Grim news on the housing front. There is no joy at all in the figures out this morning from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing the decline in housing approvals is getting even steeper. For the month of November the trend estimate for total dwelling units approved was 26.1% down on a year ago with the seasonally adjusted measure showing a 34.7% fallo.

The trend figures for the individual states and territories suggest that Queensland is how being hit hard by the economic down turn.

Don’t move from the centre of the beach. Another example of how electorally successful politicians put up their ice cream stall right slap, bang in the centre of the beach that I wrote about earlier in the week. President elect Barack Obama has invited evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration even though Warren supported California’s Proposition 8 prohibiting the gay marriages that had been created by the state’s supreme court. The gay lobby are outraged that their man has deserted their cause while the political operatives interested in winning elections see it as a master stroke by a President determined to continue holding the middle ground.

What makes news? Goodness knows how many people died in the conflicts in Africa in the last week. There are very few journalists around to count the bodies but it’s a fair bet that it leaves the 600 or so casualties in Gaza well behind in the body count. Yet throughout the world the military action by Israel in Palestine is headlines in the papers and dominating the television and radio news bulletins while the Congo and Darfur get nary a mention.

I really don’t understand why it is so. In the Darfur conflict this century alone the estimate is of 400,000 deaths. And that pales in to insignificance compared with perhaps 1.8 million killed in the Congo. Yet there is no sense of outrage at these slaughters while Israel gets condemned as if it is some kind of mass murdering regime. Why, too, is there no general outrage at the barbaric deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians by Muslim suicide bombers comparable to that which is accompanying the peripheral killing of innocent civilians as the Israelis attempt to persuade Hamas to stop lobbing rockets on to the homes of ordinary Israelis? I find it hard to believe other than that anti Semitism is alive and well.

Proof of the danger of chat shows. The Romanian Prime Minister Emil Boc can vouch for the fact that those light weight television chat shows are dangerous places for politicians. Watch him stride on to the transparent plastic stage to greet the host and another female guest on his nation’s Antena TV.

The incident itself happened several years ago but that evil YouTube has resurrected it and turned it into a video hit since Mr Boc became Prime Minister recently. It is reported that Opposition MPs pretend to fall over whenever he enters a room and others rub their rear ends in mock pain when he talks.

In South Africa the MP Nhlanhla Nene has similarly become a YouTube star after going “a over t” when the chair he was sitting on for a serious interview collapsed under him.