Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Thursday 15 February.

Top stories

The mining union has weighed into the debate on Labor’s stance towards the Adani coalmine, saying there is no need for the party to take a hard line on the Queensland development just to make sure it wins the Batman byelection. The boss of the CFMEU, Tony Maher, told Guardian Australia that Labor was backing itself into a position where it would have to oppose all future coal projects.

“Why win Batman and lose in central Queensland,” he said. “The environment groups have worked themselves up into a passion about it. I don’t know why. Adani is just another project, and it should be judged on its merits.” Adani is a hot-button issue in the inner Melbourne seat, which Labor narrowly held from the Greens at the 2016 federal election.

Voters in Barnaby Joyce’s New England electorate are unmoved by the problems of his private life and want him to carry on as their “down to earth” MP. That’s the verdict from interviews carried out by our reporter Michael McGowan, who has visited the main towns of Armidale and Tamworth to gauge opinion. But it’s not a universal free pass for the deputy prime minister: as one constituent says he has shown “bad personal judgment. That makes me question him.” Here is our latest wrap of where we are with all this.

The international aid group Médecins Sans Frontières acted on 24 cases of sexual harassment or abuse last year and fired 19 employees, it has revealed, as Oxfam faces questions over its handling of such behaviour. The Paris-based group said it had received 146 complaints or alerts last year. The UK’s international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt, is to meet investigators from the National Crime Agency to discuss the Oxfam sexual misconduct scandal. “While investigations have to be completed and any potential criminals prosecuted accordingly, what is clear is that the culture that allowed this to happen needs to change and it needs to change now,” she said.

Marine scientists are lobbying the federal government to ensure protection for Australia’s most endangered – but least known – ocean ecosystem. Shellfish reefs, formed by millions of oysters or mussels clustering together in or near the mouths of estuaries, have declined by up 99% since British colonisation. But they are not formally recognised as a threatened ecosystem under Australian environmental law.

The US actor Lena Dunham has revealed she has undergone a total hysterectomy in an attempt to end years of chronic pain caused by endometriosis. Dunham, the star and creator of the HBO comedy series Girls, said she has long wanted children but the pain had became unbearable. “With pain like this, I will never be able to be anyone’s mother. Even if I could get pregnant, there’s nothing I can offer.” In November, Dunham checked into hospital and said she would not leave until doctors stopped the pain or gave her a hysterectomy: “I gave up on more treatment. I gave up on more pain. I gave up on more uncertainty.”

Sport

The US vice-president Mike Pence’s very presence in Pyeongchang is having a debilitating effect on everyone and everything enduring his contact, writes Marina Hyde. Does he deserve a gold medal for killing the joy of sport? The US snowboarding hero Shaun White won a third Olympic Gold but his elusive and oblique response to past sexual harassment allegations isn’t flying in the age of #MeToo, writes Bryan Armen Graham.

Our resident cartoonist David Squires tackles the AFL’s plan to reach a global audience.

Thinking time

The latest classic Australian film to get a TV reboot is Picnic at Hanging Rock, whose first episode screened to press on Wednesday before it heads to Berlin film festival next week. According to Guardian Australia’s critic Luke Buckmaster, the six-part series – starring Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer – appears to belong to the upper crust of the nostalgia-tapping trend: strikingly vivid and stylistically contemporary (“Hot damn, the show looks amazing,”), with nods to the current cultural moment.

Damien Echols, one of the “West Memphis three” freed after being wrongly convicted of a triple child murder, found love against all odds with Lorris Davis – but now their freedom has brought new challenges. With Echols suffering severe PTSD after years of abuse at the hands of prison guards, the couple are slowly piecing their new life in New York City together – but it is not what they envisaged through two decades of love letters.

Labor’s energy spending spree has electrified the South Australian election, writes Royce Kurmelovs. In fact, it may be the most popular thing an unpopular government has done. After coughing up for the giant Tesla battery last year to help prevent blackouts, during the campaign Labor has promised to install free solar panels and Tesla batteries in 50,000 homes, earmarked $8.7m in funding for pumped-hydro storage and announced a new solar farm and another big battery.

What’s he done now?

Donald’s Trump’s alleged affair with pornography actor Stormy Daniels was one of the first speed bumps faced by his presidential campaign. Now his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, says he paid Daniels $130,000 out of his own pocket in a “private transaction” that had no link to Trump or the campaign.

Media roundup

The Fairfax newspapers splash with Barnaby Joyce’s “secret” salary, revealing that grassroots Nationals members footed the bill for Joyce’s salary for six-weeks after he was thrown out of parliament over his citizenship status and lost his $416,000-a-year income. The former police officer Rick Flori has walked free from a Brisbane court, the Courier-Mail reports, six years after leaking a video of four police officers bashing a handcuffed suspect in the basement of a police station. Flori left a USB taped to the back of a street sign for a journalist. And the ABC reports that more than 500 children have suffered serious injuries in the past five years from indoor trampolines, including spinal cord damage, fractures and sprains.



Coming up

It is the last day of the parliamentary sitting for 10 days. The circus returns on 26 February.

A Holocaust and human rights exhibition opens at Sydney Jewish Museum.

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