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Traffic Snarls Expected in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber

Several of Europe’s largest cities were snarled by traffic jams on Wednesday when thousands of taxi drivers blocked roads and held rallies in protest of ​an upstart​ American​ service that lets customers book rides through smartphones.

Founded in 2009

Making Everything Shipshape

The ports in Tacoma, Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach and elsewhere offer much shorter sailing times than Gulf Coast and East Coast ports. But for shippers of some goods, the web of logistics, including trucks and railroads, ends up being less expensive if they go through the Panama Canal.

While the widened Panama Canal will allow an all-water route for big ships to the East Coast, the project — originally scheduled to open this year — has been plagued with construction delays. And the authorities have yet to announce toll charges for passing ships. In the end, it might be too expensive for some ships to use.

A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine

Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.

“This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”

All international crises elicit predictions that, this time, the EU will finally be forced to grow up, and develop a real foreign policy strategy. Such expectations are usually disappointed. I don’t see why it should be any different, this time.

Profits Vanish in Venezuela After Currency Devaluation

The country’s high inflation — currently around 60 percent a year — has also meant that the prices in bolívares that companies charge for many goods and services have risen sharply.

Now companies are feeling the pain from a series of currency devaluations over the last year and a half. Photo

Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise dating techniques have revealed.

The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively

Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period of time.

Before the new government could go on the offensive, it needed to play defense. It fended off an attack on Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, the cornerstone of an economic policy that transformed Ireland from a financial backwater into a European hub for companies such as Pfizer Inc., the maker of Viagra, and Google Inc.

Two days after commencing his premiership, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, 62, became embroiled in what he called a Gallic spat with French President Nicolas Sarkozy after refusing to raise the tax rate in return for an interest-rate cut on aid.

“The attitude was: ‘You misbehaved and here’s what you have to do’,’”

So today, for every seven private employees who have been laid off, only one has left the public sector.

Greece’s creditors — the troika comprised of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have made public-sector layoffs a condition for providing the next tranche of the biggest bailout in history.

Public employment grew by fivefold from 1970 through 2009 — at an annual growth rate of 4 percent, according to according to a recent academic study by Zafiris Tzannatos and Iannis Monogios.. Over the same four decades, employment in the private sector increased by only 27 percent — an annual rate of less than 1 percent.

"Be extremely cautious that you don't take more than you can service. Try to issue liabilities that involve an element of risk sharing between the creditor and the debtor," he said.

"As for international contracts, be very careful that you treat the business cycle symmetrically. If you stimulate and borrow when the economy goes down then you must tighten... when the economy grows."

The reason is not hard to fathom. Hobbled by severe damage to private and public-sector balance sheets, and with policy interest rates at or near zero, post-bubble economies have been mired in a classic “liquidity trap.” They are more focused on paying down massive debt overhangs built up before the crisis than on assuming new debt and boosting aggregate demand.

The sad case of the American consumer is a classic example of how this plays out. In the years leading up to the crisis, two bubbles – property and credit – fueled a record-high personal-consumption binge. When the bubbles burst, households understandably became fixated on balance-sheet repair – namely, paying down debt and rebuilding personal savings, rather than resuming excessive spending habits.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph

US consumers have pulled back as never before.

It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked.

To some extent this reflected the fact that capital controls have potential costs: they impose extra burdens of paperwork, they make business operations more difficult, and conventional economic analysis says that they should have a negative impact on growth (although this effect is hard to find in the numbers). But it also reflected the rise of free-market ideology,

European Debt Crisis Navigator A list of resources from around the Web about the European debt crisis as selected by Journalist's Resource, a project of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard.

The Eurozone Crisis: How Banks and Sovereigns Came to Be Joined at the Hip International Monetary Fund, November 2011

How did this happen? As Kemal Derviş has pointed out, the cumulated current-account surplus of the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany is now around $500 billion. This dwarfs China’s surplus at its mercantilist peak of the mid-2000’s, when the G-7 (including Germany) regularly scolded the Chinese for fueling global imbalances.

The second exception is France. Over the last year, France’s external deficit deteriorated further, from a 2.4% to 3.5% of GDP. France now faces zero or negative growth in 2013, and seems to have reached the point at which it must reverse course on competitiveness or risk more trouble ahead.

Walking around town, my friend and I had noticed that almost every home had a pile of coal outside, soft dark chunks that people shoveled into stoves for cooking and heating. Thousands upon thousands of coal fires were loading the air with tiny dots of soot. Scientists have taken to calling these dots “black carbon,” and have steadily ratcheted up their assessments of its harm. In March, for instance, a research team led by a Mumbai environmental group estimated that black carbon and other particulate matter from India’s coal-fired power plants cause about 100,000 deaths a year.

A 31-scientist team from nine nations released a comprehensive, four-year assessment in January arguing that planetary black-carbon output is the second-biggest driver of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change; the little black specks I found on my glasses and clothes have roughly two-thirds the impact of carbon dioxide.

The rule of thumb is that if a well leaks more than about 3 percent” of its methane production into the air, “natural gas actually becomes dirtier than coal, from a climate-change perspective,

Galileo — first proposed in 1994, more than 20 years after America started its own system, and initially promoted as a big potential moneymaker — “can’t give a direct return on investment, but politically it is very important for Europe to have its own autonomous system,” said Mr. Magliozzi of Telespazio.

It is also designed to be far more precise than the American version.

Galileo has been financed almost entirely by the European Union since 2007. It is the first and so far only major infrastructure project managed by the European Commission.

He has threatened to veto any new budget that does not at least freeze spending,

“Europeans who are attached to the European Union are now in a minority.” Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said they felt little or no attachment, up seven percentage points since 2010. In Britain, only 27 percent felt attached to the union.

Ahead of this week’s negotiations, at least seven countries, mostly those that contribute more to Europe’s coffers than they get back in farm subsidies and other payments, have already warned that they may veto a budget that does not give them a better deal. Among these is Austria, where, according to Mr. Ehrenhauser, who sits on the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, “there is a critical mass building against the European Union.”