adapted from the ABC …..

PM predicts relationship with US will grow closer

By US correspondent Kim Landers

Prime Minister John Howard arrived in Washington at the weekend but he is
only just now catching up with his good friend and ally, US President
George W Bush.

The President and his wife are about to join Mr and Mrs Howard in planting
saplings, taken from 200-year-old trees at the White House at the home of
the Australian Ambassador in Washington.

Read the whole tree planting at the ABC

When Australia announces that it will lease uranium to India, the deceptiveness and misleading nature of our Foreign Minister will again be revealed

Mr Downer appeared to be sticking to his principles last week when he issued a statement that Australia would not be selling uranium to India.  In attempting to repudiate a story in the Australian claiming that a nuclear transaction would take place regardless of whether India signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  "Officials have told me that that's not correct" Mr Downer intoned.

One of the main reasons for the Halliburton-built Adelaide to Darwin Railway now becomes apparent.  If the Australian Government's mooted plans come to fruition, trains of imported nuclear waste trundling to repositories in the Australian outback will soon become a reality.

Halliburton have had a dual role in Australia, creating the tracks and providing environmental impact date for nuclear waste facilities.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is expected this week to discuss "uranium leasing" with US President Bush.   Under the plan, Australia's 40% of global uranium supplies would not be sold, but "hired out" to users, the waste returning to the Australian point of origin.

‘Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than
half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing
Karl Rove. 

During the course of that
meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of
Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official
with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak
case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to
get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the
meeting said Saturday morning. 

‘Why did the government end its
own investigation of itself? Because the NSA refused to grant security
clearances to Justice Department lawyers! Without the security clearances, the
lawyers can’t look at any of the NSA’s documents or policies, and so they can’t
investigate to see if anything untoward is taking place. Got that? The
government tries to investigate itself, but then it won’t give its own
investigators clearance to do any actual investigation. This is right out of Duck Soup. Where are the
Marx Brothers when you need them? At least Groucho could get in some amusing
one-liners while feebly trying to convince the populace that the government
really is here to help them. 

‘Determining strategic
objectives, and ensuring that those objectives are not contradictory, is the
job of the most senior level of command, in this case the White House. By
demanding that U.S. and allied troops pursue two conflicting objectives
simultaneously, the Bush administration has created a no-win situation. Efforts
to defeat the Taliban only work if they can gain the support of the rural
population, but poppy eradication pushes the rural population toward the
Taliban and its allies. (One could add a third incompatible objective,
promoting women’s rights in a conservative Islamic culture.) 

‘President Bush should talk to the Iranians. Refusing to
talk is childish. How would the Cold War have ended if Ronald Reagan had
refused to talk to Soviet leaders? How would relations with China have been
established if Richard Nixon had said he would never talk to Chinese leaders? 

For heaven's sake, how would the
American Revolution have ended if the Americans had refused to talk to the
British? 

What if Al Qaeda
deemed Pine Gap a threat to their operations and send a team through
the fence.

Here's a little from a piece posted on Webdiary by Brian Law last Decemberr:

[extract] 

Again we climbed through and realised all the power of the greatest
empire in history could not stop two untrained, unfunded, unarmed
Christian pacifists from entering one of their most important and
secure bases - even after we had told them we were coming.

‘One in three Iraqi children is malnourished and
underweight, according to a report released by the United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF) in Amman on 2 May.

"Under-nutrition
should not be accepted in a country like Iraq, with its wealth of
resources," said UNICEF Special Representative for Iraq Roger Wright from
the Jordanian capital, Amman. Wright added that ongoing insecurity served to
deter parents from visiting health centres for essential services, while many
health workers had been kidnapped or killed in different parts of the country.

‘He was the undisputed ruler of
one world, convinced that the larger world outside his own immediate control
was corrupt, lacking inspiring heroes and proper values. He acted boldly on the
belief that through his own genius, combined with force, manipulation, and
powerful weapons he had no hand in creating, he could make a difference - a
positive difference, one he'd eventually be lauded for, petty carpers be
damned. 

To actuate his initially
well-intentioned scheme, he launched an enormous, convoluted and confusing set
of manipulations, tried to rid the world of magic, generated an interplanetary
war, and built a giant cosmic tower capable of creating an endless array of
alternate earths from scratch, powered by the energy forces of kidnapped
Martians, Kryptonians, and random superbeings.’ 

Congratulations to the two miners, Todd and Brant, and to their rescuers. Their survival is a complex fantastic story at the forefront of human endurance, good luck, planning and great community spirit.

The media reports on the unfolding events were in general quite good.

The various outlets, print and TV, have a complex dynamic of necessarily reporting the news as it happens as well as the ingrained urge to corner the grand prize without offending too many people. Checkbook journalism for exclusive interviews has never been a proper way towards "objectivity" (a journalist who believes in objectivity is deluded anyway — as no matter what, the reporting always become part of the calculated importance of the story) but in some circumstances cheque book journalism can help victims or accidental subjects...

Australia's Pine Gap base was used to send 32 cruise missiles at Osama Bin Laden.

The missiles failed to kill the Al Qaeda leader as he had left the target site approximately twenty minutes earlier.

International affairs commentator and policy advisor Mr Keith Suiter said on  Adelaide radio this morning that the US surveillance installation at PIne Gap assisted in monitoring Bin Laden's satellite phone call to his mother and pinpointing his location for the missile attack.

Speaking on ABC 891 Mr Suiter said that one of the problems with the plan was that many of the missiles destroyed each other while attempting to strike the same target.