an extendable baton, a can of pepper spray, eight mobile phones, a large amount of amphetamines, nunchuckas, an unregistered handgun...
Plus the explosives. And more explosives were found when they searched the suspect's home.
Russell Crowe likes to try to boost his rugby league's team morale with lots of positive talk, declarations of love and hugs. Some of the players are less than impressed, calling his morale building methodology "bullshit". Clearly men hugging other men is far too wussy for these guys. They're rugby league players. Macho guys. Who get paid to grab other men, climb all over them, insert their fingers up each other's bums to try and make them drop the ball and grope each other's genitalia. But hugging? God no!
Annabel Crabb, the rising star of Australian political journalism. Sharp, funny and dead on. Here she imagines Christmas-based policy option discussions about whether the Rudd child should, or should not, be gifted a bicycle. Brilliant.
John Howard used a fear campaign based around interest rates to win the 2004 election. In person he famously promised to keep interest rates low. In advertisements, he said he planned to keep interest rates at record lows.
Now interest rates are about to go up again, for the fourth time since the last election, putting extreme financial pressure on millions of already hard-hit Australian families, Howard says his government is not responsible for interest rates. Well, not when they go up. Make up your mind, mate. Voters already think you're sneaky, now they're going to think you've completely lost your mind.
Jack Marx writes the usually entertaining, and sometimes damned extraordinary, Daily Truth blog. Now he's been forced to actually post daily, instead of two or three times a week, he makes our blog roll. Jack's blog is well worth checking out. Daily.
You need to find ten minutes, right now, not later, and go here and read the full story that goes with this downright Australian urban legend :
...mad scientist "Monkey Jones", obsessed with finding the secret of eternal youth, had spent the wild years between the wars transplanting monkey testicles into the scrotums of aging male human beings, thus transforming the isolated Lake Macquarie hamlet of Dora Creek, nearby the doctor's clinic, into a kind of sexual Shan-gri-la, where old men at the end of their days matched sexual vigour with fresh young women. The honeymoon ended, says the legend, when the doctor died, the experiments ceased and everything - to the relief of the township's elderly women - returned to normal.
Now go here and read the Jack Marx story on the truth behind the urban legend. In many ways, the true story is even better than the legend. Guaranteed, this is the greatest, most eye-opening, jaw-dropping story you will read anywhere this week. Now go for it.
Would it surprise you to learn that a pedophile who carried around a kitten to draw in children also kept a locked dungeon in his backyard? Probably not. Chilling, nonetheless. Apparently, it's not illegal to build and keep your own backyard dungeon in Australia. It's only illegal when you keep people inside it, against their will.
'Downwards adjustment' : That's the terminology used by the National Gallery of Victoria to describe what has happened to the value of a Van Gogh painting they've proudly displayed for decades...now they've found out that it isn't a Van Gogh painting. It was probably painted by someone apprenticed to the Dutch master, says the NGV, or Van Gogh contemporary. Not a chance in hell, says the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. The NGV will still display the painting because, they claim, "it isn't a forgery" and it is still "interesting".
Yes, particularly interesting to the those hundreds of Van Gogh addicts and completists who've traveled from all over the world to Victoria, through the decades, to gape in awe at this remarkable Van Gogh, that isn't actually a Van Gogh.
John Howard has ruled out the judicial inquiry now being called for by Opposition leader Kevin Rudd into what the hell happened went down between the Australian government, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian mainstream media over the smearing and fearing of Dr Mohamed Haneef. Why no inquiry? Because, Mr Howard said, the...oh crap. Read it for yourself. It's too late in the night to try and make sense of Howard's bizarre logic train.
Phillip Adams finally comes clean. He's slept with the prime minister's wife. Twice.
We're still betting that one of the coming federal election slogans from the Howard government will be a variation on "Better To Be Safe Than Sorry." It's so adaptable. They can use it for terrorism, to argue why straggling voters should not switch over to Kevin Rudd, for keeping Australian combat troops in Iraq and for trusting the Howard government to keep interest rates at record lows, well kind of low, sort of...if you're rich.
The Howard Huggers in the Australia media continue to dump their idol as reality dawns like a bucket of ice water in the face. Andrew Bolt is all but begging the prime minister to leave now, so as to allow the government the slimmest of chances of winning the election. In fact, a recent column demanded "Howard Must Quit".
Fellow News Limited Howard-hugger, Tim Blair, is already anticipating Kevin Rudd's first 100 days as prime minister.
Australia's Hillsong church has got itself a very powerful and captivating whistle blower. A former lifetime member of the fundamentalist, extremely wealthy church has written a book which is bound to be a bestseller. In it, we learn that Hillsong is about money, getting money from its true believers, getting more true believers into its churches to get more money out of them, all of whom are expected to hand over 10% of their wages. In 2004-2005, the church made $50 million and paid no taxes.
Hillsong has been very successful in accumulating wealth. The church recently purchased a piece of luxurious Sydney property worth $28 million. Clearly, they must have skipped the part of the Bible where Jesus talked about how it was harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Get rid of all your possessions, Jesus said, and give them to the poor.
Hey, what the hell did Jesus know? That was 2000 years ago.
