This is a common belief. It's also wrong.

There are workshops in China that provide good working conditions for their staff, and provide a living wage. They rely a lot more on automation, and need to keep staff turnover low to provide a return-on-investment on training. They also manage to provide product at the same price - or better - than the sweatshops. These workshops do require more capital investment, though.

Cheap labour, and customers who don't care about how their goods are made, allow sweatshops to flourish. They can be eliminated without causing a price surge.

Possibly it's the way they arranged for the change to the bank details of a legitimate organisation? Dunno. The article said the scam originated in Nigeria. I was just pointing out that this wasn't a 419.

It wasn't a 419 at all. RTFA.

*sigh* can't you read TFA? There wasn't a scam like the Nigerian scams - this is more a case of someone forging invoices.

Essentially, the scammers changed the bank details for the University of Utah, and submitted invoices. The state paid them. Yes, the state was slack and had poor procedures for identifying and preventing fraud, but it wasn't one of the 419 scams. Importantly, there doesn't appear to have been an element of greed on the scamee's part.

This was a scam technique that originated in Nigeria. It wasn't the Nigerian 419 Scam. Strangely enough, Nigeria has been the origin of more than one type of scam.

Of course, preventing flooding of flood plains wrecks the ecology and in many cases has resulted in the severe degradation of the arable land downstream.

A more sensible solution would be to not build towns and cities in flood plains. But it's a bit late for that.

It could also have resulted in the stress being accumulated faster than the normal release mechanisms could offset. The FA suggests that the stress was roughly "25 times the normal tectonic movement for a year" - so instead of having a dozen or so non-damaging quakes every couple of years, they got one big one.

Who knows? Too many variables...

It snows in Australia. Some parts of Australia receive no snow, just like some parts of the US receive no snow. Some parts receive a lot. Those parts presumably like to stock up on snow shovels.

You do know that the last couple of hurricanes to get in the area did result in mandatory evacuation more than 48 hours in advance, which did result in looting and other activities done by individuals lifting a finger (and other peoples property) in their own interest, right?

You also know that the previous evacuation saw a significant number of people refuse to leave, due to fears that their homes would be looted and the hurricane would miss, right?

You also know that if the dykes hadn't failed - a contingency that nobody was ready for - the smartest thing to do in the hurricane was sit it out, right?

And finally - you know the biggest impediment to evacuation afterwards, when it was clear the dykes were going to fail, was the massive traffic jams caused by individuals fleeing by car rather than waiting to be organized into convoys with decent traffic control, right? The problem wasn't "not enough transportation", but rather "too much, doing stupid stuff".

Oh wait - silly me. I'm guessing you don't know that (or much else)

Do you like your grapes sour, or did you apply for some reason besides wanting to work there?

BTW - "looooooooong" and in-depth personality tests are very different from these quick multi-choice tests described in the article.

No, Parliament can not just change or abolish any law they want. For example: one of the big questions about Britain entering the EU fully is about if the government has the constitutional right to do so. UK courts have shot down Acts of Parliament as being unconstitutional before as well.

The boundaries are vague and not well-defined (hence why constitutional law is such a big area in the UK), but they are very real.

That's basically it. I don't know about the rest of the Commonwealth, but Australia inherited the laws of succession from the UK when we federalised in 1901. This is an act of Parliament that could be changed.

The Australian constitution proclaims us as a monarchy (originally to King George VII and his successors; now Queen Elizabeth and hers). The method of succession is up to the Federal Government, which is why we can legally become a republic in the first place. Expect more debate about this when Queen Liz does step down and we actually have to vote (in Parliament, anyway) on her successor.

Personally, I'd rather a republic (with long terms of office for the head-of-state - like 10-20 years), but if we have to have a monarch, I want an Australian monarch, who lives in Canberra.

But if some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at you, you'd be able to call yourself Emperor (at least until they put you away).

In the USA they had a revolution 200 years or so back because they didn't like unelected hereditary leaders from outside telling them what to do.

And a couple of hundred years before that, England had a revolution as well. Having put in a ruthless military dictator and El-Presidente-For-Life, they waited for him to die, put the monarchy back in, and dug Cromwell up from his grave so that they could execute him posthumously! (Well, points for effort, guys, but as the assignment was handed in late...)

You mean, that Iraq war which was started to find weapons of mass destruction that never existed, and were known by the US government not to exist?

Got to point out that the French supported the invasion of Afghanistan, which was a legitimate response to 9/11. Invading Iraq was merely Bush and Cheney's way of beating their chest.

I personally think that the French only tried to claim the moral middle ground; it just looked high from where the US was looking.

As for 600,000 people: I call bullshit. The US lost 416,800 total in WWII, of which 183,588 were in the European theatre. By contrast the Soviet Union - who were responsible for the fall of the Third Reich - lost over 10 million, nearly all in Europe. The US/British invasion was timed to take advantage of weakened defences due to the fighting in the Eastern front, and had the goal, not of freeing Europe, but of stopping Russia. Without the US, the French would be speaking, well, French (the USSR never forced their satellite nations to adopt Russian), but would have been aligned with the USSR. Wait, that's how they spent the 70s anyway!

Want to bring World War I into the picture as well? Then add another 116,708 - more than half of which died from the flu due to poor sanitation in US training camps (both in the US and in Europe). Total number of US deaths that could be attributed to "saving France": 300,296 - about half the figure you named. I'm sorry about your grandfather and all; my own grandfather flew with the Australian volunteers in the RAF. But get your figures straight. By contrast, the Commonwealth nations (Great Britain and related countries) lost over 1.7 million between WWI and WWI, most in the European conflict.

Excluding the US civil war, the US military has claimed 447,137 combat deaths since the start of the War of Independence - well short of your 600,000 total.

(figures sourced from wikipedia)

Um, no - you're the one talking out of your ass. Britain has a constitution - it's just not codified into a single document. Instead, it's spread out of a number of other statues, starting with the Magna Carta and working down through history.

Constitutional law in the UK gets complicated, but it's very real.