The Victorian government has proposed legislation to deal with future pandemics and after lobbying from crossbenchers, the government has agreed to water down the more controversial aspects of the legislation. Upper house crossbench MPs including the Reason Party’s Fiona Patten, Greens leader Samantha Ratnam and Animal Justice Party’s Andy Meddick, who negotiated the changes, have faced abuse and death threats in the lead up to the Victorian parliament’s vote on the bill1.
On the news, you may have seen crowds gathered in Dallas, Texas, in the USA. They were there because the ‘Q’ social media account told them to be there. At its heart, Q and its followers, the ‘Anons’ is a wide-ranging, completely unfounded conspiracy theory that believes former President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.
Just over two years ago, I was motivated to write a piece about the decline of religion in the Anglophone world, which was, of course, mostly about Australia, New Zealand, the US, UK and Canada. It noted that in the 1966 Australian census only 0.8% of the population had ‘no religion’, but that had climbed to 30.1% in the last census (in 2016) for which results are available1. There was a census undertaken this year, but results for that will not be released until about the middle of 20222.
They Vote For You is a website which tracks how parliamentarians vote on whatever issue you care to name1. As they say in their ‘About’ page, “Forget what politicians say. What truly matters is what they do. And what they do is vote, to write our laws which affect us all”2.
As I have said here before, I used to think Tony Abbott was the worst liar I hd ever seen in federal parliament1, 2, but he pales into insignificance compared to the appalling liar that is Scott Morrison3, 4. The recent backflip with regard to electric vehicles has once again exposed this despicable lying so clearly that nobody but his most ardent apologists (and there are a few even outside the Murdoch zoo) will be able to excuse it.
In 2018, an estimated 570,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer worldwide, and about 311,000 women died from the disease. Almost all cervical cancer cases (99%) are linked to infection with high-risk human papillomaviruses, an extremely common series of viruses transmitted through sexual contact1. The vaccine for these papillomaviruses was initially developed at the University of Queensland2.
Many years ago, I was talking to a friend who had been at a dinner party of some sort, at which a professional economist was present. He got into conversation with this bloke and the topic eventually came around to whaling and what it was doing to world whale populations. This topic was in the news at the time, either because Australia had done something to protect whales or because Japan or some other country was pretending their whaling had something to do with science.