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Does your video business make a profit? How do you really track if you're making a profit, and how can you bring home more on every project? VASST's Making Money [...]

This month I'm reviewing two of the latest training DVDs from VASST.com, a company known for creating DVDs, books, and software utilities that cover a wide variety of video-related topics. [...]

SIR.' In his attack on Bain Attwood (January-February 2006) Gregory Haines says that at the 2004 conference of the Australian Historical Association I gave a 'provocative, honest paper on how [...]

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch's commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using his news media. Murdoch himself is probably the most influential Australian of all time. He says the recent News of the Worldhacking scandal went ‘went against everything [he stands] for’. But how true is this? He sees himself as an anti-establishment rebel, yet his influence in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States makes him part of a global elite. He has become one of the key promoters of neo-liberal ideology of small government and deregulation over the past 30 years. The basis of his philosophy was expressed by one of his former editors, David Montgomery, who said ‘Rupert has contempt for the rules. Contempt even for governments.’ Murdoch is also a devotee of the neo-conservative wing of the US Republican Party. The possibility of exercising power through ownership of the news media has been little studied in recent years, but Murdoch's role in English-speaking countries over the last 30 years shows that perhaps we need to look again at such media theories.

The article presents the author's views on life insurance retirement plan (LIRP) which gives clients the tax-free advantages of a Roth individual retirement account (IRA). He offers information on LIRP which is an accumulation tool that has similar tax-free attributes of traditional retirement accounts and does not contribute to the income thresholds that trigger taxation. However, he notes that expenses can overwhelm the growth in the accumulation account unless LIRP is structured correctly.

The article discusses the author's view on tax-free financial planning. He notes that financial consumers must be willing to grow their assets in taxable accounts, tax-deferred accounts or tax-free accounts. The author states about growing assets inside and outside the estate. Meanwhile, he mentions about the liquidity of assets.

The author discusses the benefits that equity indexed universal life (EIUL), also known as life insurance retirement plan (LIRP), has to offer in the U.S. He cites the benefits of EIULs including death benefit passes tax-free to heirs, contributions grow tax-deferred, and distributions do not cause Social Security to be taxed. Meanwhile, the author mentions that many financial advisors are recommending an EIUL due to the threat of higher tax rates and increased market volatility.

The author discusses the essay "Australian Story," by Mungo MacCallum. This essay focuses on Australian politics and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The author cites MacCallum's version of Australia's history, from the strikes of the 1890s, which resulted in the founding of the Australian Labor Party. He claims that according to MacCallum, Rudd was able to manage the divine meaning of the Australian tradition that involves both the larrikin outlaw and the dutiful citizen, resulting to his popularity among Australians.

Historians have rethought some of the prevailing assumptions employed in writing about the Cold War in Australia. Until recently, the history of the Cold War in Australia was often written with too little detachment and skepticism toward the Left, and with a failure of scholarly empathy toward the claims of the anti-Communist Right. The opening of new archival and intelligence sources (such as the ‘Venona’ papers) is one reason for the shift in the field. Another is a reassessment of the link between the USSR and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), that leads to questions about the CPA’s dogmatic pro-Soviet stance, and to what degree this was partly responsible for its defeats, rather than simply victimisation. New archival sources establish that some clandestine political activity was undertaken, including espionage and that Soviet funds were given to the CPA over a long period. Not every historian, however, has embraced this new evidence. The present article critiques recent contributions by Cain and Hocking, suggesting that discussion of political fundamentalism on the Left and the security response to it is vital if Cold War history is to be understood and made relevant to discussions of contemporary terrorism.

During the Cold War in Australia, the political agenda was dominated by the threat of communism. One factor in building this agenda was the ‘counter-propaganda operations’ of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) which regularly released unattributable information to selected mass media outlets. In the period when these activities were most prevalent (1960–72), ASIO officers had regular contact with editors and with selected journalists on major newspapers and television. This formed part of a broader ‘cultural Cold War’ in which anti-communism was an organising principle. This article outlines new information on these activities, suggests that these operations were more extensive than previously thought, and discusses this relationship in terms of the scholarly work on media sources, government-sponsored intervention in the media and classical theories of propaganda. It suggests that one way to understand the controversial media role in counter-propaganda operations lies in the relationship between police and crime reporters.