Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 23 July.

Top stories

The New South Wales government funded a $16m education project closely associated with the spouse of a state minister, despite a cost-benefit analysis showing the project would be unlikely to deliver a positive benefit to the state. The Country Universities Centres project was proposed by Duncan Taylor, husband of the upper house Nationals MP Bronwyn Taylor, who at the time was parliamentary secretary to John Barilaro, the state Nationals leader and deputy premier. Bronwyn Taylor has said she played no role in securing the state funding for her husband’s project.

A prominent French journalist arrested and charged while covering a protest against Adani’s Carmichael coalmine says he’s surprised and disappointed at his treatment, while Australia’s media union has called for the charges to be dropped. On Monday reporter Hugo Clément and three of his crew members were filming a protest near the Abbot Point terminal when they were were arrested by Queensland police. The four have been charged with trespass. “For me Australia was a very big democratic country with big press freedom so to do my job here in Australia I didn’t think it would be a problem,” Clément said. “I’m very surprised and maybe disappointed too because I didn’t think it was like that here, but in fact it is.”

More than 20,000 tonnes of glass, paper and plastic was dumped in Victorian landfill while the beleaguered waste company SKM Recycling was banned from accepting kerbside rubbish due to health and safety concerns. Councils and environmentalists fear that figure could compound into hundreds of thousands of tonnes if the company is declared insolvent when taken to court this week or just stops operating, as its founder has threatened. SKM processes half of the recyclable rubbish collected from kerbside bins across the state.

World

Thugs in white shirts armed with metal rods and wooden poles attack commuters at a subway station in New Territory in Hong Kong. Photograph: AP

Pro-democracy activists and lawmakers in Hong Kong have accused the police of impotence, as men dressed in white attacked commuters and protesters, leaving 45 people in hospital, including one who is critically injured.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police have said there is “nothing to indicate” that the disappearance of two teenagers and discovery of a body on a remote highway is linked to the murders of Australian Lucas Fowler and his girlfriend Chynna Deese.

The British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has proposed a European-led maritime protection force in the Gulf, following comments by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, that the UK must be responsible for the safety of its own ships in the Gulf.

Scientists have found tantalising clues that motor neurone disease may be linked to changes in microbes that live in the gut. Studies in mice revealed that animals bred to develop a form of the disease lived longer when they were given an organism called Akkermansia muciniphila.

Donald Trump has announced that he could win the Afghanistan war “in a week”, but did not want to wipe the country “off the face of the Earth” and kill 10 million people.

Opinion and analysis

Cupid with a smartphone. Composite: Alamy

A new study has found that online dating is now the dominant way heterosexual people find romantic partners. The latest How Couples Meet and Stay Together study by Stanford University found that 39% of heterosexual couples met through online dating or apps, up from 22% in 2009, when the study was last conducted. Life has been disrupted by technology, and so has dating. What else can we learn about how romance has changed? “My parents met at a dance, and that doesn’t strike me as epically romantic,” says Roisin Ryan-Flood, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex, who is writing a book about online dating. “I don’t think apps are any better or worse than any other way. What really counts is meeting someone with whom you feel a connection.”

A lower underemployment rate is good news. But there’s no reason to get too excited, writes Greg Jericho. “The big statistical drop in underemployment in June could be a sign of a corner being turned and that things are about to improve, but this is a small hope as a more realistic view of the figures is that it was just a statistical flub in one state.”

Sport

Mack Horton (left) stands away from the podium as Chinese swimmer Sun Yang receives his gold medal for winning the men’s 400m freestyle final on Sunday. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Swimming Australia and Mack Horton will both receive an official warning from the sport’s world governing body, Fina, after the Olympic champion sensationally protested against controversial Chinese star Sun Yang’s 400m freestyle win at the world swimming titles.

We analyse the six main contenders for the Tour de France as they prepare for the final stages. Egan Bernal has been a model of consistency in the mountains and should become Colombia’s first Tour winner, while France’s charismatic and swashbuckling Julian Alaphilippe will be toppled, probably, on the first of three brutal Alpine stages.

Thinking time: an ‘epidemic of damaging parenting’

Australian author and educator John Marsden. Photograph: Chris Le Messurier

John Marsden has spent decades writing about, teaching and founding schools for young people – and lately, he has been getting worried. Really worried. In his new book about how we treat and understand children, Marsden – the author best known for his Tomorrow, When The World Began series for young adults – is in no mood for niceties about contemporary parenting. “We are seeing an epidemic of damaging parenting at the moment,” he writes.

“I think this is a widespread problem,” Marsden tells Guardian Australia. “Damaging parenting” is not equivalent to emotional abuse, but rather represents an “ill-conceived and misguided” approach that is doing significant emotional damage, he says. In the past five years, he says he has found it more difficult to run a school (he is principal and founder of two). And The Art of Growing Up does, at times, read much like the work of a principal who is fed up. Marsden says that this contemporary crop of teenagers is outperforming generations past in terms of academic achievement and political engagement, but he is fearful about their emotional health, borne out by statistics on the prevalence of mental health issues among the young. “The scale of the problem is massive. The issue of emotional damage is pandemic,” he says. “The level of anxiety is something I’ve never seen before, and I don’t know how it can be improved.”

Media roundup

The Australian reports that border patrol forces have intercepted a boat of asylum seekers heading for Australia, with around 20 Sri Lankans being taken to Christmas Island for processing. The Daily Telegraph reports on the previous criminal history of the woman accused of decapitating her mother in western Sydney. And the Courier-Mail says Queensland is getting serious about bidding for the 2032 Olympics, as premier Annastacia Palaszczuk leads a taskforce to investigate the cost, promising it could be “the best thing that ever happened to Queensland”.



Coming up

The UK Conservative party is expected to announce the winner of the leadership race between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt this evening.

Amber Paige Holt will be sentenced for assault after she tried to egg prime minister Scott Morrison during an election campaign event in Albury.