Policing by numbers: why targets lead to abuse of power
A Culture of Cheating Counterpunch
The ABC uncovers a multi-million-dollar scam where people facing homelessness and drug addiction are made company directors to rip off the tax office and do over creditors. The staggering tax scam that uses vulnerable Australians as company directors
Convicted Tax Protestor's Bid for Competency Hearing Fails on Appeal
In United States v. DiMartino (2d Cir. No. 18-2053-cr 2/4/19), here, the Court of Appeals affirmed a tax protestor conviction described as follows:
Terry DiMartino appeals from a judgment of the United States District
Court for the District of Connecticut (Thompson, J.) convicting him for
his multi-year failure to pay taxes and for his deception and
obstruction of the IRS—conduct inspired by the Sovereign Citizen
movement, a loosely affiliated group who "`follow their own set of laws'
and, accordingly, `do not recognize federal, state, or local laws,
policies or regulations' as legitimate." United States v. McLaughlin, ___ F.3d ___, 2019 WL 7602324, at *1 n.1 (2d Cir. December 30, 2019) (quoting Sovereign Citizens: A growing Domestic Threat to Law Enforcement, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (2011)).
DiMartino, a successful insurance agent, represented himself at trial and was convicted.
After trial and before sentencing, DiMartino retained counsel, who moved
for a hearing to determine whether DiMartino had been competent to
stand trial. Counsel argued that DiMartino's bizarre conduct before and
during trial raised a series of red flags impugning his mental fitness,
and submitted a psychological report from Dr. Andrew Meisler, who had
interviewed DiMartino and examined part of the trial record.
Basically, on this point, the district court rejected the proffered
expert testimony and sustained the denial of the request for a
competency hearing based principally on a proffered expert report the
district court found lacking. The Second Circuit affirmed under an
abuse of discretion standard.
Meet the man behind the cryptocurrency group trying to buy in to Australian soccer
Jim
Aylward and his London Football Exchange have come to an agreement with
Perth Glory - but not before his company was rejected by a French club.
U.S. Tax Attorney Denied Habeas Corpus in Extradition Proceeding Based on Netherlands Criminal Tax Conviction
Amber is a tool for blogs & websites to keep linked content accessible - The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
wants to keep linked content accessible. Whether links fail because of
DDoS attacks, censorship, or just plain old link rot, reliably accessing
linked content is a problem for Internet users everywhere.
This isn’t a
new problem. Some centralized initiatives, such as the Internet Archive and Perma.cc, are attempting to snapshot and preserve certain web pages…
“Amber
is an open source tool for websites to provide their visitors
persistent routes to information. It automatically preserves a snapshot
of every page linked to on a website, giving visitors a fallback option
if links become inaccessible. If one of the pages linked to on this
website were to ever go down, Amber can provide visitors with access to
an alternate version. This safeguards the promise of the URL: that
information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or
endpoint disruptions.
NSW clubs breaking money laundering and terrorism finance laws
An internal document shows ClubsNSW board believed most of its members are failing to comply with anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing laws.
The Dismal Kingdom: Do Economists Have Too Much Power? Foreign Affairs. Throwing a flag on a clear violation of Betteridge’s Law.John Weeks – Joan Robinson and the Theory of Capital Brave New Europe
Someone blew the whistle on Hookers for Jesus Boing Boing (Re Silc).
OnlyFans: a day in the life of a top(less) creator The Economist
Mutinous librarians help drive change at Elsevier FT. We need more mutinous librarians.
Neuroscience study finds evidence that meditation increases the entropy of brainwaves PsyPost (DL) (original)
An Algorithm That Grants Freedom, or Takes It Away
The New York Times – Across
the United States and Europe, software is making probation decisions
and predicting whether teens will commit crime. Opponents want more
human oversight. “.. In Philadelphia, an algorithm created by a
professor at the University of Pennsylvania has helped dictate the
experience of probationers for at least five years. The algorithm is one
of many making decisions about people’s lives in the United States and
Europe. Local authorities use so-called predictive algorithms to set
police patrols, prison sentences and probation rules. In the
Netherlands, an algorithm flagged welfare fraud risks. A British city
rates which teenagers are most likely to become criminals. Nearly every
state in America has turned to this new sort of governance algorithm, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
a nonprofit dedicated to digital rights. Algorithm Watch, a watchdog in
Berlin, has identified similar programs in at least 16 European
countries. As the practice spreads into new places and new parts of
government, United Nations investigators, civil rights lawyers, labor
unions and community organizers have been pushing back…”
Search Engine Journal – A Beginner’s Guide to Reddit: How to Get Started & Be Successful –
“In this Reddit guide, you will learn what Reddit is, why it is such an
important social platform, and what makes it different than all the
other social platforms. You will also learn what you need to consider in
order to successfully get started on Reddit. Reddit is a social media
platform, that allows any individual to create and manage their own
community, which Reddit calls a sub-reddit. The entire platform is a
social aggregation site, where individuals curate content they either
find around the web or create themselves. They then submit it to their
sub-reddit to allow other Reddit users to ability to comment, discuss,
and ultimately vote on the content, pushing the most popular content up
to the top of the page and moving less popular content down and out of
view…”
- To Enhance Democracy And Business Accountability
- US poised to celebrate its first Panama Papers tax conviction (12 Feb 2020)
- EU adds Cayman Islands to tax haven blacklist (12 Feb 2020)
- EU to Give Turkey More Time to Avoid Tax Blacklisting (12 Feb 2020)
- Outdated EU cigarette tax rules blamed for slow drop in smoking (12 Feb 2020)
- EU clamps down on free ports over crime and terrorism links (12 Feb 2020)
- HMRC: Small business investigations yield £1.2bn in unpaid tax (12 Feb 2020)
- HMRC yields £16 from small businesses for every £1 spent on staff (12 Feb 2020)
- The 'mansion tax' will be worth it if stamp duty is slashed (12 Feb 2020)
- The OECD proposal to rewrite the rules of worldwide taxation: Our take on what it means, and whether it will happen (12 Feb 2020)
- Britain needs a new strategy for taxation (12 Feb 2020)
- Families in the north England have biggest council tax bills (12 Feb 2020)
- Guernsey couples could be taxed individually in future (12 Feb 2020)
- Private equity and Britain's care home crisis (12 Feb 2020)
- How the US's CIA and Germany's BND spied on world leaders (12 Feb 2020)
How Your Laptop Ruined Your Life
The Atlantic – Smartphones aren’t the only killers of work-life balance. “It’s a common existential crisis among American office workers that virtually nowhere is now safe from the pull of their jobs. This inescapability is usually attributed to the proliferation of smartphones, with their push notifications signaling the arrival of emails and other workplace messages. The first iPhone, released in 2007, helped make social media omnipresent and pave the way for hyper-connected professional lives. Now, on-call retail workers and law-firm partners alike often feel as though they never really clock out. But that blame is often applied solely to the wrong piece of take-home technology. If staying home with a cold still requires a full day of work or you can’t find a seat at your local coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon, iPhones are not responsible for ruining your life. The novelty and early popularity of smartphones seem to have distracted America from how quickly its laptops were also dissolving much of the boundary between work and home.
…As laptops have kept improving, and Wi-Fi has continued to reach ever further into the crevices of American life, however, the reality of laptops’ potential stopped looking quite so rosy. Instead of liberating white-collar and “knowledge” workers from their office, laptops turned many people’s whole life into an office. Smartphones might require you to read an after-hours email or check in on the office-communication platform Slack before you started your commute, but portable computers gave workers 24-hour access to the sophisticated, expensive applications—Salesforce CRM, Oracle ERP, Adobe Photoshop—that made their full range of duties possible. According to a recent study, Americans with college degrees and beyond—the ones most likely to start a new job and immediately be handed a laptop—spend 10 percent more time working now than they did in 1980..”
'Not guilty': Former ministers Ian Macdonald and Eddie Obeid face trial
Former NSW Labor ministers Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald plead 'not guilty' to coal mine conspiracy
On 16 December 2019, the committee gave Services Australia the ability to provide further information on notice. The deadline for providing this information was January 24 before the committee decided to extend it to February 7, citing the department's involvement in helping those affected by the country's bushfire emergency.
All four Roger Stone prosecutors resign from case after DOJ backpedals on sentencing recommendation.
Why Walking Helps Us Think - The
New Yorker” – Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek
philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection
between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote
about walking in The
New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to
write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal.
“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that
William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through
forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand
miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day
starting from age five.
What is it about walking, in
particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer
begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps
faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all
the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or
during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of attention. Walking on a
regular basis also promotes new connections between
brain cells, staves off the
usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of
the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of
molecules that both stimulate the growth
of new neurons and transmit messages
between them…”
Coalition’s “miracle” election win claim under fire as more rorts surface
Do What You Love? There’s A Dark Side To That Idea
Nothing exemplifies the promises and perils of self-actualised work better than the culturalconversationsaround ‘do what you love’. The injunction to ‘do what you love’ has had no shortage of critics, who point out its classist nature, advocate for a clearer delineationbetween work and life, and remind us
that burnout might just be the flipside of self-actualised work. Not
all agree that work should be a calling or that we should devote
ourselves wholly to work. – Aeon
PORTUGAL SEIZES
Portugal has followed in
Angola’s footsteps, announcing it will seize the bank accounts of
Isabel dos Santos. The prosecutor's office ordered the seizure of
dozens of bank accounts belonging to the Angolan
billionaire, and her husband Congolese businessman and art dealer Sindika
Dokolo. The action is part of a "request for international judicial
co-operation by the Angolan authorities," according to the prosecutor's
office.
PANAMA PAPERS U.S. FIRST
Harald Joachim von der
Goltz is the first U.S. taxpayer to plead guilty to
charges of tax evasion and money laundering stemming from our
2016 investigation Panama Papers. Von der Goltz, one of four people facing
charges in America, was a long-term client of the firm at the center of
the Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca. Prosecutors say he was part of a
“decades-long scheme to defraud the United States.
GETTING BACK $45M
Our 2017 investigation,
Paradise Papers, has helped Lithuanian authorities investigate an alleged bank
conspiracy that cost the country tens of millions
of dollars. The former owner of Ukio Bankas, previously the
country’s sixth-largest lender, is alleged to have stolen $45 million from the
bank along with 12 accomplices. Now, authorities say they are confident of
getting the money back.
‘IT WAS PERSONAL’
The murder of Maltese
investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia was particularly poignant for our
U.K. member Juliette Garside. “It was personal
for me from the beginning. I had been watching what she was
doing during the Panama Papers when she was really coming under pressure for
her reporting,” she told us. We spoke with Juliette for our monthly Meet the
Investigators’ series.