The Queensland Government has revoked an award given to a flood volunteer because the man is a convicted rapist and armed robber.
Bob Riddler was nominated for a local hero award after helping the Shiloh Christian Church at Goodna, west of Brisbane, during the January floods.
He removed rubbish and cleaned houses in the Ipswich suburb.
He had previously served 12 years in jail and had only been released in September last year — via redwolf.newsvine.com
New York-dwelling tech geeks rejoice: Pretty soon, you’ll be able to access Wi-Fi while lounging in the park.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson, announced Thursday a five-year initiative to bring free Wi-Fi to 26 locations in 20 New York City parks across the boroughs. Today, AT&T Wi-Fi will be up and running in Battery Bosque (a garden in Battery Park), the north-end playground in Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx, and around the recreation centre at Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem — via redwolf.newsvine.com
When people are dissatisfied with their elected representatives, they have a few options open to them.
They can protest, lobby, or mount advertising campaigns to pressure politicians. They can join a party and attempt to change it from within. They can decide to run for office as an Independent. They can opt out
of voting altogether.
Or they can do what the Australian Democrats and Australian Greens did before them – start their own political party.
This weekend, two groups did exactly that.
Independent MP Bob Katter announced the formation of his Katter’s Australian Party.
And evangelical Christian group Catch the Fire Ministries launched its Rise Up Australia Party — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Meatworkers and the newly-formed Animal Justice Party may seem like strange bedfellows, but they are united on wanting to ban live animal exports.
The Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union has backed an export ban and thinks it would create thousands of jobs in regional Australia — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy went in to bat for the Labor Government’s mandatory internet filter again, reaffirming the commitment to the unpopular policy. Nothing has changed since earlier debates; the filter still has the same problems it has always had -– it’s useless, unworkable and expensive. It still won’t help anybody — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Gay and lesbian advocates have named the head of the Australian Christian Lobby as having the most outrageous and ignorant attitudes towards gay issues.
The GLORIA awards is an event organised by gay and lesbian advocates in Sydney, aimed at exposing homophobic comments in the Australian media.
Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace was awarded the Golden GLORIA for his Anzac Day tweet that said Australia’s servicemen and women had not fought for gay marriage or Islam — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hackers in China have compromised personal email accounts of hundreds of top US officials, military personnel and journalists, Google has said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Some of you will shudder at this next line, and some of you will applaud. I want you to picture an America without government regulations on the private sector. An America where companies of all stripes, from the smallest hardware store to the biggest oil conglomerate, were given completely free reign to run their businesses however they wanted, making up their own rules along the way. I want you to imagine a world where the markets regulated themselves, wholly and fully, without any intervention whatsoever from local, State, or Federal government. If your imagination is struggling to draw a picture here, allow me to paint one for you — via matt-rock.newsvine.com
A bill moving through the US Senate that would grant the government greater power to shutter Web sites that host copyright-infringing content is under fire from security researchers, who say the legislation raises serious technical and security concerns
. Meanwhile, hacktivists protested by attacking the Web site of the industry group that most actively supports the proposal
The federal government has suspended exports of live cattle to a number of killing facilities in Indonesia following last night’s exposure of brutal practices in some of the country’s abattoirs.
Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig said the decision was based on footage collected by Animals Australia that showed cattle being mistreated before slaughter.
I have decided to halt the trade of live animals to the facilities identified by the footage,
he said in a statement today — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills. Some European countries have it even worse: 21 percent of Spanish workers are unemployed.
Nor is the situation showing rapid improvement. This is a continuing tragedy, and in a rational world bringing an end to this tragedy would be our top economic priority.
Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs. Instead of a determination to do something about the ongoing suffering and economic waste, one sees a proliferation of excuses for inaction, garbed in the language of wisdom and responsibility.
So someone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is neither wise nor responsible. It is, instead, a grotesque abdication of responsibility — via redwolf.newsvine.com
These days the pretence of fair play is all but gone. The default position of the Opposition is to smear and traduce anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them or express any sympathy with a government policy. One wonders what Joyce would have said if Blanchett’s name was Gina Hancock. You suspect her free enterprise spirit and entrepreneurial flair would have been proclaimed loudly and long.
The dumbed-down populism of the tabloid press is nothing new but it has about it now a vehemence and viciousness that can still surprise, especially in its casual, off-hand dismissal of an Australian citizen’s right to speak her mind — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated — we knew that already — it’s that the US government inadvertently aided the hackers.
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The personal data of millions of passengers who fly between the US and Europe, including credit card details, phone numbers and home addresses, may be stored by the US department of homeland security for 15 years, according to a draft agreement between Washington and Brussels leaked to the Guardian — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The United Nations’s top human rights watchdog has attacked Australia’s tough refugee policies and the treatment of outback Aborigines, saying there was a strong undercurrent of racism in the country.
Long-standing policies of locking up asylum seekers had cast a shadow over Australia’s human rights record
, and appeared to be completely arbitrary, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The attempt to use super-injunctions to gag the media in the internet age reached new levels of absurdity yesterday.
A Scottish newspaper became the first mainstream British publication to identify the Premier League footballer who is attempting to prevent discussion on Twitter about his affair with the former Big Brother star Imogen Thomas. Meanwhile it was reported that a High Court judge had referred an unidentified journalist to the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, to consider a criminal prosecution for breaching a privacy injunction with a tweet about another footballer.
The move could potentially mean that criminal proceedings would be brought against 30,000 people who have broken one or other of the contested injunctions by tweeting in recent days the identities of those involved — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The New South Wales Government says it will introduce legislation into Parliament this week making life sentences compulsory for people who murder police officers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The government is to be urged to relax UK intellectual property laws to make it easier for people’s work to be parodied, potentially paving the way for the more robust humour seen in US programmes such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — via redwolf.newsvine.com
One of the most rewarding — and most deeply frustrating things about being a news junkie is that you get to see a lot more than the few soundbites that make the evening bulletins. Rewarding, because you get to hear what politicians say in context, and in full, when you watch the media conferences. Frustrating, because you also become rapidly aware that the treatment given to politicians is astonishingly uneven.
Greens leader Senator Bob Brown, Prime Minister Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott all gave media conferences this morning, and the contrast between how the media treated Senator Brown, and how it treated the two leaders, could not have been more marked.
…
That was the turning point. From then, the questioning became increasingly aggressive. Now, there’s nothing wrong with aggressive questioning in itself. It’s one of the ways the media can force a politician to answer. That’s not what happened here. Several times journalists attempted to interrupt Brown in his answers, and one journalist repeatedly interrupted Brown, describing his answers as political gobbledygook
. She didn’t preface this with the phrase, With respect, Senator …
, which usually accompanies a criticism — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Next year (2011-12) the Government will spend $709 million in asylum seeker detention and related costs. This is up $147 million on this year (2010-11) and amounts to about $90,000 for every asylum seeker that comes to Australia.
The abolition of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, which means mainly boat people, could save between $150 and $425 million per annum.
In chiding the Chinese about their human rights, Julia Gillard said that we believe (in human rights) … it is us. It’s an Australian value.
How can she say this when we have 6,819 asylum seekers in detention in Australia who are entitled to our legal protection and hopefully, our compassion? — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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