Only nine of the 62 apartments sold in One Hyde Park - the world's most expensive residential block - have been registered for council tax.

The ownership of the Knightsbridge apartments, which range in price from £3.6m for a one-bedroom flat to £136m for a penthouse, is now under investigation by Westminster city council, which is determined to pursue the monies owed by the secretive owners of the apartments.

Someone in the Labor Party remarked yesterday that the former prime minister Kevin Rudd assumes that everyone has the memory of a goldfish".

The MP, like many others, was a touch staggered at Rudd's call over the weekend for the ALP to embrace greater internal democracy or perish.

He has been railing against factional thuggery and calling for the empowerment of the great unwashed on and off since he was deposed in June last year.

But with the three-day ALP national conference beginning on Friday, and the party reforms recommended in the post-election review conducted by John Faulkner, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks to be hotly debated, Rudd has joined in.

Mr Cain and Mrs Bachmann expressly endorsed the controversial interrogation technique – in which subjects are repeatedly made to feel they are drowning – with Mr Cain denying it was torture.

Without naming waterboarding, Governor Rick Perry said that any techniques that might "save young American lives" would be approved if he were in the White House.

Waterboarding was expressly condemned by Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Mr Paul, a libertarian Texas congressman, described it as "illegal", "immoral" and "un-American".

The 0.1% only use small bills to light up their cigars... any more would be a waste of money...
We Are the 99.9%

The Liberal Party is waking up to the realisation that their leader's insistent oppositionism is not helping the cause.

 

We got a small glimpse of what makes Kyle Sandilands tick when he was interviewed on ABC TV's Enough Rope four years ago.

 

It's been a tough year for the captains of industry. The galloping salary increases of pre-GFC days have slowed to a canter, The Australian Financial Review reported. But it's hard to feel sorry for, say, Westfield's Frank Lowy on a package of $16 million.

 

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have been accused of telling TV viewers blatant untruths about Barack Obama.

The candidates deny their TV commercials are deceitful and dishonest but both ads selectively quote the president to make it appear he is saying one thing when he is saying another.

The advertisements have been widely scorned for crossing a line from a longstanding practice of political campaigns pushing the truth to its limits, over to misrepresentation. One ad appears to show Obama admitting he will lose next year's election if he talks about the economy. The other has him calling American workers lazy.

...

In recent times, Peter Slipper's political career has tilted onto a decidedly slippery slope. Former Howard government minister Mal Brough has coveted Slipper's electorate of Fisher for some time and has been busily signing up new members to take his preselection away.

Slipper himself gave the Brough putsch a significant lift last week when he accompanied former Labor PM Kevin Rudd on a school tour in his Sunshine Coast electorate.

Barry O'Farrell has vowed there will be no more "crazy" bike lanes on the city's main roads when he becomes premier. Has has also claimed that Clover Moore "deliberately set out to inconvenience motorists" with the city's 200km bike network. Click here to read the full story in the Daily Telegraph

http://www.bicyclensw.org.au/content/barry-o%E2%80%99farrell-no-more-%E2%80%9Ccrazy%E2%80%9D-bike-lanes

Two months ago, Hua cut her finger to the bone when she was boning a chicken at work. Her friend Dao watched in horror as Hua tried to mask her pain and bandage the finger to keep it hidden, knowing the injury could deem her useless to her employer and get her sacked.

Hua is one of the workers at the Baiada chicken factory in Laverton North where, against the odds, striking workers won their campaign this week. On a number of visits to the picket line, I listened to numerous horror stories of workers who worked in brutal conditions and risked their lives for as little as $8 an hour.

They saved the best until last.

Yesterday our federal representatives decided there hadn't been quite enough mayhem, number-fixing and full-throated bellowing during this parliamentary year.

So they spent the last sitting day throwing a little more sugar our way.

The first and only warning we had of the drama about to unfold was the tremor in Speaker Harry Jenkins's voice as he opened Parliament at 9am. It sounded like he had a cold. He didn't.

Our cranky, wordy Speaker, sparring partner of Christopher Pyne and creator of the Harry Grumpiness Index (or HGI), was about to announce his resignation.

"This brings me to the final area where we are leading - our support for the fundamental rights of every human being.  Every nation will chart its own course. 

Yet it is also true that certain rights are universal, among them freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and the freedom of citizens to choose their own leaders. 

These are not American rights, or Australian rights, or Western rights.  They are human rights.  They stir in every soul, as we've seen in democracy's success in Asia.