Crikey

The huge defeat of the government candidate in the by-election was one sign. A massive demonstration at the weekend is another. And now comes an opinion poll showing that a substantial majority of the Irish people wants the State to default on debts to bondholders in the country’s stricken banks. Perhaps the revolt by the [...]

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, as a good and loyal Victorian Labor Party member, will have mixed feelings as she awaits the outcome of Saturday’s state election. There will be a hope that her friend and former employer John Brumby can somehow cling on to office but a nagging realisation that his defeat will enhance her [...]

I stumbled across this oddity this morning: on the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth,the US pollster Gallup asked Americans if they believed in evolution. Only 40% did and that dropped to only 24% among frequent church attenders.

It is the unusual that is news. Dog bites man? Rarely reported. Man bites dog? Guaranteed a big run. The BBC’s Roger Harrabin has distilled this phenomenon of what you hear most often being what happens least into the following law: “When considering societal problems over the long term, news-worthiness is often in inverse proportion [...]