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READ MORE The makers of the codeine-containing painkiller Panadeine are discontinuing the product from the Australian market entirely, as the new ban on over-the counter codeine medications comes into effect. Retail shelves across the country have been stripped of low-dose codeine medications as the ban comes into force on February 1. Australians will now need a doctor’s prescription to obtain them. In anticipation of the ban, some drug makers have rolled out new pain medications mixing ibuprofen with paracetamol for those seeking a stronger painkiller. But others have taken the drastic move of pulling their codeine products off the market entirely. GlaxoSmithKline Australia says it respects the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s decision to up-schedule codeine-containing analgesics. “After a thorough assessment of the strong pain environment we believe that Australians already have access to a wide range of high quality codeine-containing analgesics via prescription,...

READ MORE Malcolm Turnbull can afford a bit of a swagger when he enters Parliament House for the first sitting week of the year on Monday. Economic news over the long summer break has largely been upbeat, especially when it comes to the politically-sensitive employment market. A record number of over 400,000 jobs were created in 2017 and forward indicators of employment, like job advertising, suggest 14 months of continuous job gains have further to run. “We’re seeing that our policies are backing Australian business, backing Australian enterprise, are working and paying off in that strong growth in jobs,” Turnbull boasted at a media conference this week. Furthermore, the International Monetary Fund’s upgrading of its global growth forecasts to the fastest pace in seven years should enable the Australian economy to maintain the pick-up seen over 2017, further fuelling employment growth. Jobs aside, retail sales figures showed spending in the run-up to the critic...

READ MORE A petrol bomb was thrown at the lakeside Yangon compound of Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Thursday while she was away from her home, a government spokesman said. “It was a petrol bomb,” spokesman Zaw Htay confirmed to AFP, without giving further details on a possible motive for a small but rare attack targeting the Myanmar democracy heroine. The petrol bomb caused minor damage. But the attack on the villa where Suu Kyi was held for long years of house arrest by the former junta is hugely symbolic. Suu Kyi has increasingly attracted the ire of the international community over her perceived failure to speak up on behalf of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim community. Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled a brutal military crackdown in northern Rakhine state into refugee camps in Bangladesh since August, bringing with them testimony of murder, rape and arson. But inside Myanmar Suu Kyi, who swept elections in 2015, is still widely regarded as a heroine by the ...

READ MORE Eleven people were killed and five were rescued in a fire at a facility to support senior people on welfare in northern Japan late on Wednesday, public broadcaster NHK said. The 16 elderly people were living in the three-storey wooden facility in Sapporo, where they paid a monthly rent of 36,000 yen ($330), NHK said on Thursday. Three of the survivors, aged between their fifties and eighties, were being treated in hospital but their condition was not life-threatening, the broadcaster said. The facility is run by a Sapporo organization that helps those who are on a public assistance by providing food and helping them find jobs, NHK said. In March 2010, seven people at a nursing home for elderly people with dementia were killed in a fire in Sapporo, Kyodo news agency said. Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sbsnews-topstories/~3/KaEsLaRT4Ss/same-sex-marriage-bill-no-voices-take-senate-floor-flag-amendments Share this: Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) ...

READ MORE Water scarcity already affects more than 40 percent of the world’s population and is expected to rise due to global warming, with one in four people projected to face chronic or recurring shortages by 2050, according to the United Nations. Already hosting more than half the world’s people, cities are at the forefront of the problem, as population growth increases pressure on reserves, which are already stretched by too little rain and too much waste. Following are some of the crisis cities: Sao Paulo The reservoir supplying Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city and a metropolitan region of 20 million people, nearly dried up in 2015, as the country faced its worst drought in 80 years, depriving many residents of water for 12 hours a day. The city was criticised by UN experts for losing 31 percent of its treated water to leaks and theft, compared to an average of 16 percent in the United States. Lima Rain in the Peruvian capital is almost non-existent, with averag...

READ MORE Federal Labor MP David Feeney has resigned from parliament after being unable to confirm if he is a dual citizen. Mr Feeney said he had written to the Speaker of the House of Representatives on Thursday and his resignation was effective immediately. He said he did not have sufficient paperwork to prove he had renounced his British citizenship a decade ago, inherited through his Northern Irish father. “I am unable to disprove that I am a dual citizen,” Mr Feeney, who held the marginal Victorian seat of Batman, said during a press conference on Thursday. “I have spoken to my family and I have decided that I will not be seeking ALP preselection for this by-election. “This has been an incredibly difficult decision but both my community and the Labor Party I love deserve a candidate that is able to give the months and the years ahead 150 per cent of their effort, their commitment and their passion. “After careful ref...

READ MORE Mr Trump on Tuesday dismissed arguments that the planet was getting warmer , telling British presenter Piers Morgan in an exclusive interview that polar ice caps were “at a record level”. “There is a cooling, and there’s a heating,” Mr Trump said. “I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place.” In a response via a letter mailed to the White House, the American Meteorological Society said Mr Trump’s words contradicted evidence gathered by agencies that work under him. “Unfortunately, these and other climate-related comments in the interview are not consistent with scientific observations from around the globe, nor with scientific conclusions based on these observations,” the AMS letter read, which was signed by its executive director Keith Seitter. Mr Trump has a long history of climate chan...

READ MORE The upper house of parliament voted 57-23, with two abstentions, to approve the bill, which sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone who refers to Nazi German death camps as Polish or accuses Poland of complicity in the Third Reich’s crimes. The lower house of parliament, which like the senate is controlled by the governing right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, had passed the bill on Friday — triggering the protest from abroad. Israel called for the bill to be dropped, seeing one of its provisions as an attempt to deny Polish involvement in Nazi Germany’s extermination of Jews. Knesset lawmakers penned a proposed bill of their own Wednesday amending Israel’s law regarding Holocaust denial, so that diminishing or denying the role of those who aided the Nazis in crimes against Jews would be punishable with jail. Before the vote on the Polish bill, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert expressed “concern” that “if ...

READ MORE Mr Feeney’s eligibility to sit in the lower house is currently being examined by the High Court. But the MP for the marginal Victorian seat of Batman has been under pressure to resign before the case concludes because he can’t find documents confirming he renounced his British citizenship. In Adelaide on Thursday Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek said Mr Feeney had “made a fine contribution to public life”. Asked if he had resigned she said, “I’ll let David speak for himself. I’m sure he’ll make comment when he’s ready.” Labor shadow treasurer Chris Bowen declined to pre-empt the speculation. “David has been a very good MP and a friend of mine, and he’s entitled to make announcements,” he told reporters in Sydney. “But we will say to the people of Batman, whenever they next have their say in a general election or another forum like a by-election, we have the right policies for Australia goin...

READ MORE Scientists are closer to rolling out a revolutionary blood test for Alzheimer’s after discovering a new way of detecting one of the earliest signs of the brain disease. For decades scientists worldwide have tried to develop blood tests to predict Alzheimer’s in the hope of replacing the expensive and often invasive brain scans and lumbar punctures currently used to diagnose the most common form of dementia. A team of Australian and Japanese scientists now claim they have the most accurate test yet for the earliest indicator of Alzheimer’s – a build-up of an abnormal protein in the brain known as beta-amyloid. One of the lead researchers Colin Masters, a Laureate professor of neuroscience at the Melbourne-based Florey Institute, says the blood test is more than 90 per cent accurate at predicting Alzheimer’s, based on a study involving 252 Australian and 121 Japanese patients. It can detect the build up of beta-amyloid in people without any outward...

READ MORE Based on highly classified information, the four-page memo — written by Republican lawmaker Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — suggests that the Justice Department and the FBI abused their power in running surveillance on a member of President Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016. The Justice Department and the FBI have actively lobbied against its release, which has the potential to taint special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians, an investigation that is edging closer to the president himself. But White House chief of staff John Kelly said Wednesday that the document could be made public soon, once White House lawyers have vetted it. “It’ll be released here pretty quick, I think, and the whole world can see it,” Kelly told Fox Radio.  “This president …. wants everything out so the American people can make up their own...

READ MORE Mr Feeney’s eligibility is being examined by the High Court but there’s pressure for him to resign before the case concludes, after he couldn’t find documents confirming he renounced his British citizenship. Asked if he had formally resigned, Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek told reporters in Adelaide on Thursday: “I’ll let David speak for himself. I’m sure he’ll make comment when he’s ready.” Comment was being sought from Mr Feeney and Speaker Tony Smith, who would be the recipient of any resignation letter. It has been speculated Mr Feeney won’t recontest his Melbourne seat of Batman in a by-election. One of the possible replacements being flagged is ACTU president Ged Kearney, who considered running for preselection in the seat in 2013. The Greens have already selected a candidate, Alex Bhathal, but she is reportedly the subject of an internal complaint from party members over her lack of support for local Gree...

READ MORE Emerging plans to curb climate change by sucking excess emissions out of the atmosphere rely on technologies that have “limited realistic potential” to work, at least in coming decades, scientists say. So-called “negative emissions” technologies – including capturing emissions from the air and storing them underground, or planting much more of the world’s land to trees – are unlikely to significantly help hold the line on climate change, they warn. Suggestions that the measures could help keep global temperature increases to under 2 degrees Celsius – the target set in the Paris Agreement on climate change – “appear optimistic” and cannot compensate for inadequate emissions cuts, a report from the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) notes. “We cannot trust technology to come to the rescue,” warned Michael Norton, a science and engineering professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology....

READ MORE Jessica Thomashow was a 9-year-old gymnast who still liked playing with American Girl dolls when USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar first molested her, she said in a Michigan courtroom on Wednesday. “You took advantage of my innocence and trust,” the 17-year-old high school student told Nassar, as he sat, eyes cast downward, in an orange prison jumpsuit. “Why? I ask myself that question all the time, especially when I am lying in bed, crying myself to sleep.” Over and over, women and teenagers stood on Wednesday to recount similar stories of abuse: Nassar, the famous physician who treated Olympic stars, played the role of caring doctor before sexually assaulting them in his exam room under the guise of medical treatment, sometimes with their own parents present. Nassar, 54, previously pleaded guilty to two sets of abuse charges in Michigan’s Ingham and Eaton counties. He was sentenced last week to 40 to 175 years in prison in the Ingham County ca...

READ MORE The four-page memo, written by Republican lawmaker Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, remains secret but the White House has hinted it could permit its release, despite concerns it could divulge top-secret information. Media reports, citing lawmakers who have seen the document, say it suggests the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation abused their power in opening surveillance of a member of President Donald Trump’s election campaign in late 2016 involving his contacts with Russians. It alleges in part that to obtain the warrant they submitted as evidence the contentious and unproven “Russia dossier” — compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and financed in part by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the FBI said the memo is hardly a complete picture of what happened. “With regard to the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum, the FBI was provid...