Days Volume Two

Shadows

2009-10-16T10:18:00.005+11:00

*

"This is a private matter, Archer." The gun stirred slightly in the Admiral's hand. I could feel its pressure across the width of the room. "Do as she says."
"I heard a shot. Murder is a public matter."
"There has been no murder, as you can see."
"You don't remember well."

Ross MacDonald

It wasn’t darkness for darkness sake, it was a torment he couldn’t escape; and so entered the valley under the illusion he was fighting for a better life. That’s what cruelled it in the end; there was no reward. Snakes sat in their offices, rewarding themselves. The labourers fought for survival; and were always down trodden. Was it just a failing psyche? A failure of command? Or something worse, more misshapen, more confused than ever. He was shocked by the blackness; the rapidity of it all. And the corny voices trying to make him laugh. And fading life forms prodding, prodding, as if they really meant something, as if they could make a difference.

There was no difference to be had; not now. He fought and he fought; nobody could have tried harder. And yet none of it worked. None of it made a difference. He was shattered by it all; shattered at the nastiness that everything had become; and here in the quiet times there was no relief; nothing that could make him feel better. Nothing that worked. And so he saw the red dust settle upon the city; the magnificent photographs of the Harbour Bridge emerging out of the haze; of bodies emerging out of the haze along the beach, of a slow and awkward recovery; of different shapes and different sizes.

Scattered spirits; that’s all he could say. It wasn’t life affirming. It was barely positive at all. He had frightened himself and the doctor had issued a dark warning: you’re about to have a stroke, go home. It was all he could think of, to survive. His life had taken a detour; everything thrown up in the air; and he thought - could I be in love with you? I’m so out of practice I don’t even know how anymore. And they laughed and played Van Morrison and everything he had ever believed went swishing down the drain; a swirl of leaves in the hot dusty wind.

It was a day that made the planet look like Mars. People stood along the edge of the beach taking photographs; as every minor event these days was multiply digitalised. He was shattered and yet all these strange sparks were trying to revive him. Look at that, look at that, he could hear the tourists say, it looks like Mars; and indeed the dust from the centre of the continent was everywhere, in the air, on the ground, covering up shadows and calling, calling, just to reignite a simple appreciation of beauty, how hard could it be?

They all look 50 years younger and 50 times happier, he said, talking of the backpackers flooding into the Eastern suburbs, filling the shops and crowding the boulevard. It could hardly be a more different scene than his forced departure from the inner city, from Redfern where he had lived for the past eight years; all the years he had been in his 50s. He had settled into the place like they were born to be there; and it seemed so natural; their little gang, their house, the scenario; it all seemed, apart from the absence of love, exactly like it was meant to be.

And so when everything was thrown up in the air; when his comfortable, organised, productive life was turned upside down; he had expected some reward. Reward for effort; wasn’t that the mantra? He laughed. As if he could have been so naïve. Why such a fool? Why let them trick you like this? Why bust a gut simply to be sneered at; you’ll never be worth anything, you’re not management material. He was shocked at how awful they were; the bold brass tacks. The bristling contempt. The viciousness that only they could muster.

He remembered; how vivid had been those dreams, of walking, in another life, on another plain, through the Himalayan hills. Finding out what he had been too lazy to grasp; the awe of it all, the beauty of the day, the triumphant glance. Instead, ground down in the devastating grind of a city gone mad, of an imposed slavery, of subjugation and a despair he could never be rid of; it wasn’t that; it wasn’t anything anymore. It was a shrug; as if nothing was real, as if nothing was important anymore. There were stories to tell, but were they really worth telling, were they worth dying for? They danced to Van Morrison and he avoided kissing her; what was wrong with her? Nothing. Nothing, except she was old, like him.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/1015_nobel_prize_economics_kaufmann.aspx

Four judges have spoken out to defend the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to US president Barack Obama.

In a rare public defence of a process normally shrouded in secrecy, the judges said Mr Obama's selection was deserved and unanimous.

One judge noted with surprise that Mr Obama "didn't look particularly happy" at being named the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Another marvelled at how critics could be so patronising.

To those who said a Nobel was too much too soon in Mr Obama's young presidency, "we simply disagree. He got the prize for what he has done," committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland said from Strasbourg, France, where he was attending meetings of the Council of Europe.

Mr Jagland singled out Mr Obama's efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and to scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe.

"All these things have contributed to - I wouldn't say a safer world - but a world with less tension," he said.

Nine-year Nobel committee veteran Inger-Marie Ytterhorn said Mr Obama's demeanour spoke volumes when he first acknowledged the award during a news conference on the lawn of the White House Rose Garden.

"I looked at his face when he was on TV and it was confirmed that he would receive the prize and would come to Norway, and he didn't look particularly happy," she said. "Obama has a lot of problems internally in the United States and they seem to be increasing. Unemployment, health care reform. They are a problem for him."

She acknowledged there was a risk the prize might backfire on Mr Obama by raising expectations even higher and giving ammunition to his critics.

"It might hamper him," Ms Ytterhorn said, because it could distract from domestic issues.

Drunken Midgets

2009-08-21T04:50:00.002+10:00

*

Big Night On The Town
drunk on the dark streets of some city,
it's night, you're lost, where's your
room?
you enter a bar to find yourself,
order scotch and water.
damned bar's sloppy wet, it soaks
part of one of your shirt
sleeves.
It's a clip joint-the scotch is weak.
you order a bottle of beer.
Madame Death walks up to you
wearing a dress.
she sits down, you buy her a
beer, she stinks of swamps, presses
a leg against you.
the bar tender sneers.
you've got him worried, he doesn't
know if you're a cop, a killer, a
madman or an
Idiot.
you ask for a vodka.
you pour the vodka into the top of
the beer bottle.
It's one a.m. In a dead cow world.
you ask her how much for head,
drink everything down, it tastes
like machine oil.

you leave Madame Death there,
you leave the sneering bartender
there.

you have remembered where
your room is.
the room with the full bottle of
wine on the dresser.
the room with the dance of the
roaches.
Perfection in the Star Turd
where love died
laughing.

Charles Bukowski

Of all the thousands of news stories he had done over the last quarter of a century, often it was the ones involving alcoholics he remembered the best. The woman with the two black eyes, crying pointlessly in the park, with the blokes hanging on. Or the time when he was sent out to do one of those summer reading features the Herald was always so fond of at the festive season. We were on the road for days. One of the projects was to follow around a circus for several days. We settled on the Ashtons, the patrician elders of the circus fraternity in Australia, their travelling show an elaborate operation. They were touring the small towns around Wagga Wagga, there in the dusty summer heat, the towns where nothing ever happened and the circus coming was a big event, where the shouts of children filled the air and families came down just to look at them setting up.

The elephants were tendered under the gum trees in the stifling heat, and rocked back and forth rhythmically in that sad obsessive behaviour of chained animals, back and forth, back and forth, there in the stifling Australian heat, thousands of miles from the lands their ancestors roamed. Nothing could look sadder than those hobbled elephants, unless it was the giant cats in the tiny cages, changing from one cage to another via the narrow channels of iron netting. We followed them, we absorbed them. And in the evenings we bought cartons of beer and sat with the workers drinking. The evil little drunken dwarf who always seemed to be there when cans were being handed out, befriended us, perhaps just as a regular source of alcohol, perhaps for conversation beyond the tiny group with which he constantly travelled, and was now permanently associated.

He was very intelligent, as alcoholics can be, and the conversations and the cans of beer went long into the night. If there was anything that could be said, anything he wanted to say, anything that would make his life easier; but that of course was not to be. He was short, that's for sure, barely more than a couple of feet tall; and had a twisted view on just about everything and everybody, from his bosses who lived in their grand caravans well away from the sides of the main tents. And there we heard every bit of bitter contempt this man held against the world, laughing at the bleak view of himself and everyone else. How would you like to be an object of ridicule and curiosity for the public to gawk at? How would you like to be me, trapped here, year after year. There is nowhere else for me.

He was always drunk, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. He was tiny and it didn't take many cans to get him going. We were from the city, a successful Sydney journalists and photograph, people with lives, careers, acclaim, fame, people with lovers to go home to. He slept in a narrow bunk with several others crammed into the sleeping quarters; dirty, dusty, smelly, cramped. This is my life, he said, and he looked out across the field at the failing light, watching the elephants rock back and forth, watching the dwarf reach for another can. If anything was to be believed, if anything was to mean anything anymore, then here in this fading scene, with the night's customers already beginning to queue, here it was.

There are always hierarchies, there are always winners and losers. He could feel the death and the smell of defeat already beginning to creep through his own bones. He went and bought another carton, keeping the receipt for expenses. Entertaining the locals. The stamps they always carried just in case: Thank you, call again. Rule one, the old soldiers had told him, never ever ever give back a single cent of your expenses. The cans popped all night. The dwarf got drunker and drunker. They ridiculed the government of the day, how little the politicians understood the lives ordinary people lived. He could hear failure and disease like other people could hear bird songs. The elephants rocked, the tigers stirred restlessly in their tiny cages, a young runaway helped with the chores, and the Ashtons themselves retired to their comfortably air conditioned caravans. He watched without comment as the dwarf stole several cans from the carton, and when he realised he had been observed just shrugged. I'm going to need them later, the drunken dwarf said. And he just shrugged; of course he would.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/20/afghanistan-voter-turnout

The classrooms serving as polling stations across the relatively secure and prosperous plains north of the Afghan capital were crammed full of people – but precious few of them were there to cast their vote.

Election workers and campaign observers milled about with little either to do or to observe. In one school in Kalakan, a solitary presidential ballot paper sat in the bottom of the translucent voting box reserved for a nearby community of Kuchi nomads.

An election observer from the Philippines, touring a patch of polling stations in full body armour, said not enough had been done to transport such people from their far-flung homes or to educate them on their rights.

If demand warranted it, officials were permitted to extend voting beyond 4pm, but at a mosque in a busy part of eastern Kabul the officer in charge was preparing to close down on time and start counting ballots. "We haven't seen anyone for an hour," he said.

Most of the usually choked routes in and out of Kabul were almost empty, but on one baking, unpaved road in Kapisa province we came across a group of 10 men halfway through their two-hour walk to their nearest polling station in a distant village surrounded by uncleared minefields.

"We wouldn't have come if it was not a holiday today," said Mohamed Rasoul, who does backbreaking work at the local gravel mines.

Although they were just a few hours' drive from the capital, rural values ruled – none of their wives or female family members would be voting, they said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/19/bolivia-cocaine-bar-route-36

Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram." The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.

The waiter arrives at the table, lowers the tray and places an empty black CD case in the middle of the table. Next to the CD case are two straws and two little black packets. He is so casual he might as well be delivering a sandwich and fries. And he has seen it all. "We had some Australians; they stayed here for four days. They would take turns sleeping and the only time they left was to go to the ATM," says Roberto, who has worked at Route 36 (in its various locations) for the last six months. Behind the bar, he goes back to casually slicing straws into neat 8cm lengths.

La Paz, Bolivia, at 3,900m above sea level – an altitude where even two flights of stairs makes your heart race like a hummingbird – is home to the most celebrated bar in all of South America: Route 36, the world's first cocaine lounge. I sit back to take in the scene – table after table of chatty young backpackers, many of whom are taking a gap year, awaiting a new job or simply escaping the northern hemisphere for the delights of South America, which, for many it seems, include cocaine.

"Since they are an after-hours club and serve cocaine the neighbours tend to complain pretty fast. So they move all the time. Maybe if they are lucky they last three months in the same place, but often it is just two weeks. Route 36 is a movable feast," says a Bolivian newspaper editor who asked not to be named. "One day it is in one zone and then it pops up in another area. Certainly it is the most famous among the backpacker crowd but there are several other places that are offering cocaine as well. Because Route 36 changes addresses so much there is a lot of confusion about how many cocaine bars are out there."

This new trend of 'cocaine tourism' can be put down to a combination of Bolivia's notoriously corrupt public officials, the chaotic "anything goes" attitude of La Paz, and the national example of President Evo Morales, himself a coca grower. (Coca is the leaf, and cocaine is the highly manufactured and refined powder.) Morales has diligently fought for the rights of coca growers and tossed the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) out of Bolivia. While he has said he will crack down on cocaine production, he appears to be swimming against the current. In early July, the largest ever cocaine factory was discovered in eastern Bolivia. Capable of producing 100kg a day, the lab was run by Colombians and provided the latest evidence that Bolivia is now home to sophisticated cocaine laboratories. The lab was the fourth large facility to be found in Bolivia this year.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jh9MXUrDOqTD3P6uA4nf-Gj32kZQD9A6OFKO0

BUENA PARK, Calif. — The search for a reality TV contestant wanted for questioning in the death of his ex-wife shifted to his native Canada on Thursday as police said he apparently slipped across the border after driving and boating more than 1,000 miles from Southern California.

A car and empty boat trailer belonging to Ryan Alexander Jenkins, 32, were found at a marina in the remote northwest Washington town of Blaine, and authorities believe from there he may have simply walked into Canada. Police want to question Jenkins after the nude body of his ex-wife, a former model, was found stuffed in a suitcase and left in a trash bin in Buena Park.

Whatcom County Sheriff's deputies received a report Wednesday that a man matching Jenkins' description arrived by boat at Point Roberts, Wash., about 10 miles from Blaine at the tip of a peninsula. The point is reachable by land only from Canada.

Canadian Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said police agencies across Canada are on the lookout for Jenkins.

Jenkins is from Calgary, Alberta, about 600 miles east of Point Roberts. Acting Calgary Police Chief Al Redford said a fugitive apprehension unit is checking with Jenkins' connections and associates in the city.

Jenkins was a contestant on the VH1 reality TV show "Megan Wants a Millionaire." Police said he is a "person of interest" in the death of Jasmine Fiore, 28, a former model whose strangled body was found over the weekend.

After taping for the VH1 series finished, Jenkins met Fiore in Las Vegas casino in March and the two soon got married, said Fiore's mother, Lisa Lepore.

But in May, "they had a big blowout," Lepore said. "She had the marriage annulled."

Blowing In The Cold Wind

2009-08-16T06:58:00.005+10:00

*

Consummation Of Grief

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

Charles Bukowski

Blowing in the cold wind at the back of that desolate farm, heralding nothing but cold sprinkles from a stormy sky to settle the dust, was an old sheet of paper he chased across the parched fields. The End Of Sydney, it announced, and he realised it was an old flyer for a party he had held back in the 1980s. Some might have pointed out to him that just because he was leaving, he was heading off to London to live for a while, that it didn't mean the city wasn't going to keep on going. But he airily dismissed any attempts to rein in his grandiosity; for he knew where the world was shaking and what meant what. He invited everybody he knew; and hundreds turned to crash the party. It was a great success, humungeous. He had taken some of the crystal pains of acid that were around at that time, White Light, they might have been called, and he stood next to the fireplace greeting guests, but basically abdocating all the normal roles of host.

He was too far gone. The grog flowed and everybody bought more. The rooms were packed. Dean, Dean he could have so easily loved and had happily shared this place with for months, was overwhelmed, drunk, everyone was drunk, and the crowds kept coming. Keith, sick sick Keith who was already on his sharp decline into an eternal Housing Commission life, one leg shorter than the other, taunted him over his predilictions, his love of amphetamines, taunted him for no good reason while the world went whack whack whack in the crystal light and he could never understand why, why taunt a fellow traveller. There had been so many good parties. There had been so much mirth, so much defiance of the mainstream, so much clarity in an unclear world. Oh to be young, only once, he thought, if only once again, no wonder they sold their souls for eternal youth.

But it was not to be and he reached down to pick up the piece of paper, which had become lodged against a thorn bush. Out to the back was the collection of derlict cars the neighbour had collected over eons of family life. Nearby were the houses of his neighbours, unemployed men with wives who kept popping out babies and so they had to do nothing but drink and smoke and bong on and pass their eternal days pottering around their humble homes. They rarely went anywhere. They rarely did any work. He had asked several of them to help him unload the truck but somehow or other they were all too busy just then. Maybe another day mate. The government stimulus packages had made them lazy. The generous welfare from the babies meant they didn't have to work. It was cheap rent and nothing happened here; unless someone got more pissed than usual. It was clear he was going to hell in a hand basket and none of his dreams would ever come true.

This was the barren waste on which he had been abandoned, and the curdled little dwarf inside, drunk, misshappen, very funny, bitter as, well that little dwarf was just going to have to wait a little bit longer before he had his time in the sun. He bundled the bit of paper under a box. Oh God how lonely he had felt, way back then, way back now, withddrawal sweats shivering through him in what seemed like the firswt time in years. This was the price to pay, he thought as he talked absently to the dog and fed the pigs the neighbours kept in his shed. How bored they must be, stuck in that shed all day, everyday, with the only interuption the daily feed from the neighbours, when they remembered. It wasn't ever going to be Christmas again. As he walked up the road the kangaroos jumped out of the way.

Bruce was sitting on his verandah and invited him in for a cup of coffee. He was caretaking two adjoining houses, and was talking of moving on. Why leave here? he asked. It's nice. Try living in Sydney. Nothing happens here mate, nothing. It's a small village. Fart and they all know about it. He drank the instant coffee but nothing could warm his ancient bones. He just kept on shivering. I've got a hangover, Bruce declared, as if this might be news. Went to the pub? For a few. Bloody hangovers. It'll pass. I'm moving on, to the coast, where it's warm, where things are happening. Where there's gorgeous babes on the beach. Nothing happens here. Nothing. I tell you, nothing's happened since you were last here.

Maybe that's a good thing. Try living here full time; then you'd see. There was nothing to see but shreds of paper blowing across frozen fields, old party invitations, old scraps of uncompleted books, just old scraps that for some reason he had never thrown out. The winter sun sank quickly and the cold settled ever more deeply into the frost hollow. He hunched over the fire but it did no good. Some days may be meant to be joined, others were simply meant to be endured. That was all he could muster. He put another log on the fire and the flame flared briefly. He could heara the sound of the pub drifting down from up the street. Nothing could make a difference now.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25955508-5005961,00.html

FEDERAL parliament is expected to sign off on a huge boost to renewable energy today.

The Government and the Opposition agreed on the Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme yesterday.

The scheme will be put to a vote in the Senate toay, then it needs to go back to the House of Representatives for final approval, which is also expected today.

The RET will see 20 per cent of electricity come from renewable sources by 2020.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8210624.stm

Security forces in Afghanistan are on high alert on the eve of the country's presidential election, which the Taliban have vowed to disrupt.

Some 300,000 Afghan and foreign troops will be deployed to protect the 17 million voters at 6,969 polling sites.

President Hamid Karzai has urged Afghans to turn out to vote "for the country's stability, for the country's peace, for the country's progress".

Earlier, troops killed three suspected militants who attacked a bank in Kabul.

The government meanwhile came under severe criticism for ordering a ban on the media reporting violence on election day.

The United Nations has asked for the ban to be lifted, saying the Afghan constitution guarantees a free press. Some journalists have reported being harassed and beaten by security forces.

On Tuesday, more than 20 people were killed in attacks across the country, including a suicide bombing in the capital.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/08/2009819162711218741.html

An all-out attack on the Iraqi government came in the form of a series of powerful assaults that hit central Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

The attacks raise a number of questions, among them who had the capacity to carry out the co-ordinated attacks and was the US right to pull out of Iraq's cities when it did?

As Baghdad reels from its bloodiest day this year, experts and journalists consider who might have been behind the attacks and what their motives might have been.

Mosab Jasim, Al Jazeera English producer in Baghdad

Jasim: It would be really difficult to enter the Green Zone with a truck filled with explosives
In my experience, getting inside the Green Zone to cover media activity is not easy.

First of all, you have to get at least two or three badges that allow you inside. Then, you have to cross through at least two or three security checkpoints, which are at least 600m outside of the Green Zone. At these checkpoints, you get searched, and after you pass through them, you are allowed on to the street that leads to the Green Zone and, from there, there is a final checkpoint and that's when you've finally arrived.

So it would be really difficult to bring in a truck filled with explosives unless it was co-ordinated from inside the Green Zone. Obtaining a badge means you've gone through all the clearance procedures. The bombers who were able to put the truck inside the area of the Green Zone had gone through all the necessary security measures and once they were cleared, they also received the badges which gave them access into the area.

I spoke to our police source in Baghdad and he was telling me that his sources said an attack would occur every three minutes from each other, exactly timed. He said the attacks had nothing to do with sectarian violence, but that they were something very well organised and co-ordinated.

Aqil al-Saffar, former deputy minister of national security in Iraq

Life was normal and it is still normal in Iraq after these blasts. I say this on so many occasions and now the government is trying to do their best to implement better security and build-up our security forces, but the foreign countries meddling with our regime, some of them Arab, are trying to interfere with our security situation and stop us from improving the situation here.

We are still in the process of building our security forces and I would say we have reached a good percentage of building our security but, maybe, it will take us months, or towards the end of this year until we have a safer Iraq. Up until now, I am satisfied, and people here are quite satisfied, with the way things are moving along.

Seen Better Days: The Envy of Others

2009-08-14T08:13:00.005+10:00

*

It goes a little something like this

In my shoes my toes are busted,
My kitchen says my bread is molded,
I got a good job at the dollar store,
One foot in the hole, one foot gettin' deeper,
with a broken mirror and a blown out speaker
And I ain't got much else to lose.
I'm faded, flat busted;
I've been jaded I've been dusted.
I know that I've seen better days.
One foot in the hole, one foot gettin' deeper,
Crank it to eleven, blow another speaker and
I ain't got, I ain't got much to loose
'Cause

(Chorus)
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.

Now My cup's filled up with five buck wine
I find myself here all the time
Another rip in the glass another chip in my tooth
Rained on I've been stained on
Found another goat I tried to put the blame on
And now I'm steppin on all the cracks
So I guess there ain't no use
'Cause

(Chorus)
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.

Woman: "Do you like my gucci bag?"

That's beautiful, beautiful

Check it check it check it out,

I'm bent like glass second hand like glory,
Missed the bus but I'm in no hurry,
Molasses fast no business born,
One foot in the hole, one foot getting deeper,
Crank it to eleven, blow another speaker and
I aint got i aint got much to lose
'Cause

(Chorus)
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days,
I've seen better days,
I know that i've seen better days,
(the bottom drops out)
I've been the star, of so many plays,
(and the bottom drops out)
Walked on the edge with that hobo way.
(the bottom drops out)
'Cause I know I know that I've seen better days
(and the bottom drops out)

Now I'm real thirsty...

In every faded bar, in every glance of young blood, in the dark passes for which we were so blessed, in the Commonwealth of nations and the glances at handsome young men, at the envied lives of others, young, fresh, optimistic, happy, healthy, they were everywhere, coating the street, taunting him. The city is no longer yours. Nothing belongs to you anymore. You are the centre of nothing, a wastrel on the edges of space, caught in the gaps between reality and unreality, between fantasy and truth, everything gone, his stomach in turmoil, his heart full of lost loves and dreadful reproach, for everything had gone wrong, everything, and now was not the time to do anything but endure. He waited for his lift. He heard the passing minutes creaking in the walls. He faded in and out of consciousness but knew that all was not well, in his sickly spirit, in his sweaty flesh, in the depression that cloaked his every thought, every move.

So it was that he looked up from the gutter and envied everyone who passed, the lives of others, fabulous, self confident, comfortable in their daily routines. He looked up and couldn't see anything but other people going about their duties with and air of self-confidence he could never display, not now, not since he took the wrong turn so many years ago and lay now, dying, in the park so close to where he used to work. We stood at the turning point, the therapeutic phrase went, and he could remember it clearly, that turning point, the last turning point of so many, before he took the dive and became nothing but another of the city's derelicts. You know why you write so well about those people, Malcolm Brown at the Herald had said, because you're half-way there yourself. And so it was that haunting phrases passed in and out of his consciousness, and when he talked to the Mission Beat worker, he said curious things that made him wonder: who was this guy?

But he had seen it all before, crossing back and forth across the great divide, tears flowing down their faces as they scuttled off into their hiding places with bottles of cheap plonk, everything has failed. "I never wanted it," the woman said, with astonishing clarity. "I never wanted it." He knew exactly of what she spoke. There were days he didn't know whether he wanted it either, the normal life, the comfortable routines, comfortable inside his own skin, comfortable in the company of others. He had felt so at odds, A Mood Apart, as the book is called, that he had been comfortable with the idea of always feeling different, of never fitting in, of being out of sorts with the world at large. You're the saddest person I've ever seen, what is it, someone commented, and it was just another phrase in a string of humiliations, make way, wide load, that emphasised time and again: he wasn't the person he used to be.

It wasn't the same anymore, and age sat badly on all of them. There could be no way forward. There could be nothing that would make a different. I've dropped. You will die. I don't want to go to detox baby, no, no, no. And the sweat poured out of him unceremoniously, because he couldn't get enough booze inside him to keep the demons at bay, he couldn't stop the withdrawals of decades taking over his soul, he couldn't shatter his way into wakefulness, or pass through the thin divide into normal consciousness. He couldn't say: hey, I'm happy now. He couldn't march his way through the quagmire, or ask for blessings, or be renounced. He couldn't say hello, how are you, and smile in a welcoming way. He couldn't be a proud person proud of his achievements, proud of his children, proud of his station in life. He could see the spikes of grass close up. He could feel the dribble coming out of his mouth. He could smell the taste of vomit and he could see blood on his hands, although he didn't know whether it was his or someone elses.

Nobody in the world wants to know me when I drink, nobody, he heard the kid say, and he welcomed the way forward and he talked in circles about everything that had happened. It was hard. It was desperately hard. He didn't know why he had had to make things so damn difficult, but he had. And so he bought grace and tiny moments of time, tiny slivers when he was the person he once was and he could see clearly his own position, there, prostrate in the park, dirty, smelly, sick, broken. They nodded patronisingly when he told them he used to be a journalist, he used to be a real person, and they smiled at the fantasies these old codgers could come up with; and he could see the high flickering light on the top of the sky scrapers, calling him, calling him, it's time to leave this place, it's time to leave this body, it's time to leave this plane. Have a better go next time, if there is a next time, if this isn't the end of the cycle. You will never remember the ruin you made of this one. You will start again; and destroy another life all over again with self indulgence and despair. And so he lifted his head up out of the grass, wiped the spittle out of his mouth, brushed the dust from his eyes and looked up: take me now, he whispered, take me now.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/14/2655546.htm?section=justin

Efforts to recover the bodies of the 13 people who died in a plane crash near the Kokoda Track are due to resume this morning, after bad weather stalled the recovery process yesterday.

An Australian helicopter was unable to winch a group of victim identification specialists from the Australian Federal Police into the crash site yesterday.

Nine Australians were among the 13 people killed when a small chartered plane crashed en route to Kokoda from Port Moresby on Tuesday.

PNG's civil aviation authority says the remains of three people have been removed from the wreckage, and they remain at the crash site.

It is hoped that the construction of a temporary helipad near the crash site will speed up the recovery and investigation process today.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday the identification and recovery process will be complicated.

"We will continue to be ... in close and regular contact with the families, as we do everything that we can to make this very difficult time for them as smooth as is humanly possible," he said.

"They are now forced to wait some time before their loved ones are returned to them."

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/national/national/general/climate-ripe-for-an-early-election/1595853.aspx

Australians have moved a step closer to an early federal election after the Senate yesterday rejected Bills to set up an emissions trading scheme.

As expected, the Opposition, Greens, Family First senator Steve Fielding and Independent senator Nick Xenophon scuttled the legislation described as ''very difficult and contentious'' by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

The Federal Government will re-introduce the Bills in three months' time and will be forced to negotiate with their political opponents or the crossbenchers to pass the legislation. If the Senate rejects the Bills a second time, MrRudd will be handed the trigger to call an early election fought on the environment.

Yesterday, Mr Rudd blasted the Opposition for voting against the Bills to set up an emissions trading scheme centrepiece of the plan to tackle climate change.

''They are absolutely demonstrating themselves as being prisoners of the past, prisoners of their own internal party disunity,'' Mr Rudd said.

''The Liberal Party prisoners of the past on climate change, prisoners of their own party disunity on climate change are therefore placing the nation's future at risk. Rather than marking this day as one when the nation actually grasped its future, those opposite have chosen instead to consign Australia to the past.''

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull said they had put forward some ''very constructive suggestions'' to make the scheme ''greener, cheaper and smarter''.

But these were dismissed by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, whose refusal to negotiate displayed ''pedantic bloody-mindedness [and] stubbornness''.

The Opposition would develop amendments in the coming months. But Opposition Senate leader Nick Minchin warned it would be ''reckless and irresponsible'' to pass the legislation before the outcomes of global climate talks in Copenhagen in December and negotiations on the US Bill.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/14/2655529.htm?section=justin

The UN Security Council has approved a watered-down statement about the continued detention of Burma's democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi.

The council has unanimously agreed to express its "serious concern" about the conviction and sentencing of Aung San Suu Kyi.

But an earlier draft statement had called for the "condemnation" of her treatment.

UN Security Council president John Sawers tried to explain why the statement has been toned down.

"I think we all know that different members of the Security Council have different views on the situation there [and] elsewhere," he said.

The statement also does not specifically call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.

How Wrong He Was

2009-08-12T08:15:00.004+10:00

*

The straight shots of Jack Daniels went down like velvet and he knew soon enough he would be pissed, gloriously pissed, at last at one with the universe. Alcoholism was a spiritual disease, they declared, and he had been blessed with infinite longing all his life. From that first cherry brandy and lemonade the girls sneaked out to him from a nightclub, because he was too young to drink legally, and he drank it quickly and felt as he had never felt before, at one with the world, a unified person, sane, gloriously sane, triumphant, exultant. Alive. Normie Rowe was playing down the road and the next night he went with the little gang from the hotel he had fallen into, from the Stella del Mare, or whatever it was called. And it seemed like the whole world was moving on its axis, and all was well.

There had always been a clicking point, the drink where he knew that beyond this one there would be no recourse, no memory, no regret, just glorious black out. He sought the point in the early hours, when he didn't care what happened to him next. He didn't care. He didn't laugh. He knew there would be a hangover and even that, vicious as they increasingly were, was a price worth paying for the beauty of oblivion. He was shattered to the very soul. He was dark in his precepts, in his reaches, in the hours before dawn. After a night at the clubs, he loved to have a coffee and a brandy and a strong cigarette in one of the cosy little medieval bars in the backstreets of Madrid. He thought everything was wonderful and everything would last forever. There would be no regrets. There would be no price to pay.

How wrong he was. "If you want to go up you have to go down," Jenny used to say. Everything had a price. There was a consequence for every act. Do good be good be rewarded. Do crime pay the time. And now, in his 50s, there was a price to pay for everything. Each mark was a wonder. Each blessing a crime. Every indulgence held a price. He had to pay, he had to pay, in tears and pain and discomfort, for all his sins, for all his indulgent despair, for all his drug fuelled melancholy. It wasn't right, it wasn't fair. His motives had been good. He hadn't realised the price was so high. He hadn't realised what he was doing to himself. And he marched forward, sheets of transparent pain flying every which way, and the gloss and the shivers and the counting pain, it had all come time to pay.

Pay the piper, pay the price, come hither and let me cast eyes across your tight firm body, a flash of desire in the winter sun, a flowering peach tree in amongst the historic old houses, the crumbling back yards, the homes that wreaked of stories never told, secrets never revealed, love never consumated. Because he was scattered to the four winds now; and he had done it all entirely to himself. So he went back to the program and back to the forgiving past; and his fingers flew across keyboards but it never told the story, not really, of all the aching loss and terrible chaos that had troubled his chaotic heart. Each box told a story. One random page almost blew away in the wind; p87, As Yet Untitled, which told of his hitch hiking across the frozen plains of Canada.

Even then, he realised, when he could barely have been more than 19 or 20, he was infinitely sad, infinitely lonely, kissed by an eternal longing. He lay awake at night listening to others making love. Even then he was fascinated by alcoholics and oblivion seekers, and naturally attracted to them, utlimately frustrated and finally betrayed by that which draws us. He stood at the turning point. There were only a few years left. He could take one path or he could take the other. He could drown in his own alcohol fuelled melancholy, he could go to the grave with a dozen incomplete masterpieces cluttering old drawers, filling old boxes. Or he could stay sober and triumph, and be productive, perhaps even happy. Suicide wasn't an option, not at this age, there wasn't enough time left anyway. And so he played and he partied, he took the high road and the low road, and finally, humiliated by his own obsessions, he crawled back through the doors of yet another psychic rehab, ready to repent.

Redemption

2009-08-09T08:43:00.005+10:00

*

The streets were already busy in the pre-dawn. There was an element of flight, he couldn't deny that. The ceilings in the kitchen and bathroom had collapsed, the plumbing was off line and suddenly he was homeless. Sam was at his grandmother's and Henrietta at school. The house was a bombshell, dust everywhere, Craig from nextdoor busily working. If everything he had ever believed in turned out to be a romantic falsehood, as was appearing very likely, even so life offered new turmoils; and he was forced to go. There seemed no other alternative. Everything was an inclusivfe madness. Everything was being swept clean. He loaded old boxes on to the back of the truck they hadd hired from Balmain Rentals. The heating doesn't work but worse, it blows a constant stream of cold air. It's freezing. He became frozen in a way he hadn't been since last in Europe, years ago now. He hadn't expected life to unfold here, children, a stable job.

Thank you for my courage, thank you for my decency, went the chant, andd that was it now, everything being swept away. Some of the boxes hadn't been opened since he last moved to Redfern around New Year in 2001. Then it was a fresh start, now it was a rut, a comfotable rut. So many of the boxes, unsorted in the last hasty move, and the one before that, and before that, related to the days before Google Docs and easy storage, before word processing, before the technology allowed everyone in the world to have a website like this for free. In those old old days there was a thing called paper, and if you made too many mistakes on a page you would have to retype it. He couldn't go on living in the twilight zone, one foot in one camp, one in the father. One half way to heaven and one half way to hell. He couldn't stand the hypocrisy anymore. He couldn't stanad to be around high functioning, intelligent, professional people one minute; and nodding in agreement at the abyss the next.

So he packed the boxes one after the other after the other. He caught sight of things he had long forgot. The flyer for Writers in the Park, which was held at the Harold Park Hotel, an infamous entertainment pub of the era. For a period the event was a great success. Somehow or other, he had been friends with some of the organisers, he had ended up in the role of videoing it. Bron provided the video camera and all the equipment, as he provided so many things in that era, up there in his apartment overlooking what is now Darling Harbour, a glistening modern place in absolute contrast to what was then. So pissed some nights, exhausted by lifestyle issues, he would begin to nod off over the camera. One day a poet was going on about "sleep, sleep" and then the whole room noticed him passed out of the video equipment and began to laugh. Well that was what it was like. There was always laughter, there was always insanity.

There was the book, Writers in the Park, which was a collection of writings from people who had appeared there. He had written the introduction, told the whole story of how it came to be that a string of the best known writers of the era, from David Malouf to Frank Hardy, came to that pub opposite the greyhound races. Of how a whole of group of people gave of their time and energy to make it possible. He hadn't seen that cover in years, or even thought of it. Eventually he had sold the tapes to the Mitchell Library for several thousand dollars.There had been debate for years other their ultimate resting place. The state public library seemed the only decent place.
Twenty years. Thousands of years had passed inside his skull. Kissed with infinite longing, every day was an eternity. Yet here it was, the detritus of years, decades, of the days before computers, being loaded on to the back of a cage truck and sent off to the country, where they and the couches will gather spiders and dust, perhaps never even to be properly filed.

Twenty years. That's how long ago it was. Kim O'Brien was one of the central characters, and if there were flaws in the character, flaws in the glass, it came from his own low moral standards and practising alcoholism, as every day turned into a pissed disaster and friendships slowly collapsed, because no one could bear the ever grasping tactics of an ever grasping addict. Cue financial chaos. Always needy. Always melancholy. Always in despair. Sickening crap and he just swept it away, into boxes, into bags, into the truck and go go go. Finally the day was getting warmer. Major, the dog ahd been fed and was sleeping comfortably in front of the fire at Toni Smith's house, Toni who he had known since universtiy days and he dropped round for breakfast on a Sunday morning, as was his want. All was lost, but he didn't believe that anymore, nothing but trite melodrama; there was hope in the wind and in the sun glittering on the leaves, in the sound of birds and blue sky, in sensory overload and a comforting fire, bringing him back to Earth; and every onwards.

http://www.booksandcollectibles.com.au/dump/Gotcha_By_The_Books/books-0013/8114.html

"Writers in the Park: the book 1985-86 Christie, Carol; O'Brien, Kim (eds)

8114 Sydney FAB Press 1986 1st Edition paperback b&w photos 8vo 104pp Very Good A collection of the work considered most representative of The Harold Park Readings by Australian poets and writers; mostly poetry and performance poetry; work by Rodriguez, Hewett, Komninos, Shapcott, Beveridge, Duggan, Viidikas, Dorothy Porter, and many more; this copy has one small lightly worn spot to fep, endpapers foxed, o.w. Very Good. ISBN: 1-86252-686-9 $17.00AUD

http://www.jamesgriffin.com.au/photos.htm

Spoken Word Performance at Writers in the Park. 1986, Harold Park Hotel, Sydney.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19890825&id=1jcRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7OcDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4776,3470169

Advertisement.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/good-living/popular-pub-rises-again/2007/07/18/1184559828846.html

The Harold Park Hotel will be hardly recognisable to patrons who were locked in there in the '80s to hear One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey read while drug dealers tried to break in with axes.

The one-time Sydney entertainment institution was trendily refurbished for Wednesday night's reopening party.

The Glebe hotel opposite the paceway hosted some of the world's top comedy acts and writers in the '80s and '90s and many of Sydney's up-and-coming bands.

English comic Ben Elton performed there and Hollywood star Robin Williams dropped in for one or two impromptu slots. Australian authors Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally spoke there.

Comedian Akmal once described the Harold Park as "the best venue ever".

"Not only did the Harold Park have a great atmosphere but it also attracted a very intelligent, respectful audience. It gave the opportunity to performers whose style did not suit the aggressive vibe of a typical Sydney pub, such as Andrew Denton, Stephen Abbott [The Sandman], Paul Livingstone [Flacco], Bob Downe and Mikey Robins."

Former licensee Simon Morgan said he sold and closed the pub in 1999 because Leichhardt Council refused to extend his licence to midnight. The pub will now stay open until midnight on Friday and Saturday nights.

The hotel was sold with an approved development application for serviced apartments behind the hotel, and it was presumed the pub would stay closed. It was a sad time in Sydney's entertainment scene, with many pubs closing their doors to live entertainment and embracing poker machines.

The site went through a number of hands before ending up with developers Barton Corporation - Bob Barton and his sons John and Jeff - in 2004.

"We're gonna turn [the Harold Park Hotel] back into the way it was," John Barton, 36, said.

Comedians Chris Franklin, Pizza star Tahir and Footy Show regular Mick Meredith have already performed at the pub's free Tuesday night comedy, and Barton said there were plans to also bring back the pub's other nights, including Writers in the Park, Politics in the Pub and Poetry in the Park.

But his motives for trying to restore the pub to its glory days aren't altruistic.

"We like cash flow," he said. "The pub's got a lot of potential. There's not many hotels you can buy that come with that sort of name. The majority people know the Comedy Club. Last Tuesday we packed it out."

The pub also hosts covers bands and plan to increase the number of poker machines from eight to 18.

That probably won't please Whitlams frontman Tim Freedman, who played a residency there in 1986 with his band Penguins on Safari and later had a hit with Blow Up the Pokies.

"I remember being down there one night when [left-wing author] Frank Hardie was speaking and the cops came for his parking fines," Freedman said. "Everyone surrounded the paddy wagon not knowing that Frank should have paid his fines. It wasn't two fines; it was $3000 worth."

Oblivion Seekers

2009-08-07T22:12:00.003+10:00

*

And so, as he passed out of consciousness and into the gutter, the office workers stepped over him as if he didn't exist. They were all the same, these carrion birds, these creatures from another planet, another place, the office workers. They bore no resemblance to him, there was no reflection of his life. They might as well have been another species. He looked up, phasing in and out, but none stopped. Except an old queen. They always stopped. Are you alright? the man asked. And he slurred his words. He wasn't alright, he hadn't been alright for a long time. He was as smashed as he could get, destroying his own consciousness. He didn't want to be awake. He didn't want to feel anything. He came stumbling around the corner, and saw himself, already dead, rising out of the gutter, helped by the gay guy who had stopped out of concern, or maybe he just liked a bit of rough trade. Are you alright, the man repeated, and he stumbled into him, unable to stand up straight.

I'm a bit pissed, he said. I can see that, the man said. And after a short period, the offer came. Do you want to come back to my place, you can have some coffee, sober up. And so it was as it always was, a shower, a blow job and $20, that's the sort of kid he was, crazy as. Nothing stopped. Nothing ended. He was caught in a downward spiral and had already hit rock bottom before he had barely begun, dashing across the thin red line as if it was non-existent. He was entranced by the underworld, the gangsters he met around the Cross, the underground gay scene, anything that was hidden, subterfuge being his natural order. He didn't know where it would end. He didn't understand what was happening. He didn't understand why his heart ached, awfully, always. There was no end to the agony and yet he had only just begun.

No one could see through this turmoil, no one could touch his heart. And so he dusted himself off and climbed back into his old clothes and made his way down yet another suburban street, not knowing where he was going or where he would end up. These strange days were an ample curse. He couldn't go back to his parents house, not to the frozen war and the belts and the harsh anger always directed at him. Briefly, before he started renting the tiny room in the private hotel by the water, he was homeless. He sped all night and drank all day. He was under age and it was hard to get alcohol, but he managed one way and another. Standing in the street swaying, hiding in corners and watching the trammelling traffic, secretive, frightened, completely alone. He didn't know why God had cursed him so. He couldn't find a way out. He sat at the bar and let the men buy him drinks. He could drink most of them under the table anyway. It wasn't the beginning of a dark time, he was already in its midst.

And so he opened his mouth and could see the slurred words coming out. No, I'm fine. No, I'm not alright. Where am I? What am I doing here? You've passed out in the gutter, the man said. All he could think of was what happened to the bottle, had he finished it already, would this bloke have alcohol back at his flat? He told these stories years later; and they sounded so humorous, so forlorn, the lost child, but there was no pity for what once was; in a brutal place, in a brutal time. The smart BMWs and Mercedes were parked along the Darlinghurst streets. Wealthy people ate in the restaurants. A group of middle aged men gathered for a meal, drinking water, in recovery, gossiping to each other. He felt infinitely alone, infinitely different, and knew it was self indulgent. Humans were much the same, wherever they came from, whatever had happened.

If only he could be spared the worst of it. If only he didn't have to face up to these brutal truths. If only he could hug tight the love, the flesh of another. And instead they all gazed at him as if he was some freak from the zoo, and he felt intensely self conscious. Only a thin membrane separated the sober world from that other, darker slipstream, the liquid intensity of the other world. It called him constantly. He could see the bars shining in the dark, the fabulous strangers, the international guests, and he knew, before the money ran out, he could join them and pretend, just for the evening, just for the moment, to be a normal, successful, happy, integrated person with a fascinating job and a string of successes behind him, with all the daily commitments of a real, connected person. Oh how he longed for a different space. And just for a moment, he could feel the fabric of things, once more glorious, the night large, the restaurants full, the strangers disappearing down alleys; and knew that while he not be right with the world right now, there was hope. He might not always be the lunatic stranger, the oblivion seeker, the shattered, disconsolate soul.

This Too Will Pass

2009-08-03T19:07:00.002+10:00

*

He couldn't be more devestated, just by the act of living. Simple, incomplete, the eternal yearning that masked his fate. God meant you to die a street alcoholic, living out those final years in Belmore Park, nearby the newspaper offices where he had worked most of his life; at various times making something of a name for hismelf. It was all so cruel, but destiny could not be defied. He coujldn't mask his own yearning, for oblivion, for love, by the shocking empathy they called the soldier, his own demise. So when he walked past the bar on the way to the meeting, and the desire to drink hit him like a sledge hammer, like a log being swung into the side of his head, he was completely taken aback. He knew he was off the air, had been for hours, but the vividness of his desire was something new.

There were tourists and sales reps and the interesting looking middle class all sitting around the bar, already lit up as the last light of the day fled, and he just wanted to be in there amongst them, ordering another beer, talking to total strangers, becoming immersed in the tales of others. Because he had none of his own left to tell; he would instead drape himself in the lives of others; and in this case, in the lives of complete strangers, both to himself and to the city. Random strangers, random acts of kindness. The Americans would talk in their loud voices about the things familiar to them, Obama, how terrible Bush was, or how misunderstood, depending on their poliitcal persuasion. And he would introduce them to the best local beers; and tell stories about being a journalist, and wash his own misery down a sinkhole of fabulousness, until all was well.

But all was not well; and his deeply dysfunctional brain longed for oblivion. Not for nothing oblivion seeking had been his primary goal for so many years. And now, frighteningly sober, he did not know where to turn. He kept thinking of Ben, always Ben, throughout this period of days when he had dived so spectacularly off the air, Ben, former NSW Premier Bob Carr's old press secretary. They had been great mates, although they met in the latter days when they were trying to stay sober, and Ben was bouncing in and out of detoxes and nothing was well in his life; the tiny apartment, the stuffed up relationships, the music CDs meant to indicate taste. And Ben had drunk himself to death just like that, not a bad feat for a man in his 30s still relatively healthy. But he could not stop; did not want to stop; and the rivers of enthusiasm and ignorance and intelligence and spirited conversations that were their times together; well he didn't know why it ended so quickly. Another death. Another dead alcoholic.

And so the bastard magistrates pound on from the bench: I see no hope, I see nothing but a long history of drugs, alcohol and dishonesty. And these brutal bastards always dictate the terms; always rule the rust and determine the outcome; while the rest of us slither from one pole to the next, uncertain of ourselves and our place in the world. Perhaps it was that uncertainty he had liked about Ben the most. All the ego had been deflated out of him; and when he admitted he had been drinking turps because he couldn't afford normal alcohol, then here, he knew, was a genuine problem, a terminal soul in acute decline, flirting with death as he drank himself into oblivion. He didn't mean to die, but equally he didn't want to stay sober. And so they marched forward; but there was nowhere to go. And he left him in that scrappy little nondescript inner-city apartment for the last time, thinking all was well. He'd said he would go back to detox, back to meetings, back to life. And the next he knew he was dead.

And he'd had everything. The good job, as the Premier's press secretary, better paying than most of the reporting jobs available, interesting, if you were interested in being near the seat of power. So smart. His knowledge burbled across streams; smart references to books, political events, characters of the right. And then he was dead. And there was nothing anybody could do. Nothing anybody could say. No meeting he could be dragged along to, no remorse he could feel, no madness he could absolve. And that was how it ended, not with a bang but a whimper. And so he walked past the bar with its shiny lights and happy looking people, its air of celebration, and went off to the meeting and sat in the hall and thought: this is therapy, how could this possibly be therapy? And all was lost, and Ben was lost, and he didn't drink; and was deeply unhappy. This too will pass, someone said, when he tried to explain the depth and complexity of his latest despair.

Kinkumber, NSW, Australia.

The Winter Of The Heart

2009-08-01T16:18:00.006+10:00

*

A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.

A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.

Dylan Thomas

Why, why, he would ask, didn't he turn around and vacate this physical presence, return to the fold and embark on the journey in a vessel less damaged, more pleasing? Why persist with this one? There were so many problems! A lack of empathy, continuity, and the brain damage from sustained drug use, these were only parts of the difficulties. The emotional chaos, making the grafting of the spirit so much more complex, was yet another issue. They clustered together, these damaged forms, and he could see across what once were bar rooms and now were old town halls, all the damage that had been done. His heart stirred with longing, sick of being alone. It was an unnatural state and now he wished to make up for lost time. "I had an affair with a Frenchman once," he said. "l flew from London to Paris a couple of times to see him, it was very intense, but I already had a boyfriend, so I wasn't too fussed. He was very passionate." They laughed, they were always laughing now, and the laughter clashed with their own suppressed feelings.

"Will I ever?" the boy man had asked in his broken French; and the gaggle of queens, always so willing to help, joined in a chorus of "of course", "of course". "You too can walk through someone elses fart clouds and after 19 years of living together not care. Love? I suppose you could call it that. We've certainly been together a long time." He listened to Patrick, ginger haired Patrick who had been sober for the past 20 years, since they had known each other in the late 1980s when they were both hanging around meetings in Sydney; watching the wolrd go by, everything so fresh, the skin ripped off; and Patrick, mooning silly Patrick, fell hopelessly in love. "This is not fair," Patrick remembered thinking, when Patrick come up to his bedroom and looked at this astonishing situation, the bedroom that floated above Sydney with some of the best views anyone had ever seen, the perfect view from the Victoria Street apartments across Woolloomoolloo to the backyard of the city, the suite of skyscrapers, the bridge off to the right.

Everything was so fabulous, the beautiful car, his old irridescent green EJ deluxe special which had people shouting out in the street, "nice car", and which he had loved with a greaet passion, "it's mine, it's mine, it suits me". Living nextdoor to Phillip Knightly's Sydney residence, A Hack's Progress, just one of the benefits. That had been one of his old sayings, "a humble hack on the highways of print", and now everything was different, he was editing a page, not staking out suspects and drumming up stories from where there were no stories. He had realised with what disdain the difficulties of general reporting were held; and perhaps it was true, what Murdoch was reported to have said, "if you're still on general news after you turn 30, there's something wrong with you". There had never been any doubt there was something wrong with him. His aching heart. His oblivion seeking. His sad dysfunction as addiction sweat soaked his clothes; distorted his thoughts.

As he sat watching passers by flick by in their new whizzy, stylish, expensive black cars, looking young, fabulous, expensive. He stared in awe at ordinary people, at handsome men behind the wheels of Mercedes, at the deep level of accomplishment and self imiposed discipline they wore so easily. They weren't mad. They weren't addicted. They were just normal, fun loving, healthy. They created a great passing by, they walked as they talked, he shrivelled on the pavement and took his rightful place as the crooked observer, damaged goods who would never be sane. No good in the woods, so deeply flawed. If only God had blessed him but it was not to be. The crippled alcoholic dwarf that was his true self would not go away; would not call it quits. He could walk into a bar so easily. He could declare this recovery over, a mistake, a brief moment in the sun; and return to his destiny, to die a street alcoholic in the parks where he once used to work as a journalist.

Who was he to defy history, destiny, God? Who was he to say no, no, that is not what I want? I know I can take a differnet course. I don't have to walk into that bar. I don't have to become the damaged cripple struggling to present himself as an ordinary person, struggling to keep up with the demands of work, passionately hopeless, angry, always, at the injuustices mounting in upon him. He knew nothing woiuld ever be the same again. He stood at the turning point. He could go one way or the other. He could walk into the bar or walk on down to the meeting. Oh how he wanted to join them, the internationala travellers, the interstate visitors, sitting there in the bar of that hotel lobby, swapping stories with strangers, being oh so fabulous as the alcohol gripped him. Or he could walk down the hill to the meeting in that obscure, hidden, uncomfortable church hall, and listen to antoher set of almsot total strangers talk about their lives. And so he walked down the road. And there sat Patrick, and they gave that cute little wave at each other and Patrick simpered in that little rabbit like way of his. Patrick had been so embarrassing, so in love, now it was his turn to play the humble fool, to be embarrassed at his own lack of progress, here on the fringers where life and death, love and despair, were entirely interchangeable, a step to the side or a step ahead, the opening of one door or the opeing of another. So far he had defied fate. how much longer could it last?

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/01/2643098.htm?section=justin

Former prime minister Bob Hawke has been honoured for his contribution to politics with lifetime membership to the Australian Labor Party.

Mr Hawke is only the third person to receive lifetime membership after Gough and Margaret Whitlam.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented Mr Hawke with the honour at the party's national conference today, before hundreds of delegates, his wife Blanche and his assistant of 26 years.

Mr Hawke entered the conference to cheers and applause before taking to the stage where he hugged Mr Rudd, Trade Minister Simon Crean and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Mr Rudd described Mr Hawke as the heart and soul of the Labor movement and of the party.

"Bob you are loved by our party, you are loved by our movement and I believe you are loved by the nation," he said.

Mr Rudd praised Mr Hawke's achievements during four terms in government such as the introduction of Medicareand wideranging economic reform .

He also made note of Mr Hawke's involvement in Labor's 2007 election campaign, making jokes about his charisma among voters.

"If you're standing with R J Hawke, your experience is as follows - to be totally ignored."

Mr Crean said the election of Mr Hawke in 1983 changed Australia and put it on the path of modernisation and reform.

Mr Hawke addressed delegates for over 30 minutes, saying Labor was the love of his life.

"You know, I can be a bit emotional and I must say you're testing the floodgates," he said.

Mr Hawke reflected on the huge change he has witnessed in the world since he joined the Labor Party in 1947 and said Labor's post-war actions in Government were what excited him about being in the party.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hhsVu67WVbRspyahHbWUHzG-8Rjg

KABUL — Three US troops and a French soldier were killed in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday, the military said.

The latest bloodshed comes after a month in which 75 soldiers were killed -- the highest number in a single month since the operation began in 2001.

More than 100,000 international troops are deployed in Afghanistan to help the young army fight a brutal Taliban-led insurgency which is mounting ahead of key presidential elections on August 20.

Around 230 French, US and Afghan troops came under fire in the Kapisa province, northeast of Kabul, while on an operation with Afghan troops, the French military in Afghanistan said in a statement.

"One French soldier was hit and died of the injury. Immediately the troops returned fire and counter-attacked the insurgents," it said.

"The fighting lasted one and a half hours and two other French soldiers were wounded. The insurgents eventually retreated."

France has lost 29 soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001, it said. It has around 2,900 French troops in NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan under a UN mandate.

Three other ISAF soldiers were killed in bomb blasts, the alliance force said separately.

"Three International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) service members were killed today after their patrol was struck by two improvised explosive devices in southern Afghanistan," it said.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/swine-flu-shuts-hospital-as-pigs-get-virus-20090801-e53z.html

SWINE flu forced a NSW hospital to close its doors to new patients yesterday as Premier Nathan Rees moved to reassure the public after an outbreak of the flu at a piggery.

An outbreak of H1N1 at Bellingen Hospital on the mid-north coast forced it to refuse new patients this weekend. Margaret Bennett, from the Health Department’s Coffs-Clarence Network, said seven staff had fallen ill with flu symptoms since a patient tested positive on July 24.

‘‘The hospital is operating normally in terms of people reporting to the emergency department and our care for current in-patients,’’ she said.

‘‘This weekend we’re diverting new patients to either Coffs Harbour or Macksville.’’

Mr Rees said there was no danger of catching swine flu from eating pork products despite a Dunedoo piggery being quarantined. The outbreak is the first human-to-pig transmission of flu in Australia.

Tests confirmed the pigs had influenza A H1, which is different to the human swine flu virus.

By Friday 21,668 people were known to have contracted swine flu, of whom 61 had died. On Friday, a 70-year-old woman, who had other health problems, became the 22nd person in NSW to die from it.

At the Kinkumber Spiritual Retreat, NSW, Australia.

The Slippery Slope

2009-07-28T00:57:00.005+10:00

*

A lesson, a gesture, a story, a philosophy, an attitude—I took something from every man in Steve's bar. I was a master at “identity theft” when that crime was more benign. I became sarcastic like Cager, melodramatic like Uncle Charlie, a roughneck like Joey D. I strived to be solid like Bob the Cop, cool like Colt, and to rationalize my rage by telling myself that it was no worse than the righteous wrath of Smelly. Eventually I applied the mimicry I'd learned at Dickens to those I met outside the bar—friends, lovers, parents, bosses, even strangers. The bar fostered in me the habit of turning each person who crossed my path into a mentor, or a character, and I credit the bar, and blame it, for my becoming a reflection, or a refraction, of them all.

Every regular at Steve's bar was fond of metaphors. One old bourbon drinker told me that a man's life is all a matter of mountains and caves—mountains we must climb, caves where we hide when we can't face our mountains. For me the bar was both. My most luxuriant cave, my most perilous mountain. And its men, though cavemen at heart, were my Sherpas. I loved them, deeply, and I think they knew. Though they had experienced everything—war and love, fame and disgrace, wealth and ruin—I don't think they ever had a boy look at them with such shining, worshipful eyes. My devotion was something new to them, and I think it made them love me, in their way, which was why they kidnapped me when I was eleven. But now I can almost hear their voices. Whoa, kid, you're getting ahead of yourself.

J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar.

What shocked him was the degree of his own romanticisation of these people, many of them dead. "I've never known anyone who knows so many dead people as you," someone had said, and while it wasn't Rawanda, the lifestyle we had fallen into was dangerous indeed. Bruce, the tall gangly poet, was the first to go, and he could not drive past that street in Turramurra where Bruce's parent's lived without thinking of the cold sadness of that early loss. He had spent his childhood nights floating across the cold suburbs, billowing on the wind, peering down, lost and alone yet triumphant in his liberation. Then he had found a new band, the partying gang, and while Bruce's death should have served as a warning of more to come, nothing was going to stop them. The grand chaos of the era could be heard even in this remote place, the giant concerts of the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium somehow had their echoes here on the other side of the world; and later Lou Reed in New York would play out in our loungerooms, as we sat around in and endless daze, playing cards, dealing out the 500 pack time and time again.

He had been in love with Tim and Jan and the whole damn gang, their children, the motley crew, Ian Farr, John Bygate, Lyn Hapgood, Colin Griffith. Every last one of them was dead now. The wonderfully eccentric sight of off-her-trolley Lyn wheeling her pram about Paddington, stumbling out of Bygate's beautiful Paddington terrace to see the day. John Bygate was everything he had wanted to be: astonishingly handsome, fabulously out of it, a great record collection, an intellectual obscurity which shut out all the hoi palloi. They were different, their closed club, intellectual giants, creative originals. John was always scribbling obscure music notations on sheets of paper, and he took to doing the same, writing obscure, funereal melodies while struggling to understand first year philospohy. He wanted to be different. He wanted to be loyal to his band. He thought of them as the beginning and the end, the group who's partying ways would change the entire country with the brilliance of their artistic output.

He wrote and he wrote, sine qua sine, garbled Latin phrases, ancient, ethereal floating castles, the ground littered with the crunched glass of shattered syringes, black and white chequered floors, a spiritual, hallucinatory place open only to the terminally gifted. In 2009, a quarter of a century after Bygate had lived in the apartment in Moore Park Road they drove past, Karl looked out of the car window and picked out the terrace where he had lived with Ian Farr and John Bygate and the rest of them. For the first time he heard the story of how Karl had met Bygate. He had been looking for a card reader, a clairvoyant, in Paddington, and had knocked on the wrong door. Bygate had answered, the ever present glass of white wine in his hand. Come in, come in, he declared expansively, as if he had been expecting him. Karl tried to explain that he had knocked on the wrong door and was looking for someone else, but Bygate was having none of it. Soon enough they were sitting around the kitchen table smoking. Soon enough John was talking about getting some pills, he just needed a bit more money to pay for the script. Soon enough they were collecting a bottle of mandrax and were off their scones.

And that was how Karl came to know that crazy crazy gang. It was the early 80s and they were already on the slippery slope. By that time he had started work at the Sydney Morning Herald, and his life was changing as he entered the mainstream. Sometimes he would sit around the Moore Park flat, hanging out with the old gang, listening to the hysterical tales of the male prostitute who would wander in from upstairs, complaining about his work load. Or knock back the proposition that he would fill in for him on one of the jobs. These were different days. He was too old to sell the flesh; ashamed of his own past, keen to become a new, professional person. But he still liked the bohemian tales, as if these people were more genuine than most he met. And so he would sit there, listening to the tales of chaos and lack of money, of unfulfilled dreams. Bygate was already getting more and more obscure. Already it was such a contrast from the fabulous person he had known in his hey day, in the late 60s, when they first met at that wonderful sugar-daddy provided house in Elizabeth Street, Paddington.

His moisturised skin was already beginning to show the wear and tear of the alcoholic. The fabulous terrace was long gone; as was the sugar daddy. His boyfriend, that shocking junky Gary, later to father a child with Virginia Fay, was also gone; and somehow it was this last in a long line of losses which seemed to toss Bygate closer and closer to the cliff's edge. He reigned over the motley bohemian crew that infected Moore Park, like some ancient, eccentric aunt. He wished them all well. He mumbled incoherently. He still drank his white wine, but these days it came from a cask. He still scribbled notations on sheets of music, but these days no one really believed he was about to produce a new Australian masterpiece. Another bottle of mandrax would arrive, and yet again the gang would be stumbling about, losing it, wandering off to the pub and returning days later, slurring words, falling into each other, desperately out of it, desperately in love. Instead of this life, these days he got up and went to work each morning. His visits became less and less regular.

And finally he wandered off altogether. And Bygate took another step down the slippery slope, moving to Adelaide where it was cheaper to live on the dole. And finally dying of a brain haemorrage. He never got sober. He never turned back. Karl and he held the memory, but even that was becoming increasingly obscure as they themselves aged and all that remained of that strange time was the memories of two men in their 40s and 50s as they drove down a busy Sydney street.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8169869.stm

Top leaders of the US and China are meeting in Washington to discuss key economic and political differences.

President Obama said the relationship between the US and China would shape the 21st century and said the two shared a "mutual interest".

China has sent Vice Premier Wang Qishan and State Councillor Dai Bingguo.

The meeting, called the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, is the first formal negotiation between the US and China since Mr Obama took office.

'Strong coordination'

The talks will cover a range of issues, including halting the spread of nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, and creating clean and secure energy sources.

But the main focus will be on working towards economic recovery.

"The current crisis has made it clear that the choices made within our borders reverberate across the global economy - and this is true not just of New York and Seattle, but Shanghai and Shenzhen as well," President Obama said at the start of the meeting.

"That is why we must remain committed to strong bilateral and multilateral coordination."

Vice Premier Wang also said it was a "critical moment" for the world economy as it moves out of crisis and towards recovery.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-host the talks.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25843607-5017771,00.html

Michael Stutchbury

THE PM bags the deregulation of the past 25 years but claims he wants to boost productivity.

KEVIN Rudd's second long crisis essay continues to misdiagnose Australia's economic challenges as stemming from the failures of a "decade of neo-liberal free market fundamentalism". And, compared to the first essay penned in January, an emboldened Prime Minister now feels vindicated that massive government intervention has saved global capitalism. But these intellectual foundations muddy rather than clarify the PM's reform principles for driving the next decade of productivity growth. His road to recovery ends up in the hoary political refuge of "nation building", which will also serves to justify post-crisis belt-tightening.

Rudd's straw man case against neo-liberalism is based on the historical fact that financial markets are vulnerable to herd-like swings between irrational exuberance and panic which, in this case, destabilised the global macro-economy.

Yet the intellectual critique of "behavioural economics" is better at poking holes in the "efficient markets hypothesis" that individuals act rationally than in demonstrating that governments know or can do better. In any case, this debate is largely confined to financial markets, not the whole sweep of pro-market economics. And it is largely a northern hemisphere argument, notwithstanding Rudd's efforts to lash the Howard-Turnbull Liberals to the supposed sins of "the right". A feature of the crisis is how well Australia's banking supervision has held up. The Reserve Bank has never been fundamentalist on financial markets, for instance supporting a floating dollar but also acknowledging that financial asset markets can "overshoot".

In a speech to the Sydney Institute last month, the federal Treasury's group director David Gruen outlined how mainstream macroeconomic theory had gone off course over the past few decades by incorporating the microeconomic assumption that financial markets were naturally self-correcting because well-informed individuals acted rationally in response to proper incentives. But Gruen pointedly added the following footnote: "In case I am being interpreted as pouring scorn on the benefits of more deregulated markets generally as opposed to financial markets in particular, let me dissuade you from that view.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25843727-20261,00.html

Rudd addresses the Labor Party in Hobart on Saturday on the reception his essays received in these pages

TODAY, you might have read an essay that I published in the national press that looks beyond the immediate response to the global recession towards the challenges of economic recovery.

I've noticed that some don't particularly appreciate it when I write long essays.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25843727-20261,00.html

After the publication of my last essay in The Monthly six months ago, I'm informed that one national newspaper published more than 50 separate articles attacking it in one way or another.

I'm also informed that's about 60,000 words the newspaper in question devoted to my mediocre prose.

Nearly 10 times the length of my original essay.

We should welcome a real debate about different ideas for the nation's future, including from newspapers that declare themselves unashamed defenders of the ideological Right.

Ross Gittins in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday goes to war with occasional Fairfax contributor Kevin Rudd:

I'VE forced myself to read every bit of Kevin Rudd's latest 6100-word diatribe on economic recovery. Now I know what it must be like to sit through one of Fidel Castro's three-hour speeches.

It was a combination of the sensible and the self-serving, marred by its partisanship. Rudd nowhere acknowledges the role of his Liberal predecessors in pursuing the policies that left us so well placed in the global crisis.

He fails to admit that the relatively low and unconcerning levels of public debt in prospect are the product of his predecessors' budget surpluses and zero net debt.

The Libs also deserve credit for the good shape our banks are in. It was they who reformed our prudential supervision system, putting it in the hands of a single, well-armed regulator, and they who persisted with the Four Pillars policy that did so much to keep our banks out of trouble.

The notion that the Libs could be fairly described as "neo-liberal free-market fundamentalists" is laughable.

I'm starting to see the motive for all this "tough times" talk: you make it sound terrible so that, when it turns out it isn't so bad, voters are more relieved than angry.

It's spin, in other words.

Redfern railway lines, Sydney, Australia.

Above The World

2009-07-25T00:25:00.009+10:00

*

"We're in a bit of a pickle here, boy," Drew said. "Maybe you should stop drinking."
"Maybe you should start," Perry said. "I killed my best friend, cut off my own junk, and I'm some kind of psychic call-in line for these things. And you? Dude, you're dropping bombs in America. You're in charge of fighting honest-to-God aliens. Ask me, that's a pretty good reason for a snort or three."
Perry held out the bottle. Drew looked at the nasty scar on Perry's left forearm. War scars, that's what Perry had.
Drew accepted the bottle. The kid was right. Drew took a long swig. The bourbon tang was a welcome sensation, a friendly memory of distant times when he could just have a drink and relax. He knocked back another long pull...

Scott Sigler, Contagion.

Apart from some vague notion of the universe as an infinite and amazing place, like most people, he had no real knowledge or even desire for knowledge of God or a higher power or anything else in that domain. The purpose of recovery is to come to know the face of God, he read, and dismissed it as cultish nonsense. Children, they were virtually children, young things in their 20s, whined endlessly about their pseudo-difficulties and their love of "the program". He shuddered. It had come to this. And then they were gone. And people he had meant to confront, or just to talk to, were swept away in the crush. He wanted to go back to a time of innocent glory, to a time of powerful clairvoyance and an infinite ease with his own spirituality, when each night he went foraging across the suburbs of his early childhood, the cold crash of the surf in the early hours of the morning, the lonely twinkle of the street lamps, the deep cold of the houses nestled into the sides of the hills overlooking the beach. The deep green of the trees which were everywhere.

Nothing matched his inner dialogue. And so it was that he abandoned everything he had once stood for. Once he could hear them, the thoughts of others, as he sat on the bus on the long ride into town. Once, if he stared at people long enough, they would do what he wanted. Instead, now, his head was full of half finished stories, scenes which went nowhere, plots which dissolved before they had even formed. The old Eastern Europeans sat in the outback baths, the hot, sulphurous water giving off steam into the infinite night, the stars in the startling sky starting to come out as dusk deepened. They were large people, both the men and the women, plagued by health problems which probably directly related to their rich diets. There was no
English spoken. This land which had transformed utterly, from the ancient culture of the aborigines, living here for thousands of years, to the bustling technological world of the West, its architecture encrusted on to the ancient land, coating the hills and bays of the coast, spreading inland through the townships.

Prior to becoming a general news reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s his knowledge of the outback and rural Australia was limited to drug fueled spiritual quests against startling backdrops - from Ernabella, the aboriginal Jerusalem, where the sky itself turned pastel above the pastel red hills and yellow desert melons lay on the gorgeous pink sands to the rich farming country of the Liverpool Plains or the Hunter Valley, where the large, white well maintained fences of the horse studs bespoke a wealth he could only imagine. What had happened to that eccentric, wealthy older man in a flash sports car he had assumed was his destiny. He could see him, why not become him. Fragment Me Quick, Blue Queen, had been the science fiction novella he had written with a cast of himself and his friends, particularly Bill Rough. They had all been "creatives", as they were now called, and could see absolutely no other reason for being.

Last night he had driven back from Waverley down Moore Park Road, past the house where John Bygate and the wild crew he had known so well, had once considered the heart of everything, now lived. John Bygate was the star recruit. By this stage John was already in decay, the fabulous terrace in Elizabeth Street, Paddington, his sugar daddy had bought for him long gone. He had met John in the late 60s when Harry Godolphin, also dead, took him up from the Cross, where they would sit around all day on the musty straw floor coverings playing music and smoking bongs. He was a street kid and these people always liked to pick up street kids, foster their potential, maybe maybe not sleep with them. I'm the only one in your life who doesn't want to sleep with you, that's why you like coming here, Harry said, and it was probably true. Harry was the man he had met in a detox just after he turned 16. He hadn't stayed in the detox long; and having nowhere to sleep and sick of the hands of ancient men crawling across his body just because he needed a bed for the night.

He went back to Harry's place, the squat overlooking Woolloomoolloo, with its spectacular views and unique, aerie like location on top of the cliffs. None of those houses are there anymore, replaced by the famous now multi million dollar apartments along Victoria Street with some of the best views of Sydney anywhere. It was to Harry he told his initial dreams of maybe being a writer one day; a fantasy which seemed so impossible it would have been laughable. But Harry listened and encouraged him, the first adult to do so. And so he started scribbling things again, as he had done throughout his childhood, which had been littered with large literary projects he had thrown away after his suicide attempt. Harry gave him a sliver of acid and took him to see Hair and his world, his consciousness, changed forever. As did the rationals for his own behaviour. Far off, but suddenly not so far off, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were playing giant arenas, and even here in this remote outpost of civilisation he could hear the drum beats of change. They were marked. They would always be defeated. But somehow, briefly, back there, before the impossibilities of life and love and success had destroyed him, he imagined a future full of hope and fun and achievement. How badly distorted things came to be.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/5900099/Muslim-woman-told-to-take-off-veil-by-bus-driver-in-Australia.html

Khadijah Ouararhni-Grech was wearing a pink, floral niqab, which covers her hair and lower face, when she tried to board a bus in Greystanes, an outer suburb of the Astralian city.

"As I was stepping onto the bus the driver said 'You can't get on the bus wearing your mask'," she told the Sydney Daily Telegraph newspaper.

When she explained it was religious dress, the woman said the driver responded: "Sorry, it's the law."

"I told him it wasn't the law and he said 'You have to show me your face,'" she said.

"I said to him, 'There's no difference between me and that lady sitting there who chooses to not wear what I'm wearing'."

The bus company, Hillsbus, said the driver was being questioned over the claims.

"We are investigating it and doing that as quickly as we can," a spokesman said. "We need to get to the bottom of it, work out what happened and what went on, and what we need to do about it."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/23/2634738.htm

Two more people have died from swine flu in Queensland, taking to five the number of swine flu-related deaths in the state.

Authorities have confirmed a 13-year-old boy died on the Sunshine Coast on Monday and an 84-year-old man died yesterday.

Queensland Health says both were classed as vulnerable due to existing medical conditions.

A 70-year-old man with swine flu died in Townsville Hospital yesterday.

Earlier this week, a 19-year-old woman from Palm Island lost her unborn baby through complications from the virus, while a 38-year-old woman died in Brisbane last Wednesday.

Muslims make up about 1.7 per cent of Australia's heavily Christian population of almost 22 million, and religious tensions have run high in recent years.

Anti-Muslim sentiment flared on Sydney's southern Cronulla Beach in December 2005 when mobs of whites attacked Lebanese Australians there in a bid to "reclaim the beach".

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gS9Eg6gT_891qZQzJXIK49F6VEow

WASHINGTON — Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki paid symbolic tribute to US soldiers killed in Iraq, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery.

As the Iraqi and American national anthems played, Maliki paid his respects Thursday during a military ceremony of the type reserved for heads of state, which was punctuated by the firing of canons.

Maliki was joined by his delegation and Brigadier General Karl Horst, the commander of Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region.

The Iraqi leader observed a minute of silence, watched by a crowd of about 200 American tourists who were visiting the site -- a national landmark.

He did not make remarks at the ceremony.

According to cemetery officials, Thursday was the third time Maliki has visited the site to pay his respects, but the previous two visits were not open to the public.

An Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the trip was "very important to stipulate a new relationship after the withdrawal of the troops."

US troops pulled out of Iraqi cities at the end of June, as part of a bilateral agreement signed between the two countries.

The transition is a major step in the Iraqi government's attempts to assert its authority throughout the country, but questions remain about relations between the still-troubled nation's ethnic and religious sects.

The future of relations between the country's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish populations was a topic in talks Maliki held in Washington on Wednesday with President Barack Obama.

Two in Advance

2009-07-25T00:11:00.005+10:00

*

I used to say I'd found in Steve's bar the fathers I needed, but this wasn't quite right. At some point the bar itself became my father, its dozens of men melding into one enormous male eye looking over my shoulder, providing that needed alternative to my mother, that Y chromosome to her X. My mother didn't know she was competing with the men of the bar, and the men didn't know they were vying with her. They all assumed that they were on the same page, because they all shared one antiquated idea about manhood. My mother and the men believed that being a good man is an art, and being a bad man is a tragedy, for the world as much as for those who depend on the tragic man in question. Though my mother first introduced me to this idea, Steve's bar was where I saw its truth demonstrated daily. Steve's bar attracted all kinds of women, a stunning array, but as a boy I noticed only its improbable assortment of good and bad men. Wandering freely among this unlikely fraternity of alphas, listening to the stories of the soldiers and ballplayers, poets and cops, millionaires and bookies, actors and crooks who leaned nightly against Steve's bar, I heard them say again and again that the differences among them were great, but the reasons they had come to be so different were slight.

J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar.

Like watching paint dry, the meeting moved by so slowly. There had been books lying in boxes at the top of Wilson Street, past where he walked each day. He grabbed A Writer's Life by Jan Morris, a couple of volumes of Paul Auster, a couple of volumes from people he had never heard of. When did anyone get the time to read all these books anymore? When was salvation going to come? It didn't matter that whole junks of memory were going to disappear. He would still remember the rickshaws in Calcutta, dance in a for off, foreign field. The truth was that life as a professional in this God forsaken town was dull; you got up, you went to work, you followed the same snail trails every day, intersecting but never speaking with people doing the same thing. Crowded lives in a crowded city. Yet no one had reached out, he remained untouched. Opportunities came and went. They laughed, at him rather than with him. Oh please, please, release me from this bondage.

The distracted thoughts and crumbling buildings, he could not be held account anymore. Books were made to be finished. The shattered path, it was the only way. High in the clouds, the airships. Nicole at the helm. Spirit beings everywhere. The dark forces of the physical planet so far beneath them as to be of no account. Whistling high, with clouds for company. It was his destiny to float, and throughout his childhood he could barely wait to slip into unconsciousness in order to go flying, flying, high above the suburb, the control of his disembodied spirit a matter of mental tricks. He had been so long about the issue, long term narcotic use, that not even the sight of the skinny little aboriginal girls selling $20 packets of pot at the top of the Block, 150 yards from the police station, bothered him anymore. Did we have to get rid of all human influence in order to gain some level of purity? Of decent motive?

He wanted to go back to Calcutta, as part of his destiny, but was afraid of dying there. The magic kingdoms had all been in his imagination, or derived from books. He couldn't work out how to get back there. He couldn't work out how to gain his former mental powers. Life was cruel; he couldn't find what he was searching for. A way back to former gifts; including the power to fly, the way he used to wait until his parents had gone to bed, and then go floating. He knew the courts didn't want ordinary people in them, that the views of the masses were not welcome. The masses and the mandarins, indeed. The legal caste thought they had it all sewn up; simply be there soaking up the energy, relearning old mental tricks. How much he longed for a happy place; and could never be satisfied with the here and now. We all knew the story of the boy who had been forced to dig his own grave, down there in the National Park. All because he had crossed the wrong person, stolen off a criminal queen, just like they stole off every one. They weren't sophisticated enough to pick their targets, they just robbed everyone they slept with.

He was blubbering. He wanted the police to turn down the volume, to set down the law for the teenagers filling his house, four girls and climbing in the front room at last check. They were all escaping boarding school, and Henrietta had the cool dad who let them do what they wanted to do, make a bit of noise in the middle of the night, giggle a lot. Which was so innocuous in comparison to what he got up to at their age he let them go straight ahead. It was better than many of the things they could be doing, scoring on the corner, bongs, collective outrage. But where was that these days? There was no spirit of revolution. Australia had descended into being virtually a communist country, Who's the aboriginal in the family, someone asked, noticing the paintings. Suzy, the kids mother, she identifies, he replied. And back out there on the plains where they all came from, he could feel the ancestors calling. Come back, come back, we will envelop you with love.

But he wasn't ready to leave the physical world yet. There was too much work to be done. Books to be written. Thoughts to be stored. Are you happy? I don't care mate, survival is the key. The skinny little drug dealers followed his every move, keeping a beady eye out as he crossed the road. They lost interest when they saw the dog - and his grey hair. The bar was his refuge and his destroyer; like the character in The Tender Bar he had gone there so early, to the Rex. Kind of like it now, he had told the librarian, he wanted his own thoughts back. He had been the subject of identity theft yet again. I don't know who I am, I can't be seen to be making these same mistakes all over again. He was conscious of an altered planet, of lost opportunities, of a past so long ago his memories of those grand events was beginning to fade; those years he thought he would always remember, those moments high above the suburbs; a return to the form of 2006. They had been so utterly betrayed; but above all had betrayed themselves. The daily grinding routine, the gross physicality of his wretched body, he was going to climb back to his former clairvoyance; he was going to become the person he was always meant to be.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/24/2635902.htm?section=australia

Police investigating the murder of a Sydney family say post-mortem examinations on the five victims have given them valuable information but it will be weeks before the results of some forensic tests are known.

Forty-three-year-old Min Lin, his wife, two sons and his sister-in-law were bludgeoned to death in the family's North Epping home, in Sydney's north west, last weekend.

Detective Inspector Geoff Beresford says police have now spoken to all the family members in Sydney, including relatives visiting from China.

He says toxicology tests from the post-mortems will not be available for some time but he is confident a suspect will be identified.

"I am as confident as I have been throughout this week, I am very pleased with the progress so far as the forensic results that are coming in," he said.

"But again I repeat there's an enormous amount of work to be done, it's not a process that can be hurried, nor will it be hurried.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/expect-more-blowups-before-november-20090724-dw68.html

THE ink was barely dry on Malcolm Turnbull's press release yesterday when Wilson Tuckey was out slamming the new offer as a time-buying exercise cooked up by the arrogant leader and his "sycophantic" shadow cabinet.

Safe to say, therefore, that Turnbull and senior Liberals have given up on wooing Tuckey and his band of supporters - not to mention the Nationals - as they sort out the climate dilemma.

Turnbull and Co are prepared to negotiate on the basis of being able deliver a majority view inside the Liberal Party, not a unanimous one. They - at least, for now - have a position by which they can stand and all sound like they are saying the same thing. After this week, that is an achievement.

The nine amendments devised by the shadow cabinet will not be accepted by the Government before August 13, when the vote is scheduled, if at all.

Penny Wong suggested cheekily she would consider them "once Mr Turnbull has agreed amendments with his party".

In this sense, it does buy time because the Coalition will, as one, vote down the scheme next month.

But afterwards, unless the Government folds and accepts them, or the Coalition blinks and softens its demands, we are none the wiser as to what may happen the second time around in November when the Government reintroduces the bill as a double dissolution trigger.

One gets the feeling there will be more blow-ups between now and then.

Mr Turnbull's personal support in Newspoll has recently taken the biggest plunge of any opposition leader and his position has been described as "terminal" by some Liberal MPs, although there is no-one to replace him.

Mr Abbott, who is releasing his own book next week on conservative politics, is not regarded as a leadership candidate in the short term and he has been strongly aiding Mr Turnbull in parliament when the Liberals have been under pressure.

"Opposing the legislation in the Senate could ultimately make poor policy even worse because the government could negotiate a deal with the Greens," Mr Abbott says in an article published in The Australian today.

"Alternatively, after several months in which political debate focuses on climate change and opposition obstructionism, the government could call a double-dissolution election on the issue of who's fair dinkum about trying to save the planet."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25826885-601,00.html

Mr Turnbull was attacked from within his own party this week when he suggested overturning the Coalition's current position on emissions trading and agreeing to pass the scheme with business-friendly amendments.
Liberal backbencher Wilson Tuckey accused his leader of arrogance and inexperience in contradicting the Coalition position, sparking an internal party battle. Mr Tuckey also suggested Mr Turnbull was scared of facing a double-dissolution election over the issue.

But Mr Abbott said Mr Turnbull was being "far from arrogant" and knew "voters are unlikely to be argued into changing their minds" on an ETS.

"Oppositions, after all, can't save the country from the wrong side of the parliament and can't be expected to protect people from the consequences of changing government," he said. "It will be the cost and complexity of emissions trading and the absence of anything much out of the ordinary about climate that will slowly engender second thoughts."

Mr Abbott also said the Coalition was in a political bind climate change. "The problem, at least for politicians who prefer rational debate to following fads, is the public's current perception that climate change is uniquely dangerous and particularly associated with man-made carbon dioxide emissions," he said.

The Betrayal Of Ancient Dysfunction: Finding A Story To Fit

2009-07-24T23:57:00.005+10:00

*

Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind clearer, where they feel closer to God or love or truth or whatever it is they happen to worship. For better or worse my holy place was Steve's bar. And because I found it in my youth, the bar was that much more sacred, its image clouded by that special reverence children accord those places where they feel safe. Others might feel this way about a classroom or playground, a theater or church, a laboratory or library or stadium. Even a home. But none of these places claimed me. We exalt what is at hand. Had I grown up beside a river or an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American tavern, and that has made all the difference.

I didn't spend every waking minute in the bar. I went into the world, worked and failed, fell in love, played the fool, had my heart broken and my threshold tested. But because of Steve's bar each rite of passage felt linked to the last, and the next, as did each person I met. For the first twenty-five years of my life everyone I knew either sent me to the bar, drove me to the bar, accompanied me to the bar, rescued me from the bar, or was in the bar when I arrived, as if waiting for me since the day I was born.

J.R. Moehringer The Tender Bar.

The urgency of unfinished projects now overwhelmed him. History had a habit of repeating its own mistakes. Only he could stop this. Only he could stand up against the inevitable tide of facism. Of hysterical anti-male anti-family rhetoric which was consuming the everyday, so that Orwell's 1984 was doomed to repeat time and again. He couldn't have been less worthy. Rarely sober, much of his life had disappeared in an internal looking cloud, the fussing and fiddling of the masses not even of interest in a cloaked and muffled world where the cushioned sounds of falling leaves in a vacuum was all that he had ever known. The vast gaps. He didn't know who he was anymore. He hadn't made up a story to suit the moment. He hadn't donned a mask which would reflect well, or create attention, or divert the ill wishers. He hadn't been born again, yet, and as a malformed, splintered, half sprung creature he could not grasp what was happening to him, or why they felt so injured by a past which was so long ago.

I was a boy from the suburbs and I, too, thought I had arrived in paradise when I landed in the Cross, when there were stories of the dead who did not obey, of bouncers who killed people, gangsters who made their toy boys dig their own graves in the National Park south of the city, when terrified children shook in the wet dewy dawns, the smell of eucalyptus all around them, the shape of the grave taking place in front of them. It was hard to separate fact from fiction anymore. The things which had meant so much to him were nothing to anyone else, there were no reference points, no common knowledge. It's interesting to hear about all that stuff, the man said, when the subject of the Rex Hotel and the Bottom's Up bar came up, and damaged souls in adult male bodies looked back and felt sorry for the adolescents they had once been.

He looked back and felt pity, but having never communicated what really happened, and having been pissed as a newt for most of it, he was not so damaged as he might have liked to have been. Instead he had regarded it all as a great adventure - something to be, something to say you had been. Something which marked him as an adventurer, as someone different from the dreary, blank, unresponsive masses of the suburb from which he came. They marched in cardres, like mini-soldiers, in their cold uniforms in the midst of winter. They never ventured to be different, for to be different was to be singled out and ridiculed. And of course caned by the teachers or beaten at home. So he settled behind the conformist mask, shivered in the cold in their neat, grey shorts, and prayed for relief. This couldn't be all there is. Surely he wasn't expected to stand on his own two feet, to defy rescue, to grow up?

But of course that was exactly what life demanded. He had always wanted to be rescued, for someone else to look after him; and in those early yeears the sugar daddies had queued up to perform the role. Now, a man in his 50s, the whole adventure lacked glamour; a man with grey hair telling a story from long ago. Decades after anyone had fancied him, or paid to see him take his clothes off. Damp with excitement. He always insisted there was a bottle of whisky in the hotel room when he arrived, it was part of the deal. And, already drunk from the bar, he would proceed to demolish the whisky so that when the fateful moment came and he was expected to join the client in the bed, he was so sloshed he had no idea what he was doing, and lay there while they worked away at his young flesh. Give as little as possible, get out as soon as you can, always, always, make sure they pay for it. The attitude was not professional.

While he had met professional workers since, perhaps even paid for their services on the rare occasion, that was not his story. And so the deep hurts of a fragmented childhood continued drifting to the surface; and he shrugged, there were lots worse stories than his. He felt like exaggerating, to make more readable the tragic tale of his isolation, the brutality, the bruises, the belts, the horrific beltings he endured on a daily basis. There was no need to exaggerate; and yet he felt like lying on the ground and kicking and screaming, look at me, look at me, look at what you have done, they have done, the world has done, bastards. No one could care less. These crimes against nature were committed long ago. If he was to find salvation, it was not going to be in memory, or even in story telling. It was in reaching out to other human beings, picking up the phone, being a decent friend. The isolation which had haunted his every waking moment, the dysfunction and overwhelming despair which had crippled his every action and so severely distorted his public persona, all of it was about to fade as he became busier than he had ever been. There was much to do, and little time in which to do it.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6726147.ece

Parliament's youngest MP was today chosen by voters to represent Norwich North after support for Labour plunged in the first by-election since the MPs expenses scandal.

The Conservative, Chloë Smith, 27, won a bigger than expected 7,348 majority, overturning Labour's lead of 5,459 in the 2005 general election.

Labour was down 26.7 per cent on the general election, with 14,854 voters deserting the party since 2005. The turnout was 45.8 per cent amid suspicions the Labour vote failed to turn out.

The result will delight the Tories, who had been briefing they expected a majority of less than 4,000 as recently as Tuesday.

Ms Smith, a Deloitte consultant seconded to the Conservatives, will now take the crown of youngest MP from Jo Swinson, the 29-year old Liberal Democrat.

Ms Smith said that this has been victory for "honest politics".

"They have voted for change and sent a message for Gordon Brown," she told the count.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/24/norwich-north-byelection-result

David Cameron has inflicted a humiliating byelection defeat on Gordon Brown as the Conservatives beat Labour into second place in Norwich North.

In the first electoral test since the MPs' expenses scandal rocked Westminster, the Tories' Chloe Smith won the Norfolk seat with a majority of 7,348 and, aged just 27, becomes the youngest MP in the Commons.

Labour's defeat, in a seat held comfortably by the party since 1997, is the fifth byelection blow Brown has suffered since he took over at No 10.

If the result was repeated across the country in a general election, the Tories would be swept to power with a Commons majority of 218, analysis by the Press Association news agency showed.

The Tories would have 434 MPs, with Labour on 107, the Liberal Democrats 79, and others 30.

Responding to the news, the prime minister admitted it was a disappointing result but said no party could take a "great deal of cheer" from it because all three of the main parties had lost votes.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/24/2636081.htm?section=business

Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has unveiled the details of a significant policy shift on the Government's emissions trading scheme.

The shadow cabinet held a phone hook-up this afternoon and has agreed to vote for the legislation this year if the Government agrees to a number of amendments.

All this is aimed at avoiding turning the legislation into a trigger for a double dissolution election.

But there is concern in both the Liberal and National parties at the untidiness of a week, which saw one MP calling Malcolm Turnbull arrogant and inexperienced.

As a staunch Catholic and one who once began training for the priesthood, Tony Abbott is obviously someone who believes in conversions.

Last year he championed the cause of three men: Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Costello, all in the one week.

And now he has turned his talents to emissions trading.

In the last two months he has expressed wariness about an emissions trading scheme, calling it an expensive and futile gesture, and saying a straight carbon tax or charge would be more transparent.

But this morning he came on board Mr Turnbull's push for the Coalition to amend and then pass the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme when it comes to a vote in the Senate, either the first due in August or the second due in November.

Mr Abbot says opposing it would set it up as a double dissolution election trigger and it is Mr Turnbull's assessment that it is a fight the Coalition can not win.

Rock Bottoms

2009-07-21T15:02:00.004+10:00

*

Violent conflict, not confinded to the home and hearth, spills out onto the streets. Moreover, I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers: run not by the government, as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum enterprise, the drug dealers. Young men and women in debt to drug dealers are kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds, and beaten or whipped. Of compunction there is none - only a residual fear of going too far.

Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit in. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil that ordinary men and women do, they do out of fear of not committing it.

Theodore Dalrymple.

And so it goes, the time sequences, the flash floods, the aching hearts. If all was well he would not be here, in this place, begging forgiveness. He felt so ashamed of himself for having wasted so much of his life. He would have been an entirely different person, if only he had been cured. But that was not to be. Life was to pass by in clouds of pot smoke and drunken evenings at the pub. In a life entirely dedicated to pleasure. Except there was no pleasure at the end, only a sad old party animal with the faraway glaze of a distant criminal, not of this world. It had been hard to manufacture such profound thought disorder. It had costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. And so when he came to partake of the real world, he was little fit. Richard would embrace him, almost as a lover, and when Stephen cracked the code we were all jealous, because we had all been in love. That drunken embrace. That devine energy. Those astonishing good looks.

And now he's dead and nothing but a memory; and few of us made it to what must have been the saddest of funerals. Why did he collapse so quickly into dereliction, living in his mother's large old house in North Adelaide, rarely going out. His father had been an academic of osme mysterious kind, everything we didn't understand was mysterious, the beauty of the Adelaide Hills and the abandoned network where we used to go to pick flowers to sell around the office blocks. There were always ways to make money, it just required enginuity. While his own teenagers lived off his efforts as if it was their God given right; and never even thought of contributing. No government helped him. No gratitude was forthcoming. Peter's voice still remained in his head, shrieking, loud, angry, impossibly camp; and his solution to ever problem: What Have YOU done about it?

Talking to him was like taking a cold shower, bracing, confronting, and often enough it was a managemnet issue, keeping him calm and the light sabres innocent. He was trying to grow, trying to avoid the consequences of his own dereliction. It was not to be. Failure was imminent. That's how he felt. That there was no way he could turn this old ship around. That momentary piece was just an illusion, recovery was an illusion, the long nights where he could barely sleep just an illusion of progress. He couldn't last much longer. Life, God, the universe, call it what you will, had only provided hope in small measure and he had betrayed all the rules of nature; and therefore could not survive. There was nothing to look forward to. Old age would not provide the peace he had long sought. Shadows flicked at his heels, the foundation core dissolved into shadows at the slightest exposure, and his desperate search for some structure in which to hide, or to build quickly enough a frame in which to live, had all been swept aside.

He didn't know what the answer was. He was convinced of his special destiny but had made too many mistakes, smoked too many cigarettes, slipped once too often, and the cnacer was eating out his lungs and his body was shutting down. Emphesema for sure. Hypochondriac, for sure. He could not believe his luck, that he was still alive. Hauled unconscious from swimming pools. Walking, emerging live from the beach, Newport beach, where he had walked along waiting for the tablets to take affect, waiting to die, the sound of the surf crashing on the yellow sands, the cliffs cold and remote. There was no one to talk to. He cried and went home, to be beaten again. And again. And he never said: you bastards, stop it, stop it, I've just tried to kill myself and here you are giving me another thrashing. You bastards. How could you treat your own child like this?

Clearly he was hated. Clearly there was nowhere to go. But then he discovered something, hitch hiking one day to shooting practice out at Narrabeen Lakes. He was the object of desire for a whole rnage of men, who thought there was nothing more exciting than a 14-year-old boy. He stuck out his thumb and they screached to a halt. They didn't have to hint very much for him to be readily available. They puffed and they panted and they licked, and all of a sudden he discovered a source of power and affection, even if fleeting. Later, when he turned 15, Old John Mason, a friend of his father's, would pull up beside him in his nice, low slung Jaguar. Want to get in he would ask. He always got in. They would go back to his house. If only his father knew. Then there'd be trouble. But he never told him, he never told anyone, he just started hitch hiking wherever he went.

If his home life was miserable, suddenly there was another world where he was the centre of attention, plied with alcohol and money and their dribbling hands, touching him, touching him, because they couldn't get enough. You're so beautiful, they would pant, and he let them do whatever they wanted. Which usually wasn't much, suck him off, stare at his young frame, and he looked young for his age, which perhaps made the crime even worse, although no one thought of it as a crime back then. It was just boys being boys in a subterranean world, where everything was illegal and the real world, the solid middle class world of morality and churches, the place where the belts kept sneaking out aqt him, a thankless, cruel and indiffernet place, was hidden and gone, unable to hurt him. Their hands spread all over him and he did whatever they asked, it was a mystery to him. He couldn't see what all the excitmenet was all about. Come quick, get it over with, I want the alcohol, was all he could think.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8160341.stm

The Indonesian capital Jakarta is getting back to business after two US-owned luxury hotels were hit by twin bombs on Friday.

The attacks killed nine people and injured dozens more.

Police suspect they were the work of the Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohamed Top, believed to have links to the radical Islamist group Jemaah Islamiah.

Indonesia had been making progress against militants and held a peaceful presidential election earlier in July.

The streets of Jakarta were filled with the usual cacophony of cars, trucks and motorcycles.

People in the city were getting back to business - the first day back at work after the deadly attacks that took place last Friday.

The crowds that had gathered around the bombing site over the weekend and on Monday's holiday to pay their respects were slowly thinning out.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25816069-601,00.html

A GROUP of Taliban suicide bombers have tried to storm government buildings and a military base in two cities in eastern Afghanistan killing four people.
Six suicide bombers, some of them also carrying guns, tried to enter several government buildings in Gardez but were shot dead before reaching their targets, Rohullah Samoon, a provincial government spokesman told AFP.

"One of the bombers detonated in front of the intelligence department killing three intelligence officers. The other bombers were killed by security forces," he added.

Two other bombers were killed in exchanges of fire with police in Jalalabad as they tried to fight their way into the city airport, a base for Afghan and foreign troops forces, said the relevant spokesman, Ahmad Zia Abdulzai.

He could not give more details but a doctor in the city's hospital told AFP that one dead policeman was brought to the hospital.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/global-warming/rudd-picks-howard-minister-for-emissions-job-20090721-drij.html

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has appointed former Coalition environment minister Robert Hill to head a key element of the Government's emissions trading scheme.

Mr Hill will chair the Australian Carbon Trust, a $75 million initiative that will promote energy efficiency in homes and small businesses, and allow individuals to feel they are making a difference by letting them buy carbon permits.

Mr Hill held the environment portfolio in the Howard government and his appointment has the potential to embarrass Malcolm Turnbull, also an environment minister under John Howard.

Mr Turnbull is grappling with trying to achieve a consensus in the Coalition on climate change.

The Senate is due to vote on August 13 on Labor's emissions trading scheme and the Coalition has agreed to vote the scheme down.

Killing Parking Cops

2009-07-21T06:14:00.007+10:00

*

I had the choice to do something more pleasing if I had wished, and I was paid, if not munificently, at least adequately. I chose the disagreeable neighbourhood in which I practiced because, medically speaking, the poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich; their pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder, seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. No doubt I also felt my services would be more valuable there: in other words, that I had some kind of duty to perform. Perhaps for that reason, like the prisoner on his release, I feel I have paid my debt to society. Certainly the work has taken a toll on me, and it is time to do something else. Someone else can do battle with the metastasizing social pathology of Great Britain while I lead a life aesthetically more pleasing to me.

Theodore Dalrymple.

There were so many days flying by, he was shocked at the way his life had disappeared. Where were all the great works? Why had everything disappeared in clouds of smoke? Literally. From the grand days of the Aquarius Festival, when it felt as if the world was turning on its axis and he was at the centre of it, a part of a greater movement, sent by the Divine to record all that was, all that ever would be. Now he was a doddering old man with a limited life span. And everything was going down the chute. There wasn't enough time in one day to do everything he wanted. He walked and he walked: taking seriously the old maxim, if you can't talk it out walk it out. That was very important to him. There in the cold of the pre-dawn, on the mostly deserted streets, Major the dog scuttling along in front or behind him. He could feel them sleeping in their houses; and they would never know how he had lingered over them like some damp, evil spirit, watching jealously their simple physicality, their uncomplicated embrace of life.

He saw Don from the Kincumber Spiritual Retreat, all wound up, critical of the pack mentality of the group, running, clustering, in fields of gold, our spirits united across divine dysfunction, shadows and shallows and distorted hope. He was sure he was going to fail. Nothing made sense anymore. All the old dreams had vanished. He was fearful he had become one of those leached out people he had never wanted to be, those vacuums of charisma without ambition, without goals, seemingly without talents. What do you want to be? Nothing. Did you ever have any childhood dreams? No. Wasn't there anything you ever aspired to? No. They sat in their vacuums, their bodies giving off the smell of death even though they had recently washed, their hair still damp. Doesn't anything happen in that damned head of yours, he felt like shouting, standing up and stepping towards, strangling. You can't be that much of a dead head. You can't be so totally vacuous.

Get a proper job dog, he shouted at the parking cop, who had only just caught him after the malfunctioning metre ran out early. This was a disgrace; and they could never be wise. The tyranny of the parking police have destroyed Sydney as a reasonable place to live, wasted thousands of man hours as people are forced to move their cars constantly, and led to the employment of cadres of working stiffs, goons coating the streets, lurking around corners, watching every move of the populace, totalitarian in their instincts. While the left wing counsellors held extravagant lunches for themselves on the proceeds of ordinary working people who couldn't find somewhere to park. It was a disgusting disgrace getting worse as other sources of revenue for councils dried up. The tyranny became ever present. The only alternative public transport: crowded, dirty, full of the smells of the unwashed crushed together. Why was there no way out?

He took it personally, the destruction of the city he had once loved. He couldn't just go and visit a friend in Paddington without confronting a major drama about where to park, coins for the metres, constantly having to check his car. He would cheerfully have exterminated the parking police from the planet, just as sometimes he would have liked to have the power to make the traffic in front of him disappear, hundreds of people daily disappearing without explanation, their families, if they had families, searching for them fruitlessly. When the true story was they had vanished because they had got in his way; and his car drove down the highway making everybody in front of him disappear. How irresponsible. How fascistic. And yet the ever growing power of the state was already doing much the same, crushing the spirit of the populace. He couldn't resist. The fight was bigger than just one person.

That others didn't share his passions and hatreds he never understood. Why didn't everybody fantasise about killing parking police? Of obliterating them from the planet? Their very ordinariness was mirrored all around him, and he thought there were ways to cure what was clearly a costly disease, these people, totalitarian scum who had become the instruments of the state, did not deserve to exist. They could persecute others with impunity, clearly with no conscience. Their shackles, their controls, deserved to be cast off. They themselves deserved the most miserable of deaths. He saw the parking cop scuttling away from him as he approached his car, ashamed, as if the ticket he had left on his wind shield was really excrement. Get a proper job dog he shouted as loud as he could, startling the office workers queueing for a bus opposite. The inspector never looked up, scuttling away in embarrassment. Shouldn't he be the one embarrassed for going off like a chook in public? Not for one second. He ripped the ticket out from under his wind shield wiper, screwed it up and threw it on the ground in disgust, not even bothering to look at the amount. May ill health, tragedy and a terrible sadness follow you all the days of your life, he chanted in an evil incantation, aiming his hatred at the rapidly disappearing back of the parking cop. I don't understand why someone doesn't go around murdering them, he said, I'm sane and I hate them. The person he was talking to, a random walking past, raised a questioning eyebrow. He got in his car and drove off, gunning the engine to express annoyance. As if anyone, in this ruthless, totalitarian place, could care less how he felt.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8159788.stm

Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab's confession took everyone by surprise - even his own legal team.

As news of his confession spread, the Mumbai courtroom became packed with reporters.

The shock came on Monday morning, when the court was in the process of recording evidence. The suspect told the judge he wanted to say something.

After speaking to his lawyer very briefly, Mr Qasab said: "I accept my guilt."

Judge M L Tahiliyani asked him to what was he pleading guilty. Mr Qasab admitted that he had carried out the firing at Mumbai's railway station in November 2008.

The judge then heard arguments from prosecution and defence lawyers over whether a confession could be recorded at this stage of the trial.

When it was noted by the court that he could indeed make the confession, Mr Qasab proceeded to give a detailed account of how he and nine others came to Mumbai from Karachi last November, and the training that led up to it.

Speaking for several hours, he first described what happened when he and accomplice Abu Ismail entered the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) railway station.

"In CST, Abu Ismail and I started firing at the public there with our AK-47 rifles. Ismail was throwing grenades also. I was firing," he said.

"We went ahead towards the hall. The police caught up with us at the time and started firing at us. We retaliated. Ismail took position behind the trains which were parked. I took position behind him. I fired at the police."

He then described how they left the station and headed to the Cama hospital - confronting four people in one of the wards.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/21/2632077.htm

The Aboriginal Legal Service in Western Australia is calling for a ban on police stun guns after a petrol sniffer caught on fire in the state's far east yesterday afternoon.

Police say the 36-year-old man burst into flames when he was shot with a Taser at the Aboriginal community of Warburton in Goldfields.

It is alleged the man was threatening officers with a container of petrol and a cigarette lighter.

The man was flown to Royal Perth Hospital with third degree burns to his face, arms and chest. He is in a critical but stable condition.

Senior police say an investigation is underway, but it is unlikely the Taser started the fire.

Aboriginal Legal Service chief executive Dennis Eggington says there is mounting proof that Tasers are dangerous.

"I think that the jury's still out on whether or not Taser is a lethal weapon in itself, particularly if you've got a part of the population that is very vulnerable to this type of electric shocks," he said.

Mr Eggington says the man was a petrol sniffer, and Tasers should not be used on Aboriginal people who suffer from a range of health problems.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/20/space.apollo.anniversary/

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The first man on the moon marked the 40th anniversary of his historic achievement with characteristic understatement Monday, calling the program that put him on the lunar surface "a good thing to do."
President Obama welcomes, from left, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong.

President Obama welcomes, from left, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong.

Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong joined crewmates Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin at the National Air and Space Museum, capping a day of commemorations that included a stop at the White House. During brief remarks at the museum, he said the mission was the climax of a "staggeringly complex" endeavor that "required the very best in creativity, determination and perseverance that could be assembled in the American workplace."

"Those successes were very impressive 40 years ago, but they were not miraculous," Armstrong said. "They were the result of the imagination and inventive minds of the people in the Apollo project since its inception eight years earlier."

The July 20, 1969, moon landing followed four test missions and came just two years after a fire that killed the first Apollo crew. Six lunar landings followed. A seventh flight, Apollo 13, was forced to abort its landing after an oxygen tank explosion crippled the spacecraft; the crew used its lunar lander as a "lifeboat" for much of their harrowing return to Earth.

Armstrong called the Apollo program "a superb national enterprise" that "left a lasting imprint on society and history."

"Our knowledge of the moon increased a thousandfold and more," he said. "Technologies were developed for interplanetary navigation and travel. Our home planet has been seen from afar, and that perspective has caused us to think about its and our significance. Children inspired by the excitement of space flight have come to appreciate the wonder of science, the beauty of mathematics and the precision of engineering."

He concluded, "Apollo was a good thing to do."

Sydney Universtiy.

Rock Bottoms

2009-07-21T04:07:00.008+10:00

*

My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for fourteen years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind.

Theodore Dalrymple.

There were fateful moments. There was no excuse. He found himself in situations he would never have believed, fateful days cursed by God. The last time he overdosed was the worst of them all. The children were crying in the lounge room, shocked and scared their beloved dad had passed out, again, not understanding what was going on. Suzy had to go next door to ring the ambulance, again, because the phone had been cut off, again. And sadness crept through every bone of his body, every second of his life, permeated his every last move. He had been chronically depressed for so long he didn't know there was any other way to be. He lived in the mud at the bottom of the aquarium, the water above made of pure mercury, crushing his soul and his spirit. Claws on an ancient sea floor, scuttling on the bed of an ancient sea. Barely able to breathe. He was struggling into moments, even days, struggling into a consciousness he could not understand.

There was no relief, no compassion, no understanding. His linkage with the real world was entirely marginal. He could see things but they made no sense. Days of sobriety were few and far between, and he felt so crushingly terrible in those moments, on those days, as The Drift of which he had always been so frightened, came swamping in. Frightened to move, frightened to stay the same. He got home from another long day at the office, another day of indignity, distrust, despair, another day when he had tried determinedly to stay off the booze, hadn't had a shot, was starting, perhaps, to get his life on track. They had just moved yet again to a new house, after losing the home they had owned due to bankruptcy. Due to using. He had so desperately wanted to provide his children with a happy childhood. To do the right thing. And here they were in this dreadful place, next to the railway line, the place where he could hear every rustle in the long terrible nights, where the sounds of the trains pierced his fitful sleep, where he had never been so depressed in all his life.

Here, Suzy had said, pushing the loaded syringe across the kitchen table towards him. Still want to stay off it? They were supposedly broke and staying off the gear; getting things back together after all that had happened. That's what they had agreed to do. To be a happy couple again. To look after the kids properly. To stop stressing out all the concerned relatives. He was shattered in every last bone of his body, and reached across the table, more or less without hesitation and picked it up. And did what he had always done, barely taking seconds. The next thing he remembered was the ambulance officer slapping him around. He could hear the children crying in the next room. And a young, handsome, blond ambulance officer slapping him around, saying: "Mate, you've got to get yourself together. You've got children."
He looked up at him and said: "They'd be better off with the life insurance."

"Ask your kids, do they want the money or do they want their dad," he said. And the comment cut straight through to the core. And he went back to meetings the next day. And while there had been slips and betweens, sometimes backward sometimes forward, that was the beginning. All the doctors, the counsellors, the groups, none of it had ever got through to him like that one ambulance officer, who probably long ago forgot what he said to some overdosed idiot lying on the floor. With the children crying in the next room. And the days filled with terror passing on a slow wheel, and his own overwhelming sense of hopelessness turning into something resembling regret, and rather than bravado, contempt for his fellow man, he began to be human. For while he cared nought for himself, he did care for his kids. He couldn't hurt them. He couldn't drag them through any more suffering, through the destruction of their cosy dream. Their favourite song of the era ran: "Uh oh, we're in trouble, something came along and burst our bubble." How true it was.

And so after that fateful day, when he finally realised he had become a person he had never wanted to be, an irresponsible lunatic passed out on the floor, a bad father, he went back to meetings and started to stay sober and straight for longer and longer periods. And their lives transformed in ways he could never have imagined. Suzy left; in what was a far from clean break. The children clung closer and closer to him as the years passed. When they were about ten, driving along in the car, one of them asked: "Dad, remember when you used to faint all the time, what was wrong? Was it some sort of health problem?" Yes, he said, but could not think of an appropriate lie. And then, what seemed like overnight, although it was more like 14 years later, they turned into gallumphing teenagers and the terrible fight to be a single father, to protect his children, was long in the past. And the days passed slowly on a revolving planet, a giant sphere hanging in space, and little things, little stories, children crying in lounge rooms long ago while the larger world transformed itself utterly, became nothing but historical anecdotes: the day he got sober, the day he went back to meetings, the day his recovery began. The day he learnt gratitude for an anonymous ambulance officer.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/lin-family-killing-a-murder-spree-of-incredible-rage/story-e6freuy9-1225752423144

ALL five victims of the brutal North Epping family murder suffered facial injuries so severe they cannot be visually identified - a likely indicator they knew their killer.

The incredible rage involved in the killings extended to the entire Lin family - including the young brothers, Henry, 12, and Terry, 9.

Police now fear for the safety of the only surviving family member, 15-year-old daughter Brenda Lin, whose overseas school trip probably saved her life.

She is now staying in a secret location with relatives.

And while police are not ruling out that the murderer was a stranger, multiple injuries to the head and particularly the face are internationally recognised as being an indicator of an emotional relationship between the killer and the victim.

Yesterday, as a forensic pathologist began a post mortem on mother 43-year-old Yun Li Lin, The Daily Telegraph learned dental records and DNA will need to be used to formally identify all five victims.

Sources said the crime was unusual in many aspects, including that the killer or killers who struck the family after midnight on Friday in their Boundary St home had maintained a consistent level of rage with all victims as they bludgeoned the sleeping family with an as-yet unidentified weapon.

Homicide squad commander Detective Superintendent Geoff Beresford, described the killings as "intensely personal".

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hBM1En9CVe1jxdLMQ-Ed02YDJTMQ

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki embarks on a trip to the United States on Tuesday grappling with strained ties with Washington and pressure over stalled national reconciliation efforts.

Maliki will meet President Barack Obama for the first time since US troops withdrew from Iraqi cities at the end of June, a milestone in Iraq's rehabilitation since the 2003 US-led invasion.

He has been keen to stress the early success of Iraq's security forces since the US pullback, but relations with Washington have hit a bump over Baghdad's failure to improve relations between its Shiite, Sunni and Kurd communities.

Maliki is also hoping to drum up investment for a country in dire need of rebuilding after years of sanctions and war.

"His visit is an opportunity to make progress on questions (regarding security), and to discuss economic, industrial and education cooperation," Ali Moussawi, one of Maliki's advisors, told AFP.

But he added: "The prime minister is telling all those who visit Iraq that he rejects their intervention in internal Iraqi affairs."

Maliki kicks off his visit with talks on Tuesday with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon likely to focus on a dispute over multi-billion dollar reparations for Kuwait stemming from the 1990 invasion ordered by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jSM16rQ_AA3cTBNwK_UJ26lRHBeAD99HR2HO0

As of Sunday, July 19, 2009, at least 4,327 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The figure includes nine military civilians killed in action. At least 3,460 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

The AP count is one fewer than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Friday at 10 a.m. EDT.

The British military has reported 179 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia and Georgia, three each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, one death each.

Sydney University, Sydney, Australia.

Save Now

2009-07-20T03:37:00.003+10:00

*

Like love affairs, bars depend on a delicate mix of timing, chemistry, lighting, luck and--maybe above all--generosity. From the start Steve declared that no one at Dickens would feel slighted. His burgers would be three-inch souffl_s of filet mignon, his closing time would be negotiable, no matter what the law said, and his bartenders would give an extra--extra--long pour. A standard drink at Dickens would be a double anywhere else. A double would leave you cross-eyed. A triple would “cream your spinach,” according to my mother's younger brother, my Uncle Charlie, the first bartender Steve ever hired.

A true son of Manhasset, Steve believed in booze. Everything he was, he owed to booze. His father, a Heineken distributor, died and left Steve a small fortune when he was young. Steve's daughter was named Brandy, his speedboat was named Dipsomania, and his face, after years of homeric drinking, was that telltale shade of scarlet. He saw himself as a Pied Piper of Alcohol, and the pie-eyed residents of Manhasset saw him that way, too. Through the years he developed a fanatic following, a legion of devotees. A Cult of Steve.

J.R. Moehringer. The Tender Bar.

Oh well, he could hear the drumbeat, the single throb of inspiration, and at the same time the frozen moments of peak experiences like sentinels across the days. High in the Himalayas, those strange rare grey green flowering plants at the cusp of the glacier, high in the mountains, almost inaccessible. And it seemed then, oh how profound were these strings of thought, that the most beautiful things in life were all inaccessible, as if you had to strive to see them. But the modern world had undone all these theories. The greatest art galleries in the world were a mouse click away, the deepest thinkers, the most interesting philosophers. He could see what was happening and didn't understand. The one step forward and two steps backward almost killed him. Now was the time to be quiet, humble, to forget his own eccentricity and flamboyance and to knuckle down. For all was a saving grace.

Those bars he had loved so much vanished as nothing but the sodden reminiscences of an aging alcoholic, fantasising about his youth. Almost all was lost, so much time wasted. They sat in circles, exploring the deep. For all the ancient story telling of the villages of old was gone from this modern place, where boasting was common place and everything was sad, wicked, awry. He was trying his best to be someone else. The fingers of past lives kept reaching out to him, now that it was approaching time to disengage, or to at least plan the disengagement. This body would not last. He knew that. But before that ancient process began, before he sought wisdom at the end of this physical life, he had to think clearly; he had to take a reconnaissance mission through his own past. The ultimate self obsession. The only path to rescue. The only way to understand those beautiful bars, the profound importance he had placed in them, the fleeting friends he had thought he had made.

We were lost, dancing on a pin, and if he needed to get in touch with his inner drunken old queen, the crotchety old right winger, the cringing child, the accomplished intellectual, then he needed to abandon all relationship with the present. There was much to do and little time to do it in. Shafts of spring sunlight shone through the dark forest. The manic rustling of the trees throughout his childhood vanished. And he faced one simple truth: he was alone. His life was pointless. All the records, all the writing in the world would get him nowhere. There was no salvation on the physical plain. If you ask for forgiveness perhaps you could forgive yourself. If that made sense. He needed to escape the dudgeon which had enslaved him for decades. The prison of self; of past concepts, of dying, degraded, outdated belief systems. The bush fire was burning on the outskirts of the city, and he was there, always there, reporter's pad in hand, skirting the charcoaled remains of buildings, the stick like drama of the burnt trees, the flattened, scorched earth.

But not this year. He was no longer a general reporter, having been shuffled on into an editorial role. He had always believed the word was his only destiny, his only justification and only worthwhile activity. The fingers splaying across the keyboard had been his only destiny. To observe. To record. To maintain laughter in the face of almost certain defeat. To find beauty and dignity in the tragedy of others. "If you see me coming you're having the worst day of your life," he would joke. But now the joke meant nothing. He had seen so many come and go. Ruthless frames, ruthless institutions, history itself a cruel, thankless master. The children had provided rationale, he had to maintain a roof over their heads. He had to keep getting up and going to work. It had not been like that in the beginning, and when he wandered into the Sydney Morning Herald in the mid 1980s it had all been part of a drunken see saw, a desire to create, a fascination for the published word.

Published being the operative word; for so much of what he had written had never seen the light of day. Those curling sheets stuck on old, unpainted terrace walls. His friend the prostitute came by to see him, there in that beautiful apartment overlooking Woolloomoolloo. It was all about drugs with her, the coming, the going, the work itself; everything was about getting enough money to maintain her massive habit. And so it was that her thunderous thighs plunged together, and the ethnic gentlemen came in a quick, excited splat, and they were out the door and the next one on the way in within minutes. The security was poor, there on Riley Street, in that notorious little huddle of small, dilapidated terraces, and so often, at a terribly loose end, he would wander down from the warehouse where he was trying to eke out a living as a freelance journalist and hung in the doorway while she went upstairs. Why did he think such a squalid thing would be a memory worth saving? Why was he drawn to the world's red light districts, when he never partook?

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j_mcWu1t32uPUF5qV762pyIpjQVAD99HKFD00

WASHINGTON — The measure of what humanity can accomplish is a size 9 1/2 bootprint. It belongs to Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. It will stay on the moon for millions of years with nothing to wipe it away, serving as an almost eternal testament to a can-do mankind.

Apollo 11 is the glimmering success that failures of society are contrasted against: "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we ..."

What put man on the moon 40 years ago was an audacious and public effort that the world hasn't seen before or since. It required rocketry that hadn't been built, or even designed, in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy declared the challenge. It needed an advance in computerization that had not happened yet. NASA would have to learn how to dock separate spaceships, how to teach astronauts to walk in space, even how to keep them alive in space — all tasks so difficult experts weren't sure they were possible.

Forty years later, the moon landing is talked about as a generic human achievement, not an American one. But Apollo at the time was more about U.S. commitment and ingenuity.

Historian Douglas Brinkley called the Apollo program "the exemplary moment of America's we-can-do-anything attitude." After the moon landing, America got soft, he said, looking for the quick payoff of a lottery ticket instead of the sweat-equity of buckling down and doing something hard.

In years since, when America faces a challenge, leaders often look to the Apollo program for inspiration. In 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer, his staffers called it "a moon shot for cancer." Last year, then-candidate Barack Obama and former Vice President Al Gore proposed a massive effort to fight global warming, comparing it to Apollo 11. An environmentalists' project to tackle climate change and promote renewable energy took the name "Apollo Alliance."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/us/20iht-letter.html

WASHINGTON — Senator Lindsey Graham, the engaging South Carolina Republican, lectured the Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor last week that if he had made a comment like hers that a “wise Latina woman” often reaches better conclusions, it would have a been a career-ender.

The cable-news commentators concurred and the nominee, playing the create-no-waves confirmation game, expressed regret. Actually, her remark was rational and Mr. Graham’s analysis flawed.

Suppose, for example, he had said: “I would hope that a wise, white Southern male with the richness of growing up in South Carolina would more often than not be more sensitive on the issue of race relations than a white Northerner who hasn’t lived that life.” While some might have disagreed, most of his constituents would have agreed, and his future would be as bright as ever.

The Sotomayor hearings followed the now-predictable pattern of partisan-edged questions with evasive answers, where little is learned about either the jurist or the law. Almost none of the questions were unfair or even that tough; compared with earlier confirmation sessions, it was tame stuff.

What endures, however, is the spectacle of middle-aged, white Republicans lecturing the first Latin female nominee about the irrelevance of race, gender and life experiences for a judge. Even Mr. Graham, one of the more enlightened lawmakers — a strong immigration advocate and a thoroughly modern Republican — didn’t get it.

Others, especially the committee’s top-ranking Republican, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, were fixated not on Judge Sotomayor’s 17-year record on the federal bench — she would have the most extensive judicial background of any justice in the past 100 years — but on a few of her speeches suggesting she has been shaped by her experiences and ethnic heritage.

Instead of raising doubts about the nomination, the Sessions obsession only reinforced the picture of a narrow Republican Party uncomfortable with differences and resisting diversity.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/a-labor-loner-who-has-given-it-all-away-20090718-dp1z.html

The transformation of Peter Garrett from environmental activist to passive government minister is now complete, writes Kerry-Anne Walsh.

When Peter Garrett was wooed to the ALP by Mark Latham and a posse of clever strategists, it was an even bigger political coup than the snaffling of Cheryl Kernot from the Democrats.

The Midnight Oil frontman was seen as a rare vote-catching beast who could appeal to a number of demographics: first-time voters just tuning into his protest music, baby boomers who chanted his anti-anything songs, and conservationists who loved his take-no-prisoners approach when head of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Parachuted into the safe Labor seat of Kingsford Smith in Sydney, Garrett landed in Canberra at the 2004 election and has, in quietly dramatic fashion, been divesting himself ever since of his pre-Labor skin.

Approving the Four Mile uranium mine last week was the starkest example to date of the transformation of Garrett from anti-nuclear and environmental activist to passive government minister. It was an even bigger slap in the face to his past than giving the nod last year to a Tasmanian pulp mill.

It's doubtful starry-eyed rockers such as Silverchair's Daniel Johns would again think of scrawling "PG for PM" on the stage wall at the annual ARIA awards, as he did in 2006 when the Oils were inducted into the hall of fame.

It's hard to know whether Garrett slept well in the days leading up to the decision, announced on Wednesday, to allow the South Australian mine to proceed. It was, after all, only two years ago at Labor's national conference that he spoke passionately against expanding Labor's three-uranium-mines-only policy.

"I have always maintained and indeed committed myself to the notion that Australia should be nuclear-free - that our country is as far into nuclear activities as it ever should be," he spruiked. "I have long been opposed to uranium mining, and I remain opposed to it. I am unapologetic about this. In fact, I am proud of it."

He was on the losing side of the argument and his decision last week was a direct result of Labor agreeing at that conference to lift the ban on new mines.

Disregard For Convention

2009-07-20T02:32:00.005+10:00

*

..disregard of convention was a virtue in itself.

Of course, it might well have been a virtue, or it might equally well have been a vice, depending on the ethical content and social effect of the convention in question. But there is little doubt that an oppositional attitude towards social rules is what wins the modern intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals. And the prestige that intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to nonintellectuals. What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare recipient - the very people most in need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them hope of improvement. The result is moral, spiritual and emotional squalor, engendering fleeting pleasures and prolonged suffering...

Critics of social institutions and traditions, including writers of imaginative literature, should always be aware that civilisation needs conversation at least as much as it needs change, and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles, is capable of doing much - indeed devastating - harm.

Theodore Dalrymple: Our Culture, What's Left Of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

This was the end of the locked doors, flimsy corridors, shallow pointless labyrinths without end. Ashley, Ashley, tomorrow is another day. He gasped, because that was all that was left. His mind kept going in loops, back through to the Kincumber Spiritual Retreat, back to the pressure to make a fool of himself; the happenstance, the magnificent St Joseph's buildings, McKillop Drive, McKillop Chapel. The older nuns. The sacrifice. The profound shifts in psyche we all prayed for. But he had not been deserted, it only felt that way. The houses creeping into their own cold in the early hours of the morning, the quiet views across the inlet, the rustle of the water birds, the hint of a coming sunrise, he saw it all in his insomniac state; and then later, when the sun was up, matched the shouts of children or boys heading off to the wharf with fishing rods against what he had imagined, the old, the derelict, the ancient cold. It was important to be quiet, humble, gracious, to tell the truth, to be awake to his own artifice.

Because when all was pretense truth was difficult to determine. When every construct was manufactured, they could be easily blown away. He was no longer seeking shelter, he was looking to build his own. He felt like an hysteric flinging himself upon a burning funeral pyre, but why the self sacrifice he would never know. At the mere hint of a feeling, he was willing to die. The funeral pyres of India, where they sacrificed the widows in days of old, burnt through his imagination as one of the most barbaric of practices. Yet here, at any moment, the same fires were burning and he was willing to sacrifice himself, just to escape. This shrieking, hysterical nonsense wrapped itself up in his head, and made it even more difficult to present the calm, gracious image he was working towards. He was shrivelled in decay; and so distressed by his own mistakes, he knew now he would die a street alcoholic and there was no escape.

For a brief respite he thought he would escape his own destiny; and then his own weak willed failures pounded it in on him: he was doomed. Might as well give up now. That had always been the way, in his derelict soul. Give up now. Failure is inevitable, so drown your sorrows. Total abstinence is not a virtue. He can sit in the corner pub and become at one with the masses, the flow, that very very beautiful flow of alcohol coursing through his veins, warming his heart and his limbs and warding off the ancient cold most effectively, was all that he wanted. The company was always encouraging. They saw him as a success; for their own triumphs were rare, and the alcohol had already lowered their expectations. He had been shocked, sober, to discover their miserable, dismal status, the tediousness of those lives he had once celebrated; could hardly wait to finish work to get back down there amongst them.

There in the beer garden they had made home, the heater burning the cold air and making inviting this tiny stretch of enclosed concrete that wasn't really a beer garden, more a tiny square of inner-city backyard where they went for cigarettes and gossip. He was so pleased. He listened to the blokes telling jokes, Justin, who lived upstairs and maintained his cockney accent and his cockney stance, talking casually about wanking off after having seen something to stir him, Margaret about to embark on another tale everyone had heard before, Bridgette preparing to say something even more boring than last time she interrupted the conversation, Gerschie crackling about his own misfortune, the pain that was haunting him from his broken bones, his smashed body the product of building work and a love of motorcylces; not to mention being bashed several times by gangs of aboriginals when he went off the main drag to score. All of these characters he had come to love.

And now, back in Sydney after a brief weekend at Tambar Springs, checking everything was where it was meant to be, he surfaced slowly, batting off the depression which threatened to engulf him, thinking time and again of ways to escape. He was shattered, yet quietly dignified. His own demise was of no importance. The story he was meant to tell was bigger than any one person. The in-between places, the in-between people, all of it was part of a deeper compromise; and yet he had no choice but to plough forward. He was convinced there was a better way out but couldn't find it. He needed an assistant, an extra worker, and he was proud of the dark ages and the stamina he had shown in bouncing back, again and again. But the doors get narrower, they say, and the busts more lethal. He didn't know about that. All he knew was he didn't want to feel derelict in the soul anymore. He wanted freedom and respite. He wanted genuine happiness. And there was no sponsor, no over-arching intelligence, no God, who was going to provide it all on a platter. He picked up the ball and ran with it.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/soldier-killed-in-unwinnable-war-20090719-dpk3.html

THE Government knows it is pursuing a war in Afghanistan that it cannot win and that will make little difference to global terrorism, a leading defence analyst says.

Hugh White of the Lowy Institute and the Australian National University said last night that he did not believe winning or losing in Afghanistan would change the terrorism situation in Indonesia or anywhere else.

With an 11th Australian soldier, Private Benjamin Ranaudo, 22, dead in Afghanistan and more than 400 more troops leaving soon to fight there, the Government has been quick to link the war to global terrorism and the Jakarta bombings on Friday.

"The question is whether what we are doing in Afghanistan is going to succeed," Professor White said. "The Government cannot justify committing troops unless there is a reasonable chance they can succeed. I do not think the Government is persuaded that there is a significant chance of success in Afghanistan."

Professor White said he thought the Government feared that it would look weak if it withdrew from Afghanistan.

"If they are not convinced they have a reasonable chance of succeeding they have really got to ask themselves why they are asking Australian soldiers to die. I don't believe there is a reasonable chance of winning in Afghanistan and I don't believe they believe there is a reasonable chance of winning in Afghanistan."

Private Ranaudo was killed on Saturday as his unit surrounded a walled compound in the Baluchi Valley while searching for suspected insurgents.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25806608-5013404,00.html

THE three Australians killed in the Marriott hotel attack took the worst of the blast having sat at the corner of the breakfast table closest to the doorway the suicide bomber used to enter the room.

Mining executive Garth McEvoy, diplomat Craig Senger and human resources manager Nathan Verity never stood a chance - and would not have seen the bomber enter the room behind them. Those at the head of the table were more fortunate, shielded from the explosion by two large pillars.

Also killed inside the Marriott lounge were New Zealand businessman Tim McKay and Indonesian head waiter Evert Mokodompit. Numerous people, including the ANZ's Scott Merrillees, were wounded.

One of the men inside the room, the former head of Rio Tinto's Indonesian operations and member of the Australian-Indonesian Business Council, Noke Kiroyan, had no doubt the Marriott bomber had directly targeted the 19 businessmen who had gathered.

"That meeting was specifically for a single purpose," Mr Kiroyan said. "I would say the guy didn't turn left to the Sailendra coffee shop but turned right to the JW Marriott lounge, which is exclusively used by our group for these discussions."

A US embassy source confirmed Mr Kiroyan's view that the businessmen were targeted.

"The way it was described to me, he had a backpack strapped on the front and he had a stroller bag, like a pull-carriage (suitcase)," the embassy official told The Australian.

"The pull-carriage is the one that did all the damage to a close colleague of mine. It basically ripped everyone through the floor and that's why all the legs are shattered and the impacts are in the lower extremities. The upper one (bomb) basically blew the suicide bomber apart and anything that came out of that hit people from the top.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/19/AR2009071900705.html

GURGAON, India, July 19 -- The stage was set for a demonstration of how India and the United States could work together to reduce the impact of climate change: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton touring an environmentally-friendly "green" office building on the outskirts of the sprawling capital of New Delhi.
This Story

But the clash between developed and developing countries over climate change intruded on the high-profile photo opportunity midway through Clinton's three-day tour of India. Indian Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh complained about U.S. pressure to cut a worldwide deal and Clinton countered that the Obama administration's push for a binding agreement would not sacrifice India's economic growth.

As dozens of cameras recorded the scene, Ramesh declared that India would not commit to a deal that would require it to meet targets to reduce emissions. "It is not true that India is running away from mitigation," he said. But "India's position, let me be clear, is that we are simply not in the position to take legally binding emissions targets."

"No one wants to in any way stall or undermine the economic growth that is necessary to lift millions more out of poverty," Clinton countered. "We also believe that there is a way to eradicate poverty and develop sustainability that will lower significantly the carbon footprint."
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Both sides appearing to be playing to the Indian audience, with Ramesh taking the opportunity to reinforce India's bottom line.

Before the visit, U.S. officials were acutely aware that the Indian government has faced criticism at home for making what they considered relatively modest concessions on reducing greenhouse emissions earlier this month at a meeting of major economies. A leaked e-mail from former Indian negotiator Surya Sethi to other negotiators -- in which he asserted the decision would make India poorer -- generated a firestorm here.

Shellharbour.

Now Is The Time

2009-07-19T22:00:00.004+10:00

*

If not for you, babe, I couldn't find the door
Couldn't even see the floor
I'd be sad and blue if not for you.

If not for you, baby, I'd lay awake all night
Wait for the morning light
To shine in through
But it will not be new if not for you.

If not for you, my sky would fall, rain would gather too
Without your love I'd be nowhere at all
I'd be lost if not for you
And you know it's true.

If not for you, my sky would fall, rain would gather too
Without your love I'd be nowhere at all
Oh what would I do if not for you ?

If not for you, winter would have no spring
I couldn't hear the robins sing
I just wouldn't have a clue
Anyway it wouldn't ring true if not for you
If not for you, if not for you.

Bob Dylan.

There had been so many heroics. The fire was burning, keeping his legs warm, but otherwise it was freezing at Tambar. Luckily there was some firewood left from his last visit, a mix of ironwood and box, the ironwood providing the best coals and the box the best flame. Everyone knew their wood around here. Burns right to a fine ash they would say proudly of the local yellow box. Nonetheless we were burnt, damaged goods. Taking refuge from the city, a brief respite. The city had become impossible, and belonged to others than him. There was no respite. The traffic was interminable. We made our snail trails and followed them religiously every day, simply for survival’s sake.

If there was hope, there were also backward steps; and some days were one step forward and two steps back. Life was like that. The early dawn tinged the surrounding forest, and this place felt truly his, peaceful, no harm could come here. A refuge had always been important to him, internally or externally. Too often it had been internal. Hidden behind multiple screens, manipulating the surface while staying deep behind, the puppet master, the atrophied, delinquent soul more like. Nothing had grown or matured as it should. Starved of sustenance, the controlling entity had ceased to control, too far hidden to effectively maintain the surface images. The content went awry. It was all artifice.

The time is now, the march master said, and if he heard one more blithering idiot crapping on about their higher power he’d machine gun them. Or felt like it. There was nothing in the external world worth fighting for. Possessions meant nothing to him. As long as he could comfortably survive. The sharman was still in him, those sharmans from long ago, deep in the European forests. He had once been leader of his band. Now he was in an outpost on the other side of the world, renovating an old woman’s house to its former bustling glory. No money has been spent on this house for 60 years, and the feeble efforts of the previous owners to tart it up for sale didn’t cover the ancient neglect. He had returned with love, doing chores that should have been done a long time ago.

A younger, more dynamic man would have had this place sorted long before, he thought, but the new dynamism is now, in total abstinence, in advanced spiritual concepts, in the other worlds that were blissfully shown to him. You can be rescued. You can survive. You can even triumph, at new jobs, at the completion of old projects. At the timely publishing of timely events, projects which sync perfectly with the broader news cycle and with the broader zeitgeist. Thus it was to be a perfectly linked human being, to in effect be normal, in tune with the times. That was his destiny, he sometimes thought, to perfectly reflect the times. And now the times were moving beyond him, the streets full of young people.

Orange smudged the skyline behind the trees, some of that rosy fingered dawn Homer talked about, except here it wasn’t rose, and you could feel the dry Australian bush stretching off into the farmlands across the Liverpool Plains to the low mountains in the distance. The cypress pines, dispersed with eucalypts, were silhouetted against the sunrise. The kookaburras gave their first guffaw of the morning. He had to drive back to Sydney this morning. He could hear the barking of the greyhounds up at the policeman’s house. A bellbird, or something like it, joined in the rising chorus of finches and other birds. The fire subsided slightly, to a bearable level. And he knew life was infinite, there was work to be done, progress to be made, projects to be finished. It was a better state of mind than many others.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-national/im-a-total-idiot-admits-neale-20090719-dpi4.html

I'm a total idiot, admits Neale
July 19, 2009 - 8:54PM

A British backpacker rescued after 12 days in near-freezing conditions admits he was "a total idiot" to venture ill-prepared into the rugged Blue Mountains bush.

Jamie Neale, 19, says he lived off bush tucker, including seeds and weeds, and kept warm under strips of bark when he lost his way during a 10-hour bushwalk on July 3.

After 12 days in the bush, and in apparent good health despite his ordeal, Mr Neale stumbled across hikers who led him to safety.

Mr Neale re-enacted his trek for the Nine Network's 60 Minutes program, which paid him $200,000 for his story.

Neale told the program he was badly under-prepared for the trip.

"I admit I'm a total idiot," he said.

"In the UK you can walk for a day and you'd end up in a pub.

"Out here you can get lost so easily and that. You should respect the fact, be more prepared and think about what you are doing a lot more."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/19/2630108.htm?section=world

The Federal Government has updated its travel advice for Indonesia, warning of the possibility of further terrorist attacks following Friday's deadly Jakarta hotel blasts in which nine people were killed and 55 injured.

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) is still advising Australians to reconsider their need to travel to Indonesia, including Bali.

DFAT says it continues to receive credible information that terrorists could be planning attacks and anyone deciding to travel to Indonesia should be extremely careful.

The three Australians confirmed to have died in the bombings at the Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriot hotels are mining executive Garth McEvoy, Austrade official Craig Senger and Perth businessman Nathan Verity.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says the Australian Government will do whatever it can to help the Indonesian authorities track down the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks.

"[It is] a violent barbaric act of murder where three Australians have lost their lives, and others as well," he said.

Local media in Indonesia has reported that metal detecters went off in one of the hotels on Friday after a bomber entered, however security guards still allowed entry.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25804581-661,00.html

DEFENCE confirmed tonight that the fallen Australian soldier in Afghanistan was Pte Benjamin Ranaudo from Melbourne.

Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston extended his personal condolences to the soldier’s family and friends.

“Our hearts go out to Benjamin's family during this very sad time,” he said.

“We will do everything we can to support them as they deal with their terrible loss.”

Pte Ranaudo was serving in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment based at Townsville and had been in the Army for three years.

Pte Ranaudo death has taken the number of Diggers lost in the Afghan conflict to 11.

He was killed yesterday by an anti-personnel improvised explosive device, which left another soldier fighting for his life.

Three Afghan civilians, including an 8-year-old boy, were also injured in the blast.

The Centre Could Not Hold

2009-07-17T05:06:00.003+10:00

*

Of course many bars in Manhasset, like bars everywhere, were nasty places, full of pickled people marinating in regret. Steve wanted his bar to be different. He wanted his bar to be sublime. He envisioned a bar that would cater to Manhasset's multiple personalities. A cozy pub one minute, a crazy after-hours club the next. A family restaurant early in the evening, and late at night a low-down tavern, where men and women could tell lies and drink until they dropped. Essential to Steve was the idea that Dickens would be the opposite of the outside world. Cool in the dog days, warm from the first frost until spring. His bar would always be clean and well-lighted, like the den of that perfect family we all believe exists but doesn't and never did. At Dickens everyone would feel special, though no one would stand out. Maybe my favorite story about Steve's bar concerned the man who found his way there after escaping a nearby mental hospital. No one looked askance at the man. No one asked who he was, or why he was dressed in pajamas, or why he had such a feral gleam in his eye. The gang in the barroom simply threw their arms around him, told him funny stories, and bought him drinks all day long. The only reason the poor man was eventually asked to leave was that he suddenly and for no apparent reason dropped his pants. Even then the bartenders only chided him gently, using their standard admonition: “Here now—you can't be doing that!”

J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar.

It was so clear, they were deep in the heart of it. When everything was a confabulation, a readable version of the truth, it was best to remain silent. To be composed, if not enigmatic; at least not to blurt. He was perfectly apt to tell a total stranger everything. So she shrugged, oh darling, in honour of those liquid, fabulous days, gin and tonics in the early afternoon, a river of delinquency that never stopped. He had betrayed himself so often, and then walked through the ruins into a brighter day. They were splintering. The centre could not hold. And so we were completely doomed, just like so many oblivion seekers before us; and the merry dance, the fine dance, the chiselled young faces and the earnest stare, everything possible, all of it vanished as if it had never been.

We were on a mission, not just to drown our sorrows but to live the fine destiny alcohol had prescribed us, from high to low and every dreary terrace on the way down. Oh couldn’t you be fair and reasonable? Couldn’t you cut some slack? Couldn’t we be let off just this once, you bastards? But there was no sympathy, there was no rationale; the casual cruelties of the time swept aside the talents until all was lost, lost, and he shuddered in hope that he had not made too much of a fool of himself, and that things went well in every quarter, the hand extended to help, help everyone. Doormat. The depths we went to.

The everyday, the very shocking ordinariness of the local, the Glengarry, he had rapidly developed a romance around, was shocking to him, when all his beloved characters turned out to be dreary imitations of the real thing, when they walked back and forth across the great divide and could see for certain how unevolved, how primitive, how sodden with alcohol and sorrow, these people were. His cheated destiny. When everything Margaret said was a repeat of a previous conversation, the Stollies having done marvels. Brigette, stay, stay, those imploring eyes and desperate uncertainties, when nothing was for her own good and everything was accepted as a downhill slide. When progress was infinitely backward.

The tediousness of common adventure, of the savage ordinariness and deep dysfunction tied up in the most average of days, when they ended as they began, within a few suburbs of where they grew up, where their parents had lived, and we were so broken hearted at the overwhelming tragedy, their distant lives at play on the screen, or closer to home, the deaths of our own friends. Nothing was settled anymore. He had confronted the worst of it. He had decided now, the course. It would involve heroic sacrifice and self discipline, it was a chore, a mandate, a task, this great assignment, and he would not fail them or others. He would not fail.

This was the sadness that had stalked him all those years, given away so arbitrarily, scattered aces as sheets of flesh and living cinematography tore away. There wasn’t any corrupt way to get to the higher plane. He was going to be humble and let the insistent voices of the nation’s God botherers wash over him. He was going to be free. Of turmoil, of fear. In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king; in the kingdom of confabulation, the networked corridors of lies and flimsy walls, he remained silent as the only source of armour, the only way to ensure protection, never disclose, never open up, trust no one and no thing, for all is treachery and betrayal in a house of cards. Be wary, be silent, be dignified and reserved; and never let the bastards win.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25793770-5006784,00.html

NSW police say they believe the story of British backpacker Jamie Neale -- who survived almost two weeks lost in the Blue Mountains -- and won't hold his family to promises to donate the proceeds of the sale of his story to rescue services.

The remarkable tale of lost and found has made headlines around the world, with many struggling to believe the 19-year-old from North London could have lived after 12 days in the freezing wilderness of the Blue Mountains in NSW.

Mr Neale and his family have engaged Sydney-based media agent Sean Anderson to negotiate the rights to his story.

The only words released publicly by Mr Neale came in a statement issued yesterday through the hospital. It said: "I am grateful to everybody for their help and support."

As he slowly regained his strength in hospital yesterday, further details emerged of what pulled him through his ordeal.

A feast of fast food may have helped save the teenager -- for the first few days at least -- after he gorged himself on pizza at his youth hostel the night before setting off on the longest "day walk" of his life.

And the teenager's former teachers believe bush skills learned through the Duke of Edinburgh Award program and his natural threshold to withstand cold temperatures set him up with the best possible chance.

http://www.abc.net.au/local/reviews/2009/07/16/2627688.htm

Harry Potter is still casting a magical spell.

The films featuring the boy wizard and his friends have always been fun, enjoyable and expertly made, but they've never really been able to capture the true magic, spirit and grand vision of JK Rowling's source novels. Until now.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has poetry, beauty and real emotion, and takes the entire series to a whole new level.

It's Year Six for Harry at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but this installment pays scant attention to what goes on in the classroom.

The young wizard (played by Daniel Radcliffe) is still battling the evil forces loyal to the dark lord Voldemort, and their power is increasing.

Harry's life is constantly in danger, and it seems his greatest protection lies in the form of school headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), who gives Harry a task to retrieve the hidden memories of Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), a teacher who played a crucial role in the life of the young Voldemort.

As well, he's come across a second-hand textbook that used to belong to a so-called "half-blood prince", and it proves to be very handy. Harry's relationship with Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) is also deepening, as is the connection between his two best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson).

The Potter films, and books for that matter, have always had a blend of cute, whimsical fantasy, and dark, treacherous storytelling.

For this sixth movie, director David Yates, who directed the previous Order of the Phoenix, has set his focus purely on the powerfully sinister and mature aspects of Rowling's tale, and it pays off in spades.

WAR hero Ted Kenna will be laid to rest in his beloved home town of Hamilton today after a state funeral in Melbourne yesterday.

http://www.standard.net.au/news/local/news/general/two-farewells-for-our-war-hero/1570176.aspx

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd joined hundreds of mourners at Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral to farewell Australia's last Victoria Cross recipient.

Today's less ostentatious funeral will be held at Hamilton's St Mary's Catholic Church at 1pm before a private burial.

Mr Kenna died last week in a Geelong nursing home, only days after his 90th birthday, with his wife Marjorie by his side.

Southern Grampians Mayor Marcus Rentsch said the Melbourne service was a poignant occasion which did justice to Mr Kenna's legacy.

``It was wonderful to be at a state funeral with the nation's leaders honouring a great Australian like Ted,'' Cr Rentsch said.

``But I'm sure he would want his final send-off in Hamilton with the community there to pay their respects.''

Old friend, Major General Gordon Maitland, told the crowd how Mr Kenna stood up in full view of the enemy machine gunners, how he had emptied his Bren gun and how he had then called for a rifle to finish the job, all while under heavy fire.

``He recognised the stature of being a Victoria Cross holder,'' Major General Maitland said. ``But he sought no glamour, no reward.

``He wore it with empathy and he wore it for all of those who fought with him.'' Mr Kenna's son Robert said his father would not have been comfortable with the fuss of his state funeral.

But he would, no doubt, have been more pleased when 11 of his grandchildren took their turn to honour ``our Pop''.

The eldest, Tammy Malcolm, recited a poem she had written. Her brothers and sisters and cousins followed, telling of special memories.

A Long Way From The Corridors Of Power

2009-07-16T05:01:00.004+10:00

*

Summer vacation and it's 40 degrees
I don't get excited, sir, I just feel mean
I got your letter in the mailbox today
Do you really mean all the things you say?
Are you on my side?
What will your friends say?
What will your sister say?
What will your little doggie say?

Daddy, he don't understand,
Your brothers, they don't understand,
Brothers, they don't understand,
Your doggie, he don't understand

Daddy, daddy, he don't understand
Doggie doggie, he don't understand
Daddy, daddy, he don't understand
Doggie doggie, he don't understand

He's lost you, he's lost you
He's lost his little nest egg
He's lost his little acorn
He's lost his little sweet tooth,
Rosebud, honey bunch, sugar pie,
Pig tails, button nose, buck teeth, freckles, chickenshit,
sugar pie
Angel dust, sugar pie
Angel dust, sugar pie

I walk a field of glass, I buy a diamond ring
I take a lonesome road, I'd buy you anything
(He'd buy you anything)
I'd buy you anything
(He'd buy you anything)
I'd buy you anything
(He'd buy you anything)
I'd buy you anything
(He'd buy you anything)
If you would ride with me
Come ride with me

The Triffids, Field of Glass.

There had been so many beloved bars, they had loomed so large. Even now, when he walked past the Irish pub in the Rocks, the Mercantile, he just wanted to be in there, on the bar stool, drinking heavily, watching the cute young sailors as they wrote themselves off, talking drunkenly of girls, randy, handsome. Oh how he could have been so lucky, there in their lives, in their beds, loved and loving. But they were light years away across centuries of lost opportunities and aging disgrace, and those moments when he did enter the ordinary world of physicality, young lust, triumph, were mere bright flecks in the dark grayish mud. The handsomest man he had ever slept with, that's how he thought of that young sailor, with his blond hair and cheeky demeanour. Oh sacrifice yourself. Oh come hither, worship at the fountain of corruption, find love in the slipstream, rise up and be grateful, remember, remember, before history washes all these things away and he will easily acknowledge: he will never be happy again.

So it was that decades later he walked past the very same bars in which he had once so immersed himself, in which he had triumphed in ways only the old queens, perched like giant vultures on their bar stools, could possibly appreciate it. From gangster's mole to aging hack, from bedevilled tranny to fading gay guy, all of these things made no difference any more. Come rescue me, it is impossible to stay sober, he said, and the air and the wind whipped away his doubts and left his face burning from the cold. The Harbour was as indifferent as it had ever been, cold in its beauty, the grasping rich who had won Sydney's great competition of a view of the glinting blue water and plying ferries adding no soulfulness to its gem like appearance. Oh how he longed to gloss over all these past failures, to embrace a love anew, to find in the heated flesh the release he had so often sought.

But it was not to be. Stay, stay, Bridgette implored, after he downed one quick soft drink at the Glengarry and kept on moving, because he didn't want to get rained on, he didn't want to get wet, again, to fall, again, into the abyss of self indulgence, to wallow in the misery his own addictions had brought. But she was annoying in her mere presence, clinging, already telling him she wanted to get married, to let someone else take care of her. She thought him high status and looked up, up, her drunken doe eyes pleading with him to fall in love with her, to rescue her. But he had no shrivel of care, not in her, and could not bear to subjugate himself again into the nightmare of a woman, or at least that woman. It was a pity: he could have done with the company.

Margaret, too, was there in full flight, having left work after lunch and been sitting in the pub since 3pm, downing Stollie after Stollie at $6.50 a pop, as he had discovered when he shouted her a drink. Which was why she always bought her own, avoiding shouts, her tiny, skinny Scottish frame barely looking like it could cope with a cup of tea, much less an afternoon in the pub on the vodka. What astonished him was that now he was sober how ordinary these people seemed. Only two months before he had regarded them as everything, the beginning and the end of his day, the most wonderful set of characters, alcholics, sure, but talented, fascinating people who's dysfunctionality was harmless enough, even funny. But sober things didn't look like that. The Festers, a band made up of local residents and practising alcoholics, played at the pub regularly.

He wasn't sure he would ever be sane again, but he had already moved on from what had only so brief a time ago seemed like such an entertaining ferment. He would settle into the pub for the evening, just like the others, and rejoiced that he was normal again, could drink like a normal person. His life long love affair with bars rebloomed, and he could hardly have been more delighted than to find himself a second home so quickly. They had all seen him around for years - eight years he had lived in Lawson Street, Redfern, next to the Block - but he had never drunk at the Glengarry. When they worked out who he was, partly, perhaps, with the help of Mick the cameraman from SBS who lived diagonally opposite him, he was welcomed with open arms. This time, as early as yesterday how could it be, he was shocked by the inanity of what was going on, Margaret repeating he swore the conversation she had had with him before about data trawling and sophisticated search engines and useless data.

And it shocked him that every word she said he had heard before. The clients she named. The programs she mentioned. The entire damn narrative, wound up or inspired by his journalistic status. He mentioned his own day, his new position, but none of it sank in, and she ploughed on with exactly the same story he had heard before, word for word, her tiny face and her tiny frame animated with the importance of it all. Pity he had already heard it. He was surprised by his own reaction, concern, contempt, wry humour, and his instant frustration at Bridgette's cloying ways. Oh how she would like a declaration of love, a cosy future. She would never have to worry again, get married, have a last gasp child as she had just turned 40. Content herself with preparing dinner and ironing his shirts; I'll do anything, anything, to make you happy, I'm a door mat, I'll be anything you want me to be. It was the biggest turnoff. Who needed doormats in the modern era?

And so he left them drinkikng. And when Brigette pleaded: stay, stay, he said a decisive: No. Gave a brief wave; and left, unable to get out of there fast enough.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25789039-601,00.html

KEVIN Rudd has toughened his rhetoric towards Beijing over the Stern Hu affair, warning that the world will be watching and emphasising that China has significant economic interests at stake in Australia.

As the Prime Minister hardened his stand towards China over the detention of Rio Tinto executive Mr Hu, experts warned that the government's uncompromising stand on Tibet, human rights, a China-hostile defence white paper, and failed iron ore deals, threatened to increase tensions in the relationship.

"A range of foreign governments and corporations will be watching this case with interest and be watching it very closely," Mr Rudd said. "And they'll be drawing their own conclusions about how it is conducted. It is in all of our interests to have this matter resolved."

Mr Rudd said Australia had significant economic interests in its relationship with China. "But I remind our Chinese friends that China, too, has significant economic interests at stake in its relationship with Australia and with its other commercial partners around the world."

Mr Rudd's press conference in Sydney came as the Chinese government's investigation into the steel industry widened with revelations the executive vice-chairman of the China Iron and Steel Association, Luo Bingsheng, was under investigation.

Mr Luo, a senior member of the Communist Party, is the most senior Chinese official to come under investigation in the widening probe by the Ministry of State Security.

The China Daily quoted an industry "insider" as saying that executives from all 16 Chinese steel mills participating in iron ore price talks had been bribed by Rio Tinto executives.

Just hours after Mr Rudd made his comments, Beijing hosed down suggestions the matter would harm its business reputation or trade with Australia.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25788834-2702,00.html

AL Gore is no stranger to the internet. George W. Bush once accused him of having claimed to have invented it.

So what better subject for Kevin Rudd to use to launch his new weapon in the never-ending war on Malcolm Turnbull yesterday when the former US vice-president turned climate-change campaigner came to visit the Prime Minister in Sydney.

Soon after Mr Gore left Kirribilli, a video of their chat appeared on the PM's homepage.

The move, aimed at building pressure on Mr Turnbull ahead of the vote on the government climate-change legislation in the Senate next month, is expected to be the first salvo in a new hi-tech assault on the voters in the name of "direct engagement".

The PM is already a Twitter convert who writes his own material. He also has a growing following. As of yesterday he had 179,000 followers, up from 143,000 last Friday and 156,000 on Sunday.

And from this morning, the PM's homepage will feature an interactive blog -- the first will be on climate change -- which will allow direct comments from voters. The PM's office claims Mr Rudd is "personally engaged" with the new technology.

"He sees these new technologies as a tool to directly interact people and spark genuine public debate."

Mr Gore was said to be happy to be the co-star in Mr Rudd's latest foray into new media.

In the video, Mr Gore congratulates Mr Rudd on his climate change stance and says Australians seem to have a high awareness of the continent's susceptibility to global warming.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25788999-5013871,00.html

TAXPAYERS have spent 71c for every hit on Kevin Rudd's stimulus website, new data released by the government shows.

The Rudd government spent $164,000 to set up the website, which provides details of the rollout of spending under the government's $42 billion stimulus package, announced in February.

Figures released yesterday show there were a total of 230,000 hits on the website in April and May.

The site received an average of 115,000 hits a month for its first two months. The figures also revealed the Rudd government had spent $7500 registering 121 domain names since it was in office.

Liberal senator Scott Ryan said it was inappropriate that the Rudd government was spending taxpayer money to deliver a political message.

"There hasn't been a sufficient justification for the cost of the stimulus website," Senator Ryan said.

"$164,000 for a government propaganda website that is highly political is a lot of money to spend."

Apocalypse Now

2009-07-15T04:12:00.005+10:00

*

With its curious division of upper class and working class, its ethnic mix of Irish and Italian, and its coterie of some of the wealthiest families in the United States, Manhasset was forever struggling to define itself. It was a town where dirty-faced urchins gathered at Memorial Field—to play “bicycle polo;” where neighbors hid from one another behind their perfect hedgerows—yet still kept careful track of one another's stories and foibles; where everyone departed at sunrise on the trains to Manhattan—but no one ever really left for good, except in a pine box. Though Manhasset felt like a small farm community, and though real estate brokers tended to call it a bedroom community, we cleaved to the notion that we were a barroom community. Bars gave us identity and points of intersection. The Little League, softball league, bowling league, and Junior League not only held their meetings at Steve's bar, they often met on the same night.

Brass Pony, Gay Dome, Lamplight, Kilmeade's, Joan and Ed's, Popping Cork, 1680 House, Jaunting Car, The Scratch—the names of Manhasset's bars were more familiar to us than the names of its main streets and founding families. The life spans of bars were like dynasties: We measured time by them, and found some primal comfort in the knowledge that whenever one closed, the curtain would rise on another. My grandmother told me that Manhasset was one of those places where an old wives' tale was accepted as fact—namely, that drinking at home was the mark of an alcoholic. So long as you drank publicly, not secretly, you weren't a drunk. Thus, bars. Lots and lots of bars.

J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar.

The rhythmic sound of the drums and the crackling heat of the funeral pyre were more than enough to awaken that sleeping parasite, his soul. He had travelled so far from the frozen villages of his birth; to be here in ancient Mexico on the pyramid of the sun, waiting for the end, a terrified slave. The same place he would stand a thousand years later as a young school boy, terrified of change, of emerging adolescence. He had topped just about everything in Primary School, but the prize of dux went to a girl who's parents were always at the school helping. Unlike his, who had never stepped foot in the place after enrolling him. How could you beat six As? Well Dianne Smith did; and he was cheated of the prize. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered when you had the whole of life in front of you, and the 52 Great Books on the shelf. It was his aim to understand everything. Not to waste bis life in frozen moments, caught in destructive habits.

That was why it was so important to break up. Lisa, who he had seen shortly before his latest recovery, who had driven over because misery loves company, was astounded by his new found health and sobriety, and peppered him with questions about how he did it. Everything was symptomatic. My dad's in AA, she let drop, and he urged her to speak to him. How delighted the old bastard would be, her daughter coming home to the fellowship. These were life gifts and mortal gifts, and if one more idiot blabbered on about their higher power he'd machine gun them. It was patently absurd to suggest that just because someone had suffered an addiction problem they should be compelled to a particular spiritual philosophy. The twelve steps are not the ten commandments, if I'd wanted to go to church I would have done so, was bound to get him unloved and uncalled, if not kicked out.

All his life he had been surrounded by fanaticism of one kind or the other. We truly believed in those great dance floors, in the mirror balls, in 3am and the heaving mass, 4am and the urgent search, 5am despair, 6am the sunrise and the thoughts running like silver tadpoles in the field of vision. He was satisfied no harm had been done. How wrong he was. But it was the cruel dark edges of a grateful time, the overwhelming discovery that he was not in fact a crippled, deformed, alcoholic dwarf loping into view, poisoning everything and everyone around him with his toxic attitudes. He thought about joining the government payroll, but hesitated. Please please mister, I know I've done wrong. He wanted to tell the story of the time when they all died, when a giant tsunami washed back from the beach and the end time, predicted for 1972, really came.

That was why he had found such pleasure in the bottom of a glass, when the world was going to end there wasn't much point in suffering, you may as well enjoy every last moment, go to the maker drunk. He made sure he stacked enough partying into those years that he would never regret not having given it a good nudge. A framed copy of the front page photography in the Daily Telegraph of the woman who had been caught driving six times over the alcohol limit, defiantly sticking her tongue out to the camera, hung on the wall where he worked. He never expected to meet her; but had stared at the picture when he first noticed it, wondering what the story was behind it. At least the kid hadn't been hurt. Nothing could be worse than the drunken truck driver who killed two kids. How could you live with that? The honourable thing old chap, the heels licking tightly together.

As an oblivion seeker it was escape from the bondage of self he sought the most. He didn't like the way he felt, demoralised, criminalised, beaten down, distressed from the beatings and jumping here and there in his head, unable to bear the pain, unable to find shelter. The silences didn't keep the beatings at bay, it only made them worse. But at least by refusing to speak he could say: this is not fair, this is not right, this is not justice, and you're a pack of brutal bloody bastards bashing up on a defenseless kid because you psychos you can. And they were his parents. How could you? When he had children of his own the question resounded even more: how could you? Do that to a child? Even at school, in the freezing mornings, he was forced to stick his hand out for the cane. And the pain never stopped. Hence the retreat into silence, into some comfy world. He would never be found. Even now there was a lot of distance between them; and he went about his day wrapped in the disguise of the ordinary man. Good on you love, he said as he shook her hand after the meeting, her little two year old who had played quietly in the corner all meeting now on her hip. It's fantastic you're here, good on you.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25751271-2702,00.html

FORMER newspaper editor and columnist Frank Devine has been farewelled today by a who's who of Australia's media and political circles.
A former editor of The Australian, The Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Post, Devine was remembered as a larger-than-life character who brought a worldliness and sophistication to the national broadsheet.

Around 250 mourners attended the requiem mass, held this morning at St Leonard's Catholic Church in Sydney's north, including former NSW Premier Nick Greiner, current NSW Opposition leader Barry O'Farrell, federal Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott and a plethora of conservative columnists and newspaper identities.

Among them were News Limited chairman John Hartigan, The Australian's current editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, and historian Keith Windschuttle.

The eulogy was delivered by his close friend and journalist Jane Fraser, who lunched with Devine weekly for the best part of 20 years.

“He was a person who enhanced lives; quick to praise and encourage, slow to criticise, and he had more good and true friends than you can imagine,” Fraser told mourners.

Devine died on Friday, aged 77, after a long battle with illness.

He is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and his daughters Miranda, Alexandra and Rosalind.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25761426-7583,00.html

David Banks

IT is tea on the first day of the first Test in Wales; England is three wickets down and struggling and I, against my upbringing and instincts, am barracking for the Aussies on behalf of a friend who cannot be with us.

Half a day earlier, on the other side of the planet in St Leonard's Catholic Church, Naremburn, in northern Sydney, family and friends who loved him as I did bade farewell to my former boss, friend and mentor.

Frank Devine, "the laughing cavalier of Australian journalism", died last week the way he edited great newspapers: with courage, with dignity and humour and with a stubborn disregard for the deadline his maker had set.

Only his timing, usually so immaculate, could be faulted on this occasion. "I think I have one more Ashes series in me," he had predicted cheerfully but mistakenly from his hospital bed three weeks earlier.

The great man had known for a long time that the game was up, accepting his fate with a graceful nonchalance for which a lifetime of devotion to Catholicism had prepared the world's unlikeliest altar boy.

"I have unstoppable cancer," he growled at me down the phone from his home in Cammeray. "I suppose you've heard?"

Indeed, I had. An email from Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian and an old colleague from my years in Australia, alerted me to the state of Frank's worsening health just a day after the two had lunched together. "I'll find a flight," I promised Frank. By the time I arrived at his bedside in the Royal North Shore Hospital, he was battling double pneumonia. Not that the irascible old legend was letting that hold him back.

Long-suffering Jacqueline, the love of his life and his wife of 50 years, arrived moments before me bearing a dozen Sydney rock oysters which he slurped with selfish satisfaction while dictating a text message to his eldest daughter, Miranda, requesting pate and baguette for his evening meal.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25751267-2702,00.html

THE first time I had lunch with Frank Devine was in 1988, after we'd had a few personality issues; it was not unknown for Frank to inflict hiccups on those who didn't measure up to what he expected.

He took me to an Italian restaurant as was his wont. It was a popular place, full, on this particular day of Eastern suburban glitterati; Frank loved a good entrance; he pushed the door open, paused and then bellowed at the maitre-d; HELLO I’M DEVINE! There was the thunderous sound of knives and forks hitting glass table tops, as the diners, mouths open, wondered whether they were witnessing the Second Coming. And so began the best 20 years of my life; a weekly lunch with Frank, Paddy McGuinness and James Murray. These lunches were interspersed with many more erudite guests, including priests - some of them troublesome - politicians and accomplished journalists passing through town. We went at first to the Shakespeare, a rather ordinary pub up the road from the office. It was aptly named; the food, for example, was half comedy and half tragedy. After a while Paddy, a food snob if ever there was one, cocked his snook at what he thought inferior cuisine, and took himself to the more up-market restaurant across the road; he would glare at us balefully, wave his superior piece of fish in the air and then join us for a restorative ale or two, over which he would tell us why we were misguided souls who knew from nothing.

Frank would retaliate by talking about his grandchildren, which, to Paddy, was a forbidden subject, as was any mention of sport, especially cricket, one of the many loves of Frank’s life. What a contrast they presented; if they’d advertised for someone in every way different from themselves, they would have found each other; they were the greatest of friends; who would ever forget Frank crying when he delivered the eulogy at Paddy’s funeral.

James Murray has averred that although he had many differences with Frank, they had never had an argument; however I well remember the time he left the table in a monumental huff at something Frank had said or done, and for good measure, when he walked down the side of the pub, he stopped at the window, wacked his walking stick on the windowsill, gave us a considerable piece of his mind and marched – well, okay, hobbled, down the hill.

Everyone has a Frank story, and when he died almost every obituary mentioned his love of a long lunch. Yes, he did, but not in the sense that journalists had the reputation of whiling away the afternoons getting plastered. He was too sophisticated, too innately courteous, perhaps too nervous of getting a tongue-lashing from Jacqui; also there were his grandchildren to pick up from school, take them to his place, talk to them about sport, teach them to play poker and show them how to cook. He got as much pleasure out of them, as he did his intellectual friends; and he loved little anecdotes such as when he asked one of Rozzie’s twins how his younger brother, Robert, was. In deference to the boy’s trouble with the R word, Frank said: “How’s Wobert? Frank replied the boy, it’s not Wobert; it’s Yobert!

Shellharbour, NSW, Australia.

The End Time

2009-07-14T01:54:00.007+10:00

*

With its curious division of upper class and working class, its ethnic mix of Irish and Italian, and its coterie of some of the wealthiest families in the United States, Manhasset was forever struggling to define itself. It was a town where dirty-faced urchins gathered at Memorial Field—to play “bicycle polo;” where neighbors hid from one another behind their perfect hedgerows—yet still kept careful track of one another's stories and foibles; where everyone departed at sunrise on the trains to Manhattan—but no one ever really left for good, except in a pine box. Though Manhasset felt like a small farm community, and though real estate brokers tended to call it a bedroom community, we cleaved to the notion that we were a barroom community. Bars gave us identity and points of intersection. The Little League, softball league, bowling league, and Junior League not only held their meetings at Steve's bar, they often met on the same night.

Brass Pony, Gay Dome, Lamplight, Kilmeade's, Joan and Ed's, Popping Cork, 1680 House, Jaunting Car, The Scratch—the names of Manhasset's bars were more familiar to us than the names of its main streets and founding families. The life spans of bars were like dynasties: We measured time by them, and found some primal comfort in the knowledge that whenever one closed, the curtain would rise on another. My grandmother told me that Manhasset was one of those places where an old wives' tale was accepted as fact—namely, that drinking at home was the mark of an alcoholic. So long as you drank publicly, not secretly, you weren't a drunk. Thus, bars. Lots and lots of bars.

J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar.

Failure was written large, in the twisted wreckage of the burning helicopter hanging off the side of the building, having missed the landing pad, in the smoking buildings in the distance, in the chiselled faces of American cops. We were all inundated with images, many of them from the U.S. Years floated by within the tender wreckage, trails of stories born and dying, fragments as he changed channels, instant diversion. The ready availability of entertainment had destroyed their souls. He was shadowed by his own ghosts, for they, too, were there amongst the thought disorder, the half borne stories, the flickering slideshow, and if you asked him to tell you a single one of the hundreds of cops and robbers stories he had watched as a way to turn off, he couldn't. The things that loomed large were the old fashioned things, love, abuse, personal trickery, personal triumphs. They were the things that made him human.

He was no longer caught out in the open between skyscrapers, running for cover in a post-appocalyptic world, seeking safety, protection, but a new structure, as if by magic, began to appear on the pavements before him. Is this mere psycho-babble? a stern voice asked. For it was as if he was seeing these people for the first time, shocked by the level of decay, shaking his head in disbelief, for he could not grasp that he, too, had stooped this low, had been this dysfunctional. They were nothing but human wreckage. He introduced two legendary alcoholics and party animals to each other at the Glengarry, you're both legends he said. But now sober and with a head full of therapy, sipping lemon lime and bitters while they poured beers down their throats, he was shocked by their diminutive nature. These people had become legends to him, great friends, enormous characters. Gerschie was much loved, and as Brigette had confided only an hour before, she trying to get him back.

But he knew what Gerschie really thought of her, how deeply annoying he found her, brushing off her blandishments, telling stories of the day she bashed him, all because he wouldn't make love to her. And this is Ian, he said, just back from Vietnam, another legend. In his own lunchtime. They chatted furiously, full of ego, trying to impress each other that their lives were on track, that they might be hopeless drunks but that that didn't matter, because they were talents destined for greatness in their own lifetimes. But life was taking them straight to the Housing Commmission and the dole, straight to the damaged zoo which coated the estates, the feral children, the druggies hanging on the corners, the alkies gathering at the early opener, the old people sitting in the feeble son, trying to warm their old bones. Not one of them working. Not one of them a success. Not one of them part of the real world.

So he introduced them, as he had introduced people all his life, and thought back to those days spent in that magnificent apartment overlooking Darling Harbour, the days when they never slept and the furtive comings and goings inflamed their paranoia beyoind all reach. Those days when he really did know the biggest gangsters in town, before the Lebanese and the Vietnamese took over the underground trades and edged out the anglos. No one ever crossed the ethnics, and they were visible everywhere, in their smart cars parked outside the mosques, oh Allah the most merciful, the most kind, and the cruel edged brutality of the Asian gangs, more discrete, more ruthless than the Lebanese, silent killers who saw no purpose in austentatious display, who thought of the Middle Eastern gangs and their black bullet proof cars as nothing but amateurs bringing unnecessary attention to themselves by their wog boy displays.

Everyone knew, the police, the media, the public, the neighbours, who these people were. Their mansions were as ostentatious as their jewellery, their cars status symbols, their physical presence dripping unexplained wealth. This was the city now. The crusty old money that had once represented Sydney wealth was long gone, overlaid by layer after layer of immigration, the heart and soul of the place now nothing but historic relics in the eastern part of town. The Picollo bar remained, but had grown more eccentric. He still stopped there occasionally for a glass of hot milk or a bowl of soup, a chat to the irritable old queen who ran it, and gasped in a kind of awe at the ridiculous scenes he saw unfold there amongst the Housing Commission dross who frequented it; Asia the tranny with her fake thrills holding court outside, oh how good she had looked in her day, Collette, the old Les Girls girl who wasn't a pretty sight as a spreading old drag queen caught in daylight and declining health, the drug effed groups slurring their words as they set themselves up at one of the outside tables, scanning the street for opportunities, for gifts from God. He shuddered, he retreated, he fanned himself frantically; and he retreated to that secret place where dignity and grace were the sole ideals, where he was a humble observer who would never dare comment on the misfortunes of others. For they were all young once, this colourful crowd of flotsam and jetsam.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/michael-jackson/5818413/Michael-Jackson-had-two-gay-lovers-new-book-claims.html

The star was allegedly “madly in love” with a half-Asian construction worker and had another fling with a Hollywood waiter.

Writer Ian Halperin claims in his unauthorised biography that “virtually everybody” around Jackson knew that the singer was gay.

Jackson’s affair with the builder, who was in his early 20s, began in Las Vegas in 2007, according to Halperin. “He rarely left his residence, but when he did, according to one of Jackson’s closest confidants, it was to meet a boyfriend at a run-down motel.

“Michael would leave the house in disguise, often dressed as a woman, and would go to meet his boyfriend at a motel that was one of Vegas’ grungiest dives. Michael was broke. He struggled to put food on the table for his children. It was all he could afford then.”

Halperin added: “A close aide of Jackson who confirmed the affair to me said that he had no knowledge of what went on behind closed doors at the motel. But the aide said Jackson would dress as a woman after midnight to meet a worker employed by the city of Las Vegas.”

The second man was an aspiring actor, working as a waiter, who visited Jackson’s Hollywood Hills home almost every night for three weeks during a short but passionate affair, Halperin said.

The author’s claims, in the book Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, were reported by The Sun.

PETER CAVE: Family First Senator Steve Fielding met climate change campaigner Al Gore briefly this morning.

As Fielding begins his own campaign against the Government's emission trading scheme.

Senator Fielding hopes to sit down with the former US vice president to discuss climate change in the next day or two.

In the meantime, Steve Fielding is today writing to the nation's 75 other senators, asking them to look at the science closely before casting their vote in August.

Included in his letter is a chart which he says shows that while greenhouse emissions have gone up over the past 15 years, global temperatures have remained steady.

Steve Fielding spoke to Alexandra Kirk in Canberra.

STEVE FIELDING: Look, this is the first time I've written to all senators and because it is a very big issue. It's the number one issue as far as our economy and the environment. One that we're going to face for the next 10 to 20 years.

And so we've got to get the decision right and the question that I'm going to be putting forward to each of the senators is - can they also explain why global air temperatures haven't been going up over the last 15 years, while carbon dioxide concentrations have been.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: In other words you're asking them to vote against the Government's emissions trading scheme?

STEVE FIELDING: Look, underlying it is, is that I have trouble voting for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme where there is a basic question about the science that needs to be answered.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25778384-664,00.html

THE petrol war between Coles and Woolworths raises huge and very complicated issues. It's dangerous to see it in simplistic black and white terms.

Either that the war must be good for consumers - they get dramatically cheaper petrol. Albeit, if only temporarily.

Or proof that the supermarket duopoly are ripping off consumers - either in petrol or in the supermarket aisle or both.

Start with the fact that the 'war' is not actually between Coles and Woolies. It's between them jointly and 'everyone else'. Specifically against mostly Metcash/IGA in supermarkets and BP-Caltex in petrol.

In launching the extraordinary petrol discounts, Coles had to know that Woolies would respond immediately and match them exactly. It picked up a marketing advantage for yesterday morning and which probably lingered to some extent into the afternoon.

But after that it was back to the status quo. At least, that is, between Coles and Woolies which have over 70 per cent of supermarket sales. Albeit, and crucially, with a huge loss of margin for the three days.

But no status quo between the the duo and Metcash which has 20 per cent of the wholesale market, and IGA and Foodworks which are its biggest customers at the retail end.

If they don't match it, they'll suffer a dramatic loss of sales for a period which equates to 1 per cent of their year. And then likely more on the 'next attack'.

If they do, they'll suffer a dramatic loss of margin which they can't afford, relative to Coles and Woolies. Either way, that adds to eventual termination or marginalisation.

Last Will and Testament

2009-07-14T00:54:00.003+10:00

*

Manhasset, site of the largest liquor store in New York State, was the only town on Long Island with a cocktail named after it (a Manhasset is a Manhattan, with more alcohol). The town's half-mile-long main drag, Plandome Road, was every drinker's street of dreams—bar after bar after bar. Many in Manhasset likened Plandome Road to a mythical country lane in Ireland, a gently winding procession of men and women brimming with whiskey and good cheer. Bars on Plandome Road were as numerous as stars on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, and we took a stubborn, eccentric pride in their number. When one man torched his bar on Plandome Road to collect the insurance, cops found him in another bar on Plandome Road and told him he was wanted for questioning. The man put a hand over his heart like a priest accused of burning a cross. “How could I,” he asked, “how could anyone—burn down a bar?”

J.R. Moelringer, The Tender Bar.

Could it have been a simple desire for alcohol? He couldn't believe it when he first saw it, a man standing up in front of a meeting, declaring himself to be an alcoholic. What the heck? Why would anyone humiliate themselves like that? What bastards, what psychological bullies, were the counsellors, to force someone into that position, to make a fool of themselves in public, supposedly for therapeutic purposes. Great shavings of the past were leaving him, in the frantic mist, in the ceaseless slideshow that was his brain, half-images half-stories forming and then dissolving in rapid succession, no point, in the end no point. The shadows had been flickering faster and faster, as if he too was on that mythical merry-go-round, as if the only hope lay in abandonment. As an oblivion seeker, that moment of pure abandonment was akin to a religious experience, the one point in the day when he was truly himself, a profound reordering of the neural networks.

Oh darling, speak to me, be kind. We don't want to remember the dead, not now, but they kept crowding in, insistent, demanding to be acknowledged. Jan was the most georgeous looking woman of them all, petite, a streak of white in her dark hair, indicating psychic abilities. They did read tarot cards and did feel the spirits flickering around them, feeding off their vulnerabilities as they chewed their jaws through the long nights, wired on duramines and playing endless rounds of 500, as if this was the most important moment that could possibly be. These were his university friends, the straight ones - if you discounted all the drugs - and he had already written stories about the death of their members; and the tolling bells had barely started. Bruce Benson, big, gawky, intelligent, funny, one of us, had overdosed before the years had even begun. We went one way and it killed people.

Now, in the lost country of the future, no one had thought of Bruce for decades, and his already elderly parents had long since gone to the grave. They had no idea what to do when their son went off the rails. He was shattered but there was too much to do. Death so early, a young man in his 20s, made no sense. His devestated parents cut a lonely figure at the funeral, and whenever he drove through those wealthy north shore suburbs around Turramurra he thought of him. That house of his high on the steep hills, the dripping damp of the environment. He was going to be a poet and he became a corpse. We carried the memory of Bruce with us, that little group, Jan, Tim, himself, later Jenny. It was astonishing that they were never breached, caught, taken up before the authorities and punished. Instead they followed an isolated, deadly path which increasingly alienated them from the outside world. They partied all night and slept all day.

Lou Reed permeated all their lives. That song, heroin, it's my wife and it's my life... Satellite of love. Hit me with a flower, you do it every hour. So why, then, were they dying, if they were such great social frontiersmen; such pioneers in new thought patterns, new ways of being. No straight person may enter here, the inner enclave. Michael Dransfield burned through the firmament and also died young. What could you say, what could you do? There wasn't any talking to us, no voice of sanity, no older, wiser person to give good counsel. We dealt out the cards and dealt out the pills, went shop lifting at the local Woolworths. He was concerned about the future but also the past, fearful its tender pain would swamp him, not just with the memories of being beaten which had so distorted his adult life, but would distract him from his core purpose. To create something beautiful.

So all vale to Bruce Benson, to all the lost memories, to the friendship we had so intently, the recognition of kindred spirits in the wild laughter of the party, their endless party. And then he introduced Kim to Jenny, and all was lost in a welfare lather of speed and lost opportunity, hopes, dreams, complex plans which never led to fruition. But as they stayed up all night, talking, communing with each other, playing cards, he could feel the planet shifting slowly on its axis, the giant machine, and knew that destiny had touched him on the shoulder. You will be my guide, you will set an example. And the day it all ended was the day Jan died, leaving two young children and a devestated husband. There in that house at Balmain where we had all lived together, the gay boys downstairs, the family up the top. He had never been happier, the London nearby, space invaders on the machines. Eery day he could he went there and got drunk, worshipping at its knees, oh salvation, oh drunken hope, be mine, for nothing is more important than this moment, nothing more profound than the complexities which bound us together.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/the-gore-effect-20090713-diqw.html

Al Gore captivates audiences even as he foresees a dire future, but is the inconvenient truth that he is preaching to the converted? Adam Morton reports.

AS MOST of Melbourne slept, business leaders, politicians and green campaigners queued on a Docklands wharf in the pre-dawn cold yesterday to hear a man say what he has said many times before.

Notionally, they were there for the launch of Safe Climate Australia — an apolitical organisation that hopes to plan a future without greenhouse gas emissions. But few braved the chill to hear about a new non-government organisation, no matter how impressive.

They were there to hear Al Gore, in Melbourne for a whistlestop 30 hours of training climate activists and delivering his well-honed message. Those hoping for insight into global negotiations on a new climate deal, or an intervention into the Australian climate change debate, would have been disappointed. In its place they got a practised summary of the climate problem, and hope that a solution is within grasp.

"We can see that we are standing in front of a fork in the road," Gore said. We can take one of two different directions. "We can say to the scientists, 'We don't want to listen to you. We would prefer to seek out the 1 or 2 per cent of the naysayers who stand against this growing and building consensus.' If we continue on that path it leads towards a catastrophic outcome. It is difficult to ignore that the cyclones are getting stronger, that the fires are getting bigger, that the sea level is rising, that the refugees are beginning to move from places they have long called home.

"So what should we do? We should respond not only to the danger, but also to the opportunity, because we face this crisis at a moment when the world is in an economic crisis as well, and the economists tell us the obvious response is to find opportunities to invest sensibly in the building of new infrastructure that can make our countries stronger and put people to work and give them money that they can spend to get the economy moving again."

Beyond the content there was the charisma; the intangible pull of a celebrity who is famous for what he does, not who he is, and is renowned as an inspiring speaker.

For the hosts — Safe Climate Australia — his presence transformed an earnest gathering of the usual green suspects into an A-list environmental event. "There are not many things you get out of bed that early on a Monday morning for," says Mark Lister, group manager corporate affairs with Szencorp, a designer of environmentally friendly commercial buildings. "Having some people who know some people who know Al Gore is very, very helpful and it makes a big difference because people look to opinion leaders like him … Having someone like that endorse what you're doing speaks volumes."

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change-most-dangerous-threat-ever-says-gore-20090713-dhwx.html

Former US vice-president Al Gore has told a Melbourne breakfast that climate change is both the most dangerous threat and the greatest opportunity that civilisation has faced.

Calling on community leaders to take a stand, Mr Gore said the projections of climate change due to rising greenhouse gas emissions had worsened through four reports by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, yet political leaders had so far failed to act.

"We can see that we are standing in front of a fork in the road. We can take one of two different directions," he said.

"We can say to the scientists, `we don't want to listen to you. We would prefer to seek out the one or two per cent of the naysayers who stand against this growing and building consensus'.

"If we continue on that path it leads to a catastrophic outcome. It is difficult to ignore that the cyclones are getting stronger, that the fires are getting bigger, that the sea level is rising, that the refugees are beginning to move from places they have long called home."

He called on the 1000 community leaders at the breakfast for the launch of non-governmental organisation Safe Climate Australia to take a stand and push for change. He said people must respond not only to the danger, but the opportunity.

"The economists tell us the obvious response is to find opportunities to invest sensibly in the building of new infrastructure that can make our countries stronger and put people to work and give them money that they can spend to the the economy moving again," he said.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/nice-breakfast-but-fielding-unmoved-20090713-ditf.html

Nice breakfast but Fielding unmoved
Michelle Grattan
July 14, 2009

THE persuasive power of Al Gore hasn't been enough to sway Family First senator Steve Fielding, who says the climate guru did not answer a key question at his Melbourne breakfast yesterday.

At the end of the breakfast, attended by 1000 people, Senator Fielding spoke briefly with Mr Gore and said he would like a meeting. The question bugging the senator, who holds a vital upper house vote, is why, if carbon dioxide is a major driver of climate change, atmospheric temperature has not been going up in the past 15 years as carbon dioxide has risen.

"We didn't get a chance to discuss that level of detail," Senator Fielding said. Mr Gore had known who he was and said he had an important role, the senator said. He told Mr Gore he would be happy to fly to Sydney for a meeting if a time could be found. But last night he had not been able to make contact.

Senator Fielding has written to all senators urging them to take a close look at the science before voting on the emissions trading scheme next month. He provides in the letter a chart making his point about rising carbon dioxide but steady atmospheric temperature.

Senator Fielding said in a statement it was incomprehensible that "we'll be voting for this scheme and going it alone before the rest of the world acts. Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong are hanging the Australian economy out to dry if the rest of the world doesn't follow suit."

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull is facing fresh problems on the climate issue, with Nationals senator Ron Boswell strongly opposing the Coalition supporting legislation for a 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020.

Mr Turnbull wants the Liberals to try to own the issue of renewable energy. But the leader of the Nationals in the Senate, Barnaby Joyce, said the Nationals had not yet reached a party position. It was "hotly debated" within the Nationals, he said.

The Last Ride

2009-07-13T04:58:00.005+10:00

*

This is your first taste of mystery
Hey, do you like it? Feel bitter already?
I could make you feel so young and vulnerable
Even though your Daddy's rich and powerful
I could have made you fishers of men
I'm gonna teach those birdies to sing
I'm gonna teach those birdies to sing
I'm gonna teach all the birdies to sing
So cheaply now

Ride, come ride,
Ride, come ride with me
Ride, come ride
Ride, come ride with me

Well, black summer night,
You can hear my sirens wail,
I gotta take another slug now,
When you hear my engines fail.
On wet black summer night
You can hear my sirens wail.
I gotta take another slug now,
When you hear my engines fail.

Slow down little sweet tooth
It's a long way down as the crow flies
Will you really nose-dive all the way down?
Are you planning to crash-dive all the way down?
Are you mine, all mine?
All mine, all mine, all mine?
Mine, All mine?
All mine, all mine, all mine?

The Triffids, Fields of Glass.

The Last Ride. It was everybody's idea to use their break from the weekend at St Joseph's spiritual retreat to go to the movies. There was little free time, but the entirety of Saturday afternoon had been set aside. They travelled in a cavalcade of cars from the magnificent Kincumber Spiritual Retreat, based at St Joseph's besides a small stone church, allegedly the oldest continuously running Catholic church in Australia. He longed for everything, half wired, everything except to fit in, because they were shadows he could only attempt to colour in, magnificent self obsessed ranters delivering their urgent messages of cultism. Some of them never shut up about their higher power, as if the length of their sobriety was a ladder of spiritual supremacy. Ten years and you were admitted to the priest hood. They boasted, oh no, shared intimately, about the struggles with their own accolytes, their sponsees, and he stared at the expensive, immaculate carpet and the expensive triangle flecked fabric in the chairs.

They were at Avoca Beach before he had barely realised they were on the move, parking, awkward globules forming on the pavement as they watched others park. They walked the short distance to the beach; and once more the luxury, the vivid colouring of Australian beaches, the casual magnificence of the vista, struck him. It was winter; and had been cold, but even so there were people everywhere, queueing outside the cafe, settling in for a late lunch at the beach side restaurant. On the way in they had commented about the real estate, the prices, the brand new, modern architecture that had taken over the once sleepy beach side settlement, the last remaining unrenovated fibro house, bright green. The magnificent large homes high on the hill overlooking the surf. Like all groups such as this, they coagulated pointlessly, leaderless, around the cafe and then proceeded on out along the walkway to the edge of the rocks, where they stood in groups talking intensely. He talked to no one. That was his only defence left.

The Last Ride, Australian actor Hugo Weaving's latest offering, was playing at the Cinema by the Sea nearby, and it was generally agreed that half the group would go, the other half taking the high moral ground and thinking it was a waste to spend time inside on electronic entertainment when the beauties of their obsessive God was on display all around. He was an agnostic in the middle of St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney's historic Catholic centre. He didn't believe, couldn't believe, and saw no reason why he should suspend reason, logic, belief. He took what he needed and left the rest; and what he needed was company, friendship, guidance, a loving hand, diversion, tales of heroism and struggle, of triumph against the odds. Sober, his childhood was already flashing before his heart. With a softly spoken Frenchman from the group he broke away and went over the dip at the end of the walkway, onto the wide flat rocks at the cliff's base. And they walked as far as they could across the rock platform, free from the group, free from their own problems.

The movie started at 3.45, leaving them enough time to get back to St Joseph's Spiritual Retreat by 6.00, when dinner was scheduled. Jokes flowed easily as they queued for tickets; and then went inside the atmospheric old fashoined theatre with its worn velvet red seats and flimsy walls. There hadn't been a fresh slick of paint since the 1970s. He sat sandwiched between people he had come to light, big, voluble, kind, expressive, emotional Michele, with a single l, and Philip, who ran a catering business. There was the easy banter of strangers thrown together who had decided their common purpose made them friends. If not life long, certainly for the purposes of the afternoon. And then acame the movie, The Last Ride, of which he had known little except it was Australian. Hugo Weaving played a rough, criminally oriented father who was on the run after killing Max, once a friend. The flashbacks told the story of them living in a derelect car park in a rural area, sheep picking through the old cars, their house thrown together from scraps of wood and metal.

I'm going to the pub, Hugo had declared, leaving his son in the care of Max, who, for whatever reasons, ended up climbing into bed with the boy. Later the boy denied it was sexual, Max was just lonely, he declared, but when Hugo came back from the pub he bashed the living daylights out of him and left him for dead. He was still breathing when we left, I swear, he declared, but now he is on the run with his boy, passing through an old girl friend's house and across the great flat plains of Australia, out to Maree and the Afghan museum and on to the Flinders, where they camped out. There is one terrible scene, after the boy had played with lipstick and makeup on his face he found in the stolen car, apparently believing it was magic paint to ward off evil. Whatever the reason, Hugo bashes him badly, that hideous scene shot throug the trees of the belt going up and down up and down and leaving him battered and bruised. At one point he is standing over his father with a rock in his hand, wanting to kill him. The rock falls harmlessly to the ground.

He had always wanted to kill his own father, after those ceaseless, pointless, cruel bashings he himself had suffered, vicious, pointless bastardy, and he fantasised constantly about sneaking into his parent's bedroom where his father's large form lay sleeping, and plunging the knife into his back. Again and again he had the dream. And finally, when the bashings became even more targetted and more pointless, he retreated, behind the veils, into silence. He played the game: how many days could he go without speaking to anyone at all for any reason. It was actually quite a hard thing for a young boy to achieve, not sayhing a word to teachers, friends, parents, no one. Four days was his best. And of course he was beaten for his own silence, his insoucience, his arrogance, for being him. They were all tearful at the end of the movie. Who's idea was that? he asked as the lights went on, what a grim little number. For the movie had been unrelenting, the dynamic between the pair its soul focus. And they all shuddered later, as they sat around in a circle, and he spouted angrily at anyone and everyone, why pick me, you know I hate talking, why should I make myself vulnerable so you people can pick over, ridicule anything I say.

How can it possibly be therapeutic, opening yourself up to the gossips and the sickos, the emotional terrorists, the parasites, the vicious little insects that resembled humans only in passing? Why the heck should he? I wanted to kill my father too, I fantasised about it all the time, he admitted, and the sign reared large in his head: TRUST NO ONE.

THE BIGGER STORY:

A car bomb has killed four people and injured 40 at a market on the outskirts of the north Iraqi city of Mosul while bombs in Baghdad killed at least three.

All of those killed or injured in the blast in Kukchali, a mixed Sunni-Shia area to the east of Mosul, are believed by police to be civilians.

The city, with its volatile ethnic and religious mix, has seen numerous attacks by insurgents.

US troops pulled out of Iraqi cities less than two weeks ago.

Correspondents say the Mosul bomb went off in an area with a predominantly Shia population, thought to be from Iraq's Shabak community.

On Wednesday two car bombs went off outside Shia mosques in Mosul, killing at least 14 people and injuring about 30. According to Reuters news agency, Shabak areas were targeted in both attacks.

Mosul, a city of about 1.8 million people about 400km (250 miles) north-west of Baghdad, is mainly populated by Iraqi Arabs with Kurdish and other ethnic minorities.

US and Iraqi officials have described the city as al-Qaeda in Iraq's last major urban stronghold in the country.

In Baghdad's central Karrada district, two bombs hit a billiards hall on Saturday evening, killing at least two people and injuring 11.

Another bomb in the south-west of the city killed at least one person.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25750704-643,00.html

CONSUMER confidence hit a 19-month high in July after the Rudd government's cash handouts and a surprising resilience in the jobs market lifted spirits.
Sydney shoppers

"Stunning result": Westpac's Bill Evans said the consumer sentiment index had risen 23 per cent in June and July, marking the biggest two-month increase on record. Picture: Bloomberg

The Westpac-Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Index rose 9.3 per cent to 109.4 - the first time since December 2007 that optimists have decisively outnumbered pessimists.

Separate data showed housing finance approvals rose a surprising 2.2 per cent, seasonally adjusted, in May from April. Economists had expected a rise of 1.5 per cent.

Westpac chief economist Bill Evans said the consumer sentiment index had risen 23.2 per cent in June and July, marking the biggest two-month increase on record.

“The second largest two-month increase was 18.8 per cent in March 1992, when households were finally convinced that the Australian economy was coming out of recession,” said Mr Evans.

“This is unquestionably a stunning result. My personal view had been that, given last month we saw the second largest increase in the index since we started measuring in 1974, any rise in July would have been a great result.”

Relief that Australia had dodged a recession also boosted sentiment.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25760016-11949,00.html

KEVIN Rudd shared centre stage with Barack Obama overnight and Australia's carbon capture and storage institute was lauded by world leaders, turning the major economies forum meeting on climate change into a diplomatic triumph for Australia.

Mr Rudd and President Obama stood at adjoining podiums after the summit in the earthquake ravaged town of L'Aquila, north of Rome, the President to brief the world leaders and media on the limited progress made in the talks and Mr Rudd to brief on Australia's global carbon capture and storage institute.

Mr Obama introduced Mr Rudd, saying the Prime Minister had a "significant announcement".

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Italian Prime Minister and summit host Silvia Berlusconi, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Mexican President Felipe Calderaacón entered the stage to stand behind the two leaders, President Obama quipped "you got back up here".

"It's good that we hunt in packs" Mr Rudd replied.

Mr Rudd told the press conference, packed with several hundred leaders, advisers and media, that he had set up the institute, which began work in June, "to get large scale carbon capture and storage projects done around the world, not just talked about."

"It was one practical contribution" that Australia could make, he said, as the President led the room's applause.

But while the major economies forum was a success for the Australian Prime Minister, it made very little progress in its aim of breaking a negotiating gridlock between developed and developing nations ahead of the crucial Copenhagen summit in December which is intended to cut a global emissions reduction deal to take over after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

Mr Obama said the 17 leaders at the meeting, which he called and chaired, had had "candid and open discussions".

Redfern, including at top Redfern's infamous Glengarry Hotel, the watering hole for some of the suburbs most dedicated alcoholics. Once a blood bath, now attracted a better behaved and largely younger clientelle.