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Lithuania said Saturday it had signed a trade agreement to buy liquified natural gas from the United States in a move aimed at reducing the EU Baltic state’s heavy dependence on Russian gas deliveries. Under the deal with Houston-based Chenier Energy company, the first LNG fuel is expected to arrive in Lithuania as early as next year, state-owned company Litgas said in a statement.

Fast-food giant McDonald’s has avoided paying €1 billion in tax across the EU, and should be included in the EU’s probe on “sweetheart” tax deals, according to a report published Wednesday (25 February). The report, published by the European Federation of Public Service Unions, its US Counterpart and the charity War on Want, accuses McDonald’s of “aggressive and potentially abusive optimization of its structure which has led to the avoidance of significant amounts of tax across the continent”. It concludes that “it is likely that the company reached a secret tax deal with Luxembourg”. In July 2009, the Happy-Meal maker...

Speaking at the EEF National Manufacturing Conference in London, Miliband said yesterday (26 February) that “(t)here is no greater threat to the long-term stability and prosperity of Britain and British business than leaving the European Union.” Leaving the European Union is not in Britain’s national interest, the UK opposition leader added. Taking aim at the Conservatives, Miliband said it was, “wrong to play fast and loose with our membership of the European Union.” …

This Key Market Signal Says Oil Is Heading to $60 a Barrel By Matt DiLallo | More Articles March 1, 2015 | Comments (1) Given the dramatic drop in the price of oil over the past few months, the burning question on a lot of minds is "What will the price of oil do next?" It seems like everyone has an opinion on that question. The range of predictions goes from $10 at the bottom to a staggering $200 a barrel at the top. What that range tells us is that where oil will go in the future is anyone's...

THE internet is stuffed with garbage...Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness. Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them. A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of...

Under the false pretense of calling for new and tougher so-called fiduciary standards for financial brokers, advisers and retirement plan representatives, the White House once again horned in on Wall Street’s compensation formulas. However, what the president surely knows is that a vast majority of retirement plans — IRAs and 401(k)s — are in simple fee-based products like mutual funds. The commission-based accounts are for those who prefer to direct their brokers in certain purchases inside some of their retirement products. The key to the White House’s interference is in its nuanced language. Currently, a broker may make a recommendation...

[excerpt from Stock-market crash of 2016: The countdown begins]Dow will drop 50% as market replays 2008, 2000 and 1929.  That will translate into the DJIA crashing from today’s 18,117 down 50% to about 9,000. Ouch, the Dow crashing all the way below 10,000. Unimaginable. Bulls will hate it. No wonder our brains tune out, turn off. Instead, we prefer the happy talk that will just keep coming out of Wall Street and Washington till the 2016 collapse. We’ll just keep denying reality ... till it’s too late, and we suffer another $10 trillion loss is on the books. Deja...

"...What was missing from CPAC? Any sign of the intellectual ferment in conservative think tanks about how to address the stagnant incomes of the American middle class. Most speakers stuck to more traditional fare: smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation. There are new ideas in the Republican Party, but this, it seems, was neither the time nor the place..."

I'm sure Dr. Mengele would agree with Bill Gates. Careful what you think is safe. Here is Bill Gates, at the TED, saying CO2 warms the planet and that he hopes to depopulate of the Earth by 10 to 15% through NEW vaccines. This is the crux of the Global Warming Movement/Climate Change rubbish/CO2 tax... That's right depopulation.

Thousands of Wisconsin union workers rallied at the Capitol Saturday to protest a “right-to-work” proposal that would outlaw the mandatory payment of union dues, but the crowd was much smaller than those in 2011 against Gov. Scott Walker’s law stripping public sector unions of much of their power. Speakers at the event jeered Walker’s comment Thursday that fighting against protesters during the 2011 debates prepared him to battle terrorists as president. Walker has not yet announced his presidential campaign, but is expected to do so later this year. “What we are doing here today is the heart and soul of...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - More than 14,600 blighted properties around Ohio have been demolished in the past two years under a program aimed at benefiting areas affected by foreclosures, the state’s attorney general said Friday. Ohio used $75 million from a national settlement with major mortgage servicers to create a grant program in 2012 to revitalize neighborhoods and eliminate abandoned structures. A portion of the settlement money also was designated for consumer relief in the form of cash payments, loan modifications and refinancing. Attorney General Mike DeWine released a report on the results of the demolition program at a news...

Greece's new currency designs are ready. The green 50 drachma note features Cornelius Castoriadis, the Marxisant philosopher and sworn enemy of privatisation. The Nobel poet Odysseus Elytis - voice of Eastward-looking Hellenism - honours the 200 note. The bills rise to 10,000 drachma, a wise precaution lest there is a hyperinflationary shock as Greece breaks out of its debt-deflation trap at high velocity. The amateur blueprints are a minor sensation in Greek artistic circles. They are only half in jest. Greece's Syriza radicals have signed a fragile ceasefire with the eurozone's creditor powers. Few think this can last as escalating...

California, New York, and New Jersey always rank near the bottom of these lists as intrusive, red tape-bound hellholes. The First in Freedom Index actually draws from a lot of the sources that have been cited here before, including the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of North America as well as Mercatus Center's Freedom in the 50 States, the Tax Foundation's State Business Tax Climate Index, and measures put together by the Center for Education Reform, among others. To this, the North Carolina group adds its own weight and emphasis. The ultimate score is an average across the categories it examines....

Pope Francis launched a fresh attack on economic injustice on Saturday, condemning the "throw-away culture" of globalization and calling for new ways of thinking about poverty, welfare, employment and society. In a speech to the association of Italian cooperative movements, he pointed to the "dizzying rise in unemployment" and the problems that existing welfare systems had in meeting healthcare needs. For those living "at the existential margins" the current social and political system "seems fatally destined to suffocate hope and increase risks and threats," he said. The Argentinian-born pope, who has often criticized orthodox market economics for fostering unfairness and...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has pulled the trigger. In the name of “net neutrality” they have decided to assert regulatory control over the vast, sprawling, ever-changing conglomeration of economic activities known simply as the “Internet.” What will the FCC do now? Think of Nancy Pelosi’s infamous statement about the Affordable Care Act: Congress had to pass it for Americans to learn what it would do. The FCC has bitten off more than it can chew. Its task will be somewhat comparable to that of the old Soviet price-setting bureaucracy in which my friend, economist Yuri Maltsev, once worked. Barely...

The housing bust and Great Recession might have scared a generation of would-be construction workers away from the building trades. That’s the strong suggestion of some new research by the Federal Reserve, which explored why shortages of construction workers are emerging even as large numbers of people who seem good candidates for that type of work remain under-employed. A working paper by Fed economist Andrew Paciorek notes that construction employment growth has badly lagged the recovery in the labor market as a whole.

(CNSNews.com) -- The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is holding a hearing today to receive public feedback on whether it should create new rules regulating political speech, including political speech on the Internet that one commissioner warned could affect blogs, YouTube videos and even websites like the Drudge Report. The hearing is a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC last year, which struck down the FEC’s previous cap on aggregate campaign contributions from a single donor in an election cycle. Before the decision, individuals were limited to a combined total of $46,200 in contributions to all...

....Hollywood star Sharon Stone was scheduled to make a (paid) appearance in Ecuador last year to talk about the environment and generally say how bad Chevron was, etc. She was paid a significant sum of money for this “activism” but two small problems cropped up. First, she didn’t show up to do the appearance. And second, according the hosts of the event, she kept the money anyway.

The new rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission are a win for smaller Internet-based companies. Internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile now must act in the "public interest" when providing a mobile connection to your home or phone, under rules approved Thursday by a divided Federal Communications Commission. The plan, which puts the Internet in the same regulatory camp as the telephone and bans business practices that are "unjust or unreasonable," represents the biggest regulatory shakeup to the industry in almost two decades. The goal is to prevent providers from slowing or blocking web traffic,...

An IRS employee tasked with trying to restore and obtain emails on Lois Lerner’s IRS computer’s hard drive was legally blind. Stephen Manning, the deputy chief information officer for strategy and modernization at the IRS, submitted an affidavit in the True the Vote vs. IRS litigation regarding the persons and procedures used to attempt to recover Lois Lerner’s hard drive containing emails pertaining to Tea Party targeting. The affidavit can be read here. Paragraph 14 describes the educational background of the person searching for data on Lois Lerner’s hard drive: “According to the Specialist, prior to joining the Internal Revenue...