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The Shortlist Daily

The best reads from around the world

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Lead item

Tornadoes blast Oklahoma "Violent tornadoes swept through towns just south of Oklahoma City Monday afternoon, killing at least 51 people, including at least 20 children, and laying waste to numerous buildings, including more than one elementary school." (Also: Time lapse video of Oklahoma tornado)

Wall Street Journal
Natural Disaster
 

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

General item

Apple's web of tax shelters saved it billions, panel finds "Even as Apple became the nation's most profitable technology company, it avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen... Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless — exempt from taxes, record-keeping laws and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world."

New York Times
 

Obama's Keystone decision "If we take the future at all seriously, which is to say as a time period that someone is going to have to live in, then we need to leave a big percentage of the planet's coal and oil and natural gas in the ground." (Elizabeth Kolbert)

New Yorker
Climate Change
 

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

General item

Syphilis: How the French disease conquered the world "Detective work by writers such as Deborah Hayden count Schubert, Schumann, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Flaubert, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Wilde and Joyce with contentious evidence around Beethoven and Hitler. Her larger question – how might the disease itself have affected their creative process – is a tricky one." (Sarah Dunant)

Guardian
Disease, Health
 

The man who nearly broke the internet "Kamphuis displayed a Napoleonic sense of grandeur. 'He claimed he had diplomatic status,' said the Spanish police officer who led the operation. 'He said he was the telecommunications minister and foreign minister of a place called the Cyberbunker Republic. He didn't seem to be joking.'"

Guardian
 

And finally