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Go Floyd! Huge support for 9-year-old heading to World Dwarf Games

<p>One multi-talented nine-year-old boy from Northern New South Wales is hard at work preparing to represent Australia at the World Dwarf Games. </p> <p>Floyd Morley was born with a form of dwarfism known as achondroplasia - a condition considered to be one of the most common types of short-limbed dwarfism, said to affect approximately one in every 25,000 people. </p> <p>His parents - mother Jade and father Ross - were initially concerned about the challenges their son may face in life, considering everything from potential health conditions to bullying.</p> <p>“At the beginning, we were really worried about all his health concerns,” Jade explained to <em>A Current Affair</em>’s Leila McKinnon, “we were worried that he was going to get picked on, we worried that he was going to get bullied.” </p> <p>However, all the pair truly wanted was for everyone to “celebrate him. He’s the best. He is the best kid.”</p> <p>After too much time spent unable to catch anyone playing tag, or finishing behind his peers in school races, Floyd was left feeling “very frustrated” and “very lonely.” </p> <p>“I didn’t really realise how much it affected him,” Jade admitted. </p> <p>“I didn’t really feel that confident,” Floyd explained, “of playing soccer. I only just took to surfing and handball.” </p> <p>And now, everyone will have the chance to see that Floyd is the best at what he does, with the nine-year-old’s sights set on competing in Germany alongside his friends and teammates. </p> <p>It was a convention for short-statured people that changed things, giving Floyd the opportunity he needed and deserved to find his confidence and joy in what he was doing.</p> <p>"He comes running up to me and he has had this beam of light and he was like, 'Mum, I caught them in tag'," Jade said of that pivotal moment. </p> <p>"No one was slowing down for him to catch them … then he participated in soccer and basketball and he was like, 'oh my God, I'm good at this'."</p> <p>As Floyd’s pride for himself and what he could accomplish grew, and his connection to those who were like him, so did Jade’s - as she had said, “I just want him to be proud and to have that real soul about him that’s like ‘I am proud of who I am’” - with his mother also confessing that it had been a “beautiful experience.” </p> <p>When asked what the upcoming World Dwarf Games meant to him, Floyd wasted no time in declaring that he “felt really proud of myself, I felt really great, I couldn’t wait to meet all these people that were just like me.”</p> <p>The games - which take place every four years in Germany - are run by volunteers, and the Australian team rely on fundraising and donations for their financial assistance. Funds go towards training costs for the athletes, as well as travel to and from the games, and are vital for budding talents such as young Floyd.</p> <p>Short Statured People of Australia set up a fundraiser for the 2023 competition, and their page has seen a flood of love and support for Floyd and his team, after Jade admitted that “we're looking for multiple sponsors or one really big sponsor. We've got shirts, we want to put sponsors' names on them."</p> <p>“You deserve the world Floyd,” wrote one donor. “Keep shining your magic!” </p> <p>“Go Floyd! And all the amazing guys and girls participating in the games,” said another. “What an inspiration you all are. I will be following these games all the way.” </p> <p>“Go Team Australia! Can’t wait for My Sophia to join you in the future!!” said one proud supporter.</p> <p>And as another put it, “way to go Floyd. You’re a true inspiration of your parents.” </p> <p><em>Images: A Current Affair / Nine</em></p>

Caring

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Bushfires are Australia's costliest natural disaster

<p>It’s hard to estimate the eventual economic cost of Australia’s 2019-20 megafires, partly because they are still underway, and partly because it is hard to know the cost to attribute to deaths and the decimation of species and habitats, but it is easy to get an idea of its significance – the cost will be unprecedented.</p> <p>The deadliest bushfires in the past 200 years took place in 1851, then 1939, then 1983, 2009, now 2019-20. The years between them are shrinking rapidly. Only a remote grassfire in central Australia in 1974-75 rivalled them in terms of size, although not in biomass burnt or loss of life.</p> <p>The term “<a href="http://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/CFEOR/LogIn/log%20in%20docs/recent%20research/mega%20fires.pdf">megafire</a>” is a new one, defined in the early 2000s to help describe disturbing new wildfires emerging in the United States – massive blazes, usually above 400,000 hectares, often joining up, that create more than usual destruction to life and property.</p> <p>Australia’s current fires <a href="http://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/CFEOR/LogIn/log%20in%20docs/recent%20research/mega%20fires.pdf">dwarf</a> the US fires that inspired the term.</p> <p>They are 25 times the size of Australia’s deadliest bushfires, the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria that directly killed 173 people, and so large and intense that they create their own weather in which winds throw embers 30 kilometres or more ahead of the front and pyro-cumulus clouds produce dry lightning that ignites new fires.</p> <p>The Black Saturday fires burnt <a href="https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/papers/govpub/VPARL2006-10No225Introductory.pdf">430,000 hectares</a>. The current fires have killed fewer people but have so far burnt <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/datablog/ng-interactive/2019/dec/07/how-big-are-the-fires-burning-on-the-east-coast-of-australia-interactive-map">10.7 million hectares</a> – an area the size of <a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/AUSTRALIA-BUSHFIRES-SCALE/0100B4VK2PN/index.html">South Korea</a>, or Scotland and Wales combined.</p> <p><strong>There are easy to measure costs…</strong></p> <p>The federal government has promised to put at least <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/bushfire-recovery-fund-to-get-2-billion-over-two-years-20200106-p53p8j.html">A$2 billion</a> into a National Bushfire Recovery Fund, which is roughly the size of the first estimate of the cost of the fires calculated by Terry Rawnsley of SGS Economics and Planning.</p> <p>He put the cost at somewhere between <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-economic-cost-of-bushfires-on-sydney-revealed-up-to-50-million-a-day-and-rising-20191212-p53jbq.html">A$1.5 and $2.5 billion</a>, using his firm’s modelling of the cost of the NSW Tathra fires in March 2018 as a base.</p> <p>It’s the total of the lost income from farm production, tourism and the like.</p> <p>It is possible to get an idea of wider costs using the findings of the <a href="http://royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Commission-Reports/Final-Report.html">2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission</a>.</p> <p>It came up with an estimate for tangible costs of <a href="http://royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Finaldocuments/volume-1/HR/VBRC_Vol1_AppendixA_HR.pdf">A$4.369 billion</a>, which after inflation would be about $5 billion in today’s dollars.</p> <p><strong>…and harder-to-measure costs</strong></p> <p>Tangible costs are hose easily measured including the cost of replacing things such as destroyed homes, contents and vehicles.</p> <p>They also include the human lives lost, which were valued at A$3.7 million per life (2009 dollars) in accordance with a <a href="https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/3310859/best-practice-regulation-guidance-note-value-of-statistical-life">Commonwealth standard</a>.</p> <p>The measure didn’t include the effect of injuries and shortened lives due to smoke-related stroke and cardiovascular and lung diseases, or damage to species and habitats, the loss of livestock, grain and feed, crops, orchards and national and local parks.</p> <p>Also excluded were “inangibles”, among them the social costs of mental health problems and unemployment and increases in suicide, substance abuse, relationship breakdowns and domestic violence.</p> <p>The cost of inangibles can peak years after a disaster and continue to take tolls for decades, if not generations.</p> <p>One attempt to estimate the cost of intangibles was made by Deloitte Access Economics, in work for the <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/economics/articles/building-australias-natural-disaster-resilience.html">Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience &amp; Safer Communities</a>.</p> <p>Deloitte put the tangible costs of the Black Saturday fires at A$3.1 billion in 2015 dollars and the intangible costs at more than that again: A$3.9 billion, producing a total of A$7 billion, which would be A$7.6 billion in today’s dollars.</p> <p><strong>Black Saturday is a starting point</strong><span class="attribution"><span class="source"></span></span></p> <p>This season’s megafires are, so far, less costly than the 2009 Victorian fires in terms of human life, roughly on par in terms of lost homes, and less costly for other structures.</p> <p>But given that considerably more land has been burnt we can expect other costs to eclipse those of Black Saturday.</p> <p>As of today, 25 times as much land has been burnt.</p> <p>Scaling up the royal commission’s Black Saturday figures for the size of the fire and scaling them down for the fewer deaths and other things that shouldn’t be scaled up produces an estimate of tangible costs of A$103 billion in today’s dollars.</p> <p>The Deloitte Access Economics ratio of intangible to tangible costs suggests a total for both types of costs of A$230 billion.</p> <p>As it happens the tangible costs estimate is close to an estimate of A$100 billion prepared using methods by University of Queensland economist <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/10/perspectives/australia-fires-cost/index.html">John Quiggin</a>.</p> <p>The reality won’t be clear for some time.</p> <p>There are several weeks of fire season remaining, and we are yet to reach the usual peak season for Victoria, which is in the first week of February.</p> <p>What we can safely say, with weeks left to go, is that these fires are by far Australia’s costliest natural disaster.<!-- Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. --><img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129433/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /><!-- End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: http://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines --></p> <p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/paul-read-18089">Paul Read</a>, Climate Criminologist &amp; Senior Instructor/Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/monash-university-1065">Monash University</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/richard-denniss-4045">Richard Denniss</a>, Adjunct Professor, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/crawford-school-of-public-policy-australian-national-university-3292">Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University</a></em></p> <p><em>This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-costs-approaching-100-billion-the-fires-are-australias-costliest-natural-disaster-129433">original article</a>.</em></p>

Domestic Travel

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Ukrainian dwarf abandoned by adoptive parents denies claims she’s a “sociopath”

<p>The Ukranian dwarf orphan who was<span> </span><a rel="noopener" href="https://www.oversixty.com.au/lifestyle/family-pets/she-tried-to-kill-us-mother-who-adopted-9-year-old-girl-claims-her-new-daughter-is-really-a-22-year-old-sociopath" target="_blank">abandoned by her American adoptive parents</a><span> </span>who accused the dwarf of being an adult pretending to be a child has broken her silence in her first televised interview.</p> <p>Six years ago, in 2013, adoptive parents Kristine and Michael Barnett left Indiana for Canada with their other children and left Natalia Grace Barnett behind, which at the time, Natalia says she was nine.</p> <p>The Barnett family had adopted Natalia three years earlier in 2010 hastily as they were under the impression that she was a six-year-old orphan.</p> <p>However, Natalia’s former adoptive parents became convinced that after adopting her, she was actually 22 and was a sociopathic adult who tried to kill members of their family.</p> <p>“Natalia would do things like place clear thumb tacks on the stairs face up so that when we would walk up the stairs, we would be stepping on thumb tacks to pain and injure ourselves,” Kristine said.</p> <p>However, Natalia has refuted the claims and has spoken to Dr Phil about the accusations, maintaining that she is a child.</p> <p>“It's not true at all. I just want people to hear my side,” Natalia said.</p> <p>Natalia is joined by her new adoptive mother known as Cynthia Mans, who insists that a bone scan that Natalia underwent after she was abandoned proves she is the age she says she is.</p> <p>However, when the Barnett family ordered a bone scan for Natalia, the scans suggested that she had been born in 1989.</p> <p>Cynthia says that despite the first allegations from the Barnett family, herself and her husband did not worry about bringing Natalia into their home.</p> <p>“We're supposed to help. Me and my husband adopted these kids,” she said to Dr Phil.</p> <p>“It's like, who would do it if you don't?”</p> <p>The Barnett family has said that the allegations against them for child neglect have been “devastating”.</p> <p><em>Photo credit: <a rel="noopener" href="https://people.com/crime/ukrainian-adoptee-allegedly-abandoned-by-indiana-couple-opens-up-to-dr-phil/?utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;xid=socialflow_twitter_peoplemag&amp;utm_campaign=peoplemagazine" target="_blank">People</a>  </em></p>

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