Looking for the European headlines. Looking at the headlines in Australian newspapers over the last week you would think there was some kind of crisis  going on here that was unique. Yet in the European community, where there were 272,209 applications for asylum last year, such scare stories are rare. It makes you wonder why.


Or perhaps things are about to change now that Lynton  Crosby is hitting his straps for British Tory leader David Cameron. I did notice this story on The Guardian website earlier this week: “A former Liberal Democrat minister, Sarah Teather, has criticised a Home Office ‘go home or face arrest’ mobile billboard advertising campaign as “nothing less than straightforward intimidation'”. It had a bit of a Tampa ring to it. And overnight there was a follow-up comment that “this anti-immigrant ad campaign is racism, pure and simple — adverts telling illegal immigrants to go home show little has changed in the UK since Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech”.

In hot water. A continuing increase in greenhouse gases in recent years has not resulted in any marked change in global surface temperatures. So where has the heat gone that’s cause by those greenhouse gases? The NOAA provides an answer with a series of charts showing how it is the oceans that are doing the warming.

There’s an interesting discussion on what will happen when the heat rises to the surface again on the SkepticalScience website.

Telling us the truth about royal baby coverage. The BBC’s Simon McCoy tells it like it was from outside St Mary’s hospital:

News and views noted along the way.

  • Film review: ‘The Wolverine’— “Hugh Jackman returns for his sixth screen appearance as the adamantium-reinforced superhero in James Mangold’s smart, Japan-set ‘The Wolverine,’ an entertaining and surprisingly existential digression from his usual X-Men exploits. Though Wolvie comes across a bit world-weary and battle-worn by now, Jackman is in top form, taking the opportunity to test the character’s physical and emotional extremes.”
  • Pentagon lays out options for U.S. military effort in Syria — “The Pentagon has provided Congress with its first detailed list of military options to stem the bloody civil war in Syria, suggesting that a campaign to tilt the balance from President Bashar al-Assad to the opposition would be a vast undertaking, costing billions of dollars, and could backfire on the United States.”
  • Cameron falls prey to the lure of clunky intrusion — “The political class is entranced by groups eager to legislate away social problems.”
  • Worker-robot interaction — “It’s easy to make the case that machinery and robots alter what workers do, and that it will shake up occupations and wages, but it flies in the face of two centuries of history to argue that mechanization will lead to mass unemployment.”
  • The stomach-turning process of how hot dogs are made