Kevin Rudd's wife Therese Rein joined the Labor leadership war today, urging "ordinary people" to back her husband in the campaign against Julia Gillard.

Mr Rudd consistently outpolls Ms Gillard as preferred Labor leader but has been savagely criticised by Labor ministers who worked closely with him as prime minister for having a chaotic and dysfunctional leadership style.

As if noting a change of seasons, many Israelis are talking about a possible war come summer, or later this year, with an air of inevitability born of years of festering conflict that has periodically flared up into full-blown hostilities. The prospect of devastating counter-strikes and possible mass casualties seems to be taken in stride, seen as a lesser evil than facing a nuclear-armed Iran.

picture by Gus Leonisky (2011)

Quickly both sides of politics were trying to show off the size of their hearts.

Shadow attorney-general George Brandis has questioned the decision to award a Human Rights Medal to a lawyer who ran a race discrimination case against newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt.

Al Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri threw his support behind rebels in Syria as the country's Arab neighbours cut it adrift and vowed to support the uprising against president Bashar al-Assad.

Arab League ministers meeting in Cairo called for a joint Arab and United Nations peacekeeping mission in the troubled country and vowed political and material support for the rebels.

The call came as regime troops continued their deadly assault on areas of the flashpoint city of Homs.

Speaking in a video message, al-Zawahiri described the Assad government as a "cancerous regime" that was suffocating the people of Syria.

picture by Gus Leonisky

A report has recommended the immediate privatisation of sections of the New South Wales rail network, to improve services and drive down costs.

Lobby group Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA) commissioned the report, and is now pushing the State Government to act on its findings.

Earlier this month Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian announced the Government's own review to improve the efficiency of RailCorp, saying the organisation costs about $10 million a day.

The BBC will today apologise to an estimated 74 million people around the world for a news fixing scandal, exposed by The Independent, in which it broadcast documentaries made by a London TV company that was earning millions of pounds from PR clients which it featured in its programming.

The US Marine Corps is once again in damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS - a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others.

The Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 would not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naive mistake.

Former clerk of the Senate Harry Evans says Mr Slipper should just get on with the job"You can't recreate a tradition once it's dead, and I think it was well and truly dead in Australia and has been well and truly dead for a number of years," he said.