The Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club

On the Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club today at 11am, Sky Digital 65, Co-host Wallace Chapman from Kiwi FM Breakfast.

STORY 1 – Children's commissioner cops the abuse as Rankin speaks out - SST
An angry Christine Rankin slammed Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro as a "waste of space" at a rally protesting the country's dismal child abuse record.
Rankin, chief executive of For the Sake of Our Children Trust, told about 500 marchers in Auckland's Queen St: "We want a children's commissioner who is not a waste of space, someone with courage who will make a difference." But Kiro, who refused an invitation to yesterday's march, hit back labelling Rankin's group and the Sensible Sentencing Trust as "the hang-'em high brigade". The debate in this country over what to do with Child abuse has denigrated into leaders of various schism groups calling eachother names in public, but out of the heat, is there any actual light on the issue?

STORY 2 – Drunk students cause mayhem – Get over it! HOS
Bottles were thrown at police during clashes with students in Dunedin last night, leaving so much broken glass ambulance crews were forced to abandon their vehicles and go into troubled areas on foot. Police reported 30 arrests late last night after the arrival of the annual Undie500 convoy of Canterbury University students to Dunedin. Ahhh – middles class kids rioting, the joys of tertiary education hu? Once they would have been on the streets protesting the injustice of society and trying to smash the state, now its getting so drunk you attack ambulance drivers during an event called the Undie 500. Add to this arrogance of youth the utter disregard the Police are held by young people now (there is NO illusion that he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother anymore) and get what we have here.

STORY 3 – Saving Private Hubbard HOS
An American soldier has been withdrawn from Iraq after his two brothers were killed, echoing the Oscar-winning film Saving Private Ryan. Jason Hubbard, 33, will return home to northern California after younger brother Nathan, 21, was one of 14 soldiers killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in northern Iraq on Wednesday. A roadside bombing had claimed the life of another sibling, Jared, 22, in Fallujah in 2004, reports said. Isn’t it bizarre that this is a news story, so one American Soldier is brought home, what about the 161 000 others forced to stay or for that matter what about the 655 000 dead Iraqis? Isn’t it weird that this story can get so much prominence because it can be associated to a mive that people have seen ‘Oh – I saw that movie, I can now connect with that news story’ – it is a smokescreen bullshit news story that is the only thing reporters can write now because conditions are so dangerous outside the greenzone they would be shot, so we are left with News filler stories like this.

STORY 4 – Shaken China declares 'war' on product safety woes - SST
China has launched a four-month "war" on tainted food, drugs and exports, state media reported, as beleaguered officials embraced time-tested campaign tactics to clean up the country's battered image. Don’t you love that they are declaring a ‘war’ on faulty goods – how does one wage a war on lead tainted goods? Isn’t China a victim of larger forces at work? The reason they have become the Wests manufacturer of choice is because they have massive cheap man power our companies want to exploit because consumers want the cheapest goods on the planet and they want them now! For the West to jump up and down and point the finger crying ‘your toys are poisonous’ also seems a wee bit churlish – China is a repressive totalitarian communist state, with a human rights violation record a mile long, but we only get cross with them when our toys have lead in them?

STORY 5 – US Navy watching for Pacific terrorists - sst
The US navy is sending more ships into the South Pacific for fear small islands might be used to launch terror attacks on it, a senior intelligence official has revealed. The comments were made at a two-day Micronesia Police Executive Association conference this week, a preliminary to a gathering of law enforcement authorities from 21 islands in the region in Wellington in October. If this a law enforcement gathering why are the US military involved? How are we having this creeping blur of police and military continuing and this is a conference in Wellington, we have been a nexus over the last couple of years for International Spy conferences and military meetings because NZers are generally too apathetic to cause the kind of chaos these meetings would attract if held anywhere else in the world.