Day: March 20, 2016

    With the Budget out of the way the focus switches to something vastly more important: Brexit. Ten years from now no one will care about what was in the Budget, but we will all remember what happened on 23 June 2016. There are two insuperable problems about this debate. One is that many people have such strong views they are not going to be swayed by mere economic arguments. So we will have more scare stories of millions of jobs being at risk were we to come out, and more visions of sunlit uplands of economic freedom if we did. But if the decision is emotional, rather than economic, there is not much that economists can contribute. The other problem is that the economic uncertainties are so huge, that more or less any set of calculations is open to challenge. We have form o...

    The arrest of Salah Abdeslam in a Brussels neighborhood on Friday marks the end of the pursuit of Europe's most wanted man. Abdeslam was cornered by Belgian police and wounded in a firefight before being taken by authorities. Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French national, is the only one left alive of the 10 assailants who carried out last November's shocking Paris terror attacks, which killed 130 people and wounded dozens more. The terrorists, all European nationals, were proxies of the Islamic State, and it's hoped that investigators can piece together more about the plot now that Abdeslam is in custody. The political tremors that followed the massacres in the French capital reached myriad countries in the West. In the U.S., the attacks immediately fed into the talking points ...

    A bus carrying foreign students has crashed and killed 14 people in northeastern Spain - and British students are feared to be among the injured. At least 43 were hurt when the coach collided with a car and overturned on the AP7 highway near Freginals around 6am local time. The injured, aged between 22 and 29, were from Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Turkey, Ukraine and Barcelona, local media said. Four were reportedly seriously hurt in the crash, which happened around halfway between Valencia and Barcelona. Two of the injured people were in the car. They are being treated at hospitals in Tortosa, Amposta, Reus and Tarragona, officials said. The bus, carrying 56 people including the driver, was returning from the renowned Fallas fireworks festival in Valencia when it crashe...