politicalowl

And as for all the publicity that is emerging from the inner suburbs of the big cities about the Greens becoming a threat to the very continuation of the Labor Party as an electoral force, just have a good chuckle. It is a wonder to behold the horror of Labor’s lefties fearing that their planned easy entry to parliamentary life is threatened. As for the Greens picking up a few lower house seats at a state and federal level affecting the Labor Party as a whole — that’s just nonsense. Shedding a few members at the extremist edge will make mainstream Labor candidates electable in more seats than will be lost on the left fringe.

The media obsession with opinion polls continues (with some of my  Crikey colleagues being just as obsessed as the rest). But why should anyone be surprised that a pollster predicts that an election today would be close just like the last actual one was? After all, nothing of significance has actually happened in Canberra since election day. Even the slight improvement in the support for the Greens found in the Nielsen published this morning is really nothing more than national polls were predicting before people marked their real ballot papers.

It was back in 1984 that the ANZ Bank last embarked on a campaign to conquer India. That was the year it purchased Grindlays Bank on the sub-continent. Five years later it changed the Grindlays name to ANZ Grindlays. Alas, by 2000 the Indian experiment was declared a failure and the subsidiary sold to Standard Chartered Plc which merged it with its existing banking operations. Today comes the news that the ANZ Banking Group Ltd has been granted approval by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for a foreign banking licence, allowing the firm to open a branch in Mumbai during the first half of 2011. The licence was granted after ANZ confirmed the location of the branch in the city's extended business district of Worli-Prabhadevi.

The social engineers have become keen on telling us that the number of restaurants and the prevalence of obesity have been rising for a number of decades. The close correspondence between these series has led some researchers to propose that there is a connection between these trends. There appears to be broad consensus, write two academics from the University of California, Berkeley in a recently published paper, among the health policy community that greater availability of restaurants increases body weight. Don't blame me! But simple correlations between restaurant visits and overeating may conflate the impact of changes in supply and demand. People choose where and how much to eat, leaving restaurant consumption correlated with other dietary practices associated with weight gain. A key question say Michael L. Anderson and David A. Matsa in Are Restaurants Really Supersizing America   is whether the growth in eating out is contributing...

Iran Is Said to Give Top Karzai Aide Cash by the Bagful When you read today's New York Times story about Iran's cash donations to the chief of staff of Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai you wonder what country Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were talking about in the debate last week about Australian involvement in the war. 

Paul Kelly's report in The Australian on Saturday morning: In his memoir, John Howard says it was "inconceivable" that Australia would not back the US in Iraq. He accuses former Labor leaders Kevin Rudd, Kim Beazley and Simon Crean of hedging their bets on the war. "I had a contempt for Labor's position," Mr Howard writes in Lazarus Rising. The former Liberal prime minister charges the Labor Party with lacking conviction, hiding behind the UN and outsourcing its foreign policy to the Russians and French on the Security Council.  Robert Fisk writing in the Sunday Independent: As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims. Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allega...

When the kind soul gave me Punch as a pup, after the tragic death of Chunky the bull terrier when he jumped out of the moving car in his eagerness to get to the restaurant for breakfast, he was described as being an American bull terrier. Now that I have Miss Polly, a real American bull dog, I am beginning to think the vet was right when she told me that I now had a very fit and active pit bull that many South Australians wrongly described because of fear that the authorities would declare them illegal. Whatever. Punch is a rather strong willed and physically strong fellow so when he told me I should be giving more coverage on my blog to matters of real scientific importance I was inclined to take notice. Hence today's coverage of the research by Andrew Dickerson, a graduate student at Georgia Tech on how fast different animals "oscillate their bodies to shed water droplets." National Public Radio reports that for his study called "The Wet-Dog Shake," which ...