Frank Bongiorno reviews a collection of essays by Australia’s thought leaders considering how we might create a better future.
Browsing: Politics
Two experts describe how climate misinformation has infiltrated the election campaign – and how Australians can protect themselves as they head to the polls.
I was going to share with you part two of my spring letter to IMA clients. What was supposed to be a few paragraphs turned into four pages. Consider yourself warned: This is going to read like a rant – because it is. I wrote it early this morning, as a stream of consciousness. I…
WASHINGTON — Beginning early next month, the roughly 5.3 million people who are currently in default on their federal student loans are going to be hearing from the Education Department. “The government can and will collect defaulted federal student loan debt by withholding … tax refunds, federal pensions and even their wages,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during an afternoon briefing on Tuesday. She was reiterating an announcement by the Education Department that May 5 will be the official end of a period of leniency for those with federal student loan debt that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. President Donald Trump paused both loan payments and interest accrual on those loans in March 2020 in response to the then-spreading pandemic, and former President Joe Biden extended that policy through October 2024. In the interim, the Biden administration also tried to flat-out forgive many of those loans, only to see its efforts blocked by the courts. On Monday, Education Secretary
WASHINGTON — A pair of bills introduced in the Senate aim to permanently block oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The combo package of legislations includes the West Coast Ocean Protection Act, introduced by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and the Clean Ocean and Safe Tourism Anti-Drilling Act, introduced by Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J. and Jack Reed, D-R.I. Padilla’s bill would permanently prohibit new oil and gas leases for offshore drilling off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington state. The Booker and Reed bill would permanently bar the Interior Department or any of its agencies from issuing leases for the exploration, development, or production of oil and gas in the North Atlantic, Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Straits of Florida Planning Areas of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, and Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, are leading compani
Image Source: unsplash.com The debate around generational wealth inequality has intensified in recent years, with millennials and Gen Z often pointing to Baby Boomers as beneficiaries of economic conditions that no longer exist. Housing affordability, education costs, and retirement security differ dramatically across generations. As wealth continues to concentrate among older Americans, some economists and…
The country’s biodiversity-rich forests are failing to appear in official records due to non-classification and legal loopholes, leading to fears over their protection The post India’s forests are disappearing, but not on paper appeared first on Dialogue Earth.
As authoritarian governments and conflicts loom large, the final season of Andor is perfectly timed to articulate anxieties close to home.
WASHINGTON — Doctors and staffers in emergency rooms in nine states and the District of Columbia are treating a new patient with a firearm injury every 30 minutes, according to new research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study, which was published last week in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, aims to fill a long-standing gap in firearm injury data. While both the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project and the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System collect such data, neither has historically captured information on the precise day or time of an injury. The study analyzed over 93,000 emergency room visits for firearm injury through data from the CDC’s Firearm Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms, or FASTER, which collects real-time data from select jurisdictions. The timeframe for the analysis was Jan. 1, 2018, through Aug. 31, 2023, and, in addition to the District of Columbia, the states included in the research wer
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is trying to decide whether to keep an Affordable Care Act provision that requires insurers to offer no-cost preventive care tests. The court heard arguments Monday on whether the procedure for deciding which tests can be included under the national insurance program is legally flawed. A group of Christian plaintiffs are most bothered by the requirement for insurers to provide free HIV tests and medications. They said in their court filings that their contributions to the health insurance fund are inadvertently making them “complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior.” If they win their lawsuit, insurers could be relieved of the costs of the tests, passing them back to patients and undercutting a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The free tests are one of the most popular parts of the 15-year-old health insurance law, allowing early warning detection of high cholesterol, cancer, diabetes and other potentially deadly ailments. Obamacare is credi