Critical Times

A US woman has been arrested on suspicion of murdering her newborn baby by burning her in a microwave oven.
China Arnold’s daughter had high-heat internal burns, but no outside marks, Ken Betz from the county coroner’s office in Montgomery, Ohio, said.

“We have some forensic evidence that is consistent with our belief that a microwave oven was used,” Mr Betz said of baby Paris Talley’s death.

Take a moment to imagine a cultural icon six times older than the Pyramids, eight times older than Stonehenge. Imagine probably the earliest surviving rock carvings on this planet: close to a million images of ancient faces and our earliest fauna, including the mighty Tasmanian tiger, spread throughout a group of small islands alongside the west coast of Australia.

Most Australians have never even heard of these rock carvings on the Burrup Peninsula – and have no idea this silent world treasure is at risk of being needlessly pulled apart and destroyed from blind industrial development.

US restaurant serves up burger to die for

A restaurant in the south-western US state of Arizona that proudly admits to trying to finish off its customers has introduced a new item on its menu – the “quadruple bypass burger”.

The burger at the Heart Attack Grill restaurant is stacked with four beef patties, cheese, onions, tomatoes and fried bacon and weighs in at 8,000 calories – more than three times what the human body needs in one day.

Patrons who have no appetite for the quadruple bypass burger can opt for the triple or double bypass.

Next May/June will see Australia host the largest military exercises we’ve ever had in peacetime: Talisman Sabre 07…

Twelve thousand Australian soldiers and nearly l4,000 US troops and sailors will take place in bombarding our shores and fragile landscape, storming our beaches, gunning down ‘terrorists’ in the newly built urban guerilla warfare training centre, testing their latest laser guided missiles and ‘smart’ bombs in some of the most pristine wilderness I’ve ever seen on this planet – and in 30years of making films, I’ve seen a lot of this planet.

Idyllic Shoalwater Bay near Rockhampton will cop it all – live aerial bombing, ship to shore naval firings, underwater depth charges exploded in areas where turtles and dugong breed, nuclear subs using high level sonar frequency which zaps the hearing of sea life and mammals, nuclear aircraft carriers inside the so-called Great Barrier Reef marine national park (!), land based artillery firings blasting the hell out of areas where the most amazing biodiversity in Australia is to be found.

(Shoalwater Bay covers 740,000 hectacres and is almost unique in our climatic landscape because it is a cross over point for tropical, subtropical and temperate zones giving rise to an amazing variety of many species of flora and wildlife, birds,sea creatures etc).

First it was John Howard saying that public schools should appoint chaplains, and then it was Bob Such proposing that state primary schools needed to have a religious education program.

It seems as though for some, it is the absence of the guiding hand of the Church that best explains the decline in standards of behaviour of young people.

The fact of their continual immersion in a culture shaped by US imperialism is hardly acknowledged.

IT IS going to be a very long weekend for Felix Riebl.

Over the next three days Riebl, a lead singer with the Melbourne band the Cat Empire, will be lucky to snatch a few hours’ sleep between late-night gigs and days spent in intensive training to become one of Australia’s first “climate messengers”.

The former US vice-president Al Gore is running his first climate workshop outside the US in Sydney.

Russian scientists warned on Thursday that southern Siberia, already known as one of the fastest warming regions on the planet, is facing grave consequences as a result of the unnaturally temperate start to its typically harsh winter.

November is normally a month when silence swathes the vast evergreen forests as migratory birds depart for warmer climes and resident mammals settle down to hibernate.

Tess Lee Ack
John Howard is unquestionably one of the most hated political leaders in Australia’s history. Clear majorities oppose the defining domestic and foreign policies of his government – the industrial relations laws and the war on Iraq. So how come he’s still there after ten miserable years?

The main reason of course, is the lack of any serious opposition.

South Australian motorists are set to face a fine if they smoke in a car when a child is present.

Under new laws introduced to state parliament today police will have the power to issue an on-the-spot fine of $75 to anyone smoking in a private car when a child under 16 is also in the car.

But if the penalty is challenged in court, the fine could jump to up to $200.

Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia scaring local people as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber.

The bears escape harsh winters by going to sleep in October-November for around six months, but in the snowless Kemerovo region where the weather is unseasonably warm, bears have no desire yet to hibernate.

“Due to weather conditions, bears didn’t go into the winter sleep in time,” said Tatiana Maslova, chief expert at a regional environmental agency in the city of Kemerovo, about 3,500km south-east of Moscow.

Given the opportunity, workers, young people and housewives speak out freely on these vital issues. The “lack of interest” is a reflection of the profound alienation of broad sections of working people from official politics and the two-party system. Their concerns find no expression in the media and the political establishment.

NoWar presents our next film fund raiser

Sunday 26 November, 4pm

The Road To Guantanamo

Winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO is the terrifying first-hand account of three British citizens who were held for two years without charges in the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Known as the “Tipton Three,” in reference to their home town in Britain, the three were eventually returned to Britain and released, still having had no formal charges ever made against them at any time during their ordeal. The film has already engendered significant controversy due to its critical stance towards the American and British governments.

Thursday 16 November 2006

6.00 pm for 6.30 pm

The Australia-East Timor Friendship Association (SA)

in conjunction with

The Australian Coalition for Transitional Justice in East Timor (ACTJET)

with the support of

Uniya Jesuit Social Justice Centre

Mary MacKilolop East Timor, Jesuit Mission, RMIT Globalism Institute, Melbourne University Human Rights Forum

Cordially invites you to the launch in South Australia of

Chega! (Enough!)

The Report of the Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CAVRT) East Timor*

Room H20-02, Basil Hetzel Building, University of South Australia

Gate 3, Frome Road, Adelaide

in the presence of

His Excellency, the Ambassador for Timor-Leste

Mr Coelho Da Silva

Speakers

Anaceto Guterres, former CAVR Chairman Commissioner Isabel Guterres, Patrick Walsh, Special Adviser to the Commission, Francisco da Costa, Former Freedom Fighter, Dr Mark Byrne, Uniya Research Officer and

Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja, Senator for South Australia

Drinks and finger food from 6.

Australian rock legend and original ‘working class man’ Jimmy Barnes and his band will play live to workers and families at the MCG on November 30 as part of a nation-wide day of protest against the Federal Government’s industrial relations laws the ACTU announced today.

Jimmy Barnes and his band will be a key part of the line-up for the November 30 protest against the Government’s IR laws which will be broadcast live from the MCG across Australia.

Unions expect the MCG rally and broadcast on 30 November will be one of Australia’s biggest ever community protests with more than half a million people expected to participate nationally.

The G20 is an informal meeting of the finance ministers and central bank governors of 19 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States of America plus the European Union Council presidency and the European Central Bank.

The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the President of the World Bank, plus the chairs of the International Monetary and Financial Committee and Development Committee of the IMF and World Bank, also participate in G20 meetings.

• The G20 started in 1999.

Eating too much meat has been linked to bowel cancer
Eating large amounts of red meat may double young women’s breast cancer risk, a study suggests.
US researchers writing in Archives of Internal Medicine looked at over 90,000 pre-menopausal women.

Having one-and-a-half servings of red meat per day almost doubled the risk of hormone receptor-positive breast cancer compared to three or fewer per week.

NAIROBI: Australia ranks among the world’s worst countries in dealing with climate change, according to a report by environmentalists.
Australia lies 47th out of 56 industrialised or industrialising nations in an evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions and climate policy, said Germanwatch, a German environmental group. Last year it ranked 50th.

“The support of the WA government for the REVA Electric Car is in stark contrast to the apathy of the South Australian government”, according to Greens MLC, Mark Parnell. The REVA is an all-electric imported car that costs less than a dollar to charge up and is emissions free when fuelled with renewable electricity.

“The REVA has been sitting here in Adelaide for a year, yet the SA Government has refused to come out from behind restrictive regulations to allow it to be tested and registered under appropriate electric car standards.

by Green Unionist
(Interview with Peter Lewis Nature Conservation Council director Cate Faehrmann on the fight against global warming and how unions and greens can learn from each other. Forget 666 – 457 is looming as the scariest number for Aussie workers and their families.

Common Ground

The debate over climate change has appeared to ramp up in the past few months, why is that?

What we have seen over the past few months is the sceptics run out of ways to pretend dangerous man-made climate change is not a reality.

Latest research shows the Earth’s climate could change quickly, and violently, writes Fred Pearce.

RICHARD ALLEY’s eyes glint as we discuss how fast global warming could cause sea levels to rise. The scientist sums up the state of knowledge: “We used to think that it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom.