The Gillard government is grappling with a United Nations inquiry into its alleged failure to protect David Hicks's human rights. But it has indicated to his supporters that it accepts the United States' denial of his torture and warned the proceeds of his book may be confiscated.

A confidential, 107-page document submitted to the UN on Hicks's behalf by the Sydney barrister Ben Saul details alleged breaches of international law by the US and Australian governments, including a failure to protect his right to a fair trial and freedom from torture.

US President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner made a winning team on the golf course - with federal budget discussion likely to have taken place between the shots.

They teamed up to beat Vice-President Joe Biden and Ohio's Republican Governor John Kasich at a military base outside Washington DC.

The game was touted as an opportunity to socialise and discuss the budget.

Republicans want spending cuts with the deficit poised to hit $1.4tr (£865bn).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13813691

After careful thought, I have decided, like the Prime Minister, that I have no time in my busy schedule to meet Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, aka His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

This may be my loss. When Tony Abbott saw the bouncy bonze on Tuesday he announced that their meeting had been "good and constructive". He had gained "an added consciousness of the importance of the spiritual dimension to life", he said, without a hint of irony.

Kevin Rudd has a two-to-one lead as preferred Labor leader over Prime Minister Julia Gillard, according to a new poll.

The latest Fairfax-Nielsen poll shows the coalition leading Labor by 59 to 41 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, worse than polling when Mr Rudd was overthrown as leader a year ago.

The poll, published in Fairfax newspapers on Saturday, also had Opposition Leader Tony Abbott tying with Ms Gillard for the first time as preferred prime minister, with both on 46 per cent.

Ms Gillard's approval rating has dropped by six percentage points to 37 per cent, her lowest level since becoming prime minister.

Realpolitik is less about policy than it is about messages, and sometimes messages are best delivered visually.

That's why politicians stage media stunts like visiting small businesses in the outlying industrial suburbs of Canberra, and, yes, Tony Abbott, I'm looking at you.

For months now the Opposition Leader has sought to lead the daily agenda, and get his face on the nightly news, by dragging gaggles of shivering (and sometimes even whimpering) journalists to fishmongers, glass pane purveyors, you name it, in order to emphasise the evil, world-as-we-know-it-slaughtering nature of the government's imminent carbon tax.

When David Flint asserts that the Queen is not a foreign national (Letters, June 16), is he claiming that she is Australian? If so, I would be interested to see her birth certificate. I'm not unreasonable - I'll accept the short form.

Michael Cahill Summer Hill

from Crikey .....

Bernard Keene

Crikey analysis of budget papers show that the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments have spent just over $15 billion on the war on terror since 2001. Indexed into 2010-11 dollars, that's $16.7 billion.

Opening a new phase in a race to define the direction of their party, the leading Republican presidential candidates gathered Monday night for the first time to begin drawing distinctions among themselves in a vibrant competition to be seen as sufficiently conservative for primary voters, but electable enough to defeat President Obama.

The first blow came so fast, from such an unexpected angle, that Andrew Ferguson didn't know quite what had hit him after stepping into the witness box last Thursday morning. Suddenly, everyone was watching a wedding video of people dancing to Love Shack by the B-52s. There was Ferguson, shuffling about on the dance floor. Even Ferguson allowed a wan smile.

As the intersessional meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change began with a faltering limp in Bonn last week, it was hard not to sense a grand emptiness.

The giant rooms of the Maritim Hotel in Bonn have been witness to almost nothing happening, as the climate talks have barely reached a murmur. This could be the last opportunity to generate any momentum before COP 17 to be held at the end of the year in Durban but differences, great and small, have prevented crucial conversations from even getting started. Over days, even the simple content of meeting agendas cannot be agreed.

THE two Americans in charge of Star City's makeover want the casino to become known as ''Sydney's Viagra''.

But they admit they have a long way to go if they want to change its reputation as ''an RSL on steroids''.

During an exclusive first look at the casino's revamped high-roller room, Larry Mullin, the chief executive of Echo Entertainment Group, spoke of how the almost $1 billion being spent on the site would change perceptions of it as a food court with pokies.

My darkest memory from Vietnam is of a young Australian soldier lying wounded in an American hospital near Saigon.

It was Christmas 1966. I was taping messages from our diggers to be broadcast back home on ABC radio. This bloke - my own age, in his early 20s - was groggy from sedation but he managed a few cheerful words for Mum and Dad in country Victoria. Don't you worry, be home soon, love to all.

Out of his earshot, I asked a nurse what had happened to him.

"His balls were blown off by a landmine," she said. "But he doesn't know it yet."

Party elder John Faulkner's speech called for an engagement in politics, and the politicians sure engaged.

They stand at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but John Faulkner and John Hewson have come to the same conclusion about the biggest structural question of Australian politics today.

That question is the future of the progressive vote in Australia. Labor used to have it, or at least enough of it to hold power. But it lost its critical mass of progressive voters to the Greens in 2010.

Russell Crowe went on an anti-circumcision tirade on Twitter late Thursday and early Friday morning (US time), later taking down his cutting Tweets and apologising for offending anyone.

"Circumcision is barbaric and stupid. Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that GOD requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect," Crowe tweeted.

When a follower wrote, "There's actually a scientific reason for [circumcision], u should google it," Crowe replied: "My friend, 'human' science has caused too much damage, don't be a moron."