from Crikey .....

Alex Mitchell writes

Liberal federal Cabinet ministers, backbenchers and hard-heads in the Liberal Party organisation were dismayed and annoyed by the pathetic performance of Treasurer Peter Costello in yesterday's live debate with Labor’s shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan.  

Apologise to asbestos campaigner, Abbott told 

The Federal Opposition is demanding that Health Minister Tony Abbott publicly apologise for not meeting with noted asbestos campaigner Bernie Banton yesterday. 

In what world do these people live?  

True, there'll be no public executions outside Buckingham Palace when His Royal Highness rides in stately formation down The Mall. We gave up capital punishment about half a century ago. There won't even be a backhander – or will there? – which is the Saudi way of doing business.  

In America's darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." But that was then. 

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president - including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination - have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns. 

from four corners 

"If you think about all the planes that are available as being puppies in a litter, the Super Hornet is the runt." US aviation analyst James Stevenson. 

For more than 30 years Australia has rested its security on the seemingly ageless wings of its F-111 fighter fleet. 

There are experts. And then there are experts. When it comes to Islam and/or national security, these days just about anyone can pass themselves off as an expert. But how do the real experts behave? 

Some months back, a number of Muslims in Australia and New Zealand were approached by a leading expert in political Islam. William Shepard is a retired associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Labor commits to new global warming deal 

The Federal Opposition says it is willing to commit to a new international greenhouse gas emissions target, even if big polluters like China and the United States do not sign up. 

On the critical issue of Iran's uranium-enrichment program, Tehran and Washington are now engaged in a game of geopolitical chicken, which favors hard-liners on both sides, making compromise more difficult, escalation more likely and war - by accident, if not by design - a greater possibility than before.  

Labor says Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey's admission the government is running a fear campaign over ALP union links exposes its fearmongering ahead of the election. 

Launching a new round of Liberal advertising attacking Labor's union links, Mr Hockey told reporters: "Our fear campaign is based on fact.'' 

After four years watching the disastrous consequences of the invasion of Iraq unfold, it's easy to forget the atmosphere of panic in which the war was sold to the American public.

The main U.S. disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a news briefing on California's wildfires that no journalists attended. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still struggling to restore its image after the bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, issued the apology after The Washington Post published details of the Tuesday briefing. 

from Crikey On November 1 last year, The SMH carried a front page interview with Peter Costello in which the Treasurer said the commodities boom was over.