When did the War in the Pacific become the “lesser known theater” of WW2?

Seriously, are these people retarded?

The stories keep getting further apart.

News.com.au (sorry, we don’t link there)

A TODDLER was upset at being left at home by his father in the hours before his murder, a housemate has said.

The Age

She said his father had left for the library, which is just a one-minute walk away, a few minutes earlier with another housemate.

So there’s a big divergence between when the father actually left. Sounds like the stories aren’t exactly lining up. But there’s something else in that as well.

The library isn’t a 1 minute walk away.

GMaps (and this is the closest library to the house…and we know they lived opposite the school) (link to full page here)

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

According to GMaps, it’s a 3 minute walk…for an adult. A 3 year old, not even close.

You know what makes it more bizarre when you look at the map, taking the school/ church story out from before: the street of the library is commercial, indeed, there’s even an MP’s office right near the library.

But then there’s the screaming

News.com.au

Gurshan Singh wanted to walk with his dad to the local library – and had been screaming because he couldn’t go, Sim Kaur said.

The Age

‘He was insisting to come as well, then the father refused and he started crying,’’ she said….

“We thought maybe he went to see his father there. He knew the way, but we didn’t find him there.”

Who would think that a child “knowing the way” would make this acceptable, even for a short time? Hell, I don’t let my 7 1/2 year old walk to our letter box unsupervised.

So the child magically stops screaming. The mother was in the shower, but some how they trusted a 3 year old to find his way to the local library…but wait, there’s more.

News.com.au

“He stopped shouting and I thought, what happened?” Ms Kaur, 24, told reporters at the home in David St, Lalor.

So someone not in the shower never thought to check on why the child had stopped shouting /screaming…or for that matter, they didn’t hear the security screen door open/ close. Yeah, right.

The Age

When the father said he wasn’t there, the family’s cousin alerted police to the toddler’s disappearance

Now the police call was at 1:10pm. He allegedly disappeared at around 12:30 (although as per the last post it could have been midday or closer to one.) But note who made the call as well: not the mother, not someone in the house.

This could still be a tragic case of a child snatched, and the death no matter what is awful. But what sort of parent leaves a screaming child unattended to have a shower? Reports suggest that there were “several” people in the house at the time, surely one of them would have been supervising if the child was screaming/ upset etc.

I don’t want to second guess a police investigation, but the initial refusal to allow the family to identify the body was probably for a reason.

Update: what I didn’t mention: why isn’t the media reporting the conflicting statements and the issues here? Blind freddy can see that something isn’t right here.

The Herald Sun

When Harpreet Kaur Channa stepped out of the shower and realised her little boy, Gurshan Singh, was no longer in the house, she panicked. But when she discovered that the front door was ajar, her heart raced…

It was around 12.30pm when they lost sight of him.

News.com.au

disappeared from a house in the northern Melbourne suburb of Lalor about 1.10pm. His body was found about 20km away near Melbourne Airport after 7pm.

ABC AM

The boy was inside a house with his mother late yesterday morning at around midday she noticed he was missing, and after searching for him with family for about three quarters of an hour police were called.

The Age

His mother, Harpreet Kaur Channa, called police after he had been missing for 45 minutes, prompting a massive search.

Notice the time line problems.

It could just be confusion in the media.

But that’s not all

The Age

She told police she thought her son had walked out the front door while she was showering.

The Herald Sun

When Harpreet Kaur Channa stepped out of the shower and realised her little boy, Gurshan Singh, was no longer in the house, she panicked. But when she discovered that the front door was ajar, her heart raced.

She knew the three-year-old was able to open the security door.

and yet

ABC

and after searching for him with family for about three quarters of an hour police were called.

Why would you wait 45 minutes to call police if your 3 year old has gone missing? If you knew the 3 year old could get out of the house, why wouldn’t you key lock the door?

But here’s the oddest thing of all

The Age (different article)

Marisa Talarica, 37, whose parents have lived a few doors along the street for 40 years, said the street was busy with cars and people attending a funeral at St Luke’s Catholic Church across the road at lunchtime yesterday.

“At the time he went missing there was a funeral on at the church,” she said.

“The street was full of cars. I don’t know how it’s possible for a kid to go missing when you have so many people around.”

As of this morning, the police are saying no witnesses have come forward, although this will change…because it’s beyond the realms of possibility that a large group of people in the street wouldn’t have noticed a lone 3 year old child walking past. That’s presuming that is what has occurred.

So this is seriously WTF. We’re in Google News as being based in Victoria, so maybe Google put in place something to be on the safe side? I just don’t know.

Women who do not breastfeed their infants are nearly four times more likely to neglect and abuse their child, a world-first study of Australian women has found….

Dr Strathearn concluded that the promotion of breastfeeding could be a relatively simple and cost-effective way of strengthening the relationship between mothers and babies to prevent child neglect and abuse.

The Age has more.

Unbelievably offensive. Andrew Bolt gets it right

Correlation isn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t causation…In this case it may well be the other way around as well – that women who abuse their children are also less likely to bother with breastfeeding.

I’d note that I don’t believe that single motherhood results in increase crime levels for the same reason; the correlation is the wrong way around.

Why though has breast feeding zealotry become so acceptable that this type of crap is published? While everyone agrees that breast feeding is good, this zealotry is hatred in a PC cloak. The reality is that not everyone can breastfeed, and as my house knows from experience, that blind nature of breast feeding zealots can and does put lives at risk.

Via SMH

Navy closes for Christmas

NAVY chiefs battling a staffing crisis have taken the unprecedented step of ordering a two-month shutdown over Christmas, and have told personnel with child-care problems that they can work from home.

The navy has also ordered all ships not deployed on operations home for Christmas to try to combat a 2020 shortfall in trained personnel.

In addition, the number of sailors forced to stay on board ships docked in their home port on “duty watch” as sentries will be reduced from previous levels of 15 to 20 people to a skeleton staff.

On the bright side, docked ships still look scary, even if there’s no one to drive them

If she wasn’t drunk, and that’s a possibility, then well….OMG

Video of one acceptance speech below. She’s not a brilliant speaker at the best of times, but there’s a distinct difference between previous pieces on camera. I can’t embed it, but here is an interview she did for Video Hits. No slurring of words

God I wish I was making the opening sentence up, but I’m not. Just as I was starting to warm to him, he resorts to the most bizarre, populist attack perhaps ever delivered by an Australian PM. Here’s the press quotes:

News.com.au

Linking executive remuneration to a financial instituion’s capital adequacy would discourage “excessive risk-taking” and promote financial stability, Mr Rudd said to the National Press club in Canberra today.

To this end the Government would work with the Australian Prudential Regulatory Commission (APRA) to set up new rules for executive pay.

“It’s necessary, I believe, to get a better set of rules in place to rein in any executive greed and, at the same time, point in the best direction possible for greater stability in the financial system in the future,” Mr Rudd said.

smh.com.au

Exorbitant executive salaries may get a trim under a Federal Government plan to deal with the “extreme capitalism” at the root of the global financial crisis.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today revealed the government will work with the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) to bring fat-cat pay packets under control.

Mr Rudd believes better rules are required to “rein in any executive greed”.

He told the National Press Club that the “failure of extreme capitalism” had forced governments to prevent the financial system’s collapse.

“You’ve got to act at home and you’ve got to act abroad on this.

“This is not just a question of fairness and perceived fairness in the system, it goes actually to the kernel of the incentive structures around risk-taking.

Of course, crony capitalism and a distorted market caused by constant Government favoritism had NOTHING do to with it.

Now that it’s Australian Government policy to dictate wages of CEO’s, how much further will wage dictation go. We’ve moved past the days of the wage accords, but will we soon see a return? Will Labor throw away its half reasonable credentials as economic liberals in the states (at least compared to more than a few Liberal Oppositions), and go so red that Doc Evatt will rise from the grave, singing the Internationale will salivating over a picture of Lenin?

PS: bonus points to the first person who can name the next Australian car manufacturer that closes up shop. 1 out of 3 chance. Double bonus points for naming how many billions Rudd will spend to save the remaining ones. Hey, lets nationalize Holden! Indeed, lets just buy GM outright, their market cap as of close business Oct 14 was only $3.7billion, or $5.3 billion AUD. Lets relive the glory days of Ben Chifley! C’mon Ruddy, you’ve started now, why stop at dictating to private businesses what they should pay CEO’s, automatically killing any chance of top Australian companies attracting overseas talent in the free market. After all, Rudd knows best, that’s what his mates in the censorship loving People’s Republic of China say!

Pretty much a non-story, even if it is on the front page of news.com.au, but given I’ve never watched the show, there was one part that flawed me:

During the episode aired on 24 July, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group Heather Ridout said she found it hard to support violent games.

Ms Ridout said she supported controversial photographer Bill Henson and that it was necessary to view art through “a different prism”, but violent games were “appalling”.

“Grand Theft Auto was one of the more famous games and seemed to turn everyone into a car thief,” she said.

“Violent games… violence, it breeds violence.”

The reference to Bill Henson for those not familiar with it was a case where Henson the artist published nude pics of kiddies, all in the name of art. There was an outcry at the time, and calls for censorship of the mag the pic was published, but it all came to little in the end.

So apparently looking a naked pictures of little kids doesn’t make you a pedophile, but playing GTA makes you a car thief. Hmmmm, I’ve played GTA before, and I don’t seem to have broken into a car yet.

Grand Hypocrisy of the first order.