Nine months ago, when John Howard was still running the place, his government introduced into Parliament a piece of proposed tax law that stank of a rort. The date was September 20.

We didn't know it at the time, but when Parliament adjourned that night it wouldn't meet again before Howard called the November election that killed his government and evicted him from political life.

The British lawyer Gareth Pierce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: "Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture, brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence.  

In a victory for corporations seeking to limit big-dollar lawsuits, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday cut the $2.5 billion in punitive damages awarded in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The court reduced the award to $507.5 million, dashing the hopes of more than 32,000 fishermen and Alaska Natives who've been waiting for nearly 20 years to hear whether Exxon Mobil Corp. must pay billions in punitive damages for its part in the spill.

To bolster his argument that the Guantanamo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush: "At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield." It turns out that statement is false. 

Speculators now account for about 70% of all benchmark crude-oil trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from 37% in 2000, according to congressional findings cited in a Wall Street Journal report Monday.  

from Crikey ….. 

Coalition's greenhouse denialism is a cynical disgrace 

Talk about the double standards at the United Nations.

Whereas UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly condemned Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric against Israel, expressing "shock and dismay", he has remained ominously, and inexcusably, silent about the blatant Israeli threats of military attacks on Iran, thus undermining the world's confidence in his ability to steer the global community clear of yet another major war in the Middle East caldron. 

After all, the point of the surge, as laid out by Mr. Bush, was to buy time for political reconciliation among the Iraqis. The results have been at best spotty, and even the crucial de-Baathification law celebrated by Mr Bush and Mr McCain in January remains inoperative.  

Peter Taylor introduces the Age of Terror, a BBC Two series tracing the modern history of terrorism.  

Age of Terror

To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Hard on the heels of Sydney's water rates rising by 20 per cent, household electricity prices are to increase by 8.5 per cent from July 1 - more than double the rate of inflation. 

The rise will maintain the profitability of the electricity retailers – Energy Australia and Integral Energy - as the State Government moves to sell them. 

Alan Ramsey 

"We are being guided by people who have probably never even seen a proper blackfella let alone lived with them and understand the problems.

Billionaire cardboard king Richard Pratt faces jail over accusations he lied to a competition watchdog investigation into a price-fixing cartel. 

The Visy boss and Carlton Football Club president was charged on summons yesterday with giving false and misleading evidence to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) hearing in 2005. 

Judy Wallman, a professional genealogical researcher, discovered that Hillary Clinton's great-great uncle, Remus Rodham, was hanged for horse stealing & train robbery in Montana in 1889. 

The only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows.