Former prime minister and cricket fanatic Bob Hawke has admitted an overloaded fixture list has made him less enthused with the game than he once was.

Mr Hawke joined the Grandstand commentary team during the coverage of the third Test between Australia and Pakistan at the SCG and spoke to commentators Jim Maxwell and Simon Katich about the current state of Australian cricket.

The 87-year-old said he preferred a time before Twenty20 cricket in which Shield and Test cricket were the only shows in town.

"I've got to be honest with you, I'm less passionate about cricket now than I was," he said.

"There's too much cricket. I've always been in favour of players getting well paid. No-one is more in favour of players getting well paid than me but I think money has taken over the game to a large extent.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-04/theres-too-much-cricket-now-bob-ha...

Who cares about what Bob thinks? 

The new format of cricket allows us to see former test player still in their prime hitting a few balls with a popularity unequalled. The seriousness of test attrition with the weather playing a role in the result can be more boring than watching grass grow on the wicket. Bob is as relevant as a retiree on a cruise ship.

• By Eugene Robinson

• By Dana Milbank

• By Richard Cohen

• By Richard Painter and Norman Eisen

• By David Ignatius

LONDON — Apple chief executive Tim Cook says fake news is “killing minds,” and governments and tech firms must act to stop it.

Cook told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that falsehoods are being spread by people who want “to get the most clicks, not tell the most truth. It’s killing people’s minds in a way.”

Tech companies have been criticized for doing too little to weed out fake news. Cook says firms have a duty to “create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news” without curbing free speech.

In an interview published Saturday he calls for a “massive” campaign to raise awareness of untrustworthy news stories.

Cook says “we need the modern version of the public service announcement campaign. It can be done quickly if there is a will.”

Read more:

http://nypost.com/2017/02/11/tim-cook-says-fake-news-is-killing-peoples-...

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WHAT? Has Tim Cook understood anything about anything yet? Is he serious? Fake news is what feed all the religious fanatics and religious moderates and has been the daily bread of civilisations for thousands of years. We live in the Age of Deceit! We live in the age of the governmental porkie! PROPAGANDA. Not a single governmental motivation is "real news". All the religious fanatics feed on religious fake news daily and so do most of America in their "happy-clappy" churches and other churches. Islam is as much fake news as "the 35 metres crocodiles" in the Northern Territory... And I mean 35 metres...

"When we told you our boats were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, we were lying. When we told you Iraqis were throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, we were lying. When we blew up a medicine factory and told you it was bin Laden's headquarters, we were lying. When we told you Iraq had WMD, we were lying. When we told you Gadafy was feeding his troops Viagra so they could rape protestors, we were lying. But we swear to God we are telling the absolute truth this time. Why would we lie?

read all at:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/home/articles/the-quiet-whispers-of-our-maste...

See image at top...

...

They finally got their briefing on March 15, in a secure Senate basement room. When Feinstein emerged after several hours, she looked shaken. The FBI, as the public would learn a few days later when Comey testified before a House committee, had been investigating since July whether the president and his associates had colluded with Russia to influence the US election.

Feinstein was stopped by reporters. Lips tightly retracted, she said, "This briefing was all on sensitive matters and highly classified," emphasizing the words with a raise of her eyebrows as Grassley looked on. "It's really not anything that we can answer questions about." She looked as determined, to those who knew her, as she had decades earlier in San Francisco, when she stepped up to announce the worst to a city in chaos.

Feinstein was in a lighter mood a couple of days later when activists confronted her outside a Los Angeles fundraiser. She cheerfully stepped into the group as they peppered her with questions, including one about Trump: "There are so many things he is doing that are unconstitutional. How are we going to get him out?"

Feinstein gave a slight smile. "We have a lot of people looking at this," she said, referring to conflict-of-interest legislation in the works. "I think he's going to get himself out."

read more:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/dianne-feinstein-versus-dona...

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Gus:

Despite her cleverness, the lioness Feinstein is not an Einstein... Once more she gets sucked in the clever constructs of disinformation by the CIA and the FBI. She admits having been sucked in by the CIA fake stuff in regard to "Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction" (whatever this means). But this time she is ready to accept that the "Russians interfered with the US Presidential elections". How can they do this? Yes, some Trump people kept in contact with some Russians. Next the bad news: There is nothing wrong with this and all along Trump said he'd like to be less "anti-Russian". We all knew about this. Is this idea of being "less anti-Russian" the factor that won him the elections? Have favourable Russian articles promoted by RT and Sputnik influenced the public to think that Russia was not so evil, contrarily to what the US MMMM (US mediocre mass media de mierda) has been promoting since the 1950s, with the cold war in mind and heaped crap on Putin because Scotland (sorry I mean Crimea) decided to become free from England (sorry I mean Ukraine)?

So, "This briefing was all on sensitive matters and highly classified," that she should believe a word of it? The public is entitled to know exactly HOW the Russians "interfered" with the US Presidential elections. What did they do that was so subversive we are not allowed to know? How did the Russians manipulate Comey to raise questions about the integrity of the DNC, which for all to see blatantly was doing some manipulative dancing of its own, even without us knowing about the Ms Clinton emails? Was the mention by Comey of Hillary's emails the clincher that sunk her in the public's mind? Did these secret emails come from Russia's official intel' or did it come from a USB sent to Assange via let's not be coy here "diplomatic mail"? 

Okay. I've let the cat out of the bag... But was not the public fooled by the US MMMM to believe that Clinton was a shoe-in when she was not? Isn't this a form of deception that in the contrariant mind of people who think that "we will see about that"? The "reverse" psychology of deceit is complicated and deceitful. Many agree that Bernie was offering a better future with ideals than hilarious Hillary did by sleeping with the corporates. This became a sore division in the DNC, which without fully explaining saw the spectre of socialism coming to YameriKa... 

Did this division of the DNC do more harm to the Democrats than the Russians could do in a million years? And what about the DNC doing no campaigning in three states, thinking these were in the bag, when they narrowly gave ALL THE delegates to Trump? And what about the Christians? Those who were repelled by Trump but could not vote for Hillary, but ended up voting for Trump, in drove, nonetheless? Did the Russians influenced all these people, including the Bernie supporters at democracynow.org? 

The Russians did not have to do a single thing... and they did nothing. This is what hurts. So the CIA and the FBI are back in their old tricks -- manufacturing false facts and information, designed to mostly defend their arse as well telling the American people that they are more clever than to elect a stupid Trump for president... But they were duped by external forces, than by their own stupidity... Yep, it's the way it works, always blame someone else for your incompetence.

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