Hi Allhere are some pictures of Oman. It took me a while to find a fast enough internet connection to upload them. I will write a bit more when I have a bit more time. Everything is good so far and I'm enjoying the sushine. Sometimes it's a little too

April 15th and just like clock work it looks like it is going to rain and not a minute to soon thought I was living in a giant sauna for the past month here in Cambodia. The Khmer new Year is going on and it signifies the beginning of the rainy season so

Greetings from Carlsbad NM We made it here yesterday from El Paso Texas. It was an easy 160 mile day. We are staying at the Carlsbad RV Park just outside of Carlsbad. It is an OK park. There are lot's of oil worker staying here. Many are from Texas. It

Wrapped up my Banos trip focus was on Spanish classes but plenty of hiking opportunity and wanted to get dialed into vegetatation soils stability before Malinguapamba MP. Banos is warmer than MP and sets on metamorphic rock with volcanics above. Plent

Back in the RVAfter a year and a half in a home without wheels Grace and I are back in the RV. We39ve moved to Santa Barbara county while we are shopping for a home in Santa Barbara. We39ve moved into Rancho Oso an old horse ranch

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

Wow It's been so long since an installment that I almost don't know where to start but alas I will do my bestSo upon the recommendation of Chloe the three of us girls headed off on a 2 day Mahout Course to learn the fine art of Elephant training. Rea

Photos of my Guatemala City apartment and the view from my balcony. Photos 112.

Hi allWell we're home now safe and sound and seem to have adjusted to the different time zone after a few nights of broken sleep We're both enjoying looking back on on the blog and on what a brilliant time we had in Oz so thought we would wrap it all

Monday 4th OctoberWell after the last blog entry I wanted to be a bit more upbeat but we've not had the best of starts today. First port of call was the Darwin Dam Darwin Damn more like as there were barricades preventing any viewings. Never mi

If you asked us two weeks ago what the meaning of 'luxury' was we probably would have said 'a Porche' or 'dinner at a Michelin starred resturant' By the time we arrived back in Ulanbatar after our ten day Gobi Desert tour luxury meant running water a

a city one of no comparison that i have yet to stumble upon...with great pleasures my fingers do the electric slide across these keys to the rythm of my thoughts hoping to do justice to barcelona. arriving on a saturday morning roughly about the time

The prime minister has refused to go head-to-head with Ed Miliband – and the multi-party debate we are getting will be a 90-minute cry for help on behalf of the democratic system

Last week, Germany chose its entry for this year’s Eurovision: Heart of Stone, performed by Andreas Kümmert, former winner of the German version of The Voice (which is known as The Voice of Germany in its native country, rather than Die Stimme von Deutschland. Presumably the producers didn’t want to put viewers off by making it sound too German).

After wailing his guts out and winning the public vote, Kümmert abruptly announced, on live TV, that he didn’t actually want to “do” Eurovision after all, and awarded his “prize” to the runner-up instead. A chorus of boos broke out. German boos. Buhen.

What sort of person can’t decide who to vote for, but can rate how much they like whatever they’re hearing out of five, and wants to sit there tapping a button accordingly?

As the general election scuttles closer, the campaign grows more confusing by the moment, so it’s good that last week’s seven-way leaders’ debate brought some much-needed mayhem to the situation. Not so long ago we were bemoaning the lack of choice in a two-party system. Now we’ve got option paralysis.

It had its moments. Nigel Farage complained about foreigners with HIV who enter Britain and immediately start wolfing down expensive medicine: greedy as well as sick. You’d think Farage might welcome immigrants with grave illnesses on the basis that they’re less likely to hang around as long, but apparently not. Say what you like about him – say it, write it down, daub it in 3ft-high cherry-red letters up the side of a prominent overpass on his regular commute if you must – but it’s undeniably refreshing to see a politician determined to speak his mind, indifferent to the absurd constraints of spin or basic human empathy. Never mind HIV sufferers – how much is Britain spending on refugees with cancer? Maybe he could put that statistic on a sandwich board and patrol the country in it, perhaps while ringing a bell and loudly commanding passersby to picture a nation under his command.

Annalena Baerbock und Robert Habeck warnen vor einem gesellschaftlichen Rückschritt infolge der Coronakrise. Was würden sie tun, wenn sie an der Macht wären?

Das Streamingportal Joyn versucht sich an einem Datingformat: "M.O.M - Milf oder Missy" lässt zwei Männer aus Frauen verschiedenen Alters wählen – und versumpft in faden Klischees. 

Der Kabarettist Sebastian Pufpaff tritt nun notgedrungen ohne Publikum auf. Hier spricht er über die Stille nach der Pointe - und über den Angriff auf das Team der "heute-show".

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

Rui Pinto is the whistleblower behind Football Leaks and has been in jail in Portugal for months. In an interview, his lawyer William Bourdon talks about how his client is doing and what he is doing to get Pinto out of prison.

The London-based company Sidefloor was part of the tax-evasion structure for which Lionel Messi and his father Jorge were convicted. Now it has been revealed that FC Barcelona spent years paying agent fees to this letterbox company, payments apparently destined for Jorge Messi.

Guest Post: XDP allows you to build a high-performance peering router using just Linux, while leveraging various open-source routing daemons.

Some in Germany have the impression that the country can survive a long-term lockdown without suffering any grave consequences. That thinking is dangerous.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reacted strongly to the crisis: they report engaging in social distancing and hygiene behaviors, and believe that strong policy measures, such as shop closures and curfews, are necessary. They also believe that their government and their country’s citizens are not doing enough and underestimate the degree to which others in their country support strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. The perception of a weak government and public response is associated with higher levels of worries and depression. Using both cross-country panel data and an event-study, we additionally show that strong government reactions correct misperceptions, and reduce worries and depression. Our findings highlight that policy-makers not only need to consider how their decisions affect the spread of COVID-19, but also how such choices influence the mental health of their population.

We explored two measures of inequality that described the full income distribution in cities. One measure is an income gini based on family incomes in 1929 for 33 cities and in 1933 for up to 48 cities in 1933 were spread throughout the country. We also estimated gini coefficients that made use of contract rents for renters and implicit rents for home owners for up to 955 cities throughout the country. We were able to expand to all counties when looking at a top-end inequality measure, the number of taxpayers per family. All three measures varied substantially across the country. We show the correlations between the various measures and also estimate the relationship between the measures and various relief programs developed by governments at all levels during the period.

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.

Europa es más que una coalición de ególatras. En una crisis como esta no existe alternativa para los eurobonos.

Twelve weeks after the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in China, leaders in Beijing are gradually reopening the country. But how can they be sure their decision won't backfire?

In the fight against COVID-19, doctors and health workers are testing drugs and treatments whose efficacy has been proven against other illnesses. We take a look at the most prominent ones and the early findings.

Levine is making the rounds to make the case for baseball in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.

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.

Public schooling systems are an essential feature of modern states. These systems often developed at the expense of religious schools, which undertook the bulk of education historically and still cater to large student populations worldwide. This paper examines how Indonesia’s long-standing Islamic school system responded to the construction of 61,000 public elementary schools in the mid-1970s. The policy was designed in part to foster nation building and to curb religious influence in society. We are the first to study the market response to these ideological objectives. Using novel data on Islamic school construction and curriculum, we identify both short-run effects on exposed cohorts as well as dynamic, long-run effects on education markets. While primary enrollment shifted towards state schools, religious education increased on net as Islamic secondary schools absorbed the increased demand for continued education. The Islamic sector not only entered new markets to compete with the state but also increased religious curriculum at newly created schools. Our results suggest that the Islamic sector response increased religiosity at the expense of a secular national identity. Overall, this ideological competition in education undermined the nation-building impacts of mass schooling.

German multinational Bayer underestimated the risks of acquiring Monsanto. Now, the company is desperately seeking to contain the damage by selling business divisions and cutting jobs. So far, though, none of these moves have helped.

Greed, envy, poor leadership and a poisonous internal culture: New York Times journalist David Enrich has written a book about Deutsche Bank that also sheds light on the financial institution's relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Singer and songwriter Brian Howe, a former lead vocalist for the British rock band Bad Company, died Wednesday after suffering a cardiac arrest at his home in Florida. The 66-year-old English musician had a brief conversation with first responders, but he then “slipped away" and could not be revived, longtime friend and manager Paul Easton said Thursday.

Glenn, a former boxer and owner of popular Times Square bar Jimmy's Corner, died of coronavirus early Thursday morning at 89.