Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls for 'new deal' to solve oil crisis

The Prime Minister has unveiled a four-point plan, which would see leading oil markets – including China and India as well as the Middle East – functioning better to reduce volatility and renew efforts to make the most of the world's remaining reserves.

Nine months ago, when John Howard was still running the place, his government introduced into Parliament a piece of proposed tax law that stank of a rort. The date was September 20.

We didn't know it at the time, but when Parliament adjourned that night it wouldn't meet again before Howard called the November election that killed his government and evicted him from political life.

Obama supports supreme court reversal of gun ban

· Candidate's stance at odds with former position

· Democrat backs death penalty for child rapist

Barack Obama intensified his campaign to appeal to voters on the life-and-death issues of the American heartland yesterday by stepping away from his past support for gun control. 

The British lawyer Gareth Pierce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: "Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture, brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence.  

Meanwhile in the Deep Blue Sea - too tainted of red blood from the dead:

'What about reasoning with them?' said one whale.

'Humans do not listen to reason, they're addicted to greed!' said another.

'Pity we don't have nukular weapons!' joked a sea cow.

In a victory for corporations seeking to limit big-dollar lawsuits, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday cut the $2.5 billion in punitive damages awarded in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The court reduced the award to $507.5 million, dashing the hopes of more than 32,000 fishermen and Alaska Natives who've been waiting for nearly 20 years to hear whether Exxon Mobil Corp. must pay billions in punitive damages for its part in the spill.

In the world of advertising there could be a few nervous souls. McCain may or may not do it again... If you see my drift. The next presidential fight is about to start. Old John versus youth-ish Barack.

To bolster his argument that the Guantanamo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush: "At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield." It turns out that statement is false. 

Rudd's big fraud: all symbols & no substance …..

Right at the heart of the Rudd Government is an emptiness - a vacuum between the rhetoric and the reality; between the empathy and the action. 

Speculators now account for about 70% of all benchmark crude-oil trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from 37% in 2000, according to congressional findings cited in a Wall Street Journal report Monday.  

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it.

Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.” 

from Crikey ….. 

Coalition's greenhouse denialism is a cynical disgrace 

Talk about the double standards at the United Nations.

Whereas UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly condemned Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric against Israel, expressing "shock and dismay", he has remained ominously, and inexcusably, silent about the blatant Israeli threats of military attacks on Iran, thus undermining the world's confidence in his ability to steer the global community clear of yet another major war in the Middle East caldron. 

After all, the point of the surge, as laid out by Mr. Bush, was to buy time for political reconciliation among the Iraqis. The results have been at best spotty, and even the crucial de-Baathification law celebrated by Mr Bush and Mr McCain in January remains inoperative.