Health News at Your Fingertips

‘Horrible act of intolerance’: witness describes Salman Rushdie attack

Prof Carl LeVan of the American University, who was in the audience at the Chautauqua Institution when the author Salman Rushdie was attacked, has told the ABC:

I was sitting about 14 or 15 rows back from the stage, it’s a fairly large amphitheatre, here we call it the Amp. It seats a few thousand people and it’s a covered amphitheatre and I was just settling into my seat around 10.45am, a few minutes beforehand.

We knew this was going to be a very popular event, he is a very well-known speaker, author, novelist and proponent of human rights.

One of the hosts for the event, one of the staff members of the Chautauqua Institution was describing the program and shortly after he started talking, a man rushed onto the stage and repeatedly and viciously stabbed Salman Rushdie. And there were just gasps of shock from the audience, we were all sitting down, many of us stood up. A few courageous and compassionate people went up the stage and it was just a really horrible act of intolerance and violence to witness.

You can follow live updates about Rushdie here:

Western Australian health authorities have reported 2,094 new Covid-19 cases to 6pm last night. There are currently 14,677 active cases in the state and 304 people in hospital.

More information here:

AAP brings us David Littleproud’s comments at the party’s federal council meeting today:

Nationals leader David Littleproud says his party will take policies representing regional and rural communities to the Albanese government’s national jobs summit next month.

Littleproud outlined his vision for the Nationals to the party faithful gathered in Canberra for a federal council meeting.

It’s disappointing that regional Australia wasn’t even thought of. We were an afterthought and it’s important regional Australia has a voice there.

We want to prosecute our case with some pragmatic solutions.

The fact that regional Australia wasn’t even invited just goes to show that this stunt was all aimed at just sending the symbolic messages to the electorate.”

Littleproud said rebuilding trust with women was also a top priority, but rejected quotas for his party.

I don’t believe in quotas. I believe in creating the environment for women to come forward.

We’ll be looking to identify female candidates in new seats and those seats that we will have retiring members in and we’ll start that process as part of this journey in being open and honest, but we want to be genuine about this.

Littleproud said pensioners and veterans should be able to work more without their payments being impacted as a reward for their service to the nation. “This is a payback to them,” he said.

The party will also fight for a visa to fast-track permanent residency for workers in rural and regional communities.

We believe that it needs now to go forward and to incentivise those migrants that come to regional Australia. We need to give them the incentive of becoming residents and citizens of this great country.

This is an opportunity to grow regional Australia to make sure the next generation are out there and taking us to our full potential.

Littleproud said the program of paying the university debt of healthcare workers in the regions should be extended to other graduates in areas experiencing skills shortages.

The federal government will hold its jobs and skills summit in Canberra over the first two days in September.

Labor invited the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, to attend, or a Coalition member in his place, but the Liberal party turned down the offer.

It brings the total number of active cases in the state up to 11,211. There are 275 people in hospital.

Lillian Frank, a Melbourne socialite and philanthropist, has died aged 92.

Frank will be remembered as an icon of Melbourne’s social scene, hairdresser and tireless charity worker.

Frank’s daughter Jackie announced the news on social media, saying “we lost the heart and soul of our family” on Friday night.

Frank was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for service to the community in 1991, and a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1977 for her philanthropic work.

There are currently 507 people hospitalised in the state.

Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, has vowed to keep advocating for a Chinese-born Australian journalist detained in China for two years on espionage charges. AAP has the story:

Cheng Lei, a one-time high-profile presenter on China Global Television Network, was detained in Beijing in August 2020 and later formally arrested.

In March, the 46-year-old faced a closed trial in Beijing on charges of illegally supplying state secrets overseas.

Australia’s ambassador to China, Graham Fletcher, was barred from attending the court hearing and China has not provided details of its outcome.

Senator Wong said in a statement:

Our thoughts today are with Ms Cheng’s family, including her two young children, with whom she has had no contact since she was detained.

Since Ms Cheng was detained in August 2020, the Australian government has consistently called for basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment to be met, in accordance with international norms.

We will continue to support Ms Cheng and her family, and to advocate for Ms Cheng’s interests and wellbeing.

The comments come after the foreign minister raised Cheng’s case with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Bali last month.

In June, the Chinese ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, said that when cases of Australians detained in China involved national security they usually were not conducted openly, and urged Australia to respect China’s legal process.

Victoria has recorded 22 deaths from Covid in the last reporting period, and 4,300 new cases. There are 543 people in hospital with 31 in ICU.

A former New South Wales Liberal staffer who raised issues of sexual misconduct says major political parties are complicit in the toxic culture outlined in a landmark report on the state’s parliament, reports AAP.

Dhanya Mani, an advocate for sexual assault survivors, has alleged she was sexually assaulted by a male Liberal staffer between 2014 and 2015 when she was working in the parliament.

Mani was sceptical any structural change in breaking a misogynistic and toxic workplace culture in NSW parliament would occur, after an independent report by former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick was handed down this week.

Mani said:

Given that there wasn’t any consultation with survivors, it feels like it’s quite a tokenistic reply to that report from both sides [Liberals and Labor].

The priority isn’t being trauma-informed and choosing to stand with survivors, the priority is scoring political points.

She accused the major parties of not reaching out to survivors:

It’s really staggering and disappointing that neither [party] leader bothered to reach out to survivors and doesn’t seem to have tried to learn.

I just felt so extraordinarily alienated. People told me that I should be in a relationship with my perpetrator in the attempted rape that occurred …

I didn’t feel that I could afford to say no. I was scared of the consequences of angering this person.

In June, the premier, Dominic Perrottet, and the opposition leader, Chris Minns, acknowledged Mani by name as a sexual assault survivor in their response to the NSW ministerial offices respectful workplace policy.

The Broderick report found sexual harassment and bullying were rife in the parliament.

It said five people had reported an attempted or realised sexual assault, while more than one in four experienced bullying in the past five years, with several unnamed offices identified as “hotspots” for the behaviour.

More than two-thirds of respondents, the report said, noted sexual harassment was perpetrated by someone at a more senior level.

Mani is the only survivor on the NSW parliament advisory group on bullying, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct established in March 2021 and comprised of politicians and parliamentary staff.

Her membership came about after lobbying efforts by Greens MP Jenny Leong and after meeting with former premier Gladys Berejiklian. Leong on Friday criticised the oldest parliament in Australia as an exclusionary space:

Parliament is a toxic, sexist and at many times unsafe workplace – nobody inside the institution needed this report to know this.

The state recorded 35 deaths in the last 24 hours. There are currently 2,107 people in hospital with Covid-19.

The Australian Capital Territory has recorded 322 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the current number of active cases to 2,749. There are currently 141 people in hospital with the virus in the territory.

Restarting life for the third time after fall of Kabul

This is an extraordinary and moving story written by Noor M Ramazan, who fled Kabul with his wife, Masuma, and two children a year ago and is now settled in Melbourne. He “had to restart from zero for the third time in my life”. He writes:

I had to go through many other dead-end jobs in my childhood when Taliban took over my hometown Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998. I had to shine shoes and sell water, cigarettes, chewing gum and cherry juice on the streets to help my family have food on the table. OK. Let’s do it for the third time. At least this is Australia and I hope no one will harass or bully me as they did on the streets when I was a child …

We were taught from childhood to love our country. Country is mother. We love our country as much as our mother. You are safe as long as you are in your mother’s arms. You are free and nothing bad can threaten you. Because mother takes care of you with all her might. But if something happen to this mother, you will become an orphan and no one cares about you. Just like us, the Afghan people, who are like helpless children whose mother has fallen to her knees due to countless wounds …

If you are very lucky like me, another kind of mother comes and holds your hand and saves you from being trampled and crushed. She keeps you in her arms and her vast heart and adopts you as a child. Like what Australia did to us. Australia saved us. We owe our lives to Australia. Australia accommodated us in its sky-sized arms and gave us freedom and security.

It’s well worth your time as a Saturday morning long read. Fair warning: tackle with tissues.

Doctors resisting calls for Covid-19 antiviral treatments to be sold over the counter have accused pharmacists of creating a false narrative for commercial reasons, AAP reports.

The Australian Pharmacy Guild this week publicly petitioned the federal government for the right to dispense the medications without a prescription, citing a national shortage of general practitioners.

While two oral antivirals are available in Australia and early treatment is considered critical to lessen the effects of the virus, access to them is restricted.

People aged over 70 and those over 50 at risk of severe disease are eligible following consultation with a doctor or nurse.

Yet the guild believes community pharmacists should be able to supply the treatments over the counter to speed up access upon infection.

The immediate reaction to the idea from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners was around concern over patient safety.

The RACGP president, Dr Karen Price, said bypassing the prescription process would be “a recipe for disaster”. She said the guild’s claims of wait-time blowouts when visiting doctors, and their impact on the narrow window to use antiviral medications, were unfounded and misleading.

Price said in a statement:

The Pharmacy Guild, which is the body representing pharmacy business owners, needs to stop muddying the message on access for patients.

Patients need to understand the urgency of contacting their GP when they test positive for Covid-19 and not be distracted by the Pharmacy Guild’s efforts to push their own agenda.

We have telehealth infrastructure in place to make sure patients can access these medicines while isolating, including patient rebates for longer telephone consultations.

We are also calling for these antivirals to be added to the doctor’s bag in the event access to a pharmacy is problematic in emergency situations or for rural and remote locations.

Doctors were best placed to safely prescribe treatments because they knew their patients, their health histories and what medications they were on, Price added.

The Pharmacy Guild president, Trent Twomey, said on Thursday that GP wait times were growing unacceptably. In NSW, that meant an average of 4.17 days to see a family doctor and in Victoria, 3.33 days.

At the same time, antivirals needed to commence within five days of the onset of virus symptoms, Twomey said.

The Nationals are holding a federal council meeting in Canberra today, the first since David Littleproud took over party leadership and since the coalition’s federal election loss. AAP has the story:

Nationals federal president Kay Hull says the party needs to reset and embrace women to remain the nation’s most diverse political organisation.

In the first address of the meeting, Hull spoke of the importance of women in politics and the contribution they made to key regional industries, including agriculture:

We need to be resetting, ensuring we are embracing particularly the women of our nation.

They are part of our heartland … we stand as one of the few parties that have such a proud track record.

I think there are many areas that we need to embrace and further reset.

Analysis of the coalition’s election defeat showed women deserted the Liberal Party in droves, with a number of women – the teal independents – winning city seats from the party. They strongly campaigned on climate change action and integrity.

Littleproud is expected to talk about his priorities for the upcoming jobs summit and the review into nuclear power. He told AAP:

We are going to have to face up to some of the challenges we’ve got.

We retained all of our seats at the election, but you only have to look at the numbers to see that women left us so we have to go out and talk to them.”

Littleproud, deputy leader Perin Davey and leader of the Nationals in the Senate Bridget McKenzie will give speeches at Saturday’s conference.

Littleproud was elected leader in May, emerging as the winner of a three-way contest with ousted leader Barnaby Joyce and former minister Darren Chester.

The party’s federal director Jonathan Hawkes is stepping down after three years in the top administrative job.