Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore sat down with Amy Goodman ahead of the release of his new film SiCKO.

The film is a seething indictment of the US healthcare system.

It focuses not on the more than 40 million people who don't have healthcare but on the 250 million who do - many of who are abandoned by the very health insurance industry they paid into for decades.

"They are getting away with murder," Moore said of the health insurance companies.

‘The first ever Australian field trials of genetically modified wheat will take place in Victoria this year, as the government aims to fight possible food shortages caused by drought.

The trials were approved by the federal gene technology regulator, who granted "the limited and controlled release of GM wheat lines containing introduced genes for drought tolerance," according to a government report.

Government by grandstanding

Graham Ring from The National Indigenous Times writes from Alice Springs

The Prime Minister has today announced a raft of clumsy and heavy handed policies in respect to Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, without any apparent consultation with Indigenous communities or with the NT Government.

MPs defend 6.7% pay rise, but Greens condemn it

Surprise, surprise!!

Government & Opposition MPs are defending their 6.7% wage rise, but Greens Senator Bob Brown called on the Party leaders to refuse to accept it.

After the wage rise MPs will get an extra $150 a week, Prime Minister John Howard's salary will increase by about $21,000 to $330,000 a year, while Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd will get an extra $15,000.

‘The sprawling $43 billion homeland security department (HSD) is known chiefly for being the agency in charge of America's color-coded terrorist-threat alarm system ("Good morning, Americans. Today is Yellow. Be vigilant. Report all suspicious people.")

‘Richard Perle, the former head of the Defense Policy Board, known in the Beltway as the "Prince of Darkness," has been on TV a lot lately in a much-publicized public spat with former CIA director George Tenet, who recently accused Perle of targeting Iraq days after 9/11.

The US department of justice is preparing to open a corruption investigation into the arms company BAE, the Guardian has learned. It would cover the alleged £1bn arms deal payments to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia.

‘Liberal and Labor senators on the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade have combined to reject a private member's bill by Democrats leader Senator Lyn Allison that would prohibit the acquisition of cluster bombs by the Australian military.

‘The US war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the US Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

‘When asked what he thought of Western Civilization, Gandhi reportedly replied that he thought it would be a good idea.

One could very well speak in the same vein of the entity called the Central Intelligence Agency. It might be useful if the federal government (once thrown back into its constitutional cage, of course) had an agency devoted to collecting relevant intelligence, rather than what it has now – a body involved in propagating turmoil, terror, and subversion throughout most of the world.

‘By trying to argue that Americans should be prepared for generations of troop presence in Iraq - along the lines of peacekeeping in Korea - the Bush administration inadvertently has signalled the depths of its confusion.

The White House has no viable plan for encouraging Iraqis to take responsibility for themselves, for winning allies in the Middle East or for rallying support at home.

‘As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus and Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth revolved around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science. With the encouragement of our professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the capacity of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power had caused the Catholic hierarchy to subvert the church's most central purpose - the search for existential truths.