Articles labeled: Australia

Well, in his defense, it *was* Foster’s, the “Amber Nectar”.

Constable Wayne Burnett said he was “shocked and appalled” when he pulled over the unregistered car Friday in the central Australian town of Alice Springs.

The 30-can beer case was strapped in between two adults sitting in the back seat of the car. The child was also in back, but on the car’s floor.

“The child was sitting in the lump in the center, unrestrained,” Burnett told reporters Tuesday.

“I haven’t ever seen something like this before,” he said. “This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child.”

He’s obviously never met our kids.

“She’s my sister AND my daughter!” Ew, the creepy factor has been dialed up to 11 on this story. An Australia man is in a consensual incestuous relationship with his own daughter, who has given birth to the man’s baby. The couple is now on a media blitz trying to get people to accept their illicit love affair. Uh, yeah, ain’t going to happen.

Jenny Deaves was 31 when she was reunited with her father John Deaves, who separated from her mother three decades before. Shortly afterwards, she had considered embarking on a sexual relationship with him, she told the Nine Network.

Jenny Deaves said not long after meeting her father, she began to see him as a man first and a father second.

“I was looking at him, sort of going, oh, he’s not too bad,” she said.

“Like you might look at a man across the bar at a nightclub.”

John Deaves, who is 61, said he knew it was illegal to have sex with his child but emotions soon overcame him.

“Emotions take over, as people no doubt realise, there are times during your life where emotions do rule the heart, it rules the head,” he said.

“I knew it was illegal, of course I knew it was illegal but you know, so what.”

OK, so this has nothing to do with (human) parenting, but damn if we didn’t need a cute little story as a break from all the child abuse news.

Seeing a dead kangaroo by the highway near her house in southern Australia was nothing new for Leonie Allan and her dog Rex, who were out for a walk on Easter morning.

But back home in their yard in Bells Beach, near Torquay, Rex kept pointing toward where they had seen the roadkill — he is a pointer after all — and eventually took off in that direction.

He came back a few minutes later and dropped a live baby kangaroo at Allan’s feet — a 4 1/2-month-old “joey” he had apparently gone back and rescued from the pouch of its dead mother, according to the Melbourne Herald-Sun.

Wow, talk about taking a sticky situation and making it worse. Stephen Peter Morrow, 55, a physics teacher in Melbourne, Australia, allegedly had sex many times with one of his students back in the 90s. And if that weren’t bad enough:

[Prosecutor Daryl] Wraith said that about four months into the relationship the girl discovered she was pregnant.

Morrow, who lives in Parkwood, Queensland, went to a fertility clinic with her, waited in the reception area and paid about $320 for the termination, Wraith said.

The relationship continued after the abortion, with the pair sometimes going to motels, the prosecutor said.

“This was a case of a young girl, it’s submitted by the crown, who was vulnerable, who was seduced by a much older man,” Wraith said.

“She’s striving in a difficult year to succeed and he took advantage of her.”

A man in Aurora, Illinois has been sentenced to 20 years behind bars for trading child pornography through an internet chat room. Alan Jungels, 45, was caught last January as part of a huge pedophile network sting conducted by Australian police.

In March 2006, then-U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales announced in Chicago that federal authorities had shut down the chat room and that 27 people were charged in the U.S., Australia, Britain and Canada.

Prosecutors said Jungels used the screen name “Big-al-43895″ when trading the pornography in chat rooms with titles such as “incest” and “daddy-daughter.”

In this day where it takes about two minutes to upload racy videos or photos and email a link out to a gazillion people, is anyone else out there petrified that your kid will do something really stupid that could cause some long lasting consequences for them or others? The internet is a double-edged sword…

Horrified relatives of the 15-year-old girl called New South Wales police after becoming aware she had been filmed and the footage had been sent to dozens of classmates at Woonona High School.

Police visited the school last week and questioned a number of students, The Daily Telegraph reported.

But detectives were thwarted from proceeding because students had deleted the footage from their phones after being addressed by the principal.

The girl told police the act had been consensual and she did not wish to file a complaint.

First we had the story of the boy who could only eat deer meat, then we had the British teen who could only eat Tic Tacs, but a 19-year-old in Melbourne, Australia may take the prize — Ashleigh Morris is allergic to water. That’s right, she can’t go swimming, take a long bath, or even get overly sweaty without breaking out in a painful rash ever since she was 14. How awful!

She suffers from an extremely rare skin disorder called Aquagenic Urticaria - so unusual that only a handful of cases are documented worldwide.

When Ashleigh gets wet her body explodes in sore, itchy red lumps that take about two hours to ease.

She has to wash. But showering is a painful experience and she can only do it for a minute at a time.

These brief showers are the only contact Ashleigh has with water. The one thing she doesn’t miss is the washing up.

“People find it hard to believe, they say things like ‘Oh my god, how do you wash. “That makes me feel dirty, but I consider myself a very clean person,” she said.

Most of us take showering for granted but for Ashleigh it’s a painful endurance that often reduces her to tears.

The python stole the dingo that stole my baby! Call us pussies, but we don’t think we’re tough enough to live in Brisbane, Australia, where “scrub pythons” slither around waiting to slurp down a tasty terrier or two. The field mice problem in our house is about as close to nature as we want to get. Although having a few snakes around would help take care of that… hmmm, maybe we need to rethink.

A 16-foot python stalked a family dog for days before swallowing the pet whole in front of horrified children in the Australian tropics, animal experts said Wednesday.

The boy and girl, aged 5 and 7, watched as the scrub python devoured their silky terrier-Chihuahua crossbreed Monday at their home near Kuranda in Queensland state.

Stuart Douglas, owner of the Australian Venom Zoo in Kuranda, said scrub pythons typically eat wild animals such as wallabies, a smaller relative of the kangaroo, but sometimes turn to pets in urban areas.

“It actively stalked the dog for a number of days,” Douglas said.

“The family that owned the dog had actually seen it in the dog’s bed, which was a sign it was out to get it,” he added.

A woman in Canley Heights, Australia, tucked her two dead children into bed, then lay down next to them waiting to die herself. Her husband discovered the grizzly scene in time to call an ambulance. The woman is currently recovering in the hospital. While police have not announced an official cause of death for the children, it surely can’t be ruled out that this was possibly a murder/suicide attempt.

A neighbour of the family, who wanted to be known only as Wendy, had followed the distraught father into the house after he had pleaded with her to call an ambulance.

She said she was overcome with a “sickening sadness” when she pulled back blankets on the bed where the woman lay to reveal the children’s cold and blue bodies. Wendy said there were prescription pills and pill packets lying about the room.

“The mother had cut wounds to her arms,” she said. “The two kids were blue, they were cold. The mother was blue as well, but not as bad as the two kids.”

The children bore no obvious signs of injury, a police spokesman said.

If you’re going to have a home birth — which already sparks heated debate about the risks involved — make sure to fully vet that midwife!

Midwife Kusum Churcher-Wells is alleged to have failed to check the baby, known as JK, for jaundice during a home delivery in metropolitan Melbourne in April, 2005.

The baby’s father complained to the Nurses Board of Victoria (NBV), alleging the baby was rendered profoundly deaf and permanently disabled with brain damage as a result.

A formal hearing was conducted at the NBV in Melbourne this morning.

Ms Churcher-Wells faces one breach of failing to adequately assess and further treat JK’s jaundice and another of failing to refer JK to a medical practitioner to assess and treat the jaundice.

We think we could definitely be described as “animal lovers”, but if our dog mauled our toddler we might have to reconsider the dog’s place in our home (if not on Earth). But Alicia Cottier, whose two-year-old son Noah Newbold was attacked by their mastiff-staffordshire, which left very bad scarring on his face and almost cost him sight in his left eye, is defending her mutt and putting the blame solely on the kid:

“People are telling me I should shoot the dog, and as much as I love my son to death, I believe Noah was annoying her. I love the dog and she’s part of the family,” Cottier said.

Noah is nursing a range of painful injuries after being bitten on Monday night at his home at Booral in the Hunter Valley…

As the child hugged and kissed the dog yesterday, Ms Cottier said the attack was not the dog’s fault.

“It’s not like the dog picked him up and shook him or anything, she just snapped at him for pulling on her ears,” she said.

The parents of Corey Delaney, the Australian teenager made famous for his house party that drew 500 people and caused thousands of dollars in damage, are sticking up for their son, saying he just made a mistake like any other teenager with limited supervision. Well, we appreciate the unconditional love and all, but face it — your kid is a royal screw up.

In an open letter to the media, she and her husband, Steve, said the image of a teenage party animal was wide of the mark: “The Corey we know is a loving, kind and fun boy who plays computer games with his eight-year-old sister, takes her to the park and always has time for his family. We certainly don’t excuse Corey’s behaviour … But how many parents have been let down by their teenager when they have been given a bit of extra trust?”

Delaney has become an internet hit both for his party and for the brazen way he explained himself in the media. At one point, when a reporter challenged him to take a long hard look at himself, he said: “I have. Everyone has. They love it.”

“He’s come a big gutser [failed], he’s a bit sore and sorry for himself,” said his stepfather, his wife adding that if her son was unable to find a suitable full-time job he would be returning to school at the end of the month.

No matter what our teens do, just remember that it can be much, much worse. A 16-year-old from Melbourne, Australia made headlines this past weekend when he hosted a house party that wound up being attended by over 500 people which spun so far out of control that a police helicopter, 30 police officers and even the dog squad had to be called in. The total clean up and damage bill looks like it will top $20,000. But that’s not the worse of the teen’s troubles:

“Detectives have interviewed two 16-year-old youths over incidents on the weekend. One male has been charged with producing child pornography and creating a public nuisance,” a police statement, released tonight, read.

The first boy had been bailed to appear at a children’s court on February 22, while a brief was being prepared in relation to the other boy, the statement added.

Today’s arrests capped a mad four days with the law finally catching up with one of the youths, who has become a media celebrity.

Carol Louise Matthey, of Victoria, Australia, was charged two years ago with killing her four young children in a sick attempt to save her marriage — an excuse that seems to come up surprisingly often in these types of cases. Well, today prosecutors dropped the charges deeming the case un-winnable:

Acting DPP Jeremy Rapke said the prosecution had been re-assessed in light of a body of evidence being ruled inadmissible. “I have now determined that the remaining Crown case is such that there is no reasonable prospect of any conviction being recorded,” he said.

Justice John Coldrey said he had asked the DPP to reconsider the viability of the prosecution.

“A detailed examination of the prosecution case revealed, in my view, evidentiary difficulties both as to its admissibility and as to the quality of the evidence the Crown was seeking to lead,” he said.

Matthey has maintained her innocence the entire time she was waiting for trial, and that all of her children dying within a relatively short time frame was just a horrible twist of fate.

Poor little pumpkin…who can just leave a beautiful little girl in a train station and then flee the country? Hopefully Australia has better sense than America and doesn’t try to give the girl back!

A TODDLER abandoned at a Melbourne railway station was dumped by her father before he fled to the US, police believe.

The man who took the girl to Southern Cross station in the city and left her there on Saturday was her father. He then went to the airport and got on a plane to the US, Inspector Brad Shallies said today.

The girl, aged about three, is now in foster care.