Well, there seems to be no doubt what the (supposedly unbiased) Herald’s official position is on the proposed “three strikes” law. The headline
‘Unjust’ bill means 11,000 per cent rise in prison time
is not exactly studiedly neutral. And making out that Kim Workman comes from “an independent organisation on crime” is simply a bad old-fashioned lie. [...]

In September 2008 I wrote this:
Unfortunately, what this [the repeal of section 59] does to parents is place them in a position of having no clear idea what is an acceptable smack. Worse still, it allows children to threaten their parents, thereby seriously reducing their authority, even if the child has no intention of notifying [...]

That, apparently, was the defense that was put forward by the killer of Navtej Singh, the man shot by thugs in his liquor store and left to bleed to death. Anitelea Chan-Kee, the man behind the gun that ended Navtej Singh’s life claims that the killing was “accidental” because he “did not realise the gun was [...]

The Herald reports a 17 year old boy (who has name suppression for no apparent reason – go get ‘em, Whale) has been sentenced to 8 months home detention (on top of 4 months in custody – an effective 12 month sentence) for assisting the suicide of 16-year-old Ben Dowdell. I won’t be revisiting the [...]

In what has to be the most bizarre over-reaction I have heard in a long time, the Herald reports that a 12-year-old girl was arrested for scrawling on her desk. That is: properly arrested in handcuffs and dragged off to the police station and given eight hours of community service as her sentence.
Wow.
I realise this [...]

An Australian court ruling has brought the entire basis of section 92a of the copyright act into doubt. In a dispute between Australian ISP iiNet and Australia’s copyright watchdog, AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft), the judge has found in favour of the ISP saying, essentially that the ISP is not responsible for the copyright [...]

Now here’s an interesting headline…
Ex-UN weapons inspector faces child sex charges
PHILADELPHIA – A longtime UN weapons inspector who blamed a 2001 sex-sting arrest on his criticism of the Iraq war has again been charged in an online child-sex case, and this time he was caught on camera.
Scott Ritter, 48, of Delmar, New York, engaged in a [...]

There is a fair amount of news about drug addiction at the moment, with John Key announcing a (somewhat laughable) $7 million boost for P treatment. Garth George, in one of his best columns for some time, points out that the real killer in terms of drug addictions is, of course, alcohol. He laments the [...]

I saw this headline on Stuff and thought “about time”.
Parents win disabled children care payment case
Sadly, it turns out only that parents with adult disabled children have won the support of the Human Rights Tribunal, not the government itself.
Currently only caregivers who are not related to the disabled adult receive payment from the government. Family [...]

I see John Minto is up to his old tricks again. He has organised a “protest” of less than a dozen people to demonstrate outside of the ASB Classic tennis tournament. Only this was not a peaceful protest, this was a Minto special. Armed with megaphones, they proceeded to make unmitigated nuisances of themselves by [...]