Thursday, March 29, 2007

Is this the road for Iran's future?

The latest news and images coming from Iran are eerily similar to those that came from Iraq during the 90's. Does Iran really want to lose the respect of international opinion? Does Iran want to be regarded as just another crackpot country ruled by despots determined to take it into conflict? Britain has never supported talk of military action to reign in Iran's nuclear ambitions.This latest episode of kidnapping British sailors,parading them on TV, and forcing them to write absolute rubbish.Don't the people responsible for the treatment of these sailors have even half a fucking brain? Every single person with an ounce of intelligence knows that a serving member of the armed forces would write like this, the language used is not even typical of English writing-it has been dictated by a foreigner, and obviously under coercion. People in this country were weary 2 days ago of our forces fighting in Iraq, and were happy that the government announced that UK troops were being withdrawn from Iraq over the next year.People either didn't know, or didn't care about Iran's nuclear ambitions. Thanks to the idiots who are responsible for the treatment of these sailors, the British population are now much more aware of the Iranian government's dangerous tendencies. People here are calling for military action, if the sailors are not released. People don't have the thirst for a long drawn out military campaign, and I have heard people begin to wonder why we don't use the nuclear weapons at our disposal. These are extreme views, but so are some of the reports coming from Iran. Iran could never be another Iraq, the west will never make that mistake again, and that makes it a much more dangerous prospect than any other since World War 2.
Why would the Iranian government want to force the west's hand?
The people of Iran are the most progressive in the Middle East, and their society the most accomplished. Modernity lives alongside religion,not always in harmony, but from film-making to literature, Iran is a cultural beacon in the midst of the Islamic world.Isolation from the world is not what Iranian people need.
Let's hope this is not the beginning of something much larger, and much more dangerous.Once again the leaders of the world drag us towards a precipice we don't want to be on.

Shocking News!!

Shock Airport baggage theft scandal

Mar 29 2007

EXCLUSIVE by Luke Traynor, Liverpool Echo


FOUR baggage handlers are being questioned over allegations that they stole from suitcases at Liverpool John Lennon airport.

The employees were immediately suspended after a routine stop and search by other airport staff.

JLA bosses today confirmed the handlers had been withdrawn from their duties and that an internal investigation had been launched.

A spokesman for the airport would not say what items were thought to have been stolen, but the ECHO understands it included a quantity of cigarettes and other items......

Newsflash

Latest reports from Barcelona, are a little sketchy....but Steve Mclaren the England manager was found in his hotel room at 9am local time. Reports state that he wasn't strangled or poisoned, and that he didn't take his own life.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Slavery should be abolished

Today marked the 200th anniversary of Britain
abolishing slavery,albeit 200 years late.This
wasnt something that Britain should have expected
praise for,the same way we expect no thanks for
not embracing fascism in world war 2.You dont
thank someone for not raping,killing and
subjecting your family to eternal servitude.
I do believe this event should be marked as the
beginning of the end of slavery. Would the U.S.
have followed suit later that century,if the UK
had not?
Should we apologize for the sins of our
countrymen? I believe not. My ancestors would
have been peasants working the fields here in
Liverpool and Ireland 300\400 years ago,and then
to a lifetime of misery in the workhouse with the
advent of the industrial age.Last century they
were forced to fight in the trenches of Belgium
or face firing squads,without even the right to
Universal suffrage.The last 500 years of human
history have been brutal for all nations,the best
way we can make reperations to our ancestors is
by never forgetting the past and by never
repeating past atrocities.
Slavery,by the way,is still a reality in Africa
and India.Whose fault is that?Who should be
ensuring its abolition today? The UK has been
involved militarily in Bosnia,Kosovo,Sierra
Leonne,Kuwait,Afghanistan and of course Iraq in
the last 10 years alone.
It is a thankless task.


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Monday, March 26, 2007

Saturday, March 24, 2007

madhouse

Rubbish

Yet another crap performance by England, it is time for Steve Mclaren to go-he should have never got the job. I listened to the match at home on Radio 5 live. I still cannot believe that an England game is not on normal Tv, even though it's being played in Israel. Where is the justification? The England team belongs to the nation and should be made available for the whole nation to watch, not just Sky Sport. kids can't go to the pub to watch it.
I can't get Sky TV, as I don't have a BT telephone line( I have an NTL/Virgin line and 3 mobiles and 2 Skype numbers) even though I wouldn't line the robbing B**tards pockets anyway.
Went over to the Albert dock as the temperature must have hit a sweltering 14c!!

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Spring forward, Fall back.

The clocks go forward this Saturday. For me, this is a little like the finishing line of a marathon.
If you can imagine the coldest night of the year in Hong-Kong, after a dreary, windy day, taking the slow ferry(to Lantau) with the wind howling through the boat, and then waiting for a bus for half an hour at 3am, and for some obscure reason the 7-11 is closed, and so is everything else.
This is how it is here, for 5 months solid! I have said it before, but even finishing work at 6pm, it is dark and cold. The city doesn't spring to life next week, just because it is light at six, but at least it feels safer, and it's less cold. I've done two winters here now, and I seriously hope not to do another. If you have to choose Christmas or summer to come home, go for summer every time. Autumn,Christmas and Winter are completely crap here, give it a miss. ' Man' came from tropical Africa, why we ever headed so far North, is beyond me.We(I) are obviously not suited to this climate.
I have started to to brush up the kid's Chinese, with at least half an hour of (Pimsluer's) Cantonese everyday, and for the first time I have let Joseph use the computer to play a game. The 'game' is actually The Rosetta Stone Mandarin language learning software, but he loves it. Joseph sang Happy Birthday to my dad in Spanish over the weekend, and he is forever telling me what Spanish words mean, I think he's learning them in school, but I can't be sure!
70 days until Barcelona.

The calamity of Asia's lost women

The killing of baby girls has led to a surplus of disaffected men who are a threat to stability

Will Hutton
Sunday March 18, 2007

Observer

In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The inability of the Imperial armies to quell the rebellion for so long was a sign of the system's vulnerability that would eventually lead to its collapse.

Importantly, the Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China - Huai-pei - where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for more economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.

By 1850, the official records show that there were 129 men to every 100 women, an astonishing imbalance in the ratio between the sexes. Lower-class Huai-pei peasants could not find wives; hungry, economically displaced and, in Chinese terms, 'bare branches' - not proper men because they could not marry and father children - they turned to banditry as providing meaning and sustenance alike.

Those womanless bandits cast a long shadow over not just today's China, but the whole of Asia. Asia is estimated to suffer from up to 100 million missing women - aborted as foetuses or murdered in infancy because of their sex. Pakistan, erupting in protests last week against President Musharraf's anti-democratic high-handedness in suspending a senior judge, is a volatile tinderbox where the capacity for such insurrection to spread is everpresent.

Fanning the flames of injustice and Islamic fundamentalism is the country's sex imbalance. Dispossessed, displaced men with no prospect of ever finding a partner more readily take to the streets like Nian rebels; violence demonstrates masculine meaning.

In today's China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.

Both governments are becoming more and more worried about the psychological and social consequences, not to mention the sheer criminality of it. As one Indian commentator remarks, the most dangerous period of a woman's life is her first few months in the womb. China's President Hu Jintao, remembering the Nian rebellion, has publicly recognised that such a huge population of 'bare branches' constitutes one of the biggest potential threats to the communist regime's survival. Real unemployment in China is more than 20 per cent, inequality is growing rapidly and there is plenty of injustice for rootless, violently inclined, womanless men to protest about.

For its part, the Indian government is increasingly alarmed by the explosion of woman trafficking and prostitution, and the threat to the rule of law implied by such mass infanticide and abortion of babies because of their sex. In the last few weeks, it has stepped up its campaign to make the battery of laws against such practices stick.

It is illegal in India to require a wife's family to pay a dowry to her future husband's family, a disastrous disincentive for poor peasants to be the parents of girls; illegal to use ultrasound equipment to establish the sex of an unborn baby; illegal to perform abortion because of a baby's sex. Yet the practices are on the increase, with the use of ultrasound becoming ubiquitous.

The problem is that peasant societies economically and culturally value boys - and India and China remain peasant societies. Wives go to live with men in their villages; it is through men that the blood line continues; it will be your son's family that looks after you in old age. In rural China, where there is no pension system for 800 million people, terror of old age with no carer or pension is rampant, accentuated by the one-child system.

If your one child is a girl, she will marry out and you face an old age of desolation and neglect. The incentive to abort or kill the baby girl and try for a boy is immense. It is nearly always the mother, aware of the disadvantage of being a woman, who commits the crime, which makes policing so very hard.

You might expect hard economics would provide some counterbalance; as women become scarcer and their co-equal and vital part in constructing healthy societies ever more obvious across Asia, you would expect their value to rise. Yet the mores of marriage trump economics. Daughters move out to live in the villages of sons, so that sons continue to be more valuable.

Rather than women in general being valued more in the face of a woman shortage, what is happening is that lower-class women are marrying further up the social scale. In India, dowries are rising, not falling, as the average income of marrying couples increases. What is left behind, just as in Huai-pei, is an ever-growing pool of men at the bottom who are both poor and without the prospect of finding a wife.

In both China and India, there is a near complete correlation between the growth of violent crime and those cities and provinces where the sex ratio is worst. It is Indian provinces such as Uttar Pradesh and parts of the Punjab that have both the worst sex imbalance and highest levels of recorded crime. Chinese cities such as Shanghai or Guangzhou report 90 per cent of crime from unmarried migrant men.

Most Chinese regimes in history, as the communists know, have been toppled from below. Western commentators like to project China and India as economic giants effortlessly on the move. But societies that are so dysfunctional rarely sustain rapid growth or stable government for long. There will be change. The questions are how and when.

· Will Hutton's recent book on China, The Writing on the Wall, is published by Little, Brown, £20

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Global Warming Scam

It is about time, that 'global warming' is put into context-It quite simply does not exist.
The world's climate has been going up and down for millennia. There have been ice ages, mini ice ages, temperature rises and global droughts throughout Earth's history.
There can be no denying that the Earth's climate is indeed rising at the moment, but there is no evidence that this is due to Man.
The effects of pollution are still, quite obviously, bad for our environment, and for that reason we must strive to clean up our act. What mustn't continue to happen, is what is happening in this country- militant greenies dictating government policies.
As we had the loony left during the 80's, and still have the 'PC' extremists, the greens have taken over.
Some people in the US have called for scientists that deny man made global warming to be censured. This reminds me of the catholic church denying evolution and disallowing any contradictory views.
On a practical level, this fixation with the environment is beginning to have undesirable inconveniences on our everyday lives. In my office, the bins under our desks have been removed in the name of the environment, and the(office) intranet message boards are full of twats extolling the virtues of recycling. In reality, all the rubbish, the same amount and type as before is piled up and overflowing in communal bins. Our bins at home are now collected once a fortnight. We have recycling bins already, which is fine, but now there is discussion about what rubbish we should be putting in our bins!
I am sick to the fucking teeth of hearing about 'carbon footprints'. It is time that these hippy environmentalists got proper jobs and left us normal people alone. It is obvious that we need to reduce pollution and waste, but, that should be done by producing clean energy-I don't choose how my electricity is produced.In fact if I could choose, I think it is about time we started building more Nuclear Power plants, and work out a way to send the waste into the next solar system, or 10 miles under the pacific ocean seabed.
I would like to hear some definitive proof that the current rise in global temperature is man-made, and not just part of a climate cycle.
And I want my bin back.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Indian Winter

If Indian Summer is a late blast of warmth, we are in for a blast of Indian Winter. The forecast is heavy snow this weekend.
I thought we had got off lightly this year, with endless days of cold and rain-but not very cold and very few frosts.
77 days until Barcelona!

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Rejected petition.


Hi,

I'm sorry to inform you that your petition
has been rejected.

Your petition was classed as being in the
following categories:

* Language which is offensive,
intemperate, or provocative

If you wish to edit and resubmit your
petition, please follow
the following link:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/newdentists/Ekg45KAjYRfFCiEFkQAXjuo

You have four weeks in which to do this,
after which your
petition will appear in the list of rejected
petitions.

Your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime
Minister to: 'force all
dentists to adopt new dental contract, or
lose license, and
allow foreign dentists into UK to undercut
greedy UK dentists.'

This country is being held hostage(dentally)
by the most
selfish group of people in society.Introduce
dentists from
places where dentists would be overjoyed to
earn a decent
living, in a (should be)caring profession.
Enable competition
to flow.

-- the ePetitions team

Monday, March 12, 2007

Israel recalls 'naked ambassador'


BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Israel recalls 'naked ambassador': "Israel recalls 'naked ambassador'
Israeli PM Ehud Olmert
Israel's leadership has been shaken by a string of scandals
Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear."...........

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Tory party suicide

So the Tory party wants to increase the duty people pay for flying-even more than Labour have already done. With any luck, this will be the issue that makes the holidaying Brits withdraw their support in droves.
Last month 1.6 million people here, signed a petition to stop the government introducing road tolls(the govt didn't say they would listen), but this has obviously led David Cameron to keep cars on the road ,but punish air travellers.
Does 1 person's 'carbon footprint' flying once or twice a year equal someone's who uses their car everyday?
If I chose to drive to Hong Kong, would that reduce the emissions? Apparently going on a cruise creates more emissions than flying, as do cargo ships, and oil tankers.
As people don't have any choice, but to fly(long haul), the logical answer is to find other answers. Logically, this has to be cars, but that would lose votes. We have a problem, and the only way forward is for all political parties to announce that they will announce road pricing, and road tolls, and increase tax on cars and on fuel for private cars. At the same time as this they need to reveal plans to greatly increase public transport, and reduce the cost, by subsidising routes. The rail network needs to double in size, and every city should have an overground light rail/tram network(recently refused in Liverpool). Finally they need to visit Hong Kong to see how public transport can really work.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6439615.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6439051.stm

Thursday, March 08, 2007

The Real China

The Sky Isn't Falling in China

The day after the Shanghai stock market fell, we saw again all the same warnings about the Chinese system and the odds of its collapse. By Fareed Zakaria Newsweek

March 12, 2007 issue - For some years economists and analysts have been wondering what it would take to scare financial markets. Wars, coups, soaring commodity prices, increased energy costs, unwinding housing markets—nothing seemed to do it. Last week we got one answer: China. The sharp plunge in the Shanghai stock market caused jitters around the world. But while the reaction pointed to the increased importance of China in global economics, it also highlighted the confusion and misunderstanding that surround the Middle Kingdom.

When a market has gone up 150 percent since 2006, as Shanghai's had, one doesn't need to search for grand explanations to recognize that it's bound to retreat at some point. More important, there is little linking the Shanghai stock market with the overall Chinese economy. It simply doesn't play the role that the stock market does in the United States or Britain. Most Chinese companies raise money through banks, not equities. Indeed, for the past 10 years, Chinese stocks have gone down while the economy has boomed. And yet the day after the market fell, we saw yet again all the same warnings about the hollowness of the Chinese system, the perils it faces and the imminent possibilities of its collapse.

It might be time to admit that we really don't understand China. The country simply does not conform to our most basic beliefs about what makes nations grow. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian scholar, has argued persuasively that clear and strong property rights are the prerequisite for economic growth. Except that China, the fastest-growing country in human history, has an extremely unclear and weak system of property rights. Alan Greenspan has argued that the rule of law is the linchpin of market economics. Except that China has a patchy set of laws, unevenly enforced. The Washington Consensus that the World Bank and the IMF have peddled across the globe claims that if currencies don't float freely, they will produce huge distortions in the economy. China has declined that advice and yet prospers. So, instead of learning from facts and revising theory, we assume that the facts are wrong, that China is one grand charade.

This paradox is even greater in the political realm. Scholars examine China's political system—a Leninist party that maintains a total monopoly on power—and they are sure that it is crumbling. Yet the regime has defied predictions of its collapse for 25 years. We're sure that the Chinese people must hate their government, except that the only polls we have suggest exactly the opposite. Surveys conducted in the late 1990s by the scholar Jie Chien showed 80 percent support for the political system. Last year's Pew Survey on Global Attitudes has a little-noticed question: "Are you satisfied with the state of your nation?" Less than 30 percent of Americans said they were. China topped the list, with 81 percent of those surveyed answering "yes." Perhaps people lie to pollsters in China, but these numbers are consistent in several polls, and people in China do regularly express their opposition to corruption, environmental degradation and other specific policies.

Citizens' feelings about their governments are made up of a complex mix of cultural, historical and emotional attitudes. Americans, by and large, don't understand this because the basis of American nationalism is ideology. We believe that regimes with bad ideologies must be deeply unpopular. So we assume that the Iranian mullahs have no support in their society, that Vladimir Putin is viewed by his people as a dictatorial thug and that Saddam Hussein must have been reviled even by his Sunni brethren in Iraq.

. Books proliferate about the fragility and weakness of the Beijing government—and the critiques are often extremely intelligent. But considering the massive challenges that it has faced, the regime has handled them quite skillfully year after year—though sometimes with a brutal edge. At every juncture, it's been able to tackle some seemingly overwhelming problems, postpone others and dodge bullets. Chinese leaders have managed the migration of 200 million peasants into cities and the mass unemployment caused by shutting down state-owned factories. They've periodically slowed the economy to stop its overheating. They've planned for the largest and fastest urbanization in history, and controlled the social discontent bred by such headlong growth. None of their moves has been perfect, but compared with any other country in the world, China has managed its problems well.

Is it so difficult to understand why the Chinese people might be satisfied with their current situation? Over the past century the country has gone through chaotic turmoil almost every decade—the collapse of the monarchy, warring states, the Japanese invasion, civil war, the communist takeover, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. But in the past 30 years, China has enjoyed stability, as well as the fastest growth rate of any country ever. Some 350 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The country has a new, sparkling image across the world. If you were Chinese, you might take some pride in that too.


Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Our neighbour and The Closest Star System


This solar system is only 4 light years away, a mere 144,000 years travelling at our present speed. It has 2 suns and a weird dwarf sun, it probably contains habitable worlds, and Hubble is searching for them as we speak.
We, eventually, will need to move on.This looks like the likeliest place.
Follow the link for more info.

APOD: May 26, 1996 - Alpha Centauri: The Closest Star System

or this one for even more:
http://homepage.sunrise.ch/homepage/schatzer/Alpha-Centauri.html

Liverpool 0 1 Barcelona

That was our best ever loss. We win on the away goals rule.
Winning isn't everything,not today. Tonight I watched the game at home on normal TV with a bottle of wine and Teosdee asleep on the sofa. Quarter finals of the Champions League, knocking out Barcelona,not too bad a season-sweet!
Strange being in Liverpool, soon on my way to Barcelona.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

How far is the nearest galaxy?

Travel Time from the Earth

Destination Jet
(600 mi/hr)
Rocket
(25,000 mi/hr)
Sunbeam
(186,000 mi/sec)
Moon 16.5 days 9.4 hr 1.2 sec
Sun 17 years 8 months 4 months 8.5 min
Mercury 10 years 10 months 3 months 5 min
Venus 5 years 5 months 1.5 months 2.5 min
Mars 8 years 10 months 2.5 months 4 min
Jupiter 74 uears 3 months 1 year 9 months 35 min
Saturn 150 years 5 months 3 years 7 months 1 hr 11 min
Uranus 318 years 6 months 7 years 7 months 2 hr 30 min
Pluto 690 years 1 month 16 years 5 months 5 hr 25 min
Alpha Centauri 4.8 million years 114,155.2 years 4.2 years
Sirius 9.6 million years 228,310.4 years 8.4 years
Pleiades Cluster ---------- ---------- 400 years
Crab Nebula ---------- ---------- 4000 years
Center of the Milky Way ------------ ---------- 38,000 years
Andromda Galaxy ------------ ---------- 2.2 million years

The table above is much more than a chart of travel time, it represents a glimpse into the past. When you look into the night sky you are looking into the history of the universe. The sunlight that shines on us is 8.5 minutes old when it reaches Earth. Sunlight reflected from Pluto takes 5.5 hours to reach the astronomer's telescope. When the light of Sirius hits your eye, those photons have been traveling for over 8 years through space. This means you are seeing that star not as it is toniht but as it was over 8 years ago. And most of the stars we see in the sky are hundreds or thousands of light years away. The Andormeda galaxy, at a mere 2.2 million light years, is truly a next door neighbor. All of the other galaxies are millions upon millions of light years distant. And that's how big the universe is.

The numbers are only rough estimates and assume the celestial bodies are not in motion for the sake of ease of calculation.

How Big Is the Universe?

Are You feeling peeved off with your hair today?Are you worried about that zit on your nose? Find out how insignificant we are by clicking on this link.(great for kids)

Astronomy For Kids - How Big Is Space - KidsAstronomy.com

Honest advertising2

Honest advertising

This was actually sold in the supermarkets - until they twigged!!

Catholic Parrots

 
A lady goes to her priest one day and tells 
him, "Father, I have a problem.
I have two female parrots, but they only know 
how to say one thing."
"What do they say?" the priest inquired.
 They say, "Hi, we're hookers! Do you want to 
have some fun?"
That's obscene!" the priest exclaimed,
Then he thought for a moment.
"You know," he said, "I may have a solution to 
your problem. I have  two
 male talking parrots, which I have taught to 
pray and read the Bible. 
Bring your two parrots over to my house, and 
we'll put them in the cage
with Francis and Peter. 
My parrots can teach your parrots to praise 
and worship, and your parrots are sure to stop saying . . 
that phrase . . in no time."
Thank you," the woman responded, "this may 
very well be the solution."> 
The next day, she brought her female parrots 
to the priest's house.
As he ushered her in, she saw that his two 
male parrots were inside  their  cage holding rosary beads
and praying.
Impressed, she walked over and placed her  parrots 
in with them.
After a few minutes, the female parrots cried 
out in unison: "Hi, we're  hookers! Do you want to have some fun?"
 There was stunned silence.
 Shocked, one male parrot looked over at the 
other male parrot and exclaimed,
"Put the beads away, Frank. Our prayers have been answered!"

lunar eclipse

This is how the eclipse looked from here, but my camera wasn't good enough to get these pics, these were sent in to the BBC from Scotland and London.


Thursday, March 01, 2007

Caring Britain-Hecklers urged suicidal man to 'jump' | the Daily Mail

Hecklers urged suicidal man to 'jump' | the Daily Mail

G'day mate!

Gays can be 'pansies', Australian court rules


By Nick Squires in Sydney

Calling one of the stars of the television series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy "a pillow biter" and a "pompous little pansy prig" was offensive but permissible, an Australian tribunal ruled today.



Veteran radio broadcaster John Laws, nicknamed Golden Tonsils for his deep voice and six-figure salary, made the on-air remarks in 2004 about Carson Kressley, the blonde-haired star of the popular TV show.

He launched the tirade after watching Kressley on television at the Melbourne Cup, where the American had been invited to judge a fashion competition.

"He was judging girls - now what the hell does a pillow-biter know about judging girls?" Laws asked. "They should have had a few truckies down there, or me….fair-dinkum Aussie blokes judging fair-dinkum Aussie girls. Not this pompous little pansy." "I remember when Australia was a land of proud, dedicated women and hard-drinking and hard-talking men. Why this sudden proliferation of pansies I don’t know. The sooner this fairy flies out and lets us judge our own women on our own criteria the better." Declaring Australia a land of "truck drivers, wharf labourers and free thinking red-blooded men," he then went on to play a recorded message incorporating the words "piss off pansy".

A gay rights activist, Gary Burns, filed a complaint with the Administrative Decisions Tribunal in New South Wales, saying Mr Laws’ comments portrayed gay men as dirty and perverted.

The tribunal agreed that Laws’ remarks amounted to vilification of homosexuals, but dismissed the complaint on the grounds of free speech.

"We rule unanimously that the statements that Mr Laws made constituted homosexual vilification, because they incited severe ridicule of homosexual men on the ground of their homosexuality," the tribunal said in their judgment.

"By majority, we rule further, however, that his publication of these statements on the radio fell within an exception established by the (Anti-Discrimination) Act that is designed, within appropriate limits, to preserve freedom of expression. Our majority decision is accordingly that the publication was lawful."

Laws, one of Australia’s best known radio presenters, had argued that his comments were tongue-in-cheek and intended to be funny. Burns said he was disappointed by the decision and had gone to the tribunal to "stand up to bullies".

He added: "I took this action because I believe it’s important to stand up and erase hate in society." "I didn’t win on this occasion, but I will continue in my mission to dissuade hate in society." A lawyer for Laws’ radio network, Southern Cross Broadcasting, said the result was "what we had hoped for."