A week before Cardinal Timothy Dolan is set to leave New York for Rome, where his name is being floated as a contender in the conclave to elect the next pope, he was grilled for hours behind closed doors in a legal deposition concerning child sexual abuse by priests.

Julia Gillard's lack of leadership has spurred on her inevitable demise.

To paraphrase Labor's campaign slogan in 1972, it's only a matter of time. Politically, Julia Gillard is a dead woman walking. The Prime Minister may dismiss the latest polls, but the trend is clear. With a trio of polls all pointing in the same direction, they spell her certain demise.

Bob Katter wants to dominate the electoral map, but according to former insiders the maverick federal MP has an abrasive way of carving out his party in his own image.

By dividing, Labor hopes to rule again. But this admission of failure repudiates its most successful period in office.

The theme of the Gillard government's election campaign has now emerged into the light of day. Although no one in Labor has yet stated it clearly as a single coherent idea, it's to be a campaign on "values".

It is a dark underworld of kidnapping and forged passports, of straw companies and assassinations.

A place where young Australians with clean identities become invaluable assets to secretive spy agencies such as the Mossad.

My Global Mail colleague Michael Bowers once had the pleasure of talking to one of Kevin Rudd’s primary school teachers, and learned that even back then, Kevin was a little know-it-all.

from PoliticOz ….

a black hole in the budget ….

Former NSW mines minister Ian Macdonald secretly controlled a ­Singapore coal trading company which was set up in May 2008 six days after he asked the mines department for information about coal tenements over a farm owned by Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.

One score years ago and 10, I was in a remote country town waiting patiently for a meeting to finish, then for another meeting to start and finish, so that I could hold a meeting with the people I had come to see. They were, of course, Aborigines of the more conscientious type, which is to say that if they had wanted they could have spent all day, every day, 365 days a year at meetings, mostly with bureaucrats.

Something interesting is happening in Australia.

The Coalition has been telling us for a year or more now that they have all their costed election policies in the can.

''By the end of next week we'll have the policies for an election campaign,'' the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said last June on the ABC's Q&A.

Over the past four decades, of all the reasons people over a certain age have given for their becoming radicalized against US foreign policy, the Vietnam War has easily been the one most often cited. And I myself am the best example of this that you could find. I sometimes think that if the war lovers who run the United States had known of this in advance they might have had serious second thoughts about starting that great historical folly and war crime.

by my friend, Dr Vacy Vlazna

Like most, I believe in democracy. But I also believe in capitalism, and though the two have usually been seen in the West as a good fit, of late I'm having doubts.

Every society has to use some system for organising production and consumption, and I know of none better than leaving it largely to private enterprise.

Civil liberties groups have slammed the legal reasoning behind the Justice Department "white paper" by pointing out that it redefines the meaning of "imminent" threat.