Members of Congress Take Lobbyist Jobs Paying as Much as $4 Million

A former New South Wales MP who warned about clergy abuse in the Hunter Valley says people should be evicted from the Catholic church in the wake of a damning Special Commission of Inquiry.

Wood Royal Commission instigator John Hatton calls for 'evictions' from Catholic Church in wake of damning inquiry

102 millionaires paid no tax and the richest and poorest postcodes and occupations revealed

Of 102 people who earned over $1m but paid no tax, on average they contributed $2.4m each to charities. I think it’s high time we took a very close look at the definition of a charity for the purposes of tax deductibility.

102 millionaires in 2021-22 who paid no net tax (99 paid no tax at all)

Infiltrating Australia The long arm of the Indian state is reaching Australians and threatening national security

Members of Congress Take Lobbyist Jobs Paying as Much as $4 Million Lee Fang

Mastercard Launches Its Biometric Retail Payment System in Europe, Using Poland As a Testing Ground

“Buy with your eyes, pay with your glance.”

The inside story of the British beauticians recruited as cash mules by a criminal mastermind

Cocaine Inc: how British drugs cash is turned into solid gold in Dubai

Fourth Circuit Rejects Defendant's Collateral Attacks on Tax Perjury and Obstruction Convictions 

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In United States v. Sutherland, ___ F.4th ___, 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 13117 (4th Cir. 2024), CA4 here and GS here, the Court rejects the criminal defendant’s collateral attacks on convictions for filing false tax returns and obstructing an official proceeding. (The latter conviction was for delivering false documents to the government attorney assisting the grand jury in the tax crimes investigation.) The collateral attacks were mounted by a petition under 28 USC § 2255 and a petition for the writ of coram nobis. The principal claim for both methods of collateral attack was an alleged ineffective assistance of counsel (“IAC”) at the criminal trial where the defendant was convicted. The defendant appealed the convictions, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed. United States v. Sutherland, 921 F.3d 421 (4th Cir. 2019), GS here; see also Obstruction Conviction Affirmed for Presentation of False Documents to AUSA Serving as Attorney for Government for Grand Jury  

Russia-Ukraine war: Moscow’s multi-front military posturing | WION Pulse Gilbert Doctorow, Armageddon Newsletter

How to Convince Putin He Will Lose Foreign Affairs

In charts: the legacy of 14 years of Conservative rule FT

Private equity stories

Wells Fargo fires employees for ‘faking’ keyboard activity The Register. Lambert ran the FT’s version of this story yesterday. Chuck L: “As The Register subhead noted, ‘Homer Simpson was ahead of his time.'”

 

How Data-Fueled Neurotargeting Could Kill Democracy MIT Reader:

This is a good article. It says what Cambridge Analytica was doing with all that facebook data. Classifying people’s personality types, picking out the neurotics (who were likely to be susceptible to emotional manipulation) and spewing tailored misinformation at them, supposedly to help the Trump campaign. It’s only been getting worse since then. It demystifies stuff that I think a lot of us had picked up on but not quite understood.