The state's election watchdog has authorised the Crown Solicitor to prosecute 800 donors who made almost $8 million in political donations to candidates and parties for last year's NSW election but failed to declare them. 

The 800 include many of Australia's biggest companies, which have given between $1525 and $543,000 each - and they face fines of $11,000 for each offence. 

Signed into law April 24, 2008, the oh-so innocent sounding Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007 establishes a national database of newborn DNA. 

This law establishes collection and warehousing of newborn DNA for scientific research and requires no parental consent or knowledge. 

I wonder, dear reader, if you are wondering the same thing I’m wondering as I’m writing: Just what the fuck is wrong with us?  

Old men make the wars, but they don’t fight the fight.  

The congressmen that declare war are too important to fight, too important and too busy. They are too busy lobbying, too busy collecting the lucrative pensions they have allocated themselves, and too busy assigning defense contracts to companies that will employ them after their tenure in congress.  

Five years after George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished" atop a Navy aircraft carrier, the death toll in Iraq continues to rise. 4,062 American soldiers have been confirmed killed since the war began, 47 in April alone.  

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates. 

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms. 

During a press conference on Tuesday, US President George Bush spelled out the threat to Iran contained in last week’s release of CIA intelligence on an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor.

As well as warning Syria and North Korea, which purportedly helped construct the building, he declared that the US was “sending a message to Iran, and the world for that matter, about just how destabilising a nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East”. 

"Your Honor - this is Hamdan - I am speaking to you." 

What followed was a riveting exchange between Judge Keith Allred and Hamdan - an exchange that revealed the enormous distance between the judge's good-faith and compassionate efforts to provide a fair trial in a flawed system, and Hamdan's increasing frustration with a legal system whose rules seem to change with each of his victories.

We have overthrown foreign governments, interfered with elections in foreign countries, invaded foreign lands on a regular basis, and supported all manner of dictators around the globe. The CIA once overthrew the first democratically elected leader of Iran and installed a brutal dictator. What other "black ops" have our spooks been up to over the years? 

For decades these self-professed saviours of the Western world helped precipitate U.S. foreign policy disasters like the Vietnam War. 

Any doubt that David Hicks was charged with war crimes for purely political reasons has gone, his father and his lawyer say. 

The former chief prosecutor of the US military commissions at Guantanamo Bay said overnight he would not have pursued Hicks because the case against the Australian was not serious enough.  

BP has reported a 63 percent jump in profits in the first quarter compared to the same period a year ago. The oil company on Tuesday reported a profit of $7.6 Billion compared to $4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2007. First-quarter profit was up 73 percent compared to the previous quarter.

from Crikey ….. 

Iemma's dilemma: privatise or count the Costa

 Alex Mitchell writes: 

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark has hailed the dedication of a statue of a Kiwi soldier on Sydney's Anzac Bridge but expatriates are angry they were barred from the ceremony.

The granddaughter of a NZ soldier who died at Gallipoli was one of about 100 expatriate New Zealanders refused entry to today's ceremony after officials closed traffic and pedestrian access for more than five hours.