Former Daily Telegraph and New York Post editor Colin 'Col' Allan (Image: New York Daily News)

Col Allan strikes again In the fallout from the increasingly sketchy New York Post story about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter — purporting to demonstrate that Hunter arranged a meeting between an executive at a Ukrainian energy company and his father in April 2015 — we see the dread hand of legendary Australian tabloid editor Col “piss in the sink” Allan.

Per The New York Times (which reported that the actual Post author was so embarrassed they took their name off the final piece) it was Allan who pushed for publication:

Top editors met on October 11 to discuss how to use the material provided by [Rudy] Giuliani. The group included the tabloid veteran Colin Allan, known as Col; Stephen Lynch, The Post’s editor-in-chief; and Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor-in-chief, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Allan, who was The Post’s editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2016 and returned last year as an adviser, urged his colleagues to move quickly, the person said.

He needn’t have worried. As Giuliani has said of the story, he went to the Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out”. Indeed even presenters on Fox News have been calling the story “sketchy” and “suspicious”. And today we found out Fox had the chance to run the story, and passed on it.

US election watch Freedom of information expert and friend of Crikey William Summers has been forwarding us election material from hugely influential US gun lobby — and friends of One Nation — the National Rifle Association. And let us tell you, it’s quite something. The association is offering, among other things, a “banned guns giveaway”:

This is in aid of what the NRA call the “most important election battle we’ve faced in all our lifetimes”:

The NRA offering guns banned under even lax US regulations, while telling gun nuts that “losing the 2020 election means losing our guns forever” is one of many reasons to watch the outcome of the 2020 election through your fingers.

Letter boxing Voters in Queensland have been finding an unwanted lodger in their letterboxes, courtesy of an open letter from Coalition backbenchers Craig Kelly and George Christensen to Queensland chief health officer Jeannette Young demanding she decriminalise the prescribing of the drug Hydroxychloroquine.

Meanwhile, over on his popular Facebook page, Kelly is busy making not at all a mockery of his office by actively promoting distrust of NSW public health services, again over Hydroxychloroquine.

The question remains — is there anything that will prompt Prime Minister Scott Morrison or Health Minister Greg Hunt (or hell, just any single one of Kelly’s colleagues) to tell him to pull his head in?