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What the unions really need - John Quiggin suggests: * Term limits for union officials. * Ending affiliation with the Labor Party (or any political party). * Actual workplace experience for officials.
U.S. Doesn’t Know How Many Foreign Visitors Overstay Visas - The question from the congressman to the Obama administration official was straightforward enough: How many foreign visitors overstay their visas every year? The reply was simple too, but not in a satisfying way. “We don’t know,” the official said. ... Nearly 20 years ago, Congress passed a law requiring the federal government to develop a system to track people who overstayed their visas. ... Since then, the federal government has spent millions of dollars on the effort, yet officials can only roughly estimate the number of people in the United States illegally after overstaying visas. Officials blame a lack of technology to conduct more advanced collection of data like iris scans, resistance from the airline and tourism industries because of cost, and questions about the usefulness of tracking people exiting the country as a counterterrorism measure.
2016 Forecast: The Experts Will Be Wrong - We're in a season when experts and pundits like to make predictions about what will happen next year. But an interesting column found at Marketwatch.com casts doubt on the value of those predictions. “Stocks that were recommended most highly at the start of 2015 by the highly trained, highly educated, highly paid experts on Wall Street did worse this year than a bunch of stocks picked at random.” Brett Arends added the real kicker. “And they did worse — a lot worse — than the stocks those same experts told you to avoid.” His data looks back over the past eight years and comes to a stunning conclusion. Imagine that you invested each year in the stocks the experts said to avoid. With such a strategy, you would have made three times as much money as you would have by investing in experts’ top picks.
An election battle for the identity of Taiwan - In the eight years that President Ma Ying-jeou, from the Kuomintang (KMT) party, has been in power, he has focused on improving relations with China. This era has seen the rivals on the most cordial terms since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. But when he completes his second term in May, he cannot run again. And many are uncomfortable with having the KMT, which supports the notion that Taiwan and the mainland are part of one China, continue to negotiate deals and develop relations with Beijing. These people are expected to vote for the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which does not share that view.
Tasmanian independent Jackie Lamby might be right. Perhaps the Peter Dutton led Liberals can't win coz they've gone nasty. Nasty they certainly were this afternoon as Michael Sukkar, newly elevated to the post of manager of opposition business, tried to show what a tough guy he could be. Sukkar chose to try and stop Attorney General Mark Dreyfus part way through explaining his personal family links to the Holocaust. Attempts to smear Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for being soft on anti semites is one thing. Trying to paint the Jewish Dreyfus of trying to politicise debate on the subject is another.
The baby Penguins of Bicheno are dying of starvation and federal Environment Minister Tania Plibersek remains silent about the crisis. Plibersek has failed to mobilize veterinay nurses to provide emergency feeding. Photo from Reddit The helpless chicks urgently need mashed fish to survive. Normally parents of the world’s tiniest penguins wade ashore on eastern Tasmania’s mid-summer nights to feed their young, hidden within the dunes. But a month ago, the London Times reported, adults of the Little Penguin species, which count Australia’s southern island state as their stronghold, suddenly ended their nightly visits, leaving their infants to starve. "The cause of the abandonment of their young is unclear but scientists believe a rapid warming of waters surrounding eastern Tasmania in recent years has robbed adult penguins of the small fish that they feed on." That this story of shame has become international only increases the reputational damage being done to the Anthony Al...
There's a first time for everything even for an 82 year old. Today it was Tik Tok. Finally ventured to this much publicised site after a friendly referral to a story titled Spud Stands on his Record . It told how " Peter Spud Dutton, the joyless eeew tuber and social media phobe, has taken to TikTok." I could not resist and went searching. I was disappointed at not finding one of those glamorous all-singing all-dancing clips that have crossed my path on other sites after being down-loaded from Tik Tok. Instead there was this : An Opposition Leader explaining “… I really joined TikTok for one reason. It’s to tell you that we do not have to live in a country where you spend your whole life renting,” (Spud. Sept 2024). A very serious politician indeed. But one to lure younger voters to the Liberal Party? Perhaps if they are moved by a photo of the would-be leader as an outdoor man. Footnote The Australian Inependent Media Network has what it calls "a far from comprehe...
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