Bush may come to NZ

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Bush may come to NZ
A visit to New Zealand by United States President George W. Bush is being actively considered in Washington, the Herald understands. The visit would follow his attendance at the annual Apec summit in Sydney on September 8 and 9. The worst President in the history of America, who lied about the reasons to invade Iraq wants to come to NZ? Let’s hope likeminded NZers decide to turn out and give him a warm welcome.

UN issues desertification warning

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UN issues desertification warning
Tens of millions of people could be driven from their homes by encroaching deserts, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, a report says. The study by the United Nations University suggests climate change is making desertification "the greatest environmental challenge of our times". If action is not taken, the report warns that some 50 million people could be displaced within the next 10 years. Global warming now threatens 2 billion on the edges of deserts and 3 billion on the coastlines, imagine what will happen when the 2 billion from the deserts are forced inland while the 3 billion from the coastline are forced inland – that’s a lot of frightened angry people.

We don't really care about the mentally ill

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Patients tell of neglect
Former patients in psychiatric hospitals between 1940 and 1992 have given harrowing accounts of neglect and abuse to a special forum set up in 2005. The forum, chaired by Judge Patrick Mahoney, issued its report yesterday and said 493 people attended its sessions, 80 per cent of them ex-patients. Common themes that emerged included physical violence, sexual misconduct and abuse, and a lack of care and compassion. I've always suspected that we really don't care about the mentally ill in this country, out of sight, outta your mind.

Government bans party pills

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Government bans party pills
The Government is moving to counter new products from the party pill industry, which hopes to stay afloat despite the impending ban of its main products. Associate Health Minister Jim Anderton yesterday revealed plans to outlaw so-called herbal highs containing benzylpiperazine (BZP) and related synthetic substances. A legislative amendment will be introduced to the House shortly. The move has the support of most political parties, including National, virtually assuring it of becoming law and creating a major headache for the $35 million-a-year industry. The sheer lunacy of banning party pills shows the conservative chill that is running through the country, how many people have died from party pills? One, how many people die per year from tobacco? 5000 – don’t for one second dare tell the NZ public that this is about safety concerns, all that will happen now is the party pill scene will now go underground mixing more young people with more organized criminals, which the cops will use as an excuse to arrest more and more people, will we start putting party pill users in prison as well? How much of a moral panic have we gotten ourselves into when the result is now to put people into our overstretched, groaning at the seams, corrupt and violent prison system for something as innocuous as party pills.

If Israel is serious about peace...

The oppression of the occupation helps create the radicalisation of the Palestinian people and gives radical groups legitimacy and support, if Israel is serious about peace and not have the West Bank fall to 'extremists' then one way of doing that would be to let the West Bank be free of the brutal roadblock and checkpoint regime the Israelis use for daily humiliation.

Israel urged to leave checkpoints
Israeli peace activists are calling for dozens of military checkpoints and hundreds of unmanned roadblocks to be dismantled in the occupied West Bank. Peace Now said if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was serious about negotiations with the Palestinians, he should begin by removing the internal obstacles. A spokeswoman said such controls were unnecessary for securing Israel and would improve Palestinian daily life. The call applies to 58 manned barriers and almost all the 467 roadblocks. Peace Now says only 35 checkpoints can be justified as controlling access between Israel and the West Bank, which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. The permanent roadblocks established by the army included gates, earth mounds and cement blocks. They restrict the freedom of movement for the majority of Palestinians and turn short journeys into lengthy trips which involve waiting periods at each checkpoint, the group says. Trips between Palestinian cities in the West Bank which used to take just one hour can now take three times that because of delays at checkpoints, the group says. It adds that for the Israeli soldiers manning checkpoints there are dangers from coming into close contact with the Palestinian population, increasing the risk of suicide attacks. The Israel government defends its travel restrictions as being necessary to prevent such attacks on Israel and Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The settlements are illegal in the eyes of international law.

Checkpoints to Israel (manned): 35
Internal West Bank checkpoints (manned): 58
Permanent unmanned roadblocks: 467

Prime Minister gets terrorist list powers

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Prime Minister gets terrorist list powers
The New Zealand High Court review process on who or what can be considered a terrorist or a terrorist group will be by-passed under a new law proposed by the Labour-led Government. The Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill, if passed by Parliament, will see New Zealand follow the United States of America and Australia in empowering a nation's political leader (the Prime Minister in New Zealand's case) to decide who is a terrorist. It also automatically adds to New Zealand's official terrorist organisations list those the United Nations' Security Council recommends. Currently a High Court Judge would make such a declaration of who a terrorist is, that check and balanced judicial power has been moved into the hands of the Prime Minister, The Prime Minister now gets to declare who is and isn’t a terrorist – shouldn’t everyone be very concerned that has happened and not a mention of it in the mainstream media?

NZ Police want big brother powers

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NZ Police want big brother powers
Police want the power to fingerprint people without the need to arrest or lay charges against them. The proposal was among those presented at the first in a series of public meetings last night outlining possible changes in the review of the 1958 Police Act. The new Act is expected to be passed into law next year. Police would like to be able to use the latest technology -- which includes mobile fingerprint scanners and, in the future, eye scanners -- while working on the streets, for checking against the national database. Chairman of the Council for Civil Liberties Michael Bott said this would be a concern. "The ability for police to, in a sense, fingerprint anyone, not even for the suspicion of a crime is a worrying trend and it's got Orwellian overtones that should be resisted," he said. At a time when there is an investigation into ill tempered, low intelligence recruits, at a time right after a major inquiry into Police rape culture which discovered that there was evidence of Police Officers raping, assaulting and lying to cover one another and concludes that Police Culture will not be able to change on their own, at a time when top police chief Clint Rickards and two of his cop mates were put on trial for 3 separate rape allegations – at this time do we honestly want to give cops MORE unrestricted powers like taking your fingerprints or eye ball scan for no reason whatsoever? We live in a democracy where the individual has rights and these rights are protected by the government a society that allows it’s Police to take anyones fingerprints, not even for the suspicion of a crime, that’s called a police state.

Time to listen to gangs

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Time to listen to gangs
Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia says New Zealand has got itself into a "moral panic" over gang culture and should start listening to the gangs' own ideas for change rather than focusing on social control of them. The moral panic created a perception that the gangs were "completely out of control", said Mrs Turia, who is based in Wanganui where gang conflict has plagued the city and resulted in the fatal shooting of toddler Jhia Harmony Te Tua. She said the gangs had been singled out for censure and the debate over them had been a key distraction from "rocketing interest rates, bureaucratic bumbling or insider trading". "All that such tactics do is to [provoke] more resentment and rage from those who already feel positioned on the outskirts of society," she said in Parliament yesterday.The idea that we should deal with the most ostracized and alienated members of society with even harsher laws rather than understanding the reasons why people join gangs is a Neanderthal talkback kneejerk response, but in NZ we do Neanderthal talkback kneejerk responses better than anyone.

Government orders report into police recruits

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Government orders report into police recruits
The Government says it will get an independent assessment of police recruit standards after it was accused of allowing a decline in quality to meet a promise of 1000 new officers. The police and senior ministers have rejected claims that the drive to increase numbers has resulted in the recruitment of people with low intelligence and poor decision-making skills. An internal police report said one recruit had to be taught how to write the alphabet, and the need to give extra training to poor performers had increased by 150 per cent. Currently it takes 19 weeks to be a Police Officer – 19 weeks, it takes longer to be a card dealer at Sky City Casino, perhaps the mix of low intelligence and short training time is creating ill prepared, angry cops who we have now nationally armed with tasers.

It's official: Politicians just can't take a joke

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It's official: Politicians just can't take a joke
MPs may make fools of themselves from time to time but they want to ban others from doing it. Satire, ridicule and denigration of MPs using any television footage shot from parliamentary galleries is to be banned under rules proposed by the standing orders committee. So serious is our Parliament that anyone attempting to ridicule Politicians using images of their own deplorable behavior during Parliamentary debating sessions will find themselves in contempt of Parliament, punishable by what the privileges committee decides. Out of all the dumbest, petty, small minded crap our Politicians serve up on a weekly basis, this has to be a new low point, if Politician’s open themselves up to satire or ridicule by their own behavior, so be it, this is a democracy – but to be told that you might face contempt of Parliament for making jokes about our dear leaders borders on the fascist, such a mindset is contempt for free speech.

CIA releases past secrets on site

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CIA releases past secrets on site
The US Central Intelligence Agency has posted hundreds of once secret documents on its website. The papers include documents known as the "Family Jewels" detailing some of the agency's worst abuses and illegal activities from the 1950s to 1970s. The documents detail CIA assassination plots, domestic spying, wiretapping, and kidnapping - none of which the CIA claim they would do today, and anyone who says otherwise is either a Communist or an Islamo-fascist terrorist who needs to be in one of the secret CIA torture prisons in Europe.

Aborigines threaten tourist ban

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Aborigines threaten tourist ban
Aboriginal elders are threatening to ban tourists from one of Australia's landmarks over a plan to curb child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities. Some 50 community, church and indigenous groups are meeting in Canberra to discuss the situation. The government's measures include a six-month ban on pornography and alcohol in the Northern Territory, where evidence of sex abuse was found. It also includes compulsory medical checks for Aboriginal children, but the Aboriginal backlash is growing in ferocity against what are increasingly being described as John Howard's shock-and-awe proposals, proposals that seem more aimed at impressing Australia’s redneck voting population in an election year than any real attempt to address the decades of underfunding John Howard himself has helped contribute to. With rising tensions and more Police being sent in to round up communities, this situation has the potential to backfire horribly. Advance Australia Fair.

Sensible Sentencing not so sensible

The Sensible Sentencing Lynch Mob might need deep pockets after it was revealed this morning that their on-line name and shame list of sex offenders actually has innocent people listed on it. In one case in britain a pediatrician was listed because the first three letters of his job matched the first three letters of the word pedophile. Sensible Sentencing, not so sensible.

Only in America

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Only In America
A US judge has lost a $54m claim against a South Korean dry-cleaning firm which lost a pair of his trousers. Roy Pearson, a judge of administrative law, claimed that Custom Cleaners had violated the Consumer Protection Act. By refusing to pay him $1,000 (£500) after losing his trousers, they failed to honour a pledge to provide "Satisfaction Guaranteed", he argued. But a Washington judge dismissed the case, which drew international attention, awarding the cleaners costs. Legal groups have said the case, which has dragged on for two years and involved thousands of hours of legal investigative work, has damaged the image of the US judicial system. $54 million for a pair of trousers? Only in America.

Police State plan gathers speed

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Police State plan gathers speed
Federal police and troops have begun moving into the Northern Territory as Prime Minister John Howard's takeover of Aboriginal life starts to take shape. Howard claims child abuse and booze is a national emergency even though he has been Prime Minster for the last 12 years during which Howard has done nothing to make Aboriginal life one inch better, in fact it has been decades of deplorable underfunding in Aboriginal communities which has made conditions as dreadful as they currently are, none of which matters to an Australian Prime Minister desperate to look tough in an election year and as such has declared a Police state to enforce his will. In a week where a white Police Officer was let off from killing an Aborigine in Police custody, this has the awful possibility of going bad very quickly.

When they’re brown, kick em when they’re down

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When they’re brown, kick em when they’re down
More people believe that the Muliaga family should take responsibility for her death than the power supplier who switched off electricity to her oxygen machine, a Herald-DigiPoll survey has found. The poll was taken before revelations yesterday that the Muliaga family had sought help from Mercury Energy about their power bill weeks before the death of Mrs Muliaga. Asked who should take responsibility for her death, 40.6 per cent of the 703 people questioned said Mrs Muliaga's family should. She died hours after Mercury disconnected power to her South Auckland home, where she was using an electrically-operated oxygen machine. If there was ever proof needed that NZ has become a selfish nation that borders on garden variety bigotry, it is this poll, one can’t help but wonder if the Muliaga family were white if the poll result would be different.

Migrant sweat makes the wine taste sweeter

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Migrant sweat makes the wine taste sweeter
There have been warnings to the wine industry from those trying to help foreign workers who say they were lured to New Zealand with promises, only to find themselves overworked, underpaid and living in crowded accommodation. There are at least 100 contractors and some unionists claim legal migrants are getting paid as little as $4 an hour. "They're usually too scared to run an official like the police or a government department in case they get deported," says unionist Steve McManus. With the wine industry needing 5000 seasonal workers each year the pressure to push the labour laws by some wineries seems too much to resist. Who would have thunk it, in NZ in the year 2007 that glass of NZ wine you’re enjoying has been made possible by sweet shop migrant labour, cheers.

Family aid plan cuts food parcel demand

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Family aid plan cuts food parcel demand
Demand for food parcels is finally dropping slightly as low-income families gain from the Government's Working for Families package. The Auckland City Mission, the Salvation Army in Manukau and Papakura's Mercy Mission all report handing out fewer food parcels to hungry families last year, and say a further decline is likely this year. For all three agencies, the declines follow a decade of increasing demand, despite falling unemployment. Although more people are in paid work, agencies have reported worsening problems of indebtedness driving families to ask for food handouts. It is good news that demand for food parcels is dropping, it is just a pity that it took Labour being in power for 8 years and a lot of talk about the underclass from John Key before Labour seems to have woken up to the need at the bottom of the heap.

We aim to save, not steal, says Howard

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We aim to save, not steal, says Howard
Prime Minister John Howard says extra police will be in the Northern Territory within 10 days as part of his plan to crack down on child abuse in indigenous communities. Howard said yesterday that the first part of the operation would be to restore law and order in indigenous communities. NSW and Victoria have agreed to send police officers and he expected other state Governments would follow. Federal police would also be sent. Seeing as another white cop just last week got off charges of killing another Aboriginie in police custody, this Police state that Howard is setting up to oversee Aboriginal communities looks doomed to be meet with stiff resistance from the local townships. This will lead to violence, riots and TV images that will infuriate white Australia and will push Howard into a more confrontational position, all justified by the myth that Howard is trying to save Aboriginies from themselves, but then again this is election year and no one ever lost votes in Australia for beating up and cracking down on abos.

Australia link in Afghan casualties

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Australia link in Afghan casualties
Seeing how Australia treat their own indigenous people is it any surprise that Australia has confirmed that its troops were involved in a Dutch-led attack on Taleban militants that killed civilians amid anger at the loss of innocent lives in Afghanistan. The Defence Department in Canberra said yesterday that it was reviewing the operation in Chora Valley in southern Afghanistan and would support a Dutch investigation, being prepared as Afghan President Hamid Karzai launched a blistering attack on "careless" Nato troops. "Afghan life is not cheap and should not be treated as such," he said. Karzai's attack on Nato followed a rising civilian death toll that has outstripped the number of non-combatants killed by the Taleban.
The unknown number of civilian deaths in the Australian and Dutch engagement are among a toll that has risen this year to 211, according to an Associated Press tally of figures provided by Afghan and foreign officials, news correspondents and witnesses. This was more than the 172 civilians killed by militants.Karzai said that in the past 10 days alone more than 90 civilians had been killed by air strikes and artillery fire directed against Taleban positions. There are some smart bombs, but there are some dumb ones as well, seeing as NATO has now killed more civilians than the Taleban this year, how long do you think it will be before for the Afghan people join together to kick NATO out?

The Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club

On the Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club today (11am Sky Digital 65), Co-host Wallace Chapman from Kiwi FM Breakfast/Radio live DJ and Ben Thomas from the NBR

STORY 1 – More black marks for rookie cops - HOS
We were only bitching about this last week! 19 weeks IS NOT ENOUGH TRAINING TIME to be a cop, a lo and behold here’s a secret report pointing out that some rookie cops are so bad it takes them 3 attempts to pass the entrance test, and 64 charges have been laid against recruits in the last two years. Isn’t it time to accept that something is broken in the Police force?

STORY 2 – “It’s not about Race’ – HOS/SST
Is that an election I can hear coming in Australia? John Howard has declared the state of sexual abuse and degradation in Aboriginal communities is a National emergency and as such justify sweeping new powers against Aborigines. It’s taken John 12 years of being in power to wake up to this supposed ‘new national emergency’ when the truth is that decades of underfunding and white government policies that border on outright racism are to blame, but no one ever lost an election in Australia by racebaiting.

STORY 3 – US seeking way to shut Guantanamo – HOS/SST
375 tortured and rights deprived terror suspects can’t be wrong – Guantanamo has become a symbol of American hypocrisy, how can you claim to be fighting for Freedom and Democracy when you deprive detainees of internationally agreed human rights? And while we are on TWOT (The War Of Terror) how about that NATO bombing in Afghanistan that killed 25 civilians and the 160 000 troops now in Iraq – at what point is it last helicopter out of Saigon?

STORY 4 – ‘Where the white women at’ – SST
Statistics NZ reveals that single white educated women are doubling in size. Is it the man drought? Why are educated women more likely to be single? Are NZ men frightened by intelligent women? Is the time needed to pay off student loans simply too long?

STORY 5 – Millie Holmes – SST
Do we care?

Let them in - UN rebukes world's closed-door nations

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Let them in - UN rebukes world's closed-door nations
Legitimate refugees may be threatened by populist policies driven by xenophobia, said Erika Feller, assistant commissioner for protection at the United Nations refugee agency. "This is a very explosive mix." The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says refugee numbers rose 14 per cent last year to nearly 10 million. The increase, which reversed a trend of decline over several years, was caused mainly by an exodus from Iraq, the country America is bombing for freedom and democracy, indeed of the millions running and screaming from Iraq, America has currently taken less than 1000 in as refugees, which when you consider it is their fault for invading in the first place, seems a little churlish.

Alcohol, pornography ban for Aborigines

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Alcohol, pornography ban for Aborigines
Alcohol and pornography will be banned in indigenous communities in Australia's Northern Territory as part of a dramatic response to widespread child abuse, which was yesterday labelled a by John Howard as a "national emergency".
Which is interesting, because if it is a national emergency, then why hasn’t John Howard done anything in 12 years about the decades of underfunding and cycle of abuse much of which has been exacerbated time and time and time again by white Australian Governments, the stolen generation actions of whom, Howard refuses to say sorry for. The despair and community collapse of many impoverished Aboriginal townships is nothing new, the only thing that is new is that the election date is coming up, and no one ever lost votes in Australia by race baiting, it’s John Howard at his most obvious.

MPs cool on voting at 16

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MPs cool on voting at 16
A bill to lower the voting age to 16 and make civic education compulsory in schools has the support of youth groups, but has found little favour among MPs. Green MP Sue Bradford yesterday announced her intention of adding the Civics Education and Voting Age Bill to the parliamentary ballot. "Youths are as knowledgeable and responsible as a big portion of the voting population. That's the whole point, really," Ms Bradford said. But she faces an uphill struggle as some senior politicians dismissed the bill and others questioned how responsible the average 16-year-old was. If you can be taxed at 16 and society wants to charge you criminally like an adult at 12, why shouldn’t you be able to vote? Taxation without representation is unacceptable in a democracy, especially when that democracy is hell bent to argue that teenagers can be charged like an adult when they do something wrong.

Trial of the decade booked

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Trial of the decade booked
Police plan to open a hotline in a search for new evidence after the Solicitor-General yesterday ordered a retrial for David Bain. The trial is likely to be in Dunedin early next year. Detective Superintendent Malcolm Burgess said from Christchurch last night that a Dunedin police team had already completed initial preparations for further inquiries and analysis of new evidence in case a retrial was ordered. Solicitor-General David Collins, QC, announced yesterday, 13 years and one day after the murders of Bain's parents and siblings in their Every St, Dunedin, home, that Bain was being ordered back to court.

This time around it won’t just be Bain on trial, it will be the NZ justice system, so many questions about how just our judicial system is has been thrown up by this case, for example several of the Appeal Court Judges who are now on the Supreme Court would have previewed this case and it seems highly unlikely that they would have ruled against their own previous rulings. The system has to prove that it can get it right because currently by recharging David Bain looks like it is only acting to protect its authority.

(cough, cough) excuse me Mr, but the end of the world is nigh

The Achilles’ heel of capitalism in my mind is the environment. So focused on quarterly profit margins, capitalism is like a meth addict with an insatiable hunger looking for a hit every second of the day, reason and rationalism about where that drive leaves us tomorrow can never come from the corporate elite because they are part of the problem. The drain on resources our consumer culture (exacerbated by a mass media induced status anxiety neurosis) simply can’t be sustained and we are making the planet violently ill. Like any living organism though, the planet has a set of defenses, disease fighting feed back mechanisms that once breached purify the planet for a few millennia from whatever virus has gotten so out of control it has greedily consumed all natural resources so obscenely and wastefully that it manages to throw out of synch an entire planet.

We seem to have 10 years to change that.

I think people should choose sides now.

Earth could 'flip' into environmental disaster
The Earth is in imminent peril and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change, six leading scientists say . Writing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the American scientists believe civilisation itself is threatened by global warming. They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for under-estimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the scientists say the true rise may be as great as several metres by 2100, which is why Earth today is in "imminent peril".

The 29-page scientific paper, Climate Change and Trace Gases, is the product of James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York. They say: "Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures." Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate near the range of the past one million years. The unnatural "forcing" of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a "flip" in the climate that could "spark a cataclysm" in the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. Dramatic climatic flips have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now.

"Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end," the scientists say. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth's remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. "To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built," they say. Dr Hansen said the world had about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made worse by the "albedo flip" - when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water. The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland in the northern hemisphere, and the Western Antarctic ice sheet in the south, both show signs of the rapid changes predicted with rising temperatures.

"The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice-sheet collapse," the scientists say. "The required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less." The study looked back over more than 400,000 years of climate records from deep ice cores and found evidence to suggest that rapid climate change over a period of centuries, or even decades, have in the past occurred once the world began to heat up and ice sheets started melting. However, it is not possible to assess the dangerous level of man-made greenhouse gases.

- INDEPENDENT

I'm sorry am I missing something?

Bush, Olmert back Abbas
WASHINGTON - United States President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday pledged to bolster Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, as Israel sought to tighten the screws on Hamas Islamists who control Gaza. Bush and Olmert reaffirmed their commitment to the vision of a Palestinian state but offered no concrete plan to achieve a negotiated deal with Abbas while his new emergency cabinet rules only the West Bank and Gaza remains in Hamas' hands.

I'm sorry am I missing something here? Bush and Olmert backing Abbas? Bush and Olmert the two most hated people in the eyes of the Palestinian's backs one faction within Palestine - well this is going to end up well isn't it folks, it is such a dumb move that can only end in more fighting you almost imagine that's exactly the intent of such a declaration - divide and rule tactics once again and the Palestinian people continue to suffer

Officer Whitey cleared over death in custody

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Officer Whitey cleared over death in custody
A jury has acquitted a Queensland police officer over the death of a man in custody on Palm Island. Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley had pleaded not guilty in the Townsville Supreme Court to one count each of manslaughter and assault over 36-year-old Mulrunji Doomadgee's death at the island watchhouse on November 19, 2004. The jury took just over three hours to deliver their not guilty verdict on both charges. Effectively another white police officer is cleared of another killing of another aborigine in Police custody, no real surprises then. Advance Australia Fair.