Three months after a fatal brawl at Sydney Airport that horrified scores of innocent bystanders, police have charged a bikie gang leader with murder.
Serial video rapist jailed for 28 years
A VICTIM wept in the courtroom as John Xydias was sent to jail for filming himself raping 11 unconscious women.
CBD Metro extended... but no idea when
The controversial CBD metro is being extended through Sydney's west, but when that will happen is anyone's guess.
Fed Govt still eyeing public hospitals
A federal takeover of the public hospital system is still on the cards if benchmarks are not met,......
Make a mint off dateless coins
An mistake at the Royal Mint in Britain has let at least 100,000 coins with no date slip into......
Car on fire in M5 East blocks traffic
A car on fire in the M5 East tunnel west bound has blocked traffic in peak hour.
'You'll be on a cloud': alleged murderer
A NSW man accused of poisoning five people - two fatally - allegedly told a woman she would feel like she was floating on a cloud, but instead she clinically died twice while in a coma, a court heard.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Trouble for the Plan?
As Dems push their healthcare plan, Congress cuts out for recess. So, what awaits the bill after the break? Get answers on 'Your World'!
===
Economy
All the action, all the politics and all the latest stories. If it's happening in Washington, it's happening here! Only on 'Special Report'!
===
A 'Factor' Investigation!
Geraldo with a shocking update on the child rapist getting released after only months in jail!
=== Comments ===
Our pork pie PM revels in butchering the truth
Piers Akerman
THE Federal Police are investigating a fake email _ why not also investigate Kevin Rudd’s fake 2007 election policies?
There were the big promises and there were the little promises and all of them were dodgy. Remember that pledge to bring Iran’s rulers before the International Criminal Court at the Hague? That was a biggie. Out of left field but phoney. - I think Rudd has been hit fatally by Turnbull, which is why the spinners are working overtime to turn the damage around. I saw footage of Rudd in parliament, prior to Swan releasing his correspondence on the issue and showing he had spoken to grant and involved treasury. Rudd said words to the effect “Neither I, nor Swan nor anyone in my government would do what the leader of the opposition suggests.” Thing is, the email of Swan apparently did just that. And the press haven’t asked Rudd about that. I would dearly love the footage to be posted on youtube .. I would also love it in quicktime format .. I could do a lot with it.
On the Insiders we saw a collage of Rudd statements, with cuts to Turnbull talking, making out that Turnbull had said some misleading things about Rudd and then contradicted himself. That was highly misleading. The footage of Rudd’s earlier statement would show the montage for the propaganda it is. Turnbull has got Rudd where it hurts .. in the PM’s ego. We now know that Swan was indiscrete and Rudd helped to cover it up .. and Gillard, Tanner and Albanese have weighed in with furphys of their own. If the conservative party had behaved that way, the press would be all over it.
I don’t wish to take away from the great list you have compiled too, Piers .. - ed. - Simon replied
Absolutely spot on DD. Thank God, I was beginning to wonder if I was the only person seeing all this being covered up. In reality, Rudd is in damage control big time. He has even got all his cronies hitting this blog harder than normal. When the truth gets out about this, I reackon we’ll get a new PM and Treasurer hence the remarkable effort to turn the tables.===
Turnbull has in reality done a good job. The media have mostly been utterly complicit in this.
CARE CONSIDERED
Tim Blair
Tim Flannery – who believes that “Australia’s climate dinosaurs are a lot bigger and uglier than the climate dinosaurs elsewhere” – ponders the fate of those who care:
TONY JONES: New laws are now being used to penalise protesters who stop or impede production at coal-fired power plants and smelters and so on. Do you think those protesters should be protected in some way?
TIM FLANNERY: Absolutely. I find this completely outrageous to see state governments who are doing next to nothing to secure the future of younger people in Australia, penalising those who care with absolutely punitive measures now, making them pay for their protests. It is just extraordinary and I find it just utterly immoral and despicable.
TONY JONES: We’ve just seen NASA scientist Jim Hanson, I think you know him pretty well, arrested along with an actress outside a coal-fired power station in Virginia, something he describes as a “death factory”. Have you considered yourself that kind of direction action?
TIM FLANNERY: Look, I have. I think we’ve all got a job to do, and my job has over the last couple of years has been working with business and the more progressive end of the business spectrum. I have considered those sort of actions, but there’s probably a lot of young people who’ve got a lot more at stake than I have who are gonna get angrier over time and who are gonna demand action, and they’re probably the ones who are gonna carry the day in that area.
Maybe he doesn’t care enough.
===
HOPE CHANGED
Tim Blair
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs explains, as best he can, Obama’s broken promise:
Note the laughter. Vice-joke Joe Biden keeps the comedy coming, lately referring to Tim Kaine as the “great governor of New Jersey”. One small problem with that:
Tim Kaine’s not governor of New Jersey. Jon Corzine is governor of New Jersey … Tim Kaine is governor of another state, called Virginia. He’s also chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Another Biden speech, another Biden blunder:
At a town hall meeting this week in Perrysburg, Ohio, on the middle class and manufacturing, the vice president told the crowd that “the Buick LeSabre is made in Ontario, Canada,” and that “the UAW worker in Canada makes the same wage as the UAW worker in the U.S.” …
Had Biden’s staff better briefed him, he might have known that the LeSabre was discontinued in 2005, that model was made in the United States, not Canada, and workers in Ontario are members of the Canadian Auto Workers which broke off from the UAW in 1985 and became an independent union.
===
FROM GRACELAND TO NEVERLAND
Tim Blair
Presley and Jackson weren’t so far apart.
UPDATE. “When your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young once again, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure.” - I despair of ever finding another hairless pincushion to replace Michael. - ed.
===
GET LOOKING
Tim Blair
Andrew Bolt – returned to Australia and again shackled to his desk – lists several broken Rudd election promises. By comparison, the GetUp! kids can find only one.
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RACISM!
Tim Blair
It doesn’t take much to kick off a racism debate in Australia. A few Indians and Lebanese go at it in Harris Park, some cartoonists draw sombreros, or a girl says “wogs” and suddenly everyone is talking about how racist the place is.
“Debate” is probably the wrong word. Participants usually just try to place Australian racism somewhere between “widespread” to “universal”, slot in mentions of the White Australia policy and the Cronulla riots then go back to worrying about solar panel rebates.
It’s less a debate than a ritual. Previous outbreaks featured occasional use of the phrase “international embarrassment”, as though brutish Australian racists could be shamed into better behaviour by the idea that, say, Germans disapproved. Almost by definition, racists are unlikely to care much for the opinions of foreigners.
===
WE’LL BE EXILED TO MARS
Tim Blair
Holy warmenist Paul Krugman in the NY Times:
As I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
===
Too many sevens
Andrew Bolt
Another sign that Iran’s theocrats stole the election: like most humans, they are hopeless at making up numbers.
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Only Flannery is blown away
Andrew Bolt
Poor Tim Flannery. Is there a single prediction made by this Alarmist of the Year that’s come true? I’ve noted below that Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide have not run out of water, despite Flannery’s claims, and now we have yet another contradiction of one of his favorite scares.
Flannery’s claim:
Hurricanes are becoming more frequent in North America.
In fact, that’s not true. And now there’s this latest forecast from Britain’s Met Office:
Forecast for July to November 2009
Issued 18 June 2009
Six tropical storms are predicted as the most likely number to occur in the North Atlantic during the July to November period, with a 70% chance that the number will be in the range three to nine. This represents below-normal activity relative to the 1990–2005 long-term average of 12.4.
Recall how Al Gore cynically exploited the frenzy over Hurricane Katrina to promote his global warming scare, even putting a picture of a hurricane on the poster of An Inconvenient Truth? Then wonder why he and Flannery are not called to account everywhere they go for so loudly predicting disasters which have not come to pass.
===
Uncle Napoleon now runs Iran
Andrew Bolt
Christopher Hitchens on a novel you may care to buy - but which the paranoid fascists of Iran have banned:
But you have no idea how deep is the primitive belief that it is the Anglo-Saxons - more than the CIA, more even than the Jews - who are the puppetmasters of everything that happens in Iran.
The best-known and bestselling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series.
Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the creation of the British government itself.
I strongly recommend that you get hold of the Modern Library paperback of Pezeshkzad’s novel, produced in 2006, and read it from start to finish while paying special attention to ...the afterword by the author himself, who says: “In his fantasies, the novel’s central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it.
===
How the ABC tickled Tim
Andrew Bolt
Tim Flannery, undaunted by the failure of his predictions that global warming would cause Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide to now be out of water, went on Lateline last night to bang once more that doomsday drum that’s made him so rich.
And why wouldn’t he, when Lateline host Tony Jones is a fellow warming alarmist who is guaranteed not to ask him any awkward questions?
So last night Jones did not do to Flannery as he did to sceptic Professor Ian Plimer, for instance, and precede his interview with a report on three critics calling his guest an idiot. Nor did he ask a single aggressive question. Nor did he ask Flannery to defend his hypocrisy in demanding cuts to our gases while endorsing (for cash) Sir Richard Brazen’s joy-rides to space, or travelling to Copenhagen, blowing yet again more of the gases out the back of his jet that he claims are heating the world to hell.
Instead there was this exchange, in which Flannery demanded green extremists be allowed to illegally shut down out power supplies without being charged either with crimes or with the bill for the damage:
TONY JONES: Let me ask you on another issue altogether. New laws are now being used to penalise protesters who stop or impede production at coal-fired power plants and smelters and so on. Do you think those protesters should be protected in some way?
TIM FLANNERY: Absolutely. I find this completely outrageous to see state governments who are doing next to nothing to secure the future of younger people in Australia, penalising those who care with absolutely punitive measures now, making them pay for their protests. It is just extraordinary and I find it just utterly immoral and despicable.
TONY JONES: We’ve just seen NASA scientist Jim Hanson, I think you know him pretty well, arrested along with an actress outside a coal-fired power station in Virginia, something he describes as a “death factory”. Have you considered yourself that kind of direction action?
TIM FLANNERY: Look, I have. I think we’ve all got a job to do, and my job has over the last couple of years has been working with business and the more progressive end of the business spectrum. I have considered those sort of actions, but there’s probably a lot of young people who’ve got a lot more at stake than I have who are gonna get angrier over time and who are gonna demand action, and they’re probably the ones who are gonna carry the day in that area.
Oh, and note once more a typical trait of Flannery’s - to demand from others the sacrifices he won’t make himself. After all, Flannery has all those corporate deals to protect, right? And when it’s a choice between earning fat fees or saving the planet…
===
Some may die and all will cost
Andrew Bolt
We may soon be back to where we were before John Howard got tough:
INDONESIAN authorities are bracing for a huge influx of boat people, anticipating as many as 10,000 asylum-seekers are waiting in Malaysia to transit through the archipelago and on to Australia.
This estimate was backed by a Malaysian group that deals with unauthorised immigrants. An Australian Government source warned of the potential for a similar influx to the thousands who began arriving in Australia from the late 1990s.
===
Even waste is patriotic
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd could dump the cash in a gutter and still say it’s for our own good:
KEVIN Rudd’s $14.7 billion spending spree on the nation’s schools is to be examined by the Auditor-General amid opposition claims of chronic waste and skimming by state governments.
But the Prime Minister insisted yesterday that any unusual costs involved in the program were acceptable because it was going to protect jobs.
With that excuse, any spendthrift would make a great Prime Minister.
UPDATE
My main worry is that the Government’s huge stimulus spending has been wasteful - much of it going on cash handouts and unproductive and even unwanted infrastructure. But now there’s a warning that the size of it may well matter, too:
THE Rudd government’s fiscal stimulus packages may provide no more than a temporary boost to growth, and be followed by an extended period of economic stagnation.
The only international body to correctly predict the financial crisis - the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) - has warned the biggest risk is that governments might be forced by world bond investors to abandon their stimulus packages, and instead slash spending while lifting taxes and interest rates.
“An extended period of stagnating economic activity could undermine the credibility of the policies in place. Governments may find it hard to place debt if market participants expect the underlying (budget) balance to remain negative for years to come,” the bank said last night… The BIS analysis shows that Australia is running the third-largest fiscal stimulus package in the advanced world, behind the US and Korea.
===
Wise Latina told she isn’t
Andrew Bolt
”Wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, is judged by her peers to be a racist - in the nicest possible way, of course:
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.
New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.
===
The O'Reilly Factor - Burgers & Bikinis
Carl's Jr. strikes again with racy commercial
===
Are Polar Bears Really in Trouble Due to Global Warming?
By Bret Baier
Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:
Difference of Opinion
One of the world's leading polar bear experts has been told to stay away from an international conference on the animals because his views are "extremely unhelpful," according to an e-mail by the chairman of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, Dr. Andy Derocher.
The London Telegraph reports Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor has more than 30 years of experience with polar bears. But his belief that global warming is caused by nature, not man, led officials to bar him from this week's polar bear specialist group meeting in Denmark.
Taylor says the polar bear population has actually increased over the last 30 years. He says the threat to them by melting Arctic ice — illustrated by a famous photo taken by photographer Amanda Byrd — has become the most iconic cause for global warming theorists. The photo is often used by former Vice President Al Gore and others as an example of the dangers faced by the bears. But it was debunked last year by the photographer, who says the picture had nothing to do with global warming, and that the bears were not in danger. The photographer said she just happened to catch the bears on a small windswept iceberg.
Baby Talk
A former aide to John Edwards says the former Democratic vice presidential nominee is the father of his mistress' baby. The New York Daily News reports Andrew Young recently signed a book deal. His book proposal says that, contrary to public statements young made last year, he did not father Rielle Hunter's baby, but that Edwards did.
Young also claims to have discovered a videotape that shows Edwards and Hunter having sex. He says the pair also discussed what music they would play at their wedding should Edwards' wife die of the cancer she is fighting. It's all in the book pitch according to the report.
And Young says that before the affair became public, Edwards told him that then-candidate Obama promised to make him attorney general, if he didn't pick him as a running mate.
Left Turn
Finally, some left-leaning journalists are taking shots at each other for being too soft on the president in a debate on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday afternoon. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post Sunday responded to a column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, in which Milbank criticized what he called "stagecraft," between Pitney and White House officials.
Pitney was called upon last week by the president during his news conference. Reports suggest the White House coordinated with Pitney on his question from an Iranian blogger, about Iran's post-election uprising.
But Pitney says that when Milbank, "had a chance to ask Obama a question, he approached him in the hall during the campaign and asked him not one, but multiple questions about how he looked in a bathing suit."
Milbank shot back saying: "I have never worked in collusion with an administration."
