There really is a kind of a tsunami of shocks facing not just the economy but people's lives, people's real lives.

They're all intersecting.  

The co-ordinator of World Youth Day, Bishop Anthony Fisher, today responded to a question about Cardinal George Pell's handling of a sexual abuse case by saying:  

The US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is the federal agency responsible for all US government & government sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting.  

It sounds like a spot of gallows humour, but the numbers are no joke: the US environmental protection agency (EPA) has lowered the value of a human life by nearly $1m under George Bush's administration. 

The brouhaha surrounding the Iran issue has been taken up several notches on account of this missile launch, but let’s look at how much of a real danger it really poses.

The following statement from Leonard Peltier was read at the Oglala Commemoration.  

June 26, 2008 

Greetings my relatives, 

For five years, from 1995 to 2000, Wendy Craik, 58, was executive director of the National Farmers' Federation. Four years ago John Howard's government appointed her executive director of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.  

A year later it appointed the National Party's battle-scarred political warrior, Ian Sinclair, 79, the commission's part-time president. Both Craik and Sinclair are still there. Taxpayers fund Craik's annual salary, now $340,000.

A major development unfolded this week, with Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki floating, for the first time, a call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.  

from Crikey ….. 

Morris Iemma is an ex-premier, bereft of life, no more, etc.  

Alex Mitchell writes: 

Blood and Oil has several important advantages over Klare’s earlier and well-researched book.  

First, the 52-minute presentation is tight, clear, and well-integrated – suitable for home use, classroom use, independent and even corporate television broadcast. 

Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions.

But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis.

Anyone with any knowledge of Iran's history and culture will know that it will not be bribed or bullied into doing what the West wants.

It has no reason to trust Western promises, and having endured the suffering of the Iran-Iraq War, is unlikely to buckle under any pressure, military or economic, that the West would be prepared to impose.

Organisers had been expecting 150 people, but instead a rowdy crowd of about 1,000 has turned up to a meeting on the presence of convicted pedophile Dennis Ferguson in their Brisbane community. 

Police Minister Judy Spence and Acting Police Commissioner Kathy Rynders were shouted down by the crowd at the meeting in Carbrook, a suburb on Brisbane's southern fringes, last night. 

(With Apologies to AB Paterson) 

For years I brown-nosed bastards from the Centre to the Right,I fiddled with the numbers & I suck-holed day & night.

And when they wouldn't have me, waited for the next election,

The Village Chronicle 

Latest headlines ….. 

·                     Cardinal Pell accused of paedophile cover-up