One of the unstated goals of imperial warfare is to make hapless civilians pay a price for having the temerity to be born in a targeted nation.

It ain’t easy being a libertarian anti-war activist. No one trusts your motives and the scene is rife with assumption: If on the left, the heart bleeds for humanity, libertarians want to make sure no one drops blood on behalf of the state. One is selfless, while the other is selfish. Or so the metaphors go.

This is the last chapter of "The Age of Deceit" by Gus Leonisky. This is by no mean the end of the age of deceit on planet earth. 

It was rather amusing as it was a complete mass of epigrams, with occasional whiffs of grotesque melodrama and drivelling sentiment. The queerest mixture! Mr Tree is a wicked Lord, staying at a country house, who has made up his mind to bugger one of the other guests — a handsome young man of twenty. The handsome young man is delighted; when his mother enters, sees his Lordship and recognises him as having copulated with her twenty years before, the result of which was — the hansome young man ... It seems an odd plot, doesn't it?

One hundred years after women like Emmeline Pankhurst fought for women's equality, men cannot fully grasp women's inclusion in the professional world, writes Paul Donoughue.

Senior Cabinet minister Peter Dutton has been caught up in the continuing Jamie Briggs scandal, after mistakenly sending an offensive text message to a journalist who was covering the story.

When I read your report that  the Baird government had sold the Education Department building and the Lands Department building for $35 million, I checked the date, thinking that it must have been April 1 ("Baird's $3b sell-off", January 2-3). Each of those buildings occupies a complete block in  one of the most prestigious parts of the CBD.  Were competitive bids sought before this unbelievable price from a Singaporean hotel developer was accepted? 

On this scale of values the government no doubt will consider selling the Opera House for $1 million and the Sydney Harbour Bridge for, oh say, $50,000.

Rupert Murdoch is the major mass publisher of climate change denialism. ALL his journals, newspapers and TV outlets sing to the same tune: "Global warming is CRAP". Even when his learned journalists publish some purportedly "balanced" articles on the subject, it is designed to sow doubt in the mind of fair minded people. In his heart he hates anything that smells of anti-coal, anti-oil and anti-gas. He wants to burn the place down with more CO2 emissions. So how can he and HALL got into a relationship?

Here is some of what Jerry Hall wrote in the daily Mail in 2009:

The most dramatic example of this is recommendation 60 – which singles out the CFMEU for its “culture of disregard for the law” and suggests parliament consider legislation banning individual CFMEU officials.

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump used a Yiddish vulgarity to refer to Hillary Clinton on Monday, saying she was “schlonged” in her 2008 Democratic primary loss to Barack Obama.

So how will the Pentagon succeed where the State Department has apparently failed? No one really knows. "There's not a lot you can do to message against that kind of enemy," says Will McCants, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who researches Islamic extremist groups. "A big part of their recruiting pitch is that they've been successful in creating a state in Syria and Iraq, and until that disappears, they continue to have a big talking point that no amount of tweeting or Facebooking is going to refute."