Principal grateful students survived crash

11/09 The Australian | THE principal of Sutherland Shire Christian School is thanking God for the lives of children from the school who were injured in a fatal bus and car crash in Sydney's south. "We thank God that none of the children were critically injured and we continue to pray for the children and their families as well as the people in the other vehicle and those who witnessed the horrifying scene," Nicola Taylor said.

The bus was carrying 37 students from the school.

Violence against women not cool, says PM

11/09 The Australian | PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has sent a message to young Australian men that it's "not cool" to hit your girlfriend or force them to have sex.

Mr Rudd was speaking in Sydney last night to launch a new campaign by the White Ribbon Foundation, which calls for the end of violence against women.

"Any man who hits a woman is a coward, any man who threatens a woman is a coward, because violence by a man towards a woman is nothing more than the absolute abuse of power," Mr Rudd told a gala dinner.

"We should have in our minds and our hearts a vision for Australia's future where women no longer walk around in fear...and that is possible and in our grasps."

Mr Rudd described as horrific that on average 1000 women were violently assaulted in Australia every day, and nearly half a million a year.

Woman charged with attempt to procure abortion

10/09 The Australian | A QUEENSLAND woman charged with organising her own home abortion has been committed to stand trial. Cairns magistrate Sandra Pearson today ordered Tegan Simone Leach, 19, face trial on a charge of procuring an abortion in Cairns District Court on a date to be fixed. Her boyfriend, Sergie Brennan, 21, was also committed to stand trial on a charge of supplying drugs to procure an abortion. The charge of procuring an abortion carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail.

The court last week heard police found empty pharmaceutical blister packets alleged to have contained the contraband drugs along with doctor's instructions written in Ukrainian during a search of the couple's Cairns home in relation to another matter in February.

Blindness 'licked' by new technology

02/09 News.com.au | A groundbreaking electronic device will allow blind people to "see" using their tongues, scientists have claimed. The extraordinary technology takes pictures filmed by a tiny camera and turns the information into electrical pulses which can be felt on the tongue. Tests show that the nerves send messages to the brain which turn these tingles back into pictures.

People using the device, which resembles a pair of sunglasses attached by cable to a plastic lollipop, say that with fewer than 20 hours training they can make out shapes and even read signs.

Call for Queensland parliamentary inquiry into botched abortion cruelty

01/09 Australian Christian Lobby Media Release | The unforgivable inhumanity of 19 Queensland babies being born alive and then left to die following botched abortions in 2007 reveals the human face of Australia’s alarming abortion statistics, the Australian Christian Lobby said today.

ACL Managing Director Jim Wallace called for a Queensland parliamentary inquiry into late-term abortion practices and the ethics, morality and legality of leaving babies to die when premature babies – sometimes at a similar stage of development – are being cared for in neonatal wards.

“This is an issue from which we cannot simply turn our faces. Babies are now surviving in some places at 22 weeks gestation and above, while research supports the proposition that unborn babies feel pain by at least 20 weeks gestation.

Is it right that babies of the same age are being cruelly left to experience pain and death when they could be helped and given a chance at life? How long are legislators and pro-abortion activists going to pretend these aren’t real people with a right to live? How selfish and cruel are their agendas?