Posts by Steve Curtis
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Hard News: Auckland's future: Keep calm,…, in reply to Stephen Adams,
Auckland City’s financial asset base is nowhere near that high: the $37bn figure includes parks, roads, footpaths, pipes, etc that can’t ever ever be sold… not sure the banks would count those.
Just because the Whaeloil sys so doesnt mean its true.
Papakura sold off its water pipes a while back and they are privately operated to this day. The Brits sold off their water/wastewater for local councils as well. The only place this really hasnt happened in the USA. However Chicago sold off the right to operate its parking meters, so there is an asset !. -
The Apache gunships use a monocle gunsight, as shown here by Prince Harry, who was a front seat or weapons operator in Afghanistan.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00376/120298959__376246b.jpg
The computer projects the target information onto the monocle glass.
Doesnt seem to be a reliable way to target people, a slight movement of the head and the house is hit instead of the truck on the road -
Interesting that your 'Take' involves face to face discussions with the journalists and is not like the ABCs Media Watch, which doesnt require their participation, and in my opinion is able to offer a much more critical review.
Is there a problem in that your media review is partly like travel journalism which as we know is mostly sponsored by the places visited. Im not saying its the fawning kind but if your format requires 'guests' where you then take their head off, they sure arent coming back in the small pond of NZ journalism.
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Isnt there a book out next week by Herald journalist/author John Roughan on John Key ( published by Penguin)
Perhaps this too could be a good source of background material if you had some sort of lawsuit against John Key.
Anyway, the best way to make these things go away, is do what the GCSB did, and 'age it off your computer'. This is techno speak for deleting it.
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Hard News: The Fine Line, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Besides, don’t Australia’s own stats show that most “queue-jumping” refugees arrive by plane rather than boat?
Chris , doesnt matter if you arrive by plane and cannot be returned immediately, you are still locked up. There is a detention camp at Villawood in the suburbs of Sydney, amoung others.
The latest numbers from Australian immigration show last year 20,019 humanitarian visas were granted. NZs number is around 750, which indicates they are taking 5 times the number NZ is , in proportion to population. Some of those were 'queue jumpers'
You are aware of course, that North Asian countries, like where you are resident have non existent refugee programs
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Its not only Pilger who sees us being dragged into a new Cold War. So does his ideological opposite Peter Hitchens , who writes in the Daily Mail
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Hard News: Softly, softly, in reply to Russell Brown,
the people who risked their lives to encourage their Parliament to send Yanukovych packing in February
Thats not how others saw it.
" On 18 February, the worst clashes of Euromaidan broke out after the parliament did not accede to demands that the Constitution of Ukraine be rolled back to its pre-2004 form, which would lessen presidential power"I would have thought if you are violently demonstrating against an elected President AND parliament , thats a putsch in anybodys language.
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Hard News: Softly, softly, in reply to Matt Crawford,
bizarre to think that Pilger doesn’t see an issue with a country dispatching special forces into a neighbour – such as Russia sending in non-uniformed Spetsnaz troops into Ukraine to start this crisis.
The New York Times has walked back from its article, seemingly planted by the US Administration, that Spetsnaz had been identified in Ukraine.
Pilger seems to just be saying the US has its own people there as well.
I wonder too how the Cubans feel about the US presence in their country, the result of an invasion, where they never went fully home
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Reminds me of the description of the Clinton political machine.
"Very unpleasant and unattractive and effective"
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Thanks for that Deborah. Another area to look at is the amount of tax in relation to GDP over the years. There is a big debate in Australia at the moment about budget blowouts and special levies and so on. Yet some have pointed out that spending is much the same as a % but its the tax take as a % that has dropped.
This has echoes in NZ , remember the 'decade of deficits' which was really about big tax cuts meant you borrow to make up the difference