TONY Abbott has been caught agreeing with Germaine Greer's nasty comments about Prime Minister Julia Gillard's dress sense.

There are a lot of very confused feminists out there right now. Tony Abbott, long seen by the sisterhood as Australia's foremost manifestation that we're all just monkeys in clothing - some more hirsute, and scantily-clad, than others- now wants to help women get back to work after childbirth.

Pope Benedict has slammed America's economic embargo on Cuba, saying it unfairly burdens the Cuban people.

Electricity companies are refusing to tell struggling families and businesses exactly how much the carbon tax will add to their power bills.

They have rejected state government demands for transparency on power prices, claiming it is impossible to provide accurate itemised billing to every home and that it would put them squarely in the sights of the ACCC.

However, the O'Farrell government will this week announce its intention to force all energy retailers to provide an "averaged" carbon tax liability on every consumer's bill starting from July 1.

Americans often ascribe to economics effects that are in fact caused by politics. Before the Espionage Act, for instance, there were hundreds of radical newspapers, many of them socialist or communist - or just sympathetic to the plight of workers. After the war, most disappeared. That wasn't the result of market forces. The US government went to great pains at great expense to persuade Americans to embrace an approved ideology while it silenced dissidents with old-fashioned censorship. The Masses, along with 70 other radical publications, went out of business, because the US Post Office wouldn't deliver it.

Yet they were the lucky ones.

'A turnkey totalitarian state'

A report into executions has found capital punishment decreased by a third over the past decade worldwide, but spiked last year in the Middle East and North Africa.

A secret unit within Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation promoted a wave of high-tech piracy in Australia that damaged Austar, Optus and Foxtel at a time when News was moving to take control of the Australian pay TV industry.

The piracy cost the Australian pay TV companies up to $50 million a year and helped cripple the finances of Austar, which Foxtel is now in the process of acquiring.

A four-year investigation by The Australian Financial Review has revealed a global trail of corporate dirty tricks directed against competitors by a secretive group of former policemen and intelligence officers within News Corp known as Operational Security.

Paul Crouch, 77, and his wife Jan Crouch, 73, run the Trinity Broadcasting Network which delivers the Christian message to every continent except Antarctica 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It bills itself as "the world's largest religious network and America's most watched faith channel".

The network broadcasts prosperity gospel programming, which promises that believers will be materially rewarded, and raked in $92 million in donations in 2010.

The March 11 Massacre of the 17 Afghan citizens, including at least nine children and four women, raises many fundamental issues about the nature of a colonial war, the practices of a colonial army engaged in a prolonged (eleven-year) occupation and the character of an imperial state as it commits war crimes and increasingly relies on arbitrary dictatorial measures to secure public compliance and suppress dissent.

New statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else -  and the desperate need to address this wrenching problem. Even in a country that sometimes seems inured to income inequality, these takeaways are truly stunning.

Julia Gillard has tackled head on her principal perceived weakness among voters by framing the next federal election as being about trust.

After the routing of the Labor government in Queensland on Saturday put the Prime Minister's trustworthiness at the centre of the political debate, Ms Gillard went on the front foot yesterday, mimicking the strategy John Howard adopted at the start of the 2004 election campaign.

''I'm happy now and in the 2013 election to say 'who do you trust to manage the economy in the interests of working people?','' Ms Gillard said from South Korea where she is attending a nuclear summit with world leaders.

The Whistleblower who informed The Sunday Times about the lobbyist offering access to David Cameron, which led to the resignation yesterday of party fund-raiser Peter Cruddas, not to mention the fascinating revelations about the PM's "come upstairs" supper club for wealthy donors, has asked the police to investigate whether the Tory leadership flouted laws banning political parties from taking foreign donations.

picture by Gus Leonisky

Queensland is the fourth state in four years to dismiss a Labor government. Those states contain 87 per cent of Australia's population. And the federal Labor government lost its majority in the same span. Could there be a message?

from Crikey …..

Poll Bludger: the hole where Qld Labor used to be