I found this image on the ABC news website, is it just me or does this look faintly disturbing ?
The ABC captioned the image “The Pope has celebrated midnight mass in Vatican City”.
Category Archives: News
Missing Presumed Drowned – Two Indian Islands
Fortunately the two Indian islands that have disappeared in the Bay of Bengal do not appear to have been inhabited (though the report doesn’t say about vegetation and animals), but the fact that they appear to have been lost to rising sea levels should give folks everywhere in low lying areas pause for thought.
Detentions in Iraq
Two Americans get picked up in a raid on a dodgy security company in Iraq, both are innocent and one has been working as an FBI informer, which is why the raid happens. They then spend months in custody before finally getting released.
Nathan Ertel, the American held with Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.
Donald Vance made a very good point:
While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.
Another case of “do what I say, not what I do”. 🙁
To Each As They Deserve – A Good Example of Political Satire
John Howard to be deported after failing citizenship test
Category: News article
Topic: Politics
Author: Michael Ellerman
Year created: 2006
Overall rating: out of 5
Content rating: out of 5
You absolutely have to read Michael Ellerman’s satirical news article “John Howard to be deported after failing citizenship test“.
I hereby lend it any Google foo that I have..
Tags: citizenship deported failing howard john+howard citizenship+test australian+citizenship michael+ellerman satirical satire liberal+party
Google Earth Overlay of DSE Bushfire Updates in Victoria
Back in January 2006 some clueful person came up with the idea of creating a Google Earth overlay to monitor bushfires in Victoria.
It pulls in the latest image from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) from their current incidents page about fires and overlays it on the satellite imagery.
Red circles are controlled fires, red stars are contained fires and red fires are “going” (i.e. not controlled or contained).
Kenny wins the AFI Best Actor award
Congratulations to Shane Jacobsen for winning the AFI 2006 Best Actor award for Kenny!
Corporate Archaeological Vandalism in China
The ABC is reporting that a section of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia was blasted to make way for a highway.
The company responsible, Hongji Landbridge, was warned not to go ahead with construction. According to government officials, it not only ignored the warnings but went on to demolish three nearby ancient villages.
Another great idea from the Australian Liberal Party
OK, so global warming is going to bleach most of the Great Barrier Reef if business as usual carries on in the world. So the Australian Liberal Party (currently in power) has come up with a really great idea to protect part of it – the Federal Tourism minister wants to cover part of it with a shade cloth!
Federal Tourism Minister Fran Bailey says using “shade cloth” over parts of the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland could protect it from the harmful effects of global warming.
This is based upon the fact that a scientist noticed that shaded areas of the reef currently have more vibrant colours. However, my guess is that this won’t be enough to save the polyps from the rising water temperatures which will be the main issue. Sure, the shade will reduce local temperatures relative to exposed areas, but that won’t stop a general trend in temperature rise from the effects of the surrounding water.
WordPress 2.0.5 is out
WordPress have just announced the release of WordPress 2.0.5, you can see the changes at the Trac page for the release.
It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.
Congratulations to Ryan Boren on his new baby, Ronan, after whom this release is named!
Update: The upgrade here was painless, nice work folks!. There’s also some more details in this blog post.
Update 2: Brian Layman has asked me to point out that this fixes some serious security problems.
Vegemite and the US FDA
There’s been a fair bit of discussion around the web about the US FDA banning the import of Vegemite (( Alec Muffett – US govt bans Vegemite )) (( Andrew Pollock – Egad. They’ve banned Vegemite! )) (( BoingBoing – US govt bans Vegemite )) ((News.com.au – US bans Vegemite )).
Well I went digging around because this sounded a little too odd and because the only source was a tiny news story that gave no details. Wikipedia’s Vegemite entry mentions the ban but is equivocal about the veracity of the reports and if you check the history and the discussion page there’s quite a debate about whether or not its real.
So I went to the horses mouth – I left a feedback message on the Vegemite website asking about whether this was real or not and (to my suprise) got a rapid response from Kraft Foods, which I’m waiting to see if they’ll give me permission to quote.
The summary is that the news story is pretty much accurate, if a little old, Kraft Foods haven’t been exporting Vegemite to the US for 12 months now because of the US FDA’s regulations on what foods are allowed to have folate fortification.