A Commonwealth Religious Discrimination Act for Australia?

There have been a number of attempts to create a constitutional bill of rights in Australia, but all have failed. The most recent exploration of the idea of a constitutional bill of rights by the Rudd government in 2010 stalled because of church opposition. Yet Australia has embraced international norms outlawing racial and sexual discrimination passed as ordinary legislation using the Commonwealth’s external affairs power. This paper discusses whether religious freedom is a norm sufficiently well established in international law that it could also be passed as ordinary legislation in Australia. It then investigates what an Australian religious freedom law might look like and whether it could be crafted so as to allay the church opposition which has shut down previous attempts to create a constitutional bill of rights

Future Sensitivity Studies for Supersymmetry Searches at CMS at 14 TeV

The sensitivity for CMS searches for supersymmetry is evaluated in the context of an upgraded LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 300 fb-1. Results for several key searches for supersymmetry are presented including direct and gluino-mediated stop and sbottom production and electroweak production of supersymmetric particles.Comment: Presentation at the DPF 2013 Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields, Santa Cruz, California, August 13-17, 201

Dark Energy and Dark Matter

A brief overview of our current understanding of abundance and properties of dark energy and dark matter is presented. A more focused discussion of supersymmetric dark matter follows. Included is a frequentist approach to the supersymmetric parameter space and consequences for the direct detection of dark matter.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, Summary of talk given at the XXIV International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies, Hamburg Germany, August 200