"60 Minutes" has been investigating the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by Russian athletes, including some who won gold medals at the Sochi Winter Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee said Thursday it's considering retesting blood and urine samples from the now-tainted Russian lab at the 2014 Winter Games. But based upon what CBS News has learned from the lab's former director, any positive drug tests disappeared a long time ago.
Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov shared details of a systematic cover-up in Sochi during Skype conversations with Vitaly Stepanov, a former Russian anti-doping official turned key whistleblower.
Stepanov allowed "60 Minutes" to listen to 15 hours of conversations he secretly recorded with Rodchenkov.
"He had the ability to help to get the necessary results," Stepanov told CBS News -- referring to gold medals.
In the recordings, Rodchenkov named Russian gold medalists in three sports -- bobsled, skeleton and cross country skiing -- whose dirty drugs tests he helped cover up.
It was all part, he said, of an elaborate scheme to protect Russia's Olympic medal winners, with the help of his country's intelligence service, known as the FSB.
"FSB tried to control every single step of the anti-doping process in Sochi," Stepanov said Rodchenkov told him.
The FSB figured out a way to open bottles considered to be tamper-proof containing urine from drug-tainted athletes. Then they filled the bottles with clean urine collected from athletes before they started doping.
Rodchenkov said he then had two weeks after the Sochi games -- to make sure, in his words, people turned out to be clean before test samples were sent to the International Olympic Committee in Switzerland for storage.
CBS News also learned Thursday a recent review of blood tests in at least one Olympic event at Sochi has revealed evidence of test tampering involving Russian athletes.


REASEHEATH College floristry students proved they’ve got the X Factor after sweeping the board at a regional contest.
The first three places in the intermediate section of the WorldSkills UK regional heat went to students who are studying for their Level 3 Diploma in Floristry at the college.
The competition, hosted by Reaseheath, attracted competitors from other colleges and from within the industry.
It was the first of a series of regional competitions organised by the British Floristry Association (BFA) to find the UK’s best young florists.
The highest scoring competitors across all heats are invited to a UK final at the RHS Flower Show Tatton Park in July.
The highest placed there will be considered for the GB squad at the WorldSkills competition in Leipzig in 2013. WorldSkills is the largest vocational skills competition in the world and has 50 member nations.
For the competition, students had to create a dinner table design for a stylish after-show party. The designs were judged by a national panel of judges from the Floristry Judges' Guild, WorldSkills staff and moderators.
Reaseheath students took the three top places. The winner was Victoria Tempest from Manchester, Vicky Carr from Nantwich took second place and Hollie Thompson from Sandbach was third.
Said Victoria, 18: “I was delighted with the result and received some really useful feedback from the judges.
BFA moderator Deborah Richardson said: “This event is designed to identify talented and eligible florists who have the potential to be trained to join the WorldSkills UK squad and represent their country.
“The selection procedure is very rigorous and even those who win at the national final are not guaranteed a team place.


If you don't have a bench, perform flyes on a stability ball.
4 What Is a Dumbbell Skull Crusher?
If you're looking for a versatile exercise that can target different areas of your chest, consider a wing exercise, better known as the fly. Flyes are isolation exercises, but you can shift the targeted area by doing dumbbell flyes on a bench. Use an incline bench to focus on the upper part of your pectoralis major, a flat bench to hit your middle pecs or a decline bench to emphasize your lower pecs. The basic arm movements remain pretty much the same, no matter which type of bench you use.
Warm up before attempting dumbbell flyes with five to 10 minutes of light cardio activity, such as jumping rope. Ease into your workout by performing a warm-up set of flyes using approximately 50 percent of your standard weight.
Lie face up on a bench with your feet flat on the floor. Maintain contact with the bench throughout the exercise.
Hold one dumbbell in each hand and extend your arms straight up so the weights are above your upper chest with your palms facing each other. Bend your elbows slightly.
Inhale as you lower the weights under control. Move the dumbbells in a wide arc as you maintain your elbow flex. Stop when the dumbbells are about level with your shoulders, or when you feel the stretch in your chest, whichever occurs first.
Exhale as you lift the dumbbells back to the starting position, using a hugging motion as you continue to maintain the bend in your elbows. Perform eight to 12 repetitions per set.
Improve your chest flexibility after you do flyes by standing straight with your feet close together and placing your palms on the back of your head. Keep your hands in place as you pull your elbows back until you feel the stretch across your chest. Hold the position for 20 to 30 seconds.
Check with your doctor before doing dumbbell flyes, particularly if you've previously injured your chest.
Use a spotter whenever you lift weights above your body.


Editor’s note: The Post Independent, in conjunction with Valley Life For All, continues a monthly series of profiles about people in our community who have different abilities. Twenty-seven percent of Americans experience some disability. One hundred percent are a part of our community. Each has a story.
She is the outreach coordinator for the Aspen Hope Center. She adopts older dogs to give them their best golden years. She finds her serenity in the outdoors. Christie has a diagnosis of bipolar 1, defined as manic highs and depression lows. She knows how to manage her illness and does not let it define her.
Her voice will change you.
Everyone goes through hard times and faces challenges. The more we share and talk about our struggles, the more we will change the perception of looking at our hardships as a weakness. I think this is especially true for mental health.
For years I hid my depression. I didn’t want people to know how I was really feeling. It began in high school, and I masked my feelings with drugs and alcohol. Suicidal thoughts became part of my norm. Eventually the highs became too extreme and the lows too dark. Six years ago, a friend called the Aspen Hope Center, and I finally was ready to ask for help. I acknowledge them for saving my life.
It is a relief to now be able to say that I’m having a bad day instead of pretending otherwise. My life isn’t full of rainbows and unicorns, but I am happy. Instead of asking “why me,” I have learned to embrace my illness, and I am better because of that. I had to dig deep and make the choice that I wanted to live. Mental wellness comes first in my life; I take my medications daily, see my therapist regularly, have an amazing support system and have learned what tools and techniques that work to keep me balanced.
We all get wrapped up in our lives; work, loved ones, friends, putting others first or taking on too much. It took me a long, long time to realize I had to put my well-being first. I have a tattoo of a semi-colon on my wrist which represents suicide awareness and that we all need to pause. It reminds me to slow down every day and just take at least a minute to myself, whether it is hugging my dog, looking at the beauty around us or just taking a few deep breaths.
I encourage everyone to reach out and share their stories of loss, struggles and stories of hope. The more people do, those who are struggling will know it is OK to reach out. Over the years of burying my depression it built up to such excruciating and consuming mental and physical pain I just wanted it to be over. But I found H.O.P.E. Hold On Pain Ends.
Whether you have a diagnosis or not, mental wellness needs to be one’s top priority. And you don’t have to figure that out on your own. One of the things we say at the Hope Center is “We Can Talk.” One conversation can save a life. I know that one conversation saved me.
Local nonprofit Valley Life for All is working to build inclusive communities where people of all abilities belong and contribute. Request a training or join the conversation at http://www.valleylifeforall.org or #voicability4all. Help us redefine the perception of challenge.


NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — In the dozens of calls, hundreds of emails I’ve received since we launched “Medical Debt Rescue,” there is the one constant: desperation. The sound of helplessness in your voices has permeated my subconscious all week.
I wish we could help all of you. I wish that every person who’s drowning under a mountain of medical debt right now could be helped by this program we’ve started. But that sad reality is that with nearly one in four Americans struggling with medical bills right now, we are barely scratching the surface by paying off bills for a mere 600 of you.
If there is one thing I have learned this week it’s this, the current state of our nation’s healthcare system is as broken as some of the dozens of people who have called to talk this week.
There was James Glasscock who emailed on Tuesday. James nearly lost his sight a few years ago in an accident. He was hospitalized for a week and was eventually sent a bill for $398,999.98. How many people could afford to pay a bill like that?
James went on to say that he’s doing the best he can to make ends meet. Like so many others he does not qualify for Medicare coverage. Even if he did, it wouldn’t erase the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt he owes. James’ wife works full time and he’s started driving for Uber just so they can put food on the table.
There’s another common theme that’s emerged this week as I’ve sat here listening to your stories. All of you want to pay off these bills, but for so many different reasons you’re stuck.
This year alone, hundreds of thousands of you will be forced into bankruptcy because of medical debt. Most Americans say they couldn’t afford to pay off a hospital bill as small as $400. And a majority of these people have insurance. But shrinking coverage and rising costs are catching people off guard when they get sick. Suddenly you find yourself drowning in debt.
I’ve heard stories of people who have had to sell their homes to settle medical bills. Stories of people who have tried to sell their homes to pay off medical debt but can’t because their bank has placed a lien on the property, it’s the sobering reality so many of you are facing.
Since Tuesday, I’ve listened to 78 voicemails.
Ricky Eads called to talk about a logging accident he was in a few years ago. He broke all of his ribs and ended up nearly dying in the hospital. After eight days he was finally released. But now Ricky has been sent a $90,000 medical bill that he has two months to pay. And this man has insurance.
So many of you have called to ask how you can qualify for our “Medical Debt Rescue,” program. The unfortunate answer is that you can’t. There was and is no way for NewsChannel 5 to specifically pick whose medical debt we are paying off. We gave a $15,000 donation to the non-profit RIP Medical Debt, they then took that money and went to a debt collector. Because medical debt gets bought and sold so often, it’s worth next to nothing. Which is why our $15,000 paid off nearly $1.8 million in debt for 600 of you across Middle Tennessee.
My advice if you’re facing crushing debt: don’t ignore it. Call the hospital, call the debt collector, they may be willing to work with you. The Tennessee Justice Center is another great resource if you need help.
I truly wish we could help every person who has contacted us this week asking for help. If you get a yellow envelope in the mail, please call us.
And even if you don’t, keep calling. These stories are too important not to share.


NATICK - A Natick woman was arrested Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. on Pond Street, police said.
Mary M. Brewer, 46, of 1 Lincoln Circle, was charged with OUI and possession of an open container of liquor while driving, police said. Brewer was also cited for a marked lanes violation.
FRAMINGHAM - A Framingham man was arrested Tuesday at 11:30 p.m. after a domestic dispute, police said.
Wanderly G. DaSilva, 36, of 126 Beaver St., was charged with two counts of assault and battery, police said.
MARLBOROUGH - A Marlborough man was arrested Tuesday at about 11 p.m., police said.
Gary T. Graham, 55, of 898 Concord Road, had two Framingham District Court warrants, both charging him with assault and battery, violating an abuse prevention order and witness intimidation. He also had a Marlborough District Court warrants for assault and battery, witness intimidation and destruction of property worth less than $250; assault and battery, assault on ambulance personnel and resisting arrest; and OUI, a third offense, violating an abuse prevention order, resisting arrest and driving violations, police said.
MARLBOROUGH - A Marlborough man was arrested Tuesday at 5:22 p.m. on Concord Road, police said.
Jared Joseph Murphy, 20, of 658 Concord Road, was charged with assault and battery, police said.
NORTHBOROUGH - A Hudson woman was arrested Tuesday at 11:45 a.m. at Southwest Cutoff, police said.
Tara Elizabeth Colleton, 28, of 11 Lake St., Apt. 322, had a warrant for providing liquor to a minor, police said.
NORTHBOROUGH - A Westborough man was arrested Tuesday at 9:26 p.m. on South Street, police said.
Juan Cruz Triana, 44, of 297 Turnpike Road, Apt. 122, was charged with OUI, driving without a license and a marked lanes violation, police said.
SOUTHBOROUGH - A Marlborough man was arrested Sunday at 12:16 a.m. near the intersection of Rte. 9 and Central Street, police said.
Francis Moreira Barbosa, 29, of 319 East Main St., was charged with OUI, a second offense, reckless driving to endanger and a marked lanes violation, police said.
SOUTHBOROUGH - A Framingham man was arrested Sunday at 2:06 a.m. on Rte. 9, police said.
Justin A. Averett, 23, of 15 Clark St., was charged with OUI, driving with an open container of alcohol and speeding, police said.
SOUTHBOROUGH - A Douglas woman was arrested Monday at 5:13 p.m. on Rte. 9, police said.
Denise Marie Conza, 50, of 101 North St., was charged with driving with a revoked license and driving a car with a failed inspection sticker, police said.


Factbox - Who has submitted letters of no confidence in PM May?
Brady said on Sunday the threshold to trigger a vote had not yet been reached.
“I am not alone and I do it with a heavy heart but now it’s the country that matter more than absolutely anything else,” she told the BBC.
6) STEVE BAKER - submitted his letter on Oct. 22.
“Politics is all about trust and once it is lost it is impossible to win back,” he said in a letter to constituents.
21) CHRIS GREEN - said on Twitter he had sent a letter.


A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on August 09, 2018, on page 13.
Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, past major winners trying to rise once more from contenders to champions, tee off side by side when the 100th PGA Championship starts Thursday. Woods, eight months into a comeback from spinal fusion surgery, and McIlroy, seeking his first major win since the 2014 PGA, will be joined by defending champion Justin Thomas for the first two days over the 7,316-yard, par-70 Bellerive Country Club layout.
Woods, a 14-time major champion, has not won a major since the 2008 U.S. Open and hasn't won any event since the 2013 Bridgestone Invitational. But he fired his lowest final round in five years to take fourth in June at the PGA National and led in the British Open final round before sharing sixth at Carnoustie.
Fifth-ranked McIlroy has five top-10 showings in the past nine majors, sharing second at last month's British Open and fifth at the Masters.


FORMER Energy minister Dzikamai Mavhaire yesterday distanced himself from the case in which the former Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) board chairperson Stanley Kazhanje is being accused of concealing his business interests in Intratrek Zimbabwe Company from his bosses when he was appointed to the board.
Intratrek is currently entangled in the botched Gwanda solar power plant with the State pressing charges of fraud after the company failed to set up the project.
Mavhaire, who was last week convicted by magistrate Hosea Mujaya for refusing to testify, told the court that when he recommended Kazhanje's appointment to the board, he had only seen his curriculum vitae.
Mavhaire told the court that the President's Office could have unearthed during vetting process that Kazhanje had interests in Intratrek before his appointment.
"Kazhanje had never disclosed to me that he had interests in Intratrek Zimbabwe. If he had declared, we could have not appointed him to the board since he had proved that he was conflicted," Mavhaire told the court.
The former minister said the only place Kazhanje could have seen him was in the newspapers or on television.
Kazhanje is also set to be jointly charged with Intratrek Zimbabwe for bribery after allegedly receiving $10 000 from Wicknell Chivayo for him not to terminate the 100 megawatt Gwanda solar panel station contract.


Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and South Korea's president in June.
The U.S. Treasury secretary has said he told U.S. lawmakers that President Donald Trump will keep strict sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, as congressional Democrats turned up pressure on the administration's policy toward the Kremlin-connected oligarch.
Steven Mnuchin released a statement on January 10, ahead of a classified briefing he was requested to give a key House of Representatives committee.
Congress has been reviewing an administration decision announced in December to lift sanctions against three companies that Deripaska controls: Rusal, EN+, and JSC EuroSibEnergo.
Early last year, the Trump administration indicated it was planning to sanction Rusal -- one of the world’s largest aluminum companies -- but that announcement roiled global markets, sending metal prices soaring.
The Treasury Department delayed imposing the sanctions several times, amid a reported lobbying campaign by Deripaska's companies.
In December, the administration notified Congress it would lift the sanctions. That triggered a clause in Congress that gives lawmakers 30 days to try to reverse the decision by passing a joint resolution of disapproval.
In his statement, Mnuchin said Deripaska remained under sanctions and "his property and interests remain blocked, and any companies he controls are also sanctioned."
House Democrats, however, were publicly angry, with the leader of the chamber, Nancy Pelosi, calling it "one of the worst classified briefings we've received from the Trump administration."
"He answered some questions, but he didn't give testimony. They had an intelligence briefing, which I won't go into, and then they read a document that was unclassified, wasting the time of members of Congress," she told reporters after the briefing.
Deripaska is a billionaire tycoon who made his fortune in aluminum and metals trading. He was barred from entering the United States in the 2000s, on allegations of ties to organized crime.
He was also a business partner of Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman during part of the 2016 presidential election.


So if the SNP were able to con the Scottish electorate into committing suicide then at the end of the day once the dust has settled from the resulting chaos of ripping the UK apart then England should start to reap the benefits of no longer having to subsidise Scotland in perpetuity. Though of course there will be a heavy cost to England of a breakup of the UK that could total as much as £120bn, especially as a bankrupt Scotland would be in no position to service its share of Britains £1.8 trillion national debt. So it could take more than a decade before England starts to turn a profit from the break up of the UK.
Whilst for Scotland, well the Scottish economy would have jumped over the edge of a cliff where the impact of the loss of the English subsidy would be felt near instantaneously. The Scottish economy would be in free fall, and it would not be too long before Scotland passes Greece on the way down as the loss of £12bn per annum would demand deep cuts in government spending that I am sure would result in the SNP permanently losing power in Holyrood for bringing about such a catastrophe onto the Scottish people.
Where the oil revenues are concerned, SNP fantasy has never matched oil price reality.
The bottom line is that yes Scottish independence would be pain for the rest of the UK, probably take the UK a decade to fully recover from its consequences. However, for Scotland Independence would be catastrophic as there is the real risk that Scotland may not even survive in tact from what would follow as bordering regions in severe permanent economic distress would soon start to demand their own referendums to re-join the UK.


Cleveland Cavaliers: Acquired G Dan Majerle, F Antonio Lang and a first-round choice in 1996, 1997 or 1998 for F John "Hot Rod" Williams.
New Jersey Nets: Signed G Scotty Thurman, G Corey Beard, G Tommy Brown, F Joe Hooks, C Grady Livingston and C Robert Werdann.
NHL: Suspended Oilers LW Louie DeBrusk two games and fined him $1,000 for head-butting.
OC Buffalo Sabres: Signed C Curtis Brown to a multi-year contract.


Firms doing business abroad are being warned to consider buying currency in advance after the Indian rupee fell 20 per cent against sterling in six months, causing uncertainty for UK firms.
Currency exchange giant Western Union said it had seen a huge rise in British small businesses forward-buying rupees over the summer with a 90 per cent increase from May to June.
Western Union’s Kerry Agiasotis said: ‘The rupee has hit all-time lows against sterling. India is an important trade partner for the UK and it is vital firms use this opportunity to look at cashflow and maximise their purchasing power.
Rajan Jolly is operations manager at Naturetrek, a firm offering wildlife treks.
As growth stutters in emerging markets... Is now the time to pick up a bargain?
Set up in 1985, it employs 25 staff in Alresford, Hampshire, and 100 tour leaders in 85 countries.
Naturetrek has always paid for goods and services in US dollars, but two years ago their suppliers in India began quoting in rupees, with payment in US dollars.
This meant Naturetrek had to manage two foreign exchange deals, which pushed up costs. Having persuaded suppliers four months ago to accept rupees, it recently began forward-buying the currency.


Based on Bradshaw’s out-of-left-field gasbagging about Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin on a recent episode of FS1’s “Speak for Yourself,” it seems that any clue Bradshaw might have had left him a long time ago — if he ever had one at all.
Bradshaw then had the audacity to add another “at all’’ for emphasis.
Fact: Not long after that highly educational TV program aired, the Steelers defeated the Ravens on Christmas to clinch their seventh playoff berth in the 10 seasons Tomlin has coached them.
Fact: The Steelers are 102-57 on Tomlin’s 10-year watch.
Fact: They have won five AFC North division titles, including two of the last three, two AFC Championships and one Super Bowl in that span.
Apparently Bradshaw does not deal in — or pay attention to — facts. Or maybe he really is as dumb as Henderson said he was and truly cannot read.
Predictably, Tomlin’s players came to his defense after Bradshaw’s preposterous comments began to circulate. But it was the passionate way in which the players spoke to reporters in Pittsburgh about their coach that was the true measure of how ridiculous the comments were.
Tomlin took the Bradshaw rant in stride.
“Criticism and critiques are very much part of our business,” he said. “It’s an element of our business that as a competitor I embrace. Now that being said, terms like ‘cheerleader guy,’ to me, maybe fall outside of the bounds of critique or criticism. They probably fall more toward the area of disrespect and unprofessional.
Hammer. Laid. Down. Game, set, match.


Lo-Fi (Low Fidelity) is at present incorrectly assumed to be a genre of music. During its inception lo-fi was more akin to a type of sound rather than a style of music. However, over the years, lo-fi has somewhat become a standard genre of music that is known to be popular amongst “bedroom musicians” or people producing music from their homes as opposed to studios.
Lo-fi was heavily criticised by both critics and the general audience when it first came onto the scene. The so-called “lo-fi aesthetic” would arise unintentionally during sound engineering and was characterised as being undesirable. Some of the first musicians to experiment with lo-fi did so somewhat by accident. The likes of Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys, Beck, and Robert Stevie Moore were among the first. Moore is today regarded as one of the pioneers of the genre.
Out of all the artists associated with lo-fi back then, only Moore was producing music in his home, which ultimately resulted in the overall aesthetic. While Moore's name isn't known as widely, his work has influenced Beck, Guided by Voices, and Ariel Pink.
By the start of the 1990s, lo-fi would become a radio mainstay by finding a place in the grunge scene. Grunge musicians wanted their music to sound rough and low effort. The “aesthetic” would prove to be as important in the grunge scene as the music itself.
Moving forward, lo-fi found itself a new home in jazz rap, a genre filled with producers sampling classic jazz artists. Selectively sampling parts from 50s jazz and then looping it endlessly became a common industry practice in jazz rap.
So, where is lo-fi now? It's still here and has finally become a genre in its own right. Developments in technology over the past two decades has given rise to more bedroom musicians and created the electronic musician. The rise of personal computers and modern production capabilities has allowed more and more people to start dabbling in the genre by producing tracks from multiple samples.
But how did lo-fi finally make it into the mainstream? As music continued to evolve, demand arose at the turn of the last century for a different kind of music.
The purpose of a lo-fi track in this day and age is to be a simple song that you don't need to think about while you're listening to it. It's just the same sample (usually the best part) played on repeat over a beat with some effects such as that of a cassette deck or vinyl scratches added into the mix. The overall result is a song that doesn't require you to think about it. Instead, it sets the mood for a situation where you're almost procrastinating about the music you're listening to, making it a great genre to listen to while working or studying.
Jazz and lo-fi still continue to have a relationship, with the former being one of the cores of mainstream lo-fi music today. And while lo-fi still continues to be used as a production technique in genres such as “trip hop” and “chillhop”, it cannot be denied that lo-fi has carved out a place for itself over the years. The democratic nature of the internet has truly allowed amateur and hobbyist musicians to carry the genre.
So be it at the next hangout with your friends, or an intense study session, lo-fi could be exactly what you're looking for. Allow it to drone away in the background while you do literally anything else.


Beans, corn, and endless varities of root vegetable—is this the stuff of an obsession?
The land was inviting, but depending on its bounty could trouble your dreams.
This Christmas, my two sisters and my brother and I, along with our families, will head toward home, our real home, which is where our seventy-eight-year-old mother, Christy, lives, in western Kentucky. She’ll be ready for us with the usual Christmas feast, and what I’m looking forward to most is the green beans and sweet potatoes and creamed corn, the farm fare that once seemed so oppressively ordinary to me. When I was growing up on our fifty-three-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food. Food was the center of our lives. Everything we did, every day, revolved around it. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it—endlessly, day after day, season after season. This was life on a farm. I can appreciate the value of a country upbringing now, but when I was a girl all that toil drove me crazy.
One day my mother and my grandmother were shelling beans and talking about the proper method of drying apples. I was eleven and entirely absorbed with the March girls in “Little Women.” Drying apples was not in my dreams. Beth’s death was weighing darkly on me at that moment, and I threw a little tantrum—what Mama called a hissy fit.
“Can’t y’all talk about anything but food?” I screamed.
There was a shocked silence. “Well, what else is there?” Granny asked.
Granny didn’t question her duties, but I did. I didn’t want to be hulling beans in a hot kitchen when I was fifty years old. I wanted to be somebody, maybe an airline stewardess. Also, I had been listening to the radio. I had notions.
Life for our family was haunted by the fear of crop failure. We ate as if we didn’t know where our next meal might come from. All my life, I have had a recurrent food dream: I face a buffet or cafeteria line, laden with beautiful foods. I spend the entire dream choosing the foods I want. The anticipation of eating them is deliciously agonizing. I always wake up just as I’ve made my selections but before I get to eat.
Working with food was fraught with anxiety and desperation when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and it wasn’t to be trusted. My mother watched the skies at evening for any portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign. Our livelihood—even our lives—depended on forces outside our control.
I think this dependence on nature was at the core of my rebellion. I hated the constant sense of helplessness before vast forces, the continuous threat of failure. Farmers didn’t take the initiative, I began to see; they reacted to whatever presented itself. More than that, though, I disliked women’s part in that dependence.
From the front yard, where I sat reading under a maple tree, I could see my mother stooped over in the garden and my father on his tractor, far back in the field. No wonder I believed that progress meant freedom from the field and the range. That meant moving to town, I thought. Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes; we couldn’t just go buy things, the way they did. Although we were self-sufficient and resourceful and held clear title to our land, we farm people lived in a state of psychological poverty. We felt that the fine life in town—celebrated in magazines, on radio, in movies—was denied us. Of course, we weren’t poor at all—I knew that. Poor people had too many kids, and they weren’t landowners; they rented decrepit little houses with plank floors and trash in the yard. “Poor people are wormy and eat wild onions,” Mama said. We weren’t poor, but we were country.
The truth was, Mama was a natural cook. At harvest time, after she’d got in from the garden and put out a wash, she would whip up a noontime dinner for the men in the field—my father and grandfather and maybe some neighbors and a couple of hired hands: fried chicken with milk gravy, ham, mashed potatoes, lima beans, field peas, corn, slaw, sliced tomatoes, fried apples, biscuits, and peach pie. This was not considered a banquet, only plain hearty food, fuel for work. All the ingredients except the flour, sugar, and salt came from the farm—the chickens, the hogs, the milk and butter, the potatoes from the potato patch, the beans, peas, corn, cabbage, apples, peaches. Nothing was processed, except by her. She was always butchering and plucking and planting and hoeing and shredding and slicing and creaming (scraping cobs for the creamed corn), and pressure-cooking and canning and freezing and thawing and mixing and shaping and baking and frying.
We were known to eat our pie right on the same plate as our turnip greens so as not to mess up another dish. It didn’t matter if the peach cobbler oozed all over the turnip-green juice and the pork grease. “It all goes to the same place,” Mama said. We never used napkins, and our table manners were boarding-house reach—no “Pass the peas, please.” Conversation detracted from the sensuous pleasure of filling yourself. Every meal required meat and vegetables and dessert. We drank milk and iced tea (“ice-tea”). Our salads were fruit Jell-O and slaw. We also ate “poke salet” and wilted lettuce. Mama picked tender young pokeweed in the woods in the spring, before it turned poison, and cooked it a long time to get the bitterness out. We liked it with vinegar and minced boiled eggs. Wilted lettuce was tender new lettuce, shredded, with sliced radishes and green onions, and blasted with hot bacon grease to blanch the rawness. “Too many fresh vegetables in the summer gives people the scours,” Daddy said.
We strode out at dawn, in the dew, and picked until the midmorning sun bore down on our heads. To protect her hands from the thorns, Mama made gloves from old bluejeans, with the fingertips cut out. Following the berries down onto the creek bank, we perched on ledges and tiptoed on unsure footing through thickets. We tunnelled. When Mama saw an especially large berry just out of reach, she would lean her body against the bush and let it support her while she plucked the prize. We picked in quart baskets, then poured the berries into red-and-white Krey lard buckets. The berries settled quickly, and Mama picked an extra quart to top off the buckets. By nine o’clock, the sun was high, and I struggled to the house with my four gallons of blackberries, eager to wash the chiggers off and eat some cereal.
From the blackberries, I learned about money. I wouldn’t eat the berries, even on my cereal: I wanted the money from selling them. Granny said everything was food, but I was hungry for something else—a kind of food that didn’t grow in the ground. Yet I couldn’t deny that we were always feasting. We ate sumptuous meals, never missing dessert. At Christmas, we slurped gallons of boiled custard. Once in a while, Daddy brought home exotic treats—fried oysters in little goldfish cartons and hot tamales wrapped in corn shucks.
Food was better in town, we thought. It wasn’t plain and ordinary and everyday. The main pleasures were there, too—the barbecue places, the movie shows, all the places to buy things. Woolworth’s, with the pneumatic tubes overhead rushing money along a metallic mole tunnel up to a balcony. Lochridge & Ridgway, with an engraved sign on the third-story cornice: “Stoves, Appliances, Plows.” On the mezzanine at that store, I bought my first phonograph records, brittle 78s of big-band music—Woody Herman and Glenn Miller, and Glen Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra playing “No Name Jive.” A circuit of the square took you past the grand furniture stores, the two dime stores, the shoe stores, the men’s stores, the ladies’ stores, the banks, the drugstores. You’d walk past the poolroom and an exhaust fan would blow the intoxicating smell of hamburgers in your face. Before she bought a freezer, Mama kept our meat in a rented food locker in town, near the ice company. She stored the butchered calf there, and she fetched hunks each week to fry. But hamburgers in town were better. They were greasier, and they came in waxed-paper packages.
At the corner drugstore, on the courthouse square, Mama and my younger sister Janice and I sat at filigreed wrought-iron tables on a black-and-white mosaic tile floor, eating peppermint ice cream. It was cold in there, under the ceiling fans. The ice cream was served elegantly, in paper cones sunk into black plastic holders. We were uptown.
She was eager for a chance to buy us things. After the war, she had wanted Daddy to get out of dairy farming and run a small business of some kind, something that would bring in more cash, but he had refused to leave his parents’ farm. He was an only child, and my grandparents depended on him to carry on. Mama had swallowed her disappointment. She was resilient and optimistic—when Janice and I were growing up, we always saw her sparkling like morning dew—and she always wanted more for her children.
I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. Running our own little restaurant could mean we wouldn’t have to work in the garden. I wanted nothing more to do with okra and beans. I longed for deliverance and an endless supply of Co’-Colas.
A restaurant would hold no fears for her. “It’s a chance to make big money,” she told me. She told the owner she would try it for two weeks. If she liked the work, the deal was, she would be permitted to rent the business, for a hundred dollars a month.
“If it works out, maybe I could make a hundred dollars a week,” she said.
I tagged along. I felt important waiting on customers—strangers driving along the highway and stopping right where I was for a bite to eat. I wanted to meet somebody from New York. When I drew glasses of Coca-Cola from the fountain, the Coke fizzed over crushed ice. I made grilled-cheese sandwiches in the grilled-cheese machine. I experimented with milkshakes. I was flying.
Most of all, I loved the jukebox. The first week Mama was there, the jukebox man came by to change records and insert new red-rimmed paper strips of titles: Doris Day and Johnnie Ray duets, “Teardrops from My Eyes,” by Ruth Brown, and “P.S. I Love You,” by a Kentucky vocal group called the Hilltoppers. I listened avidly to everything. I was fourteen and deeply concerned about my suntan, and I was saving pocket money to buy records.
The restaurant also had a television set, which sat in a corner with a “television light” on top—a prism of soft colors which supposedly kept people from ruining their eyes on TV waves. I had no experience with television, and I was captivated by Donald O’Connor’s variety show and “I Love Lucy.” When the evening crowd came in, Mama was kept busy as she trotted back and forth from the kitchen with her hamburger platters and catfish platters, but she would stop and laugh at something Lucy and Ethel were doing on the screen.
A tale of faith in human dignity restored.


OVERVALUED: Estimates of home values from Zillow.com may be no more accurate than homeowners’ estimates of value, according to a new study in The Appraisal Journal. (HousingWire) MORE HERE!
U.K.’S PRICIEST: London’s Chester Square tops U.K. priciest list again. (Bloomberg) MORE HERE!
HELMSLEY HOTEL: The estate of real-estate baroness Leona Helmsley has signed a deal to sell one of its prime Manhattan hotels for about $170 million. (WSJ) MORE HERE!
SAVE THE SIGN: SkyTag says it would pay to preserve the land around the Hollywood sign — if it’s allowed to keep about 20 giant signs up throughout the city. (L.A. Times) MORE HERE!
HANDS OFF FHA: The National Association of Realtors opposes hiking minimum downpayments. (Inman News) MORE HERE!


Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean is leading a team of younger political leaders to Brunei for a four-day visit at the invitation of Crown Prince Haji Al-Muhtadee Billah. The delegation left Singapore yesterday.
DPM Teo will reaffirm the close bilateral ties between the two countries and explore new areas where both can learn from each other and work together on, said a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA).
The visit is the fifth edition of the Young Leaders' Programme (YLP), an annual exchange of visits that was started in 2013 to enhance relations.
The two countries enjoy what the MFA has called a "special relationship", underscored by frequent high-level exchanges between leaders. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong visited Brunei for Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah's Golden Jubilee celebrations last month. Sultan Bolkiah visited Singapore in July to mark 50 years of Singapore-Brunei currency interchangeability.
The two countries take turns to host the YLP. Last year, Crown Prince Billah led a delegation of younger Bruneian leaders here.
"The YLP reflects the long-term commitment from Singapore and Brunei to enhance the special relationship, including through the strengthening of ties between the next-generation leadership from both sides," said an MFA spokesman.
•Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Education, Social and Family Development, Associate Professor Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim.
During the visit, the Singapore delegation will meet Sultan Bolkiah and Crown Prince Billah. They will be hosted at a lunch by the Crown Prince, and at a tea reception with Bruneian ministers.
The two sides will open the Brunei leg of a co-curated exhibition - the second part in a two-part exhibition showcasing artefacts from Singapore and Brunei. The first part was launched in Singapore in July by PM Lee and Sultan Bolkiah.
The various office-holders in the Singapore delegation will also meet their respective counterparts to exchange views on regional developments. Mr Ong will visit Singapore Armed Forces soldiers undergoing jungle confidence and survival training in Brunei.


What a cute house! This would be great for a starter home or rental property. This home has a brand new roof, vinyl siding and the appliances are included. Hardwood flooring, attractive archways and a lovely 4 season room add to the charm. Close to downtown and good sized back yard as well! If you're thinking you want to upgrade to newer windows or refinish the flooring or anything else you would like to improve you need to check out the FHA renovation loan where all the upgrades can be financed into one larger loan. It's a great program and a great house to use it with! Ask for more details and make an appointment to see this home now!


Merkle's Q1 2018 report shows Shopping campaigns dominate retailers' paid search click volume.
Shopping campaigns on Google and Bing continued to fuel paid search spend in Q1 2018, according to digital agency Merkle’s latest quarterly report. Overall, search spend increased 21 percent year over year among the sample of Merkle clients’ US campaigns included in the report [registration required].
Looking at overall performance, cost-per-click (CPC) growth remained relatively steady from Q4 2017, increasing 13 percent year over year. That CPC growth is much higher than what Merkle clients, who skew large retailer, experienced in the earlier quarters of 2017. The rising CPCs have coincided with improved ad quality and higher conversion rates. Click volume growth has slowed significantly over the past two quarters, up 7 percent year over year in Q1 2018.
Merkle clients spent 20 percent more on Google paid search in Q1 2018, on average, than the previous year, marking the fifth straight quarter to see year-over-year spend growth surpass 20 percent. Click volume was up 7 percent, and CPCs increased by 13 percent year over year. Merkle says average CPCs have risen sharply across formats and devices, but that brand keyword text ads have seen the biggest CPC jumps.
Google Shopping spend shot up 40 percent year over year. That’s the highest rate of growth Merkle has recorded in nearly two years.
Shopping ad impressions increased by 47 percent year over year, and average non-brand CPCs on product listing ads rose 15 percent.
Overall, product listing ads (PLAs) generated 60 percent of retailers’ Google search ad clicks. The increase from 55 percent click share in Q4 2017 represents the biggest quarter-over-quarter jump in more than four years, says Merkle. Non-brand PLA clicks also jumped in Q1, to 82 percent of retailers’ clicks.
Local Inventory Ads (LIA) click share also continues to rise for those participating in the program. On desktop, LIA generated 7 percent of clicks, up from just 1 percent a year ago. Mobile LIA clicks accounted for 15 percent of clicks, up slightly from 14 percent the previous year.
Click share for Showcase Shopping Ads represented 2.7 percent of mobile Google Shopping ad clicks, up from just 1.3 the previous quarter. On tablet, Showcase Shopping Ads drove 3.8 percent of Shopping clicks, up from 1.9 percent in Q4 2018.
Spending on text ads slumped to just 4 percent growth in Q1 2018, down from a steady increase of around 15 percent in the prior three quarters. Most advertisers saw text ad impressions fall or stay flat year over year. Non-brand CPCs on text ads rose 7 percent on average.
Meanwhile, brand CPC growth on Google remained high from the previous quarter after seeing negative growth for most of 2017. Average brand CPCs increased by 28 percent year over year, up from 23 percent in Q4 2017. Merkle says it has seen nothing in Google Auction Insights reports to indicate that higher CPCs have been caused by increased competition. The declines in brand CPCs seen last year possibly reflect Google’s changes to Ad Rank thresholds.
Merkle has also observed declining click share for ads in the third and fourth positions at the top of the search results. “These lower position ads had helped depress CPC growth, so as their contribution to clicks has decreased, it has helped drive CPCs higher,” writes Mark Ballard, Merkle director of research, who leads the report.
Looking at the use of audience targeting in AdWords campaigns, overall, audience targeted campaigns accounted for 34 percent of Google Search click share in Q1. The overall increase in click share reflects the steady rising trend of click share for RLSAs (remarketing lists for search ads). Customer Match and Similar Audiences account for just 3 percent click share each, and that has remained steady for several quarters.
Search ad spend across Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini (combined in this report) saw robust growth again in Q1, increasing 30 percent year over year. Clicks increased 11 percent and CPCs continued to rise, with 17 percent growth compared to a year ago.
Bing Product Ad spend continues to drive upward, increasing 64 percent year over year. Product Ad spend increased nearly 700 percent on phones and 41 percent on desktop. Click volume on Bing Product Ads increased 110 percent year over year. Overall, Product Ads click share hit 33 percent, and Product Ads now account for more than 50 percent of retailers’ non-brand clicks.
Text ad spend on Bing and Yahoo increased 24 percent in Q1 2018.
Phones drove 55 percent of Google clicks, 26 percent of Yahoo Gemini and 18 of Bing Ads search ad clicks. That’s a five-point increase for Bing Ads from last quarter, driven by mobile Product Ad clicks, says Merkle.


President Barack Obama is scheduled to speak about his plans for preschool and early childhood education live Thursday at 1:20 p.m. EST in Decatur, Ga. The White House will stream the speech live.
During his State of the Union address Tuesday, Obama said: "I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America." He singled out Georgia in his address, which made pre-K programs universal in 1995, reported Businessweek.The administration has since released the details of Obama's plan for early childhood education.


The resistance to imperialism, the global anti-war movement and in particular the British Stop the War Coalition have brought Blair to his present humiliating position.
He is no longer in control of when he leaves, no longer able to control the succession, no longer in control of his ministers and no longer able to make the barest claim to represent a majority in Britain.
The Lebanon war, which saw Blair’s utterly single-minded devotion to Bush and to Israel, was the final straw for many Labour MPs.
Some were politically revolted by the refusal to call for a ceasefire. Others were bitterly aware that this sharp reminder of Blair’s warmongering would prove disastrous at next May’s council, Scottish and Welsh elections - and perhaps at the general election to follow.
Blair will be remembered for the bloody disaster of Iraq above all else. He and Bush are responsible for 150,000 or more Iraqi civilians dead, for the bestial events at Abu Ghraib, for the creation of a global network of torture and imprisonment without trial, for Guantanamo Bay and for the announcement of a future of war without end.
But it is not just the war that marks Blair’s regime. The last few weeks summed it up.
In August Blair abased himself before Rupert Murdoch and his chief executives in California just as the Middle East was burning.
He returned to launch new broadsides against Muslims, blame the poor for their own poverty and to preside over a £22 billion NHS privatisation scheme.
Blair has created a Britain where the gulf between the rich and the rest of us have increased at turbo speed.
The most recent figures suggest that City of London bonuses were expected to rise by £21 billion this year.
Blair has followed that to the letter. The limit of any policy change has always been what the rich will accept.
The revolt by Labour MPs reflects a much broader revolt. In 1997 13.5 million people voted Labour. Last year that figure had fallen to 9.5 million.
The lost four million are Blair’s “achievement”.
Blair has torn apart his own party, trampled on what people believed it stood for and alienated vast swathes of Labour members and supporters.
Clare Short was right this week when she said that Blair’s rule had caused “long term damage”.
The task now is not just to celebrate Blair’s demise. It is to force him out now. For how many other disasters will he push through in the days left to him?
And, because his likely successors are just as committed to war, neo-liberalism and updating Trident nuclear weapons, we have to redouble our efforts against the war policy, against the favours to the rich and the assault on civil liberties.
The demonstration in Manchester on 23 September is now more vital than ever. It will signal we want Blair out now but that we also want a fundamentally different set of policies and a political alternative to Blair and those who went along with him.
It will be a crucial staging post in rallying those who want to fight for a better world.


The illustrious former Great Britain internationals are the latest players to join the prestigious roll of honour.
Loose forward Turner - who died aged 82 in 2015 - was captain of the all-conquering Wakefield Trinity team of the 1960s having started out at Hull KR.
He was part of Great Britain's World Cup-winning side of 1960 and later coached Castleford to Challenge Cup glory in 1969 before leading Leeds to the Championship three years later.
Fellow back-row Whiteley, 87, led Hull FC to two Wembley finals, as well as enjoying Ashes-winning success as a player and coach.
Gregory, meanwhile, was a multiple Challenge Cup winner with Widnes and Wigan and another famous Lions tourist.
Whiteley and Gregory will be joined by their families at the Rugby League Hall of Fame and RLIF Golden Boot dinner at Elland Road, Leeds, on Wednesday November 7.
It will also be attended by current Hall of Fame member Neil Fox MBE, Billy Boston MBE, Lewis Jones, Garry Schofield OBE and Malcolm Reilly OBE, as well as family representatives of Jim Sullivan and Mick Sullivan.
Chris Rostron, the Head of Rugby League Cares, said: “Hundreds of thousands of players have played Rugby League since 1895 and Johnny, Derek and Andy represent the best of the best.
“The three players had stellar careers and quite rightly deserve their place in Rugby League’s Pantheon alongside the existing 25 members of the Hall of Fame.
The Rugby League Hall of Fame is the highest honour any player can aspire to and has been awarded to just 28 players since the sport’s inception in 1895.
To qualify for membership of the Hall of Fame, a player must meet stringent criteria including a record of outstanding achievement at the very highest levels of the game; have a reputation that transcends the era in which he played; and made a contribution to the game that will last as long as rugby league is played.
Players are only considered for inclusion once they have been retired for 10 years; they must also have played at the highest level of Rugby League for a minimum of 10 years.
Members of the public are invited to help celebrate the induction of Johnny Whiteley, Derek Turner and Andy Gregory into the Rugby League Hall of Fame and RLIF Golden Boot Dinner, tickets for which are available priced £40.


PARIS (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy takes his campaign for greater global food price and currency stability to Washington next week when he seeks Barack Obama’s support for France’s goals as head of the Group of 20 powers.
Soaring food prices and riots in places like Algeria offer Sarkozy ammunition to press for more coordination between G20 governments to combat wild swings in vital commodity prices as well as exchange rates versus the long-dominant U.S. dollar.
The French president wants to use his run at the G20 helm in 2011 to start, if not finish, reforms of the monetary system at a time when many countries are tempted to let their currency drop to promote exports and growth after the worst downturn since World War Two, even if that can be at each others’ expense.
Paris is also pressing for international efforts to impose greater transparency in commodity markets trading and pricing, and for tougher regulation of trading in commodity derivatives along the lines pursued for other investment derivatives in the wake of the financial markets crisis that preceded the economic downturn of 2008-2009, and the government debt crisis now.
“As we sense it, more multilateralism is the best answer to the increased instability in the world,” a Sarkozy adviser said of a meeting happening on Monday in Washington, where Sarkozy will be accompanied by wife and ex-model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as well as his finance and defense ministers.
“We want to broach this thinking with the Americans and see if they are willing to join in such an approach, whereafter we can produce more precise proposals,” said the advisor, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.
South Korea, which has just handed the rotating presidency of the G20 to France, said on Friday working-level meetings had already begun on food price rises that have revived fears of a repeat of the 2008 food crisis.
The problem is moving up the political agenda in Asia, where China has recently sold corn, sugar, rice and other commodities out of state reserves to cool prices.
In North Africa, hundreds of youths clashed with police over food prices and chronic unemployment in several cities this week, including in the capital.
Some of the concrete ideas being considered for G20 talks include: obliging commodity investors to trade through exchanges rather than less transparent over-the-counter transactions and pressing for better sharing of data and crop forecasting.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon underlined the point this week when he told a conference in Paris one of France’s top G20 priorities was to find a collective response to “excessive volatility” in commodity prices, notably for food and energy.
The French president who played a key role in cooordinating a European response in the earlier stages of the financial crisis in his own part of the world, is also keen to make some headway as G20 presidency on his long-held view that the time has come to wean the world off decades of dollar-dependence.
“For us this is not about reducing the dollar’s role. We want the dollar to continue to play a major role but exchange rate forces are inexorably set to change, which brings with it phases of major financial tension and great instability,” said the Sarkozy adviser.
With the rise of the likes of G20 members China and Brazil, Sarkozy is seeking to rally the group as a whole to the idea of a more diversified monetary system after decades where the U.S. dollar has served as the world’s reserve currency and a major unit of international trade settlement.
“We want to encourage the international development of other currencies, such as the yuan,” said the adviser.
Brazil has been blazing a trail to curb speculation and a rise in its own currency. Its central bank announced further measures this week that increases banks’ reserve requirements when betting that the real will strengthen against the dollar.
Obama is expected to visit France in May for a meeting of the G8, which includes the wealthy Western countries of the G20 economic forum plus Russia, but is shifting toward a focus more centered on foreign policy discussion since the G20 became the forum of preference for fighting the global economic crisis.
White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said Sarkozy and Obama would also confer on that front during their Monday meeting in Washington.


Cavaliers guard and ex-Knick J.R. Smith earned his one-game suspension from the team by throwing a bowl of soup at assistant coach Damon Jones, according to a report.
ESPN reported on Friday that the "conduct detrimental to the team" the Cavs announced before Thursday's 108-97 loss to the 76ers was indeed broth-based.
Smith will return to practice on Friday and resume game action Saturday night when the Cavs host the Nuggets, per the report.
Jones, a former Cleveland guard, has been with the Cavs as a coach since 2014 after working his way up from the franchise's G-League squad.
Cavs head coach Tyronn Lue said he had "a little discussion" with Smith on Friday but didn't go into any details, per ESPN.
Lue filled Smith's shooting guard slot with Rodney Hood, who bucketed five of his 14 attempts and finished with 11 points, five rebounds and five assists in the defeat.
Smith, who has missed only one other game with the Cavs this season, is averaging 8.3 points on 39.2 percent shooting from the field and 36.3 percent from three-point range this year.
The 14-year NBA veteran rejoins Cleveland as the team continues to try to hold off the Wizards, who sit a half-game behind the third-seeded Cavs in the Eastern Conference.


The Net may have spawned a New Economy, but it's shown less success with New Excuses. Last month, the lawyer for a teenager accused of slinging online threats argued that the youth had a Net addiction. The novel argument went that virtual threats in a virtual world aren't worth squat. But even the plaintiff couldn't stomach that line of defense. Yesterday, he pleaded guilty to the threats in a Denver courtroom.
Microsoft Corp. may be sighing with relief over the hacks. Buried by the avalanche of media coverage over the break-ins is the news of yet another antitrust investigation involving Redmond. This time it's European Union officials who are peering into Microsoft's doings - they're investigating anticompetitive charges against Windows 2000.
In morning-after coverage of the New Hampshire primary, the cyber-savvy campaign of Republican victor John McCain came under scrutiny, as did the media's own use of the Net in covering the Granite State's doings. It turns out that readers, like the electorate of which they are a part, aren't always the winners.
Today's presidential primary in New Hampshire isn't the only vote-seeking campaign being waged. In the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., both sides have mounted a get-out-the-vote rally in the form of legal briefs.
Did it seem like too many days had passed since someone in the music industry filed a Net-related lawsuit? If so, everyone can relax. The National Association of Recording Merchandisers got in the groove on Monday with a lawsuit against Sony Music Entertainment. The music retailers want to bar Sony from tucking hyperlinks to the company's online music stores into its enhanced CDs.
Dell Computer Corp. will end this quarter with its revenue off by $800 million, but it's not the company's fault. As told by Dell, and faithfully repeated by the media, the company lost $300 million due to a dried-up chip supply and another $500 million to nasty Y2K slowdowns.
There's nothing more boring than a lawsuit that becomes a battle of the briefs. So when the Associated Press reported that the Ohio attorney general wasn't entirely sold on the idea of a Microsoft breakup, the press was off and running on the news - and on a hunt for other defectors, among the 18 other states that are plaintiffs in the antitrust suit.
There's nothing like a few words of cynicism to get a Grokker pumped up.
Newsweeklies lucked out with the AOL-Time Warner Inc. deal. Nearly two weeks after the union was announced, the debate du jour remains how much this sucker's stock is worth. And with that unanswerable question bound to linger for months and years, the weeklies chimed in with their two cents' worth.
As if there wasn't enough hot air in the business-to-business market, investment firm Thomas Weisel Partners hosted a gathering this week in Boston to inject a little more.
Jim Barksdale might have made his zillions at the helm of companies based on the West Coast, but when it came time to give away some of his money, he gave the early word to the East Coast media.
One reason journalists are so fascinated with IPO money is that most of them won't ever get near a penny of it. Then again, IPO features in Vanity Fair and Money prove that plenty of people who stand closer to the IPO pipeline won't be raking in the really dazzling cash, either.


CafeChavalos is finally open.We opted not to have a big bash opening until we have finessed our service and food preparation to the highest caliber. I think we are finally there.
The café is located on the corner of Calles Martirio and Arsenal and open to the public at 6 p.m. Fridays through Mondays.
Reservations are not required but are helpful (852-0210).
It is open for special groups – tours, brigades, professional associations – on any night of the week. Reservations are needed for this, of course.
Unlike the first CafeChavalos, the restaurant now serves a full menu that includes vegetarian choices along with meat and fish entrees. The Chavalos’ red snapper baked in banana leaves and the chiles rellenos are especially interesting to the patrons.
Chocolate Mombacho and Tri Limon (a dessert of limoncello, lemon pudding in a scooped lemon half, and a lemon biscotti) are tied for first-place dessert favorites.
In a move to encourage the “greening of Granada,” they have eliminated the sale of plastic bottled water and instead offer purified ice water in ceramic pitchers.
A documentary film entitled “CafeChavalos” has just passed through the final editing stage and is being entered into major film festivals.We’re looking forward to its premiere in Granada in the near future. More on this when we receive the news!
Drop by for dinner soon!


She was not aware of any complaints.
Bill Clinton came to Fresno Monday as part of a campaign swing through the state for his wife Hillary, ahead of the state’s June 7 primary election. As part of the event, university President Joseph Castro spoke.
The university’s website says the Satellite Student Union can be rented for $150 per hour, with a two-hour minimum, or $1800 for all day. In addition, technicians are $13 per hour, and custodial services a minimum of $150.
It’s unclear what the final bill was for the Clinton campaign, but the event took several hours, and at least one technician is required to be in the building at all times.


The Glenbard Parent Series, Equity Student Achievement Committee (ESAC) and Families of African American Students United for Excellence (FUSE) will present Find Your Future at College on Thursday, Dec. 6.
High school is a crucial time for students to grow intellectually and personally and to prepare for college and career. This presentation will assist students and their parents in this important journey. Specialists in the field will discuss what families can expect from each stage of the college admissions process. Panelists will discuss the role of grades, test scores, work experience, financial aid and the significance of an upward trajectory. Raquel Wilson, Glenbard District 87 coordinator for equity and Directions program, joins a panel of educational leaders and students who will inspire and empower all students to reach their goals and thrive.
A light dinner will be served, and all family members are invited to attend. Babysitting will be provided, as well as translation for Spanish-speaking participants.
The program will begin at 6 p.m. Dec. 6 at the Marquardt School District 15 administration center, 1860 Glen Ellyn Road in Glendale Heights.
The mission of FUSE is to provide Glenbard families with the tools, resources and education to equip students for success.
GPS is generously sponsored by the Cebrin Goodman Center, Cooperative Association for Special Education (CASE), College of DuPage, DuPage Medical Group, Emmy Gaffey Foundation, Glenbard Early Childhood Collaborative, Holiday Inn/Carol Stream, Prevention Leadership Team of the DuPage County Health Department and Birth to 5 Community Coalition District 93.
For further information, visit glenbardgps.org or contact Gilda Ross, Glenbard District 87 student and community projects coordinator, at 630-942-7668 or gilda_ross@glenbard.org.


EL SEGUNDO — Like everyone else who grew up captivated by the sound of the thump, thump, thump of a basketball on a court, Lakers coach Phil Jackson and guard Kobe Bryant said they mourned the passing of the legendary John Wooden on Friday.
“I just stand in awe of the guy,” Jackson said Saturday.
“As a young basketball player growing up and watching the 1962 Bruins, the ’63 Bruins, the era I came out of high school, watching this team, this pesky team of 6-foot-5 guys roll out this great defense they had, with the speed they played at, that was my first awareness of John Wooden,” Jackson added.
Jackson said he learned more about Wooden later in life. Tex Winter, Jackson’s longtime assistant with the Lakers and the Chicago Bulls, was a rival of Wooden’s UCLA teams while coaching at Kansas State.
“Tex always tells the story,” Jackson said. “His team was ahead by four points going into the last stretch of the ballgame. There’s a blizzard out in Kansas. The game was in Kansas City, which is close to Manhattan, Kan., where Kansas State is located.
“And then the UCLA girls showed up, the cheerleaders led the Bruins on to victory. (Winter) said, `I think the referees got enamored with the cheerleaders, all these beautiful California girls.’ So that’s a 40- or 50-year-old vision of a man.
Bryant was born three years after Wooden retired from UCLA in 1975, and he never attended college, jumping from high school to the NBA in 1996.
But he was well aware of the coach’s place in college basketball history.
“I think if you talk to any of his players, the thing that’s consistent is that he made them better people,” Bryant said.
Bryant recalled they spoke for 30 minutes after Chick Hearn’s funeral in 2002, mostly about the Lakers in the wake of their third consecutive championship.


Benzinga's Week Ahead: Can Facebook, Apple Earnings Rescue The Stock Market?
Below is a list of notable corporate events for the week beginning October 29. Note, this list is not comprehensive and all dates are subject to change. All times are ET.
API U.S. crude oil inventories at 4:30 p.m.
RedHill Biopharma Ltd (NASDAQ: RDHL) holds analyst/investor webcast on TALICIA at 8:30 a.m.
Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) holds its “More In The Making” Event, beginning 10:30 a.m.


In life Brian Clough was never at a loss for words, and not even death has been sufficient to shut him up. Clough recently featured in Steven Lowe's play The Spirit of the Man at Nottingham Playhouse, and his starring role in David Peace's novel confirms that writers are queuing up to get inside the mind of Old Big 'Ead. Good job there's plenty of room. Peace has the good sense to realise that 300 pages of Clough in barrel-thumping mode would be fairly intolerable, and instead chooses to focus on the manager's ignominious 44-day tenure at Leeds United. The novel makes you wonder how it lasted quite that long. Clough loathed Leeds - he famously told the players they ought to throw their championship medals in the bin as they had been won unfairly - and his attempt to instil "a little bit more warmth, a little bit more honesty, a little bit more me" in a taciturn squad of cloggers was doomed from the outset. The story unfolds with the grim inevitability of hubris inviting humiliation - if Euripides had ever tried ghosting football memoirs he could not have done it better.
In the long hot summer of 1976, Evan, a would-be prog rock guitarist, is offered a job in a residential care-home. Though he doesn't feel particularly attractive in a navy nylon overall "which made a sad whistling sound whenever he moved", he meets the gawky gap-year student Adrea (without an "n") and their fate is sealed when their eyes meet over a bloated corpse. Broady depicts the elderly with just the right mixture of grotesquerie and compassion: "they followed in a line, gentle grey and wrinkled, holding on to each other's trailing stocking ends like circus elephants." But he's even better at evoking hot, sputum-flecked nights at London's Roundhouse, where Evan and Adrea stumble across a compelling new phenomenon called punk. Worth the price of admission for the image of Joey Ramone, so puny "the microphone stand seemed to be throwing him around" and the eye-witness account of Patti Smith howling "I'm so goddamned young!" on her UK debut. "An hour ago Evan would have smirked at this, especially as her T-shirt's flapping sleeves revealed her armpit's wattled skin. But now he accepted that being young had nothing to do with age."
In Manhattan at the turn of 21st century, three friends share the anxiety of having entered their thirties without having yet made their mark. Of the three, only Marina grew up in the city, her father having definitively made his own mark there as a crusading journalist - a hard act to follow. Danielle and Julius have come from Nowheresville to remake themselves as flamboyant successes, but Julius's secret life as a temp, and his squalid apartment, show the reality of survival. Then Marina's cousin Bootie arrives, raw, unshaped, with the reckless zeal of a Dostoevsky hero. The Jamesian ambitions of this long, close-focus novel, with its jolting, many-claused sentences, do not prevent it from being a thoroughly absorbing read, as soapy and entertaining as something with fewer pretensions to grandeur. The steps of good fortune and calamity rise and fall like a ziggurat, until all the characters are floored by horror on a greater scale than any of them ever imagined. Humorous, worldly, alive to both the kitsch and the glamour of New York City, this beautifully structured novel skewers moral vacuity and hypocrisy with a sureness of touch that is deeply satisfying.
Canvey Island in Essex was reclaimed from the sea in the 17th century, but in January 1953 the sea tried to take it back again. Dozens of people died in the terrible floods, including, in this fictionalised account, Lily Turner, mother of a small boy who almost drowns too but survives because he loses his grip on his mother's hand. Martin's life is shaped by the tragedy. He grows up obsessed with the idea of holding back the sea, measuring it, testing it, fighting it. And in his emotional life, he is always afraid that fate may surge in and drag away anyone he is foolish enough to love as much as his mother. Seven characters pass the narrative between them to tell their family's story. They trace a linear progression through the last half of the 20th century, knitting their own lives into the fabric of history: Churchill's funeral, Aldermaston, cup finals, Greenham Common, and on through Thatcherism to the near present. All the touchstones of nostalgia are dropped in: fruit salads, Lambretta scooters, Evening in Paris perfume, Black Forest gateau and Blue Nun wine. This material was perhaps more memorably handled by Jonathan Coe in The Rotters' Club, but Runcie advances through the decades with great skill.
Journalist Simon Beckett turned his hand to crime fiction after a visit to the Body Farm in Tennessee, a groundbreaking facility where donated bodies are left to decay in various terrains, so that forensic anthropologists can study insect activity to ascertain time of death. He demonstrates all he learned there in the opening chapter, where two schoolboys wandering through the Norfolk Broads discover the body of a woman via the "umbilical of death" left by a trail of maggots. The effect this has on the boys, and the rest of their community in the isolated village of Manham, are seen through the eyes of "incomer" David Hunter, who has recently taken up work here as a doctor to flee his haunted past. Naturally, the past just won't stay buried. Hunter is a forensic anthropologist and, when the local police realise this, he is dragged back into helping them. It is at this point that all promise of originality slowly dissolves into a plot heaving with horror and crime clichés - a psychopath at large, Hunter assailed by surly yokels and a righteous reverend, a pub called the Black Lamb and a dénouement that requires the immediate services of Hammer studios. One for the gorehounds.


Are you a bear market CIO?
From 2005 to 2008, my approach to business development was simple. I would walk into my office, put my feet up on my desk, throw open the window and smile as bluebirds flew in with juicy search projects in their beaks. I was a bull market executive recruiter.
Reach beyond IT. From human resources to customer service to call center operations, the majority of today's CIOs (nearly two-thirds of you, according to CIO magazine's 2009 State of the CIO Survey) have taken on at least one major responsibility beyond IT. If you have not, the bear market should provide you with significant opportunity to do so. Not only will this help you find new ways to leverage IT during these tough times, it will also help you to raise your own visibility as an enterprise leader.
But clean up your own shop first. The CIO survey reported that 70 percent of CIOs believe that IT is considered an integral business partner and is beloved by the company. But it's not all a lovefest. In fact, 46 percent of CEOs gave IT marks of "fair" or "poor" when it comes to improving the quality of products or processes, according to the survey.
"In tough economies, 'one must be purer than Caesar's wife,'" says Greg Buoncontri, EVP and CIO of mail services company Pitney Bowes. "You cannot offer assistance in other areas unless you've got your own function in order."
CEOs are deciding which of their executives are keepers. Now is not the time to take your delivery record for granted. Know your numbers. Any bull market CIO knows "IT as a percentage of revenue" or "IT's share of corporate expenses," but in a bear market, aggregate numbers are not enough.


SAN ANTONIO — The Texas economy is cruising along just fine despite Hurricane Harvey's wrath, swirling political questions about NAFTA and a crackdown on immigration, the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve said Thursday.
"The dynamics of the Texas economy are pretty darn good," Robert Kaplan said during his keynote conversation at the Texas Business Leadership Council's fall meeting.
Harvey would cost the state between $75 billion and $100 billion, he said, and the state is expected to temporarily lose between 55,000 and 75,000 jobs in the areas affected by the natural disaster. But Kaplan said he expects those jobs to return as recovery continues, leaving intact the Dallas Federal Reserve's 2.6 percent job growth forecast.
Kaplan carefully avoided politics in his speech but stressed the importance of NAFTA to Texas' economy. His words came just days after renegotiation talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement ended with all sides agreeing to continue the discussion in 2018 after reaching an impasse.
"The trade relation with Mexico has been critical to Texas," Kaplan said, adding that Mexico is the state's top trade partner and that seeing the United States, Mexico and Canada as a regional bloc is beneficial to the country's economy.
"It is our best judgment that those relationships, which have taken many years to build, have allowed U.S. companies to stay here, be competitive, add jobs," he said. "If we didn't have that trade relationship with Mexico, it's our best judgment at the Dallas fed that we would lose some of those businesses and some of those jobs, most likely to Asia."
Kaplan also tread lightly on the subject of immigration, pointing to immigrant integration as a way to replenish and grow the workforce.
"You have to recognize that we have a workforce growth population challenge already," he said, "and that's the context with which we should be having this discussion."


It's lonely at the top.
Single player mods are in the clear.
Live your dream of becoming a gunrunner.
Hold me closer, tiny racers.
Yes, it appears that building is a jump.
Don't ask why, just go play.
Rockstar North's Imran Sarwar has a lot to say about what's coming in Freemode Events.
Tired of being mowed down by wealthy 'GTA Online' players in their solid gold armed and armored pickup trucks?


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KTEN's viewers were concerns about our constitutional right to bear arms and restrictions on smokers in restaurants. Here's a sampling of what you had to say.
"Hi. This is Tommy, calling from Ada, and I would just like to say that Obama is going to be one of this country's greatest presidents, and he is not going to put a ban on assault rifles. I believe in the second amendment. It's there to protect us. It was put into place by our forefathers, and it will not be taken away."
"This is H.D. Williams, here in Denison, and I think they ought to allow people to smoke in a smoking room with no ventilation. No one allowed in that room under 18 years of old - of age - excuse me. Let 'em smoke until they drop."
"Yes, this is Jeanette, and I'm from Sherman, Texas. And I don't think it's right for them to cut out smoking and everything, because people that don't smoke... then they have the most advantage of everything. And people that do smoke, they won't be able to smoke, and that's not fair."
"This is Jessie, and I live in Allen, Oklahoma. Where is our freedom? What did all our soldiers die for? All of our freedoms are being taken aware. We can't smoke here, we can't smoke there. We can't do this, we can't do that. Wear your seatbelts in your car. Wear your helmets when you're riding bicycles. Blah, blah, blah. Every time we turn around, they're telling us to do one more thing. Where's our freedom?"
Are you passionate about a subject?
Call the KTEN Sound Off Line and let us know how you feel. The number is 903 337-4041.
We'll air some of your comments, too.


The Connected Screens Tracker survey monitors consumer adoption and usage of relevant media technology with a focus on connected screens. Results, data and insights are available exclusively within the Mediatel Connected tool.
The tracker approaches media consumption from the perspective of the consumers themselves, giving a user-centric view of how adoption of screens and platform technology is driving high level media usage.
The Connected Screens Tracker began first fieldwork in September 2014, with first data live in January 2015.
Two waves per year, each spread evenly across a six-month period, allowing year-long tracking of consumer trends.
Fieldwork is conducted by our fieldwork partner Alligator research (http://alligator-research.com/) from their representative access panel of UK consumers.
The survey design has been developed in conjunction with the independent consultant Richard Marks of Research The Media, a respected name in UK and international media research with a 27 year track record in media research.


Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached Tokyo on Saturday evening on a three-day tour to attend the 13th Annual India-Japan Bilateral Summit.
Mr Modi will attend an informal lunch hosted by his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe in the Yamanashi Prefecture tomorrow. He is also scheduled to visit the automation and robotic firm FANUC in the industrial city facing Mount Fuji.
Later, Mr Modi will also attend a private dinner hosted by Mr Abe at his second home in Yamanashi. Both the leaders will travel by train to Tokyo the same night.
The Prime Minister’s official engagements will begin on Monday. Mr Modi will be accorded the ceremonial welcome by the Japanese Prime Minister Mr Shinzo Abe on the same day.
Delegation level talks and joint statements will follow.


CLSA has maintained its buy call on Tata Motors for target price of Rs 600 per share. CLSA says that stock pricing is in an extremely pessimistic scenario and JLR has multiple buffers in China. CLSA expects price to improve once volume growth recovers.


Lynden Christian gets a chance to bounce back when it hosts La Conner in a nonconference game at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 16, at home.
WP: Brooke Writer (n/a). LP: Allison Smit (2-5). Highlights: Lynden Christian: Allison Smit 2-3, 2 2b, RBI; Avery Dykstra 2-3, 2b, RBI, R.


William Kratman, 50, was arrested for allegedly threatening another driver with a hammer in a road rage incident on June 20, 2018 in Nashua, New Hampshire.
A man who allegedly threatened another person with a hammer in a road rage incident was arrested Friday in Nashua, New Hampshire.
On June 20, Nashua police responded to a call of a road rage incident at Alec’s Shoe Store that resulted in one of the involved parties being struck by the other's car.
Investigators spoke with both parties involved and determined that William Kratman, 50, was the aggressor. Officials issued an arrest warrant for Kratman and charged him with criminal threatening with a deadly weapon.
Kratman was bailed on $2,000 cash and was released. He faces up to seven years in prison for the charge. The suspect will be arraigned on Aug. 23 at the Hillsborough County Superior Court South in New Hampshire. It's unclear if he has an attorney.
Anyone who witnessed the road rage or who has information on the incident is asked to contact the Nashua Police Department’s Crime Line at 603-589-1665.


Robert Griffin III may fancy himself the best quarterback in the NFL, but he sure as heck didn’t look like it on Thursday night while constantly peeling himself off the turf at FedEx Field.
Griffin looked gun shy as he was consistently battered by the Detroit Lions in Washington’s second preseason game. He was hit six times on eight dropbacks, sacked three times and fumbled twice.
Griffin left with a shoulder stinger and also was tested for a concussion, so we hope he didn’t suffer one.
You can blame the offensive line plenty for RG3 getting drilled, but a good part of this is still on Griffin. He is responsible for calling plays and assigning protections, and he has the ability to slip in and out of the pocket to avoid rushes. Oh yeah, he can also get rid of the ball before he gets hit if he chooses to.
Neither Colt McCoy nor Kirk Cousins were sacked during their action, and both completed far more passes and led touchdown drives. RG3 is clearly uncomfortable, lost, and he looks like a guy who forgot how to function as a quarterback. In the past he used to be able to scramble when in trouble, and he’s no longer doing (or relying) on that. That’s really taking a toll.


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The EU upgrade offer is more modest than proposals made last year by Israel which included summits of EU and Israeli leaders.
European Union states will say on Monday they are ready to deepen ties with Israel but will urge the Jewish state to make progress on Middle East peace, diplomats said.
EU foreign ministers are expected to give the green light to the upgrade at talks in Luxembourg, hours before a scheduled meeting there with Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni.
Diplomats said EU member states had agreed a text on their readiness to enhance ties with Israel in social policy, access to the EU market and regulatory issues, including reference to the need for progress in peace steps with the Palestinians.
The wording of any linkage between moves to deepen ties and progress in the peace process was not immediately available.
The EU upgrade offer is more modest than proposals made last year by Israel which included summits of EU and Israeli leaders, and meetings with EU sectoral ministers on top of the current annual session at foreign minister level.
Israel currently has a seven-year-old association agreement with the 27-member bloc setting out a schedule of political meetings, regulating trade ties and areas of cooperation from internal security to education.
The move comes despite increased criticism from the EU and the United States of Jewish settlement expansions in the occupied territories. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned on Sunday it could hurt Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad wrote to Brussels last month urging the EU not to boost relations with Israel, whose settlements he said were a flagrant disregard of Palestinian rights.


A caretaker and her boyfriend have been accused of stealing checks from a 93-year-old disabled Hermosa Beach woman and cashing them at a business.
Shekesha Shenea Andrews, 31, and Perry Lewis Jr., 47, made off with less than $500 from the woman’s account but took advantage of her condition, police said.
Andrews, who was employed with a caregiver company, went to work in the elderly woman’s home as a live-in attendant.
“The victim is 93 years old and disabled to the point of being confined to a wheelchair in the downstairs portion of her two-story home,” Wolcott said.
As part of the company’s service, a supervisor recently visited the house to write checks to pay the woman’s bills.
The supervisor paid them from the woman’s checkbook.
Five checks were missing. The supervisor contacted Hermosa Beach police.
Detectives determined the checks were cashed at a supermarket. The transactions were videotaped by a surveillance camera.
Andrews and her boyfriend, Lewis, were in the video, Wolcott said.
Detectives arrested the pair Jan. 8. The Los Angeles residents remain in custody in county jail on $115,000 bail.
Prosecutors charged Andrews with first-degree burglary with a person present, theft from an elderly or dependent adult by a caretaker and second-degree commercial burglary.
“Fortunately, the supervisor for the company caught it and recognized what happened,” Wolcott said.
In addition to the theft, Andrews sneaked Lewis into the woman’s home to “entertain him in the upstairs portion of the home” while the elderly woman was downstairs, Wolcott said.
Police did not identify the woman’s employer.


Call it the Internet of Things, call it the smart home, call it a sign of the imminent robot takeover. Whatever it is, it's coming to connect your light bulbs, locks, thermostats, fridges, and everything else, to your phone and to the Internet. And Alex Hawkinson, CEO of SmartThings, is pretty sure he's going to be right smack in the middle of it all.
Today, at the IFA conference in Berlin, Hawkinson announced the second version of the SmartThings platform. It comes with a new hub, new devices, a new app, and new tools for developers to connect to the SmartThings ecosystem. This is a big moment for the company, one Hawkinson calls "the big scale-up."
The difference between SmartThings and its ever-increasing list of competitors—you may have heard of a few of them, like Google and Apple and Wink and Amazon and on and on and on—is that SmartThings is totally committed to being open to everyone. Hawkinson says over and over that he didn't sell to Samsung to become a HomeKit competitor, to make things that would only work if you use Samsung lightbulbs and Samsung washing machines. "The initial vision is still the same," he says. "Somebody's got to make it easy enough for everyday people, and the right move here is a totally open platform." Sure, you'll start to see SmartThings built into a lot of Samsung products soon, but Hawkinson is hell-bent on remaining the Switzerland of the smart home world.
"It's been a year since the acquisition," Hawkinson reminds me. "Since we bought Samsung, in an incredible reverse-dilutive acquisition." He's kidding, of course, though it was about a year ago that Samsung bought Hawkinson's smart home company for a reported $200 million. SmartThings has been quiet since the acquisition, working to upgrade its systems and integrate into the hulking behemoth that is Samsung. All while working on a complete redesign of its whole product.
SmartThings also got a new office in the Samsung deal—a huge, ornate space in Palo Alto that its new parent company evidently just wasn't using. Just inside the front door, they've rigged up a kitchen full of connected gadgets, which Hawkinson manipulates alternately from a Samsung Galaxy Note 5 (synergy!) and an iPhone 6. He also uses an Amazon Echo at one point, which now supports SmartThings.
Part of SmartThings' goal was to make connecting your home easier than ever. Starting in early October, you'll be able to buy a home monitoring kit, which comes with a hub and a handful of sensors that will get you a long way toward a basic home-security, is-my-house-still-standing setup. Stick a motion sensor on the door, a moisture sensor near the water heater, plug in the hub, and you're done.
Hawkinson imagines a world where you might buy a separate hub for doing really deep stuff, with even more power and flexibility.
The new hub is the most powerful piece of the equation. It's dramatically more powerful, and can now run offline as well, meaning if you lose power your home can still execute on its commands. If you have your water set to turn off when the temperature gets below freezing, and Comcast craps out at just the wrong moment, you'll still be OK. And thanks to the AA batteries inside the hub that Hawkinson says will run for ten hours. It supports video for the first time, partnering with Samsung's home monitoring camera and others to show you clips when something happens you should see. It's not like, say, the Nest cam, where you can access footage from any time; this, like all SmartThings products, just waits to tell you when something's happening.
The companion app has been totally redesigned to let you control things by room, or by need, instead of having to dig through each and every sensor individually. Now, you can quickly check in on your garage, and you'll know all in one glance that everything's OK. It turns out that's what most people want from their connected home: just to know if everything's OK. If you do want to get deeper and nerdier about it all—which Hawkinson says is a small but growing group of people—you can program complicated macros in the app so that the whole environment can change automatically with your every action.
Developers can make these, too, and they can even create mini-apps within the SmartThings app that give you more granular control over a portion of your home. Part of SmartThings' goal, and part of Hawkinson's challenge, is giving developers as many tools as possible without making the whole thing too complicated for regular people.
On one hand, the company's wholeheartedly embraced Github, basically turning SmartThings into a hacker platform. Hawkinson imagines a world where you might buy a separate hub for doing really deep stuff, with even more power and flexibility. "Call it, I don't know, Super Smart Things." (He just came up with that, and he likes it.) On the other, its certification program has selected 200 devices that it swears will work with SmartThings straight out of the box. And unlike, say, Apple's HomeKit, SmartThings doesn't actually make getting that sticker very hard.
"Some of these are Wi-Fi devices," Hawkinson says. "Some are Zigbee, some are Z-Wave. In the future, it's Thread, it's whatever. We tried to just say, you don't have to worry about it because we'll support anything that has this stamp on it." He can't support HomeKit, probably ever, which annoys him—he says Apple has security requirements that are both complicated and unnecessary, and he can't be as open and inviting as he wants to be with so many extra requirements. But everything else might be fair game.
There are two camps in the smart-home game right now. On one side, companies like Google and Apple, which are inventing new standards and throwing their weight around to get everyone's support. But then there's SmartThings, along with companies like Wink, which just say "sure, we'll support everything." Of those, none have the power and distribution SmartThings assured itself by joining rank with Samsung. As Hawkinson stood in the faux kitchen, turning on the lights, triggering a moisture sensor that shut off the water, turning a horribly annoying alarm on and off, I found myself thinking about what a company like Samsung offers a company like SmartThings. Marketing budget, for sure. Factories and manufacturing efficiencies, too.
But then, sitting in the conference room in their gorgeously vintage office, Hawkinson points at the TV on the wall. A Samsung, of course. "We can embed our hub in other things now, and there's been some work to make that happen," he says. "Where you buy an X," and here he points at the TV again, "and it is a hub. And you turn it on, and it's like oh, it's SmartThings enabled. That's cool!" Samsung makes a few of the things we'd currently think of as smart-home devices, but it also makes a ridiculous number of connected things. Refrigerators, TVs, dishwashers, you name it—every year, Samsung's cavernous CES booth becomes more and more like the world's smartest home.
Eventually, Hawkinson figures, SmartThings won't need to make hardware. Samsung is pretty good at that. So he'll get to focus on keeping the platform open, and encouraging people to build for it. His pitch is so compelling: support anything you want, build it any way you want, just build it right and we'll make sure it works.
He's thinking a lot about pool sensors right now. He just bought a new house, with a pool, and is worried about his 5-year-old. "It's not like Samsung or Apple or Google are going to build a pool sensor anytime soon," he says. "Because it's a sliver of the market. But it's a really relevant part of the market, too." His job, then, is to give someone everything they need so they can just build a sensor and plug it in.
"We want to be the easiest way for normal people to turn their home into a smart home," Hawkinson says. He has a soft spot for the hacker stuff, though, showing me funny macros he's trying to set up to turn off the TV when his wife opens the garage door, so that the kids won't get in trouble for watching too much. He's focused on moving in both directions—easy and powerful—and giving all the tools to everyone he possible can.
Just for good measure, a few days later, someone purchased supersmartthings.com. Now it redirects to the SmartThings website.


Esperansa Morales, from Klamath falls, is the first female to cross the finish line at the Pear Blossom 10 mile run.
MEDFORD, Ore.,-10-year-old Esperansa Morales crossed the finish line with a time of 1 hour and 3 minutes. She's from Klamath Falls and says she's only been training for a month or two.
"In the beginning I had to start hard in order to get a good place. And it's tough but it's all about the mental game and the physical game," says Morales.
She told NewsWatch 12 that if she didn't win, she was ready to try again next year.
The first place male to cross the finish line was 26-year-old Tyler Vandyke. He had a final time of 54 minutes and 24 seconds. This wasn't Vandykes first run, he says he was ran in a 65 mile race before. He's been running since college.