Good morning, this is Richard Parkin bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Thursday 5 September.

Top stories

Boris Johnson has lost a vote calling for a general election on 15 October after MPs passed a bill aiming to prevent a no-deal Brexit. Slamming parliamentarians after the no-deal Brexit vote, including 22 Tory rebels, for “a great dereliction of their duty” the British prime minister said the bill proposed by Labour’s Hilary Benn “hands control to our partners”. Soon after, the government suffered another big loss with the Commons rejecting the motion to hold a general election – while moves to definitely block a no-deal Brexit still have to go before the House of Lords. Elsewhere, retailers have warned of potential fresh food shortages before Christmas and possible price rises if there’s a no-deal Brexit. And more than 100,000 people have rushed to register to vote – a large majority aged 18 to 34 – after a tumultuous 48 hours in British politics.

Fears over the health and safety of a Sri Lankan family detained on Christmas Island continue, with the mother, Priya, telling Guardian Australia the family is “distressed and worried” and that their youngest daughter, two-year-old Tharunicaa, is not eating properly. Subject to a court injunction preventing the Australian government from sending the family back to Sri Lanka, the shadow home affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, accused Peter Dutton of only moving them offshore “to get them out of sight of a sympathetic Australian public”. Priya also holds concerns for her older daughter, Kopika, whom she reports is “scared”. “I am asking to both of the ministers kindly and safely please let us go back to Biloela, and please give safety and peaceful life to my daughters.”

Labor is seeking to pressure the government over its “flirtation” with nuclear energy by releasing parliamentary library research naming 150 reactor or dump sites across Australia proposed over the past 50 years. “Instead of indulging the policy fantasies of his restive backbench, Mr Morrison should reject the nuclear option or be upfront with Australians about exactly where he wants to build nuclear reactors,” said Labor’s shadow energy minister, Mark Butler. Labor MPs are expected to follow up the release of the information with localised campaigns highlighting the potential threat of nuclear facilities in the listed locations, with almost all proposed sites understood to be near residential communities.

World

Students attend a school boycott rally at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. Photograph: Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images

Hong Kong’s government will withdraw the controversial bill that sparked months of unrest, with its leader, Carrie Lam, announcing that the decision, one of five key demands from demonstrators, had been issued to “fully allay public concerns”.

Hurricane Dorian could cost “up to billions”, with the Bahamas deputy prime minister reporting that approximately 70% of homes on the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahamas are underwater.

Five civilians have died in Kashmir one month since India revoked the region’s special status. It’s unclear how the people died, with officials denying reports one woman died owing to teargas inhalation.

Australia could be complicit in war crimes in Yemen, a UN report has claimed, owing to its material support to a Saudi-led coalition accused of starving civilians, bombing hospitals and blocking humanitarian aid.

Welcome to the plastic age. That’s the finding of scientists whose documentation of the exponential rise of plastic pollution is, like the bronze and iron ages, now epoch-defining.

Opinion and analysis

‘I’m talking to you. My pushy, aggressive, attention-seeking period. The very same period that has no sense of timing or mercy.’ Photograph: Richard Johnson/Getty Images/iStockphoto

“I am standing in a draughty, picturesque church on an icy Saturday in December, wearing four-inch glittery heels and silently cursing you as you churn up my insides without a thought for the occasion,” writes Emma Barnett. “Yeah, I’m talking to you. My pushy, aggressive, attention-seeking period. I thought it high time I addressed you directly, seeing as we’ve known each other intimately for 24 years, which, bar my parents and three long-suffering schoolmates from Manchester, makes you my longest relationship. And yet the dialogue has been mainly one way. You wreak havoc with my bowels, skin, mood and energy levels. The expulsion of all is real, month in, month out.”

Last week an Oklahoma judge fined the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson US$572m for igniting the state’s opioid crisis. Its targeting of reluctant and “the least knowledgeable” physicians rang particularly true, writes Ranjana Srivastava: “I was once flown to an overseas conference. There, I was allocated a pharmaceutical representative to ensure my comfort. The height of this came when I bought a bowl of soup and the representative insisted on paying the $10 bill. I was bemused, perhaps even flattered, that a doctor who knew so little mattered so much. As I slurped my soup, the representative benignly talked about his product. Did it make me prescribe that product over and above others? I’d like to say no but the evidence is against me.”

Sport

Steve Smith brings up his half-century with an unorthodox stroke. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne have again provided steel to Australia’s lacklustre batting, putting on a 116-run partnership after the openers David Warner and Marcus Harris fell cheaply on day one of the fourth Ashes Test. Play was abandoned owing to poor weather after just 44 overs, with Australia 170-3, with Smith on 60 not out.

Michael Cheika has decided to rest key players, including the captain, Michael Hooper, for the Wallabies’ final match before heading to the World Cup in Japan, rather than pick a full-strength side to avert another upset at the hands of Samoa.

Thinking time: Dreaming of a voice to parliament

The Indigenous band Spinifex Gum performing. Photograph: Fifty Acres

Spinifex Gum’s music is no ordinary choral fare. It is full of the exuberance of youth, underwritten by bass lines that would feel at home on a Beyoncé album. The songs’ subject matter is similarly un-sanitised: tackling issues from deaths in custody to the effect of mining on Indigenous communities. Their self-titled first album was released in 2017; their second, which comes out this year, includes the lead single, Dream Baby Dream – a Bruce Springsteen cover performed in English and Yindjibarndi. Featured on the single alongside the choir are the voices of more than 10,000 Australians who have recorded themselves singing as part of an ongoing online petition by the band calling for a First Nations voice to parliament to be enshrined in the constitution.

It’s a key recommendation of the 2017 Uluru statement from the heart. While Scott Morrison has been dismissive of the recommendation and his Indigenous affairs minister, Ken Wyatt, has been under fire for ruling it out as a referendum question, Spinifex Gum performers, Indigenous groups and leaders around the country believe it to be the pathway to “a better future for everyone”. On 9 September, Spinifex Gum is taking vinyl-pressed recordings of the song to Parliament House in Canberra and will perform their appeal directly to Wyatt and his colleagues.

Media roundup

Australia’s migration intake is the lowest in a decade, reports the Australian, prompting the government to spruik a new plan to address chronic job shortages in regional Australia.And NSW MPs will undergo compulsory “corporate virtue” training, writes the Daily Telegraph, to combat integrity crises as yet another Icac cloud hangs over the state parliament.

Coming up

Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne are due to appear at a Senate inquiry investigating their post-parliamentary careers.

The inquest into the death of the Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day, who died after falling in police cells, continues in Melbourne.

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