Sunday, October 25, 2009

Headlines Sunday 25th October 2009


Since its creation in 1950, the Top Ten list has helped the FBI capture some of the nation's most dangerous criminals, and this week it was filled to 10 again after the captures of three top fugitives earlier this year.

Senior MP in cocaine king's client book
THE names of a senior politician and a film star are in a cocaine dealer's client notebook seized in a major drug bust.

Police caught emailing porn
POLICE will be given new email guidelines following a blowout in complaints about pornographic and racist content being sent.

School's 250 sickies a day
IT'S the school where 250 students chuck a sickie every day.Some teachers complain their classes are two-thirds full and truants are easy to find wagging in the local skate park and shopping centre.

Wayne Carey tells of family murder plot
WAYNE Carey claims his dad was so violent that his mum and brother devised a plot to kill him.

Mobile spy gadget traces your secrets
CHEATING partners watch out - secret text messages can now be retrieved from phones five years after they were deleted.

Idol star admits: I was a boozing bisexual
FALLEN Australian Idol star Kim Cooper says she kept her bisexuality a secret on the show for fear of losing votes.

Car tragedy orphan out of hospital
THE baby boy who survived a horrific car crash which killed his parents is out of hospital and in the care of his grandparents.

Families lie low to save money
NSW residents are going back to basics, happy to cocoon in the suburbs in summer to save money, a study of social effects of the financial crisis shows.

'Corby's world of drugs, sex, murder'
MURDERS, paid sex and drug abuse are part of everyday life in the jail housing Schapelle Corby and the Bali Nine.
=== Comments ===
We don’t choose who comes here
Piers Akerman
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd deserves some sort of an award for his histrionic and hypocritical outburst over serious concerns raised about the now-rushed process of checking the credentials of those who use people smugglers to thwart the authorities and seek asylum.

- I feel you are too kind on Rudd, dismissing his chosen course as being merely incompetent. It isn’t. Rudd has knowingly taken the position he has chosen, and his party is complicit. What we have now is no different than what we would have had had any other grey suits of the ALP been in charge. The reason for it is that they profit from it, both electorally and monetarily. The press are willing to stand up for this travesty of justice and label it as well intentioned or even successful in some unmeasurable way. Many members of many communities will reasonably believe the propaganda delivered on behalf of the ALP.
But the truth is that many suffer from this new policy. Those that brave the dangers and pay people smugglers substantial amounts clearly will suffer, and those who are left behind. And those who are at the receiving end of the weaker security arrangement. And those who might otherwise have been given hope, but will not get to enjoy that because the help programs are maxed out helping smugglers and smuggled. - ed.
Gandalf replied to DD Ball
The left wing press hailed Rudd as a champion negotiator as the camera’s clicked while he recently shook the Indonesian President’s hand haveing ‘secured a deal’ for Indonesia to take the asylum seekers (which under International law they were obliged to do anyway). They did not show the President’s other hand holding a bag with a large $ sign on it.
===
O MAMA
Tim Blair
One cable network takes a few swings, and the White House bursts into tears:
Team Obama was pushed over the brink by a growing list of what it considered outrageous anti-Obama conduct by Fox that showed no sign of stopping. Obama’s advisers say that they seethed while Fox commentators used their shows to encourage protests against Obama’s healthcare proposals last summer. Team Obama fumed as Fox personalities tried to pressure some controversial Obama advisers to resign. White House officials say that Fox has continued to stir the pot against Obama in a regular pattern—raising a criticism, having Republican congressional leaders comment on it, and then using those comments to keep the criticism alive.

A break point came when Fox tried to create the impression that angry anti-Obama protesters at congressional town hall meetings last summer signaled that Obama’s healthcare proposals were dying, a story line that other news organization picked up. White House officials say this was untrue, that those proposals were not dying at all.

Another break point came when Fox commentator Chris Wallace called White House officials “crybabies.”
What on earth might have given him that impression?

UPDATE. Further to Shaun Carney’s awful contemplations, US journalist John Guerra reaches out to a Republican congressman:
The Republican Party is now a mentally ill group of people who want nothing more than to destroy Obama’s first term no matter how much the country needs his policies. I despise your party’s activities and the hatred you spew on Fox and other sounding boards for the insurance companies. Please don’t you dare get him killed, which is the underlying goal of you right wing nuts.
This is the best job application MSNBC has ever seen.

UPDATE II. Unnamed “naysayers” torment the President:
US President Barack Obama on Friday hit out at naysayers he blamed for peddling “cynical” claims that global warming is a myth to derail a landmark climate change bill in Congress.
The curious thing is, you’d struggle to find any member of the general public who could identify a high-profile warming doubter, while prominent warmenists are everywhere. Yet the doubters are apparently so powerful that they can derail legislation.
Obama warned that the closer the Senate came to passing legislation which has already cleared the House of Representatives, the more opponents would resort to underhand tactics.
They’re called “facts”, Mr President.
“The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized,” Obama warned …
Obama is a denialist.
===
Day of apathy
Andrew Bolt

Sydney yesterday demonstrated the depth of international passion about global warming through several highly pictorial stunts:
It was part of a series of events across Sydney yesterday by the environment movement 350.org. Australia was the first of 179 countries to take part in 4500 events worldwide as part of the International Day of Climate Action.
Counting the people in the picture, though, I’d say that this is not a global day of action, but global day of apathy. Or, let’s hope, a global day of mounting scepticism.

And that’s even without discounting for the tourists and the unfortunate children who were simply dragged there by parents warning them they may not have a future:
Among those on the Opera House steps showing their support was Rae Lawrence from Croydon, who brought her sons, Cameron, 6, and Nicholas, 8. ‘’We care about the future and I want them to have one to live in,’’ she said.
UPDATE

Apologies. From Greenpeace, this proof that the crowds in Sydney may have been even bigger than I sneeringly suggest:

UPDATE 2

The global day of apathy rolls on in Rome:

And in Kiev:

And Dunedin, just the one:

In Copenhagen, where the world’s leaders will meet in December to discuss slashing emissions - or not:

And in Shanghai, city of 17 million, in a country that is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases:

UPDATE 3

SBS tries its unprofessional worst to beef up the numbers. Senior correspondent Brian Thomson reports in his most serious voice on a 350 protest from Kiribati, which alarmists have warned for years is about to drown under our warming seas:
Hundreds gather today to form a number with special significance.
Hundreds? Reader Bob counts around 167 on the video, a job SBS factcheckers could have done in a few seconds before airing a falsehood. You’d think if the 100,000 islanders really felt threatened with imminent drowning, a few more of them might wave to the watching world for rescue.

It’s a pity that Thomson didn’t add that the measurements of sea levels around where he’s standing actually don’t support claims of dangerous rises, as warming escalates. Even the Bureau of Meteorology is forced to very reluctantly concede that the very tiny rises (and at one Kiribati station, a tiny fall) measured so far, come nowhere close to the warmists predictions:
Historical sea level trends, and even to an extent the current SEAFRAME sea level trends, would suggest that we could expect sea level rises of less than 0.5m over the next 50 years, which is considerably at variance to current scientific commentary. It is possible, therefore, that the effects of recent accelerations in climate change have not yet started to have a significant contribution to or impact on current sea levels; but based on international scientific opinion, it is more a case of when, rather than if.
Isn’t that a brilliant example of what we’re facing? The BOM suggest we be guided not by the data, but by “opinion”. SBS dutifully ignores the data completely to report only the (exaggerated) opinion.
===
Rudd’s more humane regime
Andrew Bolt
Here we go again:
Most of the Sri Lankan asylum seekers on board the Australian customs ship, Oceanic Viking, have gone on hunger strike.

Last Sunday the Oceanic Viking picked up 78 asylum seekers when they sent out a distress signal in Indonesia’s search and rescue zone. The ship is on its way to an Australian-funded detention centre at the Indonesian port of Tanjung Pinang.
Lip-sewing is all that’s needed to complete the circle and return us to where we were.
===
The campaign against debate
Andrew Bolt
Business writer James Kirby on the usually hidden campaign to silence even a sceptic as qualified as Professor Ian Plimer, author of the best-seller Heaven and Earth:
Last week I was asked to chair a question-and-answer session for Plimer at the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), a non-political business association. I was sceptical about associating with Plimer and so were many of those attending. Just before Plimer took to the stage, a senior AICD member whispered: ”We’ve had more complaints about hosting this guy than anyone I can remember.’’
In this case, the whisperers and character assassins failed to move even these timid business souls, and Kirby confesses:
By the time Plimer had finished his address, one thing had become clear - climate change is a debate in which one side has dominated media coverage.... Like most investors or business people, I am not a scientist and I can’t tell if either side is fudging the figures. But I know that when a highly qualified scientist is sidelined and demonised to the point he can’t get a book published - and that book later becomes a bestseller - we may not be getting the full story.
No wonder the very idea of debate is bitterly opposed by the ABC preachers and Greens candidates.

UPDATE

The makers of the eco-alarmist The Age of Stupid are even more determined to silence dissent:

Post your reviews and ratings of The Age Of Stupid below. Any comments from climate deniers/sceptics will be deleted.
===
Needed: an international league of democracies instead
Andrew Bolt
Yet another example of how such international bodies are turned into cover for the worst, to diminish the best:
Unveiled to great fanfare this weekend at the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Thailand, the Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights is already under fire for its membership and mandate. Burma, regarded as one of the world’s most brutal regimes, is a commission member...
Sure, I’m conpletely with the human rights groups who are protesting. But why isn’t the same anger directed at a far more powerful human rights institution with even more dictatorships, authoritarians and thugs on board? Here, for instance, are some of the office holders and members of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, now presiding over a show trial of Israel, treating it as the moral equivalent of Hamas:

Vice-President and Rapporteur: H.E. Mr. Hisham Badr (Egypt)… Bahrain, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Egypt, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia
===
The real pollution is the propaganda
Andrew Bolt
The Age confirms it’s now publishing not fact but propaganda through its deliberate use of one deceptive word on its front page:
POLLUTING coal-fired power plants and other heavy emitters would be protected from rises in emissions targets for at least a decade under Coalition amendments being considered by Labor.
It’s utterly bizarre to call a gas that is essential for plants a pollutant. Then again, it’s pretty bizarre to think Australia can cut the world’s temperature, let alone do so by exempting the biggest emitters of the gas you insist is the real cause of a warming that actually halted in 2001, if not before.

INCIDENTALLY, the Liberals are cactus if Labor agrees to their amendments. They’ll be torn apart, if nothing else.

So here’s the one amendment they need to add, to ensure Kevin Rudd does not trap them and to have a cut-through point of difference worth fighting for: that nothing in Rudd’s job-killing scheme be actually implemented until countries responsible for 60 per cent of the world’s emissions agree to make similar cuts to their gases, too.

Call it the shag-on-a-rock amendment. People will understand.

Oh, and don’t forget you can add this free daily-updated reality check to your blog or website, by going here:

Inserted on the Age site, it would make a healthy corrective and a rare addition of fact to the hot air.

UPDATE

What does it say about the prevailing culture of Australia’s political and media elite that even government officials from “Red China” are more likely to cut the propaganda and speak the frank truth? Here’s Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Center:
There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous… Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects. We are not focusing on what will happen with a one degree or two degree increase, we are looking at what level will be a danger to the environment. In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today.
Would Rudd ever say something as honest on global warming? Would The Age editor?

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