Granted it’s been just on three months since my last installment of the World in a Week blog segment. But, I thought I’d resurrect this feature for now and post a review of the past week’s events. Plenty of interesting stories out of Australia last week and as such the bulk of the stories will be from the southern continent.
- Big news on the sports front was the announcement that Rugby League international, Karmichael Hunt will jump codes to play Aussie Rules playing with the newly-formed Gold Coast Football Club in 2011, when the club enters the Australian Football League. Hunt will play out the rest of the NRL season with the Brisbane Broncos and most probably jump to yet another code in the interim playing professional Rugby Union in Japan or France for six months next year before commencing his foray into Aussie Rules. The news of Hunt’s defection to a rival football code was created a huge stir amongst the Australian (4-code) football fraternity with plenty of follow-up opinion pieces, such as this one from Rugby League former player, coach and now media pundit, Phil Gould, since the news was released last Wednesday.
- A more disturbing news story to come out of Australia was the ongoing court case in which a man claims to have been raped by a stripper using a dildo at his mate’s buck’s night. As the case has proceeded it does seem that the man in question was indeed genuinely violated by the stripper who subsequently threatened to call in bikies if she wasn’t pay in full for her services.
- Young cricketer Phillip Hughes found himself in trouble for his twit in which he announced to the world before the commence of play that he would not be taking his place on the field with his Aussie team-mates for the Third Test in the Ashes series against England at Edgbaston. Encouragingly though, former Australian cricket greats, Doug Walters and Matthew Hayden offered their support for the young opening batsman and his sudden axing.
- Another controversial story out of Australia this week involved scumbag and almost-universially loathed dickhead, Kyle Sandilands and his sidekick Jackie O from Sydney radio station 2day fm‘s morning programme. The couple thought it would be a good idea to have a 14-year old girl and her mother live on air for a truth-or-dare session on her sexual history complete with lie detector test. As the session continues the girl reveals the time she was raped to which arsehole of the month, Kyle Sandlilands replies, “Right … is that the only sexual experience you’ve had?” before the session is abruptly cut off with the mother and daughter offered subsequent counselling services. Understandably, the radio station and its two hosts received a wall of complains over their extreme poor judgment and lack of prior screening of the guests on a controversial topic in airing this session live, to which Sandilands lamely retorted that he was so shocked by the girls relevation he didn’t know what to say. The two have sinced been suspended indefinitely, with Sandilands claiming he’s ‘unable to go to air’.
- Rifts are emerging over just how to deal with the Taliban threat as there has unfortunately a large spike in allied casualties of late in Afghanistan, triggering debate from an increasingly war-weary allied camp especially in the US and UK over just how to tackle the threat of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
- The H1N1 pandemic continues its spread throughout the world increasing anxiety and concern as it nearers closer by the day to the northern winter of 2009-2010, when the virus could pose its greatest threat yet.
