"Mr Howard needs to make a choice of who he has dinner with, and that is, he has dinner with the powerful merchants of the world who he collaborates with under the 'Free Trade Deal' with China, or he decides to dine with the humble people involved in meditations seeking peace for the world, who, when returned to China, face the same fate as 5,000 others before them. Mr Howard can no longer avoid telling the Australian people who he lends his support."

British MP, George Galloway, offers his latest blunt assessment of the Bush administration.

At the Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures 2005: Lecture Five, Shared Destinies: America, Asia and Australia on Sunday 5 June 2005 Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani posed some provocative challenges for Western and Eastern societies alike.

As our world is smaller and more linked than ever before, economic prosperity, political stability and environmental survival are all deeply enmeshed.

One of his themes was that perhaps our greatest challenge lies in coming to terms with some profound cultural differences; differences that still separate Western and Eastern cultures. Acclaimed author of "Can Asians Think?" Kishore Mahbuban was not holding back in being pro-American... which was not a problem for me since I am not anti-American as some people would believe. Hey, there are at least half of the population in the US that do not believe the crap dished out by the Bush administration...

Watching the unrolling of these announcements and announcements of announcements evokes similar emotions as watching a dog eating its own vomit

Infrastructure will soon be in place that wouldl allow  Adelaide to become a "one-stop shop" for armoured vehicle renovation.

Also a U.K. precedent implying more jobs for Halliburton in Australian military accomodation 

Hi all, as you may have noticed if you were online between 2:30 and 3:30 Sunday, I've upgraded the sites software. Although it didn't happen as quickly as rehearsed, it did seem to work OK. Improvements include:

• A better message editor
• Improved spell checker (with highlighting)
• Security fixes
• Improved search support

There may still be some minor problems, so please let me know if you run across any issues.

 Nigel Sim
 

The Editor
Sydney Morning Herald
June 4, 2005

So General Cosgrove feels ‘fiercely protective’ of the people under his command (‘Operation protect, as SAS comes under fire’, Herald, June 4)?

But in losing his cool this week whilst defending the SAS against allegations of bungling & misconduct, the good General confirmed that outmoded & misguided concepts of leadership & governance still hold sway in the ADF, just as they do in the broader reaches of the defence & intelligence establishments & in the highest ranks of government.

‘The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine & barbarism.

We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage & senile & paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.’

John Flynn, 1944

In a letter to the editor, Richard Cox suggested the Sydney Morning Herald did a feature for a week on Darfur and the terrible state of affair in that region.... I could not agree with you more, Richard ...... And there are many other places in Africa where similar problems have happened and are still happening. For example "Western Sahara" that was liberated by its own people fighting the colonial Spanish in the 1970s were mostly reoccupied by Morocco soon after...

“Although some activists remain hostile to Paul Wolfowitz, development experts and non-governmental organisations who have met him say they have been reassured by their early encounters with the urbane Mr Wolfowitz.

Recently, the Victorian academic, Professor Mirko Bagaric, argued the moral case in support of torture, through his paper “Not enough (official) torture in the world?: The circumstances in which torture is morally justifiable