Facebook’s mobile photo service, Instagram will be expanding is new advertising business to countries outside the United States.
The plan is to first show ads to users in Australia, Britain and Canada later this year by working with just a small number of advertisers in each of those countries.
Facebook has already begun placing ads in Instagram inside the US, beginning last November with brands like Levi’s and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Instagram announced that the ads within the US have, in some cases yielded results “well above the ad industry’s average for performance.”
Instagram has over 200 million users, and is therefore expected to be an excellent source of advertising revenue for Facebook, which purchased the mobile photo service in 2012 for $1 billion. Seeking to calm investor expectations of a quick revenue uptick, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg said that the company was going to roll out their ad program on Instagram at a moderate pace.
“We don’t see the need or the urge to ramp this as quickly as we possibly can,” Sandberg said.
A US official told the Wall Street Journal of the White House concern that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was able to hide his intentions towards Crimea from the National Security Agency.
The official said that the Obama administration is “very nervous” about Russia’s successful subterfuge; taking over Crimea and bringing troops to the Ukrainian border and hiding it from US eavesdropping equipment. “This is unchartered territory,” he said.
According to the WSJ US officials are in the dark about how Russia was able to hide its plans from the NSA, which spies on digital and electronic communications.
Apparently, says the Journal, Russian leaders either “deliberately avoided communicating about the invasion or simply found a way to do so without detection by the U.S.”
Another worry for US deterrence is whether this new secrecy is part of a wider trend in which Russia can act without US foreknowledge.
“All military combat operations depend on NSA contributions,” said former assistant command security manager in the US Navy, and consultant Robert Caruso during a discussion about documents potentially accessed by Edward Snowden. “[The Department of Defense] depends on NSA and the Defense Information Systems Agency to secure all its networks and others networks too.”
In what is at least the third recall of generic Lipitor in the past two years, The Federal Food and Drug Administration announced a Class II recall of the Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd product.
Over 64,000 bottles of the medication that lowers cholesterol levels were recalled in the United States as a reaction to the discovery by a pharmacist of a 20-milligram tablet in a sealed bottle which was marked as containing just 10-milligram tablets.
A Class II recall means that there is only a slight chance that severe bad consequences or death will ensue due to the problem. Ranbaxy, located in India, did not comment on the recall announcement.
Ranbaxy is India’s largest drug manufacturer by revenue. In November 2012 the company recalled 480,000 bottles of atorvastatin calcium, the generic name for Lipitor’s active ingredient, due to the discovery of tiny particles of glass by the company.
Speeding violations major source of revenue for Hampton, Florida
The tiny town of Hampton, population 477, is well-known in north Florida despite its small size. Sitting along route 301 between Gainesville, where the University of Florida has a campus, and other much larger communities, Hampton is known as a speed-trap, a place where driving too fast frequently gained the transgressor a speeding ticket . It turns out that the 17 policemen on the force of Hampton gave out tickets to the tune of $200,000 over the years, but did not keep track of where the money finally ended up.
This turns out to be only a small sample of the mismanagement at best, and pervasive corruption at worst, that plagued the town for many years. Hampton just went through a devastating audit pointing to gross wrongdoing by city officials. As a result of the audit the entire staff of the town resigned, and the Florida legislature plans on filing legislation to abolish the town this coming spring.
In wake of the fact that the town’s staff has resigned en masse, passage of a bill to disband the town may be purely symbolic, as the town, for all intents and purposes, already does not exist as a political entity.
“The whole town’s resigned now,” said the chairman of the Legislature’s joint auditing committee Lake Ray, R-Jacksonville. “Apparently, the operator of the water plant had resigned but agreed to come back and work for a little while.”
Hampton is about 130 miles north of Orlando. The audit, overseen by the Florida Joint Legislative Auditing Committee, showed that the town kept horrible records of expenses, could not account for 46 percent of its water, entered into contracts without keeping records, and in one case at least, lost public records “in a swamp.” Not to mention the 17 policeman who generated $200,000 in revenue through the handing out of speeding tickets, with no record of where those funds went to.
“You can’t make this stuff up in a book,” Bradford County Sheriff Gordon Smith told the panel last week.
“We do have the information that says there’s a lot of unusual activities,” Ray said. “So therefore we believe there may be some problems, so we’re sending it to the State Attorney’s office. Our understanding is they’re aware of it and they will be taking action.”
The committee is planning on sending a letter to the State Attorney to ask for an investigation into the issue of whether criminal wrongdoing took place in the running of Hampton.
In response to a complaint lodged at the end of last year by the US unit of a German solar manufacturer, the US launched an investigation into the imports of solar power from China, sparking a strong response from the Chinese commerce ministry.
The US began investigations on Thursday into the allegations that imports of some solar products from Taiwan and China are being “dumped” onto the US market. China fears that the US investigation could negatively affect their growing solar market.
The US Department of Commerce said it will investigate whether China is selling their solar products in the US at prices below their fair value, or whether their producers are getting inappropriate amounts of foreign government subsides.
The Chinese commerce ministry wrote on their website that
“The Chinese side expresses serious concern. China urges the United States again to carefully handle the current … investigations, be prudent in taking measures and terminate the investigation proceedings.”
The ministry added that China will evaluate the impact the investigation has on its solar industry and will “resolutely defend” it via a variety of mechanisms.
The present investigation was a response to complaints by SolarWorld AG which said they wanted to close a loophole in a previous trade case which allowed Chinese solar panel manufacturers to sidestep duties by using solar cells produced in other countries, such as Taiwan.
