You can’t please everyone

THE story is told of a young man and his father who set out one morning for the fair, in a bid to sell their donkey. Funds were low, the rains had not come for a long time, and they needed some way of putting food on the table for the next month or so.

When they set out, the old man rode on the donkey and his son walked alongside the beast. But they had gone just a few miles, when they came upon a number of women who stopped and stared, and then started to shout at them.

“How can you ride on the beast when you have a boy of such a tender age? You are forcing him to walk while you have a nice restful journey. Shame on you,” they yelled.
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The fraud of frauds gets a chance to vent

ON JANUARY 17, US time, world sport’s worst serial cheat, Lance Armstrong, will make a confession of sorts to the world’s best known chat show host, Oprah Winfrey. Not surprisingly, both are Americans.

Armstrong was indicted by the US Anti-Doping Administration and the level of proof that the agency gathered would have put anyone behind bars. It was a dream case, one where the evidence was so startling that even a serial liar and cheat like Armstrong kept silent.

Armstrong won seven consecutive Tour de France titles from 1999 onwards, with every possible chemical helping him to the podium.
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Stupid is as stupid does

Sent from my iPad. Sent from my iPhone.

These are two of the most stupid lines you encounter at the end of an email or a text message these days. They serve the valuable purpose of informing you that the sender of the message has purchased one of these devices from the Apple Computer Corporation and is using it.

That’s certainly newsworthy enough for you to know about it, isn’t it?
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The fox can never guard the coop

THE solution to eradicating mass shootings is to introduce more guns into the population, only this time in the hands of guards at schools.

That’s if you choose to believe the US National Rifle Association, the biggest and most powerful lobby group for the weapons industry in the US of A.

This brilliant idea comes from the mouth of Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s vice-president, just a week after 20 children were killed in Connecticut, along with eight adults.
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Where guns matter more than kids’ lives

In the US of A, they value their guns more than their children. That’s why you get situations like that in Connecticut where 20 children were shot dead by a nutjob. Another eight adults also died, among them the shooter.

But nobody will dare question the interpretation of the second amendment of the constitution that Americans claim gives them the right to bear arms.

The gun lobby is the third-most powerful lobby in the country, after the Zionist lobby and Big Pharma. In the end it all translates down to money, pure and simple – there’s too much money in firearms sales for the industry to ever contemplate any restrictions on the sale of guns.
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When the offenders become the story

IT COULD only happen in Australia. Two DJs stage a prank call to the hospital where a member of the royal family, Kate Middleton, had been admitted as she was suffering from morning sickness; they pose as Queen Elizabeth and her son, Charles.

The call is passed on by an unsuspecting nurse who is doubling as a telephone operator, and her colleague in the ward provides an accurate rundown of Middleton’s condition.

The DJs, from 2Day FM, play the recorded conversation without asking the hospital for its permission as they are required to do by the rules of their own station. The recording was played by several other stations and the nurse involved, Jacintha Saldanha, was made to look like a fool.
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Who wants peace in the Middle East?

BOTH Israelis and Palestinians have too much to lose if the Middle East problems that separate them are solved. Neither is interested in a solution for that would lessen the attention that is paid to them.

Israel receives $3b of aid from the US every year. If there were peace in the Mideast, that aid would fall away – after all when a country is at peace with its neighbours, why does it need such large amounts of aid? The Palestinians are in the same boat – if they were not at loggerheads with Israel who would pay them much attention?
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Cheating is universal (not that this excuses Armstrong)

WHEN the Australia dollar shoots past the greenback, it enables people to buy goods that they previously avoided due to the cost.

On the internet, for the most part, the outlets keep to this rate, or at least stay close to it.

But on the ground, this does not always work out. In other words, exchange houses will not give you what you are supposed to get.
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US voters go one way; Australians are different

GIVEN the fact that the Democrats were returned to power in the recent US elections, there is a tendency for people in Australia to see a similar trend emerging in the elections due Down Under in 2013.

One should be extremely careful when drawing such conclusions.

Those who incline towards the view that the leader of the Coalition, Tony Abbott, will suffer a fate similar to that which befell Mitt Romney, should take into the fact that voting is compulsory in Australia.

That fact tends to change things a great deal.
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For Lance Armstrong, cheating is in the blood

CHEATING runs in the blood (no pun intended). This is true in the case of the American Lance Armstrong, now known to be the king of cheats, and one who used drugs of every kind to win seven consecutive Tour de France titles from 1999.

In 1993, Armstrong participated in the Thrift Drug Triple Crown of cycling: the Thrift Drug Classic in Pittsburgh, the K-Mart West Virginia Classic and the CoreStates USPRO national championship in Philadephia.

There was a bonus of $US1 million which was available to anyone who won all three events.
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