional weapon: Calvin Klein’s Obsession cologne. The power of Obsession to lure big cats was first established by experiments at Bronx zoo in New York in 2003. The key ingredient is a synthetic version of the musk secreted by the civet, a small nocturnal mammal whose glandular liquid is prized for its powerful aroma.

Media roundup

Josh Frydenberg has urged the US and China to de-escalate their trade war amid warnings by the International Monetary Fund that Australia’s economy could suffer, writes the Australian. Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph‘s front page is dominated by the headline “Put Brakes on Migrants”, saying NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian has called for a 50% cut to the state’s overseas migrant intake. The Australian Financial Review reports that the federal energy minister, Angus Taylor, will unveil a fresh push to keep the national energy guarantee’s reliability mechanism alive.

Coming up

A climate change forum will be held in the federal seat of Wentworth to discuss the local implications of the new United Nations’ IPCC 1.5C global warming report.

Peter Dutton will deliver an address to the National Press Club about fighting organised crime.

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