Mr Tatchell said: "It's deplorable that the Queen has invited royal dictators from Bahrain, Swaziland and Saudi Arabia who preside over severe human rights abuses, including detention without trial, torture and violent repression of protests."

St James's Palace defended the wedding list yesterday, insisting the Foreign Office had approved it. "Invitations are extended from the Queen following the long-held tradition of inviting other crowned heads of state; we have taken advice from the Foreign Office about their continued inclusion," a spokesman said.

Libya's UK ambassador had his invitation rescinded after fighting began, but Zimbabwe's ambassador to Britain, Gabriel Machinga, remains invited.

Former Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been overlooked.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/outrage-at-dictators-invited-to-royal-wedding-2274230.html

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The wedding guest list starts to look like a kebab of dictators without the Blair slippery dip and the Brown bland sauce... Lucky, our own republican red Julia will represent this hum-royal bonza bluey country. Tony (Abbott) is green at the gills with envy...

The argument goes that republicans are all inner-city latte-sipping lefties who want a Republic because they have no understanding about what the common man really cares about.

The idea appeared because some especially pompous Sydney Law School Professor from the inner-city Eastern suburbs of that city wrote a book on the subject. Such irony.

As a bloke from Dingo, on the Mackenzie River in Central Queensland, who spent most of his boyhood mustering cattle, building fences and branding calves, the thought that I would ever be part of some elitist inner-city of Sydney al fresco cafe frequenting elite, or would ever even want to be, is utterly absurd.

I have nothing against coffee or the elites, but that’s just not my crowd, nor will it ever be.

Who are Republicans, and what do they want?
I have met a lot of Republicans and by far the majority of them are like me — ordinary Aussies from all sorts of different, usually modest, backgrounds. We want Australia to be a Republic because it makes sense. Because we believe all people are equal. We don’t believe in some mythical blue-blood superiority. We know we’re as good as those toffs…and Sydney law professors…and frequently better.

We want Australia to be a Republic because we recognise instantly that having some English member of the nobility automatically taking top dog position in our wholly Australian Federation due to some lame-brained 17th century European idea about “breeding” is not at all what makes this continental Southern Pacific nation tick.

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/elites-cling-to-the-monarchy-real-people-want-a-republic/

Royalty and democracy does not mix. Long live the republic.

The royal wedding has brought out the bunting and the trestle tables. It has also raised the question: would William and Kate much prefer to be having a simple wedding in a country church, surrounded by their university friends and family, rather than playing up to a fairytale myth foisted upon them by centuries of tradition and the royalist mainstream media?

In short, do we need them more than they need us?

Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph argues that it doesn't matter how illogical the institution might be, the British people still feel a powerful affection for the monarchy.

"We are a country that values ritual, custom, tradition... The monarchy does not merely define us as a nation: it defines us as individuals. Our respect and affection for the Queen is rooted in our collective unconscious. There is something deep, instinctive and even primeval going on here, which goes right to the very core of our nature as social beings."

It's incredible that this mediaeval nonsense still applies in Australia.

MORE than two centuries ago, Tom Paine famously pointed out that a hereditary monarchy was as absurd as a hereditary poet or hereditary mathematician (today he might have added hereditary airline captain). But his republicanism failed to take into account the enormous entertainment value of the royal family, currently on display. The palace's decision to censor the Chaser strikes at the very heart of this continuing value of the monarchy for Australians. Why else should we be reigned over by a white Anglo-German Protestant monarch?

The bedrock of the Australian constitution - the law which defines our head of state - is the 1701 Act of Settlement. It is a blood-curdling anti-Catholic rant that enshrines Protestant religious beliefs in the succession to the throne. This means that any monarch who holds communion with the Church of Rome or who marries a Papist - heaven forbid a Muslim or Methodist or Scientologist - is immediately dethroned. The act imposes anti-meritocratic race discrimination: no one unrelated to this German family (the Windsors changed their name from Saxe-Coburg Gotha during the First World War to disguise their familial relationship with the Kaiser) can aspire to the crown.

86. "I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ninety-gaffes-in-ninety-years-2290148.html

On the face of it, the Paris air show - to be held later this month - is all about the civil aviation and space industries.

But the biennial exhibit is at least as much about billions of dollars of military spending.

A broad range of companies, ranging from small component makers to giant defence and security firms such as Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Finmeccanica and Northrop Grumman, will fill the 130,000 square metres (1.4m sq ft) of exhibition space in the chalets and halls on the edge of Le Bourget airport's runway.

With more than 200 official delegations from 88 countries, many in the arms industry are expecting their order books to be dramatically boosted this year, industry officials and military officers have told BBC News.

Military conflict obviously bolsters arms sales, because it uses up weapons and ammunition, and there has been plenty of it in recent months.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13437491

see toon at top...

Has the Khalifa family gone mad? Yesterday, the Bahraini royal family started an utterly fraudulent trial of 48 surgeons, doctors, paramedics and nurses, accusing them of trying to topple the tin-pot monarchy of this Sunni minority emirate. The defendants in this flagrantly unfair military court are, of course, members of the majority Shia people of Bahrain. And since I was a witness to their heroic efforts to save lives in February, I can say – let us speak with a frankness that the Bahraini rulers would normally demand – that the charges are a pack of lies.

Doctors I saw, drenched in their patients' blood, desperately trying to staunch the bullet wounds of pro-democracy demonstrators shot in cold blood by Bahraini soldiers and police, are now on trial. I watched armed policemen refusing to allow ambulances to collect the wounded from the roads where they had been cut down.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-i-saw-these-brave-doctors-trying-to-save-lives-ndash-these-charges-are-a-pack-of-lies-2297100.html