1.Five women have been promoted to Malcolm Turnbull’s front bench, including Australia’s first female Minister for Defence.
The Australian reports that Senator Marise Payne will oversee $80 billion worth of naval shipbuilding and Australia’s involvement in Syria and Iraq.
The Australian says senior defence personnel “are confident” that Senator Payne has the experience necessary to take on the vital role.
Senator Payne chaired a Senate committee inquiry into the counter-terrorism laws in 2003 “and intelligence officials have said she demonstrated then that she was very well informed, intelligent, highly organised and ideally equipped to take on the wave of major and very complex defence decisions heading her way in the weeks to come”.
“She’s an inspired choice,” Australian Defence Association executive director Neil James told The Australian.
Cameron Brown.
2.Nearly 15 years after a four year old girl plunged to her death from a seaside cliff, her father has been sentenced to life in prison for her murder.
News Ltd reports that jurors found Cameron Brown, 53, guilty of hurling his daughter, Lauren, from Inspiration Point near Los Angeles in November 2000 amid an ugly custody battle with her mother.
Brown had a short-lived romance with Lauren’s mother, Sarah Key Marer, that “soured when she got pregnant”.
Brown wanted Sarah to get an abortion but she refused.
“Initially, Brown wasn’t involved in Lauren’s life, but he eventually sought custody that would help trim hefty child support,” the report says.
Lauren was with her Dad when she died.
Brown told police that Lauren ran ahead of him and tripped and fell off the cliff.
A prosecution expert argued that a girl her age wouldn’t have been able to run fast enough to land where she did in the rocky ocean below.
Brown’s current wife, Patricia, said her husband loved Lauren, that the death was an accident.
3.A 16-year-old boy has been charged with having naked photographs – of himself – on his phone.
In a bizarre case, the Guardian reports that the boy was prosecuted as an adult under child pornography laws. His girlfriend was charged for having the same photographs of him on her phone.
The boy, whose name is Cormega Copening, is now 17, and he had to accept a plea deal to avoid being registered as a sex offender for life.
The Fayetteville Observer reports that Cormega was charged with five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, and that four of those charges related to “making and possessing two sexually explicit images of himself and the fifth for possessing a naked image of his girlfriend, Brianna Denson, 16.”
Curiously, sex between the two would not be illegal, since the age of consent in North Carolina is 16, but the images are still criminal.
The case has stunned observers.
“It’s dysfunctional to be charged with possession of your own image,” University of Wisconsin professor of criminal justice and co-founder of cyberbullying.org Justin Patchin told the Guardian.
4.Former news reader Tracey Spicer is going topless in a new video encouraging women to check their breasts for cancer.
The Daily Telegraph reports that eight members of Tracey’s extended family have died of cancer and, in an effort to encourage more women to check their breasts, Tracey, 48, takes off her top in a new video “Letstalkaboutbreasts”.
“On the first day of filming I’d never met the crew and the first thing I had to do was take my top off and have a doctor poke my boobs,” she told the Telegraph.
“I did it because it was important, I’ve got to the age where I don’t give a damn what people think of me, whatever is the most effective way to get the message across I’ll do it.’
One of Tracey’s best friends was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and it made her realise she didn’t know her own risk factors.
It had been seven years since she had last had a mammogram that had resulted in a false positive scare.
“And I’m one of those women at higher risk, there is a strong risk of cancer on one side of my family,” she says.
Tracey’s mother died of pancreatic cancer at age 52, a week later her aunt was diagnosed with lung cancer, her grandmother died of cancer in her thirties, her uncle died from leukaemia at the age of 14, other family members also had cancer.
5.NSW Attorney-General Gabrielle Upton is considering whether to lift the ban on advertising for surrogates.
Commercial surrogacy – where women are paid to deliver a baby for an infertile couple – is illegal in NSW and will remain so.
However, the ban on advertising for altruistic surrogates may be lifted to enable families willing to find a surrogate who does not want to be paid.
“I am determined to ensure that our laws make surrogacy easy and, most importantly, put the interests of the child front and centre,” Ms Upton said yesterday.
Surrogacy Australia founder Sam Everingham welcomed the news.
“It’s forced hundreds of people every year in NSW to look for surrogates in online forums, some of which are dodgy,” he said.
