Insights

Some experts predict the domestic price of this increasingly relevant energy source could triple in coming years, Peter Ker reports.

Today, a train car loaded with coal in Kazakhstan can rumble thousands of kilometres across the Eurasian steppes to a factory in Belarus, all without once clearing customs.

Primary Health Care managing director Edmund Bateman says avoiding a recession at the time of the global financial crisis may have locked the Australian economy into a drawn-out recovery, as opposed to a painful but short-term hit.

Accessories retailer OrotonGroup plans to take on global brands such as Burberry, Gucci and Chloe in the luxury handbag market as part of a plan to revitalise the 75-year-old label.

It's a funny thing about the awful truth: people are much more inclined to talk about it after elections than before. And it seems as though, of late, our top economists have done little but tell us our economic future is a lot more "challenging" than was contemplated during the election campaign.

Have you ever noticed how slim and fit our world leaders are? Our own Prime Minister has made a virtue of being fit. Basketballing Barack Obama is a lanky 185 centimetres tall and just 75 kilograms. His British counterpart, the tennis-playing David Cameron, looks fit enough to open the bowling for England.

It might be an idea to rename the EPA the BPA. This minor change, from the Environment Protection Authority to the Backside Protection Authority, would enshrine more precisely the agency's central priorities.

The industry has long been dominated by its goliaths and this set the scene for the GrainCorp decision, writes Brian Robins.

Shadow, an application for iPhone that will be launched next month, is designed to capture dreams. According to the creation myth, its inventor, Hunter Lee Soik, was catching up on lost sleep at a beach resort in Mexico when it occurred to him that dreams are a vast untapped data source. What if millions of them could be tethered and tallied, before they float away?

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.

There is a Far Side cartoon of a man talking to his dog. In the first frame titled "What we say to dogs", the man says: "OK, Ginger! I've had it! You stay out of the garbage! Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage or else."

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.

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.

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.

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.

As Tony Abbott was preparing to drop his bombshell announcement of a "unity ticket" with Labor on school funding, it was a time of frayed nerves in Coalition ranks.