Civil Liberties council urges rethink on terror laws The Australian Council for Civil Liberties has called on the Federal Government to scrap its proposed anti-terrorism laws completely and go back to the drawing board.
The Federal Opposition has announced it is moving to block the counter-terrorism legislation which gives ASIO the power to detain suspects, including children aged between 14 and 18, without charge. Council for Civil Liberties spokesman Cameron Murphy has welcomed Labor's stance against the bill. He says he is particularly opposed to the inclusion of children. "There's no reason at all why children should be included in this bill," Mr Murphy said. "It's totally unreasonable for a child as young as ten years old to be picked up in the middle of the night or off the street by someone from ASIO and being interviewed without their parents knowing where they are." Proffr defends misleading use of rat... Professor defends video use in embryonic stem cell debate The leading proponent of embryonic stem cell research, Professor Alan Trounson, has defended the use of a video he showed federal MPs in the lead up to a Parliamentary conscience vote on the issue. The video showed a crippled rat able to walk after treatment using cells from aborted foetuses, not the five-day-old fertilised eggs used in embryonic stem cell research. But a spokeswoman for Professor Trounson says the video was not misleading, as embryonic stem cells and aborted foetus cells share the same application in the example shown.
