Good old Setty tweeted the other day about Doing Business in Venezuela. According to its mission, Doing Business is a "project [that] provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 189 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level." Doing Business ranks Venezuela in 181 place, out of 189 economies measured. That is, according to Doing Business there's only 8 other economies in the world where, overall, doing business is worse in every measurable aspect than in Venezuela.

Last Friday, the new board of Cadena Capriles, a media conglomerate that owns among other things Venezuela's largest newspaper, announced that a company called Latam Media Holding had recently acquired Cadena Capriles. The announcement came on the back of a previous one, made roughly five months ago by former CEO and owner Miguel Angel Capriles Lopez (a.k.a. "Michu"), claiming that the group of companies had been sold.

Countless words have been printed in the last few days about Angela Merkel's reaction to the news that the US government bugged her phone, and President Obama having even been briefed about in 2010 and doing nothing to "halt the operation" by the NSA. In this post Wikileaks and Snowden era we live in, that ever so defining and most useful of politicians' treats -hypocrisy- no longer cuts mustard. For Merkel's "outrage" is just that: utter hypocrisy. To illustrate the point, I shall provide an example that may have escaped Frau Merkel's "public indignation" radar.

I get my F1 news mainly from Joe Saward. His report of the last grand prix from Suzuka almost made me choke, because of this claim regarding Williams F1 Team and PDVSA...