All those pundits out there who have been saying construction of the Gunns pulp mill is a foregone conclusion obviously forgot something. ANZ has pulled out of financing the controversial project.  

from Crikey ….. 

Camden: a tale of cowardice and mortgage belt bigots 

Alex Mitchell writes:  

The Pentagon's core budget – already a staggering $300 billion when George W. Bush took the presidency – has almost doubled while he's been parked behind the big desk in the Oval Office. For fiscal year 2009, the regular Pentagon budget will total roughly $541 billion (including work on nuclear warheads and naval reactors at the Department of Energy).  

It is not news that the United States is in great trouble.

The pre-emptive war it launched against Iraq more than five years ago was and is a mistake of monumental proportions—one that most Americans still fail to acknowledge. Instead they are arguing about whether we should push on to “victory” when even our own generals tell us that a military victory is today inconceivable.

Tomorrow a number of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay will finally get their day in court - although, alas, not literally. Thirty-five Americans who were arrested at the US Supreme Court last January during a demonstration protesting the illegal detention center will go on trial in Washington.

They are charged with "causing a harangue." Instead of entering their own names, each defendant will enter the name of a prisoner held at Guantanamo. 

As of May 20, the website for the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the American neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., is no longer operating. 

A digital vault containing information about every email, internet visit and phone call made in Britain is to be created in a European bid to battle terrorism. 

The plan, which will widen legislation governing the record-keeping responsibilities of telecommunications and internet companies, has alarmed civil libertarians who are already anxious about a proposed ID card scheme. 

Oil prices continue to rise and rise, with no end in sight. Virtually all other commodities seem to be following to be the same suit.  

On October 16, 2004 President Bush signed into law the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, which establishes a special department within the US State Department to monitor global anti-Semitism, reporting annually to Congress.

As one of the major steps in the implementation of that law, Secretary of State Condi Rice swore in Gregg Rickman as head of the State Department’s office of global anti-Semitism on May 22, 2006. 

A shareholder revolt at ExxonMobil led by the billionaire Rockefeller family has won the support of four significant British institutional investors who will call on Monday for a shakeup in the governance of the world's biggest oil company.  

Oliver Stone, the Hollywood director known for his controversial movies about John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, is less than six months away with his film about George W. Bush.  

Filming of W starts this month and Stone has cast Josh Brolin, the actor who starred in the Oscar-winning film No Country for Old Men, as Mr Bush.  

The NSW Police Minister, David Campbell, and two of his staff spent $40,000 on a 12-day, five-star, surf-and-turf romp across the United States, splashing out on steakhouses in Hollywood and oyster bars in New York. 

Their official engagements included briefings by the New York Police Department on Tasers, gangs, terrorism, identity theft and radicalisation; meetings with the FBI in Washington; and a visit to the Davis Training Facility in California. 

After 9/11, of course, George W. Bush and his top advisors almost instantly launched their crusade against Islam and then their various wars, all under the rubric of the Global War on Terror.