A Devon petrol station is charging drivers more than £1.99 a litre - or about £9 a gallon - for petrol and diesel as drivers clamour for fuel.
He said the move was prompted by dwindling stocks. "We cannot get any more supplies. We're not being mean. I would say I'm a very nice person. The price will go back to normal as soon as we get a delivery."
A presentation is here, and here's interesting commentary:Although many observers portray aging as the dominant cause of future growth in federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid, most of the increase that CBO projects reflects rising costs per beneficiary rather than rising numbers of beneficiaries. The effect of population aging is smaller.
The likes of Jonathan Ross and Chris Moyles are not receiving salaries above the market rate, according to a review of how the BBC pays its top names.
As Monetary Authorities, we have been humbled and have taken heart in the realization that some leading Central Banks, including those in the USA and the UK, are now not just talking of, but also actually implementing flexible and pragmatic central bank support programmes where these are deemed necessary in their National interests.
That is precisely the path that we began over 4 years ago in pursuit of our own national interest and we have not wavered on that critical path despite the untold misunderstanding, vilification and demonization we have endured from across the political divide.
A few months ago, the USA economy confronted a severe mortgage crisis, which threatened to spark an economy-wide recession.
The USA Central Bank again responded by injecting over US $160 billion between December, 2007 and March, 2008, to provide impetus to the American economy and prevent a worse crisis from happening....
Here in Zimbabwe we had our near-bank failures a few years ago and we responded by providing the affected Banks with the Troubled Bank Fund (TBF) for which we were heavily criticized even by some multi-lateral institutions who today are silent when the Central Banks of UK and USA are going the same way and doing the same thing under very similar circumstances thereby continuing the unfortunate hypocrisy that what’s good for goose is not good for the gander....
As Monetary Authorities, we commend those of our peers, the world over, who have now seen the light on the need for the adoption of flexible and practical interventions and support to key sectors of the economy when faced with unusual circumstances.
Alarm at Google Yahoo partnering
Regulators in the US are being urged to investigate any potential online advertising and search partnership between Google and Yahoo.
The call by a coalition of 16 American civil rights and rural advocacy bodies [DC: What do civil rights and rural advocacy?!?? bodies have to do with competition?] comes despite the fact no firm deal has actually been announced.
"We all suffer in such mega mergers," Gary Flowers of the Black Leadership Forum told BBC News.
[The] coalition is made up of the League of Rural Voters, the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the American Agriculture Movement.It also includes the Black Leadership Forum, an umbrella group of 36 civil rights organisations including the NAACP and the National Urban League.
League of Rural Voters' executive director Niel Ritchie claims that the do-no-evil mantra may no longer apply in today's marketplace in which Google's reach is apparently without bound, touching more and more aspects of our everyday lives."We believe the government should give this agreement very careful scrutiny," he says.
Barrels of oil per dollar in blue, Euro in red and ounce of gold in purple.The steep increase in the price of crude oil in the United States remains a headline issue, along with the falling US dollar. The drop in the dollar has caused concern in oil-producing countries which use it as the economic basis for the commodity, and often their currency. The chart below shows the spot market price of crude oil per barrel (BBL) in US dollars and in euros from 2001 to today. The price of oil has grown faster relative to the dollar than to the euro. Yet, a portion of the rise in oil prices is due to the fall of the value of the dollar. The graph also shows the number of barrels of crude oil per cost of an ounce of gold, demonstrating the parallel growth in commodity pricing.
For four consecutive years, Africa has experienced record economic growth. Overall in 2007 the continent registered 5.7 per cent GDP growth and a per capita increase of 3.7 per cent. Indications are that growth will only accelerate in 2008 and remain buoyant in 2009.
[A] reality masked by the growth figures is that net oil exporters continue to outpace oil importers by far. In 2008, the average real GDP growth rate for the former collection of countries is expected to be 6.8 per cent, but it will only be 4.9 per cent for the latter.
Banks are not, and cannot, be plc's in the same way that other companies are. The social value of a steelmaker can only fall as far down as zero, while the social value of a bank can be much, much lower than that.
The third pillar [of financial regulation reform] is requiring banks to pay an insurance premium to tax payers against the risk that the tax payer will be required to bail them out. If such a market could be created, it would not only incentivise good banking and push the focus of regulation away from process to outcomes, but it would provide an incentive for banks to be less systemic. Today, banks have an incentive to be more systemic as a bail out is then guaranteed. The right response to Citibank’s routine failure to anticipate its credit risks is not for it to keep on getting bigger so that it can remain too big to fail, but for it to whither away under rising insurance premiums paid to tax payers.
I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight. May God bless you all. I am ready.
Petitioner Leonel Torres Herrera was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in January 1982. He unsuccessfully challenged the conviction on direct appeal and state collateral proceedings in the Texas state courts, and in a federal habeas petition. In February 1992--10 years after his conviction--he urged in a second federal habeas petition that he was "actually innocent" of the murder for which he was sentenced to death, and that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law therefore forbid his execution. He supported this claim with affidavits tending to show that his now dead brother, rather than he, had been the perpetrator of the crime. Petitioner urges us to hold that this showing of innocence entitles him to relief in this federal habeas proceeding.[Emphasis DC] We hold that it does not.
[...] In any system of criminal justice, "innocence" or "guilt" must be determined in some sort of a judicial proceeding. Petitioner's showing of innocence, and indeed his constitutional claim for relief based upon that showing, must be evaluated in the light of the previous proceedings in this case, which have stretched over a span of 10 years.
Once a defendant has been afforded a fair trial and convicted of the offense for which he was charged, the presumption of innocence disappears. [...] ("The purpose of the trial stage from the State's point of view is to convert a criminal defendant from a person presumed innocent to one found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"). In the eyes of the law, petitioner does not come before the Court as one who is "innocent," but on the contrary as one who has been convicted by due process of law of two brutal murders.
We really are being asked to decide whether the Constitution forbids the execution of a person who has been validly convicted and sentenced but who, nonetheless, can prove his innocence with newly discovered evidence. Despite the State of Texas' astonishing protestation to the contrary [...] I do not see how the answer can be anything but "yes."
The protection of the Eighth Amendment does not end once a defendant has been validly convicted and sentenced. In Johnson v. Mississippi, 486 U.S. 578 (1988), the petitioner had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death on the basis of three aggravating circumstances. One of those circumstances was that he previously had been convicted of a violent felony in the State of New York. After Johnson had been sentenced to death, the New York Court of Appeals reversed his prior conviction. Although there was no question that the prior conviction was valid at the time of Johnson's sentencing, this Court held that the Eighth Amendment required review of the sentence because "the jury was allowed to consider evidence that has been revealed to be materially inaccurate." [...]
Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.
If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.
Mr. Goodall is a member of the Green Party in Britain and a devout environmentalist — he says he has ceased air travel because of its emissions. But he also questions how much good is being done by eliminating short trips by car.
The G-Econ research project is devoted to developing a geophysically based data set on economic activity for the world. The current data set (GEcon 1.3) is now publicly available and covers "gross cell product" for all regions for 1990, which includes 27,500 terrestrial observations. The basic metric is the regional equivalent of gross domestic product.
Three applications of the data are investigated. First, the puzzling 'climate-output reversal' is detected, whereby the relationship between temperature and output is negative when measured on a per capita basis and strongly positive on a per area basis. Second, the database allows better resolution of the impact of geographic attributes on African poverty, finding geography is an important source of income differences relative to high-income regions. Finally, we use the G-Econ data to provide estimates of the economic impact of greenhouse warming, with larger estimates of warming damages than past studies.
