SEOUL, South Korea — The Group of 20 major economies took initial steps to address imbalances in the global economy on Friday. But they did not act as assertively as President Obama had hoped, and he left little doubt that he considered one country, China, the primary source of the problem.

On September 13, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age published a set of articles by Fairfax group Indonesia correspondent Tom Allard presenting detailed claims by victims of torture by members of the elite Indonesian National Police (POLRI) Anti-Terror Squad known as Densus 88 or Detachment 88.

Am I right in remembering the First Home Owner Grant comes from the federal government?

Then this is some very special political opportunism.

A picture by Roy Lichtenstein just sold for US$42 million... More dosh than the Campbell Soup Can by Andy Warhol. The one on the right is by Roy Lichtenstein that is. The one on the left was of course the inspiration. Meanwhile an old theory in regard to the CIA sponsoring the "modern" arts has resurfaced for whatever reason...

Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists have recently discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our galaxy.

This feature looks like a pair of bubbles extending above & below our galaxy's centre.

Each lobe is 25,000 light-years tall & the whole structure may be only a few million years old.

Americans keep odd things up on the mantelpiece, or in the fridge: Dad's ashes in a biscuit tin or, in Barbara Bush's case, the foetus she miscarried, stored in a mason jar. As her eldest son disclosed this week on national TV, she then handed it to the teenaged George Jr, to take to the hospital. "George, honey, could you hold this while I get the car keys."

"What is it, mom?"

trilogy

They lied. They went to war under false pretenses. They killed. They destroyed a country.

They write about their right to do the things they did and blame "intelligence" that got it wrong - though they were lying about everything - and, in a well-oiled threesome speil, they say they would do it all again...

They take us for fools.

More to come.

When Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton announced they wanted to ''make solar power competitive with conventional power sources'' within five years, they left out one important detail.

Their goal was based on solar being competitive with coal-fired power after a carbon price had been imposed.

Banks will be put under further pressure this week when the government releases the formal definition of the term ''gouging'' that it will use to guide prosecutions.

Since July it has been illegal for a bank to charge a mortgage exit fee any higher than needed to cover its costs.

But until now no bank has been taken to court because the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has been preparing what it calls ''regulatory guidance'' detailing what it will regard as unfair.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said yesterday the guidelines would help crack down on the fees ''that keep people bound into their banks even though they want to change''.

US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, sat in front of a tame audience on the ABC tonight & held-forth on the wonders of the awesome awstraylen-american relationship.

Earlier in the day, 'Our Kevin' almost wet himself with ecstacy when the well briefed yankee diplomat referred to him as the Prime Minister.

Be afraid - very afraid.

A tsunami of Yemeni mail-bombs is about to bury us: this week, "inspectors from the U.S. ... [headed] to Yemen to monitor security practices and to try to find the holes in their system that allowed two explosive packages to leave the country. ... a team of six inspectors from the Transportation Security Administration [TSA] will make recommendations and give Yemeni officials training to improve their cargo security."

That oughta have the mail-bombs absolutely flooding the ol' Homeland.

One has to congratulate Alan Jones.

One of his favourite words is "rubbish"...

For the last 25 years, Jones has held the number one spot, week after week after week on Sydney radio. Twenty-five years is a long time, a heck of a time to be top rating basically non-stop - even beating all the fancy music FM stations. Alan Jones is an intelligent and flawed man...

Oh ye of little faith - a little pricing power causes wholesale abandonment of confidence in markets to sort out supposed hubris. So much for a robust free market economy.

The bank mania sweeping Canberra, whipped along by the usual populist commentaries, is starting to take on bizarre proportions as the two major parties compete to sound the most interventionist and to display the least confidence in the market mechanisms. The outbreak of posturing by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission isn't a good look either.