Just hours after the UK Parliament’s vote to bomb Syria on December 2, four British jets were scrambling from their base in Cyprus, on their way to strike oilfields held by ISIS.

Over the past decade Australia bet hundreds of billions of dollars that the rest of the world wasn't serious about tackling climate change. It looks like we lost. World demand, and in turn the prices we receive for our precious raw materials, are collapsing under the weight of the oversupply we helped cause. While demand for coal stubbornly refuses to live up to the optimistic forecasts of Australian politicians, the price of renewables keeps falling faster than its most ambitious boosters predicted.

Is the hydrocarbon economy too big to fail?

My latest journey to Timor-Leste (East Timor) began on 16 October, the 40th anniversary of the murder of five Australian-based journalists in Balibo by Indonesian special forces. My first trip there was in March 1975, six months prior to their deaths.

Could you explain to me this custom?” We had spent three days with our Turkish colleague, and by our final evening together in Çanakkale, on the eastern shore of the Dardanelles strait, the conversation had become more expansive. “Why do Australians insert newspaper into their backsides and set fire to it as they leap into the sea?”

US, British, French, Israeli and other energy interests could be prime beneficiaries of military operations in Iraq and Syria designed to roll-back the power of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) and, potentially, the Bashar al-Assad regime.

The Australian Tax Office released the Corporate Tax Transparency Report in December. It tells us which big businesses didn’t pay any income tax. On top of that it tells us those companies who did but at rates well below the statutory rate of 30 per cent.

Peter Dutton is, to use his own words, more or less, a mad fucking wanker.

from John Passant …

I take Panadol Osteo on my doctor’s advice for my osteo-arthritic knee. I buy it over the counter from my local chemist.Until today patients could also buy it at a subsidised price if it was prescribed by a doctor.

2016, the year when the richest 1 percent of humanity will own more than the rest of the world, according to projections made by the nongovernmental organization Oxfam.