Rolling Stone has been covering Australia's global warming extremes for two years, and they've stepped up their coverage in light of the continent's current extreme heat emergency:

Though Australia's existing heat record, set in 1960, still stands for the moment, officials believe it may soon be surpassed. The nation's Bureau of Meteorology has been open about the impact that rising greenhouse gases are already having there: The agency's website declares that Australia is "experiencing rapid climate change," including more frequent heat waves and changing rainfall patterns.

The current heat wave has produced above-average temperatures for 80 percent of the country – the nationwide average on Monday was 104 degrees Fahrenheit – and scores of wildfires. The state of New South Wales, home to Australia's most populous city, Sydney, is facing its greatest fire danger ever, officials say. In some areas of the state, the official fire danger rating is "catastrophic.

"Nor are heat waves and wildfires Australia's only climate woes. Decades of drought are causing the salination of groundwater in the nation's prime agricultural region; warming and acidifying oceans are killing the Great Barrier Reef; and extreme storms are increasing. As Rolling Stone's Jeff Goodell reported in 2011, the tendency of climate change to "amplify existing climate signals" means that already extreme places like Australia will be the first to experience the kind of major impacts that could be in store for the rest of the world.

"Australia is the canary in the coal mine," said David Karoly, a climate researcher at the University of Melbourne, in that story. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."

It’s been a hellishly hot summer in Australia, this week temperatures soaring over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), and bushfires raging out of control in three states. In Sydney, it’s even too hot for ice cream trucks.

In some places, the temperature has reached an all-time record high of 54 degrees Celsius (129.2 Fahrenheit). The heat has become so bad that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s interactive weather map has had to add new colours – deep purple and pink – to indicate temperatures in excess of its previous cap of 50 degrees. And summer has just started... the heatwave hasn’t even peaked yet.

Worse, this so-called “once in 20 or 30 year heat wave” is likely to become a much more regular occurrence, the last record breaking heatwave in 2009. But of the more than 800 articles covering the heatwave over the past five days, less than ten of them even mentioned “climate change”, “global warming” or “greenhouse gas.” And those that have skimmed over it quickly.

Australia’s media is just as irresponsibly bad at covering climate change, even when their feet are literally being held to the fire. When Morning Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons tweeted, “Will the politics of carbon tax/climate change alter with this extraordinary, sustained heatwave hitting the southern states?”, Tim Blair retorted in the Daily Telegraph, “It’s called summer, Peter.” Tim Blair seems less concerned about climate change than he is sulking over the possibility that air fare might become so expensive that only the rich “carbon kings” will be able to travel to London, Paris or New York, while the rest of us “bogans” will have to make do with Mildura. (Although, if I were from Mildura, that sort of snobbery would get right up my nose, it’s a lovely place.)

So, on a day when Simon Divencha of the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide is asking why, oh why, isn’t the media paying more attention to climate change, why are our media, our leaders, even our community at large still willfully in denial of the realities of global warming, I sat down for lunch in the sweltering Queensland heat and flicked on the television to watch... a rerun of “Miracle Planet: Snowball Earth.”

*sigh*.

So the U.S. has become the model for what other countries don't want to do with their markets. Don't you wish we had capable, efficient and timely regulation for our markets? Hey, a girl can dream!

Industry leaders and regulators in several countries including Canada, Australia and Germany have adopted or proposed limits on high-speed trading and other technological developments that have come to define United States markets.

The flurry of international activity is particularly striking because regulators have been slow to act in the United States, where trading firms and investors have been hardest hit by a series of market disruptions, including the flash crash of 2010 and the runaway trading in August by Knight Capital that cost it $440 million in just hours. While the Securities and Exchange Commission is hosting a round table on the topic on Tuesday, the agency has not proposed any major new rules this year.

In contrast, the German government on Wednesday advanced legislation that would, among other things, force high-speed trading firms to register with the government and limit their ability to rapidly place and cancel orders, one of the central strategies used by the firms to take advantage of small changes in the price of stocks. A few hours later, a committee at the European Parliament agreed on similar but broader rules that would apply to all 27 member states of the European Union if governments also give their approval.

In Australia, the top securities regulator recently stated its intention of bringing computer-driven trading firms under stricter supervision and forcing them to conduct stress testing, to protect “against the type of disruption we have seen recently in other markets.”

The broadest and fastest changes have come out of Canada, where this spring regulators began increasing the fees charged to firms that flood the market with orders. The research and trading firm ITG found that the change had already made trading more efficient by reducing the crush of data burdening the market’s computer systems.

Now Canadian trading desks are preparing for rules that will come into effect on Oct. 15 and curtail the growth of the sophisticated trading venues known as dark pools that have proliferated in the United States. While the regulation has been hotly debated, many Canadian bankers and investors have said they don’t want to go any further down the road that has taken the United States from having one major exchange a decade ago to having 13 official exchanges and dozens of dark pools today.

I recently was added to the team over at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, and my first post is up -- this one concerning an "Internet yob" (as they called him in one Aussie headline) from Ohio creating an international incident Down Under:

Violent IKA Activist Lashes Out Again

Jarred Hensley is a white supremacist who likes to hurt people. He did prison time for it. And now he's figured out a way to hurt people and even break a country's laws without having to do jail time. Along the way, he's also caused something of an international uproar on the Internet.

Hensley is a Cincinnati-based activist in the Imperial Klans of America, one who already brought serious trouble to the organization. In 2006, he and fellow IKA member Andrew R. Watkins brutally assaulted a 16-year-old in rural Kentucky because they thought he was Latino; the pair spent three years in prison for the attack, and the SPLC brought a lawsuit against the IKA that resulted in a $2.5 million judgment against the hate group.

Now Hensley – out of prison and evidently with a lot of time on his hands – has joined the ranks of Internet "trolls" who haunt the Web and harass people for various reasons, including leaving ugly messages for bereaved family members and friends of the deceased. (A recent New York Times Magazine piece explored their weird world in depth.)
This kind of activity, as it happens, is illegal in many nations, including Great Britain (where one "troll" was recently jailed for polluting a tribute site for a former reality-TV star) and Australia. Which is where Jarred Hensley came in.

Go read the rest here.

Dolphins caught on camera "kicking" jellyfish in the air soccer-ball style. Found at Asylum Australia. Open thread below....

Travelling from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles? Pack extra supplies for Google Map's Step Number Six.

Open Thread below...

Download | play Download | play

In a sign of just how toxic the Bush administration has become for Australian politicians after years of former PM John Howard's all-too willing servility, current prime minister Kevin Rudd gets into trouble at home for "conduct unbecoming of an Australian prime minister" by saluting Bush at the NATO summit.

Greens Leader Bob Brown was also unimpressed, accusing Mr Rudd of belittling Australia and being subservient. "There is a streak of John Howard's 'deputy sheriff' in Kevin Rudd's slip-up," he said. "We are not the 51st state of the United States of America and Mr Rudd's salute carried a subservient connotation many Australians won't like."

The Cerebral Mum: An apology a long time coming: Australia Says Sorry

DownWithTyranny! A corporately-funded puppet got his ass kicked yesterday...by the people.

Our Future: Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, Part ll--Debunking the Free Marketeers

Parenting Squad: There are no conflict free diamonds.

Hullabaloo: Raped and in legal limbo.

Old Hickory's Weblog: The Maverick in his own words (3): Roberts and Scalito (h/t Politics in the Zeros)

at-Largely: Zounds! Are we really gonna see some good reporting?

The Orstrahyun: Coming soon to the US? A new wave of "restrictions" on mobile phone content, websites, chatrooms and message boards will be introduced in Australia by late January, 2008.

Vagabond Scholar: The 27th edition of Batocchio's "Right Wing Cartoon Watch." And the Comics Curmudgeon keeps an eye on all da comix all da time.

The Newshoggers: An invitation to fraud

The Pump Handle: The water cooler for the public health crowd has it's own roundup. Go look...

HOLY CRAP: Put On Your Jesus Glasses...Breasts have no place in art...God likes Republicans and animal killing...We could fill several entire editions of Holy Crap with this guy's religious insanity...even former enablers are spooked...Christian Embassy Jr...The real "War On Christmas" and Christians is in Iraq...When to stone your children...Is I-35 a a holy road?...Oppressing The Stranger...The Immanent Frame is a blog discussing secularism, religion and the public sphere... Mitt ‘Double-Crosses' Huck

...Take a minute and sign the statement of conscience at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture

AP Via Yahoo:

Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd swept to power in Australian elections Saturday, ending an 11-year conservative era and promising major changes to policies on global warming and his country's role in the Iraq war.

"Today Australia has looked to the future," Rudd said in a nationally televised victory speech, to wild cheers from supporters. "Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward ... to embrace the future, together to write a new page in our nation's history."

The win marked a humiliating end to the career of outgoing Prime Minister John Howard, who became Australia's second-longest serving leader — and who had appeared almost unassailable as little as a year ago. Read on...

President Bush just lost another lap dog. Rudd said he'd take Australian troops out of Iraq and sign the Kyoto treaty if elected, so here's his chance.