Today's fake: Supposed billionaire with money to lend

Author of not a Ponzi scheme but a simple fraud, this fellow advertised himself as a billionaire willing to loan millions out of his personal fortune. Companies only had to put up an "establishment fee":

Mr Johnson was one of many who saw the ads WGA ran in the Australian business press. Favourable stories followed about a Newcastle company so happy with its first $US200 million loan, it said it was after a second.

The Herald has since revealed that no money was ever received and that one of the directors of that company was Sydney lawyer John Mulally, who happens to be WGA's lawyer in Australia.
Mr Johnson paid a $3.8 million establishment fee to secure a desperately needed $150 million loan, which never materialised. He is now struggling to refinance his development company which was hoping to develop 10,000 housing blocks around the central coast and Hunter area.

Not sure how long the scammer expected to get away with that. Sounds like a simple pigeon drop scheme, only with millions of dollars on an international scale.

Focus on the Fundies: Evangelist tries to profit from Australian fire disaster

An Australian fundamentalist is claiming that the Australian fire disaster is God's punishment for the state of Victoria allowing abortion.

Pastor Danny Nalliah says he had a dream that God's "conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb." Of course, this is exactly what American fundies said after Sept. 11 and after Katrina: that the disasters were holy retribution for New York or New Orleans allowing whatever it is they don't like. Of course, when floods hammer the Mississippi valley, or tornadoes decimate a Southern town, they don't have much to say.

It's always been like this: preachers said the same thing when San Francisco was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. After a distiller paid firefighters to save his warehouse, a local wag wrote:

If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over-frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down
And spare Hotaling's whiskey?

technorati: Australia, wildfires, abortion

Oops, forgot about those rabbits

Australian wildlife managers decided to remove the feral cats from an island to protect the native bird population. Oopsy: without the predatory cats, the rabbit population exploded and consumed the island's vegetation where the birds lived. The result was "widespread ecosystem devastation, and decades of conservation effort compromised."

Those Australians are kind of famous for their brilliant decisions involving wildlife, aren't they? That decision to import rabbits in the first place worked out fabulously.

Americans not the only ones freaked out by images of children

Jesse Helms may be dead, but his spirit lives on in Australia, of all places. There politicians are freaking out over a nude image of a child -- her mother is the artist -- on the cover of Art Monthly Australia. Foamers are threatening to cut support grants from the publication. Ironically, the issue contains an article exploring a previous controversy over images of children that were yanked, then restored, to a Sydney gallery after being declared "'G' or 'very mild.'"

It's no surprise that Australia is the only English-speaking country aside from the U.S. where right-wing evangelical Christianity has a foothold. Among the influential foamers down under is the Anglican bishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and other organizations like Family First and Catch the Fire Ministries, which attempt to duplicate the influence of U.S. groups like Focus on the Family.

technorati: art, censorship,Australia,fundamentalists, nudity