Jozef Banas supplied information to the secret police on the movements of foreign journalists when he was employed in the press division of the foreign ministry. At Media Dragon, we were hardly surprised to read last year that Jozef Banas was unhappy with the decision of the Memory of the Nation Institute to publish the files.
Last week a Slovakian secretary of state, Jan Hurny, a member of the same party, resigned following allegations about his past as an StB agent. Jozef Banas is to address a parliamentary session this week with respect to his listing on the Stb files. While in Poland Jozef Oleksy resigned after being found guilty of lying about collaborating with Communist secret services Blood Sucking Fleas
A western Sydney schoolboy has received a back-to-school cheque addressed to "Mrs Passed Away", 15 months after his mother died. I'm not in a position to make a personal apology because it wasn't an envelope that I addressed. Fair go; Bob Carr Ministry has Business and AAA on Side
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Gillard, Rudd canvass colleagues
A Three-Horse race for Labor's federal leadership seems likely. As we all know, a week is a long time in politics ... Labor faces an excruciating dilemma. It is running scared, scarred from its experiment with generational change and paying the price for a decade or more of not replenishing its talent pool. It has reached the point where only a handful of caucus members have any employment experience outside politics or the union movement It is a party with few choices and those that it has are flawed
KIM Beazley is holding on to the votes of many of the caucus members who backed him at his last failed leadership attempt, but support was last night building for Kevin Rudd.
The former opposition leader flew to Sydney yesterday to continue lobbying for votes, breaking with his tactics of 2003 by calling caucus colleagues directly rather than relying on close factional allies to do the work for him.
But while he remains the frontrunner, the race is tightening, with Mr Rudd's supporters last night claiming they already had about 30 of the 44 caucus votes he would need to scrape through and win.
I wouldn't have blamed him for either, or both, of two highly personal reactions: psychic depression, or Get Stuffed. As the leader of the Labor Party, Mark Latham can't afford either. He has to summon his courage and grit out the next three, and possibly six, years. It will be the toughest time of his life: tougher than his testicular cancer, tougher than pancreatitis, tougher than losing the 2004 election. Whatever, Latham was the victim
• Numbers All Over The Floor [Google links to leadership challengers; Gillard is game as contest gets ugly; The Australian federal election of 2004 is a long way distant from the 1840s of Karl Marx, but his arguments still resonate. Many in the Labor Party and on the Left have blamed the 'selfishness' of families with mortgages who overwhelmingly voted for the Coalition and who supported John Howard because they believed that the Coalition was more likely than the ALP to keep interest rates lower The collapse of communism and the failure of socialist states around the world revealed the Left's vision to be unattainable ]
• · Bush begins 2nd term today amid stiff security; Bush Avoids Iraq in Inaugural Speech George Bush aka Orwell launches term with vow to spread freedom; [ The anchor of King's dream; The anchor of Economic dream]
• · · The Pentagon has hit back at claims by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that US commandos have been carrying out covert operations inside Iran. There is plausible deniability - of course they [the Bush administration] don't want it known- Seymour Hersh Intelligence coup: Until the Government Denies it; [Being a 007 can be glamorous and boring all in the same day As a city police officer, never try to arrest the mayor; A political artist on trial A professor facing possible charges of bio-terrorism speaks in Toronto]
• · · · This blogger holds many bitterweet memories of the Czechoslovak army: Compulsory military service was introduced by Emperor Franz Jozef in 1868 when the Czech lands were part of Austria-Hungary The last conscripts have left the Czech army ; There is never a shortage of idiots, but, War and Principal Vidmar takes the cake! Idiot of the Year
• · · · · CNN.com - Wave of suicide blasts kills at least 25
• · · · · · The identity of Australians could be subjected to unprecedented scrutiny under the biggest security protection plan since the failed Australia Card; Authorities are scouring Boston for four Chinese nationals and two Iraqi men who may pose a nuclear threat to the city Two Iraqi; via Czech Amerikan: Four Chinese nationals sought in terror probe
[I am going to be sleeping in my bed in Massachusetts tonight and I feel perfectly safe doing so
-Mitt Romney; Massachusetts governor]