Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 9 July.

Top stories

Australia’s emissions are again the highest on record, driven this time by an increase in emissions from the electricity sector, which rose to their highest levels in two years. Fugitive emissions from Australia’s LNG industry also continue to fuel rising national emissions. According to research by Ndevr Environmental there was an 8.2% increase in emissions from the electricity sector between the December and March quarters. It follows three consecutive quarters of declines in electricity emissions and is the highest increase in emissions from that sector since March 2017.

The mayor of Christchurch has refused to commit to memory the name of the man who carried out mosque shootings in the city, in a decision that she says is echoed by her community and is a crucial part of recovering from the atrocity. But Lianne Dalziel said the way the city’s Muslims had chosen to forgive him was also essential, and had made the New Zealand city stronger and safer. Speaking to the Guardian on a visit to the UK, she said she is still raw about the 28-year-old white supremacist murdering 51 people at two mosques with military-style weapons and livestreaming the attack. “I hope he rots in hell and rots in jail,” she said.

The social justice advocate Tim Costello has called on his fellow Christians to “calm down” about their alleged persecution, amid a brewing political storm over how the government should act to protect against religious discrimination. Speaking in his new role as a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity, Costello also warned that the federal government should not try to legislate to cover “extreme” examples of competing rights, citing the high-profile Israel Folau case as an example. On Q&A Monday night, Penny Wong said religious discrimination laws shouldn’t make Australia less tolerant.

World

Facebook Twitter Pinterest US attorney Geoffrey Berman speaks about the arrest of American financier Jeffrey Epstein in New York. Photograph: Jason Szenes/EPA

The billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking conspiracy and sex trafficking. The charges appear in a newly unsealed 13-page Manhattan federal court indictment. Some victims of Epstein’s abuse were just 14 years old, prosecutors alleged in the shocking document. The allegations, which date back to 2005, could push Epstein’s powerful friends into the spotlight, too.

Donald Trump has launched a scathing attack on Theresa May and said the US will no longer deal with the British ambassador to Washington, after the diplomat’s frank assessments of the president as inept and dysfunctional were leaked.

Indoor levels of carbon dioxide could be clouding our thinking and may even pose a wider danger to human health, researchers say. A new study says there is a growing body of research suggesting levels of CO 2 that can be found in bedrooms, classrooms and offices might have harmful effects on the body, including affecting cognitive performance.

Deutsche Bank has started slashing thousands of jobs in Sydney, Hong Kong, London and New York, only hours after announcing a drastic plan to reduce its global workforce by 18,000.

The British Museum will return looted artefacts, among them fourth-century Buddhist terracotta heads, to Afghanistan. The heads, which were probably hacked off by the Taliban, were and found stuffed in poorly made wooden crates at Heathrow.

Opinion and analysis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Beautiful Byron Bay has always had something talismanic about it, as the generations of arrivals imbue it with some greater, grander meaning than merely a nice place to live.’ Photograph: Turnervisual/Getty Images

There’s no study or test in the world that can tell you what happens to your soul when you turn yourself into a brand, writes Brigid Delaney of Byron Bay’s influencers. “But maybe your children, whose childhoods have been co-opted into the marketing of hot sauce or onesies can tell you what they think of it when they are older. As for Byron itself – now the ultimate brand – I can’t help but wonder if this current iteration of the town is hastening the shire’s already shameful record of inequality. The shire has an increasing number of homeless people. Conversely Byron Bay recently scored the dubious honour of having the most expensive house prices in the country.”

While the concept of secondhand, or passive, smoking is familiar, secondhand drinking is a growing field of study, writes Paula Cocozza. “Last week the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute in Emeryville, California, published research showing that 53 million Americans each year experience harm from another individual’s alcohol use. That is one in four men, and one in five women. Given that passive smoking is treated as a serious public health hazard in countries from Mongolia to Colombia, Australia to the UK, why are governments so slow to notice, let alone challenge, secondhand drinking?”

Sport

Ashleigh Barty has crashed out of Wimbledon, after losing 3–6, 6–2, 6–3 to the world No 55, Alison Riske. Barty says she has no complaints after the curse of the women’s seeding struck again.

Australia will never produce a Super Rugby dynasty like that of the Crusaders, writes Brett Harris, because the self-imposed salary cap has put Australian teams at a competitive disadvantage against their rivals.

Thinking time: Better in Blak

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thelma Plum. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

One afternoon last year, the singer-songwriter Thelma Plum got a text. It was from the producer David Kahne, who was in the studio in New York where the pair were working on her debut album, and it said, “You’ll never guess what happened.” Another artist in the studio had wandered past, overheard Plum’s Paul Kelly-featuring song Made For You, and asked if he could “lay something down”, explaining: “I’ve got this part that I can hear.” It would be a bit of an overstep unless you were, say, a Beatle. So that’s how a song that was already a career bucket-list item for a Paul Kelly superfan also scored a guest appearance by Paul McCartney on guitar.

A Gamilaraay woman, Plum grew up between Brisbane and her grandparents’ farm 20km outside the NSW town of Delungra, and she’s been a working musician since leaving school. The first song she recorded – “the first one I really took seriously” – was Father Said, a haunting, assured minute-fifty that she uploaded to Triple J’s Unearthed platform in 2012. It won her the title of the best unsigned Indigenous artist in the country, and a spot performing at the National Indigenous music awards, and “it all started from there”. For stalwart fans, the album, titled Better in Blak – a collection of plainspoken, sparkling pop songs and naked acoustic ballads – has been a long time coming. But it’s been a “really rough” couple of years for Plum, who didn’t want to rush work, and who had been on the receiving end of waves of abuse from an old battle back home.

Media roundup

Josh Frydenberg has repudiated calls for the government to provide further fiscal stimulus to the economy, the Australian reports. The Australian Financial Review leads with S&P Global Ratings’ urging the government to stick to its budget surplus plan to maintain Australia’s AAA credit rating, rejecting calls from some economists to relax budget repair and inject fiscal stimulus into the economy. The top story on the Sydney Morning Herald’s front page this morning is that up to 90% of music fans use drugs, according to NSW Ministry of Health data. The paper also reports that the Australian federal police used national security laws to access the metadata of journalists nearly 60 times in just one year.

Coming up

Witnesses including emergency services staff, medical experts and music festival organisers are expected to be called to give evidence at an inquest into six drug-related deaths at music festivals in NSW.

The Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young will take part in a protest at South Australia’s Parliament House over water use in the Murray-Darling basin.

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