Tax Man Cometh for Beachgoers in Argentina
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) - Beach vacation checklist: swimsuit, sunscreen and, if you’re in Argentina, proof you paid your taxes.
As the summer exodus begins, Argentine officials are hunting down tax cheats at airports, ferry terminals and border crossings. In a country rife with evaders, the splashy campaign is raising hackles.
“Just when people are looking to relax and forget all of life’s problems, we want them to know there is no way to escape the tax agency,” Santiago Montoya, a top tax official, said on Wednesday as his inspectors stopped cars headed for Uruguay.
Argentines are notorious for not paying taxes, partly because they don’t trust corrupt politicians to spend the money wisely. Evasion levels are “shamefully high” at 35 percent, said Montoya.
Many Argentines, scarred by decades of banking crises and currency devaluations, don’t declare their money, preferring to stash it in foreign accounts or under their mattresses.
The government estimates that Argentines have $126 billion in assets abroad, more than Argentina’s $103 billion debt in default for the last three years.
Montoya said Buenos Aires province has launched a “shock campaign” to scare people into paying their taxes. Officials are telling vacationers that if they don’t clear their debts, they could end up in court.
The government has published thousands of evaders’ names on the Internet, left messages on people’s cell phones and threatened to open safe deposit boxes to get what’s due.
“In Argentina people think the tax administration is a joke and we want to end that,” Montoya said.
The first travelers targeted were those heading to the glitzy Uruguayan beach resort of Punta del Este, sparking anger among Uruguayan officials who believed Argentina was sabotaging their main tourist season.
Armed with a list of tax-evading ferry passengers and the model and year of their cars, officials stopped a shiny new Audi on Wednesday to tell the owner she hadn’t paid her automobile taxes — something she strongly denied.
Another woman in the ferry terminal described the crackdown as a “disaster” and said she would evade taxes if she could because the money only lines politicians’ pockets.
“I don’t see the money going to hospitals, to schools, I don’t see it going anywhere,” said Silvana, a 27-year-old lawyer who declined to give her last name.
Montoya wants 90 percent of Argentines to pay their taxes, similar to levels in neighboring Chile.
Bernardo Tilleria, 45, said he is in favor of the scare tactics. Where he lives in the rundown suburbs of Buenos Aires, some areas have no sewage drains or drinking water.
“These debts have got to be paid or nothing will get done,” Tilleria said.

 
Nike Kicks Up Fuss in China Again with Cartoon Ad
BEIJING (Reuters) - Infamous for pirating everything from watches to software — and Nike shoes — China doesn’t usually level copycat charges.
But a Beijing court has ordered Nike Inc. to pay damages to a Chinese cartoonist who said his stick figure was copied in the footwear giant’s ads, local media reported on Thursday.
The court said the stickman character 28-year-old Zhu Zhiqiang created was nearly the same as one used in Nike advertisements, and ordered the company to pay 300,000 yuan ($36,000)
“Nike used images similar to the plaintiff’s work in its advertisement without receiving authorization from the plaintiff, resulting in copyright infringement,” the China Daily quoted the court ruling as saying.
Although the damages are just a fraction of the $242,000 Zhu had requested, Nike representative Zhang Zaiping said the company would likely appeal against the decision and argued that the figure was too generic to deserve a copyright.
“Zhu’s stick figure is within the public domain and lacks originality,” he was quoted as saying.
The row was the latest run-in for the world’s biggest athletic shoe company in China.
Earlier this month, China stopped broadcasts of Nike ads featuring basketball star LeBron James going head to head against a series of animated opponents, including a white-haired kung fu master, saying they violated national dignity.
Nike later apologized for the ad, known as “LeBron James in Chamber of Fear.”
China, where pirated DVDs of the latest Hollywood blockbusters can be bought for less than a dollar on street corners, has promised to get tougher on intellectual property piracy.

Snow White Loses 3 Dwarves Over Cost-Cutting
BERLIN (Reuters) - Snow White had to make do with just four dwarves rather than the usual seven due to cost-cutting at a theater in the eastern German town of Stendal, the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported.
The Altmark Stendal theater said it could afford only six actors for its Christmas rendition of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," which led to protests from theater-goers from the nearby western city of Hanover who wanted to see seven dwarves.
The theater said it had attached two puppets in dwarf outfits to a background wall to give the production six dwarves. The actor playing the prince was supposed to double as the seventh dwarf but only made one brief appearance on stage.
"The seventh dwarf wasn't on stage the whole time because he was in stuck down in the mine working overtime," theater spokeswoman Susanne Kreuzer told the newspaper.

Italy Judge Tosses Coin for Xmas Tug-Of-Love Child
ROME (Reuters) - When the separated parents of a five-year old Italian boy could not agree whose house he should stay at over Christmas, a judge settled the dispute by tossing a coin, an Italian newspaper reported on Thursday.
The squabbling couple took their argument to a family disputes court a few days before Christmas and were surprised when the judge, who said there was not enough time to convene the tribunal, tossed a two-euro coin for “heads-or-tails.”
“I did it in the interest of the child,” Judge Carlo Alberto Agnoli was quoted as saying in Italy’s leading daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.
“I certainly couldn’t do like Solomon and divide the child. So I trusted to luck,” said the judge who presides at a court in the northeastern town of Trento.
He was referring to the biblical King Solomom who threatened to cut a boy in half when two women claimed he was theirs, thus learning who was the true mother when she begged him not to.
The mother, who usually has custody of the boy, won the toss and the boy spent Christmas with her, the paper said.
 

Celebrity underwear exhibit draws crowds in Portugal
LISBON (AFP) - An exhibit of underwear worn by Portuguese celebrities, which included an item donated by Manchester United’s teenage football star Cristiano Ronaldo, wrapped up after causing traffic to surge at a small gallery in northern Portugal, a spokesman for the venue said.
Nearly 1,000 people have poured through the doors of “Galeria Espaco t” in Oporto, Portugal’s second-largest city, since the exhibit opened on November 14, more than three times normal attendance, spokesman Leonel Moraes said.
Among the 30 items which went on display were lingerie from veteran fashion designer Ana Salazar, underwear from Brazilian psychic Simara and a G-string belonging to television comedian Rui Unas which he claims has never been used.
But one of the biggest draws was a pair of football shorts given to the gallery by Ronaldo which the football star wore during matches he played while part of the Portuguese national squad, Moraes said.
“It drew in many people, he is really someone who can draw a crowd, a real icon,” Moraes told AFP.
The underwear exhibit was modelled after a successful exhibit of celebrity shoes held eight years ago and was part of the gallery’s 10-year anniversary.
Moraes said the gallery now plans to take the items, which he said were very hard to obtain, on a tour of Portugal. “It was very complicated, many people said no right away, others thought we were joking, it took a while to piece together,” he said.
 

Tailpiece

FAILED ENGINES
There was a blonde sitting next to a man on an airplane. About an hour into the flight, the pilot comes on and says over the intercom, “One of our four engines is out, we will be about 15 minutes late arriving.” About 30 minutes later, the pilot comes on the intercom again and says, “There is a second engine out, we will be about 30 minutes late.” Fifteen minutes after that the pilot comes on again, and says, “I’m sorry to say that we’ve lost our third engine, and it looks like we’ll be about an hour late arriving at our destination.” The blonde turns to the man next to her and says, “Man, if that last engine goes out, we’ll be up here all day.”

DISGRACE
A young girl was going on a date, so she sought out the advice of her grandmother. Her grandmother said, “Sit here and let me tell you about boys. Your date is going to try and kiss you, and you’re going to like that, but don’t let him do that. He is going to try and feel your breast, and you’re going to like that, too, but don’t let him do that. Most importantly, he is going to try and get on top of you to have his way with you. You are going to like that, too, but don’t let him do that! It will disgrace the family!” With that bit of advice, the granddaughter went on her date. The next day, she told grandma that her date went just as she’d predicted. She said, “Grandma, I didn’t let him disgrace the family. When he tried to have his way with me, I just turned over, got on top of him, and disgraced his family!”