Shooters party MPs Robert Borsak and Robert Brown. Picture: Craig Greenhill Source: The Daily Telegraph
A CONTROVERSIAL law that will allow hunters into national parks has been passed by New South Wales Parliament following hours of fractious debate.
The Shooters Party's changes to the Game and Feral Animal Control Act passed both the upper and lower houses, allowing recreational hunters to cull feral animals in 79 national parks and reserves.
A day after the Shooters Party's Robert Brown said it was "unfortunate" he couldn't beat the upper house Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham to death, government and opposition MPs traded barbs in the Legislative Assembly.
Former Labor premier Kristina Keneally described the laws as "a dirty political deal and stupid policy", with the sole aim of garnering Shooters Party support for the government's power privatisation.
"This bill is about the politics of a premier who can't get his way in any other manner except to go back on his word and put our national parks at risk," Ms Keneally said.
"We are here in the lower house debating about amateur shooters to roam our national parks with loaded guns because Barry O'Farrell can't get his electricity sale through the parliament in any other way."
Opposition Leader John Robertson said the bill was a "straight out broken promise", after Premier Barry O'Farrell had said he wouldn't allow hunting in national parks.
"This bill is not going to make one difference to the number of feral animals in our national parks," Mr Robertson said.
"What it will do is compromise the safety of every single person in our national parks, compromise the flora and fauna in our national parks."
Critics have raised fears the laws will open hundreds of parks and reserves to recreational hunters, with Environment Minister Robyn Parker given the power to veto or approve shooting sites.
Ms Parker told MPs in the lower house that parks would not be opened to recreational hunters during an open hunting season like in New Zealand.
"We will be extending the current controlled and safe program of eradicating feral animals, which wreak havoc in our national parks," Ms Parker told parliament.
"This in anyone's language is not recreational hunting.
"There will be penalties in place that will be brought down very hard on those that think ... they can get out there and shoot at whatever they see."
Nationals MP John Williams said Sydneysider MPs against the legislation had no idea about the trouble caused by pests in rural areas.
"It really does amaze me that we have seen speakers from the concrete jungle of Sydney telling us how it goes on in the country," Mr Williams said.
"We continue to listen to the member for Marrickville (Carmel Tebbutt) whose biggest trip is to go to the shopping centre on a Saturday morning."
On Wednesday night Mr Brown threatened Mr Buckingham with violence after being repeatedly goaded by the Greens MP during the upper house debate.
"Unfortunately we're in a modern era so I can't take you outside and beat you to death."
A contrite Mr Brown later apologised for the outburst.
Source: www.news.com.au
Woman who lost legs in 7/7 bombing after London Olympic party meant she caught later train makes Paralympic team - Daily Mail
- 'I was one of the lucky ones,' says mother-of-one caught in 7/7 bombing
- Sportswoman makes sitting volleyball team after losing legs in the terrorist attack
By Claire Bates
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A survivor of the July 7 suicide bombings said her dreams had come true after being picked to compete at the London 2012 Paralympics.
Martine Wright, 39, took up sitting volleyball after losing her legs in the 2005 terror attacks, and spends up to 25 hours training a week.
Martine Wright, a former marketing manager, is now on Britain's women's sitting volleyball team
After finding out she had made the squad, she said: 'I have dreamt of being part of it and now I am going there to do my country proud.
'I would like to thank my family and friends for all their love and support they have given me in my quest to become a Paralympian. They are all amazing'.
Mrs Wright, from Tring in Hertfordshire, was one of the last people to be pulled from the wreckage of the tube train at Aldgate. She lost 75 per cent of her blood, spent 10 days in a coma, and lost both her legs.
She only narrowly survived because off-duty policewoman Elizabeth Kenworthy braved the wreckage and tied a tourniquet around her legs. Seven people died in her tube carriage, while 52 people were killed in total in the terrorist attack.
'I was one of the lucky ones,' she told Trans World Sport.
'I'm still here. I got new legs and I survived.'
Martine Wright now walks with false limbs. She says she is lucky to have survived the 7/7 bombings
In a strange twist of fate, the sportswoman caught a later train than usual on July 7th 2005 because she was running late after celebrating London winning the Olympics the night before. She was sitting just 3ft from one of the bombers when they detonated.
She spent 10months in hospital before learning to walk again at Queen Mary's Hospital in Roehampton.
She returned briefly to her job in marketing but then turned to sport as she felt something was missing from her life.
'Someone who goes through something traumatic can lose their confidence and lose their goals,' she said.
'I think sport revives these things in people.'
The mother-of-one tried a taster Paralympic day and fell in love with the team sport of sitting volleyball.
The sport is in its infancy in Britain, potentially putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to their rivals, but with London 2012 on the horizon the team has made a determined push to try and prove they are worth their home nation spot.
ParalympicsGB had only sent a standing volleyball team to compete at the Games before London 2012.
Martine, pictured in 2010, married her partner Nick and had son Oscar after the bombings
Also on the women's team is Sam Bowen, a former soldier who lost a leg in a mortar attack in Iraq.
When Volleyball England took control of the British Sitting Volleyball programme in 2009, there were just a few male players training.
Now there are a men's and women's squads with players training daily with a full time coach.
ParalympicsGB Chef de Mission Craig Hunter said: 'Today we have announced a group of athletes who are truly phenomenal.
'Not only have they worked incredibly hard to get to this point, but as individuals many of them have gone through difficult personal circumstances in order to do so.
'These athletes epitomise the power of the Paralympic Games to inspire people, both disabled and non-disabled, and the power of sport to change peoples' lives.'
Speaking at the selection announcement at City Hall, London Mayor Boris Johnson wished the team 'the very best of luck when they battle it out against the best teams from around the world this summer.'
For more information on the London 2012 Paralympics visit www.london2012.com/paralympics
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
New Louisiana law requires sex offenders, child predators to list criminal status on Facebook, other social media profiles - New York Daily News
RHEANA MURRAY
Sex offenders and child predators in Louisiana are now required by law to include their criminal status in their Facebook and other social media profiles.
While Facebook already bans registered sex offenders from creating accounts, State Rep. Jeff Thompson, who authored the legislation, says the new law will help ensure no one slips through the cracks.
“I don’t want to leave [it] in the hands of social network or Facebook administrators. ‘Gee, I hope someone is telling the truth,’” Thompson, an attorney and father of two from Bossier City, La., told CNN. “This is another tool for prosecutors.”
The new law goes into effect August 1. Thompson says it’s the first of its kind in the nation, and hopes other states will follow suit.
Several already require sex offenders and child predators to register their email addresses and social network profiles with authorities, but Louisiana is the first to require they explicitly list their crimes on their profile pages.
The law mandates that child predators and sex offenders “shall include in his profile for the networking website an indication that he is a sex offender or child predator and shall include notice of the crime for which he was convicted, the jurisdiction of conviction, a description of his physical characteristics ... and his residential address,” according to CNN.
Facebook applauded the law while noting that it will have no direct effect on its service.
“We take the safety and security of our users, especially the many young people on Facebook, very seriously,” the company said in a statement to CNN. “We have consistently supported legislation to help strengthen law enforcement’s ability to find, prosecute and convict online sexual predators.”
Thompson says he drafted the legislation last year after a federal court rejected a different Louisiana law that totally banned sex offenders and child predators from using the Internet. He says the new law will help keep children safe.
“I challenge you today to walk down the street to see how many people and children are checking Pinterest, Instagram and other social networking sites,” he told CNN. “If you look at how common it is, that’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week for somebody to interact with your children and your grandchildren.
rmurray@nydailynews.com
Source: www.nydailynews.com
Leave healthcare law in place - DAILY KOS
First, let’s talk about what U.S. News and World Report said in an article aptly titled, “What would happen if Obama’s Health Care Law were repealed?” “The Supreme Court deliberations will focus narrowly on whether Congress has the constitutional authority to require such a thing. But lost in the lofty rhetoric will be the scale of the original problem, which finally affected so many Americans that Obama was able to overcome decades of opposition and pass the most sweeping changes in the healthcare system since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965.” It states that 16% of our population does not even have health insurance, how medical costs ruin lives, how people die because they have no insurance, and how expensive it is for individuals and companies. These same points are being made everywhere. And here’s an extra nugget of information—over half of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical costs, and most of those people had insurance. That’s why we passed healthcare reform in the first place—to tackle some of these issues after years of political inertia and the resulting medical care system that was starting to collapse under the weight of these problems.
In the Washington Post, Sarah Klift wrote an article, “Analyst: Health reform law repeal a net-negative for hospitals.” She said Moody’s wrote a report stating that if the Supreme Court overturned the healthcare law, it would be a disaster for for-profit hospitals. Klift reminds us that “before healthcare reform passed, hospitals were in a financial squeeze.” She quotes Moody’s report about what would happen: “If the law is fully or partially repealed, for-profit hospital operators’ costs of treating patients who can’t pay their bills would rise. That’s because the population of uninsured individuals would remain large and patients would continue to be responsible for an ever larger portion of the cost of care.”
Republican leaders and their allies complain that under the new healthcare law, family health insurance premiums will go up. The truth is that they were going up before the law was enacted. David Cutler of the Center for American Progress reports in his article called “Repealing Health Care is a job-killer,” that family health insurance premiums jumped 80% in ten years after adjusting for inflation. He also points out that median income fell 5% during that time. He said that repealing this law would “destroy 250,000-400,000 jobs annually over the next decade.” Republican and their allies claim the opposite. They claim that this country will lose jobs. Who is telling the truth?
Factcheck.org looked at these claims. In their summary, “A job-killing law?,” they look at the “evidence” the GOP offers. The GOP cites a study by the National Federation of Independent Business. This study projects a 1.6 million job loss, and Republican politicians toss that number around in every speech they make against the healthcare law. There’s just one little problem—as Factcheck.org states, “the NFIB did not study the new law. Its report was based on a hypothetical employer mandate that bears little resemblance to what was actually passed…” Apparently, that report they cite actually projected a job gain. And one more problem. The GOP report claims that the NFIB analysis is “independent.” How independent can the NFIB be when, as Factcheck.org helpfully reports, they co-sponsored an ad with the Chamber of Commerce attacking healthcare legislation? They also are against any rule requiring business to offer health insurance.
Republican leaders offer the usual stone soup of healthcare “reforms and improvements,” but consumers should beware. None of these so-called reforms and improvements have ever been put into effect, even when Republicans had the White House, the Senate, and the House. Something had to be done. We now have a law and it’s working. Let’s hope the Supreme Court leaves it alone.
Source: www.dailykos.com
Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur - The Guardian
The US policy of using drone strikes to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a UN investigator has said.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, fears that Barack Obama's CIA-run programmes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere will encourage other states to flout long-established international human rights law.
In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested that some attacks may constitute war crimes.
Addressing the same meeting, organised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Pakistan's UN ambassador in Geneva, Zamir Akram, called for international legal action to halt the "totally counterproductive" US drone strikes in his country.
Heyns, a South African law professor, said: "Are we to accept major changes to the international legal system which has been in existence since world war two and survived nuclear threats?"
Some states "find targeted killings immensely attractive. Others may do so in future," he said.
"Killings may be lawful in an armed conflict but many targeted killings take place far from areas where it's recognised as being an armed conflict."
If "there have been secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping [the injured] after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime."
Akram said that US drone strikes had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Pakistan. "We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the 'war against terror'. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them.
"The only rules are through the international legal system. What are the possibilities of pursuing the international legal option in trying to deal with this problem?"
International frustration over Washington's continued policy of using drone strikes surfaced during this week's sessions of the UN's human rights council in Geneva.
The US has defended its actions as self-defence against al-Qaida and has refused to allow judicial scrutiny of the programme.
On Thursday, the Obama administration issued a fresh rebuff through the US courts to an ACLU request for information about targeting policies. Such details, it insisted, remained classified.
Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU's national security project, said: "Something that is being debated in UN hallways and committee rooms cannot apparently be talked about in US courtrooms, according to the government."
The ACLU estimates that US drone strikes have killed as many as 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
Well done Martine. What an inspiration you are. Wishing you every success and hope you enjoy every minute of the Olympics/Paralymics.
- Julie, London, 21/6/2012 15:00
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