Dateline, the SBS weekly international current affairs program, concluded its 2004 season last Wednesday, having celebrated its 20th anniversary in October. Dateline has proven time and again that it is the outstanding current affairs show on Australian television these days, with a focus on events (especially in the Asia-Pacific region) and perspective that commercial television can’t come within cooee of. Its practice of using one-person reporter/cameraperson (which, in part, is a budgetary enforcement) compares with the elephantine production values of the increasingly insipid “60 Minutes” on the Nine Network.

Dateline has been through a range of hosts over the years, from the legendary Paul Murphy to the over-rated Jana Wendt, but Mark Davis, who has anchored the program for the last two years, has shown that, despite a bland television presence, he is a sharp and intelligent reporter and interviewer.

With the help of a fine Dateline website, I am going to use this message to present a pastiche of highlights from Dateline’s 2004 season. (more coming)

January 21: A lively interview with US General Richard Myers, and an obituary of former Dateline reporter Mark Worth, who died in West Papua.
January 28: A report on plans to put the Khmer Rouge on trial in Cambodia, and an interview with former head of state and Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan.
February 11: Report from Burma, and an interview with Dr Samina Ahmed, author of an ICG report on Pakistan’s nuclear industry.
February 18: Before the overthrow of the Aristide government, Mark Davis talked to US Congressmember Maxine Waters about the USA’s role in destabilising Haiti.
February 25: Report on the struggle between China and Taiwan for the affections of Kiribati, and an interview on the subject with ANU academic Dr Ben Reilly.
Coming up: more of Dateline in 2004.

fallujahinpictures.com - a photo blog of disturbing images from Fallujah of the victims, military and civilian, of the appalling and unnecessary battle for that Iraqi city during this month.

The images aren’t pretty. How could they be?

The Guardian reported yesterday that Vieux Boulogne is the world’s smelliest cheese. It then proceeded to give a list of the fifteen smelliest (authentic Somerset cheddar coming in 14th).

The conclusion was reached following a series of scientific tests at Cranfield University.

Meanwhile, check the Guardian today for a cheese quiz (I scored 7 out of 8 ).

All I will say is go to eBay and enter “cheese virgin mary” as your search keywords.

(Informercial advisory: I have an affiliate relationship with eBay.com and earn a commission in some cases for bids and other referrals from this site.)

Interesting email arrived on the ImpeachBlair mailing list on Wednesday, and I quote:

Dear Supporter,

We apologise if you have experienced difficulties visiting the www.ImpeachBlair.org website. It was removed yesterday without warning by the hosting company.

We have now re-hosted the site under the domain www.ImpeachBlair.net and are working to get contol of our original .org domain. You can now visit the site by going to www.ImpeachBlair.net.

Although out mailing list is almost intact, our database of petition signatories was deleted along with the site, so will you please sign our online petition again by going to www.ImpeachBlair.net/form.shtml

Kind regards,
ImpeachBlair.org (www.ImpeachBlair.net)

All seems to be back in order with their website now. www.ImpeachBlair.org (or .net) has a lot of background material on the push for impeachment proceedings against Blair on the basis of “gross misconduct” in his advocacy of the grounds for war against Iraq. There’s an online petition to sign, and the booklet A Case to Answer, a “first report on the potential impeachment of the Prime Minister for High Crimes and Misdemeanours in relation to the invasion of Iraq” can be downloaded (107 pages, 316K PDF).

Still no real explanation of why the website was pulled on Wednesday. As for the parliamentary debate, I’ll keep an eye out for when it is on.

This is what I had to say on August 26 about the impeachment. And while we’re at it, here is an interview with Blair in the Oxford University student magazine Isis featuring an even daggier 70s photo of Blair.

It means absolutely zippo to us here in Australia, unless we watch the NFL double-header on Fox Sports on Friday morning. Thanksgiving does, however, have parallels with our own Australia Day - the celebration of a hostile, and ultimately successful, invasion by foreign forces.

For more on the significance of Thanksgiving, I recommend the Wikipedia entry (which includes material from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica), and Deconstructing the myths of “The First Thanksgiving” by Judy Dow and Beverley Slapin.

Then read GWB’s Thanksgiving Proclamation and puke. (And on the subject of puking, go to Al’s Morning Meeting at Poynter Online for today: Overeaters and Thanksgiving.)

Alexander Downer, Australia’s foreign minister for the past eight years and a certified Global Village Idiot, has made this country an international laughingstock yet again.

Downer has named ten religious figures to represent Australia in a delegation to Indonesia next month for a summit on Islamic terrorism. The Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj el-Din al Hilaly, is not among the ten.

Downer, exercising government by radio on 2UE this morning, told former country and western artist John Laws that, as quoted by AAP, “We have chosen people who are people of moderation and it’s very important we have the right sort of people involved.”

“We don’t want to have a provocative forum, we want to have a conciliatory and consensus-building forum.”

The Voice of Moderation representing the Roman Catholic Church is the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell. Read what the Catholic Voice of Moderation had to say in his annual address to the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan on October 12.

His address, entitled Is there only secular democracy? contains the following gem of moderation:

It is still very early in the piece, of course, but the small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the twenty-first century the attraction which communism provided in the twentieth, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other.

Curiously, this did not attract any attention until reported by the Fairfax press on November 11.

The summit, entitled the Dialogue on Interfaith Cooperation, will be held in Yogyakarta on 4-9 December. Fourteen countries have been invited to send ten delegates each. Australia is sending six Christians plus one each from the Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic faiths. Islam is being represented by the President of Islamic Councils in Australia, Dr Ameer Ali, who is not a cleric.

Catholic News has a report on the controversy, while Islamic Sydney reproduces two items on the subject by Cynthia Banham at the Sydney Morning Herald. ABC radio’s The World Today ran a story yesterday.

The news of Dan (”Ted Baxter”) Rather’s impending retirement from the CBS Evening News has been headline news in itself, especially coming so soon after the botched report of GWB’s national guard dodge. This coming less than a week before the retirement of Tom (”Ted Baxter”) Brokaw from the NBC Nightly News. Peter (”Ted Baxter”) Jennings continues to hold the fort at ABC The World Tonight. I hope Walter (”Walter Cronkite“) Cronkite is enjoying his retirement.

Anyway, it was good to see Rather’s CBS frontline contemporary from the good old days, Marvin Kalb, discussing The Big Dan Rather Story on CNN Newsnight earlier this afternoon.

All of which leads me to two articles published this week discussing the mainstream US media’s flagrant ignorance of genuine international news.

“Looking away as a tragedy unfolds” by Dick Rogers appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle last Sunday. Sudan, Rogers writes, has been the subject of 65 reports in the Chronicle this year, 23 of those being briefs. The tragedies of Darfur have made the front page just three times. In contrast, Barry Bonds was the subject of 14 page one stories, the Scott Peterson murder case 36.

As Rogers puts it:

One lesson of Rwanda, site of another African genocide, is that much of
the world was allowed to look away. Newspapers, this one included, should
apply that lesson in Sudan.

Meanwhile, the IPS news agency dumped on the US media’s coverage of the Americas’ defence ministers’ conference in Quito. Jim Lobe’s analysis piece published yesterday entitled “U.S. Media Miss Rumsfeld’s ‘Dirty Wars’ Talk” puts us in the picture.

Still, there is always the brilliant and almost unseen Democracy Now!

I’ve finally decided to retire Jabberbot (in the guise of my Jabber account with the UNESCO server in Kazakhstan) from blog duty. Press releases from Greenpeace, WWF, Human Rights Watch and ICG will appear in RSS feeds posted in the appropriate places on this website.

Jabber, in case I haven’t mentioned it already, is the open source instant messaging format of the future (if not the present), but the XMPP protocol has potential way above and beyond that. Trust me on this.

We haven’t heard much about this in the international media. Filipino police and army dispersal officers opened fire on a demonstration of striking sugarcane farmers and mill workers at Hacienda Luisita, near Tarlac City, last Tuesday. Fourteen people were killed and at least 35 others shot and wounded.

The Central Azucarrera de Tarlac Labor Union and United Luisita Workers Union issued a joint press release on Friday condemning the massacre and calling for international support.

See also the following entry from A Sassy Lawyer In Philippines Suburbia.

The Hacienda Luisita sugar plantation is owned by the family of former Filipino president Corazon Aquino.

I’ll be following this story.