In a defining moment for American capitalism, President Barack Obama ushered General Motors Corp. into bankruptcy protection Monday and put the government behind the wheel of the company that once symbolized the nation's economic muscle.

The fallen giant, the largest U.S. industrial company ever to enter bankruptcy, is shedding some 21,000 jobs and 2,600 dealers. Sparing few communities, the retrenchment amounts to one-third of its U.S. work force and 40 percent of its dealerships.

Today's surprise rise in the country's growth figures has prompted a war of words in Federal Parliament over what exactly is responsible for the jump.

The increase in growth of 0.4 per cent for the March quarter means that Australia has avoided falling into a technical recession.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says the growth would not have happened without the Government's economic stimulus measures, including cash handouts and infrastructure spending.

With the stroke of a pen Tuesday, Obama created the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission, an 11-person panel that will plan and carry out activities to mark the 100th anniversary, in 2011, of the president's birth.

His widow, Nancy, watched as Obama signed the bill in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

Here, a man called Glenn Beck is 10 seconds into his daily talkshow, and already he's reached a rolling boil. "What are the mainstream media missing?" he wonders, bounding onstage like the Duracell Bunny. "I mean, besides EVERYTHING? You are not going to BELIEVE some of the crap that's going on in the world today!"

French President Nicolas Sarkozy opened his nation's first military base in the Gulf Tuesday, boosting the naval presence along strategic oil routes and in pirate-infested waters off the Somali coast.

The new naval base outside the United Arab Emirates' capital, Abu Dhabi, is France's first major foreign military installation since the 1960s and its first outside Africa. It is expected help safeguard vital Persian Gulf shipping lanes. It also puts France in position to play a higher profile role in calming the growing tensions between Iran and Gulf Arab states.

The Obama administration is pressing the Israeli government to halt the expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas, U.S. and Israeli officials said, seeking a visible symbol of progress on peace that might inspire Arab states to consider normalizing relations with Jerusalem.

The administration's effort is being accompanied by greater willingness by U.S. lawmakers to complain publicly about settlements, but it has been complicated by an unwritten agreement on the issue between Israel and the United States reached during the Bush administration.

Gollob points to a machine that easily fits in a bag the size of a woman's purse. It's a universal translator. It is being tested in Iraq by DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the legendary research and development works in Arlington where Gollob is a contractor.

The machine interprets the spoken word. You talk in English. It repeats whatever you said in spoken Iraqi Arabic. It then awaits a spoken response from the Iraqi, and talks back to you in English.

Anthony Steen said public "jealousy" was fuelling the furore and claimed that taxpayers have no right to see the details of individual MPs' claims.

Mr Steen made his comments in a BBC interview shortly after announcing that he would be standing down at the next election. His decision came after it emerged that he claimed £87,729 over four years to maintain his Devon country house. The payments included money to inspect some of the 500 trees surrounding the property and to guard his shrubs from rabbits.

Unrepentant and newly unbridled, former vice president Richard B. Cheney has embraced two missions in his political retirement: to forcefully defend the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies and to publicly condemn those who would unravel them.

He did both yesterday, using the drama of a televised feud with President Obama to deliver the blistering accusation that more Americans are likely to die because the president has turned away from George W. Bush's post-Sept. 11, 2001, national security agenda. Cheney seemed eager to fan the flames of the debates raging through Washington.

Tasmanian devils with large facial tumours were photographed in north-east Tasmania during 1996. A decade later, we know these characteristics are consistent with Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) - a fatal condition in Tasmanian devils, characterised by cancers around the mouth and head.

As at December 2008, the Tasmanian devil disease had been confirmed at 64 different locations across more than 60% of Tasmania's mainland.

------------------------

President Barack Obama has proposed tough new rules for vehicle emissions, which could see a 30 per cent reduction in individual passenger car emissions by 2016.

Obama and friends unveil CAFE from the White House Rose Garden.

The new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards also decree that car manufacturers must maintain a fleet fuel consumption average of 43mpg by 2016.

This fuel consumption average includes both commercial vehicles and passenger cars, but 51mpg has been set as the standard for cars and 31mpg for light commercial vehicles. Current standards are 33mpg and 29mpg, respectively.

Miranda Devine

May 21, 2009 ...

You always know when zealotry creeps into a story there is another agenda at work - and that is that the Johns case is a beachhead in the war against masculinity, waged by those who think the only difference between men and women is cultural.

Homo sapiens may have been responsible for butchering Neanderthals in the Stone Age. Evidence for this theory has been found on a jawbone in France. The bone was covered in cut marks similar to those found when humans stripped the flesh from animals.

Montalto is the high peak above Thomas Jefferson's little mountain of Monticello. From this lofty perch you can see Jefferson's life shaped in the land. Far to the right, in the valley, there's the third president's boyhood home, Shadwell.

As you gaze on Monticello itself, 400 feet below and almost a mile distant, you observe the brick Palladian villa. This is not the predominant element. That prize goes to the vegetable garden, a 1,000-foot-long terrace, 80 feet wide, suggesting Noah's ark perched post-flood on Mount Ararat.

Barack Obama will revive the heavily criticised George Bush-era military tribunals for detainees at Guantánamo Bay but will make them fairer, according to US officials.

Obama suspended the tribunals within hours of taking office in January, ordering a review of the military commission system. But he stopped short of abandoning the process altogether.