Premier Gladys Berejiklian wants students to resume learning under a roster system, but principals have slammed the idea as confusing and unrealistic

Premier Gladys Berejiklian wants students to resume learning under a roster system, but principals have slammed the idea as confusing and unrealistic.

Michael Gunner issues his "first and final warning" to petrol companies to take action as the ACCC puts in its two cents on the NT's comparatively high fuel prices.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian wants students to resume learning under a roster system, but principals have slammed the idea as confusing and unrealistic

Premier Gladys Berejiklian wants students to resume learning under a roster system, but principals have slammed the idea as confusing and unrealistic.

When the Glory brought Jamie Maclaren to the A-League, they made sure he could settle quickly.

In this time of social isolation, mental health is top of mind. Here’s a guide to video chat, phone and even text therapy in Canada

Ahead of Monday's crunch meeting of top-flight shareholders, the Hornets have joined Brighton and Aston Villa in making their opposition to the current 'Project Restart' plans clear

Ryan Maguire is CTO & VP of emerging capabilities and partnerships at Kin + Carta. Prior to navigating our way through social distancing, Ryan and I connected about his work at Kin + Carta, a business "built for the 2020's" - with a collaborative ecosystem of 1,600 strategists, engineers, and creatives across four continents. When we last checked in, like so many of us, Ryan and his teams are spending their time closely monitoring and manoeuvring the impacts COVID-19 on their business, clients and investors. However, here is the conversation we had in early March.

Keep on reading: Quick Answers to Quick Questions: Ryan Maguire, CTO & VP, KIN + Carta

How do you teach second graders about A? Cupid Chan, CTO of Index Analytics has excelled in how to explain AI to non-tech proficient audiences. However, the way he presents his information also gives us seasoned tech audiences a different take on what AI truly is and does.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Cupid Chan, CTO, Index Analytics

The Allbirds co-founder on how sustainable materials like Merino wool and eucalyptus are changing the shoe game.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Tim Brown, Co-Founder, Allbirds

What issues to consider when building and optimizing your B2B e-commerce strategy.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Suchit Bachalli, CEO, Unilog

Toby Redshaw is SVP of 5G innovation at Verizon. I spoke with him about the tidal shift from 4G to 5G and the dawning of the Internet of Things.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Toby Redshaw, SVP, Verizon

Armored Things is using Internet of Things devices to keep large venues safe. I sat down with Julie to find out more about creating a new market category.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Julie Johnson, Co-Founder and President, Armored Things

For those of you who find yourselves with more time to read over the next few weeks, Managing Partner at Blue Dots Partners LLC., Philippe Bouissou, Ph.D., explains how his research and strategies help businesses stay aligned while working to survive a time of uncertainty.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Philippe Bouissou, Ph.D., Managing Partner, Blue Dots Partners LLC.

Discussing data center green initiatives in 2020 and Ireland's position on their growth with Páraic Hayes, Head of US West Coast, for IDA Ireland.

Keep on reading: Quick Answers to Quick Questions: In conversation with Páraic Hayes, Head of US West Coast, IDA Ireland

Gillon McLachlan's Sunday press conference was a game-changer — what does his announcement mean for the state of play in AFL and AFLW?

Up to 15 former Wallabies captains unite to raise questions about the leadership of the current administration, with some predicting new management within a fortnight.

Questions have been raised around the making of the new Michael Jordan documentary, or why it even exists. But maybe we should just enjoy the show, writes Paul Kennedy.

This swimmer spent years battling endometriosis, an insidious enemy within her own body that consumed her with crippling pain. The fact that most coaches in women's sport are men also didn't help, she says.

Coronavirus has people fighting over beach access. "Beyond Blue," a docu-game made with BBC Earth's "Blue Planet II" team, takes the science further.

Former anchor Linda Vester and others have been called in.

Fyusion's technology may not scream “artificial intelligence” to the general public, but it does provide an intuitive, lifelike experience for consumers. It's their consumer-friendly technology that makes Co-Founder, Pantelis Kalogiros's view on purchasing behaviour worth listening to - especially for those integrating AI into their commerce businesses.  

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Pantelis Kalogiros, Co-Founder & VP, Fyusion

COO, Chris Luttrell shares her wealth of information about the current state of fraud, what IDology research is revealing about patron's trust and the forecasted impact of recent privacy legislation on consumers and businesses.

Keep on reading: Quick Answers to Quick Questions: In Conversation with Chris Luttrell, COO, IDology

CEO at Datrium, Tim Page has a sharpness for how enterprises can protect and prepare their data and operations for disaster recovery - especially when it comes to ransomware.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Tim Page, CEO, Datrium

With 34 years of programming experience in various organizations, Cal shares what he's observed of leaders who are looking to be reinvigorated, what to do when job-inspiration is lost and taking an educated leap of faith.

Keep on reading: Quick Answers to Quick Questions: In Conversation with Cal Evans, Senior Consultant, E.I.C.C., Inc.

The challenges businesses and services are facing right now vary from wild fluctuations in supply chains; to enormous digital demand on the technologies and platforms that enable us to stay connected and live productive lives. This is why Jay Chapel is looking for ways to help organizations reduce costs across the board. Collecting information from great companies, we hope our conversation shares some ideas that may help in some small way.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Jay Chapel, CEO, ParkMyCloud

Health news and commentary from around the Web gathered by the ALLMedPage Today staff

When Gilead Sciences scored a groundbreaking FDA emergency use authorization for COVID-19 therapy remdesivir, the company made the unusual move of handing distribution rights to the U.S. government. But the federal rollout has gotten off to a rocky start. 

by Marshall Allen

The links to the viral video “Plandemic” started showing up in my Facebook feed Wednesday. “Very interesting,” one of my friends wrote about it. I saw several subsequent posts about it, and then my brother texted me, “Got a sec?”

My brother is a pastor in Colorado and had someone he respects urge him to watch “Plandemic,” a 26-minute video that promises to reveal the “hidden agenda” behind the COVID-19 pandemic. I called him and he shared his concern: People seem to be taking the conspiracy theories presented in “Plandemic” seriously. He wondered if I could write something up that he could pass along to them, to help people distinguish between sound reporting and conspiracy thinking or propaganda.

So I watched “Plandemic.” I did not find it credible, as I will explain below. YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo have since removed it from their platforms for violating their guidelines. Now it’s available on its own site.

Sensational videos, memes, rants and more about COVID-19 are likely to keep coming. With society polarized and deep distrust of the media, the government and other institutions, such content is a way for bad actors to sow discord, mostly via social media. We saw it with Russia in the 2016 election and we should expect it to continue.

But what surprised me is how easily “Plandemic” sank its hooks into some of my friends. My brother also felt alarmed that his own church members and leaders in other churches might be tempted to buy into it.

The purpose of this column is not to skewer “Plandemic.” My goal is to offer some criteria for sifting through all the content we see every day, so we can tell the difference between fair reporting and something so biased it should not be taken seriously.

Here’s a checklist, some of which I shared with my friends on Facebook, to help interrogate any content — and that includes what we publish at ProPublica.

Is the Presentation One-Sided?

There’s never just one side to a story. I mentioned this point in 2018 when I wrote about my faith and the biblical basis for investigative reporting. One of my favorite Proverbs says, “The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.” So a fair presentation should at least acknowledge opposing points of view.

I didn’t see this in “Plandemic,” so I called the filmmaker, Mikki Willis, who is also the film’s narrator, to ask him whether I had somehow missed the other side of the argument. I had not. “The other side of the argument plays 24/7 on every screen in every airport and on every phone and in every home,” Willis said. “The people are only seeing one side of the story all the time. This is the other side of the story. This is not a piece that’s intended to be perfectly balanced.”

I asked Willis if it was fair to call his film “propaganda,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”

He said he doesn’t feel there’s anything misleading in his film, but otherwise the definition fits. And based on that definition he feels 100% of news reporting is propaganda. “What isn’t propaganda these days?” he asked. “In that sense, what we’re doing is fighting fire with fire.”

Is There an Independent Pursuit of the Truth?

The star of “Plandemic,” medical researcher Judy Mikovits, is controversial. The magazine Science reports that it published and then retracted one of her papers in 2011. A search warrant provided to ProPublica by one of her former attorneys shows she was fired from her position at Whittemore Peterson Institute, a research center in Nevada, in September 2011. Then she allegedly stole notebooks and a laptop computer from the Institute, the search warrant said, leading to an arrest warrant for alleged possession of stolen property and unlawful taking of computer data. She was arrested on Nov. 18, 2011, but denied wrongdoing. The charges were dropped.

But “Plandemic” ignores or brushes past these facts and portrays her as an embattled whistleblower. “So you made a discovery that conflicted with the agreed-upon narrative?” Willis says to Mikovits, introducing her as a victim. “And for that, they did everything in their powers to destroy your life.”

A typical viewer is not going to know the details about Mikovits’ background. But as the primary source of controversial information being presented as fact, it’s worth an online search. The fact-checking site PolitiFact details her arrest and criminal charges. Clearly, there’s more to her story than what’s presented in “Plandemic.” That should give us pause when we assess its credibility.

Is There a Careful Adherence to the Facts?

In “Plandemic,” Willis asks Mikovits about her arrest: “What did they charge you with?”

“Nothing,” she replies. “I was held in jail, with no charges.”

Being charged with a crime is one of those concrete facts that we can check out. Science magazine reported Mikovits’ arrest and felony charge. I also found a civil lawsuit she filed against the Whittemore Peterson Institute in 2014 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. “Mikovits was arrested on criminal charges…” her complaint says in the case, which was eventually dismissed.

I asked Willis about the apparent discrepancy, where she said in his film that she wasn’t charged, when court documents show that she was charged. After my inquiry, he said he spoke to Mikovits and now feels it is clear that she meant that the charges were dropped.

I tracked down Mikovits and she said what she meant in the film is that there were no charges of any type of wrongdoing that would have led to her being charged with being a fugitive from justice. She admitted that all the controversy has been hard for her to sort out. “I’ve been confused for a decade,” she told me. She said she would try to be more clear in the future when she talks about the criminal charge: “I’ll try to learn to say it differently,” she said.

This underscores the importance of careful verification, and it distinguishes the craft of journalism from other forms of information sharing. People often speak imprecisely when they’re telling their stories. It’s our duty to nail down precisely what they do and do not mean, and verify it independently. If we don’t, we risk undermining their credibility and ours. That’s in part why we at ProPublica and many other journalists often link directly to our underlying source documents, so you can verify the information yourself.

Are Those Accused Allowed to Respond?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the nation’s leaders in the response to the coronavirus. In “Plandemic,” Mikovits accuses Fauci of a cover-up and of paying off people who perpetrate fraud, among other things. PolitiFact found no evidence to support the allegations against Fauci.

Every time I write a story that accuses someone of wrongdoing I call them and urge them to explain the situation from their perspective. This is standard in mainstream journalism. Sometimes I’ve gone to extreme lengths to get comments from someone who will be portrayed unfavorably in my story — traveling to another state and showing up at their office and their home and leaving a note if they are not there to meet me. “Plandemic” doesn’t indicate whether the filmmakers reached out to Fauci for his version of the story. So I asked Willis about it. “We did not,” he told me.

Are All Sources Named and Cited, and if Not, Is the Reason Explained?

All sources should be identified, with their credentials, so viewers can verify their expertise or possible biases. If they can’t be for some reason, then that should be explained. “Plandemic” features unnamed people in medical scrubs, presented as doctors, saying they’re being wrongly pressured to add COVID-19 on people’s death certificates or are not being allowed to use the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat patients. But the speakers are not named, so we can’t really tell who they are, or even if they are doctors at all. That makes it impossible to tell if they are credible.

I asked Willis why he didn’t name those people. He told me he was in a hurry to release the 26-minute version of “Plandemic,” but the doctors will be named in the final version. “We should have done that,” he said.

Does the Work Claim Some Secret Knowledge?

“Plandemic” calls itself a documentary that reveals “the hidden agenda behind COVID-19.” We are in the midst of a global pandemic where few people in the world can figure out what is happening or the right way to respond, let alone agendas. We have almost every journalist in the country writing about this. And if the truth about a conspiracy is out there, many people have an incentive to share it. But “Plandemic” would like us to think it’s presenting some exclusive bit of secret knowledge that is going to get at the real story. That’s not likely.

Plus, to be honest, there were so many conspiratorial details stacked on top of each other in the film I couldn’t keep them straight. When I spoke to Willis I told him I was having a hard time understanding his point. Then I took a stab at what I thought was the main thrust of his argument. “Are you saying that powerful people planned the pandemic and made it happen so they could get rich by making everyone get vaccines?” I asked.

It turns out Willis isn’t sure either. “We’re in the exploratory phase,” he told me. “I don’t know, to be clear, if it’s an intentional or naturally occurring situation. I have no idea.”

Then he went on to say that the pandemic is being politicized and used to take away our civil liberties and leverage other political policies. “Certain forces” have latched onto the situation, he said. “It’s too fishy.”

He had me at, “I have no idea.” That sums it up. This is a vast pandemic and massive catastrophe. Our country wasn’t prepared for it, and the response by our top leaders has been disjointed. We’re restricted to our homes. Many people have lost their jobs and some are afraid or sick or dying. That makes us vulnerable to exploitation by people who will present inaccurate or intellectually dishonest information that promises to tell us the truth.

Perhaps “Plandemic” is guilty of sloppy storytelling, or maybe people really do believe the things they’re saying in the video. Or perhaps they’re being intentionally dishonest, or it’s a biased connecting of the dots rooted in personal and professional grievances. I don’t know because I can’t get inside their heads to judge their motives.

Ultimately, we’re all going to need to be more savvy consumers when it comes to information, no matter how slickly it’s presented. This may be but a signal of what’s to come in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, when memes and ads of unknown origin come across our social media feeds. There are standards for judging the credibility of the media we take in every day, so let’s apply them.

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Scientists work tirelessly to find a coronavirus vaccine. But there are some questions to answer: How soon a viable vaccine would be developed? Would billions of people worldwide be able to to get it?

Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, answers questions about access to testing for COVID-19, false-negative results and the challenges of mass testing.

SBI Clerk Prelims Exam Analysis & Review 2020 is shared here for all days and all shifts. Check here the detailed analysis and review of the SBI Clerk Prelims 2020 exam held on 22nd February, 29th February and 1st March 2020. Know questions asked and their difficulty level. 

SBI Clerk 2020: SBI is soon going to release SBI Clerk Prelims Result 2020 @sbi.co.in. State Bank of India will conduct the SBI Clerk Mains exam on 19 April 2020 for recruitment of 8000 vacancies. Check here SBI Clerk Notification PDF 2020, exam updates, cut off marks, result date, prelims & mains syllabus, exam pattern, question paper, mock test and others. 

The father of India's moon mission will be our guest at the Idea Exchange on February 6, Monday. Grounded by the government for his alleged role in a scandal-tainted sale of rare radio frequency, former ISRO chief G Madhavan Nair surely has an arduous fight ahead. And his story to tell. We request our readers to send in questions they would like to ask Madhavan Nair. Is there anything in the probe reports of the Antrix-Devas deal? Will he be exonerated? Is he a victim? Controversy a slap on my face: G Madhavan Nair

Naina Lal Kidwai, Group General Manager and Country Head of HSBC India, will be our guest at Idea Exchange on March 23. Send us your questions for her here.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, will be our guest at Idea Exchange on Tuesday, March 20 at 4 pm. Send us your questions for him here.

Ram Gopal Yadav, senior Samajwadi Party leader, will be our guest at Idea Exchange on Tuesday, March 27 at 3.45pm. Yadav is party supremo's Mulayam Singh Yadav's cousin. Send us your questions for him here.

Sriprakash Jaiswal, Union Minister for Coal, will be our guest at Idea Exchange on April 2, 2012. Send us your questions for him here. Check out the reactions from Facebook:

S Y Quraishi, Chief Election Commissioner, will be our guest at Idea Exchange on April 12. Send us your questions for him here.

The Chief Minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar, will be our guest at Idea Exchange on Tuesday, April 17.

Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of Maldives who was ousted from power earlier this year, will be our guest at Idea Exchange on Thursday.

Law Minister Salman Khurshid will be our guest at Idea Exchange on Tuesday.

CPI (M) leader Sitaram Yechury will be our guest at Idea Exchange on Friday, May 4. Reactions on Facebook and Twitter

Israel's Ambassador to India, Alon Ushpiz, will be our guest at Idea Exchange. Ask your questions for him here.

Mushirul Hasan, Director General, National Archives and the author of 2 books on cartoons in India, will be our guest at Idea Exchange. Send us your questions for the internationally known historian, author and ex-Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University at Delhi.