A petulant child who has a tantrum is often after some love and affection... but it will reject it straight away as it does not want to appear soft and conciliatory... We all make mistakes of evaluation of behaviour... yet we cannot smack the brat before it does a bad deed, whatever his silly reasoning/excuses are...

In August when Tony Abbott launches the Coalition's campaign for the September 14 federal election, he could start as follows: "And the first pledge I now make, a commitment which embraces every other undertaking, is that everything we do as a government will have the one great goal - to reunite this great community of ours, to bring out the best we are truly capable of, together as a nation, and bring Australia together to win our way through the crisis into which the policies of the past and the men of the past have plunged our country."

The chaotic daily churn has left news organisations with gaping holes that political pundits are all too happy to fill. But don't assume they're motivated by a desire to inform, writes Jonathan Green.

The NSW Labor Party has be­come a crime scene. Sus­sex Street has been cor­doned off and foren­sic sci­en­tists sent in to gather ev­i­dence. On the other side of the thick yel­low tape, a crowd of con­fused ALP branch mem­bers has gath­ered in search of answers.

GREENWICH, Conn.

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

My grandfather had a fridge, less modern than the one depicted above (an Electro Lux from around 1928)... Grand dad's was a Frigidaire... The machine never gave up. Bought around 1923 — grand dad was a průkopník in regard to new stuff — it only had days-off when it caked up. It was still going strong, never repaired nor re-gased, when grandpa died 40 years later. Defrosting a fridge then was a major 24 hour operation but one has to know that as the fridge caked-up with ice, the inside of the fridge was less cold... This was a contradiction, the same conundrum that is happening in Antarctica... 

If President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Fresh from its triumphant negotiations with all three political parties for more effective monitoring of the press, Hacked Off, the group that champions victims of press intrusion, has begun to attract the attention of foreign governments that suffer from their own troublesome Fourth Estates.

No form of worker exploitation would exactly surprise me coming from Walmart, a company so dedicated to low-wage labor that many of its workers have to depend on food stamps and Medicaid. But doesn't it seem like there are just a few things that could go wrong with  this idea?

Moral quandaries often pit concerns about principles against concerns about practical consequences. Should we ban assault rifles and large sodas, restricting people’s liberties for the sake of physical health and safety? Should we allow drone killings or torture, if violating one person’s rights could save a thousand lives?

A great week for huffin'-'n'-puffin', what? First, Alexander Downer takes an airbrush to history. And then, more gobsmackery by our top soldier, on what he ''always knew'' was a raw deal for the people of Afghanistan's Oruzgan province.

Richard Heinberg talks about the new book "Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth," a haunting look at our current energy path.