National / International News

American writer Lydia Davis is named as winner of the Man Booker International prize for her "achievement in fiction on the world stage".

A British driver who struck a cyclist with her car — and who then bragged about the incident on Twitter — has issued an apology. The incident caused an uproar after the collision Sunday.

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A plant scientist at Mars Inc. has appealed to the world's biggest life sciences companies to help him — by sharing what they already know about 100 crops that could provide better nutrition in Africa. But can the kings of agricultural intellectual property get onboard with open source agricultural information for Africa?

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The mayor of the tornado-devastated town of Moore in Oklahoma vows to push for a new law on shelters, after Monday's deadly twister.

This final note today, in which I will settle now -- and for all time -- the burning question of how you pronounce these three little letters: G I F.

The guy who invented the graphics interchange format, which lets images on your computer screen move, kind of like animation, got a Webby lifetime achievement award last night.

Steve Wilhite is his name. He's had a stroke, so he can't speak. But you can check out the video of his acceptance presentation last night, in which he laid down the law.

It's 'jif,' people, like the peanut butter.  Speaking of which, even the peanut butter maker got in on the debate.

Despite much international criticism, Israel has continued building its West Bank barrier. It's now nearing completion, while the Israelis and Palestinians continue to argue over whether it will help or hurt prospects for a Middle East peace agreement.

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Ironically, there's one piece of Web history that can't be found online: the very first page. Now, a team at the lab where the World Wide Web was born is on a hunt for old hard drives and floppy disks that might hold copies of the missing files.

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The US tax official at the centre of a furore over the agency's targeting of conservative groups invokes her right to silence when questioned by Congress.

An electrician and his wife had a shock when they received a mobile phone bill for £163,000, then fought for months to have the debt cleared. BBC Watchdog investigated

The trio of scandals that have engulfed the White House may not be big news by 2014, but now is the time when prospective candidates must decide if they want to be on the ballot. Is the news of the moment hurting the effort?

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Capt. Francesco Schettino is accused of negligence that led to the grounding of the ship and of abandoning the stricken vessel while a rescue of its more than 4,200 passengers and crew was still underway.

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David Cameron hails an EU agreement to close tax loopholes as a "turning point", as Google's boss urges politicians to "sort" the system.

The incident occurred Wednesday when the suspects attacked the man near a London military barracks.

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The French government is trying to slay a sacred cow. The Ministry for Higher Education plans to remove some of the legal protection of the French language.

Under the so-called “Toubon Law” of 1994 , all academic subjects -- other than foreign languages -- must be taught in French; and public bodies are obliged to coin pure French alternatives to replace English imports like “le weekend “ and “le marketing.”

But the government wants to modify the law.

“The Minister is just trying to loosen the restrictions on the teaching of university classes in English,” says Douglas Yates of the American University in Paris. "This is because the business schools need to teach in English, and scientists need to deal with the scientific community in English.”

By lifting the ban on English as a medium of instruction, the government hopes to attract many more foreign students to French universities. The goal is to raise the level from 12 percent to 15 percent by 2020.

The left-leaning daily newspaper Liberation showed its support for the policy by printing its front page entirely in English with the headline: “Let’s Do It.” Editor-in-Chief Fabrice Rousselot says relaxing the ban on teaching in English would be good for France -- and the French language.

“If we teach in English, then we will have more foreigners coming here,” he said. "They will absorb French culture and language and take that back home with them when they leave.”

Rousselot argues that teaching in the world’s most popular foreign language will also help French students. It will equip them to go out and sell French products and services anywhere abroad.

“Our French youth is going to be able to go around the world instead of being afraid of the world," he said. “They’ll be able to conquer the world!”

But the plan to lower the protection of the French language is raising national hackles.

“Our public policy is to broaden French influence and the French language,” says conservative lawmaker Jacques Myard. “We should not spend French taxpayers’ money promoting American and British interests.”

Myard says focusing on English as the main international language is, anyway, a strategic error. “I’m sorry to say that English is declining. As is the United States of America. I’m sorry to say.”

But most opponents of the new measure are more worried about the perceived threat to the French language. George Gastaud is president of a French language defense group called Courriel. The name means “email" in French and was invented to replace the widely used Franglais term “le mail.” Gastaud deplores the plan to ease the restrictions on English teaching.

“I’m resisting the replacement of our own language by another,” he says. “What is France, without French? “

But even he -- the purist -- exemplifies the relentless encroachment of  English. In our interview in French, he complained about “le French bashing” and spoke of “le business lobby."

Now that’s what I call Franglais.

The Colombian rebel group Farc denies taking part in the kidnapping of two Spanish tourists in the north-east of the country last Friday.

A couple married for 87 years are invited to a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace in recognition of the length of their marriage.

Apple CEO Tim Cook's testimony on Capitol Hill shined a light on how American companies keep their foreign profits overseas -- beyond the reach of the IRS. Traditional tax havens are well-known: the Cayman Islands, Singapore and, more recently, Ireland. But there’s one offshore tax haven you might not have heard of: The island of...Manhattan.

Turns out many U.S. companies store some of their offshore profits in banks here at home.

"You don’t really have to keep money offshore to keep it offshore," says Larry Zelenak, professor of corporate tax law at Duke University. "All the big multinationals do it. It's kind of standard operating procedure."

It works like this: A U.S. company sets up a subsidiary in a country with a low tax rate and routes its overseas profits through that unit. Those profits technically belong to the foreign subsidiary, even if it deposits the money in a U.S. bank account.

"A company can invest its money wherever it likes, and the U.S. tax laws look at that as money not of the parent, but of the subsidiary and, thus, that money is not subject to U.S. taxes," explains Michael Knoll, co-director of the Center of Tax Law and Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The maneuver allows U.S. companies to avoid paying the 35 percent corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world. Still, that money can be put to use in the U.S. economy.

"The fact that the money is sitting in U.S. banks presumably makes the money available to U.S. borrowers," says Howard Gleckman, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "But, as we know, U.S. banks have not been lending. That’s one of the reasons why the recovery from the recession has been so slow."

And the economic impact of lending that offshore-onshore money, Glickman says, doesn’t make up for the billions of dollars in taxes the government misses out on every year.

Companies keep finding new ways to collect our personal information and sell it to marketers and advertisers. Now wireless phone companies like Verizon make money off data about our physical location and the websites we visit. Of course, companies generally include a caveat: consumers are allowed to "opt out." But that’s not always easy.

On many websites, the option to "opt out" and limit the sharing of consumer data is not immediately obvious.

“Opting out of data brokers and advertising schemes is notoriously difficult,” says Adi Kamdar with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting digital rights.

He says some websites try to hide the opt-out option.

“Other sites make it so you have to provide more information about yourself in order to opt out. And sometimes people feel weird or creeped-out about doing that,” Kamdar says.

Companies have a financial incentive to discourage us from opting out.

“Today, your data is the new gold. It’s the currency that companies are trading back and forth and making tens of billions of dollars on. So of course companies like Verizon and Facebook don’t want you to opt out,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of a consumer privacy group called the Center for Digital Democracy.

Chester favors a national privacy law that would restrict the trading of personal information.

But until then, it’s up to us.

“There’s certain privacy-friendly browser extensions that will block third-parties from collecting your data, or limit the amount of data you can give to them,” Kamdar says.

A browser extension is a kind of computer program. Kamdar recommends one called Ghostery and another called DoNotTrackMe.

Many people protect their privacy by clearing the tracking cookies from their computer. But Kamdar says that approach can backfire, because companies use cookies to identify which consumers have chosen to opt out.

“As soon as you clear your opt-out cookie too, you opt back in to this data broker’s scheme,” Kamdar says.

So if you clear the cookies from your computer, you’ll need to start over and opt out all over again.

Two tips on data privacy from the Electionic Frontier Foundation

1.  Install an add-on to protect your privacy online. Facebook is using "blind cookie-matching" to match up users of online marketer BlueKai with specific Facebook accounts. We'll explain the mechanics of this more in another post, but for now it's good to know that blocking trackers is a good general practice for stopping this type of tracking. We recommend you use a tool such as Ghostery (now available on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer) or Abine's DoNotTrackMe (available in Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer) or AdBlockPlus with EasyPrivacy Lists. See more comprehensive instructions in our 4 Simple Changes to Stop Online Tracking.

2. Avoid giving your phone number and email address to companies when possible.Facebook and these companies are primarily using hashed email addresses to match users between databases, though they may also use hashed phone numbers. If you’re filling out a survey or signing up to receive email updates from a website, consider creating and using a different email address than the one you associate with your Facebook account. Similarly, consider setting up an alternate phone number you can give to companies apart from the phone number you connect with your social media accounts.

A handful of polio infections in Kenya and Somalia could set back efforts to wipe out the virus worldwide, health workers warned Wednesday. The last time there was polio in this region, the virus spread throughout the Horn of Africa into the Middle East and eventually into Indonesia.

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Officials in Moore, Okla., said today they're pretty sure they've recovered the bodies of all those who died in the tornado Monday. Which means the long road to putting objects, homes and lives back together can begin in earnest.

Homes and businesses were destroyed by the dozens. And if history's any guide, figuring out of how to get the aid money that's going to let people rebuild is going to be complicated.

Gaydawn Magee is one of those business owners. And her storefront? "Looks like it was put through a blender," she said. 

She's lived through her share of tornadoes, but Magee's company, Ideal Hearing Solutions, is less than a year old. This will be her first time navigating a maze of insurance paperwork and federal forms. 

"Luckily I did find my patient records and I have a CPA that's offsite," she said, making her claim more straightforward. "That was the saving grace."

The Moore High School alum plans to stay put, albeit in a new location.

"First day it happened I was, I won't say grumpy, but not having my best day," she said. "But if I had a choice, I'd rather lose my business than my friends or children." 

Magee herself was out of harm's way, preparing to leave town to pursue her hobby: recreating historic battles for tourist audiences in Tombstone, Ariz., and elsewhere. 

"I'm a gunfighter. We basically dress up in Victorian or period clothing," Magee said. But she doesn't have to roll over and play dead in the shows very often. "Most of the time I'm an outlaw."