The Guardian November 3, 2004


Dingo bytes

The developer of the Lake Cowal gold mine in western NSW, Barrack 
Gold, is under fire over a gold mine it half-owns in Western 
Australia. Cyanide contamination has polluted groundwater and 
boosted salinity. The NSW Greens have warned that the Kalgoorlie 
Super Pit mine in WA sets an alarming precedent for Lake Cowal. 
NSW Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon has called on the ALP and Coalition 
to support a Green's bill which is currently before the NSW 
Parliament to outlaw cyanide-based mining.

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A new opinion poll has found that more than a quarter of Australians believe the bible provides a more likely explanation of the origins of life than evolution. The survey, by the British-based firm Hawker Britton, found that older people, Liberal voters and Queenslanders were less likely to accept evolution. People living in NSW and those earning over $80,000 a year preferred evolution as an explanation as to how we are here. Asked where they thought they would go when they died, 46 percent answered heaven, 16 percent "somewhere else", 11 percent ticked nowhere, while only three percent said hell and two percent purgatory. We have a way to go compared to the USA, though. In the poll's result in the US 50 percent of people said they believed the bible's claim of creationism and only 15 percent accepted evolution.
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ASIO Chief Dennis Richardson has finally conceded that it is possible that Australia's involvement in the invasion of Iraq has made Australia a terrorist target. This admission comes nine months after Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty got hammered by the Howard Government for linking the Madrid bombings in Spain with that country's involvement in the Iraq war and warning that our involvement also increased the possibility of an attack on Australia.
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CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is the weapons industry. Talk about weapons of mass destruction! The arms manufacturers are massive transnational corporations with mountains of money. They are one of the driving forces that take the world into wars and are constantly designing new means of destruction to fatten their profits. A warning last week from the British Medical Association that it is possible to design biological weapons that target ethnic groups will have the arms makers cheering. The idea is that organisms could be engineered to attack genetic variations common to a particular race of people. Of course, the spin doctors pushing the war on terrorism claim it is terrorists who will create such a threat. Yet it is not terrorists who have the technology to make them, but the rich, developed western nations, headed by the USA. America already has more weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological, than the rest of the world combined.

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