Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed concern on Thursday about what she called the Vietnamese government's intolerance of dissent.

"Vietnam, ... is on the path to becoming a great nation ..." Mrs. Clinton said in her opening statement at a news conference, as Mr. Khiem stood stone-faced next to her.

Mr. Khiem replied that human rights were rooted in unique cultural and historical circumstances. He cited what he claimed was an observation by President Obama that countries be allowed to choose their own path and that human rights not be imposed from outside.

The New South Wales Government is quietly compiling a mathematical map of almost every adult's face, sharing information that allows law enforcement to track people by CCTV.

Seven of the 91 European banks that underwent stress tests have failed the healthchecks, the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) has said.

They include five Spanish banks - Diada, Espiga, Banca Civica, Unnim and Cajasur. The other two were Germany's Hypo Real Estate and Greece's ATEbank.

The tests assessed banks' ability to survive future economic shocks.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10732597

How stupid do our political leaders think we are?

Judging from the election campaign so far, pretty stupid. It's not the Hey Hey It's Saturday-style stunts that are the problem. You always get some of those in a campaign. Watching how politicians react in slightly whacky circumstances can be fun and sometimes quite revealing. Kevin Rudd went on Rove Live, Paul Keating posed for that picture in Rolling Stone wearing shades and John Hewson once wore six silly hats in a single day of campaigning - my personal favourite being the one shaped like a hot dog.

from Crikey .....

Citizen Gillard abandons basic leadership on climate change

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

A completely discredited right-wing blogger posts an edited video which seems to convict a black Agriculture department official of racism. Fox News runs the distorted clip continuously on all of its shows Monday. Before giving Shirley Sherrod a chance to tell her side of the story, the Agriculture department demands and receives the resignation of the head of its rural development office in Georgia.

If I have to listen to another month of the Coalition banging on about Labor's debt pushing up interest rates, I think I'll scream.

But with the Reserve Bank waiting to scrutinise inflation data due out next Wednesday to decide whether a rate rise in the middle of the election campaign is necessary, we'll hear plenty more of the debt scare campaign in the coming weeks. It's worth taking some time to pick apart the argument that higher government debt means higher interest rates.

An April 2010 Pew Research Center (PRC) for the People & Press study and others report growing public anger, distrust, and hostility toward business and government because of a "perfect storm of conditions" - wrecked economies, fueling "epic discontent" toward responsible officials.

New People for the American Way (PFAW) Survey

Conducted in June, it showed:

- deep dissatisfaction with the political system;

- voters believing corporate influence on government policies is a "serious problem;"

The Order of Mates celebrated beside Sydney Harbour the other day. This is a venerable masonry in Australian political life that unites the Labor Party with the rich elite known as the big end of town. They shake hands, not hug, though the Silver Bodgie now hugs. In his prime, the Silver Bodgie, aka Bob Hawke or Hawkie, wore suits that shone, wide-bottomed trousers and shirts with the buttons undone. A bodgie is an Australian version of the 1950s English Teddy Boy, and Hawke's thick, gray-black coiffure added inches to his abbreviated stature.

The Washington Post published yesterday the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic U.S. apparatus of "intelligence" activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.

Among Priest and Arkin's findings from a two-year study are the following:

Amid all the bellowing about the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in 1988, all current commentary ignores the hippo in the room - which is the powerful evidence that Megrahi was innocent, framed by the US and British security services and originally found guilty because Scottish judges had their arms brutally twisted by Westminster.

The conviction was one of the great judicial scandals of the 20th Century.

Buckets (as in Hyacinth Bucket — pronounced bouquet) are the cheap blooms (all stalks and thorns) that Tony is giving to the media while trying hard to be flip-floppingly interesting... But I was amazed this morning at Julia being accused of "flirting with the media" in a letter written to the Sydney Morning Herald (22/07/10) by a female reader... Blimey, if we're going to vote for the best legs in this boring knife-edged election, Tony has done more of his fair share off leg-up can-cans in budgie-smuggling apparatus to distract us from his shifty eyes.

Like ugly on a toad, banker greed just can't be rinsed off, no matter how much regulatory soap you use.

Last week, Congress enacted new rules to govern America's huge banks, thus completing Washington's response to the unbridled Wall Street greed that crashed the financial system and crushed our economy. The regulatory reforms were hailed by Democrats as possessing powerful cleansing power, while Republicans wailed that the new rules were overly caustic, imposing such a heavy-handed governmental scrub that the delicate layers of Wall Street innovation, competitiveness and profitability will be rubbed away.

At the edge of Parliament Square, Winston Churchill squints – hunched and impervious and marble – over the gothic heart of British democracy. Usually, his only company is the smoggy traffic and snapping tourists. But, for the past three months, he has been joined by another symbol, and another style of democracy.

A year before the [Iraq] war, the former MI5 chief advised Home Office officials that the direct threat posed by Iraq to the UK was "very limited and containable".

In a newly declassified document, published by the inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller told the senior civil servant at the Home Office in March 2002 that there was no evidence that Iraq had any involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

While there were reports of links between the regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, there was no intelligence to suggest meaningful co-operation between the two.