Hamid Karzai is poised for outright victory in Afghanistan's bitterly contested presidential election after officials said he had won more than 50 per cent of the vote.

But his likely re-election without having to face a second round after reaching the milestone with almost all of the votes counted was mired in controversy. United Nations monitors said they had found "clear and convincing evidence" of fraud and election officials ordered a recount of thousands of disputed ballot papers.

from Crikey .....

Steve Fielding is just a media torte. Sorry, tart.

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel says she "deeply regrets" any loss of innocent life, after civilians were killed in an air strike in Afghanistan.

But Mrs Merkel told parliament that Germany's mission in Afghanistan remained necessary.

There has been heavy criticism of the strike, ordered by a German commander.

from Crikey .....

Four to one: our lobbyist to MP ratio

Terrorism as defined by the U.S. and other organizations is: activities that involve violent... or life-threatening acts... that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State and... appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping...."

He has been mocked for wearing stacked heels and standing on tiptoes in official photographs, and now Nicolas Sarkozy is embroiled in a new controversy over the alleged lengths he will go to in order to make himself look taller in public.

Americans have lost their ability for introspection, thereby revealing their astounding hypocrisy to the world.

US War Secretary Robert Gates has condemned the Associated Press and a reporter, Julie Jacobson, embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, for taking and releasing a photo of a US Marine who was wounded in action and died from his injury.

By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.

Venezuela has agreed to export petrol to Iran, in a sign of closer ties between two of America's most vocal adversaries.

At the end of a two-day visit to Iran, President Hugo Chavez said Venezuela would supply 20,000 barrels of petrol a day to the country.

Iran is a major oil exporter but lacks domestic refining capability.

Iranian leaders expressed support for the Venezuelan socialist leader's anti-American policies.

By THOM SHANKER

Tony Blair will be thrust into the controversy

over the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi with questions in Parliament over a secret meeting the then Prime Minister orchestrated that brought Libya in from the cold.

In recent days the state Labor Government has been likened to the last years of the Roman empire, what with fornication, plotting of coups and attempted overthrow of emperors.

But on the coffee table of the Premier, Nathan Rees, this week sat a book not about an empire in decline but about one's construction: Niall Ferguson's Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World.

Today marks Rees's first anniversary in the job. People doubted he would make it this far, so determined were some within the parliamentary Labor party to have him bumped off.

QandA Latest Program: Thursday 3 September 2009 at 9:30pm http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/

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Gus: There are times when one has to pay dues against one's ingrained beliefs. For example one has to admit that Senator Bill Heffernan has "improved"... Even one of my buddies who had seriously bad interaction with him way back in the wild 1980s told me in the afternoon before the show that Heffernam had mellowed and strangely grasped the major issues, including climate warming... Weird...

It must also eventually come to an end, and this could become a problem for the newly-elected Democratic Party government in Tokyo. The negatives for Japan in this institutionalized subordination to the United States have become heavy to bear, not only politically but in certain ways psychologically, and even spiritually. Japan, after all, from its brilliant successes early in the Meiji era, in its 1904-1905 war with Russia, to its defeat by American nuclear bombs in 1945, was probably the most dynamic, ambitious and nationalistic country on earth.