With the American milk business souring, the dairy industry is casting a covetous eye on athletes in need of a restorative post-workout beverage.
The fashionability of facial hair is bad news for the razor industry.
Nelson Mandela, long-time champion of the anti-apartheid movement and former president of South Africa, died today at the age of 95. He will be remembered for his unrelenting pursuit of racial equality and lifelong struggle against segregation and poverty, as well for his passionate belief in humanity. But he has also been known for his ability to motivate millions with his words. From his testimony given during the trials leading up to his imprisonment to the speech he gave upon his release 27 years later, and the countless addresses and speeches given thereafter, Mandela provided us with no dearth of inspiring thoughts. Below, a curation of some of the best Nelson Mandela quotes.
A new reversible USB plug is likely to hit the market next year.
A poll has found that 41% of Kazakhs, or nearly 8 million people in the country, favored legalizing polygamy, Bloomberg reported yesterday. That’s considerably higher than in 2004, when an unofficial survey by local newspaper Express K found that 40% of men were in favor of legalizing polygamy, while over 70% of women opposed it. (Bloomberg says the latest poll was published last year by state news service Kazinform, but it was actually conducted two years ago on Quorum.kz, a Kazakh news website, so it’s not clear how scientific it was either.)
“The median grade in Harvard College is indeed an A-,” the school’s dean of education said today, according to the student newspaper. Even more stunning: “The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A.”
Next year’s World Cup goers may be fretting about the cost of hotel rooms in Sao Paulo, which are already running up to five times normal prices during the event. But the cost of getting around the country should worry them just as much.
Mexicans living abroad sent over $1.85 billion dollars (link in Spanish) back home in October, a 3% increase from September and nearly 5% spike from the same month last year.
It’s another example of just how irresistible American consumer culture is to economies around the globe. Mexico’s version of Black Friday, better known in the country as El Buen Fin (“the good weekend”), wrapped up on Nov. 18 with much success. Eighty-thousand retailers in Mexico City took part in the event, which grossed an estimated 160,000 million pesos ($12 billion) in sales this year, a roughly 10% jump from 2012.
Facebook has had wild success with its push into emerging markets.
Christmas time is Elmo time. The lovable red monster from Sesame Street has been one of the most popular gifts in the US nearly every year since 1996. And his dominance reveals a lot about the state of the American toy industry.
For the past 10 months, children in Indonesia’s Banten province have been commuting to school on narrow bamboo rafts—along a river best known to tourists for its whitewater rapids—because local authorities still haven’t fixed a bridge that collapsed in January in a flood. In China, a group of children in Guangxi province, some as young as four years old, also travel to school along a river on flimsy rafts because other routes to the school, along a flooded mountain path, are even more dangerous.
The numbers: Super budget airline easyJet reported yearly pre-tax profits of £478 million ($770 million), marking a 51% increase from last year. Revenue for the fiscal year came in at £4.3 billion, up 10.5% from last year. The company’s shares are up sharply on the news.
The Helicoverpa caterpillar’s cuteness may only be surpassed by its surprising lethality.
There’s a peculiar thing happening in the world of marijuana users.
Mexicans aren’t feeling the love from their friends and family living abroad.
Teams around the world vying to get into the World Cup aren’t just gunning for the limelight; they’re also competing for financial boosts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Argentina is bleeding money.
A United Nations report (pdf) released on Nov. 12 highlights Latin America’s problem with violence. It was the only region where homicides overall increased between 2000 and 2010. But one country has it especially bad: Honduras.
The city of Madrid typically conjures images of its vast plazas and royal palaces, but lately it’s looking more like a monument to trash.
The early days after a disaster like typhoon Haiyan, which tore through the Philippines on Nov. 8, can be the most critical ones—especially if you’re trying to deliver food to the millions of Filipinos currently displaced and lacking access to food.
This article has been corrected.
Argentina’s soccer culture may be the envy of fanatics worldwide, but its business model appears to be morphing into something of a safe haven for criminal money laundering.
President Nicolás Maduro shook up an already shaky Venezuelan economy this weekend as he ordered the “occupation” of the nation’s largest appliance store chain by troops to guarantee “fair” pricing. Maduro said that government inspectors had found electronic goods overpriced by up to 1,000%, claiming repeatedly that the inflation is the fault of greedy store owners and his political opponents.
