Tens of thousands of troops are fanning out across Pakistan in an effort to improve security before next week's parliamentary elections. VOA Correspondent Meredith Buel reports from Islamabad that security forces are also searching for Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, who disappeared while traveling by road through a volatile tribal region.

Interior Ministry spokesman Jawed Iqbal Cheema says Pakistani troops are mobilizing and moving nationwide to provide security during the election. Cheema says the soldiers will not be stationed at the more than 64,000 polling stations across Pakistan.

The Prime Minister's plan for a 12-month pay freeze for federal politicians has been labelled a stunt by some in the Coalition even though Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson supports it. 

Kevin Rudd announced today that MPs would refuse the next pay increase proposed by the remuneration tribunal, meaning they would not receive a pay rise until the middle of next year at least. 

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race last week, endorsed front-runner John McCain today despite their bitterly-fought race. 

He would 'give my full support to Senator McCain's candidacy,' Romney told a news conference with McCain at his side. 

A small group of Liberal MPs, led by backbencher Wilson Tuckey, boycotted yesterday’s apology to the Stolen Generations in the House of Representatives. 

Tuckey, the member for O'Connor in Western Australia, was in the chamber for the Lord's Prayer but left before Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered the apology to a packed House. 

Someone wrote and asked me, "Why are there Israeli - but not Mexican-American Dual Nationals?"  

Well, here's my take on this. I'd also like your views and opinions.  

Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right.  

The former journalist who ended John Howard's political career used her first speech to Federal Parliament to champion wage equality for women. 

 

McKew's Equal Pay Plea

from Crikey ….. 

Rudd cleaning out the messy media messengers 

Christian Kerr writes: 

Australia's government stepped up its campaign against Japanese whaling in Antarctic waters Thursday by releasing grisly surveillance pictures of the slain carcasses of a minke whale and a calf being hauled aboard a ship. 

The images were taken by an Australian customs ship that has tracked the Japanese fleet in the Antarctic Ocean for the past month gathering evidence for a diplomatic and legal battle against whaling. 

“When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight.  We’re all equally precious...

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the president decided to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and authorized wiretaps without a warrant on electronic communications between people in the United States and people abroad.

Administration lawyers ginned up a legal justification and then asked communications companies for vast amounts of data.  

By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, woman, white, liberal.

But this past summer I saw a News Hour show on farmers committing suicide in Maharastra, India, which affected me deeply.  I started learning what was happening to farmers and to food and how the Clintons are connected. 

Ludwig von Mises argues that: "There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about. In a totalitarian hegemonic society the only freedom that is left to the individual, because it cannot be denied to him, is the freedom to commit suicide." 

We're "winning the battle" in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown told parliament last December.

In January, bushit told the US Congress, "Afghanistan… is now a young democracy where people are looking to the future with new hope". But now the truth is out.

If a museum were built to honour the ancestral political class, it would not look much different from the House of Commons.

Its corridors are lined with portraits of the political greats and its staircases are adorned with old Vanity Fair caricatures.‘Honourable members’ are still treated as if they were just that, with the right to jump to the top of the queue at canteens, bars and the post office.