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Poverty is engulfing the people and unrest is rising... Whoever wins, the uprising will come.
Father Joe Dizon, 2004 (Neighbourhood priest of Philippines Phame)

Nobody Expects The Czech Inquisition! If China is Blind, Czech Memory is at Best Near-Sighted...
In China, President Klaus can act like a statesman from a country that remembers its communist past or like a pragmatic, silent technocrat.
Klaus cannot claim during his current visit, as he did before his 1994 trip as prime minister, that he does not know a single Chinese dissident. He now knows the stories of He Depu, Zheng Enchong, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, Wang Wanxing and Yan Jun.
· 1,984 Reasons Orwell Was Only 20 Years Off: Choices in Beijing [Link Poached from Prague Post]
· See Also Mikhail Gorbachev: For A Global Glasnost...
· See Also A silent migration: Since the year 2000, between 234,000 and 350,000 Ecuadorians have set sail for Guatamala in illegal embarcations
· See Also THE SECOND round of Slovakia's presidential elections brought defeat to Meciar who was boxed out by his estranged ally, Ivan Gasparovic [Link Poached from Slovak Spectator]
· See Also Who is Gasparovic? Another lesser evil?
· See Also Eastern European Memories of Easter: Willow and water treats [Hockey Memories: 7 Months exactly after the Invasion You have tanks. We have goals! Cold as ice: The triumph in 1969 [Memories Poached from This is My P1S1: Tucked away in the folds of the ancient mountains that embrace the Kezmarok and Poprad valleys lay a royal town called Vrbov (a place with dual meanings: ‘willow’ and ‘boiling water’)]
· See Also Both the Old and New Testaments tell us that fathers who sacrifice their sons are good and sons who allow themselves to be sacrificed on the orders of their fathers become our saviors
· See Also Oprah of Poprad: Whirlpool brings new work culture and jobs to Slovakian town`
· See Also MEl Forgives Us for His Sins: You try to perform an act of love even for those who persecute you, and I think that's the message of the film

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French police are releasing their files on Pablo Picasso. Documents show that Picasso was spied on initially as a suspected anarchist, and later over his communist sympathies - before he became a prominent member of France's Communist Party.

Getting Older? So What!
You hear it everywhere - we're getting older, and society will be the worse for it. Even as we reap the benefits of longevity and vitality, we are becoming more anxious about the social and economic effects of ageing upon society. Demographics has turned from a peripheral issue into a major source of concern. We are told we need to confront some pretty big questions. Can society cope with having so many more old people? Can we really afford our future? But just because the mood of social pessimism is so ubiquitous does not mean we should simply accept it.
· Double Standards of Ageing: the future is affordable [Link Poached from 'We Built This City' ranks as the worst record ever ]
· See Also Trying to fix the unfixable: North Korean blast a symbol of decay that blights a shambolic system
· See Also A bit on the side: Sydney may get another window dressing
· See Also Talkfest: New blueprint to turn city green
· See Also Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power
· See Also Dad ... what's a terrorist?

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Vanunu said of Mossad and Shin Bet, which he accused of cruel, barbaric treatment... You didn't succeed to break me, you didn't succeed to make me crazy. I am a symbol of the will of freedom, that you cannot break the human spirit.

The Secret of the B-29
Barry Siegel of the Los Angeles Times spent eight months unraveling the story of a 50-year-old court case that "provides a fundamental basis for much of the Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including the USA Patriot Act and the handling of terrorist suspects. The case, involving the families of three men who died in an B-29 plane crash and the ability of the government to withhold information about the accident, created a legal privilege
· that has enabled federal agencies to conceal conduct, withhold documents and block troublesome civil litigation, including suits by whistle-blowers and possible victims of discrimination [link first seen at Scoop]
· See Also Siegel used declassified Air Force records and court documents for the story

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He had expected compliance, but not at the astounding rate of 65 per cent of subjects willing to deliver what they believed were lethal shocks.

Whatever you say, boss
An infamous experiment,threeyearsafterMEdiaDragonwasborn, showed how easily people could be led to kill.
In a post-Holocaust world, like in post-Cold War world, people were struggling to understand how scores of SS, and KGB officers, had shot, gassed and tortured millions of people to death, supposedly on orders from their commanders.
· Why even non partisan parliamentary officers will obey the deadliest orders

A sinister killer, a flight to Amsterdam, and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake . . . the asbestos saga reads like a novel
· ASBESTOS AFTERMATH: Hardie casts a long shadow
· Asian tigers, Double Dragons: Twofold disaster [link first seen at NY ]

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NOTICE IN A PADDOCK:
The Farmer allows walkers to cross the paddock for free, but the bull charges!!!
[In this extraordinary time, first we had Man Bites Dog to Death--headline, Sydney Morning Herald, April 11; & today We Know We Left Those Scissors Somewhere... ]

Much Ado About Something: South Treasures Meet North
Three things succeed on the internet: shopping, as perfected by Amazon; searching, as perfected by Google; and blogging as perfected by thousands of creative fingers and linkers...
In keeping with the egalitarian nature of blogs, via David Tiley of Barista fame is encouraging everyone to share small, but beautiful blogging treasures....
For my part, I suggested http://lakatoi.blogspot.com/
[Lakatoi by James Cumes:
Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former Australian Ambassador and High Commissioner, Dr James Cumes. James born and bred in Brissie is now based in Vienna where he devotes his time to charities, writing and leading Victory over Want http://VictoryOverWant.org]
· http://www.crosswords.blogspot.com/
[ (Southern Cross) Words;]
(Southern Cross) Words by Gregory Altreuter :: Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former New Yorker on Sydney Australia, including philosophical musings, art, music, literature raves, political obtuseness, and anything else that comes to mind on the differences between life directed by the Pole Star and living beneath the Southern Cross.
· See Also he rise of Weblogging has been a cold shower for the complacent mass communication industries [Link Poached from Webdiary: Blogjam5]
· See Also Jeremy Zawodny on creative linking [link first seen at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/aggregator/ ]
· See Also P23;S5 MEmedia Dragon
· See Also Metadata librarian becoming cool: Was it due to Harriet Klausner, retired librarian and #1 Amazon book reviewer?

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David Tiley is standing in for Tim Dunlop for the next four weeks. He is a writer, script editor, teacher and occasional director who works in film and multimedia, particularly on documentaries, and has done his bit as an arts bureaucrat. His blog Barista tries to find humour in a deadly serious world... Nevermind the substantiated accussation of MEdia Dragon being the prince of the link...

NEXT TIME DON’T BLOG SO CLOSE: Faherty has a dirty, dirty, suggestion
Juile Faherty writes an article in today's New York Times about BloggerCon II. The article focuses on the business potential of blogs and advertising again rises to the number one position for revenue generation.
There is too much emphasis on advertising and blogs. I realize that Adwords and BlogAds have created the possibility of instant micropublishing. I realize that when mainstream media reports on our corner of the world that they are going to report from their perspective - newspapers and magazines create content and then sell advertising. I also realize that people are finding success and that makes a good story.
· ConBloggerII [ courtesy of A Penny For...]
· See Also Sadly, the last thing most bloggers (and not just guys) think about is their feet
· See Also Warning! The dragon monster demands a mate! Well, I don't really have a girlfriend but in my fantasies in which I'm having sex with my girlfriend, you're her
· See Also And they say romance is dead: A lot of my day's taken up with a soul-aching commute into the city, and that just feels like dead time
· See Also The Zen of Blogging
· See Also Blogrunner

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The Lords of Bakersfield, an in-depth investigative series that exposed public and private corruption in its community over several decades. The paper carefully considered the many ethical issues involved in reporting and editing the series, insulated the newsroom from any real or perceived conflict of interest raised in reporting on the activities of former staff and members of the current publisher’s family, and withstood efforts by the local district attorney to discredit the series following publication...

Preventing the Next (Sydney) Scandal ...
Powerful gay men. Vulnerable teen-age boys. Murder. For years, some prominent local men who led secret lives were rumored to be protected. Whispers surrounding another important man's death prompt the question:
· Is there really a conspiracy??? [ courtesy of Payne Awards for Ethics Honor 2004 Winners]
· See Also Abusing Secrets: The no-right-to-know White House
· See Also The Cost of Doing Business' Sierra magazine's Marilyn Berlin Snell breaks the story of how Denver-based Echo Bay Mines secretly paid upwards of $2 million in protection money to al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Philippines
· See Also Amerikan ABC News: 'Blood Money, report on Echo Bay Mines
· See Also $4.5 Billion For Mercenaries In Iraq: NY Times has an extensive report on the scope, costs and problems of the military's use of mercenaries in Iraq

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She gave him a gift that would be useful for the rest of his life...
I didn't care how God wanted to work, I wanted a result. In his better moments since Jenny died three months ago, when his grief is less overwhelming and he can contemplate just what it is he really believes, Cain has had to deal with what theologians know as "the problem of evil": either God is loving and just, but not powerful enough to prevent evil; or God has the power, but does not love us enough to stop bad things happening.
Cain, who turned 50 last month, does not believe in a God who manipulates all that happens in the world. He describes life as "risky", and accepts that the creaturely life humans live is finite. But Jenny's death hurts and he daily confronts feelings of abandonment...
Beyond Good And Evil: There is a contradiction about God!

Rwanda
Ten years ago the world watched as one of history’s greatest crimes unfolded.
The tiny African state of Rwanda became a slaughterhouse when the majority Hutu rampaged against their Tutsi neighbours. In 100 frenzied days, an estimated 800,000 people were murdered. The international community stood by and did nothing as Rwanda joined the list of 20th century genocides…
· Bosnia, Cambodia, the Holocaust, Armenia [ via Tribute to Des Horne, much-loved Four Corners editor]
· See Also Murdoch: Well look at the power of radio, look at your power, you’ve got more power than I have at the moment. Jones: Oh cut it out... Media Watch: Everybody loves it until they're on it - and then they sometimes hate it

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Building is a little like war. Once you get in it, you have to go all the way...
Architect James Polshek

Fatal Errors: Rotten to the Corps
It is clear that the Australian intelligence community is unable to identify reality in a timely manner or convey its significance to the Government
· No sweeping of the matters under the carpet [ via Sunday ]
· See Also Shadow Defence Minister, Senator Chris Evans
· See Also Soldiers And Fortune: Who's calling the shots in Iraq? And who pays his salary? (By Barry Lando, a former CBS producer of 60 Minutes)
· See Also Anti-Bush Sentiment Busts Out All Over: & it's not just the usual suspects taking shots. The fire is coming from feature film, theatre and TV

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Occasionally, reckless use of a search engine uncovers something interesting. Even things like why Jozef Imrich just wants to be humiliated. Over and over again. Mortification: a collection of writers' most humiliating moments:
`Reading Canceled,' or three chairs occupied by people released from mental institutions and not thought to be violent; People who would much rather be gluing seashells to flower pots; Most frequently, though, no one shows up...

I didn't ask if blogging is journalism: If your mother says she loves you, czech it out.
Let's start with the basics. When a journalist writes a story, she calls a bunch of experts, and writes down what they say. Then the reporter thinks about what all this means. Maybe she interviews more experts. Maybe she interviews The Man on the Street to find out what it means to The Average Person. And then in the end, she strings together the quotes to make a story. This is an act of journalism. I think we all agree.
Enter the weblogs. They make it possible for the experts to go direct, without any intermediaries. A person who wants info can now find out what people think without going through the reporter. This is revolutionary
· This is what the Internet does to everything it touches [Link Poached from j's scratchpad ]
· See Also This is a draft of Chapter 9: Trust's Boundaries of my upcoming book, Making the News
· See Also Stories are generally about people in the last stages of physical, moral and social decrepitude, which explains the reflective and occasionally melancholy undercurrent in many of the tales
· See Also An excellent directory of library weblogs
· See Also A Novel Approach to Legal Research
· See Also OpentheGovernment.org: Ten Most Wanted Documents for 2004
· See Also Search Congressional-Research-Service Reports
Excellent roundup from Chris Sherman, a must read to keep up to date with what is really going on in the world of secret warrants & searches, Search Engine Milestones for March 2004 [ Google still has 40% of search referrals, Yahoo has 27%, MSN 19%, then there's the rest of the engines bringing up the rear

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Tiger Force: Major media have failed to follow up the Blade’s revelations. It’s as if there’s a statute of limitations on the collective conscience. A conspiracy of silence has given way to widespread indifference, coupled, presumably, with contemporary anxieties...

Welcome and Unwelcome Attention: FBI
FBI Files on Kerry Stolen from Author's Home
Historian and biographer Gerald Nicosia has been the sudden object of both welcome and unwelcome attention lately. The SF Chronicle explains: The past two weeks have been too high-octane even for Nicosia, not unaccustomed to attention (or flak) on the Beat and political fronts. Fourteen boxes of FBI surveillance files that he battled for more than a decade to obtain have suddenly become a mother lode of information about the 1970s anti- war activities of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. So enticing are the contents of those files, somebody slipped into Nicosia's modest Corte Madera home on March 25 and made off with several thousand pages -- most dealing with Kerry's years in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
· Without a permit, rising from the websites
· See Also Were you there when they spied on MEdia Dragon? How many boxes of surveillance files are there?
· See Also Battered and Bloodied Battalion: Behind the birth of Tiger Force
· See Also (Tiger Force) Blade wins Pulitzer: Series exposing Vietnam atrocities earns top honor
· See Also No-one realized that terrorists could use an airplane as a weapon, except for Tom Clancy and NORAD
· See Also Antony Loewenstein: Tools to stop them engineering your consent
· See Also A Busy Person's Guide to the Bush Press Conference

Exclusives from Iraq
This week, in only his third prime-time press conference in three-and-a-half years of presidency, George W. Bush admitted the past few weeks in Iraq have been difficult.
OpenDemocracy continues its extraordinary coverage of the spiralling crisis.
From Iraq, Ayub Nuri, a supporter of the war, watches the US military unite Shi'a, Sunni and Kurds against America.
Middle East expert, Sami Zubaida, identifies the basic cause of the trouble in Iraq: One year after the occupation and the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime the great majority of Iraqis are worse off...

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Oops, somehow MEdia D missed this link last week in the Sydney Morning Herald... The power of search
+ Use "" for phrase searching
+ Boolean available (and, or, andnot)
+ t: to limit to words in the title/headline of the document
+ d: to limit to words in the text of the document.
+ It's possible to combine the syntax
More Search News Tips & Topix

Open all hours
With the click of a mouse, libraries and museums are reaching a new audience.
It was Umberto Eco who said libraries had always been humanity's way of preserving its collective wisdom, a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten. Now, thanks to the internet, Australians are peering beyond the bricks and mortar, seeing libraries and museums for what they always wanted to be - citadels of ideas, repositories of human knowledge.
· Ironically, the web's flaws are what now help people appreciate the integrity of the information issued by libraries [ via Best Stack & Library in the World]
· See Also Special librarians are information 'detectives'
· See Also On the seventh day Cold River rested: eBook of the Month
· See Also And now, the good word by email - and that's gospel
· See Also Print-on-demand
· See Also Sifry's Alerts: BoingBoing adds Technorati support - you can too!

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Why do they do it, these whistleblowers? Why do they dare speak out? Whether in the private or public sector, often they lose their livelihoods, and the strain can damage their health, end their closest relationships and smash their friendships. Almost always they are smeared, threatened and put under intolerable psychological pressure... The balance of power is so stacked against the ethical individual that unless citizens do something to redress it, we'll run out of whistleblowers. We'll miss them when they're gone.

Axe Labor's Mates Boards: Brogden's committment to honesty blows Carr's out of the water
The NSW Opposition has promised to abolish more than 20 statutory boards including Landcom and Sydney Water, in an effort to save up to $5 million a year in directors' fees paid to Labor Mates.
In a speech to a business and Liberal Party forum at Parliament House yesterday, the Opposition Leader, John Brogden, accused the Government of "tossing aside" ministerial responsibility and relying on political spin to explain its policy failures.
· Pork O Barrel: The truth hurts... especially in SusSex Street

The political practice of dipping into the public trough to finance projects that benefit only a single legislator is so firmly established that most people yawn when they see the words pork-barrel spending. Yet every so often a project comes along with such a grotesquely negative cost-benefit ratio that even the most cynical citizen snaps awake...
· See Also Pork, Sweet and Sour [ courtesy of http://hotbuttereddeath.ubersportingpundit.com/ Personally I think they've got it all arse-backwards. The real issue is not how do you stop idiots and lunatics from voting, but how do you stop them from running for government... ]
· See Also Wife Refuses To Disclose Tax Info: Kerry claimed a wealthy candidate must release returns to prove he pays a fair share in a tax system that isn't fair and lets the super-rich get off

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According to thoughtful Alan of Southerly Buster fame, X is unthinkable is not an especially new strategy in politics or in war-making. May God have mercy on our souls...

A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer
As a security technologist, I regularly encounter people who say the United States should adopt a national ID card. How could such a program not make us more secure, they ask?
The suggestion, when it's made by a thoughtful civic-minded person like Nicholas Kristof (Star-Tribune, March 18), often takes on a tone that is regretful and ambivalent: Yes, indeed, the card would be a minor invasion of our privacy, and undoubtedly it would add to the growing list of interruptions and delays we encounter every day; but we live in dangerous times, we live in a new world ... .
· It all sounds so reasonable, but there's a lot to disagree with in such an attitude [ via Bruce Schneier is security guru: national ID card doesn't even belong on a scale]
· See Also SENATORS COLLINS, LIEBERMAN ASK Agency to Explain Why It Requested Sensitive Data From Airlines
· Come on in, the water's fine: Why the temperature doesn't hold water [ via RoadToSurfdom]
· See Also Welcome to the inaugural (Virgin) issue of Econ Journal Watch: editor@econjournalwatch.org [Link Poached from Coming Soon; According to Jason]
· See Also Cyborg Democracy: Future Hi - Celebrating the Rebirth of Psychedelic Futurism; Agents of the Culture

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Oh... currently Iraq (Detailed Iraq Chronology 1980-2004) and Australia are listed among the top 10 searches on Daypop.
Is this chillingly prescient? As when seven years ago Russ Travers of the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote an article for Studies in Intelligence, a journal published by the CIA's Center about the ways intelligence analysis would become dangerously fragmented by 21st century... From the vantage point of 2001, intelligence failure is inevitable.
There's a hindsight article that is worth reading to help put the kerfuffle over pre-Sept. 11 intelligence into perspective. Blogger Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic imagines an alternative history ...

AN ALTERNATIVE ONLINE HISTORY
Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.
· Hague: This guy isn't exactly Winston Churchill, is he? [Link Poached from Will the 2004 Election Be Called Off? Buzzflash]
· See Also Three prominent Czech journalists have disappeared in Iraq
· See Also Lt Col Collins wrote to Prime Minister John Howard calling for the royal commission, outlining how Australia's spy agencies had failed Australia many times ... > [Link Poached from The code of silence]
· See Also First off, (Non nuclear) heads should roll: Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) chairs the House Committee on Government Reform's National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee

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At a time when the words grub and charlatan seem to be synonymous for politician Nelson Mandela,like Vaclav Havel, stands as a reminder that being political can be both honourable and ennobling. Twent yeight years in prison. Strength and quiet determination in the face of oppression and humiliation. He is a colossus of courage and integrity in an age of political pygmies... The beauty and power of the speeches lie in the unmatched moral authority with which he speaks, rather than memorable aphorisms and sharp one liners...
Bruce Elder SMH 9 to 11 April 2004 reviewing HIS OWN WORDS by Nelson Mandela

Take a Deep Breath: Just follow the kold blood or smart money
As the old summary of Leftist thought says: I love humanity. It's just people I can't stand...or I love democracy. I just cannot stand the totally stupid questions totally stupid people keep asking...
In the era of glasnost and perestroika, Nader accepted an invitation from Gorbachev to energise the Soviet consumer. And the US crusader took Jones to Moscow with him. Gorbachev’s theory? That without a culture of consumer complaint – as refined and intensified by Nader and his "raiders" – you’d never get Soviet enterprises off their fat arses.
· Living in a Washington boarding house and using the payphone in the hall, he took on many a global Goliath and, again and again, beat them hands down
· See Also For Ralph Nader, but Not for President
· See Also Russia: A Normal Country
· See Also Questions To Answer On Iraq...

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That's what happens to exiles; they are scattered to the four winds and then find it extremely difficult to get back together again.
Isabel Allende

My Surreal Vienna: Do I dare to disturb real pages in BERLIN, NY, AMSTERDAM?
On July 7, 1980, I became the enemy of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and was sentenced to life imprisonment. On July 8, a part of my parents died. On Radio Free Europe they listened to my obituary, five years after their daughter Aga had died. It turned their world inside out. My parents believed I was dead for over forty hours. They were the longest hours in my Mamka's life. When my cousin Tibo eventually informed them, that according to the latest reports on Radio Free Europe, I was alive, Mamka just cried.
On July 8, I stood before the mirror as if I were another person from the one I had been the previous morning. I experienced a rude awakening from the outside world, a dark liquid world.
· Real and surreal: Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened [ via Szirine]
· See Also Beyond Cold (War) River [ courtesy of Amazon ]
· See Also How to write a blog-buster
· See Also In Amerika

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Russia's latest incarnation underlines how the EU should be more active in neighbouring countries where political orientation remains in the balance. Meanwhile, in the lucky country almost a million Australian children live in poverty...

Government offers no escape route from poverty trap
People on modest incomes in Australia are said to be paying higher taxes than those in the high-income category. The highest tax rate is 48 per cent. People in this tax bracket pay the marginal tax rate on the last part of their incomes. People on modest incomes are said to be paying 61.5 per cent. The secretary to the Treasury, Ken Henry, argues that the high effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) could be a disincentive to work. Dr Henry, who prepared a paper for the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, says correcting high EMTRs is a "balancing act". It remains to be seen whether tax cuts in the May 2004 Budget will reduce the "poverty traps" for low-income earners.
· Too-hard basket [ via By Ross Gittins: 03/04/2004; The Age, Page C4]
· Call to scrap tax breaks for rich
· See Also Corporate Risk of a Tax Audit Is Still Shrinking, I.R.S. Data Show
· See Also LeBovidge unabashedly dreams of a day when people won't even have to fill out their income tax forms...
· See Also Taxes, wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, are what we pay for a civilized society: When coporations dodge taxes, the rest of us pick up the difference
· See Also US Game: Czech your returns: your taxes weren't cut, just shifted
· See Also IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson finds that he is the person everyone at cocktail parties wants to avoid: Growth in tax cheating can be contagious
· See Also Tax dodger, meet tax collector: Love and Taxes ...We had fun, especially in the early '90s, before Congress ruined everything and put all these inhibitions on the IRS. (laughter) We had a blast, and every day was different
· See Also On the pleasure scale, reading Confessions of a Tax Collector falls squarely between a full-fledged tax audit and a root canal
· See Also They even have a word for such stall tactics: "baby-sitting"
· See Also In 1950 only 86 cities in the world had a population over one million. Today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be more than 550. No one knows if that kind of growth will be biologically or politically sustainable

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Patriotism, said Dr. Johnson, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Getting Us Out: Does anyone remember 1968? It's time for a reprise

1) A senior Australian defense adviser claims she was fired after refusing to write briefing notes that would exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq's weapons program. One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony— She has been a bad national security adviser ...

2) Sadly, this [Bush] Administration has failed to live up to basic standards of open and candid debate. They repeatedly invent 'facts' to support their preconceived agenda. This pattern has prevailed since President Bush's earliest days in office. He has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon. He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people.

Thoughtful new studies are now available online: Never Apologize: Auditing the independence of the auditor-general
Independence of the auditor-general is now accepted as one of the important elements of accountability in democratic parliamentary systems like Australia. How well does the independence of Australia’s auditors-general measure up though? In this paper Ken Coghill assesses each Australian jurisdiction, focusing particularly on the Commonwealth and the Australian Capital Territory.
· [ PDF Format ]Who Audits the Auditors?: Tony Harrises of this world [ courtesy of The Centre for Democratic Institutions, Australian National University ]
· See Also Who Judges the Judges: Judge admits lifting '57 ProJo article for '93 Lincoln piece [ via Romenesko ]
· See Also Ben Reilly: the relationship between parties, ethnicity and democracy. (Political engineering of parties and party systems)
· See Also [ PDF Format ] For and against a bill of rights (Peter Bailey, Justice Michael Kirby and Michael Zander)
· See Also Stephen Sherlock: 2004 Indonesian elections: how the system works and what the parties stand for
· See Also Mr Paul Tovua: Rescuing democracy in Solomon Islands

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It seems hard sometimes to say to someone don't make that mistake because I'm speaking now from pain, I'm speaking now from tears, I'm speaking from suffering, from joy, from love. Before I could only speak of what the future could be.
The only way to come up from low is to think high. That's what life is really about: up and down, in and out, over and under, night and day, dark and light, all right.
Solomon Burke

The original Greek meaning of PASSION is suffering
Which is your favourite ? An older book can become a new book again...
Only about 10 per cent of the commercial titles published each year are fiction, and fiction accounts for only about a quarter of retail sales. We talk about fiction incessantly -- the Man Booker Prize, for example, continues to bear far more prestige, and attract far more excitement, than its non-fiction equivalent, the Samuel Johnson -- but it is non-fiction, as a nation, that we are actually reading. There's a message too powerful to ignore Publishers love a sure-fire trend, but there is so much more to picking a bestseller:
Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it.
· The Real Read: a Recurring Sweet revenge part of the game of life [Link Poached from The Telegraph and Ottakar's launch The Real Read, a poll to find the country's best-loved work of non-fiction ]
· See Also Colm Toibin's a travelling Irishman, his subject is a dilettante American. Together they create a riveting portrait of obsession

Praise be to one Giant Confessional: it's like a one-on-one thing, and that's deeply intriguing
There is a voyeur in all of us. At some level, we are fascinated by other people's secrets, out of either prurience or a more fundamental need to affirm that we are not alone, that other people, too, have thought or done things of which they are not proud. Over the past decade, confessions have become a staple of culture... We have had bare-all books about everything from abusive childhoods to addiction, crime, obsession, failure and, of course, sex in all its myriad forms.
I think we've got this compulsive drive to feel that we belong, or that we're normal. The fascination with other people's messy lives is really about a sense of How do they deal with these things? And also, How do you place yourself on a spectrum of normality?
If Millet's book sold because it was so racy, perhaps Moody's is selling because it is so ordinary .....
· See Full Text Story For your eyes only: with innovations including reality television and web cameras, combined with a general loosening of social and moral taboos, we now have unprecedented access into other people's worlds

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One of the troubles of our time is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W.H. Auden, letter to Louise Bogan, May 18, 1942

Down through the ages, the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus has been celebrated in writing, music, art and sculpture. Today...

The passion of Christ at Easter: Torah, Bible and Koran: Passover, Alas, not by me
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

One of the greatest gifts the internet might yet prove to bequeath Humanity is a realistic shot at fisking into permanent oblivion the sacrilegious trinity of Yahweh, Allah and God, an anti-Artistic Celebrity Triple Act which has stunk up the concrete human world for several Millennia now, proving along the way to be the most hateful, destructive, divisive and sub-human fictional triptych ever written by the hand of some genius guy (or, like I said, chick).
Is anyone else at Webdiary - or in the blogosphere for that matter - as bored as I am with constantly trying to have the ‘last word’ in these endless tit-for-tat cyber-battles? Trying to ‘out-ironise’ each new level of knowing irony?.
Art can’t be art without the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief on the medium’s intrinsic terms, so if your medium happens to be writing, the internet now makes art impossible, evidently. One single cyber-heckler can prick the bubble for every potential reader on the planet. One cynic can destroy a million idealists.
· Ironically, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough [ via Webdiary: Fisking Fatigue]
· See Also God is a 2-1 on chance, a favourite
· See Also A life lived for business purposes

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Pork-barrel Mateship: World Citizens Against Public Waste
Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) document a record-breaking $22.9 billion spent on 10,656 pork-barrel projects. The 630 projects profiled in the Pig Book Summary will cost taxpayers more than $3.1 billion this year.
· Search the Pig Book [link first seen at News Knife]
· See Also The strange things people believe about history [Link Poached from International Thesaurus of Refugee Terminology ]
· See Also The security contractors killed in Fallujah represented a little known reality of the war in Iraq
· See Also Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has faced a steady exodus of counterterrorism officials, many disappointed by a preoccupation with Iraq they said undermined the U.S. fight against terrorism
· See Also Terrorised and Crying for Help: Left to die in a hospital toilet

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A woman was walking along one of the paths with a dog on a lead. She wore a grey tweed coat and transparent pink nylon gloves, and carried two books from the public library in a contraption of rubber straps. What is the use of noticing such details? Dulcie asked herself. It isn't as if I were a novelist or a private detective. Presumably such a faculty might be said to add to one' s enjoyment of life, but so often what one observed was neither amusing nor interesting, but just upsetting.
Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

Reflections on the oldest professions
If whores, razzled by drugs and disease, with crumbling bones and wrinkled skin, must now be called sex workers, what are pimps? Sexual liaison co-ordinators?
· Lord of the Liaison [Link Poached from AlDaily ]

Every day the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman meets a small coterie of political journalists known as 'the lobby' for a topical chat, or 'briefing'.
Downing Street Says... is an unofficial site that lets you read summaries of these briefings and add your own comments. Want to know more or see what's new?
· See Also Only following orders?
· See Also Stop smiling -- this is meant to look serious! The spinners did a most unusual thing -- they allowed cameras in to tape a cabinet meeting, with sound and body language. But this wasn't a real cabinet meeting. The part the media saw was as phony as you'll find.
· See Also Rupert Murdoch: The James Bond comparison is not entirely unfair
· See Also Australia Day Committee (Victoria)
[ via Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet civil liberties nonprofit organization ]

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Giving best wishes in NSW Parliament, the bear pit, to a Labor Party member who is getting over heart surgery, Cronulla MP Malcolm Kerr recalled that another colleague once received get well card, signed by the secretary of his party branch, stating I have been instructed by the branch (50 to 49) to wish you a speedy recovery. Malcolm is the unassuming but lethal Richard Amery of the Liberal Party. A rare antipodian bird with a rather precious sense of timing (bouncing czech smile)...

All Elections are Local: Slovakia, Indonesia, Republic of Malcom Kerr
The presidential elections in Slovakia brought a great surprise over the weekend, as the Secretary of State Eduard Kukan, who was believed to win the first round, ended up third, meaning the second round is off limits for him.
The two opponents who will battle for the office next Saturday, in the second round, are former Speaker of the Parliament Ivan Gasparovic and three-time former PM Vladimir Meciar.
Meciar is one of the most controversial Slovak politicians. A tough guy, former boxer. Once he attacked a TV reporter on the street, paying no attention to the fact that the attack was caught on camera. Gasparovic once used to be Meciar's right hand, a close political partner.
When Meciar left office several years ago, after being defeated in elections, he went to a TV interview where he sang for the viewers something like God bless you all / I am leaving you / I have never hurt any of you.
The presidential elections in Slovakia were more or less decided by less than 4,000 people:
Vladimir Meciar -- 32,7%
Ivan Gasparovic -- 22,3%
Eduard Kukan -- 22,21%
Rudolf Schuster -- 7% (Slovak President at this time)
Gasparovic beat Kukan by those 3,644 popular votes.
· Surprise win for Putin's hardliner in Slovakia election: 3,644 People Made The Difference [ courtesy of Czech Daily] [Link Poached from Press shock over Meciar victory - Google ]
· See Also Indonesia's Islamist party likely to be future force: Soeharto's old party set for revival
· See Also Yes, let me repeat that. Under the NSW counting system, you have no guarantee of getting the same result twice
· See Also Bringing democracy home: enfranchising Australia’s homeless
· See Also All Elections are Local

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Middle class poverty trap
Don't expect next month's budget to contain any move to reduce the poverty traps facing some low and middle-income families.
· Taxing Times
· See Also Around the turn of the millennium, the Great Australian Dream spawned a new trend: using the house to go shopping
· See Also Reconsidering plans to channel their retirement savings into a residential property market
· See Also Carr slams migrant plan

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Kelley's stories needed this disclaimer: Based on a true story
Joel Achenbach says of former USA Today reporter Jack Kelley: It appears that, like a good screenwriter, Kelley took a real tragedy and adapted it into something more dramatic, more heart-wrenching, with sharper pieces of shrapnel impaling softer body parts. His articles should have carried an italic notation: Based on a true story.
· Reality

Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four foreigners -- one a woman, at least one an American -- through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Five American troops died in a roadside bombing nearby.
· Euphrates River: scene of some of the worst violence on both sides of the conflict

Revenge, the settling of scores, a turf war - or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death takes many forms in a gangster war.
Fear probably motivated crime patriarch Lewis Moran's killers - fear that he would strike back in revenge for the deaths of his son Jason and stepson Mark, and the murder of his old mate Graham Kinniburgh.
· Yarra River

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Changing landscape of the Google News

My Brilliant Search Engines Spotlight on Google and Search Engines in Newsweek
Little Engines That Can - Even Google can't think of everything. A host of start-ups are working to fill niches and capitalize on the search boom
· All Eyes on Google
· See Also Giddy Over Going Public
· See Also Talk Transcript: Steven Levy Talked About Google and the Search Wars