It was to be Robert and Lynne Siebert's dream home, but it has turned into the house of doom. 

In the six years since the couple from Skennars Head, near Ballina, watched the foundations being laid, the closest they have come to the house they designed themselves is a duplex 500 metres away which they have been renting since 2003, and now share with their two children Madelane and Grace. 

from Crikey ….. 

Frequent fury: Qantas and customers on war footing 

Ben Sandilands writes: 

‘This is the great war of our times, It is going to take 40 years’. 

Bush said in forty years the world would know if the war on terrorism & conflicts in Iraq & Afghanistan, had reduced extremism, helped moderates & promoted democracy. 

The ugly side of science — the one we fought Adolph Hitler, amongst his other nasties, to stop his radical medical experiments — was defended by scientists but thankfully exposed by a revolted reporter. Even long aware of the crap that's going on behind the sterilised doors, I nearly spewed too...  

Angling for a vice presidential nod, Hillary Rodham Clinton refused to bow out of the Democratic race Tuesday, hoping to maintain leverage as Barack Obama clinched the delegates needed to secure the party's nomination. 

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. 

America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable.  

from Crikey 

A year, almost, in the thinking of Brendan Nelson.  

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. 

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin compared the United States to a "frightening monster" on Friday and urged France to distance itself from its American ally. 

"How can one be such a shining example of democracy at home and a frightening monster abroad?" Putin said in an interview with French newspaper Le Monde transmitted live to journalists in Paris. 

Such is the relentlessness of Tony Blair's public immersion into matters of faith these days that Alastair Campbell's 'we don't do God' assertion in Downing Street has now been fully exposed for what it was: a skilful piece of diversionary spin. 

His American jailers spared Al-Ghizzawi the very worst of the worst in the long list of torture techniques now in use. He was not murdered or waterboarded. He did not have a razor blade taken to his penis, nor was he hung from the ceiling by his arms. One might describe Al-Ghizzawi's torture as a kinder, gentler torture. 

For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground. 

from Crikey ….. 

Bringing down Henson: Police, politicians and pester power join forces 

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan continued to press his case Thursday that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, and responded to a growing chorus of criticism from other former administration officials.

All those pundits out there who have been saying construction of the Gunns pulp mill is a foregone conclusion obviously forgot something. ANZ has pulled out of financing the controversial project.