[Quote]:

The world’s four major audit firms could face break-up under draft European Commission (EC) proposals.

Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC could be forced to split into audit and consulting arms.

EC commissioner Michel Barnier said there were conflicts of interest and issues exposed by the financial crisis that needed addressing.

[Quote]:

Efforts to censor the Internet are increasing in the Western world. In the US lawmakers are currently discussing legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that could take out The Pirate Bay, or disable access to it. In several other countries such as Italy, Finland and Belgium, courts have already ordered Internet Providers to block their users’ access to the site. Demonstrating the futility of these efforts, a small group of developers today releases a browser add-on called “The Pirate Bay Dancing.”

[Quote]:

Michele Bachmann has had her fair share of foreign policy stumbles, but she just hit a whole new level.

According to a tweet from NBC News’ Jamie Novogrod, Bachmann responded to the recent raiding of the British embassy in Iran, by saying that if she was President, she would close down the U.S. embassy there.

There’s just one problem: The U.S. has not had an embassy in Iran ever since the Iranian hostage crisis, when revolutionaries from the budding Islamic state held 52 Americans for 444 days.

[Quote (Nick Hanauer op-ed in BusinessWeek):

It is a tenet of American economic beliefs, and an article of faith for Republicans that is seldom contested by Democrats: If taxes are raised on the rich, job creation will stop.

Trouble is, sometimes the things that we know to be true are dead wrong. For the larger part of human history, for example, people were sure that the sun circles the Earth and that we are at the center of the universe. It doesn’t, and we aren’t. The conventional wisdom that the rich and businesses are our nation’s “job creators” is every bit as false.

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc.

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

[Quote]:

First, the Burzynski clinic says it has severed its relationship with Marc Stephens, which seems like a good idea. Sending threatening, ungrammatical, frothing emails to scientists and skeptics who raise technical questions about medical therapy makes your therapy look like woo that can only be defended with intimidation rather than science.

Second, the clinic has released a list of Burzynski’s "publications" on his therapy, prompting a scientist named Jen McCreight to dig through the list and determine compelling these publications are.

McCreight’s findings aren’t good. Burzynski’s publications are either review papers (which add no new findings to the literature), publications in zero-impact or low-impact journals (that is, journals that aren’t cited by other oncologists), publications in "alternative medicine" journals (McCreight quotes Tim Minchin: "You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine."); unreviewed talk-proposals submitted without peer review to reputable journals; or unreviewed conference proceedings.

Summary: their shit doesn’t work.

[Quote]:

Don’t sue us, sue them.