Risk-taking and line-skirting have always been just one more cost of doing business for Rupert Murdoch.

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The big change in the statement is inclusion of the phrase: “…cautious behaviour by households and the high level of the exchange rate are having a noticeable dampening effect.”

Europe’s well-publicised fears have played a role in that, but so have Tony Abbott and Glenn Stevens himself.

Abbott’s fear campaign over the carbon tax – consistently telling workers they will lose their jobs and the Australian economy will be severely damaged – has worked, as all opinion polls show.

The global economy is in the midst of its second growth scare in less than two years. Get used to it. In a post-crisis world, these are the footprints of a failed recovery.

The reason is simple. The typical business cycle has a natural cushioning mechanism that wards off unexpected blows. The deeper the downturn, the more powerful the snapback, and the greater the cumulative forces of self-sustaining revival. Vigorous V-shaped rebounds have a built-in resilience that allows them to shrug off shocks relatively easily.

Fields near Tamora, NSW. (Picture by Gus)

Kumi Naidoo

From my first introduction to Australia via a picture book as a child, I was captivated by Australia's vast and pristine landscapes. To my mind yours is the country of health, nature and purity.

Yet on my first voyage to Australia as the executive director of Greenpeace International, I am devastated to find myself in a country set to become the first in the world to produce genetically modified (GM) wheat.

Grain loading in WA (picture by Gus).

Australia recorded a trade surplus of $2.33 billion in May, easily exceeding analyst forecasts of a sub-$2 billion number.

It is the fifth biggest trade surplus since the ABS figures began in 1971.

The Bureau of Statistics figures show exports increased 3 per cent to $26.26 billion, seasonally adjusted, while imports remained roughly the same at $23.93 billion.

The biggest rise in exports came from non-monetary gold, which jumped 49 per cent (but is highly volatile), while rural goods were up 6 per cent.

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Dickson is not yet finished with me. He correctly quotes me as saying that the famous "cast the first stone" scene "was added centuries after John was written." He then accuses me of confusing the fact that

"this narrative doesn't appear in the best manuscripts of John's Gospel, something all modern Bibles acknowledge in their text of John 8, with a conclusion that the story was concocted 'centuries' later."

But I didn't say that the story was "concocted" - I don't know its provenance, but it clearly seems to be controversial - I said that it was "added," and Dickson then goes on to confirm that it was indeed added later.

The Bolt Report has attracted larger television audiences than ABC’s Insiders every week since its 8 May launch, OzTAM data shows.

Last Sunday, The Bolt Report attracted its largest audience to date when 322,000 tuned in to the program’s two editions, beating the show’s previous best of 305,000 achieved on 15 May.

The ABC’s Insiders program, presented by Barrie Cassidy, last week attracted a combined audience of 264,000 – 58,000 fewer than The Bolt Report.

The Bolt Report airs at 10.00 am on Sunday morning and is repeated at 4.30 pm the same day.

Nickel/cobalt refinery north of Townsville (Picture by Gus)

ONE of Australia's richest men, Clive Palmer, is buying nickel laterite ore for his Yabulu refinery from an Indonesian company that is defying a ban and mining in Raja Ampat, the world's most ecologically diverse marine environment.

In about a month, if nothing is done, the federal government will hit its legal debt limit. There will be dire consequences if this limit isn’t raised. At best, we’ll suffer an economic slowdown; at worst we’ll plunge back into the depths of the 2008-9 financial crisis.

So is a failure to raise the debt ceiling unthinkable? Not at all.

A reluctant Tony Abbott has pledged, after Peter Reith's assault on his reticence to talk about industrial relations reform, that the opposition will take a ''strong and effective'' policy to the election. Abbott's office swore he wasn't saying anything new. Other participants in the debate - from Reith to the ACTU scaremongers - saw his comment on Tuesday as a significant development.

The reality is that the IR issue is on Abbott's plate and it will become very hot. He must take control of it, or it will badly burn the Coalition.

As I have mentioned before, the melting of ice sheets is masking the full potential of global warming though we can measure a strong (in geological timescale) warming trend anyway...

Again here, I use the "ice in the whisky" image: the ice cools the whisky. Yet the sum total of temperature is rising despite the ice being cold... The ice melts and there is a tipping point at which the influence of the ice becomes so negligeable, the whisky temperature quickly rises to room temperature...

President Obama’s $35,800-a-plate fund-raising dinner was the talk of Wall Street last week.

Held at Daniel, the Michelin three-star restaurant of Daniel Boulud on the Upper East Side, the event was seen as a test of the president’s popularity among the deep-pocketed financiers he has often vilified but has long relied on to finance his campaign. The tables were filled with moneymen like Marc Lasry, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Avenue Capital; Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.

Iran plans to send a live monkey into space next month, the latest advance in a missile and space program which has alarmed Israel and its western allies that fear the Islamic Republic is seeking nuclear weapons.

The head of Iran's Space Agency on Monday said five monkeys were undergoing tests before one is selected for the flight on board a Kavoshgar-5 rocket, according to the official IRNA news agency.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last August that Iran planned to send a man into space by 2017.

Western countries are concerned the long-range ballistic technology used to propel Iranian satellites into orbit could be used to launch atomic warheads.