Muslim terror attack planned for Australia

Numerous Sydney buildings, including the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor and others housing US companies, were terrorist targets for illegally-bought Australian rocket launchers. The Saturday Daily Telegraph can reveal alleged terrorists who obtained five of the launchers - believed to have been stolen from the Australian army - discussed using them on the US targets. One of the targets was a high-rise building near Hyde Park which is the base for American Express. Another was the nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas said today.

Yesterday, a 28-year-old unemployed Leumeah man was in Central Local Court, charged with illegally obtaining and selling seven of the stolen rocket launchers. Taha Abdul-Rahman was arrested in his Eliza Way home early yesterday following a joint investigation by NSW Police, Australian Federal Police and ASIO. He was charged with two counts of dishonestly receiving stolen Commonwealth property, seven counts of possessing a prohibited weapon, seven of selling a prohibited weapon to an unauthorised person and one of possessing ammunition without a licence or permit.

In court documents it was alleged Abdul-Rahman sold seven of the weapons to murderer Adnan "Eddie" Darwiche in 2003. Darwiche [a Lebanese Muslim] is serving two life sentences over his role in a gang war that involved a string of fatal shootings in Sydney's southwest at that time.

It is alleged Abdul-Rahman sold one rocket launcher to Darwiche on September 30, 2003, at Liverpool. He then allegedly sold him another six launchers on October 9, 2003, at Claymore. Police have only recovered one of the launchers from Darwiche - who had agreed to assist police. At a police press conference yesterday, officers revealed they believed five launchers had found their way into the hands of one or more Sydney terror suspects. Abdul-Rahman did not apply for bail or appear in the courtroom and was remanded to appear in Central Local Court again next Wednesday.

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A Federal attempt to reduce the tragedy of abortions

"Jawboning" -- High profile argument

Tony Abbott attributes Australia's high abortion rate to women whose lives are under control but view childbirth as a "terrible inconvenience". The Health Minister said cultural changes were prompting more women to abort pregnancies and called for greater soul-searching by those considering terminations.

"Once upon a time, women who found themselves pregnant were culturally conditioned to have the baby and have it adopted out," he said. "These days, there is very different cultural conditioning. "This is particularly the case for women who have got their whole lives ahead of them or women who have got things nicely under management - a baby, or an extra baby, is a terrible inconvenience."

Mr Abbott was backed by a survey that showed 20-something women in stable relationships were most likely to have unwanted pregnancies. In an interview with the Herald Sun, Mr Abbott said the national abortion rate - estimates put it at 84,000 a year - was too high. The Government's new 24-hour pregnancy counselling hotline was the best way to help women make informed decisions about pregnancy. A devout Catholic and abortion critic, Mr Abbott also offered qualified support for contraception. He defended the role his Christian faith played in his political life: he always separated his job and his religion.

His comments followed a storm over the appointment of a Catholic welfare agency to help develop the hotline. Centacare will help develop guidelines for the service, enraging pro-choice activists. But Mr Abbott said counselling was aimed at supporting women, not influencing them. "The whole point of this is to try to ensure that, whatever decision a woman makes, it really is her decision and not something that has been forced on her by social conditioning," he said.

He did not want to remove women's right to abortions. "Absolutely not - I think every abortion is a tragedy, in a sense, but I am not going to be judgmental about people who decide to have an abortion," he said. "In the end, it's a matter for the individual facing those circumstances to decide." Mr Abbott believed contraception had its place but offered limited elaboration. "I think there are ideals of behaviour which people should strive for," he said. "If, for whatever reason, those ideals are not going to be met, people should be prudent, so to speak." His views on abortion and other subjects were not part of a personal religious crusade. "I have never done anything because I feel that religion mandates it," he said.

A national study released late last year found 56 per cent of women with an unplanned pregnancy kept the baby. Almost 30 per cent had an abortion, 13 per cent miscarried and 2 per cent offered the baby for adoption. Women aged 25-29 were the most likely to become pregnant accidentally, followed by women aged 30-34. Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare suggest there were 84,218 abortions in Australia in 2003, or one for every three live births that year. But it is difficult to calculate because raw Medicare figures can also include miscarriages.

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AUSTRALIA BENEFITS FROM BRITISH HEALTH CHAOS

Some lucky British nurses discover the wonders of tropical Cairns. Brits from North of Watford generally settle well in Australia



The first of more than 70 nurses from the English town of Stoke-on-Trent have reported for work in tropical north Queensland. The group of medical staff lost their jobs in a round of health spending cuts last year and were due to start 2007 on the dole. But when managers at Cairns Base Hospital heard about their plight they flew to Britain to offer them jobs.

The first of the Stoke nurses are on the wards in Cairns and enjoying the laid-back Queensland lifestyle. Katey Kitchen, 22, migrated with her boyfriend at the end of last year. "I had only been working as a nurse in Stoke for a year before I was made redundant," she said. "I was really upset. I didn't know what I was going to do. "Now I'm so glad I applied to come to Cairns. The atmosphere at the hospital is great and I love the weather. "We've booked a dive course for February and can't wait to get out on the reef. Life's brilliant here."

As well as the Stoke contingent, Cairns Base Hospital has a hired a further 80 nurses from hospitals across Britain. Most are due to arrive in the next few months but Katie Hollis, 31, arrived from Birmingham three weeks ago. "I'm married to a Cairns guy and we were looking to move here anyway, so it was a real stroke of luck when I heard about the recruitment drive here," she said. "Now I smile to myself every time I walk out into the sunshine after my shift."

The 150 British nurses - who are bringing about 250 partners and children with them -will solve the hospital's staffing problems and take the nursing roster to 700. Director of nursing Glynda Summers said she was thrilled with her recruits. "They are very well-trained nurses and they hit the ground running when they arrived here," she said. "They're settling in very well and they loved spending Christmas in Cairns."

Cairns businesses have offered jobs to the nurses' husbands and wives and local developers have agreed to reserve three new unit complexes exclusively for their families. The hospital has even devised a "tropical chums" scheme to help the newcomers settle in, matching Australian members of staff with the new recruits.

The Cairns nurses are part of an influx of foreign health professionals into Queensland. No statewide figures are available for the numbers of overseas staff recruited directly by individual hospitals, but Queensland Health's "Work For Us" recruitment drive has so far brought 98 overseas doctors, 53 nurses, 46 allied health staff and seven dentists to Queensland. Another 648 applications are being processed.

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GREENIES WORSEN AUSTRALIA'S BUSHFIRES

Authorities will not take the necessary measures to prevent bush fires for fear of offending radical environmentalists

With dismaying predictability, bushfires in south-eastern Australia have devastated some of the country's state forests and national parks, put at risk the lives of thousands of firefighters who have heroically sought to contain them, and caused substantial loss of property, particularly in Victoria and Tasmania.

What is most alarming about the recent outbreaks is that they come at the beginning of summer, and their intensity can only be expected to grow as the weather gets hotter, drier and more windy.

Undoubtedly, the current drought has aggravated the problem; but the almost total absence of fuel-reduction burns - now part of the policy pursued by bodies such as the National Parks and Wildlife Service in New South Wales and the Department of Sustainability and Environment in Victoria - has contributed to the crisis.

In Victoria, bushfires consumed over 300,000 hectares early in December. For the first time in living memory, the fire-fighting organisations, the Country Fire Authority and the Department of Sustainability and Environment, conceded that they could not put the fires out, and they would burn for weeks until rain extinguished them.

Fire-reduction strategy

By contrast, the Department of Sustainability's Chief Fire Officer admitted that only 7,000 hectares was burned between last autumn and spring in low-intensity fires designed to get rid of the forest litter which turns bushfires into wildfires. (SBS News, December 8, 2006).

This is just one thousandth of the 8 million hectares of forest land which the department has responsibility to manage. They might as well have stayed at home.

According to the Victorian Association of Forest Industries, this compares to a yearly average of 225,000 hectares burnt in fuel-reduction burns in the decade from 1974-75 to 1983-84. Until about five years ago, the figure had averaged just 80,000 hectares, which fell to 40,000 hectares by 2003, still over five times the area subject to controlled burn-offs this year.

The reason why government departments have effectively abandoned fuel reduction strategies is that they have accepted the greenies' argument that their job is to minimise human activity (particularly logging) and preserve "biodiversity". They have accepted the greenies' claim that periodic low-intensity burn-offs reduce biodiversity.

In fact, low-intensity fires are far kinder to both flora and fauna than wildfires which inevitably devastate everything in their path and put human lives in grave danger.

It is curious that environmental groups, so vociferous about the effect of CO2 on climate change, have remained completely silent over the millions of tonnes of CO2 released by the bushfires which have cut a swathe through south-eastern Australia in recent weeks.

Peter Garrett, newly appointed shadow minister for climate change, has said nothing on the issue, nor has the environmental group Greenpeace, which has opposed fuel-reduction burn-offs and staged several spectacular stunts in an effort to save "ancient forests" threatened by logging.

The Wilderness Society, which first grabbed the spotlight 30 years ago in its campaign to save the Franklin River, and still raises money on the basis that it is saving the forests, has also been silent as some of Australia's old growth forests have literally gone up in smoke.

The Australian Greens, who led the campaign to prevent the timber industry getting access to timber from native forests, have also remained completely silent in the face of the bushfire crisis.

Since 2002, Australia has faced an escalating problem from bushfires, owing to an unwillingness by governments to take the necessary actions to minimise the bushfire threat.

After every forest conflagration, there have been state and federal inquiries into the causes of the bushfires, and what needs to be done to address them.

Every one of these inquiries has recommended - sometimes in muted language, for fear of offending radical environmentalists who have set the agenda for forest policy - a program of what are sometimes called "cold fires", fuel-reduction burn-offs through bush land in the wetter months of the year, to get rid of dead trees, branches and leaf litter which fuel forest fires.

It has been known for many years that such fires, if carried out every six to eight years, prevent the build-up of forest litter which turns bushfires into wildfires.

In Western Australia, the only state where successive governments rigorously conducted widespread fuel-reduction burns until recent years, there have been no comparable disasters. Studies conducted in Western Australia have shown that regular burn-offs of 10-15 per cent of forests reduce the amount of forest litter to a level where bushfires can be controlled, and do not develop into wildfires.

Until governments introduce mandatory legislated targets for fuel-reduction burns in both National Parks and State Forests, as a means of preventing further wildfires, the present problems will simply get worse.

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