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French financial watchdogs slammed Nicolas Sarkozy for spending £160m during his country’s six-month stint in charge of the EU – including £250,000 on a personal presidential shower that he never used. The vast expense is set out in a report blaming poor management and a lack of transparency by the president’s staff.
Costs soared because so many of the EU-related events were organised at the last minute, said the report.
On one occasion Sarkozy triggered the cancellation of an entire EU event he was due to host in Evian, because he wanted to sleep in his own bed at the Élysée palace. By then, hundreds of journalists, EU officials and national delegations had either already arrived in Evian or were on their way.
Golly. The shower must have been made of gold. I’d have thought you could get a golden shower much cheaper than that in Paris. :-D

DAILYMAIL – Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood.
It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own.
But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies.
NEW YORK–Verizon Wireless customers will soon be able to get their hands on the much anticipated Google Android phone called the Droid.
The companies officially unveiled the device at an event here. Like most smartphones of its class, the phone will cost $199 with a two-year contract. And it will be available to consumers starting November 6. Customers can pre-order the device now.
[..]
In terms of the specifications, they are exactly what had been expected thanks to multiple leaks about the product. It has Android 2.0, a 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. It has a Webkit HTML 5 browser, and it’s powered by a 550MHz processor and a 1,400mAh lithium ion battery offering 6.4 hours of continuous talk time and up to 11 days of standby time.And as expected, the device is about 4.6 inches tall by 2.4 inches wide by 0.5 inch thick and weighs 6 ounces. And it has a 3.7-inch, 16:9 touch screen with 480×854-pixel resolution. It also has a 3.5mm headphone jack, a micro-USB port, and comes with a 16GB micro-SD card.
New Yorkers are fleeing the state and city in alarming numbers — and costing a fortune in lost tax dollars, a new study shows.
More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country. The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City — meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out. “The Empire State is being drained of an invaluable resource — people,” the report said. What’s worse is that the families fleeing New York are being replaced by lower-income newcomers, who consequently pay less in taxes.
Overall, the ex-New Yorkers earn about 13 percent more than those who moved into the state, the study found. And it should be no surprise that the city — and Manhattan in particular — suffered the biggest loss in terms of taxable income. The average Manhattan taxpayer who left the state earned $93,264 a year. The average newcomer to Manhattan earned only $72,726. That’s a difference of $20,538, the highest for any county in the state. Staten Island was second, with a $20,066 difference.
For the idiots who think we aren’t taxed enough… please, feel free to ante up.
Chicago and Cook County residents aren’t the only ones about to get shocking tax news; the city is debuting a “tax whistle-blower” plan that could turn neighbor against neighbor in Chicago’s business community. The folks at city hall will pay cash bounties to informants who turn in business tax cheats around the city. The reward would amount to some sort of percentage of the tax money that the city recovers.
“It’s just another way of bringing people into compliance,” Revenue Department spokesman Ed Walsh told the Sun-Times. “It would probably be … a business knowing that a competitor is not remitting a tax. An employee [of the tax-dodging business] could know that, too. Typically, you need to provide some type of incentive.”
I wonder if this will also pay off when you turn in your local corrupt politician. Ya just gotta love it.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.
Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city — the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. “He’s our landlord,” a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
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Workers at a Tennessee library said someone has been using blue ink to completely scratch out curse words from books in the collection.
Maury County Library director Elizabeth Potts said dozens of books have been discovered with blue ink marks where profanities used to be, including what she referred to as an “f-word” in the “9/11 Commission Report,” The Daily Herald, Columbia, Tenn., reported Tuesday.
[…]
“This person is evidently offended by these words,” she said. “I’m more offended by (the suspect).”Potts said the library doesn’t have the money to replace the books, so patrons will “have to guess what the word was.” She said workers have also put up signs asking people not to cross out curse words in the library’s books.

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Read about McCain’s opposition here and below.
Last week, Senator John McCain [Republican-Arizona] introduced his “Internet Freedom Act”. McCain’s press release says the proposed bill “would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from enacting rules that would regulate the Internet.” What McCain should have said in his press release was ‘The lobbyist told me to do it…’
McCain’s bill came on the same day as the FCC [Federal Communication Commission] decided to move forward on an official Net Neutrality policy that would prevent ISPs from making arbitrary decisions.
Senator McCain had been the long time chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, a position he held from 1997 to 2001, and again from 2003 to 2005. This is the committee which has jurisdiction over the US Senate legislation dealing with policy about science, engineering, and technology research and development.
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