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BRITAIN'S Prince Charles has cited the Mumbai shantytown setting for the film "Slumdog Millionaire'' as a role model for sustainable living in Western cities, a report said Saturday. The 61-year-old heir to the British throne writes in a new book being published next week that the Dharavi slum is better and more instinctively organised than many Western towns, London's Daily Telegraph said.

AN Australian woman has made American magazine history - and sparked a storm of protest - by becoming the first white fashion director of iconic black lifestyle publication Essence. The hiring of Elliana Placas in the role - after a 40-year history of having an African American as fashion director - has been met with a vicious reaction from both readers and industry identities. Essence, dubbed the ultimate fashion and lifestyle magazine for black women, has been slammed for the decision, with the magazine's former fashion editor, Michaela Angela Davis, launching an attack against Ms Placas' hiring. "It is with...

CONTROVERSIAL mufti Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali was today urged to "keep his mouth shut" as Muslim groups distanced themselves from his latest shocking comments. NSW Community Relations Commission (CRC) chairman Stepan Kerkyasharian branded the mufti's outburst outrageous, though Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said nobody took the sheik seriously any more. Sheik Hilali said in an interview on Egyptian television that Australian Muslims were more entitled to be in the country than those with a convict heritage He attacked Western values and said: "The Western people are the biggest liars and oppressors and especially the English race." Kuranda Seyit, executive director...

IN a controversial treatment, doctors in the US have given a severely disabled child drugs to keep her small and 'manageable' for her parents. In a report published in a medical journal this month, the doctors described a six-year-old girl with profound, irreversible developmental disability who was given high doses of estrogen to permanently halt her growth so that her parents could continue to care for her at home. The controversial growth-attenuation treatment, which included hysterectomy, was requested by the child's parents and initiated after careful consultation and review by an ethics committee. In their report in the Archives of...

Paul Sheehan asks why Western feminists are mute on the plight of their Islamic sisters. When a beautiful young woman from Somalia wrote a screenplay entitled Submission, about the treatment of women in Muslim culture, and a Dutch artist, Theo van Gogh, then made the film, Muslim fundamentalists in Holland delivered a famously spectacular review. Van Gogh was shot eight times and his killer was apprehended while attempting to decapitate the body, just in case the message had been too subtle. As for the screenwriter, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she was taken into police protection and moved from house to house....

Movies like "The Passion of the Christ" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" have blurred the lines between movie marketing and political campaigning. So perhaps it's no surprise that the latest politically tinged pic has smudged the line even further. If you live in a hotly contested election district, you're likely familiar with "robo-calls" -- the prerecorded pleas from pols that litter answer machines in the weeks before an election. But on July 7, around 300,000 people in Gotham and four other cities received calls from Al Gore urging them not to vote but to see his global warming pic "An Inconvenient Truth."...

IN these violent times, Um Ahmed takes steps to ensure her safety, strapping on a suicide belt before going to bed at night. The mother-of-eight is one of a group of 20 women who, according to the local al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander, is prepared to die for her cause, should there be an unexpected Israeli assault on Abasa, near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis. Ahmed, and women like her, are changing the face of terrorism by declaring their willingness to die for the cause. The first recorded suicide bomber involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a woman, 28-year-old...

THE death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is excellent news in its own right and even more excellent because it resulted from information passed along by a defector deep inside his inner circle. We can also apparently thank the co-operation of intelligence agents from Jordan, in whose capital city last November a triple bomb-attack slaughtered more than 100 innocents, many of them guests at a Palestinian wedding. These people made the mistake of having their reception at the wrong hotel - a foreign-owned one - and were thus considered legitimate targets by the man who redefined that term to include all...

DUTCH pedophiles were launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations from 16 to 12 and the legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals. The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its website it would be registered officially on Wednesday, proclaiming: "We are going to shake The Hague awake!" The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether. "A ban just makes children curious," Ad van den Berg, one of the party's founders, told the Algemeen Dagblad...

THE High Court today ruled against two severely disabled people who claimed they should not have been born. In what's been termed a case of “wrongful life,” the judges found the pair did not have a right to mount a case for negligence against their mothers' doctors. The case was launched by two disabled people, Sydney woman Alexia Harriton, 25, and Keeden Waller, five. Ms Harriton was born deaf, blind, physically and mentally disabled and was not expected to live more than six months. She needs 24-hour care. She claimed Dr Paul Stephens negligently failed to diagnose the disease rubella...

AUSTRALIA'S F/A-18 fighters will be armed with the most lethal long-range cruise missiles in the region, a move likely to upset our Asian neighbours. In a controversial decision, the federal Government announced yesterday that it had chosen to buy the most deadly of the three cruise missile types it was examining to help offset the looming retirement of the F-111 strike bombers. The decision to choose the longer-range Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) will be seen by Indonesia as provocative, given that Jakarta has previously warned that such missiles could trigger a regional arms race. The Lockheed Martin JASSM was...

OSAMA bin Laden watches Larry King. It may seem a rather trite observation considering the numbing frothiness of King's CNN talk show compared with the gravity of all that surrounds the world's most hunted terrorist. But it may reveal much about the role al-Qa'ida's leader sees the Western media playing in his bloody war against the infidel. In a new book by terrorism expert Peter Bergen, there is a passage in which Hamid Mir, bin Laden's Pakistani biographer, recalls seeing the September 11 mastermind, in his hideaway, glued to CNN. "When I met him after 9/11, he said: 'I was...

THE UN's Human Rights Commission is the canary in the UN coal mine. Not quite dead yet, but spluttering in its death throes, it stands as a warning of all that is wrong with the UN. And if the UN cannot revive its farcical underling, then it has no hope of fixing itself. With the UNHRC due to meet for its last meeting early next month, time is running out. To understand what went wrong with the UNHRC, you have to start with the mother body. Uniting nations under the idea of the United Nations was always a big ask....

Western liberals must rethink their attitudes towards the causes of religious tension, writes Miranda Devine. AT LENNOX Head Public School on the North Coast, children have for decades recited a prayer at assembly. The prayer begins "O God Our Heavenly Father" and asks that the school be blessed "so that one day we may do great work for you, Australia and all mankind". Sentiments to be proud of. Only now the prayer has been dropped, pending a review, after complaints from a parent or two. Keeping the sweet, uplifting words out of the school has become a holy mission for...

Blast driver vows to return to work 9 July 2005 The driver of the No 30 bus destroyed in the London terrorist attacks has vowed he will return to work and not be cowed by terrorist evil. George Psaradakis, 49, was at the wheel of the double decker when the device exploded shortly after 9.45am on Thursday at the junction of Woburn Square and Tavistock Place. At least 13 people died when the blast tore through the back of the vehicle. The driver desperately tried to help those mutilated by the bomb and told how "many terrible things" were coming...

The cost of a Government Kyoto Protocol botch-up could soar as high as $1.2 billion - more than double that estimated by the Treasury last month - a new report claims. The Government last month admitted that it had miscalculated New Zealand's greenhouse gas growth, for which it is liable under the Kyoto Protocol, resulting in an embarrassing $500 million bill rather than a $500m credit. But the situation could be even worse, accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) says. The PWC analysis shows the company believes the $500m bill estimate is also wrong. It believes the liability will be more like...

Request from Lisa Richards for a World Economics Expert to be a guest on a TV program in Australia - "Few of us understand the mind boggling facts, figures and general workings of world trade, budgets, expenditures etc. Simple maths suggests that with the population of the world around 6 billion, United States expenditure on defence at around 370 Billions it is feasible that if every man, woman and child in the world were to receive as a gift from the United States 1 Billion dollars each, there would still be 364 Billion dollars left over for defence spending. This...

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair has at least done the world one favour: he has hastened the demise of the Group of Eight as a serious international forum. Thanks to Blair and his agenda as the G8 chairman, this week's summit will be about as relevant as Live8, and as harmful to Africa. Visit the official G8 Gleneagles 2005 website and you find two issues highlighted: Africa and climate change. This fashionably silly political correctness under Blair's chairmanship exposes the G8 for what it has become: an increasingly irrelevant and unrepresentative body. George W. Bush has completely wrong-footed the practitioners...

HONG Kongers usually rank near-bottom of the international list of lovers and a social worker may have discovered why: they don't know what to do between the sheets. Grace Wong of the southern Chinese territory's Family Planning Association said the number of inquiries at her agency rocketed 50 percent last year, with many clients claiming to have no idea how to have sex. "Some married couples are not familiar with their body parts," Wong was quoted as telling the Sunday Morning Post. "They don't know where their sex organs are. "They don't know the physical changes associated with sexual response,...

"OH Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz," prayed Janis Joplin, and the Lord obliged. With or without divine intervention, the late Pope had one. Mao Tse-tung had 23 Mercs. Today, Kim Jong-il owns dozens, all filled to the gunwales with imported Hennessy cognac. Hitler, Franco, Hirohito, Tito, the Shah, Ceausescu, Pinochet, Somoza - they all swore by Mercedes. Saddam Hussein liked them so much he probably had shares in the company. Today, though, there is one man who is doing more than the Lord himself to buy a Mercedes-Benz for the leading creeps of the world. That man is,...