Understanding Palestinian Poverty
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Indons not allowed to get ‘lively’ news
From the JAKARTA Post under the banner “News from foreign broadcasters cannot be aired lively”
For a moment I thought they meant the items must be presented in a sombre manner. But no…it’s just plain old censorship and accountability.
JAKARTA (AP): Indonesia next month will begin enforcing a law that bans local broadcasters from relaying live news packages provided by foreign stations like the British Broadcasting Corp.and Voice of America, Minister of Communications Sofyan Djalil said Monday.
Stations will have to first receive the broadcasts, edit them and then rebroadcast from a local relay station, he said.Sofyan said the reason for the law was so that viewers could hold “someone responsible” if the broadcasts were offensive.The more things change…….
Amnesty say US shouldn’t kill enemy
From the Guardian/Observer
A missile fired from a Predator killed more than 20 innocent people in Pakistan earlier this month in a botched US bid to kill Ayman al Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, and similar attacks have been made in Iraq, Yemen and on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.Excuse me. Where did the “innocent people” bit come from. According to an AP report;
… a provincial government of Pakistan had released a statement that said four or so “foreign terrorists” (they were not identified beyond that) had been killed in the CIA missile attack. And Pakistani intelligence officials told AP that Zawahiri had been invited to a dinner in the village but did not show up. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao would only say that there was a “possibility” that foreigners–presumably, militants–were killed in the strike. Officials in the tribal zone where the missile landed said separately that the strike was aimed at foreign militants invited to a dinner and that up to five of them were killed — the first such confirmation by Pakistan.They then try and leave the impression that a previous Predator strike only killed one al-Qaeda operative but they use the “alleged” tag to indicate they don’t believe he’s a bad guy and that the US shouldn’t have struck.
An earlier case of what President George W Bush described as ‘sudden justice’ occurred in Yemen on 3 November 2002, when six men were killed in a car, blown up by missiles fired from a CIA-controlled Predator drone. One of the people in the vehicle was alleged to be a senior member of al-Qaeda, Abu Ali al-Harithi.Reading that you would believe that maybe one guy was a terrorist and then only maybe when in fact he was a senior el Qaeda terrorist and the other five guys were also terrorists. Would a guy as senior as Abu Ali al-Harithi be driving around with the local boy-scout troop? From the Age November 6, 2002
A missile fired by an unmanned American aircraft over Yemen has killed six suspected al Qaeda terrorists on the first occasion the Predator drone has been used outside Afghanistan. A senior United States Government official said Yemeni officials had identified one of the men killed on Sunday as Abu Ali al-Harithi, an al Qaeda leader and one of the terrorist network’s top figures in Yemen.Al-Harithi was one of the suspected planners of the October, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors were killed while the ship was berthed in Aden and has been linked to the October 7 bombing of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. All this is good stuff until Annesty gets their hands on it.
According to Amnesty, under international standards, extra-judicial killings are always unlawful, and ‘a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any public emergency may not be invoked as a justification for such executions’.The US are at war and some lawyer says they can’t kill the enemy. “Extra judicial” is a cute feel-good phrase that means nothing in the battle field. What do they want the Yanks to do? Issue a summons?
Chicken Little was right after all.
Defence building collapses in Canberra.
Staff at the Australian Defence College began to evacuate after hearing rumbling in the roof of the five-year-old building about 4.15pm (AEDT) today.
Several people sustained cuts and bruises, but there were no serious injuries.
The roof collapsed into the top floor of the two-level building, Australian Defence College commander Major General David Morrison said.
“There was an indication that something was amiss and staff started to evacuate the building when the roof came down to desk top and filing cabinet level,” he said.Eight people had been in the immediate vicinity of the roof collapse, but 20 were in the entire building Does the reporter mean the Australian Defence Force Academy? UPDATE: Readers tell me it is the Weston Creek Annexe, which houses the Command and Staff College, and the Defence and Strategic Studies Centre. There will some contractors in the ACT having a poor sleep tonight.
Good news for diabetics
INSULIN that is inhaled rather than injected could be available in Australia within a year.
The revolutionary form of insulin, which does not need to be administered with a needle, was approved by health regulators in the US yesterday.
Exubera, a dry powder insulin that more quickly controls blood sugar levels, has the potential to make treating diabetes easier for up to 1.4 million Australians who have some form of the disease.
“This will help improve the quality of life for the many Australians who have to inject insulin several times a day,” said Dennis Yue, head of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’s diabetes research foundation in Sydney. “Exubera can be used by people with both type 1 or type 2 diabetes, but I think doctors will initially give it to adults,” Professor Yue said.If you know a dibaetic make sure they know this – it will dramaticaly improve their quality of life
Only in NZ
NZ woman to send dog food to starving children in Kenya
They’d most probably prefer to eat the dogs.
Not surpisingly, Oxfam New Zealand executive director Barry Coates did not like the sound of the plan and I think if I was a Kenyan I’d be a little insulted.
Russian conscript offered genital restoration
The state will pay for an operation to restore the sexual organs of a Russian conscript who had his legs and genitals amputated as a result of a brutal bullying incident.
Like, as if that’s going to help.
Uncivilized bastards.
Police seize insult to Nation masquarading as “art”
VICTORIA Police may have illegally seized a ragged Australian flag that was hung outside a Melbourne art gallery.
The gallery’s director, Michael Brenner, said he had received no complaints about the ragged flag.
But two days later, when the gallery was unattended, Senior Constable Jay McDonald, of Footscray police, climbed out of the window of the India Impex cafe next door and removed the flag. Next day Mr Brenner contacted Constable McDonald, who had left his card behind. “He informed me he had removed the flag due to numerous complaints within the community,” Mr Brenner said.Good on Senior Constable McDonald. Burning, deliberately damaging or defacing the nation’s flag the flag may not be illegal but it’s certainly poor form. It’s like a marketing ploy as in ” lets deface a flag around Australia Day – the police will react and we will get some free publicity. The National Association for the Visual Arts, together with the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, said the removal of the flag was an act of censorship. I’d call it an act of common decency.
Anglosphere still hanging in there
Mark Steyn, in The Wall Street Journal, on the success of pro-American leaders:
REMEMBER the conventional wisdom of 2004? Back then, you’ll recall, it was the many members of George Bush’s “unilateral” coalition who were supposed to be in trouble, not least the three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere – the President, Tony Blair and John Howard – who would all be paying a terrible electoral price for lying their way into war in Iraq. The Democrats’ position was that Bush’s rinky-dink nickel-and-dime allies didn’t count: the President has “alienated almost everyone”, said Jimmy Carter, “and now we have just a handful of little, tiny countries supposedly helping us in Iraq”. (That would be Britain, Australia, Poland, Japan . . .) Instead of those nobodies, John Kerry pledged that, under his leadership, “America will rejoin the community of nations” – by which he meant Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, the Belgian guy. Two years on, Bush, Blair, Howard and Junichiro Koizumi are all re-elected, while Chirac is the lamest of lame ducks; Schroeder’s government was defeated; and the latest member of the coalition of the unwilling to hit the skids is Canada’s Liberal Party, which fell from office on Monday.No one can say it isn’t so.
The History Wars
If anything proves Howard’s point on the teaching of history it is this statement;
Australian Education Union secretary Andrew Gohl told The Australian: “We know that John Howard says we shouldn’t have a black armband view of history, but what does that mean? Does it mean we can’t talk about the invasion of Australia, or the appalling treatment of indigenous Australians?”No, but it does mean that your using the word “invasion” precludes any balance in your approach to teaching history.
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