When the patient is dead, there is no point taking him/her to the hospital emergency. The morgue is the place to do a post mortem that tells us that an hour ago, the patient was alive and kicking. So what killed him? Were we warned or alarmed enough to see that the patient was going to die? What could have been done to prevent his/her death?

If you're old enough you may remember having to wipe the squished remains of moths, grasshoppers and other insects from your windscreen when driving through regional Australia.

During the dissolution of the USSR, France and Germany tried to maintain their place in the world by solving the problem of their size against the US giant. They decided to reunify the two Germanys and to merge together in a supranational state: the European Union.

Armed with their experiences of inter-state cooperation, they thought it possible to build this supranational state despite Secretary of State James Baker’s dictate of forced enlargement to the East.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex part of the occupied West Bank if he is returned to office next week.

The Trump era has forced the mainstream media to rethink its approach to covering the White House, given Trump’s willingness to lie so flagrantly.

The Morrison government needs to wake up. It spent the entire election campaign telling us the economy was strong despite clear evidence that was not the case, and now in the light of some of the worst economic growth figures this century it would have us believe all is going to plan.

If that is so, what the heck does that say about their plan?

At the Liberal party election campaign launch in May, Scott Morrison told the audience: “You know, it all begins with keeping our economy strong.”

.......

In 1935, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger put forward the thought experiment with the quantum cat, in which the cat is enclosed in a box together with a radioactive sample, a detector and a lethal amount of poison.

Are we reading China the wrong way? For years, our Western governments have treated China like a backwater second rate citizen of the planet... Suddenly Trump sees the "threat". China has been steadily streamlining 1.4 billion people into a powerhouse that can and will challenge the US "superiority", mostly through trade and innovations, quietly, with no other ambition than to be good. Boy, this is annoying to those used to sort out problems with fist fights rather than cooperation...

The conspicuous exhilaration of the near-death escape turns up pretty regularly in politics as spectator sport.

Democracy (rule by the people), and specifically liberal democracy (democracy with individual rights and freedoms protected), is a central and precious part of our heritage. But now, in Britain and around the world, it is in danger. Political philosophers, social scientists and psychologists are considering how and why, and whether they can and should do more.

Scott Morrison had to backtrack on comments made about the boats from Sri Lanka stopped by Border Force, writes John Wren.