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NATIONAL
- ROCKS ON TRUCKS.
Vandals in Australia get their kicks dropping large rocks onto vehicles from pedestrian overpasses and attempting to cause a crash or even a death. Last Monday they were at it again. Fortunately, no death.
- RUPERT'S NEWS.
News limited has mutated and grown, until it is the largest organization on the Australian Stock exchange. This is despite a failure to obtain a deal in Hong Kong.
INTERNATIONAL
- GOVERNMENT GREED.
The World Bank recommendation that the OK Tedi copper mine in Papua New Guinea be closed on environmental grounds hasn't got a snowflake's chance in hell.
OK Tedi provides about 30% of PNG government income, and most of that government income pays for PNG politician's & bureaucrat's pay and perks.
- CHINA.
The Taiwanese elections are due shortly, and the Beijing government has produced a paper threatening to invade if the Taiwanese people there do not negotiate to rejoin Beijing. The Chinese threaten a nuclear war if the USA interferes. Taiwanese presidential candidates have stated that Taiwan should negotiate on government to government status.
Beijing has seen the writing on the wall. The wealthy Taiwanese are obtaining a taste for people's (instead of autocratic) government, and under the liberal Taiwanese presidential system, the GDP in 1998 for 22 million people was US$362 billion. Compare this with the Beijing GDP of US$4.4trillion for 1.25billion people. At that rate, Taiwan will be able to buy China in a couple of decades.
Chinese mandarins probably fear if Beijing does not soon absorb Taiwan, then, (like the USSR), China will unravel.
Probably all that Beijing will achieve is an
acceleration
of US - ABM defence technology, and a win by the wrong candidate in
Taiwan.
After all, who is bluffing whom here. The geriatric Chinese
leadership
are not about to start a war they cannot win. It would be another
phoney war.
- US REPUBLICAN PRIMARIES.
Things are looking grim for John McCain.
The rest of the world is lucky indeed that the President of the USA is mainly a figurehead & so (relatively) powerless. Had he the power over the US people that a Russian or Indonesian or Malaysian president has over their people, then the world would have to worry.
Of course, if he did have that power the world would
not
have to worry, because the US would not have flourished to the eminence
it has.
This page published during the week starting 5 March 2000.