A VESSEL carrying suspected asylum seekers has been intercepted in Australian waters.
ETS showdown sees Turnbull triumph
MALCOLM Turnbull has delayed a likely leadership showdown by winning approval to seek to amend the PM's planned ETS.
Child plunges to his death from window
A THREE-year-old boy has died after falling 15 metres out of a window from the third floor of a city apartment block.
Kids now sex predators
CHILDREN are committing sexual assaults in alarming numbers, with five times more attacks last year than there were five years ago, we can reveal.
Female firefighters in wet T-shirt row
A WET T-shirt controversy has broken out among female firefighters who are furious about their new see-through uniform.
2LoveMyLips detects drugs
A LIP gloss with a drink spike detector is expected to be available soon in Australia.
Pit bull attacks man, kills two dogs
POLICE were unable to release a man from a pit bull's grasp for 20 minutes, after it attacked him while he was walking his dogs.
Stalker fears for Aussie supermodel
MIRANDA Kerr was under heavy guard after threats were made against her and Orlando Bloom.
Charges for balloon boy's parents
CHARGES are set to be filed against the parents of Falcon Heene, the boy at the centre of the runaway balloon drama.
=== Comments ===
INTRO THAT NEVER ENDS
Tim Blair
All the news that fits and then some, from the Age‘s Kenneth Davidson:
Professor Ross Garnaut, as an economic adviser to a succession of state and federal Labor governments and the author of the climate change report that initially shaped the government response to global warming and led to the legislation setting up the emissions trading scheme, is a man who chooses his words very carefully.Maybe he can teach Kenneth.
===
RETURN OF THE STICK
Tim Blair
The Tennessee Titans – based in Nashville, Al Gore’s hometown – suffer a huge defeat during a manifestation of the Gore Effect. And look what else turned up:
Why, it’s that famous hockey stick everyone was talking about! This one is scientifically accurate, however.
===
THEY SAY A LOT OF INCONSISTENT THINGS
Tim Blair
One boat arrival is a failure of government policy, but 30-plus arrivals within a year is not a failure of government policy.
UPDATE. On the subject of ABC salaries, communications minister Stephen Conroy commits another Labor reversal:
Senator Conroy admitted he had asked similar questions when Labor was in opposition.UPDATE II. And yet more Labor flippery.
===
JIHAD JEOPARDY
Tim Blair
A quiz! Everybody loves a quiz:
The radio-broadcast quiz organised by the Al-Qaeda-inspired Shebab organisation in the southern Somali city of Kismayo lasted throughout Ramadan, which ended last month.Some community bonding is underway. Good for them.
Five neighbourhoods of the port city entered the competition, which consisted mainly of questions on science, culture and the Koran.I’m sure everybody did their very best, but only one team can win. Let’s see what those lucky quiz-whizzes scored:
The winners – a team from Farjano district – were given a first prize consisting of one AK-47 assault rifle, two hand grenades, an anti-tank landmine and office supplies at a ceremony attended by hundreds of residents.Er …
“The team in the first place gets the weapons and office equipment worth upward of 1,000 dollars,” Sheikh Abdullahi Alhaq said, sparking cheers and applause in the crowd.At least the Sheikh has got his game-show routine nailed.
“It was a wonderful event because I have never seen students being rewarded with weapons as a result of an education competition”, Mohamed Hersi, a Kismayo trader who attended the ceremony, told AFP.Yes. Yes, it is somewhat unusual. What about the other teams? Did they win consolation books or CDs or something?
The quiz show’s runners-up had to settle for an AK-47 and ammunition.
===
LOSE YOUR CHAINS
Tim Blair
“Any conceptual linkages between the words and images are the responsibilities of the reader.” Fair call (and funny). Also fair: sufferers of advanced Obama Derangement Syndrome ought to reel it in a little, particularly when it comes to faith in certain sources. As a general rule, chain emails should be regarded – reliability-wise – as being somewhere between a Hamas ceasefire declaration and a Greens press release.
===
WEEKEND RUINED
Tim Blair
Once seen as remarkable, the Gore Effect is now just everyday news, as reader Landru relates:
All I can say is that the weather here in Virginia is absurdly cold for this time of year. High of about 6 (average 20) and raining miserably. And I did not even blink when I read that Al Gore had come to town yesterday.Al Gore is the anti-groundhog. Speaking of Gore, it turns out he inspired Dennis Miller to become a contraband globe hoarder:
Sunny and warmer next week after he clears out of town, though. Bastard ruined my weekend.
“I’m hoarding them because I don’t want my house lit up like a Jason Bourne fight scene in an Eastern Bloc stairwell.”
===
LIKE DDT TO SKEETERS
Tim Blair
Following an entertaining initial salvo, J.F. Beck continues correcting the Left on matters chemical and cultural. In other Beckian news, he is now hosted here, along with Gavin Atkins – the former Margo’s Maid.
===
The ABC’s Trioli farewells a conservative guest
Andrew Bolt
Reader Alistair is astonished:
A bit off topic but did anyone catch ABC News Breakfast today? They were interviewing Barnaby Joyce about climate change and the camerman/woman nailed Virginia Trioli making a jesture that Barnaby was nuts. This bias should be reported but I wouldn’t hold my breath.True? I’d be surprised - by the unprofessionalism, I mean.
UPDATE
It’s true, I’m afraid. Trioli did indeed show her far-Left colors after interviewing the Nationals’ Senate leader, revealing what most ABC hosts try their poor best to hide. And people still defend the ABC from charges of bias.
Mind you, even among the ABC crowd, Trioli stands out for her reflexive, knee-jerk and frankly absurd Leftism. Three examples:
Others say even worse was a response Trioli gave a week after the (September 11) bombing to a caller who asked: ``Could it be possible that some Right-wing group within the (US) military itself did this?’’And:
Replied Trioli: ``That’s true. I think it’s probably fair to say though, that no matter what you might think of the FBI and the other intelligence services in America, if they had any inkling of that I think something of that would have come out by now. I don’t rule it out. I think it’s quite a possibility.’’
``It was an important point made by a really interesting Afghani American writer that I read the other day, which was that until America understands its own hegemony and understands to what extent it has absolutely controlled and oppressed and run the international agenda for so many years, no-one is going to really want to talk to them.’’And:
``This is possibly a realistic example: Despite the fact that George W. Bush and everyone else have in their view identified Osama bin Laden as the prime suspect, which is what they call him, what if that involved bringing him somewhere, absolutely safely, sitting down with him, treating him like a human being and talking about it, and then Osama bin Laden going home again, not bombing the hell out of bin Laden?Just the person to host the ABC’s latest news show.
``That’s the suggestion: Talk to him, understand their anger, listen to them.’’
===
Clinton bombs hotel
Andrew Bolt
If her life was truly as danger-filled as she remembers, Hillary Clinton is lucky to be alive. As it is, she’s merely lucky to be Secretary of State:
(D)uring a speech she made to (Northern Ireland’s) Stormont parliament she said that Belfast’s landmark Europa Hotel was devastated by an explosion when she first stayed there in 1995…What is it with her lurid memory?
However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night. The last time the Europa underwent renovations because of bomb blast damage was in January 1994, 22 months before the presidential entourage booked 110 rooms at the hotel.
Mrs Clinton told assembled politicians at Stormont: “When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel ... even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.”
During the presidential campaign Mrs Clinton drew on her Bosnia experience, saying: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport but we just ran with our heads down to get in the vehicles to get to our base.”After archive news footage was shown of her walking calmly from her plane with her daughter, Chelsea, Ms Clinton admitted: “I did mis-speak the other day...”.
===
Sweet dictatorship
Andrew Bolt
London’s Mail on Sunday prints a loathesome ode to the joys of being a member of the the Hilter Youth or some such. Astonishing, how some forms of totalitarianism are now being whitewashed, all over again.
UPDATE
At least this whitewash hasn’t stuck:
A Russian court on Tuesday threw out a libel case brought by Josef Stalin’s grandson against a newspaper which said the leader had personally ordered the killings of thousands of Soviet citizens.
===
We’ll pay, and the rest will play
Andrew Bolt
The fix is in. The UN’s Copenhagen summit on global warming will in Decenber debate - and no doubt approve in large part - this negotiation text.
What is means for Australia is that we, like other developed countries, will promise to make deep cuts to our total emissions. But China, the world’s biggest emitter, and other big and developing countries will not be made to promise any such cuts in total emissions themselves. Instead, we will agree to hand over lots of money and technology to them - a bribe, in other words, to agree to a deal that cannot possibly hope to restrain the world’s emissions even to today’s level, and will weaken the democratic West to the advantage of the undemocratic rest.
Check:
Substantial reductions of GHG emissions from Annex I countries [the developed ones, including Australia] should be agreed,…We will lead, and few - if any - will follow. All that pain for nothing.
PP.8 [Recognizing that] sustainable development is the first priority for developing countries.
Therefore, [that] our commitment to a low carbon society would have to be linked to our development priorities, in accordance with the provisions of the Convention…
PP.10 [Emphasizing that] it is fundamental that Annex I countries comply fully with the provisions as set out in 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 as well as additional commitments on technology transfer and capacity-building.
PP.11 [Further emphasizing that] a shared vision does not include commitments for developing countries. It does, entitle technology transfer, capacity-building and financial resources for project implementation regarding mitigation national programs.
And Lord Monckton, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, sees an even greater danger - a loss of sovereignty to a new “world government*. In a speech aimed at an American audience, but one that applies to us as well, he warns:
At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.More here, including excerpts from the draft treaty.
I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.
How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty?
Monckton’s warning:
===
Save the poor NSW voters
Andrew Bolt
Exactly how incompetent does a government have to be before the Governor steps in?
THE state’s biggest housing project has collapsed after the Planning Minister, Kristina Keneally, admitted she acted unlawfully in approving the 7200-home Hunter Valley proposal.Her concession sounds the death knell for a project the planning department had ranked last of 91 potential housing development sites in the Lower Hunter, and which was approved only after the Labor Party donor behind it hired the lobbyist and former Labor minister Graham Richardson.
On the eve of a court challenge by residents opposing the Huntlee New Town project near Branxton, Ms Keneally and the developer of the $1.8 billion complex have conceded the minister’s approval of the concept plan and a rezoning application breached planning laws.
===
Rudd does what he denounced from Howard
Andrew Bolt
In opposition, Kevin Rudd thought John Howard very bad for diverting boat people to detention in some foreign island such as Nauru:
The Pacific Solution is just wrong. It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. It’s not the right way to in fact handle asylum seekers or others and therefore we think the best way ahead is to use Christmas Island instead. It’s a facility which is part of the Commonwealth of Australia....And on the humanity of the situation we will exit those arrangements as quickly as possible. There will be no continuation of the Pacific Solution under a Federal Labor government.In government, Kevin Rudd arranges to divert boat people to detention in some foreign island like Java:
AUSTRALIA may send a group of 79 asylum-seekers intercepted by the Australian Navy overnight to Indonesia for processing of their claims. .The Prime Minister, who will travel to Indonesia today with Foreign Minister Stephen Smith for further talks with the Indonesian President, is increasingly looking to the region to help manage a growing people-smuggling trade.And earlier:
Mr Smith confirmed this morning that discussions are under way for the ``safest place’’ to take the passengers, hinting because the vessel was detected in Indonesia’s search and rescue area the passengers may be sent to Java despite the fact they were picked up HMAS Armidale.
Mr Rudd said Indonesia was a proper place to deal with 253 Tamils on a boat recently detained in Indonesian waters at Australia’s request.Want more of Rudd’s hypocrisy - or of reality catching up to his spin? Guess when he gave this interview to the 7.30 Report:
KERRY O’BRIEN: Seventy-two of the Sri Lankans have been granted refugee status but still have no country to go to despite Australia’s efforts to persuade other countries to take them. Will you absorb those refugees who have been granted that status into Australia or will you too seek to have other countries take at least some of them?Answer? Two years ago, when Rudd was still in Opposition.
KEVIN RUDD: Firstly, on refugee’s policy in general I believe that Australia, together with the other signatories to the convention need to shoulder and to continue to shoulder its share of the global case load....
KERRY O’BRIEN: ...(W)ould you as Prime Minister take it as your responsibility and this nation’s responsibility as refugees to absorb them… as recognised refugees to absorb them to into Australia?
KEVIN RUDD: We would take advice of the department as against all the other claims on the refugee places which exist at the moment. We are sympathetically minded to accommodating people in that situation but I am also cautious.
===
There’s a logic there somewhere
Andrew Bolt
Brilliant. Let’s back a huge tax to cut emissions, but exempt the companies that emit most:
COALITION amendments to the proposed emissions trading scheme will shield heavy polluting industry from the short-term costs of a carbon price.So we’ll get a tax that won’’t work to stop a warming that’s halted and which won’t apply to those it’s aimed at most.
UPDATE
What Turnbull wants to change in the Rudd Government’s huge-taxing emissions trading scheme.
It appears to want a scheme which taxes everyone, but sends only muted signals to cut emissions. Then there’s an increase in compensation of what must be at least another $1 billion a year, as well as a big cut in revenue to be raised by the new tax. Taxpayers will fork out even more megadollars for a scheme even more useless in lowering temperatures. That’s how insane public debate on this issue now is.
UPDATE 3
I’d trust almost nothing from the Australia Institute, but Glenn Milne says it’s uncovered Treasury figures which only underline how useless Rudd’s colossal new tax on emissions will me:
Treasury modelling buttressing the CPRS shows it will in fact have little or no impact on one of the key offenders—the coal-fired electricity generation industry—in our lifetime.UPDATE 4
(Australia Institute head Richard) Denniss takes up the story: “What she (Wong) doesn’t tell us is that her CPRS, complex and impenetrable as it is, does not actually result in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from our coal-fired power stations.”
Using graphs taken from Treasury spreadsheets of the CPRS modelling, Denniss argues that when the CPRS comes in there is a slight reduction in the amount of electricity generated from black coal between 2010 and 2020 and virtually no reduction in brown coal electricity—the dirtiest form of electricity generation—over the same period…
It’s only after 2033—that is, in 24 years—that emissions from black and brown coal both begin to fall rapidly… And the reason emissions from black and brown coal-fired power stations plummet in 2033 also has nothing to do with the CPRS. According to Denniss, Treasury has simply assumed that in 2033 we will invent clean coal and that, having invented it, it will turn out to be cheap. Further, it assumes that between 2033 and 2043 we can replace or retrofit every coal-fired power station in Australia. Despite the fact that it takes five years to plan and build a normal one, Treasury seems to think we can replace them all in 10 years.
The Sunday Age yesterday reported this as fact:
Coalition analysis of Senate voting intentions obtained by The Sunday Age shows almost two-thirds of Coalition senators would be likely to defy Mr Turnbull’s wishes, which leaves open the prospect of passing an amended law before the Copenhagen summit… Only 12 senators have been identified as likely to vote in favour of amended legislation introduced before the December summit, including shadow ministers Eric Abetz, George Brandis, Helen Coonan, Michael Ronaldson and Victorian senators Scott Ryan and Judith Troeth.I was surprised by and critical of Ryan’s position and said so yesterday. It now turns out that Ryan was contacted by nobody about how he’ll vote on any amended legislation, and we’ll know his stand when he announces it. There may in fact be even less Coalition support for even an amended bill than suggested. (UPDATE: Ditto for Abetz, I believe.)
===
Segregation in Toyland
Andrew Bolt
Are children made more color blind or paranoid less by being denied a friendly black face in a popular book
Noddy will be without some of his best friends when a new book about his latest adventures in Toyland is released.Why does the anti-racist lobby (and our “reconciliation” variant) tend now to cause more tension than it solves?
Noddy’s golliwog mates have been omitted from what will be the first official new book about the little wooden boy for more than 45 years when it is released in late October.
UPDATE
Reader “Uncle Remus” - a man whose judgment I respect,and who also posts below under another name - makes me wonder from his comments below whether I’m too deaf to the message some receive from gollywogs. Uncle Remus is a conservative and as suspicious as I am of the grievance industry, but, unlike me, he has lived and worked in the United States and is thus far more alert to the cultural significance of gollywogs - a significance that almost vanishes here.
===
Just stick your hot head out the cold window
Andrew Bolt
Christopher Booker on the strange gap between what warmists think and what the world actually does:
Not many people in Britain were aware, I suspect, that 20 per cent of the entire United States was last week covered in snow, the greatest October snow cover the country had known for years (for details see the Watts Up With That website). Similarly unseasonable snowfalls blanketed central Europe and the Alps. Freak October snows caused traffic chaos in New Zealand. Hundreds of Tibetan herdsmen had to be rescued when blizzards swept their summer pastures weeks early.
This is now the third year running when there have been signs of an abnormally cold winter across large parts of the world. Last year’s October snowfalls in the US broke records which in some cases had stood for over a century, prefacing one of America’s coldest winters for decades. This summer’s Arctic ice-melt stopped nearly 1 million square kilometres short of its record low in 2007. Around Antarctica this year’s sea ice-melt was the lowest recorded since satellite data began in 1979, leaving the ice 30 per cent above its 30-year average.
What a startling contrast is provided by all these events in the real world to the ever more surreal frenzy of the warmists as – with only weeks to go before their doomed Copenhagen treaty conference in December – they make a last desperate bid to keep climate change hysteria at fever pitch.
===
In how much danger were these Tamils?
Andrew Bolt
The Society for Peace, Unity and Human Rights for Sri Lanka is curious about the 255 people who are trying to sail from Indonesia to Australia, claiming to be ethnic Tamils fleeing torture and death back home:
In Sri Lanka there is only one airport with facilities for international flights – that is Colombo, where outbound travellers have to pass through immigration and passports checks. How is it they could leave Sri Lanka without fear of revealing their identity, but are now fearful of going back? Or did they leave from Sri Lanka at all? “Alex” the “spokesman” for the group has explained he acquired his American accent because he worked in a call centre in Chennai. This opens up the possibility that this group has actually arrived from Tamil Nadu in India – where there are Sri Lankan Tamils in refugee camps, and are trying to get into Australia via the back door?
===
No such skin seen on this stage before
Andrew Bolt
Nikole Churchill, Hampton University’s new Homecoming Queen, writes in anguish to Barack Obama:
I am sad to say that my crowning was not widely accepted . . . the true reason for the disapproval was because of the colour of my skin...
There does indeed seem to be a shortage of smiles at the presentation:
===
Iran goes from terror sponsor to target
Andrew Bolt
This is an interesting, if alarming, development in the Sunni-Shiite story:
A suicide bomber killed six senior Revolutionary Guards commanders, including two of its top officers, and 25 other people on Sunday in one of the boldest attacks against Iran’s most powerful military institution.Al Qaeda is Sunni, but Shiite Iran is rich and was previously thought to have shielded it, if not sponsored its attacks. Wonder which way al Qaeda will now side, and hoiw aggressively, especially after this warning last year.
The attack highlighted deepening instability in the Islamic Republic’s southeast bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan, where many of Iran’s minority Sunnis live and which has seen a spate of deadly bombings and other violence in the last few years.
There’s a poetry here - a terror-sponsoring regime now the target of terrorists itself. And who would have thought the Iranian regime would have been attacked for not being Islamic enough? But who doubted that, even now, its insane paranoia would reveal itself:
Iran’s armed forces accused the United States and Britain of involvement in the attack carried out by “terrorists” and warned of revenge, the semi-official Fars News Agency reported.
===
More boats, and Gillard flounders
Andrew Bolt
Yet another:
Australian Customs and border protection authorities have confirmed there are 79 people on a boat intercepted between Christmas Island and Indonesia.And this is not just about control of our borders and our refugee program, but about yet another disaster in the making:
The Australian Navy ship HMAS Armidale responded to the boat’s distress signal yesterday.
A second boat has sent out a distress signal from Malaysian waters.MEANWHILE, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard had a shocker in her interview with Laurie Oakes on Channel 9 today.
First, she denied the undeniable - that boat people were once again dying, literally, to get to Australia, now that the Rudd Government has weakened our laws. And in doing so she verballed Nationals Leader Warren Truss:
Mr Truss has done is he appears to have just got on Google and looked in the dark recesses of the internet, cobbled together some figure and then accused the government of causing that loss of life, accuse the government of causing the loss of 25 lives. Well there is no evidence to support this figure.Actually, Julia, the evidence for not 25 but at least 37 deaths is here. If you dispute it, tell us why.
And then she walked straight into an Oakes’ trap that exposed her rank hypocrisy - as well as Labor’s increasingly desperate attempts to turn every question about its policy failures into a riff on the rotten Opposition:
LO: I’ve got here a shadow minister’s press release headed, “Another boat on the way. Another policy failure.” Do you agree that every boat of asylum seekers that arrives represents a policy failure by the Government?It may take a while for this transcript to be added to Gillard’s media site.
JG: Well, what I believe, Laurie, and what I think we can see from the conduct of the Opposition, is they’re all about playing politics with this issue. They say a lot of inconsistent things. Some days they’re in favour of temporary protection visas. Some days they’re against them. Some days they’re in favour of the Howard Pacific solution. Some days they’re against it. Each and every day they’re playing politics –
LO: But what about you? What about you? “Another boat on the way. Another policy failure.” Is that right?
JG: Oh well Laurie, I think what Australians know and what the Government knows is that we live in a world where people get displaced from their home countries for a variety of reasons. We’re seeing the aftermath of a civil war in Sri Lanka, for example, so people move because of that kind of violence. What, obviously, the world wants is for people, if they have to flee their homes, to then stop when they can get in contact with responsible authorities, like the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees, and have their claims processed. What we don’t want is we don’t want people risking long and dangerous journeys overseas where they might get into distress and get into real difficulty.
LO: You see, that press statement is dated April 23, 2003, and it’s issued by then shadow minister Julia Gillard. So why is one boat arrival then a failure of government policy, but 30-plus arrivals this year is not a failure of government policy.
===
How Obama’s team looks to Mao for his message
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama’s communications boss names mass-murderer Mao as one of her two “favorite political philosophers”. Roger Kimball laughs at the excuses made for her since.
So Obama, whose pastor was a hate-whitey race-baiter, not only has a far Left background himself, but has surrounded himself with aides who reflect his campus radical chic. For instance:
Van Jones, the onetime Marxist whose controversial statements about Republicans and 9/11 have made him a distracting lightning rod as Barack Obama’s environmental jobs czar in recent days, resigned tonight… , Jones was forced to apologize when a video surfaced of his February remarks in Berkeley, of all places, using a reference to a lower anatomical orifice to describe Republicans.And:
The next day Jones again had to apologize for having his signature on a petition to then N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer seeking an investigation into the 9/11 attacks as possibly an inside job planned by then-Pres. George W. Bush to soften opposition to a war in Iraq.
Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens....These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—informally known as the United States’ Science Czar.
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