Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 21 February.

Top stories

The Labor senator and Yawuru man Pat Dodson has accused Malcolm Turnbull of throwing out a bipartisan approach to Indigenous constitutional recognition by refusing to consider an Indigenous voice to parliament. Dodson was speaking in response to a poll that found a majority of of Australians support an Indigenous voice model, which would establish a constitutionally enshrined representative body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to advise parliament on issues affecting Indigenous people. Dodson said the poll was “encouraging”. “Unless the voice of the Australian people can penetrate this government’s ideological opposition to a voice, we are doomed to continue to deal with the First Nations people in this unjust manner,” he said.

Last week Turnbull repeated his rejection of the Indigenous voice model, saying the idea was “inconsistent with a fundamental principle of our democracy, which is that all of our national representative institutions are open to every Australian”. Dodson said Turnbull’s comments showed “sloppy thinking about race”. “First Nations people are not asking for some kind of special treatment,” Dodson said. “We are sovereign peoples and what we are asking for is that parliament do the honourable and just thing.”

Almost 200 civilians have been killed in dozens of airstrikes and shelling by forces loyal to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad over two days of “hysterical violence” which has led to warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe that could eclipse past atrocities in the seven-year war. Amnesty International said “flagrant war crimes” were being committed in eastern Ghouta on an “epic scale”. The surge in the killing came amid reports of an impending regime incursion into the area outside Damascus. “We are standing before the massacre of the 21st century,” a doctor in eastern Ghouta said.

“The Quadrilateral” is back – and it will be on the agenda when Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump meet in Washington. The four-nation security dialogue, also nicknamed “the Quad”, comprises the US, Australia, Japan, and India and is seen as a security counterweight to the growing influence of China in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad was formed in 2007 but Australia withdrew the following year, fearing the opprobrium of Beijing. But it has been revived in the face of continued Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea.

Prosecutors investigating possible collusion between the Trump election campaign and the Kremlin scored another victory on Tuesday after a lawyer who previously worked with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, was charged with lying to the FBI. Alex van der Zwaan – who is reportedly married to the daughter of a Russian-Ukrainian oligarch – is accused of making false statements to special counsel regarding work he did in Ukraine. The indictment against someone not known to be connected to the president shows the investigation’s wide-ranging nature.

The Australasian College of Physicians has apologised to 1,200 Australian and New Zealand trainee doctors and admitted it had no real backup plan to deal with a “technical glitch” that affected an online test on Monday. All those who sat the test have been told they will have to resit it next month, on paper – whether or not their online test was affected. The basic training written exam costs doctors more than $1,800 to sit, and most study for 18 months. The college told the students in the lead-up to the exam – the first to be held online – that it had contingencies in place. But according to its president, Catherine Yelland, the extent of the plan appears to have been the preparation of a paper exam.

Sport

Dramatic crashes, spectacular spills and high-profile injuries – if anything, a week and a half of action in Pyeongchang has proved Winter Olympics events carry with them a high degree of risk. But which sports are the most dangerous?

Facts can be stranger than fiction when it comes to failing drug tests, writes Andy Bull, and athletes are becoming increasingly susceptible to being spiked.

Thinking time

The problems facing Townsville are familiar: the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the decline of the resource-based economies and the curtailing of jobs in the mining sector after the slow-down. And the city hasn’t prepared. “This drift has had political repercussions. In recent elections, the citizens of Townsville have voted in droves for One Nation,” writes Jason Wilson. Whatever metropolitan citizens might think, the problems of Townsville are not unique to regional areas. What can we learn from it about how to deal with the new realities of the economy, politics and the future of work?

The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives curator and archivist Nick Henderson opens the vault to take us through four decades of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in this beautiful photo essay. From the first march in 1978 that consisted of a single flatbed truck and ended in 53 arrests and several bashings, to the float that was actually a tank, Henderson tells the stories behind what is now one of Sydney’s most celebrated events. He takes in the satirical, the outrageous and the groundbreaking in 40 years of pride and protest.

Ellie Marney was 19 when she left the Pentecostal-style Brisbane cult of her childhood and emerged, blinking, into the regular world. “Life outside the community was utterly disorienting, quietly terrifying, and bigger than I had imagined,” the teacher and young adult fiction author recalls. “I was a teenager who had never tried alcohol, had been warned that rock music was of the devil, and who had no real concept of dating that didn’t involve my parents praying over me as I left the house.” But her uncomfortable memories helped give Marney the material she needed for her latest novel, White Night.

What’s he done now?

Donald Trump has had a busy night on Twitter, firing off 10 tweets, many of them defending his supposedly hard line on Russia. “I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts. Total Fake News!” tweeted Trump, going on to blame the previous administration, and suggesting the threat was not taken seriously by Obama, who thought Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for president.

Media roundup

The Mercury reports on the Airbnb boom in Tasmania, revealing the number of properties on the site increased more than 290% since mid-2016. Its popularity has coincided with a housing crisis and soaring rents. And the ABC reports on increased pressure on Papua New Guinea to reconsider its contracts with Catholic church-run health centres, some of whom stand accused of failing to meet family planning obligations and services.



Coming up

Malcolm Turnbull will arrive in Washington DC where he is expected to meet with the US president, Donald Trump, and discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership and North Korea’s threat to global security.

A state funeral will be held for the former Wallaby captain and Sydney lord mayor Sir Nicholas Shehadie.

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