The long-awaited introduction of an adults-only rating for video games in Australia could be a step closer after South Australia’s Michael Atkinson yesterday resigned from his position as Attorney-General.

Mr Atkinson has been the South Australian Attorney-General since 2002 and has frustrated attempts to introduce an R18+ rating for games because its introduction requires unanimous support from all state and federal classification ministers.

“There ought to be renewal in the ministry,’’ he told reporters.

“There are talented people on the Labor backbench who deserve a go. I don’t think we want all the Labor ministers leaving in a bunch about the 2014 general election and so it’s important that that renewal be staged.’’

Australia is the only democracy in the western world not to have an adults-only rating for video games. Last year six games were refused classification for exceeding the limits of the MA15+ rating, effectively banning their sale in Australia.

Halle-fricken-lujha. A small step towards freedom of speech in Oz. I’m pretty sure he was pushed as he is not popular and there’s a federal election this year.

Click pics for more

I wonder if/how this will affect climate change?

Looks like a good excuse to put guard stations on every street like this. Or a wall with armed guards. And a moat. With sharks with frickin’ laser beams. And…

A recent increase in border patrol along side streets dividing Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Canada, are causing confusion and animosity between locals and border patrol agents.

The situation came to a head recently when a local man was arrested while walking down a street he said that he has walked down for years without a problem.

“I walked over to Canada on a Saturday night around quarter to nine to get a pizza,” Buzz Roy explained. Roy lives and works in Derby Line. He walked down Church Street to the nearest pizza shop, which happens to be in Canada, and said that to his surprise he was stopped by state police and told that crossing on Church Street is illegal.

“Steam was coming out of my ears from the treatment by the state cop. I felt that he had been misinformed about my ability to enter the country on Church Street. I’ve done it my entire life many many many times,” said Roy.
[...]
He will fight the fine, but said that his story speaks to larger issues. “I firmly believe that to this day … they just make up rules from day to day.” [...] He said people are scared to come here. “They come up over the hill and they don’t realize they’re in the states until they see the American customs, and then they turn around and they get hollered at.”

The Australian Human Rights Commission has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that encourages racial hatred against Aborigines.

But online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said that trying to stamp out the deplorable content would only create the “Streisand” effect, whereby an attempt to censor online content only brings more attention to it.

In a letter to Joseph Evers, the owner of Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED) – a more shocking version of Wikipedia that contains racist and other offensive articles dubbed as “satire” – the commission said it had received 20 complaints from Aborigines over the “Aboriginal” page on the site.

The same page was in the news in January when, in a rare move, Google Australia agreed to remove links to the article from its search engine following legal action from Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt.

On the Australian Communication and Media Authority’s blacklist of “refused classification” websites, which was leaked in March last year, encyclopediadramatica.com was included. This means the entire site will most likely be blocked under the government’s forthcoming internet filtering plan.

This website entry for aborigines really is unfunny degrading racist shite, but censorship is not the answer. I note that the gutless article didn’t link to the offending page. The equally gutless federal government is sure to use this as more fodder for their web filtering campaign.

UPDATE : I had a conversation with a sysop from ED after they banned me for a comment critical of that page. Here’s a couple of direct quotes.

“I agree that the Aboriginal article is crap, and it needs improvement. There are big changes coming for it soon, I promise, but at the moment, it’s creating a lot of drama in Australia so it has to stay as it is. However the general theme of taking the piss out of Aboriginals must stay.”

“With over 8000 articles, and only forty sysops, its hard to keep quality control on all pieces.

We’ve made our bed, and now we have to sleep in it, however the last thing we want to do is bow to pressure from interest groups or governments and modify the article.

As I’ve said, watch this space and you’ll see a, what I hope to be, funnier iteration of the [[Aboriginal]] article.”

Offensive Facebook Pages Censored — Read between the lines. This is a blasphemy case. Nobody wants to admit it.

Abu Dhabi: The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) instructed all internet service providers in the UAE to block a specific site on Facebook that is insulting to God, the prophets and Islam.

“TRA received numerous calls and complaints from internet users expressing their anger against unidentified people who created a site on Facebook that is offending to God, prophets, messengers, the Holy Quran and even to all God’s books,” said Mohammad Al Ganem, TRA General Manager.

“The creator of this site which he named ‘God and Prophets’ Site’, attributes divinity to himself and spreads distorted writing pretending they are verses from the Quran. He also declared writing a new book falsifying himself as a god. He spreads talk that is insulting to the prophets and to their holy stature. This is considered to be a felony according to the federal law.”

New witness comes forth — Yeah, this is the “liberal” area in the Middle East.

Ayman Najafi, 24, and Charlotte Adams, 26, are awaiting the outcome of an appeal against a conviction for public indecency in a Dubai restaurant on November 27.

The witness is understood from sources close to the case to have been present at the restaurant, but not to be one of the four friends with whom Najafi and Adams were eating.

The couple are hoping that a verdict will be given in their favour at a hearing on April 4, after they told an appeal court judge on Sunday that they had merely kissed each other on the cheek in an innocent greeting.

The opposition in Georgia has condemned a fake television report about the invasion of the former Soviet Republic by forces from neighbouring Russia. Georgia President Mikheil Saakhasvili has defended the report, following widespread panic caused by the broadcast.

Russian warplanes were seen flying over the country in a fake news report aired nationwide late Saturday by Georgia’s commercial Imedi television network.

A nervous looking presenter said Georgia had been invaded by Russian troops and that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was among those killed. But Imedi was showing old footage about the brief war between Georgia and Russia in 2008 over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

Viewers had been cautioned the report was fake, but many apparently did not see that warning.

Soon panic broke out with people seen running in the streets of the capital Tbilisi, where the network said Russian tanks had arrived.

Local media reported a record number of calls to emergency services and several incidents of heart attacks and fainting among shocked viewers, but officials said no deaths had been reported.

WTF?

The AP reports:

In a televised speech, Chavez said: “The Internet can’t be something free where anything can be done and said. No, every country has to impose its rules and regulations,” Chavez said.

And Australia, which is supposed to be “freedom land”, is following along:

“The government does not support Refused Classification (RC) content being available on the Internet,” a spokeswoman for the minister told AFP.

“The government’s proposal will bring the treatment of overseas-hosted content into line by requiring ISPs to block overseas content that has been identified as being RC-rated,” she said. “There are no plans to block any other material that is not RC,” she added.

No plans… yet.

Iceland’s voters expressed their outrage on Saturday against bankers, the government and what they saw as foreign bullying, overwhelmingly rejecting a plan to pay $5.3 billion to Britain and the Netherlands to reimburse customers of a failed Icelandic bank.

With all but 2,500 of the 143,784 votes counted, the authorities said, 93 percent voted “no” and 1.8 percent voted “yes” in the first public referendum ever held on any subject in Iceland. The remaining ballots were declared invalid.

But the referendum was more symbolic than substantive, and the Icelandic government hastened to make clear that Iceland would still pay back the money, albeit on different terms from the ones rejected.
[...]
How to repay the debt, which represents more than 40 percent of Iceland’s gross domestic product, has consumed this small, isolated nation for the last year and a half, since its banks failed, its stock market crashed and its currency collapsed.

The money represents a portion of the losses incurred by more than 300,000 Dutch and British customers of Icesave, an Internet branch of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki. The bank went bankrupt in October 2008, along with 85 percent of Iceland’s banking sector. The Netherlands and the British reimbursed their citizens, and are now pushing to get the money back from Iceland.

The three countries have been fighting over the deal’s terms ever since. An agreement this fall that would have given Iceland 15 years to pay the money, at 5.5 percent interest, only narrowly passed the country’s Parliament.

But on Jan. 5, [Icelandic President] Mr. Grimsson unexpectedly refused to sign the bill into law, setting off the need for a nationwide referendum.

Seems to me the referendum was a stunt by the government to let the public vent and try to get them onside. I suspect Americans would have voted similarly had the US had a referendum on the bailouts.

Let’s be serious for a moment: Barack Obama will not bomb Iran. This is not because he is a liberal, or because he is a peacenik, or because he doesn’t have the guts to try and “save his presidency” in this time-honored manner, as Daniel Pipes has urged and Sarah Palin said she would like him to do.

The president will not bomb Iran’s nuclear installations for precisely the same reasons that George W. Bush did not bomb Iran’s nuclear installations: Because we don’t know exactly where they all are, because we don’t know whether such a raid could stop the Iranian nuclear program for more than a few months, and because Iran’s threatened response — against Israelis and U.S. troops, via Iranian allies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon — isn’t one we want to cope with at this moment. Nor do we want the higher oil prices that would instantly follow. No American president doing a sober calculation would start a war of choice now, while U.S. troops are actively engaged on two other fronts, and no American president could expect public support for more than a nanosecond.

But even if Obama does not bomb Iran, that doesn’t mean that no one else will. [...] The defining moment of his presidency may well come at 2 a.m. some day when he picks up the phone and is told that the Israeli prime minister is on the line: Israel has just carried out a raid on Iranian nuclear sites. What then? [...] Although they keep all options on the table, they have so far concluded that bombing raids aren’t worth the consequences.

At some point, that calculation could change. Because Americans often assume that everyone else perceives the world the way we do, it is worth repeating the obvious here: Many Israelis regard the Iranian nuclear program as a matter of life and death.

One of these belongs to DV, another to Saddam

So, does this mean Bush was Luke, Cheney was Chewie and Condie Rice was Leia? Not sure I can watch those movies again in the same light…

Was Darth Vader Saddam Hussein’s ultimate hero?

The answer may be lurking in the Tate Modern in London. Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s exhibition “The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own” explores the surprising parallels between Saddam’s regime and western science fiction through a series of hand-drawn cartoons and sculptural installations.

You may have heard that when US troops stormed one of Saddam’s palaces they stumbled across lurid posters by fantasy artist Rowena Morrill. But did you know that she’s a close friend of Boris Vallejo, the artist who drew the iconic poster for The Empire Strikes Back depicting Darth Vader with two lightsabres crossed over his head?

Does the poster’s image sound familiar? It is remarkably similar to Saddam’s Hands of Victory monument commemorating Iraq’s victory over Iran. The arch in central Baghdad consists of two bronze casts of Saddam’s forearms holding two 43-metre-long crossed steel swords melted down from the weapons of slain Iraqis; the helmets of vanquished Iranians litter the base of the hands.

(CBS) “60 Minutes” has obtained an FBI videotape showing a Defense Department employee selling secrets to a Chinese spy for cash. The video, which has never been made public before, offers a rare glimpse into the secretive world of espionage and illustrates how China’s spying may now pose the biggest espionage threat to the U.S. China may be the number-one espionage threat now. “The Chinese are the biggest problem we have with respect to the level of effort that they’re devoting against us, versus the level of attention we are giving to them,” says Michelle Van Cleave, once America’s top counter-intelligence officer who coordinated the hunt for foreign spies from 2003 to 2006.

“Definitely, without a doubt,” the Chinese focus most of their espionage on the U.S., says Fengzhi Li, who once recruited spies for China’s Ministry of State Security and is now in the U.S. seeking asylum. In the videotape obtained by “60 Minutes”, Gregg Bergersen, a civilian Pentagon worker with a high-security clearance, is shown taking money, about $2,000, from the Chinese spy, Tai Shen Kuo.

I hope it was worth the 2,000 dollars, schmuck.

AUSTRALIA yesterday warned Israel its standing as a friend would be jeopardised if it were found to have condoned the suspected theft of three Australian citizens’ identities by its Mossad spy agency to carry out a political assassination.

As [Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd demanded answers over Israel’s role in the growing international scandal – and ASIO and the Australian Federal Police launched investigations – it was revealed that Australia had previously warned Israel not to use fake Australian passports for intelligence operations.

A diplomatic row broke out yesterday when three Victorians, all living in Israel, were confirmed among 26 people from four nations whose tampered passports were allegedly used by a team of suspected Israeli Mossad agents who assassinated Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith summoned Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem, early yesterday to express his “grave concern” about the issue.

The Aussie connection come in the wake of European nations having words to Israel over stolen identities apparently used in the hit. Israel has a history of this crap. In 2004, New Zealand suspended relations with Israel when Mossad agents were caught forging passports.

Why does Israel keep abusing its relationships with the West? I’d have thought they could use all the friends they could get.