les of European cultures and civilization. Turkey itself has got one foot in Europe and one foot in Asia. The question is do we want it to live under European norms and laws or tell it go off and imitate the worst performances of its neighbors?Someone else is maybe thinking that bigscreen TVs count as a business expense. And a surprising number of people are figuring the Internal Revenue Service won't notice if they don't file tax forms at all.To Republican leaders in Congress the IRS is a band of thugs with pencils. Congressional investigations have indeed exposed IRS abuses ranging from pursuit of taxes that have already been paid, to a chronic inability to provide accurate advice to public inquiries.But if their behavior is any guide, many US taxpayers really consider the IRS the gang that can't add straight. They cheat often, and imaginatively, on tax forms. Fully 17 cents of every dollar owed in federal taxes is never paid, according to IRS figures.Given the chances of being audited, which have fallen by hal
UGG Bailey Button Triplet ability indicators.'' Based on their definition of sustainability as ''longterm cultural, economic, and environmental health and vitality,'' the group has come up with a preliminary list of 20 indicators of sustainability for the Seattle area. The list includes many of the same categories used by other cities, but there are also some highly unusual ones, such as ''employment concentration'' (the percentage of the King County labor force employed by the top 10 employers), amount of work required to meet basic needs (number of hours of work at the average local wage), number of children living in poverty, the housingaffordability ratio (median income compared with housing prices), and healthcare expenditures per capita.In a number of these cases Jacksonville, Pasadena, and Oregon in particular measurement of local quality of life has already stimulated new methods of making city or state government more responsive and accountable. It has fueled the creation of strategic plans based on community goalsetting initia
Moncler Bags up from 1 percent in April of 2004.Economists believe the continual rate hikes are finally starting to act as a brake on the economy.The expectation is for economic growth to slow from 5 percent in the first quarter to about 3 percent for the rest of the year. Tuesday saw yet another sign of rising interest rates: Existing home sales in May dipped 1.2 percent, the third drop in five months. The Conference Board, a business research group, also predicted Tuesday a slowing economy even as its consumer confidence index has edged up slightly.If the economic data continues to soften, economists anticipate the Fed will want to pause and try to judge how much the higher cost of borrowing money is crimping economic activity.At this point the Fed knows there is enough tightening in the pipeline to arrest inflationary pressures and prevent the situation from getting out of control, says Anthony Chan, a New Yorkbased economist at JP Morgan Private Client Services.The only reason the Fed has not stopped is the markets ?C the
UGG Ultra Tall blicized projects like the bear park.Yet the willingness of Western animal lovers to give money to Four Paws is not lost on Bulgarians. And in a land where 70 percent of the population lives in or near poverty, such funding priorities can be a source of cynicism about Western values.In the West, when you say animal protection, people are very excited and interested, says Christoph Eberharter, a biologist from Austria and project assistant for Four Paws. They are happy people, lucky and rich. In Bulgaria, people are so poor they say 'We want to take care of our own house first.' Western governments and private organizations spent more than $20 million on projects designed to build civil society in Bulgaria in 2000.But few have achieved the visibility of the $250,000 bear park, which opened in November near the village of Belitsa, in southwest Bulgaria. Already, there are plans for expansion.The park has a visitor center and six bears, including the new arrivals. Each bear's space is surrounded by two fences and in
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