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.

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.

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?

By SCOTT SHANE

Former Vice President Dick Cheney had a heart transplant on Saturday after 20 months on a waiting list, and was recovering in a Virginia hospital, a statement from his office said.

Mr. Cheney, 71, who has suffered five heart attacks and was in end-stage heart failure, was recovering in the intensive care unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va.

As for the adversarial media—forget it. This is one of Greenwald’s pet peeves, a theme that pervades his widely read column for Salon as well as this book: the coziness of the mainstream media and the power elite, with the former acting as a journalistic Praetorian Guard for the perks and privileges of the political class.

In the race to the bottom, someone comes out on top

People wearing hooded sweatshirts are often going to be perceived as a menace, Rivera said.

Another Taser-related death in Australia has renewed debate about the powerful weapon and whether it is a safe option for police use.

A STRUGGLING Sydney golf club with a declining membership is considering joining forces with a cemetery that is overflowing.

The reference to the lands policy was the recent decision against ringfencing prime agricultural land from mining while forcing miners to face scientific panels to gain approval to mine such areas.

from Robert Fisk...

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.