Category — Noted

Found on An Eclectic Mind and had to share:

George Bush and Dick Cheney, while visiting a primary school class, found themselves in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asked both men if they would like to lead the discussion of the word ‘tragedy.’ So Mr. Cheney asks the class for an example of a ‘tragedy.’

One little boy stood up and offered: ‘If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field and a runaway tractor comes along and knocks him dead, that would be a tragedy.’

‘No,’ said Mr. Cheney, ‘that would be an accident.’

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A humpback whale breaches in Jervis Bay, NSW. Photo: Ken Robertson

A Japanese whaling fleet left today for an expedition activists say will for the first time target humpbacks, a perennial favourite among whale-watchers.

The Nisshin Maru, the 8000-tonne flagship of Japan’s whaling fleet, left Shimonoseki port for the Antarctic along with catcher boats around midday, environmental group Greenpeace said, adding that others in the fleet were expected to follow soon.

Japan, which says whaling is a cherished cultural tradition, abandoned commercial whaling in accordance with an international moratorium in 1986, but began the next year to conduct what it calls scientific research whaling.

Greenpeace said its Esperanza campaign ship was in waters off Japan, waiting to intersect the fleet in the coming days to demand that the expedition return home.”

The team from hit ABC television show The Chaser’s War on Everything have been charged after driving a convoy through APEC’s $250 million security blockade.

The comics left authorities red-faced yesterday after the security breach only metres from the Sydney hotel where US President George W. Bush is staying.

Eleven people were charged, including stars Chas Licciardello, who sat in the back of one of the cars dressed as Osama bin Laden, and Julian Morrow, who posed as a security guard running alongside.

The 10 men and one woman were last night charged under new APEC laws on entering a restricted area without justification.

Police are furious about the prank.

‘I don’t see a funny side to what’s happened today. I don’t see a funny side at all,’ NSW Police Minister David Campbell said.

Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd said the Chaser team had ‘crossed the line’.

Police apparently waved the comedy team through a roadblock into Sydney’s restricted APEC zone.”

The world’s dams are contributing millions of tonnes of harmful greenhouse gases and spurring on global warming, according to a US environmental agency.

International Rivers Network executive director Patrick McCully told Brisbane’s Riversymposium rotting vegetation and fish found in dams produced surprising amounts of methane - 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

‘Often it’s accepted that hydropower is a climate friendly technology but in fact probably all reservoirs around the world emit greenhouse gases and some of them, especially some of the ones in the tropics, emit very high quantities of greenhouse gases even comparable to, in some cases even much worse than, fossil fuels like coal and gas,’ Mr McCully said.

He said when water flow was stopped, vegetation and soil in the flooded area and from upstream was left to rot, as well as fish and other animals which died in the dam.

They then released carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the air.”

What a dickhead. Just listen to this 1994 interview — and weep!

Weep for thousands of American soldiers killed in a futile battle, weep for hundreds of thousand of Iraqis killed for naught.

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has quite a reputation.

All the institute’s dolphins are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish.

Kelly took this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool.

The next time a trainer passes, she tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer.

After a fish-reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on.

This behaviour is particularly interesting because it suggests that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification.

She has, in effect, trained the humans.

More than half the whales killed by Japanese whalers in the Antarctic last summer were pregnant females, the Humane Society International said today.

The group said that of the 505 Antarctic minke whales killed, 262 of them were pregnant females, while one of the three giant fin whales killed was also pregnant.

The findings came from a review of Japanese reports from their most recent 2006-07 whale hunt in Antarctic waters and were released ahead of the resumption of a Federal Court case the HSI is taking against Japanese whaling company Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd.

“These are gruesome statistics that the Japanese government dresses up as science”, HSI spokeswoman Nicola Beynon said in a statement.

Nelson Mandela has marked his 89th birthday by forming a “council of elders” dedicated to finding new ways to resolve some of the world’s longest-running crises.

The former South African president launched his fellow elder statesmen on a new venture to foster peace, reduce conflict and despair during a birthday celebration on Wednesday.

Among them are Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, Jimmy Carter, the former US president and Desmond Tutu, the retired South African archbishop.

Mandela said he hoped the new humanitarian alliance of Nobel peace laureates, politicians and development experts could make a difference.

The group called The Elders was an idea of British entrepreneur Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel, both of whom were present at the launch.

Branson and others pledged $18m to fund The Elders over three years.

Other members include Ela Bhatt, a women’s rights campaigner from India, former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, Li Zhaoxing, the former Chinese envoy to the UN now based in Africa, Mandela’s wife Graca Machel, a children’s rights campaigner, former Irish president Mary Robinson, and Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen bank, the pioneering micro-credit institution.

On stage, a chair stood empty for Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was invited to join the group but is under house arrest in her homeland.

Happy birthday Nelson.

A flotilla of plastic ducks is heading for Britain’s beaches, according to an American oceanographer.

For the past 15 years Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking nearly 30,000 plastic bath toys that were released into the Pacific Ocean when a container was washed off a cargo ship.

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