'Petty thief' lifts LNP climate stance

The headline above and the text below are a classical example of the Green/Left playing the man and not the ball -- what logicians call an "ad hominem" fallacy.

President Klaus obviously did NOT steal ANYTHING under the glare of the TV lights. He assumed the pen was swag -- as pens are in fact the most common form of swag. I have some myself. The other vague accusations are equally poorly founded

Note that not one word of anything that Klaus has ever said was quoted. The article is pure schoolboy sniggering

Background: The LNP is the main conservative party in my home State of Queensland. Campbell Newman is its leader

AN EASTERN European President accused of having sticky fingers, being a serial adulterer and having had links to secret police is now the Liberal National Party's latest weapon against climate change scientists.

Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus will address an audience in Brisbane next month about the scientific flaws behind global warming.

Queensland LNP Senator Ron Boswell will introduce the colourful President at the $160-plate lunch hosted by conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.Queensland LNP leader Campbell Newman said he would not attend the event, but Treasurer Andrew Fraser pounced on the revelations, labelling the LNP as "environmental Neanderthals".

Brochures obtained by The Sunday Mail show pictures of a smiling Senator Boswell, who has questioned man-made climate change, and a stern-looking President Klaus.

Hailed as "the world's leading critic of global warming ideology", President Klaus became an internet sensation earlier this year when he was spotted pocketing a jewel-encrusted pen during a press conference with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera.

Footage went viral when Czech TV broadcast the video of their leader, who was clearly taken with the pen. The station put red circles and arrows highlighting the pen as it was taken from the case and shuffled to both hands behind his back until it reached his pocket. It was posted online with a "crime scene" soundtrack, media reports said.

Overseas newspapers have revealed his affairs with younger women and his alleged former job with the secret police.

President Klaus's visit will come just weeks after UK climate change denier Lord Christopher Monckton likened Australian economist Ross Garnaut to Hitler for his views on implementing measures to tackle climate change. He later apologised.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet refused to attack the Czech Republic President but he took a swipe at Coalition MPs who refused to accept the science.

Mr Fraser said Mr Newman only believed in climate change when he was in Brisbane. "As soon as he steps west of the Great Dividing Range, the man channels (LNP Senator) Barnaby Joyce and becomes a sceptic," he said. "People are entitled to their views on climate change but it's hard to cop when the LNP has more than one."

Mr Newman said he welcomed all debate about climate change.

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NSW police to get power to lift the veil under new burqa laws

MUSLIM women who refuse to remove their burqas when ordered to by police face up to a year in jail after some of the world's toughest burqa laws were announced in NSW yesterday.

Police are to be given the power to force anyone to remove a face covering during routine traffic stops, if suspected of committing a crime or if they are considered a potential security risk.

If a woman defies police and refuses to remove her veil she could be jailed for up to a year or fined $5500. The penalties are in line with some of the world's toughest burqa rules. In France, where burqas are completely banned in public, women face fines of $202.

The unprecedented laws follow a furore over Carnita Matthews' refusal to remove her niqab - a full-length covering - when her car was pulled over by police.

Ms Matthews' conviction for making a false statement was overturned after a judge found he could not prove it was really her who made the statement, because her face was covered.

Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione called for the government to close the legal loophole that was preventing officers from identifying suspected criminals.

Premier Barry O'Farrell yesterday said there should be no discrimination - in favour of or against - any race when it came to helping police identify people suspected of criminal breaches.

"I don't care whether a person is wearing a motorcycle helmet, a burqa, niqab, face veil or anything else - the police should be allowed to require those people to make their identification clear," he said after a cabinet meeting.

Attorney-General Greg Smith is in charge of drafting the laws, which are expected to be introduced when parliament resumes in August.

Not every person who disobeys the police orders will be fined or sent to jail, with first offenders possibly given a warning. In a situation like Ms Matthews', a court will be able to apply a maximum sentence of 12 months and a $5500 fine.

Muslims Australia president Ikebal Patel said he supported the new laws but only for law enforcement purposes. "We are very supportive of any legislation required to ensure the law enforcements are not impaired," he said. "We would expect that this be done in a sensitive way."

Police previously had the power to ask women to remove veils during the investigation of serious offences but did not have such powers during routine car stops.

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Australia pub apology for evicting turbaned Sikh

An Australian pub chain was seeking to apologize Monday to a Sikh man who was evicted from a bar for wearing a turban.

The man was wrongly evicted from a pub in the east coast city of Brisbane on Sunday because staff decided that his religious turban did not comply with its policy against patrons with headwear, Spirit Hotels said in a statement.

"The patron should not have been asked to remove his turban, and we are attempting to contact the patron to apologize," the statement said.

Many Australian pubs ban headwear so that troublemakers can be readily identified from security camera footage or because caps can make patrons appear untidy.

Sikhs' turbans readily identify then as followers of their Indian religion. Wearing a turban is a tenet of the faith, along with unshorn hair and a beard.

Justin O'Connor, chief executive to the publicans' lobby group Queensland Hotels Association, said pubs had a right to refuse entry to anyone who did not comply with dress standards, as long as those standards did not breach discrimination laws.

Umesh Chandra, a leader of Brisbane's Indian community, said he had never before heard of a Brisbane pub asking as Sikh to remove his turban.

"In Australia, this is an isolated case," said Chandra, publisher of Brisbane's Indian Times newspaper.

The case attracted media attention after a man called a talk radio program Monday to report his daughter had been with a group of friends at the pub when one of them was told leave

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Australia starts punitive immigration measures

Comment from India

After thousands of aspirants managed Australian immigration by making false claims through fake certifications, the department of immigration and citizenship of Australia has now introduced a new 'fraud public interest criterion' (PIC) under which applicants making bogus claims can face a three-year ban.

According to the provisions of Fraud PIC, if an applicant is found to have supplied false, misleading or bogus information or documentation to the department, not only will the application be turned down but the applicant would also face a three-year visa bar. Even the migrating family members included in an application refused under Fraud PIC would also face the three-year bar.

Experts in immigration business revealed that while the provisions would be applicable on applications from anywhere in the world, the Australian authorities have been forced to include such stringent provisions in their immigration rules mainly due to bad experience with applications from north India (read Punjab) as thousands from here managed certificates making false claims about their work experience.

"While other countries also bar applicants for a few years if documents supplied by him/her are found forged or fake, but this is the first time that immigration authorities have included punitive action for a false claim on a genuine document," said Diamond Sodhi, programme director of Caan Wings, an immigration consultant firm.

"Officials from Australia have been expressing anguish and shock at claims made by people from here," she revealed, adding "now this would help check unscrupulous elements." It is learnt that Australian authorities were already subjecting applications for education or professional visa to thorough scrutiny including multilayered verifications from a number of sources.

Notably, even the trend of "paper marriages", whereby marriage exist only in papers for the sake of migrating abroad and actually no such relation exist between the student visa applicant and his/her spouse, started first for Australia. The trend was so rampant and open that even such matrimonial advertisements appeared in big numbers in a number of vernacular newspapers. Then thousands from here flooded Australia while showing their experience as hair dressers or cooks but actually they did not know anything about these professions.

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Patients die waiting in Queensland hospital queues as ambulance ramping gets worse

OVERCROWDING and understaffing are costing the lives of patients in public hospitals, Queensland Health's own documents show.

Medical records of patients who have recently died obtained by The Courier-Mail under Right to Information laws revealed one patient was given paracetamol after waiting almost four hours outside Nambour hospital but died before being admitted. Another patient "became unresponsive while waiting on ramp" and also died.

"Ramp time nearly three hours," the documents detailing circumstances surrounding the death of the second patient stated.

"Workload, staffing (and) overcrowding issues" were listed as having affected the cases of both patients.

United Voice Ambulance Union co-ordinator Jeanette Temperley said "ramping", which involved ambulances lining up for entry to emergency departments, was a "big issue". "Ramping's just getting worse and I don't think there's any sign of improvement," she said. "That's common. I definitely wouldn't be saying that's a rare wait. "You've got people ramped for three, four, five hours.

"That means two ambulance officers and a vehicle sitting there can't get back on the road . . . to go and save someone else's life."

Ms Temperley said she supported her members taking patients out of the vehicles and into hospital emergency departments. "A lot of the hospitals will actually say to the guys, 'will you take the patients back into the car', " she said.

United Voice Ambulance Union co-ordinator Jeanette Temperley speaks on the hospital crisis. "They're at a hospital. That's where all the equipment is, that's where the doctors are, that's where everything is ," she said.

The documents show details of patient deaths between July 1, 2009 and April 12, 2011. During this time, 95 patients died while in the Townsville Hospital Emergency Department, or were dead on arrival.

The number of patient deaths was not collated for the Royal Brisbane and Women's and Nambour hospitals. There was no data provided on patients deaths at the Gold Coast hospital.

Other factors identified as leading to patient deaths included hospitals being on bypass (accepting no ambulances and requiring patients to be taken elsewhere), patients being discharged too early or not seen in time, and poor hospital conditions.

Health Minister Geoff Wilson said patients whose conditions were classed as category one cases - those identified as the most critical - were admitted immediately and the state's hospital emergency departments were being expanded in Rockhampton, Townsville and Cairns. "There's a major expansion of capacity of beds within emergency departments as well as within the surgical wards of the hospital," he said.

"The average waiting time for all cases presented to emergency departments is less than an hour. "What we do know is that when these situations happen, they're very rare and every effort is made to learn from them."

Opposition Health spokesman Mark McArdle said Queensland Health's failures were killing patients. "For years the risk of ramping is the death of a patient, sadly this is now a reality," he said. "Queensland Health has again failed patients and the patients' ultimate sacrifice is they've now died. "This is an horrific story that gets worse every single day."

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