Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 3 May.

Top stories

Tony Abbott has appeared to countenance reopening the Australian car industry – an industry he effectively shut down while prime minister by ending subsidies – in a robust debate with his rival, the independent candidate Zali Steggall. The pair clashed over climate change and policies to address it. Steggall, who is attempting to wrest Warringah from Abbott, its member for 25 years, said Australia risked being left behind in the global transition to electric vehicles. Abbott replied: “We could create our own cars.” Today school students who want action on climate change will target Abbott’s office in Warringah and Josh Frydenberg’s in Kooyong where the two Liberals face tough re-election fights. After staging two national days of protest in the past six months, the school strike movement is turning its attention to key seats in the 18 May election.

A Tamil mother who was taken with her family from their home in Queensland and put in immigration detention in Melbourne has accused the government of failing to give proper medical care to her youngest daughter. In response, the Victorian children’s commissioner, Liana Buchanan, has increased her calls for the federal government to urgently provide access to detention centres. Tharnicaa is almost two and she has suffered serious dental problems, culminating in an infection last week. Her family and doctor said it was 10 months before she was taken to hospital, and detention staff were still inconsistent and late with giving her medication. “Australia is a really well-resourced, supposedly civilised country and it’s appalling to think we may be harming children because of the conditions in which they’re being detained, and particularly through a failure to give them medical treatment,” Buchanan said. “It’s hard to fathom.”

Almost half of Australians believe immigration should be reduced but more people are broadly positive than negative towards the largest cohorts of migrants, including skilled workers and refugees, according to a new global survey shared exclusively with the Guardian. The poll of more than 25,000 people in 23 countries found that in Australia the strongest negativity was reserved for descriptions of migrants such as “people coming here to claim benefits” – categories which don’t exist under Australia’s immigration program.

It’s been a critical and commercial success. Now Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe has picked up the book of the year and three other awards at the Australian Book Industry awards overnight. The detained journalist and Kurdish Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani and the author Bri Lee also won major awards.

World

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pro- and anti-Brexit protests in Parliament Square, London. Photograph: Imageplotter/Rex/Shutterstock

British people are more persuaded of the benefits of immigration than any other major European nation, according to a global survey, which has also found that almost half of Britons think immigrants are either positive or neutral for the country.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has said the US attorney general, William Barr, committed a “crime” when he told lawmakers at a congressional hearing that he was unaware that the special counsel Robert Mueller was unhappy with his portrayal of the findings from the investigation into Russian meddling.

Nicolás Maduro has thanked Venezuela’s military for resisting what he branded a treacherous “imperial” plot to topple him this week, by sparking a conflict that would justify foreign military intervention.

The head of a leading drug manufacturer has been found guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe a dangerous painkiller to patients who did not need it, in the first criminal conviction of a pharma chief over the opioid epidemic.

Facebook has banned several prominent accounts promoting white nationalism on the platform, including the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the neo-Nazi sympathiser Milo Yiannopoulos and the anti-Muslim figurehead Laura Loomer.

A beluga whale that may – or may not – have been trained to spy for Russia appears to have defected to Norway, refusing to stray more than a few miles from the small northern harbour where it was found on Monday and entertaining locals with tricks.

Opinion and analysis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicholas Hoult in Tolkien. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures

JRR Tolkien’s family have disavowed the forthcoming biopic about the author’s life starring Nicholas Hoult but they are far from the only clan disenchanted with films about their loved ones. The Guardian ranks biopics trashed by friends, family and fans – including Oscar winners such as The Social Network and The Blind Side, feel-good favourites including Patch Adams, and some that were a cringe-fest from start to end, namely Diana.

Mice woke columnist Brigid Delaney up by running through her hair – and she’s never been the same since. “The thought of killing, particularly poisoning, an animal seems incredibly cruel. But rodents are ‘othered’ in a way that say, birds or possums are not.” So the pest control man comes to set baits for the mice. “Although he is probably not much older than 19 or 20, the presence of mice (or a mouse) in the house, has an infantilising effect on me. I ask him, in what I fear may be a little girl’s voice, to tell me a story about what happens to the mice.”

Sport

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Super Netball match between the Giants and the Swifts. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

Rather than denigrating their “rival” competitions, Super Netball teams are increasingly looking to other sports to see how they can work together in mutually beneficial ways. The two Sydney teams, the Giants and Swifts, are cases in point.

Our resident football cartoonist turns his eye – and hand – to this weekend’s A-League elimination finals, a series that cannot come soon enough after a rather pedestrian regular season.

Thinking time: Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest President Trump. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Outsiders and the disenfranchised have always embraced the existence of wild plots and cover-ups. But now the biggest conspiracy mongers are in charge. In January 2015, the writer Anna Merlan spent the longest, queasiest week of her life on board a cruise ship full of conspiracy theorists: “It was mostly fascinating, occasionally exasperating and the cause of a headache that took months to fade. To my pleasant surprise, given that I was a reporter travelling among a group of deeply suspicious people, I was accused of working for the CIA only once.” Soon after, the US elected a conspiracy enthusiast as its president, a man who wrongly believes that vaccines cause autism, that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese “to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” as he tweeted in 2012, and who claimed, for attention and political gain, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

Could Merlan have foreseen Trump’s rise, if she’d taken her fellow cruise ship passengers seriously? “Many of the hardcore conspiracy theorists I sailed with on the Conspira-Sea Cruise weren’t very engaged in politics, given that they believe it’s a fake system … They recognised the future president as a ‘truth teller’ in a style that spoke to them and many other Americans. They liked his thoughts about a rigged system and a government working against them, the way it spoke to what they had always believed, and the neat way he was able to peg the enemy with soundbites: the ‘lying media’, ‘crooked Hillary’, the bottomless abyss of the Washington ‘swamp’.”

Media roundup

Chinese Australian voters are being targeted by anti-Labor social media scare campaign, the ABC reports. The advertisement is spreading on WeChat, a Chinese messaging service, and claims that more than 1 million refugees could come to Australia in a decade if Labor is elected. A leading neuroscientist has warned that excessive screen time is turning grown adults into volatile three-year-olds, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. “You can do all those activities without meeting another human being. Surely that has an impact on the kind of human being you become,” Baroness Greenfield said. A mass exodus of teachers is feared in the Northern Territory town of Katherine, the NT News reports, after the state government said it planned to strip them of their rent allowance.

Coming up

Thousands of students from across Australia are taking part in a national climate strike and will take their concerns about climate inaction to federal politician’s offices.

The Greens leader Richard Di Natale will appear at a media conference outside the privately run Northern Beaches hospital.

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