Italy to pay 40 billion euros of state debt to companies

By Catherine Hornby and Giuseppe Fonte

ROME | Sat Apr 6, 2013 2:35pm EDT

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's caretaker government said on Saturday it would pay 40 billion euros ($52 billion) that the state owes to private companies over the next 12 months, while vowing to stick within the European Union's deficit limit.

The cabinet approved a decree intended to provide funds to cash-strapped firms and help tackle a deep recession in the euro zone's third-largest economy. But some industry groups said it would be difficult for businesses to claim their money despite the measures.

The massive backlog of bills unpaid by Italy's public administration has long been a complaint by companies, which are having difficulty raising credit from banks that are facing increasingly tight credit conditions themselves.

Prime Minister Mario Monti said on Saturday that delayed payment of bills was "an unacceptable situation that has been accepted for a long time".

Monti, who continues to lead a caretaker government after an inconclusive February election, has been in talks with the European Commission, which is concerned about the impact the decree will have on Italy's deficit and its massive public debt.

The measures were originally due to be approved on Wednesday but were delayed due to doubts over how they would be funded.

Monti said on Saturday the government was committed to remaining within the European Union's fiscal deficit ceiling of 3 percent of gross domestic product.

"Economic policy is not changing course, and we don't believe that to revive the economy you have to create more public debt," he told a news conference.

Last month the government eased its deficit target for this year to 2.9 percent of GDP from a previous target of 1.8 percent, partly to allow the payments to private firms.

Local authorities lacking their own resources to pay bills will receive money from the central state, and will be asked to set out a plan to reimburse it within 30 years.

"We have to follow a path between the two requirements: to help our economy to recover ... and to maintain budget discipline," Economy Minister Vittorio Grilli said. "It's a narrow path but a path that is absolutely viable."

Grilli said the government planned to examine its fiscal performance again in September and the Economy Ministry would be able to adopt corrective measures if the deficit looked likely to breach the "precautionary" limit of 2.9 percent.

PAYMENTS COULD START MONDAY

He said payments to companies could begin as soon as the decree is published officially, expected as early as Monday.

Grilli is due to meet European Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn in Brussels on Monday to explain the new measures, a government source told Reuters.

Monti said he was hopeful Rome would be able in May to exit the European Commission's excessive deficit procedure, which imposes corrective measures on countries that exceed the deficit threshold.

Italy has been in political limbo for weeks with no party able to form a government while economic problems pile up.

Public finance data so far this year has not been encouraging, with borrowing in the first quarter higher than the same period of 2012.

The government says settling the bills will provide a cash injection for an economy now stuck in its longest recession for 20 years.

But it has proved difficult to find the money to pay the companies, most in the healthcare and construction sectors, which have total accumulated claims estimated by the Bank of Italy at some 90 billion euros at the end of 2011.

Italy will raise its target for government bond issuance in 2013 and 2014 to pay off a portion of the outstanding debts, a senior Treasury source told Reuters on Thursday.

Some industry groups criticised the decree on Saturday.

"The proposed mechanism makes it almost impossible for firms to recover what they are owed," said Carlo Sangalli, head of the small business association Rete Imprese Italia.

Giorgio Squinzi, head of Italy's biggest employers' lobby, Confindustria, told SkyTG24 television he wanted to see the final text of the decree, but warned that Italy was in a "desperate crisis" and "immediate action" was necessary.

Italy's biggest trade union, CGIL, said the decree, though slow to arrive, was a "positive signal that could provide oxygen to an economic system in serious difficulties".

Thousands of small Italian firms have gone bust since the beginning of the year, many of them unable to pay employees as they wait for the state to settle bills up to two years old.

(Additional reporting by Antonella Cinelli and Giselda Vagnoni; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reuters/businessNews/~3/hPeNblnliUk/story01.htm

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Google Glass The Mirror API - How It Works

Timothy Jordan gave developers at SXSW a sneak peek at the Google Mirror API, which is what they'll use to build services for Glass, and now you can see it as a video. ?What it reveals is that the Mirror API has more structure than you might expect.

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Everyone seems to be as much frightened by Google Glass as they are excited by it, but what of the ways in which we can program it? Surely it is going to be complicated interacting with all that sophisticated design - speech input, speech output, the gesture based UI and so on. Where to start?

The truth of the matter is that the Mirror API only permits a very limited range of interactions with the hardware and the user, but it is probably more than enough for everything but the most radical innovative app that needs to talk directly to the hardware. In brief the Mirror API is based on a simple model that makes it a lot like creating a web app. It is described reasonably well in the video.

Unfortunately 50 minutes to describe a simple API is a bit long and there is a tendency to wander off topic.?After a brief promo for Glass and a discussion of why its all really, really exciting, no mention of scary, we get to an interesting demo of Glass, at around 10 minutes into the video, with an attempt to show what it is like to wear it and use it.

The importance of this section is that it details ?the user interface and how you will be able to interact with with the device. This may not be as impressive as the promo video, but it is much more informative in that it shows Glass taking realistically poor photos and how the user has to swipe and tap at the arm of the glasses to give gesture commands.

The meat of the talk - the API and how it might be used - starts at around 15mins. ?The Mirror REST API is explained in quite a lot of detail including the POST, PUT and GET headers which is perhaps more detail than actually required. Of course, you can use any language that has the ability to work with HTTP on the server and the details of exactly how to issue a POST, PUT or GET vary.?

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The API is surprisingly high level and works in terms of "Timeline" cards. These act like the basic unit of interaction with the Glass user. They work like tiny HTML pages downloaded from the server and displayed via Glass and they? have simple menu options that the user can select via a tap. ?You can insert?cards into the user's information stream in response to a subscription notification and the user can scroll through the timeline with a swipe. ?You can also add services that allow cards, e.g. photos, to be shared to new services so the interaction can be two-way.

All of the processing, interaction and generally clever processing is performed on the application's server, which simply sends new Timeline cards and receives any that are saved to the server. This is the same sort of client-server behavior you find in an Ajax app, only much simplified.?

The full Mirror API gives you nothing more than Timeline cards, menu options on the Timeline cards, share entities and subscriptions and this is all. It is all very simple, but it might be more than enough when you add the built-in services that Glass provides.?

When you add it to the voice input capabilities of Glass and the ability to take photos, things become more interesting. For example, the user could voice dictate a reply to a question or send some voice dictated requests to the server. The user could take a photo, say, in response to a request from the server and then share it and so on.?

The real question that is unanswered at the moment is what else there might be in the API above and beyond the Timeline card?

There probably isn't going to be any deeper level of integration with Glass - no lower level interface that allows you to get at the camera or audio system directly. This isn't unreasonable from the point of view of security. The higher level abstraction that Mirror provides treats Glass as a simple I/O device organized as a sequence of Timeline cards, which is probably enough for most applications.

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Once you have understood the way that Timeline cards provide a two-way communication method between your server and the user it all makes sense. Any real work that your app performs has to be done on the server.

So now you know - what do you think you could do with Glass?

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Source: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/5726-google-glass-the-mirror-api-how-it-works.html

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Sun visits Rome streets of Di Canio?s youth and meets his hooligan fascist pal

SELF-DECLARED fascist Fabrizio Toffolo shuffles across his smart Rome apartment with a pronounced limp.

The ?capo?, or leader, of one of the world?s most feared football hooligan gangs insists he is fully recovered from being shot three times in the thigh by unknown hit men.

Instead, he blames his hobbling on a recent tennis injury.

The boss of Lazio?s Irriducibili Ultras gang has gone to a neighbouring room to fetch a treasured light blue and white home strip signed by ?your friend Paolo?.

The marker-pen message from Sunderland?s new manager Paolo Di Canio reads: ?To Toffolo. Thank you from the heart. I will never forget.?

The kind words relate to the loyal support Di Canio received in his Lazio playing days from the Irriducibili ? or the Unbeatables.

Salute ... Di Canio in 2005

This is the Italian Ultras gang Di Canio himself followed as a youth before he became star striker for Lazio, one of Rome?s two major sides, along with rivals Roma.

Last night Toffolo, 48, claimed: ?My politics are a bit like Paolo?s.

?If you define fascism in the values of country and family, yes, I?m a fascist. But if you align fascism with racism then, no, I?m not.

?We need to preserve cultures and not force them to mix on pain of being accused of being racist.

?It doesn?t stop me having a black friend. I?m not superior to him, that?s stupid.?

Toffolo insists he and Di Canio have met 15 times, the last time in 2010. In 2004 he was pictured in the Ultra gang?s T-shirt.

?Paolo?s political beliefs should not stop him managing a football club,? the hooligan boss added.

Di Canio, 44, was forced this week to deny racist or fascist links in the wake of the furore surrounding his move to Premier League Sunderland.

?I am not a racist. I do not support the ideology of fascism,? the manager said in a statement.

Support ... Toffolo (on left), helps Di Canio into crowd at Lazio game

In the past, the coach admitted being a terrace follower of the notorious Irriducibili Ultras as a youth.

In a 2002 BBC interview the ex-West Ham star admitted: ?I remember one day a big banner appeared saying Irriducibili ? it was a new group and once I saw them I thought I?d like to support them because they are very good as supporters for a team.?

Sections of Lazio?s various Ultras gangs have a long and repugnant history of racism, violence and fascist ideology.

Neo-Nazi banners are regularly paraded in the Curva Nord, the Ultras? favoured portion of Rome?s Olympic Stadium, the home ground of both Lazio and bitter local rivals Roma. Fights with rival supporters and police are common.

Roma ? who traditionally have Left-wing supporters ? have been taunted in the past with banners reading ?Auschwitz is your country, the gas chambers are your homes.?

Another read: ?Team of negroes, grandstand of Jews.?

Last November, visiting Spurs fans ? a club with traditional links to London?s Jewish community ? were attacked in a bar with knives, knuckle dusters and baseball bats.

Toffolo says of the attack, that involved Roma and Lazio fans and left three English fans in hospital: ?Unfortunately we live in a violent society. It was an incident between fans and these things happen.?

Inside the Olympic Stadium Spurs fans were goaded with chants of ?Juden Tottenham? ? using the German word for Jew. The Curva Nord is today led by the Banda Noantri Ultras, with the Irriducibili exisiting in the background since the 2009/10 season.

Old Paolo home ... in Rome

Irriducibili leader Toffolo is currently facing charges of attempted extortion for his part in an alleged plot to wrestle control of Lazio from chairman Claudio Lotito.

He denies the accusations. When under house arrest he was shot three times in the leg but refuses to speculate on who did it. Toffolo is, however, happy to sing the praises of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Known as Il Duce ? The Leader ? Mussolini was one of the founders of fascism and an ardent Lazio fan.

In 1938 Mussolini?s regime ? under the influence of Adolf Hitler ? passed anti-Jewish laws that banned them from universities and participating in many professions.

Di Canio has the word ?Dux?, the Latin equivalent of ?Duce?, tattooed on his arm.

In his autobiography he praised Mussolini as ?basically a very principled, ethical individual? who was ?deeply misunderstood?.

Di Canio added that the dictator had, however, ?turned against his sense of right and wrong?? after the early stages of his career.

Clad in a white Lacoste tracksuit, Toffolo said: ?Mussolini did good things. He was close to the people and built council houses for them.

?It?s not right that he kicked Jews out of jobs. But he must have done something right or we wouldn?t be talking about him 60 years on.?

Di Canio was fined and condemned by FIFA in 2005 for performing a straight-arm salute to the adoring Ultras in the Curva Nord for the third time that year.

Struggle ... Marco squats in old Paolo home

?It?s an ancient Roman salute but it?s obviously tied to Italian fascism,? explains Toffolo.

Di Canio explained the hand gesture, adopted by Mussolini?s fascist regime in the early 20th Century, saying: ?I am a fascist, not a racist.? He now claims he was misquoted.

Dr Matthew Goodwin, Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, last night criticised those who try to excuse Mussolini?s brand of fascism.

He said: ?When talking about the need to extend the Italian empire into Africa or Yugoslavia, Mussolini was happy to employ the same racist arguments as Hitler. In 1938 his regime enacted racial laws that were explicitly discriminatory toward Jews.

?Not every fascist is necessarily a racist, but every fascist is fundamentally opposed to democracy.?

In the working class district of Quarticciolo in Rome?s suburbs, where Di Canio honed his skills on waste ground, locals talked of his political allegiances.

One elderly resident ? who would not give his name ? said yesterday: ?The area is traditionally communist but Paolo fell in with a minority of directionless kids. Being fascist at the time was an act of rebellion.?

Standing outside the crumbling tenement block where Di Canio was raised, ex-builder Marco Giginelli, 54, who now squats in the flats, revealed: ?Mussolini built them. We were all poor here, we all struggled.?

Di Canio has spoken of his late bricklayer dad Ignazio?s struggle to raise his four sons. His mum Pierina died last year.

Di Canio shared a bed with Antonio, his oldest brother.

?When I needed to go to the bathroom, I simply wouldn?t. Bed-wetting is something I had to deal with till I was ten or 11,? he once said.

Family members who still live in in the neighbourhood declined to talk.

Local bar owner Emilio Cambi, 63, said: ?Paolo?s a bit to the Right but everyone?s entitled to their own ideas.?

o.harvey@the-sun.co.uk

Benito bar's Muss-haves

Going Duce ... Oliver with Mussolini gifts

A DECENT goal kick away from the Olympic stadium is a bar where Right-wing Lazio fans can snap up their own Il Duce memorabilia while enjoying a pre-game drink.

Owner Pasquale Moretti, 78, proudly shows me calendars, wine bottles, flags and T-shirts all bearing Benito Mussolini?s image.

Sixty-eight years after the fascist dictator was strung up with piano wire from a petrol station in Milan by Italian partisans, this Mussolini mini-mart does brisk business.

Grey-haired Pasquale insists: ?The busts sell well to older people, while the kids like the sweatshirts and flags.

?I?ve sold stuff to important civil servants and Italian diplomats.?

A 1952 law forbidding fascist parties or encouraging fascism has never been seriously enforced in Italy.

His voice raised with emotion, Pasquale told me: ?Mussolini was really good for my mother and father.

?He built council houses and lots of hospitals. He asphalted roads and connected small villages to the rail network.?

Of Mussolini?s race laws, Pasquale says: ?He had to follow the instructions of that dog Hitler.

?Racism is pitiful and wrong.?

Source: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4873862/Sun-visits-Rome-streets-of-Di-Canios-youth-and-meets-his-hooligan-fascist-pal.html

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South Africans give thanks for Mandela improvement

JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? Some South Africans have given thanks in Sunday prayers for the improvement in the health of Nelson Mandela, the former president who was discharged from a hospital after treatment for pneumonia.

Members of an outdoor congregation in Johannesburg say 94-year-old Mandela was in their thoughts often during his most recent hospitalization. The anti-apartheid leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was admitted to a hospital in the South African capital of Pretoria on the night of March 27 and was discharged on Saturday.

Knowledge Modisa, a South African advertising manager, says she and other worshippers have been putting Mandela "first" in their prayers.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison during the period of white racist rule that ended with his election to the presidency in a democratic vote in 1994.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/south-africans-thanks-mandela-improvement-094815488.html

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Open a Beer Bottle with a Nintendo 64 Controller

You only really need two things for a great party: beer and Super Smash Brothers. Plus, the two can work together in beautiful harmony: if you've lost your bottle opener, you can get that cap off with your Nintendo 64 controller.

It turns out, that expansion slot in the back (you know, the one that holds your memory card, rumble pak, and other things) is the perfect size and shape for cracking open a cold one (as if we haven't shown you enough ways to open a beer bottle). If you have one of those off-brand N64 controllers, I'd use that?you don't want to risk breaking your originals, since they don't even make them anymore. Check out the video above to see the trick in action.

HOW TO: Open Beer with an N64 Controller - DoTheBeer | JimAndNathDoTheGames via Lifehacker Australia

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/YgvtMhPV464/open-a-beer-bottle-with-a-nintendo-64-controller

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Jeff Bezos Just Made a Big Investment in Business Insider

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested a "significant" amount of money in Business Insider, according to an internal memo posted on the media company's website.

In total, Business Insider is receiving a $5 million investment from Bezos and other investors, according to the memo.

Henry Blodget, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, said in the note to employees that Bezos sees parallels between Amazon.com and the New York City based business news organization.

It's interesting to note, that Amazon's good fortune has been Blodget's good fortune once before.

In late 1998?when Blodget was a tech analyst for Oppenheimer & Co.? he accurately predicted that Amazon's stock price would hit $400. Blodget's call made him some what of a media sensation and he soon after left Oppenheimer to work at Merrill Lynch.

Blodget has remained bullish on Amazon since then and it looks like Bezos is now bullish on Blodget's media bets.

Read Blodget's full memo to employees below:

Team,

I wanted to share the details of the financing we mentioned last night. (Apologies for not being able to share them then?closing these things is an administrative nightmare, and it took a few hours longer than we hoped.)

I'm going to post about this shortly after 10am. Please don't say anything or tweet about it until after the post hits.

Basically, Jeff Bezos is making a significant investment in the company. Our existing investors are also chipping in some more. In total, we're raising $5 million.

This capital will allow us to continue to invest aggressively in many areas of the business, including editorial, tech/product, sales and marketing, subscriptions, and events. As we mentioned last night, it will also allow us to expand our office.

Jeff's investment grew out of a dinner he and I had about a year ago. We talked about the business, and he was excited about it. (He sees some parallels with Amazon). A few months later, he expressed an interest in investing. My reaction was basically "Hell, yeah!"

Jeff's vision, leadership, and philosophy at Amazon have inspired a whole generation of startups and entrepreneurs, including me. Amazon has always focused on customers first, knowing that, if they do a great job at that, everything else will take care of itself. This obsession with customers and long-term focus are the reasons that Amazon has been so successful. And this philosophy is something that we very much want to emulate. (We have two sets of customers, obviously?readers and sponsors. And we're obsessed with both).

Jeff's interest, and Business Insider's extraordinary success over the past year, are due to your efforts on behalf of our readers and our clients. We have improved and grown dramatically, and we were pretty good to begin with.

Our goal is simple: To become the best digital business publication on the planet. We're making great progress toward that. And this investment will help us get there.

Thank you again for your incredible work over the past year. Here's to an even better 2013.

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100619196

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Can Soil Replace Oil as a Source of Energy? [Excerpt]

William McDonough and Michael Braungart suggest moving beyond sustainability and into practical design that can result in energy abundance

By William McDonough and Michael Braungart

WASTED SEWAGE: Sewage treatment needs to be designed with re-use in mind, suggest William McDonough and Michael Braungart in this excerpt from their new book "The Upcycle." Image: Flickr

Excerpted from The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability?Designing for Abundance, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Copyright ? April 16, 2013, North Point Press.

Food as a battery?that is what we would like you now to consider. But before we get to the full expression of that proposal, we need to review exactly how batteries function, so you can appreciate the beauty, and potential innovation, made possible by thinking through this metaphor.

Batteries are not storage containers for electricity, as one might assume. They don?t provide power because somehow someone pumped in the electricity and locked it in, and now it?s ready for use. Instead, they contain the potential for an electromagnetic reaction, which, if engaged, creates power. The battery consists of a negative solution (the anode) and a positive solution (the cathode) separated by the ions of the electrolyte. The extra electrons in the anode want to move to the cathode, but there is no path through the electrolyte between them.

When a wire connects the negative end to the positive end of the battery, the electrons can flow through the wire, seeking their harbor in the cathode. These free-flowing electrons, in the middle of that path, power your flashlight or start your car.

The beauty of a battery is that it is potential energy, ready for your use, when and where you need it. Should the battery run out of charge, its power is recharged by reversing the process, forcing the electrons from the cathode into the anode. Then you can start again using your battery to provide electricity.

Now think of how humans conventionally create energy. We burn fossil fuels?i.e., carbon-based organic compounds (as we have said earlier, fossil fuels are ancient organic compounds)?and inadvertently turn them into carbon dioxide, among other things.

Photosynthesis is an electromagnetic reaction that frees electrons from water to turn carbon dioxide into organic compounds.¹ It is the reversal of the burning of fossil fuels. It is recharging the battery. It is recharging our power source. If people don?t allow the recharge of that battery, the world can?t recapitalize.

If one looks today at our organic battery, this biosphere, which has provided all the energy that people have used for their needs for millennia (the fossil fuels in coal and oil; the biofuels in wood), one might begin to understand the importance of recharging. Human beings have every reason to want to do so.

Get Down to Earth
Let?s look at the common worm. As a worm makes its sinuous way through the soil, it aerates, tills, plows, and fertilizes. Of course, it doesn?t intend to do these things, but it seems to have been designed, by nature, to have beneficial effects in the course of every single thing it does.

Worms are avid consumers. They eat their own weight in food each day. Yet they are enormously helpful to ecosystems (our use of ?yet? indicates how much people have come to associate ?consuming? with destruction and waste, which is certainly not the case in nature). Worm castings?what they leave behind?are ?waste? only for a moment before they become ?food?: These castings are rich in nutrients, extremely rich?they contain higher levels of nitrogen, phosphates, and potash than the soil around them. The lowly earthworm is one of the planet?s most valuable creatures (and apparently one of Darwin?s favorite organisms).

Compare this highly effective and evolved interaction with soil to humanity?s most recent interactions with soil. Humans have the capacity to be similarly effective as earthworms. One way is to add nutrients, and we could easily do so, but so far, for the most part, we aren?t.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=5efbaca025279578c764f0f5d008cea7

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