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http://web.archive.org/web/20120604112028id_/http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2012/06/mexico-election-diary | Dear TW: There are serious numerical anomalies in the debate you are moderating.You may want to check it out. I will state no opinion on who should or should not, will or will not become President of Mexico in four weeks´ time. I will nevertheless tell you that there is ample evidence to point out that the vote in this debate has been tampered with. I am sorry and certainly I believe the political operative who quite possibly has been behind this vote-rigging has to be at least privately reprimanded by his party;The Economist´s staff may want to do a quick investigation with the ample means at their disposal and should they conclude that enough evidence supports the proposition that this shameful event has taken place, a disclaimer on the debate should be added.Pulling this under the rug would be quite counter-productive. To many people the world over, myself included, this newspaper is an institution worth preserving.Numbers, facts and balanced, insightful analysis are the reasons we have trusted The Economist for decades. It is totally unacceptable for anyone to tarnish its reputation by using old Mexican small-town vote-rigging tactics either to get back at Mrs Josefina Vazquez´s use of The Economist at the first televised presidential debate against Mr Peña Nieto, or as a propaganda tool in the next debate. Let´s see the numbers.For those unfamiliar with Mexico´s presidential election to be held July 1, 2012,there are four candidates.One of them, from the teacher´s union, has never polled above 5%.The ones with real chances are Mr. Peña Nieto from PRI, who polled formerly as high as 42% and now in the low 30s; Mrs.Josefina Vazquez, from the ruling center-right PAN,now in third and formerly in second place, polling in the high 20s, and Mr. AMLO from the center-left PRD, now in second place, polling in the low 30s but behind Mr Peña Nieto.Some polls speak of a four point spread between the two, others point to a ten point spread. But the essence of the matter is that all parties as well as the voters they represent are united in this: they are all against PRI and Mr. Peña Nieto ever claiming back the presidency they lost in the year 2000.Thus if Mr Peña Nieto has 34% or 42 % of the votes, by definition that means that either 66% or 58% of all voters are opposed to the proposition that "Mexico is better off under the PRI" The fact that your poll shows 30% of the people opposing your motion instead of the 60-70% indicated by all polls conducted in Mexico is a first sign of trouble.Only the staff at The Economist knows how many votes have originated outside Mexico.If the numbers do not change much once these non-Mexico originated votes have been removed, the idea of vote manipulation gathers strength. Now, the people most likely to read this newspaper in Mexico, and thus vote in your debate, are naturally highly educated professionals.But you see, the latest poll gruporeforma.blogs.com/encuestas confirms the well-known fact that this demographic is overwhelmingly against the PRI, and has been so for at least 20 years, if not more.The affluent and well-educated are mostly PRD and to a certain extend PAN.In Mexico City, for example, PRD has a twenty-point lead.The actual numbers nationwide are:For voters with only primary education PRI 41%,PRD 30%, PAN 25%.For voters with college education:PRI 28%, PRD 43%, PAN 21%.Therefore, among the people most likely to read TE less than 30% would agree with your proposition, yet your numbers show just the opposite result. Or do they? Well, actually the opinions stated in your 116 Opening Comments,50 Rebuttal Comments, 541 Opening Recommendations and 286 Rebuttal Recommendations if carefully tabulated and analyzed are totally supportive of those rough numbers of 70% of voter´s negating PRI´s returning to the Presidency and below 30% believing "Mexico is better off under the PRI" The fact that your comments are in statistical agreement with the numbers we would expect from a multitude of polls, while your poll debate numbers are so divergent as to be mirror images of the former is a clear indication of voter fraud. If we read carefully the 116 Opening Comments we see only 105 are real comments, since people sometimes mistakenly click on to post before they have actually written any comment.About 10% of these 105 indicate no decision on the debate´s proposition, but rather speak of various tangential matters such as the convenience for non-Mexicans to abstain from voting(the opinion of that gentleman who wisely retired to sunny Portugal,SaintMartinian),or to buy beach-front property(YukonDave),teachers saying they will use the debate in their classroom...and a funny Mexican who thinks his country would be better served if it were a colony of Sweden or The Netherlands(recommended by 3)...or another one who says Mexico would have been better off if it had not declared independence from Spain. | medium | 0.609756 | WITH a month to go until Mexico’s presidential election, everyone is thinking about politics. Or are they? A new poll asking which news stories have caught people’s attention suggests that campaign hasn’t grabbed everyone. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20130712035347id_/http://www.aljazeera.com:80/archive/2003/06/2008491463219614.html | Castao, who leads the Colombian paramilitaries, known by their Spanish acronym AUC, the largest right-wing paramilitary force to ever exist in the western hemisphere reveals that he was trained in the arts of war in Israelas a young man of 18 in the 1980s. He glowingly adds: âI copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis,â in his chapter-long account of his Israel experiences. Castaoâs right-wing Phalange-like AUC force is now by far the worst human rights violator in all of the Americas, and ties between that organisation and Israel are continually surfacing in the press. The AUC paramilitaries are a fighting force that originally grew out of killers hired to protect drug-running operations and large landowners. They were organised into a cohesive force by Castao in 1997. It exists outside the law but often coordinates its actions with the Colombian military, in a way similar to the relationship of the Lebanese Phalange to the Israeli army throughout the 1980s and 1990s. According to a 1989 Colombian Secret Police intelligence report, apart from training Carlos Castao in 1983, Israeli trainers arrived in Colombia in 1987 to train him and other paramilitaries who would later make up the AUC. Fifty of the paramilitariesâ âbestâ students were then sent on scholarships to Israel for further training according to a Colombian police intelligence report, and the AUC became the most prominent paramilitary force in the hemisphere, with some 10,000-12,000 men in arms. The Colombian AUC paramilitaries are always in need of arms, and it should come as no surprise that some of their major suppliers are Israeli. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala. In May of last year, GIRSA, an Israeli company associated with the Israeli Defence Forces and based in Guatemala was able to buy 3000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition that were then handed over to AUC paramilitaries in Colombia. Israelâs military relations with right-wing groups and regimes spans Latin America from Mexico to the southernmost tip of Chile, starting just a few years after the Israeli state came into existence. Since then, the list of countries Israel has supplied, trained and advised includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela. But it isnât only the sales of planes, guns and weapons system deals that characterises the Israeli presence in Latin America. Where Israel has excelled is in advising, training and running intelligence and counter-insurgency operations in the Latin American âdirty warâ civil conflicts of Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and now Colombia. In the case of the Salvadoran conflict - a civil war between the right-wing landowning class supported by a particularly violent military pitted against left-wing popular organisations - the Israelis were present from the beginning. Besides arms sales, they helped train ANSESAL, the secret police who were later to form the framework of the infamous death squads that would kill tens of thousands of mostly civilian activists. From 1975 to 1979, 83% of El Salvador's military imports came from Israel, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. By 1981, many of those in the civilian popular political movements who had survived the death squads headed for the hills to become guerrillas. By 1981 there was an open civil war in El Salvador which took over a decade to resolve through negotiations. Even though the US was openly backing the Salvadoran Army by 1981, as late as November 1983 it was asking for more Israeli âpractical assistanceâ there, according to a declassified secret document obtained recently by Aljazeera. Among the assistance asked for were helicopters, trucks, rifles, ammunition, and combat infantry advisors to work at both the âcompany and battalion level of the Salvadoran Armyâ. One notable Salvadoran officer trained by the Israelis was Major Roberto DâAubuisson, who always held a high opinion of the Israelis. It was Major DâAubuisson who ordered the assassination of El Salvadorâs archbishop amongst thousands of other murders. Later he would organise the right-wing National Republican Alliance Party (ARENA) and send his son to study abroad in the relative safety of Israel. Amazingly, while the Israelis were training the El Salvadoran death squads they were also supporting the anti-semitic Argentine military government of the late 1970s and early 1980s - at a time when that government was involvedin another âdirty warâ of death squads and disappearances. In 1978, Nicaraguaâs dictator Somoza was making his last stand against a general uprising of the Sandinista-led population who were sick of his familyâs dynasty which had ruled and monopolised the county for half a century. The Israelis and the US had been supplying Somoza with weapons for years. But when President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976 he ordered a cessation of all US military assistance to Nicaragua. Israel utilised Carter's humanrights policy to its advantage Filling the void, the Israelis immediately increased their weapons supplies to Somoza until he fled the country when the Sandinistas took power. Israeli operatives then helped train right-wing Nicaraguan Contras in Honduran and Costa Rican camps to fight the Sandinista government, according to Colombian police intelligence reports Aljazeerahas obtained. At least some of the same Israeli operatives had also previously trained the nucleus of the paramilitary organisations that would become the AUC in Colombia. But by far the bloodiest case of Israeli involvement in Latin America was its involvement in Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s. As in El Salvador, a civil war pitted a populist but, in this case, mainly Indian left against a mainly European oligarchy protected by a brutal Mestizo Army. As Guatemalan President Carlos Arana said in 1971, "If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so." The Israelis supplied Guatemala with Galil rifles, and built an ammunition factory for them, as well as supplying armoured personnel carriers and Arava planes. Behind the scenes, they were actively involved in the bloodiest counter-insurgency campaign the hemisphere has known since the European conquest, in which at least 200,000 (mostly Indians) were killed. Like Israelâs original occupation of Palestine, several entire Guatemalan Indian villages were razed and a million people displaced. âThe guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea,â said Guatemalan President Rios Montt in 1982. Israeli arms and training fuelledGuatemalan unrest Guatemalan army officers credit Israeli support with turning the tide against the uprising, not only in the countryside where Israeli counter-insurgency techniques and assistance set up strategic-hamlet-like âdevelopment polesâ along the lines of the Israeli kibbutz, but also in the cities where âIsraeli communication technicians and instructorsâ working through then-sophisticated computers were able to locate and then decimate guerrillas and their supporters in Guatemala City in 1981. From the late 1970s until the 1990s, the US could not overtly support the Guatemalan army because of its horrendous human rights record (although there was some covert support), but many in the US government, especially in the CIA, supported Israel in taking up the slack. But the US grew to regret its actions. On 10 March 1999, US President Bill Clinton issued an apology for US involvement in the war: The âUnited States... support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression...was wrong.â No similar statement has ever been forthcoming from the Israelis. At the present time, the only major insurgency war in Latin America is in Colombia, where Israel has an overt involvement. Besides the dozen or so Kfir IAI C-7 jet fighters they have sold the Colombian government, and the Galil rifles produced in Bogota under licence, most of the Israeli ties to the governmentâs counter-insurgency war are closely-guarded secrets. Aljazeeraâs attempts to obtain clarification on these and other issues for this story were stonewalled by the Israeli embassy in Washington. Why does Israel continue to provide arms and expertise to the pariahs of the world? Clearly, part of the reason is the revenues produced by arms sales, and part of it has do with keeping up with trends in counter-insurgent war across the globe. But another factor is what is demanded of Israel by the worldâs only superpower, the US, in partial exchange for the superpowerâs continued support for Israeli dominance in the Middle East. This relationship can be best illustrated by recently declassified 1983 US government documents obtained by the Washington, DC-based National Security Archives through the Freedom of Information Act. One such declassified document is a 1983 memo from the notorious Colonel Oliver North of the Reagan Administrationâs National Security Council and reads: âAs discussed with you yesterday, I asked CIA, Defense, and State to suggest practical assistance which the Israelis might offer in Guatemala and El Salvador.â Another document, this time a 1983 cable from the US Ambassador in Guatemala to Washington Frederic Chapin shows the money trail. He says that at a time when the US did not want to be seen directly assisting Guatemala, âwe have reason to believe that our good friends the Israelis are prepared, or already have, offered substantial amounts of military equipment to the GOG (Government of Guatemala) on credit terms up to 20 years...(I pass over the importance of making huge concessionary loans to Israel so that it can make term loans in our own backyard).â In other words, during civil wars in which the US does not want to be seen getting its hands dirty in Latin America, the superpower loans Israel money at a very good rate, and then Israel uses these funds to do the âdirty workâ. In this regard, in Latin America at least, Israel has become the hit-man for the US. | high | 0.787234 | <P>âI learned an infinite amount of things in Israel, and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievementsâ said Colombian paramilitary leader and indicted drug trafficker Carlos Castao in his ghostwritten autobiography, Mi Confesin.</P> |
http://web.archive.org/web/20131021172903id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/china-landscape-painting | A detail from Saying Farewell at Xunyang, by Qiu Ying, c1500-50 Photograph: John Lamberton/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art On 5 August 1473, a young artist drew the first ever landscape. The date is known precisely because Leonardo da Vinci wrote it on the sheet of paper, as if aware of the revolutionary nature of what he was doing. To look at mountains and trees just for themselves was unprecedented. Or was it? The invention of landscape painting is one of the great moments of European art. Painting nature is a way to get inside yourself. To this day, people enjoy doing watercolours in the outdoors as a form of meditation. Leonardo's discovery of the mystery of nature – which you see in all his paintings, with their dreamy rocks and pools – is the invention of a new kind of inner life. Yet it is a lot less original than we might like to think. There is an uncanny likeness between Leonardo's rocks, trees and rivers and the rocks, trees and rivers that Chinese artists were painting centuries before he was born. It is bizarre: that 1473 drawing actually looks like a reworking of classic Chinese paintings such as Li Gongnian's Winter Evening Landscape. When was that painted? I look at the label in the V&A's new exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. It says 1120. That's 353 years before the very similar sketch by Leonardo. It is conventional, nowadays, to pay lip service to the fact that many versions of art exist, that beautiful art comes from all over the world and every way of life. Yet the story of art that most of us absorb – as told in The Story of Art by EH Gombrich, first published in 1950 and still the definitive account of art's progress – puts European innovation at the centre of the action. All peoples make art, but the west takes it forward. Masterpieces of Chinese Painting is the most devastating refutation of such assumptions I have ever seen. It shows that during the Song dynasty, at a time when Europeans were fighting barbaric crusades and had long forgotten the creativity that flourished in ancient Greece, artists in China were taking painting to heights of sensitivity and poetry that would not be attained elsewhere until the ages of Leonardo – or for that matter, when you look at the most radical Chinese touches, Van Gogh. I'd go further. Looking at this show being installed and talking to its curator Zhang Hongxing, I can't resist airing the theory that Leonardo stole the idea of landscape painting from China. Could he somehow have seen Chinese paintings? Might something have reached the west along the Silk Road? Excitedly, I get Leonardo's 1473 drawing up on my iPad and hold it among the 12th-century Chinese landscapes for comparison. The shapes of the hills and trees in Leonardo's sketch perfectly mirror the sugar-loaf peaks and willowy trees in 900-year-old Chinese paintings. Zhang's well aware of this idea: it was raised very seriously in the 1950s, he says, but there is no proof. It's a mystery. Nor is Leonardo the only European pioneer of landscape who looks "Chinese". Zhang points out that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is also very "Chinese" looking. This is true. Bruegel's much-loved Hunters in the Snow has all the elements that delighted medieval Chinese landscape painters, including all that snow. But why did China invent landscape art in the first place? Why did artists begin to depict, not gods and battles as elsewhere, but the grandeur of nature? It has something to do with Buddhism, which spread to China before AD1,000 and inspired a culture of contemplation. It also has to do with the technical achievements of the Song era. The scientific mind that perfected porcelain also looked at nature with a new clarity. One of the first things you see in the show was actually painted by a Song emperor – though it comes with a warning to rulers, for Emperor Huizong's dreamy fascination with art helped to lose him his throne. Indeed, as the curator explains, painting in China has always been associated with retreat and escapism. Not all the works in this exhibition are landscapes. There are pictures of courtesans and the tremendous Nine Dragons, a dazzling mythic vision painted by Chen Rong in 1244. Yet for me, the escapist pursuit of pastoral in China's pioneering landscapes is utterly beguiling. After the Mongols conquered China there was a clear association of art with the rejection of power. Turning their backs on the court, intellectuals created gardens, wrote poetry and painted expressive scenes of wintry trees. They rendered nature in a free, subjective style that anticipated – and of course, influenced – Van Gogh. Personally, I am convinced that Leonardo must have got access to the art of China. He was fascinated by the east and once applied for a job in Istanbul, offering to serve the Ottoman empire and praising Allah in a letter that survives. Did all this interest in Asia lead him to some hushed library where he unrolled a silk scroll and saw mountains, cherry blossoms and water? One thing is certain. Zhang's great exhibition turns the story of art upside down. | high | 1 | The history books say that western Renaissance artists invented landscape painting. Not if you believe a new V&A exhibition of Chinese art, writes Jonathan Jones |
http://web.archive.org/web/20141011151523id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/10/09/ben-rhodes-deputy-national-security-adviser/ | You’re one of the last charter Team Obama guys still on the job. What’s keeping you around? I never set out to work in the White House. What drew me to the campaign was really the opportunity to work for Barack Obama. I don’t necessarily see this as a situation where I’m going to be going through the revolving door, in and out of administrations. I happen to have found somebody who I really love to work for, who I have a really good relationship with, and it’s hard to walk away from that. Do you ever feel envious of friends you started with, who’re out now and setting their hours? Anybody who leaves here, you see them a couple months later and they look a lot better. They look 20 pounds lighter and five years younger. So it does give you some envy, because you see the physical toll the job takes on you. You see everybody moving, some in Washington, some out to California, and you realize there are many green pastures out there. I still come to work in a windowless office in the basement of the White House. But the other side of the coin is that there’s no other job like this. When you walk out that door for the last time here, you realize your ability to be at the center of events and decision-making on momentous things that are changing the course of history, that goes away. It cuts both ways. You had a choice when you entered public life between this and pursuing a career as an author. Is that still the plan when you leave? I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction. When I leave here, I would certainly want to do my own writing, but more in the non-fiction realm — books, long-form journalism, and related opportunities. So I haven’t given it much thought beyond that. But after writing for somebody else for so many years, it will be interesting to pivot back to doing things in my own voice. What advice would you give to somebody who wants to follow your path, about the most relevant experience you had to land you this job? People make a mistake when they think that if you just accumulate a set number of things on your resume, it’s going to lead you to a particular place — the pattern of essentially compiling credentials to climb your way up a ladder. That may work, but that’s not at all what happened to me. I found people I really wanted to work for; I made myself available to do whatever I could with the skills I had; I took some risk, packing up and moving to Chicago; and I looked for the opportunities that fit for me. So I think the biggest advice is to find people you love to work for who you’re going to learn from. You and the President obviously spend a lot of time together. Do you have any travel rituals? What do you do on the plane? He’s a card player, I’m not. But I’ve gone on all of his foreign trips. We’ll have very intense schedules. One ritual is he likes to find little pockets of down time in the day to just unwind, talk about other things, to be relaxed. But the one ritual that’s always the case is that on speeches, he works very late, so he’ll constantly be making line edits and fiddling with text up until the last minute. So you get a lot of late nights, especially on the big speeches. So you have to kind of pace yourself with the expectation you’re not going to get a lot of sleep, that you’ve got to find ways to relax over the course of the day and that you need to have a reserve of mental energy that you can draw from. That’s the rhythm that you get into on these foreign trips that can be quite a grind. When you’re actually in the White House, how long is your typical day? Can you characterize it? I’ll get in around 8 and get an intelligence briefing at the beginning of the day, and then go into a series of morning meetings that are about figuring out what we need in place for that day. The afternoons tend to be meetings or work on what policies are running through a process, what are the next big things we’re getting ready for, the next big trip, the next big speech, the next big rollout of a policy. And I’ll tend to be at work from 8 to 8. But the thing about this job, it’s not so much the hours in the office—it’s that you’re always on call. So you’ll end up having to answer email and do things up until you go to bed at 12 or 1 in the morning. So even when you’re home, you’re still working. That’s particularly true in foreign policy. The other day, when we launched airstrikes in Syria, we obviously knew that was going to happen, but that happens overnight, so you basically end up being up all night. You don’t get to control the timing of when things happen in foreign policy like you do in other areas. If something happens in North Korea, or the Middle East or Ukraine, you have to respond to it no matter what time of day it is. So it ends up making you essentially on call 24 hours a day. What’s the most important speech you’ve worked on so far? I’m wondering where the UN speech ranks. The UN speech is definitely one of the most important, because it’s intended to set the tone for the next year or so going forward, here in the United States but also globally. It’s the roadmap for we’re doing, where we’re trying to go, what we expect of others. There have been a handful of speeches like that. The Cairo speech in 2009, in some ways the Nobel speech he gave, which in some ways was a window into his view of the world that endures well. They break through in a way because they’re bigger than the precise moment we’re in. They’re about laying down markers for what’s going to define the U.S. role in the world for a period of time to come. Ben Rhodes, left with President Obama and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough on Air Force OnePhoto: Pete Souza—The White House/Getty Images Did you revisit the Cairo and Nobel speeches in writing this one? How’d they inform it? I actually find the two things I always try to do before working on a big speech are to go back and read relevant speeches by President Obama and by other presidents. It’s interesting to see how other presidents deal with similar moments in time. How did other Presidents speak at the UN at times of significant international turmoil or the beginning of a military action? For President Obama, I often try to go back and look at the foundational speeches. So, what did we say at the UN in previous years? What’s in Cairo speech, what’s in the Nobel speech, even going back to the campaign. And you try to find a thread you can pull forward and update. Even sometimes there’s specific language that you seek to use again to make sure there’s a thread of consistency to the message. Are there speeches by other presidents you referenced specifically for his latest UN address? I looked at the 1961 speech to the General Assembly by John F. Kennedy, and I actually ended up putting a quote from that speech in this one. There, too, the theme was essentially a world at a crossroads and having to make a choice between different paths. And so that ended up impacting how we framed this speech. We looked at others, too, and it’s interesting to see how different presidents make use of that particular world stage. Looking past the current military campaign, how hopeful are you about a lasting peace, in whatever way you want to define that, presiding in the Middle East in the mid- to long-term? Some people are seeing nothing less than a civilizational collapse that’s not fixable in our lifetimes. The reason I have to optimistic is that it’s the one thing everybody in the region seems to agree on–that this is such a shocking organization that it’s stirred people out of complacency and opened the doors to alliances that weren’t previously possible. We had the Iraqi prime minister in a meeting with the five Arab nations in our coalition, who have Sunni-led governments. That would not have been thinkable even six months ago. If everybody maintains the current sense of urgency, you can see a pathway for this group to be steadily eroded, but also something better taking its place in terms of a new approach to regional stability. And the other thing I’d say is we can fall into a trap of making these groups and threats out to be more resilient than they really are. With Al Qaeda, we’ve shown that if we just keep the pressure on and have a consensus against an organization, the organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan for intents and purposes is at best a shadow of its former self. The challenge is now doing that in the heart of the Middle East with this group and other extremist satellite. But part of the reason the President gave the speech that he gave is to make clear this can’t just be us launching a bunch of airstrikes. This has to be a much broader effort. Most of our readers would agree with the assessment behind the rebalance to Asia, that economically the center of gravity in the world is shifting there. It also seems unavoidable with ISIS, and Israel, and Ukraine, and Ebola, that your focus is directed elsewhere right now. How do you deal with that? You have to be very disciplined to make sure that even as you’re working the urgent issues, you’re not neglecting what I’d say are the opportunity pieces of your agenda. And the rebalance to Asia is certainly part of that. So for instance, when I went up to the UN with the President, even as we had to work on the speech and all the elements of the coalition building, I carved out two hours for a meeting with the presidential advisor from Burma to talk about the President’s upcoming trip there. It would have been easier to just scrap something like that and focus on ISIL. But you have to be disciplined and remember that you have to focus on the opportunities in the world and not just the threats. The fact is in the long run those may end up making a bigger difference, because there you can make progress and you can build new ways of doing things. The key to it is looking at your schedule at the beginning of the week, and saying to yourself, As easy as it would be to only do the Middle East this week, I have to set aside some time for Africa, for Asia, for Latin America—which we generally define as the opportunity regions—and be sure we’re hitting our marks on them. You’re part of the first brother team to make this list. What was your dynamic with [older brother David, president of CBS News] growing up? Did you argue politics over the dinner table? We always got along very well. We definitely had different political perspectives. But in my family we were encouraged to argue about everything over the dinner table. And I think since then, we’ve never been competitive, in part because we’re in different fields. He’s in media, I’m in politics and foreign policy and that makes it easier for us to root for each other without competing in the same territory. Does knowing him make you more or less cynical about media? Seeing his perspective about what people are interested in over the years definitely helped me understand that the media is in a high pressure business of their own and they have to find ways in a crowded information environment to report the news in a way that gets peoples attention. It gives me an understanding of the dynamic on the other end of the phone when I’m talking to a reporter, which I have to do a fair amount of. This story is from the October 27, 2014 issue of Fortune. | high | 1.391304 | As Deputy National Security Adviser, he helps guide the president's words and thinking on foreign policy at a precarious time. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20141111183510id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/08/francis-bedford-royal-tour-middle-east-first-official-photographer | Six Egyptians – possibly attendants of the Victorian photographer Francis Bedford and his companions – are arranged in a receding zigzag across the rough, uneven floor, dwarfed by walls, pillars and doorjambs in an austere, finely detailed 1862 image of the Ptolemaic Temple of Horus. Bedford must have insisted on between 10 and 12 seconds of complete stillness from the human figures in this majestic work, fully consonant with the 19th-century vogue for the timeless, immovable east – except for one deliberate anachronism. Between two of the pillars stands a white canvas hut. Here is Bedford’s portable darkroom, scene of minute struggles with the collodion process for making glass negatives. Thus an art form barely 20 years old breaks the repose of Ozymandias. The photograph is one of around 190 that Bedford took when he accompanied the 20-year-old Prince of Wales, Albert Edward (“Bertie”), on a four-month tour of the Middle East in 1862, and which entered the Royal Collection after his return. They are currently on display at the Queen’s Gallery in London, in a handsome exhibition that does not, however, fully explore all the possibilities of its subject. The Prince of Wales, as we are not told in the Queen’s Gallery, was under a cloud. The previous summer he had been initiated into the pleasures of the flesh by an Irish girl named Nellie, and it was from such beginnings that his scandalised father, Prince Albert, hit on the idea of an improving tour of the Ottoman dominions, focusing on the Holy Lands. But Albert had since died, his decline accelerated by his son’s “fall”, and this made Bertie doubly odious to the grief-stricken Queen, who insisted that the trip go ahead while she plotted to marry him off. The prince, enjoying a gentle degree at Cambridge, and evincing no wanderlust, was powerless to resist. Setting off from Venice in February 1862, the smallish royal party (the principals consisted of Bertie, his governor, General Robert Bruce, and a handful of other, carefully selected, male companions) steamed down the Dalmatian coast and crossed the Mediterranean to Alexandria. From Egypt they went on to explore Palestine and Syria, living in tents and escorted by Ottoman cavalrymen, before sailing back to Europe via Constantinople. The trip took four and a half months, with Bedford as official photographer. His task was to immortalise scenes that were, as the Photographic News put it, “fraught with historic and sacred associations”. Bedford was an experienced architectural and topographical photographer, with royal commissions already behind him, and he fulfilled his brief brilliantly. His harmonious, granular studies of the Egyptian temples and the Roman ruins at Baalbek, in Lebanon, accentuate the neglected, yet romantic, character of these places, with locals used for scale or foreground interest but offering no serious counterweight to the ruins among which they graze their goats or (in the case of Coptic Christians, appropriating part of a Pharoanic complex) come to pray. The biblical sites as depicted by Bedford seem virtually unchanged since the Saviour’s time. His Sea of Galilee, for instance, shimmers softly in a landscape that is empty but for the ruins of Tiberias – where the royal party took Easter communion. And there is little in his image of Jerusalem from Mount of Olives to suggest that these are not the very trees among which Jesus wept the night before his crucifixion. It would have been helpful, in the sumptuously illustrated catalogue by Sophie Gordon, to have learned more about the religious importance of these places, which is so vividly evoked in contemporary pilgrims’ accounts. Among these accounts are the entertaining letters of the liberal churchman Arthur Stanley, who was on the tour as Bertie’s spiritual chaperone. Artists and even photographers had trodden the same paths before (the Englishman Francis Frith as recently as 1860), but each year, as the photo-historian Badr El Hage notes in his useful catalogue essay, brought more pilgrims, scholars and diplomats to a region that had seen few westerners since the Crusades. Passenger steamships (P&O began plying the eastern Mediterranean in 1835), guidebooks and the first Thomas Cook package tour gave notice of a harder, more permanent intrusion, with western museums filling up with Mediterranean fragments, the great powers using their concern for the Holy Places and religious minorities as a pretext for elbowing into Ottoman affairs, and, already, those mellow voids inspiring thoughts of a Jewish state. The Tsar’s brother had made his tearful pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre three years before, the Russian foreign ministry minuting that “Jerusalem is the centre of the world and our mission must be there”. The British and French felt the same. Of the historical aspects of the itinerary, the Prince of Wales was indefatigably ignorant – as we know from Arthur Stanley, who felt affection for his boyish, good-humoured charge, but there was no denying that the young man was less moved by the scene of Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel than the prospect of shooting quail on the same slopes, and if he wasn’t complaining about all the “tumbledown” temples, he spent his time testing his travel companions on the plot of a recent potboiler. Bertie was a keen souvenir hunter, acquiring, among other things, a mummy whose excavation he had witnessed, a papyrus funerary text and a beautiful scarab made of glazed, blue-green soapstone, which he had mounted on tiny gold python heads, as a brooch. (Except for the mummy, which has disappeared, these objects have been included in the exhibition.) For the more thoughtful members of the party, there were considerable advantages to be gained from travelling with the heir to a quarter of the globe, not least permissions to visit the sepulchre of the Patriarchs at Hebron, hitherto inaccessible to Christians, and Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, whose dilapidated dignity (it has since been lavishly restored) Bedford was one of the earliest photographers to record. “The prince entered the mosque,” crowed the Illustrated London News, “standing where no infidel has stood since the Crusades.” In Jerusalem, Bertie was tattooed with the Crusaders’ Jerusalem Cross on his forearm. Along with the great Umayyad Mosque at Damascus, also somewhat shabby through Bedford’s lens, the Dome of the Rock is one of the few subjects that look better now than a century and a half ago. The pyramids have been all but consumed by Cairo’s sprawl, and the then-sleepy Lebanese port of Tripoli, also photographed by Bedford, by Sunni-Shia conflict. Religious bloodshed was indeed a theme of the later stages of the tour, from visits to Crusader castles to the aftermath of a rankling three-way enmity between Christians, Sunnis and Druze. In 1860, Druze bands had laid waste to hundreds of Christian settlements in Lebanon – including the village of Hasbiya, which Bedford photographed. Most affecting, however, are his images of Christian Damascus, annihilated in the same year, with the buildings reduced to carcasses and not a soul in sight. Also in Damascus, Bedford made a rare portrait of an exiled Algerian nationalist leader who had given Christians sanctuary in his home. Nowadays it is tempting to see communal conflict as endemic in the Levant and Mesopotamia, but the pogroms, whose effects the royal party witnessed had been notably rare until the 1840s. Bertie waxed indignant at Ottoman misrule, but Europe’s sponsorship of local clients (for years Britain had supported the Druze, while the French backed the Maronites) had helped upset the old religious balances in the first place, foreshowing the cataclysmic communal violence of the final decades of the Ottoman empire. Even the cheapness of English cloth had sharpened resentments between the various groups, enriching the Christian agents of the Manchester houses and impoverishing Muslim weavers – unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution and globalisation. In June 1862, the tourists went their separate ways – Stanley nursing a mix of pilgrim’s joy and filial sadness, for his mother had died in his absence, and Bruce a violent fever that would quickly kill him. Bedford got to work printing and exhibiting; his technique was commended by the cognoscenti and his images snapped up by the pious. As Gordon’s biographical essay tells us, he went on to become a much-respected (and wealthy) photographer, and left “an extraordinary photographic legacy, much of which remains to be discovered”. Queen Victoria found Bertie “much improved” by his travels, and “ready to do everything as I wish”. Stanley was less sanguine, writing of “the difficulty of producing any impression on a mind with no previous knowledge or interest to be awakened”. For all that, seven years later the prince would be drawn back to the Holy Land, this time in the company of his wife, the former Princess Alexandra of Denmark – and the recipient, as it turned out, of that beautiful, blue-green, python-mounted scarab. • Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1A, until 22 February | high | 1.363636 | When the Prince of Wales was sent away on a trip to the Middle East to prevent him behaving badly, Francis Bedford went with him – the pictures he took captured famous sites unchanged for thousands of years. By Christopher de Bellaigue |
http://web.archive.org/web/20150714133350id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/noble-stock-bounces-like-a-dead-cat.html | However, analysts remain unconvinced that the share purchases will be enough to help the company fight off short-sellers. According to data by Jefferies, the outstanding shares held by short sellers on Noble Group increased from 50 million shares in April to around 400 million now. "[Despite the third buyback,] we continue to see the possibility of a dead cat bounce in Noble's shares. Near-term oscillators continue to point to the bearish side, with the 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) still capped below 50 and the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD) line remaining under the signal and zero line," IG's market strategist Bernard Aw wrote in a note released Tuesday, adding that the 50-day moving average at S$0.828 will act as a "formidable barrier" for the stock. A dead cat bounce is a short-lived rally, often caused by short-covering, in a stock suffering from a prolonged decline. Most importantly, Aw said that weak underlying fundamentals remained the key obstacles for a recovery in the battered stock. "The reality is that Noble is under pressure from several fronts, including a falling profit margin, a slowdown in commodity trading as well as issues relating to corporate governance and transparency. Piecemeal measures such as share buybacks are unlikely to relieve the downward pressure as long as the backdrop does not improve substantially," Aw said. For CMC Markets' Nicholas Teo, the sustainability of the rebound depends on how aggressive Noble Group is with their share purchases. "The rebound is relative on how much more the company wants to buy since they have in their authority to buy up to 673 million shares based on their filing. The shares they have bought thus far, with no pun intended, is only the tip of the iceberg," the Singapore-based analyst told CNBC by phone. Noble Group now holds more than 62 million shares by way of market acquisition. "The aggressive buying has shown a floor in the share price and markets recognize that, regardless of whether the rebound is sustainable or not, so short sellers may not be so keen now. But the rebound above S$0.70 may also allow short sellers to have the opportunity to have another kick in the can," Teo added. Shares of Noble Group have lost about 40 percent since February when anonymous group Iceberg Research released a series of critical reports on the Hong Kong trader's accounting practices. U.S. short seller Muddy Waters dealt another blow to the company in April after saying it had taken a short position on the stock. Last week, S&P downgraded the company's rating outlook to negative from stable, citing that the higher risk nature of Noble's trading positions could result in more volatile earnings and profitability for the company. | medium | 1.375 | A fresh round of stock buyback put some color back into shares of Noble Group, but analysts warn that the upside may be just a "dead cat bounce." |
http://web.archive.org/web/20150816125642id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/fedex-posts-earnings-of-123-a-share-vs-145-a-share-estimate.html | FedEx's numbers are the first real look at the impact the brutal winter had on the shipping industry. Temperatures across a vast area of the United States, from the Great Plains through the Midwest and into the northern Appalachians, ran 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (3.3 to 5.5 degrees Celsius) below normal for 2-1/2 months straight. Companies across the board have been talking about how the weather hurt their quarterly results. McDonald's partly blamed a fall in January sales at its established U.S. restaurants on the frigid cold and snow, while vitamin and nutritional supplements retailer GNC Holdings warned that its first-quarter results would miss expectations for that reason. Ford Motor, railroad operator CSX and air carrier United Continental Holdings have also said the weather was affecting operations in the first quarter. During the third quarter, FedEx entered into an accelerated share repurchase agreement to buy back an aggregate of $2 billion of common stock. The third-quarter results benefited from Cyber Week, a heavy online shopping period that had fallen in the second quarter last year, as well as from one additional operating day, the company said. However, problems stemming from the harsh winter overshadowed those benefits. (Read more: Adobe forecast tops estimates as subscriptions rise) Apart from bad weather, FedEx, like bigger rival United Parcel Service, was also hit by an unprecedented surge in online holiday shipping volumes. Typically, a rise in online sales is good news for companies like these because it means more demand for their services. But this time, UPS said it had been overwhelmed by the volume of holiday packages. The arrival of Christmas presents around the globe was delayed, and angry customers took to social websites to complain. | low | 0.64 | FedEx reported lower-than-expected results for the holiday quarter and gave a fiscal-year profit forecast below Wall Street estimates. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20151009121515id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/25/gold-ticks-up-as-greece-fails-to-clinch-debt-deal.html | "It's just drifting higher," said one U.S. trader, adding that end-of-the-week short-covering combined with a lack of offers as the end of the quarter approaches, helped prices turn slightly higher. Signs of possible agreement soon between Greece and its creditors steadied world stock markets and sent U.S. bond yields to nine-month highs by curbing demand for safe-haven U.S. debt. Expectations that U.S. interest rates will rise for the first time in nearly a decade this year, lifting the U.S. currency and boosting the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding bullion, have pressured gold, keeping it in a range. Gold has held largely between $1,160 and $1,230 since mid-March, struggling to break higher despite an ostensibly bullish rise in tensions over Greece. It has drawn some support from a rise in holdings of gold-backed exchange-traded funds, which issue securities backed by physical metal, this week after outflows earlier this year. Read MoreHere's why gold will rally: RBC's Gero Holdings of the biggest gold ETF, SPDR Gold Shares, rose 6.9 tons on Thursday, their biggest one-day increase since Feb. 2. Silver was down 0.6 percent at $15.77 an ounce, having briefly touched a three-month low of $15.50. Platinum was down 0.5 percent at $1,075.99 an ounce, while palladium was up 0.1 percent at $678.22 an ounce. "The industrial demand is light and there's a lot of recycling," the U.S. trader said, noting chart-based weakness as well. Palladium fell to a two-year low at $666.82 in earlier trade and fell for the seventh straight week. "While short-term moves are driven by many factors and the metal faces a number of challenges, we think the underlying weakness is due to a sharp slowdown in global auto sales growth," Macquarie said in a note. | low | 0.92 | Gold was little changed on Friday, after falling to a three-week low, on caution ahead of crunch talks on Greece. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20151010121311id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/24/traders-say-this-could-be-the-big-short-for-2015.html | While it's clear rate expectations are slightly higher for 2015, with the Fed expected to raise rates, Goncalves said the market could be positioning for other events as well, such as European Central Bank easing. "We've got the ECB meeting Jan. 22. The first week of January we get all of the European inflation data. That's going to really set the tone," he said. The market sees a chance that the ECB could announce a quantitative easing-stylebond buying program, but weak inflation data would reinforce that notion. Read MoreBuying stocks now: The world's easiest trade? Goncalves said a QE announcement could actually drive yields higher, since the expectations for deflation diminish. The 10-year yield rose after Federal Reserve QE announcements, he said. Bond yields move opposite prices. Yields have defied expectations all year, with rates at the long end of the curve near the lower end of the 2014 range in recent sessions. The 10-year Wednesday was at 2.26 percent, just below 2.28 percent, a support level traders have been watching. Read MoreExpect another good year for stocks in 2015: Darst Goncalves said the market has been building in expectations for a Fed hike in short-term rates. The yield curve has been flattening as yields rose at the shorter end of the curve, particularly the 2-year. Hedging for that trade could be part of the increase in shorts, he said. "The bond market is increasingly building in a more aggressive Fed," said Adrian Miller, director of fixed income strategy at GMP Securities. He said the Commodities Futures Trading Commission data on Dec. 16 showed net short positions on 10-year futures totaled 258,000 contracts, the second largest ever behind May, 2010 when there were 275,000. | low | 0.652174 | Some investors this holiday season have been busily building what some say could be the biggest short position ever in Treasury futures. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20151010132133id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/01/with-jobs-scarce-south-korean-students-linger-on-campus.html | "I heard from others that employers do not like graduates. They ask at interviews what you did after graduation," Lee said. Two-thirds of South Koreans aged 25-34 have a college degree, the highest proportion in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a developed nations' club among whom the average is just below 40 percent. Government efforts in recent years to encourage young people to pursue necessarily require a university degree have had limited success in a country obsessed with education. The high rate of graduates means many ambitious young people feel overqualified for the jobs that are available to them, and figure it's better to have no job than one below their expectations. South Korea's labor market is divided between permanent jobs with a high degree of security and temporary positions that end after two years, a split that makes it harder for young people to get on a career track. In 2012, 24 percent of workers in South Korea were temporary, double the OECD average. In November, Finance Minister Choi Kyung-hwan suggested measures to make the labor market more flexible by easing rules on lay-offs and pay. While employers supported the proposals, labor groups and many students did not. Read MoreForget exams, jobs a bigger worry for Korean youth A hand-written letter to Choi by a group calling itself "the Misfits" took issue with his ideas and went viral on social networks after it was posted on walls at Korea University and Yonsei University, two of the country's top colleges. "We are not angry because the regular workers are overly protected. We are angry because temporary workers are not ensured the benefits regular workers receive," it said. Kim Jong-jin, a research fellow at the Korea Labor and Society Institute, said many young people in highly educated South Korea were unwilling to take temporary jobs. "People in their mid-20s are supposed to be active in the labor market, but the market cannot exploit them as they keep on studying and preparing themselves for more stable jobs." | low | 0.821429 | With South Korea's youth unemployment at a 14-year high and hiring sluggish, thousands of students due to graduate are likely to instead stay on campus. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160219130233id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-feast-of-astonishments-charlotte-moorman-and-the-avant-garde-1960s-1980s-review-1454362570 | The cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) was an intrepid performer who was central to avant-garde culture in New York during the 1960s and ’70s—the “Jeanne d’Arc of New Music,” the composer Edgard Varèse dubbed her—even if many weren’t sure how to evaluate her talents. Was she advancing the cause of free expression when she played on stage in the nude or wore a bra of televisions or was attached to a flight of balloons or let herself be covered in 20 pounds of chocolate fudge? Or did some of her antics become an excuse for men to ogle her and for the public to dismiss all unconventional art as a put-on? Was she, as well as being collaborator and muse for Nam June Paik in his revolutionary mixed-media pieces, also his stooge? These questions were debated in New York’s downtown artistic circles (especially by feminists) when she was alive. And they are quietly raised again in the celebratory exhibition and catalog “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s” at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, as well as in Joan Rothfuss ’s entertaining new biography, “Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman.” According to Ms. Rothfuss’s research, Moorman could have enjoyed a normal middle-class American life. Growing up in Little Rock, Ark., an only child who studied music and won the “Miss City Beautiful” contest at age 19, she was not a born rebel. Even after her move in 1957 to New York, where she attended the Juilliard School for a year and married a double-bassist, she envisioned herself playing cello in an orchestra or string ensemble. But performing the classics, Moorman decided, was a bore compared to the offerings in New York’s experimental music and art scene during the ’60s. Her marriage annulled, she took up with a series of male mentors. (She ended up happily paired with the visual artist Frank Pileggi. ) An eccentric who never threw anything away, Moorman has left the show’s six curators—one of whom is Ms. Rothfuss—with almost too much material to sift in presenting her flamboyant life. (Northwestern bought the artist’s archive and has been organizing it since 2001.) In addition to photographs of her in many productions, the exhibition has museum loans of Paik’s video sculptures and a program of films and videos that shows her playing works by Paik (“Sonata for Adults Only”) and others. There are cellos that Moorman fashioned, in neon or from syringes (used for her cancer treatments), as well as the felt-covered instrument that Joseph Beuys made for her to use in one of his works. Annotated scores of music she performed by New York’s avant-garde ( John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Paik) are here, along with her copy of Karlheinz Stockhausen ’s “Originale (Originals),” a piece from 1964 in which she played the part of the “String Player,” wearing only gauze. Moorman was a key figure in helping these composers to introduce unpredictability, spectacle, danger and humor into the rarefied air of the classical music concert. One way to liberate the audience, Paik believed, was to add nudity. In 1967 Moorman performed half-naked in his “Opera Sextronique” at a theater near Times Square. Arrested for indecent exposure, she spent the night in jail. The tabloid reporting on her trial, which resulted in a suspended sentence, defined her ever after in the public’s mind as the “Topless Cellist,” a label she resented when she wasn’t capitalizing on it. Moorman’s packrat habits have proved invaluable in reconstructing a less well-documented phase of her career: her role as an impresario. In 1963 she founded an annual Festival of the Avant Garde in New York. With almost no resources except her own vivaciousness, she produced it for 15 years, moving it around the city into nontraditional arenas for art and music—Grand Central Terminal, Shea Stadium, Floyd Bennett Field, and the World Trade Center. The walls and cases in the exhibition’s second half are papered with her ads and programs for the festivals, supplemented by the photographs of Peter Moore, one of the few who attended all of these ephemeral events. Dozens of composers (Varèse, Cage, Morton Feldman, Luciano Berio ), filmmakers ( Bruce Conner, Jack Smith ), performance artists and dancers ( Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Lucinda Childs ) participated because Moorman cajoled them. She had “a flair for getting EVERYBODY involved, including the more sophisticated who think Charlotte is silly; and she always somehow pulled it off,” wrote the critic Jill Johnston in the Village Voice after one of these festivals. Some feminist artists in the ’60s and ’70s were wary of Moorman. Carolee Schneemann thought her a “narcissist,” and the roster of her festivals was overwhelmingly male. The public was more flummoxed. In a clip here from the Merv Griffin TV show, the studio audience laughs nervously as she holds a string down the back of Jerry Lewis and uses him to perform Paik’s “Human Cello.” A comedian in her own right, whose friendly smile and Southern accent could disarm most hostile crowds, Moorman knew that just because you weren’t afraid to look ridiculous didn’t mean you weren’t serious. Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York. | high | 1 | Cellist Charlotte Moorman’s work divided opinion, but one thing’s for certain: She was deeply serious about her artistic projects. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160602164509id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2015/12/10/ronda-rousey-holly-holm-set-to-fight-again-next-year/21281605/? | Before you go, we thought you'd like these... Ronda Rousey is down, but won't be out for long. According to UFC president Dana White, Rousey and Holly Holm will face off in a rematch some time in 2016 -- possibly as early as July. that her next fight will come against Rousey, whether she likes it or not. Holm became a nationwide celebrity when she took Rousey down via knockout in November, leaving her with several serious facial injuries. White made sure to express that he wasn't concerned with Fresquez's opinion. "Ronda's never lost a fight," White said. "She will overcome it and be back." July 9 is the reported target date for the fight in the new Las Vegas arena. "She got clipped, stayed in there and tried to fight through it. She told me she was in there, she was rocked, and she'd never been rocked like that before. And the things that were going on in her head – what she was doing – she'd never been in that situation." Ronda Rousey, Holly Holm set to fight again next year SAN JOSE, CA - JUNE 5: Ronda Rousey (in blue) competes with Grace Jividen in their 63 kg match during the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Judo on June 5, 2004 at the San Jose State University Event Center in San Jose, California. In winning Rousey made the US Olympic team. (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images) BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND - APRIL 01: Ronda Rousey of the USA happily displays her first World Cup gold medal during the Fighting Films Birmingham Women's World Cup on Saturday, April 01, 2006 at the National Indoor Arena, Birmingham, England, UK. (Photo by David Finch/Getty Images) CHICAGO - APRIL 14: Martial artist Ronda Rousey poses for a portrait during the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Media Summitt at the Palmer House Hilton on April 14, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images) United States Ronda Rousey (blue) and Germany's Annett Boehm compete in their women's -70kg judo bronze medal match of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on August 13, 2008 in Beijing. US Ronda Rousey won the bronze medal. AFP PHOTO / OLIVIER MORIN (Photo credit should read OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/Getty Images) US Ronda Rousey poses with her bronze medal on the podium for the women's -70kg judo competition of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on August 13, 2008 in Beijing. Japan's Masae Ueno won the gold, Cuba's Anaysi Hernandez won the silver, US Ronda Rousey and Netherlands Edith Bosch won the bronze medals. AFP PHOTO / OLIVIER MORIN (Photo credit should read OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/Getty Images) LAS VEGAS, NV - AUGUST 11: Ronda Rousey poses for a portrait on August 11, 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Kari Hubert/Zuffa LLC/Forza LLC via Getty Images) ANAHEIM, CA - NOVEMBER 12: Fighter Ronda Rousey attends the UFC On FOX: Live Heavyweight Championship held at the Honda Center on November 12, 2011 in Anaheim, California. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images) COLUMBUS, OHIO - MARCH 2, 2012: Ronda Rousey weighs in during the Strikeforce Tate v Rousey official weigh in at Columbus Convention Center on March 2, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. (David Dermer/Diamond Images/Getty Images) COLUMBUS, OH - MARCH 03: Ronda Rousey prepares to walk to the cage for her bantamweight championship fight with Miesha Tate during the Strikeforce event at Nationwide Arena on March 3, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Esther Lin/Forza LLC/Forza LLC via Getty Images) COLUMBUS, OH - MARCH 03: Ronda Rousey stands in her corner before facing Miesha Tate during their bantamweight championship fight during the Strikeforce event at Nationwide Arena on March 3, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Esther Lin/Forza LLC/Forza LLC via Getty Images) Ronda Rousey arrives at the 2013 Maxim Hot 100 celebration at Vanguard on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP) Ronda Rousey, left, of Venice, Calif., punches Miesha Tate of Yakima, Wash., during the UFC 168 mixed martial arts women's bantamweight title fight on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2013, in Las Vegas. Rousey won by a third round tap out. (AP Photo/David Becker) FILE - In this Feb. 22, 2014, file photo, Ronda Rousey looks around after defeating Sara McMann in a UFC 170 mixed martial arts women's bantamweight title bout in Las Vegas. Gina Carano was scheduled to meet with UFC President Dana White on Wednesday April 9, to discuss a return to mixed martial arts for a potential bout with bantamweight champion Rousey. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken, File) Ronda Rousey smiles at a weigh-in for the UFC 175 mixed martial arts event at the Mandalay Bay, Friday, July 4, 2014, in Las Vegas. Rousey is scheduled to fight Alexis Davis in a women's bantamweight title fight on Saturday in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher) Ronda Rousey, celebrates after defeating Cat Zingano in a UFC 184 mixed martial arts bantamweight title bout, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015, in Los Angeles. Rousey won after Zingano tapped out 14 seconds into the first round. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) Ronda Rousey arrives at the premiere of "Furious 7" at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on Wednesday, April 1, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP) Mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey removes tape after her workout at Glendale Fighting Club, Wednesday, July 15, 2015, in Glendale, Calif. Rousey, the UFC bantamweight champion, will return to the octagon against Brazilâs unbeaten Bethe Correia at UFC 190 in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 1. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) UFC fighter Ronda Rousey accepts the best female athlete award at the ESPY Awards at the Microsoft Theater on Wednesday, July 15, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP) MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 12: UFC women's bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey of the United States holds an open workout for fans and media at Federation Square on November 12, 2015 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images) Ronda Rousey, left, and Holly Holm fight during their UFC 193 bantamweight title bout in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left, punches Ronda Rousey during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left wrestles Ronda Rousey during thier UFC 193 Bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left, and Ronda Rousey exchange their punches during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm celebrates after defeating Ronda Rousey during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Ronda Rousey is treated by a medical staff member after being knocked out by Holly Holm in their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left, watches Ronda Rousey, right, being tended after knocking her out during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Ronda Rousey is hugged by her coach Edmond Tarverdy after being defeated by Holly Holm after their UFC 193 Bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) | high | 1.16 | After suffering her first loss last month, Ronda Rousey is reportedly ready to get back in the octagon with Holly Holm once again. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160607161122id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/amp/news/louvre-closed-masterpieces-moved-amid-paris-river-seine-flooding/ | Jun 3, 2016 7:26 AM EDT World PARIS -- The swollen Seine River kept rising Friday, spilling out across its banks and onto some streets in Paris as curators at the Louvre closed its doors to the public and scrambled to protect a huge trove of art from the museum's priceless collection from the flooding. The Seine, which officials said was at its highest level in nearly 35 years, was expected to peak sometime later Friday. Nearly a week of heavy rain has led to serious flooding across a swathe of Europe, where 14 people have died and more are missing. Although the rain has tapered off in some areas, floodwaters are still climbing up over scores of river banks. Traffic in the French capital was snarled as flooding choked roads, and several Paris railway stations were shut. While the Louvre's most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," was safe on an upper floor, officials said about 250,000 artworks were located in flood-risk areas, mostly in basement storerooms. The art was hastily being moved upstairs -- a move officials described as precautionary. The Orsay museum, on the left bank of the Seine, was also closed Friday to prepare for possible flooding. A spokeswoman at the Louvre said museum had not taken such precautions in its modern history - since its 1993 renovation at the very least. She spoke on condition of anonymity in line with the museum's policy. At the Louvre, disappointed tourists were being turned away. "I am really sorry, but we're closed today," one staffer told visitors. "We have to evacuate masterpieces from the basement." Elsewhere in Europe, authorities were counting the cost of the floods as they waded through muddy streets and waterlogged homes. German authorities said the body of a 65-year-old man was found overnight in the town of Simbach am Inn, bringing the country's death toll to 10. France's Interior Ministry also reported the death of a 74-year-old man who fell from his horse and drowned in a river in the Seine-et-Marne region east of Paris, the second death in France. In eastern Romania, two people died and 200 people were evacuated from their homes as floods swept the area, including one man who was ripped from his bicycle by a torrent of water in the eastern village of Ruginesti. Several other people in Europe were missing Friday, including a Belgian beekeeper who was swept away by the current while trying to save his hives from rising waters in the eastern village of Harsin. The foul weather has compounded the travel disruptions in France, which is already dealing with the fallout from weeks of strikes and other industrial actions by workers upset over the government's proposed labor reforms. French rail company SNCF said the strikes had led to the cancellation of some 40 percent of the country's high-speed trains. In addition, French energy company Enedis says that more than 20,000 customers are without power to the east and south of Paris. Outside the Louvre, tourists expressed understanding over the museum's closure. "It's good that they are evacuating the paintings. It's a shame that we couldn't see them today, but it's right that they do these things," said Carlos Santiago, who was visiting from Mexico. | medium | 0.8 | Workers scramble to move priceless artwork to upper floors as Seine River overflows banks, keeps rising; more than dozen dead in European floods |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160611160752id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2015/01/29/1040-1040a-1040ez-which-form/21134017/? | Choosing which 1040 tax form you need to file your return on can be a lot harder to figure out than you'd think, but answering just a few basic questions will lead you to the right version. First of all, if you use tax software to prepare your return, then it will generally take the decision of which tax form to file out of your hands. Instead, the software will evaluate the answers you provide to its list of questions and then select the most appropriate form for your needs. For those who prepare their own returns, though, the basic Internal Revenue Service rule is that the best form to file is the simplest one that addresses all of your needs. The 1040EZ is the easiest form to fill out, with the 1040A being more complicated but still less difficult than the full 1040 form. Form 1040EZ is designed for the simplest returns. In order to use it, you have to meet several requirements. First of all, Form 1040EZ is only available for filing status of single or married filing jointly, and those who have dependents to claim can't use the form. Taxpayers have to be under age 65 and ineligible for higher standard deductions for the blind. In addition, there are income-related restrictions. You can't have more than $100,000 in taxable income, and in general, it can only come from wages, salaries, tips, unemployment compensation and taxable scholarship and fellowship grants. Some taxable interest is allowed, but only if it's less than $1,500 for the year. Alaska residents are also allowed to use 1040EZ even if they receive Permanent Fund dividends from the state. Finally, the only credit you can claim on the 1040EZ is the Earned Income Credit, and you can't itemize deductions or make any other adjustments to income. Those who received advance payments of premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act aren't eligible to file Form 1040EZ. Those who hire household employees like babysitters or nannies for whom they have to pay employment taxes also can't file 1040EZ, as well as those who are debtors in bankruptcy filings after Oct. 16, 2005. Form 1040A has some of the same restrictions as 1040EZ. Income has to be less than $100,000, and you still can't itemize deductions. But it's more flexible in other areas. For instance, heads of household, qualifying widows and widowers, and married people filing separately can use Form 1040A. Form 1040A allows you to include more types of income. In addition to those allowed on 1040EZ, you can have ordinary dividends, capital gains distributions from mutual funds, pension and annuity income, IRA distributions, and taxable Social Security benefits and still file a 1040A. You can also claim deductions for IRA contributions, student loan interest, tuition and fee payments, and expenses that educators pay for supplies for their own classrooms. You can also claim more credits on a 1040A. Those seeking credits for child and dependent care expenses, education expenses, and retirement savings contributions can use the form, as can those claiming credits for the elderly or disabled. Both the child tax credit and the additional child tax credit are available to 1040A filers. Lastly, you can handle a limited number of special situations on 1040A. Those receiving dependent care benefits from work can use the form, as can those who have to pay taxes due to having past educational credits recaptured. Even some people who owe alternative minimum taxes can use Form 1040A. If you don't qualify for 1040EZ or 1040A treatment, then your only choice is the long Form 1040. Most notably, that includes taxpayers who want to itemize deductions. For those who want it, the IRS has developed a tool to help you figure out which form is the simplest available for your needs. You can access it at , and it will take information from the tax forms you've received from your employer, financial institutions, and other sources to make a recommendation. Filing your taxes can seem complicated. But by starting with the right form, you'll be able to keep things as simple as possible and avoid biting off more than you need to chew at tax time. | medium | 1 | Make sure you choose the federal tax form that best reflects your income, credits, deductions and breaks: 1040, 1040A or 1040EZ. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160621031235id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/uknews/law-and-order/12182229/Golfer-sues-Haverhill-Golf-Club-after-winning-car-and-real-prize-is-actually-worth-half-money.html | He refused to accept the car - or £7,000 in cash - and took the club to Cambridge County Court, but lost his case in January due to what he claims was a "legal loophole". Mr Warner received £7,500 in an out-of-court settlement, but was ordered to pay his and the club's legal costs, amounting to £10,000 - leaving him £3,500 out of pocket. The sales manager has now left the £750-a-year club and claims that up to 12 friends and family have also done so in protest over his treatment. He said: "It has all been a bit of a nightmare. I got lucky and hit a hole in one, it's the first one I'd ever hit and I couldn't believe it when it landed on the green. "I was elated to win the car, but it turned out to something altogether different to what they advertised. They put a high spec car on the tee which was worth £14,000 new but when I went to collect my prize the offered me a £6,500 1.0 basic model. "It didn't have alloy wheels, air conditioning and was the most basic model. I was really disappointed. I was elated on the day and then I was devastated when I found out I wasn't going to have the car they'd advertised." Mr Warner with the brand new five door 1.6TDi Vauxhall Corsa Mr Warner said the debt forced him to remortgage his house to pay for his wedding to 25-year-old fiancée Kirsty Dolby. He said: "I had to borrow some money to get ourselves out of debt. We had to take £10,000 out of the mortgage to pay for it. It was a worrying time and at one point it looked like we wouldn't be able to pay for our wedding. "Thankfully it never came to that, but we had to waste a lot of the money we'd saved to pay for the wedding on legal bills." Before the court case, Mr Warner tried to compromise with the club and asked for £8,000 plus a few years free membership with the club. But they rejected that and said it was only insured to offer a car up to the value of £8,000. As no settlement between the two could be reached, it went to court and Mr Warner was told by a solicitor he had a "very good case". However, he said he lost the court battle because he had not seen the car before the tournament. He added: "Our argument was that the car was on the tee, written the way that it was. There's no real hiding from that. We were forced to go to court. I was told I could not have had that car purely and simply because I didn't see it before I started the round." Mr Warner lost his case on January 14 at Cambridge County Court. Immediately after the hearing, the club and its insurance company offered him a pre-registered Vauxhall Viva non air-conditioned car worth £8,300. He rejected the car, but agreed in an out-of-court settlement to accept £7,500, which he used to pay his legal fees. This meant he had to find another £3,500 to cover all his legal costs. Mr Warner was ordered to pay costs amounting to ?10,000 Haverhill Golf Club issued a statement which said they behaved entirely properly throughout and that Mr Warner's claim was bound to fail. It read: "The club never disputed that Jake Warner had won a car and made a very generous offer to settle the matter which Jake chose to reject. "The club behaved entirely properly throughout and were fully vindicated by the court's decision to throw out the claim. The club very much regrets that Jake chose to pursue a claim that had no merit and was bound to fail." After losing the battle, Mr Warner has been left driving a 10-year-old Ford Focus Zetec worth £1,500. • Tiger Woods is beaten at golf by an 11-year-old | medium | 0.758621 | Man poses for photo with what he thought was his prize before arriving to collect his car and discovering model on offer was actually worth £7,000 less |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160808090031id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/culture/books/bookreviews/11166607/jerry-lee-lewis-his-own-story-by-rick-bragg.html | There are two great themes running through this book. One is Jerry Lee’s love-hate relationship with Elvis; the other is his struggle with the Devil. Lewis arrived at Sun determined to topple Elvis from his throne as the king of rock ’n’ roll – and for a brief while he did. Shortly before departing for army service in Germany, Lewis claims, a tearful Presley bequeathed him his crown, saying, “You got it. Take it. Take the whole damn thing.” While Elvis meekly allowed himself to be tamed and neutered by the egregious Colonel Tom Parker, Lewis – whom nobody ever described as “meek” – remained the authentic article. In 1977, the day after Elvis died, Lewis was asked by a reporter what he felt on hearing the news. He replied: “Glad. Just another one out of the way. I mean, Elvis this, Elvis that. All we hear is Elvis. What the s--- did Elvis ever do except take dope I couldn’t get a hold of?” He now explains that he was drunk, “and hurting and angry”. The truth is “I loved Elvis”. But not so much as to hand him back the crown. Pondering how they rank in the pantheon of music, Lewis remains unbowed: “After me was Elvis.” Lewis’s upbringing was Pentecostal Christian – of the vengeful Jehovah rather than the gentle Jesus school. The fear of divine retribution did not, as Bragg delicately puts it, mean that he would grow up to adhere to the teachings, “just that he knew in his heart when he did wrong”. Which was frequently. The question that seems to have most tormented him, however, was whether you could play rock ’n’ roll and still go to heaven. When a troubled Lewis asked Elvis, who had come from an identical background, the question, Elvis's face, he claims, “turned blood red” and he snapped back: “Don’t you never ask me that again.” It behoves any writer contemplating the state of Lewis’s soul to write in cadences pitched somewhere between southern-fried folk wisdom and the Book of Revelation – and Bragg rises manfully to the challenge. “The demons even outran the music, and he found he could not run fast enough to beat them and still hold the road,” he writes. Even allowing for the fact that an authorised biography will err towards generosity, this book is hardly a character reference. Lewis emerges as cantankerous, boastful, threatening, possibly sociopathic. But Bragg remains ever-understanding. One can well recognise, as Bragg puts it, that “as a southern man”, Lewis required guns “in the same way other men require a pocket watch and suspenders”; and shooting his bass player might well have been an accident. But still, one can’t help thinking there was something decidedly careless in his handling of firearms. Having passed the time one night by shooting at random into a wall of his office, he awoke, hung-over, the next day to discover that the bullets had destroyed a display case of antique dentures in the dental practice next door. “He was relieved to find they were not actually in someone’s mouth.” His greatest violence, however, was reserved for himself. Much of this book has all the appalling, rubbernecking fascination of a car crash – something with which Lewis, a man who “had never seen anything wrong with going out and driving off a good drunk”, was all too familiar. His drug consumption reads like a pharmaceutical manual: biphetamines, Placidyls, Desbutal. The litany of tragedy is similarly stupefying. One son died in a swimming pool. So did his fourth wife. Another son died in a road accident. By way of consolation, the women (countless) “were always sympathetic with me”. At the age of 47, he married a 25-year-old, Shawn Stephens, who two months later was found dead in her bed. An autopsy revealed the painkiller methadone in her system at 10 times the normal dose. A grand jury reviewed the case but could find no grounds for indictment. In 1984, doctors cut away a third of Lewis’s stomach after he was diagnosed with perforated ulcers. In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, looking “like a man who had walked through a fire and been put out just in time”. Miraculously, in 2008, he returned to the Top 30 with an album featuring guest artists including Keith Richards, B B King and Bruce Springsteen. At the age of 79, having finally kicked his addiction to pills and whatever else, “The Killer” now passes much of his time in repose, lying in bed at his ranch, with his guns on the dressing table and an ill-tempered chihuahua named Topaz Junior on the quilt between his feet. Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story by Rick Bragg 512pp, Canongate, Telegraph offer price: £17 (PLUS £1.95 p&p) (RRP £20, ebook £8.54) . Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk | medium | 1.2 | Jerry Lee Lewis, the piano-pounding father of rock ’n’ roll, struggled with two great rivals throughout his life, says Mick Brown. One was Elvis. The other was the Devil |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160903171840id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/02/11/09/not-guilty-pleas-in-coorong-attack-case | A 60-year-old man will go to trial over an alleged sex attack on two backpackers at a remote beach southeast of Adelaide. The man, whose identity is concealed by suppression orders, pleaded not guilty in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Friday to seven offences including attempted murder and indecent assault. The charges, which include allegations he used a hammer, relate to an attack on two women at Salt Creek, in the Coorong National Park, in February. The man appeared by video link and was remanded in custody to appear in the Supreme Court on September 26. He is also charged with detaining a person, causing harm with intent, assault and endangering life, including an allegation he drove at or over one of the backpackers in his car. In a previous appearance the court was told extensive material had been recovered from a mobile phone and two laptop computers seized from a man. Prosecutor Sarah Attar described the material extracted as "voluminous" and indicated it would be handed over to defence counsel. At that stage the only outstanding material was a medical report from a doctor at the Flinders Medical Centre. With the man's committal for trial, statutory suppression orders on his identity lapsed. But Ms Attar successfully applied for his identity to remain concealed in the "interests of the proper administration of justice". Magistrate Brett Dixon suppressed the man's name and image and anything else that might identify him. But he lifted a suppression order on the details of the car the man was driving at the time of the alleged attack, a four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was previously revealed the man met his alleged victims over the internet after the two women used a popular website to seek a ride from Adelaide to Melbourne. | low | 1.56 | A man has entered not guilty pleas to all offences related to the alleged attack on two backpackers southeast of Adelaide earlier this year. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20161019174844id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/trevor-bauer-trolls-blue-jays-fans-bloody-cleat | Trevor Bauer had his baseball horror story Monday night. After needing ten stitches to repair a cut on his pinky suffered while repairing a drone, Bauer's ALCS start was pushed from Game 2 to Game 3. Before taking the mound in Toronto, Bauer insisted he was ready to go. He wasn't. He needed to be taken out after two-thirds of an inning when his cut reopened and bled all over the field. Drone 1 Trevor Bauer 0 #ALCS https://t.co/voD3yjPqSB — ThePostGame.com (@ThePostGame) October 18, 2016 Bauer received a standing ovation from the Rogers Centre crowd, as Blue Jays fans thought they had the game in the books. Down 0-2 in the series, Toronto had Marcus Stroman on the hill with its monster lineup hitting against the Indians' bullpen for eight-plus innings. But Cleveland persevered. The Indians tagged Stroman for four runs to win 4-2 and go up 3-0 in the series. Cleveland last won a pennant in 1997, but the franchise has not won a World Series since 1948. After getting pulled from the game, Bauer turned into one of the Indians' loudest cheerleaders. He then joked on Twitter. 1) what a W!! 2) my cleats got a bit dirty. 3) loudest standing ovation I've gotten walking off the mound. ... pic.twitter.com/1VUozRBSaG — Trevor Bauer (@BauerOutage) October 18, 2016 Someone please crying Jordan the vine of the blood dripping from my finger — Trevor Bauer (@BauerOutage) October 18, 2016 — Jose Ramirez (@MrLapara) October 18, 2016 — José Rivera (@whoisjoserivera) October 18, 2016 Bauer engaged with a handful of fans on Twitter late Monday night and Tuesday morning. Right now, the thinks he is on track for a return in the World Series. @TripleH2413 2/5. I'm not out. I'll be fine — Trevor Bauer (@BauerOutage) October 18, 2016 Kids, if there is any takeaway from this, it's that you need to be careful when fixing your drone during the MLB Postseason. Oh, also, obviously people made Curt Schilling-bloody sock references. Schilling wasn't about it. Please don't tweet at me about Bauer.He cost himself a start, likely more, AND his teammates, and fans, dicking around with a drone. #stupid — Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) October 18, 2016 The Indians will attempt to close out the Blue Jays Tuesday night in Toronto. -- Follow Jeffrey Eisenband on Twitter @JeffEisenband. Baseball, Bloody Hand, Cleveland Indians, Curt Schilling, cut, Drone, Marcus stroman, MLB, MLB Postseason, Toronto Blue Jays, Trevor Bauer | medium | 1.538462 | Trevor Bauer left the ALCS with a cut finger from a drone, but he still trolled the Blue Jays with a bloody cleat tweet. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20161027133037id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/26/03/33/subdued-price-pressures-likely-to-continue | Economists doubt there will be an interest rate cut when the Reserve Bank board meets on Melbourne Cup Day after new inflation figures showed slightly higher price pressures than expected. This was the result of a sharp jump in fruit and vegetable prices, followed by rising electricity costs during the September quarter. The consumer price index rose 0.7 per cent in the quarter, almost double the growth of the previous three months, but still left the annual rate at a meagre 1.3 per cent. The annual rate, and the more interest-rate-sensitive underlying measures of inflation, remain comfortably below the central bank's two to three per cent target band, suggesting the cash rate won't be rising anytime soon. Financial markets wound back any thought of a cut in the cash rate when the central bank board meets on Tuesday, following the data. "The risk of a surprise Melbourne Cup day rate cut looks to have passed," Macquarie Research economist James McIntyre said. The Reserve Bank had cut the cash rate in May and August after the previous quarterly inflation readings, and the rate now stands at a record low 1.5 per cent. Fruit prices soared 19.5 per cent in the quarter, followed by vegetables up 5.9 per cent and electricity increasing by 5.4 per cent. South Australia saw the largest proportional increase in electricity prices, a major concern for business, SA senator Nick Xenophon says. "Energy costs ... are worth a lot more than any tax cut that is being offered by the federal government," Senator Xenophon told reporters in Canberra. He said Treasury's own modelling shows the company cuts will have a minuscule impact in terms of economic growth. Treasurer Scott Morrison was in SA on Wednesday for a business roundtable. He took the opportunity to gee-up Senator Xenophon and his team to support the government's 10-year business tax plan and back improvements to the budget. "When the Labor Party is going to vote against improving the budget ... (the Xenophon team) sit in the box seat here and they can't squib it," Mr Morrison told 5AA Adelaide radio. Senator Xenophon said "megaphone negotiations" are not the best way of doing things. "I'm happy to do that - the next time I'm here I'll bring my megaphone," Senator Xenophon said. He described it as a "very big Rubic's cube" because the government also wants to have $6 billion of welfare cuts and says the impact of those could be quite severe among the disadvantaged. If successful, the company tax rate will be cut to 25 per cent from 30 per cent for all businesses by 2026/27. In the interim, it would be lowered to 27.5 per cent for business earning under $10 million now, for those with a $25 million turnover in 2017/18 and then to $$50 million in 2018/19. The Xenophon team supports only the initial tranche of tax cuts, while Labor wants a cut limited to companies with an annual turnover of up to $2 million. | medium | 1.346154 | Economists expect official inflation figures will show continued subdued price pressures, but probably not benign enough for the RBA to cut the cash rate. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20161229164919id_/http://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/oil-falls-oversupply-still-weighs-market-n620696 | U.S. crude prices on Monday broke below $40 a barrel for the first time since April, weighed by a survey showing output in OPEC reached record highs last month amid the biggest addition of U.S. oil rigs in two years. Production in July by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries likely rose to its highest in recent history, a Reuters survey found on Friday, as Iraq pumped more and Nigeria squeezed out additional crude exports despite militant attacks on oil installations. A gas station attendant pumps fuel into a customer's car at PetroChina's petrol station in Beijing, China, March 21, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon Top OPEC exporter Saudi Arabia also kept output close to a record high, the survey found, as it met seasonally higher domestic demand and focused on maintaining market share instead of trimming supply to boost prices. U.S. oil drillers, meanwhile, added 44 rigs in July, the most in a month since April 2014, data from oil services company Baker Hughes showed. "Sentiment remains quite negative following the price slump recently. It is negative because rebalancing takes longer than some market participants thought before," said Eugen Weinberg at Commerzbank. On Monday, Iraqi oil officials said oil exports from Iraq's southern ports rose to 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) on average in July, up from 3.175 million bpd in June, as the OPEC nation increased crude production. Also on Monday, Iran's oil minister said the oil market was oversupplied but said balance between demand and supply will be restored, Iranian state television reported. "Prices remain under pressure but we think they are likely to find a floor at around $40 and increase to $50 by the year end," Weinberg said. French bank Societe Generale said that the global oil market has shifted from massive oversupply to broadly balanced in the second half of this year and first half of next year. Analysts at the bank expect crude prices to bottom out in the high $30s and should not return to lows of $26-27 seen in the first quarter of this year. Earlier on Monday, Barclays said Brent crude has averaged $46.50 in the third quarter so far and could fall further from current price levels. The global glut of oil still weighs on the market and even though summer is a good time to make supply adjustments, it is already halfway over, the bank said in a research note. "Demand growth remains lackluster and has not made significant inroads to clear the inventory overhang for oil," Barclays said. "With the macroeconomic picture worsening and Saudi Arabia unlikely to exhibit much restraint as Iran seeks incremental market share, refineries are going to find themselves in the line of fire," Barclays added. | medium | 1.185185 | Oil fell on Monday morning, reversing earlier gains, as increases in OPEC production and U.S. oil rig additions continued to weigh on the market. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20140917004027id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/boxing/story/juan-manuel-lopez-looking-to-cement-legacy-in-showdown-with-jesus-cuellar-091114 | Updated SEP 11, 2014 1:56p ET When it comes to legacy, Juan Manuel Lopez is slightly uncomfortable with where he stands. Lopez was a decorated amateur boxer, who went to the 2004 Summer Olympics for Puerto Rico. He's a former two-division champion as a professional. But all anyone wants to talk about with "JuanMa" is how entertaining he is in the ring. One of his bouts hasn't gone to a decision since 2009 -- a pretty ridiculous feat considering the competition level he has faced. In all, Lopez, 31, has only gone the distance three times in his nine-year pro career. Of his 34 wins, 31 have come by way of knockout. But Lopez is concerned that's all he'll be remembered for. "When I retire, I want people to talk about how good I was, not just how exciting I was," Lopez told FOX Sports. It's for that reason you might see a more conservative "JuanMa" against Jesus Cuellar on Thursday night at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas (FOX Sports 1, 9:30 p.m. ET) -- at least as conservative as Lopez can possibly get. He is coming off a loss to Fernando Vargas in July and admitted to contemplating retirement. When this co-main event fight came up, though, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. "This is very, very important," Lopez (34-4) said. "Probably the most important of my career. I can't afford a loss. This fight here gets me into the bigger fights down the road." Cuellar (24-1) will come in as the favorite. He's the reigning interim WBA featherweight champion and, at 27, four years younger. In the narrative, he's the young, hungry lion trying to make his name off the more well-known boxer. It's combat sports booking 101. "I know that this is going to be a hard fight," said Cuellar, an Argentinean. "I've been training hard for it in an intense camp and I'm here to do my job and take the victory home." Lopez has other plans. He knows with the way the sport works, he can notch just one or two wins and get right back into more marquee fights. "Boxing is like that," Lopez said. "The landscape is always changing. It's constantly changing in boxing. I know a victory here is a step in the right direction. A huge fight." "JuanMa," though, admitted to thinking about retirement after the loss to Vargas. He has been through an incredible amount of wars. But he said he's reinvigorated by the prospect of fighting Cuellar. Lopez's body feels good and he's excited about the possibility of getting back on track. "JuanMa" might be known for his unabashedly crowd-pleasing style, but that's secondary Thursday night. His career -- his legacy -- comes first. "Forget about looking good," he said. "I need to win." | medium | 1.833333 | Juan Manuel Lopez is known for his flash. But in Thursday's showdown with Jesus Cuellar, he's out to prove he's pretty darn good too. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20140917063947id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/nov/17/art | For its annual art exhibition, Discerning Eye chose six selectors: two artists, Anita Taylor and sculptor Peter Randall-Page; two critics, Mark Lawson and Norbert Lynton; and two collectors, Alan Grieve, who runs the Jerwood Foundation, and me. I am an enthusiastic private collector, mainly of mid-20th-century British art; it has been one of the great joys of the past 10 years for me. But in the end, Discerning Eye needed a bit of crumpet, however old, and I suspect more people will come to see my facelift than anything else. In past years the panel has included Brian Sewell, Lord Palumbo, Lord Gowrie and the Prince of Wales. We six selectors met on a cold, wet day last September. We were positioned behind two trestle tables in a grim basement and asked what tickled our fancies. The works, a staggering 2,400 of them, were presented to us by half a dozen quite dazzling young men, all artists themselves. The bonus of male beauty apart, much of the art was a joy and quite often two or three of us would be trying to bag the same picture. Mark mainly wanted what I wanted. It was quite comforting to find Peter Randall-Page and Norbert Lynton wanted the same as me. And I almost never wanted anything that Mark wanted. When Mark absented himself for a couple of hours to do an interview, I helpfully chose a photograph of a fish on a women's backside on his behalf. Sadly, he was having none of it when he returned. So the lady and the trout do not appear in his list. The exhibition opens tomorrow at the Mall Galleries in London (020-7930 6844), and of the 500 works of art on display, my collection is the largest. I've made a selection of 90, mostly by young artists. I've got a couple of installation pieces that are fantastically eclectic, by really interesting young graduates. One of my favourites is a portrait of James Lloyd by Brendan Kelly. And I've discovered Matthew Webber, who is wonderful. Two things struck me: first, what a vast amount of unsung talent there is out there; and second, to this trader's daughter, how sweetly uncommercial the youngsters were. "Call it Notting Hill," I urged one of the young artists with an untitled work, "it will walk out the door in seconds." I want to insist that anyone going to art college must attend a three-month marketing course, preferably taught by me. It is all about getting your work known, circulated and hung. | medium | 1.083333 | Art: Anne Robinson discovers unsung talent for the annual Discerning Eye exhibition - and is surprised at how uncommercial young artists are. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20150506212215id_/http://www.people.com/article/davion-only-adopted-by-case-worker-connie-going | Davion Only and his new adoptive brother, Taylor Going throughout his life, but now the 17-year-old doesn't just have a permanent home with his new mother and former case worker, Connie Going, he has three siblings to go along with it. Davion sits on a comfortable leather couch in the living room of his St. Petersburg, Florida, home, and looks over at one of those siblings, 15-year-old Taylor. "I'm pretty lucky. How often does your best friend become your brother?" he tells PEOPLE. "We have been through a lot together." It's what they have been through that makes this ordinary day a special one. Davion made national headlines in 2013 when, at 15-years-old, he made a for someone to adopt him. "My name is Davion and I've been in foster care since I was born," he told the congregation. "I know God hasn't given up on me. So I'm not giving up either." Ten thousand families came forward asking to adopt him, and he flew to Ohio and lived with a minister, but just months later, was back in the Florida system after getting into a physical fight with the man and another child. He then called Going and asked her how she felt about adopting him. "I grew up spending time with Connie," he says. "I always cared about her a lot. She was this stable person in my life." The same went for Going, 52, who officially adopted Davion on April 22. Going already had two biological daughters of her own – Carley, 17, and Sydney, 21 – when she adopted another son, Taylor, a couple years ago. He had also spent his life in and out of foster care homes. In December 2012, Taylor saw a picture of Davion on a table in their house. "He told me that was his best friend," Going says. "I said, 'We all love Davion.' " From that day on, Davion was able to leave his group home and spend weekends with Going and her children. "It was crazy that we were able to do things like water activities," Taylor says. "It wasn't always like that. We were so used to seeing barbed wire in the distance, and now we have green grass in our backyard and a swimming pool." When they were 9-years-old, Taylor and Davion lived in the same group home. The two boys formed a friendship and always had each other's back. "I liked him a lot. We were partners. You go through stuff together as a team," Davion says. "You don't forget these kids. They're in your memories for the rest of your life." Davion and Taylor couldn't be happier that they don't have to just live in each other's memories anymore – they get to see each other every day. "I think it was a blessing Taylor was adopted by Connie and that he was able to recognize the picture of me," Davion says. "I think that was God's work." From left: Carley Going, Connie Going, Davion Only and Taylor Going In addition to a new brother, Davion has found a sister in Carley, who couldn't be happier about her growing family. "My mom always talked about him, and after a while, it just felt right for him to be with us permanently," she says. "Davion is special." Davion admits he used to sleep on the top bunk and close to the wall at the group home so he could avoid conflict and trouble. "Those days are in the past," he says. "I have my mom, my siblings, my dogs, my video games. I'm good." | medium | 1.869565 | "Everyone always gave up on me, but now I know I'm here to stay," Davion Only tells PEOPLE |
http://web.archive.org/web/20150820031244id_/http://fortune.com/2013/03/21/can-time-inc-make-it-alone/ | When Time Warner announced in early March its plan to spin off the Time Inc. magazine unit by the end of 2013, financial analysts and the business press expressed broad agreement on the prospects for the two future entities. For the new Time Warner, the prevailing view was highly positive: The split is the next logical step in solidifying a pure-play television and motion picture colossus after the spinoffs of AOL and Time Warner Cable four years ago, and with CEO Jeff Bewkes shedding the drag of magazines and sharpening his focus on a stable of growing businesses, his record of enriching shareholders seems bound to keep rolling. For a newly independent Time Inc., the 91-year-old publisher of Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and dozens of other titles, including Fortune, the general opinion was downbeat: Unlike Time Warner, which grew operating earnings in its nonpublishing businesses by 4.7% last year, the magazine business needs radical change. Put simply, revenues and profits for Time Inc. and the magazine industry as a whole are shrinking. It’s unclear what strategy will reverse that decline. But industry experts and analysts agree that it might require daring bets — new digital platforms, alliances with tech-savvy partners, and even shrewd acquisitions. “Magazines could have a strong digital model, better than most media companies,” says Neil Begley, a fixed-income analyst at Moody’s Investors Service. “But for magazines to have a fighting chance, they will need financial flexibility, meaning the freedom to invest heavily to revive their businesses.” To get a dispassionate view of our parent company’s prospects as a spinoff, we talked to Begley and other analysts, along with portfolio managers and investment bankers, for their views on how Time Warner should proceed. By and large, they endorsed Begley’s view that Time Inc. would perform best with low leverage and the ability to be financially agile. It is certainly in the interest of Time Warner for the new Time Inc. to find favor with investors. The parent company’s shareholders will receive stock in the new company — shares representing roughly 5%, or 1/20, of the value of a Time Warner share. Since Time Warner spun off AOL and Time Warner Cable in 2009, the stocks of those two companies have easily outperformed the broader market. And shares of Time Warner itself have nearly doubled. For Time Inc., however, the path to revival could be blocked even before the spinoff happens. The crucial issue, analysts agree, is the amount of debt that Time Warner will place on Time Inc. If the magazine company is saddled with excessive leverage, it will lack what it needs to grow again: ample cash for big investments. It’s tough to be innovative when your main concern is paying down debt. Diverting too much cash flow to debt payment could also stifle Time Inc.’s ability to pay a dividend. Another factor is that Time Inc. must replace outgoing CEO Laura Lang. Attracting a star to the job will be a lot easier if the company isn’t overleveraged. So how much debt is the new Time Inc. likely to carry? The most common measure for leverage is the ratio of debt to Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — essentially the cache of profits available for making interest payments. Time Inc.’s Ebitda has been falling sharply since 2007. According to projections by Morgan Stanley, its Ebitda will reach $524 million by 2014, its first year as an independent company. That’s a 15% drop from 2012. Time Warner hasn’t given a specific number yet for what the debt load will be. Nor has it said whether it will pitch Time Inc. as a stock that pays a dividend at the outset. (Analysts believe that asking the fledgling company to pay a dividend and service debt could stunt its prospects.) On Wall Street predictions range widely, from $500 million to $2 billion. But an individual familiar with Time Warner’s thinking told Fortune that the company “plans to put on a level of leverage consistent with the ratios followed at Time Warner.” Time Warner has a current debt-to-Ebitda ratio of 2.6, close to its stated goal of 2.5. Let’s assume that Bewkes plans to base the spinoff company’s ratio on Time Inc.’s 2013 Ebitda of close to $600 million. In that scenario Time Inc.’s debt would approach $1.5 billion. The 2.5-times-Ebitda number may be right for Time Warner, but Begley and others think the ratio is excessive for Time Inc., which does not boast the same credit quality or diversified revenue sources as its parent. Consider that entertainment and publishing conglomerate News Corp. plans to shed its publishing assets this year — as the new News Corp. — with no debt. Here’s how piling on excessive debt could choke off the new Time Inc.’s investment capital. Afoccording to Begley, Time Inc. cannot afford to let its interest costs absorb a bigger and bigger share of its cash flow. To reassure investors, it should hold constant the cents in interest that it pays on each dollar of Ebitda. Ebitda has been shrinking at over 7% a year for five years, and most analysts expect the trend to continue. So Time Inc., from 2014 to 2018, would need to pay down an average of $95 million in principal on its $1.5 billion in borrowings to hold its interest payments constant at 19¢, or 19% of Ebitda. The crucial number is what’s left over after Time Inc. pays its taxes and interest. That’s the free cash that it can lavish on digital publishing technology or acquisitions. From 2014 to 2019 it would be forced to spend over a third of its cash flow on debt repayments, lowering the amount available for investments to around $180 million a year. But a bigger number would generate higher earnings and also make the company far safer in the eyes of lenders and shareholders. So let’s consider a second scenario: Time Warner structures the independent Time Inc. with a relatively light debt-to-Ebitda ratio of 1 to 1. That’s the amount of leverage that Begley recommends. Based on its 2013 Ebitda, Time Inc. would then carry about $600 million in debt. To be prudent, it would still pay down principal each year to keep debt service at a constant portion of its Ebitda. But since both its interest and principal payments would be lower, Time Inc. would generate more cash each year. Layer on a second set of assumptions: Let’s forecast that Time Inc. spins off with a 1-to-1 ratio and invests aggressively, and that those investments are successful. As a result, cash flows keep dropping in 2014 and 2015, then embark on modest growth of 3% a year through 2019. From then on, they simply rise with inflation at around 2%. In this projection, the cash flow available for investment would average about $320 million, almost 80% higher than under the $1.5 billion debt load scenario. The rising cash flows would create a virtuous cycle of ever lower debt and stable earnings. That kind of turnaround will prove a tough challenge. But if Time Inc. can generate any kind of growth — and again, low leverage is key — its stock could actually be quite attractive to investors. Most analysts predict that after the spinoff Time Inc. will have an enterprise value — debt plus equity, minus cash — of around $4 billion. If that proves true and that the company takes on the more manageable $600 million debt load, Time Inc. will have an equity value of $3.8 billion. If Time Inc. can indeed restore growth by 2016, it could potentially boast a market cap of $6.3 billion by the end of 2019 — meaning annual returns of 9% for five years starting in 2014. That would be more than enough to turn a struggling magazine company into an unexpected Wall Street success story. This story is from the April 08, 2013 issue of Fortune. | high | 1.409091 | The spinoff of Time Warner's magazine business has a chance to succeed -- if it's not overloaded with debt. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20150925032028id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/27/david-armstrong-photographer-outsiders-fashion/amp | David Armstrong, who has died at age 60 from liver cancer, never achieved the kind of recognition afforded his best friend, Nan Goldin, but his influence was acknowledged of late by a younger generation of photographers, including Ryan McGinley. “He has a specific style and owns it,” McGinley told the New York Times in 2011, when Armstrong’s book, 615 Jefferson Avenue, was published. “It’s almost like Vermeer, using only sunlight to illuminate uni-directionally. His photographs are about desire and despair. These are qualities he looks for in the boys’ eyes.” The boys in question were the male models that Armstrong had been photographing between 2001 and 2011, making the beautiful young men seem both timeless and out-of-time in his curiously classical and unapologetically romantic portraits. Armstrong had come to fashion photography relatively late, having been commissioned by the young designer Hedi Slimane to shoot backstage at a Dior catwalk show in 2001. Suddenly, in middle age, he was hip again and also ubiquitous, shooting editorials for the likes Vogue Homme and Purple magazine. It was an unexpected – and, one could say, unrepresentative – coda to a remarkable life lived, in the main, on the margins amid fellow freaks and outsiders. Born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1954, Armstrong befriended Nan Goldin when he was 14. He later said: “All the cool kids who met in the morning to eat hash brownies talked about this legend, Nan Goldin, who got kicked out of school the year before.” He was the first person she photographed and they remained close throughout their teenage years and into their early twenties, both attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he studied painting before switching to photography. Alongside the likes of Jack Pierson, Philip-Lorca di Corcia and Mark Morrisroe, they became part of “the Boston School”, unified by their shared approach to the making of arrestingly intimate images of their often dissolute everyday lives. In Boston, and later in New York’s Lower East Side, they both shot the same subjects – the drag queens and druggies that they hung out with. “We both delved in different ways with things available to us and didn’t consider going outside our worlds,” he told the New York Times. Like Goldin, Armstrong also became enmeshed in the hard drug culture he portrayed. His first boyfriend died of Aids in 1983 and, the following year, he went home to Boston to come off heroin. He stayed clean for 17 years, but began using again in 2002 describing himself wryly as “functioning enough”. In 1994, Armstrong collaborated with Goldin on a photobook called A Double Life, which showed in their dramatically contrasting styles just how much their lives had intertwined. Armstrong’s formally austere style and monochrome tones make his images seem, if anything more haunting than Goldin’s. “I used to think Nan and I were complete opposites and it was all about the complement,” he noted at the time. “But it’s different from that. At the same time we’re identical - like our pictures. At first they seem to come from different planets but finally they arrive at the same place.” In 2012, Morel Books published Night and Day, a selection of Kodachromes from Armstrong’s extensive New York archive from the late 1970s and early 1980s. A tale of drug-taking, partying and comedowns from an already long-lost time, it includes portraits of artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Di Corcia alongside shots of beautiful young people at play in the early hours. “He was such a cool cat – cultured in that old-school way,” says Aron Morel, who got to know him over the past few years. “He reminded me a bit of Boris Mikhailov: two guys that worked because they loved it. Artists without the art market. The first time I met him, he sent me back to London with over 300 ‘chromes’ of the Night and Day series. Just like that – with complete trust. He was such a poetic guy. He had recently moved to a house in upstate New York and he said he was going to live his last days like Mrs Haversham in her mansion.” Sadly, that was not to be. | medium | 1.666667 | The photographer, who has died aged 60, had a dramatically contrasting style to his great friend Nan Goldin, but their subjects were intertwined, writes Sean O’Hagan |
http://web.archive.org/web/20151003003645id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/21/the-perch-of-materiality-in-misappropriation-cases.html | For those of you just joining us at home, the other day shares of a company with the ticker symbol NEST soared 1,900 percent after Google announced the acquisition of Nest Labs. This was incredibly stupid because Nest Labs has nothing at all to do with NEST. It seems like a case of mistaken identity. So the question Levine raised is whether trading in shares of NEST would be insider trading if you had advanced knowledge of the Google deal? Does the law prohibit you from using non-public information about a deal to profit off of people stupidly buying a different stock altogether? In my earlier piece, I argued that insider trading law does say you can't do this. If you got the information because you were, say, a guy making deal toys for the people involved, you aren't allowed to take the information that you were entrusted with and that belongs to others, in this case Google and Nest, and use it to trade for yourself. And if you got the information from your buddy who was involved in the deal somehow, then you inherit his breach of fiduciary duty and so you're in trouble. Not so fast, says Levine. To give rise to insider trading liability, information must not only be non-public. It must also be "material." And, to make a long Levine post short, since Nest Labs has no relationship to NEST, information about Nest Labs cannot be material to NEST. That seems rather straight forward and smart. But it's wrong. Here's how the judge instructed the jury in the recent case against Mark Cuban: "Materiality depends on the significance the reasonable investor would place on the withheld or misrepresented information. Materiality is not judged in the abstract, but in light of the surrounding circumstances. Information is material if there is a substantial likelihood that, under all the circumstances, the information would have assumed actual significance in the deliberations of the reasonable shareholder." So here's something both the federal courts and the SEC consider to be an important factor when considering materiality: The effect on the stock's price. As the Third Circuit put it in Oran v. Stafford, "when a stock is traded in an efficient market, the materiality of disclosed information may be measured post hoc by looking to the movement, in the period immediately following disclosure, of the price of the firm's stock." The price of NEST shares rose 1,900 percent when the deal was disclosed. That pretty much screams materiality. Levine says that the information isn't material because the connection just isn't "reasonable." Or, rather, that no reasonable investor in NEST would care about the acquisition of Nest Labs. Sure the stock price moved, but that was unreasonable. And stupid. So it's not material. The problem with this line of argument is that in Levine's scenario, the investor with inside information buys shares of NEST as part of a scheme to trade from a mistake he anticipates occurring when the deal is announced. And then that mistake happened. That may be stupid but it's not unreasonable Let's put it this way. Would knowledge of the Google deal have played a part in the decision of owners of NEST to sell their shares the day before the deal was announced? It may not have been decisive but surely it would have played some part. I mean, you own shares of worthless stock that could have value tomorrow based on investor error. Why not hold it an extra day? More importantly, I think Levine is wrong about the touch point of materiality. He assume that the information needs to be material about the company in which the shares actually were traded. That's incorrect, in my opinion. Keep in mind that in a misappropriation case, the duty breached that gives rise to illegality is not owed to the person on the other side of the trade. It's owed to the person who is the source of the information. The line of materiality should also connect not to the investors in NEST but back to the investors in the source of the information, Google. And for Google investors, the multi-billion acquisition almost certainly was material. Misappropriation is about using the information that belongs to others for your own benefit, in breach of a duty of loyalty and confidentiality toward them. When judging materiality, it only makes sense that the correct place to look is to the owners of the information. | medium | 1.269231 | Another foray into the great debate about hypothetical insider trading in a penny-stock that soared when Google announced it was buying Nest Labs. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160227105719id_/http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2006/09/20084915589199285.html | Joseph Kabila's Alliance of the Presidential Majority bloc has emerged as the biggest single political force in the country, capturing more than 200 of the 500 seats in the new National Assembly in elections held on July 30. An alliance of parties led by Kabila's arch rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba, the Rally of Congolese Nationalists (RCN), took second place with around 100 seats. The remaining seats were shared among independents and smaller political groupings, including the Coalition of Congolese Democrats (CCD) led by Pierre Pay Pay, who served as governor of the country's central bank when DRC was ruled by Sese Seko Mobutu. The results were compiled from provisional figures that were released by the Independent Electoral Commission on Friday, and mirror those of the country's first-round presidential election, in which Kabila won the most votes with Jean-Pierre Bemba, the vice president, in second place. Jean-Pierre Bemba, Kabila's rival,took second place with 100 seatsThe results complete a three-year period of political transition that followed the vast central African country's five-year civil war from 1998 to 2003, which drew in six foreign armies and claimed more than three million lives. Jean-Pierre Bemba, Kabila's rival,took second place with 100 seats Jan Egeland, UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said this week that he remained "very concerned" by the situation in DRC, parts of which were still violent. The situation in the capital, where the UN and EU peacekeepers are patrolling the streets, remained calm after the final results were announced. Deputies are due to take up their seats in parliament in 15 days. Kabila and Bemba are to face each other in a second round run-off that is scheduled to take place on October 29.  The elections are to be followed by local polls, and are intended ultimately to lead to the re-building of the war-ravaged central African country. | low | 0.833333 | A bloc led by the country's president has won the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) first free multi-party legislative elections in over 40 years, but failed to secure an absolute majority. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160427013157id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-masterclass-in-unpredictable-decor-1461699143 | OUR DESIGN ASSESSMENT: This vignette—part of a larger study in a contemporary Houston home—is all about deadpan juxtapositions. Starkness collides with splendor, masculinity with femininity, 90-degree angles with coy curves. Houston designer Richard Holley made such unexpected choices: The looming, brooding 2005 canvas (by painter Nancy Nye ) should be bullying the slight, impish Regency settee, but the two bring out the best in each other. In case you don’t get the joke, the concrete floor, as blank and brusque as the painting, also highlights the cheeky ornateness of the settee, ottoman and pillow. (Plopping the furniture on an equally florid rug would be far less modern.) Our favorite bit of visual wit: How the splaying lines of the camera’s tripod echo the pillow’s sunburst pattern. Only criticism? The seating looks rather uncomfortable. THE DESIGNER’S RESPONSE: “This is a disorienting conversation to have,” said Mr. Holley. “You’ve put in words things I just did intuitively.” A blockier sofa might have matched the décor’s squared-off elements, he said on reflection, but “this project was all about a client who is eccentric and unpredictable. She’s an artist and a beekeeper and a Buddhist. I wanted to amuse her eye.” He deliberately skipped a rug—“it would have confused the simplicity”—but didn’t consciously orchestrate the tripod-sunburst echoes. As for the comfort factor, “The room also contains an overscale chaise and an overstuffed chair,” he said in his defense. This arrangement, designed to lure the eye down a hallway and into the room, “is more decorative than functional.” | low | 1.25 | A Masterclass in Unpredictable DécorWe pit our aesthetic assessment of a study in a Houston home—full of opposites that attract—against the intent of the designer, Richard Holley |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160604030152id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/blindspot/episode-guide/season-blindspot-season-1/a-stray-howl/102 | With Jane (Jaimie Alexander) in a state of near-constant panic over her identity, Dr. Borden (Ukweli Roach) administers a Rorschach test. But all Jane's got is the memory of weapons training in the woods with the ruggedly handsome man. Meanwhile, Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) has breakfast with his sister Sarah and her son Sawyer, who have moved in while looking for an apartment. Sarah mentions their father called to ask if they're attending Taylor's yearly memorial? Weller is definitely not interested. At work, he tells Patterson (Ashley Johnson) that he noticed a scar on the back of Jane's neck. Then he runs Jane through more weapons training, hoping to trigger another memory. One thing's for sure: Jane knows her guns, and she now remembers shooting a nun in the back of the head. Stunned, she refrains from telling Weller, just as word arrives that Chao is dead of a massive stroke. Surveillance footage shows a man walking away from Chao's room as everyone else rushes toward it... Suddenly, Patterson announces that she's decoded a Vigenère cipher on Jane's neck: Maj. Arthur Gibson - a Silver Star-awarded pilot, who once injured, left a desk job in Nevada to work for the Air Force in New York. Convinced Gibson may know something about her, Jane insists on accompanying the team to his home in Brooklyn. Refusing to talk, Gibson orders the team off his property. As they head back to their SUV, Gibson's house explodes. The only thing that survives the explosion is a wall safe - no sign of Gibson. The team questions Air Force Colonel Margaret Powers, who explains that after experiencing collateral damage on a mission, Gibson's increasing paranoia and PTSD earned him a desk job and, ultimately, a discharge. But after reviewing Gibson's files, Patterson finds that not only did the Air Force not fire Gibson, they promoted him - and gave him top security clearance. Weller figures the Air Force made Gibson a drone pilot, which means there must be a drone program in New York. Meanwhile, Gibson kidnaps Emily, the six-year-old daughter of his co-worker Alex, in order to force his assistance in launching an armed drone. Moments later, the drone drops a missile on Colonel Powers as she's getting into her SUV. Frustrated, Reade (Rob Brown) wonders whether Jane and her tattoos are to blame. Weller insists it's not Jane's fault; they need to focus on finding Gibson. Furious, Mayfair (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) calls General Fitzmorris, who admits Gibson worked for a secret domestic drone surveillance program, and the drone he now controls is armed with two more missiles. Distraught over the general's disregard for Emily's welfare, Weller blows up, so Mayfair orders him to stand down. While Reade speculates that whoever tattooed Jane knew about the drone program, Jane flashes back to shooting the nun. Maybe her tattoos are some kind of penance? Mayfair pulls Weller aside, to chastise him for yelling at Fitzmorris. Weller admits he's been thinking about Taylor, who went missing 25 years ago when he was 10. In his last memory of her, Taylor fell while climbing a tree, leaving a scar on the back of her neck - the same scar as Jane's. Weller knows why his name is on Jane's back: Jane Doe is Taylor Shaw. Paterson cracks Gibson's safe, finding an air-gapped laptop with a list of five seemingly unrelated domestic accidents - yet the victims of each incident were all from the Middle East. Gibson's initials are associated with three, the initials I.M. with the other two. Patterson thinks I.M. is Major Ivon Musgrave, so the team scrambles to his Brooklyn apartment. When Musgrave runs, Jane gives chase. An intense fight ensues, until Weller intervenes, hauling Musgrave onto the street. Musgrave demands to talk to Colonel Powers, just as Jane spies the man from her memory. That's when the second missile hits, blowing the team back into the apartment building. Jane rushes to help an injured Reade, then stumbles back to the street, but the man from her flashback is gone. Back at HQ, Musgrave explains that Gibson wanted to expose the drone program, which was rife with collateral damage. When he asked for help, Musgrave turned him in, then helped the Air Force destroy Gibson's life. Since Gibson has one missile left and is dead set on destroying the program, Weller asks Fitzmorris where the drone pilots work from... and it's the top three floors of the building they're in. Twice a day, every pilot is in the building for a shift change, which is in one hour. As the building evacuation begins, Patterson narrows Gibson's location to one of two construction sites in Brooklyn. On the way, Jane tells Weller that she did remember something... what if she's a terrible person? Insisting Jane has a good heart, Weller leaves her in the car, then runs to check the roof. After a firefight, Gibson takes the elevator down as Weller tries and fails to warn Jane. Gibson open fires on the SUV, then drives off, so Jane decides to follow, forcing a crash and rolling her own car, which brings on another flashback. The nun is actually a soldier in disguise. After the shooting, Jane pulls a coded USB fob from around his neck. After pulling a woozy Jane out of the SUV, Weller extracts Emily's location from Gibson and returns the little girl to her father. Back at HQ, the team argues about the day's events. The Air Force has already come up with a cover story for the press, and Reade isn't convinced Jane's tattoo saved thousands of lives. Mayfair pulls Weller aside to advise that Patterson is running DNA tests to confirm whether Jane truly is Taylor. But Weller doesn't need test results - even if he's not ready to tell Jane. That night, he runs his theory by his sister. Stunned, Sarah reviews how this could change all their lives: their father was accused of kidnapping and killing Taylor, causing their mother to leave. Weller has spent the last 25 years believing his father murdered Taylor... and now their father is dying of pancreatic cancer. Soon. Across town, Jane is surveying the dismal contents of her safe house refrigerator when someone grabs her from behind... the ruggedly handsome man. | high | 1.428571 | While a tattoo sends the team after a drone pilot gone crazy, Weller seeks to confirm that Jane Doe is a missing person from his childhood. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160610204110id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/06/02/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-foreign-policy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region%C2%AEion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 | Mrs. Clinton will deliver the address on her final campaign swing before California holds its Democratic primary on Tuesday, when she is widely expected to reach the threshold of delegates needed to secure her party’s nomination. But in choosing to raise concerns about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy stances, she will be speaking to swing voters in general election battleground states who have doubts about a Trump presidency. While Mrs. Clinton must be cautious not to alienate liberal Democrats who oppose some of her hawkish foreign policy stances, her campaign says national security could be the catalyst that drives independents and wavering Republicans to support her this fall. Roughly 21 percent of independent voters and 32 percent of Republican voters said the most important issue this election was terrorism and national security, compared with 16 percent of Democrats, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted last month. At the same time, 61 percent of registered voters said a Trump presidency would make America’s image in the world worse, according to the latest New York Times-CBS News poll. “There are many Republicans concerned about this,” R. Nicholas Burns, an American ambassador to NATO during the George W. Bush administration who also served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, said of Mr. Trump. “They find his policy positions beyond the pale, and they’re also turned off by his vulgarity.” To that end, the Clinton campaign and its outside advisers have embarked on an effort to reach out to prominent moderate Republicans who could endorse Mrs. Clinton, largely making the case for foreign policy sure-footedness. Those calls have included to an aide of the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and to Nicholas F. Brady, who served as secretary of the Treasury under Mr. Reagan and the elder Mr. Bush, with plans to reach out to James A. Baker III, a White House chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and secretary of state under President George Bush. In her debates with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton has defended her foreign policy decisions, including urging the Obama administration to join a NATO-led coalition to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, which she later said was a mistake. Donald J. Trump told a crowd in Sacramento that NATO states and other allies should be paying the United States compensation for all the U.S. has done for them. In an interview Wednesday night, Mr. Trump criticized Mrs. Clinton’s early support for the Iraq war, which he said he opposed, and questioned her judgment in Libya. “Bernie Sanders said it and I’m going to use it all over the place because it’s true,” Mr. Trump said. “She is a woman who is ill-suited to be president because she has bad judgment.” As each candidate argues the other is unfit to occupy the Oval Office, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers are preparing to make a case against Mr. Trump that will be jarringly different from the sparring of past presidential campaigns over foreign policy. “It’s not like the campaign against McCain or Romney, which was two competing visions,” said Derek Chollet, a former White House and Pentagon official under President Obama. Instead, he said, Mrs. Clinton will remind voters that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean government of Kim Jong-un have expressed support for Mr. Trump, who has suggested a willingness to talk directly with Mr. Kim, a pariah worldwide. Mrs. Clinton will also accuse Mr. Trump of bluster and oratory that is in direct opposition to the bipartisan pillars of American diplomacy that every president has adhered to since World War II. Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., pointed to Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the United States rethink its involvement in NATO, the Brussels-based coalition of European nations. Mrs. Clinton, she added, needed to explain to voters that “every single president over the last couple decades has understood the value of alliances” and that “playing by the rules makes sense for all of us.” Mr. Trump said Mrs. Clinton was “fraudulent” in her misrepresentation of his foreign policy positions, explaining that he supported global alliances, but believed that the United States should shoulder less of the financial burden. “Our country can’t afford to protect the world anymore, and at least not get reimbursed for it,” he said. Mrs. Clinton has delivered a series of foreign policy speeches over the course of the nominating fight that included calling for accelerating the American-led operation to defeat the Islamic State, ending the economic embargo against Cuba, and pledging unwavering support of Israel. And she had already begun to lay the groundwork against what she called Mr. Trump’s “reckless actions” on foreign policy. The San Diego speech, to be delivered in a city known for its military presence at a time when Mr. Trump is facing scrutiny over his donations to veterans’ groups, will present a more sweeping — and fearsome — portrayal of Mr. Trump, one that the Clinton campaign will deliver like a drumbeat to voters in the coming months. “There’s not a lot of room left in terms of new proposals,” Mr. Sullivan said. “This is a speech about a vision and principle and purpose, not individual policy proposals.” The prospect of a foreign policy debate not centered on policy differences has confounded Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, who in a more traditional election would be facing questions about Mrs. Clinton’s call for a no-fly zone with coalition forces to protect Syrians or how she would handle the flood of migrants to Europe. But Mr. Trump, in addressing foreign policy, has largely relied on gut instinct and appealing to voters’ emotional concerns that America has lost its standing in the world. “You do get the sense that he’s in a dialogue with a part of the electorate — and I consider it a minority — that couldn’t be less interested in facts or realities,” said Daniel Benjamin, coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department under Mrs. Clinton. “That’s a really challenging task that most of us were unprepared for in many ways.” | high | 1.2 | A speech will cast her likely Republican rival as a threat to bipartisan tenets of American diplomacy and declare him unfit for the presidency. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160701024815id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/news/2016-race-donald-trump-ted-cruz-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-tax-plans-impact/ | Before making your final presidential candidate pick, be aware that it can have a direct impact on your wallet. In the International Business Times, personal finance editor Lauren Lyons Cole explains how the tax plans of leading presidential candidates could have a "lasting impact on the American economy as well as your future paycheck," based on research from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Perhaps the most surprising finding from Cole's research was that Donald Trump would put the most money back into your paycheck. The GOP front-runner proposes tax cuts across all income levels, and slashing taxes for those making up to $50,000. "With Trump, of course, it's going to benefit the wealthy the most, so as you go up, your paycheck will increase drastically, which would benefit him as well," Cole explained on "CBS This Morning" Friday. But this comes at a cost -- a $9.5 trillion federal deficit over the next decade, which would require drastic reductions in federal spending to help pay for the tax breaks. Republican rival Ted Cruz's tax plan would also result in an enormous federal deficit: an estimated $8.6 trillion over the next decade. Cruz's plan is the "most creative," Cole said, and would reform the current 750,000-page tax code for a flat tax rate of 10 percent across all incomes. Cruz's plan would also benefit the wealthy most, even more so than Trump's, Cole said. As for the middle class, paychecks may increase by about 50 dollars, according to the International Business Times analysis. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders would also raise the federal deficit with his tax plan, which Cole said was "more extreme" than Trump's. The senator vows to raise taxes regardless of your income, with the highest earners paying over 40 percent, for a "trade off" for funding free government programs, including college and health care. "Unless you need health care, then Bernie Sanders is not going to do a lot for you," Cole said. But if you want to keep things as they are, Cole said Clinton is your choice. Most Americans can expect the same taxes, and only those making over one million dollars would face an increase. For those making $5 million and over, Clinton plans to add a four percent surtax. "Hillary Clinton is very status quo. Her plan is very similar to what we have with President Obama," Cole said. © 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. | medium | 1.782609 | International Business Times' Lauren Lyons Cole shows how each candidate's tax plan could have lasting impacts on your paycheck and taxes |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160717153549id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/07/17/02/59/police-arrest-3-in-nice-is-claims-attack | The man behind the Bastille Day truck attack that killed at least 84 people in Nice had recently been radicalised, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says. Thursday night's attack in the Riviera city of Nice plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism. Authorities are yet to produce evidence 31-year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any links to Islamic State, which claimed the attack, but Valls said there was no doubt on the assailant's motives. "The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly," Valls said in an interview with Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. "The claim on Saturday morning by Islamic State and the fast radicalisation of the killer confirms the Islamist nature of this attack." Officials said on Saturday that people questioned by police had indicated that he had undergone a rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion. Relatives and friends interviewed in Nice painted a picture of a man who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and according to French media even ate pork, behaviour that would be unlikely in a devout Muslim. Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel's sister told Reuters he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005 and had sought medical treatment. As authorities were trying to better understand his motives, two more people, a man and a woman close to Bouhlel, were arrested in Nice early on Sunday, bringing the number of people in detention over the killings to seven. The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said that Bouhlel "was one of the soldiers of Islamic State". Valls, who said security services had prevented 16 attacks over three years, indicated that at play on Thursday was the group's modus operandi of cajoling unstable individuals into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible. "Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts ... this is probably what happened in Nice's case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. The group, which is under military pressure from forces opposed to it, considers France its main target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States, which is leading a coalition against it. Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and far right over how President Francois Hollande's Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no risk zero and new attacks would occur. "I've always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It's difficult to say, but other lives will be lost." With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, French opposition politicians are increasing pressure and seizing on what they described as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2km through large crowds before it was finally halted. After Thursday's attack, a state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris was extended by three months. | medium | 1.724138 | The family of the man who killed 84 people in Nice doubt his Islamic State links, but French authorities say he may have been radicalised very quickly. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160722193239id_/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/mar/30/constructive-criticism-women-in-architecture?CMP=twt_gu | It's been a good week for women in architecture in general, except for one female architect in particular. In the first instance, the Architect's Journal announced the finalists for its inaugural Women in Architecture awards. The magazine's recent championing of female architects, and highlighting of inequalities within the profession, is commendable. Among its findings was that the proportion of female architectural staff in the UK has actually declined since 2009, from 28% to 21% – this despite the proportion of female architecture students being roughly 50%. That work-life balance is evidently hard to strike in a profession many say is still inherently masculine, with its long apprenticeship, long working hours, and emphasis on competition rather than collaboration. No wonder they've called it the WAA – it sounds like a cry of despair, doesn't it? The shortlists aren't too depressing, though. Eight women are up for the award, including Amanda Levete (formerly of Future Systems, doing well on her own), Roisin Heneghan (of Heneghan Peng, designers of the new London Olympics footbridge) and Sarah Wigglesworth (whose fine Sandal Magna primary school gained her a lot of attention last year). There's also an award for emerging woman architect of the year. The prizes are announced on 20 April. There's a nice (if confusingly Anglo-American) infographic on women in architecture here, by the way. The woman for whom it has not been such a great week is the first female architect most people would name: Zaha Hadid. She's up for the WAA as well, but first she lost out on the competition to design the prestigious new Bauhaus Museum in Weimer, Germany, for which she was the only British architect in contention. Her absence was conspicuous, too, when it came to another architecture award: the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) announced the 23-strong shortlist for its inaugural national awards this week, and Zaha's Glasgow Riverside Museum for Transport isn't on it, despite being surely the highest-profile new building in Scotland of the past year. It wasn't a unanimously popular project, but its omission has baffled even its critics. Was it because Zaha has won the Stirling prize for two years running? Has she just become too big? Hadid can at least take consolation from her inclusion in the V&A's new exhibition on British design, which opens today. The exhibition's architecture component includes a model of her Aquatics Centre, the only female-designed building in the show, as far as I could see. There are plenty of the usual architectural suspects here: the postwar Festival of Britain generation; Basil Spence; Denys Lasdun; big models of Foster's Gherkin and Rogers's Lloyds building. One discovery for me was John Prizeman, about whom I'd known very little. He was an accomplished writer, and his work mainly focused on domestic interiors, particularly kitchens. There are illustrations of two small designs by him that caught my eye. One was his "Soft-Tech House for the 1980s" – an evocative, late-70s vision of "the future" that looks like a cross between Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House and a sort of Hobbit-style eco-dwelling. It's somehow simultaneously quaint and ahead of its time. The other, particularly pertinent in the context of women in architecture, is a cutaway illustration of a neat, compact family home Prizeman designed in 1959. It's bracingly modern, with fitted kitchens, free-flowing living areas and a new Mini in the garage, though its name wasn't exactly progressive: it's called Her House. It says it all that the woman in Prizeman's dream home is depicted bustling around indoors; the man is lounging on the back terrace. Finally, another new discovery this week was Architects of Invention, a practice that not only has one of the best names in the business but looks to be living up to it. It is headed by Niko Japaridze, a former senior architect at Rem Koolhaas's OMA, who has worked in the UK and also has offices in his native Georgia. Last year, the firm wove a snaking wooden staircase through the new headquarters it designed for Georgia's National Olympic Committee, and has recently finished an imposing new building in Tbilisi with an imposing name: The Prosecutor's Office. It looks like a giant black filing cabinet, with square, glass rooms projecting out like half-opened drawers. Seventy per cent of the building is hung off the ground. The interior is just as startling – its long central staircase with green glass walls looks like something out of The Matrix. Japaridze has a host of other promising-looking buildings going up in Georgia. He also claims to be Tbilisi's one millionth citizen. One to watch. • This article was amended on 4 April 2012. The original misspelled the names of Roisin Heneghan and Heneghan Peng architects as Roisin Peneghan of Peneghan Heng. This has been corrected. | high | 1.807692 | It was a good week for women architects – except for the most famous one – while the British design exhibition reveals a couple of gems |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160723065050id_/http://time.com:80/money/3419105/kids-marketing-adults-disney-vitamins-cereal/? | It’s hard to remember a time when video games and comic books were enjoyed almost exclusively by people under the age of 18. But that was the case a mere couple of decades ago, before both began featuring violence, profanity, sex, and other material not appropriate for young children. Along the same lines, in recent times many other things long associated with kids are now being marketed to adult consumers. Here are a dozen examples: Gummy Vitamins. A string of studies indicating that vitamins appear to be largely a waste of money has resulted in flat sales for the once sizzling vitamin market. It looks like consumers are getting the messages spread by researchers in the field, who point out that while vitamin supplements are correlated with better health, there is little proof of causality because the people taking vitamins tend to healthier and take better care of themselves in the first place. But if consumers are dubious about the benefits of boring old-fashioned vitamins, they appear less skeptical about vitamins “disguised as candy,” a.k.a. gummy vitamins. Once popular only with children, colorful, chewable, sweet-tasting vitamins are now ubiquitous in stores’ adult vitamin sections, and makers of such adult vitamins say that the category has been enjoying “explosive growth” of late. Walt Disney World. In some ways, Disney World has always been marketed to adults—who often say they enjoy “feeling like a kid” while touring the theme parks sans children. Some even wish Disney would host child-free days when adults could hit the rides without having to deal with the young whippersnappers clogging up the parks. While that’s highly unlikely to ever take place, Disney has taken several steps over the years to appeal to adult-only clientele, including the introduction of booze for sale at the Magic Kingdom, as well as special events like $35 “After Hours” party with alcohol and tasting menus, and, most recently, a $79 “Food & Wine Late Night” at EPCOT. Pop Tarts. While interest in breakfast cereal has collapsed in recent years, sales of another kid favorite at the breakfast table, Pop Tarts, have risen each and every year for more than three decades straight. The Wall Street Journal noted that while Pop Tarts are most popular with teens and younger children, “adults reach for them as a retro snack.” It’s not just nostalgia that’s drawing adults to Pop Tarts, but that, “Shoppers increasingly want quick breakfasts they can eat with one hand on the go.” Over the years, Pop Tarts and its imitators have periodically tried out products more directly marketed to adults and foodies, such as “Toaster Pastries” in flavors like Cherry Pomegranate from Nature’s Path. Happy Meals. McDonald’s briefly tried to market a “Go Active Happy Meal” for adults a decade ago, with a salad and an exercise booklet instead of chicken nuggets and a plastic toy. It obviously didn’t catch on—very few healthy fast food items are successful—but this fall, the Happy Meal for Adults concept is back, bizarrely, in the world of high fashion. Nordstrom is selling a series of pop culture-themed items from Moschino, including an iPhone case that looks like a McDonald’s French fry container ($85) and a Happy Meal lookalike shoulder bag that retails for over $1,000. Backpacks. In what could be considered a sign that adults really don’t want to grow up, backpack sales are up dramatically among consumers ages 18 and up—including a 48% rise in backpack purchases by female adults over a recent time span. Valentino, Alexander McQueen, and Fendi are among the many fashion designers to feature posh leather and camouflage versions of the bag normally associated with high school and college kids, only theirs sometimes cost $2,000. Lunchables. OK, so neither Kraft nor its Oscar Mayer brand actually markets Lunchables to adults. But the Adult Lunch Combos look eerily like Lunchables only without Oreos or Capri Sun, and everyone is referring to the new protein-packed prepared lunches as “Lunchables for Adults” even though the real name is the Portable Protein Pack. Obstacle Courses. Kids have playgrounds in town parks and schools. What do adults have to help keep them in shape while also having fun? The gym doesn’t qualify because, for most people, working out is work, not fun. The exception is when the workout allows adults to swing, jump, get dirty, and challenge themselves on courses made specifically for them, like those on the popular TV show “American Ninja Warrior” and on Tough Mudder and other extreme obstacle course races. This fall, Las Vegas is even hosting an “Adult-Themed” course where the obstacles have names like the Dominatrix Dungeon and the Blue Balls Dash. Sugary Cereals. A big reason that cereal sales have dropped is that fewer kids are eating them for breakfast. Yet as parents try to sub in healthier fare as a replacement for kid-favorite sugary cereals, the cereal giants appear to be having some success reaching a different audience—the parents themselves. Baby Boomers and Gen X, who grew up craving the sugar rush provided by a bowl of neon-colored goodies on Saturday mornings, are now being fed heaping doses of nostalgia, in the form of cartoon-character cereals brought back from the dead and other adult-focused marketing efforts. The fastest-growing consumers of Trix and Lucky Charms are, in fact, older adults. Legos. “The Lego Movie” was certainly clever and entertaining enough to warrant an adult audience, especially among those who grew up building with the bricks. Lately, Lego has been making another appeal to adults. Several Legoland Discovery Centers—which normally attract families with children under the age of 10 or 12—have been offering special Adult Nights, where all visitors must be 18 or over. Fruit Roll-Ups. Many adults would probably be embarrassed if they were caught eating Fruit Roll-Ups, delicious though they may be. How can you avoid being kidded about your preference for what is a quintessential kid snack? Easy. Call them something more adult-sounding, such as Fruit Strips or Fruit Leather. Hot Pockets. Last year, Nestle attempted to broaden the Hot Pocket demographic—typically, teen boys and slacker college kids who don’t want to cook or even order pizza—by introducing gourmet versions featuring angus beef, hickory ham to appeal to adult foodies. Halloween. October 31 used to be about children trick-or-treating door to door in their neighborhoods. Now it’s the centerpiece of a whole Halloween season where the kids are invited to enjoy only some—but by no means all—of the fun. A year ago, adults spent roughly $1.2 billion on costumes, compared to $1 billion spent on costumes for kids. Roughly 7 out of 10 college-aged adults plan on dressing up for Halloween, which explains the sales success of oddly “sexy” costumes of pizza slices or corn fields. Or sexy nuns. Adults also tend to spend more on their costumes than they do on Halloween outfits for kids. So that explains why companies are marketing the holiday to adults more and more. Still, it’s hard to come up with a good explanation for the existence of the Sexy Pizza Costume. | medium | 0.909091 | Who says kids should get to have all the fun? Not the forces behind a wide range of seemingly juvenile foods, products, and places that are increasingly being sold to adults—plenty of whom are happy to play along. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160725140431id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/07/25/04/11/munich-shooter-was-bullied-loner | The teenager behind the deadly shooting rampage in Munich was a withdrawn loner investigators say, adding that he had planned the attack for a year. Law enforcement officials said on Sunday 18-year-old David Ali Sonboly was obsessed with playing "killer" video games in his bedroom and a victim of bullying who suffered from panic attacks set off by contact with other people. The German-Iranian was seeing a doctor up to last month for treatment of depression and psychiatric problems that began in 2015 with inpatient hospital care and then was followed up with outpatient visits. Medication for his problems had been found his room but toxicological and autopsy results aren't yet available, so it's not yet clear whether he was taking the medicine when he went on his shooting spree on Friday, killing nine people and leaving dozens wounded. The attack came on the fifth anniversary of the killing of 77 people by Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, whose victims included dozens of young people. Investigators said the Munich shooter had researched that slaughter online and had visited the site of a previous school shooting in the German town of Winnenden last year. "He had been planning this crime since last summer," said Robert Heimberger, Bavaria's top official, citing a "manifesto" linked to the shooting found in the gunman's locked room in the apartment he shared with his parents and brother. Heimberger said he could not reveal details of the document yet because there were "many more terabytes" of information to evaluate, but described the gunman as a "devoted player" of group internet "killer games" pitting virtual shooters against each other. Weapons are strictly controlled in Germany and police are still trying to determine exactly how the shooter obtained the Glock 17 used in the attack. Heimberger said it's "very likely" the suspect purchased the weapon illegally online on the "darknet". The shooter's father saw a video of the start of his son's rampage on social media and went to police as it was taking place, Heimberger said, adding that the family was still emotionally not up to questioning by police. Witnesses say the gunman shouted slurs against foreigners, even though he himself was the German-born son of Iranian asylum-seekers Heimberger said the McDonald's restaurant were most of the victims died was a hangout for youths of immigrant backgrounds, and the dead included victims of Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, and Kosovo Albanian backgrounds and a stateless person. In the aftermath of the attack, Bavaria's top security official urged the government to allow the country's military to be deployed in support of police during attacks. Because of the excesses of the Nazi era, Germany's post-war constitution only allows the military, known as the Bundeswehr, to be deployed domestically in cases of national emergency. Munich deployed 2300 police officers to lock down the city Friday night, calling in elite SWAT teams from around the country and neighbouring Austria. | medium | 0.961538 | As German investigators piece together what was behind the Munich shooting, a picture of a withdrawn teenage loner, obsessed with violence, emerges. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20160805183559id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/01/business/media/whats-next-at-fox-news-with-ailes-out-and-murdoch-in.html?_r=0 | The Murdochs are still in crisis mode at Fox News. The network was rocked yet again on Friday, this time by a devastating article in New York magazine by Gabriel Sherman, who reported that Fox News paid a $3 million settlement to a booker who said Mr. Ailes carried on an abusive 20-year relationship with her — at times using company resources and personnel to facilitate it. Mr. Ailes denied the charges through his lawyer. It immediately raised new questions about whether the Murdochs would be forced into a bigger house cleaning of Mr. Ailes’s remaining team of lieutenants at Fox News, where, it seems, sexual harassment payouts were not followed by the recognition that there just might be a problem, let alone by any obvious attempts to aggressively address the corporate culture that facilitated the behavior in the first place. Mr. Ailes’s departure from the network leaves a huge vacuum in its own right. He drove it to pursue the stories that helped define the strife of the Clinton, Bush (No. 43) and Obama eras. He made it a TV headquarters for the patriotism-infused Bush war marketing effort; the false accusations that Mr. Obama was a “socialist” of dubious citizenship, and, most recently, the Trump movement. Mr. Murdoch abided by it all, even when it conflicted with some of his own views, such as his support for a path to citizenship for certain undocumented immigrants. But as often as not he seemed to be in line with Mr. Ailes, at least based on how he portrayed himself on Twitter — as a “climate change skeptic”; as a fan of Dr. Ben Carson, “a real black president who can properly address the racial divide”; and as one who believes: “Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.” Though executives who have worked with Lachlan Murdoch say they assume he shares some of his father’s conservatism, they also say he does not readily advertise his views, which is in itself a major departure from the elder Murdoch. As for James Murdoch, his leanings are in plainer view than his brother’s, and they are decidedly different from his father’s (with an important exception, friends say: free-market fiscal policy). James Murdoch’s wife, Kathryn, is a trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund and a former director at the Clinton Climate Initiative. The couple started Quadrivium, a foundation that focuses on the “sustainable use of resources” and “scientific understanding.” James has spearheaded initiatives to make the company “carbon neutral.” In an essay in Time magazine in December, he wrote, “Entrenched and compromised interests spin the fiction that science is more divided than united, and they sow seeds of uncertainty on issues of unquestionable priority: namely, the survival of our species on this planet.” His views have heartened producers and executives at National Geographic, which 21st Century Fox took greater control of last year. Fox News’s reporting often tells a much different story. Its hosts don’t hesitate to report that “the science is still in question,” as Heather Childers recently did, or that warnings about climate change are emanating from “people aligned with the political left in the scientific community,” as the host Steve Doocy said in April while promoting a film purporting to debunk climate change. Even before Mr. Ailes’s ouster, climate activists were hopeful that James Murdoch would force changes to skeptical coverage of climate change at Fox News, as well as its corporate cousin The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has great sway with congressional Republicans. To nudge it along, one group, Partnership for Responsible Growth, has run ads with both outlets reminding Republicans that their leaders used to support market-based solutions to climate change — and calling on The Journal’s editorial page to acknowledge humankind’s role. David Fenton, a longtime strategist for progressive causes whose agency, Fenton, made the ads, said its main goal was to push a bipartisan solution in the form of a carbon pricing system. The Murdoch outlets have been standing in the way, he said, by creating a “false reality bubble denying science” that scares amenable Republican politicians away from the cause. “James knows better, and there’s no way that someone like that could be happy with the terribly negative role the Murdoch properties have played in slowing bipartisan action on climate,” Mr. Fenton said. None of the Murdochs would comment for this column. But it’s impossible to talk about the intersection of their political and business interests without lingering for a moment on the latter. Even if some of Fox News’s programming drives one or both of the brothers bananas, it is still a major cash generator for 21st Century Fox, with $1.6 billion in operating profit in fiscal 2015, according to Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. Fox News’s raison d’être was to fill a void that conservative-leaning viewers sensed in the mainstream media. That guiding philosophy has provided a steady compass, and a lucrative revenue stream, as its competitors have struggled with their own paths. That could provide a strong argument against drastic change, especially for the elder Mr. Murdoch, who is by all accounts enjoying his new role running the network and is saying he won’t rush into picking a successor to Mr. Ailes. It seems a near certainty that he will stay through the election. With Mr. Murdoch at the helm, the network covered Hillary Clinton’s convention in Philadelphia with all the skepticism you’d expect. It didn’t show the speech of Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of a fallen American soldier. Then, there was Bill O’Reilly’s aside that the slaves who built the White House, whom Michelle Obama referred to in her prime-time address, were “well fed” and adequately housed. That said, Fox News’s audience tends to be older, which is why executives there indicate that the family views its younger prime-time star, Megyn Kelly, as an important part of its future. Her appeal extends to the core Fox News viewer as well as to those with more mainstream news tastes. Ms. Kelly’s contract, like Mr. O’Reilly’s, comes up for renewal next year. Before Mr. Ailes left, Ms. Kelly seemed certain to leave. Now it’s a given that her decision will depend on how the Murdochs decide to proceed — as will so, so much else. A version of this article appears in print on August 1, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: With Ailes Out, and Murdoch In, What’s Next at Fox News?. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | high | 1.176471 | Rupert Murdoch as the network’s interim chief after Roger Ailes’s ouster is a smart move, but Mr. Murdoch’s sons may have a hand in the direction of the empire. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20161117092715id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/03/29/concord-maker-fivefingers-running-shoe-faces-suit-over-health-claims/cLiXKQaDLsAQONwyQnHVOK/story.html | Another Massachusetts shoemaker is being challenged for making health claims about its footwear. A Florida woman, Valerie Bezdek, has sued Vibram USA Inc., based in Concord, accusing the maker of the FiveFingers running shoe of making misleading claims about health benefits. Designed to mimic the act of barefoot running, the minimalist running shoe has a shaped sole and a mesh top, with individual sleeves for each toe. In its advertising, Vibram says the shoe improves posture and strengthens leg muscles. But the lawsuit says that using FiveFingers may be risky for runners. “Indeed, running in FiveFingers may increase injury risk as compared to running in conventional running shoes, and even when compared to running barefoot,’’ according to a copy of the suit, filed in US District Court in Boston. Get Business Headlines in your inbox: The Globe's latest business headlines delivered every morning, Monday through Friday. The Vibram suit follows several recent cases against Massachusetts shoe companies about how they market sneakers. Last year, Canton-based Reebok International Ltd. refunded $25 million to customers after the Federal Trade Commission found it made deceptive claims that its toning shoes improved muscle tone. A suit filed in January 2011 alleged that New Balance, of Boston, also overstated the benefits of its toning shoes. FiveFingers shoes have gained in popularity. Still, according to SportsOne Source, which tracks the sporting goods industry, barefoot-style footwear represents only 8 percent of the $6.5 billion running shoe market in the United States. “This is a totally different manner of running,’’ said Matt Powell, an analyst with SportsOne Source, “and you need to be pretty dedicated to it.’’ There are similarities between the Vibram lawsuit and the Reebok case, but the Vibram claims differ, he said. While Reebok promised firmer butts and toned legs as a result of wearing its toning shoes, he said the Vibram claims are more about the benefits of barefoot running, which Vibram claims are supported by scientific evidence. “And there is ample evidence that training without shoes allows you to run faster and farther with fewer injuries,’’ the company says on its website. Vibram, with corporate headquarters in Italy, is a 70-year-old company known for pioneering the use of rubber soles for footwear. It introduced its line of FiveFinger shoes in 2005. Janine Pollack, one of the lawyers who filed the suit against Vibram, would not comment on the case. She was also involved in the case against Reebok. Vibram did not return a call for comment. | low | 1.62 | Vibram USA Inc., which is based in Concord, is facing a class action lawsuit that challenges the company’s health claims about its minimalist FiveFinger running shoes. sneakers have grown in popularity along with the recent rise in “barefoot’’ running. The lawsuit challenges the shoemaker’s claim that its footwear helps reduce risk of injuries, improves posture, and strengthen leg muscles. The lawsuit follows a record-setting settlement paid by Reebok after the Federal Trade Commission complained that it was making false assertions about a brand of its shoes. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20161209170132id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/08/15/34/peter-overton-pays-tribute-to-ken-sutcliffe | Peter Overton has penned a personal tribute to friend and legendary sports broadcaster, Ken Sutcliffe. (9NEWS) Ken Sutcliffe came from the bush and after 37 years at the Nine Network returns to the bush to enjoy his retirement. What I love and admire so much about Ken, is those authentic bush values have never left him in the nearly four decades he has reigned supreme as the voice, the face, the fabric of sports broadcasting in this country. Since announcing his retirement, I have been bowled over by complete strangers all wanting to tell me how much they will miss Ken. It’s his voice, his sparkling eyes, his familiarity, his realness...that’s what they have told me in the supermarket aisle, car line at school, on the street. You see, strangers feel completely comfortable with Kenny coming into their lounge rooms every night. He is like a friend or a family member and that recognition doesn’t come easily in this game. And let me tell you, that’s the Ken that lights up our newsroom every day. Away from the studio lights and cameras he is a mentor, a friend, an advisor and one of the hardest working journos you could meet. When it comes to work ethic, Ken sets the gold standard. None of us - viewers and workmates - want him to go, but he is and we wish him happiness, health and bucket loads of good times exploring the world with his wife Anne and cheering on his grand kids in life. Every night when Ken throws back to me on the Sydney 6pm news desk I respond with “see you tomorrow” ... And now I won’t. I am going to miss him, and so are you. Sydney viewers can watch 9NEWS at 6PM tonight as we farewell Ken Sutcliffe. © Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016 | low | 1.538462 | 9NEWS Sydney anchor Peter Overton has penned a touching tribute to “his mate” and beloved sports presenter Ken Sutcliffe, who retires tonight. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20130302215159id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/autos/story/20130227-mclaren-supercar-in-focus | Want to know how fast the 903bhp supercar will go/cost? Step this way. Plus, first official production pics. This is the moment quite literally some of you have been waiting for. You've seen the camouflage development mules. You've seen the interior. You've learned about its hybrid drivetrain and how much power its packing. Today, you will learn that the McLaren P1 supercar will accelerate from 0-62mph in "less than three seconds" and on to a limited top speed of 218mph. Fast, no? That's not all. McLaren has revealed more acceleration details with which you can arm yourself in the inevitable Discussing Which Supercar Is Best In The Pub On Friday Night With Friends game (deluxe edition). The P1 will sprint from 0-124mph (0-200km/h) in less than seven seconds, and go from 0-186mph (0-300km/h) in 17 seconds. McLaren rightly informs us that last benchmark is some nine seconds quicker than the old McLaren F1. To provide you with some perspective, the Porsche 918 Spyder is estimated to hit 62mph in under three seconds and 124mph in around eight seconds, while a Bugatti Veyron SS – the 1,183bhp orange merchant of speed – hits 124mph from rest in 7.3 seconds and 186mph in 15 seconds dead. So despite McLaren's claims that the P1 was never meant to be the fastest outright, it's clearly no slouch. Production is limited to 375 models only, combining – as you know – a 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 to an electric motor to provide 903bhp. And because it's a hybrid, emissions (combined) sit below 200g/km of CO2. There are also DRS and IPAS technologies on board to ally it closely with the company's Formula 1 activity. This is good. Pirelli has been working with McLaren on the tires too, and has developed a special compound for the P1, probably something a little bit less rubbish than the F1 tire TopGear.com made in Turkey. Ahem. And here's one of the best bits about the P1. We're told the brakes are akin to those on a GT3 racer, developed by Akebono and featuring a new kind of carbon ceramic disc, previously used in space. Space! Sadly, for us mere mortals, the price is equally cosmic. Because McLaren has confirmed that this limited run, 903bhp rear-wheel-drive hypercar that we estimate will weigh around 1,500kg (3,305lbs), will cost £866,000 ($1.3 million). That's quite a chunk of change, but then the upcoming Porsche 918 Spyder and new Ferrari Enzo aren't going to be cheap. This story originally appeared on TopGear.com. | medium | 0.52 | A week before its formal unveiling at the Geneva motor show, the British manufacturerâs hybrid hypercar comes, finally, into focus. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20130803181233id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/active/recreational-cycling/10213508/Should-cyclists-be-forced-to-wear-helmets.html | So if they can help reduce injury, shouldn’t they be mandatory, just like motorbike helmets? Australia tried it in the early 90s and the result was a 15 to 20 per cent drop in the number of hospital admissions for head injuries. That would have been great, but it also reduced the number of cyclists by around 35 per cent. The hassle and, for teenagers, embarrassment of wearing one steered people away from bikes and towards public transport and cars. And that, counter-intuitively, could have been bad news for their health. A recent study in the British Medical Journal showed that cycling has a positive health impact around 77 times larger than the potential for serious injury; essentially, there’s a small chance that you’ll come a cropper, but a very large chance that you’ll reduce your likelihood of suffering mental illness, heart disease and obesity. That means the laws were hugely counterproductive; they reduced cycling injuries, but only by reducing the number of cyclists, and those people then became more likely to come to some other kind of less-dramatic and tangible harm. Clearly, if this was an acceptable approach then we could easily slash injuries by 100 per cent simply by banning bicycles. The CTC, the UK’s largest cycling charity, has long argued against mandatory helmet laws for a similar reason. It claims they would make cycling seem more dangerous than it actually is, putting people off. “The evidence on this question is complex and contradictory, providing as much support for those who are deeply sceptical of helmets as for those who swear by them,” it says. Then there’s the problem of enforcing new laws. In the first year after the Australian State of Victoria made helmets mandatory there were 19,229 Bicycle Offence Penalty Notices issued. Do we want to tie up that much police time on a crime which has no negative impact on a third party? South Africa made helmets mandatory, then couldn’t agree on exactly how to enforce it, so never did. There's even evidence that wearing a helmet can put you at more risk. A 2006 study by Jeff Brewster from the University of Bath found that drivers passed closer to cyclists wearing a helmet when overtaking than they did those without them. The driver's subconscious sees them as less vulnerable and therefore less worthy of a wide berth. It’s undeniable that mandatory safety devices such as motorbike helmets and seatbelts in cars have been lifesavers on a huge scale. But neither had the same potential for harmful side-effects: dissuade motorcyclists from riding and they’ll buy a car, which is actually far safer (if less fun). Meanwhile, there is virtually nothing that will discourage drivers. Personally, I believe that wearing a helmet has more pros than cons, even though cycling is not as risky as many would have you believe. But there are those out there who would rather not ride than be made to wear a helmet, and for that reason the idea is a non-starter. | low | 0.625 | Bare-headed cyclists are often branded reckless and there are regular calls for helmets to be compulsory, as politicians in Jersey are currently demanding. But is it a practical way to keep riders safe? |
http://web.archive.org/web/20140510014244id_/http://time.com/13564/feedback-sensitivity-brain-wiring/ | We swim in an ocean of feedback. It’s not just those performance reviews at work. It’s your reflection in the mirror, the comment your spouse made at breakfast, or the accusatory note you just found in your mailbox from your neighbor. Recent research that suggests that how you react to that feedback — whether you take it in stride or get flattened by it — is due at least in part to your wiring. When it comes to sensitivity to feedback, individuals can vary up to three thousand percent in terms of how far they swing, emotionally, and how long it takes them to recover. And that has profound implications for their ability to hear the feedback they get, and to learn anything from it. Take Alita. She has been highly sensitive to criticism since she was a child. Now an accomplished obstetrician, her skills and confidence have matured, yet her sensitivity to feedback is just as strong as it was when she was young. “Three years ago we did patient satisfaction surveys,” Alita explains. “My patients love the attention I give them, and my reviews were largely positive. Yet there were a few comments from patients frustrated that I sometimes run late.” She adds, “I haven’t felt the same way about my practice since.” While Alita knows intellectually that these are a few negative comments among many, and that, in fact, it’s the attention that she gives each patient that causes her to run late, this doesn’t change her emotional reaction to the feedback itself. Sound familiar? If you’re like Alita, you’ve probably been hearing the same advice for much of your life: “Don’t be so sensitive,” “You’re overreacting.” “You need to get a thicker skin.” Yet new research suggests that this is far harder for some than others. Three factors can be used to measure our sensitivity to feedback. The first is Baseline, which measures your general state of happiness or contentment. In the wake of positive or negative events (or feedback), we all tend to gravitate back toward our baseline. Some people have a relatively high baseline – like Elaine in the next cubicle who always seems so (gratingly) cheerful no matter how much pressure the team is under. Others — like Mortimer down in purchasing — may have a relatively low happiness baseline, perpetually dissatisfied with their lives (and with you), regardless of how well things may be going. The second variable is Swing — how far up or down you go as a result of positive or negative feedback. Someone with small swing is “even keeled”: Nothing excites them much, and few things really get them too upset. If you swing wider emotionally, your ups and downs will be more intense and you’ll require less stimulation to move you off your baseline. And finally, Sustain or Recovery, which measures how long it takes you to return to your baseline. How long do you sustain a bounce in your step in the wake of an appreciative email from an important customer? How long does it take you to recover from the public dressing down you got from your boss on the newsroom floor? Recent findings from neuro-imaging show that positive and negative swing and recovery can operate independently. If you have small swing and short sustain on positive feedback, and wide swing and long recovery on the negatives, that’s a tough combination. Positive feedback disappears quickly, while negative feedback hits you hard and keeps you down for a good long while. This is Alita’s profile, and it’s why she finds critical feedback – even well-intended “suggestions” from patients about how to better manage her time – so upsetting. Rather than prompting her to improve service or better manage her appointments, it paralyzes and demotivates her. Her head delivery nurse, Toni, has the opposite profile; she’s unflappable in the face of stressful events, and she can shrug off even angry attacks within minutes. The good news for Alita is that wiring is only part of the equation. Researchers estimate that it accounts for about 40% of how we react, and whether it’s a little more or a little less doesn’t matter. The bigger point is that a significant part of how we react to negative feedback is not from wiring, but rather, results from the story we tell ourselves about what the feedback means. In other words, our own upset can cause us to distort the feedback we receive. For example, say someone tells you that you were singing off-key — it’s about your singing, of this song, this time. But through the lens of upset, the feedback is supersized: “I must always sing off key and no one tells me. I can never do anything right. I’m a loser and everyone knows it.” Alita is doing a version of this when she dwells on the one or two complaints about keeping patients waiting and ignores all the comments from patients who adore her. Given her wiring, she is easily upset, but she’s compounding the problem by telling a story that incapacitates her. Her reaction to the feedback is blocking her ability to learn from it. We can all learn to manage feedback more skillfully by learning how to see the feedback at “actual size.” Feedback should be bound in time (feedback about right now is not about the future) and by specificity (feedback about one thing is not about everything) and by size (needing to improve by 10% is different from needing to improve by 80%). Understanding our own triggered reactions to feedback can help us all regain our footing, and turn even upsetting feedback into something we can work with, and use to grow. | medium | 1.473684 | Your emotional wiring plays a critical role in how you react to feedback -- both good and bad -- from others. But you can override those instincts by learning how to frame the input you receive. |
http://web.archive.org/web/20140516180208id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/16/bring-women-artists-out-of-storage | Detail from Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders (1610). Click for full image Revealing the history of female artists on television may sound an easy project, a delightful exercise in heritage tourism. Haven't we moved beyond a worthy roundup of forgotten heroines, hidden from history? After all, feminist art history has been investigating the female gaze since Linda Nochlin asked "Why have there been no great women artists?" in 1971. Magisterial surveys and text books have come since, from Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race (1979) to Griselda Pollock and Rozika Parker's Old Mistresses (1991), enabling art history degrees to offer courses on gender and "ways of seeing" for the last 20 years or so. Engaging TV on the subject of this debate would be easy, I blithely presumed, until I embarked on the simple but fundamental task of seeing female art for myself. Is art male? Most institutions would have us think so. The disparities are startling. In 1989 the feminist Guerrilla Girls discovered that fewer than 5% of the modern works in the Metropolitan Museum in New York were by women, but 85% of the nudes were female. It is usually possible to see works by one or two women in an entire museum, but you could spend hours looking. I was relieved to find Judith Leyster's tiny but spell-binding Proposition (1631) and Clara Peeters' genre-defining Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels (1621) in the Hague's Gemeentemuseum. Even Artemisia Gentileschi's masterpiece Judith Beheading Holofernes (1620) has only been exhibited in the Uffizi since 2000. A Medici duchess had banished Gentileschi's assassination scene to a dark corridor, finding her "blood work" too grisly for display. Weeks of negotiation and an Italian fixer got me into the Vasari corridor to film. This kilometre walkway snakes from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Pitti Palace, crossing the Arno over the Ponte Vecchio. Built in 1564, it allowed the Medici to travel unmolested between their palace and government offices. It is lined with self-portraits by artists, a pantheon of art history from the 16th century onwards. But of the 1,700 self-portraits only 7% are by women. Did women not paint, sculpt or craft? Or were female efforts so third-rate they did not earn the wall space? The absence of a celebrated female pantheon contrasts starkly with women's success in literature. But the requirements of authorship were far easier to fulfil than the demands of art. Writing required only literacy, access to a library and a desk. Even the risky exposure of publication could be offset by anonymity. By contrast, art demanded complex training, public production and was enmeshed in a well-guarded infrastructure. Unyielding social prejudices, prohibitions on formal training and legal restrictions on female commerce hobbled the woman artist. I was prepared for a hunt, but nevertheless the near invisibility of women's art was shocking: I was forced into storage facilities and basements. The Advancing Women Artists Foundation estimates that 1,500 works by women are currently stored in Florence's various deposits, most of which have not been on public view for centuries. To the question "Are all of these works of a high artistic standard?" Jane Fortune, head of the foundation, answers: "We'll never know unless they are seen." Public galleries seem tacitly to endorse the conservative view, exemplified by Brian Sewell's assertion that "only men are capable of aesthetic greatness". But painters and sculptors were artisans working within family-based workshops, just like tailors, locksmiths, goldsmiths and cabinetmakers. Art was a trade. Few paintings were the product of a single hand – only the face and hands might be the work of the "master". The male artist's brand was a fiction. Marietta Tintoretto worked alongside her father in Venice, Barbara Longhi beside her brother in Ravenna, their labour a vital constituent of the family economy, but unrecognised outside the workshop. A deep belief in the impossibility of female genius is at work. Many of Leyster's sunny canvases celebrating the social life of the Dutch golden age were so skilful they were attributed to Frans Hals, despite her signature. The Bolognese Elisabetta Sirani produced more than 200 pieces in a 13-year career, garnering international acclaim for her smooth religious art. She ran the family workshop that embraced her sisters, supported her father when he could no longer paint and established an art school for young girls. The very accomplishment, speed and fluency of her art, however, laid her open to the accusation that she could not have created it – a man must have helped her – an accusation she saw off by staging live demonstrations of her painting. Gentileschi could match the men of counter-reformation art, but chose to dramatise the struggles of women. She depicted the same heroines, even repeating the scenes of her father Orazio, but she charged hers with a pungent critique of male possession of women. The violence of voyeurism is palpable in her Susanna and the Elders (1610), when the cowering woman is victim to the lecherous gaze of two old men. They will accuse her of the capital crime of adultery unless she agrees to sleep with them. Her strong twisting body is displayed, but her horror is uppermost, and her arms are raised in resistance. "What are YOU looking at?" the painting says to us. Compare this with Tintoretto's titillating version in which Susanna seems to know she is being watched and exhibits her white nakedness in an obliging soft performance. The episode becomes a pretext for erotica, and as the woman is complicit in her own subjugation, the dirt of sexual oppression is whitewashed away. Gentileschi will have none of it. It is not my purpose to suggest that we have yet to discover a female Michelangelo, but it is misleading to look at the past through the eyes of men alone. What women saw was different. Let's remember that. • The Story of Women and Art continues on BBC2 on 23 and 30 May. | high | 1.043478 | Why are there so few paintings by women in public galleries? Amanda Vickery goes on a shocking hunt to unearth more masterpieces |
End of preview. Expand
in Dataset Viewer.
Test split of the Newsroom dataset (2) filtered by using the code by Aumiller et al. (1) available at https://github.com/dennlinger/summaries/tree/main with the following settings: min_length_summary = 18; min_length_reference = 250; length_metric = "whitespace"
Furthermore:
all article-summary pairs with density > 2 were removed. This means that all summaries contained in the dataset are more on the abstractive side
each line break ("\n") contained in an article or a summary was replaced by an empty space (" ")
columns 'date', 'density_bin', 'url', 'compression', 'coverage_bin', 'coverage' and 'title' were removed from the dataset.
(1): Aumiller, D., Fan, J., & Gertz, M. (2023). On the State of German (Abstractive) Text Summarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.07095.
(2): Grusky, M., Naaman, M., & Artzi, Y. (2018). Newsroom: A dataset of 1.3 million summaries with diverse extractive strategies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.11283.
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