• Charge first! Ask Questions Later! It's payday!

    But for up to 400,000 workers (possibly including myself) the fruits of our labours won't be hitting our bank accounts today. Due to a monumental "problem" (read: Cock Up) with the BACS system, hundreds of thousands of people's pay cheques won't work their way through the system by the time they're supposed to. Full story here.

    It's alright, though. The banks have promised that any fines they doll out because of missed payments (if your pay cheque arrived AFTER that rent payment was went to go out) will be refunded in full.

    The question I have is this: If the banks know almost half a million people could be struck with this "problem" (read: Cock Up) why on earth should they be allowed to fine anybody in the first place?

    It's their error, not the customers. I think it's absolutely disgusting that bank charges are such an automatic and institutionalised system that we would even entertain the idea of letting them FINE us for THEIR error.

    I know what people will say - that the systems that charge customers are automated and it would be more of a hassle to stop the charges than just repay them afterwards. However I think that's a pretty sorry situation to be in.

    I've already written about the liberties my bank takes with my money - and I'm DAMN sure I need it more than they do. I think far too many people forget that a bank doesn't just render a service - 'looking after' our money. It also makes a very healthy profit from having OUR cash in THEIR coffers.

    There are hundreds of banks and building societies. I would like FOR ONCE to see my bank actually behave like they appreciate my business - and appreciate the fact that I'm trusting my hard earned money with them and not with one of their myriad competitors.

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  • Abu Muslim al-Austraili: The Truth about David Hicks Meet David Hicks.

    David is a 31 year old former kangaroo skinner from Australia. For the last five years, he's been an inmate of controversial US prison complex Guantanamo Bay, after being arrested by US forces in Afghanistan.

    David has the dubious honour of being the first Gitmo inmate to face trial for war crimes commited against the United States. He's shocked the international news community by pleading guilty to these charges.

    I think the reason they're so shocked is because they've been reading too many of their own editorials.

    I've written extensively on Editorial Bear about the slanted bias of the media. Nowhere is this more clear than in the trial of David Hicks. Read Yahoo's editorial here.

    If you believe everything you read, David Hicks is a victim. Arrested and imprisoned in Afghanistan, this unassuming Australian was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's taken as a given in most of the recent news reports that he's innocent.

    David's guilty plea is spun quite effectively into this hypothesis: The US Courts would have found him guilty either way.

    It's unofficially accepted that the US War Tribunals are 'Show Trials' and since David Hicks would have been facing a guilty verdict either way, he might as well get a lesser sentence by pleading guilty.

    But the fact is, all these news reports are wrong. David Hicks is not innocent. He's as guilty as sin and the plea he's entered in court admits to just a fraction of the crimes he's committed.

    What's conspicuously lacking from any of the news reports about the trial of David Hicks are the facts about David himself.

    Who is he? What was he doing in Afghanistan in the first place? Why was he arrested?

    The biased media is so focused on attacking the American institution that they have totally glossed over the facts. And the facts are pretty shocking.

    David Hicks was born in Adelaide, Australia. A former car thief and drug addict, he dropped out of school at the age of 14 and then drifted around the outback, working on cattle stations and as a kangaroo skinner in a meat packing factory.

    He fathered two children with girlfriend Jodie Sparrow, before moving away from Australia in 1996 to train horses in Japan.

    Failing to settle down in Japan, his next move wasn't back home. He flew to Albania, where he inexplicably joined the Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting the Serbs in the Bosnian conflict.

    David finally found his calling in life. He wanted to be a soldier.

    Hicks served with the Kosovo Liberation Army for a mere two months, having missed any of the actual fighting. Returning to Australia, he decided to follow his dream and applied to join the Australian Army. They rejected him on the grounds of his poor education.

    Fortunately for David, there was a military force that was happy to accept him. In 1999, David Hicks converted to Islam, changed his name to Abu Muslim al-Austraili and moved to Pakistan to fight against the Indians in Kashmir.

    Joining the Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists, David was trained in guerilla warfare, kidnapping, assassination and the use of landmines. He fought in the 'controlled war' on the Indian border until the events of 9/11. When Lashkar-e-Toiba was disbanded, David joined another terrorist organisation - Al Qaeda.

    Feroz Abbasi, an Al Qaeda terrorist and another Guantanamo inmate, reports the David Hicks was accepted by al Qaeda with open arms, becoming something of a 'golden child' who took it upon himself to translate the Al Qaeda training manuals into English to assist in recruiting more people to the cause of Islamic Fundamentalism.

    In letters to his parents, Hicks claims he met personally with Osama Bin Laden on several occasions and gave important information about the travel habits of Australians, which may have played an important factor in the Bali bombings.

    When the United States, in retaliation for 9/11, invaded Afghanistan, David Hicks was equipped with an AK47 and grenades and went off with his terrorist comrades to fight the coalition forces.

    He was later captured by the Northern Alliance, the Afghanistan forces fighting against the Taliban. As an object of some curiosity, the Australian prisoner was handed over to US Forces on December 17th 2001.

    A terrorist. A traitor. An enemy combatant.

    How come Yahoo, the BBC - just about every western news outlet - fails to remember this? He's no friend of ours - yet so many people are so desperate to attack the US government that they'll support him and accept his allegations of mistreatment without reservation - despite the fact that they're proven to be exaggerated or entirely fictional.

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  • British sailors seized by Iran If you believe everything the protestors tell you, it's Washington beating the war drums concerning Iran. George Bush has been demonised for plotting the invasion of another Middle Eastern country.

    Yet recent events consistently seem to indicate that Iran is not the victim of invasive western aggression, like President Ahmadinejad portrays the country to be. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already refused to allow UN Inspectors the chance to examine his 'innocent' nuclear processing plants - and now his soldiers have kidnapped 15 British troops. See the story here.

    The kidnapped Royal Navy sailors and marines were in Iraqi waters, checking local shipping to crack down on smuggling. The Iranians entered Iraqi water and confronted the Brits. I assume the 'kidnapping' itself was facilitated by our troop's reluctance to fire on their kidnappers and spark off a conflict. Their restraint saved Iranian lives at the risk of their own. True Brit Grit.

    This kidnapping is further evidence that Iran's behaviour remains consistantly mischevious.

    I honestly believe Ahmadinejad's masterplan is to simply keep niggling at the United States or Britain until one of the two countries find themselves forced to react aggressively.

    If Ahmadinejad's taunting gets the desired reaction, America or Britain will be viewed as 'overreacting' and Iran will get to play the 'innocent' victim of 'western aggression.' Given the growing popularity of the anti-war stance in Britain and America, I'm worried niave people will fail to see that it's Iran behind the diplomatic fireworks - not Bush or Blair.

    President Ahmadinejad is a cunning, immoral man who seems to want to lead his country into a war it cannot win - no matter what price his people must pay.

    All we can hope is that our diplomats show the same restraint our kidnapped troops did - and resist the urge to react to Iran's provocative behaviour.

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  • Simply not Cricket! Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, leading the Pakistan Cricket team during their matches in Jamiaca, was recently discovered dead in his hotel room. It was confirmed today that he'd been strangled - making his death an act of murder. Full story here.

    But who would strangle a cricket coach? Does anybody really take the game that seriously?

    The Pakistanis certainly do. And after being knocked out of the game in a crushing defeat by Ireland, rumour has it that Woolmer was set to reveal match fixing allegations. The Pakistanis have already flirted with allegations like this - would they be willing to kill to protect their team's shredded reputation?

    At the moment, all we can do is speculate. However the Pakistani team has been fingerprinted and one man - confirmed as a non-Jamaican resident - has been arrested. Full story here.

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  • Tory Blair I once went out with a girl whose nickname was: "Tory Wife."

    She was the only female member of the Conservative Society that I joined during my first year at University. So not only did I fend off the competition - I also had the dubious honour of 'working my way' through the entire society's female compliment. All one of them!

    Anyway. I remember staying up with her all night during Mayday 1997, when Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Back then, as a Conservative (with a big C) I was dead set against Mr Blair and the Labour Party. I was a conservative!

    Little did I know that the following decade would reveal Tony to be a far more effective Conservative Prime Minister than anybody in the Tory Party could have been.

    Tony Blair reinvented the Labour party as "New Labour," shifting the traditionally socialist party to the centre of British politics. This nudged the wounded Conservatives out of their traditional place and the party has never since been able to recover.

    New Labour was able to do what the traditional socialists hadn't been able to do. Win an election. And in doing that, Tony Blair gathered enough momentum to perform what must be the biggest and most incredible political fraud in British history.

    New Labour became the New Conservatives.

    Socialism went out of the window. More and more traditionally Conservative values were adopted and instigated. Like a cuckoo, kicking the other eggs out of the nest, New Labour unseated the Tories and took their place.

    Never more so has this been evident than yesterday, when Tony Blair managed to win a crucial vote securing the future of Trident, Britain's nuclear submarine deterrent.

    It was a real landmark vote. The Labour Party, since the end of the Second World War, has traditionally been against nuclear proliferation and now the cold war is over, the official 'Party Line' has been that Britain's nukes must go.

    Yet here was Labour's Leader, calling for twenty billion pounds of investment in Nuclear Weapons. Whatever the ruling party had become, it was no longer the Labour we knew as children.

    Tony Blair only managed to win the crucial vote by calling on the support of David Cameron and the Conservative Party itself. 95 Labour MP's stood firm to traditionally Labour values and voted against the missiles.

    But Tony Blair won - with almost the entire Tory party backing his motion. Finally a man who has acted for a decade like a Conservative Prime Minister found himself standing at the de facto head of the real Conservative Party (what's left of it.)

    But the rebellion by those 95 labour dissenters, mostly hailing from the old school north of Britain, hinted at the reemergence of a new Labour movement. A return to the socialist roots that Tony Blair and New Labour abandoned.

    Old Labour could be making a comeback.

    What this will do to Britain's traditionally bipartisan political scene, who can tell? It will be interesting to find out.

    In the safety of another country.

    :-)

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  • Star Crossed Lovers Star-crossed lovers quit West Bank
    By Matthew Price
    The couple married three years ago after meeting in Jerusalem.

    She is a 26-year-old Jewish Israeli. Her name is Jasmine Avissar. He is a 27-year-old Palestinian Muslim, Osama Zaatar. Jasmine and Osama's is a love story, and it tells you so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Full story here.

    This is a very sad story - I have to admit, I emphasis a lot.

    When marrying somebody from another country, the challenges you face as newlyweds are startlingly different from the ones normal people deal with.

    While most couples were dealing with paying rent and maybe buying a house, Tina and I had to deal with a more fundamental problem - which country would we live in? Which country would have us?

    Most newlyweds lay out their hard earned cash for furniture and carpets... Tina and I found ours was filtered off into the pockets of unscrupulous immigration lawyers and handed over to American and British government departments.

    To get Tina's permission to live in the UK cost us over £1,000 in all.

    To finally get my green card cost us thousands of dollars.

    And if the financial cost wasn't bad enough, Tina and I lost years. We were married in 2003 and we won't finally be able to start our lives until at least December of 2007.
    But maybe that indicates how thousands of miles and the meddling of bureaucratic governments can't come between people who care about each other.

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