INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.TV

THE LATE, GREAT, PLANET EARTH INVESTIGATE: MAR 03

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:21:36 +1300

Sometimes ignorance can be bliss, but science writer Nick Sault argues the world needs to take the threat of asteroid strikes a lot more seriously...

Over the last few decades there has been a great deal of debate about the level of danger posed by impacts from asteroids and comets. Though the furore has settled down recently with various authorities downgrading the danger, I have been doing some of my own research into the phenomenon of impacts from space, and there are some really worrying aspects that I believe are being overlooked. It looks like it may be the smaller asteroids that we have to look out for, as there is mounting evidence that impacts from some of the tens of thousands of these rocks that have buzzed Earth throughout civilised history, have been responsible for some of the major disruptions to the growth of human societies. I really do not intend to be unduly alarmist, and rather than being fatalist, I believe that we can realistically counter the danger, because the objects that most commonly impact Earth destructively are within our means to destroy.

Investigate response to Press Council ruling

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:14:04 +1300

A Press Council ruling partially upholding a complaint by Air New Zealand against Investigate has been released today, which is somewhat surprising given that Investigate had been invited to place further evidence in front of the Press Council for a review next Monday.

The council ruled that Investigate had erred by calling the flights "secret", and that our cover montage of an Air New Zealand jet beside a military plane with a soldier nearby was also misleading.

Given that the issue has gone public prior to the review, Investigate has no choice but to release its submission to the Press Council below:

Dear Mary

Further to our last correspondence, please find attached a copy of an email from Air New Zealand head office, specifically the then Manager of Government Relations Rick Osborne, to senior officials inside MFAT.

The email is a further advisory to MFAT about some of the Australian troop flights.

Significantly, the email, at Air New Zealand's initiative, is classified "CONFIDENTIAL". Download file

Also significantly, the email is loosely contemporaneous (just a few weeks prior) with when Investigate was first alerted by Air New Zealand staff about the first flight. Those staff, I repeat, told the magazine the flights were confidential.

Vector Energy sold to Chinese spy?

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:57:42 +1300

ANY STORM IN A PORT

China's Trojan horse in NZ

[The following story initially ran in the April 06 edition of Investigate magazine, but is directly relevant to the purchase announced April 28, 2008 of Vector Energy's Wellington grid by the same businessman]

The Hong Kong business conglomerate trying to purchase a stake in some of New Zealand's biggest port companies [and now the purchaser of energy company Vector] has been named as a front for the People's Liberation Army of China, and some of its associates have been caught shipping weapons and alleged WMD technology. IAN WISHART has more

His name is Li Ka-shing, and if his name sounds like a cash register there's a very good reason: this 77 year old Chinese businessman has just been ranked by Forbes magazine as the tenth wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at nearly US$20 billion. His companies, including Hutchison Whampoa, account for 10% of the value of the Hong Kong stock exchange and have tentacles that reach across the globe – more than forty countries according to one estimate – and in industries as varied as mobile telephone networks, electricity grids, retailing, shipping and real estate.

ABSOLUTE POWER

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:08:16 +1300

COMING SOON>> http://www.helenclarkbook.com

Deborah Coddington pinged

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:58:12 +1300

JUNE 2002 EDITION

Evidence of a political and financial spider's web involving Cabinet Ministers, millionaire businessmen, senior journalists and newspaper editors in a plan to manipulate public opinion has emerged in a pile of explosive documents leaked to Investigate magazine.

The documents, pictured on the following pages, show tentacles of influence spreading out from New Zealand Business Roundtable CEO Roger Kerr across virtually all the main sectors of NZ society.

A source with access to the Roundtable's confidential files dumped a number of them in the hands of this magazine that show:

~A National Cabinet Minister apparently seeking money from Fay Richwhite in 1993 for personal reasons

~A list of policy demands being delivered by David Richwhite, Lion Nathan boss Doug Myers, Air New Zealand chairman Bob Matthew and Roger Kerr to Minister of Labour Bill Birch

~A summoning of National Prime Minister Jim Bolger and Bill Birch to a meeting with Myers, Matthew, Kerr and Telecom boss Rod Deane at Brierley's head office in Wellington

~An apparent close working relationship betweenDominion editor Richard Long and the Business Roundtable

~That the Business Roundtable offered to bribe — in Investigate 's opinion - journalists and columnists in newspapers to write articles showing Roundtable policies in a favourable light

~That a journalist who is now a senior writer for North & South magazine was secretly paid by the Business Roundtable to write a book under her own name that portrayed Roundtable policies in a favourable light

~That speeches and articles allegedly written by top business leaders may not have been written by those business leaders at all, but by the Business Roundtable as part of a cynical attempt to manipulate public, business and political opinion

TRAVEL: May 05, AU Edition

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:53:20 +1300

RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT
Gary A. Warner says that if you look beyond the sleaze, Amsterdam is full of treasures

Forget the canals. Forget the coffeehouses. Forget the acres of Rembrandts and Van Goghs. Forget all that wooden shoes and tulips and silly Hans Brinker and his silver skates stuff you ever heard, read or saw.

Before you go to Amsterdam, get your brain around the other Amsterdam. The in-your-face Amsterdam.

The CBD shops that sell postcards of genitals painted to look like Santa Claus. Where delivery boys on pink bicycles deliver marijuana seeds. Where porn and prostitution flourish in the most picturesque red-light district in the world.

Get ready for it, all of it, because it is going to smack you right in the head whether you like it or not.

How you react will determine whether you see Amsterdam as the most liberal, liberating metropolis in Europe or a beautiful old jewel wrapped in an oily envelope of sleaze.

For the better part of two decades, I fell in the latter category. Four times Amsterdam was penciled in on my itinerary, and four times I found reason to get out the eraser.

But when I realized I’d been to nearly every major European city – I had been to Brussels twice – I decided it was time to give Amsterdam a shot.

SCIENCE: July 05, AU Edition

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:51:31 +1300

COPY CATS
Entrepreneurial American scientists are destined for the dog house, says Susanne Quick

It’s just another brown brick building in a suburban American business park. But Suite J at the Waunakee Business Center in Wisconsin is about to turn into the animal cloning debate’s ground zero. Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. – the entrepreneurial outfit that introduced the first cloned pet cat to the world in December – is opening its doors in this small Madison, Wis., suburb this month. The company’s CEO, Lou Hawthorne, has promised that by year’s end, a dog will be born here.
In the eight years since Dolly the Sheep’s birth was announced to the world, research into animal cloning has progressed in ways few dreamed possible a decade ago.

Scientists have now cloned barnyard animals and endangered species. They’ve created cloned cows from frozen steaks and cloned mice from cancer cells. They’ve talked about resurrecting extinct creatures such as woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. And with the news on Thursday that soft tissue from dinosaurs had been discovered, re-creating these giant lizards does not seem so farfetched. Despite the scientific excitement, creativity and ingenuity that have inspired and driven this research, cloning remains uncomfortable – even freakish – for many people.

Who and what are the clones? Are they healthy animals or deformed monsters? How many animals are sacrificed in the pursuit of one healthy clone? And, in the end, what will it lead to?

As ethicists and scientists weigh the motivations for animal cloning – improving the food supply, fighting disease, saving endangered animals – the arguments for and against cloning mutate and evolve along with the research advances.

LINE ONE: Mar 05

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:49:09 +1300

CHRIS CARTER
A state-sponsored frontal lobotomy

How do you finally discover that you have crossed the threshold as it were and become, irrevocably, a grizzly old bastard? Could some of the signs, for instance, be somehow linked to the old chestnut theories that the Coppers now seem indecently young, that Americans rejoicing in names like Snoop Dogg, Eminem and the like who wail frequently obscene or incredibly violent doggerel to a sort of ghetto-like primeval beat is now akin to the prophesied effect that Rock and Roll would have on my generation, (a notably accurate prophesy when you come to think of it.) That women and wimps have taken over our world. That we now live in times where the number one objective of every good person must be, at all costs, to avoid ever letting a word or a phrase cross your lips that may give offense to a fellow human being, or for that matter any living thing that could be thought to have an IQ higher than that of a common amoeba.

Having studied at some length our society since the beginnings of the new millennium, the term dinosaur I have now discovered is no longer a strong enough description to accurately portray the likes of such as I.

Indeed so decrepit have become my mental processes and general inability to accept change, that together with my plainly unacceptable desire to hold on to such antediluvian principles regarding such matters as the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, truth versus lies etc, this should, without any doubt at all, make me an instant candidate for a state-sponsored frontal lobotomy. Worst of all, and this is a terrible admission to make I’m sure you will agree, I don’t personally give a big rat’s bottom as to either my supposed mental decay, current thought processes or – worse – frequently rabid utterances.

Since liberal socialism and all of its mind numbing, institutionalised gray-matter-destroying rubbish infiltrated our previously very well balanced and indeed pleasant little country, you may be absolutely assured that anything at all that you may say, do, or even think, will be contrary to this brave new world where euphemism, spin, and downright deception is not only the norm, but where advanced practitioners of these new age black arts are rewarded almost beyond measure.

TECHNOLOGY: July 05, AU Edition

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:47:33 +1300

IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD
From cough syrups to eyeglasses for cows, Martha McKay takes a peek into a very tiny future

At the nanotechnology show in New York City recently, companies touted the state-of-the-art, from quantum dots to microscopes powerful enough to see atoms.And then there were two guys from Cleveland hawking cough syrup.If you follow the nanotechnology industry closely, this sort of thing isn’t surprising.

But if you don’t, such seemingly humdrum technology on display alongside the advances at the fourth annual NanoBusiness conference might seem unusual.

Spend time with nano-experts and one thing becomes clear: nanotechnology is more commonplace than you might think – from nano-engineered eyeglass coatings used on one in five pairs of eyeglasses, to sunscreens and stain-resistant fabrics.

One of the most hyped areas of technology since the Internet, nanotechno- logy is the study and engineering of really small things – particles and gizmos from 1 to 100 nanometres, or a billionth of a metre, in size to be specific. The paper you are reading this on is about 100,000 nanometres thick.

TRAVEL: Sep 05, AU Edition

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:45:45 +1300

SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT
After a whirlwind trip through India’s sights, smells and sounds, Robert Cross vows to return

AIPUR, India – ‘I was told that the first thing you’ll notice is the smell,’ said my friend Dave with a faint leer. Just a friendly word of warning to get me going on the wrong foot.

My wife, Juju, and I had been hearing a lot of secondhand and even firsthand tidbits like Dave’s almost every time we told anyone about our travel plans. Visiting India? Get ready for a shock: Pollution. Dirt. Poverty. Stifling heat. Noise. Weird behaviour. Those odors.
I’m here to testify that any negatives were far outweighed by the beauty, culture, architectural grandeur and spirituality we were privileged to sample during a brief visit to a few cities in the north.

After we cleared the jetway in New Delhi at 5:30 a.m. on an autumn Saturday, the only smell came from the universal airport brew of electric-light ozone, air conditioning and passenger scents no different from those at Sydney or Heathrow.

Instead, the first thing we noticed was the wallpaper on immigration officers’ cubicles, a darling blue-and-pink-flowered pattern of the sort that might decorate a little girl’s nursery.

The officers’ faces remained properly stern, of course, and they worked deliberately. We heard a constant thumping of rubber stamps and piped-in native music that sounded like the whining of a thousand mosquitoes, and after about 45 minutes, a man in uniform summoned Juju and me to his posy-splashed quarters, examined our documents and pounded on them with his stamps.

DOUBLE SPEAK: Mar 05

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:45:21 +1300

IAN WISHART
Killing us softly with their song

Cellphones kill 17 in road crashes”, screamed the newspaper headline, or something like it. I almost choked on the latte (come on, I live in Auckland). Seventeen people a year being killed because drivers are using cellphones, I thought to myself. Almost enough to warrant reconsidering my “yeah, right” attitude to the problem. And then I read on. It was actually 17 deaths over seven years. And on the strength of that, the Nanny-State brigade are calling for a blanket ban on the use of cellphones in vehicles, including a ban on the use of hands-free kits.

“It’s not the cellphone that’s the worst problem,” they wail to sympathetic, liberal, control-freak journalistic lap-puppies, “it’s the conversation. People can’t drive and talk at the same time. It’s not safe!” No. Apparently not. Not with a rampaging death rate of two and a half people per year. What’s next, a lead story in the Herald telling us, shock horror, “100% increase in cellphone-related fatalities prompts call for Government to introduce emergency regulations…”?

Ah, they’re a right little bunch of comedians, these.

It’s almost enough to make me think Darwin might actually have been right. Perhaps a segment of our population, mainly in the left-wing liberal camp, really are the natural descendants of apes and that’s why we’re fast becoming a banana republic. Buried, a week later, in a much smaller story in the paper was Matthew Dearnaley’s brave attempt to provide some much needed balance. He reported that the biggest distractions for drivers in road smashes were passengers talking and/or drivers reaching for or looking for something while they drove.

Add to that the third-largest factor in road smashes – fiddling with those pesky, all-the-bells-and-whistles-you-can-afford car stereos with the really really really small buttons and even tinier writing on the knobs – and you’ve got a whole heap of bigger causes of road fatalities than cellphones.

THE WATCHER: Dec 05, AU Edition

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:44:48 +1300

ALAN RM JONES
The year of the monkey…

It was an annus horribilis for an increasingly isolated and beleaguered Republican president under attack from a scathing media and irresolute Democrats in Congress. Each day’s news appeared more dreadful than the last; a constant stream of casualties and poor generalship and setbacks.

Even the president’s attempts to honour the nation’s war dead was sharply condemned. The Chicago Times said he ‘misstated the cause for which they had died’. In other words, he had lied. And, they added, ‘the cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States’.

Pretty harsh words. They were to be expected, though, from pundits and cartoonists who frequently questioned the president’s intelligence and who had regularly drawn him as a chimpanzee. Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to give 1863 a miss entirely. But then 1862 hadn’t been a banner year, either. At Antietam, Union forces suffered over twelve thousand casualties, the South nearly fourteen thousand; many more would fall in the year ahead at Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

One of the few bright spots in an otherwise grim political landscape was that Congressional Democrats were severely split. The so-called ‘War Democrats’ were all for it, but squabbled over every battlefield disaster, of which there was no shortage. If that wasn’t enough, the War Dems also accused Lincoln of being a tyrant – packing the Supreme Court with cronies that would do his bidding to destroy civil liberties.

On the other side of the Democratic divide were the ‘Peace Democrats’, who had bitterly attacked Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration on job protection and racist grounds – proof, they wailed, that he had lied all along about the real aims of the war he had foisted upon the nation. They demanded that the war, which was being ‘fought on a lie’, be ended at once, even if the Confederacy was allowed to secede.
Even some Republicans voiced their doubts. Covetous European powers were encouraged.

FOOD: May 05, AU Edition

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:41:27 +1300

HOMEMADE PROZAC
When the weather’s cold and the sun sets mid-afternoon, Eli Jameson finds brightness in the kitchen

It has always amazed me that when T.S. Eliot wrote the line, ‘April is the cruelest month’, he wasn’t talking about the onset of winter. Of course, this is hardly surprising given that he lived in the northern hemisphere. But for myself, April, with all its attendant rituals – the changing of the clocks, the airing of the jumpers – has always been a grim affair.

Somehow, it’s hard to be cheery when the sky turns black at what always feels like four o’clock.

To cope with this seasonal black dog, I’ve tended to take refuge in good food and cooking: after all, much better to stick a roast in the oven than your head in one. Not only does keeping the cooker on full-bore help heat at least one end of my drafty circa-1890s terrace house, but it also provides something in the neighbourhood of an acceptable substitute to that favourite summer pastime – namely, standing in front of the barbeque searing off ribeyes and drinking shiraz at 8:30pm, when it’s still bright and sunny.

Another advantage is that winter comfort food (for lack of a better, and less hackneyed, phrase) can be as simple or as complicated as one likes. For the home chef with a busy work schedule who still likes to muck about in the kitchen a few nights a week, this is a great advantage: if I’ve knocked off a bit early and am home by six or seven, then I might happily bread and fry some eggplants, knock up a red sauce, grate a few cheeses, and boil some spaghetti (perhaps even making the noodles myself, if the mood strikes) to wind up with a ridiculously huge platter of eggplant parmagiana that will keep me in lunches through the week. (Fill a good bread roll with a few rounds of the leftovers, wrap in foil and bake until gooey). Otherwise, tossing a tray of veggies in the oven to roast for an hour or so while pottering around the house tidying or simply watching the 7:30 Report over a quiet drink pays a myriad of dividends. Out of a concession to age and arteries, I don’t do this very often, but lately I’ve taken to tossing the results of this together with some pasta, cream, and good freshly-grated cheese (see recipe).

BREAK POINT: Mar 05

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:39:36 +1300

ANN COULTER
The problem of fruitbat university lecturers…

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that “unquestionably, America has earned” the attack of 9/11. He calls the attack itself a result of “gallant sacrifices of the combat teams.” That the “combat teams” killed only 3,000 Americans, he says, shows they were not “unreasonable or vindictive.” He says that in order to even the score with America, Muslim terrorists “would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.”

To grasp the current state of higher education in America, consider that if Churchill is at any risk at all of being fired, it is only because he smokes.

Churchill poses as a radical living on the edge, supremely confident that he is protected by tenure from being fired. College professors are the only people in America who assume they can’t be fired for what they say.

Tenure was supposed to create an atmosphere of open debate and
inquiry, but instead has created havens for talentless cowards who want to be insulated from life. Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry.

Even liberals don’t try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth. They simply invoke “free speech,” like a deus ex machina to end all discussion. Like the words “diverse” and “tolerance,” “free speech” means nothing but: “Shut up, we win.” It’s free speech (for liberals), diversity (of liberals) and tolerance (toward liberals).

Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that “free speech” is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That’s why you don’t see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other well-known people who have been punished by their employers for their “free speech” include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.

THE ARENA: Dec 05, AU Edition

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:37:08 +1300

JAMES MORROW
Get ready for a long, hot summer…

Anyone who has ever taken a holiday in a beach community knows that such places can be fairly insular places. When so much time is spent looking out to sea, it’s sometimes hard to remember that there’s a whole land-based world behind you. And with a little bit of paradise on their doorstep, it’s no wonder that locals get possessive and resentful when outsiders roll in and start violating all the little informal and unwritten rules that make a place where everyone enjoys a common piece of property – the beach – function properly. Just ask fish-kisser Rex Hunt, who was accosted with his teenage son by a group of toughs in Byron Bay recently.

But the riots which swept over Sydney’s eastern beaches recently in the wake of the bashing of a lifeguard by young “men of Middle Eastern appearance” (as the popular press so gingerly puts it; it’s amazing that they don’t use the abbreviation MoMA to save column inches, though perhaps a certain museum in New York might not be so happy about it) were something else entirely.

It is no secret, to anyone who has cared to look for it, that there have long been simmering tensions between packs of youthful “MoMAs” and not just beachside locals but about anyone else who is unfortunate enough to cross their path. In places like Cronulla, the only Sydney beach with its own train stop, this simmer has been on the verge of boiling over for months if not years, as locals share stories of disrespect, abuse and attacks by young Lebanese males pouring in from the western suburbs and causing trouble and charging around the place with a disrespectful swagger.