By Maha Atal, Contributor When Pakistan‘s 13th National Assembly closed up shop Mar. 14, members gave themselves a round of applause. They delivered farewell speeches thanking their supporters and gathered for photos outside Parliament House. Pakistan‘s politicians could hardly believe their luck. For the first time in the country’s history an elected government had served out its full term. Assuming new elections are carried out peacefully in May, the country will have completed its first democratic transfer of power. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
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Australian PM apologizes for forced adoptions
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered a historic national apology in Parliament on Thursday to the thousands of unwed mothers who were forced by government policies to give up their babies for adoption over several decades.
More than 800 people, many of them in tears, heard the apology in the Great Hall of Parliament House and responded with a standing ovation.
“Today this Parliament on behalf of the Australian people takes responsibility and apologizes for the policies and practices that forced the separation of mothers from their babies, which created a lifelong legacy of pain and suffering,” Gillard told the audience.
“We acknowledge the profound effects of these policies and practices on fathers and we recognize the hurt these actions caused to brothers and sisters, grandparents, partners and extended family members,” she said.
“We deplore the shameful practices that denied you, the mothers, your fundamental rights and responsibilities to love and care for your children,” she added.
Gillard committed 5 million Australian dollars ($5 million) to support services for affected families and to help biological families reunite.
A national apology was recommended a year ago by a Senate committee that investigated the impacts of the now-discredited policies.
Unwed mothers were pressured, deceived and threatened into giving up their babies from World War II until the early 1970s so they could be adopted by married couples, which was perceived to be in the children’s best interests, the Senate committee report found.
The seven-member Senate committee began investigating the federal government‘s role in forced adoption in 2010 after the Western Australian state parliament apologized to mothers and children for the flawed practices in that state from the 1940s until the 1980s.
Western Australia was the first of five state and territory governments to apologize for forced adoption. Australia has eight such governments.
Roman Catholic hospitals in Australia apologized in 2011 for forcing unmarried mothers to give up babies for adoption and urged state governments to accept financial responsibility.
Catholic Health Australia, the largest nongovernment hospital operator in Australia and which provides 10 percent of the nation’s hospital beds, said the practice of adopting out such children to married couples …read more
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2 Australian government ministers quit politics
Two senior Australian government ministers announced Saturday that they are quitting politics only days after beleaguered Prime Minister Julia Gillard said elections will be held in September.
Government leader in the Senate Chris Evans, the third most senior government minister, and Attorney General Nicola Roxon announced they have resigned from Cabinet.
Evans, the minister for tertiary education, skills, science and research, said he will quit the Senate within months. Roxon will leave the Parliament at the next election.
Both said they were quitting politics for personal reasons and praised Gillard’s leadership.
“Like Chris, I believe we can win the next election. I believe that we will win the next election,” Roxon told reporters as she stood beside Evans and Gillard at a news conference at Parliament House.
Gillard said she will swear in a new Cabinet on Monday before Parliament sits for the first time this year on Tuesday.
It will be the final reshuffle before the center-left Labor Party government faces likely defeat at the next election to a conservative coalition led by Tony Abbott.
Gillard said she had known for months that neither minister wanted to remain in Parliament past the next election.
She praised the two for their contributions, and rejected journalists’ suggestions that the timing of the resignations after the election date was set reflected a government in chaos.
“I’ve always had it in my mind that this was the time to announce new arrangements,” she said.
Gillard surprised Australians on Wednesday by announcing the Sept. 14 election date. Australian governments traditionally give the opposition little more than a month’s notice to keep a strategic advantage.
Her government narrowly scraped through the last elections in August 2010 to form a minority government with the support of independent legislators and a lawmaker from the minor Greens party.
Since then, every major opinion poll has shown the government lagging well behind the opposition. A glimmer of hope for the government is that polls show Gillard is the more popular choice for national leader than her rival, Abbott.
Since Gillard set the election date, triggering what commentators have described as the longest election campaign in Australia history, her party has been tarnished by scandal.
Independent lawmaker Craig Thomson, who quit the Labor Party at Gillard’s insistence in April last year over longstanding allegations that he misused trade union funds in his previous career as a union official, was arrested by police on Thursday on fraud charges stemming from those allegations.
While Gillard had sidelined Thomson from the ruling party in the hope of reviving public confidence in her government, her opponents remind her that she had previously long stated her full confidence in the lawmaker.
A corruption inquiry in New South Wales, Australia‘s most populous state, has heard evidence daily this week of illegal profiteering from insider knowledge on coal mining applications involving senior members of the previous Labor state government, which suffered a crushing defeat at elections in 2011.
Federal ministers agree that evidence of corruption in the party’s state branch is harming their chances of re-election at the federal elections.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News