Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 11 June.

Top stories

Human destruction of the living world is causing a “frightening” number of plant extinctions, according to scientists who have completed the first global analysis of plant species. The researchers said the plant extinction rate was 500 times greater now than before the industrial revolution, and this was likely to be an underestimate. They found 571 species had been wiped out since 1750 but, with knowledge of many plant species still very limited, the true number is likely to be much higher. “It is way more than we knew and way more than should have gone extinct,” said Dr Maria Vorontsova of the Royal Botanic Gardens in London.

Laws that target price-gouging energy companies should be extended to all big businesses, the Nationals MP Keith Pitt has said, endorsing a Centre Alliance push to legislate an economy-wide power to break up big companies when parliament returns in July. The Queensland National has been one of the most vocal advocates of the “big stick” legislation, which allows energy companies to be broken up if they engage in price gouging. But the government should be able to steer the package through the lower house without amendments, unless Pitt is joined by more Nationals colleagues.

The Indigenous rapper Briggs says the Australian public is not attached to the national anthem because it is only 35 years old and the “song’s just not that good”. Appearing on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday, Briggs was asked about his video for the Weekly in which he said the anthem “sucks” and sought to explain what it “sounds like when blackfellas listen to it”. The video sparked a critical front-page news story in the West Australian newspaper but on Monday night Briggs dismissed the backlash, saying he tried to push himself out of his comfort zone because “change doesn’t come from being comfortable”.

World

Firefighters are seen after a helicopter crash landed on top of a building in midtown Manhattan in New York. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

A helicopter has crashed on the roof of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, killing one person, reportedly the pilot, and sparking panic in New York.

Canada will ban harmful single-use plastics as early as 2021, Justin Trudeau said on Monday. Items to be banned may include water bottles, plastic bags and straws.

The final list of candidates for the leadership of the UK Conservative party has been reduced to 10, with Michael Gove mounting a strong attack on the favourite, Boris Johnson. Voting begins on Thursday.

Google made $4.7bn in advertising from news content last year, almost as much as the revenue of the entire online news industry.

Egyptian authorities are trying to stop the auction of a statue of Tutankhamun’s head after concerns were raised that the bust might have been stolen from the Karnak temple in Luxor.

Steven Berkoff has performed his monologue Harvey. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

David Mamet and Steven Berkoff are among the artists using the Harvey Weinstein case as material. “For these guys I guess rape and harassment is some kind of interesting philosophical exercise they feel they need first bite at,” writes Suzanne Moore. “Imagine that Weinstein is actually not that interesting. Imagine that, given the #MeToo movement, women playwrights might do something with this material beyond ‘dark farce’ … This is not farce, it is real life, and the contents of Weinstein’s mind are not as deep or interesting as any of these guys think. They are sordid and ordinary. A real dramatist might grasp this.”

“Nothing about the election result has changed the fundamental picture of the economy,” writes Greg Jericho. “As it is, the latest figures on the housing market suggest any improvement had started before the election result, but we should be pretty wary about getting overly excited – when we talk improvement we really mean ‘less bad’. The latest housing finance figures, released on Friday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, show that the value of housing finance commitments in April was 19% below what they were a year earlier.”

Sport

Goals were hard to come by in the women’s World Cup overnight, with Japan and Argentina playing out a 0-0 draw, and Canada edging past Cameroon 1-0.

Sebastian Vettel knew what he was doing when he incurred the penalty that cost him first place at Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton has said. Hamilton won after the stewards penalised the German by adding five seconds to his time.

Thinking time: “People keep asking if you have closure”

Emily and Mark Longley. Emily was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 2011. Mark, a journalist, discusses coping with the grief in his new podcast

When Mark Longley’s daughter Emily was 17, she was strangled by her ex-boyfriend. No one around him knew what to do or say. “I was in a weird paradox where I felt isolated and I wanted human contact, but people didn’t know how to talk to me,” the New Zealander says. “The journalist in me thought this was interesting and I wanted to examine it.” The decade Longley has spent grappling with grief has found its way into a podcast, which he hopes will function as a how-to guide for anyone struggling with the death of a loved one – or struggling to talk to someone in mourning. He spoke to Eleanor Ainge-Roy about Emily, grief, domestic violence and the false promise of closure – which he calls “a load of rubbish”.

“Death is the atom bomb [for] emotions; if your internal wounds were visible you’d be rushed to hospital and you’d be in intensive care,” says Longley. “We don’t talk about death; there’s no duck, cover and hold routine. We know what to do in an earthquake but we don’t know what to say or do if someone dies. We are kind of awkward about it. It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch.” Although Emily was killed in the UK, Longley’s research into domestic violence has centred on his home of New Zealand, which has one of the worst rates of intimate partner violence in the OECD.

Media roundup

Top of the Sydney Morning Herald this morning is the $850m cost in revenue forgone of the Berejiklian government’s housing package, which aims to help first-home buyers enter the market. The ABC reports that “a perfect storm is brewing” in Sydney’s rental market. And the Australian says Green activists are killing tourism on the reef by spreading perceptions of its decline due to climate change.

Coming up

A rally will be held outside the electorate office of the communications minister, Paul Fletcher, to protest against last week’s AFP raids on media organisations.

The Queensland budget is tabled in state parliament today.

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