In eigenen Finanzfragen zeigen sich die öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten verschwiegen - obwohl sie sich mit Zwangsgebühren finanzieren. So behält ZDF-Intendant Thomas Bellut die Gehälter seiner Fernsehmoderatoren weiterhin lieber für sich. „Würden wir das veröffentlichen, gäbe es sofort Neiddebatten, die sehr heftig werden könnten“, sagte er der „Zeit“. Seiner Meinung nach haben „auch gut bezahlte Menschen ein Recht, geschützt zu werden“. Bellut fürchtet sich nach eignen Angaben vor Zuschriften von Zuschauern, in denen stehen könnte: „Der kriegt von mir Gebührengelder, ich mag den aber gar nicht.“ Und wenn er nicht mehr fähig wäre, eine „bestimmte Summe“ zu zahlen, verlöre er die Chance, „die Besten“ zu seinem Sender zu holen.

I'll march my band out, I'll beat my drum / And if I'm fanned out, Your turn at bat, sir. / At least I didn't fake it. / Hat, sir, I guess I didn't make it!

In the mid 90’s Ed Templeton started documenting life around him. As a professional skateboarder Ed has been able to travel the world on skate tours, giving him the opportunity to photograph his vision of contemporary culture and life around him. Ed’s camera mainly points towards the people he encounters in his everyday life, seeking for truthful moments to capture.

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Recently, Tyler sat down at a sold event in New York’s Highline Ballroom to speak to Elliot Wilson, for the CRWN live interview series. The interview – which lasted over an hour – took place on April 23rd and was not your typical Tyler interview. Instead of the usual joke answers we have come to expect from Odd Future interviews, Tyler instead gave fans an insight into his life and creative process, among other things.

Two decades after a low-budget film turned Washington Square skaters into international celebrities, the kids from "Kids" struggle with lost lives, distant friendships, and the fine art of growing up.

After the vuvuzela, the caxirola. The World Cup in Brazil is still more than a year away and already the marketing campaign for the tournament's stadium soundtrack is under way.

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (±9.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift.

An unreleased 15 year-old video by Deftones has shown up for the first time on YouTube tonight, without fanfare or possibly even the band being aware of it – but it's a serious gem for fans of the band's earlier days. When Deftones recorded the video for their 1998 smash single "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)," they apparently made a second video in the same location for the highly popular, dreamy acoustic version of the track. It’s a minimalist video, featuring frontman Chino Moreno singing the song under a bridge, but a very cool dose of nostalgia nonetheless.

Der bekannte Verteidiger zahlreicher Politiker und notorischer Verbrecher, Giovanni di Stefano, ist nach Überzeugung eines britischen Gerichts gar kein Anwalt. Die Richter befanden den Italiener unter anderem des Betrugs und der Geldwäsche für schuldig und verurteilten ihn am Donnerstag zu 14 Jahren Haft. Di Stefano habe fälschlicherweise angegeben, verschiedene juristische Abschlüsse und Qualifikationen zu haben, sagte Staatsanwältin Hilary Ryan. Er habe sein Spiel über acht Jahre lang getrieben und so seine Klienten um Millionen gebracht. Di Stefano war unter anderem als einer der Verteidiger des früheren irakischen Machthabers Saddam Hussein bekannt geworden. Zu seinen weiteren Klienten zählten der frühere serbische Präsident Slobodan Milosevic und der bekannte britische Posträuber Ronnie Biggs. Auch den im Vereinigten Königreich als „Doctor Death“ bekannten Arzt Harold Shipman, der mindestens 215 seiner Patienten ermordet hatte, vertrat di Stefano.

Decked out with a game room, a radio station, and a remote control tire swing, David Choe's Los Angeles warehouse studio is a testimony to the "bonus level" that he has reached in the art world. As a wildly popular and widely recognized international artist, Choe is also known for his reality TV show, the art he made while detained in a Japanese prison, and the mural he painted for Facebook, valued at over $200 million in Facebook shares. Inside his studio, the painter, muralist, and graffiti writer talks frankly with Alia about the new freedoms and challenges he's facing at this new stage in his practice.

Speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM's Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO Ira "Gus" Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos -- and that the agency wants all of it."The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time," Hunt said. "Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever." Hunt's comments come two days after Federal Computer Week reported that the CIA has committed to a massive, $600 million, 10-year deal with Amazon for cloud computing services.

I tried but I could not find a way / Looking back all I did was look away / Next time is the best time we all know / But if there is no next time where to go? / She's the sweetest queen I've ever seen / See here she comes / See what I mean / I could talk talk talk talk myself to death / But I believe I would only waste my breath

Reverend Pat Robertson said, "Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it." It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush's State Department. Despite Bush's providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we'll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular. But why the Bush regime's hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn't coy about the answer: It's the oil. "This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil." A really BIG pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia. If we didn't kill Chavez, we'd have to do an "Iraq" on his nation. So the Reverend suggests, "We don't need another $200 billion war….It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with." Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush's attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton. So what made Chavez suddenly "a dangerous enemy"? Here's the answer you won't find in The New York Times.

Each took $1.6 million. They set aside $1 million each for Perez and Diaz, and $500,000 for Alex Leon, who had been hired to ditch the pickup truck. [...] Ultimately, the success of a heist rests on what happens after the money is stolen. “You better know more than just how to steal the money, because that’s just the beginning of the process”

Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas, where nearly 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians conducted research [...] on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of these items. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.

It was 1 in the morning. They were flummoxed by a safe. Jordan hadn't opened it in years, and he couldn't remember the combination. Everything else stopped as this consumed him. After 10 failed attempts, the safe would go into a security shutdown and need to be blown open. None of the usual numbers worked. Nine different combinations failed; they had one try left. Jordan focused. He decided it had to be a combination of his birthday, Feb. 17, and old basketball numbers. He typed in six digits: 9, 2, 1, 7, 4, 5. Click. The door swung open and he reached in, rediscovering his gold medal from the 1984 Olympics. It wasn't really gold anymore. It looked tarnished, changed -- a duller version of itself.

кетай как всегда пиздец – “China is always fucked.” Clips from China that feature severe crashes and frequently feature passerbys ignoring the bodies and car debris. кирпичи – “Bricks” (as in “shitting bricks.”) The audio track often features the driver panting or shouting the entire Russian vocabulary of swears at the top of their lungs. Used for videos with near misses or close shaves. железобетонное очко – “Anus of Concrete.” Honorific given to drivers who, faced with sudden danger like a huge truck coming head-on, remain calm, only saying “shoot” or “darn” quietly in the background, and efficiently steer away from danger, displaying some seriously fucking great driving skills.

A University of Washington graduate whose football team had the best defense in the country at the time, Costacos came up with the idea of making a "Purple Reign" T-shirt to honor the team, featuring a lineman in a purple jersey falling from a cloud in the sky. Costacos printed up the shirts, traveled to a road game at Stanford one fall weekend and sold them in the parking lot. The idea was brilliant. By the end of the first week, he later estimated he had sold 20,000. An idea was born. Along with his older brother, Tock, he parlayed those T-shirts into series of sports-themed posters that, like that first T-shirt, played on pop culture. Together, they created one of the most influential businesses in the history of sports marketing. Its lasting impact eventually would extend all the way to a New York City art gallery, where, 25 years later, those posters were viewed as art and sold for thousands. At one show Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White bought the entire gallery collection.

In this week's New York magazine, Carl Swanson uses the opening of an exhibition at the New Museum to explore the question of whether or not 1993 changed the world. As part of the issue, we interviewed several directors, musicians, actors, and TV showrunners for their thoughts and memories from two decades ago.

Am 23. November 2010, so ging es bereits aus früheren französischen Medienberichten hervor, war es zu einem Treffen im Amtssitz des französischen Präsidenten in Paris gekommen. Am Tisch im Élysée-Palast saßen demnach Sarkozy, der katarische Kronprinz Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, Sebastian Bazin, Europa-Repräsentant der US-Investmentfirma Colony Capital und damals noch Hauptaktionär des Fußballklubs Paris St. Germain, und eben Platini. Das Treffen soll bis auf Platini für alle zufriedenstellend verlaufen sein: Bazin wurde sein Verlustgeschäft mit PSG los, der Kronprinz aus Katar freute sich über eine weitere Investitionsmöglichkeit und Sarkozy war über die vielversprechende Zukunft seines neureichen Lieblingsklubs PSG schlicht „glücklich“, wie ihn sein Sprecher hernach zitierte. Blieb Platini da nichts anderes übrig, als seine Interessen denen seines Landespräsidenten unterzuordnen? Immerhin schaffte, ganz nebenbei, sein Sohn Laurent kurz darauf im Januar 2011 den Sprung in die Chefetage bei Qatar Sports Investment (QSI), jenem Ableger des Staatsfonds Qatar Investment Authority, der nun Eigentümer von PSG ist. Der Deal mit PSG, dem Klub, der seit über anderthalb Jahren mit Geld nur so um sich wirft, sei dabei „nur Teil eines größeren Deals“ gewesen. Das erzählt James M. Dorsey, Autor des Blogs „The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer“ und ein viel beachteter Experte zum Thema Fußball im Nahen Osten.

The program was created with the music and film industry and the largest Internet firms, with some prodding by US government. The system had been set to take effect late last year but was delayed until early 2013 by the Center for Copyright Information, the entity created to manage the program. Participating in the program are the five largest broadband Internet providers — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Cablevision and Verizon — covering some 85 percent of US residential customers. A Verizon document leaked on the TorrentFreak blog suggests that the big Internet provider would deliver warnings for the first two suspected offenses and for the third and fourth incident, redirect customers to a page where they would have to “acknowledge” the warning. For the fifth and six offenses, Verizon would “throttle” the Internet download speeds of customers to just above dial-up speeds. Customers could appeal the actions by paying $35 for a review by an arbitrator. Other leaked documents showed AT&T would block users’ access to some of the most frequently-visited websites and that Time Warner Cable would temporarily interrupt the ability to browse the Internet, according to TorrentFreak.

In a Berlin courtroom earlier today, the Technoviking met his maker. The star of one of the most emblematic Internet cultural phenomenons of the past decade issuing the artist who surreptitiously filmed him, claiming he stole his image and profited from the results. Fritsch let the video collect dust on his personal website for six years, until he finally uploaded it to YouTube in 2006, where it continued to exist in obscurity for months. It took until 2007 for it to really take off. Fritsch has traced the origins of its viral path to an obscure Central American porn site. From there it jumped to Web communities and humor blogs, and at one point racked up 2 million views in a single night. In 2009, the star of the video, whose real identity is still a mystery, hit Fritsch with a legal notice asking him to stop using the video and all derivations of it.

Noreaga and his longtime friend Geno Sims collected a treasure trove of hip hop footage back in the late 90’s for a documentary show they called The What What. And in this newly unearthed trailer, there is literally too much to comprehend. There’s random bits of Big Pun, KRS One, Eminem making crank calls, Snoop Dogg at his most misogynistic, a chubby 50 Cent coveting NORE’s then-new Skytel 2-way pager…There’s Jay-Z and Amil, Capone in prison, De La Soul….and at the 2:25 mark, we see Cam’ron shopping his new 17-year-old artist Juelz Santana to Chris Lighty (RIP) and his staff. Amazing.