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Anti-Brexit campaigners unfurl a banner on Westminster bridge. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Friday briefing: Brexit deal – May digs in at the crease

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Anti-Brexit campaigners unfurl a banner on Westminster bridge. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Hard Brexiters openly threaten to topple PM … fears for 600 people in California wildfires … and hear Michelle Obama read from her new memoir

Top story: PM vows to see plan through

Good morning – Warren Murray with you at the end of a tumultuous week.

Theresa May starts her Friday lacking a Brexit secretary and facing mounting threats to her leadership. Our live coverage is under way. After Dominic Raab quit the Brexit portfolio, there has been speculation in roughly equal amounts that Michael Gove might either take over from Raab, or turn down the job and resign his existing cabinet position as environment secretary in protest over the draft agreement. May’s prime ministership survived a turbulent day but the arch-Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg is among those who have submitted letters to the Tories’ 1922 Committee seeking to depose the prime minister. Forty-eight letters are required to trigger a confidence vote. May would need the backing of 158 Tory MPs to see off any challenge.

There are calls for a free vote on the draft agreement, which would allow May’s ministers to vote against it without having to resign from cabinet. The Conservative former education secretary Nicky Morgan says she is backing May’s deal, arguing that constituents “want us to just get on with it”. May gave a defiant press conference where she underscored her determination to plough on.

Theresa May on Brexit: 'Am I going to see this through? Yes' – video

Labour says it will call for a general election or, failing that, a second referendum should May fail to get her deal through parliament. Here is the view from Shropshire: novel among them is that of David Miller, who described himself as a welder and evangelist: “I follow the prophesies in the Bible and a split in Europe was prophesied. Europe will never unite again. God has said so.”


Justice served on Khmer Rouge – Two former leaders of Pol Pot’s murderous Cambodian regime have been found guilty in what is being called the country’s “Nuremberg moment”. Nuon Chea, 92, who was second-in-command to Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, 87, who served as head of state, will both be sentenced for genocide carried out between 1977 and 1979. They are already doing life sentences for crimes against humanity. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died through a combinations of mass executions, starvation and brutal labour camps.

Skulls of victims of the Pol Pot era at the Choeung Ek shrine in Cambodia. Photograph: Alamy

By the time the regime was ousted in 1979, about 25% of Cambodia’s population had died. Most of those responsible for the killings, including Pol Pot, died before they could be tried under the UN-backed extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia (ECCC), set up in 1997. The tribunals have been criticised for moving at a glacial pace – having cost $320m to convict only three men – while being susceptible to political interference from the government of prime minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge member. But Alexander Hinton, Unesco chair on genocide prevention at Rutgers University, said: “Justice is not perfect. But it’s better than no justice. And what’s the alternative? Impunity for mass murder.”


Camp fire – The number of missing or unaccounted for people in the northern California wildfire has soared to 631 according to authorities. It is an increase of more than 500 since Wednesday. The death toll in the Camp fire increased to 63 after authorities recovered the remains of seven more people, outdoors and in the ruins of homes and cars in the towns of Paradise, Magalia and Concow. More than 9,700 homes have been destroyed, along with a total of 118 multi-family residences and 290 businesses. Police officers were involved in a shooting in an area under evacuation that left one man and two dogs dead including a police canine. The man was a 48-year-old from Berry Creek who was a suspect in a 2014 double murder. When approached by officers he allegedly reached for a gun after saying: “I’m not going back. You guys should have left me alone.”


Sorry to Soros – Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, says the company has severed ties with a PR firm that stoked conspiracy theories about its critics’ links to George Soros. But in doing so, Zuckerberg repeated some of the messaging of the rightwing PR firm Definers Public Affairs. “The bottom line is the intention was not to attack an individual but to demonstrate that a group that was presenting itself as a grassroots effort … was not in fact a spontaneous grassroots effort,” Zuckerberg said, adding: “I have tremendous respect for George Soros.” Invoking Soros as a puppetmaster funding liberal groups is well known as an antisemitic “dog whistle”. Patrick Gaspard, president of Soros’s Open Society Foundation, said Facebook’s engagement in the “concerted rightwing effort the world over to demonise Mr Soros and his foundations” was “reprehensible” and “frankly astonishing”. Gaspard noted “much of this hateful and blatantly false and antisemitic information is spread via Facebook”.


‘Assange on secret charges’ – Court papers filed in the US suggest the existence of secret charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader. The filing was made in a Virginia federal court jurisdiction that handles national security cases. It concerns an unrelated defendant but appears to include text copied and pasted from sealed documents outlining charges against Assange. The text argues the court must keep unspecified charges sealed because “no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged”; and says the sealing must stay in effect “until Assange is arrested … and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition”. WikiLeaks said the filing “reveals existence of sealed charges (or a draft for them) against WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange”. Assange is considered a wanted man in the US because of his publication of classified diplomatic cables and other secret US government documents, while WikiLeaks is a target of the Trump-Russia investigation.


‘I was too far in’ – Mark David Chapman, who shot and killed John Lennon in 1980, has told a parole board he feels “more and more shame” about it every year. Chapman, 63, was denied parole for the 10th time at a hearing last month. A transcript has been released.

Mark David Chapman in a January 2018 prison mugshot. Photograph: AP

Chapman said he had gone through an internal “tug of war” over whether to go ahead with the shooting after getting the former Beatle’s autograph. “I was too far in,” he said. “I do remember having the thought of, ‘Hey, you have got the album now. Look at this, he signed it, just go home.’ But there was no way I was just going to go home.” Chapman described working at Wende prison in New York state cleaning, painting and stripping wax from the floors. He said he left his quest for notoriety behind long ago and devoted himself to Jesus.


Hockney under the hammer – A celebrated swimming pool painting by the British modern artist David Hockney has sold for $90.3m in New York, setting a new auction record for a living artist.

David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was snapped up after more than nine minutes of bidding, dominated by two rival telephone bidders, at Christie’s last night. The previous record was held by American Jeff Koons and his Balloon Dog (Orange), which sold for $58.4m at Christie’s in 2013.

Today in Focus podcast: A day of Brexit chaos

Anushka Asthana joins her colleagues in Westminster on an extraordinary day in British politics as Theresa May attempted to build support for her Brexit deal while members of her cabinet resigned in protest.

Theresa May leaves Downing Street. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Plus: in an exclusive extract from her autobiography, Michelle Obama reveals how she met her future husband, Barack.

Lunchtime read: Seagulls – will they stop it now?

In the last 30 years – the lifespan of a large seagull – they have come among us as never before, writes Tim Dee. “Though still popularly regarded as seagulls, many have moved inland, far from the seaside or saltwater. They have adapted to life in many places we have made, and they have thrived. Urban rooftop nesting gull colonies are now spread throughout the UK. The birds feed among us, on our streets, as well as on our rubbish dumps. Above all they steal our chips.

Seagulls have their eye on your chips. Photograph: Alamy

“But gulls are losing out at our hands much more than the other way around. A gull moment – 30 years or so – is coming to an end. Little food waste is now going into landfill. Now most gull-edible trash is being composted or incinerated. Gulls will have to shift their behaviour once more. We’ve seen them do it before – will they manage again?”

Sport

Gareth Southgate shelved plans to criticise his players for their second-half performance in victory over USA at Wembley after Wayne Rooney stole the stage by delivering a tearful post-match speech in the dressing room as he called time on his England career. In Zagreb, Tin Jedvaj scored a last-gasp winner in Croatia’s 3-2 win over Spain to set up a Nations League decider with England. Flanker Masakatsu Nishikawa has returned serve on Eddie Jones’ promise that England would “physically smash” Japan, pledging to “emotionally smash” their hosts when they meet at Twickenham on Saturday. Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana played to a fifth draw in as many games in the latest episode of their world championship showdown in London, as the Norwegian champion adroitly weathered early fireworks to negotiate a peaceful result.

On a day when it was learned that a merger of the revamped 118-year-old Davis Cup and the new ATP Cup is one solution being considered to break the impasse that has gripped the sport for five years, Roger Federer cruised into the semi-finals of the ATP Tour Finals for the 15th time. If England can overcome South Africa, the team they squeezed past in last year’s World Cup semi-final, they can go to sleep on Friday having eliminated their recent rivals and secured safe passage to the final four of the Women’s World T20. Meanwhile, the men’s Test team has resumed on day three of the second Test confident of victory over Sri Lanka, despite the home side’s lead.

Business

The Brexit crisis may well soon account for Theresa May but immediate victims include the pound and Britain’s housebuilders. Sterling fell dramatically against the dollar yesterday to below $1.28 before stabilising slightly overnight at $1.279. It also fell sharply against the euro and is buying €1.128 this morning. Companies with large domestic businesses such as housebuilders were punished on the stock market as negative sentiment about the UK economy took hold. However the FTSE 100 ended the day in positive territory overall thanks to its legions of internationally focused companies which report profits in the US dollar. The FTSE is seen rising 0.55% this morning.

The papers

The front pages all lead with the draft Brexit deal – from the resignations of Dominic Raab and Esther McVey, to Theresa May’s leadership troubles. Some papers suggest it’s only a matter of time before May steps down. The Mail is furious with those seeking to undermine the prime minister: “Have they lost the plot?” and calling May’s critics “peacocking saboteurs” and “low-grade assassins”. The Express is also supportive of the PM, running the headline: “Defiant May: I’ll fight to the end”.

The Telegraph quotes the prime minister: “Am I going to see this through? Yes I am”. But it also features front-page commentary calling on her to resign immediately. Playing things with a fairly straight bat are the Guardian (“Resignations, a coup and a day of hostility. But May fights on”), the FT (“May defiant as draft deal threatens Tory civil war”) and the i (“Plotters move in on the PM”). While we’re on bats, the Sun continues the rather tortured cricket analogy used at May’s press conference: “She’s on a sticky wicket”, as does the Mirror, which is more critical: “Stumped”.

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