My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy.
~A River Runs Through It (Naration)
Tax commissioner Chris Jordan is taking his own department to court as part of his defence in a defamation case brought against him by Sydney accountant Vanda Gould.
~A River Runs Through It (Naration)
Tax commissioner Chris Jordan is taking his own department to court as part of his defence in a defamation case brought against him by Sydney accountant Vanda Gould.
ATO boss Chris Jordan seeks protected tax documents to fight his defamation case
Reason for NSD180/2019
CHRISTOPHER JORDAN, COMMISSIONER OF TAXATION v SECOND COMMISSIONER OF TAXATION
& ANOR
Orders
in NSD1735/2017
VANDA GOULD v CHRISTOPHER JORDAN reveal:
“The
second trial in the proceeding R v Vanda Russell Gould, District Court
of New South Wales proceeding no. 2016/00278181 is currently listed for hearing
commencing on 14 October 2019 with an estimate of four to six weeks.”
“The
parties to this proceeding have accordingly requested that the proceedings be
listed for a further Case Management Hearing on 6 December 2019.”
And Facebook and Google Must Be Taxed for It – Fortune: “For the last few years, some psychologists have been warning of the dangers of social media addiction—a phenomenon that whistleblowers from within tech industry say has been deliberately fostered by companies such asFacebook and Google. Now, lawmakers in the U.K. say social media addiction should be formally classified as a disease, and the companies behind the platforms should pay a 0.5% tax on their profits in order to help fix the problem. A cross-party group of parliamentarians on Monday published their report following an inquiry into “managing the impact of social media on young people’s mental health and wellbeing,” which ran from April 2018 to January this year. “Our Inquiry shows that there are aspects of social media which are positive—particularly for bringing together people with similar interests, reducing loneliness and helping communities stay in touch,” wrote Chris Elmore and William Wragg, the lawmakers who led the inquiry.
- #NewFilters to manage the impact of social media on young people’s mental health and wellbeing – Report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Inquiry: “Managing the Impact of Social Media on Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing”
Seeing Justice Done: The Impact of the Judge on Sentencing
“The recent sentencing of Paul Manafort by federal judges in two different district courts has renewed interest in the sentencing practices of individual judges. Countless studies over the years have documented a basic fact: while decisions should be determined by the law and the facts, in reality there is a third very important force at work. This ingredient is the identity of the judge assigned to a given case. Again and again, court records show that the particular predilections of individual judges influence the legal decisions that they reach, including those involving sentences. The record of Judge Thomas Selby Ellis III who sentenced Manafort on March 7 contrasts somewhat with that of Judge Amy Berman Jackson who serves on the District of Columbia court and sentenced Manafort in a separate case on March 13, six days later. Court records further show that the sentencing patterns at the two courthouses also differ.
In a just completed study of judge sentencing differences at 155 federal courthouses across the country the judge with the lowest average prison sentence was compared with the judge with the highest average sentence at each courthouse. Based upon case-by-case sentencing records, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University found that half of federal judges served at courthouse where the average prison sentence differed by at least 23 months depending upon which judge handled the case. Sixty-six of these judges served at six courthouses where the average prison sentence length differed by more than 48 months. The Orlando courthouse in the Middle District of Florida with seven judges had a range of over 80 months between the judge with the shortest versus the longest average prison sentence. This was followed by the Greenbelt courthouse in Maryland with over 64 months difference among the seven judges serving there.The existence of judge-to-judge differences in sentences of course is not synonymous with finding unwarranted disparity in sentencing practices. A key requirement for achieving justice is that the judges in a court system have sufficient discretion to consider the totality of circumstances in deciding that a sentence in a specific case is just. No set of rules, including the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, can substitute for this necessary flexibility. But a fair court system always seeks to provide equal justice under the law, working to ensure that sentencing patterns of judges not be widely different when they are handling similar kinds of cases. To examine current sentencing differences at each of the 155 federal courthouses included in the study, read the full report at: https://trac.syr.edu/tracrepor
The Sentencing Project 2018 Annual Report
“Criminal justice reform is a challenging undertaking, but if we take the long view we can recognize that success is possible, even if incremental at times. This was the story of reform in 2018, a year in which we saw significant gains in sentencing policy and public understanding of mass incarceration.Most prominent, of course, was passage of the Fair Sentencing Act in Congress. The legislation, a mix of sentencing reform provisions and expansion of programming in federal prisons, represented the culmination of years of advocacy. Yet its passage was far from assured at several key points in the process.The original version of the bill passed by the House contained no elements of sentencing reform. We and our allies worked closely with Senate leadership, particularly Sen. Grassley (R-IA) and Senator Durbin (D-IL),
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