At The End Of Life

*



The red shirts whistle and wave outside the Siam Paragon Centre, this high end shopping complex with Hermes and Gucci and Maserati cars. There wasn't any time to be peaceful or free. He could feel the world shrinking into one disheveled mess. Some days he just woke up off the air. With dumb, cow like expressions on their face, commuters remain glued to the video advertising in the densely packed carriages. Blood is everywhere, red blood, protestor's blood, the courage of conviction, to believe sincerely in everything. They should be machine gunned, blood is a health hazard, a loud American said in the crowded internet cafe come travel agent. What a stupid thing to say, he said loudly, but of course the American did not hear. They never hear anything but themselves. The fabric of things is all wrong. He was out on a limb and could not get back.

Waves of distress kept overtaking him. He couldn't feel or believe anything, not now. All he wanted to do was medicate the distress away. And yet it would pass. Would it? There wasn't time to be frightened. He couldn't see what the solution was. Some days he was just off the air, that was all there was to it. The cruelty of fate, the fundamental disturbances in the ether, the endless prattle of the loud and self obsessed; the garbage about God and Higher Powers and outside in the thick, sweaty heat the protestors kept coming and coming. There were extra police on the sky train stations. The crowds sat clamped together. Almost no one read. Almost no one acknowledged the existence of another. The red shirts could be a million miles away. They poured blood over the gates of various institutions; and it was hard to believe that here, in this strange futuristic city, he was not in the thick of it all.

Time passed; cruel time, kind time, and the grinning auspices of another face, the front line officers of another consciousness; and through it all, oh bless me, bless me, went the voice, they could hear nothing but contempt for those "out there", as the crowds slowly returned to the high end stalls and significantly, desperately, anguish written large, eyes popping out of his head, the air conditioning cool and bright young things in their frilly dresses swishing through the mall, through the acres of malls, while outside the heat stifled and the red shirts shouted, crammed into the back of crowded vans, sweating, their own skin flailing, giving off the aroma of death, of sacrifice, of crowded sweat and ultimate belief. They appeared entirely cheerful. There had been little violence. The government was not backing down. There would be no elections. Not now. Not for a long time.

There had to come a time when he could learn to live with himself, when the waves of distress would dissipate, when he didn't want to drape himself in the street with every protestor, with every misguided belief, with every ardent advocate of the real world. It would come easily. How terrible to be so frail, so misguided, so desperate for a drink, for oblivion, for the simple caress of an altered consciousness. Enjoy your shopping experience. If you notice any belongings not attended please contact your staff. While enjoying your shopping experience please keep your belongings with you at all time. Thank you for your cooperation. If only he could simply rewrite his head. Be called to answer. Summon up courage. Overcome disgrace. Begin anew. And outside in the heat the whistling and the banging continued; and supporters waved from the sides of the street, from the overhanging bridges, from the balconies of this oh so crowded city.

He was indifferent to his own fate. He made time pass and relished it all. It was time to settle down anew, to begin anew, to find peace in quiet houses, to discontinue the search for comfort; because it would never come. There was no way out but through. There was no way to answer the questions that haunted not just him but everyone around him; the meaning, the purpose, the way to escape the anguish. To become God, a fragment of the broader spirit. To trudge the road of happy destiny. But that wasn't going to be. He could only summon small pieces of the past. Plastic teeth. The rigours of growing old. He reached out to be kind; to old Bill, 60 years sobriety, to make amends, as if the entire past was a ghost town; while he looked down on marauding packs of young girls parading through the high end malls of Asia, the glistening floors, this ultra modern world where sky scraper piled on sky scraper and the advertising bill boards rose like waves into the sky.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=483084

Red Shirts Achieve Target; UDD Protesters Pour Blood At PM's Home

BANGKOK, March 17 (Bernama) -- Thailand's Red Shirt protesters broke through cordons of police on Wednesday to splatter their own blood on the front gate at the entrance of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's home, and flung bags of blood over the walls into the compound in an upscale area of the capital.

However, during the incident, the prime minister is out of the city on the job upcountry, Thai News Agency reports Wednesday.

A caravan of pickup trucks, cars and motorcycles carrying thousands of red-clad protesters led by the red-shirted United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) began moving from Phan Fah Bridge, their main protest venue in the old Bangkok area adjacent to the centres of government and the bureaucracy, to the prime ministers' residence in Soi Sukhumvit 31, paralysing outbound traffic.

Thai News Agency reported that some 1,500 policemen with shields and batons were in formation in front of the premier's residence to provide security, which was raised to the highest level.

But the protesters braved rain and penetrated the police barricade, achieving their goal of pouring their own blood on the front gate and nearby walls of the prime minister's home.

Despite the significant scuffle and push, there was no report of violence.

The blood-pouring campaign at the prime minister's house followed similar actions on Tuesday at entrances of Government House and Democrat Party headquarters as protesters' intensified their campaign to pressure Mr Abhisit to dissolve Parliament.

It was the latest move of the Red Shirt four-day rally which drew some 100,000 protesters on Sunday on Rajdamnoen Avenue, many loyal to convicted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra who was ousted in the 2006 coup.

However, the number of protesters has dwindled to about 25,000 people, according to the Peacekeeping Operations Command.

The Thai government earlier enforced the Internal Security Act, deploying 50,000 soldiers and police across the capital and surrounding provinces as it feared possible violence.

http://ricksweblog.ebidz.biz/archives/310

A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC

Feb 27th, 2010 by Rick Arms

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all – the notorious “hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

n other words, in crucial respects the IPCC’s 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world’s politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December’s Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by “Climategate”, the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC’s 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).

Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU’s suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.

The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

The Magic Kingdom

*



There wasn't any way out, or through. The heat was stifling. He stood on the brdge and watched the endless parade of red shirts. As far as the eye could see the road was choked with vans, trucks and busses filled with the red shirts, cheering, waving singing, playing loud music. It all appeared cheerful as they waved and clacked their plastic clacker toys; smiling up at the watchng crowds, many taking pictures on their mobile phones; many waving in cheerful response, or support. As many point out, their call for elections is not unreasonable. There is heightened security in the streets this morning and his moto driver, whisking him from the hotel to the Bangkok Sky Train, takes off his 'official" jacket and hands it to his son. "Police', he explains, although it is not really much of an explnation.

There were days when the universe called out to drink flahing bars, cold beers in the bottom of fridges, shattered days and shattered psyches, good time girls beckoning, oblivion, communion, relief. But beyond the oblivion, beyond the border of the real, lay the most appalling despair, the most appallng states of mind, and he couldn't bear it, not now, not again. He put himself in harms way and instead found himself back at meetings, watching the flashing lights whistfully out of windows, caring nought for what was said, letting everything wash over him, letting the past be the judge of the future. The past is a troubled country, lets not go there, he said cheerfully, as the internet shop owner gave someone an explanation that it might happen today, it might happen tomorow, he was not sure.

None of us are sure, of course, and the winds and threads of every day life, of disturbed days and threatened psyches, of loud mouthed yanks and rich white men, saying the same things they have said for years, washed over him into an over archng scepticism, sad always, relieved always, here at the end of days and the end of life, at the end of specific courses of action which should never have been. It was all too true. He would be free; he would take these courses of action, he would make brief friends; but it would all wash away, as every one he had ever known had washed away. Such bitter friendships, in memory only now. The sing song voices surrounded him. The crowded trains of the Bangkok rush hour spoke of a future, of a million ants, of a cowed and obedient people, of a future he could never have imagined, not in his life time, not in this place.

And yet there it was; the spectacular city scapes, the crying, crawling signs, the heat coming off in waves as skyscraper after skyscraper stepped off into the distance, here, high above the streets, the dirt, the chaos. There was an amazing level of social order considering the crowds. Six young women to each men, that was what he counted time and time again as he checked the gender makeup of the packed train carriages. Good girls, far from the bar girls, they clung to their boyfriends, if there was one, and they looked neat, perfect, in their tidy, ironed uniforms. It was the heat of the hive, the makeup of the hive, here in the air conditioned carriages. There was no relief. No one smiled; none laughed. The few old women he saw looked seriously unhappy. Yet a pregnant woman was immeditely stood for; or a man made way for the giggling, bejewelled, laughing, obviously silly bar girls.

They don't value education; only five parents showed up; one of the English language teachers said. That was the message. And yet here, he looked for relief. He missed his children. The heat mounted. Lampini Park was crowded in the mornings; and each time he forsook all hope, swore this was it, the swan dive from the top into the end of life, the morphine stream, something happened and he emerged, still thinking, still alive. Asia was full of old men, old FBI agents, aging, charming English crims, people who had done the right thing all their life and people who had done the wrong thing all their life. They ended in the same places; they ended in the same bars; switching, swapping yarns, gathering apace the quickest ease, the easiest way out, the most colourful stories. Money allowed that.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/avoid-thailand-gatherings-aussies-told-20100316-qacp.html

Avoid Thailand gatherings, Aussies told March 16, 2010 - 8:59AM

Australians presently in Thailand have been told to avoid large political gatherings as anti-government protests continue in the capital Bangkok.

Thailand's prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is resisting the demands of tens of thousands of activists who want him to dissolve parliament.

Abhisit has blanketed Bangkok in security as protest leaders vowed to collect blood from their supporters and splash it onto government headquarters in a symbolic sacrifice.

Australia wanted the political situation in Thailand to be resolved "peacefully and peaceably", Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said on Tuesday.

"We are advising Australians to exercise a high degree of caution and, in particular, stay away from large gatherings of people," he told Sky News.

Australia was "very pleased" the Thai government had not used the military to quell protests.

"We urge Thailand and its people to resolve these matters peacefully."

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-03/15/c_13211933.htm

BANGKOK, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Monday morning rejected the anti-government protestors' demand of House dissolution by noon while the latter decided to take further steps to push the government to give in, including a blood-scattering strategy.

In a nationwide broadcast following a special meeting of the leaders of the coalition parties, Abhisit on Monday morning confirmed there will be no House dissolution by noon as the red- shirts demanded one day before.

He said the government will not meet the ultimatum or dissolve the parliament by Monday noon. And the decision was made out of consensus of all the coalition parties, said the prime minister.

Abhisit's remarks were a response to an ultimatum read by one of the red-shirts leader midday Sunday, which demanded the government to dissolve the parliament within 24 hours or they will step up pressure during their rally in Bangkok.

The government is receptive to the views of the red-shirt protesters, Abhisit stressed in his address, although he was not able to respond to their ultimatum for a House dissolution by Monday noon.

Diseased Fate Lines

*



At least in the morning, the streets of Bangkok were quiet. Like a neutron bomb had gone off in the midst of Calcutta and the people were no more, the sun rose over the haphazard houses and apartment blocks. Then the streets were full of queues of Red shirt demonstrators, cheerful, waving from buses and vans, whistling, laughing. They were cheerful despite the obvious discomfort. Many had traveled a long way to be here. They walked down the streets. It was nothing to do with them. But here he was, a part of history, again. A history that was never going to be his, not now, here at the end of life. Why had he ever thought one story would make a difference amongst all the millions. He listened to old hippies play songs in late night bars. He watched the Thais charm their way through everything.

The Red Shirts whistled and supporters waved enthusiastically from the side. Many small shop keepers wore red in support. But like every big city, life went on in other sections as if nothing was happening. A 3D Phone promotion went on outside the Siam Paragon centre as if there weren't tens of thousands marching in the street, hoping to overthrow the government. As if nothing but wealth and technology mattered. He had crossed so many fate lines, only to end up back here. Nothing made sense. His head hurt. His visa was too short to do anything. All the plans had come to nought, because he had followed a different path, heading to Cambodia, welcome, welcome, as if all was grand, as if all mattered, as if the crumbling streets and filthy piles of garbage, the beggars heading towards them, really didn't exist.

It wasn't easy to be this mentally deranged on a somewhat semi-permanent basis, as if nothing would be right again, as if he had seen too much and could no longer cope. The demonstrators would once have been the subject of endless fascination. He would have had to write about them, as a way of understanding what was happening. Now the collapsing paths, the collapse of the multiverse down to a few single strands, had changed everything. He could feel the sad sack characters amongst them all. He could find his way clear through to the darkness; whatever that meant. The crowds swirled beneath him, in a pristine, air conditioned world. They were all so young.

The girls, so many, so many, so well dressed, looked up admiringly at their boy friends. Good girls. In other parts of town tattoos snaked up their legs and across their breasts, and the discipline of the Falun Gong called, other spiritual traditions, and paths, pathways, opened up. He listened to their stories. He sighed internally at every cliche; but there he was, again. He sought peace and found nothing but a harsh likeness. He knew now where he could find the Heart of Darkness, whenever he wanted. They couldn't match his despair, self abnegation. The delusion he could drink normally, be a part of every day life.

They signaled contempt, for themselves, for others. They said, shattered, come with me, dance with me, whisper in my ear. He was snaking past everything that had ever mattered. Things that could so easily have been had already disappeared. Wasted days, wasted ways. There were so few alternatives, so few ways out. He could grasp their clear passage through to another life; but didn't believe it, not now, not with a vicious headache mixing with the heat and the shouts of the red shirts, the sight of police with riot shields up the edge of streets, the dancing denouement of everything they had ever believed in. His story was only just beginning. Dance with me, dance with me.

When he looked through troubled fate, existed entirely alone, watching and listening as the most disturbed images went round and around, provoking, trying to break through. Everything had been turned upside down and inside out. Chaos reigned. He had lost feeling at the end of his fingers and the tips of his hair. Rock music echoed through the most modern of department stores. There were people every where. Nothing was quiet here, nothing. He watched; and was a part of nothing. There could be no other way out. He surrendered and died. Self abnegation took over. But it's not like that at all, the man said. You do not become like a dead fish; something flapping in the wind. He had escaped one diseased fate line, only to be trapped by another. It was easy to be sad. His head pounded into oblivion.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/14/2845378.htm?section=world

About 80,000 anti-government protesters have amassed in the streets of Thailand's capital, Bangkok.

Royal Thai Police say the number of red shirts, supporters of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, is expected to reach at least 100,000, with more protesters arriving every hour.

The leaders of the demonstration have given the government an ultimatum to dissolve parliament within 24 hours and call fresh elections.

The protesters say if their demands are not met their protest will spread to a number of other sites.

Mr Shinawatra won two elections but was ousted by mass protests and a military coup in 2006.

His supporters say his conviction last month on corruption charges was rigged.

"He does for every people, for every poor people, for farmers get money and every poor person get money and get a job and bring civilisation to our country," student Kelly Gaertz said.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Thailand-Thousands-Of-Red-Shirt-Protesters-Demonstrate-Against-Prime-Minister-Abhisit-Vejjajive

As tens of thousands of anti government demonstrators gathered in Bangkok, British holidaymakers in Thailand have been warned that the political situation is increasingly "volatile".

The Foreign Office has warned that "British nationals should exercise extreme caution throughout the country and avoid demonstration and large gatherings, which may turn violent".

More than 800,000 British tourists visited Thailand last year.

An estimated 80,000 "red shirt" pro democracy supporters of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a military coup four years ago, have been pouring into Bangkok.

They will give Thailand's military backed government a final ultimatum to call new elections or face days of widespread protest.

Thousands more demonstrators are expected to arrive later.

The leaders of the "Red Shirt" protest insist their rally will be carried out peacefully and are calling on the current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajive to dissolve parliament and call new elections.

"If Abhisit does not quit by Monday, we will march all over Bangkok," said Veera Musikapong, chairman of the protest group, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD).

The Last Odyssey

*



While reality generators may have maintained the last city on earth, at the end of time, while the multiverse collapsed all the way back to the present day; here there were other patterns; where their addictions still ruled their lives; where it was possible to disappear down any tunnel you chose, in bars called The Heart Of Darkness, Sharkies, The Walkabout, The 69ers, The Top Ten, The Happy Hippy, where any predilection was barred from its full flowering by remarkable self constraint. They giggled. There was garbage everywhere. The dust swirled up in storms from the potholed, unpaved roads, wretched smells drifted in the baking heat. Flies were everyhwere. Wherever he looked a beggar was approaching.

Dysfunction had reached the highest order. Nothing worked. Hundreds of houses burnt down in the middle of Pnom Penh and the news story focussed on whether the firemen had accepted bribes to save a few houses over the rest. Was it possible? Did anything work? The German and Austrian tourists, escaping the rigidity of their own cultures, embraced it with gusto. On holiday, they could do anything they wanted. He last saw them polishing off three Singhas for breakfast at the guesthouse. Gary, hungover to buggery, is marching around in the midday sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen. We are heading to Bangkok tomorrow. His eyes are still puffy red; having barely survived the battery of pathogens.

At least he knew now where he could achieve his delinquent goals. In the last frontier. In one of the most lawless places on the planet. Far away from anyone he had ever known. Half the English criminal class were floating around Asia, with indeterminate exit dates, often unable to return without being arrested. They loved it here. They, too, could now do almost anything. Totally indulged the simpering classes, whsipering in the wind, offered perversion or indulgence or straight forward oblivion seeking; and only the tiniest shred of self preservation kept him from joining them forever.

For as long as it lasted. For all good things come to an end. All empires crumble. All marginalised activity finally shifts on its access, unable to hold the centre, unable to go on. The human frame wasn't made for it. He would listen to them once again, their stories, their bullshit. He didn't believe half of what he heard, wouldn't trust half of them to walk him around the block. The biggest bullshitters on the planet. With his cocknehy accent and slightly camp loping London crim gate, because nobody could get to him and nobody could mess with him and get away with it, no one, he took to him immediately.

Turned out Rodney had been drinking a bottle a day of vodka while in Pnom Penh and things were starting to disappear from in front of him, black holes just opened up in the table and he couldn't his keys, things like that were happening all the time. So he flew to Bangkok to see the specialist who told him his brain was shrinking and it was the alcohol doing it. So he decided to go down to Sihanoukville on the Cambodian coast to straighten himself out. Sihanoukville is nothing but one long line of bars, at least along the beachfront where he chose to stay, so once more he was into the Passis and happy as God could make him, sitting up there at the end of the beach in the British bar, watching the view, flirting with the girls, being entertaining. And everyone else had a problem, everyone but him. Life was a wonderfjul thing, when you can watch the sunset and flirt with girls and get pissed, all at once.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g0tHL0lMZBAEpTMRlvmgYvx2Y7yA

Thailand's Thaksin supporters set to march on Bangkok

By Rachel O'Brien (AFP) – 6 hours ago

BANGKOK — Supporters of Thailand's fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra were set to gather on the streets of Bangkok Friday for mass protests aimed at toppling the government.

The so-called "Red Shirts" say they will start marching at noon. They expect their numbers to swell to hundreds of thousands on Sunday for the main rally against what they claim is the government's elitist and undemocratic rule.

"Our aim is to topple the government, to force them to make a choice between suppressing us and stepping down," Red Shirt leader Jaran Ditsatapichai told reporters last week.

The rally, to be attended by many from poor, rural areas in the kingdom's north, comes two weeks after Thailand's top court confiscated 1.4 billion dollars of Thaksin's assets, frozen after he was deposed in a 2006 coup.

Senior Reds insist the demonstration will be peaceful, but the government said Thursday it had begun deploying a 50,000-strong security force to oversee the gathering after intelligence reports warned of "sabotage".

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has cancelled a trip to Australia that clashed with the rally and a harsh security law has been invoked, which allows the government to call out troops, impose curfews and limit movements.

Thirty-three countries have issued some form of warning to visitors to the kingdom because of the protests, according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

"Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers. You should exercise caution at all times," the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office said on its website.

Bangkok's main airport, which was besieged by protesters in 2008, has made contingency plans for the rallies and The Stock Exchange of Thailand also has measures prepared to ensure trading is not affected between March 12 and 15.

Red Shirt leaders have dubbed the rally a "million-man march" but last week told reporters that up to 600,000 people were expected. The government estimates a figure of 100,000.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/11/nigeria-sectarian-massacre-murder-charges

Forty-nine people are to be charged with murder after a sectarian massacre in Nigeria left hundreds dead at the weekend, it was reported today.

Police spokesman Mohammed Lerama told the BBC that 200 people had been arrested since the pre-dawn attacks, near the town of Jos, in which children, women and elderly men were hacked with machetes and burned.

Most of the 49 facing murder charges are Muslims from the Fulani group, he said.

Nigeria is under international pressure to enforce the rule of law after accusations that it failed to protect the victims.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has called for the arrest and trial of the perpetrators.

Today, several hundred women, wearing long black dresses, marched through downtown Jos to protest against the killings, which happened in mostly Christian villages nearby.

The women waved Bibles and crosses made of scrap lumber.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Nigerian Red Cross said they were distributing food and water to nearly 5,000 people who have taken refuge in police stations, and to around 300 detainees.

Almost 3,000 people fled from Jos to camps in the neighbouring state of Bauchi after the violence, the ICRC said.

The death toll – as often after outbreaks of violence in Nigeria – remains uncertain.

Police have confirmed 109 fatalities, but the New York Times quoted the Nigerian Red Cross as saying 332 bodies had been buried in a mass grave in the village of Dogo Na Hawa.

The state authorities, human rights groups and religious leaders estimated that more than 500 people were killed.

Wolf's Eyes

*



If there were shadows in the ether, if the slathering hounds were circling just out of fire light, he was not going to pay any attention. Here in the Heart of Darkness. Here in Sihanoukville; which is remarkably similar to Goa in India 20 years ago. Much is filthy. Bars line the beach. Young drunken backpackers get blasted on a nightly; sometimes daily; basis. All is sick. Nothing is well. His stomach refuses to behave. Crippled with the stigmata of a thousand generations, he was not going to lie down now. He needed to evolve to survive. He could become another person. He could become anything he wanted to be.

And yet here it was, this crummy beach in the over bright sun; where nothing could be achieved. Old men lamented they could no longer drink; that they had woken up at the end of their lives, more dedicated to living out of it than in it, as yet another amiable English outcast described it; and you couldn't even have a Scotch. Gary is sleeping after a restless night, the disco music pumping out. The guards let him know the hotel was owned by a senior member of the police, just in case there was any trouble. "This f...ing country," his friend had declared in the middle of the night. "Ï am not going to pay." That was unlikely. You always paid.

Sullen, the locals stared at you like you were about to rape their children. Which considering some of the behaviour of the western tourists, was possible. They stared at you with a numb, ignorant loathing he was born to endure. The tragedy of it all was just beneath the surface. What could have been. What would have been. The creatures that came, the creatures that went. As if all sound, all light, all flight was something that could be taken in; as if the whisps of sand and heat and a dog shitting on the beach, the bobbing fishing boats and the wreaking air of neglect could never compensate; and yet there were moments, as the pink mauves of the sunrise and the sunset transformed the scene, when he could almost have been happy.

There was nothing else to do and there were bars everywhere. He was surmounted by evil and conditioned by lust; yet nothing worked. They were away from meetings yet they were not drinking. All was gone quiet. They were thinking of fleeing the country. All was quiet. There were no girly bars. Banana pancakes and English breakfasts sold along the beach. Coffee was readily available. The tourists came and went; most of them 30 years younger than himself. He couldn't believe he had gone out of his way, had wasted money, to come here. All was quiet and yet the supernatural was all around, as if the fabric of things was nothing but a paper cloth over a deeper place.

A lace from which he had almost managed to depart himself. A place where he could never be happy. Where the sanctuary he sought was unavailable. It didn't matter now. He just wandered. The filthy conditions meant he was under assault, like other westerners, from every bug imaginable. It was awkward. He just wanted to get pissed and dance off on his own, a corner, a subject of interest or derision but beyond caring; dancing jerkily through to the sunset when other wasteoids joined him on the beach, grinning stupidly as the partook in their poisons, holding still the large alcohol containers as they used straws to suck the liquid into their already inebriated bodies.

It looked such fun but he could not partake. And so it was that the whispers of the sea took him everywhere and nowhere; and lights circled and pain was brief. There would be no cure. Not for this. Not now, not ever.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/2010/03/oscars-academy-awards-news-the-hurt-locker-371682594-story.html

How did 'The Hurt Locker' defy the odds at the Oscars?
March 8, 2010 | 5:07 pm

It's amazing that "The Hurt Locker" won best picture at the Oscars despite having three strikes against it. "The Hurt Locker" didn't feature A-list stars. It wasn't successful at the box office. And maybe, worst of all: it was about the Mideast war, a topic usually cursed at the Academy Awards.

So how did it pull off this Oscar miracle?

For starters, "The Hurt Locker" had some high-caliber oomph behind it. It was distributed by Summit, a studio with bold leaders who had deep pockets and something to prove. Flush with money from the "Twilight" movies, Summit wanted to be taken seriously as an artistic player in Hollywood.
The Hurt Locker Oscars Academy Awards news

Early on, Summit hired Cynthia Swartz and her Oscar soldiers at 42West to head up its academy campaign. Swartz had been a key player in the past blitzkriegs behind "Chicago" (and other Miramax flicks when she was still a commander in Harvey Weinstein's army), "Crash" and "No Country for Old Men" and other successful award champs.

Swartz likes to take on daredevil challenges. A few years ago, for example, she adopted a gritty, hip-hop film called "Hustle & Flow" just to see if she could ram it past the academy's fuddy-duddy bias. Bingo. She ended up nabbing a best-actor nomination for Terence Howard and reaped a win for best song ("It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp").

The initial groundswell of support for "The Hurt Locker" came from a pure, heroic source: the film critics. It hadn't fared well on the awards front at first. It competed last year at the Indie Spirits, for example, and only reaped nominations for actors Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie. Nothing for picture, director or screenplay.

But when "The Hurt Locker" entered this year's derby, things were different. It gathered momentum quickly, launching a bandwagon that was hard to stop. The Indie Spirits' rival award, the Gotham, named it best picture. It swept the film critics' trifecta: Los Angeles, New York and National Society. Those are critics' groups comprised of mostly print-based, cynical, gritty journalists who are renowned for picking quirky stuff like "Mulholland Drive" that doesn't break through into the Oscars. Then "The Hurt Locker" won best picture from the Critics' Choice Awards. That was odd because it's a prize bestowed by members of the Broadcast Film Critics Assn. They're largely part of the junket press just like Golden Globe voters. Both groups tend to be similar in taste to Oscar voters.

The Golden Globes picked "Avatar," but that wasn't too strange: they've been out of sync with Oscar voters four out of the past five years. Then something extraordinary occurred. "The Hurt Locker" won laurels from the directors' and producers' guilds, which usually predict what wins best picture at the Oscars. Think about it: the producers — people in charge of generating profit — endorsed a financially unsuccessful movie. That meant that "The Hurt Locker" had not only crossed over from the film critics to the film industry, but that it landed with nuclear force.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/09/2840558.htm

Abbott still 'threatened' by homosexuality

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is standing by his comments that homosexuality makes him feel "threatened".

Mr Abbott said he would "probably feel a bit threatened ... as most people do" when asked how he felt about homosexuality during a 60 Minutes interview which aired on Sunday night.

Last night he told Lateline's Leigh Sales that the comment was a "spontaneous answer".

"The truth is I try to take people as I find them," Mr Abbott said.

"I've always tried to be that way and I hope as I get older I become better at it."

When asked to clarify what he meant by "threatened", Mr Abbott would not say if he felt threatened that men might be attracted to him, or if he felt that traditional families were threatened.

"There is no doubt that it challenges, if you like, orthodox notions of the right order of things," he said.

"But as I also said on [60 Minutes], it happens, it's a fact of life and we have to treat people as we find them."

Sun Set

*




Feverish and indistinct it might have been, but sometimes everything came together and they were thrown back through time, into dusty little villages where nothing had changed in centuries, except now a television continued night and day in one corner of the dirt floored shacks. Banana leaves swept across the environment, marching sentinels. He remembered now, how utterly twisted they used to get in Asia all those decades ago; at the frontier, on the cusp of change, shamans dancing for a greater cause. There were always sycophants. There was always the sick. Time kept crawling past like an over hanging shadow; waits for no man. The evil hand kept rising and falling; the shockwaves had almost dissipated in the far night, the tuk tuk drivers were always waiting.

The girls hung off him like evil moths and he paid for their food, even though they ordered too much. He was happy with the way things went. He was not robbed. But it was easy in those twisting back streets to be confronted with anything, and everything. You want something, anything? the man asked, and the implication was clear. You didn't have to stick to the straight and narrow here. If he was going to be rescued, it wasn't here and now. If the old ghosts were stirring, it wasn't with remonstrance. They looked on and barely recognised the person he had become. The bar girls stayed for as long as the jugs of beer held out. They were wasted beyond any good reason. The sun set over the lake and time stood still.

It was easy to be a corporate suck. It was harder to sit here and be so dramatically precious, to cry deeply into beers and wonder why, why, the delusion of every alcoholic to drink normally, into the gates of insanity and death. That's what they said. But there were many theories, many options, many ways of viewing the situation. They couldn't just say you're stuffed and it's time to get yourself together. They had to bring God into it. Through prayer and meditation. If you want to see a group of truly self obsessed and self indulgent people go to a meeting. Man. They never shut up. He heard them out and remained quiet. Wild times were wild times. He was flying across the shadowed ground; the hallowed, dangerous lands between the real and the unreal, the gateways he had fought to make his own.

Money protected him from everything, even consequence. They were heading to the coast. Already the baking heat of Pnom Penh was picking up, the dust caked into the air, the glow of forth coming heat already lighting up the sky. Already the smoke and dirt, the snarl of the traffic, was beginning to build up. Saturday, and the construction sites were quiet. But here in the palace, in a place where a bar was called The Heart Of Darkness, there were other concerns. He was shattered and yet rebuilding. He traveled back in time and was a young man, doing the same things in the same bars amongst the same people, but now he had white hair and was expected to pay for everything. The shadows were at bay, just. Strangers stood watch on the outer perimeter.

The music began as the sun set. The lake was being filled in and major development was going ahead. Soon the ramshackle collection of old back packer guesthouses where anything and everything usually went would be gone, replaced by money and progress and charmless development; and the old Asia of which there were so few signs; and yet so many; would be gone. A brief moment in a flickering consciousness; eaten alive by passing generations, poor behaviour, a stubborn population, bribes and fear. Everything would go fleeing before the bulldozer; and waves of sickness would be upon them once again. No one could live forever. These were just silly endeavours; the recovery of lost moments; in a thousand bars, in a thousand places, amongst myriad strangers. He had sought oblivion and, briefly, found it.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/fight-on-the-election-starts-now-20100305-pot3.html

After copping a hiding from Tony Abbott for three months, this was the week Kevin Rudd finally fought back.

The Prime Minister overdid his apology last weekend, but his broad strategy to reboot the public debate has worked. Talk shifted from insulation to Rudd's self-flagellation, and then when that got boring, the government had the space to launch its election campaign offensive on education and health.

And for the first time since he took over as Opposition Leader, Abbott was not in the right place at the right time, but quite literally lost in the wilderness as the government began its attack.

What Rudd released this week was the broad framework of his health and hospitals plan. It is the first move in a carefully choreographed re-election strategy.

More details of the health plan are to come. So is the Henry tax review, which will explain in part how the government intends to pay for its promises.

Rudd has said the whingeing states should ''get with the program'' on health.

The premiers, not unreasonably, say they don't yet know what the whole program is.

The big revelation this week was the Commonwealth volunteering for 60 per cent of the dizzying increases in our national hospitals bill. That's a major incentive for the states to agree, since under the existing system they would have had to pay for most of it, and lacked any plausible means of doing so. It's also a big incentive for the federal government to get the system right, because if it doesn't, it will carry the cost.

We already know this promise means the government will need to find an extra $15 billion by 2020 just to meet the share of cost increases for which it will now be liable. Over the same period NSW will be $4.9 billion better off.

But with premiers it always comes down to the bucket of money, and our state leaders don't yet know the size of that all-important bucket - how much more Rudd is offering in the short term, over the next three years, which is the timeframe of immediate relevance to voters, state and federal.

We know there will be extra spending in the promised announcements about training more doctors and nurses, reducing the hours patients have to wait in emergency departments and also hospital waiting lists.

As a senior female minister likes to put it, the Rudd government is showing the states a bit of ankle first, not revealing its whole leg, and certainly not starting proceedings by ripping off its skirt.

More will be revealed as the prime ministerial courtship of the premiers continues in the lead-up to the Council of Australian Governments meeting on April 11.

And most of the premiers are wisely waiting for a clearer view of what they might be getting before passing final judgment.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/06/2838318.htm?section=justin

Labor preselectors in the New South Wales Central Coast seat of Robertson are deciding whether or not to stick with sitting member Belinda Neal or ditch her for a similarly-named rival.

Ms Neal's fate will be decided in a ballot of 177 Labor members, to be conducted today at the Country Women's Association hall in Woy Woy.

"I'm not taking anything for granted," she said.

"I'm working as hard as I can, but I'm quite confident that at the next election I will be representing the ALP in the seat of Robertson."

The Robertson MP has been embroiled in a number public scandals since taking office in 2007.

She hit the headlines in 2008 when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd instructed her to take anger management classes after she and her husband John Della Bosca were accused of abusing staff at a restaurant.

There have also been allegations of impropriety in this preselection battle.

But Ms Neal has denied the claims and says she has served her constituents well.

"There's an acknowledgment both in the ALP and on the Central Coast at large that I have been very effective," she said.

She has also been buoyed by the Prime Minister's support.

"I'll be very pleased to be part of his team at the next election," she said.

But Newcastle University lecturer Deborah O'Neill says she is the party's best shot of keeping hold of the marginal seat at the next election.

"People in this area want to vote Labor," she said.

Fat Bitches In A Hand Basket To Hell

*



I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect.
George Carlin



He sat in the Foreign Correspondents Club at sunset watching that famous scene, the foreign flags fluttering, tourists coming and going. One fat f... sat grandly at a table, shoveling food into his enormous body. An Asian woman with a bored Eurasian child playing at her feet sat next to him, dwarfed. There were so many things to think about. Had enough now? Done now? The corporate suck. Lost, after so many years working, the days grew longer in the stifling heat and the dust. Astonishing architecture and a way of life. An American academic in his sixties, accompanied by an enormously frail old man, asked if they could share his table. By all means he declared, and thought of adding, I could do with the company.

Gary had disappeared so a pub crawl down the Riverfront seemed the only solution. There were so many tourists, he was surprised. Cambodia just didn't seem an ordinary sort of place for tourists to come, too dusty, too dirty, too hot, too chaotic. But there they were, often clutching their Lonely Planet Guides. You didn't want to come here? he asked the old man, after his academic friend explained he hadn't wanted to come to this particular establishment and was grumpy about it. I've been here so often before, he explained. But the ambiance, the high ceilings, the fans, the view, the sunset, his friend declared. I love it. Time cured all, that's what they declared, but time was our worst enemy.

They were so enormous, some of those elephantine girls climbing the steps to the rooftop bar. He stayed where he was. He watched them come, he watched them go. All was not lost, but he needed to be careful now. He sat in Street 86, in the forecourt of that enormous house, and waited for someone, anyone, to come, even one of those garrulous Americans who never stopped talking about themselves. They were in paradise. They had found the vehicle of their dreams. They could be the legends they had always wanted to be. Water trickled through the fountain; gold fish swam in its base. No one came and he was left with his own thoughts, his own broiling stomach and disorganised, sometimes anguished head. Fully optioned deviate, he declared; but there was no fun in growing old.

He watched those women climb those stairs, looming over the fat f... who had just finished shoveling a giant meal into his already giant frame, and thought of the lean Khmers in the crowded streets outside. The coolies who worked all day in the beating sun on the construction site next door. The pounding of hammers breaking through the day. They seemed oblivious to their own disgrace. The man lit up a cigarette, unhealthy in every way. The people with him watched on in a kind of complicity. There could be no way out. A man would drive him home in a tuk tuk for a slightly inflated price, four dollars, because he was white and pissed. He was happy to tip if they got him home safely and didn't rob him.

They didn't and everything came swirling back. More than 90% of the professors in America are Liberals, the academic told him, they voted Democrat. So how is Obama doing? Has he failed to link to the working masses all you people purport to represent? But they had no love of the common man. They had a love of their comfortable salaries and comfortable views; so progressive in their own little extinguished minds. He said something to that effect and the academic shouldered it all with good humour. Yes, I am in a very privileged position. The ugly girl talked to one of her friends, even higher up the stairs now, disappearing, all but her trunk like legs, and next to him another bunch of tourists settled. Briefly. It's tourist season, the old man explained, before the hot season gets here in April, May. And this place - the Foreign Correspondents Club - there will always be tourists. It's in all the Guide Books.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/hunt-for-killer-after-indian-boy-found-dead-20100304-pm01.html

Police have launched a hunt for the killer of a three-year-old Indian boy who was found dead last night after he disappeared from a house in Melbourne's north.

A council worker found the body of Gurshan Singh Channa in long grass on the side of a road near Melbourne Airport just before 7pm.

The boy, who had been visiting Australia on a holiday with his family, went missing yesterday afternoon from a house in David Street, Lalor.

His mother, Harpreet Kaur Channa, called police after he had been missing for 45 minutes, prompting a massive search. She told police she thought her son had walked out the front door while she was showering.

Homicide detectives were called in last night after the discovery of the body at Wildwood Road, Oaklands Junction, about 20 kilometres from where the boy went missing.

Police said he was found in the same clothes he was wearing when he went missing - a grey top and blue jeans.

They declined to give details of injuries he had suffered, or to speculate on the precise cause of his death.

But at a media conference late last night, Victoria Police deputy commissioner Sir Ken Jones said it was believed the boy had been murdered.

''We are treating as worst case … as a homicide,'' Sir Ken said. ''This is a terrible tragedy.

''We are doing everything in our power to establish what happened. Clearly the circumstances are suspicious, so we are assuming the worst.''

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/100215/cambodia-development-street-sweep

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — At night in Cambodia’s capital, parks once populated by sex workers fell silent. Streets and abandoned lots in the center of Phnom Penh where drug addicts and homeless slept lay empty. The city’s underbelly had been washed away.

Then reports of abuse emerged. Sex workers said police had detained them for weeks, taking the cash they had on hand and raping them — even those who protested by saying they had HIV. There were accounts of government facilities where drug users, street kids and the mentally ill were beaten and starved. Rights workers reported a security crisis for the groups they served, and a facility was shut down after they and the U.N. raised concerns.

That was more than a year ago and the uproar has since eased. Now, a new report has put the government’s street sweep campaign front and center again.

In a report released Jan. 25, Human Rights Watch describes a climate of “sadistic violence” in the government’s drug rehabilitation centers. Drug users face beatings and arduous forced labor, while being deprived of effective treatment for their addiction, the watchdog group says.

“He had three kinds of cable … he would ask you which one you prefer. On each whip the skin would come off and stick to the cable,” the report quotes a 16-year-old identified as M’noh as saying.

In its own study, the World Health Organization found a nearly 100 percent relapse rate in people coming out of the government’s drug rehabilitation facilities. “This is a common approach globally,” says Graham Shaw, a technical adviser for the World Health Organization in Cambodia. “It’s cheap and easy and it allows the government to show the public that it’s responding to drug dependence problems amongst the population, but it doesn’t provide a solution.”

The facilities are presided over by a mix of authorities, including local government offices, the Social Affairs Ministry as well as civilian and military police. Human Rights Watch says officials running the rehabilitation centers profited by renting out detainees as laborers and by selling blood they forced detainees to donate. More than 2,000 people were detained in 11 of these facilities throughout the country in 2008, the vast majority involuntarily, according to the group.

Holiday In Cambodia

*



The heat dripped through everything. There was no escape. The generation which had developed the rest of Asia into the astonishing place it now is had been wiped out in Cambodia. There were pockets of expensive Western luxury along the river front; German sausages and banana splits and beer, lots of beer. But the vendors crowded across the local train station; there were no passenger services in the whole of Cambodia, no government bus service, and infrastructure remained ad hoc. God smiled on our endeavour and we left only one hour late; was the expression in the Cambodian Daily. S21 was probably the saddest, most blighted place he had ever been. Pain and a terrible sadness still hung in the walls. Of the thousands who passed through there, only seven are known to survive.

They were only children for Christ's sake, he thought, staring at the seemingly endless rows of faces, men, women, pain wracked bodies; and then the kids, much like the cheeky kids he saw along the streets each morning as he walked out for coffee; each evening as he wandered the streets and the bars. It was like going back in time. And it was certainly more like India than Thailand. Everything wasted away. Shadows passed. One kid after another; gone, gone. Rarely, in the blizzard of photos, one stood straight with a smile in their eye. They still had hope. They thought they could talk their way out of this one. No doubt reality had set in very quickly.

There were those famous pictures of the abandoned city, the girl posing with a baby in the empty street. Love was forbidden. Currency was forbidden. All was forbidden. And you know what's really f...ed; Ross said. They say Pol Pot disappeared into the jungles. Or lived out his final days in Thailand. Until the international community got restive, he lived here in Pnom Penh, quietly in the suburbs. As if nothing had happened. No wonder the people felt schitzophrenic, frightened, years later. Tell them about the death camps, tell them about the death camps, the inebriated man said, embracing his Khmer mother-in-law. She sat there with tears in her eyes. It was appalling. Nothing could be forgiven. The heat confirmed all that he had feared.

In the brazen choking of all last options; in a world and a life where fate lines were coalescing into a single path, every deviate hid in a corner, every path was fatal; the shops were full and yet he dared not enter. Tourists gathered along the strip. The marble floors gleamed each morning after the boy had cleaned them. The sky lightened and the world erupted. Diseased, he could barely breathe. Yet hope was not absent. Despair failed to mark his every hour; the world was not a glutinous, evil place. And the sun shone and the world shook; and the muffled shock waves that spread across the land was awesome in its power. They had just been a bunch of silly, middle class boys, partying on.

While the horror of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, the forced marches, the death of a million people, the torturing of intellectuals, of anyone suspect, had grimaced through the country in the most terrible pain, all in the name of socialism, he had been lost in a different place; the staggeringly beautiful landscapes of Australia; our little gang, my little gang, almost all dead now, partying like there was no tomorrow, there in the heart of Sydney. Every turn of every street opened up another vista; and he had owned them all. Everything was going to be alright. He grimaced and yet there was nothing wrong. The horror might have just begun; but it was a very small and self indulgent horror indeed in contrast to the pain of a whole country. And so he whizzed about town on the back of a moto, cheerfully over paying the driver; or caught a tuk tuk home through the crowded traffic; and never complained, always tipped. Like other tourists, they seemed to think it was the least they could do. The country would thrive; on the verge of a boom; and all those kind dollars would be forgotten in the rush to modernity.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/7361061/Australian-opposition-leader-lost-in-outback.html

Mr Abbott had set off with a small party on quad bikes to visit Aboriginal sacred sites located deep into Watarrka land in the Northern Territory.

However, once they reached their destination of Fossil Creek several members of the group, including the leader of the Liberal Party, became separated from their guide.

In a dream scenario for Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, Mr Abbott, who has been gaining in the polls, had no way of communicating with the outside world.

In desperation, Mr Abbott attempted to send a text message to his press secretary reading: "WERELOSTNEARFOSSILCREEK" but the message would not send because there was no mobile coverage.

Other members of the group considered using an emergency satellite phone to raise the alarm, but no one knew how to make a call from it.

As the hours wore on the situation looked increasingly dire.

Six hours after losing their guide Ian Conway, a local Aboriginal entrepreneur, and with daylight fading, Mr Abbott and his companions were stuck in unfamiliar country, with no idea of the way out and only T-shirts and trousers to protect against the cold Outback night.

"Our safety is not at risk, mate, but our comfort sure is," Mr Abbott reportedly declared.

Luckily, Mr Conway reappeared just before the sun set. The group then endured a hair-raising 40 mile journey on quad bikes in the dark before reaching the safety of their Kings Creek station.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/04/2835999.htm?section=justin

There are fears of a large-scale attack in Iraq in the coming days after more than 30 people were killed in blasts yesterday, just days out from the country's national election.

Three suicide attackers killed more than 30 people and injured more than 50 in Baquba, north-east of Baghdad, yesterday afternoon.

Baquba was notorious as a stronghold for violent Sunni insurgents and yesterday they showed they could still hit hard.

Two police stations were hit simultaneously by the separate car bomb attacks.

Police say as the wounded were being taken to hospital, a third attacker dressed as a police officer rode with them in an ambulance and then blew himself up when they arrived at hospital.

The militants are believed to be linked to Al Qaeda and the operation appeared highly organised.

Security has been tight as Iraqis prepare to go to the polls this weekend in the country's second national election since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Yesterday's violence had been expected, but Iraqis still fear an even bigger attack from Al Qaeda in their efforts to disrupt the vote.

What were the chances?

*



What were the chances? There were his old neighbours from back home sitting out front of a restaurant on the Riverfront in Pnom Penh, yacking garrulously, as seemed entirely fitting, as they always seemed to do, with the tourists at the neighbouring table. He struggled to stay sober; and there he was, that familiar face from the local. David. Was it? A lawyer. Always up for a chat. His girlfriend. They seemed to suit each other; although there he was, entirely trapped. She wasn't letting him out of her sight. Couldn't go off and have a shower or whatever while they had a beer and a game of pool. But that was it, the clinging essence. He watched the backpackers walking past in the chaos; it was like Asia used to be like 40 years ago.

Until modernity swept the land and the region; and money poured in from everywhere; and an industrious people embraced everything about the modern world; the world the West had assumed for no good reason was its own. Before Pol Pot wiped out a generation and threw the country back in time. The elephant walked the Riverfront; the story going it was the only elephant in Pnom Penh, the only one, being small and able to be hidden during the seventies, and therefore the only one to survive the murderous regime. All the rest were worked to death. They smile but they keep on coming. The traffic is chaotic.

Check your guns at the door. Don't cross anyone in a Gold or Black Lexus, the saying goes, the driver will be doubling as a guard, and carrying a gun. This was a different world and a different place. He could feel the shammozzle eating its way through his heart. He could see time stand still and fold in upon itself. He could see the vast awakening and yet here was a different path. He was shadowed into non-existence. He worked his way through the dark reaches. He came across everything and he came across nothing. The mosquitoes here are fierce; he said, batting away the annoying insects. Peter Garrett is finally going under; his arrogance and contempt for normal procedure and for other people finally coming home to roost.

If you had held every trendy idea in history; if you had bemoaned the fates of all the right groupings and held all the correct views to slot in with the chattering class, then he could be free. He could wake up and yell: this is it. We are going out. We are born again. Raise a glass. Great to see you. What are the chances? Over the pool table they exchanged astonished glances, what are we doing playing pool in Pnom Penh with this dude from home? And yet here they were, in this piece of the Western world, being comfortably fleeced but even more comfortably entertained. And all was well. Until he picked up that first drink.

Shadows flicked across the land like a sad gasp. In the morning the sky coloured early and the palm fronds made out against the sky. Everything was lost and yet everything was gained. Finally they left, back to their hotel, a cheappie on the Riverfront full of young backpackers. The boys were so fresh faced. The girls such princesses. They weren't going to let him go; not their man, not in his bloom of youth. He remained silent; just watched. The circuit was never ending. Shadows danced, mosquitoes buzzed, the tuk tuk drivers jostled each other and the handsome security guard lounged at the front; ever ready to perform one service or another, smiling all the way; these big, handsome, uniformed men. Even now, at sunrise, a swarm of mosquitoes bats against the window, drawn by the light. He remained frozen in the time that was all time, and smiled ruthfully as he negotiated his way home; determined not to be robbed.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2010021532041/National-news/ministry-confirms-cases-of-cholera.html

THE Ministry of Health has reported that more than 100 Cambodians have tested positive for cholera since November, reversing its initial refusal to confirm the presence of the disease and simultaneously defending its handling of the outbreak.

Speaking at a joint press conference held with the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday, Minister of Health Mam Bunheng said there had been 128 confirmed cholera cases and one death. About 65 percent of the cases involved children under the age of 15, and the single recorded fatality was an 82-year-old man from Takeo province who died after contracting cholera in January, he said.

Dr Nima Asgari, a public health official at the WHO, on Sunday noted that the nation has only four hospitals, all in Phnom Penh, with the correct laboratory facilities required to test for cholera, adding that it would be “almost impossible to estimate the actual number of cases of cholera” nationwide.

Prior to Friday, ministry officials had not released any information about cholera cases, drawing criticism from officials at Kantha Bopha Children’s Hospital in Phnom Penh, who said they had been forwarding information on cases of cholera to the government since mid-November.

Though doctors at the hospital last week accused the government of not doing enough to publicise the outbreak, Mam Bunheng said his ministry had tried to balance the need to be forthcoming and the need to avoid sowing “panic”.

“We have not hidden any cases,” he said, pointing out that cholera cases had been reported in “three or four” Khmer-language newspapers. He said the ministry had refrained from making more publicising information about the cases so as to avoid encouraging people to seek unnecessary treatment and potentially overwhelm medical facilities.

“We may cause panic among people, and they will rush to hospitals to get treated,” he said.

He said the ministry had taken immediate action after the first case was confirmed, visiting provinces in which potential cases had been reported to educate residents about the importance of frequent hand-washing, covering toilets and boiling drinking water. He also said the ministry had distributed oral rehydration salts, intravenous fluids and chlorine for disinfecting water.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/03/2834814.htm

D-Day for Rudd's hospitals overhaul

By Samantha Hawley

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will today unveil his plan to fix Australian hospitals, an announcement that could mark the biggest change to healthcare since the introduction of Medicare in the 1970s.

Mr Rudd has previously outlined his desire to take control of funding from the states and territories, establish a national funding pool and pay hospitals on a per-patient basis.

With the states and territories against the move, he is likely to threaten to remove GST if the premiers and chief ministers do not get on board.

Western Australian Liberal Treasurer Troy Buswell says the opposition is hardly surprising.

"We've seen a Commonwealth Government who couldn't even get roof batts into people's ceiling spaces and they want us to trust their kids and our parents in a hospital system that they run," he said.

"How would it be having someone like [Environment Minister] Peter Garrett being in charge of your mum when she goes to hospital?"

Mr Rudd will also face protests from the Labor state governments as well Victorian Premier John Brumby, who was the first to publicly criticise the plan.

But the decision to overhaul the system is backed by Neil Blewett, who was health minister during the Hawke years and who oversaw the introduction of Medicare.

"It is the most fundamental change since the introduction of Medicare because it transforms hospital funding," he said.

Dr Blewett says he has long argued for a single hospital funding pool and the payment to hospitals on a per-patient basis.

"It removes what is one of the great weaknesses of the system. That is the buck-passing between the states and the Commonwealth," he said.

With the announcement coming very close to the next election, Dr Blewett says the Government has a very short time to win over the states.

Life Is Magnificent

*



Feverish and indistinct, yes, but there had been gaps, whole days even, when life had been magnificent. He stood on one of the balconies of the great house, listening to the street life outside the walls, the music pounding while he padded the empty corridors. He could see the golden stream, the golden way, the road not just less traveled but so much grander, beckoning from an adjacent path. The boy is mopping the many marbled floors. Long ago, in a distant disconnect, he had dreamed and written of hallucinatory marble floors high above the sky, and in these strange realms he had sought to make his own there were few personalities, much broken glass, much that was ethereal. Back in the real world bodies snored in his lounge room. There was only one way to protect.

He had been around there, in those last weeks before leaving Sydney, searching, paying homage to the house where John Bygate had lived, where his life had changed, possibilities had opened up. They remembered only the good times. Perhaps it was only euphoric recall. Again. Imprinting the city landscapes on a deeper retina. But that was the way of it. He thought there was no way back, that time, unfortunately, was a linear construct, but as they moved and ducked and shadowed through those ordinary streets, overridden now by decades of a property boom, with millionaires ensconced in the homes where ordinary people had once lived, there they were, the ghosts of those he had loved so much.

There was Lynne pushing her pram, every witticism that came out of her mouth a W.C. Fields style wisecrack, there was John Bygate vibrating on the stairs, the lines of the universe crossing his handsome face, there were others as they came and went. It was all too true, and it was as nothing. So few had survived. The passing of Colin Griffith and of Ian Farr in recent years had put a final full stop on that ancient gang. Oh how much those streets had seemed their own. The rooster crowing in the morning. The cats sneaking along rooftops. Now he stood looking out across another city, its strange rhythms a throwback in time to his happiest days. Mine were the 90s, David declared. Perhaps the eighties. As you get older responsibilities accrue.

Everything changes. Children come along. James, he said, I read you, I see you, I see deep into you. And then another moment was passed. He had traveled along the great divide, from the seediness at the heart of the Cross, where he had thrived and been and haunted, and it too rotated every few years through the bottom of his heart, as if any of this made sense, as if any of these people were still alive. He had become the final sentinel, harbouring things he could only poorly describe. If they had meant so much, why not conjure them up? Living, breathing? Charismatic, doomed.

Because shadows are shadows and the past is the past, and every little thing is as nothing when compared with the bigger, grander world that the sun now swept across every day. When communications had opened up everything and there was no excuse for ignorance. When rich men lived in Dubai and the world was their glistening oyster. When private planes roamed the planet at will. When the shadows of grand houses swept down across manicured lawns, and the camera eye was everywhere. It wasn't fair to be haunted. It wasn't fair to be changed. It wasn't fair to have outlived everybody in his youth. But in this strange city, in a place he had never even contemplated being, just as he had looked out across Marrakesh from that dusty rooftop more than 40 years ago, just as he had gazed out the second floor window of that room in the community centre all that time later, and seen the same dreaming spires, the same set apart rooms, the same web of streets, the heart of the matter. A landscape undone, overprinted, reread.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8544608.stm

Thousands of Chilean troops are heading to the country's devastated earthquake zone as reports emerge of desperate survivors turning to looting and arson.

President Michelle Bachelet said a total of 7,000 troops would soon be in place in areas around Concepcion.

The city, Chile's second-largest, was the closest to the epicentre of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake.

At least 723 people have been confirmed dead, with 19 more missing, officials say, with the toll expected to rise.

Ms Bachelet said reinforcements would join the troops already in the provinces of Bio Bio and Maule, bringing the total to some 7,000.

Concepcion will see another night under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, with reports emerging from the city of residents clashing with police as they lay siege to shops and supermarkets in the search for food.

The army was called in to help the police force deal with looters, some of whom filled shopping trolleys with groceries while others made off with plasma TVs and other electrical appliances.

Some 160 people were arrested for looting and breaking the curfew, police said on Monday.

Clashes with looters saw one 22-year-old man shot and killed.

And by Monday evening tensions had flared once more, with troops deployed to the streets after a blaze began in a looted supermarket.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/article/the-abbott-poll-jump-is-deceiving-pd20100302-35qqw?opendocument&src=blb&

Mark Westfield

The plunge in Kevin Rudd and Labor's opinion poll figures, and the corresponding recovery of the Tony Abbott-led coalition has caught most pundits (including this writer) by surprise.

It has been the speed of the Labor fall from grace that has been most surprising – triggered by the insulation batts fiasco, but due also to a number of slow-burn policy failures – rather than a closing of the poll gap itself, which was widely expected on both sides of politics as we move towards an election.

Tony Abbott finds himself in a fortunate position, courtesy of Rudd’s many failings. But then the opposition knew it was only a matter of time before voters wised up to Rudd, though the wait has been frustratingly long.

Malcolm Turnbull fought so hard for his leadership because he also knew that this swing away from the government would happen. Rudd suddenly looks like a rabbit caught in the spotlight, though he is transforming himself from being a leader overconfident to the point of hubris, to the more palatable position of underdog.

However, the reality is more complex than this. What appears to be a potentially election-losing shift in the polls for Labor could easily be mishandled by Abbott and his colleagues. They will need to continue fighting hard to keep Labor on the back foot and any complacency or premature arrogance, will be punished heavily come election time.

I still believe Labor can and will win the next election, but the remarkable string of policy failures and blunders and unmet promises by Rudd Labor are taking their toll, and the contest is shaping to be far closer than I – or most observers – would have believed at the turn of the new year.

From consultation with former colleagues, I get the sense that Labor will still increase its majority, but not by the 10 seats I believed at the end of last year – more like a net two or three.

If Labor’s margin increases only narrowly, the coalition numbers men (they are overwhelmingly men, and to the right in the coalition’s spectrum) will see this as a moral victory justifying their decision to risk all by dumping Turnbull in favour of Abbott, and a victory of sorts for the opposition given the dire predictions of only a month or two ago.

The recent boundary redistribution has rendered five coalition seats notionally Labor, so a net loss of anything less than this number will be regarded as a net gain and a reasonable outcome.

Feverish and Indistinct

*



All the single ladies, all the single ladies, the music pounded in the bars and he danced, briefly, without consequence, without need for approval, without cooperation. Feverish and indistinct, he had been sick ever since he had arrived in Cambodia. There were alternatives, but none were savory. Diseased fate lines. Paths not taken. Consequence coming home. Outside the sun never stopped. By 7.30am the sky was a single glare and the heat was already kicking up from the ground. His own state made it impossible to embrace wherever he was. He couldn't be free. He couldn't see what was coming. Love to shadows, black moths picking at his skin. They pay you all the attention in the world, until the money runs out, his companion said, and they both laughed in the knowledge.

Here one eyed strangers and old Asian hands gathered to help, but there was nothing they could do. He had been free and he had made the wrong choice. He was sick and the era was not his own. Too many things had happened. Feverish and indistinct, he padded around the massive mansion, as empty as his own life. The ceilings were high. The marble gleamed. There were servants to accomplish everything. All was calm. All was bright. All was an infinity that could not be mustered. He was strong. He was weak. He had seen too much. He had betrayed too many. He had seen off his friends and survived, only to end in this terrible state.

The past is a troubled vault for both of us, my son, let's not open it up. The past is a troubled country, and all was past, all was lost, he was trapped in circumstances not of his own, the diseased fate line from which he struggled to survive. All was lost but not lost, all was crazy. He felt indistinct, as if nothing had ever mattered. The paper's were full of complex stories of another era; and everything he had hoped to contain, within himself, within his own story, was as nothing. The feverish intensity of this place, of the millions, of its frontier quality and the plain intensity of other things, these days we made our own.

All was coming but not conquered. He bowed his head to the surrounding tide. Next door the clatter of construction began early and ended late. Hard lives, different lives. Sometimes he came through, sometimes he simply wasn't there. Others looked on in concern, tried to treat him like a normal person. But there was nothing normal about this terrible state. He came back, I come back, the guard smiled. But there was nothing there, nothing to say: come get me, I am human, you are not divine. The gaps in the force field, the fabric of reality, they were opening up everywhere and there was little he could do to resist. Serious things were happening. It was quaint, die hard, and doomed to failure.

If things could be rewritten, if things could be done again, he would take a different path. He should never have come here. All these things were different. All these places were feverish and discontented, as if the world itself was turning upon him. They looked with kind eyes, from the comfort of their own places. Keep coming back, they said, as if it would make the slightest difference, as if this terminal train had another destination. All the time, everything, closing in, washing away, as his stomach roiled and everything became faint. It wouldn't be clear what was going to happen. There wasn't anyway out, perhaps he would just catch a plane to a different place, perhaps there was a solution, he just didn't know what it was, not right now.

The sting of the Scotch whisky made little sense, except as a symptom of relief. The beggars came and went. All was not lost, but he couldn't feel that now. Time would take him through to the end; on the passenger train; on the path less followed. He would climb into the hills and never forget. He was heading to Sihounikville, but perhaps, perhaps very easily, it was just another mistake. The times were crowded and decayed. He could see everything and nothing. He could finally come back into his own skin. He granted an audience to the king, as the spirit between the worlds. Yet even his own riding of the border of the real made little sense; and he could impart no wisdom, no advise. Stay clear of slippery places. Be clean and comfortable. Let the days roll away, for all is not lost, you only think it is, now, sick, feverish and indistinct.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/01/2832826.htm

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's admission that the Government deserves a "whacking" from voters is simply a ploy to gain headlines, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says.

In an extensive mea culpa yesterday, Mr Rudd said he needed to improve his performance following the home insulation debacle and the delay of some government policy announcements such as health.

His deputy, Julia Gillard, says the comments were needed but Mr Abbott says they are simply the words of a "rattled" Prime Minister who wants to keep his job.

"I think plainly this is the politics of seeking forgiveness that he's interested in," Mr Abbott said.

"The thing about this 'I'm sorry' routine is that he really wants to get off scot-free.

"I think he's shocked by the scale of his Government's own ineptitude - I think that's what's got him worried."

The Government is preparing to announce its plan to improve the country's hospitals - a plan that has been due since the beginning of the year.

Yesterday Mr Rudd indicated that the Commonwealth could take more control in the funding and planning of hospitals but was unlikely to take over their operation.

"Our challenge for the future is to make sure the system is properly funded and properly planned, but it has always been my view that hospitals are best run locally," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8541790.stm

A roadside bomb has killed 11 civilians in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province, officials say.

The bomb, blamed on Taliban insurgents, hit a coach in Nawzad district, said a spokesman for the provincial governor.

The blast was well to the north of where Nato and Afghan troops are waging a major offensive against the Taliban.

Taliban insurgents have increasingly resorted to using roadside bombs as Nato countries have increased their troop numbers in Afghanistan recently.

"A newly-planted mine of the Taliban hit a coach bus, killing 11 civilians including two women and two children," said the spokesman, Dawud Ahmedi.

The Taliban has come under pressure from the increased foreign forces acting with Afghan troops but have struck back with bombings and suicide attacks.

A bomb left on a bicycle in Helmand's capital on Tuesday killed seven civilians.

And on Friday, the Taliban said they were behind an attack on the national capital Kabul which lasted several hours.

At least 16 people were killed, including 11 foreigners, two policemen and three gunmen.