The Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club

On the Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club today at 11am, Sky Digital 65, Wallace Chapman from Kiwi FM Breakfast and Ben Thomas from the NBR

News that caught my eye –
1: GEO 4 the most important report on the possible future of humanity and the implications of environmental degredation. The news is very bad, the IPCC took the planets temperature, Geo-4 shows us what is going on in the blood supply, the lymph system, the intestines and the immune defences, Hundreds of researchers from a huge variety of disciplines have compiled, written and analysed its 572 pages; thousands more have reviewed the various chapters, .…
*The present footprint is equivalent to 22ha per person, whereas the natural carrying capacity of the Earth is less than 16ha per person
*The world economny has at the same time boomed with the global GDP per capita rising from about US$6000 to just over US$8000. But this increased wealth has come at an enormous cost to the environment.
*Available freshwater stocks have declined dramatically since the 1980s. In west Africa, for instance, stocks have fallen from 1700 cu m per person to 907 cu m today.
*Species of animals and plants are estimated to be going extinct 100 times faster than the historical record.

2: Fox News has a ‘britney’ reporter that they cut to live whenever Britney news breaks.

3: The warning from the NZ Institute to slow down on global warming regulation.

4: The murderer calling the killer black award - US Vice President Dick Cheney, taking a tough line toward Iran, described the country's government on Sunday as a "growing obstacle to peace in the Middle East".

5: Washington Post story - Ghost Prisoners
On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush announced that the CIA's overseas secret prisons had been temporarily emptied and 14 al-Qaeda leaders taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But since then, there has been no official accounting of what happened to about 30 other "ghost prisoners" who spent extended time in the custody of the CIA.

STORY 1 - Deep in the forest: Ross Meurant - SST
Ross Meurant explains in his own words on how he has changed, how police culture has not, and why we should hold off on new anti-terror legislation. This is an incredible in sight into Police Culture, but is Ross merely reflecting what a knuckle dragging society NZ was in the 1970s/1980s and is he still right about Police now and the terror trials of the ‘Urewera 17’?

STORY 2 - - Give Mallard break: Peters - HOS
Beleaguered Sports Minister Trevor Mallard had at least one supporter as potentially the worst week in his political career drew to a close. Mallard was in Taupo yesterday, keeping a low profile after punching National backbencher Tau Henare in the parliamentary lobby last Wednesday. Also in the lakeside town was New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, attending his party's annual conference. "Could we have just a little less of all the hectoring, lecturing, prissy, do-gooder, PC, finger-pointing at Trevor Mallard because he made one mistake?" Peters said. The Government is spending $14million to teach NZers it isn’t ok to hit people, should Trevor go?

STORY 3 - Desperate tenants in unfit homes - sst
An Auckland landlord is fighting to evict a woman refusing to pay $410 rent for a house the council has condemned as a health risk. Tenant Pam Heffernan has been battling since March to have the Glendene house fixed.
She says that when she moved in she told the landlord the toilet was not attached to the floor or flushing properly "he said if I didn't like it I should move". Three weeks later she was given written notice to leave the property and the matter has been before the Tenancy Tribunal ever since. Heffernan has been without a stove for three months and a leak under the house is bringing water inside rooms and rotting the floorboards. Tenant advocates say her family is one of a growing number nationally being forced to live in substandard conditions as landlords cash in on an undersupplied rental market. There are 3 property investment stories in the HOS today, they are usually profiled on the front page of the Newspaper, we didn’t perform well in last weeks OECD report showing 10% of the population lived in overcrowding, are NZers creating a slum lord class?

STORY 4 - Our bankrupt youth - HOS
Generation Y - people aged under 30 - is financially illiterate and sees credit as a way of life. That's the view of credit managers and insolvency experts who are witnessing a huge rise in loan defaults and bankruptcies among this age group. People aged 20 to 29 account for the largest rise in bankruptcies over the past three years, the Insolvency and Trustee Service says. Numbers of people in this group made bankrupt have risen almost 30 per cent since 2004. People aged 30-49 account for more bankruptcies, but the increase in these age groups over the same period is around 18 per cent. How much are student loands to blame for this?