=== Todays Toon ===
From ZEG
Above is a cartoon drawn to accompany an article appearing in the next edition of The Spectator Australia magazine. This piece is a great observation of the narrow-minded and delusional state of the progressive liberal mindset and examines just how truly superficial and dangerous that wet-dream multi-culti bubble is, as well as how easily it can be popped when they to have to confront actual reality.=== Bible Quote ===
“The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.”- Hebrews 1:3=== Headlines ===
All eyes on Obama, as the country wonders if Justice Stevens' replacement will be a hard core liberal — or a moderate who'll breeze through the confirmation processStupak Calling It Quits
Anti-abortion Dem Rep. Bart Stupak, slammed for role in health care law, says he won't seek re-election
Tea for Two: Backing Palin, Bachmann
Rep. Michele Bachmann has emerged as a galvanizing force along with Sarah Palin within Tea Party movement
Gender Bender in Maine Schools
State commission says forcing student to use specific bathroom because of gender amounts to discrimination
Bosses party as staff miss pay
THOUSANDS of hospital workers go without fortnightly pay while their bosses live it up.
Support grows to dump state governments
FOUR in 10 Australians favour abolishing state governments, seeing them as ineffective.
U-turn on asylum seekers an 'election fix'
GOVERNMENT'S policy change on asylum seekers is designed to win votes, the Opposition says.
Comic's Down syndrome rant 'despicable'
COMEDIAN Frankie Boyle rebuked for mocking Down syndrome during his latest tour.
Meet Australia's own Susan Boyle
SUSAN Boyle doppelganger Kim Pickering Jones is trying to replicate her hero's success.
Man charged with double murder
A MAN has been charged with murdering a man and a woman in an alleged drug deal gone wrong.
Electric shock as businesses face disaster
FAMILIES will be stung twice by soaring electricity price rises with small businesses forced to pass on average bill increases of more than $5000 a year.
Surgeons don armour to remove bullets
US army surgeons donned body armour to remove a high-explosive bullet from a soldier's head during a tense five-hour operation.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Locating, targeting, & eliminating the enemy. Experts reveal cutting-edge advances used to keep our troops safe!But, is there a danger in relying too much on this technology? It's our military's modern-day might revealed!
Time To Be Heard: Young Conservatives in AmericaIs education a right or a privilege? Don't miss this special live-audience episode
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Voight Fights Back!
Critics continue to slam the Tea Party. Now, Jon Voight takes a stand! Plus - a rare sit down with Andrew Young to find out what Rielle Hunter's saying now!
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Mastering His Universe?
From the scandals to the tournament, we get the latest on Tiger's return!
=== Comments ===
Pro-Pot People Push for Palin to Speak at EventThis is a RUSH transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," April 8, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Watch "The O'Reilly Factor" weeknights at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET!
LAURA INGRAHAM, GUEST HOST: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight: This week, Sarah Palin gave a speech at the Wine and Spirits Convention in Vegas. Well, after that, the pro-pot people — it's a group called Nevadans for Sensible Marijuana Laws — began lobbying the governor to speak at one of their events. They're offering her $25,000, but there's a hitch. She also has to acknowledge that pot is a "legitimate recreational substance that should be taxed."
With us now, Steve Fox, who's the director of the state campaigns for the Marijuana Policy Project and the author of the book, "Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?" It is great to see you. How are you?
STEVE FOX, AUTHOR, "MARIJUANA IS SAFER": Thanks for having me.
INGRAHAM: Let's talk about this. Now, this is kind of a cute little ploy that this Nevadan pro-pot group is doing. They didn't really think Palin was going to accept, right? It was just a way to get attention.
Click here to watch the interview!
FOX: The truth is that we didn't expect her to accept and, you know, unfortunately, that's the way many elected officials are today. And the reason we did it is because she was out there speaking to the alcohol industry. And our point is that marijuana is simply a less harmful recreational substance than alcohol, and it's incredibly irrational to punish adults who choose to use marijuana instead of alcohol.
INGRAHAM: Her speaking fee is about $75,000 a speech, so you would have to triple that and maybe you would — I have a question. Would you smoke pot before an appearance like this?
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Censorship hides behind the great Conroy firewall
Piers Akerman
BIZARRE but true, Australia and China are allied in their determination to censor internet content. In totalitarian China, the plan is known as Green Dam. In Australia it should be called “freedom-be-damned”.
- The bedrock of Western Civilization is the free exchange of ideas. Conroy & Rudd’s plan is totally at odds with this. We have actually fought wars against people who believed that a government has the right to censure and punish individuals for thinking differently. In effect Rudd is dialling back our freedoms to match those of communist China’s.Tim, I will be running for the NSW Legislative Council (the senate) within the year on the issue of Justice for Hamidur Rahman. If the filter goes through it may well be that I would never have gotten the story to break to this stage. Instead I would still be living in fear that a hit man would be targeting me because no one knows what I know about the issue. I will be running as an independent conservative. Although I would support Liberal Party policy, I will not run as a Liberal because I want to focus on the single issue which drives me.
Right now we have a free internet and the world has not come to an end. We need to keep it that way. The cops routinely capture the vermin who post life destroying pictures on the net and our security services have been brilliant at detecting terrorist threats and eliminating them. Why do we need more? The answer is we don’t. Terrorism and porn are just pretexts. This is about control and nothing more. Knowing Rudd he will already have a huge bureaucracy in the works to oversee every webpage, every post and every download. This body will probably hand out fines for swearing on line.
The Pricks.
Where will it end? Will they ban Piersly’s blog because most posters disagree with Rudd? Will they ban religious websites? These are valid questions.
What they really want to do is to take the ‘anonymous factor’ out of the net. The anonymous factor works exactly like a secret ballet ....people express what they really feel when they know they wont be punished for it. AF brings an honesty to the net that Rudd and his thugs want to destroy.
They must be stopped.
Party on
Tim of NotOnMyWatchVille
I note that Conroy’s plan is three times more expensive than the US one .. and guarantees delivery of an obsolete technology. - ed.
Inmate replied- Inmate, I have been a regular contributor to icompositions.com, which is Steve Jobs personal site for artists around the world to collaborate on artistic projects. I have been privileged to have worked with some of the worlds top musicians on various projects, from classical or jazz to contemporary and spoken word. Occasionally I would do side projects which get political, like on the intifada, che and on global warming. Recently I made a post on ‘40 inconvenient truths regarding global warming’ taken from a Piers site blog posting.
Censorship is closer to you than you think, it’s alive and well in this blog.
It is hypocritical in the extreme for Piers to attack Conroy regarding the proposed net filter when he frequently blocks comments that are critical of him or his acolytes. I estimate that only 25% of what I post ever sees the light of day in this blog.
What is you’re scared of Piers? People pointing out the errors in your arguments or the dubiousness of the facts or sources that you quote? If you believe so much in free speech and unfettered content than start practising what you preach. (Then added) Actually I wrote that only 25% gets posted, that means you block 75%. If you are the sole arbiter of what is “idiotic comment” then how are you any better than the Chinese Government?
I may be sarcastic but I make a point of not being abusive or offensive when I blog. You will understand then why I suspect your filter is your own personal bias and a sensitivity to criticism.
At first site moderators who objected to any criticism of global warming criticism said that they didn’t like the fact it wasn’t a musical piece. Then they claimed it came from the BNP and I should take it down immediately or they might get sued for copyright. I pointed out it wasn’t subject to copyright and didn’t belong to the BNP but they threatened my account. And so after 7 years and over five hundred musical and av items with over a half million hits and hundreds of collaborators I had to delete my site.
That is what your friends do. They don’t believe in inclusiveness, although they preach it. They are rude and abusive and frequently wrong, just like you. The posts Piers has allowed of your contribute nothing to debate, but shows a great deal of what we are being shielded from. Thank you Piers - ed.
Inmate replied- Inmate, you are right about that. You see previously I had to delete 2.5 million words and images because an education department bureaucrat had apparently been asked by someone from the NSW Premier’s office to threaten me into doing that. The material I deleted had nothing to do with my workplace, but that meant nothing to those in the ALP who were keen to remove evidence of a cover up over the death of school boy Hamidur Rahman.
Piers
Censorship is censorship irrespective of whether it be you or a government that decides what gets through or doesn’t.
You huff and puff about the evil intent of the proposed filter, bluster about freedom of expression and then turn around to impose your views on what gets posted. Where is your “...bias in favour of people’s right to free expression\”?
DD Ball
Your icompositions tale of woe has more to it than you are telling us I suspect. Why would you post something about global warming on a site for musicians? Did you feel they needed to be “educated” about the truths on AGW. If you valued your site membership so much why not take down the offending post? After all you joined because of your musical interest, right? It seems you brought about the unhappy outcome solely through your own actions. Your treatment by the site administrators was probably deserved.
I’m sure Piers will continue to provide a blog where you can immerse yourself in like minded comments. You won’t be troubled with an alternative perspective to jar the cosy fantasies many in this blog seem to have about federal and state politics.
In both cases I had done nothing wrong and did not need to delete the sites, but had no choices because I was being threatened. So you will note the moderator at the link (given previously) erroniously claiming I had admitted fault for deleting a file and may be ordered to delete more in the future.
Does it make you feel good to ask me to state this explicitly? Or were you attempting some smear, suggesting that I had other reasons for deleting the material? I would never have prospered those seven years if I had nothing but politics to contribute. From the beginning, some of what I did was political, but much of the more than 500 pieces were not .. less than 2 percent. But I’m sure facts won’t sway you from a good smear. - ed.
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ASSIMILATION HALTED
Tim Blair
When you move to Australia, there is always the risk of becoming Australian:
A man who killed his wife by using her veil to strangle her in their Melbourne home did so in the belief he was entitled to dominate her, a Supreme Court judge has found.Enjoy your new jail friendships, Azizi. Be docile.
Soltan Azizi was today sentenced to 22 years’ jail by Justice Betty King, who said the Afghani refugee had been physically abusive towards Marzieh Rahimi throughout their 14-year marriage.
Justice King said Ms Rahimi had sought help from social workers and was intending to leave Azizi, despite him warning that he would kill her if she tried.
She said Azizi had complained to Ms Rahimi’s sister in the days prior to her killing that his wife was becoming “too Australian”, meaning “she was not a docile and good wife in the terms you expected her to be”.
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CODE CHANGED
Tim Blair
In 2008, “socialist” was a code word for “black”.
In 2010, the code word for “black” is “athlete”.
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Rudd gives us more boats, detainees and detention
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s freeze on procressing asylum claims from Afghan and Sri Lankan boat people leaves us back to where we were a decade ago, in the lip-sewing days.
We now have a flood of boats that may or may not stop, with a couple of thousand people again in detention, lured here by Rudd’s earlier and misguided softening of our laws. For many newcomers that detention will now be indefinite once more (breaking a Rudd promise), which invites some to try desperate stunts to blackmail their way in. And, indeed:
The government acknowledged its decision could create tension among detainees at Christmas Island, as a team of Australian Federal Police flew to the island yesterday with riot gear to bolster security arrangements....Rudd is trying to avoid a return of lip-sewing tactics and violent protests by detainees by applying the freeze only to new arrivals. This means that those here already from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan will likely be given refugee status, even though the Government’s freeze suggests it does not think they deserve it.
Tensions have been rising at the centre, particularly among long-term detainees. About 4.30am yesterday, a Tamil asylum-seeker who arrived last year tried to hang himself inside the Immigration Detention Centre’s green compound using a bedsheet and a security camera fixture.
The Weekend Australian has been told a fellow detainee stumbled across the suicide attempt while walking to a communal phone and alerted a guard, who cut the man down.
This is a farce.
And meanwhile:
Sources said intelligence suggested that in light of the increased traffic, it was likely that up to six asylum-seeker boats were headed for Australia, with another six being prepared for transit. But they cautioned that the intelligence varied in its reliability.UPDATE
Immigration Minister Chris Evans said yesterday he did not expect the policy change to have an immediate effect on boat traffic.
Paul Toohey in Malaysia finds boat people who don’t think Rudd is as tough as he’s now claiming, and are banking on the freeze being lifted after the election:
KEVIN Rudd’s attempt to buy political time on asylum seekers as the federal election draws nearer will not deter 10,000 Afghans and Sri Lankans in Malaysia and Indonesia from trying to boat to Australia.UPDATE 2
“Right now, these people are desperate,” said K. Arumugam, the chairman of Kuala Lumpur’s Suaram human rights group, which works with Sri Lankan refugees in Malaysia.
“If they have to wait longer in detention on Christmas Island to find out what will happen to them, that will be OK with them,” he said. “They will still go to Australia."…
The entire refugee community and network is aware 2010 is an election year in Australia, as they are aware both sides of politics attack each other over the issue. But they also believe Rudd’s Government has been more humanitarian.
They have all heard about Christmas Island from friends and relatives who have gone ahead. To them, it sounds five-star - they can’t wait. One man told me he believed it had a large swimming pool (it doesn’t).
Only last month, Immigration Minister Chris Evans told Parliament about the evil of keeping people in the indefinite detention he yesterday introduced:
We do not want to hold people in detention for long periods…The evidence suggests that the impact of indefinite detention has a much worse impact on people’s mental health than even, say, being in prison, because at least people in prison have a time frame for when they will be released, whereas those who are in indefinite detention have all the doubts and uncertainties about that.UPDATE 3
The 39th boat of 2010 arrives. Ten on board.
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Save the planet! Make Africans go without power
Andrew Bolt
Left-wing leaders of rich countries want to “save” the planet by making Africa’s poor go without cheap power:
The World Bank on Thursday approved a controversial $3 billion loan for the development of a coal-fired power plant by the South African state utility Eskom despite lack of support from major shareholder countries.(Thanks to reader Alex.)
The United States, the Netherlands and Britain said they abstained from supporting the loan because of environmental and other concerns about the project…
“Without an increased energy supply, South Africans will face hardship for the poor and limited economic growth,” Obiageli Ezekwesili, World Bank vice president for Africa, said in a statement.
The U.S. Treasury said it abstained because of “concerns about the climate impact of the project and its incompatibility with the World Bank’s commitment to be a leader in climate change mitigation and adaptation.” ...
The opposition to the Eskom loan has raised eyebrows among some observers, who note that Britain and the United States are allowing development of coal-powered plants at home even as they raise concerns about those in poorer countries.
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Slickers inspect slick
Andrew Bolt
Politicians show they’re worried about oil on the Great Barrier Reef by burning oil above it:A PROCESSION of senior politicians has flown over the stricken Shen Neng 1, with five in five days “examining” the wreck, despite no change to the situation.And who are these media tarts and poseurs, keen to pretend they’re Doing Something about the Shen Neng’s tiny oil slick?
The political tour of the region began on Monday with Greens leader Bob Brown flying over the zone in a fixed-wing aircraft, at a cost charter companies estimate to be about $2500.I’m not sure what’s worse - that we’re led by such pretenders, or that such pretences actually work.
[Queensland Premier Anna] Bligh was the latest to soar over the southern Great Barrier Reef early yesterday morning in a helicopter at a cost of $4000 an hour.
Also throughout the week, [Transport Minister Rachel] Nolan took a helicopter, while [Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd and Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett took separate flights in the Australian Maritime Safety Authority Dornier, each estimated by charter companies to cost $2500 an hour.
(Thanks to reader John.)
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Education experts make breakthrough
Andrew Bolt
Shocking findings are announced by the Australian Council for Educational Research:
Children who walk to school are more physically active in their day-to-day activities around their neighbourhood than those children who are driven to school, a new study finds.Well, that settles the debate at long last.
(Thanks to reader Kevin.)
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Facebook protects Rudd, defames Abbott
Andrew Bolt
Facebook removed a site which called Kevin Rudd a failure:
It was revealed this week a group titled “KEVIN RUDD = EPIC FAIL”, devoted to highlighting grievances with the prime minister, was removed by Facebook.But it continues to publish a defamatory Leftist site called ”Tony Abbott is a paedophile”:
In a statement to news.com.au, Facebook said: “We do not take down groups that speak out against countries, political entities or ideas.”
However it refused to say exactly why the group had been deleted.
(Thanks to reader Mark.)
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As one life ended, another was threatened
Andrew Bolt
Police have been called in, and the full story may well be even more sinister:
Health authorities are concerned that an anaesthestist working in an abortion clinic deliberately infected 12 patients with hepatitis C…To add to the picture, the doctor worked at two other clinics, yet:
Victoria’s chief health officer Dr Jon Carnie said the doctor had been working at Croydon Day Surgery iin 2008 and 2009 when he allegedly infected the female patients at the clinic, which is the state’s only late-term abortion clinic.
He said it was unclear how the doctor transmitted his strain of the virus to the women, but he said it was difficult to imagine how it could have been transmitted accidentally.
There was no evidence any patients at the two other clinics had been infected...(For legal reasons, no comments.)
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Craven opportunist
Andrew Bolt
So why did Kevin Rudd suddenly get tough on boat people? Was it because his weaker laws had caused too many boats to land? Had lured 53 boat people to their deaths? Had cost taxpayers countless millions? Had poisoned relations with Indonesia? Had helped queue-jumpers to push ahead of real refugees?
None of the above. Laurie Oakes explains, without a word of criticism:
The Prime Minister was advised by strategists weeks ago that he had to act. Border control, they told him, posed an election risk in key marginal seats.
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It’s Rudd failures, not the Opposition, that has him scrambling
Andrew Bolt
There’s a nasty habit of Leftist journalists to excuse the chicanery of Kevin Rudd by blaming the nasty Opposition for forcing a nice man to do bad things.
The latest examples?
Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher:
On one hand, you have Tony Abbott’s opposition. It’s fanning alarmism in pursuit of political advantage. It’s issuing incoherent and misleading statements that are plainly designed to fan fears of immigration.... And on the other, you have the Kevin Rudd government...Rudd appointed Australia’s first Population Minister in the form of Tony Burke to give the impression that he was taking charge…Here’s his colleague Jessica Irvine:
Similarly, Rudd’s decision yesterday to suspend asylum applications from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka was an urgent effort to shut down a subset of the population argument. He just wants it to go away. So if fear-mongering on one side and an anxious muteness on the other constitutes a debate, we have one. Otherwise we just have a desperate opposition and a frightened government.
(T)his week’s announcement of Australia’s first Minister for Population, Tony Burke, had more than a tinge of the propagandistic about it… I would say he will commission a panel of experts from the private and public sector to hold public consultations on the issue. After 12 months he will give a report to the government...By then the election will be over. If the Coalition wins, Burke’s efforts will be meaningless. If the Coalition loses, hopefully they will abandon their scaremongering over immigration and the issue will settle.Here’s the Age’s Tony Wright:
Under fire from the opposition for having ‘’softened’’ its border protection rules, leading to the arrival of 105 boats to date, the government was clearly desperate for a strategy to send a message to people smugglers. The message? Your clients will sit in limbo on Christmas Island and probably be sent home.Here’s Laurie Oakes:
Shadow Immigration Minister Scott Morrison ... has run a ruthless and pretty effective scare campaign. Not that it has been difficult.But what this trope also obscures is the real story: that once again Rudd has created problems by botched policies. He weakened the boat people laws, and triggered a mini-Armada. He took his eye off our immigration intake and failed to note our population was increasinging by an unsustainable 450,000 Australians a year.
Boat people breaching our borders is an issue that provokes an emotional response, whipped along by radio shock jocks as well as the Opposition.
The Government could argue until it was blue in the face that overall numbers are small, but that is not the way the punters see it. And in politics, perceptions are everything…
Just the same, there is logic in what the Government is doing.
Forget the Opposition. It’s Rudd’s own blunders that are forcing his scrabbling attempts to find fixes - or to appear top. That is the real story.
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The Minister for pretending to do something
Andrew Bolt
Jessica Irvine explains Kevin Rudd’s trick of appointing Tony Burke the Minister for Population:
I would say he will commission a panel of experts from the private and public sector to hold public consultations on the issue. After 12 months he will give a report to the government. Most likely it will tell the government whatever it wants to hear on the subject…(Thanks to reader Pira.)
By then the election will be over… In the meantime, appointing a minister for population means every time Rudd or one of his ministers gets thrown a curly question about population on talk back radio, they can say the new minister is figuring it out.
And we couldn’t possibly preempt the findings of that review, Alan. (Hello again, Henry tax review). Questioners will eventually tire and give up. ..
The ‘’invent a minister/review/acronym’’ trick of media management has been perfected by the Rudd government, with varying success. Got a question on tax? We’ve got a review on that. Got a question on petrol prices? We’ve got a new price monitoring scheme for that (or we had). A question on grocery prices? Ditto (and ditto). A question on housing affordability? We’ve got a minister for that.... A question on bank gouging? We’ve got a bank switching package for that. A question on education? Why, we’ve got an entire revolution for that.
All of which gives the impression of furious activity. But it also invariably raises people’s expectations of what governments can do to solve their problems. Eventually people start to wonder what exactly has been done.
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The broken families are struggling most
Andrew Bolt
A measure of the price to pay for our “freedom” and flight from responsibility:
The number of calls [to a NSW Government-funded advice line ] from parents seeking advice on how to raise adolescents has risen 36 per cent, from 2685 in 2007 to 4179 in 2009.And, of course, undersocialised and undisciplined children, as they grow older, cause problems not only for their parents…
Release of the data from Parent Line, a 24-hour-a-day service operated by Catholic Care, follows concerns raised by school principals about parents who fail to set boundaries and want to be popular with their children…
“What this tells us is that while, predictably, new parents are seeking help with raising their young children, more and more parents are unsure about what’s best for their teenagers,” [Minister for Community Services Linda ] Burney said.
‘’Parents today allow children greater influence over how the family operates and even though the popular democratic style of parenting has its strengths, it can raise issues for parents.’’
Ms Burney said blended families were having difficulty negotiating multiple adult and child relationships and differences in standards and parenting styles. Single parents were often overwhelmed by their responsibilities.
Last year, 30 per cent of calls to the Parent Line were from single parents and 6 per cent from parents in blended families.
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How the state was left for burning
Andrew Bolt
The real issue after the Black Saturday catastrophe is why Victoria once again failed to the fuel reduction burns that would have made the flames less fierce.
The Royal Commission is hearing only one message on this - that, as I argued just days after the fires, the Government did far too little burning for far too long:
A panel of seven experts assembled by the Commission’s legal team came to the consensus view that Victoria should burn between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of its 7.7 million hectares of public forest annually - an ambitious target when you consider 1.7 per cent, or 130 000 hectares, is currently burnt each year. The scientists ranged from the CSIRO fire investigator Phil Cheney and forest ecologist Professor Mark Adams to the more cautious Dr Michael Clarke, an associate professor and head of the Zoology Department at Latrobe University, with expertise in conservation biology and Dr Malcolm Gill, a scientist concentrating on plant diversity.But take Western Australia instead:
No-one was suggesting burning would prevent bushfires altogether but all agreed it would reduce the number of fires that broke out and lessen the spread and intensity of those that did ignite, making them easier to extinguish....
The scientists were scathing of Victoria’s current approach to prescribed burning. Fire ecologist Dr Bradstock, the director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, said it was “probably better than nothing” but on a scale of 1 to 10 it only reduced the risk from a high of 10 to 9. The University of Melbourne’s Kevin Tolhurst said prescribed burning had the potential to reduce the risk of bushfire by two thirds, if done in large 1,000-hectare tracts burnt at least 70 per cent through, but he said burning at the level done by Victoria might be achieving a 1 or 2 per cent reduction.
The Department of Sustainability’s (DSE) assistant chief officer Liam Fogarty ... spoke of a belief in, and passion for, prescribed burning within the organisation.... He attributed reductions in prescribed burning during the ‘90s to an “anti-forestry, anti-fire management movement”, saying there’d been an associated loss of “organisational focus and capacity” during that period… Fogarty agreed the burning program needed to increase...
Richard Sneeuwjagt is the man responsible for WA’s planned burning program, managed by the state’s Department of Environment and Conservation....(Thanks to reader James.)
The Commission heard WA had implemented a broad-scale planned burning program since large fires in 1960/61 prompted a Royal Commission and a recommendation to boost the preventive use of fire… Since the early ‘90s WA had been aiming to burn approximately between 6 and 8 per cent or about 200,000 hectares per annum…
“We haven’t had a forest fire fatality, we haven’t had major property losses for 50-odd years. We haven’t had a wildfire in excess of 30,000 hectares since 1961...’” [Sneeuwjagt said.]
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Why were Reuters employees hanging out with terrorists?
Andrew Bolt
This was the latest atrocity story about the US in Iraq, as peddled by CNN:
Two Apache attack helicopters, code-named Crazyhorse 18 and 19, headed out to help the ground troops clear insurgents from an area of the New Baghdad district of the Iraqi capital.This was also the line gleefully taken by far-Left outfits such as Crikey, run by ”quality journalism” campaigner Eric Beecher:
Forty minutes later, nine people in the street were dead, including a photographer and his assistant for the news agency Reuters. Two Iraqi children were injured, while U.S. forces suffered no casualties.
The engagement on July 12, 2007, gained international attention because of the deaths of the Reuters journalists.
Now, aerial footage from one of the helicopters made public by the Web site WikiLeaks has led to new revelations about exactly what happened in the sweltering heat that morning…
The video footage showed that one of two photojournalists killed was being rescued when the gunship’s crew fired on the van to which he was being carried. Saying the footage was still classified, Wikileaks contended it “clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers."…
In a statement posted on the Reuters Web site Tuesday, the agency’s editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, called the footage “difficult and disturbing to watch, but also important to watch.”
“I will continue to campaign for better training for the military—to help as much as possible to teach the difference in form between a camera and an RPG or between a tripod and a weapon,” Schlesinger’s statement said.
Whistleblower website Wikileaks.org has released ‘decrypted’ video from a US Apache helicopter that appeared to show US forces in Iraq firing upon and killing at least 11 unarmed civilians who stopped to inspect an injured insurgent in 2007. Two children, not visible in the video, were also injured.But here’s what Wikileaks didn’t say and Reuters needs to explain: the Reuters men were in a group of Iraqis carrying AK-47s and RPGs, used to shoot down American helicopters:
Wikileaks we already know is not credible. But Reuters needs to explain why its employees were embedded with terrorists, and how that might have affected their coverage.
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