Alleged Asian terror mastermind Noordin Mohammed Top was reportedly killed on Saturday in a hail of gunfire at his Indonesian hideout after a 17-hour siege by police special forces.
Activists: North Korea Lured U.S. Journalists Into Trap
Christian activists who work on the North Korean border believe two American television reporters may have blundered into a trap when they were detained in March and say their arrests led to a crackdown on refugees.
Nine dead after Hudson mid-air collision
Nine people are presumed dead after a plane and helicopter collided in mid-air over the Hudson River in New York.
Fatal bus crash under investigation
ONE man is dead and four other passengers were trapped for hours after a minibus crash today.
Roger Federer shows off twins Charlene Riva and Myla Rose
MEET the tennis world's newest doubles pairing - champion Roger Federer's twin daughters. The tennis star posted a picture of his and wife Mirka's first children on Facebook yesterday.
Radio stars gagged over rape controversy
RADIO duo reported to be furious at being unable to give their side of story over teen rape revelation.
Fee-free account puts pressure on banks
EXPERTS say new account that waives all ATM charges will put pressure on the big four banks.
Good looks more important than good CV
EXPERTS warn that "lookism" is on the rise as employers hire on good looks over good experience.
Catholic seminaries full as religion resurges
AFTER years of decline, the number of priests in the Catholic Church in NSW is on the rise.
DNA test proves prisoner's innocence
HE spent 23 years in jail for rape but now a DNA test proves Alba Morales didn't commit the crime.
'I'm sure Paris Jackson is my daughter'
THE godfather of Jackson's children makes detailed revelations of sperm donation and why Michael didn't like sex.
=== Comments ===
Rudd’s hot air puts jobs on the line
Piers Akerman
THE Rudd Labor government will introduce to the Senate this week the most far-reaching economic Bill since the GST, but it is chronically unable to explain what its effects will be on the Australian public. - I agree that the ETS is a waste of time. I didn’t always feel that way. Back in ‘98 I felt convinced that Global warming was man made and needed to be faced, and I felt an ETS was a step in the road to doing that. I felt that business needed to be on board for global warming to be effectively fought. However, even back then, I felt that destroying industry was not going to be the answer. When industry is capable of fighting the threat because they have the right methods for doing it then the threat will be no more. Until then, industry needs to be supported and made as cheap as possible so as to allow growth .. only healthy industry will facilitate effective change when the technology becomes available.
One possible technology that will be useful is nuclear. the ALP’s failure to embrace nuclear industry dooms any meaningful advance in the area of environmentalism.
Plants are useful in absorbing Carbon Dioxide, but not effective. Once an efficient method is perfected the entire Carbon dioxide issue will be over. There are also other pollutants that need to be addressed.
At the moment, the ETS is a war on plant food. We need plants to live.
I have sympathy for Turnbull’s position, partly because I think he will have the devil of a time in his home electorate. An effective leader can be turfed, as we learned with Bennelong. But before that happens he has to be effective and that means facing down AGW believers.
I have no sympathy for the government and those ALP members who support Rudd’s alleged plan. To criticize Turnbull for ignoring reality for political reasons is nothing compared to forgiving the ALP for their evil plan. It threatens to make the ALP unelectable in the future, possibly destroying the party as an effective political force when the wind changes and people recognize the hoax as the Millennium bug was found to be .. but this will be much bigger.- ed.
===
TOP UNTOPPED?
Tim Blair
Earlier reports of terrorist Noordin Mohammed Top’s eradication may be wrong, although some remain convinced:
“The man shot dead in ?Temanggung is Noordin,” a senior anti-terror officer involved in the operations told the New Sunday Times.
“We are now waiting for DNA tests, expected within a week, for a?100 per cent positive confirmation of Noordin’s identity.”
However:
Another top anti-terror officer said the dead person is not Noordin but Boim Ibrahim, a suspect in the July 17 twin bombings of the JW Marriott and Ritz- Carlton Hotel.
Doubts over the identity of the dead idiot now awaiting an autopsy in Jakarta arose following publication of post-shootout photographs:
Pictures that began circulating several hours after the raids suggested the corpse flown to the national police hospital in Jakarta yesterday afternoon did not resemble police photographs previously published of Top.
Comparisons are rendered slightly difficult by the fact that Top (or Boim, the non-Top) is currently missing the top of his head. He’s topless. Terrorism analyst Sidney Jones:
“Apparently, he’s not dead,” said Ms Jones. “The legend continues.”
===
PAY DAY
Tim Blair
News Ltd this week indicated that it may soon begin charging for online content. Fairfax is thinking along similar lines:
Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy told The Sunday Age that charging for online access was essential if publishers were to maintain their newsroom staff.
This might happen more rapidly than people expect. You all up for payin’? - I’m up for paying so long as it is structured well and affordable. The search fees structure is prohibitively expensive .. but then so is the government freedom from information legislation.
Ideally, I will still be able to reproduce the headlines with a small amount of description for posting referrals externally. I also think it important that the articles themselves will have lots of external pointers which I wouldn’t be copying .. but which could be used. If I’m going to pay, I want the articles to be as good as Tim’s are, and not the generic article unless it is primary source.
Elliptically related is the observation on Channel 10’s Meet the Press where the program twice allowed lies to come to air and no one questioned them. The lies were related to global warming .. Penny Wong was introduced with the lie that islands are sinking in the Pacific. Green idiot Milne was allowed to claim that there was going to be catastrophic ecology collapse imminently. If we have to pay for these articles, let us also post comments on them. -ed
===
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
Tim Blair
Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi answers a question about Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud:
“He has been taken out.”
Some of Mehsud’s fellow Taliban lunatics deny the claim, for what it’s worth. Others are pleased:
Meanwhile, Scots sniper Corporal Christopher Reynolds discusses a successful one-mile shot on another Taliban leader:
“He dropped straight away into the arms of a fighter behind him. The guy just panicked and dropped the leader and ran away.
“He had been given a lead sleeping tablet. I was quite proud of that shot – it is the longest recorded kill in Afghanistan. I am going to use that fact as a chat-up line in the pub when I get back home.”
It’s been a great week for the good guys.
===
FUNDS MONITORED
Tim Blair
An enviro-holiday for US politicians:
When 10 members of Congress wanted to study climate change, they did more than just dip their toes into the subject: They went diving and snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. They also rode a cable car through the Australian rain forest, visited a penguin rookery and flew to the South Pole.
The 11-day trip – with six spouses traveling along as well – took place over New Year’s 2008. Details are only now coming to light as part of a Wall Street Journal analysis piecing together the specifics of the excursion.
Estimated cost: north of $500,000. Impressively, the Congressional climate inspectors used air force planes instead of commercial jets, thereby bloating their carbon footprint even further. But it was all worth it:
Lawmakers say the trip offered them a valuable chance to learn about global warming and to monitor how federal funds are spent.
It’s particularly easy to monitor how funds are spent when you’re the one spending them.
===
THE PEOPLE’S KOALA
Tim Blair
An unexpected end for a Victorian marsupial:
Australia’s most loved koala will be stuffed and displayed in the Melbourne Museum following her death during surgery.
The image of Sam the koala holding hands with Country Fire Authority (CFA) firefighter David Tree and sipping from his water bottle in the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires was beamed around the world as a symbol of hope in the days following the disaster.
Via KP, who emails: “I know it was a cute moment in the midst of tragedy, but seriously ...”
===
KIDDY KITTY
Tim Blair
The usual excuse is research, so this is at least a creative alternative:
Authorities in Florida said a man charged with possessing of more than 1,000 images of child pornography on his computer blamed the downloads on his cat.
He’s now in jail. The cat remains at large.
===
Why killing jobs won’t save the planet
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd will this week ask the Senate to vote for his colossal job-killing scheme to cut emissions to set the world a good example. Quadrant Online rounds up the experts to explain why our sacrifice would be utterly useless. Some extracts:
Professor James Allan:
The main problem is that we know going in that cap-and-trade won’t work, or rather that any program that manages to get passed will be so shot full of holes that it won’t achieve anything much in the way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions - though I grant it will create a big bureaucracy and kill jobs.
Scientist David Archibald:
The government’s intention to introduce an emissions trading system in Australia rests upon their belief that human carbon-dioxide emissions are a cause of dangerous global warming. That belief is incorrect.
Professor Bob Carter:
Comfortably clad, fed and housed, and egged on to view themselves as original sinners, our chattering classes and their media flag-wavers have proved astonishingly susceptible to ecoevangelistic propaganda about dangerous human-caused climate change.
Ian Castles (former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics):
There are formidable measurement, verification and enforcement issues that stand in the way of any internationally-agreed scheme of binding emissions reduction targets. In the meantime, Australia should not commit itself to the large costs and inefficiencies of an emissions trading scheme of the kind that is currently before the Parliament.
Professor Sinclair Davidson:
It has quickly become apparent that green jobs will require massive government subsidies to sustain them. They do not create additional value and so cannot become self-sustaining. The biggest question, of course, is to what extent will green jobs crowd out existing jobs? In short what is the opportunity cost of a green job?
Dr David Evans (former Australian Greenhouse Office consultant):
How long before the alarmists start fudging the temperature records, because there is so much money, political control, and science funding riding on the outcome? Bad news—it’s already started.
Ray Evans (secretary of the Lavoisier Group ):
Wind and solar are fantasies in the Green mind. Where they have been seriously tried, as in Spain, the costs have been prodigious and the impacts on employment calamitous. The political consequences of cities suddenly finding themselves without electricity, a very real prospect in Melbourne as the Latrobe Valley generators are facing bankruptcy next year, are serious.
William Kininmonth (former head of the National Climate Centre):
The basis of the Bill is an unsustainable hypothesis that dangerous global warming will be an outcome of continued burning of fossil fuels and the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Alan Moran (energy and deregulation analyst):
As a coal based power generation economy and with coal and other fossil fuels forming one third of our exports, Australia is perhaps the world’s most vulnerable economy to carbon taxes and similar restraints. We therefore need to take particular care to shape a constructive and economically viable policy.
Professor Ian Plimer
In voting on the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (CPRS) bill, Australian senators are poised to determine the biggest financial and sociological decision since Federation. Yet their vote is being cast without either a transparent, independent scientific audit, or comprehensive financial due diligence.
Dr Alex Robson:
The Government’s policy will have large incremental costs and negligible incremental benefits for Australia. This means that the expected net incremental benefits of the Government’s policy are negative, and from a cost-benefit point of view, the Government’s policy should be rejected.
Astrophysicist Willie Soon and Professor David R. Legates:
The “answers” given Senator Fielding shifted the usual goalposts, arguing, for example, that global average atmospheric temperature was not a desirable measure of global warming – despite its consistent use by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for more than 15 years.
Climatologist Professor Richard S. Lindzen:
The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.
===
How a foolish act by an ALP minister was allowed to kill his career?
Andrew Bolt
Robert Richter QC, who represented Theo Theophanous, explains crisply why the decision to charge the then Minister with rape was an outrage. And he adds:
What is asked of the (Director of Public Prosecution) is that upon proper analyses and investigation there should be a ‘’reasonable prospect of conviction’’. In the Theophanous case there was not; but more disturbingly, I don’t believe anyone asked such a question after an objective assessment of the available evidence and before setting out to ruin the reputation of a public figure… One can only hope that such decisions are made on a rigorous analysis of the evidence rather than upon some politically correct position that complainants never lie.
We are yet to hear a proper explanation for this persecution of Theophanous, who had the case against him thrown out, but has nevertheless had his career ruined.- I don’t know anything about this case, and what I write might appear unfair to those who know much more. However, the observation I wish to make is that it may be the case that a Minister can not have consensual sex with people in their portfolio area. I am aware that Ministers have to work very hard to maintain an effective work presence, and that finding a mate might be harder under the circumstances, but it is up to their political party (IMHO) to cover the back of their workers by not allowing such transgressions. The appalling track record of the ALP, dating back before Whitlam, suggests that they are not supporting their ministers appropriately. - ed.
===
No excuse left to not fight this
Andrew Bolt
Which also means that the emissions trading turkey is not something that the Liberals can wave through the Senate and then hope to “move on”:
KEVIN Rudd’s plans for an early double dissolution election have been sunk, with the discovery of a legal defect in his Emissions Trading Scheme.
The Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, is understood to have confirmed that even if Mr Rudd were to go to a double dissolution election to get his ETS through Parliament, the scheme could still be blocked by the Senate. Mr Evans an expert on Senate practice is understood to have based his argument on the fact that most of the ETS relies not on law, but on regulation. - why does Bolt accept of the ALP what he despises of the Liberal party? - ed.
===
Not biased, just always right
Andrew Bolt
Jason Wilson, GetUp operative and Wollongong University lecturer in digital communications, says the reason much of media wouldn’t give space to conservative arguments on hot tops isn’’t because journalists lean to the Left. It’s just because conservatives are wrong:
(John) Howard was reasonably restrained in talking about the “bad” aspects of the mortal foe of his political imagination — the ABC — confining himself to the observation at one point that especially on the national broadcaster, “there is an unwillingness to accept ... any suggestion that there could be some doubt ... about climate change”. I recall him saying something similar, very early in his prime ministership, regarding reconciliation: that the media had trouble accepting that there was a “legitimate conservative position” on the topic. In these kinds of attitudes, Howard displays the conviction that room ought to be made in the media for the uncritical transmission of any conservative position, no matter how wrongheaded, and that the problem with getting his “legitimate” messages out through the media was the inherent left-wing bias of journalists.
That’s the beauty of being so utterly convinced of your infallability. You save so much time and space by shutting out the fools who disagree. This is what made Pravda such a useful paper for so long, of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment