A judge who slept and snored through the evidence of the alleged victim in a rape trial will have no action taken against him.

The woman was giving about alleged sex attacks which began when she was six years old.

Documents show Judge Dodd snored out loud as he slept for 15 minutes at a time, causing laughter and comments from the jury.

Not only did the victim leave the stand "destroyed and humiliated", she also feared the judge's behaviour may have influenced the jury's verdict after the defendant was found not guilty.

The accused rapist was later convicted to 12 years' jail for a sexual assault on another person, in a hearing before a different judge.

The woman said "it was like a circus. I felt like pure entertainment because he was sleeping constantly".

"You could actually hear him snoring - he'd sleep for 15 minutes and wake up in a panic."

The Judicial Commission found that Judge Dodd "fell asleep momentarily on occasions during the trial", but ruled he was fit to remain on the bench.

Strangely, despite accepting that the judge was unconscious, the Commission claimed that there were no "examples of non-responsiveness" and that it had not affected "his understanding of what was going on".

(Source: Daily Telegraph)

 

Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, ordered all Catholic bishops to collect evidence of child abuse in secret and not involve the law.

In May 2001, the then-Cardinal wrote a letter which was sent to every Catholic bishop, ordering that investigations into child sexual abuse in the church be conducted in secret by priests and not referred to the legal system.

Ratzinger was head of the Congregations for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body descended from the Inquisition. His letter asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence secret for up to 10 years after the alleged victims of priestly sex abuse reached adulthood.

(Source: Herald Sun)

 

Despite an extreme shortage, overseas-trained doctors have been prevented from taking positions in NSW hospitals because of Immigration Department discrimination against gay people.

Both Campbelltown and Liverpool Hospitals found qualified psychiatrists in the UK who were able to fill 'area of need' positions.

However they were unable to come to Australia, because the Immigration Department would not issue their partners with a family visa.

Roger Gurr, the Clinical Director of Liverpool Hospital's mental health unit, said it was a major blow because "New South Wales needs 41 trainee psychiatrists to enter the system every year. This year there were only 19 accepted into training".

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone conceded that gay people were treated differently under immigration laws, but her office said there were no plans to change the law.

(Source: MCV newspaper)

 

The secretary of the Victorian Labor Party has resigned, allegedly because of corruption within the party.

Eric Locke cited personal reasons for his decision to resign. But Labor sources said he has become disillusioned by the party's internal problems, which include claims that branch stacking is so rife in the Victorian ALP that more than half of its members are now bogus.

(Source: The Age)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"The people I saw and treated at Baxter were the most damaged people I've seen in my whole psychiatric career. Up until that time, I'd never met an adult-onset bedwetter. I'd never met someone with psychological blindness. And there were also a few physically crippled people who believed they were unable to walk, and this was probably psychological too."

Dr Howard Gordon, former psychiatrist at Baxter refugee detention centre.

 

Quote of the Moment:

"Many years ago I worked for a man who forced a pair of employees who had just ended their relationship to move to adjacent workstations. He did it purely for his amusement. Doubtless everyone has a story of this ilk. But scientific evidence that leaders really are different in their personal pathology from the rest of us has been lacking - until now. Case studies by psychologists have claimed that 'successful psychopaths' really exist. These are portrayed as emotionally detached, with superficial charm and an unbounded preparedness to use others, differing only from personality-disordered criminal psychopaths in being law-abiding and less impulsive. Because such reports are ultimately anecdotal, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon of Surrey University decided to test whether there was any overlap between the personalities of business managers, psychiatric patients and hospitalised criminals (psychopathic and psychiatrically ill). Their results, published last month, make startling reading.

Board and Fritzon found that three of 11 personality disorders (PDs) were actually commoner in managers than in disturbed criminals. The first was histrionic PD, entailing superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity and manipulativeness. There was also a higher incidence of narcissism: grandiosity, self-focused lack of empathy for others, exploitativeness and independence. Finally, there was more compulsive PD in the managers, including perfectionism, excessive devotion to work, rigidity, stubbornness and dictatorial tendencies."

Oliver James in the Guardian [UK]

 

A man with scitzophrenia has been held in solitary confinement in jail for months without having his mental state formally assessed, despite being found unfit to stand trial.

23-year-old Mohamad Ayoub has been in custody for more than a year, after he was found mentally unfit to stand trial over a number of break-and-enter cases. He is currently being held in solitary confinement in Parklea jail.

(Source: ABC News website)

 

Quote of the Moment:

Interviewer: Will this Government commit to keeping the Medicare-plus-safety-net as it is now in place after the election?

Tony Abbott: Yes.

Interviewer: That's a cast-iron commitment?

Tony Abbbott: Cast-iron commitment. Absolutely.

Interviewer: 80 per cent of out-of-pocket expenses rebatable over $300, over $700?

Tony Abbott: That is an absolutely rock solid, iron-clad commitment.

Health Minister Tony Abbott, on ABC's Four Corners before the election, promising not to raise the Medicare safety net threshhold, which the government has recently raised.

 

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has defended his decision not to change travel advisories for Bali hotels after two Australian families said their children were sexually abused at exclusive island resorts.

Justice Minister Chris Ellison asked Mr Downer to issue a travel warning about the childcare centres after two families said their children were sexually abused while holidaying on the Indonesian island.

In one incident in 2001, a three-year-old girl was sexually abused and contracted gonorrhoea while at a creche at the Sheraton Nusa Dua resort while in another, a five-year-old boy was orally raped at a resort playground.

Mr Downer said the request was considered but denied.

He said that "on the basis of an inconclusive investigation, that is it wasn't clear who had molested the child, you wouldn't issue a travel advisory to that particular hotel, that would be a pretty tough thing to do."

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

A Catholic priest who resigned under pressure due to his failure to remove pedophile priests from the ministry, was allowed to lead thousands of worshippers in a memorial mass for the late Pope John Paul II.

Cardinal Bernard F. Law resigned as archbishop of Boston in December 2002, after nearly a year of disclosures about priests accused of sexual abuse who he had permitted to remain in parish work. Cardinal Law stepped down soon after a judge unsealed church records in a court case, including correspondence showing that he wrote letters praising priests he knew were pedophiles.

11 months ago he become the archpriest of one of Rome's four most prestigious churches, the Basilica of St. Mary Major.

Cardinal Law was known as a favorite of John Paul's, influencing the appointments of bishops and serving on more Vatican committees than any other American cardinal.

He is one of 115 cardinals who will elect a successor to John Paul.

(Source: New York Times)

 

Far from instilling discipline, physically punishing children is likely to make them more violent, according to a new study.

The study on school violence by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found that students whose parents subject them to 'punitive discipline' at home are much more likely to have attacked someone at school than students whose parents are not punitive toward their children.

The study also found that violence is more likly if the students at the school are racist or if children who make racist remarks at school don't get into trouble.

(Source: www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au)

 

An autopsy on an Aboriginal man who died in custody has found evidence of torture.

Douglas Bruce Scott died in Darwin's Berrimah Jail in 1985.

Her wife Letty alleges her husband was killed by four prison guards, but the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and a coronial inquest found Mr Scott committed suicide.

A second autopsy conducted on Mr Scott's body found lesions that were consistent with torture procedures, like being kicked in the genital region, and with a facial blow and strangulation.

(Source: ABC News website)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"Throughout my career I have reported, often undercover, from countries ruled by repressive regimes where dissidents would read me reports in the press that were no more servile and false than the reporting you read every day in the Murdoch papers in this country. In Eastern European states, for example, the papers had tame correspondents in Moscow who would parrot the Kremlin line. Now read the Washington correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald and there is no difference."

John Pilger.

 

The pharmaceutical industry are 'disease-mongers' who have released under-tested drugs on the market, and created a culture in which doctors prescribe 'a pill for every ill', ignoring prevention or cheaper and better non-pharmaceutical treatments, according to a British inquiry.

British MPs heard evidence of 'disease-mongering' drugs firms effectively inventing diseases for which they could then sell treatments, with relatively normal behaviour - from mild depression to low female sex drive - re-labelled as conditions for which drugs were supposedly necessary.

The report from the Commons health select committee is also expected to criticise the secretive process of licensing medicines in Britain, following several safety scares in which so-called 'wonder drugs' have turned out to have serious side effects.

The common anti-depressant Seroxat was recently linked to an increased risk of suicide in teenagers, while the widely prescribed arthritis drug Vioxx was withdrawn last year over links to fatal heart attacks and strokes.

The seven-month inquiry follows complaints from patients' groups and senior doctors that the interests of the industry are distorting health care priorities.

Prescriptions for Seroxat tripled after it was licensed for mild depression, while it is marketed to doctors as a treatment for ill-defined 'social anxiety disorders'.

Drug firms are banned from advertising directly to patients in Britain, or offering bribes to doctors to prescribe a certain brand. However campaigners say the industry has discovered ways of 'guerrilla' promotion, including generously funding medical charities - which, the inquiry heard, raises the risk of them becoming its 'unwitting foot soldiers'.

One mental health charity, Depression Alliance, receives almost 80 per cent of its funding from drugs companies, while Arthritis Care received money from Merck Sharp and Dohme, maker of Vioxx.

The inquiry heard of drugs marketed to doctors in papers written for medical journals ostensibly by independent experts which are, in fact, ghostwritten by the firms, which pay academics to lend their names to the reports.

Dr Richard Horton, editor of leading journal, the Lancet, disclosed he had been effectively offered bribes to publish papers showing drugs in a favourable light. He said firms offered to buy 'hundreds of thousands of reprints' - which could be worth up to half a million pounds to his magazine - if their paper went in.

Reclassification of the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin as an over-the-counter medicine for preventing heart disease is a classic example of the pharmaceutical industry's worrying influence, experts warned yesterday.

The editor of The Drug and Therapeutic Bulletin , Dr Ike Iheanacho, said long-term trials had not been carried out to test the drug's efficacy or risks in those considered to be in moderate danger of having heart problems. As people could be sold Zocor Heart-Pro, the drug by its brand name, without detailed assessment of their health, there was also a danger that those at high risk of having heart attacks were getting inadequate treatment.

'The absence of any long-term efficacy trails for Zocor Heart-Pro in the target group means that people are, in effect, being used as guinea pigs,' Iheanacho said.

Another example is provided by the anti-depressant Seroxat. Seroxat's manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) tried to market it as a cure for relatively mild forms of depression, despite the fact that the the drug has been linked to suicide. 'The thrust was to move sales beyond the $1 billion to the $2bn mark by pushing it to people who were not clinically depressed,' Professor David Healy told the select committee, while Richard Brook, chief executive of Mind, the mental health charity, told the MPs that the plan was 'all about developing new conditions for that drug'.

At the same time, other options are ignored. Britain's GPs have largely ignored the advice of the Chief Medical Office that many depressed patients should be prescribed exercise programmes rather than pills.

(Source: The Observer [UK])

 

An asylum seeker was denied access to psychiatric help, despite slashing himself several times inside South Australia's Baxter detention centre, and another was told he should commit suicide by a Baxter psychologist, the Federal Court in Adelaide has heard.

Two asylum seekers, known only as "M" and "S", staged a 10-day protest on a roof at Baxter late last year.

"M" told the court he took part in the rooftop protest out of desperation after spending more than four years inside detention centres.

He says after the protest he was seen by a psychiatrist who prescribed new medication for his severe depression.

The psychiatrist also told him he may need shock treatment in hospital.

The medication failed but "M" says he has not seen the psychiatrist since.

"S" told the Federal Court he had been held in Australian detention centres for four-and-a-half years, the past two years at Baxter.

Despite a series of self-harm and protest incidents, S said he was not consulted by a psychiatrist until January this year.

He said he had twice been placed in Baxter's management unit, an isolation facility.

"I thought I was an animal, just like an animal they lock me up," S told the court, through an interpreter.

S detailed several incidents of self-harm, in which he used a razor blade to repeatedly slash his arms, legs and chest.

S said he spent 10 consecutive nights on the rooftop but when he climbed down, he was still not seen by a psychiatrist.

The man said he was frightened of being held in some areas of Baxter, and claimed one of his friends in detention had also separately spent time protesting on a rooftop and was told by a Baxter psychologist "he should jump".

The hearing was told last week by Adelaide psychiatrist Jon Jureidini that Baxter "is a place that drives people mad".

Lawyers for "M" and "S" want their clients to be taken out of Baxter and put into psychiatric care in Adelaide's Glenside Psychiatric Hospital, saying that the Commonwealth Government has failed to provide asylum seekers with a duty of care.

(Source: ABC News website, news.com.au)

 

The Transport Workers Union (TWU) says that up to 90 per cent of long-distance truck drivers use illegal drugs to meet unrealistic deadlines forced on them by major companies.

TWU spokesman Tony Sheldon told a NSW Parliamentary inquiry that companies like Woolworths and Coles are using their strong market position to pressure drivers into meeting tight deadlines.

Mr Sheldon says the drug abuse and long hours are putting the drivers and other road users at risk, and having serious psychological impacts on the drivers.

He says the suicide rate among drivers is 10 times higher than the national average.

(Source: ABC News website)

 

A rising number of American soldiers returned from Iraq or Afghanistan are being diagnosed with mental disorders, according to a new report.

The report in the New England Journal of Medicine says that the number is steadily rising.

Records show that 20% of eligible ex-soldiers came to Veterans' Affairs hospitals seeking medical treatment between October 2003 and February 2005. Overall, 26% of them were diagnosed with mental disorders, say Han Kang and Kenneth Hyams of the VA.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was most common, diagnosed in 10% of patients, followed by drug or alcohol abuse (9%). Seven percent were diagnosed with depression; 6% had anxiety disorders, such as phobias and panic. Many ex-soldiers had multiple disorders, Kang says.

Large funding cuts in VA psychiatry programs over the past several years and the limited number of doctors trained in PTSD could put a strain on the system, according to Bruce Kagan, staff psychiatrist at the West Los Angeles VA Hospital.

"The soldiers didn't come right away after Vietnam, either. If they come in the numbers predicted, the numbers the VA's own studies predict, we could be overwhelmed," Kagan says.

(Source: USA Today)