The Commonwealth Bank is facing the prospect of a royal commission into a fraud scandal that left thousands of its customers millions of dollars out of pocket.

A Senate committee has recommended the judicial inquiry as part of its report on the performance of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has threatened legal action over comments made by a Tasmanian Liberal MP that eco-charities may be using tax deductible donations to fund illegal activism.

[ABC religion and ethics] Editor's note: Few topics are as contentious today as the role of religion in political debate and public deliberation. Rival positions rely on differing accounts of history, conceptions of "religion" and convictions about the role of the state. Russell Blackford (University of Newcastle) and William Cavanaugh (DePaul University) have both written extensively on this topic, and thus their wide-ranging exchange represents an uncommonly sophisticated treatment of the issues at stake and why they matter.

For those who measure a teacher's week by time spent in the classroom the TALIS report provides a more balanced account. Australian teachers, on average, work 43 hours a week, 5 more than the TALIS average, with 19 hours teaching, seven hours planning and five hours marking.

New Norcia. 

The Bishop of the Australian Defence Force has been charged with a sex offence dating back to 1969.

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work - that is correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple.”

The purpose of Palmer's "CONservationist" "CONversion" is to distract people from the main game: ELIMINATE THE WELL-PERFORMING CARBON PRICING for Abbott to claim victory on the repeal of the "carbon tax". NOTHING ELSE. 

The Prime Minister has used the Federal Liberal Council meeting to take a step closer to handing more power to the states.

Tony Abbott says the federation has great strengths but they are combined with buck passing, duplication, waste and inefficiency.

Extraordinary film footage has emerged of Australian immigration minister Scott Morrison directly threatening asylum seekers detained in Australia’s offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru to return to the countries they have fled from or spend a “very, very long time” in detention.

Dear Mr Gore...

The Australian Competition Tribunal has overturned a decision by the competition watchdog to block AGL Energy from buying the New South Wales power assets of Macquarie Generation.

The tribunal says it will allow the $1.5 billion deal with some conditions.

More than $5 billion was invested in Australian clean energy last year but the sector has virtually ground to a halt owing to widespread anxiety over the government’s commitment to renewables, according to the industry body.

The Federal Government is pressing ahead with its plan to wind back Labor's financial advice laws aimed at protecting investors.

The Coalition has been under pressure over some of the controversial changes it flagged to the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reforms.

Tony Abbott might be our global coal ambassador but it appears he is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world, writes Mungo MacCallum.