Ok have finally packed.One day left at work.Gotta leave my boy at the kennels Saturday not looking forward to thatNext entry will be from sunny BangkokBring it on xxx

Products I’ve made up for the sheer giddy thrill of it include Total Farage Plus, which skilfully Photoshops the Ukip leader into whatever you’re looking at

This week it’s the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, an annual opportunity for tech companies to unveil their latest gizmos during January’s traditional slow news week, thereby picking up precious coverage that might otherwise be spent detailing something – anything – more important than an egg whisk with a USB port in the side.

At the time of writing, the show is yet to kick off, although some of the offerings have already been unveiled – such as “Belty”, the world’s first “smart belt”, which monitors your waistline and tells you when it’s time to lose weight, just like a mirror or a close friend might. More excitingly, it adjusts to your girth (again, like a close friend might), and will tighten or loosen itself according to your current level of blubber. No word yet on whether it’s possible to pop a Belty round your neck and order it to squeeze you into the afterlife, but there’s no reason they can’t incorporate that feature in Belty 2.0, except maybe on basic ethical, moral and humanitarian grounds.

An American woman goes to the police in Las Vegas. She claims she has been raped by an athlete: global football star Cristiano Ronaldo. What really happened has never been resolved because lawyers settled the case with a payment of $375,000 by the Real Madrid star. By SPIEGEL Staff

Claas Relotius, the DER SPIEGEL journalist outed this week for churning out fraudulent stories, wrote for the magazine about the U.S. town of Fergus Falls. Two locals fact-checked his reporting, and their verdict is devastating -- a perfect example of how DER SPIEGEL's editorial safeguards failed.

Rui Pinto is the whistleblower behind Football Leaks and has been in jail in Portugal for months. In an interview, his lawyer William Bourdon talks about how his client is doing and what he is doing to get Pinto out of prison.

The fight against the coronavirus has paralyzed society and the economy. Lockdown measures are fine for the short term, but they threaten to rapidly destroy the economy and erode our existing social order. What should the next steps be?

Every day, tens of thousands people in Germany seek to get tested for the novel coronavirus. Often, though, they run up against a lack of testing capacity. And it is likely to only get worse. By DER SPIEGEL Staff

German politicians have begun calling for industry to be shielded from too much environmental protection during the coronavirus crisis. But corporations aren't joining the appeal. They managed to turn CO2 reduction into a competitive advantage long ago.

The danger of a new euro crisis is growing. Weak member states like Italy need help if they're going to survive the coronavirus lockdown financially. But the call for euro bonds has been met with stiff resistance -- especially from the Germans.

In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, 53, criticizes the U.S., China and Hungary for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He also promises not to abandon Italy and explains why he doesn't want to say that he's actually in favor of corona bonds.

Levine is making the rounds to make the case for baseball in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.

Pressure is growing across the board for large corporations to do more to protect the environment and the climate. Even institutional investors like Blackrock head Larry Fink are joining the chorus of voices calling for change.

Greed, envy, poor leadership and a poisonous internal culture: New York Times journalist David Enrich has written a book about Deutsche Bank that also sheds light on the financial institution's relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Freelancers and small companies are getting hit especially hard by the corona crisis. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the federal government is planning a massive financial aid package. It would mark the end of Germany’s balanced budget policy.

The coronavirus pandemic has inflicted massive damage on the aviation industry. But Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr says that the German flag carrier is in a good position to survive, even if it will take several years for the industry to recover.

Audio recordings of two 911 calls placed moments before Ahmaud Arbery was killed confirm that at least two people were concerned that a black man was running in their Georgia neighborhood.

An extensive search was launched Thursday for a teenager who allegedly stabbed his younger brother to death in the Florida Keys community of Islamorada, authorities said.

They don’t want people bugging out.

The semen of men infected with coronavirus revealed that the disease lingered in only a few patients, suggesting there is a small chance COVID-19 can be transmitted sexually, researchers said.

President Trump on Friday called the viral video of Ahmaud Arbery’s killing “very, very disturbing,” but he said he’s confident that Georgia’s law enforcement authorities will handle the case properly despite a slow-moving investigation and conflict-of-interest questions surrounding the incident. “So I saw the tape, and it’s very, very disturbing," he said in a Fox New phone interview. “I looked at a picture of that young man. He was in a tuxedo... And I will say that that looks like a really good, young guy.”

Ohio State University will pay about $41 million to settle a dozen lawsuits by 162 men alleging sexual abuse by a team doctor, Richard Strauss.

A Boeing 737 ran over a man who was on an Austin, TX runway

Surprisingly, they didn’t do it years ago due to traffic.

New research from the Central Bank shows that demand for bank loans has fallen sharply.

The beating of a young black man by police on the East Village last weekend should trouble all New Yorkers. Even more troubling is that the incident began with officers enforcing the city’s social distancing rules on the first summer-like weekend of the pandemic while white revelers lounged close together, unmolested, in parks nearby. Officers handed them masks instead.

Lynbrook, L.I.: The news outlets have not covered the way that the smallest small businesses have been overlooked during the pandemic. As a Schedule C tax filer, I am eligible to collect Pandemic Unemployment Assistance under the CARES Act. I applied for PUA on March 16. I have been certifying for benefits every week. This entire time, my online account with the state Department of Labor says that my case is still pending.

The nation lurches toward November as a weakened giant. When Americans decide whether to end or extend the tenure of a reckless president, they will also be voting up or down on whether the rule of law and official accountability remain hallmarks of a great republic.

Seen plenty of people on sidewalks or in parks gallivanting without masks and clustering less than six feet apart? Of course you have, no matter the racial, religious or ethnic composition of the neighborhood; it’s happening everywhere, especially on nice days.

Add Dr. Rick Bright to the list of coronavirus whistleblowers silenced or sidelined for trying to push truth over politics as we battle this deadly scourge. He was just ousted from his post as director of the HHS agency working on a COVID-19 vaccine for what he claims was his refusal to support a “game-changing” supposed cure President Trump and friends have been touting. CDC chief Robert Redfield suffered a similar rebuke for warning of a second wave of the virus next winter, contradicting the more rosy picture the president wants trying to paint. Not fired (yet), but clearly pressured to toe the line, truth and science be damned.

A New York City condominium tower will be the world’s tallest predominantly residential building when it opens next year, though it will be competing with other ultra-luxury buildings for billionaire buyers, the building’s developer said Tuesday.

Hall of Famer and 12-time All Star Mike Piazza buys a three-bedroom condominium at The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Miami Beach for $5.6 million. The 3,838-square-foot condo has views of Surprise Lake and Biscayne Bay.

Most of the Georgia mall heavily featured in the latest season of Netflix's "Stranger Things" is going up for sale.

Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavalarri have chopped the price of their Tennnessee mansion to $4.95 million.

With the current trend toward de-cluttering and downsizing, there are plenty of books about how to winnow down possessions to the few that are truly necessary and loved. This book shows how you can live well once that's done.

As important as sober homes are to the effort to address a statewide crisis at the local level, many neighborhoods prefer not to be a part of that mission.

Chris Wilder says he will respect the decision of any Sheffield United player opting not to play when football is given the go-ahead to resume.

Sporting events in the Netherlands will have to take place without fans in attendance until there is a vaccine for coronavirus, Health Minister Hugo de Jonge said.

We develop a multi-risk SIR model (MR-SIR) where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young”, “the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our MR-SIR model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy similar to those already developed in the context of the homogeneous-agent SIR models. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group. For example, for the same economic cost (24.3% decline in GDP), optimal semi–targeted or fully-targeted policies reduce mortality from 1.83% to 0.71% (thus, saving 2.7 million lives) relative to optimal uniform policies. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. We also study the impacts of social distancing, the matching technology, the expected arrival time of a vaccine, and testing with or without tracing on optimal policies. Overall, targeted policies that are combined with measures that reduce interactions between groups and increase testing and isolation of the infected can minimize both economic losses and deaths in our model.

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key sufficient statistics. Using tax changes and scanner data, we estimate relatively elastic demand and limited substitution between e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes. In sample surveys, historical smoking declines for high- and low-vaping demographics were unchanged after e-cigarettes were introduced; this demographic shift-share identification also suggests limited substitution. We field a new survey of experts, who report that vaping is almost as harmful as smoking cigarettes. In our model, these results imply that current e-cigarette taxes are far below the social optimum, but Monte Carlo simulations highlight substantial uncertainty.