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FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER 2018
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Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières has called on the federal government to immediately evacuate all refugees and asylum seekers from Nauru for mental health reasons.

At a press conference in Sydney on Thursday, MSF Australia director Paul McPhun said “there is nothing humanitarian about saving people from sea only to leave them in an open-air prison”. MSF was ordered to leave the country on Friday following a Nauruan government order, with the charity confirming on Wednesday that “all its international staff have now left the island”.
FORMER UN CLIMATE CHIEF CHRISTIANA FIGUERES GIVES AUSTRALIA AN ULTIMATUM ON ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE
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“I want to be a regular 17-year-old. I like clothes, I like makeup. I get up in the morning, check my Instagram, have breakfast, and walk in the hills around the village. Sometimes I go to Ramallah with friends to go bowling, eat ice cream, and go to restaurants. But I am not a normal teenager.”

“I have been trying to let go of saying sorry. I apologise to my parents, to my partner, to friends, to colleagues, and even to strangers. Most of the time, it’s for things I cannot control, let alone be responsible for. From my manic searching on the internet, the habit of constantly saying sorry is not a trait of any diagnosable condition, nor a sign of any obvious sociopathic tendencies. But it is, from my personal experience, a problem.”

“Over the first 12,000 or so years after Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan wall was scoured out by glaciers, no human had ever climbed up it without a rope. Then, last year, Alex Honnold scaled the 3,000-foot monolith without assistance of any kind. It is an utterly elemental human achievement.”
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“Key crossbench senators have warned the government not to expand religious schools’ right to fire gay teachers and expel gay students … LGBTI advocates have called on the government to rule out extending the federal law to the states, because students in Queensland and Tasmania and teachers in Tasmania are protected from discrimination on the basis of sexuality.”
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“Leading ‘No’ campaigner and religious conservative Lyle Shelton says schools should not have the right to expel students simply for being gay – but should be able to do so if a student acts on that impulse by having sex … Mr Shelton said he did not think it was necessary to preserve the right of religious schools to expel a student simply for their sexual orientation – if they revealed their sexuality or were outed by their peers, for example. Rather, it was about ‘behaviour’.”
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“The Opera House is expected to greatly improve tourism to the state, padding out Melbourne’s otherwise lacklustre list of sights, which previously included one graffiti-covered wall, a low poly copy of the Eiffel Tower with graphics acceleration turned off, and Melbourne’s world famous answer to the Big Banana: the three-foot-high inflatable ego.”