A former top lawyer for Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers insists he told the mogul's son there was evidence of widespread phone hacking more than three years before a scandal over the practice erupted.

Tom Crone questioned claims made by James Murdoch - chairman of News International, the British arm of his father's media empire - that he had not been fully informed about an email indicating that hacking was rife.

For many months, News International insisted the illegal accessing of the mobile phone voice messages of celebrities and crime victims was confined to reporter Clive Goodman who, along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, was jailed in 2007.

You may have missed it, but the Labor Party made history last week by passing a policy to support, for the first time, the offshore processing of asylum seekers.

But for card-carrying Labor supporters in particular, and fair-minded Australians in general, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

The federal Labor MP Craig Thomson took a $24,000 taxpayer-funded overseas study trip to Europe and the US; and then plagiarised much of his report to the Australian government and Parliament - presenting speeches by overseas officials and outdated Wikipedia articles as his own work.

Stevedoring company POAGS and the Maritime Union of Australia have agreed to suspend all industrial action after an intervention by new Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten.

POAGS had locked out around 120 workers at its Bunbury and Fremantle operations after the union took industrial action.

But both parties have agreed to return to the negotiating table after Mr Shorten intervened on his first day in the job.

A Fair Work Australia-appointed mediator will now oversee the negotiations.

The Maritime Union is demanding an 18 per cent wage increase and improved safety conditions for workers.

The gold bugs will be pleased. Analysts at the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE) reckon gold is going to be a star performer in 2012 with a forecast average price for the year of $US1850 an ounce.

That would represent a 17 per cent increase on the expected average for the just about completed 2011, and because BREE is also forecasting dollar parity for 2012, we don't have to worry about a currency conversion.

BREE reckons gold's bumper outlook is supported by a number of factors - low interest rates in the US (confirmed overnight) and Europe, net buying by central banks and continued strong investment and fabrication demand from US dollar-weary consumers in developing economies.

In trying to assert herself, the besieged PM has added to her problems.

From the Rudds to the Bolts, an issue that divides the nation also divides families.

This morning, Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd's sister Loree Rudd said she quit the Australian Labor Party last week in protest at its policy shift from opposing to supporting gay marriage after the national Labor Party Conference.

"I no longer liked the direction the Labor Party was going at state or federal level and I couldn't work for a party that had endorsed homosexuals marrying," she said.

US president Barack Obama says the United States has asked Iran to return a captured spy drone, as a top Iranian official says his country will reverse engineer the plane and is in the "final stages" of unlocking its software secrets.

Mr Obama confirmed the request for the drone, which Tehran said it brought down while overflying its territory, at a news conference with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"We've asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," he said.

Tehran says it is planning to use the downed craft to produce a fleet of its own drones.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has denied ministers threatened to resign from Parliament if they were demoted in yesterday's Cabinet reshuffle.

Two of the so-called faceless men who engineered Ms Gillard's coup against Kevin Rudd last year, Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib, were promoted yesterday as Ms Gillard unveiled an expanded Cabinet.

Rudd supporter Kim Carr was booted out of Cabinet and there have been reports two ministers - Robert McClelland and Peter Garrett - threatened to resign from Parliament and force by-elections if they were sacked.

From Paul Sheehan...

Everyone has a bad banking story, and we take for granted all the productive things the banks do for us. It is the bad stories that come to mind when the big four banks issue their profit statements. In the latest financial year the big four made a combined profit of $24 billion.

The EPA's findings about fracking's contamination of ground water have sent a shockwave through a gas industry in denial.

A television advertisement shown during a children's show after school and depicting students sharing Oreo cookies was not aimed at children, the Advertising Standards Board ruled, because it was appealing to adults' sense of nostalgia.