Andrew Hill:

He said GE “might be paying no taxes because they’ve got special crony capitalistic favours from the government, and [are earning] certain tax credits because they’re investing in alternative energy”. In response, GE said it paid “significant income taxes in the US, and our US tax rate reflects laws that encourage investments supporting US jobs and economic growth”.

Mr Mackey, whose conservative views have in the past placed him at odds with customers of his food stores, said he thought Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, should have been “more aggressive” in laying out the company’s position at a US Senate committee hearing in May into corporate tax.

Ed Wallace:

Today few people would ever refer to the gasoline-powered engine in their automobiles as a Langen, a de Rochas, or an Otto, the gas engine’s inventors and early pioneers in internal combustion, respectively. But the Diesel’s name lives on, not just for his compression-ignition engine, but for the very fuel that powers it. In fact, from the day he designed it, his engine’s elegant beauty lay not just in its incredibly efficient use of thermal energy, but also in the fact that each new generation of engineers and scientists could improve it even more — meanwhile finding new uses for its low rpm and high torque output.

Even in his own time, Diesel saw wide adaptation spread his engine’s popularity. By the time of his death in September of 1913, 70,000 Diesel engines were in operation around the world. In fact, Diesel was traveling to England to open yet another manufacturing plant for production of his engine, meanwhile attending meetings to discuss the British Navy’s use of his engine in its vessels.

Much more on Rudolph Diesel, here.

Thomas Content

Look at a U.S. map for hybrid car sales hot spots and you’ll see they’re all the rage in California, the Pacific Northwest and some pockets of the East Coast.

Peer a little closer, and you’ll find just one spot in the rest of the country where hybrids are big sellers: Madison, Wis.

While the number of hybrids sold compared with all cars remains small, it’s growing fast. Between 2011 and 2012, hybrids’ share of new-vehicle sales nationally rose from 2.4% to 3.4%, according to registration data analyzed by Edmunds.com.

Places like Madison lead the charge.

In Madison, hybrids accounted for 4.2% of new-vehicle sales last year. And so far this year, hybrids are even more popular, accounting for 4.7% of registrations.

To be sure, Wisconsin’s capital city has some of the key hallmarks of a hybrid hub — university town, progressive tradition.

In college towns, buyers are “a lot more inclined to try hybrid technologies,” said Jeremy Acevedo, automotive analyst at Edmunds.com.

Among top hybrid cities, other college towns that appear on the list include Charlottesville, Va., Eugene, Ore., and Gainesville, Fla.

Malte Spitz:

That was my motivation for publishing the metadata I received from T-Mobile. Together with Zeit Online, the online edition of the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit, I published an infographic of six months of my life for all to see. With these 35,830 pieces of data, you can follow my travels across Germany, you can see when I went to sleep and woke up, a trail further enriched with public information from my social networking sites: six months of my life viewable for everybody to see what exactly is possible with “just metadata.”

Three weeks ago, when the news broke about the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata in the United States, I knew exactly what it meant. My records revealed the movements of a single individual; now imagine if you had access to millions of similar data sets. You could easily draw maps, tracing communication and movement. You could see which individuals, families or groups were communicating with one another. You could identify any social group and determine its major actors.

All of this is possible without knowing the specific content of a conversation, just technical information — the sender and recipient, the time and duration of the call and the geolocation data.

With Edward J. Snowden’s important revelations fresh in our minds, Germans were eager to hear President Obama’s recent speech in Berlin. But the Barack Obama who spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate to a few thousand people on June 19 looked a lot different from the one who spoke in front of the Siegessäule in July 2008 in front of more than 200,000 people, who had gathered in the heart of Berlin to listen to Mr. Obama, then running for president. His political agenda as a candidate was a breath of fresh air compared with that of George W. Bush. Mr. Obama aimed to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, end mass surveillance in the so-called war on terror and defend individual freedom.