| Good morning, this is Emilie Gramenz bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Monday 15 June. Top stories Three cabinet ministers charged taxpayers more than $4,500 for an overnight trip to Sydney during which they mingled with mining and banking donors at a lucrative Liberal party fundraiser hosted by Channel Nine. Stuart Robert, Dan Tehan and Simon Birmingham flew into Sydney on the day of the $10,000-a-head fundraising dinner last year before flying out again the next day, charging their flights and overnight accommodation costs to their parliamentary allowances. The rules for expenses bar MPs from claiming travel where the dominant purpose is to raise funds for political parties, but all three say they were within the rules because they were in Sydney for other parliamentary business in the hours on either side of the fundraiser. A former Reuters Baghdad bureau chief has described the US military’s explanation of the 2007 killing of two Iraqi colleagues as “all lies”. Dean Yates was in charge of the bureau in Baghdad when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed. A WikiLeaks video called Collateral Murder later revealed details of their death. US prosecutors didn’t include Collateral Murder, one of WikiLeaks’ most shocking video revelations, in the indictment against Julian Assange – a move that has brought accusations the US doesn’t want its “war crimes” exposed in public. An Australian actor turned financial investor has been sentenced to death in China for drug smuggling, with friends claiming he has been set up. Karm Gilespie, 56, was sentenced to death in the Guangzhou intermediate people’s court on Saturday and has just 10 days to appeal the verdict. He was arrested in 2013 with more than 7.5kg of methamphetamine in his check-in luggage while attempting to board an international flight from Baiyun airport. Australia Scott Morrison has promised to bring forward a further $1.5bn in infrastructure spending and fast track 15 priority projects in an attempt to hustle the Australian economy out of the Covid-19 contraction. Close to 70 journalists from the Age have expressed their “alarm” over what they say is the increasing politicisation of the Melbourne newspaper. The journalists have written a letter to the executive editor, James Chessell, and fellow Nine executives, the chief digital and publishing officer, Chris Janz, and the Age editor, Alex Lavelle. Environmental groups have questioned a federal government decision to approve the “relocation” of thousands of endangered spectacled flying foxes from the Cairns CBD. A recovery plan for the species identifies dispersal tactics as a significant threat. The owners of the Dolphin Marine Conservation Park in Coffs Harbour have come together with animal rights advocates to propose a radical plan to house the animals in a semi-open sea enclosure. Under the proposal the zoo’s dolphins would be released from their concrete pools and put into a sectioned-off area of the Coffs Harbour marina. The world | 