Month: November 2005

Nguyen court bid ‘questionable’

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HISTORY was against the latest bid to save condemned Australian Van Tuong Nguyen, a Singapore-based human rights campaigner said today.

…campaigner Sinapan Samydorai said the application to the court would require the approval of Singapore’s Government, and history showed this appeared unlikely.

Interestingly Singapore News has no original articles on Nguyen but links only to the Australian and Voice of America

The Straits Times doesn’t carry any mention of Nguyen at all on its front page nor does the local language Berita Harian (Daily News)

I’m not sure how this is going to pan out – I fear Nguyen’s days are truely numbered and all that is left to debate is the extent of the diplomatic fall-out between Singapore and Australia and will trade suffer.

If/When the Indonesians pass the death sentence on the Bali Nine then the debate is going to get louder and when it does it need rules. It is about the death sentence, not drugs. Nguyen and the Bali Nine are drug traffickers and will get little symapthy from mainstream Australia if they are sentenced to life in a rotten Asian goal, but the death sentence?

That is something different altogether.

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Could be good news…please let it be so

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From LGF

U.S. forces sealed off a house in the northern city of Mosul where eight suspected al-Qaida members died in a gunfight _ some by their own hand to avoid capture. A U.S. official said Sunday that efforts were under way to determine if terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among the dead.

Although The White House said Sunday that it was “highly unlikely” that the terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among the dead one can live in hope.

UPDATE: The news hasn’t improved overnight. This morning MSM caught up with the Blogger world and states it is unlikely that al-Zarqawi is amongst the dead

General Musings

Australia under attack!

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Long-range American bombers will be able to drop live bombs on an Australian training range in the Northern Territory under a key plan announced today.

The training initiative between two allies prompted this letter to the Editor.

What depths of submissive deference to the superpower has us bending over to let George W. Bush’s Stealth bombers bang up the Northern Territory? Have we really got so little national pride as to let the US bomb Australian soil?
Daele Healy
Brisbane, QLD

Australia and the US have been training together in the US and here in Australia for over half a century. It’s no accident that our respective forces can work together as it takes a lot of hard work, planning and training to achieve force compatability.

Yet somehow Daele (I bet he thanks Mum and Dad for that name) turns it into something reminiscent of the Japs bombing Darwin in 1942.

Sometimes I think it a pity that the ADF can’t pick and choose who they protect. We could set up an area in central Australia (or maybe the Northern Territory) where all idiots of Daele’s class could go and live in peace to conduct there sit-ins, have continuous live feeds to a local TV station especially set up for those who enjoy protest marches and with a local newspaper, distributed locally only, dedicated to their thoughtless letters.

Let the rest of us get on with what has to be done.

Defence

Pen mightier than the sword

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ASTOUNDING comments from Amanda Vanstone ridiculing federal airline security measures and questioning increased spending on national security warranted an apology and the Immigration Minister’s resignation, Labor frontbenchers said last night.

I have literally made similar observations to Amanda Vanstone except I use a ball point as an example. A ball point pen can be a weapon in the hands of anyone capable of stabbing another human and this fact simply demonstrates how hard total security is.

Amand’s comments are relevant but should be made outside of the public arena lest politicians and journalists devoted to the destabilisation of the Howard government get to sing and dance about every utterance she makes.

Still, it gives ammo for Matt Price and Glen Milne to bolster their attack on Howard and I now wonder how Milne will include the event in his monthly Howard threatened by Costello article.

On a positive note Amanda has managed to get IR off the front page all by herself.

Well done!

Politics

What happened to the pistol?

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The story of Australians being held for attempting to carry a disassembled pistol and bullets onto a plane in Syria has been downgraded to ‘young boy souveniring a used cartridge’.

The son of one of four Australian women detained in Syria amid fears of a hijacking plot says an empty gun cartridge souvenired by a child travelling with them sparked the drama.

But the lead in the original article was based on the disassemble pistol.

Early reports about the women’s detention had said a dismantled gun was found inside a toy carried by a child who was with them.

So what happened to it?

General Musings

McIlveen hits superlative overload

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DRUG offender Michelle Leslie is heading home to a storm of outrage after the Australian model ditched her Muslim garb for a skimpy top and moved to sell her story to the highest bidder.

Storm of outrage…mmmm

If one swallow doesn’t make it summer one Muslim whinging doesn’t make it a storm unless you’re McIlveen.

From mobs of Muslims…

And Muslim groups condemned her conversion to Islam as a sham set up to elicit sympathy from Indonesian judges.

we wind back to one.

“We’ve got no time for these pseudo-Muslims,” Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Dr Ameer Ali said yesterday.

If it was a sham, and there is no clear evidence it was, then good on her. Possession of two ecstacy tablets hardly constitutes a serious crime. Ecstacy is a problem but if we locked our youth up for possession of a tablet or two we would totally alter the social structure of Australian Night Club scene and fill prisons to overload.

She might be an intellectual lightweight but she’s a pretty one and I’d rather see her in tank top than anything from a devoted mulsim’s wardrobe.

She’s had her 15 minutes of fame. Now let’s forget her and move on.

Correction. Her 15 minutes of fame is now immortalized in Wikipedai. How frivolous.

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Nguyen execution date set as 2 Dec

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POPE John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI both made direct but unsuccessful appeals to Singapore to spare the life of convicted Australian drug courier Nguyen Tuong Van.

Who ever thought Singapore would listen to the Pope.

Singapore’s Prime Minister didn’t listen to Howard either as it would appear that when Howard raised the issue the Singaporeans had already classed the decision as irreversible.

Later, Loong proves he understands diplomatic protocol but not compassion

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has apologised to Prime Minister John Howard for not personally informing him of the date for an Australian man’s execution in Singapore.

And the Singapore government has revealed that the letter it sent to Nguyen Tuong Van’s family, informing them of his December 2 execution date, had been delivered a day earlier than planned. An investigation will be held into how this happened.

Altogether a sad case. I have no time at all for drug trafficking but the death penalty is far to severe and as the Singaporeans say, it is irreversible.

In a year or two when Singapore commutes death to life for such crimes it will be to late for Nguyen.

Big price to pay for a stupid mistake.

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Banned bullets not banned

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Banned bullets ‘used in tube shooting’ says London correspondents

THE Brazilian man mistaken for a suicide bomber and shot dead by British police was killed with a type of bullet banned in warfare under international law, a newspaper reported today.

Outside of the fact that the shooting was a tragic error the use of hollow point rounds has some merit.

It is believed the decision was influenced by the tactics used by air marshals on passenger jets – where such bullets are designed to splinter in the body and not burst the fuselage, it said.

They have been assessed as posing less risk to people around the suicide bomber than conventional bullets but the effect on victims is devastating, it said.

Fair enough but the piece loses it’s impact with this line

However, there is no legal ban on British police use of such ammunition, it said.

So the bullets aren’t banned. It’s just a case of journalists trying to keep the heat on those who try and stem the flow of terrorism.

War on Terror

Disaster averted

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This report from the NZ herald. The US government has won its battle to retain control of the internet, under a compromise worked out ahead of this week’s United Nations summit on the information society, which leaves the current addressing and traffic direction system intact.

Thank God. I can’t think of any organization in the world less qualified to control the internet.

Can you imagine the UN with its stable of wacko, tinpot countries running anything as technical as the internet? Half of the committee would be working out how to make life difficult for the US and the other half, like China, Cuba etc would be working out how to stem the information that their citizens have through access to the web.

Who’s idea was it in the first place?

General Musings

Socceroos qualify for World Cup

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I’m not a soccer fan but I do appreciate skill, team spirit, lasting the distance, courage and any Aussie team winning.

I watched the whole game, something I have never done before, and I mostly enjoyed it. I say mostly because I still find a score of 1-0 at full time fustrating. The game is too defensive in my Aussie Rules and Rugby tainted mind but I cheered with everyone else when John Aloisi gives Australia an unassailable 4-2 lead.

Not only did they win but the Socceroos clearly deserved to win. For most of the game they were in control and were the fitter team.

Well done.

(At least they won, unlike my beloved Wallabies, who have lost their last seven matches….mumble…bitch…moan)

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