Dear 'Shooty',

I've just watched our Prime Minister talking about shared Commonwealth values in Perth. My mind turned at once to you and your solitary, late-night death in Villawood detention centre last week.

The decision by Qantas to ground its fleet will inflict lasting damage on its brand and see the airline lose customers, says a marketing expert

The move by Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce, to ground the Qantas fleet around the world, will cause significant damage to the brand, regardless of his motives for doing so.

Branding is all about perception, rather than some objective reality. And the key to branding is trust. This move has the potential to further erode trust in the "flying kangaroo" among its key audiences, including business travellers and the government.

In the hit Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, a young window washer discovers a book that tells him the secrets to climbing the corporate ladder.

If such a book were to exist in Australia, it would be short, consisting of one sentence: ''Become the CEO of a company with monopoly power.''

Australia's top 10 biggest companies, by the value of their shares listed on the ASX, comprise four banks, three mining companies, a telecommunications company, a shopping centre owner and a grocery store.

A highly critical report into the moral standards of bankers has been suppressed by St Paul's Cathedral amid fears that it would inflame tensions over the Occupy London tent protest.

The report, based on a survey of 500 City workers who were asked whether they thought they were worth their lucrative salaries and bonuses, was due to be published last Thursday, the day that the Canon Chancellor of St Paul's, Giles Fraser, resigned in protest at the church's tough stance.

What a shame the RSL was heavied into abandoning plans to build bridges between Vietnamese and Australian soldiers of the Vietnam war.

The RSL president, Rear Admiral Ken Doolan, had argued that ''we owe it to the future to do all we can to bring former enemies together''. But the Vietnam Veterans' Association wouldn't have a bar of it.

The allegations are horrifying, the evidence credible: massed civilians shelled and bombed, enemy leaders shot down after surrendering, naked and bound male and female prisoners executed by jeering soldiers. All happening just over two years ago in a nearby Commonwealth country.

Politics aside, the Occupy Wall Street movement has given us some memorable imagery: electric-blue tarps, various graphic riffs on 99 percent, the hipster cop.

The anger of the widow of the murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane remains undimmed two weeks after she ended a meeting with David Cameron in which he declined to hold a public inquiry into her husband's death.

The directors of Britain's largest companies were last night condemned as "elite greedy pigs" for pocketing a 49 per cent pay rise in the past year, while average workers failed even to keep up with inflation.

Two entities are more powerful than any individual government in the West. They are the financial markets and the media. We could argue about the latter, but surely nobody would deny the supreme and often malevolent power of the former.

Yesterday in Brussels a room full of 27 European presidents, chancellors and prime ministers was intent on a single task, trying to do what financial power demands.

Specialist detectives from the Metropolitan Police have discovered the existence of a secret mobile phone within News International's east London headquarters that was used in more than 1,000 incidents of illegal hacking.

The Independent has established that the phone, nicknamed "the hub", was registered to News International and located on the News of the World's news desk. Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police's hacking inquiry, has evidence that it was used illegally to access 1,150 numbers between 2004 and 2006.

There's an old rule in journalism that ''man bites dog'' makes a far better story than ''dog bites man''. Dogs bite men every day, making it a less newsworthy event. But when men bite dogs, something unusual is going on - something people might like or need to know about.

Don your newspaper editor thinking hats and answer this: which type of story is it when Business A comes out warning of dire consequences if it is slapped with a new tax?

Is that what you'd expect them to say? Well, yes, it is. Dog biting man. If Business A came out complaining it didn't pay enough tax, that would be man biting dog.

They raised their heads again last week - the good old ''senior sources''.

Their junior counterparts were nowhere to be heard, leaving it to the anonymous sources of superior rank to spell out the latest nuances in the saga - or should that be tragedy? - that the prime ministership has become.

Trying to write this in one sentence is tiring enough. So don't hold your breath, please, while reading it.

On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only 'engage' for 'self-defence', says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.