NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca has denied speculation he is set to challenge Premier Nathan Rees' leadership. - now we don't know who is going to replace Rees before the next election. - ed.
MP links immigration to terrorism
A FEDERAL Labor MP wants Australia's migration intake to be slashed so authorities can conduct more rigorous security checks. - the ALP are no friends to migrants. -ed.
Police car ploughs into CBD crowd
Two pedestrians were injured and a cabbie was trapped in his taxi after a collision with a police van at a busy intersection in Sydney's CBD.
Digital time will be 12:34:56-7/8/9 at 12.34pm today
At exactly 56 seconds past 12.34pm today, the digital time will be 12:34:56-7/8/9.
Bikie gang given hit list for rivals
A HELLS Angels bikie was given personal details of 47 members of the rival Comanchero gang - thanks to a court mix-up.
Maddie suspect 'looks like Posh Spice'
VICTORIA Beckham look-alike with an Aussie accent sought over the toddler's disappearance.
Women 'programmed' to not like his mum
IT has caused many arguments, but experts say wives expect to dislike their partner's mother.
Grandfather gets life for Cowra murders
A Cowra grandfather has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering his two young grandchildren and his wife.
Israel blamed for Arafat's death
THE Fatah party has blamed Israel for the 2004 death of its founder, iconic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. - absurd, Arafat was responsible for his own death in French hands. - ed
Website of hatred supports terror attack
HATE-filled messages on a Muslim website claim an alleged plot to attack an Australian army base would have been justified.
Last WWI soldier remembered at funeral
THOUSANDS of people have paid their respects at the funeral of Harry Patch, the last soldier to fight in the trenches of WWI.
=== Comments ===
JOHN HUGHES
Tim Blair
National Lampoon writer and teen film director John Hughes, one of the original pants-down Republicans, has died at 59.
===
MAN OF CONTRADICTIONS
Tim Blair
The Age‘s Paul Millar ponders the many sides of accused terror suspect Wissam Mahmoud Fattal:
Fattal won five professional light-heavyweight fights and lost one in Australia. The Lebanese migrant also won a gold medal for kickboxing at the 1998 Arab Championships held in Amman, Jordan.
But out of the ring the accused man has a reputation for volatility.
===
BRING ON THE BLUNTNESS
Tim Blair
Kevin Rudd’s blunt answer to a question about whether Australia would take in so-called “climate refugees”:
Let’s be blunt about the order of priorities here. One is a set of actions agreed to by the international community which minimise the impact of coastal inundation as we minimise the impact of climate change but taking the mitigation measures that are outlined in the possible contents of a new framework agreement and the various national actions to be undertaken here in Australia.
That’s Ruddlish for “no”.
===
BIG WON’T FAIL
Tim Blair
GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz considers public demand:
“It remains a fact that the American public buys big, high-consumption cars,” he said.
“It is completely wrong to hope that Americans will massively rush to economical vehicles.
“The mass movement towards ‘green cars’ is only taking place in the media,” he added …
Lutz – whose company is now increasing production of SUVs and trucks – is exactly right.
===
HATRED OF COLLINGWOOD IS A FORM OF RACISM
Tim Blair
“The Shabaabers really are bad eggs,” emails Tony the Teacher, an obvious racist.
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JUST LET US MAKE IT THROUGH THE WEEKEND
Tim Blair
Australian actors are on strike.
===
What if we simply disagree?
Andrew Bolt
Simple! Just treat global warming sceptics for madness:
Psychological barriers like uncertainty, mistrust and denial keep most Americans from acting to fight climate change, a task force of the American Psychological Association said on Wednesday.
Hey, treating dissenters for psychological problems worked for the Soviet Union, too.
UPDATE
Robert Gottliebsen warns that Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme is what’s really mad:
-- The first step is that a number of the Latrobe Valley companies will halt long term maintenance. TRUenergy has already announced this, but at least one or two other Latrobe stations follow. The power stations say who in their right mind would spend cash when they have no idea whether the generators will be viable in the short and long term because the level of carbon charges and carbon policy is not known… Victorians will have the main burden of the price hikes and blackouts.
-- The banks will have the power to take control of at least one Latrobe Valley power station within six to nine months. They will be trying to extract as much money from the station as possible so will also cease long term maintenance and go for spot prices. If Australian and Victoria think the blackouts next summer are going to be bad wait for the following year when the full impact hits the nation.
-- Victorian Premier John Brumby’s staff know exactly what is going to happen to their state and realise that although this is a Canberra induced crisis they will cop the blame. Brumby’s people have gone to Canberra and been met with a wall of Godwin Greches. They might not fake emails, but they have no interest what so ever in the truth about what is going to happen. ...
So how do we get out of this? Step one is to vote down the crazy carbon trading legislation and forget the massive grants needed to offset the cost of carbon permits.
===
If not from me, then hear it from him
Andrew Bolt
When it’s said by a non-Muslim like me, it’s enough to have you branded a “far-right” anti-Muslim bigot who is playing the “race card”. Media Watch then jumps in to defend the hate preachers and smear you for trying to hold them to account. SBS even destroys tapes that confirm the danger you’re attempting to warn against.
But perhaps when it’s now said by a Muslim such as Abdullah Saeed, head of Melbourne University’s National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies, we may perhaps have a more serious dialogue:
The silent majority (of Muslim extremists) should strengthen its campaign of undermining the militancy and hatred advocated by the extremists. This campaign should begin at Friday sermons, in mosques, at homes, through lesson at Muslim weekend and day schools, in study circles and youth camps. This is no doubt happening but more needs to be done in view of the present situation.I appreciate Saeed’s frank speech and courage, and wish only I’d have heard more such voices several years earlier - particularly when I was being vilified for saying the very same thing. But what is alarming is that Saeed actually needs to say this - that there really is now a great need to tackle a “theology of hate” that is otherwise “likely to become the standard interpretation of their faith for many disaffected young Muslims”.
There needs to be a strong and clear message that killing innocent people, be they Muslims or non-Muslims, is a grave sin and is prohibited in the strongest terms in the Koran and in keeping with Mohammed’s deeds.... Unless the theology of hate is challenged, it is likely to become the standard interpretation of their faith for many disaffected young Muslims.
It is important that mainstream Muslims stop—where that happens—berating the West for its supposed moral failings and preaching that Muslims cannot be fully Muslim in Australia if they are actively involved in Australian society as full citizens…
The basis of some hate-filled literature is that non-Muslims are kuffar (unbelievers) and therefore do not deserve to be treated with respect. Such views are rightly rejected by mainstream Muslims. But rejection is not enough. They need to promote the Koranic teaching that all human beings, whatever their faith, deserve to be honoured as the children of Adam…
It is important to deal with militant extremism at the ideological-theological level as a matter of urgency. Mere condemnation is insufficient. Sitting on the fence will not help either. Muslim Australians and their religious leaders can play a crucial role in dealing with the theology of hatred and violence.
Not such a tiny minority, after all.
===
Aly’s battle with racism - or not
Andrew Bolt
The Islamic Council of Victoria’s Waleed Aly on Lateline:
I grew up in an area in the eastern suburbs in Melbourne at the time, sort of through the 80s, where it was a bit odd not to be of an Anglo heritage, there was sort of mostly Anglo-Australian kids, and then me and a few Vietnamese kids, and that was about it. And I’ve got to say, when I was growing up in that environment I certainly was keenly aware and made keenly aware of my difference...
But here’s his wife Susan Carland on Turntoislam:
… you know my husband has a beard but people cant necessarily tell that he is Muslim,..he sort of fits in with everybody else...
In fact, here’s Aly earlier on Enough Rope:
WALEED ALY: It’s interesting my parents were odd in that way in that they didn’t try to infuse in me love of the home country and I remember having a conversation with my dad especially that he was keen for me not to be with the Egyptian community really tightly so that I wasn’t going to all the Saturday schools and all these sorts of things, and I played footy; I didn’t play soccer, and I played cricket and they’d never heard of cricket, and you know I think dad was actually very keen to make sure that I wasn’t going to be an outcast in Australia. So Egypt wasn’t really a major part of my upbringing, which is kind of odd.
ANDREW DENTON: Well cause you went there as an adult when you were 20. What was your experience of Egypt?
WALEED ALY: I experienced major culture shock. In that first week I remember thinking I just want to go home I just found the place rundown and dirty and crowded and inhospitable and and so on, and then something flipped. As soon as I spent that week there I suddenly fell in love with the place. There’s an energy about it. ... It was at that moment really that I kind of flick, I kind of arrived at a new level of religious consciousness in a way because as a Muslim growing up in Australia you know your religious identity is not it’s something you can avoid if you want to, and there were parts of my life where I had.
If anyone has been stressing his difference from the rest of us, it seems it’s actually been Aly, ever since he returned to the faith his father played down. It seems he then became a cause in search of a grievance.
But here’s another example, incidentally, of how the second generation of the diaspora is often more radical than the first:
WALEED ALY: I came back to Australia looking for religious things and when I looked around all I saw really all that was really being offered was a brand of Islam that I think really did inculcate a kind of fundamentalist outlook, a kind of thing that was about purity to the exclusion of everyone else who is by definition then impure. And it’s at that phase that I sort of started doing all the things that people who follow a similar kind of path do and it’s a I think it’s actually kind of form of youth rebellion in a lot of cases… Well, like for example the first thing you do, is you go, you find your parents and you tell them off about everything they’ve ever done in their life.
UPDATE
All that said, Aly did, to his credit, dispute the “Australia is racist” meme on Lateline.
===
Married to the story
Andrew Bolt
More conflicts in the media reporting of the Northern Territory than you’d find in the Balkans:
Former indigenous affairs minister Alison Anderson quit Labor on Tuesday, partly in response to the Chief Minister’s failure to condemn a story in the NT News that she claimed had “played the race card”.
That story, in Saturday’s paper, was written by Nigel Adlam, who is married to Andrea Adlam, press secretary to Chief Minister Paul Henderson…
NT News editor Julian Ricci yesterday said it had not been necessary to declare the journalist’s relationship with the government staffer in Saturday’s edition of the paper… “The relationship has been mentioned numerous times in radio and in the publication over a long period of time.”
Ricci then raised the personal circumstances of Nicolas Rothwell, The Australian’s northern correspondent whose partner is Ms Anderson…
In yesterday’s NT News, the paper reported how Ms Anderson’s “eloquently worded” resignation statement had been emailed to journalists from Rothwell’s computer. Rothwell told the paper he had not been the author of her statement.
===
Just went off a little early
Andrew Bolt
If true, this modifies my grief a little:
An Iranian plane crash two weeks ago – which left 168 people dead – was caused by the explosion of sophisticated fuses slated to be delivered to Hezbollah, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Saturday, quoting sources in the Middle East… According to the report, the transfer of arms was a special operation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and some of its members were among the crash victims.
MEANWHILE, it’s hard to know if this is Barack Obama getting tougher, or stalling on the one option left:
The Obama administration is talking with allies and Congress about the possibility of imposing an extreme economic sanction against Iran if it fails to respond to President Obama’s offer to negotiate on its nuclear program: cutting off the country’s imports of gasoline and other refined oil products.
The option of acting against companies around the world that supply Iran with 40 percent of its gasoline has been broached with European allies and Israel, officials from those countries said… In a visit to Israel last week, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, mentioned the prospect to Israeli officials, they said.
The White House refused Sunday to confirm or deny the contents of Mr. Jones’s discussions. But other administration officials said that they believed his goal was to reinforce Mr. Obama’s argument that the Israeli government should stop dropping hints about conducting a military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities if no progress is made this year, and to give the administration time to impose what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls “crippling sanctions” that might force Iran to negotiate.
That would be a big move. But will the rest of the world cooperate? Will sanctions finish the regime, or rally Iranians to it?
===
Can we survive without Googlejuice?
Andrew Bolt
Jeff Jarvis says Rupert Murdoch’s plan to make consumers pay for internet access to our content won’t work:
If you can charge for your content - if you are the FT or the Wall Street Journal, the only brands that do it successfully - and your readers can make money on your content, and pass the cost of it onto their employers I have nothing against it. But for most, pinning hopes for the survival of news on charging for it is not only futile but possibly suicidal.
Charging for content brings marketing and customer-service costs. Online, it reduces audience and the advertising they justify. Putting content behind a wall cuts it off from search and links; they cut off your Googlejuice.
When publishers build those walls, they open the door for free competitors, who can now enter the content business with virtually no barrier to entry. Publishers who fool themselves into thinking pay will save the day only further forestall the innovation and experimentation that is the only possible path to success online....Cut yourself off from links, behind pay walls, and you cut yourself off from the internet and its real value.
The dilemma for us is that if only 1 per cent of you wind up paying for the content we now give on sites like this for free, we still end up better off financially. And that means my wage, for one, starts to get covered.
But there’s one other consideration. Some of us who blog actually rather like the bigger audience, even if it doesn’t pay. Our egos may be in conflict with the need for our bosses to turn a profit on what they pay us.
===
Joke of a prime minister
Andrew Bolt
Just the jokes for a man who asks his own questions.
===
Not made by us. Just imported
Andrew Bolt
IBRAHIM Khayre is a decent and kind man. But the explanation he gives for his arrested nephew will not do.
“The Government don’t let us parents look after our kids,” the Somali refugee, now owner of a coffee shop, said this week. “We had no chance to discipline our kid.”
Khayre was speaking about Yacqub Khayre, charged with four other Muslim men this week over an alleged terrorist plot to kill Australian soldiers.
For the uncle, who brought Yacqub out from Somalia when he was just a toddler, here was proof that Australia was turning good Somali boys bad. How stupid police and welfare workers had been, he complained, to let the parentless Yacqub leave his uncle’s home against his objections at just 17, only to find radical Islam.
But I suspect these arrests seem proof instead of something harder to discuss: that in bringing such people to Australia, we’re more prey to strife.
Since this week’s arrests of Lebanese and Somali Australians (who must be presumed innocent) the reaction from many Somalis has followed a depressing pattern.
True, all praise is due to senior Somali cleric Sheik Isse Musse for categorically condemning terrorism, as does Ibrahim Khayre. Thank also the Somali leaders who tried to warn of creeping radicalism in some mosques.
But dig deeper and we see less of a disowning of the men charged than a disowning of Australia—especially of the institutions charged with our protection.
In Wednesday’s court hearings, two of the accused men refused to stand for the magistrate, claiming they’d stand only for their god. In a courtroom packed with family, friends and supporters, several women refused to stand as ordered, too, and one man wore a soccer top with “mujahid”—or holy warrior - emblazoned on the back.
Reporters were abused as “dickheads” and “faggots”, and several of the accused men’s supporters defied orders to turn off their mobile phones in court. One waved a newspaper at Yacqub Khayre to show him his picture.
At a private meeting at Coburg Town Hall between police and Somali and Lebanese “leaders” (are we now so divided?) the mood was reportedly only marginally less belligerent.
===
Speaking (above) of the reaction…
Andrew Bolt
Yes, again a tiny minority, but how unrepresentative?
HATE-filled messages on a Muslim website claim an alleged plot to attack an Australian army base would have been justified. And Somali community leaders have branded police as terrorists in the wake of this week’s anti-terror swoop.
Abdurahman Osman, a leader of Melbourne’s 15,000 strong Somali community, said police acted unreasonably.
“What do you call waking people up at four in the morning with guns?” he said. “It is the police themselves that are the terrorists…
Mr Osman’s outburst came as a prominent Muslim website featured a photograph of Australian soldiers in uniform with the caption: “Real Australian terrorists.”
This is not healthy at all, to say the least. It only confirms the point I make in my column today.
UPDATE
Osman is president of the Somali Community. Why did the Victorian Multicultural Commission last year give $2500 to an organisation whose president calls our police “terrorists”?
Indeed, what benefit to taxpayers - and to community harmony and integration - has been achieved with this spending:
The Victorian Multicultural Commission has provided 105 grants totalling $222,710 to Somali community organisations since 1999. The grants range from $14 000 for an orientation program for newly arrived refugees to many smaller grants for projects including festivals, office equipment, publications, community leadership training and professional development programs.
===
Not all scientists are on the warming teat
Andrew Bolt
Nice to know that below the babble, some Australian scientists are getting on with the business:
The sniper is an ever-present threat on the battlefield, and one that soldiers must always be on the lookout for. Now, a pioneering invention by Western Australia firm Acacia Research is making that task easier.
The Shot Location System (SLS) is a small, highly-adaptable device for detecting and tracking sound sources, particularly gunfire.
The SLS is a miniaturised set of acoustic sensors mated to a small processing package and GPS unit. The SLS, currently being trialled by units of the Italian army in Afghanistan, is designed to swiftly locate sources of gunfire. The sensor and processing package, contained in a unit about 8cm square, is mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), a drone flown a kilometre ahead of ground forces. Any weapons fire is tracked and pinpointed, and the shooter’s location relayed to ground forces.
It works by detecting both the sound of the gunshot and the crack of a supersonic bullet. It has multiple sensors, allowing it to compare the reading from each one and triangulate the source of the shot. This enables it to provide a range, bearing and elevation to the shooter, as well as the type of weapon. If the sniper is using a subsonic weapon to limit the firing noise, the SLS is still able to provide a bearing and elevation.
The SLS and its sensors can also be mounted on a soldier’s helmet, allowing for rapid tracking of incoming fire if a drone is unavailable.
Now that’s saving Australian lives.
===
Obama’s “mission accomplished”
Andrew Bolt
The war is over:
It’s official. The U.S. is no longer engaged in a “war on terrorism.”
Great news. So when’s the victory parade?
Neither is it fighting “jihadists” or in a “global war.”
Yes, yes. Got that. So we can relax, right? I mean, the jihadists we’ve been fighting in this global war must be defeated, then.
But wait. It turns out that like Kevin Rudd, Barack Obama has instead declared a new war - against language:
President Obama’s top homeland security and counterterrorism official took all three terms off the table of acceptable words inside the White House during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“The President does not describe this as a ‘war on terrorism,’” said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, who outlined a “new way of seeing” the fight against terrorism. The only terminology that Mr. Brennan said the administration is using is that the U.S. is “at war with al Qaeda.”
What, only against al Qeada? And not against, say, the Taliban, Jemaah Islamiyah, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, al-Shabaab, Abu Sayyaf Group, Al-Qa’ida in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam, Hamas’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hizballah External Security Organisation, the Islamic Army of Aden, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Jamiat ul-Ansar, Lashkar-e Jhangvi and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, too? And what might the common factor be in all those terrorist groups - and more I haven’t listed?
Oops. Don’t mention the faith:
“Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself,” Mr. Brennan said.
That would not be right. But how to tackle the idea that Islam is somehow at war with the United States?
===
President Obama and Corporate Corruption
By Bill O'Reilly
As you may know, the vicious recession we have now was largely driven by irresponsible corporations selling and buying bad mortgages, and big oil raising gas prices because of speculation.
The Bush administration failed to oversee the chaos and now most of us are suffering. President Obama campaigned on cleaning up corporate corruption. That was one of the changes we can believe in. But now the president has a major problem with the General Electric corporation.
On Tuesday, GE agreed to pay $50 million to settle a fraud claim lodged by the federal government. Simply put: GE misled investors by cooking its books. There are many prominent CEOs on GE's Board of Directors. How can they live with this?
Wednesday, the Free Enterprise Project called for GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to be fired, and certainly Mr. Immelt has a lot of explaining to do, because this is the same GE that has received $139 billion in government-backed low interest loans. In other words, taxpayer bailout money.
Think about that. GE defrauds the public, has to pay $50 million in fines, but could conceivably use taxpayer loans to do it. Amazing.
The situation directly touches the president because NBC News, owned by GE, has been perhaps Barack Obama's biggest supporter in the media, and Jeff Immelt was rewarded for that when the president appointed him to his economic advisory board.
And there's more. GE is now claiming to be a green company, saying it wants to clean up the environment and be paid for doing it. But that goes against General Electric's drastic pollution of the Hudson River:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ALEX MATTHIESSEN, PRESIDENT OF RIVERKEEPER INC.: It's high time that GE clean up the Hudson River PCB contamination and all the other superfund sites that they're responsible for around the country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
By the way, some analysts believe that General Electric stands to make hundreds of millions if cap-and-trade passes.
There is something very wrong about all this. A major American corporation promoting the election of Barack Obama and then seeking to profit from his policies. I mean, it's very simple. The Securities and Exchange Commission says GE is guilty of fraud, so how can its CEO be advising the president? That's insane.
It is long past time for the federal government to stop the nonsense and begin policing corrupt corporations. There is nothing the feds can do about a news organization promoting a political candidate, but to reward a corporation that does that with government contracts is flat-out corrupt.
We are going to continue watching this situation very closely. President Obama needs to distance himself from the General Electric corporation — immediately.
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