THE MIST CAME UP THROUGH THE VALLEY

South Coast, NSW, Australia

The mist came up through the valley. He had been harassed, bullied, threatened and intimidated, sleepless and distressed, for so long that he had begun to make poor decisions, or even poorer than before. Now, all this time later, he still paddled in the aftermath, still nomadic, still haunted. Many things would come screaming out of the sky to catch him, as if he was in a latter day version of Avatar. A private hell. "You would be stupid to think corrupt journalists were not involved," said his old friend on the way to Bangkok's international airport. And all could be forgiven, because all had already gone. 

He understood things now that he had never understood before. But he was uncomfortable without focus, without a place of residence, without a daily routine. Without established cycles and established friendships. There was no routine. There was an eternal wandering, as if cast out to roam the Earth. All would be well. The crisis would die down. Different doors would open. Having given up smoking, yet again, mental acuity was returning. But the shattered remnants of what had once been, the path less followed, the distinct personalities left to perish on the side of the road, all these things remained unformed, or only partially formed, and he tried once more to move forward.

Whether there would be a landing on the valley floor, in some secret, tucked away village, remained to be seen. He was cursed, most certainly, but perhaps for a purpose. All would be forgiven, perhaps not forgotten. The news flashed a cosy story about British men retiring to Pattaya, there to live out their days and crowd the local hospitals. He took it in because he knew it was there, the old, semi-familiar sign Pattaya spelt out along the hill, a promise of sin and decadence and a wild life. He remained transformed. He remained in hiding. He could act out for the cameras, which of course he did, as would anyone who knew they were under such savage surveillance, and in the end he would do his best to bore them away, to force them to detach, to destroy the commercial or investigative potential of what they were doing.

These things weren't easily achieved. They came at a cost. He remained distant, isolated, uncertain, self esteem battered and cruelled by diminished circumstance, by secrets exposed as myths, by hollow story telling they had concocted around him, by cruel gain andan empty laugh. The road less travelled, a dank and uncomfortable place. He could feel them through, almost to his bones. Could see the shadows marking them all the way to the next doorway. And he took a comfortable gloss and made it into a hard shallac, stopped the tears and regret, lifted up his face and said: "Fuck off. Leave me alone. Not one of you ever put out a hand to help. And you can all die, curdled on your own bastardry." And then he sat back in the cafe chair and laughed again; because none of it made sense, none of it had ever made any sense. He had been pursued for the basest, most trivial, most dishonest of motives. And now, they could leave him alone forever. Because time had moved on and over them; and would destroy exactly who it was meant to destroy.

THE BIGGER STORY:

30 December 2013, 7.12am AEST

Found: world’s most mysterious bird, but why all the secrecy?

AUTHOR

1. 

   Leo Joseph

   Research Director and Curator, Australian National Wildlife Collection at CSIRO

A ex parrot: one of the few Night Parrots collected in the 1870s in South Australia. Marie Meister, Museum of Zoology, Strasbourg

The Night Parrot has been called the “world’s most mysterious bird”. First discovered in 1845, it was rarely seen alive for most of the next hundred and seventy years, but it has been rediscovered in 2013 by Queensland naturalist John Young.

The rediscovery has been shrouded in secrecy; photo and video evidence of the parrot was presented at an invitation-only viewing, and the Queensland government hasn’t been told the location of the parrot. So, why all the secrecy?

What a living Night Parrot looks like Wikimedia Commons

Click to enlarge

The first Night Parrot specimen was collected in 1845 in northern South Australia. After a spate of records in the 1870s, the parrot vanished. The 20th Century yielded almost no reliable reports until a single, road-killed specimen was found in 1990 in western Queensland.In 2006 another was found further to the south-east. This one was headless, presumably having flown into a fence line, decapitating itself.

Western Queensland seemed like the place to be. With colleagues, we have analysed existing records of Night Parrots to learn about where to look for the birds and when in relation to climatic events, and flowering and seeding cycles of plants that the parrots might feed on, such as spinifex. It has been a frustrating exercise, however.

In 2013, Queensland naturalist John Young found what he thinks might be two pairs of Night Parrots, and, to top it off, a nest with three nestlings. Young recently presented a select group of experts with photographic and video evidence of Night Parrots from May 2013, confirming that these were indeed Night Parrots.

Young also made recordings of the parrot’s vocalisations, which he used to draw the birds close enough to photograph.

  

A VALLEY FAR BELOW

Death of the Local Shopping Centre, Australia

Far below, so far below it was barely possible to make out the patchwork quilt of farms, the tiny village. The fall was steep, very steep. A swan dive into an ordinary life, a dive into a place from which he had been previously immune. There wasn't any way to surrender now. "It may be possible to reintegrate him back into normal life." The stray threads, the mistakes he had made, the terrible squandering and distress, a malfunctioning unit. What evil was he supposed to have done? He had blundered into a cesspit, and that was that. Eaten alive. The pit in his stomach would not go away.

Away, away from where you were. Into hiding. Nobody could see behind the screens. That had been the modus operandi for much of his life, until, all at once, the screens had collapsed, exposing a shrieking, under-developed animal trying to hide from the light. Now the screens, in response to circumstance, were building again. Trying to find a way to protect himself from the "slings and arrows" of misfortune, for all was lost. "He will regret it for the rest of his life." He already knew that. The time had come to say goodbye. If he couldn't find a way out in the real world, he would find it in another.

Reintegrate into normal life? We shall see about that. He didn't want to be cornered. He didn't want to be responsible. He just wanted to take a long quiet look at things that had never happened, to be someone other than the stigmata, to find a place where no one knew him, where he could find peace. All in all, the darkness wept. If there was no immediate path opening up, there were the dizzying heights and the valley far below, a unique perspective. There was a way of thinking no one could endure. There was a time and a place for everything, but he could not find it. He launched off the side of the cliff, already flying.

But unlike the populated dreams of childhood, it was difficult to control his fall. Sometimes he tumbled, sometimes he soared. He could see, kilometres below, the little house which offered refuge, a secret life, another path. But it was difficult to hold his balance, difficult to break his fall. The hot gusts of air from below swirled him up, almost back to the edge of the cliff from which he had leapt. And then he ducked and dived, far out, far below. Yes, their faces still came to haunt him. Yes, mistakes from a former life continued to batter through the fabric of things. But now, air-borne, he had to manage his descent, down down, into a farmer's life, a farmer's wife, into a place where children ran in sunlit fields and corn rustled in the barely moving air. It was a long and dangerous fall. And it wasn't over yet.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.firstperspective.ca/index.php/news/2274-john-pilger-s-damning-new-film-about-indigenous-australia

 Julian Drape

The Sydney Morniing Herald

"It's so degrading," says Noongar elder Noel Nannup in John Pilger's latest film about indigenous disadvantage in Australia.

The Aboriginal man is standing in a $240-a-night hotel room on Rottnest Island which used to be divided into three prison cells in which more than 50 indigenous people died.

"They don't have any idea what happened in here," Nannup tells Pilger of the hotel's paying guests.

"No one tells them. No one lets them know."

It's perhaps the most poignant moment in Utopia.

London-based Pilger returns to outback Australia for this documentary film to find little has changed since his 1985 work The Secret Country.

The Utopia of the title refers to the Northern Territory region north of Alice Springs.

There are the same shacks, the same lack of basic services and the same diseases.

"I was shocked all over again," Pilger tells AAP.

"It's not that I expected a great deal of change. But to fly from a rich metropolis like Sydney, in what is now one of the richest countries on the planet, and drive into impoverished communities deprived of the basic services that the majority of Australians take for granted, is shocking."

Pilger, 74, sees a treaty and genuine land rights as the key to improving the position of the original owners of Australia.

Anything less, including the current talk of constitutional recognition, is simply a "distraction", he says.

The film opened in the United Kingdom in mid-November and screens in Sydney on January 17. Subsequent limited dates include Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Alice Springs.

Pilger would have been delighted to show Utopia in Australia first but no local distributor offered a cinema run.

"One Australian distributor refused to take the film because he said it was 'too dark' and 'it might upset people with its myth-busting'," the veteran journalist says.

The film was commissioned by ITV in Britain and funded entirely in the UK.

Pilger doesn't pull any punches in Utopia.

He asks Warren Snowden, then indigenous health minister and a Labor MP in the Northern Territory for 23 years, "Why haven't you fixed it?"

Snowden, who has already admitted government policy has failed for at least 50 years, hits back stating: "What a stupid question. What a puerile question."

But Pilger doesn't apologise for taking such an uncompromising view.

TRAVELS WITH MY HAT: A LIFETIME ON THE ROAD

MEDIA ALERT MEDIA ALERT MEDIA ALERT !

The culmination of a life’s work, Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road by photojournalist Christine Osborne begins in the 1950s in the tiny Australian gold mining town of Temora. Osborne’s classmates laughed at her when she declared she wanted to see the world. But in the decades to follow that’s exactly what she did, becoming an accomplished international travel writer and photographer whose many adventures include encounters with the Queens of England and Jordan, and Sheikha Fatima, the desert queen of Abu Dhabi.

While an award winning travel writer in her own country of Australia, when photojournalist Christine Osborne first settled in London in 1974 she was told: “We don’t know who you are. To get a name here, you need to write a book.”

Which is precisely what she did, choosing the then largely unexplored subject of the developing Arab oil states. It was ground breaking work.

In the Middle East of the time, Osborne often found herself the only woman in many situations, but says she was always treated with kindness and respect.

“Arabs are a very hospitable race,” says Osborne. “Some of the humblest people, the least well off, were always ready to offer you water or a date. But it was a man’s world out there. I rarely met any women. It didn’t bother me; it was just a fact. And I was doing a man’s job so I had to be one of the boys. But not in a butch sense: I would wear evening dress when meeting an important ruler or minister. I didn’t really receive any unwanted attention, except from stupid western salesmen away from their wives.

“There was no internet. There were no guide books. No street names. No maps. No apps. No public relations officers to make things easier.”

Publication of The Gulf States & Oman in 1977 established Christine Osborne as a media resource for photographs and information.

In 1979 she was commissioned to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s historic tour of Arabia. At the time she was the only woman photographer accredited Buckingham Palace Press Corp.

The title Travels with My Hat refers to a famous piece of millinery worn everywhere by Osborne. Her Majesty, disoriented in the great bazaar in Nizwa in Oman, said: "I was looking everywhere for your blue hat." 

The foreword to Osborne’s second book, An Insight and Guide to Jordan, was written by Queen Nour, the US-born architect and fourth wife of HM King Hussein.

Fourteen more books followed, primarily through Longman, including works on Thailand, Malaysia, Oman, the Seychelles, Pakistan and Morocco.

Osborne’s indelible images of starving children in the Ethiopian droughts of the 1970s were seen around the world.

The tens of thousands of photographs taken during her travels throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East, ultimately led to her founding two major photo stock libraries, including, in 1990, The World Religions Photo Library based in London.

Travels with My Hat is a record of a life defined by travel. Maintaining a professional demeanour no matter what, and often the only woman in difficult and hostile environments, Christine Osborne saw and photographed many of the world’s most pristine places, before mass tourism and hyper-development changed them forever. Osborne’s adventures in Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and other developing countries are rounded off with a series of letters to her mother, who never left Australia.

In one communiqué, from the shores of Lake Galilee, she declares she cannot bear the loneliness anymore: “I think I will give up being a travel writer. It is not a normal life.”

But Osborne never stopped travelling. In the end, she declares, “only travel brings a life lived in the moment”.

For interviews, review copies, photographs and more information contact John Stapleton at A Sense of Place Publishing on +61 24786 0329 or email asenseofplacepublishing@gmail.com

For more information:

http://travelswithmyhat.com/

http://www.asenseofplacepublishing.com/

AFORETHOUGHT

The Mood

We weren't sacrificed. We hadn't even been heard. The voices carried on, but in a far off place. As if they had finally taken heed, and left him alone. It had been a long, cruel and disorientating journey. He didn't like where he was, or what had happened. He was disapointed in himself, and disappointed by everything. The mood had taken over. There weren't many ways to stop it. Catastrophe after catastrophe came beckoning. He thought back to people he had cared about, but they had disappeared in a mist. The cruelty of what they had done was up to them to discern. He didn't think they cared. He knew they didn't care. It was easy to laugh when you were in a comfortable space.

But these trials were tribulations he was not meant to bear. Things he was not meant to have seen. Ignominy he was not meant to have reached. He crawled under cupboards and found nothing but dust. "I used to think people were basically good, well intentioned, but I don't think that anymore. The last few years have bashed it out of me." 

There were silent streams. There was the each of a scream that had died down. There was embarrassment over everything. Two steps forward and one step back became one step forward and two steps back. Hard work wasn't enough, you had to be shrewd. But he wasn't shrewd. He was just dissembling into a place without a home. A dark force without a focus. An ache that never went away. He couldn't control his moods, he couldn't control anything. Lotto tickets were not an appropriate investment strategy. The city no longer welcomed him. Everyone knew of his mistakes. The propaganda machine had destroyed him. No good deed went unpunished. Psychopaths crawled through the rafters. He was disappointed beyond disappointment.

"Why couldn't they have just left him alone?"

"Not in their nature."

And so he washed from one remnant of an old life to another, and he held back what should have been tears. They weren't going to die today, that's all he knew. He was more alone than he had ever been; and none of it had been intentional. The laughter died down to a ruthful cry, a grimace at the stupidity of others. The madness of foreigners. He had painted the sky; and drowned.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Searing temperatures that have set new heat records in central Queensland are heading to the state’s southeast.

Four weather stations recorded their highest ever January temperatures on Thursday as a stagnant mass of hot air in central Australia continued to affect inland Queensland.

In the state’s northwest, Century Mine reached 44.5C and 45.6C in Camooweal, while further south temperatures at the Monument hit 45.5C, and 46C in Bedourie.

However, it was Birdsville residents in southwest Queensland who endured the hottest temperatures in Queensland when the mercury reached a scorching 48.1C at 4pm.

Forecasters say a trough coming from the west is pushing the hot air southeast, and Brisbane and surrounding districts will be affected in coming days.

The temperature in Brisbane is predicted to soar to 37 degrees on Friday and 41 on Saturday.

West of the capital, residents of Ipswich and Gatton are set to endure 43-degree heat on Saturday.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s Pradeep Singh said Queensland’s wet season was unusually late in arriving for the second year in a row.

‘‘Normally the monsoon starts affecting northern Australia around late December/January but it didn’t happen last year and it hasn’t happened this year, so the heat’s just been building up over inland parts of Australia,’’ he said.

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/heatwave-pushes-mercury-to-new-highs-20140102-307zq.html#ixzz2pNDxoj8U

DISTORTED TRUTH

The Death of Local Shops Australia

There were a thousand things that came from nowhere, difficult, small, resonances of things that had been. pasts that had been dwelt upon too much. Time that came curling around into small dark corners. Pasts. Faces. Loves that had disappeared. Moments which were barely created before they disappeared. Fragile. Bitter. An anger that could curl the tails off ants. A boy aughing as he squashed insects. An intelligence hiding. A truth gone. There came a point when it wasn't worth arguing. That the story told might as well be the story that survived, "because nothing will save the Governor General".

He was on the move, as he had been for years now. Other people created their lives. He destroyed his. There were times when an ancient colony would try and break through the walls. But he barely had the heart to hear them anymore. All had gone. Old friends had disappeared. Michael had left the country with little intention to return. He was saddened by familiar signposts that were disappearing. He had always wanted to come from a village, but there was no village. Not in this place of suburbs and closed doors and silent streets. Not in this place where he was old and no longer sought after. Where post and position had disappeared. 

Where the hallucinatory screach of summer cicadas was all that could be hoped for.

This place where he couldn't find the heart to move on.

THE BIGGER STORY:

To those listening closely enough, it might have sounded like a thinly-veiled threat.

As the royal commission into the first Rudd government's home insulation program began on Monday, its counsel assisting noted there was an ''armoury of coercive powers'' available to force reluctant witnesses to give evidence.

But Keith Wilson, QC, added he was hopeful such force would not be necessary.

It may have been the biggest clue yet that former prime minister Kevin Rudd and then environment minister Peter Garrett are due for a stint in the witness box, willingly or not.

Since the $25 million royal commission into the $2 billion-plus scheme was announced by the federal government last month, speculation has been rife about who would be called, but neither Commissioner Ian Hanger, QC, nor Mr Wilson would name any parties issued notices to appear.

The names on the list will not be publicly available until closer to the hearing dates, which are expected to be in March and April.

The royal commission can summon a witness to appear before it and there are very few grounds on which a person can refuse. Failure to comply could result in either a fine or imprisonment.

Mr Rudd launched the scheme in 2009 as a way of staving off the global financial crisis.

Three Queenslanders and one man from NSW were killed while installing insulation during the life of the program and many more were injured. Up to 220 house fires have been blamed on poorly trained installers operating while the scheme was in place and established insulation businesses suffered financial losses.

Mr Rudd apologised for the deaths in July this year, following findings from the Queensland state coroner that the rushed implementation of the program had contributed to the deaths of Matthew Fuller, 25, Rueben Barnes, 16, and Mitchell Sweeney, 22, between October 2009 and February 2010. Marcus Wilson, 22, was also killed.

The government has asked Commissioner Hanger to ''focus on how the actions of the [Rudd] Australian government may have contributed to those deaths, injuries and financial loss and damage to businesses''.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/signs-kevin-rudd-peter-garrett-may-be-called-before-insulation-inquiry-as-counsel-emphasises-its-powers-20131223-2zun0.html#ixzz2pHZFHonw

RECOVERY: THE HAUNTING PART TWO

The Death of The Local Shopping Centre, Australia

We were here and there, perplexed, with the coming of the Sales, with a distant cry. I have no faith but the faith in other people's kindness, an old friend said on Facebook, having had a friendly encounter with a US taxi driver. He had no such faith. He compared them to carion birds, ready to pick the flesh off anything that moved. They bolstered their own beliefs by a belief in others, but as the world swirled by, as they did their best to destroy anything and everything he did, he knew the dark soul, the treakle of disease and darkness through which they all waded. He knew there was no love in the heart of others. That all these barren moments led to an even darker, more dismissive moments. To a differnt hope: that it would all be over.

"The world is so beautiful," the Buddha is said to have exclaimed in his dying hours, but whether he had got there was a different question. He missed the world he should have been a part of. He lamented his own stupidity and mistakes. He pined for things that were already lost. It came through time and again, the thud, the thud. The swirling skies and the mismatched motives, assorted faces. He sought kindness where he could find it, and ignored the rest. For all was of a shadow, and he knew not where to go.

If it had been a slow suicide, that was over now. But he still coughed and slept abnormally; and his mind ran around in circles, regretting what had happened. Shame, guilt, regret, remorse, they came in thuds and were dismissed as useless emotions. Because emotions themselves were useless, leading to cringing solitiude and paths not travelled. To encounters ignored. Pasts gone haywire. 

Briefly, he couldn't find a way out. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/tony-abbott-kevin-rudd-julia-gillard-a-year-of-frantic-politics-20131227-2zzmj.html

The same December night General Motors signed the death warrant of Holden, one of Tony Abbott's most senior ministers went looking for love.

While thousands of auto workers began contemplating Christmas with a new uncertainty, the minister texted journalists: ''I got the tone right today, what do you think?''

Such needy egotism would barely be worth mentioning, were it not juxtaposed against the life-altering depth-charge that Holden's demise represents for many Australians.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

Contrary to Labor's characterisation, the car maker's closure was decided in Detroit, but like most everything else in the 2013 political year, it was also mired in our now deeply polarised politics.

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A new generation of Liberals was contemptuous of the heavily unionised auto industry and its co-dependent business model reliant on constant government assistance.

In the end, the new government's decision to hold its nerve and let the mainstay of Australia's postwar political-economy slip into history was as brave as it was cold.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

But in the short-term it just added to a growing sense for voters that they'd elected a kind of anti-government - one which stood more determinedly against things than for them.

It was against the minority parliament and everything it produced. It was against the carbon tax, the mining tax, the education funding model (until it wasn't), the national broadband network, climate science and, now, in power itself, it was even against the car industry.

The departure of Holden bookended a year that began with renewed hope for the ALP. Its faint pulse had strengthened from the middle of 2012, when the sky stubbornly refused to fall in with the commencement of the carbon price. Somewhat laughably, what was going to be a wrecking ball for the economy morphed into a slower but equally lethal python squeeze.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

The chasm between such imagery and the equanimity with which the carbon price was absorbed cost the opposition leader much of his personal standing. The result was an Indian summer for Julia Gillard, and it set up 2013 in new and interesting ways.

Despite a horror term, Gillard now eyed the possibility that, in the end, voters might baulk before installing Abbott if she could just give them enough reason to stick.

But her eagerness begat another classic error: the crazy-brave decision to open the political year on January 30 by setting the election for September 14.

Bold, imaginative, or just mad, the idea had several elements. First, she wanted to wrong-foot Abbott from the start of the election year. Second, she hoped to forestall any talk of a leadership change by placing her own party on an election footing. And third, she wanted to fence off some time to leverage the authority of office.

The focus would be on voters and on implementing long overdue reform in areas such as disability insurance, school funding and skills.

''It should be clear to all which are the days of governing and which are the days of campaigning,'' she told the National Press Club.

Yet it was Gillard herself who revealed, just three days later, a reshuffle forced by the departures of her attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, and Senate leader, Chris Evans. Immediately, Labor went straight back to talking about itself. And, of course, that meant demotions and bad blood - for which there would be a heavy price exacted.

The return to normal dysfunction brought to mind John Howard's cutting lament that voters had got just ''five minutes of economic sunshine'' out of Paul Keating before things had turned grey again.

Gillard's period of not-campaigning barely lasted that long, and was already being seen for the stunt it was when she embarked on an ill-conceived campaign swing into western Sydney.

According to a senior Labor figure, the week-long encampment at the Rooty Hill Novotel/RSL complex was always headed for disaster.

''The people in the outer west who, by the way, commute every day, thought it was stupid that the PM had to base herself there to get anything done, even though she has a Sydney residence,'' one exasperated MP said.

''It said it all. It was like declaring they lived in another country.''

And her reassurance that ''Westies'' were not ''second-class citizens'' had the perverse effect of suggesting that the government might actually think they were.

Such missteps kept coming, as did the fortnightly polls, which provided the grim countdown to Labor's inevitable demise.

As Fairfax Media's Tim Colebatch reported in June, the government's descent was being led by Gillard herself.

''A comparison of Fairfax/Nielsen polls in the 2010 campaign with those in the first half of 2013 shows Ms Gillard's net approval rating has slumped by a massive 33 percentage points,'' he wrote.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/tony-abbott-kevin-rudd-julia-gillard-a-year-of-frantic-politics-20131227-2zzmj.html#ixzz2pAxCZGmM

THE HAUNTING

Australia's Nanny State

He had deteriorated rapidly since returning to Australia. For one, he hadn't wanted to be there. He didn't have a job or a home there anymore, and floating from one location to the next was not his idea of fun. And two, the haunting hadn't stopped, it had just dissembled into finer forms. There was no compensation forthcoming, the thieves of Thailand's criminal milieu regarded it as entirely within their purlieu to rob tourists, to do as they do. And to haunt anyone who dared to object  But his own heart had gone now, in a swirl of depression. He couldn't keep going, having climbed one mountain too many; only to find another mountain behind. Or that's how it seemed some days. 

"I told you to watch him, not haunt him," a senior officer said. But perhaps his brain was only making sense out of nonsense; and he shrank and he shrank, trying to be invisible. Instead he watched first, all the six seasons of the Supranos, then After Earth, Frozen Ground, and was already half-way through the 4400. It hadn't been easy dealing with The Haunting from the very beginning, when they had surrounded his house, infested it with cameras, laughed at his every move, followed him everywhere. Ridiculed him at every opportunity. It hadn't been easy being back in a country where he did not want to be, in diminished circumstances, trying to make a project work. Just working and coping with the eternal ache; and the eternal surveillance.

They might have finally got the message, but it had been a long time coming. You could shred someone's heart and feed it to the masses. You could act in mobs and hunt to kill. You could be more base than he could ever possibly have imagined. And you could sing sick reason for the rest of your days; you die for sure, you die for sure. But if the haunting had gone on for ever, if they had pursued him from one place to another without any reason but vengeance,  he could be forgiven for wanting to forget. "They'll find him in the harbour one day, I suppose," they said, as if he was at fault, and the out of control Thai mafia could do as they liked. Did do as they liked.

He still wished he had never come across the story. He still wished things had never happened the way they had happened. He still missed his funny little place in the country and flogged himself for his own stupidity. But none of this was useful in forcing him to move on. Nor was the surveillance; sometimes minimal, never non-existent. He wanted to be free but they never let him. He wanted to face the world on his own terms but did not have the resources. He wanted to go to a place where he was not known and would never be known, but there was no such place. And so, instead, he retreated into a tiny room and pulled a sheet over his head. And let the world swirl by in its unrelenting way. No kindness goes unpunished, as the saying went.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/12/31/thousands-of-police-troops-tighten-security-in-russian-city-hit-by-2-suicide-bombings/

Vladimir Putin vows to obliterate ‘inhuman’ terrorists responsible for bombings ahead of Russian Olympics

Gary Peach, Associated Press | December 31, 2013 9:04 AM ET
More from Associated Press

AP Photo/Denis TyrinRussian soldiers patrol the Battle of Stalingrad memorial in Volgograd, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2013. Russian authorities ordered police to beef up security at train stations and other facilities across the country after a suicide bomber killed 14 people on a bus Monday in the southern city of Volgograd. It was the second deadly attack in two days on the city that lies just 400 miles (650 kilometers) from the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

 
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HL:Thousands of police, troops tighten security in Russian city hit by 2 suicide bombings

Eerily empty buses lumbered through the streets, police weighed down with body armour warily watched pedestrians near a fast-food restaurant, and members of Cossack units stood guard at bus stops. Volgograd was an ominous and jittery city on Tuesday, after two suicide bombings in two days that killed 34 people.

We get a feeling that a war has started

“People are afraid it will happen again; they’re trying not to go outside if they don’t have to,” said 20-year-old Yulia Kuzmina, a student. “We get a feeling that a war has started.”

That is a worry that extends far beyond Volgograd.

Although there has been no claim of responsibility for the bombing of the city’s main railway station and a trolleybus, suspicion falls strongly on Islamist insurgents, whose leader ordered his adherents this summer to do all they could to derail the Winter Olympics, which start Feb. 7 in the Russian resort city of Sochi.