Mining barons Clive Palmer and Andrew Forrest have taken on the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, the first labelling him an "intellectual pygmy" who does not understand economics and the second launching a national advertising campaign against him.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has declared he is confident Australians will send him to The Lodge, suggesting to a Liberal Party audience he is a sure bet to be prime minister.

The global gender gap defies simple solutions. Eighty-five per cent of countries have improved conditions for women over the past six years, according to the World Economic Forum, but in economic and political terms there is still a long way to go.

"From London to Lahore," says Oxfam, "inequality between men and women persists." Here The Independent on Sunday explores the best places to be a woman today.

Were we wrong? I have lived through two global conflicts: the west against Russian communism and now the west against political Islam. The latter was caused by western leaders exaggerating a threat from a tiny group of terrorists to win popularity in war. But the former? Surely the cold war was a good war, a Manichean struggle between competing visions of how to order humanity. If not, then it must have been one of the great mistakes of all time, and a horrific waste of resources.

Yesterday I received an email from Stratfor CEO and founder George Friedman. "Deplorable, unfortunate and illegal," he thundered.

Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimised twice by submitting to questions about them.

The first thing to understand about terrorism against America is that it is negligible. Horrible as it was, the destruction of the Trade Towers was an outlier, that is, an event that lies way, way outside the main body of terrorist activity.

'There aren't any bombshells,'' Mark Arbib says. ''No one has threatened me. No one has cajoled me. No one knew I was going to resign until I went to the PM.''

Bob Carr's love of US Civil War history doesn't make him qualified to be Australia's next foreign minister, a senior federal opposition frontbencher says.

And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win. 
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why, that I cannot tell," said he;
"But 'twas a famous victory."

Yesterday was a very big day for WikiLeaks. It just released 500 million internal documents stolen from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, allegedly obtained by hacktivist collective Anonymous in December.

from Crikey .....

Surprise! Gillard brings Bob Carr to Canberra

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

BOB CARR, GILLARD CABINET, LABOR LEADERSHIP SPILL, RESHUFFLE, ROBERT MCCLELLAND

Australia's economic success is at risk from a tiny minority of wealthy business people who are using their money and influence to ''poison'' the political and economic debate with arguments that benefit their self-interest but hurt the community, the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, has said.

In an essay for The Monthly magazine likely to stir controversy, Mr Swan names business people Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer as examples of the self-interested ''0.1 per cent'' against whom he rails.

Julia Gillard this week defeated Kevin Rudd overwhelmingly, but she shows little sign of winning the battle with herself to stop making bad mistakes. The aborted attempt to get Bob Carr into Parliament turned an opportunity into an own goal. Suddenly, everyone involved became a casualty.

Carr was embarrassed by being wooed and then unceremoniously dumped. NSW ALP secretary Sam Dastyari, who thought he'd done the right thing by identifying a high-profile figure to shoehorn into the Parliament and ministry, finds himself back in the box labelled ''faceless men''.