1 Greece may need €60bn in funds and decades of debt
relief (Phillip Inman, Larry Elliott & Alberto Nardelli in The Guardian) The
International Monetary fund has electrified the referendum debate in Greece
after it conceded that the crisis-ridden country needs up to €60bn of extra
funds over the next three years and large-scale debt relief to create “a
breathing space” and stabilise the economy.
Before Sunday’s knife-edge referendum that the
country’s creditors have cast as a vote on whether it wants to keep the euro,
the IMF revealed a deep split with Europe as it warned that Greece’s debts were
“unsustainable”. Fund officials said they would not be prepared to put a proposal
for a third Greek bailout to its board unless it included both a commitment to
economic reform and debt relief.
According to the IMF, Greece should have a 20-year
grace period before making any debt repayments and final payments should not
take place until 2055. It would need €10bn to get through the next few months
and a further €50bn after that. Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras welcomed
the IMF’s intervention saying that what the IMF said was never put to him
during negotiations.
Tsipras is campaigning for a no vote in the
referendum on Sunday, which is officially on whether to accept a tough earlier
bailout offer, to impress on EU negotiators that spiralling poverty and a collapse
in everyday business activity across Greece has meant further austerity should
be ruled out of any new rescue package. Greece’s finance minister, Yanis
Varoufakis, pledged to resign if his country votes yes to the plan proposed by
the EU, the European Central Bank and what appears to be an increasingly reluctant
IMF.
2 Airbus plans second
unit in China (BBC) Airbus has signed a
deal for its second factory in China as it expands further its growing
relationship with the world's second-largest economy. The new cabin-completion
factory for A330 jetliners is worth a reported €150m ($166.3m; £106.5m) and is
aimed at attracting new orders for Airbus.
The plant will be built
alongside an existing site in the city of Tianjin. Earlier this week, China
signed a deal for 45 new Airbus planes worth more than $11bn. "The
signature of this [latest] framework agreement on the A330 completion and
delivery centre will open a new chapter of strategic cooperation on wide-body
aircraft with China," said Airbus' president Fabrice Brégier,
3 Status updates are personality fingerprints
(Psychology Today/Khaleej Times) Every message posted to a social media site is
like a fingerprint--a fleeting trace of the poster. A close analysis of these
words, researchers are showing, can enrich our sense of who the users are,
online and off.
A team of investigators
recently dug into millions of Facebook updates to get a better sense of how
personality reads. That is, which words and phrases do specific types of
people--the darkly neurotic, say, or the pleasantly agreeable--tend to use when
communicating with friends. To find out, they cross-referenced the status
updates of thousands of users with the results of a personality test those
users accessed via the app MyPersonality.
“The results let you
see what personality factors like conscientiousness look like in everyday
life,” says Gregory Park, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. The
analysis also yielded some surprises. Conscientiousness, for example, is
associated with planning and a tendency to get things done, but much of the
language highly conscientious people tend to use relates to R and R. “I was
pretty surprised to see words like weekend and relaxing,” Park says.
For analysts of
important human variables like personality, health, or political attitudes,
social media offer naturalistic samples of how people interact with the world.
“More and more,” says psychologist Molly Ireland of Texas Tech University, “the
language that we are analyzing truly represents what people are thinking and
feeling throughout the day.”
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