This time David Cameron didn't mind interrupting his holiday. Two weeks after cutting short his main summer break in Tuscany because of the riots, the Prime Minister broke another family holiday in Cornwall to handle Britain's response to the dramatic endgame in Libya.

After taking a high-stakes gamble by calling for international intervention six months ago, Mr Cameron could hardly be blamed for wanting a share of the limelight when Muammar Gaddafi's regime finally crumbled.

Ii was, I thought, a legitimate question. Broadcaster Alan Jones had spent the morning speaking passionately to the crowd outside Parliament House for yesterday's ''Convoy of no confidence''.

He urged them to action, he praised them, he denounced the government and declared Australian democracy dead.

About 1.10pm, Jones handed the microphone to another speaker, and I approached him, introducing myself. I asked him whether he had taken a fee to appear at the rally.

On a warm spring day, strolling in south London, I heard demanding voices behind me. A police van disgorged a posse of six or more, who waved me aside. They surrounded a young black man who, like me, was ambling along. They appropriated him; they rifled his pockets, looked in his shoes, inspected his teeth. Their thuggery affirmed, they let him go with the barked warning there would be a next time.

from Crikey ....

Politicians are masters at answering a different question to the one asked and, while she might have slipped up a little when referring to the member for Dobell, normally no one does it better than our trained-lawyer Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

She shows all the skills honed by chasing ambulances in pursuit of a dollar as she verbally steps around things like a promise not to introduce a carbon tax. And she was at it again in the Labor Party parliamentary caucus this week as she sought to play down calls for an enquiry into the ownership of Australian media.

In a demonstration of the kind of zero-tolerance policing of modern criminality that will no doubt impress Iran's morals police as much as Egypt's military rulers, officers outside London announced on Monday that they had arrested a man for sending text messages encouraging people to take part in a mass water fight.

from Crikey .....

On farming v mining, Abbott clear on the politics but not so clear on a policy

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes

The Bullingdon is an ancient dining club for undergraduate toffs at Oxford, all male, by invitation only. You need pots of money to join, partly to fork out for the uniform of white tie'n'tails with trimmings, but mostly to pay for the property damage wrought at the club's notorious orgies of drinking and destruction.

The British Prime Minister, David William Donald Cameron (Eton, Brasenose), his Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Gideon Oliver Osborne (St Paul's, Magdalen, and heir to a baronetcy), and the Tory mayor of London, the blond, bicycling and batty Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Eton, Balliol), were all Bullingdon chaps in the '80s.

Eighty-one congressmen, or about 20 percent of the US House of Representatives, will visit Israel over the next three weeks during Congress's summer recess, with the first group of 26 Democrats scheduled to arrive on Monday.

The Democratic delegation will be followed by two Republican ones, bringing a total of 55 Republicans.

Most of the representatives are freshmen congressmen, with 47 - or fully half of the freshmen Republicans voted into office in 2010 - making the trip.

For many of them, this will be their first trip to Israel.

God it's wonderful - really diverting in a macabre sort of way, at least if you have a diseased sense of humor and enough Padre Kino red. Which I do.

As I write the world's only delusional superpower, perennially in love with itself, navel-gazing as narcissistically as ever, ignorant, self-indulgent, gurbling like an insane relative in the attic and fondling electro-trinkets from Japan, is broke. Yes, we see a beautiful dive from the high board, two somersaults and a half-twist, into the Third World. And so richly deserved.

The state government has bowed to pressure from Fred Nile and will consider removing ethics classes from schools only months after they began.

A deal the Christian Democratic Party MP says he has struck with the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, places at risk the Coalition's election promise not to remove the classes, which began in February under the former Labor government as an alternative to religious education lessons.

But it also presents Mr Nile and the government with a potential compromise over the issue, on which neither has been willing to give ground since it re-emerged two weeks ago.

The United States Air Force has been training young missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons by citing passages from the New Testament and commentary from a former member of the Nazi Party, according to newly released documents.

The mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which includes a discussion on St. Augustine's "Christian Just War Theory," is led by Air Force chaplains and takes place during a missile officer's first week in training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is investigating a complaint about alleged inaccuracies in statements on climate change by broadcaster Alan Jones.

GetUp! had made a complaint, which it believed was not being pursued by the broadcasting regulator, but the Herald has learned ACMA is investigating the GetUp! complaint, and some others, concerning Mr Jones.

If the complaint is upheld, Mr Jones may be asked to acknowledge the statement was wrong and promise not to repeat it.

The complaint says the 2GB broadcaster was wrong when he stated human beings produce only 0.001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air.

The violent upheavals that have marked 2011 in the Arab world have led to some astonishing statements, from France's foreign minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, suggesting that French forces should help the Tunisian regime deal with protesters (she lost her job) to US Vice-President Joe Biden's assertion that Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was not a dictator (he kept his).

from Crikey .....

One man's terrorist is another man's freak

Piers Kelly of Crikey language blog Fully (Sic) writes: