When 16-year-old Colleen Walker went missing from Bowraville, a country town in northern New South Wales, police told her family she had probably "gone walkabout". They said the same when Colleen's cousin, four-year-old Evelyn Greenup, disappeared three weeks later. Then a third Aboriginal child, Clinton Speedy, 16, vanished - and a fortnight later the bodies began turning up in bushland.

Greek talk shows are by nature combustible affairs. But rarely have they witnessed anything quite as shocking as the moment when a leading member of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party launched a physical assault on two female politicians.

Australians have turned on the carbon tax, with almost two-thirds of people opposed to pricing greenhouse gas emissions and an overwhelming majority backing Coalition plans to unravel the policy.

Two bad boys of Australian swimming are in hot water again for posting online photos of themselves posing in a gun shop in the United States.

If you want to see a pretty pack of pollies, you need look no further than James Packer's new political mates.

The billionaire's offices in Sydney's Park Street are now becoming a stronghold for the Labor Party in exile. How strange.

Not content with hiring just one hard man from the NSW Right - former ALP General Secretary, Karl Bitar - James Packer has now hauled his terrible twin, Mark Arbib, on board. 

"Captain Emad", the man alleged to have run a people smuggling operation out of Canberra, left Australia on Tuesday night.

AFP Commissioner Tony Negus told reporters in Canberra today that Captain Emad had not been detained when he left Melbourne, despite an alert going out to authorities.

Mr Negus said there was not enough evidence yet to detain him.

"Yes, it's frustrating," Mr Negus said of the people smuggling case.

But he said the AFP would go ahead with the "full force of the law" in investigating Captain Emad.

The US has terminated funding for a $US20 million project to develop a Pakistani version of Sesame Street.

Poor old Joe.

Forced to flick the default personality switch from ''generally avuncular'' to ''prophet of doom'', Hockey flailed at a loss, sinking deeper the more he spun in his own rhetorical quicksand.

Good economic news was just that. Good.

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan has described the latest economic growth figures as "stunning" and has declared that they should put an end to the "doomsayers".

The National Accounts figures show the Australian economy grew by 1.3 per cent in the March quarter - significantly higher than what economists were predicting.

In his penetrating study "Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights," international affairs scholar James Peck observes, "In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are always committed by somebody else, never us" - whoever "us" is.

Almost any moment in history yields innumerable illustrations. Let's keep to the past few weeks.