New York Times, Trump Organization Is Charged With Running 15-Year Employee Tax Scheme:
The Trump Organization, the real estate business that catapulted Donald J. Trump to tabloid fame, television riches and ultimately the White House, was charged Thursday with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with fringe benefits that were hidden from the authorities.

New York Times op-ed: This Is Tax Evasion, Plain and Simple, by Gabriel Zucman (UC-Berkeley) & Gus Wezerek (Opinion):

In the decades after World War II, close to 50 percent of American companies’ earnings went to state and federal taxes. Economically, it was a golden period. Middle-class incomes grew at roughly the same rate as those of the richest Americans.

But as globalization gave companies the ability to choose where they recorded profits, Congress scrambled to keep their business by lowering corporate taxes. In 2018, American companies were taxed at an average effective rate of less than 14 percent, by our calculations.

Corporate tax breaks have helped business owners amass inconceivable amounts of money over the past few decades. Meanwhile, middle-class Americans have footed the bill, as Congress has propped up the budget by raising taxes on wages.

ATO chasing fraudulent or ineligible claims for JobKeeper, super withdrawal and small business cashflow boost

Australian billionaire Lex Greensill beguiled the world's rich and powerful. Until it came crashing down

Outbreak.info is a standardized, searchable platform to discover and explore COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 data from the Center for Viral Systems Biology. Outbreak.info combines together data and metadata from a large number of data sources

About the API – This site is a collection of APIs developed from the Su / WuLabs at Scripps Research on COVID-19-related data and resources. These APIs provide all the data at outbreak.info, which is a resource to collect, share, and integrate COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 data critical to for scientific research.
Design – These APIs were built using BioThings SDK and follow the same design pattern of our official BioThings APIs (MyGene.info, MyVariant.info, MyChem.info, etc). These APIs are also pending to be integrated into the proper official BioThings API based on their entity type.
Docs – Since these APIs follow the same design pattern as our BioThings APIs, you may refer to the following MyChem.info API documentation as a guide on how to use these APIs. Additionally, you may try the live APIs on the Try It pages below…”

Google’s been recording you: 3 ways to delete your voice history

CNET – “Find your My Activity page and purge it of all those awkward Google Home or Google Nest voice searches. People were understandably freaked out when reports surfaced in 2019 that Google and Amazon were giving human contractors access to audio clips from their customers’ Google Home (now Google Nest) and Echo devices. Google has since made a change, requiring you to opt in to having voice searches recorded in the first place — and opting in also allows for human review, though audio is anonymized. (Google does this to improve personalization across its platform.) If you don’t remember whether you opted in or not, or if you opted in and now regret it, it’s worth taking time to see what Google’s recorded about you. Even though Google changed its stance on recording voice searches, the rest of your Google ecosystem activity might still be getting saved for posterity, no opt-in required. You can find all of your Google activity, from Google Maps navigation to search engine queries, in the My Activity section of your Google account. You can read a list in the Google Home app or actually listen to your own voice search history (if it has indeed been recorded). Fortunately, you can easily purge your account of all these recordings…”

Colonial espionage …

Two books about America’s first spy ring

Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that unfavorable views of China have reached historic highs in 17 advanced economies with large majorities also agreeing that Beijing does not respect the personal freedoms of its people. The findings came amid celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China where President Xi Jinping addressed an audience on Tiananmen Square. Casting the party as the country's savior, he said that the "Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us" and that "whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people

Forbes: Unfavorable Views Of China Have Reached Historic Highs [Infographic]