Your noon Briefing: Packer in Barangaroo views win

Your noon 2-minute digest of the day’s top stories and must-reads.

Hello readers. It’s a win for James Packer and Crown Resorts in the courts, and CBA joins ANZ in allowing customers to use Apple Pay.

DAILY TELEGRAPH - Pictured is the Barangaroo development from Darling Island in Pyrmont today. Picture: Tim Hunter.

Packer’s Barangaroo view blue coup

Billionaire James Packer’s plans for an iconic casino, hotel and apartment tower at Sydney’s harbourside Barangaroo have received a major boost with his Crown Resorts winning a long running court battle against the authority overseeing the area. Crown Resorts and developer Lendlease had gone to court seeking to ensure that their sightlines from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Sydney Opera House were maintained and argued that the authority had not acted in good faith in negotiations.

-

STRICT EMBARGO - NO ONLINE BEFORE 7AM, 12TH DECEMBER, 2018.The Commonwealth Bank has rolled out Apple Pay allowing customers to buy using their Apple device. Source: Supplied.

CBA caves to Apple Pay

Commonwealth Bank has become the second major Australian bank to allow its customers access to Apple Pay, buckling to feedback that suggested strong demand for it. CBA joins ANZ in opening the door to Apple Pay, which has 5,200 banking partners worldwide.

-

Maria Radina and Vladimir Putin

Spies like US

As a flame-haired young Russian woman, Maria Butina was always a strange fit for the blokey world of the National Rifle Association and the conservative Republican circles she moved in. But she was the girlfriend of a longstanding Republican operative and she seemed to those who met her to be genuine in her passion for gun rights and for Donald Trump’s political ambitions. Now Ms Butina, 30, finally admitted that there was nothing genuine about her. She was, in fact, a Russian spy.

-

Indonesian protesters shout slogans as they hold a rally outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta on November 26, 2018. - About hundreds of protesters held a rally against the plan to move Australian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (Photo by ADEK BERRY / AFP)

The long read: Jakarta’s Jerusalem jitters

Amanda Hodge considers why Indonesia feels obliged to resist any shift in Australia’s policy on the Israeli capital.

-

Comment of the day

“I’m an atheist but I pay for my grandchildren to go to a religious school. The public schools are dangerously left wing these days. ‘Safe schools’ and the climate change propaganda left me no choice.”

John, in response to ‘Protect our faith, multicultural voters warn Bill Shorten’.