i handed my notice in today at work so 8 weeks to go they were really good about it and now i have done this the nerves have set in and im actually thinking what have i done.... well theres not turning back now.... yipeee So 8 weeks today ill b

Sept 27Oct 1stIt was really nice seeing John at the airport when I arrived. THe altitude of La Paz considering it is the highest capital in the world didnt affect me like I had assumed it would. I did purchase a coca cola which helps and John and I

Thank you to everyone who's commented on our blog entries and apologies it took all of a month to approve them.Now log in to FB and check out the photos we've uploaded. They'll take you from Venice through to Budapest across the border into Vienna ove

Our feet are firmly set in the US still but only for a few more weeks. We are checking our lists of things to bring and Ranjit's mom has a list of obscure favorite items we'll be searching for prior to the trip. Jeet and mom have decided that we'll be vi

Sometimes I cannot believe that I actually live in this Central American country. It has been raining and raining and raining since we came home from Managua on Friday. Like the pants 7 pairs 3 mine that I washed in the rain on Saturday morning

When I got to Arequipa a white city within view of three volcanoes in the middle of the desert I was really feeling the absence of Conny and Jennie. It was odd to suddenly be on my own again after 2 weeks of being part of a three. And for the four month

The first rule of panic mode is you don’t talk about panic mode. And this is purely for personal reasons, but I don’t want Scotland to reject us

It used to be unthinkable. Now it’s thinkable. In fact, in some minds, it’s already been thought. Scotland might be voting yes to independence and splitting from the rest of the union. I’m not Scottish, and I’m therefore powerless to intervene, although I would personally prefer Scotland to stay – but only for entirely selfish and superficial reasons. Reason one: I’d rather not be lumbered with a Tory government from now until the day the moon crashes into the Thames. Two: I quite like Scotland and the Scottish, so it’s hard not to feel somehow personally affronted by their rejection. Why did you just unfriend and unfollow me, Scotland? What did I ever do to you? What’s that? Sorry, you’ll have to slow down a bit. Can’t understand a word you’re saying. Don’t you come with subtitles?! Ha ha ha! No, seriously, come back. Scotland? Scotland?

Apparently the consequences of a split in the union could be calamitous. The skies will fall and the seas will boil and the dead shall rise and the milk will spoil. There will be a great disturbance in the force. Duncan’s horses will turn and eat each other. Starving ravens will peck out your eyes halfway through the Great British Bake Off. Your dad will give birth to a jackal full of hornets. And in London’s last remaining DVD shop, Gregory’s Girl will quietly be re-categorised as “world cinema”.

The John Lewis and Sainsbury’s ads have kickstarted an earlier-than-ever festive season in which we’ll shop or click our way to bankruptcy chasing 15% off the top Christmas products. But beware of My Friend Cayla …

Hey, remember when Christmas used to last 12 days? Now it’s so bloated it’s virtually an epoch, lasting twice as long as the year it falls in. The early-warning signs keep changing: not so long ago the start of the holiday season was signified by the release of the Christmas edition of the Radio Times. Now it’s the annual unveiling of the John Lewis ad, which this year features a boy arranging for a trafficked overseas bird to be smuggled into the country inside a small container and presented like a gift-wrapped object to the laddish penguin mate who exists only in his troubled mind. They say psychopathic murderers often start their “careers” by doing ghastly things to animals: hopefully they’ll keep the storyline going year after year, as his illusory brain-penguin commands him to carry out increasingly hideous yuletide ceremonies, until eventually the advert consists of nothing but him appeasing the Penguin King by dancing in the moonlight wearing a necklace of ears and eyeballs, all of it seen through the sights of a police marksman positioned on the roof of a neighbour’s evacuated home.

But this year, the John Lewis ad has been overshadowed by gargantuan supermarket and noted humanitarian anti-war campaigner J Sainsbury PLC, and its tear-jerking period piece in which a perfectly good war is ruined by a tragic outbreak of football.

Sie hatten den europaweit härtesten Corona-Lockdown. Wie sich die erste Woche der "Phase 2" in Italien anfühlt, beschreibt unser SPIEGEL-Korrespondent vor Ort.

An American woman goes to the police in Las Vegas. She claims she has been raped by an athlete: global football star Cristiano Ronaldo. What really happened has never been resolved because lawyers settled the case with a payment of $375,000 by the Real Madrid star. By SPIEGEL Staff

Guest Post: High precision time measurements depend on using multiple clocks to ensure redundancy and stability.

The Leopoldina National Academy, Germany’s academy of sciences, recommends that schools be reopened soon. Businesses and public authorities are also expected to be reopened gradually. Travel should also be permitted under certain conditions, according to the report, which DER SPIEGEL obtained in advance of publication.

People are growing increasingly impatient over the coronavirus lockdown, and politicians are now debating whether to loosen measures. From a scientific point of view this is a disaster. Measures should actually be tightened until we know more about the virus.

Ambient pollution is a byproduct of economic activity. It has been widely reported that COVID-19 and associated lockdowns have generated large improvements in air quality worldwide, including to China's notoriously-poor air quality. We analyze China's official pollution monitor data and account for the large, recurrent improvement in air quality following Lunar New Year (LNY), which essentially coincided with lockdowns in 2020. With the important exception of NO2, China's air quality improvements in 2020 are smaller than we should expect near the pandemic's epicenter: Hubei province. Compared with LNY improvements experienced in 2018 and 2019 in Hubei, we see smaller improvements in SO2 while ozone concentrations increased in both relative and absolute terms (roughly doubling). Similar patterns are found for the six provinces neighboring Hubei. We conclude that whether COVID-19 actually decreased pollution in China depends on the pollutant and reference period considered.

Do new societal needs increase charitable giving or simply reallocate a fixed supply of donations? We study this question using IRS datasets and the natural experiment of deadly tornadoes. Among ZIP Codes located more than 20 miles away from a tornado's path, donations by households increase by over $1 million per tornado fatality. We find no negative effects on charities located in these ZIP Codes, with a bootstrapped confidence interval that rejects substitution rates above 16 percent. The results imply that giving to one cause need not come at the expense of another.

The European Commission is limited in what it can do to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this only makes it more imperative for Brussels to set the correct priorities.

The German government's rejection of eurobonds is selfish, small-minded and cowardly. Existing mechanisms will not be enough to contain the crisis we are facing. We need to act now.

On Thursday, European leaders will discuss how to navigate the block through the economic crisis triggered by the novel coronavirus. In a DER SPIEGEL interview, European Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni talks about what is at stake and the need to find at least 1 trillion euros.

In an interview, Hong Kong-based epidemiologist Gabriel Leung explains why he considers a rapid lifting of contact bans and social distancing measures to be irresponsible. The corona crisis, he believes, will be with us for a long time.

We estimate valuations of time using detailed consumer choice data from a large European ride hail platform, where drivers bid on trips and consumers choose between a set of potential rides with different prices and waiting times. We estimate consumer demand as a function of prices and waiting times. While demand is responsive to both, price elasticities are on average four times higher than waiting-time elasticities. We show how these estimates can be mapped into values of time that vary by place, person, and time of day. Regarding variation within a day, the value of time during non-work hours is 16% lower than during work hours. Regarding the spatial dimension, our value of time measures are highly correlated both with real estate prices and urban GPS travel flows. A variance decomposition reveals that most of the substantial heterogeneity in the value of time is explained by individual differences as opposed to place or time of day. In contrast with other studies that focus on long run choices we do not find evidence of spatial sorting. We apply our measures to quantify the opportunity cost of traffic congestion in Prague, which we estimate at $483,000 per day.

Dominican Yankees and Mets stars are working with Pedro Martinez to respond to the coronavirus pandemic in their homeland.

Banks usually hold large amounts of domestic public debt which makes them vulnerable to their own sovereign’s default risk. At the same time, governments often resort to costly public bailouts when their domestic banking sector is in trouble. We investigate how the interbank network structure and the distribution of sovereign debt holdings jointly affect the optimal bailout policy in the presence of this "doom loop". Rescuing banks with high domestic sovereign exposure is optimal if these banks are sufficiently central in the network, even though that requires larger bailout expenditures than rescuing low-exposure banks. Our findings imply that highly central banks can use exposure to their own government as a strategic tool to increase the likelihood of being bailed out. Our model thus illustrates how the "doom loop" exacerbates the "too interconnected to fail" problem in banking.

We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms’ employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant-native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the “rest of the world” countries.

Estimating the returns to education remains an active area of research amongst applied economists. Most studies that estimate the causal return to education exploit changes in schooling and/or labor laws to generate exogenous differences in education. An implicit assumption is that more time in school may translate into greater earnings potential. None of these studies, however, explicitly consider the quality of schooling to which impacted students are exposed. To extend this literature, we examine the interaction between school quality and policy-induced returns to schooling, using temporally-available school quality measures from Card and Krueger (1992). We find that additional compulsory schooling, via either schooling or labor laws, increases earnings only if educational inputs are of sufficiently high quality. In particular, we find a consistent role for teacher quality, as measured by relative teacher pay across states, in generating consistently positive returns to compulsory schooling.

Recent research has highlighted unequal treatment for women in academic economics along several different dimensions, including promotion, hiring, credit for co-authorship, and standards for publication in professional journals. Can the source of these differences lie in biases against women that are pervasive in the discipline, even among students in the earliest stages of their training? In this paper, we provide evidence on the importance of explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduate students in Chilean universities, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above. On a wide battery of measures, economics students are more biased than students in other fields. Economics students are somewhat more biased already upon entry, before exposure to any economics classes. The gap is more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, in particular for male students. We also find an increase in bias in a sample of students that we follow longitudinally. Differences in political ideology explain essentially all the gap at entry, but none of the increase in the gap with exposure. Exposure to female students and faculty attenuates some of the bias.

Clouds are gathering on the horizon of the global economy and the risk of a recession is growing. Many experts believe that the international banking system is unprepared and Germany has begun getting ready for the worst.

In an interview, Alex Zhu, the head of the Chinese video app TikTok, defends the company against accusations of spying and censorship and explains why he isn't interested in making the platform a place for political debate.

De Niro, 76, also voiced his support for Joe Biden as a presidential candidate on "The Late Show," and was critical of President Trump’s handling of the response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Things were not OK.

Brya Bishop was arrested days before her 25th birthday and charged with three felonies.

Audio recordings of two 911 calls placed moments before Ahmaud Arbery was killed confirm that at least two people were concerned that a black man was running in their Georgia neighborhood.

McDonald’s knows exactly where its beef is. The fast food chain’s CEO on Thursday expressed full confidence in the burger joint’s meat supply.

Disney World is beginning to spring into action. Disney Springs, the company’s outdoor dining, shopping and entertainment complex near its Florida theme parks, is set to begin a phased reopening on May 20 following closures to reduce the spread of coronavirus.

Chris Cornell’s widow is firing back at her husband’s Soundgarden bandmates, calling the lawsuit they filed against her Wednesday an attempt to “browbeat” her into giving up “copyrighted works.”

Ohio State University will pay about $41 million to settle a dozen lawsuits by 162 men alleging sexual abuse by a team doctor, Richard Strauss.

How should those now working from home due to the coronavirus deal with guilt and exhaustion?

The Minister for Finance has said the State can afford to continue to fund the measures put in place by the Government to deal with the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Like many New Yorkers — indeed, many Americans — I’ve looked to Gov. Cuomo’s decisive leadership during the coronavirus crisis. But his Nourish New York initiative, while well-intentioned, is a step in the wrong direction. With federal funds stretched to the limit, why would the governor squander $25 million to bail out the dairy industry, which is rife with disease and cruelty?