GordonMoyes.com

Each generation apparently thinks the younger generations are going to the dogs, as illustrated by the old criticism of misbehaving youth that regularly makes the rounds in the press that then turns out to have been penned by Cicero, the ancient Roman orator. It always gets a laugh because the 2000-year-old complaints could have been made yesterday.

The Auditor-General, Mr Peter Achterstraat, yesterday called for improvements in the management of Sydney metropolitan bus services. He stated: “Buses are vital for moving people and the public deserves good service. Sydney metropolitan bus services need to be improved.”

Over one hundred and twenty-five years ago some unknown party smuggled out a 3000-year-old coffin they most likely obtained from excavations in the Egyptian Pharaohs’ tombs. The wooden sarcophagus was plastered and painted in an elaborate fashion, and covered with images and religious inscriptions that were later deciphered and understood to be instructions to aid the soul of the deceased on its journey through the afterlife.

Six years after the forming of its new national political party, “Family First” is now set to contest the 2011 state election in New South Wales.

Two reports were tabled in Parliament recently. The Standing Committee on Social Issues released a report on “Substitute decision-making for people lacking capacity” and the Committee on Children and Young People released “Inquiry into children and young people 9-14 years in NSW”.

When my wife and I first married, we lived with my grandmother in a small cottage in Moonee Ponds, Victoria. Up the road lived our most famous citizen, Dame Edna Everidge who greeted everyone with a flamboyant “Hullo possums.” That is because leafy Melbourne is home to hundreds of thousands of possums, and is known as the possum capital of the world.

A recent report by the NSW Auditor-General found critical flaws in the system of protecting children from potential abusers and molesters. The Auditor-General’s findings revealed a failure in the State’s employment screening system. The report found that 14 people assessed in 2008-09 who posed a significant risk went on to get jobs working with children. At least one had access child pornography.

Egyptian authorities using modern medical technology to further investigate King Tut’s family and health have announced the results that the world has been so eager to hear. Their objectives were to use innovative approaches to the new fields of molecular and medical Egyptology, in the attempt to determine the relationships between the royal mummies housed at the Egyptian Museum at Cairo.

Jerusalem is an amazing city, beautiful, historic and for Muslims, Jews and Christians, it is the Holy City – a central place to the world’s three leading faiths; and a magnet for foreign pilgrims. It is also a target for mentally sick people and also the cause of mental illness in otherwise mentally balanced pilgrims.

Yesterday, the New South Wales coroner recommended major changes to the spa building industry after the “avoidable” drowning of an 11-year old girl. Shannon Rankin died when she was sucked underwater in a spa in the newly built Sevan Apartments block at Forster on the NSW mid-north coast in 2006.