IT BEARS a striking resemblance to our own Earth - right down to the smog-ridden atmosphere. Using radar to pierce the thick atmosphere, scientists have mapped a third of the surface of Saturn's planet-sized moon, Titan. And despite the alien environment, they have revealed an uncanny likeness to Earth, with mountain ranges, dunes, numerous lakes and suspected volcanoes.
Pro-democracy leader found guilty
BURMA'S Aung San Suu Kyi has been sentenced to a further 18 months house arrest.
Female teacher on multiple sex charges
A TEACHER faces seven charges of sexual penetration with two male students from her school.
Mutilating doctor to face trial
Graeme Reeves, a former doctor, will face trial after being charged with genital mutilation, grevious bodily harm and aggravated sexual assault.
Fears for Ausssies on PNG plane
A charter plane with eight Australians heading to the Kokoda Track is missing having failed to reach its destination in Papua New Guinea.
Fears for 30 as deadly horse virus hits
UP to 30 people may have been exposed to the potentially deadly Hendra virus after tests confirmed it killed a horse on a stud.
Anglican bishop a real estate 'slum lord'
A BISHOP who campaigns for the homeless is being called before a tribunal for allegedly making his own tenants live in squalor.
Hero dog guards master's body
A SCRUFFY bitser dog has been hailed a hero after sticking by his dead master's side for days and guiding rescuers to his body.
Greg Inglis arrested over assault
The Melbourne Storm have been caught up in an off-field scandal, with superstar centre Greg Inglis arrested for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend.
Self-help course blamed for suicide
A coroner is examining whether a self-help course played any role in the death of a woman who jumped from a Sydney office building during an unexplained psychotic episode.
Snatched toddler reunited with mum
A toddler has been reunited with his mother 24 hours after being taken from her Sydney home late yesterday. The boy's father has been arrested.
Man left wife to die over glass of wine
A Melbourne man who left his defacto wife at home with a life-threatening head injury so he could......
Brits 'just too lazy' to have sex
THREE-QUARTERS of couples admit to having trouble mustering energy for a night of passion.
Sleeping pills in heart medicine mix-up
A PHARMACY is the subject of a government investigation after filling a prescription for heart medicine with sleeping tablets.
Cub born to celibate pandas named
A PANDA cub born in Thailand after years of artificial insemination and efforts to get its celibate parents to mate has been named in a competition, a government official said. - I thought Celibate meant never marrying, but Chaste meant never having sex. They marry Pandas in Thailand? - ed.
=== Comments ===
Politics of envy with Coalition alternative
Piers Akerman
OPPOSITION Leader Malcolm Turnbull has called Prime Minister Kevin Rudd out on the Government’s emissions trading scheme by presenting a report which outlines greater pollution reduction, is cheaper and provides greater protection for Australians. - It has been appalling to hear ALP spruikers diss Mr Turnbull for Rudd's faults. Rudd won't compromise on the ETS so people criticize Mr Turnbull for lack of leadership. Rudd corruptly administers so Mr Turnbull is savaged for pointing it out.
As I wrote when Mr Howard was promoting his environmental model, I can support the compromise even though I don't hold hold the belief regarding AGW because there are other agenda within the compromise that promotes a healthy future. We need nuclear. We need water. We need plant food. We don't need Rudd.
The coordination of Rudd supporters is strong. A reasonable person new to these issues might easily conclude Mr Turnbull has done something wrong. Instead it is those who are supposed to be balanced and fair in their reporting who have failed all of Australia. We allowed Rudd to be elected without due diligence of knowing what he would do. I'm not surprised that Rudd still fails to make hard decisions which might be unpopular, or even worthwhile. - ed.
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CHILLARY
Tim Blair
All those stories about ashtray-throwing and face-clawing are suddenly much more believable:
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PRINCE OF DARKNESS
Tim Blair
We’ve just seen the future under Kevin Rudd’s carbon lunacy scheme—the power went out while he was addressing Parliament. Terry McCrann predicted this:
Kevin Rudd wants to effectively increase the GST by a quarter to 12.5 per cent … He also wants to deliver power blackouts across Australia …
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VLAD THE COLLAPSER
Tim Blair
More than 80 years after his death, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is still killing people.
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WHEELS ON FIRE
Tim Blair
It’s car-b-q time again in France, where – ahem – restive youths are on the warm-path:
Restive youths in a Paris suburb torched a tourist bus and nearly a half-dozen cars and hurled objects at police early Tuesday, a night after fullblown unrest prompted by the death of a teen fleeing police …
A night earlier, some 40 people hurled Molotov cocktails at police and firefighters, torched dozens of cars and one person fired a handgun during a rampage hours after the death of the young man.
And in Sweden, a Saab-b-q:
More than ten cars were set alight in a series of arson attacks across Malmö on Sunday night …
Police have cordoned off the area and will conduct a forensic examination of the scene on Monday. CCTV pictures secured from a nearby restaurant will be examined for clues.
Reader comments following that news story hint at rampant Presbyterianism.
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COLUMN ON SPEED LAMENTABLY DELAYED
Tim Blair
Last Saturday’s column. Forgot to post it.
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JUST SAY NEIN
Tim Blair
An unintended consequence of repeatedly describing carbon as a life-destroying pollutant is that people might actually come to believe carbon is a life-destroying pollutant, and refuse to have it stored anywhere near them. Last September, a clean new German coal-fired power station commenced operations:
It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.
Kevin Rudd, among others, supports this technology. But local residents – you know how sensitive Germans are about toxic gases – completely rejected it:
“This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical.”
And who could blame them? The US government describes carbon as a pollutant; the Australian government describes carbon as a pollutant; the German media routinely describes carbon as a pollutant. Would you want a pollutant stored in massive quantities underneath your town?
Scientists maintain that public safety fears are groundless: the consequences of escaping CO2 would be to the climate, not to public health.
Too late, alarmists. You’ve already created … alarm. And the result:
The German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.
Perfect. A similar carbon storage plan was rejected in March by a Dutch council that opposed Shell’s plans to store carbon beneath a town near Rotterdam. These days, you’d have a better chance of storing nuclear waste.
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SMALL WORLD
Tim Blair
Now living in Sydney, Australia, ex-New York State resident James Morrow nevertheless finds himself the target of an Obama-Turfing. In other interconnectivity news, the formerly anonymous kindergarten teacher who launched those bogus Palin separation rumours has been separated from his job.
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So much pain for zero gain
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann on our insane need to cut our throats for the planet:
KEVIN Rudd wants to effectively increase the GST by a quarter to 12.5 per cent… He also wants to deliver power blackouts across Australia and even perhaps permanent electricity rationing; and/or send billions of dollar overseas so we can ‘have the right’ to produce our own electricity.
He may even, as analysis from CEDA warns, help create a new “carbon finance bubble” that according to CEDA’s research director Michael Porter, “could eventually dwarf the recent Global Financial Crisis problems"…
This is just part of what we would get if the government’s Emissions Trading Scheme or ETS were to pass the Senate and become law.
The Opposition’s failure to effectively oppose the ETS at its appalling absolute core, might be bad enough… But any failure by him and his colleagues pales into insignificance against the disgraceful performance of the bulk of the media and in particular the Canberra Press Gallery, which has given the government a complete pass on the dynamics if not the detail of the ETS.
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Not just any youths
Andrew Bolt
Which “young people” are we yet again talking about?
About 40 rioters in a Paris suburb hurled Molotov cocktails at police and firefighters, torched cars and one person fired a handgun during a rampage prompted by the death of a teen pizza deliverer fleeing police… The scenario - the death of a youth with police directly or indirectly involved - mirrors other incidents that have triggered unrest. Tensions between young people and police have long simmered in housing projects in France’s suburbs, feeding on poverty, unemployment and anger over discrimination against minorities.
This AP copy in the Sydney Morning Herald won’t give a clue to the ethnic makeup of the rioters, although it does note at the end that four years ago there was a riot by “young Arab and black men”.
Radio France, though, gives one hint that it’s the same story all over again:
French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux called for calm on Monday after Yacou Sanago, an 18-year-old boy, died when he hit a metal barrier when trying to flee a police cordon...
The problem with this kind of non-reporting is that it so easily permits the intellectually dishonest to heap all the responsibility for this anarchic violence on the French state, by leading reporters (in this case) to then say that such violence is “feeding on poverty, unemployment and anger over discrimination against minorities”.
If we actually - and accurately - note that this violence tends to come from one particular religious minority, we might then better see that there is potentially another influence feeding not just the violence, but the poverty and unemployability, too.
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Saluting Gaia
Andrew Bolt
From the Ballarat Courier’s report on a rally against global warming comes this picture, with this caption:
HANDS UP: Ballarat Mayor Judy Verlin joins other participants at the forum in an exercise.
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Such divisive stupidity is evil
Andrew Bolt
Not just racist, but divisive, naive and utterly impractical:
ALL non-Aboriginal Australians should be prepared to leave the country if the indigenous people want that, making restitution for the vile sin of genocide, an Anglican leader said last night. If they stayed, they would have to provide whatever recompense indigenous peoples thought appropriate, the Reverend Peter Adam said.
Could the Reverend tell us where 20 million Australians should be sent? How this would be done? Would part-Aborigines be deported, too? How would Aborigines be left better off with all whites gone?
But the $64 million question: when will Adam himself leave? If he’s not going, what has he paid to stay, and to whom?
UPDATE
Another question for the cleric: this means we should end immigration, right? And do we deport on a last-in-first-out principle?
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A massage from your Priem Minista
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd, author of the Education Revolution, writes to young voters on his live blog:
Hi PM here lets get going with this Nearly a thousand people contributed ton the climate change.
...
michaelcrowe23 asks about our targets. Please have a look at http://www.climatechange.gov.au re our three sets of targets : five,fiteen and twety five with the latter two conditional on the nature of the Copenhagen outcome. Back on energy efficiency, ideas re working from home and less business and govt commuting. One of the reasons we are laying out a nationa high speed braodband network is to make all that morepossible
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China threatens us again
Andrew Bolt
It’s the Chinese century, and so we’ll see more such threats to our freedoms:
THE Chinese government tried to pressure the National Press Club into cancelling a nationally televised speech by Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, scheduled to take place today.
Another reminder of the Bush doctrine - that countries that do not share our values remain a threat.
Here is one aspect of the great global warming panic that has not been discussed: the West seems hell-bent on cutting its growth to “save” the planet. China refuses to, and so will grow comparatively richer - and mightier - much faster. What’s more, to “fight” global warming, China is demanding and in some cases getting cash, carbon-credit investments and technological aid from the West to lower its gassiness. And thus will Chinese power grow even greater.
===
You can take some ferals out of the West…
Andrew Bolt
Culture will out:
YOUTHS from Melbourne’s west and north are responsible for most of the escalating violence in the city’s centre.
Police figures obtained by The Age reveal almost half of the assaults in the central business district, Southbank and Docklands are by offenders from Melbourne’s west and north-west, but these suburbs house just one-quarter of the city’s population. With northern suburbs such as Reservoir added, the share for the west and north is more than half.
Criminologists say the figures clearly highlight a close link between city violence and disadvantaged postcodes.
That word “disadvantaged” seems weaselly. It suggests that once again that fault lies not with the violent but with the rest of us who left them “disadvantaged”. It suggests that more “advantages” - a bigger cash handout, perhaps, or better facilities - could fix things.
This downplays how much the culture of the family, the local community, the religion, the ethnicity, the school and the rest affect the choices the violent make.
Many of the poor are virtuous, but some are poor because they prize too highly drunkenness, irresponsibility entitlement and violence.
Unless you realise this, you may think that all you need do is move the ferals from “bad” suburbs to more “advantaged” ones make them better behaved. Which, of course, is the mistake American social planners made...
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