Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
We round up this year’s winners at awards for achievements that ‘first make people laugh and then make them think’
Piff and his colleagues found that upper-class drivers were more likely to cut other cars off at junctions and ignore pedestrians at crossings. Wealthier people also appeared more willing to lie at work. In one experiment, volunteers were left alone with a jar of sweets ostensibly meant for children. When the researchers returned, upper-class people had snaffled nearly twice as many candies as lower-class people.
“The general pattern seems to be that with wealth and rising power, you become less engaged with the needs of others and less burdened by the needs of social relationships,” Piff said. “Taking candy from children might be the least of our worries but it’s emblematic of the tendency to prioritise one’s own needs over those of others.”
The levels of both mandatory and discretionary funding for the IRS face an uncertain future as Congress returns from its August recess, and the fate of the agency’s annual funding likely won’t be determined until the end of the year.
Lawmakers have a September 30 deadline for fiscal 2027 government funding when they return from the summer break, with the passage of a short-term extension of funding at fiscal 2026 levels into December serving as the most likely scenario. But language in the final version of that stopgap bill plays a role in forecasting additional cuts to the agency’s boosted operations support funding.
The naysayers about my Taxing Wealth Report have always said that some of my suggestions, such as equalising the tax rates on income and capital Read the full article…
Trump is staking out extreme positions on White House secrecy, legal experts say
CNN: “At this point more than two months before the midterm elections, Democrats retaking control of Congress and its subpoena power is far from certain. But President Donald Trump is already laying down legal markers for how he’ll fight any attempt by lawmakers to investigate him.
In a Justice Department memo and legal filings, the Trump administration is arguing that the president can keep secret not just the conversations he has with his advisers within the White House, but that his dealings with individuals outside the government can be shielded as well.
The White House is also saying in court that even disclosing the identities of the people who worked on significant policy efforts would infringe upon the presidential confidentiality to which Trump is entitled. And the administration has taken the stance that it can ignore a Watergate-era law prohibiting the destruction of White House documents. The posturing comes as Trump, in his second term, has been notably reliant on a constellation of business moguls, non-government attorneys and old friends to help shape his agenda.
“There has been an unprecedented amount of interaction between the Executive Branch — particularly the White House — and the private sector that Congress has made clear is going to be the subject of oversight,” said Jamie Bair, a partner and head of congressional investigations at the law firm Crowell & Moring…”
Source (Slip Opinion) DOJ Office of Legal Counsel – Applicability of Executive Privilege to Presidential Communications with Private Advisers. Executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential.
August 10, 2026 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT.
The President’s authority to withhold certain sensitive information for the public good, today referred to as executive privilege, is “peculiar to our system of separation of powers” and “derive[s] from the supremacy of each branch within its own assigned area of constitutional duties.” United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 705 (1974); see also Congressional Re- quests for Confidential Executive Branch Information, 13 Op. O.L.C. 153, 154 (1989) (“Congressional Requests”). You have asked whether that privilege, and particularly the presidential communications component of it, permits the President to protect communications that he has with advisers who do not work for the Executive Branch. Determining whether the privilege applies to any specific communication would require additional information about the facts and circum- stances surrounding that communication.
But as a general matter, executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications (1) relate to official presidential decisionmaking, (2) involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and (3) are confidential…”
Investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning, collaboration in OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
METR – Redaction summary statement:Except where explicitly noted in this post, OpenAI redacted no additional information that was important to our conclusions. Two METR staff members (Hjalmar Wijk and Ajeya Cotra) and a Redwood Research staff member contracting with METR (Ryan Greenblatt) worked on premises at OpenAI over a total of six days to attempt to form an independent understanding of model behavior observed during the recent incidentin which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned “message board.” Our investigation focused mostly on the period between July 7th and July 13th. The earlier incidents from training and the subsequent compromise of OpenAI infrastructure described in OpenAI’s recent Black Hat presentation were out of scope, as was OpenAI’s investigation process and planned remediation. Per our standard policy, we did not take payment from OpenAI for this independent assessment.
From fiscal year 2015 through fiscal year 2025, the Secret Service’s budget increased while the number of its protectees fluctuated, particularly around changes in presidential administrations. During this time, there were 83 security incidents. The Secret Service updated its protection policies in response to 25 of them.
Secret Service policy does not require that personnel document their rationale when they determine an incident does not warrant a protection policy update. However, Secret Service officials told GAO that doing so would be important because it shows an incident was fully reviewed.
In the absence of this information, it is sometimes unclear why the Secret Service maintained the status quo. For example, the Secret Service encountered drone incidents from 2015 to 2021, but did not update its policies to address civilian use of drones prior to July 2024, when a shooter used a drone in an assassination attempt of then-former President Trump.
Revising its policy to require personnel to document the rationale for not making policy changes after incidents would provide the Secret Service with more complete information when considering protection policy updates to mitigate future threats. Further, the Secret Service has not reviewed and updated protection policies in a timely manner.
These policies are to be reviewed and updated within 4 years of issuance, but the Secret Service has not reviewed or updated eight of 22 protection policies within the required time frame. Secret Service officials said they try to make timely updates but are not always able to identify personnel available to do so.
Revising its policy to assign responsibility to specific positions for updating protection policies within required time frames could help the Secret Service incorporate the most current techniques into advance planning. Finally, since 1991, the Secret Service and Diplomatic Security Service, the protective division within the Department of State, have not updated a key memorandum of understanding that delineates the two entities’ roles and responsibilities for securing the President and others traveling abroad, and foreign dignitaries traveling to the United States.
Much has changed over the intervening years, such as the emergence of drone threats, and updating the memorandum would provide the two entities an opportunity to respond to evolving roles, responsibilities, and advance techniques.”
Soon after I joinedThe Canberra Times54 years ago, as a copyboy, I was taken aside by a senior journalist and allocated a discreet, clandestine and confidential task which created an unlikely alliance with a considerable impact on my career.
Frank Cranston, a New Zealander who was a former and future chief of staff, was defence and aviation correspondent, who from time-to-time reported hot gossip from ASIO mates and was bylined "From a special correspondent". He was ferociously right-wing and, though I was a Vietnam protester and soon-to-be draft-dodger, an unlikely ally of mine (indeed a colleague, Bruce Juddery, once christened our friendship the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).
Former editor, current columnist, and legendary longtime Canberra Times journalist Jack Waterford reflects on the newspaper's centenary. Pictures by Rohan Thomson, supplied
Frank's devoted wife made a brown-paper bag of sandwiches for his lunch every day. Sometimes they were Vegemite. Sometimes peanut butter. Sometimes tuna. My task - there were predecessors, but not always reliable ones - was to eat the sandwiches and to remember to tell Frank before he departed about 7pm what had been between the slices. It was important. His suspicious wife would be sure to ask him.
I was not being a party to the concealment of infidelity as such. There was enough of that at the newspaper, some of which a copyboy could hardly overlook. Frank adored his wife but was terrified of her. He did not like her sandwiches, and in any event often had a working lunch at some lobbyist's expense or went for a stroll and a snack. But he dared not tell his wife that.
Jack Waterford surrounded by his reference books at the time of his retirement. Picture by Rohan Thomson
One pay-off from this occurred in 1973 while early in the morning I was working on a feature. Frank's phone rang, but Frank was not in. I answered it, but before I could introduce myself, a voice said, "Frank, I haven't got time to talk, but you should know that [Attorney-General Lionel] Murphy raided Canberra ASIO last night, and he is now on a plane heading for Melbourne, where he is going to raid it. He's had the Commonwealth Police seal it up. Must go, but I will ring you later".
Now this was sensational information, but it was not mine. Frank waltzed in after about 10 minutes, and I told him the message. We talked about it. He said that he did not think the story would hold without anyone knowing during the day. But we had some information others did not have. He would tip off the Melbourne Herald to the raid going on at St Kilda, without telling them about the earlier Canberra raid. They would owe The Canberra Times, and him, one.
Murphy had not even arrived at ASIO when he saw a phalanx of Melbourne Herald photographers gathered around the gates. It was his first inkling that his raid, made at Commonwealth Police urging, could be a serious political mistake.
There were two sides to this story, and thanks to Murphy's office, with whom I was good friends (with Frank being anathema), we were especially well informed on both. But we did it cooperatively. Along the way I learnt quite a few tricks of the trade, including arts of concealing the provenance of sensitive information otherwise difficult to get out.
I had been at that stage a cadet journalist only for a few months, taking up the job only when the warrant for my arrest under the National Service Act had been withdrawn. My first appointment was as police roundsman, Frank thinking it a great joke that police who knew me well from demonstrations would now have to be answering my polite questions.
The commissioner, Roy Wilson, rang Frank to complain that it was unfair that they had to endure my walking around reading notices in the police station when they had been used to arresting me on sight. Frank told him to get used to it, and to be ready for a lot of hell if anyone treated me other than professionally. As it happened I made enduring friendships, based on mutual trust, among police - the better, as I rose up the ranks, for the fact that the contacts were doing the same.
Frank Cranston, who became an unlikely newsroom ally of Jack Waterford.
I spent time in the press gallery, during the Whitlam years, working alongside David Solomon, who was chief political correspondent and later press secretary for Gough Whitlam, and who impressed upon me the need to read documents and understand legal and political processes.
Tony O'Leary, later press secretary to John Howard was also there. I was given several bits of good advice from Alan Reid, a veteran journalist and political mischief maker, who seemed to like me. He once told me that I should always remember that one could work in the zoo without liking the animals. He also told me that when I got to his age, I should never walk past a lift or a toilet.
I broke service in 1977, soon after writing a story which provoked the then federal attorney-general, Bob Ellicott, to resign, accusing the prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, of leaking on him to me. I left, on effective leave without pay, to work with Professor Fred Hollows, of the national trachoma program, and to start drafting his report, but returned in 1979, initially to work in the parliamentary press gallery alongside Gay Davidson, the first woman to be chief political correspondent in the parliamentary gallery.
Later I was to report the High Court, public administration, and to supervise the newspaper's pioneering coverage of freedom of information, and write editorials and book reviews. In 1987, soon after returning from a three-month fellowship in the United States, I became deputy editor, later editor, editor-in-chief, and finally editor-at-large before retiring in 2015. Of the last job, a roving one without administrative duties, a letter writer once wrote that if it was true that I was at large, I ought to be promptly recaptured and locked up.
Over this career I knew all but two of those who had edited the paper and later the news source over its full 100 years. The first, Arthur Shakespeare, was a legend, of whose influence one could never be unaware.
Both John Pringle and David Bowman had moved from The Canberra Times to the Sydney Morning Herald by the time I arrived, but I knew them both. All the rest were colleagues, mentors, and in cases people I helped appoint and whose careers I had helped guide. For me, the paper itself, including its advertising and administrative staff and its printers, was a living institution, over which I felt a strong sense of duty as a steward and a trustee.
Jack Waterford, then editor Michelle Grattan and chief of staff Bob Ferris at news conference.
A golden age for print journalism was coming to an end, marked most obviously by a dramatic decline in advertising revenue, particularly the "rivers of gold" of classified ads, which sometimes led to a 136-page broadsheet paper. I was there from when I could have still explained our hot-metal production system to Gutenberg through to the advent of the computer, the mobile phone and Google. Pre-Google, I had thousands of research books for checking facts; nowadays I can scarcely remember my processes of research.
But the essential tasks of journalism have not changed much, whether it is produced on paper, broadcast or placed online. It is still about getting important information to our customer. Important, and accurate information they need to know. About their community. About their region and about the world. About health, and education, and community services. About courts, law and order, culture and sport and community groups. About politics, at local and national levels, and other matters affecting lives, including these days consumer matters, personal relationships, and what is being said in social media.
It's generally for the time-poor, who need summarised information, if with access to sources so that more detail can be obtained. But it is also, sometimes, for long reads, detailed accounts of what has occurred, and the explanations of experts and people advocating different sorts of action.
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And all for a sophisticated audience. The Canberra market is a very sophisticated one, with high education levels and extensive background knowledge of current affairs. I used once to remind reporters that on most of the issues on which they wrote, at least a third of the readers knew more about the subject than they, the reporters, did.
Many Canberra readers were public servants, involved in governing the nation or absorbed in defence and foreign affairs. Many came from elsewhere, other parts of Australia or from overseas, and remained closely interested in matters affecting their families and friends. They were not to be talked down to, even as reportage had to cover material with which most readers were unfamiliar.
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That The Canberra Times has lasted, and is by this anniversary girding itself anew for the task of informing its audience about what they want and need to know, is in major part due to the energy, professionalism and sense of duty of its founders.
Thomas Shakespeare first came to Canberra with his sons in 1913, 11 years before Federal Capital Press had any physical presence here. He told his sons that he would, at an appropriate moment, start a newspaper, and that the boys ought to prepare themselves for their partnership in that enterprise. Arthur, the eldest, was to train in journalism, ready to assume the task of editor. Chris (Jack), James (Bill) and Clarence were to learn the arts of newspaper production and printing, advertising and business management.
Thomas Mitchell Shakespeare, the founder of The Canberra Times.
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Thomas Shakespeare was an ardent federalist, and had owned newspapers around Forbes and Grafton. He took four of his sons to the ceremony naming the new capital Canberra in 1913, telling them he had wanted them to be there at this moment of the capital's history because he planned, at the right moment, to launch the capital's first newspaper.
The newspaper would grow with the city, and become in time a great civilised metropolitan daily, quoted around the world.
He did not mean by that that The Canberra Timeswould be remote from the local news and the life of Canberra. To the contrary. It would be intensely local, and a great champion of the city, its citizens and the federal idea. At least pending self-government - which was being talked about then but recognised to be some time off - it would be the primary forum of ideas and conversation with the community, talking to its governors on behalf of the people.
NSW had many daily country newspapers in 1913, many with reasonable circulations because big city newspapers did not typically arrive until the day after publication. Shakespeare wanted such a daily newspaper, and its influence and advertising revenue, reporting not only the lives of its citizens, but their role and functions in political and public administration.
Immediately behind the site, in Mort Street, Civic, after all, was to be the proposed Canberra railway station, coming over from Queanbeyan through Kingston and across the river approximately where the Kings Avenue Bridge now stands. It would proceed through Reid to Civic, then onwards to Yass.
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The NSW government had agreed to build the Yass line as a part of the 1913 treaty by which the Commonwealth acquired the lands of the Australian Capital Territory. It had also agreed to build a railway to Nowra and Jervis Bay and given the Commonwealth eminent domain over the Molonglo and Queanbeyan rivers, and over the Snowy River if the Commonwealth wanted it for hydro-electric purposes.
The task was conceived in 1913, before the devastation of World War I and the slowdown in Canberra development which that and the slump afterwards involved. But the Commonwealth was still determined that Parliament would sit in Canberra rather than Melbourne in 1927, and Shakespeare was determined that the paper would be publishing by then.
The Canberra Times newsroom of the 1970s that Jack Waterford entered.
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His expansion plans were much restricted by the Great Depression and later World War II. It was not until the mid-1950s, with many precarious years for a newspaper geared for a much larger circulation, that Robert Menzies decided to let Canberra grow, to bring most of the policy-focused federal public service to Canberra, and, of course to embark on the massive task of house building, and the provision of schools, shops, hospitals and services that this implied. After that Canberra began to grow rapidly, if with at times, 1990s abrupt pauses and stops brought on by changes of government.
As the sons aged, they began to look for a succession. They decided that they would sell if a major competitor emerged, but not to that competitor.
They made a secret deal with the Fairfax organisation that it could buy it if Sir Frank Packer or Rupert Murdoch appeared on the horizon. In 1963, Murdoch arrived with surplus presses from his purchase of the Mirror in Sydney, and decided to start a new newspaper, to be called The Australian. This paper, with superior resources would swamp The Canberra Times and grab its classified advertising base, already the third biggest in Australia. But Murdoch inadvertently tipped off Arthur Shakespeare, and by dawn, the Fairfax agreement was in effect. Fairfax promptly hired many more journalists, determined to kill off The Australian before it got established. Arthur Shakespeare was to remain chairman of the Federal Capital Press board, and it was agreed that, though part of the Fairfax empire, it would be directed locally.
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The efforts of young Warwick Fairfax to guarantee his succession to the interests of his father, Sir Warwick, saw the collapse of the old Fairfax empire in the late 1980s. The Canberra Times was sold to Kerry Packer to buy out his Fairfax shareholding. But he wanted only the Fairfax magazines, and secretly, it appears, he promptly on-sold it to Rupert Murdoch. But the ACCC quickly ruled out such a sale, and Packer later sold it to Kerry Stokes. Stokes invested in the newspaper, including purchasing a modern printing press, but ultimately sold to the Rural Press network, of whom the chief shareholder was John B. Fairfax, a second cousin to young Warwick Fairfax who had bought out his old Fairfax holdings. Rural Press had substantial country newspaper and agricultural newspapers, including The Land.
Soon after buying The Canberra Times, John B. told of his ringing the then prime minister, John Howard, to tell him. Howard congratulated him, saying The Canberra Times would make a great flagship for Rural Press. So, what do you think of it? asked John B.
"Oh it's a terrible paper," said Howard. "The worst metropolitan paper in Australia. Worse even than The Age. Sort of like the ABC in print."
John B. did not attempt to control the newspaper's editorial line. Indeed, on buying he had endorsed the newspaper's code, which had enshrined editorial independence. If he disagreed, he said so in a letter to the editor - always, of course, promptly published.
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Rural Press used The Canberra Times and its other holdings to launch a type of reverse takeover of the remaining Fairfax newspapers - the SMH, The Australian Financial Review and The Age. But the glory days were over for newspapers, with advertising revenues in serious decline, and staff numbers affected accordingly. Old newspapers have continued to be published, but they have become focused on subscription audiences online. The Nine television network acquired the new Fairfax, but soon after, sold all but the core Sydney and Melbourne newspapers to ACM.
The vocation of the journalist - to bring news of importance and interest to the audience, and in a manner that is fair, and honest and correct - has not changed, but the way that we communicate, and the services that media organisations can offer readers are much extended and more challenging.
A hundred years from now the task, and the duty, will likewise be similar, but no doubt the way news and information is shared with the audience will have changed enormously again and beyond my powers of imagination. It is all, however, built on foundations laid down here over the past 100 years.
