Headlines Monday 20th September 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

Sir Zelman Cowen, AK, GCMG, GCVO, QC (born 7 October 1919), was the 19th Governor-General of Australia.

=== Bible Quote ===

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”- Ephesians 4:29

=== Headlines ===

Missing 'Cult' Members Found Alive in California Park
California authorities find 13 members of a 'cult-like' religious group alive and well in a park after they told family members that they were awaiting an apocalyptic event.

Freed American Hiker: We Are Not Spies
Sarah Shourd, who was freed from an Iranian jail this week after more than 13 months, says she and two other American hikers never committed any crime, calling their arrest 'a huge misunderstanding'

Powell: Illegals Fix My House
In an effort to urge the GOP to support immigration, the former secretary of state says illegals do essential work in the U.S. and that he has firsthand knowledge because they do repairs around his house

DeMint Warns of Possible Death to GOP
One of the GOP's most conservative senators and a Tea Party favorite says the Republican Party will be 'dead' if it fails to live up to its principles again

Breaking News

Cult leader held for mental evaluation
THE woman believed to be the leader of a small religious sect in Palmdale, California, was held for questioning and a mental evaluation.

Fast drilling begins to free trapped miners
THE fastest of three drilling machines brought in to help rescue the 33 workers deep in a Chilean mine began boring into the Earth yesterday in its bid to reach the trapped men.

Father charged with triple murder
A HOUSTON father was charged with capital murder after his three children were shot dead in Texas yesterday.

Britain to allow voting in prisons
BRITISH prison inmates are poised to win the right to vote in a decision set to inflame tensions within the coalition Government.

Woman goes on shooting spree at hospital
A TODDLER was among four people killed after a woman armed with a shotgun went on a rampage.

China 'could be a charity superpower'
CHINESE millionaire to give more than $747 million to charity when he dies, following in Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's footsteps.

Gel fails to protect women from AIDS virus
A VAGINAL gel failed to protect women against the AIDS virus, doctors said today, reporting on a major clinical trial that enrolled more than 9000 women.

China 'will not bow to yuan pressure'
ADVISER to China's central bank says Beijing won't cave in to foreign pressure to let its exchange rate appreciate.

China to decide on backing Potash bid
CHINA'S state-owned Sinochem Group asks Government to back a potential bid for Canada's Potash Corp, local media reports.

Bodies of woman and teenager discovered
POLICE are investigating the deaths of a 15-year-old girl and 47-year-old woman after their bodies were found at a house in Melbourne's east last night.

NSW/ACT

Feral pest plague in gunsights
PARKS, beaches and reserves in NSW will shut down from this week as wildlife experts cull pests.

Taronga Zoo's next big cheeky thing
FORGET meerkats or baby elephants - this is the face of the next big thing at Sydney's Taronga Zoo.

Gelato journey on beaten track
AMONG the sheep in the heart of NSW is a slice of Italy and gelato.

Microsoft's smooth PC operator
NICK Hodge is a hired geek who works for Microsoft but he's never worn a tie and rarely goes to the office.

Trucks roll in rail fee protest
A ROW involving stevedoring giant Patrick and the NSW Government could mean 1000 more trucks a day on our roads.

Hat no way to pick a mayor
REGIONAL council areas are increasingly choosing who is the next mayor by pulling names from a hat.

Fiery farewell from ancient sky warrior
IN ITS farewell performance, the striking F-111 made sure it went out with a big bang

Queensland

Flood warnings as holidays begin
FLOOD warnings for several towns as Queensland prepares for a wet week.

Queensland town bans plastic bags
A TOWN on Queensland's central coast is pushing to become the first in the state to ban plastic bags.

$30,000 fine for small crabs
A COUPLE of fishing trips have cost a man $30,000 after he was caught with more than 100 undersized and female mud crabs.

Former heath chief cleared over Patel
THE former head of Queensland Health has been cleared of any wrong doing in his handling of complaints made about convicted killer surgeon Dr Jayant Patel.

Man unhurt after three-storey fall
A 23-YEAR-old man has fallen from a Surfers Paradise hotel and walked away unharmed.

Spider sinks fangs into bird
BIRDS might not normally be on the menu for this North Queensland spider but she wasn't going to pass up a free lunch. See the gruesome pictures.

Car driver killed in truck smash
THE driver of a car has been killed after collision with a truck on a north Queensland highway.

Truck full of cows in creek
A TRUCK loaded with cattle has rolled into a creek . The driver is OK, bu the fate of the livestock is unclear.

Locust cloud stretches 5km
STATE Government officers have sprayed a 5km-wide swarm of millions of spur-throated locusts so thick it looked like a dust storm.

Drugs a problem 'in every school'
DRUG and alcohol use by Queensland children is common and the drug trade is occurring in every school in the state, an expert has warned.

Victoria

Security misses 'weapon' twice
AN 80-year-old got through Melbourne airport's security-screening with a screwdriver in her bag on two recent flights.

Doctors praise Jim's courage
DEMONS legend Jim Stynes is such an inspiration he should be made Australian of the Year, his surgeon says.

Search for missing motocyclists
A SEARCH is underway for five missing motorcyclists including three teens at Gellibrand.

Power cut by remote
HOUSEHOLDS are set to get electricity discounts for letting power companies turn appliances on and off by remote control.

Crowds push Pies to the G
COLLINGWOOD has won permission to stage an extraordinary open training session for up to 20,000 fans at the MCG.

Find us someone to love
GINGER Moggs and his four siblings were within a whisker of being homeless.

Northern Territory

Detention centre escapee recaptured
A MAN who escaped from the Darwin detention centre has been recaptured

South Australia

Outback rustlers thrive
A NEW brand of professional thief has revived the old Australian art of duffing in the Outback, where the high price of livestock has made sheep and cattle a valuable commodity.

Weeds choke River Murray
STRONG flows from Victorian floodwaters are needed to save the River Murray from another environmental disaster - weeds.

Western Australia

Grylls 'misled parliament'
The WA opposition says National Party leader Brendon Grylls misled parliament by not disclosing a helicopter joy-ride with mining magnate Clive Palmer.

Several hurt in three-car pile-up
CHARGES are expected to be laid after a three-car pile-up in Ballajura yesterday which left several people injured.

Dept knew of Leonora child-sex abuse
REFUGEE advocates say both the Immigration Department and the minister knew there was a risk of child-sex abuse occurring at detention centres housing cross-cultural families.

Tasmania

Nothing new

=== Comments ===

Beck: Peaceful Revolutions

Non-violent movements of Moses, Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
===
A STICK NAMED PABLO
Tim Blair
A massive storm hit New York last week, causing widespread damage. That’s basically it, but somehow the New York Times was able to generate more than 1000 words on the Great Tree Tragedy of 2010:

Some were more than a century old but still sturdy and doing their jobs.

Their “jobs”? In Obama’s America? Not likely.

Many others were young and willowy, just getting going. Some of them were inscrutable; no one truly knew them or how they got there. But others felt like old friends.

If your friends are covered in bark and have birds in them, sure. By the way, it’s nice that only some of NYC’s trees are inscrutable. I prefer an open, chatty tree myself.

There was a beloved scarlet oak that had stood forever in a farm family’s cemetery in Queens. There was a Callery pear that parrots preferred on a street in Brooklyn. Trees that had stories to them that were now prematurely finished.

Some of the trees deserved it, though. Like that Norway maple on 43rd. The backstabbing bitch.

The tragedy of the storm, which meteorologists said Friday included two tornadoes, was Aline Levakis, 30, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., the sole person to die, when a tree, as it happened, hit her car ...

Kind of ruins the whole “kind, gentle trees” concept, but the Times barges on:

The city has over 100 species and more than five million trees, some as old as 250. Clearly the loss was great.

Not really. As the next paragraph reveals, the estimated tree doom count is 2000. That’s just 0.4 per cent of the city’s tree population. NYC added far more trees in the decade from 1995-2005, which should cheer everybody up.

In All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village stood another cherished tree, a towering live oak thought to be 180 years old. It was about 90 feet tall. After the storm, all that remained was the bottom 12 feet.

“It was a cool-looking tree,” said Daniel C. Austin Jr., the cemetery’s vice president. “It had these beautiful arms. Every time we drove by it, we used to talk about it.”

Every single time? That must have been fun. Still, it’s not as though there’s anything else in New York to talk about. Except maybe the child with a companion stick:

Reuben Slater had his own tree-loss story. He is 13 and lives in Park Slope. When he walks to school, he passes a massive ash tree with a trunk that gives way to branches that form a V. When he was younger, he thought of it as the tree of life.

The storm carved off half the V. The tree is expected to survive, but to no longer resemble its old self. That saddens Reuben. He sees a tree “with a broken arm.”

He snatched a small branch off the ground. He said he would keep it in his room. “I’m going to name it Pablo,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”

#futuredemocrat. Has anybody seen James Wolcott lately? The famous nature fan should be delighted that nature finally visited his city and smashed … nature.
===
BAGFEST
Tim Blair
Wearing their finest freedom sacks, the babes of Hizb ut-Tahrir are loud, proud and under a shroud:

Islamic values are superior to ‘’flawed’’ Western secular values and non-Muslims are in no position to lecture Muslims about the oppression of women, a speaker said yesterday at a Sydney rally against proposals to ban the burqa.

‘’Despite the intense negative propaganda against Islam and in particular the lies about its treatment of women, the number of Western women embracing Islam continues to rise at a rapid rate,’’ said Fautmeh Ardati, a member of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
‘’By turning their backs on this flawed way of life, it is testament of the superiority of Islamic values over Western values.’’

That line about “turning their backs” might have been a little misplaced:

There were about 2000 people at the rally, with men and women segregated by a row of plastic markers. Male speakers spoke to the crowd from a podium at the front. The two female speakers spoke from the women’s section, meaning most of the men had their backs turned to them.

Leading Hizbie chick Fautmeh Ardati defended her multi-layer fabric liberation enclosure:

Women had two options, she said. ‘’The Western secular way of life, which robs a woman of her dignity, honour and respect, where she is considered little more than a commodity to be bought and sold, or the option of Islam, where a woman’s dignity, respect and honour are priceless.’’

That’s not a very nice thing to say about Western women, nor about face-exposer Robina Jalali, currently running for election in Afghanistan. Sheikh Shady – the real Sheikh Shady, I assume – also attended yesterday’s rally:

Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman said Muslims loved Australia but rejected interference in the practice of their religion. ‘’Keep away from our affairs,’’ he said.

When your religion is in the main street, strolling about in Mohammed’s Snuggie and viewing the world through a mail slot, it’s not just your affair, mate. More from Ardati:

‘’We dress like this because it is the command of Allah, not any man.’’

The last paragraph includes this line: “One woman wearing a burqa said she would have to ask her husband before speaking to the Herald.” Further from Andrew McCarthy:

Islamist ideologues are ascendant because they are moving what they are proud to call their “civilizational jihad” against the West from the battlefield, where they know they cannot win, to our institutions, where the scales tip in the Islamists’ favor. They are culturally confident. We, on the other hand, are ambivalent about whether our culture deserves to survive. No law can solve that problem.

He’s right. It’s a cultural deal, not a legal one.
===
FISHER OF MEN
Tim Blair
When greensters like Al Gore and Nick Stern say how great China is about cleaning up pollution, consider the pollution that they might be talking about:

Wei Jinpeng is a fisher of dead people. He scans the river about 18 miles from Lanzhou, China, for cadavers, drags them to shore with a small boat and then charges grieving families to recover their relatives’ corpses. It is a thriving business.

But they really care about global warming, so hugs for China.
===
CASH FOR OUCHIES
Tim Blair
They risk their lives (and the lives of others) to get here, then sue over injuries received after they’ve arrived:

Dozens of asylum-seekers have received a total of $5.4 million in compensation payouts from taxpayers for injuries they suffered while in detention.

Official figures obtained by News Ltd reveal that more than 50 immigration detainees have pocketed an average of $100,000 each over the past two years.

News Ltd says the federal government has refused to detail the reasons for the multi-million-dollar payouts to detainees, saying only they were related to wrongful detention or injuries suffered in detention.

It must be part of the government’s ingenious plan to repel would-be asylum seekers and end the trade in people smuggling. Which is just going brilliantly:

In September, Australia’s detention population included 4527 people who had arrived illegally by boat.

This compares to just four people in November, 2007. Under Labor, the number of those held in detention centres has increased by – wait for it – 113,075 per cent. So much for Rudd’s pre-election boast that he would turn them back.

While the federal government is handing out millions to accident-prone boaties, another Australian government is closing down a productive farm. Do hit that last link. Greens are involved.

(Via Habib)