Saturday 19th February is the anniversary of the bombing of Darwin during WWII by aircraft launched from Japanese carriers, 10 weeks after Pearl Harbour.

The ABC has a news report on the commemoration.

It appears that a project launched in 1999 to try and clone the Thylacine, more popularly known as the Tasmanian Tiger, has been shelved due to the poor quality of the available DNA. 🙁

The ABC News Investigative Unit have published the transcript of their background story and interview with Mahamadou Sacko, the French tourist who was wrongly detained after immigration services thought (wrongly) that he was travelling on a forged passport and didn’t bother to check with the French embassy. Some of it reads like a Monty Python sketch, the quote in the previous story mentions that they told him they wouldn’t call the French Embassy, that it was his job to phone them. But it then gets worse..

ANDREW FOWLER: Did you have money to do that?

MAHAMADOU SACKO: No, because they keep all my money.

It gets even more surreal when, rather than contact the French embassy..

ANDREW FOWLER: In their attempts to establish Sacko’s nationality, immigration officials resorted to unusual tactics. They asked him to name the French president, the tallest mountain in France and to sing the French national anthem.

With questions like that I’m suprised they didn’t go on to ask him why he wasn’t wearing a stripy shirt and riding a bicycle with a string of onions around his neck..

To round things off Kerry Nettle, a Greens Senator for NSW, has said that her office was told of a South Korean woman who was wrongly locked up in Baxter detention center for one or two weeks in the mistaken belief she was an illegal immigrant caught in an immigration raid.

Not content with locking up its own citizens as illegal immigrants the Australian Government has now managed to win friends and influence people by locking up a French tourist who they (mistakenly) thought had a false passport in a detention centre and then forgetting to tell the French embassy about him.

It took Mr Sacko two days to get in touch with the French embassy and he remained locked up in Villawood for four days.

“They’re asking me if I want they call French embassy, I say ‘ok, yes’ [but] they didn’t do,” Mr Sacko told the ABC’s Investigative Unit.

“Why not? They say is not their job for do that, if I want I must do by myself.”

The Australian government has paid AU$25,000 in compensation and the French Government has sent an official protest through their consul in Australia to DFAT.

An interesting piece of news from the ABC if you’re into Australia’s wierd wildlife, apparently marsupials (kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, etc) and monotremes (egg laying mammals, the platypus and the echidna) diverged much earlier than previously thought. This is based on a fossil of a 115-million-year-old relative of the platypus found in Victoria.

There’s more at Google News.