Good morning! There is plenty of commentary this morning about Prince Andrew’s surprise settlement with Virginia Giuffre, as well as developments in the face-off between Russia and Ukraine.
The Duke of York has reached a settlement in the civil sex claim filed by Virginia Giuffre in the US. In the unexpected development, Prince Andrew agreed to make a “substantial donation” to Giuffre’s charity and accepted that she “suffered as an established victim of abuse”. The move is a remarkable turnaround for Andrew, who had pledged to fight to clear his name in court. A document submitted to court on Tuesday said the prince also regretted his association with the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who took his life in prison while facing trial for sex trafficking. The prince “was never going to win”, writes former Guardian royal correspondent Stephen Bates: “And now his stupidity and arrogance have cost him almost everything he values.”
The Morrison government is considering whether a little-known section of national environmental laws could be used to allow developments in some parts of the country to proceed without the need for federal approval. The move, revealed in documents released to Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws, could allow the commonwealth to reduce its role in environmental decision-making without needing support for a bill to transfer power to the states and territories, which has been blocked by the Senate since last year.
The Coalition used its $187m safer communities grants program to fund at least 10 projects that had been deemed “unsuitable” by the department after the project applicants were visited in person by Peter Dutton’s assistant minister, Jason Wood. Over five rounds of the program, 225 applications were awarded funding worth $47.9m against the recommendations of the department. Of these, 23 projects worth a combined $7m were “assessed as either ineligible or unsuitable”.
Russia claims it is withdrawing troops from near Ukraine’s borders but Kyiv and western diplomats remain cautious, while some residents are relieved. Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said he had seen no sign yet of a withdrawal of troops and equipment. Nato’s scepticism was echoed by the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, who described the intelligence his government is seeing as “not encouraging”. Russian field hospitals were being constructed, which “only can be construed as preparation for an invasion”, Johnson said.
Australia
Private school funding has increased at nearly five times the rate of public school funding over the past 10 years. Government funding for independent schools increased by $3,338 a student over a decade, compared with $703 more per student for public schools.
Lethal “blackwater” in the Barwon-Darling River has prompted fears of another mass fish kill similar to the 2019 event in which more than a million fish died. Blackwater events are caused when heavy rains wash leaf litter that has collected on a floodplain into a major river, and expert say the problem is “accelerated by poor management”.
The Future Fund has been forced to divest about $5m in taxpayers’ money from a Chinese state-controlled weapons manufacturer sanctioned for selling arms to the genocidal Myanmar military.
The world
Russia could extend the opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s imprisonment for up to a further 15 years in a fresh criminal trial at a penal colony far from his support base on charges of embezzlement.
The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said there is “a very real risk” democracy will cease to exist in the US within a decade. She told the New Yorker that efforts by Republicans to restrict voting rights could result in a return to the Jim Crow era.
The US west has spent the last two decades in what scientists are now saying is the most extreme megadrought in at least 1,200 years, according to a new study.
Recommended reads
It was by chance that Archie Roach met the woman who would be his collaborator and the love of his life. Their love story is the subject of the writer-director Philippa Bateman’s new documentary Wash My Soul in the River’s Flow, to be released in cinemas in March. “Archie is my silent hero and I’m his rowdy troublemaker,” Ruby Hunter says in the film. “She just had this cheeky way about her,” Roach recalls. “Not so much making trouble but had this glint in her eye.”
“When my son Connor first told me he was transgender and was not, in fact, the daughter I thought he was for the first 12 years of his life, I could have handled it a lot better,” writes Carolyn Tate. “It’s not that I kicked and screamed. I didn’t throw him out or call him vile names. I wasn’t even disappointed. It almost feels worse than all that: I didn’t believe him.”
In our weekly interview about objects, comedian Dave Hughes shares his love of tennis, and the diaries he kept as an unemployed twentysomething: “I went to the Australian Open final a few years ago and saw Rafael Nadal play Roger Federer. I had front row seats, which I’d paid quite a bit of money for. As part of getting the seats, I got to keep some of the balls that Roger and Rafael used during the match. But sometime later my dogs got hold of them, chewed them up and they’re gone. I lost a part of history.”
Listen
With more than 100,000 Russian troops at Ukraine’s border, there are fears Europe is facing its biggest military crisis since the second world war. In today’s Full Story Guardian reporter Shaun Walker, in Kyiv, tells Michael Safi that, on the face of it, much of the city is continuing life as normal. But how likely is the full-scale military assault being warned of by western intelligence agencies? And is there a diplomatic solution that could be sold to Vladimir Putin that would satisfy the Ukrainian government?
Full Story is Guardian Australia’s daily news podcast. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting app.
Sport
Novak Djokovic says he would rather miss out on grand slams than be vaccinated against Covid. He told the BBC on Tuesday he was not anti-vaccination in general but believed people had the right to choose. “The principles of decision-making on my body are more important than any title or anything else,” Djokovic said.
The 15-year-old Russian ice skater at the centre of a doping scandal, Kamila Valieva, is in the gold medal position for the individual event at the Winter Olympics. Many are still questioning whether she should still be in Beijing at all. But her legal team has claimed that her positive drug test may have come from a glass of water that contained traces of her grandfather’s heart medication.
Media roundup
Western Australian MP Sophia Moermond has been suspended from the state’s parliament after she refused to provide her Covid vaccination status or a medical exemption, reports WA Today. The Age says an interest rate rise is expected in June, which could add hundreds of dollars to home-owners’ mortgage repayments.
Coming up
Federal parliament sits and estimates hearing are ongoing. Simon Holmes à Court will address the National Press Club.
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