Courage is a virtue and heroism is admirable, but do we have a right to demand them? Which of us cannot look back on his or her own life and remember decisions, or compromises made, or silences kept because of cowardice, even when the penalties for courage were negligible?

If we are cowardly in small things, shall we be brave in large? Have we the right to point the finger until we have been tested ourselves? When we read of the seemingly lamentable conduct of the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, who left his passengers to their fate, do we say, ''There but for the grace of God go I''?

The Gillard government has conceded for the first time that poker machine reform agreed to with the independent Andrew Wilkie in 2010 will struggle to pass the Parliament.

Mr Wilkie last night met the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to discuss the reforms and will meet her again today in Melbourne.

He reiterated his threat to withdraw support for Ms Gillard if reform was not legislated by May 8 but failed to detail what that would mean inside the Parliament.

''I'm not going to mince my words ... if the government fails to honour its agreement with me then I may well walk away,'' he said.

"The spy rock was embarrassing," he said in the BBC2 documentary series, Putin, Russia and the West. "They had us bang to rights. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose."

A diplomatic row was sparked six years ago after Russian state television broadcast a film claiming British agents had hidden a sophisticated transmitter inside a fake rock left on a Moscow street. It accused embassy officials of allegedly downloading classified data from the transmitter using palm-top computers.

In recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

“When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended.

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the looting of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

“I think it is an important moment in the Capitol,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the antipiracy legislation. “Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

David Cameron will spell out his vision of "moral markets" today, as he enters the intense political debate over how to create a more "responsible capitalism".

In a long-awaited speech in London, the Prime Minister is expected to call for reforms to create a new "popular capitalism" and say the Government is prepared to intervene to make it happen. However, he is also likely to stress the benefits of free markets and to reject what he regards as the heavy-handed, statist approach favoured by Ed Miliband, the Labour leader.

Leaving the beach on a recent Saturday afternoon on a day when a bright deep blue sky reached down to meet blue water, I walked through a beachfront hotel, through the bar and then a large room filled with poker machines. As always with gambling rooms, it was dark, with most of the light coming from the garish machines. The room was packed.

It was an off-putting contrast between beauty and the beast for someone who only gambles once a year (Melbourne Cup) and cannot see the pleasure people get from poker machines, but has no right to patronise them.

In the amoral milieu of the corporate bottom line, you can't blame Tokyo Electric Power Co. for trying.

What Murdoch had intended to write - and who he had intended to target - was POTUS, a common nickname for Barack Obama, the President Of The United States.

The gaffe was immediately noticed by Australians, with ABC boss Mark Scott pointing out Murdoch would have caused: "Cheers at Telstra, confusion at Optus - and amusement from the Potus team."

Others quickly joined in, asking Murdoch what he had against our Telco.

"Yes, thanks, of course I meant POTUS," the 80-year-old newcomer to Twitter replied minutes later. "Somehow iPad changed my spelling. I should have checked. Sorry."

The Queen's decision to bestow the Order of Merit on our former PM is self-interested. With luck, it will expedite the monarch's demise, Bruce Haigh writes .....

Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are "evidence-based views or theories" that run "contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations".

I've heard the term ''political junkie'' thrown around a lot over the years - and it's my generation, and perhaps the one before it, that really live up to the term ''junkie''.

Teresa Gambaro's wrong-headed remarks about migrants are symbolic of a wider problem with Coalition attitudes.

How did Teresa Gambaro's father smell? Let us survey the evidence. His first Australian job was as a farmhand in the hot, sweaty climes of north Queensland. It's unclear how long he stuck at this, but it must have been quite some time because it gave him enough savings to buy a small fish store, which rapidly grew into an impressive seafood business.

It was Napoleon who once called us a "nation of shopkeepers". To judge from the reaction to Antony Worrall Thompson's pilfering from Tesco, we are actually a nation of shoplifters. Still, celebrity shoplifting is a source of hilarity, not outrage.