It is tempting for normal people to ignore our President when he starts ranting about treason and corruption at the FBI. I understand the temptation. I'm the object of many of his rants, and even I try to ignore him.

But we shouldn't, because millions of good people believe what a president of the United States says. In normal times, that's healthy. But not now, when the President is a liar who doesn't care what damage he does to vital institutions. We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign, and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts.

Russia engaged in a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Near as I can tell, there is only one US leader who still denies that fact. The FBI saw the attack starting in mid-June 2016, with the first dumping of stolen emails. In late July, when we were hard at work trying to understand the scope of the effort, we learnt that one of Trump's foreign policy advisers knew about the Russian effort seven weeks before we did.

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In April 2016, that adviser talked to a Russian agent in London, learnt that the Russians had obtained "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, and that the Russians could assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton. Of course, nobody from the Trump campaign told us this (nor about later Russian approaches); we had to learn it, months after the fact, from an allied ambassador.

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But when we finally learnt of it in late July, what should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the Trump campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn't know what was true. Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate.

As director, I was determined that the work would be done carefully, professionally and discretely. We were just starting. If there was nothing to it, we didn't want to smear Americans. If there was something to it, we didn't want to let corrupt Americans know we were on to them. So, we kept it secret. That's how the FBI approaches all counterintelligence cases.

And there's the first problem with Trump's whole "treason" narrative. If we were "deep state" Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret? Why wouldn't the much-maligned FBI supervisor Peter Strzok – the alleged kingpin of the "treasonous" plot to stop Trump – tell anyone? He was one of the very few people who knew what we were investigating.

We investigated. We didn't gather information about the campaign's strategy. We didn't "spy" on anyone's campaign. We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help. By late October, the investigators thought they had probable cause to get a federal court order to conduct electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page.

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Page was no longer with the campaign, but there was reason to believe he was acting as an agent of the Russian government. We asked a federal judge for permission to surveil him and then we did it, all without revealing our work, despite the fact that it was late October and a leak would have been very harmful to candidate Trump. Worst deep-state conspiracy ever.

But wait, the conspiracy idea gets dumber. On October 28, after agonising deliberation over two terrible options, I concluded I had no choice but to inform Congress that we had reopened the Clinton email investigation. I judged that hiding that fact – after having told Congress repeatedly and under oath that the case was finished – would be worse than telling Congress the truth. It was a decision William Barr praised and Hillary Clinton blamed for her loss 11 days later. Strzok, alleged architect of the treasonous plot to stop Trump, drafted the letter I sent Congress.

And there's still more to the dumbness of the conspiracy allegation. At the centre of the alleged FBI "corruption" we hear so much about was the conclusion that deputy director Andrew McCabe lied to internal investigators about a disclosure to the press in late October 2016. McCabe was fired over it. And what was that disclosure? Some stop-Trump election-eve screed? No. McCabe authorised a disclosure that revealed the FBI was actively investigating the Clinton Foundation, a disclosure that was harmful to Clinton.

There is a reason the non-fringe media doesn't spend much time on this "treason" and "corruption" business. The conspiracy theory makes no sense. The FBI wasn't out to get Donald Trump. It also wasn't out to get Hillary Clinton. It was out to do its best to investigate serious matters while walking through a vicious political minefield.

But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, they will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.

The Washington Post

James Comey is a former director of the FBI and a former US deputy attorney general.

The AFL community is reeling following the death of Anna Green, the wife of Demons champion Brad Green.

Ms Green, a mum and lifestyle blogger, died on Monday, leaving behind two young sons, Oliver and Wilba.

Tributes have started pouring in for the former flight attendant, who described herself on Instagram as a “lover of sunshine, palm trees, yoga, beaches, travel, summer, sunsets, cocktails [and] style”.

Her husband made a touching message to his wife on social media.

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“Goodbyes are not forever, are not the end. It simply means, I’ll miss you until we meet again. Rest easy my darling #xxx3boys.”

The Green family also released a statement on Tuesday.

"It is with the heaviest of hearts that we confirm the passing of beloved mother, wife, daughter, sister and friend, Anna Green," it reads.

"Anna suffered a cardiac arrest last week and passed away peacefully at lunch time yesterday surrounded by her immediate family.

"The family would like to thank the committed medical team at the Intensive Care Unit at Melbourne's Alfred Hospital and would now ask for privacy as they come to terms with their loss."

Fashion label J’Aton Couture founders Jacob Luppino and Anthony Pittorino remembered “Divine Anna” as an incredible woman who will always remain “with us”.

“Til well all reunite with our beautiful sister Audrey [Anna] in our hearts forever J&Axx,” the pair wrote on Instagram.

Fan page DeeBrief posted on Facebook it was “devastated” by the news of Ms Green’s death and urged her husband, former Dees captain, to “stay strong”.

“Anna leaves behind two sons, a husband and distraught family and friends. Our sincerest condolences are with Brad, his children and everyone affected by this horrible news.”

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Ms Green has in recent years worked in the fashion industry, including launching online women’s boutique Wilo Green in 2012, and starting an Instagram blog.

Her social media is filled with sun-kissed photos of her, her sons and lifestyle images.

It can be hard to like your body. Even in the years when I've dieted and felt "thin", I've hated trying on swimwear in a tiny changing room, every flaw spotlit in a full-length mirror.

It seems being unhappy in our bodies is the norm. The theme of this year's UK Mental Health Week is body image; a foundation survey of UK adults found that one in five felt shame, 34 per cent felt down or low, and 19 per cent felt disgusted because of their body image in the last year.

I get the impression that, like me, most women have a constant low-level feeling of our bodies not being good enough. Friends of mine are always happy to talk about their hang-ups. One, a great runner, calls her thighs "huge". Another apologises that she's "got no tits". We have ugly names for the parts we point out to each other: cankles, spare tyre, bingo wings.

My body shame started in puberty. I remember being on a beach in Egypt aged 14, looking down and for the first time, seeing my body through the eyes of a critic rather than as the person living in it. I saw that my stomach stuck out, my breasts were too big.

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In academia, this lack of body-mind connection, seeing the body not as yours but from the outside, is one of the defining features of negative body image. "It is viewing our bodies as objects, as a collection of parts to be critiqued and scrutinised and monitored," says Nadia Craddock, of the Centre for Appearance Research, UWE Bristol, whose PhD is on what industry can do to foster positive body image. This leads to us seeing our bodies as a project to fix, to fit with society's strict and slim beauty norms.

So, until the past few years, going on a diet, for me, was a normal part of this. I did my first diet aged 13; boiled eggs, grapefruit and cardboard crispbread. Aged 22, March to July, all I consumed per day was one slice of ham, two pieces of toast and 10 Marlboro Lights. I spent three, joy-free years of my 30s eating zero carbs.

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But in the past few years, the rise of the Body Positivity movement, especially on Instagram, has made us rethink. I smile at @bodyposipanda dancing in her underwear. I've cheered on Bryony Gordon running in her underwear. I love Stephanie Yeboah’s fashion shots. I have begun to see the beauty in women of every shape and size.

Body Positivity hasn't given me all the answers, though. While it started as a political movement for bodies that didn't fit the ideal, it has been co-opted as a marketing tool to sell products to women who aren't a size 10, so the message has increasingly become commercial. That explains the size six #fitspo Instagram influencers hashtagging their posts as #BP. And spending time and energy thinking about your body's appearance still puts the focus on what your body looks like.

The anti-diet dietitian Laura Thomas, author of Just Eat It, told me about a new way of looking at the body that might suit me, Body Neutrality. "It's what's called rational self-acceptance in body image literature," she says. "It's knowing that I don't have a perfect body or it doesn't align with societal ideals, but it's my body and it allows me to move through the world. It functions for me. It's being accepting of the fact that this is your body, your home."

On a practical level, the idea is simply to have fewer thoughts about your body's appearance – both criticisms and positive ones, to not let the way you look define how you feel.

This is the thinking behind Jameela Jamil's brilliant I Weigh campaign on Instagram too – that appearance is a tiny drop in the wonderful mix of your qualities, accomplishments and reasons to feel worthy.

If body neutrality sounds like a comfortable place to be, how do we get there? What I've found helps is focusing on what my body can do, on the fact I am able and healthy, on yoga and swimming and walking. "It doesn't have to be about being able to achieve impressive sporting accomplishments, like running a marathon," says Craddock. It can include things as everyday as housework, as creative as craft, as emotional as hugging.

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Anuschka Rees, another body neutrality advocate and author of new book Beyond Beautiful, stopped wearing any tight or uncomfortable clothes, bras that dig in, high heels. "Every time you wear uncomfortable clothes, you're telling yourself your wellbeing is less important than what you look like to others," she says.

This year, I have promised myself, no more diets.

I am still not looking forward to trying on swimwear, but then we are all just our own work in progress, right?

The Telegraph, London

It has been two months since US Attorney General Barr released his summary of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, and just over a month since the redacted report was made public. President Trump, of course, claims the report “fully exonerated” him, and replies with the sound bites “no collusion, no obstruction” whenever the subject comes up.

The initial coverage of The Mueller Report seemed to spell an end to the cottage industry of Trump related podcasts that sprung up looking into the President’s Russian connections and ongoing investigations. The most vulnerable seemed the show named after the man himself, Mueller, She Wrote.

Hosted by three San Diego based comedians, Jordan Coburn, A.G. and Jaleesa Johnson, Mueller, She Wrote has followed the investigation in minute detail, with a weekly breakdown of investigations, and a playable fantasy Indictment League. Host AG says the show copped a wave of abuse following Barr’s summary letter.

“We got a lot of responses, tweets and messages [laughing and saying] mud on your face? Or don't you feel stupid for having this podcast for a year and a half that's dedicated to this farce witch hunt hoax?”

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But since then, the podcast has only grown in popularity and authority. The show is picking up subscribers to the free show, as well as paid subscribers to a new spin-off daily podcast. Recent guests have included former FBI director Andrew McCabe and Michael McFall, former ambassador to Russia under President Obama.

“I hate to use the word vindication because it indicates like a victory, and this country is in a very, very precarious and terrible position. And I hate to be seeming victorious when we're in such perilous times. But I feel like this administration and Trump supporters and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have been gaslighting us for a really long time. And now we have written proof in 450 pages that we weren't crazy. And so it's kind of like we've put the gas light out. And we’re now in a position where America is catching up …”

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Despite comedians at the helm, the podcast goes into incredible detail on the investigation and its many characters. Responding to the news that just three per cent of Americans have read The Mueller Report, the podcast has just released the first episode of a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the report.

“In 40 years when they do a documentary on the Mueller investigation, I wanted to be a part of that, because I just consider this so historical and so important. But how can I possibly do that? I'm not a journalist, I can't just go on MSNBC and get a show. I'm a comedian but I’m not known for political humour, so I can just go on stage and go around and be like Bill Maher.”

“But podcasting, that's accessible to anyone. Anyone who wants to start a podcast can start a podcast. So that's what we did. We had zero marketing budget, we just started with 50 bucks in my kitchen and went from there.”

The Dee Why RSL Club faces a disciplinary hearing following an investigation into allegations of irresponsible gambling practices after the death of one of its customers last year.

Gary Van Duinen died by suicide after an all-night gaming binge at the club that occurred after family members begged the club to help curb his gambling.

Liquor & Gaming NSW has completed an investigation and as a result lodged a formal disciplinary complaint with the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority (ILGA).

According to Mr Van Duinen’s mother, Joy, by the end of his life her son was commonly spending up to 13 hours at the club’s poker machines, and had destroyed both his business and his marriage.

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Both she and Mr Van Duinen’s estranged wife had asked the club for help.

The morning after he failed to return home from his gambling binge Mrs Van Duinen went to the club to look for him and ask for help. His body was later found in nearby bushland.

“They do not care. All they care about is the money going into their machines and into their coffers,” said Mrs Van Duinen of the Dee Why RSL Club yesterday.

“Clubs have become so much like casinos that you can’t tell the difference. Now they are building a new whopping great building down there from the tax breaks and the gambling money. It is not what clubs are meant to be.”

Since her son’s death a year ago this Friday, Mrs Van Duinen, has campaigned for poker machine reform in NSW, and she continues to call for the machines to be slowed down and for minimum bets in NSW to be reduced. Mr Van Duinen’s ashes will be scattered in a ceremony on Saturday.

The ILGA can impose formal reprimands, change, suspend or cancel the club’s licence or levy fines of up to $550,000 where it finds practices have encouraged the misuse and abuse of gambling.

Reverend Tim Costello, spokesman for The Alliance for Gambling Reform, said he believed the club should face significant punitive measures.

“I believe the Dee Why RSL’s conduct was so egregious towards the late Gary Van Duinen, that they should have their licence to operate a NSW pokies venue suspended for at least six months, plus suffer the maximum $500,000 fine,” he said.

“This is a cowboy industry which won’t ever learn to be responsible until the NSW government and the regulator breaks free from industry capture and proves they can fearlessly govern this industry to stamp out predatory behaviour.

“The DEE Why RSL is the 11th biggest pokies club in NSW with 494 machines and is currently embarking on a $100 million expansion after taking $44.4 million from gamblers in 2018 and declaring a profit of $11.5 million on total revenue of $67.4 million.

“It can well afford to suffer a multi-million reduction in its 2019 profit through a meaningful suspension of its pokies operating licence which would serve as a wake-up call to the industry."

Dee Why RSL and Clubs NSW declined to comment while the matter remained before ILGA.

Lifeline: 13 11 14

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There’s nothing quite like state politics to show how skin deep civility can really be.

And with NSW Labor leadership contenders Jodi McKay and Chris Minns assuring supporters they intended to have a clean contest, it’s fallen to others to take up the incessant sledging.

As best as CBD can tell, there is no clear frontrunner as yet.

With Minns having alienated key unions with his inaugural speech — saying they had too much influence in party affairs and prompting the meat workers to suggest they would be sharpening their knives — we thought McKay would be a sure thing to secure their backing.

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But an oddly worded missive from McKay seems to have put more than a few noses out of joint.

In the Friday email, McKay asked party members for their support because she was not a "career politician", never being in Young Labor or working as a staffer or union official.

(She may, according to O’Farrell-era energy minister Chris Hartcher, have even canvassed the possibility of running as a Liberal candidate in the seat of Port Stephens.)

But in an online ventilation worthy even of “devastatingly experienced” barrister Bridie Nolan, former Iemma government minister Cherie Burton took particular umbrage with McKay’s commentary about her past Labor involvement (or lack thereof).

“Like all of the rank and file I felt my contribution to the Labor movement was an important one, one I could be proud of,” Burton, a one-time Bob Carr staffer, wrote in Sunday night Facebook post.

“It is something I am supposed to now be ashamed of … I can no longer stand by and watch someone who has no history with the party attack and degrade the people who are a large part of the heartbeat of the Labor movement.”

And who should rush to agree but her former boss: Iemma himself.

“Ironic isn’t it … a vote in which branch members get to vote and she makes a pitch to them on the basis that she has no branch culture or history," he responded.

As one-time Labor powerbroker John Della Bosca put it: “Isn’t it a bit absurd that the (Labor HQ-backed) candidate is running an anti-party campaign presumably on advice from Sussex St.”

On the other hand, as one McKay supporter told us: “For a campaign pitching new leadership, there sure is a lot of bloody old faces lining up behind him”.

OPEN GOVERNMENT

Having been hit with a temporary exodus of staff before the federal election, Liberal faction man and PremierState lobbyist Michael Photios has been quick to find replacements.

(The outfit, most recently working for consumer credit outfit Zip Co and AMP Capital, lost former Labor advisor Sabina Husic and a number of other staff earlier this year.)

Now, Photios has recruited Arts Minister Don Harwin’s deputy chief of staff Mark Jones — who was also his senior resources advisor when he was energy minister — to his influential lobby shop.

We hear Jones, who having worked for one of the Berejiklian government’s most senior ministers is exceedingly well-connected, decided to jump ship early last week.

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But awkwardly, he’s yet to walk from the 52 Martin Place offices where he remains.

He wasn’t due to leave until later this week, despite chiefs-of-staff being informed on Monday, but that was fast-tracked to last night after our calls.

The move has apparently left Harwin and his chief-of-staff Andrew Kirk fuming.

We presume Photios will take longer to replace Husic, given recent state and federal losses haven’t exactly created a pressing need for a new Labor-aligned spinner.

LOCAL MATTERS

It was with a wry smile we recalled former Labor MP Matt Brown was only last year trying to play kingmaker in his old seat of Kiama, boasting to colleagues that he was “playing the chess pieces” in his attempt to install a mate to run against Families Minister Gareth Ward.

Brown’s rise in Macquarie Street came to an abrupt halt three days after his elevation to police minister in 2008 when he was allegedly caught simulating a sex act on then Labor MP Noreen Hay.

Things haven’t gone well for Brown, who now sits on Kiama Council, since then.

He was arrested at the Townsville casino in November and pleaded guilty to possession of a glass pipe and a packet of ice, which he claimed to have found “on the floor”.

Now we can report Kiama Council has, unsurprisingly, found his conduct “inappropriate” and barred him from attending any further council conferences (the reason he was in Townsville).

But the Office of Local Government — now in the realm of Ward’s close friend Local Government Minister Shelley Hancock — is reviewing the evidence to determine whether he should face further penalties, including losing his stipend or even being suspended.

TAKING A BAUER?

Bauer Australia boss Paul Dykzeul has held the top job at the magazine house since 2017. With the struggling Women’s Weekly publisher due to make a major announcement today, could speculation Dykzeul will leave be right? Bauer was not forthcoming last night.

Putting an honest-to-goodness lightsaber in your hands and making interactive characters from a galaxy far, far away appear in your lounge room as holograms, Lenovo's Star Wars: Jedi challenges headset is great way to pass the time while you wait for the new movie later this year.

These headsets were originally released almost two years ago, but they now represent a much better value for Star Wars fans (and especially kids). Not only have they shed $300 off the price, currently coming in at $99 each, but the app powering the experience has seen some substantial content updates.

The first thing you'll notice about the package is that the included lightsaber is very cool. It's heavier and more authentically detailed than I expected, and if it wasn't for the light-up rubberised nubbin at the end (necessary for tracking in AR), you'd think it was a collectible to put on your shelf.

The visor itself is an ingeniously simple device, though I was a little nervous putting a $2000 phone into it. There's a stiff plastic case that you snap your device into, after you've set up the app, and then you attach a cable to the phone and put the whole drawer into the headset. Unlike phone-based VR you won't be face-to-face with your device's display, instead a mirror reflects images onto the visor so you see the blue-tinged holograms projected into your real-world surroundings.

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Setup can take some time to work out, what with pairing the lightsaber by bluetooth and finding enough clear floor for it all to work, but once it's ready you get a legitimately magical moment. Holding the lightsaber up between yourself and the included beacon light that you set on the floor, you hit a button and the blade shoots out from the hilt with an electric krsshhhh straight from the films (sound comes from your phone's speakers, or earbuds).

I don't want to oversell what you're getting here. The graphics are simple, and so dull that you really need to play at night or with all the curtains drawn. But swinging a legit lightsaber around your house and having it look (and sound!) like you're hitting stuff is brilliant.

When fighting waves of droids you can reflect blaster bolts with an impressive degree of accuracy to take them out, or wait until they come close and slash. You'll also have to duel against other saber-users like Darth Maul, but you can't just swing away at them. Indicators appear to let you know when you need to block, dodge or strike, and it's a lot of fun even though it's essentially Simon Says with Sith Lords.

The main mode is filled with menus that are a bit clumsy to navigate, but it's essentially a series of scenarios of increasing difficulty, plus a second campaign added after launch that's themed after The Last Jedi. A Lenovo rep told me more content was on the cards going forward, but wouldn't confirm whether a Rise of Skywalker campaign was planned.

The most exciting update since the headsets launched is that you can now wield your lightsaber against a friend. Each player needs his or her own phone, lightsaber and beacon to play, and you need to be on the same Wi-Fi, but with that sorted it works great. The game choreographs the fights and lets each player know where they should be striking or how they should be blocking, and even though you're not physically hitting each other with anything the glow and clash of the two lightsabers can make the battles feel intense.

Outside of swordplay, there are two additional, slower-paced modes that you can play on the floor. The first is a strategy game that sees you commanding troops on the battlefield, while the second is an authentic (and complicated!) version of Dejarik; the holographic chess game that R2D2 plays against Chewie.

What's most impressive about the whole package is how true it is to all manner of Star Wars properties. There are characters from the original trilogy, prequels and latest films, as well as the Clone Wars and Rebels TV shows, and having them show up as enemies or allies is always a treat. Of course, even if you're not a Star Wars buff, jumping around your lounge room and swinging a laser sword at robots can still be very satisfying.

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From a town that defined Australia in the estimation of poet Henry Lawson, to a town that shamed it, the north-western NSW town of Bourke is on a path to redemption.

Six years ago Bourke topped the state in six out of eight major crime categories, and the Herald reported that it was more dangerous than any country on earth when its per capita crime rate was compared with United Nations data.

These days towns from all over Australia are asking its leaders for advice on how to reduce incarceration rates and improve the prospects of their Aboriginal inhabitants.

It has been an interesting journey from the lowpoint of 2013.

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"That was a stark reality check, finding out how we're being perceived by the broader community in Australia," Indigenous leader Alistair Ferguson said.

"It was a case of just, something was way overdue. We had to take drastic measures."

Mr Ferguson knew instinctively that those drastic measures would have to come from the community itself.

It was not due to lack of funding that the Darling River town found itself in the situation it was in. Hundreds of millions of dollars had been poured into addressing social disadvantage in the Aboriginal population.

But relationships with the service providers, individuals and the police force were marked by mutual mistrust and cynicism. Bourke needed a new approach.

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So in 2013 Aboriginal leaders including Mr Ferguson partnered with Just Reinvest NSW, an independent group that advocates for the reallocation of public funds from prisons to early intervention programs, and started at the bottom.

From that time, the Aboriginal community devised its own programs and all 27 tribal groups in the area had input through representation on a new Aboriginal Tribal Council.

Their relationship with the police and other agencies was reset, and began again in a spirit of goodwill.

Instead of focusing on law and order, efforts were concentrated on addressing the underlying causes of crime.

"It’s the opposite of a top down approach," Just Reinvest NSW chairwoman Sarah Hopkins said.

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"We’re not coming in with a magic bullet. It’s the community looking at a whole-of-life course approach to addressing juvenile and adult offending."

An impact assessment by KPMG last year found the new approach had saved $3.1 million in 2017 alone, mostly in relation to the justice system but also costs such as crisis payments and health care.

There was a 23 per cent reduction in domestic violence incidents reported to police, a 42 per cent reduction in the number of days spent in custody for adults and an 84 per cent increase in the completion rate of VET courses.

NSW Health Minister and designated "champion" for Bourke Brad Hazzard said community-led models always had the best chance of success.

"There are already successes including massive reductions in domestic violence, but it's also provided the glue for the community to come together," Mr Hazzard said.

Some of the initiatives were very simple. The number of people arrested for driving offences decreased sharply following the introduction of a learner driver program.

NSW Police Commander Greg Moore said although crime rates were still high there had been significant reductions in offences such as domestic violence and homicide.

Instead of waiting for a crisis, officers visited known perpetrators of domestic violence and talked to them about triggers, which might prompt the men to stick to mid-strength beer or spend the night away from their partner on nights they drank.

"What’s uncle doing here?" the men asked in the early days. "Uncle is here because we’re worried about you because every Thursday night you have a skinful and put your partner in hospital," Superintendent Moore replied.

Police also became involved in employment strategies for young people to prevent the idleness that sometimes led to crime. An abattoir that opened in January provided 82 jobs to the region, some of them going to young men whose parents and grandparents had never worked.

"A lot of kids are coming from families where there’s been no history of employment for generations. That’s a cycle we wanted to break," Superintendent Moore said.

Nobody pretends that all problems are solved. The number of drug and alcohol-related hospital admissions has increased. High school attendance remains low. Support within the community is not unanimous.

But Mr Ferguson said it feels for the first time like cultural change is afoot.

"We’ve gone from being the most dangerous town, which didn’t go down too well, and managed to turn that into a positive and make our town one of the safest in the world."

Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and best-selling author known for embedding himself in the worlds he wrote about, died on Monday in Washington. He was 60.

His wife, Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, said he had collapsed while walking in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and was declared dead at George Washington University Hospital. The cause has not yet been determined, she said.

Horwitz was on the staff of The Wall Street Journal when he won the 1995 Pulitzer for national reporting for his vivid accounts of grim working conditions in low-wage jobs, including those at garbage recycling and poultry processing plants. He later wrote for The New Yorker on the Middle East before amplifying his brand of participatory journalism in nonfiction books.

His immersion in the subculture of battlefield re-enactors led in 1998 to Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War, which was a New York Times best seller.

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He followed that with another Times bestseller, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (2002), in which he retraced the Pacific voyages of explorer James Cook; A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008), a revisionist view that plays down the significance of the Pilgrims; and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (2011).

His latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, published this month, retraces the antebellum meanderings of Frederick Law Olmsted, whose dispatches for The Times, long before he gained fame for designing Central Park and other urban landscapes, sought to fathom the soul of the slaveholding states and find common ground among Americans of good will.

Horwitz, who lived in West Tisbury on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, was scheduled to read from Spying on the South on Tuesday night at Politics and Prose, a popular book store in Washington.

"Tony created his own unique genre of history and journalism in book after book," David William Blight, a professor of American history at Yale and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, said in an email. "His search for Olmsted's journey was Tony's own brilliant mirror held up to all of us about the awful social and political sicknesses we face now as Olmsted's epic journey showed the same for the South and the road to the Civil War."

Anthony Lander Horwitz was born June 9, 1958, in Washington, the son of Dr. Norman Horwitz, a neurosurgeon, and Elinor (Lander) Horwitz, a writer. Norman Horwitz was part of the team that operated successfully in 1981 on Officer Thomas Delahanty, who was shot in the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.

When he was six, Tony learned that his 101-year-old great-grandfather, an immigrant from czarist Russia, had become an American Civil War buff. So did Tony's father, and Tony became one, too. His Confederates in the Attic, he wrote, portrayed the war as a Rorschach test of "all sorts of unresolved strife: over race, sovereignty, the sanctity of historic landscapes and who should interpret the past."

After graduating from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, Tony Horwitz graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in history and earned a master's from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1983. He was later a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard and president of the Society of American Historians.

Horwitz turned to newspaper reporting after a stint as a union organizer in Mississippi. He was an education reporter for The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel in Indiana from 1983 to 1984 and a general reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia from 1985 to 1987 before joining The Wall Street Journal in 1990 as a foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East.

He and Brooks won the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award in 1990 for their coverage of the Persian Gulf war.

He returned to the United States in 1993 and reported on workplace issues while assigned to The Journal's Pittsburgh bureau.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by their sons, Nathaniel and Bizu; his mother; his sister, Erica; and his brother, Joshua.

"His journalism was always participatory, and he took readers along for the ride," Joel Achenbach, a reporter for The Washington Post, said by email Tuesday. "He climbed masts on sailing ships, rode mules, marched with Confederate re-enactors, and ventured into dive bars in the remote crossroads of America."

Horwitz was driven by an antic energy and unquenchable curiosity. While reporting in the Middle East, he lay down on a battlefield to block Iraqi earthmovers from burying Iranian soldiers in mass graves so that their comrades might claim the bodies, financial journalist Michael Lewis recalled.

He endured a sweat lodge in the Pacific for four hours, all the while feeling as if he were being cooked alive, because, he told an interviewer at Ohio State University in 2009, "I think it's the sickness of writing that however horrible the experience is, some little voice inside is saying, 'Yeah, but this is going to be a great story.'"

"He was easily bored with conventional explanations," Lewis said, "and his restlessness led him to places a normal person wouldn't get to."

Horwitz was a gifted interviewer. In Confederates in the Attic,"he engaged the only living Confederate widow at the time in a conversation about the future, in which she predicted, "If it's like it usually been bein', it won't be so good." And for his latest book, following in Olmsted's footsteps, he got "the drift of things" in the South by cultivating sources in after-hours interviews in dive bars from the Potomac River to the Rio Grande.

Horwitz wrote in The Times last month: "Last week I saw my cardiologist. He told me I drink too much."

Horwitz acknowledged his occupational hazard, but made a case for what he called bar-stool democracy. His sojourn in the South, he said, had him discarding stereotypes and seeing blue-collar conservatives as "the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads."

He expressed the hope that they would remember him not as "one of those 'coastal elites' dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America," he wrote, but "rather, as that guy from 'up north' who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down."

The New York Times

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An Australian who was rescued after he was stranded unconscious on Mount Everest has been identified as Gilian Lee.

Mr Lee's against-the-odds survival comes amid a horror climbing season, with 11 mountaineers reported dead or missing so far during the northern hemisphere spring.

Few details have emerged since news first broke of the miraculous rescue, which involved a yak and a team of Tibetan alpine specialists who were on the mountain doing repair work.

The team stumbled across Mr Lee at an altitude of 7500 metres on the northern slopes of the mountain on Wednesday last week.

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Facebook posts from an account in Mr Lee's name indicate he was attempting to climb Everest without oxygen tanks.

The day before he was rescued, Mr Lee posted on Twitter that he'd had a "rough night" at Camp One, a waypoint on the path to the top of the mountain located at an elevation of about 6000 metres, due to a persistent chest infection.

Mr Lee's rescuers used a yak to drag him to the safety of base camp, where people embark on the trip to the summit. The Canberra man was reportedly taken to a hospital in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, where his condition has improved according to China Daily.

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has refused to provide any other details about his dramatic survival story, citing privacy reasons.

'Every day of delay is a nightmare'

Mr Lee had documented his frustrations in the lead up to his Everest climb on social media throughout May.

"Plans getting worse by the day," Mr Lee wrote on Facebook on May 9. "Lot of wind at the summit from the south side direction."

He wrote that he was based at the Chinese Base Camp, which is less popular than the base camp on the Nepalese side, but that the Chinese rope fixing team who prepare the path for climbers had not arrived.

"Every day of delay is a nightmare," Mr Lee wrote.

And he spoke about the particular challenges of trying to prepare for an Everest ascent without using oxygen cylinders. Mr Lee said that without being able to climb higher than Camp One, he was unsure about acclimatising to the low oxygen levels further up the mountain.

"The science for acclimatisation for non-O2 [oxygen cylinder climbing] is not as well known. Does one really need to hit high high? Last year a higher point worked OK. It's all out of my hands … horrible feeling," Mr Lee concluded.

Climbing without oxygen appeared important for Mr Lee. When a friend queried his decision on Facebook, Mr Lee said that if he were climbing with oxygen "I might as well chop 50 per cent of the mountain height off."

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He said he had summitted another extremely high peak, Manaslu, which is the eighth highest mountain in the world and also in Nepal, without oxygen tanks.

A day earlier, Mr Lee had been more optimistic, writing that his "support and sherpa team are looking strong and committed."

In a post on his blog, he described climbing Everest as "unfinished business" because of a failed attempt that he blamed on "being horrendously let down by the expedition company", which he called an inexperienced, Indian-run company.

"I have put a lot of pressure onto myself. I am running out of $$ to keep chasing this dream," Mr Lee wrote.

"I will never take supplemental O2, as it is just not me. It is like asking Alex Honnold to use a rope in his monumental solo climb up El Capitan. Defeats the purpose of being there in the first place in my opinion. This will be the last throw of the dice."

A mountain under strain

The heavy death toll from this year's climbing season has put the issue of overcrowding on the iconic mountain back in the spotlight.

Climbers have shared photos taken just below the summit, showing them queued up in a tight column, waiting for their moment to push for the summit.

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Canadian adventurer and filmmaker Elia Saikaly said he was unlikely to ever return after the chaos he witnessed as he made the summit last Thursday.

Mr Saikaly returned from his eighth Everest expedition with a sense of abhorrence, saying he had watched people clamber over dead bodies.

"I cannot believe what I saw up there. Death. Carnage. Chaos. Lineups. Dead bodies on the route and in tents at camp 4," he posted on social media after making it safely back to base camp.

"People who I tried to turn back who ended up dying. People being dragged down. Walking over bodies."

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He later told the Ottawa Citizen he was unlikely to make another journey to the summit.

"It's a really messed up thing to be in a position where you have to walk over a dead body," he said. "Do I think I'll go back? I don't think so. Not after this season. It was pretty horrific."

American doctor Ed Dohring, who made the summit a few days ago, told the New York Times it was "like a zoo" up there, with climbers jostling to take selfies and lined up chest to chest.

"It was scary," he said, describing how, like Mr Saikaly, he had to step around the body of a woman who'd just died.

Nepal's tourism authority has responded to the cluster of deaths by saying overcrowding is not solely the problem.

The authority's director general, Dandu Raj Ghimire, said other factors were involved including only very brief windows of fine weather during which climbers could push for the summit.

Other veteran climbers have also pointed to the inexperience of some climbers and the pursuit of profits by climbing companies.

AAP with Nick Bonyhady

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