Digger killed in Afghanistan
BREAKING NEWS: AN Australian soldier has been killed and another seriously wound - Rudd is still on light duties (holiday) as the Chinese continue to detain an innocent man. The Afghan war is Rudd's one, and yet he doesn't seem to want to commit resources to keeping our soldiers safe there. One noticed that Rudd managed to get a US official to threaten China, yet as Julie Bishop has noted, he hasn't made the reasonable steps to guard the welfare of Stern Hu. - ed.
Rudd 'disrespectful', says Bishop
Rudd's refusal to raise the issue of a detained Australian Stern Hu directly with senior Chinese officials is disrespectful, the federal opposition says.
Bali suspect linked to bombings
THE Jakarta bombings that killed three Australians are "clearly linked" to an extremist wanted for the 2002 Bali terror attacks.
Bombers were Jemaah Islamiah members
Indonesian police say the two suicide bombers responsible for the Jakarta bombings were members of Jemaah Islamiah.
'Hush money paid to sleeze victims'
STRIP club visits and a bed hopping boss are just some of the claims of harassment at this government-owned business.
MP expecting child with G-G's daughter
LABOR MP Bill Shorten is expecting a child with girlfriend Chloe Bryce, even though both are still married to other people.
How Nuttall plotted to topple the Premier
HAD Gordon Nuttall's ego-driven political plan come off, he could be sitting in the premier's office today instead of a prison cell. - and the ALP would have lined up behind him. -ed.
Officials baffled as oil appears on beaches
BAFFLED officials are hunting for the source of oil globules which has fouled several metropolitan beaches in Perth.
Bullet-proof hospitals for crime-ridden city
FIVE major hospitals in Brazil's crime-ridden city of Rio de Janeiro are to be bullet-proofed because of frequent gunfights involving drug gangs, the state news agency Agencia Brasil said today.
Family died from violent attack: police
Police now believe a family of five who were found dead in their home, were killed during a violent home invasion.
=== Comments ===
Rudd is a bit player on the world stage
Piers Akerman
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd had a short-lived and undistinguished career in the Australian diplomatic service and now we know why. He wasn’t very good at diplomacy and the prospect of working for a Queensland Labor premier, Wayne Goss, obviously seemed vastly more attractive. - Ever notice how Rudd describes terrorists? He calls them ugly. Why is everything to Rudd about image? Why does Rudd claim to be Christian among Christians, yet supportive of abortion in government? Why does Rudd’s wealthy wife have to slim up to be seen by the public? Why are so many of Rudd’s colleagues in jail? When Rudd tries to expand his power base, why does he meet with criminals? Isn’t it the case that Rudd’s timidity in the face of terrorism is the result of more tragedy? - ed.
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SPUD NAZI
Tim Blair
A statue of IRA hero – and Nazi collaborator – Sean Russell has been vandalised in Dublin. Former Sinn Fein member and local councillor Christy Burke is upset by this, as Irish Examiner columnist Stephen King reports:
Some very naughty person has painted “Hitler’s friend” on the statue. For some reason, republicans from the Provo tradition sound surprised. “There seems to be some group in the area who are hellbent on destroying it,” Cllr Christy Burke was quoted as saying.
I wonder why that might be, Christy?
An earlier version of the pertayter Nazi’s statue was decapitated in 2005. To guard against a repeat chopping, the bronze replacement statue has a tracking device in its head.
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CHE KILLED AGAIN
Tim Blair
“Why was Che such a complete box office failure,” asks Rosslyn Smith, “when his image still adorns posters and tee shirts among self proclaimed radical revolutionaries in Western nations?” One reason, as director Steven Soderbergh tells the Guardian, is that fans pirated the film:
“We got crushed in South America. We came out in Spain in September of last year and it was everywhere within a matter of days. It killed it.”
Smith: “The irony of fans of a sworn enemy of private enterprise and bourgeoisie property laws ripping off a filmmaker seems lost on both Soderbergh and the Guardian‘s Henry Barnes …”
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SAINT PETER
Tim Blair
Everyone is making excuses for Peter Garrett, Labor’s pro-uranium, anti-water environment minister. One good sign from this: nobody seems to think that expanded uranium mining is such a bad thing.
UPDATE. I am wrong! And we’re all going to die, according to Helen Caldicott, who – as usual – places herself at history’s centre:
It is clear that Obama also understands this urgency. Indeed as a young Columbia University student in the early ‘80s, he was deeply concerned about the threat of nuclear war and wrote several fine articles proposing total nuclear disarmament with the Soviet Union. He also participated in the 1 million people peace march in New York in June 2002 at which I spoke.
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Whose rights protected?
Andrew Bolt
Are Canadians crazy?
Even the discovery of cocaine worth up to $4 million was no excuse for a police pull-over and search that trampled Charter rights, says Canada’s top court.
The Supreme Court of Canada has thrown out a drug conviction linked to the 2004 seizure because the officer who hit the narcotics motherlode “flagrantly” breached his suspect’s Charter protections… “While an officer’s ‘hunch’ is a valuable investigative tool—indeed, here it proved to be highly accurate—it is no substitute for proper Charter standards when interfering with a suspect’s liberty,” wrote Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin for the court…
On Oct. 24, 2004, the Ontario Provincial Police officer stopped the Dodge Durango near Kirkland Lake, Ont., that (Bradley) Harrison and a friend had rented two days earlier at the Vancouver Airport.
The constable had noticed the vehicle was missing a front licence plate. He quickly realized, however, that the Durango was registered in Alberta and didn’t require a front plate.
That’s where the matter should have ended, wrote McLachlin. Instead, the officer told court that since he already had his lights flashing, the “integrity” of the police required he pull the vehicle over.
Harrison said he couldn’t find his driver’s licence. A computer search revealed that it was suspended. The officer arrested Harrison on that basis, but then said he searched the vehicle in hopes of finding the lost licence—even though it was by now irrelevant. Two cardboard boxes in the back of the SUV contained 35 kilograms of cocaine with a street value of up to $4 million.
Process trumps judgment.
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Eleventh Digger killed in Afghanistan
Andrew Bolt
We have lost our eleventh soldier in Afghanistan. The announcement was made by the Australian Defence Force this morning.
The soldier was just 22, and was killed by an IED. Another Australian soldier was injured in the explosion.
This brings to 51 the number Coalition troops killed in Afghanistan this month - making it already the deadliest month of fighting there.
Britain has now lost more soldiers in Afghanistan than it has in Iraq. Canada alone has suffered an astonishing 125 fatalities. That said, the Coalition deaths in Afghanistan are still a quarter of those suffered in Iraq. It’s just that Iraq is essentially won, but Afghanistan has little end in sight. It’s also that Americans were left to do almost all the real fighting in Iraq, while now its partners are asked to do their share in Afghanistan.
Typically, it’s largely the English-speaking countries that have responded.
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The work of his own thumbs
Andrew Bolt
I suspect it will work for him, not least because it actually sounds like him:
HE refers to his wife as “T”, name-drops shamelessly and “can’t believe Mozart didn’t get a guernsey in Triple J’s hottest 100 of all time”.
He’s “KRudd”, the Twitter persona of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
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Top suspect. UPDATE: Digger killed
Andrew Bolt
The killer of three Australians in Jakarta this week may be the man that’s helped kill Australians before:
SOUTH-EAST Asia’s most wanted man, militant Islamist Noordin Mohammed Top, is behind the twin bombings of the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta, according to Indonesian officials, who have launched a manhunt for the terrorist wanted over a string of attacks since he plotted the first Bali bombings.
He should now be on the top of the most-wanted lists of both ASIO and the Federal Police.
UPDATE
Something about Islam attracts the violent and disaffected:
A 20-year-old British man, Isa Ibrahim, was sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison on Friday for planning a suicide attack on a shopping center in Bristol. Prosecutors said Mr. Ibrahim, a private-school-educated physician’s son who converted to Islam after a period spent as a homeless drug addict, had assembled explosives, ball bearings, a detonator and a homemade suicide vest at his apartment. The police said they arrested Mr. Ibrahim after receiving a tip from the Muslim community in Bristol that he had boasted of his plans to achieve martyrdom through a suicide bombing.
Good to see in this case Muslims protecting their faith and their fellow Britons.
Background on Ibrahim here. Once again it’s the university educated, rather than the allegedly oppressed themselves, that’s the real threat.
UPDATE 2
On another front, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith has this morning announced another Australian soldier has died in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. No further details yet.
UPDATE 3
One of the Jakarta bombers filmed:
His Australian victims were West Australian businessman Nathan Verity, Austrade official Craig Senger and mining executive Garth McEvoy.
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Heal thyself
Andrew Bolt
It’s all very well for a mother to demand society get tougher with thugs like her son, but I’d be asking a few other questions first. As in, where’s his father?
Sorry to sound so tough, but this is precisely the question you should expect from a society that gets tougher on crime.
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Not just another murder
Andrew Bolt
Truly ghastly:
A FAMILY of five including two children have been killed in what is believed to have been a violent home invasion in northern Sydney before dawn yesterday.
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Die now or fry later
Andrew Bolt
Shikha Dalmia explains very carefully why developing countries such as India and China will not agree in Copenhagen to slash their emissions, too:
Consider what would be necessary to slash global greenhouse-gas emissions just 50% below 2000 levels by 2050—a far less aggressive goal than what the enviros say is necessary to avert climate catastrophe. According to U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculations, even if the West reduced its emissions by 80% below 2000 levels, developing countries would still have to return their emissions to 2000 levels to meet the 50% target. However, Indians currently consume roughly 15 times less energy per capita than Americans—and Chinese consume seven times less. Asking them, along with the rest of the developing world, to go back to 2000 emission levels with a 2050 population would mean putting them on a very drastic energy diet.
The human toll of this is unfathomable: It would require these countries to abandon plans to ever conquer poverty, of course. But beyond that it would require a major scaling back of living standards under which their middle classes—for whom three square meals, cars and air-conditioning are only now beginning to come within reach—would have to go back to subsistence living, and the hundreds of millions who are at subsistence would have to accept starvation.
In short, the choice for developing countries is between mass death due to the consequences of an overheated planet sometime in the distant future, and mass suicide due to imposed instant starvation right now. Is it any surprise that they are reluctant to jump on the global-warming bandwagon?
Which I suggest means:
A: To “stop” global warming, on IPCC calculations, the developing world would have to slash its emissions by even more than the most vehement green now demands to make up for China and India. Even if that were possible, practically or politically, the economic devastation would be enormous.
B. Should that happen, China’s economic rise, relative to the weakening West, would be much, much faster. But so would be its political and military rise, making it a much greater strategic threat, given its nationalism and authoritarian values.
C: Arguments that Australia should rush to set a good example by voting for emissions trading before the Copenhagen meeting are the purest, most self-regarding fantasy.
D. If man is really warming the world, get used to more of it.
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Biden speaks, jobs go
Andrew Bolt
Glenn Reynolds has discovered the Biden Effect:
It’s like the “Gore Effect,” only for unemployment.
Examples:
Eight days after Joe Biden traveled to Ohio to defend the stimulus, arguing, “Roads plus teachers plus cops plus jobs equals a community — and that equals paychecks and prosperity,” the unemployment rate in the state increases from 10.8 percent to 11.1 percent. That is the highest in 26 years…
A day after the Vice President touted the success of the stimulus in Richmond, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Virginia lost 22,800 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent.
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