After a year of travelling, I had planned a last, short trip. I was going to take the train from Montreal to New Orleans. The travels I had been undertaking earlier this year had brought me to places that were meant to form the background of my second novel.

from the shovel …..

I have quite a few friends who are politicians. A decent chunk of them earn much less than they could in the private sector. Some of them left much more lucrative jobs to go into politics. Others that I know undoubtedly obtained a pay rise by going into representative politics, and I wonder whether they would ever have earned as much in any other pursuit.

from john passant ….

Imagine any other election where one group’s vote is worth 350 times that of other constituents. To call that democratic would engender howls of laughter. And yet that is what happened today when the 86 Federal Labor Party parliamentarians voted 55 to 31 in favour of Bill Shorten as Labor leader.

from the stringer …..

As we will never return to 'business as usual' 23 international thinkers, government advisors and Wall Street money-men break their silence and explain how to establish a moral and just society.

Four Horsemen is an independent feature documentary which lifts the lid on how the world really works.

from the ante-empire report …

What if China was beating the US at its own super-power game in the Pacific and we didn’t even notice?

from politicoz ….

Tony Abbott declared that he offered an apology to Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak for drawing his country into the ugly Australian asylum seeker debate.

This is a long, but very important and revealing analysis of the international legal manoeuvring behind the military onslaught now being waged against the Afghan people by the Bush {now Obama} Government.

from john passant ….

The born to rort party is back in charge and all is right in the land of the long boozy taxpayer funded lunch, dinner, wedding, party, anything.

The explosion of hydraulic fracturing in the last several years, according to a new report, is creating a previously 'unimaginable' situation in which hundreds of billions of gallons of the nation's fresh water supply are being annually transformed into unusable - sometimes radioactive - cancer-causing wastewater.

Propaganda campaigns from vested interests have unduly influenced the past three election results, and the mark of the Australian plutocracy doesn't end there, writes David Llewellyn-Smith.

What image of Palestinians would viewers, who have a smattering, or if any, knowledge of the Palestinian struggle, gain after seeing Dror Moreh’s documentary, The Gatekeepers?

After Rio Tinto had its approval to expand a mine in the Hunter Valley overturned by a court, it entered into a flurry of correspondence with the NSW Government. The government joined with Rio to appeal the decision and now wants to change planning laws to favour mining companies. The Global Mail applied under FoI to have the correspondence released - we got a big no.