Saturday, February 11, 2012

If you don’t have anything nice to say, say it on Twitter

A Saudi journalist is in trouble for a controversial tweet:

Interpol has been accused of abusing its powers after Saudi Arabia used the organisation’s red notice system to get a journalist arrested in Malaysia for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

Police in Kuala Lumpur said Hamza Kashgari, 23, was detained at the airport “following a request made to us by Interpol” the international police cooperation agency, on behalf of the Saudi authorities.

Kashgari, a newspaper columnist, fled Saudi Arabia after posting a tweet on the prophet’s birthday that sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats. ...

Reports suggest that the Malaysian authorities intend to return him to his native country.

Malaysia is a country whose approach on asylum-seeker policy Tim Blair seems to think Australia ought to follow.

(via Tim Blair)

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Friday, February 10, 2012

Internecine battle minimised

Lateline presenter Emma Alberici sketches a gripping scenario:

The campaign to clean up alleged financial misconduct at the Health Services Union is being taken directly to Canberra.

At the same time, the woman at the centre of the campaign to rid the union of corruption has herself been accused of financial misconduct and been criticised by the union's national executive.

But Monash University politics lecturer Dr Nick Economou is unimpressed:

It’s only because of the link between the union and [Labor MP] Craig Thomson and the fact that the Gillard Government really depends on him hanging onto his seat in whatever circumstance that there’s this great interest in what’s otherwise a fairly minor internecine battle.

Gee, that’s okay then... for a few minutes there I’d been moderately concerned.

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Pub Friday

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Yes we can, Amen

US President Barack Obama recently recalled “one of the great honours of my life,” his meeting with Billy Graham at the Reverend’s “mountaintop retreat”:

Before I left, Rev. Graham started praying for me, as he had prayed for so many presidents before me. And when he finished praying, I felt the urge to pray for him. I didn’t really know what to say. What do you pray for when it comes to the man who has prayed for so many? But like that verse in Romans, the Holy Spirit interceded when I didn’t know quite what to say.

And so I prayed, briefly, but I prayed from the heart. I don’t have the intellectual capacity or the lung capacity of some of my great preacher friends here that pray for a long time. But I prayed. And we ended with an embrace and a warm goodbye.

As ABC presenter Andrew West suggests, when an incumbent POTUS is “making sure everyone knows that he prayed with Billy Graham,” then the re-election game is decidedly on.

Hopefully Obama won’t get to the point where God starts telling him to do stuff... such as another misadventure in Mesopotamia, or Persia or somewhere.

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