fatvegan

The cover article on one of the Sunday paper magazines today was Final Justice: Inside one of Australia's biggest true murder cases. It sort of implies there might be a bunch of bigger murder cases out there, but mostly fictional ones. I don't know what their criteria for "big" is, but I would have thought that when it came to murder cases being true kind of trumps being fictional in the bigness stakes. For things like marriage, it might be different and maybe they think of a big TV murder the way they think of a big TV marriage. You never know what is going on the heads of the Sunday paper editors.

Apparently, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) was redrafting the Children's Television Standards recently. They decided not to introduce any additional restrictions on marketing junk food to children even though quite a few people would like to see that. That's a valid decision on a number of grounds, but the reasons the chairman of the ACMA actually gave are slightly bollocks. He said that the authority wasn't a health advisory body. Fair enough, but neither is it a product standards advisory body or a sexual ethics advisory body. The job of that kind of authority isn't to advise, it's to take advice from the relevant advisory bodies and apply that advice to communications and media. When all the advisory bodies suggest to it that explosive chia pets are a bad idea, it doesn't claim that it isn't an expert on the chia pet industry. It just pulls explosive chia pet ads. I very much doubt there are many "health advisory bodies" in Australia that wouldn't support stricter standards for junk food advertising for kids. Folk such as the AMA, who thought the decision was "unconscionable". What a great word that is.

There is more though. And this part is much funnier. The chairman was happy to acknowledge that research suggests there is a relationship between advertising and consumption. Obviously a smart fellow. He might only have been in the media industry 30 years, and he's already worked out that there's some sort of vague correlation between advertising and purchasing. However, he then claims that the link isn't causal. According to this advertising expert, there's no clear evidence that advertising to children actually changes their preferences in any way. I suspect that all those companies spending $1 trillion a year on marketing would be disappointed to hear this. According to the ACMA all their money has been wasted.

I'm usually the sort to get upset about people assigning causality where there isn't any. But in the case of advertising, I do think you can pretty safely say that spending money on advertising influences people's decisions on what they buy. It is rather a pity that the man in charge of regulating advertising doesn't agree.

Although if he's right, and those junk food marketing fellows really are throwing their money away, he would be doing them a huge favour by closing them down. I would love it if he was right, but desperately hoping doesn't necessarily make it so, even in advertising.

The Pentagon has announced that a lot of Guantanamo Bay prisoners will never be released even if they are found innocent in their trial. According to the Pentagon, these people are simply too dangerous for the US and the world to ever be released. Good thing they are looking out for the world and saving the world the inconvenience of having to think about these things for ourselves. Dealing with terrorism is obviously very tricky and something best left our self-appointed experts.

Mohamed Haneef should never have been charged, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions admitted last night.

We got it wrong on Haneef: DPP chief

Days of front page terrorism accusations, effectively countered by 5 inches on page 11. Good job Sydney Morning Herald. I think your work here is done.

Prime Minister John Howard visited Government House in Canberra this morning to ask permission to call the federal election, ending months of phoney campaigning.

Election looming

Are the SMH editors asleep? I may happen to agree with the statement, but even the most rabid Greens voters might hope for less bias than that.

So. To keep score. The United States is supporting: the Shia government, which funnels money and arms to Shia militias, death squads, and insurgent/terrorist groups; the Sunni opposition, which funnels money and arms to the Sunni insurgency; the Sunni insurgency directly, so that they will combat the Shia militias as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of Sunni terrorists supposedly supported by Shia Iran; the Saudis, who fund Sunni insurgents as well--almost surely--as Sunni terrorist groups; the Iraqi Kurds, who have their sights set on an independent nation that includes a de-Arabized Kirkuk; and the Turks, who have their sights set on never, ever seeing an independent Kurdish entity anywhere, anyhow, anyway, ever, amen.

Who is IOZ?

The Bush administration is thorough, at least, if not much else.

This is from the introduction to the recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report. What I've read of it so far is good.

And one of the things I think we should have learned by now is that you can't solve these things by centralised bureaucratic direction. You can only educate children in a school at the place where they live. You can only give people jobs or get people into employment person by person. And I think my own view now is that the lesson we've learned is that you need locally based action, local resourcing, local control to really make changes.

Fred Chaney, in 'Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse'

• China bans bible smuggler
• CHINA: Why can't all Christian bookshops sell Bibles?
• Repression against Christian groups (Amnesty)
• Christian-Inspired Groups in the People’s Republic of China after 1978: Reaction of State and Party Authorities (Social Compass)
• The Shouters Background Information
• China Country Report (UNHCR)
• Watchman Nee
• Chinese Christians Are a Force, But What Kind?
• The crackdown on Falun Gong and other so-called ''heretical organizations'' (Amnesty)
• “Yellers” and healers – “Pentecostalism” and the study of grassroots Christianity in China

A Brazilian housewife has been sentenced to 19 years in prison for killing her husband, chopping his corpse into pieces and frying it.

Police said the killing was either part of a black magic ritual or a bid to get his life insurance money.

She denied killing her husband but said she copped up his body, claiming she was forced by masked assailants.

Straight out of The Sun Herald.

A mother's weight during her pregnancy may have a lasting impact on her child's health. British researchers found that women who had a relatively high percentage of body fat tended to have fatter babies, and other studies have linked an overly high birth weight to an increased risk of obesity later in life. Doctors advise mothers to be to exercise regularly and to maintain a healthy weight through a balanced diet before and during pregnancy.

Obesity During Pregnancy Has Lasting Effect on Babies

Presumably it's also important to maintain a healthy weight after pregnancy.

I should add that I'm inclined to think that this is bollocks. I can't think of a way you could work out if this was actually true without force-feeding mothers. Newspapers are so crap.

In 2003, the average American devoted 327 more hours than in 1987 watching movies, playing video games and using the Internet.

Videophilia' Keeps Americans Indoors

Also, between 1800 and 2007 the number of Americans driving petrol-electric hybrid cars increased by several million.

No guns, less TV, better health care what children need

I love those people who work at newspapers trying to think of neat titles.

Cancer patients are being urged to avoid soy food products due to fears they can cause tumours to grow faster.

Cancer patients warned to avoid soy products - National - smh.com.au

I don't really know what to make of this. They don't actually quote the research. And a few months ago I had a look at the research on soy foods and cancer and couldn't find any evidence.

They're probably only talking about weirdo vegetarians like our house who have tofu and soy milk every day.

The harassment of the Exclusive Brethren continues in the Sydney Morning Herald. Normally I'm not a big fan of media crusades but this seems pretty reasonable. Although it's possible that is merely a sign of my growing conservativism.

In 2001 a Canadian toddler, Erika Nordby, wandered outside at night in subzero conditions and was later found by her mother, almost frozen solid.

Despite the fact that she was pronounced clinically dead - her heart had stopped beating for two hours and her temperature had dropped to 16 degrees from the normal 37 degrees - Erika made a full recovery.

Sydney Morning Herald

That mother must have felt like the luckiest person in the world. It's hard to imagine.

The poor old Central Bank of Kazakh has mispelled bank on its latest of notes. That's got to be pretty embarassing for somebody. And the whole country I suppose. Although I wonder if demand for those notes will increase. I reckon I'd buy one. It's not every central banks do stuff like that.

“Pack rape of white girls is an initiation rite of passage for a small section of young male Muslim youth, said Jean Jacques Rassial, a psychotherapist at Villetaneuse University. ‘Fraternal bonding now dominates. It is the law of the gang, shorn of any sexual morals’, he said.�

Janet Albrechtsen made this claim in "Talking race not racism" from The Australian (which has since been removed). Unfortunately, she changed "girls" to "white girls" and "young male" to "young male Muslim". The Rassial fellow was rather unimpressed by her paraphrasing and said in response:

There is absolutely no connection between the cultural background, even less between the ethnic one, and this practice [of ritual gang rape].

Journalists like that Janet make me feel not so bad embarassed about all the bad left-wing journalism. And I love Media Watch despite their tendency to patronise people they disagree with.

A Japanese woman gave birth to her own grandchild.

The woman agreed to in vitro fertilisation because her daughter, in her 30s, had her uterus removed and was unable to bear children, the Yomiuri said, quoting Dr Yahiro Netsu, director of the Suwa maternity Clinic in Nagano in central Japan.

That is really cool. I love science.

Thanks to action from NSW police and politicians, the threat of mob violence in Sydney's riot hotspots has been eliminated. It's hard to believe that only 12 months ago women like these participated in bloody race riots on south Sydney's beaches.

I heard this on the news tonight:

Several men have been arrested in London. They have been charged with conspiracy to murder, and conspiracy to cause a social nuisance, using explosives and chemical weapons.