Alexander: No more patience for patients

“It is absurd that mental health patients who pose a significant risk to others or themselves cannot be indefinitely detained under proper residential supervision,” said United Future Law and Order spokesman Marc Alexander.

“This follows yet another example where an indiscriminate upholding of individual human rights undermines everyone else’s.

“The attack on psychologist Malcolm Falconer – which left him blind in one eye – and community support worker Hilary Warren as a result of a patients release from 24 hour care in Ranui, East Auckland, two months ago, was predictable and avoidable. It did not have to happen.

“This patient had a history of violence having attacked before in 2001

“Dangerous mentally ill patients who need round the clock supervision should never be allowed to stray from that supervision. How can anyone argue that such patients’ human rights should be upheld over everyone else’s whose own rights are subsequently put at risk?

“At some point we have to understand that not everyone should be able to exert their so called human rights when it clearly risks the rights of others.”

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>