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Final arguments are being made before Australia's vote to create Indigenous Voice_我的网站

A |     Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron accused each other of taking extreme stands on abortion policy Monday night as they wrangled over an issue that's become a flashpoint in their hotly contested campaign for governor in Kentucky.During an hourlong debate at Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, Kentucky, the rivals fielded questions over education, taxes, public safety and the monthlong strike by autoworkers, which has spread to Ford's highly profitable Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville.The candidates tried to one-up the other in their support for public education. Some of their sharpest exchanges during the televised debate, however, came when asked to lay out their stands on abortion. Their remarks, which took place about three weeks before the Nov. 7 election, came against the backdrop of Kentucky's current abortion law, which bans the procedure except when carried out to save a pregnant woman’s life or to prevent a disabling injury.Beshear said that his challenger celebrated the abortion ban’s passage and pointed to Cameron’s long-running support for the law as written, without exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.“My opponent’s position would give a rapist more rights than their victim," Beshear said. "It is wrong. We need to change this law. We need to make sure that those individuals have that option.”Once Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the state’s trigger law — passed in 2019 — took effect to ban nearly all abortions.Cameron reiterated Monday night that he would sign a bill adding abortion exceptions if given the chance, a position he revealed during a radio interview last month.Cameron went on the attack by pointing to Beshear’s opposition to abortion restrictions passed by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature. As attorney general, Beshear refused to defend a law imposing a 20-week ban on abortion, and later as governor he vetoed a 15-week ban, Cameron said. “That is Andy Beshear’s record on the issue of life," Cameron said. "It’s one of failure for the unborn.”Beshear responded that he has consistently supported “reasonable restrictions,” especially on late-term abortions. Beshear also noted that the 15-week ban lacked exceptions for rape and incest.Abortion polices have been at the forefront of the campaign. Beshear's campaign released a TV ad last month featuring a Kentucky woman who revealed her own childhood trauma while calling for rape and incest exceptions. The woman, now in her early 20s, talked about having been raped by her stepfather when she was 12 years old. She became pregnant as a seventh grader but eventually miscarried.Meanwhile, the candidates took turns touting their plans to improve public education.Cameron accused the governor of mischaracterizing his plan to help students overcome learning loss when schools were closed during the pandemic.“We need a governor that is going to lean into this issue to fight for our kids and make sure that they have the best education system here possible in Kentucky,” Cameron said.Beshear highlighted his own plan calling for an 11% pay raise for teachers and all public school personnel, including bus drivers, janitors and cafeteria staff. He said he's supported educators “every step of the way” to raise their pay and protect their pensions as governor and previously as attorney general.“If we want to make sure that we have a math teacher, a physics teacher, everything we need in our classrooms, we have to pay people closer to what they’re worth,” the governor said.Beshear also made another pitch for his plan for state-funded pre-K for every 4-year-old in Kentucky.Beshear criticized Cameron for supporting a Republican-backed measure to award tax credits for donations supporting private school tuition. The Kentucky Supreme Court struck down the measure last year. The governor and other opponents of the bill said the program would have diverted money from public schools. Supporters said the measure offered opportunities for parents who want new schooling options for their children but are unable to afford them.“He (Cameron) supports a voucher program that would take tens of millions of dollars out of our public school system," Beshear said. "Out of the paychecks of our educators, out of the resources that they need, and again send them to fancy private schools.”Cameron has proposed raising the statewide base starting pay for new teachers, saying it would have a ripple effect by lifting pay for other teachers. Cameron’s plan also would develop an optional, 16-week tutoring program for math and reading instruction.“We need leadership that’s going to catch our kids up,” Cameron said.The candidates were asked to weigh in on the targeted strikes by the United Auto Workers union at all three Detroit automakers. Beshear replied that “this isn’t an either-or. We need the UAW to come out in a strong place and Ford to come out in a strong place, too.”Ford is a major employer in Louisville with two assembly plants in Kentucky's largest city. Ford and its battery partner, SK Innovation of South Korea, are building twin battery plants outside Glendale in central Kentucky — a $5.8 billion megaproject landed during Beshear's tenure as governor.Cameron expressed support for the workers while saying he hopes for a swift resolution. He blamed the labor dispute on President Joe Biden's economic policies, part of his effort to nationalize the campaign by linking Beshear to the Democratic president — a well-used GOP strategy in red states like Kentucky.“We are in this mess because of the inflationary pressures that are coming from Washington, D.C.,” Cameron said.。

B |     CANBERRA, Australia -- Opposing campaigners made their final pitches on Friday over changing the Australia's constitution to acknowledge a place for Indigenous Australians on the eve of the nation's first referendum in a generation.The referendum has the potential to amend Australia’s founding legal document for the first time since 1977. But opinion polls suggest that the amendment will be rejected as more than four-in-five referendums have been in the past.Australians are being asked to alter the constitution to recognize the “First Peoples of Australia” by establishing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.The committee comprised of and chosen by Indigenous Australians would advise the Parliament and government on issues that affect the nation’s most disadvantaged ethnic minority.Indigenous Australians account for only 3.8% of Australia’s population. But they die on average eight years younger than the wider population, have a suicide rate twice that of the national average and suffer from diseases in the remote Outback that have been eradicated from other wealthy countries.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a leading Voice advocate, cited the Israel-Hamas war to underscore why Australians should vote “yes” out of kindness toward the Indigenous population.“This week of all weeks where we see such trauma in the world, there is nothing — no cost — to Australians showing kindness, thinking with their heart as well as their head, when they enter the polling booth tomorrow and vote ‘yes,’” Albanese said.“Kindness costs nothing. Thinking of others costs nothing. This is a time where Australians have that opportunity to show the generosity of spirit that I see in the Australian character where at the worst of times we always see the best of the Australian character,” Albanese added.Opposition leader Peter Dutton, whose conservative party opposes the Voice, said polling showing declining support for the referendum over the past year was evidence Albanese failed to convince voters of the benefits of the Voice. “He’s instinctively won their hearts because Australians do want better outcomes for Indigenous Australians, but he hasn’t won their minds,” Dutton told Australian Broadcasting Corp.Indigenous activist Robbie Thorpe drew attention to Indigenous division over the Voice this week by applying for a High Court injunction to stop the referendum. “The referendum is an attack on Aboriginal Sovereignty,” Thorpe said in a statement on Friday.But the High Court said his writ had been rejected on Thursday on the grounds that it appeared to be an abuse of the court process, frivolous, vexatious or outside the court’s jurisdiction.Thorpe is among so-called progressive “no” campaigners who argue an Indigenous committee with no power of veto over legislation is not a sufficiently radical change.Many progressives argue the constitution should more importantly acknowledge that Indigenous Australians never ceded their land to British colonizers and a treaty was a higher priority than a Voice.Conservative “no” campaigners argue the Voice is too radical and the courts could interpret its powers in unpredictable ways.Some Indigenous people don’t have faith that the Voice’s membership would represent their diverse priorities.“Yes” campaigner Kyam Maher, an Indigenous man who is South Australia state’s attorney general, said the question he was most often asked by thousands of voters was what result Indigenous Australians wanted.“I can say absolutely and overwhelmingly Aboriginal people want their fellow Australians to vote ‘yes’ tomorrow,” Maher said.An opinion poll published this week supported Maher's view that a majority of Indigenous Australians wanted the Voice although that support had eroded since early 2023.Polling suggests the referendum will lose despite Australia’s peak legal, business, faith and sporting groups overwhelmingly supporting the Voice.Anne Twomey, a Sydney University constitutional law expert and a member of the Constitutional Expert Group that advised the government on drafting the referendum question, said she feared that Australian lawmakers might give up trying to change the constitution if the referendum fails.“I think it is a big concern if we end up with a constitution that’s frozen in time that we can’t change,” Twomey said.“In practice around the world, when a constitution becomes frozen and out of date with the world that it operates in, it becomes brittle and when there’s ever any stress on it, it does tend to break,” she added.___Follow AP's Asia-Pacific coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/asia-pacific。

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