You may be amazed at how it’s possible to ship a package and have it arrive anywhere in the world overnight (for a premium price), but you’ll be even more amazed when you see how it’s done. FedEx, UPS, and DHL have overnight shipping down to an art — via Youtube
Britside cannabis delivery commercial by Sandwich Video — via Youtube
— via Youtube
— via Youtube
Vegemite is set to return to Australian ownership after dairy company Bega announced it would buy most of Mondelez International’s Australia and New Zealand grocery and cheese business.
Bega, in a note to the Australian Stock Exchange, said it would use bank debt to fund the $460 million acquisition.
The deal does not include Philadelphia products but will see Australian ownership of Kraft-branded products, including peanut butter, cheeses and mayonnaise — via redwolf.newsvine.com
For years, American Apparel proudly touted its Made in Los Angeles
motto. With its sale Tuesday to a Canadian sportswear firm, neither American Apparel’s name nor its motto will ring so true.
Gildan Activewear agreed to pay $88 million in a winning auction bid for the American Apparel brand and some manufacturing equipment, the company said Tuesday. The deal for American Apparel, which filed for bankruptcy in November for the second time, still requires approval from a Delaware bankruptcy court judge Thursday.
Gildan did not buy any of the company’s 110 retail stores in the US. Those stores are likely to close within a few months, analysts said.
Glenn Chamandy, chief executive of Gildan, said that American Apparel will be a strong complementary addition
to its portfolio.
We see strong potential to grow American Apparel sales,
he said in a statement. There is potential to drive further market share penetration in the fashion basics segment
both in North America and internationally.
Gildan may keep some warehouse and manufacturing operations in Los Angeles, but analysts said that the vast majority of American Apparel factory workers in the Southland will be out of a job. In December, American Apparel notified nearly 3,500 Southland employees that they may lose their jobs. The message went to 332 workers in Garden Grove, 959 workers in South Gate and 2,166 workers at the company’s sprawling headquarters in downtown Los Angeles — via redwolf.newsvine.com
For eight days each year, Basel becomes the centre of the watch universe. The fair’s organisers claimed 150,000 paying visitors and 1,800 brands spread over 141,000 square metres of exhibition space. Admission cost 60 Swiss francs a day (almost £50), for which one could have bought a nice Timex. Near the Breitling pavilion was an obelisk for Omega, and a palace for Rolex. TAG Heuer adorned its booth with a TAG Heuer-sponsored Formula 1 racing car. One could spend many hours walking the plush carpets here, and encounter many very handsome men and women promoting Breguet, Hublot, and Longines, and very many handsome men and women buying their wares, too. Some booths were also selling jewellery — including Chanel, Gucci and Chopard — and some brands were selling watches covered in jewels: symphonies of the unnecessary, such as the Harry Winston Premier Moon Phase 36mm, with mother of pearl and 104 brilliant-cut diamonds.
The show was a celebration of our mastery of timekeeping, and of the refinement and years of training that go into making objects of beauty and accuracy. But it was also a celebration of excess and superfluousness, of watches that exist merely because they can, like animal acts at a circus. Many worked on the most intricate levels to perform functions almost beyond usefulness: there were watches with a calendar that lasts 1,000 years; there were watches showing the phase of the moon in a different time zone. And then there were items such as the Aeternitas Mega 4 from Franck Muller, assembled from 1,483 components. This would announce the hours and quarter-hours with the same chime sequence as Big Ben. At its launch, it was heralded by its makers as the most complex wristwatch ever made, and a grandiose work of art. In addition to its 36 “complications” – a complication is essentially a nice gimmick – was the ability to tell the time. Another complication was that it cost £2.2m.
And therein lies the mystery of the modern timepiece. These days, no one requires a Swiss watch to tell the time – or a watch from any country. The time displayed on our mobile phones and other digital devices will always be more accurate than the time displayed on even the most skilfully engineered mechanical watch, yet the industry has a visual presence in our lives like few others. The store fronts of the world’s big-money boulevards glow with the lustre of Rolex and Omega; newspapers and magazines appear to be kept in business largely by watch adverts; airports would be empty shells without them. The export value of the Swiss watch trade fell by 3.3% last year, due primarily to a downfall in demand from the east Asia. But it is up 62.9% compared with six years ago. In 2015 the world bought 28.1m Swiss watches valued at 21.5 billion Swiss francs.
We live in uncertain economic times, but watch prices at Baselworld show no signs of making a cut-price concession to the unstable yen or rouble, or even the recent competition from the Apple Watch. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the higher the asking price, the greater the appeal, for cheapness may suggest a reduction in quality — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Each summer, thousands of the best and brightest graduates join the workforce. Their well-above-average raw intelligence will have been carefully crafted through years at the world’s best universities. After emerging from their selective undergraduate programmes and competitive graduate schools, these new recruits hope that their jobs will give them ample opportunity to put their intellectual gifts to work. But they are in for an unpleasant surprise.
Smart young things joining the workforce soon discover that, although they have been selected for their intelligence, they are not expected to use it. They will be assigned routine tasks that they will consider stupid. If they happen to make the mistake of actually using their intelligence, they will be met with pained groans from colleagues and polite warnings from their bosses. After a few years of experience, they will find that the people who get ahead are the stellar practitioners of corporate mindlessness — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Three former bank executives have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from two years to three and a half years for a €7.2bn conspiracy to defraud in September 2008.
Former Anglo Irish Bank executives John Bowe and Willie McAteer and the former chief executive of Irish Life and Permanent, Denis Casey, were found guilty last month of agreeing a scheme to mislead the public about the true health of Anglo.
Judge Martin Nolan sentenced Bowe to two years, McAteer to three and a half years and Casey to two years and nine months — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In the lead up to the 2013 federal election, amid a fierce political debate between the major parties over the roll out of the National Broadband Network, an ABC editor-journalist was directed by his boss to find any story he could that was critical of the Labor Party’s NBN Plan in order to provide insurance
against attacks on the ABC by the Coalition.
The explosive revelations are contained in a secretly-made recording of a meeting between Nick Ross, the ABC’s former Games and Technology Editor, and Bruce Belsham, the Head of ABC’s Current Affairs division.
Ross has been the subject of growing media interest over the past week, following his resignation from the ABC on January 14. It came amid long-running speculation that Ross had been ‘gagged’ by the national broadcaster from reporting on the NBN.
That claim — that Ross was gagged
— continues to be strongly denied by the ABC — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The names of 57 agencies that are seeking to gain access to telecommunications metadata stored on Australian residents without a warrant have been released under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
The names of four agencies have been redacted, with the Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) previously saying that disclosing the names of these agencies would be contrary to the public interest.
The FOI request originally asked for correspondence from organisations seeking to gain access to stored telecommunications metadata. The department denied this request on practical grounds, stating that 2,661 pages spread across 288 documents were related to such a request, and that 45 third parties needed to be consulted before the information could be released.
Eventually, the request was narrowed down to merely a list of agencies looking to be declared as an enforcement agency as defined under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act.
Agencies objected to disclosure on the basis that it would compromise the trust they place in the Commonwealth,
AGD said last week. During consultation, these four agencies clearly indicated that disclosure of this information would damage the relationship between the department and the relevant agencies, and could affect any future cooperation with the department
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) member states will force internet service providers (ISPs) to give up identification details of alleged copyright infringers so that rights holders can protect and enforce their copyright through criminal and civil means with few limitations, according to the full text of the agreement.
The TPP, the full text of which has been published on the website for the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade a month after reaching agreement, will regulate trade between Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Brunei, and Chile.
Section J of the Intellectual Property chapter [PDF] covers ISPs, with Article 18.82(7) stating that member states must enable copyright holders to access the details of alleged copyright infringers through ISPs.
Each party shall provide procedures, whether judicial or administrative, in accordance with that party’s legal system, and consistent with principles of due process and privacy, that enable a copyright owner that has made a legally sufficient claim of copyright infringement to obtain expeditiously from an internet service provider information in the provider’s possession identifying the alleged infringer, in cases in which that information is sought for the purpose of protecting or enforcing that copyright,
the text says.
The full text of the intellectual property chapter ties in with leaks last month from WikiLeaks revealing that ISPs would be forced to give up copyright infringer details — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Dr Paul Vixie, a pioneer of the internet’s domain name system (DNS), has lashed out at the creation of hundreds of new top-level domains, ranging from .dog to .horse, and .cool to .porn, labelling them a money grab and a mistake.
Vixie, who is now the chief executive officer of Farsight Security, was speaking at the Ruxcon information security conference in Melbourne on Sunday about the importance of securing the internet’s DNS infrastructure.
In response to an audience question about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decision to create some 1900 new top-level domains in this first round alone, Vixie was blunt.
I think it is a money grab. My own view is that ICANN functions as a regulator, and that as a regulator it has been captured by the industry that they are regulating. I think that there was no end-user demand whatsoever for more so-called DNS extensions, [or] global generic top-level domains (gTLDs),
he said.
Vixie sees the demand for the new domains as having come from the people who have the budget to send a lot of people to every ICANN meeting, and participate in every debate
, that is, the domain name registrars who simply want more names to sell, so they can make more money. But these new domains don’t seem to be working.
They’re gradually rolling out, and they are all commercial failures,
Vixie said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via Doghouse Diaries
Cisco’s suffered a legal reversal in Australia, where the nation’s Trade Marks Office has ruled the logo of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is not an attempt to imitate or cash in on the Borg’s bridge badge.
CSIRO’s logo is supposed to be a stylised map of Australia. Cisco’s reimagining of the Golden Gate bridge and/or an graph is well known.
Cisco objected to the CSIRO’s application to trademark its logo. The Borg’s beef seems to have been that the colours and wave design in both logos are similar and therefore perhaps confusing to punters. That CSIRO’s desire to have its logo classified as pertaining to software and “telecommunications” didn’t help either.
CSIRO has form in the latter field: astronomers there did the basic work that led to the creation of WiFi and the organisation has scooped hundreds of millions in patent royalties from technology companies, including Cisco. The case therefore has an ironic element, as Cisco makes millions from WiFi kit every year — via redwolf.newsvine.com
FedEx agreed to buy Dutch parcel-delivery company TNT Express for 4.4 billion euros ($US4.8 billion), predicting it can succeed where bigger rival United Parcel Service was blocked by regulators in 2013.
TNT, originally Thomas Nationwide Transport, was founded in Sydney by Ken Thomas in 1946. The company merged with Hungarian refugee Peter Abeles’ transport company, Alltrans Group, in 1967. Alltrans was famously started with Sir Peter’s two trucks dubbed Samson and Delilah.
Though the merged company scrapped the Alltrans name, Sir Peter was a significant driver in TNT’s huge expansion with his motto: Anything, anywhere, any time
. The company began to expand internationally with the purchase of a California truck line in 1969.
Key to the company’s expansion was Sir Peter’s close relationship with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, which was developed when the pair took joint control over Ansett in 1979, with TNT winning the contract to distribute Murdoch’s British newspapers.
TNT was eventually taken over by Koninklijke PTT Neder-land for $2 billion in 1996 in one of the largest mergers in Dutch history — via redwolf.newsvine.com
FedEx agreed to buy Dutch parcel-delivery company TNT Express for 4.4 billion euros ($US4.8 billion), predicting it can succeed where bigger rival United Parcel Service was blocked by regulators in 2013.
TNT, originally Thomas Nationwide Transport, was founded in Sydney by Ken Thomas in 1946. The company merged with Hungarian refugee Peter Abeles’ transport company, Alltrans Group, in 1967. Alltrans was famously started with Sir Peter’s two trucks dubbed Samson and Delilah.
Though the merged company scrapped the Alltrans name, Sir Peter was a significant driver in TNT’s huge expansion with his motto: Anything, anywhere, any time
. The company began to expand internationally with the purchase of a California truck line in 1969.
Key to the company’s expansion was Sir Peter’s close relationship with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, which was developed when the pair took joint control over Ansett in 1979, with TNT winning the contract to distribute Murdoch’s British newspapers.
TNT was eventually taken over by Koninklijke PTT Neder-land for $2 billion in 1996 in one of the largest mergers in Dutch history — via redwolf.newsvine.com
TPG has announced plans to purchase rival, and Australia’s third-largest internet service provider, iiNet.
The deal was announced to the Australian Securities Exchange on Friday morning. TPG will acquire 100 percent of iiNet shares, of which the company already had a significant stake.
The total value of the deal is worth AU$1.4 billion.
The agreement will see the combined TPG company become larger than Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company Optus, increasing TPG’s customer base to 1.7 million.
There will be combined revenues of AU$2.3 billion — via redwolf.newsvine.com
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes in his forthcoming book Murdoch’s World that Fox News’ public relations staffers used an elaborate series of dummy accounts to fill the comments sections of critical blog posts with pro-Fox arguments.
In a chapter focusing on how Fox utilised its notoriously ruthless public relations department in the mid-to-late 00’s, Folkenflik reports that Fox’s PR staffers would post pro-Fox rants
in the comments sections of negative and even neutral
blog posts written about the network. According to Folkenflik, the staffers used various tactics to cover their tracks, including setting up wireless broadband connections that could not be traced back
to the network.
A former staffer told Folkenflik that they had personally used one hundred
fake accounts to plant Fox-friendly commentary:
On the blogs, the fight was particularly fierce. Fox PR staffers were expected to counter not just negative and even neutral blog postings but the anti-Fox comments beneath them. One former staffer recalled using twenty different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had one hundred. Several employees had to acquire a cell phone thumb drive to provide a wireless broadband connection that could not be traced back to a Fox News or News Corp account. Another used an AOL dial-up connection, even in the age of widespread broadband access, on the rationale it would be harder to pinpoint its origins. Old laptops were distributed for these cyber operations. Even blogs with minor followings were reviewed to ensure no claim went unchecked. [Murdoch’s World, pg. 67]
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Figures suggest one of the country’s largest training colleges had just 19 students graduate from any of its courses in a single year, reigniting concerns about the training sector.
Data on the Government’s MySkills website showed Evocca College enrolled almost 14,000 students in 2012 but just 19 graduated.
The company has disputed the figures but others have suggested the numbers support ongoing concerns about some players in the training industry.
In particular, criticism focused on the recruitment practices of companies which sometimes targeted disadvantaged students.
Such students often struggled to cope with high-level course content and dropped out, leaving them with hefty government training loans and no qualification.
Evocca College was one of the training market leaders with almost 40 campuses around Australia.
In a statement, Evocca said the MySkills figures were wrong and many hundreds of students graduated out of 2,770 enrolments in 2012, with its graduate rates at or above industry average.
It said not all students dropped out and many went on to work or other training — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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