LinkBlog: australia

THE Federal Government's plan to immunise the population against swine flu is in chaos because insurers may not cover doctors who administer the jab. Inadequate testing and the possibility of spreading other infections means there is too high a risk patients will sue, the insurers say. Despite weeks of crisis talks, the Government has refused to underwrite doctors' liability for the vaccinations and medical groups say the program - due to start as early as mid-September - cannot proceed unless doctors are insured.

LECTURE AT SYDNEY UNIVERSITY - "The Life and Death of World Trade Centre One" Dr David Leifer - http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/staff/homepage/davidleifer.shtml When: 6:30pm, Thursday the 4th of June 2009 Where: Sydney University, Architecture Faculty, Lecture Hall 1 Title: The Life and Death of World Trade Centre One

Four months after their cattle dog fell overboard off the coast of Australia, a couple has been reunited with the pooch. Owner Jan Griffith said her dog, Sophie Tucker, fell off the side of their boat in choppy waters off the Mackay coast in north Queensland in late November. Apparently, the dog swam five nautical miles to St. Bees Island, where she survived until last week by hunting baby goats. She was returned to her family last week after rangers captured what they believed was a wild dog, according to an Australian Associated Press report.

Entire towns have been seared off the map by wildfires raging through southeastern Australia, burning people in their homes and cars in the deadliest blaze in the country's history. The number of dead Monday stood at 108, a grim toll that rose almost by the hour as officials reached further into the fire zone. Searing temperatures and wind blasts created a firestorm that swept across a swath of the country's Victoria state, where at least 700 homes were destroyed and all of the victims died. More victims were expected to be found, officials said. "Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria," Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said. "It's an appalling tragedy for the nation."

The Defence and Prime Minister's office files show that the US was strongly pushing then prime minister Harold Holt's government in the 1960s to allow tests of two of the deadliest chemical weapons ever developed -- VX and GB, better known as Sarin nerve gas. The revelation airs this morning on the Nine Network's Sunday program.

It is with great pleasure that we can announce that Mr. Yukihisa Fujita, a Member of the Japanese Parliament representing the Democratic Party, is to attend the Sydney Truth Now Conference. He is, in the organizing committee’s opinion, the single most important person to step forward to ask the hard questions about 9/11 and the “War on Terror” this year. We hope that his attendance may encourage Australian Parliamentarians to examine the provably false official 9/11 conspiracy theory! He will be in attendance on the 15th (Sat) and 16th (Sun) only and will make a short address on both days.

A 10% loss of value in the markets in one day is the very definition of a stock market crash. Yesterday, Australian markets lost 7.3%.

Just a good story to read. Think of it in the context of this "war on terror" we are supposedly fighting.

In this tale, written from an Australian perspective, I’ll review an incident that took place overseas several years ago - and the remarkable failure of Australia's premier public broadcaster to report the story. Then I’ll look at equivalent public broadcasters, in Britain and the USA, to examine their bizarre reportage of the same extraordinary event. Publicly-funded mass media can - and should - survive only if they enjoy widespread confidence. Why should the public fund media which lies about very important topics - matters of life and death? Read on - and judge for yourself whether the tangled web woven by these three mass media organizations is evidence of deliberate deception.

This well-crafted, well-documented film from Australia exposes the 2002 Bali Bombings as yet another case of False Flag Terror. Using a formula that has worked so well for the Loose Change crew, the filmmaker has crafted a very watchable piece that flows well, with interesting visuals, a soundtrack that moves from hip to emotionally engaging, and most importantly, and most damaging of all to the powers that be... the Truth.

Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge regime swept to power in 1975. They emptied the capital city Phnom Penh of its inhabitants within days of their April 17 victory. Thirty-two years later, and thousands of Phnom Penh’s residents are again being forced out of the city, and dumped on empty land in abysmal refugee-camp conditions. But this time, they are not being evicted with the aim of creating a Marxist agrarian utopia, but in the name of development and private enterprise. After the Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, Cambodians returned to their capital city in droves. Private property had been abolished under the radical communist regime, and ad hoc squatter communities sprang up all around the city as people occupied what vacant land or buildings they could find. The new government has passed a plethora of progressive laws since 1992, but nevertheless increasing numbers of Cambodians are finding that the land they’ve lived on for decades – and assumed was theirs – has been sold behind their backs. Internationally well-connected individuals are brokering the deals, and the Australian Government is one of the players.

THE market's biggest one-day fall in almost six years knocked almost $53 billion off the value of Australia's top 200 companies. The 3.7 per cent lambasting followed last Wednesday's 3.3 per cent fall. They were the two largest one-day falls since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

A gay pub in the city of Melbourne has won the right to ban heterosexuals - the first time such legislation has been passed in Australia. The Victorian state civil and administrative tribunal ruled the Peel Hotel could ban patrons based on their sexual orientation. The pub's management said the move would stop groups of heterosexual men and women abusing gay people.

Please join us at the Sydney Town Hall at 11 AM on 11 April 2007, as we are launching the Australian 9/11 Truth Movement.

Some achievement. Securing a trial wholly run by the US military that allows coerced evidence from secret detention centres and can impose the death penalty (including for "spying") with limited means of appeal, doesn't seem much of a tribute to diplomacy. "Under a diplomatic deal, Mr Hicks would serve that term in Australia," the article reported; but this will provide scant hope for the 385 prisoners still held at the prison. It seems highly unlikely that the Pakistanis, Yemenis, Bosnians, Saudis, Afghans, Chinese and at least seven long-term UK residents still imprisoned will be able to strike such deals.

The worst of the worst? The first "detainee" to be tried? Held for sixty-four months before he could even get a sham hearing, and then sentenced to nine months more? Doesn't he get credit for time served? He's done the nine months already, plus fifty-five more. For what? For being tortured?

Why would Crawford secretly circumvent the prosecutors and the judge and negotiate a deal with Hicks’ attorneys behind their backs? After all, isn’t negotiating a plea bargain the job of the prosecutors? Isn’t it the judge’s job to determine whether a plea bargain should be accepted as fair and just? Not in the Hicks case. The deal that Crawford struck with Hicks’ attorneys was final and binding on the prosecutors, the judge, and the military tribunal. Even more unusual were the actual terms of the deal. After the Pentagon had repeatedly said that Hicks was one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists, Crawford agreed to a 7-year sentence, all but 9 months of which will be suspended. That means that after all the hullabaloo about how dangerous and evil Hicks is, he only has to serve 9 months in jail, and he gets to serve them all in his home country of Australia.

Hicks accepted responsibility for a list of activities that were revised slightly from the government's original charge sheet during negotiations over the plea agreement. The list dropped a reference to meeting "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid during his al-Qaida training in early 2001 as well as a description of his training as "advanced." Hicks confirmed that he traveled to Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to attend terrorist training camps. After the attacks, under the alias "Abu Muslim Australia," he acknowledged arming himself to join al-Qaida and the Taliban in the fight against U.S. forces.

Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty to helping terrorists because he was desperate to escape 5 years of "hell" in Guantánamo Bay and return to Australia, his father says. After years of insisting on his innocence, Hicks is likely to be sent home soon, and may serve any remaining sentence at a high-security prison in Adelaide.

"If I were running al-Qaida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."

This weekend, Australian citizen David Hicks will have spent five years in the torture hellhole that is Guantanamo Bay. Five years, and he still hasn't faced a court to answer the charges levelled against him. Nor is he likely to in the next twelve months.

Peter Tinley, who was decorated for his military service in Afghanistan and Iraq, has broken ranks to condemn the Howard Government over its handling of the war and has called for an immediate withdrawal of Australian troops. "It was a cynical use of the Australian Defence Force by the Government," the ex-SAS operations officer told The Weekend Australian yesterday. "This war duped the Australian Defence Force and the Australian people in terms of thinking it was in some way legitimate."

Support was strongest among residents and businesses who were in the area before it was established, providing further evidence of the success of the center, which has dramatically reduced overdose deaths.