Free Republic

FAMILIES relying on food parcels to survive; pregnant women being whisked away to give birth because the hospital can’t help them, pot holes that just keep getting bigger and a community that can’t afford to look after itself. It sounds like a damned corner of a faraway land. But it’s actually a forgotten fragment of Australia whose handful of residents were given unprecedented power to look after their own affairs. According to some, the experiment in self-rule has failed so miserably it’s end can’t come quickly enough. In just over a month Gai Brodtmann, the Labor member for Canberra, will...

A day's work in the garden nearly three years ago has proved an expensive exercise for Anthony Tauszik. His decision in June 2002 to illegally cut down two Norfolk Island pines standing between his Pearl Beach weekender and the ocean has cost him a $25,000 fine and several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. Last month Tauszik was found guilty of illegally removing two of three pines he felled from the front of his $1.35million property. In the Land and Environment Court yesterday, the resident of Circular Quay's Toaster building was fined and ordered to pay costs. The prosecution's bill...

DUBLIN, Ireland - Ireland has become the first country on earth to cut off direct-dialed calls to entire nations in a bid to crack down on Internet-based fraud. The crackdown, announced this week and due to come into force Oct. 4, will block calls to 13 locations — all but one of them far-flung islands — to deter fraudsters from breaking into people's computers and hijacking their modems for profit. The government-appointed Commission for Communications Regulation said it was obliged to act after receiving more than 300 complaints this year from Internet users who discovered that their connections had been...