A federal judge in Houston has thrown out the 20-year-old arms smuggling conviction of a former CIA agent, outlining in scathing terms how federal officials knowingly used a false affidavit at his trial and concealed the act through years of appeals
The kerfuffle over Bob Brown‘s heckling of the President is by no means over. The speaker Neil Andrew wants to find someone to punish for the sin of letting the world see what actually happened in the Australian Parliament
Some moron from the US propaganda machine has ripped off the very well written, girl on the street blog, Baghdad Burning
The Motion Picture Association and APRA have commissioned a report from Allen Consulting into the effects of extending Australian copyright from life plus 50 years to life plus 70 years. This forms the MPA and APRA’s contribution to US-Australian free trade negotiations, currently underway. The report recommends that copyright terms should be extended. An extension of copyright would not be in Australia’s interest. Some would argue that it is not in anyone’s interest. Projects such as Project Gutenberg of Australia would be adversely affected by such an extension. Perhaps now is to time to write to your Member of Parliament, asking them to oppose any extension of copyright or patents, and shore up whatever resistance there is to an extension of IP in Australia
Howard does jingoistic nationalism well. He clutches sports people to his breast. He honours our war dead and the Bali victims by affirming our core values, yet he casually throws them away, even in our own Parliament, to please disrespectful foreign guests
More than seven years after British Rail was abolished, the Government took a large step towards the renationalisation of the network last night by allowing the state-backed Network Rail to take all track maintenance back in-house. The news came on the day that one of the main rail contractors was accused of falsifying records. It is the most significant sign yet that the privatisation drawn up by the Conservative government and refined by Labour has been a failure
A group of geeks who reformat badly designed web sites have tackled their most ambitious project yet. They scraped the poorly designed web site for the UK Parliamentary record, Hansard, reformatted all the information and presented it in infographic Tuftean glory as The Public Whip
The spirit of the retarded monkey boy has been trapped in a clay pot and tossed into a river in northern Thailand after being cursed by hundreds of farmers protesting US agriculture policy
Indian protesters choked the streets and highways of La Paz with a powerful anti globalisation demonstration
The Victorian government has moved to curb the hours telemarketers can harass people, they will be banned from calling people at home after 8:00 pm on weeknights and after 5:00 pm on weekends
Our federal representatives are doing their best to rid Australian inboxes of junk email — for their own benefit as much as anyone elses
An audit of e-commerce Web sites by the Victorian government has found less than 1% met all the requirements for the Commonwealth ‘Best Practice’ model
A disused industrial site at Green Square will become Sydney’s first legal squat, where students will live for a token sum pending redevelopment of the site. Six art students and four architecture students are due to move into the dilapidated Waverley-Woollahra incinerator within the next three weeks pending approval from South Sydney Council. The project already has tentative support from the property’s owners, Waverley Council and Woollahra Council
Seventeen conservation and wildlife protection groups filed suit this week to challenge the federal decision to lower the status of the gray wolf from endangered to threatened in the lower-48 states. The decision would also ultimately hand over species management to state governments, at least one of which has called for extermination of the species
The Federal Government has been urged to investigate allegations that failed asylum seekers have been encouraged by Government officials to use fake passports. It is claimed immigration officers supported the use of false documents in order to bypass passport controls in other countries
The Queensland Government’s plan to issue smartcard driving licences to the state’s 2.5 million motorists could seriously compromise privacy rights
Australia will soon have a new federal Communications and IT Minister, with Attorney-General Darryl Williams set to over the job as Senator Richard Alston prepares to retire amidst a major Cabinet reshuffle. Former Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock will take over the Attorney-General’s department
The Green Man has an article on political spin and the stupidity of the Shrub and his merry band of cohorts:
Representative of Bush Government: ‘We can clearly say that the overthrow of the Iraqi regime has made America a safer place.’
Reporter: ‘There were either WOMD and the facilities to produce them or there wasn’t. If there was then they are now in the hands of another rogue state or terrorists and as such are still a danger. If there wasn’t any then there was never any danger. So how can you say that things are now safer.’
Representative of Bush Government: ‘I think we should stick to the facts. The overthrow of the Iraqi regime has made America a safer place.’ and terminates interview.
Good to see that logic is not getting in the way of some good spin.
Cyberspace users in India are up in arms against the government. For the first time since the Information Technology Act, 2000, was introduced, the government has banned a site, Yahoo Groups, for publishing anti-government material. Many netizens believe the government is trying to gag the Internet, a medium for free flow of information
A controversial Pentagon big brother program, Total ‘Terrorism’ Information Awareness, that called for monitoring databases containing data on millions of Americans for signs of terrorist activity is set to be killed off by a stop on funding
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