POLICE STATE

Gold Walkley winner hits out at AFP

This year's Gold Walkley winner Hedley Thomas has criticised the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for pursuing the lawyers who leaked the information that allowed him to write his award-winning articles.

Mr Thomas from The Australian won the country's top journalism prize for a series of stories about the government's handling of the Dr Mohamed Haneef case.

In his acceptance speech, he thanked Dr Haneef's lawyers Peter Russo and Stephen Keim for risking their careers to expose vital facts about the case.

"They went out on a limb, Stephen Keim particularly, risked his career and livelihood to help me see the facts in this case and for that he is still being pursued by the Australian Federal Police who have lodged and have active a formal complaint against him," he said.

"And I believe that every journalist in this room should understand that the Australian Federal Police and its Commissioner Mr Mick Keelty is still trying to punish Steven Kime for bringing out the truth."

BIG BROTHER

UK's families put on fraud alert

Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing.
Alarm bells should be sounding in Canberra -- as well as in commercial, legal, law enforcement and policy-making circles -- following the news from Britain that data on 25 million people has been lost in the post.
Personal details of half the UK's population stored on two computer discs went missing while being couriered from HM Revenue and Customs, the UK tax office.
"It is inexcusable, I deeply regret it, I unreservedly apologise for what has happened," grovelled Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling.

TOE IN THE WATER

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing.

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
His proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics. Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space.

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.

"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Saudi court orders 200 lashes for rape victim

The United States has given only mild criticism of a Saudi court's order to double the number of lashings for a gang rape victim.

"This is a part of a judicial procedure overseas in the court of a sovereign country," US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, when asked to comment on the case. Mr McCormack declined to directly criticise America's close ally, or the Saudi legal system, which has made a series of erratic verdicts in recent months.

The 19-year-old Shiite woman from the town of Qatif in the Eastern Province was raped by seven men in 2006.
A court had originally sentenced the woman to 90 lashes and the rapists to jail terms of between 10 months and five years.
But the victim's lawyer told Reuters last week the court had increased her sentence to 200 lashes and six months in prison.

He said the court had blamed the woman for being alone with unrelated men.

INNER SPACE

Professor proposes theory of unparticle physics

Howard Georgi, a physicist at Harvard University, has recently published a paper on so-called unparticle physics, which suggests the existence of “unparticle stuff” that cannot be accounted for by the standard model. Appearing in a recent edition of Physical Review Letters, the paper says that unparticle stuff would be very different than anything seen before.

Georgi – a pioneer in supersymmetry, quantum chromodynamics, and grand unified theories – explains that the low-energy physics of nontrivial scale-invariance cannot be described in terms of particles. In this initial investigation of the idea, he gives a quantitative scenario of the production of unparticle stuff, and predicts how it could be experimentally detected in the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator that will open in early 2008.

In many ways, science is all about finding the meaning in the mysteries of math.

DOUBLE ENTENDRE

Dong sues over sex scene cuts

A CHINESE moviegoer is suing China's film watchdog in frustration with the censored version of Ang Lee's steamy World War Two drama Lust, Caution, Beijing media reported today.
The film was shown minus the on-screen sex and other scenes cut at the behest of local censors.
Mr Dong Yanbin had filed a suit against the nation's film censor for infringing upon his "consumer rights".

HIGH STRANGENESS

Global panel calls for new UFO probe

An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials has called on the US Government to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security, given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.
The panellists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.

"It's a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the Government?" remarked John Callahan, a former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska.

WORK ETHIC

Buster Martin blows out the candle of his cake at work

100-year-old told 'take day off'

A man has turned up for work despite being told to take the day off for his 100th birthday.
Buster Martin began cleaning vans for Pimlico Plumbers despite retiring as a market worker three years ago.
Buster Martin said he went back to work because he was bored.
Colleagues at the firm in Lambeth, south London, threw him a surprise party and were treating him to a tour of Chelsea FC's Stamford Bridge ground.
He joined the Army at 15 and served 35 years before joining the Navy.
Mr Martin said the last time he had a party he was in the desert "getting as drunk as a Lord when I was 21". (c. 1928)
He said the secret of his longevity could be due to a pint of bitter every day and daily press ups.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Press freedom declining: audit

An independent audit by former New South Wales ombudsman Irene Moss has found a general "subtle shift" towards secrecy in Australia.The audit reviewed legislation and practices related to free speech issues affecting the media in Australia.