Court rules in favour of Roundup over cancer query

A great relief. The Greenie jihad against glyphosate has been relentless

Australian farmers are relieved by a Federal Court ruling that the commonly used herbicide Roundup does not cause cancer.

Regarded as a key tool for controlling weeds in agricultural crops, Roundup’s manufacturer Monsanto has been hit by a barrage of legal action across the world in recent years.

A landmark class action in the Federal Court against Monsanto’s Australian offshoot, Huntsman Chemical Company, was filed by 800 on-Hodgkin lymphoma patients in 2020, but judge ­ Michael Lee late on Thursday found the evidence did not prove the glyphosate based herbicide was carcinogenic.

German chemicals and pharmaceuticals company Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, is facing multiple lawsuits in the US and has in some cases been found liable by juries for causing cancer.

National agencies, including the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, which last considered glyphosate in 2016, European Food Agency and European Chemicals Agency and the US Environmental Protection Agency have all approved use of glyphosate as a weed killer, subject to conditions, after strict safety assessments.

Justice Lee found there was not enough evidence to prove Roundup caused the non-Hodgkin lymphoma of 41-year-old Kelvin McNickle, who was diagnosed with the cancer six years ago after two decades of using the chemical on his family’s property.

The National Farmers Federation said Justice Lee’s decision was reassuring, given the widespread use of the product in the agriculture sector.

“As a farmers and stewards of the land, it’s important we use products that are safe for ­humans and the environment,” the NFF said after the verdict.

“Glyphosate is one of the most common products farmers and home gardeners use all over the world to combat invasive weeds. It allows us to be more productive and sustainable, often being associated with no or minimal till farming, which preserves soil structure.

“The decision from the Federal Court today reinforces that our regulator is doing its job to ensure the health and safety of our farmers, communities and environment.”

Describing glyphosate as “a critical component of modern and sustainable agricultural production”, NSW Farmers Ag Science Committee chair Alan Brown said Australian farmers were “well aware of how to use this chemical correctly to protect the health of their families and communities”.

“Without access to the chemical, farmers would have to resort to cultivation to manage weeds – degrading our landscape and making it harder than ever to maintain productivity” Mr Brown said.

Bayer said the decision was consistent with worldwide regulatory and scientific assessments and “remains committed to supporting Australian farmers by ensuring safe-for-use and effective products such as Roundup continue to be available”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/court-rules-in-favour-of-roundup-over-cancer-query/news-story/4786be27bbf3dbf6fc2b0e12a24d0c12

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COVID effect to cause 'excess' deaths for years to come

Death rates in Australia could be impacted for years by the lingering effects of COVID-19. (Steven Saphore/AAP PHOTOS)
Australia could continue to feel the tail effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for years as more people die because of the virus and its impacts.

Some 8400 more people died in 2023 than would have been expected under pre-pandemic conditions, an Actuaries Institute report, released on Monday, found.

The figure was down from the 20,000 "excess" deaths recorded in 2022.

Of the extra deaths logged in 2023, 4600 were directly because of COVID-19 while another 1500 were linked to the virus.

The institute's mortality working group said the substantial drop in excess deaths between the two years had not prevented the 2023 rate sitting higher than it had during bad flu years before the pandemic.

"We think COVID-19 is likely to cause some excess mortality for several years to come, either as a direct cause of death or a contributing factor to other causes such as heart disease," actuary Karen Cutter said.

"In our view, the 'new normal' level of mortality is likely to be higher than it would have been if we hadn't had the pandemic."

A higher death rate could remain as things such as vaccination rates and jabs' efficacy continued to be managed, Australian National University epidemiology lecturer Rezanur Rahaman said.

"It could be said that the excess deaths will continue for some time as it is a highly contagious respiratory pathogen that will not die out anytime soon," he told AAP.

But University of Technology Sydney bio-statistics professor Andrew Hayen noted the report found the age-standardised death rate in 2023 was almost the same as in 2019.

"We've already witnessed a considerable decline in excess deaths as measured by the Actuaries Institute (and) we are likely to see a continued decline in mortality, particularly due to COVID," he said.

It was difficult to attribute deaths specifically to post-COVID effects, rather than reduced health care during the pandemic, Professor Hayen said.

"Many of the deaths in 2022 were probably due to mortality displacement and there may also be issues relating to pressures on emergency services and delays in standard care, like elective surgery rates," he said.

"However, it's not possible to attribute exactly what proportion is attributable to putative causes."

Comparing Australia's experience with 40 other countries, the actuaries' report found the local excess death rate of five per cent between 2020 and 2023 was low by global standards, which averaged 11 per cent.

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8710518/covid-effect-to-cause-excess-deaths-for-years-to-come/

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Aussie Olympics star says Paris Games are so woke they're ruining athletes' chances of setting world records

Retired Olympic swimmer James Magnussen has taken a swipe at the Paris Olympics, saying they are so eco-friendly that they're ruining athletes’ chances of setting world records.

Magnussen won gold, silver, and bronze medals at the Olympic Games in 2012 and 2016. He also secured the title of 100m freestyle world champion in 2011 and 2013. Magnussen retired from competitive swimming in 2019.

He believes that the pinnacle sporting event in the world has an eco-friendly, vegan-first mentality that is damaging performance.

'There’s multiple factors that make village life far from ideal,' the dual Olympian wrote in his News Corp column.

'It’s the cardboard beds, which can’t give you optimal sleep.

'It’s the no airconditioning, which is going to play a bigger factor as the week goes. It was 20 degrees and raining yesterday. It’s going to be mid 30s in the coming days.

'That’s going to play a factor and the Australian team having their own portable air conditioners will be a welcome relief.

'It’s the crowded buses with no air flow. It’s all of the walking everywhere. The one thing we noticed in London was I was getting up to 6000-7000 steps a day, going from my room, to the food hall, to the bus stop, to the pool.'

Organisers of the Paris Games have been aggressive with their green approach, billing the event as the most sustainable ever.

Magnussen however believes they've gone overboard and that the environment that has been created for the athletes might be the toughest ever to produce world record swims.

'The lack of world records boils down to this whole eco-friendly, carbon footprint, vegan-first mentality rather than high performance,' he said.

'They had a charter that said 60 per cent of food in the village had to be vegan friendly and the day before the opening ceremony they ran out of meat and dairy options in the village because they hadn’t anticipated so many athletes would be choosing the meat and dairy options over the vegan friendly ones.

'The caterer had to rejig their numbers and bring in more of those products because surprise, surprise — world class athletes don’t have vegan diets.

'They must have watched the Netflix doco Game Changers and assumed everyone was the same. But let me tell you, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Roger Federer — none of those guys are on a vegan diet.'

Conditions in the athletes village have already raised eyebrows among the Aussie contingent.

The 'anti-sex' cardboard beds went down like a lead balloon with water polo star Tilly Kearns and her teammate Gabi Palm, who said 'my back is about to fall off' after their first night.

Tennis star Daria Saville revealed the village is nothing like being in a hotel in a social media post on Tuesday.

'We don't really have hotel-like housekeeping here in the Olympic Village, so you have to get your own toilet paper,' she wrote in a caption alongside video of herself grabbing several rolls.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-13682595/James-Magnussen-Paris-Olympics-Games-2024-woke-world-records-eco-friendly-vegan-vegetarian.html

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State’s ‘old school’ switch offers a template for the nation

When a starry-eyed Paul Martin launched his teaching career at a western Sydney high school, he was shocked that so many of his teenage students struggled to read. Thirty-five years later, he has just produced a new primary school teaching syllabus that will revolutionise learning for nearly 1.3 million students in one of the world’s biggest schooling systems.

In a startling confession, the chief executive of the NSW Education Standards Authority now says that for a half-century education systems have been doing a lot of things wrong.

“I started teaching in 1989,” Martin recalls. “I walked into a year 7 class where more than a third of the kids couldn’t read. And I had no idea how to teach them to read because all I knew how to do was what the syllabus said – and it had nothing in it. By the time I’d finished classroom teaching, I had the desire to change all of that.”

The new primary school curriculum for NSW, launched on Wednesday, is a clear and concise document that focuses on phonics and facts, erasing the gobbledygook and feel-good theories that still clutter curriculum documents across the nation. NSW is returning to the old-school method of teaching children vital facts, in sequence. It is based on cutting-edge research that proves children learn best when they are explicitly taught facts and given practice to embed them in long-term memory.

For decades, children’s learning has been sabotaged by left-wing ideologies that regard schooling as an opportunity for indoctrination and social engineering under the cover of “critical thinking and creativity”. Phonics and facts were dirty words for the “child-centred” groupthink.

“Without being too condemnatory of the past, some of the earlier syllabuses were written at a high point of what I would call progressivist ideology – the ‘choose your own adventure’ of education,” Martin says. “Some things were potentially wrong, like whole-language reading, and we took grammar out of syllabuses. Beforehand, some of the syllabuses expected kids to do things in, say, history, in terms of writing expectations, that they hadn’t yet learned in English.”

The flaws in the previous curriculum have produced a generation of children who often struggle with basic reading and mathematics, and have a poor general knowledge.

The “long tail of disadvantage” described in 2009 by Julia Gillard, the former federal Labor education minister and prime minister, has grown ever longer. In last year’s NAPLAN tests, one in three children starting high school failed to meet the minimum standard expected for reading, writing and mathematics.

Australian students are twice as likely to fail than excel in English and maths, despite taxpayers pouring $72bn a year into schools. By 15, one in three teenagers can’t read to the level required for year 9. Is it any wonder so many drop out of school, sucked into street crime and a life of dysfunction?

Martin, 60, worked as a teacher in some of Sydney’s poorest communities and was an education policy adviser for the NSW and federal governments before taking the helm at NESA in 2019, when he initiated a clean-up of what he regarded as a “cluttered curriculum”. A new syllabus for English and mathematics was released last year and this week he delivered teaching materials across all subjects – the bipartisan policy love child of former Coalition NSW education minister Sarah Mitchell and her successor, Labor’s Prue Car.

Car, who also is NSW Deputy Premier, insists teachers must rely on evidence of “what works” to help children learn, just as doctors perform operations based on proven and best-practice surgical techniques. “It’s the bleeding obvious,” she says. “We would never tell a surgeon, ‘Do what works for you, see how you feel on the day and it’s up to you, here is the scaffold.’ No! We say, ‘This is how you do it based on the evidence of what works.’ ”

As the mother of a teenage son, Car has seen first-hand the failures in longstanding teaching techniques. “When my son was learning to read I, like so many other parents, was obsessively reading books to him constantly,” she recalls. “A lot of the conversation at that time was about the use of sight words, and looking at pictures next to the words they’re learning to read.

“Now when I’m in classrooms, I can see that teachers are using a combination of that plus phonics. The kids can actually make the sounds out because that’s the building blocks on which they learn how to read and write and understand. So I think every parent – me included – can see that would have been very useful to us back then. Being able to read changes lives.”

Australia has a national curriculum that was streamlined and updated in 2022 to Version 9. In Queensland, schools have until 2027 to adopt the changes, so many children will go through most of primary school being taught a defunct curriculum.

NSW, Victoria and Western Australia have written their own syllabus materials, which give more detail and guidance to put flesh on the bones of the national curriculum, which is confusing to comprehend given its “three-dimensional” nature with layers of online documents that must be cross-referenced.

The differences across Australia are stark: in NSW, a year 2 student will be taught to locate the seven continents and five oceans of the world, read ancient Greek legends and identify significant Aboriginal sites across NSW.

In Queensland, the year 2 syllabus based on the old national curriculum confuses teachers with vague and rambling explanations. “Continuity and change are not only key concepts in history but ones that challenge students to move from simplistic notions of history as a series of events, to powerfully complex understandings about change and continuity,” it states.

“Changes occurs at different rates simultaneously, linking forward and backward in time.”

This is why hardworking teachers are constantly complaining about late nights wasted trying to interpret the curriculum and devise practical plans for the next day’s lessons.

WA’s year 2 naval-gazing history lessons focus on a child’s own family, in line with the national curriculum. While NSW kids will listen in wonder about Roman gods and Dreamtime legends, yawning seven-year-olds in WA will learn about their own name, what they look like and what objects are familiar to them.

Young children who have not learned to read and write fluently are being expected to “analyse and explain” concepts in history or science.

Victoria updated its syllabus last month, mandating that from next year schools explicitly teach children up to year 2 to read using structured phonics – the sounding out of letters and letter combinations to form words. The Australian Education Union’s Victorian branch blasted this change as a “burden” and instructed teachers to ignore the mandate.

In NSW, the Minns government consulted 200 expert teachers and involved the NSW Teachers Federation, which has given a lukewarm endorsement that “curriculum with high levels of subject knowledge and rigour can be positive”. The union secured a compromise that while teachers can start using the new syllabus this week, it won’t be compulsory until 2027.

The NSW reforms are based on a two-year review by Australian Council for Educational Research chief executive Geoff Masters, who insists teachers and students need a clear “pathway” for learning.

“It’s important that it’s clear to teachers what they should be teaching and what students should be learning,” he says. “You need a high-quality curriculum and a clear sequence of learning. The curriculum has to be a pathway that all students will follow.”

Masters says schools must ensure children don’t fall behind on the learning pathway but also let them race ahead if they’re ready.

“We have many students in our schools who are being taught things currently that they’re not ready to learn because they lack the prerequisites,” he says. “The curriculum has moved too far ahead for them. And we have other students who are being taught things they already know, when they need to be stretched.”

Small gaps in basic facts taught to children in primary school can grow into a chasm of ignorance in high school. No one would expect a teenager to become a violin virtuoso without having been taught how to hold the violin and bow, read music and practise musical scales. Yet somehow we expect kids to master algebra even if they haven’t learned their times tables or fractions first.

Young children who have not learned to read and write fluently are being expected to “analyse and explain” concepts in history or science. They end up stressed and struggling. Children who are bored or anxious are likelier to muck up in class or drop out of school.

“Many kids are getting well into their school life before anybody has recognised that they’ve missed some really basic things,” says Masters. “Right at the beginning of schooling, whether it’s reading or mathematics, the curriculum has marched on. Everything is so time-bound currently, where students are required to move on whether or not they’ve mastered what they’ve just been taught.

The consequence of that is many students lack the prerequisite for what they’re to be taught next, and they struggle and fall further behind as the next year-level curriculum gets further and further beyond their reach.”

Knowledge Society chief executive Elena Douglas, who has been driving reforms to teaching methods and curriculum content, hopes NSW has “broken a stalemate” over the best way to teach.

“This is how we get smart and creative citizens,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what postcode, we need the same formula of calm and orderly classrooms, teacher-led instruction, a well-sequenced and ambitious curriculum and lesson plans, and evidence-based reading instruction. I hope this starts a race to the top.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/states-old-school-switch-offers-a-template-for-thenation/news-story/b0320684d93ada8cc318ca4ac6824e84

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http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

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