Post: #26

Correct me if I'm mistaken but after she's jailed she will lose her sole custody in Australia by default...? Did she just completely screw herself?

Post: #27

This is comedy gold.

The sixty minutes crew are clearly mentally trapped in baby boomer land where westerners used to be able to do stupid shit anywhere in the world and at very worst be deported at their earliest convenience.

As for the morons running this operation, I don't care if I were 7 foot tall and 300 pounds. You wouldn't catch me doing illegal crap in some MiddleEastern shithole for any amount of money on earth.

Post: #28

(04-15-2016 01:34 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  This is comedy gold.
The sixty minutes crew are clearly mentally trapped in baby boomer land where westerners used to be able to do stupid shit anywhere in the world and at very worst be deported at their earliest convenience.
As for the morons running this operation, I don't care if I were 7 foot tall and 300 pounds. You wouldn't catch me doing illegal crap in some MiddleEastern shithole for any amount of money on earth.

Yes indeed.
Maybe, maybe if it was Canada or Holland.
Yet to cause any level of shite in either the middle east or south east asia (drug running)?

Essentially Darwin Awards all round.

Post: #29

As i was saying earlier:

(04-14-2016 10:21 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  It'll get hilarious if she cops the deal and goes flying home to Australia with her arse on fire but the 60 Minutes crew gets all principled and gets five years.

Well, while it might not result in a deal, it's looking more and more like she's going to get out while the White Knights stay imprisoned:

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/...117a43ebf5

Quote:All the defendants, including Mr Whittington’s fellow CARI operative Craig Michael and two Lebanese security staff, will have the chance to apply for bail at today’s vital court hearing, which will take place around 5pm AEST.
Channel Nine’s Tom Steinfort told The Today Show Ms Faulkner had a “fair chance of being granted bail” as her lawyer asks the court to consider the operation as a family custody matter. But Steinfort said it was “pretty unlikely” the 60 Minutes crew would be bailed.

I doubt this is out of simple spite, too. 60 Minutes is arguably in deeper shit than Faulkner because it appears the show directly bankrolled the operation. Adam Whittington, the head of the rescue team, is driving the knife into 60 Minutes' back:

Quote:“Child recovery expert” Adam Whittington told News Corp Australia he has receipts showing direct payments for the operation from the Channel Nine accounts department.

Mr Whittington, who is ready to present the evidence to a Beirut court today, made the explosive revelation he received $115,000 for the recovery of the children in two instalments from the TV channel.

“I have the receipts and internet payments; for [Channel Nine] to claim they weren’t involved is a joke,” he said from behind a door at Baabda detention centre.
His testimony could be devastating for his cellmates — 60 Minutes producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David ‘Tangles’ Ballment — and for reporter Tara Brown, who is being held with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner.

Had the TV crew simply paid a fee to Ms Faulkner, they could argue they had no control over whether she used it for the abduction of her children from Beirut, where they were living with their Lebanese father.

As for the Lebanese father, well, he seems content to channel Paul Keating and do the whole lot of them slowly:

Quote:The child recovery specialist yesterday accused the Aussie mother of “throwing everybody under the bus” by doing deals with her estranged husband Ali al-Amin in her bid for freedom.

But her negotiations do not appear to have progressed far, with Mr Moghabghab telling News Corp Australia that any deal-making was now taking place between Channel Nine and Mr Al-Amin.

Mr Moghabghab said Ms Faulkner had agreed to relinquish custody, but was told by Mr Al-Amin’s lawyer: “We are not in a hurry to talk about this’.’

Aside from all of that, the whole operation could have turned out a shitload worse. Most news organisations by now have reported that where the kids were snatched is smack bang in the centre of a Hezbollah-controlled neighbourhood. They were fortunate someone didn't come out with an AK-47 or an RPG launcher ... or that they didn't wind up somewhere with black hoods over their heads.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #30

Apparently Tara, her crew and the mother are back in Australia:

Daily Mail Wrote:Presenter Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes crew have arrived back in Australia after a US$500,000 deal was reached with the father in the botched child abduction case.

The veteran reporter arrived at Sydney Airport on Thursday with producer Stephen Rice, sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson on a business class flight from Dubai.

They walked free from a Lebanese prison on Wednesday along with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner after her estranged husband, Ali Elamine, agreed to drop the charges.

The TV crew had spent two weeks behind bars over the plot to snatch Ms Faulkner's two children from her ex-husband's family on a street in Beirut.

They sparked outrage on social media after posting a pictured of them celebrating their release with drinks in an airport lounge before their flight back to Australia.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ralia.html

Post: #31

Massive victory for the dad who got paid 500K + full custody in Australia + undisclosed hush up $$$$. This is the best thing that's happened to him.

Post: #32

He sounds like a good and compassionate man. Good that he received a large financial settlement from the company. Must be enough money over there to live a prosperous life with his children.

Tara Brown is glad she can see her children again but apparently had no problems with kidnapping someone else's.

It wouldn't have happened if the woman had married an Australian guy with a similar culture and roots in the same soil. It's very exotic and liberating to mess with the natural order, sure, but it's a very risky gamble which her children now have to pay for. Sad!

Post: #33

(04-21-2016 08:39 AM)[email protected] Wrote:  Massive victory for the dad who got paid 500K + full custody in Australia + undisclosed hush up $$$$. This is the best thing that's happened to him.

Not bad but i'd say that's still a bit cheap of a payout. Full custody is what really matters at the end of the day though.

They literally tried to kidnap dude's kid. I know some fathers out there who would murder someone if they tried that shit.

He probably could have pushed for a couple million at least. He could hang that charge over their head for awhile while he negotiated a proper settlement.

Quote:He is still pressing ahead with charges against Adam Whittington and Craig Michael from Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI), who allegedly helped plan and carry out the abduction.

They were not freed as part of the deal and remain behind bars

Good I hope these white knight motherfuckers enjoy taking it up the ass daily in the Lebanese big house.

Post: #34

I thought they did this for a living. They got paid 115K pre tax for it. Were they white knights or just trying to get paid for their niche work? If it's the former, f them

Post: #35

Quote:He is still pressing ahead with charges against Adam Whittington and Craig Michael from Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI), who allegedly helped plan and carry out the abduction.

Kind of ironic...


Lebanon and most other arab countries are true patriarchies, I believe that the fathers there get custody by default (the article below confirms it). This makes more sense in their societies, where extended families tend to be close, and would come in and help raise the kids. This custody rule acts as a deterrent against women walking out from their marriage for selfish reasons (of course extramarital relationships are completely off the table).

http://www.arabnews.com/node/401246

Post: #36

(04-25-2016 06:39 PM)[email protected] Wrote:  I thought they did this for a living. They got paid 115K pre tax for it. Were they white knights or just trying to get paid for their niche work? If it's the former, f them

It's their business, although they get a lot of mileage out of looking like child-rescuing heroes. Even then there are women who whinge that they're nothing but sharks who get families at their most vulnerable and try to extract maximum dollars out of parents who want to get their kids back. (Hilariously, the same woman who made this charge then went on to describe the harrowing, half-year-or-more ordeal she had to go through in order to get her kid back, including engaging people smugglers to get her across the border in question.)

Me, I'd say that $115K pre-tax isn't an unfair amount to ask if what you're proposing to do is basically a covert operation in a foreign nation which doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with your nation of birth, and which could net you a good 20 years in prison if not get you killed. They had a team of, what, four men, all armed, who had to grab two kids and then somehow get out of the country with police and other security service bodies looking for them. That's under 30K each if you're splitting the money evenly. You get better danger money working on an oil derrick than doing this sort of shit.

Odd as it sounds, I think the Lebanese got it backwards. These guys were literally hired muscle. Yes, they organised how the operation was to be done, but the initiator of the plan was Faulkner, and 60 Minutes bankrolled the operation. They should've stayed in prison and these guys should've been turned loose for just doing their job. Either that, or make no distinctions between them: everyone stays in, or everyone gets out.

As it is, I've seen some reports of an interview with the father about their release - he said it wasn't about the money, and while he didn't want the kids to think he'd left their mother in prison, in his words, it was "more political than anything".

Based on that, I suspect the police/government leaned on him to drop the charges against the mother and 60 Minutes settle the civil claims between the father, mother, and 60 Minutes, because doing so resolved an embarrassing diplomatic situation for Lebanon and Australia. Bodies like Amnesty and/or women's agitation groups would have raised hell at Lebanon for holding captive a mother and a group of journalists (no matter how justified the imprisonment is). Lebanon clearly didn't want the hassle and the attention.

Australia also didn't want to lose face, it seems to me. Julie Bishop, the foreign minister basically admitted that what was at play here was a pair of opposed decisions by the justice systems of the two countries: an Australian court had given the mother custody, and a Lebanese court had given the father custody. Legal stalemate, in other words. And she mentioned in interviews there is a bilateral agreement between Australia and Lebanon to sort out these sorts of issues when they arise - a clear indication that it's happened many times before. But at the end of the day it was pure mediation, not enforceable ultimately, and I'm pretty sure Bishop didn't want to fuck up diplomatic relations with Lebanon over a stupid TV crew and the grinning slut who came to them with her tale of woe -- not when Channel Nine was willing to pay a massive bribe to the Lebanese government to get its people out.

(In passing, Faulker said she had contacted the Australian government for help when the kids had been abducted and received no help. Also bullshit. She did, and the foreign office contacted her to ask her what she wanted to do, but she never went back to them.)

EDIT: Also - note that the criminal charges are still in place, while the civil claims between 60 Minutes and the father are over. Per this piece from an international law lawyer, the court can still find the 60 Minutes crew guilty in absentia ... which then gets their names put on an Interpol watch list and makes it very difficult for said journalist to leave Australia.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #37

I think it boils down to Lebanon and Australia wanting to solve this amicably due to the presence of a large Lebanese immigrant community in Oz.

Post: #38

They fired the producer, and the crew has been given "formal warnings."

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/28/asia/austr...index.html

Post: #39

Media Watch has done an analysis of the situation - you can find it here. It includes a link to the internal report that the network did on the incident.

Quote:What emerges from Nine’s inquiry is that 60 Minutes has been allowed by management over the years to become a law unto itself.

The Head of News and Current Affairs Darren Wick was never consulted about paying the child snatchers or doing the story.

We’re told he didn’t even have authority over 60 Minutes until 18 months ago.

Nine’s report proposes several new checks and balances. But cultural change is what’s really needed: more ethics, less arrogance.

Because 60 Minutes has been close to crossing the line for years.
And the key difference with Beirut is they got caught.

Not that Tara Brown saw it that way when she came out of jail five weeks ago.

Quote:TARA BROWN: Yeah, I think, you know, I think when we presented ourselves and we were being questioned, I really thought, you know, we’re journalists, we’re doing our job, they will see reason, they’ll understand that, you know, that we, we are here just to, to do a story on a very, very desperate mother. And I just thought that reason would prevail, and it didn’t.
— Channel Nine, 60 Minutes, 24 April, 2016

It’s still possible that charges will be brought in Lebanon against Brown, Rice and the rest of the 60 Minutes team, and with Whittington still in jail it’s going to be hard for Nine to win back the trust of the audience.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #40

Quote:But cultural change is what’s really needed: more ethics, less arrogance.

Given the ABC's coverage of Gamergate, that's fucking rich.