Mission & Justice

Debbie Guest; 16/10/08

Sitting in his backyard in Narrogin, a small wheatbelt town 190km southeast of Perth, Jock Abraham can’t forget the day he frantically tried to save his 32-year-old son, Joel, whom he found hanging from a tree. “I went into the backyard and saw him at the tree,” Mr Abraham said. “I thought he must have been hiding from me, then I got closer and realised something was wrong. He wasn’t standing … he was hanging there, he was already dead.” Joel was one of six Aboriginal men who have committed suicide in the past six months in Narrogin. Two whites have also taken their lives and four other Aborigines have attempted suicide in the past six months in an inexplicable crisis that is tearing the town apart.

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22/8/08

The Government today launched a study to asses how many veterans commit suicide and why. Veterans Affairs Minister Alan Griffin said this study would examine a number of specific cases of suicide by ex-service members in recent years to help identify those members who may be at risk of self harm. “We know that war service can have both a physical and mental impact on the lives of service personnel. Physical impairment can be obvious, psychological injury is less so,” he said. “This Government is determined to support veterans and ex-service personnel who may suffer psychologically as a result of their service. However to do so we need a better understanding of the incidence and characteristics of suicide amongst this community.”

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24/6/08

Three rockets fired from the Gaza Strip have hit southern Israel, hours after Israeli forces killed two Palestinians in the West Bank.Tuesday’s incidents cast doubt over the future of a fragile truce that has been in force in Gaza between Israel and armed Palestinian groups during the last five days.Al-Quds, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, took responsibility for the rocket attacks which caused sosome damage but no casualties in the Israeli town of Sderot. The rocket attacks followed an Israeli raid into the West Bank town of Nablus earlier during the day. Israeli troops killed the men in an exchange of fire, an Israeli military spokesman said, adding that one of them was a fighter from Islamic Jihad and the other was a “militant”.me damage but no casualties in the Israeli town of Sderot. David Baker, a spokesperson in the Israeli prime minister’s office, said: “Any rocket fire from the Gaza Strip would be a grave violation of the calm.”

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20/6/08

Wars around the globe killed three times more people during the second half of the 20th century than previously estimated, according to a study released on Friday. Some 5.4 million deaths caused by armed conflicts occurred between 1955 and 2003 in 13 nations surveyed, ranging from a low of 7000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million killed in Vietnam. Previous research, based on media reports or before-and-after census figures, have tended to severely underestimate war-related fatalities among both combatants and civilians, the new study argues. These so-called “passive” reports “are typically the only ones available during ongoing conflicts, and represent the most commonly cited sources for government and other estimates of war casualties, as in the current war in Iraq,” notes the study, published in the British Medical Journal. The number of civilian casualties in Iraq remains sharply contested, with some studies estimating the death toll at 10 times the figure given by the US military.

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Stephen Lunn & Siobhain Ryan; 2/5/08

Australia boasts one of the world’s lowest rates of mothers dying while pregnant or in childbirth, but the situation is far grimmer for indigenous women. New figures to be published today by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare reveal Australia’s maternal death rate for the period 2003-05 of 8.4 per 100,000 women giving birth is low even among developed countries. Overall, there were 65 deaths directly or indirectly related to pregnancy or its management, equating to one woman dying for every 11,896 women giving birth, the AIHW reported. This was a marked fall from the 2000-02 period, when 84 deaths were recorded. The report, Maternal deaths in Australia 2003-2005, reveals a marked discrepancy for indigenous women. “Maternal mortality rates for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander women were more than 2 1/2 times as high as for other women,” it says. “There were 21.5 deaths per 100,000 women giving birth, versus 7.9 per 100,000 for non-indigenous women.”

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Matthew Moore; 19/4/08

In June last year, the then minister for immigration, Kevin Andrews, confirmed a report from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union that three foreign nationals on 457 skilled worker visas had died in work-related accidents in four months. He said then 17 other foreigners employed on the same visas had died in Australia over the five previous years, but that none of those deaths were work-related. The revelation that 17 people brought to Australia to work, all of whom were in good physical condition, had died in circumstances unrelated to their work sounded unlikely, so the Herald lodged a freedom-of-information request in July.

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17/4/08

A drug company has been accused of misrepresenting data on the safety of a top-selling arthritis drug and persuading academics to lend their names to medical studies that were ghostwritten for them. Two papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association accuse Merck of questionable practices over its drug, Vioxx (rofecoxib), now withdrawn from sale. A University of Washington in Seattle team reported that Merck had not fully disclosed the death rates in trials in which Vioxx was tested in Alzheimer’s patients after there was some evidence to suggest drugs of the Vioxx type could slow progression of the disease.

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Salam Pax; 9/4/08

Iraq’s first blogger, Salam Pax, was in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. He watched cautiously as the US military entered the capital and took down Saddam Hussein’s government. But hopes for a better future were soon replaced with fears of looters taking the city apart brick by brick. Five years later, he recounts the trials and tribulations experienced by Iraqis who woke up for the first time in 24 years without a government led by Saddam Hussein. The collected weblog has been published by Guardian Books under the title The Baghdad Blog. He also made 19 short documentaries about life in Iraq after the war and was awarded Royal Television Society’s award for innovation in 2003

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