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Victoria's Indigenous truth-telling inquiry is calling on the state government to create an independent watchdog to tackle police complaints, a First Nations-controlled child protection system and to stop detaining children under the age of 16.

During a year-long inquiry, the Yoorrook Justice Commission found evidence of ongoing systemic racism and gross human rights abuses committed against First Peoples in the state of Victoria.

In its most significant proposal yet, the commission has put forward 46 recommendations amounting to a sweeping overhaul of Victoria's child protection and criminal justice systems.

It is the first time in Australian history a government will be forced to respond to a major reform agenda put forward by its own truth-telling commission.

The recommendations range from long-term transformative change — like establishing a dedicated child protection system for First Peoples children, controlled by First People — to urgent asks including raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14.

"This is the first truth-telling commission in Australia, in Victoria, for Victorian First Peoples," Wurundjeri and Ngurai Illum Wurrung woman and Yoorrook Commissioner Sue-Anne Hunter said.

"We are not going to tinker around the edges here." Yoorrook wants an independent police complaints body

Yoorrook's 46 recommendations broadly call for more control — and oversight — of policies that the commission has found are continuing to devastate and disadvantage Aboriginal people in Victoria.

"We are talking about real change," Ms Hunter said.

"We've had over 200 years of a colonial system that needs to change … We're not going to stop until we have self-determination for First Peoples in this state."

Among Yoorrook's recommendations is a call for a new police oversight body — to be led by someone who is not a police officer — with the power to arrest and search Victoria Police officers and investigate police complaints and deaths in custody.

Yoorrook wants the new watchdog to have a dedicated First Peoples-led division to deal with police complaints from Aboriginal people.

The commission also wants recognition of systemic racism embedded at the highest levels of Victoria Police.

It asks that a commitment to understanding and ending racism within the police force be made a mandatory criteria informing the selection and annual review of the police chief commissioner.

It wants criminal offences of poverty, including offending linked with homelessness, disability and mental ill-health to be decriminalised, where appropriate.

Yoorrook is also calling for training for all Victorians working in policing, corrections, youth justice, child protection and some health roles after the commission heard evidence of racial bias and over-policing against First Peoples.

It wants more power given to existing watchdogs, like the Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young people.

It is also asking the government to commit to proper monitoring of programs intended to benefit Indigenous Victorians, through an Indigenous-led oversight and accountability commission.

Several of Yoorrook's recommendations — such as bail reform, raising the criminal age of responsibility to 14 and the creation of a new body to handle police complaints — are not new.

The commission has acknowledged progress has been made in some of these areas, including the Victorian government's recently introduced bail reforms and its plan to eventually raise the criminal age of responsibility to 14.

But Yoorrook's recommendations go beyond what has already been proposed by the government.

For example, not only does Yoorrook recommend urgently raising the criminal age to 14, it asks that the government prohibit the detention of children under the age of 16

The recommendations follow Yoorrook's own inquiry into the criminal justice and child protection systems, hearing from more than 80 witnesses including government ministers and First Peoples with lived experience of Victorian state systems.

The 12-month inquiry found unacceptable disparities in outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people caught up in state systems.

Aboriginal children are 21 times more likely to be in the out-of-home-care system in Victoria.

In the criminal justice system, over the last decade, the rates of Aboriginal men on remand in Victoria increased by nearly 600 per cent.

Twenty of the urgent recommendations relate to reforms of the child-protection system, including addressing the "pre-birth" reports systems, which the commission found were unfairly impacting Aboriginal women.

A "pre-birth" report is a child-protection notification made about a pregnant woman before her child is born.

"In effect, this means an Aboriginal child in our community can be in a pipeline to the justice system before being born," Wergaia/Wamba Wamba Elder and chair of the commission Eleanor Bourke wrote in the forward to Yoorrook's report.

"It is hard to imagine a scenario that more profoundly demonstrates systemic failure."

Yoorrook has recommended a notification scheme for pre-birth reports, including that the pregnant Aboriginal woman is told that she has been subject to a notification and is offered support.

The scheme would also trigger, with the consent of the expectant mother, notification to an Aboriginal community-controlled health and legal service.

These specific recommendations fall within the broader call for the Victorian government to transfer decision-making power, control and resources to First Peoples to give effect to self-determination within the child protection system and criminal justice systems.

In early December last year, during Yoorrook hearings, Premier Daniel Andrews conceded the state's child protection system was "troubling" and "not designed properly".

"We are taking too many First Nations kids away from their families," he said.

"We're going to do something about this … we are absolutely going to do something about this."

Mr Andrews's comments have been referenced by Yoorrook commissioners in its report.

"Premier Andrews said his government would 'waste no time' in delivering on Yoorrook's recommendations," Commissioner Sue-Anne Hunter said.

"I urge the Premier to live up to these words, because our people cannot wait any longer."

Yoorrook's next issues report is expected to examine land injustice, with the commission scheduled to conclude its work with a final report due in 2025.

Attendees were told to shelter in place in the Black Rock Desert and conserve food, water and fuel after a rainstorm swamped the area, forcing officials to halt any entering or leaving of the festival.

“A little over 70,000 people,” remained stranded Saturday, Sgt. Nathan Carmichael, with the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office, told CNN Sunday morning. Some people have left the site by walking out but “most of the RVs are stuck in place,” he said.

nature taking ironic revenge for the climate defenders.

Also: Biden cites busy schedule when asked about visiting East Palestine, Ohio: 'It's going to be awhile'

After they had ram into climate protesters!

strikes again!

Burning Man conditions are bordering on disaster with over 70,000 people trapped and sheltering-in-place after rains turned the playa into an undrivable mud pit.

"It is a complicated issue. It is truly a complicated issue, with a wide range of views, truly a wide range of views," Jean-Pierre said. "There is no 'yes or no' answer to this, it is complicated. There is a rule that the Department of Education [DOE] has put forward, and we're going to let that process move forward, and again, we want to make sure that while we establish guardrails with this rule, we also prevent discrimination, as well, against transgender kids. But again, a complicated issue with a wide range of views, and we respect that."

"Absolutely no reason for the Biden admin to do this," New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote. "It is indefensible and embarrassing. The admin can still walk this back, and they should. It's a disgrace."

"Honestly, this move by Biden to push a rule on trans kids in sports is not only a backwards betrayal, it [forces] us to have to spend our time dealing with god d*** sports instead of criminal bans on our healthcare," Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and LGBTQ+ advocate, wrote. "He could have just done nothing. This is legitimizing transphobia."

The mOsT PrOgReSsIvE Administration in History™ "A complicated issue with a wide range of views, and we respect that" Fuck off out of here with that "centrist" nonsense. There's nothing complicated about it, and it's not an issue unless you want to turn it into one and want to appeal to people's emotions like Republicans are doing. It was only a matter of time before they'd start throwing trans people under the bus. I guess with the coming elections it's as good a time as ever.

by Natasha Gilbert & Gemma Conroy

The US government has extended for six months a key symbolic agreement to cooperate with China in science and technology. The agreement was due to expire on 27 August, and its short-term extension has revived researchers’ hopes that the 44-year-old pact will continue.

The pact does not provide research funding. Rather, it is an umbrella agreement to encourage collaboration and goodwill between US and Chinese government agencies, universities and institutions doing research in agriculture, energy, health, the environment and other fields. The extension means that, for now, research will continue as normal.

The non-binding agreement was first signed in 1979 and has since been renewed every five years. The new extension stops short of a full renewal, which some scientists worry is now in jeopardy. Without the agreement, research cooperation and programmes between the two governments could flounder, some specialists warn.

The extension “is not as good as a renewal”, says Denis Simon, a researcher in global business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But it’s a good start. It says the US wants to stay connected.”

Growing tensions

The agreement not only has a practical role in promoting scientific collaboration, but also holds great symbolic value, say researchers in China and the United States.

“Abandoning such a long-standing agreement would exacerbate the ongoing decoupling in science and education” between the two nations, says Li Tang, a public-policy researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

When the agreement was last renewed, in 2018, it was amended to strengthen rights over intellectual property generated by research collaborations between the countries. But since then, tensions have grown, potentially contributing to the decision by the administration of US president Joe Biden to adopt only a short-term extension, researchers say.

Among the programmes that have degraded the US–China relationship is a US initiative that aimed to safeguard US laboratories and businesses from espionage. It targeted researchers of Chinese descent before it was shuttered last year. And last July, the US Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which includes measures designed to tighten research security, such as requiring US institutions to report gifts of US$50,000 or more from a foreign government; the previous reporting limit was $250,000.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government recently restricted the flow of academic and health data from China, citing cybersecurity and data-privacy concerns.

In a statement to Nature, a US State Department spokesperson said that the country intends to negotiate amendments to the deal and that challenges posed by China’s science and technology strategies, protection of intellectual property and threat to US security are central considerations.

“This short-term, six-month extension will keep the agreement in force while we seek authority to undertake negotiations to amend and strengthen the terms of the [agreement]. It does not commit the US to a longer-term extension.”

Opposition in Congress

Some US lawmakers say the agreement poses a threat to national security and have called for scrapping it. In a 27 June letter to Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, some members of a US House of Representatives committee on China alleged that research partnerships between government agencies in the United States and China organized under the agreement could have developed technologies that would later be used against the United States.

But some scientists have campaigned for the US government to continue the agreement. In a letter sent to Biden on 24 August, physicists Steven Kivelson and Peter Michelson at Stanford University in California wrote that the agreement provides an important framework for cooperation between the two countries and that cutting off ties with China “would directly and negatively impact” their own research. More than 1,000 academics signed the letter.

Kivelson, a theoretical physicist researching quantum materials, told Nature that many of his best graduate students and postdocs come from China.

“Much of the physics that I think about is based on experimental work that is done in China,” he says. “The entire field is highly dependent on and benefits from cooperation with colleagues in China.”

Collaboration under threat?

Deborah Seligsohn, a specialist in US–China relations at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and a former US State Department official who served at the US embassy in Beijing, says scientific cooperation between the two governments could become “deeply problematic” without the agreement. It provided a “critical structural basis” for projects such as one on birth abnormalities that was the basis for the discovery that folic acid can prevent spina bifida, a birth defect in which an area of the spinal column doesn’t form properly, and other neural-tube defects, she says.

Jenny Lee, a higher-education researcher and vice-president for international affairs at the University of Arizona, Tucson, says that, if the agreement is scrapped, it could hurt research and higher education in the United States more than in China. This year, China overtook the United States as the nation publishing the largest number of high-quality research articles. The impact will probably be felt in future when new collaborations fail to form, she says. “It will signal to the next generation of scientists that we don’t want to actively cooperate with China,” she says.

It’s not clear what amendments the US government will seek, but Simon says he is “cautiously optimistic” that the two nations can agree on a way forward that will lay the groundwork for future collaboration.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02701-7

"I just want to grill for Pete's sake!"

Mali has passed a new mining code allowing the state to take up to 30 percent stakes in new mineral projects and collect more revenues from the vital industry.

Junta leader Assimi Goita signed the code into law on Monday (Aug. 28), his office announced on social media Tuesday (Aug. 29).

Mali is one of Africa's leading gold producers.

It is also boasts manganese and lithium -- two minerals key to the global energy transition -- though these have not been extensively explored.

Mali produced 72.2 tonnes of gold in 2022, including six tonnes by artisanal gold panners, then-mines minister, Lamine Seydou Traore, said in March.

Gold accounts for 25 percent of the national budget, 75 percent of export earnings and 10 percent of GDP, he added.

Mali's mining sector is dominated by foreign companies, including the Canadian firms Barrick Gold and B2Gold, Australia's Resolute Mining and the British Hummingbird Resources.

They have continued to operate despite political instability and an expanding jihadist insurgency.

Mali's junta, which seized power in 2020, has made sovereignty a key priority. Boosting the national budget

The mining code reform could boost the national budget by 500 billion CFA francs ($820 million), economy minister Alousseni Sanou said this month.

The new mines minister, Amadou Keita, said the state hoped the mining industry would eventually contribute to between 15 and 20 percent of GDP.

The reform allows the government to hold up to 10 percent equity in new projects with the option to buy an additional 20 percent during the first two years of commercial production.

And it allows the Malian private sector to hold up to five percent. The new code also removes tax exemptions for mining companies during operations.

According to the economy minister, exemptions on petroleum products and equipment represent about 60 billion CFA francs a year.

The junta had for months championed the proposed reform, pledging to make "gold shine for Malians".

"Mali's demand for higher stakes in mining projects... reflects a wider trend across the continent where resource-rich countries, impacted by the knock-on effects of global shocks, aim to increase their control over the mining sector," Mucahid Durmaz, an analyst with Verisk Maplecroft, said in a note.

But, he added, the Malian government is "walking a tightrope" and must be "cautious not to scare away investors".