The Lombard Finance Company collapse, the losses and the roll-on effect on its investors is a well-known story in New Zealand.

Prime Minister John Key announced today that Sir Douglas will retain his knighthood. (more…)

Hi,

My son is a Year 12 student at a large college in Hamilton. He was formerly in my custody but has been in his mother’s custody since 2008. The mother and I don’t get on and as a result of this she is quite obstructive and won’t send me copies of my sons school reports.
(more…)

Norwegian parents should go on date nights to help reduce the country’s soaring divorce rate, the [Norwegian] government says.

Solveig Horne, the country’s minister for children, equality and social inclusion, has set herself the goal of strengthening families and reducing the divorce rate, which at 40 per cent is one of the highest in Europe.

(more…)

Stuff story

A Wellington taxi driver has been found not guilty of driving carelessly after a collision that claimed the life of his unborn son.

Bililigne Gebretsadik, 41, has pleaded not guilty to three charges of careless driving, two of causing injury and one of careless driving causing the death of his unborn child in June last year.

At 31 weeks’ pregnant his wife, Seble Cherie, was a passenger in a car Gebretsadik was driving. She was injured and lost the baby after an emergency caesarean section in Wellington Hospital.

But wait just a minute … can’t a woman walk into abortion clinic and demand an abortion? Yet this man is charged with causing the death of ‘his’ unborn child?

Is this equality of the sexes?

I saw this today and thought, this is such a relevant piece of art in today’s social climate. I have no idea who the artist is.

A Wellington woman spoke on the phone for more than eight minutes as her 15-month-old baby drowned in the bath, a jury has heard.

Stuff News

She then made two separate calls to her parents, trying to arrange for a rug doctor to clean the carpets later that day.

This will be interesting to see how the jury view this; whether they excuse this mother’s negligence as she has suffered the loss of a child or they hold the woman to account for prioritising the housework above the well being of a child.

Updated 31 October The jury return their verdict.

A Wellington mother has been found not guilty of killing her 13-month-old son, who drowned in the bath while she spoke on the phone.

In the High Court in Wellington this afternoon, a jury of seven men and five woman found the woman’s fatal mistake to talk on the phone for eight minutes while her child bathed was not bad enough too warrant a conviction for manslaughter.

Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/Police-trial-new-system-to-tackle-domestic-violence/tabid/423/articleID/318946/Default.aspx#ixzz2ixgsKNJo

“We know that New Zealand offenders score very highly compared to our Canadian counterparts and we’re very concerned about that,” says Kiri Hannifin of Women’s Refuge.

The origins of ODARA as shown in a previous post are Canadian and relate specifically to marital assaults by husbands on their wives.
(more…)

Brief Spousal Assault Form for the Evaluation of Risk or B-SAFER

This is a form that has been developed by the New Zealand Police along side the modified version of the Canadian ODARA domestic violence predictive assessment tool.

Do we have any information on the purpose and use of information?

It is possible these B-SAFER forms are turning up in Family Court proceedings. Do we have the situation now where the police are absent witnesses in Family Court cases.

Anyone heard of ODARA.

New Zealand Police are now using the ‘Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment’ ODARA for short, imported from Canada.

ODARO is a predictive assessment to determine the likelyhood of a person deemed to have assaulted their partner assaulting them again. The results rank a person on a scale of 0 – 13, 13 being most likely to assault their partner again.

From what I have read so far there is no indication of when the system is used or exactly how the assessment is made or whether it has been modified in anyway from the original Candaian model.

What does concern me is the suggestion that the assessment may be an automatic includion in a bail hearing. Why bother having a bail hearing before a judge if a man’s liberty is determined by a pimply faced kid ticking boxes which pre-determines that he is already guilty of the offence and might offend again. It fact why bother paying for a public defender when it is already a forgone conclusion according to this systematic assessment.

This could be an interesting discussion if we could find out a little more about it.

This is an article about Japan that appears in Fox News

This trend in Japan has been mentioned here before. It would be interesting to know how extensive the trend is in Asia and the reasons behind it. Certainly a population’s future could be severely tested with such a trend.

The bizarre trend, dubbed by the Japanese media as “celibacy syndrome,” was reported in a widely circulated article from the Guardian, which noted that the number of single people in Japan has reached an all-time high. According to a 2011 survey, approximately 60 percent of men and nearly 50 percent of women aged 18 to 34 were not in a romantic relationship, and another survey found that a third of Japanese people under 30 had never dated anyone before.

Original article quoted at The Guardian. (more…)

Our Themes for 2013
1) Single Parents you’re Brilliant, and;
2) Lose the labels

This is the first known conference ever for single parents made up of fathers and mothers who wish to start something from the ground. It’s a joint effort to bring attention to single parent families from a realistic perspective for who better knows what is needed and how to move forward than single parents themselves.

Schedule
9.30am – 12.30pm Speakers

• Senior Lecturer Dr Lesley Patterson (School of People, Environment and Planning)
• Single Parent Julie Whitehouse
• Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG)

1 – 2.30pm Speakers

• Single Parent Aaron D’Souza
• 1.30 – 1.45pm Dance Entertainment
• Single Parent Jayesh Jain
• Single Parent Alan Gibson

3pm – 5pm Speakers

• Law Society on Family Court Law
• IRD on Child Support
• WINZ on welfare changes

Entertainment
We understand single parents will need to bring children if they don’t have means for childcare and have organized entertainment in a separate hall. 
10am – 11.30am

• Clown, Juggler, Magician and Acrobat Le Cirque de JP will entertain children and caregivers in a hall attached through a foyer.

12.30pm- 5pm

• Throughout the day children can play with toys, dressup clothing, arts and crafts and more.

BYO lunch, coffee, tea, etc provided.
COST: Gold coin donation
Date: 2nd November, 2013
Time: 9.30am – 5pm
Place: Kelston Community Centre
Address: 135 Awaroa Rd, Sunnyvale 0602(corner of Great North Rd and Awaroa Rd – opposite Waikumete Cemetery) - MAP here
Sponsored by: Auckland Single Parent’s Trust and Te Kaitiakitanga Tamaki Makaurau o te Matua Kotahitanga

I am offering support to Commodore Keat. This man served his country for almost 40 years. His only crime was not to tell his superiors about a private relationship he had with a civilian subordinate and not ending it. Well whip-d-do-dang.
(more…)

The Ministry of Men’s Affairs is a community group because successive governments have ignored the voice and welfare of NZ men.

Each Saturday in October a few of us have been pounding the pavements in different cities to raise awareness of men’s issues and to encourage people to wear a black ribbon rather than supporting the male-bashing White Ribbon Campaign. We have handed out thousands of leaflets and we express our gratitude to Paul Catton for generously donating several reams of leaflets as well as food and refreshments for the campaigners.

We have been heartened at the level of positive response to our campaign from the various cultural and socioeconomic groups represented in the places we visited so far. (more…)

Full Story

Figures released exclusively to the Sunday Star-Times by Police Minister Anne Tolley showed in the year ending June 30, police investigated 89,947 family violence cases – 3225 more than in 2011. Yet of those, only 39,716 investigations resulted in offences being recorded. This was down on the previous year’s figure of 40,024.

So Police Minister Anne Tolley has decided to manipulate the manner in which family violence is reported in the media by selectively releasing Police data to specific slanted news outlets. (more…)

Above is a bit of humour. Now read this story.

midtown Manhattan, said police, who were called to the scene after a guard noticed a strong odour coming from one of the bags.

MoMA has been encouraging study and consideration of media reporting of situations involving men and fathers, both about the underlying situations and the way that media manipulated these stories.

This individual case study approach is very illustrative of the ups and downs, but may miss out on seeing the bulk of the wider picture. For example, it may easily miss other stories, that women may be frustrated about, which are also an important part of the overall picture, especially that total picture as seen by developing boys and girls.
(more…)

she says it all..

https://www.embooks.com/blog/single/broken-families-broken-britain

Oooh, Shock Horror, How Exciting, A Scandal! Auckland’s newly elected Mayor Len Brown confirms allegations made on the WhaleOil blog site that he participated in a 2-year extramarital affair with a younger woman who served on a council advisory board. This revelation immediately became the top news story around the country.

But how silly it is for people to be surprised. (more…)

The research, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, showed the Metropolitan Police detained the highest number of children aged 17 and under for both years, with 14,370 in 2010 and 13,860 in 2011.

This is an interesting article looking at the number of children held in overnight custody in the London Metroloitan Police Area.
(more…)

NEED BETTER WORK STORIES?
[The link above takes you to the front page, which presently contains this story. After a week, you will then need to look down the front page, or search for the title “Need better work stories”.]
8 October 2013
A 7-day trial in the Auckland High Court begins Monday, 14 October, against 14 men in blue concerning the dawn 2008 raid on the offices of Spartan News Limited (this website) and home of Vince and Jane Siemer. A fifteenth defendant is the deputy registrar of the District Court who signed the undated police search warrant.
(more…)

The world economy is like a chess game, but not one between two players who take turnabout. Each piece on the board has its own mind, plays its own game, may move when it wants, and the game progresses in a sometimes unpredictable manner.

The five days referred to above is when the US could default on the world economy. We’ve been playing this game for a while now but this time is different. The US treasury has exhausted its extraordinary options and the Fed had indicated it would stop printing money but has been forced into an embarrassing about face. (more…)

So in how many of these cases is sentencing determined by what Women’s Refuge have to say.

Women’s Refuge chief executive Heather Henare said the case had brought the organisation into disrepute but it was not the sentence or reparation figure they were concerned with. “What we want to achieve is for Kathy to get the help she needs so she’s no longer a risk to the community,” she said.

Full Story

A Whangarei woman who stole more than $123,000 in taxpayers’ money over 15 years.

Her lawyer, Kelly Johnson, initially asked Judge Greg Davis to adjourn sentencing so Ms Apetera could arrange for someone to look after her children if she was sent to jail. Mr Johnson later submitted a letter of support from the Women’s Refuge and asked for a sentence of home detention to be imposed.

Full Story

Judge Javier Albar ruled a driving school was within its rights to charge female drivers a higher rate than men on a course of driving lessons.

The Zaragoza driving school was initially fined [Euro]4000 for sexual discrimination, but Albar overturned the ruling when the school appealed and presented research to prove its claims that men were better drivers. Its research suggested women required more lessons than men to pass their driving test.

Judge Albar cited information from Spain’s Directorate of Traffic which he argued demonstrated that “every single year, men displayed greater dexterity and better open road skills” in their driving tests than females.

Full Story

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to advertise this because I think it is a good idea.

Any covert operators looking for the inside running.

Wonder who the special guests might be.

Full Story

As far as a San Jose appeals court is concerned, parents don’t need to spare the rod with their children. The court has ruled that using a wooden spoon for a spanking that causes serious bruising should not necessarily translate into a finding of child abuse.

In a ruling designed to establish legal precedent, the 6th District Court of Appeal overturned a trial judge’s finding that a South Bay mother should be reported for child abuse for trying to resolve discipline issues with her 12-year-old daughter by spanking her so hard with a wooden spoon it severely bruised her.