Four stabbed at Sydney church

ANOTHER SYDNEY STABBING

A Sydney bishop was live-streaming mass last night when he was stabbed by a teen, along with three people in the Assyrian church’s congregation. NSW ambulance told the ABC all were taken from Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, though NSW Health described Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel’s condition as critical. A 15-year-old boy “known to police” was arrested, The Australian ($) reports. He was held at the church while riot police tried to control the crowd outside — the unrest shattered a NSW police car’s windscreen, while one cop suffered a broken jaw from a brick and another copped a twisted knee and a chipped tooth from a metal object.

So who is Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel? He gained a huge following during the pandemic as the leader of an ultra-conservative sect of the Assyrian Orthodox faith, the SMH reports, attracting “hardline Christians” with his anti-LGBTQIA+ sermons and pandemic scepticism. It’s mere days after six people, mostly women, were stabbed to death by a man at Bondi Junction Westfield. The SMH reports this morning that one of the victims, Ashlee Good, carried the Olympic torch back at the Sydney 2000 Games as a junior state player for both basketball and netball. During the incident, she gave her nine-month-old baby to bystanders and later died from her injuries. She was 38. The perpetrator was initially wrongly reported as a Sydney university student with a Jewish last name, a lie bolstered by antisemitic and pro-Kremlin X accounts, an ABC investigation found.

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

It was a self-own of epic proportions not seen since probable war criminal Ben Roberts–Smith’s failed defamation case against Nine newspapers — Justice Michael Lee found that former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann raped his former colleague Brittany Higgins on the balance of probabilities, as the ABC reports, and neither Lisa Wilkinson nor Network Ten defamed him. Importantly, the finding was to a civil standard not a criminal one, as Justice Lee stressed in his judgment, and there’s a “substantive difference” between the two standards of proof. Lehrmann has always maintained his innocence and the criminal charge against him was dropped. So what happens now? A lawyer named Carol Grimshaw told Mamamia that Lehrmann will likely try to find a way to appeal, but he may have to cover the winning side’s legal costs as well as his own “multimillion-dollar lawyer fees”.

So can he be re-charged? Grimshaw carefully stated that, as a general rule, if there’s new evidence brought to light, the prosecution can put it before the court. But another lawyer said it’s unlikely that the director of public prosecutions would pursue it after hearing Lee’s judgment. Former NSW senior Crown prosecutor Ian Lloyd agreed, telling the Daily Mail it probably won’t happen, and that a judge would likely grant a permanent stay of proceedings if it did. Whether or not anything will come of Lee’s finding that Lehrmann leaked criminal trial documents to Seven’s Spotlight, as news.com.au reports, is anyone’s guess (the allegations were already referred to the AFP and ICAC). Meanwhile, former US president and Republican nominee Donald Trump’s criminal trial began overnight when jurors were sworn in, as The Guardian reports — he’s charged with falsifying business records to hide his affair with Stormy Daniels.

ALL WORK, NO PLAY

Workers could get the right to double their annual leave by taking it at half pay, the AFR reports, though employers want to be able to knock it back. Union are pushing for a reasonableness criteria to apply instead, with ACTU secretary Sally McManus pointing out it could help Australians balance work and care responsibilities. It is already legal to take half-pay longer holidays under the Fair Work Act, but few awards allow it. Meanwhile, the Victorian government is urging Fair Work to deliver a “substantial increase” to the minimum wage, the Herald Sun reports, which would mostly benefit retail, hospitality, accommodation, health care and aged care workers. The minimum wage last year rose 5.75% to $23.23 an hour, but rents are at a record high.

Speaking of rents, has lawyer and housing advocate Jordan van den Berg’s squatting campaign reached the UK? A group is occupying Gordan Ramsay’s York and Albany Hotel in Camden as the Camden Art Cafe, The New Daily reports. The group says it aims to serve locals in the punk neighbourhood who have been the “victims of gentrification and parasitic projects”. From our homes to our home planet now and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek will release her long-overdue environmental reforms, The Age reports, which will create a new watchdog and delay plans to end native species extinctions. The reform was due to be delivered in Parliament last year, but Plibersek is releasing it in stages instead. Independent Senator David Pocock called the move “poor parliamentary process”, arguing lawmakers need to see the whole picture to vote.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

David Morris was single, but his life was full. Full of a menagerie of clucky, hungry animals, a quirky variety of native flora needing pruning, picking and pollinating, and full of gleaming antique tractors — he had a whole collection of them on his farm in Deep Lead. Having lost his wife to cancer, the 75-year-old had made peace with spending his twilight years as an island, telling himself: “That’s it … I’m not going to get attached to anybody”. Plus, he had enough social interaction as the caretaker at the local campsite. Folks were always coming and going again. When you’re young, as Celine tells Jesse in the film Before Sunset, you believe there’ll be many people with whom you’ll connect. Later in life, you realise it only happens a few times.

And it did, one nondescript afternoon when a woman named Shirley Madden set up camp. She was alone, but didn’t mind — indeed she was used to it, having raised her kids after her husband lost his life in a truck accident. Chatting to her, Morris felt his heartstrings play like a harp, but the conversation was cut short and the next morning she was gone. He sweet-talked the manager into handing over her phone number and a budding friendship began. When Morris heard Madden needed to undertake several rounds of chemotherapy some hours away, he immediately volunteered to drive her. Time melted away on those trips, the backdrop of rural Victoria a fitting impressionist landscape for the two lovers. They were married on Valentine’s Day this year. “You never know when love is there,” Morris told ABC. “It could be hiding around the corner any time.”

Hoping you feel loved today too.

SAY WHAT?

Having escaped the Lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of coming back to collect his hat.

Michael Lee

And just like that, the judge presiding over Bruce Lehrmann’s failed defamation case against Network Ten drew a neat line under his findings.

CRIKEY RECAP

The colossal cost of the Bruce Lehrmann trials

CHARLIE LEWIS

“Number of court cases and inquiries relating to the allegations against Lehrmann: 17 (six ongoing and 11 concluded separately). Number of defamation cases brought by Lehrmann against media companies: three. Amount News Corp paid Lehrmann to settle: $295,000. Amount the ABC paid Lehrmann to settle: $150,000 

“Amount Seven allegedly spent on Thai massages for Lehrmann and others while negotiating the interview Lehrmann conducted with Seven’s Spotlight program: $10,000. Amount Seven allegedly paid, according to former producer Taylor Auerbach, to cover Lehrmann’s ‘expenditure on cocaine and prostitutes’: $750 (Lehrmann denies this).”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Azerbaijan calls for ICJ to throw out Armenian ethnic cleansing case (Al Jazeera)

Tesla lays off more than 10% of its workforce (BBC)

Ocean heat is driving a global coral bleaching event, and it could be the worst on record (CNN)

I sat down with Ecuador’s leader as a major diplomatic dispute raged. This is what he said (SBS)

Nikki Haley takes new job at ultra-conservative thinktank (The Guardian)

Iraq postpones vote on bill including death penalty for same-sex acts (Reuters)

Poland ends long wait and gets first payment of EU recovery funds: €6.3 billion (euronews)

Questions about assassinations test the limits of Trump’s immunity claim (The New York Times) ($)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Terra nullius 2.0 — what AUKUS means for First Nations peoples — Ben Abbatangelo (IndigenousX): “As the weakest partner in the AUKUS alliance, with a huge land mass and relatively small human population, the only thing that will prevent First Nations communities from housing the nuclear waste is if the deal falls through altogether, which is becoming a likelihood as the US announces that it will halve the number of submarines it will build next year. A Donald Trump reelection only brings more points of failure into the fray. The Pacific Islands are already experiencing the burden of nuclear waste, as Japan recently began releasing treated nuclear wastewater from its Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean.

“Last year, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, the plant’s operator, began releasing 7,800 tons of radioactive wastewater. It plans to discharge an additional million tons over the next 20 to 30 years. The interoperability of the AUKUS relationship will also transform Indigenous territories into military playgrounds, as the presence of United States military personnel and weaponry expands. The Pentagon’s presence has steadily expanded since the Obama-Gillard era and correlated with an increase in sexual violence at the locations US military personnel are stationed. Last August, the US Air Force announced that it is planning to build a ‘missions planning’ and operations centre in Darwin, as part of $630 million in American spending across the Northern Territory over the next two to three years.”

Ten’s hollow victory no vindication of ‘shambolic’ trial by media — Chris Merritt (The Australian) ($): “Let’s be clear about what ­happened. Yes, Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson successfully defended the truth of the assertion that Lehrmann raped Brittany Higgins in the office of former Coalition minister Linda Reynolds. But none of the main parties emerges from this affair wearing a white hat — particularly the nominal victors, Ten and Wilkinson. It is wrong to go beyond the formal outcome of the case and portray this decision as vindication for the brand of journalism practised by Wilkinson and Ten. Justice Lee’s ruling makes it clear they allowed themselves to be used to publicise unsubstantiated claims that the former ­Coalition government engaged in a cover-up of this incident.

“That will be welcome news to Senator [Linda] Reynolds, one of the former ministers who, for a time, had been wrongly maligned and targeted by the then Labor ­opposition. Justice Lee shot down the ­suggestion that Higgins had been the victim of some sort of political conspiracy that had been ­uncovered by Ten and Wilkinson. Even though Ten and Wilkinson ‘have legally justified their imputation of rape, this does not mean their conduct was justified in any broader or colloquial sense’ his judgment says. He viewed the rape allegation as a minor part of the main theme of political intervention and a cover-up that had been broadcast by Ten’s program, The Project. And that main theme, according to the judge, turned out to be mere supposition.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Online

• Guardian Australia’s Karen Middleton will speak in a webinar for the Australia Institute.

Whadjuk Noongar Country (also known as Perth)

• WA Minister for Mines David Michael, US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, and UK Consul General Maria Rennie are among the speakers at the Battery Minerals Conference.