— Michael Crichton, who died in 2008
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
~Cesare Pavese
I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth
~ George Bernard Shaw
The Largest Act of Terrorism in Human History – Daniel Ellsberg Real News Network
Special Report: Double agents - How soccer clubs, players and ...
Kerrie Redgrove should have received a $1200 tax return but she is ...
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
~Cesare Pavese
I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth
~ George Bernard Shaw
Philip Resnick | Literary Review of Canada
| AN OFFSHORE ODE
I still remember the
excited email I got from our boss when we learned of this poem. A poem! I never
thought someone would pen a poem about an offshore finance investigation. But,
that's just what Philip Resnick did, and it’s well worth reading
| RUSSIAN CENSORSHIP
| RUSSIAN CENSORSHIP
It’s more bad news for
press freedom in a nation that has been stifled by the
government already. Our Russian member’s media organization has been fined
$340,000 for allegedly failing to report donations from non-Russian readers.
Thankfully, Yevgenia Albats’ supporters have come to the rescue to help pay the
fine
The Largest Act of Terrorism in Human History – Daniel Ellsberg Real News Network
Special Report: Double agents - How soccer clubs, players and ...
Kerrie Redgrove should have received a $1200 tax return but she is ...
Wife of jailed minister gives media the finger outside court
Anita Gylseth went through a rollercoaster of emotions both inside and outside the court.
BuzzfeedNews – 26 People Told Us How Public Libraries Make Their Lives Better[Note – many of the reasons referenced in this article are consistent with our own experiences decades ago, minus the technology. What is consistent is – the librarians.]
Dicey Topics: Kerry O'Brien talks politics, sex and money
The Walkley Award-winning journalist Kerry O'Brien discusses the topics we're told to keep private.
In November 1931 Churchill also published an article entitled ‘Fifty Years Hence’ in Maclean’s Magazine, in which he made some absurd predictions — that we would grow only those parts of chickens we wanted to eat, for example — but also some astonishingly accurate ones. ‘Wireless telephones and television…
That is from the new and excellent Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. It is true of course that the fifty years prediction was off. Here is the Churchill essay.
Corruption in Tax Administration: Interviews with Experts
DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: Britain Turns Offensive Speech Into a Police Matter.
It is chilling that cops, whose only business should be fighting crime, now want to hear about non-crime. Anyone who has even a sliver of respect for the ideal of liberty, for the right of people to go about their lives without being watched or narked on, should be seriously concerned that cops would want to hear about non-criminal behavior, otherwise known as everyday behavior.
Even more perversely, these non-crimes really just mean “insulting comments.” So if you’re in Yorkshire and someone on Facebook calls you a fat slob, call the cops. If you wear a niqab and a work colleague tells you—a la Boris Johnson—that you look a little bit like a mailbox, phone the police.
In essence, South Yorkshire Police want people to report on everyday conversations. This is Stasi territory. Coppers asking citizens to file reports on things they have read or overheard really should have disappeared from Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet here it still is, this GDR-style instruction to eavesdrop and squeal, though now it’s happening on the other side of the old Iron Curtain.
George Orwell intended 1984 to be a warning, not a how-to guide, as did the producers of The Lives of Others.
Corruption in Tax Administration - World Bank Group
Causes and consequences of corruption in tax administration
Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist: Whitey Bulger Gave Stolen Art To IRA, Says Investigator
"Following a network of leads, many from underworld contacts, [former Scotland Yard detective Charles] Hill is convinced that the Gardner treasures are still stashed in the Republic of Ireland. 'Even if Bulger did not order the robbery originally, he would have muscled in and taken control of the haul soon after it took place. ... Whitey felt he owed one to his friends in the Republic. I believe he offered them the paintings." … Read More
Wall Street Journal, Facebook, Google May Face Billions in New Taxes Across Asia, Latin America:
Dozens
of countries are stepping up efforts to levy new taxes on technology
giants such as Alphabet and Facebook, hoping to capture revenue from
digital services as economic activity increasingly shifts online.
HEALTH: The potential savings on medical costs could make a big difference for relieving pressure on Australia’s health systems, says Ben O’Mara.
Contract risk a multi-billion dollar problem for Australia’s local government
TECHNOLOGY: A former senior public servant's technology solution helps curb cost blowouts and track lost visibility on project and contract overspend.
Via Gallup: “With the release of the World Bank’s 2017 Global Findex microdata last week, policymakers and researchers — for free — can now dig deeper into how billions of the world’s adults use bank accounts, mobile money, digital payments, savings and credit. In April, the World Bank published its country-level data and released its report on financial inclusion indicators that are based on data from nationally representative surveys that Gallup, with the support of the World Bank team, collected in more than 140 economies in 2017. The release of the microdata opens up the individual survey responses from roughly 150,000 adults in these economies. Among the findings that policymakers and researchers can use the microdata to investigate — and discover their own new insights into the world’s financial inclusion challenges and opportunities:
- 1.2 billion adults worldwide have opened an account since Gallup and the World Bank started tracking these data in 2011, including 515 million in the past three years.
- Globally, 69% of adults — or 3.8 billion people — now have an account at a bank or with a mobile money provider.
- 1.7 billion adults do not have a bank account. But more than 1 billion of these unbanked adults have a mobile phone, which potentially offers convenient access to financial services.
- The gap between men and women in account ownership is just as wide in 2017 as it was when it was first measured.
- Having access to the internet as well as a mobile phone puts a wider range of financial services within reach.”
Why we should worry less about retirement ‒ and leave super at 9.5%
Compelling Australians to put even more into super runs the risk of giving them a better standard of living in retirement than they had while working.
Brexit, multilateralism and how the media impacts policy work
The secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet was interviewed by the UK government’s Civil Service Quarterly about what a post-Brexit UK can learn from Australia, how policy development is changing, and rebuilding capability and public trust.
Melbourne or Sydney? This is how our two biggest cities compare for liveability
Liveability is an important concept with implications for health and well-being that go beyond promotional material or the prestige of being named number one.
Independence is paramount to the work of a scrutineer
The retiring Inspector-General of Taxation discusses, among other things, the tensions between the internal regulators and the agencies they oversee.
