A migrant doctor and his family are being forced to leave Australia, because his son has Down Syndrome and is likely to use public health services in the future.

Dr Bernhard Moeller is the rural town of Horsham's only permanent specialist physician. He and his family moved to Australia in 2006 on a temporary working visa.

However the Department of Immigration and Citizenship has rejected an application from the Moellers for permanent residency because 13-year-old Lukas is "likely to result in significant costs to the Australian community in health care and community services."

(Source: Herald-Sun)

 

There are more than 12 assaults a week in state schools throughout Victoria, according to Education Department records.

Records show 1227 allegations of assault involving state school students and staff have been filed in just over two school years - from 2006 to April this year. A further 247 sex abuse cases were alleged.

(Source: Herald-Sun)

 

Less than a week after the United States government offered a US$85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company spent over US$400,000 on a retreat for its executives at a luxury resort.

The week-long retreat at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California, cost a total of US$440,000, including $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for the spa.

AIG lost over $5 billion in the last quarter of 2007 due its risky financial products division. In March 2008, when the company's compensation committee met to award bonuses, Chief Executive Martin Sullivan urged the committee to ignore those losses.

The board agreed to ignore the losses from the financial products division and gave Sullivan a cash bonus of over $5 million. The board also approved a new compensation contract for Sullivan that gave him a 'golden parachute' of $15 million.

Joseph Cassano, the executive in charge of the company's financial products division, received more than $280 million over the last eight years.

Even after he was terminated in February as his investments lost money, the company allowed him to keep up to $34 million in unvested bonuses and put him on a $1 million-a-month retainer. He continues to receive $1 million a month.

(Source: Washington Post [US])

 

The parents of a young soldier who killed himself say they were threatened with jail if they publicly discussed the report on their son's death.

20 year old David Hayward was found dead in 2004, after being absent without leave for 60 days.

His parents Wendy and Adrian said they were not told at the time that he was missing.

Mrs Hayward said she and her husband were warned days after his death that they would be committing a federal offence if they spoke about the report.

"I was really frightened...can you imagine dealing with that and dealing with grief as well?" she said.

(Source: The Age)

 

Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon has defended accepting a free luxury trip to Los Angeles worth tens of thousands of dollars.

The Chief Commissioner and her husband John Becquet flew from Melbourne on Monday as guests of Qantas. Mr Becquet, the former head of crew operations, said the couple were invited to LA after a chance meeting with a Qantas executive.

However Ms Nixon said that "I thought about what people might think but I have to say I don't think in any way I've been compromised," she said.

She added that "I haven't had a holiday for maybe 12 months."

Ms Nixon and her husband were greeted by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John and have enjoyed free accommodation at the Sofitel in Beverly Hills, cocktail parties and private tours of galleries and museums.

Qantas business class airfares are more than $16,000 a person, while first class costs more than $20,000. Standard luxury rooms at the Sofitel cost more than $500 a night.

Police Minister Bob Cameron last night declined to comment on whether he supported Ms Nixon taking the free trip.

(Source: Herald-Sun)

 

A 17-year old student at a Melbourne private school who was hospitalised with leg fractures has been the target of years of bullying, according to a family friend.

Nick Mooney, a year 12 student at Xavier College, is a patient at the Epworth Hospital.

Xavier College has campuses in the wealthy Melbourne suburbs of Kew and Brighton. Tuition for a Year 12 student is currently $16,410, on top of a $1,100 yearly fee for boys and a seperate 'capital levy' of at least $1,100. There are extra fees for each subject, including a fee of $1,568 for 55 minutes of music lessons a week.

The family friend said Nick, the oldest of three boys, had been a frequent target of bullying over years at the school because of his small stature.

In one incident he and another student were forced to fight, in front of 100 jeering students.

"There's no doubt in my mind that this is part of systemic bullying at the school," he said.

Calls to talkback radio implied Nick was at home and resting. However the friend said that "he's not at home and he's not fine."

He remains on painkillers and is limiting visitors to immediate family and close friends.

"It's very serious," the friend said. "It's going to require some of those metal pins they use through surgery but it's so swollen that they have had to delay surgery." It is unclear when Nick will be able to leave hospital, let alone return to study.

He also said he was concerned that Nick's injuries would be dismissed as the result of an isolated accident.

Xavier principal Chris McCabe said that Nick "was just at the wrong place at the wrong time", and that "it was purely accidental."

In a seperate incident, the school described mobile phone footage showing a student being kicked and verbally abused while lying on the ground as "a group of friends who were role-playing".

(Source: The Age, Xavier College website)

(further reading: Snakes and Lads)

 

More than 700,000 Australian homes are vulnerable to rising sea levels, with up to $150 billion worth of homes, property and infrastructure at risk of seawater inundation, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.

Almost all Australians will be affected by rising sea levels, according to the Federal Government's Department of Climate Change.

"Eighty per cent of the Australian population lives in the coastal zone, and approximately 711,000 addresses are within three kilometres of the coast and less than six metres above sea level," the department said in a submission.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts sea levels could rise between 0.18 metres and 0.59 metres over the next 100 years.

But even a small rise will dramatically change Australia's coastline, the department warns.

"It is estimated that erodible coasts will recede one metre for every one centimetre rise in sea level. Storm surges will exacerbate coastal erosion."

Other experts believe sea levels could jump even more dramatically, rising several metres over the next century, inundating thousands of homes and threatening infrastructure.

The director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University, Professor Will Steffen, told the inquiry, which is investigating the effects of climate change on coastal settlements, there was enormous uncertainty among the scientific community about the rate of sea-level rise, and that "the science … has progressed significantly since the publication of the IPCC [report] last year".

"The observed rate of sea-level rise is tracking at or near the upper limits of the envelope of IPCC projections. With no further changes in the rate of sea-level rise, this would suggest that sea levels in 2100 would be 0.75 metres to 1 metre above the 2000 levels."

But there is further uncertainty over the loss of polar ice sheets, particularly Greenland, which is now melting rapidly.

"The concern is that a threshold may soon be passed beyond which we'll be committed to losing most or all of the Greenland ice sheet," said Professor Steffen. "This would lead to 6 metres of sea level rise (with enormous implications for Australia), although the time frame required to lose this amount of ice is highly uncertain, ranging from a century to a millennium or more."

(Source: The Age)

 

A religious group that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described as "an extremist cult", nonetheless received around $18 million of public money to run its schools.

The Exclusive Bretheren received more than $5.8 million from State governments this year to run its six schools. The Federal Government contributed nearly $12 million.

A former teacher who worked at one of the schools said the group discouraged tertiary studies.

"Board members remove pages of textbooks if they object on moral grounds to things like bad language or sex before marriage," the former teacher said.

"They don't want their children to go on to university or other tertiary colleges because they might be corrupted."

He said the group had "extraordinary fund-raising capacity" compared with Great Public Schools (GPS) where he had worked.

"I can't understand how the school can be getting so much government funding when it has so much of its own money," the former teacher said.

Greens MP John Kaye said Brethren schools received the maximum level of federal funding, usually reserved for schools in severely disadvantaged areas.

Fairfax journalist Michael Bachelard in his book Behind The Exclusive Brethren said a survey of members showed most were in "middle to upper levels of the socio-economic group".

(Source: Brisbane Times)

 

American police classified 53 active opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war as terrorists, despite having no evidence that any of them were involved in violence.

The surveillance took place over 14 months in 2005 and 2006, under the administration of former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

Current police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan said protest groups were also entered as terrorist organizations in police databases, but his staff has not identified which ones.

State police stated that they have "no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime" by any of the 53 activists.

Thomas E. Hutchins, the former state police superintendent who authorized the operation, defended the operation. He described the activists as "fringe people."

(Source: Washington Post [US])

 

A Church of England priest has written that gay people should be forced to carry tattoos giving 'health warnings'.

The Reverend Peter Mullen, Anglican chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, wrote on his blog "let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS."

"In addition", Reverend Mullen wrote, "the obscene 'gay pride' parades and carnivals should be banned for they give rise to passive corruption, comparable to passive smoking. Young people forced to witness these excrescences are corrupted by them."

After being forced to remove the post, Reverend Mullen described them as "light-hearted jokes."

(Source: MX, BBC News website, anorak.co.uk)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"The broad cross-section of the Australian people - maybe not the metropolitan sophisticates who live in inner-Sydney city - supported it."

Journalist Tom Switzer, on Australia's 'tough' policy on refugees.

Tom is an Old Boy of St. Aloysius' College, a private school located in Milson's Point on Sydney Harbour, which currently charges fees of $11,000 per year for years 7-12, plus a $110 application fee, a $1400 Administrative Acceptace Fee, extra fees for "interstate and overseas tours" and "private music and instrument lessons", and various voluntary contributions. Uniforms are extra, and include a $210 blazer for Years 11-12. Tom currently lives in northern Sydney.

Non metropolitan-sophisticate Tom Switzer

(thanks to the slackbastard blog)

 

Hawthorn football club has claimed millions of dollars worth of wages and expenses for running its business operations as a "community benefit".

The club won approval in July to run 80 poker machines in Caroline Springs, in Melbourne's western suburbs.

Poker machines in pubs and hotels are charged an 8.3% community benefit tax. However clubs are allowed to claim virtually any expense as a community benefit.

Hawthorn claimed that last financial year it paid $3.3 million of revenue from its poker machine venue, Vegas at Waverley Gardens, back into the community. However analysis of the payments shows only $3058 - one tenth of one percent - was for genuine community gifts or sponsorships unrelated to running the business.

The club claimed a $1.9 million payment "subsidise football operations" as a community benefit, as well as televisions, monitors and a calculator.

Similarly, Melbourne football club claimed promotional liquor as a community benefit, and North Melbourne claimed a "poker subsidy".

New regulations tighten the community benefit categories, but still allow venues to claim some ongoing costs and wages.

Victorians lost a record $2.6 billion on poker machines last financial year.

(Source: The Age)

 

British police have been accused of withholding the fact that a racist prosecuted for stockpiling illegal weapons was one of their own officers.

Ellis Hammond was found with a cache of arms including a CS spray, a stun gun, combat knives, a knuckleduster and a replica AK-47.

He was also a member of the British National party and had a collection of racist literature.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says that police officers failed to disclose that Mr Hammond was a serving police community support officer at the time.

Although a CPS lawyer was told of Hammond's police role at the time of his being charged, that fact was apparently later omitted from the prosecution file.

He was given a conditional discharge after pleading guilty to two firearms charges. He was also permitted to resign his post rather than face disciplinary procedures.

Largely because Mr Hammond's connections with the police were not publicised, the court case was not attended by any media. The Sunday Times did, however, report on the case shortly afterwards and the lightness of the sentence given out to Hammond led to further inquiries being made by the Independent Advisory Group, which oversees the force’s handling of race issues.

A CPS spokeswoman said that "we would have used the information if we had had it. It is fair to say it would have been helpful."

A member of Hammond's family said that "the Met [Metropolitan Police Service] have been very good about this. They gave Ellis the option to resign, which was good because if he had been dismissed it would have been on his CV. There were people from the Met at court to support him, which was nice too."

(Source: Sunday Times [UK])