Finance crisis claims 85,000 jobs, brings down a government
Companies forecast more than 85,000 job cuts in a single day as the rampant financial crisis hit workers across the globe and brought down a government.
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Copycats? ATM bandits strike again
Thieves who blew up an ATM in Sydney's south-west fled empty-handed but left behind a shattered shopfront.
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Italy PM under fire over rape gaffe
Italy's gaffe-prone Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is facing a hail of criticism after he said he wished there were enough soldiers to protect "beautiful girls" from rape.
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Deal to reduce Japanese whaling... with a catch
Australia is behind a plan which could see Japanese whalers kill fewer whales in the Southern Ocean, although that number could be made up in northern waters.
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Man found shot dead on the Gold Coast
A 32-year-old man found dead at a busy Gold Coast intersection was shot at close range, police say.
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Paramedic charged in Travolta extortion plot
A paramedic has been charged in an alleged plot to extort $US25 million ($A38 million) from John Travolta after his teenage son suffered a seizure and died at the family's home in the Bahamas.
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Taxpayers' $158,000 Cityrail cab bill
Ivan Milat cuts off finger, tries to post it
Cyclone on track towards Pilbara coast
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Labor's election chances gone if Robertson gets his way
Labor's credibility is truly on the line in NSW if it goes ahead with plans to give infamous union heavyweight John Robertson the job of Police Minister, writes Alan Jones.
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Let’s talk about the realities Mr Dodson
Piers Akerman
NEWLY-named Australian of the Year Mick Dodson certainly knows how to grab a headline, a feat he has perfected over years of so-called “indigenous” activism. - It is fascinating to me that the handpicked poster boy made a comment and Rudd said ‘no’ about thinking or discussion. It was never going to be easy for Rudd in government because his populist entry made him accountable to special interest groups but the size of the success of the push meant he didn’t lose any of them as he might reasonably have expected. Now he owes lots of people with leverage .. many at cross purposes.
Specifically, the Aboriginal issue is a problem for him. The racism inherent to the issue is appalling. I have Aboriginal ancestry but I was born over seas and so according to the ALP (who care about such things) I am not Aboriginal as I’m not a recognizable member of the community. Nor do I wish to be, because I’m not. But it would have meant legal aid would have taken my case and not ignored it recently. I would have had better access to Centerlink and the government would have gotten into trouble for lying to me in the senate (they still might).
I love Australia, and celebrate Australia day on Jan 26th because it represents, for me, the flowering of Australia in 1788, when the land became a home for many ethnicities and races and not a ghetto for some misplaced utopian ideal. My great great great great grandad, mak sai ying, came to Australia in 1818 and married the daughter of two convict forgers from Ireland. It was a new world, a new colony with new dreams. We should celebrate the hope, the love and the diversity. - ed.
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SHOOT THEM
Tim Blair
London’s Daily Mail reports:
It looks like a scene from a surreal post-apocalyptic film - a polar bear and her cub stranded on an iceberg float past the Houses of Parliament.
But the creatures floating down the Thames today were sculptures launched in the river to raise awareness of climate change.
Raise awareness of what? To assist the unaware, the Mail offers another image:
The caption:
This 2007 picture of polar bears stranded on eroded ice floes has become the iconic image of the impact of climate change on the Arctic creatures.
Everything in that caption – aside from the claim that it’s “iconic”, which is only true due to warmenist repetition of lies – is completely wrong, including the date of the photograph. It was taken in 2004. During summer. Take that and float it down the Thames.
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MOLAR BOLAR
Tim Blair
We’ve already seen a case of watercide, and now a New York environmentalist is particularly chewsy about public transport:
The frantic passenger who bit a veteran driver’s arm was upset that his bus wasn’t a hybrid, he said Thursday.
“She came on the bus, and she said she waited more than an hour for a hybrid,” said MTA driver Peter Williams, 42. “I said, ‘I’m not in control of what bus is assigned to me.’”
Then the eco-lady, Shelia Bolar, attacked:
Bolar chomped through a jacket, a sweater and a thick shirt, causing a bruise and swelling but not breaking skin.
“She bit through all that,” said Williams, still shocked.
Bolar faces assault charges, pending a psychiatric exam.
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NOBODY EXPECTS THE RSPCA
Tim Blair
These labradors seem a little on the chunky side:
Not that there’s anything wrong with a tubby dog. They look kinda happy, in fact. And some padding can come in handy when you live in cold, cold England. Now read on to discover the fate of these cheerful hounds …
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Counting on the NIMBY greens
Andrew Bolt
Spin, spin, spin:
THE Federal Government has helped draw up a secret deal to break the whaling deadlock by letting Japan kill more whales in the North Pacific in return for killing fewer in the Southern Ocean.
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Rudd the socialist
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann is as worried as me by the rush by governments to throw (our) money at the financial gorilla:
There are all sorts of dangers that flow from it. Not the least is that governments and central bankers ‘have the solution’. It’s just a matter of pressing enough of the right buttons, often enough.
So if ‘another $10 billion’ here - another $1000 billion there (in the US) doesn’t ‘work’, and even more dangerously, immediately - well, we’ll just throw another $10 billion/$1000 billion at it.
This is made more dangerous by the arrogant assumption that ‘we’ know better than those poor sods who messed up the Great Crash of 1929 and so dumped the world in the Great Depression through most of the 1930s.
‘We’ wouldn’t make the same ‘mistakes’.’We’ are just too clever. We ‘know’ you have to flood the financial system with liquidity and deficit-spend like there’s no tomorrow.
This arrogance begs a rather small but rather fundamental question. If ‘we’ are so clever, how did we get into this gigantic mess in the first place?
Henry Ergas has some specific worries about Kevin Rudd’s latest big spending plan, which could cause yet more of the unintended consequences that made its unlimited bank deposit guarantee such a disaster:
ALTHOUGH the details of the Government’s proposed lending facility for commercial property are not yet known, it is fair to say that what is known raises more questions than answers.... As for the longer run, the risk is that of protecting precisely those developers who did not take adequate precautions, while signalling to others the likelihood of government bailouts. The result will be to make property markets more, rather than less, cyclical…
At the end of the day, the only sense one can make of the proposed fund is as a wealth transfer: from taxpayers to property developers, banks and the managers of the most poorly run superannuation schemes that would otherwise have had to incur reductions in asset values. If forcing taxpayers, most of whom have low incomes, to underwrite the incomes of property developers and financiers is not “extreme capitalism”, it is very difficult to know what is.
Add Michael Stutchbury to the list of the alarmed:
While the crisis warrants emergency measures, it’s hard to see how Australia benefits from giving the rest of the world, including foreign investors, any impression that we are departing from the disciplined pro-market approach that produced our modern prosperity.
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Gillard evicted from Lodge
Andrew Bolt
We sure were getting used to the idea of a fresh, female face at the Lodge:
In the 420 days since Labor won office at the 2007 election, Julia Gillard has spent 102 days — or almost a quarter of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership — at the helm…
Mr Rudd’s frequent absences have given Ms Gillard the chance to broaden her profile and display her leadership skills — something Mr Rudd may later regret, according to political experts.
Not that Rudd minded, as of just a week ago:
He shows no anxiety yet. Shortly after returning from his Christmas break, Mr Rudd will hand the reins over to Ms Gillard — again — and fly to Papua New Guinea on January 27 for the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting, before flying to India on January 28 for a “working visit”, and then on to Zurich to attend the World Economic Forum between January 29 and 31.
But maybe that anxiety is showing, after all, because the roles have suddenly been reversed:
Kevin Rudd ... has cancelled his scheduled trip to this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland… Julia Gillard will fly the flag at Davos,
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No dissing the Prez, now that it’s Obama
Andrew Bolt
The Age imposes this headline on a Paul Krugman article:
Memo Republicans: Obama won, so get over it
A prize to anyone who can find an Age article with the headline:
Memo Democrats: Bush won, so get over it
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Now Australia Day is the problem
Andrew Bolt
First it was just the “sorry” that stood between us and reconciliation. Now that the sorry is said, the agenda moves inevitably to another hurdle - Australia Day:
Just minutes after receiving his honour on Sunday night, Professor (Mick) Dodson said the day of national celebration should be shifted because many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people regarded January 26 as “Invasion Day”.Speaking earlier on radio, he said not allowing a dialogue about a new date would be ”another act of exclusion” towards indigenous people.
To his credit, Kevin Rudd has answered this with an unusually crisp answer - one that would have been hooted down as insensitive and racist had it come from John Howard:
TO OUR indigenous leaders, and those who call for a change to our national day, let me say a simple, respectful, but straightforward no.
To which Dodson has replied with the Left’s usual refusal to take no for an answer:
Professor Dodson told journalists he was not worried by the Prime Minister’s remarks, but urged him not to “close the door to having a conversation about this”.
The Left love having a conversation kept open - until it reaches the conclusion they wanted. Then the debate is over, over, over. In this case, though, no answer will ever be enough for the reconciliation industry, whose very existence depends on a grievance.
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Too silly to breastfeed, instead
Andrew Bolt
Or is it vice versa?:
WOMEN who do not breastfeed their infants are nearly four times more likely to neglect and abuse their child, a world-first study of Australian women has found… Dr (Lane) Strathearn concluded that the promotion of breastfeeding could be a relatively simple and cost-effective way of strengthening the relationship between mothers and babies to prevent child neglect and abuse.
Correlation isn’t causation, as we so often fail to remember with global warming and man-made emissions. In this case it may well be the other way around as well - that women who abuse their children are also less likely to bother with breastfeeding.
And to help fill in that picture, add this, from a Victorian study last year:
POORER women are now less likely to breastfeed than they were a decade ago, increasing the chance of their babies becoming ill and being hospitalised, a new study shows…
Infants in the highest socio-economic group are more likely to be breastfed than in previous years, with a rise from 53 to 66 per cent between 1995 and 2005. But in the lowest socio-economic group, the figure dropped from 38 to 37 per cent over the decade…
“Moreover, (these) women are more likely to interact socially with women who are less inclined to breastfeed, such as those who are younger, less educated, overweight/obese or smokers,” Dr (Lisa) Amir said.
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