Sender unknown. Cory Bernardi has slammed the Huffington Post Australia for attributing an email to him he says he didn’t write.

Earlier this week, an email Bernardi sent to a mother who criticised his stance on the Safe Schools Coalition was leaked to the media. In it, Bernardi says the program exposes students to “unhealthy ideas at an early age”, and says the Safe Schools website allows students to “find out more about bondage clubs and adult sex toys”. Bernardi has confirmed this email was from him.

However, he has disavowed a second email, alleged to have been sent from Bernardi to the Huffington Post. The Senator tweeted.

“The email being used by [HuffPo acting politics editor] Josh Butler today is a fake. He has been conned.

“Faking (or spoofing) an email is relatively easy but I suspect it might be an offence to do so. Will have to make some enquiries.”

The Huffington Post says it took steps to verify the email, but Bernardi’s office said it couldn’t reach him.

The Huffington Post’s report states that the second email was sent to it through its corrections submissions form — a web form on the bottom of every story that allows readers to suggest corrections …

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The Huffington Post’s online correction form

It appears someone used Cory Bernardi’s parliamentary email address to complete a web form at the bottom of the Huffington Post article. The second email was a justification of his original email and added the line that there is “no overwhelming stigma to same-sex parents in Australia”.

The second, fake email has since been deleted from the Huffington Post’s coverage, but Butler tweeted it in full. — Myriam Robin

News UK not OK. Accounts for News UK’s main operating group, News Group Newspapers, show that the Murdoch clan’s UK operations had conflicting results for the year to June 30, 2015. The Times and Sunday Times made a higher profit thanks to cost cuts, but the company’s major assets — The Sun and Sun on Sunday — lost more than half a billion dollars after News management took the axe to the balance sheet and wrote down the value of both tabloids by more than $400 million.

Reports filed at the UK Companies House office in London offer a rare insight into the financial housekeeping inside the Murdoch clan’s UK print empire in the year to June 30, 2015, now overseen by Rebekah Brooks, who was given back her CEO role last year after she was cleared of charges relating to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

The accounts reveal that The Sun and The Sun on Sunday plunged to a headline loss of 253 million pounds in the year ending June last year after its parent company, News Group Newspapers, wrote down the value of The Sun by over 220 million pounds, and paid out millions to former executives and in legal costs.

On top of that, the company paid out 42 million pounds in costs relating to phone hacking and the Operation Elveden inquiry into payments to public officials, and 10 million pounds was paid out in relation to the Management and Standards Committee, the body set up to investigate legal matters relating to the company in the aftermath of the scandal.

But the write-downs and big loss at News UK has failed to show up in News Corp’s 2014-15 annual results report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which makes no mention of this write-down or loss. The only impairment figure in the accounts was for US$455 million, which was related primarily to the decision to sell the Amplify online education business. — Glenn Dyer

Front page of the day. The New York Daily News goes hard on conflict, past and present.

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