It’s not just me who says it, it’s the Office of Personnel Management — and Lee Sigelman at Monkey Cage. (These are not the people who run the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but rather services like Voice of America, but as Sigelman notes, Ken Tomlinson moved from the CPB to these guys).
Via opendemocracy, this interesting piece on defamation costs worldwide:
Comparatively with other jurisdictions, England and Wales did not fare well in a recent Oxford University report called A Comparative Study of Costs in Defamation Proceedings Across Europe. The report was commissioned by the Daily Mail and found that CFAs are making defamation in England and [...]
If you read Italian newspapers, you’ll have seen lists of the wealthiest parliamentarians, based on their tax records for 2007.
I wondered where this information was coming from, so I checked on the Senate web site.
Apparently, disclosure like this has been required since 1982 — legge del 5 luglio 1982, n. 441, if you’re interested. All [...]
My friend Andrea has the online cover story in the Tribune at the moment — go check it out.
I’ve recently been investigating whethether high rates of abstentions and missing data cause problems for roll-call analysis of the Italian parliament. Here are some figures for the 14th Camera. Of the 1,141,673 possible votes (1657 rollcalls with 689 individuals):
23.5% were votes in favour
51.6% were votes against
1.8% were registered abstentions
23.1% were absent — that is, that [...]