From all the uproar, you would think that the government's new super tax on the resource companies was the greatest moral challenge of our generation. To coin a phrase.

The miners want us to believe they face a disaster of biblical proportions. There would be floods, fire and famine, earthquakes and plague, the veil of the temple rent in twain, widows and orphans begging in the streets, the horsemen of the Apocalypse thundering by.

from Crikey .....

Corey Bernardi's sinister plot to ban the burqa

Greg Barns writes:

In the Court of Appeal yesterday morning, six former Guantánamo prisoners - Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga - won a resounding victory against the government, when three senior judges, including Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, overturned a ruling that, for the first time in British history, allowed the government to use secret evidence in a civil claim for damages.

Wall Street bankers are strutting around like little banty roosters these days, crowing about the phenomenal profits their banks are raking in.

Citigroup has just announced that its profits for just the first three months of this year totaled an incredible $4.4 billion, Goldman Sachs' haul was $3.5 billion, JPMorgan Chase grabbed $3.3 billion and Bank of America took $3.2 billion. Top bankers are cock-a-doodle-doing over these numbers, claiming that such results prove what geniuses they are, how essential they are to America's financial health and, of course, how deserving they are of their multimillion-dollar bonuses.

Citing the possibility of a terrorist organization getting hold of a nuclear weapon as the greatest threat to U.S. security, Barack Obama persuaded 46 other countries at the recent Nuclear Security Summit to agree to secure the world's loose nuclear material. Those leaders who came to Washington might have made done more to avert a nuclear attack, however, if they had asked the U.S. President to account for America's own loose nukes.

from the Mayne Report .....

There's nothing quite like a big court case between powerful media personalities so I've really enjoyed spending 9 hours over the last two days soaking up the damages action that sacked Herald Sun editor-in-chief Bruce Guthrie has brought against News Ltd in the Victorian Supreme Court.

What can possibly justify the relentless U.S. diplomatic (and mainstream media) assault on Iran?

The U.S. and Israel have been acting in tandem to extend and deepen the occupation.  In 2005, recognizing that it was pointless to subsidize a few thousand Israeli settlers in Gaza, who were appropriating substantial resources and protected by a large part of the Israeli army, the government of Ariel Sharon decided to move them to the much more valuable West Bank and Golan Heights.

from Crikey .....

Rudd's and Wong's response to the 'great moral challenge': CPRS into the deep freeze

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

from Crikey .....

Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.

Despite no involvement in terrorism, prisoners are subjected to horrific torture, abuse, and humiliating treatment as "unlawful enemy combatants" - now called "unprivileged enemy belligerents," defined as anyone (with or without evidence) suspected of "engag(ing) in (or materially supporting) hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."