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A group of related stories and videos: 'We shot down crusader Howard' - AL-QAEDA-linked insurgency groups have celebrated Kevin Rudd's election win over John Howard Photo caption - Familiar face ... online jihadis celebrate John Howard's election defeat.

EVERY Australian with an internet connection could soon have their web content automatically censored. The restrictions are planned by the Federal Government to give greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites. Under the plan, all internet service providers will have to provide a "clean" feed to households and schools, free of pornography and other "inappropriate" material. Australians who want uncensored access to the web will have to contact their internet service provider and "opt out" of the service. Online civil libertarians yesterday warned the freedom of the internet was at stake, while internet providers were concerned the...

...There has been appropriate international outrage over the treatment of Gibbons, from virtually everyone except American “feminists.” Multiple Muslim groups in the U.K. have condemned the sentence. Even the popular little boy in Mrs. Gibbons’ class who suggested the name for the bear came to her defense, explaining that he named the bear after himself.

NEXT Friday is Walk to Work Day, which, if I observe it, will deprive a taxi driver of my usual fare. Being susceptible to enviro-tokenism, quite a few journalists should be joining in. It'll be a sad morning at the wheel for Tran and Nkomo. One wonders if cabbies might call for a No Press Day in response, shutting down Australia's electronic and print media to cut carbon emissions. The reduction would be substantially larger than anything achieved by walking to work. Perhaps cabbies will turf us out of their Falcons as part of a taxi-based environmental initiative. It'd only...

Author arrives today amid tight security Calls Islamic culture 'backward' Under 24-hour guard since 2004 A VISIT to Sydney by a controversial Somali writer who calls the prophet Mohammed a pedophile and says Islam is inferior to Western culture has outraged Muslims, who accuse her of inciting hatred. Ayaan Hirsi Ali will arrive in Sydney today amid tight security normally reserved for foreign dignitaries or royalty. Her writings and talks focus on what she calls the backwardness of Islamic culture and the persecution of Muslim women. The Somali-born Muslim - who fled to The Netherlands, became a Dutch citizen and...

THE El Nino weather system has run its course and the worst drought in a century could be coming to an end, the Bureau of Meterology says, as famers in south-eastern Australia rejoice at heavy rain. JUST three weeks ago the drought-stricken Graham family got down on their knees and prayed for the skies to open and fill their cracked-earth dams. Yesterday their prayers were answered when 27mm fell on their parched property near Griffith - the first decent rain since April 2005 when they got 30mm. While the much needed rain was a welcome relief for the Graham family,...

Markos Moulitsas is perplexed. The polls are all breaking the Democrats’ way. In response to the question, “Who do you trust to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq?” 34% said the President and 54% said the Democrats. And yet the Democrats still have yet to surrender in Iraq and begin formulating a plan for offering government-subsidized prayer rugs. Markos wonders, What gives? Why, he asks, are the Democrats “being so timid” in pulling the plug on Iraq? Allow me to help with the answer. When the Democrats ran in 2006, they positioned themselves as anti-Bush on Iraq....

Has anyone noticed an indifference in the precincts of the far Left to the fatalities of 9/11 and the horrors of Saddam Hussein? Right after the 9/11 attack, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called it "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos." Eric Foner, an ornament of Columbia University's Marxist firmament, trivialized it by announcing himself unsure "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." Norman Mailer called the suicide hijackers "brilliant." More recently, it appears that none of the millions of antiwar demonstrators have a...

A PORTION of the religious right, usually a bedrock for US President George W. Bush, defected to the Democratic Party in this week's legislative elections following sex scandals and complaints the Republicans were taking them for granted. White Christian evangelicals remain overwhelmingly Republican, but about 30 per cent opted to vote for Democrats on Tuesday, an increase of six to 10 percentage points compared to previous elections, according to exit polls published in the US media. The Democrats secured majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994, despite hopes among Republican strategists that "values voters" would...

THE executive producer of the BBC's Planet Earth series has branded the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin a "showman" more interested in his own stardom than the animal kingdom. Alastair Fothergill launched an extraordinary attack on the Australian TV star who was killed by a stingray while making a wildlife program in September. "What Steve Irwin did for a living was as different from what we do as it's possible to get," he told the Radio Times. "Let's face it, Steve was a showman. Yes, he introduced a lot of people to natural history, but his basic stock in trade...

THE Saudi Government has pulled the rug from under a French newspaper report about the alleged death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, saying it "has no evidence to support" the contention. "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has no evidence to support recent media reports that Osama bin Laden is dead," the Saudi Embassy said in a statement issued in Washington this morning (AEST).

AL-QAEDA in Iraq has said in response to remarks by Pope Benedict XVI linking Islam with violence that it will wage jihad until the West is defeated, in a statement posted on the Internet today. "We say to the servant of the cross (the Pope): wait for defeat ... We say to infidels and tyrants: wait for what will afflict you. "We continue our jihad. We will not stop until the banner of unicity flies throughout the world," said the statement attributed to the Mujahideen consultative council. "We will smash the cross ... (you will have no choice but) Islam...

A HUSBAND and wife arrested in the British terror raids allegedly planned to take their six-month-old baby on a mid-air suicide mission. Scotland Yard police are quizzing Abdula Ahmed Ali, 25, and his 23-year-old wife Cossor over suspicions they were to use their baby's bottle to hide a liquid bomb. The theory is one of the reasons security chiefs are now insisting mothers taste babies' milk at check-in desks before allowing them to take bottles aboard flights. The pair are among up to 23 suspects being questioned over a plot to bring down nine airliners over five US cities, killing...

Hugo Chavez must be trying to whack his competition for leading lefty in the Western hemisphere. Today he suggested that Fidel Castro would benefit from taking a dose of a homegrown concoction to clean out "all the digestive paths". During a broadcast on Friday to inaugurate new health clinics partly staffed by Cuban doctors, Chavez described the recipe for Fidel's home-grown stomach cure-all known as "tsunami.""Fidel has a formula for stomach problems and gases and heartburn — the tsunami," Chavez said. "Fifty percent oatmeal, 25 percent whole rye flour, and the other 25 percent whole wheat flour. You mix all...

"GO now!" The message came from Pakistan and it rattled the British intelligence agents who intercepted it. The urgent direction was sent early this week to a group of young British Muslims who had been plotting one of the world's biggest-ever terrorist attacks. Intelligence officials who had been monitoring the group thought they had plenty of time to keep watching them and gathering evidence before safely rounding them up early enough to stop them carrying out their scheme. But the message from radicals in Pakistan saying "do the attacks now" changed everything, and when it was passed to higher authorities...

BRITAIN'S central bank froze the accounts and named 19 of the 24 men arrested in an alleged terror plot today, as it was reported that police had been tracking the plan since the London attacks in July last year. The probe into the foiled plot to bomb US-bound airliners began in 2005 after the London subway bombings, involved up to 50 suspects and was wound up suddenly out of fear more conspirators could be at large, The Washington Post said today. The suspects were kept under close surveillance while they frequently modified their plans and prepared for a practice run...

September 11 was a wake-up call for me personally. I recognised that I had to know more about Islam. In the aftermath of the attack one thing was perplexing. Many commentators and apparently the governments of the "Coalition of the Willing" were claiming that Islam was essentially peaceful, and that the terrorist attacks were an aberration. On the other hand one or two people I met, who had lived in Pakistan and suffered there, claimed to me that the Koran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims. Can Islam and the Western democracies live together peacefully? What of Islamic minorities in Western...

TWO men are wanted by police over the stabbing murder of a former Israeli soldier outside a Bondi shop, in an attack which lasted only seconds. The victim was attacked by at least two men whom witnesses say jumped out of a car, bashed him with a pole or similar object, and left him with multiple stab wounds to the back and stomach. Witnesses said a carload of men bashed the 36-year-old victim, named by Channel 10 as Arnon Gelman, at about 9.45pm (AEST) yesterday, although police were uncertain how many were involved. When police arrived at the scene, outside...

This past week has given us a fascinating insight into the worldview of the gay far-left, which sometimes controls gay organizations. Two major human rights groups, Human Rights Watch's gay wing and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), refused to endorse or participate in the July 19 vigil for two executed gay teens in Iran. The leaders of this group believe the Tehran regime's description of the executions as punishment for an alleged rape of a 13 year-old. They don't believe the extensive reporting of Doug Ireland, and the accounts of gay activists within Iran, which strongly...

Former treasury secretary John Stone, at a Quadrant dinner on Wednesday, on the perils of Islamic culture WE need to understand that the core of the Muslim problem - for the world, not merely for Australia - lies in the essence of Islam. It is the problem of a culture that, for the past 500 years or so at least, has failed its adherents as its inward-looking theocracy has resulted in it falling further and further behind the West. It is that sense of cultural failure (and) smouldering resentment that fuels the fires so busily stoked by the more extremist...