JIHAD RECRUITING TARGETS YOUTHS "WHO HAVE NOTHING" [NBC NEWS, March 28, 2007] "We were told to fight against Israel, America and non-Muslims," said Muhammed Bakhtiar, 17, explaining why he wanted to become a suicide bomber. "We are so unhappy with our lives here. We have nothing," he said. Last month, Bakhtiar and his school friend, Miraj Ahmad, also 17, left their home, families, and boarding school in Buner, a district of the Malakand Division of the Northwest Frontier Province. Their destination was the Muridke madrassa right outside of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The madrassa or religious school is run by the Jama’at-ud-Da’awah, the charity linked to the outlawed terrorist organization, Lashkar e Taiba. And Lashkar e Taiba has links to al-Qaida. The grounds of this madrassa looks much like the campus of any exclusive boys boarding school – except for the bearded armed guards sporting Kalashnikovs checking all those who come and go. There is a cricket field, swimming pool, all sorts of sport activities, and horses too. In addition to religious instruction, the school offers computer sciences, engineering and pre-med classes for students ranging in age from six to 17. It also offers jihad. "We read about jihad in books and wanted to join," said Ahmad. "We wanted to go to the Muridke madrassa so we would have a better life in the hereafter." Ahmad said that he and his friend Bakhtiar were recruited at their high school in Buner. The recruiter offered to take the boys to Muridke for two weeks of training and then to Peshawar where they would be introduced to people and make contacts. "We were told it is our choice to become a freedom fighter or a suicide bomber," explained Ahmad, who had a neat beard and wore a white Muslim prayer cap. "But we should never fight against Pakistan." Every morning the students were taught Islamic studies; afternoons were reserved for sports. Jihadi training was given in the evenings; two classes a night. "The jihadi man who brought us to Muridke told us we would become great by fighting jihad," said the clean-shaven Bakhtiar. "We knew we could never become great if we stayed in Buner. I wanted to become great." About 600,000 people live in Buner, a green valley surrounded by high mountains. The area is underdeveloped and the climate is harsh. The Yusufzai tribe, the largest of all the Pashtun tribes, makes up most of the population. Pashtuns are the ethnic group comprising 15 percent of Pakistan’s population – mostly in the Northwest Frontier Province, along the Pakistan-Afghan border – and in Pakistan’s southwest Balouchistan Province. They have an ancient culture, speak their own language and abide by their own tribal codes of honor and hospitality called Pashtunwali. They have gotten a bad name of late since the Taliban are also Pashtuns. The Buner tribesmen who cannot eke out a living from farming often try to leave and work in Malaysia or the Gulf States. Some, like Bakhtiar and Ahmad, just try and leave. Buner seemed like a perfect place to sign up kids for jihad. When the parents of Bakhtiar and Ahmad learned the boys had missed a week at their Buner boarding school, they panicked. They contacted relatives and friends. There were no clues. Finally a nephew remembered the boys talking one night about the Muridke madrassa. He went there and somehow managed to get past the armed guards and identified his cousin, Bakhtiar. He called home to Buner and told the family to come. The parents of both boys said that they believed the Hera boarding school in Buner had brainwashed their sons. The principal, Abdur Rahman, denied this, saying he went to the local police and demanded they go after the man who recruited the boys at his school. "We don’t support this; suicide attacks are murder; this is against Islam," said Rahman. "Those boys went to Muridke by themselves, they should have been here taking their exams, and I no longer want them back in my school," he said. The tribal elders intervened and now Bakhtiar and Ahmad are back in school in Buner. "My brother and my uncle found me in Lahore," said Bakhtiar. "The people at Muridke let us leave and said we could come back after we finished our exams at home," he said. But we asked them, "Do you want to go back and learn jihad?" "I don’t know" said Bakhtiar."Maybe, maybe." Ahmad agreed. "There is nothing for us here. Nothing."

Dr John Elliot dies "With my head held high."

SWISS CLINIC "TOO HASTY" WITH ASSISTED SUICIDES

[SMH, February 3, 2007] A Swiss clinic specialising in assisted suicides has been accused of being too hasty in helping some people die. For three years Soraya Wernli worked at the right hand of Ludwig Minelli, a 74-year-old Swiss lawyer whose organisation, Dignitas, helps profoundly ill people to die. About 30 times the 49-year-old nurse watched a client drink a dose of a barbiturate, sodium pentobarbital, and peacefully fall asleep. She believed in her work, in ending extreme suffering. But two years ago, she says, her unease reached crisis point. Two things came to alarm her about Minelli's practice. First was the haste of the process before suicide. Clients, mostly foreigners, would arrive in Zurich and have a doctor confirm in the morning they were ill and sound of mind. "And by 4pm they would be dead. It was against my morality. In that time, how can you be sure they really wanted to die?" Second, Wernli says, not all clients had a terminal illness or an intolerable condition, as a statement on the Dignitas website says they must. She says some were depressed and a few were merely old and wanted to die. A document Wernli gave to the Herald lists 35 people whom she says committed suicide with the help of Dignitas. Twenty-eight - including a 93-year-old South Australian woman - died on the day a doctor saw them to assess their medical and mental state. In 2005 Wernli and her husband, Kurt, who had been a director of Dignitas, left the organisation, ending a friendship of more than 30 years with the human rights lawyer. "I could not accept what he was doing. He was not interested in their [clients'] diagnosis, just their money," she says. On Thursday last week a terminally ill Sydney doctor, John Elliott, used the Dignitas service to die. His death, reported in the Herald last weekend, was peaceful, and the Dignitas nurse and social worker were professional and sympathetic, witnesses said. But Wernli's allegations, and others, raise troubling questions about the methods of Dignitas, and about the regulation of assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland. The questions are relevant to Australia, not only because five Australians have died with the aid of Dignitas - up to 30 are registered to use the service - but because the direction of public opinion in favour of euthanasia and assisted suicide suggests that similar organisations may eventually exist in Australia. The case of Dignitas raises a stark moral question: who is entitled to end their lives, and to be helped to do so? Minelli contests as "absolutely unfair" the charges that he runs Dignitas as a business. He says a University of Magdeburg study of 138 Dignitas suicides shows its planning is careful, not hasty. But on the Wernlis' charge that he is indiscriminate in his choice of clients, he says unashamedly that anyone of sound mind has the right to exercise "the last freedom." His views are widely sought: in 2005 he gave evidence to a select committee of the British Parliament on its Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill. He calls suicide a "marvellous possibility, given to man to withdraw him from a situation that is unbearable and inevitable". After all, he jokes, "life is a sexually transmitted disease, with a 100 per cent mortality rate." He is a leading advocate for the right-to-die movement, if not the gentle face that some in it might desire. Combatative, he makes and sees enemies everywhere. He says that Zurich's chief prosecutor, Andreas Brunner, has tried to shut Dignitas for years because too many foreigners coming to Switzerland to die aggravates his workload. "As a lawyer and intellectual he is impressive," says Elke Baezner. "But as a person -- his aggression, arrogance, the way he speaks -- he does great damage." Baezner and her colleagues at Exit, an organisation that provides assisted suicides exclusively to Swiss people, fear Minelli's approach will drive authorities to restrict all right-to-die groups. Minelli counters that Exit wants to help only Swiss. Exit and Minelli have been at odds since 1998, when he quit the organisation in unhappy circumstances to form Dignitas. So began what Dignitas's critics call "suicide tourism." Using two Zurich apartments, Dignitas was involved in 192 assisted suicides last year, 42 more than the much larger Exit. It charged foreigners €3500 ($5900) for the privilege. The Darwin doctor and euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has helped four Australians to end their lives with the help of Dignitas, including the 93-year-old woman and Elliott. He says all had a good experience and none was hastily processed. If anything, the demand for accurate medical and legal records was too burdensome. While assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, most doctors will write prescriptions of sodium pentobarbital only for someone with a terminal illness or intolerable condition. Minelli wants to extend access to the lethal drug to anyone with "the capacity for discernment." That would include an 80-year-old man whose wife of 50 years had just died and who felt life was no longer worth living. And it would include the mentally ill. Minelli is advising a young man with bipolar disorder -- but "full capacity for discernment" -- who has asked the Swiss Supreme Court for the right to kill himself. Yet Minelli maintains that Dignitas's orientation is always "towards life". He says he often dissuades clients who wish to kill themselves; and that the work of Dignitas actually reduces the suicide rate by giving sick people an escape clause. He says more than 70 per cent of Dignitas members who are accepted to use the service never do so. Instead, with the knowledge they can die if they wish, they are able to live on more easily. But a 2005 case exposed the dangers of allowing clients to kill themselves without proper checks. An autopsy of a 69-year-old German woman, helped by Dignitas to commit suicide, showed the woman was not terminally ill, as her GP's report had stated. Instead, it appeared she had been depressed. When the Swiss doctor who had approved the suicide request learnt of the post-mortem result, he killed himself, the British medical journal BMJ says. The German doctor who provided the false report told investigators he thought she planned to use it to take time off work. Minelli was unrepentant: the doctor's report indicated the woman was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and hepatitis. Besides, "every person in Europe has the right to choose to die, even if they are not terminally ill." Then there is the harrowing story of the 43-year-old German secretary Anke H. She had fought terminal brain cancer for four years, says her friend of 18 years, Dirk Neuhaus, a 46-year-old manager with an aluminium extrusion company. In the last two years of her life she would lie crying on the floor of her apartment, immobilised by pain. Her decision to commit suicide was agonising; she was devoutly Catholic. Neuhaus says that only after a long struggle, and with the support of religious friends, did she decide that God would love her whatever she did. One of these friends, a member of her church, accompanied her to her death. In November Neuhaus and three others travelled to Zurich with Anke. Their appointment at the Dignitas apartment was fixed for 11am. But in a possibly catastrophic mistake, the Dignitas nurse arrived between 35 and 40 minutes late. In three of the four friends' accounts provided to the Herald, the delay had a huge effect on Anke. Neuhaus and his partner, Pomina Bentson, say she went into shock. A blanket had to be placed over her shoulders as she sat in a wheelchair in the corridor outside the apartment. In the version of another friend, Anke did not go into shock but certainly "suffered" from the cold and her weakness. Accounts of what happened inside the apartment diverge dramatically. Neuhaus and Bentson say that 30 seconds after drinking the mixture containing sodium pentobarbital, Anke began to cry out: "I am burning, I am burning, I burn so bad." The other two witnesses, who requested anonymity, say they did not hear those words. Instead, said one, Anke complained about the drink's bitterness: "This shocking thing! Chocolate! This shocking thing!" Then she spoke to the drink: "Stay in! I want to keep you." Neuhaus and Bentson allege that Anke fell into a coma after four minutes, as she was meant to, but that several times she appeared to almost leap out of the coma, as if she were drowning and gasping for air. The other two witnesses say Anke's body was tense for a short time before lapsing into a peaceful state. They say Anke had a good death. However, one told the Swiss newspaper Sonntagszeitung: "I do not think Dirk Neuhaus and Pomina Bentson are lying. They just saw and felt the situation different from me. It was a very hard day for all of us." Neuhaus has begun a campaign against Dignitas over the death, which he says he will remember for the rest of his life. A pharmacological opinion obtained by the Herald found there was almost no precedent for sodium pentobarbital to cause the disturbed coma described by the two witnesses. But on rare occasions unusual reactions, including distress, can occur. The prosecutor Brunner is investigating the case. It demonstrates the trauma and differing perceptions that can accompany assisted suicide -- and the importance not only of regulation but of psychological preparation for clients and their companions. Andreas Blum is a spokesman for Exit, the Swiss organisation that is 25 years old and has 60,000 members. Each pays 35 Swiss francs (about $36) a year to belong and has the right to use Exit's service for free. He says a terminally or intolerably ill member who wishes to commit suicide must consult an Exit team, which includes a doctor, a psychologist and sometimes a theologian. He says the team makes no fewer than two, and as many as five, visits with the client, and that the period of reflection before death can last two to three months. The team must be sure the client's wish to die is constant over time. The client, family and friends are offered counselling before and after the event. After Anke's death, Neuhaus says, all he got was a questionnaire. Change is looming for Dignitas. Brunner says that while he gets on well with Exit, Dignitas is not transparent, financially or in its medical practices. He also has periodic concerns about the quality of its staff. Minelli says he has nothing to hide: that anyone is welcome to examine his accountant's books. "I am not saying Dignitas should be banned but we need a law to provide standards in this field," Brunner says. Such a proposal is before parliament. "In the years ahead there will be more organisations like Dignitas. There are going to be more elderly people who want to die on their own decision. We have to get it right." The Wernlis plan to open a new assisted suicide organisation for foreigners. They say they will require clients to see two doctors over at least five days and will charge €2300, not the €3500 Dignitas charges. Minelli, meanwhile, remains determined to give anyone with the capacity for discernment the opportunity to die. His critics, he told the British parliamentary committee, expose the plight "of the prophet in his own land". Related stories: MY NAME IS JOHN ELLIOT AND I’M ABOUT TO DIE WITH MY HEAD HELD HIGH NOT ALONE ON FINAL JOURNEY BOB BROWN TO BRING PRIVATE MEMBER’S BILL TO SENATE

ALARMING EXTENT OF CHILD ABUSE BY AMERICAN CATHOLIC CLERGY [Catholic Exchange, January 28, 2007] [See Webmaster's comments below] It has been five years since the story of clergy sex abuse and cover-up erupted in the pages of The Boston Globe and then spread like wildfire throughout the nation via other media. Despite everything that's been said since January, 2002, some key lessons of the worst crisis ever to hit the Catholic Church in the United States still haven't sunk in. Meeting in Baltimore last November, the US bishops approved the first installment of the million dollars they've committed to a study of the roots of abuse, to be carried out by New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. (Other sources are expected to come up with several million more.) During the discussion, a bishop complained that the study would extend over several years, guaranteeing still more publicity and pain. Couldn't the researchers hurry up? The answer was no. It's easy to sympathize with the bishop's concern, but he was being unrealistic. Study or no study, ugly publicity will continue, off and on at least, as new disclosures come to light and new settlements of abuse cases are announced. As of a year ago, abuse was known to have cost the Church and its insurers a cool $1.5 billion over the past half-century, and by now the sum already is many millions higher. In saying this, it's important to keep the real dimensions of clergy sex abuse clearly in mind. Although what happened was truly scandalous, the reality isn't quite so horrendous as sometimes supposed. According to the best figures available, between 1950 and the present about 6,000 Catholic clergymen, almost all of them priests, abused approximately 13,000 minors in the US. The incidence of abuse peaked in the 1970s and dropped sharply after that. Abusers made up about 4% of the total number of priests active in the United States during the period in question. Whatever anyone chooses to make of that, there are excellent reasons for not forgetting what happened. One reason is that it's far from universally understood and acknowledged how much ecclesiastical clubbishness and the habits of secrecy it encourages contributed to turning what unquestionably was a very bad situation into an unmitigated disaster. Nor is it generally grasped how deeply entrenched these destructive attitudes still remain. Back in 2002, six months after the scandal broke, the bishops adopted a policy of "transparency" on sex abuse. But much relevant information has yet to come to light, while transparency needs to be extended across the board to other areas of Catholic life, notably including finances. Similarly, neither the Church nor the media have yet faced up to the implications of the corrosive hostility to the Church motivating some journalists in their coverage and commentary five years ago. Some of the reporting was merely sloppy, conveying the impression that things that happened decades earlier had only recently occurred. But, according to Peter Steinfels, former religion editor of The New York Times, the problem went far deeper than that. Certain editorial writers and commentators — often, it seems, alienated Catholics themselves — seized on the scandal in a manner that "settled scores" with the Church over other, unrelated issues, Steinfels says. On this anniversary, American Catholicism finds itself in a new, post-scandal era. For the most part, that's all to the good. But even though it's understandably tempting to put the recent unpleasantness out of mind, doing that would be a serious mistake. If we fail to absorb the painful but salutary lessons of 2002, we risk setting the stage for fresh problems not so far down the road. WEBMASTER'S COMMENT The above figures would quite likely reveal only the tip of the iceberg, because presumably most abused children would be too embarrassed or afraid to tell their parents. They would also be afraid of the possible consequences for "dobbing in" the offending priest. Many of the cases which have been dealt with by the Church would no doubt be complaints from adults who were abused as children.

Catholic Church Bans "Morning After" Pills for Rape Victims

[January 11, 2007] Sexually-assaulted women who seek help at Catholic-controlled hospitals cannot be referred to rape crisis centres that supply morning-after pills, under church policy. The policy, spelt out in an 80-page ethics document, has heightened concerns among doctors and rape counsellors about the Catholic Church's growing control of hospitals. And The Australian reveals today that another fertility centre has been told to move out by the Catholic buyers of the hospital where it is based. One prominent doctor said she had long been concerned at the church's rape policy, which is contained in an ethics document approved by the Catholic hierarchy in 2001. The Code of Ethical Standards, compiled by Catholic Health Australia, says direct referral of raped women to centres that offer the morning-after pill "should only occur if reasonable steps have been taken to exclude the likelihood of pregnancy." Senior Catholic spokesmen defended the policy as a logical and ethical extension of the church's opposition to the morning-after pill, which it considers morally no different to abortion. But Melbourne GP and medical broadcaster Sally Cockburn said she was "blown out of the water" when she read the policy. "If this is the way their staff are mandated to behave, then I don't believe rape victims should be taken to their hospitals at all," Dr Cockburn said. "They have no right to make us follow their point of view, and if they're going to be taking over more hospitals, I'm concerned." Karen Willis, of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, said it was standard practice for a raped woman to be offered the morning-after pill, if there was a real risk of her becoming pregnant with her attacker's child. "To not offer someone the morning-after pill would be negligence as far as we are concerned," she said. Catholic-controlled health organisations control more than 70 hospitals in Australia -- and added one more this week, the Wesley Hospital in Townsville. The buy-out by the rival Catholic Mater Misericordiae Hospital is subject to approval by competition regulators. But the Queensland Fertility Group, which offers in-vitro fertilisation and other fertility treatments at the site, confirmed yesterday it had already been told it must find new premises elsewhere. Catholic doctrine is opposed to IVF. QFG Townsville director Ron Chang said the forced relocation was annoying, but predicted it would not interrupt services. The Australian revealed on Tuesday that Canberra's John James Hospital -- bought in October by a Catholic-controlled organisation -- had begun withdrawing services to the Canberra Fertility Centre, which was based on its premises. Catholic Health Australia chief Francis Sullivan said that as well as private hospitals, Catholic organisations ran 21 public hospitals around the nation that would also have to follow the ethics policy. Mr Sullivan said health workers in Catholic hospitals "are not prevented from giving information" about abortion, the morning-after pill or any other treatment. "The only restriction would be that the staff are not permitted to directly refer women to abortion services," he said. Catholic health ethics spokesman Bishop Anthony Fisher said the ban was a logical extension of the church's position on use of the morning-after pill.

STRONG DISCRIMINATION REMAINS AGAINST INDIA'S "UNTOUCHABLES" THE dalit or "Untouchable" is a government servant, the teacher in a state school, a politician. He is generally never a member of the higher judiciary, an eminent lawyer, industrialist or journalist. His freedom operates in designated enclaves: in politics and in the administrative posts he acquires because of state policy. But in areas of contemporary social exchange and culture, his "Untouchability" becomes his only definition. The right to pray to a Hindu god has always been a high caste privilege. Intricacy of religious ritual is directly proportionate to social status. The dalit has been formally excluded from religion, from education, and is a pariah in the entire sanctified universe of the "dvija." Unlike racial minorities, the dalit is physically indistinguishable from upper castes, yet metaphorically and literally, the dalit has been a "shit bearer" for three millennia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. The word "pariah" itself comes from a dalit caste of southern India, the paRaiyar, "those of the drum" (paRai) or the "leather people" (Dumont, 1980: 54). At 150 million, dalits or "scheduled castes" and "scheduled tribes," form about 20 percent of India's population (Census of India, 1991). Backward castes as a whole, taking dalits, tribes, and Other Backward Castes (OBCs) into consideration, form about 52 percent of India's population. Today, wide-ranging policies on affirmative action have opened up government service and state education to dalits. But areas of freedom are limited, largely to sectors that are under the aegis of the state, such as the civil service or state-owned enterprises. Exclusion from cultural and social networks emerges from the dalit's crucial exclusion from the system of castes (Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1998: 39). The dalit's pariah status derives its strength and justification from religious texts. In the Manusmriti, the dalit is described as "polluted," in the same way as a menstruating woman, a widow, or a person who has recently been bereaved is polluted. The dalit is "unclean" from birth. He violates, by his very existence, the brahminical obsession with hygiene (Dumont, 1980: 131). While the "untouchability" of the menstruating woman or the bereaved is temporary and he or she can escape the Untouchable condition after the period of "pollution" is past, the dalit can never escape his status: he is perpetually filthy. In a hymn from the Purusasukta of the Rig Veda, the dvija are said to have been born from elevated parts of the body of the supreme being. The dalit is the "unborn," with no physical link with the supreme being. According to this hymn, from the body of Brahma come the four main categories of Hindu society, namely the four varnas (colors or castes): brahmins (priests), kshatriyas (warriors), vaishyas (businessmen), and shudras (servants). The priest is born from the mouth of the Creator, the warrior from the arm, the businessman from the stomach, and the servant from the foot. Untouchables are born from outside the body of the Creator, almost a different species from Brahma's children. Their entry into the divine body would be as unthinkable as the entry of an animal. Today, the literary and scholarly efflorescence among dalits is set apart from caste Hindu society as a particularly dalit development. Dalit critiques of nation and society barely impinge on upper-caste notions of the social order, of the nation-state, and of modernity in general. The reasons for this are often attributed to the grafting of traditional caste networks onto modern state institutions--for example, the upper-caste seizures of Western education and the higher bureaucracy. The slide of the independent Indian nation-state into a landscape dominated by the brahminical upper castes has meant that new ways have been found to effectively seal the dalit in his "democratic" prison (Nigam, 2000). As a result of legally reserved quotas in government and in state educational institutions, sections of dalits have emerged from agricultural poverty to become middle class. Yet the waters of modern opportunity flow along the fields of the upper castes, which were the main beneficiaries of the professional opportunities provided by colonialism and which also stand to gain the benefits of contemporary globalization, such as opportunities in the Information Technology industry or in the private sector. Thus, while dalit political importance and militancy rises, at the same time the dalit remains segregated from caste Hindu society by the invisible arms of caste. The word "dalit" or "crushed underfoot" or "broken into pieces" is the contemporary version of the word "Untouchable." "Dalit" owes its genesis to the nineteenth-century writings of Jotirao Govindrao Phule as well as to the literature of the Dalit Panthers, a political group formed in 1972 in the state of Maharashtra. British colonial census takers grouped together all those communities' neighbors considered "polluted" and called them "Untouchable." "harijan" or "children of god" was Mahatma Gandhi's name for dalits. The word "Untouchable" is sometimes still used, but "harijan" is seen as an equivalent of "Uncle Tom," a paternalistic and condescending categorization of a group doomed to remain in perpetual bondage. Dalit leader Bhaurao Gaikwad observed in 1935 that "It is no use only giving Untouchables a sweet name. Something practical should be done to ameliorate their conditions" (Moon, 1987, vol. 4: 230). Today most Untouchable castes would prefer to use the term "dalit" as an identity of assertion. The UN Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001 equated "racism" with "casteism"; although this parallel has been systematically criticized, the word "dalit" has been interpreted by some activists as equivalent to "Black."

NSW GOVT REFUSES FUNDING FOR ABORIGINAL CHILD ABUSE [SMH, January 5, 2007] The Premier, Morris Iemma [pictured] and the Treasurer, Michael Costa, have refused to provide new funding to tackle an epidemic of child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities, ignoring the pleas of three ministers and the taskforce that identified the crisis. Almost a year after receiving a report from an expert panel warning that abuse in Aboriginal communities was four times the average, the State Government has responded with a "five-year plan" containing 88 recommendations -- but no extra funding to implement them. The Federal Government, the State Opposition and taskforce members have expressed dismay at the Government's response. The Herald understands Mr Costa blocked any new funding despite representations by the Attorney-General, Bob Debus, the Community Services Minister, Reba Meagher, and the Health Minister, John Hatzistergos. The acting federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister, John Cobb, yesterday called on Mr Iemma to override Mr Costa and fund the recommended programs. The state ministers are believed to have sought funding of between $20 million and $40 million a year. The Opposition has compared the request with $25 million the Government recently gave to the Lane Cove Tunnel company to compensate it for delaying road closures until after the March election. Professor Chris Cunneen, from the University of NSW and a member of the taskforce, yesterday likened the lack of new funding to an inadequate response by governments in the early 1990s to the royal commission on Aboriginal deaths in custody. Because of the lack of new funding, the Herald understands, the Government has scrapped a recommendation that a special case worker, dealing with child sexual assault, be provided to each Aboriginal community. "The issue of funding is very important because it will require agencies to find funds to do this out of their existing budgets," Professor Cunneen said. "While the Government can say it's funding the recommendations, we don't really know how they're doing that if there's no clear allocation of resources." The Opposition Leader, Peter Debnam, said the Government had released its response during the holiday season because it was "woefully inadequate." Professor Cunneen feared the response to the report -- Breaking the Silence: Creating the Future, which the Government received in February but did not release for four months -- would be "buried" in the lead-up to the state election. The taskforce's chairwoman, Marcia Ella-Duncan, warned last month a decision not to fund the programs would be inhumane. A Government source said the lack of funds was disastrous: "They've been sitting on this for ages. There was a lot of work in preparing budget proposals with an understanding this was a major thing the Government wanted to address. Treasury said they had no money ... [and] the next day put $25 million in for the tunnel in Lane Cove. There's a big opportunity to tackle a major problem and they have just missed it. It means we can't do as much as quickly." The report found there existed a culture of "silence, denial and inappropriate responses such as protecting the perpetrator." The Government's response said it would boost surveillance and evidence-gathering efforts by police for paedophile cases. It also promised alternative accommodation for Aboriginal people granted bail and to "encourage" police prosecutors to place more restrictions on bail for offenders. A spokesman for Mr Iemma, Ben Wilson, said the Government was boosting spending in the Department of Community Services, which would benefit Aboriginal communities and stop abuse. He said the report had found ways to better employ existing resources. Mr Costa's office refused to comment.

LEGAL INJECTIONS FOR VIOLENT ICE ADDICTS [The Sunday Telegraph, December 10, 2006] VIOLENT ice addicts are using the Kings Cross injecting room to shoot up as police battle a crime wave fuelled by the drug. The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that ice addicts make up eight per cent of users at the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, which has been forced to retrain staff to deal with them. The concern is that unlike heroin, the drug most commonly injected at the facility, ice causes higher levels of violence and aggression in users when they walk out the door. Premier Morris Iemma said yesterday he was concerned at the growing trend, which would be examined in a review of the injecting room scheduled for next October. But the Federal Government, and State Opposition Leader Peter Debnam said the revelations should lead to the immediate closure of the centre. The injecting room's handling of ice users is set to be discussed at the State Government's ice summit on Thursday. Injecting centre medical director Ingrid van Beek [Pictured at the centre] said eight per cent of the 220 addicts using the centre each day were injecting ice -- more than twice the number 18 months ago. "Ice changes people's behaviour in such a dramatic way and can be quite scary,'' she said. "People become incredibly strong and quite aggressive, and that's what makes the impact of this drug greater.'' Staff had undergone additional training to manage abusive behaviour among ice addicts and to identify the early signs of psychosis, Ms van Beek said. "Staff have to be aware of how to manage that sort of crisis situation, and our staff are specially trained in that. If people show sings of emerging psychosis, they are counselled and not allowed to enter the centre. The Sunday Telegraph approached several addicts outside the injecting centre who admitted to using ice inside. One man said staff did not check the type of drug he injected. "I just don't tell them. They don't care; they just write you down on a piece of paper,'' he said. "You just say, `I'm doing hammer (heroin)' and go boom, boom quickly. Just keep it quiet.'' Another addict, calling himself Ace, said: "Hell yeah, bro, it's a proper sealed joint in there with security guards and all. You can do what you want. It's amnesty once you cross the door; cops can't touch you.'' A security guard at the Mansions nightclub, across the road, said ice users were often seen stumbling on to the street, drug-fuelled and aggressive. "They must be on ice -- they're screaming and ranting and raving,'' he said. Kings Cross police duty officer Robert Allison said users high on ice were assaulting people and damaging property in the area. "When they're in the episodes, they commit violent crimes - assault and malicious damage, punching a glass pane,'' he said. "It's more prevalent now. We have noticed people affected by ice are creating more problems for police and are tying up police longer because we have to stay with them.'' Mr Iemma said ice addiction was a serious problem. "I am extremely concerned about the increased use of ice across the community, and the use of the drug at the Kings Cross facility is no exception,'' he said. "The trial of the MSIC will end in October, 2007, and the Government will be carefully considering the rigorous scientific analysis that has been done and its impact in saving lives and referring drug addicts into treatment.'' Opposition Leader Peter Debnam said it was alarming that addicts were allowed to inject ice in the MSIC centre. "All health professionals and law-enforcement agencies are horrified by the impact of ice on our community, and here you see the State Government condoning - in fact, promoting - the use of ice,'' he said. Federal parliamentary secretary for illicit drugs and mental health Christopher Pyne said the NSW Government should reconsider the role of the MSIC. "The Commonwealth Government does not support the heroin injecting room, and if it is becoming the ice injecting room we think that is the wrong approach,'' he said. Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said ice had led to more violence and criminal activity, including armed robbery. "It's no coincidence this growing problem is reflected in an increase in numbers injecting ice at the Kings Cross facility.''

ALCOHOL and TOBACCO MORE SERIOUS than ILLEGAL DRUGS

Two of the British Government’s most senior drug policy scientific advisors have just ranked alcohol and tobacco ahead of such Class A illegal drugs LSD and ecstasy in terms of the dangers they pose. On a new “league table” of both legal and illegal drugs, based on the harm they do, alcohol is listed as the fifth most dangerous drug and tobacco the ninth. That would male alcohol a likely Class A drug and tobacco a Class B drug – both illegal under the current classification system. According to Professor David Nutt of the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and Colin Blakemore, the chief executive of the Medical Research Council, who drew up the list, tobacco and alcohol cause about 40 times the total number of deaths from all illegal drugs combined. The list was provided to a UK parliamentary committee, which has just released a report delivering a broadside at the British Government’s illicit drugs policy. It said there was little connection between the danger posed by drugs and their classification on the illegal drugs scale. Some drugs had been added to the classified list because of political pressure or media attention, rather than because they were dangerous. In the UK six drugs are Class A: heroin, LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, methyamphetamine, and illegal or “street” methadone. Tobacco and alcohol related deaths in the UK total 162,000 a year. The biggest killer behind tobacco and alcohol is methadone, which is prescribed to help treat heroin addicts. The drugs on the new league were assessed across three broad categories of potential harm: physical harm, risk of dependence and harm to family and community. Alcohol ranked second highest (behind heroin) on the social harm scale. Here’s the “league table” of drugs ranked by the risk of harm they pose: 1. Heroin 2. Cocaine 3. Barbiturates 4. Methadone 5. Alcohol 6. Ketamine 7. Benzodiazepines 8. Amphetamine 9. Tobacco 10. Buprenorphine 11. Cannabis 12. Solvents 13. Methtamphetamine (4-MTA) 14. LSD 15. Methylphenidate 16. Anabolic Steroids 17. GHB 18. Ecstasy 19. Alkyl Nitrites 20. Khat The parliamentary committee has said officially publishing such a list, where drugs were decoupled from criminal penalties, would “give the public a better sense of the relative harms involved.” READ FULL REPORT

HIGH COST OF TOBACCO RELATED DISEASES IN NSW

The social and economic cost of smoking, including medical expenses and the impact of tobacco-related diseases on loved ones and the workplace, places a $6.6 billion burden each year on the NSW Government, businesses and families. But huge savings could be made by reducing rates of smoking by five percentage points from current levels, economists say in a report published today. Just under 18 per cent of Australian adults report smoking daily. Based on conservative estimates, NSW would save $2.3 billion over 20 years, or $9036 for each person prevented from smoking, if that rate was reduced to 13 per cent, the experts predict. Besides causing premature death among half of long-term smokers there is a considerable cost to the health system, said two economists, David Collins, of Macquarie University, and Helen Lapsley, of the University of Queensland. In 1998-99 6860 deaths were attributable to smoking and 353,180 hospital bed days were for people suffering tobacco-related illness, at a cost of $254 million, they found. Work, including unpaid household activities and volunteer work, was also affected. "Smoking reduces both the number of people in the paid workforce and the productivity of some people remaining in the workforce," their report says. Of the total tangible costs of smoking, 58 per cent were borne by individuals, 29 per cent by business and only 13 per cent by governments. Professor Collins said that nearly half of all the costs were avoidable, and could be reduced by increased funding for government anti-smoking campaigns and other prevention programs. Business also had much to gain from investing in anti-smoking programs, he said. "They will experience reduced absenteeism and higher on-the-job productivity if they take part in policies to reduce smoking." It was difficult to get governments to invest in long-term tobacco control programs, he said, describing both federal and state investment in anti-smoking as "far too low". "Our research clearly shows there will be very high rates of return in this area, so very clearly you can justify much higher levels of expenditure." Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University, said rates of heart disease could be greatly reduced by tobacco control policies. Governments often suffered from a go-slow mentality when it came to smoking, he said, because rates of tobacco consumption were slowly falling. The director of the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Advancement, Professor Bill Bellew, said NSW spent $7 million each year on prevention programs. He noted that while smoking rates in the general population had dropped below 20 per cent, they were much higher in the country's indigenous people and required some shift in public health funding. STATISTICS * More men smoke than women. * Those aged 25 to 34 have the highest smoking rates. * 150 admissions to hospitals a day are attributable to smoking. * In 2002, 70 per cent of all deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 87 per cent of lung cancer deaths were attributable to smoking. [Source: NSW Health.]

AIDS - THE SILENT TSUNAMI - THREATENS ALL OF ASIA

AIDS is a silent tsunami that threatens all of Asia, but the deadly disease can still be conquered if governments take urgent action now, world health officials said. One in four new infections occurs in Asia and 1,500 people die in the region each day. The disease has spread to all provinces in China, the world's most populous nation, while India has the second-highest number of AIDS/HIV patients after Southern Africa. But political will to battle the illness is lacking in most of the region's governments despite the huge potential toll in lives and missed development goals as millions of households are pushed into poverty, officials said at an international AIDS conference in the western Japanese city of Kobe. Governments need to view AIDS as a threat on the scale of a natural disaster such as the tsunami last December that killed or left missing 232,000 people, said JVR Prasada Rao, Director of the Regional Support Team for UNAIDS, the UN agency dedicated to fighting the disease. "The only real barrier to scaling up the response to HIV is one of perception," he told a conference session. The virus doesn't kill hundreds of thousands at a thunderous stroke like the tsunami, and it doesn't provide vivid television pictures," he added. "It is more like a silent tsunami." The UN estimates 8.2 million people are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Asia, about 5.1 million of them in India. The Chinese government says there are 840,000 patients in China. Worldwide, about 39 million people have HIV/AIDS, including 25 million in sub-Saharan Africa. But targeted prevention programs are reaching only 19 per cent of sex workers and five per cent of injecting drug users in Asia. The figure for homosexual men is no higher than two per cent. If no steps are taken, 12 million people are likely to be infected with HIV in Asia by 2010, UNAIDS warns. This figure could be cut by half with hard work over the next two or three years, but this would require major political will, UNAIDS director Peter Piot said yesterday. In Asia, the AIDS epidemic is still mainly found among vulnerable groups such as homosexuals, injecting drug users and sex workers, but health officials say it could spread to the general population. Rao said many politicians did not like to talk about injecting drug users, men having sex with men and sex workers. "True leadership means accepting and acting on this, and doing it in the most public and vocal way," he said. There are success stories in Asia, such as Thailand, where annual new HIV infections fell from nearly 143,000 in 1991 to 21,260 at the end of 2003, thanks to mass education and condom programs aimed at sex workers and other high-risk groups In contrast, affluent, well-educated Japan still has a relatively low number of infections, but experts say general apathy could lead to an explosion of cases over the next decade. "Obviously, the problem is one not of resources or know-how," Rao said. "Japan is economically one of the most advanced countries in the world. The only explanation, surely, is low prioritisation." But Asia is more than capable of conquering the disease, Rao said, citing its response to emergencies such as SARS and the tsunami. "When we need to, we can mobilise rapidly, assemble the resources and become extremely creative in figuring out solutions to all manner of problems," he added. "We need an emergency-like response to this epidemic."

MANY BLACK AMERICANS BELIEVE IN AIDS CONSPIRACY

[Washington Post] More than 20 years after the AIDS epidemic arrived in the United States, a significant proportion of black Americans embrace the theory that US government scientists created the disease to control or wipe out their communities, a study released this week has found. That belief markedly hurt efforts to prevent the spread of the disease among blacks, the study's authors and activists said. The US Census Bureau says African Americans represent 13 per cent of the population, yet the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention say they account for 50 per cent of new HIV infections in the nation. The study, by the Rand Corporation and Oregon State University, appears in the February edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. Nearly half of the 500 blacks surveyed said the HIV virus was man-made. More than a quarter said they believed AIDS was produced in a government laboratory and 12 per cent believed it was created and spread by the CIA. A slight majority said they believed a cure for AIDS was being withheld from the poor. Forty-four per cent said people who took the new medicines for HIV were government guinea pigs and 15 per cent said AIDS was a form of genocide against black people. At the same time, 75 per cent said they believed medical and public health agencies were working to stop the spread of AIDS among blacks. But the responses, which varied only slightly by age, sex, education and income level, alarmed the researchers. "Knowing that these beliefs were out there, I wasn't as surprised as people I share the study with," said Laura Bogart, a behavioural scientist for the Rand Corporation, who co-wrote the study with Sheryl Thorburn, an associate professor at Oregon State University. "But the findings are striking, and a wake-up call to the prevention community," Dr Bogart said. "The prevention community has not addressed conspiracy beliefs in the context of prevention. I think that a lot of people involved in prevention may not be from the community where they are trying to prevent HIV." The findings were also no surprise to Na'im Akbar, a professor of psychology at Florida State University who specialises in African-American behaviour. "This is not a bunch of crazy people running around saying they're out to get us," Professor Akbar said. The belief "comes from the reality of 300 years of slavery and 100 years of post-slavery exploitation." Professor Akbar cited the Tuskegee experiment conducted by the US Government between 1932 and 1972. In it, scientists told black men they were being treated for syphilis but actually withheld treatment so they could study the course of the disease.