Tag: SB001

Democrats in Congress want to send US$1 trillion to help out states and cities in their version of the relief bill. The GOP’s bill has, so far, no money for states and cities, though reportedly its position has moderated recently.

COVID-19 has now made us two Australias. There’s Victoria – most specifically Melbourne – and then there’s the rest of the country.

Melburnians have now been wearing mandatory face coverings in public for two weeks. Yet Premier Daniel Andrews yesterday announced another grim milestone in Victoria’s second wave of COVID-19 infections: 725 new cases, a record daily tally for any Australian state since the pandemic began.

The Australian Alps in southeast New South Wales is the traditional home of three Aboriginal groups: the Ngarigo, Walgalu and Djilamatang people. It is home to Australia’s highest peak, Mount Kosciuszko.

New modelling shows that under a worst-case scenario, Australia will be 1.4 million people - or 4% - smaller in 2040, than if COVID-19 had not happened.

In his address to the Aspen Security Forum today, Prime Minister Scott Morrison stressed the importance of Australia’s alliances with fellow liberal democracies.

Virgin Australia’s plan to sack about 3,000 of its 9,000 staff, axe its budget brand Tigerair, streamline its fleet to only Boeing 737s and suspend long-haul international flying indefinitely should come as no surprise.

Americans were alarmed last week when their president suggested on Twitter that the November 3 presidential election should be delayed because mail-in ballots would be fraudulent.

With cases of COVID-19 on the rise, many Australians are asking: what happens if I test positive? With no known cure and no vaccine, what are my treatment options?

The Lebanese capital Beirut was rocked on Tuesday evening local time by an explosion that has killed at least 78 people and injured thousands more.

As Victorians face yet another long period of enforced lockdown, serious concerns are being raised about people’s capacity to comply.

Urban living brings many benefits, but city dwellers worldwide are seeing a rapid increase in noncommunicable health problems, such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.

Americans who lost their jobs because of the pandemic had been getting a US$600 bump on top of state benefits in their weekly unemployment checks since March.

The world continues to reel from the pandemic and, among many other things, the shortage of medical supplies that has resulted.

The restrictions in place for metropolitan Melbourne now are in some ways stricter than those that were in force during New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced sweeping changes to businesses across metropolitan Melbourne, including closure of retail stores and restrictions on some industries, including construction.

In recent years wildfires have entered urban areas, causing breathtaking destruction.

The announcement of stage 4 restrictions in Victoria marks a new, and depressing, stage in Australia’s response to COVID-19.

Non-essential retailers across Melbourne will be shut except for “click and collect” and delivery sales, and industries including meatworks and construction will be drastically scaled back, under Victoria’s unprecedented lockdown.

Creative destruction “is the essential fact about capitalism”, wrote the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942.

Air pollution contributes to as many as 9 million premature deaths worldwide each year – twice as many as war, other violence, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.

A “state of disaster” has been declared for the whole of Victoria from 6pm, Sunday August 2, for a month.

James Murdoch is not the most obvious candidate for editorial heroism. His route to resigning from the News Corp board because of “disagreements over certain editorial content” has been circuitous and colourful.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft, produced by private company SpaceX, is scheduled to return from the International Space Station (ISS) and splash down in the Atlantic ocean on August 2.

COVID-19 testing has two purposes. The first is to confirm a diagnosis so that medical treatment can be appropriately rendered. The second is to do surveillance for tracking and disease suppression.

Road transportation is a major consumer of fossil fuels, contributing 16 per cent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, which warm up the Earth’s atmosphere and cause changes to the climate.

For a long time, richer developed countries have been underwriting the costs of climate change in poorer developing countries, leaving them reliant on Western solutions to their climate-related issues.

Stronger Indigenous languages are more than a standalone target. Every policy area needs to consider the language backgrounds of the people affected.

The COVID-19 crisis has led many to argue that the current crisis has exacerbated the inequalities inherent in the current economic order.

This recession is the result of the forced hibernation of large parts of the economy in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

COVID-19 has shown how damaging ill-health can be for the economy. But it has also shown how measures that benefit health (lockdowns) can be seen as bad economic prosperity.

State revenues are heading in the same direction, so many U.S. cities will need to rely on help from the federal government.

Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, lower-income families are struggling to pay their energy bills.

Certain crimes, such as robberies and sexual offences, have declined dramatically, while others, such as online fraud, have been on the rise.

The ACCC has previously found Google and Facebook’s failure to pay for news content is eating into the advertising revenues which fund journalism.

Next spring is going to be a busy time for Mars. In close succession, three spacecraft will arrive at the planet, joining the dozen or so craft already circling Mars.

The emergency response to Victoria’s COVID-19 crisis has been ramped up today with AUSMAT teams now working alongside defence force and hospital nurses in aged care homes.

Victoria has today achieved another grim record, with 723 new cases of COVID-19 and 13 deaths.

The Morrison government has finally unveiled the long-awaited new National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

Most countries have a staple food: native, fast-growing and easy-to-store plants high in carbohydrates.

This week’s annual Australia-US ministerial (AUSMIN) talks took place within the fraught context of a world growing in enmity and anxiety — but no longer economically.

Sweden’s policymakers did introduce restrictions to limit the spread of COVID-19 infection, but they tried to do so in a way that minimised the effects on people and companies.

From August 1, if the federal government has its way, Medicare will stop paying for GPs to interpret common heart tests called electrocardiograms, or ECGs.

The many manifestations of climate change — including heat waves, droughts, water stress, more intense storms, wildfires, mass extinction and warming oceans — all get progressively worse as the temperature rises.

The WA government closed its border to everybody other than “exempt travellers” from April 5 to limit the spread of COVID-19. Palmer was refused an exemption to enter WA in May and responded by filing a constitutional challenge to the laws authorising the border closure.

Governments all over the world still mostly rely on the use of GDP for economic planning and to set monetary and fiscal policy.

Sovereign citizens are concerned with the legal framework of society. They believe all people are born free with rights.

Australia’s consumer watchdog is suing Google for allegedly misleading millions of people after it started tracking them on non-Google apps and websites in 2016.

On the eve of this week’s Australia-US ministerial (AUSMIN) talks, Payne and Reynolds penned a largely proforma opinion piece in The Australian newspaper.

Strong team. More jobs. Better economy. So say the National Party’s campaign hoardings.