About

Glen - presenter …

What a week of epic coverage of relentless disaster news from the Asia Pacific region.
From the Phillipines to Samoa and Indonesia, the bad news just kept coming.
Reporters from the ABC and many of our partner networks, such as BBC and CNN, are now on the ground and face the daunting task of covering the awful aftermath of the death and destruction - a difficult task but already some outstanding work has been delivered.
If only it wasn’t required.

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Meanwhile, the return of a familiar argument :

A nude photo of actress Brooke Shields when she was ten years old has been removed from an exhibition in London, after a police pornography probe found it inappropriate.

The photograph was reproduced by Richard Prince, and titled Spiritual America.
It was due to go on show as part of the Pop Life: Art In A Material World exhibition at the Tate Modern gallery.

The picture shows the young actress from the knees up, naked, oiled and wearing heavy make up. A Scotland Yard spokesman said it was working with gallery staff to ensure it did not “break the law or cause any offence to their visitors”.

The case echoes that of Bill Henson’s exhibition in Sydney last year, which was cancelled after complaints to police about photos of naked teenagers

Where do you draw the line on this stuff ?

AND, in more online related news :

The US Secret Service says a juvenile was behind a Facebook poll asking whether US President Barack Obama should be assassinated - and no charges will be brought in the case.

Facebook quickly removed the user-generated poll, which was titled “Should Obama be killed?” and offered answer choices of “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” and “If he cuts my health care.”

More than 750 Facebook users had reportedly cast votes by the time the poll was yanked from the wildly popular online social networking community.

Nice.

Technology - just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
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Marius - politics …

Friday reflection:

Human circumstance is, to a large extent, a product of the law of unintended consequences.

This general truth was brought home to me again while reading recently about the Dreyfus case, the legal drama which was played out in the last years of the 19th century in France.

If you aren’t familiar with the case, it saw a French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly convicted of spying for Germany, in a court action that was fuelled by anti-semitism.

Exiled to jail on Devil’s Island, he was finally freed and exonerated as a result of a defence led by his brother Mathieu and featuring the most famous newspaper editorial ever penned: J’accuse, written by Emile Zola.

Among those who watched the Dreyfus proceedings was a Viennese journalist Theodore Herzl who, as a Jew, felt the primary lesson on the legal travesty that Dreyfus had experienced was that justice could be denied to a Jew, simply because they were Jewish.

He turned away from his journalism to become the spiritual father of political Zionism, providing the impetus for a movement which, half a century later, would see the foundation of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

In Australia similar sequences of circumstance and fluke dictate public life.

In a parallel universe, John Hewson would have won the unloseable election of 1993 and John Howard vanished into the political ether. Similarly, Kim Beazley would have won in 2001 and the Labor river run a different course.

Chance, somebody once observed, moves through life like a homicidal maniac.

As of early October, Malcolm Turnbull has set the Australian political hounds running again by declaring that the emissions trading debate is an issue on which his leadership could rise or fall.

It will be interesting over the next few weeks to see how events play out.