Before the newly elected Whitlam government rushed to get rid of regally bestowed titles, Harold Holt's widow (now deceased herself) became Dame Zara. The gong for this one-time head of a fashion business located in Toorak was for what was vaguely described as "devotion to the public interest".

Whatever Zara did in the public interest, it was under the right light to be seen. The devotion to the public interest of a nurse who has been working staggered shifts for 20 years is not.

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown says he cannot afford to pay a $240,000 Forestry Tasmania bill, a move which could see him lose his seat in the Senate.

Senator Brown was ordered to pay the money after losing a federal court case to stop logging in the Wielangta Forest in south-east Tasmania.

He says he has been told he could end up bankrupt if he does not pay, meaning he would lose his Senate seat.

Senator Brown says he is now campaigning to raise the money which must be paid by the end of the month.

Early in the afternoon of June 8, 1967, Israeli jets and missile boats opened fire on the USS Liberty, an American surveillance ship operating off the coast of Gaza. Struck by rockets, cannons and torpedoes, the vessel suffered extensive damage and over 200 casualties.

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro says US allegations that a Washington couple spied for Cuba are a "ridiculous tale".

In an editorial, he questioned the timing of their arrest - days after the Organisation of American States lifted Cuba's 1962 expulsion from the group.

The couple, retired state department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, are accused of having passed on information to Cuba for three decades.

The pair, both in their 70s, face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.

In his article, Mr Castro described the case as an "espionage comic strip".

Is irony even the word for this? The president created a new online "open government" system in which people were free to brainstorm and vote proposals up or down. Far and away the leading proposal in the category of "Legal and Policy Challenges" as of the scheduled end of brainstorming was End Imperial Presidency.

As assassination plots go, James Purnell's move to finish off Gordon Brown must rank among the most dramatic in recent times - partly because he managed to keep it to himself, and partly because it was so direct and unequivocal.

While the Prime Minister was undoubtedly biting his fingernails to the quick in expectation that the local and Euro election results would prompt a move to oust him at some point over the next few days, he did not spot arch-Blairite Purnell creeping towards him in the undergrowth.

The Vatican appears to have an enduring vocation for Italian political and financial scandal. Secrecy and intrigue were the order of the day when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus held sway in the Bastion of Nicholas V, the medieval tower housing the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican's central bank.

from Crikey .....

A Crikey cure for outlandish executive pay

Adam Schwab writes:

Stretching out a hand to the Islamic world, President Barack Hussein Obama on Thursday invoked the Quran, his middle name and an American evenhandedness he says too few Muslims see. Obama drew a respectful response from unlikely places - an Iranian cleric called it "an initial step for removing misconceptions."

The president, speaking at a seat of Islamic learning, delivered a 55-minute speech that was heavily promoted, carefully watched and had as its guiding themes the need to "speak the truth" and "seek a new beginning."

On April 13, the U.N. Security Council condemned North Korea's rocket launch earlier in the month.

Within nine hours, North Korea denounced and rejected the Security Council statement; expelled international inspectors and the U.S. technical team from its Yongbyon nuclear facilities; walked away from the Six-Party Talks and all previous agreements; threatened to strengthen its "self-defensive nuclear deterrent"; and said that it would restore its nuclear plant to normal operation and reprocess spent fuel rods.

For over a decade, Judid Angamarca lived in a wooden shack on stilts next to an old waste pit, where for years oil sludge from drilling was dumped.

The patch of land, the size of a tennis court, was cleaned and covered with earth in 1996. But it stubbornly refused to produce anything she tried to grow. Her three children played in the grass as babies; her animals roamed around, too. The residents living in and around San Carlos have long lived among the wells, pipes, and waste pits laid down for the oil bonanza in the Ecuadorean Amazon.

Even as China's state media on Tuesday slammed the country's massive U.S. debt purchases, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said China's leaders believe in "the basic resilience and dynamism of the U.S. economy."

Geithner said the economic and finance officials he met with during his two-day trip did not repeat concerns they have expressed publicly over the past few months about the deteriorating value of their holdings of U.S. Treasuries or the U.S. dollar position as the world's dominant reserve currency.

God doesn't need to save the Queen - she's got Barnaby

As the June 15th deadline nears for the Australian Government's decision to allow or disallow Chinalco to increase its stake in Rio Tinto, opposition to the move is playing out like a 19th century English comic opera, with Barnaby Joyce playing the "very model of a modern" toady of the Queen.

His crusade to protect Rio Tinto from the Chinese on the grounds of Australia's national interest is high farce-it is a British company, owned by Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth herself.

The history of Rio Tinto is full of ironies with regards to the flap over Chinalco's share bid:

If outlanders tend to associate Australia with kangaroos, broad-brim leather hats and an opera house, many Australians are different. They think of iron ore and bauxite, copper and coal, nickel, gold and uranium, a trove of mineral riches that is their nation's birthright and the bedrock of its prosperity.

Australia vetoed part of a $1.8 billion bid for Oz, a large zinc miner, because the military raised the prospect of Chinese espionage at an Oz mine not far from an aerospace test site.