25 Australian education an immigration racket - sham marriages, forged exams, bogus courses

Last week's Radio Interview lasted 2 hours. At the 1 hour break, the station played an interview with Alan Keyes, calling Obama a "radical communist" and denying that he is legitimately President.

I was embarrassed about that; it compromised my political independence. If I had known that the station would pull a stunt like that that, I would not have done the interview.

I was invited on to balance an earlier interview with Fritz Berg, who argued for Holocaust Denial; I would be arguing against that, and talking about Stalin overthrowing the Jewish bolsheviks.

Opera always semed boring to me, but the piece which opened the interview is particularly beautiful.

It was sung by Andrea Bocelli (the tenor; he is blind) and Sarah Brightman.

It's called Time to say goodbye (Con te partirè). You can see the video clip at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_JLkIOnq04
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbN0g8-zbdY

(1) Fake emails warn of movie Corpus Christi "Shocking info about JESUS"
(2) Corpus Christi play depicts Jesus as a gay man who is seduced by Judas
(3) Chinese police warn third party payment firms against pornography
(4) Police crack down on porn sites with foreign proxies
(5) Google pledges to comb out porn results in China
(6) Phoney bidding 'rampant' on eBay
(7) Immigration scam - English language tests for sale
(8) Australian immigration cracks down on spouse visa fraud
(9) Australian education an immigration racket - sham marriages, forged exams, bogus courses
(10) Resources boom over, but high immigration to remedy "skills shortage"
(11) New Matilda - home of Australia's Chardonnay social commentators

(1) Fake emails warn of movie Corpus Christi "Shocking info about JESUS"

Emails warning about a new movie, Corpus Christi, depicting Jesus & his disciples as Gay, are circulating and inviting readers to join a petition to ban it.

However, it seems that the emails are fake and the movie does not exist.

Nevertheless there is a play Corpus Christi, which depicts Jesus & his disciples as Gay.

(2) Corpus Christi play depicts Jesus as a gay man who is seduced by Judas

http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2008/01/gay-jesus-play-blasted-by-bishop.html

January 19, 2008

Aussie Anglican Bishop Blasts Gay Jesus

A PLAY that depicts Jesus as a gay man who is seduced by Judas and conducts a gay marriage for two apostles has been condemned by religious leaders as it prepares to open in Sydney.

The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth, questioned the integrity of Corpus Christi and expressed his outrage at the "unhistorical and untrue" depiction of the son of God and some of his disciples as homosexual.

Gay Jesus play blasted by bishop
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia

As part of the 2008 Mardi Gras Festival, New Theatre is presenting the Sydney premiere production of Corpus Christi by Terrence McNally (Love, Valour, Compassion and Lips Together, Teeth Apart).

What if Jesus Christ hailed from Corpus Christi, Texas ... and what if he was gay?

Arguably one of the most controversial plays of the last ten years, Corpus Christi has outraged Christian groups with its modern take on the story of Jesus' birth, ministry and death. Why? Because it depicts both Jesus and his disciples as homosexual. Yet the moralists miss the point: this is not a play that mocks Jesus; it's a play that speaks out against inhumanity by providing a witty, contemporary interpretation of Jesus' life.

Corpus Christi caused an uproar when first produced in the US nine years ago due to its portrayal of characters from the New Testament's Last Supper as less than divine and more like 'Divine' (the transgender star of 80s cult films).

The religious right picketed the Melbourne production and it has never been produced in Sydney. We think it's time Archbishops Jensen and Pell were treated to a season of this daring, at times irreverent, and lyrically beautiful play. == ==

Last Updated: Friday, 10 December, 2004, 17:04 GMT

No action on 'gay Jesus' - police

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4085023.stm

Police investigating a controversial theatre production which depicts Jesus as homosexual have said they will be taking no further action at the moment.

Christian Voice has labelled Corpus Christi, now playing in St Andrews, a "hate-filled mockery".

A member of the prayer group lodged a complaint of blasphemy with Fife police after walking out of the play on its opening night on Thursday.

However, the director of Corpus Christi defended her version of the play.

The piece by American playwright Terence McNally is being staged by student company Zuloo and is sold out at The Crawford Arts Centre until its run ends on Saturday night.

The play originally opened in the US in 1997 to strong protests and is a modern retelling of the Gospels, taking place in the Texan town of Corpus Christi.

Mr McNally's play portrays Jesus and his disciples as sexually active homosexuals, which has since become the main focus for its many religious critics. ...

(3) Chinese police warn third party payment firms against pornography

http://www.chinaview.cn 2009-07-13 21:01:57

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/13/content_11702945.htm

BEIJING, July 13 (Xinhua) -- Chinese police have warned Internet third-party payment businesses against providing services for those providing pornographic and lewd material online.

The Ministry of Public Security on Monday said third-party payment platforms, who act as intermediaries for payments between buyers and sellers of goods and services on the Internet, would face prosecution if they deliberately provided such services for illegal material. ...

More than 1,000 websites have been blocked for distributing porn and other lewd materials since the government launched the Internet clean-up campaign at the beginning of this year.

(4) Police crack down on porn sites with foreign proxies
(Xinhua)

Updated: 2009-07-13 00:09

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-07/13/content_8417861.htm

BEIJING: Chinese web police are cracking down on criminal suspects who made profits by running pornographic websites with proxy servers based in foreign countries.

Ministry of Public Security on Sunday revealed two such cases that police forces cracked in Sichuan and Jiangxi Provinces, in which suspects were charged for selling advertisements on their porn websites and selling their foreign-based proxy services to other domestic porn spreaders.

Sichuan police department in April tracked down two porn websites "May babe" and "May Erotica," which had gained more than 100,00 yuan of profits by selling advertisement on their illegal websites since December, 2008.

To escape from Chinese web supervision, they hired a US-based proxy server. To conceal the websites' owner and its real address, the suspect maintain the websites through Virtual Private Network (VPN), a computer network using encrypted communicating protocol in the Internet.

Police authorities in eastern Jiangxi Province also located two suspects who sold US-based proxy services for the operation of pornographic websites in China. ...

(5) Google pledges to comb out porn results in China
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-06-20 21:20

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-06/20/content_8305856.htm

BEIJING: Searching engine giant Google Inc. said Saturday that it would take all necessary steps to clean up pornographic searching results in its Chinese-language portal, Google.cn.

"We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results," a statement from Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley in the United States said.

The statement given by John Pinette, communications director of Asian-Pacific Region, confirmed that the company's representative in China had met with government officials to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches.

The statement came after the Chinese authorities criticized some of the search results served up by Google violated the country's Internet regulations and laws.

Xinhua acquired the statement after an e-mail request to Google on Friday. Telephone calls to the company's Beijing office has not been answered since Thursday.

The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC) Thursday "strongly condemned" Google's Chinese portal for providing links to pornography and lewd information. ...

(6) Phoney bidding 'rampant' on eBay

Asher Moses

July 14, 2009 - 3:49PM

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/biz-tech/phoney-bidding-rampant-on-ebay-20090714-djsr.html

An in-depth investigation by an Australian retiree has revealed that fake bids are "running rampant" on eBay, forcing users to pay inflated prices for items on the auction site.

Philip Cohen, 69, from Brighton-Le-Sands in Sydney, found several instances of shill bidding - where phoney eBay accounts are used to bid up the price of items on the auction site to inflate the final price paid by buyers.

He places the blame squarely on eBay, saying that its anti-shill security systems are flawed or non-existent. He says that shill bidding has been encouraged by a new policy from eBay to hide from other users the usernames of people bidding on items.

Cohen's 8000-word analysis was published on eBay's message board and the AuctionBytes website, but it has been inexplicably deleted from the former.

"eBay should not be allowed to knowingly facilitate the defrauding of the `buying' users of its service by those unscrupulous shill-bidding `selling' users nor conceal such crime after the event - which, in my humble opinion, is presently, effectively the case," Cohen wrote.

When buying an item on an eBay auction, a user enters the maximum amount he or she is willing to pay and, if another buyer bids on that item, the first user's bid is automatically increased in small increments up to the maximum amount he or she has entered.

With shill bidding, unscrupulous sellers typically register new eBay accounts and bid on their own items to push bids higher and higher towards buyers' maximum price. If the shill bidder accidentally bids too much and wins the item, the seller is able to remove that final bid to reinstate the previously highest bidder as the winner.

Cohen, who is predominantly an eBay buyer, discovered this practice on several eBay auctions. In two of them, an Australian shill bidder was able to bump up the price of Australian oil paintings by $156 and $153.50, respectively, without the winning bidder even realising.

It was obvious to Cohen that the bids were from a shill bidder because that eBay account had made 190 bids on 41 items in the preceding 30 days, all from just a single seller.

"If there's a proactive system it's just ludicrous to say that they're not picking it up," Cohen said in a phone interview.

In his article he writes: "eBay simply has no incentive to remove fraudsters ... because these many fraudsters contribute to eBay's revenues and, if users don't notice any such untoward activity, then eBay does nothing."

In response to the instances of shill bidding raised in Cohen's piece, eBay took action against - but did not ban - the particular sellers involved but did not make any changes to make it harder for shill bidders in future. It says it has tools in place to detect shill bids automatically but refuses to go into further detail.

Cohen said eBay should reinstate its policy of disclosing the usernames of all buyers bidding on an item and run checks on users' IP addresses to determine whether two different accounts are in fact being used from the same computer.

It should also proactively check bidding patterns to determine if any accounts are bidding an inordinate amount on items from a single seller, and make it more difficult to retract bids.

Cohen quotes Jarrod Trevathan, a computer scientist with James Cook University, who suggests eBay publish a "shill score" out of 10 that rates bidders based on factors such as how many auctions they have participated in, the number of times they have won, how quick they are to bid and what stage in the auction they submit most of their bids.

"Most suspect shill bidding incidents are only investigated when a complaint is made by a legitimate bidder who feels that something is not right," Trevathan is quoted as saying.

eBay Australia spokesman Daniel Feiler said bidding users' account names were hidden to avoid another type of nasty eBay scheme, whereby people who did not win an auction are contacted - often by scammers - with offers to buy the item or something similar from another seller outside eBay.

He noted that shill bidding was becoming less of a problem as half of the items listed on the site were now sold for a fixed price as opposed to the auction format.

"We've had systems for [detecting] shill bidding since eBay's earliest days," Feiler said.

"This person has found a couple of isolated incidents ... there's over 100 million listings on eBay at any one time, so there's bound to be a handful that are problematic, but in the scheme of things it's very, very small."

(7) Immigration scam - English language tests for sale

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25837024-2702,00.html

Probe after immigration cheating claim

July 26, 2009
Article from:  Australian Associated Press

Allegations of cheating by students in immigration exams has seen the launch of a corruption investigation.

Australia's largest international student service, IDP Australia, is investigating possible corruption among its staff after students in Sydney were caught cheating on exams it conducts for the Department of Immigration, The Sun-Herald newspaper reports.

Copies of the May International English Language Testings System (IELTS) exam were sold for between $12,000 and $18,000, one source claims.

"These have been leaking out for months,'' the source told newspaper.

"It's like a chain of command. It came from the official service who gives it out and takes his cut.."

IDP would not confirm how many people had been caught cheating.

"Cheating in IELTS tests is not commonplace,'' an IDP Australia spokeswoman said.

''However given the high stakes involved, attempts to cheat or engage in other fraudulent activity such as identity fraud do occur.

"Recently in Australia a number of test takers have been detected in their attempt to cheat in the IELTS test. Whether or not it was an internal problem, we don't know.''

IDP is investigating the matter.

Meanwhile the Immigration Department has defended its outsourcing of English tests, which have been handled by IDP since 1994.

(8) Australian immigration cracks down on spouse visa fraud

http://www.globalvisas.com/news/australian_immigration_cracks_down_on_spouse_visa_fraud1343.html

July 27 2009 by Mark Johnstone

Australian immigration cracks down on

A specialist unit of the Australian immigration authorities is concentrating on exposing sham marriages between immigrants living in Australia on spousal visas.

An increasing number of Australian marriage visas are being applied for and the unit has been set up to try to find out if couples are genuine. If a couple are suspected they will be interviewed separately and questioned about their lives together. This is called an ‘intimacy test.’

Some 40,000 spouse visas were issued in 2007/2008, up from 26,000 ten years earlier. Of the 40,000 visas issued, some 1,150 couples were questioned over ‘irregularities' in their Australia visa applications.

Among the couples investigated, 220 spouse visas were cancelled after the couples failed the intimacy test, while a further 3,146 visa applications were never granted in the first place.

Sandi Logan, the spokesperson for the department, says, "We might ask them for the floor plan of the house they're supposed to live in together.” “Or we might ask what they did on birthdays together for the last couple of years. Or what they gave each other for Christmas or Ramadan.”

(9) Australian education an immigration racket - sham marriages, forged exams, bogus courses

Crackdown on rogue education agents

Andrew Trounson | July 27, 2009

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25839529-5013871,00.html

THE troubled international education sector has moved to clear out rogue operators in a bid to protect the once-respected $15billion Australian market from being turned into an immigration racket.

The decision to establish a register of approved offshore education agents follows the revelation in The Australian two weeks ago that the lust for high-dollar Indian students has led to a thriving black market in sham marriages, forged English language exams and bogus courses. ...

(10) Resources boom over, but high immigration to remedy "skills shortage"

Record number of arrivals swells population

Date: July 19 2009

http://www.smh.com.au/national/record-number-of-arrivals-swells-population-20090718-dows.html?skin=text-only

Figures suggest we're experiencing the biggest boom since the 1950s, writes Kelsey Munro.

A COMBINATION of high immigration rates and high birth rates has pushed Australia to a record population boom.

Population growth in 2008 was the highest since the baby boom of the 1950s, according to statistics from RP Data.

Last year, Australia's population grew by 1.9 per cent, or 406,083 people, to 21.6 million.

A record figure of 253,415 in net migration (total arrivals minus total departures) represented a great increase over 2007's net migration figure of 184,438.

"In terms of [raw] numbers it's a record," said social researcher Mark McCrindle. "In terms of rates, it's not - we had higher birth rates in the 1960s, we had higher migration rates in the postwar years.

"But the gross numbers are key. A growth rate of 1.9 per cent doesn't sound that much but it's almost half a million people."

Western Australia was the fastest-growing state in 2008, with a 3.1 per cent population increase largely fuelled by overseas migration drawn by the resources boom.

However, Queensland had the greatest raw number of new residents, with 107,000 new Queenslanders (including births) arriving during 2008.

NSW grew by 97,509 people but lost 22,690 residents to other states, mostly Queensland. However, this is almost half the number of residents heading north compared with the year before.

Fertility rates rebounded from a 2002-03 low of 1.7 children per woman to 1.9 in 2007-08, an increase of about 12 per cent.

Yet demographer Peter McDonald from the Australian National University said it was primarily the migration rate that was driving Australia's population boom. "Most of it is contributed by long-term temporary movements, such as overseas students, New Zealanders, long-stay business visas and working holidaymakers," he said. "They now form a very substantial part of the Australian labour force."

The Bureau of Statistics estimates that the country's population will grow to 28 million by 2026, and 35 million by 2056. But 2008's growth rate of 1.9 per cent would see the population grow much faster, doubling by mid-century to about 44 million.

"There are considerable advantages to the Australian economy to be taking immigrants in," Professor McDonald said. The estimate of 35 million "is manageable but we can't plan after it's happened", he said.

Peter Newman, professor of sustainability at Curtin University, said: "Population is mostly a global issue and we are one of the few countries which should take more immigrants and refugees as the global population stabilises in the next 20 to 30 years."

But not all are convinced population growth is good for the country.

Scientist Tim Flannery, who was the Australian of the Year in 2007, has questioned whether Australia's natural resources can support even the existing population in the longer term.

Mark O'Connor, the author of the 2009 book Overloading Australia said: "From any scientific point of view it's straightforward: it's crazy to be growing our population. We need to cut carbon emissions and secure food and water supplies."

(11) New Matilda - home of Australia's Chardonnay social commentators

From: Tony Ryan <tonyryan43@gmail.com> Date: 14.07.2009 09:24 PM

New Matilda is secure home of Australia's trite upper-middle class Chardonnay social commentators, few of whom have personal insight into their myriad and invariably nauseating political focii.

And those from outside their class who intervene with inconvenient realities, soon find themselves banned from the site.

Russell Mark's article is prosaically typical. His first glaring inadequacy is his inability to understand the difference between colour prejudice, xenophobia, racism and culture clash.

His references to racism are so distant from the mark (accidental pun) that all these really tell anyone with appropriate cross-cultural experience is that he does not comprehend the word culture. Culture means different values, manifested by different behaviour, and understood only by fluency of language. Put another way, the language is the only clear window to the culture, and if we do not understand a migrant's language we may be confronted by otherwise inexplicable behaviour (ie strange garments and gestures), something annoying for the host culture (ie inappropriate behaviour), and occasionally downright offensive; illegal even (ie female circumcision).

Abrasiveness and conflict under these circumstances is natural for all human beings, and to apply terms such as good or bad are mindless. This is why all international cities of history adopted proselytised adages that encouraged conflict-avoidance mechanisms, for example, encouraging people to speak the local language in public, acknowledging that to do otherwise automatically invites passersby to believe they are being discussed, especially if the speakers glance in their direction, or worse, laugh. As Shakespeare acknowledged, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

Marks has not mentioned the prime and generative source of the conflict in Australia, the Policy of Multiculturalism. No Australian was consulted and no Australian agreed with this policy implementation. It was dumped on Oz by the UN and all governments acquiesced. What it says is that migrants can impose their culture on host Australians and that Australians who object can be labeled racist. In the independent AIA survey of 2006, 86% of Aussies voiced their opposition to Multiculturalism, yet media pollsters claimed the majority support it. This is a story in itself and, for those who comprenhend the past three decades of history, provides a clue to the policy's function...the creation of social division and the weakening of demand for national sovereignty in the face of impending one world government.

Behind the imposition of this conflict-creating policy is a rising swell of resentment, and deepening and defensive nationalism, that Australian journalists are too insular and naf to be aware of, let alone identify. That this will explode in an paroxysm of violence is inevitable; and in fact the reaction to Lebanese thugs by the Bra Boys was only a taste of things to come.

So is there racism in Australia? Judging by the number of Aborigines and part Aborigines who disparage other Australians every day and in every town of Australia, obviously there is. But if one wants to understand the average Joe's attitude to migrants and students, one must accept the message most often heard in the local patois... "Fit in or fuck off". This is, in fact, a demand for the retention of cultural integrity, which is the essence of national self defense. This is not only natural, it is critical for survival of societal values and institutions.