FANS of “American Idol” might be surprised to learn that, if sales figures are any indication, the real music capital of the world may not be America, but Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a tax haven, and Apple funnels more than a billion dollars worth of iTunes sales through that tiny country to avoid paying higher taxes.
These tax strategies are nothing new — and, no doubt, Apple has taken advantage of tax rules that allow them. The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2008 estimated that at least $5 trillion to $7 trillion was sheltered in offshore jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Bermuda and the Bahamas — not just by Americans, but by everyone. These jurisdictions have little or no income tax.
The favorable tax rates encourage corporations to avoid paying American taxes by structuring complicated international transactions, like Apple’s “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” recently described by The New York Times. But it’s not just the low tax rates that make these jurisdictions attractive to those following the rules. The secrecy of offshore jurisdictions allows some individuals and corporations to engage in outright tax fraud, costing America at least $40 billion each year.
And that secrecy makes offshore tax fraud almost impossible for law enforcement to detect. When I was the Manhattan district attorney, we learned of offshore accounts only through whistle-blowers, cooperators and serendipity.
Legislation shaped by Senators Carl Levin, Kent Conrad and Sheldon Whitehouse that would curb some of these tax abuses by giving the Treasury Department the muscle to respond when foreign governments hampered our tax enforcement was recently passed by the Senate, but awaits House action. Those reforms are long overdue but do not fully address the larger problem: financial secrecy laws in offshore jurisdictions.
The secrecy laws in these tax havens are at the root of serious crimes: fraud, money laundering and international terrorism.
Follow the trail of nearly any major financial scandal and you will enter one or more of these notorious jurisdictions.
Read more HERE.
###
Washington Post: Super Moon Photos from Around the World “The moon had its biggest, brightest night of the year May 5, 2012, making its closest approach to Earth – in its full glory.”
During 2008-2009, colleges were expected to award 731,000 associate’s degrees, 1,603,000 bachelor’s degrees, 649,000 master’s degrees, and 61,7000 doctorate degrees. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
###
###
An old hillbilly farmer had a wife who nagged him unmercifully. From morning until night (and sometimes later), she was always complaining about something. The only time he got any relief was when he was out plowing with his old mule. He tried to plow a lot.
One day, when he was out plowing, his wife brought him lunch in the field. He drove the old mule into the shade, sat down on a stump and began to eat his lunch. Immediately, his wife began harassing him again. Complain, nag, nag. It just went on and on.
All of a sudden, the old mule lashed out with both hind feet, caught her smack in the back of the head. It killed her dead on the spot.
At the funeral several days later, the minister noticed something rather odd when a woman mourner would approach the old farmer. He would listen for a minute, then nod his head in agreement, but when a man mourner approached him, he would listen for a minute, then shake his head in disagreement. This was so consistent, the minister decided to ask the old farmer about it.
So, after the funeral, the minister spoke to the old farmer and asked him why he nodded his head and agreed with the women, but always shook his head and disagreed with all the men.
The old farmer said, “Well, the women would come up and say something about how nice my wife looked or how pretty her dress was, so I’d nod my head in agreement.”
“And what about the men”? the minister asked.
“They wanted to know if the mule was for sale.”
###
Maurice Sendak, the beloved author and illustrator of Where The Wild Things Are, has died after complications from a recent stroke. He was 83.
Sendak won nearly every major book award, including the Caldecott Medal,considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book illustration. He had lived with his partner, Eugene Glynn, for 50 years before Glynn’s death in 2007.
Watch an excerpt from the documentary Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak here.
From here: nyt
###
“Family is complicated,” the photographer Joseph Rodriguez said. “That’s all.”
Mr. Rodriguez was talking about “Migrantes,” his long-term project following several immigrant families as they journeyed from rural Mexico, past the border in Arizona and on to various parts of the American South. They encounter hardship – even death – as they go on to accept menial, backbreaking jobs on farms. But they face all these challenges together, as family.
###
If all goes as planned, Facebook will finally pull the trigger later this month on its long-salivated-over IPO. The deal could value the company in the neighborhood of $100 billion, making founder and CEO Mark Elliot Zuckerberg’s own unusually large stake worth $25 billion. It is a huge sum, even in context. Zuckerberg’s impending fortune is more money than Wal-Mart’s 10,000-plus stores made last year. It’s more than Wall Street paid in bonuses to New Yorkers last year. And it has been amassed in only eight years by a 27-year-old who not long ago passed out business cards reading “I’m CEO, bitch.”
The Zuckerberg most people know is the one depicted by The Social Network: nerdy, insecure, and shady—in no way a mature adult who’s earned such massive wealth. His awkward public appearances over the years have not improved that impression. Zuckerberg may have written the original code for Facebook, the common view of him goes, but the company’s success since then—the service is now used by nearly one-eighth of the world’s population—has come more despite him than because of him. He was just in the right place at the right time.
MORE.
###
It was early on a summer evening in 1729, and the French astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan was procrastinating. When I’m procrastinating I tend to stare off into space, but that would have been too much like work for an astronomer, so De Mairan stared at a houseplant. Specifically, the mimosa on his windowsill.
Everything is more interesting than your work when you’re procrastinating, including a potted plant, and so De Mairan found himself thinking about the mimosa. Its leaves were furled up for the evening. How did they know when to do that? De Mairan recalled the way plants track the sun (picture flowers gradually turning their faces from east to west), and concluded that the leaves’ behavior was triggered by the waning light.
Curious to test his hypothesis, he placed the mimosa in a dark cabinet, theorizing that the light-deprived leaves would stay closed. The next day, he found them unfurled. Surprised, he let the experiment run for a while. Every evening, when he peered into the cabinet, the leaves were closed; every morning, they were open. So much for his hypothesis: When it came to the timing of leaf behavior, the plant, not the sun, was running the show.
MORE.
###
The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan
Chinese history has yet to find a home for Yuanmingyuan, the ‘Old Summer Palace’ enjoyed by five Qing Dynasty emperors
On a balmy, moonlit evening in the autumn of 2010, I took my son out to Yuanmingyuan to wander among the ruins. The 150th anniversary of the destruction of “The Garden of Perfect Brightness” – often called the Old Summer Palace – was approaching and I wanted him to see what remained.
We savored the wind in the willows, bought spun sugar in animal shapes from a vendor near the entrance, gaped at the gargantuan lily pads that carpeted the lakes, and gawked at a black swan floating in their midst. When we heard music, we followed it to an outdoor stage where “The Legend of Yuanmingyuan” was being performed. Billed as “patriotic education” for children, it consisted of shadow puppeteers and costumed dwarfs reenacting the looting and burning of the palace complex in 1860. Foreigners – played by dwarfs in curly yellow wool wigs – were portrayed as so stupid they couldn’t speak their own languages. Chinese villagers were uniformly brave, defending the Emperor unto death and shouting, “Kill the Foreign Devils! Kill the Foreign Devils!” The dwarfs were not professional actors, but were evidently there to lure an audience that might prefer a freak show to a history book, and the whole event struck me as sordid, sad – and, yet, somehow, unsurprising.
Read more HERE.
###
Opiate-Addicted Baby Born Every Hour in US
Opiate use is on the rise in the US, and pregnant women are no exception to the trend. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of pregnant women testing positive for opiates increased fivefold, and the rate of babies being born with symptoms of opiate withdrawal tripled. This is putting an increased burden on the healthcare system, as babies born in opiate withdrawal tend to be born earlier and smaller; suffer from health problems like seizures, restlessness, respiratory issues, and difficulty feeding; and often require treatment to wean them off their drug dependency. More …
###
How to publish a bestseller
Of brooms and bondage
Publishers used to tell readers what was hot. Now it’s the other way round
TAKE the plot of “Jane Eyre” (rich man with issues falls for innocent young lass), strip away the introspection, add some S&M sex and you have “Fifty Shades of Grey”. E.L. James’s novel is the hottest book so far this year, having sold 2m copies in three weeks in America.
The book’s appeal is obvious, says James Hall, the author of “Hit Lit”, who claims to crack “the code” of bestsellers. He reckons that every mega-hit is fast, emotionally charged and written simply, with a maverick hero who is in over his head. Each discusses a thorny issue and includes a pivotal sexual incident.
But it is easy to see a pattern in hindsight. The money is in prediction, which is tough and growing tougher. This is because readers have more power than ever, says Joel Rickett, an editor at Penguin. Publishers used to be able to create winners by flooding stores with their picks. The bestseller lists of the 1980s and 1990s were dominated by brand names such as Stephen King and Danielle Steel. Industry mergers and bookstore monoliths made hype easy.
Read more HERE.
###
China And The Politics Of Oil
By Jacqueline N. Deal
China faces a dilemma. Today China imports more than 50 percent of its oil, and that figure is expected to rise to 75-80 percent in the coming decades. As many experts have noted, China does not seem to feel comfortable relying on the international system and the continued operation of energy markets to meet its needs.[1] To put this dilemma in context, let’s consider the history of great powers in the age of oil, then turn to China’s options for securing its imports, and conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Beijing’s choices for other states in Asia and for the United States. The analysis suggests that China is pursuing an indirect strategy designed to alter the geo-strategic map in China’s favor. To ensure stability along key oil routes, then, the United States may have to build up the defenses of friendly or allied states or, at least, encourage their cooperation.
China remains officially Marxist; so Chinese strategists might embrace a historical materialist account of the twentieth century. According to this account, oil played a decisive role in the series of clashes between great and rising powers that shaped the last hundred years. Oil first emerged as a critical resource in the period before World War I, when Great Britain’s empire was still preeminent, and Germany was the ambitious rising power.
Read more HERE.
###
Top 10 Spy Tactics
HERE.
###
The Salon I by Otto Dix (1921)
Today I am looking at a painting by an artist whose work has frequently shocked the public. His art often focused on the First World War and the aftermath of it on the people of Germany. It was not his intention to shock people with what was depicted in his paintings. It was simply his intention to tell the truth through his art and ensure that people would not ever forget the price citizens had to pay when their governments took them to war. Of his controversial paintings, he said:
“I’m not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I’ve seen is beautiful.”
“I did not paint war pictures in order to prevent war. I would never have been so arrogant. I painted them to exorcise the experience of war.”
“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people’s powers of resistance.”
more.
###
Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.
Read more HERE.
###
###
###
Asteroid’s Impact Still Central to Dinosaurs’ Extinction
So three young researchers, led by Stephen L. Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University who is affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, decided to test this hypothesis with a close examination of the fossil record over the 12 million years leading up to the mass extinction.
For the study, the researchers departed from the practice of focusing almost exclusively on raw counts of the number of species over time. Instead, they analyzed changes in the anatomies and body plans of seven large groups of late Cretaceous dinosaurs for insights into their evolutionary trajectory.
Groups that show an increase in variability, for example, might have been evolving into more species, giving them an ecological edge. But decreasing variability might be a warning sign of approaching doom.
In science, alas, not all projects fulfill researchers’ ambitions.
MORE.
###
Anthropologist finds explanation for hominin brain evolution in famous fossil
One of the world’s most important fossils has a story to tell about the brain evolution of modern humans and their ancestors, according to Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk. The Taung fossil — the first australopithecine ever discovered — has two significant features that were analyzed by Falk and a group of anthropological researchers. Their findings, which suggest brain evolution was a result of a complex set of interrelated dynamics in childbirth among new bipeds, were published May 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“These findings are significant because they provide a highly plausible explanation as to why the hominin brain might grow larger and more complex,” Falk said.
The first feature is a “persistent metopic suture,” or unfused seam, in the frontal bone, which allows a baby’s skull to be pliable during childbirth as it squeezes through the birth canal. In great apes — gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees — the metopic suture closes shortly after birth. In humans, it does not fuse until around 2 years of age to accommodate rapid brain growth.
MORE.
###
###
2001. Is creativity in our genes? The self-made scholar Ellen Dissanayake thinks so, but it has taken her a lifetime of experience outside the academy to find out why.
Suppose there were a person who saw, before almost anyone else, that the most important concept in modern biology could be applied to the arts. Suppose, however, that this person studied biology only as an undergraduate, never took a class in anthropology, and never received a Ph.D. Suppose, in fact, that she were a homemaker for a dozen years and then spent fifteen years in the Third World, where it was difficult for her to gain access to the research libraries and social networks that most professors take for granted. Nevertheless, over the past two decades—with no more institutional support than a few years of adjunct teaching, several grants, and a couple of visiting professorships—she has managed to publish three books setting forth her ideas. And today a new field of study has sprung up where she pioneered. Suppose, in addition, that some people think a scholarly framework based on her insights will displace much of current aesthetic theory—that future generations will understand literature and the arts as she does, thereby reconciling the humanities to the science of human nature.
From the shape of her career alone, you might think this is the description of an intellectual hero. Or you might be tempted to dismiss her as an amateur. After all, you’ve probably never heard of Ellen Dissanayake.
MORE.
###
Colour photographs of the Hindenburg interior, 1930s
‘The two Hindenburg-class airships were passenger carrying rigid airships built in Germany in the 1930s named in honor of Paul von Hindenburg. They were the last such aircraft ever built, and in terms of their length and volume, the largest aircraft ever to fly.’
more.
###
Fossilised shark teeth found in Narmada valley .
Ancient crocodile may have dined on humans .
Darwin’s Ghosts by Rebecca Stott: review –
‘Humans can use their own brain power to read other people’ .
How the war on terror could solve art’s most enduring mysteries –
Zinc may shorten common cold but side effects common .
Pink slime label forces beef plant closures .
###
