– A Victorian Supreme Court judge orders the Royal Women’s Hospital to release the records of a woman’s late-term abortion. Patient privacy and confidentiality has been struck an ominous blow.
– Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz continues his campaign to stop the publishing of Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah. The Nation articles outlines the various ways the free-speech advocate has intimidated, threatened and provoked the University of California Press. Finkelstein’s thesis utterly destroys the intellectual underpinnings of Dershowitz, so his fear is understandable, though attempting to censor the work shows the man’s profound hypocrisy. It is still possible that the book will not be released, the latest release suggests. Lynne Withey, director of the University of California Press, puts it best: “To say that the book is anti-Semitic is to say that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”