Shenandoah

Paul Robeson was born 112 years ago today.

Suzanne Prentice vs Tim Shadbolt?

A friend’s email yesterday inlcuded an attachment saying Suzanne Prentice would be holding a media conference about the local body elections on Monday morning.

I added two and two and came up with a number indicating this meant she’d be challenging Tim Shadbolt in the election for Invercargill’s mayor.

I was tempted to blog about that but held back because I thought it would be unfair to the friend. However, the Southland Times had no such scruples and has a story saying Prentice is set to challenge Shadbolt.

The paper is running a poll which has 108 of 226 votes saying she has a strong chance and only 45 votes giving her no chance.

If only they’d asked

New Zealand has a low rate of organ donation for a variety of reasons, one of which may be over-sensitivity with next of kin.

Both our sons died in hospital but no-one mentioned organ donation.

It’s possible that wouldn’t have been appropriate. But although Tom and Dan had brain disorders a raft of tests in an attempt to diagnose the cause had established their physical health was fine.

The paediatricians caring for them had discussed the probability of them dying with us and if they’d asked us about organ donation we’d probably have agreed.

I can understand the sensitivity round this issue. Telling parents their baby is likely to die is hard enough without complicating matters with a discussion on organ donation.

But we would have been happy to know that the body bits which were no longer needed by our sons could have improved the quality of life for others.

If only they’d asked.

PS.

This post was prompted by posts on harvesting organs from live donors : the moral case for kidney markets at Offsetting Behaviour and  organ recitals at Macdoctor.

And Kathryn Ryan discussed the issue with transplat anthropoligist  Lesley Sharp and Pacific correspondent Make Field on Nine to Noon this morning.

Good politics

Whatever else might be said about the Whanau Ora programme  appointing Tariana Turia as the Minister is good politics.

She has asked for it, she is passionate about it, she believes it will work and now she’s responsible for ensuring it does.

However, that doesn’t mean this can be sidelined as a Maori issue which doesn’t concern anyone else.

Dysfunctional families aren’t peculiar to Maori and regardless of the ethnicity of the families, if they’re dysfunctional the problems associated with that are problems for our society as a whole.

National Library’s web harvest

The National Library is undertaking a web harvest because:

The National Library exists to preserve New Zealand’s social and cultural history, whether in the form of books, newspapers and photographs, or of websites, blogs and videos.

The New Zealand Web Harvest 2010 harvest recognises the importance of the internet in all areas of New Zealand society and culture by taking a ‘snapshot’ of the New Zealand internet in May 2010.

The harvest will run for approximately for a couple of weeks from May 12 and will only collect publicly viewable web content.

The harvest will pick up every domain in the .nz country code, and some others from .com, .net and .org.

More information and a link to the nomination form if you have a blog, want it  harvested and it doesn’t have a .nz address, are at the link above.

Hat Tip: Grant Jacobs at Sciblogs.

Public Service no place for zealots

“Public servants have to implement the policies of the government of the day

Many people come to government to try to support a good cause. They don’t realise the one who has to determine which good cause is to be supported is the democratically minister of the day. And quite a lot of departments, not slinging off at their professionalism but say DOC, you get a lot of people who join DOC because they know they want to save a kakapo and if not a kakapo it will be the lesser spotted whatever. And if the lesser spotted whatever is not on the minister’s list of priorities they’ll find it hard to do.

A key part of the role of senior public servants is to explain to them well it is the minister who has to take the heat in public about that and the public servant really isn’t just employed to follow their own interests and if they want to follow their interests they can go and work in the private sector like anyone else. . .

. . . No public servant should be zealous about the particular cause they’re interested in. They should be zealous about democracy and respecting the law. . .”

This is an extract from Mark Prebble’s  discussion with Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon.

He was referring to central government but Kiwiblog’s posts on why ECan was sacked  and ECan vs its own commissioners show what he says should also apply in local government.

Some of the officers have at times adopted more of an advocacy role than a neutral advisory role. …

The regional councillors have been replaced by commissioners. Very little has been said yet on the need for a change of staff as well but unless there is a change of attitude and/or personal the problems in ECan will continue.

April 9 in history

On April 9:

 32 Jesus Christ ascended into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday.

 

193 Septimius Severus was proclaimed Roman Emperor by the army in Illyricum.

475 yzantine Emperor Basiliscus issued a circular letter (Enkyklikon) to the bishops of his empire, supporting the Monophysite christological position.

1241  Battle of Liegnitz: Mongol forces defeated the Polish and German armies.

1413  Henry V was crowned King of England.

1440 Christopher of Bavaria was appointed King of Denmark.

1682 Robert Cavelier de La Salle discovered the mouth of the Mississippi River, claimed it for France and namesdit Louisiana.

1860 The oldest audible sound recording of a human voice was made.

1865 American Civil War: Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia (26,765 troops) to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, effectively ending the war.

1865 Birth of Charles Proteus Steinmetz,  German-American mathematician and electrical engineer.

1867 Chris Watson, third Prime Minister of Australia, was born.

1867  Alaska purchase: Passing by a single vote, the United States Senate ratified a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska.

1898 Paul Robeson, American singer and activist, was born.

1909 The U.S. Congress passed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act.

1916  World War I: The Battle of Verdun – German forces launched their third offensive of the battle.

 

1917 World War I: The Battle of Arras  started with Canadian Corps executing a massive assault on Vimy Ridge.

 

1918 World War I: The Battle of the Lys – the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps was crushed by the German forces during the Spring Offensive on the Belgian region of Flanders.

 

1926 Hugh Hefner, American entrepreneur and publisher, was born.

1932 Unemployed workers in Dunedin reacted angrily to the refusal of the Hospital Board to offer assistance, protesters stoned the mayor’s relief depot and tried to storm the Hospital Board’s offices, before being dispersed by police batons.

 

1934 Bill Birch, New Zealand politician, was born.

1937 The Kamikaze arrived at Croydon Airport – the first Japanese-built aircraft to fly to Europe.

1939 Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial, after being denied the right to sing at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall.

 

1940 World War II: Germany invadesd Denmark and Norway.

1942 World War II: The Battle of Bataan/Bataan Death March – United States forces surrendered on the Bataan Peninsula. The Japanese Navy launched an air raid on Trincomalee; Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Hermes and Royal Australian Navy Destroyer HMAS Vampire were sunk off the island’s east coast.

1945 World War II: The German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was sunk.

1945 – World War II: The Battle of Königsberg, in East Prussia, ended.

 

1945 – The United States Atomic Energy Commission was formed.

 

1947 The Glazier-Higgins-Woodward tornadoes killed 181 and injured970 in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

1947 – The Journey of Reconciliation, the first interracial Freedom Ride  started through the upper South in violation of Jim Crow laws. The riders wanted enforcement of the United States Supreme Court’s 1946 Irene Morgan decision that banned racial segregation in interstate travel.

1948 Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s assassination provoked a violent riot (El Bogotazo) in Bogotá, and a further ten years of violence in Colombia known as La violencia.

1948 – Massacre at Deir Yassin.

1952 Hugo Ballivian’s government was overthrown by the Bolivian National Revolution, starting a period of agrarian reform, universal suffrage and the nationalisation of tin mines.

 

1957 The Suez Canal in Egypt was cleared and opened to shipping.

1959 Mercury program: NASA announced the selection of the United States’ first seven astronauts,-  the “Mercury Seven“.

 

1965 Astrodome opened and the first indoor baseball game was played.

1967 The first Boeing 737 (a 100 series) made its maiden flight.

1968 Martin Luther King’s funeral

1969 The “Chicago Eight” pled not guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

 

1969 The first British-built Concorde 002 makes its maiden flight from Filton to RAF Fairford.

 

1975 The first game of the Philippine Basketball Association, the second oldest professional basketball league in the world.

1978  Rachel Stevens, English singer (S Club), was born.

1989  The April 9 tragedy in Tbilisi, Georgian SSR an anti-Soviet peaceful demonstration and hunger strikes, demanding restoration of Georgian independence was dispersed by the Soviet army, resulting in 20 deaths and hundreds of injuries.

 Photos of the April 9, 1989 Massacre victims (mostly young women) on billboard in Tbilisi

1991 Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

1992 A U.S. Federal Court found former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega guilty of drug and racketeering charges. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

1992 John Major‘s Conservative Party won an unprecedented fourth general election victory.

1999  Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara, President of Niger, was assassinated.

2002 The funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother at Westminster Abbey.

 

2003 2003 invasion of Iraq: Baghdad fell to American forces.

2005 Charles, Prince of Wales married Camilla Parker Bowles.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia