Monday, October 12, 2009

Headlines Monday 12th October 2009

Attacks Show Taliban Resurgence in Pakistan

A week of terror strikes across Pakistan, capped by a stunning assault on army headquarters, show the Taliban have rebounded and appear determined to shake the nation's resolve as the military plans for an offensive against the group's stronghold on the Afghan border.

Obama should give back Nobel Peace Prize - Downer

BARACK Obama should have been "man enough" to refuse the Nobel Peace Prize, former foreign minister Alexander Downer writes today.

Dianne Brimble case reduced against Mark Whilhelm, jury can only consider 30 seconds in verdict

THE manslaughter case against a man accused of Dianne Brimble's cruise ship death has been dramatically reduced, a jury being told only 30 seconds of the fateful cruise is now relevant to their verdict.

'Don't give boat survivors visas'
THOSE aboard the deliberately lit asylum-seeker boat should not get visas, a premier says. - the WA Premier is right, the other ALP premiers are too frightened of the press to express such an opinion. - ed.

Morgue bungling an insult to the dead

MORE than 1000 grieving families are being left in the dark - some for more than a year - to be told by a coroner how their loved one died.

Tram line proposed for George St
A TRAM line down Sydney's George St is being planned after the NSW government today caved in and agreed to examine the proposal.

Vet dies after cancerous lung transplant
A BRITISH Iraq War veteran has died after receiving lungs from a heavy smoker in a transplant.

Boy band star dies suddenly on holiday
PIN-UP singer Stephen Gately, of the chart-topping band Boyzone, has died at the age of 33.

Boyzone singer Stephen Gately 'choked on his own vomit'
BOYZONE singer Stephen Gately choked to death on his own vomit after a night of drinking at a gay club, reports say. - forensically speaking we don't know if it was his own vomit. - ed.

Still no News on Who Will Replace Rudd
MALCOLM Turnbull's besieged leadership has received a boost, with support for him outstripping potential rival Joe Hockey.

Mining boss collapses at soccer match
AUSTRALIA'S fifth richest man suffers heart trouble while watching his A-League team.

'Birthday ends in race-hate murder'
A BUILDER out celebrating his 23rd birthday allegedly bashed an elderly man to death in a drunken race-hate killing.

New energy-efficient light globes a real turn-off

SHOPS are predicting a black market in old-style power guzzling light globes in a consumer backlash against new energy-efficient bulbs.

Big banks cash in on savers
SCARED savers are putting their trust in big bank misers, missing out on the best interest rates.

P&O cruise ship in sex attack claim
POLICE are investigating another alleged sexual assault on board a P&O cruise liner as it toured through the South Pacific.

Taxi smashed by passenger train
A TAXI driver and his two passengers fled their cab seconds before it was destroyed by a train at Oak Park in Melbourne's northwest.

New York Woman, 38, in 'Top Shape' Before Sweat Lodge Death

A 38-year-old New York woman who died after sitting in a sauna-like sweat lodge during a spiritual cleansing ceremony at an Arizona resort was an active athlete — an avid surfer and hiker who was "in top shape," took self-improvement seriously and had a passion for art — a family spokesman said.

Hostages killed in army raid
PAKISTANI troops have stormed army headquarters, ending a militant hostage siege that left 19 people dead.

'Evil spells are being cast on Parliament'
A FORMER running mate of Steve Fielding says MP marital problems show Satan at work.
=== Comments ===
GLOBAL ONIONING
Tim Blair
Joe Hockey remains the preferred leader of the Liberal Party, as shown in previous recent polls. Or he doesn’t, according to another poll (the margins in both are fairly close). Anyway, of interest is that 23 per cent of those involved in the first survey answered “don’t know” when asked their opinion of the Coalition’s emissions strategy. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago:
Anything with the word ‘Copenhagen’ in it will turn the public off.
This theory is based on my firm belief in racist Australian anti-Copenhagenism. There’s another moment in that same clip, when I say something about Kevin Rudd being unable to run a grocery pricing website yet remaining convinced he can influence global temperature. Co-panellists Fran Kelly and George Megalogenis were dismissive. Replied Fran:
No one could run a grocery pricing website.
Interesting. Megalogenis (The Australian) and Kelly (ABC) are reasonably representative of mainstream journalistic opinion in Australia, which apparently holds that:

• Running a multi-million dollar website listing comparative prices for onions and detergent: Impossible! No human can possibly accomplish this!

• Replacing gigantic structures upon which international economies are based in order to adjust a 4,500,000,000-year-old, 5,972,000,000,000,000,000,000-tonne planet’s thermostat: Yep, no problem. Kev’s got a plan. It’ll all be sorted in Denmark. Got any cheap onions?
===
LET THERE BE LIGHTS
Tim Blair
Readers have previously revealed their own globey stockpile plans. The idea is catching on:
Shops are predicting a black market in old-style power guzzling light globes in a consumer backlash against new energy-efficient bulbs.

Sales of incandescent globes have surged by up to 200 per cent as home owners begin stockpiling ahead of a retail ban beginning next month.

Many consumers don’t like the new compact fluorescent lamps, complaining the light they give off is dull and they look ugly.
With less than a month to go before the ban kicks in, please assist your fellow Australians by listing in comments any stores in your area that have stocks of useful globes. Or otherwise buy all the globes and set up your own global sales network; either way is good.
The Federal Government is worried about the run on incandescents which threatens to undermine the ban, which aims to cut greenhouse emissions by 2 million tonnes a year.
How about we ban Rudd’s jet?
A Department of the Environment spokeswoman said: “It doesn’t make financial sense to bulk buy bulbs that cost more to run and last a tenth of the life of a more efficient bulb.”
It makes sense if the aim is to see.
===
MESSAGE SENT
Tim Blair
Pay people-smugglers, float towards Australia’s coastline, set fire to your vessel when confronted by authorities, win residency:
All surviving asylum-seekers from the boat that exploded near Ashmore Reef in April will be granted permanent residency in Australia, ahead of a coronial inquest into the cause of the blaze that killed five of their fellow passengers.
They’ll be loving this in Makassar.
===
WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?
Tim Blair
A baseball match in Denver is postponed due to a lack of global warming. Get used to it, warns the BBC’s Paul Hudson:
For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?
Nothing much at all, of course. The same as nothing much has been happening – climate-wise – during the whole era of warmoid panic, driven entirely by insane exaggeration:

But wait:
The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.
That settles it, then. Global warming is dead. Which is a tough break for terrorists, according to US ABC:
A number of U.S. intelligence and military studies recently made public describe how man-made climate change plays into the hands of terrorist groups in many countries …

The warmth makes it easier to throw rocks at Jews!

“Terrorism” is already on the list.
===
HIS HEAD SHINES BRIGHTER THAN FIFTY STARS
Tim Blair
Only got $5? Spend it on an Obamerica flag!

(Via Don Surber, who notes flag deployment in Indiana)

UPDATE. It’s the yes-we-can.
===
Getting rid of Jews
Andrew Bolt
The Guardian engages in some ethnic cleansing:
The Guardian produced a nice list for readers of winners of the Nobel Prize. But for some reason there were a few names missing.

The list appeared without the three Israeli winners. Begin (1978), Peres and Rabin (1994) had all been excised.
Odd coincidence.

UPDATE

Stephen Pollard, who first noticed the excision, doesn’t buy the Guardian’s explanation:

They have told us that it was down to:
technical issue during the data transfer from the site, which meant that many of the names of the joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize were accidentally omitted, although the country of origin of the winners was not.
Eh? There are many, many other joint winners listed on the original, and they all transferred over to the Guardian’s site. Somehow this technical issue only affected the three Israeli names.

I do not believe the Guardian’s explanation.
===
Won’t look, won’t think
Andrew Bolt
Reader Michael whips up the perfect image to illustrate the real climate denialism in the media:

===
Kevin Rudd’s newest Treasurer
Andrew Bolt
No kidding:
THE national economic debate in Australia just became personal. And the person is Ken Henry.

At the most senior levels of the opposition there is now a belief that Henry, the head of the federal Treasury, has crossed the Rubicon; that he has become a partisan political player, instead of remaining an impartial bureaucrat.

Malcolm Turnbull and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey believe Henry made his final river journey to the Labor side of the political divide on Friday with his appearance before the Senate committee inquiring into the continued need for the government’s economic stimulus.
The evidence produced by Glenn Milne is pretty convincing. The fact that the Opposition dares now to so publicly bell this cat is actually further proof.
===
Exploding your way to the head of the queue
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government lets in 42 more asylum seekers, rewarding the one or more of them who blew up their own boat, killing five people:
ALL surviving asylum-seekers from the boat that exploded near Ashmore Reef in April will be granted permanent residency in Australia, ahead of a coronial inquest into the cause of the blaze that killed five of their fellow passengers.

The 42 Afghan men from the boat that was set alight on April 16 will be released into the community this week.

Police believe the fire was deliberately lit by one or more of the asylum-seekers, but do not have enough evidence to lay any charges.
Is this really behaviour we should encourage? Is the asylum seeker with the match really someone to welcome here?

UPDATE

The word on this nice new government sure has got out:
At the mountain resort town of Puncak, two hours south of Jakarta, an estimated 400 Iraqis and Afghans, including Naghmeh and her son Milad, are scattered about in rundown inns and hotels. Most of them barely know each other but they are united by a common obsession - getting to Australia…

But all the people The Weekend Australian spoke to were sure of the new ground rules in Australia - that is, that anyone who makes it to Australian waters will, if they pass the health and security checks, be on the mainland with a visa within 90 days.

Samer, a 31-year-old Iraqi now living in Puncak, knows all about Kevin Rudd and his new immigration rules. “I know Kevin Rudd is the new PM,” he says. “I know about him. He has tried to get more immigrants. I have heard if someone arrives it is easy. They have camps, good service and if someone arrives they give us a limited visa and after three years you become an Australian citizen.”
The Howard government’s Pacific Solution is dead, and they know it.

And hot off the press:

Indonesia has detained nearly 260 Sri Lankans suspected of trying to sail illegally to Australia, an Indonesian navy spokesman says.
===
Do not question Gore
Andrew Bolt

McAleer demonstrates why Al Gore rarely subjects himself to questions from unvetted journalists:
In what organizers said was a rarity, Gore took half a dozen questions from journalists, including one from Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who asked Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.

Gore responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools. When McAleer tried to debate further, his microphone was cut off by the moderators.
Gore actually got angrier when I asked him about his most egregious falsehood at a conference several years ago. He refused to answer directly then, either, why past ice records showed not that rising carbon dioxide levels had previously been followed by rising temperatures (suggesting causality, as Gore claimed in his film) but the other way around.

Debate? Yet to really have it.

McAkeer’s documentary Not Evil Just Wrong - The True Cost of Global Warming opens next weekend. Or you can buy it here. - it is also hard challenging Rudd, as Mr Turnbull has found. - ed.

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