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20150427195230

Best game: Bucks 92, Bulls 90. The Bulls literally handed the game to the Bucks. Twenty-eight turnovers from Chicago is a lot. It's the most turnovers Chicago has had in a game this season, in fact. And it's probably not surprising that Milwaukee would be the team to create such havoc. The Bucks' long-armed defenders employ a switch-heavy scheme that offensive players aren't completely used to seeing yet, with the strong-side pressure defense of Tom Thibodeau still preferred by many teams. And it works for Milwaukee; the Bucks led the league in opponent turnover percentage this season. So, yes, the 28 turnovers from the Bulls were a lot. The 39 points Milwaukee generated off those turnovers were a lot, too. But one instance loomed larger than any other on the night. Derrick Rose brought the Bulls back with some stellar play in the final two minutes after struggling for much of the night. But with the game-winning shot Rose's for the taking, Khris Middleton stripped Rose and earned one final possession for Milwaukee with 1.3 seconds remaining. And, well, Jason Kidd drew this up and Jerryd Bayless executed: Game over. Milwaukee stays alive. And a big night from Jimmy Butler (see below) is all for naught. Best stat line: Stephen Curry, G, Warriors: 39 points, 8 rebounds, 9 assists, 6-of-8 on 3's. We're all going to need to become much more creative, because Curry will have us all out of superlatives sooner or later. Curry seems an affable chap, and it comes through in his reputation as a fan favorite. More than once, we've heard how Curry is the role model to which young girls and boys can aspire. No one can ever work so hard that he or she grows up to be 7 feet tall. But the exquisite shooting accuracy and deft ball-handling of Curry seem attainable, if only we work hard enough. Don't let the nature of the gifts fool you: Curry is ruthless. He's shown a knack this season for delivering when his opponents take their game to the next level — in game or across the country on the night before, and here, we're talking about you, James Harden. Curry is not to be outdone by anyone (except maybe Klay Thompson), and Saturday night was no exception, as the Warriors beat the Pelicans 109-98 to complete a first-round sweep. Anthony Davis put up another monster performance with 36 points and 11 rebounds. Against anyone else, it's the best stat line of the night, and the Pelicans go home with a win. But Curry isn't anyone else. He's the likely MVP, a star equally likely to bury a dagger or throw a pass that would make Magic Johnson get out of his seat and shimmy. One can never discount the King as he reigns in Cleveland. But on nights like Saturday, it's hard to believe this long season belongs to anyone but Steph Curry. Best stat line, pt. 2: Jimmy Butler, G, Bulls: 33 points, 7 rebounds, 2 assists, 3 steals. If the Bulls are just going to keep alternating massive games from Butler and Rose, this team has a chance to make the Eastern Conference finals. But a bit of balance could go a long way toward Chicago surprising Cleveland and Atlanta and earning a spot in the NBA Finals, and it could have earned the Bulls a sweep on Saturday. In a helter-skelter Game 4, Butler stood head and shoulders above every other player on the floor. No one came close to matching his 33 points — the second-highest scorer in the game, O.J. Mayo, scored just 18 points. But there's more to glean from that difference than might first meet the eye. One of the biggest reasons no Buck could hold a candle to Butler was Butler's outstanding defense on whomever the Bulls needed him to guard. In fact, Milwaukee had its greatest success when it ran out a lineup with Mayo, Jared Dudley and Jerryd Bayless, too many Bucks shooters for Butler to guard on his own. The Bulls struggled with turnovers, and Butler coughed it up four times. But he was forced to assume much of the playmaking burden because of a quiet Rose (14 points on 5-of-13 shooting, 8 turnovers to 6 assists), so a handful of turnovers can be forgiven. Milwaukee staved off elimination for at least one more game thanks in large part to those turnovers (see below). But when Bucks fans are asked which Bull put the fear of summer vacation into them, they'll have but one answer: The Butler did it. Best individual play that symbolizes a Warriors sweep and the future of the NBA: Stephen Curry hits a ridiculous step-back jumper over the outstretched arm of Anthony Davis. Seriously, there is no better metaphor for where the NBA is, where the NBA is going, and this single first-round series than this shot: The Pelicans were game in each of the four contests in the series. They nearly overcame insurmountable deficits, and they gave away a 20-point advantage in Game 3 that will haunt New Orleans fans for a while. And all of it was because of Davis. He couldn't have done it without Tyreke Evans or Ryan Anderson or any of the other Pelicans who stepped up, but it was The Brow who kept New Orleans within arm's reach for four incredibly entertaining games. And Curry and the Warriors were just out of reach each time, coming up with plays out of nowhere that broke the backs and dreams of the Pelicans. This one goes to the Warriors. But it's safe to say that we haven't seen the last of Curry vs. Davis. Best quote: Steve Kerr has seen the future, and it is The Brow. Steve Kerr on A.D.: "The guy will be the MVP within in the next few years, I think." Best impersonation of your opponent: The Nets became the Hawks to beat the Hawks. Maybe Brooklyn as a basketball entity is just a giant chameleon, and playing in the Eastern Conference meant that the Nets took on a bad basketball environment and reflected it in their own play. Introduce a passing machine like the Hawks into Brooklyn's home environment, however, and the Nets turn into a whirling buzzsaw of passes and finishes at the rim. Can we talk about that Brooklyn home environment for a second, though? Granted, Saturday's game was a pretty early start. But this isn't the greatest showing in playoff fan history, Nets supporters. Best picture that is clearly not at all a foul: Zach Randolph and Robin Lopez are besties. Listen, referees will let marginal contact go if it doesn't create an advantage for either player, and this collision between Randolph and Lopez is clearly nothing out of the ordinary. It's just two very, very large men trying to get a rebound. Nothing to see here. Next play! Unlike Lopez, Blazers fans are likely anxiously tugging at their collars, as Saturday night's 115-109 loss to the Grizzlies leaves Portland in 3-0 first-round hole. Best insight into why Mike Budenholzer is the Coach of the Year: Budenholzer started to draw up a play, decided against it. The sign of a true genius is the ability to recognize that simplicity is best. Sure, you could desperately design some crazy set to try to get your team back into the swing of things on the road. Or you could trust the system, shrug your shoulders, and say, "Let's just play." It didn't work out in the end for the Hawks, but it was a refreshing glimpse of a coach conceding that sometimes you just need to let players make plays. Best visual: Kosta Koufos jams all over C.J. McCollum. Credit to McCollum for putting his body and pride on the line here, but this highlight is not for the faint of heart. Best use of film study to make an opponent sad: Bojan Bogdanovic perfectly read a Hawks play, got the steal. Technology has changed the NBA. It's perhaps an under-discussed part of the way the league has evolved, but film study is easier today than it's ever been — and it's becoming even easier by the day. A player can fire up Synergy on the plane, in the locker room, at the hotel, hell, even on the bench. Whenever and wherever he is so inclined to study, the material is always available. That easy access to information makes each and every player who chooses to use it that much smarter and that much more prepared. And it makes going up against such thoroughly informed defenses all the more difficult. Banning hand-checking on the perimeter undoubtedly opened up the game, and that maybe made things easier for elite wing scorers to get past the first line of defense. But once that primary defender is in the dust, an entire system of switches and hedges, of helping and communicating, waits to swallow up all but the very best offensive efforts. It might seem that this is a simple steal from Brooklyn's Bogdanovic, on a missed opportunity by Atlanta. But note the switch Bogdanovic makes based on what he knows of the Hawks offense and his faith in the information he's gathered and the studying he's done. Hours and hours of work likely went into that one play. In the playoffs, it's all worth it. Best improvisation that was completely ineffective and thoroughly hilarious: Leandro Barbosa throws a pass to no one to avoid a travel. It might have been better to just suck it up and take the up-and-down violation on this one, Brazilian Blur. But thank you for sacrificing your pride for the sake of the people's entertainment. Best at being the worst: Aaron Brooks got up close and personal with Jerryd Bayless. Let it never be said that you have to be a big human being to turn a basketball game into a chippy affair. Brooks is generously listed as 6 feet tall, but he has no problem playing the instigator. Brooks picked up three fouls in just six minutes, including a flagrant for the shove on Bayless. Best blatant disregard for the mid-quarter entertainment during a game: Joey Crawford has places to be, people! Listen, elderly Nets dancers, we understand that you're just trying to thrill the crowd with your choreographed shenanigans. But Crawford needs to get from here to over there, and he doesn't have time to wait for you. There's basketball to be officiated. Best wishes to a player after a scary injury: Mike Conley suffers blow to the head, taken to medical facility. Here's hoping that the Grizzlies point guard make a speedy and full recovery after an inadvertent elbow from C.J. McCollum forced Conley from Game 3 in Portland in the third quarter.

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Saturday's best: Bulls' Jimmy Butler erupts, but Bucks steal a win -- literally

Plus: Mike Budenholzer shows why he's Coach of the Year, Taj Gibson hangs around at -- and on -- the rim, and Bojan Bogdanovic demonstrates how technology has changed the NBA forever.

20150524080945

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7— Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said today that the board's tight hold on growth of money and credit was likely to cut off any strong economic recovery as long as inflation remained high. At the same time, Mr. Volcker called for help in the fight against inflation from the Federal Government's budget policy, which he said had tended to ''strongly aggravate interest rate pressures.'' In sum, Mr. Volcker's testimony before the Senate Banking Committee appeared to be both a warning and a policy prescription for the incoming Reagan administration. In one sense, Mr. Volcker's remarks constituted his defense of monetary policy a day after Donald T. Regan, designated to be Secretary of the Treasury, cited ''erratic monetary policies'' as one cause of volatile financial markets. ''Monetary policy, indispensable as it is, is only one instrument, and, as I have emphasized, relying entirely on that instrument focuses the strains on financial markets,'' Mr. Volcker said. ''The fiscal posture of the Federal Government is the most important of the other instruments that can be brought to bear.'' The grim economic outlook offered by Mr. Volcker was based on the belief that a limit on monetary growth results in a limit on the growth of the gross national product. And to the extent that G.N.P. growth consists of inflation, the potential for ''real'' growth is reduced still more. ''The underlying inflation rate today appears at least as high, and probably higher, than a year ago,'' Mr. Volcker said. He noted in particular that the size of wage increases had risen. The Federal Reserve chairman made clear, as he has before, that neither the gloomy prospect for economic growth nor a hope of fiscal changes to come would deter the central bank from gradually reducing the rate of growth of money and credit. ''We have to continue plowing forward in our own furrow, hoping and really expecting that other elements of the program will come into place,'' he said. ''We had better take very seriously the fiscal and other dimensions of the problem that contribute to the credit demands very directly.'' Balanced Budget in 1983 Despite those repeated warnings, Mr. Volcker repeatedly refused to offer specific suggestions for reducing the growth of Federal spending. But he said that the combined spending and tax strategy should aim at a balanced budget in 1983. ''One would think in terms of budget figures that would be consistent with balance, provided we reach our objective on the economy and the economy is operating at a high level,'' Mr. Volcker said. He also called for changes in regulatory policies, aimed in part at ''permitting market pressures to operate.'' In the past, Mr. Volcker has expressed opposition to the 30 percent, three-year tax cut for individuals endorsed by Presidentelect Ronald Reagan, preferring reductions aimed more directly at savings and investment. Today, Mr. Volcker declined to specify what kind of tax cut he would like to see. ''A tax cut will be extremely helpful but it's got to be fitted into the overall fiscal program,'' he said. He also remarked that ''in cutting taxes, you want to look toward incentive effects;'' by this, he, along with other economic advisers of the President-elect, appeared to be opposing the originally planned Jan. 1 retroactive date for individuals' tax cuts. Part of Mr. Volcker's heavy emphasis on the need for changes in fiscal policy apparently resulted from his perception that, because of the election and because ''we have a sense of wanting change,'' the country now has ''an opportunity that doesn't come along all the time of making changes that are difficult.'' Mr. Volcker was criticized by several members of the committee for both the high interest rates and their extraordinary fluctuations in the past year. ''In light of the need to encourage a return to price stability, it could hardly be argued that the growth of money and credit has been unduly constricted,'' Mr. Volcker replied. ''Indeed, some have argued the reverse.'' As for the fluctuations, Mr. Volcker attributed them to high inflationary expectations and the lack of help from other policies in fighting inflation. In addition, he repeated recent remarks by other Federal Reserve members that less emphasis should be put on meeting short-term targets for the money supply. ''We cannot and should not impose rigidity on these short-term movements, because we would then get more instability in the money markets,'' he said. ''You're going to have to accept some short-term fluctuations, particularly in M-1,'' a measure of the money supply. Illustrations: photo of Pual A. Volcker (page 4)

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VOLCKER CAUTIONS ON INFLATION

Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said today that the board's tight hold on growth of money and credit was likely to cut off any strong economic recovery as long as inflation remained high. At the same time, Mr. Volcker called for help in the fight against inflation from the Federal Government's budget policy, which he said had tended to ''strongly aggravate interest rate pressures.'' In sum, Mr. Volcker's testimony before the Senate Banking Committee appeared to be both a warning and a policy prescription for the incoming Reagan administration. In one sense, Mr. Volcker's remarks constituted his defense of monetary policy a day after Donald T. Regan, designated to be Secretary of the Treasury, cited ''erratic monetary policies'' as one cause of volatile financial markets.

20150524081047

THIS is the month of flowering roses, flights of June bugs and a bonanza of flea markets, collectibles shows, antiques fairs and street bazaars. And this weekend may be the time when such events peak throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, attracting thousands of the curious and challenging the most compulsive collectors. Browsing through these bazaars offers a passport to the past, recent and distant, a nostalgia trip that is sparked by the sight of something that may be primitive or precious, but is always extremely personal. The settings for these shopping excursions may be urban or rural, alfresco or air-conditioned, sunny or shady. And you might find the object you are seeking in a pasture, a parking lot, a drivein theater, on a town green, at a race track, on a sidewalk or in an indoor mall. Most of what is sold at flea markets and street fairs was made in the 20th century. At some, the offerings were born yesterday. Indeed, new clothes, sheets and towels, kitchen utensils, toys and packaged foods are now the stock in trade of many flea-market merchants who are increasingly showing name-brand merchandise. But modern wares are at a minimum, and period wares dominate at many flea markets, including the Old Mystic Flea Market in Connecticut, according to its owner, Sander Hendel. Mr. Hendel said that this is so because he wants to keep ''dealers in modern merchandise down to a very few.'' Mr. Hendel defines ''period'' as anything from the 1960's or earlier. Dealers there are showing Victorian oak furniture with lion's-paw feet, 1930's ruby-red Depression-glass tumblers and pitchers, turn-of-the-century jewelry, gilded mantel clocks, railroad-conductor watches and cut-glass vases. ''To find decent Big Little Books from the 1930's for under $10 is a problem,'' he continued. ''I know, I collect them.'' He also looks for Matchbox toy cars, which are ''anywhere from $1 to $100.'' The most sought-after ones date from 1953 and are part of the ''Yesteryear'' series of 16 designs, including a horsedrawn milk cart and a double-decker London bus. While he is shopping for toys, he also watches out for a ''Shirley Temple anything'' to enlarge his wife's collection of dolls, records, jewelry and memorabilia. ''The blue cereal dish is the toughest Shirley Temple item to find,'' he said. In mint condition it is $50 to $75. When the picture disappears - as it did on most of those dishes, the price goes down to $5. Dolls of the child movie star run $25 to $1,000, he said, adding that the rarest are the 1930's 27-inch-tall composition doll and the 1950's 36-inch vinyl doll, each of which commands $800 to $1,000. Henry Kaplan, a New York dealer, whose shop, Sideshow, at 184 Ninth Avenue, benefits from his forays through flea markets, says that he has noticed that Art Deco trivia is ''on its way out.'' ''All of a sudden lace and embroidered tablecloths are disappearing because people are transforming them into clothes. Decoys are booming at high prices. Nineteen-forties furniture - all that chrome - is getting very expensive. Toys of all periods have gone out of sight. Robots are very big - some sell for up to $100. There is another collecting area that has taken off - scrimshaw. The problem there is that there are so many fakes.'' The merchandise mix is different at other bazaars, including the Elephant's Trunk Bazaar Giant Country Flea Market in Milford, Conn. According to Gregory Baecker, its manager, the five-year-old flea market, which started with 30 antiques dealers and now has up to 100, has 50 percent new merchandise, 25 percent wares of antiques dealers and 25 percent ''people cleaning out their attics.'' The new goods are increasingly from quality sources. Dealers arrive in vans with designer clothes. Socks and T-shirts, car-care products and new tools are big also. ''I don't know where they find their merchandise,'' he reported. ''But the prices are well below what one pays in stores, and the dealers still make a good profit.'' In antiques there are a number of dealers in late-19th-century pine, golden oak and Depression glass, to mention a few categories. Round oak tables with lion's-paw feet are $250 to $350. A pine chest of drawers is $120 and up. Spindle-back chairs are $40 and $50 each. Commodes are $80 or $85. ''Anything that is useful - sets of china and glass, for example - sells,'' Mr. Baecker says. ''But accessories to decorate a mantel are not moving.'' Mostly New Goods at Barterama At Barterama, the mammoth flea market that holds forth at Aqueduct Race Track on Saturdays, Sundays and Tuesdays, virtually everything is new. And, the vendors maintain, most of their wares are bargains. Designer jeans can be found for $18. Sneakers by Adidas and others are sold from $16. Danskin leotards are $8 and up, and Danskin bathing suits are also available. Roller skates with shoes come with price tags of $27 to $75. Tablecloths for use indoors or out are $6 and up; bedspreads by Bates are $25; sets of satin sheets containing a fitted sheet, a flat sheet and two cases are $19 each. Household items, including glass wares, pots and pans and kitchen utensils are also abundant at these fairs, where dealers set out their wares on tables with sign reading ''50 cents and up.'' Tools, too, can be excellent buys. A complete socket set was priced last weekend at $8. Cosmetics - brand and nonbrand - are becoming more available. Socks and stockings are increasingly popular, as are women's shoes and pet supplies. ''When it rains, we now move indoors,'' said a Barterama merchant. ''So it's a rain-or-shine flea market.'' One of the Largest at Roosevelt Jay Factor, manager of the Plain and Fancy show at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island, says that the new merchandise dramatically outnumbers the old at his show, which is one of the largest in the country. Clothing, he says, is one of the biggest categories of offerings. Other popular wares include packaged nuts and fruits, cheesecake, pickles, jewelry, pocketbooks, shoes, wicker furniture, glassware and housewares. ''With the economy the way it is it is, manufacturers and distributors are viewing flea markets as conventional outlets for their goods,'' he explains. ''This way a manufacturer does not have to get stuck at the end of the season with wares he cannot sell. We find also that there is a lot of closeout merchandise here from stores and distributors. Some stores use flea markets to sell off returns, too - in everything from clothing to furniture.'' Illustrations: photo of doll sold at flea market drawings map of locations of flea markets in tri-state area

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FLEA MARKETS IN SEASON AGAIN ALL OVER REGION

THIS is the month of flowering roses, flights of June bugs and a bonanza of flea markets, collectibles shows, antiques fairs and street bazaars. And this weekend may be the time when such events peak throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, attracting thousands of the curious and challenging the most compulsive collectors. Browsing through these bazaars offers a passport to the past, recent and distant, a nostalgia trip that is sparked by the sight of something that may be primitive or precious, but is always extremely personal. The settings for these shopping excursions may be urban or rural, alfresco or air-conditioned, sunny or shady. And you might find the object you are seeking in a pasture, a parking lot, a drivein theater, on a town green, at a race track, on a sidewalk or in an indoor mall.

20150524110014

ALBANY— While Republicans in the State Senate negotiated with New York City lobbyists last week over a bill providing for binding arbitration in transit contract talks, Governor Carey was nowhere to be seen. His role was limited to signing a ''message of necessity'' that enabled the Legislature to do expeditiously what it already intended to do eventually - pass the bill. In a sense, this wasn't surprising, since the measure was of concern primarily to Mayor Koch. What was more surprising was that no one seemed to miss Mr. Carey. What a difference a year makes. Last year, Mr. Carey was pilloried by legislative leaders for being ''uninvolved'' in a variety of issues, particularly plans to bail out and rebuild New York's subways. Since Mr. Carey announced he was not running for reelection, such attacks have stopped. And although the Governor promised to use the time he might ordinarily have spent on the stump to insure passage of his legislative program, he hasn't been very successful so far. Legislative leaders are busily rewriting his budget, an unusually tight plan that calls for the elimination of 4,900 state jobs, cuts in state services and $400 million in increased taxes and fees, and reworking his proposal to redistribute aid to education without fretting too much about Mr. Carey's reaction. Already, the Governor's plan to raise the sales tax a penny to assist the state's poorer school districts appears dead. So does his plan to raise gasoline taxes to cover the costs of rebuilding the state's roads and bridges. As for the budget, the Republicans who control the Senate believe Mr. Carey has underestimated revenues, which means they think some new programs are possible without any major tax increases. But Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink, a Democrat, believes Mr. Carey may have overestimated revenues, meaning he thinks the Legislature will have to do less with less. The Senate is trying to resist as many tax increases as possible; Mr. Fink expects to support many of the Carey proposals, though not controversial ones such as the gas tax increase and portions of a tough Medicaid cost containment program. No one, however, thinks the treasury is all that flush and that, too, may account for the quiet at the Capital. ''There's no money around,'' said Assemblyman Melvin H. Miller, ''so nobody can fight over what to do with it.'' Mr. Carey's lame duck status could take its toll on other issues as well. Last week, Mr. Fink said he might oppose any new spending for the Westway, the controversial replacement for the crumbling West Side Highway that has been one of Mr. Carey's pet projects. Mr. Fink had long been silent on the issue, though his private views have become increasingly negative lately. When asked why he had begun to speak out against the project, Mr. Fink replied that his tacit support in the past stemmed from ''unabashed loyalty to the Governor.'' ''He's the Governor of New York State,'' Mr. Fink pointedly added, ''and he's decided he's not coming back.'' Insofar as they think about the effect of their actions on the gubernatorial race, legislators tend to focus on Mayor Koch, who is regarded as the favorite. On the transit arbitration proposal, for example, the Republican-led Senate refused to support a bill that did not also have the Mayor's blessing. They didn't want Mr. Koch to blame them for a generous transit settlement. For his part, Mr. Carey insists that he intends to lobby for his programs as hard as he ever has. He points out that he's been sitting down with Mr. Fink and the Senate majority leader, Warren M. Anderson, with a regularity undreamed of last year. ''I don't meet with the legislative leaders in order to consume tea, coffee and cakes,'' he added. But the sessions, while regular, have also been tranquil, since both Mr. Fink and Mr. Anderson have put aside their own gubernatorial ambitions this year. Mr. Fink was knocked out of the race when Mr. Koch decided to run. His time could come later. Mr. Anderson, a 66-year-old Republican, has likely put his hopes aside forever. ''The only nervous guy in the room was Mario,'' said Mr. Fink, referring to Lieut. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. Mr. Cuomo was a front-running candidate before Mr. Koch unexpectedly stepped in. Other than those meetings, Mr. Carey has largely confined himself to occasional lectures on what he perceives are the Legislature's responsibilities. ''The question is whether they do things on the merits or let things ride,'' he said during one of them last week. ''I understand the election-year jitters,'' he continued, adding that if the lawmakers rejected his plans, he hoped they would ''at least discuss them in constructive terms before the electorate'' in the fall campaign. How well people here think his new style will serve Mr. Carey depends largely on what they think he wants from his final year in office. The Governor's aides speak in terms of ''building the record,'' or doing the things now that will leave the voters - and, perhaps, even the historians - with good feelings about all eight of Mr. Carey's Albany years. Although they don't say so out loud, most of Mr. Carey's aides seem to believe that the Governor, simply by proposing some tough measures, has already served himself well. Even if those measures are defeated, they reason, Mr. Carey will at least get credit for putting them forward. What seems clear, in any event, is that Mr. Carey is not in a fighting mood. ''He wants to be done with it all,'' says one Republican, who thinks the Governor will be happy when the Legislature disposes of his proposals, regardless of how many find their way into the statute books. ''When we're finished, he's finished, and he'll be free at last.'' Illustrations: photo of Gov. Hugh Carey

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CAREY, NOT YET GONE, IS SOMETIMES FORGOTTEN

While Republicans in the State Senate negotiated with New York City lobbyists last week over a bill providing for binding arbitration in transit contract talks, Governor Carey was nowhere to be seen. His role was limited to signing a ''message of necessity'' that enabled the Legislature to do expeditiously what it already intended to do eventually - pass the bill. In a sense, this wasn't surprising, since the measure was of concern primarily to Mayor Koch. What was more surprising was that no one seemed to miss Mr. Carey.

20150623215835

FORTUNE — When Joe Stinziano, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics, took the stage recently at a press event on the future of smart TV, few might have expected him to talk about the quietest device in the living room: the remote control. “Until now, the remote control has basically stayed the same for 50 years,” Stinziano said, before proceeding to unveil a bevy of innovative new features. Indeed, Stinziano cast a spotlight on a device that may very well be the last piece of home entertainment equipment to undergo broad, fundamental change. Hampered by manufacturing costs, infrastructure, and competing technical standards, the remote control has gotten little attention even though the average household now has four of them, each with its own confusing array of buttons and services. What changes remote controls have gone through have mostly been evolutionary. That may be starting to change. Why has the remote control been a long-time victim of innovation? “It’s always come secondary to the television or set top box it’s been paired with,” says Michel Alvarez who was lead designer when Boxee TV, a progressive home theater PC software application, developed its flagship set-top box and dual-sided remote. “As manufacturers continued to invest production costs on making sure the main unit delivered on its competitive features, remote control innovation sat on the back burner, ultimately plateauing the relationship between the remote and the television.” MORE: The mistake Netflix is making now It didn’t start that way. The first wireless remote was a marvel, introduced by Zenith Radio Corporation in 1956 and engineered by Robert Adler. Called the “Zenith Space Command,” it offered a simple interface, consistent with consumer habits for watching television at the time. With its introduction an evolution happened: choice or remotes was granted to consumers for the first time. Findings emerged that began to shape programming: 25% of viewers changed the channel once the credits started rolling since they could change the channel sitting down. Yet by the turn of the century, the remote’s design faltered under the weight of multiple systems. Not only did it multiply by device — while one remote shipped with a TV, another shipped with the cable box — but the separation of labor and service provider caused an unstoppable multiplicity of buttons. Zenith 300With the introduction of new services to the living room — VCRs, DVRs, DVD and Blu-ray players, game consoles — device infraction emerged on the coffee table because each new box pack its own remote. And while universal remotes intended to unite the confounding multiple experiences, it was often a less usable version of simple versions from manufacturers. And there wasn’t much incentive to focus on the problem. “Mid- and low-end TV sales are very sensitive to margins, and so many manufacturers effectively gave up trying to own the entire experience and focused on lowering manufacturing cost and on investing in picture quality,” says Jun Lee, a partner at ReD Associates, an innovation and strategy consultancy, “They reduced the price of remote control manufacturing to $1 for the average remote to $3-5 for a ‘premium’ remote, but they also knew the remote was no longer a primary point of contact between their customers and the TV viewing experience.” MORE: 5 things that mattered at SXSW There is a chief difference, however, between cable or TV manufacturers (where remote controls are often an afterthought) and the business of making remote controls. Take Logitech LOGI , who for 30 years has been making personal peripherals. These devices win design awards year after year. “We have customers come in to our office on a weekly basis, says Kevin Simon, director of Product Research. “People often don’t know what they want or what their pain points are.” As part of their process, they do a combination of lab studies at their headquarters, ethnographic studies, and traditional surveys. Even the Harmony Link, one of their remotes on the market, effectively crowdsources live behaviors so that each new addition becomes available for Harmony Link users everywhere. Things could be turning around. Two non-traditional remotes have recently put better control in front of consumers, effectively raising expectations for gesture and voice. First the Kinect, a Microsoft MSFT Xbox remote that supports both voice and gesture input without a device at all. Apple’s AAPL Siri, which shipped with the iPhone 4S, recognizes voice commands, and helped result in $46.33 billion in revenue by the end of 2011 just a few months after it was introduced. And if history is any evidence, Siri has already changed consumer expectations and behavior irreversibly. “Apple unified service and product on the iPhone. It may try to make a similar move on TV,” says Lee. Meantime, Samsung introduced its Smart Interaction technology with face recognition, gesture, and voice control, intended to provide choice for how consumers interact with their TV. And while Samsung still supplies the Smart Touch Remote and traditional remote in the box, the way consumers can interact with them clearly tips a hat to what its voice and gestural predecessors have done well. MORE: Time to redefine “innovation” But is the advent of voice, gesture, and touch really more control for consumers in a remote? “You don’t even have to pick up a remote control,” says Chris Harrison, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), “You’re sitting in your living room and snap your fingers. It’s like clicking the button for Siri. The computer looks for whatever hand is being held out—that is your remote control. Then you type ‘Channel 52’ or the top five shows you love watching on your DVR and click play. It’s getting away from the paradigm of a remote control. Your whole room is interactive. That’s what’s really exciting.” Together with Microsoft Research and a CMU colleague, Harrison prototyped a mobile interaction system, OmniTouch, that turns any surface, including the human body, into a screen. Both OmniTouch, and another of his on-body interface projects, Armura, offer a new evolution of control—one where human interaction with our media experience dissolves into something much simpler: the environment itself. So what this the future of the remote control? “We need to bring great new interaction and interface design to the remote control itself, the compatibility, the crowdsourcing. We absolutely need that because that is what the customer is buying. They demand innovation when they buy our product as opposed to when they buy a cable package,” Simon says. Meanwhile manufacturers will experimenting with voice, gesture, and touch and consumers will play, voting for their choice with gestures and buttons on how to put the control in the remote experience. At least finally this is an evolution, one Joe Stinziano’s audience has been waiting to hear about for more than fifty years. Liz Danzico is chair and co-founder of the MFA Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts. She is part designer, part educator, and part editor, who writes part of her time at Bobulate. Follow @bobulate on Twitter.

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The quietest device in the room

Remote controls haven't had much sex appeal over the past 50 years. New technology is changing that -- and creating a lucrative market.

20150731133412

For most of its 16-year history, Cambridge Innovation Center has stuck close to its Kendall Square roots. Now it’s jumping the Atlantic. On Tuesday, the startup hub will announce its first international expansion, a 140,000 square-foot office in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam that could eventually house up to 500 companies. CIC’s founder and chief executuve, Tim Rowe, said the expansion is a natural — though big — step for an organization that prides itself on helping entrepreneurs with ideas to create products. “We think, obviously, that innovation is a global phenomenon,” Rowe said. “We’re looking for ways to bridge across continents and connect innovation in Europe to innovation happening here. In this business one plus one is three.” Rowe launched the company in 1999, and it has since become a key ingredient of the Cambridge startup scene. It now manages about 500,000 square feet of office space that it rents to some 800 companies, mostly startups and innovation units of big companies, but also to investors and related companies. Though it has seven locations, much of its operations are in Kendall Square. Two years ago, CIC launched its first out-of-town startup center, in St. Louis, and last year it opened one in downtown Boston. The center has been looking at locations in Europe for some time. It chose the Netherlands, Rowe said, for the country’s strong startup culture and one of the highest entrepreneurship rates in Europe. Rotterdam is “the Boston” of the Netherlands, Rowe said, because it is near many of the nation’s best universities. It also has the cultural heritage of being Europe’s largest port, a trade hub, and the place from which many Europeans emigrated to the United States. CIC is signing a 15-year lease in the Groot Handelsgebouw, a 1.1 million-square-foot former warehouse and iconic piece of Rotterdam’s postwar rebuilding effort. It’s now the country’s biggest business center, across from the city’s central rail station. The project has been two years in the making, with Rowe and other CIC executives making many trips to the Netherlands to meet with university officials, business leaders, and even the king. CIC already has a managing director in place in Rotterdam and partnerships with universities and economic development groups. It has agreements with two large Dutch companies to rent space, though Rowe said he couldn’t yet name them, and is talking with a number of startups. CIC plans a soft opening this fall and an official grand opening in early 2016. CIC’s expansion probably won’t stop there, Rowe said. He said he’s in “fairly advanced” talks about another startup hub in the United States, and “early” talks about other international locations. “There’s kind of a renaissance of startup activity globally,” he said. “It’s just the right time for us to be doing this.”

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Cambridge Innovation Center expands to Rotterdam

The Cambridge Innovation Center startup hub will announce Tuesday its first international expansion, a 140,000 square-foot office in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam that could eventually house up to 500 companies. CIC founder and chief executive Rowe said the expansion is a natural — though big — step for an organization that prides itself on helping entrepreneurs with ideas create new products

20150824024945

Hedge funds are playing with fire as they turn short on Nikkei futures for the first time in two years, according to one analyst, noting Japan's public pension fund is ready to buy the dip. "Shorting the Nikkei can be risky because the government pension fund and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) are effectively providing a floor to prices," said BNP Paribas Chief Japan Equity Strategist Shun Maruyama. "It's a very dangerous strategy for the hedge funds." Hedge funds had been long Nikkei futures for two years and helped fuel a near 60 percent rally, but that changed in January. "Doubts about the huge Bank of Japan injections led hedge funds to turn net short," Societe Generale equity strategist Arthur van Slooten said in a note last week. The Nikkei rallied 13 percent in November, boosted by two events in late October: additional monetary easing by the BOJ and an announcement by the Government Pension Investment Fund of Japan (GPIF) – the world's largest public pension fund – that it would double its Japanese stock holdings. The rally stalled, however, with the Nikkei currently down 1.6 percent from its most recent peak on December 8. Foreign investors sold 897 billion yen ($7.6 billion) worth of stocks in January alone, Ministry of Finance figures show. The public pension fund, which held assets of 126.6 trillion yen ($1.07 trillion) at the end of fiscal 2013, said on October 31 it would boost its stock holding from 12 percent to 25 percent. In theory, GPIF needs to buy around 1 trillion yen worth of stocks every month for thirteen months to achieve its new allocation target.

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Hedge funds playing with fire shorting the Nikkei

Hedge funds are playing with fire shorting on Nikkei futures, said one analyst, noting Japan’s public pension fund is ready to buy the dip.

20150825164025

"Across the board, bookings are strong particularly for cruises and long haul holidays. We believe the changes are likely to be positive but it's all moving in same direction. People are living longer, healthier and wealthier lives. It's therefore incredibly difficult to dis-aggregate this generational trend from this particular change but our estimates that an extra £1.5 billion will be released this year alone as a result of the changes and our research shows that 8 percent of those releasing money from pensions would use some of that money for a holiday," a spokesperson from Saga said. At the same time, capacity in the cruise industry has ballooned, with two of the largest cruise ships ever built for British holidaymakers, P&O Cruises Britannia and Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas, arriving in British waters. The Britannia, named by the Queen last month carries over 3,600 passengers and set off on her maiden voyage last month, while the next-generation Royal Caribbean cruise ships launching this month will hold 4,180-passengers, with 2,090 cabins. Along with cruises and package holidays, investment in property is also set to get a boost, with help-to-buy properties an attractive option for savers according to Brian Hilliard, chief UK economist at Societe Generale. Read MoreCruising's new frontier: Chinese tourists "It is going to give a boost to consumption, that's clear, and it may give a boost to investment, if we are worried about a risk it's that people are going to go out on a spending spree in consumer goods," he said. "If they are going to buy something in investment, buy-to-let, classic cars whatever it may be, that is less of a concern. It could certainly help buy-to-let, that is one obvious area," he added. Saga also surveyed more than 10,000 savers over 50, and while some may be willing to treat themselves a little early, a huge majority wanted to hang onto to their savings "By far the greatest response to the survey was those saying that they wanted to secure the best financial income they could for their retirement," Saga Group said Interestingly the Lamborghini salesmen who were rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of getting their hands on this wealth might be a little disappointed as in our survey of more than 10,000 over 50s, only 54 said they planned to splash the cash!"

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Cruises, property set for UK silver spending spree

Cruise and holiday groups, along with buy-to-let property are just some of the sectors set for a boost this year, following new U.K. pension rules.

20150916121334

Lucian Freud was a fundamentalist in his belief that thoughts of the artist should never be allowed to interfere with their art. They should appear "no more than God in nature", he once wrote. So it was probably as well that he seldom gave interviews, because there was certainly a lot to talk about. Freud was famously gregarious, and loved the good life, including expensive food and cars. (His regular table at the Wolseley was said to be set with a black cloth last night.) And "it is thought", in the cautious words of this BBC profile, that he fathered "dozens" of children. The legends about his ramshackle (some would say disgusting) studio were also true – as you can see from the dirt and paint that cakes the walls in this extract from Tim Meara's film Small Gestures in Bare Rooms. For a fuller profile, the best film available online is Jake Auerbach's Portraits (2004), made up of interviews with his friends and family. Part one includes, among other things, the memory of his friend, the novelist Francis Wyndham, being taken to the River Cafe in Freud's glamorous car. "You know how frightening he can be as a driver," Wyndham says. In the second part, fellow artist David Hockney remembers sitting for Freud, and is full of praise for his work. "I think they're as good portraits as have been done by anybody, actually," he says. The third part is here. Among critics, the London Review of Books art writer Peter Campbell made a superbly detailed study of Freud's technique, following his visit to Tate Britain's 2002 retrospective. There is also this film on YouTube, which is far from slick – indeed it's annoyingly shoddy – but it does give a good summary of Freud's influences and development. The Today programme this morning carried a clutch of interviews, including with Sue Tilley, the subject of several of Freud's portraits. Most notable among them was Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which became the most expensive painting by a living artist ever sold when it was bought for £17m in 2008, reportedly by Roman Abramovic at the instigation of his girlfriend, collector and millionairess Dasha Zhukova. Tilley also spoke in more depth to BBC Breakfast this morning, revealing that the famously protracted process of sitting for Freud was not exaggerated – taking "three days a week for nine months" in her case. "You'd think he was a very serious person," she adds, "but his excitement when he met Kylie Minogue beggared belief." Perhaps his closest literary counterpart, when it came to documenting the grotesque glory of the human body, was John Updike. And maybe it's a fitting way to say goodbye to one of the greatest British painters ever to read this short poem, in which the writer pays tribute to Freud's work.

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Lucian Freud: the best of the web

Leo Benedictus: Following Lucian Freud's death, sitters, critics and fellow artists from Sue Tilley to David Hockney have paid tribute to a great portrait painter … and a 'frightening' driver

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About 15 years ago I did a drawing titled based on studies of how London could grow as a polycentric metropolis with higher degrees of connectivity. This research clarified to me how London could expand eastwards – more or less what is happening now with the Olympic Games as the catalyst.It is very interesting to see it becoming a reality. I think one of the great challenges is the fundamental restructuring away from the "Fordist" paradigm of an industrial mass society towards a society with much greater degrees of complexity and dynamism in people's lives. So hybrid mixed-used buildings have become very interesting. There also needs to be a further shift away from zoning – you live here, work there and play somewhere else. By layering all these uses together, in the same zone, it completely changes the way we look at cities. In 1989 there was no city government planning anything, it was all pretty haphazard. Broadly, No one in 1989 realised the long-term impact of deregulation was going to be so dramatic for the financial sector. There was an assumption of slow decline. Now, we've got the London Plan, which I devised and which came into force in February 2004, which is a strategy through to 2025. Given the length of time it takes to get things done, the only big question mark now is the transport projects like Crossrail – they depend on the outcome of the next general election: whether you get a government who's prepared to back that sort of investment. London might not grow as well as it should, it might not be as environmental a city as it should be, but I don't think anyone's going to see London as a failure. There will be serious talk of bringing back a riverbus service for the Thames. There will be more white ghost-bicycles than any other kind, cycling being compulsory for those who want access to the National Health Service . Privileged lanes for VIP non-participants will have expanded and public lanes shrunk. Tickets will be at a premium for permanent show trials, inquiries into inquiries, after terrorist outrages and botched judicial executions. Film, television and other forms of electronic communication will happen on fingernail-size screens and be without content, other than re-runs of . Locality won't exist, the slab or vertical stack being the universal form. West Ham FC will debate a move into the part-demolished Olympic stadium. The late Ken Livingstone, in computer-generated form, fresh from his triumph in , will be re-elected as mayor. The key thing is that the population of London will have risen to around 9m which is well above its previous highest level, and there will be an even bigger concentration of economic activity than now. London's capacity to attract people from all over the world – rich Americans and Europeans to asylum seekers – will continue. So by 2030 London will be a city that is over 40% overseas-born, even higher than it is now. There will be a similar percentage for the non-white population, so it will be even more cosmopolitan than it is today. In a curious way this cosmpolitan-ness and the tolerance that goes with it becomes a self-reinforcing factor, so it becomes even more attractive to people who are footloose, international and often talented. The skyline will probably have even more towers on it, it will probably be a city which has had to tackle congestion more comprehensively by then. What there will certainly be is a greater number of electric vehicles: by then small, silent electric vehicles will be much greater in number and there will be many fewer noisy, dirty, big vehicles of the kind we accept as normal today. we'll look back on the streets today and wonder how it was possible to tolerate the diesel-driven big vehicles: there'll be pressure to improve the air and environment, that's for sure. There's no evidence thus far of any society getting away from railways, especially when they're all built. The one thing I don't think there will be a move away from is working in city centres, or in the centre of London, but for many years there have been prophets who think that eventually people because of electronic communication will be able to work from home and visit the city centre occasionally; I think that analysis is wrong: partly because many people want to go to work, they enjoy the social element. Outer London, the bit that most people live in but people outside London don't know so well, will benefit: partly as a result of the population growth but also due to the Olympic development in the east. I think the big question is what happens to other parts of London, particularly south London where economic prospects have always been more challenged. Fashion shows becoming live will be increasingly popular - that's going to take off and in twenty year's time should be well-established. It's allowing two things: first it allows the consumer to see it as soon as it hits the catwalk, and then through sites like netaporter.com you can buy the clothes before they get to the shops, so that's changing the whole way people consume fashion and the way they see it. We're seeing the embryonic form of a new medium happening now. People are living their lives through their mobile phones and laptops. In terms of what people will be wearing it depends on which society-changing events you get between now and then. Any form of civil unrest on a large scale or wars, influence fashion. You really have to start looking at politics: what clothes people wear is dependent on what their role in society is. Fashion is unpredictable, as events are. I'd like to see the parameters of what we consider beauty completely enlarged: we're really only presented with one version of how women should look at the moment and that's really quite shocking. I hope that we'll no longer tolerate being shown images of ourselves in such narrow parameters. Food growing in the city will be commonplace: oil shocks and a growing awareness of food security will have encouraged people to grow their own. Rooftops and spare places will be full of vegetables: not, obviously, enough to feed the city but enough to reconnect people to food and make them more resilient and more aware of where food comes from. A much higher percentage of our food will come from farms around London with a lessening of dependency on foreign imports. Oil prices and water shortages will make this essential. We will have electric chargers across the city and electric vehicles will be commonplace. Biking will have increased dramatically – and proper bike super-highways will allow Londoners to commute across the city. Food co-ops will be common and waste will be used for power and not go to landfill. Recycling will be second nature and all homes will have smart meters, both for electricity and water usage. It won't be an age of austerity but it will be an age of watchfulness.

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London 2030: our expert predictions

What will Britain's capital city look like in 20 years' time. What technological, social or environmental changes will most shape our future?

20151001181129

Nichy Loh | TAS | Getty Images Taylor Swift performs at Singapore Indoor Stadium on June 9, 2014 in Singapore. The numbers don't lie. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, music industry revenue totaled $15 billion in 2003 and that figure fell by more than half to only $7 billion by 2013. When looking specifically at the number of albums sold, Nielsen SoundScan reports that the U.S. is selling 30 million fewer albums than just two years ago, now at nearly 121 million albums. This trend is also being seen with U.S. digital album sales, which saw a decline of nearly 16 million to 113 million units in just the last year. What's keeping the industry barely afloat is music streaming. According to the Nielsen SoundScan 2014 mid-year report, music streaming for the first half of 2014 saw a 42% increase compared to last year, but that growth isn't enough to offset the decline in physical and digital CD sales. Rolling Stone contributor and former Editor-in-Chief of both VIBE and Spin magazines Alan Light disagrees that it's all doom and gloom for the music biz. One bright spot he points to in the Nielsen SoundScan report is that vinyl sales are up 40% since last year. "What we've seen is fans will pay for stuff whether it's Jack White's record club or Nine Inch Nails doing limited releases," remarked Light. "Albums at this point need to be souvenirs. They need to be experiental. We see it now with the phenomenon around 'Frozen.' This is selling albums through the roof because kids want to retain that relationship, sing the songs over and over, have that souvenir." Technology's impact won't stop at just disrupting the music industry's business model. Light reveals you can also expect it to change what you listen to. "The Shuffle generation is coming of age. You see the DJ Avicii has a huge hit with a country singer," Light said. "Country and hip hop are fusing, and that's what country radio sounds like now. I think we now have kids who've grown up listening to lots of things, and that should be good for where the music itself develops."

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Did Taylor Swift’s op-ed hit a flat note?

The 24-year-old stood up for the future of music in her op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, saying he believes there's still value in albums

20151003142853

Networking giant Cisco Systems reported its first quarter with CEO Chuck Robbins at the helm, since the retirement of longtime CEO John Chambers. And while the stock has been stalled recently, Cramer thinks that the company is moving in the right direction. Cisco reported a 3-cent earnings beat from a 56-cent basis, with higher-than-expected revenues and strong guidance for the next quarter. The company continues to move into high-growth areas such as cybersecurity and the Internet of things, while removing itself from low-margin businesses such as their set-top-box division, which it sold for about $600 million in July. To find out what could be in the pipeline for Cisco, Cramer spoke with Robbins. The new CEO stated that he sees a strong future ahead in the area of cybersecurity, an area that Cramer considers to be the fastest growing group of any business on Earth. The CEO considers cybersecurity to be a top priority in the face of a world that is connecting everything. "We think that security is a tremendous play for us, and we will use all of our leverage for innovation to actually build out that architecture," Robbins said. Read More Cisco CEO: Cybersecurity acquisitions are coming Last week, Cramer said that while he likes the concept of natural pet food as an interesting play on the health-conscious consumer, the stocks seemed too expensive. But now he wonders if Freshpet, which makes refrigerated food for cats and dogs, has finally bottomed. After it peaked at $25 in April, it was slammed down to $14 on Wednesday. The company reported its quarterly results on Tuesday, and investors took the stock to the woodshed on the assumption that it was disappointing. Clearly, the initial reaction was way too negative, as the stock mounted a magnificent reversal since then. Will the bears finally back off, and let Freshpet soar? To find out more, Cramer spoke with CEO Richard Thompson. The CEO assured Cramer that the company would become profitable, because it is a growth company. "We are disrupting a $25 billion category with innovation. And with that innovation we are taking big market share, from our standpoint, in this big category with fresh, all natural food with no preservatives," Thompson said. In the Lightning Round, Cramer gave his take on a few caller favorite stocks: Timken Co: "Tough to own that group.Just tough to own right now. The industrials, like that company, are not the place to be. I wish I could be contrarian, but I will go only for Newcor." Taser International: "The stock really ran up, I think it's a terrific long-term situation. I am not going against Taser, I'm going with Taser." Read MoreLightning Round: A terrific long-term play

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Cramer Remix: This US stock is a winner

“Mad money” host Jim Cramer makes a call on China’s currency devaluation and which U.S. stocks can still win.

20151009020410

Russia and the United States are expected to take part in Syria peace talks in October, along with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, Russia's deputy foreign minister says. A meeting of an international contact group of the "most influential outside players" will "be pushed forward to October after the UN General Assembly," deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov said, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency. "We have named the participants: Russia, the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt," Bogdanov said, adding that others could also be invited. Russia wants the talks to happen "as quickly as possible," he added. Bogdanov said the makeup of the contact group had not yet been decided but could include the countries' foreign ministers. "The level hasn't been decided yet. I think it will be working at multiple levels: experts, deputy ministers and ministers if necessary." He said the group would meet after the formation of four working groups on Syria in Geneva and would work together with the UN's envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura. "Naturally, here it is very important to work in conjunction with the United Nations, with de Mistura," he said. De Mistura has said he hoped the working groups, which will involve Syrians, could lay the ground for the country's warring factions to find a political solution to the conflict. Vladimir Putin has sent troops and aircraft to war-torn Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Putin is calling for a new coalition to fight the Islamic State jihadists who have seized swathes of Syria and Iraq that would include Russian forces and Assad's regime. Putin is set to make a major speech at the UN General Assembly in New York later on Monday, before holding his first official meeting with US President Barack Obama in over two years. Do you have any news photos or videos?

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Russia, US to hold Syria talks in October

Russia, the US, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran are expected to take part in Syria peace talks in October, Russia's deputy foreign minister says.

20151009112343

Stan Honda | AFP | Getty Images The Aston Martin DB5 driven by actor Sean Connery as James Bond in the films "Goldfinger" and "Thunderball" is on display, Sept. 14, 2010, at Sotheby's in New York. Aston Martin vehicles have been featured in 11 of the 23 current films, according to the company, and the upcoming "Spectre" will mark the car's twelfth appearance. The Aston Martin DB5 turned heads in several Bond films including "Thunderball," "Casino Royale," and "Skyfall." The DB5 was released three months prior to the filming of "Goldfing,er" and sported an array of gadgets: including machine guns, smoke screen, tire slashers, and an ejector seat. According to National Auto Dealers Association (NADA), a used 1963 DB5 can now be sold for as much as $711,100 depending on its condition. Aston Martin's 1968 DBS from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" was driven by George Lazenby, the second actor to play the British secret agent with a license to kill. When it was released, that model sold for $16,850, but could sell for upwards of $115,000 today. Read MoreHow Uber's $40 billion could become a problem "The Living Daylights" introduced audiences to Timothy Dalton in the role of James Bond, and the 1985 Aston Martin V8. The car's original manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) was $96,000, and its retail value remains relatively unchanged with some auctions selling the vehicle for around $100,000. The 2002 Aston Martin V12 Vanquish, which appears in Pierce Brosnan's "Die Another Day," had a sticker price of $228,000, but has depreciated quite a bit since its release. The model now has an average retail price of $75,500.

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License to drive: James Bond gets a new car you can't buy

Director Sam Mendes worked with engineers and designers from Aston Martin to create a vehicle specifically for the new film.

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LONDON/VIENNA, Sept 16 (Reuters) - OPEC's new medium-term forecasts point to higher demand for the group's oil, OPEC delegates said, a sign that its strategy of letting prices fall is discouraging supplies from competing producers. The forecasts, to be published in OPEC's World Oil Outlook later this year, are expected to be discussed on Thursday during the second day of a meeting of OPEC's national representatives taking place at its Vienna headquarters. "The new medium-term numbers show a higher demand for OPEC crude," said one OPEC delegate, who added that oil prices are assumed to be lower than previously. "There is an impact on higher-cost producers." OPEC's 2014 World Oil Outlook expected demand for its oil to fall to 28.50 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2016 from 30 million bpd in 2014 and assumed oil prices at around $110 a barrel to 2020 - more than double the current level. The exact 2015 figures could still be revised following feedback from the national representatives, who are technical experts and do not set the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' output policy. OPEC's new outlook is being prepared after the group's historic policy shift of November 2014 to not support prices by cutting output, in order to defend market share against U.S. shale oil and other higher-cost supply sources. The shift, led by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, has proved controversial within OPEC as oil prices have more than halved from above $100 in June 2014, hurting the economies of less wealthy members such as Venezuela. Venezuela has been calling for output cuts to prop up prices and President Nicolas Maduro said on Tuesday he would travel shortly to seek support for his push for a summit between OPEC and non-OPEC producers. But the new higher demand forecasts would appear to support the view of the Gulf members that a period of lower prices would curb competing supplies, leading to an extra need for OPEC crude in the longer term. OPEC's next ministerial meeting to decide policy is on Dec. 4 in Vienna.

http://web.archive.org/web/20151013053124id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/16/reuters-america-opecs-new-medium-term-forecasts-show-higher-demand-for-its-oil-delegates.html

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OPEC's new medium-term forecasts show higher demand for its oil -delegates

LONDON/ VIENNA, Sept 16- OPEC's new medium-term forecasts point to higher demand for the group's oil, OPEC delegates said, a sign that its strategy of letting prices fall is discouraging supplies from competing producers. The forecasts, to be published in OPEC's World Oil Outlook later this year, are expected to be discussed on Thursday during the second day of a...

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Federal law limits responsibility for unauthorized credit card charges to $50. Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express have "zero liability" policies, so you'll never lose a penny to credit card fraud. (Read more: 4 tips for avoiding holiday-related identity theft) With debit cards, your maximum liability is $50, if you notify the bank within two days. After that it jumps to $500. You could lose all the money thatwas stolen from your checking account if you fail to report the fraud within 60 days of getting your bank statement. Visa and MasterCard promise "zero liability" on the debit card transactions they handle if the customer chooses to sign for the transaction rather than use a PIN. Even so, the missing money doesn't go back into your account instantaneously. "Your money could be legally missing from your account for as much as two weeks while the bank investigates and decides whether to reimburse you," noted Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the advocacy group U.S. PIRG. "During that time you may not be able to pay your rent or mortgage or buy anything with your debit card." So why have a debit card? Some people don't qualify for a credit card. Others use them to stick to their budget, since you can't spend more than you have in your checking account. "Debit cards are fine, right up to the point where they get stolen, and then they're no longer fine," Ulzheimer said. "In my mind, if you qualify for a credit card and have the willpower not to run up a massive amount of credit card debt, then credit cards are a safer alternative." Note: After the Target breach, a few banks took the unprecedented step of limiting how much customers could spend at stores or withdraw from ATMs using their debit cards. No such restrictions were put on credit card customers. 2. Free credit monitoring is nice, but it won't protect Target victims We've come to expect free credit after a breach. It's a way for the company to show they care about us. Credit monitoring can be a useful fraud-fighting tool if someone steals your identifying information, such as date of birth, account passwords or Social Security numbers. That did not happen in this case. (Read more: Chart of the Day: Target's image takes a beating) "To be honest with you, it's worthless in this situation," Pascual said. "I think it created a false sense of security, which is unfair and probably wasn't the best way to go about helping people." That's because the fraudulent use of your credit card does not trigger an alert on your credit report. And debit card transactions aren't even reported to the credit bureaus. 3. A security freeze won't protect you in this sort of breach A lot of "experts" advised victims of the Target breach to put a security freeze on their credit report. When Social Security numbers are stolen, a credit freeze is the smart thing to do. It prevents an identity thief from opening new accounts in your name. But that did not happen in this case. "A security freeze doesn't make any sense as a way to respond to this data breach," said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). "That's something you typically do after you spot obvious signs of financial fraud." A freeze prevents lenders from accessing your credit report to process a new loan or credit card application. It does not prevent fraud on an existing account. It will not stop a crook from using a stolen account number to shop online or clone a new debit or credit card to use at the store. A credit freeze is a smart thing to do when Social Security numbers are stolen because it prevents a thief from opening new accounts in your name. 4. Should you change the PIN number on your debit card? Target confirmed Friday that encrypted PINs were stolen in the breach, though it said the "key" necessary to decrypt data is not within its system and could not have been taken during the breach. Changing your PIN will prevent a stolen debit card number from being used to withdraw cash at an ATM, but it won't stop a crook from using it to buy things. Debit cards can be used without a PIN at most stores. To be completely safe, you'll need to ask the bank to issue you a new card number. 5. Is it safer to choose "credit" over "debit" when you use a debit card? When you swipe your debit card, you're asked to choose "debit" or "credit." I've heard it suggested that if you hit "credit" you are then making a credit card transaction. That's not true. "There is nothing you can do to turn that debit card into a credit card, even if the card has the Visa or MasterCard logo on it," said Bill Hardekopf, CEO and founder of LowCards.com. What you are doing is choosing how that transaction is processed. Does it require a PIN or just a signature to pull that money out of your checking account? "You're just as vulnerable to a hacker," said Brian Krebs, who broke the Target breach story on his KrebsOnSecurity blog. "Nothing magically happens if you push credit instead of debit that makes it any harder for someone to steal your card information. It's all still ones and zeros on a magnetic strip." Debit cards are not going to go away. People like them. Banks encourage us to use them. Consumer groups want Congress to guarantee more fraud protection for debit cardholders. "We would like to see the liability for debit cards capped at $50—just like credit cards," said Linda Sherry, director of national priorities at the advocacy group Consumer Action. "We'd like to see a higher standard of protection for debit cards enshrined in law, not just in the voluntary 'zero liability' programs offered by card issuers." The nation's bankers oppose any change in the law. And quite frankly, it's unlikely Congress will do anything. That means you need to take steps to protect yourself. Best practices for anyone with a credit or debit card The best way to take responsibility for your financial security is to go online a couple of times a month to check your credit card and checking account statement. Look for any unauthorized charges and report them right away. Don't wait for your end of the month statement. Take advantage of financial alerts, if available, on your accounts that can give you a heads-up to a possible problem. (Read more: Banks could sue over Target card data breach) If you get a notification in the mail that your debit or credit card accounts have been breached, respond immediately, because the risk is real. Javelin's data show that people who were notified of a card breach this past year had a 28 percent chance of being the victim of card fraud. Beware of email alerts that ask you to provide your personal information. Target is not doing this, and no company would. These bogus alerts are from identity thieves. "These attacks are affecting retailers of all sizes, and they are going to continue to happen," Pascual said. "Consumers need to remain vigilant and take advantage of any opportunity they have to monitor their accounts and protect themselves." —By CNBC contributor Herb Weisbaum. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter @TheConsumerman or visit The ConsumerMan website.

http://web.archive.org/web/20151030034514id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/27/5-lessons-learned-from-the-target-security-breach.html

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5 lessons learned from the Target security breach

The theft of 40 million credit and debit card records from Target sure got our attention—and maybe that's good. Here are five lessons learned.

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Coffee. It’s the only thing that gets some of us out of bed in the morning. It fuels the world’s workforce, with more than 1.3bn cups consumed around the world every day according to coffee researchers Allegra Strategies. More than 1.3bn cups are consumed around the world every day Yet unlike wine sommeliers, the baristas making and serving your skinny, frothy, cappuccino or latte haven’t always been taken seriously. Working in the coffee industry has been thought of as an in-between job, something you’d do to get you through college or help bolster the sporadic income from an acting career. For decades, working in coffee was a stopgap on the way to another, more important career goal. Things however are changing. It’s a huge business - Allegra has calculated that cups drunk out of the home account for sales of around $60bn -$80bn per year globally and the coffee industry is now considered a viable career option in itself. Speciality coffee shops employ workers who are passionate about their trade and see it as an end in itself, not a route to their dream career. Poke your head into a fancy coffee joint in New York, Sydney or Singapore and the chances are you’ll be served by someone who waxes lyrical about their latest beans in the same way as a craft brewer eulogises on a favourite ale. You’ll be served by someone who waxes lyrical about their latest beans You won’t be earning an investment banker’s salary. In 2014 the Speciality Coffee Association of America found that, on average, baristas in speciality coffee shops in the US earned $22,000 a year basic salary. With an industry certification this salary rose to $24,500. Make the next step to become a roaster and you can expect on average $38,000, rising to nearly $40,000 with a certification. Baristas can also use their expertise to get a well-paid job in equipment sales and product sourcing. Globally there are 40,000 professional baristas according to coffee research specialists, Allegra Strategies. Throw senior chain store baristas and senior brewers into the mix and the number swells to 200,000 in the US alone. Big chains such as Starbucks still account for the majority of coffee shops – a staggering 45,000 worldwide including 22,000 outlets but there are a sizeable number of independents; around 1,200 in the US and 450 in the UK. London, for its part, is an independent coffee shop hot spot. In the heart of Fitzrovia, a trendy, enclave north of the frenetic hub, Oxford Street is a plethora of high-end joints so certain of their value to espresso drinkers that the presence of coffee behemoths seemingly on every street corner, doesn’t worry them. “If a rival opens five doors down, it makes us focus even more on what we offer,” said Peter Dore-Smith, owner of coffee shop, Kaffeine. “We need to make sure our coffee, our food, our service, our atmosphere make our place somewhere people want to hang out.” It’s that go-getting attitude that marks out small independent outlets as the industry pioneers. Among the big drivers of the rise of ‘barista craft’ worldwide are international coffee competitions. In 2000 the inaugural World Barista Championships were held in Monte Carlo and since then it’s spawned a host of other events globally. Gareth Jones is the manager of the Fitzrovia branch of Workshop Coffee, a small chain. He takes his job and the chance to show off his skills in competitions, very seriously. But whilst winning is a bonus, the taking part is, in some ways, more important “Baristas from around the world can get together, discuss ideas and move the industry forward. Competitions push you to improve, raise the quality and focus on the finer details.” Taking the job seriously also brings financial rewards. Gareth earns around £25,000 ($37,000) a year and down the road, Claire Brice manager of Kaffeine boasts a salary of £32,000 ($48,000). Winning one of the big competitions can also mean thousands of dollars in equipment, trips abroad and of course the prestige of being the best. It’s this change in attitude and expectation which has helped elevate the barista trade from a fill-in job for college students to a caffeine-fuelled career. Do you have what it takes to be a coffee hot shot? Click on the arrow above as BBC Capital checks out London’s barista scene. To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

http://web.archive.org/web/20151113112202id_/http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20151109-how-to-turn-coffee-love-into-a-career

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How to turn coffee love into a career

Wake up and smell the java. If you think you’re a coffee hot-shot, wait until you meet the people turning the morning cuppa into a career.

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To some, he is verging on a saint and martyr, singlehandedly standing against the forces of Chinese political repression. For others he is a canny manipulator, utterly in control of his reputation and place in the art world and market. For others still, he is all these things: an artist who outdoes even Andy Warhol in his ubiquity, his nimbleness at self-promotion and his use of every medium at his disposal to promulgate his work and his activism. Whatever your views on the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, one thing is clear: he is everywhere, from the Hampstead theatre in London, where Howard Brenton's play about the 81 days Ai spent in detention in 2011 is underway, to the web, where his the video for his heavy metal song Dumbass is circulating, to the Venice Biennale, where not one but three of his large-scale works are on display – perhaps the most exposure for any single artist at the international festival. One of the works, Bang, a forest of hundreds of tangled wooden stools, is the most prominent piece in the German national pavilion. Then, in the Zuecca Project Space on the island of Giudecca, is his installation Straight: 150 tons of crushed rebar from schools flattened in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, recovered by the artist and his team, who bought the crumpled steel rods as scrap before painstakingly straightening them and piling them up in a wave-like sculptural arrangement. By far the most revealing about Ai's own experience, though, is the third piece, SACRED. Situated in the church of Sant'Antonin, it consists of six large iron boxes, into which visitors can peek to see sculptures recreating scenes from the artist's detention. Here is a miniature Ai being interrogated; here a miniature Ai showers or sits on the lavatory while two uniformed guards stand over him. Other scenes show him sleeping and eating – always in the same tiny space, always under double guard. (The music video refers to some of these scenes with a lightly satirical tone that is absent from the sculpture.) According to Greg Hilty of London's Lisson Gallery, under whose auspices SACRED is being shown, and who saw Ai in China a week ago, the work is a form of "therapy or exorcism – it was something he had to get out. It is an experience that we might see as newsworthy, but for him, he was the one in it." The uncanny hyperreality of the installation speaks of the fact that, according to the project's curator, Maurizio Bortolotti, "the experience made him fix all the details like a nightmare". For 81 days, said Hilty, he had nothing to do (aside from his periods being questioned) but memorise the minutest details of the tiny, featureless room in which he was kept. The outside of the metal boxes is entirely blank – Ai was brought there hooded. The only detail of the cell's exterior he observed was on his release, when he saw the number on the door: 1135. The ecclesiastical setting, the title of the work, the appearance of the metal crates (which might resemble a reliquary or saint's coffin) suggest that Ai is positioning himself as a martyr. According to Hilty, however, "He is not pretending to be a saint, but the setting does suggest things such as the stations of the cross, or the temptations of St Anthony, to whom the church is dedicated. But these are human, universal things that go beyond Ai Weiwei … he's not saying he's a saint, or that he is wholly right or good. He's just being honest. "There is a reflex among artworld people that if he is strong as an activist you can't see him as an artist," Hilty added. "But Ai shows a remarkable knack for working in different registers." The sculpture at the Venice Biennale should be seen as entirely different from the pop video, the blogging, the activism and the rest, Hilty suggested. "He could be dismissed as a polemicist, an activist. But I hope people see these works and recognise that he can do all that and also step back and make art with profundity."

http://web.archive.org/web/20160204230618id_/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/may/30/ai-weiwei-venice-biennale/amp

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Ai Weiwei shows Venice Biennale his many sides

The three large-scale works on display – including horrifying mockups of his 2011 detention – show the artist and activist working confidently in a number of registers, writes Charlotte Higgins

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This is especially true for Democratic senators such as Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina facing tough re-election battles next year in states Obama lost. A group of these vulnerable Democratic senators recently signed a letter to embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking that the March 31st open enrollment deadline for Obamacare get pushed back. Republicans in the House, meanwhile, may seek to increase the pressure this week by again voting to delay the mandate for individuals to buy insurance or face a tax penalty. Calls for an individual mandate delay, fiercely opposed by the administration, will likely becoming overwhelming if the federal website is not functioning seamlessly by Dec. 1. Even if the mandate is delayed, the millions of young, healthy and currently uninsured people the law depends on to make the economics work could ultimately decide paying the penalty is better than buying insurance. That could spark a "death spiral" for the law, an outcome that would be devastating for the Obama presidency and Democrats hopes in 2014 and beyond. The hearings begin on Tuesday but the main event comes Wednesday when Sebelius squares off against Republicans at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. Obama speaks on the health care law the same day at Faneuil Hall in Boston, the place then-Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006 signed the Massachusetts law cited as the model for Obamacare. ALSO IN WASHINGTON THIS WEEK – The House-Senate budget conference begins Wednesday at 10 a.m. EDT with a meeting that should be little more than a photo-op and a chance for the 29 members to speechify on their priorities. No one in D.C. holds out much hope that the conference will produce any kind of "grand bargain" on spending, tax reform and entitlements. There is some hope they could find a smaller bargain that replaces the 2014 sequester cuts with longer term entitlement changes. But that's also difficult in that Democrats won't agree to Social Security or Medicare cuts without significant additional tax revenues that Republicans view as impossible. The chances still seem greater that the committee fails and a much smaller group must cut another temporary deal to keep the government open and raise the debt ceiling again nearly next year. — By Ben White, POLITICO's chief economic correspondent and a CNBC contributor. White also authors the daily tip sheet POLITICO Morning Money [politico.com/morningmoney] Follow him onTwitter @morningmoneyben.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160210061953id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/28/its-crisis-time-for-obamacare.html

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It's crisis time for Obamacare

Even if the website gets fixed by the end of November, as the White House promises, potentially bigger problems lie ahead.

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With the event focusing on banking ethics, Welby suggested that the program could be used for financial hopefuls before they enter the City of London or Wall Street. However, he did add that it would also be available for those interested in government roles, the armed forces and the Church itself. There was little information on who would be signing up to this scheme and whether any person or company had already shown an interest. A video on the Church's website said that the group would be available to people from the 44 countries and 38 provinces that make up the Anglican Communion, but also would extend to form an "ecumenical" group from all cultures. The reputation of financial services and banking has been through the wars in recent years following the crash of 2008. Risk-taking has been frowned upon as regulators have been busy stepping up their efforts to ensure a repeat episode doesn't play out. In the U.K., high profile banks have been on the receiving end of heavy fines for the miss-selling of financial products to customers. Read MoreShould bankers swear an oath to God? In January, a yearly survey of 27,000 people from 27 countries by the public relations firm Edelman found that banks and financial services were the least trusted sectors. Welby worked in the oil industry in the 1980s and became a group treasurer of a large British exploration and production company. On Sunday, he recalled his life of derivatives trading and futures contracts but said that it was at odds with the definition of what ethics should be about. Rather than results and rewards, he said that ethics should be about what you do as a "virtuous person", and predicted a future of overregulation if the industry didn't change itself. His comments match those of other global faith leaders who have spoken directly to the industry. In January ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Pope Francis asked business leaders to put their wealth at the service of humanity and aids they had a responsibility towards others, particularly the most frail, weak and vulnerable.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160318022932id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/13/bankers-asked-to-swap-profit-for-prayer.html

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Bankers asked to swap profit for prayer

Bright young professionals from the banking industry have been asked to attend a year-long course run by the Anglican Church.

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Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez has been hit with a 162-game suspension from arbitrator Frederic Horowitz, effectively ruling him out for the entire 2014 season. The suspension also covers the postseason. Rodriguez originally received a 211-game suspension from MLB in August due to his alleged ties to Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic in South Florida which supplied performance-enhancing drugs. A number of high-profile players were suspended for their involvement in the scandal, including Ryan Braun, Nelson Cruz, and Jhonny Peralta, but Rodriguez received the biggest penalty of them all, allegedly for interfering with MLB's investigation. (Read more: Elite athletes born all 'roided up: Data on books) While the other players connected to Biogenesis immediately accepted their suspensions, Rodriguez appealed and was able to finish out the season. Following a contentious arbitration process, Horowitz did not uphold the original ban, but this should be considered a major victory for MLB and commissioner Bud Selig. It is still the longest suspension under MLB's Joint Drug Prevention & Treatment Program. Guillermo Mota previously received a 100-game suspension in 2012. The other big winner today, at least from a financial perspective, is the Yankees, who will no longer have Rodriguez's salary ($25 million) on the books for the 2014 season. They have a very good chance to keep their payroll under $189 million even if they sign Japanese right-hander Masahiro Tanaka. (Read more: Firms show off gadgets for drivers, parents, athletes) Below is a statement from Alex Rodriguez, who intends to take his fight against MLB to federal court: "The number of games sadly comes as no surprise, as the deck has been stacked against me from day one. This is one man's decision, that was not put before a fair and impartial jury, does not involve me having failed a single drug test, is at odds with the facts and is inconsistent with the terms of the Joint Drug Agreement and the Basic Agreement, and relies on testimony and documents that would never have been allowed in any court in the United States because they are false and wholly unreliable. This injustice is MLB's first step toward abolishing guaranteed contracts in the 2016 bargaining round, instituting lifetime bans for single violations of drug policy, and further insulating its corrupt investigative program from any variety defense by accused players, or any variety of objective review. I have been clear that I did not use performance enhancing substances as alleged in the notice of discipline, or violate the Basic Agreement or the Joint Drug Agreement in any manner, and in order to prove it I will take this fight to federal court. I am confident that when a Federal Judge reviews the entirety of the record, the hearsay testimony of a criminal whose own records demonstrate that he dealt drugs to minors, and the lack of credible evidence put forth by MLB, that the judge will find that the panel blatantly disregarded the law and facts, and will overturn the suspension. No player should have to go through what I have been dealing with, and I am exhausting all options to ensure not only that I get justice, but that players' contracts and rights are protected through the next round of bargaining, and that the MLB investigation and arbitration process cannot be used against others in the future the way it is currently being used to unjustly punish me.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160318025749id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2014/01/11/ny-yankees-alex-rodriguez-suspended-from-pro-baseball-for-entire-2014-season.html

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NY Yankees' Alex Rodriguez suspended from pro baseball for entire 2014 season

The 162-game suspension is the longest in baseball history for doping, but shorter than the original 211-game suspension originally sought.

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There is no question the United States has achieved a moral victory by finding and killing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. More practically, the implications relating to geopolitical risk are much less certain. While some would argue that killing the head of al Qaeda is a positive development, there is also a credible case to be made that this action could potentially accelerate terrorist activity if bin Laden is perceived as a martyr by his brethren. In assessing the impact of the death of bin Laden, it is important to note that he has been on the run from U.S. Special Forces for almost a decade. While figuratively bin Laden remained the head of al Qaeda, there is no doubt that being on the run reduced his effectiveness from an operational leadership perspective. With the entire CIA looking for him and a massive award on his head, bin Laden realistically didn’t have the capability to micro manage al Qaeda operations. Therefore it is unlikely that the killing of bin Laden will dramatically reduce the threat from al Qaeda in the short term. Stepping back for a moment, it is also important to note that the very nature and organization of al Qaeda remains very much in question. There are some analysts that question whether al Qaeda is as organized as is often portrayed by the press. In fact, as Marc Sagemen, a former CIA agent based in Islamabad, and author of Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, wrote: “There is no umbrella organization. We like to create a mythical entity called al-Qaeda in our minds, but that is not the reality we are dealing with.” This is a controversial position and is widely disputed, but the reality is that al Qaeda is most certainly not organized akin to a Western criminal organization with specific command and control functions. To this point, as of 2004, it was estimated that almost two-thirds of the senior leadership of al Qaeda had either been captured or killed. If this were a typical American crime family, it would be safe to assume the family would be out of business. This has not been the case for al Qeada. In fact, the July 2005 London bombings purportedly occurred without specific leadership from abroad. Conversely, the 2009 plot by three Londoners to detonate seven bombs on airliners bound for North America was tied directly to al Qaeda. These actions suggest that al Qaeda is alive and well despite this loss of “leadership.” While al Qaeda, as led by bin Laden, may have once provided funding or training for some of these groups, currently many them, as characterized by the 2005 London bombings, likely work largely independently. In fact, while bin Laden had at one time bankrolled al Qaeda, his ability over the past decade to do so was limited by the fact that he was cut off from the family fortune; and even if he still had some independent wealth, moving those funds would have likely given U.S. operatives information as to his whereabouts. Conceptually, bin Laden’s key role over the past decade seemed to have been to fan the flames of discord against the United States, and the Western world generally. In this effort, he was certainly successful and the al Qaeda network will likely need to fill this vacuum. Ultimately, the real legacy of bin Laden is the hundreds of thousands of operatives that have been trained in al Qaeda terrorist camps. In fact, Gary Bernsten, a former senior ranking CIA official, and author of Jawbreaker, has estimated this number to be as high as 800,000. Despite the death of bin Laden, this large group of like-minded Islamic terrorists continues to exist. It is also important to note that, based on the evidence, al Qaeda activities are typically planned years in advance of when they are actually intended to occur. Therefore, even if bin Laden were more directly involved in orchestrating broader terrorist activities of the al Qaeda network than we believe he was, it is still not likely that any potential attacks currently in the pipeline would necessarily be thrown off course. The primary example of this process is the September 11th attacks in the United States. According to reports, the idea for these attacks was germinated in 1996 and planning began in 1998, which was a full three years before they occurred. Not surprisingly, equity markets, as a proxy of investors’ propensity to accept more risk, have completely shaken off any potential positive impact of bin Laden’s death. This is partially because of the points outlined above, which suggest that killing bin Laden likely won’t halt terrorist activity in the intermediate term, but also because there is real potential that bin Laden’s death accelerates terrorist activity on the basis of avenging bin Laden. In fact, Hamas started stirring such emotions by stating the following in a press release: “We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.” We certainly won’t suggest that the world is not a better place with the death of bin Laden, but it is not quite clear that is a safer place, or that geopolitical risk premiums should be reset lower as a result. While the head of the serpent has been cut off, the snake is still very much alive.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160615015731id_/http://fortune.com/2011/05/03/in-a-post-osama-world-risk-is-still-high/

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In a post-Osama world, risk is still high

Geopolitical risks remain largely the same as the day before Osama bin Laden was killed, since his legacy – operatives trained by al Qaeda – remains alive and well.

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Idanuwanmu suna kwantsa idan muna barci, to amma mecece kwantsar nan? Kamar yadda Jason G Goldman ya gano, abar tana da amfani fiye da yadda ake dauka. Abu na farko da nake yi idan na tashi daga barci shi ne, na duba wayata na ga tarin abubuwan da yakamata in yi wadanda suka taru a lokacin da nake barci. Abu na biyu kuma shi ne na goge kwantsar da ta taru a gefen idona, da daddaren. Ko ma da wana suna ka kira ta da shi, ka dai san abin da nake nufi da kwantsa. A kullum, ina tunanin abin da wannan aba ta kunsa da kuma dalilin da ya sa take fitowa a idon mutum, saboda haka ne na shiga bincike domin na gano wadannan bayanai. Abu ne da ya fara da hawaye ko kuma ruwan da ke idonmu. Shi ido ko a fuskar mutane ko karnuka ko bushiya ko giwaye duka dai dabbobin da ke shayarwa na tudu (doron kasa, ba na ruwa ba ko na sama),yana cikin gida uku ne na ruwa ko hawaye, ta yadda zai yi aiki sosai. Gida na farko da yake kusa da idon, gida ne da yawanci ya kunshi ruwa mai yauki kamar majina, inda kwayar idon take, kuma ya ke jawo ruwa, wanda hakan ya ke samar da gida na biyu wanda shi kuma na ruwa ne. Shi gida na farkon shi yake tabbatar da rarrabuwar gida na biyu wato ruwa a ido yadda ya kamata, wa to ya ce yawan ruwan da yake a nan shi ne a can. Wannan rukuni na gidajen ido yana da muhimmanci, shi yake tabbatar da idonmu yana da ruwa ta yadda zai iya motsi, shi ne kuma yake wanke duk wani abu da zai kawo wa ido cuta. A karshe kuma sai gida na uku, wanda yake a waje, wanda kuma ya kunshi ruwa mai maiko da sauran abubuwa da suka jibanci mai. Wannan ruwa mai maiko da ke cikin wannan gida na uku ya kasance ne daidai da yadda jikin dabbobi masu shayarwa suke. A lokacin da yake yanayi na daidai da dumin jikin dan-adam, za a gan shi a yanayi na ruwa mai maiko-maiko. Idan kuma ya yi sanyi da akalla lamba daya a ma'aunin digirin Celcius sai ya bushe ya zama busasshiyar kwantsa da muka sani. Wannan busasshiyar kwantsar za ta iyakasancewa a idon mutum da yawanta saboda wasu dalilai. Da farko dai jikin mutum yana dan yin sanyi da dare, saboda haka wannan ruwa yakan yi sanyi ya daskare a wannan lokaci. Na biyu kuma kamar yadda wani likitan ido dan kasar Australiya Robert G. Linton da abokan aikinsa suka ce, ''barci yana sassauta aikin jijiyoyin da ke kai wannan ruwa mai maiko na wannansashe na ido wanda hakan zai iya sa a samu kwararar ruwan da yawa a lokacin barcin wanda hakan yake sa ya kwarara a fatar da ke rufe idi da kuma gashinta. Ba shakka ba wani abin damuwa ba ne mu murtsika idonmu don mu wartsake sosai idan muka tashi daga barci, amma to me ya sa, muke da wanna ruwa mai maiko a da yake zama kwantsarma ? To abu na farko shi ne, wannan ruwa mai maiko shi yake hana hawaye ya rika zuba ba tsayawa daga idonmu, yana kwarara a kumatunmu. Idan muka duba za mu ga ke nan idan hawaye yana ta kwarara daga idonmu zai yi wuya mu iya tafiyar da ayyukanmu na yau da kullum da idonmu ba tare da wahala ba. Ta hanyar hana hawayenmu zuba a ko da yaushe, wannan ruwa mai maiko, yana sa idonmu ya kasance yana da lema a ko da yaushe. Wani bincike ma ya nuna cewa yayin da idanun zomo ya rasa wannan ruwa mai maiko, ruwan idonsa yakan fice ta hanyar tururi da linki 17 kan yadda yake yi a ka'ida Wannan ruwa mai maiko ba shi kadai ba ne yake hana ruwan idanuwanmu bushewa ba. Kifta idanuwan da muke yi ma hakan yana da amfani, saboda wannan 'yar runtsawar da muke yi tana tatso wannan ruwa da hakan ke sa a samu dan karin wannan ruwa mai maiko a idon kari a kan wanda daman yake kwararowa cikin idon. Haka kuma wannan kifta ido da muke yi na taimakawa wajen haduwar shi ruwan mai maiko da ruwan hawayenmu su samar da wani ruwan mai maiko sosai wanda shi kuma yake zama kamar makari ga kwayar idon. Idan ka dade ba ka kifta idonka ba wannan ruwan mai maiko sosai sai ya rabu, domin ruwa da mai ba sa son haduwa, hakan sai ya sa kwayar ido ta kasance ba ta da kariya daga iska. Wanda kuma hakan zai sa ka ji idonka ba dadi, idan kuma abu ya yi tsanani sai ya sa idon shiga wani yanayi da ake cewa busasshen ido. Wani likitan ido na Japan Ekiti Goto, ya bayyana wannan cuta ko yanayi na busasshen ido da wata babbar larura ta rashin hawaye a ido, wadda take shafar miliyoyin mutane a duniya. Bayan bushewar idon, matsalar tana kuma sa gajiyar ido da jan ido da kaikayi sannan kuma mutum ya rika jin idon ya yi masa nauyi, ba kamar yadda ya saba ji ba. A wani lokacin idan yanayin ya yi tsanani yana shafar ganin ido, amma kuma duk da wadannan matsalolin da idon kan gamu da su a wannan yanayi ba a daukar matsalar a matsayin wata babba. Ta hanyar amfani da kayan gwaji na zamani, Goto ya gano cewa a wannan yanayi na bushewar ido, idon yana rasa santsin da yake da shi. Daga nan sai idon ya daina ganin abubuwa tsaf yadda ya kamata, domin hasken da yake shiga idon yana fadawa ne kan wurin da ba shi da santsi saboda haka hoton abin da ido ya kalla ba zai kasance mai kyau ba kamar yadda yake. Haka kuma Goto ya gano cewa mutumin da yake da wannan larura yana kifta biyu linki biyu a kan yadda wanda ba shi da wannan matsala yake yi. A kan haka ya ce yana ganin mai larurar yana yin hakan ne ba tare da ya sani ba, da nufin ganin idaon yanuna masa siffar abin da yake kallo yadda ya kamata. Za ka iya dauka cewa wannan binciken yana kawo wata hanya mai sauki ta maganin wanna larura: ko alama. Ka jarraba kikkifta idonka a ka a kai, yadda za ka iya. Za ka ga hakan ba abu ne mai saukin yi ba a wannan zamani da muke amfani da na'urori iri-iri a ayyukanmu na yau da kullum. Karatu da tuki da rubuta sakonni ko wasika ta wayarmu ta salula da aiki da kwamfuta na sa mu rage kifta idanuwanmu. Wannan na nufin duka wadannan ayyuka da makamantansu suna rage mana yawan yadda muke kifta idanuwanmu. Misali a lokacin da muke tuka mota da gudu musamman idan gudun ya wuce kilomita 100 a sa'a daya muna rage kifta idanuwanmu. Hakan na nufin ganin mutumin da yake da matsalar bushewar ido zai ragu a wannan lokaci, da ba zai cancanci a bashi lasisin tuki ba, domin yawancin karfin ganin mai wannancuta shi ne 0.3, wato kasa da 0.7 da ake bukata mutum ya samu a Japana kafin a ba shi lasisin, a Amurka kuwa 0.5 ne mafi kankanta kafin a baka lasisin tukin mota. Wannan ya nuna cewa wasu marassa lafiyar idon, da ke da larurar bushewar idanu, ba lalle su kasance suna gani da kyau ba a lokacin da suke tuki. Saboda haka daga yanzu idan ka tashi daga barci kuma kagoge duk wannan kwantsar da ke idonka, watakila za ka dan saurara ka yi tunanin amfaninta. Idan kana son karanta wannan da harshen Ingilishi latsa nan Why do we get sleep in our eyes?

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Me ya sa muke barci da ido?

Idanuwanmu suna kwantsa idan muna barci, to amma mecece kwantsar nan? Wani abu da ba mu sani ba shi ne kwantsa tana da matukar muhimmanci a wurinmu.

20160704072747

Actor Jason London, best known for his role as a stoner in 1993's "Dazed and Confused," was arrested Sunday night after a bar fight in Scottsdale, Ariz. The 40-year-old actor's night then took an even worse turn — after police accused him of defecating in his pants in their squad car. But a rep for London tells the News that the actor was in fact a victim of a vicious beatdown by the bouncers at the Martini Ranch bar and produced photos which show the actor hospitalized with a right orbital fracture, severe brusing and a concussion. "It really doesn't matter what led to the incident even if he were being inappropriate," the rep said. "it's not acceptable for bouncers to take him outside and hold him in a headlock and beat him in the face until he was unconscious and then to keep beating him." London faces a long road to recovery, incluing two facial reconstruction surgeries, the source said. "The 40-year-old was taken into police custody after they were called to the Martini Ranch bar and found London there nursing a swollen eye, Reuters reported. According to the police report, the fight started after "an unidentified person complained London had sneezed on him and the person asked him to apologize." "Instead of apologizing, London punched the person," the police report said. "He was escorted out by bouncers and during that time he hit them, leading the security guards to 'defend themselves' against London." A 26-year-old bouncer, whose name was not released, was one of the victims listed. London was charged with assault with intent to injure and disorderly conduct, according to the news agency. PHOTOS: MOST HILARIOUS MUG SHOTS OF ALL TIME An eyewitness on the scene described the actor's behavior as "belligerent" and he started cursing at the paramedics when they tried to help him. Once London was taken away in the police car an officer said they saw him "lean to the left and defecate in his pants." The police report also stated he "showed obvious signs and symptoms of extreme alcohol impairment." London has since taken to Twitter to defend the allegations against him, which were also picked up by the gossip site TMZ. "Guys, the TMZ report is a total f--king lie. I got jumped by three 250 pound bouncers," he wrote Tuesday. "They knocked me out and beat me for several minutes. I would never say or do the crap they are reporting. Have faith in me, the truth will come out and you will see." "Some guy thought I was hitting on his girl and had me jumped. My wife was in the next room, had no idea what even happened," he continued to explain, "I hate Arizona." On mobile? Click for video

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Jason London arrested in Arizona, defecates in police car: cops

Jason London, known for his role as Randall "Pink" Floyd in popular '90s flick "Dazed and Confused" was arrested Sunday night when a bar fight broke out in Scottsdale, Ariz. The 40-year-old was taken into police custody after they were called to the scene at the Martini Ranch bar and found London there nursing a swollen eye, showing his involvement in a bar brawl.

20160708083220

Alex Gibney likes to take on challenges — lots and lots of challenges. The latest are the Stuxnet worm and cyberwarfare. They’re the subject of his new documentary, “Zero Days.” Showing something super-secret and effectively invisible: Now, that’s a challenge. Since winning an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007), about the United States’ use of torture in the war on terrorism, Gibney has averaged more than two documentaries a year. Subjects have included political corruption (“Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” 2010), Julian Assange (“We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” 2013), and two very different kinds of misplaced worship (“Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” and “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine,” both 2015). Gibney’s documentaries may vary wildly in subject matter — don’t forget the ones about Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Lance Armstrong, James Brown, and Frank Sinatra, and the cooking show with Michael Pollan — but they have at least three things in common: seriousness, ambition, and a willingness to push back. That willingness can take two forms: pushing back against subjects who want to deny access and against subject matter that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to visual presentation. In that regard, “Zero Days” is a two-fer. The Stuxnet computer worm was reportedly developed by US and Israeli intelligence services to disrupt Iran’s nuclear efforts. It was insidious and highly effective. To this day, neither the United States nor Israel has officially acknowledged any involvement with Stuxnet. The Oscar-winning director discusses his latest documentary, a cyber warfare exposé. Until the Israelis overreached and altered the Stuxnet code — or so US intelligence-community sources allege in the film — it remained unknown. Gibney starts out by showing how various computer-security types came across Stuxnet and figured out what it was. Kaspersky Lab’s Eugene Kaspersky and Symantec’s Eric Chien and Liam O’Murchu make for excellent talking heads. They know their stuff, scarily so, and talk about it with missionary zeal. This is a world very few of us have familiarity with, which makes it all the more fascinating to learn about. The first half of “Zero Days” (zero day refers to a type of computer vulnerability) is a high-tech espionage thriller, really, and all the more thrilling for the story it tells being real. Gibney handles things with sleek assurance. If some smart person ever gets around to producing a movie of the collected works of William Gibson, Gibney should be a lock for director. Part of the fascination this material holds is that even if we’re not familiar with it specifically, we’ve been exposed to it generally, in the form of hacking. It’s the larger issues relating to cyberwarfare that dominate the second half of “Zero Days.” We hear from such talking heads as David Sanger of The New York Times, and Michael Hayden, former head of both the Central Intelligence and National Security agencies. Larger implications loom. Making the prospect of mutual assured cyber-destruction compelling on screen is a challenge Gibney doesn’t quite meet. That makes the issue no less important, obviously, but it does mean “Zero Days” loses a bit of steam. What may the most ingenious thing about the documentary is Gibney’s treatment of anonymous sources. There’s one NSA staffer in particular — seen in shadow, her voice altered — who’s the real star of “Zero Days.” Her reveal is at once solid journalism and dramatic tour de force. It’s a challenge Gibney meets with ease. Written and directed by Alex Gibney. At Kendall Square. 114 minutes. PG-13 (some strong language)

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In ‘Zero Days,’ Oscar winner Alex Gibney offers fascinating look at cyber-warfare

Gibney examines a world very few of us have familiarity with, which makes it all the more fascinating to learn about.

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CityBase, a Chicago-based startup that makes payment technology for governments, has raised a $6.25 million series B round, the company announced Thursday. Chicago-based venture fund KDWC Ventures — led by William Blair senior executive Dick Kiphart and Talon Asset Management founder Terry Diamond and CEO Bill Wolf — put $4 million into the round, CityBase said. The company, launched in early 2015, aims to create a uniform payment experience for citizens by incorporating all of a city's disparate agencies and departments into a single platform. For example, CityBase powers the online payment portal for Indianapolis and Marion County, which lets users pay traffic tickets or debts. CEO and founder Mike Duffy said CityBase creates websites and mobile applications for cities, as well as self-service kiosks and point-of-sale tablets with customized software. He said CityBase charges its nearly 40 customer cities monthly based on transaction volume. The kiosks, tablets and pay-by-phone services can carry additional fees. Duffy said interacting with city services can be challenging for citizens, who have come to expect online interactions to occur seamlessly based on how they deal with the private sector. CityBase wants to "create the most effective, most pleasurable user experience possible," Duffy said. He also wants to make it easier for cities to communicate better with citizens, by encouraging them to choose whether they prefer to be contacted by phone or email, for example. By creating a connective layer across several city departments, Duffy said CityBase can also help governments get a better sense of who their citizens are, instead of departments maintaining separate profiles on them. He said CityBase never forces citizens to create profiles, though. CityBase employs about 30 people in Chicago, and Duffy said the new funding will go toward doubling the headcount by the end of 2016. He said they'll be hiring to increase CityBase's tech team — including developers, project managers and systems engineers — as well as its support and relationship management groups. The company had previously raised $4 million.

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CityBase, which helps cities collect money, raises $6.25 million Series B

CityBase, a Chicago-based startup that makes payment technology for governments, has raised a $6.25 million series B round, the company announced Thursday.

20160723161036

Vigils have been held across the United States after the deadliest mass shooting in its history targeted a gay nightclub in the state of Florida. At least 49 people died and 53 were wounded in Sunday's shooting in Orlando with the rampage only coming to an end after perpetrator Omar Mateen was shot dead in a gun battle with police officers. "Forty-eight of the 49 victims have been identified. Twenty-four of the next of kin have been notified with more to come," Buddy Dyer, the mayor of Orlando, said on Monday morning. "We will not be defined by the act of a cowardly hater. We will be defined by how we respond, how we treat each other and this community has stepped up to do that," Dyer added. Orlando Police chief John Mina described the shooting as "one of the worst tragedies we have seen", adding that police officers "were shaken by what they have seen inside the club". "It's a tragedy not only for the city but the entire nation," he said. "Just a look into the eyes of our officers told the whole story." The injured, many in critical condition, were transferred to nearby hospitals. Among those injured was one police officer, whose kevlar helmet was hit by a round from the suspect.  The suspect exchanged gunfire with a police officer working at the club, which had more than 300 people inside. The gunman then went back inside and took hostages, Mina said. Who was Orlando shooter Omar Mateen? At around 5am, authorities sent in a SWAT team to rescue the hostages. Ron Hopper, special FBI agent in charge of the Orlando office, confirmed that Mateen was interviewed twice by the agency in 2013, after he made "inflammatory comments" to co-workers alleging possible "terrorist ties". In 2014, authorities interrogated Mateen anew for possible ties to an American suicide bomber. In both cases, the FBI closed the investigations as they turned out to be "inconclusive" at that time, Hopper said.   Hopper also confirmed media reports that Mateen made 911 calls to police early on Sunday, and referred to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL also known as ISIS) group. Late on Sunday, mourners gathered near the target of the attack, the Pulse nightclub, as well as landmarks in other cities. In New York, the Empire State Building went dark to honour the victims, while One Trade Center lit up its spire in the colours of the gay pride flag. READ MORE: Who was Omar Mateen? New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all flags would be flown at half-mast in the city and that security measures have been strengthened, in particular around places associated with the LGBT community. De Blasio told reporters that the shooting, which also left dozens injured, was "against our values". But "you'll see a lot of additional police presence on the streets of the city," he added. "No city in the world is better prepared to stop terror, to stop hate." Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday evening in Greenwich Village to reflect on the violence and leave flowers, candles and letters beside a sign reading "Stop Hate". Earlier, US President Barack Obama condemned the shooting as "an act of terror and an act of hate", calling the shooter "a person filled with hatred". "As Americans, we are united in grief and outrage," he said, adding that the attack was "a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon" and commit violence in the US. Florida Governor Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency in Orlando. Al Jazeera's Patty Culhane, reporting from Orlando, said politicians from opposite sides of the spectrum would be reacting in very different ways. "It's been less than 24 hours but this is going to become a political issue ... what we're going to see is Democrats wanting to put the emphasis on [banning] semi-automatic weapons," Culhane said. "The Republicans are going to try taking advantage of the fact that people are scared of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ... so we're going to see [Democrats and Republicans] put the emphasis on two very different things." The nightclub shooting came just a day after a man thought to be a deranged fan fatally shot Christina Grimmie, a rising singing star who gained fame on YouTube and as a contestant on The Voice, while she was signing autographs after a concert in Orlando. The attacks were the worst in the US since the September 11 attacks carried out by al-Qaeda in 2001. Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

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Orlando: Vigils held after US' deadliest shooting

Forty-eight of the 49 victims identified as vigils are held across the US after shooting at gay nightclub in Orlando.

20160723180944

The critically acclaimed civil rights drama Selma may not have gotten quite the recognition some feel it deserved by the Academy of Motion Pictures, but a nationwide movement called “Selma for Students” is ensuring that the movie isn’t overlooked at theaters. The program allows 7th, 8th, and 9th graders to receive free tickets to Selma at participating theaters around the country, including four apiece in cities like Baltimore, Nashville, and New Orleans, and at 11 movie houses in the San Francisco Bay area. The requirements differ slightly from city to city—some give free admission for high school students no matter what the grade—but in general, all you need to do to get a complimentary ticket is to show a student ID, report card, or some other proof of being a student at a participating theater’s box office. As the Washington Post reported, the idea for “Selma for Students” was born in New York City, where African-American business leaders joined together in early January to create a fund allowing some 27,000 students in the city to view Selma for free. Roughly two dozen other cities have since joined the cause. In St. Louis, for instance, local efforts are making it possible for some 6,250 teenagers to see the film for free. “It is important that St. Louis students are informed about this moment in history and its connections to the challenges they face today,” Reverend Starsky Wilson, president and CEO of Deaconess Foundation, a partner in the “Selma for Students” campaign in the city, said via press release. “We believe this experience will nurture civic engagement among young people and give them hope that systemic change is possible through cooperative, intentional, and well-planned efforts.” Altogether, it’s being estimated that more than 275,000 American students around the country will be able to get free admission to the movie, with most attending over the long Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday weekend. A limited number of tickets are being given away for each theater, and as of Friday afternoon several locations were already “sold out,” including all of New York City and Philadelphia, and all but a few of the participating Regal Cinemas around the country. All who watch the movie are encouraged to share images and responses on social media using the hashtag #SelmaforStudents.

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275,000+ Free Tickets to

A "Selma for Students" campaign has raised enough money to allow hundreds of thousands of American middle and high school students to see the Martin Luther King, Jr., biopic Selma for free.

20160728154723

Queensland's child safety minister Shannon Fentiman has been forced to defend her commitment to her job after visiting Splendour in the Grass. Opposition child safety spokeswoman Ros Bates wasted no time attacking Ms Fentiman's trip on Saturday to the Byron Bay music festival, attempting to contrast it with problems in the department. "Does the minister take her role as Minister for Child Safety seriously, yes or no?" Ms Bates said on Wednesday. Ms Fentiman said she was "absolutely committed" to her various portfolios. "My diaries and work schedule is a matter of the public record," she said. "I am happy to let my commitment to meeting with stakeholders, community organisations and families speak for itself." The minister invited Ms Bates to compare her record to that of her LNP predecessor, pointing out Labor has appointed 166 more frontline and frontline support staff. Ms Bates pressed on, but her various attempts to exploit Ms Fentiman's trip were ruled out of order. Committee chair Leanne Linard took issue with Ms Bates' use of words such as "jaunt", "getaway" and "partying". But it wasn't just the LNP putting the heat on Ms Fentiman. Labor MP Jo-Ann Miller, who has been a thorn in the government's side during the estimates process, demanded to know how many children in care had suffered forms of abuse. Ms Fentiman told the committee there had been 121 "substantiated harm reports" in the last financial year, from a total of 361 harm reports. In Ms Fentiman's opening statement, she quoted the state's family and child commissioner as saying: "The system in Queensland is certainly not one that is in crisis." The minister also quoted LNP leader Tim Nicholls as once describing child safety as being "rightly considered beyond politics". The opposition has this week shifted its estimates strategy by attempting to cut off ministers' answers faster, therefore minimising the political points they can score by raising historical comparisons to the Newman government.

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Qld minister's concert 'jaunt' draws fire

Queensland's child safety minister has defended her commitment to the role as the LNP uses her Splendour in the Grass visit in budget estimates.

20160816205046

It’s a great time to be in the market for a used car. The Wall Street Journal recently cited data indicating that used-car prices declined for the four consecutive months through August. USA Today noted that the average used car purchased at a franchised auto dealership sold for $10,883 in August, down 1.6% from the previous year and 2.4% versus July 2014. Edmunds.com predicted that used car prices would dip around 2% overall this year, and that some used vehicles—in particular, large crossover SUVs like the Chevy Traverse—would drop in price by upwards of 8%. What’s more, the forecast calls for used-car prices to stay on a downward trend for the foreseeable future. AutoTrader.com, the Atlanta-based online marketplace for new and used vehicles, says that its inventory of certified pre-owned vehicles has risen 6% since March, and that by year’s end buyers can expect a handful of top “pre-loved” car models—including the 2011 versions of the Ford Fusion, Toyota Corolla, and Honda CR-V—to be priced at roughly 5% less than what dealers were asking just six months ago. What accounts for the sudden price dip? A quick review of what has happened in the new and used car markets over the past few years sheds some light. In 2011, used vehicle prices hit a 16-year high in the wake of the Great Recession, when relatively few consumers were purchasing or leasing new cars because money was tight and credit was less available. That meant a shrinking supply of used cars, as there were fewer trade-ins or vehicles coming off lease. The “Cash for Clunkers” stimulus program also removed millions of used vehicles from the market, further tightening supply. According to Cars.com, the average 2012 listing price for five popular used vehicles five or more years old had risen a whopping 29% over the three years prior. Around that time, however, new car leases and sales surged, rising 13% in 2012 and continuing with impressive growth in 2013 and 2014. All of those new vehicle purchases and leases have translated to a parallel rise in trade-ins and cars coming off leases. “Leasing has surged in recent years with thousands of those cars coming back to dealerships as used cars,” Michelle Krebs, AutoTrader.com senior analyst, said via press release. “The abundance of returned lease cars should result in used cars coming off their historical highs of recent years, representing good buys for consumers.” The takeaway is that used cars are cheap, at least when compared to the record highs of a few years ago, and that the market for previously owned vehicles should remain attractive to buyers through the near future. Yet this turn of events isn’t all good for consumers. When used car prices tank, so does the value of your trade-in, if you have one. Also, automakers are more likely to offer low-price lease deals when their anticipated resale value is high. The flip side is that when used car prices crater, like they’re doing now, car dealerships must assume that they’ll be forced to sell off-lease vehicles for less money—and therefore they need to make more money from the person leasing the car in the first place. In other words, typical monthly payments for a customer leasing a new car are likely to rise compared to the rates available not long ago.

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Best Time to Buy May Be Now

When the market for new car sales is hot, smart buyers know to look instead at the overflowing inventory of used cars—a supply that's cheap and getting cheaper.

20160917132258

Oil spilled from a well blowout in the Great Australian Bight could reach a wide stretch of the southern Australian coastline, new modelling has revealed. BP has proposed drilling two exploration wells in the Bight and has released modelling on a worst case discharge from its Stromlo-1 well with no clean-up response. It shows oil on the sea surface could travel up to 2650 kilometres from the well site and would almost certainly reach large sections of the South Australian coastline. It also reveals up to a 64 per cent chance of it reaching Esperance in Western Australia and a 41 per cent chance of it stretching as far as the NSW south coast, depending on the time of year. The company says it's confident a loss of control would be contained within 35 days, but says drilling a relief well to completely kill the blowout would take 149 days. The modelling has angered environmental groups, which have called on the regulator to immediately reject BP's application to drill in the Bight. "The risks posed by this project to the environment and to the coastal communities of southern Australia are simply too great," Wilderness Society national director Lyndon Schneiders said. "The time has come for the regulator to terminate this project once and for all." The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) is expected to rule on BP's plans on September 29. It has twice previously asked the company to rework its proposals because of environmental concerns. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said NOPSEMA could not, in good conscience, allow the project to go ahead. ""The environmental and economic impact of a spill on the marine life, fisheries and tourism industry of South Australia would be absolutely devastating," Senator Hanson-Young said.

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Modelling shows impact of Bight oil spill

Oil giant BP has released modelling which reveals the impact of a major oil spill from the exploration wells it wants to drill in the Great Australian Bight.

20160917135022

The head of Canada's statistics agency has resigned in a surprising move over concerns that the agency's independence is being compromised, making him the second top statistician to quit in recent years. In an email sent to the members of an independent advisory board, Wayne Smith said he was stepping down as head of Statistics Canada because of concerns around changes to the agency's data infrastructure. Statistics Canada is responsible for producing major economic reports on everything from jobs to international trade. In an arrangement under the previous Conservative government, responsibility for StatCan's informatics infrastructure was transferred to a department that oversees information technology services across the government. Smith said in his email that Shared Services Canada now holds an effective veto over many of the agency's decisions, including the collection, analysis and dissemination of data. "This loss of independence and control is not only an apprehension, but an effective reality today," Smith wrote in the email, adding that StatCan is increasingly hobbled by the ineffective and slow services being provided. "I do not wish to preside over the decline of what is still, but cannot remain in these circumstances, a world leading statistical office." Concerns about confidentiality and efficiency had troubled Smith for some time, said Ian McKinnon, chair of the National Statistics Council advisory board. "He felt that losing control of the data infrastructure was incompatible with the continued independence of the agency." The agency was criticised earlier this year for technological issues that delayed the release of some economic reports on its website. Smith came to the job after Munir Sheikh resigned in protest in 2010 after the Conservatives scrapped the long-form census. Anil Arora, who previously helped run Canada's census, will become chief statistician as of Monday, the government said. In a nod to the concerns, Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains said the government was working closely with the agency toward the reinforcement of its independence. The concerns voiced by Smith come on top of some hiccups with releases in the past, said Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets. "It's going to raise a lot more questions than would have been in place before," said Porter. The agency was forced to withdraw a jobs report in 2014, citing a flaw in the way the figures had been processed. The monthly report can be volatile, often prompting economists to question its validity.

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Statistics Canada head resigns

Wayne Smith says he is stepping down as head of Statistics Canada because of concerns around changes to the agency's data infrastructure.

20161111163123

Australia has ratified a landmark global deal on climate change action but questions hover over its future with Donald Trump assuming the US presidency. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Thursday announced the federal government had ratified the agreement, which commits signatory countries to work towards limiting global warming to two degrees and set five-yearly targets for cutting emissions. "Almost a year from the Paris conference, it is clear the agreement was a watershed, a turning point and the adoption of a comprehensive strategy has galvanised the international community and spurred on global action," he told reporters in Canberra. The deal has already come into effect globally but Australia was delayed in finalising its agreement because of the July federal election. More than 100 nations representing 70 per cent of the world's emissions and three-quarters of global GDP, have now ratified the deal. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg next week join United Nations climate change talks in Marrakech to help develop rules to guide the agreement's implementation. Australia's ratification comes as Mr Trump's election win puts at threat global action on climate change. Mr Trump has said he'll withdraw America from the Paris agreement and stop funding UN climate change programs. That prompted Liberal MP Craig Kelly to post "Paris is cactus" on Facebook. Labor seized on the comment during question time to query the government's commitment to climate change action. Under the agreement's terms no country can back out until November 2020 at the earliest. Even if America does pull out, Australia won't follow. "When Australia makes a commitment to a global agreement, we follow through and that is exactly what we are doing," Mr Turnbull said. Greens climate change spokesman Adam Bandt said if America did back out, countries like Australia would have to work even harder to cut emissions. "Malcolm Turnbull needs to get on the phone to Donald Trump to try and talk him out of ripping it up," he told reporters. The Climate Institute says Australia's ratification of the agreement sent an important global signal that the rest of the world would get on with implementing it regardless of what happened in the US. "The Paris agreement is a long-term, durable agreement which would outlast any election cycle in the United States," deputy chief executive Erwin Jackson told AAP. "It's critical that countries continue to implement it to build confidence globally in the transition to clean energy."

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Climate deal signing sends vital signal

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced the federal government has ratified the Paris agreement on climate change action.

20161115133627

Labor and the Nationals are homing in on disgruntled regional voters, as Barnaby Joyce acknowledged the federal government needs a better listening ear. Both the Nationals leader and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten were in regional Victoria on Monday, where the community is reeling from a recent drop in dairy prices and the imminent closure of the Hazelwood coal-fired power station. Attending media events 75km apart, the leaders zeroed in on concerns about the future of farmers, small business owners and blue-collar workers. Speaking at a farm in Riverslea, Mr Joyce boasted the Nationals represent "things you can touch, things you can understand". There was "no systemic problem" with the dairy industry, but improved water infrastructure, cheaper inputs such as grain and improved milk prices would help farmers and deliver flow-on effects to the wider community. "Once the money gets into the district it starts to spin around," he said. Mr Joyce said dairy, food processing and horticulture had a big future as industry made the most of free trade agreements. Asked whether US president-elect Donald Trump, who has advocated higher tariffs, would make it harder for Australia the deputy prime minister said he would travel overseas next year to open doors to new markets. The Nationals took a hit in the Orange by-election in regional NSW at the weekend, where the primary vote was down 34 percentage points. Mr Joyce said it was important "you don't sook and you don't sulk". "We take our medicine, we understand it, we respect the voters and we go back and work harder again," he said. Visiting a manufacturing plant in Moe, Mr Shorten said the government needed to focus more on prioritising Australian-made products and employing Australians. "Haven't they learned anything from the American election results? Where you abandon hard working, working-class communities and provide no support for them, that is when people get angry at mainstream politics," Mr Shorten said. "We are here and Malcolm Turnbull should take a day out of his busy diary, leave the Sydney harbourside and come and visit Latrobe Valley and other communities." Mr Shorten said he was not a "rampant greenie" who saw no future for coal, but the government should better manage the transition to renewable energy. "What we need to see here is a genuine effort to find Australian jobs for people dislocated by change."

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Joyce, Shorten take jobs message to Vic

The federal government and opposition are jousting for political advantage in regional Victoria, which is feeling the effects of economic shifts.

20090131120518

BY ROSEMARY BLACK DAILY NEWS FOOD EDITOR Wednesday, November 2th 2005, 1:10AM Let the après-Halloween candyfest begin with some tricky transformations of treats into desserts. One minute, those Pixy Stix, Gummy Worms, Butterfingers and Jolly Ranchers are just hanging out in your kid's bulging loot bag. Seconds later, you're looking at chocolate pudding topped with Butterfingers, monster sundaes replete with Gummy Worms, and sugar cookies decorated with those Jolly Ranchers. "Creating desserts with leftover Halloween candy is just a whole lot of fun," says cookbook author and chef Wayne Brachman, who built his Monster Mash sundae by arranging assorted candies around a basic hot fudge and vanilla ice cream concoction. (Yes, Pixy Stix turn the whipped cream Day-Glo shades of color.) Desserts with all those leftovers transcend the ice cream freezer, though. You can also melt them down or chop them up and add them to batters, puddings, frostings and doughs. Or turn them into liquids and dip apples, bananas or even pretzels. The beauty of creating candy-based confections is flexibility. Substitute vanilla for the chocolate pudding, dip bite-size pretzels into chocolate instead of pretzel logs, and crush up your favorite candy bar as a crunchy topping for just about any fruit you can think of (like caramel apples). And think outside the treat bag. Use Gummy Worms as tongues when you make a monster sundae. Candy corns becomes fangs, shoestring licorice turns into tentacles, and candy eyeballs can be spooky wherever you place them. Your imagination - and how much of his Halloween haul your child's willing to part with - are your only limits. STAINED GLASS SUGAR COOKIES WITH JOLLY RANCHERS Makes 2 to 3 dozen 1 cup crushed Jolly Ranchers Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat well. Sift together the dry ingredients. Sift into the creamed mixture in 3 batches. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured work surface to 1/4-inch thickness. Cut into rounds that are about 3 inches in diameter. Using a smaller, round cookie cutter, cut out a hole in the center of each cookie. (Reroll the scraps to make more cookies.) Bake the cookies for 5 minutes. Remove from the oven and fill the holes with crushed Jolly Ranchers. Return to the oven for another 2 to 3 minutes, or until lightly browned. Remove the cookies to wire racks and cool completely. From Paul Vandewoud, who notes that freezing the candy first makes it easier to crush. 3 large milk chocolate bars (such as Hershey) 10 to 15 pretzel rods Crushed Life Savers or any other hard candy or lollipop Melt the chocolate bars in the top half of a double boiler or in a microwave oven. Dip the pretzel rods into the melted chocolate, then roll in the crushed hard candy. Set on wax paper to dry completely. From Wayne Brachman, who likes to use Gummy Worms for tongues and tentacles. 3 scoops vanilla ice cream To decorate: Sprinkles, Pixy Stix, Gummy Worms and other shapes, candy corn (for horns), candy eyeballs, candy pumpkins (shaped like black cats and Place the 3 scoops of ice cream into the dish and top with chocolate sauce and whipped cream. Sprinkle Pixy Stix on the whipped cream and all around the edges of the plate. (This will turn the whipped cream into brilliant colors.) Now turn your sundae into a monster: Use licorice for the antennae, candy eyeballs for the eyes, candy corn for horns. Use your imagination, as there is no specific recipe for this! From Scott Campbell, proprietor and chef of @SQC. In a heavy saucepan, whisk 2 cups of the half-and-half, 1/4 cup of the sugar and a pinch of salt. Bring to the boil, stirring. In a separate bowl, whisk cornstarch, cocoa and remaining 1/4 cup sugar in a bowl. Whisk in the remaining 1/4 cup of half-and-half until smooth. Whisk the hot half-and-half mixture into the bowl and return to the saucepan. Bring to a simmer and let simmer for 2 minutes, stirring. Whisk 1 cup of the hot mixture into the egg, then whisk this back into the hot mixture. Cook, stirring, over medium-low heat for 2 minutes. Do not allow the mixture to boil. Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla extract and chocolate shavings. Pour the pudding into glasses and allow to cool. Stir the broken Butterfingers into the pudding and top with whipped cream.

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TRICKED-OUT TREATS. Turn Halloween leftovers into haunting desserts

TRICKED-OUT TREATS. Turn Halloween leftovers into haunting desserts BY ROSEMARY BLACK DAILY NEWS FOOD EDITOR Let the après-Halloween candyfest begin with some tricky transformations of treats into desserts. One minute, those Pixy Stix, Gummy Worms, Butterfingers and Jolly Ranchers are just hanging out in your kid's bulging loot bag. Seconds later, you're looking at chocolate pudding topped with Butterfingers, monster sundaes replete with Gummy Worms, and sugar cookies decorated with those Jolly Ranchers. "Creating

20091229130032

BY ROBERT INGRASSIA DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Monday, July 23th 2001, 2:22AM With a flair for figures and a tenacious organization, Spanish Raymond Marquez earned his place in the lore and legend of New York's underworld. Now, after nearly half a century as the king of the Harlem numbers racket, Marquez swears he's retired. He says he gave up the gambling business reluctantly because he's tired of being hounded by District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and his underlings. But Marquez, 71, buoyed by his acquittal this month on gambling charges, doesn't plan on puttering around the house, raising tomatoes or otherwise fading into obscurity. Instead, he's trying to overturn a 1996 gambling conviction, and he's fending off the city's attempt to snare $6.5 million in back taxes. He's also working on a book about his rise from grocery store peon to a man of wealth and influence. And he's fighting bladder cancer. "Regretfully, I can say I am out of the numbers business," Marquez said. "But my troubles are far, far from over." During an interview at his home in tony Great Neck, L.I., the Harlem legend talked openly about his kingdom - the illegal numbers game. He described the storefront "holes" where players placed bets, the "banks" that handled the money, the payoffs to cops and the percentages that guaranteed profits. He looked back fondly on his career, boasting of accounting innovations that propelled his ascension. He defended street lotteries as a harmless diversion for working-class people. "It was more entertainment than it was really gambling," Marquez said. "I viewed it as giving a source of entertainment to the people." But while describing his operation, Marquez and his only son, a lawyer, adamantly denied being guilty of the various crimes the elder Marquez has been charged with over the years. "Listen, I deny everything until somebody proves it beyond a reasonable doubt," said Marquez's son David, who represented his father in a three-month trial that concluded July 2. "When that ceases to be the standard in this country, we can all move to Russia." The district attorney's office declined to talk about Marquez. But a former prosecutor in Morgenthau's office who investigated Marquez's numbers racket in the mid-1990s said Spanish Raymond's saint act doesn't ring true. "The evidence, to which he pleaded guilty, was that he was running probably the largest numbers operation in New York City," said Howard Perzan, now an assistant U.S. attorney in Philadelphia. "These organizations enforce their influence and control other businesses in competition with them through violence," he said. During a 1994 raid of dozens of betting spots and suspected offices of Marquez's empire, authorities found eight guns, including a machine gun and a stun gun, and a bulletproof vest. Still, the name Spanish Raymond - a moniker invented by organized crime prosecutors in the 1950s - evokes warm memories among some folks in Harlem. "He's a pillar of the community," said a 51-year-old former numbers runner for Marquez. "He made jobs for the people, and he put money back in the community." The man recalled being paid $250 a week in the late 1970s to transport betting slips. He and his pal Charles Leach, 48, sat last week on a bench at Broadway and W. 151st St., near a bar that was once a Marquez hangout, but is now an electronics store. "The lottery we have now takes the money out of the community," said Leach, who grew up in Harlem. "Not like Spanish Raymond, who brought the money back." The numbers game is a decades-old institution in New York. It's a simple lottery in which players pick three numbers, with the winning combination determined by the last three numbers of a specific race track's handle - the total amount of money wagered on a given day. The numbers racket has been a traditional domain for the mob. In the 1920s, Bronx bootlegger Dutch Schultz ran the numbers in upper Manhattan. Later, Italian crime families muscled in. Marquez, born in Harlem to parents from Puerto Rico, saw the numbers game in action as a boy. His father, booted from a Jersey City box factory because of his role in labor organizing, had bought a store in Harlem, one that came with a small numbers operation. Working at the store and going to school, the young Raymond graduated from Textile High School in 1947 and, with no money or role model for college, set out on his own. He had no cash, but had brains and guts. He also had eyes. "A lot of the fellas that were dressing better in those days and had the flashier cars were in the numbers business," he said. "It was something that was an eyeopener for me, and I said, 'Well, I want some of that, too.'" Starting as a daring teen who collected betting slips and solicited new business, Marquez said he rose in part because he applied bookkeeping standards to the operation. At the time, the guys running the racket weren't the brightest bulbs, Marquez said, and they failed to analyze the percentages. In a three-digit lottery, he explained, the odds of winning are 1,000 to 1. But by paying winners at 600 to 1, a numbers operator can count on a 40% return over time. But a slipshod operation that pays too much to store owners, runners and bankers will go broke, Marquez said. Marquez said he never ran craps games or accepted wagers on sporting events. "I was never induced into those types of rackets because they were really exploitive," he said. "You never saw anybody jumping off the roof because he lost money betting numbers." Graft was routine, he said. As a kid, Marquez saw his father pay beat cops $2, sergeants $5 and lieutenants $10 so the store could openly violate blue laws, which prohibited beer sales on Sundays. The numbers racket was no different. "You started giving this cop $2 a day and that one $5 a month," he said. "And it just grew, and then the word got out that you were involved and doing better." Pal of a mob figure Marquez swears he never did business with the mob, except for a brief favor processing betting slips for Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno in the late 1950s. He said he was friends with Salerno, who later became boss of the Genovese crime family, but not a business partner. In the 1960s, the feds started cracking down on organized crime, and Marquez became a target. He had mob friends, he owned a yacht, drove fancy cars and wore expensive suits. And he had the Long Island house, an expanded Cape Cod he bought for $38,000 in 1953. Authorities called it a palatial mansion, a description that still irks Marquez. "I had more money than you could shake a stick at before I bought this house and nobody ever paid any attention to me," he said. "When I bought this house - that's when all my troubles started because, at the time, I don't think there was a Hispanic out here, not even as a domestic worker, and it probably annoyed a lot of people." There was also the fact that the prior owner was a lawyer who had represented mobsters Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano. Marquez said he had no idea who the man was. Arrested in 1969 and convicted in 1971, Marquez served five years and four months in federal prison. The numbers game flourished, however, after police corruption scandals in the late 1960s and early 1970s prompted cops to adopt a hands-off policy toward such graft-inducing rackets. Marquez, who has beat gambling raps three times, said police and prosecutors never have had strong evidence linking him to illegal activity. "They're so used to making a half-baked cake and passing it on to the jury and getting the result they want that they don't really work hard enough to prove a case," he said. Cops and prosecutors got their man in 1994. After a two-year probe, cops busted Marquez and his wife, Alicia, at their Great Neck home. Marquez later pleaded guilty to two gambling counts and agreed to forfeit $1 million. He says he agreed to the deal - three months in prison plus nearly five years' probation - only to aid his wife and girlfriend, who also were charged. The deal teetered when prosecutors realized the plea violated sentencing guidelines for Marquez's type of crime. The sentence was changed to probation only, but Marquez used the mistake to challenge the plea and try to get his money back - a battle he's still waging. Marquez and his son called the $1 million forfeiture a legalized version of the "pad" he paid cops decades ago. "This was a massive treasure hunt that flopped," Marquez said. "Then it turned to extortion." Marquez claims that prosecutors have overestimated his wealth. When he was arrested in 1994, authorities said he was raking in $30 million a year. But Marquez said that figure represented gross income. He said most of the revenue in a numbers operation goes to bodega operators, numbers runners and bankers. Profits for the top organizer are maybe 2% to 3% of the gross, he said. Today, Marquez said, he's a legitimate businessman, running hotels in Commack, L.I., and Fort Lauderdale. Still, he said, he misses the racket. "I didn't see anything wrong with the numbers game when I was 10 years old," he said. "Now I'm 71 years old, and I still don't see anything wrong with it." "Listen, I deny everything until somebody proves it beyond a reasonable doubt." and attorney for Raymond Marquez. "It was more entertainment than it was really gambling. I viewed it as giving a source of entertainment to the people." SIDEBAR: RAYMOND MARQUEZ: RAP SHEET July 1957 - jailed briefly for refusing to testify before a grand jury about police corruption. May 1969 - arrested on gambling charges; sentenced to five years in prison, but released pending appeal. Dec. 1969 - arrested for convicted and sentenced to additional three years in prison. April 1975 - released from prison with time off for good behavior. April 1977 - arrested during police gambling raid; charges later dismissed. Nov. 1982 - arrested and charged with gambling and weapons possession; later acquitted. April 1994 - arrested on gambling charges; released on bail. Jan. 1995 - arrested on Aug. 1996 - agrees to plead guilty to two felony gambling counts and forfeit $1 million; later sentenced to five years' probation. Aug. 1998 - arrested on gambling charges; bail denied. July 2001 - acquitted of gambling charges; released

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SPANISH RAY SAYS HIS NUMBER'S UP DA's pressure forces Harlem betting kingpin to retire

By ROBERT INGRASSIA daily news staff writer With a flair for figures and a tenacious organization, Spanish Raymond Marquez earned his place in the lore and legend of New York's underworld. Now, after nearly half a century as the king of the Harlem numbers racket, Marquez swears he's retired. He says he gave up the gambling business reluctantly because he's tired of being hounded by District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and his underlings. But Marquez, 71,

20110212051703

Monday, October 6th 1997, 2:03AM WBAI (99.5 FM) kicks off its fall fund drive today with a day-long look at the 50-year history of the CIA. If you expect an occasional warning or note of skepticism, you just might be right. Things start with Bernard White, Amy Goodman and Samori Marksman on "Wake-Up Call," which begins at 6 a.m. The CIA theme then continues all day with breaks for news and Gary Null through Utrice Leid's afternoon show and into the evening. Guests will include Stansfield Turner, former director of what 'BAI calls "the country's most secretive and destructive institution." AROUND THE DIAL: Darian O'Toole from San Francisco starts today as the morning deejay on WAXQ (104.3 FM). A speak-up kind of woman doing the morning show on a rock station hmmm. . . . Sal Anthony has launched a nightly R&B oldies show on WNJR (1430 AM), 1-4 a.m. every day except Thursday, when it's midnight-4 a.m. The musical range is the '50s to the '70s, and the show takes 'NJR back to some of its roots: In the '50s and '60s it was one of the city's most important R&B outlets. . . . "The World" on WNYC (820 AM), 6:30 p.m., today starts a three-day look at Che Guevara. . . . Dara Welles of WABC (770 AM) hosts the TV show "CNN & Company" this week, 11:30 a.m.-noon. . . . WNEW (102.7 FM) starts a seven-week "Rock 'n' Read" campaign this morning, with Dave Herman and Marty Martinez talking books around 8:20 a.m. Scholastic Book Clubs is helping out with this push for literacy. . . . Chris Rock plays guest deejay today, 3-5 p.m. on WQHT (97.1 FM). . . . Morning show guests today on WKTU (103.5 FM) are Andrew Shue and Joan Collins. . . . WFAN morning man Imus tomorrow hosts his favorite white bluesman, Delbert McClinton, who also has a fine new CD.

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'BAI SETS ITS SIGHTS ON THE CIA

WBAI (99.5 FM) kicks off its fall fund drive today with a day-long look at the 50-year history of the CIA. If you expect an occasional warning or note of skepticism, you just might be right. Things start with Bernard White, Amy Goodman and Samori Marksman on "Wake-Up Call,"which begins at 6 a.m. The CIA theme then continues all day with breaks for news and Gary Null through Utrice Leid's afternoon show and

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Ming Tsai, the owner of the Blue Ginger restaurant in Wellesley, served “Soy marinated Alaskan Butterfish” at a State Department lunch, but it was actually sablefish. Did celebrity chef Ming Tsai serve mislabeled fish to Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and no less, the vice president of the People’s Republic of China? Tsai, well-known owner of the Blue Ginger restaurant in Wellesley, prepared “Soy Marinated Alaskan Butterfish’’ this week in Washington, D.C., at a star-studded State Department lunch honoring Vice President Xi Jinping of China, who is expected to be that country’s next leader. It was a takeoff on the signature miso-sake Alaskan butterfish Tsai serves at his restaurant. But as the Globe reported last fall after a five-month investigation into fish mislabeling, the silky fillet on the menu at Blue Ginger at that time was actually sablefish. There are eight other species that can be called butterfish. But sablefish is not one of them, according to the Food and Drug Administration. As it turns out, sablefish was served at Tuesday’s luncheon at the State Department, said Alan Eisner, a spokesman for Tsai. “The goal was to show off American products and Alaskan butterfish is what Ming came up with. It sounded a lot better than Alaskan sablefish. But it was sablefish,’’ Eisner said. The explanation was similar to the one that Tsai - host and executive producer of “Simply Ming,’’ an Emmy-nominated Create TV cooking show - gave last fall. At the time, he said he thought the FDA allowed sablefish to be called butterfish in Massachusetts, and explained that he used a different name for the expensive fish because it sounds better. The butterfish details were included in “Fishy Business,’’ a two-part Globe series that was the result of an investigation into seafood misrepresentation at area restaurants and supermarkets. The newspaper hired a lab in Canada to conduct DNA testing on 183 fish samples and found that nearly half had the wrong species name. After the series was published, Tsai agreed to change the name on his menu. It now reads: “Miso-Sake Sablefish (a.k.a Butterfish).’’ “I did not ever intentionally deceive customers,’’ Tsai said last fall. “I did make a technical mistake and now that I know, I’ll change the name.’’ In an interview last year, Tyson Fick of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute said butterfish is an unusual name for sablefish. “It’s my understanding that nobody in Alaska calls it butterfish,’’ Fick said. “They call it black cod and sablefish.’’ Nonetheless, the rest of the names on the luncheon menu appear to be uncontested, and the dessert - flourless bittersweet chocolate cake with cardamom ice cream - would probably be just as tasty by any name. “The meal, as far as I know, was incredibly well received,’’ Eisner said.

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Ming Tsai serves mislabeled fish to China’s vice president

The noted chef and owner of the Blue Ginger restaurant in Wellesley served “Soy Marinated Alaskan Butterfish” at a State Department lunch, but it was actually sablefish.

20130929002720

You won't always win. It takes some time to try. But if you believe the tax man thinks your home is worth too much, you can fight City Hall. The first steps are easier than it seems: The paperwork is available online and there's no penalty for trying. Every year, about 1,300 New Yorkers — owners of one- to three-family homes — file assessment appeals on their own. People who appeal their assessments without help from a lawyer have a 26.8% success rate at the city Tax Commission, the agency that decides tax appeals. Putting up a fight may be worth it if you live in a home built in the last couple of years, or live in a neighborhood with many foreclosures bringing values down. If you honestly think your property tax bill is too high, make your case. Owners of one- to three-family homes have until March 15 to file an appeal with the city Tax Commission. "You can very easily do it yourself. The Tax Commission is very user-friendly for homeowners," said appeals lawyer Joel Marcus. "You don't need to have any expertise," he added. "You just need to arm yourself with information, and all the information you need is on the city website." To a nonexpert, city property taxes are very complicated. Even when the system is working properly, it can lead to your tax bill rising in the same year your property value is falling. "It's always a lagging indicator, but it's very hard to explain to people," said City Councilman Domenic Recchia, chairman of the Council's finance committee. "The whole system needs to be looked at." Take a look at the most recent notice of property value sent by the city Finance Department. If you don't have it, you can download it from nyc.gov/finance. On the first page, the top line lists the new market value of your home. The Finance Department calculated that based on other comparable sales in your neighborhood. Now look at the line below — the effective market value. That's the key number. The city's system tries to limit how much your taxes will rise. They can't go up more than 6% a year, or 20% over five years. The catch is, all those delayed assessment increases will be phased in eventually — even when your market value stops growing. That's why many New Yorkers saw their assessed value rise this year, even as the sputtering economy meant their real market value fell. So the effective market value is how much the city thinks your home is worth, based on this year's assessment. In many cases, it's far below the real market value. If you think your home is worth more than the effective market value, don't bother appealing. That's the case for most New Yorkers, because assessments have been bottled up for years. However, people who bought newly built homes at the peak of the last housing bubble should look closely. So should people in neighborhoods where values have dropped sharply. "As the market falls, more people will get closer to their estimated market values," said Glenn Newman, president of the Tax Commission. "In neighborhoods with a lot of foreclosures, where values are falling, you could have a lot of properties that are getting closer to the estimated market value." Now flip over your notice of property value. The back side lists the description Finance has of your property — the size of your lot and your building, the year it was built, the type of construction and so on. If any of that info is wrong, you can file a request to update property data with Finance. It's a one-page form, available on the Finance website, and if you file by March 15 the agency can use it to recalculate your home value. "It's always worth correcting your records with Finance," Newman said, though he cautioned that not all changes will result in a change, especially for a minor variation. "If you have a 5% to 10% discrepancy, it's a judgment call," he said. But if it's "a 30% or 40% discrepancy in square footage, it's worth getting corrected." To appeal your home assessment, your first step is the Tax Commission's website, nyc.gov/html/taxcomm. Start with form TC600, How to Appeal a Tentative Assessment. It's eight pages and dense reading, but it has a worksheet at the end that can help you determine whether to keep going. Then download the TC600 checklist, and finally the actual application form, TC108. Try not to be intimidated. The form asks you to estimate your home's current market value, and then for details on how you came up with that number. A crucial factor is recent comparable sales nearby. To get those stats, called comps, you can talk to your neighbors or a broker you know. If you're comfortable using a computer, check the Finance Department website and look at "rolling sales" files. They summarize all property transactions for every city neighborhood in the last year — including price, square footage and zoning — to give you a comprehensive look at what your neighbors paid. When you file your appeal, you can ask the Tax Commission to decide based on the paperwork, or you can request a hearing. "The advantage to an in-person hearing is that you can answer questions that may come up," Newman said. "I tell all the applicants, ‘You know your property best.' We want to know as much information as we can."

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How to hack your home tax: Homeowners can fight high property taxes with an appeal - and no lawyer

You won't always win. It takes some time to try. But if you believe the tax man thinks your home is worth too much, you can fight City Hall.

20131027004636

Reporter: Long after most of us put our work week behind us, kelly osborn is still up at night. Still pouring through every piece of evidence but by far the most difficult pieces to study --- are the... Reporter: Long after most of us put our work week behind us, kelly osborn is still up at night. Still pouring through every piece of evidence but by far the most difficult pieces to study --- are the images of her dead daughter. A lot of people will ask, how could a mother look at the photographs from an autopsy? I don't recommend it to any, any parent. But why did you? I had to. I became my daughter's investigator. I didn't have a choice. Reporter: And immediately there were clues. The kind she says only a mother would notice. The first, I was very shocked at um, looking at her eyes. Sheena and i, we wore the same mascara, and I knew that we, if you cry with this mascara on, that mascara just clumps up, your eyelashes are all clumped up and, and hers were perfect. Reporter: If sheena took her own life, there were no tears, which experts say is very rare. Her make up untouched. Reporter: Something else only a mom would notice -- that diamond bracelet they fawned over at christmas. Reporter: Kelly says it was on the wrong wrist. It is on her right wrist, and I knew that sheena didn't wear her bracelets on her right wrist. As a matter of fact, that video on christmas, when she got that bracelet, she takes that bracelet out of the box, and shows it, with her right hand and automatically places it on her left wrist. Reporter: The crime scene photos also show both the bathroom and the shower doors left open. Sheena's mother convinced she would never have done that with her babies - her two little dogs right there in the room. She would have made sure that her dogs didn't see her that way. One or both of those doors would have been closed. Reporter: And while that's what a mother noticed from those photos veteran crime reporter lee williams saw something else. There's a photo of sheena in the shower, her feet are caked with sand and debris, yet there's no debris on the white floor, on the shower or on the white floor of the bathroom immediately outside the shower. So her feet were caked in sand and yet there was no sand anywhere in that bathroom? None whatsoever. Other than on her feet. Reporter: For williams, sand on her feet and not on the floor around her, makes it nearly impossible to believe sheena killed herself in that shower. So either sheena was carried in there, post mortem, and hung. Or she somehow levitated into that room. Reporter: Kelly had the reporter on her side, but what she truly needed were some big names, forensic heavyweights. And she got three of them to look at all the evidence. One of them taking 20/20 went back to that very hotel room with her. Reporter: Jan johnson is one of those c-s-i experts who examined the evidence. She's spent more than 40 years studying crime scenes, and she immediately saw red flags. A pillow lying on the floor. I would be interested in what is on that pillow. Reporter: A veteran investigator would rule everything out, asking could that pillow have been used to smother her. You're thinking someone could have used one of these pillows to kill her. Absolutely. Reporter: Most telling the bathroom. Where she says crucial evidence was missed. This is where sheena was found hanging from a dog leash. That's correct. It's attached to the shower head. Clipped at the top. Extending downward. The noose around her neck. Her buttocks eight inches off the ground. She's extended toward the back side of the shower with her legs extended outward. Reporter: She's not suspended in midair. No. Reporter: Her legs are on the bottom of the shower. Flat. Reporter: Wouldn't that give somebody ample opportunity to pull themselves back up? Absolutely. Reporter: She points to her clothes, if she were convulsing she would expect the clothes to ride up the body. She points to the cuffs of her pants down around her feet and january says it looks like she was dragged into the shower. The pants are her-- extended outward. And you would have expected if she had, you know, walked her way down the shower wall and hung herself that the pants would've gone up her legs. I mean, her clothing is perfect. She appeared serene, like she had just fallen asleep. A hanging is a violent act. Towards the end, um, your body fights that, it fights the ligature. It struggles to get air, and there was no evidence of any of that. Her hair was perfectly in place. Yeah. And in fact you described it as tucked right behind her ear the way she typically would. It was like a mannequin that had just been pushed over on its side. I've never seen a hanging like that. Reporter: And one more red flag for jan and that entire team of experts was what they saw in sheena's eyes. When you looked at those images and saw she had popped blood vessels you thought -- she had been strangled. You usually see petechial hemorrhages in a strangulation, you don't often see them in a hanging. Reporter: The hemorrhaging in sheena's eyes they believe is more consistent with a violent struggle, a strangling and then the bombshell conclusion. All three experts weighing in, and in every one of their reports -- three words stood out, "staged crime scene." And that's huge, that means that what was done to sheena was staged to make it appear as a suicide. What I think happened in that room that night is -- I think that she may have been suffocated on the bed and i think that she was dragged into the shower and placed into that leash that was already set up on that shower head. This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

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What Happened in This Hotel Room?

Act 3: A crime scene expert discovers 'red flags' in the hotel room Sheena Morris was found dead in.

20131225201355

Martin Puryear’s “Confessional” (1996-2000), which was recently acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts and is on display in the museum’s Linde Family Wing, has a door. A wooden door. It’s a strange door, and perhaps not even a door at all, because it doesn’t open. What’s more, it has a sort of step in front of it. Perhaps the step is for entering. Or is it (thinking of the work’s title) for kneeling? The door itself is wooden and very plain, but it suggests some kind of power. Is it supposed to evoke the ending of Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” in “The Trial”? “No one but you,” wrote Kafka, “could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.” It’s always possible, I suppose. But I doubt it, just because there is no “supposed to” about it in Puryear’s work. He was born in 1941 and grew up in Washington, D.C. He started out as a painter but later turned to sculpture, and has spent more than three decades inventing a lexicon of superbly crafted, original forms in an array of materials — especially wood. (He was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007.) Like Ellsworth Kelly, whose wood sculptures inaugurated the temporary exhibition program in the new Linde Family Wing two years ago, Puryear comes across as a virtuoso — almost a fetishist — of the properties and textures of different woods. But unlike Kelly, Puryear — although he is deeply influenced by abstraction — is no minimalist. His forms are ambivalent and enigmatic, but they are charged with poetic meaning, haunted by history. “Confessional” has a backward-blooming shape that Puryear, who is African-American, has used in other works. For me, it conjures the shape of a human head, particularly as abstracted in certain African sculpture. The door might be the face, the rest the mind’s container. This container may be inaccessible, but it is also transparent. Over a frame of metal rods Puryear has placed overlapping squares of wire mesh, welded together and coated with tar. “Confessional” is charismatic. It keeps you on your toes. The materials combine lightness and warmth with heaviness and darkness. The sculpture’s form suggests delicacy but also a daunting robustness. It evokes architecture (a hermit’s chapel?) and a human form (a head). Nothing about it is settled or clear. Everything is in tension.

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Puryear’s ‘Confessional’ is portal that leads to introspection, questions

Martin Puryear’s “Confessional” (1996-2000), which was recently acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts and is on display in the museum’s Linde Family Wing, has a door. A wooden door. It’s a strange door, and perhaps not even a door at all, because it doesn’t open. What’s more, it has a sort of step in front of it. Perhaps the step is for entering. Or is it (thinking of the work’s title) for kneeling? The door itself is wooden and very plain, but it suggests some kind of power. Is it supposed to evoke the ending of Kafka’s Parable of the Law parable “Before the Law” in “The Trial”? “No one but you,” wrote Kafka, “could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.”

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Gowin has often pictured Edith naked, framing the female body as a sculptural form. Photograph: Emmet Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York "She had just finished dancing with someone else, and as she approached me, I didn't think I'd ever seen anyone so alive." Photographer Emmet Gowin is remembering the night he met his wife, Edith Morris, in the 60s. Some of the most striking images he's ever taken – 130 of which are on show in a retrospective at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris – focus on his wife, his most enduring subject. These "established Edith as a person, and us as a couple", he says. "If you set out to make pictures about love, it can't be done. But you can make pictures, and you can be in love. In that way, people sense the authenticity of what you do." As soon as the pair married in Danville, Virginia in 1964, he adopted her family – "a feminine clan" – wholeheartedly, and began photographing their everyday life and gatherings. Back then, art that focused on family was a total anomaly. "I was asked by a journalist if the work is incestuous," Gowin says, mystified. "Photojournalism was the modality. You were reporting on a broader world," he says of the expectations that arose during the Vietnam war period. "We've got antecedents now … you can hardly find graduate work where people aren't doing things about their family." To Gowin, it's never been hard to share intimate moments with Edith and his family. "What's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realise you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us." He has often photographed Edith naked, but her nudity has nothing coy about it; it's a plainspoken, fetish-free approach to the female body. His photographs show many tender nuances of womanhood, coupledom and motherhood, whether Edith is baring her breasts, nuzzling into her son Elijah's neck, spreading her legs with a nightgown lifted above her pelvis, or simply showing the nape of her neck. One particularly soulful portrait, taken in 1983, shows her, unclothed, perched on a windowsill with vines framing her. She looks like a wood nymph, yet human in the folds of her stomach and the dip of her breasts. Gowin's images of his wife manage to combine reverie and reality, veneration and humility. Moreover, his Edith portfolio is a prismatic look at age. The most recent portrait is from 1999, in which she looks rather severe, with round glasses, crinkled eyes, choppy hair and pursed lips. Similarly composed portraits taken in 1980 and 1994 flank each side in the exhibition, magnificently evoking the grace of ageing. Gowin developed his style under Harry Callahan, at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in the mid 60s. "I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously." His early photography experience still resonates. "As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise – who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence." In 1967, he crossed over from student to teacher, taking a post at the Dayton Art Institute. Six years later, he was appointed to teach at Princeton, an establishment he stayed at until his retirement in 2009 (though he admits "I could never have gotten into Princeton as a student"). As a teacher, he rhapsodised about creativity so philosophically that, after the first class of every semester, students often had to double-check they were in the photography class they'd signed up for. It's easy to imagine why they'd be thrown: over the course of our conversation, Gowin quotes James Joyce, William Blake, Diane Arbus, the Bible, Charles Darwin, Maya Angelou and William Henry Fox Talbot. This is not someone who plows linearly through a curriculum. His life and work have been fed by a perpetual sense of wonder at the world, a quest for beauty and an openness to transcendence. He describes his teaching role with awe: "Going over ideas that you love, smoothing them out and presenting them to someone new ... to honour the thoughts you had yesterday tomorrow is a kind of refinement that brings you dignity. It gives you endurance and dedication." Gowin's work, in the exhibition and more generally, can be cleaved into two periods. The family moments in his Virginia hometown peter out, and give way to sprawling global landscapes. It feels like a brusque change of scope. Gowin photographed landscapes, on the ground and aerially, from the early 1970s onwards. He travelled to the ancient Italian town of Matera, the archaeological site of Petra in Jordan, and spent several years chronicling the scarred topography of the American West. He realises it disappointed fans when his family portraiture fell by the wayside, but he is unrepentant: "The world is larger and more complex than that. You change as much as the world around you changes." Further, he says: "The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly." In the past few years, Gowin has made multiple trips to the tropics, studying devastated land and photographing nocturnal moths. On these expeditions, he travelled with a cut-out silhouette of Edith on trips she couldn't attend. "It was extremely comforting to have her along. I got as interested in that as the insect pictures I was trying to take." His insect series incorporates Edith's silhouette, so while they may be a long way from his raw black-and-white snaps in Danville, the affection for his subject is just as heartfelt.

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Emmet Gowin: 'Everyone thought my photographs were incestuous'

When he started taking intimate portraits of his wife and family in the 60s, it was a totally alien concept. The master photographer shares his thoughts on going public with personal shots – and why after 40 years he's turned his sights on moths

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Disturbing images have emerged online claiming to show a Ukrainian separatist fighter stealing a ring from a victim of the MH17 disaster. The picture, which is yet to be independently verified, shows three rebels dressed in military uniforms reportedly rifling through victims' luggage. In one frame first tweeted in Russian by user stabilizec, a blond fighter appears to be handling a gold ring, possibly belonging to one of the dead. Thousands online were quick to condemn their "appalling" and "inhumane" actions, despite having no confirmation of the photo's veracity. July 22, 2014: A man believed to be a pro-Russian rebel fighter has appeared in an online video purportedly taking a ring belonging to a MH17 passenger. While others suggested the rebels may have simply been trying to identify one of the 298 passengers, whose bodies were scattered across the eastern Ukraine countryside where the plane came down. The emergence of the photos came shortly after a video published by the BBC showed other pro-Russian fighters searching through bags and walking over wreckage while searching for the doomed aircraft's black boxes. A militia leader known only as Zhuk, who is believed to have filmed the footage, said his men were merely following procedure. "We looked at their belongings because we were searching for documents," he told the BBC. July 22, 2014: Pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine have released footage to the BBC showing flight MH17 directly after it crashed. "Then we put them in a truck and took them away for sorting." Australia was among a number of countries to voice concern over the reported manhandling of passengers' bodies. Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans told Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko that he was furious at reports of mistreatment at the hands of clean-up crews. "We are already shocked by the news we got today of bodies being dragged around, of the site not being treated properly," he said. July 22, 2014: The train with the bodies of the MH17 victims has finally left rebel territory and is en route to Kharkiv in Ukraine, where they will be loaded onto a plane for transport to the Netherlands. Ukrainian officials today confirmed of 282 of the 298 victims had been moved to a refrigerated train, which was last seen heading west from Torez. The bodies will be handed to the Netherlands along with fragments of the remaining 16 bodies, which were badly burned. Source: Twitter, BBC Author: Chloe Ross, Approving editor: Martin Zavan Twitter users reacted strongly to this picture of a Ukrainian separatist fighter appearing to handle a victim's ring. (Supplied) Do you have any news photos or videos?

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Outrage over alleged ring theft at MH17 crash site

Disturbing images have emerged online claiming to show a Ukrainian separatist fighter stealing a ring from a victim of the MH17 disaster.

20140817213042

Editor’s Note: This article is from the Globe archives. It originally appeared in The Boston Globe on Sept. 9, 2007. In April of 2004, two Harvard undergrads walked into the Charles Hotel for a meeting with a venture capitalist. What happened next either highlights Boston’s deficiencies as a greenhouse for a new generation of Web start-ups, or illustrates the incredible magnetism of Silicon Valley - or a bit of both. The Harvard students were Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, and they were at the Charles to talk with a senior associate at Battery Ventures of Waltham. It was the senior associate’s job to spot interesting companies for the partners at his firm to consider as investments. (The firm where this person now works allowed him to be interviewed only under the condition that he not be named.) He’d heard about the website that Zuckerberg and Saverin and a few other students had built because he himself was a Harvard alum, and a few days earlier, he’d run into some current students who had told him about it. It was called Facebook, and at the time it only had 1,000 or 2,000 users. Zuckerberg told the senior associate that he was planning to go to California for the summer, and he wasn’t sure whether he would return to Harvard for his junior year. Summer was less than two months away. The senior associate was pretty sure that if Battery Ventures didn’t invest before then, a Silicon Valley venture firm would discover the deal. For venture capital firms, getting in first can often mean getting a bigger chunk of a start-up for less money - especially if the start-up isn’t talking to other firms. And Facebook wasn’t. After a second meeting at the Charles, and a visit to Battery’s offices above the reservoir in Waltham, Zuckerberg said he thought Facebook was worth about $15 million, and was willing to accept an investment ranging from $1 million to $3 million, which would have given Battery a substantial chunk of the start-up. But Battery had already made an investment in an earlier social networking site, Friendster, which was foundering. Zuckerberg struck some partners at the firm as a little too brash. And no one was sure whether Facebook would appeal to anyone other than college students, its target. There were also turf issues with Battery’s Silicon Valley office, which had invested in Friendster. “There was a question about whether we on the East Coast side were going to lead an investment with a sophomore in college who was considering a move to the West,” says the senior associate. The firm passed - even though Scott Tobin, the Battery partner who evaluated the opportunity, could have invested a few hundred thousand in Facebook without putting the deal to a vote of all the partners. (Tobin had earlier invested in Akamai Technologies Inc., now a member of the S&P 500 index.) Zuckerberg, who grew up in Westchester County in New York and attended Phillips Exeter, went to California in June 2004 with two of his Facebook cofounders. Through a chance connection, Zuckerberg was introduced to Peter Thiel, a cofounder of the online payment system PayPal, who was running a hedge fund called Clarium Capital. He met with Thiel in August, at Thiel’s office in downtown San Francisco. Facebook found its first financial support in PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel (left), who invested his own money in the venture. Thiel is shown with Elon Musk, his PayPal cofounder, in their Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters. Thiel had also been an investor in Friendster, and he knew that the conventional wisdom was that all the social networking sites “were just fads that would come and go,” he says. Thiel listened to Zuckerberg’s pitch in the morning, asked him to go out and grab lunch, and by the time Zuckerberg returned in the afternoon, “we said we’d invest, and we agreed to the basic valuation parameters,” Thiel says. ”It seemed like a good company,” he said, adding, “Most of the time, we’re not that fast.” Thiel put in $500,000 of his own money in return for 10 percent of the company. Zuckerberg set up shop in Palo Alto, and by the end of the year, Facebook was approaching a million users. In 2005, the company took in $12.7 million from the Silicon Valley firm Accel Partners, and by the end of that year, the site had more than 5 million users, having decided to allow high school students to join. ”Facebook was perhaps the most controversial deal we’ve done in several years,” says Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. “Some of my best friends in the business were wondering why we’d write a check to a company that had very little defensibility to their business.” Indeed, anyone could potentially build a better site and lure Facebook’s users away. Last year, the company passed 12 million users, and raised another $27.5 million; this time, Greylock Partners, a Waltham firm that has a branch office in San Mateo, Calif., invested. Greylock partner David Sze, who works on the West Coast, admits that he had the opportunity to invest in Facebook in 2005, but says, “I was too busy - I just didn’t have the cycles to look at it. In retrospect, that was a mistake.” Facebook now has 39 million users and is the sixth most popular website in the United States, according to the measurement firm comScore Inc. An average of 150,000 new users create a free Facebook account every day, according to the company. A Bear Stearns analyst recently estimated that the company, which has already spurned several acquisition offers, is worth as much as $6 billion, and will bring in about $140 million in revenue this year. That’s with just over 300 employees. (Looming over Facebook’s success - and any eventual public offering - is a lawsuit filed by several fellow Harvard students who allege that Zuckerberg built Facebook using software code he had originally written for their site, ConnectU.com, and that he also borrowed parts of their business plan. A Facebook representative said that none of its founders were available to comment.) What makes Facebook so appealing is that once users join and create connections with their friends and colleagues, it becomes an incredible hub of information: friends can share photos, tell you where they are, show what music they’re listening to, what parties or conferences they’re planning to attend, or how much money they’ve raised for next weekend’s charity walkathon. Facebook also decided, in May, to allow other companies to develop applications that users can easily incorporate in their profile pages. Each of these apps - there are now more than 3,000 of them, according to the tracking firm Adonomics - adds new features without the company investing a penny. And unlike MySpace, Facebook is allowing the companies that develop these apps to use them for marketing purposes or to make money, which provides a great incentive. So even if Boston didn’t end up as Facebook’s home base, there are plenty of companies here now developing applications for it. Needham-based TripAdvisor, Inc. offers a world map that you can stick virtual pushpins in, to show your friends where you’ve been. Fafarazzi.com in Somerville has an app that allows Facebook users to send each other photos of celebrities, to reflect their mood. StyleFeeder Inc., a Cambridge shopping recommendation service, launched an app in June that has since been installed by 45,000 people. ”We don’t want to make Facebook the cornerstone of our growth strategy, but we’re happy to ride the wave,” says Dina Pradel, StyleFeeder’s vice president of marketing. Could Facebook have succeeded if it had gotten an investment locally before Zuckerberg Co. went West, and kept its headquarters here? When I put that question to Accel Partners’ Breyer, who is a native of Natick, he had a one-word answer: no. ”So many of the Facebook employees have come from top Internet companies like Yahoo, eBay, and Google that the culture that has been built at Facebook is fundamentally more consumer Internet savvy than if it would’ve been built anywhere else on the planet,” Breyer says, after praising the engineering talent in Boston. ”Folks in the Valley are incredibly geo-centric to a point of snobbery,” writes Battery Ventures’ Scott Tobin via e-mail. He acknowledges that Silicon Valley is producing more companies than Boston but “to make an argument that great companies can’t be built in any one place is bunk in my mind.” He mentions Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., and Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego as examples. “It just takes a good driving attitude to make it happen.” As for passing on Facebook, “that may turn out to have been a mistake,” Tobin admits. Innovation Economy is a weekly column focusing on entrepreneurship, technology, and venture capital in New England.

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Why Facebook went west

Turned down by a local venture capitalist, two Harvard students look to Silicon Valley for funding instead. The result: Boston misses out on an online phenomenon worth up to $6 billion.

20141024133558

Edward Snowden, the American intelligence contractor and NSA whistle-blower, said in a satellite interview at Harvard Law School on Monday that the Boston Marathon bombings can serve as an example of how potential dangers can be missed even by a system of massive surveillance. “The reality is that we knew who these guys were and who they were associating with,” Snowden said during an interview via Google Hangout with Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig inside the law school’s Ames Courtroom. “But we didn’t follow up or watch these guys.” Snowden, who has been called a traitor by a number of senior government officials, leaked secret NSA documents in 2013 about the agency’s global surveillance program to journalists from The Guardian and the Washington Post. He is now in Russia evading charges of theft of government property and of violating the Espionage Act. The discussion, titled “Institutional corruption and the NSA,” covered politics and policy, privacy, and the public’s right to knowledge deemed secret by government agencies. Snowden started by saying that there are many “difficult questions that don’t really have proper answers” but that he would do his best to give clarity to the major issues revolving around his decision to become a government whistle-blower. “I’ve been struck by the number of people who have no clear sense of who you are,” Lessig said, “and what your values are as you came to work for the NSA, and the work you did by exposing the NSA.” Snowden said he comes from a government family, who believed that “fundamentally the government had noble aims and that it did good things.’’ “But what I was not aware of and have grown aware of, while the people in government largely are there for the right reasons, there is a culture that pervades the upper levels, the senior levels that has become less accountable to the public they serve,” Snowden said. This realization, Snowden said, led him to uncover that a massive amount of surveillance was being done on Americans, surveillance that he said should have never happened. “They were happening beyond any possible statute for recording, based on the Constitution,” he said. He added that there were no reasons for much of the surveillance to exist and that very few people, including members of Congress and many of his co-workers, knew about the program. Snowden said he believed whistle-blowers are people who are standing up for something, in this case democratic right of free speech and privacy. But he emphasized that they should not dictate how the information is dispersed to the public. “It comes down to not dictating outcomes,” he said, “but allowing the public a chance to participate in democratic processes.” One point Snowden emphasized was that he believed the United States has changed from focusing on the traditional way it did surveillance to mass surveillance but that it hasn’t made the process any more effective. He argued that, in fact, spying is less successful. “This is the real challenge between what happened before and what’s happening now in surveillance,” Snowden said. “It’s not necessary to collect information on everyone, and it’s never been necessary.” He said the approach of massive surveillance, of listening to phone networks and hacking into websites, is actually making the United States more vulnerable to attacks. “Once you make a backdoor into something,” Snowden said, “you can’t control who walks in through it.”

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Edward Snowden interviewed at Harvard by Lawrence Lessig

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig interviewed the American intelligence contractor and NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden via satellite, or, more specifically, via Google Hangout, Monday afternoon inside the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School.

20141027184007

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave his first interview in Mandarin Chinese last week at Tsinghua University (known as “China’s MIT”), where the audience hooted and clapped at Zuckerburg’s jokes and general good humor. But as admirable as his efforts are, it’s hard not to wonder how good is the Zuck’s Mandarin, really? Zuckerberg has been studying Chinese for years — by his admission, partly to impress the family of his wife, Priscilla Chan, whose grandmother does not speak English. During the interview, the Facebook FB executive halted and mangled grammar and misused words (like calling Chan a “Zhongguo ren” – which implies Chinese citizenship – instead of “Meiji Huaren,” an American-born Chinese). In the brief open Q&A period (unlike the scripted interview), Zuckerberg needed questions repeated in English. He may have tripped over his words a few times, but he certainly didn’t need fluency to charm his audience. Zuckerberg’s interview was widely reported in Chinese media; the video was uploaded to hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs and video-sharing sites. One popular link on YouKu (“China’s YouTube”) had 800,000+ viewings within 2 days of posting. Mistakes were part of Zuckerberg’s charm. Jokingly, he admitted his poor listening skills weren’t limited to Chinese; his wife, he said, tells him his listening skills are just as bad in English. Zuckerberg shared family stories (like Chan’s grandma’s surprise as he asked for her hand in marriage in Chinese). Perfect grammar or not, he had the guts to do an interview in a language that he is clearly still learning. Like any good language student, he stuck to his messages and got his key points across and other executives may find he has once again raised a bar they didn’t realize they might someday have to cross. Rebecca Weiner is co-founder of Strebesana Resources, a New York-based brokerage firm in U.S.-China optics trade.

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How good is Mark Zuckerberg's Chinese?

The Facebook CEO stumbled and misused words, but give him a break, says Rebecca Weiner, co-founder of Strebesana Resources, a New York-based brokerage firm in U.S.-China optics trade.

20141203043351

Eric Branc, San Francisco Chronicle Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle At 31, workhorse running back Frank Gore, carrying against Seattle, is on pace for the fewest yards per run of his career. At 31, workhorse running back Frank Gore, carrying against Seattle,... Frank Gore ran into a wall of defenders in the second half. The San Francisco 49ers defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 26-21 at Levi's Stadium Sunday September 28, 2014. Frank Gore ran into a wall of defenders in the second half. The San... Rookie running back Carlos Hyde has played to positive reviews, but averages only 3.7 yards per carry. Rookie running back Carlos Hyde has played to positive reviews, but... 49ers’ vaunted running game has been grounded As the 49ers’ offense has gasped and wheezed this season, an army of armchair analysts has begged and pleaded: Run the ball. It makes sense, right? In the first three years of the Jim Harbaugh era, the 49ers had the most rushing attempts in the NFL, averaged 12 wins per regular season and reached three straight NFC title games. This season, they’ve tweaked their power-running identity and, well, perhaps you’ve heard: Things aren’t going so well. The 49ers (7-5) have their most regular-season losses since 2010, thanks largely to a 22nd-ranked offense headlined by a stalled-in-development quarterback. Colin Kaepernick is on pace to throw 501 passes — the 49ers averaged 434.7 from 2011 to 2013 — and the 49ers are tied for eighth in the NFL in rushing attempts. The shift in offensive philosophy is perhaps best illustrated by the use of fullback Bruce Miller, who played only nine snaps in Thursday’s 19-3 loss to the Seahawks. Miller has played 40 percent of the offensive snaps after logging 52 percent in 2013. So, again, the solution seems obvious: Run the ball. The problem with that fix? The 49ers’ once-vaunted rushing attack has been grounded. The 49ers are averaging 3.97 yards a carry, which would be their lowest figure since they averaged 3.94 yards per attempt in 2005, when rookie Alex Smith was the quarterback and the team ranked last in total offense. The middling ground game helps explain the death of many drives. On 1st-and-10, the 49ers are averaging 3.7 yards a carry. They averaged 4.9 yards a carry in such situations from 2011 to 2013. What’s happening here? Miller believes defenses have adjusted to a once-novel rushing attack that kept opponents off balance with an array of shifts, formations, personnel groups and blocking schemes. In an increasingly pass-happy league, the 49ers’ run-a-bunch offense presented opponents with a variety of new wrinkles when Jim Harbaugh arrived in 2011. “I don’t think we really tried to fool people,” Miller said. “I think definitely with the motions and things like that, we’ve tried to get reactions from the defense and figure out what we’re playing against: getting man (coverage) and zone (coverage) keys. That’s what a lot of that’s for … “Now we have caused confusion with defenses by adjusting, and moving and shifting. I think that’s gone. We’re not exactly getting the reaction we expect from defenses. I think that has caused some error on our part.” Defenses also have adjusted to the read option, which the 49ers used successfully after Kaepernick became the starter in 2012 and averaged 6.6 yards carry. Kaepernick is averaging 4.5 yards an attempt this season. Still, the 49ers’ issues could be tied to problems with their personnel. Running back Frank Gore, 31, is averaging 3.9 yards per attempt after a career-low 4.1 last season, which suggests his age and workload have taken their toll. That said, fresh-legged rookie Carlos Hyde, who has earned positive reviews, is averaging 3.7 yards a carry. Gore and Hyde are running behind an offensive line that has lacked the continuity it enjoyed in recent seasons. In 2012 and ’13, the 49ers’ offensive linemen combined to miss all of four starts (all by left guard Mike Iupati in 2013). In 2014, left tackle Joe Staley is the only lineman to start all 12 games, and the other four starters have combined to miss 14 starts. The attrition has included tight ends, who play a key run-blocking role. Vance McDonald has missed four games and Vernon Davis missed two games with early-season leg and back injuries, which could be lingering and would help explain his forgettable season. Beyond his puny pass-catching numbers, Davis, until now an excellent run blocker, ranks 57th among 68 tight ends in run-blocking, according to Pro Football Focus. Miller suggested that the 49ers are still countering adjustments made by opposing defenses. The good news for the 49ers: They could get their running game right — at least temporarily — Sunday against the Raiders (1-11), who have allowed the sixth-most rushing yards in the NFL. “Defenses adjust, and we’ve seen that as we’ve tried to do some similar things, maybe even being a little bit repetitive, giving (them) the same looks,” Miller said of the overall offensive issues. “That’s what we’ve tried to get away from: doing the same things, because we found ourselves struggling and stalling.” Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch The 49ers’ rushing totals since 2005: * Projected at current pace How the 49ers have fared on 1st-and-10 runs: 2011: 4.8 yards per carry

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49ers’ vaunted running game has been grounded

49ers’ vaunted running game has been grounded In the first three years of the Jim Harbaugh era, the 49ers had the most rushing attempts in the NFL, averaged 12 wins per regular season and reached three straight NFC title games. The 49ers (7-5) have their most regular-season losses since 2010, thanks largely to a 22nd-ranked offense headlined by a stalled-in-development quarterback. Colin Kaepernick is on pace to throw 501 passes — the 49ers averaged 434.7 from 2011 to 2013 — and the 49ers are tied for eighth in the NFL in rushing attempts. The shift in offensive philosophy is perhaps best illustrated by the use of fullback Bruce Miller, who played only nine snaps in Thursday’s 19-3 loss to the Seahawks. Miller has played 40 percent of the offensive snaps after logging 52 percent in 2013. [...] again, the solution seems obvious: The problem with that fix? The 49ers’ once-vaunted rushing attack has been grounded. The 49ers are averaging 3.97 yards a carry, which would be their lowest figure since they averaged 3.94 yards per attempt in 2005, when rookie Alex Smith was the quarterback and the team ranked last in total offense. The middling ground game helps explain the death of many drives. On 1st-and-10, the 49ers are averaging 3.7 yards a carry. What’s happening here? Miller believes defenses have adjusted to a once-novel rushing attack that kept opponents off balance with an array of shifts, formations, personnel groups and blocking schemes. In an increasingly pass-happy league, the 49ers’ run-a-bunch offense presented opponents with a variety of new wrinkles when Jim Harbaugh arrived in 2011. “I don’t think we really tried to fool people,” Miller said. [...] we have caused confusion with defenses by adjusting, and moving and shifting. Defenses also have adjusted to the read option, which the 49ers used successfully after Kaepernick became the starter in 2012 and averaged 6.6 yards carry. Kaepernick is averaging 4.5 yards an attempt this season. [...] the 49ers’ issues could be tied to problems with their personnel. Running back Frank Gore, 31, is averaging 3.9 yards per attempt after a career-low 4.1 last season, which suggests his age and workload have taken their toll. Gore and Hyde are running behind an offensive line that has lacked the continuity it enjoyed in recent seasons. In 2012 and ’13, the 49ers’ offensive linemen combined to miss all of four starts (all by left guard Mike Iupati in 2013). In 2014, left tackle Joe Staley is the only lineman to start all 12 games, and the other four starters have combined to miss 14 starts. The attrition has included tight ends, who play a key run-blocking role. Vance McDonald has missed four games and Vernon Davis missed two games with early-season leg and back injuries, which could be lingering and would help explain his forgettable season. Beyond his puny pass-catching numbers, Davis, until now an excellent run blocker, ranks 57th among 68 tight ends in run-blocking, according to Pro Football Focus. Miller suggested that the 49ers are still countering adjustments made by opposing defenses. The good news for the 49ers: “Defenses adjust, and we’ve seen that as we’ve tried to do some similar things, maybe even being a little bit repetitive, giving (them) the same looks,” Miller said of the overall offensive issues. Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch Grounded The 49ers’ rushing totals since 2005: TD * Projected at current pace Weaker start 2011: 4.8 yards per carry

20141227134040

This was the first advertising campaign I did. My mum had signed me up to an agency at the age of six, when she saw how much I enjoyed getting up in front of everyone to do karaoke. I was seven, and the audition lasted only three minutes: I just had to repeat the action – stepping up on to a copy of the Yellow Pages and pretending to kiss; there was no one standing there. I was very excited when I found out I’d got the part. I remember running around telling everyone at primary school that I was going to be on TV. Everyone was nice to me on set. It was a little daunting being seven and having to kiss a girl in front of all these people and the camera. She was a Scottish girl, about 11, and she made me feel a lot more comfortable about the whole thing. She said, “Don’t worry, I won’t bite.” I ended up having to do it about 30 times, as they had to make sure they got the right shot. I was busy that day. It was due to air a couple of months later. We didn’t know when exactly, just that it was going to be on in the run-up to Christmas. I remember the first time my family and I saw it. My mum screamed, “Dean, Dean, your ad is on the telly!” It was quite exciting, and quite surreal, too. My mum made a point of recording it. The video was always ready in the machine, and as soon as we heard those jingles at the start it was a race to press Record. I got teased a bit at school, but it was lighthearted, like, “Oooh, I saw you kiss a girl on the telly.” I also got a bit of positive attention from the girls, which was nice. I kept a bit of mistletoe in my back pocket that year. Until recently, the ad aired pretty much every year. I am 29 now, and to this day I still have people coming up to me and asking if I am the little boy from the Yellow Pages advert. It’s nice, because I receive a royalty cheque in the post for a few hundred pounds, but also because it’s something I’m really proud of. I went on to become an actor; this was the first thing I did, and it became iconic. I’ve re-enacted it a couple of times, once against my will on a night out with friends a few years ago. They asked for the Yellow Pages from behind the bar and found a good-looking girl who was in on the joke. They brought her over and put the book down in front of her. It was rather embarrassing. It comes up mainly because I am quite short – about 5ft 6in. So people say, “Can you not reach that? Shall I get you a Yellow Pages?” It’s all good fun. I am getting married next year. At Christmas. I have no doubt someone will bring a Yellow Pages. Are you in a famous photograph? Email thatsme@theguardian.com

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That’s me in the picture: Dean Cook recalls starring in the 1992 Yellow Pages Christmas advert

‘I got a bit of positive attention from the girls, at school. I kept a bit of mistletoe in my back pocket that year’

20150109083840

Police close off a service station in northern France where the fugitive gunmen were reportedly spotted. (AFP) Heavily armed police and security forces have descended on a small town in northern France where the two brothers suspected of the Charlie Hedbo attack robbed a service station and took off back towards Paris. The manager of a petrol station near Villers-Cotteret in the northern Aisne region "recognised the two men suspected of having participated in the attack", the source told AFP. Brothers Sherif and Said Kouachi are suspected of slaughtering 12 people during a rampage at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo yesterday. French newspaper La Parisien reports the two suspects robbed the service station, about an hour's drive north of Paris, at around 10.30am local time (8.30pm AEDT). Sherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi. (Supplied) Shots were reportedly fired during the robbery, and the suspects were carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and what appeared to be a rocket launcher. They abandoned a grey Skoda car on the site, which has been seized by police for examination. The men then drove off in the direction of Paris in a white Renault Clio with covered-up number plates. RAID, the anti-terrorist unit of the French police force, and the GIGN, a paramilitary special operations unit, have been deployed to Villers-Cotterets. Eighteen-year-old suspect Hamyd Mourad reportedly handed himself in to police after learning he was wanted but the Kouachi brothers have been on the run since the shootings. One French security official who declined to be named warned that "there will be a showdown" with the men who are heavily armed. The Kouachi brothers are believed to be the orphans of Algerian immigrants who grew in Rennes, in France's northwest, French newspaper Liberation reports. The paper describes Cherif Kouachi as an "occasional Muslim" who worked as a sports instructor before he became radicalised by the US invasion of Iraq and highly-publicised images of human rights abuses at Abu Gharib prison. In 2005 Cherif was arrested with another French national for planning to fly to Iraq to take part in the war against US forces. He was sentenced to three years jail in 2008, including a suspended sentence of 18 months. The brothers are alleged to have links to a Yemeni terrorist network and are believed to have returned to France from Syria in the last year. A witness to yesterday's attack told reporters that one of the attackers had said "you can tell the media it's al-Qaeda in Yemen". Do you have any news photos or videos?

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Two suspects in Paris magazine shooting spotted in north France

Two brothers suspected of having gunned down 12 people in an Islamist attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were spotted Thursday morning and are armed, sources close to the manhunt said.

20150130062924

Wells Fargo wants in on Boston’s biotech party. After trying to convince local life sciences firms to bank with Wells from afar, the bank moved Katherine Andersen from its capital finance office at One Boston Place to its commercial banking office at 101 Federal St. and named Andersen to lead its New England biotech initiative. Until now, life sciences clients in the Boston area were primarily served out of Wells’ Palo Alto, Calif., office, even though the Boston area is a global hub for the biotech industry. “It’s challenging to grow relationships from 3,000 miles away,” said Andersen, who will be the company’s first life sciences banker in Boston. For Andersen, the new role resonates personally after she helped an out-of-state friend deal with her young daughter’s fatal leukemia. The girl died about six months ago at the age of three, and Andersen got an up-close look at the often-heartbreaking process of lining up to get into experimental cancer drug trials. “When I had the opportunity to not just do what I love, but to do it in an industry where I could feel like I was helping people, I knew it would be a perfect fit,” she said. Wells has slowly been expanding in Boston’s business scene, with the number of commercial bankers here doubling to 35 today from seven years ago. But the average consumer won’t be seeing the Wells stagecoach anytime soon. Boston is one of the few major metro areas in the country without Wells branches, and federal antitrust rules prevent Wells from buying a smaller branch network to expand into Boston because the bank already has such a significant market share nationwide. The bank would have to build the branches one at a time, and there’s no plan on the books to do that just yet.

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Wells Fargo is looking to build its biotech business in Boston

After trying to convince local life sciences firms to bank with Wells from afar, the San Francisco-based company’s commercial banking division decided it needed someone on the ground in the Boston area to bring in new clients.

20150517195204

Every new startup wants to be the “Uber of . . .” its own industry, but now an entrepreneur is claiming the popular ride-sharing app was actually stolen. Kevin Halpern filed a lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court on Thursday claiming that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick stole the idea for a “real-time, cellular phone-based” car service from a startup, Celluride Wireless, that Halpern founded in 2003. Celluride appears to no longer be in operation, though the company is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with Halpern. The lawsuit filed against Uber in claims that Halpern began meeting with Kalanick — whom the complaint describes as “an approachable fellow entrepreneur” — in 2006 and later shared detailed information about the ongoing development of Celluride with the future Uber co-founder. Halpern alleges that these discussions were held under the guise of confidentiality. Halpern worked until 2008 to develop the technology for Celluride, which, the lawsuit says, is similar to Uber’s business and app interface. Halpern claims Kalanick and fellow Uber co-founder Garrett Camp then stole his trade secrets and presented them as their own at a venture capital conference in the fall of 2008, which was months before the launch of Uber. Uber said Thursday that Halpern’s lawsuit has no merit. “These claims are completely baseless. We will vigorously defend against them,” Uber spokeswoman Kristin Carvell said in a statement. Halpern is accusing Kalanick and Camp, along with a handful of venture capital firms that back Uber, of misappropriation of trade secrets, conversion (illegally using someone else’s idea) and breach of contract. The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory damages. An attorney for Halpern did not immediately respond to Fortune when asked why the lawsuit was not filed until this week, more than six years after Uber’s founding. (Halpern’s attorney announced the lawsuit in a taped press conference.) In 2009, Halpern sued Anu Shukla, the founder of tech company Offerpal Media (now called Tapjoy), for breach of contract in a similar lawsuit that alleged Halpern helped create Offerpal only to be cut out of the company shortly before it was founded. That lawsuit was later dismissed, as was another one filed against two Santa Cruz police officers who arrested him for being under the influence of an illegal stimulant. Of course, Uber is no stranger to legal action itself. The ride-sharing service has faced lawsuits from taxi companies as well as charges brought by passengers and former Uber drivers. Successful tech companies are often the targets of lawsuits by people claiming to behind the original idea. Facebook, for example, was sued by the Winklevoss brothers, who attended Harvard with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The brothers, who claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea for a social network, eventually won a settlement. In another lawsuit against Facebook, Paul Ceglia claimed to have a contract showing that Zuckerberg had promised him half of the company. Ceglia has since reportedly gone missing after being accused in federal court of fabricating the evidence. For more about Uber, watch this Fortune video:

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Lawsuit claims Uber cofounders stole ride-sharing app idea

Kevin Halpern, who previously lost a similar case against another startup, claims Uber ripped off its wildly successful idea from his company, Celluride Wireless.

20150524075448

MOSCOW, Sept. 1— The Soviet Union, plagued by mercurial weather, appears to be bracing for its third poor grai n harvest in succession. If the results are as bad as Western agricu ltural specialists here believe, they could send Soviet grain buyers into world markets for record purchases of as much as 40 million met ric tons. For American farmers, this could mean some of the largest sales ever to the SovietUnion after 18 months of a grain curtailment that President Reagan ended last June. With collective farms from Kiev to Kazakhstan in the midst of the harvest, even the Kremlin cannot be sure how poor the final figure might be. But the seriousness of the situation was indicated by the action of the Communist Party's Central Committee, which two weeks ago distribut ed a private circular to its branches throughout the country warni ng of the urgent need to conserve food. Privately, Soviet agricultural specialists have told Western diplomats that the grain harvest will not be as bad as the latest forecast of the United States Department of Agriculture, which has estimated the total yield at 185 million metric tons of wheat, feed grains and oil seed. This would be more than 20 percent below the official target of 236 million tons and would compare with poor harvests of 189 million tons in 1980 and 179 million in 1979. A metric ton is the equivalent of 1,000 kilograms, or 2,205 pounds. The seriousness of the harvest situation was reflected in the manner in which the Central Committee distributed its circular. Instead of publishing it, the leadership distributed the document secretly through party channels, ordering that it be read at meetings of the party's 16 million members. According to officials familiar with its contents, the document warned that weather conditions this year have been as bad as in 1972 and 1975, when disastrous harvests resulted in record Soviet grain imports. Heavy rainfall last fall forced a cutback in the acreage sown to winter wheat, and the hottest weather in a century across European Russia withered crops during the summer. Then, just as harvesting began, heavy rainfall set in, flattening crops and leaving those still standing sodden. Other signs that the Government expects a poor harvest have come in the official press, which has run a spate of front-page articles urging extra efforts by the nation's 20 million agricultural workers. Other articles have urged people to economize on bread. The articles have pointed with increasing urgency to problems brought about by drought and flood, and by familiar man-made blockages in the Soviet system - tractors and combines that stand idle for lack of spare parts, grain that withers for lack of manpower to reap it and granaries that leave wheat to spoil under leaking roofs. In an editorial yesterday, Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, said: ''To collect swiftly and without waste everything grown in the fields, to save every kilogram of produce and deliver it in due time to the consumers - this is the duty of farmers, Government procurers, trade and transport organizations and processing enterprises.'' At 185 million tons - the United States Agriculture Department's estimate - this year's harvest would mean a cumulative shortfall of 145 million tons since 1979 from the grain harvest goals set in the five-year plans. The record Soviet harvest was 237.4 million tons, in 1978. Food and Fodder Cutbacks Traditionally, shortfalls have been made up by a combination of food and fodder cutbacks at home and by stepped-up grain imports from the major exporting nations of the West, principally the United States, Argentina, Canada and Australia. Since June, when the export curtailment was lifted, the United States has sold 1.5 million tons of grain to the Soviet Union. The Russians purchased 35 million tons of wheat, corn and soybeans last year, only eight million of which came from the United States because of the export cut imposed by President Carter after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. The economic implcations of recurrent poor harvests are severe. Last year, food imports ate up nearly half the country's hardcurrency earnings of $24.4 billion, and an increase could force a cutback in the Kremlin's drive to aid lagging industry with hightechnology imports from the West. Western diplomats here believe that continued dependence on Western grain, particularly purchases from the United States, also constitutes a major foreign policy constraint. Although other factors have deterred a Soviet military invasion of Poland, diplomats say that Kremlin strategists must also have weighed the probable cutoff of food supplies that have become essential to the national diet. Perhaps more serious from the Kremlin's viewpoint, poor harvests indirectly hamper its ability to shift resources into the military sector, and thus to match the arm s buildup fa vored by the Reagan Administration. Articles by Soviet generals a ppearing in recent weekshave alluded to the problem, saying that offi cials in Washington appear to be intent on undermining the Soviet economy with large increases in defense spending. ---- U.S. Affirms Forecast By SETH S. KING Special to the New York Times WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - On the basis of recent weather reports and comments by Soviet officials, the Agriculture Department is staying with its mid-August forecast indicating that this year's Soviet grain crop would total only 185 million metric tons. ''We have certainly not seen nor heard anything since then that would cause us to increase that figure,'' a department specialist on Soviet agriculture said today. The specialist added that there were two conflicting reports on the 1981 crop from the Soviet Union last week. He cited a Reuters dispatch quoting an unnamed Soviet official who asserted that this year's crop would be better than last year's. Article Discussed Problems However, on Friday, Izvestia, the Government newspaper, carried an article discussing the serious problems already affecting wheat, feed grain and oil seed production. From Soviet weather reports this summer, the specialist said, it was evident that soil moisture in most areas was only 75 percent of normal. It had been particularly dry in many Soviet farm areas during critical periods of plant development, he added. In the last month, in addition, there had been fewer than usual reports in the Soviet press of collective farms selling their recently harvested grain to state collecting agencies, he said.

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THIRD YEAR OF POOR SOVIET HARVESTS INDICATED

The Soviet Union, plagued by mercurial weather, appears to be bracing for its third poor grai n harvest in succession. If the results are as bad as Western agricu ltural specialists here believe, they could send Soviet grain buyers into world markets for record purchases of as much as 40 million met ric tons. For American farmers, this could mean some of the largest sales ever to the SovietUnion after 18 months of a grain curtailment that President Reagan ended last June. With collective farms from Kiev to Kazakhstan in the midst of the harvest, even the Kremlin cannot be sure how poor the final figure might be. But the seriousness of the situation was indicated by the action of the Communist Party's Central Committee, which two weeks ago distribut ed a private circular to its branches throughout the country warni ng of the urgent need to conserve food.

20150524082153

''I have recovered. I feel fine. And the doctors say I've recovered. So if I'm a medical miracle, I'm a happy one.'' It was hard to believe, watching Ronald Reagan on television yesterday, that 11 weeks ago he was in intensive care. Since the assassination attempt the President has made other public appearances at which he sounded chipper but looked drawn. Yesterday he was fit, grinning and practicing politics with high style. There were some rough, uninformed, even misinformed answers to foreign affairs questions. When asked about Syrian antiaircraft missiles that are by definition defensive, he said, ''They're offensive weapons; there's no question about the direction in which they're aimed.'' Why has he so long delayed an address outlining his foreign policy? He fumbled for an answer, finally settling on an arithmetical test, as though a foreign policy is measured by the number of visitors entertained and the number of miles traveled (''I have met with eight heads of state already ...''). But in other respects, the President was back at the top of his form. He took pains, for instance, to show his sense of political fair play: What does he think about conservative groups focusing expensive television commercials targeting liberal Democrats for defeat? ''One of the things that does not set too well with me is that to campaign before there is a candidate on your side means that you're campaigning totally in a negative way.'' And more to the point, Mr. Reagan kept the focus where he wanted it - on his economic program. In his opening statement, he sought skillfully to portray his Democratic opponents as obstructionists, people who ''have reported spending cuts they know can't be made; closing, for example, one-third of the nation's Post Offices.'' Rich man's President? Not him, by golly. By the time the questions stopped, he seemed almost ready to bet that he's more of a common man than Speaker O'Neill, a Democrat. One need not share Mr. Reagan's politics to be pleased: an accomplished and audacious professional is back in uniform.

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The Professional

''I have recovered. I feel fine. And the doctors say I've recovered. So if I'm a medical miracle, I'm a happy one.'' It was hard to believe, watching Ronald Reagan on television yesterday, that 11 weeks ago he was in intensive care. Since the assassination attempt the President has made other public appearances at which he sounded chipper but looked drawn. Yesterday he was fit, grinning and practicing politics with high style.

20150524082845

Ann Buffington Rhame, a 1981 graduate of Hamilton College, and Peter Breckinridge Coffin, a senior at Hamilton, plan to be married Dec. 30. Mr. Coffin's older brother, George Jarvis Coffin 3d, and Susanne Claypoole Madeira, 1979 graduates of William Smith and Hobart Colleges, respectively, have set April 24 as their wedding date. Dr. and Mrs. Harold Ellis Rhame Jr. of Fairfield, Conn., have made known their daughter's engagement to the son of Mr. and Mrs. Coffin Jr. of Eden, N.Y., formerly of Wilton, Conn. Miss Madeira's engagement has been announced by her parents, Mrs. Rufus C. Finch Jr. of New York and Harry R. Madeira of Haverford, Pa., and Northeast Harbor, Me. Miss Rhame, an alumna also of Choate Rosemary Hall, was presented at the Fairfield Debutante Ball. She attends the Katharine Gibbs School in Norwalk, Conn. Her fiance was graduated from the Ridley College School in St. Catherine's, Ont. Miss Madeira, who was graduated also from the Garrison Forest School, is an agent with City Travel in New York. Her father is a retired executive vice president of the General Coal Company, a marketing subsidiary of the Westmoreland Coal Company. Mr. Coffin 3d, a sales representative for Advertising Age, a Crain Communications publication in New York, was graduated also from Ridley. His father is a vice president of the Ostendorf Trading Corporation in Buffalo. Miss Rhame is a granddaughter of Mr. and Mrs. Morris R. Williams of Easton, Pa., Mrs. Rhame of Washington and the late Dr. Rhame, former senior surgeon at the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. Her maternal grandfather, who is retired, was chairman of C.K. Williams & Company, a pigments and minerals concern that is now a division of Pfizer Inc. Her father is a surgeon. Miss Madeira is a granddaughter of Mrs. Crawford Clark Madeira of Haverford; the late Mr. Madeira, former vice president of the Rockhill Coal Company; the late Eckley Brinton Coxe 3d, who was a limited partner in the brokerage firm of Auchincloss, Parker & Redpath, and the late Mrs. Coxe, also of Haverford. The grandparentrs of the future bridegrooms are Mr. and Mrs. Frederick N.C. Jerrauld of Buffalo and Dr. and Mrs. Coffin of New York. Mr. Jerrauld, who is retired, was general manager of the Southwest Color Printing Corporation, a subsidiary of the Greater Buffalo Press. Dr. Coffin, also retired, was director of medicine at St. Luke's Hospital. Illustrations: photo of Ann Rhame photo of Susanne Madeira

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Ann B. Rhame and Susanne Madeira Fiancees of Peter and George Coffin 3d

Ann Buffington Rhame, a 1981 graduate of Hamilton College, and Peter Breckinridge Coffin, a senior at Hamilton, plan to be married Dec. 30. Mr. Coffin's older brother, George Jarvis Coffin 3d, and Susanne Claypoole Madeira, 1979 graduates of William Smith and Hobart Colleges, respectively, have set April 24 as their wedding date. Dr. and Mrs. Harold Ellis Rhame Jr. of Fairfield, Conn., have made known their daughter's engagement to the son of Mr. and Mrs. Coffin Jr. of Eden, N.Y., formerly of Wilton, Conn. Miss Madeira's engagement has been announced by her parents, Mrs. Rufus C. Finch Jr. of New York and Harry R. Madeira of Haverford, Pa., and Northeast Harbor, Me.

20150524083941

Takeover situations and earnings reports dominated trading interest in the stock market yesterday as prices over all declined slightly. While individual issues responded to corporate developments, analysts said that high returns available in alternate investments continued to restrain enthusiasm for equities. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 2.76 points, to 848.27, after showing a loss exceeding 7 points earlier. Volume contracted to 40.6 million shares from Wednesday's 48.5 million. Newmont Mining, the volume leader on a turnover exceeding 1 million shares, tumbled 4 5/8 points, to 49. This followed an agreement whereby Newmont will allow Consolidated Gold Fields Ltd. of England to acquire up to 26 percent of its shares. The compromise accord extends through 1984. Penn Central Down 4 1/2 Penn Central, No.2 on the active list, fell 4 1/2 points, to 41 1/2, reflecting two developments. The company, whose stock has been strong in recent weeks, said on Wednesday that, despite Wall Street rumors, it was not negotiating to be acquired by Esmark or any other company. In addition, Penn Central, which emerged from bankruptcy in 1978 and now operates successfully as a conglomerate, stressed its intention to proceed with the proposed takeover of Colt Industries despite the opposition of a group of Penn Central's preferred shareowners. This sent Colt's stock ahead 7 points, to 80. Kaiser Steel fell 2 points, to 40 3/4, after the West Coast steelmaker said it had terminated talks regarding its possible acquisition by an investor group led by Stanley Hiller Jr. The Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company dropped 1 7/8, to 10 5/8. In the Reagan Administration's first comment on a major corporate merger, the Justice Department announced Wednesday that it would oppose the $494 million acquisition of Schlitz by the G. Heileman Brewing Company as a violation of antitrust law. Heileman gained 1/4, to 29 1/2. Uncertain prospects for the domestic economy have made investors increasingly attentive to newly issued earnings reports, especially those regarded as disappointing. Four-Phase Systems Off Thus, Four-Phase Systems dropped 4 1/2 points, to 29 1/2. The producer of distributed data processing systems reported flat earnings for its September quarter after showing higher profits in the first half of 1981. Another big loser was Gearhart Industries, falling 4 points, to 24 3/8, after the company said that earnings for its quarter ending Oct. 31 may run below the level of a year earlier. In 1980, this stock sold at a record price of 60 3/4. Minnesota Mining, showing the largest loss among the 30 Dow industrials, dropped 1 3/8, to 50 1/2, after reporting lower quarterly profits. On the American Stock Exchange, higher prices for several large energy companies helped to send the exchange's market value index ahead 3.66, to 309.30. The Nasdaq composite index gained 0.05, to 192.43.

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Stocks Edge Down On Profits Reports

Takeover situations and earnings reports dominated trading interest in the stock market yesterday as prices over all declined slightly. While individual issues responded to corporate developments, analysts said that high returns available in alternate investments continued to restrain enthusiasm for equities. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 2.76 points, to 848.27, after showing a loss exceeding 7 points earlier. Volume contracted to 40.6 million shares from Wednesday's 48.5 million.

20150524084532

Women in business are doing all right at the very top (on corporate boards) and at the bottom (in the growing number enrolled in business schools), says a Columbia University social scientist who has analyzed 250 studies on how women managers are faring in the business world. It is in the middle levels where ''the crunch will come,'' she predicts. According to Dr. Linda Keller Brown, of Columbia's Center for the Social Sciences, these studies indicate that this crunch has to do with the reluctance of American companies to send women abroad for management experience. ''Because foreign profits are so important, companies cannot have people in upper management who do not have foreign experience,'' she said recently in an interview at her Columbia office. ''But these companies are not yet willing to send women abroad on foreign assignments. They think that women will not be accepted in third world countries or in countries like Japan, where there are few women managers.'' ''Without this foreign experience,'' Dr. Brown added, ''the woman manager's future in the company will be compromised.'' Dr. Brown has written a new book based on her analysis of the studies, called ''The Woman Manager in the United States.'' It was funded and published by the Business and Professional Women's Foundation in Washington. She was also speaking from her experience as director of the center's Cross-National Project on Women as Corporate Managers. In that role, she analyzes the economic and social factors affecting the leadership of women in business in the United States and several foreign countries. The project is financed by the Ford Foundation and the German Marshall Fund. Success in Foreign Countries Calling the reluctance of corporations to send women abroad ''one kind of fly in the ointment,'' Dr. Brown said she thought that women did much better in foreign countries than was commonly thought. ''They do very well in Thailand and the Philippines,'' she said. ''And anyone who goes to Japan is considered an outsider. A woman going into that situation with a high enough rank would be at an advantage. She would be considered so unusual that the Japanese would go out of their way for her.'' Dr. Brown characterized the situation for women managers in the United States as ''improving, the change is real,'' but added that the change was not as great as indicated in the news media. ''The press has conveyed the impression of a tremendous change, which has not yet happened,'' she said. ''The situation is more like a big tub of hot water, with a few cold drops coming into it. It takes a while for the temperature to change.'' Change at Business Schools She said the major change taking place was at the business school level, where 28 percent of the students in the top American schools are women. She said that about 15 percent of today's management trainees were women, compared with only 1 percent in the mid-1960's. And 36 percent of corporate boards now have women directors, she said, as opposed to 11 percent in 1973. ''The key to what happens to women in the next few years probably lies with the the older male managers,'' Dr. Brown said. ''How they view women is very important. Two top examples are Coy Eklund of Equitable Life Assurance and Al Neuharth of the Gannett newspaper chain. Both have outstanding records of seeking top management talent, regardless of sex.'' Quoting from studies mentioned in her book, Dr. Brown said that the greatest discrimination toward women in business came from male business school students. ''Much of this student antipathy toward women results from the fear of more competition for fewer jobs in a poor economy,'' she said. The Mentor Concept The 38-year-old social scientist said she thought the notion that mentors were important to a woman's advancement was ''overblown.'' ''It doesn't hurt to have friends,'' she said. ''But one study, by J.J. Speizer, shows that the popularity of the mentor concept tends to reinforce the male-dominated organizational status quo.'' She was more enthusiastic about the value of women's networks to women in business. ''They're crucial if a woman is going to change jobs,'' she said. ''This is especially true in business, where women don't have the strong professional associations that women in other fields have.'' Adding to the value of networks, she said, is the fact that 48 percent of all jobs come through personal contacts and that in management the percentage is ''much, much higher.'' In the area of salaries, the most recent census statistics showed that only 102,000 female managers earned over $25,000, compared with 2,560,000 males. And according to one study in Dr. Brown's book, the wage differential between men and women managers was actually worse than the national earnings average. Nationally, women earn 62 percent of what men earn; women in managerial and administrative jobs earn 60 percent of what men earn. Type of Jobs an Issue ''Part of the problem is the kind of jobs women have gone into in management,'' Dr. Brown said. ''They are most heavily in health administration, general office administration, the food area and the retail trade area. Those are not particularly well-paying fields, for men or women.'' Dr. Brown said that despite the stereotype of female managers as being more helpful, intuitive and understanding than male managers, studies done in this area had shown that male and female managers had more characteristics in common than they had differences. One study of 2,000 male and female managers in 1980 found ''a significant case of no significant difference,'' she said. One difference that showed up in another study was that male managers considered personnel decisions the most important part of their jobs, while women rated task decisions highest - a reversal of the stereotype that women are oriented toward relationships and men toward tasks. Another lingering difference is that the women managers in the studies were only a third to a half as likely as male managers to be married. ''Compared with the general population,'' Dr. Brown writes in her book, ''a substantially larger percentage of women in middle management are not married, and those who are married tend to marry late.'' Among the reasons cited in the studies were dedication to the job, difficulty in combining domestic and career demands and the fact that the kind of ''power-motivated'' men that women managers were likely to meet at work preferred dependent wives. Anyone wanting to order a copy of ''The Woman Manager in the United States'' should send $5.50 to the Business and Professional Women's Supply Service, 11722 Parklawn Drive, Rockville, Md. 20852. Illustrations: photo of Dr. Linda Keller

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FOR WOMEN IN BUSINESS, NO ROOM IN THE MIDDLE

Women in business are doing all right at the very top (on corporate boards) and at the bottom (in the growing number enrolled in business schools), says a Columbia University social scientist who has analyzed 250 studies on how women managers are faring in the business world. It is in the middle levels where ''the crunch will come,'' she predicts. According to Dr. Linda Keller Brown, of Columbia's Center for the Social Sciences, these studies indicate that this crunch has to do with the reluctance of American companies to send women abroad for management experience. ''Because foreign profits are so important, companies cannot have people in upper management who do not have foreign experience,'' she said recently in an interview at her Columbia office. ''But these companies are not yet willing to send women abroad on foreign assignments. They think that women will not be accepted in third world countries or in countries like Japan, where there are few women managers.''

20150524110020

WASHINGTON— Where have all the Government's futurists gone? A decade or so ago, when a thousand scholarly flowers bloomed, few seemed as promising, or as alluring to Federal officials, as the flower of futurism. The United States seemed to overcome its antipathy to concerted planning and began seriously considering the shape the future might take. Even Congress, whose members seldom looked beyond the next election, started examining the implications of legislation in fields such as energy, the environment and social policy. Now, however, activity in the field has slowed to the point of stopping. ''Actually, it died somewhere in the 1970's,'' said Michael Marien, the editor of ''Futures Survey,'' a monthly abstract published by the World Future Society. ''Nobody announced its death, but it happened.'' Mr. Marien, who has been monitoring futures literature for the past dozen years, said the flood of books on trends and forecasts is down to a trickle. Those hardy few who still contemplate the future with curves, graphs and computer models insist that the Government, especially Congress, has an inherent institutional resistance to such studies. They argue that the election cycle -every two years for members of the House, every six years for members of the Senate - nurtures an almost congenital form of myopia. And in the urgent press of day-today events in the departments and agencies scattered about Washington, the present almost always takes precedence over the future. ''Sometimes you talk to Foreign Relations Committee staff members and realize that 'long-term' to them means two weeks,'' said John H. Gibbons, director of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. But if futurism has died, as Mr. Marien suggested, the body is still twitching and may not be beyond resuscitation. A year and a half ago, the Council on Environmental Quality and the State Department engaged in a little futurism, producing a 766-page study, the ''Global 2000 Report,'' which examined demographic, resource and environmental trends over a very long run. The Reagan Administration has created a working group to continue studying these issues. Private organizations, such as the Global Tomorrow Coalition, a consortium of 56 groups claiming a combined membership of 6 million people, and the Year 2000 Committee, have started up in the wake of the study. ''We're trying to make sure the report just doesn't gather dust,'' said Donald R. Lesh, the coalition's executive director. Even Congress is plowing a few forward-looking furrows. The Joint Economic Committee has published a study of economic change and the dynamic forces driving the American economy. Other Congressional committees have prepared reports on energy consumption, communications and a host of global issues. The Congressional Research Service even maintains a futures research group, while agencies such as the Office of Science and Technology keep an eye on the long-range impact of Congressional lawmaking. Indeed, some observers argue that futurism is not dead, but rather was institutionalized and so well integrated into the legislative process, no one sees it. In 1974, they note, the House passed what has become known as the ''foresight provision.'' This required each standing committee of the House, except the Appropriations and Budget Committees, to include futures research and forecasting in their respective areas. Perhaps a more accurate measure of the state-of-the-art is that one of the major centers of Government futurism is a modest office suite tucked away in a Capitol Hill annex. There, the staff of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future toils - all four of them. ''Things are happening slowly,'' Rita Goldman, staff director, admits. ''But they are happening.'' The clearinghouse, which began nearly four years ago, has a budget of $115,000. Over the years, it has invited academic luminaries such as Margaret Mead, E.F. Schumacher and Carl Sagan to speak before members of Congress and has held seminars on subjects as diverse as the future of the workplace and the future of public education. It produces two publications and monitors emerging issues in areas ranging from culture and the arts in America to the economy. ''It has provided an extremely valuable perspective,'' said Representative Albert Gore Jr., Democrat of Tennessee and chairman of the clearinghouse. ''But its effect is difficult to measure in terms of specific bills or resolutions. It's more subtle than that. The clearinghouse gives people a long-range perspective from which they can analyze the context of legislation.'' Some members of Congress, and some futurists, find the clearinghouse's work necessary, but not sufficient to their needs. And what is needed, they say, is not the flabby and trendy thinking offered by many forecasters of yore. ''The problem is that futurism is very difficult,'' said Mr. Marien. When the future turns out to be quite different from what has been expected, he said, social scientists tend to condemn both the forecasts and the practice of looking ahead. ''But you don't expect a baseball player to hit .400 or .500,'' Mr. Marien said. ''Perhaps a good futurist is like a good baseball player, hitting one out of three times.'' Senator John H. Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, believes that the nation, and official Washington in particular, must overcome prejudices against futurism. ''Everybody always says that we have so many immediate problems that we can't waste time thinking about the future,'' said Senator Glenn, a former Project Mercury astronaut who held hearings on Congress's need to project ahead his first year in the Senate. If the United States doesn't plan, ''if we lay down the curiosity that has been the hallmark of being American,'' Senator Glenn said, ''we will fall behind. It's that simple.'' Illustrations: photo of smokestacks spilling waste

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NOW AND THEN, CONGRESS ALSO PONDERS THE FUTURE

Where have all the Government's futurists gone? A decade or so ago, when a thousand scholarly flowers bloomed, few seemed as promising, or as alluring to Federal officials, as the flower of futurism. The United States seemed to overcome its antipathy to concerted planning and began seriously considering the shape the future might take. Even Congress, whose members seldom looked beyond the next election, started examining the implications of legislation in fields such as energy, the environment and social policy. Now, however, activity in the field has slowed to the point of stopping. ''Actually, it died somewhere in the 1970's,'' said Michael Marien, the editor of ''Futures Survey,'' a monthly abstract published by the World Future Society. ''Nobody announced its death, but it happened.'' Mr. Marien, who has been monitoring futures literature for the past dozen years, said the flood of books on trends and forecasts is down to a trickle.

20150524124529

CHICAGO, Jan. 18— Members of the Chicago Board of Trade tonight narrowly re-elected Leslie Rosenthal to be chairman of the nation's largest commodities exchange in one of the biggest and most heated exchange elections in recent memory. The controversial Mr. Rosenthal, who is the general manager of the commodities trading firm of Rosenthal & Compa ny, defeated Ralph Goldenberg, an independent trader who was the choice of the exchange's nominating committee by 105 votes -659 1/2 for Mr. Rosenthal and 554 1/2 for Mr. Goldenberg. ''It was the biggest election we've had in a long time, said Robert Wilmouth, president of the Board of Trade. ''It was the intense competition and the contrasting style of the two men.'' He attributed Mr. Rosenthal's victory to his reputation for ''innovation.'' The election was the most heated in recent years, long-time board members said. Campaigning began in mid-November right after the nominating committe passed over the present chairman, Mr. Rosenthal, and gave its nod to Mr. Goldenberg. Mr. Rosenthal's supporters quickly gathered enough signatures on a petition to place a slate of candidates headed by Mr. Rosenthal on the ballot. The weeks that followed saw an unusual number of campaign rallies and receptions. Allegations of pressure and various improprieties were hurled by both sides. Electioneering continued right up to 2:30 this afternoon, when the polling place on the exchange floor was closed. The tally continued late into the night. The battle was so intense, experts said, partially because the lines were so clearly drawn. Mr. Rosenthal represented a faction of powerful clearing members, who handle transactions for many other traders, and traders who deal in financial futures contracts. This group cast itself as the forward-looking members, arguing t hatthe Board of Trade, largely an exchange for agricultural commodities,would have to speed up its diversification into financial contracts. Traditional Contracts Down Last year's statistics on volume seemed to support their case. Trading volume in traditional contracts such as wheat and corn fell 16.9 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively, while trading in Treasury bonds surged 114.3 percent, becoming the board's most heavily traded contract. Mr. Rosenthal's faction argued that the board was losing ground to its local rival, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in the battle for dominance in financial futures. To shore up the Board of Trade's position, Mr. Rosenthal said, he negotiated an agreement to link electronically the trading floors of the board and the foundering New York Futures Exchange, a subsidiary of the New York Stock Exchange. The opposing faction, dominated by independent traders from the grain pits, criticized the proposed link to the futures exchange and made it a main issue of the campaign. They argued that the link would save a weak competitor, the futures exchange, and would benefit only the clearing members, since all futures exchange trades would be cleared in Chicago. Discontent was so high among members over the secretive manner in which Mr. Rosenthal negotiated the contract that the faction headed by Mr. Goldenberg was able to deny Mr. Rosenthal renomination. Referendum on Tie Forced Mr. Goldenberg's supporters then went on the offensive, forcing a membership referendum on the proposed futures exchange link. Some grain traders charged that he had botched the industry's effort to retain tax straddles in last year's tax bill. The anti-Rosenthal faction then negotitated an agreement with the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which advocates said would make the futures exchange connection unnecessary. A hint of today's outcome came in December, however, when the Board of Trade's membership voted by nearly three to one to pursue the New York affiliation. Late yesterday, Mr. Goldenberg was sanguine about predictions that his side would lose. ''One thing is sure, we won't be passive anymore; we'll be active from now on,'' he said, ''I feel good about my campaign; I retained my sense of humor.''

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ROSENTHAL RE-ELECTED IN CHICAGO

Members of the Chicago Board of Trade tonight narrowly re-elected Leslie Rosenthal to be chairman of the nation's largest commodities exchange in one of the biggest and most heated exchange elections in recent memory. The controversial Mr. Rosenthal, who is the general manager of the commodities trading firm of Rosenthal & Compa ny, defeated Ralph Goldenberg, an independent trader who was the choice of the exchange's nominating committee by 105 votes -659 1/2 for Mr. Rosenthal and 554 1/2 for Mr. Goldenberg. ''It was the biggest election we've had in a long time, said Robert Wilmouth, president of the Board of Trade. ''It was the intense competition and the contrasting style of the two men.'' He attributed Mr. Rosenthal's victory to his reputation for ''innovation.''

20150802004100

Since this summer, Brent crude oil has fallen from above $115 per barrel to around $61.08 a barrel in Asian trade Monday, with many analysts predicting prices will continue to slide. At the same time, the ruble has dropped around 70 percent since the end of June, with the U.S. dollar fetching around 58.2 rubles Friday. Government debt not a worry Only around $38 billion of Russia's government debt is denominated in dollars, and of that amount only around $6 billion of interest and principal payments are due in 2015, compared with around $400 billion of foreign-exchange reserves, Wells Fargo noted. With around two-thirds of government debt borrowed in rubles, the central bank can theoretically create enough rubles to pay off those creditors, the bank said. Read More US Congress readies new sanctions on Russia Obviously, that creates inflation risks. The cost of Russia's borrowing has climbed recently, with its 10-year ruble-denominated sovereign bond yield around 13.00 percent Friday compared with 8.33 percent at the end of June, according to Reuters data. Russia's central bank raised its main interest rate by 100 basis points to 10.5 percent on Thursday – the latest in a series of hikes this year as it attempts to rein in inflation and bolster the country's struggling economy, which also faces headwinds from sanctions from the West due to its conflict with Ukraine. Credit Suisse Private Banking echoed the relatively sanguine view on Russia's sovereign debt risks, adding it expects the country's current account surplus will rise in 2015 on a combination of weaker domestic demand and the ruble's decline. In a note last week, Credit Suisse said it has a positive view on the country's sovereign hard-currency bonds on attractive valuations, but it is more cautious about buying into the local-currency ones. Both banks expressed concern over Russian corporate debt. "Any Russian company or bank that needs to service foreign currency debt would have a more difficult time making foreign currency debt servicing payments if it does not generate revenue that is denominated in foreign currency," Wells Fargo said, noting the ruble's decline also lowers corporate net worth. Read More Why India and Russia remain BFFs Russian companies owe about $160 billion in intercompany debt to overseas parents and subsidiaries, likely mostly to Western European companies, while Russian banks have around $200 billion of external debt and other sectors have around $300 billion, Wells Fargo said.

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Are Russia’s bonds the next big worry?

Russia is among the worst hit by oil's decline, but clean living may keep government finances on an even keel. Its corporate debt may be another matter.

20150823201203

People familiar with the matter told Reuters it was the Indonesian captain Iriyanto who took this step, rather than his less experienced French co-pilot Remy Plesel, who was flying the plane. The outage would not directly upset the aircraft but would remove flight envelope protection, which prevents a pilot from taking a plane beyond its safety limits, leaving the junior pilot to fly the jet manually in delicate high altitude conditions. The decision to cut off the FAC has surprised people following the investigation because the usual procedure for resetting it is to press a button on the overhead panel. "You can reset the FAC, but to cut all power to it is very unusual," said one A320 pilot, who declined to be identified. "You don't pull the circuit breaker unless it was an absolute emergency. I don't know if there was one in this case, but it is very unusual." It is also significant because to pull the circuit breaker the captain had to rise from his seat. The circuit breakers are on a wall panel immediately behind the co-pilot and hard or impossible to reach from the seated position on the left side, where the captain sits, according to two experienced pilots and published diagrams of the cockpit. Shortly afterwards the junior pilot pulled the plane into a sharp climb from which investigators have said it stalled or lost lift. "It appears he was surprised or startled by this," said a person familiar with the investigation, referring to the decision to cut power to the affected computer. The captain eventually resumed control, but a person familiar with the matter said he was not in a position to intervene immediately to recover the aircraft from its upset. Data already published on the plane's trajectory suggest it may have been difficult for someone to move around the cockpit in an upward-tilting and by then possibly unstable aircraft, but there is so far no confirmation of the cockpit movements. "The co-pilot pulled the plane up, and by the time the captain regained the controls it was too late," one of the people familiar with the investigation said. Tatang Kurniadi, chief of Indonesia's NTSC, told Reuters there had been no delay in the captain resuming control but declined further comment. Lawyers for the family of the French co-pilot say they have filed a lawsuit against AirAsia in Paris for "endangering the lives of others" by flying the route without official authorisation on that day. Investigators have said the accident was not related to the permit issue. AirAsia did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit. Although more is becoming known about the chain of events, people familiar with the investigation warned against making assumptions on the accident's cause, which needed more analysis. Safety experts say air crashes are most often caused by a chain of events, each of which is necessary but not sufficient to explain the underlying causes of the accident.

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AirAsia captain left seat before jet lost control

The captain of the AirAsia jet that crashed into the sea in December was out of his seat conducting an unorthodox procedure when his co-pilot apparently lost control.

20150825180615

The U.S. 2-year Treasury yield traded near 0.50 percent while the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield gained to hold 1.91 percent, up from 1.85 percent earlier. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up more than half a percent higher on Monday, holding in the black for the year. The blue chip index gained as much as 187 points after falling triple digits in the open. "I don't know why bad (economic) news continues to be good news," said Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at The Lindsey Group, who noted the weaker dollar. Markets were closed on Friday and stocks opened sharply lower on Monday, following futures that plunged after the monthly employment report showed the addition of 126,000 jobs, far below the estimated 245,000 from a Reuters poll. "The theme of 'data dependent' is back in the market," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital. He still expects the Federal Reserve to raise rates in the second half of this year, but said that weaker economic data could push a rate hike out to 2016. The ISM non-manufacturing Index was 56.5 in March, its lowest level in three months but in line with estimates. The Markit Purchasing Managers Index rose to 59.2 in March, the highest level since August. On Tuesday, traders will eye the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) as one of the few other economic indicators coming out this week. "We really don't get much (data) this week. That's why we're getting a bigger reaction (in stocks)," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities. Stability in the dollar cross "is helping markets as well." The strong dollar weighed on corporate profits last quarter and is expected to continue to be a headwind. Analysts are also watching for the effects of lower oil prices. Alcoa reports quarterly results this Wednesday in the unofficial start to the earnings season. "The dollar is a little softer. It should be a lot softer," said Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital. "The biggest disconnect is that people actually think the U.S. economy is recovering" and will lead to a rate hike soon. Read MoreBad news turns good for 'Fed addicted' stocks European markets were closed for both Good Friday and Easter Monday. Asian stocks outside Japan gained on hopes the weak jobs report would push out a rate hike by the Federal Reserve. U.S. stock futures continued to indicate a lower open following remarks by New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley that the central bank will watch subsequent data to see if March's report was an aberration or an indicator of greater economic weakness. Weekly jobless claims have held to lower levels and had suggested a stronger read on monthly nonfarm payrolls. Dudley was the first Fed official to speak publicly since the March labor report. Over the weekend, Greece's finance minister told reporters in Washington after a meeting with International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde that the country "intends to meet all obligations to all its creditors, ad infinitum." Athens is due to pay the IMF 450 million euros ($494 million) Thursday. Read MoreGreece needs deal by April 24: Varoufakis In U.S. corporate news, Tesla delivered 10,030 vehicles during the first quarter, its highest quarterly total ever and a 55 percent increase over the first quarter of 2014. Lorillard and Reynolds American closed higher as investors sought guidance on whether a proposed merger between the tobacco giants will be allowed to proceed. The stocks fell in recent weeks on sentiment that it would be rejected, but reports emerged late last week that the FTC was leaning towards a proposed compromise that would allow it to go through.

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Stocks climb on reduced rate hike fears; Dow in the black for the year

U.S. stocks closed higher, rebounding from initial losses on the disappointing jobs report as weak data renewed hopes of a rate hike delay.

20150828192307

Federal regulators on Thursday approved a new injectable drug that promises to sharply reduce levels of bad cholesterol in millions of people who need more than common statins but is also likely to spark another round of debate over the high prices of new medicines. The drug, Repatha, developed by Amgen Inc., will be made in West Greenwich, R.I. It’s part of a new class of powerful but expensive medicines that block a protein called PCSK9 from degrading receptors that remove bad LDL cholesterol from the blood. The first similar drug, approved by regulators last month, hit the market at a price of $14,600 per year. Insurers had hoped more competition would lower the cost of such treatments. But any immediate relief will be modest. Amgen said it plans to charge $14,100 per year for Repatha. More than 73 million Americans have high levels of LDL, or bad, cholesterol, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 15 percent, those who don’t respond to or are only partly helped by inexpensive and widely prescribed statins, are candidates for Repatha. But that is a huge market for Amgen, the largest US biotech by market value. The Food and Drug Administration approved Repatha as a second-line therapy for patients with heart conditions who already take statins to prevent heart attacks and strokes. “Repatha provides another treatment option in this new class of drugs for patients with [hereditary high cholesterol] or with known cardiovascular disease who have not been able to lower their LDL cholesterol enough with statins,” Dr. John Jenkins, head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said. While considered highly effective, the new PCSK9 inhibitors were immediately scrutinized by health insurers for their hefty price tags. “The focus will be on how you deliver the best value and the best price for patients,” said Clare Krusing, spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry group. “But when these new medications across the board are bringing five- and six-figure price tags, that’s becoming the new norm. So we have to negotiate from a higher starting point.” Executive vice president Anthony C. Hooper said Amgen “is sensitive to the concerns of payers around cost, budget predictability, and paying for value.” Repatha and the rival PCSK9 injectable called Praluent, made by Sanofi SA and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., may eventually face increased competition. But health insurers are expected to try to restrict the market for PCSK9 drugs to the highest-risk cardiovascular patients, said Peter Chang, principal scientific analyst at Informa PLC in San Diego. “These drugs are a breakthrough,” Chang said. “They dramatically lower LDL cholesterol levels and have the potential to reduce cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes even further for people who also take statins.” Most cholesterol drug patients pay less than $250 a year because the statin market is dominated by low-cost generics, said Steve Miller, chief medical officer for Express Scripts, the largest pharmacy benefits manager, which negotiates pricing with drug companies on behalf of insurers and employers. “These drugs represent an enormous step up to more than $10,000 a year,” said Miller, who added that drug makers hope to win approval for PCSK9 drugs as “first-line” treatments for primary prevention. “This will probably over time become the biggest class of drugs in history.” Even as second-line therapies, the new drugs could represent a big share of the market for all cholesterol drugs — projected to be as much as $24 billion in 2018 by the research firm IMS Health. “We believe the PCSK9 class could be $5 billion to $10 billion worldwide long term, and Amgen could get around half the share,” said Michael J. Yee, at RBC Capital Markets. Amgen’s drug will be produced at its plant in Rhode Island, where Amgen also makes Enbrel, a top-selling drug for rheumatoid arthritis, and Vectibix, for colorectal cancer. The new drugs have been shown to lower bad cholesterol 54 to 77 percent. High levels of bad cholesterol increase the risk of heart disease.

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FDA approves new Amgen cholesterol drug

Federal regulators Thursday approved a new Amgen Inc. drug that can reduce levels of bad cholesterol in millions of people who don’t respond to or are only partly helped by statins.

20150906080905

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is adding staff for a new division dedicated to restaurants in Seattle and New York, with indications the unit is trying to rapidly expand a meal delivery service, according to posts on LinkedIn and the company's jobs site. Amazon, which declined to comment on Friday, is best known as a place to buy millions of products including books and electronics. It has increasingly moved into services, offering customers the ability to book everything from plumbers to local getaways. The online retailer has dabbled in food delivery before but its move to form a dedicated division called Amazon Restaurants could mean it is preparing to enter the increasingly crowded meal delivery market and compete against well-established players like GrubHub Inc. The exact purpose of the division is unclear but the job description of at least one employee in the unit suggests Amazon is interested in expanding restaurant delivery services beyond Seattle, where recent media reports say the company is already testing its own meal delivery program. There are at least 15 job openings for a division called "Amazon Restaurants," based in Seattle and New York, according to a Reuters search on LinkedIn and Amazon's own jobs site. There are also six other postings for "Amazon Restaurants and Travel," which appears to be a separate unit. At least five Amazon employees have updated their LinkedIn profiles in the last five months to indicate they are working for Amazon Restaurants. One of them joined the division from GrubHub. In a job ad posted last week, Amazon said it was looking for candidates to cultivate relationships with restaurant owners. Amazon already partners with restaurants in Seattle on Amazon Local, a website and app where users can buy local deals and order food for takeout or delivery. Deliveries are done by restaurant staff, not by Amazon. Technology-focused blog GeekWire reported last week that Amazon began quietly testing its own meal delivery service in Seattle using drivers for Prime Now, the company's one- and two-hour delivery program. Ride-hailing app Uber has rolled out its own food delivery service UberEats, while startups like Postmates use a network of couriers to deliver food and home essentials. Groupon Inc also launched its own food delivery service in Chicago in July called Groupon To Go after acquiring OrderUp, a Chicago-based food delivery company.

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Amazon hiring staff for new restaurant division in Seattle, New York

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 4- Amazon.com Inc is adding staff for a new division dedicated to restaurants in Seattle and New York, with indications the unit is trying to rapidly expand a meal delivery service, according to posts on LinkedIn and the company's jobs site. The online retailer has dabbled in food delivery before but its move to form a dedicated division called...

20150913091958

Kirill Kudryavtsev | AFP | Getty Images Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang (on right) reviews an honor guard during an official welcoming ceremony at Vnukovo airport outside Moscow on October 12, 2014. The U.S. and Europe imposed wide-ranging sanctions against Russia in the wake of its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March, with measures including a ban on cooperating on oil exploration in the Arctic as well as targeting politicians, financial institutions, defense technology companies and energy players. Read More China's exports surge in September; Imports also unexpectedly rise China has been vocal in opposing the sanctions and Li's three-day official visit, his first since taking office last year, has offered the mainland the chance to scoop up deals which can offset Russia's inability to trade with the West. But the deals likely won't be on an entirely equal footing. Russia imports more from China than any other country, but Russia is only China's ninth largest trade partner, just under the U.K., noted Tony Nash, global vice president at Delta Economics. In addition, Russia may find itself relegated to primarily a supplier for China's factory floors. Indeed, it's a pattern visible in China's trade data for September, with imports unexpectedly rising 7 percent, driven by increasing shipments from commodity-intensive countries, including Russia, which are expected to be processed and re-exported later. Read More Russia Deputy PM: 'Sanctions not good from any side' "The Chinese were delighted because it enabled them to get hold of many, many deals that might not have come their way," Colin Chapman, president for New South Wales at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, told CNBC Tuesday, noting that many of the deals expected to be signed during Li's visit are in the energy segment.

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Why China-Russia ties are heating up

China Premier Li's trip to Moscow is expected to net as many as 50 trade deals, as sanctions spur Russia to accelerate ties with the mainland.

20150918200220

The larger emerging markets did not do very well: China ranked 90th, while Brazil ranked 120th and India at 142nd, below the troubled economies of Russia and Greece, which ranked 62nd and 61st respectively. Eritrea, where it takes an average of 84 days to start up a new business, ranked last followed by Libya (188th), and the Central African Republic (187th). However, the compilers of the rankings noted that their analysis uses a narrow spectrum of parameters and does not measure all aspects of the business environment that matter to firms and investors. The quality of fiscal management and other aspects of macro-economic stability like the levels of skills in the labor force or the resilience of a country's financial system, are not considered. Read MoreFamily business: Trust can be thinner than blood East Asia and the Pacific saw a marked improvement in business conditions over the past year, according to Rita Ramalho, lead author of the report: "Consistent regulatory reforms have improved the ease of doing business in the region in the past decade, and contributed to more business opportunities for local entrepreneurs." In Vietnam, ranked 78th, a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 22 percent from 25 percent this year gave start-ups a boost, while China enhanced its electronic filing and payment system and made business incorporation less expensive. Read MoreChallenges China faces for its future: Kevin Rudd In Mongolia - one of the world's fastest expanding economies - local businesses saw the average time for tax compliance fall to 148 hours from 192 hours over the course of 2013, a shorter time than Austria, for example. It ranked 72nd.

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Singapore easiest place to do business for 9th year

Singapore topped the World Bank's ease of doing business rankings for the ninth consecutive year, according to a report, released Wednesday.

20150925021027

To many people Kodak means memories, and with the news the 130-year old photographic company filed for bankruptcy we were flooded with images sent it by readers keen to collaborate on a gallery of their favourite "Kodak moments". Flicking through the photos, not only do the grainy Kodak pictures show something of times past and a collective nostalgia for things lost – but some of the photos clearly have more of a story to tell. Paul Baldwin (photo 38) sends in this image of his great grandmother – one of the iconic "Kodak girls" who worked at Eastman Kodak in the US. His grandparents moved to the US, got married and settled there – and after the first world war returned to the UK. Many have also been interested in Chris Miller's tale of how he ended up with this close up shot of the late Lady Di at Tidworth in Wiltshire, looking straight down the barrel of the lens in what he calls one of the first times she became visibly upset by the press onslaught. Not only did readers tell us about their particular memories related to people in the pictures – but also about their fondness for the Kodak technology and techniques used to capture, and record the image. On our Kodak thread on Flickr, where readers are continuing to share their images, there is much discussion on the methods used and the result – and our pictures editor Roger Tooth aptly describes the fondness for the Kodak products in this comment piece: "That was the thing about shooting on film and printing on paper: every time, it felt fresh. Fresh film, chilled from a fridge. Box fresh, beautifully packaged by Kodak in cute yellow boxes that opened with one thumb, perforated in exactly the right place." One Kodak product which has been fondly recalled by the youth of the 90s is the disposable hand-held camera. Found at wedding parties, taken on many a travel trip or bought off the cuff to document the events of a sunny day – the disposable camera was the common companion for those on fun and spontaneous escapades. Alex Kovalenko tells us about a project he's involved with using Kodak disposable cameras called Disposable stories. The camera is given to someone with the direction to take five photos and pass it on. This chain carries on five times until it's returned to Alex and his team – who process the photos and add them to the project website here. The photos from cameras which went round the world in September and June 2011 have just been uploaded and you cannot help but be sapped into the camera's own story – tracking a journey around the earth in the hands of excited travellers with their own vision of the world and stories to tell from the trip. Alex says: "I hope people will continue travelling with those and not only with cameraphones. Such an amazing feeling when you get your photos back from the shop after your trip and don't even really remember which photos you took." Going back even further in the Kodak production line, Neil Brown on Flickr has shared with us his project of uploading Kodak 35mm slides to the web to make a digital copy. Neil started collecting the slides he found at boot fairs, jumble sales, secondhand shops and auctions, as part of an art project. He writes: "This is such a shame, I just love the physical element you get with 35mm slides, which is lost with digital." Take a look at the wall of slides on Neil's website here – each has a story and memory which feel somewhat lost and forgotten. But reader Mark Davies, from Cheltenham, runs a project reuniting lost photographs with the families to whom they originally belonged. Lifebooth, he says, started with a Kodak folder he found at a flea market in Oxford – this sparked an interest in lost family albums and he soon found many people were selling them on eBay. "I thought it was really sad those family artefacts of our memory were ending up being sold and I was interested in the stories behind the albums." Mark thinks the lady connected to the images has since passed away, but continues to laboriously look for clues which appear to track one holiday for a boy called Jimmy who in 1949 is photographed next to his father's grave. He's currently looking for a woman called Nancy pictured in this photo: You can read more about it on his blog here. He writes: "I made a promise to myself that day when I was semi-resigned to being unable to find them, that if I ever saw photo albums for sale, and if there was any kind of information in them that would help me connect them to a family (even just a surname or a place), then I would try to reunite the photographs with someone who had a personal connection with the people in the photos." This all eventually led to Mark doing a PhD in family photography and he continues to reunite lost family albums with their owners or relatives here. But it all started with the Kodak folder – his "Kodak moment". There are other similar projects around trying to unearth the stories behind the photographs. And these remind me of one I was familiar with in Cardiff after a pile of photographs was found during a refurbishment of an old music hall – sparking memories of 1980s Cardiff life and calling for residents to come forward with stories and information on the pictures. The project was called Cardiff Before Cardiff and is run by Jon Pountney. Do you know of any photographic projects unearthing the stories behind the picture? Let us know in comments. You can see the "Kodak moments" gallery here and find out more about getting involved here.

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Kodak moments - your stories of forgotten memories

Readers created this stunning gallery showing their favourite 'Kodak moments' – but some of the photographs have more of a story to tell behind the lens. Here we explore some of them

20150926041605

The announcement comes just one week into Obamacare's second open-enrollment season, which is set to run through Feb. 15. One of the rules calls for open enrollment for health insurance plans that will go into effect in 2016 to to begin Oct. 1, 2015, and run through Dec. 15 of that same year. That would mean a sign-up season two weeks shorter than the current season. Read MoreObamacare toothache! Enrollments were juiced up Another proposal calls for having Obamacare customers be "defaulted" to a lower-cost insurance plan instead of their current plan. "Under current rules, consumers who do not take action during the open enrollment window are re-enrolled in the same plan they were in the previous year, even if that plan experienced significant premium increases," CMS said. "We are considering alternative options for re-enrollment, under which consumers who take no action might be defaulted into a lower-cost plan rather than their current plan." Although CMS said it is considering allowing state-run Obamacare exchanges to implement that default option in 2016, the agency is eyeing using that option on the federal Obamacare exchange HealthCare.gov starting only in 2017. While the defaulted option could protect customers from sticker shock once their now-pricier plan renews, the option also increases the likelihood that people will find themselves in a plan that doesn't include their preferred doctors or hospitals. Automatic renewal is currently a concern among Obamacare advocates, who worry that people will end up staying in plans that are too expensive for them, or which do not give them the most value for federal subsidies that help them pay their premiums. CMS said the proposed rules would also add provisions to "facilitate public access to information about rate increases and small group markets for" individual health plans. "It also proposes provisions to further protect against unreasonable rate increased in the individual and small group markets," CMS said.

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HHS calls for slew of Obamacare rule changes

The Obama administration late Friday called for a slew of significant rule changes that would affect the Obamacare health-care program.

20150928061812

* H1 operating profit 726 mln euros, up 2.6 pct * Dia integration, retail tax weigh on French profitability * Rest of Europe and Brazilian business strong * Retailer sticks to 2015 capex, cash flow goals (Recasts with CEO comments from news conference, analyst, shares) PARIS, July 31 (Reuters) - France's Carrefour said its turnaround plan was reaping rewards in Europe and Brazil, where strong performances helped it beat first-half profit forecasts. The world's second-largest retailer, which has suffered from a reliance on the hypermarket format it pioneered as customers shift to local and online shopping, is in the third year of a global recovery plan started by Chief Executive Georges Plassat. The company, which makes about three-quarters of it sales in Europe, is making price and cost cuts and expanding into smaller convenience stores, while also revamping its hypermarkets. Its operating profits in Europe - outside its home market - tripled in the first half of the year, while Latin American earnings rose by more than a quarter. This countered a decline in its biggest market France, reflecting the integration of its recently acquired Dia stores, a rise in taxes on larger commercial spaces and the transfer of rental income from shopping malls to its Carmila property unit. Plassat said Carrefour was on a "sustainable" growth path, with Europe a significant contributor to earnings, while the Brazilian business should continue to hold up well in the face of slowing economy. Carrefour shares were up 0.34 percent at 1150 GMT, outperforming a flat European retail sector. "In a still challenging environment for food retailers, this performance appears resilient and confirms our view that the group is well managed," said Societe Generale analyst Arnaud Joly, who has a "hold" rating on the stock. Europe's largest retailer said first-half recurring operating profit rose 2.6 percent to 726 million euros ($806 million) at constant exchange rates, above the average estimate of 711 million in a Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S poll. In France, which accounts for almost half of group sales, operating profit fell by 20.9 percent to 321 million euros. In the rest of Europe, profit accelerated sharply in Spain and also rose in Italy. Latin America was boosted by a strong performance in Brazil, its No.2 market, accounting for about 14 percent of sales, where Carrefour, unlike French rival Casino, is proving resilient to an economic downturn. The retailer, which is stepping up a multi-billion euro investment in its stores to cement its recovery, kept its goal to raise cash flow this year and predicted debt of 5 billion euros by year-end, from 4.9 billion at end-2014. (Editing by Jason Neely and Pravin Char)

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UPDATE 2-Carrefour says turnaround taking hold in Europe and Brazil

*Rest of Europe and Brazilian business strong. PARIS, July 31- France's Carrefour said its turnaround plan was reaping rewards in Europe and Brazil, where strong performances helped it beat first-half profit forecasts. The company, which makes about three-quarters of it sales in Europe, is making price and cost cuts and expanding into smaller convenience...

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The Northern Avenue Bridge could soon fall down, and US Representative Stephen Lynch is ready to release $9.4 million in federal funding to help design a new one. The city will need to match a portion of the money, but Lynch has been waiting more than a decade for Boston to do something about the century-old span. Last week, officials said they plan to start removing the dilapidated bridge in March after the Coast Guard raised concerns that it might tumble into the Fort Point Channel. The Walsh administration will begin a formal public process this spring to decide whether to rehab the bridge or build a new one. The city has to do something after committing up to $100 million to replace the link as part of its agreement to woo General Electric Co.’s world headquarters to Boston. Lynch is a former ironworker who built bridges and has been keeping tabs on the Northern Avenue structure because it’s in his district. He isn’t shy about what the city should do. He thinks it’s time to retire a relic. This is not the moment to rebuild a steel swing bridge, a move preferred by some preservationists. “No, not at this point,” the South Boston Democrat said. “We should look at maximum utility.” Tucked in the agreement to bring GE to Boston is a commitment from the city to spend as much as $100 million to reopen the Old Northern Avenue Bridge. Lynch said that means the city should build a new fixed bridge — one that does not have to open when boats pass underneath like the old span did. He also thinks that’s what the Coast Guard would prefer. Swing bridges are old technology, and not too many folks are building them these days. Lynch says he has secured funds for the bridge work. Lynch also wants the bridge to once again carry cars so the fast-growing Seaport District has another outlet for traffic. He said he recently had lunch with federal judges at the Moakley courthouse who raised concerns about gridlock during high-profile trials and its effect on security and public safety. The congressman himself recently experienced the congestion when he it took him 40 minutes to get from his district office at the other end of the Southie waterfront to City Hall. “I could have walked it,” he said. Lynch wouldn’t be the first congressman from South Boston for whom the Northern Avenue Bridge holds no sentimental value. The late Joe Moakley — whose seat Lynch filled after his death in 2001 — famously was not a fan. At one of Southie’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts, Moakley brought along a box that contained proposals for the span — and then proceeded to pull out some dynamite, according to an Associated Press account. The oft-told story goes that Moakley did not like the bridge because it blocked views of the Evelyn Moakley Bridge — named in honor of his wife. That span, built in 1996, connects the Financial District with the Seaport District and was meant to replace its Northern Avenue counterpart. The Northern Avenue Bridge hasn’t been structurally sound to carry cars since 1997, and then pedestrians lost access in December 2014 when city engineers had to abruptly shut down the structure because it could not bear any weight. Mike Capuano is one local congressman who does not have an opinion on whether the bridge should be rehabbed. Capuano sits on the transportation committee and told me he’ll go to bat for the city whatever it decides. “The $9 million, it’s a wonderful earmark,” he said, but “it’s not going to build a bridge.” The Somerville Democrat would like to see cars on the bridge, though he points out that it is unlikely to significantly reduce traffic given the configuration of roads in the area. Capuano would like to see the span remain pedestrian-friendly. The city is still figuring out how it will pay for the project. It has tapped a tiny portion of the federal funding Lynch has secured and plans to use the rest. As soon as next month, the city will put out a request to the public to gather ideas on how to rebuild the bridge, followed by a public design process. Chris Osgood, who oversees the city’s departments of transportation and public works, said officials are looking for ideas that will improve access, have a sense of history, and create a space that connects the harbor, the channel, and the Greenway. “We’re looking at how to balance those goals,” Osgood said. “We’re taking a lot of steps to make sure preservation is a priority.” But one thing’s for sure. Much to the ire of preservationists, the bridge needs to come down soon because it’s in such poor condition. Even iron and steel doesn’t stand forever.

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On Northern Avenue bridge, Congressman Stephen Lynch says out with the old

Congressman Stephen Lynch, who has secured $9.4 million in federal funding to design a new Northern Avenue bridge, doesn’t want to preserve the historic structure.

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The British-owned Asia Energy wants to develop an open-pit mine at Phulbari in Dinajpur district, 350km northwest of Dhaka. Residents and rights groups say the mine would displace hundreds of families and damage the environment. Asia Energy officials said on Monday they had withdrawn staff from Phulbari and cut operations in the mining area to a minimum. The six demonstrators died on Saturday when police opened fire on a crowd near the Asia Energy office. Police returned the bodies of the six to their families and Dinajpur district officials pledged to pay compensation to the relatives. Tofayel Ahmed, a leader of the opposition party Awami League, said on Monday: "The casualties at Phulbari adds another black chapter to the country's history. We strongly condemn it and have called for the August 30 countrywide strike to voice our further protest." ThreatsPolice say at least 120 people have been injured in clashes at Phulbari over the past two days. The protesters have already enforced an indefinite strike from Sunday around the mining area and in nearby towns, local officials said. Protesters have defied policewarnings against demonstrations On Monday, hundreds of protesters in Phulbari defied police warnings against demonstrations, blocking a train line and burning an effigy of Mahmudur Rahman, the government's energy adviser. Protesters have defied policewarnings against demonstrations They also threatened to halt all transport and cut communications in the area. Mahmudur said on Sunday the violence had sent "negative signals" to Bangladesh's potential overseas investors and called for calm. Trying to ease tensions, authorities on Monday withdrew police and paramilitary troop reinforcements from Phulbari, witnesses said. The withdrawal cheered the protesters, who vowed to force Asia Energy out of the area.Development Asia Energy intends to spend $3 billion on the mine and a related power plant. Total investment over the mine's 30-year life is expected to total $10.4 billion. Gary Lye, chief executive officer of Asia Energy Corporation (Bangladesh) Pty Ltd, denied the Phulbari project would harm people or the environment. Asia Energy said it had submitted development plans and a feasibility study and was awaiting final government authorisation to start mining.

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Strike urged over Bangladesh mine

<P>Opposition parties in Bangladesh have called for a nationwide strike to protest against the deaths of six people who were killed in protests against a coal mine.</P>

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It’s a mini-Jazz Age in movies these days. Among the greats celebrated in new biopics are Miles Davis in “Miles Ahead” (April 15), Nina Simone in “Nina” (on VOD April 22), and Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker in Robert Budreau’s “Born to Be Blue,” opening Friday. Their stories call out for the standard stereotype of the genius who must endure hardship and inner turmoil to create art. The challenge comes when a filmmaker tries to fit a life that is as variegated as a jazz solo into that template. When Baker died in 1988 at a well-worn 58, he left behind a messy mythic legacy, enough for many movies (Bruce Weber’s 1988 doc “Let’s Get Lost” is a good start). Budreau focuses on key events in the 1960s (with flashbacks in sleek black and white that would make great album covers) and pretty much makes up the rest. At first the results seem both convoluted and one-note, an improvisation that goes nowhere. But when Hawke’s Baker finally slips out of the whiney loser persona and performs “My Funny Valentine,” the scene evokes Baker’s elusive melancholy and wistful torment, making the earlier fumblings worth the struggle. “It came too easy to him,” laments Baker’s long-suffering manager Dick Bock (Callum Keith Rennie). By 1966 the easy times are long gone, and Baker lies strung out on heroin in an Italian jail cell staring at his trumpet on the slimy floor. A tarantula crawls out of it. Then, who should walk in but Dino De Laurentiis, offering to make a biopic of Baker’s life? This never happened, and at this point “Blue” threatens to become a meta-movie as the made-up movie within-the-movie merges with the real movie’s real-life flashbacks. Luckily, a drug dealer fed up with Baker’s debt knocks his teeth out. His career seemingly at its end, Baker falls in love with Jane (a great Carmen Ejogo), the actress who plays his real wife in the movie-within-the-movie, and the story slips into a jazz take on the comeback theme. For the next two decades, the end notes reveal, Baker made the best music of his career. The film does its job if it encourages people to give that music a listen. Written and directed by Robert Budreau. Starring Ethan Hawke, Carmen Ejogo, Callum Keith Rennie. At Kendall Square. 98 minutes. Unrated (drug use, narcissism, bad sex).

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In ‘Born to Be Blue,’ Chet Baker gets lost ­- and found

The jazz legend’s life offers plenty of material for a great movie – a heroin addict whose bad decisions led to getting his teeth knocked out, resulting in a dramatic comeback.

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Some Victorian homes have been damaged by trees and Melbourne streets have been affected by flash flooding, as heavy rain and strong winds batter the state. The SES has received some reports of flooded buildings in Geelong and Melbourne, but most of the 150 calls for help were for building damage and trees down, a spokesman said. Images from social media show leaking ceilings at Monash University and flooded roads in Melbourne's CBD. Do you have photos or video of today's storm? Send them to contact@9news.com.au but please stay safe. The low pressure trough from the southwest brought strong winds and heavy rain to metropolitan areas late in the morning. A severe weather warning is in place across much of the state. A flood watch has also been issued for northeast Victoria, including the Upper Murray, Mitta Mitta, Kiewa, Ovens and King Catchments and the Goulburn and Broken Basins. READ MORE: Winds of up to 100km/h batter South Australia, felling trees and triggering mass power outages across Adelaide Damaging winds have been forecast for the the northeast, west, and south and east Gippsland districts today - particularly during the evening - with gusts of up to 100km/h forecast for alpine areas, the Bureau of Meteorology advised. Gusts of 82km/h battered Ballarat and Mount William this morning, and a gust of 113km/h was recorded at Mt Hotham. Heavy rain hit Melbourne in the late morning, with possible further thunderstorms on the way. "Thunderstorms have cleared this morning but may redevelop over the central areas late morning or early afternoon, so there may be a severe thunderstorm warning issued," duty forecaster Alan Bailey said. Flash flooding is possible for the northern country, north central, northeast, southwest and central districts and parts of the Mallee and Wimmera. Full warning from the Bureau of Meteorology: Severe Weather Warning for damaging winds and heavy rainfall for people in the Mallee, Wimmera, Northern Country, North Central, North East, South West, Central, West and South Gippsland and East Gippsland forecast districts Issued at 10:42 am EST on Monday 9 May 2016. A low pressure trough is over western Victoria and will move eastwards across the State during the day. An associated low pressure system will enter the far west of Victoria later in the day then weaken and head to the southeast. A trough and cool change associated with the low will cross the State during Tuesday morning. DAMAGING WINDS around 50-60 km/h with peak gusts of 90-100 km/h are forecast for the Mallee, Wimmera, North East, Central, North Central, Northern Country, West and South Gippsland and East Gippsland districts during Monday, with gusts in Alpine parts (above 1000 metres) of the North East, West and South Gippsland and East Gippsland forecast districts peaking at 110-120 km/h, particularly during Monday evening and early Tuesday. Damaging winds of 50-60km/h with peak gusts of 110 km/h are forecast to develop about coastal parts of the South West, Central and West and South Gippsland districts during Tuesday morning. Thunderstorms and heavy rain which may lead to FLASH FLOODING are forecast for the Northern Country, North Central, North East, West and South Gippsland and Central forecast districts. The risk of storms and flash flooding is expected to contract to the northeast of the State during Monday. Mount Hotham has recorded a gust of 113 km/h during Monday morning. The State Emergency Service advises that people should: *Move vehicles under cover or away from trees. *Secure or put away loose items around your house, yard and balcony. *Keep clear of fallen power lines. *Don't drive, ride or walk through flood water. *Keep clear of creeks and storm drains. *Be aware that in fire affected areas, rainfall run-off into waterways may contain debris such as ash, soil, trees and rocks. *Be alert that in areas recently affected by fires, heavy rainfall increases the potential for landslides and debris across roads. For emergency help in floods and storms, ring your local SES Unit on 132 500. The next warning will be issued by 5:00 pm EST Monday.

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Streets flooded and homes damaged as storms batter Victoria

Homes have been damaged by trees and flooding in Victoria as heavy rain and strong winds batter the state.

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This post is in partnership with Entrepreneur. The article below was originally published at entrepreneur.com. There was a time when knowing how to program was for the geekiest of geeks. That’s not exactly the case today. As most entrepreneurs, freelancers and marketers will tell you, learning how to program can help you succeed. Over the past year, I’ve been learning to code. It’s helped me to become a much better entrepreneur—I can dive in when my team needs to fix a few bugs on the site. You don’t even need to shell out a ton of money or put yourself in debt to learn how to code, either. These 12 places offer coding courses for free: One of the most popular free places to learn coding is CodeAcademy. In fact, more than 24 million people have already learned how to code through this educational company’s engaging experience. At CodeAcademy, you can dive right in and take courses that teach you everything from HTML & CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby. Founded in 2012, Coursera has grown into a major for-profit educational-technology company that has offered more than 1,000 courses from 119 institutions. While you can pay for certain programs to receive a certificate, there are a number of free introductory programming courses in various specializations from universities such as the University of Washington, Stanford, the University of Toronto and Vanderbilt. EdX is another leading online-learning platform that is open source instead of for-profit. It was founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, so you know that you’ll learn about cutting-edge technologies and theories. Today, edX includes 60 schools. You probably can’t go wrong with the free Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard University. Founded in 2010, Udemy is an online learning platform that can be used as a way to improve or learn job skills. While there are courses you have to pay for, there are plenty of free programming courses, which are taught via video lessons, such as Programming for Entrepreneurs – HTML & CSS or Introduction to Python Programming. AGupieWare is an independent app developer that surveyed computer-science programs from some of the leading institutions in the U.S. It then created a similar curriculum based on the free courses offered by Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley and Columbia. The program was then broken into 15 courses: three introductory classes, seven core classes and five electives. While you won’t actually receive credit, it’s a perfect introductory program for prospective computer programmers. Sometimes, you need to recall a reference book when you’re stuck on a problem. That’s GitHub. You can find more than 500 free programming books that cover more than 80 different programming languages on the popular web-based Git repository hosting service, which means that it’s frequently updated by collaborators. If you’ve already learned the basics, and went to get into something a bit heavier—such as exploring the theory behind coding—take advantage of MIT’s free courseware site that includes classes such as Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Introduction to Programming in Java and Practical Programming in C. This is a community of developers, which include some high-profile developers such as Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. There, you can perfect your programming skills by learning from some of the leading developers in the world. Based out of New Zealand, Code Avengers provides fun and interactive programming courses that will teach you how to code games, apps and web sites using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Each course takes just 12 hours to complete and is available in English, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and Portuguese. Created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, Khan Academy is one of the original free online-learning institutions. With step-by-step video tutorials, you can learn how to program drawings, animations and games using JavaScript and ProcessingJS, or learn how to create webpages with HTML and CSS. Here you’ll learn HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Databases, DevTools, Node.js, Angular.js and Agile by networking and joining a community of professionals and students. You’ll even work together on your coding skills so that you can build apps for free. Here’s the catch: you’re learning those skills and building helps to help solve real-world problems. Code is available to nonprofits. This Google project launched in 2010 to counter Apple’s HTML5. The site is full of tutorials, resources and the latest HTML5 updates. It’s open source, so developers can play around with HTML5 code. Because this is more advanced than most introductory courses, you may want to gain some knowledge and experience before jumping in. Learning code used to require access to expensive books and classes, but no longer. I highly recommend that every entrepreneur learns to code. Still wondering if you need to code? Here is a programmer guide I put together to show you every step I took to become an entrepreneur that codes! Teach Yourself Coding on Your Own Time With These Resources GitHub Is Said to Hit $2 Billion Valuation With New Investment Round Want to Take Your Business to the Next Level? Boost Your Marketing and Coding Skills.

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12 sites that will teach you coding for free

Programming has helped me to become a much better entrepreneur, and you can learn this skill without spending a dime.

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Facebook has made no bones about wanting to blanket the planet with Internet connectivity, and it’s developed a huge, solar-powered aircraft to help it do so. The unmanned aircraft, called Aquila, has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, but weighs “about the third of a [Toyota] Prius car,” said Facebook vice president of infrastructure engineering Jay Parikh Thursday during a media event at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park. Aquila will be responsible for beaming Internet signals back to rural areas on Earth that lack the kind of communications infrastructure needed to maintain Internet connectivity. According to Parikh, 10% of the world’s population live in these rural areas—found in certain regions in Africa and India, among others—and are unable to access the web. A small team of Facebook engineers in the U.K. spent 14 months building the plane. Facebook wouldn’t say how many employees were involved in the project. Aquila’s wings are made of a type of material called carbon fiber. When the carbon fiber material undergoes a kind of heating process known as curing, it can become “stronger than steel for the same mass of material,” explained Facebook Connectivity Lab director Yael Maguire in a blog post. This material also accounts for why the drone is so light. Facebook plans to launch the plane into the sky with the help of a big balloon that will carry the aircraft to the stratosphere. There it will hover between altitudes at around 60,000 to 90,000 feet. At these altitudes, the aircraft will be far above the airspace where commercial airliners fly and free from storms or other weather disturbances, Parikh explained. The Facebook team also covered Aquila with solar panels and fitted the craft with batteries and an electric motor so the plane can stay up in the sky for 3 months. Over that time the drone will beam the Internet down without interruptions or a need for refueling. And when the plane does come back to the planet, Maguire told reporters that it “will land like a glider” because of its aerodynamic design. While in the air, Aquila will be responsible for providing the Internet to people on Earth in a 50-kilometer radius. Small cellular towers and dishes will receive the signals sent by the aircraft and will convert those signals “into a Wi-Fi or LTE network that people can connect to with their cellphones and smartphones.” Maguire wrote in the post. Facebook said it also achieved a breakthrough for the way data and information can be transferred from drone to drone. If Facebook flies multiple planes it could be able to cover much larger swaths of land. Using laser communication technology, Facebook supposedly created a way to stream data between drones at a rate of ten gigabits per second, a speed that’s as fast as what fiber-optic services can provide to U.S. residents, such as those living in Minneapolis. The breakthrough in laser communications is a result of the software-based networking advancements Facebook has been rolling out in its data centers, Parikh explained. Communication signals sent through the sky are so accurate, they can apparently “hit a dime from 11 miles a way,” said Maguire. The accuracy is important if drones are to be able to send signals to and from each other, which would result in less Internet infrastructure needed to be built on the ground. “This starts to look like a backbone of the Internet using lasers in the sky,” said Maguire. Of course, it’s important to remember that Facebook is not close to launching these planes to power the Internet just yet. Facebook has only built one drone so far, with plans for more coming down the pipeline. Parikh wouldn’t estimate when Facebook might plant to fly multiple drones over the Earth. He only said: “This will be an effort that we will invest in for many years to come.” As of now, “the plan is to spend the second half of this year doing flight testing,” Parikh said. Parikh also pushed back on a question implying that Facebook might only allow the Facebook website or certain websites to be sent to rural areas through its ambitious project. He said Facebook has no plans to become an Internet service provider. Instead, the goal is for Facebook to set up the aerial Internet infrastructure, and then let major carriers operate and distribute the web in a similar manner to how they do so on Earth, Parikh said. The drone project was developed by Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, which contains former researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, among others. The lab is part of Facebook’s Internet.org initiative to bring the Internet to places where there is a lack of connectivity. Major players involved in the telecommunications industry have signed on as partners of the Internet.org initiative, including Ericsson, Samsung, and Qualcomm. Subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology.

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Facebook's new solar-powered drone can beam the Internet back to Earth

Facebook wants to blanket the planet with Internet connectivity, and it’s developed a huge, solar-powered aircraft to help it do so.

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Before you go, we thought you'd like these... Earth Day 2014: Celebrate by looking at 11 amazing photos of our planet NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured this stunning view of the Americas on Earth Day, April 22, 2014 at 11:45 UTC/7:45 a.m. EDT. The data from GOES-East was made into an image by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The 2002 Blue Marble featured land surfaces, clouds, topography, and city lights at a maximum resolution of 1 kilometer per pixel. (NASA image by Robert Simmon and Reto Stöckli) The Blue Marble: Next Generation features imagery of land surfaces during each month of 2004, with a maximum resolution of 500 meters per pixel. (NASA Image by Robert Simmon and Reto Stöckli) Image by Norman Kuring, NASA/GSFC/Suomi NPP. Caption by Michael Carlowicz. Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense. Ocean scientist Norman Kuring of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center pieced together this composite image of Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the entire Arctic. It was compiled from 15 satellite passes made by Suomi-NPP on May 26, 2012. The spacecraft circles the Earth from pole to pole at an altitude of 824 kilometers (512 miles), so it takes multiple passes to gather enough data to show an entire hemisphere without gaps in the view. (Photo: NASA) This image provided by NASA shows a 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on Jan. 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on Jan. 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin. Suomi NPP is NASA's next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth. Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. (AP Photo/NASA) On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were coming around from the far side of the Moon on their fourth orbit. Borman began to roll the spacecraft, and as he did, the Earth rose into view over the Moon’s limb. Anders, photographing the Moon from the right side window, caught sight of the view, and exclaimed: “Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!” He snapped a black and white photo (top), capturing humanity’s first view of Earth from another planetary body. A few minutes later, Anders put color film in the camera and took the iconic color photographs of a half Earth hanging over the lunar horizon. Looking back from its orbit around Mercury, MESSENGER captured this view of Earth and the Moon on May 6, 2010. The spacecraft was 183 million kilometers (114 million miles) from Earth at the time, farther than our average distance from the Sun (150 million kilometers, or 93 million miles) because Mercury and Earth were at different places in their orbits around the Sun. The image was taken by the spacecraft's Wide Angle Camera (WAC) on the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS). Image taken on April 1, 1960 by TIROS 1. This was the first television picture of Earth from space. Credit: NASA The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, at a distance of about 45,000 kilometers (28,000 mi). A view of the eastern hemisphere of earth from space is shown in this undated NASA handout photo obtained by Reuters February 6, 2012. NASA's second 'Blue Marble' image was created from data acquired by a new instrument aboard the Earth-observing satellite Suomi NPP, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). REUTERS/NASA/Handout. (UNITED STATES - Tags: SOCIETY SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY) THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. IT IS DISTRIBUTED, EXACTLY AS RECEIVED BY REUTERS, AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS This spectacular ?blue marble? image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date, using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of Earth. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA?s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite in 2002. REUTERS/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Handout (UNITED STATES). EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS. This spectacular 'blue marble' image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date, using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of Earth. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device - NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. REUTERS/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Handout (UNITED STATES) FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY SPACE - UNDATED: Fifteen orbits of the recently launched Suomi NPP satellite provided the VIIRS instrument enough time (and longitude) to gather the pixels for this synthesized view of Earth showing the Arctic, Europe, and Asia. Suomi NPP orbits the Earth about 14 times each day and observes nearly the entire surface. The NPP satellite continues key data records that are critical for climate change science. PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA / Barcroft Media /Barcoft Media via Getty Images In 1970, millions of Americans concerned about the environment observed the first 'Earth Day.' Forty-four years later, the tradition and message of conserving our beautiful planet is still going strong. On Tuesday, April 22, captured by NOAA's GOES-East satellite to commemorate the occasion. Above, take a look through some of the splendid photos of Mother Earth that have been shot from outer space through the years. From the original Blue Marble photo shot back in 1972 to the new high-definition Blue Marble images to a screen shot of the very taken by a weather satellite in 1960, the photos are breathtaking on any day, but take on a special meaning on Earth Day.

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Earth Day 2014: Celebrate by looking at 11 amazing photos of our planet

%Slideshow-189851% In 1970, millions of Americans concerned about the environment observed the first 'Earth Day.' Forty-four years later, the tradition and me age of con

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A SIMPLE blood test commonly used to measure kidney function is a highly accurate predictor of heart attack and stroke in patients with high blood pressure, a new study indicates. People with high levels of the substance creatinine in their blood were five times more likely to die of heart attack or stroke than those with low levels, researchers said. Creatinine is a natural byproduct of the breakdown of muscle tissue. It is found in the blood and excreted in the urine. High levels of it in the blood indicate that the kidney is unable to cleanse it from the body. In light of the new findings, patients with high blood pressure should have their creatinine levels tested at least once annually, the scientists said. If the levels are high, patients should probably seek more intensive treatment or take further precautions against heart disease, like losing weight, lowering cholesterol or cutting down on smoking. ''A high creatinine level is a warning light that the patient is at a very high risk,'' said Dr. Neil Schulman, who directed the study for the National Institutes of Health. He is an associate professor at the Emory University medical school in Atlanta. Dr. Schulman noted that there has been no blood test to reliably predict the likelihood of heart attack or stroke in patients with high blood pressure. He said the study showed that creatinine levels were more reliable in predicting death among hypertension patients than such factors as an elevated cholesterol level, diabetes, smoking or a history of heart trouble. In addition, the study provides new evidence that therapy to control hypertension may also protect against kidney damage. The study was reported this month in Hypertension, a journal published by the American Heart Association. It was based on data compiled during an eight-year project started in 1971. The project, which cost about $100 million, followed 10,500 patients with high blood pressure. High Levels of Creatinine About 1,400 patients in the study had both hypertension and a creatinine level of at least 2 milligrams per deciliter of blood serum. Nearly 40 percent of these patients died in the eight years. In contrast, about 9,000 patients had creatinine levels considered normal or below, and just 10 percent of them died in eight years. A normal creatinine level is 1.2 to 1.5 milligrams per deciliter. Roughly 60 million Americans suffer from high blood pressure. Of the 500,000 fatal heart attacks annually, about 30 percent are attributed to hypertension. About half of the 150,000 fatal strokes each year are attributed to hypertension. Researchers said that it is unclear whether people with high creatinine levels but no history of high blood pressure are at a greater risk of a fatal heart attack or stroke. In addition, they said it was unclear why elevated creatinine levels indicate a greater risk. But a number of theories are being studied, said Dr. Jeffrey Cutler, chief of prevention and demonstration research at the National Institutes of Health. One possibility involves hormones produced in the kidney. A malfunctioning kidney may produce altered or reduced levels of hormones, and these may damage the blood vessels of the heart and brain, the scientists said. Another possibility is that the kidney, and not the heart, may cause high blood pressure in some patients.

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Blood Test Found to Predict Risk of Heart Attack

LEAD: A SIMPLE blood test commonly used to measure kidney function is a highly accurate predictor of heart attack and stroke in patients with high blood pressure, a new study indicates.

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It is hard to say just when the New York Institute for the Humanities, once the city's favorite intellectual hangout, lost its buzz. Two decades ago the institute was the place for big thinkers to hobnob. Its membership roster included Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel prize-winning poet. It was host to celebrity visitors from abroad, helping to introduce postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Americans. When the writer Jorge Luis Borges gave a talk about his pet theory that the best metaphors are cliched dead metaphors -- time is a river, life is a dream -- the sound was piped out the door of a big auditorium so the overflow crowd of young acolytes could hear. The novelist Edmund White, the institute's executive director from 1980 to 1982, recalls that in the early 1980's the institute also became a haven for dissidents from Eastern Europe, writers and literary historians who desired freedom but in a comic way did not know what to do with it. ''They would come to us and say: 'We are reporting for duty. What do you want us to do?' '' said Mr. White, who wrote a dreamlike roman a clef based on the institute, in Greenwich Village. ''I would say, 'Just exist,' and that would totally confuse them.'' Today such intellectual glory days are viewed with nostalgia. The institute's annual budget is less than a sixth of the half a million dollars that financed the institute after it was founded in 1976. A bitter internal feud in 1996 caused a major rift among the members. Meanwhile, many of its current and former members lament that the 120-member institute, a part of New York University, has devolved into a weekly lunch club for a coterie of mostly aging professors, nothing like the hot intellectual forum it once was. So the institute is trying to resuscitate itself. A. Richard Turner, a retired art history professor and a former director of the institute, is heading a search committee for a new director that members hope will lead a comeback. Interviews have begun and a director could be chosen within a month, he said. ''What is going to be asked is to give an assessment of where the institute has been and on that basis, where do you think it ought to go,'' he said. Just where the institute ought to go is precisely the problem. Ann Douglas, a cultural historian at Columbia University and a former member, suggested that the institute needed new blood. Ms. Douglas, who was last at a Friday lunch in the mid-1990's, said: ''It felt very polite, which seemed to me a shame. If there is such a thing as a New York intellectual, the very definition is a fighter and a quarreler. I didn't see young scholars who were willing to take on and even tear down the older scholars. That's the life of the mind.'' Louis Menand, a staff writer at the New Yorker who left the institute in 1996 because he was unhappy with the way it was being run, cautioned against overreaching, however. Even five years ago, he said, it was difficult to get a big turnout because of competition from other intellectual events. Mr. Menand said that the institute should continue to do what it does best, bringing together academics and nonacademics. ''I think it was successful as along as it had a modest goal of bringing people together without any particular pressure,'' he said. William Taylor, a cultural historian who was acting director of the institute for one year a decade ago, agrees that times have changed. ''There are a lot more places where scholars and writers can go, and in some ways you can say it's an achievement of the institute,'' he said. ''It's a pathfinder.'' Indeed, the organization -- whose list of recent guest speakers includes Breyten Breytenbach, the expatriate South African writer; Jessica Yu, a documentary filmmaker; Daniel Pipes, a specialist on Arab affairs; and the novelist Michael Cunningham -- was among the first generation of humanities institutes in the nation. Being in New York, it was by far the most visible, and it was distinctive in its mix of academics and nonacademics. ''It was a pretty innovative idea,'' said Leslie Berlowitz, executive officer for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., and a former N.Y.U. vice president. ''They really sought to bring together public intellectuals and academics around issues of common interest. That kind of impulse became more and more pervasive.'' Some organizations, including the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, and the International Center for Advanced Studies at N.Y.U., were inspired at least in part by the institute. The institute's relationship with N.Y.U. complicates the process of redefinition. Although the university provides an operating budget of about $80,000 and three offices (much of the money came from foundations in the early days), the institute has always had an oddball relationship with the university. Members, particularly the nonacademic ones, have been skittish about any attempt by N.Y.U. to get involved in their affairs. That was the subtext of commotion in 1996 that began with an invitation to Hillary Rodham Clinton to speak at the Friday lunch. The dispute left the institute on the verge of self-destruction. Tony Judt, the director at the time, told the associate director, Jocelyn Carlson Baltzell, in a fax from Paris that he had asked the university to dismiss her from that post for insubordination because she tried to help arrange the speech. (Mrs. Clinton did not speak.) But their relationship already had deteriorated over Mr. Judt's plan to consolidate the administration of the institute with that of the university's Remarque Institute, which focuses on European studies. Mr. Judt, a professor of European studies and a former dean, saw his plan as cost-efficient at a time of tightening budgets. But some members said the move would make the institute more academic and less a hybrid. A few members quit in protest over Ms. Baltzell's dismissal. Mr. Judt resigned. The bitter feelings, members agree, have dissipated in the four years that the institute has been under the stewardship of the now-departing director, Leonard Barkan, an affable scholar of Renaissance arts and literature. Members say the 1996 upheaval was more of a symptom than the cause of the institute's malaise. Ms. Baltzell, who helped create a virtual clone of the institute at the University of Southern California, said the answer to the New York institute's midlife crisis might be to go online. ''It would be a form of outreach,'' she said. ''Since all of these little institutes have a problem, the charge of exclusivity and elitism, it rather immortalizes the conversations.'' Yet even Mr. Turner, who is heading the director search and would like to see the institute sponsor more events like conferences and seminars, wonders whether the institute could meet ambitious new goals. ''It's ever harder to do that,'' he said. ''Everybody is so damned busy and life is so speeded up.'' Photos: Jorge Luis Borges, one of the big names who lectured at the New York Institute for the Humanities in its heyday. (Mariana Cook, 1986)(pg. B11); A luncheon meeting where the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach addressed members of the Institute for the Humanities. (Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times); Jocelyn Carlson Baltzell (Stephanie Diani for The New York Times)(pg. B13)

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Headhunting For a Thinker And a Buzz

It is hard to say just when the New York Institute for the Humanities, once the city's favorite intellectual hangout, lost its buzz. Two decades ago the institute was the place for big thinkers to hobnob. Its membership roster included Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel prize-winning poet. It was host to celebrity visitors from abroad, helping to introduce postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Americans. When the writer Jorge Luis Borges gave a talk about his pet theory that the best metaphors are cliched dead metaphors -- time is a river, life is a dream -- the sound was piped out the door of a big auditorium so the overflow crowd of young acolytes could hear.

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She was on top of me. It wasn’t a command — it was a challenge. You so obviously cannot be gay, was her implication, because this is good sex. It was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop its unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular understanding of orientation was that it was something you were born with, something you couldn’t change. If you happened to engage in activity that ran counter to your sexual identity, then you had two options: you were lying to yourself and everyone else, or you were just experimenting. The sexual categories were rigid. Fixed. They weren’t subject to human imagination or experimentation – to the frustration of many sociologists, and kids, like myself, who found themselves inexplicably in bed with a player from the other team. My sexual journey through college was anything but run-of-the-mill. I came out at a conservative Christian college in the US and was in a gay relationship for around two years with a basketball player who ended up marrying a woman. During that time, we both pal’d around with girls on the side. I even went so far as to fall in love with one. To this day, she and I joke about how she was the only girl I was ever in love with, and how I would’ve been quite happy marrying her. As a writer, this kind of complicated story is incredibly interesting to me – mostly because it shows that my own personal history resists the kind of easy classifications that have come to dominate discussions of sexuality. Well, you must have been gay the whole time, some might think, and because of some religious shame, you decided to lie to yourself and experiment with a girl. But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. After all, most kids experiment with heterosexuality in college, don’t they? If so, that ‘blip in the road’ has always been a thorn in my flesh. How do I explain that I was honestly in love with a woman? Some people might argue that I am innately bisexual, with the capacity to love both women and men. But that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of my sexual history, either. I’m only speaking for myself here. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this way. In 1977, just over 10% of Americans thought gayness was something you were born with, according to Gallup. That number has steadily risen over time and is currently somewhere between 42% and 50%, depending on the poll. Throughout the same period, the number of Americans who believe homosexuality is “due to someone’s upbringing/environment” fell from just under 60% to 37%. These ideas reached critical mass in pop culture, first with Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way and one year later with Macklemore’s Same Love, the chorus of which has a gay person singing “I can’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to.” Videos started circulating on the internet featuring gay people asking straight people “when they chose to be straight.” Around the same time, the Human Rights Campaign declared unequivocally that “Being gay is not a choice,” and to claim that it is “gives unwarranted credence to roundly disproven practices such as conversion or reparative therapy.” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often cast as homophobic, and their thinking is considered backward As Jane Ward notes in Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, what’s interesting about many of these claims is how transparent their speakers are with their political motivations. “Such statements,” she writes, “infuse biological accounts with an obligatory and nearly coercive force, suggesting that anyone who describes homosexual desire as a choice or social construction is playing into the hands of the enemy.” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often cast as homophobic, and their thinking is considered backward – even if they are themselves gay. Take, for example, Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The City fame. In a 2012 interview with New York Times Magazine, the actress casually mentioned that homosexuality was, for her, a choice. “I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” The blogger John Aravosis was one of many critics who pounced on Nixon. “Every religious right hatemonger is now going to quote this woman every single time they want to deny us our civil rights.” Aravosis leveled the same accusations against me in 2014 when I wrote a piece for The New Republic discussing my own complicated sexual history. Calling me “idiotic” and “patently absurd”, Aravosis wrote, “The gay haters at the religious right couldn’t have written it any better.” For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they think they were born gay. And yet the available research does not support this view. Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Tennessee, for instance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexuality is innate still hold negative views of gays. In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic respondents he studied shared similar levels of belief in a Born This Way ideology. As Samantha Allen notes at The Daily Beast, the growing public support for gays and lesbians has grown out of proportion with the rise in the number of people who believe homosexuality is fixed at birth; it would be unlikely that this small change in opinion could explain the spike in support for gay marriage, for instance. Instead, she suggests it hinges on the fact that far more people are now personally acquainted with someone who is gay. In 1985, only 24% of American respondents said they had a gay friend, relative or co-worker — in 2013, that number was at 75%. “It doesn’t seem to matter as much whether or not people believe that gay people are born that way as it does that they simply know someone who is currently gay,” Allen concludes. In spite of these studies, those who push against Born This Way narratives have been heavily criticised by gay activists. “They tell me my own homo-negativity is being manifested in my work,” says Grzanka. Similarly, Ward has received her own hatemail for pushing against the ruling LGB narratives, with some gays telling her she’s “worse than Ann Coulter,” the controversial US author of books like If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans. And when I published my essay on choosing to be gay, an irate American lesbian activist wrote me that it had “just been confirmed” to her that my writing was “directly responsible for four gay deaths in Russia.” While I can understand why some contemporary activists (and the journalists who seem beholden to their agendas) might chalk up recent gains in LGB acceptance to Born This Way’s cultural infiltration, activism must be founded upon facts and truths, or the whole program will eventually turn out to be a sham. Drowning out every voice that dares to question dominant cultural narratives is not the same thing as invalidating the arguments those voices are making. As Ward says, “Just because an argument is politically expedient doesn’t make it true.” So what does the science say about Born This Way? There is a unanimous opinion that gay “conversion therapy” should be rejected Let’s first be clear that whatever the origins of our sexual orientation, there is a unanimous opinion that gay “conversion therapy” should be rejected. These efforts are potentially harmful, according to the APA, “because they present the view that the sexual orientation of lesbian, gay and bisexual youth is a mental illness of disorder, and they often frame the inability to change one’s sexual orientation as a personal and moral failure.” Little wonder these therapies have been shown to provoke anxiety, depression and even suicide. In other words, the question of the efficacy of conversion therapies is a non-issue. We condemn these efforts not just because we don’t think they work — perhaps anyone could be tortured into liking or disliking anything? — but because they’re immoral. The question of what leads to homosexuality in the first place, however, is obscure, even to the experts. The APA, for example, while noting that most people experience little to no choice over their orientations, says this of homosexuality’s origins: “Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors.” Similarly, the American Psychiatric Association writes in a 2013 statement that while the causes of heterosexuality and homosexuality are currently unknown, they are likely “multifactorial including biological and behavioral roots which may vary between different individuals and may even vary over time.” True, various eye-grabbing headlines over the years have claimed that some scientists have found something like The Gay Gene. In 1991, for example, neuroscientist Simon LaVey published findings that he claimed suggest that “sexual orientation has a biological substrate.” According to LeVay’s research, a specific part of the brain, the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH-3), is smaller in homosexual men than it is in heterosexual men. You can spot the problem with this study a mile away: were the gay brains LeVay studied born that way, or did they become that way? LeVay himself pointed this out to Discover Magazine in 1994: “Since I looked at adult brains, we don't know if the differences I found were there at birth or if they appeared later.” Further, the brains LeVay studied belonged to AIDS victims, so he couldn’t even be sure if what he was seeing had something to do with the disease. Another landmark paper on the origins of homosexuality was published in 1993 by a geneticist named Dean Hamer, who was interested to learn whether homosexuality could be inherited. Beginning from his observation that there are more gay relatives on a mother’s side than a father’s, Hamer turned his attention to the X chromosome (which is passed on by the mother). He then recruited 40 pairs of gay brothers and got to work. What he found was that 33 of those brothers shared matching DNA in the Xq28, a region in the X chromosome. Hamer’s conclusion? He believes there’s about “99.5% certainty that there is a gene (or genes) in this area of the X chromosome that predisposes a male to become a heterosexual.” A 2015 study sought to confirm Hamer’s findings, this time with a much larger sample: 409 pairs of gay brothers. Researchers were pleased with their findings, which they claimed “support the existence of genes on… Xq28 influencing development of male sexual orientation.” But not everyone finds the results convincing, according to Science. For one thing, the study relied on a technique called genetic linkage, which has been widely replaced by genome-wide association studies. It’s also noteworthy that Sanders himself urged his study to be viewed with a certain caution. “We don’t think genetics is the whole story,” he said. “It’s not.” And as Allen points out, there have also been studies that found no “X-linked gene underlying male homosexuality.” Perhaps predictably, these studies haven’t received as much media coverage. If you are enjoying this story, take a look at the other pieces in our Sexual Revolutions special series, including: Besides the individual critiques leveled against each new study announcing some gay gene discovery, there are major methodological criticisms to make about the entire enterprise in general, as Grzanka points out: “If we look at the ravenous pursuit, particularly among American scientists, to find a gay gene, what we see is that the conclusion has already been arrived at. All science is doing is waiting to find the proof.” The other problem with Born This Way science is summed up nicely by Simon Copland: “Scientists are asking whether homosexuality is natural when we can’t even agree exactly what homosexuality is.” Grzanka agrees. “If you know anything about social constructionism, then you know these sexual categories are very recent. How then could they be rooted in our genome?” Our desires may express themselves in many different ways that do not all conform to existing notions of ‘gay’, ‘straight’ or ‘bisexual’. This is one of the best takeaways of Ward’s Not Gay, a penetrating analysis of sex between straight white men. Gay men make up only a fraction of the US population — yet Ward says that there are many men not included in that number who engage in homosexual behavior. Why, then, do some men who have sex with men identify as gay, and others identify as heterosexual? This question interests her far more than ‘how were they born?’. Ward stresses that not all straight-identifying men who have sex with men are bisexual or closeted, and we do a disservice if we force those words on them. That’s because terms like ‘heterosexual’ and ‘straight’ and ‘bisexual’ and ‘gay’ come with all sorts of cultural baggage attached. Crucially, she argues, “whether or not this baggage is appealing is a separate matter altogether from the appeal of homosexual or heterosexual sex.” Even if you accept that sexual desire may exist on a kind of spectrum, the predominant idea is still that these desires are innate and immutable – but this runs counter to what we know about human taste, says Ward. “Our desires are oriented and re-oriented based on our experiences throughout our lives.” In fact, the straight-identified men Ward studied for her book sometimes found themselves in situations that sparked the desire for homosexual sex: fraternities, deployments, public restrooms, etc. But Ward doesn’t conclude these are somehow repressed or latent gay men. Rather, she argues that they — like all of us — have come to desire bodies and genitals within specific social contexts pregnant with “significant cultural and erotically charged meanings.” In other words, what they want isn’t the “raw fact” of a man’s body, but what it represents in a certain context. Why might we be uncomfortable asking whether and how much control we each possess over our “full range of erotic possibilities,” as Ward calls it? “What would it mean to think about people’s capacity to cultivate their own sexual desires, in the same way we might cultivate a taste for food?” she asks. Ward thinks this question is the next frontier of queer thought. When I first said I chose to be gay, a queer American journalist challenged me to name the time and date of my choice. But this is an absurd way to look at desire. You might as well ask someone to name the exact moment they began liking Chaucer or disliking Hemingway. When did I begin to prefer lilies to roses? What time did the clock read at the exact moment I fell in love with my partner? All of our desires are continually being shaped throughout our lives, in the very specific contexts in which we discover and rehearse them. I’m claiming that at some point during college, my sexual and romantic desires became reoriented toward men Thinking back to my college romances with women and men, I can begin to understand how my own experiences might have helped me to ‘cultivate’ my desire for homosexuality. I want to be very clear: I’m not claiming I simply began to ‘grow into’ my homosexuality, or that as I became more comfortable with being gay, I allowed myself the freedom to express what had always been latent within me. I’m claiming that at some point during college, my sexual and romantic desires became reoriented toward men. These desires suggested to me a queer identity, which I at first reluctantly accepted and then passionately embraced. This new identity in turn helped reinforce and grow new gay desires within me. Granted, none of this means that there were no genetic or prenatal factors that went into the construction of my or any other sexual orientation. It just means that even if those factors exist, many more factors do too. So why not encourage conversations about those other things? Humans aren’t who and what we are because of one gene Humans aren’t who and what we are because of one gene. We’re who and what we are for a variety of reasons, and some of it might have something to do with how our genes randomly interact with our environments. But that’s not the whole story, and to engage in discourse that pretends it is — regardless of the nobility of the intentions — could have “profound and very negative consequences” for the LGBT community, says Grzanka. “Limiting our understanding of any complex human experience is always going to be worse than allowing it to be complicated,” he says. So what are we to do with the Born This Way rhetoric? I would suggest that it’s time to build a more nuanced argument — regardless of how good a pop song the current one makes. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s just not the truth, as we currently understand it. The evidence to date offers no consensus that the Born This Way argument is the beginning and end of the story. We should stop pretending that it does. Secondly, the entire search for a gay gene is predicated upon the assumption that homosexuality is not the natural or ‘default’ state of a developing human. ‘Something had to happen to make that man gay!’ But why cede such enormous ground to those who believe something has ‘gone wrong’ inside gay bodies and brains? For that matter, why play their game and pretend the only forms of difference that deserve justice are those we were born with? “That’s a very narrow understanding of what justice looks like,” says Ward. What about the concern that homophobes will want to ‘encourage’ gay people to be straight if there’s no biological basis for sexuality? Let’s turn it around. Is it not equally true that ‘finding a gay gene’ might inspire the same homophobes to ‘find a cure’ for homosexuals? It doesn’t take too much creativity to imagine a scenario in which homophobic parents, upon being informed their fetus has ‘the gay gene’, choose what to them may seem the lesser of two evils: abortion. Finally, I would argue that the Born This Way narrative can actively damage our perceptions of ourselves. In my sophomore year of college, I attended a Gay Student Alliance event at a nearby campus. It was the last meeting before Thanksgiving break, and the theme was coming out to your families. The idea was that the students would rehearse the coming out speech that they’d deliver while they were home. Student after student, while sobbing hysterically, said something like this: “Mom, you see how much pain this is causing me! Of course, I’d want to be straight if it were up to me. This is just who I am! You have to accept that because I can’t change that.” I wanted to grab each of them and say, “Being gay is not a handicap. It’s OK to be queer even if you choose to be queer — and you should want to be queer! Because we are beautiful and fabulous.” Ward sees this as a self-hating narrative. “Could you imagine if the dominant narrative of people of color was, ‘Well, of course I’d want to be white if I could. Wouldn’t everyone want to be white?’ That’s so racist! We’d never accept that story.” Perhaps it is time to look to the beginning of the gay rights movement. “Queer Nation and earlier movements in the US were not fundamentally organized around Born This Way explanations,” says Grzanka. “They were organized around sexual liberation, and the radical notion of challenging heteronormativity.” Gay and lesbian activists, says Ward, used to draw on religion parallels to argue for inclusion. “People aren’t born with their religions. They’re born into religious cultures, and they can convert if they’d like. But there are still legal protections for them.” Eventually activists decided that argument wasn’t working fast enough, particularly in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. “Then there was a shift, and the leaders of the movement chose to jump on board with a less nuanced argument that people already understood: just like race, people are born with their homosexuality.” Fortunately, we have now made enormous strides in understanding and affirming our queer sexualities. Some experts have even started using categories like ‘mostly straight’ and ‘mostly gay’ to try and expand our limited ways of viewing human sexuality. A recent UK poll from J. Walter Thompson Innovation group found that only 48% of Generation Z (ages 18-24) identify as “100% heterosexual.” Respondents were asked to rate themselves on a scale from zero (which signified “completely straight”) to six (“completely homosexual”). More than a third chose a number between one and five. In response to the poll, one of my Facebook friends quipped about how natural selection must be working in overtime, what with making all of us gay! Indeed, as Ward notes, the Generation Z findings don’t signal some evolutionary shift over the last 15 years. Rather, they show that the times — the ‘nurture’ part of the nature/nurture dichotomy — are changing. Homosexuality isn’t considered taboo. Heterosexuality isn’t (always) considered the compulsory norm. And importantly, each isn’t always constructed in opposition to the other. I’m thankful for a new generation that is capable of imagining sexuality in a way that transcends the gay/straight binary, that couldn’t care less about what happened to their bodies and minds to make them who they are today. I’m hopeful that for this generation, sexual histories like mine and Cynthia Nixon’s aren’t seen as threatening, but liberating. I don’t think I was born gay. I don’t think I was born straight. I was born the way all of us are born: as a human being with a seemingly infinite capacity to announce myself, to re-announce myself, to try on new identities like spring raincoats, to play with limiting categories, to challenge them and topple them, to cultivate my tastes and preferences, and, most importantly, to love and to receive love. This story is part of our Sexual Revolutions series on our evolving understanding of sex and gender. Brandon Ambrosino is a freelance journalist. He Tweets as @BrandonAmbro. Ignacio Lehmann is an Argentinian photographer who has travelled the globe for his 100 World Kisses project. Join 600,000+ Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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‘I am gay - but I wasn’t born this way’

Is sexuality purely the result of our biology? Brandon Ambrosino argues that simplistic explanations have ignored the fluid, shape-shifting nature of our desires.

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No one can claim in absolute seriousness to be writing the Great American Novel, not without risking the polite smiles and muted derision of others. One says one is writing the Great American Novel the same way one announces a midlife crisis, with a faint air of the ridiculous. And to call someone else’s book the Great American Novel can only lead to skepticism, especially as we live in an age where all these terms — the, great, American, novel — seem rife with potential for doubt. Instead, I offer a great American novel which does not even seem to be a candidate. It is two books rather than one, neither of which are possibly even novels, their America balanced with other places: Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” (1976) and “China Men” (1980), a duo that she imagined could have been published as one volume. They mix one woman’s story with those of her extended Chinese immigrant family, blending nonfiction and fiction, legend and oral storytelling, history and imagination. These are different genres separated by walls of form, which separate, for example, a novel from a memoir. Kingston scales those walls to see what lies beyond them. Such an impulse is not only aesthetic. It also emerges among the most daring and imaginative people who have been confined by walls, or kept out by them, whether they be women, misfits or minorities of any kind. Kingston’s writing deals with all three. Facing walls, the conventional response is to ask to be let in or let out; the unconventional response is to question the very existence and meaning of walls. In the first line of “The Woman Warrior,” we are given a wall when the mother says to the daughter who writes the book, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you.” This command and injunction is a barrier that is destroyed in the same sentence that it is mentioned, as the writer reveals what she has been ordered to keep silent and secret. Our Critics at Large pick their Great American Novels One of the unspoken silences of the Great American Novel is the assumption that it can only be written by white men. At least that is what the male-dominated literary establishment has historically told us, why some readers might only be able to name Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Updike, Bellow or Roth, why it shocked me to see for the first time, at 18, a book by an Asian American in a bookstore: “The Joy Luck Club.” For some readers, this is possibly a Great American Novel too. Amy Tan is Kingston’s descendant, and in full disclosure, I was Kingston’s student at Berkeley. But I was a bad student, a rebel who had not yet paid his dues. To be honest, I was also a young man unsteadied by strong women, and Kingston’s books are indisputably feminist. I needed those books then, even if I did not know it. Giving us what we don’t know we need, something we may even resist — perhaps that’s one definition of greatness. Nguyen is one of our Critics at Large

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Viet Thanh Nguyen's Great American Novels: 'The Woman Warrior' and 'China Men'

No one can claim in absolute seriousness to be writing the Great American Novel, not without risking the polite smiles and muted derision of others. One says one is writing the Great American Novel the same way one announces a midlife crisis, with a faint air of the ridiculous. And to call someone else’s book the Great American Novel can only lead to skepticism, especially as we live in an age where all these terms — the, great, American, novel — seem rife with potential for doubt.

20160710110545

Challenging the classic theory about the development of the animal kingdom, a new study says that some major categories of mammals and birds appeared long before the dinosaurs died out. The dinosaurs vanished about 65 million years ago. By examining animal genes to compute how long certain creatures have been around, researchers estimated that the major orders of birds and mammals evolved 100 million years ago. An order is a category of animal, like rodents, for example. The new work argues against the classic idea that the disappearance of the dinosaurs opened the door for the diversification of mammals and birds. Instead, the researchers suggest today in the journal Nature that the breaking up of ancient continents might have been the cause for such diversification. The early date for the emergence of the major orders was a surprise, said Dr. S. Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University, an author of the paper, because there is virtually no trace of such diversification in the fossil record until about 40 million years later. The earlier creatures might have left few fossils because high sea levels restricted the amount of land available for them, Dr. Hedges said, and dinosaurs and other reptiles may have kept the populations of such animals low. Dr. Hedges and colleagues based their study on animal genes. The idea is that genes change over time by accumulating mutations. So when a particular gene is inherited by two species from a common ancestor, it evolves in each species, and the two versions become less and less alike as time passes. If the mutation rate is fairly constant, the differences between two versions can indicate how much time has passed since the two species split from each other. Dr. Hedges and his colleagues looked at dozens of genes. They compared the human, mouse and cow versions of particular genes to estimate when the three orders represented by those creatures split apart. For birds, they compared genes from the chicken, duck, ostrich and pigeon. The researchers noted that continents were being split apart around 100 million years ago, both by water intrusions because of high sea levels and by movement of the continental plates. That splitting could have isolated species, Dr. Hedges said, eventually spurring the appearance of new orders of mammals and birds. The study does not knock dinosaurs out of the picture completely. Their disappearance, Dr. Hedges said, could still have opened up opportunities for the creation of species within the various orders of mammals and birds. Dr. Michael Novacek, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said the 100-million-year figure did not surprise him because scientists had an inkling that mammals and birds diversified before dinosaurs died out. Dr. Novacek also said the link to the breakup of continents made sense. But he said he was skeptical about using genetic analysis to estimate the time of evolutionary splits, because of doubts over whether genes really change at a constant rate.

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Study Challenges Theory on Evolution of Mammal and Bird Orders

Challenging the classic theory about the development of the animal kingdom, a new study says that some major categories of mammals and birds appeared long before the dinosaurs died out. The dinosaurs vanished about 65 million years ago. By examining animal genes to compute how long certain creatures have been around, researchers estimated that the major orders of birds and mammals evolved 100 million years ago. An order is a category of animal, like rodents, for example.

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Pierre Ferrari listens to a group meeting of the Pooja women’s group in a school building in Janakpur, Nepal. Geoff Oliver Bugbee / Heifer International The mission of Heifer International is an ambitious one: to end hunger and poverty around the globe. But although that may seem like an improbable dream, to date, Heifer has delivered on a grand scale, lifting more than 20 million families out of poverty and hunger. The organization’s strategy is to give people the tools, education, and livestock that will help them build livelihoods and strengthen their communities. Animals are at the center of this plan, providing life-sustaining products such as milk and wool, and creating a chain of giving -- each family that receives an animal, agrees to pass on its offspring to another individual in need. This simple yet powerful act is called “Passing the Gift.” In addition, Heifer educates communities on how to manage their water resources, supports small-scale farmers, and empowers women by helping them become more self-sufficient. At the helm of Heifer’s efforts, is President and CEO Pierre Ferrari. Born in the Belgian Congo (today called the Democratic Republic of Congo), Ferrari assumed leadership of Heifer in 2010, bringing more than 40 years of business experience to an organization which celebrated its 70th anniversary this year. Here, Ferrari shares his passion for the work and explains how the women of the world have inspired him. What do you most want people to know? That the poor are not responsible for their poverty and misery. Most of them struggle in conditions that are subhuman, dangerous, full of disease, hunger and despair. But when Heifer International offers a sliver of hope, they grab it with astounding energy, enthusiasm, creativity and optimism. Heifer approaches farmers who are eager and who we know will rapidly strive toward self-reliance and autonomy. We are there to help them do; we don't do it for them. What motivated you to get involved in this work? One of my earliest ambitions was to work in development. I had planned to work at the World Bank after getting my MBA, but it didn’t work out that way. I spent 20 plus years in corporate business, but the pull to engage in social issues finally got me to leave Coca-Cola and join CARE in the mid ’90s. I then worked in a variety of ways that were mostly oriented to development of distressed communities. I think both my mother and grandmother influenced me deeply towards this work. My grandmother had a wholesale and retail vegetable business in Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo), working with local African farmers to produce the goods she needed for her trade. I remember going to the villages and buying the produce they had grown at her request, and the importance this trade had on their livelihoods and health. It felt like good and important work. They adored her. Who or what has made the greatest impression on you during your involvement? All over the world I come across women who take on leadership roles with energy, vision and great engagement. It is really inspiring. They push me to help more, to move faster, and to support their efforts as they drive to end despair, poverty, hunger, abuse and more. They can leverage our help one hundredfold. They focus on their families and their communities. What have you been most surprised to learn? The depth of passion my colleagues and others in the sector have to help others. It is a commitment for life -- and to life -- for so many. The work is hard and sometimes frustrating, but it’s shouldered with great joy and hope. What has been the hardest part of this work, or how has it most challenged you? Development is hard work, and one needs to be patient. Changes only come when the individuals, families and communities decide for themselves that it is time to radically change their own reality. Internal change is hard. It takes patience, and I am not a patient person, but I am learning. How has this work changed you? This work has deepened my study of systems, networks, complexity and human motivation. Finding the places where systems can be changed in the most fundamental ways, is important. Becoming more of an activist and an advocate for changes in systems (economic and political) that are responsible for exploitation and maintaining the status quo at the expense of the poor; and channeling resources to combat that exploitation, is exhilarating. What goal do you have for the next 12 months? All of us at Heifer have been implementing substantial changes in our way of working in the world. We have scaled up our work as demanded by our partners in the field. We have installed systems that are making us more efficient and effective, and we are raising needed resources in a more balanced way to ensure our stability and impact. Now we will take advantage of all these improvements to help the communities and women with whom we work accelerate their escape from poverty and hunger. For more information and inspiration visit MariaShriver.com

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My Project: Heifer International's Pierre Ferrari

Heifer International has a global ambition: to end poverty and hunger around the world. CEO Pierre Ferrari shares his passion for the work.

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5) During a shaky performance in the witness box, Pistorius changed his story and his defence from previous statements read at his bail hearing and the start of his trial; adding the last words he exchanged with Steenkamp and that he heard the lavatory door slam, and first saying he fired at an intruder, then that he fired by mistake. Oscar Pistorius sits in the dock during his trial in Pretoria (Reuters) 6) On his account of challenging an intruder, Pistorius admitted he didn't check the sound he heard with his girlfriend lying awake next to him. Five couples living nearby told the court how their first reaction on hearing bangs, screams or cries was to verify what they heard with the person next to them. 7) The trigger of the gun Pistorius fired had to be pulled four separate times to fire the four shots, suggesting a conscious action. 8) He could not explain how he never heard or saw Steenkamp leave the bed to go to the lavatory moments before he started shooting into the door, despite her being just feet away from him. 9) Pistorius said Steenkamp never responded to his instructions to call the police, or made a sound as she hid in the lavatory. Prosecutor Gerrie Nel said this was "impossible" to believe. 10) Witness Dr Johan Stipp told the court he saw a light on in Pistorius' bathroom when he heard shots fired; the athlete said he was "too scared" to switch the lights on until after the shooting. 1) Pistorius had a heightened fear of intruders because his family had been victims of crime many times before, and this made him react more dramatically to a perceived threat. 2) The athlete felt especially vulnerable because he did not have his prosthetic legs on when he fired the shots. A psychologist said his reaction might seem “extraordinary” for an able-bodied person, but could be explained by his disability. The Paralympians’ team doctor said disabled people often exhibited more dramatic “fight-flight” responses, and Pistorius would have chosen to fight since he was unable to flee. 3) Pistorius suffered from a Generalised Anxiety Disorder, a psychiatrist who evaluated him found, which along with his disability may have made him react more extremely to a perceived threat. 4) Pistorius fought to save Steenkamp's life and was, witnesses said, distraught by what had happened. 5) The state presented scant evidence of the row they say prompted the shooting, through witness testimony or communication between the couple. The majority of Steenkamp's WhatsApp messages reflect that she was happy with the athlete. She also wrote him a Valentine's card in which she revealed she was in love with him. Oscar Pistorius listens to evidence in court (AP) 6) Sound tests conducted by the defence showed Pistorius screamed like a woman when he was anxious, his lawyer Barry Roux said, explaining the "woman's screams" neighbours heard. 7) Both prosecution and defence accept there were two sets of bangs: the gunshots and Pistorius later breaking down the door with a cricket bat when he realised Steenkamp was in the lavatory. Sound tests suggested the two sounded very similar. The gunshots neighbours thought they heard might have been Pistorius breaking down the lavatory door. 8) Neighbours who heard a woman screaming only heard one set of bangs; the timings of phone calls to estate security made by those witnesses, and Pistorius' phone calls to the estate manager and friends after he broke down the door, suggest they didn't hear the gunshots, only Pistorius screaming for help and the second set of bangs from the cricket bat. 9) Police contaminated the crime scene by failing to wear protective clothing, moving key exhibits and walking over the lavatory door. 10) Prosecutors decided to charge Pistorius with premeditated murder when they believed he took time to put on his prosthetic legs before firing the fatal shots. State forensic experts later agreed with the defence assertion that Pistorius did not have his legs on when he fired the shots.

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Oscar Pistorius: 10 reasons why he is guilty - or innocent

Oscar Pistorius is on trial for the premeditated murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. The state say he killed her deliberately after an argument; the athlete says he believed she was an intruder. The following are 10 reasons why the judge might find him guilty, or innocent

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Step Right Up: David Cay Johnston, whose “The Making of Donald Trump” enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 15, had just started a job as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in June 1988 when he first met Trump in Atlantic City. “I almost immediately recognized Donald as the P.T. Barnum of our age,” Johnston said in a phone interview. During one of their meetings, Johnston deliberately said something wrong (about craps, natch) to see how his subject might respond. “He embraced my false fact in his answer,” which taught Johnston, formerly a reporter at The Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner, something he hopes his readers will learn too: “Donald doesn’t know anything.” Well, there are certain things Donald does know, Johnston admits. “He is masterful at understanding the conventions of journalism,” and — perhaps relatedly — “Trump is remarkably agile at doing as he chooses and getting away with it,” which is how Johnston puts it in his book. “The Making of Donald Trump” uses financial records, court documents and Trump’s own declarations to trace the ascent of a man who “presents himself as a modern Midas even when much of what he touches turns to dross.” Johnston wrote the book in 27 days, drawing his material from almost three decades of following Trump’s career. “Here are those dots,” Johnston said about the glut of Trumpiana that is already out there. “Here is how they connect,” he said about his own book. By becoming the Republican nominee, Trump has truly upped the ante — not just for the country but also for his own fortunes. His campaign style has made losing the presidential election a very expensive proposition. “He’s seriously damaged his brand,” Johnston said. “The audience that’s most loyal to him can’t afford to stay in Trump hotels.” Even though voters might already feel exhausted by this election cycle, Johnston — who referred to Trump as “Donald” in our conversation — says he will never tire of his subject: “I’m going to follow him for the rest of his life.” Treat the Rich: A couple of months have passed since Jeffrey Toobin’s 1996 book about O.J. Simpson, “The Run of His Life,” appeared on the monthly best-seller lists (for race and civil rights, and crime and punishment), buoyed by the FX mini-series that was based on the book. This week Toobin is back with “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping and Trial of Patty Hearst,” arriving at No. 9 on the hardcover nonfiction list. Hearst spent 22 months in prison before Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979. Two decades later, Bill Clinton pardoned her. Toobin told “CBS This Morning” he was struck by these exceptional shows of forgiveness: “When you look at the scope of her crimes — the three bank robberies, the shootings, the bombings — that she got those sorts of gifts from two presidents tells you a lot about wealth and privilege.”

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The New York Times

David Cay Johnston, whose “The Making of Donald Trump” is No. 15 on the hardcover nonfiction list, says Trump has “seriously damaged his brand.”

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Controversial jockey Danny Nikolic claims he has been the victim of a conspiracy by corrupt Racing Victoria officials. Nikolic has told a court RV integrity services head Dayle Brown and chief steward Terry Bailey are corrupt and have led a targeted campaign against him. The Caulfield Cup-winning jockey said he has been treated very differently from other riders, including by RV investigator Tim Robinson. "I believe there's been a very well thought out position, Dayle Brown and Terry Bailey especially," Nikolic told his appeal to regain his jockey licence. "Because I've had words with Terry Bailey, I just find that in my opinion I get treated very differently to anybody else by those three in particular." Nikolic blamed Bailey or Brown for the decision to scratch the Lee Freedman-trained Kookaburras after the jockey was seen taking a mouthful from a can of beer at a 2010 race meeting. "Even now I think someone has come over the top and made sure that that horse got scratched, obviously to stop me from riding for that stable and to embarrass me publicly," Nikolic said on Tuesday. RV barrister Jeff Gleeson QC suggested Nikolic believed the decision to scratch the horse was part of an ongoing conspiracy orchestrated by Bailey and Brown against him. Nikolic replied: "Something like that." "I believe if it had have been another jockey the horse wouldn't have been scratched," he added. Nikolic, who was outed for threatening Bailey at a 2012 race meeting, said he would relocate to Queensland if he regains his jockey licence. "By relocating I won't have to put myself in the firing line of Terry Bailey and his henchmen so to speak," he told the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. Gleeson suggested Nikolic believed the conspiracy and Bailey's allegedly corrupt behaviour would continue if the jockey was relicensed. "On your view Terry Bailey as a corrupt chief of stewards will lay in wait for you, he will be quite prepared to manufacture evidence against you and will continue in his campaign of conspiracies to make your life impossible as a jockey." Nikolic said he did not know what Bailey would do but believed he would lose out in that it was his word against the steward's. "That's why I don't even want to ride in Melbourne and I want to restart my career in another jurisdiction until Terry Bailey is either moved on or retires. "Do I think he'll make life hard for me if I ride in this jurisdiction, my honest answer is yes I do." Nikolic said he did not know if Robinson, a former policeman, was corrupt but it was possible. "I think he's got an opinion about me and he's gone out of his way to make life very difficult for me." Nikolic says he has paid the penalty for past wrongful acts, which include assaulting a fellow jockey, the rider's girlfriend, a taxi driver and a policeman.

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Nikolic claims conspiracy by 'corrupt' RV

Jockey Danny Nikolic continues giving evidence in a Victorian tribunal as he tries to regain his riding licence.

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The title’s allusion to Through the Looking-Glass is no coincidence. This album also includes a tune called “Alice,” and it’s not that hard to think of Nicks as the little blond from the Disney cartoon 20 years and some measure of frowsiness later. Nicks’s lyrics, too, often have a surreal quality. Line by line, they don’t add up to much. Read the title of “Doing the Best I Can (Escape from Berlin)” and try to make sense of it. But Nicks knows which words can carry a serious burden, and her impressions do create vivid images: “And the angel said, ‘Well you must have had a dream…/ And you remember it…’ Till the dream followed through… / Till the—end of the dream…and the dream came true/ When I want something…I get it.” (Nicks has a Cheshire cat sense of punctuation; all those ellipses and dashes are hers.) She continues to sound darker and more substantial on her own than she does with Fleetwood Mac, and her nanny-goat-with-a-head-cold voice, while it’s nobody’s textbook instrument, conveys the passion, anger and persistent curiosity of her language. It’s hard to imagine, say, Judy Collins singing most of these songs without sounding silly. Nicks makes them both poetic and musical. Bruce Hornsby sits in (and sings in) on a couple of tracks, to the best effect on “Juliet,” where his jangly piano complements Nicks’s vocal. There’s also a reggae-ized version of the Johnny Cash standby “I Still Miss Someone (Blue Eyes)” on which Nicks succumbs to blatant romanticism. Most of the time the images are less sweet, as in “Rooms on Fire” or “Fire Burning,” which make Nicks seem to be someone interested in neither lighting any candles nor cursing the darkness, though she might be talked into sitting down and spending some time discussing the topic “All Right, Just Exactly What Is Going on Here?” (Modern/Atlantic)

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Picks and Pans Review: The Other Side of the Mirror

Stevie Nicks The title’s allusion to Through the Looking-Glass is no coincidence. This album also includes a tune called “Alice,” and it’s not that hard to think of Nicks as…

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After 59 years of marriage, family and friends weren’t surprised things ended the bittersweet way they did for Margaret and Don Livengood. The couple – inseparable since the day they met – spent their last few days holding hands, side by side in a single hospital room, and died within hours of each other. “It was normal for them to be holding hands, their love was so precious,” the couple’s daughter, Pattie Beaver, tells PEOPLE. “But it was the sweetest, most precious thing you can imagine to see them holding hands in the hospital.” Beaver brought her parents to the hospital on the same day. Margaret, 80, was suffering from cancer, while Don, 84, was fighting to breathe because of pulmonary fibrosis and bilateral pneumonia. When they arrived, they were one floor apart at Carolinas Healthcare System Northeast in Concord, North Carolina. “It broke my heart,” Beaver says, recalling how she’d have to run from floor to floor to help care for her parents. She couldn’t stand the thought that they couldn’t see each other and pleaded with hospital staff to bring them together. Hospital Chaplain Beth Jackson-Jordan was working with the family and says the doctors and nurses had gotten to know the couple in recent months as each came in for treatment and knew they belonged in the same room. “The need for them to be together overrode any of the other normal concerns,” she says. Dr. Randy Schisler treated both Margaret and Don and says the hospital staff truly came together to make it happen. “I’m really proud. We stretched as far as we could with the rules to allow things that aren’t typical because it was the absolute right thing for these patients and for this family,” he tells PEOPLE. After four days apart, nurses moved Margaret’s bed into her husband’s room and positioned them so that they could see each other, and of course, hold hands. “Once they were together, it was just that sense of everything was going to be okay – we knew because they were together,” Beaver says. Dr. Schisler says he’s never seen anything like it. “This is one of those cases I don’t think any of us is ever going to forget. Seeing these two people who had spent their lives together, together in the same room as they took their last breaths, none of us are ever going to forget this.” One of the other hospital chaplains, Denise Hopper, tells PEOPLE, “I remember her beside him even when she wasn’t able to communicate… I remember him holding her hand and everybody in the room could feel and see the connection. It was very touching to know they had journeyed their entire lives – and as it came to the end of their lives, they were able to be together.” Despite losing both of her parents in the same day, Beaver says, “It gave me comfort to know that this is exactly what they would want and the hospital was able to make that happen. In the most horrific grief I’ve ever had in my life, I still had comfort because they were together.” Margaret died around 8 a.m. on Aug. 15. Don passed away later that day, shortly after 5 p.m. Don was alert until the end, telling his daughter he was grateful he and Margaret could take this last journey together. Beaver remembers sitting at her father’s bedside and being in awe when he said of his wife, “When we get to heaven, we can walk in together, just like we’re getting married again. Another honeymoon.”

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North Carolina Couple of 59 Years Dies Holding Hands

“It was the sweetest, most precious thing you can imagine to see them holding hands in the hospital,” the couple’s daughter, Pattie Beaver, tells PEOPLE

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t first glance, it may seem a long shot in an era of orange alerts and stepped-up border patrols. But quietly and carefully, elected officials, labor unions and community groups are starting to push the notion of allowing legal immigrants who are not United States citizens to vote in New York City elections. Supporters say it is not an outlandish proposition. They point out that even without citizenship, legal immigrants pay taxes, send their children to public schools and serve in the military. Noncitizens in many states were allowed to vote in local, state and even Congressional elections as recently as the 1920's. Until New York City moved to abolish its school boards two years ago, all residents had the right to vote for and serve on them. And although a proposal to open city elections to immigrants was raised 10 years ago without success, some people believe that the time may now be right. In the last decade, five towns in Maryland have allowed noncitizens, even illegal immigrants, to vote in local elections. Campaigns for immigrant voting rights are under way in several cities, including Hartford; Cambridge, Mass.; and Washington, where Mayor Anthony Williams has said he supports giving legal immigrants the vote in District of Columbia elections. Those initiatives may be taken more seriously in a campaign season when politicians in both major parties are making overtures to immigrants, as President Bush has with his proposal to grant temporary legal status to millions now living here illegally. For the moment, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has declined to express an opinion on the subject, and Gifford Miller, the speaker of the City Council, said this week that he was still studying the legal issues. Several union locals have quietly indicated their support, though only one has formally joined the coalition that is promoting the idea. At a minimum, it is an intriguing prospect in a city with about a million legal immigrants of voting age who are not citizens — equivalent to more than a fifth of the total number of current voters. Granting those people, most of them Hispanic or Asian, the right to vote could change the electoral calculus in a number of arenas, from the races for mayor and the five borough presidents to ballot questions on city borrowing and building projects. The new voters would be more likely to elect minority candidates, political analysts say, and could force politicians to become more responsive to issues like deportation policy and immigrant access to health care. If voting rights were extended to the state level — truly a long shot at this point — the effects would be even greater, forcing redistricting that could affect the balance of power in Congress. Although all residents are counted when district lines are redrawn, normally only eligible voters are included when the new districts are challenged in court under the Voting Rights Act. "This would be seismic in its impact," said Roberto Ramirez, a political consultant and lawyer who has served as a state assemblyman and chairman of the Bronx Democratic Party. "Both parties would have to develop a different mindset to address policy issues for those residents who have historically not been part of the political process." Nationally, there are more than 10 million legal immigrants who are not citizens, according to estimates based on census figures. Some are waiting to become citizens, a process that often takes as long as 10 years with the current backlog of applications. Others are not eligible for citizenship because they are here on temporary visas, or have simply not applied. In New York City, the latest proposals are still being drafted by two council members, Bill Perkins and John C. Liu. Supporters all agree that whatever measure surfaces, it should extend the vote to legal immigrants who are eligible to become citizens. Some would prefer a broader law to include anyone who pays taxes, regardless of immigration status. There will certainly be opponents. Critics say that giving newcomers the right to vote would undermine the very idea of citizenship.

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Push Is On to Give Legal Immigrants Vote in New York

Elected officials, labor unions and community groups are starting to advocate the notion of allowing immigrants to vote in the New York City elections.

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Jul 2nd 2012, 7:37 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is on course to become the next president of Mexico. An official “rapid count” of ballots just before midnight following Sunday’s election gave him a projected lead of between 6% and 7.7% over his closest rival. Felipe Calderón, the outgoing president (and member of the rival National Action Party, or PAN), congratulated Mr Peña on his victory late on Sunday evening, and the PAN’s candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, conceded. But Mr Peña’s closest challenger, the left-wing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said he would wait for the final results, which are expected on Monday evening. Nearly all pollsters had expected Mr Peña to win. The projected result however is closer than most predicted. Surveys had given Mr Peña a lead of between ten and 15 percentage points. If the projected results of the presidential race are mirrored in the congressional elections, which was held on the same day, the PRI is likely to be the biggest party in both houses. Still it may fall short of the absolute majority for which it had hoped. A complicated voting system, involving elements of first-past-the-post and proportional representation, means that the composition of the legislature will not be known until late on Monday. The return of the PRI is not welcomed by everyone. The party ran Mexico for seven uninterrupted decades until it was ousted from the presidency in 2000. Back then few expected that the “perfect dictatorship”, as the PRI regime was dubbed by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, would return to power just 12 years later. But the television-friendly Mr Peña ran a professional campaign and faced weak opposition from the fiery Mr López Obrador and from Ms Vázquez, whose poor result is in part a verdict on Mr Calderón’s disappointing six-year term in office. Many have predicted that a close result would lead to a challenge by Mr López Obrador, who lost the 2006 election by less than 1% and mounted a months-long blockade of Mexico City’s main thoroughfare to protest that result, which he claimed (with thin evidence) was fraudulent. This year’s race looks to be nothing like as close as that of 2006. But if Monday’s final results show a narrower gap, Mr López Obrador’s committed followers could yet take to the streets again. Election day provided some ammunition for a challenge, with evidence of cheating by some parties and cock-ups by the electoral authorities—though the scale of both was unclear. There were reports of voters in poor areas being offered upwards of 500 pesos ($38) to hand over their voting cards, which prevented them from casting their votes and perhaps enabled someone else to cast them instead. The PRI featured most often in such reports. A ban on political advertising after the end of the campaign on Wednesday was flouted by the Green Party, a formal ally of the PRI. The Greens illegally sent text-messages and recorded phone calls to many people (including your correspondent) on the day of the election, urging them to vote for their candidates. Others were disenfranchised by poor planning on the part of the election authorities. Some polling stations ran out of ballot papers. The problem was acute in Mexico City, where I spoke to Óscar Villanueva, a 23-year-old employee of the federal police who had hoped to vote in a presidential election for the first time. Mr Villanueva had to leave his home constituency to go to work before the polls opened at 8am, and would not return before they shut at 6pm. Special polling stations in the city centre were set up for the thousands of people in his position. But each was stocked with only 750 ballots. All had run out by the time Mr Villanueva went to vote at lunchtime. “One vote could make the difference,” he said, hurrying off in search of a better-stocked station. Disenfranchised voters protested outside the electoral authorities into the night. Some desperately chalked up their votes on makeshift tally-sheets outside polling stations. Despite these dispiriting events, turnout was 62%, slightly higher than in the previous presidential election. So far it seems unlikely that the instances of cheating and administrative botches were widespread enough to swing the result by the roughly 7% by which Mr Peña is believed to have won. If Monday brings more evidence of irregularities, if the final vote count is closer and if Mr López Obrador has the energy for a fight, Mexicans might be in for a long July. But it seems all but certain that December 1st will see the inauguration of Mr Peña, and the return to power of the PRI.

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Mexico's election

ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is on course to become the next president of Mexico.

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MADISON, Wis., Dec. 17— Normally, the death of Theresa J. McGovern on Tuesday would have gone largely unnoticed, dismissed as the end of another alcoholic found in a snow bank on a cold December morning. But Ms. McGovern, 45, was the daughter of former Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, the 1972 Democratic candidate for President. And her father said he hoped her story would inspire other alcoholics to "try to make a special effort to find treatment and stay sober." "The only redemptive part of this is maybe it will save somebody else," Mr. McGovern said in an interview from his Washington home. Ms. McGovern was buried in Washington today after a funeral service there. An autopsy found that Ms. McGovern, the third of five children, had frozen to death in a parking lot behind a printing shop near downtown Madison. When she died, she was acutely intoxicated; the level of alcohol in her blood was 0.34 percent, more than three times the level at which the state considers a person legally drunk. Her death came after years of efforts by friends and family to help her. She died hours after picking up the key to a new apartment, which her father had helped her rent. The police found the key in her pocket. In talking about Ms. McGovern's life, her family and others who knew her described Ms. McGovern as a spirited woman with a lot of concern for other people. But Ms. McGovern, whom most people knew as Terry, started drinking when she was a teen-ager, her father said, adding, "I think the first time she ever tasted it, she was hooked." In 1972, Ms. McGovern campaigned for her father in his bid for the Presidency. She was the featured speaker in a group that included the authors Gloria Steinem and Arthur Schlesinger on a bus tour named the Grasshopper Special. Even then, Mr. McGovern said, his daughter was "thoroughly alcohol-dependent." While working in a group home here she met a colleague named Raymond Frey, who became the father of her two daughters, Marian, 9, and Colleen, 7. But after Colleen was born, Ms. McGovern began drinking again, after having been sober for several years. "She was very secretive about it," Mr. Frey said. "By the time I realized it, the drinking had been going on for several months." The couple split up, with Mr. Frey keeping custody of children. By the early 1990's, Ms. McGovern started a cycle of sobriety and drunkenness. The cycle accelerated as her addiction became more acute. She usually drank alone, on the street or in her rented room. She also began to get into trouble with the law and was arrested for petty offenses like disorderly conduct. Last year, she was accused of stealing beer from a convenience store, but escaped prosecution by taking part in a county program for first offenders. Despite her deteriorating condition, people who knew her said, Ms. McGovern never stopped believing that she would recover. Dr. Brian Lochen, who treated Ms. McGovern during her repeated visits to a treatment center near here, said: "In this business, you see a lot of people give up. You never got the sense from Terry that she had given up." It was largely on the basis of such optimism that Ms. McGovern checked herself out of a public treatment center on Monday, the day before her body was found. She had been admitted five days earlier, when police found her sleeping in a snow bank just a few blocks from where she died. "Terry knew what was involved in recovery," Mr. McGovern said. "But she was unable to make it."

http://web.archive.org/web/20121112081213id_/http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/18/us/for-a-former-senator-s-daughter-a-solitary-death-in-the-snow.html

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For a Former Senator's Daughter, a Solitary Death in the Snow

Normally, the death of Theresa J. McGovern on Tuesday would have gone largely unnoticed, dismissed as the end of another alcoholic found in a snow bank on a cold December morning. But Ms. McGovern, 45, was the daughter of former Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, the 1972 Democratic candidate for President. And her father said he hoped her story would inspire other alcoholics to "try to make a special effort to find treatment and stay sober."

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One morning Colin Thurmond had a revelation. It included Joey Fatone as a spectral Duke Orsino, Jordan Knight doing the New Kids dance in an ancient region of the western Balkans after a shipwreck, and Justin Timberlake in yellow stockings. Thurmond, who is working on his doctorate in classical guitar at the New England Conservatory, was so passionate about marrying 1990s boy band music with Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that he sat at his computer first thing that morning and didn’t stop writing until 11 that night. He was so entranced by the project he didn’t change out of his pajamas. Josh Reynols for The Boston Globe Troy Barboza rehearses a scene from “Sexyback: or what you will,” being performed Monday at Oberon. “The story really wrote itself,” he said of “Sexyback: or what you will.” This not-exactly-classic alliance between the music of ’N Sync, New Kids on the Block, and the story of “Twelfth Night” makes its premiere Monday night with a staged reading at Oberon in Cambridge. It’s the kind of show where the audience is encouraged to sip hooch, get social with each other, and sing along with familiar songs. It also helps the audience understand the high jinks of the gender-bending play. Thurmond and his performance troupe, Touch Performance Art, will perform the show again in July, and then begin a regular run in September. Monday is an opportunity to see the show in its infancy, for free. We asked Thurmond to explain his vision of combining modern pop and classical prose. Q. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time connecting Justin Timberlake and Shakespeare. A. I had a moment when those things just really clicked because I was thinking a lot about my favorite Shakespeare plays, and I was batting around this idea of how to tell a really complex narrative story through song. I was the music director for the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company this past summer on their “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” production. [CSC artistic director] Steve Maler said he really wanted to be able to turn the show into a Rat Pack, Vegas thing that could also propel the narrative forward. He wanted the music to add an emotional depth to the characters and make it feel really contemporary and fun. Q. And in this case, how did you make the jump to 1990s boy band music? A. I was watching “The Donkey Show” and seeing how they tell the story through disco music. I thought, What is that really guilty pleasure for young audiences now? I’m 29 and realized that what’s on par with the disco hits of the 1970s for my generation are those boy band songs. I went back and started reading the script of “Twelfth Night.” It’s always jumped off the page for me. It’s always just felt so funny and sharp and alive. I think these songs can also feel that way. Q. How much of the show is actual dialogue? A. It’s the music that’s driving the story. The text and the dialogue is found in the interlude moments. We try to sing the songs as faithfully as we can to the original. Sometimes you can tell the story of “Twelfth Night” without changing the lyrics, but in some cases we needed to. Q. The skeptic in me would ask: Haven’t we already seen the Shakespeare-goes-pop routine with “The Donkey Show?” A. Yes, absolutely. I think that’s something that I’m very conscious of. I know “The Donkey Show” extremely well. I really make conscious choices about how we can do this in different ways. I’m not interested in replicating it but really creating a piece that stands on its own. I think it’s a little bit closer and a little bit truer to Shakespeare than “The Donkey Show.” We pull segments of dialogue that you hear directly. You get every plot point along the way, even though it zips by at blazing speed. I think it all comes together to be its own thing. I think when people see it, they’ll realize that. Q. This seems a bit out of your realm. I thought you were a classical music kind of guy? A. I took a year off after getting my master’s degree to live in London. I was able to go to the Globe Theatre all the time. I remember having some of the most amazing times at the Globe. It was a very communal experience that I really enjoyed. So I started writing some side projects. It’s been an amazing outlet for me outside of classical music to use my interest in pop music and theater. I started showing my work to people, and it picked up steam. I didn’t really expect it to. It’s like throwing wet paper towels at the wall and seeing if they’d stick. And they just kind of stuck.

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The newest boy band: Justin, Joey, Jordan, and Will

One morning Colin Thurmond had a revelation. It included Joey Fatone as a spectral Duke Orsino, Jordan Knight doing the New Kids dance in an ancient region of the western Balkans after a shipwreck, and Justin Timberlake in yellow stockings. Thurmond, who is working on his doctorate in classical guitar at the New England Conservatory, was so passionate about marrying 1990s boy band music with Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that he sat at his computer first thing that morning and didn’t stop writing until 11 that night. He was so entranced by the project he didn’t change out of his pajamas. “The story really wrote itself,” he said. This not-exactly-classic alliance between the music of N’Sync, New Kids on the Block, and the story of “Twelfth Night” makes its premiere Monday night with a staged reading at Oberon in Cambridge.

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'Theatrical and mystifying' … one of the scenes of finality at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Photograph: André Morin With thunder in the air, rain falls through the skylight smashed by a falling meteor that has bored its way through the concrete floor, leaving a gaping hole and a cavern below. I peer in and see strip lights blinking in the dark. This is just one of the theatrical and mystifying moments in Hiroshi Sugimoto's exhibition Aujourd'hui, le monde est mort (Lost Human Genetic Archive) at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Part of a riveting cycle of shows that fill the building, Sugimoto's is both entertaining and a mournful experience. If the meteor doesn't get you, there are plenty more morbid, memorable moments in the clearings and corridors of his end-times phantasmagoria, installed amid a warren of rusted walls of corrugated metal sheeting. "The world died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know …" Sugimoto writes, on the many handwritten notes that double as captions as we make our way round. Echoing the beginning of Albert Camus's 1942 novel The Stranger, which begins with almost the same words ("Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday …"), the phrase keeps recurring, leitmotif and chorus. Swapping "mother" with "world" implies a final, universal end of fertility and the breaking of the primal bond. It's also fun. Imagining the end of the world is a great creative conceit and has its own perverse fertility. The end is always with us – end of the novel, death of the author, death of painting, no more bees (in one section of the show, the beekeeper has hung up his clobber and the hive is empty). No more people, end of the world. The end. "Imagining the worst conceivable tomorrows gives me tremendous pleasure at the artistic level," says Sugimoto. "The darkness of the future lights up my present." He is best known for his bleak, empty and sometimes beautiful black-and-white photographs, and his remarks make me peer into his images more intently, looking for signs and tremors. This is an unexpected show from an artist associated with images of horizons, iceflows, collections of Buddhas and empty cinemas whose screens are filled with glowing blank voids (for these, Sugimoto left the shutter open for the duration of the projected film, recording only a luminous, numinous blank). Only a small number of Sugimoto's own photographs are included here. Instead, he presents us with scenes of apocalyptic, whimpering, cataclysmic and drawn-out finality. A 13th-century carved sculpture of Kaminari-sama, the Shinto god of thunder, stands atop a stone staircase, rescued from a ruined house and leering maniacally. On the wall opposite, ancient fossils sit in cabinets. Sugimoto sees these little cabinets as incubators. Maybe they're waiting for a flash of galvanising lightning to bring them back to life. Sugimoto provides his own, using a hidden Faraday cage to create indoor lightning, and displaying camera-less photographs whose images are produced using electromagnetic charges. (He is only following Fox Talbot, the pioneer of early photography who used the same technique.) Artificial weather and lifelike artifice are part of Sugimoto's theme. His captions are as fanciful as they are informative, and not always easy to read. A guidebook would have been more helpful. Near a collection of Barbie dolls, one note claims: "I wanted to be a Barbie when I grew up." Cosmetic surgery made this possible. "Genes went haywire and made seedless melons out of everyone," the caption notes. All this leads, we later discover, to the creation of a race of hermaphrodites. Futuristic gender trouble is a favourite sci-fi ploy. Beneath a 1750s engraving of hermaphroditic genitalia, by the French anatomist and artist Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty, Sugimoto places a lifesize supine figure in a gorgeous, 16th-century geometric Noh play costume, with an equally old, androgynous Kassiki mask for a face. The figure's head sits under a glass dome. It is a wonderful and erotic thing, with arms outstretched like an immobilised angel. Beneath the clothes, the figure is bound like an Egyptian mummy. If it weren't for the quality of the exhibits in Sugimoto's wunderkammer, most of which come from his own collection, all this could be tiresome, teetering into kitsch. Instead it is a treasure trove of the marvellous, frightful and bizarre. It is also an extremely dense exhibition, full of odd things you don't notice first time round. Real space-programme vessels for astronauts' pee and poo, an enormous stone phallus on a gurney, odd confabulations that refer to the works of Marcel Duchamp and Warhol. One display includes a greenish-brown lead-glass sphere, which was made as a window to inspect the reactions in making a "Nagasaki-type" atomic bomb in America's Manhattan Project. The timing device of a second world war Japanese torpedo, a map of Iwojima and a macabre US military "Jap Hunting License ('Open Season – No Limit')" occupy the same display, while round the corner another strange gas-masked figure lies rigid on a stretcher. All this does not prepare one for Sugimoto's remaking of Duchamp's Étant donnés, the work Duchamp made in secret over the last 20 years of his life. The elements of Duchamp's work have been replaced – with a hyper-real sex doll, made by a Japanese company, on a couch, a gas lamp on the stool beside her, and a photographic backdrop of a rainforest by Sugimoto. The accompanying sound of a waterfall is reproduced by computer-generated white noise. It feels so alive, so real, so fake, so dead. Like life but not life, it has little of the mystery and none of the voyeurism of Duchamp's original. But I swear the thunder was real on my visit, even though it felt laid on. So, too, was the rain through the skylight. In the distance, at the end of a corridor, hangs one of Sugimoto's seascapes. Black sea, grey sky; it is an image of an unpeopled, indifferent world. It warms the heart. • Aujourd'hui le monde est mort (Lost Human Genetic Archive) is at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until 7 September.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140516180058id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/16/hiroshi-sugimoto-aujordhui-palais-de-tokyo-paris-exhibition

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Hiroshi Sugimoto: art for the end of the world

Astronauts' poo, a giant phallus lying on a stretcher, a future race of hermaphrodites – Sugimoto has created a treasure trove of the marvellous, frightful and bizarre. Perfect for the apocalypse, writes Adrian Searle

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In a new study published in JAMA Surgery, researchers say that 70% of women with breast cancer in one breast who decide to remove the other breast do so unnecessarily. In fact, only 10% of women diagnosed with breast cancer should consider such prophylactic mastectomy, say experts. But that hasn’t kept rates of mastectomies from climbing. In the 1990s, about 1% of women diagnosed with breast cancer in one breast opted to have the other one removed; that percentage has jumped to 20% in recent years. MORE: Angelina Jolie’s Double Mastectomy: It’s Not the Only Option This increase is despite the fact that studies don’t show that removing an unaffected breast can lower a woman’s risk of recurrence or increase her chances of surviving the disease. That doesn’t change the fact that there are other reasons—perfectly understandable and deeply human ones—that may be guiding women’s choices. We spoke with leading experts and identified these four. 1. A fear of doing nothing “Fear is absolutely driving the decision,” says Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “I definitely understand that fear; we often hear, ‘I don’t want to deal with this ever again.’” And that’s reasonable, especially for women who go through the rigors of chemotherapy, and who are worried about surviving their disease so they can be there for their children and their families. That fear, however, can overshadow reason. Bedrosian was not involved in the current study, but published a trial in 2010 in which she and her colleagues found that only a small and specific group of women diagnosed with breast cancer—those under age 50, with early stage disease that was negative for estrogen receptors—may benefit from having both breasts removed. These women enjoyed a nearly 5% improved chance of survival five years after diagnosis than those who did not have the unaffected breast removed. But as the current study found, this represented less than 10% of women with breast cancer. Studies also show that the chances of breast cancer recurring in the opposite breast are very, very small. In fact, breast cancer patients are more likely to develop recurrent tumors in other parts of the body—the liver, lungs, or the brain—than they are their other breast. Still, says Hawley, “There are probably other things caught up in the variable of worry, from not wanting to think about [cancer] anymore, to not wanting to regret anything in the future if something did happen.” VIDEO: MRI: A New Tool to Detect Recurrent Breast Cancer 2. Early detection means too much information Technology may also play a role in driving up rates of just-in-case surgery. More women are getting an MRI of the breast, both as a way to screen for breast cancer and to give doctors a better picture of the tumors. These images are refined enough to pick up the tiniest of lesions, including those that may not need treatment. But it’s hard for women to do nothing at all after learning they have a growth in their breast, even if they might be benign and not require treatment. In such moments, it’s likely that every instinct tells women to do something. “The feeling is to do everything possible, and doing everything possible means more surgery,” says Hawley. 3. The pink ribbon brigade Breast cancer advocacy is a model of how to mobilize and educate the public about a disease. Rates of screening have gone up while death rates have come down (although it is still the leading cancer killer among U.S. women). The awareness about the disease and the push for better treatments, however, have magnified the obligation and responsibility behind every choice, from screening to diagnosis and treatment. And that’s especially true about the decision surrounding prophylactic surgery. “There is a hyper awareness surrounding prophylactic mastectomy, and many women are choosing it without a clear understanding of why,” says Bedrosian. Coverage of celebrities’ decisions to proactively remove their breasts may also heighten the urgency of taking aggressive action for many women. “I don’t know of anyone publicly who has said they were diagnosed with breast cancer recently and chose to have lumpectomy with radiation,” says Hawley. (Good Morning American anchor Amy Robach, who does not carry the BRCA breast cancer genes which put women at higher risk of recurrence, still decided to have a double mastectomy.) “There is a feeling that doing everything you can is a way to take control. And just doing a lumpectomy and radiation may not be taking as much control as choosing a double mastectomy.” MORE: Study: Double Mastectomy May Not Improve Survival 4. Not enough accurate information about options Bedrosian admits that part of the reason women are choosing to proactively remove their breasts, even when they may not need to, has to do with the fact that doctors don’t have the best tools for helping patients make this decision. For the 10% of women at high risk of having recurrent breast cancer, the decision isn’t as challenging. But for the remaining 90%, many of whom may not have a genetic risk but have distant relatives with the disease, the decision becomes harder. “Communication is important to make sure that patients are informed about the medical facts,” says Bedrosian. “It’s important to make sure that our patients are making informed choices and not simply fear-driven choices.” In the end, it’s a very personal—and complicated—decision, in which each of these factors, and many others, may take on varying degrees of importance.

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Preventive Mastectomies Still High Among Women At Low Risk of Breast Cancer Recurrence

Science says the treatment doesn’t lower risk of recurrence, but here’s why rates of the procedures continue to climb

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Among the new models that BMW will introduce in 2013, two stand out. The first, a sports coupe named the 4 Series, is instantly recognizable as a BMW. A bit lower and wider than the 3 Series coupe it replaces, it will be built at BMW’s Spartanburg, S.C., manufacturing complex and sell for prices starting at about $45,000. The second vehicle, an all-electric city car called the i3, is unlike anything BMW — or anyone else, for that matter — has ever made. Its weight-saving carbon-fiber body is wrapped in layers of electronic services and smartphone apps designed to make life simpler and save time for the owner. Searching for a parking space? The i3 will help you find one at your destination — as well as arrange to rent out your space at home while you are gone. Need a charge for the lithium-ion batteries? Another feature locates the nearest charging station and arranges for an emergency boost if you can’t find it. Should you be planning a trip out of town, BMW will help you swap your electric car for a gasoline-powered one with a longer range. Engineering cars that make driving pleasure a top priority has made BMW the bestselling luxury brand in the world. Its cars are renowned for innovative design, high-performing engines, and exceptional handling. The i3 has none of those things. It is designed for utility and fuel economy, and when it goes on sale this fall, it will be expensive — about $40,000 — and probably appeal to a small number of people. So why is the Munich automaker risking its reputation by venturing into unproven new technologies where sales will be tiny and profits a challenge? The answer goes to the heart of BMW’s long-running success. It wants to be seen as a manufacturer of cars that serve a real purpose. In pursuit of that goal, it has made this detour. While BMW believes that the luxury-car market will remain robust, it also thinks buyers are becoming more interested in two qualities that it has largely ignored: sustainability and interconnectedness. In its new mission statement it aspires to become the “world’s leading provider of premium products and premium services for individual mobility.” In other words, BMW wants to make cars that are plugged-in and eco-conscious. What the initiative means for BMW is uncertain. Six months after the i3’s introduction, it will launch the second car in its i Series, a $125,000 grand touring car with a plug-in hybrid drivetrain. Other electric models are expected to follow. In all, they will require an investment of several billion euros, with little prospect of a quick payoff — a tremendous risk for a company that, in its entirety, is smaller than GM’s Chevrolet division. Rumors have appeared in the automotive press that BMW has canceled or postponed some models because of weak electric-vehicle sales, or is adding gasoline-assisted versions as a hedge against buyer resistance. But BMW’s top executives appear committed. “There is no doubt in my mind,” chairman and chief executive Norbert Reithofer told Fortune, “that sustainable thinking and action is an essential condition for long-term growth, higher profitability, and the development of new customer segments and pioneering technologies.” BMW embarks on its new direction from a rock-solid financial base. BMW Group’s brands — BMW, Mini, and Rolls-Royce — all set sales records in 2012. Sales of BMW cars alone rose 12%, to 1.54 million, besting Mercedes-Benz and Audi for the title of the world’s most popular premium brand. In the U.S., 281,460 BMWs were sold, leaving Cadillac, Buick, and Acura in the dust. BMW’s market capitalization has surged to 45 billion euros, twice the value of Mercedes. The stock is up 30% in the past six months and hit an all-time high in January. At BMW the car has always been the star. The company’s heart and soul is the Forschungs- und Innovationszentrum, the research and innovation center known as the FIZ. A short drive from corporate headquarters in Munich, the FIZ is home to some 8,900 engineers and others who bring together the three essential functions of the car business — product development, procurement, and marketing. In 2007, though, BMW was faced with problems that could not be solved at the FIZ and that threatened BMW’s survival as an independent company. Rising commodity prices and the expensive euro were driving up the costs of manufacturing at the same time that automakers were investing large sums to meet EU regulations for CO2 emissions. Traffic congestion in cities and an aging customer base were depressing demand for high-performance cars. Chairman and chief executive Helmut Panke had sold off the money-losing Rover Group and led BMW’s expansion in North America and China, but the supervisory board declined to extend his contract when he reached the mandatory retirement age. In his place it installed a dark-horse candidate, a manufacturing specialist named Norbert Reithofer. Reithofer, then 50, had spent most of his career in production, making his reputation by halving the time required to ramp up production of a new 3 Series car. Reithofer set out to understand the threats to the company and the factors that were braking its profitability. He identified some 200 economic, technological, and social trends likely to shape BMW’s future. “It became obvious that our competitive position was at stake,” Reithofer explained at the time. “We realized that we couldn’t carry on as we had before.” The project was controversial. “Many people didn’t understand back then why the company needed to make changes after being successful for so many years,” he told Fortune recently. “But things are different now. The results have shown that we are on the right track.” With his study in hand, Reithofer set in motion what he called Strategy No. 1: BMW would become the leading provider of premium products and services for individual mobility by 2020. BMW watchers understood that it was a radical plan. Reithofer’s focus on “premium” was a clear refutation of BMW’s foray into mid-price cars with the Rover acquisition. And his declaration that BMW would provide “premium services” as well as “premium products” signaled that BMW would be venturing beyond the FIZ. Reithofer also set ambitious financial targets. By 2012 he wanted BMW to sell 1.8 million vehicles, earn operating margins of 8% to 10%, and achieve a return on capital of 26%. The next step was figuring out how to meet the targets. In the spring of 2008 he assembled some of the company’s most innovative thinkers at a secret location in Munich and gave them instructions to redefine personal transportation for the 21st century. A team traveled around the world, visiting big cities, interviewing urban planners and architects, and talking to residents. After nine months the thinkers came up with a new direction. BMW would follow two different paths: one evolutionary, with efficient combustion engines and the technologies that surround them — its traditional car business, in other words — and the other revolutionary, with electric powertrains, recyclable materials, and software-driven mobility services. Strategy No. 1 gave birth to “Project i” — for intelligent, innovative, and international. In 2009, Project i unveiled its first experimental vehicle, the Mini E. It wasn’t elegant — the back seat of a conventional Mini had been removed to make room for batteries — but the car taught BMW about owner usage and battery life. One Mini E set a record at the time by traveling 147.3 miles on a single charge. Next came the ActiveE, which began U.S. field tests with 700 cars in January 2012. Based on the BMW 1 Series, it was more sophisticated than the Mini E, with seating for four and a thermal management system for improved battery performance. For the third phase of Project i, BMW unveiled the i3 at the Frankfurt Auto Show in 2011. Developing it sent BMW into uncharted territory. For the carbon-fiber body, it formed a joint venture with an American company, SGL Automotive Carbon Fibers, and built a $100 million manufacturing plant in Moses Lake, Wash., to take advantage of hydropower from the nearby Grand Coulee Dam — sustainable power for a sustainable car. Raw material for the carbon fiber is shipped from Japan to Moses Lake, then sent to component makers in Wackersdorf and Landshut, Germany, and then on to Leipzig for final assembly. BMW figures the lifetime global-warming impact of the electric i3 is a third less than that of a similar-size diesel hatchback because of the use of carbon fiber for the body, recycled aluminum in the chassis, and interior panels and seats made out of hemp fibers, recycled water bottles, and the like. The Leipzig plant, which was expanded two years ago to accommodate the i3, runs on 100% renewable energy. Although the i3’s electric powertrain weighs about 440 pounds more than a similar combustion setup, the car is 550 pounds lighter, thanks to its aluminum chassis and carbon-fiber body. The car needs eight seconds to get to 62 mph — tortoise time for a BMW — but that didn’t stop Ludwig Willisch, president of BMW North America, from exclaiming after a drive, “It looks great, and it goes like hell. It is a true BMW.” But the real innovation can be found in the passenger compartment. BMW calls i3 the world’s first fully networked electric vehicle. The driver will be able to summon a mobile charging truck if his battery runs out. He will have smartphone apps to find charging spots, and the ability to swap into a gas-powered car. Operation of the navigation system, as well as the transfer of information among the vehicle, the outside world, and the driver’s smartphone, has been tailored for city driving. If the i3 is all about practicality and convenience, the i8 grand tourer sits at the opposite end of the mobility spectrum, where glamour and performance rule. Early i8 concepts featured two large pivot doors for access to both the front and rear seats, and laser headlights that are 10 times brighter than standard ones yet somehow don’t blind oncoming drivers. The combined gas and electric motors of its hybrid drivetrain are said to whisk the 3,250-pound car to 62 mph in 4.6 seconds on the way to a top speed of 155 mph. For those with a lighter foot, fuel economy is figured at 104 miles per gallon. Deliveries begin in the first half of 2014. BMW’s search for services and features to wrap around its i cars has taken it thousands of miles from Munich. For years automakers have used satellite design studios in Southern California to get a window on new trends. BMW has one, of course, but it also uses a technology office in Mountain View, Calif., where 40 professionals seek out, evaluate, and develop high-tech ideas. BMW has a beachhead on the East Coast too; it created its own New York venture capital operation in New York City and funded it with $100 million to invest in mobility services. Among its holdings is London-based Parkatmyhouse, which connects home and business owners who want to rent their parking spaces with drivers looking for a spot. Another is a California company called ChargePoint, the largest network of independently owned charging stations, operating in 14 countries. There’s more. If you own a BMW in San Francisco, the company offers a service called ParkNow that lets drivers find and book a parking spot in advance at off-street locations, as well as get information on related services, such as finding a car wash and renting a bike. Want to drive a BMW but don’t own one? BMW has established DriveNow, a car-sharing service, in Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and San Francisco. Find a car on its website and pay per use; you’ll be billed by the minute. All this focus on the future does not mean that BMW is ignoring the present. The company easily met its financial targets for 2012, and propelled by strong sales in China and the U.S., the company expects to hit its target of 2 million in car sales in 2016, four years earlier than planned. Growth is coming from expanded offerings of small and compact cars like the 1 Series, and from BMW’s ability to exploit product niches in existing segments. At the Paris Auto Show last fall it presented a short, chubby hatchback with a hybrid powertrain that it called the Active Tourer. About the same length as the 1 Series, the Active Tourer will share a front-wheel-drive platform with the Mini, making it the first BMW to come to market without the rear-wheel drive that enthusiasts prefer. Considering the inability of Nissan and others to profit from electric vehicles, BMW’s ability to sell them at premium prices is hardly a given. Fortunately, Reithofer can afford to be patient. Since 47% of its stock is owned by Munich’s Quandt family, BMW essentially operates like a private company. When asked how soon BMW could expect a payoff from its i investments, Reithofer said the project had already been paid for, and “if everything goes according to plan, we will earn a reasonable margin per vehicle and make money on every car.” Just to make sure there was no misunderstanding, he added, “We don’t build vehicles that are not profitable.” A BMW supplier was overheard one day complaining that the company’s standards make it a very difficult customer. “Every time we get to perfect, they change perfect,” he said. The same might be said of BMW’s long-term strategy. Besides continually refining the ultimate driving machine, BMW has taken on the additional challenge of creating the ultimate sustainable and plugged-in urban vehicle for the 21st century. It is big challenge for a small company, but then that is what makes BMW BMW. This story is from the March 18, 2013 issue of Fortune.

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BMW gets plugged in

The company is making huge bets on green, wired cars for city dwellers alongside its high-performance luxury vehicles.

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The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has expressed readiness for a Gaza truce and Washington says Israel has sought help in calming a 22-day conflict that has killed nearly 1200 in the enclave. But the Israeli government remained silent on the subject while continuing its bombardment on Tuesday, leaving scores more dead more than three weeks after launching a military offensive against rocket-firing militants. US Secretary of State John Kerry said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had asked for fresh help from America in trying to broker a ceasefire. "Last night we talked, and the prime minister talked to me about an idea and a possibility of a ceasefire. He raised it with me, as he has consistently," said Kerry. The top US diplomat added that Netanyahu had said he "would embrace a ceasefire that permits Israel to protect itself against (Palestinian militants') tunnels and obviously not be disadvantaged for the great sacrifice they have made thus far". There was no Israeli government comment. PLO secretary-general Yasser Abed Rabbo said after consultations with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two main militant groups in Gaza, that there was "willingness for a ceasefire and humanitarian truce for 24 hours". A joint delegation headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would travel to Cairo to take the next step. "This is more proof that we have a unified Palestinian stand," Abed Rabbo said. "The delegation will head to Cairo under the PLO umbrella represented by President Mahmoud Abbas." Hamas said so far it had not agreed to any new truce and was waiting for Israel to show its hand first. "When we have an Israeli commitment ... on a humanitarian truce, we will look into it, but we will never declare a truce from our side while the occupation keeps killing our children," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zukhri said on Facebook. Mohammed Deif, head of the movement's military wing, echoed his position. "There is no ceasefire without the stop of the aggression and the end of the siege," he said in remarks aired on Hamas radio and television. A series of ceasefires in recent days have failed to take hold, as both sides appeared more determined than ever to keep up the fighting. The Israeli offensive, which began on July 8, has killed more than 1190 Palestinians, mostly civilians according to the United Nations, and injured over 7000. Fifty-six lives have been lost on the Israeli side, all but three of them soldiers. Do you have any news photos or videos?

http://web.archive.org/web/20140731203035id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2014/07/30/01/55/israel-asks-for-us-help-on-gaza-truce

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Gaza truce offers fly, but so do shells

Secretary of State John Kerry says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked for fresh US help in trying to broker a ceasefire in Gaza.

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FORTUNE — Google GOOG today implemented its controversial new privacy policy, which ties together more than ever before data gathered from users’ online activities across all of its properties — search, Gmail, Google Plus, Picasa, Google Maps, etc. — to better target ads based on users’ interests. There is plenty of blowback, of course. But that might have been mitigated, at least somewhat, by Google’s ad campaign, “Good to Know,” which comprises cute line drawings to explain and promote the new policy. “Online privacy has never looked more cuddly,” decided Advertising Age. MORE: The story behind “Inside Facebook” Or maybe privacy intrusion has never looked more cuddly is a better way to put it. Google of course is putting the best possible face on what is, after all, a highly controversial, possibly troubling move. But the campaign might be unique in terms of taking such actions directly to the people, circumventing lawyers, interest groups and politicians to the extent possible. “Good to Know” was launched in Europe before the anti-SOPA campaign reached full volume, culminating in an online movement of people and companies that resulted in Web blackouts and other protests the led to the anti-piracy legislation’s being shelved. Google took part, though only with a message on its site stating its opposition to the bill. But the company must have been pleased by the effort’s success, since it offered further evidence that in many cases, direct-to-the-public publicity campaigns can be highly effective. MORE: How StumbleUpon saved itself Of course, that can work both ways, and for a lot of people, Google’s new policy is a lot like SOPA in being anathema to the interests of Internet users. Some of the same groups and many of the same individuals that opposed SOPA also oppose this. But if such battles are increasingly fought in public, that might be a lot better than having them fought in Congress, the courts, or lawyer’s offices, where interests other than the public interest are bound to hold more sway.

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What Google learned from SOPA

With its "Good to Know" campaign, Google tried to take the debate out of the realm of lawyers and politicians and into the public square. Given that opposition is still vociferous, it's hard to know how effective it has been.

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US security firm says 1.2 billion internet credentials have been stolen. (AAP) Russian hackers stole 1.2 billion internet credentials from major US companies and others around the world in what is likely the biggest data breach ever, security researchers say. The US firm Hold Security said the gang which it dubbed "CyberVor" collected confidential user names and passwords were stolen from some 420,000 websites, ranging from household names to small internet sites. "As long as your data is somewhere on the World Wide Web, you may be affected by this breach," Hold said in a statement on its website. "Your data has not necessarily been stolen from you directly. It could have been stolen from the service or goods providers to whom you entrust your personal information, from your employers, even from your friends and family." The security firm, which specialises in research on large data breaches, said the cybergang acquired databases of stolen credentials from fellow hackers on the black market, and then installed malware that allowed them to gain access to many websites and social media accounts. "To the best of our knowledge, they mostly focused on stealing credentials, eventually ending up with the largest cache of stolen personal information, totalling over 1.2 billion unique sets of emails and passwords," the researchers said. "The CyberVors did not differentiate between small or large sites. They didn't just target large companies; instead, they targeted every site that their victims visited. With hundreds of thousands sites affected, the list includes many leaders in virtually all industries across the world, as well as a multitude of small or even personal websites." The researchers dubbed the hacker group CyberVor, using the Russian word "vor," for thief. The New York Times first reported the breach, and said the group of hackers based their operation in south central Russia, flanked by Kazakhstan and Mongolia, the report said. The Times said the group includes fewer than a dozen men in their 20s and that their computer servers are believed to be in Russia. Do you have any news photos or videos?

http://web.archive.org/web/20140808023336id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/technology/2014/08/06/09/23/russian-hackers-pull-off-massive-breach?

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Russian hackers steal 1.2 billion internet passwords in massive security breach

The US firm Hold Security says Russian hackers have stolen 1.2 billion internet credentials from major US companies.

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09/08/2014 AT 06:30 PM EDT Molly Glynn, an accomplished Chicago theater actress who also played a recurring role as a doctor on the TV series , has died after a tree toppled by a powerful storm struck her as she rode her bike in a forest park. She was 46. Glynn was with her husband, Joe Foust, when the storm rolled quickly into the area, just north of Chicago, the executive director of First Folio Theatre and a close family friend, David Rice, said Sunday. "Molly was one of the most loving and generous people in the Chicago theater scene," he said. "She was incredibly talented – incredibly versatile. She could handle both comedy and the deepest, darkest dramas." Glynn's husband called 911 just before 4 p.m. on Friday to say his wife had been injured, Cook County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Sophia Ansari said. NorthShore Evanston Hospital spokeswoman Colette Urban confirmed Glynn died Saturday. Glynn had an audition earlier in the day Friday and she and her husband had decided to go for a ride. The inclement weather took them by surprise and the tree slammed into Glynn as the couple sought to ride to safety, Rice said. "It was a freak accident and a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. Others in the theater community in and around Chicago also expressed shock and sadness. "It is an incalculable loss," said Michael Halberstam, the artistic director of the Glencoe-based Writers Theatre. "She was a loving mother and wife and everyone who met her fell in love with her." Glynn grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, Rice said. In addition to her husband, she is also survived by two teenage sons. Foust has been open about his grief with his Facebook followers, sharing a link to of himself on Sunday wearing Glynn's wedding band as well as his own. "Wearing the rings myself," he wrote below the photo. "Preparing to say final goodbye before she goes off to surgery to donate her organs. I know it's just a shell now, but I've grown used to the comfort of her body here in this room. Be kind. Love hard. Remember."

http://web.archive.org/web/20140909123120id_/http://www.people.com/article/molly-glynn-chicago-fire-actress-dies-bicycle-accident-storm

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Chicago Fire Actress Molly Glynn Dies Following Bicycle Accident : People.com

The Chicago-based actress was biking with her husband when a tree fell on her during a fast-moving storm

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Tom Brady has movie star looks -- and apparently he's ready to apply those assets literally. In an interview with ESPN's Bill Simmons, Mark Wahlberg revealed that he convinced Brady to appear in two upcoming movies that Wahlberg himself is involved in. The first, Ted 2, is a sequel to a hit comedy Wahlberg stars in. Wahlberg told Simmons that Brady "killed it" in his performance. Brady was appearing in the movie as himself, and the two improvised several interactions in which Wahlberg's character is overwhelmed to meet Brady and tries to play it cool -- but fails, of course. "There were moments where I was always improvising when doing the scene with him," Wahlberg says. "There are times I’m supposed to be a super fan, so I’m trying to calm myself down before I knock on his door. But I’m pretending that I don’t know who he is. I keep saying he looks like different people. "Then of course, I’m playing an air conditioning guy, so I'm asking him to sign the paper, and I ask him if he can sign that to me and Ted and put No. 12 there, and can you put 'Eli Manning sucks.' And can you put 'Wes Welker is a traitor,' and we keep playing around and playing around. I’m staring at his eyes, and I’m like, 'Oh my God, they’re bluer than Daytona Beach on MTV Spring Break.'" Here's the full clip of Wahlberg talking about Brady: Here is Brady's Facebook post about his Ted 2 experience: Wahlberg also said Brady, along with Patriots teammates Rob Gronkowski, Stevan Ridley and Julian Edelman, will also appear in the upcoming 'Entourage' movie. Both movies are slated for a summer 2015 release. Tom Brady And Gisele Bundchen Like us on facebook, follow us on twitter, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Lolo Jones Discusses 'Bobsled Butt'

http://web.archive.org/web/20141108202108id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/dish/201411/tom-brady-will-appear-ted-2-entourage-movies-being-released-next-summer

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Tom Brady Will Appear In 'Ted 2,' 'Entourage' Movies Next Summer

Tom Brady has movie star looks -- and apparently he's ready to apply those assets literally. Mark Wahlberg, The Sports Fan In an...

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The state’s landmark law to promote energy efficiency and renewable power sources such as wind and solar is projected to produce a modest economic benefit in coming years, including the creation of about 16,000 jobs, according to new report released Tuesday. The report by Analysis Group, a Boston economic and financial consulting firm, is believed to be the first detailed look at the economic impact of the state’s Green Communities Act, passed in 2008 with the primary aim of promoting renewable energy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions blamed for accelerating climate change. The study found that the programs put in place by the law, and financed with $2.7 billion in higher electric and natural gas rates, would create enough economic activity to cover those costs and yield a net benefit of $1.2 billion over about 15 years. The lead author of the report acknowledged the projected economic benefits are relatively small in a state with a $400 billion economy and a workforce of about 3.3 million people. But Paul Hibbard, vice president at Analysis Group, said the study shows the Green Communities Act is not a drag on the state’s economy, as some critics have contended, and is even helping it a bit. “In the big scheme of things, these numbers may not look large,” Hibbard said. “But they’re still positive numbers.” The report, funded by the Barr Foundation, a charitable nonprofit that has made fighting climate change a priority, focused solely on the economic impact of the law and did not consider potential environmental and health benefits. Alan Clayton-Matthews, an economist at Northeastern University, agreed that $1.2 billion in net economic activity and 16,000 jobs add up to “virtually no impact” on the broader economy. But, he said, the potential pluses of a cleaner environment and resulting health improvements are probably incalculable. “The fact is, it appears to be not costing the state economic growth, and that’s sort of nice,” said Clayton-Matthews, who was not involved in the report. Robert Rio, vice president at Associated Industries of Massachusetts, a business group that has been highly critical of Governor Deval Patrick’s environmental initiatives, said the report’s findings are “probably pretty close to the truth.” “The economic benefits are quite modest — which is why I think the report is right,” said Rio. But he warned that not all the requirements of the Green Communities Act have been implemented. Goals yet realized, such as increasing the use of expensive offshore wind power, could quickly offset the relatively small benefits, he said. “What we fear moving forward is that the more costly items [in the act] still have to be implemented — and that could hurt,” Rio said. The Analysis Group study looked only at the programs implemented since the law was passed six years ago. The study uses economic models to estimate the economic pluses and minuses from 2010 through 2025. Some of the report’s findings: ■ The energy-efficiency program and other components of the act are largely paid for by utilities, which in turn recover the costs by charging higher electric and natural gas rates. ■ Despite the upfront costs, the study said, efficiency programs will cut consumption by enough energy to power about 5 million homes for a year, thus providing a net savings for consumers. ■ The reduction in demand will eliminate the need to build power plants that burn natural gas and other fossil fuels. ■ The energy-efficiency programs have created jobs for workers who install insulation, lighting, heating systems, and other equipment to conserve energy. These modest economic gains seem to fall short of boasts by the Patrick administration that the governor’s environmental polices have created hundreds of clean-energy firms and up to 80,000 new jobs. But Richard K. Sullivan Jr., state secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said the Green Communities Act is one of just many energy and environmental initiatives that are boosting the state’s economy. They include the Clean Energy Jobs Act and the Global Warming Solutions Act, also passed in the early years of the Patrick administration. Sullivan added that more benefits from the Green Communities Act will be realized as more programs, such as solar and wind projects, kick into gear. Hibbard, the report’s lead author, was appointed by Patrick as chairman of Department of Public Utilities and served from 2007 through 2010, when the agency wrote rules to implement provisions of the Green Communities Act. Hibbard said the report was a “rigorous, objective review” — and not biased. “Virtually all of those [Green Communities Act] measures were installed, constructed, or approved after my departure from DPU,” he said.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150312194916id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/03/04/green-communities-act-yields-modest-economic-benefits-says-study/HyqJARJ31bBkDh85AfxMVP/story.html

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Green Communities Act yields modest economic benefits, says study

The state’s landmark law to promote energy efficiency and renewable power sources such as wind and solar is projected to produce a modest economic benefit in coming years, including the creation of about 16,000 jobs, according to new report released Tuesday. The report by the Analysis Group, a Boston economic and financial consulting firm, is believed to be the first detailed look at the economic impact of the state’s Green Communities Act, passed in 2008 with the primary aim of promoting renewable energy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions blamed for accelerating climate change. The study found that the programs put in place by the law, will yield a net economic benefit of $1.2 billion over 15 years.

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Updated MAR 21, 2015 7:11a ET Arizona had been close to the top but has never quite broken through to the hallowed ground in the first five years under coach Sean Miller. Looking for that little extra boost -- a jolt of inspiration and motivation for this season -- Miller stumbled onto something while watching a two-hour documentary from ESPN's 30 for 30 series: "Bad Boys." It became required viewing for his Wildcats. There were lessons to be learned and messages to take away from the Detroit Pistons teams of the late 1980s and 1990s: Teamwork, toughness, family, roles and winning. "With team success it's amazing how individual accolades follow, how players in a team sacrifice, and how it comes back around and they benefit," Miller said Friday as his Wildcats prepared for a Round of 32 game against Ohio State. "There are a lot of lessons. Defense is something you can control better than offense. For our team to be totally committed to being a great defensive team, (it) will take us the furthest we can go." His players say they've taken the lessons to heart en route to a 32-3 record heading into Saturday's game. What was senior point guard T.J. McConnell's prime takeaway? "How close they were as a team," McConnell said. "He wanted our team to be like that. We've watched it so many times that we're pretty much like that. We kind of figured it out as they kept talking about how close they were and what they would do for each other. We said to ourselves we have to be like that." Success didn't come easily or overnight for the Bad Boy Pistons. They had to get past the reigning powers of the time, the Celtics in the East and the Lakers in West. After several years of knocking on the door, the Chuck Daly-coached Pistons won back-to-back titles in 1989 and 1990. It's a journey that Arizona can relate to -- the Wildcats have twice been one basket away from the Final Four during Miller's tenure but have yet to take that big step. "How Coach (Miller) viewed it was we have been knocking on the door of a Pac-12 championship and the Final Four," said Ryan Reynolds, Arizona's director of basketball operations. "Our program, like the Pistons, has to break down some doors." Miller first showed the tape last summer -- initially to his returning players, then to his entire team. They've watched it at least four times, enough to have broken down some parts into segments to illustrate points. Chief among them are the staples of a championship team: Defense and rebounding. "(That) was the backbone of their team," said Arizona assistant coach Joe Pasternack. "Everybody had a certain role on the team, and everybody had to accept that role." Isiah Thomas was the leader. That's McConnell. Bill Laimbeer was the enforcer. Kaleb Tarczewski, though lacking Laimbeer's mean streak, plays that role for the Wildcats. Mark Aguirre, the scorer, comes in the form of freshman Stanley Johnson. And Rondae Hollis-Jefferson plays defense like Dennis Rodman and has the personality of John Salley. "In that aspect, as far as being the hustle guy, diving on the floor for a loose ball, having energy, I would say, 'yeah,' " Hollis-Jefferson said, agreeing with the Rodman comparison. "Know your role," he said. "If you think about it, in a way, we're like them because we have so many situations, so many places where we didn't break through. They (Pistons) were getting closer and closer every time. Eventually they broke through. "It's time to break through." Tarczewski added three points: Playing with heart, being physical and being unafraid. "It was about being all in and playing hard basketball," he said. "That was the most important thing. They were a team, and everyone was playing their hardest, doing everything they could to win. That's what we're trying to do. "They were a family. Everyone was trying to win. That's what he was trying to tell us. It was good for us. It provided our team a lot of motivation." For Johnson, the prevailing message was one of toughness, to be the "baddest boys" on the court. "We're not going to get punked, not going to back down from anybody," Johnson said. "It's not about how big or tough you are. We're going to show you -- and not by fist fighting -- but how we crash the glass and how we play offense and defense. "If we lose, we're going to lose the right way, doing our thing. That's the mentality how this team works. That's what (Miller) was getting at." Follow Steve Rivera on Twitter

http://web.archive.org/web/20150322060530id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/arizona-wildcats-ncaa-tournament-bad-boy-detroit-pistons-032015

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Arizona Wildcats' teamwork, toughness shaped by 'Bad Boy' role models

Sean Miller uses message from Pistons' hard-fought climb to top as inspiration for pushing Arizona toward long-awaited breakthrough.