January 30 in the news....
- The election-year debate over the value of the American alliance will be brought into sharp focus when US Vice-President Dick Cheney visits Australia next month. Mr Cheney's visit is expected to draw protestors out onto Sydney's streets. It is rumoured the main protest will be against any attempts by Cheney to go roo shooting with Aussies.
- Former WBA world champion and rugby league footballer Anthony Mundine's first music video shows the union jack flag and a photo of Prime Minister John Howard being burned together. Filmed in Sydney in the notorious area of Redfern known as The Block, it shows Aboriginal residents tossing them into a barrel of flames. It then shows the rest of the petrol can used to start the fire being poured into dozens of Coke bottles and passed to residents to get high on.
- New Zealand's foreign minister has warned Kiwis to stop taking cheap shots at Australia and the US and instead recognise what they do in the Pacific region. He said there seemed to be an "irrational, and growing, sense of sport among some quarters in New Zealand where it is considered a perverse badge of honour to take cheap shots at the Australians and Americans". Australia's Foreign Ministry reacted with a shrug of the shoulders, highlighting that a sense of sport and a perverse badge of honour in New Zealand was not assumed to have anything to do with Australians or Americans, unless they were dressed up in an outercoating of wool.
- France's foreign minister has said that troops alone will not solve Iraq's woes in his country's latest swipe at US policy in the Middle East. The US agreed that woes sometimes can't be solved this way, it then lamented having big American graveyards in France full of troops and the fact the French are free to eat cheese, stare at paintings and be arseholes.
