The CSIRO has duped one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies into buying anti-counterfeit technology that could be easily compromised - passing off cheap chemicals it had bought from China as a ''trade secret'' formula.

The capture of the Enigma code machine 70 years ago changed the course of the second world war. But the secret codes broken by this event were not history's toughest ciphers. Plenty of codes are uncracked and, as MacGregor Campbell discovers, their solutions may provide the key to murders or even buried treasure

The Somerton Man

from Crikey …..

Rundle: John Howard's still lying about Iraq invasion

from the Anti-Empire Report ….

Bob Carr may have been Foreign Affairs Minister for only 12 months, but he started talking to United States diplomats about internal Labor politics nearly 40 years ago.

from The Shovel …..

In a final nod to the benefits of market capitalism, Baroness Thatcher has, on her deathbed, asked that all public memories of her be privatised.

There’s an old Jew­ish prophecy that, as end times ap­proach, his­tory will speed up. Sur­vey­ing the Aus­tralian po­lit­i­cal land­scape, it seems Ar­maged­don must be nigh. Events move in fast for­ward.

Democratic systems struggle to thrive among people threatened by disease - or so says a pair of maverick evolutionary psychologists. Jim Giles investigates their controversial claim

In a sign of just how tough life on Struggle Street has become, the Jones family of Sydney today announced to family and friends that their Christmas holiday to Aspen had been scrapped. The Joneses earn just $250,000 a year.

The 1980 adventure movie Raise the Titanic was one of the all-time box office stinkers. Based on the unlikely premise that the wreck of the great liner contained a rare mineral that could save the world from godless communism, it had a hilarious scene in which the ship popped to the surface apparently unscathed after 68 years on the sea floor.

Tony Abbott is coasting to The Lodge on a dream run, first class up the pointy end. No federal opposition leader has had it so easy since 1941, when Labor's John Curtin gained government after the collapse of the Menzies-Fadden wartime minority Tories. And no opposition leader has so little deserved such good fortune.

The NSW Labor Party has be­come a crime scene. Sus­sex Street has been cor­doned off and foren­sic sci­en­tists sent in to gather ev­i­dence. On the other side of the thick yel­low tape, a crowd of con­fused ALP branch mem­bers has gath­ered in search of answers.

If President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Fresh from its triumphant negotiations with all three political parties for more effective monitoring of the press, Hacked Off, the group that champions victims of press intrusion, has begun to attract the attention of foreign governments that suffer from their own troublesome Fourth Estates.