The San Francisco Giants took on the Chicago Cubs on Tuesday in a game that was stopped due to heavy rain. The ground crew struggled to get the tarp on properly to protect the field—leading to Wrigley Field fans booing the crew and chanting ”Pull, pull, pull!”
What to watch for today
The Canadian tuxedo, the Texan tux, Justin Timberlake… denim-on-denim fashion choices have a short and infamous history. But they appear to be making some sort of comeback. Ralph Lauren recently unveiled its spring-summer collection for 2015 and among the usual combinations of men’s fashion were two curiosities. Two denim suits. One is more hipster:
Lawyers, politicians, salespersons, police officers, and receptionists are among those considered likely to be bad parents because their working lives are perceived as aggressive, weak, or impersonal. That’s according to new research on the effects of occupations on parenting at the University of Iowa.
In 2013, Amy Rose Spiegel wrote a piece for BuzzFeed titled, ”What’s the Deal With Jazz?” It was a trademark listicle featuring gems such as “Jazz guys account for, like, 74% of all fedora wearers, which basically makes them criminals in the rest of the world’s eyes.” The story was widely ridiculed. But at some point, the story disappeared.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey went marching in Ferguson, Missouri, on Saturday night with everyone protesting the death of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown at the hands of local police. The St. Louis native—Ferguson is a suburb—walked with the small, peaceful crowds, followed State Highway Police Captain Ron Johnson in a march, and (what else?) tweeted and vined his experiences, such as this:
Two players at the 41st Chess Olympiad held in Norway have died within hours of each other. At the tournament in Tromso, deep in the Arctic Circle, a man from the Seychelles suffered a heart attack and collapsed in the middle of a game. Later, an Uzbek player was found dead in his hotel room.
“Where other nationalities mass frenziedly, the British queue,” according to the etiquette guide Debrett’s. ”Turn up at a railway station, or a supermarket, or a post office and you will see an orderly queue. For foreigners, the art of queuing must seem esoteric at best and maddening at worst.” Not anymore, at least when it comes to the long and painful wait to speak to a human being on a corporate helpline. The mobile phone carrier Everything Everywhere now lets people in the UK stuck listening to muzak pay a fee of 50 pence (80 cents) to skip the line.
The new season of English Premier League soccer is the costliest ever, before a ball has even been kicked. Teams have already spent a record £647 million ($1.08 billion) on players, according to the BBC, and there are still two weeks before the summer transfer window closes.
The original patient in the current Ebola outbreak in Western Africa was a two-year boy in Guéckédou in Guinea, medical researchers told the New York Times. The boy died of the disease, which has a fatality rate of up to 90%, on Dec. 6, but not before it infected his mother, his three-year-old sister and his grandmother. How did the virus spread? Relatives who attended their funerals took it back home with them to their villages.
Amazon has stopped selling pre-orders of some of the year’s biggest movies from Walt Disney in its latest contract dispute. The titles affected include Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Maleficent, and Muppets Most Wanted. When Quartz searched for the Captain America sequel on the US site, the Amazon Instant Video stream was available but no physical copies on Blu-ray or DVD were offered.
That symbol of Americana, McDonald’s, has suffered a hit around the world. Global comparable monthly sales in July fell by 2.5%, the hamburger chain’s worst performance in a decade. The drop was led by Asia, Middle East, and Africa, where sales fell by a whopping 7.3%.
For the past month, Israel and Hamas have been at de facto war with each other; almost 2,000 Palestinians and 66 Israelis have died so far. On Friday, after a three-day truce, Israel resumed its attacks in Gaza. And yet, through it all, Israelis are singing along to a song called Kum, Aseh Piguim—which translates to “Up, Do Terror Attacks.”
On Friday, a judge in San Jose took the rare step of rejecting a $324.5 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit over whether Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel conspired not to hire each other’s employees—an anti-competitive practice that it is alleged to have kept salaries of 64,000 eligible employees artificially low. The rejection vindicated Michael Devine, one of the four named plaintiffs in the suit, who wrote to the judge and asked her to reject the deal negotiated by his own lawyers because of the paltry terms.
If you’re not living in a former British colony, you probably haven’t realized that an international quadrennial sporting event has been going full tilt. But on Sunday, after 11 days, the Commonwealth Games held in Glasgow ends. The Games feature the “home nations” (the countries that make up the United Kingdom—England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), Canada, India, and many more, including a string of tiny island nations such as Nauru, which has a population of 9,000. You may have seen HBO’s resident expat John Oliver’s fairly scathing take on the Games recently:
Every major city in the world has a network of public phone booths on most streets—absolutely crucial to the running of the city only a couple of decades ago but now just taking up space in the age of smartphones. In Britain, home of the iconic red telephone booths that have been around since 1926, many booths have fallen into disrepair.
Students in the UK can now get graduate degrees in cyber-spying approved by the masters of the craft at the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters, the British counterpart of the US National Security Agency. Students at the University of Oxford and five other universities can get masters in cyber-security signed off by the best eavesdroppers in the country, the BBC reported.
Warren Buffett is a happy man. In the second quarter of this year, his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, made $6.4 billion in net profit, the most it has ever made in a three-month period. To put that in perspective, ExxonMobil made $8.8 billion and Apple made $7.7 billion in the same period—and they make oil and some of the world’s most beloved consumer devices, respectively.
Call it the 21st century version of hitchhiking: BlaBlaCar is a peer-to-peer marketplace for open spots in cars across Europe. Unlike American ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft, BlaBlaCar caps the price of the ride based on distance and the cost of fuel in that country. The average ride is 200 miles and the average fare is less than $25.
On July 22 Spain passed a law (link in Spanish) called the canon AEDE, after the acronym for Spain’s daily newspapers’ association. The law has been dubbed the tasa Google (“Google tax”) in the Spanish press and gives these publishers the right to seek payment from any site that links to their content with a “meaningful” description of the work.
Why do some of China’s biggest tech companies engage in the sincerest form of flattery? This week Lei Jun, the chief executive of Xiaomi—recently rebranded internationally as Mi—stood on stage in a black T-shirt and jeans and announced a new smartphone with a notable resemblance to the iPhone in front of a slide that said “one more thing…”
Early this morning, the three towers of the Didcot power station in the UK were pulled down in a controlled explosion.
China is already the biggest beer market in the world by volume—it overtook the US in 2002 and is already twice as large, according to Euromonitor. By value, the US still leads, but last year, the Chinese market was worth around 80% as much as America’s and Euromonitor predicts it will overtake the world’s richest country by 2017. “As the legal drinking age population is expected to grow faster in China than in the USA over 2013–2018 in absolute terms, brewers will be capturing prospective demand that has been dormant for years,” said Amin Alkhatib, a drinks analyst at Euromonitor.
For a nation of historic tea drinkers, Koreans love their coffee. And they increasingly prefer the good stuff. The Korea Customs Service said 120,000 tons of coffee were imported into Korea in 2013, up 7% from the year before, making it the seventh-biggest importer in the world.
