The following eyewitness account of Sunday's events appeared in Monday's subscriber email edition of Crikey. As at Tuesday morning it has not appeared on their website, and I have not seen it posted anywhere else. I take the statement in its opening paragraph as implicit permission to republish here. The author is Cronulla resident Benjamin Amy:
I've just returned home after spending six hours watching the disgusting afternoon unfold at Cronulla beach. I'm sending this to anyone that'll read it.
There's a lot of statements of the bleeding obvious I could make about the quite stomach-turning race riots in Cronulla (and in Maroubra, Brighton le-Sands, Woolooware, Tempe and Lakemba) over the past few days. While race-based rioting in indigenous ghettos is, sadly, nothing new, this gang versus gang warfare is nothing like anything seen in modern Australia. Just twenty kilometres from where I live. I'll say my bit on the issue further on. Race is an issue here, but not the central one. Nor is it just, as conservative political leaders have been saying, a law-and-order issue.
This in over the weekend from Human Rights Watch about the House of Bush's old chinas at the House of Saud:
Saudi Arabia: Court Orders Eye to Be Gouged Out
Torture Sentence for Indian Migrant Worker Follows Clash With Saudi Citizen
I've put together another thirty-second promo for The Net Sessions, with the help of a fifty-four year-old US Civil Defense announcement. The file (MP3, 128kbps, mono, 469K) can be downloaded here.
In the Saturday night gloom at the Feroz Shah Kotla, Vaas bowled to Tendulkar, who hit a single. Before another ball could be bowled, the umpires offered the light to the batsmen for the day and off they went. There's more to that ball and that run, however. It brought up the 100 for Sachin Tendulkar, his 35th in Test cricket.
It's not just a great moment in parliamentary behaviour, but a great moment in understated journalism, as the Press Trust of India began a wire report on Tuesday with the following:
Shiv Sena MLA Gulabrao Gawande created commotion in Maharashtra Assembly today by pouring kerosene on his clothes and trying to consume some poisonous substance to protest against, what he called, DF Government's "apathy" towards scores of suicides by debt-ridden farmers, an act resulting in his suspension for rest of Winter Session.
I've critiqued CricInfo's entry into the blogosphere a bit more than I wanted to or indeed should have, but I'll wrap it today by commending the two latest additions to their stable.
I subscribe to the view that calling Adam Curry the inventor of podcasting is akin to calling Al Gore the inventor of the internet. Which enables me to have a chuckle at this item posted in the last hour by Frank Barnako on his Internet Daily column on Marketwatch.com (free rego might be required to read this).
You've probably noticed some of these already, but here we go:
Firstly, I have now merged my old blog with the current one, and this makes for a fairly comprehensive compilation of all the cricket-related stuff that I have written since 1996 that isn't owned by Anyone Else. (Hence the gap from 1997 to 2001. - If you do want to see the stuff I have written or edited that is owned by Anyone Else, follow this link.)
