5:
Labour promises to fight TPP provision
Mr Little made the comments as the party gathered for its annual conference in Palmerston North.
Trade Minister Tim Groser released a link to the full text last night, saying the public could now thoroughly review it before it was signed by governments.
Work on the legal verification of the text – which makes up more than 6000 pages – would continue in coming weeks, he said.
Mr Little said four of the party’s other bottom lines had been met.
But Labour remained adamantly opposed to a provision in the deal under which the government would be prevented from banning house sales to foreign buyers, he said.
4:
Exxon Under Criminal Investigation over Lying About Climate Change
Oil giant ExxonMobil is under criminal investigation over claims it lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has issued a subpoena to Exxon demanding the company turn over financial records, emails and other documents. This comes after recent exposés by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that for decades Exxon concealed its own findings that fossil fuels cause global warming, alter the climate and melt the Arctic ice. Exxon scientists knew about climate change as early as 1977. But beginning in the 1980s, the company openly embraced climate denial and spent millions of dollars funding outside groups that sought to undermine climate science. Bill McKibben of 350.org praised the New York probe, tweeting: “Just a remarkable day. [The] World’s most powerful fossil fuel company may actually be held to account for helping wreck our planet.” Legal experts say other oil companies who have promoted climate denial could face similar investigations.
3:
Women Tweet About Their Periods to the Irish Prime Minister in Protest of Abortion Law
Women in Ireland have been tweeting the bloody, graphic, painful, and often just plain banal details of their menstrual cycles to Prime Minister Enda Kenny as part of a campaign to repeal the country’s restrictive abortion law.
Abortion is a divisive issue in Ireland where — after a series of high-profile court cases and deaths, along with large demonstrations from both sides of the debate — the complete ban was only lifted in 2013. Now, terminating a pregnancy is allowed if the mother’s life is in danger.
The 2013 abortion legislation was adopted following the death from septic shock of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian-born dentist who was not allowed to abort her dying fetus, a controversy that made international headlines and reopened the decades-long debate.
2:
Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds
Children from religious families are less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households, according to a new study.
Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.
They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.
“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.
“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”
1:
Report: Climate Change Had Role in 50% of 2014 Extreme Weather Events
This comes as a new collection of scientific studies on extreme weather events says climate change played a role in at least half of the droughts, floods and storms last year. Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann told The New York Times, “The question is no longer whether there is an influence of climate change on extreme weather events. The debate is simply over the magnitude and extent of that influence.”
