Morning Mail: Gillian Triggs, #spycables, Australian killed fighting Isis, Bali Nine, octopus v crab

Guardian Australia's Morning Mail Thursday 26 February 2015 g
Gillian Triggs
Bill Shorten has launched a stinging attack on Tony Abbott over the Gillian Triggs saga, accusing the PM of sinking to a “new low” and being “psychologically unsuited” to the nation’s top job. The AFP has confirmed it is investigating whether George Brandis broke the law by offering Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs a job in exchange for her resignation, but Tony Abbott says there was no impropriety. A special report from First Dog on the Moon on how to make children in detention (the report, not the 'abuse') go away, with today's education session from Chapter 6 of Tony Abbott's Handbook of Good Government Handbook. See how the day unfolded in yesterday's politics live blog as Ian MacDonald defended not reading what he says is the "worthless and irrelevant" children in detention report.
Australian news and politics
An Australian who travelled to Syria to join Kurds battling Isis has been killed, a monitor said Wednesday, adding he was the first Westerner to die fighting alongside the Kurds.Members of the Liberal party’s federal executive say they will demand an end to “a culture of financial secrecy” at a meeting next week after being “kept in the dark for years”. Some of the figures used to produce secret government modelling on university fees were “essentially invented by departmental officials”, a senior bureaucrat has said. Before hitting play on this video, prepare yourself for the moment an octopus explodes out of the water to take down a crab. The number of people charged with sexual assault offences increased nationally by 19% in 2013-14, new data shows. The Queensland government is examining whether it has grounds to revoke an Indian company's status as a "suitable operator" for Australia's largest coalmine, amid claims the state's environmental regulator gave no regard to reports in India claiming environmental destruction and bribery. As news comes that Tony Abbott has called Joko Widodo  to protest the planned executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, follow today's politics live blog now
Around the world
In the world of espionage, reports peppered with half-truths, rumours and the seemingly outlandish are par for the course, spy cables leaked to al-Jazeera and the Guardian show. South Africa is scrambling to deal with fallout from the leaked spy cables showing South Africa’s intelligence service spied on its own government to find out details of its involvement in a $100m joint satellite surveillance programme with Russia. See our full spy cables coverage here. Despite a UN security council resolution condemning their use, Syria has used barrel bombs on hundreds of locations over the past year, says Human Rights Watch. Six months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to social media sites, Google and Reddit have vowed to remove non-consensual naked images. Julian Assange is taking his appeal to Sweden’s highest court in a final attempt to persuade a Swedish judge that the arrest warrant against him should be lifted. One of the world's leading forecasters of environmental problems warns that vast tracts of Africa and China are turning into dust bowls on a scale that dwarfs the one that devastated the US in the 1930s
One last thing
Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic. All that aside, this doctor thinks he'll be able to do it in two years. Have an excellent day – and if you spot something I've missed, let me know on Twitter @earleyedition.