The Daily Briefing 23/11/05

WEDNESDAY 23RD NOVEMBER 2005

Your round-up from today's newspapers plus the best writing, analysis, critical thinking and humour from around the world.

In today's email:
1 Alan Kohler on gold and the crunch to come/SMH (4 links below)
2 Eugene Robinson on the mess Bush is in/Washington Post
3 George Monbiot on the illegal use of White Phosphorous/Guardian (3 links below)
4 Ghaith Abdul-Ahad goes inside Baghdad's hospitals/Guardian (5 links below)
5 Investigation into the faulty evidence used for Iraq/LATimes (5 links below)
6 Patrick Goldstein on end of mass movie going/LATimes (3 links below)
7 Jack Shafer sees an ugly future for Google/Slate
8 Report on the affects of hypnosis on the brain/NYTimes
9 MUSIC: Sasha Frere-Jones on Damon Albarn/New Yorker (3 links below)
10 The depiction of UFOs and aliens in cartoons/New Yorker
11 IN THE PAPERS: National, Opinion, Business round-up

1 Gold, inflation and the crunch to come
Alan Kohler is a class act, simply one of the best journalists going around anywhere. But if TDB had followed up immediately on a backdeck conversation with subscriber Kurt M., it could have beaten him to the punch on this story. Kurt was talking about the rising price of gold, and how it has broken free of its usual pattern of being the inverse of what's happening with the US dollar. "Something big is happening," he said and immediately passed on the following three links: a constantly updated measure of US debt, currently $8,084,858,891,735.31 (it's the 31 cents that I'm worried about); a report that central bank representatives told an industry conference Tuesday they will maintain gold holdings as a proportion of overall reserves because of the increasingly important role it plays as a hedge against currency volatility; and an announcement from the US Federal Reserve that it will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate which some commentators (though not all by any means) have interpreted as a sign that it is running scared and has something to hide. Before getting to Kohler, one more straw blowing in what looks like an economic ill-wind - the NYTimes is reporting that the Federal Reserve is worried about inflation, and that more interest rate rises are on the way. "Minutes of the Fed's closed-door meeting on Nov. 1, released Tuesday, underscored that policy-makers were more concerned more about the prospects of resurgent inflation than a serious slowdown in the wake of a trio of deadly hurricanes that ravaged the Gulf Coast."

Kohler refers to none of that, apart from the gold-dollar linkage, but says that "the US dollar is overvalued and the country's competitiveness has eroded to the point where the cash rate arbitrage will be pitifully inadequate to hold the currency. This has occurred because Asian central banks, led by China, have been buying US bonds at ridiculously low interest rates in order to keep their own currencies and improve their own competitive position." Kohler goes on to say "This situation cannot last. American financial assets will have to be repriced eventually, either directly or through a depreciation of the currency, or both" and that "the timing and force of the American reckoning will be the key to investment markets in 2006."

(Memo to self: take more notice of Kurt.)
ALAN KOHLER/THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

2 No exit that way
Every once in a while, you get to experience the joy of a column that rolls some part of the universe into a little ball and deftly rolls it to you. Eugene Robinson does just that, and with an enjoyable "a fine mess you got us into this time Ollie" tone to it. "George Bush will inevitably get out of the mess he has made -- he leaves office in three years and two months, not that anyone's counting. But the rest of us will be left with his handiwork: crushing national debt, rising economic inequality, a poisoned political atmosphere and, oh, yes, the war in Iraq. We're the ones trapped in the dark with no exit sign in sight."
EUGENE ROBINSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

3 White Phosphorous and faulty intelligence
The NYTimes came late, and cautiously, to the debate about the use of White Phosphorous in Fallujah, sometimes referred to as this generation's Guernica. And it may be one of the reasons that George Monbiot (link below) says "the media couldn't have made a bigger pig's ear of the white phosphorus story". What's well established is that WP was used in the attack, but not, the Pentagon says on civilians. That is an important, but ultimately irrelevant distinction, according to Monbiot. "The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence: "It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets"."

Another from the ingenious ways to kill and maim file, The Independent reports that Tony Blair is facing fresh fury over the use of controversial munitions in the Iraq war. "The dispute over British use of cluster bombs will be intensify this week with the publication of a report by the pressure group Landmine Action, which raises questions over the efforts made to ensure that the weapons did not harm civilians. It comes as international signatories to the international convention on conventional weapons meet in Geneva this week, amid pressure for a moratorium on the production of cluster bombs and tough new limits on their use."

And thanks to subscriber and occasional contributor, James O., this link to The Democrats Diary blog which argues that "the media's near total failure to report on the bloodshed caused by our side in the ongoing conflict that keeps many current US-UK government officials in their jobs, if not out of the International Criminal Court on charges of committing war crimes" and provides more links and references on the subject than any gainfully employed person could possibly follow. (So many links, so little time.)
GEORGE MONBIOT/THE GUARDIAN

4 ER in Baghdad
The only thing TDB knows about Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is that he has produced three of the best pieces of reportage to have come out of the Iraq war (links to the other two can be found in Archives). This one goes inside Yamouk hospital for a look at the medical front line in the "war on terror". (Perhaps George Bush and John Howard should pay a visit.) "What's even more frightening for these doctors is that they get casualties in from "commando" units, part of a feared paramilitary group with links to a Shia militia, which has a base a few hundred metres from the Yarmouk hospital. One night when I was about to leave the ER there was a burst of gunfire - heavy machine guns roared at the entrance of the hospital. The doctors started running around urging patients, if they were well enough, to clear out. Moments later, a group of masked young men in army fatigues and black T-shirts burst into the ward. Two went to where people had gathered in the hallway, pointing guns at them and telling them to look away. Three others carried between them a piece of cloth in which one of their comrades, badly injured, was lying."

Aljazeera reports on the call, largely symbolic, from Iraqi leaders attending an Arab League sponsored summit in Cairo, "for the withdrawal of US and British forces from Iraq by immediately setting a timetable for gradually rebuilding Iraq's armed forces". (If, has been widely speculated, the US is looking for an excuse to leave sooner rather than later, this could help by giving them some political cover.)

The Bush administration has tried a number of strategies for dealing with growing calls to withdraw from Iraq since respected Democrat hawk, Congressman John Murtha, gave that cause momentum by joining it late last week. The first response was to describe criticism of the war as "unpatriotic", but when that did go down to well, the line of attack was changed, and people arguing the war was a mistake were accused of trying to "rewrite history". Dan Froomkin in The Washington Post looks at the changing response and notes that "fully 55 to 57 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration was intentionally misleading in the run up to war".

Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones says the key to explaining the White House response is simple: fear. Englehardt, a long-time critic of the war, says the "Bush administration got spooked" because its main weapon in the debate, fear, was no longer working for it. "Starting on September 11, 2001 -- with a monstrous helping hand from Osama bin Laden -- the Bush administration played the fear card with unbelievable effectiveness. For years, with its companion "war on terror," it trumped every other card in the American political deck." (Seems to works a treat in Australia as well, with more than a little help from journalists.)

On the other side of the debate, Robert Kagan & William Kristol in The Weekly Standard, the magazine recently credited with bringing about the invasion of Iraq, are careful not to attack Murtha while arguing that "his outburst last Thursday was breathtakingly irresponsible."
GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD/THE GUARDIAN

5 Curveball and the case for war
Ah, our old friend Curveball, haven't heard from you in a while. But you are back with a vengeance, we noticed. Curveball was the Iraqi defector whose information was used as the basis for the US to claim "Saddam has WMDs and could use them in 45 minutes" (OK, it was the Brits who peddled the 45 mins bit.) This long investigative story from the LATimes, which has been much commented upon in the blogosphere, looks at the gap between what he actually told intelligence officials and claims that were pushed on the public to make the case for war. "An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case wa worse than official reports have disclosed. The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years."

In The Washington Post, Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, says that this privileged position gave him access to information others did not have, and led him to vote against invading Iraq. "From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth."

There is a massed debate happening over at the new OSM blog, essentially about whether the Bush administration lied to make its case for war. Defenders argue that Bush and co made their case genuinely believing it to be true, therefore strictly speaking it was not a lie. Perhaps, but that last quote from Bob Graham may be more to the point - everything points to the fact that the Bushies were hell-bent on going to war and manufactured the case for it.

Which is the subject of this investigation for Rolling Stone by James Bamford on the role played by John Rendon. "One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam."

Not that it had anything to do with oil of course, although The Independent is reporting that Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year.

And Col. Larry Wilkerson, former aide to Colin Powell, has told CNN that the "philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order" that lead to torture and abuse came from (Greg Sheridan's love interest) Donald Rumsfeld.
BOB DROGIN AND JOHN GOETZ/LATIMES

6 Fade to black
Patrick Goldstein says the "era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close", killed off by the same forces that are radically and rapidly reshaping music, television and newspapers, and by the industry's own failings. "As it stands, Hollywood has become a prisoner of a corporate mindset that is squeezing the entrepreneurial vitality out of the system. It's not just that studios are making bad movies - they've been doing that for years. They've lost touch with any real cultural creativity. When you walk down the corridors at Apple or a video game company, there's an electricity in the air that encourages people into believing they could dream up a new idea that could blow somebody's mind. At the big studios, the creative voltage is sometimes so low that you wonder if you've wandered into an insurance office."

Part of Hollywood's problems come from video games, and the NYTimes reports that "three decades after bursting into pool halls and living rooms, video games are taking a place in academia. A handful of relatively obscure vocational schools have long taught basic game programming. But in the last few years a small but growing cadre of well-known universities, from the University of Southern California to the University of Central Florida, have started formal programs in game design and the academic study of video games as a slice of contemporary culture."

The LATimes Microsoft's new Xbox 360. "The powerful but expensive Xbox 360 is the first entrant in what's expected to be a ruthless fight for dominance in the $25-billion global games market. Rivals Sony and Nintendo Co. are readying their own next-generation consoles for release next year."

And John Hood at Reason looks at growing calls for restrictions on product placement in film and television, but true to the magazine's libertarian bent, he is not partial to the idea.
PATRICK GOLDSTEIN/LATIMES

7 Google dreaming
Jack Shafer has a dream. Or he had a dream, that Google has peaked, and that newspapers, led as always by canny and ruthless Rupert, fight back. "Like the Apple iTunes operation only bigger, RupeWeb was a sort of "Club Web." Its content was for members only and invisible to the Web spiders of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. (Some people call this kind of Web the "invisible" or "deep" Web.) Many RupeWeb users started helping themselves to the new search engine he had purchased in his acquisition of Lycos. Capitalizing on plummeting hard-disk prices, faster processors, growing bandwidth, and sleek new algorithms, the RupeGrab search engine ran loops around Google. People didn't even seem to mind that RupeGrab billed its search results as "Fair and Balanced"."
JACK SHAFER/SLATE

8 Brain and hypnosis
The power of suggestion. Sandra Blakeslee reports that hypnosis is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists, who are learning something about it, the brain and perhaps human behaviour along the way. ""In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered. Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function. One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs."
SANDRA BLAKESLEE/NYTIMES

9 Albarn, Wray, Turner and jazz
TDB is a fan of Sasha Frere-Jones who has provided some good hints for improving the selection of music playing in the background. In the article linked to below, he reports on the eclectic career of British musician Damon Albarn of Blur fame ("Song 2"). "As Blur stalled out, Albarn went to Africa and made an album with Afel Bocoum, who trained with the legendary Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, and helped produce reissues of Trinidadian calypso and reggae music for Honest Jons, a London record label that he co-founded. In 2000, Albarn and a friend, Jamie Hewlett, formed a new band, Gorillaz, officially consisting of four cartoon characters: 2D, a spacey blue-haired singer; Murdoc, a creepy bassist; Noodle, a Japanese female guitarist; and Russel, a hulking black drummer."

The Globe and Mail reports on the death of Link Wray, the guitar legend said to have inspired many other rock musicians, including Pete Townsend, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt and that man Bruce Springsteen

The Independent takes a look at Alex Turner, the 19-year-old lead singer of Sheffield's Arctic Monkeys, who was yesterday named by NME the coolest man on the planet.

And not sure if donn has linked to these, but David Yaffe in The Nation reviews four books on jazz. "For the jazz musicians and jazz journalists struggling for mainstream attention, the sky could appear to be falling, but judging from the deluge of recent books, the music's shelf life is just beginning. Jazz, more than any other musical genre, currently dominates academic presses; compared with pondering the use of the grace note in Haydn, chasing the path of Django Reinhardt or a riverboat band might even seem sexy. Hip-hop is so recent, rock and roll so flaky and ubiquitous. Scholarly presses are more willing to admit jazz's importance today than they were when the music was at its most vital stages of development."
SASHA FRERE-JONES/THE NEW YORKER

10 Cartoon aliens
It's not yet available online, Tom Reiss in the current New Yorker "writes about invasion novels and what they tell us about the modern world". Until it becomes available, you might get something out of cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's look at how aliens and UFOs have been depicted in the magazine's cartoons in the past 60 years.
THE NEW YORKER

11 IN THE PAPERS: National, Opinion, Business round-up
IN THE BROADSHEETS

Singapore's intention to proceed with the barbaric execution of Nguyen Tuong Van dominates the papers. The Herald reports that the Federal Government has received legal advice that it could attempt to prevent the execution of the Australian Nguyen Tuong Van by going to the International Court of Justice even if Singapore did not recognise its jurisdiction; The Age says Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls will fly to Singapore in a last-ditch mission to stop the execution; and The Australian reports that while Singapore has an unwavering policy of hanging drug mules such as Australia's Nguyen Tuong Van without mercy, it has for years been one of the strongest backers of Burma, the world's second-biggest producer of heroin. (Ouch! The papers obviously believe this issue matters to the public, and are going in hard on it. Great to see when it's for a good cause - but this is also an easy cause, no courage required to champion this one. The down side is that this sort of populist crusading on other issues produces lazy, yellow journalism - and a lack of courage when it comes to tackling unpopular causes.) There are also a couple of great columns on this one this morning - Paul Kelly in The Australian and Donald Rothwell in the SMH (opinion below).

The Australian's lead says Brendan Nelson has outlined a second wave of higher education reforms that would encourage students to do generalist first degrees at outer-suburban and regional campuses before entering elite graduate schools at the nation's sandstone universities. It also reports that the most powerful indigenous body in the Northern Territory has backed a controversial bid for a nuclear waste dump on its land, breaking ranks with the Territory Labor Government and environmentalists; that almost 60 per cent of Australians support increased penalties for the sale or supply of cannabis amid findings that more 12- to 15-year-olds use cannabis than smoke cigarettes (the Oz seems to be running an anti-marijuana campaign); and that John Howard's campaign on industrial relations is battering his personal standing, with voters increasingly thinking he is less caring, likeable and trustworthy (Newspoll findings via Dennis Shanahan - it also has a story about why Newspoll is better than Fairfax's ACNielsen); and that James Packer broke down and cried as he repeatedly apologised to Lachlan Murdoch over the impending collapse of One.Tel, the NSW Supreme Court heard yesterday (hey, so even tough guys can get a little loose over a couple of hundred million dollars going down the gurgler).

The Age reports that it took John Howard 31 years to bring his radical rewrite of workplace relations laws to the brink of reality; it took the Senate less than a week to probe the impact of those sweeping changes on millions of workers and their families (Matt Price neatly sums up that farce of a process); that teenagers are at risk of internet addiction; and that three West Timorese asylum seekers are the sole occupants of the Christmas Island detention centre after a family with two infant children were released yesterday.

The Herald reports that indigenous leader and ALP vice-president, Warren Mundine, has rebuked Aboriginal men for the horrific level of domestic violence in many communities; that NSW taxpayers face paying millions of dollars in compensation to the owners of Sydney's main water filtration plant at Prospect because the planned desalination plant at Kurnell will breach their contract; that Sydney home owners have given up on the market improving in the near future, and have accepted that if they want to sell they will have to reduce their prices, new property figures show; and that the Government's plunge in the polls has fuelled speculation that the Prime Minister, John Howard, will reshuffle his front bench before Christmas - a move that would affect the leadership plans of the Treasurer, Peter Costello.

You might also be interested to know that George Bush has been taken to court; that Malcolm McDowell's daughter Lilly didn't know he was star of A Clockwork Orange until she went to college and saw the famous poster image of his face plastered on her classmates' dormitory walls; and that Aunty Jack is back, available on DVD (and you know what will happen to your arms if you don't buy it).

One of the most viewed stories in the Herald features a spectacular photograph of last night's storm.

OPINION

The Age: Michelle Grattan thinks those ugly opinion polls yesterday may be a false dawn for Labor, and that John Howard will quickly move on from the IR debate once the legislation is passed; Peter Coghlan enters the intelligent design debate, which he thinks is a philosophical and not a scientific one; and Ross Gittins and James Fallows, see below.

The Australian: Paul Kelly offers a telling account of the geo-political issues at play between Australia and Singapore over the proposed execution of Nguyen Tuong Van and says Singapore is trapped by its authoritarian mindset (great read, Kelly at his best); Emma Tom comes to the nub of the great terrorism scare, commenting that Amanda Vanstone is "the only one willing to risk vilification by telling the terrible truth: that a large part of the Government's anti-terrorism agenda is about helping us sleep better at night rather than keeping us unexploded"; Janet Albrechtsen (who owns Telstra shares) is angry at the coalition of dopes from all sides of politics and their best obstructionist efforts to stop the sale of Telstra, which means the Government is left holding what may be a dud of a stock; Alan Wood comes out in favour of urban sprawl and says "high density, high-rise living loved by Labor governments and European-influenced urban planners" is not working; and Barry Rubin looks at the shake-up in Israeli politics, which he thinks will result in Ariel Sharon winning the election, but otherwise, not much change because Palestinian politics is not ready to grasp the opportunity.

The SMH: Ross Gittins feels the pain of Australia's CEOs (all that stress and performance anxiety) and comes to understand why the average total remuneration of the chief executives of Australia's largest 300 listed companies rose by 16 per cent to $1.9 million last financial years ("In John Howard's classless society, greed is a virtue to be fostered and the greatest sin is envy of the rich"); James Fallows (fresh from writing The Atlantic Monthly piece on Iraq's army TDB linked to yesterday) reports on the increasing rancour of the debate in the US about Iraq, and says its outcome will be decided by what values the US public thinks are more important; Alan Ramsey sides with Amanda Vanstone and says her comments about terrorism (and HB pencils) were nothing more than common sense and plain speaking (here, here!); and Donald Rothwell (professor of international law) says if Australia takes human rights seriously, then the Federal Government must use all legitimate means at its disposal to stop the execution of Nguyen Tuong Van, including taking the case to the International Court of Justice.

BUSINESS

Alan Kohler says the gold price is an indication of some big forces at work in global markets and economies, that the US dollar is overvalued and the country's competitiveness has eroded to the point where the cash rate arbitrage will be pitifully inadequate to hold the currency, and a major correction is on the way.

Both Fairfax papers lead on the news that Harvey Norman is interested in Myers, with the SMH reporting that Gerry Harvey has signalled his interest in buying the money-losing Myer department store chain, saying he could team with a private equity firm to bid for the retailer, which bears the name of one of Melbourne's great families. Elizabeth Knight thinks someone forgot to tell Gerry Harvey that the biggest secret in town is the identity of those seeking from Coles Myer an application to take a copy of the information memorandum on the Myer business which is now on the blocks - a case of commercial secrecy gone mad.

The Herald also reports that David Coe's Allco Finance Group more than doubled its net profit last financial year to $13.9 million as it raked in fees for finding and structuring deals; and that Australian car and spare parts makers are at the start of a massive transition and some, perhaps all, could fall by the wayside, says industry veteran Ivan Deveson.

The Australian's lead says New Zealand has intensified negotiations with Optus and junior listed telco SP Telemedia over a deal worth as much as $850 million to offload its struggling Australian business. It also reports that Chevron, the operator of the proposed $11 billion Gorgon export LNG project, has set itself a target of winning contracts for the rest of its share of production by the middle of next year, after yesterday reaching the halfway mark; and that new Commonwealth Bank chief executive Ralph Norris has identified poor customer satisfaction levels and a long-term erosion in the bank's share of business lending as his early priorities.

The Age says the click of a button is taking away the drudge of Christmas shopping for a growing number of people, with the number of online shoppers this festive season expected to reach 2.3 million - almost double that of last year; that a partnership between Sol Trujillo and Rupert Murdoch is expected to be announced as early as next week that could see TV, movies and other multimedia content from the Fox stable moving on to Telstra's 3G mobile network and then into the terrestrial broadband fibre system the company will run out over the next three to five years; and that the London Stock Exchange has reportedly told Macquarie Bank to add 30 per cent to our market value and then we'll talk about selling.

Bryan Frith thinks that before Chris Corrigan's Patrick Corp refers the leak of Virgin Blue's surprise $262 million dividend payment to ASIC, it should take a deep breath because it's arguable that Patrick should have made disclosure of the pending dividend before the leaks occurred.

STATE ROUND-UP

The Daily Telegraph: A group of country surgeons has not been paid for four months because their hospital, which also was refused supplies of surgical sutures, can't meet its bills; From a peak of more than 5000 troops in East Timor in 1999, Australia's military contribution to its newest neighbour has fallen to just three people.

The Herald-Sun: A raid on the home of a policeman's mother by Office of Police Integrity investigators has angered police and prompted a probe into the corruption watchdog; Khoa Nguyen showed no emotion after coming face to face with his twin brother Tuong Van Nguyen on death row in Singapore yesterday.

The Courier-Mail: A Federal Government senator has been accused of breaching parliamentary rules by tipping off the Government about the secret findings of an inquiry into its proposed industrial relations reforms; Queensland is reeling from the worst period of road carnage in memory, with 10 dead in seven accidents in just 27 hours.

The Advertiser: The state's anti-terror laws should be scrapped, according to an influential legal body which claims they are unjust and ignore fundamental human rights; A South Australian man arrested in Indonesia for drugs use relied on crystal meth - known locally as shabu shabu - to beat stress, his lawyer said yesterday.

The West Australian: Nearly 80 per cent of State school teachers have either decided to quit or are contemplating it as a result of the stress being placed on them by the outcomes-based education system, a survey conducted by their union has found; The union representing WA's 33,000 public servants claims about half of them would be forced into the controversial new industrial system after legal advice overturned a widely held belief they would be sheltered from the changes.

The Mercury: A complaint about unlicensed forklift drivers was made to the workplace safety watchdog at least six weeks before the tragic death of a 16-year-old Tasmanian; Royal Hobart Hospital medical staff yesterday wore red armbands in a symbolic, silent protest against "stifling red tape".

SPORT

The Wallabies would have every resource they require to restore their cohesion and confidence on the path to the 2007 World Cup, Australian Rugby Union chief executive Gary Flowers promised yesterday; Having become just the second regular Australian opener to survive beyond 35 since World War II, Justin Langer claims it takes more than money to maintain the desire to play for your country; Greg Norman has been voted Australia's greatest golfer of the past century, but Peter Stone thinks Peter Thompson also had claim to the title.
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