WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 - The World Bank has concluded that New Zealand is the most business-friendly nation in the world and that Serbia and Montenegro made the biggest pro-business changes last year.

New Zealand Named Best Nation for Business - New York Times

Pro-life campaigners have condemned a controversial decision to grant permission to UK scientists to create a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers.

The cloned baby with two mothers

In a report to be presented at the World Bank today, a group that includes senior government officials from 13 countries will urge nations to adopt open-information technology standards as a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation.

The 33-page report is a road map for creating national policies on open technology standards, and comes at a time when several countries - and some state governments - are pursuing plans to reduce their dependence on proprietary software makers, notably Microsoft, by using more free, open-source software.

Plan by 13 Nations Urges Open Technology Standards

The decision to introduce cellphone service in the city's underground subway stations touched off a flurry of interest in the telecommunications industry yesterday, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began soliciting bids for a 10-year contract that will involve immense technical complexity and probably be worth $50 million to $100 million.

So far, they're only talking about stations, not tunnels.

Race Is on for Cellular System for the Subway

People like Ms. Skhakhane have made Africa the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. From 1999 through 2004, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million, from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent. South Africa, the continent's richest nation, accounted for one-fifth of that growth.

Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of just 34 percent in that period.

Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century

Anybody who pumps a barrel out of a reservoir today to sell at $60 could make three times as much money if they just left it in the ground another two years before pumping it out. The same is true for anybody with above-ground storage facilities-- they're throwing away money, and lots of it, for every barrel they sell at $60 that they could have instead stored for two years and sold for $200. If oil producers did respond to these very strong incentives by holding back oil from today's market, the effect would be to drive today's price up.

Really good. I don't believe in peak oil: short a cosmic-scale disaster, the supply isn't going to dry up suddenly. Instead, I think the price will steadily increase over time as the remaining reserves become more and more expensive to exploit. At the same time, alternative tech is going to get more investment and become progressively cheaper. At some point, the curves cross and that's that.

Econbrowser: How to talk to an economist about peak oil

The American Beverage Association recommended yesterday that soda and other sweetened beverages be pulled from vending machines at elementary schools across the country, saying the industry needs to help fight the increasing rate of childhood obesity.

Coke doesn't want to look like Phillip Morris in 20 years. Talk about marketing a harmful, habit-forming product to children...

Trade group: Pull soda from elementary schools

WHEN Congress comes back from its summer recess, one of the first things Senate Republicans will try to do, again, is kill the estate tax.

A major harm of repealing the estate tax that is not mentioned here
is the huge amount of money that will be sucked out of things like university endowments, etc, as a result. As it stands, folks "might as well" bequest money to these things because it'd be taxed away otherwise.

Death Tax? Double Tax? For Most, It's No Tax

In a pattern that has become familiar in the three years since Iran's once-secretive nuclear facilities became public, the United Nations nuclear agency expressed "serious concern" today about Tehran's nuclear program, but Iran responded that it would not curtail it.

Is it possible that Iran really isn't trying to make weapons or is this whole thing a farce? Its too bad that the US blew what little cred it had on Iraq which turned out to have none and now, politically, its going to be much harder for the US to try to make this stick. Which, I suppose, is the reason that we're standing behind the EU3 and saying, "yeah, what they said."

One idea that's been floating around the "new/better nukes" crowd
that appears in Wired on a pretty regular basis is to have a single global nuclear fuel supplier. A single operation under heavy
supervision on all sides would provide *everyone's* fuel and handle spent fuel afterwards. Anyone who's truly only interested in civilian power production should be amenable to such a plan, at least in principle.

U.N. Nuclear Regulators and Iran Spar Over Fuel Program

To me FOSS as Richard Stallman has set in motion with the GNU GPL is about the greater good of humanity as opposed to the selfish greed of a few people. The GPL has insured the freedom of users while showing that the closed development model has real flaws. Let's not lose site of what's important. Our community provides the moral center at probably the most pivitol point in history. 500 years ago the printing press ended the dark ages with an unprecedented sharing of ideas. The internet offers dramatically more potential. Thankfully Microsoft was late to the party and FOSS was there to prevent them getting dominant control of the new international currency, information access. The battle for the freedom of access for us and our children is not over. We need to cooperate to insure the enemies of freedom don't overcome us, not attack those who should be our allies. Wars have been lost over just such foolishness.

Linked from Groklaw.

Qt, the GPL, Business and Freedom