The Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club

On the Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club today at 11am, Sky Digital 65, with Bomber from Alt, Wallace Chapman from Kiwi FM breakfast show and Ben Thomas from the NBR

News that caught my eye –
1: Center for Public Integrity has reviewed all the comments during the build up to the Iraq war and they found that 8 administration officials made at least 935 false statements about Iraq, the report called ‘False Pretences’ finds that Bush and his administration "waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq," Bush himself was found to have lied about Iraq, 260 times.

2: Watching Palestinians streaming across the Gaza border to get food and a family interviewed saying they were just there to ‘breath freedom’, really showed what Gaza has become, the largest open air prison in the world.

3: The West must be prepared to carry out pre-emptive nuclear strikes to halt the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, a radical new manifesto argues. The document - written by five of the West's most senior military officers and strategists - has been presented to the Pentagon and Nato's secretary-general. They argue there is a need for urgent and comprehensive reform of Nato, the Guardian reports. A new pact - involving the United States, Nato and the European Union - was also essential to face the challenges ahead, they said. It identified a number of key threats to the West's values and way of life - including international terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

4: Claims from Christchurch Mens Prison that an insurrection is pending – but haven’t we all heard that before in 1999?

5: Child prostitution in South Auckland – 3 years after Stakeout filmed this the NZ Police have sprung into action.

6: Great moments of irony – Paul Wolfowitz, the man who built the Iraq war and who left the World Bank after claiming to clean up corruption but was found to have gotten his girlfriend a cushy job, is now to chair the US Arms Control Panel, it’s like putting Fox News in charge of the Truth and Fairness in Media Council.

STORY 1 – Youngest killer's parole is delayed - hos
The country's youngest killer will remain behind bars for at least another two months while authorities consider the best way of managing his possible early release back into the community. Bailey Junior Kurariki appeared before the Parole Board for a sixth time on Friday, with the hearing adjourned until a date in March so authorities could obtain a residential restrictions report and detailed relapse prevention plan.
We have had a spate of youth attacks, a young University student stabbed this week by a 16 year old and 4 teenagers also faced court this week for a string of assaults on the North Shore – Bailey Junior Kurariki was our youngest ‘killer’, we threw him in prison and because we know our prisons are broken and do no rehabilitation whatsoever, we are terrified to let him out – do we have a teen violence problem and in our lynch mob country do we have the resources available to deal with these kids other than locking them up.

STORY 2 – Referendum looms on smacking law - sst
The rancorous smacking debate is set to be reopened this year, with an election day referendum looking increasingly likely. Anti-smacking campaigners are closing in on the number of signatures they need to force the referendum.
Family First director Bob McCoskrie said activists have gained 273,000 of the 300,000 signatures needed to trigger a Citizens Initiated Referendum. Activists, including Christians, libertarians and Act supporters, were working hard to get the remaining 30,000 signatures by the March 1 deadline.
Here we go again, could this end up back firing for the right? If the issue is campaigned on in the same screaming mess it created last time, it could rally urban liberals back to Labour, not against them, the end of the world and mass arrests of parents for knocking their children out of the way hot stoves hasn’t happened and our appalling rate of violence against children hardly defends the idea of allowing parents to go back to beating their kids.

STORY 3 – Small parties will determine who rules – poll - sst
A big increase in support for the Greens has knocked National hopes that it could govern alone, the first Herald DigiPoll in election year shows. National retains a lead in the poll registering 47.5 per cent support, down 3.8 per cent from its highest-ever Herald-DigiPoll rating of 51.3 per cent in November. Labour is relatively steady on 38.7 per cent support, meaning the gap between the two major parties has fallen to 8.8 points from 13.2 points in November, the Weekend Herald reports.
The Green Party has rocketed to 9.1 per cent after looking in previous polls as if it might struggle to make the 5 per cent threshold.
The Greens plummeted under 5% during the eco-terrorism nonsense of the Urewera 17, but after it was broadcast the Greens had fallen under 5% there was a real fear amongst voters of a Government minus the Greens and forced fence sitters to come back to the fold on mass – we have been arguing that the Nats can’t win this election on their own, and they can’t.

STORY 4 - $19,000 Burton bill spurs minister into action - sst
Annette King is alarmed the Legal Services Agency has asked the widow of a man murdered by Graeme Burton to pay $19,000 for the inquest into his death. Karl Kuchenbecker was shot by Burton while quad biking in the Wainuiomata Hills on January 6. His former partner was involved in a four-day inquest in November and was granted legal aid. Legal Services Agency manager of legal aid grants Robyn Nicholas told the Dominion Post the $19,000 figure was a theoretical maximum and the true amount would likely be less.
Don’t you love the smell of roasting bureaucrat and an angry Annette King will be in BBQ grilling mode – this despicable cock up shows how unfair these changes to legal aid has become, we now ‘loan’ the money to victims from legal aid and try and claw it back, how ugly.

STORY 5 - $9b fraud 'genius' vanishes - sst
He is 31, a lowly paid employee, and said to be a loner. But in perpetrating the greatest banking fraud in history, could Jerome Kerviel really have acted alone? It is just one of the questions swirling around the world's money markets as they try to digest the impact of the €4.9 billion ($NZ9.4 billion) defrauding of Societe Generale, France's second-largest bank.
Financiers are also asking whether the bank's desperate attempt to unravel Kerviel's trading positions on Monday provoked the stockmarket turmoil, in which prices fell 7 per cent across Europe.
No need to be concerned with the health of global capitalism, it was all just a Frenchman.

FINAL WORD – Ronalds blog and The Standard