In a sign of just how tough life on Struggle Street has become, the Jones family of Sydney today announced to family and friends that their Christmas holiday to Aspen had been scrapped. The Joneses earn just $250,000 a year.

The 1980 adventure movie Raise the Titanic was one of the all-time box office stinkers. Based on the unlikely premise that the wreck of the great liner contained a rare mineral that could save the world from godless communism, it had a hilarious scene in which the ship popped to the surface apparently unscathed after 68 years on the sea floor.

Tony Abbott is coasting to The Lodge on a dream run, first class up the pointy end. No federal opposition leader has had it so easy since 1941, when Labor's John Curtin gained government after the collapse of the Menzies-Fadden wartime minority Tories. And no opposition leader has so little deserved such good fortune.

A petulant child who has a tantrum is often after some love and affection... but it will reject it straight away as it does not want to appear soft and conciliatory... We all make mistakes of evaluation of behaviour... yet we cannot smack the brat before it does a bad deed, whatever his silly reasoning/excuses are...

In August when Tony Abbott launches the Coalition's campaign for the September 14 federal election, he could start as follows: "And the first pledge I now make, a commitment which embraces every other undertaking, is that everything we do as a government will have the one great goal - to reunite this great community of ours, to bring out the best we are truly capable of, together as a nation, and bring Australia together to win our way through the crisis into which the policies of the past and the men of the past have plunged our country."

The chaotic daily churn has left news organisations with gaping holes that political pundits are all too happy to fill. But don't assume they're motivated by a desire to inform, writes Jonathan Green.

The NSW Labor Party has be­come a crime scene. Sus­sex Street has been cor­doned off and foren­sic sci­en­tists sent in to gather ev­i­dence. On the other side of the thick yel­low tape, a crowd of con­fused ALP branch mem­bers has gath­ered in search of answers.

GREENWICH, Conn.

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

My grandfather had a fridge, less modern than the one depicted above (an Electro Lux from around 1928)... Grand dad's was a Frigidaire... The machine never gave up. Bought around 1923 — grand dad was a průkopník in regard to new stuff — it only had days-off when it caked up. It was still going strong, never repaired nor re-gased, when grandpa died 40 years later. Defrosting a fridge then was a major 24 hour operation but one has to know that as the fridge caked-up with ice, the inside of the fridge was less cold... This was a contradiction, the same conundrum that is happening in Antarctica... 

If President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Fresh from its triumphant negotiations with all three political parties for more effective monitoring of the press, Hacked Off, the group that champions victims of press intrusion, has begun to attract the attention of foreign governments that suffer from their own troublesome Fourth Estates.

No form of worker exploitation would exactly surprise me coming from Walmart, a company so dedicated to low-wage labor that many of its workers have to depend on food stamps and Medicaid. But doesn't it seem like there are just a few things that could go wrong with  this idea?