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The normal search on eBay sorts by the most popular articles. Since you do not know on what criteria this happens, it is possible that real bargains are not found.
Our special search sorts the items found according to the remaining time of the auctions. Thereby it is more likely that you will get a real bargain at an item which has not received any bids just before the end of the auction.
This gives you the chance to buy a little-noticed item with a few bids at a very reasonable price.
Take advantage of this opportunity to find some real bargains!
Banksy-inspired NFT drives 'seismic' change in art world
A Banksy-inspired digital artwork is being auctioned and some of the proceeds will go to charity. The artist's 2006 piece 'Warning Sign' has been reimagined as a non-fungible token (NFT) - a unique ...
How AI Is Hijacking Art History
Art historians have long used traditional X-rays, X-ray fluorescence or infrared imaging to better understand artists’ techniques.
Awesome Art We’ve Found Around The Net: The Eternals, Harry Potter, Superman, They Live
Our weekly column features artwork from fans and pros alike. This week features interpretations of The Eternals, Harry Potter, Superman, They Live and more!1 ...
ART TRENDS 2022: Brexit and Art - will ongoing uncertainty continue to stifle the art market?
Brexit and Art Will new regulations and ongoing uncertainty continue to stifle the art market after the impact of Covid-19?
Today's Gospel in Art: First Sunday of Advent
There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars; on earth nations in agony, bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves; men dying of fear as they await what menaces ...
Green's art featured in JWCC exhibit
For more information about the exhibit or to purchase any of the artwork in it, contact gallery curator Jenna Seaborn at firstname.lastname@example.org or 217-653-3246. The gallery is on JWC ...
‘Color Your Christmas’ art exhibit opens Dec. 3
A new art exhibit in Bettendorf is opening soon for the upcoming holiday season. The public is invited to attend the “Color Your Christmas” exhibit beginning Friday, Dec. 3, at the ...
Black Friday Weekend Video Game Art Book And Comics Deals
If you've got a video game or comic book fan in your household, these Black Friday weekend deals on graphic novels and gaming art books are the perfect thoughtful gift to get them.
Art Museum of Eastern Idaho exhibit pays tribute to trio of local artists
The Art Museum of Eastern Idaho is currently hosting an exhibit dedicated to the work of three artists who made significant contributions to the fabric of the local art community over the course of ...
Art returns to city hall; featured artist Aaron Lynn
Enumclaw’s city hall is once again displaying Pacific Northwest art. The displays were put on hold when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, meaning it’s been about a year and a half since the ...


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The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the government can issue regulations intended to protect consumers from certain airline industry practices.
Southwest and Spirit airlines had challenged the rules, but today the three-panel court ruled in favor of the Department of Transportation, reported the Associated Press.
Three regulations are covered in the ruling.
First, airlines must show customers a total ticket price–that includes taxes and fees in print and online ads.
Also, consumers can now cancel reservations within 24 hours of ticket purchase without penalty, if the tickets are made more than a week in advance of the planned trip.
Also, airlines are not allowed to increase the price of tickets or baggage fees after tickets have been bought.
An article released last night by CNN said that all of those extra fees charged to fly nowadays add up.
A new study looked at 50 airlines around the world, and found that they made billions of dollars in revenue from baggage fees and extra charges last year.
The report finds the airlines’ extra costs took in more than $22 billion dollars in 2011, which is 66 percent more than in 2009.
The study said airlines now make more money by selling a growing array of products and services.
The extra charges are known as ancillary fees. Airlines started adding the fees after the great recession.
United Continental, Delta, American and Qantas made the most money of the major airlines in fees.
Consultant firm IdeaWorksCompany and the travel technology firm Amadeus conducted the study.

domain: news


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Original Article: Contently, "The Financial Times on Why They Ditched CPMs For A New Ad Currency: Time Spent."
The Financial Times announced that it will sell display ads based on the time its audience spends with its content, as opposed to cost p[...]
On December 12 the Financial Times named Jack Ma, founder and chairman of the Hangzhou-based Alibaba Group, person of the year. It’s hard for us to disagree. Ma controls the largest and fastest growing e-commerce platform in the world, whose 2012 sal[...]
The 3Doodler – created by seasoned toy veterans Peter Dilworth and Max Bogue – was posted to Kickstarter about one day ago, and the $75 plug-in pens are already selling like hot cakes.
According to TechCrunch, the pens work by heating and pushing [...]


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Can a tobacco company ever be considered socially responsible?
It’s an important question given one of the biggest investment trends of the past decade is the rise of ESG, overlaying social and environmental factors into the investment process. Today there are well over $12 trillion invested in ESG-oriented mandates in the U.S. alone and many trillions more overseas.
It would surprise exactly no one that tobacco companies have long been excluded from this multi-trillion dollar pool of investable assets. If the products themselves weren’t bad enough, the image of Big Tobacco CEOs shamefully claiming under oath at congressional hearings in the 1990s that they did not believe smoking caused cancer and was addictive has permanently damaged the industry’s credibility.
Tobacco’s exclusion from ESG has undoubtedly been an overhang, secularly depressing the sector’s valuation. As a result, it’s an issue the companies are beginning to confront head on.
When you think about it, today’s cigarettes are virtually the same as the ones that rose into consumer consciousness in the 1950s: a burning stick of paper-wrapped plant material. There has been no real innovation in the tobacco business since the invention of the cigarette-rolling machine in the 1880s.
Over the past decade, though, billions of dollars have been spent researching and developing next-generation, reduced-risk products. Public health authorities around the world, including the FDA, agree that there is a continuum of risk across tobacco products, with cigarettes at the highest end of that spectrum.
Philip Morris International alone has invested over $7 billion between 2008 and 2019 to fulfill its mission of “delivering a smoke-free future,” and the company is dedicating 98% of its R&D expenditure towards this objective. Earlier this month, the FDA authorized PMI to market its iQOS line of heated-tobacco products as modified risk – the first to receive such “exposure modification” orders – concluding that that the “scientific evidence demonstrates that iQOS is expected to benefit the health of the population as a whole.”
With broad support of less-harmful tobacco products by public health authorities around the world, one of the biggest secular trends in global tobacco is the shift from combustible cigarettes to alternative, smoke-free products like heated tobacco, e-cigarettes or oral nicotine pouches that contain no tobacco.
Millions of people have already completely stopped smoking and switched entirely to these new, less-harmful alternatives. Philip Morris has ambitions to convert over 40 million adult smokers to smoke-free products by 2025, from 10.6 million as of the end of March 2020, and to end selling cigarettes altogether in many countries within 10 to 15 years. It is aggressively transforming an arguably controversial business to meet this ambitious goal.
As a frontrunner in the movement to replace cigarettes, the company is also taking the lead in communicating its ESG credentials. At the end of June, PMI released its integrated report, structured around four sustainability pillars: innovating for better products, operating with excellence, caring for the people it works with, and protecting the environment. There is also an extensive sustainability-related Q&A on its website that’s worth the read.
Will every ESG investor all of a sudden begin to embrace a sector they have shunned for so long? That’s highly doubtful. But the industry is taking huge strides towards improving public health, with PMI leading the way. That directional progress should certainly count for something, in my opinion.
It’s worth noting here that, from an investment standpoint, this mix shift towards iQOS also has an important financial impact on the company. Largely because of different tax regimes, PMI generates more than twice the net revenue per unit on a heated-tobacco stick than a cigarette. Of course, its free cash flow generation is legendary, and the company may be in a position to reinstate its stock buyback next year.
In the future, when reduced-risk products become an ever-larger piece of the nicotine pie, there is very likely to be less tobacco-related disease and death. Perhaps at that point, there will be less pushback from the ESG crowd.
Until then, though, PMI will continue its march towards a smoke-free world, undervalued and unloved. Just how contrarian investors prefer it.
Companies discussed in this article will often be held in the Vitium Global Fund. These informational articles do not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy any securities.


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This article is more than 1 year old
Japanese cabbies take mobile drink drive test
3GSM Japanese transport firms are using mobile phone technology to prevent drunk drivers from starting their shifts.
The system from NTT DoCoMo uses an alcohol breath analyser that sends data to a service centre rather than one that can immobolise a vehicle by connecting directly to its ignition system. Drivers starting their shifts make a video call to their firm's service centre before taking a test. A software package that forms part of the system confirms a driver's identity before a test is made. Altogether the technology costs around $2,000 per seat.
NTT DoCoMo has sold the system to 50 taxi and bus companies since introducing it, solely in Japan, in September 2006.
NTT DoCoMo marketing executive Ryo Kiyofuji explained that firms are interested in using the technology because it allows them to demonstrate that they have procedures in place to combat drink driving, thereby helping to avoid liability in the case of drink driving deaths. Incidents where a number of children were killed by drunk drivers brought the issue to the fore last year.
Kiyofuji said drivers who are found to be over the limit at the start of their shifts will be told not to drive that day and not fired. The legal limit for driving in Japan is under 1.1mg/litre of breath. ®


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China’s largest hotel chain is investigating an apparent data theft that is said to involve as many as half a billion pieces of information.
Shanghai Police are investigating what looks to be a credible post on a darknet site advertising the sale of nearly 500 million pieces of data reportedly belonging to people who stayed at the chain of hotels Huazhu operates in China.
The data being advertised is said to include ID card details and hotel registration information for guests. The cost of the data was 8 bitcoins.
The total number of people exposed by the data theft could be as many as 130 million, and the report claims that third-party security companies in China have already reviewed and authenticated the data as being a new cache, rather than a collection of previously-leaked details.
Get the full story at The Register


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… Maybe. Although this time it will be more complex.
IE and FireFox are the dominant incumbents and Google’s Chrome is the rising super-power. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll see there are more potential players in the battle for world domination.
“The issue that lies ahead is whether browsers will remain a relatively simple window on to the internet or become intelligent agents that shape online experiences. If they go down the latter route this would have potentially disruptive effects for others who do business on the internet”, said Elliott King of MintTwist web design.
For the internet’s booming social networking industry in particular, the prospect that some of the capabilities associated with social networking will be embedded into browsers, making them more aware of users’ interests and social relationships, could force difficult strategic decisions.
Google’s goal, as it takes on Microsoft, is clear – to accelerate the advances in the internet platform in ways that eventually make it unnecessary to run “native” software applications that rely on a PC’s underlying operating system. That, ultimately, should benefit the web-based services on which its success depends.
Others, however, see deeper potential in the browser and are out to push its capabilities further. As a piece of software that all users have to use – it clearly has a strong strategic position.
For instance, Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, says it is looking into arming its browser with a number of extra munitions – such as ‘knowing who you are and handling authentication on the websites you visit, keeping a record of your social network so that you can interact with friends; and, making it easier for you to share content with your network.
Given that these are all territories that social networks like Facebook currently view as their own, that could create new fronts opening up between browser makers and the internet services that rely on them.
If it makes life easier for internet users, bringing more capabilities into the browser will be hard to resist and populations of internet users may start to migrate away from using artificial silos [like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn].
This has attracted a flurry of interest and investment in browsers from the social networking big guns. The potential for “social browsers” is a currently a hot topic in Silicon Valley.
The internet industry has long nurtuerd a feeling of mutual growth and co-operation; but there’s a growing evidence that the time may be coming for players to choose sides, ready themselves and prepare for war!
MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads by defeating their enemies on the battlefields of the internet with better web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.


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Earlier this month, a Tweet from author Rachel Sharp alerted the Internet to a disturbing trend: Some people were resorting to taking fish antibiotics to cure their ailments. Yes, fish antibiotics. Sharp’s Tweet, which quickly went viral, included a screenshot of several thinly veiled Amazon reviews left by humans who were clearly using the aquatic pet medicine Moxifish on themselves.
Naturally, the Internet was appalled. But few stopped to ask: what’s actually so wrong with taking fish antibiotics?
How bad is American healthcare?— Rachel Sharp (@WrrrdNrrrdGrrrl) July 30, 2017
Read the reviews for aquarium antibiotics and decide for yourself. pic.twitter.com/DT8wuq4iHg
It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. Fish are given many of the same antibiotics as humans—amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin, penicillin and more—sometimes even in the same doses. These pills, which are intended to be dissolved in fish tanks and be absorbed through fishes' skin, can also look extremely similar to the human versions. And while a trip to the doctor can rack up hundreds of dollars for someone who doesn't have insurance, a bottle of 30 500mg capsules of Moxifish costs just $29.95 from the supplier, Fishceuticals.
But there are a few key reasons why taking your fish’s drugs is a very bad, no good idea. Let’s start at the top.
First, fish antibiotics are completely unregulated. Technically, they should fall under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees both human and animal drugs. Those animals including companion animals (dogs, cats, horses) and food animals (cattle, pigs, chickens). Yet no ornamental fish antibiotics are approved by the FDA.
"The antibiotics available in pet stores or online for ornamental fish have not been approved, conditionally approved, or indexed by the FDA, so it is illegal to market them," the FDA said in a statement to Smithsonian.com. The statement continued:
If consumers are seeing these products in stores, they should be aware that these products have no assurance of purity, safety or effectiveness. The FDA does not have any information about the unapproved antibiotics sold in pet stores because they have not been evaluated for quality, safety, effectiveness, or purity. We strongly advise people to not substitute them for approved products that are intended for use in humans as prescribed by their health care provider.
Why aren’t they regulated? According to some veterinarians, they’re simply too small of a problem for the agency to bother with. Pet fish antibiotics make up a tiny fraction of the total amount of antibiotics used, says Samuel Young, a veterinarian and founder of the Uncommon Creatures Mobile Veterinary Services, which treats animals from fish to gila monsters to llamas. Thus, pet fish meds don’t pose nearly the same risks as antibiotics used for food animals, which the FDA is currently working to regulate more tightly.
The FDA says that it does not have any data on how prevalent the fish antibiotics problem is. "We are currently looking into these products," representatives wrote in a statement. "FDA considers taking action based on its resources, the risk the product poses, and its public health priorities."
Lacking the stamp of FDA approval, fish meds instead often sport claims that they are pharmaceutical or “USP grade,” a supposed quality benchmark set by an independent non-profit called the United States Pharmacopeia. The USP, however, is not a regulatory agency. Though it tests a small number of supplements through its "USP verified" program, it does not otherwise measure the purity or content of drugs for their purported contents.
"I think it's probably mostly B.S." Young says of these grades. "[Companies] are not able to guarantee—or even required to guarantee—what's actually in it, the purity of it, or the actual amount of it. It can be anything."
According to the FDA’s website, the agency hopes to someday help make more of the medications given to "minor species," which include fish, legally available and therefore regulated. But for now, Young describes the field of fish medicine as being in its infancy. He likens the situation to the early days of the livestock industry, when farmers could purchase a range of medications without a prescription. "We're still figuring out what works for fish and what kind of diseases we're treating," he says.
But even if fish meds were labeled as human-grade medicines, using them to self-medicate would still be a bad idea.
When a doctor prescribes you antibiotics, the first step is to make sure you’re dealing with a bacterial infection by running the proper tests. Antibiotics, which are intended to kill or slow the growth of bacteria that cause infection, are useless against a virus—and you don’t want to use them if you don’t have to, or it might lead to bacterial resistance.
The next step is to find out what kind of bacteria you’re up against. Even broad spectrum antibiotics work differently to target different kinds of infections. Moxifish, for instance, contains amoxicillin, a type of penicillin. When a fish absorbs this compound through their skin, it travels through the bloodstream until it latches onto a bacteria’s rigid cell wall. There, it interferes with wall-building, leading to a build-up of pressure that eventually causes the the cell to burst. Unfortunately, many types of bacteria have grown resistant to penicillin: Staphylococcus Aureus, the bacteria commonly responsible for skin infections no longer responds to this class of antibiotics.
Other fish antibiotics, such as API's Erythromycin, are known as macrolides. These compounds destroy bacteria by targeting the protein-building structures of the cells. Without proteins—which act as messengers, structural supports, transporters, storage and more—the cell dies. Another antibiotic class called Quinolones, which include the fish drug Fish Flox, inhibit bacterial cells from copying their DNA, thus preventing the colonies from multiplying. Quinolone are used to treat a range of infections including urinary tract infections, but in recent years many bacteria have begun to develop resistance.
Matching the right antibiotic to the right illness is crucial. “Let's say the antibiotic is correct, that capsule contains the right amount of medicine, and it’s a good quality medication and its able to be absorbed into the system,” says Wilson E. Gwin, director of the Purdue Veterinary Teaching Hospital Pharmacy. “We don't really know if that's the right drug for what the person is trying to treat. If it's the wrong drug, they can do themselves even more harm.”
Choosing the right med is also difficult. Learning the particulars of each antibiotic is "an exhausting part of medical school," says Daniel Morgan, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Maryland. "It's a bit like learning verb tenses in a language."
So what if you skip the doctor, take a gamble and choose wrong? Well, each drug comes with its own set of potential side effects and allergic reactions. Taking amoxicillin while suffering a viral infection such as mono, for instance, can cause the body to erupt in rashes, says Morgan. Ciprofloxacin, previously a go-to for UTIs and sinus infections, has come under recent scrutiny for causing lasting damage to tendons, muscles, joints, nerves and the central nervous system. Many other antibiotic classes come with their own unpleasant effects.
And even choosing correctly doesn’t guarantee success.
There’s a reason that bacterial resistance is a major public health problem: Bacteria are hardy foes that adapt rapidly to the changing environment of you. Sometimes, when they divide, they end up with useful random mutations, which they can pass down to future bacterial generations in a matter of hours. Other times, they get genes that are transferred from already resistant bacteria. "As a result, each new progeny becomes a resistant one and a potential donor of resistance traits to new recipient bacteria," writes Stuart B. Levy, a microbiologist and drug resistance expert at Tufts University, in his book The Antibiotic Paradox.
Using these processes, the ingenious invaders eventually develop specific adaptations as they multiply that can tackle and even degrade the antibiotics. Some even take on genes that code for tiny "pumps," which actively eject antibiotics from the bacterial cell. "Bacteria are not there to be destroyed; they're not going to give up," Levy says.
Finally, antibiotics kill off both good and bad bacteria. That means that, to avoid unwanted side effects, it's crucial to take them for the proper amount of time. Ending an antibiotic regimen too soon—or taking one for too long—can both breed further bacterial resistance. Stop too soon and you risk relapse, potentially allowing the microbes causing the disease to proliferate and form resistance. But take antibiotics for too long, and you might be giving the bacteria greater amounts of time to develop ways to elude the meds, recent studies suggest.
In short, you don't want to mess around blindly with your bacteria.
And yet, humans raiding the medicine cabinets of our finned friends is by no means a new trend. As Levy documents in his book, the practice stretches back to at least the 90's. While investigating antibiotics misuse, Levy describes a conversation with a pet store owner who admitted to taking the fish antibiotics for an infected finger—noting that the practice wasn't unusual among other pet store workers.
In 2002, Army physician Brandon J. Goff wrote a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine documenting an encounter with an unnamed Army Special Forces soldier who came to him with a sinus infection after self-medicating with fish antibiotics from a pet store. The soldier described this source of antibiotics as "common knowledge among all branches of the American Special Forces community," according to Goff.
In the years since, many pet stores have wised up to the trend and quietly removed these antibiotics from their shelves. PetSmart representatives told Smithsonian.com that the company had limited its selection to "fish medication in forms that could not easily be consumed by humans. This allows us to provide fish medication to the customers who need it for their aquariums while helping to prevent misuse." (The company did not say when they made the change and did not respond to a follow-up request.) In the last week, Amazon has also removed these antibiotics from their site last week in the wake of Sharp’s Tweet; the company declined to comment about the move.
Unfortunately, fish antibiotics are still well within reach. A quick Google search for fish antibiotics pulls up a range of other sources, including Walmart and Thomas Labs. And many Youtube videos, blogs and websites provide guidance for humans seeking out information on taking fish medications for their own personal use. These often target Doomsday preppers—people who stockpile medical supplies and other necessities in case of a society-ending catastrophe—but reddit and other online forums show that the fad isn't limited to those preparing for the end of days.
Sure, some people using fish meds may get lucky, says Morgan. And others may experience few effects, good or ill. But if you are taking fish antibiotics, you’re playing a dangerous game, and you’re playing it with your health. "People will always find different ways to get at things that they think maybe helpful,” says Morgan. “The issue is you need to balance potential harms and benefits … I would guess that there are people out there who have been harmed by doing it."
"We're not talking about a 50 cent or $200 fish—we're talking about a human life,” adds Gwin. “You really are taking a chance. Is it worth it?”
Editor's Note, August 2017, 2017: This post has been updated to include follow-up from the FDA.


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By now, you’ve probably heard about the multiple Disney retail stores that have closed or have plans to close in the near future. In fact, Disney announced in March of this year that at least 60 of its retail stores across North America will close their doors by year’s end.
Before the closures began, Disney Stores were located in 28 states in the U.S. and in 3 Canadian provinces. Closures have either taken place or are to take place before the end of the year in states like Texas, Utah, Virginia, New Jersey, Connecticut, and even in states where U.S. Disney Parks are located–California and Florida. And that’s just to name a few.
Disney was already moving toward a greater focus on its online retail store, ShopDisney.com, but in 2020, retail shopping soared because of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting quarantines that left many at home either by choice or necessity.
As a result, online sales across the board saw an increase of nearly 33%, which, according to an announcement made by Disney, gave the entertainment giant a push in the right direction–five years ahead of its projections.
“While consumer behavior has shifted toward online shopping, the global pandemic has changed what consumers expect from a retailer,” explained Stephanie Young, President of Consumer Products, Games and Publishing for the Walt Disney Company.
At this time, there will be some Disney Store locations that remain open, such as the location at Jersey Gardens in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the location at the Shoppes of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Times Square location in New York, the Bellevue Square location in Virginia, and four locations in outlet malls in Texas, among others.
Target will also be tripling the number of mini-Disney stores in its retail locations, just in time for holiday shopping this fall.
Somehow, we’re not quite sure the mini stores will feel as magical as the larger stores that we’ve come to love over the years.


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A hacker beached a security firm and stole Ubisoft data and close to 57M Fortnite emails from Epic Games among others.
Bent on revenge, a hacker penetrates and breaches a 3rd party internet security firm. The US cyber-security firm DataViper provides “data leak” monitoring services for companies that have had their data breached and leaked. What is does is send bots out scouring the internet looking for the locations where that breached data is – then it alerts the owners so they can monitor when an employee or customer’s credentials are leaked online.
DataViper is indicating that the hack was on a test instance and the data stored there was old information that was breached a long time ago. Some of it years ago. Whether or not ALL of it was old previously breached and leaked information is currently being investigated.
The hacker, going by the name NightLion sent an email off to numerous publications that report on cyber-security to inform and prove to them of his success in hacking the company. The information is currently published on a dark-web portal and is for sale.
Some 8,225 databases where hacked ranging from big companies to really small ones. The hacker did post up a list of the 50 of the larger companies they have data from after their successful breach of DataViper’s backend.
Two of particular note to us are Ubisoft and Epic Games. No comment as of yet if these databases are indeed old previously leaked data or if they are new.


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Both ministries support re-opening tourism in a safe and select way
The Ministry of Economic Affairs as part its economic revival strategies and interventions after COVID-19 has recommended some reforms in the tourism sector of which the main one is liberalization of the USD 250 tariff system.
It recommends that this daily international tourist tariff should be freed up and only the USD 65 sustainable development fee should be retained.
The MoEA said that while Bhutan is perceived as a high-end tourist destination by the international community due to its fixed tourist tariff of USD 250 to 200 per day international tourists are deterred by the high upfront tariff especially as they do not realize that the USD 250 to 200 per day includes the sustainable development fee, hotel accommodation, food, transport and guide.
The ministry says that tourists coming to Bhutan, are required to come via established tour agencies who normally have agreements with a small number of hotels leaving tourists with limited hotel options.
It says with the increasing reliance on the internet via hotel reviews and recommendations, tourists may have a hotel in mind but are unable to book the hotel of their choice.
The ministry recommends that the Department of Immigration should consider changing the visa requirements for international tourists, whereby tourists can obtain their visas with a hotel booking, and a licensed tour guide, thereby giving them the option to customize their trips to Bhutan.
It says to encourage tourists to revisit Bhutan, the government should consider giving tourists more freedom in second and subsequent visits, for instance, paying a lower SDF and being exempt from having a guide.
It says TCB can consider a trial-run on permitting international tourists to visiting the eastern parts of Bhutan to customize their trips without a tour operator. This could encourage international tourists to visit the East, as they could opt for flights, as opposed to the current scenario whereby majority of tour operators opt to drive to the East as a cost-cutting mechanism, thereby deterring international tourists due to the long drive times to reach the Eastern parts of the country.
The ministry says that based on the outcome of this trial-run, TCB can determine the feasibility of allowing international tourists to customize their own trips without having to go through a tour operator.
The recommendation is also adopting the charging of sustainable developmental fees in a more discrete manner which could potentially increase the likelihood for tourists to visit Bhutan.
On the above while other stakeholders of the tourism industry like the Guides and Tour Operators support a liberalized tariff there is likely to be a strong push back to any suggestions to have any tours without tour operators or guides.
The Ministry of Finance in its revival report recommends for the government to put a temporary restriction on hotel construction and FDI in service sector and reprioritize in other sectors. This recommendation arises out of the concern that there are too many hotels with a high exposure level in loans from Financial Institutions.
However, at the same time there are concerns in other levels of the government that the market should decide and not the government on what is a viable economic sector.
The MoF has also recommended that Budget hotels redesign their business model.
Both the MoEA and the MoF are on the same page when it comes to reopening tourism. The MoEA has recommended bubble tourism. The MoEA has also recommended future tourism contracts whereby the government can start selling tourism packages for the future and if tourists cancel then there is no refund while if the government cancels then a refund is given.
The MoF has recommended that Bhutan open tourism in a restricted manner with tourists from selected countries until COVID situation persists. It also recommends promoting work based or MICE tourism with proper standard operating procedures in place.
The MoEA recommends that Bhutan use this lull in international tourism to promote Bhutan as a future destination using the Digital Marketing Strategy.
It says the government should market Bhutan vigorously online as research shows that that more people around the world are now online for a longer duration than ever before. Furthermore, based on surveys conducted by the TCB, some 64 per cent of the tourists who visited Bhutan in 2019 learnt about Bhutan from the internet.
It says more digital content should be created immediately promoting Bhutan as an attractive travel destination as the probability of visibility of such promotional campaigns will be high right now.
This the MoEA says can translate into more inflow of tourists once the country opens up allowing people to come into the country.
Both the MoEA and the MoF have also recommended promotion of Domestic Tourism. The MoEA says there is a need to promote domestic tourism for equitable regional development and employment generation and so our packages to religious, cultural sites, site seeing, etc. should be promoted. The MoF recommends that the government should host local trainings and meetings, seminars and workshops in hotels.
The MoEA has recommended that Bhutan should invest to widen its tourism product offerings.
It says diversification of tourism products and activities can be promoted by providing fiscal incentives, and access to finance with lowered interest rates. To diversify tourist attractions, development of new tourism products and services such as ropeways, kayaking etc must be encouraged.
The Ministry recommends that Bhutan’s tourism sector should go beyond the current businesses of fixed travel itinerary and trekking and it needs to create a vibrant tourism environment, whereby tourists can contribute to the local economy instead of a fixed fee, structured program and free sightseeing programs.
The MoEA has also recommended the promotion of wellness tourism with a USD 639 bn global market in 2017, growing more than twice as fast as general tourism. It says wellness tourism fits Bhutan’s value proposition due to the country’s availability of approximately 400 medicinal and aromatic plant varieties.
The ministry says that wellness tourism can also capitalize on Bhutanese traditional healing methods such as So-Wa Rig-pa (Bhutanese traditional medicine) and promote the traditional hot stone and hot spring baths as an avenue for revenue generation.


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Meeker 2019: 3 Key Health Takeaways
It’s that time of year again: VC and tech analyst Mary Meeker has just released all 334 slides in her closely-watched annual Internet Trends deck (archive). Don’t have time to view all three-hundred-plus for the health-related bits? Let me outline what she’s saying about health and healthcare this year.
In last year’s deck, Meeker pointed out that the portion of healthcare costs paid by consumers was increasing — while consumers’ expectations for the healthcare experience were also rising, driven by improving UX (convenience, personalization, lower cost) across a wide variety of other parts of their lives. Could this mean that consumers would finally start paying more attention to healthcare costs, and exert downward pricing pressure?
Well, we don’t know: in this year’s deck, Meeker doesn’t provide any data to suggest an overall reduction in consumer health spending. After pointing out the USA’s unfavorable results in terms of costs, efficiency, and health outcomes, she focuses on three big takeaways:
More health data available
Improving the healthcare experience
Big tech moving in
But don’t miss the overarching theme of “consumer experience” — part of a secular shift towards the consumerization of health and healthcare. People want their prescriptions, appointment booking, and health records to all be up to the UX standards of Gmail, Uber, and Hulu — though in many cases these things are stuck in 2005. Major competition to change that.
Details below. And you can view just the health-related slides here.
1 - More Health Data Available
Meeker briefly touches on the large amounts of data that are now becoming digital as a result of the advent of EHRs, with penetration nearing 100% (noting that it is still “early innings” for the technology).
She also devotes a slide to genomics; in particular the soaring popularity of consumer testing, and the resulting enormous increase in genomic data (see slide 275 at right).
Her main point here, though, is that the digitization of healthcare is “driven by consumers” (see slide 273 at right). This trend includes digital telemedicine activities going from about 10% penetration in 2015 to more than 30% in 2018, and the use of wearables more than doubling over the same time period.
The increase in data from all this adoption is key to health research, management, and to the increasing use of artificial intelligence.
2 - Improving the Healthcare Experience
Much of what Meeker talks about isn’t related to artificial intelligence, robots replacing doctors, or any of the topics that take up much of the news coverage of healthcare tech. What she really drills down on are the companies that are using technology to tackle the inefficiencies of the healthcare system and make the health experience as easy as the Uber experience or the Facebook experience.
Importantly, and very unlike the majority of electronic health record systems that have had a very bumpy introduction (looking at you Epic and Cerner!), all of these companies run their own software independently, rather than installing it within a health system. This is key in letting them aim for consumer-grade user experiences.
A great example is Zocdoc (@zocdoc), which uses a modern website and mobile app to provide scheduling services for health providers. I’ve used Zocdoc myself to find and book appointments with doctors, and I can tell you that it beats calling and waiting on hold to talk to the receptionist by a mile.
Other conveniences include the ability to fill in health questionnaires (those 300 question long surveys usually provided on paper with a clipboard in the waiting room) online — and then simply edit your answers for subsequent visits (instead of filling out the paper form every year).
Full list of health-related companies in this year’s Internet Trends coming soon.
Another compelling entry, specifically in the “insuretech” space, is Oscar Health (@oscarhealth), which provides simplified health insurance plans, claims, and coverage — along with scheduling and other tools, aiming to use technology to improve the insurance experience. The latest on Oscar.
3 - Big Tech Moving In
Of course it isn’t just startups and smaller companies moving into the health space, and Meeker wraps up the health section of the slides by looking at Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and their increasing interest in health.
Apple — “Apple = Democratization of Healthcare” — Quoting Tim Cook, Meeker touches on Apple’s Health app, access to EHR records, and the integration of consumer tools like ResearchKit and CareKit into medical research and consumer-provider interaction, respectively. Meanwhile sales of the Apple Watch (not specifically mentioned by Meeker) continue to soar.
Google — “Artificial Intelligence Unlocking Insights for Practitioners” — here Meeker mentions the Streams app created by Deepmind, a formerly independent but soon to be wholly integrated part of Google. Streams is a tool currently in us at the UK’s NHS that aims to increase the efficiency of treatment by better managing patient data, including test results. Streams has gotten high marks, and at the same time courted controversy around data privacy protection, but it’s clear that Google wants to improve Streams, including now by incorporating AI.
Microsoft — “Enabling Healthcare’s Move to the Cloud with AI Solutions” — the focus here is on rolling out cloud services to “more than 168,000 healthcare organizations”, with those services including Microsoft’s AI Healthcare Bot, a set of tools to enable healthcare organization to role out AI-powered chatbots and “virtual health assistants”
Amazon/Pillpack — “Consumer-Centric Approach to Medication Management — Amazon’s medication delivery service, acquired last year, aims to bring consumer-centered UX to prescription medication use. Pillpack has been lauded for its customer-friendly packaging (though just this week it was called on the carpet for alleged user privacy violations), and can be a potent weapon for Amazon against CVS and Walgreens in fighting for the $500 billion prescription drug market.


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Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Jan. 6, 2019.
Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter.
Most popular stories on GeekWire
For weeks, photographers have been snapping pictures of a retro-looking, shiny stainless-steel rocket that’s been taking shape at SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas — and tonight, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk declared that assembly of the first Starship short-hop test rocket is complete. … Read More
Stratolaunch, the aerospace venture created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says its twin-fuselage, six-engine aircraft raced as fast as 136 mph down the runway at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port today during its latest taxi test. … Read More
The latest managed database to emerge from Amazon Web Services is based around MongoDB, setting up a new confrontation between the cloud giant and the company behind that open-source project. … Read More
Things are a little on edge in Seattle’s biotech scene after the Jan. … Read More
Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, announced this morning via the Amazon CEO’s personal Twitter account that they’ve decided to divorce after 25 years of marriage. … Read More
If creating and running a successful business isn’t challenging enough for many entrepreneurs, it can be mind-boggling to think about what it takes to do that and maintain a healthy personal relationship. … Read More
Microsoft says goodbye to its past as demolition begins on original buildings ahead of big renovation
REDMOND, Wash. — Matthew Whilden has been at Microsoft for 11 years. … Read More
Can Microsoft and Kroger upgrade the grocery experience better than Amazon and Whole Foods can? … Read More
Alexa is center stage at the big CES tech show in Las Vegas this week, and Monday she went way off script. … Read More
It’s a good day to be Sunny Gupta. The Apptio co-founder and CEO stood to make $196 million as the deal to take the company private was completed on Thursday. … Read More


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Mohammad Arshad Islamabad
Advisor to the Prime Minister on Commerce & Investment Abdul Razak Dawood, Thursday, appreciated the enhanced bilateral trade between Pakistan and the UK and spoke about ways to further enhance and diversify trade and investment opportunities between the two countries.
In a virtual meeting with UK’s Deputy High Commissioner in Karachi and Trade Director Mike Nithavrianakis here Razak Dawood discussed matters pertaining to bilateral trade and investment came under discussion.
Post-Brexit UK has granted enhanced market access to Pakistan on the basis of 2018 EU Monitoring Report. The same is to continue till December 2022 under the ‘Enhanced Framework’.
The Government of UK has launched an eight-week public consultation on the UK’s future tariff schedule and policies regarding its Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP).


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Home › magazine › october 2012 › latest news › Kimberly Clark celebrates sustainability award wins
Kimberly-Clark celebrates sustainability award wins2nd of October 2012
Kimberly-Clark has won a host of awards acknowledging its commitment to sustainability and ethical business practices.
The US-based company won the 2012 Circle of Excellence award from the Distribution Business Management Association (DBMA), an American business and academic forum. It was given for leadership in sustainability and environmentally responsible supply chain management as demonstrated by its Sustainability 2015 strategy.
It has also been recognised by the Ethisphere Institute - a New York-based business ethics think-tank - as one of the World's Most Ethical Companies in 2012. The methodology for the rankings includes evaluating investment in innovation and sustainable business practices, and looking at activities designed to improve corporate citizenship.
And the list of awards goes on. The FTSE Group has included Kimberly-Clark on its FTSE4Good Index Series for the ninth consecutive year; it has received a ‘Gold' standard in the Best Employer for Healthy Lifestyles Awards; Corporate Responsibility Officer magazine has listed the company as one the top 20 Best Corporate Citizens; and the US Environmental Protection Agency has ranked Kimberly-Clark number 25 in the top 50 Green Power Partnership organisations voluntarily using clean, renewable electricity.
Sustainability marketing manager for Kimberly-Clark Professional Lori Shaffer commented: "As a key part of the Kimberly-Clark family we fully subscribe to its Sustainability 2015 strategy. Sustainability is no longer only in the realm of our operations. It has grown to include virtually every function, every brand and every business at Kimberly-Clark."


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Anker is making its smallest charger even smaller and cheaper at $22.99. The new Anker 511 Nano 3 Charger is a 30-watt single USB-C charger designed to quickly charge an iPhone or iPad and can even power a MacBook Air — all with a charger the size of Apple’s old 5W charger. Including iPhones.
Like last year’s model, the Nano 3 is a gallium nitride (GaN) charger that can produce more power from a smaller and cooler packaging. It doesn’t use the company’s new GaNPrime tech introduced in July, but the Nano 3 has foldable blades that make it less fiddly to carry in a pocket.
Compared to Apple’s 30W USB-C charger, the new Nano 3 is 70 percent smaller, according to Anker. It can charge the iPad Air up to 20 minutes faster than Apple’s included 20W charger.
The Nano 3 is available now on the Anker website and Amazon for $22.99 and comes in black, white, blue, green and purple. Anker also sells matching lighting cables that use a combination of plastic and plant-based materials for $18.99 (3ft) and $21.99 (6ft) each, as well as USB-C versions for $16.99 and $19.99, respectively. Unfortunately, bio-based plastic composites are still non-biodegradable when they eventually hit a landfill, and even though their sources are renewable, experts warn that the materials used by the crops produce more water use and greenhouse gas emissions than regular plastics.


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Movers & Groovers
Sarajit Mitra, former Global Head of Marketing & Customer Experience at HSBC Global Banking and Markets, leads the TX proposition, and is joined by a heavyweight international team of former marketers and insights specialists. TransgressiveX, based in Kensington and operating worldwide, is led by prominent consumer psychologist Nadim Sadek, former Global CEO of Millward Brown’s Qualitative network, and Worldwide Commercial & Strategy director of Research International. [more…]
RKCR/Y&R has completed its senior management triumvirate by promoting Emily James to the role of Chief Strategy Officer.
Emily James, who was previously Head of Strategy at RKCR/Y&R, joins Chief Executive Officer Jon Sharpe and newly appointed Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Burley on the agency’s executive management team. [more…]
WPP’s global brand strategy and design agency, Brand Union, (www.brandunion.com) has today announced the appointment of Alex Clegg as the new UK CEO.
Clegg will lead the UK team, providing innovative and bold leadership as the agency focuses on ambitious growth plans. Alex’s appointment comes at a key time for Brand Union as it installs a new approach to helping clients meet the wide variety of brand challenges they face today.
WPP’s global brand strategy and design agency, Brand Union, (www.brandunion.com) has announced the appointment of John Shaw to the newly created role of Chief Product Officer.
In this new role, John will be responsible for overseeing the agency’s product, from strategy and creative to design and technology, to help clients meet the wide variety of brand challenges they face today.
Shaw will work alongside Brand Union’s Worldwide CEO, Toby Southgate and CFO, Alex Spark, to drive value across everything the agency offers.
RadiumOne appoints Craig Tuck as first UK MD
Marketing technology business RadiumOne has appointed Craig Tuck to the newly created position of UK managing director.
Tuck, previously UK sales director, will report to Rupert Staines, the EMEA MD.
He will oversee the UK team of 60 people and focus on driving revenue and relationships across the wider industry. [more…]
Lewis will be responsible for driving the creative vision and overall creative quality of Ogilvy’s work for the Dove brand. He will be based in London, which is the Global hub for Dove and replace Maureen Shirreff, who returns to Ogilvy Chicago where she joined two years ago.
The content driven website, that delivers customer insight to hundreds of dealerships, has made the appointments as an increasing amount of dealers and manufacturers are leveraging the qualified leads that its research delivers.
Liz will be responsible for developing the commercial marketing strategy, using her extensive content, research and product knowledge to bring to life its brands and audiences. Currently Publisher on Bauer Media’s music, film and maturity markets, she has been instrumental in recent innovations such as the launch of Empire Live – a three-day immersive movie and entertainment event.


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Cary-based The Pantry Inc. (Nasdaq: PTRY), in a performance summary, says in-store sales rose by 3.3 percent during its fiscal 2012, compared with a meager 0.2 percent in the prior year.
Expenses, meanwhile, were cut by $18.5 million to $210 million.
"We are pleased with our inside comparable store sales growth and the reduction we made in expenses," says the company, which operates 1578 stores in 13 states under the Kangaroo brand.
The summary was included in the firm’s latest proxy statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC.
During fiscal 2012, which ended Sept. 27, Pantry managers say, their fuels business was "volatile". Gross profit from fuel sales fell by $47 million.
Another highlight of the year was the arrival in March 2012 of new CEO and President Dennis G. Hatchell, whose total compensation was $1.976 million, according to the proxy.
That, among other items, included base pay of $412,500, a bonus of $483,600 (a part of which was to make up for lost income from his job change); stock awards of $796,932 and "all-other" compensation of $185,255, according to the proxy.


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Samsung has announced that it has collaborated with Sun Microsystems to develop ultra-endurance single-level-cell NAND flash memory device for use in solid state drives. (SSDs).
Offering a five-fold increase in data write-and-erase cycles over standard SLC flash memory, Samsung’s new server-grade SLC NAND memory is designed to be used in SSDs to greatly extend the life cycle of any high-transaction data processing server.
Samsung claims that the new SLC flash memory will be 100 times faster compare to hard drive, in number of data transfer per watt. However, it looks like these new SSDs are not yet prepared for launching in consumer market.


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REDWOOD CITY, Calif. & SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amobee, a global leader in marketing technology, today announced the appointment of advertising industry veteran Katie Ford as Chief Client Officer and Shouvick Mukherjee as Chief Technology Officer.
These key hires expand Amobee’s management team at a time when the company is experiencing significant expansion on the heels of the recent acquisition and integration of Turn under the Amobee brand. The transformation establishes Amobee as a global technology leader and one of the largest independent marketing platforms.
As Chief Client Officer, Ford will drive the introduction and adoption of the Amobee Marketing Platform with brand and agency clients. Ford was most recently President, Managing Director of Publicis Media-owned Spark Foundry, a full-service media agency. With over 23 years of experience in the advertising industry, Ford has a proven track record in creating and executing the strategic brand vision for a portfolio of Fortune 500 brands.
“I’m thrilled to join Amobee at a time of enormous trajectory for the company,” said Ford. “I’ve spent my career working with phenomenal agencies and brands and I understand intimately the challenges marketers face around the convergence of data, technology and creativity, which is where Amobee’s platform excels.”
In his role as Chief Technology Officer, Shouvick Mukherjee will lead the company’s data science, engineering and technology teams. Mukherjee was most recently Vice President of Product and Engineering for @WalmartLabs, and previously the Vice President of Engineering at Yahoo. Mukherjee’s expertise includes big data, IoT, omnichannel digital relationships, and customer acquisition and loyalty.
“Amobee has proven that it is without rival in navigating the rapidly evolving digital marketing space, and I look forward to working with the team to continue to advance the company’s programmatic and data management capabilities following the integration of Turn,” said Mukherjee.
Amobee's CEO, Kim Perell, stated, “Katie and Shouvick are respected industry leaders and a perfect addition to the world-class team we have assembled. They share in our excitement to propel Amobee through its next stage of growth, as we continue to enhance the value we provide marketers through people, products and technology.”
Amobee is a technology company that transforms the way brands and agencies make marketing decisions. The Amobee Marketing Platform enables marketers to plan and activate cross channel, programmatic media campaigns using real-time market research, proprietary audience data, advanced analytics, and more than 150 integrated partners, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel, one of the largest communications technology companies in the world which reaches over 640 million mobile subscribers. The company operates across North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Australia. For more information, visit amobee.com or follow @amobee.


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Nearly a dozen cars and their parts lined Firestone Complete Auto Care in downtown Minneapolis.
On the ground lay a tire with a pothole-induced scrape across its surface, something manager Rich Fellers said the shop sees daily. Nearby was a BMW wheel with a rarer, more costly pothole casualty: a thin crack through the rim.
So begins pothole season in Minnesota — a nightmare for drivers, but a boon for the auto repair business.
At shops across the city, employees agreed that potholes are unusually rough this year. Not only are more cars coming in for repairs, but the rush started earlier.
Fellers said he started seeing cars with pothole damage at the beginning of March, about a month earlier than usual.
The story is similar elsewhere. John Grausam, owner of Lowry Repair Center in northeast Minneapolis, said March is typically slow. But he estimated a 40 percent increase in business last month, compared with the same time last year.
In addition to wheel and tire damage, vehicles hitting potholes can experience worn shocks and struts, damage to the suspension, exhaust system or engine, and steering misalignment.
While the number of customers with pothole damage typically drops off in late spring or early summer, some damage can cause long-term problems. Suspensions, for example, can fail later in the year if they’re damaged by a pothole in the spring, Fellers said.
In addition to the increase in business from pothole damage, some shops are seeing worse damage than usual. Employees blame the unusually tough winter.
James Savoren, owner of Savoren Service North in north Minneapolis, said damage this year is the worst he has seen.
“It just seems more aggressive,” he said.
Emma Nelson is a University of Minnesota student reporter on assignment for the Star Tribune.


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Facebook is all set to roll out new patented search algorithms that will sort results based on ‘Facebook Likes’ on the items. Ever since Facebook rolled out the Universal ‘Like’ button, all kinds of web content have now started accumulating ‘Likes’ by Facebook users. Following a similar strategy to Google’s PageRank algorithm which, in a nutshell, runs on the foundation that the relevance of any web item is determined by the number of other quality web items linking to it.
Facebook’s new ‘Likes’ based search runs on the foundation that the relevance of any web item is determined by the number of ‘Likes’ as well as the number of ‘Likes’ from friends. This is really personalized search, where the search results you see is determined by your Facebook friends. If this gets turned on the SEO landscape is going to see a major shift in a new direction.
Facebook has started leveraging their massive Social Graph and Google better watch out – ‘Likes’ are the new ‘Links’.


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GM Shanghai, GM’s joint venture with SAIC, will begin the production of a hybrid system—a version of the Belt Alternator Starter system used in the Malibu, Aura, and VUE hybrids (earlier post)—in 2008. GM had indicated in 2006 that China would see a BAS implementation in 2008.
|The Riviera concept.|
The announcement came during the reveal of the new Buick Riviera concept at Auto Shanghai 2007. The Riviera, developed and launched in China, has been engineered to accommodate the new hybrid system, which reportedly will also be applied in the production version of the Buick LaCrosse in China.


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Though its components and performance are somewhat average for its price, the Dell Inspiron 14 7000 Series' aluminum chassis, backlit keyboard, and 1080p touch screen give it a more premium feel.
If you hate AA batteries, but like inexpensive compacts with manual controls, the 16x zoom Canon PowerShot SX170 IS takes a good photo. Otherwise, seek out its predecessor, the SX160 IS.
If the rumors are true, Apple will soon offer 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhones. Android users have enjoyed those sizes for years. What are the pros and cons?
And a quarter of those polled by RBC would be willing to pay a $100 premium for an iPhone with a 5.5-inch display.
There's a new player in the smartphone world, taking on Apple and Samsung: Amazon's Fire phone, with 3D technology. CNET's Kara Tsuboi checks out the unique features Amazon is touting to consumers.
Nine out of ten Samsung Galaxy S5 phones sold in Britain's two major mobile chains have been signed up to 4G contracts -- is 4G catching on? Plus, we catch up with the latest on the Amazon phone, Samsung Kamera and Nokia's crazy code-names.
A hefty 40 percent of people polled by ChangeWave Research said they'd likely buy Apple's next-generation iPhone.
The company will let new and existing postpaid customers add an LTE slate to their existing plans and get nearly 1.2GB of free data through the end of the year.
With its relentless outpouring of both mid- and high-end phones offered by well-known carriers, ZTE is steadily carving out its presence in the US market.
The startup, which measures online authority, is reportedly being swallowed up by Lithium, a pre-IPO social software-as-a-service company.


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The Walt Disney Company reported its fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2019 financial reports this afternoon. In the Parks, Experiences and Consumer Products segment that includes Disney's worldwide theme parks, revenue and operating income were up for both the quarter and the year, but the company reported attendance decreases at some resorts.
Revenue was up 8 percent for the quarter and 6 percent for the year for the parks' segment, while operating income rose 17 percent for the quarter and 11 percent for the year. Income gains were driven mostly by higher prices for admission, hotels, food, and merchandise. Disney reported a slight attendance gain at the Walt Disney World Resort but noted attendance declines at California's Disneyland, Shanghai Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland.
From the company's earnings summary:
Growth at Disneyland Resort was primarily due to higher guest spending, partially offset by expenses associated with Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, which opened on May 31, and, to a lesser extent, lower attendance. Guest spending growth was primarily due to increases in average ticket prices and higher food, beverage and merchandise spending....
Results at Walt Disney World Resort were comparable to the prior-year quarter, despite the adverse impact of Hurricane Dorian in the current quarter. Increases in guest spending and, to a lesser extent, occupied room nights and attendance were offset by higher costs. Higher costs were driven by costs associated with Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, which opened on August 29, and cost inflation. Guest spending growth was primarily due to increased food, beverage and merchandise spending and higher average ticket prices.
Operating income at our international parks and resorts was comparable to the prior-year quarter, as growth at Disneyland Paris and Shanghai Disney Resort was largely offset by a decrease at Hong Kong Disneyland Resort. The increase at Disneyland Paris was driven by higher average ticket prices and attendance growth. At Shanghai Disney Resort, higher operating income was due to an increase in average ticket prices, partially offset by lower attendance. Lower results at Hong Kong Disneyland Resort were due to decreases in attendance and occupied room nights reflecting the impact of recent events.
Disney officials said in a conference call that advance hotel bookings are up 5 percent at Disney's domestic theme park resorts, suggesting that attendance will rise in the upcoming year as Disney completes the opening of its Star Wars Galaxy's Edge lands at Walt Disney World and Disneyland, and opens additional new attractions on both coasts.Tweet
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LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) - Police say, usually when someone doesn't get the package they're expecting, they chalk it up to lost mail, but they may be a victim of a crime.
Milton Skeen lives in the Firebrook neighborhood and said he'd been expecting a package in late March.
"Checked the tracking from Amazon and UPS and it said it had been delivered," said Skeen.
But there was no box. He checked a surveillance video he set up a few years ago, and sure enough, he saw a delivery truck drop it off.
"About thirty minutes after that, a car pulled up in front of my home, walked up to the door, and took the package out from the door," said Skeen.
Police said he's not the only victim. They also worked a similar case in the Southpoint neighborhood and they say lots more people have been affected without even realizing it.
"People think maybe it got lost or it never showed up. It doesn't occur to them that probably someone simply stole it from their front porch," said Lexington Police spokesperson Sherelle Roberts.
"I have a friend over across the road in Dogwood Trace who had a friend whose packages were stolen and he talked to the UPS man and sure enough, they're familiar with lots of packages that are stolen around town," said Skeen.
A woman in Southpoint said her husband noticed a car similar to the one caught on video the day their packages were stolen. Skeen says he's feeling good about that decision to put cameras up.
Police say in most cases, these thieves are just hoping to get lucky and find something valuable in the packages that they can sell. They worked a rash of similar thefts earlier in the year, but they don't believe the newer cases are related.


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Microsoft Brings Adds-Ins to Outlook for Android
Sep 8, 2017, 11:39 AM by Eric M. Zeman
Microsoft today updated its Outlook email application for Android devices and gave the app the ability to support add-ins. Microsoft says add-ins let Outlook users do more with their email thanks to powers enabled by third-party applications. For example, adds-ins will negate the need to leave Outlook to perform certain tasks, such as translate text, insert GIFs, or save items for safekeeping. Some of the launch partners include Evernote, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Translator, Nimble, OnePlaceMail, Outlook Customer Manager, Smartsheet, and Trello. More are on the way. Microsoft says add-ins are available when reading or composing and replying to emails. Microsoft Outlook for Android is free to download from the Google Play Store. Add-ins were added to Outlook for iOS earlier this year. Microsoft said it will be bringing add-ins to Gmail customers on iOS and Android soon.
Jun 7, 2021
Apple today announced iOS 15, the next version of its core software that powers iPhones. Version 15 is not a major overhaul, but does add a long list of new features.
Jun 27, 2019
The Google app for iOS and Android now makes it easier to search for animated GIFs and share them directly to popular messaging apps. When searching for "excited gif", for example, a new "share GIFs" section in image results will show GIFs based on how likely they are to be shared, and include a "share" button that connects directly to apps including Whatsapp, Android Messages, Gmail, and Hangouts.
Apr 7, 2021
Apple has officially opened up the technology behind "Find My iPhone" to non-Apple devices. The first devices using the new program ship next week, including bicycles from VanMoof, true wireless earbuds from Belkin, and a keychain-style tracking tag from Chipolo.
Jul 1, 2019
Samsung just launched Bixby Marketplace, which lets users add third-party "capsules" to their Bixby Assistant. The Marketplace includes a variety of convenience-enhancing capsules such as Google Maps, Spotify, iHeartRadio, NPR, and Yelp, across categories such as Productivity, Communication, Travel and transportation, Food and drink, Local, Music and audio, Shopping, and Business and finance.


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A two-day music festival took place on a hilltop in Gush Etzion in the Judean Mountains. The festival’s organizer, Yehuda Leuchter, made it clear that the gathering wasn’t about politics. “We want to give people some other choices besides fighting,” he said. “It’s time to rise up and give people a chance to be bright.” In addition to the concerts that ranged from folk to reggae to heavy metal, participants could buy kosher food, clothing and artwork, and attend Torah study sessions.
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Profit from Poverty: Queen's BrightHouse investment exploits Britain's poor
zardos777 at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Nov 11 16:31:27 GMT 2017
Has the Queen's BrightHouse investment helped make Britain's poor even poorer?
As the Paradise Papers leak reveals, some of the Queen's private wealth is invested in the rent-to-own outlet. But what is BrightHouse and is it exploiting some of Her Majesty's poorest subjects?
Adam Lusher Saturday 11 November 2017 11:18 GMT 179 comments
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At the ‘no frills’ end of the high street, near where the William Hill neighbours Paddy Power a few doors away from Poundland, there stands an altogether glossier alternative.
Here, as suggested by the shop’s very name, BrightHouse, all is light and brilliancy.
The lush primary colours of the window ad announce “our biggest TV ever!” beneath depictions of brightly wrapped presents and the promise of “Christmas moments”.
The sales counter is approached via the massed ranks of ultra-high definition widescreen TVs, with the Ecobubble washing machines beyond.
Queen invested in rent-to-own firm BrightHouse
And yet when Nothoizile Kombe exits the store in Lewisham, south-east London, it seems that all is not quite light and brilliancy at BrightHouse – at least not for its customers.
“The rates they charge the poor,” she says, the feisty laughter not quite hiding her frustration, “Are extortionate.”
The 25-year-old fast food worker, by her own admission “struggling” on the minimum wage, had asked about a mobile phone.
As she discovered, and as the BrightHouse autumn catalogue confirms, an Apple iPhone 7 Plus would cost her £1,277 with weekly payments of £24.57 spread over a year. Yet Apple is selling the exact same model for £769, or from £886 spread over two years – 30 per cent cheaper than at BrightHouse with twice the time to repay.
Widescreen TV for sale from BrightHouse
The Independent was told the 75in Samsung would cost £4,680 spread over three years (Tom Goulding)
There were plenty of other examples: the Samsung 65in ultra HD curved TV that cost £2,914 over two years at BrightHouse, but £1,681 in 24 months at Currys, which was quoting 19.9 per cent APR, a fraction of the 69.9 per cent printed in the BrightHouse brochure.
And that “biggest TV ever”? The 75in Samsung ultra HD smart TV is yours – provided you keep paying £30 a week for three years – for £4,680. Although you could buy it straightaway at Currys for £2,499, roughly half what you would end up paying at BrightHouse.
The idea, of course, is that BrightHouse provides the “rent to own” option of small weekly payments for those who can’t afford to buy outright or whose low credit ratings stop them getting ‘pay later’ deals at other stores.
It’s just that Ms Kombe – and, it has to be said, a fair few others – see it rather differently.
“I get so angry,” she says. “The poor have someone exploiting them over and over and over again – and BrightHouse is part of that.”
And yet, as we now know thanks to the revelations about offshore funds in the leaked ‘Paradise Papers’, BrightHouse is where the Queen, or perhaps more accurately her financial advisers, ended up investing some of her private wealth.
Who has been named in the Paradise Papers leak?
In 2007 a Cayman Islands-based fund run by an American company asked the Duchy of Lancaster to contribute to five projects including an interest in Vision Capital, which acquired 100 per cent of BrightHouse in June of that year.
The Duchy still has £3,208 invested in BrightHouse.
To some, Ms Kombe included, BrightHouse seems a very odd choice to be the beneficiary of Royal investment.
To some, but perhaps not to the Queen or others living at a genteel remove from the breadline, BrightHouse is part of the British “poverty premium”, that curious phenomenon whereby those on the lowest incomes now seem to end up paying more than anyone else.
Although those at the top of BrightHouse might possibly prefer to see a success story created in the “boom” years of what to everyone else was the economic downturn.
According to the Financial Inclusion Centre think-tank, during the austerity years between 2008 and 2016, BrightHouse’s gross profits more than trebled from £62.8m to £192.m, as customer numbers more than doubled from 125,300 to 276,200.
(Financial Inclusion Centre)
In November 2008, as the ‘good times’ - for BrightHouse - began rolling, a few months after it received the Queen’s money, Leo McKee, the chief executive who retired in September 2016, gave a revealing interview to the Financial Times.
There were now 5m households unable to get credit elsewhere available for him to target, he told the newspaper. While every other retailer was cutting capital expenditure, Mr McKee was planning to expand.
The FT reported at the time that at least 40 per cent of BrightHouse customers were wholly or partially reliant on benefits. The Financial Inclusion Centre would later characterise the typical BrightHouse customer as a single mother on benefits.
But Mr McKee wasn’t going to sell them the cheapest, most basic model on the market.
“Our products have to be aspirational: we can’t sell entry-level products,” he told the FT. “Some retailers can target the first-time buyer or the budget buyer, but we can’t do that because our customers are looking for the telly that gives them bragging rights.
“My head of marketing said to me, we shouldn’t advertise in the tabloids. Now that kind of blew my mind, because if you think about the mainstream electrical retailers, they’re all over the tabloids. But he said to me: ‘daytime television’.”
The FT reported that some 30 per cent of customers were falling behind in the weekly payments and having to return products to BrightHouse, which could then refurbish and resell them as “quality refurbished” or “pre-loved”.
But Mr McKee rejected accusations of preying on the vulnerable. BrightHouse staff were not on commission, he said. They would try to help customers when they got into financial difficulties.
“Say they’ve got two tellies,” explained the jovial Mr McKee. “The store people will talk to them and say, ‘I think you could do with one.’ They won’t drop to no tellies, though: they’d hand their bed back first.”
BrightHouse APR rates were broadly comparable with other mainstream retailers, said Mr McKee.
But seven years later, in February 2015 MPs on the Debt and Personal Finance All Party Parliamentary Group were reporting that some BrightHouse goods were being sold at 94.7 per cent APR.
“Bascially,” says Gareth Evans, co-author of the Financial Inclusion Centre’s March 2016 report on the sector, “Some of Rent to Own was the Wild West during economic downturn, with unchecked practices, ridiculously high growth in customers, in stores, in revenue and gross profit.”
Eventually, from late 2014 onwards, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) began “working closely” with BrightHouse. The end result came a month ago, in October 2017.
“Following engagement with the FCA,” the authority announced, “BrightHouse has committed to pay over £14.8m (in the form of cash payments and balance adjustments) to 249,000 customers in respect of 384,000 agreements for lending which may not have been affordable and payments which should have been refunded.”
Jonathan Davidson, Executive Director of Supervision, Retail and Authorisations at the FCA referred to “historic practices” which meant that: “During the time in question, BrightHouse was not a responsible lender.”
Hamish Paton, Mr McKee’s successor as BrightHouse chief executive, said: “We sincerely apologise to those customers affected. Our top priority is to ensure they are reimbursed. We’re absolutely determined this doesn’t happen again and have made significant improvements over the last 18 months.”
But not everyone seems entirely convinced by the refunds and the promises of ‘never again’.
'BrightHouse don’t have customers, they poach people' - Nothoizile Kombe (Tom Goulding)
Ms Kombe, for example, is rather too scarred by her own experiences and those of her friends.
She tells the story of her friend, a single mother on benefits who last year, while BrightHouse was “working closely” with the FCA, brought a laptop from one of the shops.
“This was the first gadget that she could get to share with her four-year-old daughter, so her little girl could go on YouTube, watch cartoons,” remembers Ms Kombe.
“Most of the other kids had tablets. This girl didn’t have any of that.”
But four months into the £12 weekly payments, her friend got a sanction on her Jobseeker’s Allowance.
“The Job Centre said they sent her a letter about an appointment that she missed, but she never got the letter.
“The sanction meant she didn’t have the £12 a week for BrightHouse. The first week she missed a payment, BrightHouse phoned her.
“The second week the BrightHouse guy is knocking on her door, panicking her. A couple of hours later, she is being told, ‘If you can’t pay, you need to return the laptop.’”
Ms Kombe paid the shortfall out of her own pocket. She didn’t want her friend to lose the laptop with nothing to show for the £190 she had already paid. She also couldn’t bear the thought of BrightHouse taking the laptop from the four-year-old “like taking candy from a little kid”.
“BrightHouse don’t have customers,” she says. “They poach people.
“It’s like a little system, and it always involves the same people – poor people.”
The incident with the young mother happened, of course, before the FCA announcement and BrightHouse’s ‘never again’ promise.
But Ms Kombe has another story, only a few days old, told to her by a friend who went into another BrightHouse store and was spotted looking at one of the widescreen TVs.
“The guy in the shop said, ‘listen, I know I work here, but if I were you, I would go somewhere else. It’s extortionate here.’”
UK news in pictures
The experts too are still sceptical about BrightHouse, despite its engagement with the FCA.
"I remain anxious,” says Yvonne Fovargue, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group that reported on Rent to Own. “I regard BrightHouse's business model as one designed to make quite a large amount of profit out of people they deliberately target as being on the lowest incomes and least able to have a wide range of choices.”
So she still worries about BrightHouse shoppers being confronted by all those widescreen TVs and fancy washing machines, about the apparent signs of continued ‘upselling’: “You go in because your washing machine is broken. You just need a machine that washes clothes, but you get sold the latest ecobubble device.”
BrightHouse, she says, is still putting “amazing mark-ups” on goods that cost much less elsewhere for those able to pay for them straightaway.
"They deliberately put stores in low-income areas," she adds. "You don’t see BrightHouse in places like Kensington, do you?
“I just feel they are making a large amount of money out of the people who can least afford it, and that just feels wrong to me. There is enough of a poverty premium already.”
It should be said, however, that the BrightHouse spokesperson was considerably more upbeat.
The Independent was told: “At BrightHouse we allow people with low incomes and poor credit ratings to get access to everyday items they otherwise wouldn’t be able to have.
“Our customers have no long-term commitment meaning they can return the products at any time without penalty, so you can’t get into a spiral of debt with BrightHouse.
“Over the last 18 months we’ve worked hard to make our business better and more flexible so that we can even better serve our customers who tend to be financially excluded by mainstream lenders.”
As for BrightHouse’s most illustrious investor, the Queen, a spokesperson for the Duchy of Lancaster said: “The Duchy’s investment in Bright House is through a third party and equates to £3,208 – just 0.0006 per cent of the Duchy’s value.”
And yet on Lewisham High Street, when Hanna, 33, heard of even a fraction of the Queen’s wealth being invested in BrightHouse, her face fell.
“I am so disappointed,” she said.
Now married to a British public sector worker, with an 18-month-old baby, she had moved to the UK from a Middle Eastern country three years ago.
“I thought it was going to be the best, freedom of speech, a country where people were protected…”
But she had just left BrightHouse – in a hurry:
“The prices are crazy,” she said. “They scared me so much I needed to leave the shop.”
This, she said, looking around the high street, was not the Britain she had dreamed of.
“There is austerity, benefits cuts, and the poor aren’t being protected. They are being taken advantage of, exploited.”
Bono responds after being named in the Paradise Papers
The high street scandal that makes the poor pay more for less
The ‘poverty premium’ pushing JAMs to the edge
Mr Evans and Ms Fovargue speak of solutions, the MP suggesting more Government funding for credit union-style alternatives, Mr Evans calling for tougher regulation, including safeguards to “prevent households seeing essential goods being taken away even where substantial repayments have been made towards them.”
They mention the more affordable credit union options – like Leeds Credit Union and Fair for You.
But these are not-for-profit groups. As yet, says Mr Evans, they lack the promotional muscle to rival BrightHouse as a presence on the high street:
“The trouble is these not-for-profits don’t have the promotional budgets to match those of BrightHouse – people just don’t know about them.”
So for now, in Lewisham, Ms Kombe just shrugs and offers, on the streets of 21st Century London, a sentiment that seems almost reminiscent of earlier, Dickensian times:
“They [BrightHouse senior executives] have got their fat bank accounts. They don’t care about people.
“We are the poor folk, and that’s just how it works.”
More information about the Diggers350


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Samsung has launched Galaxy S10 smartphone, featuring cryptocurrency storage to house private cryptocurrency keys. Currently, the phone has been announced in Seoul, San Francisco, and London. According to the company, Galaxy S10 comes with Samsung Knox function that will provide a hardware-backed secure storage for the private keys. The feature is expected to enable the smartphone users experience streamlined blockchain-enabled mobile services.
The Brave browser is now using Blockchain based verification service on its platform. Through it, the browser is checking the authenticity of the publishers anonymously. Also, the process is ensuring that publishers are paid for their content. They can connect their Ethereum wallets to get paid for their work.


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Prior to this morning’s release of the monthly Employment Situation Summary, economists polled by Reuters were predicting gains of 200,000 jobs in November. Instead, the Labor Department’s tally showed 228,000 jobs added to public and private, non-farm payrolls. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1 percent.
“It’s a really, really strong economy,” Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a staffing firm in Chicago, told The New York Times. “Companies really want to take advantage of the economy, so they want to hire and get while the getting’s good.”
Where Jobs Are Growing
The following industries added jobs last month:
- Professional and business services (+46,000)
- Manufacturing (+31,000)
- Healthcare (+30,000)
Within the construction industry, jobs for specialty trade contractors increased by 23,000 last month. Other industries changed little in November, including mining, retail trade, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, information, financial activities, leisure and hospitality and government.
Are Wages Picking Up?
Wages have grown for nine consecutive quarters, according to The PayScale Index, which measures the change in pay for employed U.S. workers. But the real value of workers’ wages is 6.9 percent less than in 2006, once inflation is taken into account. And wage growth overall has been softer than we might expect, given low unemployment.
But that may be changing. Average hourly earnings for private-sector employees rose 5 cents to $26.55 last month. In the past year, earnings have risen by 64 cents.
“With the unemployment rate this low and with just not enough people coming back into the work force to fill positions, firms are having to resort to offering higher wages,” Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist of RSM, told the Times.
Tell Us What You Think
What’s your take on this report? We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comments or join the conversation on Twitter.


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Following a gta6 leak, the trailer for “Grand Theft Auto 6,” the highly anticipated and graphic game, was made available online ahead of schedule. The sixth chapter will be released in 2025, as the trailer indicates, according to creator Rockstar Games. In its first few hours on YouTube, the eagerly awaited trailer received over 32 million views.
GTA 6 leak:
Initially, the trailer was scheduled to launch on Tuesday, December 5 at 9:00 a.m. PST. However, Rockstar Games stated, “Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube,” in a post on X, the platform that was originally known as Twitter.
It has taken a while for GTA 6, the next installment in the action-adventure series, to arrive. 2013 saw the release of GTA 5.
In the teaser, Lucia, the lead female character, goes on what looks to be a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style crime spree through packed beaches, city streets, and nightclubs with her companion.
Take-Two Interactive’s Rockstar Games has experienced leak problems. Unreleased video from the upcoming GTA game was exposed by hackers in 2022. The release of pictures and gameplay videos on the internet, which the company verified were authentic and had been leaked due to a “network intrusion,” stunned the video game community.
In the 90-second teaser, players will examine each frame in search of clues about what the upcoming chapter of the open world might contain.
For the vast majority of players who have been waiting for official word on Grand Theft Auto VI, the upcoming game in the popular Rockstar Games series, there was finally some comfort.
Grand Theft Auto 6 release date:
The firm announced on Monday night that the game will be released in 2025, putting an end to years of conjecture. The 90-second clip was released. The sun-kissed beaches and shimmering condos heralded the franchise’s return to Vice City, a decadent take on Miami that it previously visited in 2002.
The game may have a female protagonist for the first time, based on many scenarios with a woman named Lucia. She is initially shown staring into a prison yard while wearing an orange ‘inmate’ shirt and then she bursts into a store carrying a gun and a bandanna mask.
The game would “push the limits of what’s possible in highly immersive, story-driven open-world experiences,” according to a statement from Rockstar President Sam Houser. Regarding the franchise, Rockstar turned down requests for interviews.
The uproar surrounding early promotional materials—Rockstar gta 6 leaked the trailer, releasing it roughly 15 hours ahead of schedule—showcased how a franchise known for its slapstick humour and gratuitous violence, which has been indulged in since 1997, has grown into an industry behemoth.
The Grand Theft Auto VI trailer features a woman in fishnet stockings twerking on the roof of a moving vehicle, zooming speedboats and sports cars and dollar bills fluttering in a strip club. It is set to the song “Love Is a Long Road” by Tom Petty. Numerous moments play into the cliché of the “Florida man.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 games let the player to do almost anything, like driving around the streets while listening to the radio and firing rocket launchers at police cars, even though the main plot of the games revolves around robberies, kidnappings, and assassinations. Versions of New York and Southern California have been the settings of earlier games.
Since its 2013 debut, Grand Theft Auto V has sold approximately 190 million copies on computers and many console generations.


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The government is set to launch the National Equipment Identity Register (NEIR) – a system capable to identifying unregistered mobile devices – on July 1, to prevent illegal mobile handsets from connecting to any telecom network.
Existing users of unregistered devices, including those who purchased their handsets from abroad, will get an option to register their phones, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission's (BTRC) Director General (Spectrum Division) Brig Gen Md Shahidul Alam said.
He added that the opportunity to register handsets will be available to users through online and SMS.
On 25 November last year, the BTRC signed an agreement with Synesis IT Ltd – a local private information technology company – for setting up the country's first infrastructure for identifying illegal mobile handsets that are active.
After setting up the technology, the regulator will be able to disconnect illegal phones that are not registered with the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) database from mobile networks.
As part of its move to crack down on illegal imports of mobile phones and duty evasion, the BTRC has been working to launch the NEIR system for several years. At the beginning of 2018, the telecom regulator launched the country's first IMEI database for mobile phones.
According to the BTRC, around 118 million IMEI numbers were added to the database over the last three years in consultation with phone importers, operators and Bangladeshi mobile manufacturers.
From the database, customers can check the legality of imported handsets simply by sending an SMS.


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Low-carbohydrate diets are a popular way to shed pounds these days, but while diet devotees of Atkins or South Beach are slimming down, so are their wallets.
Low-carb, high-protein diets can be expensive, possibly doubling your grocery food bill. Although you might be eating less, you're eating more expensive foods. Meat, fish and nuts are far pricier than pasta, bread and potato chips.
And if dieters get hooked on pre-packaged, expensive products labeled "low-carb," the family grocery budget will go bust in no time. A four-person American family spends about $7,500 on food each year, or about 14 percent of all spending, according to government data. So a low-carb lifestyle could cost thousands extra a year.
But low-carb isn't only a diet for the rich. If you want to limit the carbs but keep more money in your pocket, consider these strategies from low-carb experts, nutritionists and professional cheapskates:
Eat real food. "The best way to cut costs is to stay away from those low-carb processed foods," says Fred Pescatore, former medical director at Atkins and author of a new low-carb book, "The Hamptons Diet."
"They're dreadfully expensive," he says. "You can pay $6 for a loaf of bread. That's ridiculous."
Real foods include meat, poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds.
Substitute. Swap in less expensive cuts of beef for low-carb recipes that call for pricier meats, says Colette Heimowitz, vice president of education and research at Atkins Health and Medical Information Services.
And use chicken and turkey, especially the affordable legs and dark meat.
"Poultry is always cheaper than meat," she says. "You don't have to eat meat to succeed on low carbs."
Lentils and other legumes can be an inexpensive side dish or even a component of a main meal. While they're not low in carbs, they're high in fiber, which means they're OK on low-carb diets, Heimowitz says. Legume recipes are widely available on the Internet.
Use frozen vegetables and canned fish, which are cheaper than fresh varieties.
Buy seasonal fruits and vegetables, which are less expensive than those out of season. And consider growing a garden for cheap veggies.
Cook up savings. Spending some time in the kitchen can save money. Low-carb recipes are available in all the low-carb books and on the Internet.
Buy a head of lettuce rather than expensive bagged salad.
Make your own low-carb bread and crackers with crushed nuts and soy flour.
For desserts, make diet Jell-O for 49 cents a box instead of buying premade cups for $4. Buy unsweetened chocolate to make desserts, or make your own ice cream with sugar substitutes.
Celery with peanut butter or cream cheese is a cheap snack.
"There are ways to do this inexpensively," Pescatore says. "You don't have to buy $19.95-a-pound cheese."
Use spices and herbs to dress up cheaper cuts of meat. And use food leftovers in stews, soups and casseroles.
"You don't need low-carb products to succeed on Atkins," Heimowitz says.
And, of course, anytime you cook at home, it's cheaper than eating at restaurants.
Be a savvy shopper. Michelle Jones and her husband of King, N.C., switched to low-carb eating in January. But they're total cheapskates. Jones runs the Web site, BetterBudgeting.com.
She keeps costs down by rationing low-carb meal replacement bars and shakes and employing shopping tactics that work for all foods.
"We buy our low-carb products, including sugar-free candy and gum, at discount stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart," Jones says.
Shop at warehouse clubs, where you can save money by buying larger quantities. Repackage frozen items into smaller portions.
"And we use our grocery-savings rule," Jones says. "If it's not on sale, it doesn't go in your cart."
Often that means planning meals around whichever meats, poultry and seafood items are on sale in a given week.
Still, even frugal low-carb dieters might be spending a little more on food in the short term. Long-term, though, fewer doctor visits and drug prescriptions to treat obesity, diabetes and other ailments more than balance the ledger, low-carb proponents say.
TALE OF THE CHECKOUT TAPE
Foods that will help you go low-carb without going broke (from top): Canned fish legumes chicken instead of beef frozen vegetables seasonal vegetables fresh lettuce instead of bagged salads unsweetened chocolate to make your own dessert nut flour to make your own bread fruit in season
Gregory Karp is a personal finance writer for The Morning Call. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.org or 610-820-6643.


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This is your robot. This is your robot on drugs. It pukes a lot. Any questions?
A new mobile app aimed at teens who are at risk of abusing over-the-counter medications such as cough syrup lets them test the effects on a customized robot. The results? Lots of projectile vomiting.
The campaign, less in the vein of a traditional scare-tactic public safety announcement and more like a mobile game, comes from ad agency Tribal Worldwide on behalf of the Consumer Healthcare Products AssociSee Original Article
HELSINKI — Mobile game developer Rovio Entertainment says it plans to cut some 16% of its workforce amid signs that its Angry Birds game is losing some of its luster.
CEO Mikael Hed said in a statement on Thursday that Rovio expects to cut up to 130 jobs in Finland, as the company had been building its team on assumptions of “faster growth than has materialized.” The Espoo, Finland-based company currently has about 800 employees.
See also: Anguished Birds: Rovio Net Profit Falls 52% in 2See Original Article
Ten companies that have been selected for a new startup incubator are committed to a linchpin of lifting millions out of poverty: empowering young women.
The Girl Effect Accelerator, launched Thursday by the Nike Foundation and the Unreasonable Group, will mentor a cohort of companies that are all dedicated to the hundreds of millions of girls who live in poverty globally. For two weeks they will gather to grow their businesses — but not just because fighting poverty is the right thing tSee Original Article
Boilerplate kills kittens. Early in my career, I worked as a technical writer for a large government contractor. The GPO Manual was our ultimate arbiter of word choice, I learned to spell “judgment” without a second “e,” and we relied heavily on giant chunks of pre-written text. I was a “writer,” but one who was having her soul slowly crushed under the weight of government regulations. Those formative experiences gave me an intense interest in how words areSee Original Article


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Hong Kong has overtaken London as the world's most expensive office rental market while Beijing and Shanghai have also made their ways into the top five spot, international property consultancy JLL said in a latest report.
Renting a top quality office in Hong Kong will cost an average of $262 per square foot per year ($2,819 per square meter per year) as strong tenant demand and shortages of premium grade space jointly push prices up. That beats London, where rents in premium buildings average $240 per square foot per year, according to JLL's first edition of Global Premium Office Rent Tracker.
Beijing, which is rapidly extending its global business networks, ranks third at $199 per square foot per year while in New York, top rents average $171 amid increasingly rising demand from the technology and media sectors. Shanghai, supported by the growth of domestic enterprises, wraps up the Top 5 list with an average cost of $136.
"Our research reveals that half of the top 10 cities are in Asia," said Chris Archibold, head of markets at JLL Singapore. "A large part of the global growth is now driven out of Asia and international businesses will continue to be keen to set up their presence in the region. In order to remain competitive from a real estate perspective, these cities will need to ensure a supply of appropriately priced, flexible commercial space."


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In images shared on Instagram, the “Cactus Jack” Jordan Trunner sneakers are pictured with a price tag of $54.95 still attached. Given that standard Trunner models retail for $140 and Scott’s collaboration will likely see a premium price increase, it would be an understatement to call the sub-$60 price a good deal.
At concerts, Scott has given the unreleased Jordan sneakers to fans, so it’s not implausible that a pair could have found its way into a secondhand store.
There is currently no confirmed release date for the “Cactus Jack” Travis Scott x Jordan Trunner, but inline versions of the sneaker can be purchased now from nike.com for $140.
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