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IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Drinking coffee may help protect kidneys. “The researchers found that people who drank any quantity of coffee every day had a 15% lower risk of acute kidney injury, and those who drank two to three cups a day had a 22% to 23% lower risk.”
Plus: “We already know that drinking coffee on a regular basis has been associated with the prevention of chronic and degenerative diseases including Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and liver disease.”
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The Dogs borrowings
Anna Katharine Verney's exposé in The Guardian has a hell of a summing-up headline: Miles Franklin-nominated novelist apologises for plagiarising Nobel laureate ‘without realising’.
Plagiarism is a bad idea in general; plagiarizing a Nobel laureate seems downright foolish. And I wish authors would start coming up with more creative excuses when they get caught at it.
The book in question is John Hughes' The Dogs -- see the Upswell publicity page (which does not yet note that the novel in ... not entirely original) -- and the book it 'borrows' from is Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War. See also the Books + Publishing report.
And it's a safe bet that The Dogs will not be taking this or any prize anytime soon.
(Updated - 11 June): Unsurprisingly, The Guardian now reports that the Miles Franklin Prize has now removed The Dogs from the longlist.
This is an edited version of the 25th annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture delivered by ABC Chair Ita Buttrose, in Sydney, on Friday, June 17.
Australian media’s ‘other’ night of nights didn’t disappoint, despite naysayers
The Andrew Olle speech is often a 45-minute interruption to the night’s true purpose — the reminiscing, networking, yarning and bitching. Oh, and the drinking.
Ita opened her speech with a ‘Shout out’ to Vladimir Putin and Russia for sanctioning her and other ABC journalists for coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Lecture host Richard Glover warned, “Vlad, don’t take her on!”
Over the years, I've seen a lot of changes in journalism and the media more broadly. But, no matter how great the changes, fundamental things still apply.
Good journalists always will be society's fact-seekers and truth-tellers. The job takes courage. We are reminded of this today as journalists risk their lives to report on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It always takes determination.
It is never about lecturing the public on what they should think. Good journalism is about reporting, just the facts — not opinion. It is about listening to community concerns and fashioning them into powerful stories that inform and illuminate; stories that are backed by evidence and take a fair and impartial point of view.
Whatever the ownership structure of the organisations they work for, journalists must be prepared to defend the integrity of their output, and the reputation of their profession.
