Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Episode 2, Tax Policy and the 14th Century Fresco (Miranda Stewart )

Mr Saviano has been studying the changes in Castel Volturno with the same forensic obsession that saw him forced into hiding in 2007 after the publication of his global bestseller, Gomorrah. He's one of 20 Italian writers who are now under 24-hour police guard thanks to their mafia exposes.



Victoria J. Haneman (Creighton), Tax Incentives for Green Burial:
Every living being is doomed to decay and die and decay some more. Death is inevitable, and the disposal of our dead is a fundamental global activity with the potential to have significant environmental impact. In the United States, the environmental toxicity of “traditional” modern burial is stark. A cosmeticized body is pumped with three gallons of embalming fluid (containing chemicals such as formaldehyde) that eventually leaches through metal and wood and into the ground. An estimated 5.3 million gallons of embalming chemicals are buried annually in what are essentially luxury landfill-slash-golf-courses, with landscaping and grass to maintain and mow, in coffins that are typically constructed of nonbiodegradable chipboard. And while cremation is a more environmentally friendly alternative, incineration cremation falls short of being labeled “green.” Fire-based cremation utilizes significant resources and energy, attributable to the substantial quantity of fossil fuel required to burn human remains at 1,562° F (850° C) to reduce a corpse to ash. Pollutants are generated in doing so, including an average of 250,000 tons per year of carbon emissions and an estimated 320 to 6,000 pounds of mercury (from incineration of dental fillings) per year.


  1. A night-time SAS raid on an Afghan village left two men dead. New allegations about how they died could lead to war crimes charges against Australian soldiers.




German Military Laptop Sold on eBay Included Classified Missile Information
The computer was probably decommissioned years ago, but its hard drive held information relating to a weapons system that’s still in use.

 "You can't tell people a place like this exists in Italy," says Roberto Saviano. "No-one would believe it … a whole city that's been constructed illegally."
In a ruined city on the Italian coast, the Nigerian mafia is muscling in on the old mob


The Nigerian mafia has built Italy into a European hub, smuggling cocaine from South America, heroin from Asia, and trafficking women by the tens of thousands.

Episode 2, Tax Policy and the 14th Century Fresco (Miranda Stewart (Melbourne Law School)):  

Tax MavenEpisode Summary: Melbourne’s Miranda Stewart has a passion for tax law that led her halfway around the world to NYU Law’s tax LLM in the late 1990s, helping launch her prolific career as a scholar. Now, Professor Stewart teaches, writes and advises governments about improving the relationship between people and their governments and the role that tax policy can play in promoting transparency. In this episode, Stewart describes the way the tax law intersects with gender, human rights, good governance and the rule of law. She also explains why she has an Italian fresco on her home page and what it says about the role tax plays in society. She answers a pencil question based on an article by UCLA’s Eric Zolt.




Boeing shows the danger of ignoring fearful staff FT
Boeing shows the danger of ignoring fearful staff Would financial salespeople recommend their products to their own family members?

Andrew Hill An employee works on a Boeing Co. 737 MAX 8 airplane on the production line at the company's manufacturing facility in Renton, Washington, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 7, 2015.



Boeing Co.'s latest 737 airliner is gliding through development with little notice, and that may be the plane's strongest selling point. The single-aisle 737 family is the company's largest source of profit, and the planemaker stumbled twice earlier this decade with tardy debuts for its wide-body 787 Dreamliner and 747-8 jumbo jet.



Boeing has said it is focusing on running the 737 Max jet production line at a manageable pace



Be the first to know about every new Coronavirus story Am I safe? Are my family, friends and colleagues safe?



The coronavirus pandemic has exposed how thin the frontier is between security and insecurity. Citizens are looking to fallible leaders for reassurance.

Employees rarely pose the same questions to business leaders. Yet they should. The evolving case of how Boeing’s ill-starred 737 Max jet was produced reveals why.

 Indeed, the most striking testimony presented to the US House of Representatives committee looking into the design, manufacture and certification of the aircraft came from Ed Pierson, a former senior manager on the 737 production line. He asked exactly those questions — and received an unsatisfactory response. In June 2018, just before the first 737 Max crash, Mr Pierson emailed the programme head about what he later called a “factory in chaos”. He wrote: “For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing aeroplane.” He claimed no action was taken. The House committee referred to Mr Pierson’s testimony in preliminary findings that included a coruscating attack on Boeing’s “culture of concealment” and its overriding desire to beat its rival Airbus. “The desire to meet these goals and expectations jeopardised the safety of the flying public,” the committee said.

What struck me about Mr Pierson’s account was not only his highly personal reaction to the problems on the production line, but the fact he had also spotted many weaker signals that Boeing’s culture had broken down. His initial email listed employee fatigue combined with schedule pressure as reasons why he was requesting the line should be shut down, “to allow our team time to regroup”. In a later email, sent after the fatal 2018 Lion Air crash and just before the Ethiopian Airlines accident in 2019, he also drew attention to “a large number of high hazard safety incidents” on the production line. Employees were reluctant to log “near miss” safety breaches because they did not have time, he claimed. That reminded me of my discussion last year with managers at Linde Engineering.

 The project management arm of industrial gases group Linde instituted a coaching programme — encouraging team leaders to ask open-ended questions and “actively listen” to the responses — after it noticed a pattern of small accidents, such as falls and puncture injuries, that seemed impervious to traditional safety management techniques. Not only did safety improve, the “ask, don’t tell” approach also changed the relationship between managers and teams and enhanced the culture as a whole. Financial services employees would also recognise the “production pressures” piled on to the Boeing engineers. Whether in the Libor interest rate-fixing scandal or mortgage mis-selling, banks have repeatedly subjected staff to dangerous competitive pressure, amplified, in some cases, by ill-begotten incentive schemes.

Like Mr Pierson, financial salespeople might ask themselves whether they would recommend their products to their own family members. Boeing denied at the time of Mr Pierson’s testimony that production problems caused the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes. In one exchange with the House committee last October, then chief executive Dennis Muilenburg sparred over a 2016 internal survey that showed 39 per cent of Boeing staff surveyed had experienced “undue pressure” and 29 per cent were concerned about the consequences if they reported it. Mr Muilenburg preferred to draw attention to the finding that over 90 per cent of staff were “comfortable raising issues”. That was evidence, he said, of a “culture where employees can speak up”.
Mr Muilenburg has since been replaced as Boeing chief executive by Dave Calhoun. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he said he was focusing on insulating engineers from business pressures and running the production line at a manageable pace “one airplane at a time”. Boeing now faces the additional pressure of a pandemic that has thrown the aviation sector into disarray. But one positive feature of the early corporate response to the coronavirus outbreak is that employers are offering to listen to their fearful staff’s concerns. Whether they are equipped to do so is another matter, but if they were not before, they should be afterwards. As Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization and proponent of “psychological safety” at work, wrote recently, in Harvard Business Review, while it “takes courage to choose transparency” — over, say, a culture of concealment — “organisations that explicitly value and make paths for speaking up happen are more effective in dealing with challenges of every kind”. andrew.hill@ft.com Twitter: @andrewtghill


Three of our Italian members, Gloria Riva, Paolo Biondani and Leo Sisti, share their experience reporting on the coronavirus as it gripped their nation. Riva feels both “personally involved and powerless” as she reports on the pandemic for L’Espresso, a weekly magazine. The trio have been working from home since early March, an experience that is “very strange” for veteran reporter Biondani. He shares his “survival kit” for working alongside his grandmother, sons, cats, dogs and wife.
Our chief reporter, Ben Hallman, will share occasional roundups of investigative stories that shine a light on the COVID-19 virus as it spreads. This time we ask: Where are the tests? While other countries, like China and South Korea, have worked to identify and isolate victims, doctors in the United States have been hampered by a lack of test kits and labs to process them.
Peru’s former first lady faces jail over corruption allegations stemming from our Bribery Division investigation. Nadine Heredia is accused of leading a scheme to steer a $7 billion pipeline, the Gasoducto Sur Peruano, to Odebrecht in exchange for campaign contributions to her husband, former president Ollanta Humala, and other illegal payments. A prosecutor has recommended that she be jailed for three years.
Portuguese judge Carlos Alexandre wants all of Isabel dos Santos’ assets in the country seized, including lucrative stakes in various companies and luxury properties. Alexandre said a previous court ruling in January that froze dos Santos’ bank accounts did not go far enough in safeguarding Angola’s interests.
 
  
 


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