No penalties for Chris Ellison - Police Are Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Flock Cameras

If you went to 1 funeral every day - for each child who died since Elon Musk and Donald Trump erased USAID ayear ago —you'd be mourning for 1,370+ years

No penalties for Chris Ellison, Mineral Resources as ASIC ends alleged tax evasion probe

ASIC to take no action against MinRes, Chris Ellison after probe by Mark Wembridge

The corporate regulator has ended its investigation into share trading and governance issues at Mineral Resources, saying it will not pursue any action against the iron ore and lithium miner or its billionaire founder Chris Ellison.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission began the investigation into MinRes and its managing director in 2024 after The Australian Financial Review reported that Ellison had established and run a 10-year tax evasion scheme that enriched him and three other executives, but cost shareholders more than $7 million.

Corporate governance has come under scrutiny at Mineral Resources, headed by Chris Ellison.  Trevor Collens

The regulator’s inquiries expanded to focus on share trading around Kali Metals, a lithium minnow whose initial public offering was heavily bought by Ellison and MinRes staff.

On Tuesday, MinRes told investors that the regulator had informed the company that it had “concluded its investigation and determined that it will not take any enforcement action”. ASIC confirmed that its investigation had ended.

“ASIC conducted extensive inquiries, and after assessing the available evidence, it has determined that no regulatory action is warranted and the investigation is now closed,” the regulator said in a statement on Tuesday

Ellison’s behaviour – including his use of offshore tax havens and misuse of company resources – was also the target of a separate probe by the Australian Taxation Office. The New Zealand-born businessman admitted to defrauding MinRes shareholders and taxpayers, and promised shareholders that he would step down as managing director by the middle of this year.

ASIC investigators probed share trading in Kali Metals that saw MinRes buy millions of shares in the lithium aspirant’s first days of trading, sending its stock soaring. Some early shareholders, including Ellison’s mother-in-law Jennifer Robinson, sold some or all of their stock and pocketed big profits.

The Financial Review is not suggesting those who acquired Kali shares engaged in any wrongdoing, only that ASIC investigated these matters.

Although the company has hinted that new chief operating officer Darren Killeen was being groomed to replace Ellison, the timeline for his departure has been ditched, and he remains in charge of the diversified miner.

When Ellison’s misdeeds came to light, major superannuation funds such as AustralianSuper and HESTA either dumped their stock or cut their holdings, taking the broader market along with them.

Six directors quit the board in the months after the probes were launched, including all three members of an ethics and governance committeethat was created to oversee Ellison’s behaviour and improve the miner’s culture.

Since then, MinRes has appointed former packaging executive Malcolm Bundey as its chairman, and said it has imposed tighter checks on potential conflicts of interest and related-party transactions.

MinRes shares have rebounded from lows of $14 in April 2025 to recent highs around $70, and AustralianSuper has returned as the miner’s second-largest shareholder, behind Ellison.

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Mark Wembridge covers resource companies for The Australian Financial Review, based in Perth. He formerly worked for the Financial Times in London and Hong Kong. Connect with Mark on Twitter. Email Mark at mark.wembridge@nine.com.au

This creepy Israeli spy tech is likely operating in a city near you Responsible Statecraft

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Buying politicians Chris Dillow

Clinton insider is running PR for tech behind Trump’s secret police, cyber attacks, and Israeli drone warfare All-Source Intelligence

Democrats Are Losing the Billionaire PrimaryJacobin. “…confronts the Democrats with a choice they’ve spent years avoiding: chase big money or build mass politics.” Yeah that decision was made a while ago. And they’ve spent two years kissing “good” billionaire behind to no avail.

The 700 freebies: how lobbyists and businesses courted Labour’s special advisers Democracy for Sale

Police Are Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Flock Cameras Mother Jones

 

Google’s hyper-personalized ‘Dreambeans’ feed is now free to test  9to5 Google

Why We Need to Elect More Workers to Public Office

Getting more workers into legislatures is the only way to build a government for ordinary Americans.

Five Outrageous Things Trump’s New Attorney General Has Already 

The New Republic – It didn’t take Todd Blanche long to take a wrecking ball to long-standing Department of Justice principles. “In just his first week in office, Todd Blanche has inflictedmore damage on the norms and traditions of the Department of Justice than any attorney general in its history. I don’t say this casually, and I’m not ignoring the competition. 

John Mitchell ran Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and went to federal prison for it. A. Mitchell Palmer used the DOJ to round up and deport thousands of people for their politics. Harry Daugherty turned it into a vehicle for graft, his cronies selling pardons and immunities like so many indulgences, earning the DOJ the nickname “the Department of easy virtue.” 

These evil deeds damaged the department, but they were furtive and ended in disgrace. None of these men served up his conduct as a model for the DOJ to follow. Blanche, by contrast, has openly taken a blowtorch to standards that have been articles of faith at the department for 50 years. Puffed up with his Senate confirmation, President Trump’s former personal lawyer has taken on a renewed cockiness—arrogance, really—and proclaimed his and Trump’s perverted view of the attorney general as the new normal. Consider these five separate betrayals of the department’s ideals.
1. Asked by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press whether he could pledge that the Justice Department would always act independently of the White House, Blanche was combative: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.” That gratuitous added sentence disparages the canonical approach of every attorney general for at least the last half-century. Most of them made the very pledge Blanche now declares inappropriate, and all of them lived by it. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s very first attorney general, swore that the department’s actions “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations” and that it “can never be used to retaliate politically against opponents.” 

Michael Mukasey, the conservative Republican attorney general brought in by President George W. Bush in 2007 to clean up the U.S. attorney firing scandals, told the Senate that staff who discussed cases with political actors would be fired. Merrick Garland put the principle most concisely at his own confirmation hearing in 2021: “I’m not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’s lawyer.” Blanche has now breezily declared that all of these predecessors in office were misguided in their fundamental approach to the job and justice…”

How to grow $700k to $5.4m – and why panic selling could halve returns

Volatile markets are the new normal, but what does reacting to market noise really cost investors?

Shamir Popat

From the rapid rise of AI to conflicting signals over what assets are truly worth, today’s markets offer a steady stream of noise.

It’s enough to make even seasoned investors feel uneasy, raising a question that resurfaces whenever uncertainty peaks: should you keep investing through the madness, or wait on the sidelines for a quieter entry point?

The answer has less to do with picking the perfect moment and more to do with the actual cost of reacting to the chaos.

Trying to time the market can be a rollercoaster that destroys returns. Bethany Rae

Every year, Morningstar runs a US-based study called Mind the Gap, comparing the return of the average dollar invested in managed funds and ETFs with what those funds earned. The two numbers should be close. They rarely are.

Morningstar’s research consistently shows that the average investor earns less than the funds they hold. That gap, driven almost entirely by the timing and size of investors’ own buying and selling, was a 1.2 percentage point annual shortfall. That is equivalent to giving up about 12 per cent of the return the funds generate each year.

This behaviour isn’t limited to reckless trading; it creeps in through well-intentioned decisions made at the wrong moment. Morningstar’s research finds that investors in simple, diversified, set-and-forget funds capture most of their funds’ returns, while those in more volatile, actively traded categories capture far less.

The lesson is straightforward. The more disciplined and consistent the approach, the more likely investors are to earn the returns their investments generate. We wanted to test whether the same pattern exists in Australian equities, and which behaviours prove most costly.

Four investors, one experiment

We’ve updated some Morningstar research we first conducted in 2023, involving four hypothetical investors: Annie, Bridget, Charlie and Don.

Each start with $100,000 in December 1992 and set aside $1500 a month to invest. That money goes into their bank account, then gets deployed into the Australian sharemarket according to a personality-driven rule akin to a fund manager with disciplined processes.

• Annie – the modest dip buyer – buys the dip after any month the market falls by 2.5 per cent or more.
• Bridget – the deep dip buyer – waits for a deeper fall of 5 per cent before buying.
• Charlie – the momentum chaser – invests following a month when the market has risen 5 per cent or more.
• Don – the panic seller – sells down his equity holding by 2.5 per cent every time the market falls 2.5 per cent or more in a month and, tellingly, his rule never brings him back in.

A “control” participant, Steady Eddy, simply invests his $1500 immediately into the market at the start of every month.

We used the Vanguard Australian shares index fund as Eddy’s proxy, net of fees (spliced with the S&P/ASX All Ordinaries total return index for the years before the Vanguard fund existed). This reflects the return an investor could achieve, fees included, rather than a raw benchmark figure.

Nearly 34 years on, with the experiment running through to July 31, 2026, the total capital contributed by each investor is the same at $704,500, yet the outcomes are different – and revealing.

Steady Eddy’s balance stands at $5.36 million. Annie, the disciplined modest dip-buyer, is close behind at $5.35 million. Momentum-chasing Charlie and deep-dip buyer Bridget trail with $5.21 million and $5.17 million, respectively.

Panic seller Don, whose rule sees him sell out of the market and never brings him back in, sits at $2.26 million – less than half of Eddy’s outcome, despite contributing the same amount of capital as everyone else.

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Every dollar sitting in cash while an investor waits for a signal to buy is a dollar not compounding. Notably, in the strong, dip-friendly market of the past few years, Annie’s disciplined buying has closed most of the gap to Eddy.

This is insightful as it shows the cost of waiting depends on the market regime, even where the ranking rarely changes. Don’s result isn’t a story about bad luck. His rule was designed to protect him from a crash, but instead it delivered one on its own terms: a gradual, self-imposed exit he was structurally unable to reverse. It amounts to a negative asset allocation decision.

Timing matters – just not in the way most investors think

These results do not mean the entry point is irrelevant. It means that the risk is more about when your investing life starts, as a matter of circumstance, rather than trying to actively dodge it.

Australian equities were used for this exercise specifically to illustrate the impact of timing on investment decisions. The benefits of diversification across asset classes continue to hold, especially at times when market valuations are uncertain.

It’s worth being clear about who this experiment speaks to. The 34-year time horizon tested here suits an investor still accumulating capital, with enough runway for a poorly timed entry to wash out.

The picture looks different for someone closer to drawing down their capital, which the breakdown below helps illustrate.

Breaking the same 30-plus years into non-overlapping seven-year blocks (the approximate length of a business cycle) shows this clearly:

• 1993-2000: A lump sum of $100,000 invested in 1993 grew to roughly $263,000 by 2000. This is an annualised return of close to 15 per cent per annum.
• 2007-2013: The same $100,000 invested at the start of 2007, just before the global financial crisis, had grown to only about $125,000 by the end of 2013. An annualised return of just 3.3 per cent per annum, barely ahead of cash over the same stretch.
• 2000-2007 and 2014-2021: Investors starting in 2000 or 2014 landed somewhere in between the 1993-2000 and 2007-2013 experience.

This is what financial planners and retirees face as sequencing risk, and it’s real – nobody chooses which seven-year stretch of returns they’re handed.

What the data also shows is that this risk shrinks dramatically as the time horizon lengthens. If we chain all five periods together into the full horizon to 2026, then the annualised equity return settles at 9.5 per cent per annum, comfortably ahead of cash’s 4.2 per cent per annum return across the same span – and this includes the GFC period.

Sequencing risk doesn’t disappear with a longer horizon, but it gets diluted because a poor seven-year stretch becomes one more input among several, instead of being the whole story.

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What this means today

None of this is about whether the market is expensive or cheap right now.

Morningstar’s US research and our Australian experiment point to the same conclusion from two different markets – that investors tend to give away a meaningful share of their returns not through one dramatic mistake, but through the accumulated cost of reacting, be that buying in on a rally, selling out in a downturn, or waiting for a clearer signal that never quite arrives.

For long-term accumulators, the fix is almost boring in its simplicity: stay invested, keep contributing, and resist the urge to act on every swing in sentiment.

The investors who capture most of their funds’ returns are usually the ones doing the least in response to short-term market noise.

For pre-retirees and those with shorter time horizons, the answer isn’t market timing either. It’s about portfolio structure. Instead of holding cash to wait for a crash – a timing decision that demands being right on both the exit and re-entry – shorter-horizon investors manage valuation risk through diversification, position sizing, and dedicated defensive cash buffers.

There’s a structural irony worth noting here. Superannuation, almost by design, enforces much of this discipline for you by pairing regular compulsory contributions regardless of market mood with structural friction around early access that makes panic-selling an entire balance rare in practice.

It is a system that nudges the portfolios of millions of Australians toward those of Steady Eddy, whether they’ve ever thought about it or not.

Ultimately, the useful question isn’t whether markets are overpriced today. It’s whether your portfolio structure matches your specific time horizon so you’re not relying on a well-timed call you don’t need to make.

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Voting is now open for the 2026 Tiny Awards

 "Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, and stupid people already have all the answers."

- Socrates

Voting is now open for the 2026 Tiny Awards, featuring 10 sites that celebrate “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”. You have until Sept 25 to vote.

25 MOST INFLUENTIAL CREATORS OF 2026

From breakout comedians and beauty experts to fashion newcomers and political stars, here are some of the biggest voices shaping the internet in 2026

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JEFFREY EPSTEINSeymour Hersh

Ways of Treeing, “Meditations on time and rebellion against the straight line”.

The quiet grief of adult friendship. “Adult friendship became one of the most emotionally significant and least discussed losses of modern life.” (Via swissmiss)

Hugh Howey (author of the Silo books) on how the self-publishing window has closed(or at least narrowed). “We had less than 20 years of writing being hard and publishing being easy, and we will never get that window back.”

A media diet post - watching s03 of Silo, listening to Toni Morrison read Beloved (great book but what a fucking gift to hear Morrison read it), and enjoyed the new Spider-Man, a series that is at its best when the three leads just chill and talk.

“Artist and researcher Maggie Coblentz fermented miso in orbit, chasing a deeper question: What makes a miso a miso—or a person a person—away from Earth?”

Bye Bye Paywall.

I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World by Sarah Wilson.

Messy Nessy’s Cabinet (always a good source of interesting links) redesigned recently.

These Dutch strip islands are cool

Federal Data Terminations Tracker.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our briefing introducing the Federal Data Terminations Tracker. If you missed the briefing or would like to revisit the discussion, watch the recording below to learn about the methodology behind the tracker, why measuring data terminations is so challenging, and a few of the dozens of federal datasets identified as terminated. Additional resources from the webinar are available here.

Introducing the Federal Data Terminations Tracker

dataindex-us

Have a termination or removal to add? Contact us at removals@dataindex.

The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing—Who Wins the Battle?

So, do both! Marano G, Kotzalidis GD, Lisci FM, Anesini MB, Rossi S, Barbonetti S, Cangini A, Ronsisvalle A, Artuso L, Falsini C, Caso R, Mandracchia G, Brisi C, Traversi G, Mazza O, Pola R, Sani G, Mercuri EM, Gaetani E, Mazza M. The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing-Who Wins the Battle?Life (Basel). 2025 Feb 22;15(3):345. doi: 10.3390/life15030345. PMID: 40141690; PMCID: PMC11943480.

Background: The advent of digital technology has significantly altered ways of writing. While typing has become the dominant mode of written communication, handwriting remains a fundamental human skill, and its profound impact on cognitive processes continues to be a topic of intense scientific scrutiny. Methods: 

This paper investigates the neural mechanisms underlying handwriting and typing, exploring the distinct cognitive and neurological benefits associated with each. By synthesizing findings from neuroimaging studies, we explore how handwriting and typing differentially activate brain regions associated with motor control, sensory perception, and higher-order cognitive functions. Results: Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. 

Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts. 

Conclusions: This review contributes to the ongoing debate about the role of technology in education and cognitive development. By understanding the neural differences between handwriting and typing, we can gain insights into optimal learning strategies and potential cognitive advantages, in order to optimize educational, cognitive, and psychological methodologies.