Headlines Wednesday 8th April 2009

Escorts and an election: MP accused of credit card rort
A Federal Labor MP and former union boss has been accused of abusing his union credti card to pay for escort services and bankroll his election campaign.

RBA cuts rates by 0.25% - will banks follow?
The Prime Minister has urged banks to match a Reserve Bank 0.25% interest rate cut, with NAB so far rejecting it completely and CBA not passing it in full.

Police storm bikie clubhouse in series of dramatic raids
Police believe they've smashed a bikie drug ring, after raiding a number of properties across Sydney and in southern NSW.

Broadband plan the biggest infrastructure project in Australian history
The new $43 billion broadband network – the single biggest infrastructure project in the nation’s history - has been given the thumbs up by business, academics and internet providers.

'Devastated' D'Arcy expected to quit
Nick D'Arcy is expected to quit swimming after claims the controversial butterflier was misled for more than a year that he could return to the national team.

Rudd denies rift with RAAF
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has denied suggestions of a rift between him and the air force following......

Hawi's bail application delayed by fresh police info
A Sydney bikie chief who sought peace talks with fellow outlaw gangs following an airport brawl has......

Teen charged over pizza delivery kidnapping
A man has been charged over the robbery and kidnapping of a pizza delivery man in Sydney on......

One of world's rarest sharks caught and eaten
A megamouth shark, one of the world's most elusive species, was caught, carved up and eaten by fishermen from a town in the Philippines, the environmental conservation group WWF said on Tuesday.

US man coughs up inch-long nail
Prax Sanchez says he doesn't recall any serious hammer-and-nail mishaps in his past.

Yet doctors administering an MRI on the 72-year-old Colorado man last month abruptly stopped the examination to tell him there seemed to be something metallic in his face.

Right after the MRI, Sanchez coughed up an 2.5cm nail.

His doctor, Jamieson Kennedy, told television station KKTV in Colorado Springs that the nail might have been embedded there as long as 30 years. The MRI's magnetic force apparently dislodged the nail, causing Sanchez to cough it up.

Sanchez says he can't remember ever using a nail like it.

Man charged after allegedly slitting sleeping man's throat
A 23-year-old man from NSW central west has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly slashing another man's throat and attempting to stab him in the chest while he slept at home.

Cyclist Jobie Dajka found dead: report
Australian cyclist Jobie Dajka has been found dead at his Adelaide home, it has been reported.

Drugs from China found in picture frames
A man has been charged with smuggling from China a precursor chemical commonly used to make the illegal drug ice hidden inside photo frames, customs says.

Clashes as Thai protesters attack PM's car
Anti-government protesters attacked Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's car and trapped him inside a beach hotel on Tuesday as the kingdom's political turmoil boiled over into violence.
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ALL LIFE DWINDLING
Tim Blair
Writing for Time, a magazine on the brink, science-challenged eco writer and earth-doom hysteric Bryan Walsh describes a planet on the brink:
It is the black-and-white indri, largest of the lemurs … the species — like many other lemurs, like many other animals in Madagascar, like so much of life on Earth — is endangered and dwindling fast.
Time‘s editors would once have cut this sort of demented exaggeration. I know; I used to work there. But quality editing is, as Walsh might say, endangered and dwindling fast. Oddly, this runs parallel to magazine sales. Walsh continues:
Through our growing numbers …
What? A few words ago all life was dwindling.
… our thirst for natural resources and, most of all, climate change — which, by one reckoning, could help carry off 20% to 30% of all species before the end of the century — we’re shaping an Earth that will be biologically impoverished. A 2008 assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that nearly 1 in 4 mammals worldwide was at risk for extinction, including endangered species like the famous Tasmanian devil.
Famous for dying of a unique transmissible facial cancer, not climate change, as Walsh might know if he read his own magazine.
“Just about everything is going down,” says Simon Stuart, head of the IUCN’s species-survival commission. “And when I think about the impact of climate change, it really scares me.”
We’re all scared of something, I guess. It’s just that some of us are scared of things slightly scarier, on any empirical scale, than weather requiring fewer layers of clothing. Are the likes of Stuart terrified when someone takes off an overcoat? Is he Floridaphobic? More from Walsh:
When we pollute and deforest and make a mess of the ecological web, we’re taking out mortgages on the Earth that we can’t pay back — and those loans will come due.
Mortgages? Can’t pay? Loans due? Tell it to Barack Obama, pal.
The worst-case scenarios of habitat loss and climate change — and that’s the pathway we seem to be on — show the planet losing hundreds of thousands to millions of species, many of which we haven’t even discovered yet.
If we haven’t discovered them, how does Walsh know they exist?
The result could be a virtual genocide of much of the animal world and an irreversible impoverishment of our planet. Humans would survive, but we would have doomed ourselves to what naturalist E.O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Era — the Age of Loneliness.
We’ll all miss our lemurs. Imagine the loneliness! Bring it to a close, Walsh:
We can save life on this special planet, or be its unwitting executioner.
This ran as the cover story, by the way. Then all the editors and publishers and writers retired to their communal hut for the evening bark feast.
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PM COLLARED
Tim Blair
Gordon Brown cannot tie a tie.
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LOCAL CARS FOR LOCAL PEOPLE
Tim Blair
Kevin Rudd’s South Australian state Labor colleague isn’t helping him cut carbon output:
A move by the State Government car fleet operator to buy new four-cylinder cars from interstate has been blocked by Premier Mike Rann.
Instead, the South Australian Labor government will continue buying SA-built V6 Commodores rather than imported four-cylinder cars or even similar vehicles made in neighbouring Victoria. Jobs beat Gaia.
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HE SURE WAS
Tim Blair
The story in English is here, but a more vivid description of this encounter is provided by Flemish newspaper De Morgen:
Model schiet wakker op vliegtuig en ziet lief seksen met buurvrouw
That just about covers it, although another De Morgen line is even more succinct:
Daniel was doodleuk …
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HE RULES WITH IRON HEART
Tim Blair
Chinese spies monitor Kevin Rudd.
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BUY A CAR, SAVE YOUR LIFE
Tim Blair
Victoria’s annual road toll has halved since 1989. For one group, however, numbers are trending in the opposite direction:
Cycling injuries have soared in Victoria in recent years …

Research by doctors at The Alfred hospital and Monash University found the number of cyclists at emergency departments between 2001 and 2006 had risen 42 per cent, hospital admissions by 16 per cent and major trauma by 76 per cent.
A hospital tax – say, at a rate of around 120 per cent – should be added to the price of bicycles. These people are overloading the system.
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NAME NAMES
Tim Blair
In the long run, Mark Steyn is right about anonymity:
As for the broader philosophical question, in the long run I’m in favor of less anonymity. One reason why I admire Ezra, Kathy and Kate is their willingness to take the heat under their own names. Throughout the last year, I encountered far too many Canadian politicians who said, “Oh, of course, I’m behind you 100 per cent, but please don’t mention my name.” I’ve also encountered, discreetly, a bunch of Hollywood bigshots who say, “I loved America Alone. Er, but please don’t mention it to anyone” …

But at some point Canadians – and Britons, Americans, Australians, Europeans – are going to have to stand up under their own names, or they will lose their freedoms to an administrative tyranny …

Live free or die!
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Albrechtsen reads Robertson his rights
Andrew Bolt
Janet Albrechtsen explains carefully to celebrity lawyer Geoffrey Robertson the argument for a charter of rights - and why we might not actually buy a scheme that relies so much on the superior wisdom of people as pompous as he is:

An honest argument for a charter would go like this. By definition, politicians are elected by the majority and pay insufficient attention to the rights of the minority. To get elected, politicians pander to populism, to our base instincts and lowest-common-denominator politics. Even worse, they are too dimwitted and slow, too afflicted by venality and imprisoned by self-interest to care about human rights. They either pass bad laws or refuse to pass the laws they should.

These defects require correction by wise, experienced, unelected people not subject to the vagaries and shortcomings of the political process: those who know what we want and how to engineer a more just society. These people are judges. And you won’t be surprised that many judges and lawyers share this view of judges as the people’s saviours.
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Repeat after Comrade Wong, children
Andrew Bolt
Does propaganda come more crass than this competition, launched by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong?

The competition “Think Climate, Think Change,” asks students in years 3 to 9 to use short stories, poems and art work to answer the question ”what does climate change mean to me?”

First prize is a trip for two to Canberra (the winner and a parent), a Nintendo Wii console, sports kit and Wii Fit pack, and books for the winner’s school.

PS

Er, should a competition to scare kids about global warming really offer as first prize two plane tickets?
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What’s happened to our cash. and who will repay it?
Andrew Bolt
If the stimulus packages that are plunging us into such catastrophic levesl of debt are actualy working, why the need for this?:

THE Reserve Bank cut rates by 25 basis points to levels not seen in 49 years, amid signs that economic conditions are getting worse.

And how in God’s name will we pay for this as well?:

The Prime Minister announced today that the government has scrapped the broadband tender process. Instead, it will form a new company to roll out a national network. The federal Government will be the majority shareholder of this company, but significant private sector investment is anticipated... The jointly owned company will invest up to $43 billion over eight years to build the national broadband network. The Government will initially put $4.7 billion to the project.

Hands up anyone who thinks the private sector is in the mood at the moment to stump up the missing $20 billion, or that consumers are ready to pay the premium it will take to make this project pay?

And how, with the economy still sliding, does the Government intend to pay back the $200 billion-plus deficit it is building?
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There’s something to be said for our shocking diets
Andrew Bolt
Must every weight gain be presented as a crisis?:

Up to 40 per cent of Australian women now buy bras with a cup size of DD or higher, new figures from lingerie suppliers show.

So I’m not sure if “blame’’ is precisely the right word here:

Experts blame the cleavage boost on obesity, contraceptive pills and artificial hormones.
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Left to grow too strong for too long
Andrew Bolt
How on earth was this threat allowed to grow this potent?

MILITARY facilities are in lockdown across southwest Sydney over fears bikie gangs may try to break in to weapons armouries.
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Jews detected under turbans
Andrew Bolt

My eyesight is failing. Check again this video of men beating a 17-year-old girl in the Swat valley, and you’ll find they are not Muslims but ... Jews:

Federal Minister Senator Azam Khan Swati of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) said on Saturday that the flogging of the 17-year-old girl in Swat was a Jewish conspiracy aimed at destroying peace in Swat and distort the image of those Islamists who sport beards and wear turbans.

What’s frightening is that Swati is in fact a Western-trained lawyer and political scientist and is now Pakistan’s Minister for Science and Technology.
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A sex lesson no government should endorse
Andrew Bolt
This sex-education website is recommended by Queensland’s Education Department and the Victorian Government. Some very strange people have seconded those governments’ recommendations, to judge from the site’s on-line poll:
Is 13 old enough to have sex?

Opinion Meter:
Agree - 20700
Disagree - 12024
Not Sure - 2923

Adults shouldn’t be sexy with kids

Opinion Meter:

Agree - 14674
Disagree - 8922
Not Sure - 1704
I’d suggest governments withdraw their recommendations - at the very least until The Hormone Factory removes the polls which show an implicit endorsement of pedophilia.
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Kill the Talibani before you build the school
Andrew Bolt
Brigadier (ret.) Justin Kelly, former director of strategic operations in the US headquarters in Iraq, explains what it will take to win in Afghanistan, too:

(U)ntil there is security there be no real progress and, as a result, we should be doing more fighting and fewer good deeds…

The twin propositions that “there is no military solution” to insurgencies and that “hearts and minds” approaches are the only the way forward are based mostly on wishful thinking. Fighting is unattractive to liberal democracies while good deeds put a song in our hearts. All western countries would rather build a school than raze a village. Unfortunately, building schools is only marginally useful in creating an acceptable peace. The true worth of such actions is only realised after the war—in extending and solidifying a peace that can, invariably, only be achieved by the application of force.

A hearts and minds approach represents a strategy of exhaustion and typically engages one of the insurgent’s principal strengths—time. For the West, strategic exhaustion is a critical vulnerability: “if you"re not winning, you"re losing”. In any event a “heart’s and minds” approach cannot provide security in the first instance, and can’t be fully realised until there is security…

In Afghanistan a strategy focusing on the annihilation of Taliban power is the only way to achieve broad political progress. Until that is done, Afghan institutions; political, bureaucratic, police and military, will be denied the time and space they need to achieve a robust maturity. There will be a time when reconstruction and other aid will begin to produce dividends and that time will be marked by the establishment of security which, in Afghanistan, requires the removal of the insurgent and the extension of the coercive authority of the Afghan state into Pashtun areas. Until then NATO must be prepared to act as the proxy for the Afghan state in establishing control over the Pashtun population.

Without security there is nothing.
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Why the World Will Not Fight Evil
By Bill O'Reilly
As President Obama wraps up his overseas trip, he must be a bit frustrated. Once again, an American president asked Europe to fight evildoers, and once again, Europe declined. Yes, Obama did get some European money and training personnel for Afghanistan, but no combat troops, which are badly needed to inhibit the Taliban.

So what's Europe's excuse this time? They obviously disliked President Bush, but they seem to love President Obama — that is until he asked them for something.

Right now, only Canada, Great Britain, Australia and Poland are aggressively fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. The USA, of course, is taking the lead as usual. Germany, for example, refuses to let its troops fight. Italy and Spain will fight only if directly threatened. So Europe is content to allow the Taliban a chance to once again brutalize Afghans and give sanctuary to Al Qaeda.

Take a look at this video. A 17-year-old girl is being beaten by a Taliban fanatic simply because she talked with a boy. These scenes should be shown in every European and American household. Then we'll run the Al Qaeda beheadings. Then we'll run some 9/11 stuff and on and on.

But here's the truth. The world largely doesn't care what the Taliban and Al Qaeda do to innocent people. Nor does it care if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, even if the nukes could then be sold to terrorists.

Surely President Obama understands the weakness in Europe and the double dealing by the Russians and Chinese, who are actually helping Iran. The president may be a very popular guy abroad, but he is getting just what President Bush got: very little help.

The new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands completely the situation and has publicly stated: "It is a mark of disgrace for humanity that several decades after the Holocaust the world's response to the calls by Iran's leader to destroy the state of Israel is weak. We cannot afford to take lightly megalomaniac tyrants who threaten to annihilate us."

Netanyahu knows that many in the world simply don't care if Jews get slaughtered again, just as they don't care about that 17-year-old Afghan girl. So Israel may well attack Iran, and then the world will be looking at a conflict that will make the current War on Terror look like a touch football game.

"Talking Points" believes President Obama understands the danger the world is facing. But despite his popularity abroad, he still cannot unite the world against evil. He has loudly trumpeted change in America, but little has changed overseas. I just hope President Obama has a Plan B.
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It's Time for Tough Love
By Glenn Beck
It's time for America to experience some tough love, but instead we're being coddled. Think about it like parenting, but your kids in this case are our politicians.

Every day they're causing more trouble: underemployment is now at 15.6 percent, (by the way, that's the people who want jobs but have given up.) Our national debt is over $11 trillion and the people who can rescue us — the small business owners — are being told to redistribute their wealth instead of using it to create jobs.

Yet, we as parents sit back and basically laugh it off.

According to the latest FOX News Opinion Dynamics Poll only 42 percent of Americans are angry about the economy. Put down your abacus; that means that 58 percent of us are not angry that the government is running the money printing presses 24/7 and burying future generations in our selfish debt.

So now that our kids have realized that their parents are softies, they're going even further. Forget the small stuff — now it's time to fix the banks and the insurers and yes, even the auto industry.

But before we as parents hand the keys to the car over to our 7-year-old, shouldn't we at least figure out if they can really drive?

I mean, look at their track record:

In 1991, the lawmakers-only House bank had to be shut down, after House members bounced 8,300 bad checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — all of which were effectively, interest-free loans.

Then you have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which cooked the books like Enron on steroids. Except, unlike Enron, who didn't cost us any direct money, this fraud will cost the taxpayers more than $240 billion, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

You know what happened to Ken Lay (he was convicted and died before serving his time); meanwhile, Fannie's Franklin Raines pocketed nearly $100 million.

(By the way, last week the government quietly announced $210 million in bonuses for Fannie and Freddie employees, $45 million more than we wanted to string up the evil AIG executives for.)

Or, how about the broken education system that they created? The average American 15-year-old is now worse at math and science than kids from all 30 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — except (ready for this?) Portugal, Greece, Turkey and Mexico. Congratulations, America. No disrespect to the Turks, but that's quite the company we're now keeping.

When are we going to learn? I have no idea. Maybe never. But there's a lesson in Russia.

They have one of the world's least efficient car factories, with each of their workers producing just a quarter of the vehicles that we do each day, often with hand-held wrenches. These aren't the kinds of cars you cruise for babes in. It's the same boxy car they've been making for 40 years. It makes a Volvo look sporty.

Yet, despite their lack of innovation or efficiency, their government keeps pumping billions of dollars of aid in, with no strings attached.

Why? That's easy: To prevent 3 percent of their workforce from rioting like we've seen in France, China, the Ukraine and the Czech Republic.

Which brings me right back to the coddling.

It may seem easier to ratchet down our anger than it is to stick to our founding principles, but doing that will only make our leaders think they can keep pushing us even farther.