The health select committee has shot itself in the foot. After sending signals that it would unanimously recommend the removal criminal penalties for the possession of needles used to inject illicit drugs, it has failed to do so, apparently on the advice of the police.
The New Zealand Drug Foundation has a pissed-off press release pointing out that "the committee ignored all public health evidence - including from the independent review of New Zealand's needle exchange programme," in its decision.
Let me put it this way, for committee members with comprehension trouble: making the possession of the needles a criminal offence does not, has not and will never stop people injecting drugs. What it will do is encourage re-use of needles, which will exacerbate the overwhelming health issue related to injecting drug use: infection rates of hepatitis C and HIV. Which makes it a bloody odd decision for a health select committee to deliver, doesn't it?
The police appear to have changed their minds in the course of this process, and I'd be interested to know why.
Meanwhile, not so fast on the Newsweek retraction: the ACLU has obtained and released summaries of FBI interviews in which nearly a dozen Guantanamo detainees make claims about the abuse of the Koran, including one who says guards there - yes - "flushed a Koran in the toilet." These are only prisoner interviews and therefore difficult or impossible to corroborate, and at least two of the claims are hearsay, but the list of allegations to the same effect just keeps getting longer. The WaPo story story says:
A Defense Department spokesman was not immediately available for comment today. Pentagon officials have said previously that detainee allegations about the Koran have not been considered credible, although authorities have launched an internal review in the wake of the Newsweek controversy.
Amrit Singh, an ACLU attorney, said in a press release that "the United States' own documents show that it has known of numerous allegations of Koran desecration for a significant period of time."
"The failure to address these allegations in a timely manner raises grave questions regarding the extent to which such desecration was authorised by high-ranking U.S. officials in the first place," Singh said.
The conservative Front Page magazine's investigation, unsurprisingly reaches very different conclusions, on the basis of, er, one memo that said it shouldn't really happen. On this basis, of course, nothing ever happened at Abu Ghraib either. And I guess that nice Mr Karimov in Uzbekistan was just taking out the trash.
Meanwhile, on the grimly humorous front, in the wake of Hamad Karzai's emphatic statement that the recent fatal riots in Afghanistan were nothing to do with the Newsweek story, the White House is claiming that nobody ever said that people lost their lives because of the report. Except, as Editor & Publisher points out, they did. How on earth can you say something so serious one week and flatly deny you said it the next, and not be absolutely crucified in the press?
Meanwhile, Amnesty International releases its annual report by declaring Guantanamo to be "the gulag of our time" and noting that ''there was a huge gap between rhetoric and reality" in US pronouncements on justice and freedom.
Chris Bell had observations about the Slashdot discission on Google's library indexing plans that I linked to yesterday:
Most of the Slashdot discussion seems to revolve around whether or not Google is talking about scanning copyrighted works, which, according to the NY Times etc, it is.
But I heard Professor Dan Atkins enthusing about Google's plans at EDUCAUSE Australasia a couple of months ago. He said it was exclusively about out-of-copyright, academic works in the first instance.
And the initiative is been driven by academics at Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and other universities - so it does have academic value and isn't just another money-making Google rort. They're creating a searchable database (which would be of incredible value to the community at large), according to Atkins, not offering entire works for free.
And Google says any copyrighted works would be limited to bibliographical information and a small amount of selected text. I'm all for authors' rights to copyright protection, but the societal benefits of this initiative seem to outweigh any likelihood of infringement. Universities around the world seem to feel strongly that they're currently being extorted by academic publishers.
Staying with intellectual property issues, the average reader might form the impression from this story noting that "US law enforcers have shut down a computer network that distributed illegal copies of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," that the illicit sharing of the movie had been ended in one fell swoop. Hardly. But it does seem likely that the appearance of such an expensive and iconic work as ROTS on BitTorrent networks so early in its theatrical release will prompt further crackdowns. Bit of a bummer for anyone who just wants the occasional innocent fix of The Daily Show …
Lindsay Vette said other parts of yesterday's post "hit a couple of notes with me":
I grew up in Glen Eden, next to a very nice Tongan family that over the years had a lot of family and village members from "home" staying with them while working in NZ. I certainly recall a couple of occasions when the police were there checking on immigration status. I can't imagine how humiliating that must have been for the people involved. And Winston wants to stir all that shit up again! He may be my local MP, but he's not getting my vote.
The hypocrisy of pious religious leaders who fail to get the basic tenet of the message that the founder of Christianity was trying to get across to humanity just makes my blood boil. The claiming of moral high ground while utterly rejecting any alternate thinking is just un-Christian in my view.
My personal and family's experiences with the Church of Christ NZ nutters from Mt Roskill only serve to reinforce those views.
There are a lot of genuinely decent religious people out there, but their quiet good work is constantly being undone by the nutters that are getting in the press all the time. The same applies to non-Christian religions as well, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, the "Australian solution" to immigration issues is looking worse and worse. The SMH reports today that more than 200 people are in detention despite being lawfully in Australia. Yesterday, a three year-old girl and her overstayer mother were released from detention after it was revealed that the girl, who had never known life outside, was displaying obvious signs of mental illness. It wouldn't be so bad if John Howard hadn't campaigned on the conceit of moral values. It doesn't matter what her mother did - and the details of the case suggest that most of us would have done the same thing in her position - inflicting psychological damage on a toddler is a grotesque abandonment of any kind of moral values of which I am aware.
And, finally, wasn't the European Champions League final a thriller? I'll succumb now to the flu (upgraded from a cold, unfortunately) and try and knock up something on the tax-versus-spending fight for tomorrow. Later …