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By The Numbers

A Loft-y purchase

Tony Wagner May 18, 2015
$2.16 billion

That’s the purchase price for Ann Taylor’s and Loft’s parent company. The buyer? Ascena Retail Group, the owner of Lane Bryant and Dressbarn. As reported by the New York Times, the combined companies will have 4,930 stores in the United States alone.

“Seven or eight”

That’s how many errors publisher HarperCollins corrected in “Clinton Cash,” a controversial book about Hillary Clinton’s finances and foundation. Normally, readers would have to wait for a new edition for these revisions, but there’s no standard practice for e-books, and in this case they were updated with a notification email from Amazon. 

300,000

That’s about how many acres of timberland the California’s public-employee pension fund, Calpers, is reportedly looking to sell. With the lumber market down since the housing crash, investments in that industry by Calpers have not been performing as well as if the money had been put into stocks and bonds.

$16.1 million

That’s how much Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba says it spends per year fighting counterfeit goods. But not everyone thinks the site is doing all it can. Shortly before its IPO in July, a group of luxury brands represented by Kering SA filed a suit against Alibaba citing dissatisfaction with efforts to weed out counterfeit goods. That initial suit was dropped, but now those same brands are back, this time claiming Alibaba assists counterfeiters in the sale of their products.

2 weeks

That’s about how long The Navigation Center, a new kind of homeless shelter in San Francisco, aims to have residents back on their feet and into housing. Facing pressure from the tech industry to address homelessness, the city is trying out a new kind of system that feels less institutionalized. At The Navigation Center, residents are allowed to bring pets, and there are no curfews. There are also government programs on site to help with employment and housing.

461

That’s how many people police killed in 2013, according to the FBI. But there’s more to those numbers; mainly that they may be inaccurate, and better data is hard to come by. Local departments’ reporting standards don’t match up, and often the paperwork just doesn’t get filed correctly. That’s the latest story in our series “Behind the Blue Line.”

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