An investigation is under way into how a severely disabled teenage girl was attacked by a 22-year-old intellectually disabled man in a state respite facility.
Baby Natalie Hill found dead in crib, covered in rodent bites
A three-month-old baby whose body was covered with rodent bites bled to death before she was found in her crib in suburban New Orleans, according to an autopsy released on Wednesday.
TV reporter 'bashed by mansion squatters'
MANSION "squatter" wanted over the alleged assault of Today Tonight reporter Damien Hansen.
Police 'faked evidence' to catch criminals
SENIOR cops allegedly forged signatures, faked recordings and misused cash to get convictions.
Police raid Jackson doctor's clinic
Police swoop on Michael Jackson's doctor's offices, with lawyers revealing the star's death is being treated as possible manslaughter.
Judge says drunk sex was technical rape
A South Australian judge has provoked outrage with suggestions a man who continued to have sex with an unconscious woman should be called a 'technical rapist'.
Prisoner 'walks' out of Silverwater gaol
Prison officials admit an inmate who's escaped from Silverwater gaol probably walked out.
Mum drives son's body to police station
A woman has been charged with murder after she drove to an Adelaide police station with the body of her 16-year-old son.
Six luxury boats gutted in Sydney blaze
Six luxury boats have been destroyed in a huge blaze at a marina on Sydney's northern beaches, with......
Swine flu vaccine a month away
Experts hope a vaccine will be available in a few weeks as NSW becomes the Swine flu capital of......
Man tried to sell girl for child porn
A judge has sentenced a Texas man to 30 years in federal prison for attempting to sell his......
Corbys beg help for 'delusional' Schapelle
DRUG smuggler Schapelle Corby is so traumatised in jail that she has lost all touch with reality.
Lesbian dance parties no-go zone for men
MEN banned because they might pester women for sex.
Barack Obama says police acted 'stupidly' in arresting black professor Henry Louis Gates
US President Barack Obama stepped full throttle into the divisive issue of race relations Wednesday when he accused police of acting "stupidly" in arresting a black Harvard scholar. Police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have already apologised to eminent African-American professor Henry Louis Gates, who was arrested after having to break into his own home because of a faulty door last Thursday. - Obama never acts stupid, but doesn't seem clever, either. - ed
=== Comments ===
An indecent haste to lock in the science of hot air
Piers Akerman
SENATOR Penny Wong and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd both claim there is a desperate need to pass a Bill establishing an emissions trading system for Australia before the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen at the end of the year. They are wilfully misleading the electorate. - While I agree with Tuckey’s view, I accept Turnbull’s pragmatic stance. I don’t see the two positions as being significantly divergent. I see them as being aspects of the same side of the coin. Tuckey’s response is what should be the result of parliament’s foray into the matter of Global Warming. Turnbull’s stance is what precedes the rejection. Is the government capable of compromise? Turnbull can show that the government is divided on this issue. Tuckey would unite the government. A united government can carry the bill, which would be worse for Australia..
I am too aware that it is too easy to dump on the libs than to report on them. Rejection letters to my manuscript usually say my story is good, but there isn’t a market for it. That isn’t true. My story is good, there is a market for it, but the publishers would rather cut their own throats than hurt the ALP by publishing factual accounts.
The fact is Global Warming is a lie, and the Rudd policy will not benefit Australia, but may bankrupt her. One wonders if the ALP will accept my challenge and vote against this stupid policy which will ruin their chances of maintaining government. - ed.
===
MARSEILLE CONQUERED
Tim Blair
An historic victory for the French military.
===
Follow the hot money
Andrew Bolt
Who wouldn’t be a believer, in such a climate?
* The US government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.
* Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers…
* Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.
* Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.
Read Joanne Nova’s findings in full here.
But maybe all this spending really is saving us from warming. Observe that spending goes up ...
... and the temperature goes down:
It worked!
UPDATE
A new paper says changes in ocean currents, rather than carbon dioxide, explain most of the recent warming:
Overall the results suggest that the Southern Oscillation exercises a consistently dominant influence on mean global temperature, with a maximum effect in the tropics, except for periods when equatorial volcanism causes ad hoc cooling. That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5–7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation.
===
Tell Bashir, not us
Andrew Bolt
Sweet idea:
A GUIDEBOOK for politicians, police and public servants on how to talk about Muslims and terrorism without implicating the religion of Islam should be released by the end of the year. The book, A Lexicon on Terror, was conceived by Victoria Police and the Australian Multicultural Foundation, but was so popular it became a national project...
Have they sent a copy to Abu Bakar Bashir, the suspected leader of Jemaah Islamiah, who was jailed for inciting the 2002 Bali bombings? Here he is now defending last week’s Jakarta bombings, in which another three Australians died:
The main cause of this disaster (the bombings) is the Indonesian government, which undermines the supremacy of Islamic law. This (terror) will not end until the government follows the right path…
But the problem is we don’t know for sure that the victims weren’t involved in the fight against Islam. Even the thought of fighting against Islam is involvement. Everyone that thinks like that is allowed to be killed.
===
So safe that we need one of these
Andrew Bolt
What Victorian Premier John Brumby says:
Victoria remains the safest place to live in Australia, and one of the safest places anywhere in the world.
But what his police actually must now buy:
IT looks like something out of a Mad Max film but the armoured vehicle seen on Melbourne’s roads could become the first line of defence for Victoria Police. Victoria’s elite special operations group took the truck for a test drive yesterday to see how it stacks up on the mean streets of Melbourne.
===
See a link now, Mr Ramadge?
Andrew Bolt
The Age editorial, July 21:
Mr Rudd has no excuse, then, to conflate what is happening in Afghanistan with last week’s events in Jakarta. Apart from a shared jihadist ideology, there is no evidence linking the perpetrators of the Jakarta bombings — according to Indonesian police, a faction of the regional terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah, led by Noordin Mohammed Top — with the Taliban.
The Age, July 23:
INVESTIGATORS believe the terror network behind last week’s Jakarta hotel bombings received help from Pakistan-based al-Qaeda leaders.
Pakistan’s Daily Times today makes clear the link The Age editor denies:
On Tuesday, 13 Taliban, including two foreigners, were killed while fighting against Afghan forces in the province’s Chahar Dara district and 14 Taliban were arrested in the same district on Wednesday, Omar added. Citing intelligence reports, the governor claimed that about 20 Al Qaeda-linked foreign Taliban and 300 Taliban fighters had flooded into his province...
===
Are they sure warming is worse?
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s plan to slash our emissions may be useless, but it sure will cost us:
ELECTRICITY generators are pleading for between $5 billion and $20bn in extra assistance from the Rudd government to avoid an “industry crisis” under the emissions trading scheme, with some suggesting the compensation could be tied to new investments in renewable power.. The government is already offering the generators 130 million free permits worth at least $3.5bn over the first five years of the ETS.
Never has so much been spent for so little.
UPDATE
Brendan Pearson:
Work commissioned by state and territory governments suggests a loss of 126,000 jobs across the economy by 2020. Is that an acceptable burden?
UPDATE 2
How desperately cynical was Kevin Rudd’s decision to appoint former Liberal Minsiter Robert Hill to head his Carbon Trust? Let Cut and Paste explain:
The PM keeps an uncharacteristic diplomatic silence at a press conference as Penny Wong congratulates Robert Hill
CAN I say on a personal note how delighted I am that Robert Hill has agreed to chair the Carbon Trust? He brings to this position a wealth of experience. He also brings an understanding of the opportunities which exist, from his work internationally, the opportunities which exist for Australia to become a world leader in energy efficiency and when it comes to action on climate change.
Rudd was not so diplomatic with Matthew Franklin in the Courier-Mail on January 21, 2006:
RUDD doubted whether Senator Hill possessed the diplomatic skills to go to the UN. (He) said the government’s use of the diplomatic service as “a Liberal Party employment agency” had left diplomats without the capacity to realise their ambitions.
Or in the Canberra Times on the same day:
MR Rudd said he questioned whether Senator Hill was up to the task of taking on such a complex and multilateral post compared to a career diplomat.
Or in the Australian Financial Review on January 23, 2006:
(KEVIN Rudd said) Robert Hill’s appointment as Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations would represent “the comprehensive prostitution of Australia’s diplomatic service. John Howard needs to learn that the Australian diplomatic service is not a Liberal Party employment agency. And if this action is taken to appoint Robert Hill to New York, it will make a laughing stock of the way in which diplomatic appointments have been made.”
===
Only the victim’s race counts
Andrew Bolt
Another of those “racist” attacks Eddie McGuire deplores:
TWO men and a youth have been jailed over a vicious and “unprovoked” axe and hockey stick attack that left a man dead in Kealba last year.
Bao Tran, 17, died in hospital from massive head injuries seven days after the assault in Melbourne’s west, on February 22.
The little detail of who actually did the attacking is, of course, irrelevant. Let’s just hold another Harmony Day walk and denounce racism, shall we?
===
Hit ageism for six
Andrew Bolt
He’s right, of course:
Former Pakistan chief selector Abdul Qadir says Australia must bring Shane Warne out of retirement they want to beat England in the ongoing Ashes series.
“Age is not a factor, if Warne can play in IPL (Indian Premier League) I don’t see any reason why can’t he play in Test matches,” Qadir said.
===
Melbourne Club members should say they’re gay
Andrew Bolt
Men-only is bad:
Victoria’s Attorney-General, Rob Hulls, has signalled he would favour putting an end to protections that allow private clubs to be excluded from equal opportunity laws. Mr Hulls said exclusive clubs that denied women membership, such as the Athenaeum Club and Melbourne Club on Collins Street, were “fast becoming an amusing relic”.
Women-only is good:
A PARTY company specialising in dances for lesbians and bisexual women has won the legal right to ban men… The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission backed the ban.
===
Technically, she also said yes
Andrew Bolt
As soon as you hear words such as “technical rape” you know a judge is in for a hiding. And yet in the real world - or at least in this feral, rutting one - you know he’s merely trying to deal with a messy, boozy reality, and not the black-and-white of gender theory:
A JUDGE has questioned if a man who had sex with a drunken woman after she passed out should be “marked for the rest of his days as a rapist”, describing it as a ”technical rape”.
Sexual assault experts and victims groups last night said the judge should be censured while NSW Rape Crisis Centre manager Karen Willis said there was no such thing as a “technical rape”.
In the South Australian District Court yesterday, Judge David Smith said he was “troubled” by the case of Matthew James Sloan....
The court had heard Sloan met his victim at the PJ O’Brien’s pub and suggested they have sex across the road. She agreed and the two began to have sex but she fell asleep during foreplay - which Sloan continued despite her being unconscious. Both were drunk at the time, with the woman being “heavily intoxicated”.
Bad, yes, and squalid. And I don’t think anyone sensible will deny that the sex should have stopped when the woman passed out.
But while “technical” may not be the word, is this really a rape of the castrate-the-bastard kind? For one, this is a rape where the last word said by the victim was “yes”, and not “no”.
===
How dare the property not be a steal
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann over yet another Big Government fuss over a problem that actually isn’t:
THE hysteria over so-called underquoting ahead of property auctions is both very silly and serious…
At best this frenzy over so-called underquoting is the nanny state run rampant. The demand that the government solve all difficulties that people face no matter how trifling or self-generated…
At worst, it’s a further extension of the soft totalitarianism that increasingly afflicts us. No longer, I’m from the government and am here to help you, but to control and punish you for artificial crimes and high misdemeanours.
All sorts of really quite offensive as well as just plain silly and hysterical comments are being thrown around. Talk of unsuccessful homebuyers being “duped” by “greedy” vendors. Competition czar Graeme Samuel issuing warnings to “cheats”.
What, a vendor should sell their property at a deliberate discount? What exactly has someone—presumably the unsuccessful property buyer—been cheated out of? The ‘right’ to buy the property at an imposed or artificial discount?
At most, I’d say, the would-be buyer has lost no more than an hour on the weekend, thanks to not having done the most basic of checks on the true worth of a property that’s actually out of his league, or put that way by just one eager bidder more than the auctioneer had counted on. More fool him for being too lazy to even checked prices for similar properties, before chancing his arm with a bid of a million or more.
===
Save the planet! Charge customers extra
Andrew Bolt
Global warming is now the last refuge of the scoundrel. Evidence?
Telstra announced it would introduce a fee of $2.20 for every bill paid by mail or at a Telstra Shop or Australia Post, in line with most other communication companies including Optus, Vodafone and 3… The telco’s announcement also included a double whammy for customers who pay their bill with a credit card.
The surcharge applied to bills for those who use MasterCard, VISA and American Express will be increased from 0.69 per cent to one per cent of the total bill, while Diners Club card holders will be slugged two per cent, up from 1.68 per cent.
(Choice magazine) said the move was part of broader technological and environmental changes being embraced by major companies, such as the compacting of multiple bills to save on paper.
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