I hate it when doctors try to confuse us with Latin mumbo-jumbo.

What a load of alarmist and deceptive nonsense. Carefully worded to make harmless or irrelevant things sound scary.
That is immoral behavior.
Worse, the sub-edit has taken those deceptive words, and made headlines which are outright lies. So if the editor is fooled so badly, the general readers must be even more so.

e.g. OMG Fukushima put more radiation into the ocean (100x claimed) than Chernobyl!! (But less into the Caspian maybe?)
But this leads to the headline: "Released 100 times as much radiation as Chernobyl"
I'm sad for the decline of journalism.

The Japanese are such wimps. The three remaining reactors at Chernobyl continued operating for 10 to 14 years after the #4 reactor incident.
Fukushima may have lost 3 reactors, but there are still another 3 perfectly good ones on site that happened to be shut down for maintenance when the Tsunami hit.

The Pacific is kind of big. The ocean water naturally contains about 100 million tonnes of uranium.
And while the reactor isotopes will cross the ocean in detectable quantities, that takes years.

The US was well involved in the war against Germany already. They just don't like _declaring_ war. At least not on countries, just abstract nouns.

That would be a win for everyone. Top actors would still have their mansions in the hills, but maybe be slightly less likely to die from a drug binge. With a capped income, they might tell their agents to start looking at the quality of the scripts a bit more, not just the bottom line. Movies would be more profitable, studios could afford to make more of them.
And most of all, without the mega-million star wages, studios might not make such dull, conservative safe movies.
    Wouldn't it be nice to see the studios putting out more movies on a lower budget, and taking a few chances? We might see the occasional Casablanca again.

Or according to the NEJM, second to 36, when you look at actual results. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0910064

Saying US healthcare is the best, is a bit like saying India has the best housing on earth, and pointing to the mansions and palaces of Mumbai as evidence, while ignoring the slums.
(BTW, India also has excellent healthcare, if you can afford it. )
  Quality healthcare is more widely available in the US, but the system is still incredibly inefficient compared to other developed countries.

Well, its all the same sauce, but you need different packaging and marketing to appeal to all consumers.

Does your philosophy apply to corporations? Families? Individuals? Is that the only sensible path for career advancement?
Should gov't departments spy on each other? (They are competing for funding.)
Should the spies stop at bugging phones? You OK with blackmail and assassination, because "that's their job", or do you still draw a line somewhere?

Or are national govt's just a special case where laws, morality and conventions can be broken with trivial justification and impunity?
Because I really don't see any self-defense case here. Its not like SBY might be planning an invasion.

Its one thing to spy on their military capacity and movements.
Or to collect open source intelligence.

But to directly bug the phone of civilian leaders of a friendly country for political purposes?
That's not very neighbourly. How can we justify it? Its not the cold war.

For a scientist, you have made a big mistake.
  There is a bit of Heisenberg here: It is the oldest known animal, but we only know the age because it was killed. There are presumably countless older clams still on the seabed. I doubt they survive well in captivity. The "uniqueness of the status of this animal", as you put it, relies on it being dead. Want to put on a deep-diving suit and start counting rings?

Only Doctor Hans Zarkhov, formerly at NASA, has provided any explanation.

Nice strawman you've built there! You must be ones of those pedophiles/terrorists I hear about ...

The "boat people" issue has been used by politicians of all sides as a distraction, but few things affect Australia as much as immigration. A nation is shaped by its people, much more than its geography or resources. Immigration has always been radically changing the country, and decisions made now have far-reaching consequences. Especially refugee intake, and due to their much higher birth rate than the native population, or non-refugee immigrants, there is a multiplier effect.

But please find someone else to abuse over our government's latest policy idiocy.

Yes, it really is the leaks. The Indonesian security services and government would have known of this all along. Australia and Indonesia have never had the coziest relationship. We've been shooting at each other in Borneo, new Guinea and Timor, which neither side wanted to publicise.

But with the leaks, the Indonesians have to be "shocked, shocked I tell you" for internal political reasons.

And they would have to start cooperating with Australia before they could stop.

Cost-conscious parents will borrow their friends' (with older kids who got a wii years ago) games, and build a library in a hard-drive hanging off the back.