Liftoff: the space shuttle Endeavour, launched on its final mission on 16th May, will deliver the $2bn Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station in June. The equipment will look for clues to the nature of dark matter, the material that makes up most of the universe
A question of tax
There is keen attention in Edinburgh and Cardiff on a Treasury consultation, due to wrap up in late June, exploring whether Northern Ireland should enjoy lower corporate tax rates. That would allow its businesses to compete better with those across the border in the Republic, which has a 12.5 per cent rate. Owen Paterson, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, is in favour of the idea—although there is a sting. The Treasury insists that a cut in Northern Ireland’s corporate tax rate, currently 28 per cent, could mean a cut of about £300m in the block grant from Westminster, on top of the cuts already planned (see David McKittrick). Ed Miliband is against different tax rates for different regions of Britain, and so is a recent paper from the Wilberforce Society of Cambridge University, which calls itself Britain’s “first student-run think tank.” But Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond (see our interview) has seized on the idea, and Welsh Assembly members are eager to join in too.
Ed Miliband’s volte-face
After Ed Miliband became Labour leader, he declared: “When Ken Clarke says we need to look at short sentences in prison because of high reoffending rates, I’m not going to say he’s soft on crime.” Since then, he has called for the sacking of only one minister: Ken Clarke, for trying to reduce sentences in certain rape cases.
Blair said “No” to AV
Since leaving office, Tony Blair has infuriated tribal Labour folk by subtly praising David Cameron, the self-appointed “heir to Blair.” The final chapter of Blair’s book, A Journey, goes some way towards endorsing the Tory deficit strategy: “If Labour simply defaults to a ‘Tory cutters, Lib Dem collaborators’ mantra it will lose any possibility of being chosen as an alternative government,” Blair wrote. Elsewhere, Blair has praised Cameron over Libya. Now, Prospect has learned that Blair told friends he privately backed the No to AV campaign, led by Cameron and opposed by Labour leader Ed Miliband. Electoral reformers have long resented Blair’s failure to change the voting system. Had Blair done more, some claim, the Lib Dems may even have sided with Labour after the 2010 general election. But given that Blair told Paddy Ashdown in an early-hours phone call from Jerusalem during the coalition negotiations that a “progressive alliance” could not work, one can’t imagine Blair loses much sleep over that.
Joining the dots
The blandly-named Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—an organisation as influential as it is obscure—is due to issue guidelines in June that could change the internet. There are currently 21 so-called “generic top level domain names” (.com, .net and so on), which ICANN effectively controls. Soon, however, companies will be able to buy branded suffixes. Endings such as “.ibm” and “.hitachi” will be up for sale for the first time. According to ICANN: “There will also be opportunities to apply for community and geographic top-level domains, such as .city, .brand, and .blog.” The application fee alone is $185,000, so smaller organisations are excluded. The obvious worry is the potential for ruinously expensive bidding wars. How much would, say “London.city” be worth—and who should own it? If companies, organisations or cities choose to opt out, they risk being held to ransom by cyber-squatters: perhaps an even more expensive fate.
New school at Oxford
When Oxford University announced it was launching the first British school of government, with the help of a £75m donation from the US philanthropist Leonard Blavatnik, the move won applause from the likes of Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan and David Cameron. The first students are due to start in 2012. Yet despite the generous funding, there are now whispers of problems attracting the finest tutors, due to the somewhat restrictive pay scale at the university.
Dr Ngaire Woods, who is setting up the launch next year, denies this, laying the blame on more general funding concerns elsewhere: “The problem Oxford generally faces is from the swingeing government cuts which will hit humanities,” she tells Prospect. “With those cuts, it’s a question not of how much to pay [tutors] but whether there will be any money to pay for posts at all.” Still, she added, they are “getting a lot of support from across the world,” and it is high time the university had a school of government: they have been thinking about it for around 100 years—although, as Woods points out, that is “for Oxford, a relatively short amount of time.”
A royal Tripoli wedding
The staff of the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli, where western journalists are kept under virtual house arrest by the Libyan regime, were surprisingly accommodating towards the British media corps on royal wedding day. Yes, they could bake a cake and make cucumber sandwiches. Regrettably, they could not provide Pimm’s.
True to form, the Libyan regime eventually tried to turn the event into a propaganda advantage. Close to midnight, a group of Libyan children appeared at a press conference, appealing to the newlyweds to intervene and stop the Nato airstrikes. The oldest read a statement, the youngest—just four years old—held a drawing of William and Kate, depicted with blood dripping from the former.
Picking up the tab
Anyone keen to have lunch with Warren Buffett should visit eBay on 5th June. Each year, the US investment guru auctions off a private lunch with himself for charity. This year, the bidding starts at $25,000. Deep pockets are required: last year’s winner paid $2.6m. But will this year’s take-up be so enthusiastic? Buffett suffered a rare setback earlier this year with the resignation of David Sokol, the man tipped to succeed him as head of Berkshire Hathaway. Sokol had traded in shares in a company called Lubrizol, which Buffett then went on to buy for $9bn cash. Sokol denies any wrongdoing, and he has not been charged with any offence. But Buffett called his actions “inexplicable and inexcusable,” and accepted that he had made a “big mistake” in not adequately querying the timing of his deputy’s trades. Still, Buffett has the consolation of being the world’s third richest man, with a fortune of $47bn. And if you win the lunch bid, he’ll be picking up the tab.
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One to watch
The speculation about who should replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn as IMF chief has focused on big beasts such as Kemal Dervis of Turkey and even Gordon Brown—although the latter option was threatened by opposition from David Cameron. But the turmoil has also brought to prominence one lesser-known figure: Nemat Shafik, the former permanent secretary of Britain’s department for international development who, shortly before Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York, had taken up the job of deputy managing director at the IMF.
Born in Egypt but also a national of the US, and of Britain where she was educated, fluent in Arabic and French as well as English, western but not purely American, Shafik might just be the perfect compromise for a role traditionally held by a European, but coveted everywhere. Appointed a vice president of the World Bank at just 36, she is, says a former Dfid colleague, “extremely effective, great to work with, has a consensual approach and not an empire builder like some at her level… World Bank people can rub people up the wrong way but she never did.”
However the drama at the top of the IMF plays out, Whitehall insiders tip Shafik, known to policy wonks by her nickname Minouche, as a star set to rise.
A question of tax
There is keen attention in Edinburgh and Cardiff on a Treasury consultation, due to wrap up in late June, exploring whether Northern Ireland should enjoy lower corporate tax rates. That would allow its businesses to compete better with those across the border in the Republic, which has a 12.5 per cent rate. Owen Paterson, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, is in favour of the idea—although there is a sting. The Treasury insists that a cut in Northern Ireland’s corporate tax rate, currently 28 per cent, could mean a cut of about £300m in the block grant from Westminster, on top of the cuts already planned (see David McKittrick). Ed Miliband is against different tax rates for different regions of Britain, and so is a recent paper from the Wilberforce Society of Cambridge University, which calls itself Britain’s “first student-run think tank.” But Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond (see our interview) has seized on the idea, and Welsh Assembly members are eager to join in too.
Ed Miliband’s volte-face
After Ed Miliband became Labour leader, he declared: “When Ken Clarke says we need to look at short sentences in prison because of high reoffending rates, I’m not going to say he’s soft on crime.” Since then, he has called for the sacking of only one minister: Ken Clarke, for trying to reduce sentences in certain rape cases.
Blair said “No” to AV
Since leaving office, Tony Blair has infuriated tribal Labour folk by subtly praising David Cameron, the self-appointed “heir to Blair.” The final chapter of Blair’s book, A Journey, goes some way towards endorsing the Tory deficit strategy: “If Labour simply defaults to a ‘Tory cutters, Lib Dem collaborators’ mantra it will lose any possibility of being chosen as an alternative government,” Blair wrote. Elsewhere, Blair has praised Cameron over Libya. Now, Prospect has learned that Blair told friends he privately backed the No to AV campaign, led by Cameron and opposed by Labour leader Ed Miliband. Electoral reformers have long resented Blair’s failure to change the voting system. Had Blair done more, some claim, the Lib Dems may even have sided with Labour after the 2010 general election. But given that Blair told Paddy Ashdown in an early-hours phone call from Jerusalem during the coalition negotiations that a “progressive alliance” could not work, one can’t imagine Blair loses much sleep over that.
Joining the dots
The blandly-named Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—an organisation as influential as it is obscure—is due to issue guidelines in June that could change the internet. There are currently 21 so-called “generic top level domain names” (.com, .net and so on), which ICANN effectively controls. Soon, however, companies will be able to buy branded suffixes. Endings such as “.ibm” and “.hitachi” will be up for sale for the first time. According to ICANN: “There will also be opportunities to apply for community and geographic top-level domains, such as .city, .brand, and .blog.” The application fee alone is $185,000, so smaller organisations are excluded. The obvious worry is the potential for ruinously expensive bidding wars. How much would, say “London.city” be worth—and who should own it? If companies, organisations or cities choose to opt out, they risk being held to ransom by cyber-squatters: perhaps an even more expensive fate.
New school at Oxford
When Oxford University announced it was launching the first British school of government, with the help of a £75m donation from the US philanthropist Leonard Blavatnik, the move won applause from the likes of Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan and David Cameron. The first students are due to start in 2012. Yet despite the generous funding, there are now whispers of problems attracting the finest tutors, due to the somewhat restrictive pay scale at the university.
Dr Ngaire Woods, who is setting up the launch next year, denies this, laying the blame on more general funding concerns elsewhere: “The problem Oxford generally faces is from the swingeing government cuts which will hit humanities,” she tells Prospect. “With those cuts, it’s a question not of how much to pay [tutors] but whether there will be any money to pay for posts at all.” Still, she added, they are “getting a lot of support from across the world,” and it is high time the university had a school of government: they have been thinking about it for around 100 years—although, as Woods points out, that is “for Oxford, a relatively short amount of time.”
A royal Tripoli wedding
The staff of the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli, where western journalists are kept under virtual house arrest by the Libyan regime, were surprisingly accommodating towards the British media corps on royal wedding day. Yes, they could bake a cake and make cucumber sandwiches. Regrettably, they could not provide Pimm’s.
True to form, the Libyan regime eventually tried to turn the event into a propaganda advantage. Close to midnight, a group of Libyan children appeared at a press conference, appealing to the newlyweds to intervene and stop the Nato airstrikes. The oldest read a statement, the youngest—just four years old—held a drawing of William and Kate, depicted with blood dripping from the former.
Picking up the tab
Anyone keen to have lunch with Warren Buffett should visit eBay on 5th June. Each year, the US investment guru auctions off a private lunch with himself for charity. This year, the bidding starts at $25,000. Deep pockets are required: last year’s winner paid $2.6m. But will this year’s take-up be so enthusiastic? Buffett suffered a rare setback earlier this year with the resignation of David Sokol, the man tipped to succeed him as head of Berkshire Hathaway. Sokol had traded in shares in a company called Lubrizol, which Buffett then went on to buy for $9bn cash. Sokol denies any wrongdoing, and he has not been charged with any offence. But Buffett called his actions “inexplicable and inexcusable,” and accepted that he had made a “big mistake” in not adequately querying the timing of his deputy’s trades. Still, Buffett has the consolation of being the world’s third richest man, with a fortune of $47bn. And if you win the lunch bid, he’ll be picking up the tab.
***
One to watch
The speculation about who should replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn as IMF chief has focused on big beasts such as Kemal Dervis of Turkey and even Gordon Brown—although the latter option was threatened by opposition from David Cameron. But the turmoil has also brought to prominence one lesser-known figure: Nemat Shafik, the former permanent secretary of Britain’s department for international development who, shortly before Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York, had taken up the job of deputy managing director at the IMF.
Born in Egypt but also a national of the US, and of Britain where she was educated, fluent in Arabic and French as well as English, western but not purely American, Shafik might just be the perfect compromise for a role traditionally held by a European, but coveted everywhere. Appointed a vice president of the World Bank at just 36, she is, says a former Dfid colleague, “extremely effective, great to work with, has a consensual approach and not an empire builder like some at her level… World Bank people can rub people up the wrong way but she never did.”
However the drama at the top of the IMF plays out, Whitehall insiders tip Shafik, known to policy wonks by her nickname Minouche, as a star set to rise.
