Speaking to the Herald after announcing his plan on Thursday night for a permanent environmental workforce of 15,000, Mr Abbott said he would work out the details in conversation with green groups.

When asked how much an employee could expect to earn in the green army, Mr Abbott cited current standards for trainees and minimum wage-earners '' from $12,000 to $26,000''.

By JAMES KANTER

BRUSSELS — European Union leaders on Tuesday sought to deflect criticism that they had fumbled their strategy at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting, just as a feud between the British and the Chinese over whom to blame for the outcome worsened.

from the ABC

India has confirmed it worked with China and other emerging nations to ensure there were no legally binding targets from the Copenhagen climate talks.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has told Parliament that India got its way at Copenhagen.

He says India, China, South Africa and Brazil emerged as a powerful force.

Mr Ramesh hailed the lack of legally-binding emissions targets and said the group had protected its right to continued economic growth.

From the First Post

From the BBC

Gordon Brown will accuse a small group of countries of holding the Copenhagen climate summit talks to ransom.

The 193-nation UN conference ended with delegates simply "taking note" of a US-led climate deal that recognised the need to limit temperature rises to 2C.

Mr Brown said on Monday the talks were "at best flawed and at worst chaotic" and called for a reformed UN process.

From the Moscow Times...

President Dmitry Medvedev touted Russia as a world leader in cutting emissions at a UN climate change conference and then took the lead in ducking out of the meeting as U.S. President Barack Obama worked overtime to clinch an agreement.

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is going after the environmental votes that have traditionally gone to the left side of politics.

Mr Abbott will stake out his environmental credentials in a speech he will give at the New South Wales Liberal Party's Millennium Forum in Sydney this morning.

He also outlines some decidedly un-Liberal links in his past - one of his grandfathers was a unionist, and his father says he attended a communist Sunday school and sang The Red Flag instead of hymns.

From the BBC

It would have been "right to remove" Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein even without evidence that he had weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair has said.

The former prime minister said it was the "notion of him as a threat to the region" which had tilted him in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Without WMD claims it would have been necessary to "use and deploy different arguments," he told the BBC.

Mr Blair is expected to face the Iraq war inquiry early next year.