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Enjoy low maintenance living in this 2-story Townhouse! Located in the desired Ram Works community, this home offers an eat-in kitchen, nice size living room that leads to the private back deck, main level stack washer & dryer, and 2 spacious bedrooms upstairs with a full bath. Conveniently located to downtown and Waynesboro city amenities. Don't miss out!
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The CIA is expected to begin operating armed drone aircraft over Yemen, expanding the hunt for al-Qaeda operatives in a country where counter-terrorism efforts have been disrupted by political chaos, U.S. officials said.
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The plan to move CIA-operated Predator and other unmanned aircraft into the region reflects a decision by President Obama that the al-Qaeda threat in Yemen has grown so serious that patrols by U.S. military drones are not enough.
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U.S. officials said the CIA would operate alongside, and in close coordination with, the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, which has been flying Predators and other remotely piloted planes over Yemen for much of the past year.
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Because it operates under different legal authorities than the military, the CIA may have greater latitude to carry out strikes if the political climate shifts in Yemen and cooperation with American forces is diminished or cut off.
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A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment when asked Monday about the Yemen plans. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said the White House also would not comment. The CIA’s plans were first reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday night.
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The new tasking for the agency marks a major escalation of the clandestine American war in Yemen, as well as a substantial expansion of the CIA’s drone war.
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The agency pioneered the use of armed drones in Afghanistan a decade ago and has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistan in recent years. As a result, officials said, the CIA has developed substantial expertise in using a combination of drone surveillance and the cultivation of human source networks on the ground to carry out strikes inside a country where the U.S. military has limited ability to operate.
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The addition of CIA drones also addresses a growing concern inside the Joint Special Operations Command that the military-run drone campaign in Yemen was not getting adequate resources, given the seriousness of the threat posed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemen-based offshoot of the terrorist group is known.
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Fewer than a dozen JSOC drones have been available to conduct patrols over Yemen for much of the past year, far fewer than have been used in Afghanistan or Iraq, said a second U.S. official.
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The official, and others, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity surrounding operations in Yemen. The decision to deploy CIA drones to Yemen comes as cooperation between U.S. special operations forces and Yemeni counter-terrorism units have collapsed amid political turmoil.
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Yemen’s dictator for the past three decades, Ali Abdullah Saleh, flew to Saudi Arabia recently after being injured in an attack. Some Yemeni counter-terrorism teams, which are led by Saleh relatives, have been diverted from the pursuit of AQAP.
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The turmoil has put pressure on the White House to use other means to locate AQAP operatives, who are seen as taking advantage of the chaos to improve their position in the country and potentially launch new attacks.
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In recent months, some JSOC officers have complained to officials visiting from Washington that their paucity of resources was puzzling, given the concern expressed by the nation’s top intelligence officials about AQAP.
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White House officials disputed that characterization. U.S. officials have testified repeatedly in recent months that AQAP represents the most immediate terrorism threat to American targets. At a hearing before a Senate committee Thursday, CIA Director Leon Panetta confirmed that the agency had expanded its counter-terrorism programs in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.
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“Our approach has been to develop operations in each of these areas that will contain al-Qaeda and go after them so they have no place to escape,” he said.
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The group is responsible for plots that have included the unsuccessful attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in 2009 and an effort to send packages packed with explosives to addresses in the United States last year.
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One of the key figures in the group is an American-born cleric, Anwar al-Aulaqi, who escaped a drone strike targeting him in Yemen last month. That strike was the first by the United States in Yemen since 2002, punctuating a long drought that U.S. officials have attributed to a lack of solid intelligence on the whereabouts of AQAP operatives who went into hiding after a flurry of conventional airstrikes in late 2009 and early 2010.
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Another constraint on the Yemen campaign has been the availability of runway capacity at a U.S.-operated airfield in Djibouti, where the JSOC drones are based. It is not clear whether the CIA aircraft will operate from the same facility.
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Post staff writers Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung contributed to this article.
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The liberal media took another stunning defeat Tuesday as Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace totally demolished the BBC's Katty Kay on Jeopardy!.
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This followed Monday's abysmal performance by MSNBC's Chris Matthews (video follows with commentary).
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At the closing bell, Wallace had amassed $22,400 to Kay's pitiful $8,000. Dr. Mehmet Oz came in third with $5,900.
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And liberals claim they're the smartest.
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A man whose alleged stalking activity continued intensely even after the victim moved to another city was arrested in Thousand Oaks last week.
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THOUSAND OAKS - A man whose alleged stalking campaign inundated his victim with thousands of text messages, hundreds of phone calls, multiple hacks into online accounts and surreptitious observation of the woman’s personal life was arrested last week in Thousand Oaks outside the victim’s home, authorities said.
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The arrest of 33-year-old Raul Plancarte-Hernandez on suspicion of felony stalking culminated a monthlong investigation by the Thousand Oaks Police Department, officials said, and came after the woman had made every effort to avoid the man, including moving to another city.
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The victim, a 38-year-old Thousand Oaks resident, had briefly dated Plancarte-Hernandez in 2016, police said. After she ended the relationship, she allegedly started to get phone calls and texts from him “during all hours of the day and night,” according to the department. Plancarte-Hernandez is from North Hills in the San Fernando Valley.
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The woman’s attempts to stop the cyberstalking failed, authorities said. When she blocked his number, he circumvented the block using smartphone applications that allowed him to call and text her from different numbers.
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Over the next year and a half, Plancarte-Hernandez called the victim about 300 times and sent about 4,000 text messages, authorities allege. He also hacked into her social media sites, her PayPal and iCloud accounts and her cellphone and made changes to the accounts, police said.
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The victim changed her cellphone number, email address, Apple ID and other forms of electronic identity, but Plancarte-Hernandez was still able to make contact via cellphone and email, authorities said.
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The woman further tried to escape the stalking by moving from Moorpark to Thousand Oaks, authorities said, but he found her in the new location.
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Plancarte-Hernandez sent threatening text messages that included current events in the victim’s life he could have known about only if he was nearby and watching the victim, police said.
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Around 11:30 a.m. June 7, Thousand Oaks police detectives allegedly saw Plancarte-Hernandez sitting in a vehicle parked directly in front of the victim’s home. He had parked among other vehicles on the street and concealed himself by putting sun shades in the windows, according to police. He was “actively stalking the victim and sending her unwanted text messages” at the time, authorities alleged.
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Plancarte-Hernandez was arrested on suspicion of felony stalking and made an initial court appearance Monday. As of Tuesday night, he remained in Ventura County jail with bail set at $100,000, jail records showed.
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The North accuses South Korea’s spy agency of using missionaries to gather information about North Korea’s secretive nuclear program and other sensitive topics, as well as to smuggle propaganda materials via leaflets, CDs and USB sticks, and to build underground churches to undermine Kim’s leadership — allegations the Seoul government strongly denies.
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Though Han was little known to international media before his death, he was an important figure in the risky, covert work to promote Christianity in the North, which views such efforts as a Western-led plot to topple its government. At the Chinese government-registered church in Changbai where he had worked since the early 1990s, he fed and sheltered thousands of North Koreans over the years — many of whom had fled their famine-stricken country in search of food and jobs — while also converting hundreds of them to Christianity.
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For the first time ever, three branded videos cracked YouTube's top 10 most watched videos of the year. Evian's "baby&me video" led the way as the fifth most-watched YouTube video of 2013 with more than 60 million views. Meanwhile, Volvo Trucks' Epic Split with Jean-Claude Van Damme was 6th and the new Carrie movie's Telekentic Coffee Shop Surprise stunt was 8th.
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AOL's Adap.tv is expanding into Southeast Asia with a new office in Singapore.
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Danone Group, makers of Dannon yogurt and other products, awarded its North American media account to Carat.
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Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said cable companies have failed to capitalize on the opportunities they've had with video-on-demand rights, adding that this failure has allowed competitors a chance to get a foothold.
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Crispin Porter + Bogusky's Matt Walsh has left the firm after nearly eight years. He last served as EVP/executive experience director.
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Wieden+Kennedy's director of U.S. media buying, Tom Winner, is leaving the agency after more than 18 years.
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TBWA\London executive creative director Andre Laurentino is leaving to join Ogilvy, where he will work on the Unilever account.
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A new study from e-commerce analytics firm Custora suggests that a minuscule 2% of holiday online retail sales are inspired by social media.
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With Coachella winding down, we’ve seen enough from afar to get a serious case of FOMO. For those who weren’t able to dilly-dally around Indio in trendy bohemian getups, you can take the ‘chella inspo and translate that into your home decor. While it may not make you feel like you’re there, it’ll sure look like it (minus the tipsy influencers everywhere).
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Some may be thinking that Coachella seems a bit too juvenile to work for home decor, but desert-inspired interiors have been seriously picking up popularity lately on our Pinterest and Instagram feeds. With some Southwestern influence, your home can go from basic to a modern, bohemian dream with just a few touches.
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Who needs to be at a festival when you have a home that brings that serene, laid-back feels every time you’re in it? Click through the slideshow for 16 interiors we’ll be copying ASAP.
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A Virgin cross-country train has ploughed into a herd of cows, causing major delays for commuters.
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The crash happened on Thursday evening near Hinton Admiral in Dorset.
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A spokesman from Virgin said no-one was injured and the train had not derailed. Passengers were moved onto buses, but the line remained closed.
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Steve Rodgers, 26, a passenger from Southampton, said: "The train shuddered and the sky outside was lit up by sparks. I thought it would derail."
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Mr Rodgers told the BBC News website that three cows had been killed and at least 10 more were wandering on the track.
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David Ewart, from Virgin Trains, said: "There are 36 passengers on board but no-one is injured and there was no derailment."
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The train had left Bournemouth at 1846 GMT and was on its way to Manchester.
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The runway was closed until about 1:30 p.m.
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The runway at McGhee Tyson Airport reopened after an aircraft with a landing gear malfunction delayed all flights on Tuesday.
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An incoming private aircraft reported landing gear issues at 11:02 a.m. and slid off the edge of the runway into the grass as it touched down, said McGhee Tyson spokeswoman Becky Huckaby.
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Travelers were advised to contact their airline for up-to-date information on their flights.
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Another player in the packed p2p payments space is announcing an $8.3 million Series A funding round today. SF and Barcelona based Verse is gunning to be the Venmo of Europe — given Venmo hasn’t yet shown an inclination to expand its mobile social payments app outside the US.
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The Series A is led by Greycroft, with participation from Spark Capital, eVentures and Boost VC. Verse had previously raised a $1.8M seed round from angel investors in Europe and the US. DFJ Dragon also invested in that round.
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“We’re trying to be like the WhatsApp of payments,” he tells TechCrunch. “It’s really frustrating today when you want to do a transaction, when you want to pay back your friends, money that you owe them, and you don’t want to do online banking. It’s not something that’s cool or really works.
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It’s a mobile social payments story that’s amply familiar from multiple apps these day. And not just in the US: in Europe other players here include the likes of France’s Lydia, Germany’s Cookies, US-based Circle, and N26 with its MoneyBeam offering, to name just a few.
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But as my TC colleague Romain Dillet succinctly puts it: “Social payments is not a product; it’s just a feature” — which is another way of saying there’s a race on to see which of these startups can scale fast enough to be the winner-takes-all network for Europe. After which they’ll be in a position to monetize p2p usage via other banking features — and even by becoming fully fledged banks (N26 got its banking license this summer, for instance).
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Lopera touts Verse’s market footprint as an advantage vs competitors, noting it’s now in 16 European markets — which does give it greater reach than some rivals at this point, even as most of the competitive field here is also thinking outside one local European market.
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Verse was actually incorporated in San Francisco, and went through a local accelerator there, before relocating most of its team to Barcelona and soft launching the app this February. It now has around 550,000 users across its Android and iOS footprint, according to Lopera, relying on viral spread rather than any substantial marketing spend at this point.
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He says the typical size of payment Verse users are pinging to each other via the app is between €25 and €30.
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“We think that there’s really no company today that has cracked the entire European market,” he adds. “We’ve seen other companies launching products that are fairly local. We haven’t actually seen a player that’s operating in every major European country and actually has a sleek mobile app that works across countries.
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What about the potential threat of a messaging giant such as WhatsApp wading into p2p payments and sucking all the usage out of the room? WhatsApp’s parent Facebook does already offer p2p payments in Messenger in the US, for instance.
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That doesn’t mean smaller players here might not be future acquisition targets for messaging network giants.
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Verse does not charge for p2p payments generally but if a user wants to send money between different European currencies — such as the euro and the UK’s pound sterling — it does charge a fee, of between 1.5 to 2 per cent “depending on the country and the currency”.
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Verse is using blockchain technology for its main ledger system but not for moving money around (as some other payment startups, such as Circle — which started life as a Bitcoin wallet — are).
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Editor's Note: A misreading of the report led us to believe that the Center for Food Integrity polled consumers and those working in the meat industry separately. What the survey shows, generally, is that 2,000 polled consumers believe commercial farmers are more concerned with profitability than consumers believe farmers should be. We regret the error.
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According to MeatingPlace, the Center for Food Integrity asked more than 2,000 respondents to rank a field of eight possible priorities for the meat industry. The rankings of meat industry respondents were quite different from those of consumers.
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Meat industry respondents ranked profitability as number two and humane treatment of farm animals as number eight.
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In contrast, consumer respondents ranked profitability way down the list as number seven but humane treatment of farm animals as number four.
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There is an inverse relationship between the perception of shared values and priorities for commercial farms. Consumers fear that commercial farms will put profit ahead of principle and therefore cut corners when it comes to other priority issues. As farms continue to change in size and scale we have to overcome that bias by effectively demonstrating our commitment to the values and priorities of consumers.
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Maybe the message is getting out there?
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One extreme weather event after another seems to be occurring more and more often these days. Whether you believe in climate change or not no longer matters. Call it whatever you want, it’s here now. And it’s very expensive.
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One extreme weather event after another seems to be occurring more and more often these days. Whether you believe in climate change or not no longer matters. Call it whatever you want, it’s here now. And it’s very expensive. More and more Americans are going to need assistance and help in the coming years. So what is the priority of the Republican Party for the upcoming year? Let’s have more tax cuts for the wealthy. Tax cuts, folks. And let’s keep denying climate change. It’s fake news.
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So, go ahead and keep voting these numbskull Republicans into office year after year. But sooner or later your family, your friends or maybe even you will be directly affected by one of these weather events. Your insurance will become so high that you will no longer be able to afford coverage on your home and you’re going to need federal assistance (as is the case for 80 percent of the flooded homeowners in Houston). And what will you do? Well keep voting in Republicans and having more tax reductions, of course. “Sad,” as the Donald would say.
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Traditional retailers long have railed against tax laws that allow Amazon.com and others of its online ilk to avoid charging many customers a sales tax on their purchases.
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According to federal law, a retailer does not have to charge sales tax on purchases made in a state where it does not have a presence. And thus the argument has been that online-only retailers — which have only distribution centers instead of a massive fleet of stores dotting every state in the country — have enjoyed an advantage over their brick-and-mortar counterparts because they could effectively beat them on price by not having to charge that tax.
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But e-commerce is still fast-growing and oft-changing, and so it’s been hard to pinpoint exactly how much the lack of an online sales tax really shapes shoppers’ buying habits.
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The researchers studied household spending data in 19 states, examining what happened to shoppers’ spending on Amazon after their state chose to implement what they call an “Amazon Tax,” or legislation that requires Amazon and other e-commerce sites to charge them sales tax.
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The effect is significant: When the so-called Amazon Tax was put in place, shoppers spent 8.3 percent less on products on Amazon after the tax went into effect. The researchers described that dip in spending as a “permanent decline” even though shoppers’ total tabs remained essentially unchanged. In other words, shoppers were shelling out the same amount overall on purchases on Amazon, but because a share of that tab was now going to taxes, the shopper was getting less product for their spending and Amazon was pulling in less revenue from that transaction.
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That Amazon lost some sales dollars when it began charging the tax would seem to support what a chorus of retail industry voices have long contended: Amazon enjoyed a tailwind by not having to charge a sales tax in many places.
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As the e-commerce giant rapidly expands its network of fulfillment and sorting centers and ramps up offerings such as same-day and one-hour delivery, it will have to beef up its physical presence and its workforce in more locations. And so conversation around whether Amazon will be compelled to charge a sales tax may take a different shape as it has more robust operations in more states and thus becomes more like its traditional brick-and-mortar counterparts in the eyes of the law.
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But it may suggest that the retailer’s booming growth was in its early days at least partially fueled by its ability to undercut its rivals on tax-inclusive price.
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The study also sought to uncover what shoppers did when they didn’t shell out for something on Amazon. Did they not buy an item at all, or did they take their business to a competitor? To evaluate this, the team looked at the electronics category, examining what happened to sales at rival electronics sellers in states that implemented an Amazon Tax. One store, the online-only Newegg, saw an 11.3 percent sales bump after the tax began. This suggests that shoppers sometimes ditched Amazon for Newegg when they realized that Newegg could still sell them goods without the tax. But perhaps more interestingly, the researchers also found that Best Buy — a traditional retailer that charges a sales tax — also saw a 7.1 percent uptick in sales.
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The study also examined whether the implementation of an Amazon Tax has had disproportionate impact on the habits of a particular group of shoppers or certain types of purchases. Indeed, the researchers found that low-income households reduced the amount they spent on goods on Amazon by 12 percent, while high-income households pulled back by 9 percent. The researchers suggested this makes sense given that low-income shoppers generally tend to be the most price-sensitive.
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The Amazon Tax had an especially chilling effect on big-ticket purchases that totaled more than $250, the study found. On these transactions, Amazon sales declined 11.4 percent once the tax was put in place. It seems fairly logical that a shopper might give more consideration to sales tax on a large purchase for which the dollar value of that figure is going to be relatively high.
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The research, conducted by Brian Baugh, Itzhak Ben-David and Hoonsuk Park, used transaction-level data from 422,452 U.S. households that had spent money on Amazon before the sales tax implementation. They were provided the data by a website where consumers can track their bank accounts, credit card activity and investments. The team first published research on the effect of the Amazon Tax in 2014; this latest version uses a larger sample size and what researchers describe as “more precise” estimation methods.
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Ceetiz, an international online booking platform for tourist and leisure activities, and Hertz, one of the world’s leading car rental brands, have established an exclusive commercial partnership.
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The partnership enables Hertz customers to book thousands of activities in more than 200 destinations around the world from hertz.ceetiz.com in the language and currency of their choice.
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All Ceetiz customers benefit from the guarantee that they will never pay more for a ticket than what they would pay by booking direct with the attraction or event organisation.
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The website is easily accessible from a PC, a tablet or a smart phone.
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“Our partnership with Ceetiz allows us to offer our valued customers a comprehensive service for them to easily plan exciting holiday activities in advance,” said Michel Taride, group president, Hertz International.
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Acer, one of the big players in the netbook market, will be offering customers the option of the Android operating system (OS) in place of Microsoft Windows on its new netbook.
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Developed by the Open Handset Alliance, the open and free-to-develop Android OS was originally hailed as the next big thing for the smartphone due to its ability to open up the platform and move away from the closed proprietary OS offered by many mobile operators.
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