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10/27/2013
Cuba's currency system (audio)
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French football clubs to strike
France will soon face a weekend of strike action by the country’s football clubs in protest against a 75 per cent income tax rate.
Angrily condemning the “unfair and discriminatory” tax, Jean-Pierre Louvel, head of the UCPF, the professional football club union, declared on Thursday: “We are talking about the death of French football.”
The unprecedented strike – involving the cancellation of all matches in the final week of November – presents a new challenge for Mr Hollande, the French president, who is suffering from deep unpopularity.
The 75 per cent tax, which will take effect in 2014, will be levied on employers who must pay it for two years on all annual salaries above €1m.
The UCPF insists that the tax will have a devastating effect on French football clubs, which are mostly lossmaking and struggle to compete for players with Spanish, English, German and Italian rivals, despite the recent infusion of vast funds into Paris Saint-Germain and Monaco by deep-pocketed foreign buyers.
The clubs say the tax will cost them collectively €44m a year. They say clubs and their players paid €700m in tax and social contributions last year – more than they earned in television rights.
“We are already the most taxed league in Europe and the other leagues are already much stronger than us,” complained Mr Louvel.
Struggling clubs such as Marseille, Lyon, Lille and Bordeaux, with exposures to the tax of €4m to €8m each, see it as a further hindrance to their ability to compete with PSG and Monaco and foreign rivals.
An LCI-Opinion Way poll on Thursday showed 85 per cent support for taxing the clubs and a similar level of opposition to the strike.
The issue is also clouded by the cases of PSG and Monaco. PSG was bought three years ago by an arm of the Qatar state. PSG will have to pay €20m to meet the tax levy, but its owners have means well beyond most French teams.
Monaco, owned by Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire, and second to PSG in the league, is exempt from the tax as it is based in the low-tax principality, not on French territory. The club spent €170m on transfers in the summer, including €60m on the Colombian striker Radamel Falcao.
Mr Hollande agreed this week to meet football’s leaders next Thursday.
The cancelled games on November 29, 30 and December 1 will be replaced by “open days” at the club grounds. The matches will be rescheduled.
adapted from The Financial Times
10/20/2013
Michele Ferrero, Italy's chocolate king
(Milan) - Michele Ferrero, Italy's richest man and the owner of a global chocolate and confectionery empire, will not allow outsiders to buy his company.
In a statement on Thursday, his son Giovanni, the Chief Executive of the Ferrero group, rejected suggestions the Italian company is holding talks with Swiss competitor Nestle and said Ferrero is not for sale.
But like other family-controlled Italian companies that flourished in the postwar boom, Michele Ferrero, now 88, will soon have to discuss succession plans.
His older son Pietro, the chosen heir to run the Piedmont-based empire, died of a heart attack in 2011 while riding a bicycle in South Africa. He was 47 and his death opened the way for the ascent of younger brother Giovanni, who is less interested in running the business.
"There is certainly an issue of succession," said a financial source with knowledge of the situation. "Either the father will open up to an external management team, or he will have to sell the company."
However, other sources believe the family may decide to continue without making such changes.
The Ferrero group, also known for its Ferrero Rocher pralines and chocolate Kinder eggs, is Italy's most valuable privately owned company. With sales of nearly 8 billion euros, Ferrero is worth 18 billion euros.
Fashion house Armani, another Italian global private brand that could face a succession issue, has an estimated market worth of at least 6 billion euros.
A man of few words, Ferrero senior turned a Piedmont-based chocolate factory into a world giant. He is known for running Ferrero with an iron fist but is also loved by locals for a tendency to give back to his community and by employees for the company's generous working conditions.
Until a couple of years ago, Michele commuted daily by helicopter from his Montecarlo villa to the company headquarters in the northwestern provincial town of Alba to take an active role in the tasting and designing of new products.
The company, which nearly four years ago toyed with the idea of making a bid for British rival Cadbury, is cash-rich and not in an immediate need of financing, several bankers and people familiar with the situation said.
"While Michele is alive, it's difficult to think about a sale but not impossible," said an insider when asked about a possible tie-up with Nestle or another competitor.
Nestle, which has denied any plans to carry out a major acquisition in the short-term, already has a strong foothold in Italy. In 1988 it acquired pasta-maker Buitoni and chocolate-maker Perugina and 9 years later, mineral water group San Pellegrino.
Analysts say a merger of the Nestle and Ferraro could potentially turn the Ferrero group into Nestle's biggest single shareholder.
adapted from Reuters
A new visual effect for TV sports (video)
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10/15/2013
10/14/2013
Fly me to the moon
Britain could become the first country to fly a tourist around the moon, after an Isle of Man-based company announced that it will be ready to take passengers on private lunar expeditions by 2015.
Excalibur Almaz will charge wannabe astronauts an average of £100m for a six-eight month journey exploring deep space.
“It is like how private British companies led expeditions to the South Pacific in the 17th century,” said Art Dula, founder of Excalibur Almaz. “We’ve just gone from seafaring to spacefaring.”
The company, run by Americans, chose to be based in the Isle of Man because of the island government’s commitment to the space industry, which ministers forecast will soon make up a third of its gross domestic product. The lack of corporation tax and proximity to London are also advantages.
Excalibur Almaz biggest advantage is its second-hand Soviet spacecraft which has helped the company avoid the laborious process of developing and testing new equipment.
Mr Dula, a long-time space enthusiast, bought the kit from Russia after working as a patent lawyer in the industry. He and his business partner are the only investors in the company, which started in 2005.
The entrepreneur says the company will take passengers deeper into space than competitors such as Virgin Galactic. Sir Richard Branson’s venture will only allow tourists to orbit the earth, though its price is also less stellar, at £200,000.
Tickets for the historic first flight will cost about £150m, with the price falling to about £50m after 10 years. Adventurers will have to submit to six months of full-time training with the Californian company XCorp.
The company will conduct research for universities and pharmaceutical companies and allow other expeditions – including government astronauts from countries like China – to rent the space station.
adapted from The Financial Times
10/07/2013
Cristina Fernández's health: A political headache
NEWS from Argentina can resemble a David Lynch film: the more you learn, the less you understand. In the past year alone the government signed a pact with Iran to investigate a bombing in 1994 of a Jewish centre which the Iranians were suspected of executing, invited tax evaders to buy financial instruments with preferential rates of return, and puffed up growth rates so much it may have to shell out billions of dollars in GDP-linked securities.
Last weekend’s goings-on are no less bizarre. On October 5th the president, Cristina Fernández was rushed to hospital on account of an irregular heartbeat. On arrival the 60-year-old complained of a severe headache. Neurological tests revealed that Ms Fernández was suffering from a subdural hematoma, an accumulation of blood between the tissues surrounding the brain.
Such internal bleeding can be caused by trauma. Following her diagnosis, the president’s press secretary casually explained that on August 12th, the day after Ms Fernández's Front for Victory (FPV) party was drubbed in nationwide legislative primaries, she fell and hit her head. The president was briefly hospitalised but tests concluded that she was fine. The public was never informed.
That head bump is now blamed for triggering the hematoma. The vice-president, Amado Boudou, immediately called back from an official visit to Brasil.
Convalescence may put Ms Fernández out of action until after the midterm elections on October 27th. It is far from assured that Ms Fernández's health shock will win her any sympathy votes.
After the sudden death of her husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, in October 2010 her popularity shot up from 36% to 55% in a month, according to Poliarquia, a pollster. The widow, dressed in black ever since, rode the sympathy wave to win re-election with an unprecedented 54% of the vote a year later.
This time may be different, however. For a start, Mr Boudou is not the ideal standard-bearer. Last year he faced allegations of illegal enrichment and influence-peddling. Prosecutors ultimately failed to provide convincing evidence of wrongdoing, but Argentines may be reminded of the imbroglio now that Mr Boudou will once again come into the spotlight.
More important, perhaps, the hematoma is Ms Fernández’s second big health scare in less than a year. Last December she underwent surgery to remove a suspected tumour. This ultimately proved to be healthy tissue but the president was still unable to work for 20 days. All this risks making her appear fragile—and lead Argentines to ask searching questions about her physical ability to govern, just as they have been about her political capacity to do so.
adapted from The Economist
JPMorgan Chase Ex Trader's extradition
US federal authorities expect that one of the former JPMorgan Chase employees facing criminal charges in connection with the bank’s multibillion-dollar trading loss in London will eventually be extradited to the United States.
The former trader, Javier Martin-Artajo, is living in Spain and fighting extradition after surrendering to police in Spain in August.
“We have a good extradition agreement with Spain,” Lorin L. Reisner, the chief of the criminal division at the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, said on Tuesday. “I expect that Mr. Martin-Artajo will return to the U.S. via the extradition process.”
Another former trader charged in the case, Julien Grout, will probably prove more elusive, Mr. Reisner said. After leaving JPMorgan’s London offices, Mr. Grout returned to his native France, which typically does not extradite its citizens. “It’s more complicated,” Mr. Reisner said .
Mr. Reisner made his remarks at a conference on white-collar crime. The conference featured panels with leading government officials and criminal defense lawyers, as well as senior lawyers from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The white-collar crime conference coincided with the first day of the government shutdown. Mr. Reisner, the federal prosecutor, described the shutdown as a “complete mess” for his already resource-constrained office. With 10 criminal trials under way in Federal District Court in Manhattan, he is spending much of his time seeking to prevent the government paralegals from being furloughed.
The Justice Department is in settlement talks with JPMorgan and is seeking more than $11 billion from the bank over its sale of questionable mortgage securities.
The investigation into JPMorgan’s trading loss in London reached a peak in August when the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, along with the F.B.I., announced charges against the two.
Both Mr. Martino-Artajo and Mr. Grout deny wrongdoing. Bruno Iksil, a third former trader, known as the “London Whale”, reached a nonprosecution deal with the government in exchange for testifying against his former colleagues.
"I quit" (video)
Marina Shifrin, a 25-year-old University of Missouri-Columbia journalism graduate, quit her job at Next Media Animation, the Taiwanese animator that makes crazy, funny and often disturbing videos.
Her "I quit" video has gone viral and received more than 14.5m hits on YouTube so far.
Marina Shifrin explains in a blog post titled "Journalism is dead (to me)" that she's tired of how journalism has become about clicks over quality.
"I am not saying that all journalism is bad. I am saying that most popular 'journalism' is bad. You can't blame the writers, though, we're scared into it. We're the ones writing the stories about the poor job market. That's why when we find a job that remotely carries just the slightest essence of journalism we gently bend at the waist, place our elbows upon our desk and let the Clicks have their way."
And so, she writes, she's making way for other journalists, ones willing to give up their relationships and social lives for a job.
"I work for an awesome company that makes news videos. I have put my life into this job, but my boss says quantity, speed and views are what is most important.
I believe it's more important to focus on the quality of the content. Here is a little video I made explaining my feelings"
But Next Media Animation wasn't willing to let Shifrin have the last laugh. So some days later, the company posted its own video response, mimicking the format Shifrin used in her own video and using the exact same Kanye song.
Here is Kanye West's "Gone"
Wished I had told
Ooh was (the) only one
But it's too late, it's too late
He's gone
You sweat her, and I ain't talkin 'bout a Coogi
You a big L, and I ain't talkin 'bout Cool J
See me at the airport, at least 20 Louis
Treat me like the Prince and this my sweet brother Numpsay
BROTHER NUMPSAY! Groupies sound too choosy
Take 'em to the show and talk all through the movies
Says she want diamonds, I took her to Ruby Tuesdays
If we up in Friday's, I still have it my way
Too late, we, gone - we strivin home
Gone - we ride on chrome
It's too late
Y'all don't want no prob from me
What you rappers could get is a job from me
Maybe you could be my intern, and in turn
I'll show you how I cook up summer, in the winter
Aaron love the raw dog, when will he learn
Caught somethin on the Usher tour he had to "Let it Burn"
Plus he already got three chil'run
Arguin over babysitters like, "Bitch - it's yo' turn!"
Damn 'Ye, it'd be stupid to ditch you
Even your superficial raps is super official
R-R-R-Roc Pastelle with Gucci on
With TV's in the ride, throw a movie on
Said he couldn't rap now he at the top with doobie long
Cause the dookie's on any song that they threw me on, gone
We strivin home, gone
I ride on chrome...
We strivin home, gone
Killa, I ride on chrome
Knock knock, who's there? Killa Cam, Killa who?
Killa Cam, hustler, grinder, gorilla true
Oh my chinchilla blue, blue you ever dealt with a dealer
Well here's the deal ma we goin to the dealer booth
No concealin, no ceiling I don't need a roof
10/01/2013
Hernán and Himalaya - a viral video
How about filling in the blanks with the following verbs and then watching the video below? It has already received almost 11 million views!
- causes
- doesn't want
- ends up
- has
- is
- is
- is refusing
- looks
- posted
Gentle Dog Befriends Little Boy With Down Syndrome
This …………………………. a dog called Himalaya. She …………………………. to give up on a toddler who …………………………. to play.
Little Hernán, from Buenos Aires, …………………………. Down Syndrome, which, according to comments …………………………. by his mom Ana, …………………………. him to shy away from physical contact.
But Himalaya …………………………. persistent and gentle, and Hernán…………………………. giving her what…………………………. like a hug around the 3:12 mark.
adapted from The Huffington Post
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