How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes
A clever new paper puts concrete numbers to the taxes paid by members of the Forbes400.
Public servants cleared of 'absurd, baseless, irrational' bullying allegations
"I acknowledge the applicant believes he has been bullied, however there is simply no objective basis whatsoever for him to hold such a belief," Fair Work Commission Deputy President Lyndall Dean said.The case was revealed in a decision published on Friday, August 22, when it was also comprehensively dismissed.The bullying claims were brought forward by an Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) employee whose name has been suppressed.Across a five-day hearing, the self-represented man made an application for an order to stop bullying, which he alleged had been perpetrated by nearly a dozen other employees.
A clever new paper puts concrete numbers to the taxes paid by members of the Forbes400.
Cash reward proposed for blowing whistle on corruption
Whistleblowers could be paid for exposing wrongdoing under a radical proposal to curb corruption.
Centre for Finance and Security research fellow Eliza Lockhart said similar schemes internationally that offered economic incentives to expose corruption had resulted in more people coming forward.
"They increase the amount of actionable intelligence that's provided to law enforcement agencies and they increase the amount of successful prosecution and financial recovery," she said.
But they needed to be accompanied by adequate protection regimes, she said, which was something Human Rights Law Centre associate legal director Kieran Pender said was severely lacking in Australia.
Mr Pender pointed to nine federal whistleblowing regimes as well as state and territory legislation that complicated protections.
Commonwealth legislation also failed to adequately protect whistleblowers, with loopholes that included people not being covered for gathering evidence before blowing the whistle.
Richard Boyle, who exposed predatory debt collection practices in the Australian Taxation Office, will be sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty to offences pertaining to him copying and obtaining information before going public.
"We're not saying that whistleblowers should be able to break into safes to get documents," Mr Pender said.
"But the reality is, if our whistleblowers go to a regulatory authority with a bare disclosure with no information, then the authority won't be able to do much, and it's more likely they're not going to not take that forward."
France, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union all had some level of protection covering preparatory conduct, he said.
With only a third of people expressing confidence in the federal government in 2025, down from almost 60 per cent the year before, something needed to be done to restore trust, Transparency International CEO Clancy Moore said.
More unhappy chapters are being added to the sorry saga that is ASIC, arriving late, avoiding the hard targets, bayonetting the wounded. Michael Pascoe with the latest.
Corporate watch-puppy ASIC is all bark and no bite
At least thirty-three crypto kidnappings this year?
Continents are drying out worldwide Tasseschau via machine translation (guurst). Underlying study is from July, and seems to have been underpublicized: Unprecedented continental drying, shrinking freshwater availability, and increasing land contributions to sea level riseScience. Australia is less affected than I expected.
What the Economy Really Looks Like
American Prospect – The Trump administration’s war on reality will make it meaningfully difficult to understand the health of the economy in the coming months.
If data is either not being collected or is no longer reliable, now that Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as punishment for weak jobs numbers, it’s hard not to succumb to bias or motivated reasoning, on either side of the political divide.
TYLER O’NEIL: National Security Threat? Pacific Island Politician Who Took Money From Chinese Companies Now Works in Trump Admin
Yuval Noah Harari Explains How to Protect Your Mind in the Age of AIl
Open Culture: “You could say that we live in the age of artificial intelligence, although it feels truer about no aspect of our lives than it does of advertising. “If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI,” says Yuval Noah Harari in the new Big Think video, even if the product has only the vaguest technological association with that label.
Charting How U.S. Tariffs Will Hit Key Products
Visual Capitalist: “U.S. tariffs have climbed to an average rate of 18.6%—the highest since 1933. But what does this mean for everyday consumers? This visualization, developed in collaboration with the Hinrich Foundation, highlights major goods expected to face sustained price increases due to rising tariffs. Based on data from the Yale Budget Lab, it explores both short-term shocks and longer-term inflationary effects
New zero-day startup offers $20 million for tools that can hack any smartphone TechCrunch
Denmark ending letter deliveries is a sign of the digital times BBC Bullshit. It’s a sign of neoliberalism, as in privatization of once public services that when they were implemented were seen as advances in civilization. Admittedly, in the US, the Internet did kill severely dent a key source of revenues for the Post Office, catalogue delivery.
