The US Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and interaction with G20 initiatives: a quick guide

This guide provides a selection of information sources about the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, an American law developed to reduce offshore tax evasion which has implications for Australia. Introduction: The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is an American law developed to reduce offshore tax evasion and regain federal tax revenues from American account holders at foreign (non-American) financial institutions internationally. It therefore has implications for Australia and its financial institutions. The impetus for the Act was a 2009 court case in which Swiss Bank UBS was found to have assisted American nationals to evade paying American taxes. As a result, UBS agreed to pay the United States (US) government US$780 million in fines, restitution and provide the names of suspected tax cheats. According to the United States Department of Justice, the use of offshore bank accounts to avoid paying American taxes costs the US Treasury, in total, at least US$100 billion annually. The wide-reaching FATCA was passed in the 111th Congress as part of the 2010 Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (Hire Act), becoming law in March 2010. FATCA requires: – individuals to report their financial accounts held outside of the United States, and – foreign (that is, non-US) financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about their American clients. To enforce the FATCA, it has become necessary for the US government to sign agreements with foreign governments allowing the trade of individuals’ financial data; this is outlined below. FATCA’s large scope and international presence has led to fears about the expanding reach of the US Treasury and IRS. The Australian Government is seeking to address concerns regarding the infringement of individuals’ data privacy rights and Australian taxation sovereignty prior to signing an Intergovernmental Agreement with the United States

The Print Page Space as Aesthetic Discourse Art Semiotic in Democracy

[Abstract] Roland Barthes writing, to the zero degree, seemed to put its accent on the differences between art and craft as a question of style, mannerism: writing limits, merges, proportions, isolate, build its own social reality, but is it still a thoughtful shape? Or it is the suit, the envelop, the skin, of a constitutional part of the ‘I’, that revolts this scenery, that renews the pact as agreement of the rights of the person, the individual outside the conveniences as before 1996 were the ground of the usury of any political term? Among linguistic and semiotic we can discover the traits of differences as to perceive its eidetic necessity, the elements and the objects. Since Erik Landowsky, in which the page is structured as a painting of spaces connotations, oblique to the reader or since Giovanni Anceschi where the art of the page it is experience of communication, the occurrence, the author, inference a social space and a collective «I», the subject restrain, closes, exemplify or even models what is expanded, translated, loosened. From the identity body of the newspaper we get to the unreachable public identity of the consumer. The chiastic gesture or the censure one, or the polisemic as it is involved just in the object: it should impress a certain quality of the message and continuity of the communication. A semiotic landscape, in some of the terms of Ruggero Pierantoni, of light phenomenon, while on the newspaper could be seen in its own categories exploited as re-reading a townscape, as the voyageur propose a journey, the compositions aspects may represent some ways to renew the fragmented process, pauses, attitudes to rebuild a reader theory. To Jean Marie Floch, the page is the emergences of the meaning: utters as sudden wriggle, out of the waving envelop. If there is a mania that is to compare the different corporate identity without results, as to forget the composition, the athletic heritage of the development; but here is the challenge: the irony become quotation, through a passionate writer – the pigiama seems only to create the deal, the game, the landscape in a possible recognition of a certain time braking the appearances between words and deeds, knowledge and real objects. Subjectivity is in the semiotic montage: where it disappears, democracy is forgotten. To Giovanni Anceschi the newspaper is a communicational artefact that sculpts, models, our history: its typefaces are still means that signs the melodic registry of counterfeit? We will bring together some pieces of graphic experiences, some deep lecture and irony as vocation, and compare the voices as textual genres and the typefaces as tools for semiotic culture: as in a painting of J.-L. T. Gericault, the relicts of The Raft of The Medusa, to demystify the genres, to rediscover some anthropological calls for cultural objects in visual communication from painting to architecture, from sculpture to print

Composition of Australian parliaments by party and gender: a quick guide

Summary: This Quick Guide contains the most recent table showing the composition of Australian parliaments by party and gender. It takes into account the results of the 2015 Queensland state election and the South Australian by-election for Davenport, both held on 31 January 2015. Please note that the data in this table is updated periodically as changes occur

PointSampler: A GIS Tool for Point Intercept Sampling of Digital Images

Close-range digital photography to assess vegetation cover is useful in disciplines ranging from ecological monitoring to agricultural research. An on-screen point intercept sampling method, which is analogous to the equivalent field based method, can be used to manually derive the percentage occurrence of multiple cover classes within an image. PointSampler is a GIS embedded tool that provides a semi-automated approach for performing point intercept sampling of digital images, and which integrates with existing GIS functionality and workflows. We describe and illustrate the two general applications of this tool, in in efficiently deriving primary ecological data from digital photographs , and for the generation of validation data to complement automated image classification of a time series of groundcover images.  The flexible design and GIS integration of PointSampler allows it to be put to a wide range of similar uses

Commonwealth Members of Parliament who have served in war: the Second World War

Introduction This paper chronicles Commonwealth Members of Parliament (MPs) who are identified as having engaged in active service in the Australian Defence Forces during the Second World War, based on the Department of Veterans’ Affairs World War 2 Nominal Roll. The list contains 164 parliamentarians: 125 Members of the House of Representatives and 44 Senators, five of whom served in both chambers (Don Chipp, John Gorton, David Hamer, George Rankin and Keith Wilson). It includes: four future Prime Ministers (John Gorton, Harold Holt, William McMahon and Gough Whitlam) four Speakers of the House of Representatives (Archie Cameron, William Aston, John McLeay and Billy Snedden) five Presidents of the Senate (Edward Mattner, Alister McMullin, Magnus Cormack, Justin O’Byrne and Douglas McClelland) nine men who served in the war effort while at the same time sitting in Parliament (Adair Blain, Max Falstein, George Bowden, Thomas Burke, Archie Cameron, William Hutchinson, Harold Holt, George Rankin and Thomas White) and 12 MPs who were prisoners-of-war (Charles Anderson, Kenneth Anderson, Adair Blain, George Branson, John Carrick, Alexander Downer, Wilfred Kent Hughes, Justin O’Byrne, Thomas Pearsall, Reginald Swartz, Winton Turnbull and Tom Uren)

Elemental hydrochemistry assessment on its variation and quality status in Langat River, Western Peninsular Malaysia.

This paper discusses the hydrochemistry variation and its quality status in Langat River, based on the chemistry of major ions, metal concentrations and suitability for drinking purposes. Water samples were collected from 30 different stations to assess their hydrochemical characteristics. The physico-chemical parameters selected were temperature, electrical conductivity, total dissolved solids (TDS), salinity, dissolved oxygen , pH, redox potential, HCO3, Cl, SO4, NO3, Ca, Na, K, Mg, 27Al, 138Ba, 9Be, 111Cd, 59Co, 63Cu, 52Cr, 57Fe, 55Mn, 60Ni, 208Pb, 80Se and 66Zn to investigate the variation of the constituents in the river water. Most of the parameters comply with the Drinking Water Quality Standard of the World Health Organization and the Malaysian National Standard for Drinking Water Quality by the Malaysia Ministry of Health except for EC, TDS, Cl, HCO3, SO4, Na, Mg, Al, Fe and Se. The results show that the Langat River is unsuitable for drinking purposes directly without treatment

Copula-based probabilistic assessment of intensity and duration of cold episodes: A case study of Malayer vineyard region

Frost, particularly during the spring, is one of the most damaging weather phenomena for vineyards, causing significant economic losses to vineyards around the world each year. The risk of tardive frost damage in vine-yards due to changing climate is considered as an important threat to the sustainable production of grapes. Therefore, the cold monitoring strategies is one of the criteria with significant impacts on the yields and prosperity of horticulture and raisin factories. Frost events can be characterized by duration and severity. This paper investigates the risk and impacts of frost phenomenon in the vineyards by modeling the joint distribution of duration and severity factors and analyzing the influential parameter’s dependency structure using capabilities of copula functions. A novel mathematical framework is developed within this study to understand the risk and uncertainties associate with frost events and the impacts on yields of vineyards by analyzing the non-linear dependency structure using copula functions as an efficient tool. The developed model was successfully vali-dated for the case study of vineyard in Malayer city of Iran. The copula model developed in this study was shown to be a robust tool for predicting the return period of the frost events