Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has conceded defeat a week after Australians went to the polls and says he accepts that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has a mandate to pursue the policies he took to the election.

Mr Shorten said he had spoken to Mr Turnbull on Sunday to congratulate him on his victory.

The Coalition is confident it will win the 76 seats required to form a majority government and could win 77 seats if the counting of postal and absentee votes continues to trend its way. 

From OffGuardian (no link available from this computer). The Chilcot Report was released On Wednesday, and a hard copy can be yours for just £767 (though I would suggest reading it free online here), and while there will doubtless be many and varied autopsies of the evidence and documents, this early observation is an interesting one.

Tony Blair is one of the biggest hypocrites on this planet. The intelligence "he relied" upon to go to war on Iraq had been MANUFACTURED to suit the war on Iraq. This will be the next step of any investigation.

Media Botch on Monday 4th of July ran a study of the media's influence on voters concluding that it had very little impact. I disagree.

I would admit that the clowning about Shorten on the Front pages of The Daily Telegraph, being way over the top, would have demeaned the DT itself. These may not have had much impact on voters' intention, just their gut feeling that the Telegraph might be going a bit too far, predictably. What could have influenced voters would have been its crafted editorials and sneaky words from its uber Kommentariat — words repeated by Malcolm Turnbull especially that Medi-scare was a big Labor lie. 

The great empire operators of today and their governments are as devious as those of the past, possibly more hidden in their intent, because the plebs, us, are more educated. 

President Barack Obama has received much credit for drawing down American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but less attention has been paid to his administration's embrace of armed drones.

His expansion of covert drone strikes goes far beyond that of former President George W. Bush, and has blurred the line between warfare and assassination.

If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking.

Abbottism was going down like a lead balloon, so Abbott was replaced by Turnbull who made all the right noises that could have put the LNP back in the running. But the cabinet was still full of Abbottists, and the policies were still Abbottist. So nobody was fooled. Nobody outside the Liberal party anyway.

The caustic editorial followed similar comments made by The Project co-host Waleed Aly who on Wednesday noted Mr Turnbull had also failed to appear on their show.

Armytage said all of commercials networks had been frozen-out by the Prime Minister's office and suggested Mr Turnbull had no interest in talking to Sunrise viewers.

"We should point out we have asked Prime Minister Turnbull to appear on this show throughout the later stages of this election campaign," she said.