The Bolt Report has attracted larger television audiences than ABC’s Insiders every week since its 8 May launch, OzTAM data shows.

Last Sunday, The Bolt Report attracted its largest audience to date when 322,000 tuned in to the program’s two editions, beating the show’s previous best of 305,000 achieved on 15 May.

The ABC’s Insiders program, presented by Barrie Cassidy, last week attracted a combined audience of 264,000 – 58,000 fewer than The Bolt Report.

The Bolt Report airs at 10.00 am on Sunday morning and is repeated at 4.30 pm the same day.

Nickel/cobalt refinery north of Townsville (Picture by Gus)

ONE of Australia's richest men, Clive Palmer, is buying nickel laterite ore for his Yabulu refinery from an Indonesian company that is defying a ban and mining in Raja Ampat, the world's most ecologically diverse marine environment.

In about a month, if nothing is done, the federal government will hit its legal debt limit. There will be dire consequences if this limit isn’t raised. At best, we’ll suffer an economic slowdown; at worst we’ll plunge back into the depths of the 2008-9 financial crisis.

So is a failure to raise the debt ceiling unthinkable? Not at all.

A reluctant Tony Abbott has pledged, after Peter Reith's assault on his reticence to talk about industrial relations reform, that the opposition will take a ''strong and effective'' policy to the election. Abbott's office swore he wasn't saying anything new. Other participants in the debate - from Reith to the ACTU scaremongers - saw his comment on Tuesday as a significant development.

The reality is that the IR issue is on Abbott's plate and it will become very hot. He must take control of it, or it will badly burn the Coalition.

As I have mentioned before, the melting of ice sheets is masking the full potential of global warming though we can measure a strong (in geological timescale) warming trend anyway...

Again here, I use the "ice in the whisky" image: the ice cools the whisky. Yet the sum total of temperature is rising despite the ice being cold... The ice melts and there is a tipping point at which the influence of the ice becomes so negligeable, the whisky temperature quickly rises to room temperature...

The total cost to America of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the related military operations in Pakistan, is set to exceed $4 trillion - more than three times the sum so far authorised by Congress in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

Click HERE to view graphic (101 kb)

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Two reporters held hostage in Afghanistan are freed

President Obama’s $35,800-a-plate fund-raising dinner was the talk of Wall Street last week.

Held at Daniel, the Michelin three-star restaurant of Daniel Boulud on the Upper East Side, the event was seen as a test of the president’s popularity among the deep-pocketed financiers he has often vilified but has long relied on to finance his campaign. The tables were filled with moneymen like Marc Lasry, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Avenue Capital; Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.

Iran plans to send a live monkey into space next month, the latest advance in a missile and space program which has alarmed Israel and its western allies that fear the Islamic Republic is seeking nuclear weapons.

The head of Iran's Space Agency on Monday said five monkeys were undergoing tests before one is selected for the flight on board a Kavoshgar-5 rocket, according to the official IRNA news agency.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last August that Iran planned to send a man into space by 2017.

Western countries are concerned the long-range ballistic technology used to propel Iranian satellites into orbit could be used to launch atomic warheads.

In the first months of the Arab Spring, foreign journalists got well-merited credit for helping to foment and publicise popular uprisings against the region's despots. Satellite TV stations such as Al Jazeera Arabic, in particular, struck at the roots of power in Arab police states, by making official censorship irrelevant and by competing successfully against government propaganda.

photographic mischief by Gus...

PROCLAIMING Jesus to be ''a prophet of Islam'' on billboards is a statement of belief and does not discriminate against or vilify Christians, the Advertising Standards Bureau has found.

The billboard, one of several in an awareness campaign by Islamic group MyPeace, was the subject of a series of complaints to the bureau on the grounds that the statement was insulting to those who believed Jesus to be the son of God.

Other complaints included the charge that Jesus ''must not be associated with such [an] aggressive religion'' and another claiming the advertisement was upsetting to children.

"If there is any way I can change this, I would," she said.

"But, basically, Ms Gillard has destroyed my life.

"If it takes me the rest of my life I will find a way to make sure she realises ... what a terrible thing she has done."

Ms Ranacher says the situation for pastoralists hit by the export ban is "absolutely desperate".

"Everybody is reeling from this decision and it is very hard to know what the future holds," she said.

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In response, Garnaut said that there was a tendency for economists "to tailor the analysis to what their client wants". In other words, Garnaut was suggesting that economists employed by business cannot be taken at face value. But, apparently, economists who are engaged as consultants by governments are completely credible. I asked both Cameron and ABC management why Garnaut's role as a paid consultant to the Gillard government was not mentioned during the interview. There was no reply.

Both Gillard and Abbott promised sweeping tax breaks in duelling election campaign-like pitches aimed at the hearts and hip-pockets of voters.

And each side claimed its plan was superior to the other.

But the similarities soon ended, with Labor and the Coalition taking predictable and aggressive stances on either side of the issue of carbon tax compensation.