Miller Buys Foster's

From Business Week:
SABMiller Plc clinched Foster’s Group Ltd. with a sweetened A$9.9 billion ($10.2 billion) offer for Australia’s biggest brewer after three months of pursuit.

The U.K. company will pay A$5.10 a share in cash for the Melbourne-based brewer, SABMiller said today in a statement. The offer was previously for A$4.90 minus dividend payments.

The purchase will be the biggest ever by SABMiller and give it access to about half of the Australian beer market.

SABMiller’s initial attempts to nab the maker of Victoria Bitter were rebuffed by Foster’s management as undervaluing the brewer, one of the world’s most profitable...

SABMiller to Buy Foster’s After Raising Bid to A$9.9 Billion
Clementine Fletcher
September 21, 2011
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-21/sabmiller-to-buy-foster-s-after-raising-bid-to-a-9-9-billion.html

Atomic testing victims must have day in court

http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=625197

Atomic testing victims must have day in court
2010/11/02
Tammy Franks, MLC

Only last year Premier Mike Rann vowed that the British Government has an “absolute responsibility” to do the right thing by “its and our service personnel and, of course, our Aboriginal people”.

Mr Rann was referring specifically to the devastating nuclear testing conducted by the British Government in South Australia at Maralinga and Emu Fields during the 1950s and 1960s.

The deadly secret atomic testing program, which began just seven years after Hiroshima, became known to locals as ‘the black mist’.

The Indigenous and non Indigenous Australian civilians affected have since experienced serious and ongoing health problems including higher levels of cancer, eye problems and genetic abnormalities in survivors and their offspring.

Fast forward to 2010, however, and the Premier is refusing to put any money where his mouth was to get civilian victims their day in the British courts.

The Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement (ALRM) is preparing its legal case against the British Government, and has called on the State and Federal Government to assist with the cost of the lawsuit.

But in July this year South Australia’s Attorney-General John Rau refused to even meet with representatives of the ALRM and the Government has so far failed to pledge any monetary support for the legal case, (money that would later be repaid to the Government should the case be successful.)

I find it appalling that Premier Rann is refusing to aid South Australians in seeking justice and compensation for their injuries when he shed crocodile tears on this very issue just one year ago.

The situation prompted me to move a motion in Parliament calling on the SA Government to back the ALRM’s legal challenge.

This motion was brought to a vote in Parliament yesterday and was supported by the Liberals, while Labor remain callously opposed.

Legal cases are costly and this one requires substantial funds to commission expert witnesses, conduct investigations and collate medical and other information.

Until recently it seemed there was no legal recourse available to victims, however recent legal advice has confirmed that Australian civilians are entitled to bring legal suits against the United Kingdom Government.

Justice must be done.

A successful legal claim will give financial compensation to those who suffer the ongoing affects of the atomic tests, as well as formally recognising the wider environmental impacts associated with the testing.

It was a hideous page in our state’s history some half a century ago when the Long Range Weapons Establishment issued unfounded assurances that Aboriginal people would not be affected by the trials.

As we now know, bombs that exploded near areas like Wallatinna, to the north-east of Emu Field, caused stomach pains, vomiting, choking, coughing, diarrhoea, rashes, puss-filled sores, peeling skin, headaches and running eyes.

Then, in the year that followed, an estimated 20 older members of the Anangu community died prematurely, while cemeteries filled with infants and children taken before their time are another horrific legacy of the tests.

The South Australian Government could and should offer unconditional and unwavering support to victims.

The Premier has previously acknowledged that compensation should be paid, now it is time to act.

In bringing this motion to a vote, I am calling on Premier Rann to contribute to the legal costs of the case launched by the ALRM in South Australia so that both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal South Australians can seek redress for injuries suffered during the nuclear testing.

Let’s hope the Premier is true to his word and will exercise his “absolute responsibility”.

The world's happiest cities

http://shine.yahoo.com/event/tastefulliving/the-worlds-happiest-cities-508202/

The world's happiest cities
by Forbes.com
Wed Sep 2, 2009

Ever since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appeared in the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio, the world has been fascinated with Rio de Janeiro. Popular perception of the city is infused with images of starry-eyed youngsters dancing into the dusk, backed by imposing mountains and dark sea.

That view has propelled Rio to the top of our list of the world's happiest cities. Famous for its annual Carnaval festival (starting Feb. 13 next year), the second-largest metropolis in South America finished first among 50 cities in a recent survey conducted by Simon Anholt, an author and policy adviser.

"Brazil is associated with all these qualities of good humor and good living and Carnaval," says Anholt. "Carnaval is very important--it's the classic image that people have of Rio, and it's an image of happiness."

Next on the list is the top city from Down Under: Sydney, Australia. Known for balmy weather, friendly locals and an iconic opera house, Sydney fared well in Anholt's survey because of its association with a popular brand--Australia.

"It's where everybody would like to go," he says. "Everybody thinks they know Australia because they've seen Crocodile Dundee. There's this image of this nation of people who basically sit around having barbecues."

Rounding out the top five are third-ranked Barcelona, Spain, which Anholt calls "the classic Mediterranean city"; fourth-ranked Amsterdam, Netherlands, because Anholt's young respondents "know you can smoke dope in the bars"; and Melbourne, Australia, which makes the list simply because it's in Australia.

"People know it's in Australia, and that it's full of Australians," says Anholt. "Therefore, it must be fun."

Behind the Numbers

The data Anholt provided for our list is part of his Nation Brands Index, which he developed in 2005. The latest incarnation, the 2009 Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index, was released in June. The data was compiled from online interviews with 10,000 respondents in 20 countries.

Happiness is difficult to quantify, and Anholt acknowledges that his data is less an indicator of where local populations are happiest than a reflection of respondents' thinking about where they could imagine themselves happy.

"This is a survey of perception, not a survey of reality," he says. "People write me all the time and say 'that's not true.' It probably isn't true, but it's what people think. The gap between perception and reality is what interests city governments."

The French historian Fernand Braudel wrote that "Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves very little trace in history." But a perception of happiness leaves a strong trace on the balance sheets of cities that depend on conventions, tourism and an influx of talent.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Anholt notes that the results of his survey reflect the longstanding reputation of Mediterranean and Latin American cities as non-stop party locales.

"It's pretty much the expected bunch," says Anholt. "Though I'm a little surprised about Spain outdoing Italy. It's interesting that the Spanish are perceived as being happier than the Italians--I find the Spanish rather gloomy."

Still, Barcelona--Spain's highest-ranked city--has plenty of supporters.

"The beauty of the city and its environs, along with affordable housing and business opportunities, is the fantastic lifestyle," says Michelle Finkelstein, a vice president at travel agency Our Personal Guest. "There's not the stress of getting a child into the best preschool--the public ones are good and close by. And they have the top soccer team and some of the best weather in Europe."

Other places in the world that lack the metropolitan flair of the cities on this list are often identified with the notion of happiness. "Anyone lucky enough to visit the magical Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan would know that there is no competition: There can be no happier place," says Patricia Schultz, author of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. "This small Buddhist nation of incredibly stunning beauty follows a unique guiding philosophy of GNH--Gross National Happiness. You can see it in their open faces--they smile from the heart. Barcelona has nothing on them."

Global rivalries notwithstanding, Anholt notes that his findings more or less support historical trends, with one notable exception.

"The cities on this list would probably be the same if I'd been running this survey in 1890, aside from Sydney and Melbourne," he says. "Australia is kind of a branding miracle."

Not bad for a former penal colony.

Top 5 World's Happiest Cities
1. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2. Sydney, Australia
3. Barcelona, Spain
4. Amsterdam, Netherlands
5. Melbourne, Australia

Hobbit feud: scientists argue over mysterious bones

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2009-02-01-hobbit-bones_N.htm
Hobbit feud: scientists argue over mysterious bones
By Peter Brown
2-1-9

The setting was a hidden island filled with pint-size men who feasted on pygmy elephants and battled dragons. The story of paleontology's "Hobbits," the extinct human species called Homo floresiensis, packs plenty of drama.

But the 2003 discovery by an Australian-Indonesian of the undersize bones inside Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores has long also suffered from a modern-day human rivalry. Add in the scientific back-story — a five-year feud over the whether the original inhabitants of Flores were actually a separate human species — and you have enough material for a novel.

The latest chapter of this story comes in the next Journal of Human Evolution, which boasts four reports concerning the hobbits— five years after discovery was first disclosed in the journal Nature. "Here we report the discovery, from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia, of an adult hominin," wrote the authors of that 2004 paper in the formal language of scientists declaring a new species. ("Hominin" is what the cool kids among paleontologists say instead of "hominids" now, or what reporters call "human species." )

Incredibly these "hobbits" stood less than 40 inches tall and had brains about a third the size of modern humans, although they were buried with Stone Age tools, which indicates they had some smarts. "The combination of primitive and derived (modern-looking) features assigns this hominin to a new species, Homo floresiensis. The most likely explanation for its existence on Flores is long-term isolation, with subsequent endemic dwarfing," concluded the team led by Peter Brown of Australia's University of New England. The declaration made the bones of "Liang Bua 1," or LB1, described in the study the "holotype", basically the defining specimen of the new species, much like the fossil of " Lucy" defines the pre-human species Australopithecus afarensis, which lived 3 to 4 million years ago in Africa.

For something so sacrosanct, LB1's bones have enjoyed a rough few years, derided by critics such as Jochen Weber of Germany's Leopoldina Hospital as belonging to a microencephalic victim of a small-brained pathology, not a new species. Florida State University neuroscientist Dean Falk countered those claims in other studies, most recently in a 2007 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science paper that concluded, "Despite LB1's having brain shape features that sort it with normal humans rather than microencephalics, other shape features and its small brain size are consistent with its assignment to a separate species." The bones even departed from their home in Jakarta's Indonesian Centre for Archaeology without the permission of all of the discoverers, a move that left them damaged and pawns in the politics of paleontology in Indonesia prior to their return.

Another look at LB1's much-maligned noggin comes with the new Journal of Human Evolution papers in a study led by anatomical scientist Karen Baab of the Stony Brook (N.Y.) University Medical Center that examines the asymmetry of the skull. Critics of the new-species designation had pointed out the two halves of the skull are lopsided, suggestive of microencephaly. However, Baab's report concludes that "the cranium is fairly asymmetrical, but within the range of asymmetry exhibited by modern humans and all extant African ape species." Packed under 10 feet of wet mud, the skull likely became a bit distorted, a process called taphonomy by fossil researchers.

The whole microencephaly debate is nonsense, original team members such as Peter Brown have argued, as they have turned up bones, if not skulls, from about a dozen "hobbits" underneath Liang Bua Cave. The bones all display similar looks. A graveyard for stubby microencephalics in a cave on Flores strikes the discoverers as unlikely.

Two papers look at those "post-cranial" remains of LB1 and kin, in other words every thing but the skull. The hips, legs and feet of nine hobbits are examined in a paper led by William Jungers of Stony Brook University. And the arms, collar bones, wrists and fingers of six hobbits are described in another led by his colleague Susan Larson. Those bones "presents a unique mosaic of derived (human-like) and primitive morphologies, the combination of which is never found in either healthy or pathological modern humans." Larson's group reports. The leg bone finds indicate LB1 was most likely female. Overall, the bones most resemble those of Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, suggesting they arrived at the island of Flores a very long time ago.

The latest papers include a better description of that cave, which concludes that whatever hobbits were, they ate a lot of Stegodon pygmy elephants. "There are at least 47 individual Stegodon represented in all excavated sectors of Liang Bua," the researchers write, describing findings from 10 holes that held remains from 95,000 to 17,000 years ago, when a volcanic eruption appears to have bumped off both elephants and hobbits.

Komodo dragon and giant stork remains also litter the cave, though there is less suspicion the hobbits preyed on those species. More likely they scavenged their carcasses. One thing the cave lacked was seashells, suggesting that hobbits were not big on surf and turf. "Homo floresiensis probably descended from a very early Homo erectus, or from Homo habilis, both human species that are not known to have used marine resources. Homo floresiensis probably did not have the right behavior to exploit marine resources (perhaps fear of entering the water, just like for instance orangutans)," says study lead author Gert van den Bergh of Holland's Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum Naturalis, by e-mail.

Or perhaps modern humans lived on the coasts and hobbits were "restricted to the more inaccessible interior of Flores and did not venture into the coastal areas," he says. "You see, still many unanswered questions remain."

Ex-rocker is Australia's new Environment Minister

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2971279.ece

From The Times
November 30, 2007
Ex-rocker is Australia's new Environment Minister
Bernard Lagan in Sydney

Old rockers never die — in Australia they take to running the country.

Less than a week after electing a new Labor Prime Minister, the country’s cultural and social revolution gathered pace when two children of the Sixties were appointed to key jobs.

Peter Garrett, the former sweaty, edgy and menacing frontman of the Sydney-based band Midnight Oil, scourge of corporate America, became Environment Minister.

And the right-wing Liberal Party, shattered after its electoral catastrophe of last weekend, has turned to the raffish, thrice-married Brendan Nelson. The 49-year-old, who for years wore a diamond ear stud, owns several Fender guitars and is known for belting out hits by the Animals.
The choice of Mr Garrett, in particular, was brave. At 6ft 4in (1.93m) and aged 54, he always had a rock star’s body with a politician inside. He spent the 1980s screaming from stages against the US military, supporting the rights of Aborigines and railing against big business. Yesterday the politician emerged fully when the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, appointed him — not without risk — to the Environment portfolio. Mr Garrett, a lawyer who never practised, stumbled in the election campaign. He joked off-air to a radio announcer that what his party said during the campaign and would do in Government were two different things.

More than any other, Mr Garrett’s appointment underscores the enormous change that is sweeping the Australian Parliament since John Howard, Prime Minister for nearly 12 years and the world’s longest-serving conservative leader, was ignominiously dumped by voters and even evicted from the Sydney suburban parliamentary seat he had held for 33 years.

The consensus within the Liberal Party is that Mr Howard stayed too long and should have stood aside last year for his youthful deputy and Treasurer, Peter Costello, the former barrister long seen as the heir apparent.

But Mr Costello, seemingly enraged by the scale of Saturday’s loss, his thwarted ambition and with Mr Howard, has refused to seek the leadership of the Opposition. He now says that he sees his future out of Parliament and pointedly failed to turn up at Mr Howard’s farewell lunch for his outgoing ministers on Wednesday.

So when the conservatives met in Canberra yesterday to select a replacement for Mr Howard, they could hardly have chosen a man more his opposite. They rejected by only three votes the man thought most likely to win: Malcolm Turnbull, the former Goldman Sachs banker who is Australia’s richest parliamentarian.

Mr Turnbull, 53, who married into the Hughes legal and literary dynasty and represents the blue riband Sydney seat of Wentworth, first came to national attention when he represented the former MI5 agent Peter Wright to overturn the British Government's ban on Wright’s memoirs, Spy Catcher, in the mid-1980s.

Despite Mr Turnbull’s impeccable credentials to lead the Australian conservatives, the party voted for Dr Nelson, a radical choice that broke with the past. Dr Nelson is a medical doctor with a track record of socially liberal thinking. He rides large motorcycles and has a raffish aura.

Mr Garrett was keeping, mostly, quiet about his plans at the Environment Ministry, but his 1990 song Blue Sky Mine, which protested against asbestos mining giants, might provide a clue: It said: “The candy store paupers lie to the shareholders / They’re crossing their fingers they pay the truth makers / The balance sheet is breaking up the sky.”

What was increasingly clear was that Australia may now be ready to do what Mr Howard never would — address global warming and sign the Kyoto agreement on global emissions.

In some of his first words since taking over from Mr Howard, Dr Nelson underlined the cultural shift, saying: “Whatever some critics of the Kyoto Protocol might think, it’s symbolically important to Australians and I think the most important thing for us as the alternative Government is to see that Mr Rudd gets it right.”

The rock generation has found a new mission. And so, yesterday, did Australia.

Protest songs

“Got your last meal, filled up with pesticide Hamburger chain third world infanticide Got robot car your jobs will disappear It's the politics of a brand new year Manhattanization is coming, open your eyes if you dare Carry us on to the crossroads, come to your senses and care"
Progress

“Here comes the tired statesman Heavy lidded, bearded, nowhere left to land He makes the jigsaw fit With a hammer in his hand"
Drop in the Ocean

“Now market movements call the shots Business deals in parking lots Waiting for the meat of tomorrow"
US Forces

“Flat chat, pine gap, in every home a Big Mac And no one goes outback, that's that"
Power and the Passion

“Coastline hosed down washed away Economics now there's nothing left Tomorrow's child takes concrete footsteps And they’ll drink champagne or be damned"
Shakers And Movers

“Four wheels scare the cockatoos From Kintore east to Yuendemu The western desert lives and breathes In forty five degrees Beds are Burning

Source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/