Quaint Arse has confirmed it will cut 1500 jobs as it grapples with higher fuel prices that have hit the global aviation industry.
Transport Workers Union national airline officer Scott Connolly criticised for not consulting Qantas employees before the announcement.
The co-ordinator of World Youth Day, Bishop Anthony Fisher, today responded to a question about Cardinal George Pell's handling of a sexual abuse case by saying people are 'dwelling crankily ... on old wounds'.
And this afternoon Cardinal Pell did not respond to reporters' questions about Bishop Fisher's remarks. Read more »
President Bush invoked executive privilege to keep Congress from seeing the FBI report of an interview with Vice President Dick Cheney and other records related to the administration's leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003. Read more »
It's the scariest book of any year in recent memory, if "scary" is understood to reach beyond mere bumps in the night and encompass the horrifying ways in which a great nation can utterly fail in upholding its own ideals. Read more »
There really is a kind of a tsunami of shocks facing not just the economy but people's lives, people's real lives.
They're all intersecting.
The co-ordinator of World Youth Day, Bishop Anthony Fisher, today responded to a question about Cardinal George Pell's handling of a sexual abuse case by saying:
What’s so funny about Barack Obama? Apparently not very much, at least not yet. Read more »
I spent 23 years in the CIA. I drafted or was involved in many of the government's most senior assessments of the threats facing our country. I have devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat. Read more »
It sounds like a spot of gallows humour, but the numbers are no joke: the US environmental protection agency (EPA) has lowered the value of a human life by nearly $1m under George Bush's administration.
The word began spreading across Wall Street trading desks on Monday morning: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant companies at the heart of the nation’s housing market, might be in trouble.
For five years, from 1995 to 2000, Wendy Craik, 58, was executive director of the National Farmers' Federation. Four years ago John Howard's government appointed her executive director of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. Read more »
from Crikey …..
Morris Iemma is an ex-premier, bereft of life, no more, etc.
Alex Mitchell writes:
Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions.
But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis. Read more »
Tony Abbott today pointed to the premiere of the ABC's The Hollowmen as an indication of how the Rudd Government has performed in its first year in office. Read more »
Organisers had been expecting 150 people, but instead a rowdy crowd of about 1,000 has turned up to a meeting on the presence of convicted pedophile Dennis Ferguson in their Brisbane community. Read more »
At first sight, the G8 agreement on climate change promises much.
Leaders are 'committed to avoiding the most serious consequences of climate change', and determined to stabilise greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at levels that would avoid 'dangerous climate change'. Read more »
(With Apologies to AB Paterson)
For years I brown-nosed bastards from the Centre to the Right,I fiddled with the numbers & I suck-holed day & night.
And when they wouldn't have me, waited for the next election,
The Editor,
Sydney Morning Herald. July 8, 2008.
‘Pell accused of sex abuse cover-up’, Herald, July 8. Read more »
New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma has accused the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) of trying to blackmail the State Government by calling a strike during World Youth Day (WYD). Read more »
After fights over rising costs and falling pilgrim estimates, government and church both need World Youth Day to be a hit, writes Linda Morris.
In the autumn of 2003, a high-ranking Vatican official visited Sydney for a week. He was Cardinal James Stafford, a member of John Paul II's inner circle and a mate of the Sydney Archbishop, Cardinal George Pell. Read more »
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he can't stand artwork that depicts naked children.
Mr Rudd today said work such as that shown in this month's edition of Art Monthly Australia did the opposite of restoring dignity to the debate over depictions of children in art. Read more »
The Archdiocese of Sydney is contributing $15 million toward WYD events and denies it will be making a profit from the event. On optimistic days the pilgrim juggernaut is expected to hit 500,000 participants and bring millions of tourist dollars into the state.
What follows are just a few of the July 4th lies and errors that we are supposed to blindly accept:
· The military is glorious, its heroes heroic, and our support is patriotic
The remorseless destruction of the Murray-Darling river system is arguably the most grotesque of this country's more obscene political and environmental crimes of the 20th century. It's right up there at the top. Read more »
“Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets.
Therefore the U.S. should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.” Read more »
After Senator Barack Obama said Thursday that he might “refine” his Iraq policies after meeting with military commanders there later this summer, he hastily held a second news conference to emphasize that he remains committed to his central proposal for withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Read more »
Police have told organisations planning to campaign during World Youth Day events they need to have placards, banners and T-shirts pre-approved or risk losing their protest "rights" - even those groups representing victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Read more »
Police have told organisations planning to campaign during World Youth Day events they need to have placards, banners and T-shirts pre-approved or risk losing their protest "rights" - even those groups representing victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Read more »
Police have told organisations planning to campaign during World Youth Day events they need to have placards, banners and T-shirts pre-approved or risk losing their protest "rights" - even those groups representing victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Read more »
Police have told organisations planning to campaign during World Youth Day events they need to have placards, banners and T-shirts pre-approved or risk losing their protest "rights" - even those groups representing victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Read more »
from Crikey …..
Bidding farewell to our worst foreign minister
Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:
from Crikey …..
Bidding farewell to our worst foreign minister
Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:
from Crikey …..
Bidding farewell to our worst foreign minister
Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:
Oil climbs peak, economies plumb depressions and the future will not imitate the past Read more »
Oil climbs peak, economies plumb depressions and the future will not imitate the past Read more »
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.
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. Read more »
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. Read more »
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. Read more »
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.
the legacy of a war criminal …..
“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one historian.
Hard on the heels of Sydney's water rates rising by 20 per cent, household electricity prices are to increase by 8.5 per cent from July 1 - more than double the rate of inflation. Read more »
Billionaire cardboard king Richard Pratt faces jail over accusations he lied to a competition watchdog investigation into a price-fixing cartel.
The Visy boss and Carlton Football Club president was charged on summons yesterday with giving false and misleading evidence to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) hearing in 2005. Read more »
We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had. Read more »
When George Bush announced that he favoured keeping troops in Iraq for decades, the media apparently didn't think the opinion of Iraqis mattered.
from Crikey …..
You're unpleasant Belinda, but you're no LBJ
Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:
Looks like every day there is a military-style raid somewhere in the US. One of the more recent ones, in Detroit involves the raid of an art gallery, where people had gathered to listen to music, have some drinks and dance. Read more »
Wonderful – the people we're liberating are our enemies, because of the extended occupation – now there's a good reason to support the troops and extend the occupation. I guess Congress thought so too.
US interrogators of terrorist suspects were instructed to destroy handwritten notes that might have exposed harsh or even illegal questioning methods at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a lawyer for one of the prisoners said.
The Planning Minister, Frank Sartor, hit back after an outcry against the Government's controversial planning reforms - which passed through the Legislative Assembly at 2am yesterday - by calling the state's peak local government bodies 'dumb'. Read more »
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The ugly side of science — the one we fought Adolph Hitler, amongst his other nasties, to stop his radical medical experiments — was defended by scientists but thankfully exposed by a revolted reporter. Even long aware of the crap that's going on behind the sterilised doors, I nearly spewed too... Read more »
The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. Read more »
The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. Read more »
Such is the relentlessness of Tony Blair's public immersion into matters of faith these days that Alastair Campbell's 'we don't do God' assertion in Downing Street has now been fully exposed for what it was: a skilful piece of diversionary spin. Read more »
For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.
International Space Station astronauts are eagerly awaiting the arrival of shuttle Discovery - it is bringing a new pump to mend their broken toilet. The station's urine collection unit, as opposed to its solid waste unit, has been malfunctioning for several days. Read more »
It is not news that the United States is in great trouble. Read more »
Tomorrow a number of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay will finally get their day in court - although, alas, not literally. Thirty-five Americans who were arrested at the US Supreme Court last January during a demonstration protesting the illegal detention center will go on trial in Washington. Read more »
In the BBC series The Blue Planet, David Attenborough's epic documentary on the Earth's oceans first televised seven years ago, he nails us all.
That is when Attenborough tells us there is now more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at any time "in the last 650,000 years". Read more »
With the economic news of the week of July 14 - the continuing crisis among mortgage lenders, the onset of bank failures, the announced downsizing of General Motors, the slide of the Dow-Jones below 11,000 - we are seeing the ongoing collapse of the U.S. economy.
Even the super-rich are becoming nervous as cries for an emergency suspension of short selling ring out. Read more »
The Federal Opposition has accused the Government of slugging consumers with more taxes and higher costs through its proposed emissions trading scheme and will not support a 2010 start-up date. Read more »
"If there be one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1791, "it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest."
We are here today because our bipartisan governing elite and its media apologists have turned Mr. Jefferson on his head to America’s detriment. Read more »
Yes that is correct, George Bush was found guilty of war crimes. Unfortunately it was determined by the Red Cross and not the Hague, Congress or any facet of our justice system that could physically detain him.
A Treasury Department plan to bolster beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be added to a massive housing package working its way through Congress, to be to the president's desk within days, key lawmakers said today.
