By Eric Nnaji [update] FILE PHOTO: Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen on the field before Super Bowl XLVIII against the Denver Broncos at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S., February 2, 2014. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas/File Photo. Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen, the man who persuaded school-friend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard to start what became the world’s biggest software company, died on Monday at the age of 65, his family said. Allen left Microsoft in 1983, before the company became a corporate juggernaut, following a dispute with Gates, but his share of their original partnership allowed him to spend the rest of his life and billions of dollars on yachts, art, rock music, sports teams, brain research and real estate. Allen died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer, the Allen family said in a statement. In early October, Allen had revealed he was being treated for the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ...
Katharine Murphy Admitting you were wrong is hard, but there are bigger issues at stake now: namely whether voters can still trust institutions. Protesters rally outside the banking royal commission hearing in Melbourne. Photograph: Luis Ascui/EPA Given this isn’t complicated, here’s what should happen now. The Turnbull government, if it has any sense of right and wrong, and any remaining shred of political judgment, should say to voters, without dissembling or weasel words: “Sorry, we got this one badly wrong.” The collective mea culpa needs to be short and sharp, given we were all here and we all saw what happened. We all saw the Turnbull government resist consistent calls for a banking royal commission after a string of damaging reports about scandals in the financial services industry. We saw that stonewalling play out for months. Then we saw the government forced into having an inquiry because the prime minister and the treasurer got overr...