As the prospective presidential nominees ponder choosing their running-mates, the spectre of Vice President Dick Cheney looms large. 

from Crikey ….. 

Hetty Johnston's strange bedfellows 

Bernard Keane writes: 

An Australian doctors' group is pushing to have former prime minister John Howard charged with war crimes for sending troops to Iraq. 

The Medical Association for the Prevention of War said the war was illegal because it was not backed by the United Nations. 

The Planning Minister, Frank Sartor, hit back after an outcry against the Government's controversial planning reforms - which passed through the Legislative Assembly at 2am yesterday - by calling the state's peak local government bodies 'dumb'.

In response, the president of the Shires Association of NSW, Bruce Miller, said sections of the Government were 'malicious and dishonest'. 

France's first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, reveals today that she fell in love with the President for his good looks and his 'five or six brains'. 

In a book containing Mme Bruni-Sarkozy's first extensive interviews on her high-profile, whirlwind, power romance, the pop singer says her attraction to the President at a 'blind date' was 'immediate'. 

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November. 

It was to be Robert and Lynne Siebert's dream home, but it has turned into the house of doom. 

In the six years since the couple from Skennars Head, near Ballina, watched the foundations being laid, the closest they have come to the house they designed themselves is a duplex 500 metres away which they have been renting since 2003, and now share with their two children Madelane and Grace. 

from Crikey ….. 

Frequent fury: Qantas and customers on war footing 

Ben Sandilands writes: 

‘This is the great war of our times, It is going to take 40 years’. 

Bush said in forty years the world would know if the war on terrorism & conflicts in Iraq & Afghanistan, had reduced extremism, helped moderates & promoted democracy. 

The ugly side of science — the one we fought Adolph Hitler, amongst his other nasties, to stop his radical medical experiments — was defended by scientists but thankfully exposed by a revolted reporter. Even long aware of the crap that's going on behind the sterilised doors, I nearly spewed too...  

Angling for a vice presidential nod, Hillary Rodham Clinton refused to bow out of the Democratic race Tuesday, hoping to maintain leverage as Barack Obama clinched the delegates needed to secure the party's nomination. 

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. 

America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable.  

from Crikey 

A year, almost, in the thinking of Brendan Nelson.  

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. 

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin compared the United States to a "frightening monster" on Friday and urged France to distance itself from its American ally. 

"How can one be such a shining example of democracy at home and a frightening monster abroad?" Putin said in an interview with French newspaper Le Monde transmitted live to journalists in Paris.