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Amazon UK boycott urged after retailer pays just £4.2m in taxes, despite selling£4.3bn

Juliette Garside
The Guardian
Fri, 09 May 2014 09:52 UTC
Image
© Derek Brown
Amazon warehouse in Marston Gate, near Milton Keynes
Shoppers have been urged to boycott Amazon's British business after it paid just £4.2m in tax last year, despite selling goods worth £4.3bn - more than the UK sales of Argos, Dixons or the non-food arm of Marks & Spencer.

Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, said shoppers should find alternatives to the Seattle-headquartered retailer, after consumer action persuaded coffee chain Starbucks to resume UK tax payments last year.

"It is an outrage and Amazon should pay their fair share of tax," said Hodge. "They are making money out of not paying taxes. I no longer use Amazon. We should shop elsewhere. What we demonstrated with Starbucks is the power of the consumer voice."

Amazon's most recent charge brings to just over £10m its contribution to the public purse through corporation tax in a decade. Over the last four years, Amazon has generated £23bn in British sales. It made a tax contribution of £3.2m the previous year.

Amazon is able to pay low tax because when shoppers in Europe buy from any of its local websites, the payment is taken by a subsidiary based in the low tax jurisdiction of Luxembourg. A British shopper's bank statement will show a payment to Amazon EU S.à.r.l. rather than Amazon.co.uk.
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Yoda

Japanese women are leaving careers to hunt amid food shortages and earth changes

Kentaro Sugino
Stuff.co.nz
Mon, 12 May 2014 08:16 UTC
Chiharu Hatakeyama
© Kentaro Sugino
Chiharu Hatakeyama left an office job in the city after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to become a hunter. She says food and water shortages after the quake made her concerned about survival.
Modern people have largely lost their connection to "the hunt," but with fewer people wanting to become hunters and damage to fields and mountains in Japan increasing due to booming wild boar and deer populations, could "hunter girls" be the next generation to face the beasts of the wild?

One young woman left her office job to hunt and another serves fresh game in her guesthouse. Why did they seek out the hunter's life?

It was mid-March and there was not much time left in the hunting season. In the mountains of Itoshima, Fukuoka Prefecture, a woman took on an 40kg wild boar.

The boar's foreleg was caught in a snare she had set, and it was angry and menacing.

"If you hesitate, it'll get you," she said later.

Carefully approaching her prey, she brought the boar down with a special spear - her fourth, and biggest, kill since becoming a hunter last autumn.
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Oscar

Bearded Austrian drag-queen wins Eurovision Song Contest

Caroline Davies
The Guardian
Mon, 12 May 2014 07:57 UTC

Bearded drag act Conchita Wurst, who secured Austria's first Eurovision win in 48 years, received a jubilant welcome home to Vienna on Sunday as she pledged to promote tolerance.

The singer, whose real name is Tom Neuwirth, was greeted at the airport by more than 1,000 fans, some wearing painted beards and singing the winning anthem Rise Like a Phoenix.

The 25-year-old, whose participation in the contest had sparked controversy before the Copenhagen final on Saturday, secured victory with 290 points amid a Twitter storm.

As her victory was announced, Twitter activity spiked at 47,136 tweets per minute, with the Eurovision song contest generating 5,384,678 tweets in total.

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What the... ?
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Pumpkin

Idiocracy! CNN map places Ukraine in Pakistan


RT
Mon, 12 May 2014 05:13 UTC
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The American news giant, CNN, has reshaped the world a bit in their live coverage of events in Ukraine. The eastern part of the European country got pinned miles and miles away from where it actually is - in Pakistan.

CNN was reporting Sunday about independence referendums in Ukraine's eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk while also using a map to indicate the country's geographical location. Apparently by mistake, the arrow with Ukrainian flag on top was pointing to Pakistan, South Asia.

The error was quickly spotted by sharp-eyed viewers, one of whom snapped the TV screen and published the image on Twitter. Quite predictably, the post has gone viral with hundreds of users retweeting the picture and marking it as "favorite".
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USA

American dream is dead for everyone but a happy few

Tyler Durden
zerohedge.com
Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00 UTC
$250 Million homes in Europe, $150 Million homes in the US, and as Bloomberg notes Million-dollar homes in the U.S. are selling at double their historical average while middle-class property demand stumbles, showing that the housing recovery is mirroring America's wealth divide. As CoreLogic notes, "the real estate market is the ultimate reflection of confidence, wealth and income," as purchases costing $1 million or more rose 7.8% in March, while sales of homes costing less than $250k plunged 12%, as "the same factors driving the income stagnation in the middle are driving the income momentum at the top." The luxury markets are indeed on fire as foreign (and domestic) super-wealth floods into real estate but as NewEdge's van Batenburg notes, echoing ur very words, "The American Dream is dead for everybody but the happy few who have enjoyed the tailwinds of the appreciating stock market."
Cartoon I tried to flip the house
© John Darkow
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Bizarro Earth

Fracking well leak spills 1,600 gallons of oil drilling lubricant into an Ohio tributary

Jeff Spross
ClimateProgress
Sat, 10 May 2014 19:22 UTC
oil rig
© Shutterstock
About 1,600 gallons of oil-based lubricant leaked into an Ohio river tributary this week, after an equipment failure at an oil and gas well.

The rig site is located in southeastern Ohio near the town of Beverly, and is owned by PDC Energy Inc. One of the company's contractors is handling the cleanup, under the supervision of Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency. A spokesperson for PDC told the Associated Press that workers at the site noticed a build up in high pressure in the well, but were unable to contain it thanks to malfunctioning equipment at the well head.

That released the oil based fluid, called "mud," which is used to lubricate the equipment in the well bore during drilling. The mud reached a creek that serves as a tributary to the Muskingum River, and cleanup crews are using containment dams to prevent the fluid from spreading any further.

Both the sheriff and fire departments for Morgan County were called in following the leak, and PDC paid to relocate several nearby residents to ensure no one would be harmed if leaking natural gas led to an explosion. Officials said the spill was contained by Wednesday, though also added it could be harmful to marine life.

The well had been intended for hydraulic fracturing, but the fracking process hadn't yet begun when the leak occurred. PDC Energy has 15 active wells in Ohio and permits for 18 more, but this is the only reported spill the company has in the state. It did suffer a spill of fracking fluid at a Colorado well in February of 2013.
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Bad Guys

Mentally unstable man seeks help, police suffocate him in his driveway


Polics State USA
Sun, 11 May 2014 18:28 UTC
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Aaron Torres
A man seeking help during a period of mental instability had his life ended shortly thereafter by police officers who sat on him so long in his driveway that he died of asphyxiation. The death was officially ruled a homicide, yet no one was ever charged.

The incident took place the morning of February 20th, 2012. Aaron Torres, 37, called 9-1-1 emergency services himself seeking help. Torres, who happened to be the transportation captain for the TV series "Hawaii Five-O," was suffering from a state of delirium caused by substance abuse.

At 4:27 a.m. a police dispatcher asked him if he needed assistance.

"Yeah, help...help...help, please," Torres responded. The response would not be as helpful as he may have anticipated.

Honolulu Police soon arrived, and rather than providing the medical assistance he had requested, officers were looking to arrest him.

Torres "was saying there was no reason to arrest him and the officers were indicating they were going to arrest him for something," a family lawsuit alleged.

Aaron's sister Tassa Torres came outside after hearing the early-morning dispute. She witnessed what came next.
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House

San Francisco: Gentrification and the suburbanization of poverty

Ted Asregadoo
Truthout
Sun, 11 May 2014 09:30 UTC
Hudson and Asregadoo discuss the ways in which "tech capitalism" is turning San Francisco into a playground for the very rich - as those who are not wealthy get pushed out to the suburbs.

San Francisco is a top tourist destination for travelers around the world. The picturesque views, the wonderful restaurants, the progressive politics and a kind of left-libertarian cultural openness make it a fairly unique place. Many have remarked that San Francisco reminds them of European cities. However, if San Francisco has European qualities, they are not confined to positive characteristics. Indeed, with the second tech boom reaching a fever pitch, rents in the city are skyrocketing; evictions are up and many residents are being pushed from their urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. The process of gentrification of not just whole neighborhoods, but the entire city is remaking the Bay Area in a way that resembles the core/periphery geography of some European cities. That is to say, the wealthy and upwardly mobile live and work in the core (with San Francisco being the epicenter) while the poor, working class and middle class get pushed to suburban cities in the periphery.

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Cult

Christians denounce Sarah Palin for water-boarding comparison to baptism

David Edwards
The Raw Story
Wed, 30 Apr 2014 09:55 UTC
Image
© Raw Story
Faithful America, a large online community of Christians, has launched an effort to publicly denounce former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin after she mocked one of the religion's most important rituals by comparing it to waterboarding.

Speaking at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention last week, Palin had explained how things would be different if she were president.

"They obviously have information on plots to carry out jihad," Palin said of terrorists. "Oh, but you can't offend them, can't make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."

By Tuesday, Faithful America had already reached its goal of 15,000 signatures on a petition condemning Palin for the remarks.
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Light Saber

Belgrade: March in support of Russian people in Ukraine - 'We remember Kosovo'


InSerbia News
Sun, 11 May 2014 15:50 UTC
serbia march support russia
More than a thousand people walked along the streets of Belgrade in support of the Russian people and referenda in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Demonstrators carried flags of Russia and Serbia, a photo of Vladimir Putin and Tsar Nicholas, carrying the slogan "Glory to Russia" as well as flags of Donetsk, Odessa, Lugansk and Kharkov. In front of the Temple of Saint Sava, Milica Djurdjevic, spokesman for the "Srpski Sabor Zavetnici", organizers of the march of support, recalled the glorious history of the two nations. She pointed out that despite the fact that the Belgrade authorities fell under the influence of their mentors in the West, who are asking Serbia to turn its back on the Russian Federation, the Serbian people will never forget the historic alliance between the Serbs and Russians.
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