How Uber and the gig economy changed the way we live and work

Highlights from ANAO’s draft audit program for 2024-25

Telcos let scammers flog the SMS screens everywhere…

South Carolina has $1.8 billion but doesn’t know where the money came from or where it should goAssociated Press 

Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed? Guardian This is a long-standing issue. The USDA said in 1938 (no typo) that soils had become so depleted that it recommended vitamin and mineral supplements.

Colonialists used starvation as a tool of oppressionThe Conversation 

How Uber and the gig economy changed the way we live and work

Researchers publish dataset of over 6,000 agri-environmental policies from all over the world

 The database is accessible to the general public at this link…researchers from the University of Bonn and the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology (ETH) Zurich have published a database containing over 6,000 agri-environmental policies, thus enabling their peers as well as policymakers and businesses to seek answers to all manner of different questions. The researchers have used two examples to demonstrate how this can be done: how a country’s economic development is linked to its adoption of agri-environmental policies and how such policies impact soilerosion. Their study has now been published in Nature Food. 

Although agriculture is vital for our survival and well-being, it is also responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and soil degradation. Countries are therefore adopting all manner of different policies to make agriculture sustainable, from regulations to paying for agri-environmental services. Every year, new laws, programs, and schemes are introduced all over the world while others are abolished, making it hard to keep track of developments. This is a problem for researchers and policy decision-makers alike: How are they to go about making comparisons? 

How can they tell which measures work in which circumstances? Together with colleagues at ETH Zurich, Professor David Wuepper from the Institute for Food and Resource Economics at the University of Bonn has now put together an extensive, easy-to-use database containing 6,124 policies, from over 200 countries, that were adopted between 1960 and 2022…”

Grey divorce is on the rise with more Australian couples splitting after the age of 50 than ever before

HARVARD:  Harvard removes human skin binding from library book.

Warren Entsch - Federal MP 'delivered' multi-million-dollar contract to company that hired his wife to run 'character building' craft workshops

Guardian Australia last week revealed widespread problems with the Centrepay system, including its continued use by rent-to-buy appliance companies that had previously been sanctioned by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) for predatory conduct.

Last year Asic revealed in parliament it had repeatedly and privately expressed concern to Services Australia about 122 rent-to-buy appliance companies, many of which operate in Indigenous communities.

Government ignored warnings more than 100 companies may be misusing Centrepay scheme, Asic says