20/07/2008 | WITH expectations in the past week waning that Pope Benedict XVI might say sorry to sex abuse victims of clergy, it was heartening to see yesterday's decisive apology.
It has been the elephant in t...
18/07/2008 | Australian industrial leaders as well as domestic consumers of energy are now digesting with apprehension the content and fiscal consequences of the Rudd Government's Green paper on an emissions tradi...
18/07/2008 | It takes a lot of guts for a non-Catholic to comment on World Youth Day, especially one like me who has an enormous soft spot for Catholics.
It all started in the mid-1970s, when I was the only br...
18/07/2008 | Record store owner Rob Gordon and the ''musical moron twins'', Dick and Barry, are compulsive list-makers in High Fidelity a book by Nick Hornby.
In the film adaptation, Barry describes I Just Calle...
18/07/2008 | Are we witnessing the beginning of a real-life satire, at once amusing and terrifying? Its theme is the smothering of the nuclear power risk by catastrophic climate change and the oil crisis. At the G...
18/07/2008 | WE KNOW, we know, it's probably blasphemy and we are very naughty.
But we promise no more papal pun pics after this one. Following the papal procession yesterday was another much-loved, feared and r...
17/07/2008 | WE thought TD Securities senior strategist Joshua Williamson must have won a bet when he was interviewed on ABC Radio's PM program on Tuesday night, suggesting an interest rate cut by December and man...
17/07/2008 | The first thing to say about the questionnaire, Crime and the Farm Environment, which some or all farmers are now receiving in the mail is that its claims that respondents will be anonymous is not wo...
17/07/2008 | Australia and the international community wish to address climate change and mitigate its effects. There is now an almost constant debate on climate change in national and international level forums.
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17/07/2008 | After this month's release of the draft Garnaut climate change review, Federal Minister for Climate Change and Water Penny Wong was careful to give no clue or hint as to the Federal Government's futur...
17/07/2008 | Controversy surrounding the visit of Pope Benedict XVI for the Roman Catholic Church promotional event that is World Youth Day, and Cardinal George Pell's unsatisfactory response to yet another sexual...
16/07/2008 | Imagine the reaction if an inquiry assigned responsibility for the Holocaust without mentioning Hitler, and focused only on the last few months of World War II. Yet that is what the Truth and Friendsh...
16/07/2008 | The release of a joint Indonesian-East Timor report on Tuesday by the Commission for Truth and Friendship into the causes of the crimes against humanity in the run-up to East Timorese independence in ...
16/07/2008 | Yesterday's Federal Court decision striking down the World Youth Day ''annoying laws'' was not a great victory for freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate. Nor, for that matter, for those oppo...
16/07/2008 | The Pauline Hanson phenomenon erupted on to the political landscape 12 years ago when there was a feeling around that the politicians were not listening to the people, and that the major parties forme...
16/07/2008 | OH, I SAY. Family First senator Stephen Fielding certainly knows how to attract attention. Headlining the political party's latest media missive, the senator posed this delightful question, ''Will th...
15/07/2008 | Why do we put so much faith in the market to solve environmental problems? Why do we assume that increasing the cost of fossil fuel emissions will reduce their use rather than just increase everyone's...
15/07/2008 | You can tell that Kevin Rudd is popular at the moment just look at the pictures. A front-page newspaper photograph last week showed the PM seconds before he went up the steps to his aircraft and fl...
15/07/2008 | Only six months after the last election, Thai politics has, once again, descended into chaos. The Government is under attack in the courts, in Parliament and in the media. A determined and vocal group...
15/07/2008 | The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, sought an arrest warrant yesterday for Sudan's President, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on charges of genocide and crimes agains...