Howard government minister Mal Brough has won Liberal National Party preselection to run for parliamentary Speaker Peter Slipper’s seat of Fisher at the next election.

Mr Brough won the ballot for one of Queensland’s safest conservative federal seats on Sunday afternoon.

Entrepreneur Dick Smith has launched a stinging attack on News Corp and Kim Williams, the head of its local operations, News Ltd, branding the organisation's campaign against proposed media reforms as hypocritical.

BOB CARR: Absolutely. You take what he said on China, this adversarial tone towards China, and you take what he said about Indonesia, sending the boats back, which would be guaranteed in his first week as prime minister, if he's elected, to produce a crisis in our relations with our nearest, most important neighbour, and you take what he said about the anglosphere.

A millionaire Saudi businessman, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of being the brains behind the terrorist attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000, in which 17 U.S. soldiers died. He is also a victim of the notorious torture program initiated by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.

With the ease of downloading a song, anyone with a computer and a credit card can order thousands of bullets and shotgun shells on the Internet, along with tear-gas canisters and speed loaders. They can get the same high-capacity ammunition clips that infantry soldiers use. They can even get bulletproof vests and SWAT helmets. All without fear of a single background check.

from politicoz …..

Two opinion polls out today make for sobering reading, and not just for the government.

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality.

‘Look over there’ said the evil angel. ‘It’s the devil.’

That’s apparently why we have to vote for the evil angel Labor Party – to help ward off the Tony Abbott devil.

“Such violence, such evil is senseless. It's beyond reason.”

Tony Blair is a pariah because he colluded in an act of abundant wickedness, and untold hundreds of thousands died and millions more suffered monstrously in consequence.

Finance Department report shows former Liberal senator Helen Coonan spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer’s money last year fitting out her personal office.

Time to face facts. Time to pull the pin.

Julia Gillard is leading the Australian Labor Party towards a catastrophic election defeat, probably the worst in its federal history. For the good of the party and the good of the country, she must quit the prime ministership or be prised out of it.

This is a story of two letters and two Britains. The first letter was written by Sebastian Coe, the former athlete who chairs the London Olympics Organising Committee. He is now called Lord Coe.