In the aftermath of these disasters, politicians often talk about how you can’t put one event down to climate change. But the fires that are still burning across NSW and Queensland have brought this link into sharp focus.

On a hot Saturday afternoon in Darwin, James Poppleton is mopping the sweat from his brow. 

It hasn't rained for 160 days.

Naomi Wolf has reignited her row with Australia’s energy minister, Angus Taylor, publishing a recording of a heated phone call with his office.

France is enduring severe disruption as millions of workers threaten to strike in protest at being forced to retire later or face reduced pensions.

   I don’t need the Turner Prize to remind me to make my bed… As the Turner Prize claims relevancy in this modern world, it simply means the modern world is either crooked, pissy or it stinks or both. And to tell the Gus-truth, does the art in Turner Prize represent anything else but the frustrations of annoying deluded artists trying to push old crap forward in squared-wheel new wheelbarrows? Is Gus blind? 

Labor and the Greens have accused crossbench senator Jacqui Lambie and the Government of having struck a secret deal to end the medevac laws that allow refugees to come to Australia for medical treatment.

tooon...   

  What American constitutional government most urgently needs at present is for our Madisonian institutions—the presidency, the Congress, and the courts—to wrest back control of national security policy from an unelected and increasingly rogue national security establishment. 

  Australia's foreign minister Marise Payne said on Monday said the treatment of an Australian writer detained in China was "unacceptable", and called for more details on his case in a move likely to increase tensions with the government in Beijing.

Mostly what Scott Morrison has adopted from Trump is the arrogance and utter refusal to concede error even in the face of overwhelming evidence

porter

Is the CFMMEU the most unlawful organisation in the history of Australia's industrial laws, as Christian Porter says?

One of Gadfly’s field agents reports that his stepmother had turned 100 and was anxiously awaiting a letter from Her Majesty to mark the occasion. Instead, through the post came a congratulatory letter from Michael McCormack, the deputy PM who is promoting carbon emissions as a way to contain bushfires.

When the 1974 impeachment hearings turned south for former US president Richard Nixon, his aides blamed the media.

   Accumulating evidence suggests that the microbiota living in and on animals has important functions in the social architecture of those animals. Sherwin et al. review how the microbiota might facilitate neurodevelopment, help program social behaviors, and facilitate communication in various animal species, including humans.

Understanding the complex relationship between microbiota and animal sociability may also identify avenues for treating social disorders in humans.