The house of reps members are heading over to the Senate for the speech by the governor general, Sir Peter Cosgrove. Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull are walking together.

The climate sceptic Liberal MP Craig Kelly has been appointed chairman of the backbench environment and energy committee, with National party MP Kevin Hogan as secretary.

It's hard to know where to start... 

South Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has been stripped of the immigration portfolio, in a major internal reshuffle.

"I fought hard to keep the immigration portfolio, but ultimately it was a decision of the leader of the party," Senator Hanson-Young said in a statement after The Greens meeting in Melbourne.

Bernie Sanders is set to launch a new organization fighting for progressive change across the country, but are the former presidential candidate’s supporters disenchanted?

20 march 2016: The New South Wales Government has said it will allow a private operator to bid to run a medium-security jail on Sydney's north-western outskirts, while announcing that prisons that fail to cut reoffending rates will be put to competitive tender.

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The dirty war on Syria will be settled on the battlefield.  International law is broken.

Powerful nations continue to enjoy impunity for their crimes, and they have no reason to expect that they will be prosecuted.

The major American news network claims that the FBI is looking toward Russia for hacking into the New York Times and other news organizations. Where CNN got this information is unknown.

Hearing the shrill from the new mad senators is mind numbing... And some of them will get to stay six long years... Let's hope that the new ignorant lot starts to study reality beyond their long-learned prejudices... Let's hope that the ultra right-wing mongrels start to see that their sponsors, the rich, are rorting society under the premise of dripping-down on the plebs and that the lefties abandon harsh refugee policies. Let's hope that all see that the planet is at a slow turning point of sort, with CO2 climbing sky high to dangerous levels due to our burning of fossil fuels. Global warming is real.