Less than a week before Australia’s election, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a bold defense of same-sex marriage. In a questions and answer session on Australia’s ABC News on Tuesday, Pastor Matt Prater asked why the prime minister now supported the right of same-sex...
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Australian prime minister on opposition to marriage equality: ‘The Bible also says that slavery is a natural condition’
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Colbert: ‘If America was concerned with shooting people, we’d be invading Chicago’
Stephen Colbert returned from his two-week hiatus last night and opened with a cutting critique of John Oliver and his English accent, before moving on to criticize the Obama administration for its clumsy handling of the escalation of the war with Syria. “I don’t ‘sprechen sie...
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Edward Snowden receives whistleblowing award in Germany
I’m still at a loss as to how people cannot call Ed Snowden a whistleblower, given just how many government abuses his leaks have revealed, and the wider discussion they have created (all without revealing anything that appears to be truly damaging –…
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British soldier tells inquiry board about unit’s ‘degrading’ abuse of Iraqis
Duncan Aston tells al-Sweady public inquiry how sergeant stamped on head of dead Iraqi after firefight in Iraq in 2004 A British soldier engaged in a fierce gunfight in Iraq described on Wednesday how his colleagues punched and kicked a prisoner and stamped on the head of a dead Iraqi, and how he...
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100,000 kilograms of dead fish cleared from polluted Chinese river after ‘chemical discharge’
Hundreds of thousands of dead fish were left floating in a Chinese river after a chemical discharge, officials said Wednesday, the latest industrial accident to pollute the country’s battered environment. About 100,000 kilograms of fish were cleared from 40 kilometres of the Fu river in...
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Secret U.S. documents reveal Al-Qaeda has anti-drone operation: Washington Post
Al-Qaeda’s leaders have set up cells of engineers to try to shoot down, disable or hijack US drones, The Washington Post reported late Tuesday citing top-secret US intelligence documents. The Al-Qaeda leadership is “hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system...
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Qatar announces its first MERS coronavirus death
A woman has died in Qatar after contracting the MERS coronavirus, becoming the first recorded fatality from the SARS-like virus in the Gulf state, local press reported on Wednesday. The 56-year-old Qatari victim, who already had chronic illnesses, died on August 31, a week after she was admitted to...
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Al-Jazeera accuses Egypt of jamming signal
Qatari-owned news channel Al-Jazeera has accused Egyptian authorities of jamming the network’s satellite signals, as the broadcaster kept up its critical coverage of Cairo’s crackdown on Islamists. “Independent experts” used by Al-Jazeera have determined where the jamming...
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Leaked season 3 premier of ‘Homeland’ downloaded more than 200,000 times
An unfinished work-print of the hit Showtime series Homeland appeared online yesterday. According to TorrentFreak, the leaked episode is missing the opening credits and some of the “seamless” CGI effects — buildings in the background, cars on closed roads, and a key element of...
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Putin vows no anti-LGBT discrimination at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday vowed there would be no discrimination against gays at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, despite a storm of controversy over a new law banning the dissemination of gay “propaganda” to minors. In an interview with Channel One television,...
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Rubio: Syria situation would be different ‘if I had been in charge’
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) offered stern criticism of the Obama administration in an interview with Brett Baier of Fox News saying that if he were president, the situation would be very different now. According to Talking Points Memo, Rubio said that he is skeptical of the efficacy of President Barack...
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Japan nuclear agency says Fukushima water leak risk exaggerated
The chief of Japan’s nuclear watchdog chided the operator of the Fukushima plant Thursday for its inability properly to explain problems, which he said was inflating fears around the world. Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, said information given by Tokyo Electric...
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Benedict Cumberbatch set to play Amazon explorer in ‘Lost City of Z’
Benedict Cumberbatch is being lined up to portray the 1920s Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett in James Gray’s Lost City of Z, reports Deadline. In what appears to be the currently red-hot British star’s first starring role in potential blockbuster fare, he will portray a real-life figure...
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Neil Young says his Pono Music service will be ready to launch next year
Neil Young has issued an update on his Pono Music project, promising the “high-resolution” audio service will be ready to launch in early 2014. Although details remain scarce, Young hopes his service will replace the MP3 through a combination of a new portable music player, new...
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Colbert just happy that 29 percent of Americans ‘know there’s a place called Syria’
On Wednesday night’s edition of “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert reflected on the fact that while only 29 percent of Americans surveyed support the idea of military intervention in Syria, that does mean that 29 percent of Americans know that the country exists at all....
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Kim Dot Com resigns from Mega to pursue plans for his New Zealand political party
Internet mogul Kim Dotcom said on Thursday he was resigning from his new venture Mega to focus on fighting extradition to the United States and his plans for a New Zealand political party. Dotcom launched mega.co.nz in January, a year after his wildly successful Megaupload empire was shut down as...
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Eric Bolling’s co-hosts mock ‘bloody hand’ stunt and say he went to ‘Code Pink store’
On Wednesday’s edition of Fox News panel show “The Five,” co-host Eric Bolling made a statement against proposed military intervention in Syria by holding up a ketchup-smeared “bloody” right hand. Bolling’s co-hosts made quick work of the stunt, calling it...
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Fox News guest: ‘That’s a teaching moment’ when hungry students don’t get school lunches
A Fox News guest on Thursday argued that hungry students would have a “teaching moment” if they were refused access in the cafeteria line to school lunches because their parents hadn’t properly filled out the right paperwork. During a segment on Fox & Friends, therapist and...
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Obama promises to demand information about Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg’s death from Putin himself
US President Barack Obama will ask Moscow what happened to Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg after he was taken into Soviet custody and disappeared in 1945, Wallenberg’s family told Swedish media. Wallenberg was posted as a Swedish diplomat to Nazi-occupied Budapest in July 1944 and...
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Australian billionaire: Rupert Murdoch discovered wife Wendi Deng was a Chinese spy so he ‘got rid of her’
Flamboyant Australian billionaire Clive Palmer on Thursday said he plans to sue Rupert Murdoch over unflattering allegations and claimed the media mogul’s estranged wife is a Chinese spy. Palmer, best known for building a replica of the Titanic and who is running for election in Australia on...
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