An update on Harry Nicolaides – he’s set to receive a royal pardon.  Which is great for Harry, but just goes to show that the current Thai legal regime is one in which arbitrary decisions of members of a royal family are more important that principles of free speech or basic human rights.

This is disgraceful: a Melbourne man, Harry Nicolaides, has been jailed in Thailand for three years for insulting the Thai royal family in a novel he has apparently written.  The conviction is a result of Thailand’s anachronistic “lese majeste” laws, which make insulting the royals an offence punishable by 3-15 years prison.  As this website [...]

Thanks to Sam, our roving feline news correspondent and long-suffering cat owner/victim:

Bush family cat dies (possibly of shame); Bush’s nickname for cat is “Kitty”.
Cats commence takeover of worldwide news media with German putsch; weatherman demonstrates excellent comprehension of cat psychology.
Nick Cave outed as fan of cat-related artwork; meanwhile artist’s cat gives him schizophrenia and causes [...]

This just happened in one of the busiest locations in the Adelaide CBD in the middle of a weekday afternoon: link. It sounds like two groups of Sudanese youths had a very serious fight with knives. This is literally 100 metres from where I work, and in fact I walked through the front [...]

…water boils you! : link. Featuring headline of the week, and quote of the week from “an official at the Military Medical Academy hospital in St Petersburg”:
She parked her car, left it, and immediately found herself in boiling water.
Where would we be without news.com.au’s commitment to bringing us the stories that matter from across [...]

This is a heartwarming little story – the process put in place to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay lacks some of the essential elements of fairness that were afforded even to the senior Nazis tried at Nuremberg. That is according to Henry King Jnr, who was chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, where a number of [...]

The US has established “Africa Command” on the Horn of Africa – a military group with a mission including fighting Islamist militants and, it seems, getting involved in local conflicts in the process.
Some relevant details:

the US now has two-dozen ‘forts’ established in the region
operations include supporting the “xenophobic to the core” Ethiopian regime [...]

This is the headline this afternoon from the ABC news website:

The headline is a reference to the proposal that Australia implement a carbon trading scheme to (finally) start doing something about our greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon trading works, in part, on the basis of charging businesses for the greenhouse gases they produce. [...]

It seems China has a slightly more extreme approach to countering government corruption than Australia.  I wonder what they’d do to someone who allowed millions of dollars in bribes to be sent to a country they were at war with?
Of course the death penalty is not to be taken lightly and is a centrepiece of [...]

The latest shooting spree in the US is invariably going to turn into a debate about guns (it must be gun week on this blog), so here are some relevant statistics to assist in wading through the emotional and political non-sequiturs:
Murders with firearms per capita, by country.
Firearm-related deaths per capita, by country.
Correlation between changes in [...]

Two people are detained in a war zone. Both are alleged by the military force which detains them to have been somewhere they shouldn’t have. Both are held captive, without proper charges or any prospect of genuine legal process. Both confess, seemingly under duress and in possible fear for their own safety, [...]

Canada’s parliament has just voted to repeal an anti-terrorism law passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Even more impressive, they did it in the face of a scare campaign from their government which attempted to paint them as ’soft on terror.’
As reported in the Canadian Globe and Mail:
Last night, a [...]

Hot on the heels of this comes the (alleged) news (well, a story in The Sun so the term ‘news’ is used loosely) that Led Zeppelin is looking at reforming to tour the United States.
As if that wasn’t enough, it looks certain that Rage Against the Machine are reforming for the Coachella Festival (which once [...]

It appears that the courts in Europe are prepared to ignore what are undoubtedly massive political considerations and are giving the victims of the practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ (i.e., the warrantless, state-sponsored kidnapping and extraction to third world countries where torture is practiced for ‘interrogation’ of private citizens) an opportunity to pursue those responsible for [...]