Flanked by eight American flags, Mr Obama said that faced with the prospect of "violence on a horrific scale" in Libya, he felt compelled to act.

The Opposition has urged federal independent MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott to "change teams" after three independents lost their seats in Saturday's New South Wales election.

The rural independents lost their seats to the Nationals in the Coalition's sweeping victory on Saturday night.

Among them was Mr Oakeshott's friend and successor, Peter Besseling, who lost his Port Macquarie seat with a swing of around 11 per cent to the Nationals.

The use of the death penalty globally is continuing to fall, an annual report by Amnesty International has said.

Although 23 countries carried out executions in 2010, four more than in 2009, the number of people executed dropped from at least 714 to at least 527, the rights group said.

But that figure does not include China, whose executions are thought to be more than all other countries put together.

Gabon last year became the 139th country to cease the practice.

Mongolia declared a moratorium on the death penalty.

AJDABIYA, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces retreated from this strategic city on Saturday, running for dozens of miles back along the coast with Libyan rebels in pursuit in their first major victory since American and European airstrikes began a week ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/26/opinion/26opchart.html?hp

During a door-knock in Balmain last week supporters of Verity Firth found themselves face-to-face with an ALP diehard who is so disillusioned with the party that she tried to close the door in their faces.

"But we're not Labor," they protested, "we're Verity Firth."

This is a party which is so on the nose and so demoralised that it dared not speak its name to the electors.

So how does it make a comeback from the political graveyard? Not easily, is the short answer.

On Wednesday, Ms Gillard descanted upon Mr Howard's brave and forward-thinking policies on climate change. "I remind the House that in 2007 Prime Minister Howard actually went to the election promising 'the most comprehensive emissions trading system anywhere in the world'!" she trilled, to an admiring rumble of hear-hears from the Government benches.

...

Ms Gillard's own attitude to the carbon-tax protestors, meanwhile, is complicated. On one hand, she utters "not a word of criticism about them". On the other, she simply cannot believe that Mr Abbott would hang out with such an "extremist", "sexist" bunch of weirdos. One cannot imagine Mr Howard offering such an equation, either.

Picture modified by Gus under fairness of news and current affair agreement satirical policy @2 #67.

From Glenn Milne

And the reason for that importance is that the leaders themselves have made it so. The carbon tax will destroy one or the other.

The Greens planning spokesman, David Shoebridge, said there were so many applications in the pipeline that it would be ''business as usual for the development lobby'' for the next two years unless the Coalition returned many of them to councils for determination.

''We must put in place a regime that has these applications assessed in light of all the local, regional and planning laws that apply to all other developments not under the rule-free Part 3A,'' Mr Shoebridge said.

He said that letting the Planning Assessment Commission approve them would make little difference because it operated under the 3A provisions, which ignored the local planning laws that smaller developments complied with.

If ever we wanted a classic example of how damn broken our parliamentary system really is, we had it yesterday.

In one corner we had the rabid budgie smuggler talking-up a 'people's revolt' that turned out to be such a dud, that not even police would take it seriously, & in the other, big red, suitably indignant because her good name & that of her office had been publicly brought into disrepute.

There they both were folks, treating us to another second rate round of parliamentary theatre costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to stage, welded implacably to opposite sides of the stage, mouthing the most offensive language at each other.