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US Charges Swiss Bank with Helping Americans Evade Taxes
U.S. authorities also seized more than $16 million in assets that the Wegelin bank holds in a U.S. account.
The indictment charges Wegelin with soliciting customers from another Swiss bank, UBS, when that institution agreed to stop hiding secret accounts in 2008.
If found guilty, Wegelin could be fined at least $500,000. Three Wegelin employees who advised customers also have been charged. Each faces a $250,000 fine and as much as five years in prison.
This is the first time the United States has formally charged a foreign bank with helping U.S. depositors avoid taxes.
President Barack Obama has pledged to crack down on U.S. citizens and corporations that use overseas accounts to evade taxes. He says tax fraud costs the country billions of dollars a year in revenue.
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Wealthier China Helps Keep Food Price
Don't expect food prices to come down much in 2012, experts say.
While the reasons behind today's high food prices are complex, one nation - China - has an oversized influence on global markets. China's three decades of breathtaking economic growth has fueled a remarkable rise in prosperity in the world's most populous nation.
But what's been good news for China is bad news for many others connected to the global food economy.
Rising prosperity, changing diets
Experts say the first thing people do when they rise out of poverty is improve their diets. That means more meat and animal products.
A few decades ago, meat was a luxury in China. Food was strictly rationed until the 1980s.
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences economist Zhu Ling recalls eating meat only once or twice a month when she was growing up. “Only during Chinese New Year could we get 250 grams of pork each," she says.
But that changed after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1980s, which set the stage for China’s miraculous growth.
“This was an era of change and improvement in food consumption," she says. "Basically, apart from vegans, everybody, every family has seen an increase in meat and seafood consumption.”
Chinese pork consumption has more than doubled since 1990, and chicken consumption is up five-fold.
Feeding animals that feed people
Livestock need to eat, too. Feeding those rapidly growing herds and flocks has quickly made China the world’s most voracious consumer of soybeans.
“Ten, 15 years ago China imported virtually no soybeans at all," says to U.S. Department of Agriculture analyst Hui Jiang. "Since the mid-1990s, Chinese imports have grown drastically, to today dominating over half of the total world trade in soybeans.”
The impacts are felt around the world.
“This has been positive for American agriculture,” says Maryland farmer Dave Burrier.
Soybean grower have seen the price of their crop nearly double since Beijing entered the market. Last year, China imported one out of every four soybeans grown in the United States.
Increasing competition
Demand for soybeans has also helped fuel economic growth in Brazil and Argentina, which now compete with the U.S. for the world soy market.
China's tremendous demand helps push prices up - and not just for soybeans.
All crops need land to grow on. “That puts competition on crops like corn and other crops as well," says Jiang. And competition for farmland is also helping increase the cost of food.
And prices are expected to stay high in part because China is not done growing. Its expanding middle class is projected to more than triple this decade, "and its food expenditure is expected to double in the same timeframe," Jiang says.
"Its impact on demand cannot be overstated,” she adds.
Growth in the developing world
But it’s not just China. People in India, Brazil and other emerging economies are also growing wealthier and eating better. Plus, the world is expected to add another two billion people by mid-century.
That’s good news for farmers like Burrier. “I really think that because of the population increase that we’ll continue to have tremendous demand,” he says.
But for consumers, food prices will likely remain high until supply can catch up with that tremendous demand.
Gates offers free software to Indonesian students
During a meeting here with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Gates, one of the world's richest men, expressed his commitment to supporting the government's efforts to improve education quality by providing Internet-based national education.
"He (Gates) told the President that Microsoft will continue to train teachers and students throughout Indonesia in software, computer and information and communication technology," Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie told a press briefing after the meeting.
Yudhoyono told Gates that Indonesia and Microsoft should continue to work together as the cooperation would mutually benefit both parties.
The government is seeking to obtain software from Microsoft for a million computers for educational purposes in an effort to cut the ratio of computers to students from the current 1:1000 to 1:20, Aburizal said.
Gates said he was ready to help Indonesia get high-quality personal computers for a price of less than US$200 per unit, plus free software if Indonesia could make a deal with Intel chairman Craig Barrett, who will meet Yudhoyono in Jakarta next week.
"We will make a deal with Barrett to acquire cheap or even free processors for the computers to be distributed to the students. As a result, we will get a much lower price than $200," minister of communication and information Muhammad Nuh said.
He expressed optimism that Indonesia could strike a deal with Barrett, who is known as a leading advocate for education improvement in the United States and around the world, and a vocal spokesman for the value of technology.
Gates also praised Indonesia's progress in fighting software piracy, pointing to fact the country had moved out from a priority ranking on a world piracy watch list.
"Gates' visit shows that he trusts we are making progress in fighting piracy. We are now checking government offices and big businesses to make sure they don't use pirated software. We want to get out from the watch list as soon as possible," Nuh said.
Indonesia ranks as the fourth-worst offender of software piracy in the Asia Pacific after Vietnam, Pakistan and China.
Gates also expressed commitment to expanding the Microsoft Innovation Center program, which now runs at the University of Indonesia, the Bandung Institute of Technology, Gadjah Mada University and the Surabaya Institute of Technology. The center helps students conduct research in the information technology field.
Gates is in Indonesia as a key speaker at the presidential lecture to be held as part of Microsoft's annual Government Leadership Forum, which started Thursday. He will address about 1,500 government officials and business representatives and 1,000 students on Friday.
The Stupid Things You Do When Dating (and How to Fix Them)
Photo by liubomir (Shutterstock).
Stupid Thing #1: You Confuse Heightened Emotions for Physical Attraction
When you feel love, attraction, fear, sadness, or any other emotion, your brain likes to come up with an explanation to make sense of the feeling. The problem is, that explanation is often wrong because you try to match the feeling to the closest explanation possible. If you're standing on the edge of a mountain and afraid you could fall and die, a beautiful man or woman standing beside you could cause you to mistake that anxiety for sexual attraction. This misattribution happens frequently in various stressful situations.David McRaney, of the blog You Are Not So Smart, points to a study by psychologists Art Aron and Donald Dutton that put men in a room and scared them into believing they'd receive a mild or painful shock. While they fearfully waiting to be electrocuted, they'd meet an attractive subject and be asked afterwards to fill out a questionnaire rating their anxiety and attraction to the subject. Here's what happened:
The men who expected a terrible, painful future rated their anxiety and their attraction to the ladies as significantly higher than those expecting mild tingles. When it came to those narratives explaining the pictures, once again the more anxious the men, the more sexual imagery they produced.In the real world, you're constantly waiting to be shocked, but you do occasionally feel anxiety, excitement, and other heart-pounding emotions. You run the same risk as the test subjects of attributing your state of arousal to the most convenient explanation. This can cause you to feel attraction to someone you wouldn't otherwise find compelling, which can be problematic whether or not you're in a relationship already.
Aron and Dutton showed when you feel aroused, you naturally look for context, an explanation as to why you feel so alive. This search for meaning happens automatically and unconsciously, and whatever answer you come up with is rarely questioned because you don't realize you are asking.
The easiest way to combat this problem is to consider why you're feeling aroused rather than automatically accepting the conclusion that pops into your head. We make a lot of mistakes because we assume what we think and feel is accurate without questioning, so challenge these assumptions to avoid stupid mistakes.
(To learn more about the misattribution of arousal, ready McRaney's full article.)
Stupid Thing #2: Wearing Cologne, Perfume, and Body Sprays Inhibit Others from Finding You Attractive
While the jury is still out on the exact role scent plays in sexual attraction, studies are beginning to find that covering up our natural scent may be detrimental. While we don't want to go around wafting oxidized sweat from our armpits, diet and exercise plus good hygiene can be more than enough to help us maintain a scent that's actually more attractive to prospective mates than the ones we pay so much for in stores.
Human sociosexual interactions are influenced by pheromones, even if they cannot be detected consciously. Pheromones have the potential to influence human behaviour and physiology and so there has to be asked the question, in which way the modern striving for cleanliness and odourlessness affects our everyday social lives and human reproductive success in the future. What we know at the moment, as many studies in the last few years have pointed out, is that the human sense of smell has by far been underestimated in the past and that humans, like other animals, use olfactory signals for the transmission of biologically relevant information.
Stupid Thing #3: You Try to Hide Physical Features You Consider Unattractive
Whether or nose is too big or too small, you have freckles you hate, or you wish your skin was darker or lighter, making those changes won't do you much good. Popular dating site OKCupid posted a look at what people find most attractive on their blog and it wasn't a specific standard of beauty. Instead they found that people who were considered both ugly and unattractive by their users received the most messages likely because they offered a level of uniqueness that some people found very attractive.While TV, movies, and other entertainment media can make it easy to believe that there's a general ideal of beauty that we ought to aspire to, statistics point to that being a problem. If you want to be attractive, just take good care of yourself. Don't try to be somebody else.
Stupid Thing #4: You Choose the Partner You're Most Likely to Lose Rather than the Best One
In the experiments we've done we've shown that if you can date three people, and they all promise they can stay viable and you can keep on dating them, you very quickly pick one and just stay with that person. But if you date three people and two of them threaten you that unless you go on and continue dating them or they will go away and find somebody else, you keep on revisiting those options. We have a very hard time closing doors.
Stupid Thing #5: You Believe The Opposite Sex Should Always Understand What You're Saying
These researchers found differences in the way male and female brains process voice sounds. The results of this study demonstrate that, in the male brain, the perception of male and female voices activates different brain regions. The guys could easily hear and understand other men's voices. However, women have a greater natural melody in their voices and possess a more complex range of sound frequencies than a male voice. The men in the study had a harder time deciphering them and really hearing what a woman was saying. When they heard the female voices, they had to decipher them using the part of the brain that processes music - a more complex process than is used in the part of the brain that analyzes a male voice.