Greek default moves closer after negotiations on voluntary restructuring breakdown; France and Austria lose their triple-A rating as S&P criticise handling of eurozone crisis

S&P downgrades euro bailout fund from AAA; Finnish Foreign Minister slams new fiscal pact as ???unnecessary and harmful???

Could you live without daily electronic conveniences -- Twitter, Facebook, email, texting and more -- for 90 days? Jake P. Reilly, a 24-year-old copywriting student at the Chicago Portfolio School, did just that. From October to December, he unplugged from...

So, Loma Linda, place in California where the health nuts hang out. And half the city are 7 th day Adventists. And McDonalds whishes to p[ollute the heaqlthy air of this mostly vegetarian town with a store selling burgers and the like. We know how this is going to turn out, don’t we? The freedom

We’ve not often LibLinked through to the ‘Breaking News’ section of Peterbrook Primary School’s website. In fact we never have before. But their report of Nick Clegg’s visit, alongside local Solihull MP Lorely Burt, deserves a wide audience, and here’s a snippet: Together with Solihull M.P Lorely Burt and an entourage of press and media

Today Boris Johnson has claimed that he has protected "police officers from cuts". This is completely untrue and at odds with the Metropolitan Police's own figures. The latest figures from the police have confirmed that Boris Johnson has cut 1,782 police officers in the last 18 months. * In March 2010 there were from 33,260 police officers in London; * By October 2011 there were just 31,478 p...

The debate in the US about this SOPA legislation and the protests about it ("Stop Online Piracy Act"), has reignited debate in some circles about intellectual property as such. I have just taken delivery of this book, Justifying Intellectual Property, by Robert P. Merges, in which he gives an ethical, as well as economic, defence of IP (patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc). I have not read it in ...

They said it would never be agreed. Then they said it would never be launched. Then they said it would fail. When it was a success, the euro-haters still insisted that the single currency was a recipe for economic chaos and political instability. The phobes are proving to be wrong again. At a time when so much of Europe's political leadership is in flux, the single currency is the steadying p...

As expected S&P last night downgraded the EFSF, the eurozone’s bailout fund, from AAA to AA . The move is likely to lead to higher borrowing costs for the fund which will feed through to higher rates on any loans it pays out, reducing its effectiveness.

But this is to miss the big point. S&P and its rival Moody’s have a power……What gives S&P and Moody’s such immense power is not their brilliant analysis: it is simply the function they perform. Whether prime minister or CEO, if you want to borrow from bond markets you need a credit report to show