Friday, July 31, 2020

Visualizing COVID-19’s Impact on Travel Worldwide

Berrima is filled with frost today ... while Lou's LA is experiencing chilly quakes - Magnitude 4.2 earthquake centered near San Fernando rattles Greater L.A.

‘The world wins at that struggle’: Mike Pezzullo on embracing uncertainty

TRAVEL BAGS PACKED? Rapidly redeploying teams and utilising their capabilities across the APS is now the ‘permanent way of operating’ for the post-pandemic world, according to the Home Affairs secretary.


Top local governments recognised for best practice projects

LOCAL GONGS: Local government minister Mark Coulton congratulated the nine winners, noting that more than 100 applications were submitted across all award categories this year.




The principal conspirator of the $105 million Plutus Payroll tax fraud syndicate has now been sentenced to seven and a half years in jail.




ICIJ"

Mauritius Leaks might sound like a country with a plumbing issue, but it was the name of our investigation that revealed how companies across the globe used the small island nation to slash their tax bills. Together with 54 of our friends (reporters) in 18 countries, we published Mauritius Leaks one year ago this week! Since then, two countries have

A couple of my personal Mauritius Leaks highlights: 

Our

‘SERIOUS BREACHES’

Hidden in the 13.4 million Paradise Papers documents were 556,000 files from Singapore-headquartered Asiaciti. As we

CASE DISMISSED

Isabel dos Santos has had another legal setback, this time in Paris. She took a case to the International Court of Arbitration after Angolan president João Lourenço

KEEP REPORTING

ICIJ member Maria Ressa pleaded

IMPROVE DATASHARE

Our document analysis tool, Datashare, has been out in the world for a year now. But we want to make it better – and see how we can meet your needs. If you’re a Datashare user, please take our



Homeland Security Was Destined to Become a Secret Police Force New Yorker


We’re Publishing Thousands of Police Discipline Records That New York Kept Secret for Decades Pro Publica



Live Lightening Map of the world


Visualizing COVID-19’s Impact on Travel Worldwide - Washington Post – “Travel is one of the clearest ways to show how the coronavirus has disrupted the world. This globe shows the disappearance of flights over a five-month period, as covid-19 emerged in China and restrictions on global travel began to take hold…The pandemic has impacted global travel like no other event in history: By spring, every country in the world had thrown up some sort of entry restriction, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. In April, international air passenger travel fell to levels not seen since the 1970s…”



Live Lightening Map of the COVID world


BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: 18 of the world’s 20 most monitored cities are in China.


 Chinese Tycoon Denounced Xi Jinping. Now He Faces Prosecution.

China’s ruling Communist Party has expelled an outspoken and prominent property tycoon who denounced the country’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, paving the way for his criminal prosecution and escalating its efforts to quash dissent among the elite.

The party announced the expulsion of the tycoon, Ren Zhiqiang, late Thursday, and said that it had seized his assets for “serious violations of discipline and law” that included the possession of golf club memberships. Officials also took aim at Mr. Ren’s family, accusing him of “colluding with his children to accumulate wealth without restraint.”

The moves against Mr. Ren, 69, appeared designed to send a chill over the country’s entrepreneurs and other business leaders and demonstrate the party’s resolve to use him as an example to show that no one was above its demands of unflinching political loyalty.

From “to get rich is glorious” to “colluding with his children to accumulate wealth without restraint” in one generation.



Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 26, 2020 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Your Genetic Data Isn’t Safe; Sustaining large-scale, long-term remote telework security; Issue with Cloudflare’s DNS service shuts down half the web; and Most Dedicated VPN IP-addresses Are Not Anonymous.




NIST study finds that masks defeat most facial recognition algorithms

NIST: “Now that so many of us are covering our faces to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, how well do face recognition algorithms identify people wearing masks? The answer, according to a preliminary study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is with great difficulty. Even the best of the 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms tested had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching digitally applied face masks with photos of the same person without a mask. The results were published today as a NIST Interagency Report (NISTIR 8311), the first in a planned series from NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) program on the performance of face recognition algorithms on faces partially covered by protective masks. “With the arrival of the pandemic, we need to understand how face recognition technology deals with masked faces,” said Mei Ngan, a NIST computer scientist and an author of the report. “We have begun by focusing on how an algorithm developed before the pandemic might be affected by subjects wearing face masks. Later this summer, we plan to test the accuracy of algorithms that were intentionally developed with masked faces in mind.”…

The Unspotted Issue in an Audit; Ethics and Crimes 
In an ABA Tax Section Court Procedure Virtual meeting on Wednesday, there was a one-hour discussion of ethical issues 


Money in pursuit of hopelessness: the gold price has hit an all time high

Posted on July 27 2020

The FT has a headline, just out: As they note: Gold soared to an all-time high and the dollar weakened to a multiyear low as
Read the full article…



Scott Dyreng (Duke), Fabio Gaertner (Wisconsin), Jeffrey Hoopes (North Carolina) & Mary Vernon (Wisconsin), The Effect of U.S. Tax Reform on the Tax Burdens of U.S. Domestic and Multinational Corporations:

We quantify the net effect of recent U.S. tax reform on the tax rates of public U.S. corporations and find they decreased by 7.5 to 11.4 percentage points on average following tax reform.