Our gatekeeper for fairness gets mad as hell

SHANE GREEN Campaign for fairness motivates Victoria's new Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner Kate Jenkins.

Shelter, fight or flee ... residents plan their firestorm strategies

CAROLYN WEBB This week's four-day heatwave was an uncomfortable reminder of similar conditions before Black Saturday in 2009, which claimed 173 lives - 120 of them in their own region.

As the Oscars' brassy bridesmaid, the Golden Globes are a lot more fun

Michael Idato The Hollywood hustle, otherwise known as awards season, is back on.

Bali officials confident autopsies will explain sudden deaths of mother and daughter

Jeffrey Hutton The sudden, excruciating deaths of a Queensland mother and daughter in Bali leave many questions unanswered.

Hands up for the king of the ball kids

Mark Dapin Managing hundreds of ball boys and girls child's play for court king Darren Sturgess.

Poland's Catholics and socially liberal clash on 'gender ideology'

Vince Chadwick, Warsaw If you turned on a television in Poland this holiday season, chances are you would have witnessed secular and religious figures all seeking to grasp the meaning and gauge the influence of the English word 'gender'.

Will legal changes be enough to stymie the synthetic drugs trade?

RORY CALLINAN The new business of synthetic drugs has rapidly rewritten the rules of the 'highs' industry while generating millions in profits.

Poo-therapy the new frontier in medical treatment

Anjana Ahuja It is fashionable to kick off the new year with a detox, which supposedly clears the body of waste products that have accumulated over the year. In fact, the concept of ''detoxing'' is a modern myth, derided by doctors and dietitians.

Perfect storm lures Australians to war

RUTH POLLARD It is only 1pm but the winter sky is already darkening in the border town of Kilis and the reception room of this small, nondescript hotel is bleak and cold.

The comrades of Volgograd refuse to be cowed by terrorism

NICK MILLER Early last Monday, a few minutes before the trolley bus blew up, Mikhail Shuvarikov was adrift in a lazy sleep-in in the suburbs of Volgograd.

Vitamin D research takes edge off cure-all claims

Julie Power and Laura Banks Nearly 60 per cent of the Australian population has been diagnosed with low vitamin D but new research has revealed supplements could be a waste of money, even causing harm in some people who take high doses.

2013: The year when politicians earned rich rewards or got their just desserts

JUDITH IRELAND Three prime ministers, 4 and a half Labor leaders (if you count Chris Bowen and Albo), one very big election and three Labor leadership votes.

The Coalition's 'adults' are in charge of the country, but it's time Tony Abbott's team started growing up

Mark Kenny The same December night General Motors signed the death warrant of Holden, one of Tony Abbott's most senior ministers went looking for love.

Back to the future: 1983 and all that

Nick Dyrenfurth According to legend, English teenagers possess a ''1066 and all that'' knowledge of their country's history. As the humorous book of the same name suggests, only two dates are remembered: Julius Caesar's arrival in 55BC and 1066's Battle of Hastings.

Superbug showdown: the time is nigh to get serious about antibiotics

Julie-anne Davies It's difficult to know precisely when Maria Jarchow should have died but didn't. It might have been in 2000 after she was diagnosed with cancer in her spine and spent months lying in a hospital bed so sick from the chemotherapy that her oncologist told her there was nothing more to be done. Then a neurologist who had heard about Jarchow's case came to see her on the ward and proposed a surgical solution: a metal frame inserted inside her body to support her spine, which hopefully would then allow her to regain her strength to be able to cope with the rigours of stem-cell treatment.

2013 Australia's hottest year on record

PETER HANNAM 2013 is the year Australia marked its hottest day, month, season, 12-month period and, by December 31, hottest calendar year.

Belgium on track to allow child euthanasia

Elisabeth Braw Jutte van der Werff Ten Bosch has already had the talk with her 10-year-old son. Several times, in fact. No, not the sex talk. The euthanasia talk.

George Brandis reveals new direction for human rights commission

Deborah Snow Alone among the seven commissioners of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Tim Wilson never had to apply for the job. He never had to sit for an interview, be screened by an expert panel, or undergo the rigorous weeks-long selection process that applied to the others.

Syrian opposition forces fragment in bloody endgame

Ruth Pollard In the small room crowded with badly injured men in a Syrian ''recovery house'' in Turkey, Nasser stands out.

Quest for the divine...

Barney Zwartz Anguish drove Sarah Bachelard back to religion - a familiar path but one with some modern twists. As a young scholar, she studied theology at Oxford University, seeking to fulfil the ''glimpse'' of God she had seen while growing up Anglican. ''I was an academic soul, and thought the way to make it real was to study it, but that didn't work so I left the church for 10 years.'' She worked for the Senate in Canberra, but ''a broken heart and painful, frightening anxiety'' led her to begin meditating to recapture her spiritual side.

On the road to oblivion

Iain Gillespie Thousands of people flock to Warrandyte on hot weekends to swim in the Yarra and soak up its scenery and historic attractions, unaware that if a fire approaches they could suddenly find themselves in one of Australia's most dangerous places.

Is government dysfunction the new norm?

Nicholas Reece This week Tony Abbott marked the first 100 days of his new government in a very modern way. The Prime Minister released a YouTube video and a 30-page glossy brochure, and undertook an exhaustive round of interviews with major media.

All quiet on the contested front

Gina McColl What if they held a war and nobody came? Eight months after the Napthine government released guidelines to encourage private tourism investment in Victorian national parks - provoking fierce protests in communities, letters to The Age and, last month, a rally on the beach at Wilsons Promontory - not a single proposal has been received.

Tolkien 'bout money, money

Lord of the Rings a chronicle of legal disputes

KARL QUINN They're preciousss, those nasty little hobbitses. We loves them, we does; oh yes. But not quite as much, perhaps, as the lawyers do.

Feeling the heat

TONY WRIGHT Tony Abbott, on the most basic measure, was Australia's most successful opposition leader. He oversaw the destruction of prime minister Kevin Rudd, prime minister Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd again. Now the pressure is on him. ''The time for campaigning has passed, the time for governing has arrived,'' he told his legions of supporters on the night of his election victory, September 7, 2013.

Use of film subtitles in project PlanetRead helps more than 200 million Indians learn to read

Amrit Dhillon Ever wondered why your mind weirdly starts reading English subtitles on an English film, automatically, without your being able to stop it? The answer lies in neuroscience, of course, but this feature of the brain is the key to a literacy project that has benefited more than 200 million Indians.

Gang Gang

Wondrous window on our war widows

Ian Warden Try to think of the most utterly appropriate, most utterly Australian fund-raising event there could be to help fund a memorial window project of the War Widows Guild (ACT).

Geography is destiny: states of red and blue

Tim Colebatch Victoria remains core Labor territory. New South Wales, once Labor's heartland, has shifted its tectonic plate towards the Coalition. Queensland and Western Australia are the Coalition's solid loyalists while most Tasmanians voted for Labor to govern Australia, even though it won just one of their five seats.

Darkness at the edge of town: growing up in hell

ANNE DAVIES This is not a story for the faint hearted. It includes details that may disturb. But it deserves to be told because it reveals how children - several generations of them - have fallen through the cracks of Australia's child protection system.

Is the glass half empty or half full for Australia's ailing automotive industry

CLAY LUCAS Marc Newson designs beautiful tableware. He's done a fine dining range for Noritake, drinking glasses for Iittala, a salt-and-pepper set for Alessi.

Darkness at the edge of town: How Australia failed three generations of victims

Anne Davies This is not a story for the faint hearted. It includes details that may disturb. But it deserves to be told because it reveals how children - several generations of them - have fallen through the cracks of Australia's child protection system.

Ain't no Sunshine in these boys

TONY WRIGHT Keith Miller, the great Australian cricket all-rounder, maverick and son of the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, might have had a little wisdom to impart to those caught up in the pressure cooker of the Ashes series and its accompaniment, the sledging rumpus.

Beijing tactic makes waves in disputed sea

Philip Wen Beijing and Nick O'Malley When China marked out an expansive swath of airspace above the East China Sea and effectively claimed it as under its control, it was seen as an abrupt escalation of an already tense territorial dispute.

Schoolies Week now a tamer affair than its riotous past suggests

Konrad Marshall The ocean air is salty and the Queensland humidity is sweet, and the combination must taste like freedom to the tens of thousands of teenagers here, buzzing the streets on scooters and whooping at one another from balconies.

The Money Men

Royce Millar and Ben Schneiders Faceless men or faceless man? The minutes of a May meeting of a mysterious company linked to the Australian Workers' Union record a ''discussion'' about finances before a motion that the company be wound up.

Apps

Dream catcher app Shadow to chart frontiers of the mind

Andrew Purcell Shadow, an application for iPhone that will be launched next month, is designed to capture dreams.

Warm, fuzzy families exist in many forms

ANDREW STEPHENS Melbourne artist Tai Snaith had a children's book published last year about the Australian family. In it, she used indigenous animals as a metaphor for different versions of the contemporary household. It sounds kitsch, but there we are - stylishly so - in The Family Hour in Australia as corroboree frogs, numbats, eastern spotted quolls, hairy-nosed wombats or, inevitably, kangaroos, platypuses and koalas.

A million Australians sign up to social media site Change.org

Australia is now Change.org's seventh-largest market with 1.5 million users, two-thirds of whom are women, and two-thirds are over 35. A Queensland student's campaign against the Coalition's NBN policy is the most popular in Australia, with more than 270,000 signatures.

A Saturday morning that cleaved history in two

Tony Wright It takes time to figure out the meaning of the big days in our lives; for some they become cleavers,

Abbott faces Indonesian anger over spying revelations

Tom Allard, Michael Bachelard In the annals of international diplomacy, there has never been a salvo quite like it. Alone in his study in his private residence outside Jakarta, just after midnight on Tuesday, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, took to Twitter and let Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott - and his 4 million followers - know just how he felt about revelations Australia had bugged his and his wife's phone. As he composed a series of tweets, his anger seemed to rise. Indonesia had protested the spying operation, he noted. Australia needed to make an official response. Meanwhile, relations would be reviewed, the strategic partnership ''certainly damaged''. And then this final missive: ''I also regret the statement of Australian Prime Minister that belittled this tapping matter on Indonesia, without any remorse.''

Denis Napthine, accidental Premier to a state precedent?

JOSH GORDON Napthine proves to be far more effective than his predecessor at dealing with inevitable problems.

Spooky silence until next Snowden bomb

Deborah Snow The ability of American whistleblower Edward Snowden to poach the Western intelligence community's most explosive secrets while working as a government contractor in Hawaii has left security experts around the world gobsmacked.

Quality TV

BBC must adapt to retain its crown as the king of quality television drama

STEPHANIE BUNBURY Like every other public organisation, the mighty BBC is feeling the pinch.

Comments

Sausage sizzle? Wait, there's a snag or two

TONY WRIGHT Opinion I hesitate to confess these things, but I ride a motorcycle and occasionally, on a Saturday morning, get the urge to mount up and burble off to find a sizzled sausage for breakfast at a charity stall.

The unbearable lightness of seeing

BARNEY ZWARTZ Georgie Crozier thought she was mentally ready to investigate child sexual abuse in the churches.

Pope Francis backs fracking opponents

Adoration for Pope Francis may go into overdrive now that he has adopted a new role as an environmental crusader.

A matter of life and deadlines

Hanna Rosin When I was in Australia last week, I dreamed about my old red bicycle that I hadn't thought about in years. It was a clunky one-speed bike I'd bought off a senior sorority girl when I was a freshman. I went to college in California and the bike was my only form of transportation; I didn't have a driver's licence and I didn't really care. In my mind, the bike gave me a certain freedom that the slaves to the car didn't have. Once, although everyone said I was crazy, I cycled to San Francisco. And when on Friday nights my friends all piled into someone's Honda to head to dinner in Palo Alto, I made my way there alone on my bike, gliding past the palm trees on Palm Drive that never got less exotic. The bike moved so much more slowly than everyone else's wheels but to me it was my Batmobile: I controlled the motion and speed; I arrived and left on my own time; I set my own rhythms.

Political sleepwalkers wake to the Dog Days

Ross Garnaut It matters that the public interest wins in the great struggle to shape the resources boom aftermath.

Spying claims raise Australia and Indonesia tensions

David Wroe and Michael Bachelard Indonesia's reaction to spying allegations started off looking somewhat pro-forma but by the end of the week had turned into something quite different - the possibility of a major diplomatic incident on the high seas.