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Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
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Speaker 2: Good afternoon, this is Tamsin Rose and we've made it to Friday, which means it's time for the weekly debrief, where we catch up on the stories everyone's been talking about this week and we look at where they're heading next. This week, we've heard hours of evidence from Beau Lamar Condon. He's the former police officer accused of killing his ex-boyfriend, Jesse Baird, and his new partner, Luke Davies. He's pleaded not guilty.
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Speaker 3: Good morning, Pat Cummins has hit back at Usman Khawaja's claims about the 2018 sandpaper ball tampering scandal.
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Speaker 2: And the boys are fighting. Sandpapergate is back in the headlines, eight years after the scandal ripped through the cricketing world. We're getting into the he said, he said of it all. But first, here are your headlines for Friday, November 13th. Victoria Police has announced it will not charge the four AFL players caught up in the Sydney Swans after-party scandal after they finalised their investigation. Sydney players Isaac Heaney, Chad Warner and James Jordan, and now former Swan Nick Blakey, had been under investigation since August after three women made reports of sexual assault to police. Victoria Police said, Following a thorough investigation and based on legal advice, Victoria Police will not proceed with criminal charges due to insufficient evidence. The players were reportedly partying with adult entertainers in a room at the Pullman Hotel in East Melbourne on August 17. Civil matter is ongoing. Australia is improving its system designed to prevent criminals jumping borders and working with children. The government has announced the next phase of the national database which would harmonise the working with children's checks across states, called the National Continuous Checking Capability. It comes after all jurisdictions agreed in 2025 to share working with children check material and criminal histories, making it far harder for known offenders to jump states and to continue working with kids. The database will track the criminal history of all Australians who hold working with children checks, in near-to-real time. Shares in global tech giant Nvidia have dropped further following the news that chief executive Jensen Huang had stepped down after revelations of extramarital affairs, including one involving a suspected Chinese spy. His resignation leaves the artificial intelligence industry without one of its biggest champions and clouds the future of the chipmaker that he built into an AI powerhouse. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will now take over as Interim Chief Executive as the company looks for a permanent successor. Shares in the US fell more than 14% when trading kicked off on Thursday local time before recovering to a decline of around 5%. If you'd like to know more about this story, we covered it extensively in this morning's episode. It's been a tough day for Microsoft users with key tools including Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams down around the world due to a disruption. Microsoft said a portion of servers were returning to service on Friday afternoon and a streamlined recovery process was underway to end the global outage. And a giant and very smelly flower is about to bloom in Geelong near Melbourne. The flower is nicknamed peat, which is a better name than corpse flower, the name it gets from its stench. Despite people having compared it to the smell of a dead possum, rotting cheese and fermenting cabbage, when it last bloomed in 2024, thousands of people came to visit. Peat stands at 1.5 metres tall in a climate-controlled greenhouse at the Geelong Botanic Gardens. Those are the headlines and now it's time for the weekly debrief where we go behind a few of this week's biggest stories. Today we're looking back at a week of evidence given by Beau Lamar Condon in the murder trial of Jesse Baird and Luke Davies. But first.
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Speaker 1: Well, Usman Khawaja has bunkered down this morning cancelling all planned media interviews, including here on today, as the backlash over his explosive tell-all memoir intensifies.
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Speaker 2: It's been a big week for cricket and sandpaper fans. Chances are, even if you know nothing about the sport other than it's the game that dominates TV screens all summer long, you've seen some of the names and allegations flying around. So we're here today to get you up to speed on the whole thing. And it's best to start by turning back the clocks to March of 2018. That's when TV cameras caught Australia's opening batsman Cameron Bancroft using a piece of sandpaper to rough up one side of a cricket ball during a test match in South Africa. The reason that's such a big deal was that it's an illegal modification to the ball, designed to create an aerodynamic imbalance making the ball reverse swing, which they thought would help them win. This blew up right around the world. Then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called it a disgrace and a bitter blow to the pride of our country.
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Speaker 4: We all woke up this morning shocked and bitterly disappointed by the news from South Africa. It seemed completely beyond belief that the Australian cricket team had been involved in cheating. After all, our cricketers.
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Speaker 4: Are role models and cricket is synonymous with fair play.
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Speaker 2: In the wake of the scandal, an initial Cricket Australia investigation found that Vice-Captain David Warner was the main architect of the plan and Captain Steve Smith had knowledge of it and allowed it to happen. They were each banned by Cricket Australia from international and domestic cricket for 12 months. Warner was also permanently barred from ever holding a leadership role in Australian cricket. Bancroft received a nine-month suspension and the head coach, Darren Lehman, resigned from his position. Australian cricket has been rebuilding its standings in the
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international arena ever since, which by expert opinions they have, until perhaps now. Aussie cricket star Usman Khawaja retired from international test cricket in January of this year. And then it seems he got to writing. His autobiography was just released and he's thrown the team in it.
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Speaker 3: To say, yes, this was happening. And even though that one person did it or the captain knew about it and David Warner always took the heat too for it, that it wasn't just them, that we were all involved in it as a team, as a squad.
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Speaker 2: He's claimed that the entire touring party and the team knew about ball tampering, including during a previous test, contradicting those initial findings that only a select few had been aware. And then Warner backed him up, breaking his silence on the whole thing. And now, this morning, Pat Cummins, who's now the Australian captain, called a press conference that lasted.
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Speaker 3: For more than an hour.
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Speaker 2: He says that Khawaja's claims that the entire team knew what was going on at the time was complete and utter nonsense.
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Speaker 1: When he says we all knew, if by that he means that we knew sandpaper was going out in the field, he's 100% wrong. I've said that consistently for the last eight years.
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Speaker 2: He insisted he had no knowledge of the ball tampering plot in South Africa, and now he said he doesn't want to discuss it further, thinks it's time to let the sandpaper scandal die. But something tells me that's unlikely.
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Speaker 1: Bolimar Condon has told the Supreme Court he wasn't stalking Jesse Baird, despite hanging around.
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Speaker 2: His home and neighbourhood in the months after their breakup. Bolimar Condon has spent the week in the witness box. The 31-year-old former New South Wales police officer is accused of murdering his ex-partner, 26-year-old TV presenter Jesse Baird, and Baird's new boyfriend, Luke Davies, a 29-year-old Qantas flight attendant, at Baird's Terrace in the Sydney suburb of Paddington in February of 2024. The couple's bodies were later found hidden in surfboard bags on a rural property about 200km from Sydney. Lamar Condon has pleaded not guilty. He says both men died in separate struggles over his police-issued pistol. He claimed Baird lunged at him with a knife. The Crown has spent this week trying to pull that story apart. Lamar Condon has told the court he was suicidal in the months before the deaths. On Monday, prosecutor Brett Hatfield SC put to him, you weren't suicidal, you were homicidal. Lamar Condon had told the court he'd taken his gun because he was suicidal. When Hatfield suggested he'd executed Baird with a second shot, he replied, I never execute Jesse Baird. Then on Thursday, the court heard about a 1,600 word message Lamar Condon had a friend send to Baird from her own Instagram account after the pair broke up in November of 2023. He claimed he had a cancerous tumour growing in his left shoulder and that worst-case scenario could see his arm amputated. Lamar Condon told the jury a naturopath in Bondi Junction had told him he had a sporadic form of cancer. He said he skipped the recommended biopsy in favour of cannabis oil injections he bought online, but he admitted parts of the message weren't true. Hatfield asked him, You were so desperate to get back with him that you were prepared to say or do anything at this stage? Lamar Condon said, I don't agree with that. Hatfield also put to him, your unrequited love turned into an obsession, didn't it? He replied, that's not the case. The court heard the pair dated from late 2022 until April 2023. Lamar Condon claims they got back together that September. In November 2023, he went through Baird's phone and found messages showing Baird was seeing another man. He deleted messages and blocked the man. He said he wasn't angry, just kind of frustrated. When Hatfield accused him of gaslighting Baird, he said you could say that. He also admitted pouring water in the petrol tank of Baird's ute because he suspected he'd scratched the rims of his Tesla. The jury was shown a draft message from that period as well, Telling Baird he wouldn't exist to him, Lamar Condon said he only meant he would ignore Baird in public, not that he wanted to harm him. He told the court that by January 2024, a month before the deaths, he knew he had to move on. Lamar Condon handed himself to police a few days after the men's deaths and later led them to where the bodies were buried behind a If you or anyone you know needs to speak with an expert, please contact your GP or in Australia, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or 1 800 RESPECT, the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service. We'll provide more help in the show notes. That's all for now. If you have a topic you'd like us to discuss, our inbox is always open. We're at the quickie at mamamia.com.au and make sure to rate and review us in your favourite podcast app. It helps other people find us. Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.