More than a decade ago, the Dutch central bank recognized the dangers of .. euphoria, but its warnings went unheeded. Only last year did the new government, under conservative-liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte, amend the generous tax loopholes, which gradually began to expire in January. But now it's almost too late. No nation in the euro zone is as deeply in debt as the Netherlands, where banks

Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, has defended the search engine's tax avoidance policies, saying "we fully comply with the law" after paying just £6m in corporation tax in the UK.

Schmidt's comments drew an angry response from a member of the parliamentary public accounts committee (PAC), who accused the company of treating tax payments as a "voluntary act".

In an interview with the BBC, Sc

"The idea of placing innocent citizens under constant surveillance is one definition of totalitarianism," Hank Wolfe, an associate professor in the Information Science Department of Otago University's School of Business told the Herald. "It will inhibit free thought and association. This has been demonstrated historically time and again where repressive totalitarian regimes have installed pervasi

No matter how he tried, he just couldn't replicate Reinhart and Rogoff's results.

"We had this puzzle that we were unable to replicate the results that Reinhart-Rogoff published," Prof Ash, says. "And that really got under our skin. That was really a mystery for us."

.. he'd spotted a basic error in the spreadsheet. The Harvard professors had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countrie

a student called Ed (you'll see very soon why he didn't want to reveal his whole name) went on eBay and offered up his prized new gadget.
His motivation, he says, was quite simple: he wanted to pay off his student loans. Given that, these days, some student loans are more expensive than some houses, his keenness to perhaps break even is understandable.
For a very brief moment, he must have felt

Margaret Thatcher horrified her advisers when she recommended that the government should revive the memory of Oliver Cromwell - dubbed the butcher of Ireland - and encourage tens of thousands of Catholics to leave Ulster for the south.
A year after she was nearly killed in the IRA's 1984 Brighton bomb, the then prime minister expressed dismay at Catholic opposition to British rule when they

Old Mohamed Said al-Sauda from Deraa, in his tawny gown and kuffiah headscarf, sat at the end of a conclave of tribal elders, all newly arrived in Damascus for an audience with no less than the President himself. They sat – only one woman in a blue dress among them – round a long table in the Damas Rose Hotel drinking water and coffee, rehearsing their anxieties. How should they talk to the young

All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood's whims, selling out their users in the process. But open Web standards are an antidote to that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood's gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards. It would undermine

The Parliamentary Commission on Banking declared that HBOS crashed after a lack of risk controls, rapid and aggressive expansion and poor management, which amounted to a “colossal failure” on the part of bank executives. Particular criticism was directed at HBOS’s former head Sir James Crosby, who led the bank until 2006. The inquiry described him as the “architect of the strategy that set the co

One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, "style" and even mental health of those who challenge them.
...
Nobody has been subjected to these vapid discrediting techniques more than Noam Chomsky. The book on which I'm currently working explores how establishment media systems restrict the range of acceptable debate in US political discourse, and I'm

The rapid fall in the price of gold over the past few days—its biggest plunge in more than 30 years—is an indication that deflationary tendencies are strengthening throughout the world economy.

As one commentator on the Australian Business Spectator web site put it: “Are we witnessing a global slump unfolding before our eyes?”

On Monday the gold price dropped by $110 per ounce, eclipsing it

The city of Auckland might be in one of the most volcanically interesting locations on the planet. The largest city of New Zealand is built on top of an active volcanic field, with at least 50 scoria cones, maars and shield volcanoes dotting the landscape of the city and into the Hauraki Gulf (be sure to read this great summary of all things Auckland Field from GNS Science). Considering that a ma

"He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will des

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks is publicly dumping just under two million diplomatic cables - dubbed the Kissinger cables - from the mid 1970s.

Wikileaks has put together a search function on its website so users can comb for keywords in these Kissinger files as well as the 'Cablegate' files, which were largely from the mid-2000s.

Called PlusD, or the Public Library o

Two more people in Shanghai have been confirmed infected with the deadly H7N9 bird flu strain that has claimed the lives of six people nationwide, local authorities said yesterday.

Meanwhile, Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, announced yesterday that it was suspending live poultry trading - the second city to do so, following Shanghai.

And in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, offi