Editorials 1 March 2010
The NZ Herald editorial does not appear to be online.
The Press looks at the furore over the forged passports by Mossad:
British police officers have arrived in Israel in an attempt to find out who or what stole the identities of six British-Israeli nationals and used them in the assassination in Dubai last month of a leader of the Palestinian Hamas organisation. The chances that the police will find anything worthwhile is exceedingly remote. If the murder was carried out by the Israeli foreign intelligence agency Mossad, as Dubai alleges and many others suspect, the Israeli Government will see to it that the truth never emerges. If it was perpetrated by some other actor – and the possibility that the killing was carried out by Arab agents from Hamas or elsewhere as part of some internecine feud has not been entirely ruled out – there is no chance that any plodding Western investigation is going to get to the bottom of it.
Maybe iPredict should do a market on who was it. My money will be on Mossad!
The victim was Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, co-founder of the military wing of Hamas, the radical Islamic organisation that controls the Gaza Strip. What Mabhouh was doing in Dubai without security protection is not known. As someone well aware that he was a target for assassination from a variety of quarters, Mabhouh seldom ventured far from Damascus where he was heavily protected. It appears likely he was involved in arranging a further illicit shipment of weapons from Iran for Hamas’s continuing attacks on Israel and for some reason felt secure travelling without guards. If this is the case, it is likely that Israeli intelligence seized the chance to carry out a strike that had probably been planned for some time.
Hamas is at war with Israel. Their policy is to destroy Israel. It is hard to argue that the co-founder of the military wing is not a legitimate military target.
The Dom Post welcomes a review of employment law:
Four years ago, a Tauranga company concerned about the theft of company property installed motion-sensitive cameras on its premises.
The cameras filmed a worker placing a cardboard box containing cakes of soap under a bench. Another worker, who subsequently admitted stealing company property, was filmed taking a box from under the bench and putting it in his car. The company believed it was a clear case of theft. It asked the worker who had placed the box under the bench to explain his actions. He refused. The company sacked him.
End of story? No. The worker took his case to the Employment Relations Authority. The authority found in favour of the employer. The worker appealed to the Employment Court. It took a different view.
It found the worker had been unjustifiably dismissed because his employer had not followed proper procedures. It had given him only selected portions of the surveillance tape, it had not put in writing the misdeeds of which he was accused, and it had wrongly concluded that the worker’s representative was stalling when he put off meetings because of other commitments. The company was ordered to pay the employee $12,000 for lost wages and $7000 for distress.
A good example of the case for change.
The ODT looks at home insulation:
Large-scale taxpayer subsiding of home insulation would seem an unlikely policy for a right-of-centre political party.
But that is what pragmatic National did and, by and large, Prime Minister John Key and his colleagues will be pleased with the outcome.
As are the Greens!