Morning mail: Joyce under the pump, Sri Lanka warnings, climate strike call

Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 23 April.

Top stories

Barnaby Joyce asked to be kept informed by his department about the $80m sale of water by Eastern Australia Agriculture, documents released to the Senate show. Joyce, who was agriculture minister when the controversial water buyback went through in mid-2017, has said he played no part in the negotiations with the company. But, as responsible minister, he signed off on the authority to negotiate with the company without going to open tender and he put specific conditions on the department’s work. He also signed off on the $80m price. On Monday evening in a combative interview on Radio National Joyce attempted to pin responsibility for the buyback on the Queensland Labor government and brushed off threats of a royal commission into the issue.

Sri Lankan authorities received warnings two weeks before the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks that killed at least 290 people, a cabinet spokesman admitted on Monday. “Fourteen days before these incidents occurred, we had been informed about these incidents,” Rajitha Senaratne told a press conference in the capital, Colombo, as Sri Lankans mourned after the bombings, which also injured at least 500 people. The intelligence memo warning about the attacks had named the radical Islamist group National Thowheeth Jama’ath as planning suicide bomb attacks on churches, Senaratne said. But there are serious doubts about whether a relatively small local organisation could have mounted the huge coordinated attacks, writes Jason Burke.

A host of government MPs fighting to hold on to their seats have erased the Liberals’ name and logo from campaign material, sparking Labor claims that the party’s brand is “toxic”. As the Coalition struggles to lift its standing among voters, MPs across the country appear to be relying on their personal standing to counter any backlash against the Liberals’ brand. Jason Wood, Sarah Henderson, Michael Sukkar and Russell Broadbent are among the Victorian MPs who have chosen to drop the party’s name from campaign material, relying instead on personalised campaign messages. In Western Australia, conservative MP Andrew Hastie is running a presidential-style personal campaign, with the former SAS soldier’s Facebook page featuring a “Fighting for You” tagline alongside an image of an Australian flag.

World

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist, has given her support for a general strike for the climate, saying the student movement she inspired needs more support from older generations.

A federal appeals court has denied a request by the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be released from jail on bail, and upheld a lower court’s decision to hold Manning in civil contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

Ugandan police have detained the pop star turned MP Bobi Wine after shutting down one of his concerts and firing teargas at his fans. The high-profile government critic was pulled from his car by baton-wielding police in Kampala on Monday, they said.

Dozens of people have been rescued while trying to cross the English Channel in small boats, officials have said. The 36 men, women and children were intercepted in separate operations and gave their nationalities as Iranian and Iraqi.

Friends of Lyra McKee have staged a protest outside the Derry offices of a hardline republican party, underlining continuing revulsion towards the group after the killing of the 29-year-old journalist.

Opinion and analysis

Guardian Australia readers got to know Amethyst DeWilde in the Life on the Breadline series, where she wrote about the day-to-day experience of living below the poverty line. Now as part of the Fair Go? series, DeWilde tells her story on video: “It’s like living with the slow dimming of the light, and waking up in darkness.” Almost one in five Australians live with a disability, and DeWilde is one of about 750,000 people who receive the disability pension, writes Royce Kurmelovs. The vast majority have been on the payment for longer than 10 years, and those living with a mental health condition, 257,828 people, made up the largest group on the DSP.

Why is the US news media so bad at covering climate change? Last summer, during the deadliest wildfire season in California’s history, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes got into a revealing Twitter discussion about why US television doesn’t much cover climate change. Elon Green, an editor at Longform, had tweeted: “Sure would be nice if our news networks – the only outlets that can force change in this country – would cover it with commensurate urgency.” Hayes replied that his program had tried, which was true. The problem, Hayes tweeted, was that “every single time we’ve covered [climate change] it’s been a palpable ratings killer. So the incentives are not great.”

Sport

Australia are eyeing their first Fed Cup crown in 45 years after Ashleigh Barty won both her single rubbers in commanding fashion, before teaming up with veteran Samantha Stosur to win a pulsating doubles tie against former world No 1 Victoria Azarenka’s Belarus.

Chelsea are the latest team to stutter in their pursuit of a Champions League spot, drawing 2-2 at home to Burnley on Monday, a result that leaves them clinging precariously to fourth place in the Premier League.

Thinking time: Is Sanders the man to beat Trump?

Raging against the machine has taken Bernie Sanders a long way, writes Lauren Gambino. In 2016, his disdain for “the establishment” and the “donor class” gave progressives a near-perfect foil to Hillary Clinton, who was cast as the “anointed” Democratic candidate for president. Sanders was beaten in the primary but the senator and his allies clamoured for and won changes to party rules they said were “rigged”. Now, the party’s role in choosing its nominee has been limited and a Sanders nomination is a very real possibility. At the top of early polls, the increasingly confident senator from Vermont is daring the “political establishment” to stop him.

Last week, the New York Times revealed a series of private dinners in which Democratic leaders, strategists, donors – and even a presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg – had met to discuss “the matter of What To Do About Bernie”. Not long before the Times story came out, Sanders had escalated a feud with the Center for American Progress, a liberal thinktank founded by a Clinton ally, accusing the group of trying to “smear” him in a video produced by an affiliated website.

Rick Wilson, a Republican political consultant and author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, said he understood the impulse to stop Sanders. “If I were the Trump team I would wake up every morning begging for [the nominee] to be Bernie Sanders,” Wilson says. A mainstream Democrat, such as Joe Biden or even Buttigieg, could attract disaffected Republicans like himself, Wilson says. “This is not about Medicare for All or free college or any of that,” he said. “This is about Donald Trump. Democrats have two choices: make this a referendum on Donald Trump or lose. That’s it. There are no other options.” But Sanders is betting that his anti-establishment appeal is a perfect match for Trump in the heartland states the president needs to win in 2020.

Media roundup

The Sydney Morning Herald reveals that Helloworld, the private company co-owned by the Liberal party federal treasurer, Andrew Burnes, made a $200,000 donation two weeks into a government tender process for a contract worth close to $1bn, and later, while contract negotiations continued, paid $120,000 for tickets to a 2017 Liberal party dinner. The contract was ultimately won by another of Burnes’s companies. Clive Palmer has received a “surge in support”, the Australian reports, giving the billionaire – who has spent $30m on political advertising – “the power to act as kingmaker in marginal seats” and potentially win several spots in the Senate. The Age reports that the Liberal candidate for the marginal Melbourne seat of Macnamara, Kate Ashmor, has apologised for a Facebook post in which she appears to refer to Chloe Shorten as a pig.

Coming up

Bill Shorten continues his tour of marginal seats in Queensland, visiting Townsville today.

Nominations close at noon for both House of Representatives and Senate candidates.

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