Headlines Monday 23rd February 2009

Turnbull to go greener than Rudd
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has indicated he'll advocate a far more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target than the government, and amendments to make the scheme less of a burden for business....
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Rees bows to pressure, cancels Robertson office
Premier Nathan Rees has bowed to public pressure and cancelled a $500,000 renovation of Prisons Minister John Robertson's office....
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Australian author jailed 'in bid for fame'
Australian author Harry Nicolaides knew he risked imprisonment by defaming the Thai royal family, says a former colleague who claims the writer was jailed in a bid for "fame"....
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Police on hunt for escaped ATM bandit
Detectives who arrested two men over a Sydney ATM attack have now revealed that a third man escaped....
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Clinton urges to China to keep buying US Treasuries
Hillary Clinton has urged China to continue buying US Treasuries, saying it would help get the US economy moving again and stimulate imports of Chinese goods....
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Heath Ledger becomes hottest favourite in Oscar history
Bookmakers have made late Australian actor Heath Ledger the shortest-priced favourite in Oscar history for the 81st Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood....
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Nationalise the banks? Obama considers capitalist heresy
Wall St is abuzz with rumours President Obama's administration is considering doing what 12 months ago would have been unthinkable – nationalising US banks.
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Australian missing in Japan ski resort
There are grave fears for Australian tourist Scott McKay, who has been missing for three days from a ski resort in northern Japan.
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Abbott backs Costello against Hewson's 'extraordinary attack'
John Hewson's extraordinary attack on Peter Costello was "quite unfair", opposition frontbencher Tony Abbott says.
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11-year-old shot pregnant woman, then went to school
More drivers losing their licenses than ever
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GREEN WEDGE
Tim Blair
It’s a Wong-Green conflict:
The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, has attacked the policy demands of the Greens and conservation groups as economically destructive and environmentally irresponsible because they would drive jobs and pollution offshore.
Keep our pollution local!
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SO DOES WATER
Tim Blair
We live in a strange new world:
President Barack Obama’s climate czar said Sunday the Environmental Protection Agency would soon issue a rule on regulation of carbon dioxide, finding that it represents a danger to the public.
Question: what doesn’t represent a potential “danger to the public”?
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MAWK THAT SCHEME
Tim Blair
Environmentalist Johnno reflects on the deaths of some 200 Australians:
I’m somewhat troubled by the level of mawkish introspection it has generated such as this weekend’s National Day of Mourning. That emotional intensity should perhaps be redirected at restoring Australia’s Emissions Trading Scheme …
Emissionites have already held their Day of Mourning. Several days, in fact. You’d think they’d leave one day aside for people.
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YOUR MONEY IS THE GOVERNMENT’S GIFT
Tim Blair
CBS condescender Bob Schieffer faces hot economist Michelle Muccio, during which he makes the extraordinary claim that people receiving tax cuts would be getting “something for nothing”:

Via Jim Treacher, who notes: “It’s hard to believe they’re both of the same species.”
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BAKOUMA KPATEKATOLA
Tim Blair
Sponsors of impoverished children abroad know the delight that follows every update on their kid’s progress. Drawings are especially moving, for some reason.

More moving – in fact, harrowing – is this piece from Iowahawk on the brief life and pointless death of Bakouma Kpatekatola. Follow the links provided to supply help of your own, if you are not already helping.
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LUCKILY, THEY HAVE A FEW JOBS FILLED
Tim Blair
The entire Australian population out of work; that’s how things are shaking down in China.
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HOT BASKET
Tim Blair
The ABC’s Quentin Dempster:
It is obviously getting harder to put climate change fires into the too-hard basket.
“Well, obviously,” answers Imre Salusinszky. “They’d set the basket on fire, for a start.”
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Welcome to your family, Dr Kamrava
Andrew Bolt
But this is one doctor who - if the allegations are true - should indeed be considered the father of the children, and be made to raise them:

LONG before she gave birth to octuplets, Nadya Suleman delivered for her fertility specialist. Like clockwork, she had babies every year but one between 2001 and 2006.

The six children accounted for a big share of the success at Michael Kamrava’s clinic.And he touted his feats with Ms Suleman on the local news.

But that track record — together with the birth of the octuplets on January 26 — has doctors and ethicists asking whether he disregarded professional standards and used Ms Suleman to boost his standing in the lucrative fertility field.

“A motivation would be improving his rate of live births,” said Alex Capron, a professor and bioethicist at the University of Southern California…

Ms Suleman, 33, an unemployed single mother, has said he implanted her with six embryos for each of her six pregnancies — a violation of national guidelines that specify no more than two embryos for a healthy woman under 35. In her last pregnancy, two of the six embryos split to create eight babies.

In 2006, when Ms Suleman was pregnant with the twins, she was featured with Dr Kamrava in a television news story about an embryo implantation procedure that he claimed could boost pregnancy rates by 70 per cent.

Those poor children. That idiot doctor. As for the mother, I suspect she’s too damaged to be held responsible - for raising children or almost anything else.
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Greens add fuel to the fires. Literally
Andrew Bolt
Greens didn’t just stop the fuel reduction that would have made the Black Saturday bushfires less intense.

Greens literally added fuel to the fires by planting “carbon offset’’ forests - which have now burned, adding the carbon dioxide emissions they were meant to remove:

Greenfleet will assess the impact of these fires on our forests over the coming weeks, with a view to replant if necessary or monitor recovery in areas where the impact was less severe.

Greenfleet plants the trees that allegedly offset the emissions from the Victorian Labor Government’s car fleet.

Now Treesmart’s Thornton forest may also be in danger, to judge from the CFA’s latest alert. And only a miracle has saved Climate Positive’s plantation:

The Balook planting was under imminent threat throughout Saturday 7 February. The fire started in Churchill, just 30kms to the north. Strong northerly winds pushed it right up to the site and 20kms beyond it until the winds shifted. Miraculously, the planting site was unaffected, as was the entirety of the Trust for Nature property.

But Climate Positive’s other big planting isn’t doing much for offsetting:

The Bush Family Reserve, located on the Perry River, while heavily affected by continuing severe drought, is safe from fire.

The AGW believers at Cities of Theory predicted this danger two years ago:

It can be expected that over the next ten to thirty years, many of the areas where trees for carbon sequestration will be planted will be in increasingly hotter and drier areas, subject to more intense and frequent bushfires. Are the resulting risks to the safety of rural communities acceptable?
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Green mafia
Andrew Bolt
When seeming counts for more than achieving, it’s no wonder that fast money boys are so attracted to green schemes:

A Mafia plot to take control of an alternative energy windfarm project in Sicily has been smashed, police have said.

CleanTechnica adds:

It has long been widely known that the violent organised crime cartels of southern Italy have major links to the waste management industry. However, it now appears they are making efforts to expand their portfolio of environmental businesses to include the renewable energy industry.

I’m not suggesting criminality in the following case, but some scrutiny is needed here, too:

The man behind (British) Labour’s fortnightly bin collections is embroiled in a row over his links with a tycoon seeking to build a £22million recycling plant.

Paul Bettison - nicknamed the ‘Bin Baron’ - is chairman of the environment board of the Local Government Association, which represents councils. He is a driving force behind fewer rubbish collections, calling them ‘efficient and hygienic’, and penalties against households that fail to meet recycling targets…

Mr Bettison was appointed a paid director of Wharf Waste Ltd and Wharf Aviation Ltd, both wholly owned subsidiaries of Wharf Land Investments… (which is building) a 30,000-ton recycling plant for kitchen, garden and animal waste on a former airfield.
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Paying for Rudd’s “help”
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s promise:
John Howard was “out of touch with Australian working families,” but Rudd promised help. He would take measures that would seek to make housing more affordable, and to contain the price of petrol and groceries.

Kevin Rudd’s delivery:

MEAT, especially beef, dairy products and wool could cost a lot more if farmers are required to buy permits under the Federal Government’s planned greenhouse emissions trading scheme, a farm policy think tank says. Because of the high methane emissions from cattle, beef could cost almost 25 per cent more in 21 years and 5 per cent more in 11 years, the Australian Farm Institute says...
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Blame may save lives next time
Andrew Bolt
David Burchell worries that Victoria’s royal commission into the Black Saturday fires won’t do its main job:

Bushfire inquiries generally work best when they recognise that grieving and the attribution of responsibility are important but distinct processes. This, perhaps, is why coronial inquiries - which are by nature inquisitorial and forensic - sometimes yield more answers than do royal commissions, which often seek to fuse the healing process and fact-finding into the one brief.

It’s not clear how far Victoria’s new royal commissioner, Bernard Teague, has yet absorbed this fact. Justice Teague has told us that he intends to enlist as many public testimonies as possible: his will be a “round-table” commission, with an emphasis on healing. But he worries that the attribution of blame is a vexedly difficult business. The problem, it seems, is the need for procedural fairness. “You can’t blame anyone, you can’t even be mildly critical, without giving them the opportunity to meet any allegation. The whole area has to be thought about flexibly.”

Yet one lesson of the 1994 NSW and 2003 ACT coronial inquiries is that procedural fairness can become an alibi of monstrous proportions. In 2003, ACT coroner Maria Doogan was assailed on all sides by public officials who declared that their natural rights were being abused, and that in attributing blame she was exceeding her jurisdiction. Even though, as the ACT Supreme Court observed when rejecting the ACT Government’s request to remove her, “it is often impossible to learn from mistakes made without finding fault on the part of individuals”.
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Hockey dives on Swan
Andrew Bolt
I missed it, but Bernard Slattery didn’t - and explains, with telling quotes, how Joe Hockey wiped the floor with Treasurer Wayne Swan on Q&A last week.
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Warming to some paid opinions
Andrew Bolt
Frankston City Council in Melbourne does its bit to subsidise the global warming gravy train:

Climate Change Officer

Permanent Full Time or Part Time

48K – 52K plus super

An exciting new position has become available as a Climate Change Officer to oversee Council’s greenhouse and climate change strategies and initiatives.

Sceptics may starve, while the gullible prosper.

“Is that your opinion or your career?”

(Thanks to reader Michael.)

UPDATE

Spot the trick in the job description?

As a selection criterion for this position is the possession of a current Victorian Driver’s Licence.

As in, if you have a driver’s licence, you can’t be the council’s Climate Change Officer. I mean, obviously, right?
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Divided even in death
Andrew Bolt
For heaven’s sake, can’t we at least be united by a tragedy? Was today’s memorial service for the Black Saturday dead really a time to play race politics, dividing us into First Australians and the rest?
The service was marked by music, with many wiping away tears as Indigenous soprano Deborah Cheetham sang the national anthem… Aboriginal leader Auntie Joy Murphy officially welcomed those to the land of the Wurundjeri people.

Actually, I think those who mourn the dead of places like Kinglake and Marysville consider that their relatives and friends died in land that was also theirs - and will be buried in land that was also theirs, too. They need no one to welcome them to the land where they lived and died.

But add to this divisive political posturing at the service the fact that the guests of honor were serenaded by didgeridoos, there was a smoking ceremony ... and were they really clapping sticks I heard in the singing of the national anthem?

Let me surprise you:

Many survivors from fire-ravaged towns, such as Kinglake, decided not to attend the service because they were still too traumatised. Many buses in Whittlesea, organised for the event, were left unused.

Not surprised, really. I mean, it hardly sounds as if the service was designed with the victims’ wishes, tastes and loyalties foremost in mind.
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Help the animals, hurt the humans
Andrew Bolt
When you want animals treated like humans, you’ll treat humans like animals:

Four animal activists have been arrested for their alleged roles in attacking and harassing animal researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz over the last 18 months, the FBI announced Friday…

Pope, Stumpo and Khajavi were accused of being among a group of protesters who attempted to force their way into a UC Santa Cruz professor’s home during a children’s birthday party last February. When the professor’s husband opened the door, he was hit by an object, authorities say.

Pope, Stumpo and Buddenberg are charged with publishing the names and addresses of several UC Santa Cruz scientists in July in a flier that read: “animal abusers everywhere beware we know where you live we know where you work we will never back down until you end your abuse.”

Soon after, the homes of two researchers on the list were firebombed. Those incidents remain under investigation.
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After all that journalists did for them
Andrew Bolt
Maybe now journalists - at least those who sympathised with the protesters who set fire to Greece - will finally see that the Left threatens them, too:

A Greek militant group that opened fire outside a television station in Athens last week has issued a statement in which it threatens to kill journalists.

The group, Sect of Revolutionaries, first appeared earlier this month when it opened fire with a submachine gun on an Athens police station, spraying the precinct with bullets but injuring nobody. It claimed that attack was to avenge the death of a teenager killed by police in December in an incident that sparked Greece’s worst riots in decades…

“Mister journalists, this time we came to your door, but next time you will find us in your homes,” it said.

Greek far-left militant groups have become increasingly aggressive following the December police shooting of the teenager and the riots that followed. Nobody has been killed so far, but authorities are alarmed that the terror tactics appear to demonstrate a desire to carry out indiscriminate killing.