Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Michael Cullen looks niggardly by comparison to his UK counterpart, Gordon Brown. A revolutionary scheme to provide hundreds of thousands of struggling first-time buyers with cheap mortgages funded by taxpayers' money is to be announced this week. Under ambitious plans to turn Britain into a nation of owner-occupiers, Chancellor Gordon Brown will outline a deal struck with lenders under which couples would have to raise as little as half of the cost of homes sold on the open market. The rest of the equity in the house would be shared by the government and the bank or building society - potentially slashing average monthly repayments on a £200,000 home by up to £372 a month.
Why are the French and the Dutch teetering on the brink of voting "not" to the proposed European Constitution over the next week. Andrew Rawnsley looks at the the issues.
As policymakers in the United States, Europe and Asia grapple with the long-term affordability of their pensions systems, a new World Bank report says that growing demographic and economic pressures are forcing both developing and developed countries to undertake urgent pension reform.
Here's a good example of why it's important to protect your computer against Internet invaders. According to a disturbing report published today by Websense Security Labs, scam artists are using known security flaws in Internet Explorer to seize control over any text files found on their victims' computers. Those files are then scrambled using an encryption scheme controlled by the attackers, rendering the files unreadable and useless to the victim unless he or she pays for a decoder program by paying $200 to the attackers. The attack leverages an IE security hole that Microsoft released a patch for last July (ironically, the flaw resides in an IE "help" feature).
Latin is not dead. Indeed, something like 75 percent of the multisyllabic words in the English lexicon come from Latin, or from Greek via Latin, or from Latin via French. If Latin died in our mouths, we'd just stop talking.
On several reformist Arabic-language websites, Tunisian thinker Al-'Afif Al-Akhdar has posted an in-depth analysis of the necessary reforms needed in the Arab and Muslim world concluding that secularism is vital for its future. Secularization and modernization, he writes, are global historic processes that cannot be avoided in the long run. He also explains secularism is the key to full citizenship for men, women, Muslims, and non-Muslims, as well as to proper relations among all elements of society. According to Al-Akhdar's analysis, Islamist thought is primitive and incapable of accepting human thought over divine decree. He adds, Islamists seeking to prevent the modernization of the Arab and Muslim world, and struggle against secularism, is a manifestation of modernization. While their struggle is doomed to fail, he explains, it may nevertheless be impossible to skip stages of history, and Islamic countries may have to experience Islamic rule before finally despairing of its false promises to eventually adopt a secular regime.
Is this the future of news? In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? (Your Internet browser will need the ability to read Flash files to see this 8min presentation.)
Why are the French and the Dutch teetering on the brink of voting "not" to the proposed European Constitution over the next week. Andrew Rawnsley looks at the the issues.
As policymakers in the United States, Europe and Asia grapple with the long-term affordability of their pensions systems, a new World Bank report says that growing demographic and economic pressures are forcing both developing and developed countries to undertake urgent pension reform.
Here's a good example of why it's important to protect your computer against Internet invaders. According to a disturbing report published today by Websense Security Labs, scam artists are using known security flaws in Internet Explorer to seize control over any text files found on their victims' computers. Those files are then scrambled using an encryption scheme controlled by the attackers, rendering the files unreadable and useless to the victim unless he or she pays for a decoder program by paying $200 to the attackers. The attack leverages an IE security hole that Microsoft released a patch for last July (ironically, the flaw resides in an IE "help" feature).
Latin is not dead. Indeed, something like 75 percent of the multisyllabic words in the English lexicon come from Latin, or from Greek via Latin, or from Latin via French. If Latin died in our mouths, we'd just stop talking.
On several reformist Arabic-language websites, Tunisian thinker Al-'Afif Al-Akhdar has posted an in-depth analysis of the necessary reforms needed in the Arab and Muslim world concluding that secularism is vital for its future. Secularization and modernization, he writes, are global historic processes that cannot be avoided in the long run. He also explains secularism is the key to full citizenship for men, women, Muslims, and non-Muslims, as well as to proper relations among all elements of society. According to Al-Akhdar's analysis, Islamist thought is primitive and incapable of accepting human thought over divine decree. He adds, Islamists seeking to prevent the modernization of the Arab and Muslim world, and struggle against secularism, is a manifestation of modernization. While their struggle is doomed to fail, he explains, it may nevertheless be impossible to skip stages of history, and Islamic countries may have to experience Islamic rule before finally despairing of its false promises to eventually adopt a secular regime.
Is this the future of news? In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? (Your Internet browser will need the ability to read Flash files to see this 8min presentation.)
