The new Annie Jacobsen book on biological warfare

 The new Annie Jacobsen book on biological warfare

Why this PwC and big bank agitator is running for the Senate

Law academic Andy Schmulow has had enough. Big companies are too powerful and corrupting democracy, he argues. And he wants to ask them the hard questions

Timothy Snyder: “What comes next? For the Nazis, the deportation and the pogrom of autumn 1938 were steps towards creating a centralised national police agency. In the US, something similar is unfolding with ICE.”

Every second cigarette in Australia is now illegal

Barry O'Farrell expected to return as Wests Tigers chairman 10 days after shock sacking

Former Australian Taxation Office staffer walks free after defrauding taxpayers in GST scam

A former Australian Taxation Office worker from Brisbane who defrauded taxpayers of $105,000 in a GST scam, and spent it on her lavish lifestyle has avoided jail.

Eva Ellen Dierens was in the District Court in Brisbane on Wednesday where the court heard she created a fictitious house-cleaning business, then facilitated the lodging $105,000 worth of fake GST refund claims.

The 28-year-old from Woolloongabba spent the money on tattoos, teeth straightening, an overseas holiday and a car loan, the court heard. 

Her ex-boyfriend, named in court as Zachariah Ahmed, was never charged over Dierens crime, Ms Tanzer-Wilde told the court.

Maybe a General Strike Isn’t So Impossible NowLabor Notes

The National: speaking truth to power

‘Looks like massive fraud’: Trump’s many pardons spark fury The release of drug traffickers and fraudsters is puzzling allies and sending shockwaves through legal circles.

Who Runs Congress’s Agencies?

First Branch Forecast: “While legislative branch agencies belong to Congress, not all are entirely free of executive branch entanglements. 

The question of how Congress chooses, oversees, and removes legislative branch agency heads is integral to the independence of the legislative branch, especially with recent White House efforts to take over or place personnel inside the Library of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, the Government Publishing Office, and the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights. 

Legislative branch agencies are responsible for providing confidential legal and policy advice to Congress, conducting its oversight of the Executive branch, providing Congress with access to records, independently evaluating the state of our economy, administering the legislative branch workplace including addressing complaints concerning member misbehavior, and much more. 

There are very good reasons why their activities should be fully independent and separate from White House control. A few years back we surveyedhow appointments work for officers like the Architect of the Capitol, Librarian of Congress, the Director of the Government Publishing Office, the Comptroller General of the United States, and there was no consistency. How inconsistent? Let’s provide some examples…”

Creative Christmas Lunch

… Memories and the feeling of the rhythm of the season 

“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

~ Vaclav Havel

Enjoy this footage, which shows a Tesla bot removing an invisible headset and then falling over. In other words, it's being remote-controlled by a human operator, who forgot to shut it down before removing their headset. People of a certain age may recall the scene from Robocop 2 when OCP executives review replacement models. 

Tesla robot repeats human operator removing headset, then falls over

The trailer for It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary film about the late singer/songwriter.

The concept of human rights in ancient Persia - Iran - is primarily associated with Cyrus the Great circa 600 - 530 BCE and the Cyrus Cylinder

, which many scholars consider the world's first charter of human rights. 

After conquering Babylon in 539 BCE, Cyrus issued a decree that established several groundbreaking principles of governance and human treatment, which were inscribed on a baked-clay cylinder in Akkadian cuneiform script. The rights and policies outlined included: 

• Abolition of slavery: Cyrus prevented unpaid, forced labor and prohibited the exchange of people as slaves within his ruling domains.
• Freedom of religion: He declared that all people had the right to choose their own religion and live in all regions, a significant departure from the practices of many other ancient empires that imposed the conqueror's gods and customs on the subjugated people.
• Repatriation of exiled peoples: Cyrus allowed enslaved and exiled populations, including the Jewish people who had been held captive in Babylon, to return to their homelands and rebuild their temples.
• Protection against oppression: He pledged to ensure that no one would oppress others and that if it occurred, he would restore the rights of the oppressed and penalize the oppressor.
• Equality and tolerance: His policies promoted racial equality and a general attitude of tolerance and respect for the diverse cultures, customs, and languages of the peoples within his vast empire. 

A replica of the Cyrus Cylinder was presented to the United Nations in 1971 and is now displayed in New York, where its provisions are often paralleled with the first four Articles of the modern Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While some historians consider the application of the term "human rights" to an ancient artifact anachronistic, the Cylinder undeniably represents a uniquely progressive and humane approach to governance for its era. 

From Babylon, the idea of human rights spread quickly to India, Greece and eventually Rome and Bohemia. There the concept of “natural law” arose, in observation of the fact that people tended to follow certain unwritten laws in the course of life, and Roman law was based on rational ideas derived from the nature of things.

Documents asserting individual rights, such as the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), the US Constitution (1787), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the US Bill of Rights (1791) are the written precursors to many of today’s human rights documents.

The Authoritarian Tech Network: The Kingmakers

The Dr. Roy Casagranda Podcast is 

a show focused on history, politics, philosophy, and world affairs, aiming to uncover untold stories, challenge narratives, and provide deeper understanding, often through in-depth lectures and Q&A sessions covering diverse topics from ancient civilizations and Islamic Golden Age to modern conflicts and cultural issues. Hosted by historian and political scientist Dr. Roy Casagranda, it offers both structured content and "Office Hours" with direct audience engagement. 

• Mission: To "unerase the erased peoples of the world" by sharing marginalized histories and truths.
• Content: Explores complex events, ideologies, and cultures, seeking truth and challenging misinformation.
• Formats: Features lectures (often from his Museum of the Future talks) and interactive sessions like "Office Hours".
• Topics: Spans global conflicts (Palestine, Ukraine), historical eras (Abbasid Revolution, Islamic Golden Age), philosophy, and current events.
• Accessibility: Available on platforms like Apple Podcasts and YouTube, with audio versions of video lectures. 
• Apple Podcasts: Dr. Roy Casagranda Podcast

• YouTube: Dr. Roy Casagranda - YouTube
• Podchaser: Dr. Roy Casagranda Podcast | Podchaser 

No one cooks an omelette without cracking an egg. No one starts a blog on political economy thinking they will keep everyone happy.

A Line in a Tom Stoppard Play Inspired a New Breast Cancer Treatment

In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pioneer which greatly increased the survivability of breast cancer.

Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.

Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.

Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL

Certainly drives home the value of a robust and diverse culture of humanities in contradiction to the current backlash. (via @harrywallop.co.

How MacKenzie Scott is giving away her billions. “Once you begin to see Scott as [Toni] Morrison’s mentee — rather than as a certain Amazon founder’s ex-wife — you can’t unsee it. She gives more like an artist would.”

Annual List by Tom Whitwell – 52 things I learned in 2025

 things I learned in 2025 –  – [a small selection from the list]

• In 2023, Nigeria had a million more births than the whole of Europe – Our World in Data, via Charles Onyango-Obbo]
• Childhood peanut allergies are falling dramatically, perhaps because advice to avoid peanuts was reversed. [Simar Bajaj]
• The serial killer epidemic in 1970–80s US may have been caused by lead fumes from cars and factories, and solved by environmental regulations. [Caroline Fraser via James Lasdun]
• Global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000, due to measures like pesticide bans, more responsible media reporting of suicide, mental health education in schools and improved healthcare responses. [Dévora Kestel & co, via Angus Herveyagain]

 

DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now

Follow up to DOGE ‘doesn’t exist’ – with eight months left on its charter, via Wired, see DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now [no paywall] -“…On Instagram, Yat Choi described his work as ongoing, announcing that he was returning to the underground Pennsylvania mine where federal retirement claims are processed.

 “Like Jigga [Jay-Z] I showed them the blueprint back in April, now going back in the Mine to lead the pilots next week,” wrote Choi, who previously worked as an engineer at AirBnb and has referred to Canada as home in other Instagram posts. Choi did not respond to a request for comment. 

It’s not just Choi. Many of the original young and inexperienced DOGE technologists whose identities were first reported by WIRED appear to still be enmeshed in federal agencies. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, Gavin Kliger, Marko Elez, Akash Bobba, and Ethan Shaotran all still claim to be affiliated with DOGE or the US government. So do other tech workers from Silicon Valley and Musk companies like xAI and SpaceX. Coristine, Kliger, Elez, Bobba, and Shaotran did not respond to requests for comment. 

The DOGE ethos—characterized by cutting contracts and government workers, consolidating data across agencies, and importing private sector practices—remains fully in force. While several media reports have suggested that DOGE has all but fizzled out, DOGE affiliates are scattered across the federal government working as developers, designers, and even leading agencies in powerful roles. “That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”

DOGE has “just transformed,” an IRS employee tells WIRED. While DOGE is no longer moving across the government in a move-fast-and-break-things blitz, DOGE affiliates appear to be digging in for the long haul—and Silicon Valley–shaped fingerprints remain all over the way agencies continue to be run. Over the last few weeks, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has rolled out coding tests to its hundreds of technical staff, quizzing them over their “technical proficiency.” The decision to roll out these tests came from Sam Corcos, a DOGE operative and chief information officer of the Treasury, according to a source familiar with the situation. Corcos is seeking to overhaul the IRS’s 8,500-person IT department, the source says. This is part of a larger ongoing “modernization” process at the US Treasury. The tests, administered through a tool called HackerRank, have been used by private-sector tech companies like Airbnb, LinkedIn, and PayPal to quiz a potential hire’s technical skill. One source at X, the social media company owned by Musk, tells WIRED that X uses “HackerRank’s tool to do coding screen-sharing for tech screens and remote interviews,” but confirmed that existing employees are not assessed with the tool. “They want to see IRS as like a tech company, that’s the feeling I get,” says an IRS employee who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to the press. While coding tests are expected for candidates applying for technical roles, testing existing agency employees is highly unusual, four IRS sources tell WIRED. Early in DOGE’s tenure, staffers at the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) were forced to defend their projects on video calls with DOGE members. Government employees were also asked to send weekly emails detailing their work and achievements, which were later reviewed by artificial intelligence. (These emails and project reviews closely resemble the playbook Musk used when he took over X, formerly Twitter, in 2022.)…”

What’s the best way to lift people out of poverty?

 What’s the best way to lift people out of poverty? “Cash giving programs believe the people experiencing poverty best understand what they need to escape it.”

FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals Ken Klippenstein

Behind the Scam: How Fraudsters Use Social Media, Software, and Shell Companies to Steal Millions

Professional scammers call upon a global network of service providers to execute their work in a sophisticated, streamlined...

Alleged Russian Tax Fraud Mastermind Funneled Millions Into Luxury Dubai Properties

A company owned by the alleged mastermind behind a massive tax fraud in Russia poured millions into two luxury hotel resorts...

 Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 7, 2025 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Six highlights from this week: 

Admins and defenders gird themselves against maximum-severity server vulnerability; WhatsApp closes loophole that let researchers collect data on 3.5B accounts; Real or AI? The 7 Telltale Signs Every Fake Image Still Can’t Hide; Does a VPN really slow down your internet? I measured it; Google Starts Sharing All Your Text Messages With Your Employer; and Yep, Cloudflare died again. Here’s what happened.

Bloomberg’s Jealousy List for 2025 – token access [no paywall], a collection of journalism admired by the magazine’s writers and editors. “For an industry that’s perpetually facing the parallel challenges of diminishing reader trust and declining advertising revenue, the media business sure delivered in 2025. 

There were way too many podcasts, documentaries, in-depth investigations and entertaining magazine stories to consume, let alone optimistically bookmark for later. 

That is why we, the philanthropic-minded editors and writers of Bloomberg Businessweek, assemble our annual Jealousy List, where we each identify the one piece of journalism from the past 12 months that we think is absolutely not to be missed. 

The only stipulation: We only pick stories from rival outlets, never the home team. —The Editors [Subject matter spans war, hunger, politics, medicine, privacy, music, human trafficking, crypto, drugs and sports]

Check out our previous Jealousy Lists: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

To Grow, We Must Forget

People don't have the literacy to comprehend satire

What are the perils when political satire leaves too much open to interpretation?

That was running through my mind after Tina Fey’s recent appearance on “Weekend Update: Summer Edition,” which is “Saturday Night Live’s” bid to stay relevant amid a summer hiatus and a news cycle churning faster and furiouser than ever.

When political satire — whoops! — reinforces ideas it means to skewer

An Astonishing Graph

For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.

To Grow, We Must Forget… but Now AI Remembers Everything. “What if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now helping shape the human minds that do?”

100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025

Literary Hub – “…There were times our definition of “small press” was tested. Was Tin House still a small press after it was acquired by Zando in March? 

Yes, we decided, since Zando was not a big five publisher. Were university presses that published well over 50 books yearly small presses? We decided they were so long as their creative offerings fell under that number. We tried to stay nimble and responsive, while sticking to the project’s principles. 

There are a few important things this list is not: This is not a best of list. This is not a comprehensive survey of all small presses. This is not a juried selection of books. This is instead the product of a group of enthusiastic, committed reviewers reading hundreds of small press books from the past year and choosing the few they heartily recommend. 

Ours is not the first list to highlight small press books. One of the joys of this project was finding the many other venues already doing this work. If our list interests you, find more small press books highlighted at CLMP, Foreword Reviews, and Necessary Fiction, to name a few. Without further ado, 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025:

Shop the List on Bookshop.org

This photo-organizing app is so good it made me ditch Lightroom’s library

MakeUseOf: “…digiKam is a free, open-source app that’s available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. No monthly fees, no paywalled features, no cloud lock-in, just free software that actually works. 

It doesn’t force your photos into a predetermined structure like Lightroom’s collections model. Instead, digiKam works alongside your existing folder structure. Your photos can be stored on your internal drives, external SSDs, network storage, wherever you want. The software will build a database around your photos without demanding you move or reorganize everything to fit in its system. 

And unlike Lightroom, digiKam can automatically tag your photos for you. The program comes with AI-powered features that run locally on your computer to analyze your photos and generate keywords automatically. It doesn’t get the keywords right always, but it’s fast and accurate enough to quickly make a large photo collection easily searchable…”