Local news briefs
NZ Greens accuse Prime Minister John Key of spying plan
Website toxic, warns NZ Mum A mother will lobby New Zealand companies to pull their advertisements from a Latvia-based social networking site after her 12-year-old daughter was asked to provide explicit photos and subjected to extreme abuse while using it. The woman, who declined to have her name published to protect her daughter, said local companies would be horrified to see what their brand was aligned with on ask.fm. And yesterday, after Herald inquiries, State Insurance and BNZ both said they had taken steps to ensure their adverts would not appear on the website. The police and NetSafe are in contact with ask.fm’s owners about concerns, including that users can pose questions anonymously, enabling bullying and abuse. The woman said within a month of her 12-year-old daughter signing up to the site she was asked to provide naked pictures of herself, told to kill herself and called a whore and slut. She looked at her daughter’s friends’ profiles, and in three days found two children threatening to kill themselves in response to abuse on the website. One, a 13-year-old girl, was sent violent pornography depicting a rape, was challenged to fights and was told, “I am outside your house watching you” at night. “How a 13-year-old copes with all of that I just do not know, it gave me bad dreams for a few nights. The horrifying thing is you can send pornography in video or picture form, and there is no way to know what you are going to open.”
NZ head of charity kept behind bars The New Zealand boss of a Christian charity who allegedly smuggled 8.5kg of drugs into Australia has been denied bail in Darwin. Bernadine Prince, 41, appeared before magistrate John Neill on Thursday on three charges related to importing, possessing and supplying drugs. The pregnant mother of three and chief executive of the Oasis of Grace Christian mission faces life in prison if found guilty. Prosecutor Raphael De Vietri alleged that on May 24 two suitcases owned by Prince were found containing seven backpacks that had methamphetamine and heroin concealed in their lining. Prince, from Whakatane, was allegedly found with two passports in different names and six credit cards in several names. Mr De Vietri said Prince had claimed the suitcases were given to her on a trip to Kenya, where her mission does charity work, by a stranger known only as “Mummy Rose”. Defence counsel Michael Burrows said importing drugs did not fit with Prince’s background. “How does a person go from being CEO of an international Christian mission to being an international drug trafficker?” Mr Burrows said.
Green Party co-leader Russel Norman has accused Prime Minister John Key of conspiring to establish a surveillance state in New Zealand by encouraging American data-mining company Palantir to set up shop here. The comments prompted a savage response from Rod Drury, a business associate of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with Mr Drury labelling the attack another example of economic vandalism. Dr Norman voiced concerns this week about Palantir and its software Prism, which he suggested was similar to the huge online data gathering and tracking tool of the same name used by United States spy organisation the National Security Agency. He also pointed out Palantir had set up an office in Wellington and was advertising for an analyst to be embedded with the Government. Yesterday he said: “We need to know, is John Key effectively trying to replicate Prism in New Zealand by getting this organisation Palantir to set up here and start spying on all of our internet communications and everything digital that we do?” In Parliament he questioned Mr Key on what contact New Zealand intelligence agencies had with Palantir but Mr Key said it was his long-standing practice not to discuss operational matters and contracts of those agencies. The Prime Minister confirmed he had met Mr Thiel – who sometimes lives in New Zealand – a few times but said he had never discussed intelligence matters with him. Mr Thiel, a billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former PayPal chief executive, was “extremely generous after the Christchurch earthquake”, Mr Key said. Dr Norman later tweeted: “When crony govt meets surveillance state – John Key appoints Peter Thiel’s Palantir to spy on NZers”. That drew an angry response from Mr Drury who tweeted: “Don’t be w***ers”, and followed that up with “Hey Greens. Cheating NZ out of $200m on Mighty River Power now spinning this rubbish. Please put NZ ahead of yourselves.” He said the Greens were “ruining relationships and/by insinuating cronyism is vandalism. Politics in NZ is getting nasty. Lift the game.” State Owned Enterprises Minister Tony Ryall said Dr Norman suffered from paranoia and called him the Chicken Little of New Zealand politics. “Every time he talks about anything the sky’s falling in ... it’s all big business big politics, the right against the innocent little Greens.”
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www.christian-life.co.nz 7 AM 3/05/13 |9:48