Wednesday 24th of April 2024

so sayeth the prince .....

so sayeth the prince .....

Kevin Rudd has again been forced to defend his past contact with disgraced former WA premier Brian Burke.

The federal opposition has accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of having a 'chatty, intimate' relationship with disgraced former Western Australian premier Brian Burke. 

Mr Rudd is expected to come under fire in parliament today as the coalition pursues contact between the Labor figures revealed in a series of emails more than two years old.

The November 2005 emails reveal Mr Rudd initially accepted an offer of a dinner, organised by Mr Burke, with journalists in Perth. 

Mr Rudd then declined the invitation citing uncertain travel arrangements for an upcoming trade meeting in Hong Kong. 

Asked about the matter last year Mr Rudd said he cancelled the dinner because he thought it would not be a good idea to interact with Mr Burke, who has been the subject of a Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) inquiry in WA. 

Abbott: Rudd A 'Machiavellian Politician' 

Gus: It's common to tell someone we've got an engagement rather than say 'piss off' when invited to something we don't want to go to...

SCHEIßEdelweiss

Whistle-blower site taken offline

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

The court also ordered that Dynadot should "prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court."

Other orders included that the domain name be locked "to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar" to prevent changes being made to the site.

Wikileaks claimed that the order was "unconstitutional" and said that the site had been "forcibly censored".