Good afternoon.
The race discrimination commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, has called on Pauline Hanson to apologise for inflammatory comments about Australian Muslims, amid backlash to her comments denounced by others as “reprehensible”.
You can read more details here about Hanson’s remarks, made during a Sky News interview on Monday. She walked back some of them on ABC radio today, but also said: “I am not going to apologise … I will have my say now before it’s too late.”
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, accused the One Nation leader of a “racist intervention”, while the outspoken Nationals senator Matt Canavan said Hanson was “not fit to lead a major political party”.
Top news
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In pictures
From the heart of Beijing to far-flung Manila, Panama, Moscow and New York, communities around the globe have celebrated lunar new year, ringing in the year of the fire horse.
What they said …
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“We are doing nothing to repatriate or assist these people.” – Anthony Albanese
The prime minister today insisted that his government would not assist any repatriation efforts for the group of women and children stuck in Syria. The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said one of them had been banned from returning for up to two years under a temporary exclusion order.
Full Story
Graham Readfearn steps into our climate future
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia. With heatwaves intensifying, our climate and environment correspondent Graham Readfearn put his body to the test in a climate chamber experiment. He tells Nour Haydar how extreme heat affects us, our cognitive functions and our chances of survival.
Before bed read
Fiona Wright and her friends have a joke: to afford a home in Sydney – where the median rent has just hit $800 a week – they must wait for their parents to die. “It feels like a deal with the devil,” she writes for our Age of Inheritance series.
Daily word game
Today’s starter word is: GIES. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply.
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