Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Thursday 6 June.

Top stories



The brother of the Australian racing legend Winx is one of thousands of exported thoroughbreds killed for meat in Korea under conditions the RSPCA has called “very distressing”, a Guardian Australia investigation has found. Footage filmed secretly at the Nonghyup abattoir in South Korea last year shows horses being repeatedly beaten on the head with lengths of black polyethylene pipe in an attempt to herd them into the facility. That treatment would be in breach both of Australian animal welfare laws and of the requirements imposed on abattoirs that process live export animals if it was part of a formal Australian supply chain, the RSPCA said. In the past five years Australia has exported 158 racehorses to South Korea. But the Australian government says responsibility for the horses is out of its hands.

After two police raids on media outlets in two days, the Greens and Centre Alliance have accused the government of a double standard.The Greens senator Nick McKim accused the government of “leaking sensitive information like a sieve when it suits them” while Centre Alliance’s Rex Patrick said it was “abhorrent” that public interest reports applying scrutiny to officials’ actions were now being investigated. Over the last three years referrals to the police resulted in raids investigating leaks about the national broadband network and Peter Dutton’s ministerial intervention in the case of two foreign au pairs.

NSW Labor will stop accepting political donations from the fossil fuel industry and ban them altogether when it wins government, one of the candidates for the NSW Labor leadership, Chris Minns, has announced. In a pitch designed to burnish his credentials on the climate crisis, Minns is today sending emails to branch members explaining his policy. “We can’t just put it in the too-hard basket,” he writes. “The time to take climate change action is running out.” NSW already has bans on political donations from property developers, tobacco, liquor and gambling industries.

World

Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar greets Donald Trump at Shannon airport. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

Donald Trump has started his visit to Ireland by comparing its post-Brexit border with Northern Ireland to the US border with Mexico, along which he wants to build a permanent wall. “I think it will all work out very well, and also for you with your wall, your border,” he said at a joint press conference. A visibly uncomfortable taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, interjected that Ireland wished to avoid a border or a wall, a keystone of Irish government policy.

A severely ill Dutch girl widely reported by international media as having been “legally euthanised” in a clinic in the Netherlands died at home, apparently after voluntarily refusing to eat or drink and with no evidence that her death was assisted.

Paramilitaries in Khartoum threw dozens of bodies into the Nile to try to hide the number of casualties inflicted during a dawn attack on pro-democracy protesters in the Sudanese capital this week, doctors and activists have said.

Voters looked set to return the third left-leaning government in a year to the Nordic region, after exit polls suggested Denmark’s Social Democrats had secured victory in parliamentary elections with more than 25% of the vote.

Ancient Siberia was home to previously unknown humans, scientists say, with DNA analysis revealing hardy groups genetically distinct from Eurasians and east Asians.

Opinion and analysis

Australian federal police raid ABC’s Sydney headquarters over 2017 investigative stories. Photograph: Bianca Demarchi/EPA

A media freedom act that positively puts the role of the press in the middle of our legal system is the solution to the increasing criminalisation of the legitimate work of journalists, writes Peter Greste in response to two federal police raids on Australian media in two days: “At the moment, there is nothing in Australian law that explicitly protects press freedom in the way that the First Amendment does in the US constitution. Such an act would recognise the fundamental importance of national security and the protection of certain commonwealth activities and the identities of key employees, whilst still providing a basis for journalists to investigate and report on government misconduct.”

In the last year the economy had the slowest growth since 2009, and for the first time in 36 years GDP per capita has gone backwards in three consecutive quarters, writes Greg Jericho. “The big message from the GDP figures is that the biggest lie during the election campaign was not the death tax but that the LNP has managed a strong economy. In reality they have run it into the ground.”

Sport

Samantha Kerr of the Matildas. Photograph: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

On the eve of the Women’s World Cup, the Matildas captain, Sam Kerr, talks exclusively to Richard Parkin about her initial reluctance to embrace the game after growing up in an AFL-dominated environment in Perth, and the challenges of swapping a Sherrin for a round ball. Given her current status as one of the world’s best footballers, it’s perhaps surprising that, by her own admission, she was “total crap” in her first season.

Queensland opened the 2019 State of Origin series with victory at Suncorp Stadium, in a win that will be remembered as much for a multitude of missed opportunities as for their ability to overcome a talent deficit with energy, cohesion and will.

Thinking time: The rise of body-positive swimwear

Diverse beach options from Lyra Swimwear and Youswim

From larger-cup bikinis to modest beachwear, fashion is finally beginning to cater for a range of women’s bodies after decades of limiting choices to itsy bitsy bikinis in one size fits all. “I buy swimwear about once every 10 years,” says Sasha Khan, a London charity worker who wears a size 10/12 and has a 32FF bust. “I always put it off. I hate it. It’s like having to go to the dentist or get your eyes tested.” Stephanie Boland, 28, agrees. “It fits into the narrative, which I think a lot of us have internalised, that your body is wrong for the clothes, rather than the clothes being wrong for your body … it’s depressing to buy things that are supposedly in your size and find they don’t fit at all.”

Now though, in part thanks to the rise of online shopping, retailers are beginning to sharpen up. “If we think about online providers, in effect they have endless aisles, which means that they can store unlimited inventory,” explains Jonathan Reynolds, a retail expert at the University of Oxford. According to market researchers Mintel, 18% of women buy plus-size clothing. Online-only retailers have proved particularly adept in targeting these consumers. And, even for women who are not plus-sized, online shopping takes the sting out of buying swimwear. “What we’re seeing is people purchasing multiple swimsuits online, trying them on in their own home and sending the remainder back,” says Steven Wright, a senior lecturer in fashion design at the University of South Wales.

Media roundup

Experts are divided on whether the “sophisticated operator” behind the data breach at the Australian National University can be attributed to China, the Canberra Times reports. “War on truth” is the headline on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, with a report saying the Scott Morrison government is attempting to distance itself from raids by the AFP on media organisations. And dingos’ diets are widening during drought as food and water become increasingly scare, a report in the ABC says, with the predators hunting and eating larger animals such as cattle.

Coming up

Scott Morrison winds up his trip to the UK before heading for Singapore.

Cardinal George Pell’s appeal continues against his convictions for sexually abusing two boys in the 1990s.