No contest. It’s the Fairfax tabloids this morning by the length of the straight — easy winners in the daily Leadership Beat-up stakes.

What the market says. The Crikey Leadership Indicator this morning puts the chances of Julia Gillard leading Labor at the next election at 40%.

Good for mattress sales. Nothing else to say about Cyprus, really. Why anyone in Spain and Italy now would keep their money in a bank is beyond me.

News and views noted along the way.

  • Echoes of 1933: the Cyprus heist — “Just imagine what you would be thinking now if you were a resident of troubled periphery economy and had funds in your bank account. I suspect it would be whether my bank was next and whether I needed to get my funds out ASAP. It is almost as if the EU and IMF were trying to create a banking panic in Europe.”
  • Reforming China’s gulags — “China’s new Premier Li Keqiang has signalled his government is prepared to start the process of reforming the widely-despised system of re-education camps. The camps, a gulag-type network created half a century ago, hold thousands of inmates who are made to undergo ‘laojiao’, also known as ‘re-education through labour'”.
  • Beef good, bacon not so bad — “A new European study claims an increase in processed-meat consumption raises the risk of early death. But the real news? Red meat won’t kill you.”
  • The fake ‘minister’ who duped China’s Communist Party for years
  • China is engineering genius babies — “At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.”
  • Are older parents putting our future at risk? — “Thanks to medical advances, we’re now having children later and later in life. And it’s making many scientists fear for the future.”
  • Does Greek coffee hold the key to a longer life?