Overnight, the situation in Athens got ugly in a hurry.
Greece stands on the ‘‘edge of the abyss,’’ President Carolos Papoulias has warned, after a day of often violent protests against brutal budget cuts and tax hikes left three people dead.
As a general strike - called to vent public fury at the planned measures to avert national bankruptcy - paralysed the nation, demonstrators tried to storm the parliament and hooded youths hurled petrol bombs at stores and businesses in central Athens.
Police said two women and one man died at a branch of the Marfin bank which caught fire after rioters broke a window and threw Molotov cocktails inside.
They're certainly fighting in the streets over the austerity plans. The grief is pretty serious while people are worried "the contagion" will spread over Portugal, Ireland and Spain. Portugal and Ireland are relatively small but Spain is a much bigger problem. Yet the international bonds traders are circling all this in spite of the big IMF deal because they just don't buy the notion that the Greek Government will be able to pull their austerity plan together, let alone implement it. Just look at what's going on in Iceland and its terse negotiations with England. The Greeks really could make this worse by defaulting.
In one of the earlier iterations of the story today I saw a photo of mass of people carrying placards. My first instinct for a caption was "Wogs out of Work". Then again I thought the headline a few days ago said Gordon Brown was in trouble for calling a woman bigtoed. "What's wrong with having a big toe?" I wondered. I had to do a double take to realise he said bigoted. I imagine if I worked for 'The Age', I'd be sacked by now.
From Russia With Weirdness
I don't know what to make of something like this.
He said he saw a "semi-transparent half tube" spaceship on his balcony. He then entered it and met "human-like creatures in yellow spacesuits", The Moscow Times reported.
"I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of the ideas," he told the television program host.
He had told The Guardian the aliens took him to "some kind of star".
"They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist."
What has got his Russian political peers suddenly agitated after all this time is whether he let slip any state secrets and whether there is a proper procedure for dealing with aliens.
Andrei Lebedev, a State Duma deputy, was apparently moved by "holy terror" at Mr Ilyumzhinov's claims, and yesterday wrote to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev asking him to launch an investigation, the Times said.
He was concerned about whether Mr Ilyumzhinov's brush with the spacemen affected his ruling of Kalmykia and whether they might have tried to get him to divulge state secrets to them.
Mr Lebedev also wanted the Russian leader to clarify what guidelines officials were to follow if they were nabbed by aliens.
It's amazing what people will have problems with when somebody says they've been abducted by aliens. State Secrets? They're worried about State Secrets?
Is Australia Burqua-Lurkastan?
In one of the deleted scenes from 'Team America', Spottswood says words to the effect that he let his racism blind him. It wasn't the camel jockey towel heads of Derka-Derkastan but the slanty-eyed chinks of North Korea led by the evil Kim Jong-Il all along.
This article has the same kind of pungent offensiveness to it. The problem of course is that it's written by an Australian Senator and he's serious.
Put simply, the burqa separates and distances the wearer from the normal interactions with broader society.
In my mind, the burqa has no place in Australian society.
I would go as far as to say it is un-Australian. To me, the burqa represents the repressive domination of men over women, which has no place in our society and compromises some of the most important aspects of human communication.
It also establishes a different set of rules and societal expectations in our hitherto homogenous society.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
As an avid motorcyclist I am required to remove my helmet before entering a bank or petrol station. It's a security measure for the businesses and no reasonable person objects to this requirement. However, if I cover myself in a black cloth from head to toe, with only my eyes barely visible behind a mesh guard, I am effectively unidentifiable and can waltz into any bank unchallenged in the name of religious freedom.
Little wonder bank bandits in the UK are now becoming burqa bandits.
The same can be said for any number of areas where photographic identification is required. How many of us would ask for the veil to be dropped so we can compare the photo with the burqa wearer's face? I suspect the fear of being called bigoted, racist, Islamaphobic or insensitive would prevent many from doing what they would not think twice about under normal circumstances.
I know that there was some robbery committed by people in a burqua. Even allowing for that particular misuse of the item, it's really not a reason to go all hostile on a religion is it?
All the same, the article got me thinking about how the western world must look like to these muslim. What do blonde bikini babes look like to these people? It must be the height of immodesty to be sure. And here's an Australian politician calling out these women telling them that what they wear for the sake of modesty is wrong and that they should expose themselves to the same degree as the immodest people. It must feel like they're being asked to walk the streets with the equivalent feeling of having their nipples exposed, just because it is the custom in Australia.
I'm not a muslim but even I can imagine that far. Why can't a Senator of the Australian Parliament? I mean really. Going after muslim women and their traditional garb out of your own fear of the Islamic terrorist is weak, weak, weak. A truly free society does not fear the burqua.
That being said a truly free society does not get angry at 'South Park' either.
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