NewsWrap for the week ending June 1, 2002 (As broadcast on This Way Out program #740, distributed 6-3-02) [Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Chris Ambidge, Brian Nunes, Jason Lin, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle & Greg Gordon] Anchored by Jon Beaupré and Cindy Friedman In Canada, the conservative province of Alberta is extending pension benefits to the domestic partners of its unmarried civil servants including same-gender partners, the provincial Justice Minister announced this week. Some top provincial managers won the benefit earlier this year as the result of a lawsuit. Now another lawsuit has forced its extension to beneficiaries of five other pension plans, including provincial and municipal employees, nurses, police officers, judges, and teachers. In mid-May Alberta's Government unveiled its draft bill to amend an array of provincial laws to recognize domestic partners. The Australian state of New South Wales is also moving towards equality for gay and lesbian and other unmarried couples. Last week state Attorney General Bob Debus announced his Government's plan to reform 23 state laws regarding court proceedings, work entitlements including survivor benefits, and other financial issues. That bill may not be discussed in the NSW Parliament until September or October. Gay and lesbian activists are disappointed that the package omits adoption rights and equalization of the age of consent for homosexual acts with that for heterosexual ones. But this week Debus announced that NSW has earmarked 75,000 Australian dollars per year to support programs to prevent violence against gays, lesbians and transgenders. One-third of the funds will go to the "Skools Out" project against homophobic bullying on campuses. A mistrial has interrupted for a second time prosecution of criminal charges in connection with mismanagement of Australia's now-defunct Satellite Group, the first gay-identified corporation ever to go public on a stock exchange. That famous 1999 "pink float" ended in a financial debacle after less than a year amidst an investigation by ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, and numerous criminal and civil allegations against founder Greg Fisher and board member Jonathan Broster. Originally a property company, Satellite acquired the bulk of Australia's gay and lesbian publications and shut them down as it failed. The Satellite entity officially wound up in November, but the legal battles continue. A first criminal prosecution for Fisher and Broster in October was declared a mistrial when two jurors fell ill. Last week, after two weeks of trial proceedings and just before the Sydney District Court judge was to instruct the jury, Crown prosecutors finally obtained from ASIC a Satellite file which Broster had sought to support his testimony. A mistrial was declared despite Fisher's protest, and prosecutors will have to try again in August. Britain's Home Secretary David Blunkett this week announced that his Government will be funding LAGPA, the Lesbian And Gay Police Association. In a statement he said the group is "contributing to [his] aims for the police service" and that the funds "will enable LAGPA to operate on an equal footing with other minority staff associations such as the National Black Police Association and the British Association of Women Police." LAGPA will use the funds to hire a full-time staff member and become a truly national operation that can support officers in rural as well as metropolitan areas. One of the group's goals is to win pension benefits for officers' same-gender partners. In the U.S., the California state Senate overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to protect survivors of unmarried couples from post-mortem property tax reassessments. The exemption, which currently applies only to legally married couples, would be extended to any couple which had cohabited for at least 5 years before one partner's death or terminal illness. If the state Assembly also approves state Senator Jackie Speier's SCA9, it will go to a statewide referendum. Shareholders of oil giant ExxonMobil this week voted down the addition of "sexual orientation" to the corporate equal employment opportunity statement -- but even the "Wall Street Journal" was impressed by how much support the proposal won despite management opposition. This was the fourth year that activists led by Trillium Asset Management placed the proposal before shareholders, and this time support almost doubled to nearly one-fourth of the vote. That's due in part to a favorable recommendation from the powerful adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. Most of ExxonMobil's major competitors specifically protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. But while several other corporations have bowed to shareholder pressure to change their policies, ExxonMobil insists that its existing policy is adequate, and had to be forced by the Securities and Exchange Commission to even include the proposal in its proxy materials. A U.S. law making federal funding for public libraries contingent on their use of Internet filtering software was struck down this week by a panel of federal judges. The Children's Internet Protection Act is the third legislative attempt to censor online access in the name of protecting children from pornography -- and the third to be blocked by the courts. Gay and lesbian services have been among the plaintiffs in American Civil Liberties Union challenges to all three. The latest ruling found the law violates First Amendment free speech rights because existing software filters block far more than pornography. The Justice Department is expected to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. As the U.S. observed Memorial Day this week, gay and lesbian military veterans were officially invited participants in the annual wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery for the first time. The Secretary of the Army included the gay and lesbian group American Veterans for Equal Rights, AmVER, among 30 veterans organizations invited to the ceremony organized by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. AmVER -- formerly known as the Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Veterans of America -- was astonished that it was the Bush administration that was first to recognize them, although the President himself was visiting Normandy rather than present to lay the first wreath. Previously it took a lawsuit for the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance to win the right to lay a wreath at Arlington on Memorial Day beginning in 1980, among a number of other gay and lesbian veterans' struggles with the VFW and the Department of Defense. The Alliance left its wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns to honor "all servicemembers regardless of their sexual orientation who gave their lives." The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees this week named bisexual Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani a goodwill ambassador. Armani launched a campaign to organize support for refugees from Afghanistan. He said in a statement, "I have always believed that each individual has an opportunity to make a difference, and I hope that I may have a chance to do just that." Openly gay entertainment mogul David Geffen in early May made the largest single gift to a medical school in U.S. history –- 200 million (U.S.) dollars -- to swell the University of California, Los Angeles' endowment by about one-third. In honor of this whopping donation, it will henceforth be known as UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. Open lesbian Dr. Kerryn Phelps this week was elected to a third year as president of the Australian Medical Association by a nearly 4-to-1 margin. She's only the second physician ever to win three terms, the maximum AMA rules allow. Seven U.S. gays and lesbians this week became the first such group to climb to the 20,305-foot summit of Nepal's Imje Tse, or Island Peak. The biggest obstacle for the expedition organized by the nonprofit association GayOutdoors was a 500-foot headwall of ice and snow as steep as 60-degrees. Openly gay Canadian Jay Cochrane, self-styled "Prince of the Air," last week tightroped nearly 100 meters across Niagara Falls, walking about 40 stories high on a cable less than an inch wide. He'll be repeating the feat several times this year to raise funds for children's charities. Although spectators gasped, after a lifetime of tightroping, 58-year-old Cochrane called it "just another day at the office." Open lesbian Martina Navratilova has added yet another to her amazing list of all-time tennis records, becoming at age 45 the oldest woman ever to win a Women's Tennis Association tour title. Navratilova returned to the tour in 2000 after six years' retirement to play a few doubles tournaments. This wee k partnered with Belarussian Natasha Zvereva, she took the doubles crown at the Spanish Open. And finally... as told by the none-too-gay-friendly newspaper "The Scotsman", service in Afghanistan posed an unexpected challenge to British marines. While their seven-day Operation Condor failed to locate any members of al-Qaeda, they found by the dozens something at least one marine found "more terrifying" -- gay male villagers. Those local men not only openly displayed their affection for each other, they propositioned the visiting troops. One Corporal Paul Richard was quoted as saying, "It was hell. Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing make-up coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises." And Marine James Fletcher added, "One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours."