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Now through Mar. 12, Camp Foster Exchange Subway diners who purchase a 30-ounce beverage will have a chance to win one of more than 75,000 prizes during the “Sip. Rip. Win.” Sweepstakes by peeling the label on their cup.
The grand prize is a $25,000 Exchange shopping spree. Ten first-place winners will receive a $10,000 Exchange shopping spree, and 10 second-prize winners will enjoy a $5,000 shopping spree. Other prizes include Exchange and Subway gift cards and free Subway subs and treats. The prizes add up to more than $500,000 in winnings for military members and their families.
Cups with the peel-off prize labels can be found at Camp Foster Subways. No purchase necessary to win. Available only at participating locations on U.S. military bases in Germany, Italy, Kosovo, South Korea, Mainland Japan, Okinawa, Puerto Rico, Honduras and Kwajalein. For alternative method of entry and complete rules, visit ExchangeSubwayPromos.com.
"Meet new people and make friends."
About Me It's lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believed in myself.
I have feelings too. I am still human. All I want is to be loved.
Wild Fact About Me I�m a morning person. I wake up ready to dance.
Another chief executive of the beleaguered construction arm of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics has resigned amid claims of financial impropriety.
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has wielded his power as he tries to establish a new-look country built around the Olympics and the 2018 World Cup. He is seemingly frustrated at delays, cost overruns and inefficiencies in the Games organisation.
This week, on the day that the local police established six fraud cases against senior members of the Sochi Olympic development agency Olimpstroi, chief executive Taimuraz Bolloyev resigned.
Bolloyev, founder of the Baltika brewery and former manufacturer of Aeroflot air hostess uniforms, was appointed by Putin two years ago to oversee the construction of more than 200 Olympic-related projects.
But Russian news agency Interfax said six senior members of Olimpstroi management are now facing fraud charges involving more than 23 million roubles (£481,000) in an employment scam over the past three years.
The Krasnodar region Investigative Committee has also filed 27 cases of corruption against government associates and companies.
“As a result of providing false documents, according to current charges, those accused received more than 23 million roubles in funds in the period between 2007-2010,” Alexei Kramarenko, head of Sochi’s investigative department, said.
This is the latest in a series of blows for the Olimpstroi agency. Bolloyev’s predecessor, Viktor Kolodyazhniy, resigned after Putin complained at the charges Russian Railways was invoicing for the Olympic construction freight.
The chief executive before that, Semyon Vainshtok, resigned after seven months in the job, amid accusations of mismanagement.
Last year, Russian Olympic committee president Leonid Tyagachev, a ski buddy of Putin’s, resigned in the wake of the Russian team’s disappointing three gold-medal haul at the Vancouver Games.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last month launched an audit into government spending on the Sochi Games, which was originally £10 billion but could end up being double that amount.
The Russians have to build media and broadcast facilities, an athletes village, two ice hockey rinks, a speed skating oval, a figure skating centre, a short-track skating venue, a curling hall, and the 69,000-capacity Olympic Stadium.
This is in addition to an entirely new ski resort, with lifts and infrastructure and a massive road and railway link between the mountains and the coast.
“Of course, questions arise: where does the money go? Is it used correctly? How effectively is it spent?... Everything connected with the building work must be put under proper control,” Medvedev said.
The International Olympic Committee says Bolloyev’s removal will not impact on preparations.
The deputy prime minister, Dmitry Kozak, said on Tuesday that there was no corruption in the Sochi Olympics, but admitted there had been some violations that had been passed on to the law enforcement authorities.
“This has nothing to do with corruption,” he said.
Putin has appointed Sergei Gaplikov, his deputy chief of staff, as the new head of Olimpstroi.
Was the “happily ever after” for Rachel and Finn that Lea Michele laid out in the Cory Monteith tribute episode last week how Glee was supposed to end? With Rachel making it on Broadway (and maybe doing a Woody Allen movie) before returning to Ohio and walking into McKinley High where Finn was a teacher to tell him she was home. Talking to reporters at an FX event at the Paley Center last night, Ryan Murphy confirmed that the current two-year pickup of the musical dramedy is indeed designed to be its last, with the next and final sixth season originally built around Rachel and Finn’s story, according to TV Line. “I always knew that, I always knew how it would end. I knew what the last shot was — (Finn) was in it. I knew what the last line was — (Rachel) said it to him.” Monteith’s untimely death has changed all that. Murphy said he has a idea about a new ending that would be “kind of in (Cory’s) honor)”, which he is getting ready to pitch to Fox. Glee started its fifth season low before ratings rebounded with the episode dedicated to Monteith.
HONG KONG, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Hong Kong commercial banks raised their benchmark lending rates on Thursday for the first time in 12 years, increasing the cost of home mortgage repayments in one of the world’s most expensive property markets.
The moves, which come after Hong Kong raised its base rate in lockstep with the U.S. Federal Reserve, are expected to add pressure on the city’s real estate sector, which has just started to show signs of cooling on the prospect of higher rates.
HSBC, Hang Seng Bank and Bank of China (Hong Kong) all said they will raise their benchmark lending rates to 5.125 percent from 5 percent, while Standard Chartered will raise its to 5.375 percent from 5.25 percent.
The extent of most banks’ rate increases, however, was smaller than the 25 basis points expected by the market.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) hiked the base rate charged through its overnight discount window to 2.50 percent from 2.25 percent earlier on Thursday.
The property sub-index in Hong Kong’s stock market closed down 0.9 percent in, underperforming a 0.5 percent decline in the broader market.
“Today’s change in rates marks the start of the normalisation cycle for local interest rates and we believe Hong Kong is well prepared for the change,” HSBC Hong Kong chief executive Diana Cesar said in a statement.
George Leung, an adviser to HSBC Asia Pacific, told reporters the bank had taken into consideration the uncertainties in the global economy, including trade tensions between the United States and China, when it raised its rate.
“I think we have to be very cautious in order not to increase the additional burden on the local economy and society, particularly when the economy in the future is highly uncertain, and most likely on the downside,” Leung said.
Hong Kong tracks U.S. interest rate moves because its currency is pegged to the U.S. dollar, although local banks have some leeway to lag U.S. moves when setting their “prime rates”.
The prime rate refers to the benchmark lending rate upon which commercial banks base their lending products. Customers can choose between a mortgage that is based on the prime rate or the Hong Kong Interbank Offered Rate (HIBOR), which is near its highest level since 2008.
The last time the city’s banks changed their prime rates was Nov. 10, 2008, when they cut them by 25 basis points. The last hike was in March 2006.
Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan warned of the risks posed by rising interest rates.
“The impact on our asset market is yet to be seen but this puts a high risk on the asset market because of the interest rate burden, because of the uncertainty brought about by the escalating trade conflicts between the U.S. and China, as well as external uncertainties in the emerging markets and Europe,” Chan said at a briefing following the HKMA’s decision.
He urged investors to exercise caution.
Hong Kong’s peg to the U.S. dollar has forced the former British colony to import ultra-loose monetary policy from the U.S in recent years, with rock bottom interest rates having fuelled soaring real estate prices.
While the HKMA typically tracks the Fed in raising its rates, the city’s commercial banks have up until now left their prime rates unchanged at decade-lows to remain competitive.
The low rates, however, have led to capital outflows in the past few months as rates in other markets rose.
Interbank rates spiked to fresh 10-year highs after Thursday’s prime lending rate increase, with the one-month HIBOR hitting 2.27 percent.
Facing shrinking liquidity in the interbank market, Hong Kong banks raised HIBOR-based mortgage rates last month to cover the cost, as well as increasing deposit rates to attract more money into the system.
“Now that (the banks) have prepared the market (for further hikes), Hong Kong prime rates may move more in tandem with Fed hikes. We expect another 25 basis point hike from the Fed in December,” said Frances Cheung, Westpac Banking Corporation’s Asia head of macro strategy.
Mortgages will be directly impacted by a hike in the prime rate, which most are linked to, increasing the funding costs for home buyers.
But with Hong Kong still in an ultra-low interest rate environment, an increase of 12.5 basis points will send the new effective mortgage rate to levels ranging from 2.375 percent to 2.475 percent, still very low levels.
HSBC’s Leung said he did not expect the bank’s 0.125 percentage point increase to have any impact on the mortgage default rate.
The Memphis Redbirds announced Tuesday that the team will offer $1 tickets for fans hoping to attend the Pacific Coast League Championship Series.
The Memphis Redbirds announced Tuesday that the team will offer $1 dugout and field box tickets for fans hoping to attend the Pacific Coast League Championship Series between Memphis and the Fresno Grizzlies this weekend.
The Redbirds begin the best-of-five championship series in Fresno on Tuesday night, and are attempting to repeat as PCL champions after taking home the crown last season.
The deal is part of a partnership with KTG USA and will be good for Friday's Game 3, as well as Games 4 and 5 on Saturday and Sunday if the series continues.
The $1 tickets can be purchased at www.memphisredbirds.com/playoffs and at the AutoZone Park box office. Individual tickets in other locations begin at $15.
People can know something is happening. And the police can go in there and ask them and they’ll say, ‘No, I don’t know nothing about it.’ Or I don’t want to talk about it.
Friends thought gung-ho Army sergeant Calvin Wilhite might die in distant Iraq, where he bravely served for a year, or maybe in Afghanistan, where he was heading on his next mission.
Instead, he fell in a barrage of gunfire in Memphis, his hometown, outside FedExForum, a block off Beale where more than four million tourists visit a year.
“We still don’t know who did it. That’s an extra hurt,’’ says his mother, Valerie Henderson, who can’t understand why her son’s killer can’t be found despite a $20,000 reward and all those surveillance cameras, all those police officers keeping watch on the Downtown tourist zone.
Wilhite’s murder fits neatly into a morbid algorithm that’s governed violence in Memphis from its earliest days as a debauched river town to the first half of the 20th century when the city held the unwanted label of America’s “Murder Capital,’’ through last year’s surge of violence that undermined two encouraging decades of decline in the homicide rate.
He was young, 26, and killed with a firearm after an argument — one of more than 7,000 people murdered in Memphis since 1960.
But his 2015 death also fits a largely unexplored pattern revealed in an analysis by The Commercial Appeal of more than 1,500 homicides, nearly one every other day, over the past decade. Memphis has accumulated scores of mystery murders as an especially deleterious brand of violence has taken root.
Nearly 28 percent of last year’s murders are unsolved.
“People can know something is happening. And the police can go in there and ask them and they’ll say, ‘No, I don’t know nothing about it.’ Or 'I don’t want to talk about it,' ’’ said Eddie Brooks, who’s endured a wave of shootings in his North Memphis neighborhood, including an unsolved murder a block from his house in July.
While violent crime rates that brand Memphis as one of the nation’s bloodiest cities are dubious because of myriad imprecisions — everything from differences in how the data is collected to some cities not reporting all crimes — there is far less debate about murder rates. Deaths are tracked and consistently reported across the U.S.
Eight of ten homicide victims over the past decade were killed with a firearm.
More than 800 shooting victims have died at the Regional Medical Center since 2006.
Victims arrive at the hospital’s Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center with far more wounds than a decade ago, reflecting the availability of semiautomatic weapons.
The shooters are getting younger: on average 23 now versus 26 just eight years ago.
While Downtown, the epicenter of Memphis’ $3 billion-a-year tourism business, is routinely deemed safe because of the blanket of police protection and cameras, that description is relative amid such violence: there were 14 homicides recorded in five years.
Within a two-mile radius of Graceland, a magnet for international visitors, an additional 29 died, according to the newspaper’s analysis; none on Elvis Presley Boulevard or near the mansion but in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Combining MPD homicide records and census data over a five-year stretch between 2011 and 2015, the newspaper found 48 census tracts where the murder rate topped 30 per 100,000 — six times the national rate — largely the result of a toxic mix of economic decline and easy access to firearms.
Over those five years, no neighborhood recorded a higher murder rate than Klondike in North Memphis, where a devastating exodus of residents began in the 1970s as nearby industry shuttered.
In 2011, police found James Rucker, 40, and Melodie Weddle, 26, shot to death in a small, brick-veneer home at 830 N. Claybrook in the heart of Klondike. Four years later, at the same address, 32-year-old Thearchie Brown was gunned down. The homicides were three of 11 between 2011 and 2015 in a census tract measuring one-half of a square mile where the murder rate is equivalent to 140 deaths per 100,000 residents — a pace that dwarfs the U.S. rate of 4.9 per 100,000, Memphis’ 2015 citywide rate of 21, even a chilling rate of 90 in Central America’s murderous Honduras.
Note: Census tract populations used in the calculation of murder rates for this graphic come from the 5-year American Community Survey estimates for 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. The 2015 estimates weren’t available; 2014 populations were used for 2015.
Forty-eight census tracts in Memphis tallied an average murder rate between 2011 and 2015 of 30 or more deaths per 100,000 residents, six times the national rate. The ten highest, shown here, each had rates of 56 or greater. Census Tract 112, an area roughly encompassing the Klondyke neighborhood in North Memphis, tallied a rate of 140.
The southern portion of Orange Mound, its population estimated at 2,632 in 2014, saw 11 murders between 2011 and 2015, with a murder rate over those five years of 79.
The more heavily populated Riverview-Mallory Heights area of South Memphis, population 3,582, also had 11 murders, with a rate of 59.
Census Tract 217.32, a densely populated 1.2-square-mile area that includes the Hickory Ridge Mall and the neighborhoods immediately south and east, recorded 11 murders and a 33 rate.
Conversely, about 10 percent of Memphians — as many as 69,000 people — live in census tracts where no murders were recorded in those five years.
Sitting at her desk inside the tiny offices of a Frayser car lot, LaRhonda Clark leafs through a spiral notebook that serves as a scrapbook for loved ones she’s lost, her narration giving life to the faceless statistics.
Stephen Faulkner, a friend, murdered delivering pizza.
Great uncle, J.V. Price, shot to death in a robbery.
A 24-year-old cousin, Marcel Poscoe, murdered. No arrest.
The Regional Medical Center, she says, is a second home.
OP-ED: Crime challenge is a community challenge by Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings.
Memphis has borne a blood-soaked reputation for more than a century, reaching back to at least 1915 when an insurance company statistician first labeled it the nation’s murder capital with a homicide rate double the next worst city, Charleston, South Carolina.
For much of the intervening 100 years, murder was a wholly uncomplicated crime, with MPD’s solve rate a source of pride, a bragging right.
The solve rate slid dramatically over the past decade amid a burst of gang and drug shootings, stranger crime, distrust of police and a culture of uncooperative witnesses. They are factors complicating Memphis’ historical murder matrix: Death at the hands of a neighbor, an associate, a relative or a boyfriend, crimes spontaneously committed.
“Forever, that has been the way homicide got solved: There almost always was some connection, however tenuous, between the victim and the perpetrator,’’ said former MPD Director Buddy Chapman, 77, now executive director of CrimeStoppers of Memphis & Shelby County, which has seen a recent increase in tipsters seeking cash for murders police can’t solve.
The rise in unsolved murders is seen in MPD’s declining clearance rate, which fell nearly 36 percent between 2004 and 2015, according to statistics maintained by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Records in MPD’s Homicide Bureau indicate investigators failed to identify suspects in only 12 percent of murder cases in 2008, but that percentage has since grown steadily, more than doubling in 2015.
According to Homicide Bureau data, police did not identify a suspect in as many as 40 of 135 homicides ruled as unjustifiable, non-negligent killings in 2015 — nearly 28 percent — a trend that continued at a slightly reduced pace last year amid the record-setting surge.
Among 209 unjustifiable homicides, 58 remain unsolved — 28 percent, according to figures released by MPD spokesman Louis Brownlee on April 19.
That’s more unsolved killings than there were murders in Memphis in all of 1962.
Deputy Chief Don Crowe cautioned MPD’s homicide data from past years might not be updated when old cases are belatedly solved, though he conceded that “very few’’ are solved months or years after the fact. Through Oct. 11, he said, seven cases from past years had been solved in 2016. He said he didn't know how many murders were unsolved over the past 10 years and didn't have the manpower to check.
Generally, homicide is becoming a much more difficult crime to solve, in large part because of uncooperative witnesses.
MPD’s deteriorating solve rate is illustrated in high-profile cases, such as the 2010 murder of basketball star Lorenzen Wright, shot as many as 11 times in a remote Southeast Memphis field, his killers never found.
It’s seen, too, in an array of lesser-known mystery murders like that of Timothy Dockery, 49, found shot to death in a parked car in 2015 in South Memphis, the headlights on and the engine running; Bernard Jackson, 28, shot dead in 2014 as he slept in the back seat of sedan rumbling down Interstate 240 near the airport; and Rickey Moore, 25, found on the street around midnight on a chilly night in February 2015 in Nutbush, the victim of a robbery.
Overall, the newspaper identified as many as 249 murders committed between 2007 and 2015 (2006 data was unavailable) in which detectives listed no suspect in lists the city released. That’s about one in five, a pattern that mirrors declining solve rates across the country.