Sensational gestational gossip leaves women's mags holding the baby

SURROGACY extends to sources when it comes to gossip mags reporting on celebrity babies.

This week's Woman's Day cover story on Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's "adopted Haitian baby":

OUR insider reveals the actress was touched by the plight of orphans in Haiti during an emotional trip to the disaster-stricken country last July, where she visited tent cities and shelters for abused women in the devastated capital of Port-au-Prince as a UN goodwill ambassador. "It broke her heart when she saw babies and kids who needed a mum and dad, and she realised she had to do something to help," our insider explains. "When she got home and talked about those helpless tots with Keith, she broke down in tears. They decided there and then they wanted to adopt."

Blame the paparazzi. US-based celebrity website TMZ explains yesterday:

NICOLE and Keith were frank about their choice: that in Australia they live in a fishbowl and they can't do anything on the down low. The couple told people connected with the birth that the US is so "entertainment oriented", they're just two of many celebs and aren't scrutinised the way they are in Australia . . . making it a lot easier to have the baby without anyone noticing. And it worked. Before TMZ broke the story, we called some of Nicole's reps, who were totally unaware she had hired a surrogate who had given birth.

Kidman on helping women in USA Today, August 20 last year:

IT'S not what I get out of it. I feel like I can never put enough into it. The greatest thing my parents did was give me a social conscience.

Tuesday's Crikey.com slams The Australian for looking hard at the role Brisbane's Wivenhoe Dam may have played in the flood disaster:

THE Australian's ego continues to distort its coverage.

Too early to ask tough questions? Interviewed on ABC TV's Breakfast program yesterday about coverage of the floods, Crikey journalist Andrew Crook urges the media to follow The Australian's example:

JOURNALISTS should be looking at these questions quite early on. I don't think they should be resting on their laurels. If there's an issue there that needs to be explored . . . definitely.

Black Swans? Wayne the prophet interviewed by Sunrise's David Koch on August 18 last year:

KOCH: OK, so, again, just clear it up for me. Would you be prepared to delay us getting back into surplus if we needed to fight another global financial crisis?

Treasurer: Well we're getting back into surplus in three years, Kochie.

Koch: OK. Come hell or high water?

Treasurer: Come hell or high water, but we've got the judgment to handle these situations. If we had gone into recession we wouldn't be in this position and that's where we would have been if the Liberals had been in power.

She has a point. Annabel Crabb on ABCOnline's The Drum yesterday:

WITH all this uncertainty, the 2012-13 budget surplus seems a curiously precise thing to be certain about. But it's a pretty good lesson in the way political realities can insert some blunt certainty into the elastic science of economics. Why is the surplus such a big deal? The simplest answer is that it's a big deal because the government has made it a big deal.

Queensland CFMEU spokesman Jim Valery in today's The Australian slams Greens leader Bob Brown's comments blaming last week's floods on the coal mining industry:

THESE sorts of comments are not only insensitive.

They reek of desperation and opportunism. He should at least recognise that the comments were very ill-informed.

Too many people. An editorial in The West Virginia Gazette, January 8, praises China's one-child policy and India's past forced sterilisations:

THESE are ruthless measures, but necessary . . . More birth control, more sterilisation plus more education and prosperity: these are urgently needed to halt humanity's lemming-like rush towards misery.

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