Melbourne, Mar 14: Australian trade unions want Prime Minster Kevin Rudd to stop banking jobs going offshore, after his government rejected calls to have the deposit guarantee withdrawn from banks that move jobs out of Australia.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has sought an urgent meeting with Rudd after ANZ Bank announced it was shifting 500 jobs to India.

Sydney - The global financial crisis and the battle in Afghanistan would feature strongly when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd meets US President Barack Obama in Washington next month, officials said Friday.

The March 24 tryst in the White House would be Rudd's first meeting with Obama.

Their meeting would come a week before the summit of the Group of 20 (G20) April 2 in London, which both leaders are scheduled to attend.

The prime minister also attended the December summit in Washington of the G20, which consists of 19 of the world's largest economies and the European Union.

Sydney  - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's 42-billion-Australian-dollar (27-billion-US-dollar) spending programme was voted down in the upper house of the federal parliament on Thursday.

The opposition Liberal Party voted against the package and Labor failed to win the support of independent MPs it needed to get the legislation through both houses of parliament.

Rudd said the massive stimulus package would put the government deeply into debt but was necessary to stop the faltering economy from falling into recession.

Sydney  - To some, it's just fun. To others, it's psychopathic behaviour they can't control. To Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, deliberately starting fires on scorching days in the wooded fringes of towns is nothing short of mass murder.

"There are no other words to describe it other than mass murder," Rudd said, after the death toll in the nation's worst-ever forest fires topped 100.

Sydney  - Prime Minister Kevin Rudd Tuesday announced a 42-billion-Australian-dollar (27-billion-US-dollar) spending programme that he hoped would stop the faltering Australian economy from lurching into recession.

Rudd last raided the piggy bank in October for a 10.4-billion-Australian-dollar package of one-off payments to low-income families, first-time house buyers and pensioners.

The latest stimulus package is more of the same: one-off payments to families, to farmers and the unemployed. But as well as hand-outs to households, there will be a

It is being said by the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that the conclusion to keep out Telstra from bidding to build the national broadband network was made at arm's length from the Federal Government.

Since Telstra was not contended that there was enough detail from the Government on regulatory requirements, it submitted a brief proposal instead of a full bid.

According to Telstra, the reason behind its exclusion is that it did not say how it would include small and medium businesses in the network's construction.