Coonan rejects Murdoch's media
policy criticisms …..

Communications Minister Helen Coonan
has brushed aside Rupert Murdoch's criticism of the Federal Government's
plans for changes to media laws. 

The News Corporation chairman and
chief executive has suggested the Government should throw out its package
of changes or leave things the way they are until someone with the
political will to make more drastic change emerges.

‘When a man's plea for help is rejected by both of the
countries that legally owe him a duty of care, it is clear that political
expediency has triumphed over justice.

David Hicks, the only Westerner
still incarcerated in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, was born in
Adelaide of an English mother. This entitles him to dual citizenship. 

Since January 2002, Hicks has
languished in detention while the Australian Government has denied any
obligation for his welfare, preferring to support clear breaches of
international law by its American allies. Now, the British Foreign Office has
decided not to make representations for his release because he was an
Australian citizen when captured and handed to US forces.

Four former Bush administration officials involved in the run-up to the
Iraq war testified before the Democratic Policy Committee yesterday to explain
how and why the intelligence was manipulated.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin
Powell's former chief of staff, said he needed just three words to explain why
a small number of individuals in the administration “had more influence…than
the professionals.” "The
Vice President," he said.  

 
Howard says IR protests threaten
resources trade ….

Prime Minister John Howard says
today's national day of protest and the Opposition's policy to abolish
workplace agreements (AWAs) jeopardises resources trade with China. 

Mr Howard and the Premier of China
today attended a ceremony in southern China, marking the start of multi-billion-dollar
Australian liquid natural gas exports.

Australia's Foreign Minister believes he's responsible for the marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban?  This is the man that George W. Bush wanted to lead the world into Iran?

Ninemsn has reported that Downer was "in the vicinity" when Kidman and Urban met.  Apparently he's just told BBC Radio that he has a photograph to prove it.  Until this photo is released the mental pictures in my head will keep me giggling for days.

Alex, you're always going to be an "extra", even in attempted publicity stunts like this one.  What the Brits think of this announcement is a point of conjecture, but the word "tosser" springs to mind. 

 
from yesterday’s Crikey ….. 

No basis for Murdoch's Muslim
scaremongering

Charles Richardson writes: 

Rupert Murdoch picked a bad time
to express the view, as he did yesterday, that Muslims'
religion "supercedes any sense of nationalism wherever they go".
Perhaps he was following Mark Steyn, who maintained back in February that Islam
"is not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for its
adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression – a Pan-Islamic
identity that transcends borders."

Just last week, the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a report that
provides strong evidence against the Murdoch-Steyn position. Pew surveyed
people in Muslim countries, western Europe and the US, and also specifically
Muslims in western Europe. While the responses were not monolithic, they show
that as a general rule European Muslims were more liberal and less anti-western
than their counterparts in the Middle East.

The Australian Government's Aid Agency Ausaid, a major Australian employer of Halliburton/KBR, has been warned to tighten its anti-corruption practices in a report released today (Wednesday)

The report follows admission by Ausaid representatives earlier this year that the organision had no internal protocols for reporting detected corruption in aid deals.

The report, released by the National Audit Office, states that funds earmarked to provided relief to Indonesia following the Decenber 2004 tsunami were used to pay Ausaid officers and to cover administration costs.   It includes the statement that "a key risk for activities is that of fraud and corruption" and claims that numerous contracts were not signed until after the provision of services had commenced.

‘Tell me, if you went into
surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your
entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that
you no longer have a knee problem?

’Great Moments
In The History of Imperialism

Do you think that Dick Cheney's words in the US today are going to be echoed in Canberra in next year?

[from SBS) 

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that a
landmark nuclear deal with India will win support of the US Congress
despite strong opposition by critics.

Mr Cheney said in Washington that the deal was "one of the most
important strategic foreign policy initiatives of President Bush's
second term".

Reuters has reported that legislation prepared for action next week
by a key House of Representatives committee would require India to
strongly support US efforts to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions and would
bar lawmakers from amending the formal peaceful nuclear cooperation
agreement still under negotiation by Washington and New Delhi.

The draft bill, which was obtained by Reuters, is "much closer to
the Bush administration's initial cut than things that were being
talked about" earlier by some lawmakers, said a congressional analyst
who closely followed the drafting process.

 Writing the piece Agonies Of A Conspiracy TheoristA and reading the responses both here and on Webdiary has altered the way I go about things.  The main sentiment I was left with was that I should "keep on keeping on".

The trouble is that in my second year of this blog I feel like I'm in a time-loop, almost as if I'm watching last year's script being followed by a sequel.  It even comes down to the sense of "lull" in proceedings I felt last June, which quickly came to an end with the arrival of the London bombings.

For those in our audience who are
too young to remember or too old to want to, a long, long time ago, in a far
off part of the galaxy called Awstralya, there was once a Minister for Defence
- Senator “Wookie” Hill.

Now “Wookie” was in charge of
Awstrayla’s stockpile of second-hand & redundant “boys toys”, acquired for
enormous sums of money from the Amerikan Military Industrial Complex (AMIC),
the people who run the United States government (aka The Universal Policeman –
TUP): Awstrayla’s special friend.

‘Nothing's going better in Iraq.
Everything's out of whack in Afghanistan. The two military interventions in the
greater Middle East that were supposed to bring stability, if not democracy,
clash with a ferocious opposition composed of radical forces that do not
necessarily have the support of the population, but which profit from growing
hostility towards the "liberators." The deterioration of the
situation in Afghanistan at the moment when NATO is taking over the international
coalition led by the United States is not independent of the latter's failure
in Iraq.