Righto… you know the drill. Empty your minds, take a few deep breaths and try to Yoga your way to inner peace and improved colonic health while we do our darndest to keep you informed about things that may or may not turn out to be quite important.

 

FROM THE HEADLINES

From the increasingly odd world of Kanye West comes yet another strong waft of weird, after news broke that Ye’s hugely controversial “White Lives Matter” fashion statement t-shirts are being distributed for some unfathomable reason to homeless people in LA.

Whether it’s guerilla marketing, or a less-expensive way of dealing with several boxes of clearly unwanted garments, we’re not 100% sure – but either way… you know what? It’s just confusing. The whole thing makes almost zero sense.

Meanwhile, also in America, reports of a man behaving strangely in Arizona have taken an extremely dark turn, after a Republican candidate for college district governing board whose stated political aim was to “protect our children from the Progressive Left”, has done his part in that fight by getting busted tickling his pickle outside a pre-school.

In his defence, Randy Kaufman (this thing is just writing itself at this point) said “I’m sorry. I f–ked up. I’m really stressed”.

How “stress levels” equate to a need to get into some one-man-dogging action isn’t clear – but given how deep the doo-doo that Kaufman’s now in, we’re expecting to see him attempt to masturbate outside every pre-school in the world simultaneously sometime in the next 10-14 days. Stay tuned.

And lastly, again from the US (because that’s just how they roll), there’s some “good news for the environment” after the Biden administration flagged that it is prepared to sink many many millions of dollars into research on ways to “dim the sun”, which sounds great if you’re in a Chinese eatery, but not so great when you’re talking about a feasible way to tackle climate change.

As far as Monty Burns impersonations go, it’s not a bad one from Joe “I call this enemy… The Sun!” Biden – so we don’t quite have the heart to tell him that we used to have some perfectly good things that did just that, but sadly something’s been making them get all melty, so they don’t work so good any more.

 

FROM THE MARKETS

Details have begun to emerge from the suspected Medibank (ASX:MPL) cyberhackbreachdata thing, and it’s not looking great for the private health insurer.

According to Medibank, a criminal has contacted the company to say that they’ve made off with 200GB of purloined data, and has provided Medibank with a sample of the stolen info – details from about 100 policies which MPL says appears to be from its “ahm and international student systems”.

It’s about as much of a bare-faced admission that there’s a serious problem at Medibank without the company going full-on mea culpa at this stage – but it has gone as far as confirming that the breach looks likely to include “first names and surnames, addresses, dates of birth, Medicare numbers, policy numbers, phone numbers and some claims data”.

But wait! It gets worse…

The claims data “includes the location of where a customer received medical services, and codes relating to their diagnosis and procedures” – which means that some spotty Russian Herbert knows that you’ve had a nose job or you’re having trouble pooping or whatever.

And, the hackers are also claiming to have Medibank clients’ credit card security details, although at least that part of it remains unconfirmed at this stage – so it’s not a complete disaster, but give it time…

Given that the hackers have contacted Medibank, it bears all the hallmarks of an extortion attempt along the lines of “Give us $XX million or we dump the data online for anyone to access”, and Medibank says it’s going to continue to update affected customers with information as soon as it’s able to.

 

TRADING HALTS

Findi (ASX:FND) – Findi has expanded in India and has an updated material agreement to prove it, which it will share with the class at an appropriate time.

NeuRizer (ASX:NRZ) – Capital rize.

Pantoro (ASX:PNR) – Pantoro is having a capital raise. No bull.

Galan Lithium (ASX:GLN) – Galan has a results announcement on the way, and rumours are swirling the company has found more lithium… galans of it.

 

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