The gentlemen in the above photo are:
(a) Turning the first sod at the Shanghai Inflatable Doll Trade Fair;
(b) Gravediggers of the Central Committee of the Communist Party heroically exceeding their quotas at the funeral of the last member of the Gang of Four;

For the second year running I am doing a preview of the Australian of the Year award, which will be announced by John Winston Howard later today. Please refer to my 2005 preview for some facts, figures and background on past winners.

The eight state and territory nominees, as announced in November:

http://www.pm.gov.au/news/media_releases/media_Release1752.html

I wonder what's the point really. We know that ministers aren't responsible for the actions of their departments and are always given wrong information by them anyway. So who cares who has what portfolio?

Momentous steps forward in the merging of women's and men's cricket administration in India were taken on Monday, when the BCCI's Working Committee met in New Delhi. The title of this post says it all. Today's The Hindu reports.

Zimbabwe Cricket's announcement last Wednesday that they were withdrawing from Test cricket for the rest of 2006 was greeted variously with sighs of relief, pats on the back, and gales of laughter. I belonged to that last category.

It's election day in Canada today. The following press release from the Green Party of Canada hit my inbox overnight on Friday. The principles basically hold true elsewhere, including Australia:

1. I want to feel good about my vote. I want to vote for someone, not against someone.

Let's just recap a sequence of events involving the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) over the past year or so:

A grain of truth
Marian Wilkinson's excellent, but necessarily long, summary of this week's astonishing revelations at the Cole Inquiry into bribes allegedly paid by Australian companies as part of the UN oil-for-food scandal.

A big, big story is unfolding this week at a Royal Commission being conducted in Sydney by Justice Terence Cole into "Certain Australian Companies in Relation to the UN Oil-For-Food Programme". Australia's biggest agribusiness company appears to be up to its neck in it, and so too the Howard Government.