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The Australian army will be brought in to help in the worst bushfires in Victoria's history. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered army troops to help firefighters control 26 fires around the state that have claimed at least 26 lives, injured hundreds and destroyed hundreds of properties, Premier John Brumby said. "The army will become involved, I spoke to the prime minister in the early hours of this morning when I was in Bendigo," Mr Brumby said.

KEVIN RUDD has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of "social capitalism" in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily. In an essay to be published next week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis. "The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes," he writes of those who placed their...

PM KEVIN Rudd wants to recruit an army of volunteers to help the elderly, feed the homeless, and clean up the environment. In exchange for giving up their time, members of the new Community Corps would get discounts on their university HECS debts. The proposal could attract tens of thousands of volunteers from the 1.3 million Australians with a higher education debt. The average ex-student has a $12,000 HECS debt, which typically takes more than seven years to pay off. The scheme could wipe out students' debts as they accumulate hours of community service. The plan, backed by top business...

Prime Minister Rudd’s emissions reduction target condemns Australia to economic suicide, on the basis of the lie of man-made global warming, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood charged today. “I can tell you, most scientists know that a man-made climate disaster is absolute nonsense,” Mr Isherwood said. “Don’t believe the lying mainstream media or Hollywood’s ‘climate porn’—this climate dictatorship is run by the same City of London/Wall Street bankers who caused the current global financial crisis. “The fact is, global warming stopped a decade ago and this year has been much colder than most. Earlier this year, China had its...

Australians could vote on whether the country should drop the Queen as head of state and become a republic within two years Greens Senator Bob Brown has introduced legislation to the upper house that would enable the public to vote on severing ties with the Crown at the next federal election in 2010. Senator Brown has introduced similar legislation before and the Greens Party hope the move will help gauge public opinion on the prospect of a referendum. The Greens will closely follow the reaction of both major parties to the legislation. Both the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and...

The global economic crisis is a result of the "comprehensive failure of extreme capitalism," Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday as he took aim at bulging executive pay packets. The centre-left Labor Party leader named greed and fear as the "twin evils" at the root of the financial sector collapse, which began in the United States and swept the world. "What we have seen is the comprehensive failure of extreme capitalism -- extreme capitalism which now turns to government to prevent systemic failure," Rudd told the National Press Club in Canberra.

Former weatherman Mark Rudd, who worked closely with William Ayers is a signer with the group, ”Progressives for Obama“.

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd witnessed a heated discussion between US President George W. Bush and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, over Russia's invasion of a tiny neighbouring country as athletes paraded before them in the Opening Ceremony on Friday night. Mr Rudd revealed in an interview with Beijing Now in Beijing on Saturday that he was sitting just two rows behind Mr Bush when an "animated" discussion between he and Mr Putin broke out over Russia's advance into South Ossetia, a breakaway region in neighbouring Georgia.

IN THE most private recesses of their minds, some Labor figures are thinking the unthinkable: could Kevin Rudd be a one-term prime minister, the first of the modern era? Rudd himself has warned that although the Government appears to have a healthy majority on paper, a good number of its seats are held by wafer-thin margins. But this is a mathematical assessment. What's driving the pessimism - albeit still nascent - in Labor ranks is the Prime Minister's style of political management, his apparently boundless appetite for "gesture politics'' and the increasingly fractured narrative it creates. Take last week's visit...

THE history of left-wing politics is a history of unintended - and invariably negative - outcomes. Glorious workers’ revolutions lead to tyranny. Welfare causes misery. Government-funded tertiary education ends up subsidising the same proportion of private school and state school students as previously attended universities under full fees. Public broadcasting evolves into elite programming funded by people who never watch or listen to it. Decades of state film funding gives us films nobody pays to see. I could go on. Hey, I will: Environmentalism Thanks to its capture by leftists - degenerates from a positive save-the-critters movement into a freaky...

NASIRIYAH, Iraq (AFP) — The 550-strong Australian contingent in Iraq withdrew from its bases in the south of the country on Sunday as most of the troops prepared to head home, Iraqi and Australian officials said. The soldiers left following a flag-lowering ceremony at the Imam Ali airbase west of the city of Nasiriyah, the capital of Dhi Qar province, governor Aziz Kadoum Alwan said. "The Australian soldiers left today from Dhi Qar and Muthanna provinces," Alwan said. In Sydney the Australian Defence Force said in a statement that the "Overwatch Battle Group and the Australian army training team formally...

- Australia, a staunch U.S. ally and one of the first countries to commit troops to the Iraq war five years ago, ended combat operations there Sunday, a Defense Department official said. ADVERTISEMENT Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was swept into office in November largely on the promise that he would bring home the country's 550 combat troops by the middle of 2008. Rudd has said the Iraq deployment has made Australia more of a target for terrorism.

AUSTRALIAN troops have begun arriving home from Iraq, signalling an end to the nation's combat mission in the war-torn country and fulfilling an election promise made by Kevin Rudd. The first of about 500 soldiers from the Overwatch Battle Group (West) 4 and Australia's Army Training Team reportedly touched down in Brisbane late this afternoon. The soldiers had been stationed at Tallil air base, 300km south of Baghdad, and were responsible for providing security training for Iraqi forces, as well as reconstruction and aid work. A British military spokesman in the southern city of Basra has confirmed the withdrawal was...

THE Rudd Government is preparing a case to take Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the International Court of Justice for "inciting genocide" and denying the Jewish Holocaust. Australia is the only nation pursuing Iran's despotic leader, who has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map", through international laws. The Australian revealed last October that Kevin Rudd, then the Opposition leader, promised the Jewish community before last year's election he would take legal proceedings in the ICJ against Mr Ahmadinejad. The Labor leader said it was "strongly arguable" that Mr Ahmadinejad's conduct - statements about wiping Israel off the map, questioning...

Kevin Rudd: Australia will become a republic By Andrew Pierce Last Updated: 2:21pm BST 07/04/2008 The new Australian prime minister today declared his Republican credentials and pledged to open a debate about the future of the monarchy only hours before his first audience with the Queen. Kevin Rudd suggested that Australia would not become a republic while the Queen was on the throne Kevin Rudd, in his first official visit to Britain since becoming Prime Minister in November, said: "Once a Republican, always a Republican." Mr Rudd, who was speaking at Downing Street where he met Gordon Brown, said that...

KEVIN Rudd has been invited to return to New York's famed strip club Scores and offered "a dozen free lap dances" when he makes his first official visit to the US as Prime Minister later this week. Scores owner and operator Elliot Osher is welcoming Mr Rudd, who he referred to as the "Aussie stud", back to his landmark gentlemen's club, which features topless lap dancers, on Manhattan's east side. "All Australians are invited to my place, including Kevin Rudd. Thanks to the Prime Minister, a lot of our business is from other countries, especially Aussies," Mr Osher wrote in...

SPORTING figures, academics and mainstream Muslims will be sought out by the Rudd Government to help recast the overly religious image of Islamic Australia. The Australian reports a new-look Muslim advisory body is being considered in a bid to help dismantle the stereotypical picture of Islam, despite infighting - fuelled by ideological rivalries and conflicting egos - wracking the former government's board. And the Rudd Government will also consider reviving the Council for Multicultural Australia - featuring leaders from a cross-section of ethnic backgrounds, including the Jewish and Muslim communities. The previous government abolished the trouble-plagued Muslim advisory board -...

KEVIN Rudd has assured mainstream Australia he will avoid radical social and cultural change by resisting calls to broaden his reform agenda and by sticking to his election promises. The PM warned that people had "elected the wrong guy" if they believed that once he was in power he would unveil a secret left-wing reform agenda or suddenly yield to pressure from sectional interests... He said that despite the threat to the economy of inflation, he would deliver his promised $31 billion tax-cut plan in full... ...the Coalition warned voters that Rudd would be a captive of trade union leaders,...

THE latest Chinese blockbuster is not about a boy wizard, although the hero of the tale looks a bit like him. Appropriately, for the Chinese Year of the Rat, it's about a politician - Lu Kewen, better known here as Kevin Rudd. Fujian Education Press is so convinced the "legendary life" of Lu Kewen will run off the shelves it has ordered its biggest ever print run. The introduction to the biography gives readers a hint of the excitement to follow: "This book will fully interpret the legendary life of Lu Kewen. How he was born in a poor family...

MELBOURNE: Australia has announced pulling out its military troops from Iraq while reassuring its commitments to continue aid and help for the reconstruction work both in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Skynews TV channel , Australian Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith informed this to US secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary Robert Gates and Vice-President Dick Cheney on his first official visit to Washington since Kevin Rudd Government's election last year. Australia has pledged to withdraw 550 combat troops from Iraq by June this year. Smith's agenda comprised explanations on Australia's decision to withdraw its combat troops from Iraq, which...