Nike Inc. is raising the prices of its sneakers, assuming that the brand's cachet will carry it through a period when many of its shoppers are scrounging for discounts. As labor, materials and shipping costs increase, Nike is raising shoe and clothing prices by 5% to 10%, analysts say. A test of the approach comes this fall, when Nike will debut its priciest sneaker yet—an expected $315 LeBron James basketball shoe that includes its own electronics. The price leaps come after Nike's gross margins dropped to 42.8% from 44.3% in its most recent quarter ending May 31, the sixth-straight year-to-year quarterly decline. Nike's margins are now lower than most of its direct competitors, rival Adidas AG and apparel maker Under Armour Inc. Nike isn't the only sneaker maker asking customers to pay more. Adidas's signature three-striped Superstar shoes now cost $70, nearly 8% more than a year ago. Overall basketball shoe prices were up 9.4% compared with a year before as of June, according to market researcher NPD Group Inc., while soccer cleats jumped 15.5% and running shoes climbed 5.5%.
"I adopted a few dogs in Thailand, and he was one of them. Another dog was attacking him. He was full of scars, I don't know if they used him for fighting, so I called him Scarface. So I've got all this promotion, I've got [morning TV show] The View booked, the New York Times … They say, 'If you go there, the movie will do well.' But my dog is sick, he had a stroke. Brain stroke. So, clinically, he's dead. I go to the clinic and he's got tubes and everything. I love animals. I talk in his ear and I kiss him, and guess what? The fucker wakes up! We have to get him in a cage, so I get the biggest one, and I sleep there with him. What, I'm gonna promote JCVD? Who's JCVD? He's the guy we saw in the movie. Why change him in real life? So, Scarface was alive next to me. He had a tube in his penis, I had to change it. And now he's an amazing dog. He loves me like crazy. And JCVD's gone, but Scarface is here. And God paid me back with Expendables 2. Voilà."
Awesome, Mindblowing, Unbelievable, Impossible. Some of the words used to describe what this piece of code from demoscene gods Future Crew did on 1993-era PC hardware. Even by today's standards, what this program can do without relying on any kind of 3D graphics acceleration is impressive. As if the graphics weren't impressive enough, it can even playback in Dolby Surround Sound.
Reuters photographers and editors discuss their strategy for covering Olympics track and field events from every angle, such as the highly anticipated men's 100m final. Videography by Lucy Nicholson. Production by Jillian Kitchener.
The real question is: what's in it for the player? After all, the risk and reward are completely out of sync. A married player has so much to lose for the sake of five minutes of lust. But it's more than that. There is the bravado. I can sit down with a stunning woman and she'll hang on my every word; I can make the worst jokes and she'll laugh like I'm a standup; I can buy her bottles of champagne and she'll be impressed. In short, a player can have his ego stroked relentlessly, sleep with a beautiful woman at the end of it and, nine times out of 10, he'll get away with it. If, indeed, his wife or girlfriend even cares. Many players have childhood sweethearts who they end up marrying, and many of them will have kids at a young age. When a player begins to earn the big bucks, that's when the temptations really start: and they coincide with the arrival of the Louis Vuitton handbags and the first-class flights to Barbados.
Sometimes, as in the case with three men busted recently in New Jersey, recyclers will allegedly form a front business ("Metro Paper Inc.") to support their cardboard ring. A favored tactic of this particular heist squad, according to the authorities, was to back their vehicles up to stores while pretending to be licensed haulers. With nobody on the loading docks apparently questioning their authority, they're suspected to have made off with 900 tons of cardboard in just three months this year, a weight that represents $103,000 in free money.
It was the old days: analogue, manual focus, crappy cameras. I felt torn between the horror of what I was seeing and trying to capture it. I was also thinking, how am I going to survive this? Because sooner or later these people are going to say, "There's this guy taking pictures of us committing murder." I was 1km from my car and the nearest outsider. They killed him. And then one of them turned and said, "The white guy's photographing." Everyone leapt away, and I said, "No, it's fine, it's fine. Why did you kill him? Who is he?" I was thinking, "I'll spit on his body, I'll kick this corpse, I don't care – I'm going to survive this." Thankfully, I didn't have to do that. They pulled his ID out of his pocket: he was from another tribe. Then two of the killers posed and said, "Take a picture of us." So I took a picture and walked away. All the time I was expecting somebody to say, "Wait, that guy musn't leave." But I walked off, got into my car and got the hell out of there.
Blådårar 2 is set in 2000, the year after Malmö FF had been relegated to Superettan, and follows the team as they fight for Malmö FF's return to Allsvenskan. The film has a significant focus on Zlatan Ibrahimović (then 19 years old), his progress and how he was eventually sold to AFC Ajax during the 2001 season.
"... ich würde mich allenfalls als Verfassungspatrioten mit einer hohen Wertschätzung für Rationalität bezeichnen. Wobei der letztere Aspekt in den vergangenen Jahren eine gewisse Relativierung erfahren hat. Als Dombrowski fand ich früher Friedrich den Großen besonders deshalb sympathisch, weil der keinen Nationalstaat wollte, sondern einen Rationalstaat. Heute sehe ich, dass die kalte, absolut moralfreie und bis zur äußersten Konsequenz getriebene hemmungslose Rationalität der Finanzkapitalisten uns direkt in die Katastrophe führt und verstehe endlich einen Gedanken von Adorno und Horckheimer aus deren „Dialektik der Aufklärung“, auf den ich erst spät in meinem Leben, erst vor anderthalb Jahren, gestoßen bin: „Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils.“
Berlin: (hib/HLE) Die Bundesregierung lehnt das vom Bundesrat geforderte Verbot komplexer und riskanter Finanzprodukte ab. Solche Verbote würden den Zugang zu Finanzprodukten beschränken, heißt es in der als Unterrichtung (17/10252) vorgelegten Gegenäußerung der Bundesregierung zur Stellungnahme des Bundesrates zum Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Stärkung der deutschen Finanzaufsicht (17/10040). „Wenn ein Missstand vorliegt, kann die Bundesanstalt bereits nach geltendem Recht ein Verbot aussprechen“, begründet die Bundesregierung ihre Haltung. Auch die Schaffung einer nichtstaatlichen Organisation, die als „Finanzmarktwächter“ fungieren soll, wird abgelehnt.
The company got its start in 2007 as StatSheet, which generates news stories from raw feeds of play-by-play data from major sports events. The company generates advertising on its own website and is now beginning to sell its services to other organizations for sports and real estate news. “Over the next 12 to 24 months, every media property will need some automation strategy,” Frederick told AFP. To mimic the effect of the hometown newspaper, the company generates articles with a different “tonality” depending on the reader’s preference or location. “If it’s not in the data, we can’t say anything about it. We’re very aware of that, but more of what goes on is data-driven,” Hammond said.
MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after "MP3" entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one's music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience. Enter Winamp, the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that "really whips the llama's ass." In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million—and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge.
Die Zahl der Verkehrsverstöße durch das Diplomatische Corps hat sich innerhalb von zwei Jahren mehr als verdoppelt. Zählte die Polizei im Jahr 2009 noch 8600 Ordnungswidrigkeiten, waren 2011 es 18.886. Die Zahl der registrierten Diplomatenautos ist in diesem Zeitraum dagegen um sechs Prozent auf 2874 gesunken. Diese Bilanz ist das Ergebnis einer parlamentarischen Anfrage des CDU-Abgeordneten Peter Trapp.
This 20-minute film chronicles the influence that the video part has had on the skateboarding industry through current skater and filmmaker interviews along with footage from the most popular and respected videos of all time, ranging from Stacy Peralta's The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), to Element's Rise and Shine (2011). "Skate on Film" combines in-depth interviews with industry greats, such as Andrew Reynolds, Matt Hensley, Heath Kirchart and Nyjah Huston, just to name a few.
Twenty years after The Dream Team dominated unlike any other sports team in Olympic history, NBA TV's behind the scenes look at the squad brought back many moments of nostalgia. The documentary entitled The Dream Team, narrated by Edward Burns, began by looking at the history of Olympic basketball, including how the Soviet Union team won the gold in 1972 and 1988 just when it seemed like the Americans'amateur players were good enough to win the gold every year.
Private companies will be running large parts of the UK's police service within five years, according to the world's biggest security firm. The prediction comes as it emerged that 10 more police forces were considering outsourcing deals that would see services, such as running police cells and operating IT, run by private firms. Taylor-Smith, whose company is in the running for the £1.5bn contract with West Midlands and Surrey police, said he expected forces across the country to have taken similar steps within five years . "For most members of the public what they will see is the same or better policing and they really don't care who is running the fleet, the payroll or the firearms licensing – they don't really care," he said.
But the future of the business may be methamphetamine. During the 1990s, when the market for meth exploded in the United States, new regulations made it more difficult to manufacture large quantities of the drug in this country. This presented an opportunity that the Sinaloa quickly exploited. According to Anabel Hernández, author of “Los Señores del Narco,” a book about the cartel, it was one of Chapo’s deputies, a trafficker named Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel, who first spotted the massive potential of methamphetamine. “Nacho was like Steve Jobs,” Hernández told me. “He saw the future.”
If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world. It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company's servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior.
Für unser neues BACKSPIN TV-Format, Stammtisch, haben wir niemand Geringeres als den Hip-Hop-Provokateur schlechthin, unseren geschätzten Kollegen Marcus Staiger, in dem Berliner Restaurant seiner Wahl getroffen, um bei türkischen Köstlichkeiten, über seine Aktivitäten nach Rap.de, seinen neuen Job bei Aggro.tv und Journalismus allgemein wie auch speziell im Hip-Hop zu sprechen. Der Royal Bunker-Gründer erwies sich ein weiteres Mal als redseliger Gesprächspartner, der mit seiner Meinung nicht lange hinter dem Berg hält.
Then there's "Girls Gone Bitcoin." In this reddit subforum [...], women post naked pictures of themselves along with Bitcoin addresses, in hopes of receiving tips. [...] Andresen calls this "the high-tech equivalent of putting a dollar in a G-string."
The Obama White House's extreme fixation on secrecy is shaped by a bizarre paradox. One the one hand, the current administration has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers – government employees who leak classified information showing high-level official wrongdoing – than all previous administrations combined. But at the very same time that they invoke broad secrecy claims to shield their conduct from outside scrutiny, it is Obama officials themselves who have continuously and quite selectively leaked information about these same programs to the US media. Indeed, the high publicity-value New York Times scoops of the past two weeks about covert national security programs have come substantially from Obama aides themselves.
This is the state of our military-industrial-scientific complex in miniature: The military has so much money that it has two extra telescopes better than anything civilians have; meanwhile, NASA will need eight years to find enough change in the couches at Cape Canaveral to turn these gifts into something they can use.
Die mutmaßliche Rechtsterroristin Beate Zschäpe ist unmittelbar nach ihrer Flucht aus Zwickau von einem Handy angerufen worden, das auf das sächsische Innenministerium zugelassen ist. Das geht aus einem Vermerk des Bundeskriminalamtes hervor, der dieser Zeitung vorliegt. Die Dresdner Landtagsabgeordnete der Linken, Kerstin Köditz, will nun von der Staatsregierung die Hintergründe der Anrufe erfahren. „Die katastrophale Informationspolitik des Innenministers schürt das Misstrauen gegen die Sicherheitsbehörden in diesem Fall“, sagte sie dieser Zeitung.
At the request of Republican lawmakers, taxpayers are funding a 24-hour security camera to watch over a Rush Limbaugh bust in the Missouri Capitol building. State House Clerk Adam Crumbliss on Thursday told The Associated Press that he had authorized the $1,000 camera after Republican lawmakers expressed concerns about vandalism. Limbaugh’s statue is the only one in the Rotunda with 24-hour security.“We recognize that there was a level of controversy around it, and we want to make sure that property is protected,” Crumbliss explained.