Financial Transparency Coalition

Last week, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced that it had received troves of data on a number of wealthy UK individuals that held money in an offshore bank in the Channel Isles, a British crown dependency and well known tax haven. The ICIJ, along with The Guardian newspaper, dissected the documents, and released a number of stories outlining some of their findings. One of the more interesting tax arrangements uncovered seems to be that of the owners of Nando's, the worldwide restaurant chain famous for its chicken dishes.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and The Guardian have received troves of documents exposing the offshore banking activities of thousands of wealthy individuals. The information, which was leaked to the ICIJ, highlights the activities of a major private bank in the Channel Islands, a British crown dependency. According to ICIJ, the list of clients includes "donors to the British government, which has been outspoken against tax havens, and some of the most prominent people in British life."

This week Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked information about the National Security Agency’s data collection program, may be allowed to leave his temporary station at the Moscow International Airport, where he has been staying since he fled Hong Kong in June. Snowden’s leak has brought the concept of whistleblowing into sharp focus in our headlines lately, including the controversies over the relative benefits and costs of these individuals and programs that support them. As in the case of Snowden, the concept of whistleblowing can be controversial, and it is always painful for the entity or government who is...

A shell game is a well-known parlor game in which players try to follow the movement of a ball placed under one of three quickly shuffled shells or cups and then try to correctly guess the shell that covers the ball once they are brought to rest. When the operator of the game is especially skilled, correctly tracking the ball can prove quite difficult. If a skilled and dishonest operator uses sleight of hand to covertly move the ball to one of the shells not identified by a player, the game becomes impossible to win, a veritable “confidence trick used...