Former NSW mines minister Ian Macdonald secretly controlled a ­Singapore coal trading company which was set up in May 2008 six days after he asked the mines department for information about coal tenements over a farm owned by Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.

Mischief by Gus...

Findus UK said Saturday it was taking legal advice after early results from its internal investigation "strongly suggest" that the presence of horsemeat in its frozen beef lasagne meals was "not accidental".

One score years ago and 10, I was in a remote country town waiting patiently for a meeting to finish, then for another meeting to start and finish, so that I could hold a meeting with the people I had come to see. They were, of course, Aborigines of the more conscientious type, which is to say that if they had wanted they could have spent all day, every day, 365 days a year at meetings, mostly with bureaucrats.

Something interesting is happening in Australia.

The Coalition has been telling us for a year or more now that they have all their costed election policies in the can.

''By the end of next week we'll have the policies for an election campaign,'' the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said last June on the ABC's Q&A.

As a major winter storm made its way up the Atlantic Coast on Thursday, local authorities from New York City to Maine began to make preparations for what forecasters said could be the heaviest snowfall for some cities in the Northeast in a century.

Over the past four decades, of all the reasons people over a certain age have given for their becoming radicalized against US foreign policy, the Vietnam War has easily been the one most often cited. And I myself am the best example of this that you could find. I sometimes think that if the war lovers who run the United States had known of this in advance they might have had serious second thoughts about starting that great historical folly and war crime.

by my friend, Dr Vacy Vlazna

Given the NSW Shennagans being uncovered by their ICAC last week, you have to wonder how many similar situations across the country exist. In South Australia we don't have an ICAC yet, and when we do we probably won't be allowed to hear what happens.

Over recent years I've been a proud supporter of a group of locals trying to save their community-bequeathed park from being bulldozed for housing in a dodgy land-swap.  In that time I've seen the leader of the protesters become elected as the Council's Mayor!

Like most, I believe in democracy. But I also believe in capitalism, and though the two have usually been seen in the West as a good fit, of late I'm having doubts.

Every society has to use some system for organising production and consumption, and I know of none better than leaving it largely to private enterprise.

Civil liberties groups have slammed the legal reasoning behind the Justice Department "white paper" by pointing out that it redefines the meaning of "imminent" threat.

Obama Administration Claims Power To Authorize Pre-emptive Cyberwar Strikes

If it does nothing else, the election year of 2013 will vindicate some political careers and end quite a few others. Among them, of course, will be those of the party leaders: we will learn whether Julia Gillard can recover from an apparently terminal decline in the opinion polls and whether Tony Abbott can translate his initial blitzkrieg into a win where it counts.