US MPs on patrol outside a Brisbane hotel .....

My condolences to the People of Australia

The lock step between the major political parties over Australia's continued presence in Afghanistan has effectively neutralised the war's potential to politically damage successive Liberal and Labor governments.

So far. But sniff the political wind today and you might just smell the potential for change.

Afghanistan remains an immensely unpopular war with Australians.

Thirty-two Australian Defence Force personnel serving in Afghanistan have been killed. Hundreds more have been wounded.

Britain has formally opened talks with the Syrian opposition movement as international pressure continues to mount against the beleaguered regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Frances Guy, a former ambassador to Lebanon, met members of the exiled opposition in Paris yesterday. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, is to meet members of the Syrian opposition in London next week when they will also hold talks with senior officials in Downing Street.

For many years conventional wisdom has said that the whole world is controlled by the monied elite, or more recently by the huge multi-national corporations that seem to sometime control the very air we breathe. Now, new research by a team based in ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, has shown that what we've suspected all along, is apparently true. The team has uploaded their results onto the preprint server arXiv.

The NATO invasion & occupation marks the ruinous "rebirth" of Libya's standard of living. That is the forbidden & unspoken truth: an entire Nation has been destabilized & destroyed, its people driven into abysmal poverty.  

The objective of the NATO bombings from the outset was to destroy the country's standard of living, its health infrastructure, its schools & hospitals, its water distribution system.

And then "rebuild" with the help of donors & creditors under the helm of the IMF & the World Bank.

Senate debatesTuesday, 23 August 2011AdjournmentQantas

7:37 pm

The President said the new positioning is not about China, but it is.

Perhaps there was one kiss too many. Suddenly, the warmth between Julia Gillard and Barack Obama transformed from being a really good look to appearing a little over the top.

Gillard did not come out with a pat line to encapsulate the alliance. But the kissing (through a couple of international conferences as well as on Obama's arrival) and the arms around each other's backs as they left Wednesday's news conference became the new version of ''all the way with LBJ''.

The Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, has come under fire after using his welcoming remarks for Barack Obama as an opportunity to take political potshots at the government.

Mr Abbott, who has broken convention during previous state visits, did so again yesterday when he took potshots at Labor over its policy regarding uranium sales to India and its carbon and mining taxes.

''There's no event too big in which he doesn't show himself to be too small,'' the manager of government business, Anthony Albanese, said. ''He always goes a step too far.''

Embattled South Australian Education Minister Grace Portolesi has defended flying her young daughter to India business-class on a work trip, saying she used the seven-year-old to help further international relations.

Asked to justify to taxpayers the $7000 airfare for her daughter, Allegra, which required an exemption from MPs' travel rules, Ms Portolesi said it was done as a "sign of respect" to the people of India.

The minister has come under scrutiny since it was revealed she had been granted special permission to nominate her daughter as her travelling companion in place of her spouse, allowing her daughter to travel to India on a $7000 business class air ticket.

As the Occupy Movement marks two months of activism, and faces the chill of the northern winter as well as increasingly hard-line city authorities, a reassessment of its effectiveness is inevitable.

Some organisers are talking, for instance, of declaring a "Phase I Victory" and shutting down for the cooler months.

Others are discussing whether to put forward independent nominees for next year's US presidential elections and others still are wondering whether a political party might emerge out of the movement.

A parliamentary break and a season of diplomacy has Gillard seeming poised, relaxed, and picking up in the polls. Has her luck changed?

Julia Gillard, some think, is on the up, and not only with the opinion polls, but in the sky. November had her saving Australia and the world from carbon pollution, playing hostess to the Queen, and, later, to Commonwealth political heads of government, nipping overseas to a G-20 conference to help save Europe from itself, at Hawaii with Barack Obama and APEC heads, home playing host of Obama today and, shortly off to the East Asia summit in Bali, again with her new best friend.

Homeless people are being moved away from Darwin's city centre ahead of US President Barack Obama's visit tomorrow.

The traditional land owners, the Larrakia people, have been asked to encourage the homeless to leave places on the president's program.

Larrakia Nation chief executive Ilana Eldridge says the "gentle suggestion" has come from the Northern Territory government.

"When we go in, people know it is time to move, otherwise the cops will come in heavy-handed later," Ms Eldridge said.

"We take them to another place where they will be comfortable and safe and then in a few days time they will drift back."

Australia should tell Obama we take a different view on China.

As China's power grows, the Asia we have known is passing into history, and a new and very different Asia is taking shape. Barack Obama's visit is a key moment in that transformation, because he is coming here to promote America's view of how the new Asia should work.

As hard as it is to believe, the Republican candidates for president seem to have learned very little from the moral calamities of the administration of George W. Bush. Three of the contenders for the party's nomination have now come out in favor of the torture known as waterboarding. Only two have said it is illegal, and the rest don't seem to have the backbone to even voice an opinion on the subject.

from Crikey .....

After nine years as a refugee, it's time for quality of mercy

Bruce Haigh, a commentator and retired diplomat who worked in Sri Lanka, writes: