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Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations - some are not happy

Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.

Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients - on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare.

Health officials stress that ethnicity is just one of five factors considered in deciding when a person gets surgery, and that it is an important step in addressing poor health outcomes within Māori and Pacific populations.

Some surgeons, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the new scoring tool was medically indefensible. They said patients should be prioritised on how sick they were, how urgently they needed treatment, and how long they had been waiting for it - not on their ethnicity.

One of the surgeons said he was “disgusted” by the new ranking system.

“It’s ethically challenging to treat anyone based on race, it’s their medical condition that must establish the urgency of the treatment,” the surgeon said.

“There’s no place for elitism in medicine and the medical fraternity in this country is disturbed by these developments.”

A document on the equity adjustor which was leaked to Newstalk ZB shows two Māori patients, both aged 62 and who have been waiting more than a year, ranked above others on the list. A 36-year-old Middle Eastern patient who has been waiting almost two years has a much lower priority ranking.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81.

Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.

Ted Kaczynski's most notable work, his manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future, can be read in full here: https://unabombermanifesto.com/

ISTANBUL – The Turkish authorities on Tuesday seized and jailed a 16-year-old boy for drawing a moustache on an election campaign poster showing re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, media reports said.

Several media outlets close to the opposition, including daily newspapers BirGun, Cumhuriyet and private TV station Halk TV, said the youth from the south-eastern town of Mersin was accused of defacing the poster near his home with a pen, scribbling “a Hitler moustache and writing insulting comments”.

He was arrested after he was identified through CCTV camera footage, media reports said.

The authorities interviewed him at his home, where he reportedly “admitted drawing the moustache” while denying writing the accompanying comments.

Taken before the public prosecutor, he was found to have “insulted the president” and was jailed at a nearby youth facility, according to Halk TV.

Mr Erdogan extended his 20-year rule over Turkey after winning the May 28 second round of the presidential election to embark on a new five-year term.

According to the Justice Ministry, “insulting the president” is one of the most common crimes in Turkey, resulting in 16,753 convictions in 2022. AFP

I didn't spot coverage of this story on more major news sites. This Indian source seemed less editorialized than others:

Environmental activists break into Sylt Airport in Germany and spray an orange color on a Cessna Citation corporate plane.

It appears that the aircraft operator will incur higher costs. On one of the Twitter accounts, a video of some of the activists painting an airplane with orange paint is shared. The engine is fortunate to be covered while they are painting it.

NYC ranked first among major cities for the worst air quality worldwide today, according to IQAir, a Swiss air monitoring company.

The smoke from ferocious Canadian wildfires cast a sickly pall over much of the eastern United States today, worsening air quality for millions of people. The air was acrid, skylines looked orange and municipal officials told people to stay indoors. The National Weather Service does not expect things will get much better tomorrow.

About 98 million people in parts of 18 states from New Hampshire to South Carolina were under air quality alerts this morning for both wildfire smoke and ozone.

“This is a historic event. We’ve gone back to our smoke data and not seen anything of the same magnitude and size on the East Coast,” Burke said. And for New York City, “it’s by far the worst in the last 18 years.”

Wednesday — once data is analyzed — could be the worst day of smoke in the U.S. in nearly two decades, Burke said.