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by Who Me.
Monday, Dec. 30, 2002 at 2:58 PM
December 30 2002
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Prince Charles has dropped plans to visit the United States because the White House, apparently unhappy with his views on Iraq, signalled he would not be welcome, the The Mail on Sunday reported.
In a front-page report, it said "senior figures in the Bush Administration" had indicated it would be "very unhelpful" for the trip to proceed due to the prince's reported concern that a war would lead to a dangerous rift between the West and the Muslim world.
He had been "politely informed that his views ... might not go down well".
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by Roving.
Monday, Dec. 30, 2002 at 3:32 PM
“Although he has some drastic intellectual limitations (to put it mildly), George Bush is not the drooling cretin who's been so derisively lampooned in the political cartoons, stand-up routines and quickie books.
Despite his patent awkwardness before the cameras, Bush does possess a certain nasty shrewdness, which has often served him well at the combative kind of politics.” The proper word is 'Psychopath'.
"As long as these states in possession of weapons of mass destruction do nothing about reducing their own, then other states like North Korea and Iraq and so on will take steps to acquire them." - Richard Butler, former head of the UN weapons inspections team in Iraq.
December 30 2002.
As United Nations arms inspectors in North Korea pack their bags to leave the country, the Bush Administration, in co-ordination with Australia and other allies, plans to step up diplomatic and economic pressure on Pyongyang if it refuses to abandon its nuclear arms program.
As part of what one United States official called a "tailored containment" strategy, the US is counting on North Korea's neighbours and allies to further isolate the regime politically.
But in a move likely to further increase tensions, North Korea warned yesterday that confrontation with the US was inevitable. "The imperialist reactionaries are seriously mistaken if they think they would bring the Korean people, who regard independence as their life and soul, to their knees with pressure," said a commentary in the newspaper Rodong Sinmun , the mouthpiece of the ruling communist party.
The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has called his Australian counterpart, Alexander Downer, amid deepening concerns over the crisis.
Mr Downer yesterday refused to reveal details of his talk with Mr Powell on Saturday but said Australia was "playing a fairly intense diplomatic role". He would neither confirm nor deny that Australia was considering sending its Beijing ambassador to North Korea. He said Australia was looking for a greater role for the UN Security Council in the crisis. It was important there was "an appropriate degree of co-operation between the major players", which included the US, South Korea, Japan and also China and Russia "and countries like Australia".
But Mr Downer sidestepped the question of whether North Korea now posed a bigger threat than Iraq. "I don't think you can make comparisons in a simple way, as, I am sorry to say, some people do. They are similar and dissimilar situations."
The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, said that he would submit a report to the UN body's governing board today asserting that North Korea had violated its commitments under a 1994 deal with the US that obligates it to submit to inspections.
Mr ElBaradei said he would urge the board to demand that North Korea immediately allow the inspectors to resume surveillance at the reactor complex. Barring that, the IAEA would be obliged to refer the matter to the Security Council, which had several options including imposing economic sanctions or the use of military force.
The departure of the IAEA's inspectors would end the agency's ability to monitor North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex. But an unnamed senior US military intelligence officer said the US would be able to keep tabs on the complex "through our intelligence apparatus".
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by Out and about.
Monday, Dec. 30, 2002 at 3:43 PM
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by JAIME JOHNSON
Monday, Dec. 30, 2002 at 4:59 PM
Hey Bush Lover,
Your'e no different than those extremists that you are railing against!
Does it get hot under that white hood?
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by C@P.
Monday, Dec. 30, 2002 at 5:59 PM
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The big tough Australian. All piss and wind. Be alert, not alarmed - grins replace guns on anti-terrorism ad.
December 28 2002.
Smiling in the face of adversity ... the ad shows images of children instead of SAS raids.
The Federal Government has ditched images of balaclava-clad SAS troops storming houses and police look-outs on the Harbour Bridge for the first phase of a three-month counter-terrorism awareness campaign.
Originally tested among focus groups, the pictures have been replaced by smiling Muslim girls, indigenous children and summer scenes of park cricket and barbecues, spliced with shots of army, customs personnel and sniffer dogs at work.
Be alert, not alarmed is the central theme of the $15 million campaign - Let's Look Out for Australia - which has been directly supervised by the Prime Minister, John Howard.
"I don't want Australians to become frightened, I don't want Australians to stop living their ordinary lives,' Mr Howard said at the launch. "If that happens then the terrorists win."
However, the Federal Opposition has criticised the ads as next to useless and lacking practical information.
The acting Opposition Leader, Jenny Macklin, said: "There's no practical information in these ads. There's also nothing useful in the advertising giving people a lead as to what they should be looking out for."
The ads screen for the first time on commercial television and the ABC tomorrow, the same day as full-page print ads are published.
They will be followed at the end of January with an information mail-out to 7.2 million Australian homes and the second phase of the television campaign.
Without being specific, the ads urge Australians to report any suspicious activity to a central hotline number, which the Government says is capable of taking between 1200 and 2000 calls per hour.
The ads will be available in 28 languages. Today show host Steve Liebmann [from New Zealand] won out against the likes of A Current Affair's Mike Munro, recently retired Nine newsreader Brian Henderson and the retired ABC newsreader Richard Morecroft for the job of presenter.
Originally, the focus group audiences shown the SAS raid are believed to have expressed concern about the timing of the counter-terrorism campaign, the sensitivity of the subject, the alarming tone of the message and the likelihood that it will terrify people not at risk.
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