from Crikey ….. 

Bidding farewell to our worst foreign minister 

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: 

Extraordinary new powers will allow police to arrest and fine people for "causing annoyance" to World Youth Day participants and permit partial strip searches at hundreds of Sydney sites, beginning today. 

from Crikey ….. 

NSW crime commission: the law beyond the law 

Joe Hockey is the manager of Opposition business. As such, his brief is to organise the flow of legislation with the Government, and to be the Opposition's union rep in question time.

At 42, he is hardly old, but it's fair to say that he has been an adult for some years. Which makes it all the more odd that opposition has caused Mr Hockey to regress to the age of approximately 14.

Nine months ago, when John Howard was still running the place, his government introduced into Parliament a piece of proposed tax law that stank of a rort. The date was September 20.

We didn't know it at the time, but when Parliament adjourned that night it wouldn't meet again before Howard called the November election that killed his government and evicted him from political life.

The British lawyer Gareth Pierce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: "Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture, brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence.  

In a victory for corporations seeking to limit big-dollar lawsuits, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday cut the $2.5 billion in punitive damages awarded in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The court reduced the award to $507.5 million, dashing the hopes of more than 32,000 fishermen and Alaska Natives who've been waiting for nearly 20 years to hear whether Exxon Mobil Corp. must pay billions in punitive damages for its part in the spill.

To bolster his argument that the Guantanamo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush: "At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield." It turns out that statement is false. 

Speculators now account for about 70% of all benchmark crude-oil trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from 37% in 2000, according to congressional findings cited in a Wall Street Journal report Monday.  

from Crikey ….. 

Coalition's greenhouse denialism is a cynical disgrace 

Talk about the double standards at the United Nations.

Whereas UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly condemned Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric against Israel, expressing "shock and dismay", he has remained ominously, and inexcusably, silent about the blatant Israeli threats of military attacks on Iran, thus undermining the world's confidence in his ability to steer the global community clear of yet another major war in the Middle East caldron. 

After all, the point of the surge, as laid out by Mr. Bush, was to buy time for political reconciliation among the Iraqis. The results have been at best spotty, and even the crucial de-Baathification law celebrated by Mr Bush and Mr McCain in January remains inoperative.  

Peter Taylor introduces the Age of Terror, a BBC Two series tracing the modern history of terrorism.  

Age of Terror

To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.