just a more expensive version of Farrago

NONE of the three judges presiding over Schapelle Corby's trial has ever found a defendant innocent, and they have now reached broad agreement on the verdict they will hand down on Friday.

The claim that weight is an important medical issue is not completely false, it's just largely false. At the statistical extremes of thinness and fatness, there's no question that weight has some relevance. But for the vast majority of people in this culture, and including the vast majority of people who are classified as weighing too much -- especially this completely phony overweight category -- it doesn't.

One of the things that I have been struck by, in studying this literature, is the weirdness of the assumption that the variation in body mass between individuals is a product of something other than their genetic predisposition to have a certain kind of body mass. Think of how bizarre that assumption would be in the context of something like say, height. The assumption that, say, Shaquille O'Neal on the one hand and Winona Ryder on the other, have different height because of lifestyle choices would be something that would just obviously be absurd. And yet, to a very significant extent, weight is just like height in that regard. [my emphasis]

Understandably unwilling to leave the great moral questions to rival Chris Martin of Coldplay (who, readers will remember, recently identified "shareholders" as "the greatest evil of the modern world"), fellow theologian/ethicist Thom Yorke of Radiohead ventures to disagree. Mr. Yorke maintains that ultimate evil is instead represented by "people denying that climate change exists," as the Indy's "5-Minute Interviewer" puts it (not online).
Asked how he felt upon hearing the opinions of such individuals, Mr. Yorke responds that "it is a flagrant evil, more evil than anything else".

You can make CDs from hemp - it is not impossible - but nobody is doing it because they can't be arsed.

There was a time when British engineering counted for something. But unfortunately this time was 1872. Today the demise of MG Rover is being blamed on a collection of businessmen, two of whom have face hair, who bought the company from BMW for a tenner and then began what looked to some like a massive asset-stripping operation.
This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that after so many years of utter and absolute hopelessness there might have been any assets left to strip.

The governor's communications director, Rob Stutzman, dismissed Beatty as a "crackpot".
"I don't know why anyone would care what he says," Mr Stutzman told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The future is coming so fast now that I think the ABC could be connecting with the future a bit more and looking at kind of cutting-edge ideas, but having said that, it’s such an easy thing to criticise…there’s this great big blancmange but in the blancmange there are nuggets and there is something for everybody and there is a kind of national conversation that it does inspire.

VIVIAN Alvarez returned to Australia on a Philippines passport stamped with a tourist visa six months before she was wrongfully deported, diplomatic cables reveal.

One of the contestants had chosen Lawrence of Arabia as his main topic. Ms Wright remarked (I am paraphrasing): “Don’t you think it’s funny that today Lawrence would be in Guantanamo Bay for his beliefs”.
She ended this with a satisfied smirk, as if she had just said something very witty. To her utter disgust (and my pleasure) the contestant fired back with: “To the contrary, if Lawrence would have succeeded in his ideas, there wouldn’t be a need for Guantanamo Bay. There would be democracy in the Middle East."
The consternation on the face of Ms Wright as she turned away from the contestant was telling. What an answer! In my high school days in LA, it was referred to as getting ‘bitch slapped’.

As a newly established resident of Narre Warren, it is perhaps surprising that my literacy skills and intellectual curiosity were sufficient enough to allow me to start, let alone finish Margaret Simons' (Review, 7/5) summation of my life as an Australian citizen living in the outer suburbs. Her unfortunate visit to Narre Warren and Fountain Gate, variously described as research, tourism or perhaps anthropology positioned me and my fellow residents as nothing more than vacuous curiosities available for examination from the supposed superiority afforded the cultural elite via the distinction of their educated inner-city location.

Hey Semi! Did we know about this?

Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.

The Latham Diaries is one of the most important books we have published in our 80-year history.