1. A Gold Coast mother has plead guilty to poisoning her daughter with chemotherapy drugs in order to maintain a Facebook page about her daughter’s ‘cancer.’ The mother had purchased the drugs online and administered them to her daughter herself.
Doctors had been left baffled by the four-year-old girls’ condition, performing bone marrow transplants and other surgeries to no avail. The mother had a history of creating fake illnesses for sympathy online, having run a Youtube account where she posed as a cancer sufferer herself.
The girl has made a full recovery, but doctors are still unclear as to the long-term effects of her poisoning.
2. A quarter of the frontbench are now involved in the expenses scandal. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and Assistant Minister for Defence Stuart Robert are the latest MPs to have repaid taxpayer funds used to attend a colleague’s wedding.
3. Voting for the Labor Party leadership ballot has ended. It is expected that the result will be announced sometime tomorrow. This is the first time that the party will use a members’ vote, which will form 50% of the result.
4. A woman in Mexico has been forced to give birth on a hospital lawn after being denied treatment, despite being fully dilated. The hospital’s director has since been suspended. Nearly one in five women in the Mexican state of Oaxaca are forced to give birth outside of hospitals.
5. A US teenager has committed suicide after he was told that he would be put on a sex offenders registry for streaking at a high school football game. 15-year-old Christian Adamek was found dead five days after the incident, which saw him expelled from his school in Hunstville, Alabama.
6. The body overseeing the removal of chemical weapons from Syria has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) won the prize, awarded in Stockholm overnight.
Top Comments
I first read the book 'Sickened' by Julie Gregory about her experience with Munchausen by proxy (which is where a parent makes their child ill in order to gain attention) about ten years ago. It was so terrible, she was almost subjected to open heart surgery because her mother managed to fool doctors into believing that she was genuinely ill. Despite her book being published, her mother was allowed to remain as a foster carer in the US. Horrendous.
I read that book too. Horrendous!
Malala missed out on the Nobel Peace Prize, losing to the chemical weapons organisation. I can't see how they could win it given that they missed the weapons that Syria used against their own people.
The anti-chemical weapons unit was formed to enforce a treaty against chemical weapons. Syria was not a signatory to that treaty so the unit did not have any jurisdiction to inspect Syria for chemical weapons.
The Nobel Prize is recognising the excellent handling of the unit (and the USSR, which in my opinion has not received enough recognition on this issue) in getting Syria to sign the treaty and therefore have that treaty be enforceable.
Fresh publicity probably decided it.
I hadn't thought about Malala for months, until the MM article on her TV appearance.
No, you wouldn't be able to see that given that you are not on the committee and actually don't know much about it at all>