The al-Qaida extremists bypassed the brightly colored, high-end synthetic floor coverings and stopped their pickup truck in front of a man selling more modest mats woven from desert grass, priced at $1.40 apiece. There they bought two bales of 25 mats each, and asked him to bundle them on top of the car, along with a stack of sticks.

"It's the first time someone has bought such a large amount,

We are now ranked 23rd worst out of 30 OECD countries for income inequality. Around 270,000 New Zealand children are living in poverty, creating a permanent future under-class.

Before we start blaming the victims, the Living Wage organisers reveal that four out of 10 poor children are in families where at least one parent is in full-time work or self-employed.

Wages moved a measly 2 per cen

This indicates a high level of coordination among the various entities that might be blamed for his death. They desperately wanted to be sure to have all their ducks in a row. If this isn’t an incipient cover-up, I don’t know what is.

Another extraordinary aspect of the case is that it took eight days before Israel released the body for repatriation to his family in Australia. One of the mo

For many young people, illegal jobs are their first and only work experience. In these times of crisis, many companies only hand out part-time contracts. Others opt for redundancy fund schemes or close down. The abusive use of redundancy fund schemes creates a vicious circle that feeds the black labour market. Employees are left in limbo between work and unemployment. Many of them turn to illegal

If a homeowner's real-world equity is effectively zero, then what do they actually own? They own a mortgage, i.e. a promise to pay a debt. As long as they are current on payments, this acts more as a claim on future ownership, i.e. full ownership when the mortgage is paid off, or a long-term lease.

If their equity is 10% of the mortgage, there is no way to extract this equity short of selling

New figures show a sharp rise in gambling problems linked to Lotto, and health officials blame big jackpots.

The figures show more than 12 per cent of problem gamblers cite the Lotteries Commission as their main gambling outlet, up from 8.8 per cent in a survey three years earlier.

While pokies in pubs and clubs still lead problem gambling statistics, the figures show more problem gamblers

The organization known as Parent Revolution is attempting to convert the struggling 24th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles into a charter school. The pro-charter organization is pursuing its agenda by utilizing provisions of the state’s “Parent Trigger” law, under which drastic changes can be made to the operation of a public school if more than 50 percent of the student body’s parents agre

A century ago, Benedict XV was an energetic and courageous man who mobilized the Vatican diplomatic corps to end World War I and to arrange a negotiated peace. Benedict XV was hated especially by the British, who considered him a sympathizer of the Central empires.

Something of the spirit of Benedict XV lived on in Wojtyla, the Polish pope. When the Panamanian leader Noriega took re

From my interaction with Google recruiters, I can tell that by not knowing anyone at Google I am unfit to work at Google. This reminds me of the classic Economist article on the topic of teacher credentialing that shows a picture of Einstein with the caption “unfit to teach.” A hiring heuristic that gives massive preference to internal referrals means you’ll throw away some of the best candidates

"In my view, film is the only way to truly show the scale of the subject – the significance of Richard III's grand ambitions and the disastrous defeats.

"I know how hard it is to find backing for ambitious projects – especially when they concern history."

http://kingrichardarmitage.rgcwp.com

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money

We’ve had an endless series of products whose ingredients have been cheapened in order to maintain the price. Consumers won’t be able to taste the difference, the theory goes.
So, as the horse-meat lasagna scandal in Europe is spiraling beautifully out of control, we’re now getting hit where it hurts: Maker’s Mark is watering down its bourbon.
Unlike the horse-meat folks, Maker’s Mark

The case of Prisoner X, Australian Jew Ben Zygier, gets ever stranger. It appears that his crime may have been confirming to Australian spooks that Israel was indeed misusing Australian passports to run security operations.

From afar Israelis may not have appreciated the fury of the Australian government and people after Mossad used fake Australian passports in the operation to kill a Hamas ma

The civil war in Syria is increasingly destabilising the Caucasus. Chechen Islamists fighting against the Kremlin are supporting the Syrian Islamist opposition. Russia fears that an Islamist regime in Damascus would change the whole balance of power in the region. At the same time, ethnic conflicts threaten to spill over from Syria into the southern and northern regions of the Caucasus.'

Since

The tactics employed against Christopher Dorner by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department are attracting an awkward amount of interest since an audiotape surfaced with law enforcement officials referring to a munition as a “burner”.

As in (all quotes from the Feb. 15, 2013 LA Times report titled “As Dorner fired, tactics got toughter”):

“We’re going to go forward with the plan, with the bu