Tuesday, December 1, 2009 With two by-elections coming up in Australia, many minor parties and independents will be looking to gain a seat in the House of Representatives. Stephen Murphy is one of the independents. Mr Murphy is a computer programmer from the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. “After growing up in South-East Melbourne I studied Science at Monash with first class Honours, worked in Europe for 10 years and have

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 The Supreme Court in Libya has upheld the death sentence for five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian medical intern condemned for infecting 426 children with HIV. Just one day ago, a deal to free the foreign medics was announced. The six defendants were not present at the court ruling, while family members of the children rejoiced when the judge confirmed the verdict. “This is a victory

Sunday, August 21, 2005 A robotic system at Stanford Medical Center was used to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery successfully with a theoretically similar rate of complications to that seen in standard operations. However, as there were only 10 people in the experimental group (and another 10 in the control group), this is not a statistically significant sample. If this surgical procedure is as successful in large-scale studies, it

Thursday, August 7, 2008 Across Easter weekend Wellington, New Zealand was host to Rock2Wgtn, an international two-day hard rock festival. Large crowds showed up at Westpac Stadium to see the various acts. The world has never seen an event of this kind before, and New Zealand has never had any kind of major rock festival or multi-day music festival. Day one featured three theatrical acts. Finnish band Lordi, known for

Thursday, June 23, 2011 NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft has discovered evidence for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. The study has been published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature. Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as

Sunday, April 24, 2011 The California Controller’s office reports that eleven state agencies have given US$13.3 million in pay and travel advances that have not been collected. Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order to recover uncollected loans by the agencies. A press release from the governor’s office states, “The Governor’s Executive Order seeks to recover taxpayer dollars by directing state agencies and departments to clear salary and travel advances

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 Australian Minister for Vocational Education and Training, Gary Hardgrave has announced the government will provide AU$15.8 million to establish an Australian Technical College in North Adelaide. The minister said the government was entering into a partnership with the Archdiocese of Adelaide and consortium of industrial and manufacturing companies. The North Adelaide college will be located in Elizabeth and be operated as an independent non-government school. The