As usual with state premiers, it was all about the money. Facing debt and deficit, the Sunshine State is crying poor. Queensland, the Premier claims, "has been bankrupted - is on the way to being bankrupted - by poor and reckless financial management".

The state needs to "right size" its public finances, and if it doesn't, then it could go the way of the indebted sovereigns of the Mediterranean.

The 2012 London Olympic Games were preceded by an Opening Ceremony that controversially involved a social history of the ordinary people of England since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the 18th century.  Unfortunately the Opening Ceremony considered only the several score English subjects of the English Establishment and ignored the horrendous maltreatment of hundreds of millions of other subjects of the ruthless British Empire.  

Howard government minister Mal Brough has won Liberal National Party preselection to run for parliamentary Speaker Peter Slipper’s seat of Fisher at the next election.

Mr Brough won the ballot for one of Queensland’s safest conservative federal seats on Sunday afternoon.

Entrepreneur Dick Smith has launched a stinging attack on News Corp and Kim Williams, the head of its local operations, News Ltd, branding the organisation's campaign against proposed media reforms as hypocritical.

BOB CARR: Absolutely. You take what he said on China, this adversarial tone towards China, and you take what he said about Indonesia, sending the boats back, which would be guaranteed in his first week as prime minister, if he's elected, to produce a crisis in our relations with our nearest, most important neighbour, and you take what he said about the anglosphere.

A millionaire Saudi businessman, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of being the brains behind the terrorist attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000, in which 17 U.S. soldiers died. He is also a victim of the notorious torture program initiated by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.

With the ease of downloading a song, anyone with a computer and a credit card can order thousands of bullets and shotgun shells on the Internet, along with tear-gas canisters and speed loaders. They can get the same high-capacity ammunition clips that infantry soldiers use. They can even get bulletproof vests and SWAT helmets. All without fear of a single background check.

from politicoz …..

Two opinion polls out today make for sobering reading, and not just for the government.