The Wine Kone, a handsome guy with a steady gaze and a wheezy chortle, holds forth there on belly-button issues, while the Ninja plays older brother, offering advice and pushing Net neutrality, the so-called First Amendment of the Web.
New migration figures, which show that 239,000 more people arrived in the UK than those who left - pushing net migration up by 21% - need to be completely unpicked to understand what is going on.
That pushed net earnings down to 6 cents a share, but analysts shrugged off the charge as temporary.
That pushed net job creation over the past 12 months to 2.5m, which is the best performance of the recovery so far.
The company has already disposed of $38bn worth of assets to pay for the Gulf of Mexico spill, and this helped push net profit down from $5.017bn a year ago to $3.692bn.
Dell reported Thursday that lower component prices helped push net income in its second quarter up 46percentto to $733 million, or 32 cents a share, from $502 million, or 22 cents, in the year-earlier period.
Bank of America, based in Charlotte, N.C., said higher fees from its securities unit and gains from its investments in companies pushed net income to $2.24 billion, or $1.33 a diluted share, compared with $1.91 billion, or $1.08 a share, in the period a year earlier.
A merger between Applied Materials, which is based in California, and Tokyo Electron that would have created the world's biggest producer of chipmaking-equipment was called off because of antitrust concerns in America.Apple sold more iPhones in China than in America for the first time in the latest quarter, which helped push net profit up to $13.6 billion.
The deal is being funded out of existing cash and debt facilities; we estimate that this will push net debt/EBITDA to 2.2 times, but we believe that the group is also looking at asset and business disposals as part of the portfolio review; this debt level is thus likely to be temporary.
A$200 million pretax charge to cover legal fines and settlements pushed net income down 54% from a year ago to $377 million in the fiscal year ended in June.
In the quarter ending early August, Lowe's pushed net income up 42% from a year earlier, sales up 22% and same-store sales up 6.8%.
