Around the Bloc: Obama Ice Cream
A new Russian brand is only the latest in a line of controversial usages of the U.S. president’s image.
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A new Russian brand is only the latest in a line of controversial usages of the U.S. president’s image.
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Naming Russians cited in Panama Papers may have been the last straw for the independent media group.
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Fans of the Trabant, the iconic East German car, now have a place in the Czech Republic to show their love.
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FIFA membership could soon follow, as the former Serbian province gains increasing acceptance by major sports organizations.
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The IT sector has emerged from post-Soviet doldrums to become a rare success story in the economically challenged country.
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Police discover grenades ahead of commemoration of bloody 2014 clashes.
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For second year in a row, authorities prevent “Night Wolves” club from driving through the country, irking Moscow.
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As tensions reached the boiling point in Nagorno-Karabakh last month, the breakaway region saw support from some unlikely allies: U.S. state governments.
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Looking forward to elections, Bloc Against Islam looks West for a model.
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Saint Gregory of Calabria was the first abbot of the Basilian monastery, Aachen-Burtscheid, which was founded in the year 997 by Emperor Otto III, not far from his royal residence. He was born sometime between the years 930 and 940 in the territory that had been under the administration of the Byzantine Empire. According to historical sources, he was a Greek, originating from the southern Italian town of Cerchiara. According to the earlier legends (Vita posterior), he was the brother of the emperor’s mother, Theophanu, but according to today's research, he actually came from a wealthy family in Calabria. The Greek colonisation of the southern part of the Apennine peninsula, in the 9th and 10th centuries, was an interesting phenomenon. When the Saracens began to displace them around the year 990, Gregory came to Rome, where he has settled in the monastery of St. Alexius and Boniface on the Aventine. In Rome, in the year 996, the young Emperor Otto III met with Abbot Gregory. In the “Eternal City”, where Gregory acted as a preacher and teacher, he had to profoundly impress the monarch with his piety. In the same year, the Emperor Otto III summoned him to the establishment of a monastery near his palace, as an imperial document, from 6th February 1000, talks about it.
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Tamás Fedeles (born 1974), after passing the maturity exams in the Franciscan Grammar School of Pelbárt Temesvári, in Esztergom, studied theology in Pécs. After receiving a degree, he studied history at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pécs. In 2005, in the field of Medieval Studies at the Institute of History of the University of Szeged, he defended his thesis, entitled “The members of Pécs chapter, in the late Middle Ages.” Tamás Fedeles is currently a member of several historical societies, he is participating in international investigations, and he has completed several long-term foreign stays, especially in Germany and in the Vatican. He deals with ecclesiastical medieval history, historical auxiliary sciences and the misrepresenting of historical sources. He is the author and co-author of several monographs: Isten nevében utazunk. Zarándokok, búcsújárás, kegyhelyek a középkorban. Pécs 2015. 354 p.; A király és a lázadó herceg. Az Újlaki Lőrinc és szövetségesei elleni királyi hadjárat (1494 – 1495). Szeged 2012, 256 p.; Die personelle Zusammensetzung des Domkapitels zu Fünfkirchen im Spätmittelalter (1354 – 1526). Regensburg 2012, 485 p.; Eztán Pécs tűnik szemünkbe. A város középkori históriája (1009 – 1526). Pécs 2011, 200 p.; Pécs (Fünfkirchen) : Das Bistum und die Bischofsstadt im Mittelalter. Wien 2011 (coauthor László Koszta).
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Hugo Grotius : O pravdě křesťanského náboženství, ed. Jana Engelbrechtová (Adam Bžoch) (p. 124) Kultúra pretrvá svojho tvorcu : Zborník venovaný 20. výročiu úmrtia Ladislava Hanusa, eds. Peter Zmátlo - Juraj Považan (Daniela Nazadová) (p. 127) Erik Dulovič, Juraj Slávik. V službách Československa. Politická biografia 1890 – 1935 (Pavol Lukáč) (p. 129) Historické štúdie k životnému jubileu Pavla Valachoviča. Acta historica Posoniensia XXX, eds. Tomáš Klokner - Lukáš Rybár (Marek Babic) (p. 132)
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Filip Wittlich, Fotografie – přímý svědek?! : Fotografický obraz a jeho význam pro historické poznání (Lukáš Katriňák) (p. 135) Brian Cummings - Freya Sierhuis (eds.), Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture (Katarína Furdáková) (p. 136) Miloš Jesenský, Historické prírodné katastrofy v Žilinskom kraji : v kontexte environmentálnych dejín Slovenska (Lukáš Tkáč) (p. 137) Vladimír Rábik, Monumenta Vaticana Slovaciae. Tomus IV. Camera Apostolica 1 (Libri formatarum 1425 – 1524) (Michal Šebeňa) (p. 138) Milan Vároš, Poklady panovníkov a slovenskej šľachty. Osudy strate ných umeleckých pamiatok (Slavomír Zelenák) (p. 140) A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, ed. Lee Palmer Wandel (Patrik Griger) (p. 141) Jane Dawson, John Knox (Peter Rusnák) (p. 142) Simone Laqua-O’Donnell, Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster (Anna Smreková) (p. 144) Rastislav Molda, Ideálny obraz národa. Stereotypizácia uhorských národností v slovenskej cestopisnej a národopisnej literatúre 19. storočia (Matej Maruniak) (p. 146) Stephen J. Lee, Európske diktatúry 1918 – 1945 (Michal Mudroch) (p. 147) Paul Kennedy, Architekti vítězství. Jak byla v období od ledna 1943 do června 1944 vyhrána druhá světová válka (Michal Mudroch) (p. 148) Silvester Krčméry, Pravdou proti moci. Príbeh človeka, ktorého nezlomili (Ján Golian) (p. 149) Silvia Eliašová - Miroslav Palárik - Daniela Prelovská - Pavol Šteiner, Komentované pramene k dejinám slovenského múzejníctva v 20. storočí (Slavomír Zelenák) (p. 151) Robert O. Bucholz - Joseph P. Ward, London : A Social and Cultural History, 1550 – 1750 (Roman Petráň) (p. 152) Matej Bel : Liptovská stolica, zost. Martin Turóci a Jozef Kordoš (Lukáš Tkáč) (p. 153) Hana Opleštilová - Lukáš Babka, Zmizelý svět Podkarpatské Rusi ve fotografiích Rudolfa Hůlky (1887 – 1961) (Igor Strnisko) (p. 154) Střed | Centre. Časopis pro mezioborová studia střední Evropy 19. a 20. století, 2015, roč. 7, č. 2 (Matej Maruniak) (p. 155) Magyar Sion. új folyam, 2015, roč. 9 (51), č. 2 (Jaroslav Nemeš) (p.156)
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A buyout deal involves several parties, including private equity firms, the target company, and lending banks. All these parties are legally connected by contractual arrangements, and covenants among all interest parties are important. However, a comprehensive study on designing covenants among parties in a buyout deal to achieve commitment and avoid risk in closing a deal is seldom seen in current literature. By investigating one of the world's largest buyout deals – the acquisition of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), this paper not only probes into the design of contracts and covenant, but also provides several managerial implications. This paper concludes that well-designed covenants in buy-out deals can appropriately align all participants’ diversified interests.
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This paper investigates the long-run and short-term dynamics of 351 US metropolitan statistical area housing prices in relation to personal income. We apply a panel cointegration approach on annual data from 1993 to 2011 and find a long-run relationship between local house prices and per capita personal income. The causal direction is then assessed based on an autoregressive distributed lag specification that also accommodates for error-correction. Results from Granger-causality tests reveal the existence of a bi-directional causality between real house prices and real per capita personal income over both long and short-horizons. Our results continue to be robust, when our bivariate system is extended to include additional MSA-level (employment and population) and national-level variables (real stock price and mortgage interest rate). We conclude that changes in personal income can predict house price movements and vice versa.
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Economic variation and its effects on construction demand have received a great deal of attention in construction economics studies. An understanding of future trends in demand for construction could influence investment strategies for a variety of parties, including construction developers, suppliers, property investors and financial institutions. This paper derives the determinants of demand for construction in Australia using an econometric approach to identify and evaluate economic indicators that affect construction demand. The forecasting contribution of different determinants of economic indicators and their categories to the demand for construction are further estimated. The results of this empirical study suggest that changes in consumer's expectation, income and production, and demography and labour force are closely correlated with the movement of construction demand; and 14 economic indicators are identified as the determinants for construction demand. It was found that the changes in construction price, national income, size of population, unemployment rate, value or export, household expenditure and interest rates play key roles in explaining future variations in the demand for construction in Australia. Some “popular” macroeconomic indicators, such as GDP, established house price and bank loans produced inconclusive results.
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Real estate developers in China are using mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to ensure their survival and competitiveness. However, no suitable method is yet available to assess whether such M&As provide enhanced value for those involved. Using a hybrid method of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) indices, this paper evaluates the short and medium term effects of M&As on acquirers’ economic performance with a set of 32 M&A cases occurring during 2000–2011 in China. The results of the analysis show that M&As generally have a positive effect on acquirers’ economic performance. Acquisitions on average experienced a steady growth in developer Malmquist TFP, a more progressive adoption of technology immediately after acquisition, a slight short-term decrease in technical efficiency after acquisition but followed by a marked increase in the longer term once the integration and synergy benefits were realised. However, there is no evidence to show whether developers achieved any short or long term scale efficiency improvements after M&A. The findings of this study provide useful insights on developer M&A performance from an efficiency and productivity perspective.
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The real estate sector has been negatively affected by the recent economic recession, which has forced structural changes that impact property value and price. Recent pressures have also motivated reduced liquidity and access to credit, causing a drop in property sales and, thus, boosting the rental housing market. It is worth noting, however, that the rental housing segment is not with-out difficulties and complexity, namely in terms of legislation and rental value revaluation. In light of this reasoning, this study aims to develop a multiple criteria decision support system for calculation of residential rents. By integrating cognitive maps and the measuring attractiveness by a categorical based evaluation technique (MACBETH), we also aim to introduce simplicity and transparency in the decision making framework. The practical implications, advantages and shortfalls of our proposal are also analyzed.
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The recent sluggish recovery in the U.S. house market has further motivated our research interests in overbuilding in real estate markets. Our model is an extension to Grenadier's (1996), who emphasizes rational investment decisions possibly leading to oversupply in real estate markets, by further allowing for the important implication of irrational expectation for the strategic interaction amongst competing investors. In this model, two market participants are asymmetric because one of them is allowed to have heterogeneous expectations about the growth and volatility of demand shocks. Unlike most of previous studies that only simply think of this phenomenon as a result of irrationality, our model further finds that irrational investors’ value-maximizing investment choices matter in understanding the strategic interaction of investment decisions in real estate markets, therefore providing additional insights into overbuilding and other puzzling phenomena in real estate markets.
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