Britain and Gibraltar draw battle lines over proposed ... - Online Betting

A new internet gambling dispute has raised its head between Gibraltar and Britain. With a lot of online betting companies running their operations in the tax haven of the British territory at the tip of the Iberian Peninsula, their status may be placed under?pressure now.

The battle?lines have been drawn following?British Prime Minister David Cameron?s plan announcement that a 15 per cent tax will be placed on British customers?placing bets through Gibraltar based?betting sites.

Naturally the officials and the executives?operating in the territory?s online betting industry aren?t too happy at the news. The concern is that the proposed tax represents nothing but an unfair revenue take from the British Government, reaping the benefits from their operations in their tiny outpost. Britain doesn?t have?say over the trade?and industry issues in?Gibraltar,?who set their own taxes.?However, they?won?t have a say over what the British Government?do with their taxation on Britons residing in Britain.

The proposed new?tax from David Cameron, which he wants in place by December 2014,?has been designed to level the playing field for British bookmakers who take bets in Britain.?Anyone placing a bet in Britain is subject to?a fifteen per cent tax, but bets placed on?any of the many Gibraltar based sites aren?t.?The levies?required by Gibraltar based companies is a paltry 1 per cent in comparison.

The tax would be ?clearly against the common-sense logic of electronic commerce,? said Phill Brear, Gibraltar?s gambling commissioner. He said that about 60 percent of online bets by Britons were placed through Gibraltar sites. ?We now hear a lot of talk in the U.K. about creating a level playing field. But you can in fact never level the field between high-street shops and online services.?

If the plan does come in, then Gibraltar companies would then face the same rules as betting-shop operators back in Britain, like William Hill and Ladbrokes. However, because both William Hill and Ladbrokes have online operations based among Gibraltar?s online wagering industry, they would get ensnared by the new tax.

The change would put ?a huge and unwanted cost on our business,? said Steve Buchanan, who heads the Gibraltar operations of Ladbrokes.

So the taxation saving by moving?business to Gibraltar may now be trimmed.?Online betting exchange Betfair, when they moved their operations to Gibraltar in 2011,?announced that they would be?able to save around??20 million on taxes alone, because there are also other tax saving on?other aspects of business as well over there. The online betting industry is vital to Gibraltar.

Around 15 percent of Gibraltar?s $1.89 billion economy is provided through online betting, and gambling companies provide jobs for about 2,500 of Gibraltar?s 30,000 residents. Four more Gibraltar-based online betting operators entered the territory?over the last twelve months alone, raising the total to 25 ? each of which might operate several Web sites.

So this argument looks to rumble on for some time. On one side there is Gibraltar, who thinks that the protectionist measures by the British Government violates the Union?s free market rules, and could force punters to use less regulated?markets. On the other hand there is the British Government?trying to protect the British based operators who?are having to pay taxes anyway, and who also believe it will?help to control betting irregularities as well.

?These proposals will ensure that British consumers enjoy consistent standards of protection, regardless of where a gambling business is based,? the British minister for sport, Hugh Robertson, said last year.

Source: http://www.online-betting.me.uk/blog/britain-and-gibraltar-draw-battle-lines-over-proposed-uk-gambling-taxation.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=britain-and-gibraltar-draw-battle-lines-over-proposed-uk-gambling-taxation

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Apps of the Week: Scam School, Sixaxis Controller, House of the Dead Overkill and more!

Your weekly look at the apps we're using from day to day

You probably know it by this point, but every week we take just a little time for each of the Android Central writers to show off one of the apps they've been using on their own device in the previous week. They may not be the most popular or well-known, but they work for us, and we think that merits letting the readers know about them as well.

Another great random assortment of apps awaits you after the break, so stick around and see how we did with our picks this week.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/ZQJe5ZwJTzg/story01.htm

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Lawmakers Propose Raising State's Legal Smoking Age To 21 - NY1

Updated?04/28/2013 05:28 PM

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City and state lawmakers are joining forces in an attempt to make buying tobacco as hard as buying alcohol.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a mayoral candidate, joined state Senator Diane Savino and Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal in City Hall on Sunday to announce legislation that would raise the minimum age to buy tobacco products to 21 statewide, from 18.

They say 90 percent of people buying cigarettes for minors are between the ages of 18 and 20.

The state Health Department also says 88 percent of adult smokers today began smoking before the of 19.

"By raising the minimum age to legally purchase tobacco products in New York City from 18 to 21, the same age it is to start drinking, we could potentially reduce the smoking rate among 18- to 20-year-olds by 55 percent and reduce the smoking rate among 14- to 17-year-olds by two-thirds," Quinn said.

The move comes on the heels of similar legislation that was introduced in the city last week.

A council hearing on the city legislation is scheduled for Thursday.

Source: http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/181183/lawmakers-propose-raising-state-s-legal-smoking-age-to-21

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Beastie Boys Writing 'Multidimensional' Memoir

Surviving members Mike D and Ad-Rock will release oral history in 2015.
By Gil Kaufman

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1706452/beastie-boys-memoir.jhtml

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"we are disenfranchised by the concepts of invisibility and ...

For a long time I've been suspicious about the desire to make interfaces "invisible" or "intuitive." Mainly I think that, when it comes to interacting with the world or with information at a level above randomly waving your arms and legs around, there's no such thing as an intuitive gesture that could be used by digital devices or wearables to trigger some action.

Timo Arnall makes an excellent point about invisibility:

Intentionally hiding the phenomena and materiality of interfaces, smoothing over the natural edges, seams and transitions that constitute all technical systems, entails a loss of understanding and agency for both designers and users of computing. Lack of understanding leads to uncertainty and folk-theories that hinder our ability to use technical systems, and clouds the critique of technological developments.

As systems increasingly record our personal activity and data, invisibility is exactly the wrong model?. [A]s both users and designers of interface technology, we are disenfranchised by the concepts of invisibility and disappearance.

The other issue I've tried to raise is that invisibility isn't a quality that's inherent in an object (unless that object actually IS invisible in a Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak kind of way). Instead, we should understand invisibility as a product of familiarity and skilled use. As John Pavlus puts it,

A pen is ?intuitive? because you?ve used a zillion pens, pencils, crayons, markers, and stick-shaped inscriptor-tools in your life. A computer mouse is ?intuitive? for the same reason (if you were born in or after my generation). If you grew up 500 years ago in an agrarian society, you might think a plow or a scythe was pretty damned intuitive.

A user interface on a digital divide should be invisible in the way a keyboard can be invisible to me. The keyboard is something I no longer have to think about because I've spend 40 years using it, not because the QWERTY keyboard is in some way "intuitive." (Indeed, the keyboard is so familiar I now spell with my hands.)

Or as Arnall argues,?interfaces

may become normalised in use, effectively invisible over time, but that will only happen if we design them to be legible, readable, understandable and to foreground culture over technology. To build trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the background.

This is what invisibility should be: not a design tactic that tries to obscure complexity or seal it behind aqua icons and backs that have no screws (hi, iPod!), but a strategy that understands that things become invisible when we use and trust them well enough to not have to think about them any more.

Source: http://www.contemplativecomputing.org/2013/04/we-are-disenfranchised-by-the-concepts-of-invisibility-and-disappearance-arguments-against-invisible-interfaces.html

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The Bling Ring Trailer: Emma Watson Wants to Rob You!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/the-bling-ring-trailer-emma-watson-wants-to-rob/

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Streisand feted by Clinton, Minnelli and friends

NEW YORK (AP) ? "Ever since I can remember," Barbra Streisand told a crowd at Lincoln Center Monday night, "people have been calling me bossy and opinionated."

She continued: "Maybe that's because I am. Three cheers for bossy women!" The crowd roared.

Of course, the crowd ? which included the singer's friends, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, was roaring at pretty much anything connected to her all evening, as the legend of song and screen was honored for her film career with the 40th annual Chaplin Award from the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

The Streisand fans especially loved the film highlights, which covered everything from "Funny Girl" and "The Way We Were" to "The Owl and the Pussycat," "What's Up, Doc?" and "Meet the Fockers."

And then there was "Yentl" ? the first Hollywood movie to be directed, produced, written and starred in by a woman, as the crowd was reminded.

Streisand spoke of how hard it was to get funding to make the film. Producers, it seemed, weren't as passionate as she was about the tale of a Jewish girl in Eastern Europe who so longed to study the Talmud that she disguised herself as a boy. It was only when Streisand agreed to turn the movie into a musical ? and most importantly, sing in it herself ? that she was able to go ahead with the project.

"It's funny how things always come back to music," she said. "How it saves me."

Streisand, who turns 71 this week, is one of the few entertainers to have won Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards. Although she is perhaps most loved for her beautiful singing voice, she told the audience that as a young child, what she wanted most was to be an actress. But nobody really wanted "a 15-year-old Medea," she noted. "Thank God I was given a good voice," she said, explaining how her singing opened the doors to acting.

Not that acting was so easy in the early going. At age 16, she recalled, she had to show in a scene that she was in love with a man. But she was not attracted to the actor, she said, so she placed a piece of chocolate cake nearby ? so she could stare at that longingly, instead.

For the awards gala, which raised $2 million for the film society ? twice the previous high amount for the annual event ? Streisand was serenaded by Wynton Marsalis on trumpet, by Liza Minnelli, and by Tony Bennett, who closed the show with the song, "Smile," fittingly a Charlie Chaplin song. Also appearing onstage to praise their friend and colleague were Michael Douglas, Catherine Deneuve (last year's honoree), Amy Irving, Blythe Danner, George Segal, Ben Stiller, Pierce Brosnan and Kris Kristofferson.

In video clips, Robert Redford ? her "The Way We Were" co-star ? spoke of how he'd been warned before making the movie that Streisand was "a pain," but discovered that she was "totally engaging to act with, beautiful, thorough and skilled." And Omar Sharif, who played Nick Arnstein in "Funny Girl," gave perhaps the most moving video tribute, talking about how incredible it was that he, an Egyptian actor, played a New York Jew in the 1968 film, and how she had become such a good friend. "We used to go to the cinema together," Sharif said. "We paid for our tickets and sat there and watched."

It was Bill Clinton, though, who got the last word ? before Streisand, that is ? praising the singer as driven, in the best way.

"Every great person is driven," the former president said. "But if that person has massive talent, big brains and a bigger heart, you want to go along for the ride."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/streisand-feted-clinton-minnelli-friends-045250728.html

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