Critical Times

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent

AUSTRALIA has been identified by the Stern report as one of the most vulnerable countries in the developed world to the economic and social impacts of global warming.
While wealthy countries are better placed than poorer nations to cope with the massive changes to be wrought by climate change, that burden will not be spread evenly, the report warns, and Australia faces a tougher time than many northern nations.

The impacts will become more damaging from north to south, the report warns, citing more extreme weather changes, more severe bushfires, droughts and water shortages, damage to Australia’s tourism industry and the potential devastation of vast areas of farming.

One of the world’s most significant rock art sites may soon be lost forever, writes Victoria Laurie————————————————————————————————————————

Etched in stone: Aboriginal rock art at Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula is thought by some to be the world’s oldest

IT’S hard to imagine a more impressive cultural site in Australia than the Burrup Peninsula, or a more undefended one. The largest, and possibly oldest, rock art site in the world consists of thousands of jagged red Pilbara rocks bearing remarkable human, animal and plant images etched into shadowed crevasses or sun-beaten surfaces.
A few are darkly outlined Tasmanian tigers, so individual in their sleek stripes or wolfish mien that they hint at many artists’ hands and several millenniums.

MORE severe droughts were inevitable if global warming continued, CSIRO climatologist Barrie Pittock warned today.

“While drought relief may well be appropriate in the short term, we have to treat the cause as well as the consequences,” Dr Pittock told a Victorian National Parks Association audience in Melbourne tonight.

“Increased temperature, due to emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation, is leading to increased evaporative losses from soil and vegetation, making droughts worse.

The Australian Greens say they have taken over from the Democrats as the third major force in Australian politics.

The Greens met in Adelaide today for their last national conference before the federal election.

Party leader Bob Brown says a third of the Democrat vote has gone to the Greens.

THE assassination of U.S. President George Bush has been warmly received ¿ by movie audiences, at least.

Weekly radio show on peace and Justice!

101.5 FM

Radio Adelaide

Every Sunday at 12:30pm

Sunday lunch will never be the same; whether it’s a roast or risotto you can’t miss this innovative, dynamic new group presenting a different and informed perspective on peace. We aim to stimulate, challenge and entertain you with healthy debate, music, commentary and interviews.

The creators of the South Park cartoon series are unrepentant about a new episode that shows Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin attending a party in Hell with a stingray barb protruding from his chest.

Irwin died just eight weeks ago when a stingray barb pierced his heart as he was filming off the north Queensland coast.

The South Park episode, which had been scheduled for broadcast in the US on Wednesday, is expected to upset Irwin fans and his family – wife Terri and children Bindi and Bob.

IT’S mid-afternoon and the emergency department at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital is predictably frantic. A dead body has just been delivered – somebody has jumped or fallen from a block of flats – adding to the already onerous workload of dozens of routinely busy people.
Yet Gordian Fulde, the man in charge of this maelstrom, has spent more than a half-hour sitting on a park bench just outside the chaos, chatting to Inquirer.

Have you been wondering about power bills, global warming and whether nuclear energy is the answer? Are you interested in hearing about a range of future energy options and finding answers to your questions? Would you like to know more about what individuals and communities can do to use energy wisely?

Come and hear:

Dr Helen Caldicott, Professor Timothy Doyle, Dr Michael Lardelli and Monica Oliphant

Casa D’Abruzzo-Molise Club

86-89 Churchill Road, Prospect

(near Bus Stop 9)

For more information, contact: energyforum@picknowl.com.au or phone 0432 650 701

by Diet Simon
(No verified email address) 24 Oct 2006
Imagine the entire NSW police force of 13,300 people assigned to one event for several days. A few hundred more than that will shortly be deployed into a north German county to guard a nuclear waste transport against demonstrators.

The transport will cost German taxpayers at least 50 million euros.

The Dangers Of Thinking
It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties every now and then – just social thinking.

Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

ZNet Commentary
Busy Fondling Their Self Esteem October 17, 2006
By John Pilger

The great Chilean balladeer Victor Jara, who was tortured to death by the regime of General Pinochet 33 years ago, wrote a song that mocks those who see themselves as rational and liberal, yet so often retreat into the arms of authority, no matter its dishonesty and brutality to others. He sang:

Come on over here
where the sun is nice and warm.
Yes, you, who have the habit
of jumping from one side to the other .

ZNet Commentary
Is the Death of Art Upon Us? October 11, 2006
By Sudhanva Deshpande

In 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, General Franco’s planes bombed Guernica, the holy city of the Basques, for three days. The city was flattened, and about 1600 people were killed, a large number children. The event shocked the world.

This year’s ozone hole over Antarctica is bigger and deeper than any other on record, US scientists say.

The ozone layer shields Earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, and the layer thins out over the South Pole each year, primarily because human-made compounds release ozone-eating chlorine and bromine gases into the stratosphere.

“From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.

Welcome to mediastrike.org . This is the website for the Adelaide based activist group MediaStrike.

by Mike Head via sam
(No verified email address) 11 Oct 2006
Nonetheless, the Beattie government has shelved the report. Unable and unwilling to resolve the social problems, its reaction has been to close ranks with the police and prepare for further repression.

In a highly revealing ruling, a coroner has found that police bashed and killed an innocent Aboriginal man on Queensland’s Palm Island nearly two years ago.

by Daniel Hoare

A visiting land care expert has made a frightening prediction for Sydney and Melbourne residents.

Canadian conservationist Maude Barlow, a keynote speaker at the International Landcare Conference in Melbourne this week, says both cities will run out of drinking water unless governments take urgent action.

Ms Barlow says policies like the building of new dams and water trading schemes will not prove effective in the long-term.

A CSIRO report has warned climate change will threaten the region’s economy and security unless governments and aid agencies start preparing for its impacts.

The two-part CSIRO report was commissioned by a new coalition of aid, church and development groups.

It warns that a two degrees Celsius increase in temperature by 2030 will have a devastating impact in northern Pakistan, India and western China.

Smoking will be banned in all public places in France from next February.

Smoking is a well-known French past time but the Prime Minister, Dominque de Villepin, says smoking kills more than 13 people a day in France.

He called it an “unacceptable reality”.

A Queensland drover was grazing his herd on the long acre along a remote pasture in outback Queensland when suddenly a brand-new Range Rover emerged from a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Bolle sunglasses and Yves St Laurent silk tie, leans out the window and asks the drover, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Nokia cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg Germany.