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'It's time to go': Brendan Nelson quitting politics
The big Liberal party shake up has continued, with former leader Brendan Nelson shocking colleagues and announcing he is quitting politics....
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Grim reality: Some bodies will never be identified
The gruesome reality of the search through the rubble of Victoria's bushfires has become clearer as police admit it is difficult to determine whether remains come from one person, or even if they are human....
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Jeff Fenech released over 'ridiculous' assault claim
Boxing great Jeff Fenech has been released without charge after being questioned over an assault....
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Bong bust: No charges to be filed against Phelps
No charges will be filed against American swim star Michael Phelps from his being photographed with a pipe typically used to smoke marijuana, police announced on Monday....
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Worst situation since WWII: Japan's economy plummets
Japan said it was trapped in its worst economic downturn since World War II, as once-buoyant developing economies China and India issued stark warnings that the outlook was worsening....
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Push to ban online blogs on arson suspect Sokaluk
Victoria Police want to ban messages being posted on internet blogs about accused firebug Brendan Sokaluk.
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Aussie in Thai jail recommended for pardon
Australian Harry Nicolaides, facing a three-year jail sentence for insulting Thai monarchy, has been recommended for a royal pardon.
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Girl starves to death over dentist phobia
An eight-year-old girl starved herself to death because of an extreme dental phobia that doctors failed to diagnose properly, a British coroner said on Monday.
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Primary teacher faces child sex charges
A Sydney primary school teacher has been charged with a series of historical child sex offences against students, police say.
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Raise taxes to cover dental care: report
$1b plan to keep apprentices off the dole
New laws to tackle lock-in contracts
Healesville on alert, toll at 189
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Stop sticking up for Julie Bishop
Bloggers and armchair experts across the nation have fallen over each other today to say what a brave person Shadow Treasurer Julie Bishop was by falling on her sword, but Tim Brunero thinks otherwise.
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Ground Zero through the fireys’ eyes
Piers Akerman
GROUND Zero of Victoria’s Black Saturday fires lies less than 4km east of the town of Kilmore, between Sunday Creek and Saunders Rds.
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SPIRIT OF 1976
Tim Blair
This is how we once advertised flavoured milk:
We were an innocent people, back then.
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SHAME BLAZONED
Tim Blair
Last night’s ABC Media Watch offered one of its rare total shamings, in this case of SMH columnist Miranda Devine, who pointed out that green policies contributed to the extent of Victoria’s bushfires:
That’s not opinion-writing, Miranda. That’s hate-mongering. You and your paper, which saw fit to blazon your ugly piece across the front page of its website, should both be ashamed of yourselves.
Oddly, Media Watch never wheeled out the shame hammer when Devine’s fellow Fairfax columnists Peter FitzSimons and Michael Leunig kissed up to a mass-murderer. Presumably they were considered to be love-mongering. Last week’s program was also illustrative, with an item pointing out several technical errors in recent ABC broadcasts. Viewers may have thought the program was critical of ABC failings, but no; Media Watch was instead criticising new technology that required fewer tax-funded jobs:
So what on earth is going on on the South Bank of the Yarra???New technology is what. Studio automation. A wondrous new system called Ignite. Efficiency! Cost savings! Progress! One person doing four people’s jobs! And all too often stuffing up.
Sky News seems to get by using similar technology. Give the ABC some time. It’s only recently that they’ve cottoned on to the idea of electronic payslips.
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SHARE WITH AL
Tim Blair
Global warming makes people share:
Some researchers believe we could owe our consciences to climate change and, in particular, to a period of intense global warming between 50,000 and 800,000 years ago. The proto-humans living in the forests had to adapt to living on hostile open plains, where they would have been easy prey for formidable predators such as big cats.
This would have forced them to devise rules for hunting in groups and sharing food.
Difficult to imagine Al Gore sharing food. You’d rather take your chances against a sabretooth sea kitten.
UPDATE. A nice line from Henry Halloway on our most beloved Gore Effect guy:
He’s the only former Vice-President tracked by both Secret Service agents and Doppler radar.
Barack Obama seems to have inherited the Gore magic. Not surprising, really, when you consider how close he is to environmental lunatics.
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CHRIST YOU CAN BELIEVE IN
Tim Blair
A church billboard in Singapore:
“Poor Jesus,” emails HM. “He’s reduced to being the Burger King to Obama’s McDonald’s.”
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STORY UNCUT
Tim Blair
Pakistan Dawn, the Nation, the Daily Times … Pakistan’s media seems less timid about covering a New York state beheading than does media in the US. Meanwhile, a gem of understatement from Croatia:
Muzzammil Hassan established his own TV network to show Muslims in a good light. Decapitation charges will not help.
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Your personal train
Andrew Bolt
Finally, public transport for the 21st century:
Another system, called ULTra (Urban Light Transport) and developed by the British company Advanced Transport Systems (ATS), also offers on-demand personal transport with virtually no waiting time to take individual passengers non-stop to their chosen destination.
It’s already being built and tested at Heathrow.
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Health fascists get muscle
Andrew Bolt
Please, no one tell Kevin Rudd. It’s just the Big Brother scheme that would appeal:
Six councils (in Britain) will be taking part in a pilot scheme which will see inspectors paid £8.50 an hour, with double time on Saturdays, to visit our homes and offer ‘advice’ on what we eat and what we throw away.
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Spend, spend, spend
Andrew Bolt
Another billion or more, from a man who already has us heading $35 billion in the red:
EMPLOYERS will receive cash subsidies to stop apprentices being thrown onto the dole queue, as part of a multi-billion dollar jobs rescue plan… The plan is expected to cost at least $1 billion, with some sources claiming it could spiral close to $2 billion…
In a first, the Government is planning to subsidise the wages of apprentices who face the sack - or who have been made redundant.
Since Kevin Rudd knows better than anyone who to employ, which industries to subsidies and how to spend, why doesn’t he cut out the middleman and simply nationalise the private sector?
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More fires could mean no water
Andrew Bolt
Another reason to build another dam, to diversify our sources and leave us less dangerously vulnerable:
MORE than a billion litres of drinking water — enough to supply Melbourne’s entire daily water consumption — was rushed out of one of the city’s major dams yesterday in a bid to avoid contamination from bushfires.
And this is even without the fires yet serious challenging our biggest dam, the Thomson:
Fire officials said the flames were last night about 40 kilometres from the water at Thomson.
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While Bolt and other journalists claim the frontbench scalp of Bishop, Costello points out the obvious
Mr Costello is believed to have told people that Ms Bishop had done nothing wrong.
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Save Afghanistan
Andrew Bolt
Australia’s Major General Jim Molan, who was chief of staff of coalition forces in Iraq, rightly wonders if we’re ready to do what’s needed to save Afghanistan:
Australia can increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan this year from 1100 to probably about 2000…
There are about 60,000 to 70,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, which will this year increase to about 90,000 as more US troops move in.... Yet many countries’ contingents are so hobbled by national caveats that they cannot effectively conduct offensive operations. ..
I have long estimated an adequate number of foreign troops in Afghanistan would be 180,000, based on history and recent experience in Iraq. Most, if not all, would be required to conduct offensive operations…
(W)e must also ask it of ourselves: Are we in this fight to win? ...An important benefit of an Australian increase of up to 2000, as long as they are permitted to fight, may be to begin redressing the jaundiced view that our allies take of Australia’s military resolve. This stemmed from our meaningless deployment of a capable battle group to Iraq that was rarely permitted to fight.
Molan, incidentally, is the vastly experienced can-do leader who clearly should be taking the job given to Police Commission Christine Nixon of rebuilding the towns destroyed by our bushfires.
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I wish Rudd had earned this kicking
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd doesn’t quite deserve this criticism from warming extremist James Hansen, which is a pity:
A YEAR ago, I wrote to Gordon Brown asking him to place a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in Britain. I have asked the same of Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd and other leaders.
The reason is this: coal is the single greatest threat to civilisation and all life on our planet. The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.
The German and Australian governments pretend to be green. The Australian government was elected on a platform of solving the climate problem, but then, with the help of industry, it set emission targets so high as to guarantee untold disasters for the young, let alone the unborn. These governments are not green. They are black, coal black.
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US grows cold on global warming
Andrew Bolt
That’s some cold year that the United States has had:
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Talking us into trouble
Andrew Bolt
Professor Bradley Schiller makes a criticism that doesn’t apply just to Barack Obama:
President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package…
This fearmongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics. It is bad history because our current economic woes don’t come close to those of the 1930s… The Congressional Budget Office projects a GDP decline of 2% in 2009. That’s comparable to 1982, when GDP contracted by 1.9%. It is nothing like 1930, when GDP fell by 9%, or 1931, when GDP contracted by another 8%, or 1932, when it fell yet another 13%…
Mr. Obama’s analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they’re also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren’t likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup.
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Meet Naim the “medic” and the other innocents
Andrew Bolt
The slaughter of the innocents in Gaza turns out to be not quite what the United Nations and the Leftist media claimed:
While the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose death toll figures have been widely cited, reports that 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the fighting, amounting to more than two-thirds of all fatalities, the IDF figures shown to the Post on Sunday put the civilian death toll at no higher than a third of the total.
The international community had been given a vastly distorted impression of the death toll because of “false reporting” by Hamas, said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which compiled the IDF figures…
Basing its work on the official Palestinian death toll of 1,338, Levi said the CLA had now identified more than 1,200 of the Palestinian fatalities. Its 200-page report lists their names, their official Palestinian Authority identity numbers, the circumstances in which they were killed and, where appropriate, the terrorist group with which they were affiliated.
Of course, the Israeli army would say that, wouldn’t they? But already we’ve had some cause to think there’s been a gross exaggeration of Israel’s “crimes” during its Gaza operation - with independent reporters who checked Gaza hospitals finding a shortage of the victims claimed by Hamas, and the UN caught out in false claims that Israel bombed one of its schools, killing 40 civilians, when in fact troops had returned fire on terrorists on the street outside who’d launched mortars from among a crowd.
But speaking of that non-bombed school, that seems not the only distortion of the facts in this most celebrated of Israel’s alleged atrocities:
In fact, he said, 12 Palestinians were killed in the incident - nine Hamas operatives and three noncombatants…
“From the beginning, Hamas claimed that 42 people were killed, but we could see from our surveillance that only a few stretchers were brought in to evacuate people,” said Levi, adding that the CLA contacted the PA Health Ministry and asked for the names of the dead. “We were told that Hamas was hiding the number of dead.”
Then there’s this:
The CLA gave the Post the names of several fatalities who it said had been classified by the Palestinians as “medics,” but who it stated were Hamas fighters, including Anas Naim, the nephew of Hamas Health Minister Bassem Naim, who was killed during clashes with the IDF on January 4 in the Sheikh Ajlin neighborhood of Gaza City.
Following the clashes, the Palestinian press reported that Naim was killed and that he was a medic with the Palestinian Red Crescent.
From a Hamas website comes this picture of Naim, the “medic”:
Of course, I do not deny - and do mourn - the innocent who were killed in the Gaza operation, either accidentally at the hands of Israel, or deliberately at the hands of Hamas:
Earlier, rival Fatah movement called for forming an international investigation committee to probe the killing of its 27 activists in the Gaza Strip, in addition to shooting of dozens in their knees and legs after torture… Fatah said in a statement that “it also wants a real and serious investigation in the Gaza Strip after dozens were executed and tortured by Hamas militants.”
But I do wonder: why are the UN and the media so peculiarly susceptible to Hamas’ spin?
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Swatting humans aside
Andrew Bolt
As I’ve said before, the trouble with demanding animals be treated like humans is that you then tend to treat humans like animals. Mel Broughton, for example, wanted even mosquitoes to be treated like humans:
Broughton… had posed as the acceptable face of the animal rights movement… He once declared he would not sanction experimentation on a single mosquito - even if it would provide a cure for malaria, which kills a million people a year - because he claimed an insect’s life was as valuable as a human’s.
Not surprisingly, Broughton also treated humans as if they were mosquitoes:
He planned and possibly carried out arson attacks using homemade petrol bombs on college buildings at the university. In 2006, two improvised devices, constructed with fuel and a fuse made from sparklers, exploded on Queen’s College grounds, causing almost £14,000 damage. Months later, two similar bombs - designed to stop the building of the new animal lab - failed to explode when they were planted under Templeton College as part of the same ‘ruthless conspiracy’.
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Pilger’s vileness
Andrew Bolt
I hope that at least any Jewish readers of the Left will end their infatuation with the propagandist John Pilger, who was so undeservedly honored by an obsequious exhibition at the Melbourne Museum.
Here’s the latest chapter of his never-ending apologia for totalitarians, Leftist authoritarians, war-mongers and terrorists, this time a rabid denunciation of Israel’s action against the Hamas forces in Gaza:
...the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist"…
Every subsequent “war” Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land…
(israel is) a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called Zionism…
In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50% of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention…
Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages…
Obama’s silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers.
(O)n 5 November last, ... Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger”. A cease-fire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government — which had imprisoned its violators — was shattered by the Israeli attack and homemade rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed”. On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz
. ...Gaza, effectively a concentration camp…
In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government...
Those who know the facts, or care to check Pilger’s claims here, will know how despicable this piece is in its half-truths, silences, exaggerations, misrepresentations and outright errors. Why no mention of the thousands of rockets Hamas had fired in breach of its ceasefire? Of Hamas’ murder of dissidents and political opponents, as democracy was silenced in Gaza and elections put off, perhaps for ever? Of the only true democratically elected Arab Government - in Iraq? Of Hamas’ opposition to a ceasefire, even during this latest fighting? Of Hamas’s record of terrorism? Of Israel’s need to protect its own citizens? Of the Hamas rocket attacks that continue even now? And so much more…
Above all, note that vile, vile parallel he seeks to draw, again and again, between Israel’s self-defence and the Holocaust.
It’s a scandal that for years this man could walk into any ABC studio in the country and expect a fawning interview. True, that’s slowly changing, but why was Pilger for so long treated as an oracle, and not the meanest kind of propagandist in some of the meanest of causes?
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Two God squads too many
Andrew Bolt
I used to think it a good sign when bikies turned to God:
AN ANCIENT religious enmity is at the centre of a new conflict in the Sydney bikie scene, with a new gang comprised mainly of Sunni Muslims warring with a group of bikies with a Shiite Muslim background....
The president of Notorious is a Lebanese-Australian with a long-standing association with a bikie from a colourful Sydney Sunni Lebanese family.... On the other side of the conflict is the president of the Comanchero City Crew, a Beirut-born Shiite who grew up in the St George area...
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Fix our Internet before you fix our constitution
Andrew Bolt
What brief does Telstra have to preach on this? What expertise?:
TELSTRA has launched an extraordinary attack on Australia’s human rights record, citing the Howard government practice of keeping children in detention as a reason why a charter of rights is needed.
In a submission to the national human rights consultation panel, the country’s largest telecommunications company wholeheartedly endorses a charter, arguing it would “provide greater clarity about the protection of human rights in Australia"…
Telstra says a charter could also help redress the “racist” underpinnings of the Constitution, which it said had failed to protect indigenous Australians from official injustices.
Which activist in the company - led by a Mexican - is pretending to represent the views of all shareholders? Or all employees? Why not simply put forward this submission in their own name, rather than borrow the company’s logo to give it a weight it doesn’t deserve?
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