Poke! Pricier transport; Pedo-stepdad; loneliest plant (23rd August 2011)

Brisbane's Transport price raise for another 50 percent [Courier Mail]

Not fair. not fair! Seems like the ever-inflating commodity price and commuting price is getting heavier and heavier for us International students. You can see the Australian currency is getting all time high, yet the things here are still as expensive as gold. Now, the City Council of Brisbane has decided in the coming years, they will increase the price for each zone gradually to 50% by the year of 2014. Now, by that time, I think there'll be no one taking buses and trains since this already priciest city in the world is still heading to that way. Have they studied about diminishing marginal returns?

Ridiculous mum re-married to pedophile stepdad [Courier Mail]
What sort of maniac will a mother of 2 daughters get married to a man that abused her daughter for 2 years? A Brisbane mum has all the eyes on her as her now husband was alleged to molest her daughter when she was 12 years old back in 2007. Her daughter, who cannot be named according to the law, gave a letter to her mother telling that she is going to marry a child raper, before she got married to this man. She never confronted this issue to the man and they got married together on 2009, after the man has apologised to this girl. The police were informed as soon as the daughter told her biological father about this abuse. The act is sick and perverted.

Introducing the loneliest plant in the world [NPR]
There are over a million species of plants in the world, but one stood out as it survived the asteroids bombardment in the distant past that wiped out dinosaurs, survived through five different ice ages, and evolved itself through eons. Now, there is only a single male tree left in the world in London, along with other genetic clones around the world's botanic garden. This tree is named E. Woodii, a cycad, a kind of tree that lived since the Jurassic and Triassic era. However, they have genders and without the opposite sex, they cannot pollinate. Without pollination, they can't grow seed and thus will ceased to reproduce and the situation now was the researchers have wandered all over the Ngoya forest in Africa, where they discovered this specimen by John Medley Wood in 1895, has yet to find a female E. Woodii. So, you can see why it is called the loneliest plant in the world, and who knows if the tree will die in next year, or the next hundred years without successors?



D.