No mercy. There, in two words, you have the White House game plan for BP. It's no use Mayor Boris Johnson bleating about the "huge exposure of British pension funds to BP" and it being "a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves". It's worse than useless for Lord Tebbitt to splutter about "a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance against a multinational company."

Thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Sydney's CBD today, waving colourful banners and chanting demands for equal pay for women.

The Australian Services Union, which represents workers in the female-dominated community services sector, organised the nationwide rally - Australia's biggest equal pay march since the 1970s.

Women earn 18 per cent less than men, which amounts to about $1 million over a lifetime, recent Australian Bureau of Statistics show.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will meet with mining magnate Andrew Forrest in Perth today to try to end the bitter row over the Government's proposed resources super profits tax.

Mr Rudd has promised to pour $2 billion into infrastructure in Western Australia in a bid to garner support for the tax, but has failed to convince fierce critics like Mr Forrest.

Mr Forrest told Lateline Government officials have made it clear the consultation process for the proposed tax is a charade.

"The consultation process started with Fortescue at 8:00am in Canberra on the first day," he said.

A US soldier serving in Iraq has been arrested for allegedly leaking a classified combat video to a whistleblower website, Wikileaks, last year.

The video footage from a helicopter cockpit shows a deadly 2007 aerial strike in the Iraqi capital that killed 12 civilians including two journalists from the Reuters news agency.

If you want to hide a leaf, find a forest. Jérôme Kerviel, alleged to be the world's biggest rogue trader, will attempt to hide a €5bn leaf in a multi-trillion euro forest when he goes on trial in Paris today. Mr Kerviel's defence will be horrendously complex – and very simple. His lawyers will admit that what he did in 2007-8 – to bet more than the value of France's second largest bank on a series of trades on stock exchange futures – was insane. However, they will also argue that his actions were rational, even tacitly approved, within a global banking culture which had, itself, broken off relations with reality.

Picture by Gus

In Sydney, the present temperatures for early June are "below" average by half a degree... The "normal" winter high pressure system is moving back northward, after having been stuck further south than usual by weather frothed up by the warm Eastern Australian current. The winds are now influenced by a southerly cold wind coming from Antarctica via the Bight and twirling back in the north, in eddies on the edge of the high pressure system...

My view.

here is what I wrote about a year ago:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/6600#comment-10300

Mining magnate Clive Palmer has retreated from his earlier claim that he had scrapped mining projects because of the Federal Government's proposed resource super profits tax.

Mr Palmer owns one of the largest deposits of iron ore in the world, carved out in five separate projects.

The investment for the first development was secured before the super profits tax was announced.

Mr Palmer, a Liberal National Party donor, told Lateline last month he had canned two projects in Western Australia's Pilbara region because of the tax.

He said one of those projects would employ about 3,000 people and generate about $2 billion a year in exports.

The government of Israel today launched a massive air assault on suspected terrorist targets along major coastal cities in the United States of America. In an operation termed "Friendly Enemy," hundreds of Israeli F-16 fighter jets streaked across the Atlantic in precise formation & fired surgical air strikes at alleged terrorist strongholds in densely populated Muslim communities all along the northeast corridor of the United States. The American-made Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jets then continued south, inflicting massive destruction in densely populated Muslim communities along many southeastern US states as well.

If you were to draw an oily line from the first exploitation of oil in the Middle East by the British in 1901 (they were in the process of converting their then world dominating naval fleet from coal to oil and were in desperate need of it) to the overthrow of the secular democratic leader in Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq, in 1953, to the Iraq War, to the criminal environmental catastrophe in the Gulf, BP would have been there.  

President Barack Obama is to nominate retired Gen James Clapper, a top Pentagon official, as his next intelligence chief, an administration official has told the BBC.

Gen Clapper would replace Adm Dennis Blair, who resigned in May after a run of security failures, as director of national intelligence (DNI).

He would oversee 16 agencies in the intelligence community as the new DNI.

Gen Clapper is expected to be nominated at a White House ceremony on Saturday.

Mixed reviews

from Crikey .....

What you won't learn about the Xstrata 'closures' from the media

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: