Tag: SB001

A growing global push to halt biodiversity decline, most recently agreed at the G7 on Sunday, leaves Australia out in the cold as the federal government walks away from critical reforms needed to protect threatened species.

The UK government has begun negotiations to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), suggesting that joining this trade pact is a positive result of Brexit.

Morrisons is the UK’s fourth largest food retailer after Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda, holding a 10.5% share of the market. Founded by William Morrison in 1899, the Yorkshire-based company grew under the leadership of his son, Sir Ken Morrison, listing on the London Stock Exchange in 1967.

Public health experts estimate that approximately 70% of the world’s 7.9 billion people must be fully vaccinated to end the COVID-19 pandemic. As of June 21, 2021, 10.04% of the global population had been fully vaccinated, nearly all of them in rich countries.

The Australian government on Tuesday expressed shock at a draft decision to list the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”. But the recommendation has been looming for some time.

New Zealand’s pandemic response and elimination strategy have drawn worldwide attention. At this point, the country remains one of few places in the world without community transmission since the end of February 2021.

Despite the upheaval in the news media caused by loss of advertising, the majority of Australians are unaware of the financial difficulties of commercial news organisations.

The Senate on Tuesday night disallowed a government regulation that would have allowed the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to invest in technologies such as carbon capture and storage and blue hydrogen using fossil fuel.

Managed retreat is controversial, particularly in the United States, but it isn’t just about moving – it’s about adapting to change and building communities that are safer, addressing long-overlooked needs and incorporating new technologies and thoughtful design for living and working in today’s world.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in May 2021 that the nation’s total fertility rate had reached 1.64 children per woman in 2020, dropping 4% from 2019, a record low for the nation.

Traffic is so ubiquitous in U.S. cities that until recently, imagining urban life without it meant looking to other nations for examples. Then, in 2020, COVID-19 closures and lockdowns took drivers off the roads. The thought experiment became real.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already changed so many things about our society and our lives. While some of the impacts can be seen clearly and straight away, others take more digging.

China, meanwhile, has said it supports Myanmar “choosing a development path that suits its own circumstances”. Its veto power on the UN Security Council makes any global consensus on sanctions unlikely.

Journalism has rarely had a fiercer critic, nor a finer practitioner than the longtime writer for The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm, who died last week aged 86.

When we were hanging out for a COVID-19 vaccine in 2020, it was a bit like a horse race. We asked ourselves which vaccine would get over the line to win, and how quickly. Then, as multiple vaccines began reporting results from clinical trials, the race turned to which could ...

The federal Coalition has the characteristics of one party while formally remaining separate entities, which has been a successful, but unusual political arrangement.

Last weekend, China reached a milestone of having administered more than one billion doses of its homegrown COVID-19 vaccines, the majority of which were developed by local companies Sinovac and Sinopharm.

In the past, Olympic Games have resulted in soaring budgets — Tokyo’s US$15.4 billion budget being the latest example — and infrastructure that has lain unused after the 16-day event is over. This has led to justified criticism the Olympics are not the jewel in the crown they were once ...

Public health experts have long argued that when it comes to preventing obesity, we need to stop blaming individuals.

A new drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease was last week given accelerated approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration.

New Zealand faces two enormous challenges if it is to meet its international climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement: biogenic methane emissions from agriculture, and carbon emissions from industry and transport.

Stunning photographs of vast, ghostly spider webs blanketing the flood-affected region of Gippsland in Victoria have gone viral online, prompting many to muse on the wonder of nature.

The wild storms that recently raged across eastern Victoria caused major property and environmental damage, and loss of lives. They’ve also triggered serious water contamination incidents.

Research shows that building lighter-colored, more reflective roads has the potential to lower air temperatures by more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 C) and, in the process, reduce the frequency of heat waves by 41% across U.S. cities.

The charitable deduction is a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxable income that lowers what someone owes the Internal Revenue Service. Only donations to tax-exempt charities count.

The ruling is narrow, but it means that any unequal treatment of religious groups will be regarded as a violation of the First Amendment, even if it comes at the expense of the dignity of LGBTQ citizens.

Flood plain statistics can be confusing, and that confusion can be deadly. Developing better tools to estimate flood risk and finding better ways to talk about that risk can better inform people of the actual risks.

The author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott announced on June 15, 2021, that she and her husband Dan Jewett had given US$2.7 billion to 286 organizations, including universities, arts organizations and other nonprofits. It was her third announcement of this kind since she first publicly discussed her giving intentions in May ...

Leading manufacturers of EVs need to keep import costs low and find a reliable source of these raw materials. Mining the deep sea is one option, but it could also damage habitats and endanger wildlife.

There is growing support for the idea of a four-day working week. Benefits would include greater freedom from work and the opportunity to share work more evenly across the population.

The leading candidate is Ebrahim Raisi, chief of Iran’s judiciary and close ally of the supreme leader. He is all but assured of a victory after the candidates who could have posed a serious challenge to him – including three reformists – were disqualified and prevented from participating in the ...

While it’s now pretty easy to get a COVID-19 shot in most places in the U.S., the vaccine rollout in other parts of the world has been slow or inconsistent due to shortages, uneven access and concerns about safety.

About a quarter of census tracts with a post office don’t have a community bank or credit union branch, suggesting postal banking could provide a financial lifeline to the millions of Americans without a bank account, according to our new research.

The 2.5% increase is more than what Treasury and the Reserve Bank forecast for average wages over the coming year, but also something these conservative institutions would welcome.

New Zealand faces two enormous challenges if it is to meet its international climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement: biogenic methane emissions from agriculture, and carbon emissions from industry and transport.

When Portugal was recently removed from England’s green list for travel, the UK transport secretary, Grant Shapps, blamed it on a new coronavirus variant. “There’s a sort of Nepal mutation of the Indian variant which has been detected,” he said in a recent interview.

When COVID hit the Netherlands in 2020, Amsterdam emptied of visitors overnight. Long-term residents, inured to the permanent noise and litter and tourists peeing in the streets, welcomed the newfound tranquillity. The pandemic, they told the Washington Post, was “a blessing in disguise”.

From news reports, it might sound like the fossil fuel industry is on the defensive after a landmark court ruling and two shareholder votes challenging the industry’s resistance to curbing its greenhouse gas emissions.

NASA is finally headed back to Venus. On June 2, 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency had selected two winners of its latest Discovery class spacecraft mission competition, and both are headed to the second planet from the Sun.

When President Joe Biden took Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning pickup for a test drive in Dearborn, Michigan, in May 2021, the event was more than a White House photo op. It marked a new phase in an accelerating shift from gas-powered cars and trucks to electric vehicles, or EVs.

Organised crime has been front page news after the Australian Federal Police revealed its pivotal role in a multinational sting, three years in the making.

QR code contact-tracing apps are a crucial part of our defence against COVID-19. But their value depends on being widely used, which in turn means people using these apps need to be confident their data won’t be misused.

Australian farmers will benefit from tariff-free access to the UK for limited amounts of Australian beef, lamb, sugar and dairy products to the UK (but will have to wait ten years for the full elimination of tariffs).

Hybrid strain or not, Vietnam’s situation should be a reminder to the world — and particularly countries like Australia, with a similarly good track record in containing the virus — of the continued importance of social distancing and vaccination in our fight against COVID-19.

The Euros are here – Europe’s festival of football, featuring some of the best players on the planet in peak physical condition. Yet alongside this spectacle runs a carnival of corporate advertising – often marketing unhealthy products such as alcohol, junk food and gambling apps.

Did the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 result from high-risk research gone wrong? Regardless of the answer, the risk of future pandemics originating from research with dangerous pathogens is real.

Five antitrust laws proposed in the United States aim to aggressively rein in the market power of “big tech” companies and change the way they do business.

Under so-called mutual obligation rules, the Australian government requires the unemployed to complete activities (including training and applying for a certain number of jobs) in return for receiving unemployment benefits.

South Asia is crucial to the future of Australia. But Australia has just one (small) program focused on South Asian studies across its many universities.

Today, many Australians are enjoying a public holiday. For republicans, days off are great, but celebrating the queen’s birthday rather than an Australian achievement is bizarre. Without constitutional change, we will soon be taking a day off in honour of King Charles.