Qantas has shocked everyone with a record $2.84 billion headline loss, around three times as bad as expected.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has seized on leaks from the government party room saying they show the Prime Minister is unfit to govern the country.

Tony Abbott stunned MPs when he told them he scheduled a visit to a cancer research centre in Melbourne on Tuesday so he could justify billing taxpayers for a Liberal Party fundraiser in the same city the night before.

from Crikey ….

'No credible threat' from the virus of radicalisation

By Bill Rowlings, CEO of Civil Liberties Australia

The bottom of Sydney Harbour has been contaminated by widespread microplastic pollution which could be entering the food chain, scientists say.

In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of ‘barbering without a license’…

Pell replied: “I was aware of a report in the newspapers and of course through my eventual meetings at groups of survivors and victims that was brought home to me very clear, and there were groups such as Broken Rites that were very active.

Christian Democratic Party MP Fred Nile says women should reconsider having abortions "if the price of the decision is breast cancer", repeating discredited views that have angered women and health groups.

At a budget estimates hearing at Parliament on Thursday, Mr Nile called on the NSW government to alert women to the so-called dangers of abortion, later claiming that studies confirming the link to breast cancer are being "censored".

"The body is preparing to have a baby … and suddenly it's terminated, and that causes some reaction in the cells, and the cells in the breast particularly," he later told Fairfax Media.

This is a dissertation by Gus, about a religious article published by The ABC religious unit... 

The article starts thus:

On 3 August 1964, Flannery O'Connor, one of America's greatest fiction writers, died. To mark fifty years since her premature death, we are pleased to publish this article by Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University and author of Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South