From our ABC

UN response swift and tough: Bush
United States President George W Bush says the world has sent a "clear message" in imposing sanctions against North Korea over its declared nuclear test.

The United Nations Security Council has unanimously agreed to impose sanctions on North Korea, less than a week after the country defied the world by saying it had tested an atomic bomb.

"It's a unanimous resolution sending a clear message to the leader of North Korea regarding his weapons programs," Mr Bush said.

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Gus: All in all, this "swift and strong" stance proudly led by little Bushbit is the wrong tactic...
To blast and punish a bloke who's already severely handicapped by others' attitude and his own pigheadedness, can only make that someone experience a deterioration of behaviour and become a full-blown bandit or a stuff-head more dangerous than before... Irrational and forceful as North Korea's leader is, his people cannot be made to suffer the consequences of a war like the Iraqi have been — now carrying the can for the US little fibs and grandiose sneaky looting of their country's resources.

I have seen it before in individual and collective behaviour: No matter what, some people do not understand the meaning of kicks-up-the-butt, but can be swung around eventually with a dose of subtly managed tailored clever rewards that involve many aspects from discovery, sharing and curiosity enhancing activities... Its harder work than using threats and sticks but in the long run it works much better...

Making a friend in such a way without trying to enforce an outcome is more persuasive that all the bushit sabre-rattling in the world in which people end up being killed and resent your existence and threats even more. A "clear" message? No... just the wrong understanding of a delicate situation.

From our ABC

Australia to make South Pacific aid conditional
Australia says it will impose conditions on aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Solomon Islands to get better governance in the South Pacific.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, says Australia has every right to attach conditions to its aid.

"If you want Australian aid, you've got to reduce corruption. If you want Australian aid, you've got to improve governance," Mr Howard said.

"If you want Australian aid, you've got to have a better approach to economic management.

"It's not a question of forcing countries to do things, it's a question of defending the operation of the rule of law in Australia."

Mr Howard says the diplomatic fight with Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands is caused by the police effort to extradite and prosecute the suspended Solomons Attorney-General, Julian Moti.

He says the Government will not interfere with the police and the rule of law.

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Gus: What a crock... eventually PNG and other countries in the Pacific will turn to countries like China and Japan to help them get out of their misery... Why Not? The price might be high but under the circumstances of conditional-elastic-band-return-my-"generous"-money-by-post clowning attitude of our Mr Clowner, that could be the only way for these countries to survive...

From the Hew York Times

Questions Grow Over U.N. Curbs on North Korea

TOKYO, Monday, Oct. 16 — Questions over the effectiveness of the Security Council’s punitive sanctions on North Korea for its claimed nuclear test grew Sunday, as both South Korea and China — the North’s two most important trading partners — indicated that business and economic relations would be largely unaffected.
A day after the Council unanimously passed the resolution, following nearly a week of intensive diplomatic negotiations, [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/world/asia/16korea.html?hp&ex=1161057600&en=9544be70b2da0b6e&ei=5094&partner=homepage|the South Korean government] said it would still pursue economic projects with North Korea, including an industrial zone and tourist resort in the North. Those projects are not explicitly covered by the Security Council resolution, but they are an important source of hard currency for the North.
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Gus: Makes more sense... Stuff the bushit and Clowner hysterics! Be more open about the reality like adults rather than behave like brats. At some stage or another, the situation will have to be delicately negotiated without dismissing the communist angle — not childishly treated by jumping up and down like a JohnBoltonian who has just sat on a prickly cactus... His own furry handlebar.
Meanwhile our Johnnee government still has not learn a thing about diplomacy, stuck in the "good" old days of the cane in schools... 1950... a good year for our Johnnee...? Let's send an Aussie warship to blockade North Korea?... That will impress 'em! We're with the big boys... Would that make a difference? Just a few more people dying from starvation and a more resolute North Korean government...

From the BBC
Bush aides 'mocked evangelicals'
James Coomarasamy
BBC News, Washington

A new book by a former US official says President Bush's top political advisers [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6054208.stm|privately ridiculed evangelical leaders], while publicly embracing them.
David Kuo says the aides recognised the religious leaders' political use in securing election victories.
The White House has denied the claims by Mr Kuo, a former official in the Faith-Based Initiatives programme.
The Republican party is concerned the allegations may harm its standing in next month's mid-term elections.
With just weeks to go before what promised to be highly competitive congressional elections, Republicans can ill afford to lose the support of their evangelical Christian base. So the allegations made in David Kuo's book have set alarm bells ringing in the White House,,
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Gus: hypocritical enough for you?

You just knew that Bushit was either back on the bottle or off his medication when he conceded the Iraq / Vietnam analogy in an interview yesterday.

It obviously hadn’t occurred to the great deciderer that the only difference between Iraq & Vietnam is that he had a plan to get out of Vietnam.

'Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harboured terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.'

After Pat’s Birthday

From our ABC

Iraq limits data on death toll from violence: UN
United Nations (UN) officials say Iraq's Health Ministry will no longer give death toll data to the organisation, jeopardising a vital source of information on the impact of the fighting in the country.

Ashraf Qazi, who heads the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), has cabled headquarters in New York to say Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office had instructed the Health Ministry to no longer give him mortality data.

Instead, the data would come from the Prime Minister's communications director, a change that could politicise the figures.

The shift in policy was first reported in Friday's Washington Post.

UN chief spokesman Stephane Dujarric says he would not comment on leaked internal cables but the world body "has enjoyed excellent cooperation" with the Health Ministry.

"We very much hope that cooperation will continue," he said, adding that the UN mission was discussing the matter with the government.

The latest UN figures said 6,599 Iraqi civilians were killed in violence in July and August, 700 more than in the previous two months.

From our ABC and Reuters

Researchers defend Iraq war deaths estimate
Researchers have defended the accuracy of a controversial estimate by public health experts that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died because of the March 2003 US-led invasion.

The new estimate, made in a study published earlier this month by the Lancet medical journal, employed a method known as "cluster sampling" in which data are collected through interviews with randomly selected households.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimated with 95 per cent certainty that the war and its aftermath have resulted in the deaths of between 426,000 and 794,000 Iraqis.

Other estimates have calculated the number of extra Iraqi deaths to be much lower.

The Iraq Body Count Database calculates that between 43,850 and 48,693 extra civilians have died since the invasion, using a different methodology.

David Rush, a professor and epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston, has defended the new estimate.

"Over the last 25 years, this sort of methodology has been used more and more often, especially by relief agencies in times of emergency," he said.

Body counts 'inaccurate'

Critics, including US President George W Bush, have said the results are not credible, but Professor Rush says traditional methods for determining death rates, such as counting bodies, are highly inaccurate for civilian populations in times of war.

Professor Rush, speaking at a meeting in Los Angeles on the medical consequences of the Iraq war, has said that the relatively small size of the sample - 1,849 households - does not change the findings, although it does widen the "confidence limits," hence the large range of the estimated additional deaths.

In addition, the biases inherent in cluster sampling, such as wording of questionnaires, would tend to undercount, rather than inflate, the number of deaths, Professor Rush said.

Michael Intriligator, professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, says he commonly uses cluster sampling in his own work.

"I think this is an extremely credible study," he said.

Professor Intriligator notes that the study's most remarkable finding is that the death rates in Iraq have risen from 5.5 per thousand Iraqis per year before the invasion to 13.2 per thousand per year as of the study's July cut-off.

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Gus: By the time the Kommandant-und-Chief, Adolph Bushit, landed on an aircraft carrier to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" to glorify his little turding of the world by invading Iraq, I had estimated from the many reports coming from the embedded and the non embedded, that at least 5,000 Iraqi had been killed and something like 35,000 Iraqi troops had been killed which by then made about 40,000 dead... Within a few months that total, with new reports and ongoing fighting was going towards 100,000 at a rate of knots... By then I was estimating that also 500,000 would have been injured, a number which was conservative applying the rule of one death per 5 injured (it can go as high as 8 injured per violent deaths...)... The ratio for US troops killed to injured is about one dead per 6.7 badly injured... This means that by now with 400,000 dead (conservatively), about 2 million Iraqi are nursing injuries and, using the family constructs, about 4 to 5 millions Iraqi have first hand of the disaster created by El Bushito and his midwives, Blair and Howard. Crime against humanity on a large scale... No wonder the insurgency is gaining momentum as at least not officially the US soldiers cannot overtly use the tactics of the SS during the last world war... reprisal of massive consequences... a hundred people hung, shot or killed by whatever means per German soldier killed by resistance... But places like the assault on Fallujah by US troops with phosphorus bombs cannot be forgotten by the locals... it looks that the numbers speak of ill-will despite the rhetoric of the Idiot in the White House...