Shire Network News is so called because the man who started it, "Tom Paine" hails originally from New Zealand, which did such a great job of looking exactly like Tolkein's Shire in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.

This week's show is hosted from New Zealand by well known Kiwi blogger Murray, whose work you can find at Hitting Metal With a Hammer. And no, he is not related to Gimli. As far as we know. Gimli's just nowhere nearly as aggressive and warlike as Murray.

This week's guest is Dr Walid Phares, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies where he focuses on Middle East history and politics, global terrorist movements, democratization and human rights.

He speaks to us about the Hizbollah intimidation of the government of Lebanon, and whatever happened to the amazing disappearing Bush doctrine.

In Blog News this week, Muslim radicals show maximum respect to the fearsome UK constabulary, is Barak Obama's mysterious middle name actually "Neville", we ask why Londoners are confused as to why some guy can get stabbed to death in broad daylight in Oxford St, what length the Yorkshire Ripper's sentence ought to be (and should it be measured in years or length of rope) and Murray tells the rest of the world why they should use New Zealand as a horrible example of what happens when a government actually believes in global warming and signs Kyoto.

We have our regular chat with Evan Sayet and you can pre-order his new book on Amazon.

And Meryl Yourish is along to make fun of someone's name. But he deserves it.