Thursday, June 18, 2009

Headlines Thursday 18th June 2009

Toxic heavy metals leaking from Wallerawang power plant into Sydney water catchment
Sydney's drinking water is being contaminated with heavy metals and poisons leaking from a power station in the NSW central west.

Govt creates new protect category for swine flu alert
The federal government has moved to a new alert level for swine flu, creating a category known as protect.

Autopsies suggest Air France plane broke up in the air
Bodies recovered in the Air France disaster show multiple fractures in the legs, hips and arms, which experts say suggest the plane broke up in the air.

Cahill to the rescue again as Socceroos beat Japan
Tim Cahill scored both goals for the Socceroos in 2-1 victory over Japan at the MCG.

Barack Obama proposes most dramatic regulation reform since 1930s
US President Barack Obama has proposed the most "sweeping" regulatory overhaul since the 1930s, vowing to stop future meltdowns in a financial system humbled by lax oversight, greed and huge debts.

Expensive cars don't improve your sex appeal: Top Gear study
An Australian study has found an expensive car won't help a man get a girl, unless he already has a lady with him.

Johnny Depp names beach after Heath Ledger
Johnny Depp has paid tribute to his late friend Heath Ledger, by naming a beach after him.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Please Help Max
The skype video below was an accidental skype...meaning I saw that I had gotten a message some time back...so tonight I just skyped this number...and wait until you see this video. I am very happy I happened to call since maybe we can ALL help. By the way, don't let this video upset you -- instead feel determined! This gives us all purpose tonight. We can inspire each other by working together to help.)

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP MAX! Watch this video and help. All you need to do is contact the North Carolina Governor, and North Carolina legislators ASAP (Contact Info Governor Bev Perdue Office of the Governor 20301 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-0301 Phone: (919)733-4240 Fax: (919)733-2120) and tell them:

"do not cut ANYTHING from CAP-MRDD...or punish families with a co-payment on the CAP-MRDD Program." Time is of the essence because the bill apparently is on the Governor's desk. There has to be a better way to cut costs than to take from this family. I do not think you will disagree with me.

After you watch the video you will know why this is so important. This is one of those times when we all on GretaWire get together and with our numbers do something really forceful. [...]
Watch the video HERE
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Parents BEWARE!
Has family-friendly YouTube gone X-rated? Plus, Bernie Goldberg's under attack from a Philly paper! He responds on the Factor!
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A Major Misdiagnosis?
With the deficit already in intensive care, is pushing national health care the wrong prescription for our ailing economy? Karl Rove breaks it down!
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Election Aftermath!
As the deadly protests in Iran continue and the world awaits recount results, how involved should the U.S. be?
=== Comments ===
Crusading Green is a lantern for tree moths
Piers Akerman
GREENS Senator Bob Brown announced last year that he might face a “$200,000 to $300,000” legal bill because of court action he’d taken against Forestry Tasmania.
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CITY FLANNED
Tim Blair
Your four-day Sydney forecast:

Thursday: Flannery, heavy at times. Light to moderate east to southeast winds.

Friday: Cloudy with Flannery, heavy at times. Light and variable winds, turning moderate easterly during the day.

Saturday: Flannery.

Sunday: Chance Flannery.
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PRETTY FLY FOR A HALF-WHITE GUY
Tim Blair
Barack Obama eliminates a White House invader:

PETA has sent him a handy-dandy bugcatcher … as reported by, ahem, The PETA Files.
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Yet another warming fooled-you
Andrew Bolt
Roger Pielke Jr reveals just some of the problems with the Obama Administration’s alarmist report which this week claimed the effects of global warming were real and already being felt. (Naturally the ABC swallowed the report whole.)

Pielke notes that the report doesn’t just misrepresent his own research, which actually disputes that we’re suffering more losses thanks to global warming. It also implies that the damage done by warming includes damage actually done by an earthquake and the 9-11 terrorists.

If the proof of man-made warming is so clear, why all these exaggerations, fudges and deceptions?
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The revolt in Iran continues
Andrew Bolt

The second Iranian revolution continues:

Supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi have gathered in central Tehran for a fifth day of protests against election results.

But the crackdown hardens
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Preferences detected
Andrew Bolt
But were the considerations racial, cultural or business?

Australian National University researchers Alison Booth, Andrew Leigh and Elena Vargonova sent out 4000 fake job applications to employers advertising on the internet for entry-level hospitality, data entry, customer service and sales jobs, changing only the racial origin of the supposed applicants’ names.

Applicants with Chinese names fared the worst, having only a one-in-five chance of getting asked in for interviews, compared to applicants with Anglo-Saxon names whose chances exceeded one-in-three.

Typically a Chinese-named applicant would need to put in 68 per cent more applications than an Anglo-named applicant to get the same number of calls back. A Middle Eastern-named applicant needed 64 per cent more, an indigenous-named applicant 35 per cent more and an Italian-named applicant 12 per cent more.

I wonder what the results would have been if the jobs applied for had been not so overwhelmingly in service industries but in, say, computer repair, surgery, physics, medical research and engineering.
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Costello the great
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann:

PETER Costello is Australia’s best treasurer. Plain and simple and quite frankly undeniable.

He’s best not just among the - decidedly, mixed assorted - bunch that have variously minded, misused or just been plain incapable of handling the nation’s purse-strings in the six decades since World War II. But across the entire 108 years of federation so far and 35 treasurers in total…

From the methodical but so crucial work of putting the budget back into surplus in the early years (and then paying off the Labor debt). Through the Asian financial crisis, the GST tax reform - maybe not quite as revolutionary. To what I - and all of you - should regard as the crowning glory of the Costello treasurership. Those annual tax cuts.
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Free money follies
Andrew Bolt
Yet more evidence of colossal spending under Kevin Rudd’s “stimulus” package on not much at all:

The veteran head of Berwick Lodge Primary School, in Melbourne’s outer southeast, pulls no punches, with claims of bungling, bullying and dubious accounting as he reveals how an upgrade to his school was mishandled. (H)is school requested a library and six classrooms under its $3 million funding allocation. It was instead offered a gymnasium worth an estimated $2.1m, although the school already had a gym.

There have been similar stories before.
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How WHO found the pandemic that wasn’t
Andrew Bolt
Michael Fumento on how one of the world’s mildest flu viruses became one of the world’s biggest scares:

A global flu pandemic is a “when, not an if.” So the World Health Organization (WHO) has been crying for five years. Now it can boast it was right. Problem is, the mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide, while old-fashioned seasonal flu strikes every nation yearly killing an estimated 250,000 to 500,000. But only 144 people had succumbed to H1N1 swine flu when the WHO declared its pandemic – far less than seasonal flu’s daily toll. Further, in Mexico, where the outbreak began and where it has been the most severe, cases had already peaked.

You see, ... (to) gets its pandemic, the organization used its own bizarre, unscientific new definition....

The organization’s definition for “influenza pandemic” once required “several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” But in 2005, it promulgated a new one that virtually ignores case numbers and completely ignores deaths. Now it requires “sustained chains of human-to-human transmission leading to community-wide outbreaks” in two parts of the world, with this addition: The cause must be an animal or human-animal flu virus; the latter known as a genetic reassortment.

Thus, under the 2005 definition, “community-wide outbreaks” of swine flu in two South American countries and somewhere in China could qualify as a pandemic. No deaths required. Meanwhile, a pure human flu that killed 20 million people would not qualify.

Fact is, the kind of flu WHO now freaks over is the least likely to actually kill.

UPDATE

Now experts in Victoria concede it might actually be good to contract this swine flu:

“Some good things have come from the current outbreak,’’ say the doctors based at the Infectious Diseases and Clinical Epidemiology Department of Austin Health, in Melbourne. “It is possible ... that people who caught swine flu this year may have some protection for next year’s possibly more aggressive strain.”

In which case, may it have been a mistake to try to stop more of us catching it now?
===
The friends of the Jews are on the Right
Andrew Bolt
Soeren Kern says that the Jewish groups now condemning the rise of the Right in the European elections are forgetting who their real friends are:

The knee-jerk tendency to stereotype the European right-wing as anti-Semitic obscures the fact that, with few exceptions, the only genuine European supporters of Jews and Israel are on the political right-wing. Indeed, in the bigger scheme of things, Jews have much more to fear from the European left than they do from the European far right.
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A Gross Injustice in Oklahoma
By Bill O'Reilly
As we have been reporting, a 5-year-old girl was raped and a 6-year-old boy, her brother, allegedly sexually abused by a convicted felon. The children are poor. They have no one looking out for them. And the Oklahoma governor, attorney general, presiding judge and the DA all threw these kids away.

Let's begin with the crime. On May 13, 64-year-old convicted felon David Earls pled no contest to raping the 5-year-old girl. District Attorney Jim Bob Miller made a deal with the attorney for Earls. The monster would only serve one year in prison. Miller says he was worried about the evidence. Judge Thomas Bartheld allowed the plea, even though Earls had been previously convicted of two violent crimes, and the 5-year-old girl qualified to be a witness.

Now "The Factor" has been investigating the judge, and we found out he has put children at risk before. In the most notorious case, Judge Bartheld placed a severely abused child with a grandfather who did not protect the boy. He was beaten to death by his mother, who had abused him in the first place. She pled guilty in that case. The 2-year-old boy, Ryan Luke, died because of Judge Bartheld's ruling leading the state of Oklahoma to retrain all judges in child abuse cases. Yet, Bartheld kept advancing in the Oklahoma legal world. Why? Because he's a friend of Governor Brad Henry, that's why. In fact, they went to college together, and Henry has done absolutely nothing in the latest case of the 5-year-old rape victim. In fact, we asked the governor for a comment. He is hiding, and so is Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson, who has done absolutely nothing as well about the rape of the 5-year-old. Now the Oklahoma press is confronting Edmondson.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The plea bargain in this case was made public almost four weeks ago, and yet your announcement of being outraged by it and starting an investigation was not made until yesterday, almost a week after FOX News went national with the story and the same day of your official announcement to run for governor. What do you say to those who find something cynical in your statement?

DREW EDMONDSON, OKLAHOMA ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, I would refer to the first statement that I made in this interview today. The attorney general does not supervise DAs.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

That is false. The attorney general can investigate any miscarriage of justice in Oklahoma. Mr. Edmondson is not telling the truth, and as you heard, he's running for governor, if you can believe it.

Finally, let's go back to the rapist, Earls. Recently, his own daughter, now an adult, came forward saying he raped her as a child. Despite that, Earls could be out of jail in just a few weeks. This is justice in America?

When Geraldo went to Oklahoma a few weeks ago, Judge Bartheld ran and hid. And he has good reason to hide. In addition to botching two horrendous child abuse cases, one leading to death, Bartheld sentenced Earls to county jail, not to state prison. It's obvious the judge is not fit to serve.

So let's sum up. Governor of Oklahoma doesn't care. Attorney general doesn't care. District attorney botches the case. And the sentencing judge gives incredible leniency to a proven monster. This is happening in the United States of America.

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