HMRC faces court challenge over Goldman "sweetheart deal"

By Estelle Shirbon

LONDON (Reuters) - The HMRC faces a court challenge on Thursday over a deal with Goldman Sachs worth an estimated 10 million pounds to the U.S. bank, a case aimed at pressuring the government into tougher action against corporate tax avoidance.

The challenge by activist group UK Uncut Legal Action stems from public anger in Britain about how big and powerful firms succeed in paying less tax than many ordinary people struggling to cope with a stagnating economy and government spending cuts.

The case concerns a settlement reached in 2010 between Goldman Sachs and the tax authority (HMRC), to end a long-running dispute over a now banned tax avoidance scheme involving the payment of bonuses to UK staff via an offshore tax haven.

UK Uncut Legal Action wants the High Court to declare the settlement, which allowed Goldman Sachs to pay the principal it owed but not the interest that had accrued during a five-year battle with HMRC, as unlawful.

The activist group labels the settlement a "sweetheart deal", a term rejected by the tax authority.

The risk for Goldman Sachs is further damage to its image in Britain after a public outcry in January caused it to scrap plans to delay paying bonuses to its bankers to make the most of an income tax cut for high earners.

In financial terms, the disputed $15 million (9.6 million pounds) is a drop in the ocean for a bank that paid its employees $12.9 billion in compensation and benefits last year.

"At a time when the government is making huge, unjust cuts to public spending, the rich must pay their fair share," said Murray Worthy, director of UK Uncut Legal Action.

The High Court hearing into the Goldman Sachs deal is a judicial review expected to last one day. The court will reserve judgment until a later date. Goldman Sachs, which will not be an active participant in the case, declined to comment.

At a time of budget austerity, revelations about the low tax bills of companies ranging from Vodafone to Starbucks have caused widespread outrage in Britain, putting pressure on the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government to act.

Chancellor George Osborne has called aggressive tax avoidance "morally repugnant" but critics say his new General Anti-Avoidance Rule is not enough.

Asked to comment on the case, HMRC pointed to a 2012 report by the National Audit Office (NAO) that said five big business tax settlements including the Goldman deal were "reasonable" in that HMRC may have received less if it had litigated and lost.

(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; additional reporting by Lauren LaCapra in New York; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-taxman-faces-court-challenge-over-goldman-sweetheart-230521945.html

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Willem-Alexander becomes new Dutch king

AMSTERDAM (AP) ? Millions of Dutch people dressed in orange flocked to celebrations around the Netherlands Tuesday in honor of a once-in-a-generation milestone for the country's ruling House of Orange-Nassau: after a 33-year reign, Queen Beatrix abdicated in favor of her eldest son, Willem-Alexander.

At 46, King Willem-Alexander is the youngest monarch in Europe and the first Dutch king in 123 years, since Willem III died in 1890. Like Beatrix before him, Willem-Alexander has assumed the throne at a time of social strains and economic malaise.

Although the Dutch monarchy is largely ceremonial, he immediately staked out a course to preserve its relevance in the 21st century.

"I want to establish ties, make connections and exemplify what unites us, the Dutch people," the freshly minted king said at a nationally televised investiture ceremony in Amsterdam's 600-year-old New Church, held before the combined houses of Dutch parliament.

"As king, I can strengthen the bond of mutual trust between the people and their government, maintain our democracy and serve the public interest."

Hopes for the new monarch are high.

For most of the 2000s, the country was locked in an intense national debate over the perceived failure of Muslim immigrants, mostly from North Africa, to integrate. In response, politicians curtailed many of the famed Dutch tolerance policies.

More recently, this trading nation of 17 million has suffered back-to-back recessions. European Union figures released Tuesday showed Dutch unemployment spiking upward toward 6.4 percent. That's below the EU average, but a 20-year high in the Netherlands.

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS - APRIL 30: A general view of celebrations for the inauguration of King Willem Alexander of the Netherlands as Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands abdicates on April 30, 2013 in ... more? AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS - APRIL 30: A general view of celebrations for the inauguration of King Willem Alexander of the Netherlands as Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands abdicates on April 30, 2013 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images) less? "I am taking the job at a time when many in the kingdom feel vulnerable and uncertain," Willem-Alexander said. "Vulnerable in their work or health. Uncertain about their income or home environment."

Amsterdam resident Inge Bosman, 38, said she doubted Willem-Alexander's investiture would give the country much of an employment boost.

"Well, at least one person got a new job," she said.

Tellingly, one of Willem-Alexander's first diplomatic missions as king will be to visit the country's largest trading partner, Germany.

While many are skeptical that the new king can make a difference where politicians have failed, the celebrations provided a welcome change from the humdrum of everyday life, and the popularity of the royal house itself is not in doubt. A poll commissioned by national broadcaster NOS and published this week showed that 78 percent support the monarchy.

Most say that the House of Orange-Nassau, which was instrumental in the Dutch war for independence in the 16th and 17th centuries, is a cornerstone of the national identity. It represents something that is both quintessentially Dutch, and above politics.

"I think (Willem-Alexander) is just like his mum ? honest, wants to do a lot for his people inside the country and also outside the country," said Ron Pols, who was attending celebrations in Amsterdam.

Willem Alexander's popularity has been steadily rising since his 2002 marriage to an Argentine commoner, Maxima Zorreguieta.

In an interview shortly before his accession, Willem-Alexander turned in a relaxed performance, saying he will not be a "protocol fetishist," but a king who puts his people at ease.

Around 25,000 supporters thronged Amsterdam's central Dam Square Tuesday, hoping to catch a glimpse of the new king or the departing 75-year-old queen, now known as Princess Beatrix.

Millions more watched on television as King Willem-Alexander, wearing a fur-trimmed ceremonial mantle, swore an oath of allegiance to the country and the constitution.

Earlier, the new king gripped his mother's hand and looked briefly into her eyes after they both signed the abdication document in the Royal Palace on Dam Square.

Beatrix appeared close to tears as she then appeared on a balcony decked out with tulips, roses and oranges, overlooking her subjects.

"I am happy and grateful to introduce to you your new king, Willem-Alexander," she told the cheering crowd, which chanted: "Bea bedankt" ("Thanks Bea.")

Moments later, the generational shift was enacted symbolically. Beatrix left the balcony as King Willem-Alexander, his wife and three daughters ? the children in matching yellow dresses and headbands ? waved to the crowd.

The highly popular Maxima became Queen Maxima, and their eldest of three daughters, Catharina-Amalia, became the Princess of Orange, the first in line to the throne.

At a sparsely attended anti-monarchist demonstration on the nearby Waterloo Square, protestors dressed in white instead of orange and carried signs mocking Willem-Alexander.

"Monarchy is a sexually-transmitted disease," one sign said. "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," said another. It included a picture of a pig wearing a crown, with a line crossing it out.

Amsterdammer Jan Dikkers said he attended to show his disapproval for a hereditary head of state, and Willem-Alexander in particular, who he said Dutch people only accept because "people like his wife."

He added that Beatrix is overrated.

"People say the queen did a 'good job', but she didn't really do any job," Dikkers said.

One criticism of the royal house is that it is too expensive, especially in difficult economic times. University of Ghent professor Herman Matthijs estimates that it costs ?40 million ($52 million) a year to maintain? slightly more than taxpayers' support for Britain's House of Windsor.

The difficulties facing the Dutch should be kept in perspective. Per-capita incomes remain high, the United Nations says Dutch children are the world's happiest, on average, and the country retains its triple A credit rating.

The celebrations in Amsterdam Tuesday were lively but peaceful, a stark contrast to Beatrix's investiture in 1980. Then, squatters protesting a chronic housing shortage battled police nearly to the doors of the palace.

The official festivities concluded with the new king and queen and their daughters taking an evening boat cruise around the historic Amsterdam waterfront, at one stage climbing out of their boat to join DJ Armin van Buuren and the Concert Gebouw Orchestra on stage at a concert.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/willem-alexander-becomes-dutch-king-081540031.html

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The Key of Destiny

:3 The dreams part of the character Skelly just basically means what do you want to do when you become the master of life itself? and yeah everyday things that could aid you on your trip, there are no powers (yet)

and yeah photo's of actual people, whether famous or not that's up to you.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/-jPBYxoCoUg/viewtopic.php

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Reinstate Your Texas Driver License with Texas.gov

Reinstate Your Texas Driver License with Texas.gov

AUSTIN, Texas - 4/16/2013

Skip the trip to the driver license office and earn back your driving privileges with Texas.gov/License Eligibility, an online service offered by Texas.gov in partnership with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). This service lets you:

• pay reinstatement fees online,
• view the compliance items necessary to reinstate your driver license, and
• track the status of your driving eligibility.

Originally launched in 2011, Texas.gov/License Eligibility is rapidly gaining popularity among Texans. In 2012, more than 110,000 Texas drivers paid their reinstatement fees online and more than 14,000 people visit the site every day to view their reinstatement requirements and check their eligibility to drive.

"Texans are encouraged to visit Texas.gov, where they can take advantage of this convenient online option to track their driving eligibility and pay the necessary fees to reinstate their driver license," said DPS Driver License Division Assistant Director Rebecca Davio.

All suspended Texas drivers, including commercial driver license holders, can use the online service. To get started, all you need is your Texas driver license or ID number and the last four digits of your social security number. For Texans in need of other driver services, Texas.gov/Driver also offers quick, convenient access to Driver License Renewal, Vehicle Registration Renewal, Driver Records, and more.

About Texas.gov

Texas.gov is the official website of the state of Texas (www.texas.gov) and is a collaborative public/private partnership managed by the Department of Information Resources (DIR). Texas.gov helps state and local government entities Web-enable their services and operates without tax funds through a partnership between the state and Texas NICUSA, LLC. Texas NICUSA builds, operates, maintains, and markets Texas.gov and is part of eGovernment firm NIC?s (NASDAQ: EGOV) family of companies. Since its launch in 2000, Texas.gov has securely processed more than 189 million financial transactions and collected more than $27 billion on behalf of participating entities.

About NIC

NIC Inc. (NASDAQ: EGOV) is the nation?s leading provider of official government websites, online services, and secure payment processing solutions. The company?s innovative eGovernment services help reduce costs and increase efficiencies for government agencies, citizens, and businesses across the country. Our popular self-funded solution allows government to put in-demand services online without using taxpayer funds. The NIC family of companies currently provides cost-effective eGovernment solutions for more than 3,500 federal, state, and local agencies in the United States. Additional information is available at http://www.egov.com.

Source: http://www.nicusa.com/Media/PR/Pages/ViewRelease.aspx?PR_ID=20130416005314

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How we decode 'noisy' language in daily life

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child."

A new study by MIT researchers indicates that when we process language, we often make these kinds of mental edits. Moreover, it suggests that we seem to use specific strategies for making sense of confusing information ? the "noise" interfering with the signal conveyed in language, as researchers think of it.

"Even at the sentence level of language, there is a potential loss of information over a noisy channel," says Edward Gibson, a professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Gibson and two co-authors detail the strategies at work in a new paper, "Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation," published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"As people are perceiving language in everyday life, they're proofreading, or proof-hearing, what they're getting," says Leon Bergen, a PhD student in BCS and a co-author of the study. "What we're getting is quantitative evidence about how exactly people are doing this proofreading. It's a well-calibrated process."

Asymmetrical strategies

The paper is based on a series of experiments the researchers conducted, using the Amazon Mechanical Turk survey system, in which subjects were presented with a series of sentences ? some evidently sensible, and others less so ? and asked to judge what those sentences meant.

A key finding is that given a sentence with only one apparent problem, people are more likely to think something is amiss than when presented with a sentence where two edits may be needed. In the latter case, people seem to assume instead that the sentence is not more thoroughly flawed, but has an alternate meaning entirely.

"The more deletions and the more insertions you make, the less likely it will be you infer that they meant something else," Gibson says. When readers have to make one such change to a sentence, as in the ice cream example above, they think the original version was correct about 50 percent of the time. But when people have to make two changes, they think the sentence is correct even more often, about 97 percent of the time.

Thus the sentence, "Onto the cat jumped a table," which might seem to make no sense, can be made plausible with two changes ? one deletion and one insertion ? so that it reads, "The cat jumped onto a table." And yet, almost all the time, people will not infer that those changes are needed, and assume the literal, surreal meaning is the one intended.

This finding interacts with another one from the study, that there is a systematic asymmetry between insertions and deletions on the part of listeners.

"People are much more likely to infer an alternative meaning based on a possible deletion than on a possible insertion," Gibson says.

Suppose you hear or read a sentence that says, "The businessman benefitted the tax law." Most people, it seems, will assume that sentence has a word missing from it ? "from," in this case ? and fix the sentence so that it now reads, "The businessman benefitted from the tax law." But people will less often think sentences containing an extra word, such as "The tax law benefitted from the businessman," are incorrect, implausible as they may seem.

Another strategy people use, the researchers found, is that when presented with an increasing proportion of seemingly nonsensical sentences, they actually infer lower amounts of "noise" in the language. That means people adapt when processing language: If every sentence in a longer sequence seems silly, people are reluctant to think all the statements must be wrong, and hunt for a meaning in those sentences. By contrast, they perceive greater amounts of noise when only the occasional sentence seems obviously wrong, because the mistakes so clearly stand out.

"People seem to be taking into account statistical information about the input that they're receiving to figure out what kinds of mistakes are most likely in different environments," Bergen says.

###

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice

Thanks to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 39 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128015/How_we_decode__noisy__language_in_daily_life

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George Jones funeral at Grand Ole Opry (+video)

George Jones: The country music star, George Jones, will be honored with a funeral at the Grand Ole Opry on Thursday.

By Chris Talbott and Hillel Italie,?Associated Press / April 29, 2013

A public funeral will be held at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville for country music superstar George?Jones, who died Friday.

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Publicist Kirt Webster said in a statement that the public funeral will be held Thursday starting at 10 a.m. Webster says Jones would have wanted his fans everywhere to be able to pay their respects along with his family.

A private visitation for family, friends and fellow performers will take place Wednesday evening. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that contributions be made to the Grand Ole Opry trust fund or the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

George?Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic "He Stopped Loving Her Today," has died. He was 81.

"Today someone else has become the greatest living singer of traditional country music, but there will never be another George?Jones," said Bobby Braddock, the Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter who provided Jones with 29 songs over the decades. "No one in country music has influenced so many other artists."

He did it with that voice. Rich and deep, strong enough to crack like a whip, but supple enough to bring tears. It was so powerful, it made Jones the first thoroughly modern country superstar, complete with the substance abuse problems and rich-and-famous celebrity lifestyle that included mansions, multiple divorces and ? to hear one fellow performer tell it ? fistfuls of cocaine.

He was a beloved and at times a notorious figure in Nashville and his problems were just as legendary as his songs. But when you dropped the needle on one of his records, all that stuff went away. And you were left with The Voice.

"He just knows how to pull every drop of emotion out of it of the songs if it's an emotional song or if it's a fun song he knows how to make that work," Alan Jackson said in a 2011 interview. "It's rare. He was a big fan of Hank Williams Sr. like me. He tried to sing like Hank in the early days. I've heard early cuts. And the difference is Hank was a singer and he was a great writer, but he didn't have that natural voice like George. Not many people do. That just sets him apart from everybody."

That voice helped Jones achieve No. 1 songs in four separate decades, 1950s to 1980s. And its qualities were admired by more than just his fellow country artists but by Frank Sinatra, Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, James Taylor and countless others. "If we all could sound like we wanted to, we'd all sound like George?Jones," Waylon Jennings once sang.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/BwC7Kd0xv1Q/George-Jones-funeral-at-Grand-Ole-Opry-video

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Fish win fights on strength of personality

Monday, April 29, 2013

When predicting the outcome of a fight, the big guy doesn't always win suggests new research on fish. Scientists at the University of Exeter and Texas A&M University found that when fish fight over food, it is personality, rather than size, that determines whether they will be victorious. The findings suggest that when resources are in short supply personality traits such as aggression could be more important than strength when it comes to survival.

The study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, found that small fish were able to do well in contests for food against larger fish provided they were aggressive. Regardless of their initial size, it was the fish that tended to have consistently aggressive behaviour - or personalities - that repeatedly won food and as a result put on weight.

Dr Alastair Wilson from Biosciences at the University of Exeter said: "We wondered if we were witnessing a form of Napoleon, or small man, syndrome. Certainly our study indicates that small fish with an aggressive personality are capable of defeating their larger, more passive counterparts when it comes to fights over food. The research suggests that personality can have far reaching implications for life and survival."

The sheepshead swordtail fish (Xiphophorus birchmanni) fish were placed in pairs in a fish tank, food was added and their behaviour was captured on film. The feeding contest trials were carried out with both male and female fish. The researchers found that while males regularly attacked their opponent to win the food, females were much less aggressive and rarely attacked.

In animals, personality is considered to be behaviour that is repeatedly observed under certain conditions. Major aspects of personality such as shyness or aggressiveness have previously been characterised and are thought to have important ecological significance. There is also evidence to suggest that certain aspects of personality can be inherited. Further work on whether winning food through aggression could ultimately improve reproductive success will shed light on the heritability of personality traits.

###

University of Exeter: http://www.exeter.ac.uk

Thanks to University of Exeter for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 31 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127971/Fish_win_fights_on_strength_of_personality

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