A former fine wine consultant at an exclusive Auckland auction house has been convicted of 16 counts of fraud after defrauding affluent clients of over $1.3 million – including faking vintages. [Read more…]
Fraud Awareness Week – 19-24 March 2012
The prevalence of the crime of fraud in New Zealand society is one obvious symptom of moral corruption. Fraud Awareness Week kicked off yesterday. It is estimated that Kiwis lose $448 milion to scams each year. The SPCS supports all enforcement agencies that seek to crack down on all forms of fraud, including the Consumer Affairs Ministry that seeks to inform people how to avoid becoming victims of fraud.
Scammer’s Tricks
Some of the most prolific or highest-loss scams: [Read more…]
Law needs to catch up with HIV ruling – NZ Herald editorial
NZ Herald Editorial. Monday March 19, 2012
The law is generous to people with HIV who do not tell a sexual partner they have the virus. They have no obligation to inform their partner as long as they practise “safe sex”. It is only if they do not protect the unwitting partner to that extent that their failure to disclose their condition becomes a criminal offence, though not as serious an offence as it really is. Thanks to a court ruling last week, the offence will now be regarded more seriously – but only for the purposes of accident compensation.
The Court of Appeal has ordered compensation for a woman who was fortunate not to be infected but suffered post traumatic stress disorder when she learned her partner of four months was HIV positive. Under stress, she took so much time off work that she lost her job. She applied for compensation on grounds of mental injury but ACC refused her claim because the crime was not in one of the eligible categories.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10793001 [Read more…]
“Extremely sexually promiscuous” HIV-infected man recruited and infected lovers
Radio New Zealand Checkpoint reported last night that 57 people turned up at just one of a number of sexual health clinics in the country reporting that they had had sexual relations with an HIV-positive man who media were reporting at that time was facing 28 charges of deliberately infecting people with the HIV virus. They were just some of those very keen to be tested for the HIV-virus, having had unprotected sex with this “extremely sexually promiscuous man” … Mr Glen Richard Albert Mills (deceased).
The Dominion Post reported today that an inquest into the jail-cell death of the same man accused of deliberately infecting numerous lovers with HIV has been told he used text messages and internet dating sites to recruit partners, and was on antidepressant medication at the time he died. [Read more…]
Ethicists advocating infanticide open way to horrors of Nazism
Karl du Fresne, a regular columnist for The Dominion Post, has written today:
When I read recently that two medical ethicists had suggested it should be legal to kill newborn babies, my first thought was that they must be anti-abortion campaigners choosing an unusually dramatic way to make their point.
After all, what’s the difference, ethically speaking, between aborting a baby at 20 weeks’ gestation or waiting until it’s born, then quietly suffocating it or administering a lethal injection? None that I can see.
That’s exactly the point made by doctors Francesca Minerva and Alberto Giubilini in a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics. As it turns out, the two ethicists are not opposed to abortion. Far from it. They are simply advancing, in a clinically dispassionate way, the argument that it doesn’t make any difference whether babies’ lives are terminated in the womb or after birth.
Newborns aren’t actual persons, they suggest, merely potential persons. Neither the foetus nor the newborn baby is a person with a moral right to life. Only actual persons can be harmed by being killed.
It’s a proposition that would shock decent people. Yet it exposes the fundamental flaw, both logical and moral, behind abortion laws such as those that apply in New Zealand.
Most people who think it’s OK to abort babies in the womb would recoil in horror at the thought of snuffing their lives out once they’ve been born.
But I ask again, what’s the difference? Some babies that are legally aborted under present law (there were 16,630 in 2010) have reached a stage in their development when they are capable, with intensive medical care, of surviving outside the womb.
Newborn babies also need intervention to survive. So at what point do we decide a baby has a right to life – at six months old, one year, only when it’s capable of feeding itself and walking?
No civilised society would countenance the killing of babies at any of these stages. It would equal the worst horrors of Nazism.
Yet the Australian state of Victoria already allows babies to be aborted right up to the time of birth and pro-abortion lobbyists would like the same law adopted here. It’s only a short step from there to infanticide.
And why not? After all, Minerva and Giubilini make it clear there is no ethical difference between killing babies in the womb and murdering them after birth. Any point after conception at which society decides it’s legally permissable to end their lives is entirely artificial and arbitrary.
One chilling argument advanced by the ethicists is that parents whose babies are born disabled without warning, as often happens frequently, should be able to have them killed.
A society that considers itself humane would draw back in horror from such a proposal, but it’s simply a logical extensioin of what we’re doing now.
Source: The Dominion Post. Tuesday, March 13, 2012.
Note: The Society for Promotion of Community Standards Inc. (SPCS) has as one of its seven objects in its constitution:
Section 2(b) “To promote recognition of the sanctity of human life and its preservation in all stages.”
This written purpose has been approved by the Charities Commission, headed by Trevor Garrett, as a “charitable purpose”. The publication of the opinion piece above by Karl du Fresne is relevant to this “charitable purpose”.