In coastal towns across regional Australia, a growing demand for locally made surfboards is helping manufacturers bounce back after being hit by a wave of imported products.

It's been 30 years since the Daintree rainforest was World Heritage-listed, signalling the end of one industry and the birth of another.

A team of citizen scientists join in the effort to restore the balance in inshore reefs and save threatened corals by clearing them of choking algae and seeding them with coral larvae.

Two holidaying nurses want to have a beer with two "cool" English tourists who managed to keep positive minutes after being attacked by a shark. The nurses provided first aid which is credited with saving the men's lives.

Sprinting into the path of a bucking 600-kilogram bull is not something most people would consider enjoyable, but it is what Cain Burns does for fun.

Scientists are hoping to stop mountain pygmy possums from hibernating, acclimatise them to warmer environments, then relocate new populations to lowland forests.

More than a dozen live venues and nightclubs across Canberra shut down in the 2018 financial year, but the Government hopes a new plan to make a racket will turn that trend around.

A remote Cape York community is in the fight of its life to save a unique rainforest that was devastated by a cyclone.

David Glasheen was once a multi-millionaire living in Sydney. But that was a different life. For 22 years, the 76-year-old has been the sole resident of a remote Queensland island and he wouldn't have it any other way.

Cardwell residents band together to save a large tree that arborists have declared unsafe due to beach erosion during the recent heavy wet season.

A Gold Coast mother relives the horror of finding her young son with a pencil lodged in the roof of his mouth as she is reunited with the paramedics who helped save his life.

Concerned about a spike in drownings on Queensland's beaches most of which occur outside the flags lifesavers have come up with a unique way to get people where they want them.

Conservationists are claiming a coup after convincing Gold Coast Council to save a freshwater lake from being turned into a carpark.

Betty, the piglet born with just two hind hooves, is saved from slaughter just in time for the Lunar Year of the Pig.

As the drought continues, water is being carted by train for the first time in decades to keep production on track at a NSW coal mine and secure 140 full-time jobs.

The founder of an online discussion supporting hundreds trying to go dry believes drought, financial hardship, uncertainty, and isolation are causing more rural people to self-medicate with alcohol.

Movie theaters are banking on "Inception" director Christopher Nolan's upcoming thriller to bring back audiences to the cineplex amid coronavirus crisis.

(California Court of Appeal) - In an amended opinion, revived a citizen group's claim that a city violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it authorized a utility company to remove numerous trees within its local natural gas pipeline rights-of-way. Reversed a demurrer ruling, in relevant part.

(California Court of Appeal) - Upheld the City of San Diego's decision to approve an environmental impact report addendum for an urban park project. Affirmed the denial of a citizen group's petition for writ of mandamus.

(California Court of Appeal) - Affirmed. Plaintiff brought a qui tam action alleging that Defendant violated the False Claims Act in its billings to Medi-Cal. The trial court sustained a demurrer and entered a judgment of dismissal of the complaint. The appeals court held that Defendant did not violate any requirement under law as to its billings to Medi-Cal.

(California Court of Appeal) - In an amended opinion, revived a citizen group's claim that a city violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it authorized a utility company to remove numerous trees within its local natural gas pipeline rights-of-way. Reversed a demurrer ruling, in relevant part.

(California Court of Appeal) - Revived a citizen group's claim that a city failed to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act when it authorized a utility company to remove more than 250 trees within its local natural gas pipeline rights-of-way. Reversed an order sustaining the city's demurrer, in relevant part.

(California Court of Appeal) - Affirmed. Plaintiff brought a qui tam action alleging that Defendant violated the False Claims Act in its billings to Medi-Cal. The trial court sustained a demurrer and entered a judgment of dismissal of the complaint. The appeals court held that Defendant did not violate any requirement under law as to its billings to Medi-Cal.

Cloe Wilder Releases The Music Video For Her New Single.

(California Court of Appeal) - Affirmed the denial of a supermarket chain's motion to compel arbitration of three employees' claims. The issue concerned whether alleged violations of state anti-discrimination and retaliation statutes had to be arbitrated under the collective-bargaining agreement.

Cloe Wilder Releases The Music Video For Her New Single.

Although the deadly coronavirus has wreaked havoc with all aspects of American life, there are people who optimistically believe there can be baseball in 2020, if all major-league teams play in a bubble down in Arizona.

She said actor Pierce Brosnan prevented her from choking.

The 20-year-old was fatally shot on February 19.

He shared the near-death experience during a FaceTime.

Bermudian goalkeeper Nathan Trott’s save in a match against Rochdale has been voted as AFC Wimbledon’s save of the season so far. A story on the AFC Wimbledon said, “Nathan Trott’s superb save in the match versus Rochdale earned deserved applause from the home faithful – and your vote as Wimbledon’s save of the season […] (Click to read the full article)

The closing panel in The Listening Lounge at February's Splore festival was a fairly ambitious one, I wasn't sure whether it was going to work and I knew I was going to depend on my panelists – a psychologist, a brilliant young Zimbabwean New Zealander, an evangelical pastor and a campaign expert – to make it work.
I'm never really sure after these discussions what's actually happened – I've spent the whole time in the moment. But re-reading the transcript (thank you to Emma Hart for that), I felt good about it.
I also felt that the subtitle: "How do we all move…

Somewhere in the Southeastern United States, probably Louisiana or Arkansas (you know, the bible belt), a huge hurricane came through and threatened to take out an entire town. At the local church, people were praying. Their pastor, a fervent young man, asked for people to remain calm and wait for God’s help. Mid-prayer, the flood […]

The post God Will Save Me! appeared first on Funny & Jokes.

IBM today announced that Victoria University has selected IBM to design and build the university’s first green data centre.

Corporations Will Not Save Us: The Sham of Corporate Social Responsibility

Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their shareholders. 

They said “investing in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities“ is now at the forefront of their business goals — not maximizing profits.

Baloney. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.

One Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM’s hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers’ demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Nearly 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn’t save any jobs. Barra was paid $22 million last year. How’s that for corporate social responsibility?

Another prominent CEO who made the phony Business Roundtable commitment was AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to use the billions in savings from the Trump tax cut to invest in the company’s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs. 

Instead, even before the coronavirus pandemic, AT&T cut more than 23,000 jobs and demanded that employees train lower-wage foreign workers to replace them.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable commitment, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce.

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is $117 billion – makes in a few hours. Bezos’ wealth grows so quickly, this number has gone up since you started watching this video.

GE’s CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. So much for investing in employees.  

Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, also committed to the phony Business Roundtable pledge. Shortly after making the commitment to “deliver value to customers,” Muilenburg was fired for failing to act to address the safety problems that caused the 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people.  After the crashes, he didn’t issue a meaningful apology or even express remorse to the victims’ families and downplayed the severity of the fallout to investors, regulators, airlines, and the public. He was rewarded with a $62 million farewell gift from Boeing on his way out.

Oh, and the chairman of the Business Roundtable is Jamie Dimon, CEO of Wall Street’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. Dimon lobbied Congress personally and intensively for the biggest corporate tax cut in history, and got the Business Roundtable to join him. JPMorgan raked in $3.7 billion from the tax cut. Dimon alone made $31 million in 2018.

That tax cut increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. This was before Congress spent almost $3 trillion fighting the pandemic – and delivering a hefty portion as bailouts to the biggest corporations, many of whom signed the Business Roundtable pledge. 

As usual, almost nothing has trickled down to America’s working class and poor. 

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before in order to further boost runaway profits and unprecedented CEO pay. And not even a tragic pandemic is changing that. 

Americans know this. A record 76 percent of U.S. adults believe major corporations have too much power. 

The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be – for example, giving workers a bigger voice in corporate decision making, requiring that corporations pay severance to communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day.  

If the CEOs of the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws, not make phony promises they clearly have no intention of keeping. Don’t hold your breath.  

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of our politics.

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the sham it is. The next step is to emerge from this pandemic and economic crisis more resolved than ever to rein in corporate power, and make the economy work for all. 

No doubt — this is a crazy, scary, sad, worrying time for everyone. Most of us are sheltering in place and trying our best to adjust to a new reality. While we are not performing heroic deeds like all the frontline healthcare workers and first responders, grocery store employees and delivery drivers, we can all … Continue reading nine cool things on a tuesday (stay home, save lives edition)

Very few people in the science fiction community ever came face to face with Alice Sheldon, who wrote SF under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr, much less met her tarantulas. One of those very few was Gardner Dozois. When he sold his papers to UC Riverside (the proceeds went to keeping his wife, Susan Casper, alive for several years longer than would otherwise have happened), bookman Henry Wessells became aware of the correspondence between Sheldon and Dozois.

Now, Henry has created a chapbook, She Saved Us from World War Three, containing the two most significant letters from that correspondence. The first is from Sheldon, telling Gardner that the secret of her identity was about to go public and that she was not a man but a woman. The second is her relieved response to Gardner's assurance that they were still friends.

Which understates how Gardner felt about Sheldon/Tiptree. He was in awe of her as a writer and remained so after the murder-suicide that ended her life.

To go with the letters and give them some context, I interviewed Gardner about his friendship with Alice Sheldon and this introduction now forms the bulk of the chapbook.

Today is the publication date for She Saved Us from World War Three and it is currently available for sale. It costs $20, which is not cheap for twenty pages of prose but is cheap for a beautifully made limited edition chapbook with fold-out facsimiles of the letters themselves.

Those of you who need it know who you are. Me, I already have my copy. I'm going to dig up the oversized paperclip which Sheldon gave to Gardner  as a souvenir of their meeting and Gardner gave to me because souvenirs meant nothing to him and keep the two of them together. This is a very meaningful publication for me.

You can find ordering information here.


Above: The chapbook's cover. Photo by John DeChancie and used with his permission. John is a Mensch. I esteem him highly.

Living Room Lifesavers brings lifesaving skills to the home during social isolation  Great Lakes Advocate

The meat supply is starting to fail. Meat processing factories seem especially susceptible to COVID-19 probably because of mist, chilled air circulation, the creation of aerosols and close worker contact. What other industries could be affected? What would happen if the energy, transportation, or pharmaceutical sector failed? We aren’t even sure which industries are critical. […]

The post Save Grandma, Save the Economy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Saw this in an email. Save 5% on Raise Gift Cards until 11:59PM

 

Use Coupon Code: APRIL

 

Would be a good time to buy PSN / Xbox / Nintendo cards for digital sales.

Now that millions of Americans are isolated in their homes, everyone is using more energy during off-peak hours. Americans are getting more concerned with paying their growing electricity bills. Combined with the obvious environmental tolls of changing and increased at-home energy usage, paying a larger bill during times of economic uncertainty is enough to weigh on anyone’s heightened nerves. Inhabitat has rounded up some tips and tricks to help readers save energy (and money) at home during this time.[...]

The Black Mirror creator invents exciting products to transform your life – from the workout that makes you feel like a saint to the world’s cleverest toilet

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but happiness is in sharp decline. Many people blame technology for our woes, and it’s not hard to see why. The internet is nothing but deranged screeching and fascist memes sitting atop a plateau of moldering desperation masquerading as ironic meaninglessness. No one has smiled in real life since 2011. But wait! Silicon Valley is waking up to the negative effect its products can have on us, and like the good Samaritans they are, they’re unveiling a whole new range of products aimed at making us feel good about ourselves. Here is an exclusive look at just a few of the cool gizmos and rad gadgets due to be unveiled at next year’s CES Consumer Electronics Show and featured in news reports, and then in shops, and then in your house before you even know it.

Continue reading...

The monster who started it, Hitler, was dead, with a coward’s bullet to the head. Also gone was FDR, the man who mobilized a nation and built a worldwide coalition to defeat Germany. As were millions of men who fought in the second war to end all wars to crush an insane regime that had murdered millions of civilian men, women and children, Jew and gentile. Churchill, who stood sometimes alone against the threat, would soon be turned out by the voters.

The last thing Jorge Cruz ever did was ask for a cup of hot tea. By the time it was cool enough for a sip, he was dead -- apparently from coronavirus.

Inmates were coughing and sneezing, and guards wore no personal protective equipment, said Hassan Chunn, 46, who fears the disease is spreading through the Metropolitan Detention Center.

American pikas’ responses to climate are driven by location, location, location.

In rural and hard-to-reach areas, postal workers are the only ones who provide regular delivery service.

In America, the healthiest are by no coincidence also the wealthiest. The poor, the disabled and people of color get the short end of the stick.

More humans may be exercising more flexibility and cooperation, in vaster global numbers, than at any other time in human history.