To understand the new prime minister, you need to know a bit about Uren, for this is how Albanese describes the relationship: “I grew up without a dad, but not without a father. Tom Uren was my father figure.”
Uren dreamed of Albanese becoming a prime minister. It seems cruel he didn’t live to see it.
‘I love the boy’: The gift our PM received from a bamboo prison
The country experiences a mass shooting nearly every day while federal gun control legislation remains a distant dream
On Tuesday, an 18-year-old shot and killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. It was the second deadliest school shooting in American history, behind the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting when 20 children and six adults were killed.
Outrage and inaction: how the push for gun control rises and falls with each school shooting
The band prophecy
In the mid-20th century, Austin Wiggin’s mother predicted that her son would have daughters, and those daughters would form a famous band. He did, and they did, in the most surprising way possible.
The return to a frank and fearless public service is a monumental task Glyn Davis, Anthony Albanese's pick to head Prime Minister and Cabinet, represents the first step in reversing the profound damage of the Morrison years.
The return of Frank and Fearless Advice
New bureaucracy boss will offer ‘frank and fearless’ advice to government
Ars Technica: “Misinformation posing as news has been a problem that only got worse with the ease of publishing on the Internet. But the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have raised it to new levels, driving lots of attention to rumors, errors, and outright falsehoods. Given the magnitude of the threat, there would seem to be a premium placed on ensuring the accuracy of any pandemic information. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s unlikely there will be a single explanation for why that was the case. But researchers based in Paris have looked into the dynamics of pandemic news and found a potential contributor: Unreliable news sources were better at producing content that matched what readers were looking for…”
Source – Nature Human Behaviour – Published May 23, 2022 – The supply and demand of news during COVID-19 and assessment of questionable sources production
Immigration Defense Project – HART Attack: “The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is building a $6.158 billion-dollar, next-wave biometric database that will vastly expand its surveillance capabilities and supercharge the deportation system. The Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART) will collect, organize, and share invasive data on over 270 million people (including juveniles), with that number projected to grow significantly. This data will come from federal agencies including DHS and the FBI, as well as local and state police, and foreign governments. Powered by military-grade technologies,
How to prevent financial meltdowns, according to the Library of Mistakes - Quartz: “Down a narrow alley in Edinburgh, Scotland, there is a tiny library in an old, stone building. The single room houses about 4,000 books, most of them purchased second-hand, and all aiming to chronicle the history of business and finance. Its founder, Russell Napier, calls it the Library of Mistakes. “All of us make decisions not knowing the future, and therefore we’re prone to mistakes…If we study these mistakes, we might be able to work out where they come from and create less of them,” says Napier, a financial advisor and a contributing columnist for the Toronto Star. It’s the kind of approach that might have avoided trillions of dollars in losses over the course of centuries, up to the recent collapse of Terra, an algorithmic stable coin. This single incident cost investors $45 billion. For Napier, the models and computer code that dominate the financial system now tend to obscure the lessons of history: “It’s a distillation. When you make whisky, you distill stuff and you throw the rest away. Well that’s what the mathematicians have done; they’ve distilled it, they’ve got this essence, and they’ve thrown the rest away. We’re trying to bring it back in.”…
HM Revenue & Customs really do not want to collect tax from the wealthy
I campaigned for automatic information exchange from tax havens for a long time. Perhaps my most important paper on the issue was published in 2009.
Read the full article…
Scammers Use Elon Musk Deepfake to Steal CryptoVice
Peaceful nukes
In the 1960s and 1970s, both the United States and the Soviet Union explored “peaceful” applications of nuclear weapons: excavating earth for lakes and canals, geological research, and extinguishing gas well fires.
