Smith, ADA say abuse liability is possible

Smith, ADA say abuse liability is possible

Complaints of physical and sexual abuse in the military will be investigated says Defence Minister Stephen Smith.

The Australia Defence Association (ADA) agrees with the Defence Minister that the Commonwealth may be legally liable for physical and sexual abuse in the military.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith's office has received hundreds of complaints from people who claim they have suffered physical and sexual abuse in the military, dating back decades.

The complaints follow wide publicity about the treatment of an 18-year-old female cadet at Canberra's Australian Defence Force Academy who had a sexual encounter with a male cadet transmitted to others via the internet without her knowledge.

A string of inquiries have been set up in response to the scandal, which has prompted others to raise allegations of abuse.

Mr Smith says the Commonwealth may be legally liable and he has promised all of the allegations will be investigated.

ADA executive director Neil James agrees with Mr Smith.

"He is probably right to the extent that they could be liable. But obviously each allegation will have to be checked out," he said.

"They'll have to check whether they have already been investigated or been the subject of previous inquiries."

Mr James says it will be difficult to prove many of the allegations.

"The trouble is a lot of the allegations are old, some are clearly exaggerated, some are the result of peoples' personal views and not necessarily the facts, some could even be false memory syndrome," he said.

But he also says the investigations will be far-reaching.

"Well they should go back as far as you can satisfactorily investigate the inquiry in terms of known facts and the availability of documents and witnesses," he said.

"Trying to rely just on peoples' memories as we know from other inquiries say into child sex abuse are exceptionally difficult to do."

On Saturday it emerged that South Australian police were investigating an allegation of serious sexual assault of a recruit at the former HMAS Leeuwin in Western Australia in 1971.

Allegations have also emerged of systemic bullying and bastardisation, sometimes bordering on sexual assault at the Defence Force Academy.

Defence said it was also investigating personnel who allegedly set up a Facebook hate page to vilify serving gay members of the Defence Force.

Afghan suicide bomber kills 9 troops

Afghan suicide bomber kills 9 troops

Afghan policemen keep watch at the site of a suicide attack that killed three officers Friday in Kandahar province. The next morning, another suicide bomber killed nine soldiers at a base near Jalalabad in Laghman province.

Five NATO and four Afghan soldiers died Saturday morning at the Afghan military's eastern headquarters after a suicide bomber dressed in an army uniform approached the base on foot and blew himself up.

The explosion also injured four Afghan soldiers and four translators, according to Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi.

In an email to journalists, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest assault against foreign forces this year. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the bomber was from Day Kundi province in central Afghanistan.

"A month ago, he joined with the Afghan army and his aim was to carry out the suicide attack," Mujahid said. "Today, when there was a meeting going on between Afghan and foreign soldiers, he used the opportunity to carry out the attack."

Militants have conducted an increasing number of attacks in the east and north since many of them were routed from their strongholds in the south by an influx of tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO forces last year.

The assailant approached the base, located in Laghman province near the city of Jalalabad, and detonated a vest of explosives at about 7:30 a.m. local time at the entrance, Azimi said.

"The attacker had the Afghan security force uniform on and that gave him the opportunity to reach the entrance to the base and carry out the attack," Azimi said.

NATO issued a statement confirming that five soldiers in its International Security Assistance Force, as the deployment to Afghanistan is known, were killed in "an insurgent attack."

The nearly 100 ISAF troops posted at the base are there mainly to train Afghan army soldiers, NATO spokesman Maj. Tim James said.

The military alliance did not release further information on the service members killed pending notification of their next of kin.

Saturday's attack was the deadliest against foreign forces since a car bomber killed six U.S. soldiers in December in the province of Kandahar.

It came on the heels of a suicide bombing on Friday in which a Taliban fighter disguised in a police uniform made his way into the outer perimeter of police headquarters in Kandahar and blew himself up, killing the provincial police chief and two other officers.

More than 120,000 foreign soldiers are serving in Afghanistan, two-thirds from the United States. Canada's military mission to the country counts about 2,900 forces, most of whom are based in Kandahar in the south.

Russell Williams divorce to stay muzzled

Russell Williams divorce to stay muzzled

An Ottawa judge has ruled that divorce proceedings involving convicted killer Russell Williams — a former Canadian Forces colonel — and his estranged wife shall remain under a publication ban, at least for now.

An Ottawa judge has ruled that divorce proceedings involving convicted killer Russell Williams — a former Canadian Forces colonel — and his estranged wife shall remain under a publication ban, at least for now.

Williams' wife last month applied to the court asking for sensitive records to be under a publication ban — particularly a domestic contract signed between the two shortly after he was arrested for two murders.

In support, she filed sensitive medical information which her lawyers said outlined the harm she might suffer, should any divorce proceedings be made public.

On Tuesday, Justice Jennifer MacKinnon ruled that until there is a divorce trial in open court (unlikely if Williams and his wife mutually agree to part ways), then the domestic contract should not be available to the public.

The judge also sealed sensitve portions of the woman's medical records that were put before the court.

The CBC, Ottawa Citizen and other media organizations had intervened, arguing the public had a right to know whether Williams tried to shield assets — including his military pension — by signing them over to his wife after getting caught by police.

Williams was arrested in February 2010 and pleaded guilty last fall to the sado-sexual murders of Jessica Lloyd of Belleville, Ont., and Marie France Comeau of Brighton, Ont. He was also convicted for assaulting two women in Tweed, Ont., as well as for dozens of fetish raids and break-ins in eastern Ontario and Ottawa, where he shared a home with his wife.

16 police officers arrested in connection with Mexico mass graves

16 police officers arrested in connection with Mexico mass graves

Mexico City (CNN) -- Sixteen municipal police officers from the northeastern Mexican town of San Fernando have been arrested for allegedly protecting those responsible for the mass graves uncovered there, the country's attorney general said.

The police officers worked to cover up the killings of the Zetas drug cartel, Attorney General Marisela Morales said.

Authorities recovered six more bodies from the mass graves Wednesday, bringing the total number of bodies found to 122, state attorney general's spokesman Ruben Dario Rios Lopez said.

Morales said that to date, investigators have identified 17 people who participated in the executions of the victims.

Bank of Canada holds rate steady

Bank of Canada holds rate steady

The Bank of Canada has opted to leave the country's key lending rate unchanged at one per cent.

The Bank of Canada kept its benchmark lending rate unchanged at one per cent in its latest decision on Tuesday.

Since raising its overnight lending rate to one per cent in September, the bank has held steady for five consecutive policy decisions.

Economists had expected the central bank to hold rates steady, citing the fact that inflation still appears to be under control in Canada.

"We judge that the BoC will want to monitor core CPI for signs of 'consistency' for at least a couple months more," Michael Gregory, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets Economics, said in a report a week ago.

For its part, the Bank of Canada said economic growth in the United States appears to be picking up steam, while emerging markets continue to expand at a robust pace.

But the recent Japanese earthquake will cause supply disruptions, the monetary authority said.

In addition, while Canada's gross domestic product growth is better than anticipated, the expansion is not setting off inflationary alarm bells, the bank said.

Canada steady, Europe not so

The bank’s decision comes in the face of an interest rate hike in Europe. Earlier in April, the European Central Bank raised its trend-setting rate by one-quarter of one percentage point to 1.25 per cent.

Historically, European monetary authorities have been much quicker to clamp down on economic growth to ease inflationary pressures than either Canada or the United States.

Most central banks have begun worrying that soaring commodity prices, including for foodstuffs, and gathering strength among the world’s major economies could reignite a general round of price hikes in industrialized countries.

But, as of yet, the U.S. Federal Reserve is still taking a “wait-and-see” approach before hiking U.S. rates.

“Most Fed members have made it clear that rising commodity prices are not [the] result of U.S. monetary policy nor does it require a policy response,” noted Camilla Sutton, chief currency strategist at Scotia Capital in a Tuesday note.

Japan PM urges calm as nuclear level raised

Japan PM urges calm as nuclear level raised

Japan's prime minister urges the public not to panic after the government boosts the severity level of the nuclear crisis to the highest rating, on par with the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. 

Japan's prime minister is urging the public not to panic after the government boosted the severity level of the crisis at a tsunami-damaged nuclear plant to the highest rating — on par with the 1986 Chornobyl disaster.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan urged people in a televised address to focus on recovering from the country's disasters.

"Right now, the situation of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant has been stabilizing step by step," he said. "The amount of radiation leaks is on the decline. But we are not at the stage yet where we can let our guards down."

Japanese regulators said they raised the rating from five to seven after new assessments of radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The country's nuclear watchdog said that while the radiation emission rate at the stricken plant is only about 10 per cent of that released at Chornobyl, the crippled Japanese facility has emitted a huge amount of radioactive substances that pose a risk over a large area.

Until now, the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine was the only event rated Level 7.

The Fukushima crisis was previously rated Level 5, equalling the 1979 Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania.

Although the upgrade was dramatic, the two disasters — Fukushima and Chornobyl — are not all that similar, experts say.

In Chornobyl, it was the reactor core itself that exploded, releasing a huge amount of radioactive material in a very short time. Fukushima experienced a less critical hydrogen explosion. And the total amount of radioactive particles released so far is believed to be only a small fraction of that seen in Ukraine.

The upgrade came as at least two new earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 6.0 hit Japan's northeast on Monday night and Tuesday morning. The area has been rocked by numerous aftershocks since then. Until the subducted plate settles back into position, any quake within the rupture zone — in this case an area 300 kilometres long by 150 kilometres wide off the Japanese coast — that has less force than the initial quake is considered an aftershock.

The 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11 and the tsunami it generated are believed to have caused as much as $310 billion in damage. Japanese officials have updated the death toll from the disaster to 13,219 people. More than 14,000 others are still missing and more than 145,000 people are living in evacuation centres across the country.

Two Japanese people have a moment of silence on a burial ground, one month after the earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11. 

The Fukushima Daiichi plant has been spewing radiation since, and even a month on, officials say they don't know how long it will take to cool reactors there.

In a move unrelated to Monday's aftershock, the Japanese government is expanding the evacuation zone around the plant to 30 kilometres from 20, citing the risks of cumulative radiation exposure.

The latest calculations from Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission found that an area stretching 60 kilometres north of the nuclear plant and 40 kilometres south have, in the month since the earthquake, already been exposed to radiation equivalent to the annual dosage limit. Within the old 20-kilometre evacuation zone, radiation exposure has reached up to 100 times the annual limit.
 
Work resumes

At the plant itself, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., known as TEPCO, has resumed efforts to contain the plant's radioactive leak, after a one-day delay because of strong aftershocks.

TEPCO will begin pumping contaminated water from the No. 2 reactor Tuesday and transfer it to a condenser, after checking the safety of equipment.

The radioactive water has been hampering work to restore cooling functions in the damaged reactors. TEPCO says it also resumed injecting nitrogen into the containment vessel of the No.1 reactor late on Monday night. That's aimed at preventing further hydrogen explosions.

Japanese leader invokes WWII to urge quake recovery

Japanese leader invokes WWII to urge quake recovery

A Japanese flag stands amid the devastation of the tsunami in the town centre of Onagawa, Miyagi prefecture, on April 6, 2011.

Tokyo (CNN) -- Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan invoked his country's recovery from World War II on Tuesday as he sought to turn the nation's attention to the arduous task of rebuilding.

Yet the challenges awaiting Japan remained on full display the day he spoke: The country rated the crisis at a nuclear plant stricken after last month's earthquake and tsunami as the most severe on an international system for rating nuclear accidents.

And a fresh round of earthquakes rumbled across an already battered landscape. One with a magnitude of 6.3 was the latest of 52 quakes with a magnitude of 6 or greater since a monster 9.0 quake rocked the country and spawned a tsunami, leaving nearly 28,0000 people dead or missing.

The prime minister noted that he was born in 1946, a year after the end of World War II, and that his family used an unexploded bomb to help stabilize a pickling tub in their home. He said the Japanese people "stood up bravely and achieved a reconstruction that amazed the world" after the war.

"We must renew the determination that we had in the post-World War II reconstruction period, and we must tackle the task of reconstruction after this earthquake," he said.

The devastation left behind by the March 11 earthquake is an opportunity to build "a new, better future than before," said the prime minister. He spoke at a news conference that had been originally scheduled to take place Monday but was delayed because of a series of aftershocks that rattled northern Japan.

In one of the lastest developments following the wave of aftershocks, the Iwaki Fire Department said the death toll from landslides set off by a 6.6-magnitude quake on Monday had risen to six.

Iwaki is located about 100 miles (164 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo and about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The landslides in Iwaki buried three houses.