ATTORNEY-GENERAL Rob Hulls will today announce a controversial compromise struck with the state's religious groups that will allow them to continue to discriminate against gays and lesbians, single mothers and people who hold different spiritual beliefs.In a move that has delighted religious groups but angered gay activists and discrimination experts, Mr Hulls will protect the right of hundreds of church-run organisations - including schools, hospitals and welfare services - to refuse to employ or provide services to people who they believe may undermine their beliefs.
Under the deal, Mr Hulls will allow church groups to continue discriminating on the grounds of sex, sexuality, marital and parental status and gender identity. But they will be unable to discriminate on the basis of race, disability, age, physical features, political beliefs or activity, or breastfeeding.
The decision has dismayed groups that argued that the review was a chance to eliminate entrenched discrimination in Victoria, which has more exemptions to its equal opportunity law than any other state.
Leading discrimination law expert Professor Margaret Thornton said it was a win for fundamentalist religious groups. ''In terms of a person's private life ... their sexual preference or marital status really has nothing to do with their ability to perform a job. Being able to discriminate on marital status is particularly absurd. It is really out of date. It really amounts to the policing of women because the focus is on single mothers, not on men.''
From The Age, Government bows to religious right.
Some excerpts on how weekly/tabloid magazines create their stories below, but it's worth reading the whole Guardian piece on The Brangelina industry.
Of course, from a traditional perspective on the nature of reality, there were problems with these stories. ... "These weeklies no longer have any interest in actual reporting," Aniston's publicist, Stephen Huvane, told me via email. Richard Spencer, the editor-in-chief of In Touch, insists that all his stories are double-sourced. But maybe these disagreements over journalistic ethics miss the point. The weeklies are their own world, with their own rules. Their priority is to keep the rollercoaster of a star's life - romance, betrayal, marriage, separation, reunion - moving as quickly as possible. Real facts play a role, but not always a leading one. "A tabloid version of a fact isn't exactly a lie," is how one editor at a prominent celebrity weekly puts it. "But it isn't the truth. You know what I mean?"...
...the verifiable facts will only take you so far. Fuelled by panic over falling magazine circulations, the challenges posed by blogs and a desensitised readership hungry for authentic emotion, the storyline of Brad, Angelina and Jennifer has achieved escape velocity. It seems, somehow, to exist independently of its real-life protagonists, even as it draws on the facts of their lives. And its inner workings - the web of relationships between stars, publicists, editors, paparazzi, "insider" sources and bloggers - show the machinery of modern fame operating at its most combative, absurd and intense.
The frenetic state of today's celebrity news industry stems from one inescapable fact: the lives of real people - even people as volatile and wealthy as A-list movie stars - simply don't unfold fast enough to meet the appetite for information about them. Weekly magazines need weekly scoops, and preferably scoops different enough to distinguish them from their rivals. Sales of celebrity magazines are plummeting (newsstand sales in the US fell 11% in the second half of last year, and the situation in the UK is similar, though Grazia is an exception) but the decline seems only to have increased the desperation for exclusives.
...
Editorial meetings at celebrity magazines, therefore, may not always resemble those elsewhere. "You build the story around an emotion," says a celebrity weekly editor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "What's happening with poor Jen this week? Well, John Mayer's seeing someone else, and for a woman of her age, that must be awful ... So you construct a narrative of what a woman her age may be feeling." Stories may start with nothing more than a set of photographs: Aniston looking happy, or sad - or happy one moment and sad the next, since if you take multiple shots of anyone, with a fast shutter speed, you can capture a range of expressions. "The question is: how can we construct a story around a set of emotions that our readers are going to relate to? It can come from a genuine tip, or a photo. Or it can come out of our ass."
jezebel.com also asks, 'As The Tabloid Wars Heat Up, Do We All Lose?'.
It was the final two lines to the petition about Alan Turing that did it:
"So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."
More:
The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the "appalling" way he was treated for being gay.Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of 'gross indecency' in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration.
Gordon Brown's statement came in response to a petition posted on the Number 10 website which has received thousands of signatures in recent months.
Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling" - PM