“The economy appears to be at a turning point,” the commission said. It forecast growth of 0.2% for the July to September quarter, with Germany and France continuing to grow and Italy exiting recession. The commission also forecast the UK economy, which is outside the eurozone, would grow by 0.2% during the third quarter, marking the end of recession. Separately, official figures showed that eurozone industrial production fell by 0.3% in July compared with the previous month.

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LONDON (Reuters) – Most people around the world support significantly increasing government spending to counter the economic crisis, according to a 20-nation opinion poll released on Monday. The findings will bring solace to leaders such as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who have backed multi-billion-dollar stimulus programmes to try to lift their economies out of recession. G20 finance leaders agreed this month they would not remove emergency stimulus until the recovery was well entrenched. The survey of more than 22,000 people in 20 countries for the BBC World Service found that, on average, 60 percent favoured “significantly increasing government…

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Earlier this year I began receiving a lot of inquiries about translating the site into other languages. I’ve been forced to put off the launch since I was busy working on other stuff but last week I finally got around to launching the French version of AllFacebook. Right now I am being helped by the team over at KRDS. This is more of an experiment than anything else but I’m pretty excited to expand internationally.

We’ve also had a number of other people reach out about producing a translated version of the site. If you are interested in creating a…

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For those who watched the Tour de France, you may have been pleasantly surprised to see some cool tech. Nike was using a robot to paint pictures on the street in chalk dot matrix style. It was accepted by the general public as new and innovative, as well as generally cool. In the hacker community though, a bit of trouble began to brew. The Chalkbot bears more than a passing resemblance to a project called GraffitiWriter. GraffitiWriter was a bot initially designed to protest the militarization of robotics. As it turns out, one of the early developers of the…

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In the days leading up to the European Central Bank’s rate decision on July 3rd, 2008, many political leaders around Europe publically pleaded for the ECB to leave interest rates unchanged. Among others, French President Sarkozy voiced the opinion that the recent rise in inflation was due primarily to the spike in commodity prices.¹ As such, Sarkozy suggested that though hiking interest rates would not really help in lowering inflation, it would adversely impact growth. The ECB went ahead and hiked interest rates anyway, and looking back now, a month and a half later, we can begin to asses…

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