ANZ’s Nuno Matos reads riot act to staff, says culture must ‘pivot’

ANZ’s Nuno Matos reads riot act to staff, says culture must ‘pivot’

 Labour’s tax raids on wealthy ‘already backfiring’ as Reeves prepares to come back for more: CGT revenue drops as Goldman Sachs boss warns London’s status as global financial hub is at riskDaily Mail

These 7 Free Tools Can Help You Avoid Malicious Links to Stay Safe

How to Geek: “How safe is this URL? That’s the question you should be asking before clicking on random links. 

A friend of mine on X shared how she learned this lesson the hard way after getting locked out of her Snapchat account. Don’t make the same mistake. Here are seven of the best free URL checkers that’ll help protect you from malicious links online. 

Despite its name, the VirusTotal Link Checker is one of the best URL checkers I use to vet suspicious links in my texts, inbox, and social media DMs. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of URL scanners. It lets you scan and analyze links, files, and even search file hashes, among other things…”

 Simple and easy to use, it has separate tabs for scanning links, files, and searching for different threats. It uses AI technology to scan links and reference current databases of known threats.

Trump creates ‘Schedule G’ to add more political appointees to agencies top ranks

Government Executive: “President Trump created another new category of federal employee on Thursday evening, issuing an executive order to expand the number of political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation and will serve in policy-making or policy-advocating roles. 

While presidents can already tap an uncapped number of appointees to serve in Schedule C positions, Trump noted those individuals serve in more narrow confidential or policy-determining roles. 

The new positions will therefore fill a gap that currently exists in federal appointments, the White House said.  The order is the latest in Trump’s effort to establish a tighter grip on the executive branch and its actions. He has already created Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F, which is similarly defined to Schedule G but reserved for career civil servants. 

Agencies are in the process of determining who qualifies for conversion to Schedule Policy/Career and those employees will become easier to fire for any reason. “President Trump believes creating non-career Schedule G positions will enhance government efficiency and accountability and improve services provided to taxpayers by increasing the horsepower for agency implementation of administration policy,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order.  

Appointments to Schedule G positions are expected to lapse at the end of a presidential administration. The roles are particularly aimed at the Veterans Affairs Department and will go to applicants who prove to be suitable supporters of the president’s agenda. Agencies cannot take into consideration an applicant’s political affiliation. 

“Schedule G employees will be hired to help faithfully implement the President’s policy agenda,” the White House said. Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said Schedule G would only make an “overly complicated system more confusing” and the Trump administration failed to engaged with experts, who would have said the new appointment category was creating redundancies that disempower the apolitical civil service. 

Adding more political appointees will mean that “effective, stable service delivery will suffer,” he said.  “This new Schedule G classification is another misguided attempt by the administration to further politicize the federal workforce,” Stier said.

 “A president already has the power to make more than 4,000 political appointments, far more than other democracies, most of which number their political appointees in the 10s.” The White House boasted that Schedule G’s creation is just the latest effort to deliver on Trump’s “promise to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our government from Washington corruption.”

A Nation in Fragments

The INK – Anand Giridharadas: “Six months. It may not be long enough to grow a baby or build a house or land a liquor license, but it is enough time to break a country. 

To disembowel its institutions, to lay waste to its ideals, to darken its spirit, to make it crueler and harder and more fearful than before. As Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches the half-year mark, I wanted to consider this turbulent period as a whole, instead of in the daily, death-by-a-182-cuts way I had been. So I spent a few days looking at every New York Times front page since January 20, noting down phrases, fragments, lines that struck me — some about the chaos in Washington, others about the broader world. I ended up with nearly 800 shards of news.  

That was my first round of this reliving. But I wanted to remix and reorder these shards in a way that better captured what it has been like to live through this period. And chronology, here, was not my friend. It missed the disorienting, destabilizing, whiplash feeling of this time. It kept the reader from making certain non-obvious but important connections. 

From the brilliant book Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti, a different possibility came to me: re-array the fragments alphabetically. Remove the linearity and the false sense of order it lends. Allow new patterns, new themes, to grow visible, and the frazzled randomness of it all, too. After a good deal of paring down, the result is now below. 

It is very much in keeping with the mission and work of The Ink over these chaotic months: to explore not just what is happening but how people experience it; to understand the phenomena driving modern American life in psychological as much as political terms; to pay attention to language and its uses by power. This is a post to be read when you have some time on your hands. 

At first, you may not feel drawn to the idea of reliving these six months. But I would encourage you to think again. Presented this way, I think, the half-year gone by, the half-year we have shuddered through and fought through and endured through, becomes a document of who we have been…”