ABC journo quits Twitter after Bolt slap. ABC journalist Alison Caldwell appears to have deleted her Twitter account (@CaldwellAlison) after several of her tweets praising Scott Ludlam’s recent takedown of Tony Abbott in Parliament were criticised by Andrew Bolt yesterday morning. In a post highlighting several of Caldwell’s tweets — including ones where she calls Ludlam a “man with substance” and retweeted praise for the Greens Senator — Bolt held Caldwell up as another example of the ABC’s “Left bias”.

But after a reader alerted Bolt to the fact that Caldwell was getting lots of abuse on Twitter, the Herald Sun columnist called on his troops to stand down. “If any of the guilty were readers of this blog, I beg you to stop and apologise. You discredit your argument,” he wrote in an update. — Myriam Robin

A leading woman at The New York Times. While visiting Iran recently, Carol Giacomo got her nails done in order to see a different side to the country’s women. The New York Times columnist, editorial board member and foreign policy expert believes women’s stories are important and integral to every part of life. But you need to go beyond the stereotype to determine what’s really going on.

Finding her own way to add value to a story has helped build her high-profile media career, and she has engaged and travelled with some of the most powerful people in the world — including a time when she regularly travelled with secretaries of state, often as the only woman on the plane.

In conversation with Helen Dalley at a Women In Media event in Sydney this morning, Giacomo revealed a number of tips that have helped her drive her media career and become one of The New York Times‘ most prominent columnists and now editorial board member — with a say over such matters as whom to endorse for president and what position to take on major issues like the death penalty and abortion. Giacomo decided she wanted to be a journalist at the age of just 12, and used the ambition to drive her major career and life decisions and support some necessary sacrifices. — Angela Priestley (more at Women’s Agenda)

Video of the day. Republicans hated the “parody interview”, but Barack Obama probably won more fans with his hilariously awkward webisode chat with Zach Galifianakis in the White House …

Front page of the day. The Toronto Sun — home of all the Rob Ford news you could ever want — takes it up a notch …