from Crikey

When governments drape a flag over their secrets, we need whistleblowers

Qantas this morning reported a $252 million half-year loss and announced it would cut 5000 jobs as part of an overall plan to reduce costs by $2 billion over 3 years.

The results come as the government weighs up assistance measures for the struggling airline.

According to a February 25 article in the business section of The Washington Post (WP), a senate report has found that the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse knowingly enabled and assisted wealthy Americans in avoiding paying US taxes on billions of dollars in income for many years.

Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

Qantas has posted a $235 million half-year loss and announced that 5,000 jobs will go.

We are witnessing history being made. Unfortunately, it's a history-making decline in standards of political behaviour. At least it proves we're not merely imagining that things were better in the old days.

The latest Census Bureau figures on poverty in America, combined with the data on inequality released a week earlier, confirm a shocking new reality. While a sliver of top earners are doing better than they ever have before, for tens of millions of Americans, insecurity - and, for a distressing number, destitution - is the new norm.

When Cardinal George Pell was officially elevated to the status of God's banker this week, Rupert Murdoch was among the first to congratulate him.

A campaign to hold the former Australian prime minister to account wouldn’t be a stunt. It would remind people there is a price to be paid for going to war against all reason.

Australian Cardinal George Pell has been appointed to one of the most Vatican's senior roles, Prefect for the Economy of the Holy See.

He will be responsible for management and reform of the Vatican's sprawling administration and finances, reporting directly to the Pope.

One of his first tasks will be cleaning up the mess exposed by the 'Vatileaks' scandal, in which private letters to Pope Benedict leaked by his personal butler revealed infighting and allegations of corruption among a territorial and rebellious bureaucracy.

A witness to violence at the Manus Island detention centre last Monday night says guards from the security firm G4S allowed locals armed with makeshift weapons into the facility.

from Crikey …..

Crikey says: Hockey the king of the left-wing gabfest

Now here's a photo for Joe Hockey's pool room ...

In an open letter to Mr Nile, PhD student Angela Williams wrote that she was "disgusted" by [his] post.

She said her post labelling the comments "inappropriate" had been removed from the Facebook page.

"Since you choose to remove my dissenting comments on your Facebook post I am writing to you here to ask why you think it is appropriate to continue the bullying of Charlotte Dawson after her tragic death," she wrote.