Blogotariat

Joe Hockey thinks Treasury's budget figures are 'Wayne Swan’s numbers'. Attacks on public servants are not new but this recent talk about a politicised Treasury is nonsense, writes Ben Eltham

Ford have just announced that it will cease Australian manufacturing operations after 2016.

FORD will cease producing vehicles in Australia from October 2016, in a move that will cost 1200 jobs.

Ford Australia boss Bob Graziano announced the closure of the car-maker’s Broadmeadows and Geelong plants in Victoria while unveiling a $141 million after-tax loss for 2012-13 year, making losses of $600 million over the last five years.

In Asia, high-speed fibre broadband is seen as an enabler, not an expensive drain on the public purse. Gabrielle Jackson compares the top networks in the region

CEO Bob Graziano of Ford Australia announced this morning that they will be closing operations in Geelong and Broadmeadows, resulting in Ford being an import only Australian brand.

“We will cease our manufacturing operations in October 2016,” Graziano said.

“Manufacturing is not viable for Ford in Australia in the long term.”

AN UGLY brawl erupted last Sunday outside a restaurant in Beijing’s Ghost Street entertainment area. Windows were smashed and people bloodied after itinerant pedlars reportedly clashed with the owners of a popular eatery. It was one of the estimated five hundred “mass incidents” across China each day.

When did the pre-occupation with fact checking arise? When audiences stopped trusting mainstream media. Even expert-sanctioned truths need some scrutiny, writes Jeff Sparrow

The poor physical health of people with mental illness has been known about for decades – one of the first studies in this area was published as far back as 1934 (see reference 1 at the bottom of this article). A National Summit on Mental Health and...

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The colloquial medical advice "rub some dirt in it" appears to have some merit. Researchers at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have been experimenting with different clays, and it appears in research presented in the journal PLoS ONE that they've come across a family of antibacterial clays capable of killing pathogens ranging from E. coli to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as hard-to-kill MRSA.

Monday's tornado in the Oklahoma City area killed at least 24 people and leveled a massive number of homes and businesses. The L.A. Times quoted weather officials as saying the twister "was at least in the same league" as the harrowing tornado that struck the same area in 1999, while one local meteorologist called it "the worst tornado in the history of the world."

Here's a full-on "disk" shot of the planet, taken by NOAA's GOES-13 satellite. (Fun fact: NOAA is pronounced like the name "noah.") You can see the storm over the central part of the US.

The flurry of post-budget polling, encompassing Newspoll, Nielsen, Galaxy, Essential Research and Morgan (so basically everyone except ReachTEL), came in slightly above Labor’s recent form, pushing them up 0.5% on two-party preferred on the weekly BludgerTrack poll aggregate. Labor also gains three on the seat projection, which come off the totals for Victoria (where they were boosted by a 54-46 lead in Nielsen), South Australia and the territories. On the primary vote, the “others” total has increased for a fifth week in a row, to a level matched in the current term only in March and July 2012. See the sidebar for full details.