December, 2010

Out here fires can sometimes run for weeks – if not months – and burn-out huge tracts of land – I’ll try to keep a watching eye on this fire over the coming weeks – if you have any information on its progress please log in and post a note about its progress.

Australia Network is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but operates independent of that official source. It is not a propaganda machine, even if from time to time it seems a little too cosy. That’s often a misreading of the situation: regionally there are issues that deserve far greater exposure than an Australian audience would care to bother with. And therein lies the rub with the tender trap.

The first attack had occurred in the winter 3 years ago and the second attack was 4 days ago (22/07/2009). The first attack was on the wife who was walking with her husband and 2 dogs (one large and one small) at about 7.30 pm across the golf coarse fairways near Horseshoe Billabong in moonlit darkness. The bird had circled overhead before swooping three times and then stalked the ‘intruders’ for several hundred metres almost up to the golf course clubhouse where it perched in a tree giving the victim a good view of her attacker.

females benefit substantially from consuming their male partners, a job they complete after the lengthy mating has finished. In one of the first studies able to demonstrate this effect, she found the cannibalistic females put on weight and produced more eggs using the extra energy they got from a single meal of male meat. “Sexual cannibalism can boost the reproductive output of the females by up to 40 per cent,” Miss Barry said.

Well he’s up late at night with the work light on, He’s gonna write a book but first he’s getting out his bong, He’s drinking red cask wine, smoking home grown reefer, Got the stereo on, he’s listening to Aretha, They call him Jesus of Westralia Street.
Lyrics for “Jesus of Westralia Street”, Tracey Bunn/Colin Holt

According to University of Oslo zoologist Petter Böckman, about 1,500 animal species are known to practice same-sex coupling, including bears, gorillas, flamingos, owls, salmon and many others. If homosexuality is natural in the animal kingdom, then there is the question of why evolution hasn’t eliminated this trait from the gene pool, since it doesn’t lead to reproduction. It may simply be for pleasure. “Not every sexual act has a reproductive function,” said Janet Mann, a biologist at Georgetown University who studies dolphins (homosexual behavior is very common in these marine mammals). “That’s true of humans and non-humans.”