Call to make Byron Bay rental properties pet friendly - community forum 7 pm 23 November 2016 at RSL

Bliss Communications, media release, 14th November 2016:

Byron Bay To Be First City in Australia To Have Pets Are Welcome Policy

Welfare advocate Karen Justice is leading the way to bring in a Pets Are Welcome Policy to Byron Bay to curb the high number of animals surrendered because of housing restrictions.   

“Sadly 36 percent of cats and dogs that end up in shelters and pounds are there because their owner can’t find pet friendly accommodation,” said Ms Justice.

“The horrifying statistic is 20,000 family pets per year are surrendered to the RSPCA alone because landlords say no to animals,” she said.

“As at July 2016 Australia’s major cities and surrounding suburbs have the following amount of “pets allowed rentals” as compared to total available rentals – Sydney – 2%, Melbourne 1%, Brisbane 8%, Darwin 5%, Perth 4%, Adelaide 4%, and Hobart 12%.”

“Renting in Byron Bay with a pet is almost impossible and in extreme cases people have ended up homeless because they can’t part with their pet.”

“I’m forming a Community Council to try and educate others about the benefits of having pet friendly accommodation.”

“I’m inviting real estate agents, strata management, and local council members to be part of this Community Council to put Byron Bay on the map for making a difference in animal welfare.”

“The Community Council can help re-educate landlords about the benefits of pet friendly accommodation and lobby the NSW Government to introduce strata by laws that welcome pets rather than discourage them.”

“Not allowing pets into homes only leads to dogs and cats unnecessarily being killed and their owners left distraught because they have lost a loved one.”

“I want Byron Bay to show the rest of Australia that it can be done – an across the board Pets Are Welcome Policy – to see a huge drop in animals left at shelters.”

“It’s a bold plan but something has to be done or more and more animals will be killed because a landlord won’t let them into their homes.”

Ms Justice said the benefits of pet friendly accommodation are :

1.     Saving Lives : Allowing pets into homes means owners don’t need to surrender them to shelters and pounds which means less animals are put to sleep.

2.     Health Benefits : There is scientific proof having a pet makes people happy and healthier.

3.     Rental Longevity : Tenants with pets tend to stay in rental properties longer saving landlords time and money rather than face uncertainty of securing another rental property.

Ms Justice believes if one city can do it then the rest of Australia might just follow.

A community forum is being held on Wednesday 23 November 2016 between 7pm and 9pm at Byron Bay RSL 

Facebook's reputation going downhill fast

Facebook killing off its users……

Inshorts, 12 November 2016:

A Facebook bug on Friday caused the social network to briefly declare around two million people, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, dead on their profiles. Several users were greeted with a eulogy message when visiting the profiles of friends and family, while some found their own accounts memorialised. Facebook apologised for the mistaken posts and said it was a 'terrible error'.

I'm guessing Zuckerberg isn't dead either... pic.twitter.com/9M9uaVsvjR

— Peter Stringer (@peterstringer) November 11, 2016

Facebook feeding its users lies as news……

The New York Times, 12 November 2016:

In May, the company grappled with accusations that politically biased employees were censoring some conservative stories and websites in Facebook’s Trending Topics section, a part of the site that shows the most talked-about stories and issues on Facebook. Facebook later laid off the Trending Topics team.

Mashable.com, 10 November 2016:

Every employee at Facebook should be ashamed of what their product became this year: a tangled mess of bizarre falsehoods and outdated information used as ammo to help people scream at one another. 

It has failed our bitterly divided country through its News Feed, which has weighed legitimate, reported information from good news organizations against propagandistic junk written by trolls and found there is no difference. Posted to your News Feed, a Pulitzer-winning New York Times report looks just the same as a blog post from The Right Stuff, an anti-Semitic content factory of the so-called "alt-right."

here's another thing facebook screwed up this week https://t.co/pJm8E3F5Kb

— Damon Beres ✨ (@dlberes) November 11, 2016

The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November 2016:

Facebook has vowed to crack down on misinformation and burst the "filter bubble", highlighted by the US election….

The US election has highlighted the power of social media as a propaganda tool, underpinning the insidious concept of "voter suppression" – attempting to dissuade your opponent's supporters from voting. Thankfully it's ineffective in Australia due to our mandatory voting system but it could have a significant impact on a close US election.

A voter suppression push to convince Clinton supporters that they could vote via Twitter, rather than attending a polling booth, was so widespread that Twitter was forced to publicly denounce it.

Blatantly false trending news stories are also a problem on Facebook, which has spawned an entire cottage industry of fake news sites because social media's vetting process for news is clearly less stringent than Google News' processes.

Facebook has usurped the role of the mainstream media in disseminating news, but hasn't taken on the fourth estate's corresponding responsibility for keeping the bastards honest. The mainstream media has no-one to blame but itself, having engaged in a tabloid race to the bottom which devalued truth to the point that blatant liars are considered more honest.

Facebook caught out and scrambling……

Pro Publica, 11 November 2016:

Facing a wave of criticism for allowing advertisers to exclude anyone with an "affinity" for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people from seeing ads, Facebook said it would build an automated system that would let it better spot ads that discriminate illegally.

Federal law prohibits ads for housing, employment and credit that exclude people by race, gender and other factors.

Facebook said it would build an automated system to scan advertisements to determine if they are services in these categories. Facebook will prohibit the use of its "ethnic affinities" for such ads.

Facebook said its new system should roll out within the next few months. "We are going to have to build a solution to do this. It is not going to happen overnight," said Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook.

He said that Facebook would also update its advertising policies with "stronger, more specific prohibitions" against discriminatory ads for housing, credit and employment.

In October, ProPublica purchased an ad that targeted Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an "affinity" for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. When we showed the ad to a civil rights lawyer, he said it seemed like a blatant violation of the federal Fair Housing Act.

After ProPublica published an article about its ad purchase, Facebook was deluged with criticism. Four members of Congress wrote Facebook demanding that the company stop giving advertisers the option of excluding by ethnic group.

The federal agency that enforces the nation's fair housing laws said it was "in discussions" with Facebook to address what it termed "serious concerns" about the social network's advertising practices.

And a group of Facebook users filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the company's ad-targeting technology violates the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Trump's America: that Russian link raises its head again

The Huffington Post, 11 November 2016:

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are reviewing the Democratic Coalition’s investigative report highlighting 10 “clear links” that the FBI failed to investigate about our President-elect’s business ties to Russia, and to the Putin regime.

It’s named “The Dworkin Report.”

“The FBI missed at least 10 key connections between President-elect Trump and Russia when they conducted their investigation and concluded that our President-elect had no links to the country,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Advisor to the Democratic Coalition and author of the report. “It is imperative that the American people be made aware of this information.”

The Dworkin Report shows that Donald Trump has incorporated almost 250 registered businesses in Russia.

This hard evidence directly contradicts Trump’s prior statements about having no business ties to Russia over the summer.

Additionally, the evidence shows that Trump has travelled to Russia dating back to 1987, before the end of the Soviet Union.

In particular, a visit in 2010 included a tour of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum led by a Russian government official of sufficient ranking, that he earned a personal photo and award from Vladimir Putin earlier this year.

The Democratic Coalition also revealed a 2013 video recorded interview with Donald Trump to MSNBC’s Thomas A. Roberts - which he has confirmed as authentic - where he claimed twice to have a relationship with Putin.

Also in 2012, Donald Trump Jr. told Latvian interviewers in a video recorded interview, that he had been to Russia many times and that the Trump Organization has a significant business there.

The Dworkin Report was also shared with Democratic Congressional leaders Senator Harry Reid, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Congressman Keith Ellison on Thursday evening.

Russia’s authoritarian President Putin himself sent warm congratulations, after Tuesday night’s Presidential election, in which his government has already openly admitted to interfering.

Since Tuesday night, Putin’s regime has publicly admitted to having a hand in the Wikileaks deluge of emails during the election.

Russian government officials told the New York Times that they had direct contact with Trump’s closest allies this week, after polls closed....

The Washington Post, 10 November 2016:

MOSCOW — Russian government officials had contacts with members of Donald Trump’s campaign team, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday, in a disclosure that could reopen scrutiny over the Kremlin’s role in the president-elect’s bitter race against Hillary Clinton.

Facing questions about his ties to Moscow because of statements interpreted as lauding Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, Trump repeatedly denied having any contact with the Russian government.

After the latest statement by the Russian diplomat, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks denied that there were interactions between Russia and the Trump team before Tuesday’s election.

“The campaign had no contact with Russian officials,” she said in an email.

But Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said in an interview with the state-run Interfax news agency that “there were contacts” with the Trump team.

“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Ryabkov said. “Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions. I cannot say that all of them but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.”…..

U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. accused the Russian government last month of deploying hackers to meddle in the U.S. elections. Officials said Russian hackers, possibly with high-level intelligence links, broke into the email account of Clinton’s campaign chief, John Podesta. The emails were then disclosed by WikiLeaks in an effort that Clinton supporters claim was intended to damage her White House bid.

Putin throughout the campaign interfering with the elections.

But neither the administration’s hacking allegations nor reporting of Trump’s apparent ties to Russia dissuaded more than 59 million voters from casting their ballots for the Republican.

Speculation has swirled about Trump’s links to Russia since early in the campaign, both because of his warm words about Putin and past business ventures in Russia. It is not clear whether Trump currently has any investments in the country, because he has not released any tax records.

But he made millions of dollars by bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. Wealthy Russians also have been an important source of investments in Trump’s businesses. His son, Donald Trump Jr., said in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” adding that “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Several Trump advisers have also had well-publicized ties to Russia, including his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who managed an investment fund for a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Putin. He resigned from the campaign days after his name was found in a ledger of payouts from the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a pro-European street revolution in 2014…..

The Dworkin Report by The Democratic Coalition by Grant Stern on Scribd

List of alleged Trump companies registered in Russia here.

Clarence Valley Council announces Section 55 amendment to application for SUB2015/0034 a 162 lot subdivision at Lot 99 Hickey Street, Iluka

On 10 November 2016 Clarence Valley Council sent out by email a letter dated 7 November 2016 concerning a development application being determined by the Northern Joint Regional Planning Panel:

Redesigned subdivision plan for 157 lot development:

NOTE: This is not the plan sent with the official notification email. This final plan was sent by a second email 4 days later - cutting the time in which a submission based on accurate information could be created by a total of 7 submission period days.

Previous subdivision plan for 162 lot development:

Note: Streetscape plantings are indicative only and were not part of the development application.

Amended DA documents can be viewed and download here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fo7a1wml2tak7xf/SUB2015-0034%20Amended%20Application%20Documents.pdf?dl=0

A brief history of the development application here.