A parliamentary probe investigating links between former cabinet minister Stuart Robert and a Canberra lobbying firm, and the subsequent awarding of government contracts, has called on the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) to investigate the saga.
Key points:
- Mr Robert has been accused of using his position to help a firm secure lucrative taxpayer contracts
- The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) officially started in July of this year
- Nine-hundred-and-eight referrals have been made to the NACC since it started work
Former cabinet minister Stuart Robert referred to NACC, 908 referrals made to commission since July
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Morgan Stanley to launch oAI chatbot to woo wealthy
Reuters: “Wealthy clients going to a Morgan Stanley financial adviser to discuss their investments may have a different sort of experience in the future: having a chatbot listen to their conversation. After testing it with 1,000 financial advisers for some months, the bank will roll out a generative artificial intelligence bot this month, developed with the makers of ChatGPT, OpenAI. Bankers can use the virtual assistant to quickly find research or forms instead of sifting through hundreds of thousands of documents. The bank is also developing technology which eventually, with clients’ permission, could create a meeting summary of the conversation, draft a follow-up email suggesting next steps, update the bank’s sales database, schedule a follow-up appointment, and learn how to help advisers manage clients’ finances on areas such as taxes, retirement savings and inheritances. The details of the program have not yet been reported. “The impact (of AI) will be very significant,” potentially comparable to the advent of the internet, said Sal Cucchiara, Morgan Stanley’s chief information officer of wealth and investment management, who is among the executives driving the bank’s push into AI…”
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The Lies in Your Grocery Store
The New Yorker [free link]: “…Spencer Sheehan Sheehan, forty-four, specializes in consumer-protection class-action suits. Specifically, he focusses on packaged foods, and on the authenticity of their ingredients and flavors.
Sheehan has sued the makers of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts (dearth of real strawberries), Hint of Lime Tostitos (absence of lime), Snapple “all natural” fruit drinks (absence of natural juice), Keebler’s fudge-mint cookies (lack of real fudge and mint), Cheesecake Factory brown bread (insufficient whole-grain flour), Trident original-flavor gum (lack of real mint, despite package’s illustration of a blue mint leaf), and many more, generally seeking millions in damages from each.
He also pursues class actions unrelated to food, involving subtle fraud in products such as toothpaste (Tom’s of Maine Fluoride-Free Antiplaque & Whitening, for containing no ingredient that fights plaque) and sunscreen (Coppertone Pure & Simple, for being neither). Sheehan emphasized this breadth of scope during our first phone conversation.,,”