Muslim women will have to remove face veils when having their signatures officially witnessed under the latest laws in New South Wales, Australia's most populous state.

State Attorney General Greg Smith said on Monday that officials who fail to check identities will face fines under laws recently approved by the state legislature.

Some say if the Bowraville children had been white their killer would have been brought to justice by now. But 20 years later, after two investigations, two trials, a coronial inquest, a change to the law, two appeals to attorneys-general and a petition to Parliament, no one has been convicted.

One reason for this could be that NSW lags other parts of Australia in how it treats some Aboriginal people in court.

One of Barry O'Farrell's closest advisers has been stood aside without pay today following revelations he kept the Premier in the dark over crucial details of The Star casino sexual harassment allegations.

Premier O'Farrell said he was launching an investigation by the The Director General of the Department of Premier and Cabinet to see if Mr Grimshaw had breached the code of conduct for ministerial staff.

The Premier said Mr Grimshaw then offered to remain stood aside until after the conclusion of the Independent Liquor and Gaming Enquiry into the scandal.

Mining barons Clive Palmer and Andrew Forrest have taken on the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, the first labelling him an "intellectual pygmy" who does not understand economics and the second launching a national advertising campaign against him.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has declared he is confident Australians will send him to The Lodge, suggesting to a Liberal Party audience he is a sure bet to be prime minister.

The global gender gap defies simple solutions. Eighty-five per cent of countries have improved conditions for women over the past six years, according to the World Economic Forum, but in economic and political terms there is still a long way to go.

"From London to Lahore," says Oxfam, "inequality between men and women persists." Here The Independent on Sunday explores the best places to be a woman today.

Were we wrong? I have lived through two global conflicts: the west against Russian communism and now the west against political Islam. The latter was caused by western leaders exaggerating a threat from a tiny group of terrorists to win popularity in war. But the former? Surely the cold war was a good war, a Manichean struggle between competing visions of how to order humanity. If not, then it must have been one of the great mistakes of all time, and a horrific waste of resources.

Yesterday I received an email from Stratfor CEO and founder George Friedman. "Deplorable, unfortunate and illegal," he thundered.

Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimised twice by submitting to questions about them.

The first thing to understand about terrorism against America is that it is negligible. Horrible as it was, the destruction of the Trade Towers was an outlier, that is, an event that lies way, way outside the main body of terrorist activity.

'There aren't any bombshells,'' Mark Arbib says. ''No one has threatened me. No one has cajoled me. No one knew I was going to resign until I went to the PM.''

Bob Carr's love of US Civil War history doesn't make him qualified to be Australia's next foreign minister, a senior federal opposition frontbencher says.

And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win. 
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why, that I cannot tell," said he;
"But 'twas a famous victory."

Yesterday was a very big day for WikiLeaks. It just released 500 million internal documents stolen from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, allegedly obtained by hacktivist collective Anonymous in December.

from Crikey .....

Surprise! Gillard brings Bob Carr to Canberra

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

BOB CARR, GILLARD CABINET, LABOR LEADERSHIP SPILL, RESHUFFLE, ROBERT MCCLELLAND