Salon.com > Australia

Australian psychiatric hospital locks up the wrong man

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 14:56:00 +0000

Talk about a no good, very bad day.

A psychiatric hospital in Australia is trying to figure out how it locked up the wrong man and injected him with a powerful cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs, mistakenly thinking he was a runaway patient, The West Australian reported.

The unidentified man was picked up Dec. 16 by police and brought to Graylands Hospital in Perth.

Police said he matched the description of a patient that had run away two days earlier, according to Gawker.

Weird news: Worker’s comp covers sex mishap

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:14:00 +0000

CANBERRA, Australia — An Australian court has ruled that a bureaucrat who was injured while having sex on a business trip is eligible for worker's compensation benefits.

The Full Bench of the Federal Court ruled Dec. 13 in favor of the woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, and rejecting the appeal of the federal government's insurer.

The woman was hospitalized after being injured in 2007 during sex with a male friend while staying in a motel in the town of Nowra, 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of her hometown of Sydney.

During the sex, a glass light fitting was torn from its mount above the bed and landed on her face, injuring her nose and mouth. She later suffered depression and was unable to continue working for the government.

Her claim for worker's compensation for her physical and psychological injuries was initially approved by government insurer Comcare, then rejected after further investigation.

An administrative tribunal agreed with Comcare that her injuries were not suffered in the course of her employment, saying the government had not induced or encouraged the woman's sexual conduct. The tribunal also found the sex was "not an ordinary incident of an overnight stay" such as showering, sleeping and eating.

Julian Assange wants to run for office

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:30:00 +0000

According to Australian news sources, Julian Assange plans to run for a seat in the Australian Senate in 2013 under the banner of the "WikilLeaks Party." News site the Age reported that Assange has said plans for registering the party were "significantly advanced" and that “a number of very worthy people admired by the Australian public” have expressed interest in standing on the WikiLeaks ticket.

Unsurprisingly, Assange said the party platform would push for greater government transparency and against creeping intrusions on individual privacy. "Polls inside Australia show that Assange could conceivably stand a chance of winning in either New South Wales or Victoria," the Age noted.

10 best countries to be born in 2013

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 14:50:00 +0000

As 2012 comes to a close, marking the finish of a year of economic upheaval around the world (with no clear end in sight), the Economist Intelligence Unit posed the question: Which child born next year will be more likely to have a good quality-of-life? And, perhaps most importantly, what person entering adulthood in the 2030s will be gladdest to live where she or he lives? They call this the "born index” or "life satisfaction index," and it explains which countries lead the pack as the best place to be born in 2013.

America, which used to be number-one on this very same index back in 1988, has plummeted to number 16. It’s understandable in terms of our miserable healthcare system, growing social stratification and workplace policies; we hang out toward the bottom of the lists when it comes to maternal health, paid leave for parents or family sickness. And yes, we have zero mandatory vacation hours.

Rupert Murdoch’s mother dies at 103

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:07:00 +0000

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, a prominent Australian philanthropist and mother of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has died at age 103.

News Ltd., the Australian media company headed by her son, confirmed her death late Wednesday.

She died peacefully surrounded by family members in her garden estate outside Melbourne.

She had been hospitalized in September after a bad fall in which she broke her leg.

Rupert Murdoch said in a statement issued on behalf of the family that "We have lost the most wonderful mother but we are all grateful to have had her love and wisdom for so many years."

She has 77 direct descendants, including 50 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren.

Australian radio station pranks Kate Middleton’s nurse

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The King Edward VII hospital in London has confirmed that a Sydney radio station pranked a nurse monitoring the Duchess of Cambridge, who is currently being hospitalized for acute morning sickness.

Mel Greig and Michael Christian of 2DayFM assumed the identities of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, and were put through to Middleton's nurse, initiating "the easiest prank call ever made." She eagerly updated the co-hosts, saying Middleton was "quite stable at the moment. "She hasn't had any retching with me and she's been sleeping on and off," she said. Greig and Christian played a tape of barking Corgis in the background, for dramatic effect.

Hospital chief executive John Lofthouse said of the incident,"This was a foolish prank call that we all deplore. We take patient confidentiality extremely seriously and we are now reviewing our telephone protocols."

Melbourne Metro PSA: “Dumb ways to die”

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:25:00 +0000

This week's viral video comes from an unlikely source: Melbourne Metro Trains. The video, "Dumb Ways to Die," is part of a campaign aimed at preventing train-related deaths in Victoria, Australia.

The PSA sheds light on a dark subject, using cute characters and catchy music to make a serious point. John Mescall, the executive creative director who headed the campaign, said, “We’ve got people eating superglue, sticking forks in toasters and selling both their kidneys. But truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and we still couldn’t come up with dumber ways to die than driving around boomgates and all the other things people do to put themselves in harm’s way around trains. The aim of this campaign is to engage an audience that really doesn’t want to hear any kind of safety message – and we think dumb ways to die will.”

Watch the three-minute video and sing along:

h/t Tastefully Offensive

Australian PM takes on misogyny

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:19:00 +0000

If only the U.S. could borrow Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to take on Congress's misogynist caucus. New footage from Australia's parliament shows Gillard is more than capable.

During a parliamentary session Tuesday, Gillard skewered opposition leader Tony Abbott for a career's worth of patriarchal comments. She tells the chamber that she "will not be lectured on sexism by this man" (pointing at Abbott). She goes on to list a number of Abbott's misogynist remarks, including his suggestion that men might be more adept at wielding authority than women.

Gillard's speech came in response to Abbott's call to have Australia's speaker of the house, Peter Slipper, removed after a scandal involving lurid text messages. As Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams noted on Monday, Gillard has faced misogyny from a far wider base than just her parliamentary colleagues. Taking to Facebook to discuss education policies with the public, the PM was bombarded by trolls calling her a "slut."

We wonder if Gillard takes requests: Todd Akin, R.-Mo., and Allen West, R.- Fla., to name just a couple, could certainly use a similar treatment.

Watch Gillard's speech below:

Don’t forget to breathe

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:41:00 +0000

Do your palms get sweaty as you’re about to make a public presentation? Does the thought of being judged make you jittery?

It’s called performance anxiety, and it bedevils many musicians. New research from Australia suggests a simple solution:

Breathe.

Specifically, breathe deeply, from your diaphragm, for a half-hour before stepping into the spotlight.

This easy exercise produced positive physiological results for a group of 46 musicians, impacting their heart rate in welcome ways. Furthermore, it left the most anxious among them reported feeling noticeably less tense.

Biofeedback? Not necessary, according to the University of Sydney research team led by psychologists Andrew Kemp and Ruth Wells. Deep breathing alone did the trick.

Australia’s prime minister bullied online

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:39:00 +0000

This is why we can't have nice things, people. Sure, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard may be calling her recent Facebook question and answer session with her constituents a "success," but when you're dealing with humans who have access to Facebook, remember that success is a very relative term.

Gillard had taken to Facebook on Monday to discuss her education policies in real time, the first event of its kind for the Australian government. But if you've ever spent five minutes on the Internet — and in particular if you're a woman — you can guess what happened next. The 51-year-old leader was called a "slut." She was asked, "Are your pubes as radiant, shiny and glorious as mine?" She was invited to "McPiss off you red-headed bloody McClown." She was told, "Get my dinner ready." And, because online animosity toward Gillard has been particularly nasty since Sydney radio personality Alan Jones declared last month that her recently deceased father had "died of shame … to think that he had a daughter who told lies every time she stood for Parliament," she was also asked, "How's your dad?" Say what you will about the Internet's robust sexist, troglodyte population, at least they're predictable.

Drowning is contagious

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 12:00:00 +0000

When it comes to sacrificing yourself in an attempt to prevent a drowning, Australians Joseph and Carole Sherry may be the ultimate examples.

In January 2010, two of the couple’s three children, Elise, 14, and Nicholas, 9, were struggling in the surf at a beach south of Brisbane, according to a newspaper account, when Carole, 44, entered the water to help them and apparently got caught in a riptide. Seeing his wife in trouble, Joseph, 42, tried to save her. Instead, both drowned as Elise and Nicholas and their older sister, all now safely on shore, watched in horror.

It is a pattern that is all too familiar to Richard C. Franklin, senior research fellow at the Royal Lifesaving Society in Australia, and to John H. Pearn, a senior pediatrician at Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. The Western Pacific and Southeast Asia, with large populations near the water, account for six out of 10 drownings. And Franklin, in emails, says that his and Pearn’s investigations show that at least 86 potential rescuers “drowned for love” in Australian waters between 1992 to 2007.

“Wake in Fright”: A rediscovered Aussie classic

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:50:00 +0000

Australians really can’t blame the 1971 thriller “Wake in Fright” for widespread stereotypes of their country as a land of beer-soaked, brawling idiots and blast-furnace heat, because it’s hardly been seen outside its native land, and not seen at all in the United States since its butchered initial release (when it was retitled “Outback”). Down Under, director Ted Kotcheff’s nightmarish saga of a provincial schoolteacher’s descent into booze-fueled savagery remains a legendary and controversial Aussie classic, although it’s long been available only in poor-quality video releases.

After a decade-long hunt, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia finally located the original negative of “Wake in Fright” in 2004 — at a storage facility in Pittsburgh, strangely enough — and embarked on a painstaking frame-by-frame restoration. The film that opens this week at Film Forum in New York, with numerous more cities to follow and home-video release after that, is vibrant with color, atmosphere, emotion, violence and dread. It’s simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a full-on shotgun blast to the face of rediscovered 1970s weirdness, something like finding out that there’s a classic Peckinpah film you’ve never seen, or that Wes Craven and Bernardo Bertolucci got drunk in Sydney one weekend and decided to make a movie together.

War crimes suspect safe

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 13:15:00 +0000

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia's highest court ruled Wednesday that a 90-year-old citizen cannot be extradited to Hungary to face accusations he tortured and killed a Jewish teenager during World War II.

The High Court upheld a lower court's decision that reasoned war crimes charges former Hungarian soldier Charles Zentai may face did not exist at the time of the slaying, a conclusion criticized by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Hungary says Zentai is suspected of beating the teen to death in Budapest in 1944 for failing to wear a star identifying him as a Jew. Zentai, who migrated to Australia in 1950 and later became a citizen, has denied the allegation and has been fighting extradition since 2005.

Last year, the Federal Court found that because the offense of "war crime" was not on Hungary's statute books when the teenager died in 1944, it was not an offense for which Zentai may be surrendered under Australia's extradition treaty with Hungary.

The government appealed, but on Wednesday, the High Court upheld the lower court's decision. Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare confirmed in a statement that the ruling means Zentai cannot be extradited.