There is one major ugly factor that has influenced politics around the western world since the early 1970s like no other... His empire has employed armies of scribes, armed with poisoned pens and lies bigger than Ben Hur, to make nightmares come true.

Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.

I could be wrong but I finally have come to a conclusion that astonishes me, myself and my reflection in the mirror: Like Abbott, Mike Carlton is a closet misogynist...

There’s an old Jew­ish prophecy that, as end times ap­proach, his­tory will speed up. Sur­vey­ing the Aus­tralian po­lit­i­cal land­scape, it seems Ar­maged­don must be nigh. Events move in fast for­ward.

Democratic systems struggle to thrive among people threatened by disease - or so says a pair of maverick evolutionary psychologists. Jim Giles investigates their controversial claim

In a sign of just how tough life on Struggle Street has become, the Jones family of Sydney today announced to family and friends that their Christmas holiday to Aspen had been scrapped. The Joneses earn just $250,000 a year.

The 1980 adventure movie Raise the Titanic was one of the all-time box office stinkers. Based on the unlikely premise that the wreck of the great liner contained a rare mineral that could save the world from godless communism, it had a hilarious scene in which the ship popped to the surface apparently unscathed after 68 years on the sea floor.

Tony Abbott is coasting to The Lodge on a dream run, first class up the pointy end. No federal opposition leader has had it so easy since 1941, when Labor's John Curtin gained government after the collapse of the Menzies-Fadden wartime minority Tories. And no opposition leader has so little deserved such good fortune.

A petulant child who has a tantrum is often after some love and affection... but it will reject it straight away as it does not want to appear soft and conciliatory... We all make mistakes of evaluation of behaviour... yet we cannot smack the brat before it does a bad deed, whatever his silly reasoning/excuses are...

In August when Tony Abbott launches the Coalition's campaign for the September 14 federal election, he could start as follows: "And the first pledge I now make, a commitment which embraces every other undertaking, is that everything we do as a government will have the one great goal - to reunite this great community of ours, to bring out the best we are truly capable of, together as a nation, and bring Australia together to win our way through the crisis into which the policies of the past and the men of the past have plunged our country."

The chaotic daily churn has left news organisations with gaping holes that political pundits are all too happy to fill. But don't assume they're motivated by a desire to inform, writes Jonathan Green.

The NSW Labor Party has be­come a crime scene. Sus­sex Street has been cor­doned off and foren­sic sci­en­tists sent in to gather ev­i­dence. On the other side of the thick yel­low tape, a crowd of con­fused ALP branch mem­bers has gath­ered in search of answers.