Leaving the beach on a recent Saturday afternoon on a day when a bright deep blue sky reached down to meet blue water, I walked through a beachfront hotel, through the bar and then a large room filled with poker machines. As always with gambling rooms, it was dark, with most of the light coming from the garish machines. The room was packed.

It was an off-putting contrast between beauty and the beast for someone who only gambles once a year (Melbourne Cup) and cannot see the pleasure people get from poker machines, but has no right to patronise them.

In the amoral milieu of the corporate bottom line, you can't blame Tokyo Electric Power Co. for trying.

What Murdoch had intended to write - and who he had intended to target - was POTUS, a common nickname for Barack Obama, the President Of The United States.

The gaffe was immediately noticed by Australians, with ABC boss Mark Scott pointing out Murdoch would have caused: "Cheers at Telstra, confusion at Optus - and amusement from the Potus team."

Others quickly joined in, asking Murdoch what he had against our Telco.

"Yes, thanks, of course I meant POTUS," the 80-year-old newcomer to Twitter replied minutes later. "Somehow iPad changed my spelling. I should have checked. Sorry."

The Queen's decision to bestow the Order of Merit on our former PM is self-interested. With luck, it will expedite the monarch's demise, Bruce Haigh writes .....

Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are "evidence-based views or theories" that run "contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations".

I've heard the term ''political junkie'' thrown around a lot over the years - and it's my generation, and perhaps the one before it, that really live up to the term ''junkie''.

Teresa Gambaro's wrong-headed remarks about migrants are symbolic of a wider problem with Coalition attitudes.

How did Teresa Gambaro's father smell? Let us survey the evidence. His first Australian job was as a farmhand in the hot, sweaty climes of north Queensland. It's unclear how long he stuck at this, but it must have been quite some time because it gave him enough savings to buy a small fish store, which rapidly grew into an impressive seafood business.

It was Napoleon who once called us a "nation of shopkeepers". To judge from the reaction to Antony Worrall Thompson's pilfering from Tesco, we are actually a nation of shoplifters. Still, celebrity shoplifting is a source of hilarity, not outrage.

In the 10 years since the Guantánamo detention camp opened, the anguished debate over whether to shutter the facility - or make it permanent - has obscured a deeper failure that dates back more than a century and implicates all Americans: namely, our continued occupation of Guantánamo itself. It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.

from Crikey ….. 

Anti-coal activists pose a political threat. That's why we're being spied on …..

A toon doing the email rounds...

When you have already spent half a million pounds on rent, £300,000 on furniture and £2.3m paying your staff, an extra £8m on unexplained "administrative expenses" might seem to be stretching credulity, but that is what Tony Blair has told Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which as a consequence has received a rather smaller cheque from the former Prime Minister than it might have expected.

If you enjoyed a cup of coffee this morning, it might interest you to know it took 140 litres of water to produce that cup. Such a simple but profound equation.

It is strange, strange, strange that when it comes to the most important subject on the planet, the basis of all life - water - governments, international agencies, economists, scientists and businesses have consistently underestimated the growth in global demand, and the growing stress on supply.

It's the biggest story in the world, yet mostly what we talk about is money: debt, growth, superannuation, savings, stockmarkets, gross national product, housing prices, wages.