The Brat
, a 1972 Honda CB350, was built by reader Rex Havoc and his friend Brad, who run a small custom workshop in Perth, Australia, called Garage Project Motorcycles — via Bike EXIF
Malcolm Fraser has accused both sides of federal politics of appealing to a redneck
minority in the asylum seeker debate.
The former prime minister says the Federal Government has a responsibility towards asylum seekers from Afghanistan because of Australia’s military intervention in that country.
Mr Fraser allowed tens of thousands of refugees into Australia after the Vietnam War in the 1970s and says people trying to flee the war in Afghanistan also deserve protection.
He says the current debate over asylum seekers is one of the most terrible in the history of the Parliament, with both the Government and Opposition chasing cheap votes at the expense of the lives of vulnerable people — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hydrogen — a potential clean energy source — can be sustainably generated using just seawater, river water and bacteria, according to new research.
Hydrogen is a potentially valuable energy source but production costs and environmental concerns about using fossil fuels to production costs and environmental concerns about using fossil fuels to produce the gas have limited its application so far.
Previous studies have shown hydrogen gas can be produced by harnessing the by-products of microbial organic matter metabolism in a device called a microbial electrolysis cell.
But the process requires an additional input of electricity to make it work effectively.
Now, according to a study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hydrogen can be produced in a single device by integrating a water-based power supply into the system — via redwolf.newsvine.com
News Limited is to undergo a major rebranding exercise which will see it become News Australia early next year, according to leaked document obtained today by Crikey.
According to Crikey, three agencies have been approached to pitch on the major rebranding, codenamed Project Darwin and timed for early next year — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Guinea pigs are sociable animals and Swiss law prohibits owners from keeping the furry rodents on their own. But what happens when one dies? Don’t fret, just call Priska Küng, who runs a rent-a-guinea pig
service to provide companionship for grieving, lonely animals in the twilight of their years.
Swiss animal lover Priska Küng runs a kind of matchmaking agency — for lonely guinea pigs that have lost their partners. She lives with around 80 of the furry, squeaky little creatures, in addition to six cats, a number of rabbits, hamsters and mice in the village of Hadlikon, some 30 kilometers from Zürich.
Küng, 41, rents out her guinea pigs, a service that has been in high demand in the Alpine nation ever since animal welfare rules were tightened up a few years ago. Switzerland has forbidden people from keeping lone guinea pigs because the animals are sociable and need each other’s company.
As a result, the sudden death of a guinea pig, shocking enough in itself, can also place the hapless owners outside the law if they only had two of the pets.
That is where Küng comes in. Because they hardly ever die at the same time, even if they are exactly the same age, people who don’t want a new guinea pig and lose one of their two animals need an interim solution,
she says.
Without her rent-a-guinea pig service, the owner would have to purchase a new, probably younger guinea pig as a companion to the ageing survivor, whose eventual death would force the purchase of yet another guinea pig, locking the owner into an endless cycle of guinea pig purchases in order to adhere to Swiss law — even though he or she may only ever have wanted one guinea pig in the first place
Two Chinese telecommunications giants have reportedly teamed up to build a new subsea cable between Australia and New Zealand, estimated to be worth US$100 million.
Axin, the Australasian agent and representative of China Communications Service Corp, wants to build a 2300km cable between Auckland and Sydney, and has tapped Huawei Marine Networks Co to help build the link.
The direct link between the two countries would mean that companies seeking to only transfer information between the two countries would not have to share capacity on international subsea cables that redirect overseas, such as the Southern Cross cable or the planned Pacific Fibre cable that both iiNet and Vodafone NZ plan to use for international traffic.
Its capacity will probably be smaller than the existing Southern Cross Cable and the prospective Pacific Fibre cable — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The US Justice Department on Tuesday accused poker celebrities Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson among other executives of a major poker website of defrauding poker players out of more than $300 million.
The US Attorney in the Southern District of New York filed a motion Tuesday to amend an earlier civil complaint to allege that Mr Ferguson, Mr Lederer and two other directors for the website, Full Tilt Poker, operated what the Justice Department says was a Ponzi scheme that allowed the company to pay out $444 million to themselves and other owners, which included other famous poker players — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Igloo Village in Kakslauttanen, Finland is like the Rolls-Royce of ice hotels. Each igloo is equipped with glass that allows you to gaze at the northern lights and millions of stars, all while relaxing comfortably in your warm room.
The glass igloo is a a marvel of modern technology, which is based on a groundbreaking idea and years of research and development. Built from special thermal glass, the view stays clear even when the temperature outside drops to under -30°C. Every igloo is equipped with a toilet and luxury beds and, every evening, a hot sauna and a refreshing ice hole await you — via My Modern Metropolis
An 18-year-old law that prevented serving US military personnel from disclosing that they were gay has been formally repealed.
At one minute past midnight eastern time (0401 GMT), the controversial don’t ask don’t tell (DADT) law was abolished after its repeal was signed into law some nine months ago.
Introduced by President Clinton in 1993 as a compromise step to full equality, DADT allowed gay and lesbian members of the military to serve only if their sexuality remained secret or was not reported.
The Servicemembers Legal Defence Network estimates that since the law’s introduction, 13,000 gay men and lesbians have been discharged after their sexual orientation was revealed.
In some cases dismissals were made on the basis of testimony from jilted lovers or those with personal grievances — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The FBI has publicly declared that its counter-terrorism training seminars linking mainstream
Muslims to terrorists was a one time only
affair that began and ended in April 2011. But two months later, the Bureau employee who delivered those controversial briefings gave a similar lecture to a gathering of dozens of law enforcement officials at an FBI-sponsored public-private partnership in New York City.
And during that June presentation, the FBI’s William Gawthrop told his audience that the fight against al-Qaida is a waste
, compared to the threat presented by the ideology of Islam itself.
At the operational level, you have groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaida. Like teeth in a shark, it is irrelevant if you take one group out,
Gawthrop said during his lecture to the New York Metro Infragard at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scotland Yard has decided not to pursue
its legal bid to force the Guardian to reveal the sources it used for stories about phone hacking.
A hearing was scheduled for Friday but police said it had consulted the Crown Prosecution Service and opted at this time
not to go ahead with the hearing.
The CPS said it had asked for more information and more time.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said the paper welcomed the Met’s decision to withdraw this ill-judged order
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Graeme the trainspotting cat has attained rock star status among commuters at his station.
Every morning the laid-back feline leaves home and saunters down to the platform on the Hurstbridge line to mix with travellers heading off to work.
The pampered cat cannot get enough of attention, with scores of regulars calling him by name as they stop for a chat and give him a pat on the head.
Safety conscious, the sociable moggie is meticulous about using the subway to cross to the city-bound platform, rather than take a dangerous short cut across the tracks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In Australian politics, a Dorothy Dixer is a rehearsed or planted question asked of a government Minister by a backbencher of his/her own political party during Parliamentary Question Time.
The term is used in a mildly derogatory sense. Often, the question has been written by the Minister or his/her staff rather than by the questioner, and is used to give the Minister a chance to promote themselves or the work of the Government, or to criticise the opposition party’s policies, to raise the profile of the backbench Member asking the question, or to consume the time available for questioning and thereby avoid tougher questions. It is a common and widely-accepted tactic during Question Time in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
While it is not very common in the Australian context, it would be possible for a backbencher on the Government side of the house to ask a member of the Government a question without it being regarded as a Dorothy Dixer. Such a question would be one that the Minister was not aware of in advance, or that the Minister had not planted, or both.
It is common for Dorothy Dixers
to end in the question: Is the Minister aware of any alternative policies?
This enables the responding Minister to launch into extended criticism of the Opposition and its policy on the question’s subject matter, while still remaining technically relevant to the question as asked, as Standing orders require.
The term references American advice columnist Dorothy Dix‘s reputed practice of making up her own questions to allow her to publish more interesting answers. Dorothy Dixer
has been used in Australian politics since the 1950s, and has become increasingly common in everyday usage, although the term is now frequently shortened to Dixer
. However, its origin is unclear; the term is virtually unknown in other countries where Dix’s column was equally popular — via Wikipedia
Grant Imahara is The Doctor — via Neatorama
I’ve always thought that the Ducati 900 SS deserved more praise. It was a fast sports tourer with good handling — but it was also pigeon-holed by critics as a lesser bike than the 996, and too expensive compared to the early Monsters. So it’s great to see someone take a 900 SS by the scruff of the neck and turn it into a seriously desirable machine. The 900 TT
is the latest build from Radical Ducati, and like most of the customs from the Madrid workshop, it’s lithe, muscular and stripped back to the essentials — via Bike EXIF
An American man’s bequest of $8 million for an Australian volunteer wombat rescue program may never reach the program.
Brigitte Stevens from the Wombat Awareness Organisation says the man’s family is contesting the donation he made in his will — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via unurth
This past year, a Berlin man, Timothy Brown, became world famous as the first — and thus far only — person to apparently have been cured of his HIV infection. Brown’s HIV disappeared after he developed leukemia and doctors gave him repeated blood transfusions from a donor who harbored a mutated version of a receptor the virus uses to enter cells. Now, researchers report promising results from two small gene-therapy studies that mimic this strategy, hinting that the field may be moving closer to a cure that works for the masses — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Mark Dadds says some children literally cannot see the love in their mother’s eyes. Professor Dadds, a parenting expert from the University of New South Wales, has just published results of his work in the British Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology that suggest the ability to make eye contact is vital in learning how to love other people.
For the past five years, he has been working with children referred to his Sydney clinic for sustained rages, continual aggression, calculated violence and, occasionally, cruelty to animals.
These are children with some of the worst behavioural problems, who score highly for callous, unemotional
traits. In his studies in both Sydney and London, it was these children who did not meet their mother’s gaze, even when told they were loved.
People marvel at the resilience of children who overcome appalling family backgrounds to make good lives. We understand when childhood trauma sends a child off the rails. But we also have to accept that even good parents can have mean children — how else to explain families where only one child seems to be callous and unemotional, while the siblings are not? — via redwolf.newsvine.com
UK passport holders may be able to opt out of identifying themselves as male or female under proposals being investigated by the Home Office.
Discussions on the introduction of gender-free documents are still at an early stage, with officials in the UK and other countries examining the security implications of not requiring transgender people to state whether they are men or women.
Passport holders might be able to simply put an X in a box marked sex
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
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