Live odds …

South Australian Labor Premier, Jay Weatherill said …

 … it was “staggering how much match-day broadcast time is being devoted to sports betting and live odds”.

“It has become a pervasive part of the coverage,”

“It is of great concern to me that we will end up with a generation of children who believe gambling is a normal part of watching or even playing sport.”

… and I could not agree more.

Scolded …

A MUSLIM man standing trial over his role in last year’s violent protests in central Sydney has been scolded for his “disrespect” after refusing to stand before a magistrate.

Mohammed Issai Issaka, 44, has pleaded not guilty to rioting, resisting arrest and assaulting police during the protests last September, organised in response to an internet video defaming the Islamic prophet Mohammed.

As the hearing commenced in Sydney’s Downing Centre yesterday, Mr Issaka refused to rise from his chair as a show of respect to magistrate Jacqueline Milledge as she entered the room.

Ms Milledge then repeatedly demanded the defendant stand, refusing to accept his excuse.

“You can tell me where it is in his religion that it says he cannot stand,” Ms Milledge told Mr Issaka’s lawyer. “I was a magistrate at Bankstown court (in southwest Sydney) for four years and I have never had to deal with such disrespect.”

After a delay of almost half an hour, the case resumed with Mr Issaka waiting outside the courtroom until the magistrate was seated.

Round one to Issaka …

Place …

As a kid growing up in the east end of London, places like Epping Forest had an almost magical effect on me.

Australia is rich in places that have much the same ability, a little shiver and a sudden sense of smallness within a vast universe, others might say numinous but that would admit the supernatural.

My place in the country finds ways of doing it to me again and again.

Saturday morning we had our first frost for the year, as the sun gots its edge over the trees along the creek it highlighted a mist suspended on an inversion about 20 metres above the ground with a red sky backdrop, by the time I got the camera the whole place was enveloped in fog.

DSC_9431My morning walk …

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May thirty-first …

Even more scary than carbon dioxide …

“This is a really big asteroid, similar in size to the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and it’s getting very close to us,” she said. “Fortunately we’ve been tracking its orbit very carefully so we know with great certainty it won’t hit us.

“We don’t need to panic, but we do need to pay attention,” she said.

Is that like, 97% of space scientists agree?

It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT.

Maybe it is, the trajectory of objects is space is about observations and calculations, not computer modelling. Still asteroids pose a far greater risk to life on earth than does CO2.

Full article <HERE>.

After dark …

Burglars in New South Wales should be quite safe from the police during the hours of darkness … but watch out for the vigilantes …

WHEN police scaled back their search for toddler Tyler Kennedy at nightfall on Friday, nearby residents refused to give up, turning out in droves to scour the thick bushland where he had disappeared.

With temperatures plunging to 6C, the community of Johns River, on the mid-north coast (of NSW), feared two-year-old Tyler could die of exposure …

Soon after the official search was scaled down at 5.30pm, more than 100 volunteers joined the only remaining police officer on the scene and the search was back on.

By 1.15am, a group of volunteers found Tyler in thick scrub  … , covered in scratches and bitterly cold, was reunited with his distraught mother Amanda Kennedy. “I was speechless when they said they had to call it off,” Ms Kennedy, 21, said. “My heart stopped and I walked away. I couldn’t handle it.

“We thought, ‘OK, we’ll call in our own search party and get everyone out there to find him’.”

Good answer …

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• Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America …

• India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong by far the least tolerant. In only three of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbor of a different race. This included 43.5 percent of Indians, 51.4 percent of Jordanians and an astonishingly high 71.8 percent of Hong Kongers and 71.7 percent of Bangladeshis.

The full article, including a discussion of possible sources of bias, <HERE>.