Monday, June 08, 2009

Headlines Monday 8th June 2009

Queens birthday celebrations. Although she wasn't born on this day.
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Millions in Rudd cash not claimed
ALMOST half a million Australians have their stimulus cheques still waiting for them at the tax office. - but what stimulated the economy then? - ed.

Airbus 'safe' despite sensor fears
QANTAS will not replace airspeed sensors despite safety fears.

Underworld beauty haunted by hitmen
SHAYDA Bastani has seen more violence in her 23 years than anyone should see in a lifetime.

William Billy Stewart went to 21st birthday party
A BRAZEN Kiwi fugitive who ran rings around police for more than three months was so relaxed he even attended a 21st birthday party bash while on the loose.

'Spank me' tape shame for Rubgy League
FURTHER shame for the NRL after Sharks boss allegedly offered to let an employee "spank" him and showed her porn. - at least he wasn't showing the players porn .. they might line up for that. -ed.

Fake mother 'hid body under kitchen'
A WOMAN is charged with murder after a new mum's body was found under her kitchen.

David Carradine family 'disturbed' by naked pics
THE family of late actor David Carradine is "profoundly disturbed" by photos published in Thailand that are said to be of Carradine's naked body hanging in his Bangkok hotel room.

Pirate Party wins European Parliament seat
A POLITICAL party that represents internet pirates has been voted into the European Parliament.

French media claim Omar Bongo dead
THE president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, has reportedly died after 41 years in power in the west central African country, the website of French magazine Le Point claims.

Sydney University offers protest degrees
ANTI-military activists have been offered training on how to disrupt Australia's top-level wargames with the US military in an official course run by Sydney University.

Britney goes topless in music video
BRITNEY Spears leaves little to the imagination in her latest shock-factor stunt.
=== Comments ===
PRISON FOR PRINTERS
Tim Blair
Green consultant Dan Cass asks:
Have you ever wondered why it is that nobody is going to jail for causing climate change?
Probably because changing the climate, besides being relatively difficult to both accomplish and prove, isn’t actually a crime. Yet Cass sees a precedent:
The best known precedent of international legal action are the war crimes trials held after World War Two, in Nuremberg and Tokyo.
This person is an idiot. Anyway, someone named Ben Oquist fired in the first response to Cass’s item:
Great piece. just printed it off for the boss. thanks Dan.
He printed it? Jail him! And who is Ben Oquist’s boss, sitting there reading Ben-supplied documents he could more easily – and much more sustainably – have received via email? Why, he’s none other than Greens leader Bob Brown.
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EXPLOSION OF LOVE
Tim Blair
An unlikely new entrant in the matchmaking market:
At 29, Tahani is considered a spinster by the standards of deeply conservative Gaza. So in her search for a husband, she turned for help to the best in the marriage business: the Islamic militant group Hamas.

“I gaze at all the men on the street and think, ‘Oh God, isn’t there just one for me?’” said the young woman with dark skin and honey-colored eyes, set off by a maroon headscarf.
Hamas usually set things off with a detonator. Progress! Sadly for dark-skinned Tahani, however, her possible suitors are … well, let’s not use the r-word:
The ideal of beauty in Gaza means tall and fair-skinned with blue or green eyes and light-colored hair — and that’s what men usually ask for. But most Gaza women have dark hair and bronze skin.

“If we see a girl that appears to match (a man), but she’s not physically what he wants, I’ll call him and say, ‘Well, she’s pretty, but she’s dark.’ Or ‘she’s short, but she’s white.’ We encourage them to be a bit more realistic,” [matchmaker Nisrin] Khalil said.
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BOYS GONE MILD
Tim Blair
Finally, a funny Chaser sketch:

Curiously, the two Chaser performers in the original sketch now don’t say a word. They barely even look at the camera.
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SOLID GEORGE
Tim Blair
As usual, George Monbiot is hyperventilating:
I believe that advertising is a pox on the planet. It is one of the forces driving us towards destruction, as it creates needs that did not exist before and promotes consumption way beyond sustainable levels. I believe that it is also socially damaging, turning ours into a more grasping, more atomised society, focused on material display rather than solidarity and community action.
So “solidarity” is important now, is it? Makes a change from September 18, 2001, when Monbiot was all hot for dissent. As for Monbiot’s arguments against advertising, David Thompson has the boy covered.
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OBAMA’S MAGIC CONTINUES
Tim Blair
An island is revived in India, and warmening is reversed in North Dakota:
Snow has fallen in Dickinson in June, the first time in nearly 60 years the city has seen snow past May. National Weather Service meteorologist Janine Vining in Bismarck says there were unofficial reports of a couple of inches of snow in Dickinson on Saturday.
In comments at the above-linked item:
Everyone is referring to Al Gore. Al must have visited North Dakota recently because wherever he goes cold weather follows.
Poor Al. The Gore Effect may be his legacy.
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Invest, don’t spend
Andrew Bolt
Steven Kates, a senior lecturer in economics at RMIT University, puts neatly the case against the Rudd Government spending billions on free cash, pink batts, public housing and school halls, rather than on something more productive:

We will have the debt, but no extra output to repay any of the monies we are so madly spending now… It is not buying more that creates growth. It is producing more that creates growth.
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A degree of professional protesting
Andrew Bolt
Is this a university or sheltered workshop for the chronically disaffected Leftist?

ANTI-military activists have been offered training on how to disrupt Australia’s top-level wargames with the US military in an official course run by Sydney University.

The University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies offered students a six-week “Peace and Activism Training Course” culminating in a trip to Queensland next month to disrupt Exercise Talisman Sabre. The $500 course fee even included travel expenses for the six-day trip to Rockhampton to take part in the “Peace Convergence” for the first week of the three-week exercise.

An online discussion group by organisers investigated by The Daily Telegraph reveals the group plans to blockade Rockhampton airport on Sunday, July 12 and other direct action.

“Direct action” is, of course, the licence that “peace” protesters give themselves to be violent.
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Gotta be in it to win it
Andrew Bolt
The Age is front-page upset that relatively few women got an Order of Australia gong today, and declares it to be unfair:

The perennial problem of the paucity of women recipients is reflected in a simple calculation: among 558 people who received Order of Australia honours today, 391 men were recognised compared with 167 women… However, a key problem appears to be that not enough women are even being nominated.

Here’s one explanation not considered: that maybe men are more likely than women to succeed in the public sphere, which is what these awards are meant to reward, and thus are receiving no more than is their due.
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The questions Fielding wants Wong to answer
Andrew Bolt
Family First Senator Steve Fielding now questions the basic assumption behind Kevin Rudd’s plan to tax our emissions:

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive. At the conference I attended on Tuesday hosted by the Heartland Institute, I heard views that challenged the Rudd government’s set of “facts"…

The question of whether global warming is a new phenomenon or something that is just part of the naturally occurring 1500-year climate cycle was never raised in any of the discussions I have had with the Rudd government. Has the government considered these questions, or has it just accepted the one scientific explanation for climate change at face value?

These are the sorts of questions that I believe need to be answered before any emissions trading scheme can be properly considered.

I plan to put some of these questions to Penny Wong and her advisers when we next sit down to discuss the carbon pollution reduction scheme bill… I want to know why she is confident carbon emissions are driving global temperatures when during the past decade carbon emissions have been increasing rapidly but according to some scientists global temperatures have not been rising… Has the Minister seen modelling which shows that solar radiation is highly correlated to global temperature changes, and if so, why can this not be a plausible alternative explanation for global warming?

If Fielding can get straight answers from Wong to these questions, he’ll have done us a great service.

UPDATE

Would it really kill SBS host George Negus to act like a real journalist and ask just one hard question of a notorious warming alarmist? I mean, how much more softball can you get? For instance:

Lord Stern, how important is the upcoming Copenhagen summit? Is that a crunch point for the globe?

And:

Should we be getting on the front foot rather than waiting?
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Saudi despot wants peace of Obama
Andrew Bolt
You wouldn’t give Barack Obama this right if you didn’t think he was on your side:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has urged U.S. President Barack Obama to impose a solution on the festering Arab-Israeli conflict if necessary...
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Sub-optimal wage
Andrew Bolt
The food had better be good:

THE highest paid non-officer in the military is ... the guy cooking food on a submarine. A senior sub-sea chef with more than six years experience under his belt earns up to $200,000 a year, the same money as a junior admiral.
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Zappia’s answer had better be good
Andrew Bolt
When this is the bloke in charge, who can be surprised by what the players then do?
IN an explosive development that has rocked the NRL, a recording emerged throwing new light on the circumstances surrounding the $20,000 payout to former Cronulla employee Jenny Hall.

In a dramatic tape recording, played on Channel Seven News last night, Cronulla chief executive Tony Zappia tries to blame a wall for the severe facial bruising suffered by Hall and then he attempts to appease her by showing her pornography on his work computer…

Channel Seven reported that Zappia cornered Hall in a hallway, came up close to her and stood on both of her feet before he lashed out at her. Zappia told the Herald the punch was accidental and he was shadow boxing.

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