Eric Schmidt defends Google’s tax affairs following Commons criticism
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has defended his company’s financial affairs after a Commons committee branded the internet giant devious and unethical for sheltering its multibillion-pound profits from UK taxes.
Writing in the Observer, Schmidt said his company’s accounts were complicated but complied with international taxation treaties that allowed it to pay most of its tax in the United States.
Schmidt said that he understood why Google’s apparent sidestepping on UK taxation had generated controversy and calle [...]
Deadly Greenwich Village shooting possible ‘hate crime,’ police say
WNBC
Authorities are investigating the overnight shooting death of a 32-year-old man in New York’s Greenwich Village as a hate crime after police said the gunman may have hurled anti-gay slurs.
Authorities are investigating the overnight shooting death of a 32-year-old man in New York’s Greenwich Village as a hate crime after police said the shooter may have hurled anti-gay slurs.
“This clearly looks to be a hate crime,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters on Saturday.
While investigators continued to piece toge [...]
Leading Pakistan politician Zahra Shahid Hussain killed outside home
A senior female member of Imran Khan’s Pakistan‘s Movement for Justice party (PTI) was shot dead outside her home in Karachi on Saturday.
Reports suggested that Zahra Shahid Hussain, who was senior vice-president of the PTI, was killed while resisting an attempted robbery in the upmarket Defence neighbourhood of the city. Police said that she was ambushed by two people on a motorcycle. “The assailants opened fire on Zahra, 60, as soon as she reached the gate of her residence. Apparently they were there to target her only [...]
Is computing speed set to make a quantum leap?
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.
Consider some of the things that particle physicists believe. They accept without batting an eyelid, for example, t [...]
Car barrels through Virginia parade crowd, witnesses say
Witnesses in southwestern Virginia said a car drove into a crowd at a parade Saturday and hurt several people, but the nature of their injuries wasn’t immediately known.
It happened around 2:30 p.m. during the Hikers Parade at the Trail Days festival, an annual celebration of the Appalachian Trail in Damascus, a small mountain town near the Tennessee state line about a half-hour drive east of Bristol.
A call to Damascus police was handled by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. A sheriff’s dispatcher said she [...]
Massacre suspect held in Ivory Coast
18 May 2013
Last updated at 16:57 ET
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In April 2011, the ICRC’s Kelnor Panglung described the aftermath of the massacre in Duekoue for BBC News
The authorities in Ivory Coast have arrested a militia leader suspected of a role in one of the worst massacres during 2011 post-election violence.
Human rights groups say Amade Oueremi’s fighters executed hundreds of supporters of for [...]
The Winklevoss twins are Bitcoin bulls
The Winklevoss brothers’ legal battle with Facebook (FB) over the social network’s messy creation made them rich. They eventually walked away with stock worth around $150 million at today’s share price. (They haven’t disclosed how much of the stock they’re still holding.)
A few months ago, word spread that the twins, Cameron and Tyler, had set up their own investment firm and decided to focus on a curious market niche: bitcoins.
The brothers are betting that the cyber currency can turn them from millionair [...]
Jonny Wilkinson: ‘Heineken Cup victory better than winning World Cup’
Jonny Wilkinson described winning the Heineken Cup with Toulon as a bigger achievement than his Rugby World Cup triumph 10 years ago. Wilkinson kicked three penalties and the decisive conversion following Delon Armitage’s try in the 16-15 victory over Clermont Auvergne in Dublin.
“It is right up there,” said Wilkinson. “In fact, it goes beyond [winning the World Cup] because life is in the now, it is not in the past. The next thing you search for, the next goal you set, life just gets better and better if you are i [...]
Attacking MRSA with metals from antibacterial clays
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In the race to protect society from infectious microbes, the bugs are outrunning us. The need for new therapeutic agents is acute, given the emergence of novel pathogens as well as old foes bearing heightened antibiotic resistance. Shelley Haydel, a researcher at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute has a new approach to developing effective, topical antibacterial agents — one that draws on a naturally occurring substance recognized since antiquity for its medicinal proper [...]
Former Lulzsec hacker on motivations
16 May 2013
Last updated at 11:23 ET
By Susan Watts
Newsnight Science editor, BBC News
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Watch Susan Watts’ full Newsnight film on Lulzsec and Jake Davis
Four men were sentenced on Thursday for computer hacking. In 2011 they were all linked to the Lulzsec hacking collective which targeted organisations including the FBI and Britain [...]
Suspect identified in home robbery that left Hofstra student dead
Police identified Saturday the man allegedly involved in a home robbery and the death of a New York college student early Friday morning.
Nassau Co. Police
Nassau County police on Saturday named 30-year-old Dalton Smith of Hempstead as the man who attempted to rob the off-campus home where Hofstra University junior Andrea Rebello was shot and killed.
Nassau County police said Dalton Smith, 30, of Hempstead tried to rob the off-campus house where Hofstra University student Andrea Rebello, 21, was shot and killed.
According to a police st [...]
Tories just about held it together in the past. This time it’s different | Andrew...
As the Conservative party has spent the past week tearing itself and the reputation of its leader to shreds, I have been logging the bulletins issued by Number 10 that claim to describe the temperamental condition of the prime minister. Faced with an unprecedented revolt against the government’s programme by its own MPs, we were told that David Cameron was “relaxed”. When more than half of his backbenchers went ahead and defied him, and senior members of the cabinet declared in public that they were with the rebels in sp [...]