The headline - "Bride and Boom!" - was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half.

from john passant ….

The US Senate voted Thursday night to authorize nearly $633 billion in military spending. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, which provides $552.1 billion for the regular military budget and $80.7 billion for the war in Afghanistan and other overseas contingency operations (OCO).

The intellectual dishonesty of Israel’s supporters is appalling. But in some odd way, it is also understandable. How else could they respond to the massively growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign?

Six months ago, I stepped out from the shadows of the United States Government's National Security Agency to stand in front of a journalist's camera.

I shared with the world evidence proving some governments are building a world-wide surveillance system to secretly track how we live, who we talk to, and what we say.

The British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline will no longer pay doctors to promote its products and will stop tying compensation of sales representatives to the number of prescriptions doctors write, its chief executive said Monday, effectively ending two common industry practices that critics have long assailed as troublesome conflicts of interest.

Unlike the rest of the world’s nations, Iceland has taken strong steps to reduce some of the in-your-face corruption that led to the global financial crisis. Four former heads of Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank have been sentenced to prison for between three to five years – the heaviest sentence for financial fraud in Iceland’s history.

Presumably Joe Hockey believes these Treasury figures, so here’s the simplified bottom line beyond the deficit hyperbole and predictable politics as he danced the MYEFO on the National Press Club stage:

Why are Australians so unhappy with their lot? Why do we vote for politicians who want to trash our common heritage? Karl Mathiesen spoke to former Greens leader Bob Brown about the 2013 election

Tony Abbott's cheap sloganeering and political bungles have discredited the parliament. That will make it hard for his or any other government to solve real fiscal problems, writes Ben Eltham

The first hundred days of a government is a rather arbitrary yardstick, dating originally to Franklin Roosevelt’s turbulent first months as US president during the Great Depression.

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It’s time for our annual round-up of the biggest Pinocchios of the year. This was not a presidential election year, so in some ways the subjects that needed to be fact checked were more substantive. In reviewing The Fact Checker’s more than 200 columns in the past year, we found an interesting evolution from statistics about gun violence to claims about President Obama’s health-care law. Our general rule of thumb held: the more complex a subject is, the more tempted politicians are to make misleading claims...

On the day that Joe Botch-Up lays down his "crooked" budget blown out like a Picard helium ballon at 45,000 feet, we're in for a treat from the merde-och press... Pass the mustard and spread it thick.

With its usual contempt in double layers, the boffins at the Scheiße-press lay the blame of the disastrous incompetence, petty infantilism, nasty heartlessness and grand shame of the dizzy silly Abbott government onto the previous Labor government with such a large spoon, it would be funny if it was not so tragic...

Treasurer Joe Hockey believes Tuesday's Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook will expose once and for all the depth of the damage done to the national balance sheet by the last Labor government.

The Treasurer will deliver the MYEFO statement at lunch time on Tuesday in a televised address to the National Press Club.