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It is unclear who within auDA or PPB Advisory leaked the report. |
“I cast no aspersions as to who leaked this information, but it is certainly a serious leak. It is also an ad hominem attack where someone is ‘playing the man and not the ball’,” Szyndler wrote. |
The PPB report’s leak comes amid a tumultuous time for auDA. |
Earlier this month a group of three disgruntled members – Szyndler among them – called for a mutiny, petitioning members to vote for a special general meeting for the opportunity to oust four members of auDA's leadership. |
Szyndler along with Josh Rowe, an auDA director from 2001 to 2015, and Jim Stewart appealed to members to carry a vote of no confidence in auDA CEO Cameron Boardman, and for the removal of three directors: Sandra Hook, Suzanne Ewart, and Chris Leptos. |
The rebel group says it has a number of grievances with the way the organisation is run, covering governance, transparency and the handling of a major proposed shake-up which would allow direct registration of .au domains (without the need of .com before it). |
One of their complaints – published on petition website grumpier.com.au earlier this month – relates to a "whispering campaign" at the organisation, which the trio says aims to "discredit some past staff and management". |
"There are certainly lots of rumours floating around about PPB forensic reports and possible financial irregularities," Rowe, Szyndler and Stewart wrote. "If these have any substance, these should be disclosed to members and the parties concerned. If this doesn’t happen soon, that is totally unfair, as it creates undue... |
Fellow rebel Jim Stewart tweeted: "Disgraceful behaviour by auDA. Attempting to smear detractors in Fairfax papers today." |
The in-fighting could prove academic. There are fears within auDA’s ranks that the organisation could be dismantled altogether. |
The Department of Communications and the Arts is soon to publish its review of the management of the .au domain “to ensure its fit for purpose in Australia’s modern digital landscape”. |
“The framework that governs the .au domain was last reviewed 16 years ago and since that time the digital landscape has changed significantly. The review will examine whether Australia’s top-level domain, .au, is being managed consistent with Government and community expectations,” the review’s terms of reference state... |
Diving into their most realistic and ambitious setting yet, the talents at Pixar have produced an exhilarating fish story in the perfectly cast comic adventure Finding Nemo. Not as flat-out inventive as Monsters, Inc. or as sardonic as A Bug's Life and the Toy Story pics, Nemo finds its own sparkling depths, achieving ... |
Pixar vet Andrew Stanton demonstrates confidence and exuberance in his first stint at the helm, working from a script he co-wrote with Bob Peterson and David Reynolds. With the exception of toddlers who might find a few scary moments too intense, kids will get right into the flow of Nemo, while those viewers old enough... |
The marine milieu calls for more visual delicacy and aural subtlety than in past Pixar features — challenges the filmmakers have met through the work of myriad technicians and artists. Before taking poetic license with their CG creations (real fish don't have eyebrows), the animators and designers took lessons in ichth... |
Nemo dazzles from the get-go, beginning with a pre-credits sequence that might prove more frightening to parents than kids, dramatizing as it does the notion that bad things can happen even in suburbia. Clown-fish couple Marlin and Coral (Brooks, Elizabeth Perkins) have just moved to a nice, quiet neighborhood of the G... |
It's no wonder that Marlin turns out to be a nervous, overprotective father who follows little Nemo (Alexander Gould) on his first day of, um, fish school. Nemo's a spirited kid with an endearing flaw — a smaller right fin that flutters constantly — and a healthy sense of rebellion, which he takes to extremes in Dad's ... |
Propelled by his frantic search for Nemo, Marlin ventures farther than he'd ever dreamed of going, joined by good-hearted blue tang Dory (DeGeneres). She's eager to help and unfazable, the perfect complement to Marlin's neurotic timidity, however exasperating her continual lapses in short-term memory become. They're tw... |
Nemo, meanwhile, is welcomed into a community of fish-tank eccentrics in a dentist's office not far from Sydney Harbor. A scarred, self-possessed Moorish idol named Gill (Willem Dafoe) is the only one of Nemo's tank mates who wasn't born in a pet shop, and the wide-eyed youngster inspires him to devise the latest in a ... |
There's a built-in poignancy to the dynamic between son and single father that neither the script nor the actors overstate. That Nemo has no expectation his father will lift a fin to find him is the dark center of the story, setting in bright relief Marlin's every dance with danger as he pursues his stolen child. There... |
The whole cast is aces, with turns from such vibrant talents as Barry Humphries, playing the repentant leader of a self-help group for sharks who are trying to beat the fish-eating habit, and John Ratzenberger as an annoyingly helpful bunch of moonfish showoffs. Geoffrey Rush voices a Sydney pelican who's well-versed i... |
But it's the give-and-take between DeGeneres and Brooks that gives the saga its big heart. DeGeneres' character was created with her in mind, so it makes sense that Dory is a fish with freckles, lips and a rueful smile. When, in an episode of lovely, freewheeling lunacy, she insists on communicating with a blue whale i... |
Her goofy compassion would have only half the impact, however, without Brooks' contrasting nebbish-turned-hero. It's hard to imagine another actor who could deliver lines as angst-ridden and deliriously funny. This is, after all, the tale of a father who not only transcends fear to find his son against all odds, but wh... |
Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, has been criticized for rolling back school nutrition standards, attempting to upend the food stamps program, rejecting World Health Organization guidelines on antibiotics in agriculture and ending a pesticide ban, in a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientist... |
Perdue spent his first year in office “sidelining science and favoring industry”, the report claims, calling for greater congressional scrutiny of the agency. |
“Those kinds of things are the end result of a secretary of agriculture who is more interested in rewarding industry and agriculture than in protecting the public health,” said Karen Perry Stillerman, a senior analyst at UCS and the report’s author. |
The USDA controls much of America’s food policy and programs. School food regulations, agriculture subsidies and safety and food vouchers for poor Americans are all overseen by the agency. |
Despite the USDA’s huge impact, Stillerman said Perdue remains an “under-the-radar” cabinet secretary. UCS said Perdue’s low profile belied the magnitude of changes he had sought. |
For example, the USDA surprised antibiotic resistance campaigners when it said World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines against using medically important antibiotics in agriculture were “not in alignment with US policy and are not supported by sound science”. There is widespread scientific agreement that the magnitud... |
Perdue also proposed the federal government deliver hungry Americans a “harvest box” of “shelf-stable” foods, like meal kit delivery services, rather than vouchers. The idea was immediately derided as an unwieldy. Forty-three million Americans receive food stamps. |
Perdue’s hires were also criticized. For example, the Trump administration’s first nominee for the role of the USDA’s top scientist was not actually a scientist but a former rightwing radio host. The nominee, Sam Clovis, eventually withdrew. Clovis was a Trump campaign co-chair who was questioned in the FBI’s Russian c... |
Nevertheless, Perdue hired Clovis as a “senior adviser” to Perdue. Clovis described his job as “kind of the lead troubleshooter for the secretary”, according to an interview with his former radio station KSCJ. |
Perdue has sought, and received, ethics waivers to hire lobbyists for top positions at the USDA. The director of food policy for the corn syrup industry’s lobbying body, Kailee Tkacz of the Corn Refiners Association, for instance, was hired in July 2017. She received a White House ethics waiver for the position because... |
“In sidelining science and prioritizing agribusiness interests over the public good, Trump’s USDA is following a pattern that has become familiar to administration observers,” wrote the report authors. |
The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. |
Shirley Hazzard, the Australian-born author of an acclaimed if small portfolio of fiction peopled with characters whose lives, much like her own, toss them up far from home, died on Monday night at her home in Manhattan. She was 85. |
A friend, Annabel Davis-Goff, confirmed the death, adding that Ms. Hazzard had struggled with dementia. |
Ms. Hazzard’s fiction is dense with meaning, subtle in implication and tense in plot, often with disaster looming: A shipwreck tears away the parents of tiny children. A man who has waited a lifetime for a woman loses her at the last moment. A disease slowly saps the life from a beloved brother. Nuclear weapons wreak d... |
Catastrophes are accompanied by life’s cruelties: The true love turns out to be the incestuous one. The bureaucrat basks in his power, refusing compassionate leave to an underpaid young worker facing an emergency. |
“I’m not even sure which country I’d be an expatriate of,” she said. |
She conveyed these complex dramas with an austere economy of words, in slim books of winding sentences. “Speech — in literature as in life — can crucially suggest what is not said,” Ms. Hazzard once remarked. |
Shirley Hazzard at her home in Manhattan. |
And yet her novel “The Transit of Venus,” which won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is “stuffed with description so intellectually active as to be sometimes exhausting,” Thomas Mallon wrote in The Atlantic. |
“The Transit of Venus” begins with the shipwreck that orphans the Australian sisters Caro and Grace Bell and traces the hopes of a man who has patiently kept alive a lonely love for Caro across the decades. |
To the disappointment of her admirers, more than 20 years elapsed before Ms. Hazzard followed “The Transit of Venus” with “The Great Fire,” which won the 2003 National Book Award for fiction. Mr. Mallon noted that her fans had begrudged her “even the time she spent on a brief memoir of her friendship with Graham Greene... |
“The Great Fire” had been a long time percolating, however, fed by experiences from Ms. Hazzard’s time in Hong Kong and excerpted as early as 1987 in The New Yorker. |
The novel concerns an improbable couple: Aldred Leith, a British Army officer, and Helen Driscoll, an Australian, who meet in occupied Japan when she is a teenager and he, much older at 32, is engaged in a vague post-Hiroshima project. |
Intellectual and emotional soul mates despite the gulf between their ages, they create a triangle of friendship with Helen’s dying brother, Benedict. |
Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney on Jan. 30, 1931, to a Welsh father and a Scottish mother, both of whom had immigrated to Australia and worked for the company building the Sydney Harbor Bridge. |
Her childhood in Australia was filled with reading — she said of poems that she “ate and drank them up as nourishment” — but also with family discord, alcoholism, mental illness (her mother’s), infidelity (her father’s) and ultimately the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. She recalled seeing maimed veterans of W... |
After World War II, her father joined the Foreign Service and was posted to Hong Kong. Moving to Asia opened a door to the wider world for Ms. Hazzard, but it was also the beginning of a string of wrenching leave-takings. |
At 16, she began working for the British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong and was submerged — for a brief, happy period — in a stimulating social and intellectual atmosphere before being whisked away to New Zealand (as the fictional teenager Helen Driscoll is in “The Great Fire”) and ultimately to New York. |
In New York — she never went to college — she was employed at the United Nations Secretariat for about a decade, during which time she wrote “People in Glass Houses” (1967), a collection of linked stories that satirized the bureaucratic life. |
She also took aim at the United Nations in her nonfiction, most notably in “Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case” (1990), a follow-up to a series of magazine articles she had written beginning in 1980 examining allegations that world powers had been complicit in covering up Kurt Waldheim’s Naz... |
Literary success came to Ms. Hazzard without the usual blizzard of rejection slips. Her long association with The New Yorker began with the first story she submitted, “Woollahra Road,” which had been fished from the slush pile by the fiction editor William Maxwell and published in 1961. |
In 1963 she met Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar, writer and translator, at a party given by Muriel Spark. They married later that year. |
Mr. Steegmuller died in 1994. They had no children. Ms. Hazzard had a sister, Valerie, but had lost touch with her years ago, Ms. Davis-Goff said. There was no information on survivors. |
Ms. Hazzard’s other fiction includes a collection of short stories, “Cliffs of Fall” (1963), and the novel “The Evening of the Holiday” (1966). |
She became a United States citizen in the 1970s. Before her husband’s death, as well as in recent years, she divided her time among apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in Italy — on the island of Capri and in Naples. Her time in Naples led to the book “The Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples,” a collab... |
Award season is back in full swing starting Sunday with the 59th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, and OK! is here to prepare you for television’s biggest night. Here’s what you need to know and what you should look forward to on Sunday. Make sure to check back at okmagazine.com for our final predictions and analyses of th... |
WHEN: Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007 on FOX at 8 p.m. |
Host: The show will be hosted by the man who’s taking everyone’s jobs, Ryan Seacrest. Tune in to see how the 32-year-old stacks up against past hosts — not to mention, comedians — Ellen DeGeneres, Conan O’Brien and Garry Shandling. Can Seacrest bring the funny and viewers? FOX sure seems to think so. |
Presenters: Expect awkward banter between the past, present and future of television. Nominees and past winners who will hand out some gold include Steve Carell, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mary-Louise Parker, Jimmy Smits, Kiefer Sutherland, William Shatner and more. Stars promoting their new shows include Anthony Anderson, K... |
Performers: There will be a Family Guy cast performance paying homage to animation and a number by the Jersey Boys in tribute to The Sopranos, but the most important performance of the night would have to be Tony Bennett’s duet with Christina Aguilera. The two will sing “Steppin’ Out With My Baby,” and that couldn’t be... |
Nominees: Familiarize yourself with the big categories below and make your own predictions while we finalize ours. |
– This is the last year the Emmys can award The Sopranos. How generous will they be? |
– Three Grey’s Anatomy women are up for Supporting Actress, which could potentially cause a vote split. |
– Breakout Ugly Betty star America Ferrera could sweep all three big awards (Globe, SAG and Emmy) this season should she win. |
– Will The Amazing Race five-peat (yes, five!) in Outstanding Reality-Competition Program? The show has never lost since the category was created in 2003, which also means American Idol has never won. Can Ryan bring be its good luck charm? |
– The intricate voting process — voting for the winners (and nominees) isn’t easy as 1-2-3. People don’t just check off their favorite shows and stars/Hollywood buddies (at least they shouldn’t), but rather, they’re supposed to watch the nominees’ episode submissions before deciding. Actors and shows must submit episod... |
A majority of New Yorkers believe Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s aides acted unethically when they inserted themselves into the now-defunct Moreland Commission’s corruption probes, but the scandal has only put a slight dent in Cuomo’s massive lead in the polls. |
A NBC 4 New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll released Tuesday found that Cuomo’s favorability rating is at the lowest since he’s taken office: 53 percent. Still, a majority of New Yorkers, 54 percent, support the governor over Republican gubernatorial challenger and Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, who ca... |
Cuomo has been under a barrage of criticism from Astorino and Cuomo’s Democratic primary challenger Zephyr Teachout since The New York Times reported that the governor’s aides meddled with the Moreland Commission whenever the investigatory panel set its sights on groups politically linked to Cuomo. |
But, the scandal appears to be a non-issue for voters. Only 23 percent of voters said the controversy is a major factor in deciding their vote. Seventy-one percent described it as either a minor factor or not factor at all. |
While 52 percent say Cuomo’s staff, which includes former Chief Deputy Suffolk County Executive Regina Calcaterra, acted unethically, only 11 percent believe they broke the law. |
Last week, Teachout’s running mate, Tim Wu, held a conference call with reporters where he claimed Cuomo may have broken four New York statutes—criminal solicitation of official misconduct, conspiracy to perform official misconduct, obstructing governmental administration and hindering prosecution. |
The U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, is reportedly investigating cases the commission was working on before it was unceremoniously disbanded in April. He also reportedly warned in a letter that his office may look into possible obstruction of justice or witness tampering violations related to public statemen... |
This is the most criticism Cuomo has faced since taking office, but he remains comfortably ahead in the polls. |
The governor does face some challenges, however. The poll found that the slight decline in his margin over Astorino—81 percent to 72 percent—is the result of less support from Democrats. He also saw a drop in Republican backers—30 percent to 24 percent. |
Astorino has yet to make up any ground, largely because he’s unknown among a majority of voters. |
Teachout, a constitutional law professor at Fordham University who is popular among progressives, has also struggled to get her name out to mainstream voters. |
In other news related to the commission, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, one of the commission’s co-chairs, is reportedly “assisting” in Bharara’s investigation, according to the New York Daily News. Rice’s Republican opponent for Congress, Bruce Blakeman, the former presiding officer of the Nassau Count... |
The film spawned a trio of classic lines and turned Tom Cruise into an acting powerhouse. |
When the romantic comedy Jerry Maguire hit theaters Dec. 13, 1996, it featured a career-altering performance by superstar Tom Cruise and the breakthroughs of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Renée Zellweger. |
The stars owe big-time gratitude to writer/director Cameron Crowe, who penned the screenplay that continues to pay significant pop-culture dividends two decades later with lines such as Gooding's famed "Show me the money!" |
"The notion that the phrases and utterances from this movie still resonate after entering the popular vernacular 20 years ago is rather astonishing. It just shows the very smart writing," says film historian Leonard Maltin, who writes about movies at LeonardMaltin.com. "Jerry Maguire captured something in the zeitgeist... |
Crowe admits things got really interesting when both George W. Bush and Barack Obama referenced the film. |
"The second time a U.S. president quoted Jerry Maguire, my mom finally gave up on me being a lawyer," says Crowe. |
"Show me the money!": With once-cocky sports agent Jerry Maguire (Cruise) out of a job and desperate to hold on to clients, he reaches out to Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Rod Tidwell (Gooding), who colorfully expresses his unhappiness with his existing contract. Not only does the shirtless Gooding gyrate and repeat ... |
The celebrated scene made Gooding an instant success and propelled the actor to a best supporting actor Oscar win. |
"There are star-making roles or star-making performances," says Dave Karger, special correspondent for movie site IMDb.com. "But in this case, it was a star-making four words. That is rare." |
Kevin Hart and Josh Gad re-created the scene to promote 2015's The Wedding Ringer. Gooding's emphatic utterance remains No. 25 on the American Film Institute's top 100 movie quotes list. |
"You had me at hello": Zellweger had appeared in 1994's Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation before starring as idealistic single mom Dorothy Boyd, who quits her job in solidarity with Maguire and eventually falls for him. The film shot Zellweger to stardom, with ammunition provided by the climactic scene in wh... |
"Renee Zellweger was a fresh face, and the poignancy with which she delivered that line really made it stand out," says Maltin. |
It ranks No. 52 among AFI's top 100 lines. |
"You complete me": Cruise was a worldwide star known for brash roles such as Maverick in Top Gun and Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man when he signed to Crowe's film. His humbled sports agent was able to open his heart to Dorothy with the romantic line. |
"With a line like that in that role, I would say Jerry Maguire cemented Tom Cruise, already a massive star, as a multi-decade acting powerhouse," says Karger. "This was a very important movie for him and that was a key line." |
"You complete me" spawned everything from T-shirts to movie tributes — including Heath Ledger's Joker repeating it to Batman in 2008's The Dark Knight and Mike Myers' Dr. Evil uttering it to Mini-Me in 1999's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. |
Dan Delton Fulgham was a fighter pilot during the Korean and Vietnam wars, tested high-altitude parachute systems for rocket planes and was mistaken for an alien after a balloon-test crash landing. |
His facial appearance and bandaging from the 1959 crash was coupled with a dozen years of weird sightings near Roswell, N.M. Together, the secretive Air Force test activity of the times and Fulgham’s injury made the town famous for UFOs. |
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