Speeding, using a mobile phone while driving and dropping litter top the list of rules and regulations regularly flouted, a survey has found. Other laws often broken are eating while driving, parking on pavements and not wearing a seatbelt.

Beleaguered Labor MP Noreen Hay has been dumped as a New South Wales parliamentary secretary by Premier Nathan Rees. The move comes after the member for Wollongong was caught up in the scandal surrounding disgraced police minister Matt Brown’s drunken romp at a post-budget party in June. Mr. Brown was sacked yesterday after news of his actions became public.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

A witness said Matt Brown, who was sworn in just three days ago, stripped down to his “very brief” underpants and danced to loud “Oxford Street-style” techno music on a green leather Chesterfield couch he had recently ordered for his office. The witness said Mr Brown “mounted the chest” of Wollongong MP Noreen Hay.

The listing - entitled “Empty condom packet & a photo of The Tart’s knickers”, also comes with a detailed account of how the woman discovered her husband’s infidelity. The leading bid for the items is currently at $27,600 with three days to go.

Seemingly issued independently of the former senator, the statements appeared to deflate the anonymously sourced reports of an Edwards tryst. But what went unnoticed was that the two lawyers shared an important connection to Mr. Edwards that suggests they were part of an orchestrated effort to protect him.

Even in confessing to preening, former senator John Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay. The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.