To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Hard on the heels of Sydney's water rates rising by 20 per cent, household electricity prices are to increase by 8.5 per cent from July 1 - more than double the rate of inflation. 

The rise will maintain the profitability of the electricity retailers – Energy Australia and Integral Energy - as the State Government moves to sell them. 

Alan Ramsey 

"We are being guided by people who have probably never even seen a proper blackfella let alone lived with them and understand the problems.

Billionaire cardboard king Richard Pratt faces jail over accusations he lied to a competition watchdog investigation into a price-fixing cartel. 

The Visy boss and Carlton Football Club president was charged on summons yesterday with giving false and misleading evidence to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) hearing in 2005. 

Judy Wallman, a professional genealogical researcher, discovered that Hillary Clinton's great-great uncle, Remus Rodham, was hanged for horse stealing & train robbery in Montana in 1889. 

The only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows.  

Colonel Wilkerson, in your prepared testimony, you write that “as I compiled my dossier for Secretary Powell, and as I did further research, and as my views grew firmer and firmer I had to reread that memo (of February 7, 2002), “I needed to balance in my own mind the overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture, which at its worse had led to the murder of 25 detainees and at least 100 detainee deaths.

from Crikey ….. 

Powering Sydney with the sun? Not if the pols can help it 

Alex Mitchell writes: 

We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had. 

*After Air Force One landed at Heathrow at 1.45pm, George Bush flew in his helicopter Marine One to Windsor Castle, where he spent 45 minutes with the Queen. She gave the President and Laura Bush a tour of her Berkshire palace's White Drawing Room. They were joined by the Duke of Edinburgh and America's ambassador to London, Robert Tuttle, and his wife Maria, for afternoon tea, sandwiches and cakes. 

President Bush, the ultimate conviction politician, showed that his elongated time as a lame duck president with the lowest ratings in history has given him a chance to reflect on his contributions to the world.

Talking to the Times on board Air Force One, the president bemoaned his image as a warmonger suggesting that "in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric".  

The Family organises Washington politicians into intimate "prayer cells", influences foreign policy, inspired the creation of the president's Annual Prayer Breakfast in 1953 and sponsored President George Bush's faith-based policy of transferring social welfare responsibilities to religious groups in 2001.

It has actively narrowed debate, limiting what change might be possible. 

When George Bush announced that he favoured keeping troops in Iraq for decades, the media apparently didn't think the opinion of Iraqis mattered. 

Education Minister John Della Bosca has quit the ministry pending the outcome of a police investigation into events that took place at a Gosford nightclub last weekend. 

Speaking in Bathurst after Premier Morris Iemma told a press conference the minister had been stood down, Mr Della Bosca insisted that he had done nothing wrong.