Canary in the Mine

Now here's a scary thought! Education Minster Trevor Mallard has revealed his political ambitions - he wants to be finance minister. Mr Mallard also summed up much of Labour's policy, telling the children the two most important aspects of the job were helping parents understand what was happening in the classroom and "helping teachers get better so you can learn more". [If that's his level of understanding of education, heaven help us should he ever get his mits on finance.]

A survey by the NZ Principals Federation of principals' weekly loads showed 39 per cent rated their stress levels as extremely high, 42 per cent worked more than 65 hours a week, 48 per cent had major sleeping problems and 44 per cent were constantly tired. "These figures are alarming. The toll is too high. It needs to be urgently addressed." The survey also showed 56 per cent of principals spent more than 70 per cent of their time on management, rather than leadership.

Also at the principals' conference, Auckland principal Nola Hambleton said the education system is consumed with political correctness. "Common sense, personal responsibility and traditional values are a thing of the past," she told the Dunedin conference. Political correctness had sanitised the curriculum, with restrictive health and safety regulations and prohibitive play, the Manurewa South principal said.

Seatoun School has backed down on the banning of a lunchtime Bible studies "KidsKlub" for pupils. The move by the board of trustees ends a standoff with some parents who had refused to accept a decision last February to ban the group. Both sides in the dispute hired high-profile lawyers to support their stand for and against the ban, imposed on the basis of KidsKlub being in conflict with the state school's secular nature.

A Chinese government spy with the code name "180" has infiltrated a Christian church in New Zealand, a Hong Kong newspaper claims. The Epoch Times newspaper said on its website yesterday that its reporter in New Zealand, who it did not name, interviewed a Chinese defector in Australia, Hao Feng Jun, 32, who has told Australian officials he worked as a security officer in Tianjin in China's north. In the telephone interview, Hao Feng Jun claimed that Chinese Government spies "pry into the affairs of New Zealand churches and Falun Gong". [How long, I wonder, before we also have "anti-hate speech" spies and "anti-homophobia" spies in the pews each Sunday?]

The Kyoto Protocol has been rubbished by a heavyweight committee of UK peers, on the day that Tony Blair opened the G8 summit with a focus on global warming. A cross-party House of Lords report found that the Kyoto targets will make "little difference" to the pace of global warming and has called for Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, to calculate how much it is costing Britain.

Meanwhile, Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good.

French and South African AIDS researchers have found that adult males who have been circumcised have dramatically lowered risk of contracting the virus. The study's preliminary results, disclosed Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal, showed that circumcision reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 70 percent -- a level of protection far better than the 30 percent risk reduction set as a target for an AIDS vaccine.

You didn't see it in the headlines this week, but it's likely to be more important in the long run than many things that received much more notice. The "it" in question is the New Framework for the U.S.-India Defense Relationship signed Monday by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

Here's another scary face of the Internet: Digital vigilantism. A Korean woman who recently refused to pick up her dog's mess was hounded into the ground and out of her job by witnesses and a subsequent Internet campaign against her which revealed just about every detail of the woman's life. Trial by the Internet joins trial by the media as very disturbing facets of modern communications.