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Australia’s ex-Prime Minister Julia Gillard has revealed the “acute distress” she felt after being dumped as leader of the Labor Party in June.

“Losing power can bring forth a pain that hits you like a fist,” she wrote in an opinion piece in the Guardian.

The country’s first female prime minister was ousted by long-term rival Kevin Rudd amid dismal polling figures.

But despite the switch, Mr Rudd lost last Saturday’s general election to conservative leader Tony Abbott.

Labor is set for a new leadership contest after Mr Rudd announced he would resign from his party role.

Ms Gillard revealed she had watched the 7 September election night results on her own.

“I wanted it that way. I wanted to just let myself be swept up in it,” she wrote in the Guardian column.

The leadership challenge in June was the second Ms Gillard had faced since taking office in 2010. She herself ousted Mr Rudd as prime minister in 2010.

She said the switch just weeks head of the election had sent Australians a “very cynical and shallow message” about Labor’s purpose.

“The decision was not done because caucus now believed Kevin Rudd had the greater talent for governing,” she wrote.

“Labor unambiguously sent a very clear message that it cared about nothing other than the prospects of survival of its members of parliament at the polls. There was not one truly original new idea to substitute as the lifeblood of the campaign.”

After her own defeat three months ago, Ms Gillard declared she would be leaving politics for good.

“Losing power is felt physically, emotionally, in waves of sensation, in moments of acute distress,” she said of that moment.

“You can feel you are fine but then suddenly someone’s words of comfort, or finding a memento at the back of the cupboard as you pack up, or even cracking jokes about old times, can bring forth a pain that hits you like a fist, pain so strong you feel it in your guts, your nerve endings.”

BBC

{{After rescuing a burning ship from pirate-infested waters off Yemen and a sinking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, South African salvage master Nick Sloane faces his biggest test off an idyllic Mediterranean island.}}

The 52-year-old says the attempt to raise the Costa Concordia cruise ship from its watery grave, due to begin on Monday, is his “most challenging” yet in a career that has taken him to six continents and two warzones.

The Zambia-born Sloane was flown to the Italian island of Giglio last year from New Zealand, where he was working on a spill from the MV Rena oil tanker, for the biggest ever salvage operation of a passenger ship.

He has led an international operation with 500 salvage workers including divers, welders and engineers operating 24 hours a day around the rusting 290-metre (951-foot) hulk, which is bigger than the Titanic.

When the lifting of the 114,500-tonne ship gets under way, Sloane will be the one giving the commands from a control room on the shore and monitoring the unprecedented operation through eight monitors.

The ruddy salvage master hit a low point last year when storms hampered the operation and there were serious difficulties drilling into the granite seabed to install a metal platform to hold the ship stable.

“There was a lot of questioning. ‘Are you sure it’s going to work?’ ‘This is crazy!’” he remembers.

Work has sped up since then and Sloane has said he is confident of success, while remaining realistic

The most serious risk is buckling in the hull as the luxury liner is dragged upright, which Sloane has compared to a “banana” effect — the extent of which will only become clear as the operation is underway.

“There’s a lot of unknown factors about the ship. We’ve made a lot of assumptions,” he admits.

Sloane has warned that the hull is slowly compressing in on itself and that now is the last chance to lift the Costa Concordia before it collapses too much.

“You can’t afford to wait. Time is your worst enemy,” he says, warning about the large swells expected once winds known as the sirocco hit the island in autumn.

{wirestory}

U.S.-Russian talks on eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons program have reached a “pivotal point,” a U.S. official said, and both nations said on Friday they wanted to renew efforts to negotiate a peaceful end to the war in Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Geneva to discuss a Russian proposal under which Syria would sign international treaties banning chemical weapons and hand over its stocks of such weapons to the international community for destruction.

The U.S. official said the two sides were “coming to agreement” on the size of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles and talks were continuing into Saturday.

U.S. President Barack Obama, after a meeting in Washington with Kuwait’s emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, reiterated that he would insist any deal on Syria’s chemical weapons be “verifiable and enforceable.

In Washington, senior Obama administration officials said the United States did not expect a U.N. Security Council resolution formalising the deal to include potential use of military force. But officials said Obama retained that option.

Independent of the United Nations, Obama has threatened the use of force in response to an August 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria that U.S. officials say killed about 1,400 people. But as part of negotiations toward a U.N. resolution, the United States sees no benefit in trying to include the potential use of force.

The reason is that Washington does not see Russia ever agreeing to such a step and could use its veto power to nix such a resolution, the officials said.

Russia holds a veto on the Security Council and previously used it on three occasions when Western powers sought to condemn Assad over the war in Syria. President Vladimir Putin has said the proposal on chemical weapons will only succeed if the United States and its allies rule out the use of force.

{agencies}