'We call it for what it is': Police say 'African gangs' are responsible for terrifying crime spree across Sydney - after Melbourne cops avoided the words at all cost

New South Wales Police have identified 'African gangs' as responsible for a terrifying spate of robberies across Sydney.

Assistant Commissioner Mark Jones said Strike Force Arpen is working to find a group of Sudanese teens who have been targeting electronic stores in the city over the past month. 

At least 20 stores, including JB Hi-Fi and Bing Lee locations, have been hit by teenagers taking off with thousands of dollars in goods.

'We are talking about an organised gang of African thieves,' Assistant Commissioner Jones told The Daily Telegraph. 'We are not trying to downplay this in any way, shape or form.'

The comments come just days after detectives insisted Sydney was not facing the same African gang crisis as Melbourne.  

On Sunday, Detective Chief Inspector Glyn Baker said he would not 'describe them as gangs'.

'I think it's very important that we don't draw any parallels whatsoever with what's happening in Melbourne. What we are dealing with here is a group of young African males who are committing criminal offences', he said. 

But Jones says they are now calling 'it for what it is' - however, he emphasised the situation is not nearly as severe as Melbourne's gang issue.

Previously, Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton refused to identify the city's problem as an 'African' gang crisis. He had said the youth crime was not limited to one ethnic group, in an interview last year.

'We've certainly had a lot of young Africans, Australian kids offending as well, Islander kids, a lot of indigenous kids we're getting as well.'

Melbourne has been dealing with violence relating to African street gangs for years, with footage and images of brawling youths involved in crimes and brawls.

Ugly scenes involving African youths and the wider community have erupted on numerous occasions in Melbourne in the past months, with politicians slamming Victoria Police for a lack of action.

Police said a gang which calls themselves the Blood Drill Killers were linked to numerous crimes in the city's west in recent months. The gang is comprised of African-Australian boys aged between 14 to 17 and is a breakaway group with links to Apex and Menace to Society. 

Meanwhile in Sydney, four teenagers were arrested for allegedly stealing $15,000 worth of electronics at a store in Taren Point in the city's south on Monday. Four youths of African appearance aged 18, 17, and 16 were taken into custody, with one freed on bail.

In a separate incident, police arrested a 24-year-old man for allegedly stealing a speaker from an electronic store in Hornsby, on Sydney's North Shore.

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Amazing what the threat of losing power does for your political values: Queensland APPROVES the Adani mine - after voters slammed Labor for putting climate change ahead of 10,000 jobs

Adani has won the final approval it needs to construct its new coal mine in central Queensland. The approval comes after former Labor leader Bill Shorten's refusal to endorse the mine saw the party suffer a massive swing against them at the federal election.

Queensland's environment department has signed off on the company's plan to manage groundwater on and around its Galilee basin mine site.

Adani promised an immediate start to construction once the last approval was in hand.

In a statement, the environment department said it had approved the most recent version of the plan, which Adani submitted just a day ago. 'Adani submitted its most recent version of the plan, addressing the department's feedback, yesterday,' the department said. 'The (plan's) assessment has been rigorous and based on the best available science.'

The approval commits Adani to additional measures to safeguard and monitor water sources.

Some water experts claim Adani has grossly underestimated the mine's impacts on underground, and fear the effects of its permit to pump water out of the mine to allow for the safe extraction of coal.

Hydrologists from four Australian universities issued a joint report earlier this week, saying Adani's water science was 'severely flawed'. They warned the mine could have a such a dramatic effect on groundwater levels that the ancient Doongmabulla Springs Complex, 8km from the edge of Adani's mining lease, could permanently dry up.

That would spell death for the plant and animal species that rely on the springs for survival, one of those experts, Flinders University hydrogeology professor Adrian Werner said.

Prof Werner also warned of dire consequences for the Carmichael River which flows through the mine site, saying it would be cut off from its flood plain and could be robbed of groundwater that keeps the river flowing for much of the year.

Before Thursday's decision, a former state government water chief said Adani's plan would have irrefutable consequences for underground water sources in an area that's heavily dependent on them. 'We're looking at extraction of four Sydney Harbours out of underground systems. That's a huge amount of water,' he told ABC radio.

'We see politicians put their hands on their hearts and tell Queenslanders that we're managing our groundwater resources sustainably.'They don't know ... the Queensland government doesn't have a clue what's happening in terms of how underground water is being managed.'

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Je suis un hypocrite

Australian Leftists want freedom of the press for Leftists only

How pleasing and surprising it was to see so many of the commentariat suddenly in favour of freedom of the press. Some of us had been warning for the last few years it was being compromised by executive and legislative censorship, but our progressive betters were at best indifferent to or contemptuous of such protests. But last week's "raid" on the ABC by the Australian Federal Police led to a mass outcry among the intelligentsia. Aunty had been violated.

"An attack on the press for doing their job is an attack on our democracy," tweeted Greens leader senator Richard Di Natale.

How noble. I have been thinking of designing a hashtag for such converts - how does #JeSuisFullofIt sound, Senator? In March Di Natale revealed his inner tinpot when he told his admiring Melbourne inner-city audience of his plans to silence conservative journalists.

"We're going to call out the hate speech that's been going on," he said. "We're going to make sure that we've got laws that regulate our media so that people like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Chris Kenny - and I could go on and on and on. If they want to use hate speech to divide the community then they're going to be held to account."

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young labelled the AFP's actions "an attack on the press for doing their job" and "an attack on those who tell the truth".

Compare her purported principles to her reaction in 2011 when a Federal Court found Herald-Sun journalist Andrew Bolt had breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in questioning the motives of light-skinned Australians who identified as indigenous. "Diddums Andrew Bolt," she tweeted, "Diddums". Proving this inanity was not a mere case of spontaneity, Hanson-Young repeated these puerile sentiments in a letter to this newspaper for good measure.

"Without a strong media that is fearless . our country will be weaker," lamented ABC broadcaster Patricia Karvelas. "It is in everyone's interests to know the truth". I agree entirely, but I was reminded of the reaction to Herald-Sun cartoonist Mark Knight's excellent depiction of tennis player Serena Williams's US Open tantrum last year.

Knight had spoken the truth in depicting Williams as a spoiled brat and a bully. It resulted in his suffering appalling online abuse. He was called a "white supremacist", he and his family received death threats, and he was forced to leave town for a week while he was protected by security guards. The Australian Press Council subsequently dismissed complaints about Knight's cartoon, finding that its publication was in the public interest.

So did Karvelas fiercely defend Knight's right (and obligation) to speak the truth? "Main lesson from today is that listening is always a good start to building a respectful and civilised community," she tweeted the day it was published. "If people of colour are telling you they find depictions of them hurtful and offensive that matters". So much for a "strong media".

The AFP's actions, claimed ABC broadcaster Wendy Harmer, amounted to a "chilling effect", and "one that goes beyond just media outlets". Welcome to the free press cause, Wendy, albeit it has taken you a few years to get here.

It was a very different Harmer who on 15 December 2014 tweeted "Andrew Bolt's blog is a forum for vile hate speech. A blight on this nation . Get rid of him!!" That was the same day the Lindt Caf‚ siege began at the hands of an Islamist terrorist. Two innocent hostages would later die. It says it all that Harmer was preoccupied with "hate speech" and silencing a conservative columnist.

Inexplicably journalists these days play a leading role in not only suppressing politically incorrect statements, but also in calling for retribution against those who perpetuate them. Take for example former Wallabies player Israel Folau, whose $4 million contract was terminated by Rugby Australia last month after he twice posted on Instagram that homosexuals were destined for hell unless they repented.

In the 13-month period between Folau's first Instagram indiscretion and his eventual sacking, Sydney Morning Herald columnist and sports journalist Peter FitzSimons wrote at least 11 columns about Folau. They are not what you would call reporting or objective analysis. Rather, they were shrill denunciations. "Israel Folau has to go, and will go," he wrote in April. "Quick. Clean. Gone. At least until such times as he repents." FitzSimons was also quick to dismiss Folau's right to free speech. "While he has broad freedom of speech, he has no freedom from consequences," he wrote.

You may recall former SBS sports journalist Scott McIntyre, whose employment in 2015 was terminated over a number of provocative tweets on Anzac Day that vilified the WWI and WWII diggers and those who commemorated them. "Wonder if the poorly-read, largely white, nationalist drinkers and gamblers pause today to consider the horror that all mankind suffered," he sneered.

So what was FitzSimons' reaction? "I disagree as passionately with those comments as I do with his ludicrous sacking for making them," he wrote. There's that hashtag again.

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'That is rubbish': Sunrise host Sam Armytage slams Kmart's apology after customers were banned from using Christian terms in its photo booths - but 'Islam' and 'Koran' had the all clear

Someone in Kodak's IT department will have been responsible for this -- knowing full-well that it would be a provocation

Sunrise host Samantha Armytage has slammed Kmart after photo printing kiosks at its stores appeared to ban Christian terms. Armytage directed criticism at the retail giant during the Thursday morning segment after the store blamed the error on a system glitch. 'Kmart has come out this morning and said it was a technical glitch, that is rubbish,' she said.

When customers tried to caption photos with the forbidden words, a message came up on screen saying 'profanity has been detected in text and substituted with ****'.

Words such as Jesus, church, Bible and Christian used in captions were deemed to be profanities and replaced with asterisks, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The words Jewish and Allah were also banned but mosque, Islam and Koran were not.

By Thursday morning the error had been fixed, though Armytage invited guests to her show such as social commentator Jane Caro to weigh in on the incident.

The kiosks are run by Kodak which recently installed software to detect profanities.

Kodak sales and marketing manager Gavin Wulfsohn said the list of profanities was wrong and would be fixed.

A spokesman for Kmart said: 'We would like to sincerely apologise for this system error, which has been rectified overnight. It in no way reflects our views as a business.

'At Kmart, we support diversity and inclusiveness irrespective of race, religion, age, gender, ethnicity, ability, appearance or attitude, and we want our teams and stores to reflect the communities in which we operate'.

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 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here