The hoop’s great day in the saddle followed a Boxing Day double at Randwick courtesy of Serenissima and Referees, both for Darley Australia’s head trainer, Peter Snowden.

McEvoy landed the treble and a race-to-race double on the Adam Spitzer-trained Smart Punch after wins on Chiamaka for Paul Perry and Altavilla for Snowden.

And it was Snowden who was happiest to see McEvoy enjoying a winning run.

“He’s a very hard worker and it was always going to take a little while for him to adjust to Australian racing, but we’re starting to form a good combination,” he said.

“He’s had his critics but Kerrin is riding so well at the moment and nobody deserves the success more than he does.”

Multiple suspensions have interrupted McEvoy’s return to Australia from the UK in August to be the No. 1 rider for Darley Australia and he has not only come under fire from stewards but from punters and the media alike.

McEvoy, who won this year’s Caulfield Cup on All The Good for Godolphin, took the treble in his stride and said it was crucial for him to continue working hard.

“Everything’s going well but I’ll just be keeping my head down and putting in the hours,” he said.

“It was always going to take a bit of time to re-adjust but I’m feeling very good about my riding.”

Spitzer praised McEvoy for his patient ride on Smart Punch who was held up until the last 100m in the Golden Slipper On Sale Handicap (1300m) before bursting through to defeat Triple Down by a short head.

“Kerrin was brilliant, he never panicked at any stage and when the gap came he pounced, he’s a top rider,” Spitzer said.

Smart colt Chiamaka, who started at $4.40, benefited from a perfectly rated front-running ride by McEvoy to easily account for $2.60 favourite Tinjirarni in the Caravan And Camping Show April 18-25 Handicap (1100m).

McEvoy took advantage of barrier one, driving Chiamaka to the lead.

And on straightening, Tinjirarni was travelling fourth and was looming as a danger but Chiamaka kicked in the final 200m and quickly put paid to his rivals, going on to defeat the favourite by 1 1/4 lengths.

Stable representative Nathan Perry said he expected Chiamaka to run a bold race second-up this preparation following his fifth to Putheron at Gosford on December 11 over 1100m.

“His work at home has been very good leading into this and we were quietly confident and Kerrin gave him every chance with a perfect ride,” Perry said.

Herald Sun

Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon says he has welcomed an Iraqi parliamentary resolution authorizing foreign troops to remain in the Gulf nation until the end of July 2009.

Fitzgibbon said Wednesday it would be up to Iraq to decide if Australian forces remain beyond that deadline.

American troops can stay until the end of 2011 under a separate security agreement.

Australia withdrew its combat troops from Iraq in June but still has a small noncombat presence in the country.

The Associated Press

Clarke has expensive tastes – buying fiancee Lara Bingle a $300,000 Aston Martin for Christmas – but he also has common sense in spades.

His rise from Pup to Top Dog is assured after he provided the batting glue (88 off 208 balls) that stuck Australia’s wonky top order together in the most important Test match of the year.

Clarke copped some flak on Boxing Day when he had compiled a painstaking 36 off 157 balls which had some MCG fans nodding off in their seats.

His cautious day-one knock included an incredible 132 dot balls, making sure he didn’t fall for South Africa’s bait of bowling wide of the wicket to induce rash shots.

With every run likely to be gold on a difficult MCG pitch and a slow outfield, Clarke made certain he was there at stumps, which is more than could be said for Michael Hussey and Andrew Symonds.

After a well-earned sleep, Clarke returned to the MCG a different man and smashed anything wide or full to the boundary with the full force of his flashing blade and scorched 52 off 51 balls Saturday morning.

Reversing his plans of the first day, Clarke decided attack was the best form of defence and quickly showed his intent by hoisting a short ball from Makhaya Ntini over the fine leg fence.

“It’s a very good example of just hanging in there,” former Test captain Mark Taylor said in television commentary.

“Yesterday (Friday) he couldn’t hit them off the square.

“It turns around as a batsman and Michael Clarke has given a great example of that in this innings.”

Clarke had gone from gritty to swashbuckling and it was only his disappearing batting partners at the other end that prevented him from scoring his first Boxing Day Test century.

Nevertheless, it was still his highest score at the MCG and an innings that could be invaluable in the context of the series.

The flashy 27-year-old was being hailed as Australia’s next Test captain before he had earned the tag – in fact, before he had even played a Test.

Now he has earned it with his toughness both on and off the field.

He has now played Test cricket under Ricky Ponting for more than four years and has all the tools of the trade to become Australia’s 43rd Test captain.

Clarke proves he has mettle to lead – Cricket – Fox Sports

The great Aussie action hero has been vanquished, felled by something close to the wince-inducing blow that Jackman’s Wolverine delivered to the crotch of an enemy mutant in the most memorable fight scene of X-Men 3. His attacker, devoid of all mercy, lets out a long and sustained giggle. Jackman wags his head as if to shake off the pain the way a wet dog shakes off water. “No more hitting Daddy in the penis,” he finally croaks.

It’s a clear, crisp Sunday afternoon in Jackman’s home town of Sydney, Australia, and Jackman — along with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, and three-year-old daughter and assailant, Ava — is aboard a 48ft boat cutting its way across the waters of Sydney Harbour. It’s a leisurely family cruise. Jackman is loose and relaxed, his face darkened with a faint scruff of beard. He is tall, lean and unfailingly polite. The caustic edge many Australian men display — a good-natured chip on the shoulder that manifests itself in conversational jousting — is absent. Jackman’s casual graciousness seems more British, evoking more the native England of his parents than the rough-and-tumble colony of his birth.

In between amusing his daughter, Jackman gives a starboard tour of the Sydney waterfront, pointing out an oddly extravagant house with a palm tree jutting through its roof (“I’ve been in that house. Inside, it’s literally like you’re in Tahiti. Kind of cheesy”), as well as Nicole Kidman’s expansive three-storey villa. The Jackmans, he says, watched the last New Year’s Eve fireworks with Kidman, Jackman’s co-star in the drama Australia directed by Baz Luhrmann, aboard a yacht that Sting rented for the night. With Kidman’s husband, Keith Urban, on the guitar, “everyone got up and sang a song,” Jackman says. “Then a friend who was staying with me started singing Roxanne a cappella,” a decidedly ballsy move, it would seem, on Sting’s boat. “But Sting said all right, and he got up, too.” Next he points to a dazzlingly white stuccoed Victorian mansion planted on the coastline. “And that house, there? That’s where we filmed the Darwin party scene,” he says, talking about the film Australia.

Australia — and, by extension, Australia — has been a primary focus for Jackman since 2006, when the actor was tipped to replace Russell Crowe in the leading-man slot. (Crowe reportedly dropped out for financial reasons, grumbling: “I don’t do charity work for major studios.”) The second-world-war-era epic has Jackman playing a rough cowboy (or drover) who undertakes a huge cattle drive to save the ranch of a high-strung widow (that’s Kidman). “He brings enormous Aussie charm to the role and this laid-back swagger, which I think hasn’t been seen on screen for a long time,” gushes Kidman. “I think Baz brought something very different out of Hugh.” The film has become something of a national endeavour, not unlike the effort that went into Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, which put neighbouring New Zealand on the map. Luhrmann not only filmed this down-under Gone with the Wind in Australia, he filled the marquee with an entirely Aussie cast and crew and paired up with Tourism Australia so the film could be used as bait for visitors. Then there’s the title: in Australia anyway, definitely a risk. “There’s some anxiety that goes with it,” Jackman admits. “It better be good, right? Australians aren’t going to go, ‘Oh, I didn’t like that,’ if they didn’t. No, they’ll be angry. But Baz has earned the title.”

And Jackman, it’s fair to say, has earned the role. Or any role, for that matter, since in his 10-year film career he has played nearly every kind: the darkly obsessed magician in The Prestige; his Tony award-winning run as the flamboyant, ultra-gay entertainer Peter Allen in the Broadway musical The Boy from Oz; the voice of a penguin in the animated Happy Feet; and the woolly, adamantium-clawed comic-book mutant Wolverine in the X-Men movies.

That kind of range is the definition of the job, but Jackman, 40, extends his brand of method acting to his body as well (Happy Feet excluded). Hence the nine months of daily yoga he practised to pull off the lotus position for 2006’s The Fountain, plus the additional three months’ practice it required to be able to do it underwater — all for a movie barely anyone paid to see. (Yeah, he’s heard of body doubles. Stuntmen, too. Not interested.) Or the total body transformation he achieved to play Wolverine. The former gym-phobe (“I never understood why people went to the gym; I thought it was ridiculous,” Jackman says) undertook a gruelling routine — up to two hours of weightlifting, five days a week. Ditto for Australia, for which the lean actor needed to pack on the thick muscle of an outback cattle drover. “Hugh’s amazing because he has such athleticism,” says Kidman. “He could barely ride at the beginning of the film, but by the end he was a great horseman.”

“For a year and a half I’ve been quite strict on my eating,” Jackman says. He adopted the diet of an Australian bodybuilding champ who “wakes up at four in the morning, has egg whites on dry toast, then goes back to bed so he gets some food in him before he trains at 6am”.

Jackman is so modest he won’t even take credit for being modest, chalking it up to national character. “I love the way in America people go, ‘I’m good at making coffee. I’m going to make you some great coffee,’ ” he says. “Here you’d say, ‘Let me make you coffee,’ and if someone says it’s great, you go, ‘Aw, I just fluked it. Usually it’s crap what I make, but I just got lucky today.’” He offers a variation on that theme when asked about his versatility as a performer. It’s an Aussie thing, he explains. “Look at the business here in Australia,” he says. “With a population of just 20m, you can’t be too fussy. You have to be able to do everything. That may be some of the reason Australian actors have done well. There’s more versatility to what they can do. Plus, we have a saying here: Have a go. We don’t like people who play things safe. It’s not enough just to be successful. You have to take a bit of a risk.”

Have a go, you mug: it’s as good a summation as any for Jackman’s life so far. But it’s slightly misleading at the same time, because while Jackman may sometimes leap without looking, once he leaps his commitment is fervent, and possibly even obsessive. Don’t believe him for a second when he says he just fluked it.

Jackman is the youngest of five children of Chris Jackman, an English-born accountant, and Grace Watson, who abandoned the family and moved back to England when Hugh was eight. It was by all accounts a searing split for Hugh, who was left to the roughshod care of his siblings while his father worked until 6.30 or 7 at night. Though his youth was comfortable — “I was raised in a white, leafy suburb north of Sydney with private schools,” he says — it wasn’t, at least to him, normal. Normality was what he craved, which may be why his earliest ambition was to be an accountant like his dad. “I wanted to do his job,” he says. “He had a calm power about him when he was at work. He had a secretary.”

As with most Australians, a yearning to travel eventually set in. “Part of that is our isolation,” Jackman says. Australia might be a big country, but it can feel like a small island tucked far away from the rest of the world. If we were to turn this boat due east, we’d cover lots of blue — 7,000 miles of it — before landfall in South America.

Hugh Jackman on Australia, marriage and religion – Times Online

Consumers, civil-rights activists, engineers, Internet providers and politicians from opposition parties are among the critics of a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 Web sites prohibited by the government — mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism.

Hundreds protested in state capitals earlier this month.

“This is obviously censorship,” said Justin Pearson Smith, 29, organizer of protests in Melbourne and an officer of one of a dozen Facebook groups against the filter.

The list of prohibited sites, which the government isn’t making public, is arbitrary and not subject to legal scrutiny, Smith said, leaving it to the government or lawmakers to pursue their own online agendas.

“I think the money would be better spent in investing in law enforcement and targeting producers of child porn,” he said.

Internet providers say a filter could slow browsing speeds, and many question whether it would achieve its intended goals. Illegal material such as child pornography is often traded on peer-to-peer networks or chats, which would not be covered by the filter.

“People don’t openly post child porn, the same way you can’t walk into a store in Sydney and buy a machine gun,” said Geordie Guy, spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia, an Internet advocacy organization. “A filter of this nature only blocks material on public Web sites. But illicit material … is traded on the black market, through secret channels.”

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy proposed the filter earlier this year, following up on a promise of the year-old Labor Party government to make the Internet cleaner and safer.

“This is not an argument about free speech,” he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “We have laws about the sort of material that is acceptable across all mediums and the Internet is no different. Currently, some material is banned and we are simply seeking to use technology to ensure those bans are working.”

Jim Wallace, managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby, welcomed the proposed filter as “an important safeguard for families worried about their children inadvertently coming across this material on the Net.”

Conroy’s office said a peer-to-peer filter could be considered. Most of today’s filters are unable to do that, though companies are developing the technology.

The plan, which would have to be approved by Parliament, has two tiers. A mandatory filter would block sites on an existing blacklist determined by the Australian Communications Media Authority. An optional filter would block adult content.

The latter could use keywords to determine which sites to block, a technology that critics say is problematic.

“Filtering technology is not capable of realizing that when we say breasts we’re talking about breast cancer, or when we type in sex we may be looking for sexual education,” Guy said. “The filter will accidentally block things it’s not meant to block.”

A laboratory test of six filters for the Australian Communications Media Authority found they missed 3 percent to 12 percent of material they should have barred and wrongly blocked access to 1 percent to 8 percent of Web sites. The most accurate filters slowed browsing speeds up to 86 percent.

The government has invited Internet providers to participate in a live test expected to be completed by the end of June.

The country’s largest Internet provider, Telstra BigPond, has declined, but others will take part. Provider iiNet signed on to prove the filter won’t work. Managing director Michael Malone said he would collect data to show the government “how stupid it is.”

The government has allocated 45 million Australian dollars ($30.7 million) for the filter, the largest part of a four-year, AU$128.5 million ($89 million) cybersafety plan, which also includes funding for investigating online child abuse, education and research.

One of the world’s largest child-advocacy groups questions such an allocation of money.

“The filter may not be able to in fact protect children from the core elements of the Internet that they are actually experiencing danger in,” said Holly Doel-Mackaway, an adviser with Save the Children. “The filter should be one small part of an overall comprehensive program to educate children and families about using the Internet.”

Australia’s proposal is less severe than controls in Egypt and Iran, where bloggers have been imprisoned; in North Korea, where there is virtually no Internet access; or in China, which has a pervasive filtering system.

Internet providers in the West have blocked content at times. In early December, several British providers blocked a Wikipedia entry about heavy metal band Scorpion. The entry included its 1976 “Virgin Killer” album cover, which has an image of a naked underage girl. The Internet Watch Foundation warned providers the image might be illegal.

Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom have filters, but they are voluntary.

In the United States, Pennsylvania briefly imposed requirements for service providers to block child-pornography sites, but a federal court struck down the law because the filters also blocked legitimate sites.

In Australia, a political party named the Australian Sex Party was launched last month in large part to fight the filter, which it believes could block legal pornography, sex education, abortion information and off-color language.

But ethics professor Clive Hamilton, in a column on the popular Australian Web site Crikey.com, scoffed at what he called “Net libertarians,” who believe freedom of speech is more important than limiting what children can access online.

“The Internet has dramatically changed what children can see,” said the professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, noting that “a few extra clicks of a mouse” could open sites with photos or videos of extreme or violent sex. “Opponents of ISP filters simply refuse to acknowledge or trivialize the extent of the social problem.”

The Associated Press:

The 30-metre maxi finished the 628-nautical mile race down the Australian eastern seaboard in one day 20 hours 34 minutes and 14 seconds.

Wild Oats XI holds the race record of one day 18 hours 40 minutes 10 seconds set in its 2005 win.

The record was under threat up until early Sunday when the prevailing winds subsided in the Derwent River.

Another maxi, 2003 winner Skandia, finished second, one hour and seven minutes behind Wild Oats XI, while Quest was leading the race on handicap.

Wild Oats XI last year equalled the record of the three successive Sydney-Hobart wins of Morna from 1946-48.

Sunday’s record-breaking triumph was not without incident.

The Mark Richards-skippered vessel was forced to stop temporarily late Saturday to free a two-metre (6.5 foot) shark from its rudder.

Richards said the collision with the shark proved a godsend.

He said his boat had underperformed after picking something up on its keel leaving Sydney Harbour on Friday.

Richards said having to stop and reverse to clear the shark also removed whatever was dragging on the yacht.

“The second we got him off, the boat was back to its old self,” Richards told reporters.

He said his crew knew upon leaving Sydney Harbour there was something impeding the yacht.

The skipper said he had contemplated sending a crew member over the side to inspect the keel.

“But we just never stopped. When you are doing 20-25 knots all the time it’s a hard thing to work out what to actually do,” he said.

“So we were waiting for the opportunity but in the end we didn’t have one — we had to do it anyway.”

Wild Oats XI crew member Peter Shipway said competitors Skandia had them worried throughout the blue water classic.

“She was very competitive against us and we just couldn’t nail her for a long, long while,” Shipway said.

“It was only yesterday (Saturday) when it (winds) got a bit light and flukey that we got in front of her.”

Skandia led Wild Oats XI for much of the race but its slight advantage was wiped out late Saturday.

“Once they sailed up to us when the wind shut down last night we knew that was going to be the end of the fun,” Skandia skipper Grant Wharington said.

This year Wild Oats XI did not have a major international maxi to compete against, with the ongoing Volvo Ocean Race depriving the Australian event of some powerful overseas entrants.

Ichi Ban was third across the line ahead of ASM Shockwave 5 and Limit with the remainder of the 2008 fleet expected to finish the race in the coming days.

AFP:

In a statement on its website (www.seashepherd.org), the U.S.-based group said its ship, the Steve Irwin, had forced the fleet into waters off the Ross Dependency, which is a New Zealand possession.

Australia has declared an ‘economic exclusion zone’, known by the letters “EEZ,” in waters off the coast of its Antarctic territories, and an Australian court order bans whaling there.

Sea Shepherd has said it is enforcing that order by pursuing Japan’s whaling fleet, which is in the area for an annual hunt to kill around 900 whales.

However, Japan does not recognise the zone and says its whaling fleet is in international waters.

In the statement, dated Saturday, Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson promised his organisation would continue its pursuit of the Japanese fleet.

“The good news is that they are no longer whaling in Australian waters and they only managed to hunt in the waters of the Australian Antarctic Territory for about a week before being forced to flee the Australian EEZ,” the statement said.

“They are now in the waters of the Ross dependency and the Steve Irwin is in pursuit.”

Watson said this was “bad news” for whales in waters south of New Zealand.

Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research, which runs the hunt, has accused Sea Shepherd of “eco-terrorism” and of ramming its vessel the Kaiko Maru during a protest action last Friday. Sea Shepherd has blamed the Japanese for the collision.

In a video of the incident released on its website (www.icrwhale.org), the organisation showed the crew of the Japanese ship warning Sea Shepherd in English that its protesters would be treated as “illegal intruders under Japanese law” if they tried to board.

During the last whaling season, two Sea Shepherd activists were briefly held on a Japanese vessel they boarded during a protest action.

Despite an international moratorium on whaling since 1986, Japan justifies the hunt on the grounds that its whaling is for “scientific” purposes.

Much of the meat ends up on supermarket shelves.

World | Africa – Reuters.com

Those batsmen, of course, were their bowlers, whose tail-end exploits empowered them when their turn came with the ball, particularly Peter Siddle. It is nothing new for Australia’s tail to score quality runs, but the manner in which they did it in the morning session set the tone: first extremely aggressively (46 runs in the first six overs of the day) and then calmly, as the startlingly mature Michael Clarke repeatedly fed Siddle singles with the first ball of the over. It is a much-debated tactic, and has been since Steve Waugh patented it, but here it served to inform the South Africans that the game was being played on Australia’s terms – and, probably, that Australia were extremely happy with a score of just under 400 given the sluggish outfield.

Siddle, who faced 49 of 71 balls in that last-wicket stand with Clarke, was boosted further by a splendid piece of captaincy from Ricky Ponting. It takes huge courage to not give the new ball to a man who took 11 of your 14 wickets in the last Test, but Ponting preferred Siddle, on his home ground, to Mitchell Johnson. Siddle bounded in like he wanted to run to the ends of the earth for his captain. He found an extra yard of speed, peaking at around 93mph, and claimed Neil McKenzie in his first over with a sharply cutting delivery that might make McKenzie, a disciple of leaving the ball outside off stump, consider renouncing his faith for the rest of the tour at least.

The big wicket, inevitably, was that of McKenzie’s opening partner Smith, who once again was hugely impressive. He has the same hulking presence of old, but he is a lighter man these days, both in mind and body: at the crease he is limber and no longer grips his bottom hand like an insecure boyfriend. Being made South Africa’s youngest captain meant that, not unlike a child prodigy, he did his growing up in public, and so there were inevitable Drew Barrymore moments. But now he is a magnificent specimen of masculinity, sport’s take on Tyler Durden. And he’s still only 27.

Because Smith has such obvious bat-for-your-life qualities, there is sometimes an inclination to think of him as a grinder; he is anything but. He is an enforcer, who is loath to miss any scoring opportunities: among openers of the last 20 years, only Virender Sehwag and Sanath Jayasuriya have a higher strike-rate than Smith’s 61.05. He was down to 54.86 today, mainly because of an elbow injury that would have forced 99.94% of men out of the game, and partly because he was increasingly deprived of his off-side oxygen. When Siddle offered him some with a deliberately wider delivery, Smith gulped too hard and was caught behind.

Once the South African head went, the body twitched and began to collapse. Logically, it is hard to see how South Africa can avoid defeat now, with a deficit just shy of 200 runs and only three wickets, but logic has been at a premium during this magnificent last fortnight of Test cricket. Given the events of Perth, Australia will not be comfortable until their lead reaches 500. But if, as seems likely, we go to a decider at Sydney, this already sensational series will enter a whole new dimension.

Rob Smyth: 3-D bowlers put Australia back in the picture against South Africa | Sport | guardian.co.uk