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20090428161725 | By MATT SCHWARTZ in Houston and WENDELL JAMIESON in New York Daily News Writers
Saturday, October 14th 1995, 4:22AM
Bleeding from a massive chest wound, Tejano star Selena cried, "Help me! Help me! I've been shot!" and then named her killer with her dying breath.
Shaken witnesses yesterday told a spellbound Houston courtroom how the blood-covered, mortally wounded 23-year-old Hispanic singing sensation burst into the lobby of the Corpus Christi Days Inn last March 31.
Gasping for breath, Selena told motel workers that Yolanda Saldivar the president of her fan club shot her once in the back. She begged, "Close the door or she will shoot me again," the witnesses said.
The testimony came on the third day of Saldivar's trial on charges she murdered Selena with a shot from a .38-caliber revolver when the star tried to fire her for embezzling $30,000 from two boutiques she managed for the singer.
As a paramedic and motel workers recounted Selena's last desperate moments, her mother, father and brother sobbed quietly. Saldivar, as she has throughout the trial, stared blankly.
Ruben Deleon, the motel's sales director, said he knelt over the dying star and asked who shot her.
"She said 'Yolanda Saldivar in room 158,' " Deleon said.
"She was yelling, 'Help me! Help me! I've been shot,' " said Rosalinda Gonzalez, an assistant manager. "I asked who shot her. She said the lady in room 158. She moaned. Her eyes rolled up."
Front desk clerk Shawna Vela said she dialed 911 and took the phone with her as she kneeled over the fallen singer, asking her what happened.
"She said 'Yolanda,' she said 'In room 158,' " Vela testified.
The first paramedic on the scene, Richard Fredrickson, testified that he arrived just two minutes after the call but it was already too late.
"The girl was covered with blood," he remembered. "Blood was thick from her neck to her knees, all the way around both sides."
Fredrickson couldn't even see the mortal wound until he cut off Selena's sweatshirt. He felt for a pulse in her neck but could feel only twitching muscles, he said.
Minutes later, as he rode in an ambulance with the now unconscious Selena, he unclenched the dying woman's fist and made an ironic discovery.
"When I opened it, a ring fell out," he said. "It was covered with blood."
The 14-karat gold and diamond ring, topped with a white-gold egg, was a gift from the Grammy winner's boutique employes and Saldivar. Police have said Saldivar demanded the ring back. But before Selena could hand it over, she was shot.
The singer, whose full name was Selena Quintanilla Perez, was born around Easter and collected decorative eggs.
The defense claims Saldivar, 35, was hysterical and shot Selena by accident. Prosecutors say it was deliberate. | http://web.archive.org/web/20090428161725id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/news/1995/10/14/1995-10-14_selena_s_last_cries___shot_s.html | low | http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1995/10/14/1995-10-14_selena_s_last_cries___shot_s.html | 6.965116 | 25.406977 | 0.988372 | extractive | high | SELENA'S LAST CRIES SHOT SINGER BEGGED HELP, NAMED SUSPECT | Bleeding from a massive chest wound, Tejano star Selena cried, "Help me! Help me! I've been shot!"and then named her killer with her dying breath. Shaken witnesses yesterday told a spellbound Houston courtroom how the blood-covered, mortally wounded 23-year-old Hispanic singing sensation burst into the lobby of the Corpus Christi Days Inn last March 31. Gasping for breath, Selena told motel workers that Yolanda Saldivar the president of her fan club shot |
20120604112028 | Dear TW: There are serious numerical anomalies in the debate you are moderating.You may want to check it out.
I will state no opinion on who should or should not, will or will not become President of Mexico in four weeks´ time.
I will nevertheless tell you that there is ample evidence to point out that the vote in this debate has been tampered with.
I am sorry and certainly I believe the political operative who quite possibly has been behind this vote-rigging has to be at least privately reprimanded by his party;The Economist´s staff may want to do a quick investigation with the ample means at their disposal and should they conclude that enough evidence supports the proposition that this shameful event has taken place, a disclaimer on the debate should be added.Pulling this under the rug would be quite counter-productive.
To many people the world over, myself included, this newspaper is an institution worth preserving.Numbers, facts and balanced, insightful analysis are the reasons we have trusted The Economist for decades. It is totally unacceptable for anyone to tarnish its reputation by using old Mexican small-town vote-rigging tactics either to get back at Mrs Josefina Vazquez´s use of The Economist at the first televised presidential debate against Mr Peña Nieto, or as a propaganda tool in the next debate.
Let´s see the numbers.For those unfamiliar with Mexico´s presidential election to be held July 1, 2012,there are four candidates.One of them, from the teacher´s union, has never polled above 5%.The ones with real chances are Mr. Peña Nieto from PRI, who polled formerly as high as 42% and now in the low 30s; Mrs.Josefina Vazquez, from the ruling center-right PAN,now in third and formerly in second place, polling in the high 20s, and Mr. AMLO from the center-left PRD, now in second place, polling in the low 30s but behind Mr Peña Nieto.Some polls speak of a four point spread between the two, others point to a ten point spread.
But the essence of the matter is that all parties as well as the voters they represent are united in this: they are all against PRI and Mr. Peña Nieto ever claiming back the presidency they lost in the year 2000.Thus if Mr Peña Nieto has 34% or 42 % of the votes, by definition that means that either 66% or 58% of all voters are opposed to the proposition that "Mexico is better off under the PRI" The fact that your poll shows 30% of the people opposing your motion instead of the 60-70% indicated by all polls conducted in Mexico is a first sign of trouble.Only the staff at The Economist knows how many votes have originated outside Mexico.If the numbers do not change much once these non-Mexico originated votes have been removed, the idea of vote manipulation gathers strength.
Now, the people most likely to read this newspaper in Mexico, and thus vote in your debate, are naturally highly educated professionals.But you see, the latest poll gruporeforma.blogs.com/encuestas confirms the well-known fact that this demographic is overwhelmingly against the PRI, and has been so for at least 20 years, if not more.The affluent and well-educated are mostly PRD and to a certain extend PAN.In Mexico City, for example, PRD has a twenty-point lead.The actual numbers nationwide are:For voters with only primary education PRI 41%,PRD 30%, PAN 25%.For voters with college education:PRI 28%, PRD 43%, PAN 21%.Therefore, among the people most likely to read TE less than 30% would agree with your proposition, yet your numbers show just the opposite result.
Or do they? Well, actually the opinions stated in your 116 Opening Comments,50 Rebuttal Comments, 541 Opening Recommendations and 286 Rebuttal Recommendations if carefully tabulated and analyzed are totally supportive of those rough numbers of 70% of voter´s negating PRI´s returning to the Presidency and below 30% believing "Mexico is better off under the PRI" The fact that your comments are in statistical agreement with the numbers we would expect from a multitude of polls, while your poll debate numbers are so divergent as to be mirror images of the former is a clear indication of voter fraud.
If we read carefully the 116 Opening Comments we see only 105 are real comments, since people sometimes mistakenly click on to post before they have actually written any comment.About 10% of these 105 indicate no decision on the debate´s proposition, but rather speak of various tangential matters such as the convenience for non-Mexicans to abstain from voting(the opinion of that gentleman who wisely retired to sunny Portugal,SaintMartinian),or to buy beach-front property(YukonDave),teachers saying they will use the debate in their classroom...and a funny Mexican who thinks his country would be better served if it were a colony of Sweden or The Netherlands(recommended by 3)...or another one who says Mexico would have been better off if it had not declared independence from Spain. | http://web.archive.org/web/20120604112028id_/http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2012/06/mexico-election-diary | medium | http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2012/06/mexico-election-diary | 23.292683 | 0.609756 | 0.512195 | abstractive | low | What’s on Mexican minds? | WITH a month to go until Mexico’s presidential election, everyone is thinking about politics. Or are they? A new poll asking which news stories have caught people’s attention suggests that campaign hasn’t grabbed everyone. |
20120808090019 | Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that the killing of Osama bin Laden offered a clear message to al Qaeda's Taliban allies in Afghanistan: "You cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us, but you can make the choice to abandon al Qaeda and participate in a peaceful, political process."
Clinton added that America will continue "relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people."
"The fight continues and we will never waver," she said. "Now I know there are some who doubted this day would ever come. Who questioned our resolve and our reach. But let us remind ourselves this is America. We rise to the challenge. We persevere. And we get the job done."
Noting that many of those killed by al Qaeda worldwide were Muslims, Clinton said the attacks were "motivated by a violent ideology that holds no value for human life or regard for human dignity."
"I know that nothing can make up for the loss of the victims or fill the voids they left," she said. "But I hope their families can now find some comfort in the fact that justice has been served."
The raid on Osama bin Laden's compound
What's next for al Qaeda?
Clinton thanked everyone involved in taking down bin Laden and pointed to "our close cooperation with Pakistan," which she said "helped put unprecedented pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership." The comment was notable because the nature of bin Laden's hideout - he was found in a compound outside Islamabad near a military installation - has intensified questions about whether Pakistan had effectively been sheltering the terrorist leader.
The secretary of state, echoing other officials, stressed that "we should not forget the battle to stop al Qaeda and its terror will not end with the death of bin Laden."
U.S. warns of possible bin Laden backlash
Obama: Osama bin Laden's death does not end fight against al QaedaKey dates in the hunt for Osama bin Laden
"Indeed, we must take this opportunity to renew our resolve and redouble our efforts," Clinton said. She then pointed to the war in Afghanistan, where she said "we are supporting an Afghan-led political process that seeks to isolate al Qaeda and end the insurgency," as well as the situation in Pakistan.
"In Pakistan, we are committed to supporting the people and government as they defend their own democracy from violent extremism," she said. "Indeed, as the president said, bin Laden had also declared war on Pakistan. He had ordered the killings of many innocent Pakistani men, women and children. In recent years the cooperation between our governments, militaries and law enforcement agencies increased pressure on al Qaeda and the Taliban. And this progress must continue. And we are committed to our partnership."
Video: Lara Logan on bin Laden's death
Clinton noted that the killing came amid uprisings against repressive regimes in the Muslim world, saying it came "at a time when the people across the Middle East and North Africa are rejecting the extremist narrative and charting a path of peaceful progress based on universal rights and aspirations."
"There is no better rebuke to al Qaeda and its heinous ideology," she said.
Photos: America Reacts to death of Osama bin Laden Bin Laden hid in plain site in PakistanIntel hunt led to shootout at bin Laden fortressSpecial report: The death of Osama bin Laden | http://web.archive.org/web/20120808090019id_/http://www.cbsnews.com/%20http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20058839-503544.html | medium | http://www.cbsnews.com/%20http%3A//www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20058839-503544.html | 23.964286 | 2.785714 | 0.785714 | mixed | medium | Hillary Clinton: Osama bin Laden killing shows "you cannot defeat us" | Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says killing of Osama bin Laden means "justice has been served," says it shows America cannot be waited out |
20121121211221 | Everyone is so excited about all the new businesses that are moving into the notoriously down-market Mid-Market area of San Francisco.
Twitter! One King's Lane! Dolby Laboratories! Breathless stories have extolled the benefits of having all these tech-savvy, "new economy" companies move into a stretch of real estate that's been withering legitimate businesses for decades.
It certainly seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at some of the businesses that have thrived in this neighborhood. And there are plenty of those - don't let those boarded-up windows fool you. Mid-Market and the Tenderloin are home to a thriving ecosystem of micro industries, and these entrepreneurs are in it for the long haul.
"Fenced goods dealers are all at the southwest corner of Market and Seventh," Deleano Seymour told me as we walked around the neighborhood. We glanced over at a group of young gentlemen standing outside the check-cashing store on the corner. "When your car gets broken into and your radio gets swiped, those are the guys who buy it."
"What about the other side?" I asked. The northeast corner of Market is pretty quiet, but farther down the block, between Seventh and Sixth, there's another, larger, group of young gentlemen who are usually there.
"Oh, that's weed," Seymour said. "No hard drugs on Market. Just weed, stolen goods, and then the women who sell food stamps and USDA commodities. That's all that's on Mission, too. I'll show you the hard drug corners a little further up."
Seymour has been mentioned in the pages of this newspaper as the guide for Tenderloin Walking Tours, an excellent tour he leads by appointment. He lived in the Tenderloin for 30 years, and lived it, as he told me, "from every angle - from the highest heights to the gutter."
Like many people who once lived on the wrong side of the law, Seymour has embraced the straight life with passion - moving to Nob Hill, wearing suits and hats no matter the occasion, offering reactionary opinions on illegal activity. ("You want to get the drugs out of this neighborhood? All the dealers come from the East Bay. Just put the dogs on BART!") But he hasn't forgotten his old friends now that he's gone straight. As we walk through the streets, he stops to embrace or speak to someone every few steps. He knows everyone here - and everything that's going on.
"Right now I'd say prescription drugs are the top seller on the street," he said. "Those guys are making the most money right now."
"Those guys," in case you're wondering, can be found hustling their wares within the boundaries of Leavenworth, Turk, Jones and Golden Gate Avenue. They share this space with the heroin dealers, Seymour told me, but as businessmen have a fundamentally different approach.
"Prescription drug sellers are all about volume - they can make two or three thousand dollars a month selling their meds," he said as we walked through, watching them do just that. "But heroin users are a smaller market, and they're very regimented people. So the sellers only come through twice a day, and they tend to sell to the same people for years. That industry is all about relationships."
"What about barriers to entry?" I asked him. "How hard is it to get a business started here?"
"Not hard," he said. "We don't have gangs in the Tenderloin, so there aren't the same battles over territory. You could set up shop right here and start selling."
We were standing at the corner of Eddy and Jones, near the crack corners, right across the street from the Tenderloin Police Station.
"Really?" I asked. "I wouldn't have to worry about violence? About cops?"
"Definitely not about cops," he said. "But that's because everyone tries to keep the violence down. Violence is what brings the cops in, and that's bad for business. And violence happens when people try to move in on other people's customers. So in order to move here, you have to have your own customer base already."
"So you have to have a company brand already," I said.
This all sounded pretty involved to me - and not like the sort of economic activity that could be easily uprooted by a few Internet companies. I asked Seymour whether he thought the new businesses would disrupt the current economic patterns of the neighborhood.
"No way," he said. "But there's nothing for them to be worried about. Their hustle will be respected, the same as anyone else's."
As long as the new arrivals respect the area's existing businesses, I imagine they'll have little to worry about. But it might take more than a few tax breaks and Twitter buses to bring the kind of change that City Hall is hoping to bring into Mid-Market.
The technology industry is newer than the vice industry. And in economics, the more established player has the market advantage.
Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner | http://web.archive.org/web/20121121211221id_/http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Thriving-entrepreneurs-of-Mid-Market-3848620.php | low | http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Thriving-entrepreneurs-of-Mid-Market-3848620.php | 3.478548 | 22.386139 | 0.914191 | extractive | medium | Thriving entrepreneurs of Mid-Market | Breathless stories have extolled the benefits of having all these tech-savvy, "new economy" companies move into a stretch of real estate that's been withering legitimate businesses for decades. It certainly seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at some of the businesses that have thrived in this neighborhood. Mid-Market and the Tenderloin are home to a thriving ecosystem of micro industries, and these entrepreneurs are in it for the long haul. Corner for stolen goods"Fenced goods dealers are all at the southwest corner of Market and Seventh," Deleano Seymour told me as we walked around the neighborhood. The northeast corner of Market is pretty quiet, but farther down the block, between Seventh and Sixth, there's another, larger, group of young gentlemen who are usually there. Just weed, stolen goods, and then the women who sell food stamps and USDA commodities. Dealers commute on BARTSeymour has been mentioned in the pages of this newspaper as the guide for Tenderloin Walking Tours, an excellent tour he leads by appointment. Like many people who once lived on the wrong side of the law, Seymour has embraced the straight life with passion - moving to Nob Hill, wearing suits and hats no matter the occasion, offering reactionary opinions on illegal activity. "Right now I'd say prescription drugs are the top seller on the street," he said. "Prescription drug sellers are all about volume - they can make two or three thousand dollars a month selling their meds," he said as we walked through, watching them do just that. |
20130707162746 | Vaslav Nijinsky, the great Russian dancer who was driven from the stage by madness in 1917 at the peak of his fame, recorded his thoughts and ravings in the next two years in a diary that he signed ''God Nijinsky.''
Although the diary was published in 1946 while Nijinsky was still alive, and the original handwritten volumes were sold at auction in 1979 for more than $100,000, a long-suppressed preface by the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler has now been printed for the first time, in The Archives of General Psychiatry.
The preface is the only published first-hand professional opinion of Nijinsky, whose mental illness led to consultations with all the foremost experts of his day, including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Its publication was prevented by Nijinsky's wife, Romola, who is said to have found its clinical observations distasteful, objecting in particular to Adler's belief that Nijinsky's schizophrenia was rooted in a pathological sense of inferiority. She replaced the preface with one of her own, which glorified her husband.
According to Heinz L. Ansbacher, professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Vermont and editor of many of Adler's works, the preface is of interest not only for what it reveals about Nijinsky but also for its concise presentation of Adler's theory of schizophrenia. Adler, who joined Freud and Jung as a prominent founder of psychoanalysis, eventually went his own way, forming a school of what he called individual psychology.
Nijinsky realized Adler's hopes for him by apparently regaining his sanity by the time he died in England in 1950 of a kidney disorder. Adler wrote in the preface in 1936: ''When I visited him two years ago in a sanitorium, he was quiet, well-nourished and interested in his guests. But he did not speak and only occasionally broke into a friendly laugh. The attending physician informed me that this patient was always quiet and could not be forced to speak.''
Mrs. Nijinsky, who had been married to the dancer since 1913, invited Adler to the sanitorium in Switzerland and later, because of his hopeful prognosis, she asked him to write the preface to the diary that she later found so distressing.
Adler died in 1937, but his family kept the preface until 1973 before turning it over to Dr. Ansbacher. Mrs. Nijinsky, however, was still alive then and Dr. Ansbacher was asked by her agent not to make it public. Her death in Paris in 1978 freed him to seek publication. 'Badly Prepared for Life
Adler said in his preface that ''our poor hero,'' Nijinsky, possessed motor, auditory and visual abilities ''far above average.'' But the analyst wrote that Nijinsky had been ''badly prepared for life, burdened from childhood with highly strained expectations, lacking the ordinary course of education, and put automatically in a class of people whose better schooling and background made him feel slighted.''
Adler believed schizophrenia grew out of an indulgence in frustrated vanity coupled with feelings of inferiority that made a person retreat from social life. He conceded that a genetic factor, perhaps some anomaly of brain structure, could explain why only certain individuals broke completely with reality. This appreciation of the possibility that physical and social causes may blend in schizophrenia is in line with most current thinking. Marked Lack of Social Interest
Nijinsky had shown certain ''prepsychotic'' signs in childhood, Adler said, including ''a marked lack of social interest.'' One biographer noted: ''As a boy Nijinksy never had friends. He was by nature a solitary creature.''
When such an absence of normal personal interaction goes uncorrected, Adler maintained, the child ''expects that life will be filled with triumphs and be free of difficulties, that everything will be done for him by others, while he is striving energetically to surpass others.''
''Hence, for a time,'' Adler said, ''the person may be extremely successful.'' Indeed, Nijinsky's dancing was legendary. ''Sooner or later,'' Adler continued, ''especially when confronted by the problems of social life, of occupation, and of love, such a person gains the impression that the environment is constantly attacking him. Not comprehending the situation, he experiences this as a repeated insult, is subjected to a series of shocks until finally his resistance is completely broken down.
''He is not prepared for a solution of his problems that would require that he give up his asocial interest in himself and that he cooperate and contribute even when conditions are difficult and unfavorable to himself. Therefore, he cuts off his relations to the world of reality and, directed solely by his style of life, is guided by the fancies and imaginings of his childhood.
''Wholly disillusioned and hopeless, he loses the remainder of his activity, which was diminished from the beginning, and turns more and more towards his 'irrational' imagination.''
In the final paragraph of the preface, however, Adler said that restoring hope was a path to cure. Adler never actually treated Nijinsky, although he was begged to take the case. ''If I had had time enough,'' Adler said, ''I think I could have helped him.''
The preface made no mention of the dancer's wife. This omission, according to Dr. Ansbacher, was unusual for Adler, who always considered a patient's social context.
The diary itself made repeated negative references to her. She Stayed With Him
Mrs. Nijinsky reported ''periods of violence'' between Nijinsky and herself, but she stayed with him against all advice to get a divorce. Dr. Ansbacher said, ''Romola's goal from the start was to become known as the faithful wife of the great Nijinsky, a goal for which she was willing to pay any price and which she indeed attained.''
And yet her ''mythologizing'' as Dr. Ansbacher called it, ''did not preclude good practical sense.'' She was quick to notice what conditions seemed to improve her husband and eventually helped him regain his independence and sanity.
There were two steps to recovery in Nijinsky's case, as summarized by Dr. Ansbacher. In 1938 he was among the first psychiatric patients to receive insulin coma therapy, a shock treatment, which freed him of his hallucinations and enabled him to live outside the hospital, although still requiring his wife's constant care.
Then in 1945, when the Russians occupied the town in Hungary where the Nijinskys were living, he began to speak to the Russian soldiers and even, one night, to jump up and dance spontaneously with them as they performed peasant dances.
Dr. Ansbacher characterized this experience as ''milieu therapy'' of the type practiced today in rehabilitating schizophrenic patients. Beyond these elements, and despite the tension in the marriage, Nijinsky also had his wife's support. ''When she decided to stay with Vaslav rather than abandon him to an asylum,'' Dr. Ansbacher concluded, ''this was an act of hope that must also have communicated itself to Vaslav. Without this basic hope, Vaslav would not have met the later opportunites.''
Illustrations: photo of Vaslav Nijinsky (Page A9) Photo of Alfred Adler (Page A9) | http://web.archive.org/web/20130707162746id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1981/08/05/us/analyst-s-views-on-nijinsky-finally-published.html | low | http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/05/us/analyst-s-views-on-nijinsky-finally-published.html | 7.09596 | 49.479798 | 0.984848 | extractive | high | ANALYST'S VIEWS ON NIJINSKY FINALLY PUBLISHED | Vaslav Nijinsky, the great Russian dancer who was driven from the stage by madness in 1917 at the peak of his fame, recorded his thoughts and ravings in the next two years in a diary that he signed ''God Nijinsky.'' Although the diary was published in 1946 while Nijinsky was still alive, and the original handwritten volumes were sold at auction in 1979 for more than $100,000, a long-suppressed preface by the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler has now been printed for the first time, in The Archives of General Psychiatry. The preface is the only published first-hand professional opinion of Nijinsky, whose mental illness led to consultations with all the foremost experts of his day, including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Its publication was prevented by Nijinsky's wife, Romola, who is said to have found its clinical observations distasteful, objecting in particular to Adler's belief that Nijinsky's schizophrenia was rooted in a pathological sense of inferiority. She replaced the preface with one of her own, which glorified her husband. |
20130712035347 | Castao, who leads the Colombian paramilitaries, known by their Spanish acronym AUC, the largest right-wing paramilitary force to ever exist in the western hemisphere reveals that he was trained in the arts of war in Israelas a young man of 18 in the 1980s.
He glowingly adds: âI copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis,â in his chapter-long account of his Israel experiences.
Castaoâs right-wing Phalange-like AUC force is now by far the worst human rights violator in all of the Americas, and ties between that organisation and Israel are continually surfacing in the press.
The AUC paramilitaries are a fighting force that originally grew out of killers hired to protect drug-running operations and large landowners. They were organised into a cohesive force by Castao in 1997. It exists outside the law but often coordinates its actions with the Colombian military, in a way similar to the relationship of the Lebanese Phalange to the Israeli army throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
According to a 1989 Colombian Secret Police intelligence report, apart from training Carlos Castao in 1983, Israeli trainers arrived in Colombia in 1987 to train him and other paramilitaries who would later make up the AUC.
Fifty of the paramilitariesâ âbestâ students were then sent on scholarships to Israel for further training according to a Colombian police intelligence report, and the AUC became the most prominent paramilitary force in the hemisphere, with some 10,000-12,000 men in arms.
The Colombian AUC paramilitaries are always in need of arms, and it should come as no surprise that some of their major suppliers are Israeli. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala.
In May of last year, GIRSA, an Israeli company associated with the Israeli Defence Forces and based in Guatemala was able to buy 3000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition that were then handed over to AUC paramilitaries in Colombia.
Israelâs military relations with right-wing groups and regimes spans Latin America from Mexico to the southernmost tip of Chile, starting just a few years after the Israeli state came into existence.
Since then, the list of countries Israel has supplied, trained and advised includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela.
But it isnât only the sales of planes, guns and weapons system deals that characterises the Israeli presence in Latin America.
Where Israel has excelled is in advising, training and running intelligence and counter-insurgency operations in the Latin American âdirty warâ civil conflicts of Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and now Colombia.
In the case of the Salvadoran conflict - a civil war between the right-wing landowning class supported by a particularly violent military pitted against left-wing popular organisations - the Israelis were present from the beginning. Besides arms sales, they helped train ANSESAL, the secret police who were later to form the framework of the infamous death squads that would kill tens of thousands of mostly civilian activists.
From 1975 to 1979, 83% of El Salvador's military imports came from Israel, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. By 1981, many of those in the civilian popular political movements who had survived the death squads headed for the hills to become guerrillas.
By 1981 there was an open civil war in El Salvador which took over a decade to resolve through negotiations.
Even though the US was openly backing the Salvadoran Army by 1981, as late as November 1983 it was asking for more Israeli âpractical assistanceâ there, according to a declassified secret document obtained recently by Aljazeera.
Among the assistance asked for were helicopters, trucks, rifles, ammunition, and combat infantry advisors to work at both the âcompany and battalion level of the Salvadoran Armyâ.
One notable Salvadoran officer trained by the Israelis was Major Roberto DâAubuisson, who always held a high opinion of the Israelis. It was Major DâAubuisson who ordered the assassination of El Salvadorâs archbishop amongst thousands of other murders.
Later he would organise the right-wing National Republican Alliance Party (ARENA) and send his son to study abroad in the relative safety of Israel.
Amazingly, while the Israelis were training the El Salvadoran death squads they were also supporting the anti-semitic Argentine military government of the late 1970s and early 1980s - at a time when that government was involvedin another âdirty warâ of death squads and disappearances.
In 1978, Nicaraguaâs dictator Somoza was making his last stand against a general uprising of the Sandinista-led population who were sick of his familyâs dynasty which had ruled and monopolised the county for half a century. The Israelis and the US had been supplying Somoza with weapons for years. But when President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976 he ordered a cessation of all US military assistance to Nicaragua.
Israel utilised Carter's humanrights policy to its advantage
Filling the void, the Israelis immediately increased their weapons supplies to Somoza until he fled the country when the Sandinistas took power.
Israeli operatives then helped train right-wing Nicaraguan Contras in Honduran and Costa Rican camps to fight the Sandinista government, according to Colombian police intelligence reports Aljazeerahas obtained.
At least some of the same Israeli operatives had also previously trained the nucleus of the paramilitary organisations that would become the AUC in Colombia.
But by far the bloodiest case of Israeli involvement in Latin America was its involvement in Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s. As in El Salvador, a civil war pitted a populist but, in this case, mainly Indian left against a mainly European oligarchy protected by a brutal Mestizo Army.
As Guatemalan President Carlos Arana said in 1971, "If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so."
The Israelis supplied Guatemala with Galil rifles, and built an ammunition factory for them, as well as supplying armoured personnel carriers and Arava planes. Behind the scenes, they were actively involved in the bloodiest counter-insurgency campaign the hemisphere has known since the European conquest, in which at least 200,000 (mostly Indians) were killed.
Like Israelâs original occupation of Palestine, several entire Guatemalan Indian villages were razed and a million people displaced. âThe guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea,â said Guatemalan President Rios Montt in 1982.
Israeli arms and training fuelledGuatemalan unrest
Guatemalan army officers credit Israeli support with turning the tide against the uprising, not only in the countryside where Israeli counter-insurgency techniques and assistance set up strategic-hamlet-like âdevelopment polesâ along the lines of the Israeli kibbutz, but also in the cities where âIsraeli communication technicians and instructorsâ working through then-sophisticated computers were able to locate and then decimate guerrillas and their supporters in Guatemala City in 1981.
From the late 1970s until the 1990s, the US could not overtly support the Guatemalan army because of its horrendous human rights record (although there was some covert support), but many in the US government, especially in the CIA, supported Israel in taking up the slack.
But the US grew to regret its actions. On 10 March 1999, US President Bill Clinton issued an apology for US involvement in the war: The âUnited States... support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression...was wrong.â No similar statement has ever been forthcoming from the Israelis.
At the present time, the only major insurgency war in Latin America is in Colombia, where Israel has an overt involvement.
Besides the dozen or so Kfir IAI C-7 jet fighters they have sold the Colombian government, and the Galil rifles produced in Bogota under licence, most of the Israeli ties to the governmentâs counter-insurgency war are closely-guarded secrets.
Aljazeeraâs attempts to obtain clarification on these and other issues for this story were stonewalled by the Israeli embassy in Washington.
Why does Israel continue to provide arms and expertise to the pariahs of the world? Clearly, part of the reason is the revenues produced by arms sales, and part of it has do with keeping up with trends in counter-insurgent war across the globe.
But another factor is what is demanded of Israel by the worldâs only superpower, the US, in partial exchange for the superpowerâs continued support for Israeli dominance in the Middle East.
This relationship can be best illustrated by recently declassified 1983 US government documents obtained by the Washington, DC-based National Security Archives through the Freedom of Information Act.
One such declassified document is a 1983 memo from the notorious Colonel Oliver North of the Reagan Administrationâs National Security Council and reads: âAs discussed with you yesterday, I asked CIA, Defense, and State to suggest practical assistance which the Israelis might offer in Guatemala and El Salvador.â
Another document, this time a 1983 cable from the US Ambassador in Guatemala to Washington Frederic Chapin shows the money trail.
He says that at a time when the US did not want to be seen directly assisting Guatemala, âwe have reason to believe that our good friends the Israelis are prepared, or already have, offered substantial amounts of military equipment to the GOG (Government of Guatemala) on credit terms up to 20 years...(I pass over the importance of making huge concessionary loans to Israel so that it can make term loans in our own backyard).â
In other words, during civil wars in which the US does not want to be seen getting its hands dirty in Latin America, the superpower loans Israel money at a very good rate, and then Israel uses these funds to do the âdirty workâ. In this regard, in Latin America at least, Israel has become the hit-man for the US. | http://web.archive.org/web/20130712035347id_/http://www.aljazeera.com:80/archive/2003/06/2008491463219614.html | high | http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2003/06/2008491463219614.html | 40.276596 | 0.787234 | 0.574468 | abstractive | low | Israel's Latin American trail of terror | <P>âI learned an infinite amount of things in Israel, and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievementsâ said Colombian paramilitary leader and indicted drug trafficker Carlos Castao in his ghostwritten autobiography, Mi Confesin.</P> |
20130817225359 | Alex Havriliak didn't take a single class to get ready for the SAT. But that was more than 30 years ago.
When it came time to start college planning for his daughter, Anya, 17, there was never any question about setting aside money to prepare her for the standardized test that most colleges use in evaluating applicants.
He suggested a tutor through Kaplan Test Prep, said Anya, who lives in Harlem and is an A student at Marymount School on the Upper East Side.
Anya's two-year bill for SAT tutoring and other college test prep and coaching came to $4,500. The payoff for the high school senior who plans to apply to Ivy League schools this fall: A stellar score of 2,320 out of the new maximum of 2,400. That bettered her PSAT score by 100 points.
"This was a great investment," said Alex Havriliak, 49, who's chief financial officer of Volunteers of America in Manhattan.
With competition fierce and with more students than ever taking the SAT — 1.5 million kids took it in the last school year, a nearly 30% jump from 10 years ago, according to the College Board — paying for study help has increasingly become a must.
For parents of high school juniors who want their kids to take the exams next spring, now's the time to start planning.
But in the midst of assessing the heavy costs of college, many parents often forget the expense of test prep.
"Families need to budget early for this," said Katherine Cohen, CEO of applywise.com, a Manhattan-based online college admissions counselor.
There are a number of prep options at a wide range of price points. Study aids run the gamut from $399 online classes to qualified, one-on-one tutors who charge anywhere from $150 to $750 an hour.
The most popular form of test prep are classroom courses, although the fastest growing option is one-on-one tutoring. Classes generally cost about $1,000 and include around 30 hours of teaching as well as practice exams that simulate the real test experience. Students also supplement course work with products like $4.99 SAT prep iPod downloads and $20 shower curtains featuring the top 500 SAT words. Last year, Kaplan began selling $9.99 comic books where the characters use the most frequently tested words.
Despite the huge growth in prep, the College Board — which owns the three-hour-and-45-minute, three-part exam that tests math, reading and writing — insists the exam gauges what you learned in high school, not fancy tricks taught by experts.
"The best preparation is studying hard in school," said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT program for the College Board. "Short-term expensive prep courses do not result in score gains," he said. | http://web.archive.org/web/20130817225359id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/2.1353/sat-test-preparation-college-admissions-stake-article-1.325234 | medium | http://www.nydailynews.com/2.1353/sat-test-preparation-college-admissions-stake-article-1.325234 | 17.83871 | 8.064516 | 0.903226 | mixed | medium | SAT test preparation becoming a must with college admissions at stake | With competition fierce and with more students than ever taking the SAT paying for study help has increasingly become a must. But the cost can run into the thousands. |
20130902093632 | She sees the holes in his shoes, his lucky charms, his lack of sleep and his quieter moments. For 18 months, Callie Shell has enjoyed intimate access to the man who would be the 44th president of the United States of America - and the first black occupant of the White House. Shell has been there to capture the down moments, the nerves and weariness of Barack Obama on her camera - seen in this selection of her photographs.
With exclusive access to the "Change" campaign, she eats, sleeps, travels and lives with her subjects. "I like to be forgotten," she says. "Then I can document their lives." But criss-crossing America, Shell has cultivated a unique relationship with Obama. During the New Hampshire primary in January, Obama turned to his wife Michelle on the campaign bus and said: "The reason why Callie and I get along so well is because we've both got big ears." Michelle turned to Shell and said: "Isn't it amazing he ever got a wife?"
The pair have covered thousands of miles on the road together. "We do get along well," says Shell. "He's good-looking, funny and smart." Watching him working on a speech, his feet up on a table, Shell was amazed to notice that Obama's shoes had two large holes, one in each sole. "I'm not giving them up," he said. "I've broken them in and they're not ready to go yet." Obama is superstitious like that, she says. She has seen him make speeches with his pockets full of lucky charms given by supporters. And he keeps routines. Obama, his staff, security and Shell all rise at 6am and do not go to bed until midnight. He manages to sleep only by catching brief cat-naps, which Shell insists on photographing. Obama dislikes the results, but she thinks it is important that people see he often does not sleep in a proper bed.
Shell, a 47-year-old from Georgia, was Al Gore's photographer for eight years when he was Bill Clinton's vice-president. "Gore didn't trust me at first - it took him about a year. He was hard, but Obama's easy." One of Shell's favourite pictures on the campaign bus is of Michelle falling asleep on Barack's shoulder while he is mid-text-message. She also captured the pair standing in a corridor, their heads touching, seizing a rare moment alone.
The first time Shell photographed Obama with his family was in November 2006 before he had decided, officially, to run for the White House. Shell describes the scene: "I'm in his kitchen, he's helping the girls get ready for school, he's about to leave for the office and Michelle's going to leave for the university. And I thought: this is going to change. It's never going to be the same again. Their life is never going to be the same again".
· Callie Shell, her camera and the would-be president guardianweekly.co.uk/politics | http://web.archive.org/web/20130902093632id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/jun/26/photography.barackobama | medium | http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/jun/26/photography.barackobama | 20.433333 | 15.3 | 0.9 | extractive | medium | Rhoda Buchanan on political photographer Callie Shell | Rhoda Buchanan: For 18 months, photographer Callie Shell has enjoyed intimate access to the man who would be the 44th president of the United States of America |
20131004053651 | A unit of CBS Corp. said Wednesday it has formed a joint venture with billionaire Anil Ambani's Reliance Broadcast Network to launch television channels in India, joining a host of foreign broadcasters hoping to tap a fast-growing market.
Three English channels will start broadcasting in October 2010 and the venture would have programming rights across India, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Pakistan, the companies said.
Viacom Inc., Time Warner Inc., Walt Disney Co. and News Corp. have already jumped into India's TV market, which is expected to grow at 15 percent a year to become a 521 billion rupee ($11.4 billion) business by 2014.
Television is the largest segment of India's entertainment industry, with revenues of 257 billion rupees ($5.6 billion) in 2009 — nearly three times what the much-hyped Bollywood film industry pulled in, according to KPMG.
RELATED: INDIA REVEALS WORLD'S CHEAPEST TABLET COMPUTER AT $35
Reliance Broadcast Network said it would be pairing its understanding of Indian entertainment and advertising preferences with CBS's expertise in producing content.
The channels will broadcast series such as "Hawaii Five-0," ''The Defenders" and "Blue Bloods" as well as current CBS shows like "CSI" and "Entertainment Tonight" via cable or satellite. The joint venture will also look into owning or operating channels in Hindi.
"The opportunities for growth and all of the data that support those facts are obviously staggering," Armando Nunez, president of CBS Studios International, said at a press conference.
KPMG says India's TV audience has grown to 500 million viewers — still just 60 percent of households — and the number of channels has mushroomed from 120 in 2003 to over 460 in 2009.
Another of Ambani's companies, Reliance Big Entertainment, last year paid $325 million for a 50 percent stake in Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios. | http://web.archive.org/web/20131004053651id_/http://www.nydailynews.com/2.1353/cbs-launch-television-channels-india-article-1.204794 | low | http://www.nydailynews.com/2.1353/cbs-launch-television-channels-india-article-1.204794 | 11.935484 | 12.419355 | 1 | extractive | high | CBS to launch television channels in India | The channels will broadcast series such as "Hawaii Five-0," as well as current shows like "CSI" and "Entertainment Tonight" via cable or satellite. |
20131021172903 | A detail from Saying Farewell at Xunyang, by Qiu Ying, c1500-50 Photograph: John Lamberton/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
On 5 August 1473, a young artist drew the first ever landscape. The date is known precisely because Leonardo da Vinci wrote it on the sheet of paper, as if aware of the revolutionary nature of what he was doing. To look at mountains and trees just for themselves was unprecedented.
Or was it? The invention of landscape painting is one of the great moments of European art. Painting nature is a way to get inside yourself. To this day, people enjoy doing watercolours in the outdoors as a form of meditation. Leonardo's discovery of the mystery of nature – which you see in all his paintings, with their dreamy rocks and pools – is the invention of a new kind of inner life.
Yet it is a lot less original than we might like to think. There is an uncanny likeness between Leonardo's rocks, trees and rivers and the rocks, trees and rivers that Chinese artists were painting centuries before he was born. It is bizarre: that 1473 drawing actually looks like a reworking of classic Chinese paintings such as Li Gongnian's Winter Evening Landscape. When was that painted? I look at the label in the V&A's new exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. It says 1120. That's 353 years before the very similar sketch by Leonardo.
It is conventional, nowadays, to pay lip service to the fact that many versions of art exist, that beautiful art comes from all over the world and every way of life. Yet the story of art that most of us absorb – as told in The Story of Art by EH Gombrich, first published in 1950 and still the definitive account of art's progress – puts European innovation at the centre of the action. All peoples make art, but the west takes it forward.
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting is the most devastating refutation of such assumptions I have ever seen. It shows that during the Song dynasty, at a time when Europeans were fighting barbaric crusades and had long forgotten the creativity that flourished in ancient Greece, artists in China were taking painting to heights of sensitivity and poetry that would not be attained elsewhere until the ages of Leonardo – or for that matter, when you look at the most radical Chinese touches, Van Gogh.
I'd go further. Looking at this show being installed and talking to its curator Zhang Hongxing, I can't resist airing the theory that Leonardo stole the idea of landscape painting from China. Could he somehow have seen Chinese paintings? Might something have reached the west along the Silk Road? Excitedly, I get Leonardo's 1473 drawing up on my iPad and hold it among the 12th-century Chinese landscapes for comparison. The shapes of the hills and trees in Leonardo's sketch perfectly mirror the sugar-loaf peaks and willowy trees in 900-year-old Chinese paintings.
Zhang's well aware of this idea: it was raised very seriously in the 1950s, he says, but there is no proof. It's a mystery. Nor is Leonardo the only European pioneer of landscape who looks "Chinese". Zhang points out that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is also very "Chinese" looking. This is true. Bruegel's much-loved Hunters in the Snow has all the elements that delighted medieval Chinese landscape painters, including all that snow.
But why did China invent landscape art in the first place? Why did artists begin to depict, not gods and battles as elsewhere, but the grandeur of nature? It has something to do with Buddhism, which spread to China before AD1,000 and inspired a culture of contemplation. It also has to do with the technical achievements of the Song era. The scientific mind that perfected porcelain also looked at nature with a new clarity.
One of the first things you see in the show was actually painted by a Song emperor – though it comes with a warning to rulers, for Emperor Huizong's dreamy fascination with art helped to lose him his throne. Indeed, as the curator explains, painting in China has always been associated with retreat and escapism. Not all the works in this exhibition are landscapes. There are pictures of courtesans and the tremendous Nine Dragons, a dazzling mythic vision painted by Chen Rong in 1244. Yet for me, the escapist pursuit of pastoral in China's pioneering landscapes is utterly beguiling. After the Mongols conquered China there was a clear association of art with the rejection of power. Turning their backs on the court, intellectuals created gardens, wrote poetry and painted expressive scenes of wintry trees. They rendered nature in a free, subjective style that anticipated – and of course, influenced – Van Gogh.
Personally, I am convinced that Leonardo must have got access to the art of China. He was fascinated by the east and once applied for a job in Istanbul, offering to serve the Ottoman empire and praising Allah in a letter that survives. Did all this interest in Asia lead him to some hushed library where he unrolled a silk scroll and saw mountains, cherry blossoms and water?
One thing is certain. Zhang's great exhibition turns the story of art upside down. | http://web.archive.org/web/20131021172903id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/china-landscape-painting | high | http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/china-landscape-painting | 37.259259 | 1 | 0.62963 | abstractive | low | Made in China: how landscape painting was invented in the east | The history books say that western Renaissance artists invented landscape painting. Not if you believe a new V&A exhibition of Chinese art, writes Jonathan Jones |
20131101032819 | On a recent morning, New Line Cinema bosses Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne sat in their offices on Seventh Ave. looking over audience research on their mega movie "The Lord of the Rings," which opens Wednesday. "It has incredible awareness," Lynne said, jumping up from his seat. "This is the moment before something very incredible can happen.
" "I tend to be conservative," Shaye said more hesitantly. "With some guardedness - I am very enthusiastic.
" It's hard to believe this is the same duo that within the last year has faced enough drama to transfix a movie audience, because of expensive flops like the Adam Sandler comedy "Little Nicky" and the Warren Beatty fiasco "Town and Country," each of which cost $90 million. The Sandler film took in barely $60 million and the Beatty flick took in just $15 million at the box office. But with the debut of the movie version of J.
R. Tolkien's epic saga of good and evil, the AOL Time Warner-owned studio that's been looking dumb and dumber lately has a shot at capturing the ring again. In their riskiest move to date and marking a first for Hollywood, Shaye and Lynne made three "Lord of the Rings" movies at once, pouring more than $270 million into a trilogy of special-effects-propelled films detailing the hobbits, dwarfs, humans, and elves of Middle-earth. The second "Rings" will come out next Christmas followed by the third installment a year later. Lynne and Shaye shot all three simultaneously to save on production costs, while locking in the "Rings" cast which includes Liv Tyler, Ian McKellan and Elijah Woods as the heroic Hobbit Frodo Baggins. The super-gamble comes at a tough time for New Line, the edgy, 35-year-old studio, founded in a lower Manhattan walk-up, that became known for turning less than sure thing projects into huge hits, like the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series and "Dumb and Dumber.
" AOL Time Warner, which also owns the far bigger Warner Bros. movie studio - now flying high on "Harry Potter" and "Ocean's Eleven" - came down hard on Shaye and Lynne after their recent flops. This year the studio was forced to cut 20% of its staff and slash production budgets, while Shaye parted ways with one of his closest confidants, brash New Line production chief Mike DeLuca. To satisfy AOL Time Warner number crunchers, Shaye and Lynne have substantially reduced the financial downside on "Rings.
" Through partnerships with foreign distributors, licensing agreements with companies like Burger King and JVC Electronics and tax incentives from New Zealand where the movies were shot, New Line has covered nearly 80% of the trilogy's productions costs. With pressure building on the studio, Hollywood cynics have linked New Line's very future to the success of the first "Rings" movie. "AOL Time Warner is very large, the question is: Do they need another studio that makes lots of little films?
" said CIBC Oppenheimer media analyst John Corcoran. Shaye and Lynne's answer could very well be "Rings.
" Early reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. "Awareness is at big blockbuster status," said New Line president of marketing Russell Schwartz. The most crucial review so far has come from AOL Time Warner's newly named CEO, Dick Parsons, who told the Daily News that New Line's future was in no way tied to how well "Rings" performs at the box office. "A studio doesn't hang in the balance on one film," Parsons said. But he didn't let New Line off easily: "It wouldn't be good for AOL Time Warner if 'Lord of the Rings' isn't the success we think it is," he said. Parsons said New Line serves an important function as a source of movies to fill up AOL Time Warner's entertainment cable networks - TNT, TBS and Turner Classic Movies. While Parsons said he didn't expect "Lord of the Rings" to match "Harry Potter's" record breaking opening weekend, he said in the long run, "Rings" could be just as big as the boy wizard flick. "I check my own sources - plain old New Yorkers," Parsons said, citing waiters, elevator operators, and his driver. "They are telling me it will be huge.
" "The momentum is growing stronger and stronger," agreed Gitesh Pandya, editor of Boxofficeguru.
com. If "Rings" works, it would mean that once again New Line founder Shaye has proven he can defy the conventional wisdom in Hollywood. Over the years, he's backed risky projects and untested stars - like comic Jim Carrey before he became a superstar and now "Rings" director Peter Jackson. He locked in audiences with franchises like "Nightmare on Elm Street," "Austin Powers," and "Rush Hour.
" Up next for New Line: a third "Austin Powers" and "I Am Sam," a drama starring Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer. Shaye's renegade style caught the eye of Ted Turner who bought the independent film studio in 1993. Turner's own empire was acquired by Time Warner, which was later sold to AOL. A lawyer turned filmmaker, Shaye, 62, started out in the business in 1967 peddling B movies like "Reefer Madness" on college campuses. Lynne, 60, met Shaye at Columbia Law School and joined New Line in 1990. The recent tough times have clearly taken a toll on Shaye who remains passionate about running the studio - even under demanding corporate parent AOL Time Warner. "This business is creative. The process is daunting," Shaye said. "You can't get it right every time. | http://web.archive.org/web/20131101032819id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/money/reaching-rings-troubled-studio-risks-article-1.932652 | low | http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/money/reaching-rings-troubled-studio-risks-article-1.932652 | 12.707865 | 31.516854 | 0.977528 | extractive | high | REACHING FOR THE RINGS Troubled studio risks it all - again | On a recent morning, New Line Cinema bosses Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne sat in their offices on Seventh Ave. looking over audience research on their mega movie "The Lord of the Rings," which opens Wednesday.
"It has incredible awareness," Lynne said, jumping up from his seat. "This is the moment before something very incredible can happen."
"I tend to be conservative," Shaye said more hesitantly. "With some |
20131111054111 | When the dust settles on this year of spectacle and recession-proof Olympic construction, of teetering steel pointing to the sky, of swinging cranes, mayoral openings and breathless press releases, of the mighty Shard and the risible Orbit, one of the most memorable works will turn out to be something invisible above ground, and largely the creation of little-known 1950s engineers. This is the conversion of the oil tanks of the former Bankside power station in London – a clover of three buried concrete cylinders – into new spaces for performance and exhibition for Tate Modern, which is what the power station became in 2000.
This project is by the Basel-based firm of Herzog & de Meuron, architects of that icon of icons, the stadium built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics – or Bird's Nest, as the architects don't like it to be called. The stadium set out to be a modern Eiffel Tower and succeeded, impressing its image on global television audiences of billions: of all the attention-seeking buildings of recent years, it commanded as much attention as any.
The Tanks at Tate Modern are a work of uncovering as much as addition, and finding rather than making, and there is not much chance that they will imprint their image on the world's imagination. You may indeed not be overwhelmingly excited by the photographs on this page, as the Tanks are hard to capture with a lens. They are voids rather than objects, things to be experienced rather than seen.
They are not, however, exactly modest. Each has a height of 7 metres and a diameter of 30 metres. Built to hold the fuel that powered the turbines that generated electricity for a large chunk of the capital, and to withstand the risk of explosion, they are thick-walled and capacious, a trefoil of inside-out towers, or a castle in negative.
They have the confident geometry of things made not for appearance but for a substantial practical use, and their concrete surfaces have a raw force. They are impressive just for being there, and the architects' approach has been largely to let their size and mass speak for themselves.
One cylinder has been made into a performance space, another into a room for temporary installations with a preference for those using moving images. The third tank has been subdivided into the functions, such as dressing rooms, needed to serve the other two. Floors, ceiling and lighting have been added as necessary to fulfil their new tasks. On the approach to the Tanks you see an archaeology of patches and slatherings of concrete, marks of the changes and repairs made to the structure over the years.
Unless you are a connoisseur of concrete techniques during the second Elizabethan era, you don't greatly distinguish between the changes made this year and those of a half-century ago. As in Astley Castle in Warwickshire, you're presented with a composite of past and present, where the joins between the two are not strongly marked. For an architect on such projects, according to Pierre de Meuron, "it is mostly good advice to disappear, as you leave your traces anyway. It looks as if it has been so forever but it was actually different before." The urge to dramatise what is already impressive has been avoided.
Rooflights could have been added, such that daylight could have gushed into the Tanks and made them into romantic Piranesian ruins, but Jacques Herzog says this "would have been a trap – it becomes kitsch if you make too much of it". The way that he and de Meuron have designed it is to stress that "it is really an underground space". Each tank has "a door and that's it. It's just very straightforward."
The effect of this approach is to flatten the experience of the Tanks, such that their scale grows on you rather than amazes you all at once.
It also allows them to function as background to the performances and installations they will hold, rather than be the star turn in themselves. They will only be completed by the things that will happen in them, which is as it should be. And if you want drama there is no shortage of it in the Turbine Hall next door, or in a multi-storey twisted brick pyramid that is about to rise over the Tanks.
It's tempting to see the fondness of digging and revealing as a sign of our less shiny times, and it can also be seen in the same architects' Serpentine Pavilion, and their plans for renovating the giant Park Avenue Armory in New York, but as the Tanks and the pyramid together will cost £215m, this new modesty would have to be taken at a purely symbolic level. It would be more accurate to see it as a continuation of the original idea of 1994, when it was first decided to make an old power station into the Tate's new gallery of modern art.
The plan was derided at the time, as a backward-looking, heritage-obsessed failure to take the opportunity to commission proud new buildings, but the success of the Turbine Hall showed that it can be as powerful to use and modify found spaces as make new ones. The Tanks, meanwhile, remained a great secret place, buried beneath the grass behind Tate Modern. It was a particular obsession of Tate's director Nick Serota (who liked, evidently, to park his tanks under the lawn) to bring them into use.
"I want those oil tanks," he told his architects, "even if I don't know how to use them," and eventually art based on performance and moving images provided the reason, and Tate's genius for fundraising came up with the cash. And so an intriguing new republic has been added to Tate's imperium, or a new district to its city of art. Visitors will now have a reason to turn right after passing through Tate Modern's main entrance, where at the moment all the interest is on the left.
There is an obvious danger in pursuing space for its own sake, which is that whatever goes in it feels like a pretext, a token gesture embarrassed by its setting. There is also a danger that Tate's relentless expansion will bloat it, and make it in the end an exhausting barrage of over-spectacular presentations. With an exhibition area of 1,800 sq metres, the Tanks are more than half as big as the not-small Turbine Hall, and exceed the display space of entire regional galleries, such as the Turner Contemporary in Margate.
But at this point, not yet tested by use, the Tanks feel credible.
There seems to be a purpose to their intended programming with film and performance, and they are distinctive enough – exceptionally so – to be rather more than another dollop of space in the Tate's halls. In the end, these underground chambers are simply extraordinary places, of a kind that would not now be invented from scratch. It would have been a shocking not to make use of them.
The Tanks at Tate Modern, London SE1 open on 18 July with Art in Action, a 15-week festival of performance and installation art | http://web.archive.org/web/20131111054111id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jul/01/tanks-tate-modern-review | high | http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jul/01/tanks-tate-modern-review | 49.571429 | 2.071429 | 0.857143 | mixed | medium | The Tanks at Tate Modern - review | The conversion of three huge underground oil tanks at Tate Modern may turn out to be the most memorable work of this extraordinary year, writes Rowan Moore |
20140527024940 | Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore paired up pretty successfully in “The Wedding Singer” (1998), and they repeated the trick with the amnesia-themed “50 First Dates” (2004). In both movies, Barrymore’s cuteness was an effective counterbalance (or complement) to Sandler’s hodgepodge of crass loopiness and underlying sincerity.
They’re back together in “Blended,” as melancholy single parents whose families bond on an African vacation. Barrymore plays harried for a chunk of the story, reminding us that she’s a mom in real life now, after all. But the movie could use a lot more of her familiar infectiousness. It’s the glue that holds together Sandler’s earnest moments and his penchant for scattershot tomfoolery.
The story opens with Sandler’s Jim and Barrymore’s Lauren on, yes, a first date — a disastrous rendezvous punctuated by peeved barbs and “emergency” calls from home giving them a quick out. It’s soon clear why they’re both off their dating game: Lauren has a couple of unruly boys and a smugly useless ex (Joel McHale), while widowed Jim tries hard with his three girls, but is better at teaching them basketball than at helping them navigate puberty.
A contrived coincidence involving Lauren’s brassy friend (Wendi McLendon-Covey) gives both Jim and Lauren the opportunity to jump on a family trip to Africa for cheap. The two are irked to meet again, but gradually, each fills a void in the other’s brood. Lauren is great with lullabies, and rightly points out that Jim’s oldest daughter (Bella Thorne) might prefer something girlier than the barbershop haircuts he gets her. (Uncomfortable tomboy jokes are only made odder by Thorne’s resemblance to Keira Knightley.) Jim, meanwhile, knows just what Lauren’s younger boy (Kyle Red Silverstein) needs: a father figure who actually cares. Enough, even, to join him in cartoonish craziness like ostrich riding.
“You gotta show up for your kids,” Jim tells Lauren in a likably sentimental bit of parental philosophizing. Of course, this being an Adam Sandler movie, he and director pal Frank Coraci (“Wedding Singer,” “Click”) hedge their narrative bets by glopping on the anything-goes humor that fans expect.
Some of it works. Sandler and Barrymore have some great interaction with Alyvia Alyn Lind, who plays Jim’s youngest daughter with a very funny mouths-of-babes streak. But while a Greek chorus styled like Ladysmith Black Mambazo and led by preening Terry Crews is gleefully wacky, don’t be surprised if the caricatured African setting draws some complaints. The location feels more like a random choice than a thematically relevant one, and at times it plays like an ad for South Africa’s infamously segregated Sun City resort.
Funny thing, though: The sunnier that Barrymore gets in her scenes with Sandler, the more the iffy elements and leaden bits seem to just melt away. Blend in more of that spirit, and their latest pairing might rate better. | http://web.archive.org/web/20140527024940id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/movies/2014/05/22/the-sandler-barrymore-balance-bit-off-blended/eLSEDCLJykf3nYbu3vqQLI/story.html | medium | http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2014/05/22/the-sandler-barrymore-balance-bit-off-blended/eLSEDCLJykf3nYbu3vqQLI/story.html | 21.814815 | 8.148148 | 0.962963 | mixed | high | The Sandler-Barrymore balance is a bit off in ‘Blended’ | Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore are back together in “Blended,” this time as melancholy single parents whose families bond on an African vacation. |
20140606032650 | Now that Matthew Weiner has put the lie to “Leave It to Beaver” and “Make Room for Daddy,” revealing the denial, need, and aggression behind the perfect 1950s family façade, we wait.
We wait — something that, in this age of “on demand” and TV binging, we rarely do — to find out exactly how the “Mad Men” creator will leave each of his characters when his drama ends next year. Will the symbolism-minded Weiner show these people rising to a higher floor, elevator-style; tumbling in free-fall like the cartoon man in the title sequence; or going up and down and round and round “on a carousel”?
At the end of the first half of season seven last week, all signs pointed to a happy ending, to the tune of “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” Yes, “Mad Men” and a happy ending, a somewhat oxymoronic pairing. The show has been a long, slow slide into the darkest corners of its characters’ personalities: Betty’s childlike despair, Peggy’s loneliness, Roger’s nihilism, Joan’s low self-image, and, of course, Don’s self-loathing and identity theft. The sustained mood of the series has been one of simmering discontent and alcoholic numbness, with Don dragging everyone in his life into disappointment. And yet there we were in the midseason finale, a song-and-dance step away from peace and love.
Don’s shift was profound. Every season has been a study in how Don’s poor, unstable childhood has played out unconsciously in his adult life. We’ve seen him try to remake himself into a power broker with a suburban family, to lead the picture-perfect life — and yet succumb to his neurotic needs over and over again, creating lots of collateral damage in the process. Just when we’d think he had to change or lose everything, we’d join the long queue of those frustrated by Don as he undermined himself once more with a vengeance.
But across the last half-season, Don seems to have become more self-aware. His lovely, platonic conversation on the plane with Neve Campbell in the first episode, the way he mentored Peggy into taking charge of the Burger Chef presentation and then proudly watched her succeed, his bittersweet acceptance when Megan broke up with him — all these moments indicated a newfound groundedness. He has hit rock bottom a number of times, but he no longer appears absolutely destined to do it again. Weiner even put Don in a somewhat saccharine scene in the penultimate episode — the dance to “My Way” with Peggy — and it felt like a sentimental resolution more than a setup for another fall.
The agency realignment led by Roger in order to save Don’s job was another sign of warmth in the last episode, the kind of giddy business chess game that has become a staple of “The Good Wife.” Jim Cutler emerged as Don’s enemy more than ever, openly struggling to fire him, but Weiner was not inviting us to take Jim’s side. Roger, the quip-slinging hedonist once so passive about Don, became the rescuer, taking matters into his own hands as if to contradict Bert’s comment that he was not a leader. The day was saved for Don, quite a victory given his non grata status at the end of season six.
The uniting factor in the last episode also spoke of positivity: The Apollo 11 moon landing, that “giant leap for mankind.” We’ve been watching the characters let TV into their lives, as screens appear tangentially in more and more scenes (and as Harry Crane has headed up the agency’s TV department). Suddenly, everyone was gathered together around their TV sets looking at the universe, with Don reaching out to his daughter in one of his most genuinely paternal gestures. The moon landing scenes on “Mad Men” were a kind of Kodak carousel ride, a paean to America’s lost innocence.
But is it possible, really, that “Mad Men” has gone into hope mode? Will Peggy’s professional triumph spread into her personal life when the show returns? Will Joan, who made her claim for love when she rejected Bob Benson, find a romantic partner who can deal with her newly owned power? Was this last half-season a final U-turn in the show, an ending that will be followed by a seven-episode epilogue — a novel-like winding down rather than a TV-like climax? Will we move forward with the characters into the future, with the flow of history, beyond the 1960s, as the office computer shrinks and multiplies?
Or was this half-season only a feint toward well-being, before Weiner leads his characters back into restlessness, the two steps backward to this one step forward? Either way, elevator or carousel, I’m betting it will be well worth waiting for. | http://web.archive.org/web/20140606032650id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/television/2014/05/31/mad-men-hope-mode/IZbzTMfKhokOzze7598x9J/story.html | medium | http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2014/05/31/mad-men-hope-mode/IZbzTMfKhokOzze7598x9J/story.html | 29.333333 | 19.060606 | 1 | extractive | high | Is ‘Mad Men’ in hope mode? | At the end of the first half of season seven, all signs pointed to a happy ending, to the tune of “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” |
20140720163331 | July 18, 2014: Audio released by Ukraine’s security agency appears to reveal separatists and Russian military officials acknowledging the shooting down of a civilian plane.
Phone calls allegedly intercepted of pro-Russian rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine appear to confirm that the separatists shot down a commercial aircraft with 295 people onboard, including 27 Australians.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over Ukraine's east overnight. Authorities do not expect any survivors.
A video claiming to be a tapped phone conversation between pro-Russian rebel commanders appears to confirm that the Boeing 777 airplane was taken down deliberately.
The authenticity of the video, which appears to have been released by Ukrainian intelligence services, is unknown.
"We have just shot down a plane," a rebel commander identified as 'Bes' says.
"It fell down outside Enakievo."
July 18, 2014: Amateur vision has surfaced of the final moments of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which crashed in Ukraine this morning.
The fighter then tells his comrade that his men have set off to photograph the wreckage.
A second allegedly intercepted phone call between separatist fighters in the field appears to have captured the moment the men realise they have made a fatal error.
When one of the men asks about the scene of the crash his brother in arms replies, "Well, we are 100 percent sure that it was a civilian plane.
"Are there a lot of people?," the rebel asks.
"F—k! The debris was falling straight into the yards," the soldier at the scene replies before describing wreckage that clearly identifies the flight as civilian and not military.
A third intercepted phone call purports to reveal a discussion where a militant explains to a rebel leader the tragic mistake that has been made.
July 18, 2014: Locals in the Ukrainian village where MH317 crashed have spoken about witnessing the plane exploding before crashing to the ground, some of them hearing gun shots before the dramatic accident.
"As to this plane shot down nearby Snezhnoe-Torez. This turned out to be a passenger one," the militant says.
"There is a whole lot of bodies of women and children."
"On TV they say like it is a Ukrainian AN-26, a transport plane. But the writing says 'Malaysian Airlines. What was it doing over the territory of Ukraine?," the fighter asks.
"Well then it was bringing spies," the man on the other end of the line replies.
"Why the hell were they flying? This is war going on."
Firefighters extinguish a fire amongst the wreckages of the malaysian airliner carrying 295 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur after it crashed in rebel-held east Ukraine. (Getty)
The veracity of the phone calls cannot be confirmed.
Author: Martin Zavan, Approving editor: Lachlan Williams
Do you have any news photos or videos? | http://web.archive.org/web/20140720163331id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/World/2014/07/18/09/08/Tapped-calls-reveal-moment-rebels-realise-fatal-mistake | medium | http://www.9news.com.au/World/2014/07/18/09/08/Tapped-calls-reveal-moment-rebels-realise-fatal-mistake | 17.545455 | 24.272727 | 1 | extractive | high | 'Tapped' call claims to reveal moment Ukraine rebels realise fatal mistake | Phone calls allegedly intercepted by pro-Russian rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine appear to confirm that the separatists shot down a commercial aircraft with 295 people onboard, including 27 Australians. |
20140729073255 | ONLY IN NEW YORK: Some of today's most provocative and authentic Latin Caribbean literature is being created by Dominican, Cuban and Puerto Rican women writers in Flushing, 1,500 miles from the sun of their native islands. They have been doing it for three years in the living room of Prof. Daisy De Filippis' unpretentious home, where the group comes together one Sunday per month. She and Nunzio, her husband, cook for the group. On a recent day, the smell of spaghetti and shrimp was mouth-watering. De Filippis, a highly regarded authority on Dominican literature, teaches at CUNY's York College and is the author of several books. She holds a Ph.
D. from City University and is one of the founders and the driving force of these meetings, or tertulias (the word means literary circle but also social gathering). "We are not a workshop but a mutual audience," explains De Filippis. "We read to each other our works in progress and can count on honest feedback.
" The feedback, encouraging or critical, is invariably well received because the women trust one another personally and artistically. The tertuliantes break all stereotypes. Mostly working women of color and of different ages, they do not fit pre-conceived notions about who writers are or how they look. More important, their works hardly fit their societies' definition of feminine literature. "The images we present in our writings are often not comfortable," De Filippis says. Actually, they are staking out new ground for female writers. Their works defy traditional feminine qualities such as virginity, docility, domesticity, fragile beauty. They deal with realities largely ignored in men's books: domestic violence, child abuse, the plight of working-class mothers. They unabashedly celebrate love, sexuality and desire the younger ones and the grandmothers in the group alike. "We are writing an honest diary of women's lives," says poet Annecy Baez Hernandez. "Women writers are marginalized in our societies, so we support each other," says Sonia Rivera-Valdes, also a professor at York College with a Ph.
D. from CUNY. "We trust each other because we have no extra-literary agendas.
" If De Filippis is the clear-headed leader, the freshness and authenticity of group founder Rivera-Valdes have made her its artistic inspiration. Her collection of stories, "Las Historias Prohibidas de Marta Veneranda" (The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda), recently won Cuba's Casa de las Americas Literary Award, one of the most important in Latin America. One of the youngest women in the group is Nelly Rosario, an environmental engineer from MIT. She is currently enrolled in a master of fine arts program at Columbia University. Yet, she says, "I learn more here than in any of the courses I have ever taken.
" Rosario writes in English a minority in the group, although others, like novelist Ynoemia Villar, write in English and Spanish. Rosario has not been published, but, she says, a chapter of "what could be a novel" won first prize in a prestigious literary contest at the University of Virginia. Her colleagues are beaming with pride. "The success of one is the success of all," says Marianela Medrano, a poet who lives in Connecticut. At the beginning of 1994, she approached De Filippis, worried about the loneliness of Dominican women writing in the U.
S. In July of that year, the first tertulia took place at De Filippis' home. The rest, as they say, is history. ANOTHER TERTULIANTE, Yrene Santos, is a well-known poet in the Dominican Republic. Inadvertently, perhaps, she wrote what could very well be the tertulia's anthem: I want to be a woman not fragmented/ to shout fearless the answers I've known for years/ and have silenced . . . And she is doing it; they are all doing it. They are also bringing a little Caribbean sun to the streets of Flushing. Only in New York. | http://web.archive.org/web/20140729073255id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/boroughs/words-latin-culture-grow-art-article-1.758399 | low | http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/boroughs/words-latin-culture-grow-art-article-1.758399 | 9.011494 | 42.597701 | 0.988506 | extractive | high | WHERE WORDS & LATIN CULTURE GROW INTO ART | ONLY IN NEW YORK: Some of today's most provocative and authentic Latin Caribbean literature is being created by Dominican, Cuban and Puerto Rican women writers in Flushing, 1,500 miles from the sun of their native islands.
They have been doing it for three years in the living room of Prof. Daisy De Filippis' unpretentious home, where the group comes together one Sunday per month. She and Nunzio, her husband, cook for the group. On |
20140817182307 | Tim Cook thinks he knows how to put $59.7 billion to good use
One of the things that’s keeping Apple’s AAPL market cap from overtaking Exxon Mobil’s XOM — besides Steve Jobs’ health problems and the world’s unquenchable thirst for petroleum products — is the fear that the company will do something stupid with the nearly $60 billion in cash and marketable securities that seems to be burning a hole in Wall Street’s pocket.
The Street has made it abundantly clear what it thinks Apple should do with that cash: Declare a dividend or launch a stock repurchase program or both — anything to drive up the value of institutional investors’ Apple holdings.
What the analysts who work for those institutions fear is that the company will go on a buying spree and start gobbling up the wrong kind of company — like Facebook, Adobe ADBE , Yahoo YHOO , Disney DIS or Sony SNE . Those are some of the acquisition candidates that were floated in the business press last October after Jobs was asked why Apple didn’t pay dividends. He answered, perhaps unadvisedly, that the company wanted to keep its “powder dry” for those “one or more very strategic opportunities [that] may come along.”
Of course, buying Disney or Sony is not what Jobs meant at all. Apple is not Time Warner TWX ; it doesn’t go around buying AOLs AOL . But COO Tim Cook may have had that spectacular miscommunication in mind last week when he spoke to analysts about what Apple actually does with its cash.
One thing he talked about was the $3.9 billion dollars worth of agreements Apple signed over the summer and fall with three unnamed companies in its supply chain. The money came in the form of prepayments and capital expenditures for process equipment and tooling — for building factories, in other words — for components he declined to specify but which most observers suspect are touchscreens like those used in the iPad.
The deal, he said, is similar to the one Apple cut five years ago:
“As you probably remember,” he began, “we signed a deal with several flash [memory chip] suppliers back at the end of 2005 that totaled over $1 billion because we anticipated that flash would become increasingly important across our entire product line and increasingly important to the industry. And so we wanted to secure supply for the company.
“We think that that was an absolutely fantastic use of Apple’s cash.”
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped] | http://web.archive.org/web/20140817182307id_/http://fortune.com/2011/01/23/a-fantastic-use-for-apples-cash/ | low | http://fortune.com/2011/01/23/a-fantastic-use-for-apples-cash/ | 7.634921 | 8.587302 | 0.873016 | extractive | medium | A fantastic use for Apple’s cash | Tim Cook thinks he knows how to put $59.7 billion to good use One of the things that's keeping Apple's market cap from overtaking Exxon Mobil's -- besides Steve Jobs' health problems and the world's unquenchable thirst for petroleum products -- is the fear that the company will do something stupid with the nearly $60… |
20140913150116 | A solitary swing stands still among the activities taking place at the Lawn on D, the innovative temporary public park space adjacent to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on D Street in South Boston. An oval, suspended by steel beams, emits a soft-white hue; eventually, curious park visitors decide to take a seat. Faces light up, figuratively and literally, when the oval begins to glow — first blue, then varying shades of purple-pink — as a sitter swings to and fro.
“Swing Time,” which in its finished form consists of 20 glowing oval swings in three different sizes, is the first interactive art piece to be added to the Lawn on D. Commissioned by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, the glowing swing set contains LED lights that activate based on the swings’ movement. An internal accelerometer measures speeds, which signal the color changes.
The swing set is part of the MCCA’s initiative to create the first interactive public space in Boston. “We wanted to have a piece that would entice anyone to use it, not just stop and stare,” said Jim Rooney, executive director of the MCCA.
Part playground implement, part art installation, “Swing Time” was designed by Eric Howeler and Meejin Yoon of the Boston firm Howeler and Yoon Architecture. The husband-and-wife team has designed several art pieces meant to activate public spaces, including the award-winning “White Noise/White Light” field at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.
Howeler, also an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, said he wanted to blend the ideas of a responsive environment and a play space to “Swing Time,” in order to entice park goers to physically interact with it.
“The stuff between buildings is often left to happenstance, and one of the best ways to bring life to the public realm is through art pieces like this one,” he said. “We stop playing at a certain age. And we were tasked with figuring out how to get everyone, including adults, to play.”
The swing set joins several activities already dispersed across the 2.7-acre green space. The WiFi-equipped park offers bocce ball, corn hole, and other yard games, as well as an open-air bar Thursday through Sunday. The space hosts music events, and serves as a reception area for events at the BCEC.
Rooney hopes that the many organizations and visitors who make their way to the waterfront for conventions, family outings, and the like will take advantage of the Lawn, designated as an experimental event space. “We want the space to be reflective of the innovative people who live and visit Boston,” he said. “And especially this new community that the park resides in” — Boston’s new innovation district.
Justin Saglio for The Boston Globe
Anna Kaertner at “Swing Time.”
Howeler said he is happy that the MCCA sought to unite Boston’s creative and technology cultures. “Boston has the (Institute of Contemporary Art) and MIT and so many other institutions that are really shaping the world and the space within it in creative new ways,” he said. “This is such a historic city, but it also has this techy-geeky side that could visually shine through.”
Blending the Lawn’s landscape and atmosphere into “Swing Time” was a pivotal design component, Howeler said. Planning and constructing the piece was a robust process, requiring input from structural engineers, electrical engineers, and computer programmers to prepare it for installation.
“We bring the whimsical aspect with the technological components of the piece, but that was also the work that was truly meticulous and important to get right,” he said. “We are trying to help create a community here, so those details are the ones that need to shine through.” And in the case of “Swing Time,” those details emit a purple glow. | http://web.archive.org/web/20140913150116id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/09/11/interactive-art-piece-swing-time-lights-lawn/4UQQCGiRZ0lPDysO4IYxNK/story.html | low | http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/09/11/interactive-art-piece-swing-time-lights-lawn/4UQQCGiRZ0lPDysO4IYxNK/story.html | 10.364865 | 6.662162 | 0.932432 | mixed | medium | ‘Swing Time’ lights up the Lawn on D | A solitary swing stands still among the activities taking place at the Lawn on D. The oval, suspended by steel beams, emits a soft white hue, until curious parkgoers decide to take a seat. Their faces lit up, figuratively and literally, as the oval begins to glow -- first blue then varying shades of purple-pink — as the sitter starts to swing to and fro. |
20141011151523 | You’re one of the last charter Team Obama guys still on the job. What’s keeping you around?
I never set out to work in the White House. What drew me to the campaign was really the opportunity to work for Barack Obama. I don’t necessarily see this as a situation where I’m going to be going through the revolving door, in and out of administrations. I happen to have found somebody who I really love to work for, who I have a really good relationship with, and it’s hard to walk away from that.
Do you ever feel envious of friends you started with, who’re out now and setting their hours?
Anybody who leaves here, you see them a couple months later and they look a lot better. They look 20 pounds lighter and five years younger. So it does give you some envy, because you see the physical toll the job takes on you. You see everybody moving, some in Washington, some out to California, and you realize there are many green pastures out there. I still come to work in a windowless office in the basement of the White House. But the other side of the coin is that there’s no other job like this. When you walk out that door for the last time here, you realize your ability to be at the center of events and decision-making on momentous things that are changing the course of history, that goes away. It cuts both ways.
You had a choice when you entered public life between this and pursuing a career as an author. Is that still the plan when you leave?
I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction. When I leave here, I would certainly want to do my own writing, but more in the non-fiction realm — books, long-form journalism, and related opportunities. So I haven’t given it much thought beyond that. But after writing for somebody else for so many years, it will be interesting to pivot back to doing things in my own voice.
What advice would you give to somebody who wants to follow your path, about the most relevant experience you had to land you this job?
People make a mistake when they think that if you just accumulate a set number of things on your resume, it’s going to lead you to a particular place — the pattern of essentially compiling credentials to climb your way up a ladder. That may work, but that’s not at all what happened to me. I found people I really wanted to work for; I made myself available to do whatever I could with the skills I had; I took some risk, packing up and moving to Chicago; and I looked for the opportunities that fit for me. So I think the biggest advice is to find people you love to work for who you’re going to learn from.
You and the President obviously spend a lot of time together. Do you have any travel rituals? What do you do on the plane?
He’s a card player, I’m not. But I’ve gone on all of his foreign trips. We’ll have very intense schedules. One ritual is he likes to find little pockets of down time in the day to just unwind, talk about other things, to be relaxed. But the one ritual that’s always the case is that on speeches, he works very late, so he’ll constantly be making line edits and fiddling with text up until the last minute. So you get a lot of late nights, especially on the big speeches. So you have to kind of pace yourself with the expectation you’re not going to get a lot of sleep, that you’ve got to find ways to relax over the course of the day and that you need to have a reserve of mental energy that you can draw from. That’s the rhythm that you get into on these foreign trips that can be quite a grind.
When you’re actually in the White House, how long is your typical day? Can you characterize it?
I’ll get in around 8 and get an intelligence briefing at the beginning of the day, and then go into a series of morning meetings that are about figuring out what we need in place for that day. The afternoons tend to be meetings or work on what policies are running through a process, what are the next big things we’re getting ready for, the next big trip, the next big speech, the next big rollout of a policy. And I’ll tend to be at work from 8 to 8. But the thing about this job, it’s not so much the hours in the office—it’s that you’re always on call. So you’ll end up having to answer email and do things up until you go to bed at 12 or 1 in the morning. So even when you’re home, you’re still working. That’s particularly true in foreign policy. The other day, when we launched airstrikes in Syria, we obviously knew that was going to happen, but that happens overnight, so you basically end up being up all night. You don’t get to control the timing of when things happen in foreign policy like you do in other areas. If something happens in North Korea, or the Middle East or Ukraine, you have to respond to it no matter what time of day it is. So it ends up making you essentially on call 24 hours a day.
What’s the most important speech you’ve worked on so far? I’m wondering where the UN speech ranks.
The UN speech is definitely one of the most important, because it’s intended to set the tone for the next year or so going forward, here in the United States but also globally. It’s the roadmap for we’re doing, where we’re trying to go, what we expect of others. There have been a handful of speeches like that. The Cairo speech in 2009, in some ways the Nobel speech he gave, which in some ways was a window into his view of the world that endures well. They break through in a way because they’re bigger than the precise moment we’re in. They’re about laying down markers for what’s going to define the U.S. role in the world for a period of time to come.
Ben Rhodes, left with President Obama and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough on Air Force OnePhoto: Pete Souza—The White House/Getty Images
Did you revisit the Cairo and Nobel speeches in writing this one? How’d they inform it?
I actually find the two things I always try to do before working on a big speech are to go back and read relevant speeches by President Obama and by other presidents. It’s interesting to see how other presidents deal with similar moments in time. How did other Presidents speak at the UN at times of significant international turmoil or the beginning of a military action? For President Obama, I often try to go back and look at the foundational speeches. So, what did we say at the UN in previous years? What’s in Cairo speech, what’s in the Nobel speech, even going back to the campaign. And you try to find a thread you can pull forward and update. Even sometimes there’s specific language that you seek to use again to make sure there’s a thread of consistency to the message.
Are there speeches by other presidents you referenced specifically for his latest UN address?
I looked at the 1961 speech to the General Assembly by John F. Kennedy, and I actually ended up putting a quote from that speech in this one. There, too, the theme was essentially a world at a crossroads and having to make a choice between different paths. And so that ended up impacting how we framed this speech. We looked at others, too, and it’s interesting to see how different presidents make use of that particular world stage.
Looking past the current military campaign, how hopeful are you about a lasting peace, in whatever way you want to define that, presiding in the Middle East in the mid- to long-term? Some people are seeing nothing less than a civilizational collapse that’s not fixable in our lifetimes.
The reason I have to optimistic is that it’s the one thing everybody in the region seems to agree on–that this is such a shocking organization that it’s stirred people out of complacency and opened the doors to alliances that weren’t previously possible. We had the Iraqi prime minister in a meeting with the five Arab nations in our coalition, who have Sunni-led governments. That would not have been thinkable even six months ago. If everybody maintains the current sense of urgency, you can see a pathway for this group to be steadily eroded, but also something better taking its place in terms of a new approach to regional stability. And the other thing I’d say is we can fall into a trap of making these groups and threats out to be more resilient than they really are. With Al Qaeda, we’ve shown that if we just keep the pressure on and have a consensus against an organization, the organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan for intents and purposes is at best a shadow of its former self. The challenge is now doing that in the heart of the Middle East with this group and other extremist satellite. But part of the reason the President gave the speech that he gave is to make clear this can’t just be us launching a bunch of airstrikes. This has to be a much broader effort.
Most of our readers would agree with the assessment behind the rebalance to Asia, that economically the center of gravity in the world is shifting there. It also seems unavoidable with ISIS, and Israel, and Ukraine, and Ebola, that your focus is directed elsewhere right now. How do you deal with that?
You have to be very disciplined to make sure that even as you’re working the urgent issues, you’re not neglecting what I’d say are the opportunity pieces of your agenda. And the rebalance to Asia is certainly part of that. So for instance, when I went up to the UN with the President, even as we had to work on the speech and all the elements of the coalition building, I carved out two hours for a meeting with the presidential advisor from Burma to talk about the President’s upcoming trip there. It would have been easier to just scrap something like that and focus on ISIL. But you have to be disciplined and remember that you have to focus on the opportunities in the world and not just the threats. The fact is in the long run those may end up making a bigger difference, because there you can make progress and you can build new ways of doing things. The key to it is looking at your schedule at the beginning of the week, and saying to yourself, As easy as it would be to only do the Middle East this week, I have to set aside some time for Africa, for Asia, for Latin America—which we generally define as the opportunity regions—and be sure we’re hitting our marks on them.
You’re part of the first brother team to make this list. What was your dynamic with [older brother David, president of CBS News] growing up? Did you argue politics over the dinner table?
We always got along very well. We definitely had different political perspectives. But in my family we were encouraged to argue about everything over the dinner table. And I think since then, we’ve never been competitive, in part because we’re in different fields. He’s in media, I’m in politics and foreign policy and that makes it easier for us to root for each other without competing in the same territory.
Does knowing him make you more or less cynical about media?
Seeing his perspective about what people are interested in over the years definitely helped me understand that the media is in a high pressure business of their own and they have to find ways in a crowded information environment to report the news in a way that gets peoples attention. It gives me an understanding of the dynamic on the other end of the phone when I’m talking to a reporter, which I have to do a fair amount of.
This story is from the October 27, 2014 issue of Fortune. | http://web.archive.org/web/20141011151523id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/10/09/ben-rhodes-deputy-national-security-adviser/ | high | http://fortune.com/2014/10/09/ben-rhodes-deputy-national-security-adviser/ | 104.869565 | 1.391304 | 0.695652 | abstractive | low | Q&A: Talking world peace with Ben Rhodes | As Deputy National Security Adviser, he helps guide the president's words and thinking on foreign policy at a precarious time. |
20141022181743 | FORTUNE — In August 2013, transgender television personality B. Scott filed a suit against Black Entertainment Television and its parent company Viacom Inc., claiming that the network had discriminated against him based on his gender identity and sexual orientation.
The lawsuit stemmed from Scott’s appearance as a style correspondent at the 2013 BET awards preshow. After his first segment of the night, in which he appeared with heavy makeup and heels, the network told him to tone down his look and change into masculine clothing that was “different from the androgynous style he’s used to … and comfortable with,” according to the complaint.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge decided the case Wednesday, and it came down to the First Amendment; not Scott’s freedom to speech and expression, but Viacom’s VIA . The court found that BET’s decision as to how Scott would appear on camera was part of the network’s creative process of developing and broadcasting the show, which is protected by the First Amendment.
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The case is by no means the first in which a media company has used the First Amendment as a defense against lawsuits alleging discrimination. The order on Thursday cites several other instances.
There was the racial discrimination case against ABC for its failure to feature non-white contestants on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. A federal district court in Tennessee dismissed the matter after finding that “casting decisions are a necessary component of any entertainment show’s creative content.” The court said that “the plaintiffs seek to drive an artificial wedge between casting decisions and the end product, which itself is indisputably protected as speech by the First Amendment.”
And there was the lawsuit filed against Warner Bros. by a former writers’ assistant for the television show Friends who asserted that the use of sexually coarse and vulgar language and conduct by the show’s writers constituted sexual harassment. The Supreme Court of California in that case held that “the First Amendment protects creativity.”
The case that held greatest precedent is a matter in which a group of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Irish Americans sought to participate in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. The U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately heard the case, ruled that it would be a violation of the First Amendment for Massachusetts to require private citizens “who organize a parade to include among the marchers a group imparting a message the organizers do not wish to convey.”
The defendants in these cases argued that they didn’t care what their employees or participants are in reality — gay, straight, male, female — but rather how they appear. “They say, ‘We are entitled to create a program that looks the way we want it to look,’” says Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law. And the courts have agreed with them.
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Reporting the news and creating a television show both qualify as exercises of free speech, according to Thursday’s ruling in the Scott case. Outside those realms, however, the First Amendment defense against discrimination claims doesn’t work as well. Abercrombie & Fitch anf , for instance, lost a bias suit filed by a Muslim employee that it fired because she refused to remove her head scarf. Abercrombie had argued that any deviation from its dress code threatened the company’s success and that the lawsuit violated its First Amendment right to commercial free speech. A federal judge in California disagreed.
“The First Amendment line is really drawn at news and entertainment,” Volokh says. The Supreme Court has found that “people who make visual imagery are allowed to control what’s in it.” | http://web.archive.org/web/20141022181743id_/http://fortune.com/2014/04/18/to-kill-bias-suits-companies-lean-on-the-first-amendment/ | medium | http://fortune.com/2014/04/18/to-kill-bias-suits-companies-lean-on-the-first-amendment/ | 18.230769 | 2.102564 | 0.820513 | mixed | medium | To kill bias suits, companies lean on the First Amendment | BET's recent win in a discrimination lawsuit filed by transgender TV personality B. Scott is the latest instance in which a media company has beat a bias suit by flaunting its right to free speech and expression. |
20141111183510 | Six Egyptians – possibly attendants of the Victorian photographer Francis Bedford and his companions – are arranged in a receding zigzag across the rough, uneven floor, dwarfed by walls, pillars and doorjambs in an austere, finely detailed 1862 image of the Ptolemaic Temple of Horus. Bedford must have insisted on between 10 and 12 seconds of complete stillness from the human figures in this majestic work, fully consonant with the 19th-century vogue for the timeless, immovable east – except for one deliberate anachronism. Between two of the pillars stands a white canvas hut. Here is Bedford’s portable darkroom, scene of minute struggles with the collodion process for making glass negatives. Thus an art form barely 20 years old breaks the repose of Ozymandias.
The photograph is one of around 190 that Bedford took when he accompanied the 20-year-old Prince of Wales, Albert Edward (“Bertie”), on a four-month tour of the Middle East in 1862, and which entered the Royal Collection after his return. They are currently on display at the Queen’s Gallery in London, in a handsome exhibition that does not, however, fully explore all the possibilities of its subject.
The Prince of Wales, as we are not told in the Queen’s Gallery, was under a cloud. The previous summer he had been initiated into the pleasures of the flesh by an Irish girl named Nellie, and it was from such beginnings that his scandalised father, Prince Albert, hit on the idea of an improving tour of the Ottoman dominions, focusing on the Holy Lands. But Albert had since died, his decline accelerated by his son’s “fall”, and this made Bertie doubly odious to the grief-stricken Queen, who insisted that the trip go ahead while she plotted to marry him off. The prince, enjoying a gentle degree at Cambridge, and evincing no wanderlust, was powerless to resist.
Setting off from Venice in February 1862, the smallish royal party (the principals consisted of Bertie, his governor, General Robert Bruce, and a handful of other, carefully selected, male companions) steamed down the Dalmatian coast and crossed the Mediterranean to Alexandria. From Egypt they went on to explore Palestine and Syria, living in tents and escorted by Ottoman cavalrymen, before sailing back to Europe via Constantinople. The trip took four and a half months, with Bedford as official photographer. His task was to immortalise scenes that were, as the Photographic News put it, “fraught with historic and sacred associations”.
Bedford was an experienced architectural and topographical photographer, with royal commissions already behind him, and he fulfilled his brief brilliantly. His harmonious, granular studies of the Egyptian temples and the Roman ruins at Baalbek, in Lebanon, accentuate the neglected, yet romantic, character of these places, with locals used for scale or foreground interest but offering no serious counterweight to the ruins among which they graze their goats or (in the case of Coptic Christians, appropriating part of a Pharoanic complex) come to pray.
The biblical sites as depicted by Bedford seem virtually unchanged since the Saviour’s time. His Sea of Galilee, for instance, shimmers softly in a landscape that is empty but for the ruins of Tiberias – where the royal party took Easter communion. And there is little in his image of Jerusalem from Mount of Olives to suggest that these are not the very trees among which Jesus wept the night before his crucifixion.
It would have been helpful, in the sumptuously illustrated catalogue by Sophie Gordon, to have learned more about the religious importance of these places, which is so vividly evoked in contemporary pilgrims’ accounts. Among these accounts are the entertaining letters of the liberal churchman Arthur Stanley, who was on the tour as Bertie’s spiritual chaperone.
Artists and even photographers had trodden the same paths before (the Englishman Francis Frith as recently as 1860), but each year, as the photo-historian Badr El Hage notes in his useful catalogue essay, brought more pilgrims, scholars and diplomats to a region that had seen few westerners since the Crusades. Passenger steamships (P&O began plying the eastern Mediterranean in 1835), guidebooks and the first Thomas Cook package tour gave notice of a harder, more permanent intrusion, with western museums filling up with Mediterranean fragments, the great powers using their concern for the Holy Places and religious minorities as a pretext for elbowing into Ottoman affairs, and, already, those mellow voids inspiring thoughts of a Jewish state.
The Tsar’s brother had made his tearful pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre three years before, the Russian foreign ministry minuting that “Jerusalem is the centre of the world and our mission must be there”. The British and French felt the same.
Of the historical aspects of the itinerary, the Prince of Wales was indefatigably ignorant – as we know from Arthur Stanley, who felt affection for his boyish, good-humoured charge, but there was no denying that the young man was less moved by the scene of Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel than the prospect of shooting quail on the same slopes, and if he wasn’t complaining about all the “tumbledown” temples, he spent his time testing his travel companions on the plot of a recent potboiler.
Bertie was a keen souvenir hunter, acquiring, among other things, a mummy whose excavation he had witnessed, a papyrus funerary text and a beautiful scarab made of glazed, blue-green soapstone, which he had mounted on tiny gold python heads, as a brooch. (Except for the mummy, which has disappeared, these objects have been included in the exhibition.)
For the more thoughtful members of the party, there were considerable advantages to be gained from travelling with the heir to a quarter of the globe, not least permissions to visit the sepulchre of the Patriarchs at Hebron, hitherto inaccessible to Christians, and Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, whose dilapidated dignity (it has since been lavishly restored) Bedford was one of the earliest photographers to record. “The prince entered the mosque,” crowed the Illustrated London News, “standing where no infidel has stood since the Crusades.” In Jerusalem, Bertie was tattooed with the Crusaders’ Jerusalem Cross on his forearm.
Along with the great Umayyad Mosque at Damascus, also somewhat shabby through Bedford’s lens, the Dome of the Rock is one of the few subjects that look better now than a century and a half ago. The pyramids have been all but consumed by Cairo’s sprawl, and the then-sleepy Lebanese port of Tripoli, also photographed by Bedford, by Sunni-Shia conflict.
Religious bloodshed was indeed a theme of the later stages of the tour, from visits to Crusader castles to the aftermath of a rankling three-way enmity between Christians, Sunnis and Druze. In 1860, Druze bands had laid waste to hundreds of Christian settlements in Lebanon – including the village of Hasbiya, which Bedford photographed. Most affecting, however, are his images of Christian Damascus, annihilated in the same year, with the buildings reduced to carcasses and not a soul in sight. Also in Damascus, Bedford made a rare portrait of an exiled Algerian nationalist leader who had given Christians sanctuary in his home.
Nowadays it is tempting to see communal conflict as endemic in the Levant and Mesopotamia, but the pogroms, whose effects the royal party witnessed had been notably rare until the 1840s. Bertie waxed indignant at Ottoman misrule, but Europe’s sponsorship of local clients (for years Britain had supported the Druze, while the French backed the Maronites) had helped upset the old religious balances in the first place, foreshowing the cataclysmic communal violence of the final decades of the Ottoman empire.
Even the cheapness of English cloth had sharpened resentments between the various groups, enriching the Christian agents of the Manchester houses and impoverishing Muslim weavers – unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution and globalisation.
In June 1862, the tourists went their separate ways – Stanley nursing a mix of pilgrim’s joy and filial sadness, for his mother had died in his absence, and Bruce a violent fever that would quickly kill him. Bedford got to work printing and exhibiting; his technique was commended by the cognoscenti and his images snapped up by the pious. As Gordon’s biographical essay tells us, he went on to become a much-respected (and wealthy) photographer, and left “an extraordinary photographic legacy, much of which remains to be discovered”.
Queen Victoria found Bertie “much improved” by his travels, and “ready to do everything as I wish”. Stanley was less sanguine, writing of “the difficulty of producing any impression on a mind with no previous knowledge or interest to be awakened”. For all that, seven years later the prince would be drawn back to the Holy Land, this time in the company of his wife, the former Princess Alexandra of Denmark – and the recipient, as it turned out, of that beautiful, blue-green, python-mounted scarab.
• Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1A, until 22 February | http://web.archive.org/web/20141111183510id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/08/francis-bedford-royal-tour-middle-east-first-official-photographer | high | http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/08/francis-bedford-royal-tour-middle-east-first-official-photographer | 39.977273 | 1.363636 | 0.727273 | abstractive | low | Francis Bedford’s astonishing photographs of the 1862 royal tour | When the Prince of Wales was sent away on a trip to the Middle East to prevent him behaving badly, Francis Bedford went with him – the pictures he took captured famous sites unchanged for thousands of years. By Christopher de Bellaigue |
20150214073910 | Discussions about startups often focus on founders or investors, but most people in the startup game are regular employees. So how do you find a startup job?
“I want to work for a startup.” It’s a common statement, but a “startup” can be very different things. The primary dimension on which startups differ is stage: Two guys in a garage is definitely a startup. So is a 30-person company growing with a second round of financing, and so is a 250-person company preparing for an IPO.
The first decision, and the most critical decision, of what type of startup to join is based on the current stage of the company. This selection is the most personal and subjective one, as it’s based on a person’s motivations for why they want to be a part of a startup in the first place (as opposed to just getting a job at xyz company) — desire to make an impact, better working in smaller teams, excitement to be involved with cutting-edge technology, aspirations of becoming a founder and/or a startup CEO, working with other motivated people, long-term financial upside, etc. But this juncture is also where I see people make a critical mistake.
The biggest mistake I see is people going to Series A or B funded startups because they perceive it as “safe” with VC backing, but the only thing *temporarily* derisked is financing. And that derisking is only for 12+/-6 months. Yet the company hasn’t figured out its product-market fit, hasn’t figured out its customer proposition, doesn’t have revenue… it doesn’t have traction.
As an employee joining, you bear (nearly) all the risk as the founders but an order of magnitude less in compensation, recognition, and influence.
I believe that there are three opportune times to join a startup:
As early as you can stomach. For some, the proverbial two-guys-in-a-garage-stage is the ultimate allure… but they’re not ready just yet to be one of those couple founders. Push yourself hard to ask why am I not a founder now? If the reason is the need for an initial idea, a specific skillset, time to develop a potential customer network, etc., then the right answer is to find a role and company which fits that description so that after a few short years you’re ready… usually that’s not a seed-stage startup. If the reason is that you haven’t done it before but just want to learn the playbook, then by all means joining an extremely embryonic team is the right next step. Of course many people have current income requirements that the earliest-stage team can’t satisfy; hence, reality does dictate that this rule is amended from “as early as possible” to as “early as you can stomach.”
But if you’re stomach feels queasy reading any of the above, it really makes sense to jump ahead to a much later stage startup where the…
Train has left the station. What I mean is that the startup is already on track, generating real revenue, rapidly growing (and hiring), and is clearly destined to be some type of success. It’s unclear if it’s going to be either a “win” or a “monster win,” but a reasonable outcome is reasonably assured. In other words, the train has left the station heading towards a destination and will get there if you’re on board or not. Of course you’re going to make an impact (that’s one reason why you’re joining a startup after all), but the company is already moving forward with its own inertia.
If you aren’t ready to be a founder soon, this point is the best place to join a startup. Yes, it’s larger and doesn’t have the same feel as “those early days,” but the benefits of joining this profile company are numerous:
Even though it is a smart strategy to join later in the game, realize that you miss out on acquiring some startup founder skills (searching for a repeatable model, the emotional roller coaster, etc.). But if a founding role isn’t your plan, there are some people who are just better suited to the scaling-stage of a startup — and that’s a great thing. These are people who are probably never going to be founders, but make great VPs of engineering and marketing, etc for late-stage companies… and they do it successfully again and again.
Learn and work with people or in a special situation. Going extremely early or very late is the right approach 90% of the time. The exception to the rule is just that — when there is an exceptional opportunity at the in-between. There are situations where you have opportunity to work with someone renowned in industry. Or you have a special skillset that would apply to your role.
The last reason to join a mid-stage startup, and the most compelling one, is that given your prior experience you have a unique perspective to recognize that the company has been or will be de-risked in some way that hasn’t fully been realized yet. It’s easy to craft a story to cite one of the above cases is present, but the true test is convincing yourself that it’s true.
Regardless of what stage startup you join, the choice should be just that –something which you chose, a deliberate selection based on criteria that you’re optimizing around and the potential of upside, not a perception about safety. You should be joining a startup because of your excitement about the role or situation, the company itself and the opportunities ahead with the chance to change the world, not as a hedging strategy.
David Beisel is a venture capitalist focused on the digital media space. He currently serves as a co-founding partner at NextView Ventures, and previously worked with both Venrock and Masthead Venture Partners. This post originally appeared on his blog, where it’s the first of a 4-part series. | http://web.archive.org/web/20150214073910id_/http://fortune.com:80/2011/02/07/how-to-find-the-perfect-startup-job/ | medium | http://fortune.com/2011/02/07/how-to-find-the-perfect-startup-job/ | 17.411765 | 28.397059 | 0.985294 | extractive | high | How to find the perfect startup job | Discussions about startups often focus on founders or investors, but most people in the startup game are regular employees. So how do you find a startup job? By David Beisel, contributor “I want to work for a startup.” It’s a common statement, but a “startup” can be very different things. The primary dimension on which… |
20150222032215 | NEW YORK — When a woman calls Fidelity about her investments there, her questions are likely to be handled a bit differently from those asked by a man.
Customer service representatives are more likely to chitchat to establish rapport. And they may frame the conversation around her longer-term goals or the important people in her life — perhaps a child with a college savings account, or an elderly parent. The representative may ask more open-ended questions.
Women will ultimately receive the same guidance that would be offered to similarly situated men — but when appropriate, the representative’s conversational style may differ. Fidelity said its goal was not to patronize women or to wrap its mutual funds and services in frilly pink bows. Instead, it says it wants to connect with different people — including women — about savings and investing in a way that will resonate, based on findings from its internal research and analysis.
“With men, many want a Reader’s Digest conversation — they want what they came for,” said Jeanne Thompson, a vice president at Fidelity who was involved in the research. “However, reps realize that women appreciate hearing what it means for them and want a deeper explanation.”
Fidelity, which provides employer-based retirement accounts for more than 13 million workers, and other retirement plan providers have begun tailoring their messages for specific employees — including women, but also Hispanics, members of specific generations or income groups, or those, say, who may be borrowing significant sums from their 401(k) plans. Other providers are testing ways to nudge workers to save more with just one click.
“What we are seeing is a big uptick in the number of organizations that are thinking more broadly about financial wellness and understanding it’s not a one-size-fits-all plan that will get results,” said Betsy Dill, a partner at Mercer, a consulting firm. “They have to think about how to segment and micro-target their work force at different points along the way.”
There are a lot of headlines about how women aren’t as comfortable with money as their male counterparts, but the research is mixed. The financial services industry conducts plenty of self-serving surveys reinforcing stereotypes, but they’re trying to capture women’s business: More women are their household’s primary breadwinner, and they control trillions of dollars.
And among women with access to retirement plans? They are doing just fine when compared with their male counterparts, raising questions about whether any special handling is warranted. In fact, some research has found that certain differences in behavior are hinged less to gender and more to socioeconomic status.
So why the special treatment at Fidelity?
“A lot of this is in reaction to research around the sentiment and confidence of women,” Thompson of Fidelity added. “But a lot of this is because many women are the heads of households and they are the breadwinners.” | http://web.archive.org/web/20150222032215id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2015/02/21/financial-advice-customized-sex-ethnicity-demographics/SieQfoTxDX5S8HDlcJuAiM/story.html | low | http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/02/21/financial-advice-customized-sex-ethnicity-demographics/SieQfoTxDX5S8HDlcJuAiM/story.html | 7.1125 | 44.05 | 1 | extractive | high | Financial advice customized by sex, ethnicity or demographics | Fidelity, which provides employer-based retirement accounts for more than 13 million workers, along with other retirement plan providers, have begun tailoring their messages for specific employees — including women, but also Hispanics, members of specific generations or income groups, or those, say, who may be borrowing significant sums from their 401(k) plans. Other providers are testing ways to nudge workers to save more with just one click. |
20150510054554 | WASHINGTON, Jan. 26— A large national gathering of Christian evangelicals, including hundreds of television and radio broadcasters, was urged today to bolster the campaign by evangelical political activists to combat secular humanism, which was described as ''the established religion of America.''
The challenge was delivered by the Rev. D. James Kennedy, the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and a leading figure in the recent drive by conservative church groups to help elect candidates who espoused views that agreed with fundamentalist moral principles.
Mr. Kennedy also serves on the board of the Round Table, an umbrella group for religiously conservative activists. He told 2,000 delegates at a joint meeting of National Religious Broadcasters and the National Association of Evangelicals that evangelicals should increase their level of political involvement because ''secular humanists have declared war on Christianity in this country and they are progressing very rapidly.''
Declaring that the public had been largely ''brainwashed'' into believing that the Constitution placed restrictions on churchconnected political activity, Mr. Kennedy asked: ''What does it really say about what the church can do and can't do? Absolutely nothing.''
Turning to the subject of secular humanism, a term often used to define a viewpoint that disregards religion as a factor in solving human problems, Mr. Kennedy linked its alleged rise to growing atheism and moral laxity on issues such as abortion, homosexuality and pornography.
As the political wave among conservative Christians has grown, secular humanism has been blamed for a variety of social and moral ills and represents the main focus of the conservative attack.
The activism by Christian political groups was considered a significant factor in the election of many conservative candidates, including President Reagan, who seemed to reflect fundamentalist opposition to abortion, civil rights for homosexuals and the Equal Rights Amendment, as well as their backing of prayer in the public schools.
But appeals for evangelical support for this activist movement have met mixed reactions among conservative church people. The tensions among the various segments of conservative Christianity have been apparent in the early stages of the joint four-day meeting at the Sheraton Washington Hotel. Divergence Among Evangelicals
The frictions are mirrored in the two organizations, which represent different constituencies and, to a large degree, distinct points of view on the question.
The National Association of Evangelicals, the older group, founded in 1941, is composed of 36,000 member congregations from a wide variety of evangelical denominations.
It reflects many of the moderate theological and moral views that tend to include distrust of single-issue politics, and it often criticizes the tendency of the new Christian right to identify certain political positions as being the only ones authenticated by the Bible. Many in this group also complain of the attempt to form what they see as a quasi political Christian party.
Marlin Van Elderen, a leading evangelical, underscored this criticism in an article in United Evangelical Action, the official publication of the N.A.E.
Among the dangers of the activism. Mr. Van Elderen said, is ''enshrining one's own particular political and ethical judgments as the biblical viewpoint.
''No person or organization - not the World Council of Churches nor the National Association of Evangelicals, not Jerry Falwell nor Pope John Paul II -speaks on behalf of biblical Christianity in matters social and political,'' he wrote. Criticism of Braodcasters
The disagreements are accompanied by attacks on evangelical broadcasters. The National Religious Broadcasters, begun under the auspices of the N.A.E. in 1943 as a special interest group, has in many ways overshadowed its parent. This rivalry is intensified by the widespread suspicion that media evangelists are causing neglect of local churches by siphoning away members and money.
Attacks on evangelical broadcasters came from two sources today. George Sweeting, president of the Moody Bible Institute, warned that the ''parachurch movement,'' which includes a broad scope of evangelical efforts beyond the local church, among them television and radio ministries, threatens to become the ''tail that wags the dog.'' He appealed for a ''recovery of the centrality of the local church.''
Mr. Sweeting also criticized television evangelism for running the risks of ''extravagant spending and an elegant lifestyle,'' resorting to ''unwise methods of fund-raising ... substituting entertainment for the word of God'' and ''adding our own culture to the Gospel.'' | http://web.archive.org/web/20150510054554id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1981/01/27/us/evangelicals-debate-their-role-in-battling-secularism.html | low | http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/27/us/evangelicals-debate-their-role-in-battling-secularism.html | 5.03012 | 43.548193 | 0.981928 | extractive | high | EVANGELICALS DEBATE THEIR ROLE IN BATTLING SECULARISM | A large national gathering of Christian evangelicals, including hundreds of television and radio broadcasters, was urged today to bolster the campaign by evangelical political activists to combat secular humanism, which was described as ''the established religion of America.'' The challenge was delivered by the Rev. D. James Kennedy, the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and a leading figure in the recent drive by conservative church groups to help elect candidates who espoused views that agreed with fundamentalist moral principles. Mr. Kennedy also serves on the board of the Round Table, an umbrella group for religiously conservative activists. He told 2,000 delegates at a joint meeting of National Religious Broadcasters and the National Association of Evangelicals that evangelicals should increase their level of political involvement because ''secular humanists have declared war on Christianity in this country and they are progressing very rapidly.'' |
20150516004816 | If you consider flying one of life’s miseries, you might be flying the wrong airline.
A new survey suggests that air travel is slowly improving, led by a small group of airlines.
Passengers who fly JetBlue Airways and Southwest Airlines had the highest satisfaction rating — 800 and 781, respectively, out of a possible score of 1000, according to J.D. Power’s latest North America Airline Satisfaction study.
Overall passenger satisfaction with major airlines increased to 717 out of a possible score of 1000 in 2015, up from 712 a year ago, according to J.D. Power’s study.
Here are some of the major findings:
The study gauged passenger satisfaction among both business and leisure passengers in several key areas, including costs, fees, in-flight services, onboard experience and reservations. It was conducted between April 2014 and March 2015. J.D. Power distinguishes between “traditional” and “low-cost” carriers in its ranking, but Fortune combined them for this report.
The findings reflect another recent study on airline service, which also suggested airline service was trending higher.
To put these scores into a little perspective, the top-ranked airline would receive an equivalent letter grade of “B-.” The highest-scoring legacy carrier, Delta Air Lines, would get a “C-.” The lowest-ranked carriers receive a grade of “D,” according to its customers.
Airlines still rank below banks and mortgage lenders, two other industries covered by J.D. Power. “Airline customer service experience is low,” says Rick Garlick, global travel and hospitality practice lead at J.D. Power. “But it’s getting better.”
What the findings mean for customers
J.D. Power says the findings show that customer service matters, perhaps now more than ever. In its view, the airline industry is evolving from a commoditized transportation business into a business focused on hospitality and services.
“The carriers most focused on providing a pleasant experience are being rewarded with higher customer satisfaction and loyalty,” says Garlick.
He says the study suggests that when passengers make the decision to fly an airline based on the services or experience the airline provides, rather than price, convenient routes and scheduling, satisfaction is higher and passengers are more likely to return to the airline brand and to recommend it to others.
But there’s another reason for the uptick in scores, and they have nothing to do with better service.
“People have adapted to the airline fees that use to upset them,” adds Garlick. “So it might be more accurate to say people are less dissatisfied.”
A closer look at the J.D. Power numbers shows how various airlines succeeded — and failed.
American and Delta surged ahead by investing in their customer service infrastructure and training, with an emphasis on high-revenue business travelers. Alaska’s downward swing can be explained by some of its growing pains, as it expands to new cities where passengers are less familiar with the brand. And the failure of airlines such as United and Frontier? Garlick says those airlines have focused on low fares and high fees, to the detriment of customer service.
“Everyone wants low-cost travel,” he adds. “But there’s a price to be paid for it. The low-ranked carriers are running their companies so frugally that not even their core customers are satisfied. They’re willing to pay for a better experience.”
A long way to go
Critics agree that airline service still has a way to go before it can be considered good. “As the airlines have been complaining that customers are treating their seats like commodities, the airlines themselves are treating their passengers — except frequent flier elites and first class — like self-loading cargo,” says Charlie Leocha, president of Travelers United, an advocacy organization for air travelers. “Onboard services have been ratcheted back, extra and exorbitant fees are being loaded on passengers, and legroom and seat sizes continue to shrink.”
Leocha says investing in customer service doesn’t have to be expensive. A simple smile from flight attendants or gate agents, waiving a standby fee to get on an earlier flight with empty seats, allowing families to sit together without paying more, all make the travel experience far more pleasant.
“Unfortunately,” he adds, “these amenities still seem to be in short supply.” | http://web.archive.org/web/20150516004816id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/05/13/airlines-jd-power-survey/ | medium | http://fortune.com/2015/05/13/airlines-jd-power-survey/ | 35.416667 | 3.625 | 0.875 | mixed | medium | The best airlines for customer service are…. | J.D. Power's latest North America Airline Satisfaction study finds customer service is improving -- if you fly a small group of airlines. |
20150524084747 | BADEN— BADEN, West Germany, Sept. 29 - A Roy al Canadian Mountie in abright red tunic converses in German, and a C anadian Indian dressed in white deerskin and wearing a headdress of eagle feathers asks, ''Wie gehts?'', which means ''How are you?''
There are beautiful Korean dresses called ''Han Boks'' on display and signs that say ''Sverige,'' which means ''Sweden.'' There are Japanese lanterns, and, from the Italians, a re-creation of an entire range of the Alps, 15 feet high with ski trails down its slopes.
The scene is the Alte Bahnhof, the old train station that has been divided into five sections and converted to an exhibition hall where cities from Canada, Italy, Sweden, Japan and South Korea are displaying the pleasures and advantages of holding a Winter or Summer Olympic Games in their locale.
In another part of town, at Kurhaus, the main hall, the 11th Olympic Congress is convened. The International Olympic Committee is meeting along with representatives from the 147 nations that compete in the Games and delegates from 26 international sporting federations. Today, each of the five cities delivered its official presentation to the 84th session of the I.O.C., whose 81 members will vote tomorrow to determine the sites for the 1988 Games.
The Summer Games candidates are Nagoya of Central Japan and Seoul of South Korea. The Winter Games candidates are Calgary of the Canadian province of Alberta; Cortina d'Ampezzo, a village in Northern Italy, and Falun, in Sweden.
At times, Baden-Baden resembles the host city of an American political convention. There are campaign buttons, posters, free fountain pens on which slogans are written, caucuses and communication by walkie-talkie as the representatives of the aspiring five cities stalk and buttonhole anyone they believe might have the ear of an I.O.C. delegate.
Some of the lobbyists for the candidate cities have been on the job for more than 20 years. They are well versed in the I.O.C. questionnaire that sets guidelines on such issues as airports, financial stability and technological capability for transmitting radio and television signals. Each city must also guarantee that there will be proper security to control political demonstrations at Olympic venues. To show good faith, a Summer Games candidate must post a bond of 500,000 Swiss francs, about $250,000; Winter Games candidates mu st post half that amount. Years of Preparation
Each city answered the questionnaire and submitted it to the I.O.C. at least six months before the voting. But any city seriously considering a bid must start preparing for its formal presentation two to three years in advance, after first sounding out its population's desire to have the Games. This, too, is an I.O.C. requirement and is usually done by public poll, though Calgary's indication of such interest was the receiving of more than 80,000 donations at $5 apiece from a city population of 600,000.
Representatives from the five cities talk constantly of their financial solvency, the excellence of facilities and the comforts that will be available for I.O.C. delegates and other officials. The five groups -Calgary has more than 40 people here - conduct strategy meetings that last past midnight. Protesters From Japan
Each candidate city must also strive to diminish the apparent disadvantages of its site. Nagoya's bid has been countered somewhat by a handful of Japanese who traveled here to picket and display signs saying ''No Olympics for Nagoya.'' They are protesting possible environmental damage at Olympic venues and disturbances of local burial grounds.
Seoul's chief concern is the possibility that the I.O.C. may face political problems in a city where 17 Communist nations boycotted the 1978 world shooting championships, and where in 1979 the Czechoslovak, Bulgarian and the world champion Soviet teams boycotted the women's championships in basketball.
Calgary may have to overcome negative attitudes created in the I.O.C. when Canada joined the United States-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow. Cortina, which was host to the 1956 Winter Olympics, is a small town with limited access roads that might remind the committee of transportation problems in 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. And, although Falun has the most compact and efficient arrangement of competitive sites, the Swedish city has no mountain range suitable for Alpine skiing; the closest one is more than 200 miles away. Important 30 Minutes
Today, the presentations were made in alphabetical order: Calgary, Cortina D'Ampezzo, Falun, Nagoya and Seoul. Each city had 30 minutes to present its case - generally done with brief film or slide showings and speeches - followed by unlimited questioning from the I.O.C. Yesterday, Jack Wilson, one of six delegate s representing Calgary at the presentation, said, ''Win or lose, we have no regrets - we've given it our best shot.'' This morning, after the presentation, he walked out of the hall looking both shaken an d satisfied. He looked back and, referring to the more than 1,000 co lor slides of Calgary that had been shown, he said, ''I can't ever watch that presentation without crying.''
Sigge Bergman, a Swede preparing to speak in behalf of Falun, paced a corridor, telling reporters, ''I cannot talk to you now; I must save my voice for the presentation.'' When he emerged from the presentation, he said, ''I did my best; I can't do any more.''
The Italians gathered in the foyer, lamenting how their short film had broke in the midst of their presentation. By day's end, the years of effort and campaigning had come to an end. By tomorrow afternoon, two delegations will be preparing for the 1988 Games, and the other three will be preparing bids for the 1992 Olympics.
Illustrations: photo of Canadian exhibitors | http://web.archive.org/web/20150524084747id_/http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/30/sports/the-end-of-a-long-olympic-race.html | low | http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/30/sports/the-end-of-a-long-olympic-race.html | 6.413793 | 56.862069 | 0.988506 | extractive | high | THE END OF A LONG OLYMPIC RACE | BADEN, West Germany, Sept. 29 - A Roy al Canadian Mountie in abright red tunic converses in German, and a C anadian Indian dressed in white deerskin and wearing a headdress of eagle feathers asks, ''Wie gehts?'', which means ''How are you?'' There are beautiful Korean dresses called ''Han Boks'' on display and signs that say ''Sverige,'' which means ''Sweden.'' There are Japanese lanterns, and, from the Italians, a re-creation of an entire range of the Alps, 15 feet high with ski trails down its slopes. The scene is the Alte Bahnhof, the old train station that has been divided into five sections and converted to an exhibition hall where cities from Canada, Italy, Sweden, Japan and South Korea are displaying the pleasures and advantages of holding a Winter or Summer Olympic Games in their locale. |
20150524115742 | HOUSTON, March 27— After hours of concern over predicted weather conditions at the landing site, officials of the space agency decided today not to order the space shuttle Columbia back to earth a day early but to proceed with plans for a landing Monday as scheduled.
The seven-day test flight of the re-usable winged spaceship is now set to end at 2:27 P.M. Eastern standard time on a desert landing strip at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico.
By going the full duration, the astronauts, Col. Jack R. Lousma of the Marine Corps and Col. C. Gordon Fullerton of the Air Force, will have circumnavigated the earth 115 times, logging 3.4 million miles since their launching last Monday. Improved Weather Forecast
The decision to adhere to the original flight plan was announced early this afternoon on the basis of new weather reports indicating that the clouds and gusty winds at White Sands should move out of the area by Monday. The forecast is for high-altitude clouds, light breezy winds and only occasional gusts.
At a news conference this afternoon, Harold M. Draughon, a flight director, said, ''At the present time, we have every intention of having the end of the mission Monday.''
Earlier, flight controllers said that a Sunday landing was a strong possibility. They feared that a low-pressure system, now over southern California, would intensify and, according to computer projections, move rapidly over the Southwest, carrying more clouds and winds to the landing site.
But the decision to land Monday was announced after the regular morning meeting of project managers by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center here said that they still had the option of extending the mission an extra day, until Tuesday, if the weather changed and created unfavorable landing conditions Monday. The spaceship's supplies of fuel, power and breathing gases are more than adequate for such an extension, the controllers said.
Project officials said that the failed communications links from the Columbia to earth were not a consideration when the possibility of an early return was raised.
Three links in the S-band communications system for transmitting computer data and voice messages became inoperable Thursday night. The source of the trouble remains a mystery, flight engineers said. But no further problems have cropped up and normal communications are being maintained through backup modes.
The astronauts were informed of the landing decision as they worked on scientific experiments and maneuvers testing how well the Columbia travels. With few exceptions, Mr. Draughon said, the astronauts have accomplished nearly all their mission objectives.
Despite the rash of mechanical glitches, he said, ''The mission really has been extremely successful.'' More Stability on Shuttle
As the sixth day of the mission got under way, both the spaceship and the astronauts appeared to be in more stable condition than at any time since it was sent up Monday.
There was only one new malfunction, involving a scientific instrument. A motor that drives a sensor in the solar ultraviolet monitor failed this morning as the astronauts began a period of sun observations. Scientists said they still expected to get useful data in one wavelength of the ultraviolet spectrum.
This instrument and another, to measure X-rays from solar flares, were operated through much of the day. The astronauts fired small steering rockets to reorient the spaceship so that its cargo bay, holding the instruments, was facing the sun. The Columbia had been traveling with its nose pointed to the sun, one of several positions for tests of the effects of extreme solar heating on the shuttle's systems.
Otherwise, the Columbia's condition remained much the same as it has been for several days. Besides the difficulties with the communications links, about 40 heat-protection tiles were missing from the shuttle's exterior, but not in especially critical areas. The toilet was still giving the astronauts trouble. The power generator that overheated in the launching, one of three redundant units, remained questionable, though the return-to-landing maneuvers could easily be accomplished without it.
Even one of the spaceship's earlier problems, an occasional leak in the nitrogen gas plumbing, has been corrected. Flight engineers detected the source of the slow leak and rerouted the gas flow to bypass it. Like many of the malfunctions, the leak had not been considered serious. Adjusting to Orbit
Colonel Lousma and Colonel Fullerton seemed to be adjusting better to life in orbit; their difficulties with fatigue and motion sickness were largely behind them.
''We really feel good,'' Colonel Lousma said once. ''We're really enjoying it.'' Today's wake-up call to the astronauts came at 6:30 A.M. while the Columbia was passing within range of the Yarragadee tracking station in Australia. They were on their 78th revolution of the earth.
Instead of loud music from Mission Control, in the usual spirit of wake-up calls, the astronauts were treated to brief messages from their wives and children.
Mary Lousma, 13 years old, asked, ''How'd you sleep last night, Dad? I sleep with my eyes closed.'' Gratia Lousma, the commander's wife, said, ''We don't want you to get too comfortable up there and decide to stay.'' Andrew Fullerton, 6, told his father to ''look out and see Texas, and I'll be waving at you.'' Unworldly Sensations
Colonel Fullerton described one of the unworldly sensations of waking up in orbit, saying: ''It was beautiful, sunny as the alarm went off, and we pulled up the window shade and looked out there. About halfway through the pass, the sun went down, and now it's black as night.''
At their altitude of more than 150 miles, the astronauts circle the earth once every 89 minutes, day and night, one sunrise and sunset after another.
But in other ways, the morning hours aboard the Columbia included some down-home touches. The astronauts shaved and made breakfast. They read the ''morning newspaper,'' which is what Colonel Lousma called the messages received overnight on their teleprinter in which Mission Control alerts them to revisions in the flight plan for the new day.
''I noticed that it gets longer and longer to read it these days,'' Colonel Fullerton remarked. Then, while Colonel Lousma re-aligned the Columbia's guidance systems and purged the electricity-generating fuel cells, usual morning chores, Colonel Fullerton went about the unenviable task of stowing trash and cleaning the waste collection system, the engineering name for the toilet.
The astronauts reported that they had been having some trouble with their plastic juice bottles. This morning, they said, a third bottle split, creating a nuisance. A Run on a Treadmill
Later, for the orbital equivalent of a brisk jog in the park, the two astronauts took turns running on a treadmill. All this was in preparation for a fairly busy day of spacecraft tests and scientific observations. On board, either on the deck below the cockpit or in the cargo bay, are about 21,000 pounds of scientific instruments, the largest load to be carried so far on a shuttle flight. The cargo bay is capable of holding 65,000 pounds.
In a telecast from the Columbia this morning, the astronauts again showed the case holding bees, flies and moths, the insect-motion experiment designed by Todd Nelson, an 18-year-old high school senior from Minnesota.
''Question for Todd,'' joked Colonel Fullerton. ''Where do we look for the honey? Like to have it for breakfast tomorrow.''
Illustrations: photo of Lee Briscoe at space center in Houston photo of Col. Jack R. Lousma, Col. C. Gordon Fullerton | http://web.archive.org/web/20150524115742id_/http://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/28/us/shuttle-may-end-trip-on-schedule.html | low | http://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/28/us/shuttle-may-end-trip-on-schedule.html | 7.728205 | 48.071795 | 0.984615 | extractive | high | SHUTTLE MAY END TRIP ON SCHEDULE | After hours of concern over predicted weather conditions at the landing site, officials of the space agency decided today not to order the space shuttle Columbia back to earth a day early but to proceed with plans for a landing Monday as scheduled. The seven-day test flight of the re-usable winged spaceship is now set to end at 2:27 P.M. Eastern standard time on a desert landing strip at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico. By going the full duration, the astronauts, Col. Jack R. Lousma of the Marine Corps and Col. C. Gordon Fullerton of the Air Force, will have circumnavigated the earth 115 times, logging 3.4 million miles since their launching last Monday. Improved Weather Forecast The decision to adhere to the original flight plan was announced early this afternoon on the basis of new weather reports indicating that the clouds and gusty winds at White Sands should move out of the area by Monday. The forecast is for high-altitude clouds, light breezy winds and only occasional gusts. |
20150710122300 | Credit ratings agencies play a significant role in whether or not a company — or a country — falls into fiscal catastrophe. For now, they’re all leaving Japan alone.
The three largest credit rating agencies have said that it’s too early to decide whether the recent earthquake will lead to downgrades for Japanese sovereign debt. Fitch rates Japan AA, S&P AA-, and Moody’s Aa2 and all three will remain unchanged for now.
The announcements may help keep a debt crisis at bay in Japan, as the country grapples with the mounting problems created by the last week’s series of natural disasters.
Workers are fighting to prevent a nuclear meltdown, the death toll is rising, and energy and food shortages are rippling across the nation. Moody’s notes that Prime Minister Kan was quoted in the Nikkei News as saying that the earthquake and tsunami created “the biggest crisis facing the country since World War II.”
“The shock from Friday’s earthquake does not make a fiscal crisis in Japan imminent,” Moody’s wrote in its recent report, a sentiment echoed by Fitch and S&P. “We recognize that the immediate focus of the government must be on emergency relief and reconstruction efforts, no matter what the fiscal cost.”
Before the earthquake, some hedge funds had wagered on a Japanese financial collapse, saying that the country would have to default on its massive debt (predicted to hit 228% of GDP this year) or destroy the value of the yen. In the past week, the debate about Japan’s fiscal health has returned, with Japan bears pointing to the fact that the government will be forced to borrow even more money to pay for rescue and reconstruction work.
Any downgrade of Japanese sovereign debt would certainly increase the likelihood of a debt crisis. While the agencies are adamant that their ratings are mere opinions, ratings often dictate whether large institutional investors can hold a bond (or must be forced to sell). Downgrades can also be trigger events in financial contracts, like credit default swaps, that force money to change hands between parties; and they have historically spooked markets. The decision to downgrade AIG AIG amid the financial crisis is a perfect example of a rating action having a real and disastrous impact.
In the case of Japan, the agencies all say that they have faith in the country’s ability to raise money as needed, and will take no action in the near term. They add that reconstruction will create future economic activity that could offset those borrowing costs.
Fitch warns that the rapid increase in the public debt burden will make it that much more important for Japan to come up with a credible plan to balance the budget and deal with its debt load. Fitch added that it would consider putting the country on negative watch if a “sustained rise in [Japanese Government Bond] yields… worsened the sovereign’s debt dynamics.” Because Japan has such a large debt, it can’t afford even a small rise in interest payments.
Moody’s agrees, saying that “a tipping point may be reached” if the market starts to sell JGBs and yields rise.
However, Japan has long borrowed money from its own people and institutions, which has kept interest rates low and markets stable. S&P believes that the country will continue to be able to issue additional debt “without a major increase in risk premiums, and does not expect major capital outflows.
“This supposition will, of course, be tested,” S&P wrote in its note. | http://web.archive.org/web/20150710122300id_/http://fortune.com/2011/03/16/staving-off-a-fiscal-crisis-in-japan/ | low | http://fortune.com/2011/03/16/staving-off-a-fiscal-crisis-in-japan/ | 10.5625 | 10.546875 | 0.921875 | extractive | medium | Staving off a fiscal crisis in Japan | Credit ratings agencies play a significant role in whether or not a company -- or a country -- falls into fiscal catastrophe. For now, they're all leaving Japan alone. The three largest credit rating agencies have said that it's too early to decide whether the recent earthquake will lead to downgrades for Japanese sovereign debt. Fitch… |
20150714133350 | However, analysts remain unconvinced that the share purchases will be enough to help the company fight off short-sellers. According to data by Jefferies, the outstanding shares held by short sellers on Noble Group increased from 50 million shares in April to around 400 million now.
"[Despite the third buyback,] we continue to see the possibility of a dead cat bounce in Noble's shares. Near-term oscillators continue to point to the bearish side, with the 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) still capped below 50 and the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD) line remaining under the signal and zero line," IG's market strategist Bernard Aw wrote in a note released Tuesday, adding that the 50-day moving average at S$0.828 will act as a "formidable barrier" for the stock.
A dead cat bounce is a short-lived rally, often caused by short-covering, in a stock suffering from a prolonged decline.
Most importantly, Aw said that weak underlying fundamentals remained the key obstacles for a recovery in the battered stock.
"The reality is that Noble is under pressure from several fronts, including a falling profit margin, a slowdown in commodity trading as well as issues relating to corporate governance and transparency. Piecemeal measures such as share buybacks are unlikely to relieve the downward pressure as long as the backdrop does not improve substantially," Aw said.
For CMC Markets' Nicholas Teo, the sustainability of the rebound depends on how aggressive Noble Group is with their share purchases.
"The rebound is relative on how much more the company wants to buy since they have in their authority to buy up to 673 million shares based on their filing. The shares they have bought thus far, with no pun intended, is only the tip of the iceberg," the Singapore-based analyst told CNBC by phone. Noble Group now holds more than 62 million shares by way of market acquisition.
"The aggressive buying has shown a floor in the share price and markets recognize that, regardless of whether the rebound is sustainable or not, so short sellers may not be so keen now. But the rebound above S$0.70 may also allow short sellers to have the opportunity to have another kick in the can," Teo added.
Shares of Noble Group have lost about 40 percent since February when anonymous group Iceberg Research released a series of critical reports on the Hong Kong trader's accounting practices. U.S. short seller Muddy Waters dealt another blow to the company in April after saying it had taken a short position on the stock.
Last week, S&P downgraded the company's rating outlook to negative from stable, citing that the higher risk nature of Noble's trading positions could result in more volatile earnings and profitability for the company. | http://web.archive.org/web/20150714133350id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/noble-stock-bounces-like-a-dead-cat.html | medium | http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/noble-stock-bounces-like-a-dead-cat.html | 16.625 | 1.375 | 0.6875 | abstractive | low | Noble stock bounces ... like a dead cat | A fresh round of stock buyback put some color back into shares of Noble Group, but analysts warn that the upside may be just a "dead cat bounce." |
20150811122849 | South Korea has accused North Korea of planting landmines that maimed two soldiers on border patrol, sending military tensions on the Korean peninsula soaring as it threatened to make Pyongyang pay a "harsh price".
The Defence Ministry said it believed three landmines exploded in the incident last Tuesday, hitting a patrol in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) - a buffer zone stretching two kilometres on either side of the actual frontier line dividing the two Koreas.
"We are certain they were North Korean landmines planted with an intention to kill by our enemies who sneaked across the military border," ministry spokesman Kim Min-Seok told reporters.
One soldier underwent a double leg amputation, while the other had one leg removed.
In a statement, the South's Joint Chiefs of Staff said its military would make North Korea "pay a harsh price proportionate for the provocation it made".
Describing the attack as a "baseless act" and "wanton violation" of non-aggression accords, the statement urged the North to apologise for the attack and punish those responsible.
The last direct attack on the South was in December 2010 when North Korea shelled the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong, killing two civilians and two soldiers and triggering brief fears of a full-scale conflict.
The rival Koreas remain technically at war because their 1950-53 Korean conflict ended in a cease-fire rather than a peace treaty.
The UN Command that monitors the cease-fire accord said on Monday that it had conducted a special investigation into last week's blasts and concluded they were from North Korean "wooden box" land mines placed on a known South Korean border patrol path.
"The investigation determined that the devices were recently emplaced, and ruled out the possibility that these were legacy landmines which had drifted from their original placements," it said in a statement.
More than a million mines are believed to have been planted along the inter-Korean border, including those which were air-dropped in great numbers in the 1960s at the height of a Cold War confrontation with the North.
The incident comes at a sensitive time, with both Koreas preparing to commemorate the 70th anniversary on Saturday of the 1945 liberation of the Korean peninsula from Japanese rule.
There had been hopes that the anniversary might open an opportunity for some sort of rapprochement, but efforts to organise a joint commemoration went nowhere with Pyongyang refusing to consider talks because of Seoul's refusal to cancel annual joint military exercises with the United States.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | http://web.archive.org/web/20150811122849id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2015/08/10/11/52/south-korea-blames-north-for-mine | medium | http://www.9news.com.au/world/2015/08/10/11/52/south-korea-blames-north-for-mine | 23.52381 | 2.428571 | 0.809524 | mixed | medium | South Korea blames North for mine blasts | South Korea has threatened to retaliate after accusing North Korea of planting a mine that maimed two soldiers last week. |
20150816125642 | FedEx's numbers are the first real look at the impact the brutal winter had on the shipping industry. Temperatures across a vast area of the United States, from the Great Plains through the Midwest and into the northern Appalachians, ran 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (3.3 to 5.5 degrees Celsius) below normal for 2-1/2 months straight.
Companies across the board have been talking about how the weather hurt their quarterly results. McDonald's partly blamed a fall in January sales at its established U.S. restaurants on the frigid cold and snow, while vitamin and nutritional supplements retailer GNC Holdings warned that its first-quarter results would miss expectations for that reason.
Ford Motor, railroad operator CSX and air carrier United Continental Holdings have also said the weather was affecting operations in the first quarter.
During the third quarter, FedEx entered into an accelerated share repurchase agreement to buy back an aggregate of $2 billion of common stock.
The third-quarter results benefited from Cyber Week, a heavy online shopping period that had fallen in the second quarter last year, as well as from one additional operating day, the company said.
However, problems stemming from the harsh winter overshadowed those benefits.
(Read more: Adobe forecast tops estimates as subscriptions rise)
Apart from bad weather, FedEx, like bigger rival United Parcel Service, was also hit by an unprecedented surge in online holiday shipping volumes.
Typically, a rise in online sales is good news for companies like these because it means more demand for their services. But this time, UPS said it had been overwhelmed by the volume of holiday packages. The arrival of Christmas presents around the globe was delayed, and angry customers took to social websites to complain. | http://web.archive.org/web/20150816125642id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/fedex-posts-earnings-of-123-a-share-vs-145-a-share-estimate.html | low | http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/fedex-posts-earnings-of-123-a-share-vs-145-a-share-estimate.html | 13.32 | 0.64 | 0.64 | abstractive | low | FedEx posts earnings of $1.23 a share vs. $1.45 a share estimate | FedEx reported lower-than-expected results for the holiday quarter and gave a fiscal-year profit forecast below Wall Street estimates. |
20151009121515 | "It's just drifting higher," said one U.S. trader, adding that end-of-the-week short-covering combined with a lack of offers as the end of the quarter approaches, helped prices turn slightly higher.
Signs of possible agreement soon between Greece and its creditors steadied world stock markets and sent U.S. bond yields to nine-month highs by curbing demand for safe-haven U.S. debt.
Expectations that U.S. interest rates will rise for the first time in nearly a decade this year, lifting the U.S. currency and boosting the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding bullion, have pressured gold, keeping it in a range.
Gold has held largely between $1,160 and $1,230 since mid-March, struggling to break higher despite an ostensibly bullish rise in tensions over Greece.
It has drawn some support from a rise in holdings of gold-backed exchange-traded funds, which issue securities backed by physical metal, this week after outflows earlier this year.
Read MoreHere's why gold will rally: RBC's Gero
Holdings of the biggest gold ETF, SPDR Gold Shares, rose 6.9 tons on Thursday, their biggest one-day increase since Feb. 2.
Silver was down 0.6 percent at $15.77 an ounce, having briefly touched a three-month low of $15.50. Platinum was down 0.5 percent at $1,075.99 an ounce, while palladium was up 0.1 percent at $678.22 an ounce.
"The industrial demand is light and there's a lot of recycling," the U.S. trader said, noting chart-based weakness as well.
Palladium fell to a two-year low at $666.82 in earlier trade and fell for the seventh straight week.
"While short-term moves are driven by many factors and the metal faces a number of challenges, we think the underlying weakness is due to a sharp slowdown in global auto sales growth," Macquarie said in a note. | http://web.archive.org/web/20151009121515id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/25/gold-ticks-up-as-greece-fails-to-clinch-debt-deal.html | low | http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/25/gold-ticks-up-as-greece-fails-to-clinch-debt-deal.html | 15 | 0.92 | 0.68 | abstractive | low | Gold bounces from 3-week low ahead of more Greek debt talks | Gold was little changed on Friday, after falling to a three-week low, on caution ahead of crunch talks on Greece. |
20151010121311 | While it's clear rate expectations are slightly higher for 2015, with the Fed expected to raise rates, Goncalves said the market could be positioning for other events as well, such as European Central Bank easing.
"We've got the ECB meeting Jan. 22. The first week of January we get all of the European inflation data. That's going to really set the tone," he said. The market sees a chance that the ECB could announce a quantitative easing-stylebond buying program, but weak inflation data would reinforce that notion.
Read MoreBuying stocks now: The world's easiest trade?
Goncalves said a QE announcement could actually drive yields higher, since the expectations for deflation diminish. The 10-year yield rose after Federal Reserve QE announcements, he said. Bond yields move opposite prices.
Yields have defied expectations all year, with rates at the long end of the curve near the lower end of the 2014 range in recent sessions. The 10-year Wednesday was at 2.26 percent, just below 2.28 percent, a support level traders have been watching.
Read MoreExpect another good year for stocks in 2015: Darst
Goncalves said the market has been building in expectations for a Fed hike in short-term rates. The yield curve has been flattening as yields rose at the shorter end of the curve, particularly the 2-year. Hedging for that trade could be part of the increase in shorts, he said.
"The bond market is increasingly building in a more aggressive Fed," said Adrian Miller, director of fixed income strategy at GMP Securities. He said the Commodities Futures Trading Commission data on Dec. 16 showed net short positions on 10-year futures totaled 258,000 contracts, the second largest ever behind May, 2010 when there were 275,000. | http://web.archive.org/web/20151010121311id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/24/traders-say-this-could-be-the-big-short-for-2015.html | low | http://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/24/traders-say-this-could-be-the-big-short-for-2015.html | 14.652174 | 0.652174 | 0.478261 | abstractive | low | Traders say this could be the big short for 2015 | Some investors this holiday season have been busily building what some say could be the biggest short position ever in Treasury futures. |
20151010132133 | "I heard from others that employers do not like graduates. They ask at interviews what you did after graduation," Lee said.
Two-thirds of South Koreans aged 25-34 have a college degree, the highest proportion in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a developed nations' club among whom the average is just below 40 percent.
Government efforts in recent years to encourage young people to pursue necessarily require a university degree have had limited success in a country obsessed with education. The high rate of graduates means many ambitious young people feel overqualified for the jobs that are available to them, and figure it's better to have no job than one below their expectations.
South Korea's labor market is divided between permanent jobs with a high degree of security and temporary positions that end after two years, a split that makes it harder for young people to get on a career track.
In 2012, 24 percent of workers in South Korea were temporary, double the OECD average.
In November, Finance Minister Choi Kyung-hwan suggested measures to make the labor market more flexible by easing rules on lay-offs and pay. While employers supported the proposals, labor groups and many students did not.
Read MoreForget exams, jobs a bigger worry for Korean youth
A hand-written letter to Choi by a group calling itself "the Misfits" took issue with his ideas and went viral on social networks after it was posted on walls at Korea University and Yonsei University, two of the country's top colleges.
"We are not angry because the regular workers are overly protected. We are angry because temporary workers are not ensured the benefits regular workers receive," it said.
Kim Jong-jin, a research fellow at the Korea Labor and Society Institute, said many young people in highly educated South Korea were unwilling to take temporary jobs.
"People in their mid-20s are supposed to be active in the labor market, but the market cannot exploit them as they keep on studying and preparing themselves for more stable jobs." | http://web.archive.org/web/20151010132133id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/01/with-jobs-scarce-south-korean-students-linger-on-campus.html | low | http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/01/with-jobs-scarce-south-korean-students-linger-on-campus.html | 14.428571 | 0.821429 | 0.607143 | abstractive | low | With jobs scarce, South Korean students linger on campus | With South Korea's youth unemployment at a 14-year high and hiring sluggish, thousands of students due to graduate are likely to instead stay on campus. |
20160111145408 | Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo are reportedly under investigation for meeting with El Chapo while he was on the run.
Hollywood actor Sean Penn is reportedly under investigation for an interview he conducted with Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán.
Guzmán, who has an estimated personal fortune of more than $1 billion and had been on the run since he escaped from maximum security prison in July last year, was detained in a military raid in his native Sinaloa on Friday.
In a lengthy article published in Rolling Stone magazine yesterday, Penn detailed his meetings with Guzmán in October in an undisclosed region of Mexico.
Sources in the Mexican government told ABC News that Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, who helped Penn set up the meeting, are now under investigation by authorities.
Penn and Del Castillo reportedly met Guzman for seven hours in a "secret jungle clearing". It is the first interview the drug lord has ever given, a situation which Penn said left him with “no precedent by which to measure the hazards”.
“I take no pride in keeping secrets that may be perceived as protecting criminals, nor do I have any gloating arrogance at posing for selfies with unknowing security men,” Penn wrote.
“The trust that El Chapo had extended to us was not to be f--ked with.”
Del Castillo reportedly came into contact with Guzmán in 2012, after she declared support for him on social media, and wrote, "Today I believe more in Chapo Guzmán than in governments."
The pair met and Del Castillo has been "aggressively" trying to secure the biopic film rights to Guzmán's life story, reports Variety.
The message "All rights reserved, Kate del Castillo Productions. Copyright 2016" appears on a short video of Guzmán published alongside the Rolling Stone interview.
The actress reportedly splits her time between Los Angeles and Mexico, and became well-known in 2011 when she played the role of a ruthless drug cartel leader on NBCUniversal show, La Reina del Sur (Queen of the South).
During the interview with Penn and Del Castillo, Guzmán said he was born to a poor family in Sinaloa and now wielded vast influence through his cartel.
"I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world," he said.
"I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats."
After dining and speaking with Guzmán over a number of meetings, the actors left a further set of questions to be answered – a short video of which was released by Rolling Stone today.
READ MORE: Inside El Chapo's hideout
Guzmán and his Sinaloa Cartel is estimated to be responsible for the deaths of more than 2000 people, but the drug kingpin said he did not consider himself a violent man.
Since Friday's arrest, Guzmán has been transferred back to the Altiplano maximum security prison – the same jail from which he famously fled last year.
Mexican authorities have announced that they will begin the process of extraditing Guzmán to the United States, with his lawyer vowing a tough legal battle. | http://web.archive.org/web/20160111145408id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/World/2016/01/11/03/48/Sean-Penn-reportedly-under-investigation-over-El-Chapo-interview | medium | http://www.9news.com.au/World/2016/01/11/03/48/Sean-Penn-reportedly-under-investigation-over-El-Chapo-interview | 25.375 | 20.208333 | 0.958333 | extractive | high | Actors Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo reportedly under investigation over 'El Chapo' interview | Hollywood actor Sean Penn is reportedly under investigation for an interview he conducted with Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán. |
20160219130233 | The cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) was an intrepid performer who was central to avant-garde culture in New York during the 1960s and ’70s—the “Jeanne d’Arc of New Music,” the composer Edgard Varèse dubbed her—even if many weren’t sure how to evaluate her talents.
Was she advancing the cause of free expression when she played on stage in the nude or wore a bra of televisions or was attached to a flight of balloons or let herself be covered in 20 pounds of chocolate fudge?
Or did some of her antics become an excuse for men to ogle her and for the public to dismiss all unconventional art as a put-on? Was she, as well as being collaborator and muse for Nam June Paik in his revolutionary mixed-media pieces, also his stooge?
These questions were debated in New York’s downtown artistic circles (especially by feminists) when she was alive. And they are quietly raised again in the celebratory exhibition and catalog “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s” at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, as well as in Joan Rothfuss ’s entertaining new biography, “Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman.”
According to Ms. Rothfuss’s research, Moorman could have enjoyed a normal middle-class American life. Growing up in Little Rock, Ark., an only child who studied music and won the “Miss City Beautiful” contest at age 19, she was not a born rebel. Even after her move in 1957 to New York, where she attended the Juilliard School for a year and married a double-bassist, she envisioned herself playing cello in an orchestra or string ensemble.
But performing the classics, Moorman decided, was a bore compared to the offerings in New York’s experimental music and art scene during the ’60s. Her marriage annulled, she took up with a series of male mentors. (She ended up happily paired with the visual artist Frank Pileggi. )
An eccentric who never threw anything away, Moorman has left the show’s six curators—one of whom is Ms. Rothfuss—with almost too much material to sift in presenting her flamboyant life. (Northwestern bought the artist’s archive and has been organizing it since 2001.)
In addition to photographs of her in many productions, the exhibition has museum loans of Paik’s video sculptures and a program of films and videos that shows her playing works by Paik (“Sonata for Adults Only”) and others. There are cellos that Moorman fashioned, in neon or from syringes (used for her cancer treatments), as well as the felt-covered instrument that Joseph Beuys made for her to use in one of his works.
Annotated scores of music she performed by New York’s avant-garde ( John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Paik) are here, along with her copy of Karlheinz Stockhausen ’s “Originale (Originals),” a piece from 1964 in which she played the part of the “String Player,” wearing only gauze. Moorman was a key figure in helping these composers to introduce unpredictability, spectacle, danger and humor into the rarefied air of the classical music concert.
One way to liberate the audience, Paik believed, was to add nudity. In 1967 Moorman performed half-naked in his “Opera Sextronique” at a theater near Times Square. Arrested for indecent exposure, she spent the night in jail. The tabloid reporting on her trial, which resulted in a suspended sentence, defined her ever after in the public’s mind as the “Topless Cellist,” a label she resented when she wasn’t capitalizing on it.
Moorman’s packrat habits have proved invaluable in reconstructing a less well-documented phase of her career: her role as an impresario.
In 1963 she founded an annual Festival of the Avant Garde in New York. With almost no resources except her own vivaciousness, she produced it for 15 years, moving it around the city into nontraditional arenas for art and music—Grand Central Terminal, Shea Stadium, Floyd Bennett Field, and the World Trade Center.
The walls and cases in the exhibition’s second half are papered with her ads and programs for the festivals, supplemented by the photographs of Peter Moore, one of the few who attended all of these ephemeral events. Dozens of composers (Varèse, Cage, Morton Feldman, Luciano Berio ), filmmakers ( Bruce Conner, Jack Smith ), performance artists and dancers ( Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Lucinda Childs ) participated because Moorman cajoled them.
She had “a flair for getting EVERYBODY involved, including the more sophisticated who think Charlotte is silly; and she always somehow pulled it off,” wrote the critic Jill Johnston in the Village Voice after one of these festivals.
Some feminist artists in the ’60s and ’70s were wary of Moorman. Carolee Schneemann thought her a “narcissist,” and the roster of her festivals was overwhelmingly male.
The public was more flummoxed. In a clip here from the Merv Griffin TV show, the studio audience laughs nervously as she holds a string down the back of Jerry Lewis and uses him to perform Paik’s “Human Cello.”
A comedian in her own right, whose friendly smile and Southern accent could disarm most hostile crowds, Moorman knew that just because you weren’t afraid to look ridiculous didn’t mean you weren’t serious.
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York. | http://web.archive.org/web/20160219130233id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-feast-of-astonishments-charlotte-moorman-and-the-avant-garde-1960s-1980s-review-1454362570 | high | http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-feast-of-astonishments-charlotte-moorman-and-the-avant-garde-1960s-1980s-review-1454362570 | 44.416667 | 1 | 0.666667 | abstractive | low | ‘A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s’ Review | Cellist Charlotte Moorman’s work divided opinion, but one thing’s for certain: She was deeply serious about her artistic projects. |
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in Dataset Viewer.
Test split of the Newsroom dataset (2) filtered by using the code by Aumiller et al. (1) available at https://github.com/dennlinger/summaries/tree/main
min_length_summary = 18; min_length_reference = 250; length_metric = "whitespace"
(1): Aumiller, D., Fan, J., & Gertz, M. (2023). On the State of German (Abstractive) Text Summarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.07095.
(2): Grusky, M., Naaman, M., & Artzi, Y. (2018). Newsroom: A dataset of 1.3 million summaries with diverse extractive strategies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.11283.
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