Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 12 October.

Top stories

High drama has hit the international space programme. Two astronauts aborted a mission to the space station only minutes after blast off. American Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin from Russia were aboard a Soyuz rocket when it developed a thruster problem forcing them to make an emergency landing in their capsule 250km from the launch site in Kazakhstan.

Video footage beamed live showed the astronauts being shaken around as they blasted free of the rocket. The emergency abort sent them plummeting towards the ground in what is known as a “ballistic landing”. Both are safe. Rocket launches have been suspended and an investigation is under way into what happened.

The Morrison government is on track for its first major legislative win, with the bulk of the crossbench supportive of its plan to accelerate further tax cuts for small and medium businesses. After admitting defeat on its company tax cut plan for businesses earning more than $50m, the Coalition returned with a new plan to accelerate its planned tax cuts for businesses earning under that threshold. Labor has said it will consider the proposal, set to cost $3.2bn over the next four years. But even without Labor’s support, the government looks to have enough backing from the crossbench. The Centre Alliance, Derryn Hinch, David Leyonhjelm, Brian Burston and Cory Bernardi have all agreed, while One Nation, Fraser Anning and Tim Storer are considering the plan.

Hurricane Michael has caused “unimaginable devastation” as the storm hits the Carolinas after tearing a trail of carnage through Florida and Georgia. Daylight showed the damage caused by the hurricane, which inundated coastal towns with a storm surge of up to 4m from the Gulf of Mexico. Two people have been killed. Downgraded to a tropical storm, the cyclone that struck Florida’s Panhandle as a category 4 monster on Wednesday, with winds of 250mkm/h, was dumping large quantities of rain on areas of South and North Carolina. Residential waterfront communities have been obliterated. Street after street of houses and other buildings were ripped apart in Panama City, boats and warehouses in marinas were smashed into pieces, roofs were ripped from multiple structures in several other communities. “It looks like an atomic bomb had hit our city,” resident David Barnes told the Panama City News Herald.

Remote Indigenous communities face an “intergenerational timebomb”, warn researchers, after finding that almost 6,000 mostly young people have disappeared from the remote work-for-the-dole scheme, and may be receiving no income support at all. The Community Development Program has seen a dramatic drop in participants that cannot be accounted for “by job placements or movement between regions”, according to Lisa Fowkes from the Australian National University’s centre for Aboriginal economic policy research.

A legal bid has been launched to delay land-clearing over risk to Great Barrier Reef. Kingvale station has become the latest battleground between environmental groups seeking to protect the reef, and those who see development as essential for Cape York. But federal government approval to clear more than 2,000 hectares of Queensland native forest in the catchment for the reef could potentially be held up for months after the Environmental Defender’s Office launched court action to prevent it. The court action, if successful, could force the government to undertake a more comprehensive process including seeking public submissions.

Prosecutors have decided to drop part of the criminal case against Harvey Weinstein. The Manhattan district attorney’s decision was announced in court on Thursday with Weinstein looking on. The thrown-out charge involves allegations made by one of the three accusers in the case, Lucia Evans, who was among the first women to publicly accuse Weinstein of sexual assault. In a statement, a lawyer for Evans said she was disappointed by the DA’s decision to “abandon” her. “Let me be clear: the decision to throw away my client’s sexual assault charges says nothing about Weinstein’s guilt or innocence. Nor does it reflect on Lucia’s consistent allegation that she was sexually assaulted with force by Harvey Weinstein,” said attorney Carrie Goldberg.

Sport

Australia have clung on at the death to deny Pakistan victory in the first Test. There’s no way to play down how extraordinary Usman Khawaja’s achievement was in Dubai after he batted nearly all day in Dubai for 141, writes Geoff Lemon.

Training with the world’s best marathon runner. In August of 2017 Matt Fox spent a month in the village of Kaptagat in Kenya training with the greatest marathon runner the world has ever seen – world record holder Eliud Kipchoge. For Fox, a man fascinated by the training methods of top runners, there were lessons to be learned. That they “drink quite a lot of tea” was among the most surprising.

Thinking time

Same-sex mouse mums have healthy babies for the first time. The findings show barriers to same-sex reproduction in humans can technically be overcome – but not yet. To produce the babies, scientists modified embryonic stem cells from one female mouse before injecting the cells into the unfertilised eggs of a second female mouse. The genetic materials from the two female mice combined to form embryos. The 29 live mice born from 210 embryos were normal, lived to adulthood and had babies of their own. Mouse babies are called “pups”.

Author Chloe Hooper remembers the Black Saturday bushfires nearly 10 years ago, when she was at her partner’s bush block in Woodend, central Victoria. “The day felt apocalyptic,” she says. “There was something like 400 fires around the state. If the wind had blown differently, we would have been in trouble.” Hooper’s latest book – a thriller-like work of non-fiction called The Arsonist – focuses on two of those fires and the man charged with lighting them.

“Like a lot of idiots with nothing better to do, I enjoy playing video games,” writes Eleanor Robertson. “But I’m not good at playing them.” She turns to Google for solutions when she gets stuck. “If the game is popular or a couple of years old, there have invariably been people trying to get out of the same tricky spot. The other invariable part is that one person, and often many, will reply to the asker, ‘Just get good!!! Git gud!!!’,” she writes. “I find this response baffling. I don’t want to “git gud” at video games. I play games for purely escapist reasons, and part of what I’m trying to escape is the relentless pressure to improve myself.”

What’s he done now?

When Donald met Kanye. In what has been described as the ‘“craziest oval office performance of all time”, Trump has met the rapper Kanye West in the White House to talk about the criminal justice and prison reform among other issues.

Meanwhile spare a thought for Melania, who says she might be “the most bullied person in the world”, and Anthony Scaramucci has written another book, in which he describes Donald Trump as having “an intellect that is uniquely suited to the presidency.”

Media roundup



The Herald Sun, Australian Financial Review, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are leading with yesterday’s $50bn stock market dive. The Fairfax papers also reporting on the MSF’s report on how the mental health of Nauru refugees has deteriorated “to an absolutely devastating state” amid Trump’s extreme vetting knockbacks. According to The Australian, Bill Shorten is planning to shake up bank superannuation.

Coming up

ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott is expected to tell MPs at a parliamentary hearing what steps his bank has taken to fix problems identified by the royal commission.

Usain Bolt will play a trial match for Central Coast Mariners against MacArthur South West at Campbelltown Stadium this evening.

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