Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 4 September.

Top stories

British MPs have voted to allow a bill to prevent a no-deal Brexit on 31 October by 328 to 301, after Conservative MPs rebelled against their own party. Boris Johnson threatened to force an early election after losing the vote. During the debate MPs reacted furiously to a speech from the leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said the move to prevent no deal was nothing but “legislative legerdemain” and then ostentatiously lay down and closed his eyes on the Commons benches. Earlier Johnson watched his one-vote Commons majority vanish before his eyes thanks to the defection of the Conservative MP Phillip Lee to the Liberal Democrats. Follow our live blog for all the reaction to the vote.

Australians have largely tuned out of federal politics, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll, which suggests only 15% are following events in Canberra closely. A further 15% of the sample professed no interest in politics at all, with the rest casual consumers of national affairs. The fortnightly survey of 1,075 respondents found that 38% monitored political events sufficiently to know what’s afoot, 23% said they tuned in when something big was happening, and 8% engaged only during elections. The general disengagement is consistent with a range of other surveys that suggest Australians are disillusioned with politics after a decade of leadership infighting and hyper-partisan battles over important policy issues, including climate change.

A council in South Australia has vowed to crack down on the “nuisance behaviour” of local cats, passing regulations to limit the number of felines per property and forcing owners to keep their pets inside at night. Residents of Mount Barker in Adelaide are the latest in the state to face penalties if their cats are found roaming the streets at night, after several other councils passed tough regulations. There will be penalties for cats caught outside curfew hours, and potentially covert surveillance of suspected nuisance cats. The mayor, Ann Ferguson, said: “We had a lengthy consultation over a month and received over 500 responses, so it was obvious that people are quite passionate about cats roaming the streets.”

World

Cars sit submerged in water from Hurricane Dorian in Freeport, the Bahamas. Photograph: Ramón Espinosa/AP

Hurricane Dorian continues to pummel the northern Bahamas, as the south-eastern US braces for its turn. Footage from the Caribbean islands show terrifying scenes as residents tried to escape the huge storm surge.

Britain, the US and France may be complicit in war crimes in Yemen, by arming and providing support to a Saudi-led coalition that starves civilians as a war tactic, a UN report has said.

Walmart has announced it will discontinue the sale of handgun ammunition, and will ask customers not to carry firearms openly in stores.



Top US envoys to Afghanistan have condemned the US approach to negotiating a troop withdrawal, warning it risked a return to “total civil war”.

Members of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement have overwhelmingly backed a coalition with the centre-left Democratic party in an online vote, giving the final backing to a deal between traditional foes intended to pull Italy out of a political crisis.

Opinion and analysis

Coral gardens on the Great Barrier Reef. Photograph: Roger Grace/Greenpeace

There will always be people who call for an additional review of science when the results of a rigorous process don’t yield the outcomes they want. A case in point is the scientific consensus statement on the Great Barrier Reef, writes the former Australian chief scientist Ian Chubb: “There is a small handful of scientists who have argued that the overwhelming majority are wrong, notwithstanding that the most prominent concedes that he is ‘not the authority on the issue’. If there is evidence that leads to an alternative conclusion, it should be put into the public domain and be subjected to the same scrutiny as the work critiqued in the consensus statement. There has been plenty of time for the work to be done. This is no time for hunches; it is time for evidence.”

Boris Johnson’s actions on Brexit are best explained by his “congenital aversion to things that are hard”, writes Rafael Behr. “He wants a deal but not the effort of getting a deal. He is lying to the public when he blames the opposition or Brussels for his predicament – but lying also, one suspects, to himself. A man who spent years in estrangement from the truth is unlikely to seek its company now … He wins applause by making Brexit sound easy, and the credulous ovation sustains him in refusal to consider the prospect that he is wrong.” But if Britain is taken in, the EU is not. “They are just waiting for the inevitable moment when the pantomime must end, and British politics emerges blinking into the cold daylight of a true-life Brexit.”

Sport

Elina Svitolina of Ukraine celebrates after beating Johanna Konta. Photograph: Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports

Ukrainian Elina Svitolina has won her US Open quarter-final 6-4, 6-4 against the UK’s Johanna Konta. Unforced errors cost Konta a second slam semi-final place this year.

“Come Thursday night it will have been 5,479 days since Essendon won a final – the best part of 15 years. If you want to catch it on your iPhone, open YouTube, search ‘AFL 2004 elimination final’ and note that neither of these things existed at that time,” writes Craig Little.

Thinking time: ‘The cruelty is the point’

Priya, Nades and daughters Tharnicaa and Topika have been sent to Christmas Island as the Australian government moves to deport them to Sri Lanka. Photograph: hometobilo.com

“On a personal level I couldn’t understand why – after so much documenting of how horrific that split had been in the predawn raid – I thought surely they wouldn’t do this again. Surely they’ll do this in a way that’s not traumatic. But the department dialled it right back up again. I find that completely impossible to metabolise.” Over the past year, the freelance journalist Rebekah Holt has regularly visited two families in Melbourne immigration detention, writes Helen Davidson. This week one of those families – Priya and Nades, and their two daughters, Tharnicaa and Topika – have been the focus of an extraordinary amount of community grief, anger, and support, after the Australian government attempted to deport them to Sri Lanka.

At 7.43pm last Thursday, Holt received a video call. “All I could see was them surrounded by guards, and a guard reading out the deportation notice,” she says. “I was watching for 20 or 30 seconds and we were cut off, and that’s when I rang [the family’s lawyer] Carina Ford and told her it was happening, but she hadn’t been given any of the paperwork, hadn’t been told it was happening.” Other asylum seekers called Holt and told her they couldn’t get to see the family. Separated into different vans, Priya and Nades each called Holt to tell her where they were, as they were driven to a waiting plane.

Media roundup

The Tamil asylum case sets the path for 6,000 others, the Australian claims. The Sydney Morning Herald reveals that two NSW Liberal MPs have threatened to defect to the crossbench, a move that would push the Coalition into minority government, if certain amendments are not made to the abortion bill. Trade surplus to the rescue is the Australian Financial Review’s take on the economy, as concerns over growth are partly relieved by an export surge.

Coming up

A federal court hearing in Melbourne over the deportation of the Biloela Tamil asylum seeker family starts at 9.30am.

Australia’s GDP figures will be released at 11.30am, and are expected to point to a weakening economy. Follow the numbers, as well as reaction and expert analysis, on our live blog.

Steve Smith returns for Australia as the crucial fourth Test against England gets under way at Old Trafford, with the series tied 1-1. Follow our live blog from 7pm AEST for an 8pm start (weather permitting in Manchester).