Unions and the State Government are at war after a last-ditch attempt to settle the bitter power privatisation dispute ended disastrously. 

Hours of negotiations at yesterday's ALP state conference fell apart when the Government accused the unions of "not only asking us to accept defeat but commit hara-kiri". 

The state's election watchdog has authorised the Crown Solicitor to prosecute 800 donors who made almost $8 million in political donations to candidates and parties for last year's NSW election but failed to declare them. 

The 800 include many of Australia's biggest companies, which have given between $1525 and $543,000 each - and they face fines of $11,000 for each offence. 

Signed into law April 24, 2008, the oh-so innocent sounding Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007 establishes a national database of newborn DNA. 

This law establishes collection and warehousing of newborn DNA for scientific research and requires no parental consent or knowledge. 

I wonder, dear reader, if you are wondering the same thing I’m wondering as I’m writing: Just what the fuck is wrong with us?  

Old men make the wars, but they don’t fight the fight.  

The congressmen that declare war are too important to fight, too important and too busy. They are too busy lobbying, too busy collecting the lucrative pensions they have allocated themselves, and too busy assigning defense contracts to companies that will employ them after their tenure in congress.  

Five years after George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished" atop a Navy aircraft carrier, the death toll in Iraq continues to rise. 4,062 American soldiers have been confirmed killed since the war began, 47 in April alone.  

The Iemma Government will defer the poker machine tax payments of scores of clubs in a bid to compensate for a loss of revenue since the indoor smoking ban came into force. 

The Gaming and Racing Minister, Graham West, confirmed yesterday that the Government was drawing up a policy in response to a request from Clubs NSW to allow as many as 150 clubs to defer their payments for a year or 18 months. 

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates. 

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms. 

For anyone at the CIA or the Pentagon who might be considering moonlighting as a spy, the report offers a warning: 'Since 1990, American spies have been poorly paid.' 

In fact, the proportion of those who received no payment at all for espionage increased from 34 percent before 1980 to 59 percent during the 1980s and to 81 percent since 1990. 

During a press conference on Tuesday, US President George Bush spelled out the threat to Iran contained in last week’s release of CIA intelligence on an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor.

As well as warning Syria and North Korea, which purportedly helped construct the building, he declared that the US was “sending a message to Iran, and the world for that matter, about just how destabilising a nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East”. 

For months, beleaguered American consumers have defied expert forecasts that they would soon succumb to the pressures of falling home prices, fewer jobs and shrinking pay-checks. Now, they appear to have given in. 

"Your Honor - this is Hamdan - I am speaking to you." 

What followed was a riveting exchange between Judge Keith Allred and Hamdan - an exchange that revealed the enormous distance between the judge's good-faith and compassionate efforts to provide a fair trial in a flawed system, and Hamdan's increasing frustration with a legal system whose rules seem to change with each of his victories.

We have overthrown foreign governments, interfered with elections in foreign countries, invaded foreign lands on a regular basis, and supported all manner of dictators around the globe. The CIA once overthrew the first democratically elected leader of Iran and installed a brutal dictator. What other "black ops" have our spooks been up to over the years? 

Senator Barack Obama broke forcefully on Tuesday with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in an effort to curtail a drama of race, values, patriotism and betrayal that has enveloped his presidential candidacy at a critical juncture. 

For decades these self-professed saviours of the Western world helped precipitate U.S. foreign policy disasters like the Vietnam War.