Fighters brace for 'long night' ahead after Sydney swelters through hottest ever day
Authorities have warned the worst is yet to come as record-breaking heat has sent fires within striking distance of homes in the Sydney.
CLAUDIA ROSETT: Hong Kong’s protesters give me hope.
As the Babylon Bee, America’s Newspaper of Record notes: America Offers To Trade All Of Its Communists For Democratic Protesters In Hong Kong.
Food delivery bike couriers are being underpaid by up to $322 a week,according to figures from union researchers, compared with minimum rates of pay and superannuation in the transport award. A survey of more than 240 riders revealed that almost all had no minimum rates of pay, and were paid per delivery on a “take-it-or-leave-it” basis. As independent contractors, riders for companies like Deliveroo are not paid the award minimum wage, and miss out on weekend penalty rates and superannuation. An unfair dismissal case before the Fair Work Commission began on Monday seeking to prove that Uber Eats drivers are in fact employees.
“Another passionate bulletin from the heart of modern Britain, the land of zero-hours vassalage and service-economy serfdom – a film in the tradition of Loach’s previous work and reaching back to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.”
Notching up more than five decades behind the camera – as well as 16 appearances at MIFF – Ken Loach remains as empathetic and angry as ever in this scorching, heartbreaking rebuke of today’s oppressive working conditions, which comes to Melbourne direct from this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Proud of his work ethic, Ricky takes a freelance courier job not only to make ends meet, or to pay off the debt that he’s been struggling with since the 2008 financial crash, but to provide a better future for his aged-carer wife and their two teenage children. But happiness, prosperity and navigating the gig economy rarely go hand in hand, especially for everyday workers.
“It’s fierce, open and angry, un-ironised and unadorned, about a vital contemporary issue. Five stars.”
Director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty have come storming back to Cannes with another tactlessly passionate bulletin from the heart of modern Britain, the land of zero-hours vassalage and service-economy serfdom – a film in the tradition of Loach’s previous work and ...
The author who triggered a stunning police crackdown on a mystery prisoner in a Canberra jail has hit out at the secrecy surrounding the man’s imprisonment. A former military intelligence officer was prosecuted, convicted and jailed in the ACT last year, in a process hidden from public scrutiny. The author, Robert Macklin, attempted to publish the man’s memoirs on his time in prison, which sparked police raids of the inmate’s cell and his brother’s home. “I didn’t think we had secret trials in Australia,” Macklin said. “It worries me that we do.” The former ACT chief minister Jon Stanhope compared the case to those prosecuted under totalitarian regimes, saying “not even the media was aware that this trial had occurred”.
Witness J was a prisoner who was tried, sentenced and ... looking for a memoir Witness J had written during his time locked up ... Worse, he identified agents who had been recruited for...
Selling a memoir and writing a memoir are two different things, and while agents who might take on...
Carlton Kitchen Library concept more about cooks than books
The new kitchen library is the first of its kind in Australia, where members can loan kitchen equipment for free and save buying expensive appliances.
Best of the Best! Top 10 Posts of 2019
After crunching the numbers, we're revealing the best of the best, the top 10 most popular posts we published throughout 2019
It’s not just that The Mister is bad. It’s that it’s bad in ways that seem to cause the space-time continuum itself to wobble, slightly, as the words on the page rearrange themselves into kaleidoscopic fragments of repetition and product placement … The one positive thing you can say about The Mister is that it steers (mostly) clear of BDSM, and so doesn’t misinform millions of readers about the dynamics of consent … The Mister is no different, really, in that its male characters have power and its female characters cook and clean …
The Most Scathing Reviews of 2019 Literary Hub
The Most Scathing Reviews of 2019 Literary Hub
Amazon files patent for tech to identify you using the veins in your hand : USA Today: “What if you could pay for your groceries using your veins? Amazon filed a patent for technology that could identify you by scanning the wrinkles in the palm of your hand and by using a light to see beneath your skin to your blood vessels. The resulting images could be used to identify you as a shopper at Amazon Go stores. It was previously reportedthat the Seattle-based tech giant might install these hi-tech scanners in Whole Foods grocery stores. However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published an application on Thursday that suggests the e-commerce behemoth sets its sites on Amazon Go stores. Many of the inventors named on the application include Amazon Go executives such as vice president Dili Kumar and senior manager Manoj Aggarwal. Engineer Nikolai Orlov, who previously lead Amazon Go projects, was also listed as an inventor…”
Scientific American – How Do You Save an Endangered Tree from Extinction – When You Can’t Save Its Seeds? “Recalcitrant” seeds hold the secret to saving a critically endangered Indian tree—thanks to a bit of human help. A team of Indian conservationists working to save a critically endangered tree from extinction just achieved an important conservation success, but first they had three major stumbling blocks to overcome. The first was, of course, numbers. The trees, known only as Madhuca insignis, are few and far between. Originally declared extinct more than a century ago, the 60-foot-tall, fruiting species was rediscovered in 2004. A year later it was added to India’s national priority list of endangered trees, but few if any actual protection efforts followed. By the time conservationists finally conducted the first major survey of the trees’ population—a three-year process between 2013 and 2015—only 27 individuals remained…”
HONESTLY, IT SEEMS LIKE WHATSAPP DID THE RIGHT THING HERE. NOBODY TOLD THEM THIS WAS A LEGIT SPYING OPERATION. Police Tracked a Terror Suspect—Until His Phone Went Dark After a Facebook Warning.
A team of European law-enforcement officials was hot on the trail of a potential terror plot in October, fearing an attack during Christmas season, when their keyhole into a suspect’s phone went dark.WhatsApp, Facebook Inc. ’s popular messaging tool, had just notified about 1,400 users—among them the suspected terrorist—that their phones had been hacked by an “advanced cyber actor.” An elite surveillance team was using spyware from NSO Group, an Israeli company, to track the suspect, according to a law-enforcement official overseeing the investigation.A judge in the Western European country had authorized investigators to deploy all means available to get into the suspect’s phone, for which the team used its government’s existing contract with NSO. The country’s use of NSO’s spyware wasn’t known to Facebook. NSO licenses its spyware to government clients, who use it to hack targets.On Oct. 29, Facebook filed suit against NSO—which has been enmeshed in controversy after governments used its technology to spy on dissidents—in federal court in California, seeking unspecified financial penalties over NSO’s alleged hacking of WhatsApp software. It also sought an injunction prohibiting NSO from accessing Facebook and WhatsApp’s computer systems.NSO said it is vigorously defending itself against the lawsuit, without elaborating.Technology companies such as Facebook and Apple Inc. over recent years have strengthened the security of their systems to the point where even the tech companies themselves can’t provide law-enforcement agencies with messages created on their own systems.Private companies, meanwhile, have stepped in to fill the gap by devising new ways of extracting data from computers and mobile devices. Facebook said in the lawsuit that spyware was installed by hacking WhatsApp’s video-calling function.The thwarted terror investigation, as described by the law-enforcement official, spotlights an increasingly common clash of concerns over public security and personal privacy.
Governments want encryption backdoors, but nobody can trust them to use those honestly, or to keep them from being exploited by bad actors. Governments can’t even protect their own networks and data.