background preloader

News - Politic

Facebook Twitter

Germany's super-shy super-rich. Nobody could accuse the richest people in Germany of flaunting their wealth, quite the opposite.

Germany's super-shy super-rich

With the death of Karl Albrecht, there was no announcement for nearly a week, and not until the small, private funeral was over. He and his brother, Theo, had turned their mother's small grocery store in the Ruhr into Aldi, one of the world's biggest supermarket chains, but the habits and thoughts of this mega-business mogul were unknown. For the obituaries the German papers could only trace bland statements he had made in 1953 and 1971. This was not a chatty public figure. He grew orchids, apparently, and played golf - but on his own, private golf course. The brothers, ex-employees said, would keep accounts using stubs of old pencils, almost too short to hold.

It was this frugality which set the Albrecht brothers on the road to super-rich status. Quel est l’animal le plus dangereux pour l’homme ? Il est assez rare que, dans ce blog, j'écrive autre chose que des comptes-rendus d'études scientifiques qui ont excité ma curiosité et que j'ai eu envie de partager.

Quel est l’animal le plus dangereux pour l’homme ?

Weird News

Le capitalisme se mord la queue. Les travaux de l'économiste Thomas Piketty aboutissent à un sombre constat : les inégalités entre les riches et les pauvres, qui n'en finissent pas de se creuser, compromettent l'avenir du capitalisme et finiront par détruire nos sociétés.

Le capitalisme se mord la queue

Un nouvel économiste crée aujourd'hui la polémique et il n'est pas de droite. Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why. Suddenly, there is a new economist making waves – and he is not on the right.

Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why

At the conference of the Institute of New Economic Thinking in Toronto last week, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century got at least one mention at every session I attended. You have to go back to the 1970s and Milton Friedman for a single economist to have had such an impact. Like Friedman, Piketty is a man for the times. For 1970s anxieties about inflation substitute today's concerns about the emergence of the plutocratic rich and their impact on economy and society.

François Nicoullaud "Où nous mène le Moyen Orient ?" Dramatic New Video of Japan Tsunami. Hairless hero: Iranian teacher shaves head in solidarity with bullied pupil. When Iranian schoolteacher Ali Mohammadian noticed that one of his students was being bullied after going bald as a result of a mysterious illness, he decided to show solidarity and shave his own hair.

Hairless hero: Iranian teacher shaves head in solidarity with bullied pupil

In no time, his entire class shaved their heads and the bullying stopped. Now, Mohammadian, who teaches at Sheikh Shaltoot's elementary school in Marivan, a Kurdish city in the west of Iran, has become a national hero. President Hassan Rouhani has praised him, the government has offered financial support for the pupil's medical treatment and his story has reached the four corners of his country. "I'm so happy that this has touched many hearts and people reacted enormously positive," the 45-year-old teacher told the Guardian by phone from Marivan. "Everyone in the school now wants to shave their head. " Earlier this month, Mohammadian posted a picture of himself with eight-year-old Mahan Rahimi on Facebook. Mohammadian's Facebook post soon caught the eyes of hundreds of Iranian web users. The single dumbest idea ever published. Text smaller Text bigger There are many opinions published these days, thanks to the Internet.

The single dumbest idea ever published

Everybody’s got an opinion – and almost everyone has a blog. I can’t say that I have read them all. In fact, I hardly read any of them. But of all the published ideas I have become aware of, I can tell you without equivocation that I have found the dumbest. What attack on Syria will mean. Text smaller Text bigger If Barack Obama leads America into a war with Syria, there’s something everyone needs to know about this mission that hardly anyone is articulating.

What attack on Syria will mean

This war will not just be with a Syrian regime clinging tenuously to power. It will be a proxy war against Iran. If it were not for support from Iran, Bashar Assad would probably be out of power already. It would not even be an exaggeration to suggest Syria has become a client state of Iran, as has neighbor Lebanon. Does Obama have any immutable standards? Text smaller Text bigger Moral standards are hard to come by in America these days.

Does Obama have any immutable standards?

Most people think they have them. Most people will tell you they have them. But, for most people, they are not standards at all – because they change with the times and situations they face. Barack Obama is a classic example of a moral relativist. When he was running for president in 2008, he said it was unconstitutional for any president to use unilateral military power unless it involved an actual or imminent threat to the nation, he told the Boston Globe in a questionnaire. “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” he wrote.