I have bagged Laurie Oakes a few times as the Bibendum of news for sometimes inflating the value of a political leak, designed and used to undermine a government's work... He's the king of leaks.

On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only 'engage' for 'self-defence', says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.

Labor's ''light on the hill'' is flickering. A fixation with climate change, stultifying spin and condescending paternalism are suffocating its formidable legacy. Workers, once the backbone of the Labor movement, are deserting the party. That's why the announcement of a McKell Institute in Sydney - a new think tank charged with reviving the party's intellectual gravitas - is good news for the Labor Party and the calibre of public debate.

Early this morning, as Australians were lazing in the land of Nod, Pope Benedict XVI was busy blessing Cardinal Pell's new multi-million dollar pilgrim centre in Rome, known as Domus Australia.

And what a grand occasion it was. Not only was Il Papa there, dressed all in white, but the choir from Sydney's St Mary's Cathedral-comprising 13 men and 23 boys-was on hand to sing hymns and prayers.

On our rough head count, there were also three purple-capped Aussie archbishops, one red-capped cardinal, and more than two dozen bishops flown in from Down Under, making it an awesome display of ecclesiastical power.

Secret justice looks set to be a regular feature of British courts and tribunals when the intelligence services want to protect their sources of information.

Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner's inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to national security.

The proposals, which run counter to a centuries-old British tradition of open justice, were introduced to a sparsely attended House of Commons yesterday by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke - and met almost no opposition. The planned changes to the British justice system follow lobbying of the Government by the CIA.

Of all the objectionable lies that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has told, the latest load of nonsense about repealing the Clean Energy Future is the most damaging to Australia.

Business enterprise flourishes in an environment of certainty and predictability.The Gillard government has worked hard to provide business with the certainty to invest and innovate in a carbon constrained global economy.

David Cameron has been accused of allowing a secret rightwing agenda to flourish at the heart of the Conservative party, as fallout from the resignation of Liam Fox exposed its close links with a US network of lobbyists, climate change deniers and defence hawks.

What a weasel. The self-serving manoeuvrings of Bill Shorten have become excruciating in their transparency.

Shorten, the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, is one of the Labor Right factional powerbrokers who removed his own prime minister, Kevin Rudd. He has become the most ardent cheerleader for the beneficiary of his knife-work, Julia Gillard, even as her poll numbers remain mired in unelectable territory, lower than Rudd's poll numbers when he was deposed.

The Gillard government hoped to turn the asylum-seeker impasse to its advantage but the plan was doomed.

Thursday's cabinet debate on asylum seekers was the first big, long, hard-fought cabinet argument of the Gillard prime ministership. And the most important person in the debate wasn't even in the room.

The entire discussion, broken into two meetings and running close to three hours in all, was held in anticipation of how Tony Abbott would react to any government decision. And the final decision was made on the same basis.