'There aren't any bombshells,'' Mark Arbib says. ''No one has threatened me. No one has cajoled me. No one knew I was going to resign until I went to the PM.''

Bob Carr's love of US Civil War history doesn't make him qualified to be Australia's next foreign minister, a senior federal opposition frontbencher says.

And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win. 
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why, that I cannot tell," said he;
"But 'twas a famous victory."

Yesterday was a very big day for WikiLeaks. It just released 500 million internal documents stolen from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, allegedly obtained by hacktivist collective Anonymous in December.

from Crikey .....

Surprise! Gillard brings Bob Carr to Canberra

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

BOB CARR, GILLARD CABINET, LABOR LEADERSHIP SPILL, RESHUFFLE, ROBERT MCCLELLAND

Australia's economic success is at risk from a tiny minority of wealthy business people who are using their money and influence to ''poison'' the political and economic debate with arguments that benefit their self-interest but hurt the community, the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, has said.

In an essay for The Monthly magazine likely to stir controversy, Mr Swan names business people Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer as examples of the self-interested ''0.1 per cent'' against whom he rails.

Julia Gillard this week defeated Kevin Rudd overwhelmingly, but she shows little sign of winning the battle with herself to stop making bad mistakes. The aborted attempt to get Bob Carr into Parliament turned an opportunity into an own goal. Suddenly, everyone involved became a casualty.

Carr was embarrassed by being wooed and then unceremoniously dumped. NSW ALP secretary Sam Dastyari, who thought he'd done the right thing by identifying a high-profile figure to shoehorn into the Parliament and ministry, finds himself back in the box labelled ''faceless men''.

Share markets in the United States and Europe have dipped after US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke all but ruled out more economic stimulus.

Football Federation Australia (FFA) has terminated Gold Coast United's A-League licence held by Clive Palmer.

Labor may just be able to get on with governing before it's too late.

Scotland Yard helped the former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks to go out hacking, it was revealed yesterday – but the arrangement owed nothing to the interception of mobile phone messages.

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

picture by Gus Leonisky.... Hopefully this is in the vicinity of Arkaroola... For more than 40 years I've taken pictures in Australia, some pictures got stolen, some have lost their identification... so I go by my memory which is flinching like a candle in the wind of forgetfullness...