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”.

Community gardeners and other activists in Berlin are helping the Transition movement to take root in the German capital as part of its worldwide campaign for a sustainable society.

Canadian accident investigator Larry Vance claims to have solved the mystery of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. In an interview, he explains why he believes the plane's captain deliberately ditched the aircraft.

The German cabinet on Monday agreed to an unprecedented aid package to prop up the country's economy as the coronavirus pandemic takes hold. Parliament is set to approve the package later this week.

The German government failed to obtain enough protective masks for the country. That's one of the reasons Germany has so far refused to require its citizen's to wear them in public. But those facial coverings could be critical in lifting restrictions on public life.

A railgun is an experimental weapon that uses electricity instead of explosives to fire long-range projectiles. In a railgun, a conductive projectile is propelled electromagnetically along two parallel rails. Though the device uses a tremendous amount of energy, it can launch objects hundreds of miles at many times the speed of sound. Both the US and Britain have developed and fired experimental models. What are the advantages and disadvantages of railguns compared to traditional guns?

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.

With the wave of coronavirus infections washing over Europe, countries have turned inward to protect themselves. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has struggled to define the EU's role in the crisis as border checks have been reintroduced across the Continent.

In an interview, Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio calls for greater solidarity among Europeans and for the EU to come up with an aid package comparable to the one recently passed in the United States.

We study a novel policy tool—interest rate uncertainty—that can be used to discourage inefficient capital inflows and to adjust the composition of external accounts between short-term securities and foreign direct investment (FDI). We identify the trade-offs faced in navigating between external balance and price stability. The interest rate uncertainty policy discourages short-term inflows mainly through portfolio risk and precautionary saving channels. A markup channel generates net FDI inflows under imperfect exchange rate pass-through. We further investigate new channels under different assumptions about the irreversibility of FDI, the currency of export invoicing, risk aversion of outside agents, and effective lower bound in the rest of the world. Under every scenario, uncertainty policy is inflationary.

Well-off Brazilians have brought the coronavirus back home with them from their travels. Many of them also employ domestic workers from the country's favelas - who they're apparently unwilling to protect by telling them to stay home. Brazil's poorest class could make easy quarry for the disease.

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.

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.

Innovation policy involves trading off monopoly output and pricing in the short run in exchange for incentives for firms to develop new products in the future. While existing research demonstrates that expected profits fuel R&D investments, little is known about the novelty of the projects funded by these investments. Relying on data that describe the scientific approaches used by a large sample of experimental drug projects, we expand on this literature by examining the scientific novelty of pharmaceutical R&D investments following the creation of the Medicare Part D program. We find little evidence that the positive demand shock implied by this program prompted firms to undertake scientifically novel R&D activity, as measured by whether the specific scientific approach had been used before. However, we find some evidence that firms invested in products involving novel combinations of scientific approaches. These estimates can inform economists and policymakers assessing the tradeoffs associated with marginal changes in commercial returns from newly developed pharmaceutical products.

This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating teacher value-added. Rather than imposing a normality assumption on unobserved teacher quality (as in the standard empirical Bayes approach), our nonparametric estimator permits the underlying distribution to be estimated directly and in a computationally feasible way. The resulting estimates fit the unobserved distribution very well regardless of the form it takes, as we show in Monte Carlo simulations. Implementing the nonparametric approach in practice using two separate large-scale administrative data sets, we find the estimated teacher value-added distributions depart from normality and differ from each other. To draw out the policy implications of our method, we first consider a widely-discussed policy to release teachers at the bottom of the value-added distribution, comparing predicted test score gains under our nonparametric approach with those using parametric empirical Bayes. Here the parametric method predicts similar policy gains in one data set while overestimating those in the other by a substantial margin. We also show the predicted gains from teacher retention policies can be underestimated significantly based on the parametric method. In general, the results highlight the benefit of our nonparametric empirical Bayes approach, given that the unobserved distribution of value-added is likely to be context-specific.

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.

Pressure is growing across the board for large corporations to do more to protect the environment and the climate. Even institutional investors like Blackrock head Larry Fink are joining the chorus of voices calling for change.

Freelancers and small companies are getting hit especially hard by the corona crisis. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the federal government is planning a massive financial aid package. It would mark the end of Germany’s balanced budget policy.

The frequency of fatal helicopter accidents has slipped in recent decades.

This new entertainment series should get the motor running for movie and music fans.

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.

The former captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt was relieved from his duties in response to his concerns about coronavirus spreading on his ship.

A Southwest jet traveling from Dallas fatally struck a person as it touched down at a Texas airport Thursday night, authorities said.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

An already-unlikely motive in the Ahmaud Arbery murder case became even more suspicious on Friday. The two Georgia men who were caught on video shooting the unarmed jogger to death in February claim they were chasing a suspect behind a series of burglaries in the area. But a local police official said the last break-in the neighborhood was reported nearly two months before the shooting.

Some Costco customers are not happy about having to wear masks in stores.

Surprisingly, they didn’t do it years ago due to traffic.

The desperate search for two teens who vanished while tubing in Utah continued on Saturday, days after the pair were swept up in an intense storm.

Lufthansa is negotiating a €9 billion bailout with Germany's economic stabilisation fund to ensure its future, the airline said, confirming an earlier Reuters report.

Ryanair has criticised what it has described as unjustified charges for aircraft that are parked at Dublin airport while not in use due to the Covid-19 crisis.

By the time in 2015 when prosecutors indicted Chris Christie flunkies Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni for shutting down Fort Lee’s George Washington Bridge lanes for four days in 2013 to punish the mayor for failing to endorse the big man in Trenton’s reelection, the two sick sycophants had long lost their stupid sinecures in the State House and Port Authority. And Christie had already rightly lost the trust of Jerseyans for building the hothouse in which the lichens could grow.

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?

Electric scooters are coming to New York and, with a little planning and preparation, they can safely thrive here. To understand how, it helps to start with some context.

I am proud that companies and farms are donating milk to many people. I am proud because I am one of the workers who helps produce that milk.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

After Hurricane Dorian savaged the northern islands of the Bahamas, damaged properties loom as a target for real estate speculators.

A Los Angeles real estate agent was shoved backwards off a stairway and pinned to the ground by an unknown open house visitor who flashed a chilling smile at a security camera seconds earlier.

The authors want to transform the home where they raised their children in Bangor, Maine, into the location for Stephen King’s personal archives. A guest house they own next door would host writers in residence.

Airbnb was dealt another setback in one of its most important markets Tuesday as voters in a New Jersey city just a few minutes by train from the tourist sights of Manhattan approved restrictions on short-term rental companies in a hard-fought referendum.