At least 100,000 deaths from ovarian cancer have been prevented worldwide by the contraceptive pill over 50 years, research has concluded.

The Oxford University team said the rising popularity of the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill, generally known simply as 'the Pill', meant 30,000 new cancer cases will soon be avoided each year. The Pill reduces the risk of ovarian cancer as a benign side-effect.

The findings were based on analysis of 45 previous studies.

(Source: BBC News website [UK])

 

A mother whose two teenage daughters were placed in an orphanage when she fell ill during an overseas trip has been told she is under investigation because her children were taken into care.

British woman Yvonne Bray took her daughters Gemma, 15, and Katie, 13, to New York shortly after Christmas for a shopping trip but was taken into hospital when she fell ill with pneumonia during their visit.

The girls were then told they could not wait at the hospital and as minors would have to be taken into care.

Social workers took them to a municipal orphanage in downtown Manhattan, where they were separated, strip-searched and questioned before being kept under lock and key for the next 30 hours.

The two sisters were made to shower in front of security staff and told to fill out a two-page form with questions including: "Have you ever been the victim of rape?" and "Do you have homicidal tendencies?"

Their clothes, money and belongings were taken and they were issued with regulation white T-shirt and jeans. Katie said: "It was like being in a little cage. I tried to go to sleep, but every time I opened my eyes, someone was looking right at me."

Eventually Bray discharged herself, and - still dressed in hospital pyjamas - tracked down the girls.

She said "it is absolutely horrendous that two young girls were put through an ordeal like that. They were made to answer traumatic questions about things they don't really understand and spend over 24 hours under surveillance."

Since returning home, Bray has received a letter from the US Administration for Children and Families, notifying her that, because the children were admitted to the orphanage, she is now "under investigation."

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

Two out of five charity workers have been victims of workplace bullying, according to a new study.

The British survey by the Unite trade union found that victims included volunteers in soup kitchens, and those who gave up free time over Christmas to answer calls to crisis telephone hotlines or work in animal shelters.

The victims of workplace bullying often felt humiliated and undermined, with one in five of workers surveyed by the union saying they had taken time off because of bullying.

Rachael Maskell from Unite said that "charity workers give of themselves all year round to help others and often give up their Christmas and New Year."

"It is outrageous that employers have let so much unacceptable behaviour, bullying and harassment go on."

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

Company owners and senior managers use their power to get away with sexual assaults on their female employees, according to a Sydney rape crisis centre.

The New South Wales Rape Crisis Centre received three reports of sexual assaults at work during the first half of December. 72 percent were committed by company owners or senior managers.

Only 11 percent of those victims later lodged formal complaints with police. Centre manager Karen Willis said that "one of the common concerns relayed to counsellors by victims is that if they take it further, they'll get the sack."

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

The mother of a 12 year old child who hung himself said the child committed suicide because of incessant bullying that teachers and other school administrators knew about but failed to stop.

Kim Myers, father of Brandon Myers, says her son "was teased in class on the day he died for acting depressed...if he had got the help he needed, he would still be alive."

Mrs Myers says that "there were warning signs that I should have been told about - red flags that they didn't tell me about."

Before his suicide, Brandon drew a picture of himself hanging from a rope. The drawing was found by another student and turned in to a teacher, according to a police report.

Some months before his suicide, he also handed in an assignment where he said that "I'm sorry for all the things I've done...I regret standing outside the circle."

(Source: KCTV5 [US])

 

An American police officer has been found not guilty of any crime, despite admitting ejaculating on a female motorist that he'd stopped.

In late December of 2004, officer Alex Park stopped a car driven by stripper 'Lucy'.

He had been tailing her car for at least eight minutes, and stopped her on a secluded section of a highway that was out of his jurisdiction.

Four months earlier, Park had stopped Lucy under similar circumstances. On that occasion he ignored a plastic drug baggie he'd found in her car, and her suspended license. After friendly chit-chat, Lucy had given him her phone number. Telephone records show that Park called the stripper the next morning. She told him she was too busy to meet.On the witness stand, Park explained that he'd called Lucy out of concern for a citizen’s safety.

He claimed that he had no idea Lucy was the driver until he approached the car and saw her. However, he'd run her license plate through the police computer before the stop.

He didn't call for backup despite the potential for an arrest, and failed to tell his supervisor or dispatch that he was leaving Irvine. The GPS in his car had also been disconnected without authorisation, which he claimed was a coincidence.

Lucy said that she told Park that she had no license. She said that he then began "rubbing himself up against me."

"Basically, the officer made me give a freaking hand job and he let me go."

Officer Park had run the license plates of nine employees of the same strip club through the Department of Motor Vehicles computer in the weeks prior to his encounter with Lucy. He described this as another coincidence. Irvine Police Sgt. Michael Hallinan had previously warned Park as they left work to stay away from the strippers.

Telephone records prove that Park made a 19-minute call to Lucy shortly after their encounter. He told her he was Joe Stephens, an Orange County Sheriff's Department deputy who had died months earlier, and said it was a friendly call to make sure she'd arrived home safely. Lucy said he told her to keep her mouth shut.

The defence accused her of purposefully "weakening" Park so that he became "a man" not a police officer during the traffic stop, and told her "you do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do." In his closing argument, he called Lucy one of those "girls who have learned the art of the tease, getting what they want...they've learned to separate men from their money."

Prosector Shaddi Kamiabipour countered that "Dancer or not, sexually promiscuous nor not, she had the right not to consent...[Park] doesn't get a freebie just because of who she is...he used her like an object."

Park was found not guilty on all charges.

"Park didn't pick a housewife or a 17-year-old girl," the prosecutor said in her closing argument. "He picked a stripper. He picked the perfect victim."

(Source: OC Weekly [US])

 

Doubts have intensified over the nature of an alleged aggressive confrontation by Iranian patrol boats and American warships in the Persian Gulf, after Pentagon officials admitted that they could not confirm that a threat to blow up the US ships had been made directly by the Iranian crews involved in the incident.

Several news sources reported that senior navy officials had conceded that the voice threatening to blow up the US warships in a matter of minutes could have come from another ship in the region, or even from shore.

The US administration has released video footage that it said showed the Iranian speedboats harassing the American vessels. A voice in English with a strong accent is heard to say "I am coming at you - you will explode in a couple of minutes."

Yesterday the Iranian government put out their own four-minute video that showed an Iranian patrol officer in a small boat communicating with one of the US ships.

"Coalition warship number 73, this is an Iranian navy patrol boat," the Iranian said. An American naval officer replied: "This is coalition warship number 73 operating in international waters."

The voice of the Iranian sailor in Tehran's footage is different to the deeper and more menacing voice threatening to blow up the warships in the US version. Nor is there any sign of aggressive behaviour by the Iranian patrol boats.

The Pentagon has said that it recorded the film and the sound in its version separately, and then edited them together.

President George Bush any repetition of the incident would lead to "serious consequences."

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

A senior manager at Channel 9 told female staff that they needed 'fuckability' to succeed, according to a complaint to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

John Westacott is also accused of saying that the newsroom was no place for women, and that females had to be blonde to get an on-air role.

Former reporter Christine Spiteri, who worked at the network for 13 years, said that "Westie told me if I wanted to work on 60 Minutes I needed bigger tits."

(Source: Herald-Sun)

 

The attack on an American ship which led to a sharp escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War never happened, according to recently released information.

The 1964 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident', an attack on two American warships by North Vietnamese forces, was used to justify the Vietnam War.

However a report, recently released by the National Security Agency, shows that there was no such attack.

(Source: Yahoo! News)

 

Telstra has been accused of threatening to make staff redundant unless they sign individual employment contracts.

The Ombudsman, Nicholas Wilson, is investigating claims Telstra is forcing workers to sign the three-year and five-year contracts before the federal Labor government introduces legislation next month to phase them out.

NSW secretary of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union Ian McCarthy, said workers had complained of being called at home by Telstra.

"When they say 'no', Telstra says to think about it and then rings again the next day. We have heard from people that they have been threatened with being made redundant unless they sign but when we confront Telstra they deny it."

Mr McCarthy said the only pay rises contained in the agreements were in line with the annual increase in the minimum pay rate. There is a performance pay component but it is at the employee's manager's discretion. He said workers would lose redundancy entitlements, a crucial point as Telstra plans to get rid of 12,000 employees by 2010.

Telstra is Australia's biggest user of workplace agreements. Since the election it has offered new contracts to 19,000 workers in a response to the Rudd government's policy of scrapping them.

(Source: Sun Herald)

 

The United States' Environmental Protection Agency has stopped several state governments from adopting stricter laws against greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2002 California passed a law requiring car manufacturers to gradually increase the fuel efficiency of their products. Under the law, manufacturers would have until 2020 to produce cars with an average fuel efficiency of 44 miles per gallon. The law has been adopted by 12 other states.

However it is not in practice anywhere, since the EPA has refused to give permission for it to be enforced.

The California state government is now suing the federal government in an attempt to have the law enforced.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

The US Department of Justice has been accused of ignoring crimes committed by American contractors in Iraq, including the gang rape and imprisonment of a woman.

Jamie Leigh Jones said that she was drugged and gang-raped inside Baghdad's Green Zone while she was working for KBR, the Pentagon's largest private contractor in Iraq.

After she reported the crime to an Army doctor, "KBR security then took me to a trailer and then locked me in a room with two armed guards outside my door...I was imprisoned in the trailer for approximately a day. One of the guards finally had mercy and let me use a phone."

Ms Jones said that she knew of at least 11 other women who were were raped by US contractors in Iraq.

However Democrat Robert Conyers said that the US Department of Justice "can't even give us one example of a prosecution where the victim was a civilian contractor employee in Iraq."

(Source: Herald Sun)