Ace British social parody

9/5/2009 I haven't been able to watch the youtube version since late August, BBC enforcing its copyright by pulling the video has put another hole in the cultural subconsciousness

Even more compound nouns

German language adds 5,000 words

Turkey admits to 'genocide'! The world dies of shock

Turkey admits to 'genocide'! The world dies of shock.

Turkey, the paragon of ethnic relations, finally opens to admissions of genocide... in another country.

As well.... Turkish TV shows coup d’etat in Honduras, including scenes of the Honduras military confronting Honduran protesters, as well as the Honduran president-in-exile’s airplane and its attempt to land in the capitol and pass them off completely as footage of race riots in China.

Tax Havens

Terribly funny

Then you have the ‘big four’ accountancy firms – KPMG, Ernst and Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte – whose expertise is indispensable for anyone hoping to diminish their tax exposure. Writing in an Irish magazine, a KPMG partner spelled out the mindset:

A worrying tendency seems to have emerged among external stakeholders to make ‘moral’ judgements about tax planning and to expect companies to manage their tax affairs in a ‘moral’ way . . . Let’s be clear about this. Tax is a cost to business. As with any other cost, the board members owe their shareholders a duty to manage that cost by the legal means afforded to them.

KPMG gave us a sense of its attitude to legality when it paid a fine of $456m in the US for ‘designing, marketing and implementing illegal tax shelters’. The big four have now set up a body to regulate themselves called the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Not only do the accountancy firms appoint representatives to the IASB’s committees, they actually fund it themselves – through a foundation registered in a tax haven.