CRUSADING journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who has uncovered stories in trouble spots and war zones around the world, has won the Sydney Peace Prize for his extensive career. Famous for denunciations of Israel and the US that have not passed the truth test.
Australia obsessed with celebrities - Rush
ACTOR Geoffrey Rush says Australia has become too obsessed with commercial success, celebrities and red carpet glitz and should instead celebrate creative, independent filmmaking. - No Geoff, just the PM. - ed.
2Day FM suspends Kyle, Jackie O Show
The Kyle and Jackie O radio show has been suspended indefinitely after last week's lie detector stunt, with Kyle Sandilands saying he is unable to go on air.
Two arrested after Sydney siege
TWO men have been arrested and are being questioned by police outside a home in Sydney's west following a siege.
Factory blaze contained in Sydney's west
Emergency services are tackling a large blaze at a storage facility in Sydney's west say the fire has been contained.
IVF not for gays or single women: AMA
The head of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Andrew Pesce, has said that IVF should not be a "lifestyle choice" and use of the treatment by same sex couples goes against the "natural order".
Government commits to stop cyber-bullies
The federal government is to fund a national pilot project aimed at addressing cyber-bullying in schools.
Uproar over erotic photo shoot in church
A photographer who used an historic for an erotic photoshoot has caused uproar in the local community, which has decided to sue him.
Homeless man shuts down NY airport
A homeless man is accused of creating a bomb scare that interrupted flights at New York's LaGuardia....
Teen killed instantly in Thredbo crash
A 16-year-old girl died instantly after hitting a tree while skiing at Thredbo in southern NSW....
$280 million to combat homelessness
More than $280 million is being spent reducing homelessness in NSW over the next four years....
Banks finally starting to listen on fees
TWO more banks cut overdrawn account fees for their customers.
David Hicks marries in secret ceremony
FORMER Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks has married after a 12-month courtship.
Dads need to make 'dates' with their kids
EXPERT says fathers leave too much to mothers and children with uninvolved dads are twice as likely to abuse drugs later.
Mass burial for hundreds of clash victims
NIGERIAN authorities have given a mass burial to victims of last week's Islamist uprising which killed hundreds of people.
Contaminated KFC crippled girl: court
The parents of a 7-year-old girl allegedly left crippled and brain-damaged by contaminated chicken from a Sydney KFC store are suing the food chain for over $10 million.
Babysitter charged with sleepover murder
A babysitter has been charged with the murder of a four-year-old boy during a sleepover in Hobart.
Bank teller fired over robbery heroics
A bank teller has lost his job because he tackled a would-be bank robber and held him until police arrived.
13yo girl fights off kidnapping attempt
A man has pulled a teenage girl off her bike as she was cycling with her sister in a brazen daylight attack on the NSW central coast.
Journalist ready for '40,000' lashes
A Sudanese journalist facing 40 lashes for wearing "indecent" trousers said she is ready to be whipped 40,000 times in her bid to change the country's harsh laws.
Mum gambled daughters' cheerleading cash
A New Zealand woman has been found guilty of stealing money from her daughters' cheerleading squad......
'See you soon': teen charged with murder
A man charged with murdering another man in western Sydney has appeared briefly in court, telling....
'Delusional' mum guilty of manslaughter
A Sydney woman who hacked her partner to death with a tomahawk has been convicted of manslaughter....
=== Comments ===
PEACE AND CONFLICT
Tim Blair
Terrorism supporter, Jew-hater and Tali-tubby David Hicks, famously rendered thin and ghostlike by five years in Gitmo – until it turned out he’d actually stacked on bunches of weight – marries peacenik Aloysia Brooks. She’s a perfect partner for someone who once fired hundreds of bullets at Indian soldiers protecting their border:
Ms Brooks studied at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and writes poetry on human rights issues.
Hicks is something of a poet himself:
Listen, have you got any friends
I can f--- when I get home?
They have to be good-looking
And I prefer big tits as well.
It doesn’t rhyme, but that’s modern poetry for you.
===
OPPRESSION REQUESTED
Tim Blair
The Age‘s coverage of gay marriage rallies detects reality:
Providing a reality check, Radical Women spokeswoman Alison Thorne told the Melbourne rally that marriage was an oppressive institution designed to condemn women to lives of slavery, but same-sex couples should nevertheless be equally entitled to it. She then led the crowd in a chant: ‘‘Kevin Rudd, ALP, we demand equality.’’
Next they’ll be demanding equal-rights burqas.
===
RULES CHANGED
Tim Blair
It’s interesting to hear Simon Sheikh, director of leftoid activist group Get Up!, demanding a ban on political donations (above a certain point; a point above which individual donations to Get Up! would be banned, coincidentally). The logical extension of this would mean a ban on Get Up!, which relies on donations and exists solely to deliver bundles of dumb influence to the parties it supports. Sheikh opposes individual donations of $10,000, but rejoices in Get Up!’s 20,000 donations of $38 each – a sum of $760,000, which he describes as the opposite of “fat cat fundraising”.
===
JACKIE OFF, KYLE KANCELLED
Tim Blair
No Kyle and Jackie O for at least a week. Australian teens may enjoy several days of relative – crucial word, that – safety.
===
FORCE OF THE SOURCE
Tim Blair
Robert Stacy McCain on the online source divide:
Many Republicans have been heard to complain recently, “Hey, what’s wrong with you conservative bloggers? How come you can’t just make stuff up the way those left-wingers do? You need to get with this 21st-century Web 2.0 thing, OK?”
Yesterday, we discovered the problem: Conservative bloggers don’t have “sources” the way progressives do.
Read on to discover the power of these unnamed sources, which – despite the dubious source of some sources – still generate front-page copy in co-believer broadsheets.
===
If he’d been great, he’d have advertised
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd happily criticised Employment Participation Minister Mark Arbib for being unable to explain Rudd’s fake promise of ”green jobs”.
But Rudd on Neil Mitchell’s 3AW show on Friday couldn’t explain it, either. Which may explain why the transcript is still not on his website.
UPDATE
The interview is now up on Rudd’s site. Here Rudd explains his claim of having created new green jobs:
MITCHELL: Fair enough, but you’ve announced 50,000 new jobs. How many of them are new?
PM: No, no, no, what I said yesterday was 50,000 jobs, apprenticeships and traineeships. That’s exactly what I said, and it’s a combination of the above.
MITCHELL: Your speech, I’ve got it in front of me, the quote: “The Government will now create 50,000 new green jobs.”
PM: The speech that I delivered at Conference yesterday referred to jobs, apprenticeships and traineeships.
MITCHELL: New. New green jobs, trainees and apprenticeships.
PM: Well, the apprenticeships deal with a whole new set of skills and the money, let go to –
MITCHELL: But are they new jobs or not?
PM: Well, can I say that the money underpinning these things, Neil, is absolutely new.
Not new jobs, just new spending.
For the full Arbib-like disaster, read on:
===
Feral TV
Andrew Bolt
Next they’ll put it on TV, flog some advertising and call it, I don’t know, Big Brother?
THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.
The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
But mockery aside, how do we deal with feral parents, “raising” feral children?
===
Doctor operates on careless tongue
Andrew Bolt
The new AMA president has an irrational moment of rationality:
THE new head of the Australian Medical Association has said single women and gay couples should not have access to IVF.
Dr Andrew Pesce, elected AMA federal president in May, told the Sunday Herald Sun that IVF should not be a “lifestyle choice” and use of the treatment by same sex couples went against the “natural order”.
“Fertility treatment is there to treat diseases that cause infertility, it shouldn’t be there as a lifestyle choice,” Dr Pesce said. “For example, single women (who choose IVF) don’t have a disease, they just don’t have a partner. Same-sex couples, they don’t have disease but they are using an option that gets around the natural order of things.”
Dr Pesce later contacted the newspaper and said his comments were “clumsy” and a mistake. He said single women and same sex couples should have access to IVF, but could not give a reason for his earlier remarks.
The comments have thrown the AMA into crisis, with former president Dr Kerryn Phelps saying Dr Pesce’s views were “not rational”.
Frankly, Phelps is not necessarily the first person I think of when searching for an arbiter of rationality - or even a guide to creating strong and loving families.
===
The time for talking will soon be over
Andrew Bolt
What now? Talk at them some more, until we dare talk sternly to them no more?
IRAN has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb, Western intelligence sources have told The Times.
The problem now seems to be that many of Iran’s clerics turn out to the moderate ones, compared to the crazy who’s seized much of their power and is now staging show trials:
Three decades after Khomeini’s rise to power, pious technocrats like Ahmadinejad have edged aside the ruling caste of revolutionary clerics who mismanaged the country for years. The fallout from the presidential election, therefore, is not merely a political confrontation; it is the latest instalment in a long-running culture war that began with the overthrow of the westernising Shah, continued with the Cultural Revolution that sought to reimpose Islamic values in the 1980s, and extended through former president Mohammad Khatami’s efforts to reduce the imprint of Shiite mourning in public spaces and Ahmadinejad’s attempts to reimpose it.
Leading to this:
Iran’s moderate former president, Mohammad Khatami, has denounced the trial of more than 100 opposition activists and protesters as a violation of the constitution that will further damage public trust in the Islamic republic.
“The trial on Saturday was a show and the confessions are invalid ... ,” he said in a posting on his website ...
Some conservatives have also condemned the government following the death of the son of a prominent member of their camp, Abdolhossein Rouhalamini. Rouhalamini is a close ally of Mohsen Rezai, the only conservative who ran against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the election. His son, Mohsen, who was arrested during a 9 July protest, was taken to a hospital after two weeks and died…
Ahmadinejad has sacked his hardline intelligence minister, who had criticised his actions, while his culture minister has resigned…
The defendants in the trial that started yesterday include some of the most prominent reformist politicians, including Khatami’s former vice-president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi.
===
What is it with the Left and lying smears?
Andrew Bolt
Hot Air is taunted over the latest Sarah Palin smear:
Hey, what’s wrong with you conservative bloggers? How come you can’t just make stuff up the way those left-wingers do?
UPDATE
Here is that smear, from CNN stringer Dennis Zaki:
AlaskaReport has learned this morning that Todd Palin and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin are to divorce. Multiple sources in Wasilla and Anchorage have confirmed the news…
The Palins were noticeably not speaking to each other at last Sunday’s resignation speech in Fairbanks.
And here are the obviously divorcing Palins at the Fairbanks function, “noticeably not speaking to each other”:
The Palins’ response here.
===
Why Wong couldn’t answer
Andrew Bolt
Astrophysicist Professor Willie Soon and climatologist Professor David R. Legates answer the questions that stumped Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, undermining the entire argument for the Rudd Government’s job-killing emissions trading scheme:
The brief answers to Senator Fielding’s questions are -
(1) Yes, temperatures did fall after 1998 while carbon dioxide rose;
(2) Yes, late 20th century warming was indeed not unusual in either its rate of change or magnitude; and
(3) Yes, all IPCC models did project warming through a ten year period when instead cooling occurred.
…
Taken together, the correct answers to Senator Fielding’s questions indicate that the hypothesis of dangerous global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions is invalid. It follows that costly emissions trading legislation is at best pointless. Doubtless this is why it has been so hard to elicit clear statements on the matter from Minister Wong and her supporters.
Read the full response from Soon and Legates here.
UPDATE
Warm winter? The New York Times in 2000 blamed global warming:
For the third year in a row, the United States has set a record for winter warmth, federal scientists reported yesterday… Shorter and milder winters are consistent with a century-long global warming trend that mainstream scientists believe has been at least partly caused by emissions of heat-trapping waste industrial gases like carbon dioxide.
Cool summer? The New York Times in 2009 blames everything else but global cooling:
Depending on Friday’s high, this was the second or third coolest June and July recorded in New York. If August follows the same pattern — and the latest forecast through midmonth predicts that it will — this could be the coolest summer on record… One reason for the record-breaking low temperatures was the record-breaking rainfall and accompanying cloud cover… Mr. Gadomski explained that a persistent high-level jet stream has sent cooler air streaming from the north and northwest.
UPDATE 2
Christopher Booker on an ominous silence from othe Met - one of the world’s top centres of climate alarmism, and producers of a key measure of world temperatures:
In recent months, in fact, a curious little drama has been unfolding over attempts by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian statistical expert, to get the Met Office and the CRU to divulge the computer data on which they base their temperature record. Mr McIntyre was not only the chief demolisher of the “hockey stick”, showing how it was based on a seriously skewed computer model, but later exposed the “adjustments” which had skewed the other official record of surface temperatures, run by Dr James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (The two other official sources of temperature data are based on satellite measurements.)
When Mr McIntyre made Freedom of Information requests to see the data used to construct the HadCrut record (as he has chronicled on his ClimateAudit blog) he was given an almighty brush-off, the Met Office saying that this information was strictly confidential and that to release it would damage Britain’s “international relations” with all the countries that supplied it.
The idea that temperature records might be a state secret seems strange enough, but when the policies of governments across the world are based on that data it becomes odder still that no outsider should be allowed to see it. Weirdest of all, however, is the Met Office’s claim that to release the data would “damage the trust that scientists have in those scientists who happen to be employed in the public sector”.
Worse, McIntyre says data is now being purged by the CRU.
===
More tree-planters won’t do the trick
Andrew Bolt
How many more green non-jobs will Kevin Rudd have to announce to make up for the real jobs he plans to kills?
INTERNAL Labor Party pressure on Kevin Rudd over the job-killing potential of his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is growing, with NSW Treasurer Eric Roozendaal warning the CPRS will lead to ”extreme losses” in the electricity and coal industries.
UPDATE
And to think this economic vandalism is being done on the astonishing assumption that the world is still warming, and that Rudd’s plan can help stop it, despite the fact that Australia’s emissions are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of greenhouse gases:
UPDATE 2
If we’re dumb enough to kill good jobs, we don’t deserve to keep our own cash:
FOREIGN companies stand to net billions of dollars in assistance payments from the federal government under Labor’s proposed emissions trading scheme, the Australian Greens say. The Greens have released research showing more than $11 billion in commonwealth assistance will flow to companies that are either wholly or partially foreign owned in the first five years of the scheme.
(Thanks to readers David, John and Randall. One update has now been moved to another entry above.)
UPDATE 3
The Climate Sceptics announce another protest:
If you are concerned the Emissions Trading Legislation being voted on in Canberra on 13th Aug will not have any effect on climate and in fact be a waste of money, then please join us.
We are organising a protest against the ETS on Aug 13th in front of Parliament house. We will assemble at 9.30 am on Federation Mall behind Old Parliament House, then march up to the precinct in front of Parliament House… The theme will be “Man Made Climate Change is Bull” and a quiet bull is being organised to be at the event. Bring a Placard or two in line with the theme. Barnaby Joyce will be one of the speakers.
===
Enslave women, two at a time
Andrew Bolt
When two agendas collide:
Providing a reality check, Radical Women spokeswoman Alison Thorne told the Melbourne rally that marriage was an oppressive institution designed to condemn women to lives of slavery, but same-sex couples should nevertheless be equally entitled to it.
UPDATE
Tim Blair notes that the Sunday Age’s reporter refers to this as a “reality check” ... but not one on Thorne (above), elsewhere described as a ”veteran lesbian/gay/bi/transgender/intersex/queer rights warrior”, ”victimised TAFE teacher ”, Socialist Alliance candidate, and ”Melbourne Organiser for the Freedom Socialist Party” who once argued that ”paedophiles really care for children”.
===
How Hawke showed up Rudd
Andrew Bolt
The always insightful David Burchell hears something authentic at long last at the Labor national conference:
Then Bob Hawke took the rostrum at the ALP conference last Saturday, and the nature of Rudd’s troubles with his public personality suddenly became as clear as the dawn’s sun.
Here is a man of 79 years, whose physical presence is diminished, and whose powers of memory are palpably fading a little. And yet there he was, speaking freely for a good half-hour with little regard to his notes, musing upon his government’s achievements with a kind of spontaneous analytical lucidity that is unwilling to be coached, and which resists the use of the copy-and-paste function…
Now, as a specimen of human nature Hawke is no saintly exemplar for the ages… And yet, for all his errors and excesses, for all those grand follies and petty foolishnesses, he was capable of arguing a case to his fellow citizens with tactical precision, and of speaking from the heart with a kind of artlessness, simultaneously. That, I don’t doubt, is why today’s ALP conference delegates still adore Hawke…
The present PM, despite his tireless, unyielding efforts to be all things to all people, to be at once everyone’s mate, everybody’s trusted family accountant, and everybody’s favourite salon intellectual, can somehow evoke no more ardent emotional response than a light wash of grateful applause. So much of that effort, in other words, is wasted because its all-pleasingness taxes our credulity.
The other trick for Rudd is that while he is unable to face the difficulties with his own public personality, he is debarred from learning from the example of others. As introduced by Rudd to the conference, Hawke sounded like an eccentric if somewhat reprobate uncle, of the kind younger female family members might want to avoid after a few drinks at the family Christmas party. Assuming the chipper, knowing air of the family patriarch, Rudd chose to attribute Hawke’s continuing political appeal chiefly to a ceaseless fund of septuagenarian sexual magnetism.
There was a peculiar, forced character to this assumed intimacy, of the kind you get when an incumbent is too painfully aware of the lingering moral authority of his predecessor and yet too unwilling to acknowledge it. And yet, as Tacitus well knew, it’s through your manner of giving respect your elders that you reveal your own fitness for the role.
===
Feeling stimulated now?
Andrew Bolt
More free money, spent as recklessly as free money usually is:
EIGHT tiny schools have been handed $400,000 in taxpayer funds for new fencing, spruced-up classrooms and playground upgrades this year - even though the Queensland government has shortlisted them for closure.
===
A Labor feeding frenzy
Andrew Bolt
Glenn Milne on the new Labor state:
(Nev Conway) was (Kevin) Rudd’s campaign manager in his seat of Griffith at the 2007 election… Conway has done a bit since then. Along with his wife he established a lobbying firm CMCS. In 2007-2008 CMCS donated $26,000 to the Queensland Labor Party. One of his clients is a little-known Queensland non-bank lender, FirstMac. Conway does FirstMac’s business for them in Canberra.
And very successfully, it seems. When Treasurer Wayne Swan announced in late September that in order to keep the mortgage market liquid in the face of the global financial crisis, he’d use $4 billion of taxpayers’ money to establish a Residential Backed Mortgage Securities scheme, FirstMac tendered for some of it through the Australian Office of Financial Management.
They got $500 million in taxpayer-funded backing then and another $500m in early 2009. Senior institutional securitisation investors say the sector was “amazed” when FirstMac, which had a history of providing home loans with default rates much higher than other banks, won the tender process.
Especially when the other lender also given an initial $500m in late 2008 was the Melbourne-based, union-affiliated lender, Members Equity, associated with former ACTU assistant secretary Gary Weaven and former Labor treasurer Ralph Willis… While the AOFM is at arm’s length from the government and independent, the fact that FirstMac was represented by a confidante of Rudd who’d kicked in $26,000 to Labor coffers is not a good look.
Well, no. But I’m guessing the real story isn’t loans-for-mates but the perils of this free-cash frenzy.
===
I think “gutless wonder that he is” did it
Andrew Bolt
Actually, I thought Barrie Cassidy smiled. And I believe the answer to how many times Kevin Rudd has appeared on Rove since the election is: “Twice as often as he’s been on Insiders.”
And one reason, apart from fear, is that Rudd isn’t known to apreciate Cassidy doing things like this.
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