The leadership of the New South Wales Labor Party has approved electricity privatisation, against the wishes of most delegates to the Labor Party conference, and has threatened to expel any Labor Party MP who votes against it.

Delegates to the NSW Labor state conference voted against privatisation, by 702 votes to 107.

The legislation would make it possible for a generator's power stations to be sold. Previously the Premier had promised only 50-year leases on power stations.

Premier Morris Iemma warned that any Labor MP who 'crosses the floor' and votes against the legislation could face expulsion from the party.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian)

 

Labor is taking a harsher line on refugees than the Howard Government, according to an analysis of decisions made by the new Minister for Immigration.

An analysis of the exercise of ministerial discretion by the Immigration Minister, Senator Chris Evans, shows that he has rejected 97.6 percent of applications since coming to power.

This is the highest rate of rejection since 2001.

The handling of applications for ministerial discretion has been sped up, with 41 rejections being issued in five weeks.

Most of those rejected fear death if they're returned to their countries of origin, and several cases involve families that will be split up if people are deported.

According to Pamela Curr from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, the applications that Senator Evans has rejected include an African woman who had been kidnapped and sent as a slave to the Middle East. She escaped from her abusive owners after they took her with them on holiday to Australia.

"This case just shattered us all" Ms Curr said.

"The people making these decisions are old immigration department officers, the same kind of people who handled Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon. They are still there and they are just saying no."

(Source: crikey.com.au)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"Greedy fucking jew."

The New South Wales Liberal party's then-state campaign manager Susan Chandler, describing a colleage.

 

A Catholic school allowed a brother to teach for at least seven years after being told of his sexual abuse of students.

John William Chute, also known as Brother Kostka, is to be sentenced for 19 counts of committing an indecent act with a child, involving six students of Marist College in Canberra.

One of the boys told told his parents of the abuse in 1986. They then reported their concerns to the headmaster of the school.

Despite this, Chute taught for a further seven years at the school before retiring.

It has been alleged that Marist College was told of the abuse as early as the 1970s.

(Source: news.com.au)

 

Teenagers are increasingly stressed, and prone to adult worries including not being able to afford a house, and not feeling safe in their homes, according to a new survey.

The Dolly Youth Monitor survey of 7000 teenagers found that teenagers' top worries were "home affordability" (38 percent), "getting a job" (43 percent), "being successful" (44 percent) and "needing to make money" (48 percent).

Three in four girls reported not feeling safe in their own neighbourhoods, while one in three felt unsafe in their own homes at night.

The project found that more teenagers are stressed than the last survey in 1999 (40percent, compared to 33 percent in 1999).

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

President Bush has claimed that a main cause of rising food prices is consumers in the Third World.

Mr Bush said that increasing prosperity in countries like India and China was good, because "you'll be selling products in the countries, you know, big countries perhaps, and it's hard to sell products into countries that aren't prosperous."

However he added that "when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up."

Total foodgrain consumption - wheat, rice, and all coarse grains like rye, barley etc - by the average person in the US is over five times that of the average Indian, according to figures released by the US Department of Agriculture for 2007.

(Source: The Times of India)

 

An American man who used marijuana with medical approval was denied a liver transport because of it, and has died.

Hepatitis C sufferer Timothy Garon, 56, was authorised by his doctor to use marijuana to alleviate nausea and abdominal pain and to stimulate his appetite. This is legal under state law in Garon's home state of Washington and several other states, but illegal under federal law.

However the University of Washington Medical Center automatically denied him a spot on the liver transplant list, because of his use of 'illicit substances.'

(Source: Associated Press)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"2008 will be difficult and dangerous and bloody, and the Australian nation needs to prepare itself for further losses in the year ahead."

Kevin Rudd, speaking about the war in Afghanistan.

 

Quote of the Moment:

"You're promoted by who you pray with."

Retired US Air Force officer Mikey Weinstein, who says that he has been contacted by more than 5,500 service members or their families about incidents of religious discrimination. Incidents include a sergeant who told a lower-ranking soldier that he would 'bust him in the mouth' for not believing in God.

 

Two Aboriginals froze to death last winter in Kalgoorlie and more will die this year if emergency housing is not built, a local doctor has warned the Federal Government.

Homelessness among Aborigines is a serious problem in the West Australian mining town, where rents have been driven up by the resources boom and there is a critical lack of public housing, said Christine Jeffries-Stokes, a Kalgoorlie pediatrician.

Some indigenous people sleep rough in the bush or in Boulder Camp, a string of tin sheds and a tap on the edge of the mining town.

"It's not safe and it's not fit for humans," Dr Jeffries-Stokes said of the filthy conditions. "People are dying of the cold and catching pneumonia and other infections. In the winter we often have two or three (funerals) a week. You're talking about a population of about 3000 people, so that's an awful lot of funerals."

(Source: The Age)

 

CIA agents trying to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods prohibited under international law, according to the US Justice Department.

A letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress in March makes a distinction between acts "undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack" and those undertaken "for the purpose of humiliation or abuse."

Scott Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University, said that "what they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offence."

(Source: The Age).

 

Hundreds of mentally ill patients will be forced to quit smoking under new regulations.

Mental health hospitals are moving to ban smoking outdoors as well as indoors.

The Mental Health Co-ordinating Council said in a submission that nicotine withdrawal imposed extra stress on very sick patients.

"It targets a particularly vulnerable section of the community with bans that the Government will not impose on the larger community," the submission said. "It imposes a disproportionate level of suffering on those who are already suffering enough."

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

A British court has ruled that banks have been charging overly high penalty fees.

In a case between the British Office of Fair Trading and eight banks, the High Court ruled this week that all such fees must be in line with the cost to the bank of the customers' error.

Customers in Australia can be penalised up to $50 by banks for relatively minor transgressions, such as attempting to deposit a cheque which bounces.

The Consumer Action Law Centre has estimated these penalties can be between 64 and 92 times the true cost to the bank.

Customers in Britain have been refunded more than 500 million pounds (1 billion Australian dollars) from contesting these fees and the High Court case ultimately may mean banks will be forced to refund an estimated 9 billion pounds more.

Gordon Renouf from the consumer group Choice described it as "a huge win for UK bank customers."

However he said that no similar case has been tried here because Australian banks were less willing to co-operate in a test case.

"In Australia it has been left to individual consumers to take on the banks by themselves which is a ridiculous David-and-Goliath-style situation" he said.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

The federal government has awarded a $60,000 contract to a company owned by a Minister's adviser - without any competitive tendering process.

The contract to manage the media at the 2020 Summit was awarded to CMAX Communications. Australian Securities and Investment Commission records show that the company is wholly owned by Christian Taubenschlag, the media adviser of Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon. The company is run by his wife Tara.

(Source: The Age)

 

Companies would be allowed to intercept employees' emails without their consent under legislation proposed by the federal government.

Attorney-General, Robert McClelland says that he is considering the legislation, on the grounds that it would curb attacks from hackers and terrorists.

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that "I promise we are not interested in the email you send out about who did what at the Christmas party."

However Dale Clapperton of Electronic Frontiers Australia claimed that "a network supervisor in a company or local government authority may not have the same honourable intentions."

Asha Rao, an information security expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, said the policy was little more than a Band-Aid to a more pervasive problem. "Basically, these companies need to get their information systems up to scratch," said Dr Rao. "I'm worried that this law removes the onus from companies to have up-to-date security systems."

Another leading information technology expert, who asked to remain anonymous because he had work pending with the Government on cyber-security, said that viruses and other threats to computer security are "growing faster than anyone can catch them." He added that "these sectors need to build new systems that are independent of the internet."

However, he said, "that's going to cost a lot of money".

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

Melbourne Lord Mayor John So appeared in advertisements costing a total of $800,000 of public money over three years.

The council paid for a series of television ads between 2005 and 2007, along with weekly ads in local newspapers and magazines published by a former colleague of the Lord Mayor.

The Lord Mayor claims that he thought many of them were free because they were "community announcements" promoting Melbourne.

(Source: The Age)

 

A government enquiry has heard that Aboriginal children were used as 'guinea pigs' in medical experiments.

Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance told a Senate enquiry that the Australian public did not know the full extent of what happened to some children who were taken from their parents and institutionalised under removal policies.

She also said that efforts to obtain records that support the claims, such as that children were injected with serums to gauge their reaction to the medication, had been hampered.

"These are the things that have not been spoken about," Ms Mills told the inquiry. "As well as being taken away, they were used...There are a lot of things that Australia does not know about."

Outside the inquiry, Ms Mills said her uncle had been a medical orderly at the Kahlin Compound in Darwin. She said he told her that children were used as "guinea pigs" for leprosy treatments in about the 1920s.

"He said it made our people very, very ill...the treatment almost killed them," she said.

"It was a common experience and a common practice...People are very inhibited to speak about their experience and it is not a nice subject...I don't want them to be shamed."

At least one similar experiment was carried out in the United States. Up until 1972, the 'Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male' involved withholding treatment for syphilis from 399 black men in order to study the progress of the disease. By the end of the study, nearly half of the men had died of syphilis or related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

(Source: The Age, Wikipedia)

 

The Iraqi government says that the United States has renewed a contract with a company whose employees were responsible for an unprovoked massacre.

The US State Department has renewed its contract with the Blackwater firm. The Iraqi government says they were not consulted.

The Iraqi government claims that Blackwater employees shot and killed 17 people, including women and children, on September 16 at Baghdad's Nusoor Square.

Survivors and victims' family members allege Blackwater guards started shooting without provocation. Blackwater says armed insurgents attacked its employees.

An Iraqi investigation accused the guards of committing "premeditated murder." The FBI also is investigating.

Under a provision put in place early during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Blackwater and similar companies operating in Iraq have total immunity from Iraqi law.

Although Blackwater is officially a security firm and its employees officially guards, their role is closer to soldiers. Their website lists job opportunities including "defensive marksman", and jobs for "former U.S. Military Personnel with a minimum of 8 years active duty. Service must have included a significant amount of experience in the Special Operations community."

(Source: CNN website [US], Blackwater website)