International Oil companies (IOCs) control less than 10 percent of the world’s proved oil and gas resource base. Indeed the super-majors themselves account for only 3% of oil reserves and 2% of gas reserves, although they have 20% of production, through contractual arrangement with the NOCs. When ranked on the basis of proved oil and gas reserves, 17 of the top 20 oil and gas companies in the world are NOCs. Nearly 75% of the oil reserves are held by OPEC members.

The emergence of national oil companies

Eggs are among the few foods that I would classify as "superfoods." They are loaded with nutrients, some of which are rare in the modern diet.

10 Reasons To Eat Eggs - Business Insider

Having frequent arguments with partners, friends or relatives can increase the risk of death in middle-age, say Danish researchers. Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, they said men and those not in work were most vulnerable.

BBC News - Constant arguing 'increases premature death risk'

The more small-cap stocks get scorched, the more problematic some analysts say they could become for big caps. But as of now, there aren't a lot of calls for a major downdraft despite the near 10 percent decline in the Russell 2000, and some analysts see the large cap indexes as more likely trapped in a sideways correction for a while, barring any macro catalyst.

Small caps edge to full-blown correction territory

Shariah law, which is based on the Quran, covers a range of issues within a "moral framework," which doesn't exactly jibe with outlandish past media reports about the royal family of Brunei. The family is thought to be one of the wealthiest royal families in the world. The Sultan alone is reportedly worth $20 billion. In July 2011, a Vanity Fair tell-all detailed the outrageous spending habits and lifestyle of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, brother of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah. Among other tidbits, the profile said Prince Jefri owned more than 2,300 cars and a yacht named Tits with tenders called Nipple 1 and Nipple 2. The Sultan himself lives in a palace with 1,788 rooms and 257 bathrooms. It's considered to be the world's second-largest palace after Beijing's Forbidden City, and reportedly has a 110-car garage, an air-conditioned stable for the Sultan's 200 polo ponies, and five swimming pools.

Royal Family Of Brunei Wealth - Business Insider

Citi just came out with a list of disruptive innovations that are going to change the world. The top thing on their list is '4-D printing.'

What Is 4-D Printing? - Business Insider

"If we don't have the gigafactory online when have the vehicle capacity online, we will be in trouble," Musk told analysts on the company's earnings conference call.

Tesla loses $50 million in 1Q as costs rise - Yahoo Finance

The oil markets have plenty of reasons to be spooked. In Libya, home to Africa’s largest reserves, production has fallen more than 80 percent since militias seized control of the country’s biggest ports last summer. Most of Iran’s oil remains trapped as well. Sanctions aimed at punishing Iran for its nuclear weapons program have crippled its crude exports by 1.5 million barrels a day. Nigeria is in the midst of its worst oil crisis in years: Rising violence, plus rampant sabotage and theft, have knocked out about 300,000 barrels of oil output a day. In Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, production has remained unchanged after years of underinvestment.

U.S. Shale Boom Keeps Global Oil Prices From Soaring - Businessweek

Take a look at a market heatmap and you’re going to see a lot of red in the so-called high-flying tech names. Today’s action shouldn’t surprise given the what we’ve seen thus far in 2014, but as summer approaches investors may have a safer way to capture return minus all the volatility. Instead of say, shoving money into money market fund, Tom Lydon of ETFTrends.com has a top trade to put your cash to work this summer.

Burned by crashing tech names? Here’s one sector to protect you | Breakout - Yahoo Finance

The findings offer an explanation for why people can't recall memories from early childhood, a century-old mystery.

Why No Adult Can Remember Infancy - Business Insider

Most market-watchers prefer the S&P 500 over the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But the fact that the S&P 500 is down just 1% from its all-time high of 1,897 belies the fact that many stocks in the index and in the market as a whole are way down.

The Average Stock Is In A Bear Market - Business Insider

At this point, the Apple HDTV rumors have fizzled so decisively that when new ones come along, as they surely will, it won’t make any sense to assume that anything anyone has said so far is likely to be true.

We’ve Lost Interest in Apple TV Set Rumors - TIME

What I find interesting (and surprising) is the similarities across countries, despite the differences in policies. With the exception of Greece (and possibly Italy) all the other countries are very close to each other. The three countries that originally opted out of the Euro do not look too different from the Euro countries. Yes, Sweden has done great but so has Germany. The UK has grown less than the Euro area (of 18 countries), less than France or the Netherlands and at a rate which is very similar to that of Spain.

Antonio Fatas on the Global Economy: The UK makes the Euro area look good.

"It happened so fast, there wasn't much time to think." Hamilton, then aged 13, had an arm either side of her red, white and blue board. "All of a sudden, I felt a tug and right away I knew what was happening." The sea around her swapped its deep blue for a deep red and a 14ft tiger shark swam away with Hamilton's left arm between its teeth (the shark was later captured, killed and caught with the debris of Hamilton's arm in its mouth). Holt tried to halt the gushing blood with a makeshift tourniquet but by the time Hamilton got to hospital she had lost 60% of her blood. She somehow survived. Doctors described her as "a living miracle" but her miracle was only just beginning.

The Joy of Six: second comings and sporting comebacks | Ian McCourt | Sport | theguardian.com

Hotels and restaurants are being targeted by “blackmailers” who demand free meals and stays in exchange for not writing bad reviews on the TripAdvisor website, hospitality chiefs have warned.

Hotels 'hostage to TripAdvisor blackmailers’ - Telegraph

The European Commission's Spring report - described by Oxford professor Kevin O'Rourke as "self-satirising" for its paean to recovery - said Spain's public debt will keep rising from 93.9pc to 100.2pc of GDP this year, and 103.8pc next year. It is much the same in Italy, where nominal GDP also contracted last year. Public debt will rise from 132.6pc to 135.2pc this year despite a large primary surplus, just as Britain saw its debt ratio rise in the 1920s despite its primary surplus. This is the denominator effect. It is a trap.

ECB is delighted by the splendid prospect of deflation - Telegraph

Tablets are big business, but slates designed for the workplace haven’t done as well as consumer products. That won’t stop companies like Panasonic trying, though, and its Toughpad UT-MB5 is an unusual device that pulls out all the stops. For starters, there’s the 20in, 4K screen, and if that ground-breaking component isn’t enough, there’s the ruggedised chassis and discrete Nvidia graphics. Panasonic has built this tablet for architects, photographers, designers and salespeople, and it clearly means business.

Panasonic Toughpad UT-MB5 Review | Tablet Reviews

The first mass-market consumer fuel-cell vehicle will soon be available in California: the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell SUV. It’s taken decades to get to this point, so many enthusiasts are hoping that this will be a tipping point for the technology. It’s an exciting development, and by all accounts thus far, it’s a great car with a decent range of 250 to 300 miles.

Fuel Cell Vehicles: Hype or Hope? : Greentech Media

"The big mistake of the right has been to leave unchallenged the assumption that leftist tools are the only ones available to manage the transition to clean energy, instead of coming up with good conservative solutions -- ones which have improved services, lower costs, competition, wealth creation, pricing in of externalities, personal responsibility and freedom at their heart,"

Where Are Conservatives’ Big Ideas About Clean Energy? : Greentech Media

but it seems likely that Apple’s biggest interest would be building on Beats’s nascent streaming service to offset the end of the era in which iTunes has dominated music downloads.

Forget Those Big Headphones. Apple Could Turn Beats Into a Streaming Kingpin - Businessweek

So basically the "reported" PE is one which just happens to exclude all companies with negative earnings, and also rounds down any biotech company with a PE higher than 60x to... 60x. Here alarm bells should be going off, because clearly the whole purpose of this latest "fudge" is to make the ETF appear more palatable then it is, when in reality the actual PE of the companies is something vastly different.

What Is The PE Of The iShares Biotech ETF? It Depends On Whether You Read The Fine Print | Zero Hedge

In fact, the phrase “pecking order” comes from the natural hierarchy that exists in chicken and other domestic poultry. Each bird pecks another lower down the order without fear of retaliation, but also succumbs to pecking from a bird of higher rank.

BBC - Future - Do animals bully one another?

On average, the Europeans grew faster than Latin Americans, South Asians, and Africans did. But the fact that the bulk of the height increase occurred in the early 20th century—through two world wars, poor healthcare, and a global economic recession—was puzzling. Food became cheaper between the wars, but people were also increasingly moving to cities and further from sources of fresh dairy and produce.

How People Get Tall - Business Insider

A private school is to start lessons for sixth formers at 1.30pm because teenagers "have a biological disposition to going to bed late and struggling to get up early".

Sixth form cancels all morning lessons to help sleepy students | Education | theguardian.com

Yet the story that unfolded was not so much “a new organization of society” as the pouring of existing human behaviour into fresh moulds: our goodness, hope and charity; our greed, pride and lust. New technology didn’t bring an overnight revolution. Instead, there was strenuous effort to fit novelty into existing norms.

BBC - Future - The truth about technology’s greatest myth

This theory is called embodied cognition, and it suggests that what goes on in our minds stems from our actions and interactions with the world around us. It means that encouraging children to think and learn in a purely abstract way might actually make lessons harder for them to understand and remember.. Science is beginning to back up the idea that actions really might speak louder than words in the classroom.

BBC - Future - Want to learn quicker? Use your body

South African president's refusal to accept medical evidence of virus was major obstacle to providing medicine, say Harvard researchers

Mbeki Aids denial 'caused 300,000 deaths' | World news | theguardian.com

This is only a correlation, not a causation, but it fits in with the hygiene hypothesis: the idea that recent increases in many auto-immune diseases are the result of an over-sanitized childhood environment, which prevents a kid's immune system from learning how to differentiate between trivial threats and serious ones.

6 remarkable facts about the science of motherhood - Vox

Four decades ago, Intel launched the PC revolution by selling computer chips that anyone could build into their own products. Eventually, there were dozens of PC brands, most of which sported "Intel Inside" stickers. Electric Imp hopes to play a similar role for the next generation of connected devices. Other companies will design and market the consumer products, but Fiennes hopes most of them will have Electric Imp chips inside.

Everything’s connected: How tiny computers could change the way we live - Vox

The parents who denied their 10-year-old daughter chemotherapy in favour of natural remedies placed an "inappropriate emphasis on faith" and no medical information would have changed their minds, a coronial inquest has heard.

Parents of girl denied chemotherapy put ‘inappropriate emphasis on faith’ | World news | theguardian.com

Bottom line: The world's biggest company, that revolutionized the way we get music (which is arguably proof of the existence of God) is making its biggest ever acquisition to keep itself relevant in that arena, while in the process completing an incredible story for one of the most famous artists of the last three decades. There's nothing not interesting about that.

Apple Buying Beats - Business Insider

The rise in inequality can be blamed on the shift from managerial to shareholder capitalism.

When Shareholder Capitalism Came to Town

One big thing that has happened in America over the last 35 years is the coming of large chain stores and restaurants. Mom-and-pop businesses have vanished as big-box retail, and later Amazon and other e-commerce sites, have taken over. That would tend to increase firm exit and decrease firm entry. Ryan Decker confirms that employment at large firms has been increasing since the early 80s.

Noahpinion: Declining U.S. dynamism: Story, or non-story?

The book visits Greece too – the book opens with a cargo plane chartered to fly euro notes into Greece at the peak of its crisis because the share of bank notes in GDP rose from 6 to 25 per cent. People were taking cash out of their accounts. (I don’t blame them – I did the same on 2008.) meeting the demand was an amazing logistical exercise by the Bank of Greece – the country had only had the plates to print 10 euro notes in Greece; apparently only German-speaking countries have the plates for higher denomination notes.

The Enlightened Economist | Economics and business books

There are now 104 billionaires based in the UK with a combined wealth of more than £301bn, the list says. That means the UK has more billionaires per head of population than any other country. London has more billionaires than any other city in the world with 72 - far ahead of nearest rival Moscow with 48.

BBC News - 'Rich List' counts more than 100 UK billionaires

"The Netherlands sent real musicians singing a proper song. Interesting strategy," tweeted The Telegraph's music critic Neil McCormick, adding "I wonder why the UK never thought of that?"

BBC News - Eurovision 2014: A night of surprises as Conchita wins

The mysterious vanishing of honeybees from hives can be directly linked to insectcide use, according to new research from Harvard University. The scientists showed that exposure to two neonicotinoids, the world's most widely used class of insecticide, lead to half the colonies studied dying, while none of the untreated colonies saw their bees disappear.

Honeybees abandoning hives and dying due to insecticide use, research finds | Environment | theguardian.com

Have you ever had a dream where you realized you were dreaming? The technical term is a lucid dream. And people who are lucky enough to have them can often control the dreams, as well. This week, researchers showed for the first time that they could use electrical stimulation to switch lucid dreaming on.

Scientists find switch for people to control their dreams - Vox

To the astonishment of almost everyone in the room, Angela Merkel began to cry. “Das ist nicht fair.” That is not fair, the German chancellor said angrily, tears welling in her eyes. “Ich bringe mich nicht selbst um.” I am not going to commit suicide.

‘It was the point where the eurozone could have exploded’ - FT.com

Overall, 4.3 million are now thought to claim in-work benefits. The state has grown because we are subsidising employers who are paying wages workers cannot live on and private landlords charging rents tenants cannot afford.

Who really wants to roll back the state? Not the right | Owen Jones | Comment is free | The Guardian

Two Bulgarians -- a former cow trader and a mini-bus driver -- are moving their village piece by piece to Hamburg. It is good business for them, but their customers don't always get what they bargained for.

The Business of Moving a Bulgarian Village to Hamburg - SPIEGEL ONLINE

The tragedy sheds light on a side of America that will likely always remain foreign to many Europeans. It reveals a country where freedom is more important than anything else. And that includes the freedom to defend one's own property -- with violence if necessary. For Diren D., who grew up in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, this misunderstanding was a death sentence.

Searching for Answers in a German Exchange Student Death in US - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Japanese investors sold a record amount of euro-denominated long and medium-term bonds in March, Ministry of Finance data showed today.

Japanese Dump Most Euro Bonds on Record Amid Ukraine Tension - Bloomberg

When summing or subtracting two numbers, there was a lot of "carrying the one," but not a lot of explanation as to why. The whole goal was to go through the a set of repeatable steps to arrive at a final answer. It wasn't that satisfying. But today I discovered there's a totally new way to do math that makes much more sense, and is way more educational.

How Common Core Subtraction Works - Business Insider

As the massive over-liquidity in the US banking system reaches new highs, the amount that banks borrow from each other continues to decline.

Fed Funds Rate Diminishing Usefulness - Business Insider

Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Friday he supports raising the minimum wage, splitting from many Republicans who have fought against an increase.

Mitt Romney Wants To Raise The Minimum Wage - Business Insider

Chemicals in common household products such as toothpaste, soap and plastic toys have a direct impact on human sperm which could help explain rising levels of male infertility, scientists have found.

Chemicals in soap can cause male infertility, claim scientists - Science - News - The Independent

Cocaine use in the UK is now so common that traces of the drug have contaminated the drinking water supply, a report has shown. In a study to assess the dangers from pharmaceutical compounds appearing in the water we drink, scientists discovered traces of cocaine after it had gone through intensive purification treatments.

Cocaine use in Britain so high it has contaminated drinking water, report shows - Home News - UK - The Independent

The argument he is criticising is that, following the recession, we had a demand deficit that fiscal stimulus could have tackled, but from 2010 policy went for fiscal contraction instead. How do we know that we had a demand deficit? Because interest rates went to their zero lower bound pretty well everywhere. Monetary policymakers had to go for largely untried and untested Quantitative Easing to try and plug the demand gap. Fiscal stimulus is a much more reliable method of achieving the same goal. That logic is, in my view, unassailable.

mainly macro: Yes, economic policy did fail

The euro-area’s fastest economic growth in three years probably won’t be enough to stop Mario Draghi from easing monetary policy.

Draghi Drives ECB Toward Stimulus Even as Economy Grows - Bloomberg

Morgan Stanley's Joachim Fels — writing in his Sunday Start note — makes a simple, compelling argument for staying bullish, which is that all of the world's central banks will maintain easy policy for a long time, and that some of the major banks are actually going to be easing further in the near future.

What's Going On In The Markets - Business Insider

Analysts have several theories for why growth in this recently ballistic market has suddenly tanked. They cite "increased penetration rates," "high price points," and "lack of innovation," for example. And all those factors are indeed likely contributing. But here's what I think is the real reason tablet growth has cratered: Tablets do not yet solve a pressing need that is not already solved by a laptop or smartphone.

Why Tablet Market Growth Slowing - Business Insider

Diamond will always be a girl's best friend, but it may soon lose favour with industrial drillers. The gemstone lost its title of the "world's hardest material" to man-made nanomaterials some time ago. Now a rare natural substance looks likely to leave them all far behind – at 58% harder than diamond.

Diamond no longer nature's hardest material - tech - 16 February 2009 - New Scientist

One insurance company CEO even observed that while President Obama’s claim that if you like your health insurance plan you can keep it did not apply to everyone, the promise held true for “99 percent of our customers.” As The Hill observed, “Republicans were visibly exasperated as insurers failed to confirm certain assumptions about ObamaCare” and many simply exited the hearing.

Republicans Are Finally Backing Down On Obamacare. Here's Proof. | ThinkProgress

There’s some bad news for health officials in a new study that was presented this week at the Pediatric Academic Societies’ annual meeting. Even widespread outbreaks of infectious diseases may not be enough to convince vaccine-resistant parents to get their kids inoculated.

Even Disease Outbreaks Don't Convince More People To Vaccinate Their Kids | ThinkProgress

Enthusiasm around China came after the State Council reiterated its desire to liberalize finance in areas such as IPOs and limits on foreign investment -- even though some of these measures were originally announced months ago. Jim Rogers, famed commodities investor and author of Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets, lives in Singapore and is a prominent bull on China's long-term prospects.

Jim Rogers: Forget U.S. markets, I’m buying Chinese and Russian stocks | Daily Ticker - Yahoo Finance

the BIS has spent almost the whole period since the financial crisis struck calling for tighter money. Oddly, however, it keeps changing its justifications for that call. At first it was dire warnings of inflation just around the corner. Then it was financial instability. Now, with low inflation and possible deflation a growing concern, Mr. Caruana argues that (a) deflation is not so bad (b) we’re in a balance sheet slump, and that means loose money is bad.

Unbalanced in Basel - NYTimes.com

A systematic review of 11 placebo-controlled, double-blind randomised trials, with 15,348 patients who had heart disease, measured the impact of taking one gram of omega-3s daily for at least one year. It found significant protective effects on cardiac death rates, sudden death and heart attacks, even though there was no protective effect for all-cause mortality or stroke.

5 Foods You Should Buy Every Week - Business Insider

Morgan Stanley analysts recently included this chart of crude production costs. Onshore Middle East oil sites are much cheaper to tap than North American shale, which costs about $65 per barrel to extract. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing isn't cheap.

Crude Oil Cost Of Production - Business Insider

The richest 1% of the population take about 6% of total incomes earned in Denmark or the Netherlands, according to the World Top Incomes Database, less than half the 13% taken by the richest 1% in the UK.

Pay inequality is suffocating Britain's economic recovery – and our society | Deborah Hargreaves | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Revenue has more than doubled over the past five years. Profit has more than quadrupled. Stock buybacks have aggressively reduced shares outstanding by more than 30%. And for all of that and more, Outerwall (OUTR)-- formerly Coinstar and the parent of the ubiquitous Redbox movie rental kiosks -- trades at a PE ratio less cash of less than nine.

Cheap Stocks Always Have A Story: Outerwall

Athletes beware - endurance training may make it more likely that you will need a pacemaker, scientists believe. A British Heart Foundation team found exercise in mice triggers molecular changes in the part of the heart that generates its natural beating rhythm. This may explain why elite athletes have low resting heart rates and a higher risk heart rhythm disturbances, they told Nature Communications.

BBC News - Endurance exercise 'interferes with heart rhythm'

Taking some types of vitamin supplement may make it harder to train for big endurance events like marathons, researchers in Norway suggest. They said vitamins C and E should be used with caution as they may "blunt" the way muscles respond to exercise.

BBC News - Vitamin pills 'lower exercise gains'

What’s the world’s most expensive city for a pint of beer? How about a pair of jeans? Or a date? Sadly for French beer quaffers, Swiss fashionistas, and romantically-inclined Brits—the answers are Paris, Zurich, and London. Deutsche Bank has compared the price of everything, everywhere (OK, not quite), so you don’t have to. And for a third year in a row, the priciest country in the world is Australia (that’s of the 19 countries included in the survey).

India has the lowest prices in the world says Deutsche Bank - Yahoo Finance

“I am embarrassed to confess: I am a teacher.” That was the subject line of an email Sarah Wiles, a science teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, sent to all 170 members of the North Carolina General Assembly last week.

David Curtis Emails To Teacher - Business Insider

The world’s forests are in trouble. If you think we’re joking, then just take a look at this frightening NASA image. Based on satellite data, it shows how much forest around the world was on fire during the first 10 days of May.

MAP: All Of These Forest Fires Occurred In Just 10 Days - Business Insider

The trouble with scooters, however, is that the EU does not hold them to the same emissions standards as cars and other vehicles. As a result, they are heavy polluters, as shown in new research by European scientists in the journal Nature Communications. The pollution is so bad, the authors write, that the European Commission believes "that scooters will emit more volatile organic compounds (VOCs) than all other vehicles combined in Europe by 2020."

As shown, two-stroke (2S) scooters emit 100 to 1,000 times more pollution compared to cars, vans and other light-duty vehicles (LDV), as well as trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles (HDV). Notably, scooters emitted about 20 times more pollution than what is found on a road/tunnel dominated by cars. Benzene emissions are so high that the authors claim waiting behind one in traffic might actually damage your health.

RealClearScience - Europeans & Their Highfalutin, Pollutin' Scooters

I was recently described as being “not girlfriend material” and I blame the fact that I'm an Alpha woman. I'm strong, empowered, confident, and successful. I'm also hard to impress, high-maintenance, volatile, easy to bore, and - shockingly, I know - single.

Bring your A-game: how to date an Alpha female - Telegraph

So I’m on the train and this guy sits down next to me. Skinny, skanky, persistent sniffle. Hood up, earphones buzzing like angry bees. You know the score. He’s not the problem, though. It’s the dog. A dark, tawny bull terrier with his tongue hanging out and a look in his eye that says, "You want some? I’ll rip your throat out. Come on!”

The problem with men and dangerous dogs - Telegraph

Finance is not merely prone to crises, it is shaped by them. Five historical crises show how aspects of today’s financial system originated—and offer lessons for today’s regulators

Financial crises | The Economist

A few weeks back (I am catching up on my blogging), the Economist featured a terrific essay on “A History of Finance in Five Crises.”  The conclusion of the essay – “successive reforms have tended to insulate investors from risk” and “this pins risk on the public purse … [t]o solve this problem means putting risk back into the private sector” – resonates.  However, the Economist makes a few surprising errors of omission in reaching this point.

Conglomerate Blog: Business, Law, Economics & Society

Ellis was quick to point out that Encapso is a family of encapsulated oil products, not a single encapsulated lubricant serving the oil field services market. When we speak about the first product sporting the brand name we need to remember to call it an Encapso lubricant, rather than using the blanket term "Encapso". The distinction may not be so obvious in the early days, but there are multiple encapsulated oil products in development that target various markets. It makes sense, too, considering the advantages such products have.

3 Takeaways From My Recent Visit to Solazyme Inc (BG, SZYM)

At first glance, events in eastern Ukraine may seem a repeat of Crimea—the seizure of administrative buildings and police stations, followed by a hastily organized referendum. But the history and politics of the two regions are incredibly different, and Moscow’s ultimate aims in the east are far from what it hoped to achieve in its annexation of Crimea. This split in attitude is obvious: In Crimea, in a sign of its approval, the Kremlin sent official election observers to the referendum—and within days of the result, Putin had called on the Duma to incorporate Crimea into Russia. But in eastern Ukraine, Putin urged separatists to postpone their referendum, and when they held it anyway, he made no personal comment on the results of the voting.

Now Putin Has to Figure Out What to Do With the Separatists - Businessweek

Something bad will happen with a drone. The prognosticators will say it's only a matter of time before one flies into a crane operator’s cab or drops onto a stroller housing triplets, chewing on baby bagels. These incidents will provide a field-day for headline writers and may even cause CNN to break away from its hunt for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. But something bad always happens with a new technology. Take planes, trains and automobiles – if not necessarily in that order.

Planes, Trains, Automobiles and ... Drones | LinkedIn

he is secretive; he is vindictive; he has creepily authoritarian tendencies (a woman in Gujarat was placed under surveillance by Modi for months in a controversy that somehow didn't seem to register with voters); he ricochets between aggression and self-pity in a manner familiar to anyone who has heard nationalists of any stripe; and he is simply incapable of sounding broad-minded. During the 2002 Gujarat riots, hundreds of people (mostly Muslims) were killed in communal violence on Modi's watch. (This is why he has been denied a United States visa for many years.) The extent of Modi's role in spurring on the horrors has been extensively debated; suffice it to say that he once said his only regret about the mass murders was that he didn't handle the media well enough.

Narendra Modi's Election and the Future of India | New Republic

Father Robert Sirico is the founder of the Acton Institute, a group that, among other things, marries ideas of capitalism with religion. One of the institutes key projects is PovertyCure, “an international coalition of organizations and individuals committed to entrepreneurial solutions to poverty that challenge the status quo and champion the creative potential of the human person.”

Fighting poverty: We've been doing it all wrong | Breakout - Yahoo Finance

But deflation is the real worry, says CNBC contributor Ron Insana. Sure, prices are increasing for food and energy, he writes on CNBC.com. But that has "nothing to do with monetary policy," Insana says. "Indeed, if the Fed were to raise interest rates to quell this type of inflation, consumers would fare even worse as the cost of money would join the rising cost of supply-disrupted goods." The yield curve is flattening around the world, he writes. And, "as history has frequently shown, flattening yield curves imply weakening economic growth and/or falling inflation."

CNBC's Ron Insana: Deflation is the Real Risk, Not Inflation

Muddling through, ever the EU’s default mode, may be the worst possible outcome. Europe might find, to its ultimate cost, that the contradiction built into its economic system is tolerable after all. The price may not be another sudden breakdown—though this remains a possibility—but persistently high unemployment in many countries and chronic underperformance across the EU as a whole.

Euro Illusions Force Weaker Nations Into High Unemployment - Businessweek

When the U.S. economy emerged from the recession in June 2009, productivity was rising at a fast clip. Companies had spent the downturn cutting jobs and were lean and efficient. Productivity—output per hour worked—jumped 5.5 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier as workers did more with less. But as the recovery has chugged on, productivity growth has stalled, averaging less than 1 percent a year since 2011. Workers were actually less efficient in the first quarter of 2014, producing fewer goods and services per hour than they had during the previous quarter.

US Productivity Stalls as Companies Invest in Buybacks, Dividends - Businessweek

Large banks have significantly grown in size, and become more involved in market-based activities since the late 1990s. Figure 1 shows how the balance sheet size of the world’s largest banks increased two to four-fold in the 10 years prior to the crisis. Figure 2 illustrates how banks shifted from traditional lending towards market-oriented activities.

Are Banks Too Large? Maybe, Maybe Not | iMFdirect - The IMF Blog

The answer, now widely accepted but clearly not appreciated sufficiently at the time, is that the 2008 crisis was made possible by an extremely fragile financial system in which banks and many other businesses indulged in excessive leverage—too much borrowing—as well as hazardous reliance on short-term funding and negligent risk management, with lax regulatory supervision by the government.1

The Right Way to Control the Banks by Roger E. Alcaly | The New York Review of Books

On Saturday, on the final day of the season, Atlético Madrid are three points clear at the top of the table. It is an astonishing achievement for a club whose budget is a fifth the size of Real Madrid's or Barcelona's and they are on the verge of doing what no one has done in a decade, and take the league from the big two.

Atlético Madrid defeat to Barcelona would be cruel end to La Liga quest | Sid Lowe | Football | The Guardian

We are told that the euro crisis is now over. I do not see how one can safely reach that conclusion when Italy and Portugal are contracting again, and France is back to zero growth; or when lowflation/deflation is causing the debt trajectories of Southern Europe to spiral ever higher; all against a background of G2 monetary tightening in the US and China.

EU officials plotted IMF attack to bring rebellious Italy to its knees – Telegraph Blogs