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Category: Australia

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Learner rider fined for excessive speed

    Source: Tasmania Police

    Learner rider fined for excessive speed

    Friday, 31 January 2025 – 9:52 am.

    A learner rider has been fined and disqualified from driving for four months after he was detected travelling at 130km/h on the South Arm Highway yesterday.
    Police detected the L-Plater at South Arm about 4pm Thursday travelling 50km/h above the designated speed limit of 80km/h.
    Inspector Kathy Bennett said travelling at such high speeds put both the rider and other road users at risk.
    “This rider was inexperienced and disappointingly put himself, and others, at risk of serious injury or death,” she said.
    “We’re encouraging anyone who witnesses such dangerous driving behaviour to report it to police.”
    Information can be provided by calling police on 131 444. 
    If you can’t report it at the time but you have footage, you can upload it to police.tas.gov.au/report/ 

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Fatal crash, Woolnorth

    Source: Tasmania Police

    Fatal crash, Woolnorth

    Friday, 31 January 2025 – 9:55 am.

    Sadly, a man has died after a serious single-vehicle crash at Woolnorth in the state’s North-West.
    Police and emergency services were called to West Montagu Road at Woolnorth just before 4.40am Friday after reports a vehicle had crashed.
    A Circular Head man in his 20s, who was the sole occupant of the vehicle, sadly died at the scene.
    The road will remain closed for several hours while the scene is cleared.
    Motorists are asked to avoid the area.
    Investigations into the crash are ongoing and a report will be prepared for the Coroner.
    Our thoughts are with the man’s family and loved ones.

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI: $HAREHOLDER ALERT: The M&A Class Action Firm Urges Stockholders of ATSG, CTV, DFS, BERY to Act Now

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    NEW YORK, Jan. 30, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Monteverde & Associates PC (the “M&A Class Action Firm”), has recovered millions of dollars for shareholders and is recognized as a Top 50 Firm by ISS Securities Class Action Services Report. We are headquartered at the Empire State Building in New York City and are investigating:

    • Air Transport Services Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATSG), relating to a proposed merger with Stonepeak Nile Parent LLC. Under the terms of the agreement, Air Transport Services Group shareholders will receive $22.50 per share of Air Transport Services Group Common Stock they own.

    ACT NOW. The Shareholder Vote is scheduled for February 10, 2025.

    Click here for more information https://monteverdelaw.com/case/air-transport-services-group-inc-atsg/. It is free and there is no cost or obligation to you.

    • Innovid Corp. (NYSE: CTV), relating to the proposed merger with Mediaocean LLC. Under the terms of the agreement, Mediaocean will acquire Innovid at a price of $3.15 per share of common stock.

    ACT NOW. The Shareholder Vote is scheduled for February 11, 2025.

    Click here for more https://monteverdelaw.com/case/innovid-corp-ctv/. It is free and there is no cost or obligation to you.

    • Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), relating to its proposed merger with Capital One Financial Corp. Under the terms of the agreement, DFS shareholders are expected to receive 1.0192 shares of Capital One per share they own.

    ACT NOW. The Shareholder Vote is scheduled for February 18, 2025.

    Click here for more information: https://www.monteverdelaw.com/case/discover-financial-services. It is free and there is no cost or obligation to you.

    • Berry Global Group, Inc. (NYSE: BERY), relating to the proposed merger with AMCOR plc. Under the terms of the agreement, Berry shareholders will receive a fixed exchange ratio of 7.25 Amcor shares for each Berry share held upon closing, resulting in Amcor and Berry shareholders owning approximately 63% and 37% of the combined company, respectively.

    ACT NOW. The Shareholder Vote is scheduled for February 25, 2025.

    Click here for more information https://monteverdelaw.com/case/berry-global-group-inc-bery/. It is free and there is no cost or obligation to you.

    NOT ALL LAW FIRMS ARE THE SAME. Before you hire a law firm, you should talk to a lawyer and ask:

    1. Do you file class actions and go to Court?
    2. When was the last time you recovered money for shareholders?
    3. What cases did you recover money in and how much?

    About Monteverde & Associates PC

    Our firm litigates and has recovered money for shareholders…and we do it from our offices in the Empire State Building. We are a national class action securities firm with a successful track record in trial and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. 

    No company, director or officer is above the law. If you own common stock in any of the above listed companies and have concerns or wish to obtain additional information free of charge, please visit our website or contact Juan Monteverde, Esq. either via e-mail at jmonteverde@monteverdelaw.com or by telephone at (212) 971-1341.

    Contact:
    Juan Monteverde, Esq.
    MONTEVERDE & ASSOCIATES PC
    The Empire State Building
    350 Fifth Ave. Suite 4740
    New York, NY 10118
    United States of America
    jmonteverde@monteverdelaw.com
    Tel: (212) 971-1341

    Attorney Advertising. (C) 2024 Monteverde & Associates PC. The law firm responsible for this advertisement is Monteverde & Associates PC (www.monteverdelaw.com). Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome with respect to any future matter.

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-Evening Report: 5 years after COVID began, outstanding fines mean marginalised Australians are still paying the highest price

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shelley J. Walker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Justice Health, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

    Rob1037/Shutterstock

    January 25 marked five years since the first COVID case was recorded in Australia.

    Many of us have tried to move on quickly from the pandemic, putting lockdowns and restrictions far behind us.

    But for some Australians, this hasn’t been possible. Among the pandemic’s lingering impacts is the burden of outstanding fines, issued for breaking COVID restrictions.

    These often hit disadvantaged groups the hardest, who were more likely to be fined and less able to pay. Five years down the track, marginalised communities are still feeling the impact of these penalties.

    Our new research involved surveys and in-depth interviews with people who used drugs during the pandemic. They reported feeling targeted by police and even harassed while trying to access drug treatments – and years later, many still have fines they’re unable to pay.

    Thousands of unpaid fines

    During the pandemic, police issued millions of dollars’ worth of fines to people who broke restrictions. More than 50,000 fines were issued in Victoria and around 62,000 in New South Wales .

    Fines ranged from A$200 for not wearing a face mask to nearly $5,000 for breaking rules about gatherings.

    Fines were a public health measure aimed at stopping the virus spreading.

    But for some people already struggling with financial and social problems, including those who use drugs, it compounded their difficulties.

    Studies have found some groups were fined much more often than others, including people from Sudanese and South Sudanese backgrounds, Aboriginal people and children experiencing disadvantage.

    While they were intended as public health measures, the fines reveal deeper patterns about targeted policing.

    Following calls by community legal services and human rights groups and updated legal advice, the NSW government withdrew all outstanding COVID fines at the end of 2024.

    This is not the case in Victoria. In June 2023, around 30,000 fines were outstanding in Victoria, and to our knowledge the situation hasn’t changed since then.

    Feeling targeted

    We know that people who use drugs already face increased police scrutiny in general, due to the criminalisation of drug use.

    We conduct two long-term studies with people who use drugs in Victoria, which involves participating in an annual survey.

    During the pandemic we asked additional questions about people’s interactions with police. Between March 2020 and May 2022, 1,130 participants responded to our survey.

    Our new research found one in ten reported being stopped by police.

    A third of these received at least one COVID-related fine – mostly for breaking curfews, failing to wear a face mask or breaching travel restrictions – a rate we calculated as nearly three times higher than the general population.

    However, this is a crude estimate, as accurate data on the numbers of fines in the general population is not publicly available.

    Of those who received fines, most were unemployed, more than a quarter were in unstable housing or homeless, and more than half had been to prison.

    We also did in-depth interviews with 76 participants. Many told us they felt the pandemic gave police an “excuse” to target them, leading to serious and lasting effects on their lives.

    Fined while accessing services

    Interactions with police were described as fraught with discrimination and harassment. Participants reported being stopped, searched and fined while trying to go about their daily lives. This may be partly because their circumstances meant they were more likely to be using public spaces – and therefore were more visible to police.

    Daniel, aged 41, was fined $1,652 for breaching COVID rules he told us he didn’t understand. He said:

    it was so obvious they were looking for drugs – it felt like they were doing everything they could to find a reason to fine us.

    For people who use drugs, accessing harm-reduction services and drug treatment programs (such as methadone to replace opioids) is vital to their health. Some participants told us they were fined while doing so, despite carrying medical exemptions.

    Natasha, aged 39, was homeless. She said she was fined while travelling to a needle and syringe program, despite being within the permitted travel zone.

    Police issued her a fine for leaving the home for non-essential purposes. Natasha found the situation absurd, asking “how can you be (fined for being) outside if you sleep outside?”

    Ryan, aged 45, was fined $1,800 while collecting methadone. He described the encounter as “humiliating” and unnecessary, saying police appeared more interested in finding drugs than enforcing public health measures.

    The financial and emotional toll

    In our study, the financial burden of COVID fines was devastating.

    Most could not afford to pay fines or lacked the confidence to navigate appeals processes to contest them, leading to further entanglement with the criminal legal system.

    For example, Sally, who received multiple fines while collecting her methadone during the pandemic, said:

    at the end of the day, they’re government authority and I’m a nobody – the chances of me winning would be slim to none.

    As a result, unpaid fines for some reportedly led to court orders, some were arrested, and a few even reported serving prison time.

    The emotional toll was equally severe, with feelings of being targeted and harassed by police further eroding their trust in public institutions.

    The Conversation contacted Victoria Police about our study, noting participants thought police were using the pandemic as an excuse to target them.

    In response, a police spokesperson said: “At the time officers were performing duties on behalf of the Chief Health Officer’s direction.”

    The burden can be lifted

    Public health responses should be designed to protect people, not punish them. As we move forward, it is crucial to address the lasting impacts of COVID fines.

    All Australian governments should follow the lead of NSW and waive all remaining fines to alleviate the financial and emotional burden on vulnerable populations.

    *Names have been changed.

    Shelley Walker is the recipient of an ARC Discovery Early Career Award (project number DE240101056) funded by the Australian Government. The study presented in this article was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council NHMRC (#2003255). The SuperMIX and VMAX studies are funded by the NHMRC; #545891, #1126090, #1148170)

    Paul Dietze receives funding from the NHMRC and government and non-government organisations for the conduct of research into the impacts of alcohol and other drug use.

    Lisa Maher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. 5 years after COVID began, outstanding fines mean marginalised Australians are still paying the highest price – https://theconversation.com/5-years-after-covid-began-outstanding-fines-mean-marginalised-australians-are-still-paying-the-highest-price-247912

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: One of the largest searches for alien life started 30 years ago. Its legacy lives on today

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phil Edwards, Senior Research Scientist, Australia Telescope National Facility Science, CSIRO

    In February 1995, a small research organisation known as the SETI Institute launched what was then the most comprehensive search for an answer to a centuries-old question: are we alone in the universe?

    This Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the first astronomical observations conducted for the search, named Project Phoenix. These observations were done at the Parkes Observatory on Wiradjuri country in the central west of New South Wales, Australia – home to one of the world’s largest radio telescopes.

    But Project Phoenix was lucky to get off the ground.

    Three years earlier, NASA had commenced an ambitious decade-long, US$100 million Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). However, in 1993, the United States Congress cut all funding for the program because of the growing US budget deficit. Plus, SETI sceptics in Congress derided the program as a far-fetched search for “little green men”.

    Fortunately, the SETI Institute secured enough private donations to revive the project – and Project Phoenix rose from the ashes.

    Listening for radio signals

    If there is life elsewhere, it is natural to assume it evolved over many million years on a planet orbiting a long-lived star similar to our Sun. So SETI searches usually target the nearest Sun-like stars, listening for radio signals that are either being deliberately beamed our way, or are techno-signatures radiating from another planet.

    Techno-signatures are confined to a narrow range of frequencies and produced by the technologies an advanced civilisation like ours might use.

    Astronomers use radio waves as they can penetrate the clouds of gas and dust in our galaxy. They can also travel over large distances without excessive power requirements.

    Murriyang, CSIRO’s 64 metre radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory, has been in operation since 1961.
    It has made a wealth of astronomical discoveries and played a pivotal role in tracking space missions – especially the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

    As the largest single-dish radio telescope in the southern hemisphere, it is also the natural facility to use for SETI targets in the southern skies.

    While Project Phoenix planned to use several large telescopes around the world, these facilities were undergoing major upgrades. So it was at Parkes that the observing program started.

    On February 2 1995, Murriyang pointed towards a carefully chosen star 49 light-years from Earth in the constellation of, naturally, Phoenix. This was the first observation conducted as part of the project.

    The focus cabin of Murriyang, the Parkes telescope, with the Flag of Earth, much favoured by SETI researchers.
    CSIRO Radio Astronomy Image Archive, CC BY-NC

    A logistical and technological success

    Project Phoenix was led by Jill Tarter, a renowned SETI researcher who spent many long nights at Parkes overseeing observations during the 16 weeks dedicated to the search. (Jodie Foster’s character in the 1998 movie Contact was largely based on Jill.)

    The Project Phoenix team brought a trailer full of computers with state-of-the-art touch screen technology to process the data.

    Bogong moths caused some early interruptions to the processing. These large, nocturnal moths were attracted to light from computer screens, flying into them with enough force to change settings.

    Over 16 weeks, the Project Phoenix team observed 209 stars using Murriyang at frequencies between 1,200 and 3,000 mega-hertz. They searched for both continuous and pulsing signals to maximise the chance of finding genuine signals of alien life.

    Jill Tarter in the Parkes telescope control room.
    CSIRO Radio Astronomy Image Archive, CC BY-NC

    Radio telescopes are able to detect the faint radio emissions from distant celestial objects. But they are also sensitive to radio waves produced in modern society (our own techno-signatures) by mobile phones, Bluetooth connections, aircraft radar and GPS satellites.

    These kinds of local interference can mimic the kinds of signal SETI searches are looking for. So distinguishing between the two is crucial.

    To do this, Project Phoenix decided to use a second radio telescope some distance away for an independent check of any signals detected. CSIRO provided access to its 22 metre Mopra radio telescope, about 200 kilometres north of Parkes, to follow up signal candidates in real time.

    Over the 16 weeks, the team detected a total of 148,949 signals at Parkes – roughly 80% of which could be easily dismissed as local signals. The team checked a little over 18,000 signals at both Parkes and Mopra. Only 39 passed all tests and looked like strong SETI candidates. But on closer inspection the team identified them as coming from satellites.

    AS Jill Tarter summarised in an article in 1997:

    Although no evidence for an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal was found, no mysterious or unexplained signals were left behind and the Australian deployment was a logistical and technological success.

    From left to right: journalist Robyn Williams, Jill Tarter, Australia Telescope National Facility Director, Ron Ekers, and Parkes Observatory Officer-in-Charge, Marcus Price, prior to the start of Project Phoenix.
    CSIRO Radio Astronomy Image Archive, CC BY-NC

    The next generation of radio telescopes

    When Project Phoenix ended in 2004, project manager Peter Backus concluded “we live in a quiet neighbourhood”.

    But efforts are continuing to search for alien life with greater sensitivity, over a wider frequency range, and for more targets.

    Breakthough Listen, another privately funded project, commenced in 2015, again making use of the Parkes telescope among others.

    Breakthrough Listen aims to examine one million of the closest stars and 100 closest galaxies.

    One unexpected signal detected at Parkes in 2019 as part of this project was examined in painstaking detail before it was concluded that it too was a locally generated signal.

    The next generation of radio telescopes will provide a leap in sensitivity compared to facilities today – benefitting from greater collecting area, improved resolution and superior processing capabilities.

    Examples of these next generation radio telescopes include the SKA-Low telescope, under construction in Western Australia, and the SKA-Mid telescope, being built in South Africa. They will be used to answer a wide variety of astronomical questions – including whether there is life beyond Earth.

    As SETI pioneer Frank Drake once noted:

    the most fascinating, interesting thing you could find in the universe is not another kind of star or galaxy … but another kind of life.

    Project Phoenix used Murriyang, the CSIRO Parkes radio-telescope, under contract for the work described in this article. I work for CSIRO, but joined in 2006 after this project had been completed.

    – ref. One of the largest searches for alien life started 30 years ago. Its legacy lives on today – https://theconversation.com/one-of-the-largest-searches-for-alien-life-started-30-years-ago-its-legacy-lives-on-today-247097

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Serious crash Craigmore

    Source: South Australia Police

    Emergency services are at the scene of a serious crash at Craigmore.

    Just after 8.30am today (Friday 31 January) a two-car collision occurred on Uley Road.

    Road closures will be in place motorists are asked to avoid the area.

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Greens stand with Coromandel locals against Luxon’s destructive mining policy

    Source: Green Party

    Green Party MP Steve Abel this morning joined Coromandel locals in Waihi to condemn new mining plans announced by Shane Jones in the pit of the town’s Australian-owned Gold mine.

    “These communities have successfully opposed mining for the best part of 50 years – Jones’ latest announcement is a mere blip in history that will be undone when there’s a new Green Government,” says Green Party Spokesperson for Resources, Steve Abel.

    “They know first-hand that long after the jobs have dried up and the mine bosses have taken the profits overseas the locals are left with a toxic legacy of cyanide tailings dams and acid mine drainage. 

    “Our public conservation lands exist to protect our rich natural landscapes, and the unique native plants and animals that they sustain.

    “When John Key’s National government proposed a similar policy in 2010, 40,000 people marched up Queen Street in vehement opposition. Now, Christopher Luxon is resurrecting the same terrible idea. 

    “Mining more conservation land was a terrible idea 15 years ago and it’s a worse idea now. The message back in 2010 was clear: conservation land is for all of us, not for the profits of a wealthy few. Nothing’s changed.

    “We can’t mine our way to a liveable planet. The resources we need for energy transition need to come from better waste recovery. Coal and gold are not critical minerals.

    “We can’t rip, strip and bust our way to real prosperity – our well-being relies on a thriving natural world and a stable climate–and that’s why the extractive mindset is unfit for the 21st century,” says Steve Abel.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: A new direction for the minerals sector to grow the economy

    Source: New Zealand Government

    Firstly I want to thank OceanaGold for hosting our event today. Your operation at Waihi is impressive. I want to acknowledge local MP Scott Simpson, local government dignitaries, community stakeholders and all of you who have gathered here today. 

    It’s a privilege to welcome you to the launch of the Minerals Strategy for New Zealand and our Critical Minerals List.

    Of course our joint presence fulfils a deeper presence. It is a validation of an industry that has suffered from excessive regulation and poisonous politics. It is a chance to stand with a skilled workforce that is literally worth its weight in gold.

    A year of delivery for the minerals sector under the Coalition Government

    In May last year I stood in front of a packed hall in Blackball on the West Coast, people who depend on our mineral resources.

    I presented to them a vision for the future – a vision that would see our wealth base grow by utilising our mineral reserves to benefit all New Zealanders, increasing our domestic resilience by reducing reliance on imported minerals.

    I said this meant owning up to the fact that we will use our indigenous fossil fuels. Resources integral to our modern industrial civilisation. We do have valuable minerals, oil and gas.

    These minerals include coal, a vital ingredient to steel-making, a source of energy and jobs, a stream of export earnings. 

    I spoke of our focus on cutting barriers to development but not corners, and increasing New Zealand’s contributions to global supply chains, especially for minerals that are needed to support the transition to diverse sources of energy.

    Dealing with banks

    It is not widely known but some barriers are not imposed by government but come in the form of corporate straitjackets. One should look no further than the directors and executives of our banking sector. Some are in thrall to climate group-think.

    They are the new corporate gatekeepers, imposing moral priorities under the cover of saving the planet upon regional communities. Not only are they inflicting their luxury beliefs on our farming industry but they are actively de-banking mineral firms.

    Kiwi enterprises legitimately operating in the natural resource sector are being driven to despair by these woke-riddled, corporate undertakers.

    This malevolence flows from cult like accords fostered within the UN where banks and their sustainability units foolishly believe they can change the weather. New Zealand banks should abandon such agreements as the Net Zero Banking Alliance. These instruments are alien and represent a foreign threat to regional development.

    To this end New Zealand First will be introducing a members bill stopping the banks and related corporate bodies from behaving in this harmful manner. We cannot let them hold our economic development to ransom to suit the privileged cabal employed on environmental, social and inclusion matters. 

    This will include the ability for regulators to remove a bank’s operating licence if it persist with virtue-signalling destructiveness. 

    As an Associate Finance Minister, I will be working closely with the Minister for Regulation to identify how elements of our bill can be used in the wider government work programme.

    I would like to acknowledge the work of ACT MP Mark Cameron on this issue so far. He is a champion for the farming sector.

    I want the mining sector on an enduring pathway to boost regional opportunities and jobs, increase our self-sufficiency, to be a critical part of our export-led focus, especially as we take advantage of the global opportunities for new minerals uses.

    How can we achieve such outcomes if key intermediaries such as banks and insurance companies are going to bully our Kiwi businesses and their employees out of the economy? When did citizens authorise corporates to use climate extremism to bankrupt firm and family alike?

    It is bad enough that Aussie-owned banks are behaving in this predatory manner but it is especially galling that Kiwibank is treating Kiwis in this vein. Had New Zealand First known this would be their attitude we may very well have formed a different view about their recent recapitalisation initiative. 

    Our Government has progressed in enabling an environment for a responsible and productive minerals sector to thrive.

    Resources-friendly policy

    We’ve moved quickly to enact policy and legislative fixes. Our upgrades have included introducing the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill that will not only remove the ban on petroleum exploration beyond onshore Taranaki – it will deliver a new tier of minerals permit to make it easier for people to undertake small-scale non-commercial gold mining activity across the country. We expect to finalise and pass the Bill in the coming months.

    We’ve made changes to the Resource Management Act to align consenting for coal mining with other forms of mining to reduce barriers that are holding back economic development.

    Timely permit decisions are vital in supporting the sector to get to work. Following direction on my expectations, regulator New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals has made significant progress dealing with the backlog of permit decisions while managing the growing influx of new applications as activity ramps up. 

    Figures for 2024 show a 74 per cent increase in minerals permitting output – that’s the number of outcomes made on minerals applications – compared to the previous calendar year.

    In 2023, NZP&M received 288 new and change minerals permit applications and in 2024 it was 447. That is a 55 per cent increase – and a very good indicator of a sector that is really starting to hum.

    We have begun our journey to rebuild international investor awareness in our mining sector through the delivery of investment aids such as the GNS Endowment Study. This is a specialist report bringing together extensive technical research to identify short, medium, and long-term prospects for potential development.

    We have returned to the international mining stage to make sure New Zealand is back on the agenda for international investors and challenge responsible operators to explore what we have to offer.

    Finally, I can’t understate the impact that our new Fast-track Approvals legislation will have in sending well-planned, investment-ready projects along the path of development.

    The Act’s broad and overarching purpose statement is to recognise the contributions significant projects such as mining operations can make to our communities and economy.

    At long last the gate-keepers behind the outdated Wildlife Act and cumbersome Conservation Act will be brought to heel. On the former there is more to do. Sadly it is often delivered at an operational level in a way inimical to our productivity. 

    Previously mining companies were unable to secure permits under these statutes for dubious reasons. That has now disappeared. If there are implementation problems the Government will make additional amendments to the law.

    A one-stop shop will streamline the pathway to attaining the approvals required for mining activities, removing the multiple application processes operators currently must navigate to mine in New Zealand.

    Land access

    One of the key areas I see this process improving is concessions for land access. An array of high-value mining and quarrying projects are already approved to travel this consenting pathway.

    Officials estimate the number of jobs across the mining projects listed in Schedule 2 of the Fast-track Approvals Act at over 2,500 direct fulltime jobs at peak production. Many of these roles will be well-paying regional jobs with significant opportunities for training and growing skills.

    I don’t need to tell the good folks of Waihi that every direct employee of a mining company generates many more job opportunities. The environmental scientists that provide expert advice, the drilling companies that contract with OceanaGold, and all the other skills needed to run a successful operation spread out over the local, regional, and national economy.

    For the seven listed mining projects that will generate export revenue, estimates are a peak of $2.5 billion in 2033, with gold playing a big part. This is what our minerals potential looks like.

    Going forward, this is what consenting will look like for significant mining projects in our country.

    As our industry expands, we need to ensure that Paamu and statutes such as the Queen Elizabeth the Second National Trust Act are fit for purpose and do not inhibit the growth of critical minerals.

    When there is opportunity, we are going to say yes

    I will make one further note about this Government’s work to provide the certainty that the sector needs to push forward.

    Not all conservation land is equal. We have an inordinately large conservation estate of varying quality.

    Stewardship land is managed by the Department of Conservation until it is appropriately assessed for its conservation value and classified. Around 30 per cent of conservation areas are held in stewardship – that’s over 2.7 million hectares or 9 per cent of New Zealand’s total land area.

    A lot of that land isn’t considered to have special conservation or scenic values, but we do know that there are areas there likely to contain mineral deposits.

    This Government supports sustainable and environmentally approved mining on stewardship land and other categories of DOC land but we are very clear that national parks and other land categories identified under schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act are not on the table.

    It would be remiss of me not to also mention my favourite amphibian, Freddy the Frog at this point. I raise this not in a flippant way, but as realist wanting to have a genuine conversation about how we focus our efforts and limited resources in protecting the natural assets that New Zealanders value most.

    It is correct that our Archey’s frog is endangered – but it is not from mining. The real threat to Freddy is the rats, stoats and pigs that populate significant extents of our stewardship and conservation land.

    I put to you that the work we are doing to enable responsible mining in New Zealand is the best news Freddy has had for a long time. As part of its listed Fast-track Approvals project, OceanaGold will be stepping up with an intensive predator control programme in the Coromandel Forest Park. 

    In fact, it’s because of OceanaGold and its specialist conservationists that we have some of the most insightful research collected on the species to date. Over $600,000 towards ecological outcomes around this mining site. 

    Actually a much larger sum when one considers the broader commercial footprint including Macraes, Otago, South Island. Such a quantum is not possible without a successful business.

    It is time for Kiwis to have an honest and considered debate on mining. On this score I am going to pay more attention to the blue collar community than woke collar spongers. 

    This engagement will lead us to the complex and deadweight nature of our climate change regulations. They are excessive for our small economy. They run the risk of deindustrialisation, exporting jobs and importing carbon.

    Of course this is all intertwined with environmental, social and government reporting requirements. dubious value and should be discretionary at best. Green scrub that has spread too far and needs a severe prune. 

    We need to acknowledge the criticality of minerals to our daily lives, the importance of maintaining a strong, independent economy with well-paying jobs and opportunities in our regions. Why import materials we can perfectly adequately supply ourselves?

    Some people argue against minerals extraction, but gladly rely on the conveniences of modern society and economy built by those resources. As our Prime Minister said, we don’t have the luxury of turning off growth. 

    A strategy to ensure momentum is enduring

    Some of you in the sector may be looking at this progress and feeling like we’ve been here before, only for the hard-won momentum to die with a change in Government.

    I hear your concerns. I’ve spoken at length about how a lack of long-term, enduring strategic direction has hindered this country in reaping the economic and security benefits our bounty of natural resources presents.

    Today we change that.

    The Minerals Strategy for New Zealand adopts a strategic lens out to 2040, focusing our approach to the development of our minerals estate with a delivery roadmap to get us there. This is a holistic picture of minerals production from the earth, from reprocessing waste material, and from potential recycling and recovery.

    There are three main changes to the strategy follow consultation with New Zealanders.

    We have reframed the strategy to have a clear vision, goal and succinct outcomes.

    Our key outcomes for the sector are productive, valued, and resilient, and are guided by overarching principles that respect Treaty settlement obligations and ensure responsible practices.

    Minerals developments in New Zealand will happen in a responsible manner where environmental guard rails are appropriate to the risks being managed. The protection, the health and safety of our workers, and impacts on regional communities is important.

    This means we are working towards sector growth and innovation that contributes to New Zealand’s prosperity.  The sector’s performance and responsible practices need to be emphasised. Advocacy and being forward leaning is important. I recognise the sector has been subject to misinformation but the mute button is not an option.

    We have updated the goal of doubling our exports to $3 billion by 2035 from the previous goal of $2 billion. Statistics NZ reports that mineral exports for the financial year ending June 2023 totalled $1.46 billion and our submitters were clear – we needed a more ambitious goal.

    Finally, I want to assure you that we are not downing tools when there is still work to do. The addition of a Delivery Roadmap clearly sets out the key actions the Government will take to achieve the strategy’s goal and vision.

    In the short term, key actions include creating a network to support minerals research and development, making information about minerals and regulations more accessible to potential investors, and engaging with countries to support supply chain resilience for critical minerals.

    Longer term, we will deliver a minerals research strategy and address workforce development needs, skills and training programmes.

    Through our Minerals Strategy we have formed the foundations. Soon our government will roll out the refreshed approach to inward foreign direct investment. You have told me that an overseas investment process that is efficient, timely and not too costly is important. 

    We have a pathway forward. A permitting regime which acknowledges the principle of risk proportionality. A recognition that excessive climate net zero regulations will thwart economic growth. A consideration of ecological, community, tangata whenua issues that is balanced and does not present scope for veto power.

    An expanded Critical Minerals List

    I don’t have to explain to anyone here today how we rely on a wide range of minerals to enable the comforts of our lives. Every road you drive on, every light switch you turn on, our schools, hospitals and homes. All are enabled in some way by the extraction of our natural resources.

    If suddenly we couldn’t access aggregate to construct our roads, phosphate to support the growth of our crops or iron sand to make steel for our buildings, our economy would grind to a halt.

    On the matter of iron sands, the recent Taharoa RMA hearing process for consents to continue an activity that has been happening for over 50 years was a circus. It shows that more robustness is needed. Hopefully the treatment this firm receives will be inordinately better under the Fast-track processes.

    Equally, there is no low emissions energy transition without minerals – no batteries, no electric cars, no wind turbines and no solar panels.

    Unfortunately, we have never sought a comprehensive picture of the minerals needs of New Zealand now and in the future, or how we ensure those supplies are secure and affordable.

    I am delighted today to release New Zealand’s Critical Minerals List, a holistic picture of the minerals that are economically important and are vulnerable to supply risk or essential to unlocking other critical minerals.

    Following public consultation last September, the Critical Minerals List now features 37 minerals, up from 35.

    The Coalition Government agreed to include both gold and metallurgical coal, which is used in steelmaking, on the list in recognition of their importance to our minerals sector and economy, and in unlocking other critical minerals.

    Together, they represent 80 per cent of our mineral exports, generating export revenues of around $1.2 billion in the year to June 2023.

    Simply put, OceanaGold’s Waihi Operation today shows gold investments needs skills, machinery, resources, and capacity to support our modern industrial system.

    The legacy of gold- and coal-mining is that of a catalyst for transformation – for our economy, for our development, for our technical skills and trades, and for our place on the world stage.

    Future mining in New Zealand will play to our strengths in terms of existing production while we develop new opportunities. That means gold and metallurgical coal.

    We will also offer more bespoke and boutique opportunities for the right investors.

    Of our 37 critical minerals, we produce or have the potential to produce 21 here in New Zealand. We are a prospective destination for sought-after minerals like antimony and we have operators working rare earth, vanadium and titanium projects – all exciting opportunities for New Zealand to support the international transition to a clean energy future.

    Our list will contribute to New Zealand’s work on critical international supply chains and allow us to investigate specific actions for securing better access to the minerals we’ve deemed critical.

    This could include preferential pathways and settings for development and supply of minerals on the list, or building international relationships to ensure secure supply of those we can’t produce. This work programme forms part of the Strategy’s delivery roadmap and will kick off shortly.

    Close

    When I left Blackball last year, I did so with the promise I would continue to be a dogged champion for the minerals sector and the economic prosperity it can offer New Zealand, if done right.

    I hope I have shown you that with the work we have done to get the right direction and settings in place, you can have confidence that we have an enduring pathway forward. 

    This Government is taking an active, deliberate and co-ordinated approach to harnessing the potential of our natural resources to take us from ‘open for business’ to ‘doing business’.

    The sector has been a transformative agent in the past, and I expect it to play a transforming role into the future.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Friday essay: Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naomi Milthorpe, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania

    I’m at the park with my daughter, who is jumping in and out of puddles, splashing, shrieking at me (Mum! Look what I can do!), as I read frantically, taking one-handed notes on my phone (Mum! Look at this!). Part of me wishes I could enjoy with her this moment of pleasure in movement. The other, more insistent part is thinking about this essay: where to start, what to say, how to sum up the extraordinary legacy of the book I’m re-reading, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which this year marks 100 years since its first publication in 1925. How am I supposed to write about this book?

    If you were to read a synopsis, it might seem like a book purely for an academic specialist (which, admittedly, I am). One day in London in June 1923, an ageing rich woman, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares to give a party. Across town, a shell-shocked Great War veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, loses his grip on sanity. Between them oscillate other characters: Clarissa’s former lover Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s husband Richard and daughter Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s tutor Doris Kilman, Septimus’s wife Rezia, and his doctors Holmes and Bradshaw.

    Like that other modernist monument, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows ordinary people through ordinary activities on an ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are filtered through their individual consciousnesses, threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is demonstrated by the number of online parodies it inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a verified meme.

    A new seam

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of the manuscript she was drafting – then called “The Hours” – that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could write whatever she wanted to write because she owned her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond home.

    Mrs Dalloway, first edition dust jacket, with cover art by Vanessa Bell. The Hogarth Press, 1925.
    Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to be self-published in this way. Being a small-press publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that would have been impossible if she was working with a mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do my scales”.

    I recently co-hosted a conference here in Hobart, which included a panel on contemporary Tasmanian experimental writing. The writers who spoke that day talked of the struggle to place work that pushed the boundaries of form and genre. A hundred years after Woolf’s efforts to unearth what she called a new “seam”, commercial imperatives continue to constrain writers and their work.

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion.

    It sold moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year. Her biographer Hermione Lee records that in 1926 income from writing allowed Woolf and her husband Leonard to install a hot water range and toilet at their country home.

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its challenge to the novel form and representation of time. Clarissa remembers the jolt of desire she felt as an 18-year-old for her friend Sally Seton, who kisses her on the terrace of her house at Bourton:

    the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

    Clarissa, made “virginal” in middle age by illness and marital boredom, is surprised by this irrupting memory. She connects it to her sense of joy in life itself: “the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings […] collecting the whole of her at one point”.

    Clarissa and Septimus Smith – though they never meet – are shadow versions of each other. Both have beaky noses, thin pale birdlike bodies, and histories of illness.

    Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of the social system – what Woolf’s narrator ironises as the sister goddesses Conversion and Proportion.

    “Worshipping proportion […] made England prosper”, because proportion forbids despair, illness, and emotional extremes. Conversion, the strong arm of Empire, “offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, the dissatisfied”. Conversion “loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will”. Together, they suck the life from those who cannot or will not comply with them.

    For Septimus, who has witnessed the dreadful disproportion of the war, ordinary social life becomes a torturous pressure cooker, a “gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames”. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement emphasised this aspect of its experimentalism:

    Watching Mrs Woolf’s experiment, certainly one of the hardest and very subtly planned, one reckons up its cost. To get the whole value of the present you must enhance it, perhaps, with the past.

    Watching my daughter lark about is shadowed by the two surgeries she had in early childhood to correct her developmental hip dysplasia. I hear her screech with joy in the park, rocketing about freely; I hear her scream in pain in the hospital, encased in plaster from the midsection down. As Woolf knew, the past and the present are experienced within us simultaneously.

    Doubled experience

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.”

    Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now probably the most written-about 20th century English author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which criticised the educational, economic and social constraints that prevented women, in many instances, from writing anything at all.

    Cover of the first edition of A Room of One’s Own (1929).
    Public domain.

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. Feminist politics has progressed beyond Woolf, but she laid one of the foundation stones. In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot.

    The same year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, she also published her important collection of essays, The Common Reader. The first piece in that book, on the medieval letters of the Paston family, describes the illumination cast by these ordinary, non-literary pieces of writing:

    Like all collections of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the fortunes of individuals. The family will go on, whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes.

    Mrs Dalloway encompasses this doubled experience of insignificance and blazing life. Woolf writes of the past emerging into the present day and the present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she called this her “tunnelling process, by which I tell the past in instalments, as I have need of it”.

    In tunnelling through narrative, digging out caves behind her characters, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust – buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their significance, through repeated reference to the bells and clocks of London striking the hour.

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop time. As she wrote of the Pastons’ letters: “There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.”

    Portrait of Virginia Woolf – Roger Fry (1917)
    Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of different perspectives through a single shared moment in time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and moves through that individual’s memories.

    Woolf wrote in her diary that “the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” Daiches diagrammed these relations in time and space as a series of connected trees, arguing that they illustrated the novel’s concern with “the importance of contact and at the same time the necessity of keeping the self inviolable, of the extremes of isolation and domination”.

    A legacy of inspiration

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued to inspire. For second-wave feminism, Woolf was a touchstone. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an unparalleled position in the history of 20th century letters, inspiring the recovery of other contemporaneous women writers connected with the Bloomsbury group.

    Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or explicitly.

    Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she throws a literary party.

    Cunningham’s novel counterpoints, as Woolf did, the work of living with the work of art. The homemaker Laura Brown tries to bake a cake to equal a work of art, hoping “to be as satisfied and as filled with anticipation as a writer putting down the first sentence, a builder beginning to draw the plans.” Later, her delirious dying son Richard regrets what he views as the failure of his art to compete with simply living:

    I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine trying to do that. What foolishness.

    More recently, Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf (2023) and Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead (2024) have wrestled with Mrs Dalloway the character, and with Woolf’s legacy. Darling’s novel revives a new “Mrs” Dalloway, Winona, a wealthy Sydney suburban writer, wife and mother, who struggles to break through “to something more real” than the constraint of middle class domestication.

    Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf explores a minor character from Mrs Dalloway, whom Woolf failed to make properly live: Daisy Simmons, Peter Walsh’s Anglo-Indian fiancee. In Woolf’s novel, Daisy exists entirely offstage. She is a romantic memory of Peter’s, “dark, adorably pretty”. Daisy, writes Cahill, is

    trapped in the past, in a moment, a vignette, but not the kind that would enter a room, open a window, to a life inside, a life in the mind, as it does for Clarissa with a squeak of hinges on the very first page of Mrs Dalloway! Not a real girl, Daisy, too arch perhaps, the air not stirring for her, seeing as she has no present tense.

    Cahill’s present-day narrator Mina, writing back to Woolf, sees Daisy as a fully fleshed character: a mixed-race woman living in Calcutta in the twilight of Empire, as the Indian independence movement grows in strength. In recovering Daisy’s rich personal and political history, narrated through letters to Peter, Cahill reclaims interiority for this marginalised character.

    In her 1937 essay Craftsmanship, the BBC broadcast of which is the only surviving recording of her voice, Woolf wrote: “Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations.”

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same event from different vantage points and through different filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee explained, for Woolf “the really important life was ‘within’”.

    Peter remembers Clarissa’s theory of life, which is expounded on top of a bus going down Shaftesbury Avenue:

    She felt herself everywhere; not here here here; […] but everywhere. […] so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places […] since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death.

    Late in the book, Septimus’s suicide is reported to Clarissa at the party. “Oh,” she thinks, “in the middle of my party, here’s death”. And in the middle of her party, Clarissa feels not only the disaster of death – “her disaster, her disgrace […] and she forced to stand here in her evening dress” – but the deep pulsing joy of life. “Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long.”

    In certain lights – to paraphrase Michael Cunningham – Mrs Dalloway might look like the book of one’s own life, a book that will locate you, parent you, arm you for life’s changes. As an undergraduate, I was mesmerised by Woolf’s language and her grasp on the inner life.

    Though Clarissa Dalloway is 52, Woolf turned 43 the year her novel was published. I’m turning 43 this year, too. Woolf, ravaged by long periods of illness and partially toothless, thought of herself as elderly. I do not, though I am no longer young. But to re-read this novel at this age reminds me to relish these long hours and short years: to sniff flowers, feel the lift of the gusting wind, jump and splash with my children, read the patterns made by the clouds. To seize the day.

    Naomi Milthorpe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Friday essay: Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100 – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-seize-the-day-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-at-100-246331

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Stressing Peacebuilding Commission’s Critical Role amid Rise in Conflicts Worldwide, Secretary-General Urges Increased, Innovative Funding to Support Its Work

    Source: United Nations General Assembly and Security Council

    Speakers Highlight Pact for Future’s Prioritization of Conflict Prevention, Mediation and Peacebuilding

    Amid escalating conflicts, widening geopolitical divisions and deepening climate crisis, the Peacebuilding Commission is “more critical than ever”, said the UN Chief, stressing that the Pact for the Future charts a course to reforming international cooperation by prioritizing prevention, mediation and peacebuilding.

    “Now we have the chance to consolidate and expand [the Commission’s] work,” said António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, recognizing its vital advisory role to the Security Council — including in the context of UN mission transitions.  He also commended its convening role within the UN and beyond, engaging civil society, the private sector, international and regional organizations and financial institutions.

    This year’s Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture offers an opportunity to strengthen the Commission’s role, he said, pointing to his recent report on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace, which suggests mobilizing political and financial support for nationally owned peacebuilding and prevention strategies.  

    On the issue of financing, he said the General Assembly’s approval of assessed contributions to the Peacebuilding Fund marks “an important step”. However, it is still a far cry from the “quantum leap” of $500 million per year that is needed.  Emphasizing that “voluntary contributions remain paramount”, he encouraged countries to provide additional support to the Fund.  Additionally, given the urgent and expanding needs for peacebuilding support, the Review of the Peacebuilding Architecture shall further examine how to ensure the Fund’s predictability, adequacy and sustainability by exploring innovative financing mechanisms, public-private partnerships and blended funding models.

    “We must never waver in our commitment to pursue, achieve and sustain peace,” he stated, noting that the UN’s peacebuilding architecture — in collaboration with UN country teams — is essential to help “translate aspirations into reality”.

    Following the Secretary-General’s opening remarks, the Commission adopted the body’s report on its eighteenth session, whose final version will be transmitted to the General Assembly and the Security Council for their respective annual consideration. 

    Election of Officers for Nineteenth Session

    The Commission also elected officers for its nineteenth session by acclamation, including Germany as Chair and Japan, Poland, Brazil and Morocco as Vice-Chairs.  Further, it re-elected the following countries to chair the Commission’s country-specific configurations:  Morocco, for the Central African Republic; Brazil, for Guinea-Bissau; and Sweden, for Liberia. 

    Outgoing Commission Chair Highlights 2024 Efforts to Address Peacebuilding Challenges

    As outgoing Chair of the Commission’s eighteenth session, the representative of Brazil noted the Commission’s “robust” mandate as a platform for countries seeking assistance for their peacebuilding and conflict-prevention priorities.  “Through the [Commission], political, technical and financial support can be mobilized, and real impact on the ground can be achieved,” he said.  In that context, he highlighted that the body’s work in 2024 focused on exploring “concrete peacebuilding challenges” and showcasing “what has worked, lessons learned, frustrations and challenges different countries face”. 

    He added that, during 2024, the Commission also engaged in preparation for the 2025 peacebuilding architecture review.  Expressing hope that Member States see such review “as an opportunity that should not be missed”, he urged better synergy between the Commission, the Peacebuilding Support Office and the Peacebuilding Fund. “We should also explore ways to provide adequate institutional support to the [Commission] at all levels,” he said, expressing hope that the Trusteeship Council room may one day be renamed the Peacebuilding Council room.

    Pointing out that the Security Council’s permanent members are also permanent Commission members, he expressed hope that those States will participate more in Commission meetings in the future.  “With great power comes great responsibility,” he observed.

    Incoming Commission Chair Cites Strong Focus in 2025 on National Ownership, Closer Relationship with Peacebuilding Fund and Improving Impact 

    The representative of Germany, Chair of the Commission’s nineteenth session, noted her intention to continue supporting a strong emphasis on national ownership, the body’s convening power and its “unique bridging role” across the pillars of the United Nations.  Also pointing to opportunities to improve the Commission’s coherence and efficacy, she said that she will ensure follow-up with countries after a Commission meeting, work on a closer relationship between the Commission and the Peacebuilding Fund, and make the Fund’s work more visible — “especially with a view to the first-time-ever use of assessed contributions”. 

    She also detailed her hope to strengthen evidence-based discussion and peer-to-peer learning and consider the question of peacebuilding impact — “to ensure that the work we do here in New York has an impact on people’s lives on the ground”.  Work will also be done to build on previous efforts to foster the Commission’s relationship with regional organizations, strengthen coherence within the UN and enhance cooperation with international financial institutions.  She added that a close, meaningful exchange with other UN bodies is “key”. 

    Assistant Secretary-General Says Commission Uniquely Positioned to Offer Platform for Member States 

    The Assistant Secretary-General of the Peacebuilding Commission said that, in the current context of the proliferation of conflict and violence worldwide, the Commission is “uniquely positioned” to offer a platform for Member States that wish to come to it.  She added that 2025 presents new opportunities to strengthen the Commission’s role, including by accompanying countries’ peacebuilding journey.

    Incoming Vice Commission Chairs and Chairs of Country-Specific Configurations Share Perspectives

    Incoming Vice Chairs for the nineteenth session echoed that sentiment, with the representative of Poland saying 2025 “presents itself as a truly unique and exceptional year”.  The Pact for the Future, adopted in 2024, must be made to work “in the best possible way”, he said, particularly in the context of strengthening peacebuilding and conflict prevention. 

    Morocco’s speaker stressed that the Commission should expand its geographic and thematic scope while upholding the principle of national ownership.  Underscoring the need to optimize the Commission’s collaboration with the Council and other UN organs, he called for a comprehensive approach towards sustaining peace by leveraging and utilizing each body’s unique characteristics in a mutually complementary manner.

    The representative of Morocco said he will work to promote reconciliation, post-conflict reconstruction, development and inclusive peace processes.  As Chair of the Commission’s country-specific configuration for the Central African Republic, he will continue to work to mobilize the necessary resources for organizing upcoming local elections in that country — a “crucial stage for strengthening local governance and legitimacy of the authorities”.

    Brazil’s delegate stated:  “Our region faces its own peacebuilding and conflict prevention challenges [while] developing solutions.”  Noting his country’s readiness to share lessons learned, he said “this exchange is most useful in our common task as peacebuilders”. 

    The representative of Sweden, Chair of the Commission’s country-specific configuration for Liberia, said that Liberia has made “remarkable gains over the years”.  Peaceful elections held in 2023 and the orderly transfer of power in 2024 “were true milestones”, he stressed, noting that the configuration’s focus for 2025 will be consolidating long-term peacebuilding gains in the country. Liberia, he added, “has important experiences and lessons learned” to share with the Commission, including sustaining peace, inclusive development and reconciliation.

    Commission Members Stress Need to Invest in Addressing Root Causes of Conflict and Violence

    In the ensuing discussion, Commission members underscored the need to invest in addressing the root causes of conflict and violence, adding that the Pact for the Future has gained recognition for conflict prevention as a universally shared responsibility.

    “2025 will be a crucial year for peacebuilding,” said the representative of the European Union, in its capacity as observer.  The Council has demonstrated overwhelming support for this agenda by holding two open debates on conflict prevention.  “We have collectively recognized that elaborating national prevention strategies, anchored in national ownership, should be an aspiration for all countries,” he stressed.  The peacebuilding architecture review is “an opportunity to consolidate these gains” and to further strengthen the Commission as “an institution that can act as a bridge at the UN”, he continued.  As the Commission’s biggest donors, the bloc and its member States have matched this political commitment with funding support.

    Spotlighting the Commission’s “significant achievements”, Australia’s delegate said it expanded its regional engagement, provided input into the review and facilitated the revised terms of reference for peacebuilding funding.  Underlining the need to strengthen the Commission’s engagement with his region, he said it should encourage Member States to present their peacebuilding priorities. 

    “Although, at times, we may have had divergent views on how peacebuilding should be conducted, we continue to agree on the foundational principles of peacebuilding,” said his counterpart from South Africa. Namely, that it should be nationally owned and led, context-specific and adaptable, and that more can be done to support peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts. 

    “It is high time to match the ambitions with the capacities,” said Egypt’s delegate, underscoring the need to expand resources and guarantee the Commission’s more structured cooperation with the Council.

    Colombia’s representative, noting that the Commission regularly invites her delegation to share his country’s “experience of peace”, said that doing so helps States “better elucidate a horizon of peace in other places”. The legitimacy of the UN and the future of multilateralism “depend on our capacity to tackle complex crises, contribute to peace and security and ensure a better life for our peoples”, she asserted. 

    The speaker for Bangladesh, noting that the Commission has “always” based its work on national ownership, said that the body should continue supporting local needs and national priorities “by bringing all stakeholders into the discussion”.  Further, the Commission should strengthen its advisory role to facilitate the smooth transition of peacekeeping operations, leading to long-lasting peace. 

    For his part, the Russian Federation’s representative said that the upcoming peacebuilding-architecture review “should not reinvent the wheel but, rather, use existing mechanisms”.  He also stressed that the Commission must not focus solely on conflict prevention, losing sight of countries affected by conflict and post-conflict countries.  “It is them that need the political and financial support so that crises don’t return,” he said.  Also emphasizing the need to avoid duplication of work, he observed:  “The strong suit of the UN system is the principle of division of labour between its main organs.”

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI: AMSC to Report Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Financial Results on February 5, 2025

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    AYER, Mass., Jan. 30, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — AMSC® (NASDAQ: AMSC), a leading system provider of megawatt-scale power resiliency solutions that orchestrate the rhythm and harmony of power on the grid™ and protect and expand the capability of our Navy’s fleet, announced today that it plans to release its third quarter fiscal year 2024 financial results after the market close on Wednesday, February 5, 2025. In conjunction with this announcement, AMSC management will participate in a conference call with investors and covering analysts beginning at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, February 6, 2025. On this call, management will discuss the Company’s recent accomplishments, financial results, and business outlook.

    Those who wish to listen to the live or archived conference call webcast should visit the “Investors” section of the Company’s website at https://www.amsc.com. The live call can be accessed 15 minutes prior to the scheduled start time by dialing 1-844-481-2802 or 1-412-317-0675 and asking to join the AMSC call.

    A replay of the call may be accessed 2 hours following the call by dialing 1-877-344-7529 and using conference passcode 9514460.

    About AMSC (Nasdaq: AMSC)

    AMSC generates the ideas, technologies and solutions that meet the world’s demand for smarter, cleaner … better energy™. Through its Gridtec™ Solutions, AMSC provides the engineering planning services and advanced grid systems that optimize network reliability, efficiency and performance. Through its Marinetec™ Solutions, AMSC provides ship protection systems and is developing propulsion and power management solutions designed to help fleets increase system efficiencies, enhance power quality and boost operational safety. Through its Windtec® Solutions, AMSC provides wind turbine electronic controls and systems, designs and engineering services that reduce the cost of wind energy. The Company’s solutions are enhancing the performance and reliability of power networks, increasing the operational safety of navy fleets, and powering gigawatts of renewable energy globally. Founded in 1987, AMSC is headquartered near Boston, Massachusetts with operations in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. For more information, please visit www.amsc.com.

    ©2024 AMSC. AMSC, American Superconductor, NEPSI, Neeltran, D-VAR, D-VAR VVO, Amperium, Gridtec, Marinetec, Windtec, Orchestrate the Rhythm and Harmony of Power on the Grid and Smarter, Cleaner … Better Energy are trademarks or registered trademarks of American Superconductor Corporation. All other brand names, product names, trademarks, or service marks belong to their respective holders.

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Tax policy proposal would boost NZ racing

    Source: New Zealand Government

    Racing Minister, Winston Peters has announced the Government is preparing public consultation on GST policy proposals which would make the New Zealand racing industry more competitive. 

    “The racing industry makes an important economic contribution. New Zealand thoroughbreds are in demand overseas as racehorses and for breeding. The domestic thoroughbred industry put nearly a billion dollars into the economy in 2022/23,” Mr Peters says. 

    Bloodstock breeders often join together in a joint venture when investing in a thoroughbred, helping with the initial purchase price and ongoing costs.

    Mr Peters says common practice amongst joint ventures including bloodstock breeders is to individually claim GST deductions in their own GST returns. Inland Revenue has however recently concluded that the current rules do not allow this.   

    “To comply with this, breeders would incur the compliance cost of registering and filing GST returns for each horse separately every month or every two months. The Government is proposing to take a pragmatic approach and avoid imposing compliance costs by allowing current practice. 

    “If this proposal proceeds, it will place the New Zealand industry on a more equal footing with the Australian industry,” Mr Peters said.

    The consultation document is expected to be published in the coming months on taxpolicy.ird.govt.nz.

    Mr Peters also congratulated New Zealand Bloodstock on the just completed 99th National Yearling Sales at Karaka, with combined sales of $86m.

    A highlight was the record $2.4m paid for a Savabeel-sired filly – the highest price ever paid for a filly sold in New Zealand. 

    “The sales show the New Zealand bloodstock industry is in good health and the industry presents major potential for growth both domestically and through international interest,” Mr Peters says.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI: Diamondback Energy, Inc. Announces Drop Down Transaction

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    MIDLAND, Texas, Jan. 30, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Diamondback Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ: FANG) (“Diamondback” or the “Company”) today announced that it has entered into a definitive purchase agreement with Viper Energy, Inc. (“Viper”), a subsidiary of Diamondback, to sell certain mineral and royalty interests from subsidiaries of Diamondback for $1 billion in cash and approximately 69.6 million units of Viper’s operating subsidiary (“OpCo”, and such units the “OpCo Units”) in a drop down transaction (“Drop Down”). The tax advantaged OpCo units, which will be issued together with an equal number of shares of Class B common stock of Viper, are exchangeable for shares of Class A common stock of Viper.

    Based on the volume weighted average sales price of Viper’s common stock for the 30-trading day period ending on January 24, 2025 of $49.55, the transaction is valued at a total of $4.45 billion. Viper expects to fund the cash portion of this transaction through a combination of cash on hand, borrowings under Viper’s credit facility, and proceeds from one or more capital markets transactions, subject to market conditions and other factors.

    “This Drop Down transaction with Viper is a major milestone in the continued synergy capture and execution of corporate development objectives related to the Endeavor transaction,” stated Travis Stice, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Diamondback. “Additionally, the Drop Down will accelerate debt reduction and increase Diamondback’s exposure to Viper’s differentiated growth profile and market-leading minerals position.”

    Timing and Approvals

    Diamondback expects the transaction to close in the second quarter of 2025, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and approval of the transaction by Viper’s stockholders.

    Advisors

    RBC Capital Markets is serving as financial advisor to Diamondback. Kirkland & Ellis LLP is acting as legal advisor to Diamondback.

    Evercore is acting as financial advisor to the Audit Committee of Viper’s Board of Directors. Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP is acting as legal advisor to Viper’s Audit Committee.

    About Diamondback

    Diamondback is an independent oil and natural gas company headquartered in Midland, Texas focused on the acquisition, development, exploration and exploitation of unconventional, onshore oil and natural gas reserves in the Permian Basin in West Texas. For more information, please visit www.diamondbackenergy.com.

    Forward-Looking Statements

    This news release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act and Section 21E of the Exchange Act, which involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, including statements regarding Diamondback’s: future performance; business strategy; future operations (including drilling plans and capital plans); estimates and projections of revenues, losses, costs, expenses, returns, cash flow, and financial position; reserve estimates and its ability to replace or increase reserves; anticipated benefits or other effects of strategic transactions (including the recently completed Endeavor merger, the Drop Down transaction and other acquisitions or divestitures); and plans and objectives of management (including plans for future cash flow from operations) are forward-looking statements. When used in this news release, the words “aim,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “forecast,” “future,” “guidance,” “intend,” “may,” “model,” “outlook,” “plan,” “positioned,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “seek,” “should,” “target,” “will,” “would,” and similar expressions (including the negative of such terms) as they relate to Diamondback are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain such identifying words. Although Diamondback believes that the expectations and assumptions reflected in its forward-looking statements are reasonable as and when made, they involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and, in many cases, beyond Diamondback’s control. Accordingly, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and Diamondback’s actual outcomes could differ materially from what Diamondback has expressed in its forward-looking statements.

    Factors that could cause the outcomes to differ materially include (but are not limited to) the following: changes in supply and demand levels for oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids, and the resulting impact on the price for those commodities; the impact of public health crises, including epidemic or pandemic diseases and any related company or government policies or actions; actions taken by the members of OPEC and Russia affecting the production and pricing of oil, as well as other domestic and global political, economic, or diplomatic developments, including any impact of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war on the global energy markets and geopolitical stability; instability in the financial markets; inflationary pressures; higher interest rates and their impact on the cost of capital; regional supply and demand factors, including delays, curtailment delays or interruptions of production, or governmental orders, rules or regulations that impose production limits; federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives relating to hydraulic fracturing, including the effect of existing and future laws and governmental regulations; physical and transition risks relating to climate change; those risks described in Item 1A of Diamondback’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, filed with the SEC on February 22, 2024, and those risks disclosed in its subsequent filings on Forms 10-Q and 8-K, which can be obtained free of charge on the SEC’s website at http://www.sec.gov and Diamondback’s website at www.diamondbackenergy.com/investors.

    In light of these factors, the events anticipated by Diamondback’s forward-looking statements may not occur at the time anticipated or at all. Moreover, Diamondback operates in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment and new risks emerge from time to time. Diamondback cannot predict all risks, nor can it assess the impact of all factors on its business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by any forward-looking statements it may make. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this letter or, if earlier, as of the date they were made. Diamondback does not intend to, and disclaims any obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking statements unless required by applicable law.

    Additional Information about the Drop Down and Where to Find It

    In connection with the Drop Down, Viper expects to file relevant materials with the SEC including a proxy statement on Schedule 14A. Promptly after filing its definitive proxy statement with the SEC, Viper will mail the definitive proxy statement to each Viper stockholder entitled to vote at the special meeting relating to the Drop Down. This document is not a substitute for the proxy statement or for any other document that Viper may file with the SEC and send to its stockholders in connection with the Pending Drop Down. INVESTORS AND STOCKHOLDERS IN VIPER ARE URGED TO CAREFULLY READ THE VIPER PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO AND ANY DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE THEREIN) AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS IN CONNECTION WITH THE DROP DOWN THAT VIPER WILL FILE WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE TRANSACTION AND THE PARTIES TO THE TRANSACTION. The definitive proxy statement, the preliminary proxy statement, and other relevant materials in connection with the Drop Down (when they become available) and any other documents filed by Viper with the SEC, may be obtained free of charge at the SEC’s website www.sec.gov. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by Viper will be available free of charge on Viper’s website at www.viperenergy.com/investors.

    Participants in the Solicitation

    Viper and its directors and executive officers, and Diamondback as its parent and major stockholder, may be deemed, under SEC rules, to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from Viper’s stockholders in connection with the Drop Down. Information about the directors and executive officers of Viper and, as applicable, about Diamondback, is set forth in (i) in Viper’s proxy statement for its 2024 annual meeting, including under the headings “Proposal 1—Election of Directors”, “Executive Officers”, “Compensation Discussion and Analysis”, “Compensation Tables”, “Stock Ownership” and “Certain Relationships and Related Transactions,” which was filed with the SEC on April 25, 2024 and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1602065/000119312524113976/d796418ddef14a.htm, (ii) Viper’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, including under the headings “Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance”, “Item 11. Executive Compensation”, “Item 12. Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters” and “Item 13. Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence”, which was filed with the SEC on February 22, 2024 and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1602065/000160206524000010/vnom-20231231.htm and (iii) subsequent statements of changes in beneficial ownership on file with the SEC.

    Additional information about Diamondback may be found in Diamondback’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, filed with the SEC on February 22, 2024, and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K filed by Diamondback with the SEC. These documents may be obtained free of charge from the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and Diamondback’s website at www.diamondbackenergy.com/investors.

    Additional information regarding the participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be contained in the proxy statement and other relevant materials filed by Viper with the SEC when they become available. These documents may be obtained free of charge from the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and Viper’s website at www.viperenergy.com/investors.

    No Offer or Solicitation

    This document does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, or a solicitation of any vote or approval, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.

    Diamondback Investor Contact:

    Adam Lawlis
    +1 432.221.7467
    alawlis@diamondbackenergy.com

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI: Viper Energy, Inc., A Subsidiary of Diamondback Energy, Inc., Announces Drop Down Transaction and Operations Update

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    MIDLAND, Texas, Jan. 30, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Viper Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:VNOM) (“Viper” or the “Company”), a subsidiary of Diamondback Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FANG) (“Diamondback”), today provided an update on Q4 2024 financial and operating results.

    FOURTH QUARTER HIGHLIGHTS

    • Q4 2024 average daily production of 29,859 bo/d (56,109 boe/d)
    • Q4 2024 average unhedged realized prices of $69.91 per barrel of oil, $0.84 per Mcf of natural gas, and $22.15 per barrel of natural gas liquids
    • During the fourth quarter of 2024, the Company recorded total operating income of $228.7 million
    • Declared Q4 2024 combined base-plus-variable dividend of $0.65 per Class A common share; payable on March 13, 2025 to Class A shareholders of record at the close of business on March 6, 2025

    Additionally, the Company announced today it and its operating subsidiary Viper Energy Partners LLC (“OpCo”) have entered into a definitive purchase and sale agreement to acquire all of the equity interests of certain mineral and royalty-interest owning subsidiaries of Diamondback in exchange for $1.0 billion of cash and approximately 69.6 million OpCo units (along with an accompanying equal amount of Class B common stock of the Company), subject to customary adjustments (the “Drop Down”). The transaction was negotiated for the Company by the Audit Committee of its Board of Directors, which consists solely of independent directors and is appointed by the Board of Directors to oversee all related party transactions. The cash portion of this transaction is expected to be funded through a combination of cash on hand, borrowings under the Company’s credit facility, and proceeds from one or more capital markets transactions, subject to market conditions and other factors. The Company expects the transaction to close in the second quarter of 2025, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, including the approval of the transaction by a majority of the Company’s stockholders not affiliated with Diamondback.

    The Company today also announced it and OpCo have entered into a separate definitive purchase and sale agreement to acquire certain mineral and royalty interests from Morita Ranches Minerals LLC in exchange for approximately $211 million of cash and approximately 2.4 million OpCo units (along with an accompanying equal amount of Class B common stock of the Company), subject to customary adjustments (the “Quinn Ranch Acquisition” and together with the Drop Down, the “Pending Acquisitions”). The cash portion of this transaction is expected to be funded through a combination of cash on hand and borrowings under the Company’s credit facility. The Company expects the transaction to close during the first quarter of 2025, subject to customary closing conditions.

    PENDING ACQUISITIONS COMBINED HIGHLIGHTS

    • Approximately 23,100 net royalty acres (“NRAs”) in the Midland Basin; additional acreage in the Delaware and Williston Basins (approximately 1,700 NRAs combined)
    • Diamondback operates >70% of the Midland Basin NRAs with an approximately 5.0% average net revenue interest (“NRI”) across high-quality and largely undeveloped acreage
    • Expected average daily oil production for full year 2025 of approximately 18,000 bo/d (32,000 boe/d); includes contribution from Diamondback’s expected development plan (11.0-12.0 net 100% royalty interest wells) and 6.7 net existing DUCs and permits operated by third party operators
    • Viper currently expects Diamondback to complete roughly 300-325 gross locations on the acquired properties in 2026 with an estimated average ~6.0% NRI; expected to drive an increase in Diamondback-operated production from an average of approximately of 11,000 bo/d in 2025 to approximately 14,000 bo/d in 2026
    • Third party operated acreage located primarily in Martin, Midland, and Reagan counties; ExxonMobil (~35% of third party operated acreage) is the largest operator with diversified exposure to other leading well-capitalized operators in the Midland Basin
    • Substantial near and long-term financial accretion; expected to be >10% accretive to cash available for distribution per Class A share immediately upon closing
    • Each of the Pending Acquisitions has an effective date of January 1, 2025

    PRO FORMA VIPER HIGHLIGHTS

    • Giving effect to only the assumed closing of the Quinn Ranch Acquisition during Q1 2025, initiating average daily production guidance for Q1 2025 of 30,000 to 31,000 bo/d (54,000 to 56,000 boe/d)
    • Upon the assumed closing of the Drop Down during Q2 2025, expect average daily production for the balance of 2025 in the range of 47,000 to 49,000 bo/d (85,000 to 88,000 boe/d); the midpoint is approximately 61% higher than standalone Viper’s Q4 2024 average daily oil production
    • Based on Diamondback’s expected development plans, Viper expects its Diamondback-operated production to increase to approximately 31,000 bo/d in 2026, up from approximately 27,000 bo/d on a pro forma basis in 2025
    • Viper expects to own an interest in approximately 75% of the total amount of gross wells that Diamondback would plan to develop over the next five years at today’s activity levels; expect to own an estimated ~6.0% NRI in these wells
    • Total inventory of Diamondback-operated locations with a greater than 10% IRR at $50 WTI of approximately 334 net locations
    • Approximately 60,200 NRAs in the Permian Basin, approximately 36,300 of which are operated by Diamondback; represents increases of approximately 70% and 90%, respectively
    • Maintaining return of capital commitment of at least 75% of cash available for distribution
    • Conservative leverage of <1.0x expected at year-end 2025 based on current commodity prices

    “We are excited to announce today the highly anticipated, transformative Drop Down transaction between Viper and Diamondback. This transaction, combined with the Quinn Ranch Acquisition, furthers Viper’s alignment with Diamondback’s expected development plan and positions Viper to continue to deliver organic growth driven by the Diamondback drillbit for multiple years ahead. The pro forma size and scale provided to Viper, and the continued support of our parent company, meaningfully enhances the unmatched advantage Viper has in the minerals and royalty market,” stated Travis Stice, Chief Executive Officer of Viper.

    Mr. Stice continued, “In addition to being immediately accretive to all relevant financial metrics, this conservatively financed transaction also reduces Viper’s pro forma leverage to below 1.0x. Looking ahead, Viper’s leading scale and fortress balance sheet will enable the Company to continue to opportunistically consolidate the highly fragmented minerals market through a disciplined and focused approach.”

    Advisors

    Evercore is serving as financial advisor to the Audit Committee of Viper’s Board of Directors and Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP is serving as the Audit Committee’s legal advisor for the Drop Down.

    RBC Capital Markets is serving as financial advisor to Diamondback and Kirkland & Ellis LLP is serving as its legal advisor for the Drop Down.

    For the Quinn Ranch Acquisition, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP is serving as Viper’s legal advisor and Vinson & Elkins LLP is serving as legal advisor for Morita Ranches Minerals LLC.

    About Viper Energy, Inc.

    Viper is a corporation formed by Diamondback to own, acquire and exploit oil and natural gas properties in North America, with a focus on owning and acquiring mineral and royalty interests in oil-weighted basins, primarily the Permian Basin. For more information, please visit www.viperenergy.com.

    About Diamondback Energy, Inc.

    Diamondback is an independent oil and natural gas company headquartered in Midland, Texas focused on the acquisition, development, exploration and exploitation of unconventional, onshore oil and natural gas reserves primarily in the Permian Basin in West Texas. For more information, please visit www.diamondbackenergy.com.

    Forward-Looking Statements

    This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause the results to differ materially from those expected by the management of Viper. All statements, other than historical facts, that address activities that Viper assumes, plans, expects, believes, intends or anticipates (and other similar expressions) will, should or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements are based on management’s current beliefs, based on currently available information, as to the outcome and timing of future events, including specifically the statements regarding the pending acquisitions discussed in this news release and any potential capital markets transactions and other funding sources for the pending acquisitions, as well as statements regarding the pro forma results for the pending acquisitions and Viper’s operating and financial expectations following those acquisitions, including existing and future production on the mineral and royalty acreage subject to the pending acquisitions and Diamondback’s plans with respect to such Diamondback-operated acreage.

    Factors that could cause the outcomes to differ materially include (but are not limited to) the following: the completion of the pending acquisitions on anticipated terms and timing or at all, including obtaining the requisite regulatory and stockholder approvals for the Pending Drop Down, the satisfaction of other conditions to the pending acquisitions, uncertainties as to whether the pending acquisitions, if consummated, will achieve their anticipated benefits within the expected time periods or at all, and those risks described in Item 1A of Viper’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, filed with the SEC on February 22, 2024, subsequent Forms 10-Q and 8-K and other filings Viper makes with the SEC, which can be obtained free of charge on the SEC’s website at http://www.sec.gov and Viper’s website at www.viperenergy.com/investor-overview, as well as those risks that will be more fully described in the definitive proxy statement on Schedule 14A that is intended to be filed with the SEC in connection with the Pending Drop Down.

    In light of these factors, the events anticipated by Viper’s forward-looking statements may not occur at the time anticipated or at all. Moreover, Viper conducts its business in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment and new risks emerge from time to time. Viper cannot predict all risks, nor can it assess the impact of all factors on its business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by any forward-looking statements it may make. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this news release or, if earlier, as of the date they were made. Viper does not intend to, and disclaims any obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking statements unless required by applicable law.

    Additional Information about the Pending Drop Down and Where to Find It

    In connection with the Pending Drop Down, Viper expects to file relevant materials with the SEC including a proxy statement on Schedule 14A. Promptly after filing its definitive proxy statement with the SEC, Viper will mail the definitive proxy statement to each stockholder entitled to vote at the special meeting relating to the Pending Drop Down. This news release is not a substitute for the proxy statement or for any other document that Viper may file with the SEC and send to its stockholders in connection with the Pending Drop Down. INVESTORS AND STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO CAREFULLY READ THE PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO AND ANY DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE THEREIN) AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS IN CONNECTION WITH THE PENDING DROP DOWN THAT VIPER WILL FILE WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE TRANSACTION AND THE PARTIES TO THE TRANSACTION. The definitive proxy statement, the preliminary proxy statement, and other relevant materials in connection with the Pending Drop Down (when they become available) and any other documents filed by Viper with the SEC, may be obtained free of charge at the SEC’s website www.sec.gov. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by Viper will be available free of charge on Viper’s website at www.viperenergy.com/investor-overview.

    Participants in the Solicitation

    Viper and its directors and executive officers, and Diamondback as its parent and major stockholder, may be deemed, under SEC rules, to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from Viper’s stockholders in connection with the Pending Drop Down. Information about the directors and executive officers of Viper and, as applicable, about Diamondback, is set forth in (i) in Viper’s proxy statement for its 2024 annual meeting, including under the headings “Proposal 1—Election of Directors”, “Executive Officers”, “Compensation Discussion and Analysis”, “Compensation Tables”, “Stock Ownership” and “Certain Relationships and Related Transactions,” which was filed with the SEC on April 25, 2024 and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1602065/000119312524113976/d796418ddef14a.htm, (ii) Viper’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, including under the headings “Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance”, “Item 11. Executive Compensation”, “Item 12. Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters” and “Item 13. Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence”, which was filed with the SEC on February 22, 2024 and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1602065/000160206524000010/vnom-20231231.htm and (iii) subsequent statements of changes in beneficial ownership on file with the SEC.

    Additional information about Diamondback may be found in Diamondback’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, filed with the SEC on February 22, 2024, and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K filed by Diamondback with the SEC. These documents may be obtained free of charge from the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and Diamondback’s website at www.diamondbackenergy.com/investors.

    Additional information regarding the participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be contained in the proxy statement and other relevant materials filed with the SEC when they become available. These documents may be obtained free of charge from the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and Viper’s website at www.viperenergy.com/investor-overview.

    No Offer or Solicitation

    This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, or a solicitation of any vote or approval, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.

    Investor Contact:

    Austen Gilfillian
    +1 432.221.7420
    agilfillian@diamondbackenergy.com

    Source: Viper Energy, Inc.; Diamondback Energy, Inc.

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI: Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta Declares a 7.10% Dividend for Fourth Quarter 2024

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    ATLANTA, Jan. 30, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The board of directors of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta (FHLBank Atlanta) today approved a cash dividend for the fourth quarter 2024 at an annualized rate of 7.10 percent.

    “Throughout the fourth quarter of 2024, our commitment to helping members through economic uncertainty and advancing our mission remained steadfast,” said FHLBank Atlanta Chair of the Board, Thornwell Dunlap. “Our strong financial performance reflects this dedication, allowing us to return a competitive dividend to our members.”

    The dividend payout will be calculated based on members’ capital stock held during the fourth quarter of 2024 and will be credited to members’ daily investment accounts at the close of business on February 5, 2025.

    If you have questions, please contact FHLBank Atlanta’s Funding Desk at 1.800.536.9650, ext. 8011.

    About FHLBank Atlanta
    FHLBank Atlanta offers competitively-priced financing, community development grants, and other banking services to help member financial institutions make affordable home mortgages and provide economic development credit to neighborhoods and communities. The Bank’s members are commercial banks, credit unions, savings institutions, community development financial institutions, and insurance companies located in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. FHLBank Atlanta is one of 11 district Banks in the Federal Home Loan Bank System. Since 1990, the FHLBanks have awarded approximately $9.1 billion in Affordable Housing Program funds, assisting more than 1.2 million households.

    For more information, visit our website at www.fhlbatl.com.

    To the extent that the statements made in this announcement may be deemed as “forward-looking statements”, they are made within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which include statements with respect to the Bank’s beliefs, plans, objectives, goals, expectations, anticipations, assumptions, estimates, intentions, and future performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which may be beyond the Bank’s control, and which may cause the Bank’s actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from the future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on them, since those may not be realized due to a variety of factors, including, without limitation: legislative, regulatory changes; future economic and market conditions (including the housing market); changes in demand for advances or consolidated obligations of the Bank and/or the FHLBank System; changes in interest rates; changes in prepayment speeds, default rates, delinquencies, and losses on mortgage-backed securities; volatility of market prices, rates and indices that could affect the value of financial instruments; changes in credit ratings and/or the terms of derivative transactions; changes in product offerings; political, national, and world events; disruptions in information systems; membership changes; and adverse developments or events affecting or involving other Federal Home Loan Banks or the FHLBank System in general. Additional risk factors that might cause the Bank’s results to differ from these forward-looking statements are provided in detail in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available at www.sec.gov.

    These statements speak only as of the date that they are made, and the Bank has no obligation and does not undertake to publicly update, revise, or correct any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this announcement, or after the respective dates on which such statements otherwise are made, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required by law. New risk factors may emerge, and it is not possible for us to predict the nature of each new factor, or assess its potential impact, on our business and financial condition. Given these uncertainties, we caution you not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

    CONTACT: Sheryl Touchton
    Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta
    stouchton@fhlbatl.com

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI NGOs: “Stunning dedication”: first ocean sanctuary in Marshall Islands announced

    Source: Greenpeace Statement –

    FRIDAY 31 JANUARY 2025 — The Republic of the Marshall Islands has announced its first marine protected area in the Pacific Ocean, a “stunning dedication to ocean protection for Pacific heritage”, says Greenpeace.

    The country’s first national ocean sanctuary, which covers 48,0002 kilometres of ocean – bigger than Switzerland/more than 260 times the size of the Marshall Islands’ land mass – puts the Marshall Islands on the podium as a leader in ocean protection on the world stage.

    Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Greenpeace congratulates the Republic of Marshall Islands on this stunning dedication to ocean protection for Pacific heritage.

    “The ocean is a living heritage, connecting the Pacific’s past, present and future. Protecting the ocean means protecting its treasures – the livelihoods, legacy, cultural heritage and future of Pacific people – for generations to come.

    “The Marshall Islands are unique and rich in life, but are threatened by colonialism, a heating ocean, and the devastating and ongoing impacts of nuclear testing by western nations. 

    “The Marshall Islands has a long history as champion for ocean protection, resisting the encroaching threat of deep sea mining by declaring support for a precautionary pause. We now need all nations to follow suit and stop deep sea mining before it starts.

    “The Pacific must be protected; a thriving ocean is a thriving people.” 

    The area around atolls Bikar and Bokak, as well as the nearby deep sea, will be fully protected from fishing, allowing a safe haven for marine life to recover and thrive.

    Marine sanctuaries are crucial to sustaining ocean health around the world. Greenpeace is urging governments worldwide to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty quickly to achieve the 30×30 target and start developing proposals for marine protected areas in the high seas.

    —ENDS—

    MIL OSI NGO –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Make a noise or work with the system? New research reveals 4 ways to create real change for nature

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lily van Eeden, Lecturer, RMIT University

    Ecosystems and species across the natural world are in serious trouble. The vast majority of Australians want more government action, but it’s not being delivered.

    Take, for example, the federal government commitment to end extinctions via its Nature Positive plan. Or consider its promise to overhaul Australia’s environmental legislation and create a new independent regulator. Progress on both has faltered.

    The biodiversity crisis calls for systemic change in humanity’s relationship with nature. This requires bold policy action from governments. Our new research examined how everyday people can help achieve this.

    We mined the insider knowledge of politicians, senior public servants and environmental advocates. The participants were Victoria-based, but their advice applies more broadly.

    Here, we present a recipe for achieving real, lasting change for the natural world.

    1. Be prepared for a long haul

    Change can take a long time. Be willing and able to see out the process. As one government interviewee told us:

    [Change] is not going to happen by one research paper, one meeting, one event, it’s gonna be a whole range of things over a sustained period of time.

    Also, find support. Our interviewees told us the most successful campaigns often happen when like-minded individuals band together. This provides the social support needed to stay the course.

    Remember, change is possible. As one government interviewee told us, this is especially true in marginal seats, where “constant ongoing campaigning at every level” can shift the dial.

    There is very likely a community group advocating for nature near you. These groups sometimes link up with larger, better-funded environment groups, to access their resources and networks.

    Change happens when like-minded people band together.
    Yuri A/Shutterstock

    2. Know the system

    Identify who you need to influence. The person holding the lever might not be a politician, but a public servant. Or public servants might rally for a cause internally, sometimes partnering with community groups.

    So how do you find this key person? Build your networks. Start talking to people in your community and get to know your local elected representatives. Find out what they care about and pitch your message to appeal to their values and concerns.

    One interviewee told us community groups would benefit from knowing more about how the system works:

    What are the bits that can actually change? […] Community members can be a bit aggressive in trying to drive through their challenge without understanding why they’ve been ignored in the past, or feel that they’ve been ignored.

    As another government interviewee told us:

    People don’t see how much power they have if they just use their voice and use it in a constructive way.

    3. Be strategic

    Choose whether to work with the government, or challenge it publicly.

    Environmental advocates can work alongside government to design solutions together. For example, a community group might work with their local council to design and implement management of a bush reserve. Big non-government environment groups often work in this way, relying on strong relationships with government insiders to achieve change.

    The opposite strategy is an “outsider” approach, which, at the extreme end, might include physically disrupting industry. Think chaining yourself to a tree in a forest pegged for logging or ramming a ship into a commercial whaling vessel.

    A less extreme outsider approach might be seeking to get your issue into the media to build public interest to get something on the political agenda.

    Both approaches have their merits in the right context. As one staff member of an environment group told us:

    We’re going to put on the suits […] and we’re not going to scale their buildings and release confidential information that they’ve given us to the media […] I don’t judge those that have that theory of change, because we need both, we need the really extreme advocacy to make us look mainstream and medium and reasonable.

    4. Seize the moment

    Identify when your advocacy might be most effective. It might be an upcoming election or budget, or when a policy is being reviewed.

    Or it might be something less predictable, such as a bushfire, flood or other environmental disaster. In those cases, nature conservation issues are suddenly all over the media. It might be a chance for real change.

    Effective advocates know how to identify, create, and be prepared for these windows. As one staff member at an environmental group told us:

    Some organizations talk about making change. But that’s a harder exercise. Often it’s a sort of a
    catching a wave of something else, or waiting for the opportunity.

    The upcoming federal election is one such opportunity. The lead up is a good time to advocate for nature. Speak with your local politician and their competitors about the change you want to see.

    If not us, who?

    These are well-tested, effective actions you can use to achieve positive policy change for the environment. But remember, the system is dynamic. New methods and approaches will emerge as technologies, modes of communication and other factors evolve.

    Governments, however, are a permanent fixture in the system. They stand to benefit politically by engaging with community and advocacy groups. So there is enormous potential for everyday people to genuinely make a difference.

    Environmental crises can seem overwhelming, but we can – and must – try to make a difference. Because, as the old adage goes: if not us, who? And if not now, when?

    The authors acknowledge Fern Hames and Kim Lowe for their contributions to this article.

    Lily van Eeden receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Lily was previously employed by the Victorian government.

    Liam Smith is a Councillor on the Biodiversity Council.

    Sarah Bekessy receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Ian Potter Foundation and the European Commission. She is a Lead Councillor with The Biodiversity Council, a board member of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of the WWF Eminent Scientists Group and an advisor to ELM Responsible Investment, the Living Building Challenge and Wood for Good.

    – ref. Make a noise or work with the system? New research reveals 4 ways to create real change for nature – https://theconversation.com/make-a-noise-or-work-with-the-system-new-research-reveals-4-ways-to-create-real-change-for-nature-248226

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Canada: Official trustee appointed to replace School District 61 board of education

    Minister of Education and Child Care Lisa Beare has announced that government has appointed an official trustee to School District No. 61 (Greater Victoria) and relieved the trustees of their duties.

    The appointment is effective immediately, clearing the way for the completion and implementation of a safety plan for the district.

    “Students are at the centre of every decision I make, and ultimately their safety in this school district is at risk. Our government has given this board multiple opportunities to act, and they have not delivered,” Beare said. “The decision to remove an elected board is a difficult one, but it is necessary to bring our collective focus in School District 61 back to where it belongs – supporting students.”

    Sherri Bell, former president of Camosun College and superintendent of schools with School District 61, has been appointed as an official trustee to replace the board and carry out its duties and authorities. The official trustee’s appointment takes effect immediately and is expected to continue until the next scheduled elections in fall 2026.

    In early December 2024, Kevin Godden was appointed as a special adviser to assist the board with developing a revised safety and implementation plan. Godden has been reappointed in his role with School District 61, working with the official trustee to collaborate with community partners to finalize the safety and implementation plans for the school district.

    Under Section 172(1) of the School Act, the Lieutenant Governor in Council may appoint an official trustee to conduct the affairs of a school district and replace the current board in specific circumstances. In the case of School District 61, there is evidence that the board did not assist the special adviser, demonstrated significant governance issues and failed to collaborate with partners in the development of a safety plan. 

    Learn More:

    To view the Order in Council appointing the official trustee, visit:
    https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/oic/oic_cur/0040_2025

    To view the special adviser report, visit:
    https://news.gov.bc.ca/files/Special_Advisor_Report.pdf

    To view the ministerial order appointing the special adviser, visit: https://news.gov.bc.ca/files/SD61_Special_Advisor_DEC2024.pdf

    To view the ministerial order issuing the September 2024 administrative directive, visit: https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/mo/mo/m0339_2024

    To read the School Act, visit: https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96412_00_multi#division_d2e25504

    Two backgrounders follow.

    Sherri Bell was the president of Camosun College from 2015 until her retirement in early 2022. Prior to that, she worked in the Greater Victoria School District for 20 years, serving in various senior administrative capacities, including superintendent of schools/chief executive officer. Success and support for all students has been the primary focus in every aspect of her educational career.

    Bell was appointed chair of the BC Transit Board of Directors in April 2023. She is also the chair of board for Whitecliffe College Canada. She has also served as the board chair of the British Columbia Council for International Education and chair of British Columbia Colleges. Recently, Bell was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal for her service to public education and the community.

    MIL OSI Canada News –

  • MIL-Evening Report: 5 games to play if you’re ‘not a gamer’ – or to introduce to the non-gamers in your life

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcus Carter, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney

    Steam/ Monster Couch, Stonemaier Games

    Gaming is no longer a niche activity reserved for a select few – it’s a global pastime enjoyed by people of all ages, backgrounds and interests. In fact, studies show 81% of Australians engage in some form of gaming.

    But for those who don’t consider themselves “gamers”, it can be hard to know where to start. The idea of picking up a complex, console-focused title might feel intimidating.

    But fear not. Whether you’re looking for a game that’s mentally stimulating, addictive enough to help kill time, or simply something everyone can enjoy, there are plenty of options. Here are our top picks for beginners.

    1. Real Bird Fake Bird

    Since Wordle’s meteoric rise in 2022, we’ve seen a wave of daily browser games, including Tradle, Vulture’s Cinematrix and the New York Times’ Connections.

    The Melbourne-based developers behind the critically acclaimed Scrabble-esque Gubbins have created the newest addition to this list: Real Bird Fake Bird.

    The premise is simple. Each day you’re given a topic, and are supposed to guess whether seven different things are “real” or “fake” examples of that topic. For instance, Adele is a real example of a Grammy winner, but “sun condemnation” is a fake example of a yoga pose.

    Sounds simple, right? It’s harder than it seems. The lists often have devilish examples of fakes that seem real, and real things that seem fake, leaving you second-guessing.

    And just like with Wordle, you can share your score with friends once you’ve made all seven guesses. It’s a great way to spend a minute of your day.

    You can share your Real Bird Fake Bird score with your friends.
    Studio Folly

    You can play Real Bird Fake Bird through any device that can access a browser.

    2. Balatro

    Then there’s a hypnotic re-imagining of the card game poker, Balatro, (playable everywhere).

    Each round involves playing poker hands to hit a points target, but these hands can be upgraded and augmented by a deck of “jokers” that favour particular poker hands or combinations of cards. Hands swiftly ascend to scoring tens of thousands (if not millions) of points per hand, in a near-perfect gameplay loop that combines card-game logic with the immersive flow of games like Tetris.

    Balatro, largely developed by a single, anonymous developer, was one of 2024’s biggest hits. It sold more than 3,500,000 copies, won best indie game and best mobile game at the Game Awards 2024, and even secured a surprise nomination for game of the year.

    This is the gaming equivalent of an anonymous independent filmmaker getting a nod for Best Picture at the Oscars.

    3. The Case/Rise of the Golden Idol

    This recommendation is targeted at mystery lovers. If you, or someone you know, can’t get enough of films like Knives Out (2019) or mystery books like The Thursday Murder Club, then the Golden Idol series (2022 and 2024) may be the perfect fit.

    Each level shows the moment of a crime and it’s up to the player to interact with the characters and environment to fill in the blanks on a file explaining what happened.

    With simple controls and a retro art style recalling the classic LucasArts adventure games, much of the joy in the Golden Idol games comes from the devious logic puzzles the cases provide.

    One case revolves around placing the locations of all the house guests at an estate party, while another involves interpreting an entire language made out of dance moves. Combine these puzzles with a delightful sense of humour and a slightly mystical meta-narrative and these games will keep your inner detective occupied for hours.

    The original and sequel are both Netflix games, and are available through Netflix on mobile and tablet.

    4. Mouthwashing

    Heavily inspired by the films Alien (1979) and The Shining (1980) – and not for the faint-of-heart – Mouthwashing (2024) is perfect for horror fans who want to dip their toes into the gaming world.

    The cargo spaceship Tulpar is deliberately crashed by its captain mid-voyage. Unable to call for help, its five crew members can do nothing but wait for rescue. They open the hold in search of food or medicine, but instead find millions of bottles of mouthwash. Lost in space with minimal supplies, the crew begin to turn on each other – and wonder why their beloved captain crashed the ship in the first place.

    A haunting story of human fallibility, Mouthwashing tells its tale through “walking sim” gameplay: the player simply wanders around the wreck of the Tulpar, interacting with objects and characters, without any complicated controls.

    With a compelling cast, gorgeously surreal art direction and a focus on dread and despair (rather than jump scares), Mouthwashing is a wonderful introduction to the renaissance happening in horror games right now.

    The game is available for PC via Steam (A$19) and can be completed in 2-3 hours.

    5. Wingspan

    For those who have endless bird facts on hand, can identify a bird at a glance and look forward to the Aussie Bird Count each year, Wingspan is the perfect game.

    The goal of this competitive, card-driven board game (which also has a videogame version) is to attract the best birds to various habitats by gathering food and laying eggs. Each player also has a randomly determined individual goal, which they can use to score extra points, making Wingspan very re-playable.

    The best aspects of the game include the beautiful art and the delightful facts on each bird card. There is even an Oceania expansion, so you can gather and admire Australian birds, too!

    Wingspan can be purchased online or at major board game retailers. You can play the videogame version with friends via Steam.

    Wingspan is a relaxing and captivating strategy card game about birds.
    Steam

    Although Wingspan was released in 2018, last year its publisher, Stonemaier Games, also released Wyrmspan – a spiritual successor which focuses on hatching dragons instead of birds. Wyrmspan is more complex than Wingspan, though, and offers a steeper learning curve for less-experienced board game players.

    Acknowledgement: we would like to acknowledge the contributions of Mads Mackenzie to this article, director of the upcoming game Drăculești and co-director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival.

    Marcus Carter is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (#220100076) on ‘The Monetisation of Children in the Digital Games Industry’. He has previously received funding from Meta, TikTok and Snapchat, and has consulted for Telstra. He is a current board member, and former president, of the Digital Games Research Association of Australia.

    Taylor Hardwick is employed under funding by the Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship #220100076; DECRA #240101275). She is a board member of Freeplay, a Melbourne-based independent games festival.

    Finn Dawson and Ryan Stanton do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. 5 games to play if you’re ‘not a gamer’ – or to introduce to the non-gamers in your life – https://theconversation.com/5-games-to-play-if-youre-not-a-gamer-or-to-introduce-to-the-non-gamers-in-your-life-244912

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Watch shows together, talk about them and have dance parties: how to rebalance screen use after the holidays

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Stokes, Associate Professor, Teaching Innovation Unit, University of South Australia

    Fizkes/ Shutterstock

    As January lingers on, families may find themselves struggling with what a friend of mine has labelled the “electronic nanny”.

    Children have been out of their normal routines for weeks during the holidays. Some are still yet to go back to school. Meanwhile, parents are back at work and needing to juggle those commitments with bored kids.

    We know balanced screen use is important for children’s healthy physical, mental and social development. Too much screen time has also been linked to overeating and disrupted sleep.

    How can families encourage healthy screen use as we ease back into the routine of a new school year?

    Parental monitoring recommended

    While screen use guidelines provide time limits, there is now a broader move among experts towards “curation over duration”.

    This means it matters what children are watching – not simply how long they are watching it for.

    Is the content age-appropriate? Is it educational or inspiring? Has it been well-reviewed)?

    This means parents should play an active role in what content kids are viewing or engaging with. An easy way to do so is to view with children, or at a minimum be present in the same room and alert to what they are watching.

    When you are “interactive co-viewing”, you not only watch together, you also discuss the content. This helps children engage with what they are watching and then make connections off-screen.

    For example, if you are interested in a sea creature you see on Octonauts, you could go and find a book about it in the local library. Or you could discuss a moral dilemma you see on SpongeBob SquarePants: should SpongeBob have quit his job after another chef was mean about his cooking?

    For older children, you could discuss plot points in films or strategies in games.

    If possible, try to watch programs with your child and talk about what you are watching.
    Kevin Woblick/ Unsplash, CC BY



    Read more:
    ‘Screen time’ for kids is an outdated concept, so let’s ditch it and focus on quality instead

    Positive screen use

    There are also lots of ways to use screens that can build skills and encourage critical thinking and creativity. Some things to try include:

    • producing a short film, or stop-motion animation, all the way from idea, to script, shooting and editing

    • taking and editing photos to make a calendar

    • exploring an area of interest, such as dinosaurs, the Titanic or ballet dancing, using sites such as ABC Education or PBS LearningMedia.

    • investigating generative artificial intelligence (AI). For example, test the capabilities of ChatGPT by asking it a question your child knows the answer to, and evaluating the response together. Does it contain all the relevant information? Is it fair and balanced?

    • exploring how easy it is to edit an image, and consider what this tells us about the potential for online misinformation.

    Your child could use a phone to take photos and make a calendar.
    Ann in the UK/ Shutterstock

    Being physical

    Research shows interactive screen use – such as playing games or using educational apps – is more beneficial for kids than just passively viewing content. It can can even support literacy, numeracy and academic persistence.

    You can also use screens to encourage physical activity. For example, these holidays, my little ones have enjoyed “shaking their sillies out” with dance-along videos by Danny Go!. They have also done “yoga in space” with Cosmic Kids.

    Older kids may enjoy the dance fitness program Zumba, boxing or sports competitions on the Nintendo Switch.

    Or you could stage your own family dance party. The kids could create their own set using a free DJ app.



    Read more:
    Screen time doesn’t have to be sedentary: 3 ways it can get kids moving

    Structure in time away from screens

    It’s also important for kids to see parents doing things other than using phones and other screens when they have downtime. Parents play a powerful role modelling time away from screens.

    Make sure your kids see you enjoy offline activities too, such as reading, playing sport and socialising. If you are struggling to do this as a family – and we all know it is is hard – think about revisiting some of the old standards. You could:

    • go to the park, for a scoot or a walk

    • spend time in nature at the beach or bushwalking

    • set building challenges with Lego

    • draw or do other art activities with your child

    • play board games

    • make a recipe together.

    And remember, you are certainly not the only family telling your kids “this is the very last episode”. If today has been a struggle, take tomorrow to recharge and reconnect as a family. Screens are part of our lives today, and we are all striving to find balance.

    Jennifer Stokes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Watch shows together, talk about them and have dance parties: how to rebalance screen use after the holidays – https://theconversation.com/watch-shows-together-talk-about-them-and-have-dance-parties-how-to-rebalance-screen-use-after-the-holidays-247996

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Paracetamol pack sizes and availability are changing. Here’s what you need to know

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natasa Gisev, Clinical pharmacist and Scientia Associate Professor at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

    Bowonpat Sakaew/Shutterstock

    Changes are coming into effect from February 1 about how paracetamol is sold in Australia.

    This mainly affects pack sizes of paracetamol sold outside pharmacies and how paracetamol is accessed in pharmacies.

    The changes, announced by Australia’s drug regulator, are in line with moves internationally to reduce the harms of liver toxicity and the risk of overdose.

    However, there are no new safety concerns when paracetamol is used as directed. And children’s products are not affected.

    What is paracetamol?

    Paracetamol is commonly sold under brand names such as Panadol, Dymadon and Panamax. It’s used to treat mild pain and fever for short periods or can be prescribed for chronic (long-term) pain.

    Millions of packs of this cheap and accessible medicine are sold in Australia every year.

    Small packs (up to 20 tablets) have been available from supermarkets and other retailers such as petrol stations. Larger packs (up to 100 tablets) are only available from pharmacies.

    Paracetamol is relatively safe when used as directed. However, at higher-than-recommended doses, it can cause liver toxicity. In severe cases and when left untreated, this can be lethal.

    Why are the rules changing?

    In 2022, we wrote about how the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) was considering changes to paracetamol access because of an increase in people going to hospital with paracetamol poisoning.

    An expert review it commissioned found there were about 40-50 deaths every year from paracetamol poisoning between 2007 and 2020. Between 2009-10 and 2016-17, hospital admissions for this increased (from 8,617 to 11,697), before reducing in 2019-20 (8,723). Most admissions were due to intentional self-poisonings, and about half of these were among people aged ten to 24.

    After the report, the TGA consulted with the public to work out how to prevent paracetamol poisonings.

    Options included reducing pack sizes, limiting how many packs could be bought at once, moving larger packs behind the pharmacy counter and restricting access by age.

    Responses were mixed. Although responses supported the need to prevent poisonings, there were concerns about how changes might affect:

    • people with chronic pain, especially those in regional areas, where it may be harder to access pharmacies and, therefore, larger packs

    • people on limited incomes, if certain products were made prescription-only.

    Although deaths from paracetamol poisoning are tragic and preventable, they are rare considering how much paracetamol Australians use. There is less than one death due to poisoning for every million packs sold.

    Because of this, it was important the TGA addressed concerns about poisonings while making sure Australians still had easy access to this essential medicine.

    If you buy large packs of paracetamol for chronic pain, you’ll need to go to the pharmacy counter.
    StratfordProductions/Shutterstock

    So what’s changing?

    The key changes being introduced relate to new rules about the pack sizes that can be sold outside pharmacies, and the location of products sold in pharmacies.

    From February 1, packs sold in supermarkets and places other than pharmacies will reduce from a maximum 20 tablets to 16 tablets per pack. These changes bring Australia in line with other countries. These include the United Kingdom, which restricted supermarket packs to 16 tablets in 1998, and saw reductions in poisonings.

    In all jurisdictions except Queensland and Western Australia, packs sold in pharmacies larger than 50 tablets will move behind the pharmacy counter and can only be sold under pharmacist supervision. In Queensland and WA, products containing more than 16 tablets will only be available from behind the pharmacy counter and sold under pharmacist supervision.

    In all jurisdictions, any packs containing more than 50 tablets will need to be sold in blister packs, rather than bottles.

    Several paracetamol products are not affected by these changes. These include children’s products, slow-release formulations (for example, “osteo” products), and products already behind the pharmacy counter or only available via prescription.

    What else do I need to know?

    These changes have been introduced to reduce the risk of poisonings from people exceeding recommended doses. The overall safety profile of paracetamol has not changed.

    Paracetamol is still available from all current locations and there are no plans to make it prescription-only or remove it from supermarkets altogether. Many companies have already been updating their packaging to ensure there are no gaps in supply.

    The reduction in pack sizes of paracetamol available in supermarkets means
    a pack of 16 tablets will now last two days instead of two-and-a-half days if taken at the maximum dose (two tablets, four times a day). Anyone in pain that does not improve after short-term use should speak to their pharmacist or GP.

    For people who use paracetamol regularly for chronic pain, it is more cost-effective to continue buying larger packs from pharmacies. As larger packs (50+ tablets) need to be kept out of sight, you will need to ask at the pharmacy counter. Pharmacists know that for many people it’s appropriate to use paracetamol daily for chronic pain.

    Natasa Gisev receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

    Ria Hopkins receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

    – ref. Paracetamol pack sizes and availability are changing. Here’s what you need to know – https://theconversation.com/paracetamol-pack-sizes-and-availability-are-changing-heres-what-you-need-to-know-242200

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: The Treaty Principles Bill’s promise of ‘equal rights’ ignores the blind spots of our democracy

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annabel Ahuriri-Driscoll, Associate Professor, School of Health Sciences, University of Canterbury

    Shutterstock

    Despite being used in both the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill, the term “democracy” is neither defined nor explained in either.

    This rhetorical and ideological vagueness obscures a pivotal point: there is no such thing as a singular form of democracy.

    The ACT Party is behind both bills, and its leader David Seymour has also justified the Treaty Principles Bill – now before select committee – as upholding and protecting democracy. He asks, “are we a modern democracy where all citizens have equal rights?”.

    But democracy takes various forms, and has done for millennia. Derived from the Ancient Greek “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power or rule), the word broadly means “rule by, or power of, the people”. And this can be realised in a number of ways.

    The classical Greek form was direct democracy, also known as deliberative or participatory democracy. This involved male citizens participating equally and directly in political decisions.

    In contrast, the ancient Roman form was indirect, representative democracy. Representatives elected by eligible citizens made decisions on their behalf. This was the basic model enacted in the 1852 New Zealand Constitution Act, as in most modern democracies.

    Other models exist, too. But the point is that democracy is an evolving concept. It’s wrong to assert that any type of governance or decision-making other than our existing system of representative democracy (one person, one vote, underpinned by the rule of law) is undemocratic or anti-democratic.

    Tyranny of the majority

    Many of the political mechanisms the current government wishes to dismantle – such as Māori wards and consultation processes – were established because of the problems associated with representative democracy.

    It is widely accepted that political representation should reflect the different characteristics of a community. But what has been called the “tyranny of the majority” can lead to minorities being constantly outvoted.

    Unable to gain representation in proportion to their population, their interests are excluded. In short, it is entirely possible for democracy to be applied in ways that promote inequality rather than equality.

    The common interpretation of equality as meaning “sameness” – everybody receiving the same resources and opportunities – underlies the insistence that laws and policies must be applied regardless of individual and group difference. Anything else is unfair or “special” treatment.

    However, these assertions overlook the bias of our institutions towards members of the dominant or majority culture, and the unequal outcomes (in health and elsewhere) for Māori people that have resulted in marginalisation and disadvantage.

    Correcting that imbalance is a political challenge. As others have argued, “protecting minority rights is an equal characteristic of genuine democracy”.

    Contentious legislation: the hīkoi (protest march) against the Treaty Principles Bill arrives at parliament, November 2024.
    Getty Images

    Tino rangatiratanga and democracy

    The term “equity” refers to this recognition of the inequalities that exist between people. Where these inequalities are avoidable and unfair, resources and opportunities need to be allocated to reach an equal outcome.

    Achieving health equity for Māori was a key purpose of Te Aka Whai Ora/the Māori Health Authority, prior to its disestablishment.

    For Māori, the unfairness extends beyond unequal health and other socioeconomic outcomes. It involves the disregarded guarantees pledged by the Crown in te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.

    These included Māori rights of self-determination, or tino rangatiratanga, which is the source of so much contemporary debate.

    Tino rangatiratanga challenges the singular base of power assumed by the Crown, and a “one size fits all” system of representation. But despite claims to the contrary, others argue upholding tino rangatiratanga is entirely possible within the realms of democracy.

    The idea of “rule of and by the people” may take many forms, as the work of Matike Mai, the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, tries to demonstrate.

    In proposing constitutional change, Matike Mai describes a sphere of influence based on the Māori-Crown relationship where “conciliatory and consensual democracy” operates.

    Difference and equity

    It has been argued that te Tiriti is “of its time” and should therefore be subject to reinterpretation. And yet the same argument is rarely made about notions of democracy and equality that have been with us since 1852.

    This is relevant to many communities which experience avoidable and unfair health and social inequalities, not only Māori.

    In September last year, a Cabinet Office circular required public sector agencies to ensure “services are not arbitrarily allocated on the basis of ethnicity or any other aspect of identity”.

    On the face of it, this is a call for fair and equal treatment based on need. But the language suggests difference is about how an individual chooses to identify, rather than how their identity and circumstances cause them to be treated differently in the first place.

    As long as this is the case, those differences and their associated needs will always be underserved.

    Annabel Ahuriri-Driscoll does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. The Treaty Principles Bill’s promise of ‘equal rights’ ignores the blind spots of our democracy – https://theconversation.com/the-treaty-principles-bills-promise-of-equal-rights-ignores-the-blind-spots-of-our-democracy-248121

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Cracked and Nulled Marketplaces Disrupted in International Cyber Operation

    Source: US State of California

    At Least 17M U.S. Victims Affected

    The Justice Department today announced its participation in a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, Romania, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece to disrupt and take down the infrastructure of the online cybercrime marketplaces known as Cracked and Nulled. The operation was announced in conjunction with Operation Talent, a multinational law enforcement operation supported by Europol to investigate Cracked and Nulled.

    Operation Talent Seizure Banner

    Supervisory Official Antoinette T. Bacon of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Trini E. Ross for the Western District of New York, U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza for the Western District of Texas, Assistant Director Brian A. Vorndran of the FBI’s Cyber Division, Special Agent in Charge Matthew Miraglia of the FBI Buffalo Field Office, and Special Agent in Charge Aaron Tapp for the FBI San Antonio Field Office made the announcement.

    Cracked

    According to seizure warrants unsealed today, the Cracked marketplace has been selling stolen login credentials, hacking tools, and servers for hosting malware and stolen data — as well as other tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud — since March 2018. Cracked had over four million users, listed over 28 million posts advertising cybercrime tools and stolen information, generated approximately $4 million in revenue, and impacted at least 17 million victims from the United States. One product advertised on Cracked offered access to “billions of leaked websites” allowing users to search for stolen login credentials. This product was recently allegedly used to sextort and harass a woman in the Western District of New York. Specifically, a cybercriminal entered the victim’s username into the tool and obtained the victim’s credentials for an online account. Using the victim’s credentials, the subject then cyberstalked the victim and sent sexually demeaning and threatening messages to the victim. The seizure of these marketplaces is intended to disrupt this type of cybercrime and the proliferation of these tools in the cybercrime community.

    The FBI, working in coordination with foreign law enforcement partners, identified a series of servers that hosted the Cracked marketplace infrastructure and eight domain names used to operate Cracked. They also identified servers and domain names for Cracked’s payment processor, Sellix, and the server and domain name for a related bulletproof hosting service. All of these servers and domain names have been seized pursuant to domestic and international legal process. Anyone visiting any of these seized domains will now see a seizure banner that notifies them that the domain has been seized by law enforcement authorities.

    The FBI Buffalo Field Office is investigating the case.

    Senior Counsel Thomas Dougherty of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) and Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Kruly for the Western District of New York are prosecuting the case.

    Nulled

    The Justice Department announced the seizure of the Nulled website domain and unsealed charges against one of Nulled’s administrators, Lucas Sohn, 29, an Argentinian national residing in Spain. According to the unsealed complaint affidavit, the Nulled marketplace has been selling stolen login credentials, stolen identification documents, hacking tools, as well as other tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud, since 2016. Nulled had over five million users, listed over 43 million posts advertising cybercrime tools and stolen information, and generated approximately $1 million in yearly revenue. One product advertised on Nulled purported to contain the names and social security numbers of 500,000 American citizens.

    The FBI, working in coordination with foreign law enforcement partners, identified the servers that hosted the Nulled marketplace infrastructure, and the domain used to operate Nulled. The servers and domain have been seized pursuant to domestic and international legal process. Anyone visiting the Nulled domain will now see a seizure banner that notifies them that the domain has been seized by law enforcement authorities.

    According to the complaint, Sohn was an active administrator of Nulled and performed escrow functions on the website. Nulled’s customers would use Sohn’s services to complete transactions involving stolen credentials and other information. For his actions, Sohn has been charged with conspiracy to traffic in passwords and similar information through which computers may be accessed without authorization; conspiracy to solicit another person for the purpose of offering an access device or selling information regarding an access device; and conspiracy to possess, transfer, or use a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit or to aid and abet or in connection with any unlawful activity that is a violation of federal law.

    If convicted, Sohn faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for conspiracy to traffic in passwords, 10 years in prison for access device fraud, and 15 years in prison for identity fraud.

    The FBI Austin Cyber Task Force is investigating the case. The Task Force participants include the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, IRS Criminal Investigation, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division, among other agencies.

    Assistant U.S. Attorneys G. Karthik Srinivasan and Christopher Mangels for the Western District of Texas are prosecuting the case, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Tindall for the Western District of Texas handling the forfeiture component.

    The Justice Department worked in close cooperation with investigators and prosecutors from several jurisdictions on the takedown of both the Cracked and Nulled marketplaces, including the Australian Federal Police, Europol, France’s Anti-Cybercrime Office (Office Anti-cybercriminalité) and Cyber Division of the Paris Prosecution Office, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt) and Prosecutor General’s Office Frankfurt am Main – Cyber Crime Center (Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt am Main – ZIT), the Spanish National Police (Policía Nacional) and Guardia Civil, the Hellenic Police (Ελληνική Αστυνομία), Italy’s Polizia di Stato and the General Inspectorate of Romanian Police (Inspectoratul General al Poliției Romane). The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided significant assistance.

    A complaint is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Central India’s indigenous forests are falling victim to bullets and bulldozers

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Bulbul Prakash, PhD Candidate in Politics, University of Manchester

    The state of Chhattisgarh in India’s tribal heartland has been the epicentre of a violent conflict for more than 30 years. This struggle has pit a Maoist-inspired group called the Naxalites, who are fighting for the rights of marginalised tribal communities, against the Indian government, which has deployed security forces to suppress the insurgency. More than 11,600 people have been killed in the conflict since 2000.

    At the same time, Chhattisgarh is also grappling with the pressures of rapid industrialisation. Large-scale mining and infrastructure projects are threatening both the land and livelihoods of the state’s indigenous (or Adivasi in Sanskrit) communities.

    Around 44% of the region’s land area is covered by dense forests. These forests are home to vital plant and animal species such as Mahua and Sal trees. However, these forests are being damaged. Trees are being ravaged by gunfire, animals are being killed by explosions, and the fragile ecosystem that sustains people and wildlife in Chhattisgarh is gradually crumbling.

    Soni Sori, an Adivasi activist, has shared images with me that have been taken by Adivasis in the forests of Chhattisgarh. The photos highlight the damage being caused by gunfire, explosions and shelling.

    Bullets tear through bark, while explosions strip it away, leaving trees vulnerable to pests and disease. Shrapnel and shock waves from blasts also sever branches or trunks, which further weakens the trees and causes long-term damage.

    Fresh bullet wounds on a Sal tree in Chhattisgarh.
    Soni Sori, CC BY-NC-ND

    The destruction of Mahua and Sal trees has had a particularly devastating impact on women from Adivasi communities.

    The Mahua tree, which is often called the “tree of life” by locals, provides an essential lifeline for many Adivasi women. Its flowers are fermented to make alcohol, which offers a crucial source of income when it is sold in local markets.

    When men are drawn into Naxal movements or caught in the state’s counterinsurgency efforts, women often step in and use the income from Mahua flowers and oil to fund their children’s education, sustain their families, and repay debts.

    In the town of Dantewada in southern Chhattisgarh, locals even hold a special ceremony where they “marry” the Mahua tree, honouring its life-sustaining role in their community.

    Sal trees, which form much of Chhattisgarh’s forest cover, play a crucial role in stabilising the soil. Their loss leads to erosion and increases the risk of floods and landslides. Climate change, and the increasingly erratic rainfall it brings, has compounded these risks.

    An unexploded mortar shell partially buried in Chhattisgarh.
    Soni Sori, CC BY-NC-ND

    The loss of essential resources like Mahua trees will only exacerbate food insecurity and economic hardship, pushing Adivasis further into poverty. The average annual income of Adivasi households in Chhattisgarh was just ₹53,610 (around £505) in 2022 – well below the national agricultural household average of ₹122,616.

    The conflict in Chhattisgarh is also harming the region’s wildlife. In December, a female sloth bear was killed by an improvised explosive device planted by Maoist rebels in the forests of Dantewada. The bear’s two orphaned cubs starved to death shortly after.

    This was the first recorded death of a wild animal from such an explosion in Bastar district, though livestock and pets have been victims of similar blasts in the past.

    One month earlier, in central Chhattisgarh’s Udanti-Sitanadi Tiger Reserve, a five-year-old elephant calf sustained critical injuries from a suspected bomb explosion. These incidents reflect a disturbing pattern within the conflict, where wildlife is becoming a victim of the violence.

    March of industrialisation

    Industrialisation has exacerbated these challenges. Chhattisgarh is rich in mineral resources. Between 2023 and 2024, the state produced nearly 50 million tonnes of limestone, 44 million tonnes of iron ore, and over 1 million tonnes of bauxite. However, widespread mining is fuelling further deforestation and environmental degradation.

    Between 2001 and 2023, the state lost 53,500 hectares of forest, with large-scale mining operations contributing significantly to the loss. In the Hasdeo region of northern Chhattisgarh, the Parsa East Kete Basen coal mine has led to the felling of almost 82,000 trees, spread across two phases of mining. Between 2012 and 2018, 50,000 trees were felled, with more than 31,800 more trees cut down since then.

    With continued political support for mineral extraction, government approvals, and the involvement of commercial mining giants, more deforestation is expected over the coming years.

    This deforestation is, unsurprisingly, harming the region’s wildlife. The latest census by the National Tiger Conservation Authority, which was carried out in 2022, revealed a sharp and alarming decline in Chhattisgarh’s tiger population.

    At that time, there were only 17 tigers remaining in the state – a dramatic fall from 46 in 2014. Conservationists fear that the figure could now be even lower, as the situation continues to deteriorate.

    This decline is largely due to habitat destruction. But it has probably been made worse by the Maoist insurgency in regions such as northern Chhattisgarh, which is home to the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve, as well as the Indravati Tiger Reserve in the south-western part of the state.

    The insurgency has hindered conservation efforts. The use of explosives in the forests disrupts the behaviour of tigers, while also making it more difficult for conservationists to monitor and protect them.

    What was once a lush and bio-diverse environment is rapidly becoming a wasteland. But the loss of these trees and wildlife in Chhattisgarh represents more than simply the depletion of natural resources. It symbolises the erosion of culture, identity, and a way of life for Chhattisgarh’s Indigenous people.

    Bulbul Prakash is supported by The University of Manchester through the ‘Future of the Academy Studentship’ for her doctoral research. The author would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Adivasi activist Soni Sori, who shared firsthand images taken by Adivasi community members in the forests of Chhattisgarh, which illustrate the environmental damage caused by ongoing conflict.

    – ref. Central India’s indigenous forests are falling victim to bullets and bulldozers – https://theconversation.com/central-indias-indigenous-forests-are-falling-victim-to-bullets-and-bulldozers-246272

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Economics: Celebrate Xbox’s Indie Selects program with top picks and sale

    Source: Microsoft

    Headline: Celebrate Xbox’s Indie Selects program with top picks and sale

    Balatro is a poker-inspired roguelike deck builder all about creating powerful synergies and winning big. The poker roguelike. Balatro is a hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder where you play illegal poker hands, discover game-changing jokers, and trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos. Combine valid poker hands with unique Joker cards in order to create varied synergies and builds. Earn enough chips to beat devious blinds, all while uncovering hidden bonus hands and decks as you progress. You’re going to need every edge you can get in order to reach the boss blind, beat the final ante and secure victory.

    Animal Well – Developed by Billy Basso

    “Seven years ago, I started building a new game/engine from scratch, more as a learning experience than out of any ambition to create the new big indie hit. I drew a few animal sprites. Got a candle to glow the way I wanted. As the game and the engine organically fed off of one another, it took a shape I never would have predicted when I first started. And now that Animal Well is out in the world, players continue to color it with their own perspectives, their pet theories, their love for the game. I feel like I was able to make a small contribution to video game culture and my efforts have been rewarded a hundredfold.” – Billy Basso, Developer of Animal Well

    ANIMAL WELL

    Bigmode

    ☆☆☆☆☆ 46

    ★★★★★

    $24.99

    Hatch from your flower and spelunk through the beautiful and sometimes haunting world of Animal Well, a pixelated wonder rendered in intricate audio and visual detail. Encounter lively creatures small and large, helpful and ominous as you discover unconventional upgrades and unravel the well’s secrets. This is a truly unique experience that can make you laugh in fear, surprise, or delight.

    The Plucky Squire – Developed by All Possible Futures

    “Working on The Plucky Squire has been an amazing journey for all of us at All Possible Futures. From those first prototypes of Jot leaping from desk to book, to seeing players light up as they experience it – it’s been a joy to share with the world. We poured all of our heart into the game, and it’s been incredible to see players and critics connect with it in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Knowing that the game has brought smiles to so many faces is the most rewarding part of it all. That’s what it’s all about for us, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the love and support along the way.” – Jonathan Biddle, Co-director, All Possible Futures

    The Plucky Squire

    Devolver Digital

    ☆☆☆☆☆ 65

    ★★★★★

    $29.99

    The Plucky Squire follows the magical adventures of Jot and his friends – storybook characters who discover a three-dimensional world outside the pages of their book. When the malevolent Humgrump realizes he’s the villain of the book – destined to lose his battle against the forces of good for all eternity – he kicks the heroic Jot out of its pages and changes the story forever. Jot must face challenges, unlike anything he’s ever seen if he is to save his friends from Humgrump’s dark forces and restore the book’s happy ending. Jump between 2D and 3D worlds in this charming action-adventure – solving puzzles, boxing badgers, flying with a jetpack, and enjoying many more delightful and surprising mini-challenges as you become the hero of a living storybook.

    Neva – Developed by Nomada Studio

    “Launching Neva has been a journey of four years—more than double the time it took to develop [our last game] Gris. It has been a long and challenging process. 

    “Our biggest fear was living up to the expectations of our fans and critics. After the huge and unexpected success of Gris, we felt the pressure of both external expectations and our own ambitions. Every element of Neva, from its storytelling to its art and gameplay, was crafted with the hope of creating a meaningful connection with players. This is the kind of game we aspire to create as a studio. 

    “Seeing both critics and players enjoy and praise Neva has been incredibly fulfilling—a perfect final gift to its long development journey and a transformative milestone for our studio. It has proven that players are truly eager for games capable of evoking powerful emotions and telling unique, meaningful stories that resonate with them; and for us, this recognition has provided the strength and motivation to continue pursuing this goal for as long as we can.” – Conrad Roset, Creative Director, Nomada Studio

    Neva

    Devolver Digital

    ☆☆☆☆☆ 51

    ★★★★★

    $19.99

    Neva is an emotionally-charged action adventure from the visionary team behind the critically acclaimed GRIS. Neva chronicles the story of Alba, a young woman bound to a curious wolf cub following a traumatic encounter with dark forces. Together they embark on a perilous journey through a once-beautiful world as it slowly decays around them. Over time, their relationship will evolve as they learn to work together, helping one another to brave increasingly dangerous situations. The wolf will grow from a rebellious cub to an imposing adult seeking to forge his own identity, testing Alba’s love and their commitment to one another. As the cursed world threatens to overwhelm them, Alba and her courageous companion will do whatever it takes to survive and make a new home, together.

    Crow Country – Developed by SFB Games

    “We had hopes that people would get excited for Crow Country when even early, out-of-context teaser screenshots would get very positive attention. Nothing is certain in game development though, so to have had this many people write so many lovely things about the game, recommend it to their friends or audiences, and rate it so highly – it’s really reassuring that the kind of games we want to make are the kind that people want to play. It’s also been a morale-boosting liferaft in a very troubled time for the games industry, and will keep [studio co-founder] Adam and me going through the next game and beyond!” – Tom Vian, Co-founder, SFB Games

    Crow Country

    SFB Games

    ☆☆☆☆☆ 135

    ★★★★★

    $19.99 $15.99

    The year is 1990. It’s been two years since the mysterious disappearance of Edward Crow and the abrupt closure of his theme park, Crow Country. But your arrival has broken the silence, Mara Forest. If you want answers, you’ll have to venture deep into the darkness of Crow Country to find them… A survival horror game, where you’ll test yourself against puzzles and riddles as you investigate the eerie tranquility of the abandoned theme park. Don’t be deceived by the whimsical surroundings, something is awfully wrong in Crow Country. As you unlock new areas, backtrack and discover more, you gradually piece together why Edward really shut down his park and where he mysteriously disappeared to. You’ve heard some pretty disturbing rumors, but they couldn’t possibly be true…..right?  For visitors to the park who are more interested in spotting crows and taking in the sights, Exploration Mode allows you to journey on without the fear of being attacked by the mysterious monsters roaming Crow Country. Besides, if you knew what those monsters really are….. Just how far would someone go to follow their ambition? Are some sins too wicked for redemption?  A tale of reckless hubris and human greed, and now at the center of it all… you.  Who are you really, Mara Forest? 

    Hypercharge Unboxed – Developed by Digital Cybercherries Limited

    “Power Your Dreams is more than just a slogan: it speaks to the heart of every dreamer, reminding us that with passion and determination, even childhood dreams can come true. We believed in that message and powered our dream of creating Hypercharge. With Xbox’s support, we were able to launch on this incredible platform and witness it not only change our lives as a small indie studio, but also bring families closer together through the magic of couch co-op.

    “Seeing parents and children laughing and working together to overcome challenges in Hypercharge has been truly heart-warming. That shared experience, playing together in the same room, on their Xbox – that’s something really special, where memories will last a lifetime. We’re immensely grateful to Xbox for helping make our dream come true and for allowing players to join us on this journey! The overwhelmingly positive response to Hypercharge has been truly inspiring. To everyone who has played and supported our game, thank you!” – Joe Henson, Creative Gameplay & Marketing Director, Digital Cybercherries

    HYPERCHARGE Unboxed

    Digital Cybercherries Limited

    ☆☆☆☆☆ 269

    ★★★★★

    $29.99 $23.99

    HELP SGT. MAX AMMO TO DEFEAT MAJOR EVIL AND SAVE THE HYPERCORE! There was once an ancient line of action figures, who created a magical power source that would allow humans to keep their favourite childhood memories of their toys. This ancient power source is known as the Hypercore. Inside the Hypercore are the beloved memories of our favorite toys. If Major Evil destroys it, these memories will disappear forever. Defend it with everything you’ve got, or see our cherished toys turn into lost treasures of the past! Hypercharge is a first and third-person shooter action figure game you’ve always dreamed of! Grab your friends, complete objectives, defend the Hypercore against waves of weaponized toys, and defeat Major Evil together in the story campaign! PLAY CO-OP WITH YOUR FRIENDS Work together as a team to defend the Hypercore. Grab a friend, break out of your toy packaging, and get ready to fight waves of classic toys. Prepare for each wave by searching for weapons, resources, and even hidden secrets. OFFLINE PLAY FOR SOLO PLAYERS Not everybody likes to play online. Hypercharge supports Offline, Split-Screen and Local play. You can progress and unlock everything in-game while playing solo. PLAYER BOTS Don’t have a team to play with? Don’t worry, we’ve got you solo players covered. Player bots listen to your commands, collect resources, and even help to build defences. UNLOCK ACTION FIGURES In Hypercharge, hundreds of unlocks are available, all of which can be earned directly in-game without any microtransactions. PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER MODES Go head-to-head against other action figures as you fight to become top of the scoreboard! Classic PvP modes include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Battery, Infection, and King of the Hill.

    On top of the Collection itself, we’re running an Indie Selects Anniversary Sale from January 28 to February 3, featuring over 200 indie titles that launched in 2024. This is the perfect opportunity to save on titles we recommended, including Balatro, Phasmophobia, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Legends of the Zone Trilogy, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Rounds, and more.

    Check out the full list of on-sale titles below. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for even more Indie Selects in the years ahead!

    Full List of Games in the Indie Selects Anniversary Sale

    MIL OSI Economics –

  • MIL-OSI Security: Cracked and Nulled Marketplaces Disrupted in International Cyber Operation

    Source: United States Attorneys General 2

    At Least 17M U.S. Victims Affected

    The Justice Department today announced its participation in a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, Romania, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece to disrupt and take down the infrastructure of the online cybercrime marketplaces known as Cracked and Nulled. The operation was announced in conjunction with Operation Talent, a multinational law enforcement operation supported by Europol to investigate Cracked and Nulled.

    Operation Talent Seizure Banner

    Supervisory Official Antoinette T. Bacon of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Trini E. Ross for the Western District of New York, U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza for the Western District of Texas, Assistant Director Brian A. Vorndran of the FBI’s Cyber Division, Special Agent in Charge Matthew Miraglia of the FBI Buffalo Field Office, and Special Agent in Charge Aaron Tapp for the FBI San Antonio Field Office made the announcement.

    Cracked

    According to seizure warrants unsealed today, the Cracked marketplace has been selling stolen login credentials, hacking tools, and servers for hosting malware and stolen data — as well as other tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud — since March 2018. Cracked had over four million users, listed over 28 million posts advertising cybercrime tools and stolen information, generated approximately $4 million in revenue, and impacted at least 17 million victims from the United States. One product advertised on Cracked offered access to “billions of leaked websites” allowing users to search for stolen login credentials. This product was recently allegedly used to sextort and harass a woman in the Western District of New York. Specifically, a cybercriminal entered the victim’s username into the tool and obtained the victim’s credentials for an online account. Using the victim’s credentials, the subject then cyberstalked the victim and sent sexually demeaning and threatening messages to the victim. The seizure of these marketplaces is intended to disrupt this type of cybercrime and the proliferation of these tools in the cybercrime community.

    The FBI, working in coordination with foreign law enforcement partners, identified a series of servers that hosted the Cracked marketplace infrastructure and eight domain names used to operate Cracked. They also identified servers and domain names for Cracked’s payment processor, Sellix, and the server and domain name for a related bulletproof hosting service. All of these servers and domain names have been seized pursuant to domestic and international legal process. Anyone visiting any of these seized domains will now see a seizure banner that notifies them that the domain has been seized by law enforcement authorities.

    The FBI Buffalo Field Office is investigating the case.

    Senior Counsel Thomas Dougherty of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) and Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Kruly for the Western District of New York are prosecuting the case.

    Nulled

    The Justice Department announced the seizure of the Nulled website domain and unsealed charges against one of Nulled’s administrators, Lucas Sohn, 29, an Argentinian national residing in Spain. According to the unsealed complaint affidavit, the Nulled marketplace has been selling stolen login credentials, stolen identification documents, hacking tools, as well as other tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud, since 2016. Nulled had over five million users, listed over 43 million posts advertising cybercrime tools and stolen information, and generated approximately $1 million in yearly revenue. One product advertised on Nulled purported to contain the names and social security numbers of 500,000 American citizens.

    The FBI, working in coordination with foreign law enforcement partners, identified the servers that hosted the Nulled marketplace infrastructure, and the domain used to operate Nulled. The servers and domain have been seized pursuant to domestic and international legal process. Anyone visiting the Nulled domain will now see a seizure banner that notifies them that the domain has been seized by law enforcement authorities.

    According to the complaint, Sohn was an active administrator of Nulled and performed escrow functions on the website. Nulled’s customers would use Sohn’s services to complete transactions involving stolen credentials and other information. For his actions, Sohn has been charged with conspiracy to traffic in passwords and similar information through which computers may be accessed without authorization; conspiracy to solicit another person for the purpose of offering an access device or selling information regarding an access device; and conspiracy to possess, transfer, or use a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit or to aid and abet or in connection with any unlawful activity that is a violation of federal law.

    If convicted, Sohn faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for conspiracy to traffic in passwords, 10 years in prison for access device fraud, and 15 years in prison for identity fraud.

    The FBI Austin Cyber Task Force is investigating the case. The Task Force participants include the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, IRS Criminal Investigation, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division, among other agencies.

    Assistant U.S. Attorneys G. Karthik Srinivasan and Christopher Mangels for the Western District of Texas are prosecuting the case, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Tindall for the Western District of Texas handling the forfeiture component.

    The Justice Department worked in close cooperation with investigators and prosecutors from several jurisdictions on the takedown of both the Cracked and Nulled marketplaces, including the Australian Federal Police, Europol, France’s Anti-Cybercrime Office (Office Anti-cybercriminalité) and Cyber Division of the Paris Prosecution Office, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt) and Prosecutor General’s Office Frankfurt am Main – Cyber Crime Center (Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt am Main – ZIT), the Spanish National Police (Policía Nacional) and Guardia Civil, the Hellenic Police (Ελληνική Αστυνομία), Italy’s Polizia di Stato and the General Inspectorate of Romanian Police (Inspectoratul General al Poliției Romane). The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided significant assistance.

    A complaint is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

    MIL Security OSI –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: UNECE Expert Meeting on Statistical Data Collection and Sources 2024

    Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

    Information Notice 1 PDF –
    Information Notice 2 (logistic information) PDF –
    Timetable PDF –
    Workshops and Small Group Discussions PDF  
    Report PDF  
    Session 1: Alternative Data Sources and Process Automation  
    Moderators: Paulo Saraiva (INE Portugal) and Rock Lemay (Statistics Canada)
    Tapping into web data for European statistics – challenges and experiences of the ESSnet Web Intelligence Network – Klaudia Peszat and Dominika Nowak (Statistics Poland) PDF   PDF
    Use of non-survey data in production of official statistics – Roger Jensen (Statistics Norway) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    System-to-System Data Collection in business surveys applied to an agricultural survey: small-scale pilot results – Ger Snijkers, Tim de Jong, Chris Lam and Cath van Meurs (Statistics Netherlands) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Data donation of personal physical activity trackers – Maaike Kompier, Anne Elevelt, Annemieke Luiten, Joris Mulder, Barry Schouten and Vera Toepoel (Statistics Netherlands) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Investigating paradata for one of the largest surveys in Sweden – Andreea Bolos, Viktor Dahl and Sofia Holsendahl (Statistics Sweden) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Citizen-generated data and machine learning: an innovative method to study violence against women – Claudia Villante, Gianpiero Bianchi, Alessandra Capobianchi and Maria Giuseppina Muratore (ISTAT, Italy) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    SORS Case: Performance Indicators in Population and Agricultural Censuses – Marija Hinda and Nebojsa Tolic (Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Revision of the UN Handbooks on Household Surveys: seeking input from the ECE region – Haoyi Chen (Inter-Secretariat Working Group on Household Surveys)    PDF
    Use of A.I. to use Linkedin as a new source of data – Simona Cafieri, Gerardo Masiello, Emanuele Amoruso and Michele Iannone (ISTAT, Italy) PDF  
    Mobile Phone Data for Enhanced Tourism Statistics in Italy: Insights from Vodafone-Istat Project Foundation – Lorenzo Cavallo, Maria Teresa Santoro and Silvia Di Sante (ISTAT, Italy) PDF PDF
    Tourism Data: Integrated Information System (S2S), sharing data and Official Statistics – Rui Martins, Sofia Rodrigues, Maria Jordão and Carla Braga (INE Portugal) PDF PDF
    Reforming Travel & Tourism Statistics – Tracy Davies and Dean Fletcher (ONS, UK) PDF PDF
    Designing a multichannel assistance service integrated with AI solutions for respondents – Paola Bosso, Silvana Curatolo, Gabriella Fazzi and Paolo Francescangeli (ISTAT, Italy) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Smart manufacturing and opportunities for Official statistics, a focus on SMEs – Pasquale Papa, Paola Bosso, Giovanni Gualberto Di Paolo and Diego Distefano (ISTAT, Italy) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Session 2: Approach to Multi-Mode and Mixed Source Collection: Navigating Challenges and Leveraging Advantages 
    Moderators: Pasquale Papa (Istat, Italy), Ian O’Sullivan (ONS, UK), Önder Değirmenci (Turkstat, Türkiye)
    Polish experiences in statistical data collection including the use of mixed and multi-mode approaches – Janusz Dygaszewicz and Marcin Szymkowiak (Statistics Poland) PDF PDF
    Successes and challenges of moving from a paper, to an online, based data collection mode for business surveys – Kate Thorsteinsson (ONS, UK) PDF PDF
    Optimizing Collection Strategy- Labor Force Survey – Cindy Ubartas and Sylvie Cyr (Statistics Canada) PDF PDF
    Implementing an Adaptive Survey Design (ASD) for the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS) – Michalina Siemiatkowska and Maria Tortoriello (ONS, UK) PDF PDF
    Conflation of Maps for the Integration of Geospatial Data and Enhancement of Building Registry Quality – Gianluigi Salvucci, Damiano Abbatini, Daniela Ichim, Juri Corradi and Stefania Lucchetti (ISTAT, Italy) PDF PDF
    Data collection of the environmental survey in cities: data validation – Domenico Adamo, Gianpiero Bianchi, Lucia Mongelli and Paolo Francescangeli (ISTAT, Italy) PDF PDF
    Quality of Survey and Administrative Data: Two New Applications of Representativity-Indicators – Nina Sommerland, Ella Williams Davies, Kim Warne and Chelsea-Rhianne McGuire  (ONS, UK) PDF PDF
    Working towards a business-centered vision on data collection – Anita Vaasen-Otten and Leanne Houben (Statistics Netherlands) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    ONS business-centred approach to research recruitment methods to understand business engagement needs – challenges and successes – Inara Dorsett and Kate Thorsteinsson (ONS, UK) PDF PDF
    Use and Role of Administrative Records/Data In The Modern Turkish Official Statistics Production Process – Önder Değirmenci and Hasan Ali Kozan (Turkstat, Türkiye) PDF PDF
    Redesigning the Dutch Holiday Survey into a smartphone friendly questionnaire – Rachel Vis-Visschers (Statistics Netherlands) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Use the Blaise 5 system to implement multi-mode surveys – Gina Cheung (Statistics Netherlands) PDF PDF
    Mixing data collection modes to achieve response rates above 70% – Results of a mixed-mode experiment at the Hungarian Central Statistical Office – Mátyás Gerencsér, Mária Zanatyné Fodor, Linda Mohay, Ferenc Mújdricza and Rozália Kalácska (Statistics Hungary) PDF PDF
    Make it easy to refuse – Marie Fuglsang and Bo Bilde (Statistics Denmark) PDF PDF
    Three experimental insights for strengthening response rates – Viktor Dahl, Sofia Holsendahl and Andreea Bolos (Statistics Sweden) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    10 years of communication experiments at Statistics Netherlands – Jelmer de Groot (Statistics Netherlands) PDF PDF
    Session 3: Future of Interview Modes and Interviewers 
    Moderators: Susan Oudshoorn and Leonne Hollanders (Statistics Netherlands)
    Experience on Multimode Data Collection in the NSI Spain. Challenges and Opportunities – Francisco Hernández Jiménez (INE, Spain) PDF PDF
    INS Romania’s Experience with CAPI Data Collection for Household Statistical Surveys using Survey Solutions Platform – Ana-Maria Ciuhu and Silvia Pisică (INS, Romania) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Developments in Interviewing at Statistics Netherlands: The Challenges for Personal Interviewing in a Targeted Approach – Jack Mommers and Jacky Deneer (Statistics Netherlands) PDF PDF
    Australia’s Data Collection Modernisation – Jodie Stevenson (Australian Bureau of Statistics) PDF PDF
    New Modes of Data Collection for Gaining Cooperation from Young People: The Case of the Survey «Children and Young People: Behavior, Attitudes, and Future Projects» – Samanta Pietropaoli, Federico De Cicco, Serena Liani, Fabio Massimo Rottino and Andrea Stanco (ISTAT, Italy) PDF

    PDF

    Paper
    Developments to Automate and Streamline Data Collection and Support Customers’ Needs – Epp Karus (Statistics Estonia) PDF PDF
    Smart Surveys: How to Implement Smart Data Collection in Official Statistics? – Jelmer de Groot (Statistics Netherlands) PDF PDF
    A Fresh Start: Redesigning Our Field Operation – Including Roles, Contracts, and Casework Allocations – at the ONS – Dulcie Wyatt (ONS UK) PDF PDF
    Applying Workforce Management Principles to Personal Interview Modes – Jack Mommers and Martijn van de Riet (Statistics Netherlands) PDF  

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Workshop on Ethics in Modern Statistical Organisations

    Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

    About the meeting

    The workshop will address questions of business and data ethics in the current evolving landscape of Official Statistics. With adoption of new technologies and methodologies, old policy and guidelines of National Statistical Offices are no longer cover all aspects of business operations, so progress in data ethics is now more important than ever. Business ethics is also gaining importance, as NSOs must act as moral agents upholding ethical behavior. Addressing both these questions is essential to maintain public trust and credibility in an evolving and data driven environment.

    The target audience of the includes senior and middle-level managers responsible for business, institutional and data ethics in their NSOs. As well as communication experts who handle ethical issues within their NSOs.

    Detailed information and examples of topics to be covered in the meeting, registration, contributions and other organizational aspects can be found in Information Notice #1.

    Document Title Documents Presentations
    ENG ENG
    Information Notice 1 PDF  
    Information Notice 2 (logistic information) PDF  
    Timetable PDF  
    Report PDF  
    Opening    
    Do statistical ethics apply equally to all – NSOs and other official statistics producers, whether regional/international or other national statistical authorities? Andreas Georgiou (Amherst College)   PDF
    Session 1: Ethics in institutional contexts
    Introducing Session 1: Ethics in Institutional Contexts. Fabrizio Rotundi (Istat, Italy)   PDF
    Democracy dies in darkness without Official Data. Luca Di Gennaro Splendore (University of Malta) PDF PDF
    Structure of ethical issues in new data ecosystems. Marianne Johnson, Timo Koskimäki, Markus Sovala (Statistics Finland) PDF PDF
    Revision of the Swiss Official Statistics Charter: opportunities and risks. Peter Laube (Swiss Ethics Council for Official Statistics), Marcus Baumann (Federal Statistical Office, Switzerland) PDF PDF
    UK Statistic Authority’s Centre for Applied Data Ethics (CADE) – the first three years. Nicola Shearman (Office of National Statistics, UK) PDF PDF
    Investigating Ethical Practices in NSOs – Surveys Results. Katia Ambrosino (Istat) PDF PDF
    Ethics Boot Camp Introduction. Angela Leonetti (Istat, Italy)   PDF
    Session 2: Ethics in daily work life    
    Rules of Professional Ethics in the State Statistics Bodies of the Republic of Belarus. Volha Pazharytskaya (National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus) PDF PDF
    Proposals to Promote Change from Compliance to Ethical Commitment in Istat. Angela Leonetti (Istat)   PDF
    Incorporating ethics in statistical organizations through GSBPM and GAMSO. InKyung Choi (UNECE)   PDF
    French official statistician and ethics: from law to practice. Mylène Chaleix, Olivier Lefebvre (Insee, France) PDF(en) / PDF (fr) PDF
    Ethics in staff and user satisfaction survey (Case of Albania). Vjollca Lasku (Instat, Albania)   PDF
    Session 3: Ethics for new data sources and technology    
    Reimagining how we deliver quality data and statistics: Stats NZ Journey. Emma MacDonald (New Zealand)   PDF
    The Role of Data Ethics to Maintain and Improve Public Trust: The Statistics Canada Experience. Martin Beaulieu (Statistics Canada)   PDF
    Towards a data ethics program for the Australian Bureau of Statistics: Considering privacy, ethics and trust for our innovative data uses. Joanne Hillermann (ABS, Australia)   PDF
    Statistics Netherlands ethics committee – purpose, composition and methods. Esther de Heij (Statistics Netherlands)   PDF
    Ethics of Technology. Milana Karaganis (Statistics Canada)   PDF
    The role of geo-information in ethics within modern statistical institutions. Mirela Deva (Instat, Albania)   PDF
    Session 4: Ethics and proactive communication    
    An ethical approach to the development of social acceptance and its application. John Byrne (Central Statistics Office, Ireland)   PDF
    An assessment of ethics and proactive communication practices in The Nigerian Statistical System. Kumafan Dzaan (Central Bank of Nigeria) PDF PDF
    Ethics and proactive communication: The Istat case. Giulia Peci and Michela Troia (Istat) PDF PDF
    Building trust culture in the office – examples of ethics-driven proactive internal communication at Statistics Poland. Anna Borowska and Olga Świerkot-Strużewska (Statistics Poland)   PDF
    Open discussion for the Reference Book on Ethics    
    Introduction to the Open Discussion for the Reference Book on Ethics. Fabrizio Rotundi (Istat, Italy)   PDF

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Ninth Joint OECD-UNECE Seminar on SEEA Implementation

    Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

    Report PDF
    Programme  PDF
    Get to know the speakers PDF
    Concept note PDF
    Link to the Guidelines for Measuring Circular Economy  
    Session 1: Opening & Setting the Scene 
    		  
    Updates on related work from OECD PDF
    London Group on Environmental Accounting Update PDF
    SEEA-related activities in Asia and the Pacific, ESCAP PDF
    Relevant outcomes from UN Statistical Commission, and work of UNCEEA PDF
    Online inventory of thematic and extended accounts, UNECE PDF
    Session 2: Utilising SEEA for Measuring Circular Economy
    		  
    2a: Introduction, information needs, existing measurement frameworks and their links with SEEA
    		  
    The concept of a Circular Economy and the most important measurement points, University of Exeter PDF
    Circular Economy in EU policy, European Commission, DG Environment PDF
    CES Guidelines for Measuring Circular Economy, Finland PDF
    Circular material use rate indicator: how it is calculated, results and interpretation, Eurostat PDF
    2e: Waste Accounts for measuring circularity
    The difficulty of finding circularity in solid waste accounts, Luxembourg PDF
    Limitations of SEEA waste accounts: conceptual, data collection and experiences from policy use, Australia PDF
    Experimental study: Using waste accounts for measuring plastic flows in the EU economy, Eurostat PDF
    2c: New developments and utilising EGSS for measuring jobs, goods and services related to circular-economy
     
    Conceptual framework pillar “socio-economic opportunities of a circular economy”: main indicators, UNECE PDF
    Updating of related classifications-Classification of environmental purposes (CEP), Eurostat PDF
    Using EGSS data for measuring circular economy, France     PDF
    Comparison of EGSS and structural business statistics data on measuring circular economy, Finland PDF
    2d: Measuring flows of biomass and bio-based material in a circular economy
     
    The concept of a Circular Economy and some key agenda for biological materials, University of Exeter PDF
    The sustainable and circular bioeconomy in the EU, European Commission PDF
    Costa Rica: Use of environmental accounts for policy making on circular economy and bioeconomy PDF
    Measuring stocks in the urban mine to monitor circular economy with SEEA, The Netherlands PDF
    2b: Utilising SEEA for measuring physical flows of plastics
    		  
    Policy development and the development of a statistical guideline on measuring flows of plastic along the lifecycle, UNEP PDF
    Measuring plastic flows with Plastic-KEYs, UNITAR PDF
    What statistics tell us about international trade of plastics? UNCTAD PDF
    Statistics Canada’s Physical Flow Account for Plastic Material PDF
    The use of SEEA – material flow accounts for deriving circular economy indicators, North Macedonia PDF
    Session 3: Informing climate-change-adaptation and response policies with SEEA
    		  
    3a: Introduction, information needs, existing measurement frameworks and their links with SEEA
    Climate change adaptation policies and SEEA-related information demands, OECD PDF
    Disaster-related statistics and the linkages to SEEA, ESCAP PDF
    Role of NSOs in Achieving National Climate Objectives, UNECE PDF
    3b: Climate change expenditures 
     
    Update on the revision of the Classification of Functions of Government (COFOG), UNSD PDF
    An integrated Approach to the classification of public environmental expenditure, OECD PDF
    G20 Data Gaps Initiative, IMF PDF
    Climate mitigation investments, The Netherlands PDF
    Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Expenditures in the Economy: Towards an Operational Definition, United States PDF
    Environmental expenditures account and its application in the Republic of Kazakhstan

    ENG

    RUS
    3c: Measuring ecosystem condition, degradation and loss of ecosystem services
     
    Ecosystem services accounts: from the operational platform (INCA) to their economic bridging (LISBETH), Joint Research Centre  PDF
    The role of the SEEA in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), UNSD PDF
    Ecosystem condition accounting in Statistics Lithuania PDF
    Working with blue carbon ecosystem accounts: value of coastal ecosystems in alleviating impacts of climate change, Australia PDF
    Implementation of Environmental Accounts in Ukraine – results and challenges. Estimation of damages caused by war PDF
    Session 4: Conclusions & Recommendations
    		  
    Draft conclusions and recommendations  PDF

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: New theme group created to establish future careers for the Armed Forces community

    Source: City of Plymouth

    Pictured from left to right hand side, front row:
    Andrew McConochie, Lieutenant Commander, Royal Navy
    Cllr Pauline Murphy, Deputy Lord Mayor and Armed Forces Champion, Plymouth City Council
    Emma Hewitt, Skills Lead, Plymouth City Council
    Victoria Mead, Skills and Workforce Coordinator, Plymouth City Council

    Pictured from left to right hand side, back row:
    David FitzGerald, President of the Royal British Legion Dartmoor Branch
    Darryl Newman, Nursing and Clinical Professions Recruitment Lead and Armed Forces Champion, University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust
    Consort Cllr Mark Coker, Plymouth City Council
    Cllr Chris Penberthy, Cabinet Member for Housing, Cooperative Development and Communities
    Lewis Elliot, Sea Cadet
    Jon Beake, Defence Relationship Management in the SW, Wessex RCFA

    Plymouth’s Armed Forces Covenant is launching a new theme group to help enable better access to local employment, skills and training opportunities for military service leavers, working-age veterans, military family spouses, partners and young people.

    Last year, the Council renewed its commitment to the Armed Forces Covenant.

    The Armed Forces Covenant is a nationwide agreement between the armed forces community, the nation and the government.

    One of the commitments from signing the Covenant, is to establish better job and training opportunities for members of the Armed Forces community.

    Led by Plymouth City Council’s Skills Launchpad Plymouth team, the representatives of the group are:

    • Plymouth’s Veterans and Families Hub
    • Forces Employment Charity
    • Career Transition Partnership
    • The Royal Marines Charity
    • Department for Work and Pensions.

    With strong involvement from local employers who are signatories of the Armed Forces Covenant including University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, Babcock, Livewell Southwest, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Wolferstans Solicitors and Plymouth City Bus.

    A launch event was held today to bring together a key group of people who will be involved in this work and to raise the profile of the Armed Forces Covenant with the local business community.

    Deputy Lord Mayor and Armed Forces Champion, Councillor Pauline Murphy, said: “Working in city-wide partnership, we want to recognise, communicate and seek to reduce the challenges faced by those within the Armed Forces community.

    “As a proud military city, I am delighted that we are launching Plymouth’s new vision for enabling better access to local employment and future careers. We are pro-actively engaging with our business community to increase commitment for the Armed Forces Covenant and want to create a win-win to help solve recruitment challenges in the city as we promote the highly transferrable skills and talent of our military community.

    “We are excited to support this joined up approach which builds on the Council’s renewal last year and strong commitment to the Armed Forces Covenant.”

    Attendees at the theme group launch event held 30 January 2025 at the Council House

    Speaking at the launch event, Darryl Newman, Nursing and Clinical Professions Recruitment Lead and Armed Forces Champion at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust said: “I’m proud to be chairing the Armed Forces Future Careers and Employers Group to support our city’s Armed Forces Community.

    “The Armed Forces Future Careers and Employers Group will bring together employers across the city to identify, support and grow employment for the Armed Forces Community across Plymouth, whilst sharing best practice.”

    Representing the Royal Navy, Andrew McConochie, Lieutenant Commander said: “With Plymouth being home to the largest naval base in Western Europe with the highest concentration of veterans in England, this new coordinated approach will provide significant value to serving personnel in planning their local employment and future career transitions, along with valuable support for their families, helping to both attract and retain talent in the city.” 

    Luke Pollard MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport shared his best wishes for a successful launch of the new theme group. He said: “I am so proud of my home city of Plymouth for stepping up to enhance localised employment and training support for our valued Armed Forces community. By fostering this new collaboration between local, regional and national service providers, and building better awareness of the increasing investment and growth in jobs and career pathways available in the city, we can create a brighter future.

    “We greatly appreciate the businesses who have already pledged their support for the Armed Forces Covenant, and I’d encourage more Plymouth organisations to become part of the Ministry of Defence’s Employer Recognition Scheme so that we can achieve even more positive outcomes together.”

    To find out more and to get involved, email [email protected]

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –