Winter Olympics: latest medal table for Pyeongchang 2018
13 - Czech Republic 1 Gold
Qld follows feds with new biometrics sharing laws
A team of FBI and IRS agents on Tuesday searched a North Dallas office building, authorities said. ... Brint Ryan, who has an office in the building, said about 40 agents were at the offices of Garza & Harris.
Joe B. Garza is a Dallas tax planning attorney known for his “aggressive” tax shelters. ... Garza’s website says he has negotiated and closed “more than $300 million of debt transactions” and “over $1 billion of tax exempt bond transactions as bond counsel for the state of Texas.” ...
But Garza’s promotion of certain shelters has resulted in costly adverse tax rulings against his clients, according to court records. Garza promoted and sold to clients a variety of the notorious “Son of Boss” tax shelter, which the IRS ruled was abusive if used to create artificial tax losses that could offset other income, according to federal court records.
This paper estimates the size and distribution of tax evasion. We combine random audits, tax amnesties, and leaks from offshore financial institutions matched to wealth records in Scandinavia. Tax evasion rises sharply with wealth: 3% of personal taxes are evaded on average, versus 25%–30% in the top 0.01% of the wealth distribution. A model of the supply of evasion services can explain this gradient. Taking tax evasion into account increases inequality substantially. After using tax amnesties, evaders do not seem to increase legal tax avoidance, suggesting that fighting evasion can allow governments to collect more taxes from the wealthy.
Wall Street Journal, New Tax Law Haunts Companies That Did ‘Inversion’ Deals:
The new U.S. tax law has something in store for some “inverted” companies, which signed mergers overseas that lowered their U.S. taxes: higher taxes.
Companies that engineered so-called inversion deals in recent years have been able to reduce their tax rates and take certain deductions by shifting their tax homes to other nations. Now, provisions in the new tax code restrict some of those deductions, like the interest payments American subsidiaries pay on loans from overseas parents, according to tax experts and companies. ...
Overall, the new restrictions are estimated to raise tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue, though not all of it will come from inverted companies. Tax experts and companies say the law will reduce the advantages of the corporate relocations, but probably not enough to bring companies back to the U.S.
↩︎ InversebMyth of canine guilt In 2011, a Maryland dog owner named Mali Vujanic uploaded a video to YouTube confidently titled “Guilty
119,000 Passports and Photo IDs of FedEx Customers Found on Unsecured Amazon Server GizModo
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: How to Stop Your Browser From Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency
Not allowed to cheat? So why should I turn up? Sydney Morning Herald
Government to crack down on access to patients’ Medicare numbers
Government to crack down on access to patients’ Medicare numbers
Australian Taxation Office looks to the cloud to end crashes (Sep 2017) ...
Salim Mehajer invited TV journalist 'to jump in back seat' seconds before car door slammed on her arm
History of a taboo
Where Old, Unreadable Documents Go to Be Understood - Atlas Obscura – A transcriber on the Isle of Man can decipher almost anything. “…Linda Watson’s company, Transcription Services, has a rare specialty—transcribing historical documents that stump average readers. Once, while talking to a client, she found the perfect way to sum up her skills. “We are good at reading the unreadable,” she said. That’s now the company’s slogan. For hundreds of years, history was handwritten. The problem is not only that our ancestors’ handwriting was sometimes very bad, but also that they used abbreviations, old conventions, and styles of lettering that have fallen out of use. Understanding them takes both patience and skill. “I see the job as a cross between a crossword puzzle and a jigsaw puzzle,” says Watson…Most of the documents that people need to understand, though, are wills and legal papers, which have their own pleasures. “The inventories I love,” she says. “It’s like someone comes to the front door and says, come on in to my house and have a look around.”
Pacific Standard – As the art of close reading has declined, a cohort of experts has emerged to reverse the trend and encourage stronger reading habits – James McWilliams.
“…Perhaps the oddest aspect of reading is that, for all the pleasures of the text, we must be taught to do it. Recognizing symbols and signs, as well as the ability to assign them meaning, might be innate to the human brain, but directing these abilities to follow words on the page—a relatively new skill in human history—requires instruction. Like a child learning to ride a bike without training wheels, the magical moment comes when the parent lets go and the child pedals off—and keeps going. “The most significant kind of learning,” writes the Stanford University reading specialist Elliot Eisner, “creates a desire to pursue learning in that field when one doesn’t have to.” The wonder of experiencing a novel (or the sensation of coasting on two wheels) can be habit-forming. Unfortunately, considerable evidence suggests that Americans are both reading less and reading with less intensity. It’s not unusual to hear well-educated adults who once read regularly now lament the decline in their bookish habits. In a widely circulated 2015 Medium article (“Why Can’t We Read Anymore?“), Hugh McGuire, who founded Librivox, which distributes public-domain audiobooks, highlighted the frenetic nature of digital life as the primary reason for why he was “finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters.” According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, the typical American adult now reads only four books a year. Twenty-seven percent didn’t read a single book in 2015, and a 2016 report from the National Endowment for the Arts found that reading had dropped, as the Washington Post summarized it, “to at least a three-decade low.”
“Face recognition—fast becoming law enforcement’s surveillance tool of choice—is being implemented with little oversight or privacy protections, leading to faulty systems that will disproportionately impact people of color and may implicate innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit, says an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report released today. Face recognition is rapidly creeping into modern life, and face recognition systems will one day be capable of capturing the faces of people, often without their knowledge, walking down the street, entering stores, standing in line at the airport, attending sporting events, driving their cars, and utilizing public spaces. Researchers at the Georgetown Law School estimated that one in every two American adults—117 million people—are already in law enforcement face recognition systems. This kind of surveillance will have a chilling effect on Americans’ willingness to exercise their rights to speak out and be politically engaged, the report says. Law enforcement has already used face recognition at political protests, and may soon use face recognition with body-worn cameras, to identify people in the dark, and to project what someone might look like from a police sketch or even a small sample of DNA…”
U of M crowdsourcing project transcribes Supreme Court justices’ handwritten notes
University of Minnesota News : “…If you have ever wanted to be a fly on the wall during deliberations by U.S. Supreme Court justices or travel back in time to witness Supreme Court decisions, a new crowdsourcing project led by researchers at the University of Minnesota and Michigan State University allows you to do just that. The project, named SCOTUS Notes, is the newest citizen science project under the Zooniverse platform originated at the University of Minnesota. Zooniverse, the world’s largest and most popular people-powered online research platform, runs on support from volunteers that now number more than 1.5 million. These volunteers act as armchair scientists and archivists helping academic research teams with their projects from the comfort of their own homes. In this project, members of the public transcribe handwritten notes from U.S. Supreme Court justices. Unlike members of Congress, justices cast their votes in complete privacy during weekly conference meetings. Only justices are allowed in the Chief Justice’s conference room when they discuss, deliberate, and make initial decisions on cases that focus on some of the nation’s most pressing legal issues. The only record of what has been said, and by whom, is provided by the handwritten personal notes the justices themselves take during conference. These crucial documents detail the discussions and debates that took place in thousands of cases spanning multiple decades…”Pacific Standard – As the art of close reading has declined, a cohort of experts has emerged to reverse the trend and encourage stronger reading habits – James McWilliams.
“…Perhaps the oddest aspect of reading is that, for all the pleasures of the text, we must be taught to do it. Recognizing symbols and signs, as well as the ability to assign them meaning, might be innate to the human brain, but directing these abilities to follow words on the page—a relatively new skill in human history—requires instruction. Like a child learning to ride a bike without training wheels, the magical moment comes when the parent lets go and the child pedals off—and keeps going. “The most significant kind of learning,” writes the Stanford University reading specialist Elliot Eisner, “creates a desire to pursue learning in that field when one doesn’t have to.” The wonder of experiencing a novel (or the sensation of coasting on two wheels) can be habit-forming. Unfortunately, considerable evidence suggests that Americans are both reading less and reading with less intensity. It’s not unusual to hear well-educated adults who once read regularly now lament the decline in their bookish habits. In a widely circulated 2015 Medium article (“Why Can’t We Read Anymore?“), Hugh McGuire, who founded Librivox, which distributes public-domain audiobooks, highlighted the frenetic nature of digital life as the primary reason for why he was “finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters.” According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, the typical American adult now reads only four books a year. Twenty-seven percent didn’t read a single book in 2015, and a 2016 report from the National Endowment for the Arts found that reading had dropped, as the Washington Post summarized it, “to at least a three-decade low.”
“Face recognition—fast becoming law enforcement’s surveillance tool of choice—is being implemented with little oversight or privacy protections, leading to faulty systems that will disproportionately impact people of color and may implicate innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit, says an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report released today. Face recognition is rapidly creeping into modern life, and face recognition systems will one day be capable of capturing the faces of people, often without their knowledge, walking down the street, entering stores, standing in line at the airport, attending sporting events, driving their cars, and utilizing public spaces. Researchers at the Georgetown Law School estimated that one in every two American adults—117 million people—are already in law enforcement face recognition systems. This kind of surveillance will have a chilling effect on Americans’ willingness to exercise their rights to speak out and be politically engaged, the report says. Law enforcement has already used face recognition at political protests, and may soon use face recognition with body-worn cameras, to identify people in the dark, and to project what someone might look like from a police sketch or even a small sample of DNA…”