For nearly a year John Howard lived with a spectre of humiliation - the increasing prospect of his government being tossed aside, his own Bennelong seat swamped in a Labor deluge.
Picture the scene: Old and finally ousted, Joh Bjelke-Petersen stubbornly clings to his executive suite. Just outside, knockabout minister "Big Russ" Hinze is in tears, bent and blubbering through the keyhole: " Joh, come out mate, it's all over. "
Pigs' heads are dumped under cover of darkness by persons unknown, but the intent is clear: no Islamic school for this neighbourhood. At rowdy public rallies against the school, traffic and planning concerns are drowned out by anti-Muslim tirades amid choruses of " Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi. "
Alan Johnston had just a couple of weeks to go before flying home after three years working for the BBC in Gaza. As he left his office and nosed his car into the mid-afternoon traffic, he was suddenly blocked and surrounded by gunmen. Hooded and handcuffed, he was driven to some unknown apartment and left in an empty room.
Mortgages doled out to people on disability support pensions; loans to refugees with no English and no jobs that leave their families with next to nothing to live on; home loans so large they push borrowers below the poverty line.
In modern China, baby girls can be sold for as little as $500. Boys cost $1000-plus. This documentary, made for Channel 4 and HBO, intimately reveals the depth of this tragedy and explores the connection between child trafficking, an alarming shortage of girls and the country's stringent birth control policy.
"Obama will be the next president of the United States - and the whole world will change" - A Barack Obama supporter proclaims his faith, one voice among millions clamouring for their man to storm the White House.
On 16 April last year, a young man called Seung-hui Cho took a gun and calmly turned it on terrified fellow students and staff at Virginia Tech campus in the US. He killed 32 people before turning his gun on himself.
Olympics organisers have hit the home straight in full stride. Games venues are getting their final touches. Beijing's stunning "bird's nest" stadium has been unveiled to international acclaim. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers wait impatiently as the torch teasingly approaches.
One spring evening in 2005, Brett Kebble, a young mining magnate who had lived a life in the fast lane, drove off to a dinner appointment in the suburbs of Johannesburg. On the way he stopped and opened his window, inexplicably in the crime-ridden city, and was shot seven times at close range.
If their teenage child couldn't spell "cat", most Australian parents would be howling for the blood of politicians, teachers and just about anyone else in striking distance.
Reporter Sarah Ferguson wrote a diary during her trip to the Tiwi Islands, Northern Territory, for her report on Indigenous education, "Educating Kimberly", first broadcast 16 June 2008. Read an excerpt below.
For 20 years the NSW Crime Commission went about its business quietly and effectively. When it scored a bust - and there were plenty - it stood back and let politicians and police bask in credit. It mostly avoided controversy and guarded its low profile.
When the Olympic torch and its harried security detachment finally reached Tibet last month, all went peacefully and according to script... traditionally-dressed locals danced, waved flags and cheerfully applauded, with not a protester to be seen.
The harbour where Sir John Franklin and his crew spent their first winter after they arrived at the entrance to the fabled Northwest Passage is a truly godforsaken place. And despite claims they brought with them 1,000 books, 17,000 litres of alcohol and three years' food supply, it is difficult to imagine spending one night on Beechey Island let alone the dark Arctic winter.
Michael Travesser used to be a sailor called Wayne Bent. Then he became the self-proclaimed Messiah, claiming to know the exact hour of an apocalyptic event that will mark the end of the world.
They can't rip it out fast enough. Day and night, men and machines pull iron ore from the world's biggest open cuts, crushing it then piling it onto the world's longest trains, before loading it onto Asia's biggest ships to feed the world's hungriest economies.
Supermarkets have bulked up. These days they're retail superpowers who make money not just when we eat or drink but increasingly when we fill the petrol tank, play pokies or buy a hammer from the local hardware - and they're quietly stalking pharmacies, newsagents and florists.
They stand pristine and empty, cocooned in a silence broken intermittently by the roar of low-flying fighter jets. Woomera and Baxter detention centres, pitched in desert to confine thousands of people from across the seas, have outlived their idea. They exist as harsh monuments to history - with powerful stories to tell.
To most Australians it's squiggles on a map... a wild and jagged shoreline hewn over millions of years: towering cliffs and gorges pummelled by powerful tides. Home to dugongs, turtles and crocodiles, a humpbacks' maternity ward, the Kimberley coast is nature's catwalk.
It's been 50 years since an idealistic young Sydney couple, Catherine and Reginald Hamlin, spotted an ad for doctors to go to Africa, then took a punt. Little did they know they were about to make the world a far, far better place.
His present identity and whereabouts are mysteries to all but a select few. When he reveals his story to members of a powerful US Senate committee, he's just a silhouette on a screen. The man who used to be known as Heinrich Kieber lives his life immersed in secrets.
Another crisis, another bailout... With liquidity at a critical low, this time it's the Murray-Darling Basin whose survival hangs on a desperate $12.9 billion injection - a sum that shades what the Rudd Government is spending elsewhere to cheat a worldwide recession.
Opinion polls tell Barack Obama he is on the White House porch with one foot in the doorway. But outside, in the places that will really count in this election for the biggest job on Earth, the message is: Don't pack your bags just yet.
A few days ago Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating skirmished over Gallipoli's place at the epicentre of the national psyche. Keating dismissed it as a faraway European affair, the spilt Australian blood testament to the country's lack of self-esteem. But Gallipoli, countered Rudd, was an act of courage that shaped national identity for a century.
