Thursday, October 08, 2009

Headlines Thursday 8th October 2009

Somali Pirates Mistake French Military Vessel for Commercial Ship

Somali pirates in two skiffs fired on a French navy vessel early Wednesday after apparently mistaking it for a commercial boat, the French military said. The French ship gave chase and captured five suspected pirates.

Hey Hey It's Saturday in Red Faces Mark Jackson row

AFTER 21 years, Jacki MacDonald was finally reunited with Daryl Somers on the second Hey Hey It's Saturday reunion special, but the show will be remembered for a storm over a Red Faces skit. Swing crooner Harry Connick Jr led a chorus of criticism over a final controversial Red Faces act on the show. The singer looked uncomfortable during the performance of the Jackson Jive - a group of singers with their faces painted black, the Herald Sun reports. - welcome to Obama's USA. Now we are worried about racism and cannot laugh. Truth being that were Jackson alive he would never have defended himself - ed.

Researchers on road to cancer cure
ADELAIDE researchers believe they are close to discovering a cure for myeloid leukaemia - a cancer that afflicts young adults.

Bomb blast chaos in Sydney street
POLICE are hunting a bombmaker after an explosion in a suburban Sydney street terrified residents, set shrapnel flying into homes and set alight a car.

Powerful typhoon lashes Japan
ONE of the strongest typhoons to hit Japan in years has cut power to thousands of homes and ripped roofs off buildings.

Australians threatening their health by downing 773 drinks a year

HUNDREDS of thousands of Australians would be saved from alcohol-related disease if the nation's thirst for booze dried up by a third, a new report has found.

Myer 'a nothing brand that may eat itself'
MYER is trying to be everything to everyone and its growth plans are "too aggressive", says expert.

Red tape may kill Melbourne Cup winner
AUSTRALIA'S most loved horse on death row after being served last scoop of banned medicine.

Battle as Labor figure seeks royal title
CLAIMING be heir to the long-lost French throne, this man wants to change his first name to "Prince".

Sandilands blessed by priest on air
SHOCK Jock Kyle Sandilands returns to air, kicking things off with a little holy intervention.
=== Journalists Corner ===

Look What Is Happening in Honduras
As you know, on ON THE RECORD at 10 pm we have been closely following the crisis in Honduras. At this hour, the ousted leader is still hiding out in the Brazilian Embassy and the de facto leader is running Honduras. There is news ... here is the headline and then an article is linked below: Diplomats head to [...]
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Look out below!
Watch the incredible video of a bungee jump gone bad and what happened to the man making the leap!
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Taxes, Taxes, and More Taxes?
What the upper, middle & lower bracket should expect to pay to finance the health care plan.
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Michelle Malkin Weighs In!
The president rolled out the red carpet for physicians, but do they really support his plan or are they just following partisan procedure?
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Guest: John Boehner
While Dems fight over their version of a health care bill, can the GOP come together to take the insurance alternative off the table?
=== Comments ===
More Bad News for ACORN
By Bill O'Reilly
At the risk of overdoing this ACORN story, we can now tell you that the Louisiana attorney general is reporting $5 million may have been embezzled from the organization. Previously we knew $1 million had been stolen, but now we learn the $5 million figure was allegedly discussed at a 2008 ACORN board of directors meeting.

On Tuesday, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis denied the charge:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BERTHA LEWIS, ACORN CEO: This is speculation, completely false and not based on any documentation or any audit or anything other than two disgruntled former board members. And this form of modern day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

McCarthyism? That's absurd. ACORN has problems all over the place. The FBI should open a field office in its national headquarters. Ms. Lewis should wise up.

As you may know, most of the press isn't covering this story because ACORN is an activist group with heavy ties to the Democratic Party, but there is a legitimate question of overkill here.

Let's face it: ACORN is finished in the public arena. The group will never recover from the scandals. However, millions of dollars are still unaccounted for, so an aggressive federal investigation should take place. Attorney General Holder's all over the CIA. Maybe he should be all over a corrupt political group that influences elections instead. What say you, Mr. Holder?

With cynicism running deep among many Americans when it comes to our political system, we need to know exactly how much money flowed into ACORN and where all the money went. Louisiana authorities are doing some good work. A subpoena issued Monday demands information about the alleged embezzlement, and we believe there is more to come on this front.

Here at "The Factor," we didn't think the feds would get involved until critical mass had been reached. Now it has.
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Fix NRL’s problems first, then choose a leader
Piers Akerman
AUSTRALIA’S former political leaders have a poor track record when it comes to autumnal careers.- ARL is too entrenched with apparent cronyism and corruption which is part and parcel with the ALP. To nominate Mr Howard is a refreshing example of how some may be trying to break the vicious cycle ARL is locked into. In the days of Super League, there was an opportunity to break the nexus, but too many proved to desire the status quo.
It isn’t that games are fixed, but teams appear to be nobbled, and the perception is incommensurate with a growing international sport.
Certainly Mr Howard would be capable of leading the ARL to better times .. but will they be willing to be lead by their political nemesis who may wish to remove the rorts? - ed.

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GRIEF CUDDLE? AUTOCULTURAL INTERFACE? BAKE SALE?
Tim Blair
I wonder how Change Johnson will refer to the next car swarm.
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FAITH ABOVE ALL
Tim Blair
How inconvenient: “The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.” Yet the faithful – like the San Francisco Examiner‘s Thomas Fuller, among many – cling to warmth:
Even if there is no hockey stick, there is still global warming.
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WHEN HARRY MET NANCY
Tim Blair
These two just don’t seem to gel.
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CLIVE LIVE
Tim Blair
Well-known local crazy person Clive Hamilton takes his fear-and-warming show to England:
Clive Hamilton, Professor of public ethics at the Australian National University, said the majority of the population is still in denial about the risks of clim theate change.
Interesting way of putting it.
He compared the situation to psychology of the British and German populations before the Second World War …
With which he’d be deeply familiar.
… and said the only way to make people change their behaviour is to “ramp up the fear factor.”
This is fascinating. How, exactly, did “ramping up the fear factor” apply in Germany before WWII? Against whom or what was fear ramped? Hmmm?
In the case of climate change, he said a minority of people in Britain are in complete denial and refuse to believe man-made greenhouse gases are causing the temperatures to rise. He said a smaller minority are taking action by lobbying Government and adapting their lifestyles through driving less, not eating meat and generally living a low carbon lifestyle.
None of which makes the slightest bit of difference to anything, as Hamilton should be aware.
However, Prof Hamilton said the majority of people use “maladaptive coping strategies” such as ignoring the situation, blaming someone else or simply having a good time.

He said people do this to cope with the anxiety.
Or maybe, like normal humans, they just enjoy having a good time.
Prof Hamilton said scientists have played down the risks of global warming for fear of overloading people with information.
They’ve played down the risks? Seriously? And we haven’t already been hit with enough warmy “information”?
“There is a widespread belief in the scientific community that the public cannot handle the truth and so they have been pulling their punches.”
Well, let us have it, sciencers. Last word to scary Clive:
“Personally I cannot see any alternative to ramping up the fear factor.”
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Can’t he do even this?
Andrew Bolt
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-6-2009/the-gay-after-tomorrow
Even Jon Stewart is losing patience with the dithering of Barack Obama, this time over his repeated promise to allow the openly gay to serve in the military:
You’re the President of America...
He needed this reminding?
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Not so sorry, after all
Andrew Bolt
I’m guessing that none of those polled were artists:

AUSTRALIANS have the highest degree of support for their own country out of 33 nationalities polled in a survey published in The Economist.
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Maybe Daryl Somers could help Nala?
Andrew Bolt
More racism, I’m afraid, but I suspect it’s from the protesters and not the people they accuse:

A ROW has erupted in Tasmania over displaying the Aboriginal flag in the state’s parliament. The issue came to a head when a group of six Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) activists protested against the flag’s placement behind the Speaker in the Lower House…

The group stood in the public gallery today shouting for the Aboriginal flag to be withdrawn from behind the Speaker. They shouted, “This place is where you make your laws. Remove our flag it’s ours, not yours”, as they left the gallery.

The noisy protest was marred by an ugly clash between an activist and a house attendant. The male attendant told activist leader Nala Mansell-McKenna that she was “not a member of the public” and was ”not even an Aborigine” as he waved his finger in her face, appearing agitated during the confrontation.

You might well understand the attendant’s failure to recognise in Mansell-McKenna a member of another race entirely, with rights very different to his own. Here’s her picture.
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Not racist, but dumb
Andrew Bolt

Here we go again, more proof that we’re “racist”, this time from Hey Hey it’s Saturday:

The show’s second reunion special has been marred by scathing criticism over a Red Faces performance that featured a troupe dressed as the Jackson Five - complete with black face paint.

The act - by the Jackson Jive - left guest judge Harry Connick Jr visibly upset and later prompted host Daryl Somers to issue a formal on-air apology…

Connick Jr gave the troupe a score of zero and said the act wouldn’t have gone down well in the United States.

“If I knew that was going to be part of the show I definitely wouldn’t have done it,” Connick Jr.

And the world follows the Australians-racist script closely:

Blogs and news sites from the Guardian in England to Newsweek have covered the incident, in which Connick was left shocked and embarrassed by a Red faces skit featuring performers parodying the Jackson Five by painting their faces black.

The vast majority supported Connick’s argument that painting one’s face to appear black is patronising, racist, and full of disturbing historical connotations.

They also expressed disbelief that people in a country like Australia could still find such an act funny.

Sigh. Fact is, of course, that the skit was not proof of any racism at all - merely ignorance. If Somers were truly racist, he would not have apologised so humbly the instant he realised the offence it had caused. The performers, too, are astonished to be accused to racism:

Following international outcry, Dr Anand Deva, a prominent Sydney-based plastic surgeon, went public and said the Jackson Jive act on the show’s popular Red Faces segment last night was not meant to cause offence, but he admitted he would not have performed it in the US.

“Clearly, all of us want to apologise. I mean we have offended some people no doubt, particularly Harry Connick Jr,” he said.

“So I want to say on behalf of all of us that this was really not intended ... (to be) anything to do with racism at all.”

Actually, it’s no defence against charges of racism to claim you’re Indian. It’s racist to imply that only whites can be racist towards blacks. But Deva seems completely sincere in denying he meant to mock blacks in general (unacceptable) rather than the Jacksons in particular (deserved).

His reply also suggests the real sin. Deva admits he would not have pranced around in blackface before an American audience, because, I assume, he realises that blackface there has a very, very different cultural resonance than blackface in Australia.

Yet what he, Somers and the Hey Hey team failed to consider was that in their Australian audience was indeed an American. Worse, that American was from New Orleans, in the American south, and he was now sitting right in front of them as a judge of the Red Faces segment. What on earth did they imagine Harry Connick Jr would think? And even if Connick were inclined to laugh it all off as a culture clash, what else could he do but protest? YouTube clips of him sitting there unprotesting in front of a black-face skit would have killed him back home.

That others overseas will now grab this as evidence of our racism is in part another manifestation of this clash of cultures. I doubt many American commentators will realise that black face isn’t for us an iconic symbol of racism.

Still, we can hardly complain if foreign commentators accuse us of racism, given they’re saying no more than we’ve so happily - and mischievously - said of ourselves for so long. Our Prime Minister, for instance, has falsely accused his own country of being so racist that we “stole” thousands of Aboriginal children. Baz Luhrmann’s tax-payer-backed Australia made the same false charges, and was widely watched overseas. In promoting the film on US television, Hugh Jackman even witlessly likened Australia to Nazi Germany.

No, Hey Hey wasn’t being racist, but we can hardly protest when our critics claim it was. We’ve worded the world up too well about our evil hearts, and through the same kind of no-nothingness that’s caused this latest fuss.
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Save the planet! Pee before you fly
Andrew Bolt
If they were really such planet savers, they wouldn’t be flying in the first place:

A Japanese airline has started asking passengers to go to the toilet before boarding in a bid to reduce carbon emissions. All Nippon Airways (ANA) claims that empty bladders mean lighter passengers, a lighter aircraft and thus lower fuel use.

Belief in man-made global warming will soon be laughed out of existence.

PS: Let’s calculate: Let’s very generously estimate that 50 passengers per flight have fairly full bladders (each holding 300 ml of urine, weighing 300 g) and take the airline’s advice. That’s just 15 kg of weight saved for each flight. Wow - not even the weight of a single full suitcase.

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