Headlines Sunday 19th April 2009

'Disrespectful to fallen soldiers'
THE RSL says stores trading on Anzac Day are corroding the meaning of the sacred day.

Molotov cocktail hurled into nightclub
TWO people were set on fire when an ejected patron hurled a molotov cocktail into a nightclub after assaulting bouncers.

Mum wins police review with YouTube
POLICE forced to take action after mother posted footage of her handcuffed son allegedly being assaulted by uniformed officers.

Fair-go attitude sees tax cheats caught
TATTLETALES are dobbing in their neighbours, workmates and former lovers for being tax cheats, reaping millions for the ATO.

Ramsay's cuisine more like Lean Cuisine
GORDON Ramsay is serving his pub customers ready-meals prepared in a "food factory".

Prepare for another wave of illegals
THE Government has warned us to brace for more boatpeople, describing the surge as a "threat" which must be stopped.

Residents will pay to keep the lights on
No finders-keepers as windfall lands in bank
Appeals see killers, rapists freed earlier
Council gives okay to McFilthy eatery
=== ===
Softer border protection laws caused disaster
Piers Akerman
REFUGEE advocates have been shrill and vocal in their claim that it’s too simplistic to blame people smugglers for the disaster that occurred off Western Australia’s Ashmore Reef on Thursday. - In Gorky Park, the movie, the crime was people smuggling, where the smugglers were not above murdering their clients. Time has moved on, and the conditions for fleeing Russia are not as they were, but the issue surrounding people smuggling is the same. It was also an issue in biblical times. It doesn’t go away because the Libs are in power, and come back because the ALP are in. It is an issue because of bad policy. Rudd’s policy is bad, yet it has government endorsement because it isn’t the Lib one. But the Lib policy worked effectively.
Clearly this means that the ALP do not deserve votes. - ed.
===
EFFECTIVENESS UNEFFECTIVE
Tim Blair
An Australian government fact sheet on people smuggling recently boasted:
The low rate of boat arrivals confirms the effectiveness of efforts to target people smugglers engaged in this activity.
As J.F. Beck reports, that fact sheet was taken down last Tuesday – as the latest load of people-smuggled boat arrivals approached Australia’s north-western coast. So much for effectiveness:
The Federal Government has warned the nation to brace for more illegal boat arrivals, describing the surge as a “threat” which must be stopped.

“We have a real problem on our hands,’’ Immigration Minister Chris Evans said.
You don’t say.
===
WE’RE A MAGNET
Tim Blair
Rudd knew:
Australian Federal Police warned Prime Minister Kevin Rudd just weeks ago his border protection laws were making the country a magnet for smuggling.

The warning came in secret intelligence briefings prepared by the AFP that were delivered to senior Government ministers …

Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus last night refused to disclose details of the AFP intelligence.
Meanwhile, another boat is about to be intercepted.

UPDATE. They seek asylum v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.

UPDATE II. A key question, from Margo’s Maid:
If Kevin hates people smugglers so much, why did he give them the business incentives?
UPDATE III. Another warning, this one particularly awkward, for Kevin Rudd:
Australia must boost defence spending to give its military the hardware to deal with strategic challenges presented by China’s rise as a global superpower, an influential think tank has warned.

China’s growth meant the US, Australia’s main military ally, would lose its dominant position in Asia in coming decades, creating uncertainty and a higher risk of conflict, the Lowy Institute for International Policy said.
The institute recommends an increase in military spending from the current 2.0 per cent of gross domestic product to 2.5 percent – not quite the amount forecast by Robert Fisk, but an increase nonetheless.
===
Fat, few and feckless
Andrew Bolt
If the West’s interests need defending with force, don’t count on Europe for anything but criticism. Mark Steyn checks the figures:

The idea that Continental nations are going to find money to upgrade their militaries anytime soon is delusion: A few years ago, the U.S. spent 3.4 percent of GDP on defense and the other NATO members spent on average 1.9 percent. The most recent figures show that the U.S. spends 4 percent while the rest of NATO averages 1.7 percent — and it’s mostly high wages for unionized armies keeping it even at that level: The Continental country with the highest defense spending is Greece, and that’s almost all on personnel. The average age of a Belgian soldier is 40 — which at least ensures that the eternal Democratic plaint that we’re sending “our children” into harm’s way is replaced with the faintly surreal alternative of sending our middle-aged into harm’s way.

UPDATE

Europe shows its deadly might in the war against African pirates:

Dutch marines Saturday freed 16 fishermen held captive by Somali pirates who launched a failed attack on a tanker in the Gulf of Aden, officials said, as a Belgian vessel was taken hostage by sea bandits. NATO and Dutch officials said an attack on a Greek-owned ship from the Marshall Islands, the Handytankers Magic, had failed but the nine suspected pirates had to be freed after being briefly detained…

“There exists no legal framework in the NATO for arrests to be carried out,” he explained.

Chastened by their stern talking to, the freed pirates sailed away resolving never again to be naughty. Once they’d ransomed the Belgian ship.
===
Boat deaths: ABC hears only what it wants
Andrew Bolt
A mistake, or was the ABC desperate from the very start to play down this story? Here’s its original report on Colin Barnett’s revelation that boat people make have blown up their own vessel, killing five:

Four Australian personnel are among those injured in an explosion on a boat carrying nearly 50 presumed asylum seekers to Christmas Island, says the WA Premier Colin Barnett....

Mr Barnett said the fire around the boat was caused by an oil spill.

An ”oil spill”? Like some sort of accident? How the hell did the ABC interpret that from what Barnett actually said, and what other outlets accurately reported?

“It is understood that the refugees on the boat spread petrol and that ignited causing the explosion,” Mr Barnett told reporters in Perth.

As I said, maybe just a mistake. But given the ABC’s disgraceful record of spinning for Rudd, and against the Liberals and the facts, on this issue, I’m less inclined to believe stuff-up over conspiracy.
===
Warming alarmists cry wolf
Andrew Bolt
There seem to be fewer wolves around Lake Superior, so who do you blame?

If you’re a green group like the Nationals Parks Conservation Association, the answer is not just obvious but mandatory:

For years, our national parks have clearly demonstrated the effects of climate change, from disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park to record floods in Mount Rainier National Park and dwindling wolf and moose populations in Isle Royale National Park on Lake Superior.

But if you’re a scientist still keener on evidence than funding and fame...:

The wolves on Isle Royale are suffering from genetically deformed bones. Scientists from Michigan Technological University blame the extreme inbreeding of the small, isolated wolf population at the island National Park in northern Lake Superior… During this year’s Winter Study, Vucetich and Peterson found two dead wolves with misshapen vertebrae, one killed by other wolves and the other, which also had severe arthritis, frozen under the ice of a lake.

This was a particularly cold, hard year on the wolves and moose of Isle Royale. The researchers counted 24 wolves, close to the long-term average population size, but two of the four wolf packs did not have any pups that survived, Vucetich reported.

Sum up: the science shows that wolves are suffering from inbreeding more than climate change, and from unusual cold rather than unusual heat. But try telling that to a professional global warming alarmist.
===
Selling conservatives short
Andrew Bolt
My book sold well and sold out, so I can’t complain, even though some big outlets refused to stock Still Not Sorry for what seemed to me ideological reasons. Now reader Julian writes from France of his search for a spare copy:

Your book “Still Not Sorry” ... had been recommended to me by a friend in Adelaide, so when I was on holiday in Australia during Dec - Feb I searched all the second hand bookshops in the Melbourne central area, the Herald Sun and even a book fair held being in the Atrium to no avail. My determination to find a copy was increased by the reaction I was getting from the 2nd hand booksellers who made you out to be a rabid right wing demon!! Of all the sellers there was only one who agreed with your views (which at that time were unknown to me). One of the basement sellers actually said that they had had a copy the previous week and had placed it in the ‘Horror’ section but someone had then bought it!

I searched Coober Pedy, Brisbane outskirts, parts of Adelaide without any luck and eventually guessed that most people who bought it must be keeping hold of it.

My appetite whetted even further I waited until I returned to my home in France and checked out Amazon. There was only one copy available in the UK at a price in £’s sterling double the Australian cover price but I had to have it and it was well worth the trouble to finally get hold of a copy.

I’ve published this not to fluff my own feathers, but to further illustrate the stultifying group-think of the “intelligentsia”, and the institutional hurdles facing anyone who might challenge its favored myths and prejudices. Smug complacency rules too often, I’m afraid.
===
Humans declared toxic
Andrew Bolt
The green faith reveals itself in full contempt. Humans are by their living, breathing nature now officially pollutants of this world:

THE US Environmental Protection Agency has shifted course and deemed carbon dioxide a health risk, in a turnabout important to global warming-related regulation.

But what will trees use for food when carbon dioxide is eliminated.

Madness is on the hoof.
===
I could row faster. UPDATE: More mad ABC spin
Andrew Bolt
The ABC shows why Kevin Rudd has little need to fear the media. Here’s the headline on its report on the latest boat to try to get here:

Latest boatload began journey under Howard

Seventeen months ago? Slowest boat trip ever. Or greatest spin.

(Thanks to reader Brad.)

UPDATE

Let’s do the calculations for the ABC.

Number of days since Howard lost the election: 512

Number of hours in 512 days: 12,288

Distance between Kabul and Jakarta, near where these latest 70 were detained: 6000km

Speed of travel, assuming the asylum seekers left on Howard’s very last day: 0.488kmh

That means, in fact, that the asylum seekers journeyed towards John Howard’s Australia at literally the speed of a tortoise. Unless, of course, the ABC is bending the facts a little.

UPDATE 2

How furiously is the ABC spinning for Kevin Rudd? Check this TV news bulletin:

GEOFF THOMPSON: Were you aware that there was a change in policy in Australia and did that affect your decision?

NUR ABDUL HASSAN HUSSAINI: Yeah, I don’t know about that.

That truncation of the full exchange would leave listeners with the impression that Hussaini had used the “I don’t know about that” in the ironic sense of a native English speaker - in short, as a denial.

And that’s how the ABC’s far-Left Liz Jackson presented that same clip on AM:

He’s told our Indonesia correspondent Geoff Thompson that a softening of asylum seeker policy by the Rudd Government had no influence on his decision.

In fact, AM included more of Hussaini’s remarks, which were omitted from the TV report and suggest in fact he was being at best non-committal, rather than denying that Rudd’s changes made a difference to his plans:

GEOFF THOMPSON: Were you aware that there was a change in policy in Australia and did that affect your decision?

NUR ABDUL HASSAN HUSSAINI: Yeah, I don’t know about that. Just that we said that we have to arrive in Australia; there are human rights. They know the rights of human; they will accept asylum seekers.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Thinking of a change in policy in Australia. That never influenced your decision?

NUR ABDUL HASSAN HUSSAINI: Uh huh. I don’t know about that.

That is not a denial, as claimed by the ABC, but an evasion.

Here’s the unexplained thing about Hussaini’s travel plans: why had he spent the past 12 months in Indonesia? What were he and the people smugglers waiting for? The softening of policy Rudd introduced seven months ago? To see how Rudd would deal with the first boats to try their luck? And in all that 12 months of waiting to come to Australia, did the English-speaking Hussaini truly not know anything of any changes to the laws he’d have to deal with when he arrived?

That’s the ABC in full spin - putting words in an asylum seeker’s mouth and overlooking any great gaps in the logic of the pro-Rudd case it seeks to mount.

UPDATE 3

Truly, the ABC is shameless, as well as shameful. Five people are dead, almost certainly in part because of a change of policy by the Rudd Government that it was warned was dangerous. So which of the two politicians AM interviews gets an absolutely dolly of an interview and which is savagely presented as the irresponsible clown: Rudd’s Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus or Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull?

Not reporting, but barracking. Shame.
===
Both these men seem too happy
Andrew Bolt
2006: Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan socialist, doesn’t like the US president or his country:

“The United States empire is on its way down and it will be finished in the near future, inshallah,” Chavez told reporters… Earlier, Chavez initiated a verbal assault on President Bush, calling him “the devil” during an insult-riddled address to world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly. “The devil came here yesterday,” Chavez said, gesturing to where Bush had stood during his speech on Tuesday.

2009: Chavez now sees his dreams coming true:
===
Age alarmist falls through crack in ice
Andrew Bolt
The great warming scare this April has been the huge crack in the Wilkins ice sheft, generating thousands of headlines, like this one in The Age:

UN sounds warning after Antarctica ice shelf rips

Gosh, the gleeful reports from hyperventilating Age warmists such as Andrew Darby, the paper’s official Sea Shepherd apologist, who even warns of an Antarctic warming that isn’t:
AS IF on cue, an ice wall damming the endangered Wilkins ice shelf against the Antarctic Peninsula has shattered just as scientific alarms ring about the region’s rapid warming.

And then there’s this other Darby story about the dramatic collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf that also appeared in The Age:

the Wilkins shelf began a runaway disintegration… the initial loss of 570 square kilometres in a few days last February raised the alarm

But wait. That last story was actually written last year. In fact, some outlets are even printing last year’s pictures of a crack in the Wilkins glacier as if they were pictures of the crack this year.

Anthony Watts notes at the above link that the Wilkins has been a regular favorite of the Chicken Little crowd:

It seems that not only is the photography recycled, so is the storyline. It seems to happen every year, about this time. Note the photos show shear failure and cracks, not melted ice. Shear failure is mostly mechanical-stress related, though ice does tend to be more brittle at colder temperatures.

And let’s remind ourselves of the long-term trend of more southern hemisphere ice, not less: