According to our Shiva Mahapurana one day Vishnu and Brahma had an argument over their superiority. Shiva appeared in front of them in the form of a raging fire and asked them to each find the tip of the fire. Whoever reaches the tip would be superior bet

Yesterday was Day 45 Our five o'clock briefing was delivered by the less than charismatic Mr Gove who told us more of the same . He spelled out the numbers of deaths the numbers of tests that had been undertaken. The numbers rolled off his tongue . Traf

Kedarkantha the Prominent winter trek in Garhwal Himalayas Uttarakhand INDIAKedarkantha Trekheight is around 3800 meters. And the Kedarkantha trek offers 6 days vacation

Kedarkantha the Prominent winter trek in Garhwal Himalayas Uttarakhand INDIAKedarkantha Trek height is around 3800 meters. And the Kedarkantha trek offers 6 days vacation

Reaching Blog 100 on Chesterfield who would have believed it Not me. Sometimes I would write something about my home town. Most of the time though blogs were about somewhere else . Covid 19 has scuppered any chance of a blog from out of town for a whil

Surfacing this morning was difficult . It is a work day today . Last night we had a frost . Not a heavy one . Not the sort of frost you get in the Winter . Not the sort of frost that you have to scrape off the car windscreen. But a frost nevertheless . The

It is dark when I wake . It is Day 48 of the lockdown . The sun has not risen and the birds have not woken. It is Thursday . Sage are meeting today with our government . Sage used to be that herb that you stuffed up a chicken together with onion . Now it i

I woke early again . The bedroom was still in darkness . Tossing about I found I could not get back to sleep. My mind was going round and round . Odd thoughts . Day 49 how many hours have we been locked down. 1176 hours or thereabouts. I could have begun

Morning she shouted across the road . Morning I replied . Busy isn't it I thought it was lockdown Yes seems like a lot of people still travelling in their cars was my reply. We agreed the lady on her morning walk and I that this was a lovel

Hello everyone I hope you are all well and enjoyed the half term break. Since I last wrote I have been busy exploring more of New Zealand so let me fill you in on what we have been up to whilst visiting the South Island. Mount CookWe spent a n

If you are going to nurse a hangover nurse one in New York City...yesterday became very spontaneous and boarded the Staten Island Ferry and had an opportunity to look at Lower Manhattan and Miss Liberty herself from a respectable distance. I am so amazed

Been to a concert with our hosts and drunk some legal absinthe. Thx Kitti and Adam for their hospitalityhttpwww.youtube.comwatchvw3nRAKOcZEo

Once again sorry dear readers for not writing in a weekMany people have been asking questions and I have been saying Check my blog I'll write soon and have not.Let me first talking about my past weekend my Oktoberfest adventure Then I wi

It’s a stealth adventure with nowhere to hide and hundreds of respawning enemies waiting to attack you the moment you stand out in any way

I haven’t always been the kind of man who plays videogames. I used to be the kind of boy who played videogames. We’re inseparable, games and I. If you cut me, I’d bleed pixels. Or blood. Probably blood, come to think of it.

Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera – even though they’re obviously better, because no opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds. Nobody writes articles in which opera-lovers are mocked as adult babies who never grew out of make-believe and sing-song; obsessive misfits who flock to weird “opening nights” wearing elaborate “tuxedo” cosplay outfits.

Viele Bluetooth-Kopfhörer liefern gute Klangqualität, sagt Peter Knaak von der Stiftung Warentest. Worauf Sie beim Kauf achten sollten.

Er gehörte zu den einflussreichsten Musikern in der Frühphase des Rock 'n' Roll, inspirierte die Beatles und Elvis Presley. Nun ist der US-Sänger Little Richard mit 87 Jahren gestorben.

Canadian accident investigator Larry Vance claims to have solved the mystery of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. In an interview, he explains why he believes the plane's captain deliberately ditched the aircraft.

Waffles for everybody, a children's hotel, a community beer garden: We have narrowed down the Social Design Award submissions to a shortlist of 10. Which one is your favorite? It's time to submit your vote for the Audience Award.

Germany's federal and state governments have agreed to further tighten restrictions on public life. Here's an overview of what's now allowed and what's not.

The German chancellor is staying home after being exposed to a doctor who tested positive for the coronavirus. A first test came back negative, but Merkel will keep governing remotely for the time being. What does Germany's line of succession look like, and who would jump in if Merkel gets sick?

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

All of Germany is looking forward to Easter this year, with hopes that the government will soon be able to loosen coronavirus restrictions. But will it? And if so, which ones? By DER SPIEGEL Staff

We study a novel policy tool—interest rate uncertainty—that can be used to discourage inefficient capital inflows and to adjust the composition of external accounts between short-term securities and foreign direct investment (FDI). We identify the trade-offs faced in navigating between external balance and price stability. The interest rate uncertainty policy discourages short-term inflows mainly through portfolio risk and precautionary saving channels. A markup channel generates net FDI inflows under imperfect exchange rate pass-through. We further investigate new channels under different assumptions about the irreversibility of FDI, the currency of export invoicing, risk aversion of outside agents, and effective lower bound in the rest of the world. Under every scenario, uncertainty policy is inflationary.

This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating teacher value-added. Rather than imposing a normality assumption on unobserved teacher quality (as in the standard empirical Bayes approach), our nonparametric estimator permits the underlying distribution to be estimated directly and in a computationally feasible way. The resulting estimates fit the unobserved distribution very well regardless of the form it takes, as we show in Monte Carlo simulations. Implementing the nonparametric approach in practice using two separate large-scale administrative data sets, we find the estimated teacher value-added distributions depart from normality and differ from each other. To draw out the policy implications of our method, we first consider a widely-discussed policy to release teachers at the bottom of the value-added distribution, comparing predicted test score gains under our nonparametric approach with those using parametric empirical Bayes. Here the parametric method predicts similar policy gains in one data set while overestimating those in the other by a substantial margin. We also show the predicted gains from teacher retention policies can be underestimated significantly based on the parametric method. In general, the results highlight the benefit of our nonparametric empirical Bayes approach, given that the unobserved distribution of value-added is likely to be context-specific.

To help end the protests in Hong Kong, the Chinese government is pressuring foreign companies doing business in the country to toe the official position. Any firm that doesn't can expect punishment -- and even ostensibly progressive German conglomerates are playing along. By DER SPIEGEL Staff

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.

German carmakers are going to have to open up their factories and car dealerships again soon – otherwise they could face a widespread collapse. And that would be disastrous for the German economy.

A member of the U.S. Navy who serves as one of President Trump’s personal valets has tested positive for coronavirus.

Gregory McMichael, 64, and his 34-year-old son Travis have been charged with murdering Arbery.

Officers killed three civilians in three separate incidents within hours of each other.

A Southwest jet traveling from Dallas fatally struck a person as it touched down at a Texas airport Thursday night, authorities said.

The U.S. unemployment rate suffered its worst monthly loss on record, hitting a startling 14.7% in April as the coronavirus pandemic and the drastic efforts to contain it forced employers to slash more than 20 million jobs.

Gov. Cuomo is down with Robert De Niro portraying him in a movie about the coronavirus pandemic, should there be one, and he also took a moment to play the role of the Manhattan-born actor.

A day after a father and son were charged in the February killing of unarmed jogger Ahmaud Arbery, a Georgia official promised a thorough probe into the case and said the man who filmed the horrific incident is also under investigation. In a news conference Friday morning, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vic Reynolds said “every stone will be turned over" and if the facts lead agents to make another arrest “they will do that.”

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

Two men were arrested in a fatal shooting in Flint, Mich.

Over almost three decades prosecuting criminals, I’ve been threatened, had a Santeria curse put on me, and been called a “fu--ing a--hole” on more occasions than I can count. But until my column for USA Today last week, “Why I’m skeptical about Reade’s sexual assault claim against Biden,” I’d never been called a “rape apologist.”

Former NBA guard Shannon Brown was arrested recently after shooting a rifle in a mixup at his home.

After Hurricane Dorian savaged the northern islands of the Bahamas, damaged properties loom as a target for real estate speculators.

A Los Angeles real estate agent was shoved backwards off a stairway and pinned to the ground by an unknown open house visitor who flashed a chilling smile at a security camera seconds earlier.

Trump vividly recalls the overtures he made to rebuild the 39-story tower in the early 2000s and posits that he could have done a better job with the $2.3 billion project, which took about three years longer than anticipated and came in more than $400 million over budget.

Russ Weiner, the founder of Rockstar Energy Drink, has listed his Miami Beach and Delray Beach mansions for sale. The total asking price: $71.5 million.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered the destruction of South Korean-made hotels and other tourist facilities at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, apparently because Seoul won’t defy international sanctions and resume South Korean tours at the site.