text,summary
"Update at 10:49 p.m. ET

Rep. Michele Bachmann took aim at President Obama after his State of the Union Address, chiding him for failing to find solutions to help the ailing economy.

Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican thinking about running for president, delivered her own response to Obama's speech to the Tea Party Express, one of the more active small-government groups in the 2010 elections.

Armed with statistics, Bachmann said there was ""an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt"" during Obama's first two years in the White House.

She called on Obama to sign a balanced-budget amendment, create an ""all of the above"" energy policy to reduce dependence on foreign oil, and not enact legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions, known as ""cap and trade.""

Bachmann also urged Obama to turn back ""132 regulations put in place in the last two years"" and to support ""free market"" solutions to the nation's rising health care costs.

""Thanks to all of you, there's reason to hope that real spending cuts are coming,"" the congresswoman said. ""I believe that we are in the early days of a history-making turn here in the House of Representatives.""

She delivered her speech in front of a screen showing pictures of the Constitution and of American flags being raised at Iwo Jima during World War II.

Bachmann told reporters on Monday that she's not in ""competition"" with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who was officially tapped to speak to a national televised audience after Obama's address.

A lawmaker in her third term, Bachmann has also released her own proposed list of $430 million in budget cuts. She was defended earlier today by another Tea Party favorite: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Paul, speaking on CNN this morning, said Bachmann's speech isn't any different from other Republicans who will give their opinions when Obama steps away from the microphone in the House chambers.

""I think one main Republican message, but other voices as well,"" he said.

See photos of: Barack Obama

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor

. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to

. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to",Bachmann offers economic plans after Obama's speech  - The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency
"ACWORTH, Ga. – Divers have been searching for a 68-year-old man in a wheelchair who fell into a north Georgia lake while getting off a boat.

Authorities told Atlanta TV station Fox 5 that rescue crews have been searching Lake Allatoona since Saturday, when the man fell into the water.

Authorities say Tommy Moore of Plainfield, Ind., was at the lake to attend a family reunion when he fell in.

Sgt. Mike Barr of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources says he was getting off a large boat to return to a dock and the boat separated from the dock.

Barr says there were about 20 people on the boat, and two of them jumped in immediately but weren't able to find Moore.",Divers have been searching for a 68-year-old man in a wheelchair who fell into a north Georgia lake while getting off a boat.
"Fox News hosted a town hall with Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Detroit on March 7. The candidates were asked questions about abortion, poverty and trade policy. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

Hillary Clinton never looked comfortable at Monday’s town hall event in Detroit, her first appearance on the Fox News Channel in almost two years. She stood ramrod-straight through much of her half-hour session with moderator Bret Baier, and her exclamation at the end — “Oh, my gosh, it went by so fast!” — was thoroughly unconvincing. It had clearly been a grind.

But the Democratic presidential front-runner and her supporters should be glad she participated for what I assume is the very reason she was reluctant to do so: Fox pressed Clinton on issues that are important to many conservatives and managed to throw her off-script. That might sound like a bad thing for her, but the results were actually some of her best, most substantive responses of the campaign.

Baier challenged Clinton to explain her position on abortion, something no moderator in any of the seven Democratic debates has done.

[Marco Rubio is right: The media should scrutinize Democrats' abortion stances, too]

Baier: I want to ask you about a question I asked Senator Sanders. Do you think a child should have any legal rights or protections before it’s born? Or do you think there should not be any restrictions on any abortions at any stage in a pregnancy?

Clinton: Well, again, let me put this in context because it's an important question. Right now, the Supreme Court is considering a decision that would shut down a lot of the options for women in Texas, and there have been other legislatures that have taken similar steps to try to restrict a woman's right to obtain an abortion.

The Supreme Court case, while topical, had little to do with the question. Clinton went on to talk about defending Planned Parenthood — another tangent. These were talking points, not answers, so Baier tried again.

[Supreme Court hears arguments on Texas abortion-clinics case]

Baier: Just to be clear, there's no — without any exceptions?

Clinton: No. I have been on record in favor of a late-pregnancy regulation that would have exceptions for the life and health of the mother. I object to the recent effort in Congress to pass a law saying after 20 weeks, you know, no such exceptions, because although these are rare, Bret, they sometimes arise in the most complex, difficult medical situations.

Baier: Fetal malformities and ...

Clinton: ... And threats to the woman's health.

Clinton: And so I think it is — under Roe v. Wade — it is appropriate to say, in these circumstances, so long as there's an exception for the life and health of the mother.

Now we're getting somewhere. Clinton didn't want to mention her support for late-term abortion restrictions, but Baier forced her hand with his follow-up. And she ought to be happy that he did. When Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) complained in a February debate that Democrats haven't been pressed on their abortion stances, he also said Clinton ""believes that all abortion should be legal, even on the due date of that unborn child."" That's not accurate, but Clinton can't debunk that kind of false attack if she never talks about the abortion restrictions she favors.

Later in the town hall, Baier raised the issue of Clinton's private email use as secretary of state. When he did, Clinton reverted to one of her favorite arguments: ""Nothing I sent was marked classified or that I received was marked classified.""

If only it were that simple. Any voter who has followed the story knows that the State Department, as it released Clinton's emails in batches, redacted more than 2,000 messages because they contained classified material. Without further explanation, Clinton's response looks like an outright lie. Baier pushed for a clarification.

[State Department releases final batch of Clinton emails]

Clinton: Well, what I'm saying is, it wasn't [classified] at the time. Now, if you — let's take Mary Smith who has some information in the government. And she is FOIAed — Freedom of Information Act — give us your information, your memos, your emails, whatever it might have been. That then goes through a process. So even though the agency she works in has none of this as classified, others start to have a chance to weigh in. So others might say, you know, that wasn't at the time, but now with circumstances, we don't want to release it, so, therefore, we have to classify it.

It wasn't a perfectly smooth answer, but it conveyed a point Clinton should make more often: Yes, many of the emails on her private server are now classified, but they were not at the time she sent or received them.

Clinton might prefer to say ""nothing was classified"" and have the argument end right there. But that's just not realistic. Forced to provide a more nuanced answer, she might have actually delivered an explanation that will satisfy some Fox News viewers who view her skeptically.

Clinton probably didn't win hordes of conservative converts Monday, but she answered tough questions in a way that might at least make some temper their disdain and that might appeal to independents. That's worthwhile. That's why she should do this more often.

Callum Borchers covers the intersection of politics and media.",Her answers in Monday’s town hall were some of the most substantive of her campaign.
"Authorities are looking for a skateboarder who fatally stabbed a passenger of the Red Line subway Friday evening.

The suspect was described as Asian in his 20s with an acne-scarred face, wearing a blue T-shirt. He was carrying two skateboards, authorities said.

Sheriff's Lt. John Hocking said it was too early in the investigation to say whether the stabbing was in self-defense, as witnesses say the suspect claimed.

""Investigators want to talk to anybody who witnessed the stabbing or can help with the investigation in any way,"" Hocking said. Anyone with information is asked to contact the homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500.

Los Angeles Times music writer Todd Martens, who was taking the subway home from work, said the young man and Garay were standing near a door on the crowded, rush-hour train. An argument broke out, he said, and the older man began flailing a chain attached to a jacket or bag.

""He wasn't hitting [the young man], he wasn't punching or fighting, he was waving his arms in a really fast motion,"" Martens said. ""It just wasn't a normal way to fight somebody .... He seemed a little left of center.""

The young man took a few steps backward and pulled a knife from inside his jacket, Martens said. Authorities allege that he hit Garay in the head with a skateboard and then stabbed him in the chest. Passengers, including a father and his crying son, rushed to the back of the train as blood began running down the center aisle, Martens said.

""He said, 'I can't believe he made me do that,' "" Martens said. "" 'Everybody saw it, it was self-defense right?' ""

When none of the passengers answered, the young man began lamenting that there was no way to elude capture because police would be waiting when the train pulled in to the station. Two young women said otherwise, Martens recalled.

"" 'You don't know that,' "" Martens quoted the women as saying. "" 'Keep it together, you have to be ready.' ... They were giving him a pep talk.""

At the women's suggestion, the assailant pulled a bright blue T-shirt out of his canvas bag and exchanged it for his bloodied gray one, Martens said. There were no officers waiting when the train stopped, he said. The young man ran west on Hollywood Boulevard, authorities said.

Videotape might help solve subway stabbing

2 shot after Raiders-49ers game at Candlestick Park

Rep. Maxine Waters: 'The tea party can go straight to hell'

Photo: Scene outside subway station Friday. Credit: KTLA News",Skateboarder sought in L.A. subway stabbing
"updated 8:58 PM EDT, Tue April 23, 2013

John Galliano is pictured at London Fashion Week on September 18, 2010.

Editor's note: This article contains offensive language.

New York (CNN) -- Controversial fashion designer John Galliano -- fired and convicted over anti-Semitic comments in 2011 -- is heading to a New York design classroom this spring.

The former chief designer for Christian Dior will teach a three-day master class at Parsons The New School for Design.

The class will give Parsons students an opportunity to learn from ""an immensely talented designer,"" according to a statement from the school.

Galliano was fired from the fashion giant in March 2011 after making anti-Semitic remarks in Paris. Later that year, a French court found him guilty for making public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity.

""I love Hitler,"" Galliano said in a video obtained by Britain's Sun newspaper. ""Your mother, your forefathers would be f---ing gassed and f---ing dead.""

In his trial, he said that alcohol and drugs were major factors, which he realized during a stint in rehab after he was fired. Galliano apologized, saying, ""Anti-Semitism and racism have no part in our society.""

He added: ""I only have myself to blame and I know that I must face up to my own failures and that I must work hard to gain people's understanding and compassion.""

Abraham Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League, said Tuesday in a statement, ""I think it's time that John Galliano be evaluated on his skills.""

""He apologized, he repaired, he reached out. We should just move on. I think that's the fair thing to do. I'm delighted for Parsons and I'm delighted for him,"" Foxman added.

Parsons acknowledged the controversy in its statement, saying, ""We believe that over the past two years, Mr. Galliano has demonstrated a serious intent to make amends for his past actions.""

CNN's Sheila Steffen contributed to this report.

Part of complete coverage on

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Most popular stories right now",Controversial fashion designer John Galliano -- fired and convicted over anti-Semitic comments in 2011 -- is heading to a New York design classroom this spring.
"Updated JAN 11, 2015 9:47p ET

Former New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan is working out the final details to become the Buffalo Bills' new head coach, according FOX Sports NFL Insider Alex Marvez.

In addition, 49ers offensive Greg Roman is going for a second meeting with Buffalo to finalize a deal to take the same position with the Bills under Rex Ryan, a source told Marvez.

Ryan reportedly interviewed with the Bills on both Thursday and Saturday. The Associated Press reported Sunday that Ryan has accepted the job.

Bills players were already expressing their support for Ryan in posts made on their Twitter accounts.

Excited about the hire of Rex!! Great coach to come in and keep us moving in the right direction!

Ryan, 52, was fired from the Jets one day after the team finished the 2014 season with a 4-12 record. In six seasons with New York, Ryan had overall 46-50 record.

""We're in the win business, and we're not winning,"" Jets owners Woody Johnson said at a news conference at the team's facility at the time. ""So, I thought this was something I had to do.""

The Jets failed to make the postseason for the fourth consecutive season and Ryan was 4-2 in the postseason during his tenure with the team. He did reach the AFC title game twice during his tenure with the team.

It was a tough season for the Jets. After winning the season opener against Oakland, they lost eight in a row and eventually benched starting quarterback Geno Smith for a period as they worked to get back on track. Ultimately, they fell out of playoff contention and opted to make a coaching change.

The Bills opening came late in 2014, when head coach Doug Marrone decided to exercise the opt-out clause in his contract.

The second-year coach was the sixth Buffalo coach since Wade Phillips was fired following the 2000 season. Marrone's announcement came as a surprise after the Bills’ 9-7 season, their first winning season since 2004. However, the team held on to the longest active postseason drought, at 15 years.

The opt-out clause in Marrone's contract went into effect after Terry and Kim Pegula bought the team in October.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",Former New York Jets head coach is reportedly working out the final details to become the Buffalo Bills new coach.
"AutoTrader.com has agreed to acquire VinSolutions, a provider of auto dealer solutions, including CRM, Internet lead management and inventory management. No financial terms were disclosed.

Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Nasdaq: DECK) has agreed to acquire Sanuck, an Irvine, Calif.-based shoe and sandal brand, for $120 million from Sanuk USA and C&C Companies.

Sophia, an online social teaching and learning platform, has acquired Guaranteach, a Baltimore-based online provider of short-form tutorials. No financial terms were disclosed. Guaranteach had been sponsored by Innosight Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. www.guaranteach.com

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) has agreed to acquire Clearwell Systems Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based e-discovery management platform for the enterprise. The deal is valued at approximately $390 million, net of Clearwell’s $20 million existing cash balance. Clearwell has raised around $30 million in VC funding, from firms like DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital. www.symantec.com

Emcor Group (NYSE: EME) has agreed to acquire USM Services Holdings, a Norristown, Penn.-based provider of facilities maintenance services, from Australia’s Transfield Services LTd. (ASA: TSE). The deal is valued at $255 million in cash.

Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group Inc. (NYSE: DTG) said that it has adopted a “poison pill,” which could slow down a proposed $2.08 billion buyout offer from Hertz Global Holdings.

Glencore, a Swiss commodities trader, raised $10 billion in a London IPO, selling 1.14 billion shares at $8.60 per share. It is the largest IPO so far this year. www.glencore.com

Histogenics Corp., a Waltham, Mass.-based regenerative medicine company focused on cartilage, has acquired Israeli regenerative medicine company ProChon Biotech Ltd. No financial terms were disclosed. Boston Equity Advisors managed the process. Histogenics shareholders include Boston Millennia Partners, Foundation Medical Partners, Altima Partners and Inflection Point Partners. www.histogenics.com

Thermo-Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) has emerged as a bidder for Phadia AB, an allergy-testing company owned by Cinven, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal could be valued at upwards of $3 billion. Thermo-Fisher also is a reported bidder for Gen-Probe Inc. (Nasdaq: GPRO), which has a market cap of around $3.8 billion. www.thermofisher.com

Takeda Pharmaceutical Corp. (Tokyo: 4502) has agreed to acquire Swiss drug-maker Nycomed for €9.6 billion in cash. Sellers include Nordic Capital, DLJ Merchant Partners, Coller Capital and Avista Capital Partners. www.nycomed.com

Abertis (Madrid: ABE) has sold its car parking and logistics businesses to an investment group led by Torreal for €400 million.

Allstate Corp. (NYSE: ALL) has agreed to acquire Esurance and Answer Financial for approximately $1 billion from White Mountains Insurance Group (NYSE: WTM). The deal value includes $700 million in cash, plus the book value of acquired assets. www.allstate.com

South Korea has restarted the sale process of a 57% stake in the nation’s largest bank by assets, Woori Financial Group.

Toshiba is expected to acquire Landis+Gyr, a Swiss maker of smart meters, for approximately $2 billion after two private equity firms dropped out of the process, according to the FT. Current Landis&Gyr shareholders include Australia’s Bayard Capital. www.landisgyr.com

Skyworks Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: SWKS) has agreed to acquire SiGe Semiconductor Inc., an Ottawa-based supplier of RF front-end solutions for wireless systems. The deal is valued at up to $275 million, including a $210 million up-front cash payment and $65 million in potential milestone patyments. SiGe is currently in registration for a $143.75 million IPO, and has raised around $132 million in VC funding since 1999. Current shareholders include Prism VentureWorks (19.8% stake), VenGrowth (15.5%), W Capital Partners (11.2%), TD Capital and Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec. www.sige.com

Publicis (Paris: PUBP) has agreed to acquire Rosetta Marketing Group, a Hamilton, N.J.-based digital marketing agency. The deal is valued at $525 million in cash, plus the possibility of future earnouts. www.publicis.com

Vietcombank, a state-owned bank in Vietnam, has hired Credit Suisse to manage the sale of a 20% ownership stake to foreign investors. Credit Suisse had a similar mandate in 2007, but the deal never went through.

Autonomy Corp. (LSE: AU) has agreed to acquire certain digital division assets from Iron Mountain Inc. (NYSE: IRM), including archiving, eDiscovery and online backup. The deal is valued at $380 million in cash. www.autonomy.com

Daimler AG and Rolls-Royce Group PLC have sweetened their offer to acquire German engine-maker Tognum AG to €2.4 billion, according to Bloomberg. This is an 8.3% increase from an earlier bid.

Joy Global (Nasdaq: JOYG), has agreed to acquire LeTourneau Technologies Inc., the mining equipment making unit of Rowan Companies Inc. (NYSE: RDC), for $1.1 billion in cash. www.rowancompanies.com

Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., a Vancouver-based firm and television studio, is seeking buyers for Carl Icahn’s 33% stake in the company, according to Bloomberg.

Stryker Corp. (NYSE: SYK) has agreed to acquire bio-surgery products maker Orthovita Inc. (Nasdaq: VITA) for around $316 million in cash. The $3.85 per share deal represents a 41% premium to Friday’s closing price for Orthovita shares.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has agreed to acquire a minority stake in Yihaodian, a Chinese e-commerce company whose offerings include groceries and electronics. No financial terms were disclosed.","AutoTrader.com has agreed to acquire VinSolutions, a provider of auto dealer solutions, including CRM, Internet lead management and inventory management. No financial terms were disclosed. Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Nasdaq: DECK) has agreed to acquire Sanuck, an Irvine, Calif.-based shoe and sandal brand, for $120 million from Sanuk USA and C&C Companies. Sophia, an online social…"
"A top health official has voiced concern that too little money is available to house the unexpectedly high numbers of unaccompanied children crossing the US-Mexico border.

In a letter obtained by the Associated Press, Sylvia Burwell, health and human and services secretary, told members of Congress’s appropriations committee Friday that the agency “may face serious funding challenges in meeting the costs of accommodating the increased number of children”.

The agency hopes to avoid a repeat of the summer of 2014, when tens of thousands of children and families overcrowded border patrol shelters.

Agency spokesman Mark Weber says the letter doesn’t ask for additional funds beyond the president’s budget request.

A total of 10,588 unaccompanied children crossed the border in October and November, prompting the agency to open new shelters in Texas and California.",Health and human services secretary voices concerns to Congress over money available to house high numbers of unaccompanied children crossing border
"In the land of the pusillanimous, the ambivalent speaker is king.

So House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is being heaped with praise for saying, on the matter of supporting his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, that he is “just not ready to do that at this point,” “not there right now” and “not there yet.”

Ryan’s comments, to CNN’s Jake Tapper, represented “an extraordinary rebuke” of Donald Trump, in the phrasing of The Washington Post and the New York Times. So it was. “Wish more @GOP leaders had his courage,” John Kasich’s chief strategist, John Weaver, tweeted of Ryan.

Watching these supposed leaders, I agree. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), up for reelection, attempted an unconvincing distinction between supporting Trump (she will) and endorsing him (she won’t). Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), in what he has said “may be the race of my life,” said he planned to “support the nominee of the party,” despite what he said were “significant disagreements that I have with Mr. Trump.”

So kudos to Ryan for not falling in this disappointing line. But might I also suggest that we are defining courage down here?

Trump has said enough — more, more than enough — for the proper, principled Republican response to him to be “never Trump,” rather than “not yet Trump.” His comments about Muslims and his proposal to bar them — temporarily, as if that makes his position somehow more palatable — from entering the United States. His false claims that thousands of American Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks. His reference to Mexican “rapists” entering the country illegally and his plan to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. His mocking of a New York Times reporter with a disability; his misogynistic comments about Carly Fiorina, Megyn Kelly et al.

These are not positions and statements that can, or should, be airbrushed away, excused or forgotten. They are, or should be, disqualifying. Yet that is not Ryan’s assessment. “I hope to support our nominee,” he told Tapper. “I hope to support his candidacy fully.”

In Ryan’s view, Trump simply needs to moderate his tone going forward, to bring the party together and to reassure Republicans like Ryan that he is a true conservative. “The question is, can our presumptive nominee turn things around, unify and have a different kind of cadence going forward?” Ryan said. “It’s time to go to from tapping anger to channeling that anger into solutions. It’s time to set aside bullying, to set aside belittlement.”

Actually, that time was months ago, when Trump first launched his divisive, ugly candidacy. Ryan’s courage is relative to the predictable but disappointing baseline of his peers. The speaker finds himself in a difficult position, but his expressed hope to ultimately be able to support Trump is an exercise in self-delusion.

Some Republicans in Congress could be at risk of losing seats, in part because of the party's controversial presidential candidate Donald Trump. These are some the Republicans who are feeling the ""Trump effect"" the most. (Deirdra O'Regan/The Washington Post)","Trump has said more than enough for the proper GOP response to him to be ""never Trump,"" rather than ""not yet Trump."""
"TOKYO -- Japanese voters are on the brink of doing something they have not been willing to do in more than half a century: throw the bums out.

The opposition Democratic Party is surging toward what polls predict will be a landslide victory Sunday. It would end 54 years of near-continuous rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which led Japan to stupendous postwar wealth but in recent years has become stagnant, sclerotic and poisonously unpopular.

The opposition party's leader, Yukio Hatoyama, 62, an elegantly attired, Stanford-educated engineer, seems to derive much of his popularity from the simple act of being a sentient replacement for Prime Minister Taro Aso, whose tone-deaf leadership over the past year has made him an object of derision, even in his own party.

In the election's final week, Hatoyama is drawing big crowds for his signature stump speech, which savages ""the long-term reign of one party gone rotten.""

Although voters seem energized by the opportunity to flush the LDP down the drain of history, they are much less certain about what will replace it.

""I am not sure of what the Democratic Party is saying or what it will do, but there has to be a change in power,"" said Hideo Enomoto, 58, who sells industrial machines and who listened this week as Hatoyama spoke outside a commuter train station during the evening rush hour.

Senior LDP leaders acknowledged this week that the Democratic Party is on the verge of a historic win that may provide it with a commanding two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament and the ability to decide policy all by itself. The Democratic Party already controls the less powerful upper house.

The prospect of tossing the LDP out of power has created the highest level of voter interest in a general election to date, according to a survey by the Yomiuri newspaper. In the poll, 89 percent of respondents indicated interest in the vote.

As its marquee incentive for dumping the LDP, the Democratic Party is promising that it will pay parents as much as $276 a month to raise a child until he or she graduates from junior high.

Japan has the world's lowest percentage of children and highest percentage of elderly. It's a slow-motion demographic disaster that the LDP has long ignored and that the Democratic Party hopes to turn into electoral gold.

""If that money is going to come, then it is well worth voting for the Democratic Party,"" said Aya Koike, a 20-year-old who came with her two infant children to listen to Hatoyama's speech. She works nights in a Tokyo restaurant but could quit if the government began paying her $552 a month to look after her kids.

Many young women in Japan are reluctant to have children because of the lack of affordable day care. Promising to ""take the anxiety out of child rearing,"" the Democratic Party has said that it will eliminate waiting lists for cheap public day care and remove tuition fees for high school.",TOKYO -- Japanese voters are on the brink of doing something they have not been willing to do in more than half a century: throw the bums out.
"(Adds comments by CEO, analyst; more details, background)

LONDON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Demand for designer clothes in larger sizes is helping British home shopping firm N Brown (BWNG.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) to defy a downturn in consumer spending, it said on Tuesday, as it beat first-half profit forecasts.

Chief Executive Alan White said the firm's average customer, a 57 year old woman, was more financially resilient than the typical shopper and was flocking to new designer ranges such as corsetry by fashion guru Gok Wan and dresses by Caryn Franklin, a presenter on television programme ""The Clothes Show.""

""These are people who have been almost disenfranchised by the High Street in terms of the clothes they can buy. Having it in their size is a big tick. Then being able to find some upmarket clothing, and some designer ranges, in their size is a double tick,"" he said in a telephone interview.

But White said external events, like the global banking crisis, were making him more cautious about prospects.

N Brown, whose catalogues include Simple Be and Oxendales, said pretax profit rose 20 percent to 40.8 million pounds ($71.7 million) in the 26 weeks to Aug. 30, above an average forecast of 37.6 million in a company poll of five analysts.

Sales rose 12.6 percent to 322.8 million pounds, and had stayed robust, up 11.8 percent, in the five weeks to Oct. 4.

White said sales growth was likely to moderate over the second half and that he expected analysts' full-year profit forecast to stay around 83 million pounds.

Gross margins, a measure of profitability, fell 80 basis points in the first half, due to increased sales from newly recruited and younger customers, who have a higher credit risk. Continued...","(Adds comments by CEO, analyst; more details, background)

 LONDON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Demand for designer clothes in
larger sizes is helping British home shopping firm N Brown
<BWNG.L> to defy a"
"Kia has released another teaser image of the upcoming GT4 Stinger Concept, prior to the car's Detroit debut.

Slowly but surely, Kia Motors is giving us more of a sneak peek regarding at what the automaker has in store for the 2014 Detroit Auto Show.

A 315-hp turbocharged 4-cylinder engine powers this 2-door sports coupe and, judging from the teaser images, it shares a lot of its mechanical DNA with the existing Hyundai Veloster.

RELATED: 2014 DETROIT AUTO SHOW: THESE 14 CARS ARE GOING TO ROCK THE MOTOR CITY!

In fact, come to think of it, the Veloster sports a unique 3-door body – there are two doors on the passenger’s side, and one longer one on the driver’s.

Will this style be transposed to the Kia GT4 Stinger?

RELATED: KIA SOUL EV GETS CHARGED UP FOR ITS LAUNCH IN 2014

It’s impossible to tell at this point, but we’ll know for certain when the car is unveiled on January 13, at the Detroit show.","The Korean automaker wants to be seen as more than a budget ride, and the proof is coming to the Detroit Auto Show."
"By Philip Aldrick and Angela Monaghan Published: 7:16PM BST 04 Sep 2009

Protestors demonstrate in central London ahead of the G20 finance ministers meeting, Photo: AFP

The Chancellor will make his recommendations at the London meeting of G20 finance ministers in an attempt to strike a global agreement on bonuses. His plans go far further than the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which recommends three-year deferrals, but stop short of endorsing French demands for a bonus cap.

Bonuses have thrust their way to the top of the finance ministers' agenda due to mounting evidence that banks are reverting to old habits with multi-million pound deals.

Alongside pay, the UK and US will urge other nations to accept tougher capital and liquidity requirements to prevent a repeat of past excesses. However, in a sign that discussions will not be easy, French finance minister Christine Lagarde yesterday said minor revisions to the current regime should be sufficient.

Mr Darling will be hoping to bridge the difference in policy on City pay with a range of strict new proposals, including:

- five-year deferrals on a portion of all bonuses

- clawbacks if long-term performance plummets

- a ban on all guaranteed bonuses

- clearer disclosure of sums and individuals who receive big pay-outs

He is expected to argue that caps on either individual bonuses or pay pools are ""unenforceable"" but he wants to go further than the FSA by demanding the rules be made ""mandatory"", not mere guidelines. The FSA also stopped short of imposing clawbacks and allows banks to pay one-year guaranteed bonuses to attract staff who are on course to hit their targets at their current employer.

The ministers will also debate whether to publish the names of all high-paid bankers alongside their income, not merely the pay bands as recommended in the draft Walker Review. At Royal Bank of Scotland, 200 staff were on bigger packages than chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin.

However, Mr Darling will stress that the UK will not press ahead unilaterally with the measures. If an agreement is not reached, there will be no change to the FSA guidelines.

Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers' Association, expressed concerns. ""Many people move jobs more frequently than five years and clawbacks can result in very differential application,"" she said. ""The G20 not only needs to agree a sensible regulatory framework but an implementation timetable. So far, the UK is the only country to have put proper risk and long-term requirements into remuneration.""

Other issues on today's G20 agenda include the role and funding of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). There will be pressure on countries to deliver the total $500bn (£306bn) of extra funding for the IMF which was agreed at the London Summit in April.

If all current pledges were honoured, there would still be a shortfall of $13.5bn and the Chancellor is pushing for full delivery in time for the Pittsburgh Summit at the end of this month. The UK is also keen to secure an agreement from other finance ministers that policy measures taken to deal with the crisis will be unwound with a level of co-ordination.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, said during a speech in Berlin: ""I see a real danger that policy makers may jeopardise the recovery by exiting from crisis measures too soon.""

He added that the global efforts to reform the financial system were not progressing as quickly as necessary.","Alistair Darling is to call on banks to defer bonuses for five years as the 
  centre piece of sweeping new proposals on City pay."
"Despite dismal attendance figures, Hollywood is cranking out plenty of films for November and December.

Last year, five out of the 10 best-picture nominees benefited from festival word of mouth.

The Harlem drama Precious won five prizes Friday at the Spirit Awards honoring independent film, including best picture and trophies for stars Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique and director Lee Daniels.

Learn more about the nominees, vote for your favorites, read critic Claudia Puig's take on who will win and who should (which are often the same folks this year) and then proceed to win your Oscar pool!

Adam Shankman teams with Bill Mechanic to build a better awards show. And it has been ""a very happy partnership.""

A Serious Man is this week's platinum pick. Also new this week: I Hate Valentine's Day, Couples Retreat, The Time Traveler's Wife.

Oscar watchers were blindsided by the surprise best-picture nomination for the box-office sleeper hit The Blind Side.

With 10 best-picture nominations at its disposal, Oscar managed to spread the wealth among Everyman films while maintaining much of its blueblood taste.

The science-fiction sensation Avatar and the war-on-terror thriller The Hurt Locker lead the Academy Awards with nine nominations each, including best picture and director for James Cameron and ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow.

The science-fiction tales Avatar,Star Trek and District 9 have grabbed three of the five nominations for top dramatic honors from the American Cinema Editors.","Collection of all USATODAY.com coverage of A Serious Man., including articles, videos, photos, and quotes."
"U.S. stocks dropped after weakness in U.S. jobs figures and in European economic data knocked the market into the red for the second straight session.

Michael Casey tells why problems in Europe played a key role in pushing U.S. stocks lower today.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 76.89 points, or 0.7%, at 10662.42, as a late swoon pushed the index lower after spending much of the day between gains and losses. Walt Disney fell 2.2%, while General Electric lost 2.2% and J.P. Morgan Chase slid 2.1%.

The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell 9.45, or 0.8%, to 1124.83, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 7.47, or 0.3%, to 2327.08.

The Dow had been on a roll for September, easily outpacing what had been expected to be a weak month, and analysts said it was likely due to come back a bit before the month ended. Despite the two straight sessions of declines, the Dow remains up 6.5% for the month.

Andrew Fitzpatrick, director of investments at Hinsdale Associates, said the losses were likely warranted as the market approached the high end of a recent range. With only a week left in the month and the quarter, investors aren't likely to make any moves to break that range, Mr. Fitzpatrick added, so he isn't expecting any sharp moves in either direction.

Varying sets of data had lead to the back and forth trading Thursday, as the morning's report on jobless claims was worse than expected and data on the pace of growth in the euro zone was disappointing. A stronger-than-expected gain in existing home sales last month never proved quite strong enough to push the fears aside.

The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose by more than economists expected last week. Above, a jobs sign is seen on the front of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce building.

Mr. Fitzpatrick said the mixed bag of data reinforced that it would be a slow-moving recovery, adding, ""I'm finding a little comfort in the market isn't lower than it is.""

Overseas, Ireland posted a surprise decline in second-quarter gross domestic product and surveys raised concerns about economic strength in Europe.

The Irish economy's contraction in the three months to June fueled worries across Europe and beyond about the efficacy of austerity measures in tackling the high levels of public-sector debt that many governments have incurred during the financial crisis and the recession that followed.

Meanwhile, Germany's private sector expanded at a much slower pace this month, and the euro-zone PMI data suggested the area's economy is slowing down even more rapidly than had been forecast.

Stocks in the US and Europe are struggling today, after economic numbers on both sides of the pond paint a picture of tepid economies. Kathleen Madigan, Michael Casey and Paul Vigna discuss.

The euro fell against the dollar, slipping to $1.3318 from $1.3393 late Wednesday.

Demand for U.S. Treasuries rose, pressuring the yield on the 10-year note down slightly to 2.55%. Gold prices ended at another record settlement after a slim 0.3% gain. Crude settled up as well, rising 47 cents to $75.18.

George Stahl takes a look at what's moving markets before the opening bell, including a dividend hike from McDonald's and weak data in Europe.

Among stocks in focus, Red Hat's fiscal second-quarter earnings dropped 18% as foreign-exchange headwinds ate into strong sales, but the bottom line fell less than expected. Shares rose 9%, helping lead a big gain in tech stocks.

Bed Bath & Beyond's fiscal second-quarter earnings climbed 34% as the housewares retailer posted its fourth straight quarter of double-digit percentage sales growth. Shares gained 3.2% as the company hoisted its earnings outlook for the year.

Write to David Benoit at david.benoit@dowjones.com",U.S. stocks dropped in late trading as weakness in U.S. jobs figures and in European economic data knocked the market into the red for the second straight session. The Dow industrials fell 76.89 points.
"Culture Connoisseurs consistently offer thought-provoking, timely comments on the arts, lifestyle and entertainment.

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You must be logged in to recommend a comment.","American diplomat Ryan C. Fogle was briefly detained by the Russian State Security Service and then ordered to leave the country after being accused of trying to recruit a Russian officer to work as a U.S. agent, Russian officials said Tuesday."
"A new set of before and after satellite images released by Amnesty International shows two towns in Nigeria’s restive northeast were hit hard by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in a days-long attack earlier this month.

Images provided by DigitalGlobe from Jan. 2 show Baga and Doron Baga before the assault. Ones from Jan. 7 then show, according to the international watchdog, that more than 3,700 buildings in both towns had been damaged or destroyed by fire since the pictures five days before. (Healthy vegetation is shown in red; and destroyed buildings are in yellow.)

MORE: 5 Facts That Explain the Threat From Nigeria’s Boko Haram

“These detailed images show devastation of catastrophic proportions in two towns, one of which was almost wiped off the map in the space of four days,” said Daniel Eyre, an Amnesty researcher on Nigeria. “Of all Boko Haram assaults analyzed by Amnesty International, this is the largest and most destructive yet.”

The death toll remains unclear, hovering between 150 and up to 2,000. An uptick in attacks by Boko Haram has cast a shadow over the country’s elections planned for next month.","Amnesty International says 3,700 structures destroyed in early January"
"The Federal Communications Commission wants some local TV broadcasters to sell back their airwaves so the government can auction them to telecommunications companies for better mobile phone service. This sale could earn broadcasters billions of dollars for something the government first licensed to them for free, but could signal the end of many local TV stations.

What could be lost as cable and telecom giants gain even greater dominance over the airwaves? Do we still need broadcast TV?",Does a federal plan to buy local airwaves and sell them to telecom companies for cell service make sense?
"Brake problems. A fuel leak. A cracked windshield. One electrical fire. Then another. An emergency landing in Japan. A safety investigation imposed by the FAA. Then two premier customers—Japan’s two main airlines, ANA and JAL, ground their fleet of Boeing [BA] 787s. Then the FAA grounds all 787s used by the only American carrier. Now other regulators around the world follow suit, grounding all 50 of the 787s delivered so far. The regulatory grounding of an entire fleet is unusual—the first since 1979—and relates to a key to the plane’s claimed energy-efficiency: the novel use of lithium ion batteries, which have shown a propensity to overheat and lead to fires—fires that generate oxygen and hence are difficult to put out.

And keep in mind: Boeing’s 787 project is already billions of dollars over budget. The delivery schedule has been pushed back at least seven times. The first planes were delivered over three years late. In fact, out of a total of 848 planes sold, only 6 percent have been delivered.

Yet grave as these issues seem, they are merely symptoms of a deeper disease that has been gnawing at the US economy for decades: flawed offshoring decisions by the C-suite. Offshoring is not some menial matter to be left to accountants in the backroom or high-priced consultants armed with spreadsheets, promising quick profits. It raises mission-critical issues potentially affecting the survival of entire firms, whole industries and ultimately the economy.

Thus Boeing is hardly alone in making flawed offshoring decisions. Boeing is just the latest and most spectacular example of an economy-wide problem.

“Many companies that offshored manufacturing didn’t really do the math,” Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer and founder of the Reshoring Initiative told me. As many as 60 percent of the decisions were based on miscalculations.

As noted by Gary Pisano and Willy Shih in their classic article, “Restoring American Competitiveness” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009), offshoring has been devastating whole US industries, stunting innovation, and crippling capacity to compete long-term.

Pisano and Shih write: “The decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.”

Pisano and Shih have a frighteningly long list of industries that are “already lost” to the USA, including: compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs and handheld devices like mobile phones; electrophoretic displays; lithium ion, lithium polymer and NiMH batteries; advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters and power semiconductors for solar panels; desktop, notebook and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard-disk drives; consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes; advanced composite used in sporting goods and other consumer gear; advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.

The list of industries “at risk” is even longer and more worrisome.

Now unless Boeing can quickly fix the technical issues afflicting the 787, its entire airline business will also be “at risk”. Manufacturing airplanes could even become an addition to the list of industries “already lost.”

These issues are a wakeup call not just to Boeing but to every CEO whose firm or whose suppliers have been or will be involved in offshoring. Every CEO must learn seven lessons.

In analyzing offshoring, firms must get beyond rudimentary cost calculations focused on short-term profit,, such as the cost of labor or the ex-factory cost and incorporate the total cost and risk of extended international supply chains. This is easily done with the help of the Reshoring Initiative, whose website includes an analytical tool enabling companies to calculate the full risks and costs of offshoring. It’s called the Total Cost of Ownership Estimator[TM]. And the price is right. It doesn’t require hiring high-priced consultants: it’s free.

The Estimator poses a series of questions. What’s the price of the part from each of the destinations? How far is it away? How often are you going to travel to see the supplier? How much intellectual property risk is there? How long do you think you are going to make it? It uses the answers to calculate twenty-five different costs. When they are added up, that’s the Total Cost of Ownership.

Most companies have tended to make their sourcing decisions based on the wage rate or the ex-works price or the landed cost, and leave out another twenty cost categories. The Estimator makes it easy for the company to calculate the other twenty costs.

“Often what firms find,” says Moser, “is that whereas the offshoring price is perhaps 30 percent less than the US price, all these other costs add up to more than 30 percent. If they are willing to recognize all of them, then they can see that it may be profitable to bring the work back.”

“For instance,” says Moser, “I took the last 27 cases where users compared China to the US. On average, the US price was 69 percent higher than the production price in China. It turned out that the US total cost of ownership was 4 percent lower. So it made a huge difference to make that calculation. That’s an indication that a substantial portion of the work that has been offshored would come back if people would use the right metrics.”

Let’s back up a bit and note that Boeing’s problems have been visible for some time. In August 2011, my article drew attention to the perilous offshoring course on which Boeing was embarked.

In December 2012, fellow Forbes contributor Jonathan Salem Baskin wrote: “The company was convinced by one or more management consulting firms to outsource design and production of the 787’s components. While this idea might make sense for sourcing coffeemakers, it was a nonsense approach to assembling perhaps the most complicated and potentially dangerous machines shy of nuclear reactors. I’m sure blather from Harvard Business Review supported the idea that distances between factories in Seattle and Outer Mongolia were no farther than a VOIP chat, but the reality was a mess. Parts didn’t fit together with others. Some suppliers subcontracted work to their suppliers and then shrugged at problems with assembly. When one part wasn’t available, the next one that depended on it couldn’t be attached and the global supply chain all but seized up. Boeing had to spend $1 billion in 2009 to buy one of the worst offenders and bring the work back in-house.”

“The grounding — an unusual action for a new plane — focuses on one of the more risky design choices made by Boeing, namely to make extensive use of lithium ion batteries aboard its airplanes for the first time,” write Christopher Drew, Jad Mouawad and Matthew Wald in the New York Times: “The 787’s problems could jeopardize one of its major features, its ability to fly long distances at a cheaper cost… The maker of the 787’s batteries, Japan’s GS Yuasa, has declined to comment on the problems so far. “

What was Boeing thinking when they opted to embrace such extensive offshoring? Moser believes the error lay in using the wrong measure of the impact of offshoring on earnings. “Many companies that offshored manufacturing didn’t really do the math,” Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer and founder of the Reshoring Initiative told me. “A study the consulting company, Archstone, showed that 60 percent of offshoring decisions used only rudimentary cost calculations, maybe just price or labor costs rather than something holistic like total cost. Most of the true risks and cost of offshoring were hidden.”

For many companies, it’s time to redo the math, and then verify whether they still have the expertise to bring manufacturing back.

“Boeing has acknowledged, says Moser, “that its biggest problem was in outsourcing not only manufacturing but also a lot of the engineering. There were multiple tiers of outsourced companies who were supposed to be making their designs consistent so that the parts fit together. And they didn’t fit together. If Boeing had taken full responsibility for the engineering and then had jobbed the parts out and gotten them made to print, their problems would have been a lot less severe. It seems like they had this brilliant idea of outsourcing a lot of engineering with the manufacturing. There’s almost nothing as complicated as a Dreamliner.

“For example, an iPhone isn’t nearly as complicated. The downside risk isn’t as great. Apple has succeeded with outsourcing almost everything to Foxconn, mainly because they first completely manufacture the new product in the US. They make sure it’s right, while Foxconn is working in parallel with them, developing their tooling and whatever. So Apple has a finished product and they say to Foxconn: make it just like this! What Apple has done has worked amazingly well, because they have the capability to do the perfect prototype here, before it gets offshored to Foxconn. Most companies don’t have that.

“Thus Boeing didn’t have a finished product. So there were all kinds of risks of things not coming together. The tendency is too often for companies to try to do the engineering over here and the manufacturing over there. Eventually the innovation declines and the risk increases, as outlined by Pisano and Shih.”

Moser estimates that when the total costs are included, around 25 percent of manufacturing that is currently outsourced could be profitably brought home, if the manufacturing expertise still exists. Looking ahead, changes in relative economics are likely to increase that percentage.

It is important to take into account rapid changes in relative costs. Oil prices are three times what they were in 2000. Natural gas in the US is a quarter of what it is in Asia. Chinese wages are five times what they were in 2000 and are expected to keep rising rapidly. And in any event labor is a steadily decreasing percentage of the cost of manufacturing.

Reshoring is already happening to a limited extent. Apple [AAPL] announced recently that it will resume manufacturing of one of the existing Mac lines in the US next year. GE [GE] is spending some $800 million to re-establish manufacturing in its giant facility—until recently, almost defunct—at Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky. Whirlpool [WHR] is bringing mixer-making back from China to Ohio. Otis is bringing elevator production back from Mexico to South Carolina. And Wham-O Toys is bringing Frisbee-molding back from China to California. Based on the reshoring articles in the ReshoreNow Library, Moser calculates that at least 50,000 manufacturing jobs have recently been reshored in the last three years.

Where companies see that it could be profitable to bring manufacturing back, they will need to ensure that they either have or can rebuild the necessary expertise—sometimes a daunting challenge.

In Boeing’s case, as Jonathan Salem Baskin notes: “It didn’t help that the outsourcing plan included skipping the detailed blueprints the company would have normally prepared, and allowing vendors to come up with their own. Delivered components arrived with instructions and notes written in Chinese, Italian, and other languages. Oh, and they decided to build the airplane out of plastic along with other novel materials and technologies, so it would have been a big experiment even if Boeing approached manufacturing like it always had.”

Clearly firms have underestimated the risk of having extended international supply chains. I asked Moser whether Total Cost of Ownership Estimator can help firms get a better handle on that risk.

“The TCO Estimator assigns no factor values apart from freight,” says Moser. “The user assigns all the factors. The user answers questions about the delivery time, and the price. That enables the Estimator’s algorithm to assess the inventory and the inventory carrying costs. There’s a section on opportunity cost. If the firm will lose orders because it can’t deliver, then put a value on that. There are sections on natural disaster risk and political risk. “

If Boeing had been using this earlier what would be the implications? If they underestimated the delay risk or the technical risk as low, the Estimator would have reflected the underestimation of the risk.

“The Estimator would have encouraged them to try to estimate each of the risks,” says Moser. “When you have twenty-five of them, you only have to put in 1 percent in each to balance the savings you might get from going offshore.

“If you are buying pencils, not much intellectual property risk; if you can’t get it from this source, you can get it from somewhere else. The margins aren’t big, so you don’t lose so much. You don’t have much image to lose. But when you are making airplanes, there’s a lot of risk. Instead of having one size fit all, the Estimator lets you adapt for each product, each market, and make a more holistic and informed decision.

“The Reshoring Initiative site also offers resources. Library contains articles about transportation industry and equipment, and firms can understand where production was reshored and why. They might conclude: ‘Looks like a lot of companies are having problems with these things. Maybe we should increase our risk levels?’

“The Initiative also has information on what other users have found on the distribution of average costs. If they look at that, they might realize that some costs and risks have been underestimated. So the Estimator can help them make better decisions.”

Much of the offshoring that has taken place has assumed that the outsourced items are “little do-hickeys” with low value and so didn’t really matter much in the overall scheme of things. The little do-hickeys are worth pennies or less and have next-to-no margin. While those “little do-hickeys” might seem cheap in themselves, the lessons to be learned in improving their manufacture in the end can turn out to be highly valuable. (In cost accounting and economics, which usually don’t explicitly value knowledge, this loss is invisible and so doesn’t get taken into account.)

Firms often haven’t thought through how often they are going to redesign this product. “If it’s a bracket and you’re not going to redesign it for 30 years, it doesn’t matter very much,” says Moser. These days however there are very few components that are good for another thirty years. “If it is something that you are updating every six months or every year, then that becomes a lot more important. It’s the difference between a commodity and something that’s design-driven. The result of answering those questions is an ‘innovation cost of being at a distance.’ The Reshoring Initiative has resources so that firms can develop the understanding to make better decisions.“

The opportunity cost of lost innovation can be significant. Thus when GE decided to bring manufacturing of its innovative GeoSpring water heater back from the “cheap” Chinese factory to the “expensive” Kentucky factory, the cost of production went down. “The material cost went down. The labor required to make it went down. The quality went up. Even the energy efficiency went up. GE wasn’t just able to hold the retail sticker to the ‘China price.’ It beat that price by nearly 20 percent. The China-made GeoSpring retailed for $1,599. The Louisville-made GeoSpring retails for $1,299.

GE’s water heater as originally designed for manufacture in China had a tangle of copper tubing that was difficult to weld together. In the past, GE had been shipping the design to China and telling them to “make it”. Confronted with making the water heater themselves, they discovered that “in terms of manufacturability, it was terrible.” So GE’s designers got together with the welders and redesigned the heater so that it was easier and cheaper to make. They eliminated the tangle of tubing that couldn’t be easily welded. By having those workers right at the table with the designers, the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater went from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.

“For years,” Charles Fishman writes in a great article in The Atlantic, “too many American companies have treated the actual manufacturing of their products as incidental—a generic, interchangeable, relatively low-value part of their business. If you spec’d the item closely enough—if you created a good design, and your drawings had precision; if you hired a cheap factory and inspected for quality—who cared what language the factory workers spoke? … It was like writing a cookbook without ever cooking…. there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”

What is only now dawning on the smart American companies, Lou Lenzi, head of design for GE appliances says, is that when you outsource the making of the products, “your whole business goes with the outsourcing.”

While several decades of outsourcing were under way, why didn’t these smart managers think about the importance of innovating and protecting intellectual property? Why didn’t these well-educated managers realize that it was important to have designers, engineers, and assembly-line workers talk to each other? Why didn’t these MBA graduates realize that outsourcing might be mortgaging the future of their firms?

“There was a herd mentality to the offshoring,” John Shook, the CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And there was some bullshit. But it was also the inability to see the total costs—the engineers in the U.S. and factory managers in China who can’t talk to each other; the management hours and money flying to Asia to find out why the quality they wanted wasn’t being delivered. The cost of all that is huge.”

When managers manage with a spreadsheet rather than real-world knowledge about what is actually going on in the factory and what were its possibilities, they overlook hidden costs of the erosion of skills, the loss of quality and constraints on innovation. They also missed the potential added value to customers that could be generated by designing and manufacturing things differently. They also missed the costs and risks of an international supply chain, which is increasingly out of step with the shorter, faster product cycles.

Why did all these smart, highly educated people make all these mistakes? The root cause of these errors is a focus on the dumbest idea in the world: maximizing shareholder value. Focusing on short-term shareholder value ended up destroying vast quantities of long-term shareholder value.

A focus on maximizing shareholder value leads the firm to do things that detract from maximizing long-term shareholder value, such as offshoring, favoring cost-cutting over innovation, and pursuit of “corner cutting” and “bad profits” that destroy brand equity. The net result can be seen in the disastrously declining ROA and ROIC over the last four decades in large US firms as documented by Deloitte’s Shift Index.

The errors of offshoring are thus not isolated events. They are the result of the underlying philosophy of shareholder value, rather than the true purpose of every firm: create value for customers. The resurrection of American manufacturing will require more than simply bringing back production to America. Global manufacturing is at the cusp of a massive transformation as the new economics of energy and labor plays out and a set of new technologies—robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and nanotechnology—are advancing rapidly. Together these developments will spark a radical transformation of manufacturing around the world over the next decade. The winners in the rapidly changing world of manufacturing will be those firms that have mastered the agility needed to generate rapid and continuous customer-based innovation.

Success in this new world of manufacturing will require a radically different kind of management from the hierarchical bureaucracy focused on shareholder value that is now prevalent. It will require a different goal (adding value for customers), a different role for managers (enabling self-organizing teams), a different way of coordinating work (dynamic linking), different values (continuous improvement and radical transparency) and different communications (horizontal conversations). Merely shifting the locus of production is not enough. Companies need systemic change—a new management paradigm.

Pursuit of maximizing shareholder value at Boeing led to offshoring that has caused massive damage to shareholder value. The eventual scale of the damage can only be guessed at today. The remedy lies not in pointing fingers at Boeing’s management, but rather in treating the economy-wide disease that caused the problem.

Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In The USA

Dont’s Diss The Paradigm Shift In Management

How Manufacturing Can Learn from Software To Become Agile

The dumbest idea in the world: maximizing shareholder value

The five big surprises of radical management

Steve Denning’s most recent book is: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

Follow Steve Denning on Twitter @stevedenning",Seven Lessons That All CEOs Must Learn From The Boeing Debacle: The Follies of Offshoring
"NEWARK — The cold rain had been pouring for several hours by the time the Olympian Tim Morehouse exited a cab in front of Vailsburg Elementary School. Over his shoulder, he carried a large black duffel bag filled with plastic foils and fencing masks. Despite the gray skies, he seemed giddy.

“It’s a great day for fencing!” he said, making a charge toward the door. Morehouse, 36, clad in red, white and blue, was there to demonstrate his sport to more than 100 third and fourth graders. It was one of hundreds of assemblies Morehouse has conducted with Fencing in the Schools, the educational nonprofit group he founded in 2011.

His mission: to introduce one of the most historically aristocratic sports to the most financially disadvantaged youths nationwide, involving a million children in 10 years.

The task may be more daunting than defeating the French or the Italians in an Olympic final. To most children (and adults, for that matter), foil is usually found in a kitchen drawer. Largely the sport of private schools and elite clubs, fencing is practiced by about 4,000 boys and girls in high school, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, making it about as common as riflery or drill team. It has yet to receive the kind of pop culture boost that “The Hunger Games” gave archery. Among fencing’s most noted enthusiasts have been the Three Musketeers, Winston Churchill and Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden.

But the greater barrier has been financial. Competing in junior fencing requires lessons, equipment and travel that may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, keeping talented athletes from wielding sabers or masks. Vailsburg Elementary is in one of Newark’s poorest neighborhoods, and 83 percent of its students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches.

“We thought that once people starting winning medals in fencing, things would change,” said Morehouse, who made his first Olympic team in 2004 and won a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Games. “We won six of them in Beijing, but the promise of people fencing in the streets didn’t materialize.”

Morehouse grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, attended school in East Harlem and was introduced to the sport as a seventh grader. In some ways he is bringing the sport back to its urban roots. As a child, Morehouse attended Saturday morning fencing sessions at the nearby Peter Westbrook Foundation, started by a bronze medalist from the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

“Tim has done an amazing job by trying to expand fencing in inner cities,” Westbrook said. “Whenever someone wants to do that, I welcome it. The exposure is better than when I was a kid, but it’s still not popular.”

Westbrook, a Newark native, said he paid for lessons at a local Catholic school and for years was among a handful of black athletes in the sport.

“There’s a huge talent pool in low-income neighborhoods, and it can capture kids,” he said. “Everybody has a little bit of Zorro in them.”

Working out of a corner of Teach for America’s offices in Midtown Manhattan with a fencing mask near his MacBook, Morehouse and his team, including his Olympic teammate Jeff Spear and the Olympic speedskater Maria Cruz Garcia, list their target schools on a dry-erase board. Since Fencing in the Schools was founded, Morehouse estimated that it had reached more than 10,000 children in seven states. He has also invited elite fencers to the United States for events like this weekend’s showcase in Brooklyn so youngsters from his programs can attend.

“A lot of people in the sports world don’t think of us as a serious sport,” he said.

The Fencing in the Schools model aims to teach on a large scale rather than relying only on private instruction. Instead of holding one-off assemblies, the group tries to instruct teachers on the basics of the sport so they can conduct classes on their own. Morehouse and his team have worked with manufacturers to develop more child-friendly introductory equipment than the metal weaponry used by professionals. “Pirates of the Caribbean” references are welcome.

“The kids know they need to put their masks on unless they want to poke an eye out,” said Dennis Wolfe, the athletic director at Democracy Prep Public Schools in New York, which were among the first to adopt Morehouse’s curriculum.

Installing a fencing program costs about $6,000 per school for the first year, and $3,000 or less after that if equipment is shared. Through sponsorships, students can take part for little or no cost.

In some cases, Morehouse cold-calls schools to introduce his plan, often with a donor attached.

“I say, ‘Hey, I’m an Olympian and we have a fencing program someone wants to bring to your school,’ ” Morehouse said. “And they usually think it’s some kind of scam.”

That was not the case at Vailsburg Elementary, where Morehouse’s laptop was soon projecting photographs of him at schools and of President Obama wielding a lightsaber on the White House lawn. The John Williams “Olympic Fanfare” played on a loop. Morehouse tucked his silver medal into the pocket of his track suit “for the reveal” at the presentation’s conclusion. The boys and girls filed into the cafeteria one by one, navy polo shirts tucked into khakis.

Morehouse opened with an image of Yoda brandishing his green lightsaber. The audience responded with a collective “Whoa!”

He told the students of his unlikely rise in the sport. He had fun fencing in high school and college, but was not a champion.

After graduating from Brandeis, Morehouse returned to Washington Heights to teach seventh grade through Teach for America, then decided to also pursue an Olympic berth. For three years, he said, he lost most of his matches.

“I was losing to countries I hadn’t even heard of,” he said, and accumulated $30,000 in debt.

Morehouse flashed a black-and-white image of an Errol Flynn-era fencer, pointing out the crisp lines and clean form.

“This is how you’re supposed to fence,” he said. Then he showed a picture of himself, saber flailing, a leg in the air. “They said I looked like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant.”

That remark drew raucous laughter, but Morehouse said it made him realize “this is how I am.”

He guided the children through a lesson in basic fencing terms and moves, a chorus of “en garde,” “retreat” and “advance” and a climactic face-off between the gym teacher and the school principal. “It was perfect for the message our kids need,” Yasmin Vargas, the principal, said.

The fencing curriculum for the elementary school students, which will begin next month, was the subject of much analysis among the students.

“I’ve seen the Olympics on TV,” Salma Ibrahim said. “I would like to do that.”

Precious Brown liked the presentation, which was the first time she had seen fencing.

Morehouse received a compliment from Mark Marotta, who said, “I liked when he said people might be able to do it their own way.”

Aaron Aryee may have said it best. “Who doesn’t love sword fighting?”

A version of this article appears in print on December 14, 2014, on page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Education With a Dose of Zorro. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe","Tim Morehouse is on a mission to introduce fencing, a historically aristocratic sport, to financially disadvantaged youths in the United States."
"One of China’s richest property developers topped a new list of China’s top philanthropists published in the latest issue of Forbes China, the licensed Chinese-language edition of Forbes.

Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, donated some 1.28 billion yuan, or $197 million, in cash to philanthropic causes last year, the magazine said, notably for the reconstruction of a historic temple in the eastern provincial capital of Nanjing. Wanda has more than 30 “Wanda Plazas” across China, making it one of the country’s commercial property developers. Wang ranked no. 232 on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List with wealth of $4.6 billion. Wanda’s China business partners include Wal-Mart and Starwood Hotels.

Ranking second was Cho Tak Wong, chairman of Fuyao Glass Industry Group, who gave away a way a total of 1.03 billion yuan, or $158 million, according to the magazine. He can afford it. The auto glass maker had wealth of $1.8 billion on our latest billionaires list. His customers include Audi, Ford, Fiat and Nissan. Cho’s hobbies include golf and art collecting.

Coming in third was Lu Zhiqiang, the chairman of the China Oceanwide Group in Beijing, which in turn is part owner of Chinese computer-maker Lenovo . The billionaire – Lu ranked no. 564 on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List with wealth of $2.1 billion – donated 550 million to causes that included disaster relief.

Rounding out the top five were: Chu Mang Yee, chairman of Hong Kong-listed property developer Hopson Development, and Huang Rulun, chairman of Beijing-based Century Golden Resources Group, which has interests in financial services and real estate, including six shopping malls and 16 five-star hotels. Chu ranked no. 1,140 on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List with wealth of $1 billion, and Huang was no. 938 with wealth of $1.3 billion.

Click here for the full Chinese-language report.","One of China’s richest property developers topped a new list of China’s top philanthropists published in the latest issue of Forbes China, the licensed Chinese-language edition of Forbes. Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, donated some 1.28 billion yuan, or $197 million, in cash to philanthropic causes last year, the [...]"
"Baubax, one of the top crowdfunding projects of all time, is finally shipping the last batch of jackets to backers. But some backers who've anticipated delivery for months are already fed up.

The company, which launched in Chicago in 2015 and has since moved to Seattle, billed itself the maker of the ""world's best travel jacket.""

Baubax raised more than $11.3 million on crowdfunding sites in 2015, with more than 40,000 backers ordering the company's hoodies, jackets and blazers. The multi-featured products were often likened to a wearable Swiss Army Knife.

But shipping delays and communication problems frustrated many once-loyal customers, and when Baubax began selling jackets on third-party sites before delivering to crowdfunding backers, some lost patience.

More than 75 percent of crowdfunded projects are delayed, according to research by University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick. And projects that far exceed their funding goals are more likely to be delayed. As orders grow, founders can lose sight of the costs and production demands of filling them.

In updates to backers, Baubax CEO and co-founder Hiral Sanghavi shifted blame to third-party shipping partners. Now, Rakuten Super Logistics, Baubax's North American shipping provider, says all remaining inventory was scheduled to be sent out by Friday, April 15.

Kickstarter backers started receiving their jackets — which include travel-friendly features such as an eye mask and passport pocket — in mid-February, Sanghavi told Blue Sky. Some who placed pre-orders on Indiegogo, where Baubax also began offering its products after becoming one of the biggest Kickstarter campaigns of all time, have not yet received anything. (It now ranks fourth on Kickstarter's most-funded projects page.) Shoppers continue to order jackets through the Indiegogo platform.

In late January, e-commerce site Touch of Modern began selling the jackets with no reported shipping delays. When crowdfunding backers started noticing the sales on Touch of Modern, Baubax assured them they would receive their orders first.

Sanghavi said Baubax has two accounts with Rakuten: one for crowdfunding orders and another for traditional online sales. The crowdfunding shipments, which outnumbered the e-commerce orders and often included more items, went out more slowly than the Touch of Modern orders, angering some waiting backers.

In retrospect, Sanghavi wishes he'd waited to launch on Touch of Modern, he said.

At the time, he felt it was necessary because Baubax had only about three months of cash to run the business and no additional funding on top of its crowdfunding war chest.

""I didn't know it would create such a backlash, because shipments had started already back then,"" Sanghavi said.

He blamed Rakuten for overpromising how many North American shipments it could process in a given day.

Baubax's international shipping partner, Floship, also made mistakes, Sanghavi said, including mislabeling nearly 1,000 customers' orders with a higher price, resulting in additional fees for international recipients. A Floship spokesman confirmed that error and others.

Rakuten Super Logistics CEO Joe DiSorbo confirmed that his company shipped fewer of the 35,000 crowdfunding orders per day than originally promised, but he attributed that to orders being more complicated than anticipated. He said it also took time for Baubax to provide his company order information in the right format, another hurdle.

Sanghavi said more than 75 percent of North American orders have been delivered to crowdfunding backers. Still, a vocal minority are attempting to take the company to task through social media.

Leading the charge is Kat Dawson, a retiree who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She said she spent $790 on six Baubax jackets and a travel blanket on the company's Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns but hasn't received anything.

""I really drank the Kool-Aid,"" said Dawson, who said she has backed more than a dozen other crowdfunding campaigns. She said she requested a refund through her credit card company.

In March, Dawson created a Facebook group where Baubax backers can commiserate about their experiences. She said she create it in response to having comments deleted on Facebook, marked as spam on Indiegogo and being blocked on Twitter. The group has attracted 565 members, or about 1 percent of Baubax's more than 54,200 crowdfunding backers.

""We needed somewhere to provide unbiased reviews — good, bad, ugly, indifferent — where they had no control over taking out the negatives,"" Dawson said. She said she posted comments frequently on Indiegogo, but that platform allows creators to mark repeated or abusive messages as spam.

Sanghavi said his team removed comments that were abusive, threatening or that asked questions already addressed in updates.

Joseph Brassard, of Cambridge, Mass., said he got a refund from Baubax after requesting it through his credit card company. After he received the money, he also got a tracking number for his shipment.

""It's indicative that they really are not in control of their whole channel export business,"" Brassard said.

Lance Hicks, of Newport Beach, Calif., had ordered a Baubax blazer for his son, and received it in early April. He said he understood the delays were a result of being overwhelmed by orders.

""I'm thinking about getting one for myself for travel,"" Hick said. ""Now, I'm assuming, their production time is up and running and they're going to be more much responsive.""

This summer, Baubax may attempt another Kickstarter campaign for another travel product, Sanghavi said. He's hired a team of contractors to develop the new item, and said Baubax's 11 full-time employees are working on fulfilling jacket orders.

""Our goal is not to take people's money and ship them a product which doesn't help them,"" Sanghavi said. ""Our goal is to build a brand.""

Next time around, he said, he plans to put policies in place that will allow Baubax to offer easier returns and exchanges, like e-commerce sites do.

Sanghavi, who started Baubax while an MBA candidate at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, acknowledged he made many mistakes throughout the campaign and said he took full responsibility.

He said he hopes to go back to school to finish his MBA, admitting the Baubax experience has shown him he has room to improve.

""I still have a lot to learn,"" he said.

This story has been updated.","Baubax, one of the top crowdfunding projects of all time, is finally shipping the last batch of jackets to backers. But some backers who've anticipated delivery for months are already fed up."
"The U.S. Border Patrol is under fire for allegedly ordering its elite, SWAT-style units to use non-lethal bean bag ammunition before responding with deadly force – even against suspects armed with high-powered semi-automatic and automatic weapons like AK-47s.

The controversy over the agency’s “bean bag” policy began in the days following the Dec. 14 killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and has escalated recently as more information is uncovered in the investigation of the fatal shooting.

""When the suspected aliens did not drop their weapons, two Border Patrol agents deployed ‘less than lethal' beanbags at the suspected aliens,” according to a FBI search warrant request filed in the U.S. District Court in Tucson on Dec. 29. “At this time, at least one of the suspected aliens fired at the Border Patbrol agents. Two Border Patrol agents returned fire, one with his long gun and one with his pistol. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot with one bullet and died shortly after.”

The warrant appears to support claims made by Terry’s brother, Kent, and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo that Terry’s team -- part of the U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit, also known as BORTAC -- was under standing orders to always use bean-bag rounds first before using live ammunition.

""There was a group of four guys with my brother and two had lethal and two had non-lethal weapons there,"" Kent Terry told Fox News Friday.

Tancredo wrote about the issue in a Dec. 18 op-ed article.

Although it’s not clear how many, if any, border patrol units were ordered to carry the non-lethal beanbag ammunition, one expert insists the order has been applied to at least all BORTAC teams in Arizona – if not the entire Border Patrol.

“That order stemmed from the incident on the El Paso-Juarez border in which an agent discharged a sidearm to defend himself from rock throwers,” said Andy Ramirez, founder of the advocacy group Friends of the Border Patrol. Ramirez was referring to a June shooting that left a 15-year-old Mexican boy dead.

Mexico was outraged at the incident, so Victor Manjarrez Jr., then chief of Border Patrol’s Tuscon sector, “acquiesced by ordering agents to use non-lethal loads,” Ramirez said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman, Agent Mark Qualia, said at the very least, ""every law enforcement personnel within CBP has a sidearm which is fully loaded, along with two additional magazines,” and denied that units were ordered to use non-lethal bean bag ammunition first.

“There was no order given to any CBP law enforcement personel – now or in the past – that indicates the use of less lethal devices before using deadly force,”Qualia, told FoxNews.com.

But T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the border agents’ union, said there are “conflicting statements” as to whether the agents were under such orders. “Because of the ongoing nature of the investigation, the people who know best aren’t talking.”

Ramirez said regardless of whether the men were ordered to use the bean bags, the simple fact that a Border Patrol tactical team was armed with bean bag ammunition at all was “asinine.”

“BORTAC is like a SWAT unit; they’re our most highly trained, specialized unit of agents. These guys go in when we have a serious problem. It would be like sending a SWAT team into a bust with bean bags. ... They were outgunned by far.”

Asked why a BORTAC team would carry guns armed with bean bags, Qualia said, “Why do law enforcement personnel carry Taser guns? If you’re in a confrontational situation where you do not need to use lethal force.”

If the officers did need to use lethal force, Qualia said, they had the freedom to make that decision and the equipment to execute it.

""So I’m not going to Monday morning quarterback a situation where an agent in that heat of the situation has to make that decision...I wasn't there.""

Bonner stressed he also ""didn’t know all the facts of the case,"" but said “given the intelligence they had, a number of agents I spoke with question the wisdom of having less than lethal weapons in that situation.""

Qualia said the CBP is fully cooperating with the FBI in their continued investigation. “As soon as something's been published, we’ll be able to follow up.”",A report on the death of U.S. border agent is raising concerns that the border patrol’s elite are being forced to use non-lethal bean bag ammunition against suspects armed with automatic and semiautomatic weapons.
"Jamie Parker, Sam Clemmett and Poppy Miller in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

05/31/2016 AT 01:00 PM EDT

Just weeks ahead of the first previews of

, the London stage production has released the first look at the characters in costume, starting with the Potter family: Harry, Ginny and their son, Albus Severus Potter.

The character portraits, which debuted on

, marks the first time actor Jamie Parker has been seen as Potter, complete with the infamous scar jetting across his forehead, and his round-frame glasses.

Jamie Parker as Harry Potter

The pictures also revealed actress Poppy Miller as the role of Potter's wife Ginny (née Weasley) and Sam Clemmett as their son Albus.

Poppy Miller as Ginny (Weasley) Potter

picks up 19 years after the final

book, with Potter now working in the Ministry of Magic. And much like his father once did, Albus is struggling ""with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted.""

Sam Clemmett as Albus Severus Potter

""There's much I could say about Sam-as-Albus, but we'd be into spoiler territory, so quickly I'll just say we couldn't has cast it better,"" author

said of the young actor.

And while she's staying mum about Albus, she couldn't help but gush about Parker's transformation into an all-grown-up version of the boy wizard.

""He simply is Harry now,"" she said. ""There's a kind of relief in watching him, he gets it so right.""

Previews begin at the Palace Theatre on June 7.",Cursed Child picks up 19 years after the final Harry Potter book
"Anders Behring Breivik pictured in court in Oslo in February.

(CNN) -- Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing of 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in Norway last summer, was formally charged Wednesday with committing acts of terror and voluntary homicide, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say he was psychotic at the time of the killings and should be transferred to ""compulsory mental health care.""

A fierce debate has raged over whether Breivik is mentally competent to face criminal punishment.

The mass killing on July 22 was the single largest loss of life in Norway since World War II.

Breivik is accused of killing eight people in a bomb attack in Oslo, then going to Utoya island outside the city and systematically gunning down 69 more people, many of them teens and young adults.

Breivik has pleaded not guilty, though he has admitted carried out the attacks, the judge handling his case said previously.

His trial is due to start April 16 and is expected to last 10 weeks.

The court case is designed to demonstrate his guilt or innocence. His punishment, if he is found guilty, will then be based on the determination of his sanity.

Last month, a court ordered him to undergo a fresh round of psychiatric evaluation as experts seek to determine his mental state ahead of a trial.

Two court-appointed psychiatric experts recommended that he spend four weeks under 24-hour psychiatric monitoring so the court can get the fullest possible picture of his behavior, court documents released February 10 said.

The two experts were appointed to evaluate his mental state after the court requested a second opinion because of the importance of the question of sanity to Breivik's trial.

In November, prosecutors said psychiatrists had determined Breivik was paranoid and schizophrenic at the time of the attacks and during 13 interviews experts conducted with him afterward.

It may not be possible for him to be sentenced to the maximum punishment for the crimes if he's deemed insane.

Breivik reiterated some of his extremist views during a hearing last month, which began with him entering with a smile and offering up a raised, clenched-fist salute.

He insists nobody could believe that he was insane, and describes questions about his mental condition as ridiculous, his lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told the court.

Breivik claims the shooting rampage was a matter of self-defense, meant to save Norway from being taken over by multicultural forces and to prevent ethnic cleansing of Norwegians, Lippestad said.

Authorities have described him as a right-wing Christian extremist. A 1,500-page manifesto attributed to Breivik posted on the Internet is critical of Muslim immigration and European liberalism, including Norway's Labour Party.

The victims on Utoya Island were among 700 mostly young people attending a Labour Party camp on Utoya island.

Journalist Olav Mellingsaeter in Oslo and CNN's Laura Perez Maestro contributed to this report","Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing of 77 people in Norway last summer, was charged Wednesday with committing terror and homicide, prosecutors said."
"The Metropolitan Opera’s coming season — and the livelihoods of its workers — continued to hang in the balance on Friday, as the company continued labor talks with two of its biggest unions and a federal mediator in an effort to make progress before a Sunday night deadline.

But the talks with the unions representing the Met’s orchestra and chorus did not go late into the night; they broke up for the day on Friday evening, with plans to resume on Saturday.

Inside the opera house, there was at least a semblance of normalcy, as stagehands returned to work for technical rehearsals of a new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and members of the chorus rehearsed the coming season. Whether they would be back at work on Monday was unclear, though.

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, had postponed the lockout he had threatened for midnight on Thursday, when most of the Met’s union contracts expired, for 72 hours, creating a new deadline of midnight on Sunday. That left alive the possibility that the Met could lock out its workers on Monday, less than two months before the opening of the season on Sept. 22.

Outside the opera house on Friday, the day began with about 150 singers and musicians from the Met’s chorus and orchestra holding a demonstration, with a melodious score, in Dante Park, a small park opposite Lincoln Center.

So far, the Met has come to terms with only three of its unions, those representing ushers, ticket takers, cleaning staff, security guards, building engineers and call center workers. Contracts for 12 unions, including those of the choristers, orchestra players and stagehands, remain unresolved and in some cases seem far from resolution.

Still, there was a palpable sense of relief, however wary, among the choristers and players at the rally on Friday morning. Most wore black T-shirts that read “United — Metropolitan Opera” on the front, with the symbols of the various unions on the back.

A brass nonet from the orchestra played music by Monteverdi, Bizet, Borodin, Verdi and Handel, and union officers, members of the negotiating teams and several elected officials — including Gale A. Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, and Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal — spoke of the Met’s stature and the importance of reaching an agreement.

The only bellicose moment — a chant of “Gelb’s got to go,” led by Ray Hair, president of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra — quickly changed course when Mr. Hair said, “But it doesn’t have to be that way” and urged the Met to acknowledge the musicians’ importance to the company’s operation.

The Met said in a statement that it was hopeful that the 72-hour extension of the negotiating period would “allow productive talks with the unions who have not yet reached agreement with the Met.”

Mr. Gelb said in a statement: “We want to work together with union representatives and do everything we can to achieve new contracts, which is why we’ve agreed to an extension.”

James Odom, the president of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the chorus, stage directors, soloists and others, said before the rally, “We’re ready to work out an agreement, but we have to address the real issues.” He was referring to the expansion of the Met’s budget to more than $300 million a year during Mr. Gelb’s tenure. “There are problems that go far deeper than just cutting union wages.”

Jessica Phillips Rieske, a clarinetist in the Met orchestra and a member of the orchestra’s negotiating team, also expressed guarded hope that Allison Beck, the federal mediator who joined the talks on Thursday, would be able to bring the sides together.

“I thought she was very professional, very reasonable,” Ms. Phillips Rieske said. “But we haven’t had negotiations in the mediation process yet, so we’re taking it one day at a time.”

There were indications that Ms. Beck had her work cut out for her. One union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which had not opted for mediation, partly because both sides had believed its talks were further along, said late on Thursday night that its negotiations had stalled.

And in his first public statement after the lockout was postponed, Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, continued to question the need for significant cost savings at the Met and said it would take more than 72 hours to reach an agreement.

“It is our hope that the mediated negotiations will finally yield transparency on the part of Met management, requiring it to prove why it needs upwards of $30 million in cuts to address a deficit of $2.8 million,” he said.

Mr. Gelb has said that the deficit was kept that low only by record fund-raising in recent years, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, and by dipping into the Met’s endowment, which is no longer large enough to cover the expenses of a single season — a traditional red flag for a performing arts organization. He has said that donors would be willing to double the endowment if they did not fear that the money would be used to plug annual deficits.

In addition, box office revenues are down, and in 2012 the Met took the unusual step of selling $100 million worth of bonds to see it through its financial problems.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the avenue upon which Dante Park is located. The park, across from Lincoln Center, is on Columbus Avenue (at West 63rd Street), not Amsterdam Avenue.

A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2014, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: First Extended Talks at Met End Without a Labor Deal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe","Singers and musicians held a rally on Friday morning, as other Metropolitan Opera workers rehearsed and union leaders prepared for federal mediation."
"StumbleUpon set a record for mobile stumbles during the Super Bowl, a phenomenon that may have been caused by consumers’ lack of access to their PCs.

Roberto Sanabria, the StumbleStats Ninja for the company, detailed the activity of StumbleUpon users on the company’s blog Tuesday. According to Sanabria, mobile stumbles hit a record around 6:50 p.m. PT, right before the Super Bowl ended. At that point, mobile stumbles hit a rate of 41 stumbles per second, which was 10% higher than the company’s previous peak. But overall, the vast majority of stumbles during the entire game were via desktops and laptops.

On the blog, Sanabria speculated that users may have been stuck in their living rooms and away from their computers, accounting for the relatively high number of mobile stumbles.

StumbleUpon launched an iPhone app last August. Mike Mayzel, a spokesman for StumbleUpon, says that mobile traffic for the site grows 30-40% a month, but overall mobile still accounts for a relatively small amount of overall stumbles — in the single digits, percentage-wise.

Elsewhere, users’ activity during the game appeared to be what you might expect: People stumbled less during the game, especially towards the end and during the halftime show.

Image courtesy of iStock, FuatKose.",Mobile stumbles on StumbleUpon hit record during the Super Bowl.
"Ninety minutes later, the Bounty finally lost its battle with 40 mph winds and 18-foot seas. Its captain ordered all hands to abandon the sinking ship, a shocking demise for a celebrity vessel built for the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

The ship, which had been trying to make its way around Hurricane Sandy, carried a crew of 16. When the rescue operation ended about 10 a.m. Monday, 14 of the crew members had been saved by Coast Guard helicopters. Two people, Capt. Robin Walbridge, 63, and Claudene Christian, 42, were missing.

Christian’s body was recovered Monday night, but Walbridge remained unaccounted for.

The HMS Bounty, owned by New York businessman Robert Hansen, began its journey Thursday, departing from New London, Conn., for St. Petersburg, Fla., where the ship has docked for years. In addition to its star turns in the 2006 “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel and other Hollywood movies, the ship was used to teach the “nearly lost arts of square rigged sailing and seamanship,” its Web site said. It also offered sailing, teamwork and leadership classes for the general public.

On Saturday, Walbridge reported that he expected to face the hurricane’s brunt that night, according to the ship’s Facebook page. The HMS Bounty Organization, which ran the ship, knew its tall-ship devotees might be skeptical of the vessel’s path, so it tried to reassure its 8,000 Facebook followers.

“Rest assured that the Bounty is safe and in very capable hands,” the Facebook page’s administrator wrote. “Bounty’s current voyage is a calculated decision . . . NOT AT ALL . . . irresponsible or with a lack of foresight as some have suggested. The fact of the matter is . . . A SHIP IS SAFER AT SEA THAN IN PORT!”

But Sunday night, the hurricane was proving too much for the Bounty. The ship sent out a distress signal at 9 p.m., according to the Coast Guard. Two hours later, the HMS organization called the Coast Guard, confirming that it had lost radio contact with the vessel.

A Coast Guard C-130 aircraft arrived at the scene an hour later to make direct contact with the Bounty and survey the scene, about 90 miles off Cape Hatteras.

When the captain ordered everyone off the ship about 4:30 a.m., three people struggled to climb into the two lifeboats and were smacked by a wave, the Coast Guard said. One man fell into the water, but others pulled him into one of the boats. Walbridge and Christian were thrown into the water and disappeared.

While the HMS Bounty and its crew foundered in the dark, Steve Bonn was woken from a sound sleep in Camden, N.C., about 4:15 a.m. by his ringing cellphone. The 44-year-old Coast Guard helicopter pilot was needed for a mission: A big boat was sinking.","The Coast Guard rescued 14 crew members as the storm-hit boat sank, but one died and the ship’s captain is missing."
"While the skies in Singapore has remained smog-free one month into its annual haze season, its tourism sector is bracing itself for a recurrence of last year's severe air pollution, with precautionary measures already in place island-wide.

Drifting smoke from neighboring Indonesia is an annual affair during the dry months of June to September due to the agricultural slash-and-burn practices during harvesting, but many Singaporeans and businesses were caught unprepared when smog pollution reached hazardous level last June, hitting a 16-year high.

Read MoreAnalysts slash forecasts for Singapore 2014 growth

With Indonesia's disaster agency issuing recent warnings of a surge in forest fires in western Sumatra and amid forecasts that this year's haze could be exacerbated by the El Nino effect, industry players tell CNBC that they are taking no chances. Many have put in place contingency plans to combat potential pollution-related disruptions.

Aside from alternative work arrangements, travel agency Dynasty Travel said they have a variety of indoor itineraries to fall back on in the event of hazardous air conditions.

""Last year, we had a tour group who had to cancel a trip to the Singapore flyer so this year if the same happens, we'll make arrangements to [restaurant and bar] '1-Altitude' which is indoors and they can still view the city scenery,"" said Alicia Seah, director of Marketing Communications at Dynasty Travel.

Read MoreSingapore zoo CEO takes a leap into the wild

""For our M.I.C.E groups, we have in place art and craft, baking classes and inspirational talks if outdoor team games which require physical exertion need to be canceled,"" Seah added.

While Dynasty Travel saw minimal cancellations last year, it suffered a significant slowdown in bookings for nearly a month at the onset of haze. ""If we had 20 calls per week, during the haze it dropped to five,"" Seah noted.","While the skies in Singapore has been smog-free thus far, its tourism sector is bracing itself for a recurrence of last year's  severe air pollution."
"Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park

Are you affected by the fire? Please share your images and footage if you can do so safely.

(CNN) -- It was a rare bright spot on an otherwise hazy, smoke-filled horizon.

As firefighters worked to get a grip on one of the largest wildfires in California's history, an evacuation advisory was lifted Thursday for residents in Tuolumne City, a picturesque community threatened by the blaze.

In a further sign of progress, authorities also withdrew similar advisories for two other northern California communities close to the flames, Soulsbyville and Willow Springs.

Known as the Rim Fire, the conflagration has charred nearly 200,000 acres, cost the state more than $39 million to date and is threatening 5,500 structures, of which 4,500 are residences.

It's the fifth-largest wildfire in California history. On Thursday, it was in its 12th day and it had only been contained 32%, according to Cal Fire. That's a slight improvement from the 30% containment the day before.

Because of the approaching flames, officials have shut down electricity generators, and San Francisco -- more than 120 miles to the west -- is temporarily getting power from elsewhere.

5,000 firefighters battle the blaze

While the Yosemite Conservancy says the Rim Fire has consumed tens of thousands of acres inside Yosemite National Park, it has so far had little or no direct impact on Yosemite Valley, a popular spot for tourists and home to many of the park's iconic attractions, including the El Capitan rock formation.

What you need to know about wildfires

Firefighters hope to keep it that way. Nearly 5,000 people have been assigned to tackling the blaze.

""This is going to be a tough fire,"" said Tom Tidwell, chief of the U.S. Forest Service. ""It's going to continue for a few more weeks.""

The blaze has created challenges not only for utility providers, but also for local firefighters, who fill in for state and federal fire teams.

""It makes more work for us. Everybody has to work more, whether they are up there or not,"" Art Ray, chief operator for the Stockton Fire Department, told CNN affiliate KCRA.

Some firefighters get little sleep, working four straight days, he said.

""We have to work 72 or 96 hours in a row, and being away from your family with little sleep and physically demanding takes a toll,"" Ray said.

'A lot of work to be done'

Authorities say the Rim Fire started on August 17. The cause is under investigation.

""There's a lot of concern, and there's a lot of work to be done,"" Forest Service spokesman Lee Bentley said.

Firefighters have been able to build fire lines in several locations, officials say.

The forecast is looking favorable as daytime highs sink into the 60s in Yosemite National Park over the Labor Day weekend, a break from the temperatures in the 80s firefighters were facing earlier in the week.

More than 20 helicopters and air tankers were aiding the efforts.

Firefighters battle blaze near Yosemite

CNN's Dana Ford, Gary Tuchman and David Simpson contributed to this report.","It was a rare bright spot on an otherwise hazy, smoke-filled horizon. An evacuation advisory was lifted Thursday for residents in Tuolumne City, California."
"CHICAGO – Joakim Noah had 20 points and 12 rebounds, D.J. Augustin scored 22 and the Chicago Bulls beat the Miami Heat 95-88 in overtime Sunday after Jimmy Butler blocked LeBron James at the end of regulation.

Dwyane Wade scored 25 for Miami, but with James struggling again, the Heat dropped their third straight to match their longest losing streak of the season.

James scored 17 points on 8-of-23 shooting and couldn't come through after Miami blew a 12-point lead down the stretch. With a chance to win it at the end of regulation, he got stripped by Butler on a layup.

In overtime, it was all Bulls.

Chicago outscored Miami 9-2, starting with Augustin's 3 just under a minute in. Butler added a jumper from the wing, Noah scored on a putback and Butler added two free throws to make it 95-86 with 1:33 left before James made a layup.",Joakim Noah and Jimmy Butler understand it.
"The research was conducted by Frank J. Infurna and Suniya S. Luthar, psychologists at Arizona State University, Tempe, who took advantage of a unique data set gathered annually for 13 years in Australia. It is called the Household Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia Study, conducted from 2001 through 2013 among a nationally representative sample of Australians aged 15 and older who responded via a combination of face-to-face and telephone interviews and self-completed questionnaires.

During the study, 421 participants lost a spouse. The Arizona psychologists analyzed five specific aspects of how they were faring for each of the five years before and five years after they became widowed. Sixty-six percent returned to their pre-loss level of life satisfaction within a year, whereas 34 percent experienced a precipitous decline after the death and had not returned to their prior level even five years later.

When responses to questions about positive feelings like “Did you feel full of life?” “Have you felt calm and peaceful?” “Did you have a lot of energy?” were assessed, only 26 percent had returned to their previous level; 74 percent, who had started at a lower level before their loss, sank even lower at the time of death and never bounced back fully.

With regard to negative feelings like “Have you been a nervous person?” “Have you felt so down in the dumps nothing could cheer you up?” “Did you feel worn out?,” only 19 percent were found to be resilient, no worse off after than before their loss.

The participants also reported on their general health and whether they had trouble performing daily activities like carrying groceries, climbing stairs, walking several blocks, bathing and dressing. Thirty-seven percent were resilient in terms of general health, but for 63 percent health was poor to begin with and sank lower with time. Physical functioning declined as well for 55 percent, with only 29 percent showing resilience.

Of the entire group, only 8 percent of the bereaved individuals were in good shape for all five indicators of resilience studied, while 20 percent were not resilient in any of them.

Given that 92 percent of participants experienced declines in one or more areas of functioning, the researchers concluded that it is wrong to define resilience “based on a limited set of measured outcomes.” In fact, they added, people who lost a spouse may have difficulties beyond those assessed in this study, like problems at work or general feelings of loneliness.

All told, the findings showed pronounced differences from what has been generally believed about how resilient people are to the loss of a spouse. It depends on the particular aspect of life in question.

Most important to resilience in the face of bereavement were how vulnerable or protected surviving spouses felt and how well they functioned in their everyday roles, Dr. Infurna said in an interview.

He and Dr. Luthar described three factors that influenced overall resilience: 1) Reliable comfort – having someone to confide in or lean on in times of trouble, and being able to get help from other people when needed; 2) Social connectedness – whether their physical health or emotional problems interfered with social activities like visiting friends and relatives and interacting socially with neighbors or groups, and 3) Daily functioning – having difficulties with their normal activities because of emotional problems like depression or anxiety.

Based on their data, the researchers concluded that “it can take two to three years or even longer for some to recover from bereavement” and return “to their pre-loss levels of functioning.”

What they found to help most was remaining socially connected and engaged in the usual activities of everyday life and knowing where they could turn for help and comfort and receiving support when they needed it.",Even those who seem fine often experience significant declines in specific aspects of physical and emotional health.
"View of Scheveningen Sands by Hendrick van Anthonissen after restoration, showing the whale. Photograph: Fitzwilliam Museum

It was always a bit of a puzzle what the people clustered on the sands, or peering down from the dunes, were actually looking at on a bleak stretch of windswept Dutch beach. The startling truth has just been revealed, after the conservator Shan Kuang took a delicate scalpel to a painting which has been in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for the past 140 years.

She first uncovered a baffling figure of man apparently standing in mid air, and then gradually revealed that he was standing on the great hillock of a beached whale, washed up on the shallows.

The 1641 landscape, View of Scheveningen Sands by Hendrick van Anthonissen, was very nicely painted, but perhaps one of the less exciting paintings in the museum's Dutch Golden Age collection.

There was certainly no whale when it came to the museum in 1873, bequeathed by Edward Kerrich, a clergyman, artist, and collector; the museum was probably much more excited by his oil sketches by Rubens, and drawings by masters including Albrecht Dürer.

Neither the curators nor Kuang have been able to trace any earlier reference to the whale, or to the overpainting that sank it. Kuang can't date the extra layer of paint, much more crudely applied than the original, though she suspects it may be 18th century and done because an owner thought the subject matter repellent, or a dealer thought the picture would sell better without a great dead animal taking up the middle ground.

""Today we treat works of art as entities, but in the previous centuries paintings were often elements of interior design that were adapted to fit certain spaces – or adjusted to suit changing tastes,"" she said.

The painting only came to her at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, a division of the museum renowned for paintings research and conservation, because the Dutch Golden Age gallery, which reopens to the public this week, was being renovated.

The varnish of the beach scene had yellowed and become unsightly, but as she removed it the mid-air man appeared, beside what appeared to be a sail. She could also see that a stretch of the sea was clearly a later addition. There was a long debate among the experts about the potential risk of damaging the painting before she proceeded to remove the overpainting, using a scalpel and solvents, working on tiny areas under a microscope.

The whale was a complete surprise – they thought the little man, who may actually have been depicted measuring the great creature, might have been standing in the rigging of a boat.

The curators were interested that unlike contemporary prints showing whales as terrifying monsters and omens of disaster, Anthonissen had depicted one in a real event. Records show there were many reports of beaching whales in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, prompting a surge of public interest in the creatures.

Such strandings, being studied by scientists all over the world, still cause great excitement, attracting crowds and often doomed attempts to refloat them. Huge crowds turned out to watch the Thames whale, which got as far upstream as Battersea in January 2006, but died during a rescue attempt. The skeleton is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum.

There were fears six weeks ago that the bloated carcass of a dead blue whale which washed up near the Newfoundland town of Trout River, swollen to twice its normal size, could explode. It deflated naturally, but was followed a few weeks later by a second even larger dead whale at nearby Rocky Harbour. Scientists believe both animals, from an endangered species, may have died trapped under thicker-than-usual Arctic pack ice.",Mysterious artwork at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum showing people clustered on beach had huge creature painted over
"Andrew Hammond is Ottawa’s biggest sports celebrity these days.

A win streak, plus a cheeky moniker will do that for a fella.

The 27-year-old rookie goaltender is on quite a roll. Known as ""the Hamburglar” — a take on the old McDonald’s character — Hammond is 10-0-1 in his first NHL starts, including a sparkling 1.39 goals-against average and a pair of shutouts.

In doing so, Hammond has kept the Senators in the playoff race as the team is five points behind the Boston Bruins for the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference.

Will his play catapult the Sens into the playoffs? That will be revealed in less than a month.

For now, he has galvanized a city with his stellar play. He's also reportedly set to receive a special card that will allow him to eat for free for life at several McDonald’s franchises in the Ottawa area.

Here are five other things to know about Ottawa’s new hockey hero:

Born in White Rock, B.C., Hammond played junior in the BCHL with the Alberni Valley Bulldogs and Vernon Vipers from 2006-09. He played the next four years at the NCAA level at Bowling Green University. Hammond, who posted a 30-68-13 record in college, was twice named the Falcons’ MVP.

He went undrafted, but was signed by the Senators to a two-year contract in 2013. Last season, he played for the team’s AHL affiliate, the Binghamton Senators, where he went 25-19-3.

Like many nicknames, Hammond’s Hamburglar moniker didn’t happen overnight. While he was “stealing” wins for Bowling Green, teammate Wade Finegan told the National Post that he initially started calling Hammond Robber, then Burglar, then Burgs. The Hamburglar stuck about a week later.

""For me, it was kind of like he would rob you and he was a big guy, so he’s hungry,” Finegan told the paper. “We throw around so much B.S., as you know. You throw enough at the wall some of it is going to stick.”

Andrew Hammond features a Hamburglar-themed goalie mask. (Twitter)

Now in Ottawa, Hammond, as part of some creative art work, has the McDonald’s mascot painted on his goalie mask.

His play has also caught the attention of an Ottawa radio station, which wrote a song called Ballad of the Hamburglar to the music of Billy Idol’s White Wedding.

Hammond’s journey to the Senators wasn’t easy. In fact, it took two injuries for him to crack the Ottawa lineup. First, starter Craig Anderson suffered a bruised hand on his blocker side just before the all-star break. Backup Robin Lehner then sustained a concussion on Feb. 16 against the Carolina Hurricanes.

Hammond didn’t take long to make an impact in his pro debut, starting against the Montreal Canadiens on Feb. 15 at the Canadian Tire Centre. Hammond was spectacular, making 42 saves in a 4-2 win over the Canadiens, and was named the game’s first star. His latest win — a 2-1 shootout victory over Philadelphia on Sunday — drew a burger celebration from the Ottawa fans.

After his latest victory, Hammond has earned at least a point in each of his first 11 NHL starts, becoming the fifth goaltender in history to reach that milestone, according to Elias Sports Bureau. He joins Patrick Lalime (10-0-1 with Pittsburgh in 1996-97), Bob Froese (10-0-1 with Philadelphia in 1982-83), Ross Brooks (8-0-3 with Boston in 1972-73) and Bill Durnan (9-0-2 with the Montreal Canadiens in 1943-44).

Hammond can make more history with his next start, presumably on Tuesday night in a road game against the Carolina Hurricanes. Currently, the Senators goaltender has allowed two goals or fewer in his first 11 starts. Should he continue that feat in his next game, Hammond would equal Frank Brimsek's NHL record of 12 that the Bruins netminder set from Nov. 3 to Dec. 27, 1938, according to Elias.","Andrew Hammond has posted a 10-0-1 record in his first 11 NHL starts for the Ottawa Senators. In doing so, the 27-year-old netminder has galvanized a team and become the city's newest hockey hero."
"BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY WITH MARCUS BARAM AND K.C. BAKER

Wednesday, October 28th 1998, 2:05AM

New York's upper East Side seems to be turning into Splitsville. All at once, the marriages of three power couples appear to be shorting out.

Ken Lipper, the hotshot investment banker who served as a deputy mayor for Ed Koch and went on to write and produce the Al Pacino movie ""City Hall,"" may separate from Dr. Evelyn Gruss, the child-development specialist who is his wife of 32 years, friends say.

Lipper and Gruss, who have four daughters, didn't return calls. But word is there'll be no fighting over marital assets.

Lipper, the Bronx-born son of a shoe salesman, made a fortune on Wall Street. But his bank account is dwarfed by what Gruss inherited when her financier father, Joseph, died in 1993. Shortly before his death, Forbes magazine pegged the Gruss family wealth at over $500 million. Sources say that Ken, who started a foundation with Evelyn it made the Holocaust documentary ""The Last Days"" plans to let her keep her inheritance.

Social couple Dixon and Pauline Boardman are also said to be parting.

Dixon's Optima Fund Management handles some of the smartest money on Wall Street. He's also rumored to have been the model for Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe's ""Bonfire of the Vanities.""

Pauline, the mother of their two gorgeous daughters, is a hot decorator and a member of the international best-dressed set. In spite of all this apparent perfection, the couple's marriage of 31 years has ruptured, say friends. FYI, their formerly happy home at on E. 72nd St. may soon go on the market, for $5.5 million.

Media darlings Terry and Joanie McDonell are also said to be living apart. Novelist Joanie wouldn't confirm or deny that Terry has moved out of their Gracie Square pad. ""Why don't you call Terry?"" she suggested.

Her husband, former editor of Esquire and currently top man at Men's Journal, didn't call back. Joanie did offer that she's editing a collection of thoughts on ""melancholy,"" but added, ""It's not therapeutic.""

Princess Diana wasn't ready to go Hollywood when Kevin Costner came calling.

Diana was unimpressed by Costner's plea that she take a starring role in the sequel to his movie ""The Bodyguard,"" writes royal biographer Anthony Holden. The writer lunched with her at Kensington Palace 10 months before her death.

In fact, the princess was quite miffed by the proposal, which made headlines around the world. ""She spoke with distaste of Kevin Costner, who had just been on the phone, trying to persuade her to appear with him in a movie,"" writes Holden in his new book, ""Charles at 50.""

Holly Hunter, who co-stars with Danny DeVito and Queen Latifah in the romantic comedy ""Living Out Loud,"" expertly evaded questions at the premiere about how she got on with Richard LaGravenese, who wrote and directed the flick.

In a recent New York magazine article, LaGravenese called his relationship with the actress ""challenging,"" saying that he has a nasty habit of idealizing women and giving his power over to them, which makes him start ""resenting and punishing them.""

Others weren't so tight-lipped. DeVito told us he enjoyed playing the romantic lead for the first time because he ""got to kiss the girl. Michael Douglas always gets to do that,"" said DeVito.

Referring to his character's comically steamy elevator scene, the diminuitive actor said, ""Douglas always has these really bizarre elevator scenes, and I had one, too, now.""

Liv Tyler stepped out with her new man, Royston Langdon, at Monday night's premiere of the new glam-rock movie, ""Velvet Goldmine.""

The actress, who recently split with long-time beau Joaquin Phoenix, is dating the 26-year-old Spacehog bassist. During the screening, the couple cuddled, held hands, kissed and shared a large Coke.

Tyler and Langdon weren't saying much about about their new romance. Contrary to another report she's not dating Royston's brother, Antony. ""I'm always getting confused with Antony, even though we don't look the same,"" Royston told us. Antony is one of Phoenix' pals and has been dating his sister, Summer. ""We're all friends,"" claims Royston.

Some of the other glitterati roaming the Bowery Ballroom were Claudia Schiffer and her sister Carolin, Gina Gershon, Sandra Bernhard, Stanley Tucci, Taylor Dayne, Donovan Leitch and Kirsty Hume.

LEONARDO DICAPRIO, Mike Tyson and Kevin Costner partied Monday at Lot 61. DiCaprio had some fun with one beauty at the club attaching a ""Models Suck"" bumper sticker to the brunette, a little below her waist. . . .

NO ONE WAS MIA when Barry Diller and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter tossed a party for Diane von Furstenberg's new book, ""Diane: A Signature Life."" Among the A-listers who flooded into Elaine's were Henry Kissinger, Walter Cronkite, Charlie Rose, Edgar Bronfman Jr., Anne Bass, Marisa Berenson, David Brown, Helen Gurley Brown, Don Hewitt and Steven Rattner . . .

OPRAH WINFREY's on-air relationship guru, Iyanla Vanzant, is in town this week for her induction into ASCAP. The author of the mega-selling ""In the Meantime"" is talking with songwriters about setting her inspirational words to music.

'X-FILES' STAR David Duchovny likes his films X-rated. ""I think porn is fine,"" he says in the December issue of Playboy. ""I like to watch people f-. My big porn years were the '80s."" The expectant father admits that Alicia Monet was his favorite skin-flick star. ""If anything good can happen from this interview, it's that Alicia would contact me for lunch,"" he kidded. . . .

ARTIST FERNANDO BOTERO's works will be shown at a $1,000-a-ticket cocktail party benefiting the U.S. Equestrian Team and the Developing Show Jumping Rider's Fund at the Marlborough Gallery on Tuesday.","New York's upper East Side seems to be turning into Splitsville. All at once, the marriages of three power couples appear to be shorting out. Ken Lipper, the hotshot investment banker who served as a deputy mayor for Ed Koch and went on to write and produce the Al Pacino movie ""City Hall,""may separate from Dr. Evelyn Gruss, the child-development specialist who is his wife of 32 years, friends say. Lipper and Gruss, who"
"Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Image 1 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

""Boyhood"" lost to BIRDMAN last year. It shouldn't have.

Image 1 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

""Boyhood"" lost to BIRDMAN last year. It shouldn't have.

""Boyhood"" lost to BIRDMAN last year. It shouldn't have.

Image 2 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

""Lincoln"" lost in the year that ARGO won. That was mistake.

Image 2 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

""Lincoln"" lost in the year that ARGO won. That was mistake.

""Lincoln"" lost in the year that ARGO won. That was mistake.

Image 3 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR -- the best film of 2013, not even nominated.

Image 3 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR -- the best film of 2013, not even nominated.

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR -- the best film of 2013, not even...nominated.

Image 4 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Scarface: Not nominated, but better than ""Terms of Endearment"" (which I like) -- in fact, better than anything in 1983.

Image 4 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Scarface: Not nominated, but better than ""Terms of Endearment"" (which I like) -- in fact, better than anything in 1983.

Scarface: Not nominated, but better than ""Terms of Endearment""...(which I like) -- in fact, better than anything in 1983.

Image 5 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

25TH HOUR: Spike Lee's best film, and one of the best American films of the decade. Not even nominated.

Image 5 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

25TH HOUR: Spike Lee's best film, and one of the best American films of the decade. Not even nominated.

25TH HOUR: Spike Lee's best film, and one of the best American films...of the decade. Not even nominated.

Image 6 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

A Hard Day's Night: On the cutting edge of music AND filmmaking in 1964.

Image 6 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

A Hard Day's Night: On the cutting edge of music AND filmmaking in 1964.

A Hard Day's Night: On the cutting edge of music AND filmmaking in...1964.

Image 7 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

A PLACE IN THE SUN: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.

Image 7 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

A PLACE IN THE SUN: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.

A PLACE IN THE SUN: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.

Image 8 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.

Image 8 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.

Image 9 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Raging Bull: Lost to ""Ordinary People.""

Image 9 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Raging Bull: Lost to ""Ordinary People.""

Raging Bull: Lost to ""Ordinary People.""

Image 10 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES: One of the classic westerns, and few even saw it.

Image 10 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES: One of the classic westerns, and few even saw it.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES: One of the classic westerns, and...few even saw it.

Image 11 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BEFORE SUNRISE: The true best film of 1995 -- and it has gotten even better with time.

Image 11 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BEFORE SUNRISE: The true best film of 1995 -- and it has gotten even better with time.

BEFORE SUNRISE: The true best film of 1995 -- and it has gotten even...better with time.

Image 12 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BOOGIE NIGHTS: The best film of 1997 (co-starring Heather Graham).

Image 12 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BOOGIE NIGHTS: The best film of 1997 (co-starring Heather Graham).

BOOGIE NIGHTS: The best film of 1997 (co-starring Heather Graham).

Image 13 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Years later, the Academy's mistake is more obvious than it even was at the time. ""Crash"" won that year.

Image 13 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Years later, the Academy's mistake is more obvious than it even was at the time. ""Crash"" won that year.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Years later, the Academy's mistake is more...obvious than it even was at the time. ""Crash"" won that year.

Image 14 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

CITIZEN KANE: Yes, it lost, too.

Image 14 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

CITIZEN KANE: Yes, it lost, too.

CITIZEN KANE: Yes, it lost, too.

Image 15 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

MODERN TIMES: Lost to THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. Come on.

Image 15 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

MODERN TIMES: Lost to THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. Come on.

MODERN TIMES: Lost to THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. Come on.

Image 16 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE GREAT DICTATOR: Lost to ""Rebecca.""

Image 16 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE GREAT DICTATOR: Lost to ""Rebecca.""

THE GREAT DICTATOR: Lost to ""Rebecca.""

Image 17 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

DO THE RIGHT THING: In the year that DRIVING MISS DAISY won . . . not even nominated.

Image 17 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

DO THE RIGHT THING: In the year that DRIVING MISS DAISY won . . . not even nominated.

DO THE RIGHT THING: In the year that DRIVING MISS DAISY won . . . not...even nominated.

Image 18 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Face in the Crowd: Also not nominated in 1957.

Image 18 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Face in the Crowd: Also not nominated in 1957.

Face in the Crowd: Also not nominated in 1957.

Image 19 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

FARGO lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT.

Image 19 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

FARGO lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT.

FARGO lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT.

Image 20 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

ROMEO AND JULIET: Lost to ""Oliver!""

Image 20 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

ROMEO AND JULIET: Lost to ""Oliver!""

ROMEO AND JULIET: Lost to ""Oliver!""

Image 21 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

GOODFELLAS: Lost to ""Dances With Wolves.""

Image 21 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

GOODFELLAS: Lost to ""Dances With Wolves.""

GOODFELLAS: Lost to ""Dances With Wolves.""

Image 22 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS lost to THE HURT LOCKER.

Image 22 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS lost to THE HURT LOCKER.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS lost to THE HURT LOCKER.

Image 23 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

JFK: The best movie of 1991 -- one of the best of the decade -- it could never have won because people felt so threatened by it.

Image 23 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

JFK: The best movie of 1991 -- one of the best of the decade -- it could never have won because people felt so threatened by it.

JFK: The best movie of 1991 -- one of the best of the decade -- it...could never have won because people felt so threatened by it.

Image 24 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Malcolm X: ""Unforgiven"" was a worthy choice, but 20 years later this Spike Lee film has only gotten better.

Image 24 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Malcolm X: ""Unforgiven"" was a worthy choice, but 20 years later this Spike Lee film has only gotten better.

Malcolm X: ""Unforgiven"" was a worthy choice, but 20 years later this...Spike Lee film has only gotten better.

Image 25 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

MILK lost to SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. That really happened.

Image 25 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

MILK lost to SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. That really happened.

MILK lost to SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. That really happened.

Image 26 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

OUT OF THE PAST: Captured the dark side of the period.

Image 26 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

OUT OF THE PAST: Captured the dark side of the period.

OUT OF THE PAST: Captured the dark side of the period.

Image 27 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

CITY LIGHTS: Exactly the kind of singular masterpiece the Academy prefers to ignore.

Image 27 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

CITY LIGHTS: Exactly the kind of singular masterpiece the Academy prefers to ignore.

CITY LIGHTS: Exactly the kind of singular masterpiece the Academy...prefers to ignore.

Image 28 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Broadcast News: Even better than ""The Last Emperor.""

Image 28 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Broadcast News: Even better than ""The Last Emperor.""

Broadcast News: Even better than ""The Last Emperor.""

Image 29 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

PULP FICTION: Lost to ""Forrest Gump."" Really.

Image 29 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

PULP FICTION: Lost to ""Forrest Gump."" Really.

PULP FICTION: Lost to ""Forrest Gump."" Really.

Image 30 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

REDS: Lost to ""Chariots of Fire.""

Image 30 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

REDS: Lost to ""Chariots of Fire.""

REDS: Lost to ""Chariots of Fire.""

Image 31 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Revolutionary Road: Best film of 2008, not even nominated in the year that ""Slumdog Millionaire"" won.

Image 31 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Revolutionary Road: Best film of 2008, not even nominated in the year that ""Slumdog Millionaire"" won.

Revolutionary Road: Best film of 2008, not even nominated in the year...that ""Slumdog Millionaire"" won.

Image 32 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Lost to ""Shakespeare in Love.""

Image 32 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Lost to ""Shakespeare in Love.""

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Lost to ""Shakespeare in Love.""

Image 33 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

sex, lies and videotape (by Steven Soderbergh), not even nominated in the year that ""Driving Miss Daisy"" won.

Image 33 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

sex, lies and videotape (by Steven Soderbergh), not even nominated in the year that ""Driving Miss Daisy"" won.

sex, lies and videotape (by Steven Soderbergh), not even nominated in...the year that ""Driving Miss Daisy"" won.

Image 34 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

The Divorcee: Not necessarily better but as good as ""All Quiet On the Western Front"" and a more forward-looking choice.

Image 34 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

The Divorcee: Not necessarily better but as good as ""All Quiet On the Western Front"" and a more forward-looking choice.

The Divorcee: Not necessarily better but as good as ""All Quiet On...the Western Front"" and a more forward-looking choice.

Image 35 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE NEW WORLD: Not even nominated.

Image 35 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE NEW WORLD: Not even nominated.

THE NEW WORLD: Not even nominated.

Image 36 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Thelma and Louise: Lost to ""The Silence of the Lambs.""

Image 36 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Thelma and Louise: Lost to ""The Silence of the Lambs.""

Thelma and Louise: Lost to ""The Silence of the Lambs.""

Image 37 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE THIN RED LINE: Lost to ""Shakespeare in Love.""

Image 37 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THE THIN RED LINE: Lost to ""Shakespeare in Love.""

THE THIN RED LINE: Lost to ""Shakespeare in Love.""

Image 38 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR: Not recognized as a classic in its time, one of the most prescient films of the 1970s.

Image 38 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR: Not recognized as a classic in its time, one of the most prescient films of the 1970s.

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR: Not recognized as a classic in its time,...one of the most prescient films of the 1970s.

Image 39 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Image 39 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

Image 40 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

V for Vendetta: Not even nominated.

Image 40 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

V for Vendetta: Not even nominated.

V for Vendetta: Not even nominated.

Image 41 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: Lost to ""A Man for All Seasons.""

Image 41 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: Lost to ""A Man for All Seasons.""

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: Lost to ""A Man for All Seasons.""","The Motion Picture Academy gets abuse from all sides, and the abuse never stops -- down through history everyone has an opinion as to who should have won in this or that category in this or that ye..."
"JOAQUIN AND VIRGINIA FOLCH have skied virgin powder through the fjordlands of remote eastern Greenland and forged trails at altitudes of over 13,000 feet in the Rohtang Pass in the Indian Himalayas. Heli-skiing with a group of experts, Mr. Folch opened a route on Mount Elbrus in Russia near the Georgian border, where they heard the sounds of guns and explosives in the distance. “And we were going into the helicopter each morning surrounded by Army people,” Mr. Folch said. “It was a little scary.”

You might assume that the Folches are stunt professionals or accomplished members of the Explorers Club. But Mr. Folch is a 56-year-old businessman, chief executive of a Spanish paint manufacturer, and Mrs. Folch, 50, is an interior designer — albeit a very athletic one.

“We were in a completely unexplored area,” said Mr. Folch, describing his adventures in Russia. “One day the conditions were magnificent: bluebird-colored skies and 30 centimeters fresh powder snow. There wasn’t one person for miles around, and as we skied down we had Mount Elbrus — the highest peak in Europe — always in front of us.”

Until recently it was generally only hard-core professionals and guides who would dare to go on exploratory trail-breaking trips in locations like Greenland; daring skiers like the Folches would have been limited to heli-skiing in Canada or off-piste skiing in the Alps. But recently, thanks to the efforts of some intrepid entrepreneurs, extreme ski touring has hit the mainstream.

“The market for big mountain skiing in remote locations is growing in a big way,” said Chris Owens, one of the owners of EpicQuest (888-983-3742; www.epicquest.com), an adventure tour company focusing on heli-skiing trips that began last year, the result of a merger of two existent outfits.

“People are just starting to realize that you don’t have to be a professional athlete to do it,” Mr. Owens said.

Mr. Owen stressed that most experienced skiers would qualify for one of EpicQuest’s trips. “If you can ski the blues and blacks at your resorts, you can ski remote backcountry,” he said. “We can serve everyone from an advanced intermediate to a super-duper expert.”

For a price (around $9,500 a person for a weeklong trip) EpicQuest can fly a small group up into the isolated Tordrillo Mountains in Alaska — with the two-time Olympic medalist Tommy Moe as one of the guides.

The cost of such trips are steep, but skiers willing to embark on trips like this aren’t just taking some physical risks, they are willing to pay a premium to do it. (Meals and rental equipment are usually included in the package prices.)

John Falkiner (41-27-776-1307; johnfalkiner.com), a professional ski and mountain guide from Australia who has lived in Verbier, Switzerland, since the late ’70s, has developed a growing reputation on the so-called “ski safari” circuit. Nicknamed the Powder Hunter, Mr. Falkiner, 54, has performed in James Bond films, skied off cliffs with only the light of the full moon to guide him and starred in extreme-skiing documentaries. A few years ago he realized that some of his clients wanted to join him on his wilder ski adventures — and would pay for the privilege. “What’s happening is that people are being introduced to ski touring and then discover that they like getting away from the crowds at the ski resorts,” he said.

Most winters you can find him guiding regular clients on custom backcountry trips through the Alps. The trips use a combination of lifts, skins (strips of nylon strapped to the bottom of skis to aid climbing steep hills), and sometimes helicopters to get skiers to the top of isolated peaks. Then the group cuts fresh tracks into valleys of untouched powder, taking breaks in mountain huts or tiny secluded villages.

But what Mr. Falkiner really loves to do is take a few of his most venturesome clients to places like Lebanon or Kashmir. “The North America experience is too slick and smooth,” he said. “Skilled skiers are beginning to look for something a little bit different, something outside the normal ski holiday box. I’ll take them ski touring from central Lebanon all the way to the Syrian border. Sometimes we sleep in a five-star hotel and sometimes a snow cave. You ski into isolated villages where they rarely see Westerners. There is a great sense of exoticness.”

Beyond this remoteness, part of the appeal of these trips is spontaneity. As Hans Solmssen (41-79-446-2289; www.swissguides.com), another Verbier-based ski safari guide, described it: “The final details of where we are going are frequently not decided upon until the last minute, which allows us to chase the best possible conditions. This is what my clients enjoy the most: that I take them to places I myself have not been and that we are flexible enough to change the itinerary at the last minute.”

Over the last few years, technological advances in both remote communication and ski equipment have made these kinds of trips safer and easier.

Beat Steiner, a founder of Bella Coola Heli Sports (604-932-3000; www.bellacoolahelisports.com), which offers ski safaris in the far-flung Bella Coola Valley in British Columbia, said: “You’ve got satellite phones, so there’s more security even if you are in really remote areas. All our helicopters are tracked by satellite, and our dispatcher tracks helicopters on Google Earth.” (Mr. Steiner’s company has exclusive access to an area that is 2.64 million acres, with descents up to 5,500 feet — more than 300 times the size of Whistler-Blackcomb and about one and a half times the height of Vail.)

“Recent ski technology makes it easier to ski powder,” Mr. Steiner continued. “The latest are the reverse camber or rocker skis Shane McConkey invented, which are the complete opposite of traditional skis. They are narrow at the tip and wider under the foot and they work absolutely fantastically in power snow. You can ski longer and not get tired.”

Stephen Drake, author of “The Powder Road,” a memoir of deep-powder skiing in Alaska and elsewhere, and a founder of DPS Skis (www.dpsskis.com), a small four-year-old company that manufactures custom-made skis for deep powder and big mountain skiing, said that while ski sales in general were flat, “the market for free-ride and powder skis has been growing every year.”

The last six or seven years have shown dramatic growth,” he continued.

Mr. Drake described the exhilaration of skiing an area no one has ever been on: “You look out 360 degrees over a landscape where there are no tracks and nothing made by man. It could be a million years ago.” He paused and added, “Those are the moments that give you a sense of complete freedom.”",Extreme ski touring has recently hit the mainstream thanks to the efforts of some intrepid entrepreneurs.
"When people ask us, “What’s the most frightening thing you’ve done while travelling the world?”, they often expect a story from Iran, Kazakhstan or Rwanda. Yet while we have encountered plenty of challenges during our travels, many of which have been fodder for stories on our blog, our most difficult moment came before all that. It was when in 2006, as mid-career professionals, my wife and I handed in our resignation letters, setting aside the security of one life for the uncertain opportunities of another – together.

Both of us are American, but we were working in Prague at that time. Audrey, my wife, managed tax and legal issues for US media organisation Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I was a management consultant for the mobile phone provider Vodafone. After five years in Prague, and a combined 20 years of professional experience, we both had begun to feel as though our careers no longer challenged us. We needed a professional and creative re-boot.

Travelling together wasn’t new to us, having followed our simple 25-person wedding in Pienza, Italy with a five-month backpacking trip across Europe. But it was a trip to Thailand over Christmas 2004 that truly illuminated how we could make long-term travel a reality. Even though we could have budgeted for a pricier hotel, it was a 400 baht per night bungalow that brought us joy and satisfaction.

Back home, intrigued by the idea of acquiring life experiences over objects, we found other ways to adjust our spending habits. We cut back on items for our apartment, clothes and eating and drinking out. Our goal: to save up for a 12- to 18-month sabbatical that would let us both travel the world and develop skills that could transition us each into alternate professions – and into the next stage of our lives together.

The major mitigating factor? We are two people. When you act alone, you can just pick up and go. As a couple you must constantly communicate to make sure you’re still aligned in your goals and needs. It’s something we call “checking in”, a process we’d used somewhat informally in our daily lives, but now approached more deliberately given the major life decisions ahead of us. The decisive check-in happened one night as we sat together at the edge of our bed in Prague, probing possible reasons for making the leap – or not.

“Are we really ready to do this?” I asked.

“Well… maybe we can put it off just a little while longer?” Audrey responded, echoing my own ambivalence.

“But one year becomes five, five becomes 10. The next thing you know you are looking back and wondering ‘What if?’” I said. We looked at one another, knowing what we were about to do.

Granted, our decision seemed a little unhinged, especially to those close to us. Luckily, we had prior experience with the challenging conversations and puzzled looks, having set off five years earlier from San Francisco to Prague in the mid-winter – with no jobs lined up. It was a decision that perplexed our friends and family, but also satisfied the nagging curiosity that we both had.

And so in December 2006, two years after our fateful Thailand trip, we handed in our resignation letters, sold everything except what we could cram into our backpacks and departed with two one-way tickets to Bangkok.

Over the next eight years, we travelled the Silk Road overland from the Republic of Georgia to China, climbed to the top of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, took a 60-hour train from Iran to Istanbul, witnessed the sun rise over the salt flats in Bolivia, followed penguins in Antarctica, trekked in the Himalayas, tracked tigers in Bangladesh and were continually humbled by the prevailing kindness shown to us by people we met.

That one-year sabbatical? It became a new lifestyle – and it did lead to different professions.","Quitting your job to travel is not only an option for those who go solo. Here is how one couple did it – and how they have stayed on the road, and together, ever since."
"The Texas state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland after a confrontation that began with a traffic stop was cautioned about “unprofessional conduct” in a 2014 incident while he was still a probationary trooper, according to documents released on Friday.

Related: Sandra Bland: suspicion and mistrust flourish amid official inconsistencies

Bland, a 28-year-old Chicago-area woman, was found dead in her Waller County jail cell in Hempstead, about 200 miles south of Dallas, on 13 July, three days after her arrest. Officials say she used a plastic bag to hang herself, a finding her family has questioned. Bland’s family and others also have criticized trooper Brian Encinia, who stopped Bland for failing to signal a lane change.

The Texas Department of Public Safety released Encinia’s personnel file in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Encinia had been with the department for a little over a year. For the most part, his file was unremarkable. He received “competent” ratings in all of the evaluations that were released.

However, in an evaluation that covered September and October 2014, his supervisor noted that Encinia “was given a written counseling for unprofessional conduct … for an incident occurring while at a school in Austin”. The documents provided no additional details and a department of public safety official did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The evaluation goes on to say: “In the future, Trooper Encinia should conduct himself at all times in a manner that will reflect well upon himself, the department, and the State of Texas. This supervisor will ensure that this is done by meeting periodically with Trooper Encinia.”

Under the category of “stress tolerance” in the same evaluation, his supervisor remarked that Encinia “performed effectively and rationally while involved in a pursuit resulting in a firearms discharge during the reporting period”. The document did not provide additional details about that incident.

The documents also do not include any information about Encinia’s interaction with Bland. That is still under investigation, though the director of the department of public safety, Steve McCraw, has said Encinia violated internal policies of professionalism and courtesy.

Dashcam video shows the confrontation between Bland and Encinia swiftly escalated after she objected to being told to put out her cigarette. Encinia at one point is seen holding a stun gun as he says “I will light you up!” after Bland refuses to get out of her car. Bland, who was black, eventually was arrested for allegedly assaulting the white trooper.

Bland’s death came after nearly a year of heightened national scrutiny of police and their dealings with black suspects, especially those who have been killed by officers or die in police custody.

According to his personnel file, Encinia was selected for the trooper trainee academy in December 2013, joined the department of public safety in June 2014 as a probationary trooper and completed his probation in June 2015, becoming a highway patrol trooper.

Related: Sandra Bland's death in police custody puts spotlight on Texas jail standards

Encinia’s most recent performance evaluation was for November and December 2014. Among the remarks were that Encinia “appears to operate effectively under stress”, “continues to use good problem solving skills and judgment while working patrol” and “appears to treat others in a respectful manner”.

Before applying for trooper training, Encinia was a volunteer firefighter in Brenham, where he was a supervisor at Blue Bell Creameries. Brenham fire chief Ricky Boeker remembered Encinia as a “stand-up kind of guy” popular with the people he worked with.

Encinia, a 2008 graduate of Texas A&M University, was elected as a district chief, Boeker said.

“He was a smart individual, very detail-oriented and he was just well liked by all of our members,” he said.",Brian Encinia given written counseling while a probationary trooper.Texas officials say Encinia violated internal policies during traffic stop
"The Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1944 has been brought to life in a riveting new film.  Cinematographers have added color and sound to black and white film taken by the Polish Resistance during the revolt against the Nazis.  The filmmakers hope it will help trace some of the heroes caught on camera.  ITV's Neil Connery reports.Â

By Monika Scislowska, Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland -- Rebels crouch behind barricades, dodging enemy fire. Rivers of fire belch from flamethrowers. Women and children dash across bombed-out ruins. Men pull a corpse out of rubble.

The scenes are as riveting as any Hollywood war movie. But they are snippets of historical footage from the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, enhanced by modern coloring and sound techniques — and turned into a film.

The only purely fictional elements are voiceovers presenting an imagined narrative that stitches together the footage: Two brothers scour the streets of the Polish city tasked with filming the 1944 rebellion of Warsaw residents against their Nazi occupiers, commenting on what they witness, from soup kitchens to scenes of destruction.

It makes for a mesmerizing account of the fierce house-to-house fighting against the German army that began on Aug. 1 and ended 63 days later with the insurgents surrendering, following the deaths of some 200,000 rebels and residents. ""Warsaw Rising"" is cobbled together from black-and-white silent footage of crews that the Polish resistance Home Army sent fanning through the city to chronicle the uprising. Cinematographers hired by the Warsaw Rising Museum added coloration and sound that give a real-life feel, while modern editing techniques provide a polished, fast-paced narrative.

The museum released the trailer of the film last month as part of the observances of the anniversary of the launch of the doomed struggle. The movie hits cinemas —in Poland and abroad — next year, before the uprising's 70th anniversary.

Meanwhile, the museum has posted the trailer on its website in an effort to identify people in the movie. Some have already been found, still living. One is a smiling fighter filmed in a trophy German helmet and uniform, toting a captured machine gun and ammunition: Witold Kiezun, now 91, remains active in Warsaw as a professor of economics and management.

""I was going back to base when the chronicle people stopped me and filmed me,"" Kiezun, a former U.N. worker in Burundi, told The Associated Press. ""I smiled at them because I was madly happy that we won (a battle) and that we had captured this machine gun, a precious trophy. My bag is filled with hand grenades.""

Museum historians and film experts spent two years creating the 90-minute movie. Film director Jan Komasa produced the story line, while sound director Bartosz Putkiewicz oversaw the brothers' dialogue and the matching sound and music.

Authenticity was paramount. Filmmakers recorded sound at a firing range shooting from the same kinds of weapons seen in the film. Lip-reading experts studied the footage, allowing actors to give people in the movie a voice. Historians consulted surviving fighters and pored through thousands of old pictures to get the right color and shade in every garment, object and place.

The faces in the movie are hauntingly poignant.

A woman with a soot-smudged face and disheveled hair stands stunned. A man swathed in bandages looks into the camera with a look of inexpressible sadness. Amid the death and chaos, rebels enjoy laughter and camaraderie: One spreads his arms in apparent mock despair over the state of his socks; another waves a sword with childlike, swashbuckling glee.

The Home Army footage was captured to document history but also for political reasons: to rally the nation and to show the Allies Poland's bravery against Hitler's army. Museum director Jan Oldakowski concedes that some scenes of fierce fighting were re-enactments by insurgents of action they had taken part in. It's also possible that the camera crews gave some direction to the rebels and Warsaw residents captured in the movie.

Despite all of this, museum historian Piotr Sliwowski said the footage is pretty much as real as things can get.

""When someone cries in the film, he cried for real,"" said Sliwowski. ""When someone is happy, he was happy for real. If someone dies, he really died.""

At the time of the uprising the Nazis had been occupying Poland for five years. Thousands of poorly-armed young Warsaw residents, members of the clandestine Home Army, wanted to gain control of the capital before the advancing Soviet Red Army reached it and put the city under an equally hated regime. Without reinforcements or supplies, the insurgents gave in after two months. The punishment was ferocious: The Nazis sent survivors to death camps, including Auschwitz, and razed most of the city.

The idea for the movie came from Oldakowski, whose young son asked why people in black-and-white uprising documentaries are dark-faced.

""It was an insane idea,"" Oldakowski said, ""but we decided to tell the truth and make it contemporary by removing this black-and-white color barrier.""","By Monika Scislowska, Associated Press  WARSAW, Poland -- Rebels crouch behind barricades,  dodging enemy fire. Rivers of fire belch from flamethrowers. Women and children  dash across bombed-out ruins. Men pull a corpse out of rubble. The  scenes are as riveting as any …"
"Latin America may be the most murderous continent on Earth, but huge improvements in public safety have been achieved in several major cities, according to a new homicide map of the world that is being launched this week.

Related: Ten murders in five hours: one deadly night in São Paulo's dangerous triangle

Several metropolises that were once bywords for violent death – such as Medellín, Bogotá, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – have seen murder rate declines of more than 60% over the past two decades thanks to improved living standards, better education, decelerating urbanisation and more effective policing, say the researchers behind the Homicide Monitor.

But while overall figures are falling, the map reveals that murders are stubbornly concentrated in poor communities, and the victims are mostly young – usually black or mixed-race – men.

The Monitor is an interactive online world map with data on the distribution of murder by country, year, age of victim and – where figures are available – gender and type of weapon. Drawing on statistics from the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, government offices, health institutes and police records, the authors also include a detailed city- and state-level breakdown for Latin America, the worst-affected region.

It has been compiled as a tool for policymakers and researchers by the Igarapé Institute, a Rio thinktank with funding from the Open Society Foundation and Peace Research Institute Oslo.

The map reveals that a third of the world’s 450,000 murders each year occur in Central and South America and the Caribbean, though the region is home to less than a tenth of the population. Fourteen of the top 20 countries in a ranking of murder rates are in Latin America.

The countries with highest death rates in relation to number of inhabitants are Honduras, El Salvador and Venezuela. Excluding war zones, Brazil has the most murders overall, with 56,337 homicides in 2012, the most recent year with figures for all countries.

While the figures theoretically means a person is 25 times more likely to be murdered in Brazil than in the UK, the detailed mapping of trends and murder “hot spots” shows the risks for most people are falling.

Media reports ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympics have made much of Brazil’s deadly crime problem.

But according to Robert Muggah, the Canadian founder of the Igarapé Institute, the data shows that murder victims in Brazil are more likely to be young black men than rich foreign tourists.

“Violence is not evenly distributed around the world, much less in Brazil. It tends to be highly concentrated,” said Muggah. “The perception in many cities that everyone is equally at risk is flat-out wrong. In many US cities, for example, less than 5% of street addresses account for 75% of violence. In Bogotá, just 2% of street addresses are where 98% of homicides occur.”

He noted that the urban zones most susceptible to sudden outbreaks of violence are usually fast-growing, poorly regulated areas, often with high population densities and large numbers of new arrivals. Unlike longer-established downtown neighbourhoods, these communities are often a low priority for local governments and police chiefs.

The Homicide Monitor plans to include essays from leading criminologists and other experts on the methods that have been most effective in reducing killings. High among them is “hot spot” policing – the deployment of large numbers of officers to areas with high murder rates. Thanks to this and greater efforts to involve local communities in public security decision-making, São Paulo saw its homicide rate fall dramatically from 42.2 per 100,000 people in 2000 to 13.9 per 100,000 in 2010.

Problems remain, however. Police killings are still alarmingly high and there is pressure from influential commercial districts and wealthy neighbourhoods to have more police protection. Similar “enclave mentalities” are undermining efforts to “pacify” favelas in Rio because elites in the most upmarket communities would rather have police protecting their homes than reducing crime at its source. Contrarily, in poorer regions of Brazil, particularly the north-east, resources are low and homicide rates continue to be alarmingly high.

The national government has been slow to act. Although murder is the leading cause of death for Brazilians between the ages of 15 and 29, national funding for reducing homicide and violent crime has plummeted since 2011 and there is no federal programme to support the most-affected states.

“In Brazil there is no national homicide strategy, which is not what you would expect considering 56,000 people are dying violently every year,” said Muggah. “It is a disproportionately modest response to an enormous problem.”

While the trend in wealthy countries and cities is for a steady fall in murder rates, the map illustrates the considerable challenges that remain in many parts of the world. The Homicide Monitor database will be expanded to include more detailed figures from Africa. The authors also plan to launch public media campaigns in countries such as Honduras with high levels of homicide.","Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela and Brazil earn unwanted distinction but homicides are concentrated among young male poor and policing can slash rates"
"Donald Trump’s self-deportation from the pre-Iowa Republican primary debate allowed a return to temporary political normalcy. Mr. Trump’s out-sized persona, joined to his blunt talk, surely has contributed to his remarkable rise. But without the businessman gripping the center-stage tiller Thursday evening, voters got a better chance to navigate issues along with the personalities.",The non-Trumps had a chance to define their political appeal.
"By the CNN Wire Staff

updated 5:15 PM EST, Thu December 22, 2011

(CNN) -- Attorneys for John Edwards asked again Thursday to delay his criminal trial, saying the former presidential candidate and U.S. senator has an unspecified medical issue.

In June, the Justice Department charged Edwards with conspiracy, issuing false statements and violating campaign contribution laws. He has pleaded not guilty.

In September, the trial was delayed until January 30 after Edwards' attorneys said he needed more time, in part due to his position as the sole caretaker of his two youngest children, ages 11 and 13, after his wife, Elizabeth, passed away in December 2010.

The motion to continue the trial for 60 days filed Thursday says Edwards' ""unexpected"" medical issue is explained in a sealed exhibit. The issue will ""prevent a trial of this matter during the January 2012 criminal term,"" according to the motion, and cannot be resolved before the end of the term.

Attorneys for Edwards, who was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2004 alongside John Kerry, also say in the motion a January trial would not give them enough time to prepare, especially given the ""unusual and complex"" prosecution.

""Since this trial date was set, the government has produced as part of the discovery process an additional 103,102 pages of material including more than 91,000 e-mails as well as 26 voice mails received by cooperating witnesses between 2007 and 2010,"" the motion says. In addition, both the government and Edwards are seeking evidence from North Carolina state courts.

""Absent a continuance, Mr. Edwards' counsel will not be able to effectively use the evidence the government was obligated to provide him ... and this, in turn, threatens Mr. Edwards' right to effective counsel and a fair trial,"" according to the motion.

""This is not hyperbole. Mr. Edwards' counsel are experienced trial lawyers and they are and have been working hard -- long hours, late nights and weekends -- and they have not made it their practice to seek unwarranted continuances.""

A chief issue in the upcoming trial is whether money given to support Edwards' mistress, Rielle Hunter, by the then-candidate's benefactors should have been considered campaign donations, a contention Edwards' team has disputed. They maintain the money was a gift to Hunter.

If convicted on all counts, Edwards could face 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $1.5 million.

Most popular stories right now","Attorneys for John Edwards asked again Thursday to delay his criminal trial, saying he has an unspecified medical issue."
"A former member of Hosni Mubarak's political party has been appointed as Egypt's new prime minister, a day after the cabinet announced its shock resignation, vowing to crack down on the militant violence that has blighted Egypt since the overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

Ibrahim Mahlab spoke after his appointment by Adly Mansour – the army-appointed president who has been in office since Morsi's removal in July – and said he hoped to form his government within three or four days.

""We will work together to restore security and safety to Egypt and crush terrorism in all corners of the country,"" he said. ""Security and stability in the entire country and crushing terrorism will pave the way for investment.""

Mahlab, who was housing minister in the previous administration, will head Egypt's sixth government since the 2011 uprising that toppled the autocratic Mubarak, beginning yet another chapter in the chaotic post-Mubarak era.

Mahlab once belonged to Mubarak's National Democratic party, and is the former CEO of Arab Contractors, one of the region's largest construction firms.

He is expected to lead an interim government at least until the election of a new president – likely to be army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – and perhaps even until the installation of a new parliament.

Egypt's media and political class are largely supportive of Mahlab, who is seen as a man of action compared with his predecessor, 77-year-old Hazem al-Beblawy.

Both men are white-haired, but on Tuesday pro-regime newspaper al-Watan printed a caricature of a brown-haired Mahlab standing next to a white-haired Beblawy to emphasise the former's comparative youthfulness.

""He gets things done,"" Samir Radwan, Egypt's former finance minister, told the Guardian on Monday. ""He is a doer, a man of action. I've never seen him in an office. I've only ever seen him on a building site.""

Opponents of the government criticised Mahlab's appointment because of his connection to the Mubarak era, and to business elites. Under his watch as housing minister last week, 1,200 families were forcibly evicted from their Cairo homes, and their houses demolished, Amnesty International reported.

Beblawy was blamed for failing to dealing with a rise in the number of workers' strikes, electricity shortages and a spiralling economy – problems that have blighted Egypt for years and which the new government is unlikely to solve. It is unclear how much say he or his ministers had in their departure from government, and how many of them will be reappointed. At least two ministers had no prior knowledge of their 'resignation'.",Former housing minister and Mubarak party member pledges to 'crush terrorism' and crack down on rise in violence
"WASHINGTON | Tue Jan 6, 2009 10:21am EST

WASHINGTON Jan 6 (Reuters) - Older Americans are spending less on entertainment and restaurant meals as the recession forces them to focus on paying for essentials such as food, gas and medicine, a survey released on Tuesday said.

A survey of Americans aged 45 and older conducted for the AARP, an influential advocacy group for people over 50, found many had suffered savings and investment losses and planned to postpone retirement.

About 57 percent of people aged 45-54 and about 63 percent aged 55 to 64 who suffered investment setbacks said they expected to work longer because of their losses.

The survey of 1,097 people aged 45 and older was conducted in December by Woelfel Research. About 91 percent of those surveyed said the U.S. economy was in bad shape, compared to 81 percent the previous April. The recession officially began in December 2007.

About 68 percent of those surveyed last month had cut entertainment spending and 64 percent were eating out less.

About 52 percent had difficulty covering basic expenses like food, gas and medicine last year.

""However, reports of such challenges were less common in December than in April, which most likely reflects the recent slowdown in inflation, including declining energy prices, during the second half of 2008,"" AARP said.

Thirty six percent of those surveyed stopped putting money into a 401K or other retirement saving account while 17 percent prematurely withdrew retirement funds.

(Reporting by Donna Smith, editing by Alan Elsner)","WASHINGTON, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Older Americans are spendingless on entertainment and restaurant meals as the recessionforces them to focus on paying for essentials such as food, gasand medicine, a survey"
"The results were virtually the same for men and women, according to the survey of about 1,000 working parents with at least one child under age 18. The survey was conducted on behalf of Bright Horizons, a for-profit child-care chain, and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.

It found that about 29 percent of all working parents surveyed worried that they could get fired because of family responsibilities.

Read MoreWork-life balance increasingly important for dads

Among a smaller group of parents who said they already had at least one worry about work-life conflict, close to half said they feared getting fired.

Getting the ax was the most common fear, but many parents also fretted about things like not getting promoted, not getting a raise or not getting choice projects because of family responsibilities.

About 31 percent said they had faked being sick because of family responsibilities, and about 23 percent said they had lied or bent the truth about family responsibilities that got in the way of work.

Read MoreMore dads stay at home, not necessarily by choice","Nearly three in 10 working parents fear that they could get fired because of their family responsibilities, according to a new survey."
"Don Cherry has a message for new Leaf president Brendan Shanahan: draft Canadians and players from the OHL if you ever want to challenge for a Stanley Cup.

During his first Coach’s Corner segment of the Hockey Night in Canada season, Cherry ripped the Leafs' brass for picking European and U.S. college players at the 2014 NHL draft, while the Stanley Cup champion Los Angeles Kings filled their draft with Canadian players.

“We have the Stanley Cup champions, who have won two out of three Stanley Cups, right? Their [roster is] full of Canadians, full of guys from the OHL and they win two out of three,"" said Cherry. ""How many Canadians did the Leafs draft? Zero. No stars will every come here to Toronto. Why would you? You have to go through the draft. They have not had an impact guy since Wendel Clark [drafted first overall in 1985].

Cherry’s biggest beef was Toronto passing on Peterborough Petes winger Nick Ritchie in the first round in favour of Swedish William Nylander at No. 8. The Ducks scooped up Ritchie two picks later.

“They passed on a guy, Nick Ritchie, who is 6-foot-3, 230 pounds [and had] 100 minutes in penalties. Oh, you’re going to say he’s a dummy. Only three guys in the whole draft scored more goals than this guy. And guess who picked him up right after that… Anaheim.”

Watch Don let the Leafs have it.

It was a subtle, subdued suit for Don Cherry's season debut on Coach's Corner... (Yeah, right) http://t.co/sTRGVT4DxD pic.twitter.com/11llevl54x

Cherry didn't get a lot of backing on Twitter.

Don Cherry says the Leafs should've picked Ritchie, and that Nylander was sent back to Sweden ""to save his life"". Starts Rogers era strong..

Don Cherry just laying into William Nylander because Sweden

What Don Cherry forgot: Slovenian is Kings best C. Quick is American. Gaborik, Voynov aren't Canadian.

for all the Don Cherry haters out there..he's been involved with hockey for over 6 decades. Let me know when you have a comparable pedigree","During his first Coach’s Corner segment of the Hockey Night in Canada season, Don Cherry ripped the Toronto Leafs for filling their 2014 draft with European and U.S. college players instead of Canadians."
"Military chaplains and service members opposed to same-sex marriage are coming under attack in the military, according to Republican lawmakers and a chaplain advocacy group.

The Chaplain Alliance For Religious Liberty said there is an effort under way to silence, and in some cases punish, those opposed to gay marriage. The allegations surfaced after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

FOLLOW TODD ON FACEBOOK. CLICK HERE.

“If you are supportive of same sex marriage, you can speak boldly,” said Ron Crews, executive director of the Chaplain Alliance. “But if you are opposed, you are silenced.”

Crews is one of 19 individuals to write a letter to the House Armed Services Committee urging lawmakers to protect the religious liberties of chaplains and service members.

“Until Congress acts decisively, efforts to silence the voices of our military chaplains of all faiths and backgrounds will likely continue well into the future,” the letter read. “It is time that Congress secures the rights of all chaplains, once and for all, instead of allowing those that do not subscribe to the orthodoxy of the day to be unconstitutionally silenced.”

The Pentagon disputed those assertions. In a statement to Fox News they said chaplains are not required to participate or officiate in any private ceremony that might conflict with their religious or personal beliefs. They also denied any service members have been punished for opposing gay marriage.

“In general, as we have reinforced in training across the force, DADT Repeal is not about changing attitudes but rather about reinforcing behavior that treats everyone with dignity and respect,” the spokesman said.

George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said in a statement to Fox News “the religious freedoms of Army chaplains are already well protected in Army policy and regulations.”

Crews said they know of dozens of instances where military personnel have come under fire. He said one chaplain was told that if he could not support DADT he should resign his commission.

“Some of these chaplains have in fact had their careers impacted,” he told Fox News. “They’ve been punished. Right now, if you are opposed to this policy you’re not seen as a team player.

An amendment to the 2013 defense authorization bill could change that. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), protects religious freedom of military chaplains and service members opposed to same-sex marriage.

Akin said he’s received a number of complaints about people of religious faith concerned about what they perceive to be attacks on Christianity.

“There is a war on religious belief in the military,” Akin told Fox News.

Akin said he was aware of chaplains who’ve come under fire for their opposition.

“That’s the point (of the amendment),” he said. “To prevent further reprisals in the future.”

“It’s frightening,” Crews said. “This is just another example of this administration’s push against religious liberty.”","By Todd Starnes

Military chaplains and service members opposed to same-sex marriage are coming under attack in the military, according to Republican lawmakers and a chaplain advocacy group.

The Chaplain Alliance For Religious Liberty said there is an effort under way to silence, and in some ca"
"About the Fort Dearborn Massacre, which happened 200 years ago this month, the historian Ann Durkin Keating wants to make two things clear: It didn't happen at Fort Dearborn, and it wasn't a massacre. But that's surely what you were expecting to hear. When it comes to American history, myth-busting revisionism remains the order of the day. You can hardly pick up a book about Paul Revere's ride without bracing yourself for the news that it was some other guy and he took the bus.

To be fair, Ms. Keating doesn't go all the way to the postmodern extreme and deny that something actually took place near Lake Michigan on Aug. 15, 1812—maybe it wasn't at Fort Dearborn (a site now swallowed up by downtown Chicago), but it was at least in the neighborhood. Nor does she claim that the event wasn't deeply unpleasant. She'd just really rather you didn't call it a massacre.

By Ann Durkin Keating Chicago, 294 pages, $30

Frontispiece from 'Black Partridge, or, The Fall of Fort Dearborn' (1906) by Edward S. Ellis. The Potawatomi chief entered lore for saving the life of settler Margaret Helm during the 1812 battle in what is now Chicago.

So what happened? Here is the gist: Fort Dearborn was an isolated frontier garrison in a region then generally known as Indian Country, or else just ""the Country."" At the outbreak of the War of 1812, the fort was surrounded by several hundred Potawatomi warriors who were allies of the British. The American commander, Nathan Heald, received orders to evacuate—he would have been smarter to disobey and ride out the siege, but he seems to have believed that he had a tacit understanding for safe conduct. He, his troops—more than 50 of them—and a few dozen white settlers made their way from the fort down the Lake Michigan shore. After they had gone about a mile and a half, they were attacked. The fighting was short-lived and brutal. Inside of an hour, more than half of Heald's soldiers were killed; Heald himself, and almost all the survivors, were badly wounded. Many settlers were dead as well, including most of the children; some of the women had been taken captive. Several severely wounded soldiers were tortured to death that night.

This was the Massacre—or, as Ms. Keating prefers, the Battle. She would rather not say anything bad about any Indians who took part, and the word ""massacre,"" I think we can all agree, has negative connotations. So Ms. Keating nitpicks at the word relentlessly. In a massacre, she notes, the killings are ""indiscriminate""; that can't apply here, because the Indians had reasons. The targeting of the women and children, for instance, was perfectly logical: ""From the perspective of the Potawatomis,"" she writes, ""these women and children represented an advance guard of American settlers who challenged the bounds of Indian Country."" Once this is understood, we can fix blame for what happened where it really belongs: ""squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. government."" Of course; where else?

It would be a pity if this kind of nonsense distracted readers from what is novel and valuable in Ms. Keating's book. Its exploration of the back story to the—well, perhaps we should just call it the ""event""—opens up a fascinating vista of lost American history. The Country was not, as historical studies of the region usually picture it, a timeless domain of isolated villages among trackless forests; it was a place with its own tangled and difficult heritage. Since the 17th century it had been an ambiguous border region—the kind sometimes called a ""shatter zone""—crowded with refugees, exiles and renegades on the run from the great Iroquois wars of the Northeast. By the time the main line of Ms. Keating's story begins, the Country had achieved a certain fragile balance, where the people of several ordinarily hostile tribes, together with a large number of white traders who had married Indian women, all mingled.

But by the early 19th century, this peace had started to unravel. Large numbers of white settlers were pushing into the frontier, with the backing of the American government. Their presence prompted the first major nativist political movement among the Indians, led by a mysterious figure known as the ""Shawnee prophet."" The prophet believed that settlers wanted the Country for themselves and that the treaties offered by the white government were nothing more than empty exercises in chicanery. It would be hard to argue that he was wrong there. But he went further and called for Indians of all nations to cleanse themselves of white influence altogether: no intermarriage, no trading for white goods, no alcohol. Even some of his most militant followers thought this was excessive.

Fort Dearborn, which was both a garrison and a trading post, became the center of growing unrest. Ms. Keating takes us through the inner workings of the fort from a unique vantage: a white trader named John Kinzie who had spent most of his life in the Country. Kinzie understood the anger of the local population, because he shared it: He wanted the newcomers to stay out and leave the Country the way it had been. On the other hand, he didn't have any use for the Shawnee prophet and his followers either—after all, if they succeeded, he would be out of business.

Much of the entertainment of ""Rising Up From Indian Country"" comes from watching Kinzie dealing and double-dealing with both sides in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep afloat as the situation deteriorated. As always seems to happen with people whose only interest is to stay neutral and make money, he found himself inexorably drawn further in—until, when everything at Fort Dearborn finally imploded, he was stuck precisely at ground zero.

It's a great story, and Ms. Keating's neutral, unemphatic prose makes it register all the more clearly. There are downsides: She summarizes the prophet's views lucidly enough but entirely misses the galvanic excitement he stirred up in the Country and throughout the Midwest (which contemporary accounts describe vividly). What does come through, however, is a sense of how complex and murky the issues were becoming and how tough it ultimately became to sort out the rights and wrongs.

Did the Indian warriors really kill the settler children because they were concerned with long-term demographic trends in the Country? Maybe, but elsewhere Ms. Keating argues plausibly that the children just had the bad luck to get between a band of warriors and the supply wagons, which were the real prize. How much did the occurrences of that day ultimately affect the fate of the Country? Ms. Keating would like them to be seen as decisive: White reprisals for it were what destroyed the Country, and this was the ""foundational event"" that led to the birth of Chicago and the creation of the modern Midwest. But her narrative strongly suggests otherwise: The event was ultimately an irrelevance—the prophet had been right, and whites had been determined to take the Country all along.

Ms. Keating frames her narrative with the odd story of a sculpture commissioned late in the 19th century as a commemoration of the event. It shows an Indian warrior rescuing a female settler from another Indian with a raised tomahawk. Commissioned by George Pullman, the sculpture stood for decades on the site of Fort Dearborn; then it was moved to the Chicago Historical Society; then out to a public park; then into storage—bounced around the city endlessly because nobody much likes it. It's too gruesome, too politically incorrect and too sheerly ugly to make for comfortable public viewing. But it does depict something that actually happened: The Potowatomi warrior Black Partridge rescued John Kinzie's stepdaughter. Many of the Potowatomi present that day objected strongly to the attack and did intervene to save settlers' lives. (Kinzie too was among those rescued—even in the midst of the bloodshed, he had managed to cut another deal.)

What the incident says about the larger issues of American colonization and the expulsion of the Indians isn't even remotely straightforward, but that's the point. As Ms. Keating's book shows, the more confused, violent, chaotic, ambiguous and ugly your image of a historical event becomes, the closer you may be getting to the truth.

A version of this article appeared August 11, 2012, on page C8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: What Happened at Fort Dearborn.",Lee Sandlin reviews Rising Up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago by Ann Durkin Keating.
"Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

Candy corn: Ick or treat?

(CNN) -- Yes, there's actually corn in it. Corn syrup, if that counts.

Each kernel has three colors, about 7 calories and a lot of sugar. Many people, including comedian Lewis Black, can't stand it.

And yet every October, it fills candy bowls, trick-or-treat bags and the mouths of sweet-toothed snackers everywhere.

For millions, it wouldn't be Halloween without candy corn.

Manufacturers will produce more than 35 million pounds of the humble tricolored candy this year. That's almost 9 billion pieces.

With National Candy Corn Day approaching on Thursday, here are some things you may not know about the polarizing confection.

People love it or hate it

For an innocuous little treat, candy corn sure sparks strong opinions. When CNN polled people on Facebook last year about it, we got more than 1,200 comments.

""It is a serious weakness. I'm sick from eating it all night,"" one woman said.

""HATE it and I cannot emphasize the word hate enough,"" said another.

Roughly three-quarters of the people surveyed on Facebook said they liked the stuff.

""For me, October's candy gauntlet arrives in the form of a little tri-colored mellocreme known as candy corn,"" wrote Samira Kawash in The Atlantic. ""I can pass by the Hershey's Kisses and the mini-Snickers. But when I get to the bowl of candy corn, all bets are off.""

You can count Black among the haters, though. In one of his stand-up bits, the comic jokes that manufacturers just collect and resell the same candy kernels year after year, because nobody actually eats the stuff.

""All the candy corn that's ever been made was made in 1911,"" he says.

It used to be made by hand in large kettles

Candy corn seems like a relatively modern invention, but it dates to the 1880s, before the automobile and the commercial telephone. The Goelitz Candy Co. began making it in 1900 before the family-run operation changed its name to the Jelly Belly Candy Co., which still produces candy corn today.

In the early days of the 20th century, workers cooked sugar, corn syrup, marshmallow and other ingredients into a slurry in large kettles and then poured the warm mixture by hand into cornstarch trays imprinted with the kernel shape.

Today, of course, machines do almost all the work.

There's a proper way to eat it

OK, not really. But many people believe that candy corn, like Oreos, should be nibbled in a certain manner.

While almost half of candy corn consumers gobble the whole piece at once, 43% start with the narrow white end, according to a survey by the National Confectioners Association.

Another 10% -- the true renegades -- begin eating the wider yellow end first.

Of course it can. This month, Amy Erickson posted a recipe on her food blog, Oh Bite It!, that involves rolling three or four candy corn kernels in a ball of dough and then frying them in hot oil.

""What do we do to things we don't need/want/like?"" she wrote. ""We fry it ... that's what! Frying makes everything better ...""

The sugary, waxy taste of candy corn has also inspired smoothies, cocktails and even Jell-O shots.

There are versions for other holidays

It's not just for Halloween any more. Manufacturers now produce ""Indian corn"" (with a brown end instead of yellow) for Thanksgiving, ""Reindeer corn"" (red and green) for Christmas, ""Cupid corn"" (red and pink) for Valentine's Day, ""Bunny corn"" (white and various bright colors) for Easter and ""Freedom corn"" (red, white and blue) for July 4.

Can green ""St. Paddy's corn"" be far behind?","This year, manufacturers will produce almost 9 billion kernels of candy corn, the polarizing Halloween treat."
"The mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau say they plan to lobby candidates to ensure local issues become important in the federal election campaign.

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson and Gatineau Mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin annnounced Wednesday they have joined forces to create a three-point strategy to bring key issues to the table for local candidates.

This is the first time the two cities' mayors have come together in such a joint effort, they said.

The two plan to hold a debate at each city hall — in Ottawa on Oct. 5 and in Gatineau on a yet to be announced date.

The mayors also plan to send information on local priorities to each candidate running in their cities.

Pedneaud-Jobin has said he sent this information already, while Watson said he would meet with candidates in person to speak about transit, infrastructure and affordable housing, among other issues.

The mayors also plan to send short questionnaires before the end of August to federal party leaders and local candidates on the priorities of Ottawa and Gatineau

The responses will be published simultaneously online before the end of September, according to the mayors.","The mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau, Que., say they will team up to lobby federal election candidates running locally, as well as party leaders, on top priorities for the national capital region."
"VAMOSSZABADI, Hungary/NICKELSDORF, Austria On a warm morning in late August, two dozen migrants carrying stuffed plastic bags and backpacks boarded a bus outside a refugee center in Vamosszabadi, a village in northwest Hungary.

Escorted by police on what was meant to be a short shopping trip organized by the Hungarian immigration office, the men, women and children should have spent a few hours shopping in the nearby city of Gyor before returning to their makeshift homes.

Half of the group, however, slipped away to a park where they were met by a man. He led them through an underpass to the railway station and they jumped on a train headed for the Austrian capital, Vienna. Their whereabouts now is unclear.

One year after the border between Hungary and Austria became a focal point of a mass influx of refugees to Europe, many of them heading for Germany, officials in both countries say the situation is largely under control.

But, as the events witnessed by Reuters show, migrants continue to make their way into Hungary and across the border into Austria from areas of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa hit by conflict and poverty.

The situation has left many Hungarians and Austrians on edge and could shape the outcome of two votes on Oct. 2, when Austria elects a president and Hungary decides whether to accept mandatory European Union quotas for resettling migrants.

""Clearly this is a polarizing issue that has stoked a lot of fears,"" said Austrian Defence Minister Hans Peter Doskozil.

Like many people in Austria, a country of 8.5 million that has taken in about 110,000 asylum seekers since last summer, he sees a risk that the migrant crisis could worsen again.

Although there is little evidence of it happening, he believes Austria could become the destination for migrants making their way from Africa through Italy.

""That must be stopped,"" Doskozil said.

Such concerns could work in favor of far-right candidate Norbert Hofer in Austria's election runoff. The first ballot, narrowly won by former Greens party leader Alexander Van der Bellen, was annulled because of technical irregularities.

Similar fears could also help Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban persuade voters to reject the EU quota system following an aggressive government campaign in which billboards have been erected linking migrants to assaults and terrorism.

Election of a far-right president in Austria and rejection of the quota plan in Hungary would be likely to damage the unity of the EU, which is already struggling to articulate a common vision after Britain's vote on June 23 to leave the bloc.

Few communities have felt the impact of the migrants influx more than Nickelsdorf, a town of 1,800 in the eastern border region of Burgenland surrounded by sunflower and corn fields.

It was near Nickelsdorf that the corpses of 71 refugees were found in an abandoned truck, shortly before Austria and Germany threw open their borders to migrants on Sept. 4 last year.

Burgenland is a traditional stronghold of Chancellor Christian Kern's Social Democrats. But two thirds of voters there backed the eurosceptic Freedom Party's (FPO) Hofer in the presidential run-off in May that was annulled.

""The Freedom Party promotes a very restrictive immigration policy and the people who live here in Nickelsdorf, who were confronted with this wave of 300,000 people a year ago, do not want it to happen again,"" Gerhard Zapfl, Nickelsdorf's SPO mayor, told Reuters. ""The pressure valve is the election.""

Carmen Imnitzer, a 46-year-old housewife who helped distribute food and clothes to migrants, says she would never vote for the Freedom Party. But she describes the influx as a ""big shock"" for the town.

""A lot of people are scared. They view everything that is foreign, everything they don't understand, as scary,"" she said.

Debate has been clouded by an EU deal with Turkey granting Turks visa-free travel to the bloc, she added.

Kern has accused the FPO of fanning fears about minorities and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has said politicians are using the refugee crisis for political gain.

Many migrants also arrived last year in Vamosszabadi, 65 km (40 miles) from Nickelsdorf, on the other side of the border.

A refugee camp in the village designed for about 200 people housed nearly 800 migrants at one point in 2015, and many more were camping outside. Hungarian officials say many migrants disappear within days and the authorities lose track of them.

Livia Vajda, the mayor of Vamosszabadi, said the camp had tarnished Vamosszabadi's image and should be closed.

""This is an open reception center, people can move freely in and out, they can do anything they want and we live here next to them and we don't know who they are,"" she said.

Orban opposes the EU quota plan and hopes the Oct. 2 referendum will strengthen his hand in dealings on the migrant issue with the EU and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The U.N. refugee agency has condemned Hungary's refugee practices but criticism of the referendum and Orban's stance on refugees has largely been limited in Hungary to small opposition and rights groups.

Merkel and then-Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann suspended EU migration rules last year to allow in thousands of refugees who reached those countries via Hungary.

Faymann quit in May after losing his party's support, partly because of his handling of the crisis. Merkel has also faced problems and her Christian Democrats lost a regional election on Sunday to an anti-immigrant party.

(Additional reporting by Gergely Szakacs and Alastair Macdonald, Writing by Noah Barkin, Editing by Timothy Heritage)","On a warm morning in late August, two dozen migrants carrying stuffed plastic bags and backpacks boarded a bus outside a refugee center in Vamosszabadi, a village in northwest Hungary."
"On Aug. 15, 2014, Islamic State fighters who had surrounded her small Iraqi town for days ordered Nadia Murad and other Yazidis to walk to the local school, where men were to head upstairs, women downstairs. A sight along the way terrified the 20-year-old even more: backhoes at work. She’d seen videos of Islamic State fighters filling mass graves. One of her eight brothers said no, that couldn’t happen. The militant extremists weren’t about to kill a whole village of people.

Later that sweltering day, the militants shot dead five of her brothers and her mother, along with hundreds of other Yazidis. Murad and other young women were soon sent to religious courts to be registered by a photo and number as property of fighters who could then do with the women as they wished.

On Monday, Murad’s eyes were downcast, her voice soft, her memory fractured as she spoke in Washington, one of the many cities around the globe where she has traveled as part of a desperate Yazidi campaign for help. Murad is so traumatized she cannot remember how long she was held captive before escaping.

Four days after Secretary of State John F. Kerry declared Islamic State crimes against religious minorities to be acts of genocide, the push is on for justice. Murad’s D.C. tour — which included stops at offices of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the State Department — was part of an effort to shed light on the meaning of the word genocide. If the Obama administration agrees that the ancient Kurdish minority and other groups — including Shiite Muslims and Christians — are victims of genocide, what will be done?

Advocates such as Murad are seeking a broad variety of actions: the documentation of war crimes evidence such as mass graves, the rescue of young Yazidi men and women still held by the Islamic State as fighters and sex slaves, and the granting of refu­gee status in the United States to persecuted religious minorities.

The State Department on Monday said it is already helping to provide security around mass graves and is training security forces.

But Murad and experts at the Holocaust Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide say much more must be done.

Murad’s presence was a dark reminder that Yazidis and other religious minorities in Iraq had been begging for help for years, to no avail — including before and during the 2014 massacres in Sinjar.

“No one even tried,” Murad said Monday through a translator, describing to a group of a few dozen genocide experts and journalists how the disabled, elderly and men were killed. “If they’d tried and failed, fine, but no one even tried.”

Naomi Kikoler of the Holocaust Museum’s genocide prevention center, which hosted the talk, said international and Iraqi leaders knew for a decade that atrocities against religious minorities could occur. “This is a moment when we should feel deeply ashamed,” she said.

Late last year, Congress ordered the State Department to outline a plan regarding attacks in the Middle East against religious and ethnic groups.

In a report filed Thursday, the department said it “supports a number of initiatives focused on the documentation of atrocities, which aim to lay the groundwork for future accountability for atrocities committed in Syria.”

It mentioned funding the Syria Justice and Accountability Center, an organization that investigates and documents abuses, the report said. In Iraq, however, despite $3 million in funding, efforts are hampered by funding and security problems and by the lack of an invitation by the central government in Baghdad, the report said.

Murad comes from the northern Iraqi town of Kocho. Multiple communities of religious minorities who lived in that region, including Shabak, Turkmen and Christians, began coming under increasing pressure from Sunni extremists in recent years. The 1,700 people who lived in the town in 2014, she said, were all Yazidis, mostly farmers.

On Aug. 3, 2014, when the Sunni extremist Islamic State invaded the region, “We weren’t given choices — it was convert or die,” she said. Yazidis are a Kurdish religious minority whose faith has roots in Zoroastrianism, Islam and other faiths. A report by the Holocaust Museum last year found that Yazidis were singled out by the Islamic State for extinction.

Staring at the floor of the conference room Monday as she spoke in a soft voice, Murad described how the stifling August heat prevented many from escaping into the mountains.

Her voice remained flat as she described a disabled woman being burned alive, one of many hundreds of people from her town who were killed.

“All that time we were in touch with the United States, the United Kingdom, others, to try and rescue us, but no one did anything. Even until the last minute we had hoped someone would come, but nobody did,” she said through an interpreter.

The interpreter, Abid Shamdeen, who is also Yazidi, had worked for the U.S. Army in Iraq and in 2014 was living in Nebraska while his family remained in Iraq. He described how Yazidis saw the Iraqi forces who were supposed to protect them flee when the Islamic State fighters arrived. The young man began to choke on tears as he spoke.

“They didn’t even leave their weapons for us behind — they left people behind,” Shamdeen said, Murad to his right and Kikoler to his left at a table at the front of a sterile conference room. “I wish this world was a little more fair.”

Some Western Christian groups have been speaking out over the past decade about violence and persecution Christians in the Middle East are experiencing — a movement that gained significant volume with the rise of the Islamic State.

Shamdeen, whose Yazidi community in Nebraska is the country’s largest, told The Washington Post he was “very disappointed” that Christians only recently seemed to take up the causes of other religious minorities. “We were barely mentioned, even though we were the main ones.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the last sentence, a quote from interpreter Abid Shamdeen.

Michelle Boorstein is the Post’s religion reporter, where she reports on the busy marketplace of American religion.",A woman who witnessed Islamic State massacres and was held captive tells her story in Washington.
"Don’t underestimate the beauty of North Carolina in the summertime. Whitewater Falls is a diamond in the rough and worth a visit. The Falls are located near Sapphire, NC just north of the South Carolina border in the Nantahala National Forest.

One of the tallest waterfalls east of the Rocky Mountains, it tops out at 411 feet and is well worth a stop. And anybody can get there to see it. Viewing spots are easily accessible from nearby parking areas, so you don't have to hike deep into the forest to get a look.

Adventure seekers can check out the nearby Foothills Trail. It’s downriver in South Carolina past the base of Corbin Creek Falls It's an intermediate trail and hard to follow in places so be careful.

But if you make the trip, don’t just drink in the sight of the falling waters, check out everything you can in the Nantahala National Forest. It’s a huge, historic tourism hot spot. Established in 1920, the sprawling forest encompasses more than 531,148 acres. It’s nestled in the mountains, valleys and rolling hills of western North Carolina and is far from flat. The elevations range from sea level to 5,800 feet in some spots.

The forest is divided into three parts: the Cheoah, the Tusquitee and the Nantahala. The Cheoah district is in Robbinsville, NC, the Tusquitee stretches in to Murphy, NC and the Nantahala is in Franklin, NC. The names are said to come from the Cherokee language. ""Nantahala"" means: ""land of the noon day sun,"" a fitting name for the Nantahala Gorge, where the sun only reaches to the valley floor at midday.

If you’re not a hiker, don’t worry. There are a lot of other recreational activities. Every year 8.6 million people visit these forests and they’re never bored -- with more than 600 miles of trails you hike, bike, enjoy the scenery or go horse-back riding. Have fun and be safe!

Click here for more from FoxNews.com Travel","Don’t underestimate the beauty of North Carolina in the summertime. Whitewater Falls is a diamond in the rough and it’s worth a visit. The Falls are located near Sapphire, NC just north of the South Carolina border in the Nantahala National Forest."
"A National Football League team.

""I often think about how different things might be here if they had stayed in town,"" she said.

On Sunday, the Green Bay Packers play the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl, and renewed attention will be paid to how the NFL has been such a large factor in putting its smallest member town, Green Bay, Wisconsin, on the map. For generations of Americans, the name Green Bay has equated to big league, because of the Packers and the NFL.

But in the early and struggling days of the NFL, when no one knew that the league would turn into the sports, entertainment and marketing giant it is today, it was not such a rarity for smaller towns to have a team. For four years in the 1930s, the Portsmouth Spartans were full-fledged members of the NFL. The team departed -- it moved to Michigan, where it was renamed the Detroit Lions -- but the stadium remained, and still stands, in a city that sometimes wonders how the course of its fortunes might have varied had it, like Green Bay, managed to stay in the game.

""I played in that stadium,"" said Portsmouth Mayor David Malone. ""After the NFL team left town, the stadium was used for high school football, and it still is. I played safety and wide receiver for Portsmouth High School in the 1970s, but even by then, the Spartans had been gone for a long time, and people didn't talk about them much. We know that something like that will never happen again -- a National Football League team in a small town like ours.""","""Sometimes I'll drive by the old stadium,"" Lisa Carver said, ""and it kind of feels like a dream. You can almost hear the cheers from the crowds, even though the place is empty.""Carver is the"
"My print column this week welcomes Jeb Bush back into the fray–and wonders why intelligent politicians like Bush and President Obama keep getting snared by small, tawdry tactical issues.

One clarification: Bush talks about social mobility rather than inequality. This is an important distinction. I don’t think there ever could, or should, be income equality in a free market society. But there should be open pathways toward success from the bottom end of the spectrum–and toward failure from the top.

Bush has spent a lot of his time working in the field of education. He also said on Morning Joe that we need to be willing to spend the requisite money so that poor children gets as good an education as wealthier kids do. This is very encouraging talk from a Republican. Bush has, in the past, also been candid about the social problems that lead to intergenerational poverty.

Our growing income inequality has three components:

1.The rich are getting richer. There is the so-called “Michael Jordan” effect, which has made it inevitable that stars be lavished with stratospheric salaries even when–in the case of more than a few corporate leaders–they’re not very successful. And the wealthy have been able to use their power to create a tax code and government subsidies that coddle them. (And, if they’re big enough, bailouts if they really screw up).

2. The middle class is waning. This is the most serious problem, the most difficult to crack. The great industrial labor jobs of the past are gone. Manufacturing is coming back, but it will require fewer workers, often with greater skills. The middle-management white collar jobs of the past are gone, too–computers have taken over many of those functions. Democracy requires a strong, informed middle class. How are we going to rebuild ours?

3. The poor are getting poorer. This is part of the equation that the left seems unable to acknowledge: there is a culture of poverty. As the liberal Brookings Institution has pointed out, if you graduate from high school, wait until marriage to have children and hold a regular job, the chances of your living in poverty are 2%. This cuts across all ethnic groups–the rate of out-of-wedlock births among whites is sky-rocketing. (And yes, it has been harder to find work in this recession, which is one reason why we need an aggressive infrastructure program to provide more jobs.)

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a tri-partite slogan: Opportunity. Responsibility. Community. The brilliant prescience of those values resonates–indeed, they seem even more crucial now. They represent the best way to transcend the silly, nonessential debates of the moment, a way to transcend the ancient, and now less relevant, political categories–liberal and conservative–that have strait-jacketed our ability to think in new, creative ways.

I remain optimistic that we can find a new, moderate consensus that will lift us out of the current petty, boring and unproductive public policy rut.",There are three components to America's growing income inequality.
"When you're faced with a crisis, it's important to stay calm. It's what Samsung has been doing while recalling up to 2.5 million defective Galaxy Note7 phones prone to catching on fire.

But it's time for Samsung to fess up — nerdy technical details and all — on what exactly was wrong with the phones. It's no joke when faulty Note7s are exploding, but when their replacements are as well, and on planes? How is anybody supposed to trust Samsung to make a safe product ever again?

It starts with transparency. I'm no public relations expert, but I do know that there's nothing that assuages public fear and all of the facts that are blown out of proportion by news media outlets and social media better than the truth.

You don't cover up the issue and you don't just quietly pray that it goes away if you attack it quickly enough. Problems don't just disappear like that.

Consumer safety is at stake and customers who are deciding if they should stick with your brand need reassurance.

Explaining the truth, even if Samsung doesn't think most people will understand it, would show the company has full control of the situation and has done a thorough investigation into the heart of the problem.

It would put Samsung in a position of power compared to one that's been weakened.

While it's widely believed the Note7 was recalled because of faulty batteries produced by Samsung SDI, a battery supplier division within Samsung, the company has not confirmed the reports, nor has it explained in detail what is the real reason its batteries are combusting.

This is the most detailed explanation we have from Samsung UK:

Q. What is the issue? A: Based on our investigation, we learned that there was an issue with the battery cell. An overheating of the battery cell occurred when the anode-to-cathode came into contact which is a very rare manufacturing process error.

Q. Several Korean media articles identify Samsung SDI as the supplier of battery that is experiencing the issue? Can you confirm this? A: In order to meet market demands, we are working with multiple suppliers. Unfortunately we will not be able to confirm this as we work with several suppliers. We are currently working with all of them to protect our customers’ safety first and foremost.

A source close to Samsung told Mashable the company didn't want to divert attention from the recall and make it about battery suppliers, and instead wanted to focus on getting affected Note7 phones returned or exchanged as quickly as possible.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's hazard description for the recall only provides the following statement:

The lithium-ion battery in the Galaxy Note7 smartphones can overheat and catch fire, posing a serious burn hazard to consumers.

So the batteries are overheating and could blow up because why? Lithium-ion batteries are in tons of devices and they all come with safety warnings reminding consumers to store and operate them in optimal temperatures to prevent overheating.

The majority of exploding Note7 reports seem to support the overheating claims. Like that guy's car that was incinerated while his Note7 was charging inside under the hot Florida sun.

To prevent any chances of overheating, the Federal Aviation Administration has urged all flyers with unsafe Note7s to keep them powered off during flights.

But ""overheating"" isn't saying much. Phones overheat when you're playing intensive games with 3D graphics.

The fact is any device with a lithium-ion battery can explode.

If it's a case of a manufacturing problem from a specific battery supplier, then why are replacement ""safe"" devices, which reportedly contain batteries from China's Amperex Technology Limited, also catching on fire?

Going by these exploding replacement Note7 reports, it seems they're not actually being overheated. That would imply there's some other kind of problem that's causing Note7s to explode.

In South Korea, there were several reports of replacement Note7s suffering from overheating and quick battery drains. Those devices didn't explode and Samsung said they were an unrelated manufacturing error.

How many manufacturing errors can there be? What are the precautions Samsung is really taking when building replacement Note7s to protect consumers?

These are questions Samsung needs to answer and fast if the company wants to save its reputation as a phone maker.

There won't be many people lining up to buy a Galaxy S8 or Note8 next year if the company doesn't come clean on how it's overcoming the battery or manufacturing issues.

Trust can be repaired, but only if you tell the truth.",Consumers deserve to know all the technical details.
"Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

Jasmine King posed so a friend could take her photo at the new firing range, Machine Gun Vegas, located just off the Las Vegas Strip. More Photos »

LAS VEGAS — For Vegas die-hards bored with the $750 tasting menu at Guy Savoy, the $250 Elton John tickets at Caesars or the $200,000 baccarat bet at the Bellagio, this city is serving up a new way to find high-priced thrills.

Machine Guns Vegas — an upscale indoor shooting range complete with skimpily dressed gun-toting hostesses — opened last week a half-mile from the Strip with an armory of weapons and a promise to fulfill the desires of anyone wanting to fire off an Uzi or a vintage Thompson submachine gun. With its provocative mix of violent fantasy (think blowing holes through an Osama bin Laden target with an AK-47) and sexual allure, it is the latest example of how the extravagances and excesses that have defined Las Vegas are moving beyond the gambling table.

“O.K., the Uzi is down right now — sorry!” Melissa Krause, a hostess dressed in a skin-tight black outfit and black boots, with a fake pistol attached to her hip, told a father and son who had driven three hours from Victorville, Calif. “Is there something else you wanted to choose?”

No matter. Before long, the son, Chris Neveu, 20, was standing between two range masters, a man and a woman, feet planted to the ground, eyes protected by goggles and ears by headphones. Hot shells clattered around his feet as his father, Paul, took pictures.

“They have a lot of weapons you wouldn’t be able to find back where I’m from,” Chris said as he repaired to the V.I.P. lounge, where the walls are adorned with machine guns. “Such as the — well, you can see them all around the room: the M-4, the M-16, the M-249 — a lot of exotic weapons.”

In the main lounge, Barry Burmaster, 54, of Williamsburg, Md., was giddy after he and three friends, in town for a convention, compared a stack of bullet-riddled targets.

“Twenty years ago, I’d spend $400 at the strip clubs,” he said. “Now, I just come here to shoot.”

This latest addition to Las Vegas entertainment is in a low-slung building, set among dusty fields and next to an Adult Superstore. Marked off by a few small signs, and with the main entrance at back, it recalls an after-hours club in Lower Manhattan. It has views of two towering buildings whose outsize names — Wynn and Trump — suggest a Las Vegas extravagance that by comparison seems almost quaintly outdated.

Las Vegas in general, and the Strip in particular, is no stranger to violence: Last year, there was a series of stabbings on the street, most of them involving people moving from casino to casino. But the owners of Machine Guns Vegas said that they would carefully screen customers and that their clientele would be made up of people who enjoy the sport of shooting.

This is certainly not the first shooting range here. Interest in guns is high in Nevada, particularly among tourists from countries that ban weapons. “From England, from Japan,” said Jasmine King, a former go-go dancer who now works as a hostess at Machine Guns Vegas. The Gun Store, another local destination for weapons enthusiasts, was teeming with customers the other day.

But unlike Machine Guns Vegas, the Gun Store is as much about selling guns and weapons paraphernalia as it is a shooting range. It is out of the way, more than three miles from the Strip, past the city’s airport, with a check-in counter more reminiscent of the rental concession at a roller-skating rink than a swank nightclub. There are no hostesses in black.

The aspirations of Machine Guns Vegas are, well, different.

“We want it to have a Melrose boutique feel to it,” said Genghis Cohen, referring to the upscale stretch of quirky shops along Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Mr. Cohen, a nightclub impresario, is a managing partner of Machine Guns Vegas. “It would be like a boutique style of guns,” he said as he led a tour of his latest venture. “We will have artwork on the walls.”

“This is our V.I.P. area,” he said. “Look — a cappuccino machine, nice big leather couches. Let’s say you’re the vice president of the Palazzo or the Wynn,” he continued, referring to two of the city’s fanciest resorts. “You’re like, ‘Oh, it’s lunch break. I’m going to grab a sandwich and go shoot my gun for half an hour.’ ”","An upscale indoor shooting range — complete with gun-toting hostesses — has an array of machine guns, from AK-47s to M-4s, for anyone looking for a different Vegas experience."
"The next time a friend or co-worker says he's headed to Napa on vacation to do a little wine tasting, don't get jealous. Go somewhere better.

Visited by well over 3 million tourists a year, Napa can be a hassle, with crowded tasting rooms, near-standstill traffic on Highway 29 and a paucity of dinner reservations (call the French Laundry two months in advance, to the day, but you'll probably get a busy tone).

To be sure, Napa practically invented high-quality wine tourism. But wineries in other regions around the world have followed its lead and stepped up their game, offering a personal touch, not to mention high-quality hotels, restaurants and tasting rooms that provide connections to their regions' history and lifestyle. Oh, and they have some great-tasting wines, too.

In Depth: 10 Great International Wine Destinations

Weekend Wines: Visit A Winery

The challenge is deciding among the many attractive options, from Chile to South Africa to Australia. Each, says George Taber, author of the forthcoming book In Search of Bacchus: Wanderings in the Wonderful World of Wine Tourism, offers a unique experience.

To research his book, Taber spent eight months on the road and visited 12 different countries. Along the way, he discovered that some regions offer great luxury and service, while others are worth visiting for the peace, quiet and spectacular views.

When it comes to the full package,Taber says there are few better places than Castello Banfi in Tuscany. The estate, started by American wine importer John Mariani, is housed in a spectacular castle, with two restaurants, a tasting room and a fun, informative cellar tour.

It's a similar experience, minus the pretty views, at Chateau Lynch-Bages in Bordeaux. This is the world's most heralded wine region, yet it's notoriously short on good experiences for tourists. Fancy-looking chateaus, yes; welcoming tasting rooms, tours, pretty views, nice hotels and friendly, warm restaurants, not so much. But the owners of Lynch-Bages have built a tourist-friendly destination on the grounds of the wine estate, including a hotel, more than one restaurant, stores, a tasting class and art exhibits.

When it comes to tranquil atmosphere and stunning scenery, two destinations top Taber's list: Quinta do Portal in Portugal's Douro Valley and Peter Jakob Kühn in Germany's Rheingau. Both offer incredible views and some of the best wines in their respective regions, says Taber.

By contrast, Felton Road in New Zealand's Central Otago region, is not particularly pretty. The drive from Queenstown through the Gibbston Valley to this isolated spot offers nice views of the mountains along twisting, winding roads, but the scenery once you get to Felton Road is a bit raw, says Taber (I can attest, having spent a month living a couple miles away at a nearby vineyard; it's dry and light on vegetation.).

However, the pinot noirs from this part of the world--and from Felton Road in particular--have begun to turn the heads of critics and consumers alike over the past few years, as they appreciate the wines' balance of herbal, fruity and acidic flavors.

""There's nothing sexy about it, just the wines,"" says Taber of Felton Road.

In Depth: 10 Great International Wine Destinations

Weekend Wines: Visit A Winery",California isn't the only spot offering fine wines and friendly tasting rooms.
"(CNN) -- Dozens of people were found slain execution-style in bloody Syria Tuesday, yet another grisly act that opposition activists blame squarely on the government.

The corpses were of at least 81 men who were apparently executed. Residents found them in the Queiq River in the town of Bustan Al-Qasr, near Aleppo city, opposition activists said, and they were pulled from the river.

An opposition video -- the authenticity of which couldn't be verified -- showed a long row of men sprawled on the muddy river bank with head wounds. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and some of the bodies showed signs of torture.

Abu Faris, an opposition spokesman in the Aleppo countryside, said the names of 20 of the victims were confirmed by families, who said their relatives were arrested and detained by Air Force Intelligence in Aleppo. The agency is regarded as one of the government's most important and notorious units.

It was the latest report of mass deaths in the Syrian civil war, an all-out battle between President Bashar al-Assad's government and insurgents.

The Syrian unrest started nearly two years ago when the government cracked down on civilians peacefully protesting government policies. The conflict morphed into a civil war.

Today, it is one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, claiming, the United Nations says, more than 60,000 deaths.

""The regime adds another massacre to its record while the entire Arab world and the international community keep watching the Syrian misery in silence and complete hypocrisy,"" the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

In the opposition video, men can be heard shouting ""this is unbelievable"" and ""some were children, children for God's sake.""

One middle-aged man can be heard saying, ""Tell the world these were not soldiers. They were not fighters. They are human beings. How come they know what the law of gravity is but they don't know anything about human rights.""

The opposition groups in Syria have regularly reported massacres by government forces and their allies. Some of the more notorious such reports include incidents in Taftanaz, Houla, Homs, Hama, Tremseh, Daraya, and Halfaya. Bombings in Aleppo and Damascus have resulted in many deaths.

The mass displacement of Syrians, if it continues, may go down as one of the worst in recent history The number of refugees registered with the United Nations jumped by 110,000 in January, bringing the total to just shy of 585,000.

If the masses of refugees awaiting registration are included, the number burgeons to 708,477, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said.

Read more: Fleeing violence in nighttime trek to Jordan

""It's an unrelenting flow,"" UNHCR spokeswoman Sybella Wilkes said in Geneva, Switzerland. In just the first hour of her workday Tuesday, the number of refugees surged by 4,000 people.

And when Syrians arrive in neighboring countries, they're extremely needy, Wilkes said, because they wait a very long time before fleeing.

""The last thing that Syrians wanted to do was leave their country,"" she said, adding that it's not unusual for families to be displaced internally six times before finally deciding to leave their home country.

By contrast, Iraqi refugees escaping that country during the U.S.-led invasion fled more quickly, and as a result, often still had some money in their pockets and were in better physical shape.

Syrian refugees turn up with health conditions that, for lack of treatment, require urgent attention, Wilkes said.

More women arrive who are about to give birth, she said. Recently, one woman lost a child at a U.N. station shortly after delivery because she had not received basic prenatal care.

Teen refugee: Prince Charming is dead

The flow of refugees accelerated markedly in the second half of 2012, Wilkes said.

To put the speed of the current exodus into perspective: Syria has a population of just over 22,000,000. A year ago, the United Nations had registered fewer than 20,000 refugees. Six months ago, the total number rose to 120,000. By December, the number had climbed to 471,000. And now, 585,000.

Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon are harboring the most Syrians, with more than 150,000 each.

""We have in Jordan day shifts and night shifts"" to register new refugees, Wilkes said. ""In Lebanon, we have double shifts.""

President Barack Obama has approved $155 million in humanitarian aid for people in Syria and refugees fleeing the violence.

That brings the aid toll to $365 million, making the United States the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance to Syria.

""I want to speak directly to the people of Syria,"" Obama said in a statement Tuesday. ""This new aid will mean more warm clothing for children and medicine for the elderly; flour and wheat for your families and blankets, boots and stoves for those huddled in damaged buildings. It will mean health care for victims of sexual violence and field hospitals for the wounded. Even as we work to end the violence against you, this aid will help address some of the immediate needs you face each day.""

Obama says the U.S. government has imposed sanctions against Syria, worked to isolate the regime, and backed the opposition. The United States and other nations have refrained from intervening militarily in the civil war.

""American aid means food and clean water for millions of Syrians. American aid means medicine and treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients in Damascus, Daraa and Homs. It means immunizations for one million Syrian children. American aid means winter supplies for more than half a million people in Aleppo, Homs and Deir Ezzor. And we're working with allies and partners so that this aid reaches those in need,"" Obama said.

CNN's Joe Sterling, Ben Brumfield, Salma Abdelaziz and Saad Abedine reported from Atlanta. CNN's Nick Paton Walsh contributed to this report from Beirut, Lebanon.","Dozens of people were found slain execution-style in Syria Tuesday, yet another act that opposition activists blame on the government."
"An alleged ex-bikie accused of firing a gun on a busy Sydney motorway has been refused bail.

Domenico Settineri was allegedly sprung with a loaded gun and 0.58g of methamphetamine when his car was spotted in the breakdown lane of the M4 Motorway at Homebush about 7.30am on Friday.

Officers searched the 43-year-old's vehicle, uncovering two spent casings and a live .22 calibre round.

They say another 48 rounds of ammunition were also found during their search.

Settineri is accused of discharging the firearm on the M4 at Blacktown shortly before his arrest and possessing the unauthorised black pistol in a public place without keeping it safe.

He is also charged with possessing and using the methamphetamine.

Settineri failed in his bid for release when he appeared via videolink at Parramatta Local Court on Saturday.

The magistrate said he had serious concerns about the nature of the alleged offences and there was nothing to indicate Settineri's remand was unjustified.

The 43-year-old will face Burwood Local Court on November 9.",A Sydney man accused of firing a gun on a busy motorway has been refused bail.
"Prime Minister Tony Abbott has called for a “red card” system to stop radical preachers entering Australia.

“I say to people who want to come to this country from overseas to peddle their extremist ideology: don’t bother applying. Don’t try to come,” Mr Abbott said today.

Radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir is in the Abbott government’s sights.

Mr Abbott believes it is planning a lecture by a controversial foreign preacher.

""We will henceforth have a new system in place which will ensure preachers of hate can't come to Australia,"" he said.

While the Prime Minister tries to keep extremists out, the Foreign Minister is stopping others from leaving, revoking the passports of wannabe jihadists.

""I've been cancelling them on a virtual daily basis,"" Julie Bishop said.

But amid the Government's attempts to stamp out extremism, moderate Muslims say they've become collateral damage.

They say there has been an increase in physical attacks and violence against Islamic women.

""They simply don't feel safe anymore,"" Muslim Legal Network representative Lydia Shelley said.

""We've had even prams with children in it kicked.""

Meanwhile in Iraq, Australian Super Hornets are carrying out armed missions nightly against ISIL, Defence chiefs revealing the enemy was spotted during the first flight.

The jets pursued the target into an urban area but didn't fire for fear of hitting civilians.

“It exceeded our expectations of collateral damage so they discontinued the attack at that point,” Vice Admiral David Johnston said.

Australian special forces troops are still waiting final legal clearance from the Iraqi Government.

It is expected the commandos' mission will start in the coming days.

Do you have any news photos or videos?",Prime Minister Tony Abbott has called for a &ldquo;red card&rdquo; system to stop radical preachers entering Australia.
"ANAHEIM, Calif. – Anaheim police have opened fire on a burglary suspect, days after officer-involved shootings killed two people and sparked violent protests.

Sgt. Bob Dunn says it's unclear whether anyone was hit in Friday morning's confrontation, but no one has showed up at a hospital.

Dunn says officers responding to a burglar alarm at about 3:15 a.m. at a community clubhouse saw appliances in the street and a man leaving the building. An officer chased him, and another checked out a nearby car that suddenly took off, heading toward the first officer.

Dunn says the second officer opened fire but the driver escaped.

Dunn says the man being chased on foot was later found hiding near some train tracks. Dunn says the man is a paroled burglar and was treated for a police dog bite.","Anaheim police have opened fire on a burglary suspect, days after officer-involved shootings killed two people and sparked violent protests."
"""I found myself understanding exactly where Kanye was coming from."" Photograph: John Sciulli/Getty Images for Giuseppe Zanott

Here's what's memorable from Kanye West's recent BBC interview: lots of yelling about leather pants, boasts about being the biggest rock star in the world and screaming names of random fashion designers. These are the headlines. These antics are the sticking point of Kanye's ""rant""; natural fodder for Jimmy Kimmel and the late night talk show ilk to pinpoint for satire.

Of course a lot of what Kanye said is ridiculous and over-the-top enough for jokes, but as I watched him talk, I found myself understanding exactly where he was coming from. West is a man frustrated with the glass ceiling, a feeling not unfamiliar for subjugated people in the US and Europe. His anger comes from the fact he's reached worldwide superstardom the right way.

Sure, he's known for the outrageous, but unlike so many celebrities Kanye's never been arrested, accused of cheating or known to have anything remotely close to a drug issue. He's reached superstardom just through making great music, great marketing and the occasional publicity stunt here and there. But Kanye isn't dangerous. Compared to, say, Lindsay Lohan, West is the model of good boy super celebrity.

Yet, West explains the frustration of still being denied access to a certain level of respect and acceptance in the fashion community. He's denied the respect he feels he's earned in trying to transcend barriers and garner a new social status. His frustration and disgust are palpable ... and relatable.

As a person of color, I've been told repeatedly to ""stay in my lane"". From something as simple as being followed around my neighborhood by police to my profession, where I've been told to stick to writing about ""black stuff"" and leave the ""real news"" to white writers. The black guy is qualified to reach a certain apex. When he wants to surpass that manufactured step, he's reaching too high.

West's discussion of the ""glass ceiling"" is a prevalent and all too real experience for minorities; the idea that he as a black man is good enough to entertain but when he tries to get a seat at the table of a higher social status, he's constantly denied access. Too often, African Americans face a glass ceiling where they're told ""good job"" for playing their roles, but when they attempt to excel to new levels they've stepped out of line.

Despite the idea we live in a ""post-racial"" society, racial discrimination in the workplace is as high as ever. It's as difficult as ever to enter corporate America as a minority. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, more minority males are in fact attending college. Still, the stigma of negativity follows people of color wherever they go.

It's quite possible that Kanye West could just be a terrible designer and the fashion industry doesn't want to work with a subpar fashion artist. I don't want to suppose the only reason West isn't allowed to reach higher levels of the industry totem pole is due to his race, but that doesn't mean a glass ceiling is non-existent. Barriers to excellence based on race or class are an obstacle that's been around for centuries, so it's difficult to see exclusion not at least being partially due to race or class.

The good thing about the glass ceiling is the fact it's made of glass. Breaking through isn't impossible. But there is a saying that in order for minorities to succeed they have to work twice as hard to achieve half as much. And while success is certainly possible and achievable, there is a definite sense of frustration that comes from the feeling of lower returns on work that's just as excellent as white counterparts.

The frustration is real and justified based on a history of mistreatment. So next time a person of color or lower class expresses these frustrations, they may not be unfounded. Even if it seems like they're just yelling about leather pants.","David Dennis: In order for minorities to succeed, often they have to work twice as hard to achieve half as much. Kanye West is sick of it"
"Goodyear's next fleet of airships will look similar to this one emblazoned… (Goodyear)

The 33-acre grassy airfield in Carson doesn't appear much bigger than a postage stamp when pilot Jon Conrad begins steering the 12,840-pound Goodyear blimp in for a landing.

""It looks a little different from this vantage point, doesn't it?"" he says with a chuckle. ""That doesn't seem like much room when you're landing an aircraft that's comparable to a Boeing 747.""

The tight squeeze will get a little tighter in the coming years with this month's announcement that Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. will once again replace its helium-filled fleet of three silver, blue, and gold blimps with bigger, faster ones.

The Akron, Ohio, company said it would work with German manufacturer ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik to build three airships costing about $21 million each. Beginning in 2014, Goodyear will begin to swap out the three blimps, now based in Akron, Pompano Beach, Fla., and Carson.

The plump Goodyear blimps have been a regular sight in Southern California since before World War II, when the U.S. Navy used them to keep an eye on the Pacific coast in case of an attack. Rarely is there a high-profile occasion in the region without it buzzing overhead.

""Some people would say that it isn't a complete Rose Bowl event without the Goodyear blimp,"" Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard said. ""It floats across the sky in a way that everybody enjoys. And it's slow enough that when you call your friends and family to take a look, it will still be there.""

But if the current Goodyear blimp grabs attention, the new airships will be even more eye-catching.

At 246 feet, the replacements are 54 feet longer and can hit a top speed of 73 mph — compared with the current airships' 54 mph. They will have three propeller engines attached above the gondola, unlike the two noisy engines that currently flank the rear of the gondola.

Because they will have rigid skeletons, in this case made of aluminum and carbon-fiber, they will technically be zeppelins and not blimps. But rest easy; the airship will still be called the Goodyear blimp. It will carry 12 passengers — six more than today's blimps — and include state-of-the art avionics and flight control systems.

They're typically replaced every 10 to 15 years. The current blimp in Carson was built in 2001.

""It's like I'm getting a new car,"" said Conrad, 41, a onetime helicopter crop duster from Nebraska who's now Goodyear's head pilot at the airfield. ""I'll enjoy showing it off.""

Showing off the airship is the whole point.","The 33-acre grassy airfield in Carson doesn't appear much bigger than a postage stamp when pilot Jon Conrad begins steering the 12,840-pound Goodyear blimp in for a landing.""It looks a little"
"Thousands of postal workers in New York and at all 36 Washington, D.C., post offices are being offered the antibiotic Cipro because of positive anthrax tests at postal facilities. It has been confirmed that two postal workers in Washington, D.C., died of inhalational anthrax. Two others are currently known to have the disease and a third case is suspected in a postal worker from Trenton, N.J.

On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease said that the treatment of even thousands of people who are at clear risk for developing anthrax is not a problem and that he is not concerned about antibiotic resistance in the postal worker population.

Yet, the more people who take antibiotics, the greater the odds that other bacteria — such as those that cause pneumonia, food poisoning, and blood infections — will have a chance to develop antibiotic resistance. These resistant organisms are very difficult and sometimes impossible to treat.

While the chance of contracting anthrax remains very small for the average person, recent events have placed postal workers in select cities in a much higher risk category.

""That risk may now justify the use of prophylaxis for the entire exposed group because no one can any longer be sure who in the postal worker group is at highest risk,"" says Dr. Dale Gerding, professor and associate chairman of medicine at Northwestern University Medical School.

The benefit of treating such a large group of people, perhaps soon reaching into the tens of thousands, may outweigh the risks of antibiotic resistance and side effects.

""I think that resistance is going to be an issue,"" says Dr. Stephen Jay, chair of the department of public health at Indiana University School of Medicine. ""But you have to weigh the potential risk of drug-resistant organisms on the one hand and failure to treat anthrax on the other. We're between a rock and a hard place.""

The decision to increase the treatment range to include those who are at high risk of exposure but have not yet been tested is not an easy one to make. Considering the government's current approach, it seems likely that if another large exposure event occurs, the treatment response will be similar.

Consider a hypothetical situation with an office building that has 20,000 employees and anthrax spores are detected. Will all 20,000 employees receive antibiotics?

""It depends on the chance that they are in contact with anthrax spores,"" says Dr. Stuart Levy, director of the Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance at Tufts University. ""Is everyone really at risk?""

Because anthrax is not transmissible between people, physical exposure to the spores is required. That goes a long way in determining who should be treated and limiting the inevitable development of drug resistance that goes hand in hand with widespread antibiotic use.

""We should only do what we need,"" says Levy.

ABCNEWS' Lynne Adrine contributed to this report","Prescribing antibiotics to large numbers of high risk people may increase the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, but it is a risk many are willing to take."
"An LGBTQ shelter for young adults between the ages of 21-30, the first of its kind, will be opening in the Bronx in December.

According to a statement released by the New York City Department of Homeless Services, the shelter will provide multiple services geared specifically toward issues facing young LGBTQ adults, including group counseling, HIV and transgender care (through a partnership with Callen Lorde) and on-site psychiatric care.

""LGBTQ young people, particularly LGBTQ communities of color, are more vulnerable to becoming homeless and need our support,"" Department of Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks said in a press statement. ""Today's announcement further demonstrates our commitment to generating innovative solutions and moving beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to homeless services. We thank Council Member Torres for his leadership and for standing up on behalf of homeless New Yorkers.""

Councilman Ritchie Torres, the first openly gay legislator to be elected to public office in the Bronx, played an instrumental part in the creation of the shelter by offering his district as the location.

""It's the first of its kind, and I believe it will set a precedent for the rest of the city to follow,"" Councilman Torres told NBC OUT.

Mitchell Netburn, the president and CEO of Project Renewal, the organization that will be running the shelter, echoed Councilman Torres' hope that the new shelter will provide a model for future shelters that could be implemented not just in New York City, but also across the country.

""Shelters provide a lot more than just a bed and three meals a day. The goal of any shelter is to get those receiving services into permanent housing, and that's a message that starts day one of someone's stay. It's also a message tailored to each client. For some, the first step to achieving that goal is to find a job, while for others, that means addressing underlying issues such as mental health, bankruptcy or citizenship,"" Netburn told NBC OUT.

Netburn, who previously worked for the Department of Homeless Services, said the need for LGBTQ homeless shelters has been unmet for ""decades"" and that this shelter would help specifically address the lack of space for LGBTQ people who have aged out of the youth shelter system and may not have access to LGBTQ-focused shelters.

Councilman Torres cited high rates of homelessness across the LGBTQ community as another reason why a such a shelter is necessary.

RELATED: New Rule Expands Transgender People's Access to Homeless Shelters

""Housing instability has cascading consequences that could not only lead to suicide, but to a whole host of social pathologies. Many in financial crisis could turn to sex work, which leads to a higher exposure to STDs. It is hardly a coincidence that LGBT youth face higher rates of suicide when they're also at higher risk of homelessness. What is distinctive about LGBT youth is that so many of them have been driven out by their family or loved ones as a result of institutionalized homophobia,"" Councilman Torres said.

""Many members of the LGBT community have often been ostracized from their homes, sometimes while quite young, and have not necessarily had the types of services we will provide at this new shelter available to them,"" Netburn added. ""The great thing is that we can provide this type of care in one location, especially considering how long it could take to access care in NYC. We can also assure that everyone providing these services is sensitive to the LGBT community.""

The Bronx shelter is projected to be opened by the end of the month.",An LGBTQ shelter for young adults between the ages of 21-30 will be opening in the Bronx in December.
"I am in Madrid, Spain, right now in the last training camp before the Olympics. Things are going great!

I am extremely focused and determined. My training has been amazing, and it seems as if all of the hard work that I have done is paying off.

I was a little worried a couple of months ago that I wouldn't get to the point where I am right now. I felt like I was so far away from my goals. Now I feel like there are only two weeks left until they are achieved.

Everything seems to be falling into place. I am happy, positive and motivated, my routines are consistent, and my confidence and trust in myself are on the rise. I am at the exact point in my preparation that I had planned. I am going to be my best at the Olympics.

Three things that I have been paying close attention to are my focus, relaxation and aggressiveness. I am trying to simulate competition as much as possible, and these things have been my guide.

I am focusing when I need to be focused. I am getting so deep into my own mind that I'm able to convince myself that I can hit my routine, no matter what.

I am staying relaxed before and during the routine, and I am almost letting my body go through the motions without even thinking about them.

I am also being aggressive during my routine, but not overly aggressive. My aggression is almost more like a fight during the routine. I need to be aggressive on the little details, such as keeping my legs together when I catch my release move or when I am sticking my dismounts.

I am finding that this combination of three actions has really helped me during my training and competition simulation.

Training here in Spain has been hard, but it has also been very beneficial. The entire men's gymnastic team is here, and we are all working so well together.

The whole Olympic trials process was stressful and tough, but we really do have our best team here. I think that some of the guys who were in the trials were disappointed when they didn't make the team, but I would like to thank them for pushing us and making this team better.

Any of the 12 senior team members could have easily been a part of this team, but unfortunately, only six could be. We wouldn't even be close to the point we are at right now if it wasn't for the depth of the entire national team. So thank you, guys!

I was extremely honoured and proud to be voted team captain by my fellow Olympic teammates. I take this responsibility very seriously, and I only want the best for everyone. My job is to mediate and to motivate. I think that every guy on this team is a great gymnast and also a great person.

I really believe that this team is going to make history and achieve something spectacular. Everyone has fire in their eyes right now, and I can envision a very memorable and remarkable Olympic Games for all of us.

We are leaving for Greece on Sat., Aug. 7. I can't even describe my anticipation and excitement. I know what to expect after experiencing Sydney in 2000, and I have a feeling that this Olympics will be even better.

I am looking forward to experiencing the games with a full team. I am looking forward to receiving our Roots Clothing package. I love getting free stuff! I am looking forward to meeting many other athletes, and I am also looking forward to seeing all of the history that Athens possesses.

Most of all, though, I am looking forward to the competition and having the great opportunity of making my biggest dreams come true.",Diaries from Canada's top Olympic athletes.
"By MICHAEL FALCONE (@michaelpfalcone) and AMY WALTER (@amyewalter)

If confrontation is the sincerest form of flattery in presidential politics, Newt Gingrich has got to be feeling pretty good about himself this morning.

Buoyed by stronger poll numbers and accompanying press attention, he’s clearly getting under the skin of his rivals for the Republican nomination. Look no further than Mitt Romney’s interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier yesterday in which Romney called Gingrich “a lifelong politician.”

“Speaker Gingrich is a good man. He and I have very different backgrounds. He spent his last 30 or 40 years in Washington. I spent my career in the private sector. I think that’s what the country needs right now,” Romney said. “No problem with Newt Gingrich. A good man — but a very different person than I am based on our life experiences.”

Romney could have left out the “lifelong politician” part, but his decision to take a swipe (it seems that nothing ever happens randomly in the Romney campaign) is another sign that Gingrich represents the biggest threat to the former Massachusetts governor heading into the final month-long stretch before Iowa.

And while Romney’s going after Gingrich to keep him at bay, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is latching onto the former House Speaker to try to catch some of his draft, picking a fight with Gingrich over immigration policy.

“All these conversations that people — whether it’s Newt or whatever — who say ‘let’s do x y and z’… I think you’re wasting your time until you secure the border,” Perry said in an interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show yesterday.

Immigration aside, if Gingrich’s GOP opponents really want to hit his soft spot, his deep ties to Washington are it. As The New York Times reported today, while Gingrich “is adamant that he is not a lobbyist … in the eight years since he started his health care consultancy, he has made millions of dollars while helping companies promote their services and gain access to state and federal officials.” http://nyti.ms/uPG5HQ

The question now: Will Perry and Romney start to increase their attacks on the former House Speaker, or will they simply hope the weight of the media scrutiny and Newt’s track record of self-destruction will ultimately pull Gingrich down?

In the meantime, Gingrich is also benefiting from the misfortunes of the Herman Cain campaign, which is slowly but surely collapsing under the pressure of an Atlanta woman’s allegation of a 13-year affair with the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO.

Several prominent Cain supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire are contemplating switching their allegiance to Gingrich — a couple already have.

The dynamic creates a late-game opening for Gingrich who has been traveling between the key early primary states all week. Today, Gingrich hosts a town hall meeting in Greenville, S.C. before heading to Council Bluffs, Iowa to participate in a “Slice the Deficit” pizza party.

And at his first campaign stop today, Gingrich showed that he’s ready and willing to take Romney on, turning his “lifetime politician” back at him. “I’m a lifetime citizen,” Gingrich told his South Carolina audience this morning.

CAIN ACCUSER, GINGER WHITE, TALKS TO GEORGE STEPHANOPOULUS. Ginger White, who alleges a 13-year affair with presidential candidate Herman Cain, appeared exclusively on “Good Morning America” today, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that she “can’t make this stuff up.” Cain sent out a fundraising appeal last night calling White a “troubled Atlanta businesswoman.” White responded today: “It’s very disappointing that he would call me troubled,” she said. “I’m not here to say anything negative about Mr. Cain, I’m only here to state the truth and what’s happened in the past.” She added that her relationship was “on and off” for the last 13 or 14 years. “This was not a consistent love affair that went on every day for the last 14 years.” White said she has received gifts and money for the last two-and-a-half years, but that “this was not sex for cash.” WATCH: http://abcn.ws/vOAtOA

MEANWHILE, THE CAIN TRAIN, KEEPS ON CHUGGING. A dispatch from ABC Political Director Amy Walter: Although Herman Cain told his senior staff Tuesday morning that he was “reassessing” his campaign’s viability in light of an accusation by an Atlanta woman of a 13-year extra-marital affair, Cain’s campaign manager, Mark Block, said in an interview tonight that there is “no way he’s dropping out.” Block said the term “reassessment” was meant to imply a “strategic reassessment” and “not a reassessment of withdrawing” from the race. Cain, said Block, will outline the specifics of that strategic reassessment during a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio tomorrow. In Ohio, Block said, Cain “will lay out his way forward.” When pressed on whether Cain, under any circumstances, would drop out, Block replied that just two things would push him out: “Mrs. Cain, and if we show up to do events and no one is there.”

RICK PERRY WEIGHS IN: Perry made his first comments on the latest allegations against Herman Cain this morning, saying the businessman needs to address them head on. “He needs to address these allegations. That’s the bottom line,” Perry said in an interview on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning. “He needs to address the allegations, and if they’re true he has to address that with the people of this country.” http://abcn.ws/uK1O4N

And, on “Good Morning America,” ABC’s John Berman looks at whether the champion of 9-9-9 might be getting ready deep-six his candidacy. WATCH: http://abcn.ws/ufkfc3

WORST CAMPAIGN EVER? “Herman Cain is in the midst of “reassessing” whether to continue his 2012 bid, but its legacy is already settled: His campaign will go down as one of the most hapless and bumbling operations in modern presidential politics, setting a new standard for how to turn damaging press coverage into something far worse,” writes Politico’s Jonathan Martin in a no-holds-barred assessment of Cain’s presidential bid. “The botched responses to allegations of marital infidelity, sexual impropriety and his own gaffes — not to mention the puzzling strategic decisions — have, in the eyes of many veteran strategists, reached record levels of ineptitude. It’s an operation that has repeatedly contradicted its own candidate, leveled baseless charges, and put Cain in difficult political spots with little apparent forethought.” http://politi.co/uOZaCK

WHITE HOUSE WATCH: OBAMA ON THE ROAD IN PENNSYLVANIA. President Obama’s choice of Scranton, Pa., to talk taxes today isn’t just coincidence: it’s a strategic backdrop for a pre-election pitch aimed largely at white working-class voters in critical swing states, notes ABC’s Devin Dwyer. In a speech at Scranton High School — a setting identical to one used last week in Manchester, N.H. — Obama will plug his plan to extend and expand a payroll tax cut for workers and impose a new payroll tax cut for small businesses. He’ll also likely underscore Republican opposition, which has included GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney. Obama’s campaign strategists say the goal is to articulate in real, tangible terms what’s at stake for the middle class in the 2012 campaign, and how the differences between candidates could mean a hit to their pocketbooks. If the existing payroll tax cuts are allowed to expire at the end of December, the average middle class family earning $50,000 a year would face an effective tax hike of $1,000, the White House says. In Scranton, where the median income is $34,700 according to the Census Bureau, an individual earning that amount would owe an additional $696 to the government in 2012. http://abcn.ws/u4HF5U

GOP COUNTER-PROGRAMMING. The Republican National Committee has unveiled a new web ad titled “Failed Promises: Scranton” ahead of President Obama’s visit today. According to the RNC, the spot “highlights President Obama’s dismal economic record in the state: unemployment up 19 percent, 37,900 manufacturing jobs lost in the state and 189,000 more Pennsylvanians living in poverty.” WATCH: http://bit.ly/sGQCyt

CAN NEWT SHED HIS BAGGAGE? Newt Gingrich is giving his opponents a run for their money, but some are questioning whether social conservatives — a group Gingrich desperately needs to win the candidacy — can overlook his oft-controversial political and personal baggage. Gingrich’s Washington insider label may not be that easy to shake off. The former House speaker has spent more than 20 years in Congress, and the last decade building up small business enterprises with close ties to politicians. His personal life has taken just as much heat as his political record. ABC’s Huma Khan takes a look at elements of Gingrich’s past that continue to haunt him, including his work for Freddie Mac, his marital problems, his views on immigration, global warming, abortion and child labor. http://abcn.ws/rJ63Oh

ROMNEY EXAGGERATES ACCESSIBILITY CLAIM. ABC’s Emily Friedman reports from Florida: Hounded by reporters wanting their questions answered yesterday on the ropeline after an event in Tampa, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney refused to engage, telling the reporters, “Guys, we have press avails or press conferences almost every day and that’s when I answer the questions.” Not quite. Romney’s last press conference was nearly a week ago, on November 23 in Des Moines, Iowa, where he took just four questions before an aide yelled “last question!” The one before that? November 19 in New Hampshire. And a full week before that Romney held a press conference in Mauldin, S.C, on November 11. And in October, he held just three press availabilities total. Yesterday, Romney went on to explain why he doesn’t like to take questions on the rope line — despite having done so earlier in the day at a Miami event. “When I’m meeting people it’s not a good time to answer questions that are important and require good attention and a thorough answer,” said Romney. http://abcn.ws/s7CRN2

RICK PERRY DISMISSES RUMORS OF A CAMPAIGN SHAKEUP. ABC’s Arlette Saenz reports: Texas Governor Rick Perry called the reports of a shakeup of his campaign staff “scuttlebutt,” and said campaign manager Rob Johnson and chief strategist Dave Carney remain in their respective roles.”News to me, news to me. I talked to both of them within, as a matter of fact the last 24 hours, so if they have, news to me,” Perry told reporters when asked if the two had been demoted or were leaving the campaign.” I would suggest to you that’s just scuttlebutt, highly technical Aggie term.” Perry said he was not aware of reports that Joe Allbaugh might assume some of Carney’s duties, but he also did not deny it, saying only that he’s working on being the “best candidate” and not focusing on the distribution of duties within his campaign. http://abcn.ws/uoOutA

UP NEXT FOR THE NEW DEMOCRATS. “With a tax reform debate looming and House seats to compete for in suburban districts throughout the country, members of the New Democrat Coalition say their stock is rising,” Roll Call’s Jessica Brady reports. “Like the once-mighty Blue Dog Coalition, the New Democrats have had a diminished role in the minority, with a smaller membership and few legislative opportunities to flex their influence on stock issues such as trade and innovation. But unlike the predominantly rural and Southern Blue Dog membership, New Democrats from urban and suburban districts contend that their numbers will only increase after the 2012 elections. ‘Many of the seats that we’re going to be competitive in and we’re going to win back, I think, are seats that appeal to the New Dem Coalition’s message,’ Rep. Joe Crowley (N.Y.), chairman of the group, said in a recent interview. ‘And I have no doubt many of those folks will seek to become New Dems.’” http://bit.ly/t8wijz

WHAT EARMARK BAN? “Members of the House and the Senate attempted to pack hundreds of special spending provisions into at least 10 bills in the summer and fall, less than a year after congressional leaders declared a moratorium on earmarks, congressional records show,” the Washington Post’s Kimberly Kindy reports. “The moratorium, announced last November in the House and in February in the Senate, is a verbal commitment by the Republican leadership to prohibit lawmakers from directing federal funds to handpicked projects and groups in their districts. Lawmakers have tried to get around the moratorium by promising to allow other groups to compete for the funds. But the legislative language is so narrowly tailored that critics consider the practice to be earmarking by another name. The efforts to resurrect spending on pet projects reveal the tenuous nature of current reform efforts. Two senators have publicly called out their colleagues and will introduce legislation Wednesday that would ban earmarking with the force of law.” http://wapo.st/vDuUTn

@HotlineReid: Rep. Aaron Schock reportedly asking donors if he should run for Illinois governor. Next up in 2014 #HotlineSort

@llerer: With his numbers on the rise, Newt builds a more aggressive campaign — but is it too late? My take from S.C. ow.ly/7JH9q #2012

@mpoindc: “Building a Better Mitt Romney-bot” RT @TimAlbrechtIA: A new DRAPER article!! nyti.ms/u1CuL4

@DavidMDrucker: RT @jimacostacnn Cained out? CNN/ORC POLL 2nd Choice for Nominee Among Cain Voters: Gingrich 38% Romney 25% Perry 10% Bachmann 9% Paul 6%

@Chris_Moody: Remember the massive crowds for Newt in Florida? Wasn’t a fluke. He’s dominating the state in a new poll: yhoo.it/sV0GKb

* Newt Gingrich begins his day in Greenville, South Carolina where he’ll host a town hall. Then, Gingrich travels to Council Bluffs, Iowa where he’ll participate in a “Slice the Deficit” Pizza Party.

* Herman Cain heads out on bus tour across Ohio, making stops in West Chester, Dayton and Columbus. Later in the day he travels in Manchester, NH where he plans to hold a press conference.

* Rick Perry will speak at two events in New Hampshire including one at the State House in Concord.

* Michelle Bachmann campaigns in Iowa which includes a stop at the University of Northern Iowa.

* Mitt Romney has no scheduled events, but his son Josh Romney will meet with volunteers in Des Moines, Iowa.

* Jon Huntsman will address the New Hampshire State Legislature at the State House in Concord.

* Ron Paul hosts a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Check out The Note’s Futures Calendar: http://abcn.ws/ZI9gV

* Get The Note delivered to your inbox every day.

* For breaking political news and analysis check out The Note blog: http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/and ABCNews.com/Politics: http://abcnews.com/politics","By MICHAEL FALCONE (@michaelpfalcone) and AMY WALTER (@amyewalter) If confrontation is the sincerest form of flattery in presidential politics, Newt Gingrich has got to be feeling pretty good about himself this morning. Buoyed by stronger poll numbers and accompanying press attention, he’s clearly getting under the skin of his rivals for the Republican nomination. Look no further than Mitt Romney’s interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier yesterday in which Romney called Gingrich “a lifelong politician.” “Speaker Gingrich is a good man.  He and I have very different backgrounds.  He spent his last 30 or 40 years in Washington.  I spent…"
"By KATHLEEN BELEWAPRIL 15, 2014

EVANSTON, Ill. — WHEN Frazier Glenn Miller shot and killed three people in Overland Park, Kan., on Sunday, he did so as a soldier of the white power movement: a groundswell that united Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other fringe elements after the Vietnam War, crested with the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, and remains a diminished but potent threat today.

Mr. Miller, the 73-year-old man charged in the killings, had been outspoken about his hatred of Jews, blacks, Communists and immigrants, but it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a crazed outlier. The shootings were consistent with his three decades of participation in organized hate groups. His violence was framed by a clear worldview.

You can’t predict whether any one person will commit violence, but it would be hard to think of someone more befitting of law enforcement scrutiny than Mr. Miller (who also goes by the name Frazier Glenn Cross). I’ve been studying the white radical right since 2006. In my review of tens of thousands of pages of once classified federal records, as well as newly available archives of Klan and neo-Nazi publications, Mr. Miller appears as a central figure of the white power movement.

The number of Vietnam veterans in that movement was small — a tiny proportion of those who served — but Vietnam veterans forged the first links between Klansmen and Nazis since World War II. They were central in leading Klan and neo-Nazi groups past the anti-civil rights backlash of the 1960s and toward paramilitary violence. The white power movement they forged had strongholds not only in the South, but also in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, California and Pennsylvania. Its members carried weapons like those they had used in Vietnam, and used boot-camp rhetoric to frame their pursuit of domestic enemies. They condoned violence against innocent people and, eventually, the state itself.

Before his 1979 discharge for distributing racist literature, Mr. Miller served for 20 years in the Army, including two tours in Vietnam and service as a Green Beret. Later that year he took part (but was not charged) in a deadly shooting of Communist protesters in Greensboro, N.C.

In 1980, Mr. Miller formed a Klan-affiliated organization in North Carolina that eventually was known as the White Patriot Party. He outfitted members in camouflage fatigues. He paraded his neo-Nazis, in uniform and bearing arms, up and down streets. They patrolled schools and polling places, supposedly to protect whites from harassment. F.B.I. documents show that they also burned crosses. By 1986, Mr. Miller’s group claimed 2,500 members in five southern states.

The archives also show that Mr. Miller received large sums of money from The Order, a white power group in the Pacific Northwest, to buy land and weapons to put his followers through paramilitary training. Mr. Miller’s group paid $50,000 for weapons and matériel stolen from the armory at Fort Bragg, N.C., including anti-tank rockets, mines and plastic explosives. He targeted active-duty troops for recruitment and hired them to conduct training exercises.

Mr. Miller’s downfall came after the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of black North Carolinians; as part of a settlement in 1985, he agreed to stop operating a paramilitary organization. In 1987, a federal judge found that Mr. Miller had violated the agreement, and barred him from contacting others in the white power movement. Outraged, and anticipating criminal charges regarding the stolen military weapons, Mr. Miller briefly went underground. He would write in a self-published autobiography, “Since they wouldn’t allow me to fight them legally above ground, then I’d resort to the only means left, armed revolution.” He was later caught with a small arsenal, but he began cooperating with prosecutors, testifying against other white supremacists in exchange for a reduced sentence. He was released in 1990, after serving three years.

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a nine-page report detailing the threat of domestic terrorism by the white power movement. This short document outlined no specific threats, but rather a set of historical factors that had predicted white-supremacist activity in the past — like economic pressure, opposition to immigration and gun-control legislation — and a new factor, the election of a black president.

The report singled out one factor that has fueled every surge in Ku Klux Klan membership in American history, from the 1860s to the present: war. The return of veterans from combat appears to correlate more closely with Klan membership than any other historical factor. “Military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists carrying out violent attacks,” the report warned. The agency was “concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.”

The report raised intense blowback from the American Legion, Fox News and conservative members of Congress. They demanded an apology and denounced the idea that any veteran could commit an act of domestic terrorism. The department shelved the report, removing it from its website. The threat, however, proved real.

Mr. Miller obviously represents an extreme, both in his politics and in his violence. A vast majority of veterans are neither violent nor mentally ill. When they turn violent, they often harm themselves, by committing suicide. But it would be irresponsible to overlook the high rates of combat trauma among the 2.4 million Americans who have served in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the full impact of which has not yet materialized. Veterans of those conflicts represent just 10 percent of those getting mental health services through the Department of Veterans Affairs, where the overwhelming majority of those in treatment are still Vietnam veterans.

During Mr. Miller’s long membership in the white power movement, its leaders have robbed armored cars, engaged in counterfeiting and the large-scale theft of military weapons, and carried out or planned killings. The bombing by Timothy J. McVeigh, an Army veteran, of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people, was only the most dramatic of these crimes. When we interpret shootings like the one on Sunday as acts of mad, lone-wolf gunmen, we fail to see white power as an organized — and deadly — social movement.

That Mr. Miller was able to carry out an act of domestic terror at two locations despite his history of violent behavior should alarm anyone concerned about public safety. Would he have received greater scrutiny had he been a Muslim, a foreigner, not white, not a veteran? The answer is clear, and alarming.

Kathleen Belew, a postdoctoral fellow in history at Northwestern University, is at work on a book on Vietnam veterans and the radical right.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 16, 2014, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Veterans and White Supremacy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe",The Kansas shooter had a long history of hate. Why wasn’t he stopped?
"Bre Blair stars as Jessie West on NBC's gripping new drama ""Game of Silence.""

Blair is a multitalented actress with television credits, including appearances on ""The Flash,"" ""Legit,"" ""NCIS: Los Angeles,"" ""Prime Suspect"" and ""Benched."" Recently, she appeared in the feature film ""Last Vegas,"" starring opposite Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline. Showcasing her talents, Blair also likes to dedicate some of her time to the theater. She recently shared the stage with Melanie Griffith in ""No Way Around but Through"" from playwright Scott Caan. Blair currently resides in Santa Monica, California.",Meet Jessie West from Game of Silence on NBC.com.
"Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Herman Cain, the presidential hopeful, appeared Wednesday in Washington at a Congressional Health Care Caucus discussion.

WASHINGTON — A defiant Herman Cain accused Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican rival, of orchestrating a smear campaign to destroy his presidential candidacy, as additional accusations emerged Wednesday that Mr. Cain made unwanted sexual overtures to women while he led the National Restaurant Association more than a decade ago.

As he sought to contain the fallout that consumed his campaign for a third day, Mr. Cain shifted his blame from the news media to the Perry campaign. He accused a top political adviser to Mr. Perry of leaking details of one allegation, saying the adviser learned of it while working for Mr. Cain’s failed bid for the Senate in 2004.

A spokesman for Mr. Perry called the suggestion “reckless and false,” and denied that the campaign was the source of the disclosures that have roiled the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Cain took aim at his rival after The Associated Press reported that a third woman had come forward with an allegation of sexual harassment at the restaurant association in the 1990s.

“We now know and have been able to trace it back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up, in order to discredit me and slow us down,” Mr. Cain told supporters by phone Wednesday evening.

The events left the Republican presidential race mired in claims and counterclaims brought about by the sexual harassment allegations, with Mr. Cain blaming Mr. Perry, whose campaign in turn raised the possibility that Mitt Romney’s campaign could be behind the disclosure of the allegations. A spokeswoman for Mr. Romney replied simply, “Not true.”

While Mr. Cain’s accusations briefly turned the attention away from him, interviews with more than a dozen people over the last three days paint a picture of his 1996-99 tenure at the National Restaurant Association that is at odds with his insistence that he never harassed anyone. Several people who worked at the association said they knew of episodes that women said had made them uncomfortable dealing with Mr. Cain.

One of the two women whose accusations of sexual harassment led to a paid severance agreement has decided against speaking publicly about her side of the story, her lawyer said Wednesday. The lawyer, Joel P. Bennett, said he would instead ask the restaurant association on Thursday to allow him to release a statement on his client’s behalf that would make it clear, without violating a confidentiality agreement she signed, that her version of events is different from the account that Mr. Cain has offered.

Mr. Bennett said the statement would not go into minute details of her experience with Mr. Cain. “It’s unpleasant and it’s sensational and she does not want to do that,” he said in an interview. He added, “She has a life to live and a career, and she doesn’t want to become another Anita Hill.”

Chris Wilson, who worked as a pollster at the association, recalled in an interview that an incident involving a woman at a suburban Washington restaurant had made several observers uncomfortable. He would not say what Mr. Cain said to the woman or whether she responded at the time. He did not provide any other details.

“If she comes out and talks about it, like I said, it’ll probably be the end of his campaign,” Mr. Wilson said in an earlier radio interview on KTOK in Oklahoma, where he lives. “It was only a matter of time, because so many people were aware of what took place, so many people were aware of her situation — the fact she left. Everybody knew, with the campaign, that this would eventually come up.”

Mr. Wilson, who is a partner at a Republican polling firm, is supporting Mr. Perry and is working for Make Us Great Again, the “super PAC” run by one of Mr. Perry’s former top aides. In the 1990s, he worked for Tony Fabrizio, a leading Republican pollster who is a senior adviser to Mr. Perry’s campaign.

But in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Wilson denied having provided any information to Politico.com, which first reported the harassment allegations on Sunday.

“I had nothing to do with leaking this in any way,” he said, “and I’ve never discussed or shared this story with any of my clients — period.”

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the third woman had considered filing a workplace complaint against Mr. Cain over incidents that she said included an invitation to his apartment.

Susan Saulny contributed reporting from Washington, and Mike McIntire from New York.","Herman Cain accused an adviser to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican rival, of leaking details of a sexual harassment allegation, saying the adviser worked for Mr. Cain in 2004."
"Currently, it is voluntary for companies to file for approval from the regulator but the number of applications has tumbled from 263 ten years ago to just nine last year. “Some unscrupulous sponsors may well be calculating that they are better off risking a protracted anti-avoidance battle than coming to an immediate pension settlement,” MPs said.

Last week the Pensions Regulator reached a landmark £255m pension settlement with threadmaker Coats Group, a move that prompted experts to suggest the deal could be used as a template for talks with Sir Philip.

Lesley Titcomb, chief executive of The Pensions Regulator, welcomed the committee’s report’s recognition of the “robust and proportionate regulation” and said that she would continue discussions with the Government about the regulator’s powers.

Dame Barbara Judge, chairman of the Institute of Directors , commented: “What happened to the BHS pensioners was an outrage and the Committee is right to look at significant changes to the regulatory landscape.” “ I have said for a long time that the Pensions Regulator needs more power to protect pensioners during the early stages of takeovers in order to avoid similar cases to BHS being repeated. We hope the Government takes this recommendation seriously.”",The collapse of BHS has prompted MPs to urge the Government to introduce a 'nuclear deterrent' for employers that might wish to avoid their pension liabilities.
"Michel Platini, the Uefa president provisionally banned over a £1.35m “disloyal payment” from his Fifa counterpart Sepp Blatter, has failed in his bid to have his interim suspension lifted.

The Frenchman had hoped to be able to attend Saturday’s Euro 2016 draw in Paris after applying to the court of arbitration for sport against his original 90-day provisional ban. But the Cas ruled that the decision by Fifa’s ethics committee should stand before a final ruling next week on the facts of the case.

The Cas did, however, caution Fifa against extending the provisional suspension beyond the current 90 days. Under its rules, the ethics committee could have added an extra 45 days to the ban, but the Cas panel said this would have been unfair to Platini. In the event, the argument is moot because the ethics committee has promised to deliver its verdict before Christmas.

Platini’s lawyer, Thibaud d’Alès, said his client was satisfied with the ruling. “Michel Platini notes with satisfaction that Cas partially granted his request when it demanded that Fifa not extend his ban. In substance, he is confident that his case is solid.”

Platini stayed away from Friday’s Uefa executive committee meeting as per the terms of his ban, with the Euro 2016 president, Jacques Lambert, dismissing rumours that Platini had been seen in the hotel where it was taking place.

Lambert, who stood down from Fifa’s ethics committee because of his friendship with Platini, said he was dissappointed that the appeal had not been granted. “Michel Platini has lost a battle today but he has not lost the war. For as long as the war is not lost we still harbour hopes,” he said.

Gianni Infantino, the Uefa general secretary who put himself forward as a candidate for the Fifa presidency after Platini was suspended, called for a swift end to the proceedings and said Uefa continued to support Platini’s right to a “fair process” and the opportunity to clear his name.

Platini and Blatter, who is also suspended for 90 days, will attend a hearing next week in front of the Fifa ethics committee judge, Hans-Joachim Eckert, who will rule on whether the lifetime bans requested against both men by the investigatory chamber should be applied.

The interim 90-day suspensions were announced in September after Swiss police opened a criminal investigation against Blatter and questioned Platini as a “person between a witness and a suspect” over a £1.35m payment in 2011.

Both parties said they had a gentleman’s agreement to pay the money as part of a deal over the remuneration Platini would receive to work as an adviser to the Fifa president between 1998 and 2002. Platini’s lawyers had hoped that a document they unearthed showing that a salary of SFr1m a year was rumoured to have been agreed at the time would help his case. But the case made by the investigatory chamber is understood to argue that Blatter and Platini struck a corrupt bargain and that the £1.35m payment was made in return for something.

It was made shortly before the Uefa congress in Paris in 2011, at a time when Blatter was seeking Platini’s support for the Fifa presidency in the face of a challenge from the Qatari Mohamed bin Hammam.

Platini and Blatter have accepted there was no written contract for the payment, said to relate to work undertaken by the Frenchman as a special adviser to Blatter between 1998 and 2002, but have denied wrongdoing. Platini has claimed Blatter told him at the time that Fifa could not afford to pay him, despite the governing body making £78m over that four-year cycle, and did not want to break its wage structure.

Related: United States hopes Qatar will cooperate with World Cup bidding investigation

Both Blatter and Platini have said they believed their verbal contract was legal under Swiss law. However, Swiss law places a five-year time limit on such payments. The fact that the payments did not feature in Fifa’s accounts is believed to form part of the case against them.

In addition to the alleged corruption, the charges are based on four other potential breaches: mismanagement, conflict of interest, false accounting and non-cooperation with the ethics committee. The Swiss attorney general is investigating whether the £1.35m constitutes what is termed under the country’s law a “disloyal payment”.

The fate of the two men who were once the most powerful in world football has become part of the wider corruption crisis swirling around Fifa in a year when several senior executives have been arrested or suspended.

The ethics committee will meet next week in Zurich, with a decision expected to be announced any time from 19 December onwards. Even if both men escape a life ban, they are expected to be handed hefty suspensions of six to seven years.

While both men would have the last recourse of a further appeal to the Fifa appeals committee and then Cas, a lengthy ban would almost certainly signal the end of Platini’s hopes of re-entering the race to succeed Blatter.

And it would also bring the curtain down in ignominious fashion on Blatter’s 41 years at Fifa, denying him of the chance to leave in the manner of his choosing at February’s extraordinary congress.",Suspended Uefa president Michel Platini’s attempt to have his 90-day ban from Fifa overturned has been rejected by the court of arbitration for sport
"Desperate times call for desperate measures. This helps explain why nominal gross domestic product — that is, total GDP without inflation stripped out – has wound up at the center of a debate over how, and whether, the Federal Reserve can do more to stimulate the U.S. economy and lower the nation’s current 9.1% unemployment rate.

The problem boils down to the Fed’s current dual – or in fact, triple – mandate from Congress. Here is the entire wording of the Fed’s mandate, which falls under Section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

It is this last part which is at the heart of today’s policy debate. In theory, and in the long run, it should be consistent for the Fed to conduct monetary policy in a way that promotes a healthy economy marked by maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. But that is little help at a time like now, when the Fed is roughly meeting the latter two objectives but falling well short on the first; that is, on reaching anything close to “maximum” or full employment, typically defined as something like an unemployment rate of 5% (though many think today, for various reasons including demographic ones, this rate is now closer to 7%).

This kind of dual mandate is pretty unique in central banking. Elsewhere, in Europe and Canada, for example, central banks have a single mandate to promote price stability; that is, to keep the consumer-price level growing at about a 1-2% pace per year, as many have interpreted this mandate. This approach is favored by inflation and deficit hawks who fear the Fed would otherwise monetize government deficits and run the risk of hyperinflation.

Until recently the most vocal opponents of the Fed came from this camp, and there are plenty of economists and Fed officials who would prefer this type of single mandate. (Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, for one, who earlier this year said “it would not break my heart to have a single mandate” focused solely on inflation and suggested it was up to Congress now to change the wording of the Federal Reserve Act as such.)

Lately, though, as the economic recovery continues to disappoint and unemployment remains stubbornly high, a different group has come to the fore. This camp says that if the Fed is falling short on its “maximum employment” mandate, then it ought to be – it is, in fact, required to be – far more aggressive in stimulating the economy to try and get there.

Consider Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, who in a speech earlier this month said “given how badly we are doing on our employment mandate, we need to be willing to take a risk on inflation going modestly higher in the short run.” He would prefer the Fed to commit to “keep short-term rates at zero until either the unemployment rate goes below 7 percent or the outlook for inflation over the medium term goes above 3 percent.”

Trouble is, this essentially leaves the Fed in the same, difficult position as it is in today. Hence calls, which are growing ever louder, for an entirely new, different kind of target: nominal GDP. This is something Scott Sumner, an economist at Bentley University whose views have gained prominence through his blog, TheMoneyIllusion, has been pushing for two decades. His support base among academics lately has been growing. And perhaps most significant, since it suggests the Fed might actually be open to such an idea, is that Goldman Sachs economists have just endorsed the idea as well.

The version which Goldman puts forth, building on the ideas of Sumner and others, is that the Fed ought to aim for a specific level of NGDP which would put the economy back on the trend it was prior to the recession; to close, in other words, the current gap between the economy today and where econometric models suggest the economy should be. This is no small gap; Goldman estimates the shortfall, as of the second quarter, is roughly 10%. To most quickly close this gap, Goldman estimates the Fed would need to roughly double its balance sheet to $5 trillion and keep interest rates at zero through at least 2016.

The beauty of the NGDP target, as proponents see it, is that it doesn’t differentiate between inflation and real GDP. So it doesn’t matter whether the gap is closed by three parts inflation and one part real GDP or one part inflation and three parts real GDP. The point is that the gap gets closed, because the Fed is able to be as aggressive as it needs to be, and the economy avoids a prolonged slump and chronically high unemployment a la the Great Depression. And by targeting NGDP, or a stated goal for the total size of the economy, instead of a 3% or 5% inflation rate, the Fed is better able to avoid the backlash that might otherwise undermine its ability to achieve said objective.

But would this really work? Now that NGDP is getting serious attention, this question becomes all the more important. Below, a (very abbreviated) round-up of the debate. Best to get up to speed as much as possible now, as it is only likely to gain momentum from here.

Further reading on NGDP targeting:

–Karl Smith, “NGDP Targeting in Real Life”

–Interfluidity: “The Moral Case for NGDP Targeting” (with links to many others, including Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong, on this issue)

–Bill Woolsey, emphasizing the monetarist position that underlies an NGDP target.

–Heard on the Street: Inflated Expectations for Economic Fix (and Sumner’s response here.)

–Free Exchange: Understanding NGDP Targeting

UPDATE: Australia’s central bank has a dual mandate similar to the U.S. An earlier of this version of this post suggested that Australia has a single mandate.","Desperate times call for desperate measures. This helps explain why nominal gross domestic product -- that is, total GDP without inflation stripped out -- has wound up at the center of a debate over how, and whether, the Fed can do more to stimulate the U.S. economy and lower the nation’s current 9.1% unemployment rate."
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - News Corp's (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Rupert Murdoch left the door open on Monday to a joint bid with Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) to buy Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research), a day ahead of Yahoo's quarterly financial report.

In response to a reporter's question about his interest in pursuing a bid with Microsoft for Yahoo, he said ""Depends on the deal.""

Murdoch also repeated earlier remarks about not having the financial fire power to top Microsoft's bid. ""I certainly can't afford to bid against Microsoft (for Yahoo),"" he told attendees at a speech he gave at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs group.

The 77-year-old media mogul said Google is gaining influence in the advertising world. ""Is Google really going to get control of the advertising world, and should Microsoft be supported in their attempt to try and stop that?"" he asked.

Yahoo is expected to report its first quarter results on Tuesday. Strong results could force Microsoft to raise its estimated $43 billion offer, some analysts have said.

Separately, sources have said Yahoo is pursuing a deal to merge with Time Warner Inc's (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) AOL Internet division. Yahoo is also set to complete tests this week with Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on whether Google should run a piece of Yahoo's Web search ad sales.

Yahoo faces a Saturday deadline to respond to Microsoft, after which Microsoft has said it would launch a proxy battle to unseat Yahoo's board.

(Reporting by Peter Kaplan; Editing by Tim Dobbyn.)","WASHINGTON (Reuters) - News Corp's <NWSa.N> Rupert Murdoch left the door open on Monday to a joint bid with Microsoft Corp <MSFT.O> to buy Yahoo Inc <YHOO.O>, a day ahead of Yahoo's quarterly"
"The 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash looked a lot like the apocalyptic end of something in many American cities, but to Theaster Gates it was a new beginning. Gates, these days director of arts and public life at the University of Chicago, whom ArtReview likes to call “the poster boy for socially engaged art”, was then a somewhat overlooked potter and frustrated town planner. He used the opportunity afforded by the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy a bungalow in the derelict South Side of Chicago for $16,000, then about as much as he could afford.

Gates, 34 at the time, set about making the clapboard bungalow his new artistic medium. He gutted it, “repurposed” the scrap to make shelves for 14,000 art books plundered from a closed-down bookstore, and covered the exterior with vertical strips of weathered wood. He created a “soul food kitchen”, and a room to hold a floor-to-ceiling collection of photographic slides rescued from the skip. He called the bungalow the Archive House, and opened it to the neighbourhood.

So far it sounds like any number of community projects. But Gates wasn’t finished there. He used leftover scrap wood to build shoe-shine stands – referencing a history of black poverty and labour – and sold them for thousands of dollars at an art fair in Miami. With the proceeds, Gates bought another property on Dorchester Avenue, the same street as the first. He reimagined it in the same way, bought all the records from a defunct, once famous local record store, Dr Wax, housed them there, and called it the Listening Room. By now he was on a roll.

Over the seven years since, Gates has used the same principle – buying and stripping out properties in his neighbourhood, a mile or two south of the university but a different world entirely, remaking some of the scrap as art, selling it, and buying more property to create community spaces and houses for local artists and others. In 2011 he made a series of beautiful textured canvases covered in spectrums or coils of reclaimed fire hoses, called them In the Event of a Race Riot. One set recently sold at Christie’s for £250,000. Always channelling the money back into the “Dorchester Projects”, he is inexorably remodelling his entire neighbourhood which had previously been hollowed out for two or three decades by poverty and crime. Gates now employs and houses 60 “artists and makers”, and his practice is expanding to other cities in the American rust belt – St Louis, Missouri; Akron, Ohio; Gary, Indiana. His ambition is growing too. Two years ago he saved from demolition a bank building, with classical portico and marble interior, the last civic building standing on Stony Island Avenue, the main drag two blocks from his home. The bank was flooded out and long-abandoned. Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, and Gates’s most reliable patron, sold it to him for a dollar, on the basis that the artist would raise the money to renovate it. To this end Gates has created bonds from the marble tiles of the bank’s former urinals – readymades, indeed – inscribed, “In art we trust”. He has sold 100 of them for $5,000 each to get the renovation started. In the kind of neat reversal he lives for, he plans to sell more of his urinal bonds to collectors at the forthcoming Basel art fair. “I’m hoping Swiss bankers will bail out my flooded South Side bank in the name of art,” he says, with a broad grin.

Related: Nuts, bolts and art: the man who turned a hardware store into hard cash

Gates is telling me some of this in the self-renovated shell of a corner house in which he lives alone, on Dorchester Avenue, over the road from the Listening Room (the ground floor is another venue, the Black Cinema House). He is an energising presence, precise in his movements, comfortable in his skin. In conversation he slides easily between registers, from knowing bursts of street slang to situationist theory – references to “French cats like Guy Debord” – always thoughtful but never quite in earnest. His voice is rich in cadence; occasionally he will burst into song. When I ask him about The Wire at one point, he suggests he is more of a Downton Abbey obsessive. If he were a superhero, he intones in a sudden surprising tenor, he would be the Unknown Craftsman, “You know! Mask and cape, making anony-mous artistic inter-ventions, chang-ing the cit-y for-eeever.”

Gates is 41. This week he has new work – painting and pottery – filling the hangar-like White Cube gallery in Bermondsey in south London. He is planning another large-scale show at the Venice Biennale, which may include his playful Zen-gospel band, the Black Monks of Mississippi, among other things (at 13, Gates was director of his church’s gospel youth choir). Earlier this year he was awarded the prestigious Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff and shared the £40,000 with his fellow nominees.

He has not always been the “darling of the international art world”. He grew up in the tough West Side of Chicago, at a time of increasing dislocation in the city. He was the youngest of nine children and the only boy. His sisters now mostly work in public service but when younger they all dabbled, he has said, in “Black Pantherism”. His late mother was a schoolteacher and had him read widely from an early age, a habit that won him a place at a smart North Side school and the sense of “walking in two worlds since fifth grade”. His father was a roofer and Gates worked in holidays as his labourer. He always had an idea roughly where he wanted to get to – he has a degree in urban planning, and an unusual joint masters in religion, ceramics and city design – but it took him a while to get here.

The people with the most entrepreneurial spirit also had the least consciousness about the needs of a place

“I knew immediately after graduating that the kind of tactical planning I wanted to do I wouldn’t be able to do through a traditional city department,” he says – though he was a “bow-tie wearer” in city hall for a while. “I realised it was actually developers who changed cities. It bugged me that the people with the most agency, the most entrepreneurial spirit, were also the people with the least consciousness about the needs of a place. I went after having more agency…”

Artists have long been a useful tool for developers; since the 80s the conventional way of “waking up” destitute urban areas has been to rent out cheap studio space to art students and watch the creativity and the café culture follow, before the loft apartments are sold on to the bonus-rich with authentic artisanal grit priced in. Gates wanted to change that cynical paradigm – “What if you said culture was the end point?” he says. “Then you might get what the city planners are always talking about: the spectacle of diversity. That’s the part that gets me super-excited. But in order to get there one has to have expectations in excess of dollar returns for shareholders.”

Through TED talks and keynote speeches at the World Economic Forum, Gates has lately been spreading this gospel to great effect. At the end of this year he will stage his first UK project in Bristol, details of which will be announced in June. “Most of the city mayors who want to talk to me have big problems and they see culture as a means to an end,” he says. “So they come to me and they say, ‘You seem to be doing this pretty well, Theaster, what’s your trick? What’s your secret sauce?’”

That is where the conversation starts. Gates tells them to have faith in their city’s artists, give them a real seat at the table when their city is being shaped. The problems are the same in post-industrial western cities everywhere, he says. They boil down to the fact that “we can save 80 cents on the dollar doing this or that in Vietnam”. The problem in the South Side of Chicago “is the same as it is in Liverpool, or wherever, it is: what do working people do now the industry has gone?”

Partly, Gates suggests, through his practice, the first “strategy of hope” lies in a philosophy of pride in things done well, made well, but also in the principle or metaphor of always, always finding use for what seems discarded or broken or abandoned, make do and mend at the scale of the object and also at the scale of the city. “I couldn’t find work coming out of graduate school and I was a mason’s tender. I mixed mortar and would run bricks back and forth. It was back-breaking work, but I needed to do something just to feel good. Then I started making pots a lot and that was expensive to do, no money. But it was like this need to be making busy, being purposeful. Around here, in the absence of certain kinds of jobs or when brothers don’t finish school, then keeping busy creates all kinds of new devices.”

If you walk along Dorchester Avenue it looks, as Gates says, like a decent street “but sometimes bad things happen. I have to say to my friends, violent things sometimes happen in this neighbourhood, and all the cleaning and sweeping in the world is not going to change the fact that among certain groups of young men and women here, rage is an entirely sensible reaction to their world. I get that. It is not always pretty, it is not always square.”

Gates says there has been no hostility to his efforts to revitalise some formerly “no-go area” blocks. “Well,” he qualifies, “the windows of my studio have been shot out four times by kids – you know, target practice. But I think part of that is a desire to know what is happening on the inside and there being no obvious way to ask. Part of me wants to just catch these brothers to invite them in. In general I’m a co-worker with my neighbours here. And though maybe they don’t have the platform of the Observer to talk about it, they have stuck with this place through many more dire moments than me. My hat’s off to them. They got on with it. They had no leveraging mechanism but they stayed here, and most tried to do the right things.”

You have the sense talking to Gates that the “sensible reaction” of rage, of the kind that was demonstrated last week in Baltimore, was closer to the surface in him as a younger man. Has he mellowed?

“There was more anger and more jubilance,” he says. “Everything was more. But it was clear pretty early on for me that a certain kind of frustration was going to get in the way of doing any proper work. My first show at White Cube was called My Labor Is My Protest. In my body I felt for a long time that the best political act, the best faith act, is always an act, an action.”

A lot of Gates’s work references the civil rights movement, and the lost hope it embodies. How conscious is he of an effort to reconnect with those values?

“It is true that when I am interacting with close friends, cats who use complicated phrases like ‘self-determination’, ‘community assets’, ‘funding circles’, all those things that are about aggregating thought and money for the collective good, we hearken back to days when those things meant something to many more people in this community. Those values are still present in more recent immigrant communities. When you have nothing, when you come from nothing, then you lean on people and you let them lean on you. This gross individualism that middle classness taught us to believe in, it was really an erosive ideology against all that.”

Some of his “reaggregating” efforts have to do with simply being on the ground in this place, making a long-term commitment. “I’m interested in, ‘What happens when you stay?’” Gates says. But it is also about an attitude to objects, an attitude to making them and remaking them.

“It is a way of life like: sweeping matters, shovelling matters, it matters that it is done well,” Gates says. He holds up one of the fine tea bowls he has made, from which we are drinking. “How you centre a pot matters. The willingness to elevate super-modest things is either in you or not. I think that is born in me.”

Did he see those qualities in his father, the roofer?

“I think I got it from both of them. You know my mum committed her life to raising nine children. My dad, for him it was just going to work but they were of a generation where if you were going to do something you should do it good. I’d say right now there is less of that per capita.”

As a kid, watching the margins of his neighbourhood being partly destroyed by gang violence (it was city policy to demolish larger civic buildings that had become crack dens) he suggests: “There was so much outside my control that I thought: all right, I can keep my bedroom clean, I can take out the garbage, I can look really presentable.” He paid his way through college cutting his friends’ hair. “I liked it because I always thought inside this little head under my hands is this vast possibility. With clippers and comb, there I went. That felt like the cultivation of a mindset, a skill set – and I wanted my girls and my guys to look good.”

He makes it sound almost a religious ritual.

“Well, yes. But better not to talk about that. There is always a part beyond what man owes man. It’s like: some decisions, most decisions I make, are not the right smart market decisions, but they are important to me.”

Lately, along with a determined return to his potter’s wheel, Gates has been making – the headline act of the White Cube show – large-scale “tar paintings”, which are as they sound, canvases coated with whorls and geometries of viscous black. He made some of them with his father, now 80, who bequeathed him his tar kettle.

“I could make another kind of work,” he says. “But how about I just really lean into my dad’s tar kettle?”

He believes art, if it matters, has to have roots in autobiography.

“This is the thing about the art market. If a young kid isn’t invited to know what they have inside them, and how to unlock that, then what they have is just devices. And you pretty quickly run out of devices. I had a life before all this. The lights were off for me, I was out in the shed, but that was a really useful way into this world.”

He revels in his current access to galleries and museums, and is amused by some of the excess of the prospect of a Venice show, for example. Doesn’t it sometimes just seem completely absurd, that conceptual, bankrolled world?

“Of course, but some people know how to ride the crest of absurdity and put things on your mind.”

He is not so interested in that kind of strategy though. He is, he says, after more of a “low-tide feel” than riding the latest wave.

“My dad gave me good advice. He said: ‘If this is about roofing, you should really treat it like a roof.’ It was like: should we use galvanised nails or copper ones? We have to add the gravel stop. And what is art if not the elevation of a certain set of skills? Tar is not unlike clay, which is where I started. What could be more humble than clay? No ironies. No crest of absurdity.”

What did his dad make of the paintings?

“He was into his tar pieces. He was way into them. He got it. You know, I used to sign things, and there came a time when I stopped. It was more about making the pot right. I had this big argument with White Cube because I didn’t want to sign anything.”

And you realised that what they are really selling is your signature?

He laughs. “They are like: ‘Hey man, you got to sign this stuff!’ And I’m like: ‘No, I’m the unknown craftsman!’”

They reached a compromise. Gates put his name to some things and not others.

We go for a drive around the neighbourhood and he takes me inside his vast, half-restored bank. “It was pretty rough. It was filled with shit. People came by after we had cleared it out and said: ‘Wow! This is so distressed!’ But it was actually distressed. Today as far as the banks are concerned this is my living room. I had to put myself on the line here.” He walks the floors, runs though his plans. “There will be a bar here, a little speakeasy. Performance space, galleries…” In the vault downstairs with its flood-damaged safety deposit boxes, its great submarine metal door smashed open, it looks as if Butch and Sundance have just ransacked the place. All of this was below water. Gates will leave much of it intact behind glass, create a music venue.

“It is not just about this community,” he says. “I am invested in illustrating the possible. So that other people might think: ‘OK, that works.’ People with more means, other artists in other places.”

Upstairs he has installed wooden cabinets from a demolished department store. In them he will file the album collection of Frankie Knuckles, the legendary house DJ who died last year. In the drawers below will be the collection of a man named Ed Williams who trawled around thrift stores across the country on a mission to take derogatory black miniatures out of circulation: “mammies, jolly nigger babes, little watermelon-eating sambos, all the stuff that was very popular among whites over 70, 80 years”. Williams collected 6,500 objects, which Gates now has care of. “We will have those in these drawers here, butting up against the collection donated by Johnson Publishing [based in Chicago] of Jet and Ebony magazines that were made to shift the way the world saw black people.” They will, he says, be a resource for anyone trying to grapple with meaning, from the local community to material studies PhD students.

Does he ever doubt that the refashioned artistic purposes will be clear? Worry that it might just look like Urban Outfitters?

“All the time. Constantly. The thing is, it doesn’t have to make complete sense. It doesn’t have to follow a developer logic. It’s just: I can make some meaning with this. A couple of years ago I did this project that was: ‘To make the thing that makes the thing’. I was interested in the idea that I could make a pot – or I could make a pottery. I started making wheels and kilns. I wanted to make bricks. And if I could do that then hundreds of people could do it, maybe thousands of people and we could build cities…”

He takes me to his latest project, a three-acre site with a disused power station at its centre. He has piled up all the limestone from a church that was pulled down by a developer. “It will be a green space with a large sculptural work running through it,” he says. “We call it the monastery. These materials were around and we could get them. We will find out what works here.”

Is there no real limit to the scale of his projects?

“That’s the thing. I mean it feels like a philosophy more than a commitment to a set of things. And philosophy can exist at any scale.”

What if people here feel it is not for them?

“Well, every day we are in conversation with our neighbours. Some people are excited about it, others are maybe just glad something is happening to all the waste land. And others just assume I am a front for some corporation.”

Gates’s studio and workshop is in a disused Anheuser-Busch distribution plant that he restored with his team of makers. There is a wood shop and a metal shop. He recently did a deal for the entire contents of a hardware store that was closing down – the old cabinets full of tools and nails and drill bits line the walls. (“When my guys saw all this stuff they got real horny.”) One warehouse space houses some of his major works, some firehose pieces, his remade scrap-wood market carts and trolleys, everything carefully thought out, honestly built, including the room itself. “I have three great wood guys on my team. They are incredibly sensitive in the way they handle materials,” Gates says. “They don’t like making things that are half-assed.”

Walking round the workshop, with its emphasis on the handmade – its implicit refusal of the new digital world order – it feels like a very modern medieval guild. Like something William Morris would have approved of. Does Gates see it in those terms?

“I think, as William Morris realised, as new power structures emerged, some things were being lost for ever. I am into that. I’d rather have a communal cinematheque than Netflix, so I’ll make one. The people I work with, they love each other now. They are like family. All of the scales are exciting for me, from wanting to make a pot to getting 60 people to make something well. It’s the same feeling. We believe in the things we make.”

Gates shows me one of his exquisitely engraved $5,000 urinal-tile bank bonds, destined for Basel bankers, material evidence of the transforming power of art. “People are already trading them up. They are functioning like a real bond,” he says.

We end up standing in front of a pair of his tar paintings, the matt and gloss patches of black catching the light in surprising ways.

“When you are working with tar there is a kind of consistency of movement that has to happen or it doesn’t spread evenly,” Gates says. It is, in this sense, he suggests, like a ritual dance or calligraphy, or sword fencing, or any of those habitual Zen Buddhist practices. “I used to love the moment when we had just about finished the roof and we had to figure out how to get from whatever spot we were in to the hatch to get off. You had to mop yourself into a corner and out of it, get all your supplies down, get your last bucket of tar up…”

That was presumably second nature to his old man?

“Yes. And he would tell me rules, which are what you have before it becomes second nature. And that is the same as painting. You move paint around a canvas by certain inherited rules until it becomes second nature and you make your own rules. I never painted. I was much more interested in building in three dimensions, the practical. This is the closest I have come.”

The two pieces illustrate the before and after of his father’s long career. The second of them involves a technique he was too old to master that allowed roofers to guarantee a new roof for longer, and put him out of business. When Gates was making them, he was reflecting not only on his father’s tar kettle but also on the abstract painting of Jasper Johns and others, art considered the high-water mark of American modernism.

“For me,” he says, “that kind of painting always involved an idea of whiteness. Of art as individuality. The self-made. The artist representing an autonomy, without reference to the world. I think that is bullshit. I don’t think there is a black aesthetic necessarily, but I was born into an ideological framework that believed in collective endeavour. I didn’t get here by myself, self-made. Biography and geography matter…”

That in the art world, as in the real world, there is no such thing as abstraction?

“Or rather the thing that we see as abstract is really the by-product of a set of ideas about power that are way more complicated.” Gates smiles. “Of course, if a person doesn’t want to read all that into this tar they don’t have to. They can say: ‘Look it is four lines, black on black. And all the other stuff isn’t there.’” He stands back, has another look at the work. “But it always is.”

Theaster Gates: Freedom of Assembly is at White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1, until 5 July","When artist Theaster Gates transformed a house on Chicago’s derelict South Side into an artwork open to the community, it was just the beginning. Meet the ‘poster boy for socially engaged art’"
"“Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937,” at the Neue Galerie, opens with a quietly devastating compare-and-contrast. The walls of the narrow hallway leading onto the first gallery are covered with facing photomurals.

The image in one dates from 1938. It shows the exterior of the Haus der Kunst (House of the Arts) in Berlin where the traveling antimodernist exhibition called “Entartete Kunst” — “Degenerate Art” — has opened. The line of visitors waiting to get in stretches down the street.

The photo on the opposite wall is from 1944. It shows Carpatho-Ukrainian Jews newly arrived at the railroad station at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They are densely crowded together along the length of a platform that runs far into the distance and out of sight.

The message is clear: The event in the first picture led or contributed to that in the second. The show itself is one of the few in an American museum in the past two decades to address, on a large scale, the Nazis’ selective demonizing of art, how that helped foment an atmosphere of permissible hatred and forged a link between aesthetics and human disaster.

Silent footage of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, taken in 1937 by the American filmmaker Julien Bryan. The excerpt, part of a longer film, is featured in a new show at the Neue Galerie.

The basic facts of the narrative are familiar. Among Hitler’s grand plans upon coming to power as chancellor in 1933 was to purify German culture, to promote the Apollonian “classical” and eradicate the uncontrollably Dionysian “primitive,” a category that included, along with the mentally and physically deformed, avant-garde modernism, Bolshevism, and Jewish culture.

Hitler’s views on art were far from original; they had clear roots in 19th-century German sociology. Nor were they, at first, systematic. He was into big, divalike, Riefenstahlian gestures, but with no clear official philosophy. The problem was, of course, that while his speculative thinking was limited, his search-and-destroy powers were not.

One of his first moves as chancellor was to commission the building of a museum in Munich to showcase his version of an aesthetic ideal. He inaugurated it in 1937 with the first annual “Great German Art Exhibition,” which he more or less handpicked. Most of the art was locked into uplift-intensive academic styles of an earlier time. Even Hitler seemed disappointed with the results.

A day after the museum’s debut, a second, hastily assembled government-sponsored exhibition opened nearby. Titled “Entartete Kunst,” it was made up of work in vanguard modernist styles: Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, abstraction. The whole thing was pitched as a freak show, meant to demonstrate the threat the new art posed on everything German. Jews were implicated in the attack, even though only six of the 112 artists were Jewish.

The first room of the Neue Galerie exhibition gives an instant sense of the contrasting aesthetics and complicit politics of the two Munich shows through a side-by-side hanging of two large triptych paintings: Adolf Ziegler’s “The Four Elements,” from 1937, and Max Beckmann’s “Departure,” done from 1932 to 1935.

In Ziegler’s painting, the subject is obvious: Four blond academic female nudes decorously display themselves along with traditional symbols. Beckmann’s Expressionist picture is all mystery: Scenes of human torture fill the side panels, while at the center a cluster of stylized, possibly allegorical figures stand, as if waiting to push off, in a small boat.

Hitler loved Ziegler’s art. He chose “The Four Elements” for the big Munich show, then hung it over the fireplace in his home. Working through his minister of propaganda, the wily Joseph Goebbels, he also gave Ziegler the go-ahead to do a purge of modernist art from state-owned museums, a campaign that produced the “Degenerate Art” show but continued well beyond it. Eventually, some 20,000 pieces — Beckmann’s triptych among them — were confiscated, to be sold, hoarded or destroyed.

So the two triptychs broadly define the official view of good and bad (evil) art in the Nazi era. And they divide the Neue Galerie room into two corresponding zones. The “Four Elements” side is dominated by the life-size sculpture of a neo-Classical nude by Richard Scheibe, and two sculpted portrait heads of Ziegler by August Waterbeck, now forgotten. On the Beckmann side on the room is a small, violently twisting 1910 bronze Expressionist figure by Ernst Barlach titled “The Berserker,” and a 1911 still life of African sculpture by Emil Nolde that was in the “Degenerate Art” show.

But nothing is simple; paradoxes abound. Scheibe, after an early brush with censorship, worked steadily throughout the Nazi era without ever joining the party. An approved sculptural style seems to have been enough. At the same time, the much-touted Ziegler, who put Hitler’s aesthetic biases into catastrophic action, fell out of favor, was sent to Dachau, then finally allowed to retire.

Goebbels, who took over from Ziegler as degenerate-art prosecutor, started out as a big fan of modernism. There was even a moment early on when Expressionism was a candidate for becoming the official national art style. That ended when Hitler decided otherwise, and successful artists like Barlach and Nolde, whom Goebbels admired, fell into “degenerate” disgrace.

Nolde’s story, too, has its twists. Because of his disgrace, he emerged from World War II as something of a hero, an artist who, forbidden by the Nazis to pursue a career, had painted small, brilliant watercolors in private — some are on view here — and kept a kind of creative resistance alive. But Nolde wasn’t resistant to Nazism. He had always embraced it and spent the war years trying to get back into the party’s good graces.

You’ll find all these complex stories related in detail in the engrossing catalog edited by the show’s curator, Olaf Peters, an art historian and Neue Galerie board member. But the exhibition itself works in very broad narrative strokes that gain impact through the astonishing work used to illustrate them.

A gallery devoted to art in Dresden takes us back a step in time, to the years just before and after World War I, when the city was home to a group of artists who called themselves Die Brücke, the Bridge. One of their goals was to translate great German art of the past — Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach — into the language of present. In the process, they virtually invented Expressionism.

In the 1920s, they had success; you get a sense of this in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1925-26 painted portrait of himself and three Brücke colleagues, Otto Mueller, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, looking nattily dressed and self-confidently blasé. But under the Nazis, they were pariahs. Kirchner’s group portrait ended up in “Entartete Kunst” in 1937, as did all but one of the dozen Brücke paintings in the Dresden room. A year later, Kirchner, in exile in Switzerland, put a bullet through his head.

Harassment of Bauhaus artists began even earlier. In 1931, the National Socialist party, Hitler’s party, forced the school out of Dessau. It reopened to improvised quarters in Berlin, but closed there two years later. The clean-lined, functionalist Bauhaus style wasn’t “degenerate” exactly, but the school’s international — read, foreign — outlook was nearly as threatening. In the end, cosmopolitanism is what saved it. Most Bauhaus members felt comfortable enough in the wider world to leave Germany behind, and did.

What they left was inconceivable destruction, to lives and art alike. You get some grip on numbers in the show’s concluding gallery on the first floor, where a fat ledger book is on display filled with typed lists of “degenerate art” officially confiscated, mostly in 1937 and 1938, from German museums. Compiled in 1941-42 by the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda — Goebbels’s department — the ledger is on loan from Victoria and Albert Gallery in London.

An X beside an entry indicates a work known to have been destroyed; empty frames hanging high on the wall in the Neue Galerie symbolize work still missing. But it’s the art in the room called “The Fate of Works, the Fate of Artists” that your eyes go to, and particularly to a group of self-portraits.

There’s Max Beckmann, in 1938, dressed in a red robe striped like a prison uniform and grimly eyeing a trumpet he holds in his hand as if wondering whether to sound it. And Kirchner, in 1937, sitting in a sun-flooded room with a little cat, staring straight forward, half his face left unfinished — or half obliterated. Context means a lot in the way you see art. You can’t know how specifically personal these portraits are, how they connect to history, until you know that Beckmann was painting his in exile in Amsterdam the year after hundreds of his works had been impounded by the Nazis. Kirchner, painting in Switzerland, would be dead within a year.

Nor can you know that Oskar Kokoschka, who depicts himself in 1937 as a lantern-jawed palooka, is a hero until you read the nose-thumbing solidarity-affirming title he gave to his likeness: “Self-Portrait as a Degenerate Artist.” You don’t even realize Felix Nussbaum has painted his until you look closely at his multifigure 1944 picture “The Damned,” and recognize his face, familiar from other paintings by him, in a crowd.

Nussbaum, a German Jew, wasn’t in the 1937 “Entartete Art” show. Three years earlier, sensing menace in the air, he had left Germany for Belgium. There, in 1940, he was arrested as a “hostile alien” and put in a detention camp so nightmarish that he begged to be sent back to Germany. But he escaped en route and spent the next several years in hiding, on the move, living with friends here and there, and continuing to paint.

“The Damned” is a carefully composed, exquisitely painted horror story. A dozen gaunt, exhausted people crowd together in the foreground, shut in by high stone walls. A woman screams; another weeps; everyone else looks dazed except Nussbaum, who pulls his coat collar up and looks out of the picture furtively and appraisingly. A procession of skull-faced pallbearers carrying empty coffins enters the scene from behind.

In 1944, the year he finished the painting, Nussbaum was found hiding in an attic by Nazi soldiers, arrested and send to Auschwitz where he was killed, age 39. The photomural of Auschwitz that opens the show was shot in the same year. Nussbaum could have — I’m guessing — arrived at the train station in the picture. He could have stood on that platform. And — because everything connects, always — he could have been a figure in a similarly horizon-piercing crowd.

“Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937” continues through June 30 at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street; (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org;

A version of this review appears in print on March 14, 2014, on page C21 of the New York edition with the headline: First, They Came for the Art. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe","Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937,” a show at the Neue Galerie, is one of the few in an American museum in the past two decades to address the Nazi’s selective demonizing of art."
"Police in New Zealand used a stone to smash the window of a car that tumbled into the water at an Auckland wharf Tuesday, dragging the trapped motorist out of the sinking vehicle and lifting her to safety.

Police later estimated the 63-year-old, whose name wasn’t released, was within a minute or so of drowning, they told the New Zealand Herald.

The horrified driver was was trapped inside of a BMW after the car jumped the parking lot wall and landed in the Waitemata Harbour about 3 p.m. local time, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Joined by several bystanders who witnessed the horrifying plunge, Officers Paul Watts and Simon Russell sprang into action to save the woman's life, according to the North Shore Times.

Erwin Kampos, who had been fishing nearby, was trying to balance the car as the terrified woman tried to keep her head above water in the backseat, pressing her face against the rear window.

The cops dove into the drink and one of them tried, unsuccessfully, to break the window with his baton. Another bystander, local reporter Simon Maude, handed Watts a large rock, which the officer used to shatter the car’s glass.

“At that time the car actually started to move very fast into the water. I was trying to hold the car, slowing it down from entering the water,” Russell told the New Zealand Herald.

The group then hoisted the horrified driver and carried her to safety.

The car was completely submerged within a minute of the rescue, the officers said.

Investigators are still trying to determine the circumstances of the accident, 9 News reported.",A woman whose car tumbled into the water in New Zealand walked away safely after local police smashed open her rear window.
"06/30/2015 AT 04:55 PM EDT

, a diabetes patient and outspoken advocate for those living with the disease, has a serious problem with CrossFit's sense of humor.

that read ""Open Diabetes,"" along with the caption ""Make sure you pour some out for your dead homies,"" Jonas lashed out at what he found to be an ignorant depiction of a nuanced condition, urging the company to ""understand the difference"" between type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes.

This is not cool. Please know and understand the difference between type one and type diabetes before making https://t.co/HtptOe8KMa

Ignorant comments. Sensitivity to all diseases, and proper education on the cause and day to day battle is important https://t.co/HtptOe8KMa

, has type 1. Typically diagnosed in children, it's a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin, leading to high blood glucose levels. Unlike type 2 diabetes, which can be caused by a poor diet, type 1 is not the result of unhealthy habits.

""It's really shaped who I am as a person,"" Jonas told

. ""It has an effect on my creative life, the way I approach writing songs and doing all that.""

In a series of defensive Tweets, CrossFit stood by its original message – and faulted Jonas for his assumption that the company didn't ""grasp the difference"" between type 1 and type 2.

Anyone can get T2 diabetes, even those with T1. Stop assuming we don't grasp the difference and help us raise awareness. @nickjonas

The fitness company also reposted user @GreenPlusAnE's Tweet showing an old picture of Jonas (and his brothers) at an event for Coke.

Were you being ""sensitive"" to type 2 diabetics when you accepted Coke $$ and promoted Soda? @nickjonas pic.twitter.com/8J6c4tl0GH

Jonas then re-Tweeted a message from @willpower4x, who appreciated the pop star drawing attention to the fact that sufferers of type 1 diabetes do not have a choice.

@CrossFit @CrossFitCEO my son didn't drink coke@ 3y/o when diagnosed w/ type 1.Wasn't his choice.Thanks for calling this out @nickjonas

CrossFit could not immediately be reached for comment.","The pop star, a longtime advocate for people with diabetes, urged ""sensitivity to all diseases"""
"Four days before the Colts play the favored Patriots in the AFC title game, Indianapolis linebacker Josh McNary has been charged with one felony count of rape, one felony count of criminal confinement and one count of battery, according to a charging document filed in Marion (Ind.) Superior Criminal Court Wednesday.

The NFL said that the McNary matter “is under review,” while the Colts and the NFL Players Association declined comment.

In an affidavit for probable cause attached to the charging document, Indianapolis Metro Police detective Derek Cress said that two officers were dispatched to an Indianapolis residence on Dec. 1 at 5:52 in the morning “in reference to a rape report.”

The officers spoke to a “white female age 29,” who advised the officers that “she was sexually assaulted by an unknown male approximately one hour earlier at an unknown location,” according to the affidavit.

“She had accompanied co-workers to some downtown bars and later arrived at an unknown apartment with an unknown black male. She had a physical fight with the male before being sexually assaulted. She took the male’s cellular telephone and left the apartment,” reads the affidavit. “She returned to her residence and later contacted the police for a report.”

The alleged victim told authorities that she began “feeling very, very drunk” the morning of Dec. 1, and that she “began talking with a black male, whom she believed was the same male who sexually assaulted her later that morning,” according to the affidavit. The alleged victim also said she did not recall leaving the last bar, but realized “she was at the male’s apartment” in Indianapolis.

“She described being ‘fine for a while.’ However, the male became ‘upset.’ He attempted to kiss her neck and she ‘freaked out,’” reads the affidavit. “She pushed the male away from her because she was ‘not ok with that.’

“(Alleged victim) advised the male had vaginal sexual intercourse with her in the bed,” the affidavit continues. “She didn’t believe he was using any form of protection and did not remember seeing a condom on his penis. She believed this is when she ‘scratched’ and ‘fought’ with him. She stated, ‘He scared me, intimidated me, and scared me.’”

Detective Cress said that the alleged victim agreed to a sexual assault examination later in the morning of Dec. 1, and that she “also explained how she physically assaulted the male suspect with her fingernails and took his cellular telephone from the residence.” The affidavit also states that Cress was able to track the cell phone taken by the alleged victim back to McNary.

The NFL has been under fire since the season began regarding its perceived soft stance on players - including stars such as Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson and Greg Hardy - who have been accused of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse. The criticism sparked the league to hire outside consultants to advise NFL officials on how to investigate and discipline players accused of wrongdoing and to amend policies addressing domestic violence and other violent crimes. Former FBI director Robert Mueller also conducted an investigation into the league’s handling of the Rice case and released a report last week that concluded the NFL could have done more in its investigation of the former Ravens running back.

McNary's attorney, Ed Schrager, issued a statement Thursday morning:

""The charges and affidavit publicly disseminated on Wednesday afternoon are not evidence of wrong doing but simply one side's story,"" Schrager said. ""Joshua has full and confidence in the American way, including its justice system, which he pledged to protect and defend as a West Point graduate and lieutenant in the United States Army.""

McNary, 26, played college football at West Point. His final season with the Black Knights was in 2010. He has played in 20 games over the last two seasons and finished the 2014 regular season with 28 tackles.","Josh McNary, a second-year linebacker for the Indianapolis Colts, has been charged with rape."
"Published March 14, 2012 | FoxNews.com

The hugely popular erotic novel “50 Shades of Grey” is quickly becoming universal water cooler conversation for women from all walks of life.

Everyone from so-called “mommy bloggers” to hardcore feminists is hailing the tome as a triumph for women, in spite of the book’s strong themes of female submission at the hands of a high-powered man.

They also say men who feel differently should butt out.

If you haven’t heard about “50 Shades of Grey” yet, you likely will soon. The independently published erotic novel is plunging into the mainstream this week after being acquired by Vintage Books for a seven-figure sum. Written by a little-known London author named E.L. James, it relies heavily on “BDSM” -- bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.

Vintage Books, part of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, just released a new e-edition of the book and plans to do a 750,000-copy print run as soon as possible.

The book, which began as fan fiction of the “Twilight” series, has been called “mommy porn” and “Twilight for adults.” It has more than 16,000 reader reviews on the social networking site GoodReads and has sold out in bookstores nationwide. It has blown up due to word of mouth, Facebook sharing and its popularity on women-centric blogs.

According to the website GuruMommy.com every woman in Armonk, N.Y., is reading the book, and some are so obsessed that they are forgetting to pick up their kids at school. More than that, ""when you put the book down, you will actually want to have sex with your husband. Like, a lot,"" writes Linda Meadows, the “Gurumommy,” a Los Angeles mom of three.

Stacy Geisinger, a 51-year-old married mother of one from Bedford, N.Y., who raved about the book on her website, StacyKnows.com, explained to Fox411 why she found the book appealing.

“I found it empowering! There was nothing forced,” Geisinger said. “Although many are focused on the erotic nature of the book -- and it's hard not to be -- I found the story in itself to be very romantic.”

The plot of “50 Shades of Grey” centers on a young and naïve college student named Anastasia Steele who is seduced by a rich and powerful entrepreneur named Christian Grey. Grey persuades Steele to sign a contract that allows him complete control over her life, in and out of the bedroom. Yet despite the fact that Steele becomes completely submissive to a very dominant man, feminists aren’t up in arms.

In fact, this is where the mommy bloggers and the feminist bloggers agree. Many traditionally feminist-minded writers are hailing the book for encouraging women to explore their sexuality.

A reviewer on the feminist-friendly website Jezebel wrote: “Our consensus: the book is pretty ridiculous — for every lashing there's an ‘OMG!’ — but if it's making more women feel comfortable discussing their sexuality, we're all for it.”

Jill Filipovic, a blogger with Feministe.com and a contributor to the feminist anthology “Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape,” told Fox411.com that because the book depicts a consensual relationship (Steele does sign that contract), she is unconcerned.

“I would say that there's nothing wrong with BDSM when it's fully consensual on both ends, both partners have relatively equal bargaining power, both partners feel comfortable setting boundaries, and boundaries are communicated and respected,” Filipovic wrote in an email. “I suspect it's getting extra press because of the BDSM angle (which freaks a lot of people out).”

While women are applauding the book, some men are expressing concern over whether women should be insulted by a plot dominated by a man who tells a woman when to sleep, eat, work out and even how to groom herself. Television host Dr. Drew Pinsky recently called the book a “rape fantasy” on his HLN show. Women writers laughed off Pinsky’s remarks, saying there is absolutely no reason for men to weigh in on this issue at all, and certainly no reason for them to use the term rape.

“Why is Dr. Drew speaking on behalf of the fantasies and desires of women, let alone women he hasn't even met?” Jessica Wakeman of the women’s blog The Frisky told Fox411.

“He and every other man should not be telling women what arousal is acceptable and what is not. That's pretty irresponsible. No one should be concerned about a consensual relationship between a submissive and a dominant. The realm of fantasy is just that — fantasy.

“In this book,” Wakeman continued, “the protagonist may be naive and young, but those qualities alone don't mean she isn't following her sexual desires in the bedroom. BDSM relationships could not be farther from domestic and sexual abuse: people who practice it follow the rules that everything they do will be safe, sane and consensual.""

Journalist and author Paul LaRosa blogged that he thinks the success of the book proves that women want to be dominated by men.

“Is it possible that so many women dream of becoming the submissive partner of a dominant male partner which, after all, is the central plot of the book?” LaRosa posited.

Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former sex columnist and the editor of the Best Bondage Erotica 2012, explained to us that enjoying the fantasy of a dominant sexual relationship does not mean that a woman wants to be dominated by men in all aspects of her life.

“There's nothing wrong with a man being dominant and it doesn’t mean he's misogynist, any more than a woman wanting to be submissive in the bedroom means she wants to be submissive outside the bedroom. It's about consensually playing with power and eroticizing it in a safe environment,” Kramer Bussel told Fox411. “The success of ‘50 Shades’ shows that women are becoming more comfortable reading erotica and openly claiming that reading.”

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. © 2012 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.","Erotic novel '50 Shades of Grey' unites gals, unnerves some guys"
"On the cellblocks, it is a foregone conclusion that the disciplinary system is rigged.

The uniformed staff is given almost total control over the process. Corrections officers make the charges — issuing “tickets,” in prison parlance — and hearing officers, typically sergeants, lieutenants or captains, determine guilt and decide punishment. Inmates almost always lose. At disciplinary hearings, inmates won only about 4 percent of the cases in 2015, according to the department.

The Times analyzed 59,354 disciplinary cases from last year. Systemwide, black inmates were 30 percent more likely to get a disciplinary ticket than white inmates. And they were 65 percent more likely to be sent to solitary confinement, where they are held in a cell 23 hours a day.

Last year, black inmates got 1,144 tickets that resulted in 180 or more days in isolation; white inmates received 226 tickets that had similarly long sentences.

Department officials said there were marked improvements in the past few years, thanks to a settlement the state had signed with the New York Civil Liberties Union that brought in a federal expert to oversee efforts aimed at reducing the use of solitary confinement. Between April 2014 and October of this year, the share of solitary prisoners who were African-American had decreased to 57 percent, from 64 percent, said Mr. Mailey, the department spokesman.

Taylor Pendergrass, the lead New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer in the settlement, said the department was “off to an encouraging start.”

“It will be a major undertaking to unwind decades-long practices and transform the culture of this large organization all the way down to the staff working in the cellblocks,” Mr. Pendergrass said.

There has been resistance from the rank and file. In a statement, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents guards, said the settlement with the civil liberties union had made the prisons more dangerous.

“The disciplinary system has been weakened in our prisons,” the association said. “Especially given the heavy gang presence and overwhelming increases in violent incidents, appropriate disciplinary measures are needed to maintain order and to protect other inmates, as well as staff.”

Solitary confinement is only one piece of the disciplinary process that had a disparity, The Times found, and it is unclear whether the settlement will affect other elements of the system.

Some of the starkest evidence of bias involves infractions that are vaguely defined and give officers the greatest discretion. Disobeying a direct order by an officer can be as minor as moving too slowly when a guard yells, “Get out of the shower.” It is one of the most subjective prison offenses. For every 100 black prisoners, guards issued 56 violations for disobeying orders, compared with 32 for every 100 whites, according to the analysis.

For smoking and drug offenses, which require physical evidence, white inmates, who make up about a quarter of the prison population, were issued about a third of the tickets.

In New York State prisons last year, black inmates were disciplined at a higher rate for violating prison rules, and they were punished more harshly than whites. State officials said reforms they put in place as a result of a lawsuit settlement reduced the disparity in solitary confinement, but it is unclear how the changes will affect other aspects of the system.

INMATE POPULATION AND SHARE OF

Disobeying orders is the most common violation inmates are punished for in the state prison system. It also is one of the most subjective — officers do not need to produce physical evidence to give an inmate a disciplinary ticket. In prisons throughout the state, blacks are punished for disobeying orders disproportionately to their numbers. A rare exception is Sing Sing, one of the few prisons where black guards are in the majority.

WITH “DISOBEYING ORDERS” VIOLATION, 2015

INMATE POPULATION AND SHARE OF DISCIPLINARY PUNISHMENTS, 2015

of longer than 180 days

Disobeying orders is the most common violation inmates are punished for in the state prison system. It also is one of the most subjective — officers do not need to produce physical evidence to give an inmate a disciplinary ticket. In prisons throughout the state, blacks are punished for disobeying orders disproportionately to their numbers. A rare exception is Sing Sing, one of the few prisons where black guards are in the majority.

INMATES CHARGED WITH “DISOBEYING ORDERS” VIOLATION, 2015

Inmates have the right to appeal to an outside court and be represented by a lawyer — if they can find one willing to take their case; they almost never do. Of the tens of thousands of inmates who got disciplinary tickets in 2014 and 2015, about 280 were represented by Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, which is financed by the state. If an inmate is lucky enough to have Prisoners’ Legal Services take his case, his odds improve greatly. About two-thirds of the organization’s clients won their appeals — but by then, many had completed their solitary sentence.

Ibrahim Gyang said in an interview that at one of his disciplinary hearings, an officer called as a witness had to reread the ticket because he could not remember the case. And Mr. Gyang still lost.

It is not just that blacks fare worse: Whites are more likely to get a break. Both white and black prisoners mention the escape of two murderers from Clinton last year as a prime example of white guards’ tendency to be more trustful of white inmates.

The murderers, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, both white, got the tools they needed to cut through walls and piping because of friendships they had developed with an officer and a civilian employee, both white. “A major reason for allowing those inmates to have the latitude that they had was because they had white privilege,” said Joseph Williams, who worked for the corrections department for 47 years and was one of its few black prison superintendents. “We know if he had been black he would have never been given that wide a latitude.”

Markus Barber, a black inmate at Green Haven Correctional Facility, called it “the complexion for the connection.”

On Oct. 23, 2014, at Clinton, John Richard was stopped by Officer Brian Poupore, who took issue with his tinted glasses even though he has vision problems and had a medical permit to wear them, according to department records.

“Monkeys don’t wear glasses,” a sergeant said, according to Mr. Richard, who is serving a life sentence for murder.

When Mr. Richard refused to remove them, he said, Officer Poupore and several other guards jumped him. In their internal reports, the officers said Mr. Richard punched them several times and had to be subdued. After the encounter, Officer Poupore had a minor injury, according to the medical report, while the other officers had none.

The medical report said Mr. Richard had bruises all over his body, including his face, under his ear and on his back. He had trouble walking, the report said. His glasses were broken.

He was found guilty of assault and spent the next six months in solitary confinement.

Assault on prison workers may seem like a straightforward infraction, but a closer look reveals a disturbing pattern. There were 1,028 such violations issued in the state system last year. Black men received 61 percent of them, while white men received 9 percent. Under department rules, officers have considerable leeway over what constitutes an assault. An inmate need not cause an injury or even touch an officer.

About 20,000 uniformed officers work in the state’s prisons. During the first half of the year, 2,007 of them were involved in assault cases, according to department data, but 98 percent of them had no injuries or only minor ones, which can be as vague as “aches/pain.” Eight officers suffered serious injuries, defined as a broken bone or a puncture wound.

The Times reviewed 215 reports of assaults on staff from the first quarter of 2015, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request. The department redacted the officers’ names but not the inmates’. It also redacted most information about injuries, but in several cases, The Times was able to obtain medical records through the prisoners.

Among those reports, the cases of three black inmates — Darius Horton, Paul Sellers and Justin Shaw — followed the same pattern: All were involved in seemingly trivial disagreements with guards that led to minor altercations. And while it is hard to know who was responsible for escalating the episodes, the officers were not injured and remained on duty, while the inmates were punished with long stints in isolation.

Mr. Sellers was returning from dinner at Five Points Correctional Facility when he was stopped by an officer for taking “a loaf of state bread” back to his cell, according to the guard’s report. “Surrender the bread,” the officer ordered. Mr. Sellers refused and grabbed the shirt of the officer, who punched him in the face. He was sent to solitary for 166 days.

Mr. Shaw was stopped at Washington Correctional Facility because he was “attempting to conceal contraband,” according to the officer’s report. When challenged, “the inmate produced a stack of waffles,” the report said. Mr. Shaw was accused of then grabbing the officer’s arm and given a 180-day lockup.

Mr. Horton was caught by Officer Michael Stamp at Groveland carrying a bowl of hot water from the microwave for coffee after the common room had closed. The officer ordered Mr. Horton to leave it, he refused and they got into a shouting match and bumped shoulders, according to the report. The guard claimed that Mr. Horton then punched him. In an interview, Mr. Horton denied this, saying he was jumped by Officer Stamp and six other guards. Two of the officers had minor injuries; the other five were unharmed. Mr. Horton was sentenced to 270 days in isolation.

How much race figured in these three encounters — if it did at all — is hard to know. The guard in Mr. Sellers’s case was Hispanic; in the other two cases, the guards were white. Mr. Shaw said the officer might have just been having a bad day. “I don’t like to say everything is race,” he said.

For Mr. Horton, there was no doubt that race was at play when, as he told it, he was handcuffed and beaten by seven officers, all of them white.

“They took me out there and beat me like I got caught drinking at the whites-only fountain,” he said.

The corrections officers’ union encourages members to report even the slightest physical contact as an assault. As the union negotiates a new contract, billboards in the Albany area have shown officers with neck braces, strapped to stretchers. Assaults on staff members have increased in recent years. There were 895 cases recorded in 2015, some involving more than one inmate, compared with 577 in 2010, according to department data. More recently, assaults on staff were down by 16 percent between January and October of this year, compared with the same period last year, the department said.

Union officials did not comment on the racial disparities in discipline that The Times found.

“While facing record high levels of violence and one of the most dangerous work environments in the country, corrections officers conduct themselves with professionalism and integrity to keep our prisons secure and our communities safe,” the union said in a statement.","A New York Times investigation draws on nearly 60,000 disciplinary cases from state prisons and interviews with inmates to explore the system’s inequities and the ripple effect they can have."
"The US has been seeking Snowden's extradition to face felony charges for leaking details of US surveillance programmes. Photograph: Tanya Lokshina/AP

The US has told the Russian government that it will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden should he be extradited, in an attempt to prevent Moscow from granting asylum to the former National Security Agency contractor.

In a letter sent this week, US attorney general Eric Holder told his Russian counterpart that the charges faced by Snowden do not carry the death penalty. Holder added that the US ""would not seek the death penalty even if Mr Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes"".

Holder said he had sent the letter, addressed to Alexander Vladimirovich, Russia's minister of justice, in response to reports that Snowden had applied for temporary asylum in Russia ""on the grounds that if he were returned to the United States, he would be tortured and would face the death penalty"".

""These claims are entirely without merit,"" Holder said. In addition to his assurance that Snowden would not face capital punishment, the attorney general wrote: ""Torture is unlawful in the United States.""

In the letter, released by the US Department of Justice on Friday, Holder added: ""We believe that these assurances eliminate these asserted grounds for Mr Snowden's claim that he should be treated as a refugee or granted asylum, temporary or otherwise.""

The US has been seeking Snowden's extradition to face felony charges for leaking details of NSA surveillance programmes. There were authoritative reports on Wednesday that authorities in Moscow had granted Snowden permission to stay in Russia temporarily, but when Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, arrived to meet his client at Sheremetyevo airport, he said the papers were not yet ready.

Kucherena, who has close links to the Kremlin, said Snowden would stay in the airport's transit zone, where he has been in limbo since arriving from Hong Kong on 23 June, for the near future.

The letter from Holder, and the apparent glitch in Snowden's asylum application, suggest that Snowden's fate is far from secure.

But a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin insisted Russia has not budged from its refusal to extradite Snowden. Asked by a reporter on Friday whether the government's position had changed, Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies that ""Russia has never extradited anyone and never will."" Putin has previously insisted Russia will not extradite Snowden to the US. There is no US-Russia extradition treaty.

Putin's statement still leaves the Russian authorities room for manoeuvre, however, as Snowden is not technically on Russian soil.

Peskov said that Putin is not involved in reviewing Snowden's application or involved in discussions about the whistleblower's future with the US, though he said the Russian security service, the FSB, had been in touch with the FBI.

Speaking on Wednesday, Snowden's lawyer said he was hoped to settle in Russia. ""[Snowden] wants to find work in Russia, travel and somehow create a life for himself,"" Kucherena told the television station Rossiya 24. He said Snowden had already begun learning Russian.

There is support among some Russian politicians for Snowden to be allowed to stay in the country. The speaker of the Russian parliament, Sergei Naryshkin, has said Snowden should be granted asylum to protect him from the death penalty.

The letter from Holder was designed to allay those fears and negate the grounds for which Snowden as allegedly applied for asylum in Russia. The attorney general said that if Snowden returned to the US he would ""promptly be brought before a civilian court"" and would receive ""all the protections that United States law provides"".

""Any questioning of Mr Snowden could be conducted only with his consent: his participation would be entirely voluntary, and his legal counsel would be present should he wish it,"" Holder said.

He added that despite Snowden's passport being revoked he ""remains a US citizen"" and said the US would facilitate a direct return to the country.

Germany's president, who helped expose the workings of East Germany's Stasi secret police, waded into the row on Friday. President Joachim Gauck, whose role is largely symbolic, said whistleblowers such as Snowden deserved respect for defending freedom.

""The fear that our telephones or mails are recorded and stored by foreign intelligence services is a constraint on the feeling of freedom and then the danger grows that freedom itself is damaged,"" Gauck said.",Reports this week claimed Snowden had applied for asylum in Russia because he feared torture if he was returned to US
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Police halt protests in Algeria

John Wall on MVP and Rookie Challenge record

Raw video: Violent clashes in Yemen

Raw video: Rally supports Bahrain govt.

Wis. Democrats could stay away for weeks

Raw video: Clashes in Jordan

Waves of change throughout Mideast

Rep. Speier tells House she had abortion

Post Now, February 18: Northern lights in D.C.?

Wisconsin governor on protests and cuts

Mourners vent fury at monarchy in Bahrain

Egyptians celebrate Mubarak's fall in Cairo

Bahrain locked down after five protesters killed

Hispanic growth adds 4 million to Texas

NYC to cut teaching jobs

Violent clashes in Middle East protests

Fmr. Sens. Dorgan, Bennet on shutdown

Stephen Strasburg returns to the diamond

Scott Brown reveals he was abused as a child

Wisconsin protests swell to 25,000

Washington Post report from Manama, Bahrain

Palin: Obama faith, citizenship question 'distracting'

Man arrested for poisoning Auburn's oaks

Wis. Democrats could stay away for weeks

Rep. Speier tells House she had abortion

Wisconsin governor on protests and cuts

Mourners vent fury at monarchy in Bahrain

Egyptians celebrate Mubarak's fall in Cairo

Bahrain locked down after five protesters killed

Fmr. Sens. Dorgan, Bennet on shutdown

Scott Brown reveals he was abused as a child

Wisconsin protests swell to 25,000

Palin: Obama faith, citizenship question 'distracting'

Reid: Won't stand for GOP threats

Boehner: 'We're going to cut spending'

Medicare fraud bust nets 111 doctors, nurses

White House opposes Bahrain violence

Riot police storm Bahrain protest camp

Mullen: Second F-35 engine doesn't make much sense

Chris Christie: Time to take on 'big issues'

Sen. Kerry says resolution near in Pakistan spat

Sen. Scott Brown recalls childhood abuse

Dallas official tells citizens 'go to hell'

John Wall on MVP and Rookie Challenge record

Gonzaga shows off depth, rolls past Panthers

Alabama man charged in Auburn tree poisoning

Stephen Strasburg returns to the diamond

Girl wrestler wins after boy won't face her

Man arrested for poisoning Auburn's oaks

Post Now, Feb. 17: Picking up eggs, milk and a date

Washington Post Live: The Banks situation

How I Do It: Sam Anas

DeMatha's BeeJay Anya sounds off

Boys' Basketball: No. 7 DeMatha vs. No. 4 Gonzaga

Post Sports Live: Daytona 500 preview

Post Sports Live: Pivotal road trip for Capitals

Post Now, February 16: Rockin' at Reagan National

In a battle of Top 20 Prince George's County girls' teams, Bowie toppled Wise, 47-39

In a battle of Top 5 girls' basketball teams, St. John's tops Good Counsel, 74-69

Gilbert Arenas on trash talking with Wizards Nick Young

Behind the scenes: The Westminster Dog Show

Post Sports Live: Big week for Hoyas, Patriots, Terps

Post Sports Live, Feb. 15

Sports Illustrated swimsuit models make media rounds

Howard provides spark in return to lineup

Early sights and sounds of Nationals spring training

Police halt protests in Algeria

Raw video: Violent clashes in Yemen

Raw video: Rally supports Bahrain govt.

Raw video: Clashes in Jordan

Waves of change throughout Mideast

Mourners vent fury at monarchy in Bahrain

Egyptians celebrate Mubarak's fall in Cairo

Bahrain locked down after five protesters killed

Violent clashes in Middle East protests

Washington Post report from Manama, Bahrain

Magic with goldfish stokes anger

Royal wedding watch: Invitations sent, Prince Harry's date

Violent clashes erupt during Yemen protest

Mubarak's final moments in Cairo

Riot police storm Bahrain protest camp

Ronald McDonald decapitated by food activists

Somali pirate sentanced to more than 33 years

Sen. Kerry says resolution near in Pakistan spat

Protests spread across Arab world

Iranian leaders push to suppress protests

Police clash with Mexico teachers

U.S. anti-drug agents shot in Mexico

Naked burglar nabs sausage, takes shower

Rep. Speier tells House she had abortion

Alabama man charged in Auburn tree poisoning

Post Now, February 18: Northern lights in D.C.?

Wisconsin governor on protests and cuts

Mourners vent fury at monarchy in Bahrain

Egyptians celebrate Mubarak's fall in Cairo

Bahrain locked down after five protesters killed

Bill Cosby honored by Navy

Scott Brown reveals he was abused as a child

Man arrested for poisoning Auburn's oaks

Australian washed overboard survives 5-mile swim

Magic with goldfish stokes anger

Post Now, Feb. 17: Picking up eggs, milk and a date

Royal wedding watch: Invitations sent, Prince Harry's date

Violent clashes erupt during Yemen protest

Mubarak's final moments in Cairo

Sharks swarm off Florida coast

Riot police storm Bahrain protest camp

Fashion Week: Diane von Furstenberg

© 2011 The Associated Press",Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen tells the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. can't afford to spend more than $4 billion on an alternative engine for the Pentagon's next-generation fighter jet. (Feb. 16)
"The Concorde jet airliner had a top speed of 1,350 mph. It was decommissioned in 2003 after being deemed to dangerous and expensive to continue to operate. There are no plans to replace it.

So why not build a car that can go 2,000 mph, instead?

That’s what one California man is trying to do in a garage located on the edge of the Mojave desert. Think of it as the hottest hot rod in history.

Waldo Stakes has been chasing land speed records for three decades, and now he wants the big one: World’s Fastest Car.

A general contractor by trade, Stakes has spent his free time over the past couple of years working on a 50-foot long wheeled missile called the Sonic Wind LSRV (Land Speed Record Vehicle.) His efforts, to date, have been chronicled in a number of technical publications, including Aerospace Testing magazine and Popular Mechanics.

The vehicle uses parts taken from an $8 million rocket engine that once powered the famous X-15 to a top speed of 4,519 mph in 1967, still the fastest manned aircraft that doesn’t go into orbit, as far as the public knows. He says it was purchased as surplus for $1,500 in the mid-1980s.

Read: Craig Breedlove Going for 800 MPH Land Speed Record in 2013

Stakes has designed his engine to run on a mix of methanol and liquid oxygen stored in tanks scrounged from Redstone and Corporal nuclear missiles, and claims that it will produce 60,000 pounds of thrust. That’s several thousand more than the one in the X-15 did.

With it, Stakes estimates the Sonic Wind will be able to accelerate at a rate of more than 100 mph per second and easily break the current land speed record of 763 mph set by British fighter pilot Andy Green in 1997 at the controls of the jet-powered ThrustSSC. But he has his sights set higher than that. He says his car could theoretically hit Mach 3, more than 2,200 mph.

Crazy talk? Not according to Stakes. The key is harnessing the shockwave created when a vehicle is traveling at supersonic speeds to stabilize the car, and minimizing the gyroscopic forces produced by its wheels.

With the help of a friend’s computational fluid dynamics modeling program, Stakes has come up with a unique design that features seven small, lightweight titanium wheels at the front of the car and a pair of large fixed triangular hubs at the rear with thin rims that rotate around them. A moveable airfoil and an undercar tunnel creates low pressure area beneath the car, while its bodywork and canted wings force the atmospheric shockwave to radiate out, creating virtual pontoons that work like the ones on an outrigger canoe.

Stakes says the danger zone lies in the 560-760 mph range as you approach the sound barrier, but beyond that things smooth out, which should allow even a ground vehicle to achieve much higher speeds. He points to near Mach 9 rocket sled runs carried out by the government at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico as proof.

A rendering of what the finished product will look like appears sleek and delicate compared to some other land speed efforts, like the multimillion-dollar British Bloodhound SSC team that is hoping to break the 1,000 mph barrier with Andy Green once again in the cockpit.

Read: Rocket Car on Track for 1,000 MPH Record Run

While Stakes plans to shake down the car himself, he hasn’t yet said who the driver for the record runs will be, but it definitely will not be Green. He tells FoxNews.com that he wants the Sonic Wind to set an all-American record and that there will be a woman on board when it does. He’s currently deciding which of two female F-18 pilots from the Navy has the right stuff for the job. If she or she is successful, it will mark the first time that the land speed record is held by a woman.

Stakes figures it’ll still be a couple of years before he’ll be ready to roll his underfunded project onto the Bonneville Salt Flats and light it up, but he’s confident that he will make it there. In fact, he expects to go even further than that.

While he says the 10 to 12 mile-long Bonneville Speedway is long enough to break the current record, he has his eyes on a stretch of salt on the other side of the mountains that border the track for a shot at 1,000 mph. After that, he wants to head south. Not of the border, but the equator.

Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the largest salt flat in the world, and the only place on the planet Stakes thinks is big enough for a Mach 3 run. It’s never been used for a land speed record attempt before, but no one has ever tried to go that fast before.

Click here for more from FoxNews.com Autos",The ultimate hot rod.
"03/12/2015 AT 08:35 AM EDT

Kate, in a cream coat by British maternity line

, was welcomed to the historic Ealing Studios in West London by the show's creator, Lord

She was presented with a posy by 4-year-old Zac Barker, who, along with twin brother Oliver, plays Lady Mary's son George.

In the hair and makeup department, Kate, 33, also met housekeeper Mrs. Hughes, played by Phyllis Logan, as she was made up by artist Nic Collins.

Also there? Robert James Collier, who plays the mean-spirited under-butler Thomas. He joked: ""You've come just at the right time, Phyllis is about to have her Botox put in.""

Princess Kate on the set of Downton Abbey

Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty

After her tour of the trailers, she headed to the Servants' Hall and Kitchen, where she met many of the show's actors including

was missing from the joyous occasion as she was ill and couldn't attend.

Tuesday, when she went to an art gallery.

Friday will see her joining

, 32, and the rest of the senior members of the Royal Family paying tribute to those who served in Afghanistan, while next week the couple are heading to see the Irish Guards on St. Patrick's Day before visiting the Brookhill Children's Centre in Woolwich to learn more about the Home-Start charity and its support for children and families.","In the latest of her royal outings, Kate paid a visit to the set of the hit series"
"Romney says the debt could grow to more than $20 trillion if Obama is reelected.

WESTERVILLE, Ohio — As a fresh wave of polling shows Mitt Romney’s chances slipping in this crucial battleground state, the GOP nominee began a sprint across the state Wednesday with a message to voters that the nation cannot endure a second term for President Obama.

“I don’t believe we can afford four more years like the last four years and the reason I believe that after the debates and after the campaigns, and after all the ads are over, the people of Ohio are going to say loud and clear on Nov. 6 we can’t afford four more years, we must do better,” he told about 2,000 cheering supporters crowded into a high school gym and an overflow room. “This election comes down to a very dramatic choice in my opinion.”

But polling shows that Ohioans are increasingly breaking for Obama. A CBS/New York Times/Quinnipiac poll, released Wednesday, showed the president up by 10 points here. The state is crucial to Romney’s bid for the White House. ( The campaign says their internal polling shows a closer race.) The state's important status was demonstrated Wednesday by visits from by Romney and Obama.

Romney started the morning in this Columbus suburb, which supported Obama in 2008 and President Bush in 2004. He will then head to a business roundtable in a Cleveland suburb before an evening rally in Toledo. Obama plans to court young voters at two college campuses.

PHOTOS: Mitt Romney on the campaign trail

Romney’s chances in Ohio are in part complicated by the state’s economy, which is recovering faster than the nation, a point Gov. John Kasich alluded to as he introduced the GOP nominee.

“I hope you all know that Ohio’s coming back. From 48th in job creation to No. 4. No. 1 in the Midwest. From 89 cents in a rainy day fund to a half a million dollars and we have grown 123,000 jobs in the state of Ohio. Our families are going back to work,” Kasich said. “But every day I have to face the headwinds that come from Washington.”

As he has in other states where the local economy is rosier than the nation’s, Romney emphasized the burgeoning federal debt as a billboard displayed the tally growing throughout the rally. Romney noted that when Obama took office the debt was more than $10 trillion; when Romney launched his campaign, it was $15 trillion; and now it’s over $16 trillion. He predicted that if Obama is reelected, the nation’s debt will grow to nearly $20 trillion.

“Those debts get passed on to our kids,” he said. “It’s not just bad for the economy, it’s not just bad for our job creation it will-- in my opinion it is immoral for us to pass on obligations like that to the next generation.”

As his campaign has struggled to regain footing in the presidential race, advisors announced earlier this week that he would focus on trade and energy policy on the stump. But Romney glossed over those issues Wednesday morning, instead focusing on debt, taxes and the struggles of the middle class.

Romney said his “heart aches” from the struggles of people he’s met on the campaign trail.

“There are so many people in our country that are hurting right now. I want to help them. I know what it takes to get an economy going again and creating jobs. I know that a lot of folks that have jobs that wonder how they can make ends meet till the end of the month, how they can put food on the table for their family,” he said, noting that incomes are declining while costs are increasing for electricity, fuel and healthcare. “The difference between me and President Obama is I know what to do and I will do what it takes to get this economy going.”

He pledged to cut and simplify income taxes, with a caveat.

“By the way, don’t be expecting a huge cut in taxes because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions,” he said. “But by bringing rates down we’ll be able to let small businesses keep more of their money so they can hire more people. My priority is jobs and I’ll make it happen.”

Romney campaigned with Jack Nicklaus, a beloved native son who is regarded as the most accomplished golfer of all time. Nicklaus compared the nation’s current struggles with a time he struggled with his golf game.

“At the start of the 1970 season, I had gone almost three years without winning a major championship. I lived on talent but I wasn’t the golfer I could be,” he said, adding that his father’s death prompted reflection and introspection. “I reinvented myself, worked harder than I had ever worked, and the result was some of the most successful years of my careers. I believe our country, I believe our country is at that point today. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing. We have to look at problems at hand and change them.”

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook","WESTERVILLE, Ohio &mdash; As a fresh wave of polling shows  Mitt Romney &rsquo;s chances slipping in this crucial battleground state, the  GOP  nominee began a sprint across the state Wednesday with a message to voters that the nation cannot endure a second term for  President Obama ."
"One reason American politics is so polarized is that President Obama has been so cavalier about his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws he dislikes. On Monday the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to one of his worst abuses, his 2014 order that rewrites U.S. immigration law.

In United States v. Texas, 26 states sued to block Mr. Obama’s executive diktat that awards legal status, work permits and other government benefits to some 4.3 million illegal immigrants, with no consent from Congress. A federal judge...","The Supreme Court turns to Obama’s lawless immigration order, the Wall Street Journal writes in an editorial."
"Instead, almost 75 per cent of UK web users prefer online advertising in exchange for free or lower content costs. Additionally 48 per cent of UK consumers are willing to allow their personal profile data to be tracked, although concerns over online privacy and security remain.

Tudor Aw, head of technology at KPMG Europe, said: “UK consumers still haven’t come around to the idea of paying for digital content and are clear that they will move to other sites if pay walls are put up…

""Although consumers are resistant to paying for content, they are becoming more accepting of viewing advertising and for their profile information to be tracked. This continues a trend we have seen in previous years and again acts as a pointer as to whether a pay or ad-funded model will eventually succeed.""

Seventy-four per cent of UK consumers are willing to recive adverts on their PC in exchange for free content and 56 per cent feel the same way about mobile advertising.

However, despite a growing familiarity with online profile tracking, leading to more targeted adverts, almost 90 per cent of conumers globally said there were more concerned about privacy and online security than they were 18 months ago.

Aw added: ""At first sight, these concerns over privacy might seem to conflict with our findings that consumers are more willing to have their profile information tracked, but there seems to be a clear distinction in consumers’ minds between uncontrolled use of personal information, and properly regulated use.

“They do see the value in allowing service providers to have access to the information necessary for more tailored services, but they are only prepared to do this if the risks are controlled and, crucially, if there is some value in it for them. “","UK web users are the least likely to part with cash for online content, 
  according to KPMG&rsquo;s annual 'Consumers and Convergence' global survey."
"Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with other officials Monday at a school in Howard Beach, Queens.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg swept into the Rockaways on Tuesday with technocratic precision, his tinted-windowed sport utility vehicle pulling to a stop outside a freshly cleaned storefront on Beach 20th Street at 12:28 p.m., two minutes before his briefing for the news media was scheduled to begin.

Cameras, reporters and a podium were already assembled inside. In seconds, the mayor, with a small army of deputies and bodyguards, traversed the 20 feet of open sidewalk between his vehicle and the building, disappearing from view as a few startled residents of this wounded part of Queens looked on.

Less than an hour later, Mr. Bloomberg was gone, off to meet with city workers on Staten Island. There would be no tour of the storm-ravaged Queens neighborhood, no stops at buildings still lacking power and heat. At a library a block away, where a charity was handing out used coats, residents who had waited in line for hours said they had no idea that the mayor was nearby.

“If he came out here, people would have a stronger impulse to say, ‘Yes, he’s been doing something,’ ” said Stainton Stewart, whose power was restored on Monday, two weeks after the storm. “He hasn’t even dropped by to see what’s going on.”

If the early days of Hurricane Sandy played to Mr. Bloomberg’s strengths — infrastructure expertise, no-nonsense crisis management — the extended and halting recovery has laid bare his limitations. After nearly 12 years of overseeing the nation’s largest municipality, he remains deeply uncomfortable with the role of consoling and soothing his city. He is rarely seen at public meeting with storm victims, and when he does interact with them, there are no tears or hugs.

While President Obama, touring the region on Thursday, embraced residents on Staten Island, Mr. Bloomberg hung back. He is more at ease in formal news briefings, where he ticks off facts about food-distribution centers and corporate donations. Asked on Tuesday to reflect on the scenes he had witnessed in the Rockaways, the mayor demurred. “We’re just going to deal with it,” he said.

Mr. Bloomberg has not been absent: since the storm hit, he has made more than a dozen visits — unannounced to the press — to hard-hit areas in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, where he spoke with displaced residents. By design, the trips are kept private. Videos, edited at City Hall, are sometimes posted on a YouTube page, although often without sound, so the mayor’s conversations with residents cannot be heard.

Aides said the mayor considered it crass to expose suffering residents to scrutiny.

“His interactions with people who live in these neighborhoods are not designed for the press,” Howard Wolfson, the deputy mayor primarily responsible for fortifying Mr. Bloomberg’s legacy, said.

His aides said the mayor would ultimately be judged on how the city rebounds, not on empathy, although they are keenly aware that Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire who urged New Yorkers to take in a Broadway show in the wake of a blizzard in 2010, is always at risk of falling into caricature — perhaps never more so than now, as he confronts a staggering crisis at the end of his final term.

“The people in this city didn’t elect Mike Bloomberg three times to give him a hug,” Mr. Wolfson said. “His focus is helping people restore their lives. That’s what he believes government is there to do.”

And local members of the City Council said they were appreciative of the efforts by an administration that, they said, has been more responsive than it was during the blizzard.

Still, if Gov. Chris Christie’s bear hugs and emotional odes to the Jersey Shore are now an indelible image of the hurricane, Mr. Bloomberg’s visual moment, so far, has been his unwelcome reception in the Rockaways after the storm, where residents, filmed by a camera crew, angrily demanded to know when the city would be helping them. (The mayor was quickly led away.)

The encounter did not sit well at City Hall, and Mr. Bloomberg’s public appearances now keep him mostly insulated from angry eruptions or unplanned interactions. This week, at briefings in two of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods, he appeared moments before his events and departed immediately afterward.

The mayor announced last week that he would ride the subway to work, signaling that the city was returning to normal. Aboard the train, he kept his head down, silently reading The Financial Times; an inquiring reporter said she was shooed away by his security detail.","Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg does go to storm-ravaged communities, but he does not stay long with residents, a sign that the halting recovery has laid bare his discomfort with the role of soothing his city."
"Investors looking for a little yield don't have the panoply of juicy choices that presented themselves at the bear market bottom in March of 2009, but there are still pockets of decent payouts to be had.

Check out the so-called ""Dogs of the Dow"" for ideas. These are the stocks with the highest yields in the Dow Jones Industrial Average: Verizon and AT&T both yield 6.7%; Pfizer is good for 4.9% and Merck throws off 4.2%.

The resurrection in stocks since March of 2009 corresponded with a momentous junk-bond rally, too, prompting investors take a more skeptical view of high-yield corporate debt.

Real estate investments are still offering fat yields and several funds package a portfolio of investments together into a single vehicle. Exchange traded funds like the iShares Cohen & Steers Real Estate (ICF) gets the job done with a 4.1% yield, but you can get higher yields in some closed-end funds.

Jack Columbo, editor of the Forbes/ISA Closed-End Fund & ETF Report, has an idea for income investors. He just added the closed-end DWS RREEF World Real Estate & Tactical Strategies Fund (DRP) to his newsletter’s model portfolio this month.

Here is what he had to say: ""The consequences for the Greek debt crisis not only affect Greece, but the common currency of Europe. The dollar’s strength will reduce inflationary pressures for a time, however, we still think the ultimate outcome will be worldwide inflation, since this is the only solution to oppressive debt levels.

""The DWS RREEF World Real Estate & Tactical Strategies Fund (nyse: DRP) provides exposure to the global real estate market. The fund is trading at $14.33 at a 12.9% discount to net asset value. It yields 6.9%.

""The fund invests in real estate related common and preferred stocks. The fund’s investment goal is high current income and capital appreciation. The largest holding is in U.S. Treasuries at 42% with the rest is in common stock and most of those holdings outside of the United States.""

Fat Yields! Interest rates are low but high yields are abundant if you know where to look. Click here for instant access to the Forbes/ISA Closed-End Fund & ETF Report.

Click here to sign up to receive the Stock of the Week next Monday morning.",A closed-end fund with a fat yield looks good to go.
"“Sea When Absent,” the just-released third album by the chaotic pop outfit A Sunny Day in Glasgow, is noisy and joyful and full of hooks — maximalist music that peals out of speakers, a sound so large that it’s equally appropriate for rainy-day brooding and top-down carefree summer days. Guitar squalls and meticulously realized vocal melodies crash together on “Sea,” and the results are often joyous — thanks to the band’s unwillingness to hew to a single definition of the ever-slippery term “pop.”

In the capable hands and sharp minds of ASDiG, hooky, immediately accessible music can be as informed by the silky R&B of Ciara as it is the distortion-heavy maelstroms of the Cocteau Twins. “It’s difficult to say what ‘pop’ might be, and I think it’s very difficult to explicitly state what might make a great pop song, because it’s so many things and not always the same thing,” says Sydney-based ASDiG founder Ben Daniels by e-mail, on the eve of the band’s summer tour to promote Sea. “But melody is important to me.”

For all the noise made on “Sea” — and make no mistake, it is an album full of cacophony — Daniels’s assertion is borne out by tracks like the “In Love With Useless (The Timeless Geometry in the Tradition of Passing),” which uses fuzzed-out guitars and electronics to propel soaring vocals, and the languorous “The Body, It Bends,” which hitches shimmering guitars to a loping bassline and plaintive vocals. Then there’s the late-night-worthy meditation “Crushin’,” on which whisper-soft, dreamy vocals punctuated by twinkling keyboards give way to a triumphant, squawking guitar solo before returning as the central focus.

“[Vocalist] Jen [Goma]’s melodies on that one made me think of Prince,” says Daniels, “and the lyrics she wrote suggested Smokey Robinson’s ‘Crusin’,’ which I love so much. The title for me, while conveying what we wanted to about that song, was also kind of an homage to Smokey’s song. For some reason when I heard Jen sing, ‘Hey, come on back to me,’ it really just reminded me of ‘Baby, let’s cruise.’ Nowhere near as smooth, obviously.”

With Daniels based in Sydney and the band’s other members — Goma, Josh Meakim, Annie Fredrickson, Adam Herndon, and Ryan Newmyer — split between Philadelphia and Brooklyn, N.Y., much of the brainstorming for “Sea” occurred virtually. After working out some demos beginning in late 2011, the band fleshed out the album’s details while scattered around the world. “Jen and Annie started trying out melodies and e-mailing me their ideas, and then I would have ideas and write them back,” recalls Daniels. “Then Ryan, Josh, and Adam were going into the studio to add parts, and I was recording stuff in my apartment and sending that to them. We got together again in January 2013 and took a lot of ideas back into the studio together, and then mostly had it done.

“Ha,” he adds. “I suppose that is a long way of saying that e-mail is where a lot of the ideas exchange happened.”

Despite the physical disconnect between the members, “Sea” sounds very much the product of a band. Songs take unexpected twists; the vocals of Goma and Fredrickson bubble into the mix just as quickly as they might drop out of it, with the occasional electronic glitch adding just enough of an off-kilter feeling to command the ear. “Sea” was the first album by the band to be recorded in a proper studio by an outside producer (Jeff Ziegler helmed the album at Uniform Recording Studio in Philadelphia), although its bedroom origins are still evident.

“I was hoping that this process would bring more clarity to the record and a more ‘high fidelity’ sound,” says Daniels. “It didn’t entirely work out that way — in the end I had to mix it on my not-amazing gear as opposed to the amazing gear in the studio. But the process was definitely another learning experience, and I think that that is something I need with each album.”

That stretching will be on display when the band plays Great Scott on Thursday — the band’s big bang will come out of three singers (Meakim also sings, and Daniels is quick to note that he “truly has a beautiful voice”), two guitars, two synths, and two samplers, as well as a bass and a drum kit. “We have to tweak songs like crazy [when we take them on tour], but that is also part of the fun,” says Daniels. “We talk a lot about how we think we can make something work, and then we practice it a lot. It’s mostly just hard work and a little technology.”

A willingness to work hard and maybe end up somewhere unfamiliar is part of what makes ASDiG one of the most compelling bands in the rock world — their sound has a lot of parts, but it’s uniquely theirs. “I guess I like a pop song where the singer couldn’t be someone else, and that is something that the listener picks up,” says Daniels. “[A singer like that is a] person who has thought about their limitations and what is interesting about those limitations, what they can push. I feel like that’s how we all get somewhere cool.”","Maura Johnston profiles buzzy alt-rock band A Sunny Day in Glasgow, performing at Great Scott on Thursday in support of a catchy new album, “Sea When Absent.”"
"CONCORD, N.H. – A Purple Heart awarded to a soldier from New Hampshire killed in World War II's Battle of the Bulge has brought together two branches of a family that never knew of the other's existence.

Eugene Victor Call was a 32-year-old U.S. Army technician when he was killed on March 2, 1945, near Kapellen, Germany.

Recently, the Vermont group Purple Hearts Reunited got a call from Rick Daigle in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Daigle's wife had died, and among her possessions were Call's Purple Heart and other medals. Her mother was once married to Call. Daigle wanted the medals returned to family.

The search led to a namesake great-nephew in Newport, New Hampshire, and to grandchildren in California.

Ceremonies honoring Call are planned in New Hampshire on Monday and California on Thursday.",A Purple Heart awarded to a soldier from New Hampshire killed in World War II's Battle of the Bulge has brought together two branches of a family that never knew of the other's existence.
"The Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty said on Monday that it had removed Mr. Rapfogel, 58, from his positions as executive director and chief executive officer after an investigation by an outside counsel, Dechert L.L.P. His conduct is now being investigated by the state’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, as part of a new anticorruption task force.

Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. DiNapoli would not say what their concerns were, and the Met Council said in a statement only that it had retained a lawyer to investigate “financial irregularities and apparent misconduct in connection with the organization’s insurance policies.”

Two people briefed on the investigation said the lawyers were concerned that Mr. Rapfogel might have been overpaying the council’s insurer, Century Coverage Corporation of Valley Stream, N.Y., and then directing the insurer to make political contributions to his favored candidates.

The insurance company’s employees have given almost $120,000 to various candidates since the late 1990s, including $26,175 to several candidates in 2013.

In a statement released by his lawyer, Mr. Rapfogel apologized for unspecified “mistakes” and said, “I will do everything possible to make amends.”

“After 21 years at the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, I deeply regret the mistakes I have made that have led to my departure from the organization,” he said. “I apologize to our dedicated officers and board, our incredible staff and those who depend on Met Council. I let them all down.”

Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer representing Joseph Ross, the insurance company’s chief executive, said only, “Mr. Ross is aware of the investigation and intends to address the issues raised in a responsible fashion.”

Mr. Rapfogel has been a well-respected figure in New York’s Jewish community and in its political world. He was an aide to Mayor Edward I. Koch and to the city comptroller Harrison J. Goldin; before the council, he worked as executive director of the Institute for Public Affairs of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America and of the local branch of the American Jewish Congress.

His wife, Judy, a power in her own right, is the longtime chief of staff to the State Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver.

Mr. Rapfogel’s importance is on display annually when he hosts a legislative breakfast, on the morning of the Israel Day Parade, that typically draws many of the city’s top political leaders, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Senator Charles E. Schumer and, this year, most of the leading candidates running for mayor.

The council, which provides a variety of services, including legal and immigration aid, food pantries, housing, home care and domestic violence counseling, reported receiving contributions and grants of $24.4 million, including $11.5 million in government grants, in 2011. The organization has four contracts with the city, with a total value of $13 million.

The Metropolitan Council has also been a major recipient of financing from the Legislature and from the City Council. In the last six years, the Council has given the organization more than $10 million worth of what are known as member items; in the last five years, it received $3 million from the Assembly.

In 2011, the council paid Mr. Rapfogel $340,089 in direct compensation, plus $77,202 in “other compensation,” according to a tax document filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Mr. Rapfogel’s lawyer, Paul Shechtman, said his client’s conduct was not known to Mr. Silver.

“Whatever Willie did, his wife and Speaker Silver knew nothing about it,” Mr. Shechtman said.

Mr. Silver issued a statement saying he was “stunned and deeply saddened by this news.”

Century Coverage has given money to at least four of the Democratic mayoral candidates — Bill de Blasio, Christine C. Quinn, William C. Thompson Jr. and Anthony D. Weiner. Ms. Quinn, who was the biggest beneficiary of the insurance company’s largess, said through a spokesman on Monday that she was “outraged, and frankly stunned,” by the allegations.

“In a desire to ensure that no questionable contributions related to this matter are part of our campaign fund-raising, we have decided to return any and all donations that are associated with Century Coverage Corp.,” the spokesman, Mike Morey, said.

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Weiner also plan to return contributions Century made to their campaigns, according to their spokesmen.

Jesse McKinley and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.","The state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, is investigating allegations of financial malfeasance involving William E. Rapfogel, the president of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty."
"Kelly Rowland Beyonce's New Haircut Ain't THAT Shocking

crushed it when she decided to chop off all of her hair -- 'cause when it comes to style, B can do NO WRONG ... so says her

""Beyonce can have a STRAND of hair on her head and still be fine,"" Kelly told TMZ as she was leaving Madeo in L.A. last night.

But it's not like Beyonce

women's hair fashion when she decided to hack off her locks -- 'cause as Kelly tells us, ""We have been rocking short haircuts since the beginning of time.""

In fact, Kelly had a pretty short 'do way before Beyonce did -- and looked great -- but even Kelly admits it wasn't

original of an idea at the time.

NOTE: Poll results are not scientific and reflect the opinions of only those users who chose to participate. Poll results are not reflected in real time.

Question is ... who rocked it better?

Get TMZ Breaking News alerts to your inbox","Beyonce Carter crushed it when she decided to chop off all of her hair -- 'cause when it comes to style, B can do NO WRONG ... so says her Destiny's Child…"
"Although the inside of the iPhone 4S contains some major differences from its predecessor, the exterior of the iPhone 4S looks exactly like the iPhone 4.

As Mashable’s Amy-Mae Elliott pointed out last week, that means most iPhone 4 cases will work just fine with the iPhone 4S.

Still, in the run-up to Friday’s launch date, we’re seeing a lot of conflicting information about what cases and accessories will and won’t work with the new iPhone 4S.

The iPhone 4S does have a few minor design changes from original iPhone 4. Notably, the mute switch and the two volume buttons have moved ever-so-slightly to accommodate a new antenna. Eagle-eyed iPhone fans will recognize these changes from the launch of the Verizon iPhone back in February.

Although most iPhone 4 cases will still work with the Verizon iPhone 4/iPhone 4S, cases that were designed to specifically mold to the side button layouts may be slightly off.

The good news is that over the course of the last eight months, the vast majority of case makers have updated their molds to account for the new design. Most simply have an elongated rectangle on the side of the case to account for the buttons. A few have gone as far as to create specific button holes in cases for Verizon iPhones.

What this means is that if you purchased a case for your iPhone 4 within the last six to eight months, chances are, that case will fit the iPhone 4S. For users who got a case or bumper when Apple launched the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the situation is slightly more complicated and you might want to bring your case with you when standing in line to get the new phone.

Still, the cases sold alongside the iPhone 4S in Apple Store in the U.S. and across the world should be fully compatible with the iPhone 4S.

And for the super-paranoid, we’ve already put together a list of some iPhone 4S-friendly cases.

A cute concept makes for a unique case. There's a phone icon version available too.

We can't pretend to be fly fishing experts, but we know a striking iPhone case when we see one.

If you don't take your iPhone too seriously, ""Robotector"" protection might be just the ticket.

If you're looking for something different, Jon Eicher has you covered -- or more accurately, your iPhone covered -- in military grade aluminium.

This bold case makes a real statement.

This case's naughty-but-nice look is perfect for anyone who likes to stand out from the crowd.

We've seen a few camera-themed cases for the iPhone, but this Fresh Fiber look caught our eye.

Understated and simple, Kenzo's cool pouches will appeal to minimalists.

There's something suave about the real leather Sena Vista. We love the retro looks and fold-out foot functionality.

With various ""$%#@!"" symbols around the edge, this flexible case is unusual and fun.

Give your iPhone a trendy 'stache with one of Yummy Pocket's excellent Etsy creations.

Aged to perfection, the BookBook case and wallet will lend your iPhone a certain gravitas.

Not just a cassette-shaped case, but also a stand, the ""Tuned Up"" offers two-for-one fun.

Crafty types can create their own case with the Neostitch blank canvas.

With storage space for three credit cards accessed via a thumb release mechanism, this case will allow you to leave your wallet at home.

If you think we're including this option because of the cute kitty, you're only half-right. The case is pretty sweet too.",Don't believe the FUD about needing a new case for your iPhone 4S. The case you have for the iPhone 4 will most likely work just fine.
"06/03/2014 at 12:15 PM EDT

Derick Dillard and Jill Duggar

She thought she was just going for a stroll after a lunch date.

But what Jill Duggar, 22,

know was that her boyfriend, Derick Dillard, had been planning a

that included a serenade by country singer

, who had written a song about their relationship.

The romantic moment will be featured on the season finale of TLC's hit reality show

, airing Tuesday (9 p.m. ET).

In a sneak peek of the episode, Jill – the second daughter of Jim Bob, 48, and Michelle, 47 – and Dillard, who were

, listened as musicians hiding in the park came in to join the performance.

""Last minute, I was going over what I was going to say in my head,"" Dillard says in the clip. ""I was trying to play it cool.""

But Jill may have suspected something big was about to happen: ""I ... am like on the alert, basically, like, 'What's going on?' "" she says.

Dillard and Duggar began courting after Jill's sister Jessa, 20,

, 18. The two are currently planning a wedding – and saving their first kiss for their wedding day.","Fiancé Derick Dillard, engaged to a Duggar daughter, planed an elaborate surprise with country singer Walker Hayes"
"Voters won't cast ballots for governor until 2014, but the early sniping in what has become a nonstop campaign for Illinois' top office threatens efforts to stabilize the state's worsening financial situation this year.

Among Democrats, Gov. Pat Quinn has raised the specter of a conflict of interest between House Speaker Michael Madigan and daughter Attorney General Lisa Madigan should she decide to run for governor. That move could heighten the tension between Quinn, who has low approval ratings, and the speaker, whose help the governor needs to fix the state.

On the Republican side, a wide-open primary for governor beckons, including at least two state senators in the mix. The long-out-of-power GOP has little reason hand Democrats any political victories or take risks that alienate special interests ahead of next year's election.

In the meantime, the state's financial picture grows more precarious as lawmakers await the governor's State of the State speech next week. On Wednesday, Quinn pulled back on selling $500 million worth of construction project bonds. His administration cited a recent credit downgrade that cemented Illinois' worst-in-the-nation ranking.

""I think the people of Illinois have had plenty of politics and campaigning, almost perpetual campaigning, in the past, and that didn't do us much good. I think if we're going to have good government, you need people in government, mainly, especially, this governor, Pat Quinn, to go forward with the policies that people want,"" Quinn said Wednesday. ""And that means honesty and integrity in government at all times, it means a strong focus on job creation and development and it also means straightening out all the fiscal challenges that the state has. And I am going to continue to do that.""

If there is movement on issues, it's more likely to occur on the social side during the spring session. Increased ranks of Democrats could advance a measure to legalize gay marriage and once again approve a gambling expansion that could get Chicago a casino. And Democrats now have such overwhelming control of the House and Senate that they could approve a plan to borrow money to pay the state's $9 billion balance of unpaid bills without Republican votes.

But efforts to tighten restrictions on guns — an issue that involves geography more than party ideology — remain in question, particularly with a federal appellate court directive to legalize the concealed carrying of firearms by June.

As Illinois' top agenda items remain unresolved, the jockeying for the March 2014 primaries continues unabated.

With the prospect of a Lisa Madigan challenge swirling last week, Quinn told WBBM-Ch. 2 that ""you have to deal with the House if you're governor every single day and I think it's important that no members have conflicts of interests, especially as we recover from my two predecessors"" who have gone to jail.

Since then, Quinn has been less inclined to poke the bear. The governor used a homespun tale, quoting advice from his father saying ""don't take an aspirin until you get a headache,"" to sidestep questions from reporters about the state attorney general. At the same time, Quinn has been praising Democratic Senate President John Cullerton's efforts to reach a compromise on a public pension system reform bill.

Cullerton, who has long had a close association with Madigan, downplayed concerns that the politics of a budding governor's race in each party would bollix efforts for pension reform.

""I will pass this as quickly as possible,"" Cullerton told the City Club of Chicago of his latest pension proposal in the Senate. ""The delay is not having enough votes, not my willingness to not pass it as soon as possible.""

Cullerton said the governor's race ""should be all about these (economic) issues."" As an example, he has said the candidates for governor should discuss whether the state's 67 percent income tax rate increase enacted in 2011 should be rolled back as scheduled in 2015.

""You should ask these candidates what their plan is,"" he said.

Lisa Madigan has indicated an interest in the 2014 governor's race, but discussion of a potential bid has been coupled with the status of her father, arguably Illinois' most powerful politician. He is the state's longest-serving speaker and also the state Democratic chairman.

As attorney general, Lisa Madigan has been able to display some political distance from her father, but the gap closes in the relationship between the governor's office and the House speaker, where Michael Madigan has the power to dictate what legislation is considered. If Lisa Madigan ran, her father potentially could work to frustrate a Quinn agenda while furthering hers.

Also eyeing a Democratic primary challenge to Quinn is former White House chief of staff Bill Daley, a brother of former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Bill Daley has said that one reason he gave up on potential bids for governor in the past was the powerful status of his brother as mayor.

Although both have powerful political names — particularly in Democratic politics — questions abound over how general election voters would consider the candidacy of a Daley or a Madigan, particularly after Michael Madigan's nearly four decades in the speaker's chair dictating public policy in a troubled state.

Republicans, out of the governor's office since George Ryan departed in 2002 amid scandal, already have a fairly active campaign for the office including the GOP nominee from 2010, state Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington, who lost to Quinn, and state Sen. Kirk Dillard of Hinsdale, who narrowly lost the last primary to Brady. Also considering bids are state Treasurer Dan Rutherford, U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock of Peoria and Chicago businessman Bruce Rauner.

So far, none of the potential candidates on either side has offered a detailed fiscal prescription for the state. For his part, the governor has had difficulty sticking to a plan.

The Republicans fell further into the minority in the General Assembly as a result of a Democrat-led redistricting plan in last year's elections that gave Democrats veto-proof majorities. But those margins don't ensure automatic passage of bills on controversial issues, and Democrats want Republicans to provide votes for a pension reform plan. Instead, Republicans may try to use the state's deteriorating financial condition under longtime Democratic governance as a blame-game election strategy.

In addition, a new law requires that candidates for governor pick their lieutenant governor running mates in advance of the March 2014 primary so they run as a team. That could make prospective lieutenant governor candidates want to avoid casting controversial votes that could end their prospects for advancement.

Charles Wheeler, a former longtime Statehouse reporter who teaches at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said he expects Madigan and Cullerton will try to move enough legislation to allow their members to look as though they got something done when they face re-election next year.

Perhaps not a ""grand solution to pensions,"" Wheeler said, but maybe approving borrowing to pay the backlog of bills. That move, Wheeler said, would help local companies owed money by the state and would be a way for members to show they got something to help their constituents.

Meanwhile, the posturing and head fakes are expected to be a growing part of Illinois' political landscape as the spring session unfolds.

""Politicians will be politicians, and there will be verbal exchanges amongst them and competition amongst them,"" said state Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago. ""But there are some things that have to be put before politics, and the fiscal state of our state is one of them.""

Tribune reporter Monique Garcia contributed.","Voters won't cast ballots for governor until 2014, but the early sniping in what has become a nonstop campaign for Illinois' top office threatens efforts to stabilize the state's worsening financial situation this year."
"Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack in “Serendipity.”

We know the movie formula by heart: boy meets girl, boy and girl spend one magical night together, but don’t exchange contact info. Boy starts Internet campaign to find girl who stole his heart and… Girl gets creeped out and boy looks a little bit like a stalker.

Maybe that last part is outside the usual rules of the genre. One man recently found out that life isn’t a romcom after his search for a one-night sweetheart turned sour.

Reese McKee, a 25-year-old New Zealander, met “Katie” from Washington D.C. on New Year’s Eve when he saw her crying on the side of the road in Hong Kong. Katie had been separated from her group, but in typical romcom fashion they spent the evening together “playing in traffic” and “dancing all night.” When they were eventually separated at dawn (the romcom notes keep coming), the two said a quick goodbye with McKee saying Katie’s final words to him were: “Find me.” All McKee had to go on was that Katie was from Washington D.C., and he had managed to steal a single snapped image of her.

Fast forward to almost a year later when McKee launched an online campaign to find his mysterious one-night wonder only to have it not quite go according to plan. McKee’s efforts were widely covered by media around the world, and the Katie in question was “found.” Unfortunately, Serendipity this ain’t. After being inundated by strangers on McKee’s behalf, she was reportedly compelled to close all of our her social media accounts. As many fans as this story generated for its big romantic gesture, it also had its share of people a little bothered by what they perceived as McKee’s stalker-like enthusiasm.

If I were writing this as a romcom: girl would reject boy, but then hundreds of girls would start to pursue boy after falling in love with his over-the-top romantic gesture. Boy would feel stalked and paranoid and then… Boy would know how girl feels.

Richard Linklater and the stars of the Sunrise Trilogy could not be reached for comment.","We know the movie formula by heart: boy meets girl, boy and girl spend one magical night together, but don't exchange contact info. Boy starts Internet campaign to find girl who stole his heart and..."
"The Euro 2016 soccer tournament has been marred by unruly fan behavior, with English and Russian fans in deep trouble for a series of violent acts after those two teams' 1-1 draw Saturday.

But thanks to the efforts of a group of Irish and Swedish fans, it's clear that not all European soccer fans turn their passion into mischief.

The two teams faced off against one another in the opening match of the tournament's group stage, but the emotions surrounding the match were restrained to strictly good vibes. As this video, courtesy of the YouTube channel ""LIVE Football,"" shows, fans of the opposing teams joined together pre-game to sing the famous ABBA song ""Dancing Queen.""

Sports have the ability to bring people together as easily as they can incite conflict, and Ireland and Sweden deserve credit for displaying this on the big stage.

In an ending perhaps fitting to the pre-game festivities, Ireland and Sweden proceeded to tie their match 1-1, putting both teams at one point after their opening matches. The two teams are currently tied for second place – the last automatic qualifying spot for the knockout stage of the tournament – behind Italy (1-0-0) in Group E.

More On Sweden: -- 'Odd Man Rush' ... When Harvard Hockey Kid Meets Mike Danton In Sweden -- Henrik Stenson Of Sweden Hears Amusing Cheer At U.S. Open -- Henrik Lundqvist Talks Style, Fashion Mistakes From Younger Days In Sweden

Euro 2016, Fans, friendship, Ireland, Singing, Soccer, Sweden","In a Euro 2016 tournament marred by controversy, fans of Ireland and Sweden put their differences aside, coming together to sing before a match."
"Updated Jan 4, 2014 11:59 PM ET

Kevin Love, Nikola Pekovic and the Minnesota Timberwolves were ganging up on Kevin Durant, and a rare three-game losing streak for the Oklahoma City Thunder was just over the horizon.

Durant's sidekick was on the bench in street clothes, leaving him on an island again. Frustrated from a poor start, Durant came out swinging in the fourth quarter and knocked the Timberwolves out with a fury.

Barking at and mean-mugging the feisty Wolves, Durant scored 23 of his season-high 48 points in the fourth quarter and hit the winner with 4 seconds to play to rally the Thunder from 13 points down to a 115-111 victory on Saturday night.

""I just hear a lot of stuff and I just wanted to come through for my team in the fourth quarter,"" Durant said, an apparent shot at some trash talk he heard from the Wolves' bench.

Durant went 7 for 11 from the field and hit four 3-pointers in the final quarter to help the Thunder rebound from two straight losses at home.

Love played the entire second half and finished with 30 points, 14 rebounds and five assists for the Wolves. But he missed four free throws in the final 27 seconds to let this one slip away. The last three came when he was fouled on a 3-pointer with 2.2 seconds to go and the Wolves down two.

After Durant hit a step-back jumper from 18 feet right over Dante Cunningham's outstretched arm to give the Thunder a 113-111 lead, Love was fouled on a 3-pointer by Kendrick Perkins. Perhaps a little gassed from the work load, Love missed the first two free throws and his on-purpose miss on the third one didn't hit the rim, giving Oklahoma City the ball.

""I was more upset about the first one I missed,"" Love said. ""I left it short. I think they were flat and short. There was no real air under them. Just missed them.""

Durant knocked down two more free throws, and the two stars embraced after the final horn, a thrilling duel just finished.

Durant and Love each got off to slow starts for the game, combining to shoot 8 for 24 in the first half. But they gave everyone their money's worth in the fourth quarter.

The Thunder trailed 90-77 in the fourth before Durant, who also had seven rebounds and seven assists, went off.

The Thunder had let two fourth quarter leads slip away at home this week thanks to opposing defenses swarming Durant and forcing other players to beat them. Durant sure got involved Saturday, scoring six of Oklahoma City's first seven buckets in the fourth to get the Thunder going.

""I was hanging my head a little bit in the first half and my teammates got on me about it,"" Durant said. ""So I just wanted to keep my head high no matter what and stay aggressive and I was able to hit a few.""

The last four shots of that flurry were 3s, and he struck a pose and stared at the Wolves' bench after the final one cut Minnesota's lead to 97-96 with 7 minutes to play.

The two superstars traded haymakers the rest of the way.

In one stirring sequence, Love hit a layup, Durant drilled a 3 and Love hit one of his own for a 97-93 Wolves lead with just over seven minutes to play. Durant came right back with yet another 3 and again woofed at the Wolves' bench.

Love tied it on a hook shot over Serge Ibaka and then scored on a drive to the hoop that tied it again, at 111, with 27 seconds to play. But he missed the free throw that came with the foul, opening the door for Durant's cold-blooded response.

""The special ones can have a poor shooting night and come down at the end of the game and make four or five to win the game,"" Thunder coach Scott Brooks said. ""That's how they're wired because they're great players. He loves to inspire his teammates with his play.""

Derek Fisher scored 13 points, and Ibaka had 12 points for Oklahoma City, which outscored Minnesota's bench 40-5.

Pekovic had 31 points and 11 rebounds, and Ricky Rubio had 13 points, 10 assists and five steals, but missed six of his final seven shots.

""I'll take K-Love in that situation no matter what,"" Wolves forward Corey Brewer said. ""He missed them tonight. Next time he'll make them.""

NOTES: Kevin Martin had 17 points and six rebounds for Minnesota. Oklahoma City committed 22 turnovers, but scored 24 points off 15 miscues by Minnesota. ... Timberwolves first-round draft choice Shabazz Muhammad will start a four-game stint with Iowa in the NBA Development League on Sunday.","Kevin Durant scored 23 of his season-high 48 points in the
fourth quarter and hit the winner with 4 seconds to play to rally
the Oklahoma City Thunder from 13 points down in a 115-111 victory
over the..."
"Held at a swank downtown restaurant, the lunchtime event commemorated the publication of the trade magazine's Women In Music Power Players list, which acknowledges leading female executives. Two additional awards were presented to artists, for Woman of the Year Award and Rising Star.

Respective winners Swift and Minaj were the main attraction, of course. Arriving on the red carpet in a matching belted dress and tan heels, her hair wore down with bangs, Swift — who turns 22 on Dec. 3 — gushed that it was ""magical"" to receive the honor. ""I get to wear this beautiful dress and go to this wonderful event. It's an amazing way to end what's really been an incredible year.""

Swift added that she's a huge Minaj fan: ""She's one of my favorite artists to come along in the past couple of years, and Super Bass is my favorite song of the year.""

Katie Couric and Robin Roberts, there to conduct short post-lunch interviews with the pop stars — Couric spoke with Swift, Roberts with Minaj — expressed their admiration for their subjects. Couric, also in a red dress — she would quip on stage that she and Swift had planned their outfits together — had brought her 15-year-old daughter along.

""She's very musical,"" Couric noted of her daughter. ""I took her out of school — I didn't even send a doctor's note. I love the way Taylor comports herself. I'd like my daughters to emulate her. She's gracious and sweet and well-mannered, but also in control.""

Roberts, sporting a short-sleeved gray sweater dress, said that Minaj's music ""makes me feel good. It makes me move, makes me smile. She's so wonderfully irreverent, and so talented.""

Minaj, up for four Grammy Awards in February, looked characteristcally sassy in a curve-hugging black-and-white gown and a wig of long blond curls. When asked by Roberts if she had ever had any doubts that she would succeed, Minaj said, ""There's always a little ounce of doubt in everything. I've had a lot of doors closed in my face. I'm no different than any other struggling artist; I just tried one last time.""

The hip-pop diva returned Swift's flattery, noting that the country-pop troubadour had helped her by tweeting that she liked Super Bass: ""I saw her last week and I told her, this is something you really had a hand in."" Minaj also thanked her wig designer, makeup artist and pastor, all of whom were there, and even seemed to get a bit choked up when accepting her award.

On her next album, Minaj promised, she's going to be even less self-conscious: ""I'm just going to have fun, from the beginning to the end.""

When it was Swift's turn, Couric asked how she stayed grounded and focused on music. ""I never feel entitled to play another sold-out show or to win another award,"" Swift responded. ""The women in this room know that you really have to work for everything you get.""

Asked about her influences, Swift noted that Shania Twain, Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks were favorites during ""formative years of me daydreaming in my bedroom."" Her current hit list ranges from ""older music, from the '60s"" to Foster the People, ""anything that sounds authethic.""

Couric mentioned she'd gleaned that Swift wanted to act in a film at some point. ""I really do,"" Swift said. ""I want to surprise people in good ways. My favorite moments in my favorite artists' careers are when they make a departure."" She has no plans to abandon music, though: ""I want my writing to evolve, and I want to collaborate with other artists and continue to make music that I'm proud of.""",Nicki Minaj was also honored at Friday's Women in Music awards luncheon in New York City.
"The Postal Service on Friday reported a second-quarter loss of $1.9 billion, despite increasing its revenue by $379 million and growing its shipping-and-package business by 8 percent compared to the same period last year.

The latest display of red ink prompted more calls for Congress to pass postal reforms to help fix the agency’s persistent financial problems. Friday’s numbers marked the 20th time in the last 22 quarters in which the USPS has sustained a loss.

The Postal Service lost $5 billion last year while reporting its first revenue gain since 2008. The agency has not made a profit since 2006.

USPS Chief Financial Officer Joseph Corbett said during a news conference that the agency desperately needs legislation that would allow “a smarter delivery schedule, greater control over our personnel and benefit costs and more flexibility in pricing and products.”

But postal unions worry about potential cuts in service that lawmakers have proposed in the past, including eliminating Saturday letter delivery.

The National Association of Letter Carriers said Friday that the USPS numbers are moving in the right direction, noting that its bedrock first-class mail revenue rose by $2 million compared to the same quarter last year, and that shipping-and-package revenue increased by $252 million, helping the agency report an operating profit of more than $260 million.

“Given these positive trends, it would be irresponsible to degrade services to the public, which would drive away mail — and revenue — and stop the postal turnaround in its tracks,” NALC president Fredric Rolando said in a statement.

The labor leader also renewed calls for eliminating a 2006 congressional mandate that requires the Postal Service to prefund retiree health benefits to the tune of about $5.7 billion per year. The USPS has defaulted on the last three annual payments and expects to do so again this year.

The NALC views that expense as the biggest factor for the repeated net losses.

USPS officials have called for a restructuring of the prefunding requirement, but Corbett downplayed the notion that such a plan would balance the agency’s books.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “Our liabilities exceed our assets by $42 billion, and we have a need for more than $10 billion to invest in new delivery vehicles, package sortation equipment and other deferred investments.”

The uptick in revenue from first-class mail occurred despite a 4.1 percent drop in volume compared to the second quarter of 2013. A postage rate increase that the Postal Service implemented in January helped drive the revenue gain.

The agency increased its postal rates by 3 cents for first-class letters and other mail, representing the largest rise in 11 years. Postal regulators approved the higher rate for only about 24 months, determining that the USPS needed the extra revenue to recover recession-related losses.

Shipping-and-package volume climbed by 8 percent, improving the Postal Service’s standing in a competitive field that includes well-established heavyweights such as the United Parcel Service and Fed Ex. The agency is increasingly relying on its shipping-and-package business to help improve its financial situation.

Several lawmakers used Friday’s report to justify their calls for Congress to pass postal legislation.

“As I’ve said time and again, Congress and the administration need to come to agreement on comprehensive legislation that reforms, right-sizes and modernizes this American institution,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), who has teamed up with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on a bill to overhaul the USPS.

The bipartisan plan would restructure the prefunding requirement, in addition to allowing the Postal Service to phase out Saturday and some to-the-door mail delivery if those moves are necessary to make ends meet.

Carper said the legislation would “make the changes that the Postal Service needs to thrive into the future.”

Follow Josh Hicks on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Connect by e-mail at josh.hicks(at)washpost.com. Visit The Federal Eye, and The Fed Page for more federal news. Submit news tips and suggestions to federalworker@washpost.com.","The numbers mark the 20th time the agency has lost money in the last 22 quarters, prompting calls for legislative reform."
"At Nexus Partners’ weekly videoconference last week, we compared the U.S. investment climate to India’s, given that we are a venture capital firm that operates both in Silicon Valley and Bombay.

My colleagues in our Menlo Park office in California observed that Silicon Valley venture capitalists were primarily investing in cloud computing, specialized e-commerce, ways to optimize online advertising, social gaming and the use of social media in the business environment.

When we compared that to our transaction pipeline in India — apart from a smattering of Internet, mobile, and software providers — there were companies in financial services, light manufacturing, logistics, education, power equipment and energy efficiency. The swift realization we came to was that, while the U.S. VC industry is seeking to maximize sophisticated consumer experiences (I suppose cloud computing also is about productivity), we in India largely see opportunities in the fundamentals.

In both places, investors are searching for 25% to 30% annual returns. But what are the factors that influence these different approaches?",Startup questions and answers with a panel of experts from India
"A century ago, Broadway actors spoke of a “Ziegfeld Curse,” because so many of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s famous showgirls came to tragic ends. In the generations since the impresario’s death in 1932, New Yorkers might be forgiven for thinking that there is also a curse on anything to do with Ziegfeld’s memory. His lavish theater on Sixth Avenue was demolished in 1966, and now the owners of the Ziegfeld Theater, the world’s largest single screen cinema, built near the site of the original, have considered closing it, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

But the Ziegfeld Club, the subject of an article in this Sunday’s Metropolitan section, remains, as do other relics connected to the famous “Follies” impresario.

The great survivor of old Times Square is the New Amsterdam Theater. This 1903 Art Nouveau jewel box, once known as “the House Beautiful” and “the Diamond of 42nd Street” was where the “Ziegfeld Follies” were staged from 1913 to 1927, as well as the much racier “Midnight Frolic” in the nightclub-style Roof Garden. There, Ziegfeld built a glass-floored runway so gentlemen like Diamond Jim Brady and William Randolph Hearst could look up the Girls’ skirts as they strolled overhead. When the theater was renovated by the Walt Disney Company in the 1990s, the Roof Garden became offices; the glass runway was recreated but with “clouded” glass to change its original purpose.

Next door is the Liberty Theater, a majestic Art Deco relic abandoned in the 1930s and renovated in the 1990s, that is now serving as the setting for an immersive theater production called “Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic.” Audience members have to weave past tourists on the gaudiest stretch of 42nd Street to the Liberty Diner, which is sandwiched between an Applebee’s and a Dave and Buster’s. But once inside, attendants in vintage tuxedos and silk gowns usher guests toward a red curtain in the back wall, which opens onto the stunning Liberty Theater.

The play hinges on the fate of Olive Thomas, a winner of “The Most Beautiful Girl in New York” competition who joined the Follies and married a playboy actor, Jack Pickford. Mystery still lingers around her sensational death from drinking mercury in Paris: New Yorkers debated whether she was murdered by her husband, committed suicide or drank the solution by accident, as the French police finally decided. Actors insist that Olive’s ghost still haunts the New Amsterdam Theater, where she once performed. When the theater reopened after renovations in 1997, a security guard resigned after seeing a woman in lingerie wandering the stage clutching a green bottle, and cast members still touch a portrait of Olive as they leave the stage door every night.

Many actors lived at the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street near Central Park, and the celebrity photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston kept his studio there. Johnston took hundreds of portraits of the Ziegfeld Girls in various states of undress, creating the first supermodels and pinups. The cafe-restaurant, which catered to the building’s residents, most of whom had no kitchens, is now The Leopard at des Artistes. Although heavily renovated, nine original murals of naked nymphettes, “Fantasy Scenes with Naked Beauties” by Howard Chandler Christy, still overlook the rooms.

Perhaps the most poignant relic of all sits outside a grand brownstone at 52 East 80th Street — the carved stone head of a Greek goddess that once graced the facade of the original Ziegfeld Theater. Opened in 1927 with funding by the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, this Art Deco classic on Sixth Avenue was torn down despite widespread protests, to make way for an office tower — an act of urban vandalism considered by some to be on a par with the destruction of Pennsylvania Station.

According to Broadway lore, the producer Jerome Hammer jokingly asked a friend who was working on the new building for one of the goddesses. To his surprise, some months later a crane lowered the statue in front of his house. It remains there today, noticed only by few history-loving passers-by — sitting, symbolically enough, right next to the trash cans.","Curse or no curse, the Ziegfeld Club, the subject of an article in this Sunday’s Metropolitan section, still remains in the city, as do other relics connected to the famous “Follies” impresario."
"THE NEW National Intelligence Estimate on Iran contains some unambiguously good news: that Tehran halted a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that it is responsive to the sort of international pressure applied by the United States and other Western governments. Iran's ""decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs,"" says the public summary released Monday. That sounds like an endorsement of the diplomatic strategy pursued by the Bush administration since 2005, which has been aimed at forcing Iran to choose between the nuclear program and normal economic and security relations with the outside world. It strengthens the view, which we have previously endorsed, that this administration should not have to resort to military action to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities.

But there is bad news, too, which seems likely to be overlooked by those who have been resisting sanctions and other pressure on the mullahs all along, such as Russia, China and some members of the European Union. While U.S. intelligence agencies have ""high confidence"" that covert work on a bomb was suspended ""for at least several years"" after 2003, there is only ""moderate confidence"" that Tehran has not restarted the military program. Iran's massive overt investment in uranium enrichment meanwhile proceeds in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions, even though Tehran has no legitimate use for enriched uranium. The U.S. estimate of when Iran might produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb -- sometime between late 2009 and the middle of the next decade -- hasn't changed.

""Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons,"" says the summary's second sentence. Yet within hours of the report's release, European diplomats and some U.S officials were saying that it could kill an arduous American effort to win support for a third U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Iran for failing to suspend uranium enrichment. It could also hinder separate U.S.-French efforts to create a new sanctions coalition outside the United Nations. In other words, the new report may have the effect of neutering the very strategy of pressure that it says might be effective if ""intensified.""

President Bush yesterday vowed to continue pushing for international sanctions. But Democrats and some Republicans are arguing that now is the time for the Bush administration to begin a broad dialogue with Iran -- and drop a precondition that the regime first suspend uranium enrichment. It's an odd time to recommend such a concession: The latest European Union talks with Iran last week were a disaster, in which a new hard-line envoy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad withdrew the previous, inadequate Iranian compromise proposals. Were the Bush administration to abandon its insistence on a suspension of enrichment, Mr. Ahmadinejad would declare victory over the relative moderates in Iran who have recently criticized his uncompromising stance.

That's not to say the United States should never attempt to negotiate directly with Iran about its nuclear program. But before doing so, the administration should have some indication that the Iranian regime is prepared to comply with binding U.N. resolutions and seriously address other U.S. concerns. A report by U.S. intelligence agencies is an unsatisfying substitute for a signal that has yet to come from Tehran.","THE NEW National Intelligence Estimate on Iran contains some unambiguously good news: that Tehran halted a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that it is responsive to the sort of international pressure applied by the United States and other Western governments. Iran's ""decisions are guid..."
"Not so bad, according to some of the readers who wrote to me to share their Senior Week memories.

“My boss at the hardware store I worked at in the ’80s told me stories of how he and his buddies used to blow up lifeguard shacks in the ’60s. With dynamite. Blew up. Sky-high,” dead-panned Mark Bond, who lives in the District. Recent high school graduates from Pottsville, Pa., on the Boardwalk in Ocean City, Md. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

He said I probably didn’t get out much as a kid. Absolutely, Mr. Bond, and you’ll swear that to my mom, okay?

Others remembered their own senior weeks as drunken, memorable rites of passage that all of today’s parents remember (but won’t tell about) and now dread.

“I was a Senior Week partaker more than 10 years ago, and let me say, it was no different then,” wrote one commenter, llclarityll. “The kids who go to Senior Week and obliterate themselves night after night and make seriously questionable choices or endanger themselves or others are more than likely the same kids who will be hardcore binge drinkers making the same terrible decisions in college.”

One week of partying probably won’t destroy the life of someone who’s just cutting loose, argued mcqueen0831. “I graduated in ’99 and went to beach week. I partied so hard I forgot where I was the next day. I had fun that week, came back home, got a part time job and enrolled in college in the fall. Graduated, got a job and moved on with my life.”

Maybe it’s the age, the time in life, the release after months of SAT prep classes, essays, tests, years and years of piano lessons. Who could blame stressed-out seniors for a little Bongzilla action?

Or maybe it’s the place, something about Ocean City that turns otherwise civil and reasonable people into total wankers?

That’s the theory of DigitalMan08: “Teens are one thing but Ocean City has a way of bringing out the worst in some adults, too. I’m a native Marylander that has traveled the world and nowhere have I seen the sort of behavior that occurs in OC. The drinking, power-boating, steroid taking types are out there everywhere waiting for you to look at them the wrong way. I struggle to find the reason for it too. Is it the people of the DC-Baltimore area? Who knows, but I have never seen grown adults act like belligerent high schoolers anywhere on Earth like OC.”

So what are your craziest Senior Week memories? Would you let your kids go?",Did you blow up a lifeguard shack? Forget your room number? How was your high school beach week?
"President Barack Obama, right, and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney discuss a point during the third presidential debate at Lynn University, Monday, Oct. 22, 2012, in Boca Raton, Fla. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

After Monday’s presidential debate, public opinion polls still have Republican nominee Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama in a very close race to win four years in the White House. But you don’t have to wait until Nov. 6 to know who the likely winner of this year’s election will be.

On Monday night, as Romney and Obama were duking it out over foreign policy issues, vast amounts of cash were moving through online betting markets to back the probability that Obama will take the White House again this November.

“Obama has 3 percent more chance of winning the election than he did before Monday’s debate,” said Leighton Vaughan Williams, a professor of economics and finance at Nottingham Business School and director of the school’s Betting Research Unit and Political Forecasting Unit.

Vaughan Williams has spent 12 years studying how well efficient betting markets -- also known as prediction markets -- forecast the outcomes of U.S. elections, starting with the Bush vs. Gore election in 2000. His research has demonstrated that when millions of dollars are wagered on events such as elections, the odds offered by betting websites tend to be far more accurate real-time forecasters of election outcomes than political pundits or public opinion poll.

Vaughan Williams has watched closely this fall as millions of dollars have moved through Internet betting markets such as Betfair.com or Intrade.com to wager on one candidate or another winning the White House this November.

Obama was always the market’s favorite, he said, but money has flowed toward Romney at key moments in the race. Obama’s lackluster performance in the first presidential debate increased Romney's odds of winning the election, and just before the vice-presidential debate, on Oct. 11, Obama’s chance of winning was down to 62 percent from a post-convention high of around 80 percent, Vaughan Williams said.

Obama had enjoyed boosts from moments such as President Bill Clinton’s well-received Democratic National Convention speech and Romney’s much-criticized comment at a fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans are too dependent on government and see themselves as “victims,” he said.

Bookmaker markets allow players to place bets on specific election outcomes. If Betfair.com, for example, showed Obama with a 6 in 10 chance of winning the election, the payoff on a $60 bet would be $40 (a player would risk $60 to win $40, with their initial $60 stake returned). Due to U.S. regulations, many sites such as Betfair.com do not accept bets from the U.S., so most of the wagering is by overseas bettors.

Following the third debate, Vaughan Williams put Obama’s chance of winning on Nov. 6 at 68 to 70 percent — up from 65 percent before the debate. He compiles his odds from an average of all the betting websites and bookmakers’ odds he monitors, allowing for possible inaccuracies and market manipulation. Vaughan Williams also takes into account how accurate these betting sites have been in past elections.

Vaughan Williams says betting websites offer a far more accurate prediction of electoral outcomes than opinion polls because the average voter doesn’t have any incentive to tell a pollster the truth about their voting habits, but when they are betting their own money they will tend to think hard about the choices they make using the best information available to them. The more money involved, the more efficient and accurate the market, he said.

“This is people’s real money,” Vaughan Williams said. “People who know the most bet the most, but people who know only a little tend to bet only a little. So with this very liquid market you can be pretty confident that the market is giving you an accurate insight into what is going on.”

Although Americans have bet on elections since 1868, or even earlier, according to Vaughan Williams, the first serious market for betting on elections was the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), which came to the fore during the 1988 Bush vs. Dukakis presidential election.

However, the online futures market, operated by the University of Iowa, is an educational and research project. Betting websites where individuals could bet “real” money on elections came to the fore during the Bush vs. Gore election in 2000. Since then, they have grown to large enterprises where millions of dollars are wagered on national elections, and also local and state voting.

The downside of these sites is they are open to manipulation. In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election, traders reported unusual fluctuations in bets on John McCain to win the election, which appeared to be someone trying to artificially inflate his odds.

Thomas Rietz, a finance professor at the University of Iowa who sits on the steering committee for the IEM, notes that, unlike on Intrade.com and Betfair.com, the Iowa market limits individual account sizes to $500. That’s a small enough sum in relation to the money flowing through the market to prevent any one player from moving the market too much in any one direction.

He also notes that on IEM, punters bet on a potentially different outcome to the one they bet on when using Intrade.com and Betfair.com — which candidate will win the popular vote, as opposed to which candidate will win the presidency.

“We can compare vote shares, and it turns out we’ve been very accurate,” Rietz said. “The average amount of difference from the actual outcome is 1.2 percentage points.”

Vaughan Williams says recent figures show London-based Betfair.com has taken in some $15 million on the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The very close presidential race and the media scrutiny surrounding it could mean that some $100 million could potentially be spent on betting in this year’s White House race, he said.

Betting sites have proved prophetic outside the U.S. In the British general election of 2010, the first ever U.K. prime ministerial debate thwarted the Conservative Party’s hopes of winning an overall majority in government after good performance in that debate by Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and an unexpectedly bad performance by the leader of the Conservatives David Cameron.

After the debate, betting websites clearly showed a shift in betting patterns that suggested few believed the Conservative Party would secure an overall majority in that year’s national election.

With few events as major as a debate between now and Election Day, Vaughan Williams said online betting sites will likely focus on the early voting returns, especially in key swing states such as Ohio.

“There’s just one report due to come out on the Friday before the election, but unless it’s astounding I doubt it will have much impact,” he said.

However, any indication of how early voters are behaving will have a major influence on the markets between now and the election, he added, “especially people trading with large sums of money.”

NBC's Chuck Todd reports that the third and final debate between President Obama and Governor Romney was a clash in styles, with an aggressive president met by an opponent who seemed to search for areas of agreement.

Follow NBCNews.com business on Twitter and Facebook","After Monday’s presidential debate, public opinion polls still have Republican nominee Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama in a very close race to win four years in the White House. But you don’t have to wait until Nov. 6 to know who the likely winner of this …"
"Warren Beatty has scored a legal victory in his fight with Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co. over the television and movie rights to square-jawed comic-strip crime-stopper Dick Tracy.Both sides had requested summary judgments in the long-running dispute in U.S. District Court. Judge Dean D. Pregerson of the Central District of California on Thursday granted Beatty's motion and rejected Tribune Co.'s.Beatty, who acquired rights to the character from Tribune Co.'s Tribune Media Services in 1985 and made the 1990 movie “Dick Tracy” starring himself and Madonna, filed suit in Los Angeles federal court in 2008 after Tribune Co.'s Tribune Media Services said those rights had reverted back to it.""At the present time we are reviewing the judge’s opinion and evaluating our options,"" a Tribune Co. spokesman said in response to the ruling.

Tribune Co. argued that Beatty was required to produce another Tracy television or movie project to retain the rights before a use-it-or-lose-it deadline TMS had established two years earlier. Beatty countered that, after his request to extend the rights to 2013 was denied, he had begun work on a ""Tracy"" special before the deadline.

Turner Classic Movies subsequently scheduled a half-hour movie chat between film critic

and Tracy (as played by Beatty) discussing various portrayals of the comic detective for July 2009, but it's the special didn't run on the cable channel.

""(Tribune Co.) may be frustrated that (Beatty) has not used his rights to Dick Tracy for more profitable ends,"" Judge Pregerson wrote in his ruling, noting he saw nothing in the contract between the two requiring such a project to make money.

""Obviously, Warren would have preferred to go ahead with (a news 'Tracy') picture, so he produced the special to extend the rights, and the contract very clearly says you can do that,"" Bert Fields, Beatty's lawyer. told the Chicago Tribune in March 2009. ""He sold (the special), even though the contract doesn't require him to do that. The contract doesn't even require him to finish it. He just has to start it.""Beatty, whose 74th birthday is set for next week, produced, directed and starred in 1990's ""Dick Tracy"" for Disney's Touchstone Pictures. Besides Beatty and Madonna, the cast included Al Pacino, Glenne Headly, Dustin Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Dick Van Dyke, Mandy Patinkin, Paul Sorvino, James Caan and Charles Durning.Budgeted at $101 million, its gross receipts reportedly exceeded $160 million. The film also earned seven Academy Award nominations, winning Oscars for Best Original Song, Best Makeup and Best Art Direction.

Tribune Co., which has operated under Chapter 11 protection since December 2008, would like to have back its unfettered rights to the detective, which it has said are ""worth, potentially, millions"" to the company and its creditors.Artist Joe Staton and writer Mike Curtis earlier this month made their debut with the nearly 80-year-old daily newspaper comic strip. They replaced artist and writer Dick Locher, who relinquished the role he had held since 1983.""Dick Tracy"" was launched by Chester Gould in October 1931 and Gould continued to write and draw until his retirement in 1977. Locher worked alongside Gould on ""Dick Tracy"" from 1957 to 1961. Upon the death of artist Rick Fletcher, a longtime assistant who succeeded Gould, Locher returned and has been shepherding the comic ever since.Both Fletcher and Locher (who for a time was assisted by his son, John, who died in 1986) worked with writer Max Allan Collins, who was replaced in 1992 by the Tribune's Michael Kilian. After Kilian died in 2005, Locher wrote and drew the strip by himself for a little more than three years before Jim Brozman took over the drawing in March 2009. Like Locher, Brozman left with the arrival of Staton and Curtis.",Warren Beatty has scored a legal victory in his fight with Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co. over the television and movie rights to square-jawed comic-strip crime-stopper Dick Tracy. Both sides had requested summary judgments in the long-running dispute in U.S....
"Chrysler is not amused that proud folks in Toledo, historical home of Jeep, are riffing on the company's new slogan ""Imported from Detroit.""

According to a report in the Toledo Blade newspaper, Chrysler squashed plans by a local Jeep dealer to sell a 70th-anniversary Jeep T-shirt emblazoned with ""Imported from Toledo."" Before Chrysler noticed, two other dealers put the Toledo slogan on the sides of a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited that drove out on the ice at a Toledo Walleye hockey game last weekend.

Jeep Park in Toledo still makes some models, but others are now made elsewhere, including up the interstate in Detroit.

Chrysler spokesman Michael Palese told The Blade that the automaker appreciates the local enthusiasm but does not want those folks in Ohio diluting its ""Imported from Detroit"" marketing tagline.

The slogan has been a home run for Chrysler since it was introduced with Eminem and the Chrysler 200 in a Super Bowl ad (video of the ad below). The company now has it everywhere, including on clothing it sells and 14 stories high on its headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich.

According to the Blade, the Monroe Dodge Superstore recently designed and printed up T-shirts to sell for 20 bucks with ""Imported from Toledo, and ""Jeep 70th Anniversary"" above and below a likeness of the Jeep's seven-slot grill.

Now they'll be collectors items. Says Monroe owner Ralph Mahalak Jr.: ""I want to promote Toledo. I want to promote Jeeps."" As part of deal with Chrysler over its trademarked Detroit slogan, he now is giving away the Toledo shirts for taking a test drive in a vehicle. ""I love these vehicles, and I love seeing the American auto industry coming back.""

Guess Chrysler won't be letting the folks across the bridge in Windsor, Ontario, promote local pride in all those minivans they make: ""Imported from Canada, but we can see Detroit from here.""

See photos of: Detroit, Super Bowl, Chrysler LLC, Eminem, Jeep

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor

. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to

. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to",Chrysler squashes Jeep dealers' 'Imported from Toledo' slogan - Drive On: A conversation about the cars and trucks we drive - USATODAY.com
"The State Department has issued a Travel Alert for South Africa, pegged to the coming World Cup, which takes place June 11 to July 11.

The May 25 alert is broad. It includes mentions of a heightened risk for terrorist activity (American citizens traveling in South Africa are encouraged to register with the United States mission to receive specific alerts), a general warning on crime and “public disturbances,” and even a note about a shortage of lodging, particularly in the smaller World Cup host cities.

There is also a reminder about the so-called yellow fever belt, which covers much of Africa and South America, and the need to carry proof of yellow fever vaccination.

Travel Alerts, like a recent one issued for Jamaica after violence broke out in Kingston, are for short-term events. Travel Warnings, the recently redesigned State Department Web site says, “are issued to describe long-term, protracted conditions that make a country dangerous or unstable.”","The State Department has issued a travel alert for South Africa, pegged to the coming World Cup."
"Trent Harmon, a 25-year-old waiter from Mississippi, won American Idol in the momentous show’s series finale on Thursday night.

He beat out La’Porsha Renae in the second part of American Idol two-part finale, which marks the end of the show’s fifteen-season run.

Harmon debuted the original track — now his coronation single — “Falling” on the first installment on Wednesday night.

He is the last winner of a pop culture phenomenon that produced some of the larger names in pop music, including Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood.",He beat La'Porsha Renae in the final installment of the show's 15-season run
"Question:You told me to network. I go to networking events and everyone is passing out business cards. I am unemployed and don't have one. What should I do?

Answer:First of all, you are not unemployed. You are ""between successes"" and your full time job right now is looking for your next opportunity. Having said that, there is no reason for you NOT to have a business card. Despite the fact that you might not have a company name, you still have contact information. I will encourage you to go have some cards made (Office Max, Staples etc.) that have your name, address, e-mail, phone number etc. Some of my clients even include their LINKEDIN address and/or a Web site address if you have one. Make it look professional and on a nice heavy cardstock. You don't need any fancy logos or fonts. Just make it a simple ""calling card."" If you want to make them from your own printer, just be sure to use a nice card stock and not a flimsy one. Vistaprint, a mail-order online printing company, provides them at a reduced price as well. I don't recommend the free ones.

And yes, many people today exchange this information electronically through their BlackBerry's, iPhones, etc. However, having an actual printed business card can say a lot about your brand, your image and your professionalism. Go out today and get yours so when you go to your next networking event, you are prepared.","A business card can say a lot about your brand, your image and your professionalism and can help you find a job if you are"
"There are things I wish I didn’t know.

I wish I didn’t know that companies make tiny braces, small enough to hold necks no bigger than a wrist. I wish I didn’t know that when babies are transported in an ambulance, they are stripped of their powdery-smelling clothes and strapped to adult-sized gurneys, naked. I wish I didn’t know that little bodies that are supposed to eat every two hours can go more than 12 hours without a drop of milk and be satiated by a pacifier dipped in sugar water.

The day I broke my baby started like every other since his birth three weeks earlier — with me admiring his perfection.

His legs were just gaining their chubbiness. His fingers were long and his grip strong. His eyes, color-ambiguous almonds, quickly found me when I spoke.

That morning, I took a dozen photos of him wearing a onesie with a typewriter and a phrase I found poetic: “So my story begins . . .”

I imagined how the rest of it might go — a good college, a loving partner, his pick of jobs. It didn’t matter that years as a reporter in New York and the Washington area had taught me that we can’t write our children’s stories. That if we could, flower girls would not die in car crashes and little boys would not slip under school buses they thought were leaving them behind — two stories I covered early in my career. That if we could, second graders with big brown eyes would not vanish from homeless shelters — a more recent story.

If we could, I’m sure we would all write fairy tales and I would have never ended up on a wet CVS sidewalk, cradling what I valued most.

[Would you call 911 on another parent?]

My son was not planned but was gifted to me at the perfect time in my life. He came three years after my husband and I experienced three miscarriages in a row, a pile of quiet loss I thought would never diminish until my first son was born in 2012. Then in 2014, I learned we would be expecting another boy. No one was more excited than his big brother and no one more careful than me.

I didn’t drink coffee during the pregnancy, even though my doctor said a cup a day was fine. I avoided all soft cheeses, even though I knew I’d be okay if it was pasteurized. I wore ugly, comfortable shoes to work, knowing that I have a penchant for falling.

When I was younger my knees would just decide on a whim to fail me and pull me to the ground. Doctors determined I had dislocatable knee caps and through the years I’ve grown to expect that at any time it might feel as if someone took a bat to my knees, sweeping them from underneath me. It happened during a ping pong game once and another time while I was crossing a cobblestone road in Brazil.

I don’t know if it was my knees that caused me to fall the day I strapped the baby to my chest in an Ergo carrier, making sure to carefully tuck him into a padded infant insert, but I know they didn’t help me when I needed them most. That morning, my mother and I had planned to walk five minutes to CVS to get my older son some air and a toy. When we left the house, it was sunny and my toddler was happily babbling in his car-shaped wagon. Three minutes later, the sky and the day turned dark. The rain pummeled us. My toddler wailed. My mother pushed him faster. I reached to cover the tiny inch of head peeking out of the carrier and don’t remember seeing the curb or feeling my shoe slip off. My knees hit the pavement first. Then my elbows. Then that tiny inch of head.

He cried when we fell. I would later learn this was a good thing, that it meant he hadn’t blacked out.

I would also learn that these incidents happen more often than anyone talks about. As I sat holding my son in the hospital waiting for scans to confirm what I feared most — that he had a skull fracture — I was told repeatedly by nurses and doctors that they see this all the time. I assumed they were trying to comfort me when I felt most alone, most inept. But they weren’t.

Dr. John Myseros, vice chief of neurosurgery at Children’s National Health System and the doctor who attended to my son, said he personally sees a couple of cases each week. And nationally, according to data he provided when I contacted him recently, more than 600,000 children visit emergency rooms for blunt head trauma, and of those, 95,000 have intracranial injuries and 5,700 will die as a result. Intracranial injury remains the leading cause of traumatic death in childhood.

The skull fracture my son experienced — and which most babies experience, according to Myseros — was linear, or a crack in the bone that does not depress into the brain and doesn’t usually require surgery or result in brain damage. In other words, during the most unfortunate day of my life, I was lucky — even if it didn’t feel that way.

“The thousands of parents who drop their kids, fall with their kids, turn around for a moment and have their kids fall,” Myseros said, “need to know that it is NOT their fault, unless of course they intentionally injure their child, which sadly does happen.”

My son was admitted to the hospital overnight and by morning, Myseros told me he didn’t believe there would be any lasting damage. Today, I have a chubby 7 month old who has hit every developmental milestone and smiles more than he cries — something I am grateful for everyday. I am also grateful for the CVS staff member who, without hesitation, tore open a bag of padding to wrap around his wet body, the neighbor I hadn’t met before he dropped everything to drive us to a hospital where an ambulance would take us to Children’s, and the nurse who didn’t just lend me her charger when my phone died but insisted I keep it because, although she didn’t say it, who knew when I would be going home.

While at the hospital, when everything still remained unknown, I took another photo of my son.

In this one, he is restrained in braces from his head to his naval, his face scrunched so tightly that one ear is bent. I didn’t look at the screen as I clicked it. I couldn’t. But I took it in hopes that one day — maybe when he’s a screaming toddler fighting with his older brother — that it would serve as a reminder of what I learned that day: While we can’t write our children’s stories, we can enjoy the chapters that aren’t filled with things we wish we didn’t know.

Theresa Vargas is a reporter at The Washington Post who is currently on leave, living in Indonesia with her family.

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Theresa Vargas is a reporter for the Post’s local enterprise team.",As I sat holding my son in the hospital waiting for scans to confirm what I feared most — that he had a skull fracture — I was told repeatedly by nurses and doctors that they see this all the time.
"A 10-year-old Russian boy, Matvei Tcepliaev, recently made an extraordinary discovery in Jerusalem. Working as a volunteer in the Temple Mount Sifting Project, he found a 3,000-year-old seal—engraved limestone about the size of a thimble, with a hole at one end so it could be hung from a string—from the time of King David.

The artifact was nestled in the hundreds of tons of earth and rock that had been illegally excavated from below the Temple Mount in the late 1990s by the Muslim Waqf, a trust that retains authority over...","In The Wall Street Journal, Jerold S. Auerbach writes about a boy’s discovery in Israel that rebuts Palestinian revisionism regarding the Temple Mount."
"Treasurer Joe Hockey has urged first home buyers to get “a good job that pays good money” if they want to enter the property market.

When asked at a press conference on Tuesday if residential property in Australia’s biggest city was out of the reach of many, Hockey said: “If housing were unaffordable in Sydney, no one would be buying it.”

Related: Sydney and parts of Melbourne are 'unequivocally' in a house price bubble

“The starting point for first home buyers is to get a good job that pays good money,” he added.

The comments were slammed on social media, with many users criticising the treasurer for being simplistic and out of touch with the difficulties Generation Y faces in enter the property market.

Mr Hockey, next time you're in hospital getting seen to by a nurse, are you going to insist that s/he gets a job that pays good money?

Opposition leader Bill Shorten was scathing of the treasurer’s comments.

“What planet is Joe Hockey living on?” Shorten asked. “This isn’t just another Joe Hockey gaffe; this is proof he just doesn’t get the pressures families are facing.”

Joe Hockey must be the only person in Australia who doesn’t think housing affordability is an issue. As far as he’s concerned, if Joe Hockey’s doing OK then everyone else is too,” Shorten said.

“How are Australians supposed to find the ‘good jobs that pay more’ when unemployment is at its highest levels in more than a decade under his government?”

Greens leader Richard Di Natale labelled the treasurer’s comments “fantasy land stuff” from a man charged with the “nation’s purse strings”.

“That’s right out there, that sort of language, that’s let them eat cake sort of stuff,” Di Natale told reporters in Melbourne. “Go and get a job that pays more money? We are just going to magic these jobs up out of thin air?”

Hockey continued to deny that parts of Australia were experiencing a housing bubble, saying that housing affordability would become easier as supply increased.

“I say again in relation to what is reasonably expensive entry costs for first home buyers into housing in Australia, the best response is to build more housing,” he said, adding that there is a greater role for both state and local governments in accelerating the building process.

The comments come just days after the treasury secretary, John Fraser, warned that parts of Sydney and Melbourne are experiencing a housing bubble, and the head of the financial systems inquiry, David Murray, said a sharp fall in property prices could be detrimental to the economy.

In August, Hockey came under fire for being out of touch after suggesting Australia’s “poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases”.

The treasurer admitted on Tuesday that measures to restore integrity in foreign investment would not result in a drop in residential prices.

Related: Joe Hockey forces Chinese investor to sell $39m Sydney mansion

The Foreign Investment Review Board is investigating nearly 200 cases of suspected unlawful purchases of property. Foreign investors can buy new property in Australia, but must seek approval before purchasing existing residential property. Temporary residents who buy property must sell it when they leave the country.

“I am not suggesting this is going to represent thousands and thousands of homes. But what it is going to do is provide reassurance that people are complying with the law when they engage in the purchase of a property,” Hockey said. “We welcome foreign investment in new real estate because it adds to the stock.”

A new set penalties for foreign investors who buy existing stock will come into play from 1 December. The government wants members to dob in suspicious foreign property owners via a new telephone hotline. Concerned citizens can call the hotline on 1800 050 377.

But Hockey warned against racially profiling investors.

“They may look like foreign buyers, but they’re not,” he said, pointing to the fact that some Chinese families have been in Australia longer than his own family.","Asked whether Sydney’s property prices are out of reach for many, the treasurer responded: ‘If housing were unaffordable in Sydney, no one would be buying it’"
"Missing out on deep sleep can leave you feeling slow-witted and irritable in the morning, but the consequences don't necessarily end there. Over time, too little deep sleep may also take a toll on your heart by contributing to high blood pressure, a new study suggests.

Healthy young and middle-aged adults spend about 20% to 25% of their sleeping hours in the stages known as slow-wave sleep (so called because of the brain waves associated with it). This sleep phase is considered restorative and has been shown to be important for memory and mental performance.

The new study, which included 784 men over the age of 65, adds to the growing evidence that slow-wave sleep is also essential to our metabolism and heart health. Compared to men who spent at least 17% of their sleep time in the slow-wave phase, those who spent less than 4% in this restful state had 83% higher odds of developing high blood pressure (hypertension) years later, the study found.

LIST: 7 Tips for the Best Sleep Ever

The research should be considered ""exploratory,"" the authors say, and it doesn't prove a direct link between sleep patterns and hypertension. But it suggests that ""an important aspect of successful aging is the preservation of good sleep quality,"" says Eve Van Cauter, the director of the Sleep, Metabolism and Health Center at the University of Chicago.

Older people tend to get less slow-wave sleep as they age, and fighting this natural decline — through healthy sleep habits, for instance — could be an ""extraordinarily important strategy"" for heading off hypertension, adds Van Cauter, who wasn't involved in the new research.

Sleep problems have been linked to high blood pressure before. Sleep apnea, a chronic disorder in which a person wakes up struggling for breath several times during the night, is strongly linked to hypertension, although it's not clear whether the disorder causes high blood pressure or vice versa — or whether the two conditions feed each other.

Untangling the relationship has been tricky in part because obesity increases the risk of both high blood pressure and sleep apnea. Obesity could play a role in the link between slow-wave sleep and hypertension as well; in a previous analysis, the authors of the current research found that insufficient slow-wave sleep was related to obesity.

LIST: 10 Natural Ways to Lower Blood Pressure

In the new study, published today in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, researchers at the University of California–San Diego and Harvard University assessed the sleep quality of the participants using polysomnography, a technique in which electrodes are used to track brain activity.

All of the men had normal blood pressure when they underwent the test, which was performed on a single night in their own beds (as opposed to in a sleep lab). When the researchers followed up with the men an average of 3.5 years later, roughly 31% of the study participants had developed hypertension.

Once the researchers took age, body mass index, and race into account, they found that time spent in slow-wave sleep was the only measure of sleep quality associated with hypertension risk. Forty-one percent of the men who got the least slow-wave sleep went on to develop hypertension, compared to 26% of the men who got the most slow-wave sleep.

LIST: Bedtime Behaviors That Will Help You Sleep

Dr. Susan Redline, one of the study authors and a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, says that going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, avoiding alcohol and tobacco before bedtime, and other good ""sleep hygiene"" can help people sleep longer, and probably more deeply.

But, to maximize slow-wave sleep, she adds, ""Probably the most important thing is to make sure that there is not a sleep disorder like sleep apnea or periodic leg movement that is causing disruptions.""

The study had some key limitations. The researchers tracked the men's sleep on a single night, for instance, and they likewise measured blood pressure just once or twice. More research will be needed to address these shortcomings and also to rule out factors besides sleep quality (such as diet or medical conditions) that may independently contribute to hypertension, the study notes.

Nor is it clear whether habitual sleep deprivation — an increasingly common problem — has long-term effects on overall sleep quality and slow-wave sleep, Van Cauter says.

""It's a possibility,"" she says. ""In the sixties, the average American was reporting sleeping 8.5 hours a night. Now most studies are showing six to seven hours. That's a huge change.""","Missing out on deep sleep can leave you feeling slow-witted and irritable in the morning, but the consequences don't necessarily end there. Over time, too little deep sleep may also take a toll on your heart by contributing to high blood pressure, a new study suggests."
"Do you remember the time President Obama shook hands with Iranian president Ahmadinejad? If you took part in a recent psychological study, it’s possible that you will. More than 5,000 participants were presented with doctored photographs representing fabricated political events, with around half claiming to have memories for the false scenarios (Obama has, of course, never shaken hands with the Iranian president). Part of a decades-long program of research by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, the latest study provides a neat demonstration of how our memories are created in the present rather than being faithful records of the past.

(MORE: Does “Stress” Hide Deeper Social Problems?)

The popular perception of memory shows a considerable lag with the new scientific consensus. The psychologists Daniel J. Simons and Christopher Chabris have conducted two large-scale surveys showing that roughly half of respondents thought that memory works like a video recorder. And although many people do recognize that their memories are fallible, there is much less understanding of precisely how and why they fail us.

Memory is a system with many moving parts, and thus many processes that can go wrong. The various ‘sins of memory’ (in Daniel L. Schacter’s phrase) give us the best clues about how this complex mental function works. Psychologist and neuroscientists have taken advantage of these clues to explore the strong links between imagination and memory, to demonstrate how social factors influence our recollections, and to show how memory may actually have evolved to predict the future rather than keep track of the past. There is arguably little evolutionary advantage to being able to recall the past in vivid detail; it is much more useful to be able to use past experience to predict what comes next.

(MORE: What Actors Can Teach Us About Memory and Learning)

So why are we so attached to our idea of memories as fixed, unchanging possession? There are many reasons, but one is that memories are foundational for our sense of self. This is particularly true for early childhood memories (which the scientists tell us are the most unreliable of all). In her striking description of lying as a small child in her cot at St. Ives, Virginia Woolf noted that this wasn’t just her earliest memory; it was the moment she became the person (and the writer) she was. It is no wonder that we resist the idea that our memories are collages of disparate sources of information, assembled and reassembled long after the event.

Bracing as it might be, this new way of thinking about memory does not have to lead to self-doubt. It simply requires that we take our memories with a pinch of salt, and forge new relationships with them. They may be a kind of fiction, but the manner of their making speaks volumes about those who create them. In the Obama-Ahmadinejad study, the researchers found that events were more likely to be falsely recalled if they fit the individual’s political affiliations (conservatives were more likely than liberals to ‘remember’ the Ahmadinejad handshake, for example). Whether the events happened or not, your biases and beliefs shape the kind of memories you form, and thus reveal the kind of person you are.

MORE: Why Insults Hurt — And Why They Shouldn’t",New research confirms that memories are created in the present rather than being faithful records of the past
"A happily retired Philip Roth is spending his days swimming, watching baseball and nature-spotting, revelling in the fact that ""there's more to life than writing and publishing fiction"", according to a new interview.

Reiterating his bleak view about the future of literature – that ""two decades on the size of the audience for the literary novel will be about the size of the group who read Latin poetry"" – the 80-year-old Roth told Stanford scholar Cynthia Haven that his disengagement from the world of writing is still very much in evidence. Asked by Haven if he really believes his talent – which has won him the Man Booker International prize and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel – will ""let [him] quit"" writing, Roth responded: ""You better believe me, because I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009.""

""I have no desire to write fiction,"" said the Pulitzer prize-winning literary giant. ""I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.""

Instead: ""I swim, I follow baseball, look at the scenery, watch a few movies, listen to music, eat well and see friends. In the country I am keen on nature.""

He is also studying 19-century American history. ""My mind is full of then,"" he said. ""Barely time left for a continuing preoccupation with aging, writing, sex and death. By the end of the day I am too fatigued.""

Haven was interviewing Roth by email ahead of Stanford's book club later this month on his 1979 classic, The Ghost Writer. He told her that he had no desire to be labelled as a Jewish American author, despite the fact that, in her words, ""many consider you the preeminent Jewish American writer"".

""'An American-Jewish writer' is an inaccurate if not also a sentimental description, and entirely misses the point,"" he responded. ""The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word. For me, as for Cheever, DeLillo, Erdrich, Oates, Stone, Styron and Updike, the right next word is an American-English word. I flow or I don't flow in American English.""

Even if he were writing in Hebrew or Yiddish, he would not be a Jewish writer, said Roth: he would be a Hebrew author, or a Yiddish author.

""The American republic is 238 years old,"" he said. ""My family has been here 120 years, or for just more than half of America's existence. They arrived during the second term of President Grover Cleveland, only 17 years after the end of Reconstruction. Civil War veterans were in their 50s. Mark Twain was alive. Sarah Orne Jewett was alive. Henry Adams was alive. All were in their prime. Walt Whitman was dead just two years. Babe Ruth hadn't been born. If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.""

Roth won't be attending the book club meeting at Stanford on 25 February, and the novelist told Haven that he had never been to a book club, despite their popularity.

""I know nothing about book clubs,"" he said. ""From my many years as a university literature teacher I do know that it takes all the rigour one can muster over the course of a semester to get even the best undergraduates to read precisely the fiction at hand, with all their intelligence, without habitual moralising, ingenious interpretation, biographical speculation and, too, to beware of the awful spectre of the steamrolling generalisation. Is such protracted rigour the hallmark of book clubs?"" he asked.

Roth's final novel, Nemesis, was published in 2010.","'I did what I did and it's done', novelist tells interviewer, explaining that these days he's keener on swimming and watching baseball"
"KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - MARCH 26: Malaysia's Minister of Defence and acting Minister of Transport Hishammuddin Hussein (C) is viewed through a lens as he speaks during a press conference on March 26, 2014 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The search for flight MH370 resumes today after rought winds and high swells prevented crews from searching for debris yesterday. Six countries have joined the search, now considered to be a recovery effort, after authorities have announced that airliner crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean and that there are no survivors. (Photo by Rahman Roslan/Getty Images)

Malaysia's Minister of Defence and Acting Transport Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein (L) looks at maps as Director General of Civil Aviation Department (DCA) Azharuddin Abdul Rahman (R) answers questions during a press conference at a hotel near Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang on March 17, 2013. An investigation into the pilots of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 intensified on March 17 after officials confirmed that the last words spoken from the cockpit came after a key signalling system was manually disabled. AFP PHOTO/ MANAN VATSYAYANA (Photo credit should read MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images)

US navy captain Mark Matthews (C) speaks with journalists following a media conference involving Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in Perth on April 9, 2014 on the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Australian ship Ocean Shield detected two more signals on April 8 to match a pair of transmissions picked up earlier in the week that have been analysed as consistent with flight data recorder emissions, Angus Houston said. AFP PHOTO / POOL / Greg WOOD (Photo credit should read GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

Flight MH370's pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA - APRIL 10 : A handout image released by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) in Canberra, Australia, 10 April 2014, shows the search area and Sonobuoy search area where 14 planes and 13 ships are scouring a 57,923 square km area of ocean for the wreckage of flight MH370 on 10 April 2014.Flight MH370 went missing after losing radio contact with Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic control after leaving Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8. The Beijing-bound flight carried 239 passengers including 12 flight crew from 14 different countries. (Photo by AMSA/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Ben Pelletier, marine operations engineer for Bluefin Robotics, attempts to retrieve a submarine in Quincy, Mass., Wednesday, April 9, 2014. Bluefin Robotics shipped a version of their submarine to help locate the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, by using its side-scan sonar. (AP Photo/Scott Eisen)

A submarine built by Bluefin Robotics is lowered into the water by systems engineer Cheryl Mierzwa in Quincy, Mass., Wednesday, April 9, 2014. Bluefin Robotics shipped a version of their submarine to help locate the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, by using its side-scan sonar. (AP Photo/Scott Eisen)

Ben Pelletier, marine operations engineer for Bluefin Robotics, attempts to retrieve a submarine in Quincy, Mass., Wednesday, April 9, 2014. Bluefin Robotics shipped a version of their submarine to help locate the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, by using its side-scan sonar. (AP Photo/Scott Eisen)

In this April 9, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force, a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion flies past Australian Defense vessel Ocean Shield on a mission to drop sonar buoys to assist in the acoustic search of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. The ship searching for the missing Malaysian jet has detected two more underwater signals that may be emanating from the aircraft's black boxes, and the Australian official in charge of the search expressed hope Wednesday that the plane's wreckage will soon be found. (AP Photo/Australian Defense Force, LSIS Bradley Darvill) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

This image provided by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre on Wednesday, April 9, 2014, shows a map indicating the locations of signals detected by vessels looking for signs of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. An Australian official overseeing the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane said underwater sounds picked up by equipment on an Australian navy ship are consistent with transmissions from black box recorders on a plane. (AP Photo/Joint Agency Coordination Centre) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

Angus Houston (2nd-L), head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre leading the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 speaks at a media conference in Perth on April 9, 2014. Australian ship Ocean Shield detected two more signals on April 8 to match a pair of transmissions picked up earlier in the week that have been analysed as consistent with flight data recorder emissions, Houston said. AFP PHOTO / POOL / Greg WOOD (Photo credit should read GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

A graphic of the area being searched for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, is displayed during a media conference involving Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in Perth on April 9, 2014. Australian ship Ocean Shield detected two more signals on April 8 to match a pair of transmissions picked up earlier in the week that have been analysed as consistent with flight data recorder emissions, Houston said. AFP PHOTO / POOL / Greg WOOD (Photo credit should read GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

In this April 7, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force Able Seaman Clearance Diver Michael Arnold is towed by a fast response craft from the Australian Defense's ship Ocean Shield as he scans the water for debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometers (29,954 square miles) of ocean, 2,270 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth, Australia. (AP Photo/Australian Defense Force, Lt. Ryan Davis) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

In this April 7, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force Able Seaman Clearance Divers Matthew Johnston, right, and Michael Arnold, from the Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield, scan the water for debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometers (29,954 square miles) of ocean, 2,270 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth, Australia. (AP Photo/Australian Defense Force, Lt. Ryan Davis) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

In this April 7, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force Able Seaman Clearance Diver Matthew Johnston is towed by a fast response craft from Australian Defense's ship Ocean Shield as he scans the water for debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometers (29,954 square miles) of ocean, 2,270 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth, Australia. (AP Photo/Australian Defense Force, Lt. Ryan Davis) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

In this April 7, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force Able Seaman Clearance Divers Matthew Johnston, right, and Michael Arnold, from the Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield, scan the water for debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometers (29,954 square miles) of ocean, 2,270 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth, Australia. (AP Photo/Australian Defense Force, Lt. Ryan Davis) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

In this April 7, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force a fast response craft manned by members from the Australian Defense's ship Ocean Shield is deployed to scan the water for debris of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometers (29,954 square miles) of ocean, 2,270 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth, Australia. (AP Photo/Australia Defense Force, LSIS Bradley Darvill) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

In this April 7, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force, a fast response craft manned by members from the Australian Defense's ship Ocean Shield tows Able Seaman Clearance Diver Michael Arnold as they scan the water for debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometers (29,954 square miles) of ocean, 2,270 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth, Australia. (AP Photo/Australian Defense Force, LSIS Bradley Darvill) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

Diagram shows three types of technology used in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

This image provided by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre on Monday, April 7, 2014, shows a map indicating the locations of search vessels looking for signs of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. An Australian official overseeing the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane said underwater sounds picked up by equipment on an Australian navy ship are consistent with transmissions from black box recorders on a plane. (AP Photo/Joint Agency Coordination Centre) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre leading the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, points to a graphic of the search area during a media conference in Perth on April 7, 2014. An Australian navy ship has detected new underwater signals consistent with aircraft black boxes, Houston said on April 7, describing it as the 'most promising lead' so far in the month-old hunt for missing Flight MH370. AFP PHOTO / Greg WOOD (Photo credit should read GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

FILE - In this Sunday, March 30, 2014 file photo, the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield lies docked at naval base HMAS Stirling while being fitted with a towed pinger locator to aid in her roll in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in Perth, Australia. Crews searching for the jet launched a targeted underwater hunt on Friday, April 4 for the plane's black boxes along a stretch of remote ocean, with just days left before the devices' batteries are expected to run out. The Ocean Shield, which is dragging a towed pinger locator from the U.S. Navy, and the British navy's HMS Echo, which has underwater search gear on board, will converge along a 240-kilometer (150-mile) track in a desolate patch of the southern Indian Ocean, said Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith, File)

Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre leading the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, displays a graphic of the search area during a media conference in Perth on April 7, 2014. An Australian navy ship has detected new underwater signals consistent with aircraft black boxes, Houston said on April 7, describing it as the 'most promising lead' so far in the month-old hunt for missing Flight MH370. AFP PHOTO / Greg WOOD (Photo credit should read GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

Map shows search areas for missing Malaysia Airlines missing jet.; 3c x 5 inches; 146 mm x 127 mm;

A Chinese relative of passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 cries during a mass prayer for the missing plane, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sunday, April 6, 2014. The head of the multinational search for the missing Malaysia airlines jet said that electronic pulses reportedly picked up by a Chinese ship are an encouraging sign but stresses they are not yet verified. (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)

Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft flies over Perth towards the international airport returning from search operations for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in Perth, Australia, Sunday, April 6, 2014. Retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, the head of the multinational search, confirmed that a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday, but he stressed the signals had not been verified as linked to the missing plane. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith)

A Chinese Ilyushin IL-76s aircraft taxies past another parked on the tarmac at Perth International Airport after returning from search operations for wreckage and debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, in Perth, Australia, Monday, April 7, 2014. It’s not a question most governments involved in the hunt for Flight 370 care to answer: How much has the far-flung, month-long search cost? Several Chinese ships and planes have been involved in the search, but China’s foreign ministry did not respond to questions about the expense of the effort. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith)

A man places a LED candle after a mass prayer for passengers onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sunday, April 6, 2014. The head of the multinational search for the missing Malaysia airlines jet said that electronic pulses reportedly picked up by a Chinese ship are an encouraging sign but stresses they are not yet verified. (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)

PERTH, Australia (AP) - Following four strong underwater signals in the past week, all has gone quiet in the hunt for the missing Malaysian airline, meaning the batteries on the all-important black boxes may have finally died.

Despite having no new pings to go on, crews are continuing their search Sunday for debris and any sounds that could still be emanating. They're desperately trying to pinpoint where the Boeing 777 could be amid an enormous patch of deep ocean.

No new electronic pings have been heard since April 8, and the batteries powering the locator beacons on the jet's black box recorders may already be dead. They only last about a month, and that window has passed. Once officials are confident no more sounds will be heard, a robotic submersible will be sent down.",Article - Missing plane's black box batteries may have died
"Donald Trump’s speech at the tony Plaza Hotel on Friday was interrupted several times by loud protesters, including a Jewish group that likened his policies to fascism.

The Republican presidential frontrunner, in his hometown to address the Pennsylvania GOP’s annual Commonwealth Club luncheon at the high-end Manhattan hotel he once owned, was first interrupted by a half-dozen protesters.

“Mama, mama tell us why, why our people gotta die? Donald Trump is trying to bring us down, attacking people black and brown,” the mini mob chanted.

Security quickly grabbed them and booted them from the ballroom affair, which was closed to the press. Video showed a humiliated woman being thrown on the floor before being tossed out the door.

EDITORIAL: MUSLIM-BASHING TRUMP TOO TOXIC FOR ISRAEL TRIP

In his speech, Trump repeatedly bashed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and claimed former Mayor Ed Koch was a supporter of his.

But George Arzt, Koch’s former press secretary and close friend, said the late mayor was a huge Hillary Clinton fan so almost certainly would have backed her in the race and thought Trump was “bombastic.”

About halfway through Trump’s talk, the demonstration against him began.

A few people stood up from their table and started quoting parts of “First They Came,” a poem by Martin Niemoller about the danger of keeping silent when other groups are being persecuted.

The haunting poem’s cadence was used in reference to Trump on the Daily News’ front page Wednesday, above a photo of him holding the Statue of Liberty’s head in one hand and a scimatar in the other.

MAJORITY OF AMERICANS DISAGREE WITH DONALD TRUMP'S PROPOSAL TO BAR MUSLIMS FROM ENTERING U.S., BUT GOP SUPPORT PLAN

The second wave of protesters were with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and included Upper East Side resident Jordan Wouk, 67.

“This is dangerous,” Wouk said of Trump’s popularity. “I’m very upset about what I see. It’s creeping fascism from this part of the GOP.”

Another protester, Marjory Fine, 62, said she felt compelled to interrupt because Trump’s language reminds her of the Nazis.

“What he (Trump) said about ‘make America good again’ ... it sounds like fascism,” she said.

She said it particularly bothered her as a Jewish woman whose family escaped the Holocaust by coming to the United States.

“If we weren’t allowed to come here as immigrants, we would have been in trouble,” she said.

The Donald took all of the protests in stride, saying the demonstrations showed he was “winning,” according to one attendee.

He also cracked, “Wow, this is a tougher room than I thought.”

TED CRUZ TRIES TO DOWNPLAY COMMENTS QUESTIONING DONALD TRUMP'S 'JUDGMENT,' BUT NOT BEFORE TRUMP FIRES BACK ON TWITTER

The protests didn’t sway Trump supporter Marc Scarinji, a Pennsylvania Republican.

“He’s the best candidate and the best man to make America great again,” said Scarinji.

Meanwhile, the gloves are finally off between Trump and rival Ted Cruz, even if Cruz would rather have kept them on.

After the Texas senator got caught on tape criticizing Trump’s “judgment” at a private fund-raiser, the divisive billionaire took aim at the man he said just a few weeks ago could be his vice presidential pick.

“Looks like @tedcruz is getting ready to attack. I am leading by so much he must. I hope so, he will fall like all others. Will be easy!” Trump tweeted Friday morning.

Cruz rapidly sought to de-escalate.

“The Establishment’s only hope: Trump & me in a cage match. Sorry to disappoint — @realDonaldTrump is terrific. #DealWithIt,” he tweeted early Friday afternoon.

Cruz has assiduously worked not to offend Trump throughout the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, seeking to keep a detente going and positioning himself to pick up some of the inflammatory mogul’s voters. But in a closed-door meeting, he questioned Trump’s judgment and readiness to be commander-in-chief, after admitting that he’s looked to “bear hug” Trump and Ben Carson during the race.

Trump is even stirring up even more controversy in Dubai, where his image and name were removed from a golf course and housing development amid uproar over his comments about banning Muslim travelers from the United States.

Protestor Marnie Halasa (l.) holds a sign ahead of Donald Trump’s appearance at the Plaza Hotel. Jordan Wouk (r.) said Trump's platform resembles fascism.

The disappearance of Trump’s branding from the multibillion-dollar development on the outskirts of Dubai comes as concerns over his comments grow in the Middle East, a region in which the businessman long has sought money-making opportunities.

Some of his deals appear to be in jeopardy, with the company behind the Trump Towers in Istanbul now saying it is assessing its partnership with the Republican.

In Dubai, Trump had a deal with Damac Properties to license his name and image for a housing project and two golf courses for an undisclosed sum.

A billboard once showing Trump golfing had been at Damac’s Akoya development, as well as an image of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

On Friday, all that remained was the board’s brown background, though another billboard declaring the development “The Beverly Hills of Dubai” still stood nearby.

Damac Properties has declined to comment on the removal of Trump’s name and billboard from the property.

Back home, the website for Trump Towers, Trump’s glitzy signature skyscraper in Manhattan, went offline for at least an hour Friday after activist hacking group Anonymous denounced the real-estate mogul for his anti-Muslim comments.

The website for the 68-story Trump Towers, which Trump often uses for his campaign, was down after a tweet from an account associated with the hacking collective that said: “Trump Towers NY site taken down as statement against racism and hatred.”

A spokesman for Trump Towers was not available for comment.",Donald Trump’s speech at the tony Plaza Hotel on Friday was interrupted several times by loud protesters.
"FAIRFAX, Va. – Carmela Dela Rosa offered no explanation, but a police officer testified Friday that she readily admitted what she had done: ""Yes I did it. I threw the baby off.""

The baby was Dela Rosa's own granddaughter, 2-year-old Angelyn Ogdoc. The toddler died Nov. 30 after authorities say Dela Rosa threw her off a sixth-story walkway connecting a multideck parking garage to Tysons Corner Center, one of northern Virginia's busiest shopping malls.

At a preliminary hearing in Fairfax County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, patrol officer Anthony Stancampiano testified that he immediately placed Dela Rosa under arrest after she admitted throwing the toddler off the bridge. Stancampiano said Dela Rosa did not give him a reason why.

In other testimony, Angelyn's mother tearfully recounted watching as Dela Rosa inexplicably held the toddler over the ledge and released her. The woman said that nothing unusual had happened that day, but that Dela Rosa had tried to commit suicide at least twice in recent months.

Dela Rosa is charged with murder. After Friday's hearing, Judge Helen F. Leiner certified the case to a grand jury. Commonwealth's Attorney Ray Morrogh said the grand jury will meet next week, and a trial date could be set shortly thereafter.

Morrogh said Dela Rosa's admission and her choice of word ""threw"" were telling.

""She didn't say she tripped or stumbled,"" Morrogh said.

Angelyn's mother and the defendant's daughter, Mary Kathlyn Dela Rosa Ogdoc, testified she had been walking just a few steps in front of the toddler and her mother and turned around to see ""my mother's hands come out under my daughter, over the railing."" Ogdoc's testimony was at times barely audible through the anguished sobs.

Ogdoc ran down the six flights of stairs to her daughter, who lived for several hours after the fall. When she got to the bottom, she looked up at her mother, who watched with no expression as she rested her head on the railing.

Ogdoc said the family had gone to the mall to eat at the food court and that nothing unusual happened. Under cross-examination, Ogdoc said she usually tried to keep a close eye on Angelyn when she was with Dela Rosa because of the grandmother's suicide attempts.

After Friday's hearing, public defender Dawn Butorac said Dela Rosa's mental problems were well known within the family and that she had been seeing a psychologist for 10 years. Butorac said she believes at this stage that Dela Rosa's mental health problems rise to the level of legal insanity.

While Ogdoc wept throughout her testimony and was barely able to spit out the words ""my mother"" without flashing anger, Dela Rosa sat through the hearing in a green prison jumpsuit, paying close attention but betraying no emotion.","Carmela Dela Rosa offered no explanation, but a police officer testified Friday that she readily admitted what she had done: Yes I did it. I threw the baby off."
"Nearly seven years after the financial crisis, banks are still churning out profits and wrestling with regulators.

Yet Wall Street, by many important measures, appears to be in the middle of a humbling transformation.

Bonuses are shrinking. Revenue growth has stalled. Entire business lines are being cut. And some investors are even asking whether the biggest banks should be broken up — changes that are all largely attributed to a not-so-well-known set of rules regarding capital, a financial metric that captures how much cushion banks might have in the event of a crisis.

“We have substantially reduced the amount of risk they can take,” said Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary. ""We’ve cut the profitability of banking roughly in half.”

At an industry gathering of Wall Street executives last week, the conversation returned again and again to the big changes already underway — and those yet to come — that have hollowed out trading floors and office towers in Manhattan and Connecticut and taken the swagger out of an industry that has long defined New York.

Revenue growth at U.S. banks has been flat so far this decade, and the average pay for a Goldman Sachs employee has fallen by 25 percent since 2009.

Take Goldman Sachs. It recently reported that the size of its balance sheet — all its loans and holdings — shrank 6 percent since 2010 and 24 percent since 2007, while the pay per employee fell 13 percent since 2010 and 43 percent since 2007.

“We have significantly adjusted both compensation levels and fixed expenses,” the chief executive of Goldman, Lloyd C. Blankfein, told the industry conference in Florida. “We have transformed the financial profile of the firm.”

The decline of these important measures has been largely overlooked partly because the banks successfully fended off more radical proposed changes after the crisis and have recently beaten back some signature elements of the 2010 Dodd-Frank overhaul. And profits at the banks have remained high. JPMorgan Chase recently turned in its largest annual profit ever.

The growth in profits, however, has largely been achieved by cutting costs, including salaries and head count. Overall revenue, the most basic indicator of the industry’s health, has stopped growing for the first time in decades, and has even declined at some banks, forcing executives to rethink every line of their business.

These changes have been spurred partly by the thicket of new rules and prohibitions demanded by Dodd-Frank. In addition, the economic uncertainty around the world has made it harder for banks to expand, which could change once the economic recovery gains surer footing.

But industry executives and regulators alike agree that the broad reshaping of the industry has been driven primarily by the efforts of the Federal Reserve and other regulators to strengthen the amount of capital held by big banks, measures that banks have had less success in lobbying against.

In the simplest sense, the rules about capital require banks to effectively spend a portion of a limited financial resource — their capital — every single time they take a risk by making a loan or a trade. The riskier the trade or loan, the more capital the bank has to allocate.

Banks can increase their pool of capital by raising more money from investors or holding onto profits, but doing so generally costs money and reduces profits accruing to shareholders, which typically include employees of the bank.

The capital rules have had the effect of encouraging banks to focus on parts of their operations in which they are potentially taking fewer risks — like the divisions that manage money for pensions and investors — and de-emphasizing the trading desks.

Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, shares his thoughts on breaking up big banks.

Some outspoken critics of the banks say that the capital rules do not go far enough and have not changed the day-to-day business at banks.

But even many of the industry’s toughest regulators and critics say the capital rules have forced banks to reconsider every business line and have dashed much of the confidence the industry had both before and immediately after the financial crisis.

“You are hard-wiring a change into the banking industry,” said Mike Mayo, an outspoken bank analyst who has called for the largest banks to shrink. “When we look back 10 years from now, we are going to say the biggest impact was from capital rules.”

Morgan Stanley, which has become Exhibit A for this sort of change, has gone from making nearly 70 percent of its revenue from trading operations before the financial crisis to less than half last year.

This is part of a broader shift across the industry. In 2006, before the financial crisis, banks dedicated 41 percent of their assets to trading — a number that fell to 21 percent in 2013, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.

In a more concrete sign of the change, several foreign banks that built sprawling trading floors in Connecticut less than a decade ago are now looking to sell the buildings or use them for other purposes.

The capital rules have not had nearly as much impact on Main Street banking operations that focus on things like mortgages and small-business lending, encouraging banks to expand in those areas while they shrink their Wall Street divisions.

The new requirements on capital and a closely related metric — leverage — have come in several waves and from different sources. The international organization of central banks, based in Basel, Switzerland, put out the so-called Basel III rules in 2011, demanding that the banks reach certain minimum capital levels by 2015, though the date has since been pushed back.

Many central banks, including the Fed in the United States, have said that banks in their countries must hold even higher capital levels and need to satisfy the requirements sooner than the dates required by Basel III.

Responding to a Goldman Sachs report suggesting the bank would be worth more broken up, Jamie Dimon, chief of JPMorgan Chase, said “we will be a port in the next storm. You want me to be a port.”

In the last few months, the Fed has indicated that it will also require bigger, more interconnected banks to achieve higher capital levels than smaller ones.

Because these new rules are expected to hit JPMorgan Chase particularly hard, some investors and analysts said recently that the bank might need to shrink to bring itself onto a level playing field with competitors. An analyst at Goldman Sachs wrote a report last month that suggested that JPMorgan could be worth more in pieces than it is in its current form.

While JPMorgan executives have said that they do not believe they will have to break up, they have acknowledged that they are singularly focused on managing their capital.

“We are trying to thread the needle, as you say, about making sure that we are as focused as we can be on maximizing the use of that scarce resource,” the chief financial officer at JPMorgan, Marianne Lake, said in a call with investors last month.

Beyond these large-scale changes, the particulars of how the capital requirements are calculated are resonating through every single business line in different ways.

Brady W. Dougan, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, one of the world’s biggest Wall Street banks, said considerations of capital were now a part of his everyday management of the bank.

“It’s become much more a game of driving the highest returns from the businesses that are most suited to the new environment,” he said.

Mr. Dougan is among the many Wall Street executives who say the new capital requirements have gone too far and have unintended consequences.

On the other side, critics of the banks like Sheila C. Bair, who was the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, say all the rules have still forced the banks to cut only at the periphery. But Ms. Bair said that the capital rules were forcing the industry to answer hard questions for the first time.

“We haven’t had that kind of scrutiny in the past, and I think that is healthy,” Ms. Bair said. “It’s not a bad thing for the banks to have to deal with that sort of discipline.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Rules Spur a Humbling Overhaul of Wall St. Banks. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe","Wall Street is in a transformation, as bonuses shrink, revenue growth stalls and business lines are cut, driven primarily by regulatory efforts."
"Ten people set out in kayaks at dawn Saturday and bobbed and splashed down a murky 1.5-mile stretch of the upper Los Angeles River, offering a paddle experience like no other in the city.

The L.A. Conservation Corps members were on a reconnaissance mission to confirm that the route through the San Fernando Valley's Sepulveda Basin was clear of potential hazards a week before the start of the 2nd annual Paddle the Los Angeles River program.

The scenery was captivating and, for the most part, serene as the flotilla skimmed over lazy currents of water the color of chocolate milk and smelling like old socks in the hardest working wetlands in Los Angeles.

The 70-foot channel has for years operated as a flood-control channel, wildlife sanctuary and escape valve for treated waste water befouled with chemicals and trash. Now, the soft-bottom swath of weedy islands, dense brush and willows draped with fast-food wrappers, plastic bags and clothes is one of the newest summer attractions in town.

As they maneuvered past discarded shopping carts and tree stumps, egrets and hawks flushed from trees leaning over the section of river that runs between Balboa and Burbank boulevards, about 17 miles northwest of downtown. Blue herons squawked angrily at the intruders.

Anglers stared, perhaps wondering how far the riders had traveled.

On a bluff, a woman pointed curiously at the vessels, then shouted, ""Watch out for the treacherous rapids just up ahead! Just kidding!""

An hour into the journey, Pablo Cardosa, the Conservation Corps' program manager, said, ""The water's a little lower than I expected. Otherwise, I think we're going to be in pretty good shape this year with our paying customers.""

Corps' spokesman Mike Mena agreed. ""Most folks will be pleased with the peaceful flows and lush greenery.""

Hope of transforming this portion of the river into a recreation area led to unlikely bedfellows — the city of Los Angeles, the Army Corps of Engineers, the for-profit L.A. River Expeditions and nonprofits including the River Project, Friends of the River, Urban Semillas and the Conservation Corps — to forge the plan allowing paying customers a chance to paddle it under tightly controlled conditions.

The first legal trips down the river in seven decades launched last August after the Army Corps issued the license allowing the Conservation Corps to operate the program on weekends. Its 290 tickets sold out in 10 minutes.

This year, the program will be handled by two operators — the Conservation Corps and L.A. River Expeditions — and expanded to accommodate 2,000 participants over a nine-week season ending Sept. 29.

Trips are being offered by the Conservation Corps on Tuesday through Saturday at a cost of $50 per person for a two-hour excursion, and $25 per person for a one-hour trip. Tickets go on sale Tuesday (

) will offer trips Sunday and Monday at similar prices.

The program is restricted to summer months as a safety precaution. That is because the river recedes in the summer but explodes into dangerous torrents with the first rains of winter.","Ten people set out in kayaks at dawn Saturday and bobbed and splashed down a murky 1.5-mile stretch of the upper Los Angeles River, offering a paddle experience like no other in the city."
"A midday advance on the stock market wilted in afternoon trading Friday after the FBI notified Congress that it will investigate new emails linked to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The market had started out on a strong note after the government reported that the economy broke out of a slump in the third quarter and grew at the fastest pace in two years.

The early climb was led by industrial, energy and technology companies, which would stand to benefit most from a pickup in economy, but the gains disappeared after the FBI made its announcement at about 1 p.m. Eastern. Clinton has led in recent polls, and the surprise development added new uncertainty just a week and a half before the presidential election.

""I think the betting has to be that there's nothing too damning, but we don't know,"" said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 8.49 points, less than 0.1 percent, at 18,161.19. The index was 80 points higher shortly before the new inquiry was disclosed, then went down as much as 74 points in the minutes that followed.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index dipped 6.63 points, or 0.3 percent, to 2,126.41. The Nasdaq composite slid 25.87 points, or 0.5 percent, to 5,190.10.

Health care companies took the biggest losses by far. Prescription drug distributor McKesson plunged to a three-year low after its revenue fell about $1.5 billion short of estimates. The company slashed its annual outlook because of weaker drug prices, and investors worried that McKesson and its rivals will compete by making bigger cuts in prices.

McKesson tumbled $36.39, or 22.7 percent, to $124.11 and competitor AmerisourceBergen lost $10.36, or 13 percent, to $69.14 while Cardinal Health shed $7.30, or 9.8 percent, to $67.50.

Drugmakers were pummeled on weak earnings. Amgen, the world's largest biotech drug company, reported solid results for the third quarter and raised its guidance. However the company also disclosed flat sales of the anti-inflammatory medication Enbrel, its top-selling drug. Enbrel will soon face more competition, which could hurt sales.

Amgen gave up $15.39, or 9.6 percent, to $145.18. It was the stock's worst one-day loss since October 2000. Drugmaker AbbVie disclosed weak sales and lost $3.86, or 6.3 percent, to $57.60.

Health care stocks are the worst performing part of the market this year. They're down 6 percent while the S&P 500 is up 4 percent. Their performance compared to the rest of the market has gotten even worse over the last few months.

Earlier, stocks rose after the economy grew faster than expected during the third quarter. The Commerce Department said exports grew and more businesses restocked their shelves. In total, gross domestic product grew 2.9 percent, which was better than economists expected. Growth had slowed down late last year, causing worry among investors.

McMillan said he thinks the economy should keep growing at a similar pace for the next few quarters.

""We're already seeing business and consumer confidence come back,"" he said.

General Electric and oil and gas drilling services company Baker Hughes rose as they discussed a possible deal. GE said the discussions concern a partnership and that it doesn't intend to buy Baker Hughes outright. Baker Hughes tried to merge with competitor Halliburton two years ago, but the companies walked away from the combination after the federal government sued to block it. GE added 59 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $29.22 and Baker Hughes gained $4.57, or 8.4 percent, to $59.12.

Other industrial stocks including United Technologies, which makes products including jet engines and elevators, and manufacturer Honeywell also traded higher.

Amazon sank after its profit came up short of analysts' estimates. The company also released a weak outlook. The stock is trading at all-time highs and has surged more than 30 percent over the last 12 months. It fell $42.04, or 5.1 percent, to $776.32.

AB InBev cut its annual revenue forecast following weak results from its business in Brazil. The world's largest beer maker fell $4.62, or 3.8 percent, to $116.84.

U.S. crude fell $1.02, or 2.1 percent, to $48.70 a barrel in New York. That was its lowest price this month. Brent crude, the international standard, lost 76 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $49.71 a barrel in London.

Bond prices edged higher. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 1.84 percent from 1.85 percent.

The dollar slipped to 104.78 yen from 105.29 yen. The euro rose to $1.0982 from $1.0898.

Metals turned higher. The price of gold picked up $7.30 to $1,276.80 an ounce. Silver rose 16 cents to $17.80 an ounce. Copper added 3 cents to $2.19 a pound.

In other energy trading, wholesale gasoline lost 2 cents to $1.47 a gallon. Heating oil gave up 3 cents to $1.54 a gallon and natural gas rose 4 cents to $3.11 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Overseas, France's CAC 40 rose 0.3 percent and the FTSE 100 in Britain picked up 0.1 percent. Germany's DAX edged down 0.2 percent. Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 gained 0.6 percent and South Korea's Kospi fell 0.2 percent. In Hong Kong the Hang Seng lost 0.8 percent.

AP Markets Writer Marley Jay can be reached at http://twitter.com/MarleyJayAP His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/marley-jay",A midday advance on the stock market wilted in afternoon trading Friday after the FBI notified Congress that it will investigate new emails linked to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The market had started out on a strong note after the government reported that the economy...
"Robots aren't known for their soft side. They build cars and defuse bombs; they don't, as a rule, make friends or deal with feelings. But a few groups of researchers around the world are working to build robots for an unusual purpose: Making emotional connections with

children who often struggle to interact with humans.

There's something about machines that really seems to resonate with many kids with autism, says Maja Mataric, co-director of the Robotics Research Lab at

. These children often have trouble reading human emotions and social cues — complexities they don't have to worry about when they're around a mechanical being.

""Robots are simpler than people,"" Mataric says.

Still, robots may seem like unlikely candidates for a job usually filled by therapists. As Mataric points out, the general public usually thinks of robots as either cold and efficient workers (at their best) or outright evil beings bent on enslaving humanity (at their worst).

The researchers at USC have a different vision. ""We're trying to create something that's endearing,"" Mataric says.

The result: Bandit, a metallic-colored, child-sized robot that can win the attention — and even empathy — of hard-to-reach kids.

Bandit has a pleasant, inviting face with a movable mouth, archable eyebrows and camera eyes that let him ""watch"" his playmates. He also has proximity sensors to gauge whether kids are backing away or moving in. If they get too close, he can wheel away.

With his motor-driven arms, Bandit can automatically mimic the motions of children and lead a game of Simon Says. He can make sad sighs or happy chips, and he blows bubbles with the push of a button. He can also talk in soothing tones, although USC researches are just beginning to use Bandit's speech in their work with children with autism.

Bandit, who has been around in various incarnations since 2007, is human-ish but still obviously a machine, which is exactly the look that Mataric and colleagues were aiming for. If he looked too much like a robot, kids wouldn't want to be his friend. And if he looked too human, he would likely make kids with autism feel intimidated and overwhelmed. ""It was a balance that we had to find,"" she says.

So far, a few dozen kids with autism spectrum disorders have spent time with Bandit in various small studies. Mataric would like to have more kids visit, but she says it's hard to find children and families who are willing and able to complete a study. Still, she has seen some real signs of progress. With Bandit's encouragement, children have learned how to take turns and initiate play with others. Bandit has even inspired some children to smile socially for the first time, she says.

Bandit has an overseas soulmate of sorts in KASPAR, a robot who works with kids with autism in a lab at the University of Hertfordshire in England.

With his baseball cap, black hair and child-like face, KASPAR (the name is an acronym for Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robotics) looks more like an oversized doll than a robot. But he's still a big hit among the autistic.

While not every child is interested in KASPAR, ""we've had a lot of successes over the years,"" says senior research fellow Ben Robins, who has been working with the robot for five years.

Robins has heard from parents and teachers that kids who always seemed to be locked in their own worlds suddenly showed an interest in other people after spending time with KASPAR. ""I can't say for sure that the robot is responsible,"" he adds.

Unlike Bandit, KASPAR doesn't run automatically; a nearby researcher guides his actions with a remote control. Robins acknowledges that the bot isn't as advanced as Bandit or many other robots out there. But that suits him just fine. ""I'm working from the standpoint of the children, not the technology,"" he says.

In the years since he first helped design the robot in 2006, Robins says he has removed features to make the robot simpler and easier to play with. ""Children need something basic that is both reliable and repetitive. Everything else is already so confusing to them.""

Robins envisions eventually building 15 or so KASPARs that schools or hospitals could keep for long-term therapy. Likewise, Mataric can picture a time when families could buy a Bandit or similar bot of their own to use at home.

For now, both goals are hampered by a lack of funding. Mataric says take-home Bandits could be a reality within five years if a venture capitalist would step up, but so far she isn't exactly swamped with offers.

Another challenge is that Mataric, Robins and other researchers lack the resources necessary to run the sort of large-scale clinical trials that could answer some key questions: How long do the benefits of therapy last? How do the social skills learned in the lab translate to the real world? Which children are most likely to benefit? And how can researchers design robots to get the best results with the fewest setbacks?

""Rigorous studies have to be conducted,"" says Zachary Warren, an assistant professor of pediatrics and director of the Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders at

in Nashville. ""That's how technology proves its worth.""

Warren has participated in small-scale research projects involving robots and children with autism. In April, he was the lead author of an article in the journal Pediatrics that evaluated a wide range of therapies for young children with autism. While many treatments out there have little scientific merit and no real track record for success, Warren sees real promise in the robotic approach. Machines, he says, may be able to help ""bridge the gap"" between children with autism and the outside world.

But robots aren't for everybody. Some children are profoundly disinterested or even flat-out afraid of the beings, Mataric says. ""Some kids aren't going to engage, and that's fine,"" she says.

In other cases, kids engage only too well, Robins says. Children can get very possessive of KASPAR, which defeats the goal of learning to cooperate and take turns. Robins also worries that some children could become overly attached to their robotic friend.

""At the end of the day, it's just a machine,"" Robins says. ""The ultimate goal is encouraging interaction with other people.""","Robots aren't known for their soft side. They build cars and defuse bombs; they don't, as a rule, make friends or deal with feelings. But a few groups of researchers around the world are working to build robots for an unusual purpose: Making emotional connections with  autistic  children who often struggle to interact with humans."
"Lonnie Johnson was brought up in Mobile, Alabama in the 1960s, when black children were not expected to go far, but such was his talent for engineering that he worked for Nasa, and helped test the first stealth bomber. But as he explains here, the invention that made his fortune was a water pistol - the extremely powerful Super Soaker.

I've always liked to tinker with things.

It started with my dad. He gave me my first lesson in electricity, explaining that it takes two wires for electric current to flow - one for the electrons to go in, the other for them to come out. And he showed me how to repair irons and lamps and things like that.

The kids in the neighbourhood took to calling me ""the Professor"". We had little projects that we would work on, and I was the ringleader.

For example, I put together a working engine out of parts from a scrapyard, and we stuck that engine on one of our go-karts. It had thin wagon wheels instead of tyres, and the hood was just a crate. You controlled the steering with a piece of string.

It was not perfect. We had to push the car to get it going, but after that it could sustain itself. And we had a lot of fun with it - though we were stopped by the police, because the vehicle was not exactly street-legal.

About three years later I was stopped a second time, when I was cycling around with some sheet metal on the back of my bicycle.

I was scared, but the police officer just wanted to know what the heck I was up to. So he escorted me home and I showed him how I was making a robot just like the ones I saw on TV.

Nobody had told me that the robots I saw on shows like Lost In Space had actors inside them!

This project took almost a whole year, my last year of high school. But finally the robot was finished and we entered him into a fair held by the Junior Engineering Technical Society at the University of Alabama.

We were the only black school there. This was 1968, just five years after Governor Wallace had stood in the doorway of the Foster Auditorium to attempt to block the enrolment of two black students - and my high school was in the news a lot because they were integrating us. White people were coming on TV, calling us all kinds of names, and saying they didn't want their kids coming to the school and being exposed to us.

It was all just curious to me. I have never really understood why in this country so many people look down on black people. I can't say it weighed on me at the time, though. I was just so excited to have my robot, to know that it worked and that I would have a chance to show it off.

The robot was called Linex. He was three-and-a-half-feet (1m) tall, had shoulders that could rotate and two arms with elbows and wrists that swivelled. He could pivot and move around on wheels.

His chest contained a propane tank that I'd filled with compressed air to move the limbs. His memory was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which I'd linked to a remote-control unit improvised from my sister's walkie-talkie.

Linex was controlled by signals transmitted through this unit. When you turned the tape recorder on it recorded different frequencies and tones, like the noises you get when you press the buttons on a telephone. Then it would play back and the robot would follow all the instructions.

Well, I'm not sure if it's because the judges at the science fair were from out of town, or if it's because they were from industry, not the university, but in any case they awarded me and Linex first place.

Looking back, I am struck by the University of Alabama's lack of curiosity about me. You would have thought they would want to know, ""Who is this guy? What kind of grades does he have? Is he qualified to attend school here?"" But those overtures were not made to me.

Instead, I got an Air Force scholarship and a math scholarship to Tuskegee University, a black school that's famous for the Tuskegee Airmen. During WWII there was an experiment to see if blacks could fly aeroplanes and the Tuskegee Airmen went on to become so successful as a fighter squadron escorting bombers that pilots would request them by name.

I received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, then graduated with a masters in nuclear engineering.

In one of my first jobs, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I found myself working on cooling systems for nuclear reactors with an engineer who had graduated from a prestigious New England university. To my surprise I found I just knew how to do things he didn't know how to do. I had been exposed to things he hadn't been exposed to and I was able to solve problems more easily. I was struck by how well Tuskegee had prepared me to be an engineer.

I thought, ""Here I am going toe-to-toe with an engineer from one of the top schools in the country.""

In 1975, I was called to active duty in the Air Force, studying US space launches that used nuclear power. I felt it was a big deal to be involved in such an important project - we were providing technical support for launch recommendations that ultimately went to the president.

After I presented an analysis that identified a possible failure Nasa had overlooked, I was invited on to the Galileo Mission, the unmanned spacecraft sent to study Jupiter and its moons. I was given responsibility for attaching the nuclear power source to the spacecraft and allocating power to the various systems - the science instruments, the computer, the power control system.

A major concern was that in the event of a short circuit, power to the memory would be lost and the spacecraft would be unable to call home. So I devised an isolation circuit that would maintain power to the computer memories even when power was lost.

So in 1982 you could say that I had a fun day job working on these spacecraft in Pasadena, California, but all this time I continued to tinker on my own ideas in the evening.

At that time I was experimenting with a new type of refrigeration system that would use water as a working fluid instead of ozone-destroying CFCs. One evening, I machined a nozzle and hooked it up to the bathroom sink, where I was performing some experiments. It shot a powerful stream of water across the bathroom sink. That's when I got the idea that a powerful water gun would be fun! But it was months before I did anything about it.

I rejoined the Air Force and relocated with my family to a military base in Omaha, Nebraska. I went on to become the first engineer from the Strategic Air Command - which had responsibility for identifying nuclear targets - assigned to test the B-2 Bomber, the Stealth Bomber.

After I had settled into my new job and home, I set to work making the parts of the plastic water gun on a little lathe and milling machine in the basement. I really had no idea if the magic I had in mind was going to materialise until all the parts were put together and I was ready to pull the trigger.

I gave the plastic gun to my seven-year-old daughter, Aneka, and watched as she used it to play with the other kids on the airbase. They couldn't even get close to her with their little squirt guns.

I soon found my prototype water pistol was an excellent ice-breaker at social events. I took it to an Air Force picnic one day and a superior officer, a major, saw it and said, ""What is that you got, Johnson?"" I said, ""This is my water gun, sir."" And he said, ""It looks really strange - does it work?""

So I turned to him and shot him right between the eyes. After that, the picnic was over. Everybody was throwing cups of water, cups of beer and it just turned into a big free-for-all.

My initial idea was to manufacture the gun myself. A factory told me it would cost $200,000 to get the first 1,000 guns off the production line. Well, I didn't have $200,000, so I realised I would have to go into a strategic partnership with a toy company.

There followed seven years of frustration and false starts. I don't know what it is with me, but I've never been very good at giving up.

Then, in February 1989 I was walking the halls of the American International Toy Fair in New York, the world's largest toy fair, when I ran into a company called Larami.

At the time, they were knock-off merchants - they would look at what the major toy companies were making, and what had TV advertising, then they would make cheap copies and grab 10% of the market.

At the toy fair, the vice president, a guy called Al Davis, told me that the idea of a really high-performance water pistol was interesting. ""I can't really review a product here,"" he told me, ""but if you're ever in Philadelphia, where our headquarters are, I'd be happy to talk to you. Drop in and see us.""

So I said, ""Ok, great."" But just as I was turning to leave, he called after me and said, ""By the way - don't make a special trip.""

Despite these discouraging words, as soon as I got home I started work on a fresh prototype of the water gun. The new test model was made of plexiglass and PVC piping, and incorporated a new design feature - instead of keeping water inside the gun itself, a two-litre soda bottle sat on the top, and acted as a water reservoir.

It was 628mm long. The diameter of the water stream was 2.4mm and could reach more than 12 metres.

It took me a couple of weeks to build the model, then I called Larami and said, ""It just happens that I'm going to be in your area soon…""

I remember sitting in their conference room with the president and vice-president of the company and some marketing people. I opened my suitcase, took the gun out and shot it across the conference room. And they said: ""Wow!""

I knew that I had captured their imagination. But we had the challenge of commercialisation. This gun was more complicated than the squirt guns that were on the market, and it took a lot of work to bring the price down to $10. Even then, we weren't sure that anyone would pay anywhere near that amount for a water pistol.

In 1990, the gun appeared in the toy shops. It was called the Power Drencher. To begin with we didn't do any marketing or TV advertising - but it still sold well.

The following year, we rebranded the toy the Super Soaker and did a big push on TV. That was the summer we sold 20 million guns, and I remember just staring at my royalties cheque in disbelief.

It seems strange now, but back in 1992, the Super Soaker was quite controversial. There were a few tragic incidents - on one occasion some kids shot someone with a Super Soaker, and he shot back with a real gun. On another occasion, a water fight in Boston escalated into a real gun fight and a teenager was killed.

There were also reports of people using them in weird ways, for example filling them with bleach instead of water.

The mayor of Boston tried to introduce a voluntary sales ban on the toys. I got a phone call from a reporter from that city, who, in the most serious and grave voice told me, ""We've got a report that Super Soakers are being used in drive-by shootings, and we were wondering if you had any comment.""

I had no idea what to say to him. In the end, I said, ""Well… you know… I think we should have more of that.""

In the back of my mind, I felt that my work on toy guns was probably less harmful than the work I did on real weapons systems.

Further generations of Super Soakers followed, and I went on to design the N-Strike range of Nerf dart guns, which used some of the same compressed air technology. Being a toy that sells year-round, I made even more money through Nerf guns than I had with the Super Soaker.

I didn't buy a yacht or anything. I've spent the money on something much more interesting - to me, anyway.

I have built a scientific facility in Atlanta, Georgia, which has about 30 staff.

For more than 20 years I have been interested in battery technology. Batteries typically contain liquid, but we have developed an all-ceramic battery which uses glass as an electrolyte.

It can hold three times as much charge as a lithium ion battery and it is stable enough that it can be used in very harsh environments, such as oil wells. It can be bulk-manufactured in a similar way to ceramic plates.

We are also working on an engine which is the great, great-grandson of the cooling system I was working on in 1982 when I hit upon the idea of the Super Soaker. The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter (J-TEC) is a very efficient engine that uses hydrogen to convert heat directly into electricity and it has no moving mechanical parts.

When I look at a problem I have an intuition about whether or not it can be solved, but that isn't good enough for most investors. The process of invention requires breakthroughs and you can't predict when those will happen. So it's really only thanks to the Super Soaker and Nerf guns that I have been able to develop the ceramic battery and the J-TEC.

At our offices we have a lot of the toys kicking around and every now and then we do play with them.

I also take the guns into schools to give talks. Kids need exposure to ideas, and they need to be given an opportunity to experience success. Once you get that feeling, it grows and feeds itself - but some kids have got to overcome their environments and attitudes that have been imposed on them.

In spite of the things that have been perpetrated on my race - holding us in bondage under slavery, then making it illegal to educate us and then subjecting us to long-term discrimination and criticism - we succeed anyway, to a very large extent. We just need to realise what we're capable of.

More than 170 Super Soaker models were launched, and they have made more than $1bn (£760m). For a while I tried to buy every toy that contained one of my patents, but I couldn't keep up.

After I'm finished with all this hard science stuff, I'm looking forward to doing some more straightforward inventing. Stuff where it's easier to make a bit of money.

I have a few ideas in mind - not toys, just consumer products that I know will be easy to manufacture and that will sell well.

But I hope you don't mind if I keep them to myself for now.

As told to @williamkremer. Listen to Lonnie Johnson speaking to Outlook on the BBC World Service.

Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook",Lonnie Johnson had an illustrious career as a nuclear engineer working on the Galileo space programme and the stealth bomber - but he is best known for creating a water pistol
"Chelsea Clinton might be biased when it comes to choosing our next Commander-in-Chief, but she admits becoming a parent herself has made it appreciate her own mother even more.

“Now, as a mom — I have two little kids, Charlotte who turns 2 later this month, and her baby brother Aiden, who’s 2½ months,” Clinton shared during a co-hosting stint on The View Friday.

“I hope my children are as proud of me as I am of my mom someday,” she added.

Want all the latest pregnancy and birth announcements, plus celebrity mom blogs? Click here to get those and more in the PEOPLE Babies newsletter.

The mom of two, who is married to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky, shares that her daughter Charlotte is just entering nursery school, and admits that her support for her mother goes way past her political and social involvement.

“With my husband, there’s no one I trust more than my mom,” Clinton says. “If, God forbid, anything were to happen to Marc and me, my mother would take care of my children. There’s no greater vote of trust and faith and love than that.

“So as a daughter, it doesn’t make sense to me,” she adds of how anyone could call her mother untrustworthy.

The former first daughter also shared more details about how she and Ivanka Trump still manage to keep a close friendship, despite their opposing campaign involvement.

“We were friends long before this election, we will be friends long after this election — our friendship didn’t start in politics and it certainly is not going to end because of politics,” Clinton says.

“I have tremendous respect for Ivanka. I love her family. She’s a working mom like I am. We have so much more in common than we have disagreement about.”",Chelsea Clinton and husband Marc Mezvinsky are parents to daughter Charlotte and son Aiden...
"Gwen Stefani concertgoers were in for a treat over the weekend.

Blake Shelton, 40, brought a bit of country to the stage with his surprise appearance during Stefani’s Sunday night concert at the Forum in L.A. to wrap up her This Is What The Truth Feels Like tour.

The country singer walked on stage, casually dressed in jeans, strumming his guitar and playing their duet, “Go Ahead and Break My Heart,” off of his If I’m Honest album.

The couple looked adorable together and could not stop smiling as they stared into each other’s eyes while singing, says an onlooker. After the song, Shelton gave Stefani, 47, a huge hug, and the crowd went wild with applause.

Earlier in the show, Stefani commented on her tumultuous year saying, “This last record saved my life. Music saved my life.”

It’s been almost a year since the two went public with their relationship after meeting on The Voice, where they both worked as coaches.

Not only did working on The Voice introduce Stefani to a new romance, but it also introduced her to new music.

Though performing a country song may not be what you’d expect from the No Doubt singer, Stefani recently told PEOPLE about performing at Shelton’s concerts: “To be able to get up and cross-pollinate in another world and different audience is super magical.”

“Being on The Voice, that really opened me up hearing so many different voices and their interpretations of songs and just different genres of music,” added. “That’s what’s so fun about this life. You just keep growing and experiencing things.”

Stefani has been no stranger to Blake Shelton’s stage. She also made a surprise appearance during one of his concert stops to perform the duet.

“I’m suddenly in a completely different world and audience and you’re like, ‘These are not my people, you know what I mean?'” Stefani said of her experience joining Shelton on stage. “Yet they’re so warm and sweet.”

Stefani took to Instagram Sunday night to thank her fans saying, “Last night was incredible! Thank u L.A.”",The cute couple reunited on stage at The Forum Sunday night for their duet “Go Ahead and Break My Heart”
"""I feel like we dodged a bullet with the Romney administration.""

Amen. Every time I see a clip of that artificial human speaking, I get chills up my spine.

But worse is what's indicated by the first line of this post: ""Mitt Romney's transition team had plans to inject a heavy dose of corporate America into the federal government.""

That's just appalling. The virtually unrestrained power of corporate America is at the root of most of our problems already! Like jobs that pay so little, full-time workers have to go on food stamps (See: Wal-Mart.) Like the rising taxes on the middle class (because corporations like GE and AT&T don't pay *any.*) Like pollution and destruction of the environment (See: Koch brothers, Massey Energy). Like the collapse of the economy in 2008 (See: Banks too big to fail, unrestrained greed, Nationwide mortgages, too many more to mention). Like a national media that is essentially owned by five corporations, that demonizes the left while playing stenographer to the right. (See: Washington Post, CNN, most networks -- not to mention the right-wing ""entertainment complex."" Compare, for example, the skimpy and hostile coverage of any left-wing protest -- like thousands of anti-war protesters during the Iraq War, or the hundreds of thousands during the Occupy movement -- to the blanket, largely approving coverage of any right-wing protest -- like a couple dozen ""Tea Partiers"" financed by and bused in to Washington by big corporations.) Like a Congress that institutes ALEC-written bills, and ignores the will of the electorate in favor of their corporate sponsors (See: Failure of background-check law).

I could go on in this vein, but instead I'd like to remind everyone that our government is supposed to be US. It's supposed to be ""We the People.""

But Reagan turned that idea on its head. He took a fringe idea -- ""government isn't the solution, it's the problem"" -- and made it a solemn canon on the right, to which the left pays deference.

And it's a terrible idea. And it's insulting. WE are supposed to be the government. So when Reagan said ""government is the problem,"" he was saying ""the American people are the problem."" And the right wing has spent the last 30 years excising the power of common people from their own government. Look at everything Republicans propose, and virtually every idea has at its heart the elimination of our power to have a say in what government does. Or more to the point: Elimination of our power to defend ourselves from corporations. That's the heart of ""tort reform,"" if you've ever wondered what that was and why Republicans are so insistent on it.

Further, government isn't supposed to work hand-in-glove with corporations. Government is supposed to be OUR DEFENSE from the power of corporations. Government is the only counter-weight to the enormous power of corporations. Government is supposed to regulate corporations so that they don't run roughshod over us, as they inevitably will.

But you'll note that Republicans are four-square against regulation. ANY regulation. Corporations, like the big banks on Wall Street, are supposed to be trusted to regulate themselves. The Republican theology is that ""the invisible hand"" of the marketplace will regulate corporations. (Which is not at all what Adam Smith was saying, but I digress.) Gee, how well has that worked out? (See: Economic collapse, 1929 and 2008.)

No, Mr. Romney, we do not need more corporate influence on government. There's plenty already, and it's already too much. Our government is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people, not of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. That's what every other government in the history of the world has done, and the inevitable outcome of those systems has been consistent: Fascist feudalism. (See: China.)","Mitt Romney's transition team had plans to inject a heavy dose of corporate America into the federal government, but first they had to adjust to a new email system. Its name? Gmail."
"Citroën's Survolt concept has been making its rounds of the European auto shows this year. Journalists and auto industry insiders are assembled in Paris for the media preview of the 2010 Paris Motor Show. The organizers of this year’s show have sought to focus attention on new technologies, with the theme “The Future, Today,” pointing to what many in the industry hope signals the successful commercialization of zero-emission vehicles.",Automakers are displaying new concepts and world-market cars at the auto show in Paris.
"The 62-year-old producer died Friday, according to the bureau's inmate data base.

Pearlman had been serving a 25-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, for running Ponzi and bank schemes. He was convicted in 2008 of fraud and swindling investors out of more than $300 million.

In the mid-1990s he formed the iconic boy bands responsible for hits like ""I Want It That Way"" and ""Quit Playing Games (with my Heart)"" from the Backstreet Boys and ""Bye Bye Bye,"" from *NSYNC.

An official cause of death was not announced.

Pearlman boosted the careers of entertainers who later achieved solo fame, like ex-Backstreet Boy Nick Carter and former *NSYNC member Justin Timberlake. Timberlake tweeted Sunday he hoped Pearlman had ""found some peace.""

I hope he found some peace. God bless and RIP, Lou Pearlman.

""His passing has touched a lot of people,"" said Mark NeJame, who represented Pearlman in civil lawsuits for many years.

""He literally revolutionized the world of pop music and [he was] a creative genius in that regard -- but [he] had a horrible dark side that eventually overshadowed his talents.""

Pearlman ""had a way of telling people what they wanted to hear,"" NeJame added. ""He was very seductive.""

Aaron Carter, brother of Backstreet Boys' Nick Carter, tweeted Sunday about Pearlman, ""karma is real.""

#LouPearlman my old manager died in prison... Rip Lou not the best business guy really at all but he did discover me karma is real

With Pearlman at the helm, the Backstreet Boys shot to stardom in 1996 and became one of the top-selling boy bands, selling more than 130 million records, according to the band's website.

Shortly after the launch of the Backstreet Boys, Pearlman followed up with a second boy band called *NSYNC -- which sold more than 55 million records.

*NSYNC's website was down Sunday in the wake of the news of Pearlman's death.

Former *NSYNC band members Lance Bass and Chris Kirkpatrick also posted their reactions on Twitter.

""He might not have been a stand up businessman,"" Bass tweeted, ""but I wouldn't be doing what I love today [without] his influence. RIP Lou""

Kirkpatrick posted that he had ""mixed emotions"" about the news.

Mixed emotions right now, but RIP Lou Pearlman.

The Backstreet Boys haven't released an album since 2013, and in recent years members took time to focus on individual projects. The group recorded a song with the country duo Florida Georgia Line that was released Friday.

The Backstreet Boys are also working on a new album and there are plans for a short residency for the group in Las Vegas.

CNN's Lisa Respers France contributed to this report.","Lou Pearlman, the disgraced star-maker behind 1990s boy bands *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, has died in prison, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons."
"might officially be the most hated man in the Windy City -- because last night, one of Chicago's most storied sports legends turned his back on the guy ... TORCHING Cutler's jersey inside a bar.

The video was shot inside Stanley's Kitchen and Tap in Downtown Chicago -- showing Chicago Blackhawks legend

lighting Jay's jersey on fire while some hot chick dangles it from her fingers.

One source inside the bar tells us Chris lit the jersey then said, Cutler's ""nothing but a bitch.""

FYI -- Cutler has been under heavy fire in Chicago from Bears fans who think he's not just a terrible QB ... but a cancer in the locker room who's bringing down the team.

Cutler's performance on Sunday didn't do much to win over his critics -- Jay had a very underwhelming performance in the Bears victory over the Rams ... throwing an interception and ZERO touchdowns.

We reached out to Chelios for comment -- so far, no word back.","Chicago Bears QB Jay Cutler might officially be the most hated man in the Windy City -- because last night, one of Chicago's most storied sports legends…"
"In two recent cases — one involving a black football player who was removed from a US Airways flight because he refused to pull up his pants and the other involving a lesbian actress who was escorted off a Southwest flight after a request to stop kissing her girlfriend escalated into a heated exchange — the incidents were soon posted on the Web, protests held and boycotts threatened.

The result is a public debate over whether there is a right to fly. The answer, according to courts and the Department of Transportation, is no.

“An airline can refuse to carry a passenger for any reason, so long as it is not discriminatory,” said Bill Mosley, a spokesman for the Transportation Department. He referred to a federal aviation statute that prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, national origin, religion, sex or ancestry.” Airlines can remove passengers for many reasons, which are spelled out in the fine print on the back of the boarding card and open to interpretation.

“We deal with this every day,” said an executive of a major American carrier who asked not to be identified because the airline did not want to go on the record about how it handles these situations. If a passenger “is a security threat or if they are carrying a communicable disease or if they smell bad or if they are being unruly — there are a number of things that would preclude them from being able to fly.”

What has changed in recent years is the highly visible nature of some passenger-airline disputes — details of which are sometimes on the Internet while the plane is still at the gate. Kyla Ebbert, a waitress in California, appeared on several national news programs in 2007 after she was told by a flight attendant on Southwest Airlines that her skimpy outfit was potentially offensive to other passengers. Rather than go home, change and take a later flight, she draped a blanket over her legs, then did the rounds of morning talk shows.

The path is now well trodden by others who have had a brush with the arbiters of airplane decorum.

“Whether it’s a letter to a company or a social media issue, people have agendas they push through for a lot of different reasons,” John McDonald, vice president for communications for US Airways, said in an interview.

Mr. McDonald said that was the case after US Airways removed a University of New Mexico football player, Deshon Marman, in June, after he refused to pull up his drooping pajama pants. Video of the exchange was posted on You Tube, prompting a demonstration in San Francisco contending that the airline’s action was racially biased.

Publicity over the Marmon case prompted another US Airways passenger, Jill Tarlow, to step forward with her own allegation. Ms. Tarlow said six days before Mr. Marman was removed, she was on a US Airways flight with a man who was dressed in women’s underwear, stockings and a see-through shrug. Ms. Tarlow sent a photo of the man to the airline and posted it on the Internet.

Mr. McDonald responded that the man was a frequent traveler on US Airways but said he was not allowed to board the flight until he covered up.

Frustration with the seeming arbitrariness of airline decision-making is just one part of the problem, said Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center in California. The other is diminishing respect for the sensitivities of other passengers. “Social media is shining a light on a problem that’s growing and that we haven’t been paying enough attention to,” Ms. Rutledge said. “We as a people have taken to this idea of ‘what I’m entitled to’ without considering how to respect what the other person is entitled to.”

Many airlines have found themselves in the spotlight for taking passengers off airplanes, but Southwest Airlines has removed some celebrities, which keeps it in the news. In addition to the short-skirt affair, which resulted in Ms. Ebbert’s appearance in Playboy, the carrier ejected the actress Leisha Hailey last month after a request by a flight attendant for her to stop kissing her girlfriend turned into a profanity-laced exchange. Southwest is known as well for requiring plus-size passengers, like the Hollywood director Kevin Smith, to either buy a second ticket or get off the plane.

“One of the complaints we see on a regular basis is from customers who do not have access to their full seat because of the size of the customer next to them,” said Chris Mainz, a spokesman for Southwest.

That the war over conflicting standards of courtesy and behavior is being fought on airliners isn’t surprising, Ms. Rutledge said, because people feel a powerlessness boarding an airplane. “The airplane environment is one where people have higher anxiety levels, and prickliness is heightened,” she said.

Airline executives agree. “With security and everything else,” Mr. McDonald said, “being on an airplane is very different than hopping in a car or taking a bus.”

Mr. Mainz of Southwest said: “Unlike a restaurant or movie theater, you cannot exit an airplane at 30,000 feet, so it is our duty to defuse a potential disruption before an airplane leaves the ground.”

With that in mind, the courts have given flight crews wide latitude, even when a review suggests the airline employees erred in removing a passenger.

“If you’re going to push the limits, you’re going to run the risk of being denied travel, because it’s all up to the cabin crew or the gate agents,” said Peter A. McLauchlan, a partner with the transportation law firm Gardere Wynne Sewell. “They have a nice laundry list of what could be offensive to other passengers, and airline safety gives them lots of cover.”","In the past, when passengers were removed from flights, only fellow travelers knew; now social media exposes these disputes to a worldwide audience."
"Aaron Rodgers can still remember his close encounter of the third kind.

The Packers quarterback revealed on Pete Holmes’ “You Made It Weird” podcast, as reported by the Milwaukee Record, he and former Cal teammate Steve Levy spotted a flying saucer while in New Jersey back in 2005.

“It was a large orange, left-to-right-moving object. Because of the overcast nature of the night and the snow, you couldn’t make out — it was kind of behind the clouds we were seeing, but it was definitively large, moving from left to right. It was me, Steve [Levy] and his brother that saw it. And it goes out of sight and we look at each other and go: ‘What in the f–k was that?’”

Rodgers also recalled that he heard what sounded like fighter jets after the initial sighting.

Then his chat with Holmes took a different turn when quizzed by the comedian about whether he masturbates ahead of games.

“I want to be calm out there, so I’m never opposed to it,” he said. “You got to be nice and relaxed out there, so whatever is gonna put me in that state, man.”

Rodgers’ girlfriend Olivia Munn previously shared that the couple don’t have sex on game day, though they’ve been willing to make some exceptions.

“It depends on how late the game is … I try to have sex as much as I can,” Munn said.","Aaron Rodgers can still remember his close encounter of the third kind. The Packers quarterback revealed on Pete Holmes’ “You Made It Weird” podcast, as reported by the Milwaukee …"
"(CNN) - Personal, historic details of more than 132 million people were released online through the 1940 Census Monday, providing the public with free access to a slice of American history.

The National Archives and Records Administration unlocked the records after a mandatory 72-year waiting period and released more than 3.8 million digital images in collaboration with Archives.com.

Earlier Census records were made available to the public, but not all of them are searchable online free of charge, said Megan Smolenyak, family history advisor at Archives.com. Monday's release marks the first time researchers, genealogists and history hunters can find detailed records online in one place for free.

The 1940 Census was conducted as the Great Depression was winding down and before the country’s entry into World War II, reflecting the economic tumult of the era and the New Deal recovery program of the 1930s.

See more LIFE magazine photos of 'test' Census takers preparing for 1940

""The 1940 set is really special because of the time it captures, which was so pivotal in American history,"" Smolenyak said. ""It's not only for people seeking information about their families; for people 72 and older it provides a snapshot into their early lives.""

In an era when households consisted of multiple generations of families, the records include names, ages and occupations of everyone in the home, she said. The 1940 Census also marked the first time people were asked detailed questions about their homes and whether they had a radio, “flush toilets,” electricity or running water.

For now, the site is not searchable by names. Starting a search requires an approximate address from April 1, 1940, to find the right “enumeration district,” or geographic area covered by a census taker. (Address sources could include birth, marriage and death certificates, employment records, scrapbooks, Social Security application information or the 1930 census.)

The enumeration district can then be plugged that into a search engine to browse Census records from that area.

In an era before mail-order surveys and online questionnaires, census workers went door-to-door to collect information. Questions new to the census included residence five years earlier, income, highest level of school completed and detailed questions on unemployment history, meant to measure the effects of the Great Depression.

The records reveal a snapshot of history.

Occupations listed as examples for the occupation question included frame spinner, salesman, laborer, rivet heater and music teacher. Examples of industries included cotton mill, retail grocery, farm, shipyard and public school. The 1940 Census counted 5.1 million farmers, compared with 613,000 farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers tallied in the 2010 American Community Survey.

In 1940, a supplementary census asked veterans if they served in the World War, Spanish-American War, Philippine Insurrection or Boxer Rebellion. The supplemental schedule also asked about participation in two national insurance plans: Social Security and Railroad Retirement.

Monday's release shows more details about the 1940 Census data, which was already searchable online, and shows how much the country's population and demographics have changed.

The country's population grew from 132 million in 1940 to about 308 million in 2010. New York was the most populous state in 1940 with 13.5 million people; during the most recent census in 2010, California earned the top spot, with 37.3 million people. New York City, the country's most populous city, had 7.3 million people in 1940, compared with 8.2 million people today.

The 1940 Census also found that 89.8% of the population was white and 9.8% was ""Negro."" Other options for race included Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu and Korean - the 1940 Census didn't collect information on the Hispanic population.

The 2010 Census found that 72.4% and 12.6% of the U.S. population was single-race white and black, respectively, and that 4.8% were Asian, 0.9% were American Indian or Alaska Native and 2.9% were two or more races. In 2010, 16.3% of the population identified as Hispanic, which can be any race.","By Emanuella Grinberg, CNN (CNN) -- Personal, historic details of more than 132 million people were released online through the 1940 Census Monday, providing the public with free access to a slice of American history."
"It won't be long before the paparazzi photograph a panty-less Brett Favre exiting a luxury vehicle, exposing the Hall of Famer's full monty for the enjoyment of TMZ gawkers.

""Britney Favre"" — a nickname coined by

columnist Bob Wojnowski — is just the latest example of pro sports' joyous descent into the reality-TV show abyss.

Commissioner Roger Goodell can rename the 2009 NFL season ""The Flavor of Favre.""

ESPN has run the pilot episode on a constant loop since Favre's last fake retirement in February. Chris Mortensen, Ed Werder and Peter King were the potential brides eventually stiffed by Favre and his handlers, who surprisingly flirted with Jay Glazer in the Episode 1 cliffhanger.

The World Wide Leader and Sirius NFL Radio quickly booked confessional-style interviews with Fran Tarkenton to talk about Favre's season-opening shocker — his decision to join the Vikings at the conclusion of training camp.

""I really think the whole Brett Favre saga of retiring, unretiring,"" Tarkenton said on NFL Radio, ""it's a circus. It's an absolute circus, and it takes away from all the other things that are going on with the Vikings, with the NFL. We're getting ready for football season and this is a circus and I just have no interest in it.""

Take those words and whiny attitude for exactly what they are — the ramblings of a 69-year-old man who is loathe to come to grips with what television and money have done to professional sports.

It's not Favre's fault. Television and money corrode values and ethics. Sportsmanship, individual sacrifice for the benefit of team and integrity had no chance of survival once television and money took over professional sports.

I don't want to make too much of this, but everything you see playing out in the world of American sports is also playing out in our society at large. America has become one massive reality-TV show and all its citizens are vying to be contestants.

No one is satisfied being part of a team. We all want to be the star of our own show, free to create the rules as we go.

We're not mad at Brett Favre. We're jealous.

He skipped the offseason conditioning program and training camp and still signed for $12.5 million, the starting position and the opportunity to embarrass Packers general manager Ted Thompson.

Hell hath no fury like a scorned diva quarterback. Favre is spoiled, petulant, narcissistic and irresponsible. He's no different from Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan. Wealth and fame ruined Favre at a young age, and now we're fascinated by the flaws they created.

We complain that we're tired of hearing about Britney Favre. But we google him and tweet about him incessantly. We click on the stories with his name in the headline. We anxiously anticipate Peter King's next ode to John Madden's favorite quarterback.

And when we're not watching ""Flavor of Favre,"" we're a couple of channels over being captivated by (Michael) Vick Doggy Dogg's performance in ""I Love Philadelphia."" Or maybe we tune in to Plaxico Burress' latest in ""Countdown to Lockdown.""

Seriously, what's happening on the field doesn't matter all that much anymore. It's the story behind the story, the story away from the field or court that captures our imagination. And it's the story the athletes want to tell.

Shaq has a reality show on ABC. Terrell Owens is on VH-1. The Bengals are on HBO's ""Hard Knocks."" Warren Sapp, Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice danced with the stars on ABC.

When an athlete can't get a network to pick him up, he takes his reality skills to the Web. Stephon Marbury live streams his life and credibility away. Cowboys tight end Martellus Bennett held the black-on-black racist ""Black Olympics"" on MartyBTV.

The NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball all have their own networks. They're foolishly missing the boat. Why are they allowing the other networks to cash in on the athletes they turned into stars?

The networks owned by the leagues need original programming. Maybe if Chad Johnson was provided the opportunity to bojangle for dollars on a reality show, he wouldn't find it necessary to bojangle on Sundays.

You think people wouldn't watch Roger Goodell's version of ""The Apprentice"" or ""CourtTV?"" His sit-down meetings with Pacman Jones would be must-see TV. John Madden could break out his telestrator and diagram Pacman's make-it-rain technique.

How about Josh Hamilton as the star of ""MLB Rehab?"" Darryl Strawberry could co-star as his accountability partner.

Come on, let's quit the charade. Pro sports jumped the shark more than a decade ago. The circus Tarkenton is crying about has been in town for a long, long time.

The games are an afterthought. They're vehicles to promote fame and the leverage to negotiate a contract for more money and less responsibility.

You blame the players and their agents. I blame the rules makers, the owners, the grown men with billions who should've seen this coming and implemented rules to safeguard the integrity of their games.

Too much of the money in pro sports is tied to individual fame, and not nearly enough cash is tied to the win-loss record. When fans care more about winning and losing than the players in the locker room do, it's impossible to deny the foundation of the games have been damaged.

The LeBron James reality show will focus all next season on whether he'll dash for New York cash rather than will the Cavaliers to the NBA Finals. We've all been a witness to money and fame's transformation of King James into Drama Queen James, the sore loser, the dunk-video thief.

Brett Favre used to be king of the NFL, known for his childlike passion for the game. Now he's Britney Favre. And oops, he's unretired again.

You can e-mail Jason at BallState0@aol.com or find him on Facebook at facebook.com/jasonwhitlock.",'Flava' Favre is king of new reality TV sports culture
"The digital age has long assumed that wired equals smart. Add e-mail and Web to a phone, and it becomes a smartphone. Hook up electric utilities to a sensor network, and you get the much-hyped ""smart grid."" Inject computers and broadband connections into schools, and you get smart kids.

But when it comes to our minds, Nicholas Carr argues that our obsession with connection has a cost. The Internet, Carr argues in his new book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, is a distraction factory. And it doesn't merely flatten our thinking during the moments we're tweeting or flitting among blogs, he writes. Instead, it may be rewiring our brains, wrecking our attention spans and replacing contemplative consumption of information with a frenetic search for mental fast food. The Shallows updates Marshall McLuhan's thesis that ""the medium is the message""--the technology we use to share our thoughts inescapably shapes how we think.

Carr's book, which will be released later this month, is sure to draw venom from the Web consultants and new-media professors who have happily heralded the end of the printed word. But he assembles strong scientific and anecdotal evidence that the way brains work has been altered with every new medium introduced, from Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to Lee De Forest's audion, and that the Internet may be the most effective mind-mutating technology of all time.

Forbes spoke with Carr about his belief that Internet-connected people are losing their ability to think deeply, what the rise of devices like the iPad and Kindle might mean for that shift, and his defense of President Obama's recent anti-gadget jab.

Forbes: Technology is often seen as a kind of virtuous cycle of intelligence, each new idea helping to produce the next one. But you make a case that our ability to concentrate and think deeply has suffered because of the Internet. Are we really becoming less smart?

It's true that we're seeing a much faster influx of new technologies. But I don't think that alone tells us everything about the depth of our thinking at an intellectual or a societal level.

In The Shallows, I'm looking at a mode of thinking that's been cherished in the past, a more thoughtful, contemplative way of experiencing life and the world. Because of those different kinds of thinking, I'm wary of reducing the question of how smart we are to the flow of technological innovation.

So we may be innovating more but thinking less deeply?

Right. The human brain is very flexible, and there are many ways to think.",Author Nicholas Carr argues the Internet is robbing us of contemplation.
"Big Bank Hank, one-third of the Sugarhill Gang, the unlikely ambassadors who took hip-hop out of Bronx parks and onto the pop charts, died on Tuesday in Englewood, N.J. He was 58.

The cause was complications of cancer, said David Mallie, business manager for the two other members of the Sugarhill Gang, Wonder Mike and Master Gee.

The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was not the first commercially released hip-hop single, but it was the one that effectively birthed the genre as a commercial force. The song, which used the break from Chic’s disco smash “Good Times” as a foundation, became a radio staple soon after its release in 1979, reaching No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. Sugar Hill Records, the group’s label, said it sold two million copies.

Big Bank Hank was born Henry Lee Jackson in the Bronx on Jan. 11, 1956, and grew up close to DJ Kool Herc, Coke La Rock and other hip-hop pioneers.

He was not originally a rapper by trade. In the late 1970s he was working the door at a Bronx club called the Sparkle, where he met a rapper named Grandmaster Caz. He offered to manage Caz’s group, the Mighty Force MCs, borrowing money from his father to get it a worthy sound system for its live appearances. To pay back the loan, he took a job at Crispy Crust Pizza in Englewood.

“He would rap all the time,” Wonder Mike said in an interview on Tuesday. “While he was making the pizzas, while he was slicing them, while he was serving them.”

At the pizza shop he met Joey Robinson Jr., a son of Sylvia Robinson, soul singer turned record executive. After seeing a rapper perform at a club, Ms. Robinson had become determined to release a rap record, and she built the Sugarhill Gang from scratch. Mr. Robinson heard Mr. Jackson rapping in the pizza shop and invited him to audition for his mother, who approved of his rapping and his personality.

“He was boisterous — he filled the room,” Wonder Mike said. “Ralph Kramden-type stuff.”

The Sugarhill Gang was convened on a Friday, and by Monday it was in the studio to record its first song, “Rapper’s Delight,” which was soon released as a single, in the fall of 1979.

Until that time, hip-hop was mostly the purview of parties in nightclubs, parks and even apartment-complex rec rooms. Reportedly recorded in a single take, “Rapper’s Delight” — the full version ran more than 14 minutes — immediately shifted the center of gravity from hip-hop as a live form in which D.J.’s and rappers shared billing to one that gave primacy to rappers and their recordings.

Within weeks, the Sugarhill Gang was opening for Parliament, the leading funk outfit of the day. Soon it was headlining its own shows.

Many contended that “Rapper’s Delight” was not representative of the hip-hop that was pulsing through the Bronx — it was a little too smooth, and the Sugarhill Gang, from New Jersey, wasn’t one of the known crews. Nevertheless, it lit a fire under other record labels and hip-hop crews, and soon it had plenty of commercial competition.

The group was also chided for lack of originality; many of Big Bank Hank’s rhymes on “Rapper’s Delight” were taken from one of Grandmaster Caz’s rhyme books. Not having much experience writing lyrics, he had asked his friend for help.

His verse on the song began: “Check it out, I’m the C-A-S-AN, the O-V-A and the rest is F-L-Y/You see, I go by the code of the doctor of the mix and these reasons I’ll tell you why.” Casanova Fly was a nickname of Grandmaster Caz. The lack of formal credit became a sticking point over the years; to this day, Grandmaster Caz does not receive a writing credit on the song.

Despite releasing a handful of records after “Rapper’s Delight,” the Sugarhill Gang never matched its early success and eventually disbanded in the mid-1980s, though it occasionally reunited for performances and released a children’s hip-hop album in 1999. In 2011, “Rapper’s Delight” was named to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

A version of this article appears in print on November 12, 2014, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Big Bank Hank, 58, an Early Star of Rap. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe","Big Bank Hank was one of the three members of the Sugarhill Gang, whose “Rapper’s Delight” put rap on the commercial map."
"Maroon 5 may have promised to stay for just “One More Night” in the big hit off their 2012 album Overexposed, but the pop-rock band ended up hanging around a whole lot longer. Billboard announced yesterday that the song had officially tied Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” for most number of weeks in the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 in 2012 so far. Both pop songs have logged nine whole weeks on top—and we’ll find out next week whether “One More Night” passes its predecessor for a definite win.

The two music powerhouses aren’t the only tie on the top ten songs list with the longest leads this year. After Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” and fun.’s “We Are Young,” there’s a tie between Taylor Swift‘s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You).” Next is a four-way tie between Flo Rida’s “Whistle,” Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain,” LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” and Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The last song on the list is Katy Perry’s “Part of Me.”

(The dominance of songs that hold onto the top spot for months at a time means that even some of the most omnipresent tunes—PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” notably, and the extant One Direction oeuvre—will probably never reach the top of the charts.)

(MORE: Why Is the ‘Song of the Fall’ Not a Thing?)

We called it, not just maybe: back in September we predicted that, based on chart placement alone, “One More Night” would be the next “Call Me Maybe”-level hit of the year. (To be fair, the original prediction was for a song that would last until the first week of December, but we’re calling it early.)

Will it happen again, a season of one song to rule them all? And can our totally unscientific music-prediction metric work its magic a second time, predicting which song will be the big hit around Valentine’s Day?

Again, we’ll start with the songs in the top 10 that haven’t yet reached the top and that have gained ground in the past week:

(MORE: One Direction’s Songwriters: They’re What Make the Boy Band Beautiful)

Then we knock out anything that’s been on the charts for more than 10 weeks and might be losing steam, leaving:

Rihanna isn’t charting in the digital downloads or on-demand categories, so she’s out of the running. Flo Rida is also still at No. 10, whereas Carly Rae Jepsen was No. 2 in June—plus, while the song is super danceable, it’s pretty hard to sing along with “I Cry”—so his chances are slim. That leaves Ke$ha and Bruno Mars. Which song will you be dancing to at a New Years Party?

On earworm-ness alone, the winner is clear. Check back in February to see if we were right:",Both acts have had a single top the charts for nine weeks in 2012. Don't say we didn't warn you
"Much remained unclear after the ruling, including whether and when abortion clinics that had already closed because of the admitting-privileges rule would reopen. Ms. Miller of Whole Woman’s Health told reporters earlier this month that a decision in their favor would give abortion providers the ability to consider reopening clinics, but that they would not open again overnight. In May 2013, two months before Gov. Rick Perry signed the bill into law, Texas had 41 facilities providing abortions. In November 2013, after the admitting-privileges requirement was put in place, there were 22.

“The rebuilding of that infrastructure is going to take some time,” Ms. Miller had said. “We’ve had to let our leases go in the facilities. We’ve had to sell our buildings. We’ve had to sell the equipment. Our staff has been laid off. Our physicians have gotten new jobs.”

Nan Little Kirkpatrick, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, which provides financial assistance to women seeking abortions in the northern half of the state, predicted that some clinics would reopen, especially in the Panhandle region, which currently has none.

“I think the odds are actually pretty good for us to get some clinics back,” she said. “One reason we saw providers close was because they couldn’t get staff to stay on, with their jobs completely up in the air. Now that we have some assurance from the Supreme Court, I think it will be easier for providers to attract and keep staff.”

Supporters of the law said that it was too early to say what their next steps would be. State Representative Jodie Laubenberg, the Republican who sponsored the bill in the State House and who called the ruling “bad news for women and a sad day for our nation,” declined Monday to say whether she would try to pass another abortion restriction bill when the Legislature meets early next year.

“Right now, I’m just dealing with the ruling,” Ms. Laubenberg said. “I can’t even tell you what I’m going to do next session.”

Wendy Davis, the former state senator whose filibuster of the bill in 2013 turned her into a national political figure, said Monday that the court’s 5-to-3 ruling made her less concerned about the next moves from anti-abortion activists and lawmakers in Texas.

“They pushed back very hard on the idea that focusing on the clinics, and closing clinics down, was going to pass constitutional muster,” Ms. Davis said of the Supreme Court’s majority. “If I were someone in the anti-abortion camp right now, thinking about how to regroup and push back, their options have been severely curtailed, if not completely closed off, by virtue of the court’s decision.”

Long before the Supreme Court’s ruling, Texas had been experiencing what critics of the law called an “abortion access crisis,” with 19 clinics in a state with 5.4 million women of reproductive age. If that number had been reduced further to nine clinics, abortion-rights advocates said the remaining clinics would not have been able to meet statewide demand, and they predicted an increase in the waiting times to get an appointment and a rise in the number of women who attempt to self-induce abortions using black-market drugs. The reduction in clinics had increased the travel distances for many women, including those in rural and more impoverished parts of Texas.

Vicki Saporta, president and chief executive of the National Abortion Federation, said that since the law was passed, the group’s hotline had been flooded with calls from Texas women. “Too many of those women, after hearing how far they would have to travel to access care, simply said, ‘I can’t get there,’” she said in a statement. “Other women have made appointments, hopeful they could find someone to drive them, only to have to cancel at the last minute. We’ve even heard from women forced to spend the night in their car because they couldn’t afford a hotel or another round trip to the clinic.”

Lawyers for Texas, as well as state Republican leaders who supported the tightened restrictions, said the law was needed to improve patient safety, reduce errors and misdiagnosis, and prevent less-qualified doctors from treating patients. And they said that abortion providers had exaggerated the travel burdens facing some women and the impact of clinic closures, and that it was not clear that the predicted permanent closures would occur.

Abortion providers and other critics of the law said it was a thinly disguised attempt to shut down clinics that had been providing safe, legal abortions. They said the new requirements were costly and medically unnecessary. Major medical organizations like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said the admitting-privileges and surgical-center requirements did not benefit patient safety.

In 2013, after the State Senate passed a version of the bill, the Republican lieutenant governor at the time, David Dewhurst, wrote a Twitter post celebrating the bill, known at the time as Senate Bill 5. He wrote: “We fought to pass SB5 thru the Senate last night, & this is why!” Attached was a graphic produced by opponents of the bill that said the legislation would force many clinics to shut their doors.

But Texas Republicans denied the claims that the intent of the law was a backdoor ban on abortions. On Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who is an outspoken opponent of abortion, called the ruling “a devastating blow” to the protection of women’s health and safety in Texas.

“By its ruling, the court held that the ability of abortion clinics to remain open, even under substandard conditions, outweighs the state’s ability to put women’s health and safety first,” Mr. Patrick said in a statement.

Manny Fernandez reported from Houston and Abby Goodnough from Washington. David Montgomery contributed reporting from Austin.","The Supreme Court ruling on a restrictive Texas law allows 10 clinics to remain open, while giving abortion providers and advocates their biggest win in a three-year legal fight."
"Authorities in El Paso, Colo., have opened an investigation into the decade-old disappearance of two foster children, one of whom appears to have been physically abused while in the care of his parents.

“The message is that we want to get this out, and we want to find these boys,” said El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa at a press conference on Thursday night.

Edward Dylan Bryant, who would today be 18-years-old, disappeared in 2001, and Austin Bryant, who would be 15, went missing as early as 2003.

Authorities say since then, their parents never reported them missing and have falsified records to collect $175,000 from the government to raise the two boys.

The boy’s adopted father, Edward Bryant, 58, and mother, Linda, 54, who are separated, were arrested in Texas and currently in jail in Colorado Springs. They have been held on $1 million bail.

Each face theft and forgery charges.

They have not, however, been charged in the disappearances of Austin and Edward. Calls to an attorney who represented them in a bankruptcy case filed in 2007 did not return a phone message to the Associated Press and their legal representation remains unclear.

The boys’ father allegedly told authorities that Edward ran away in 2001 and Austin in 2003, right before the family moved to Texas. The Bryants lived in the Monument area near Colorado Springs between 1999 and 2005 and most recently, they lived in the Dallas area.

He allegedly laid blame on his wife for any money received since their disappearance. He denied knowledge of receiving money for the children, but allegedly admitted to police that he signed documentation stating that the children were in his care in order to continue to receive funds from the Colorado Department of Human Services.

He also allegedly acknowledged that he and his wife never reported the children missing, according to the affidavit.

His wife, Linda, allegedly admitted some criminal culpability for not reporting the missing children.

She allegedly acknowledged that she intentionally covered up the fact they were missing to make it impossible for those in position to make a rescue, according to the affidavit. She allegedly offered to take reasonability for all the charges so her husband could keep the five children they still have.

Linda denied killing the boys and denied most of the abuse allegations, but allegedly acknowledged delaying food for Edward and Austin, the affidavit said.

The police investigation started shortly after Bryan Pennington, a foster child who knew Austin growing up, reported Austin missing on Jan. 22, 2011, after a conversation with another person who knew Austin, according to the affidavit.

James Bryant, the boys' adopted brother who was interviewed at Fort Campbell, Ky., agreed to discuss situation with the El Paso Sheriff’s office.

James told detectives that there has been significant abuse at home. He said Austin was spanked, restrained by being rolled “like a burrito” and perhaps handcuffed. He also said Austin was denied food two to three times a week as a form of punishment, according to an affidavit.

Austin got so hungry, James said, he would eat out of the garbage can, according to the affidavit. He would also be left in the garage days at a time and be forced to run up and down the driveway for several hours.

The last time he saw Austin alive was in 2003. He also said his mother asked him for help to find a friend to pose as Austin for an upcoming Department of Human Services visit, according to the affidavit.

Pennington, meanwhile, informed investigators that Austin told him that his parents used a taser on him and showed him welts all over his torso, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit has little information regarding Edward. James told authorities he doesn’t know anything about his adopted brother, according to the affidavit. He was told Edward was sent to Arizona to care for an ailing relative.

State adoption records are sealed, Liz McDonough, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Human Services told the Associated Press. An El Paso County Department of Human Services spokesman didn't return phone messages.

Maketa stressed that the investigation is ongoing and he hopes to find the boys alive.

""We're really asking the country to let us know if you know anything,"" he said.","Authorities in El Paso, Colo., have opened an investigation into the decade-old disappearance of two foster children, one of whom appears to have been severely physically abused under the care of his parents."
"Editor's note: Gary Marcus is a cognitive psychologist and author of the book ""Guitar Zero."" He is the director of the New York University Center for Language And Music.

The idea that learning a new skill - say juggling, cooking, or playing guitar - can be like an addiction is no joke.

I should know. As a college professor/scientist, who has written about the dynamics of narcotics and self-control, I have spent the last 3 1/2 years all but addicted to learning to play guitar. Despite lacking anything that might remotely resemble musical talent, I find no day is complete without at least a little bit of time on the guitar.

Even listening to music can be a little like a drug. A brain imaging study that came out last year proved what many scientists long suspected: Listening to music can lead the brain to release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the brain's universal signal for pleasure, an internal system that tells the brain (sometimes rightly, sometime wrongly) that it is doing the right thing. Drugs elicit dopamine artificially by fooling the brain, while activities like sex and eating elicit dopamine naturally. Listening to music taps into the dopamine system in part because hearing something new is a signal that the brain is learning something, and we have evolved to enjoy acquiring new information.

Shortcuts like drugs, however are fleeting. Although narcotics can elicit dopamine fairly directly, over time it takes a bigger and bigger dose to get the same rush, and can lead people to destroy families, risk their health and even lose their lives.

Learning new things is a lot safer, and ultimately a lot more satisfying.

There is a myth that children (and for that matter adults) don’t really enjoy learning new things, but as every video game maker has realized, the truth is just the opposite. From ""Space Invaders"" to ""Halo,"" ""Grand Theft Auto"" and ""Zelda,"" practically every video game is in part about mastering new skills.

As video game designers realized long ago, if you can keep a player poised on the knife’s edge of conquering new challenges, neither too easy and too hard but square in what the cognitive psychologist Vygotsky called the Zone of Proximal Development, you can keep gamers engaged for hours. As long as we constantly feel challenged but never overwhelmed, we keep coming back for more and constantly sharpen new skills.

The trouble, though, with most video games lies in what they teach, which often stays with the game when the game is complete. A game that makes you good at shooting aliens may have little application in the real world.

Learning a more lasting new skill - be it playing guitar or learning to speak a foreign language - can equally harness the brain’s joy of learning new things, but leave you with something of permanent value, in a way that neither drugs nor video games ever could. It leaves you with a sense of fulfillment, which goes back to what pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow called ""self-actualization.""

As Aristotle realized, there is a difference between the pleasures of the moment (hedonia), and the satisfaction that comes from constantly developing and living one’s life to the fullest (eudaimonia). In recent years, scientists have finally begun to study eudaimonia. Research suggests that the greater sense of purpose and personal growth associated with eudaimonia correlates with lower cortisol levels, better immune function and more efficient sleep.

From the strict ""Selfish Gene"" perspective - in which all that we do is driven by the self-perpetuating interests of our individual genes – hobbies like playing music rarely make sense, especially for mere amateurs. But maybe the art of reinvention and acquiring new skills, even as adults, can give us a sense of a life well-lived.

According to a 2009 Gallup Poll, 85% of Americans who don't play a musical instrument wish that they could. Why not start today? As it happens, this week is National Wanna Play Music Week, a perfect time to pick up a new skill that will bring satisfaction throughout life.

What stops many people from learning something new is the thought that they are too old, not good enough or just plain busy. If my own experience is any guide, none of these matter much. Taking up an instrument (starting at age 38) has been one of the most challenging but rewarding things I've ever done.

So long as your goal is growth rather than stardom, learning something new may just turn out to be one of the most rewarding things you ever do. Your brain will thank you for it.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the latest stories from CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and the CNN Medical Unit producers. They'll share news and views on health and medical trends - info that will help you take better care of yourself and the people you love.","Editor's note: Gary Marcus is a cognitive psychologist and author of the book ""Guitar Zero."" He is the director of the New York University Center for Language And Music. The idea that learning a new skill -- say juggling, cooking, or playing guitar -- can be like an addiction is no joke."
"Samsung attempted to differentiate itself in the smartphone market with its latest offerings, the Galaxy Note Edge and Galaxy Note 4, but analysts say it isn't enough to frighten Apple.

The South Korean technology giant on Tuesday rolled out the 5.6-inch Edge – which features a curved screen that wraps around the edges of the device allowing for a different set of information displays independent from the main screen. It also showed off the 5.7-inch Note 4, which can be paired with a new virtual reality device called the Gear VR.

The launch precedes a highly-anticipated Apple event on September 9, when it's widely expected to unveil the iPhone 6 and possibly a wearable device touted as the iWatch.

Read MoreSamsung reveals two phones, virtual reality device

""Samsung is headed in the right direction introducing new technology like the curved display, but the products itself aren't threatening to Apple,"" said Tom Kang, managing director, Mobile Devices at Counterpoint Technology.

""The Edge doesn't steal the limelight from the iPhone 6, but it will make product engineers at Apple think about moving towards adopting similar technology in the future,"" he said.

Sources have said that Apple will likely unveil larger 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens for the new iPhones - far larger than the current 4-inch iPhone 5s - the first time the firm has introduced different sized models simultaneously.

This is significant, says Kang, as it gives consumers more choice within Apple's product offerings.

Despite this, Apple's shares slipped 4.2 percent on Tuesday following the launch of Samsung's new smartphones. Shares of Samsung, meanwhile, gained 2 percent on Wednesday.

Read MoreWhy Apple's next iPhone will be bigger than people think

Nevertheless, other tech experts agreed the products are no game changer for Samsung.

Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at Enderle Group, noted that the Edge's signature feature, a curved display, does not have apps that support the display.","Samsung attempted to differentiate itself in the smartphone market with its latest offerings, but analysts say it isn't enough to frighten Apple."
"Editor's note: Eric Liu is the founder of Citizen University and the author of several books, including ""A Chinaman's Chance"" and ""The Gardens of Democracy."" He was a White House speechwriter and policy adviser for President Bill Clinton. Follow him on Twitter @ericpliu. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- This month, a federal judge allowed North Carolina to put into effect new laws that would make it more difficult to vote. Most of the American public didn't notice.

The Republicans pushing to restrict voting rights nationwide are betting on such inattention. Emboldened by a recent Supreme Court case limiting the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, GOP legislators have moved swiftly in numerous states to cut early voting and same-day registration, and to require ID cards at the ballot box.

Democrats claim these measures will discourage young and nonwhite voters from voting, who tend to vote more often for Democrats. GOP legislators insist they're only worried about voter fraud and the integrity of the electoral system.

But there is little evidence of significant fraud. And these legislators don't actually dispute the Democrats' basic claim. Indeed, rigging the rules to dampen turnout among youth and minorities appears to be a key strategy for some Republicans.

When people complain about the impact of voting restrictions, they're often dismissed as Democratic mouthpieces. Voting rights, to the average citizen, becomes just another partisan football.

This is bad for the country. But it's particularly bad for the GOP. While it may seem that the Republicans who want to restrict voting are winning right now, their strategy in fact threatens to isolate the party in the long term.

Republican leaders insist, correctly, that plenty of young, Asian-American, Hispanic, and African-American voters respond positively to a message of smaller government and more economic freedom.

But prior to stances on issues, what voters of color and young voters pick up on is a vibe -- an overall sense of whether we are welcome. And the vibe that many in the GOP have been sending lately has been less than welcoming.

Consider not just the efforts to invalidate the Voting Rights Act and to restrict access to the ballot, which many Millennials and African-Americans have taken personally, but also the hostility of many Republicans toward undocumented immigrants.

Consider too the remarks of people like Alabama congressman Mo Brooks, who declared recently that President Obama and the Democrats are prosecuting a ""war on whites.""

Whipping up the anxieties of older whites may be rational politics -- after all, they are still the likeliest voters -- but it alienates what demographer Paul Taylor calls ""the next America."" As Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention recently put it, the GOP, having painted itself in a corner, ""applied a second coat.""

I am a Democrat, so I know my comments will be presumed partisan. But I am foremost an American who is quite conscious of what it took for me, the son of Chinese immigrants, to get to vote.

A few weeks ago I met John Lewis, icon of the civil rights movement and longtime Georgia congressman. It happened to be the 50th anniversary of the signing of Civil Rights Act into law. I asked him how today's youth should engage, given that the obstacles and challenges are so different from what he experienced as a teenager. His answer was simple: Participate. Vote.

This is the moment for a rising Republican to deliver precisely that message to people of color and young voters: Participate. Vote. It's the moment for a leading Republican to argue that his or her party should be on the side of more democracy, not less; more inclusion, not less. If there is actual voter fraud, root it out, this leader should say, but not in a way that seems like a whites-only backroom plot.

Sen. Rand Paul has shown signs that he could be such a voice. He's met with constituencies that national Republicans often ignore, like African-American voters and college students. His outreach has seemed in earnest, and he has been a refreshing voice on issues like reform of criminal sentencing.

But telling, also, was the quick getaway he made when an undocumented ""Dreamer"" recently came up to him and another GOP congressman to ask them about immigration reform. Outreach can't be only scripted and packaged, it has to come from readiness to engage.

More importantly, it has to emerge from a sincere belief that more participation is better. A party confident about its ideas doesn't work in a cynical way to shrink the electorate. It sees in ""the next America"" a majority waiting to be made.

Rock the Vote has just launched a new nonpartisan campaign to push back against voting restrictions. Celebrities, musicians and students and many progressives have joined. All that's missing are some Republicans to argue -- in a visible, unexpected, Nixon-goes-to-China way -- that rocking the vote is better than rigging it. Are there any? Their party needs them, and so does their country.

Read CNNOpinion's new Flipboard magazine.

Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.","Eric Liu says Republicans who want to restrict voting may win now, but the party will suffer in the long term."
"The gunman who killed two women in an Indiana supermarket late Wednesday reveled in his bloodlust for at least two years on Facebook.

Shawn Walter Bair, 22, stormed Martin’s Supermarket in Elkhart about 10 p.m. and shot a 20-year-old store employee and 44-year-old customer, Sgt. Trent Smith said.

“I wouldn't say it was well-planned, but it was obviously thought out,” said Smith. “He was going to the store with a mission.”

The younger victim was identified by a friend on Facebook as Krystle Dikes. The customer was identified by police as Rachelle Godfread.

""For those who don't know, my mom was shot and killed last night at a grocery store,"" Joe Godfread, her son, wrote on Facebook. ""Rachelle Godfread we love you.""

RELATED: LANZA'S TWISTED CALL TO RADIO STATION

Bair's mayhem ended when two police officers arriving quickly on the scene shot and killed him as he pointed his 40-caliber handgun at a potential third victim.

Police have not uncovered a motive, but the gunman’s Facebook provided a window into his demented mind.

Bair showed a fascination with serial killers and posted a gruesome photo of his face bloodied by what he said was a bite from a pit bull.

“I MAY BE GOING TO HELL BUT ATLEAST I'M GOING HONEST AND YOU KNOW WHAT THATS ALL I'VE EVER BEEN YOU LOOK AT ME AND SEE THIS FREAK I SEE A GOD BECAUSE I EMBRACE MY F----- UP SIDE AND WHEN I'M IN HELL I HOPE YOU PASS THROUGH MY RACK HAVE FUN WITH THAT AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” he wrote in August 2011.

Another post that same month was equally insane.

RELATED: NORWAY MASS MURDERER HAD FAN IN LANZA

“I HOPE YOU ALL BURN IN THE FURTHEST PITS OF HELL I HOPE THE TORTURE LASTS FOREVER AND EVERY SECOND OF EVERY MINUTE YOUR THINKING ABOUT YOUR LOVED ONES. EVERYONE WILL PASS THROUGH TORTURE RACKS MADE OF BONE WITH RAZOR BLADES MADE FROM FIRE I WILL BE PICASSO WITH A FIRE RAZOR BLADE BENEATH MY FINGERS,” he wrote.

Other posts featured disturbing artwork of clowns, crime scenes and a poster of notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.

""There's not a day that goes by, it seems like anymore, where we're not learning of a school shooting or at a business. ... We hope that this would never come to our hometown and here it is,"" Smith said during a prior press conference at the scene of the crime.

Bair lived with his parents. Cops searched the home and broke the news to stunned relatives.

“You don’t ever want to think it of your child being involved in something like that,” Smith said at a Thursday press conference. “The initial shock, of someone coming to your door saying your son is dead. And a lot of the initial shock, a lot of the information was withheld from them.”

RELATED: 12-YEAR-OLD SCHOOL SHOOTER CHOSE VICTIMS RANDOMLY: COPS

Bair made his move Wednesday night, armed and carrying a knife, Smith said. He entered the story around 9:30 p.m. wearing a long heavy overcoat. A security guard who knew Bair became suspicious because he wasn't buying anything.

""He took his time. I think he might have been hesitant while he was in the store. But whether he was watching people or picking out people, we'll never know,"" Smith said.

Bair killed his first victim, Dikes, who was restocking the grocery, around 10:05 p.m. She loved dogs and was ""the closest friend I've ever had,"" wrote her friend, Natasha Sellers. Commenters on her page said she did not know the gunman.

After killing Dikes Bair stalked 12 aisles of the store and shot Godfread multiple times, Smith said.

Surveillance video showed Bair shot at another employee but missed as she made a getaway unharmed.

RELATED: ROSWELL TEACHER HAILED HERO FOR DISARMING SCHOOL SHOOTER

Two police officers happened to be nearby and were on the scene within three minutes and heard a gunshot as they entered the supermarket, Smith said. When the cops came upon Bair, he was pointing his gun at a store manager who was on his knees as if in prayer.

The madman then turned his gun toward the cops, who shot and killed him, ending the carnage as the manager fled for his life.

Officials praised the officers for acting quickly and preventing more deaths.

“They were professional,” said Smith. “They strategically cleared the store.”

It didn’t appear Bair knew his victims, according to reports. Police were still investigating his criminal background.

Elkhart is a town of 51,000 that's 15 miles south of South Bend, Ind.

RELATED: MAN CHARGED FOR KILLING THREE CHILDREN WITH FLARE GUN

Martin’s said the store would be closed Thursday.

“The entire Martin’s family is saddened by this tragedy,” company president and CEO Rob Bartels said. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families involved and the entire community.”

Tony Elkhart told The Elkhart Truth his mother had been working at the deli of the supermarket when the chaos unfolded.

He said she called him after being evacuated from the store.

“As reality set in, and her being upset, I knew something was wrong,” Tony told the newspaper.

“It makes me feel angry, obviously. This world I guess is kind of screwed up right now. You can't even go to the grocery store and be safe.”","A gunman stormed an Indiana supermarket late Wednesday, killing two women before police shot him dead. Police had yet to release the name of the 22-year-old who opened fire in the Martin’s Super Market in Elkhart, Ind. He killed a 20-year-old store employee and a 44-year-old shopper."
"But behind the booming laughter and quick wit lies a dark secret.

All three women were sexually abused and raped by their dad from their earliest memory until they reached puberty.

Vile Kevin Kavanagh would click his fingers at his chosen victim and they would know they could be next in line for his sick abuse.

Each girl was abused three times a week for more than a decade.

Shockingly, these three unbelievably close women did not share their secret torment with each other until they were in their twenties.

It was only when another victim of Kavanagh’s cruel reign of terror stepped forward that the sisters opened up to each other — and their mother — about their years of torture.

But rather than let the experiences break them, they brought their terror into the open.

Almost a decade after the last time he abused them, they pressed charges.

At his trial at Dublin Circuit Court in May 1990 Kavanagh, then 69, was jailed for seven years after pleading guilty to a staggering 94 charges including rape, incest and indecent assault.

Secret torment ... June, Joyce and Paula with their vile father, Kevin Kavanagh

Kavanagh died in July 1996. It was a year after he was released from prison for good behaviour.

The three sisters decided that to conquer their demons they needed to write a memoir.

They now hope that the resulting book — Click, Click — will help other victims of child abuse.

And they firmly believe that such horrific experiences do not have to ruin your life.

Joyce, 55, who works in the community on safety initiatives, has been with her partner for five years and has six kids.

She said: “We started writing our memoirs to help with our own healing. Unless you break down the secrecy around sexual abuse you have no hope of ever tackling it.

“But when the book launched, the response we got from readers was incredible and many wrote to us and opened up about their own abuse, something they had never shared with anyone.

“We really want this book to have an impact on survivors’ lives as we really have to tackle child abuse.

“People don’t want to talk about child abuse as it’s an uncomfortable subject — but we need to do something so it becomes comfortable and people can say, ‘Yes, I was abused and this is something I want to move forward from’.”

When the girls were being abused by the father of ten in their family home, they could never imagine anything positive could come out of the misery.

Healing ... Joyce says writing book helped her overcome her pain

Joyce added: “The abuse started at roughly the same age for all of us. My first clear recollection was around the age of six but I know it had been going on long before.

“For me it stopped at the age of 17, when I had my first period. For June it stopped at 16 and for Paula it was 18.”

Education worker June, 50, who is married with three sons, said: “You couldn’t put a number on how many times we were assaulted. It was a regular occurrence. A gap of three days would have been a long time between attacks.”

Joyce said: “June and I had once drunkenly admitted to each other what had happened in our early twenties but we never had a proper conversation. It felt shameful. Our dad was still a part of our lives but we knew he couldn’t be trusted although it was never said out loud.

“We always stayed with the kids when he was around and my skin would crawl whenever he came near me. Mum, who has recently passed away, was emotionally unattainable, so we never told her what was happening.”

It was in 1989 that the truth about Kavanagh’s sickening child abuse came into the open.

Joyce said: “Another victim tried to commit suicide because he had abused her — then the truth was finally out.

“My sisters and I admitted that it had happened to us and we told our mother, who was horrified.

“We all discussed it — but were all in deep shock. We had our first in-depth conversation about what had happened. Dad disappeared and we found he had signed himself into a psychiatric unit.”

June said: “Listening to what happened to our sisters always seemed worse than remembering what happened to ourselves.

“Hearing the ordeals of someone you love is horrific. We were all in shock and Mum was in a very bad way.”

Abuse ... Joyce and June Kavanagh with their father

Communications co-ordinator Paula, 48, who lives with her partner of 15 years, added: “It was very painful hearing my sisters’ memories.”

The women, from Dublin, knew it was time their dad was prosecuted for his crimes.

Joyce said: “We called the police as we couldn’t bear for him to hurt anyone else.

“We knew we finally needed to talk to someone and went to Rape Crisis straight away. Within weeks we were all being counselled.”

Sentencing him, the trial judge declared it was the most distressing, disturbing and upsetting case he had ever had to deal with.

Seeing their father jailed, the Kavanagh sisters realised they needed to come to terms with what had happened to them and put their experiences into words.

Joyce said: “We never got a ‘sorry’ from Dad for what he had done. He just bellowed after being sentenced, ‘Are you all happy now?’

“After the court case, we started to see our father wasn’t as powerful as we had imagined.”

June added: “Writing an account was something we all felt driven to do. Our healing wouldn’t have been complete until we went to the depths we did by writing the book.

“The writing challenged us to confront what had happened to us. The book took more than a decade to complete.”

Joyce said: “We wanted to show the reader how a child is really feeling. It’s hard to read as it’s quite graphic in the descriptions of what happened to us but this element is something we decided was necessary.

“We hoped the book would help people who have been abused or people who support the abused.”

Support ... Paula hopes the book will help others in the same situation

The women admit writing the book was a difficult process but they are proud to have produced something so honest which has helped them towards getting over their experiences.

Joyce said: “Finishing the book was an amazing feeling — but it also felt like a loss as writing was a time we could be ourselves all together and talk about our struggles.

“You don’t get many opportunities to be open and raw.

“The book has brought us very close as sisters. Our other siblings are very proud of us.”

Paula said: “I had been to therapy but never really engaged with it. But with the book you had no choice but to get involved.

“There was safety and trust between us and when you have been abused you really lack the ability to trust.”

June said: “In therapy I had the feeling I’d not got to the root of the problem.

“But the book was a really concentrated effort. We would never have got that time or space in a therapy session.

“The process of writing the book gave me time to think, ‘I was not responsible for what happened to me’. ”

Joyce added: “Now that everything is out in the open we sisters have a wonderful friendship.”

The trio hope their honest account will help people going through similar experiences.

'Uplifting' ... June says book helped her to confront her past

June said: “This is an uplifting book as it is very important to give people hope.

“The book shows you can move forward and not let abuse define your life. People who read the book when it was first published in Ireland have contacted us and told us about their own abuse. They had never told anyone before.

“At one point I asked myself what I got out of the book and it has been that it helped me to like myself.

“This sounds like a small statement but it’s huge and it transformed my life.

“I believe we were meant to do this book. It was destiny.”

Paula said: “Readers connecting with us makes us very proud.

“We are never going to feel cured of what happened to us. It will always be at the back of our minds.

“But we don’t mistrust any more and we lead healthy relationships.”

Click, Click, by Joyce, June and Paula Kavanagh with Marian Quinn (Orion, £6.99) is out now. If you want to get in touch with the sisters, email clickclickbook@gmail.com.

By DEIDRE SANDERS, Sun Agony Aunt

JUNE, Joyce and Paula are so brave to share their experiences of abuse. There will be hundreds – maybe thousands – who read their story and realise that they are not as alone as they fear.

Child abuse casts a long shadow and so many suffer in silence.

Even though these days we know child abuse is distressingly common, it is not something most of us dream of happening to someone we know, let alone our own family.

Yet all of us will know victims personally, it’s just that we don’t know we do, because they feel so ashamed of what has happened to them they keep it a dark secret.

I am a patron of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood and have backed their work for 20 years.

Each time a family brings a secret like this out into the open, it helps so many more find understanding – and helps protect many children.

If this is an issue that affects you, contact NAPC (0800 085 3330, napac.org.uk).",EXCLUSIVE: Sisters pen book to help healing after calling the cops on their vile father
"Updated Dec 5, 2013 1:55 AM ET

As time wound down in the Trail Blazers' victory over the Oklahoma City, LaMarcus Aldridge was showered with shouts of ""MVP! MVP!"" from the Portland fans.

Aldridge had a season-high 38 points and added 13 rebounds in the Blazers' 111-104 win Wednesday night that snapped the Thunder's eight-game winning streak.

It was his ninth double-double and 15th game with at least 20 points this season. He made a career-high 17 field goals.

""Just surreal. It was humbling to have that moment here,"" Aldridge said of the crowd's reaction. ""I've been here so long and I've had very few of those type of chants here. So that was fun. I thought that made the night complete for me.""

The victory gives the surprising Blazers a 16-3 record this season, best in the Western Conference and second only to Indiana overall. Portland has won 14 of its last 15 games, a stretch that includes an 11-game winning streak.

Nicolas Batum's 3-pointer with 29.9 seconds to go all but sealed it for Portland, which had lost seven straight against Oklahoma City.

The Thunder led by as many as 12 points in the first half, but Aldridge led a third-quarter rally and Portland built a 91-84 lead on consecutive 3-pointers from Dorell Wright and Damian Lillard with 7:58 left.

Russell Westbrook's 3-pointer pulled the Thunder within 95-94 before Reggie Jackson's two free throws gave them a short-lived lead with 5:34 to go. Aldridge hit a layup and a jumper to make it 105-100 for the Blazers.

Durant and Westbrook narrowed it again with consecutive baskets, but Batum's 3-pointer made it 108-104 before Durant missed a 3 on the other end. The Blazers made free throws for the final margin.

Durant finished with 33 for the Thunder, who were playing the second game of a back-to-back after defeating Sacramento 97-95 Tuesday night. Westbrook had 21 points.

""He was shooting turnarounds from almost the 3-point line over the top of our bigs and knocking them down,"" Durant said of Aldridge. ""That's what great players do, they come through in the clutch and make shots.""

Batum and Lillard added 14 points apiece for the Blazers, who were coming off a 106-102 victory over Indiana on Monday. Portland is 8-1 at home.

Aldridge scored 16 of his points in the third quarter, when the Blazers outscored the Thunder 35-21.

""I don't know if I have the words, to be honest,"" Blazers coach Terry Stotts said of Aldridge's night. ""Offensively, obviously he can score. But I liked his toughness, I liked his leadership, I liked his competitive fire. As much as he played very well, it was a lot of the intangibles that I really appreciated from him tonight.""

Wright's bank jumper evened the game at 27 to start the second quarter. It was close throughout the half, with Portland's Batum on Durant much of the time.

Durant took off on a fast break for a dunk and added a free throw to give the Thunder a 55-47 lead, their biggest of the game to that point.

Westbrook attempted a 3-pointer and the refs called a foul on Portland's Wesley Matthews, prompting an angry reaction from Stotts, who was given a technical, and the Thunder finished the half on a 9-0 for a 59-48 advantage.

Durant led all scorers in the half with 17 points.

""They hit a lot of tough 2s on us, shots we can live with,"" Durant said. ""But they made enough to beat us.""

One bright spot for the Blazers was center Robin Lopez, who had 12 points and five rebounds in the first half. Acquired by the Blazers from New Orleans in a three-team offseason trade, Lopez finished with 12 points and 10 rebounds.

Batum's 3 got the Blazers within 67-64 before Matthews' layup got them within one midway through the third quarter. Batum's pull-up jumper gave Portland a 70-69 lead, and Aldridge added a long jumper.

The Blazers clung to the lead until Durant's jumper tied it at 78, but Aldridge answered with a turnaround jumper to cap a 10-point streak for the two-time All-Star.

""I've been saying it from the start -- he's the best power forward in the game,"" Matthews said

NOTES: Oklahoma City is 9-0 at home but 4-4 on the road. ... Portland has lost only one game at home this season. ... Oregon State receiver Brandin Cooks and running back Storm Woods were at the game. The Beavers (6-6) are waiting to see if they're headed to a bowl in the postseason. ... Oregon Ducks receiver Josh Huff was also at the game. ... Coming off a six-game home stand, Oklahoma City is playing three games in four nights before heading home to face Indiana on Sunday. ... Lopez has seven double-doubles this season.","LaMarcus Aldridge had a season-high 38 points and added 13
rebounds and the Portland Trail Blazers snapped Oklahoma Citys
eight-game winning streak with a 111-104 victory over the Thunder
on Wednesday..."
"Duchess of Cambridge's portrait unveiled

Duchess of Cambridge's portrait unveiled

Duchess of Cambridge's portrait unveiled

Duchess of Cambridge's portrait unveiled

Duchess of Cambridge's portrait unveiled

Duchess of Cambridge's portrait unveiled

What do you think of the Duchess of Cambridge's portrait? Sound off with iReport or have your say in the comments below.

London (CNN) -- The first official portrait of Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, has been unveiled at London's National Portrait Gallery -- but has met with a mixed reaction from art critics and the public.

Award-winning artist Paul Emsley, who spent three-and-a-half months painting the Duchess's likeness, said he had tried to portray her warmth and personality in the picture.

""The Duchess explained that she would like to be portrayed naturally -- her natural self -- as opposed to her official self,"" he said in a video posted on the gallery's website.

""She struck me as enormously open and generous and a very warm person, so after initially feeling it was going to be an unsmiling portrait I think it was the right choice in the end to have her smiling - that is really who she is.""

Both Catherine, who is expecting her first baby, and her husband Prince William, are said to be pleased with the finished painting, with the Duchess reportedly telling Emsley at a private viewing on Friday that it is ""amazing... brilliant.""

Duchess attends first event since pregnancy

However, reaction from art critics and the public has been more mixed, with many taking to social media, including Twitter, to share their thoughts, claiming the picture is unflattering and ages the Duchess beyond her years.

Writing in the UK's Guardian newspaper, Charlotte Higgins claimed the painting transformed ""a pretty young woman... into something unpleasant from the 'Twilight' franchise.""

In the Independent, art critic Michael Glover wrote that the portrait was ""catastrophic,"" combining ""hamsterish"" cheeks and ""hair whose featheriness has been borrowed from an advert for shampoo.""

Emsley, who was born in Glasgow but grew up in South Africa before returning to Britain in 1996, won the prestigious BP Portrait Award in 2007. He has previously painted portraits of Nelson Mandela and author VS Naipaul.

Royal waxworks of William and Catherine revealed

He created the work from a series of photographs taken during two sittings, at Kensington Palace in London and at his studio in South West England, in May and June last year.

""I'm always worried about the sitter -- are they cold, are they hot, are they comfortable -- and photography today is so accurate and so good that it is really so much easier just to take photographs and work from that,"" he said.

Catherine's portrait joins centuries-worth of official paintings and photographs of the British royal family in the NPG's collection. The duchess is a patron of the gallery.

NPG director Sandy Nairne said revealing the portrait, which he described as ""a captivating contemporary image,"" was ""an exciting moment.""

In a statement, Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, said: ""The unveiling of a first official portrait of a royal sitter is always an important and intriguing moment, defining and enshrining their public image in a new way.""

What do you think of the Duchess of Cambridge's portrait? Sound off with iReport or have your say in the comments below.","The first official portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge has been unveiled in London, but has met with a mixed reaction from art critics."
"The Obama administration today released details of its plan to collect a new bank tax.

But heavens, don’t call it that; it’s the “financial crisis responsibility fee,” not the “financial crisis responsibility tax.”

This labeling choice was probably a good idea: The term “tax” seems to be a dirty word, according to a new study from three Columbia psychologists.

Bradford Plumer at The New Republic summarizes the research here:

Test subjects were broken up into two groups, and each group was allowed to pick between pricier and cheaper versions of various items like airline tickets. Group A was told that the more expensive items included the price of a “carbon tax,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Group B was told that the costlier items included the price of a “carbon offset,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Exact same policy, just different names for each.

You can guess what happened next. In the “offset” group, Democrats, Republicans and independents all flocked toward the pricier item. They were perfectly happy to pay an extra surcharge to fund CO2 reduction — even Republicans gushed about the benefits of doing so. Not only that, but most of the group supported making the surcharge mandatory. In the “tax” group, however, Democrats were the only ones willing to pay for the costlier item. Republicans in this group were much more inclined to grumble about how much more expensive the tax made things. Labels really do matter.

I wonder what would have happened if a third group had been given the option of a “carbon fee” — and how things would have looked if the tax-offset-fee had been imposed upon an outside group of much-reviled bankers, rather than the study participants themselves.

My sense is that “tax” conjures up images big, ravenous governments sucking the little guy dry; “offset” connotes restoring things to their natural balance; and “fee,” like “fine,” sounds somehow punitive or compensatory, a punishment for wrongdoing or a bill for services rendered.","The wording ""financial crisis responsibility fee"" may avoid what a study has found to be a dirty word."
"Despite all the talk about reducing energy consumption in the data center, on the desktop and in a variety of mobile devices that interface with it, companies are expanding their consumption of electricity faster than they are saving it. While many say they have adopted a very deep shade of green, they are decidedly less green than the image they paint.

For the CIO, this is largely good marketing--and a bit of a sleight of hand. Mobile devices and notebook computers do consume less power than a desktop, but they typically get charged while employees are home or on the road, in cars, hotel rooms or even airports. Mobilizing a workforce may lower a corporation's energy bill, but it really isn't reducing the energy consumption tied to that corporation. And mobile employees burn fuel when they're on the road, so the net effect is definitely negative.

Inside the data center, there is such low-hanging fruit for saving power that you have to wonder why it took so long to address these problems. Servers that are no longer in use still hum along while others use full power to run a single application. Virtualization may solve some of this, but the bigger problems are data mining and an overall architecture for what's needed, what isn't and how it should be organized. Because cooling systems in data centers are poorly planned and haphazardly implemented, that cool air never effectively reaches some servers, forcing air conditioners to work overtime and burn through more power.

These are easy fixes, and they are starting to be addressed. But they won't solve the power needs caused by the digitization of everything that used to be on paper. Images and videos require huge amounts of storage, and quick access to those records will increase power consumption in coming years. The fact that they are run on servers that draw lower power is a good thing. But basic math says the aggregation of data will ultimately consume more power than is being used today.

The federal government's push to digitize medical records is a case in point. The amount of power needed to store and access an MRI image is significantly higher than what's needed to store Tolstoy's War And Peace. A bank's storage of a check image may be convenient for customers, but it takes significantly more power to store, access and display than a basic spreadsheet. And we haven't even touched the subject of videos, which are becoming more popular as a way of communicating across a company and to the outside world.

Outsourcing and cloud computing are more efficient in some respects, namely server utilization, but they also are a way of pushing energy consumption outside a company's data center. A company doesn't consume less energy by letting another company run its applications; it merely buries the electric bill inside a service contract.

In the short term, a company that regularly refreshes its servers, virtualizes applications, fixes glaring problems and outsources its non-core functions will gain a shiny green glow. The CIO can point to lower energy bills to show that energy consumption is consistently going down and the public relations team can build a case of just how politically correct the company has become.

But the real consumption by the company will continue to rise. Even the most aggressive document retention policies will, at best, hold the line. Adding different types of documents ultimately will increase storage needs, and power consumption will rise with it. Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out where all the energy costs are buried. What is green today may look significantly more tarnished five years from now.

Painting The Data Center Green",Outsourcing energy costs isn't reducing total energy consumption.
"Our reporting last week on a Brookings Institution study advocating that part of the U.S. Postal Service be sold off drew angry and passionate responses from postal employees, unions and liberal bloggers.

Elaine Kamarck, a former Clinton administration official, joined conservatives in arguing in her Brookings report that a money-losing post office cannot survive as a government entity in the Internet age, which has sapped its First Class mail business.

Karmack says the best path forward for the Postal Service requires breaking it in two. One arm would continue to deliver the mail five days a week. The other would stake out new business with no encumbrances.

[Should the Postal Service be sold to save it? ]

The two largest postal unions, fearful that thousands of jobs would be lost through privatization, have said for a long time that the Postal Service’s multibillion-dollar deficits are artificial. The agency’s eight consecutive annual losses, totaling more than $52 billion, are largely due to its obligation (imposed in 2006 by Congress as part of a sweeping postal bill) to pay $5.5 billion a year and counting toward the health benefits of future retirees.

Yes, the volume of First Class mail — the Postal Service’s most profitable product — is in a downward spiral, union leaders acknowledge. Yes, the recession brought still steeper losses.

But if not for the pre-funding mandate, required by no other public or private entities, they argue, the post office would be making money today, with the recession over and its package business booming.

“She jumped to incorrect conclusions about what’s driving the losses,” Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers, the largest postal union, said of Kamarck’s report.

“The conventional wisdom is that the Internet is killing the post service,” said Sauber, an economist. “I’m not denying that the Internet is having profound effects both positive and negative. But most of the loss is from the pre-funding [requirement] and the recession itself.”

The agency’s finances have stabilized in the past two years, with revenue more than covering expenses by about $1.2 billion during the first three quarters of this year. That’s without the pre-funding payment, which postal officials have now defaulted on multiple times, or long-term obligations to workmen’s compensation costs. The higher revenue is largely driven by cost cutting, from shrinking the workforce to closing mail-sorting plants.

Numerous bills in Congress have called for eliminating the retiree payment, a budget maneuver at the time that most postal observers agree more than covers the agency’s obligations to future retirees. However, Congress has so far shown little appetite for fixing postal finances.

But even without the pre-funding mandate, experts say the post office is not in a healthy financial position long-term. It remains on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list, with auditors characterizing its short-and long-term outlook as a “serious financial crisis” earlier this year.

Workmen’s compensation debts, $15 billion owed to the U.S. Treasury, lagging investment in new vehicles, equipment and maintenance — these are persistent weaknesses. And most of a 3-cent rate increase that postal officials were able to count on for hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue since 2013 is set to expire this spring.

Still, the unions don’t buy the assumption that the Postal Service is in such free fall that the best option is to sell it. They also don’t buy the claim that taking its most profitable arm, its package business, private would come close to covering the expenses of its unprofitable arm, universal delivery of the regular mail.

“We would deny the public the right to universal and uniform mail service at reasonable cost,” said Mark Dimonstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union. “It will be about whether someone can make a dollar as opposed to a right that has its foundation in the U.S. Constitution.”

Sauber and Dimondstein say their commitment to saving jobs for their members goes hand in hand with their concern that private companies would simply cherry-pick the most profitable mail routes.

“Who’s going to serve Montana or Utah?” Sauber said. “You can’t make money delivering the mail there. We’d fight like hell to protect the standard of living of our members, but what you would have is a much smaller, weaker postal industry.”

Dimondstein said the exploding e-commerce business survives on the public infrastructure of the postal system: Post offices, mail carriers, mail sorting plants. “There’s not a private entity that could do all that.”

Lisa Rein covers the federal workforce and issues that concern the management of government.","Congress is the real problem facing the Post Office and the one who can fix it, labor unions say."
"AUSTIN, Texas – A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Texas' strict voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act and ordered changes before the November election.

The ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals instructs a lower court to make changes that fix the ""discriminatory effect"" of the 2011 law, but to do so in a way that disrupts this year's election season as little as possible.

President Barack Obama's administration took the unusual step of deploying the weight of the U.S. Justice Department into the case when it challenged the law, which requires Texas residents to show one of seven forms of approved identification. The state and other supporters say the Texas law prevents fraud. Opponents say it discriminates by requiring forms of ID that are more difficult to obtain for low-income, African-American and Latino voters.

""We are extremely pleased with this outcome. This law will no longer prevent eligible voters from casting a ballot this November,"" attorney Gerry Herbert, a member of the legal team that challenged the law, said following Wednesday's ruling.

The Texas Democratic Party also immediately celebrated, declaring that ""the most restrictive and discriminatory Republican voter ID law in country has been struck down.""

The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit agreed to rehear the issue after a three-judge panel ruled last year that the law violated the Voting Rights Act.

Lawyers for Texas have argued that the state makes free IDs easy to obtain. They said any inconveniences or costs involved in getting one do not substantially burden the right to vote, and that the Justice Department and other plaintiffs had failed to prove that the law resulted in denying anyone the right to vote.

Opponents countered in briefs that trial testimony indicated various bureaucratic and economic burdens associated with the law — for instance, the difficulty in finding and purchasing a proper birth certificate to obtain an ID. A brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union cited testimony in other voter ID states indicating numerous difficulties faced by people, including burdensome travel and expenses to get required documentation to obtain IDs.

Texas doesn't recognize university IDs from college students, but it does accept concealed handgun licenses as proof of identity.

Despite being struck down by a federal district judge in 2014, the law has been enforced in recent elections. The decision came so close to Election Day that the 5th Circuit panel allowed it to be enforced that year to avoid voter confusion.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal to stop Texas from enforcing the law pending the current appeal. But the court said it could revisit the issue as the November elections approach.",A federal appeals court has ruled that Texas' strict voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act and has ordered changes before the November election.
"Nov 27, 2012 05:56 PM EST

I said the other day I’d post a who-speaks-for-ducks item and so here we go. There’s just no getting around it. Because I wouldn’t want to shatter my credibility. I’m a stand-up blogger and this was a direct promise to post an item headlined in such a fashion.

And don’t think I’m stalling here trying to remember what my point was going to be.

Oh right: Fiscal cliff, Grand Bargain, tax hikes, spending cuts. We have to make some tough decisions. And on the spending side, we have to decide if we’re going to hack away at the growth in entitlement spending, or instead find savings through cuts in discretionary spending, which is to say cuts in the things that government actually does, which is to say cuts to such agencies as the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — which is to say ducks.

Well, now that I think of it, there’s an obvious answer: Ducks Unlimited.

The fact is, there’s a lobby for everything. There’s a trout lobby! Trout Unlimited, or TU as we call it in my neighborhood.

If you’re a lobbyist in this town, right now is game time. This is the flippin’ Super Bowl. You gotta gear up and get out there in the middle of the scrum. If you don’t protect your measure of gruel you’ll lose it to someone who’s hungrier and meaner. The public-employee unions are revved up, as is AARP and various advocacy groups like Fix the Debt and the National Committee to Protect Social Security and Medicare (which is very upset about the idea of switching to chained CPI as you can imagine).

And you know all those tax “loopholes” that people keep saying they want to close? Every one of them has a constituency, and a lobbying operation, and a person in a swank corner office staring out on K Street. And a membership at Congressional. A corner table at Charlie Palmer’s steakhouse. A Rolodex the size of a Doberman. [Fogey mental note: Do people still have Rolodexes?] [And Dobermans??]

Loopholes and tax breaks are a major industry here in Washington. The big tax fight between the Ds and Rs is over how to raise more tax revenue — by eliminating loopholes and tax breaks, or by raising marginal rates. The Republicans would rather do the latter. But you know the Republicans have friends who create loopholes for a living and hand over pallets of cash for re-election campaigns. The average Republican can say, with a straight face, “Some of my best friends are loopholes.”

There is no solution to the long-term fiscal picture that does not involve some level of pain. Avoidance of pain is the job of the people representing the various interest groups. We know, for example, what AARP thinks about cuts to entitlement programs. It is a measure of the success of that effort that when the time came to create brutal sequestration cuts, entitlements were protected while discretionary programs (ducks, etc.) were splayed on the chopping block.

I do not know how this will play out, but in all likelihood the future will be used again as the great slush fund for the present, and any Grand Bargain will likely involve efforts to hide the pain, obscure it, mask it, distract from it, suppress it, and ultimately lie about it.

Someone will say: “This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.” And that will be a lie.",Gear up. Game time.
"What's the old adage? If you can't beat them, join them? Well, it seems that's exactly what Tesla is doing. The upstart EV automaker has applied for a dealership license in Michigan.

This is a change, of course, for Tesla because, up until now, it has been selling its cars around the country in company-run showrooms that sell direct to customers — thereby circumventing the dealership model. However, in 2014 Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill into law that banned direct sales of vehicles, closing the loophole Tesla has been exploiting around the U.S. to avoid opening dealers.

""Tesla is committed to being able to serve its customers in Michigan and is working with the legislature to accomplish that,"" A Tesla spokesperson told Mashable. ""The existing law in Michigan is very harmful to consumers. Tesla will take all appropriate steps to fix this broken situation.""

The difference between what Tesla is doing and, say, how Chevrolet sells cars is that, rather than having a dealership owned and operated by an independent company, Tesla doesn't have a middleman hawking its cars. This allows it to control and streamline the experience and avoid the grossness of a normal dealership — think old coffee and popcorn machines.

The dealership license Tesla has applied for is a ""Class A"" license that requires the company to sell both new and used cars as well as offer a repair facility.

Rather than turning over the reigns to an unknown entity, Tesla could have a former employee open a franchise dealership. This person would likely be required to operate the dealership just like a current Tesla direct-sales store. Though the company has applied for a dealer license, it isn't happy about the direct-sales ban and still aims to fight it.

""As recently amended, current Michigan law prohibits Tesla from being able to license its own sales and service operations in the state,"" A Tesla spokesperson said. ""Submission of the application is intended to seek the Secretary of State’s confirmation of this prohibition. Once confirmed, Tesla will review any options available to the Company to overturn this anti-consumer law.""

The decision on Tesla's application could take several months. No matter how the decision comes down, however, it seems Tesla isn't done fighting the direct-sales battle.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.","Since direct sales is illegal in Michigan, Tesla has applied for a dealership license that it could have a former employee operate like a Tesla store."
"Happy New Year and welcome to the 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll for January 2015. This month's poll takes on fear, a topic that is becoming increasingly controversial as it relates to terrorism. Sony's recent decision to cancel/delay the premiere of the movie ""The Interview"" has sparked a lively debate around the country about whether we should ever give in to the fear of threatened attacks, especially when they come from nameless and faceless hackers. Fear in humans has helped us to thrive as a species, using the ""fight or flight"" response which we possess instinctively to help us survive for thousands of years.

Fear can also paralyze us. In his famous Inauguration speech in 1933, FDR famously said, ""the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.... nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror."" He was referring to the economic fear and uncertainty that had gripped the nation. FDR's advice was to ""face our fears as our forefathers did, who conquered their perils because they believed and were not afraid."" Here's wishing that the New Year brings us freedom from fear and a continuing renewal of hope and optimism. And now the results...

Three out of 10 Americans think that anger has caused the most harm in the world, followed by fear 25 percent, envy 21 percent, depression 17 percent, boredom three percent and pity one percent. Ah ""what fools these mortals be""... the folly of humans and our emotions are as old as the Bible. Our emotions have caused more harm in the world than can ever be known. They have also caused more good and more love and more kindness. Many people are always aspiring to ""the better angels of their nature"" and there are many others who are not. That's just the way of the world.

A whopping 82 percent of Americans are not afraid to say that FDR's famous quote constitutes a good way to view the world and only a paltry 14 percent think it is mostly silly nonsense. His words were timely and gave Americans inspirational leadership when they needed it most. He helped to create the Social Security Act of 1935 which has provided much needed help and dignity to countless Americans who had previously feared that they may become destitute in old age.

Thirty-seven percent of Americans are most anxious when they are walking alone at night on a city street. Other activities that cause anxiety include: being stopped for a traffic violation 27 percent, hearing a pilot warn of turbulence 15 percent, having your annual physical nine percent and answering a phone without caller ID six percent. More women (53 percent) fear being alone on a city street at night and more men (34 percent) fear being stopped for a traffic violation. Here's a little advice for the six percent who fear answering a phone without caller ID, don't pick it up.

Nearly half of Americans think clownophobia is the most ridiculous fear. Next in order were fear of commitment 13 percent, dentists 10 percent, needles eight, public speaking eight percent and flying seven percent. Whether they are ridiculous or irrational these fears can be very real to those who experience them. If you have seen the mini-series ""It"" based on the Stephen King novel, you probably know how creepy killer clowns can be.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans say they fear the wrath of God the most, followed by their spouse 15 percent, their parents 11 percent and their boss seven percent. No one wants to feel the wrath of their spouse, parents or boss, but America has always been known as a God-fearing nation and this confirms that it still is.

More than three out of four Americans say they are more likely to stay awake thinking about things that are already on their mind as opposed to one in five who say they lie awake thinking about things that are unknown and unexpected.

When it comes to which method they most fear might put an end to mankind, 35 percent of Americans chose the nuclear option. Twenty-three percent went viral, 15 percent got a rise out of choosing the Rapture, another 15 percent chose the ""Inconvenient Truth"" of global warming and eight percent most feared meeting the same fate as the dinosaurs.

Six out of 10 Americans think that people who risk their lives to climb Mount Everest are mostly fearless and 35 percent think they are mostly reckless. Over the years, many people who have attempted the climb have lost their lives. Those who train and prepare well may be called fearless and those who do not may be called reckless.

Two out of three Americans think that being loved around the world would make the United States more secure and three out of 10 think that being feared would make us more secure. The majority agrees with the Beatles that ""all you need is love"" and the minority agrees with the famous Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli who said ""it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot have both.""

The foreign powers that Americans currently fear the most are ISIS 38 percent, China 29 percent, Russia 19 percent and to a much lesser degree Liberia two percent and WikiLeaks two percent. You can watch the CBS Evening News almost any night and see why Americans fear these powers. ISIS kills and terrorizes innocent people. China has a huge population, economic clout and advanced cyber-capabilities. Russia is becoming more isolated and unpredictable on the world stage. More women feared ISIS (47 percent) while more men feared China (37 percent). JFK said, ""the cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it."" Most Americans support the price we pay to protect our citizens from the dangers posed by foreign powers.

Nearly three in 10 Americans think that the actions of the passengers on Flight 93 showed the most courage, followed by Harriet Tubman 21 percent, Martin Luther King 16 percent, the signers of the Declaration of Independence 13 percent, JFK 10 percent and Jonas Salk six percent. Those passengers made a courageous decision in the heat of a conflict they knew might mean their deaths but they did it anyway. As an escaped slave, Harriet Tubman risked being recaptured and worse. MLK risked incarceration and as it turned out his eventual death to lead his people in Selma. As Ben Franklin mentioned upon signing the Declaration of Independence, ""we must now hang together, or we shall surely hang separately."" JFK showed great leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Jonas Salk selflessly risked his health to save countless people from the ravages of polio. These episodes are just what JFK was writing about in ""Profiles in Courage.""

This poll was conducted by telephone from November 5-9, 2014 among 1,018 adults nationwide. Data collection was conducted on behalf of CBS News by SSRS of Media, PA. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus 3 percentage points. The error for other subgroups may be higher. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Poll.

Read more about this poll

© 2015 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.",Do Americans want the world to love or fear the U.S.? The results are in for this month's 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll on fear
"LINDSTROM, Minn. — Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

There is little poverty here in Chisago County, northeast of Minneapolis, where cheap housing for commuters is gradually replacing farmland. But Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year.

Dozens of benefits programs provided an average of $6,583 for each man, woman and child in the county in 2009, a 69 percent increase from 2000 after adjusting for inflation. In Chisago, and across the nation, the government now provides almost $1 in benefits for every $4 in other income.

Older people get most of the benefits, primarily through Social Security and Medicare, but aid for the rest of the population has increased about as quickly through programs for the disabled, the unemployed, veterans and children.

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

And as more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

The expansion of government benefits has become an issue in the presidential campaign. Rick Santorum, who won 57 percent of the vote in Chisago County in the Republican presidential caucuses last week, has warned of “the narcotic of government dependency.” Newt Gingrich has compared the safety net to a spider web. Mitt Romney has said the nation must choose between an “entitlement society” and an “opportunity society.” All the candidates, including Ron Paul, have promised to cut spending and further reduce taxes.

The problem by now is familiar to most. Politicians have expanded the safety net without a commensurate increase in revenues, a primary reason for the government’s annual deficits and mushrooming debt. In 2000, federal and state governments spent about 37 cents on the safety net from every dollar they collected in revenue, according to a New York Times analysis. A decade later, after one Medicare expansion, two recessions and three rounds of tax cuts, spending on the safety net consumed nearly 66 cents of every dollar of revenue.

The recent recession increased dependence on government, and stronger economic growth would reduce demand for programs like unemployment benefits. But the long-term trend is clear. Over the next 25 years, as the population ages and medical costs climb, the budget office projects that benefits programs will grow faster than any other part of government, driving the federal debt to dangerous heights.

Americans are divided about the way forward. Seventy percent of respondents to a recent New York Times poll said the government should raise taxes. Fifty-six percent supported cuts in Medicare and Social Security. Forty-four percent favored both.","The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits."
"PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Dozens of their friends and coworkers have been murdered for distributing polio vaccine here, but a resolute band of Pakistani women are risking their lives to fight the rapid spread of the disease, defying Islamic extremists who see inoculation as a CIA plot.

""My first priority,"" one polio worker, whose sister-in-law and niece were both gunned down a year ago as they distributed the vaccine near Karachi, said in broken English, ""I want polio finished and leave Pakistan.""

NBC News' Ann Curry visited the front lines of the international campaign against polio in Pakistan earlier this year to meet some of the women who go door to door to pass out the vaccine, which can prevent early death or a lifetime of paralysis or disfigurement. They risk their lives for the equivalent of about $2.50 a day.

GulNaz, the worker whose sister-in-law and niece were killed as they were making their rounds to inoculate children, said she doesn't want their sacrifices to be in vain.

""Their deaths gave me a new resolve,"" said GulNaz, who asked that she be identified only by her first name out of safety concerns for her family. ""Their sacrifice makes my mission more meaningful. I'm not stopping now.""

Polio worker GulNaz, in brown, leads her vaccination team in Karachi.

The vaccination drive has taken on a new urgency in the wake of the World Health Organization's declaration of a global health emergency for polio on May 5, which singled out Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon as nations that had allowed the virus to spread outside their borders.

But it also has gotten more risky in Pakistan, where the government temporarily suspended the campaign this summer in the wake of a pair of attacks on the Karachi airport claimed by the Pakistan Taliban, fearing that the polio workers also might be targeted, according to health officials familiar with the order.

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Pakistan is Ground Zero in the revival of the disease, which just two years ago appeared to be on the verge of eradication following 25 years of progress. This year, Pakistan has tallied 260 deaths from the disease -- nearly three times as many as last year.

It also is likely the most dangerous country in the world in which to distribute a vaccine. Sixty-four polio vaccine workers and security personnel protecting them have been killed by snipers and roadside bombs over the last two years. Recently, the government has been providing Army troops to accompany the vaccine workers in an effort to halt the slayings.

""The children of our Pakistan, our community, also are our children.""

The attacks are believed to be the work of Islamic militants, including members of the Pakistani Taliban, who widely believe the workers are actually CIA spies. It's a view shared by many of Pakistan's majority Muslims in the wake of a fake hepatitis vaccination program run by the CIA in 2011 as it hunted Osama Bin Laden.

As a result of the violence, few foreign aid workers are willing to venture into the most dangerous areas, particularly communities near Karachi controlled by Islamic militants and the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan.

That's unacceptable to Huma, a mother of two who lives in Peshawar, which borders the lawless tribal areas. She said she feels a responsibility to protect those children as well as her own.

""The children of our Pakistan, our community, also are our children,"" said Huma, who estimates that she has vaccinated thousands of children in the nearly a year she has been a polio worker. ""… They have to be the future of Pakistan. They have to be the future of tomorrow.""

Huma, who also asked that her last name not be published, said the job requires equal parts resolve and diplomacy to try to overcome the suspicions of Muslim parents, particularly when the discussion begins only after a door is slammed in her face.

Four Pakistan Polio Workers Killed by Assassins on Motorcycles

""We have to work in their comfort zone … in which … they are understanding of our words,"" she said, adding that she often has to make strategic decisions on the fly as far as ""how to enter into the home, how to convince them.""

In one case, Huma recalled, she visited the home of a woman doctor repeatedly to try to persuade her to vaccinate her daughter, only to be turned away each time. Finally, she went to the daughter's school and explained to the girl why the vaccination was so important. The next day, after the girl relayed the message ""that we have to work together and we have to eradicate the polio"" to her mom, ""She let me in,"" Huma said. Huma vaccinated the daughter and the woman later began giving vaccinations to other children herself, she said.

But Huma and other vaccine workers, who have managed to distribute 450 million doses of vaccine over the last two years, say there are some areas where even they dare not enter -- neighborhoods controlled by Islamic militants that are declared ""no-go"" zones by organizers of the vaccination effort. That means thousands of kids go unvaccinated, raising the chances of new polio outbreaks that could quickly race through Pakistan's teeming cities and across borders.

Three-year-old Musharaf was not vaccinated after his father, Usman, refused to let him receive the drops, saying it was part of a CIA plot to spy on them. Musharaf now has polio.

The depth of many Pakistanis' suspicions of the vaccine workers was evident in an interview with a man named Usman.

Usman, who is originally from the tribal area of South Waziristan, was himself struck by polio as a child and walks with a decided limp. Being ""a little educated"" about the benefits of vaccination, he said he allowed the vaccine workers to inoculate his three oldest children -- but not his now-3-year-old son, Musharaf.

Usman said the revelation of the CIA's phony vaccination program was key to his change of heart.

""I gave three of my kids polio drops,"" he said. ""The fourth one I didn't because by then polio workers were involved in espionage. The CIA uses the program to get us.""

Musharaf was recently diagnosed with polio, though he isn't yet showing any symptoms of the disease and may never do so. Despite his son's diagnosis, Usman said he has no regrets, saying Musharaf is better off with polio than being blinded by a drone attack.

""It's better that our kids get handicapped here than suffer from that,"" he said. ""At least they can see. Allah decides and will decide for them and give them a living.""

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Huma, the vaccine worker in Peshawar, said attitudes like Usman's are the reason she can't walk away from the inoculation campaign, despite the danger she faces as she appeals to parents to let her protect their kids with two drops - just two drops -- of vaccine from an eye-dropper.

""We have to vaccinate them,"" said Huma. ""… I understand the importance of these two drops. I want other mothers to understand the importance of these two drops.""

First published June 4 2014, 10:48 AM

Ann Curry is the NBC News national and international correspondent/anchor and “Today” anchor at large. Curry reports for all platforms of NBC News including “TODAY,” “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “Dateline,” MSNBC, and all digital properties. Curry also serves as anchor for multiple NBC News primetime specials and regularly substitute anchors for “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams”.Curry served as co-anchor of NBC News’ “Today,” from June 2011 to June 2012 and as news anchor from March 1997 to June 2011. She served as the anchor of “Dateline NBC” from May 2005 until September 2011.Curry has distinguished herself in global humanitarian reporting frequently traveling to remote areas of the world for under-reported stories. During the span of one year, from March 2006 to March 2007, she traveled three times to Sudan to report on the violence and ethnic cleansing taking place in Darfur and Chad. While there, she provided in-depth reports focusing on the victims who have been caught in the deadly conflict of that region, and she also conducted exclusive interviews with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Chadian President Idrsiss Deby. In February 2009, she returned to the Darfur region to continue her reporting on the humanitarian crisis and to cover the looming arrest of al-Bashir for Crimes against Humanity in Darfur. In October 2010, Curry spent a week traveling through the southern region of the Sudan with actor and activist George Clooney to shed light on the tensions building in the country. In February 2012, Curry made her sixth trip to Sudan to cover the vicious bombing campaigns targeting black African tribes in the Nuba Mountains. In spring 2008, Curry broadcast live from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where she reported on the horrific struggles of the women and children from the city of Goma. She also traveled to Serbia in 2008 where she examined the deplorable conditions of Serbia’s mental institutions. Curry was the first network news anchor to report on the humanitarian refugee crisis caused by the genocide in Kosovo in 1999, reporting for NBC News from Albania and Macedonia. Curry has conducted numerous exclusive interviews with world leaders and dignitaries including three notable discussions with Dalai Lama, the first during his trip to the U.S amid violence in Tibet in April 2008, the second at his private home in India in March 2009, and the third, on May 20, 2010 on “Today,” his first live on-set interview on a morning news program. Curry sat down with former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto just two months before her assassination in December 2007. In September 2011, Curry was granted the first-ever behind-the-scenes-access to the daily schedule of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was in this exclusive interview that Curry broke the news of his plans to free the much-publicized two American hikers who had been held hostage since 2009. In November 2011, Curry reported live from Baghdad, Iraq and conducted an exclusive interview with Vice President Joe Biden who was in Baghdad for a U.S.-Iraq Higher Coordinating Committee meeting. Curry also talked to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari in his first-ever interview with an American news organization. Other Curry exclusives include Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female elected President of an African nation; the first highly sought after interview with Thomas Hamill, the truck driver for Halliburton subsidiary KBR, who escaped captivity in Iraq; the first interview with accused spy Wen Ho Lee after he was cleared of all charges of espionage against the United States; and the first interview with the parents of the McCaughey septuplets. Curry also repeatedly landed the first exclusive interview with Lance Armstrong after his Tour de France wins.In the wake of the record-breaking earthquake and devastating tsunami of March 2011, Curry was one of the few network anchors to travel to Japan and provide on-the-ground coverage of the crises unfolding across the country. In January 2010, Curry was one of the first reporters in Haiti after the debilitating earthquake that hit that country. Twitter named Curry’s message calling for the Air Force to allow physicians to land in Haiti to administer aid to the injured, the #1 tweet in 2010. In February 2010, she traveled to Chile after that country’s massive earthquake, and in August of 2010, Curry reported live from Islamabad, Pakistan, covering the massive flooding devastation. While in the region, she interviewed Senator John Kerry. In July 2006, Curry reported on the Israel-Lebanon war, and she was one of the only American reporters to file stories on both sides of the conflict from Beruit and Northern Israel.In the summer of 2005, Curry traveled with First Lady Laura Bush throughout Africa to examine the continent’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, women's rights and education. She was the first network news anchor to report from inside the tsunami zone in Southeast Asia, filing reports from Sri Lanka for all NBC News and MSNBC programming. As part of “Today’s” unprecedented Ends of the Earth series, Curry has extensively examined the effects of climate change traveling to Antarctica and the South Pole in November 2007, and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in November 2008. Curry traveled with “Today” to Beijing in 2008 for the Summer Olympics and to Vancouver in 2010 to cover the Winter Olympics. She also traveled to London for the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.In the first two weeks following the 9/11 attacks, Curry reported live from Ground Zero every day. When the United States bombed Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in November 2001, she reported extensively from the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, and landed the first exclusive interview with the war’s military commander, General Tommy Franks. Curry reported from Baghdad in the weeks leading up to the war in Iraq, and then from the USS Constellation as the war began, interviewing fighter pilots who flew the first wave of bombing runs over Iraq. She also filed reports from inside Iraq, from Qatar, and Kuwait during the first weeks of the war.Curry first joined NBC News in August 1990 as a Chicago-based correspondent. In 1992 she was named anchor of “NBC News at Sunrise.” She later helped launch MSNBC and then became news anchor at “TODAY.” Before coming to NBC, Curry was a reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles. In 1981, she was a reporter and anchor for KGW, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon. Curry began her broadcasting career as an intern in 1978 at KTVL, in Medford, Oregon, near her hometown, rising to become that station's first female news reporter.Curry has earned seven Emmys Awards four Golden Mikes, several Associated Press Certificates of Excellence, three Gracie Allen Awards, a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications, and an award for Excellence in Reporting from the NAACP. In June 2007, Curry was honored with the Simon Wiesenthal Medal of Valor for her extensive reporting in Darfur. She has been awarded by Americares, Save the Children, Women of Concern, the Anti-Defamation League as a Woman of Achievement, and the Asian American Journalists Association, receiving its National Journalism Award in 2003. She has also won numerous awards for her charity work, primarily for breast cancer research.Curry graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1978.","PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Dozens of their friends and coworkers have been murdered for distributing polio vaccine here, but a resolute band of Pakistani women ar..."
"By Associated Press December 16 at 1:47 PM

SANAA, Yemen — Two suicide car bombers rammed their vehicles into a Shiite rebels’ checkpoint and a house south of the Yemeni capital Tuesday as a school bus was traveling nearby, killing at least 26 people including at least 16 primary school students, according to the Yemeni government, rebels and witnesses.

Witnesses said that the first car was loaded with potatoes apparently disguising explosives underneath. When the car bomber arrived at the checkpoint manned by rebels, he blew up the vehicle as the students’ bus was passing. After the first explosion, a second car targeted the home of a Shiite rebel leader, Abdullah Idris.

State TV quoted the country’s Supreme Security Committee — Yemen’s highest security body — as saying that at least 26 including 16 students and 10 civilians were killed in the twin bombings.

Witnesses at the site of the attack said that the rebels brought four pickup trucks and dumped dozens of bodies into them while several ambulances rushed to the scene to carry away the wounded. Body parts littered the street along with open bags of potatoes.

The Shiite rebels, known as the Houthis, blamed al-Qaida for the attack in the Radaa area of Baydah province, calling it “the ugliest crime against childhood.” The group said the school bus was carrying female primary school students.

The witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity for fear retribution.

This is the second time Idris’s house has been targeted since October. The Houthis and al-Qaida have been fighting in Radaa since the rebels overran the area in October.

The empowered Shiite rebels have made significant military advances in recent months, seizing control of the capital and other strategic cities.

Yemen has been gripped by a power struggle between President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and the Houthis, who have allied with his predecessor, ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh. On Tuesday, Saleh loyalists, who form the majority of parliament, derailed a vote of confidence on the new government’s program. A raucous session Tuesday came to an abrupt end before a vote, after Saleh loyalists bickered over internal party politics.

They accuse Hadi of backing U.N. sanctions against Saleh and two top rebel leaders, and have called on the government to explicitly denounce the sanctions.

Also Tuesday, Shiite rebel gunmen, who seized control of Sanaa in September, surrounded the ministry of defense and packed the city’s nearby streets, preventing the minister from accessing his office. A day earlier, the minister had kicked out the rebels from around the ministry for blocking his chief of staff from entering.

Later, Hadi drove to the ministry, effectively ending the siege.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.","Two suicide car bombers rammed their vehicles into a Shiite rebels’ checkpoint and a house south of the Yemeni capital Tuesday as a school bus was traveling nearby, killing at least 26 people including at least 16 primary school students, according to the Yemeni government, rebels and witnesses."
"Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

Amanda Brooks was inspired to leave New York by a mother of four who lives on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma.

IT was a little more than a year ago that the New York City socialite Amanda Brooks was appointed fashion director of Barneys New York, to some cluck-clucking in the industry. After all, Ms. Brooks, 38, had little experience in retail, other than acting as a muse and later creative director to the fashion label Tuleh, and was more often photographed in preppy classics than the avant-garde brands for which Barneys had been known under the stewardship of her well-regarded predecessor, Julie Gilhart. As the blog Fashionista put it, “We’ve always thought of Brooks as more of a Bergdorf girl.”

Ms. Brooks’s duties included overseeing private labels and creating trend reports, informed in part by the street style of “it” girls, many of whom were part of her impressive network. “We didn’t need more retail help,” Mark Lee, the store’s chief executive, said of the hire at the time. Indeed, a lot of her job seemed to involve attending fashion shows, where she was a front-row regular, and going to openings and galas.

But in March, Ms. Brooks pulled off yet another surprise. She announced that she was not just quitting the Barneys position, but leaving Manhattan itself and planning a yearlong move with her family to a farm in Oxfordshire, England, that is owned by the family of her husband, the artist Christopher Brooks.

Was the Barneys brass disappointed in the high-profile hire? (Through a spokeswoman, executives there turned down requests to be interviewed on the matter.) Had Ms. Brooks — such a clotheshorse that she wrote a 2009 book on personal style — somehow soured on fashion shows? Or, as some in the news media speculated, was the move in support of her brother- and sister-in-law, Charlie and Rebekah Brooks, charged with perverting the course of justice (the term in British law) in the News of the World phone-hacking case?

None of the above, Ms. Brooks said recently, dining on a sunny Friday at Freemans, downstairs from the apartment she’ll soon be renting out. (A North Fork residence will also be leased, to the artist Rachel Feinstein, a friend.)

“It was because of Ree Drummond’s blog, The Pioneer Woman,” said Ms. Brooks, who has recently returned to a blog, ILoveYourStyle.com, that she started after publishing the 2009 book, which had the same name. Reading a New Yorker profile last year of Ms. Drummond, a mother of four who lives on a cattle ranch outside Pawhuska, Okla., and posts prolifically on subjects like how to make cornmeal pancakes (using catchphrases like “yahoo, yippety”) “got me really fired up,” Ms. Brooks went on. “It’s the idea of having a career on your own terms, anywhere.”

At first glance, Ms. Brooks, a consummate urbanite with coolly styled looks, could not be more diametrically opposed to Ms. Drummond. At lunch, several days after the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute benefit (to which she wore a minimalist graphite Calvin Klein ensemble), Ms. Brooks was dressed casually in an open-knit beige sweater, black trousers and black flat sandals. Her blondish brown hair fell in an enviable natural wave, and her figure was willowy.

“I lost a lot of weight working at Barneys,” said Ms. Brooks, nibbling delicately at the turkey sandwich with bacon she’d ordered along with an iced tea, then hastening to add, “It was the 14-hour days and then all the traveling.”

Since she married Mr. Brooks in 2001, in a wedding attended by such diverse personalities as Christian Louboutin and Tama Janowitz, the couple have tried to maintain the integrity of their family life, she said, agreeing to limit work events to two nights per week, a difficult feat in the hyperactive art and fashion scenes. They have two children, Coco (not after Chanel, but an abbreviation of Carmen), 10, who has yet to take any discernible interest in fashion, Ms. Brooks said, and Zach, 8.

She said she was reveling in her days off, scrapping her daily Women’s Wear Daily reading habit — “It’s refreshing to clear your mind,” she said. After lunch, she planned to take Zach to a birthday party.

In Ms. Brooks’s view, domestic harmony and success at work are inextricably intertwined. “That fearlessness, to be able to jump around in my career, came from a certain amount of stability and foundation I’ve always had at home,” she said. “I’m defined by my history, my family. I was never looking for my career to define me.”

Ms. Brooks grew up in Bronxville, N.Y., and Palm Beach, Fla., the younger of two daughters of Stephen Cutter, a real estate broker, and Elizabeth Stewart, an interior designer whom Ms. Brooks remembers wearing Alaïa to teach Sunday school. (Amanda’s older sister, Kimberly Cutter, is a novelist.) She attended public elementary school, then Horace Mann and Deerfield Academy, where she was a New England diving champion. While majoring in photography at Brown, she roomed with Patricia Lansing, a daughter of Carolina Herrera, for two years. She also briefly dated Alexander von Furstenberg, the son of Diane, who soon became what Ms. Brooks called “my fashion fairy godmother.” “It had nothing to do with Alexander,” Ms. von Furstenberg said of the bond between the two women. “But I have always had that special complicity with Amanda because of how we started.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

The previous version of this article implied that Mark Dowley was the current chief executive of the agency’s marketing division. He is the former chief executive.Â

The previous version of this article implied that Mark Dowley was the current chief executive of the agency’s marketing division. He is the former chief executive.Â",The New York City socialite Amanda Brooks is packing up for a farm in England a little more than a year after being appointed fashion director of Barneys New York.
"But what makes the British-Nigerian youngster stand out is the fact that she's also a university undergraduate.

Esther, from Walsall, an industrial town in the UK's West Midlands region, is one of the country's youngest college freshmen.

The talented 10-year-old enrolled at the Open University, a UK-based distance learning college, in January and is already top of the class, having recently scored 100% in a recent exam.

""It's so interesting. It has the type of maths I love. It's real maths -- theories, complex numbers, all that type of stuff,"" she giggles. ""It was super easy. My mum taught me in a nice way.""

She adds: ""I want to (finish the course) in two years. Then I'm going to do my PhD in financial maths when I'm 13. I want to have my own bank by the time I'm 15 because I like numbers and I like people and banking is a great way to help people.""

And in case people think her parents have pushed her into starting university early, Esther emphatically disagrees.

""I actually wanted to start when I was seven. But my mum was like, ""you're too young, calm down."" After three years of begging, mother Efe finally agreed to explore the idea.

Esther has always jumped ahead of her peers. She sat her first Math GSCE exam, a British high school qualification, at Ounsdale High School in Wolverhampton at just six, where she received a C-grade. A year later, she outdid herself and got the A-grade she wanted. Then last year she scored a B-grade when she sat the Math A-level exam.

Esther's mother noticed her daughter's flair for figures shortly after she began homeschooling her at the age of three. Initially, Esther's parents had enrolled her in a private school but after a few short weeks, the pair began noticing changes in the usually-vibrant youngster.

Efe says: ""One day we were coming back home and she burst out in tears and she said 'I don't ever want to go back to that school -- they don't even let me talk!'

""In the UK, you don't have to start school until you are five. Education is not compulsory until that age so I thought OK, we'll be doing little things at home until then. Maybe by the time she's five she will change her mind.""

Efe started by teaching basic number skills but Esther was miles ahead. By four, her natural aptitude for maths had seen the eager student move on to algebra and quadratic equations.

And Esther isn't the only maths prodigy in the family. Her younger brother Isaiah, 6, will soon be sitting his first A-level exam in June.

Not content with breaking barriers to attend college at just 10 years old, Esther is also writing a series of math workbooks for children called ""Yummy Yummy Algebra.""

""It starts at a beginner level -- that's volume one. But then there will be volume two, and volume three, and then volume four. But I've only written the first one.

""As long as you can add or subtract, you'll be able to do it. I want to show other children they are special,"" she says.

Meanwhile, Esther's parents are also trying to trail blaze their own educational journey back in Nigeria.

The couple have set up a foundation and are in the process of building a nursery and primary school in Nigeria's Delta region (where the family are from). Named ""Shakespeare's Academy,"" they hope to open the school's doors in September.

The proposed curriculum will have all the usual subjects such as English, languages, math and science, as well as more unconventional additions including morality and ethics, public speaking, entrepreneurship and etiquette. The couple say they want to emulate the teaching methods that worked for their children rather than focus on one way of learning.

""Some children learn very well with kinesthetics where they learn with their hands -- when they draw they remember things. Some children have extremely creative imaginations. Instead of trying to make children learn one way, you teach them based on their learning style,"" explains Efe.

The educational facility will have a capacity of 2,000 to 2,500 students with up to 30% of students being local children offered scholarships to attend.

Efe says: ""On one hand, billions of dollars worth of crude oil is pumped out from that region on a monthly basis and yet the poverty rate of the indigenous community is astronomical.""

While Paul adds: ""(The region has) poor quality of nursery and primary education. So by the time the children get secondary education they haven't got a clue. They haven't developed their core skills.

""The school is designed to give children an aim so they can study for something, not just for the sake of acquiring certifications. There is an end goal.""

Read this: 92-year-old student inspires a generation

Read this: Nigerian soul superstar Nneka is back!",Esther Okade seems like a normal 10-year-old -- she's loves Barbie dolls and Frozen. But she's also a mathematics marvel who just enrolled at college!
"Madoff is a law professor, a published author, and a committed proponent of a higher estate tax.

This article focuses on how the estate tax prevents concentrations of wealth. This argument is probably the most convincing argument for an estate tax.

However, in this article, Madoff argues that Congress should give up on the estate tax, and instead should impose an income tax on inheritance. The income tax would be akin to a tax on lottery earnings and there could be an exemption for smaller estates — “up to $500,000 or even $1 million” — and deferral for “taxes on inherited family farms and businesses.”

This article reflects flaws seen in previous op-eds by Madoff. (1) It would treat the estates of farmers and small businesses differently than other estates, without explaining why concentrations of wealth are appropriate for some but not for all. (2) It does not (and her previous articles inadequately) address the problem of taxing some wealth twice. (3) It favors spenders and consumers over savers. (4) It advocates paternalism over autonomy.

Excessive concentration of wealth is a legitimate concern, but Madoff thinks that people are wealthy if they have more than $500,000 or $1,000,000. This assumption might be correct in some parts of the United States, but it is questionable as a generalization. For example, in New York City, a modest single-family house can cost over $400,000. In effect, Madoff advocates not wealth redistribution but a taking from many middle class Americans.

Yesterday, President Obama signed into law an estate tax with a $5 million exemption. Thankfully, if the new law were to expire, even liberal Democrats would now support a $3.5 million estate tax exemption for individuals.

For other op-eds by Ray D. Madoff, see

, NY Times, July 12, 2010 (arguing for limits on dynasty trusts: “Congress could fix the problem by limiting the generation-skipping-transfer exemption to trusts that last no longer than two generations. After that, beneficiaries of a trust should be subject to tax, like everyone else. Then America would not have to face the uncontrollable growth of a new aristocracy.”).

For my previous critique of Madoff’s assumptions, see Hani Sarji, Ray D. Madoff’s opinion on fixing the federal estate tax: an unbalanced proposal, Future of the Federal Estate Tax, Nov. 21, 2009.","On December 14, 2010, the New York Times published, Give Up on the Estate Tax, an op-ed by Ray D. Madoff.  Madoff is a law professor, a published author, and a committed proponent of a higher estate tax.  This article focuses on how the estate tax prevents concentrations of wealth. This argument [...]"
"Mr. Roh said the North was “somewhat upset” about the slow pace of development of the Kaesong Industrial Complex — a special economic zone built by South Korea inside North Korea and the centerpiece of the South’s engagement policy toward the North.

At the same time, the South’s reference to Kaesong as the “symbol of reform and openness” clearly made the North’s top leaders uneasy, Mr. Roh said, suggesting that North Korea, like China, was seeking economic growth without political change.

“The distrust and reluctance they feel toward the terminologies ‘reform and openness’ is something I felt when talking to Kim Young-nam yesterday and at the meeting with Chairman Kim this morning,” Mr. Roh said, referring first to the North’s No. 2 leader, whom he met Tuesday, and then to Kim Jong-il.

The first summit meeting between the Koreas, in June 2000, ushered in a new era of reconciliation between cold war enemies who had taught their children to hate one another for decades.

This meeting could serve as a reckoning of the last seven years of the South’s engagement policy toward the North — a policy that the South has hewed to despite the North’s test of missiles and a nuclear device, as well as the Bush administration’s initial hard-line attitude toward Mr. Kim’s government.

In South Korea this week there has not been any of the euphoria of the 2000 meeting, which kept South Koreans glued to their televisions and fundamentally changed their perceptions of the North. This time, the South’s focus was economic, as indicated by the large entourage of business leaders with Mr. Roh.

Among South Koreans, there is no longer any heady talk of a quick, German-like, reunification. Instead, they envision a carefully planned, sober process that will make the North less poor and shrink the gap between the Koreas before an eventual reunification, perhaps decades from now.

“In general, I support this summit, but I’m a little less enthusiastic than I was in 2000,” said Byun Yoo-seok, 36, a pharmacist enjoying a day off on Wednesday in the Myungdong shopping area here. “I guess I realized that reunification will take a long time.”

Lee Choon-won, 79, who was having coffee at a Starbucks with three friends, said: “There’s no emotion this time. It’s no fun. It’s just Roh Moo-hyun doing whatever he’s doing. North Korea got money last time and wants more this time.”

Indeed, many South Koreans and the political opposition say they thought that Mr. Roh, long accused of coddling the North, would give away too much for little in return. He has been trying to set up a meeting with the North ever since he was elected five years ago.

But critics say Mr. Roh, a lame duck with only four months left in office, wants to burnish his legacy with an accord and influence the coming presidential election.

At the moment, Lee Myung-bak, the candidate for the conservative opposition Grand National Party, has a strong lead in the polls. Mr. Lee supports the engagement policy toward the North and has also talked of offering the North huge economic projects, but he has also emphasized the need for the North to reciprocate on security issues.

The North, which has consistently attacked the Grand National Party, is believed to favor a liberal South Korean president. Critics here have accused Mr. Kim of agreeing to this summit meeting in a bid to stir euphoria about reconciliation between the Koreas and help Mr. Roh’s liberal United New Democratic Party.

Over the last five years, Mr. Kim consistently rebuffed the South’s approaches for a second meeting. He said the conditions were not right, apparently referring to the stalled nuclear talks that began moving forward with a softening of Washington’s position early this year.

On Wednesday, though, Mr. Kim surprised Mr. Roh by suddenly asking him to extend his visit by one day. Mr. Kim apparently withdrew the invitation after Mr. Roh told his host that he would have to consult his staff.

“Can’t a president decide?” Mr. Kim asked in a seemingly teasing manner. “Presidents should be able to decide.”

Mr. Roh said, “I can decide on big things, but on little things, I can’t decide.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Korean Leaders Agree On Economic Projects. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe","In a joint declaration today, South and North Korea said they would seek to put a formal end to the Korean War."
"A Spanish newspaper has sparked controversy with its front page picture of a half-naked elderly former bullfighter showing off wounds from when he was gored 50 years ago.

Readers of La Gaceta were stunned to see the snap of 83-year-old former torero Jaime Ostos holding his genitals on Wednesday morning's cover.

Wearing only a striped shirt and his trousers around his ankles, he is seen cupping his private parts and pointing to the damage to his groin.

The headline of the story, to mark the half-century anniversary of his injury in Tarazona, was ""Doctors preferred to sign my death certificate rather than get blood on their hands.""

Twitter erupted as many slammed the image, saying it was a ""desperate attempt"" for publicity by the Madrid-based publication.

Some said reporters should be focusing on the economic crisis that continues to engulf the southern European nation.

But editor José Antonio Fúster tweeted in defense: ""We're a different newspaper.""",A Spanish newspaper has sparked controversy with its front page picture of a naked elderly former bullfighter showing off wounds from when he was gored 50 years ago.
"The Vatican used to be impermeable to horrific stories of child sexual abuse by priests – and complicit in attempts to whitewash the perpetrators’ reputations. It was a place where men such as Cardinal Bernard Law, who became a pariah within the US Catholic church after it became clear that decades of sexual abuse had been covered up within his archdiocese, could go for a comfortable retirement and to escape glaring media attention or, even worse, possible investigation.

But an unexpected confluence of extraordinary events has changed all that this week. The film Spotlight, the tale of the Boston Globe’s dogged investigation into clerical sexual abuse, won Hollywood’s most coveted prize of the Oscar for best picture.

More importantly, hours before the Oscar win was announced, one of the most senior officials within the Vatican hierarchy, Cardinal George Pell of Australia, admitted under oath for the first time that he had heard that an Australian Catholic schoolteacher may have engaged in “paedophilia activity”, but never followed up on the “one or two fleeting references” he heard about the “misbehaviour”. The teacher in question, Edward Dowlan, a Christian Brother, was later convicted of abusing 20 boys and is serving a six-year prison sentence.

Pell, in an appearance by videolink before the Australian royal commission into institutional responses to sexual child abuse that began at 10pm in Rome and ended at 2am, sounded contrite as he testified, often using short sentences. He called the church’s response to clerical sexual abuse of children by one serial offender, Gerald Ridsdale, “a catastrophe” for his victims but also for the church.

Related: George Pell: church had 'predisposition not to believe' children who complained about priests

It was a topic that may have come up in an exchange Pell had with Pope Francis, hours before his second night of questioning was due to begin. The Vatican did not respond to requests about what the two discussed.

The testimony via videolink was arranged by the royal commission after Pell had said he could not travel to Australia because of a heart condition.

A Vatican official acknowledged that Pell had probably not foreseen that he would still have to testify in a public forum even though he remained in Rome: a banqueting hall in the Hotel Quirinale that included nearly 70 journalists, and 15 survivors of sexual abuse who made the journey from Australia.

The decision by Pell not to go to Australia and face intense media scrutiny there had an unintended consequence: uncomfortable questions about criminal sexual acts that do not often get a hearing in Italy – about priests kissing boys, swimming together naked, taking showers together – have been heard on the Vatican’s doorstep.

Robert Mickens, a veteran Vatican journalist, said: “This is in the pope’s yard right now, and that has never happened. Historically, yes, this is something really big.

“It was clear Pell was going to be very sullen; he had short answers and sounded repentant and ‘Gosh, I didn’t understand’. But there was an admission, finally, that he heard the rumours. Before, he was saying this was all brand new to him.”

Mickens said he believed that Pell was purposely “playing the kind of almost sorry old man who was beaten up a little bit”.

“That is a difficult act for George,” Mickens said. “Whether the commission buys it or not ... certainly here in Rome he looks like the object of a witch hunt.”

One of the unusual results of Pell staying in Rome to testify is that it meant that a host of vaticanisti (expert Vatican reporters) were compelled to observe and report on the hearing, although most – especially Italian journalists – have not usually covered specific stories about clerical sexual abuse.

In one of the most revealing moments of Pell’s testimony, he acknowledged that it was unusual at the time that Ridsdale, a paedophile priest whom Pell knew and lived with for about 10 months and was later revealed to be a serial rapist of children, took big groups of boys with him away on camping trips.

“To the extent I thought about it, I thought with a big group of 45 boys that would prevent wrongdoing, or it was a useful precaution,” Pell said.

When Gail Furness SC, the barrister assisting the royal commission, pressed him on that point, and asked whether “wrongdoing” was on his mind, he said: “Not particularly. I just thought it would have been imprudent to do otherwise.”

When asked again, whether it was “imprudent” because a boy who was alone on a camping trip with a priest could be abused, Pell responded: “That is certainly correct, and it was also capable of provoking gossip that might or might not be justified.”

Related: George Pell and the royal commission: the questions George Pell must answer | David Marr

The big question now is not only how Pell will fare under the next few days of questioning, but whether renewed focus on clerical abuse and the church’s handling of the problem will also receive more attention from the pope.

The Vatican has faced recent criticism on a number of sex abuse-related issues, including questions about its policy on reporting suspected cases – the church said it followed local laws but not all laws required such reports – and it does not appear to have made progress in establishing a special tribunal that it announced it would set up last year to investigate senior clergy who are accused of covering up abuse.

“I’m not here to defend the indefensible,” Pell said. “The church has made enormous mistakes, but is working to remedy them.”

Just how hard it is working to that end is a question Pope Francis will find it hard to ignore, observers say.",Decision not to return to Australia has had consequence of bringing uncomfortable questions to Rome
"Show's over for Liberace Museum

Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) -- This weekend marks the end of an era for many fans of the iconic Liberace. The Las Vegas museum dedicated to preserving the glitz, the glamour and even the gaudiness that defined the entertainer's career is closing Sunday after more than 30 years.

Despite his dynamic history, the draw of the Liberace Museum has been eclipsed by some of Vegas' increasingly lavish attractions.

Low attendance is the primary factor in the decision to close the museum, Liberace Foundation President Jack Rappaport said.

Liberace himself opened the museum in 1979, and in its prime, it brought in 450,000 visitors a year.

""We've dwindled down to 50,000,"" Rappaport said.

He blames the low attendance on the museum's location three miles off Las Vegas Boulevard, commonly known as the Strip.

""We are just geographically not desirable,"" he said. [When the museum opened in 1979] we weren't competition for the Strip. We actually complemented the Strip.""

Rappaport feels that the megaresort style of the new casinos of Las Vegas -- with high-end shopping, an abundance of restaurants, shows and other museum-type attractions -- gives tourists everything they could need.

""It's kind of like going to Disney World or Disneyland resort. You go there, and you don't really have to go anywhere else.""

If there is a bright side, it's that since the closing was announced weeks ago, attendance has nearly tripled, according to one tour guide's estimate.

A significant number of this influx are locals who've lived in Vegas for decades but never made it to the museum. But positive attendance news in the 11th hour doesn't change the fact that for most of the 23 employees, not only will they be out of a job, they'll be out of a way to educate people on a man they've come to admire.

""I mean, [Liberace] was Las Vegas,"" museum director Tanya Combs said. ""Reading everything and seeing everything ... you start to believe in what a nice man he was, and you really wanted everyone to know that.""

Liberace Museum archivist Pauline Lachance shares photos of the celebrated musician.

Museum archivist and historian Pauline Lachance has been the go-to gal for anything and everything Liberace.

""He's made such an impact on my life; it's unbelievable. I get kind of choked up talking about him,"" she said.

She could tell you about all sorts of things, from ""Walter"" Valentino Liberace's early life as a piano prodigy to his prime years as the highest-paid entertainer in the world, with the highest flamboyance factor to boot.

He was a man who, in the midst of a battle with HIV, sold out New York's Radio City Music Hall so fast that his record still stands.

Lachance's very first experience with Mr. Showmanship himself was a night that almost didn't happen.

""I really didn't want to go,"" she recalls of the show her husband roped her into attending. But that evening sparked a passion, some might say obsession, for the king of bling. Up until his death in 1987 at 67, she attended no fewer than 50 of his shows.

""All you need to do is go to one performance, and you want to go to every one after that. He just captivates you with his charm and his music.""

After the museum closes Sunday, Lachance will continue to work for the Liberace Foundation part-time. But there will be no more camera-wielding visitors oohing and aahing over Liberace's rhinestone-studded piano, complete with matching costume and Roadster.

See an iReporter's snapshots of the glitzy museum

The musician's remarkable costumes became more elaborate as the decades went on, some taking more than a year to construct.

Throughout his career, he played eight major hotels in Las Vegas, with his longest run at the Las Vegas Hilton.

In addition to establishing the museum in Vegas, Liberace set up a foundation to provide scholarship money to students of the arts.

To date, the foundation has given more than $6 million to more than 2,700 students. But what it's able to offer these days has diminished significantly. Two years ago, the scholarship fund amounted to $112,000. The following year, that number dropped to $62,000.

I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere down the line, Liberace gets reinvented again. ... But it is sad to see it close.--Howard Shapiro, Liberace museum tour guide

Rappaport said people can rest assured that the museum's collection -- which includes more than 60 of Liberace's intricate eye-popping costumes, his 9-foot mirrored Baldwin grand piano and his 7-foot rhinestone studded Baldwin grand -- won't go into hiding for too long.

A traveling tour of part of the collection is planned. The tour might be under way as early as summer 2011, according to Jeffrey Koep, chairman of the Liberace Foundation board of directors.

A new incarnation of the museum isn't out of the question.

""The board felt it best to close while we are still solvent and create a new business plan as we examine ways to sell our current location and search for locations that would allow for more patrons,"" Koep said in an e-mail.

Tour guide Howard Shapiro said he wasn't terribly surprised that the museum in its current form won't be around forever, but he agrees that Liberace is too much a part of Sin City to be totally forgotten.

""Las Vegas has a history of tearing down and not preserving. It's a sad commentary, but that's what this town is about, reinventing itself,"" Shapiro said. ""I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere down the line, Liberace gets reinvented again. By whom and how, I don't know. But it is sad to see it close.""","This weekend marks the end of an era for many fans of the iconic Liberace. The Las Vegas museum dedicated to preserving the glitz, the glamour and even the gaudiness that defined the entertainer's career is closing Sunday after more than 30 years."
"Quit bossing me around, Sheryl!

I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The technology industry’s big cheese, a billionairess who lives in a California mansion with two kids and a husband who does laundry (what, no servants?), has stepped off her perch as the world’s most celebrated working mom and transformed into the feminist answer to reality-TV star/celebrity slug Kim Kardashian.

Her Sherylness is a genius at generating media buzz without demonstrating a hint of street smarts. My apologies to rapper Kanye West’s baby mama.

At least Kim’s honest about being a talent-free hack.

Sheryl is leading a campaign to remove what she calls “the other B-word’’ from the English language. A word that has turned elite damsels such as Sheryl into blubbering, sugar-free gelatinous masses, and I’m not talking about boobs, bulimia or a term that rhymes with rich.

Ban Bossy is the name of the idiotic crusade. No joke. Sheryl preaches that the word “bossy’’ is hurled at girls and women by meanies in a concerted effort to turn budding estrogen-possessing leaders into docile wimps.

Sheryl’s brand of censorship does not involve government agents raiding homes and burning dictionaries. People are expected to pledge voluntarily that they won’t utter the offensive word.

Alpha females First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and singer Victoria “Posh Spice’’ Beckham have vowed to remove “bossy’’ from their vocabularies. Never mind that President Obama calls his wife’s domineering style of Christmas-tree decoration “bossy.’’ Mrs. Obama said she passively sipped hot chocolate last year with daughter Malia while the leader of the free and other daughter Sasha hung ornaments, the Washington Examiner magazine reported.

The Ban Bossy movement was launched as seriously as open-heart surgery by Sheryl and Girl Scouts of the USA Chief Executive Officer Anna Maria Chavez, who co-wrote a piece published in The Wall Street Journal this month.

“From a young age, I liked to organize — the toys in my room, neighborhood play sessions, clubs at my school,’’ wrote Sheryl. When she ran for class vice president in junior high school, she added, a teacher warned Sheryl’s best friend to find a new pal because “no one likes a bossy girl.”

One wonders whether Sheryl was victimized by a word — or undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. She never wrote if she won the junior-high-school election, but I can only assume that her best buddy took the teacher’s advice and ran from the manic toy organizer.

“When a little boy takes charge in class or the playground, nobody is surprised or offended. We expect him to lead,” the two authors continued, apparently unfamiliar with today’s touchy-feely feminized schools in which boys have their maleness pumped out of their bodies before puberty with the help of educators, therapy or medication.

There’s something obnoxiously bossy about Ban Bossy. So Sheryl was brutalized by a word as a child? See a shrink or visit a bar! I refuse to take the stupid pledge.

The flip side is, why is Sheryl harassing women into becoming leaders? What if my daughter is too pooped to run for class vice president? What if I think it’s just plain creepy to organize neighborhood play sessions?

Singer Beyoncé, actresses Jane Lynch and Jennifer Garner, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, designer Diane von Furstenberg, NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appear in an online video promoting Ban Bossy. But is Beyoncé, whose rapper husband Jay Z has made a career out of denigrating women as “hoes” and worse, properly programmed?

She ends the video by declaring: “I’m not bossy. I’m the boss.’’ Boss or bossy. What’s the difference?

Sheryl last year published “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead’’ — a book she called “a sort-of feminist manifesto’’ that sold 1.6 million copies. In it, she tells women to risk getting fired by demanding that employers give them raises and promotions.

Since the book came out, Sheryl’s turned into a veritable chick-empowerment industry, establishing the nonprofit organization LeanIn.org, which provides online lectures and instructions for starting Lean In Circles, basically consciousness-raising groups in which dames moan about useless husbands, emotionally unavailable partners and lousy jobs. The org has teamed up with Getty Images to sell pictures of strong women, girls and the people who support them.

What Sheryl doesn’t say is that American women are doing just fine. They earn more college degrees than men. Young women rake in as much money, or more, than guys, a trend that stops only when they drop out of the fast lane to raise families. We have choices.

Banning a word won’t make you rich or powerful. Act like Beyoncé, ladies. Be tough. Be a boss.

Will the tension ever lift? I doubt it. Rachel Canning and her mom were seen walking awkwardly outside their New Jersey house before each slid into a separate vehicle and Rachel drove off to her Catholic high school.

Rachel, 18, became a world-famous spoiled brat after she sued her parents for thousands of dollars to cover high-school and college tuition, plus living expenses. But after spending more than four months at a friend’s house, she returned to the home of her parents, Sean and Elizabeth Canning, last week. The Cannings said the case was “amicably settled.’’ But Rachel’s lawyer, Tanya Helfand, whined that the parents pressured her client to drop the suit.

Rachel is lucky her folks took her back.

A cup of high-faluting Lakkris latte from Budin, a Scandinavian-themed coffee palace in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, costs a ridiculous $10 — not including a tip.

The brew is made from coffee beans from Ethiopia that are roasted in Norway. It contains anise syrup and is sprinkled with licorice powder, both shipped from Denmark. With each cup you get a marble-sized ball of chocolate-covered Danish licorice. Yuck. Save your money.

Even in New York, one shouldn’t have to choose between a caffeine fix and paying the rent.

Mayor de Blasio chatted up reporters on the steps of City Hall last week before snapping a selfie with them. He’s trying to repair his relationship with the media, which is worse than his popularity with city voters — 57 percent of whom said in a recent poll that he did a fair or poor job during his first two months in office. Hizzoner might try answering questions, such as why the SUV in which he rode ran stop signs and sped through Queens streets, days after he unveiled a traffic-safety plan.

I guess we’ll have to settle for pictures.","Quit bossing me around, Sheryl! I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The technology industry’s big cheese, a billionairess who lives in a Californ…"
"Pope Francis on Saturday went before several thousand journalists, thanked them for their work, told a joke or two and even blessed (or at least patted) someone’s seeing-eye dog.

In a custom that dates at least to John Paul II, one of the pope’s first public appearances was a meeting in the modern Paul VI Hall with an estimated 5,000 reporters who are based in Rome or had flown in to cover the week’s historic events.

Francis sat on the stage in a large but relatively simple chair and read a speech that thanked the press for its work during this “intense period” which had focused the world’s eyes on the Roman Catholic Church.

Then, departing from his text, he offered to tell the story of how he chose his name, and in so doing provided a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the conclave, the secret vote by cardinals to select a new pontiff. He is the first Pope Francis, and some have wondered which Francis was his inspiration.

The balloting inside the Sistine Chapel was clearly going his way when Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the retired archbishop of Sao Paulo, “my dear friend,” embraced him and told him not to forget the poor. The still-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina sat reflecting, as the ballots were being counted, and then it came to him: St. Francis of Assisi.

“The name came to my heart,” Francis said. “The man of poverty, the man of peace ... who wanted a poor church for the poor.”

He said another cardinal quipped that he ought to be named Clement, a cheeky proposal given that the last Clement, the 18th-century Clement XIV, is remembered for having suppressed the Jesuits, the order to which Francis belongs.

Why, Francis asked. “That way you get revenge on Clement XIV,” came the response.

The crowd, which also included many journalists’ family members as well as employees of the Vatican press operation, was loving it. They applauded and laughed amid shouts of “Viva il papa!”

All in all, Francis seemed comfortable and at ease and at times spontaneous. He wore a white cassock, basic black shoes and a plain cross. It was all a marked departure from his predecessor, Benedict XVI, a brilliant theologian who in public was stiff and formal.

After finishing his speech in Italian, in which he also said he respected the freedom and intelligence of an independent press, Francis switched to Spanish. He said that he knew that the journalists, both those of the Catholic faith and those of other beliefs, were all children of God.

A small group of Vatican press staff and journalists was led to the stage to greet Francis personally, including a blind man with a seeing-eye dog. Francis embraced the man, then turned to the dog, and the crowd roared. Appropriate: Francis of Assisi was known for his love of animals

“This was extraordinary,” said Carlo Marroni, a correspondent with the Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore.",VATICAN CITY  -- He&rsquo;s a charmer.
"There's a new reigning monarch for the most expensive American car ever sold at auction. And it's a modified British sports car with a Ford V8 under the hood. Go figure.

The roundish blue shape you see above is the 1962 Shelby 260 Cobra ""CSX 2000"" — a.k.a the first Cobra from lionized car designer Carroll Shelby. It just fetched $13.75 million ($12.5-million bid plus fees) this weekend. That makes it the most expensive American car ever sold at auction.

Though Shelby didn't know it at the time, this little mod-job would go on to change American sports cars forever. Now it's altered the trajectory of American-car values forever, too. Talk about influence.

When this Cobra was first built, to make it seem like he'd made more than one, Shelby and his crew repainted it before handing it over to a car magazine for review. As a result, the unrestored body sports dents and chips that reveal different paint colors beneath the final blue paint job.

Onlookers might glimpse at what appears to be a well-worn sports car and wonder why it's worth $13.75 million. Its looks don't impart the car's significance, though. Without this car, and the racing triumphs of its successors, Shelby would never have been given the chance to lend his know-how to the automotive industry.

1962 Shelby 260 Cobra ""CSX 2000""

That means no GT350 and GT500 Mustangs. Likely, in turn, that means no cars like the Corvette Grand Sport or Camaro Z28 from Chevrolet to compete with Ford. Heck, the American muscle wars started in the 1960s that continues to this day may not have been ignited at all without this car.

So, is it worth $13.75 million? Yeah, I'd say so.",It ignited the American muscle wars.
"By Jeff Leeson2015-08-06 16:21:54 UTC

Exceptional boredom often produces exceptional talent.

Two friends took trick shots to the next level by bouncing a ping pong ball between their legs and behind their back with golf clubs before sinking it in a Solo cup. Oh, and they did it all in a single take.

Watch your back, Tiger Woods; the young bloods are practicing.","Two friends probably spent their entire afternoon sinking this shot, but it was beyond worth it."
"Energy exploration and production companies, he added, ""are really forced to do some hedging here where they haven't before just to survive the next three quarters because if oil prices stay down here for the next six months to a year, if they do, they won't live.""

Dicker, author of ""Oil's Endless Bid,"" also said that highly leveraged companies, such as those focused on the Eagle Ford and Bakken shale oil fields, were particularly at risk.

""They simply cannot service the debt with prices that are hovering in the low $80s, and they're going to start to go broke,"" he said. ""So, if you were worried that production from shale was going to be the reason that oil stays low, watch what happens if these prices stay here for several months. There's going to be a decrease in production almost immediately in several of these marginal players.""

Read More4 ways to protect your portfolio: Pros

Dicker said those hurt by falling oil prices are exiting the trade. ""And for a trader, that's a good sign if you think that oil prices are ultimately headed higher.""

However, it was premature to call the bottom, he added.","The last $4 in the decline of crude oil prices was due to distressed players getting out of the market, MercBloc President Dan Dicker says."
"03/28/2006 AT 07:45 AM EST

Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and Laurence Fishburne have donated custom-made motorcycles to an online charity auction raising money for a planned memorial for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C. ""People are always quoting (Rev. King),"" Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, who organized the auction benefiting the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Foundation, tells the Associated Press. ""He's remembered as our prince of peace, of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep him and his memory alive."" In all, four bikes are on the block: two from Affleck and one each from Pitt and Fishburne. Bids may be placed through Friday on the at charityfolks.com, Freeman says, adding that he hopes ""people will overbid"" for the worthy cause. As described on the Charity Folks site, Affleck's ""treasured"" 2001 2-cylinder, 4 stroke Big Dog Bulldog ""has very low miles and is in great condition ... from his home, to yours"" (as of Tuesday morning, it was up to $12,000). Fishburne's bike ($11,000 so far) is a replica of the ""Captain America"" model in the movie Easy Rider. Pitt's bike, a Ducati SR4, had the lowest bid of the morning: $8,000. Also available for a price: wedge-heeled shoes designed and signed by Jennifer Lopez and a DVD of Catch Me if You Can autographed by its costar, Tom Hanks. Groundbreaking for the monument, to be built on the National Mall, is scheduled for this year, with the aim of dedicating the site in 2008.",Pitt and other celebs auction their bikes to help build a Martin Luther King monument
"The U.K.’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union shocked the world. The day before the vote, London odds makers gave 80% chance that Remain would be victorious, as polls revealed a 10-point edge over the Leave campaign.

What caused the politicians and “smart money” to misjudge the electorate so badly? Elites underestimated the anger and despair of Britain’s working class. They also discounted the apathy of the millennial generation, which favored Remain but only 36% voted.

The U.S. faces similar issues: working class anger, hostility toward the federal government, and a desire to blame problems on “the other”—Hispanic people, Muslims, African-Americans, and China. These emotions translate into fears of immigration, globalization, free trade, and technology—all themes that fan flames of distrust in government and the establishment.

American business leaders who ignore their workers’ feelings do so at their own peril. Unhappy employees lead to disengaged workplaces and mediocre results. Here are five lessons they can learn from Brexit to apply immediately in their businesses:

Focus on your workforce first and stock market second

As the near-term pressures from short-term investors have accelerated, business leaders have engaged in financial engineering such as stock buybacks, cost cutting, and spinoffs. As a consequence, companies aren’t investing in their employees. Health care, perquisites, and other benefits are being cut back, employee training programs shelved, and support for creativity and innovation diminished, while the gap in compensation between rank-and-file workers and executives has widened dramatically. With employee cutbacks, fewer people are being asked to carry a larger share of the workload.

According to Gallup polls, employee engagement scores have dropped to 30% or lower. More people are simply showing up to pick up a paycheck, while their passion for the business and commitment to pleasing customers has waned.

To turn around these attitudes, business leaders need to stop trying to please the stock market – which will never be satisfied, no matter how strong the results – and engage and inspire their front-line people. Instead of cutting employee costs, they should be investing in them through training, added compensation incentives, attractive healthcare, and by creating an empowering culture.

Support front-line employees who grow the business, instead of adding corporate bureaucracy that makes work more difficult

All too often, managers see their job as controlling employees throughout the enterprise. Finance groups focus on cost-cutting, risk-averse lawyers make the company impossible to do business with, and human resources casts judgment on employees. As a result, corporate departments at many businesses have grown while the rest of the organization has shrunk, causing resentment.

Meanwhile, top executives spend most of their time in internal meetings poring over numbers rather than listening to employees in research labs, offices, and factories.

Corporate staffs in multi-business companies should be shrunk dramatically in size and refocused on helping employees do their jobs and making it easier for customers to do business. Accenture, with its 275,000 employees, is a good example of this approach. It has no true corporate headquarters, and its minimal corporate staff is dispersed around the world and focused on supporting customers.

Spend one-third of your time with customers

Whether you’re in retail, health care, IT, or financial services, there is no greater place for learning what is going on than being in the marketplace with customers. When I was at Medtronic, I observed more than 700 procedures in 12 years; it was the greatest learning opportunity I ever had. Leaders who apply all five senses to customer interactions learn more first-hand than they do from reading reports or looking at PowerPoint presentations.

When he became CEO of Unilever ul , Paul Polman asked his leaders 10 questions to see how much time they were spending with customers. Their responses were so embarrassing that Polman challenged them to refocus their organizations on customers. Similarly, Anne Mulcahy kept Xerox xrx out of bankruptcy by skipping the endless meetings at headquarters in favor of riding with field salespeople to stem the tide of customer defections. This type of customer engagement signals to the entire organization that the company puts customers first.

Promote transparency internally and externally

In today’s world of social media and smartphones, transparency is not only the right choice – it is the only choice. Employees expect their leaders to keep them informed about what is going on, no matter how negative the news. When they are not treated with transparency, they turn to external sources and internal rumors for information, which they perceive is more timely and accurate than internal communication.

Following a 2015 layoff, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh wrote to employees: “Remember this is not my company, and this is not our investors’ company. This company is all of ours, and it’s up to all of us where we go from here.” Hsieh’s communications are authentic, transparent, and informal.

Former Ford f CEO Alan Mulally used weekly business performance reviews (BPR) to create transparency across the organization to turn around the troubled automaker. In these meetings, Mulally dove into details deeper than any Ford executive had ever done. Honest conversations helped to heal Ford’s politically charged, blame-focused culture. Rather than frowning on problems, Mulally used them to come up with solutions.

Work with the government, not against it, to make sensible reforms

Many business leaders see government as an enemy, and send out legions of lobbyists to influence laws in their favor. Properly constructed, regulations can help protect against defective or rogue products in the marketplace and ensure customer and employee safety.

Brexit should be a wakeup call for all business leaders. The vote showed Britain’s leaders were out of sync with its voters. Could the same thing be happening with employees in your company? Are you involved on the front lines with your employees and customers every day, or are you holed up at headquarters?

The answer may well determine your company’s success.

Bill George is Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, former Chairman & CEO of Medtronic, and author of Discover Your True North.",Britain’s leaders were out of sync with its voters. Could the same be happening at your company?
"Revelers photograph fireworks over the Arc de Triomphe as they celebrate the New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris, France, Thursday, Jan. 1, 2015. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena) (The Associated Press)

Revellers celebrate the New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris, France, Thursday, Jan. 1, 2015. The Arc de Triomphe is illuminated in the background. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena) (The Associated Press)

PARIS – France's Interior Ministry says 940 cars were set alight by revelers ringing in the New Year — 12 percent fewer than the 1,067 set aflame last year.

The figures issued on Thursday show that, despite the dip, setting fire to parked cars remains a firmly entrenched way for some French to send out the old and ring in the new.

Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said on BFM-TV that numerous cars were burned around the country, particularly in the east, as well as in suburban Paris, notably the Seine-Saint-Denis region — where fiery riots around France started in 2005.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Parisians thronged the tightly guarded Champs-Elysees Avenue to welcome 2015.","France's Interior Ministry says 940 cars were set alight by revelers ringing in the New Year — 12 percent fewer than the 1,067 set aflame last year."
"A Florida-based father is facing off against Donald Trump.

Jeff Popick is the manager of the band USA Freedom Kids and the father of one of its member. He told FOX411 he’s planning to sue the GOP nominee because he says the Trump camp never reimbursed him for travel costs or gave USA Freedom Kids the chance to perform after the group’s scheduled performance at a Trump rally in Iowa was cancelled at the last minute in January.

USA Freedom Kids, an all-girl group that performs patriotic songs, had gained national attention after performing at Trump rally in Pensacola, Fla., earlier that month.

Popick said he is only resorting to a lawsuit because he said the Trump camp kept giving him the runaround on when USA Freedom Kids would perform again following their Iowa cancellation and then went silent.

“I don’t envision [the lawsuit] to be millions of dollars,” Popick told FOX411. “It’s the morality issue of doing the right thing and the Trump campaign has not done the right thing by these girls.”

“The girls love to perform so that’s what I wanted on behalf of the girls,” Popick added. “How many times do you give someone to make it right? It was all about performing, not about money.”

Popick said he gave the Trump camp one final chance with a “demand letter” addressed to a member of Trump’s advance team, George Gigicos, on July 9. In the letter Popick writes: “George, truth be told, I’ve been TOO patient and TOO loyal and have allowed horrible and abusive treatment that has worked to our severe detriment. You have made us broken promises galore, to the extent that they are not only deplorable, but downright actionable.”

Popick said Gigicos acknowledged receipt of the letter but never responded.

Popick said the group’s first album “Freedom Reborn” is tentatively planned to be released in six weeks but will now not include the track that made them famous: “Freedom’s Call,” AKA “The Trump Jam.”

FOX411 reached out to the Trump campaign and to Gigicos but got no reply.

Fox News.com Reporter and FOX411 host Diana Falzone covers celebrity news and interviews some of today's top celebrities and newsmakers. You can follow her on Twitter @dianafalzone.",A Florida-based father is facing off against Donald Trump.
"Rep. Anthony Weiner's television appearances Wednesday confirmed what you might have suspected: Congressmen don't win when they have to discuss crotch shots.

Right-wing commentator Andrew Breitbart began pushing the story over the weekend that a photo showing a man's crotch in snug underwear had been posted from the congressman's Twitter account.

Those initial reports suggested that the provocative photo had been sent in a direct Twitter communication (not visible to other Twitter users) to a young woman in Seattle. The woman denied receiving any photo. The New York Democrat said he had never sent such a picture, or ever met the woman in question.

She agreed that she had never met Weiner, though she acknowledged calling the lawmaker her ""boyfriend"" on the social network. She explained this as a fangirl gesture, delivered from a distance, rather than evidence the two had any sort of real relationship.

Weiner got so agitated about being asked about all of this on Tuesday he called CNN's Ted Barrett a ""jackass"" during a confrontation on Capitol Hill. The lawmaker later said he lashed out because the reporter was interrupting him.

Weiner acknowledged that wasn't such a great performance and that he needed to do more to clear the air. So he was back on cable TV Wednesday, this time granting interviews to Luke Russert of MSNBC and Wolf Blitzer of CNN.

Weiner was calmer in those interviews than he had been a day earlier. He insisted he had never sent the picture in question to the Seattleite. But he also said he could not say for sure that the picture was not of him.

“It certainly doesn’t look familiar to me,"" Weiner told Blitzer. ""But I don’t want to say with certitude to you something that I don’t know to be the certain truth.” Hmmm. Not exactly conclusive. And things got a little bumpier and more halting as the congressman tried to explain whether he had ever taken such a picture of himself.

“I can tell you this, that there are, I have photographs, I don’t know what photographs are out there in the world of me,"" Weiner said. ""I don’t know what things have been manipulated and doctored. Um, and we’re going to try to find out what happened.”

Weiner declined to answer when pressed by Blitzer as to whether he had ever communicated by direct message with the Seattle woman. “Look, I am not going to get into how I communicate with people on social media,"" he said.

Asked to explain why he would have received another message, this one allegedly from a stripper, Weiner suggested his Twitter account might have issued a ""pro forma"" response, like ones that would have gone to others of the roughly 45,000 people who follow his 140-character missives. Weiner keeps up a lively, sometimes combative narrative on Twitter, making him one of the most popular lawmakers on the social media site.

Weiner, 46, tried a lot of angles to make the mess go away Wednesday. There was humor: “It seems like a prank to make fun of my name. When your name is Weiner that certainly happens a lot.” There was empathy: ""I would just hope you would leave these people alone,"" he said of his Twitter followers. ""They didn’t do anything wrong for following me.” There was the commonweal: ""I want to talk about the debt limit and health care reform.""

Weiner married former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin last summer, in a ceremony officiated by Bill Clinton. When Blitzer asked if his responses were designed to protect someone, Weiner replied, ""Yes, I am protecting my wife.""

The congressman said the pursuit of rumors in the story had gotten so silly that a blog's list of attractive women he followed on Twitter included his sister-in-law. But the furor seemed unlikely to conclude at least for a few more days. Those who wanted to keep it alive looked for a bigger public policy issue: If a congressman's social media account had been hacked, wasn't this a potential security threat to all of Congress? And shouldn't an investigation take place, to make sure the lawmakers could keep their online accounts secure?

Others were questioning Weiner's tactics in trying to blunt the questions. ""Anthony Weiner's non-denial denial about the pic sure undermines his defense,"" said Daily Beast media and political writer Howard Kurtz on, yes, Twitter, ""and casts doubt on hacking tale. Why'd he wait almost a week?""

On CNN, commentator Gloria Borger talked about the advantages and pitfalls of interacting with constituents on social media sites. “It establishes this sense of intimacy,"" Borger said, ""and that can be good and sometimes it can be really bad.""

Photo: U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) as he met with reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday to dicuss a photo from his Twitter account. The lewd picture was a close-up of a man in tight underwear. Weiner denied that he sent the photo via social media, but he said he couldn't be certain it was not of him. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images",Summarizing Anthony Weiner's media moments in recent days. The Twitter photo that won't go away.
"Image courtesy of Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.

*No, not THAT The Avengers. I’m talking about the other Avengers movie. No, not Age of Ultron, the OTHER Avengers movie. The one that turns 17 years old on Friday? ”Rain or shine, all is mine?” “How now, brown cow?” Yeah, that’s the one.

Thanks to happenstance and random chance, I found myself seeing Fantastic Four and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. within hours of each other. We now know what I thought of both films, but there was something interesting about seeing them so close as if one acted as the antidote to the other. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is no great artistic triumph, but it is reliable, engaging, and intelligent meat-and-potatoes entertainment. And coming after the devastating catastrophe that was Fantastic Four, there was almost a feeling of relief, a reminder that Hollywood could still pull off this kind of pulpy and relatively unassuming goodness. That in itself was a familiar feeling. It was the same response I had on August 21st, 1998 to a little down-and-dirty R-rated vampire movie called Blade. Its sheer entertainment value and unquestionable competence were a huge relief coming just one week after the stunning disappointment of The Avengers. In fact, looking back on it, the utter failure of the 1960′s spy adventure is every bit as unlikely as the complete failure of the comic book superhero franchise picture was today.

If you happen to dig up a print version of the 1998 summer movie preview that I wrote for my high school paper as a junior (no, it’s not online so don’t bother), you’ll notice that my most eagerly anticipated film that summer was not Godzilla, The X-Files, or even my eventual favorite The Mask of Zorro. No, it was The Avengers. The film was an adaptation of a television show that I had never seen, but it offered a seemingly unbeatable combination of winning action, quirky British humor, and an all-star cast in the form of Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, and Sean Connery basically playing a 007-type supervillain. Oh sure it was moved from June 26th, 1998 to August 14th, 1998, but that in itself was no reason to panic. I had seen early August films like Mortal Kombat, Natural Born Killers, The Fugitive, Unforgiven, Hot Shots, and Parenthood open as the proverbial last big movie of the summer and run the tables to varying degrees, and we’ve seen plenty like The Sixth Sense and Guardians of the Galaxy do it since. So even with the switched release date and rumblings of bad buzz via the likes of Ain’t It Cool News, Dark Horizons, and Coming Attractions, I remained optimistic. After all, the first trailer was fun, and I had read the script.

In these very early Internet days, it was all-too-easy to stumble upon a script, or at least an initial draft, of a big movie. I was among those who stumbled onto the script for Scream 2, which changed its entire ending after the screenplay got out. And I did read what a draft of Don MacPherson’s Avengers screenplay was. It was very British, very weird, a little dark, and periodically quite violent. With the intended June 26th release date and aforementioned big stars, it was clearly Warner Bros. /Time Warner Inc.’s 1998 attempt at mimicking the success of their Batman movies, as every studio had been doing with period piece properties for the last eight years. Besides, it had Uma Thurman in black leather, burned by Batman & Robin but still hot off of Pulp Fiction, Ralph Fiennes looking dapper and happy in his first blockbuster role, and Sean Connery playing a variation on Blofeld who could control the weather. Even if the film didn’t turn out to be a complete winner, it was surely going to be fun and entertaining, right?

Well, little did I know that the film was about to follow a path not-too-dissimilar to the recent box office belly flop that everyone is talking about this week. Putting aside the fact that Sean Connery in 1998 was a bigger star than Miles Teller in 2015, the stories are similar. A major studio tries to make a franchise out of a property that itself has little pull with modern moviegoers. And they pick a relatively untested, at least in the realm of blockbuster filmmaking, director. This time it was Jeremiah S. Chechik, nearly a decade out from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and five years out from the buzzy Benny and Joon, but hot off Diabolique. Yes, that Sharon Stone/Chazz Palminteri remake of the classic 1955 French thriller that allegedly inspired Alfred Hitchcock to make Psycho and/or Vertigo was a box office failure. But it was a stylish picture and maybe Warner Bros. thought they had another Tim Burton in their midst.

The filmmaker turned in a first cut, apparently running a little under two hours, which both horrified studio executives and stupefied a test screening audience made up of distinctly non-British and non-quirky working class moviegoers in Phoenix, Arizona. As a result, the studio ordered copious reshoots and the film was butchered almost to the point of incomprehensibility. It ended up running 89 minutes, with a single “F” word tossed in at the last minute to avoid a dreaded PG rating. Even with a rather terrific second trailer, one that is filled with action beats that aren’t in the movie (because who would want more scenes of Uma Thurman fighting people?), the writing was on the wall. The film crawled into theaters with no press screenings, no formal premiere, and no buzz to speak of. Back in 1998, it was basically unheard of for a major summer blockbuster to forgo press screenings. The critics who did venture out to the first Friday morning matinees got exactly what they were expecting. I was at one of those first Friday morning showings, and yeah, the horror… the horror.

I recognized bits and pieces from the screenplay I had read but also noticed giant chunks of story missing as well as key trailer shots, including major action beats, not included in the theatrical cut. It was barely a complete movie, but it had just enough moments of charm and whimsy (the first act sword fight between Fiennes and Thurman is sexy as hell) to make you mourn for what might have been. Whatever it was, it did a face-first belly flop at the box office, coming in third place on its opening weekend behind the fourth weekend of Saving Private Ryan and the opening weekend of Stella Got Her Groove Back which had debuted with $11.3 million on its way to an eventual $37.6m domestic total. The Avengers, which had cost Warner Bros. and friends $60m to produce, opened with $10.3m on its way to a $23.3m domestic total. I will admit to being a mere 18-years young at the time, but it was the first time in the post-Batman era that a major would-be summer blockbuster didn’t just underperform in relation to expectations (Last Action Hero) or disappoint with regard to cost (Speed 2: Cruise Control) but outright crashed and burned both artistically and commercially. That is what was so surprising about what happened last weekend. Even G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened to $54.7m back in August of 2009 on the way to a $300m total.

Oh sure there have been bigger flops than Fantastic Four (The Lone Ranger comes to mind), and there were bigger flops than The Avengers before and afterward. But the notion that a would-be major blockbuster that was in a seemingly safe genre would fail so spectacularly was almost and is still almost unheard of. Come what may, the big budget comic book superhero movie is as safe a genre as you can get in terms of at least snagging a decent chunk of change right off the bat (remember, even Green Lantern and Watchmen snagged $50 million+ debut weekends). And the irony is that it was a comic book superhero movie in August of 1998 that saved the proverbial day the next weekend. Stephen Norrington’s Blade wasn’t sold as a Marvel comic book movie perse, but rather a supernatural R-rated Wesley Snipes action movie that just happened to be based on a comic book. And yeah, its sheer competence and relative entertainment value was something of a relief after the horrors of the week prior. I surely didn’t know that this film was going to kick off a new era of comic book movies, but I did know that I was watching a rock-solid piece of studio programming. Blade earned $18 million in its opening weekend towards an eventual $131m worldwide cume.

So yes, I do find a token irony in the fact that, almost 17 years to the day, a big budget, insanely troubled, heavily recut, and mostly disavowed comic book movie was utterly polluted our auditoriums while this week a mid-budget, star-driven, 60′s-based action spy romp is the one to provide some sort of relative relief. Maybe 2015 is bizarro 1998. I watched The Avengers three years ago so I could post something with the words “Review: The Avengers” the night after the Marvel film premiered but before the embargo broke, and I finally deduced what went wrong. The film goes through its fantasy-action plotline without a hint of emotional engagement or rising blood pressure. The running gag is that our two heroes are never really fazed by the chaos around them. The film is edited and staged in that mindset as well, meaning we the audience don’t have our pulse quickening either. People die, stuff blows up, cars get attacked by flying robotic bees, characters are attacked by their own double, and nobody seems to care all that much. The film wanted to remain faithful the stereotypical British ‘stiff upper lip’ mentality, but it renders what should be relatively exciting as almost dull.

Despite that fact, I would still sell your left arm to get a copy of the original/director’s cut, even though I’m sure such a thing does not exist. 17 years later, The Avengers remains something of a groundbreaker, as it was among the first would-be mega blockbusters, one seemingly manufactured for box office glory, to arrive in theaters absent any buzz and existing in an empty shell of its former self. Obviously 1998 was a very different theatrical era than 2015, although you still got the whole “Things are worse than ever!” mentality by the end of the blockbuster season. But yeah, it’s not an exact match, but Fantastic Four and The Avengers feel like two peas from the same pod, would-be preordained smash hits undone by nervous studios, a less-than-appealing IP, and an untested filmmaker who delivered something both faithful to the alleged intent but wholly uncommercial. As far as Josh Trank’s fortunes, Jeremiah S. Chechik never directed another major feature film again. Heck, even screenwriter Don Macpherson went 17 years without a significant feature writing credit until The Gunman just this year. Ralph Fiennes recovered but mostly stayed out of the blockbuster game until the Harry Potter series and now the 007 franchise, while Uma Thurman pretty much died as a mainstream asset save the Kill Bill films.

Director Stephen Norrington followed up Blade with the Alan Moore comic adaptation The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which incidentally starred Sean Connery. Fortunately, that was a painless shoot and didn’t remotely result in both the star and director basically retiring from Hollywood altogether. Oh, wait…

If you like what you’re reading, follow @ScottMendelson on Twitter, and “like” The Ticket Booth on Facebook. Also, check out my archives for older work HERE.","Image courtesy of Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. *No, not THAT The Avengers. I'm talking about the other Avengers movie. No, not Age of Ultron, the OTHER Avengers movie. The one that turns 17 years old on Friday?  ""Rain or shine, all is mine?"" ""How now, brown cow?""  Yeah, that's the one. Thanks to happenstance and random chance, I [...]"
"An Australian woman deported from the United Arab Emirates after being jailed in Abu Dhabi for “writing bad words on social media” says her punishment was extreme.

Jodi Magi, 39, was sentenced for a cyber crimes offence after reportedly posting a photo on Facebook of a car parked across two disabled spots outside her Abu Dhabi apartment.

Shortly after being deported on Tuesday, the 39-year-old West Australian said that during her two days in jail she was shackled at the ankles, strip-searched and made to sleep on a concrete floor with no access to toilet paper or eating utensils.

“Obviously, I think a fine and deportation with [an] ... incarceration period was an extreme reaction to a jpg [image] of a car posted to a closed Facebook page, when I did not swear or mention a single name and blocked the registration plate,” Magi said in a Facebook post.

“If you think what happened to me was insane, spend a couple of days in an Abu Dhabi jail. I have nothing to complain about compared to the vast majority of women I met.”

She was “pretty traumatised” would be “forever heartbroken” by stories of the other women she met while in jail.

Magi appeared in an Abu Dhabi court on 12 July and was taken into custody before being placed on a flight to Bangkok.

The trouble began in February, when she posted on her Facebook page a photo of a car illegally parked across two places reserved for disabled drivers. The picture was accompanied by “insulting, degrading remarks”, said a judicial source.

After a complaint from the vehicle’s owner, a European, Magi admitted having posted the photo but not the incriminating text, the source said.

In April Magi was sentenced in absentia to pay a fine of $3,600 and deportation.

She appeared in court in May with a lawyer and interpreter to appeal against the verdict but her sentence was confirmed in June.

Magi said she will take some time to “decompress” in Laos.","Jodi Magi, arrested for cyber crimes after posting a photo of a car parked across two disabled spots, says she was shackled at the ankles during her two days in jail"
"Dec. 26, 2013 4:05 p.m. ET

A period piece set in the Cold War era, ""The Americans"" (FX) was the outstanding drama series of the year—a work of steely vision, imaginative range and riveting psychological portraiture, all of it adding up to the kind of suspense that left a viewer feeling, unfailingly, that the week's episode had ended intolerably soon. The Americans of the title are sleeper KGB agents, selected for long years of training and an arranged marriage that enable them to pass themselves off as regular Americans at home in suburbia—small-business owners working and rearing a family—even as they serve the Soviets' spy network full time.

The story, by writer-creator Joe Weisberg, unfolds in a time of special threat as perceived by the Soviets. It's 1981 and Ronald Reagan has been elected president—a veritable madman, as KGB officers instruct their agents.

Loyalists to the motherland, the spy couple known to their neighbors in the Washington area as Philip ( Matthew Rhys ) and Elizabeth Jennings ( Keri Russell ) are exemplary soldiers, superb specimens trained in martial arts, which we got to see quite a lot of in their various encounters with adversaries. The physicality is no minor feature. It is like all other reflections of the training that went into the making of these agents, their history—the force that colors all, explains all, in these exquisitely rendered characters, the element that adds irresistible human dimension to this spy saga. Philip and Elizabeth each have a past, families, loyalties to certain superiors—all strands Mr. Weisberg and company weave into this tale to immensely potent effect. As Philip, a loyal operative but also a man beginning to appreciate the nature of life in America, Mr. Rhys gives an outstanding performance. Exactly the same is true of Ms. Russell's Elizabeth, the hard-core member of the couple, unyielding in her devotion to country and duty.

""The Americans"" returns Feb. 26.

In the disguise and masquerade department, HBO's ""Behind the Candelabra"" cast its own gaudy spell—one that owes its life to Michael Douglas, who plays Liberace, a portrayal that verges on the miraculous. So it feels the moment Mr. Douglas utters the first sentence in the peculiar twang he'd worked up for the role, and so it remains throughout his performance—he's Liberace himself. The film ( Steven Soderbergh directed) is based on a book by Liberace's former lover Scott Thorson, ably played by Matt Damon. Also on hand, a bewigged and more than a little deranged looking Rob Lowe, stealing scenes as Liberace's cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Startz.

""The Paradise"" (PBS) was based on Emile Zola's novel ""The Ladies' Paradise,"" set in a world of opulence and color, fitting for this buoyantly entertaining series about a large department store in an English city—a paradise indeed, for those who could afford its goods. And an enterprise meaningful, in a deeper way, to those who created and served it, the lowliest clerks included. A tale of upstairs-downstairs in a grand department store, complete with jealousy, heartbreak, misprized love—the works.

A conspiracy involving a physician ( Toni Collette ) held captive by a terrorist ( Dylan McDermott ) bent on a presidential assassination, ""Hostages"" (CBS) has gone from smashingly lean and tense early episodes to increasingly implausible plot lines. Still, however wildly improbable the story lines grow—and they grow apace—the show maintains its spark. A concoction that includes a home invasion by masked terrorists, a doctor ordered to kill the president during an operation she was scheduled to perform, isn't easily dispatched.

""The Blacklist"" (NBC), a relentlessly blood-drenched enterprise, concerns an FBI profiler who has attracted the devoted attention of Raymond Reddington, former government agent turned rogue. It's a thriller with style—thanks, mainly, to James Spader's performance as Reddington, imperturbably haughty guide to the plans of the world's evil-doers.

About a fixer valued for his ability to make the problems of Los Angeles studio heads and their stars disappear, Showtime's ""Ray Donovan"" solves problems with dispatch and, when necessary, unhesitating brutality. Ray (an impressive Liev Schreiber ) is a family man with an active moral sense, a problem father (a superb Jon Voight ), and a tendency toward heavy silences. An enormously engaging drama, and a splendidly written one.

Season two of ""Lilyhammer"" arrived in time to be counted—an uproarious addition to the TV year and a continuation of this delectably derisive satire set in Norway, whose societal values come as a shock to a New York mobster, relocated there under the witness protection program. Steven Van Zandt stars as the transplanted American in this Netflix original, a man astounded by this society governed by social workers and multiculturalism run amok.

""The Crash Reel"" traces the history of a promising athlete whose career hopes ended when he sustained a critical brain injury. It's a work of astonishing depth. Steering clear of clichés, and heroics, the HBO documentary reports on snowboarding champion Kevin Pearce and his parents and brothers. The result is an unexpected, revelatory picture of a family. No one who sees it is likely to forget its riches anytime soon.

""Our Nixon"" is the product of 500 reels of home movies taken by top members of Richard Nixon's staff—aides, as this vivid CNN documentary shows, who had once considered themselves the luckiest of men to be serving in the Nixon White House. They worked countless hours, happily; they reveled in each other's company. The happiness came to an end with Watergate, whose story is recounted in detail, much of it from old film clips and interviews with John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman. Everyone who shot this footage—Ehrlichman, security adviser, and Haldeman, chief of staff, both deceased, and special assistant Dwight Chapin—saw prison time. A film full of an undeniable sadness, but one also with a plentiful quotient of humor and optimism.",The Journal's television critic Dorothy Rabinowitz picks the best TV shows of the year.
"Create the charade that the house is being lived in – set the lights on an automatic dimmer switch, or leave the radio playing. Some people go as far as setting the dining table or drawing the curtains. Certainly place precious items such as watches, jewellery, antiques and personal details into a safe or a secure attic.

Tell your neighbours where you are going and when you get back. Leave an emergency contact number with them. If they have your keys, ask them nicely to clear your post and stop it piling up against the front door – a clear indication of a vacant property.

If you have a milkman, why not order a bottle of milk to be delivered a day before you return? And, of course, make sure your contents cover is up-to-date and suitable for your needs.

Once the house is secured, why not turn to your suitcase? Few holidaymakers are guilty of under packing, except perhaps when it comes to travel insurance.

So, as you struggle to cram your belongings into a holdall – new designer wardrobe, handbag, laptop, camera and jewellery – it may be time to consider taking out a premier travel insurance policy.

With volcanoes puffing out troublesome plumes and the increasing cost of healthcare abroad, you want to be covered for all eventualities.

All the more reason, then, to ensure you’re properly covered before leaving for the airport. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve left it to the last minute – just click and buy insurance online.

Thus armed, a delayed flight, mislaid bag or chipped tooth (curse those quaint cobbled streets) will seem a little bit less of an irritant. And you can enjoy that relaxing siesta in the sun, safe in the knowledge that you’re protected – both at home and abroad.

Forgetting to pack their toothbrush is far from the most worrying omission for many UK travellers. According to Home office statistics (2010/11), 745,000 homes in England and Wales are robbed while their owners are away.

There’s also the cost of the possessions in your suitcase to consider - there’s nothing so frustrating as realising your policy doesn’t cover that mislaid camera. It pays to have a solid policy.

Select home insurance covers your possessions anywhere in the world, plus you can choose to add annual travel cover.

For more information about insurance from Direct Line Select, or for a quote, call 0800 206 2819, or visit www.directline.com/select","Going on holiday? Make sure you’re protected both at home and away with home 
  insurance and travel cover, says Elizabeth Walters."
"NEW YORK (AP) – In a nod to rival social networks, Facebook is letting its users ""subscribe"" to news from other members — even those they are not friends with.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, center with unidentified co-workers.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, center with unidentified co-workers.

Facebook said in a blog post Wednesday that it is rolling out the ""subscribe"" button to users in the next few days. This will let people hear from Facebook users they don't know personally — such as celebrities or political figures.

Public figures have already been using Facebook to send news to their fans by creating public pages. By clicking the ""like"" button on these pages, users can see the updates in their own news feed.

The new button will let people bypass creating public pages and send updates directly to their subscribers. Only updates that users publicly share will be seen by subscribers, and Facebook says the feature is entirely optional. Twitter and Google+ already have similar ""follow"" features.

Facebook's button is a bit more customizable, as Facebook features tend to be. Once you subscribe to someone's posts, you can decide whether to see all updates, most updates (which is what you normally see now), or only important updates, such as a marriage or a new job. You can even decide what form of updates you want to see — photos only, games only or some combination.

Users have to choose, or ""opt in"" to allowing subscribers.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor

. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to

. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to

We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the ""Report Abuse"" button.",The new feature is similar to features already found on Twitter and Google+.
"Moving forward, Lemonis envisions Crumbs transitioning to a ""sweets and snack destination"" rather than just a cupcake shop. While it will add some items, customers shouldn't expect sandwiches, soup or hamburgers as part of the strategy shift, he added.

Read MoreCrumbs' backer partners with another bakery

In what he sees as a ""herculean effort to make"" Crumbs work, Lemonis said he'll be looking at the profitability of each location during the bankruptcy process.

""This is not an opportunity just to open up all these stores and sell a bunch of products,"" Lemonis said. ""We want to be disciplined about it. So if that store is a money maker, then it will reopen. And if it's not, I can't promise that it will.""

Disclosure: ""The Profit,"" which stars Marcus Lemonis, is a CNBC show.","As Marcus Lemonis mulls how to save struggling Crumbs Bake Shop, one thing's for sure..."
"Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony stole the show on Thursday night as the Latin Grammy awards delivered an entertaining and unifying evening in Las Vegas.

After months of enduring divisive comments towards immigrants and the Latino community by Trump’s campaign, there was an expectation of more political statements on the biggest night for the Latin music industry.

Last year for example, legendary Mexican bands Maná and Los Tigres Del Norte performed the powerful Somos Más Americanos (We Are More Americans) and held up a sign that read Latinos Unidos No Voten Por Racistas (Latinos United Don’t Vote For Racists) in response to the president-elect’s comments about Mexican immigrants being criminals and rapists.

Instead, the Grammys decided to take a note from Michelle Obama and go high by highlighting the importance of unifying and looking forward to the future as the gala celebrated the best from this past year’s music, including notable performances from J Balvin’s Safari which featured Pharell Williams, BIA and Sky and Bronx-born Prince Royce.

“Music moves us, makes us think, allow us to feel,” said host and singer Roselyn Sánchez. “And tonight will make us feel so proud of who we are and where we come from.”

There were some strong moments where artists expressed their views and spoke out, including the opening song by Pablo López and Juanes, Tu Enemigo (Your Enemy), where Cirque du Soleil acrobats joined them on stage to give a message of peace and unity.

The Mexican actor Diego Luna, made the biggest political impression on the night when he said a few words as he was presenting the award for song of of the year. “I have a message for all of the Latinos on this side of the border,” he said as he stood next to Julieta Venegas. “Together we can fight hate and discrimination.”

The night, however, belonged to Marc Anthony as the Grammys celebrated his illustrious career.

In honor of his recent Latin Recording Academy’s Person of the Year award, the 48-year-old singer took center stage by performing a medley of his great successes including I Need to Know, Tu Amor Me Hace Bien and Vivir Mi Vida, the latter causing the ladies to take off their heels to leave their seats and dance.

His ex-wife, Jennifer Lopez, then joined him on the stage to sing a great rendition of Olvídame y Pega La Vuelta (Forget Me And Get Out Of Here), originally made famous by the Argentine duo Pimpinela. After the song ended, the crowd roared and celebrated this once-adored couple. “Marc is a living legend who keeps giving us classics that will stay with us forever,” said Lopez after the performance.

But the highlight of the evening came right after when the entire arena encouraged them to kiss, which they did.

Un beso dice más que mil palabras. Loveit! ❤️ @JLO @MarcAnthony #LatinGRAMMY #UnidosPorLaMusica pic.twitter.com/w3i4bZtXUq

The awards came at a difficult time for the Latino community and before the awards, stars had spoken out about fears over the election result.

“Donald Trump has won – the results show it,” Puerto Rican rapper Wisin, who won song of the year with Enrique Iglesias, told Fox News Latino on Wednesday. “But it doesn’t mean that us as Latinos are going to sink. On the contrary, we must push forward and not see us by our nationalities – Mexican, Boricua, Cubans, Dominicans. We are all a family and that is how we should see it. If we do, big things will happen.”",The singer and her ex-husband Marc Anthony created the night’s most talked about moment to cap off overall theme of unity in difficult times ahead
"BUTLER, Mo. — Buy a truck and get a free AK-47 gun.

That's the deal a Missouri truck dealer is offering new customers who buy a pick-up truck in August.

Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors in Butler, says he knows people will be bothered by the promotion.

But not to worry, Muller is not handing out free guns. Instead, he will give buyers a voucher to use at a gun store after they obtain a license to carry a concealed weapon.

The AK-47 is an upgrade on a previous promotion in which Muller gave away vouchers for the price of a Caltec pistol.

The retail value of an AK-47 is $450 dollars but Muller says customers can spend their voucher on the gun of their choice.","Missouri Car Dealer Offers Free AK-47 With New Truck, Buy a truck and get a free AK-47 gun. That's the deal a Missouri truck dealer is offering new customers who buy a pick-up truck in August."
"Erik Estrada's son caused pilots of a Northwest Airlines flight to make an emergency landing Thursday in Oklahoma City, where he was removed by FBI agents.

Brandon Estrada, a student and athlete at USC, started behaving in a bizarre manner a couple of hours into the L.A.-to-Memphis flight, another passenger, who asked to remain nameless, tells us.

""During the flight, he became agitated,"" said the fellow flier. ""He was convinced that nobody was flying the plane. He jumped up and reached over the other passengers and lifted up their window cover. Then he tried to get out of the airplane. Then he tried to get into the cockpit. He kept saying there were no pilots. It was wild.""

Yet flight attendants remained calm as they handled the situation, our witness attests. ""They found military and police passengers and quietly brought them up front, and they all restrained him,"" said the passenger. ""Half the people didn't know what was going on. They kept it under wraps.""

Estrada was taken off the plane in Oklahoma City but not arrested. The flight continued, but arrived five hours late in Memphis, where Northwest footed the bill for hotel rooms, our passengers reports.

The FBI spokesman for Oklahoma, Gary Johnson, told us: ""We are conducting an investigation into an incident in which an aircraft was diverted to Oklahoma City as the result of an alleged unruly passenger.""

Northwest Airlines spokesman Roman Blahoski confirmed the incident with Brandon, whose mother is Estrada's second wife, Peggy Rowe.

A family friend said, ""He's a great kid and he's never been in any trouble.""

The senior Estrada - an East Harlem native frequently who starred in ""CHiPS"" and who trains as a cop on the CBS reality show ""Armed and Famous"" - weighed in on the incident.

""Brandon informed us recently that he has had 'stress' and 'pressure' at college, and has elected to see an on-campus psychologist,"" said Estrada. ""I told him that it was a good idea to talk to someone about his feelings and condition.

""I would like to thank all the women and men of law enforcement, as well as Northwest Airlines, for helping my son when he was clearly not able to help himself. I am sorry that other passengers had to be negatively affected by this incident, and thank all of them for helping my son. He now can get the help that he clearly needs.""

Estrada also had a plea for his fans: ""Please reach out to my son in your prayers during this time of need. I thank you all for your support.""","Erik Estrada's son caused pilots of a Northwest Airlines flight to make an emergency landing Thursday in Oklahoma City, where he was removed by FBI agents. Brandon Estrada started behaving erratically a few hours into the L.A.-to-Memphis flight, another passenger tells us."
"“You are the firefighters,” National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden told a tech savvy audience here yesterday, during my conversation with him at the SXSW festival. “The people in Austin are the ones who can protect our rights through technical standards.”

Ed’s comments were a call to arms for the tech community to protect its users from indiscriminate mass surveillance by the NSA and the insecurity it creates. Despite the talk from Washington DC regarding cybersecurity threats – and you’ll hear more of it today during a confirmation hearing for the would-be next head of the NSA – it is now clear that the NSA’s mass surveillance efforts are not meant for good. Whether it’s systematically undermining global encryption standards, hacking communications companies’ servers and data links or exploiting so-called zero-day vulnerabilities, the nation’s cyberspies are focused on attacking online privacy and weakening the security of systems that we all trust.

Forget all the government rhetoric on cybersecurity: the NSA simply isn’t here to make the Internet more secure. But that doesn’t mean the agency has to win. The global tech community can fight back, if developers ramp up efforts to build privacy and security into their products. By zeroing in on practical steps Ed and I discussed in our conversation here, we can build a more open, free and secure Internet.

Unfortunately, for far too long, security has been an afterthought. Even for a lot of my fellow geeks here at SXSW.

Until recently, many of the free email and social networking services used by consumers failed to integrate the most basic of encryption technology. That made the NSA’s job far too easy, so the real challenge for the NSA often became processing all of the intercepted communications data, rather than grabbing it in the first place.

Right now, the most widely used communications tools and services – the ones we use to do business, have fun and connect with those we love – fail to deliver the reasonable and realizable trifecta of privacy, security and simplicity. As a result, people are forced to choose between technology that’s incredibly intuitive but fundamentally weak on privacy (such as Google’s Chrome browser and Android operating systems) and technology (like PGP email encryption and Tor) that remains far too difficult for the average person to use … even if those tools do a much better job of protecting private data.

Nine months after Snowden’s documents leaked in these pages, though, the standards and practices of everyday security are truly beginning to change. Over the past few years, and even more so after Ed’s revelations, Silicon Valley companies have begun to enable – by default – basic security features, such as the use of HTTPS encryption to protect data as it is transmitted from their customers’ to the companies’ servers. While HTTPS encryption by default is a great start, isn’t enough. The tech companies must offer apps and services that are safe and secure by default.

Far too often, security is an opt-in feature that few regular people will even know about, much less seek out and enable.

In addition, big tech companies need to embrace end-to-end encryption technology. That is, they need to lock their products down, so they won’t be able to see their customers’ data. This kind of encryption technology, if deployed by several major service providers, will significantly thwart the ability of intelligence agencies, in the US and elsewhere, to engage in bulk surveillance. The more communications and data are encrypted, the less tenable mass surveillance becomes.

It comes down to simple economics, really: if the NSA has to spend more time finding a way to break or otherwise circumvent encrypted communications, it will be forced to do what it should have done all along – use its extraordinary powers on high-value targets, rather than the hundreds of millions of innocent people currently subject to NSA surveillance. If you question the power of encryption, consider this: the US government still doesn’t know what documents Ed took, because he encrypted everything.

As Ed stressed, tech companies can also begin to limit the data they collect from their customers and only store it for as long as it’s needed for genuine business purposes – and not one second longer. The impact of the government’s ability to demand data from companies like Google and Facebook is amplified because these tech companies collect and store everything. If the companies don’t have the data that the US government and other governments are seeking, they cannot be legally compelled to hand over what no longer exists or never existed in the first place.

The problem, however, is a fundamental conflict of interest between the business model of so many tech giants – the collection, storage and monetization of your data – and your privacy and security.

This is where the average Internet user can make a difference. Right now, the digital services up on which we all rely for swift communications and easy web browsing are largely reliant on advertising dollars. They sell the data you generate to third parties, or use it to deliver targeted advertisements for those third parties. Entire businesses are devoted to collecting, analyzing and then monetizing whatever data you produce. As a result, the apps, operating systems and services they provide us are optimized for one major thing: the collection of our private data.

We, the everyday consumers, must make privacy and security profitable. If we want these companies to put our interests first, we must pay for the services that they provide us. We must demand that those products preserve privacy – again, by default. Until this business model changes, the services that are made for the mass market will remain insecure, vulnerable and optimized for data collection.

By making it harder for the NSA to engage in mass surveillance, we force the agency to target the communications and devices of people genuinely suspected of wrongdoing without compromising the privacy rights of everyone else. I cannot stress enough what I said yesterday: the goal here isn’t to blind the NSA. The goal here is to make sure they cannot spy on innocent people, in bulk. Starting right now.

It’s been said that the geeks shall inherit the Earth. If that’s true, it’s also our responsibility to secure it. One of our own, Edward Snowden, started this revolution. Now it’s time we finished it by using our skills and knowledge to preserve our privacy and civil liberties, not just the bottom line.","Christopher Soghoian: How to move beyond our SXSW talk: revenge of the nerds, one everyday security tool at a time"
"The Federal Reserve last week confirmed what most Americans already know.

In its latest report on the state of the US economy, the central bank said 46 percent of Americans would “struggle to meet emergency expenses of $400.”

“The new survey findings shed important light on the economic and financial security of American families seven years into the recovery,” said Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard.

And that light is a flashing red beacon of warning.

While I love the direct nature of this survey question, I wonder what it would have been like if the number were $500. Would that have put the percentage of Americans over 50 percent?

While this is — in today’s economy — a lot of money to practically half the country, it is not a vast sum.

In addition, 22 percent of those currently employed are working two or more jobs.

So almost a quarter of those who are lucky enough to be working have to work two jobs to make ends meet before a $400 fender-bender forces them to go begging to their neighbor or borrow from a family member.

Even this sad story of the “recovery” gets worse.

A full 43 percent of those with family incomes below $40,000 don’t even have a bank account. And 31 percent of workers don’t have a retirement savings account or pension.

So there is no hope that starving today will feed you tomorrow. In this recovery from the Great Recession, almost half of America is living hand to mouth.

There’s an old saying that “Money talks and BS walks.”

I’d propose changing it to “Money walks and hope floats.”

If this was the “hope is on the way” rhetoric that President Obama promised, then I suspect half the country would gladly exchange that hope for $400, in case things don’t exactly pan out.","The Federal Reserve last week confirmed what most Americans already know. We’re broke! In its latest report on the state of the US economy, the central bank said 46 percent of Americans would “stru…"
"Linda Hogan Makes Ass of Herself in New 'MILF' Video

let it all hang out in a new music video ... by flashing her behemoth badonkadonk in a thong and sheer dress type thing.

The 52-year-old blonde bombshell stars in hip hop artist

's latest video entitled ""MILF"" and does her best Coco impersonation by exposing all of her orange mother-of-two posterior loveliness.

Besides showing off all her God given talents, Linda did some serious method acting by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in full face and a horrendous animal print bikini.

Linda is now a video ho...gan.

Get TMZ Breaking News alerts to your inbox",Hulk Hogan's ex-wife Linda Hogan let it all hang out in a new music video ... by flashing her behemoth badonkadonk in a thong and sheer dress type…
"Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) speaking on the Senate floor. (Senate TV via Associated Press)

A funny thing happened on the way to the shutdown: The Senate Republicans, from whose midst the defund Obamacare scheme came, are more united than ever, in large part because the ringleaders of the defund gambit were shown to be failures and, worse, inept.

A longtime Republican on the Hill explains, “The members have real life experience now. What [the defund Obamacare leaders] said didn’t happen.” Indeed, there is zero chance Obamacare will be defunded, and Democratic support for the defund effort never appeared as Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) had assured them it would. There is no sign the shutdown is forcing the president to cave; if anything he’s dug in even further. The entire escapade made it impossible for Republicans, at least for now, to obtain smaller gains and, most important, get onto the main event, the debt ceiling.

Many on the GOP side in the Senate are openly disparaging Cruz, who only a week ago was presenting himself as the model conservative. The burning resentment members and staff were expressing over the weekend as Cruz targeted them, rather than Democrats, has turned to open fury, disdain and much eye-rolling.

Ted Cruz faced a barrage of hostile questions Wednesday from angry GOP senators, who lashed the Texas tea party freshman for helping prompt a government shutdown crisis without a strategy to end it.

At a closed-door lunch meeting in the Senate’s Mansfield Room, Republican after Republican pressed Cruz to explain how he would propose to end the bitter budget impasse with Democrats, according to senators who attended the meeting. A defensive Cruz had no clear plan to force an end to the shutdown — or explain how he would defund Obamacare, as he has demanded all along, sources said.

He enraged colleagues further by refusing to repudiate his attack dogs at the Senate Conservatives Fund who savaged Republicans. A Senate source tells Right Turn, “Cruz got the brunt, but Lee too.” Perhaps most shocking, no senator, according to three GOP sources, rose in their defense. They have, to be blunt, been repudiated by a newly united GOP caucus. One Senate aide said, “I don’t think Sen. Cruz entered that meeting with a thick skin, but he left learning he needs one going forward, along with a strategy.”

The behavior of the defund trio in this drama has changed markedly as well. Rubio has practically gone into hiding. Instead of news clips of his appearances hyping the defund strategy, his office sends out press releases about flood insurance. Having opposed any clean continuing resolution, Cruz and Lee now are backing the clean mini-continuing resolution strategy. Although he won’t take back the insults, you don’t hear Cruz excoriate fellow Republicans in public these days. Lee, meanwhile, had to backpedal on his initial decision to take his salary, something many Republicans have declined to do. They are now on defense and under the gun from all sides, trying their best not to remind the media and supporters that their plan has been a bust.

Should there be another cloture vote on a continuing resolution that doesn’t defund or delay Obamacare, it’s doubtful Cruz would get anything near even the tepid support he did when 18 Republicans (and some of those voted with him only because of the sequester budget numbers) joined him on the original House continuing resolution. The “fear factor,” if you will, is gone.

Cruz recently has been compared to Barack Obama. Both were freshmen senators with presidential aspirations, big talkers and solo acts rather than team players. But Cruz experienced what Obama was smart enough to avoid — a high-profile drubbing that deflated the image of an invincible new figure on the national stage. Moreover, Obama, unlike Cruz, was not openly hostile to his colleagues, thereby preventing a nonstop flood of criticism and embarrassing anecdotes. Maybe in the long run that will help Cruz, who could learn a lesson about attacking Republicans and promising supporters the moon and the stars. But, for now, the defund strategy designed to elevate him has exposed him as a disliked and inept lawmaker, giving rise to the question of what he is accomplishing for the voters of Texas.

He might take a look at Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who was cagey enough to be opposed to the defund strategy, made a brief appearance during the 21-hour talk-a-thon, voted against the defund continuing resolution cloture (getting him out of Jim DeMint’s line of fire) and then promptly took up a conciliatory tone. Now Rand Paul suggests a shorter continuing resolution or muses that everyone should just sit down for a chat. He knows that vitriol can come back to bite you, especially if you make a spectacular belly-flop.

The Senate Republicans lack a majority, of course, so any deals on the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling likely will have to come from the House. But you hear from many Senate offices now that they’ve “never been more united.” That will help in the battles ahead and may, with a divided and frenetic House GOP caucus, cast them once again as the voice of reason and as instrumental deal-makers (as they were in 2011).

Call it karma or comeuppance or schadenfreude, but most members, for now, are satisfied to see Cruz on the receiving end of an angry GOP contingent and vivid confirmation of their misgivings about his defund strategy. There is nothing so satisfying as standing up to a bully.

RELATED: The Right’s 25 most influential voices",The Texas senator is no longer the top dog in the CR fight.
"SIZE: 750 square feet (estimated)

SETTING: Highmount is a hamlet of Shandaken, a town of about 3,200 in the Catskills, about 2.5 hours from New York City. This house is in a heavily wooded rural area about 10 minutes from both Belleayre Mountain, a ski resort, and an entrance to the 290,000-acre Catskill Forest Preserve. The nearest commercial center is 10 miles away in Margaretville.

INSIDE: The cylindrical house, inspired by a grain silo, was built in the mid-1970s. It has three levels: a kitchen on the bottom; a living room and a lofted bedroom on the second; and another bedroom on the third. The staircase winds along the walls. The bedroom on the top level has 360-degree views of the property.

OUTDOOR SPACE: The property’s nearly eight acres are mostly wooded.

CONTACT: Ray and Janet Pucci, Coldwell Banker Timberland Properties (607) 746-7400 ext. 13; timberlandproperties.net

WHAT: A one-bedroom, one-bath condo in a converted warehouse

SETTING: This condo is in the Northeast section of Minneapolis, so named because it is northeast of downtown, on the opposite side of the Mississippi River . Historically, the neighborhood has been home to families from Poland, Finland and Slovakia, and businesses established in the first half of the 20th century survive today, like Surdyk’s liquor store, which also sells wine, cheese and cigars, and Nye’s Polonaise Room, which has weekly polka performances. The area has a mix of single-family homes and recently converted commercial buildings. Restaurants, shops and art galleries are within five or six blocks. The Hennepin Street Bridge, which has a pedestrian and bike path, connects the area to downtown.

INSIDE: This unit is one of 35 in the Calumet Lofts, a 1911 warehouse converted to condos in 2005. A large room with wood-beam ceilings, it has an exposed brick wall and concrete floors with radiant heating. The windows face southwest. At one end is a bedroom, at the other is a living area, which has a ceiling-mounted projector with a retractable screen and surround-sound speakers. Loft owners have access to the building’s common room.

OUTDOOR SPACE: A shared deck off the building.

TAXES: $2,040 annually plus $314 a month in condo fees

CONTACT: Jason Huerkamp, Coldwell Banker Burnet (612) 306-8421; cbburnet.com","A Craftsman-style house in Birmingham, Ala.; a silolike house in the Catskills; and a loft in Minneapolis."
"Today marks 100 years since the start of World War I. On July 28, 1914, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria the month before, thrusting the world into a war unlike any seen before. It would rage on until November 1918, killing more than 5 million troops and reshaping the world in ways that only sent it hurtling toward the next world war.

Here are some of the places that endured through the war and what they look like now, photographed by Peter Macdiarmid of Getty Images.

Above: April 30, 1917, Reims Cathedral during a bombardment. (UIG via Getty Images)

Underneath: Reims Cathedral on March 11, 2014, in Reims, France. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The Reims Cathedral in France is more than 800 years old, the site of 25 coronations of kings of France, including Louis VIII in 1223 and Charles VII in 1429, in the company of Joan of Arc. The cathedral was almost destroyed during World War I when German troops tried to reach Paris.

Above: World War I, German airplanes at Place de la Concorde in Paris, wrecked by celebrating crowds on the day of the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France. Nov. 18, 1918.

Underneath: Cars are parked near Place de la Concorde on March 12, 2014, in Paris.

In the center of the Place de la Concorde sits the Luxor Obelisk, which dates back 3,300 years. The Luxor Obelisk was once an entrance to the Luxor Temple in Egypt. It was given to Paris by the Viceroy of Egypt in 1829.

Above: (Rue des Archives/PVDE Via Getty Images)

Underneath: Traffic runs from Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebieres on March 13, 2014, in Albert, France. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

“Lourdes of the North,” it was named by the pope in 1899, impressed by the 40,000 gold leaves placed on the sculpture of the Virgin Mary at the top of the basilica. The Star reports that 2,000 shells shattered the building during the war and by January 1915, the statue was left hanging “by her toes.” She came to be called the “leaning virgin.” Superstitious soldiers believed that “when the Virgin falls, the war will end.”

According to The Star, the statue fell in April 1918 and the war ended seven months later. The Notre-Dame de Brebieres Basilica was rebuilt as almost an exact replica, and the statue was back atop the building by 1929.

Above: November 1914: In Trafalgar Square, London street urchins dressed as soldiers with paper hats and canes as guns stand at attention watched by a small crowd. Behind them is a notice declaring “The Need for Fighting Men is Urgent.” (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Underneath: Trafalgar Square on March 17, 2014, in London. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Britain declared war on Germany on Aug. 4, 1914. On Aug. 5, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, became secretary of state for war. He is credited with realizing early that the war would last for years, and he built up British forces from 20 to 70 divisions in two years.

Above: A large crowd of men respond to a call by the War Office for married men aged between 36 and 40 to become munition workers. They gathered outside the Inquiry Office at Scotland Yard in London during World War 1. (Photo by Paul Thompson/FPG/Getty Images)

Underneath: A gated barrier runs near Scotland Yard on March 17, 2014, in London. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Trafalgar Square has been the hub of London since its construction in the early 1800s. It celebrates a great British naval victory in the Napoleonic wars, the Battle of Trafalgar, and so is a symbol of British might and resolve.

Above: Les Halles in the Belgium town of Ypres, the site of three major battles during World War I, and almost completely devastated by bombing. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Underneath: Cars are parked near Les Halles in the Grote Markt on March 10, 2014, in Ypres, Belgium. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

By 1918, the town hall and the entire town of Ypres was flattened. Some of the biggest battles were fought there, as it was the “linchpin” that kept Germany from advancing to the English Channel.

Above: German troops sitting on the steps of the Vareddes Town Hall, France, 1914. German soldiers taking a rest during the First Battle of the Marne. (Photo by The Print Collector /Getty Images)

Underneath: A man stands near Vareddes town hall on March 12, 2014, in Vareddes, France. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The first Battle of the Marne in September 1914 helped bring a halt to the German advance. The second Battle of the Marne, in 1918, ended in a great victory for allied forces, turning the tide of war.

Above: Soldiers standing outside the ruins of the railway station at Roye, France, during World War I in 1917. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Underneath: Cars are parked at the former railway station on March 12, 2014, in Roye, France. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The Battle of the Somme in 1916 is considered one of the bloodiest in history, with more than a million dead and injured in fighting over a 30-mile front.

Above: The town hall and the belfry of Arras in ruins, seen from the main square. (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Underneath: People walk near Place des Heros on March 14, 2014, in Arras, France. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Eight days before the battle of Arras in 1917, 24,000 British soldiers hid in a labyrinth of medieval quarries converted into an underground hideout under Arras. The Guardian published this report dated April 9-10, 1917:

“The Battle of Arras is the greatest victory we have yet gained in this war, and a staggering blow to the enemy. He has lost already nearly 10,000 prisoners and more than half a hundred guns, and in dead and wounded his losses are great. He is in retreat south of the Vimy Ridge to defensive lines further back, and as he goes our guns are smashing him along the roads. It is a black day for the German armies and for the German women who do not know yet what it means to them.”

Module development by Shelly Tan/The Washington Post

This story has been updated, the Battle of the Somme happened in 1916 not 1918.",Today marks 100 years since the start of WWI. Here are some of the places that endured through the war and what they look like now.
"However, Hong added he expects these sales will only slow, not stop, stock price rises, in what's become a frenzied market.

China's benchmark stock indexes have surged nearly 150 percent over the past year, beating the rest of the world's major indexes, even as the country's economy slows.

Shenzhen's start-up board has more than tripled in the last 12 months and is now trading at earning multiples of 140, meaning at the current level of profitability, investors need to wait 140 years to recoup their investments.

Some shareholders are getting impatient.

Between June 1 and June 3, Jia Yueting, Chairman and president of Leshi, sold 35 million shares in the internet firm he founded, making 2.5 billion yuan (£257.8 million).

Leshi said on May 25 that Jia plans in total to sell up to 148 million shares over the next six months or 8 percent of the company, though he will remain the biggest shareholder after that with a 36.85 percent holding.

Read MoreThis could open the door to China's hot market

Leshi said that Jia will lend the proceeds of the sale to the company interest free. A spokeswoman declined to say whether the selling was prodded by a view that share prices are too high.

It's not just company management who are selling; major cornerstone investors, freed from mandated lock-up periods, are also reducing their stakes.

Cornerstone stakeholders slashed 109 billion yuan worth of China-listed shares in May, double the amount sold during the previous month, according to data from Southwest Securities.

That doesn't include 3.5 billion yuan worth of banking shares dumped by sovereign investment firm Central Huijin on May 26.

The reduction by Huijin, in its holdings in China Construction Bank (CCB) and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), represents a reversal of strategy by the state investor.

Huijin had been buying mainland-listed banking shares since the global financial crisis in 2008, in an apparent support to their share prices. Huijin confirmed in statement that it has sold the shares but did not provide its reasons for doing so.

Read MoreChinese farmers hope to harvest bumper stock profits

A similar trend was captured by an index compiled by Shenwan Hongyuan Securities that tracks major shareholders' trading activities. The index surged over the past month, to a record high, meaning major shareholders are reducing holdings at unprecedented levels.

""It a barometer of how people in the real economy view stock valuations,"" said Liu Junwei, analyst at Shenwan Hongyuan. ""It means at the current level, a correction is very likely"".",Senior executives of listed firms in China have stepped up the pace at which they are selling shares in their own companies.
"By LIGAYA MISHANMARCH 20, 2014

Fung Tu at night is a faint red glow on a block of almost Chinatown on the Lower East Side. Inside, the booths are puritanical, with stiff backs of dark stained wood, overlooked by mirrors and crimson wallpaper in a study of drifting leaves.

The look suggests a modern cha chaan teng, the kind of old-school Hong Kong coffee shop celebrated in the film “In the Mood for Love,” which Maggie Cheung haunts in a cheongsam with swirled-up hair, slinky and demure at once. And while the menu here is loftier than a cha chaan teng’s roster of Western-ish Chinese comfort food, it too looks from East to West in surprising ways.

In lieu of Chinese red jujubes, there are plump Medjool dates, steeped in soy, star anise and bark cinnamon, smoked over applewood and filled with duck confit, then buttermilk-battered and deep-fried. The layers astound: first salty crunch, then sweet chew, and finally the yielding center of succulent duck, still ticking with heat.

Shrimp paste, served with dainty leaves of Shanghai bok choy, is made with shrimp rubbed with Old Bay spices, as if at a crab boil, and steamed rather than fermented. It still throws a punch, the shrimp’s brininess underscored by tomato paste and the Chinese threesome of ginger, garlic and scallions.

Nubs of beef jerky, from Jung’s on Mulberry Street, are tossed with dill sprigs, dill pollen and peanuts fried in oxtail fat. How is it that this dish never existed before? It is less food than compulsion, bright, grassy and carnal, and entirely plausible as an entrant in the Chinese canon.

The Bronx-born chef, Jonathan Wu, cooked at Per Se, a training that shows in the delicacy and technical intricacy of many of his dishes, like whorls of thin beet slices ornamented with gray-green thousand-year-old egg and dehydrated shards of twice-fermented bean curd, or a purée of broad beans set with kuzu flour and shaped into a terrine with a secret inner layer of minced bacon and pickled mustard greens.

Fung Tu, which opened in November, is run by Mr. Wu, John Matthew Wells, Jason Wagner and Wilson Tang, who a few years ago revitalized the Chinatown dim-sum institution Nom Wah Tea Parlor. Mr. Wu makes his own version of the Nom Wah egg roll, packing it with pork belly, leeks, pickled Thai bird chiles and — genius! — olives, which keep it moist and give it a briny shiver.

Mr. Wu isn’t quite as freewheeling as Danny Bowien, whose hysterically popular Mission Chinese Food operated just a few blocks north of Fung Tu until recently. Mr. Wu’s dishes are quieter and more scholarly, which means that sometimes they aren’t as immediate in their pleasures.

It is hard to know what to make of silky tofu bathed in fish stock, which tastes mostly of the seaweed heaped on top, or soybean curd dumplings molded like gnudi and presented in a celery-mushroom consommé so subtle I couldn’t pinpoint any flavor at all. Celtuce, a kind of lettuce with a long, tubby stalk, is wilted with popcorn purée and topped with a soy-blackened egg, neither of which can rouse the vegetable from slumber.

At times, classics are reinvented to no discernible improvement, like a Chinese breakfast crepe turned into an Indian dosa or steamed bao buns done in the style of Parker House rolls, with malt powder in the dough and a wash of butter. A scallion pancake made with Mexican masa, in homage to a huarache, is a downgrade, an unwieldy slab without the original’s lightness or verve.

Entrees are more straightforward: a deep-fried pork chop; soybean sprouts and bacon stir-fried with black vinegar and heaped over rice, saline and comforting. Dumpling knots, or mian geda (best understood as a Chinese spaetzle), are thrillingly overrun by a Sichuan pork sauce akin to that in mapo tofu, which manages to be somehow brash and refined.

Fung Tu is at its best when it traffics in nostalgia. The duck-stuffed dates are Mr. Wu’s attempt to recreate a long-lost street snack from pre-revolutionary Shanghai that his relatives still sigh over; a dessert of silken tofu harks back to a Mott Street shop where tofu was scooped like ice cream and doused with rock sugar syrup. And those chocolate-peanut-butter balls studded with sesame seeds? They’re a salute to Mr. Wu’s father’s favorite candy: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

22 Orchard Street (Hester Street), 212-219-8785, fungtu.com

RECOMMENDED Bok choy with shrimp paste; duck-stuffed dates; peanuts, dill and beef jerky; beets; broad bean curd terrine; original egg roll version 2; dumpling knots with Sichuan pork sauce; sunchokes with shrimp paste.

OPEN Tuesday to Sunday for dinner.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS The entrance is level with the sidewalk. The restroom has a handrail.","The look at Fung Tu suggests a kind of old-school Hong Kong coffee shop, but the menu is beyond Western-ish Chinese comfort food."
"VALLEY FORGE, Pa., Aug. 18— Ross Perot, who four years ago won more votes than any independent Presidential candidate in 80 years, launched his campaign as the 1996 nominee of the Reform Party tonight with a denunciation of the two-party system and the promise to ''kill that little snake this time.''

The 66-year-old Texas billionaire told a crowd of 1,500 cheering party members, gathered in the convention center in this town east of Philadelphia for the second and final stage of a bicoastal convention, that he was honored and humbled to be their candidate. He promised, ''I will be your servant.''

But he conspicuously failed to win the endorsement of the man he defeated for the nomination, former Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado.

Lacing his speech with inspirational anecdotes from American history and his own life, preaching self-reliance and ridiculing big government, Mr. Perot lambasted budget deficits and trade agreements like Nafta, which he said exported jobs. He broke little new ground and proposed few specific solutions.

A less formidable figure so far in 1996 than four years ago, partly because he is no longer a fresh face in national politics, Mr. Perot is expected to emphasize campaign finance reform in coming weeks. With Republicans and Democrats both waffling on that issue, the Reform Party could have a potent weapon.

Mr. Perot said later tonight that he had decided to accept $30 million in Federal money that he qualified for because of his strong showing in 1992. By accepting that money, Mr. Perot will also be agreeing to spend no more than $50,000 of his own money on the campaign. Any other fund raising would also have to conform to current campaign finance limits.

Although he did not mention President Clinton by name in his speech, Mr. Perot complained about the series of birthday parties tonight that raised millions in Mr. Clinton's name for the Democratic Party. He also mocked Mr. Clinton by asking the audience whether they wanted straight talk or a President who says, ''I feel your pain.''

And he said both major parties manipulated voters into casting ''an emotional vote'' with the help of Hollywood speech writers and other hired guns. He said the parties ''won't admit we have a problem, and therefore they cannot come up with real solutions.''

It is not clear whether Mr. Perot will take more votes from Mr. Clinton or Bob Dole, though some politicians believe he that would tend to split the anti-Clinton vote with the Republicans, helping the President's re-election bid.

Mr. Perot made no announcement of a running mate. His associates say that he offered the job to Representative Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat, and that she turned it down. He is now reported to be seeking another woman or possibly an African-American for his ticket.

A mercurial figure who entered, left, then re-entered the 1992 campaign, Mr. Perot won the 1996 nomination of the party he established, and has so far financed, by a margin of 2 to 1 over Mr. Lamm. In balloting by mail and telephone and over the Internet, Mr. Perot won 65.2 percent of the 49,226 valid votes, officials said, and Mr. Lamm got 34.8 percent.

The results were announced here late Saturday night, a few miles from the campsite where George Washington's 12,000 battered troops spent the harsh winter of 1977-78. Lest anyone should miss the parallel, the Reform Party said in its official opening to the convention: ''Valley Forge will once again represent the turning point in American history.''

In Mr. Lamm's own speech tonight, he attacked the United States's continuing acceptance of immigrants, drawing cheers with the comment that ''when the bathtub overflows, one turns off the tap.''

In a rambling, disorganized and subdued presentation, the former Governor neither mentioned nor endorsed Mr. Perot. He praised the work of the Reform Party, asserting at the outset that ''our two major parties are not going to govern our country in the best long-term interests of our children.'' But in an interview later, he repeatedly declined to say whether he considered Mr. Perot qualified for the Presidency.

Many Reform Party adherents, especially Lamm supporters, questioned the voting procedures. Many party members received ballots late, or not at all, although Russell J. Verney, national coordinator for the party, insisted that 1.13 million had been mailed. That would mean a response rate of 4 percent.

The telephone voting was particularly suspect, with many party members saying they had found it unworkable. Mr. Verney said that since the balloting opened on Sunday -- after the first stage of the convention, in Long Beach, Calif. -- 64,078 invalid telephone votes had been cast, compared with 3,963 valid ones.

''We believe 50,000 is a very large number of votes,'' Mr. Verney said. ''We are proud of each and every one.''

The Perot campaign plans to use some of the techniques that served it well in 1992, when Mr. Perot, spending $60 million to $70 million of his own money, took 18.9 percent of the popular vote, which was the largest share for a candidate outside the two major parties since Theodore Roosevelt won 27 percent on the Bull Moose Party's ticket in 1912. The party is already on the ballot in 40 states and expects to qualify in all 50.

As he did four years ago, Mr. Perot will spend a lot of time on television talk shows -- he appeared on Larry King's program on CNN tonight -- and he will produce 30-minute infomercials, replete with graphs. Such appearances propelled his campaign in 1992, erasing much of the bitterness his withdrawal had caused.

In the last New York Times/CBS Poll, conducted Aug. 3-5, Mr. Perot was the choice of 10 percent of those surveyed in a three-way race. In a later poll, taken for Newsweek after last week's Republican National Convention, the Reform Party pulled only 3 percent. But in that survey, Mr. Perot's name was not mentioned, which undoubtedly caused his support to be understated.

Mr. Verney said the party's Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates will participate in the nationally televised debates with the Republican and Democratic nominees.

Presumably, Mr. Perot will be invited to the debates. In 1992, he was included because he was running strongly in the polls, and it is widely expected that he will pick up strength by the first debate, scheduled for Sept. 25 in St. Louis. When he re-entered the race in October 1992, he was getting 7 percent support. The decision on invitations is to be made by a Federal panel, based on 11 criteria set by law.

Mr. Perot has not had much success so far this year in drawing the kinds of crowds he had the last time out. Both Representative Richard A. Gephardt, the Democratic leader in the House, and Haley Barbour, the Republican chairman, argued in television interviews today that the Reform Party would not be an important factor in this fall's election.

But Mr. Dole apparently took Mr. Perot seriously enough that he flew to Pittsburgh for a rally this afternoon, at which he admonished the crowd to ignore Mr. Perot because the Republican Party ''is the real Reform Party.''

Photos: ''I will be your servant,'' Ross Perot told the Reform Party he created. (pg. A1); The supportes of Ross Perot were exuberant when he accepted the nomination of the Reform Party last night in Valley Forge, Pa., at the second, and last, session of the fledgling party's convention. (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times) (pg. B8)","Ross Perot, who four years ago won more votes than any independent Presidential candidate in 80 years, launched his campaign as the 1996 nominee of the Reform Party tonight with a denunciation of the two-party system and the promise to ''kill that little snake this time.''    The 66-year-old Texas billionaire told a crowd of 1,500 cheering party members, gathered in the convention center in this town east of Philadelphia for the second and final stage of a bicoastal convention, that he was honored and humbled to be their candidate. He promised, ''I will be your servant.''"
"Bowels, especially those that don’t function properly, are not a popular topic of conversation. Most of the 1.4 million Americans with inflammatory bowel disease — Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis — suffer in silence.

But scientists are making exciting progress in understanding the causes of these conditions and in developing more effective therapies. And affected individuals have begun to speak up to let others know that they are not alone.

Abby Searfoss, 21, who just graduated from the University of Connecticut, shared her story not in a support group, but online. She was a high school senior in Ridgefield, Conn., when she became ill. After she researched her symptoms on the Internet, she realized that, like her father, she had developed Crohn’s disease.

Her father had been very ill, losing 40 pounds, spending weeks in the hospital and undergoing surgery. Soon after Ms. Searfoss’s own diagnosis, her two younger sisters learned that they, too, had the condition.

In Crohn’s disease, the immune system attacks cells in the digestive tract, most often the end of the small intestine and first part of the colon, or large intestine. Sufferers may experience bouts of abdominal pain, cramps and diarrhea, often accompanied by poor appetite, fatigue and anxiety.

“You don’t go anywhere without checking where the bathroom is and how many stalls it has,” said Dr. R. Balfour Sartor, a gastroenterologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and a patient himself. “The fear of incontinence is huge.”

Neither Crohn’s disease nor its less common relative ulcerative colitis, which affects only the large intestine, is curable (except, in the latter instance, by removing the entire colon). But research into what predisposes people to develop these conditions has resulted in more effective treatments and has suggested new ways to prevent the diseases in people who are genetically susceptible.

Two concurrent avenues of high-powered research are supported by the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America. One is the C.C.F.A. Genetics Initiative, in which scientists are exploring more than 100 genetic factors now known to influence the risk of developing an inflammatory bowel disease, or I.B.D.

The other research effort, the C.C.F.A. Microbiome Initiative, has so far identified 14 different bacterial metabolic factors associated with the diseases.

By combining findings from the two initiatives, experts now know that certain genes affect the types of bacteria living in the gut; in turn, these bacteria influence the risk of getting an inflammatory bowel disease.

Genes identified thus far appear to account for about 30 percent of the risk of developing an I.B.D., according to Dr. Sartor, who is the chief medical adviser of the foundation. Studies of twins underscore the role of genetics. When one identical twin has Crohn’s disease, the other has a 50 percent chance of also developing it.

In the general population, the risk among siblings of a Crohn’s patient is only 5 percent.

Many people carry genes linked to either Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, but only some of them become ill. Environmental factors that interact with susceptibility genes also play critical roles.

Strong clues to these factors are emerging from a distressing fact: The incidence of I.B.D. is rising significantly both here and in other parts of the world, Dr. Ramnik J. Xavier, chief of gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in an interview.

“There’s been a huge uptick in China and India as these countries move more toward a Western lifestyle and adopt Western work and dietary patterns,” Dr. Xavier said. “I.B.D. cases are now skyrocketing in well-to-do areas of China.”

And when people migrate from a low-incidence area to a higher one like the United States, the risk of developing an I.B.D. rises greatly among their children. ‘This clearly shows there’s an environmental impact that we think is multifactorial,” Dr. Sartor said in an interview.

“Diet is one obvious factor that affects both the composition of the gut biota and also its function,” he said, referring to the microorganisms that inhabit the gut. “Bacteria eat what we eat, and every bacterium has certain food preferences.”

Diet influences the types and balance of microbes in the gut, and different microbes produce substances that are either protective or harmful. For example, Dr. Sartor said, “Certain bacteria that can metabolize the fiber in certain vegetables and grains produce short-chain fatty acids that are believed to protect the gut. They inhibit inflammation and activate immune responses that stimulate recovery from cell injury.”

Another major contributor to the rise in Crohn’s disease in particular is the widespread, often inappropriate use of antibiotics, Dr. Sartor said.

“Early exposure to antibiotics, especially during the first 15 months of life, increases the risk of developing Crohn’s disease, though not ulcerative colitis,” he said. “If there’s a family history of I.B.D., particularly Crohn’s disease, antibiotics should be used only for a documented bacterial infection like strep throat or bacterial meningitis.

“And when antibiotics are needed, probiotics can be used during and afterward to minimize their effect and restore the normal bacterial population of the gut.”

Dr. Sartor also noted that early exposure to common viruses and bacteria can strengthen the immune system and keep it from attacking normal tissues.

“My advice to parents and grandparents is, ‘Let them eat dirt,’ ” he said.

Dr. Sartor has lived with Crohn’s disease for 43 years and for the most part has managed to keep flare-ups at bay with a proper diet, medications and daily probiotics.

He also suggests that those with a family history of I.B.D. avoid taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin, ibuprofen and naproxen, which block the action of protective substances in the gut and can cause ulcers in the lower intestine and the stomach. Acetaminophen is safer, he said.

Many patients say undue stress can cause flare-ups of an I.B.D. And a new study of 3,150 adults with Crohn’s, presented at a recent scientific meeting by Lawrence S. Gaines, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, suggests that depression — feeling sad, helpless, hopeless and worthless — increases the risk of active disease a year later.

This is the first of two columns about inflammatory bowel diseases.","With more awareness about the risk factors of inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis, those with a genetic predisposition can take precautions."
"CAIRO, May 24— President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who initiated the Arab world's diplomatic break with Egypt because of the peace treaty with Israel, says he would welcome the presence of Egyptian soldiers to help Iraq in its war with Iran.

The Iraqi leader, quoted today in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Siyasa, made the remark before reports from Teheran this afternoon that Iran had retaken Khurramshahr, the critical port city on the Shatt al Arab estuary that Iraq had held for 19 months.

By tonight there was no official comment from Egypt on the Teheran reports. In recent days, President Hosni Mubarak has conferred several times with key aides on the Iraq-Iran war. Egypt, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab nations on the Persian Gulf, has long called for a negotiated end to the fighting because of a fear that an Iranian victory would radically disturb the status quo around the gulf.

Egypt, despite the diplomatic rupture with Iraq, has for over a year been selling it arms and ammunition to replace Soviet-made Iraqi military equipment. In recent months this aid has increased and in recent days, according to the military analyst of the official Government newspaper Al Ahram, it has included ''kinds of weapons that are part of Egypt's strategic reserve.''

So far, the official Egyptian position has been that it would provide Iraq with arms and other supplies but not with ground troops. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians work in Iraq, mainly in agriculture, and it is likely that some have been pressed into military service. In addition, Egyptians are not forbidden to go to Baghdad to enlist.

Recently, a key foreign policy adviser to President Mubarak, Osama el-Baz, said the extent of Egyptian involvement on Iraq's behalf would be ''measured by developments,'' adding that ''this is a matter that varies from week to week.'' Whether today's reports about Khurramshahr will change Egypt's strategy remained to be seen tonight.","President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who initiated the Arab world's diplomatic break with Egypt because of the peace treaty with Israel, says he would welcome the presence of Egyptian soldiers to help Iraq in its war with Iran.   The Iraqi leader, quoted today in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Siyasa, made the remark before reports from Teheran this afternoon that Iran had retaken Khurramshahr, the critical port city on the Shatt al Arab estuary that Iraq had held for 19 months.   By tonight there was no official comment from Egypt on the Teheran reports. In recent days, President Hosni Mubarak has conferred several times with key aides on the Iraq-Iran war. Egypt, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab nations on the Persian Gulf, has long called for a negotiated end to the fighting because of a fear that an Iranian victory would radically disturb the status quo around the gulf."
". The World Wildlife Fund and Indonesian park officials have released video of Javan rhinoceroses obtained from camera traps in Ujung Kulon National Park, which is thought to be the last refuge of the critically endangered species. The video clips show young calves and a mother, implying the species, which once ranged through much of Southeast Asia but is now down to a few dozen individuals, is hanging in there.

. Still, wildlife biologists say the rhinos in the park face threats from poaching — mainly due to demand in China for the purported medicinal properties of the horns — as well as from a nearby volcano.

The wildlife fund, through a project with the government and other conservation groups, is trying to raise money to transfer some of the rhinos to another reserve. “There are no Javan rhinos in captivity — if we lose the population in the wild, we’ve lost them all,” Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist at the wildlife group, said in a news release.

It’s a shame that humans (media included) have a habit of paying attention to wildlife mainly when it’s already driven close to the brink.

When the Hudson River was so dense with huge Atlantic sturgeon that they were nicknamed Albany beef, did they cause the thrill I felt while accompanying biologists netting a single individual last year?

I’d love to start posting video here of species that are not down to their last few dozen individuals, and will do so when time allows. In the meantime, offer up links to video of your favorite wild things — including those that remain abundant.",Hope for a species on the brink as young rhinos are glimpsed in an Indonesian park.
"Tuesday, June 16, 2015, 3:44 PM

He was looking for a family with benefits.

Pennsylvania creep Daniel Schulties has pleaded guilty to a string of sex crimes after investigators caught him trawling for a sex date with young girl — and her parents, authorities said.

“Looking to join an Incest Family,” the 24-year-old wrote in an online ad.

His twisted solicitation caught the eye of the state Attorney General’s child predator unit, whose investigators posed as a willing family with an 11-year-old daughter.

Schulties traded text messages and emails in 2014 with the fake dad and daughter, even forwarding nude pictures of himself to agents, authorities said.

His downfall came on Aug. 16, 2014, when he drove to a hotel in the township of Moon, where he expected to have sex with the whole family, prosecutors said. He instead met a team of law enforcement agents who took him into custody.

He pleaded guilty on June 9 in Allegheny County to five charges, including attempted indecent assault of a person less than 13 years old and unlawful contact with a minor related to sexual offenses.

Prosecutors withdrew attempted child rape charges, court records showed.

Schulties is scheduled for sentencing on Sept. 19.","Daniel Schulties pleaded guilty after trying to arrange sex with an 11-year-old and her parents at a Pennsylvania hotel, authorities said."
"Drivers of super-luxury sports cars in Italy bemoan what they call unfair laws aimed at curbing tax evasion.

As BBC News reports, Italian motorists have largely stopped buying or driving flashy cars altogether, for fear of being stopped and questioned by police about their tax filing status.

In 2012, both Ferrari and Maserati experienced sharp declines in their home market, with Ferrari sales falling by 56% and Maserati’s by an astounding 72%.

Although analysts have attributed these declines to Italy’s ailing economy, affluent motorists and industry representatives see things differently, as the BBC recently reported:

""The head of the Italian motor traders' federation Federauto, Filippo Pavan Bernacchi, blamed 'an overdose of taxes aimed at hitting, if not criminalising, the acquisition, ownership and use of cars'.

In addition to taxing motoring directly, Italian authorities have also been specifically targeting the owners of Ferraris and other supercars to check that they are paying enough tax.

There have been numerous reports of police officers stopping such cars, and demanding that the driver produces his or her tax registration ID.""

It is not just affluent Italians who are feeling the pinch. In 2012, new car sales in Italy declined by 19.9% overall.

The country has significant debts, unemployment is rising and both investment and consumer spending are down. To prevent the economy from deteriorating further, the government has enacted new measures aimed at catching tax cheats, including setting up checkpoints outside luxury resorts.

Has the Italian government been too heavy-handed in its effort to ensure compliance with tax codes? Sound off on our Facebook page.","Wealthy car enthusiasts steer clear of super-luxury models in Italy, lest they be targeted by police."
"Bruce Jenner and Kris Jenner; Ronda Kamihira (inset)

Dan Steinberg/AP; AF/Star Max/FilmMagic; Inset: X17ONLINE

updated 03/18/2015 AT 11:30 AM EDT

•originally published 03/23/2015 AT 07:45 AM EDT

's relationship with his ex-wife

may have stirred up drama in the

, but whether the pair ever had a real romance is still up in the air.

""Everyone assumed he was dating her,"" a family insider tells PEOPLE of

""Who knows how intimate things got, but they knew each other for a very long time.""

Which might explain why Jenner was so close with Kris's former assistant just months before the Olympic gold medalist made headlines with the news that he is transitioning from

""It seems more like he confided in her,"" says the insider. ""She would buy him feminine things he wanted. They had some kind of special bond.""

to define his relationship with Kris's longtime friend during the March 15 episode of E!'s

, Jenner denied that he was dating Kamihira.

""I don't need to explain my relationship to anybody,"" he said. ""Nothing is going on. Certainly my intentions are not to hurt Kris. I don't want anybody upset, but Kris is not going to tell me who I can and cannot hang out with.""

While Jenner continues to lie low amid the

, the famed decathlete is focusing on his quiet life outside of the spotlight for now, telling

cameras, ""Living by myself out in Malibu has been really good. I kind of have my freedom.""","The former Olympian had a ""special bond"" with his former wife's close friend"
"Mayim Bialik is no stranger to going against the grain. The ""Big Bang Theory"" actress, who just slammed pop singer Ariana Grande's billboard ad for being too sexual, took to her blog again, this time to speak out against Disney's wildly popular flick ""Frozen.""

""I know everybody loved 'Frozen' and that I am going to get so much hate for this. But I’m just keeping it real, yo,"" Bialik wrote on Kveller.com, citing three main reason why she disliked the movie.

The first issue? Besides not being a fan of musicals, Bialik noted that the film lacks female agency.

RELATED: The cast of 'Blossom' nearly 20 years later

""Sure, it’s sort of hidden, but the search for a man/love/Prince is still the reigning plot line in the movie, as it is with pretty much all movies for young people which are animated,"" she wrote. ""The sister's desire to marry this guy she just met, and the other sister getting mad at her — we still have a plot about the identification of a woman being based on her desire and search to meet a man...I’ve had just enough already with this finding a man business in most every kids’ movie.""

Next up on Bialik's list of reasons not to like ""Frozen?"" The film bashes men, she said.

""What happens in 'Frozen?' The Prince/hero turns out to be a scheming villain,"" the former ""Blossom"" star noted. ""He pretended to love her and then he double crosses her and she gets the lesson taught to her not to trust those nasty scheming conniving men. Because you know, men can’t be trusted? Meh.""

But Bialik's biggest issue with the animated film?

RELATED: What Kaley Cuoco really thinks about her breast implants

""My biggest problem with this movie was the way the female characters are drawn and animated,"" the 38-year-old star concluded. ""The male characters look like cartoon men. They have some exaggerated features, sure. But by and large, they look like they have the proportions of human beings. Not so with our lead ladies. They have ginormous eyes. Like really ridiculously big. Teeny-tiny ski slope noses … Barbie doll proportions of their bodies in general: tiny waists, ample busts, and huge heads. They look like dolls. They don’t look like the same species as the male characters even! What’s up with that?!""

WATCH: Four4Four: Duke porn star the next Vogue star?",The Big Bang Theory actress admits she and her sons hated Frozen.
"THE DNA lab made famous by the Jeremy Kyle Show will be the first to offer a simple paternity test… BEFORE a baby has even been born.

AlphaBiolabs, the largest independent DNA testing laboratory in Europe, based in Warrington, Cheshire, has been responsible for all the revealing DNA tests that nail cheating partners on the ITV show.

Previously the only way to find out the dad of an unborn child was a risky invasive test, which involved withdrawing fluid from the amniotic sac that contains and protects a fetus in the womb.

Now AlphaBiolabs has developed a revolutionary blood test that can separate a pregnant mother’s DNA from her unborn baby’s foetal DNA.

The simple test can be done at one of their walk-in centres in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, or at home by their staff with a swab sample from the potential dad.

The tests only work on would-be mums who are at least eight weeks pregnant, as that is when the child’s foetal DNA begins to be present in the mother’s blood stream.

AlphaBiolabs, which has received a Queen’s Award for Innovation, says its cutting edge equipment is more accurate and reliable than similar tests available abroad at a handful of US-based labs.

David Thomas, managing director of AlphaBiolabs, said the test will revolutionise the industry and reassure thousands of families across Britain.

Mr Thomas said: “People are crying out for this test and finally we have the science and the equipment to offer it.

“Women unsure of the father can become very anxious during the pregnancy.

“They worry about the child bonding with the wrong parent. The test could help stop this happening before the child is born.

“We are thinking of bringing it out in the common months.”

But he stressed that the accuracy of the test is not currently high enough for the Jeremy Kyle Show.

He added: “It’s not accurate enough for the Jeremy Kyle Show.

“We would hate to think about someone having the test and getting the wrong answer, without having a second test afterwards.

“We would want to make the test 100 per cent accurate and then maybe, one day, it could be used on the show.”

But they hope they will be able to develop the tests to a level of 100 per cent accuracy, which would mean it could one day be used by the Jeremy Kyle show.

The prenatal test is currently priced at £1170 but within months it is expected to be as cheap as £300 as they get their UK lab up and running with the new “overnight service” processes.

Similar tests that separate the foetal DNA from their mother’s DNA can also be used to tests for genetic diseases such as Down’s Syndrome.","THE DNA lab made famous by the Jeremy Kyle Show will be the first to offer a simple paternity test… BEFORE a baby has even been born. AlphaBiolabs, the largest independent DNA testing laborat…"
"Three of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s fundraising consultants have left the campaign, Fox News confirmed Saturday.

The consultants are Kris Money, Trey McCarley and Debbie Alexander, and they voluntarily left the campaign Friday, according to multiple sources.

Politico first reported the departures and suggested they were the result of personality conflicts and concerns about the strength of the campaign.

However, a Bush campaign source attempted Saturday to minimize the impact of the departures by saying the consultants remain involved in multiple projects outside of the campaign.

In addition, Bush spokesman Tim Miller told Fox News: ""Governor Bush has the widest and deepest fundraising operation of any candidate in the field.”

He also said Ann Herberger, a longtime aide with more than two decades of experience in state and national politics, will continue to lead fundraising operations at campaign headquarters in Miami.

Bush, a former Florida governor, was the 2016 GOP presumptive frontrunner. And he had a superior fundraising advantage over essentially all of the other candidates in the party’s huge primary field, in large part because of his family name and connections with Washington Republicans.

Bush and the super-PAC Right to Rise raised a combined $114 million in the first quarter of this year, according to federal records, meeting often-talked-about expectations that the operation could indeed raise that much money.

However, Bush’s poll number have steadily declined since billionaire businessman and first-time candidate Donald Trump entered the race in mid-June.

""This is the time of year that campaigns make staffing changes before settling a final team going forward,"" Joe Desilets, a Republican strategist and managing partner at the Washington firm 21st & Main, said Saturday. ""Jeb is far and away the fundraising leader in the race and has announced other major fundraisers joining his team. ... If Jeb starts dropping in fundraising, it may prove to be a bigger deal, but ... I don't see this as a major problem going forward.""

Bush led the GOP field in mid-July with 17.8 percent of the vote, but is now at 9.8 percent, behind Trump at 23.5 percent and retired Dr. Ben Carson at 10.3 percent.

Trump has aggressively and consistently attacked Bush as the frontrunner, criticizing several of his positions including those on immigration and federal spending on women’s health.

Trump’s attacks have also been more personal, saying Bush is “low energy.”

Meanwhile, Bush appears to be taking a non-confrontational approach by largely not responding to the attacks and referring to himself as a “joyful tortoise.""

Money, McCarley and Alexander will continue to work for Right to Rise, sources also told Fox News.

Fox News’ Serafin Gomez and Kathleen Reuschle contributed to this story.","Three of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s fundraising consultants have left the campaign, Fox News confirmed Saturday."
"By Adrian Sainz, The Associated Press

It was a brazen and surprisingly long-lived scheme, authorities said, to help aspiring public school teachers cheat on the tests they must pass to prove they are qualified to lead their classrooms.

For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. — himself a longtime educator — to send someone else to take the tests in their place, authorities said. Each time, Mumford received a fee of between $1,500 and $3,000 to send one of his test ringers with fake identification to the Praxis exam. In return, his customers got a passing grade and began their careers as cheaters, according to federal prosecutors in Memphis.

Authorities say the scheme affected hundreds — if not thousands — of public school students who ended up being taught by unqualified instructors.

Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Services writes and administers Praxis teacher certification examinations.

Mumford faces more than 60 fraud and conspiracy charges that claim he created fake driver's licenses with the information of a teacher or an aspiring teacher and attached the photograph of a test-taker. Prospective teachers are accused of giving Mumford their Social Security numbers for him to make the fake identities.

The hired-test takers went to testing centers, showed the proctor the fake license, and passed the certification exam, prosecutors say. Then, the aspiring teacher used the test score to secure a job with a public school district, the indictment alleges. Fourteen people have been charged with mail and Social Security fraud, and four people have pleaded guilty to charges associated with the scheme.

Mumford ""obtained tens of thousands of dollars"" during the alleged conspiracy, which prosecutors say lasted from 1995 to 2010 in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Among those charged is former University of Tennessee and NFL wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, who is accused of employing a test-taker for a Praxis physical education exam. He was charged in late October with four counts of Social Security and mail fraud. He has pleaded not guilty and is out of jail on a $10,000 bond. He has been suspended by the Memphis City Schools system.

In this photo taken Friday, Nov. 23, Neal Kingston, director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas, talks about testing fraud in his Lawrence, Kan., office.

If convicted, Mumford could face between two and 20 years in prison on each count. The teachers face between two and 20 years in prison on each count if convicted.

Lawyers for Mumford and Wilson did not return calls for comment.

Prosecutors and standardized test experts say students were hurt the most by the scheme because they were being taught by unqualified teachers. It also sheds some light on the nature of cheating and the lengths people go to in order to get ahead.

""As technology keeps advancing, there are more and more ways to cheat on tests of this kind,"" said Neal Kingston, director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas. ""There's a never-ending war between those who try to maintain standards and those who are looking out for their own interests.""

Cheating on standardized tests is not new, and it can be as simple as looking at the other person's test sheet. The Internet and cell phones have made it easier for students to cheat in a variety of ways. In the past few years, investigations into cheating on standardized tests for K-12 students have surfaced in Atlanta, New York and El Paso, Texas.

Still, most of the recent test-taking scandals involved students taking tests, not people taking teacher certification exams. Cheating scams involving teacher certification tests are more unusual, said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing.

Schaeffer notes that a large-scale scandal involving teacher certification tests was discovered in 2000, also in the South. In that case, 52 teachers were charged with paying up to $1,000 apiece to a former Educational Testing Services proctor to ensure a passing grade on teacher certification tests.

Teachers from Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi took tests through Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., in 1998. The college was not accused of wrongdoing.

Educational Testing Services also writes and administers the Praxis examinations involved in the Memphis case. ETS spokesman Tom Ewing said the company discovered the cheating in June 2009, conducted an investigation and canceled scores. The company began meeting with authorities to turn over the information in late 2009, Ewing said.

""These cases are rare, but we consider them to be very serious and something we have to guard against happening for all the honest test-takers, students and teachers,"" Ewing said.

Ewing said ETS observes test-takers and reviews test scores to try to root out cheaters. ETS also has received anonymous tips that have led them to cheaters, Ewing said.

Prosecutors in the Mumford case say he, the teachers and test-takers used the Internet and the U.S. Postal Service to register and pay for the tests, and to receive payment. The indictment does not say how much he allegedly paid the test-takers.

An experienced educator, Mumford was working for Memphis City Schools when the alleged scam took place. Authorities say Mumford defrauded the three states by making the fake driver's licenses.

""What happens at many testing centers is that a whole bunch of test-takers show up simultaneously, early on a Saturday morning, and the proctors give only a cursory look to the identification,"" Schaeffer said. ""It's not like going through airport security where a guy holds up a magnifying glass and puts our license under ultraviolet light to make sure it has not been tampered with.""

Mumford was fired after news of the investigation came out, and others, like Wilson, have been suspended. But at least three teachers implicated in the scandal remain employed with their school district.

Kingston, the university professor, said prospective teachers may not be confident in their knowledge base to pass the test. Or, the cheaters may believe they are smart enough to pass on their own but also know they are poor test takers.

Kingston said his research has shown that cheating on exams is getting more prevalent.

""The propensity to cheat on exams both through college and for licensure and certification exams seems to be increasing over time,"" said Kingston. ""People often don't see it as something wrong.""

The pressure of passing the test could make people do things they normally would not do. And it could take a while for authorities and test-taking services to catch up with the cheaters.

""When people come up with a new method for cheating, it takes some time for folks to figure it out, partly because this has been an understudied area in the field of assessment,"" Kingston said.

Nina Monfredo, a 23-year-old history teacher at Power Center Academy in Memphis, has taken Praxis exams for history, geography, middle school content, and secondary teaching and learning.

Monfredo, who passed all her tests and is not involved in the fraud case, said the exams she took were relatively easy for someone who has a high school education. She said some people use study aids to prepare, but she didn't. And she didn't feel much pressure because it was her understanding that she could take the test again if she did not pass.

""If you feel like you can't pass and you hire someone it means you really didn't know what you were doing,"" she said. ""I think it would be easier to just learn what's on the test.""","It was a brazen and surprisingly long-lived scheme, authorities said, to help  aspiring public school teachers cheat on the tests they must pass to prove they  are qualified to lead their classrooms.
For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. &mdas …"
"Updated AUG 13, 2015 at 2:41p ET

How do you sculpt a physique like this?

Two things: Lift lots of weight and eat lots of food.

Like 9,000 calories worth of food.

In June, J.J. Watt discussed his eating habits on colleague Jimmy Traina's podcast, and now in an interview with ESPN he adds more. Watt explained how he noticed his energy level was down during a tough workout this offseason. He didn't understand why until he spoke with his longtime trainer and realized the problem was simple: He wasn't eating enough. ""My body was grabbing for something that wasn't there,"" Watt said in the interview. ""It was trying to fuel itself with no fuel.""

What Watt needed to do was add more fat, more carbs and more calories back into his diet.

The Houston Texans stud targeted between 6,000 and 9,000 calories per day depending on his activity level (for example, during two-a-days, he's pushing for the upper end of that range). To consume that many calories, Watt started scarfing tons of protein, quality fats and bringing cheat days back into his life once a week. ""I started crushing avocados,"" Watt said.

If Watt ate, say, eight chicken breasts in one sitting, his trainer suggested wrapping three of those in bacon in addition to adding more sweet potatoes, more pasta and more olive oil, among other fats, to his day. Watt didn't reveal his specific diet plan in detail, but ESPN's Tania Ganguli concluded that it would take 20 chicken breasts, 50 slices of bacon and 13 full avocados to reach 9,000 calories in one day (those aren't the only things Watt is eating, though, of course).

The best part of Watt's new license to consume an incredible amount of food? His once-a-week brunch cheat day.

""I love brunch,"" Watt told ESPN. ""Brunch is my favorite meal. I went there, had brunch, had a massive potato pancake omelet, which is an omelet inside a potato pancake. Then I had stuffed French toast with berries and stuff. My cheat meals aren't even that exciting. That was my cheat meal. The omelet is still pretty darn healthy. The stuffed French toast was the cheat meal, but that was delicious.""

Watt isn't going quite as crazy as swimmer Michael Phelps, who famously trained for the 2008 Olympics on a 12,000-calorie-per-day diet, but he admits eating has pretty much become his second job. ""It's literally, if I'm not working out, I eat the whole time I'm not working out,"" Watt said. ""It's exhausting. You have to force feed. You have to force yourself to eat food.""

Read the full piece for more.

Teddy Mitrosilis works in social content development at FOX Sports Digital. Follow him on Twitter @TMitrosilis and email him at tmitrosilis@gmail.com.",The Houston Texas star is a B-E-A-S-T.
"A Russian banker accused of participating in a Cold War-style spy ring pleaded guilty Friday to a conspiracy charge and agreed to spend up to two and a half years in prison, making it likely he'll be returning to his homeland in the next year.

Evgeny Buryakov, 41, pleaded guilty to conspiring with others to act as an agent of a foreign government without registering with the U.S. government.

When Buryakov was arrested last year, prosecutors said he had teamed up with diplomats from 2012 through January 2015 to gather sensitive economic intelligence on potential U.S. sanctions against Russian banks and on U.S. efforts to develop alternative energy resources.

In this Feb. 11, 2015, file courtroom sketch, Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Skotko, foreground left, addresses the court at the arraignment of Russian citizen Evgeny Buryakov, on charges that he participated in a Cold War-style Russian spy ring in New York.

Image: AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams, File

They also said he purposely failed to register as a foreign agent to conceal his true role as a covert operative embedded at a Manhattan branch of Vnesheconombank, or VEB.

There was no mention of spies during the plea proceeding, but U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara embraced the secretive nature of the alleged scheme in a statement.

""This sounds like a plotline for a Cold War-era movie, but in reality, Evgeny Buryakov pled guilty today to a federal crime for his role in just such a scheme.""

""An unregistered intelligence agent, under cover of being a legitimate banker, gathers intelligence on the streets of New York City, trading coded messages with Russian spies who send the clandestinely collected information back to Moscow. This sounds like a plotline for a Cold War-era movie, but in reality, Evgeny Buryakov pled guilty today to a federal crime for his role in just such a scheme,"" Bharara said.

Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin added in the same release that foreign nations which ""attempt to illegally gather economic and other intelligence information through espionage pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.""

Earlier U.S. government claims that Buryakov worked for the SVR, the foreign intelligence agency headquartered in Moscow, were not included in the charge Friday.

Buryakov has been behind bars and will remain so until sentencing, which was scheduled for May 25. Prosecutors and the defendant agreed as part of the deal that a 30-month sentence is appropriate.

Buryakov told U.S. District Judge Richard Berman on Friday that he had agreed to let an official with Russia's Trade Mission in New York to direct him to take certain actions without having registered with the U.S. attorney general's office as a Russian agent. He said he spoke on the telephone in May 2013 with the official about information the official had requested.

Outside court afterward, defense attorney Scott Hershman declined to comment.

The defense previously had argued that laws exempted Buryakov from registering because he already was a visa-carrying official with a financial institution that is an arm of the Russian government.

The government said Buryakov had obtained a work visa by lying on paperwork and saying he wouldn't commit espionage.

The case was announced less than five years after the arrest of 10 covert agents — a sleeper cell referred to as ""The Illegals"" by the SVR, the foreign intelligence agency headquartered in Moscow — who led ordinary lives for several years in the United States using aliases. All 10 pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to conspiracy charges and were ordered out of the country as part of a spy swap for four people convicted of betraying Moscow to the West.

Before his arrest, Buryakov lived in the Bronx with his Russian wife and two children.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.","Evgeny Buryakov, who posed as a banker, agreed to spend up to two and a half years in prison."
"The same cannot be said of the off-screen campaign. Morning news conferences by the political parties have been scaled back, regional tours by leaders in their “battle buses” have been reduced and large-scale election rallies have become a rarity.

Instead, attention has been focused ruthlessly on the TV debates, prompting questions about whether this innovation has increased — or curtailed — real scrutiny.

Many analysts believe that the television debates have simply sucked the oxygen out of the rest of the campaign.

“I think this is having a swamping effect in terms of our perception,” said Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics. “And for their own reasons, the political parties have bought into it.”

Following good performances by Nick Clegg, leader of the small, centrist Liberal Democrats, the TV debates have transformed the May 6 contest into a three-horse race, pitting him against Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Labour and David Cameron of the Conservatives.

But other expected changes have failed to materialize.

“People said this was going to be an Internet election,” said Philip Cowley, professor of parliamentary government at Nottingham University, “but there are two things dominating the election: television and direct mail. Both go back to the 1950s or 1960s in America.”

In fact, the parties have had little difficulty calculating where their effort is best focused. The first TV debate won about 9.4 million viewers and captured the public imagination to such an extent that, according to an opinion poll in The Times of London, 49 percent of respondents claimed to have watched the face-off — more than twice as many as actually did so.

Even the second debate last week, which was less readily available to many viewers, was seen by about 4.4 million viewers. The final debate, this Thursday, will be on the BBC and accessible to all.

Andrew Grice, political editor of the Independent, said that, on balance, he approved of the debates but thought they had “completely skewed” the campaign.

“You have at least two days of build-up, then you have the debate and then the inquest,” said Mr. Grice, who is reporting his seventh general election. “Then the opinion polls days later appear to be driven by the TV debates.”

Such is the importance of the TV debates that, during the last one, Mr. Grice said he had received 20 to 30 e-mail or text comments from the political parties.

All this is new in British politics.

Until recently, parties put forward specific policy ideas each morning at news conferences to try to set the agenda for the day, though this system started to become more fluid over the course of elections in 2001 and 2005 to satisfy the 24-hour TV news, Mr. Grice said.

According to Professor Cowley, the election debates may reduce scrutiny and prevent a consistent challenge of the leaders on policy. That is because if one candidate confronts another, he risks being seen by viewers as hectoring.

“The daily press conferences used to be a good way of providing scrutiny by people who knew what they were talking about,” he said.

The debates, however, have also reduced the power of the print media — parts of which are fiercely partisan — to set the agenda, since voters are reacting directly to what they see. Even the most staunch Conservative-supporting titles can no longer ignore Mr. Clegg.

Meanwhile, the new media have had a more subtle effect, proving significant for internal party communication and local campaigns in constituencies, and deemed important enough to merit some party advertising.

For example, a Google search Friday on the TV debates also brought up a sponsored link to a Conservative Party Web site highlighting the most favorable opinion poll for Mr. Cameron.

But the Internet has also acted as a check on the parties. When Conservative-supporting newspapers launched a series of attacks on Mr. Clegg, an ironic Twitter campaign, “#nickcleggsfault,” sprung up satirizing them.

Thousands of Twitter messages suggested, tongue in cheek, that the Liberal Democrat leader was responsible for almost every ill, including the eruption of the Icelandic volcano that grounded European air travel.

“Nick Clegg was seen two weeks ago poking Eyjafjallajokull with a stick,” said one message, while another added, “Nick Clegg lived in same town as a seriously ill man and never visited him, though he knows he has a spare kidney.”

Meanwhile, both Labour and Conservative election posters have also been parodied on the Internet.

Mr. Beckett, of the London School of Economics, believes that the existence of new media, along with the fear that candidates who stray off-message will be instantly exposed, have led parties to mount minimalist, risk-free campaigns.

One key crucial will be whether the advent of the TV debates increases voter turnout, which was 61.4 percent in 2005. Either way, Mr. Beckett believes they have been a big benefit.

“For 90 minutes, on a weekly basis, the public are able to look at the candidates and judge their values directly — and they also get through a lot of policy — unedited by the newspapers,” he said. “The TV debates are a terrific way to engage the voters.”","Thanks to the first-ever televised debates, the election is shaping up to be the most intriguing in a generation."
"So that’s how one of the most divisive, scrutinized and debated seasons in recent television history ends — with bullets, hearbreak and survival. Did it leave you satisfied?

For all its faults, the gonzo, gripping, silly, bleak and dense L.A. noir season of Nic Pizzolatto‘s “True Detective” ultimately made for entertaining television. Even the viewers and critics who ended up disliking what this season had to offer were “hate watching” to see what kind of crazy stuff would happen next (a guy in a bird mask shooting someone; an “Eyes Wide Shut”-style sex party) or what advanced vocabulary word (apoplectic, stridency, etc.) would come out of Frank Semyon’s (Vince Vaughn) mouth next. Even its detractors would likely admit, however, that the second season built some momentum in its second half. Would that continue in the 90-minute season finale, though?

For a while it did, but the last 20 minutes alternated between tense and bizarre moments, some strong, others head-scratching.

The episode begins with some personal business before the big plunge into the climax. First it’s Ray and Ani, then it’s Frank and Jordan.

Ray and Ani “enjoy” the moment after their coupling by working through her childhood trauma with that creepy guy at her father’s commune. Four days of blackness. Maybe he gave her something, but she does remember that he didn’t force her. “Everytime I remember that feeling, like pride, I get sick to my stomach,” she says. “I was proud that he thought I was pretty.” But Ray is quick to remind her that it wasn’t her fault.

Then it’s Ray’s turn to confess about killing a guy he had been led to believe had raped his wife. Right when the guy turned around, Ray says, that’s when he made his move. He didn’t even say anything. “It didn’t make anything better. It made it worse,” he says. “People, whole cultures, wouldn’t blame you. I don’t,” Ani says. But it wasn’t him, Ray says. The real guy was caught weeks ago. All of these moments are intercut with scenes from later in the morning, which feel much colder and more distant.

On Frank’s side of things, he is having trouble talking Jordan into splitting the scene with his henchman Nails. “Take your payout, and get the f— gone!” he tells her just as he throws his ring out. She refuses to leave. How do we know she’s serious? She tosses her ring, too, and that one has a huge diamond. Jordan isn’t buying Frank’s martyrdom play. But there’s no way out — a classic noir trope — and Frank isn’t leaving. He has a big move in mind, but they’ll keep coming after him, and he refuses to let his wife be there for what would happen to him. “If you love me, I cannot do the things I have to do unless I know you’re safe,” he tells her. He pledges to meet her in two weeks or less, at a park. He’ll wear a white suit with a red rose in his jacket, and she’ll be wearing a white dress. Born again pure.

Take the Quiz: “True Detective” Dialogue or SAT Vocabulary Word?

Frank also has a personal moment with Nails, who brings up why he’s so loyal to Frank — and why he’s called Nails. Frank saved him after he was being assaulted with a nail gun, and for that Nails swears to protect Jordan from anything.

Then there’s poor Paul, who’s being zipped up in a bodybag with his killer, Kevin Burris, standing over him and answering his phone when Ray calls. Burris tries to put pressure on him by blaming Ray for Paul’s death, but Ray tells him that he knows everything, including that Caspere was holding the stolen diamonds over his head. Burris changes his tune, and starts to offer Ray big money and safety. Ray placates him before letting Ani know what happened, and the news of Paul’s death devastates him. “He deserved better,” Ray says. But now they have nothing. Erica/Laura is in the wind. Wait a minute, though, says Ray. What about the set photographer? He even kind of looked like Erica/Laura, and the ages match up. So now they have a choice: Pursue the orphaned kids from the 1992 robbery, or take off. Ani wants to take the chance, and Ray isn’t much for running, either.

Now Frank begins to make his play. First, he stops by Mayor Austin Chessani’s house, only to find the mayor floating dead in the pool and a bunch of paperwork about the rail corridor. He then encounters Mayor Chessani’s wife, who, it turns out, met the man through his son, Tony, who has been running high-end sex parties with Frank’s rivals, particularly Russian gangster Osip. Frank believes Tony killed his own father and made it look like a suicide.

Elsewhere, Ray and Ani start looking for the orphans, who are now the top suspects in Caspere’s murder. They stop by a house where they find the bird mask, surveillance shots of the cops who killed their parents (Burris and Holloway, in particular). They also find Laura handcuffed to a bar near a fireplace. She spills about how she met Caspere, how she remembered him visiting her mother. She changed her name, dyed her hair red, fooled him. Her brother, Len, and she had been split up and put into foster care after they were orphaned. They met years later, and she got him a job on the movie set where Caspere was a producer. Together, they set up Caspere and drugged him with the intention of getting him to talk. He did indeed talk about everything. Even the rail corridor. Len got carried away, though, and killed Caspere.

Len and Laura also had the hard drive, but it automatically erased itself. Still, Len is using it to try and cut a deal with Holloway, only Len is doing it just to get close enough to Holloway to kill him. Ani then puts a weepy Laura on a bus to parts unknown. Ray goes off to stop him, but he first calls Frank, who has just finished threatening Osip. Frank is also going to the mattresses, literally, as he sets up shop in a makeshift bedroom in the dive bar where he and Ray usually drink and talk. Frank also has the kind of arsenal that might have saved Tony Montana at the end of “Scarface.”

Ray, meanwhile, rolls up wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses at the new train station where set photographer and Caspere’s murderer Len is going to meet with Chief Holloway. Ray’s face is all over the TV. He’s wanted for killing state police bigwig Davis and probably Paul, too, so a disguise is necessary. He sneaks up on Len and tries to talk him out of it. Instead, he should try to break everything wide open in the sunlight, let them all go down, but Len wants blood. Holloway shows up, and Burris is already there watching his back. It’s Ray who catches Holloway’s attention at first. He’s holding a bag with the hard drive, as well as documents about the land deal, while Len sits behind them on a bench. Ray threatens him, saying everything will go into “the cloud” if something happens to him. He wants a payout (a few blue diamonds will do), and he wants his name cleared. But Ray wants more information, so he keeps pressing. Holloway wants him to put it all on Bezzerides. Even Attorney General Geldof is onboard with that.

Then, the huge bomb drops. Holloway reveals that Caspere had a personal issue with the jewelry store owner’s wife — and Caspere was Laura’s father. This revelation sends Len into a rage, who springs up and starts stabbing Holloway. Burris then starts shooting, Ray hits the deck and starts shooting back. Then Ani, also in disguise shows up, and plugs Burris. All the while, Len is stabbing Holloway, but the police chief fires a few shots into his chest. Ray and Ani get away as uniformed cops descend on the scene.

Now Ray and Ani are holed up with Frank in the dive bar’s basement/utility room, making for Frank and Ani’s first ever meeting. He tells Ani that if she gets to Venezuela first, she should meet Jordan for him. Then it’s Ray’s turn to talk to Frank, who tries to coax him into fleeting to Venezuela, too. He also reveals that Blake was the one who told him about the wrong guy in his wife’s rape. “Maybe I spared you that one,” Frank says, alluding to Blake’s brutal death. It’s clear what Frank wants: for Ray to come along with him to Ojai and kill all of Frank’s enemies. After all, Ray is going to need money to flee to Venezuela.

Ani suggests maybe getting others on the record in the case, but Ray says he has heard enough confessions for the day. Venezuela it is, then, right? Ray wants to join Frank, though, but he considers running at that moment when Ani asks him about possibly doing that. “I just might,” he says. But she doesn’t ask him to run, and they hold hands, understanding each other perfectly.

Next thing you know, Ani is poking through the weird Dr. Pitlor’s files — Pitlor himself is dead, wrists slashed — while Ray and Frank head up to the big meeting between Osip and the Catalyst honcho McCandless. Frank and Ray begin their assault with gas bombs and a hail of bullets, quickly taking out a slew of Osip’s goons. Inside the smoky cabin, they find McCandless and Osip, whom they riddle with bullets. Now there’s a mountain of cash for them to deal with. They start packing the bags, and then they’re gone. Getting to Venezuela shouldn’t be a problem now. They part ways. Frank has made other arrangements to head south, while it looks like Ray feels like he needs to deal with other business first. Still, two loose ends remain: Tony and Betty Chessani.

Ray gets on the horn with Ani, who is eager for him to get back so they can make the boat on time. She’s all packed, but again, it looks like Ray has some unfinished business. Ani probably suspects it, and indeed Ray is moved to do something. Even after he swore to his ex-wife Gena that he would no longer bother her or try to see his son, Chad, he just can’t let go. So what does he do, with freedom just minutes away? He stops by Chad’s school, and his kid is enjoying recess with his friends — and he has his grandfather’s badge, which his father gave him a few episodes back. Chad spots him, and they exchange salutes before Ray slips away. As he walks back to his car, though, he finds that has attached something with a red light to the bottom, likely a tracking device or a remote-control bomb. So, as any rational person would do, Ray lights a cigarette and waits for whoever might have done it.

Frank, meanwhile, starts settling his debts and preparing to leave. Once it looks like he’s all done, though, he is trapped beneath an underpass by two cars. It’s the Mexicans he thought he had a deal with, but apparently they had never gotten over how he cut them out of trafficking deals at his clubs. They drive him to the desert, where he meets the gang leader, who is still miffed over the deal. Frank trades the million dollars in cash he has on him for his life, but he doesn’t get a ride back to town for his trouble. They also want his suit, but Frank has too much pride and strikes out. He’s overmatched, though, and one of the gangsters stabs him. They leave him to bleed out in the desert all alone. He walks off into the sunset, but this isn’t a happy western ending. Instead, he’s haunted by the taunting memory of his father as blood pours from a gash in his side. He re-lives other miseries, too, including neighborhood toughs picking on him and one of his victims weeping him. Buzzards trail him after a while. Finally, though, he sees Jordan in a white dress. “What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?” Eventually, he stands upright and starts walking normally. “You can rest now,” she tells him. Here lies Frank Semyon, a wordsmith and a criminal with a code.

Ray calls Ani — who is sporting freshly shorn locks — to tell her that he will be late, but he also implores her to get on the boat, even if it’s without him. He’s being tailed, and he’s confident he’ll lose them. However, he’s just saying this so Ani will get out. He gets on the phone with Felicia, who owns the bar and is helping them flee to Venezuela, tells her that he isn’t going to make it, and that she must do everything in her power to make sure Ani gets on that boat. Ray is preparing for the end, meanwhile. He creates another recording for Chad, telling him that the kid is better than he is. “Hell, son, if everyone was stronger they’d be more like you,” he says before leading his pursuers into a forest. His car is out of gas, and his message to his son has yet to upload. He grabs a gun, heads off to hide in the woods, but Burris (who survived the shootout at the train station in spite of being wounded) and a bunch of guys with heavy firepower chase him.

Burris demands the incriminating papers and “the woman,” meaning Bezzerides. Ray, though, is a killing machine, taking out two of the guys trailing him. After a while, though, Ray comes out firing only to be quickly mowed down. The message to Chad failed to upload, too. Here lies Ray Velcoro, loving father, reluctant hero.

Ani gets on the boat with Felicia, a new life awaiting her, but she keeps eyeing the waves. It becomes clear to her after a while that she’s on her own.

The aftermath: Tony Chessani becomes mayor of Vinci, the rail project gets under way with Catalyst spearheading it. At least Paul had a highway named after him.

But that’s not all. We hear Ani narrate the end of the story to someone, likely a reporter. She gives him all the evidence, saying she owes the idea of a better world to Ray and his sons, meaning Chad and the little baby Ani apparently had while in Venezuela. Jordan is there, too. A long journey awaits them, but not before Ani loads up on knives. Nails is also there, acting as a guardian angel, and the four of them slip out as a religious festival goes on in the streets. All the light blurs together, and we cut to black.

Join the WSJ TV Club.

For the latest entertainment news Follow @WSJSpeakeasy",That's a wrap for season two of 'True Detective.' Are you satisfied with the ending?
"The iPhone has been around for nearly four years. And in that time, millions of people have bought and used iPhones, swiping and tapping their way through life. Most of those people believe they know how the iPhone works.

But dig a little deeper into the iPhone’s latest operating system, iOS 4.3 — available for the iPhone 3GS and the AT&T iPhone 4 — and there’s another layer to master. (Sorry, Android users, but that OS has so many versions and skins that a quick guide would be neither very quick nor much of a guide.) Beyond the realm of those basic iPhone controls is an advanced level of shortcuts and tweaks, some of which even hard-core users may not know exist.

DOUBLE-TAP Even while your iPhone is locked, you can access the audio controls by double-tapping on the home button when the lock screen appears. This saves you the time it takes to unlock your phone, open a music-playing app like iPod and get to the volume and track controls. This feature is not limited to Apple’s iPod app. If you are using Pandora, for example, the same technique will bring up its controls.

VOICE ACCESS If you press and hold the home button while the phone is locked, you can still access Voice Control to place a phone call (or FaceTime call) or get to any of the iPhone’s other voice commands.

TELL TIME Voice control can dial phone numbers (“dial 212-555-1212”) or people (“Dial Mom, mobile”), and it can control music (“Play music,” “Play artist Earth, Wind & Fire,” Play album “That’s the Way of the World,” “Play more songs like this,” “Shuffle,” etc).

But did you know that it can also tell you what time it is? Say “What time is it?” and your phone will say the time back to you. It may sound silly, but it comes in handy if you are rushing and do not have the time or inclination to pull out your phone. (And who wears watches anymore?)

SHORTCUT TO SEARCH Swiping to the right from your first home screen pulls up the search window, where you can pull up any contacts, apps, e-mails, calendar appointments and media that have the word you are seeking.

But the search screen is also a shortcut to Google and Wikipedia. The last two search results for any entry are always “Search the Web” and “Search Wikipedia,” saving you the time it takes to open browsers or apps.

FORCE-QUIT APPS Double-tapping the home button while your phone is unlocked reveals a panel of most recently used apps. Swiping to the left moves through the apps in reverse chronological order to aid in quick app switching. This is advanced-beginner stuff.

But serious iPhone ninjas know that pressing and holding an app icon in this panel will cause minus signs to appear beside each app. Touching an app in this state forces it to shut down, a useful move if you have an app that is running in the background and causing trouble.

MUSIC SHORTCUTS Swipe that same previously used app screen to the right and you get another shortcut to music-playing controls. If you have the latest operating system, iOS 4.3, you will also see a button that will call up controls for AirPlay, Apple’s wireless audio feature.

It is here that you also gain access to the screen rotation lock button, so you can turn on or off the iPhone’s ability to switch from portrait to landscape mode. Swipe once more to the right from this screen and the iPhone’s volume control appears.

VOLUME LOCK If you want to limit the iPhone’s volume (because it is being used by your children, for example), you can go into Settings, then iPod. Under “Volume Limit” you can adjust the maximum volume and set a code to lock the setting. This code can be different from the lock code for the entire phone, if you have set one of those.

SAVE WEB IMAGES When you’re looking at Web pages in Safari, tapping and holding any image will call up buttons that can save the image to your camera roll or copy it to the clipboard.

FIND WORDS Safari’s search bar will not only look up sites, it can also be used to find a word or phrase on a Web page. Type in your search term and scroll to the bottom of the results; the last result is always “On This Page”; tap that and you can see where that term appears on the page you are viewing.

MULTIPLE KEYBOARDS You can add keyboards in other languages. Go to Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then International Keyboards. Add as many keyboards as you like. The next time the keyboard appears, it will have a small button next to the space bar with a globe icon on it. Tapping that will cycle through the languages you have selected (the name of each language will appear on the space bar).",Knowing a few tricks can make an iPhone easier to use and more efficient.
"Before you go, we thought you'd like these...

Nigerian scams often involve a prince, but years ago somebody went above and beyond and penned a letter asking for help in retrieving a stranded astronaut.

That plea for $3 million assistance has resurfaced and getting

The letter itself tells a story about a Nigerian astronaut who was rocketed to a top secret Soviet space station in 1989 but bumped from the ride home.

Plans to retrieve him later fell through the cracks when the Soviet Union crumbled.

The $15 million he is owed can't be claimed until he returns, but those who offer financial assistance towards his rescue will be richly rewarded.

Surprisingly, the letter passes a fact check

Parts about Soviet missions, spacecraft used, and, of course, the dissolution of the USSR all have elements of truth to them.

Further, a cosmonaut really did have to postpone his return due to political upheaval.

While impressively researched and executed, make no mistake – the letter is still","Nigerian scams often involve a prince, but somebody went above and beyond and penned a letter asking for help in retrieving a stranded astronaut."
"Enterprise companies find that deploying a single, global ERP system can lead to unmanageable IT complexity.

As all CIOs know, the more complex the technology environment, the more difficult and expensive it is to keep the entire operation running seamlessly. Yet over time, many companies find the complexity of their applications has gradually increased to an almost unmanageable degree. They’re paying very high prices to operate their core business, or they feel paralyzed by their systems. Some worry that they’re can’t easily support future change or execute on strategic direction. They’ve reached a point where IT complexity is preventing the business from realizing its potential, and they wonder how they got there…

In the 1990’s many companies embraced an idealized vision for enterprise IT, which was predicated on putting in place a single, global ERP system from end-to-end. But as many companies and many CIOs have discovered, this isn’t necessarily a practical vision. The world around us changes fast, and business requirements change right along with it. And monolithic ERP systems can have a hard time keeping up.

Organizations found that the reality of the global ERP vision failed to live up to its promise, for three reasons:

To respond quickly to a specific business need in a single local office, most companies put in place a point solution rather than undertaking a major change to the global ERP. It’s a reasonable short-term response. But multiply that point solution by the number of offices around the world and the number of unique business needs that crop up, and an enterprise can one day find its ERP surrounded by dozens or even hundreds of smaller applications. Take into account the integrations between these small applications, individually as well as to the main ERP, and the enterprise IT environment will grow extraordinarily complex—ironically, as a result of attempting to “standardize” on a single, global system.

This is a story we’ve heard again and again, from some of our biggest enterprise clients. And we have a solution. Microsoft Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions can strike the perfect balance: support for standardized industry best practices and the ability to implement global processes, while allowing rapid deployment and even faster modification and reconfiguration at the local level. By deploying Microsoft Dynamics business solutions across their operations, companies like Revlon Revlon and Dell Dell have consolidated hundreds of smaller applications onto a single, global platform, reducing IT complexity, saving millions in IT costs, and increasing the speed and agility of their businesses. Where they were once faced with overwhelming complexity, today our customers can actually act on their strategy and adapt rapidly, realizing tremendous return on their technology investment and saving significantly on IT costs while reaching new levels of strategic agility.

Microsoft is another great example. Ten years ago, if you had suggested that we would be operating retail stores and selling hardware in the year 2013, people might have looked at you funny. And yet, here we are, 10 years later, with a global retail presence, and we’ve transformed into a devices and services company. The world changed. And our business changed to stay relevant. And we wouldn’t be here if our business solutions hadn’t been able to change, as well.

What does the next ten years hold? It’s anyone’s guess. According to “Back to the Future,” by 2015, kids will be riding hover boards and we’ll all be driving flying cars (not to mention the Cubs will win the World Series). That may seem far-fetched, but one thing’s for sure: nothing stays the same. And you need business solutions that allow you to keep up with change.","Enterprise companies find that deploying a single, global ERP system can lead to unmanageable IT complexity. As all CIOs know, the more complex the technology environment, the more difficult and expensive it is to keep the entire operation running seamlessly. Yet over time, many companies find the complexity of their applications [...]"
"After the final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program was announced in Vienna last week, references to one long-gone politician surged on social media: Neville Chamberlain.

This is not surprising. The late British prime minister, who presided over the ill-fated Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler in September 1938, is the metaphor of choice for all who prefer confrontation to mediation.

As my colleague Philip Bump noted, Twitter mentions of “Neville Chamberlain” spiked on July 14, with neo-con hawks and others on the American right lambasting the Obama administration’s supposed “appeasement” of the Islamic Republic.

[The Iran deal: How it works.]

The historical talking point centers on Chamberlain's negotiated pact with Nazi Germany, which granted Hitler the right to extend his rule over German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia rather than risk the prospect of a full-blown invasion. In a speech delivered upon his return to Britain, Chamberlain quoted a phrase first uttered by an earlier 19th century British premier who had also conducted diplomacy with the Germans.

Europe, he said, borrowing words from former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, now had ""peace for our time."" He then exhorted his countrymen to ""go home and get a nice quiet sleep.""

If there's any doubt over how that contention sealed his fate in the eyes of history, just see the recent comments of prominent GOP politicos and presidential candidates.

For example, when President Obama had a brief, friendly encounter with Cuban leader Raul Castro on the sidelines of a memorial service for the late South African President Nelson Mandela in 2013, Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) was less than impressed. “Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler,” the outspoken senator reminded listeners during a radio interview.

The deal in Vienna, agreed between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., rankled presidential hopefuls, too. “This isn’t diplomacy, it's appeasement,” declared former Florida governor Jeb Bush last week.

On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Obama was the ""Neville Chamberlain of our time.""

[Don't forget how the Soviet Union defeated Hitler.]

Neville Chamberlain’s mistake – acceding to a territorial compromise that did little to check Hitler’s continental aggression – is seen as a kind of original sin, a fatal act of foolishness and moral cowardice that had to be redeemed by nobler, braver men in the hideous years to come.

“This is the greatest appeasement since Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler,” said Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), reacting to the Iran deal last week. “[President Obama] is doing this because of his very poor understanding of history and what happened to Neville Chamberlain.”

Today’s “appeaseniks,” Kirk and his allies argue, are either blind to or deluded about Iran’s evil ambitions, like Chamberlain supposedly was eight decades ago.

But beyond the crude flimsiness of the analogy (Obama is patently not Chamberlain, and Iran does not pose a fraction of the threat represented by Nazi Germany in the late 1930s), WorldViews reckons Chamberlain also deserves a fairer hearing.

A scholarly consensus has emerged over time in the wake of World War II revising the image of Chamberlain as a feckless, blundering dove.

“Chamberlain made mistakes in the 1930s. He overestimated his ability to reach a settlement with the dictators; he probably clung too long to the hope of averting war,” writes British historian David Dutton. “But it is doubtful if anyone else would have done much better, [Winston] Churchill included.”

[The dark side of Winston Churchill.]

Indeed, Chamberlain, a conservative politician with a long, accomplished political career and a reputation for intelligence and hard work, was operating in a very fraught context. The painful memory of World War I -- a continental disaster -- was still fresh in Europe and guided the thinking of many its leading statesman.

Nor was the Nazi regime, in a time before its concentration camps and wartime atrocities, seen in such a monstrous light. It commanded sympathy within the corridors of power in Britain and in the United States, which was even more aggressively trying to avoid Europe's simmering maelstrom than the British under Chamberlain.

Here's Dutton once more on some of the underlying realities guiding Chamberlain's actions:

Chamberlain was no fool. But no individual could change the basic facts of the international scene, which made fighting Germany almost unthinkable for most of the decade. Like all his generation, Chamberlain had been deeply scarred by the memory of the First World War. Expert opinion predicted that any future war would be even worse: to the slaughter of the battlefield would be added unspeakable destruction from the air. Extrapolating from the Spanish Civil War, it was estimated that the first few weeks of a German air assault would bring half a million casualties: Britain was defenceless in the face of the bomber.

Moreover, there were fears overall about Britain’s military preparedness in 1938, as Nick Baumann, now an editor at the Huffington Post, detailed in a 2013 article in Slate:

In March 1938 the British military chiefs of staff produced a report that concluded that Britain could not possibly stop Germany from taking Czechoslovakia. In general, British generals believed the military and the nation were not ready for war. On Sept. 20, 1938, then-Col.Hastings Ismay, secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defense, sent a note to Thomas Inskip, the minister for the coordination of defense, and Sir Horace Wilson, a civil servant. Time was on Britain’s side, Ismay argued, writing that delaying the outbreak of war would give the Royal Air Force time to acquire airplanes that could counter the Luftwaffe, which he considered the only chance for defeating Hitler. British strategists, including Ismay, believed their country could win a long war (so long as they had time to prepare for it). This was a common belief, and doubtless factored into Chamberlain's calculations.

Time, though, was not on Chamberlain's side. His overture to Hitler in 1938 was framed less as a strategic error than an act of ""dishonor,"" as his political rival Winston Churchill put it. Yet even after Chamberlain was compelled to resign his post in 1940, he served in important roles in the country's government until his death from cancer later in the year.

Chamberlain stood by his record in the last phase of his career and life. The following is from a speech he delivered in 1939, justifying his methods of appeasement. It displays both idealism as well as a certain pragmatism:

Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defense, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible.

Chamberlain worked hard to stave off a war and, set against that truly ""wicked man"" Hitler, could not. ""It's not such a bad epitaph,"" Baumann concludes.

In October 1940, just weeks before death, Chamberlain expressed optimism about how he would be remembered in the years to come.

""On the whole, although I have in a sense failed in everything I set out to achieve,"" he wrote, ""I do not believe that history will blame me for that."" At least on this count, Chamberlain was most definitely wrong.

Iran deal: What they said. What they got.

How not to write about Iran",The late British prime minister gets a bad rap.
"For Tiana Stephens, the pictures helped her learn more about a cherished grandfather she'd lost a few years back.

For Harry ""Bud"" Quehl, they offered a chilling reminder of the friends he lost as a crewman on a B-29 bomber.

And for Betty Perkins-Carpenter, the images allowed her to honor the memory of her beloved uncle.

All three are remembering their connections to the Korean War, as the world marks its 65th anniversary on Thursday.

The images -- more than 100 black and white photos taken by the Department of Defense -- show various scenes from the Korean War, including many unidentified Koreans and Americans. In 2012, a veterans group gave them to Perkins-Carpenter, in hopes she could find out who the people were in the photos and get them to family members.

During the next three years, an amazing chain of supporters stepped up to help ID people in the photos. Their efforts are touching families around the nation.

Stephens first saw the photos on local TV news and thought one of the soldiers looked a lot like her grandfather, Crawford Flynn, who died in 2005.

She tracked down Perkins-Carpenter and brought along an old family photo to compare with the one from the box. ""As soon as I put that photo down next to it, it was like a mirror image,"" she said. ""We were literally jumping up and down.""

Tiana Stephens realized her grandfather Crawford Flynn's picture was among a collection of newly found Korean War images. She compared a family snapshot of Flynn, left, with a Department of Defense photo, right. Flynn is on the far right.

Perkins-Carpenter, 84, still gets choked up when she remembers that moment.

""These are more than snapshots,"" she said. ""These are treasures. Family treasures. We have to get them in the right hands.""

Stephens flew home to Colorado and gave that photo to her grandmother, Nobuko Flynn. It was an image she had never seen of her late husband.

The couple had met in Japan while she was working at a little coffee shop at an Air Force base. ""He saw her and fell in love with her,"" Stephens said. ""I wouldn't be here now if he hadn't served."" Stephens opened up about the experience in a poignant blog post.

With so many aging Korean War veterans dying each year, Stephens told Perkins-Carpenter, ""We have to put these out there where everyone can see them, because time is running out.""

Stephens connected her with Kodak Alaris, an information management company spun off from Kodak, which devised the best method to safely scan the images. She also helped connect Perkins-Carpenter to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, which built a web page, allowing the images to be seen worldwide.

Soon, unidentified people in the photos began getting names.

Perkins-Carpenter sent Korean War veteran Quehl a photo of him standing next to a B-29 in July of 1950. He was just 22 years old.

""I was dumbfounded, I really was,"" said Quehl, now 86. ""I think it's exciting that people are trying to do this. It's a good thing.""

The photo shows Quehl inspecting bombs at an Air Force base in California before he deployed to Okinawa, Japan. There, he would spend the war flying 16-hour bombing missions over North Korea. ""We were often under attack by (fighter jets) trying to shoot us down and we saw a lot of our friends get killed,"" he said. ""A lot of people thought Korea was just a mild skirmish, but it really was a war that killed a lot of people.""

On July 25, 1950, about 135,000 North Korean soldiers invaded South Korea. Three years of fighting among troops from many nations, including the United States, led to the deaths of more than 36,000 U.S. troops, according to the Department of Defense. Nearly 3 million Chinese and North and South Koreans -- civilian and military -- were reported killed or missing. The fighting ended with a ceasefire that remains in place today.

Take a look at the images. If you recognize someone, send inquiries to bpc@senior-fitness.com.

For Perkins-Carpenter, the project has been very personal. She's a veteran herself, who lost her beloved Uncle Art in the 1940s during a World War II naval battle. By the time she was 18, Perkins-Carpenter realized she wanted to join the military like her uncle.

When the Korean War broke out, she was serving in Florida in the Air Force, teaching troops about water survival before they shipped out to Korea. After that, Perkins-Carpenter went on to a long career as a champion diving coach, businesswoman and adviser to the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

On Thursday, the anniversary of the war's beginning, Perkins-Carpenter plans to lead the Pledge of Allegiance during a veterans ceremony at a local cemetery. The flag will be lowered to half staff. She'll be thinking about the pictures, she said, because ""Uncle Art didn't come home.""

""If I had a picture of Uncle Art serving in the war, I'd treasure that picture,"" she said. ""Those people in the pictures, their families would treasure those pictures. I want them to have that. It's important.""","Air Force vet works to identify troops in more than 100 newly found Korean War photos. Another vet was ""dumbfounded"" when he saw himself in one of them."
"The re-election of President Obama was like a Rorschach test, subject to many interpretations. In this election, each side debated issues that deeply worry me: the long malaise into which the economy seems to be settling, and the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest — an inequality not only of outcomes but also of opportunity. To me, these problems are two sides of the same coin: with inequality at its highest level since before the Depression, a robust recovery will be difficult in the short term, and the American dream — a good life in exchange for hard work — is slowly dying.

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.

There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth. While the top 1 percent of income earners took home 93 percent of the growth in incomes in 2010, the households in the middle — who are most likely to spend their incomes rather than save them and who are, in a sense, the true job creators — have lower household incomes, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1996. The growth in the decade before the crisis was unsustainable — it was reliant on the bottom 80 percent consuming about 110 percent of their income.

Second, the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

Third, the weakness of the middle class is holding back tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks. The recent modest agreement to restore Clinton-level marginal income-tax rates for individuals making more than $400,000 and households making more than $450,000 did nothing to change this. Returns from Wall Street speculation are taxed at a far lower rate than other forms of income. Low tax receipts mean that the government cannot make the vital investments in infrastructure, education, research and health that are crucial for restoring long-term economic strength.

Fourth, inequality is associated with more frequent and more severe boom-and-bust cycles that make our economy more volatile and vulnerable. Though inequality did not directly cause the crisis, it is no coincidence that the 1920s — the last time inequality of income and wealth in the United States was so high — ended with the Great Crash and the Depression. The International Monetary Fund has noted the systematic relationship between economic instability and economic inequality, but American leaders haven’t absorbed the lesson.

Our skyrocketing inequality — so contrary to our meritocratic ideal of America as a place where anyone with hard work and talent can “make it” — means that those who are born to parents of limited means are likely never to live up to their potential. Children in other rich countries like Canada, France, Germany and Sweden have a better chance of doing better than their parents did than American kids have. More than a fifth of our children live in poverty — the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Greece.

Our society is squandering its most valuable resource: our young. The dream of a better life that attracted immigrants to our shores is being crushed by an ever-widening chasm of income and wealth. Tocqueville, who in the 1830s found the egalitarian impulse to be the essence of the American character, is rolling in his grave.

Even were we able to ignore the economic imperative of fixing our inequality problem, the damage it is doing to our social fabric and political life should prompt us to worry. Economic inequality leads to political inequality and a broken decision-making process.

Despite Mr. Obama’s stated commitment to helping all Americans, the recession and the lingering effects of the way it was handled have made matters much, much worse. While bailout money poured into the banks in 2009, unemployment soared to 10 percent that October. The rate today (7.8 percent) appears better partly because so many people have dropped out of the labor force, or never entered it, or accepted part-time jobs because there was no full-time job for them.

High unemployment, of course, depresses wages. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have stagnated or fallen; a typical male worker’s income in 2011 ($32,986) was lower than it was in 1968 ($33,880). Lower tax receipts, in turn, have forced state and local cutbacks in services vital to those at the bottom and middle.

Most Americans’ most important asset is their home, and as home prices have plummeted, so has household wealth — especially since so many had borrowed so much on their homes. Large numbers are left with negative net worth, and median household wealth fell nearly 40 percent, to $77,300 in 2010 from $126,400 in 2007, and has rebounded only slightly. Since the Great Recession, most of the increase in the nation’s wealth has gone to the very top.

Meanwhile, as incomes have stagnated or fallen, tuition has soared. In the United States now, the principal way to get education — the only sure way to move up — is to borrow. In 2010, student debt, now $1 trillion, exceeded credit-card debt for the first time.

Student debt can almost never be wiped out, even in bankruptcy. A parent who co-signs a loan can’t necessarily have the debt discharged even if his child dies. The debt can’t be discharged even if the school — operated for profit and owned by exploitative financiers — provided an inadequate education, enticed the student with misleading promises, and failed to get her a decent job.

Instead of pouring money into the banks, we could have tried rebuilding the economy from the bottom up. We could have enabled homeowners who were “underwater” — those who owe more money on their homes than the homes are worth — to get a fresh start, by writing down principal, in exchange for giving banks a share of the gains if and when home prices recovered.

We could have recognized that when young people are jobless, their skills atrophy. We could have made sure that every young person was either in school, in a training program or on a job. Instead, we let youth unemployment rise to twice the national average. The children of the rich can stay in college or attend graduate school, without accumulating enormous debt, or take unpaid internships to beef up their résumés. Not so for those in the middle and bottom. We are sowing the seeds of ever more inequality in the coming years.

The Obama administration does not, of course, bear the sole blame. President George W. Bush’s steep tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and his multitrillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan emptied the piggy bank while exacerbating the great divide. His party’s newfound commitment to fiscal discipline — in the form of insisting on low taxes for the rich while slashing services for the poor — is the height of hypocrisy.

There are all kinds of excuses for inequality. Some say it’s beyond our control, pointing to market forces like globalization, trade liberalization, the technological revolution, the “rise of the rest.” Others assert that doing anything about it would make us all worse off, by stifling our already sputtering economic engine. These are self-serving, ignorant falsehoods.

Market forces don’t exist in a vacuum — we shape them. Other countries, like fast-growing Brazil, have shaped them in ways that have lowered inequality while creating more opportunity and higher growth. Countries far poorer than ours have decided that all young people should have access to food, education and health care so they can fulfill their aspirations.

Our legal framework and the way we enforce it has provided more scope here for abuses by the financial sector; for perverse compensation for chief executives; for monopolies’ ability to take unjust advantage of their concentrated power.

Yes, the market values some skills more highly than others, and those who have those skills will do well. Yes, globalization and technological advances have led to the loss of good manufacturing jobs, which are not likely ever to come back. Global manufacturing employment is shrinking, simply because of enormous increases in productivity, and America is likely to get a shrinking share of the shrinking number of new jobs. If we do succeed in “saving” these jobs, it may be only by converting higher-paid jobs to lower-paid ones — hardly a long-term strategy.

Globalization, and the unbalanced way it has been pursued, has shifted bargaining power away from workers: firms can threaten to move elsewhere, especially when tax laws treat such overseas investments so favorably. This in turn has weakened unions, and though unions have sometimes been a source of rigidity, the countries that responded most effectively to the global financial crisis, like Germany and Sweden, have strong unions and strong systems of social protection.

As Mr. Obama’s second term begins, we must all face the fact that our country cannot quickly, meaningfully recover without policies that directly address inequality. What’s needed is a comprehensive response that should include, at least, significant investments in education, a more progressive tax system and a tax on financial speculation.

The good news is that our thinking has been reframed: it used to be that we asked how much growth we would be willing to sacrifice for a little more equality and opportunity. Now we realize that we are paying a high price for our inequality and that alleviating it and promoting growth are intertwined, complementary goals. It will be up to all of us — our leaders included — to muster the courage and foresight to finally treat this beleaguering malady.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, a professor at Columbia and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank, is the author of “The Price of Inequality.”",Our economy won't come back strong unless it also becomes more fair.
"By Ben Mutzabaugh, USA TODAY

- The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that ""an apparently intoxicated pilot was pulled from the cockpit of his Delta Air Lines jet"" in Amsterdam earlier today. The Newark-bound flight was canceled.

Citing the National Police Corps in Amsterdam, the Journal-Constitution reports the 52-year-old pilot registered a .023% blood alcohol level in a breath test.

Delta would not confirm one of its pilots was involved, though the airline did confirm to various media outlets that it canceled Flight 53 from Amsterdam to Newark after an unspecified crew member reported to work ""unfit for duty.""

DELTA PRESS RELEASE: Flight No. 35 Information

Atlanta TV station WXIA writes that ""without confirming that the crew member was a pilot nor elaborating on the circumstances of the flight's cancellation, [Delta spokesman Anthony Black] said the employee had been suspended pending the findings of an internal investigation. He said Delta is also cooperating with Dutch officials on their investigation.""

Still, Black pointed out in an e-mail to Bloomberg News that ""Delta's policy is that pilots shall not report for duty with the presence of any alcohol in their system.""

""Our policy is among one of the strictest in the industry and we have no tolerance for violations,"" Black adds to ABC News.

Bloomberg reports Dutch authorities acted after they received an anonymous tip, according to police spokesman Jos Klaren. The suspect was arrested and later released on 700-euro ($900) fine, according to The Associated Press.

The Journal-Constitution says the Federal Aviation Administration also is investigating the incident. The agency forbids pilots from flying with a blood alcohol level that exceeds .018, according to the newspaper.

The Journal-Constitution adds ""if the FAA finds that the pilot attempted to take off with a blood alcohol level of .023, the pilot could lose his medical certificate -- and his ability to fly.""

Bloomberg notes today's arrest is ""at least the third involving a U.S. pilot and alcohol in 16 months.""

Posted Sep 14 2010 7:36PM","The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that ""an apparently intoxicated pilot was pulled from the cockpit of his Delta Air Lines jet"" in Amsterdam earlier today. The Newark-bound found was canceled."
"The smoldering Jamie Dornan from the set of his fall 2009 Calvin Klein underwear ad campaign.

Author E L James has officially welcomed actor Jamie Dornan to the ""Fifty Shades"" family.

James took to Twitter Thursday to confirm Dornan will play the lead role of Christian Grey in the film adaptation of her best-selling S&M-themed books.

PHOTOS: HOTTEST CELEBRITY BEACH BODIES

""Stow your twitchy palms ladies … our man is here. Welcome to #TeamFifty @JamieDornan1,"" she wrote.

The 31-year-old smoldering Irishman will be replacing ""Sons of Anarchy ""actor Charles Hunnam, who backed out of the erotic blockbuster in mid-October.

RELATED: JAMIE DORNAN TAPPED AS HUNNAM'S 'FIFTY SHADES OF GREY' REPLACEMENT

""I have had some family stuff going on, so just trying to stay focused and stay positive and keep trying to do a good job at work and be with my family and stay positive,"" Hunnam told E! News earlier this week of his departure.

His replacement, Dornan, is best-known for his former role in the ABC drama ""Once Upon a Time,"" playing a part in Sofia Coppola's 2006 film ""Marie Antoinette"" and his career as a Calvin Klein model.

RELATED: JAMIE DORNAN CAST IN ‘FIFTY SHADES OF GREY’: CELEBRITIES, FANS REACT

The actor has had an outpouring of responses from the Twitterverse; however, he has yet to send out a tweet since early October.

Dornan will be playing opposite Dakota Johnson, who has been cast in the role of Anastasia Steele.

On a mobile device? Click here to watch video.","Author E L James has officially welcomed actor Jamie Dornan to the ""Fifty Shades"" family. James took to Twitter on Thursday to confirm Dornan will play the lead role of Christian Grey in the film adaptation of her best-selling S&M-themed books."
"Friday, April 10, 2015, 1:39 PM

FALL RIVER, Mass. — The jurors in the Aaron Hernandez murder trial failed to reach a verdict at the Fall River Justice Center Friday afternoon before breaking for the weekend.

It was the third day dedicated to deliberations. The seven women and five men were told to avoid any coverage of the case while away from the courthouse.

""Please keep your minds suspended,"" Justice E. Susan Garsh said.

RELATED: AARON HERNANDEZ TRIAL JUDGE BANS CAMERAMAN, WARNS MEDIA

Hernandez, 25, faces a first-degree murder charge, as well as illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition charges related to the murder of Odin Lloyd.

Prosecutors proved exhaustive in trying Hernandez. There were 135 witnesses called and 439 pieces of evidence introduced since proceedings commenced on January 29.

During closing arguments earlier in the week, Hernandez's attorney, James Sultan, acknowledged that Hernandez was at the murder scene, but Sultan maintained that Hernandez had nothing to do with the killing. Lloyd was shot to death in the undeveloped section of an industrial park less than a mile from Hernandez's house in North Attleborough, Mass.

There were no questions seeking clarification on legal issues from the jurors on Friday. Hernandez's fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, was in attendance.

Hernandez has been in jail since June 26, 2013.

He will face a separate trial for a 2012 double homicide in Boston after the Lloyd case is over.",The jurors in the Aaron Hernandez murder trial will break for the weekend.
"Sunday, September 25th 2011, 4:00 AM

Jesus Montero is 21 years old, too young to be knocking around big-league pitchers like this and way too young to become a righthanded designated hitter - especially on a team that needs to reserve the spot for Alex Rodriguez over the next four or five years.

But there you go.The Yankees have yet another debate on their hands, yet another embarrassment of riches. They already own a starting catcher, Russell Martin. What are they going to do with this kid who simply will not stop ripping apart American League pitching? What are they going to do with him in October, and then next spring and the spring after that?

""We've said he's a dangerous batter, said that all along,"" Joe Girardi was saying Saturday after Montero went 3-for-4 with four RBI and a homer during a 9-1 rout of the sad-sack Red Sox. ""This guy can put three or four RBI up against a lefty and it's not going to shock you.""

Girardi was being obtuse again, refusing to commit to Montero for the postseason as the backup catcher, as the righthanded DH or as anything else. The Yankee manager doesn't want to make those decisions yet, doesn't need to.

This much is becoming abundantly clear, however: The Yanks need to find a position for Montero soon enough, because he's too good to sit around, rust and wait.

Montero ripped a double and single against Jon Lester Saturday, the same starter who embarrassed Montero in his first game in the big leagues. Montero swung at a pitch over his head in that game at Fenway on Sept. 1, struck out and went 0-for-4. He looked foolish. He looked anything but that Saturday, knocking in three runs against Lester and taking Junichi Tazawa deep over the right-field wall in the seventh.

Montero is batting .346 with four homers and 12 RBI in 15 games, an outrageous pace. Pitchers were supposed to catch on quickly to Montero and start moving the ball inside, cutting down his power to the opposite field. That hasn't happened yet. Actually, it happened and then stopped happening, somehow. The kid adjusted.

""All the time I'm trying to hit the ball to right field,"" Montero said.

""That's the way I learned how to hit.""

So now it's late September and Girardi is waiting on Francisco Cervelli, recovering from a concussion. The sensible thing, it would seem, is to forget Cervelli and name both Montero and Jorge Posada to the roster. That way, you have a righthanded and lefthanded DH plus two emergency backups at catcher. It is probably the way Girardi will go, though he won't say that yet and shouldn't.

Meanwhile, Montero is trying to keep from getting worse defensively, which was never his strength in the minors. He is catching bullpen sessions, hoping to stay sharp and waiting for some cue from Girardi about his future.

""Yeah, sure,"" Montero said, about wanting to catch. ""I think about next year. But I don't know what's going to happen. I don't decide that. I'm here to help the team. (Girardi) hasn't told me anything.""

Montero should probably catch a few of these last meaningless regular-season games, just to see how that works. There is not much point in using Austin Romine. The game Saturday was a wasted opportunity.

Montero could have caught and Martin could have been at DH.

Girardi started his A-team, though, an indication of just how badly the Yankees want to shove Boston farther down the slide. The game turned into another day of pain for the Sox, who are spinning wheels and hoping to back into the playoffs despite abominable pitching; it was another good day for Freddy Garcia and for Montero, creating more difficult decisions for Girardi.

Garcia has surely earned the No. 3 starter spot in the playoffs. He has been more effective than Bartolo Colon, no matter what the radar gun says. He has an outstanding postseason record.

Montero, too, has earned a spot on the playoff roster. He can't possibly do any more except throw out a runner at second base.And he can't do that from the dugout.","Jesus Montero is 21 years old, too young to be knocking around big-league pitchers like this and way too young to become a righthanded designated hitter - especially on a team that needs to reserve the spot for Alex Rodriguez over the next four or five years. But there you go. The Yankees have yet another debate on their hands, yet another embarrassment of riches."
"Decades after they were first published to the accompaniment of headlines and fanfare, three huge-selling novels have recently been reissued in paperback editions: ''The Naked and the Dead'' by Norman Mailer, ''Peyton Place'' by Grace Metalious and ''Doctor Zhivago'' by Boris Pasternak.

When ''The Naked and the Dead'' was published by Rinehart & Co. in 1948, Mr. Mailer was a 25-year-old former G.I. from Brooklyn. Literary critics generally hailed it as one of the finest war novels ever. They also hailed its precocious author, who later won two Pulitzer Prizes, for ''The Armies of the Night'' (1969), and ''The Executioner's Song''(1980).

''The Naked and the Dead'' has sold 250,000 copies in 23 hardcover printings, and a New American Library paperback edition has sold 3 million copies in 28 printings since the mid-1950's. But the rights recently reverted to Holt, Rinehart & Winston. The new edition, published last month with a first printing of 25,000 copies, sells for $7.95.

''Peyton Place'' was a war novel of another kind, specifically, about the sexual and moral combat being waged in a mythical New Hampshire town. Turned down by many publishers before Julian Messner Inc. published it 25 years ago, the book has sold 10 million copies and was the basis of two movies and an evening televison soap opera. The last paperback edition of the book by Miss Metalious, who died in 1964, was published in 1977.

''We recently sold the rights for a soft-cover edition to Lafont in France,'' said Marti Freirich, a publicist for Simon & Schuster, which purchased Messner. ''Angela Miller, editor in chief of our Fireside Books, said if the French were still interested in a 25-year-old book, we still should be.'' The result is a $5.95 ''25th anniversary edition'' that the publisher hopes will appeal to those who missed the book the first time around - either because they overlooked it or because their parents wouldn't let them near it.

''Dr. Zhivago'' was published by Pantheon in September 1958, the same year its author was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union and was unable to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature because of the villification campaign waged against him in his homeland. The book had been published in Italy 10 months earlier by a Communist publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who refused to bend to pressure from the Soviet Writers Union and who, in November 1958, announced that he had left the party the previous year partly because of the Pasternak affair.

In her recent book ''The Terror Network,'' Claire Sterling describes how Mr. Feltrinelli subsequently helped such terrorist groups as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang in West Germany and Basque separatists in Spain. She said he established hideouts for the terrorists, organized an international terrorist conference and advocated the killing of innocent people - to draw attention to the cause and to force a harsh response by the state. Eventually he was killed when an explosive he was planting exploded prematurely.

Pasternak died in May 1960, but his book, a love story set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, has been published in 18 languages. New American Library held the paperback rights before Ballantine (like Pantheon, an imprint of Random House) decided to reissue it in its $3.50 mass market edition.

In another development involving a paperback publisher, Pocket Books, the mass market imprint of Simon & Schuster, has announced that it will publish 10 to 12 hard-cover titles a year beginning next spring. The new line, to include fiction and nonfiction, will be produced, sold and distributed by Simon & Schuster. Pocket Books will handle advertising, promotion and publicity. A spokesmen said that paperback rights to the hard-cover Pocket Books titles will not automatically accrue to Pocket Books; that is, some will be submitted to rival paperback publishers, in much the same way that Simon & Schuster submits hard-cover books to a variety of paperback houses.

As to why Pocket Books is not content to let its parent company acquire the hard-cover books, Carol Fass, the Pocket Books director of publicity, said that although they are members of the same family, Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books think of themselves as essentially different companies and friendly rivals.

Vladimir Voinovich, exiled from the Soviet Union in December, is the author of three books published in the United States and his fourth, ''Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin,'' is scheduled for publication on July 31. But he never saw the United States until a month ago, when he arrived from Munich on a two-month tour that has taken him from one end of the country to the other.

''The University of Southern California paid his trans-Atlantic fare because he'll be participating in a conference there,'' said Helen Atwan, publicity director of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Mr. Voinovich's publisher. ''The University of Michigan paid for his stopovers in this country. And we were on the phone calling universities with Slavic-language departments setting up talks at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Massachusetts. His agent, Leonard Schroeter, in Seattle, did the same thing on the West Coast.''

Farrar Straus also provided a translator for some of the author's engagements, including talks at the P.E.N. American Center and the New York Institute for the Humanities.

While Mr. Voinovich seems to be completely in his element in the United States, he and his wife are still trying to decide where to settle. He said that Soviet authorities usually opposes allowing writers to leave. ''But in my case,'' he said with a smile, ''they were so sick of me they wanted me to go anywhere.''

Illustrations: photo of Norman Mailer in 1949","Decades after they were first published to the accompaniment of headlines and fanfare, three huge-selling novels have recently been reissued in paperback editions: ''The Naked and the Dead'' by Norman Mailer, ''Peyton Place'' by Grace Metalious and ''Doctor Zhivago'' by Boris Pasternak.   When ''The Naked and the Dead'' was published by Rinehart & Co. in 1948, Mr. Mailer was a 25-year-old former G.I. from Brooklyn.  Literary critics generally hailed it as one of the finest war novels ever. They also hailed its precocious author, who later won two Pulitzer Prizes, for ''The Armies of the Night'' (1969), and ''The Executioner's Song''(1980)."
"For all the attention focused on next-generation smartphones like the iPhone 4, Droid X and Evo 4, there's evidence that some of the largest companies in the wireless industry are also interested in a different kind of smartphone: a low-cost one.

Much of Qualcomm's ( QCOM - news - people ) annual developer conference, which kicks off Wednesday, will focus on Brew MP, the company's software for mass-market smartphones. The San Diego event, called Uplinq, will feature a ""super session"" overview about Brew MP, as well as 14 specific sessions on topics such as Brew MP's graphics capabilities and security features. By the end of the two-day conference, approximately 2,000 attendees from the U.S., Asia, Europe, Latin America and South America will know how to develop applications for entry-level smartphones, says Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is eyeing a large potential opportunity. It estimates that low-end phones make up 60% or more of most cellphone markets, depending on the country. (Though some in the industry disagree, Qualcomm characterizes Brew MP as a smartphone operating system because it enables phones to host ""smartphone-class"" applications, has its own user interface and supports an ecosystem of developers.)

Qualcomm is already the world's biggest maker of cellphone chips. Porting the advanced capabilities associated with premium smartphones to lower-cost phones will help the company sell even more chips by enticing consumers to upgrade their handsets, says Steve Sprigg, a Qualcomm senior vice president of engineering. That, in turn, should please manufacturers because they will sell more phones, and make operators happy because they will sell more wireless data plans, adds Sprigg.

Some of these mass-market devices, like the Samsung Reality (for $80 after rebate in the U.S.), are already on sale. A number of others are in development. Sprigg says his team is working on devices with manufacturers around the world. Qualcomm has said it expects HTC, LG and Pantech to release Brew MP phones later this year or by early 2011. It also anticipates that Brew MP will power 90% of AT&T's ( T - news - people ) affordable, text-centric devices, known as quick-messaging phones, by 2011.

Like Google's ( GOOG - news - people ) Android mobile operating system, Brew MP can be adapted to non-phone gadgets. Several upcoming projects utilize Brew to tie machines to the Internet in a so-called ""machine-to-machine"" setup, says Sprigg. Qualcomm also plans to show some brand-new Brew MP features at Uplinq, including tweaks to the software tools that developers use.

Several other large wireless companies are working to democratize smartphones, as well. Nokia ( NOK - news - people ) recently released two $70 smartphones--the Nuron and E73 Mode--with T-Mobile USA. Mark Slater, a vice president of sales at Nokia, calls the price ""headline-grabbing,"" noting that both phones run on the Symbian operating system, giving them access to Nokia's online mobile applications store, free GPS navigation service and other specialized software. ""We're not expecting customers to compromise on their expectations of smartphones just because these devices are priced a certain way,"" says Slater.

The E73 Mode has only been on sale a few weeks, but Slater says Nokia is ""extremely pleased"" with the Nuron's uptake among target consumers, such as teenage girls. ""A value smartphone makes sense for kids who want a smartphone and parents who don't want to pay a ton of money,"" he adds.

In February smartphone maker HTC debuted a low-cost, Brew-based handset it calls Smart. (See ""HTC To Bring Budget Smartphone To United States."") Though it has yet to come to the U.S., Smart is available in India and six European countries (Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the U.K.).","Qualcomm, Nokia and HTC are bringing lower-priced smartphones to mass audiences."
"PARIS — Of all the places to part with fistfuls of money in St.-Tropez, few have more cachet than Le Club 55.

Patrice De Colmont, the owner of Le Club 55 and a leader of the local fight against plans to dismantle beach amenities to protect fauna and dunes.

Perched on the white stretches of Pampelonne, one of the Côte d’Azur’s most stunning beaches, Le Club offers a private patch of sand where habitués can pay around $255 a day to rent a couple of lounge chairs with an umbrella and enjoy a light lunch — not including wine.

But that traditional St.-Tropez luxury is in danger of being upended there, and at 27 other clubs and restaurants that have catered for decades to famous Côte d’Azur visitors from Brigitte Bardot to Paris Hilton.

The mayor’s office says the establishments pose a threat to the environment. Officials have proposed dismantling existing beach amenities and shrinking the area allotted for private beaches to protect delicate flora and what officials say are dunes worn down by the crush of manicured feet. As a result, despite the August atmosphere of hedonism, an unusual air of rebellion is stirring in St.-Tropez, with businesses contemplating their first ever “strike.”

“It’s completely stupid — everybody thinks so,” said Patrice de Colmont, the owner of Le Club 55 and a leader of the local fight against the government’s plans.

“If we said buildings in Paris couldn’t be above a certain height you wouldn’t cut off the top of the Eiffel Tower,” Mr. de Colmont said. “Well, this is the Eiffel Tower of the French Riviera.”

The mayor is seeking a compromise, but has not backed down. The town hall at Ramatuelle, where Pampelonne is situated, is planning to open its doors, starting Monday, to receive comments from the public.

“We all want to be here for the long term,” said Guy Martin, the chief of staff for Mayor Roland Bruno. “That’s why we need to make sure there’s a sustainable equilibrium between the environment and the community.”

Like much in France, though, the dispute is not so simple. Opponents of the move claim that it is really an effort to clear the way for big, well-connected companies to move in on the local businesses’ turf. Officials respond that the ruckus being raised by Mr. de Colmont and his colleagues is mostly in defense of their own form of crass commercialism.

French law prohibits private development on public beaches. But decades ago, residents built on Pampelonne by obtaining renewable one-year permits that allowed them to offer “public services,” like Jet Ski rentals and lifeguards, if the construction was dismantled when the contract expired.

If applying annually for permits was a nuisance, it at least protected small business owners, since no large company was willing to put up with the risk of losing a substantial investment, said Carole Balligand, the chairwoman of Save Pampelonne, a group that represents the local businesses that are in danger.

From the government’s perspective, however, all the activity stemming from the permits has hastened the erosion of an important dune on Pampelonne filled with rare native plant species. In 1986, the French Parliament passed a law to restore the area. Four years ago it ordered those in the area to strike a better balance between the environment and commercial activity.

Under the government’s plan, the commercial operators would be allowed on 20 percent of the beach rather than 30 percent, meaning their plots would be reduced to 23 from 28. As for the dune, it would be cordoned off to let nature do its work.

Local people are upset at another proposal, to require commercial beach activities to end on Sept. 1 every year — still the high season — rather than sometime in October, and to allow new businesses that build behind the restored dune 10-year operating permits. That, they suspect, is less about protecting the environment than attracting mass vacation companies with deep pockets, like Club Med.

''This would mean the total destruction of everything that has been here for nearly half a century,'' Mrs. Balligand said. She and others have calculated that the new plots could accommodate about four large hotel chains. ''They will turn us into a place like Cannes, where there is no soul,'' she said.

What is more, Mrs. Balligand’s group, after digging up photos from the Allied landing on Pampelonne beach in August 1944, contends that no large dune ever existed. She accuses the government of using environmental arguments as an excuse to bring in bigger businesses.","In Saint-Tropez, environmental measures may upend the business of spoiling the pampered."
"NORWALK MINERVA CHAPMAN and Baekland Roll are names as unfamiliar as they are imposing. However, the current exhibitions by both artists should help to correct the imbalance.

A small selection of the late Miss Chapman's oils is on view at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion, in Norwalk (295 West Avenue, through May 30); Mr. Roll's watercolors can be seen at the Richard Greene Gallery, in Guilford, where they share space with wood reliefs by Jill Disque (closing today).

Beyond the fact that her paintings belong to a collateral descendant, Morse Dial Jr. of Redding and New York City, Miss Chapman seems to have had no ties with Connecticut. She was born in Altmar, N.Y., in 1858, and after attending Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academie Julian, in Paris. Though primarily a miniaturist, the artist exhibited with various types of groups, mostly in Chicago and Paris, as well as in California, where she spent the latter part of her life. She died in Palo Alto in 1947.

Plans for a New York show are under way and presumably it will offer more information than has been available so far. To judge from this selection dating from the late 1880's to around 1912, and from a catalogue of a Washington show of 11 years ago, the artist's style ranged from a dark academism influenced by Fantin-Latour - as in the quite handsome study of pink and white flowers in a glass jar - to Impressionism, expressed in several landscapes.

But unlike other artists of the time, Miss Chapman dallied with Impressionism only to revert to the more conventional approach - or so it seems from the few legible dates to be found on the pictures. The aforementioned flower piece and a self-portrait were done in 1912 and 1911, while a high-keyed view of fields divided by a line of trees and bearing the imprint of Corot and Monet, is of 1892. One of the strongest works, a narrow view of Parisian streets freely impasted in muted but rich colors, may represent an intermediate stage in the artist's development.

On the basis of this show, which features some solid, early life drawings but no miniatures, Miss Chapman was a capable draftsman and painter, thoroughly attuned to French art, including that of Degas. Still, while there are several attractive canvases, such as the small view of white-blossomed trees against a brownish wall, there's no reason to think that Miss Chapman, like so many other artists now being plucked from historical oblivion, was unjustly overlooked.

A word about the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion itself, a National Registered Historic Landmark named for the two families that lived in it successively: It was built in 1869 by the German-born architect, Detlef Lienau, for LeGrand Lockwood, a Norwalk native and investment banker in New York during and after the Civil War. Thanks to the efforts of Norwalk citizens, the mansion was saved from destruction some 20 years ago and has been the object of scrupulous but slowmoving renovation - it still has to regain its period furniture.

A magnificent jumble of classical, Gothic, Renaissance, Turkish and other styles, the place cost $2 million to build. Still, its coffered, frescoed ceilings and carved woodwork, including the staircase that inspired the one in ''Gone With the Wind,'' all testify eloquently to the skills of the Italian artisans who were imported for the job. The house also sported what then was the last word in technology - a burglar alarm and a heating system involving four boilers, each capable of burning a ton of coal a day.

The octagonal reception hall where Miss Chapman's paintings are hanging has a magnificent parqueted floor inlaid with colored woods. Here hung Albert Bierstadt's huge ''Domes of the Yosemite'' when it was owned by LeGrand Lockwood - it's now at the Athenaeum in St. Johnsbury, Vt.

The reviewer has lately encountered several artists who, like Baekland Roll, have ''hatched'' after spending most of their careers underground. An alumnus of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and of the Art Students League, Mr. Roll has been painting in seclusion for some 30 years. He has participated in group shows in Connecticut and New York, but this appears to be the closest he's come to a solo.

The 30 or so watercolors are less abstractions than plans and ideograms alluding to landscape and figures. They are beautifully drawn in a fine, ink line on paper that has been mottled and washed in soft colors. Several are bird's eye views of imaginary gardens and fields and maplike images of an estuary looking a bit like that of the Connecticut River. But if the colors are not necessarily contained by the lines, the effect is often of quilts with some patches left plain, others patterned with dots and fine, vertical lines. Exceptions are those involving figures and faces or, in an especially lovely specimen, one of the ''White Horses'' that were cut, supposedly during the Iron Age, into the chalk hills of southern England.

Springing full blown, Mr. Roll gives no sign of his earlier metamorphosis from academic painter in oils to poet in watercolors. Still, he does show affinities to the Belgian graphic artist, Folon, to Paul Klee and, in his gouaches, to Miro, and his wit is not unlike Steinberg's. A very graceful performance.

In her assemblages of organic shapes, painted and otherwise, Miss Disque conveys little more than an infatuation with her saber saw. Admittedly, this tool encourages delusions of omnipotence, but that is no excuse for essaying trompe l'oeil effects, cutting wood so that it resembles flat pebbles stuck between flat rocks.

Illustrations: photo of 4 paintings displayed","NORWALK MINERVA CHAPMAN and Baekland Roll are names as unfamiliar as they are imposing. However, the current exhibitions by both artists should help to correct the imbalance.   A small selection of the late Miss Chapman's oils is on view at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion, in Norwalk (295 West Avenue, through May 30); Mr. Roll's watercolors can be seen at the Richard Greene Gallery, in Guilford, where they share space with wood reliefs by Jill Disque (closing today).   Beyond the fact that her paintings belong to a collateral descendant, Morse Dial Jr. of Redding and New York City, Miss Chapman seems to have had no ties with Connecticut. She was born in Altmar, N.Y., in 1858, and after attending Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academie Julian, in Paris. Though primarily a miniaturist, the artist exhibited with various types of groups, mostly in Chicago and Paris, as well as in California, where she spent the latter part of her life. She died in Palo Alto in 1947."
"A judge has decided in favour of Rihanna to ban Topshop from selling T-shirts with Rihanna's image on them. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

Rihanna has won a high court battle with Topshop over T-shirts bearing her image.

The US singer had accused the fashion chain of passing off, or attempting to pass off, the garments as being approved by her. Topshop disputed her claim.

Judge Mr Justice Birss ruled in her favour on Wednesday after a hearing in London. Birss said Topshop's sale of a Rihanna T-shirt at the centre of the dispute was an act of passing off.

But he said the mere sale of a T-shirt bearing the image of a famous person was not necessarily an act of passing off.

He said a substantial number of buyers were likely to have been deceived into buying the Rihanna T-shirt because of a false belief that it had been authorised by the singer.

The judge said that was damaging to her goodwill and represented a loss of control over her reputation in the fashion sphere.

He said it was for the singer not Topshop to choose what garments the public thought were endorsed by her.

Rihanna had claimed that she was entitled to damages for the unauthorised use of her picture.

The judge did not make any assessment of damages in a written judgment.",Judge rules in favour of US singer saying buyers would have believed T-shirts had been authorised by her
"ORLANDO - A radiator that doubles as chic wall art? Door locks with built-in alarms to keep burglars out and teens in? An inexpensive, quick way to charge electric cars at home? These are some of the hundreds of innovative products showcased here this week at the International Builders' Show.

The U.S. housing market may still be weak, but manufacturers are positioning themselves for future growth. Single-family home starts will likely jump 21% this year, compared with 2010, according to a forecast by David Crowe, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders.

Many of the new products at NAHB's annual trade show, which has attracted more than 50,000 attendees from about 100 countries, tout green features such as recycled content and energy efficiency. Others focus on comfort, convenience, aesthetics or safety.

Among them are GE's new Profile front-loading washer that's designed to also dry clothes, Matrix Lighting's Viribright low-cost LED replacement bulbs for 40-watt incandescents and Kohler's ultra-efficient Wellworth toilet (1.28 gallons per flush) for about $150. Consumer Reports gives snapshots of each in its coverage of the trade show, which runs through Saturday.

I spent hours on Thursday and Friday checking out the exhibitor booths. As I research products for the eco-friendly home my family is building in Falls Church, VA., I've come across many of the products before, but it was fun to see and touch them. Here's a snapshot of some of my favorites:

Countertops. I saw huge slabs of Zodiaq's Terra quartz collection by DuPont, which offers 25% post-consumer recycled content. ""You can't burn through this,"" said Chad Marlowe, a DuPont distributor, citing its heat resistance. While also care-free and stain resistant, it's not cheap. Marlowe says it can run $70 per square foot installed. Yet other beautiful countertops with higher recycled content, such as IceStone and Eco by Consentino, can cost even more. CaesarStone, a company making quartz counter tops in Israel, last year added four colors to its Environment First recycled collection.

Tile: Shaw Floors sells U.S.-made tiles with up to 40% post-industrial recycled content in its Lunar, Matrix and Brushtone collections. They generally cost less than $4.00 per square foot. Dal-Tile Corp. has two new U.S.-made tile collections -- Dal-Tile's Colour Scheme and American Olean's Urban Tones -- that have 60% recycled content, including post-consumer recycled glass. Another U.S.-based manufacturer of tile with recycled content is Stonepeak Ceramics, which recently displayed its wares at the U.S. Green Building Council's annual Greenbuild conference in October.

Cabinetry. Major manufacturers that have adopted eco-friendly practices, including Merillat and Kraftmaid, exhibited gorgeous products here, but my preference is the much smaller South Carolina-based Executive Cabinetry, which offers sustainably-harvested, formaldehyde-free cabinetry.

Solar products. Lennox Industries has a new SunSource Home Energy System that uses solar panels to power a home's heat pump or air conditioner. Plug 'n Save Energy Products offers home solar shutters that produce electricity. Another company, Echo, showcased solar panels that it says produce at least twice as much power as a basic photovoltaic system.

There were other nifty products, including Delta Faucet's Touch 2O kitchen faucet that can be turned on and off simply by tapping it (no need to touch the handle when hands are dirty), as well as these:

""It's a piece of art,"" Michael Mosti told me of the electric radiator that can be wall mounted as glass art in American Ecopower's booth. His company, which has been selling in Italy for six years but is branching out to the U.S. market next month, also offers an efficient radiant floor heating system using carbon fiber.

Also next month, electrical giant Leviton will begin offering its Evr-Green home charging station for electric vehicles. Ford Motor Company recently announced a partnership with Leviton to offer it for the upcoming Focus Electric at a reported retail price of $1,499.

Leviton's not the only company entering this market. Eaton Corporation's Pow-R-Station, which looks somewhat like a gasoline pump, can be used indoors on a garage wall or outside in the driveway on a freestanding pedestal. The station, retailing for about $1,000 without professional installation, runs on 240 volts so the company says it can charge an electric car in three to four hours.

Worried about security? Schlage is introducing a door lock with a built-in alarm that will sound if burglars are trying to sneak in. It can also be set to notify homeowners if anyone is trying to leave, such as hard-to-monitor toddlers or teenagers.","Spiffing up your home? Products add flair, efficiency - Green House - USATODAY.com"
"From staff and wire reports

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haiti's government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over, the

announced Saturday, saying there is little hope of finding more people alive 11 days after much of the capital was reduced to rubble.

But another survivor was rescued Saturday. French officials said they reached the 23-year-old man by digging a tunnel through the wreckage of a fruit and vegetable shop where the man had been buried for 11 days.

The statement declaring the search and rescue over from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs came a day after an Israeli team reported pulling a man out of the debris of a two-story home and relatives said an elderly woman had been rescued. Experts say the chance of saving trapped people begins diminishing after 72 hours, but one mother still missing her children said it's too soon to give up.

""Maybe there's a chance they're still alive,"" said Nicole Abraham, 33, wiping away tears as she spoke of hearing the cries of her children — ages 4, 6 and 15 — for the first two days after the Jan. 12 quake.

The 7.0-magnitude quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. The U.N. said Saturday the government had preliminarily confirmed 111,481 bodies, but that figure does not account for corpses buried by relatives.

Countless dead remain buried in thousands of collapsed and toppled buildings in Port-au-Prince, while as many as 200,000 have fled the city of 2 million, the U.S. Agency for International Development reported.

Meanwhile Saturday, mourners gathered near the ruins of the shattered cathedral to pay final respects to the capital's archbishop and a vicar in a somber ceremony that doubled as a symbolic funeral for all the dead.

Archbishop of Haiti Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot and chief vicar Charles Benoit perished when they returned to church office during the earthquake and the church collapsed. They were pulled from the rubble two days later by a Mexican rescue team.

""I came here to pay my respects to all the dead from the earthquake, and to see them have a funeral,"" said Esther Belizaire, 51, whose cousin is among the dead.

""Monsignor Miot love the poor and he lived like the poor,"" one priest said.

""I am again going to take the liberty to propose to the government, even under these circumstances, to walk in the path of the monsignor and to follow his motto: 'Not to be served, but to serve,'"" the priest said in a nod to the government's reputation for personal excess and corruption.

Haitians have complained on radio programs that Haitian president Rene Preval, who attended the mass, has not visited the neighborhoods most damaged by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

""The one's who didn't die are now saying thank you God for protecting me. After this tragedy, that's when they remember there is a God,"" he said. ""This is God saying to us that we need to change. We need a new world, a new country….. All Haitians should start thinking about a better Haiti.""

With the local government essentially incapacitated, the U.N. has coordinated rescue efforts alongside the U.S. and teams from around the world. Spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said the Friday afternoon decision does not mean rescue teams still searching for survivors would be stopped from carrying out whatever work they felt necessary.

""It doesn't mean the government will order them to stop. In case there is the slightest sign of life, they will act,"" Byrs told The Associated Press. She added, however, that ""except for miracles, hope is unfortunately fading.""

All told, some 132 people were pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams since the Jan. 12 disaster, she said. Some 49 teams — down from 67 — were still in Haiti as of Saturday, the U.N. said.

Col. Gili Shenhar, a senior officer on the Israeli Defense Forces team in Haiti, said team members were still investigating potential rescue sites in Port-au-Prince on Saturday. However, he said it is unlikely more people will be found alive under the rubble and described being called to scenes by relatives who believe, usually incorrectly, they hear voices from the debris.

""Maybe there is one person somewhere, but the problem is how to find them,"" Shenhar said. A day earlier, the team reported saving a 21-year-old man who told The Associated Press he drank his own urine to survive.

With the rainy season on the way, U.N. relief workers are concerned that many Haitians are still homeless and Byrs said the focus now will be squarely on providing shelter and medical treatment. About 609,000 people are homeless in the capital's metropolitan area, and the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million could leave Haiti's destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.

On Saturday morning, more than 1,000 people, many weeping and clutching handkerchiefs, gathered in a small park for the funerals of Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, and the vicar Charles Benoit. Classical music wafted over their two closed white caskets covered with flowers.

""This is for everyone,"" Cleopas Auza said of the ceremony before it began.

Nepthalie Miot, a niece of the archbishop, choked back tears as she described the man who would have worked to comfort the nation after the disaster had he not been killed himself.

""He was a very compassionate person. He tried to help the poor,"" she told the crowd, which included President Rene Preval, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and the Vatican's ambassador to Haiti, Archbishop Bernadito Cleopas Auza.

Only a small number of funerals have been held since the quake, with most people buried anonymously and without ceremony in mass graves on the outskirts of the city, or burned in the streets.

""The hardest thing for us is the smell of all the dead bodies,"" said Josette Elisias, 45, wearing a red handkerchief to cover her nose and mouth on Saturday as workers cleared rubble and debris from streets with brooms, rakes and wheelbarrows.

Scores of aid organizations, big and small, have stepped up deliveries of food, water, medical supplies and other aid to the homeless and other needy in seaside city.

In the U.S., celebrities and artists made impassioned pleas for charitable donations during an internationally broadcast telethon Friday night.

""The Haitian people need our help,"" said actor George Clooney, who helped organize the two-hour telecast. ""They need to know that they are not alone. They need to know that we still care.""

More than a dozen Latin pop stars including Shakira, Ricky Martin, Gloria Estefan, Paulina Rubio, Daddy Yankee and Juanes were to appear Saturday on a special live edition of a popular Univision variety show to raise money for the American Red Cross to help aid earthquake victims.

Contributors: Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY

You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the ""Report Abuse"" button to make a difference.","Haiti's government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over, the United Nations announced Saturday, saying there is little hope of finding more people alive 11 days after much of the capital was reduced to rubble."
"Oct. 3, 2015: Two members of the Buffalo Soldiers of the American West place flags beside the new headstone for Pvt. George Washington in Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo, Colo. (AP)

PUEBLO, Colo. – Gravestones have been dedicated to four Civil War soldiers who had been buried in unmarked graves at Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo and went unidentified for more than a century.

The soldiers, including three African Americans born into slavery, fought for the Union in the Civil War and came to Colorado to make lives for themselves after being discharged from the military.

They have been identified as Pvt. James W. Williams, born in 1844 and died in Pueblo in 1921; Pvt. George Washington, born in 1838 and died in Pueblo in 1899; Cpl. Thomas Walker, whose birthdate is unknown and died in Pueblo in 1900; and 1st Lt. Louis Young, who was born in 1843 and died in Pueblo in 1901.

The stones were dedicated by members of the Buffalo Soldiers of the American West.

R. Kenneth O'Neal, an Army veteran, honored the soldiers at a ceremony earlier this month, attended by about 100 people.

""Today we set aside a moment to right a wrong and to honor four brave men as a profound gesture of our appreciation for their service to this country,"" O'Neal said.

The unmarked graves were discovered while putting together a presentation about the history of Roselawn, said Lucille Corsentino, founder of Concerned Citizens of Roselawn Cemetery.

More than 350 Civil War veterans are buried in the cemetery, the Pueblo Chieftain reported (http://tinyurl.com/q6wteka). While checking burial records, Corsentino said the number of graves didn't add up and four were missing.

It took research done at the library scanning obituaries and a book of burial records to identify them.

O'Neal said many Civil War soldiers came west after the war, seeking fame and fortune. Many were broke, and the West offered new opportunities and a way to forget the death and disease they saw in the war.",Gravestones have been dedicated to four Civil War soldiers who had been buried in unmarked graves at Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo and went unidentified for more than a century.
"In referring to the Standard & Poor's decision to downgrade U.S. creditworthiness, they focus attention on the debt aspect but fail to note that the S&P's decision was based in part on the unwillingness of Congress to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire. Instead, Boehner and Cantor cling to the Republican mantra that raising taxes kills jobs and hurts the economy. Perhaps they should take a look at recent history.

Early in his first term, President Clinton raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and the increase was met by doomsday predictions from Republicans — similar to the right-wing clamor of today. Despite the dire claims, the economy prospered for nearly a decade.

USA TODAY receives about 300 letters each day. Most arrive via e-mail, but we also receive submissions by postal mail and fax. We publish about 35 letters each week.

We often select comments that respond directly to USA TODAY articles or opinion pieces. Letters that are concise and make one or two good points have the best chance of being selected, as do letters that reflect the vibrant debate around the nation on a particular subject.

We aim to make the letters platform a place where readers, not just writers representing institutions or interest groups, have their say.

By comparison, while the Bush-era tax cuts have been in place for a decade, private-sector job growth has been stagnant and the nation's debt has exploded. After 10 years of this failed approach, Boehner and Cantor are now recommending more of the same.

Dan Sales; La Porte, Ind.

Obama must work with others

Regarding John Boehner and Eric Cantor's open letter to President Obama, some pundits might be asking: ""At what point will legislators stop cajoling the chief executive in print and start charging the American people to send in new leadership?""

Instead, the American people ought to ask: ""When will the president act like a leader who wanted to usher in post-partisan change and work with the legislators whom we elected?""

Unfortunately, President Obama has made it very clear that he is not concerned with the interests of the American people. He wishes to pursue an elite, statist agenda that will enlarge the federal government at the expense of the states and the people. Of course, this course of action will only slow the economy further.

As long as the Republican majority in the House presses its attempts to create agreement and compromise, Obama is seen as an aloof stalwart stymieing attempts at change.

If all continues in the same manner as in the bitter partisan holdup over the debt ceiling, then perhaps Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will achieve his goal of turning Obama into a ""one-term president.""

Arthur Christopher Schaper; Torrance, Calif.

In their Forum piece, Reps. John Boehner and Eric Cantor state, ""The jobs and savings of too many Americans are at stake for Washington to continue ducking the toughest choices.""

Yet under their leaders, the GOP has been unwilling to make the simple choice of having corporations, millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes in order to reduce our country's debt. More than half of Americans support raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

Boehner, Cantor and other members of the GOP have demonstrated their allegiance to the wealthiest 2% of Americans and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. They have thumbed their noses at the middle class and the poor.

The GOP has taken Nancy Reagan's ""Just Say No"" slogan to new heights. The GOP has said no to health care reform, regulating Wall Street to protect Main Street, saving auto industry jobs, eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% and doing away with subsidies to oil companies that continue to reap billions in profits.

It is time for Americans to just say no to this Congress, lobbyists, corporate political influence and unending political campaigns.

Pedro Ramirez; Fort Collins, Colo.","Boehner, Cantor cling to mantra that hikes kill jobs, hurt economy."
"Whether it's called ""suffocation roulette,"" ""cloud nine,"" or simply the ""choking game,"" it's a dangerous activity that's been around for millennia, the Washington Post notes—and it's just resulted in another teen death.

Memphis Burgess, a 13-year-old from Colorado Springs, Colo., was found by his dad Dec. 10 kneeling against his closet wall with a soft rope nearby, KKTV reports.

""I thought he was messing with me and I shook his shoulder,"" Brad Burgess tells the station. ""That's when he turned around [and] I noticed he was all blue and not breathing."" The choking game creates a sense of euphoria by cutting off the brain's oxygen supply, typically by tightening an item like a tie or scarf around a person's neck, then loosening it right before the participant passes out.

It's thought to have resulted in at least 1,000 deaths since 1934, according to GASP stats cited in the Post, and was documented in medical journals at least as far back as 1951.

Many of these deaths are thought to be suicides by parents and cops who may never have heard of the game, per the Post. And it's a type of ""recreation"" that's alluring to certain teens, the Post adds: It's known as the ""good kids' high,"" per Salon, appealing to children who wouldn't normally drink or do drugs, and a slew of YouTube videos showing other kids taking part makes it seem innocuous.

""This is the age where kids are engaging in high-risk behaviors,"" an Ontario pediatrician who co-authored a study on YouTube and asphyxiation games tells the Post.

""That's just what they do."" It's an activity that Memphis' parents wish he had never heard of. ""I [feel] robbed,"" his mom, Annette, tells KKTV. ""He brought joy to everyone he met."" She adds that her son had a cognitive delay that may have prevented him from realizing the possible consequences, and that she hopes parents broach the subject with their kids so ""no other parent has to go through what we're going through right now."" (Chicago police once issued an alert about the dangerous game.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: Colo. 13-Year-Old Latest Victim of 'Choking Game'","Whether it's called suffocation roulette, cloud nine, or simply the choking game, it's a dangerous activity that's been around for millennia, the Washington Post notes—and it's just resulted in another teen death."
"With the help of some very skilled makeup artists and stylists, this model transformed into seven distinct Disney characters in the above time-lapse video. It was created by Disney Style, a YouTube channel dedicated to Disney-inspired makeup and clothing tutorials.

In the clip, you’ll see the model become Elsa from Frozen, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Ariel from The Little Mermaid and more.

If you’re already starting to plan your Halloween costume (it’s never too early to start thinking about it!) feel free to take some hair, makeup and costume inspiration from this video.","Including Elsa, Belle and Snow White"
"This inexpensive hack might just make your liquor cabinet tastier. (iStock/Brita)

Nestled in the back of your liquor cabinet there’s a dusty handle of vodka that’s so cheap and so harsh you won't even mix it with cranberry juice. Your friend (acquaintance, really) gifted it to you at a house party you threw half a decade ago, and every time you see it, you feel you should really just toss the thing.

But what if I told you this vodka could actually get a little more palatable? Luckily, there's a simple trick that bridges the gap between well-caliber swill and top-shelf booze. All you need to do is run that cheap vodka through a standard-issue Brita filter.

At least, that's what the internet says. My question: Could this possibly work?

A little bit of knowledge about the vodka distillation process reveals that the idea isn't totally crazy. In vodka distillation, a producer takes fermentable materials (anything from wheat to heirloom single-variety potatoes) and mills and cooks them into a pulp know as the mash. The mash gets a little yeast added to it, and it ferments until the sugars have converted to alcohol. Once it finishes with distillation, the vodka gets blended with water and then filtered, using activated charcoal to remove any impurities.

The internet's theory: The Brita, which also uses charcoal to filter tap water, just continues that process.

To test this theory out, I poured some low-tier vodka (it comes in a plastic bottle and costs $19) through the Brita filter four times. To my surprise, the vodka had less of a burn and a less sharp aroma—and it absolutely tasted better than a swig of the bottle that remained unfiltered.

Then I tried the method with a higher-end vodka (this one came in a frosted glass bottle and cost $67). After a few trips through the filter, it, too, was smoother and less hot.

So, it kind of works!

David Kargas, a representative from Brita, didn't discount the filter's ability to work magic on vodka—he’s just uncertain about what, exactly, he’s filtering out.

But I wanted to know what I was removing from the vodka. So I called Brian Facquet of Prohibition Distilling in Roscoe, NY.

“What separates well vodka from premium vodka is oil and sugar,” says Facquet. Glycerol is an alcoholic compound that changes the mouthfeel of the vodka, while sugar often gets added to change the flavor and mask some of vodka's burn. Both of these additions are common in European vodkas such as the ones I tested with, and are likely what the Brita helped remove.

Thirsty for more vodka tips? Check out the full story.

12 Lightning-Fast Chicken Dinners to Make Now

14 Main Course-Worthy Vegetarian Salads

The 12 Easiest No-Cook Pastas Ever

15 Foods That Are Just Plain Better on Sticks",We put an internet theory to the test to see if we can turn bad vodka good.
"Over a decade ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had a vision to create an electric car for the masses, but the technology just wasn’t good enough or cheap enough yet. In the early days that car had a code name: Bluestar.

Tesla will finally unveil that dream car, now called the Model 3, at a buzz-filled event Thursday night in Hawthorne, Calif. Musk’s vision is finally becoming a reality.

Tesla’s Model 3 is the next step in the company’s evolution, from high-end luxury electric car maker, to a manufacturer of an affordable product for mainstream car owners. The move is both a major risk for Tesla, which isn’t yet profitable, and also a massive opportunity for the company to continue to disrupt the auto industry.

Expect the usual fanfare of Tesla events on Thursday: an open bar, a legion of Tesla-obsessed customers in the audience, and brief remarks by Musk including inside jokes only his engineers will really understand. Oh, and Tesla says attendees will get a chance to ride in a working Model 3.

The company has prohibited professional cameras and videos from the event, and will only allow photos from cell phone cameras. Instead, Tesla says it will provide all the stock imagery. To me that doesn’t exactly install confidence in what the Model 3 prototype will look like close up. Tesla didn’t explain the decision.

But we’ll see shortly—as soon as Tesla’s livestream and media live blogs (like ours) start—what Tesla fans, would-be buyers, and critics really think of the Model 3’s design, specs, and value. The car is both a big gamble and a very big deal for Tesla’s future.

Like it tends to do with all its major decisions, Tesla is betting its future on the Model 3. It had a successful run with its second car, the Model S electric sedan, and followed that up with an electric SUV, the Model X, which is loosely based on the basic design of the Model S.

For more on Tesla’s lithium strategy read: A Lithium Gamble That Could Win Big for Tesla

But those cars, with added bells and whistles, commonly sell for over $100,000 each. That’s a little over three times what the Model 3 is supposed to cost ($35,000) when it finally ships in late 2017 (translation: you won’t likely get yours until 2018 and 2019).

The Model 3 represents a major step in Tesla’s evolution as a car company. While Tesla has shipped about 100,000 electric cars to date, the company plans to boost that number dramatically over the next four to five years with help from the mainstream Model 3.

To create a car that it can sell so cheaply, Tesla has had to make some big, risky decisions.

The company is building a massive multi-billion-dollar factory outside of Reno, Nev., that will mass produce batteries to help make them and the cars they power cheaper. Musk has said that Tesla couldn’t make the Model 3 without the battery factory, and Tesla wants to churn out enough batteries at the facility to make 500,000 electric cars annually.

The company wants to reduce the costs of its batteries by 30% using various techniques like large scale manufacturing, innovative supply chain sourcing, and new chemistry. In general, lithium-ion batteries have been falling in cost over the years as Asian giants like Tesla-supplier Panasonic have been investing heavily in increasing supply.

Betting on a drop in lithium-ion battery costs has been a critical part of Tesla’s business model since the company was formed in 2003. Adding in the Gigafactory just helped to accelerate that decline.

Will it be enough to enable Tesla to make the $35,000 car with a 200 mile range? Likely yes. Years ago, Musk was actually hoping that Tesla’s mainstream car could be priced as low as $20,000 or even $30,000. $35,000 now appears to be a more conservative estimate for the car.

So what can we expect from the Model 3? Analysts have speculated that the body will be made of steel, instead of aluminum, which would lower costs, would be easier to manufacture, but is a heavier metal. The basic autopilot features that Tesla showed off last year are also supposed to be included in the Model 3 from the start.

A couple years ago, Tesla’s chief designer, Fran von Holzhausen, told me that the Model 3 could be more expressive and almost couture in its style, than the almost staid Model S sedan that he designed. However, analysts are now speculating that the Model 3 could look and operate like a toned-down cheaper version of the Model S. If that were true, Tesla would then also try to differentiate the Model S from the Model 3 by giving the premium car even more added goodies.

For more on Tesla autopilot watch our video.

Even if Tesla fans don’t love what they see at the premiere on Thursday, they will likely bombard the company with reservations for the car. Tesla and SpaceX employees can already reserve their Model 3s while the general public can start submitting them on Thursday morning at Tesla stores. Anyone on the Internet can reserve online starting at 8:30 PM pacific time on Thursday night.

Model 3 reservations cost $1,000. Expect to see lines overnight at Tesla stores throughout California, and maybe even the world, on the night of March 30, so that die-hard fans can get earlier on the wait list. Many Tesla-lovers will probably be willing to put down a deposit sight unseen.

Toning down a car, and fitting it under $35,000, will be a new experience for Tesla. So far, Tesla has focused on one upsmanship its cars with wow-inducing features like the swooping doors of the Model X and the 17-inch dashboard screen of its cars. In hindsight, though, some of these over-engineered features have caused Tesla delays and frustration.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.

But for all the risks that Tesla is taking with the Model 3, the company is usually pretty good at adjusting early products to make its customers happy. If it doesn’t get it quite right, the company has consistently worked hard at using adjustments, refinements, and software updates to get closer to what it’s customers want.

Still, the unveiling of the Model 3 is a very big deal for Tesla. It’s one of the final steps in Musk’s plan to build a business out of expensive luxury (and cool) electric cars and use it to eventually build a mass market product. Musk gets handsomely rewarded when he hits milestones like ‘deliver Model 3 prototype’ and eventually ‘ship final Model 3 production car.’

If the Model 3 somehow falters badly, it could send a big scare to Tesla investors. Earlier this year, Tesla’s shares dropped substantially, partly over slow production of its Model X car, but the company has always benefited from enthusiastic shareholders. If the company gets its first mainstream push wrong, that could spook even the most bullish Tesla’s Wall Street analysts.

To get the first glimpse of what the Model 3 actually looks like, come back to Fortune.com on Thursday night and see what the world’s most interesting electric car company has in store.",Its electric car for the masses is finally being unveiled.
"Tax season is in full swing and if you haven't gotten your return in yet, the clock is ticking. If you're married, one of the things you'll need to decide before you file is whether to opt for a joint return or do your taxes separately.

Typically, a joint return is the smartest move, since you can cash in on some valuable tax breaks. But there are a few scenarios where it makes sense to file on your own. Here are 3 reasons married couples should consider filing taxes separately.

Find out now: How much do I need to save for retirement?

When you work as a freelancer, independent contractor or you own a small business, your tax situation looks very different from someone who works a traditional 9 to 5 gig. Not only are you responsible for paying income tax on the money you earn, you're also on the hook for covering your Social Security and Medicare tax. As of 2015, the self-employment tax rate is 15.3%.

Since your taxes aren't being taken out during the year, you're generally expected to make estimated quarterly payments (every three months) to cover the amount of tax you owe. If you haven't been doing that or you underestimated what you needed to be setting aside, that can add to your joint tax liability or take a big bite out of your refund. Splitting your taxes up may disqualify you from claiming certain credits or deductions but it can also sometimes minimize the amount of tax you'll owe overall. RELATED: Important tax dates to know

3 reasons married couples should consider filing taxes separately

January 15, 2016: Those who are self-employed or have fourth-quarter income that requires payment for quarterly estimated taxes must have them postmarked by this date

(Photo via Tetra Images/Getty Images)

April 18, 2016: Individual tax returns are due for the 2015 tax year

April 18, 2016: Requests for an extension on filling out your taxes must be filed by this date

(Photo by Chris Fertnig via Getty Images)

April 18, 2016: Those who are self-employed or have first-quarter income that requires payment for quarterly estimated taxes must have them postmarked by this date

April 18, 2016: This date is also the deadline to make a contribution to an IRA account for 2015

(Photo by Garry L., Shutterstock)

June 15, 2016: Those who are self-employed or have second-quarter income that requires payment for quarterly estimated taxes must have them postmarked by this date

September 15, 2016: Those who are self-employed or have second-quarter income that requires payment for quarterly estimated taxes must have them postmarked by this date

October 17, 2016: 2015 tax returns that received an extension are due by this date

(Photo by Juan Camilo Bernal via Getty Images)

October 17, 2016: Today is the last chance to recharacterize a traditional IRA that was converted to a Roth IRA during 2015

January 15, 2017: Those who are self-employed or have fourth-quarter income that requires payment for quarterly estimated taxes must have them postmarked by this date

(Photo by Pascal Broze via Getty Images)

Student loan debt in the U.S. has reached staggering proportions and approximately 70% of students leave school with loans. The average debt load hovers right around $30,000 and for grads who are struggling to find their way in the job market, paying it down can be a challenge. Opting for an income-dependent repayment plan can offer some short-term relief but qualifying can be a challenge if you're married.

Check out our student loan calculator.

If you file your return jointly, both you and your spouse's income will be considered for an income-based repayment plan even if only one of is responsible for paying the debt. When you file separately, only your income is taken into account to determine what kind of payments you qualify for. Again, you're sacrificing certain other tax benefits but if you don't have kids and you normally take the standard deduction, you may not feel as much of a pinch.

Deductions can be a major boon at tax time, since they reduce your taxable income. But the IRS limits how much you can write off based on what you make. If one or both of you has a substantial amount of deductions you want to claim and there's a pretty sizable gap in what you earn, filing separate returns can allow both of you to get the full amount of tax benefits you're entitled to.

4 Reasons to File Your Taxes Early

For example, if you experienced a serious illness or injury and you racked up some big out of pocket medical expenses, you can deduct the amount that exceeds 10% of your adjusted gross income. If you earn $25,000 but your spouse earns $150,000, combining your income on your taxes is going to significantly reduce the tax benefit you'd get from the deduction, if you were able to claim it all. In this case, going solo would probably yield the bigger advantage.

These are just some of the most important things married couples should keep in mind when planning their tax strategy. If you're getting divorced or you're worried about being liable for your spouse's tax debt, filing separately may be a no-brainer. When you're trying to decide what the best choice is, running the numbers can give you an idea of how much you stand to gain or lose either way. Check out ways to avoid a tax audit:

3 reasons married couples should consider filing taxes separately

Double check your figures to assure there are no mistakes

Be sure to be 100% honest, and report your numbers realistically

Those in the highest and lowest income brackets are most often targets of fraud, and thus, audits

(Photo by Gary Conner via Getty Images)

Don't draw too much attention with unusual or unrealistic deductions

(Photo by Rita Maas via Getty Images)

Filing returns electronically drastically reduces errors","A joint return is often the smartest move for married couples, but there are a few scenarios where it makes sense to file on your own."
"Yael Stone, left, and Uzo Aduba in a scene from ""Orange is the New Black.""The Associated Press

Yael Stone who plays lovelorn inmate Lorna Morello in “Orange is the New Black,” revealed to Huffpost Live during an interview with co-star Selenis Leyva that she was a virgin when she filmed her first sex scene reports The New York Daily News. When discussing the sex scenes on the hit Netflix show, Stone was asked if she had filmed any previously. “That’s interesting that you would ask that,” she said. “I’ve never said this, but I did my first sex scene before I’d actually had sex in real life.”

“It was a leap of imaginative faith,” Stone added, “A lot of times we create roles and their experiences we haven’t had but we have to imagine it. I happened to do that as a young 15-year-old person.” The scenes were in a 2001 miniseries called “The Farm.”

When Leyva asked what research she did, Stone laughingly replied, “Made out a little.”

Earlier the Aussie actress spoke about the often graphic sex scenes in the prison show.

“The sex scenes are also a privilege, and we have to see it that way,” she said. “'If it’s written by great people — these people that write the show are really smart, we can trust them — I do feel like those scenes are really necessary. It’s a big part of (prison) life.”","Yael Stone who plays lovelorn inmate Lorna Morello in “Orange is the New Black,” revealed to Huffpost Live during an interview with co-star Selenis Leyva that she was a virgin when she filmed her first sex scene reports The New York Daily News."
"The U.S. government has said that iPhone owners are officially allowed to “jailbreak” their devices for “educational purposes.”

The new rule was one of a number of exemptions to 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention protections. These exemptions are reviewed and authorized every three years to ensure that work protected by copyright can be used in non-infringing ways. While the “jailbreaking” exemption is surprising, it’s not the only one of note.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed for three of these exemptions, is understandably ecstatic.

Its statement says in part:

“The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone ‘jailbreaking’ — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes ‘App StoreApp Store,’ and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.

In its reasoning in favor of EFF’s jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: ‘When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”

While we expect the jailbreaking news to get all of the attention, the ability for amateurs and educators to use short commercial video clips in their noncommercial or educational works is actually a much bigger deal. In essence, this makes the art of the video mashup “legal” and, in theory, should put a stop to many of the DMCA removal requests sent to services like YouTubeYouTube.

What do you think of the most recent DMCA exemptions?

Jobs In this exciting and challenging role, the Website Managing Editor will be an integral member of the Public Relations team, striving to build the hospital’s local, national and international reputat...",The U.S. government has declared that iPhone owners are officially allowed to “jailbreak” their devices for “educational purposes.”
"In 13 short years, killer drones have gone from being exotic military technology featured primarily in the pages of specialized aviation magazines to a phenomenon of popular culture, splashed across daily newspapers and fictionalized in film and television, including the new season of “24.”

What has not changed all that much — at least superficially — is the basic aircraft that most people associate with drone warfare: the armed Predator.

The Predator, with its distinctive bubble near the nose and sensor ball underneath, is the iconic image of drone warfare, an aircraft that grew out of 1980s work supported by the Pentagon’s future-thinking Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally developed to perform surveillance, the CIA added Hellfire missiles and began using the Predator to hunt down members of the Taliban and al Qaeda after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Though the CIA and Air Force now fly an updated version of the Predator — named Reaper — the drone is still relatively easy to detect, and easy to shoot down, at least for a country with a modern military.

A MQ-9 Reaper during a 2009 combat mission over southern Afghanistan.Photo: AP

In fact, as terrifying as drones sound, they actually aren’t all that sophisticated compared to other weapons in the US arsenal. The original Predator plodded along at a pokey 84 miles an hour.

A ShadowHawk drone with the Montgomery County, Texas, SWAT team. Civilian cousins of the drone are being sought by police departments, border patrols, power companies, and news organizations who want a bird’s-eye view.Photo: AP

Its missiles, though lethal, are decades-old technology developed to destroy tanks, not terrorists. And despite concerns about autonomous killing machines, the Predator must be operated by a pilot (albeit remotely). The Predator has proved effective, but it is not exactly the sci-fi miracle that many might imagine.

Under development, however, is a new generation of drones that will be able to penetrate the air defenses of even sophisticated nations, spotting nuclear facilities, and tracking down — and possibly killing — terrorist leaders, silently from high altitudes. These drones will be fast, stealthy and survivable, designed to sneak in and out of a country without ever being spotted.

In fact, the Predator may someday be to drone warfare what the V-2 was to long-range ballistic missiles: a crude, but important, first step in a new era of warfare.

1980 — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launches “Teal Rain,” a top-secret study on high altitude, long endurance unmanned aircraft.

An SR-71A Blackbird in flightPhoto: Getty Images

1984 — DARPA contracts with Abe Karem to design a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) called “Amber.”

1990 — General Atomics buys Abe Karem’s company, Leading Systems. It sells Karem’s UAV, now called “Gnat,” to the CIA. In 1994, General Atomics is given contract to develop the Predator, a successor to the Gnat.

1990s — Pentagon secretly funds development of an unmanned successor to the SR-71 Blackbird (a stealth plane introduced in 1964 and famous in popular culture; it’s even used by the “X-Men”). Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed compete.

The Dark Star at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.Photo: US Air Force

1998 — Retirement of SR-71 Blackbird. The Pentagon pursues two new spy drones: the Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone, and the RQ-3 DarkStar, a stealthy spy drone, which crashes and is cancelled.

A Global Hawk at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 2001.Photo: AP

2001 — October 7: First armed Predator strike in Afghanistan. The CIA attempted to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

2007 — General Atomics delivers the Reaper, an upgraded version of the Predator, to the Air Force. The Reaper can fly higher and faster than the Predator, and carries a variety of weapons.

2009 — A photographer in Kandahar, Afghanistan, captured an image of the stealth RQ-170 drone, which aviation watchers called the “Beast of Kandahar.” Its mission: slip past air defense radar into countries like Pakistan and Iran. US officials soon leaked that RQ-170 had been used to keep tabs on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in 2011. One RQ-170’s life was cut short, however, when it was captured by Iran later that year, possibly after Iran intercepted the signal used to control it. Last week, Iran claimed it had cloned the drone. It’s unclear how many RQ-170s exist.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seated left, listens during an aerospace exhibition in Tehran Sunday. The exhibition revealed an advanced CIA spy drone, captured in 2011, and its Iranian-made copy, pictured in back.Photo: AP

After the retirement of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the military had an obvious gap in its arsenal.

In 2007, satellite pictures emerged showing new construction at Area 51, the Pentagon’s top-secret testing area in the Nevada desert. Veteran watchers of “black,” or secret, aircraft, immediately suspected that the Pentagon was preparing to test a new secret aircraft, and the most likely candidate was a stealth drone.

Aviation Week produced this artist’s concept of the RQ-180, a stealth drone that spies from high altitudes.Photo: Aviation Week

Now, two unmanned spy drones are under development. One that appears almost ready for combat is the RQ-180, a stealthy spy drone built by Northrop Grumman. Though the Pentagon refuses to confirm its existence, Aviation Week & Space Technology ran this artist’s concept earlier this year and revealed a little about its rumored design.

The RQ-180 is designed to fly very high, for a very long time (perhaps as long as 24 hours). According to Aviation Week, it has a 130-foot wing span and a “cranked kite” stealthy design that would allow it to slip past enemy radar. Chances are it will only be used for surveillance, not attack, though it could carry out an electronic attack.

Another, recently revealed project is a high-altitude drone being developed by Lockheed Martin that can travel up to six times of the speed of sound. The drone would be both a spy and strike aircraft, according to Lockheed. But the SR-72, as Lockheed is calling the twin-engine aircraft, wouldn’t be ready to fly until 2030.

Lockheed’s SR-72 will fly at six times the speed of sound, and could strike targets.

What about a replacement for a Predator? The original Predator was essentially a surveillance aircraft that was turned into an armed drone, so any future replacement aircraft would likely look very different. The Pentagon has openly funded work on unmanned combat aircraft, including Northrop Grumman’s X-47, a diamond-shaped drone that can take off and land from aircraft carriers. But aerospace watchers have long presumed that these programs are hiding even more secretive work.

The X-47, a combat drone from Northrop Grumman.Photo: Zumapress.com

Part of the difficulty of deciphering the world of drones is that the Pentagon for over three decades has run a series of overlapping projects, often using unclassified programs as “covers” for more secret unmanned aircraft work.

Aviation Week, for example, says the RQ-180 was part of a secret, three-way contest that involved competing drones from Lockheed and Boeing. What happened to those other unmanned aircraft is unclear. Figuring out which are “real” drone project meant for deployment, and which are covers for secret drones, is a shell game.

Even the stealthy killer drones known or suspected to be under development fall short of some of the unmanned aircraft depicted in science fiction or thriller novels, which often feature swarms of autonomous killing machines. It is true that the Pentagon has been funding work to make drones operate with greater autonomy — for example, one of DARPA’s latest proposals calls on researchers to design ways to have drones collaborate with each other, such as having drones share information about a target.

But drones that can operate completely without the need for a pilot sitting in an air-conditioned trailer on a base in Nevada are still several years away, at least, and the Pentagon has long insisted that drones won’t be allowed to use weapons without a “man in the loop.”

Yet another longtime goal of military work is to create tiny drones, possibly disguised as birds or even insects (the CIA did develop a robotic dragonfly, though it never proved useful).

In terror expert Richard Clarke’s new novel, “Sting of the Drone,” the CIA operates stealthy mini-drones that are capable of assassinating someone inside a bar, and there is certainly evidence such drones are of interest. A four-minute animated video created by the Air Force Research Laboratory showed up on the Web in 2009, illustrating the lab’s work on micro aerial vehicles. The video featured a kamikaze insect-sized drone loaded with high explosives.

But drones of that level of sophistication — able to perch on telephone wires or hunt down terrorists inside a building — still belong to the future.

The real drone revolution may come not through sophistication of drones, but the proliferation of drones. So far, unmanned aircraft have largely been the weapons of technologically advanced nations, but that is changing as drone technology becomes cheaper and more accessible.

A model of an insect size US Air Force drone.Photo: Reuters

Just as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, fast became the No. 1 killer of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, experts are now warning that crude drones — in some cases essentially sophisticated model airplanes — could be the real threat in the years to come.

Dr. Gregory Parker, Micro Air Vehicle team leader, holds another small winged drone.Photo: Reuters

Indeed, Hezbollah has already bragged of sending spy drones into Israeli territory, and Israeli leaders have warned of the possible drone threat that Hamas could pose from Gaza.

And a recent report by the Rand Corporation warned that, in the future, terrorist groups might be able to buy small, armed drones: “Smaller systems could become the next IEDs: low-cost, low-tech weapons that are only of limited lethality individually but attrite significant numbers of US or allied personnel when used in large numbers over time.”

The US military holds an annual exercise called Black Dart, which looks at ways to counter hostile drones, particularly small drones. Among the possible defenses are lasers to shoot down drones or systems that can jam the radio signals used to control drones. But this sort of counter-drone technology is scarce today.","In 13 short years, killer drones have gone from being exotic military technology featured primarily in the pages of specialized aviation magazines to a phenomenon of popular culture, splashed acros..."
"updated 03/18/2015 AT 12:00 PM EDT

•originally published 03/18/2015 AT 10:35 AM EDT

Check out this Jaw dropper taken tonight @ Fort Dunree here in Donegal of The aurora borealis. Pic by @DerryPhotos pic.twitter.com/i2Gk24K32O

, caused by eruptions on the surfaces of the sun, have been especially visible this week, including in the U.K.; the lights are usually only visible in Norway and Iceland.

The #AuroraBorealis could be visible in the midlands & northern parts of the UK tonight if there are clear skies pic.twitter.com/Pip99qz9CO

Earlier this week, an explosion of magnetically charged particles called a coronal mass ejection trigged a strong geomagnetic storm, which resulted in the lights' further reach. In a pleasant coincidence, they showed up in the hue of green, just in time for St. Patrick's Day.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Green from space. We have @Space_Station aurora views: (video) https://t.co/UG1x2YutsO pic.twitter.com/FBpXJ5OIhd

The video at the top of this post was taken by Steven Graham in Templeton, Christchurch, New Zealand, on Tuesday. The video below comes from CJ Barr, who shot the time-lapse footage in Penmon Point, North Wales.

And if all this natural majesty wasn't enough for you, just you wait: There's going to be

(and our hearts) this Friday. What a time to be alive.","The Lights were visible in the U.K., a rare occurrence"
"A Sydney teenager charged over an alleged Anzac Day terror plot has pleaded not guilty.

The 16-year-old's lawyer Zemarai Khatiz entered the plea on his client's behalf in the Parramatta Children's Court today.

The teenager was not in court, and Mr Khatiz said he there would be a bail application on Friday, with supporting evidence from a psychologist's report.

The 16-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was arrested near his Auburn home on Sunday on suspicion of trying to get a gun and carry out a terrorist act at an Anzac Day service.

Police swooped after the apprentice electrician allegedly sent messages on an encrypted mobile app seeking to buy a gun, and the date April 25 mentioned.

""Extremist propaganda"" was also allegedly found by police at the boy's home.

No weapons or explosives were found during the search.

He first became known to police last May as part of an investigation into a Melbourne terror plot, foiled on the eve of Mother's Day, the ABC reports.

He was said to have been communicating online with senior Australian Islamic State recruiter Neil Prakash.

After the boy's home was raided, he was reportedly signed up to an intervention program jointly run by the Australian Federal Police, NSW Police and Victorian Police.

The program involves psychologists, teachers and religious leaders working to deradicalise potential young terrorists.

The boy is expected to apply for bail today, which police said they will oppose.

During a press conference yesterday morning, NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said the risk from the particular threat had been ""thwarted"".

The teenager has been charged with one count of acts in preparation for, or planning, a terrorist act, which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Mr Scipione said there was an ""online component"" to the alleged offences and believed the teenager was acting alone.",A Sydney teen accused of plotting an Anzac Day terror attack had been part of an intensive deradicalisation program with Australian police since last year.
"The real meaning of the creepy new anti-Obamacare ads

For all of the political fighting in Washington over defunding the Affordable Care Act, a pair of jarring new anti-Obamacare ads shows that some leading opponents have shifted their focus to sabotaging the law once it’s in place.

The spots feature a creepy, clownish Uncle Sam character performing gynecological and prostate exams on patients who signed up for insurance under the ACA. “Don’t let the government play doctor. Opt out of Obamacare,” the ads tell viewers. Not surprisingly, they’ve gone viral.

The canny bit of marketing is part of a reported $750,000 campaign by Generation Opportunity, an anti-Obamacare group backed by the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch, to convince young adults that their best option is to remain uninsured once the health care law kicks in next year.

What’s most notable about the ads – besides the unfortunately positioned patriotic symbol – is who they target. Young adults are crucial to the ACA’s success. The law’s state-based health insurance marketplaces, called exchanges, will keep premiums affordable only if enough young, healthy people sign up for coverage to offset the cost of insuring older and sicker enrollees. The White House has said the exchanges will need to enroll 2.7 million healthy 18-25-year-olds to remain solvent.

According to Yahoo! News, Generation Opportunity is planning a series of campaigns on college campuses, replete with a game that includes a “Wheel of Misery” and “informative palm cards,” as a counter-effort to groups working to enroll young people in the exchanges. Generation Opportunity’s staff is packed with conservative recent college graduates and some more experienced political hands, including a failed 2012 congressional candidate from Pennsylvania and a former vice president of Americans United for Life.

(MORE: Insane Anti-Obamacare Ad: Creepy Uncle Sam Wants to Probe You)

Some young people could spend less by paying a penalty for not having insurance under Obamacare than what it will cost to buy coverage. But new federal subsidies will dramatically cut the cost of coverage for individuals earning up to about $44,000 per year and low-cost, high-deductible plans often favored by the young and healthy will be available to those under 30. Older Americans, by contrast, will need more comprehensive coverage to avoid paying federal fines for not having insurance.

Persuading younger, generally healthy people that they don’t need insurance is an acknowledgment by conservatives that their only true hope of sinking Obamacare is to try and make it function poorly. House Republicans are poised to pass a stopgap spending measure this week that will tie funds to keep the government running to a measure that would defund Obamacare. With the Senate under Democratic control, the effort amounts to little more than political theater. Campaigns like Generation Opportunity’s represent the real new front in the fight over Obamacare: persuading young people to opt in or out.",The real meaning of the creepy new anti-Obamacare ads
"The political significance of the hacking scandal has been through many metamorphoses: first, it was no more than a cloud the size of a man’s hand over David Cameron; later, the hand curled into a fist, and Andy Coulson resigned as Downing Street director of communications in January 2011. In July of that year, the saga was reframed as Parliament standing up to corporate might, when Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before the Commons Culture, Media and Sports select committee. Throughout, Murdoch’s company, News Corp, had struggled to keep its bid for BSkyB separate from the mire into which the News of the World was slipping – a distinction which the Government respected. But the disclosure that the Sunday red-top had hacked Millie Dowler’s phone forced the bid to be dropped, the arrest of Coulson, and the appointment of the Leveson Inquiry. Ed Miliband enjoyed a moment of stardom, having shown undoubted guts in taking on Murdoch, and (ludicrously) the embarrassment of News Corp was described as the “British Spring”. When Leveson’s report was published in November 2012, the political story was reframed yet again as a battle between statutory regulation and the free press.

Subsequently, Cameron always insisted that he had been given “assurances” by Coulson. But Coulson’s clear memory, as he put it at the Leveson Inquiry, was this: “I was able to repeat what I’d said publicly, that I knew nothing about the Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire case in terms of what they did”. His “assurances”, in other words, were limited to the single court case in 2007, when Goodman, the NoW’s former royal editor, and Mulcaire, a private investigator, were jailed for plotting to intercept voicemail messages left for royal aides. This was not the blanket guarantee Cameron heard, or chose to hear.

To which you may say: Coulson ought to have revealed to Cameron what he told the court in April – namely, that he had heard voicemail messages relating to David Blunkett in 2004, even if, as he claimed, he was not aware at the time that the material had been acquired illegally. Yet Coulson did make clear to Cameron over the years that any party leader hiring a former red-top editor is taking a calculated risk. “I wasn’t running a sweet shop, Dave,” he would say. After The Guardian reported in 2009 that News International had paid Gordon Taylor, boss of the Professional Footballers’ Association, to drop legal action, Coulson offered to resign. “You’ll get no quarrel from me,” he told Ed Llewellyn, the PM’s chief of staff. Determined to call it a day after the 2010 election, he was again persuaded by Cameron to follow him to No 10. Coulson later reflected that, had he parted company with Dave four years ago, “none of this” would have happened.

What is forgotten is how good at his job Coulson was, bringing maturity and professionalism to the party’s dilapidated communications organisation. This is not a fashionable thing to say, only five days after his conviction. All the more reason to do so. He was less given to outright spin than his Labour predecessors and rarely lost his temper. In the first months of the Coalition, before his departure, he was increasingly sought out by senior Lib Dems, including Nick Clegg, seeking discreet advice.

Cameron’s relationship with Coulson was an example of what the old News of the World would probably have called “Top Tory Toff’s addiction!” The Conservative leader became utterly dependent upon his adviser’s insights – not only because Billericay always has something to tell Bullingdon, but also because Coulson took to politics quickly and easily, and understood how to translate Cameron’s strategy into messages that would be picked up by the media. Inevitably, much has been made of his past in the Murdoch print stable and the mystique that held for Cameron – as if his comms director had only ever been on secondment from Wapping. But Coulson’s principal task was to get the Tory party on to our television screens.

Beyond his formal remit, Coulson became a confidant whom the Tory leader routinely referred to as “a genius”. Like many genial people, Cameron makes true friends slowly and very cautiously. Coulson was one of them. It was said that there were only three colleagues who could change Dave’s mind: George Osborne, Steve Hilton – and Coulson. As the attack intensified, the Tory leader grew more determined to hold on to his ally. Coulson knew that the game was up well before Cameron – a case study in what Margaret Heffernan calls “wilful blindness” in her marvellous book of the same name.

Now, General Hindsight – an elderly relative of Wilful Blindness – stomps through Westminster, honking, braying and stroking his damp moustache as if it had all been so obvious. Expect to hear a lot between now and the election about Cameron’s failed judgment and lack of ethical perspective. But the moral of the story, funnily enough, is not moral. It is psychological. Where friendship is concerned, we hear what we want, or often need, to hear, filtering out warnings even (as in this case) when they are issued by our friends themselves. As Cicero knew, no understanding of politics is complete without an understanding of friendship and its formidable power. And it is this power – rather than Murdoch, hacking, or Leveson – that has brought David Cameron and Andy Coulson alike to this wretched point.

'In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government’ (Penguin) is in paperback with new chapters",David Cameron was utterly dependent on his spin doctor&rsquo;s insights &ndash; and was   remarkably incurious about the precise details of his past
"Seek sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of your busy life at this oceanfront oasis, the Sea Wellness Spa, located in the luxurious Casa del Mar hotel. Drop your car off at the complimentary valet parking and let the “me” day begin. Offering an enchanting escape, the serene spa setting fosters the wellness that comes from within with their state-of-the-art HydraFacial procedure. This non-invasive, non-surgical treatment administered by expert estheticians sooths and moisturizes skin and improves the appearance of fine lines, wrinkles, enlarged pores, oily skin, hyper-pigmentation and brown spots. Quick and effective, a HydraFacial combines cleansing, exfoliation, extraction and hydration simultaneously, resulting in clearer, more beautiful skin with no discomfort and no downtime. Continue your spa day poolside with a complimentary glass of bubbly and spectacular coastal views. Book your appointment today at the Sea Wellness Spa, one of L.A.’s favorite destinations for the ultimate in pampering and rejuvenation.

The HydraFacial has been a favorite pre-red carpet treatment for the stars and is even enjoyed by the Prince of Monaco! It’s been featured on Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, Allure Magazine, Essence Magazine, In Style Wedding Magazine and more.",$185 for spa package (reg. $370)
"Fuel pumps are the unsung heroes for your vehicles. They are safe, require little maintenance and are rarely thought about unless they fail. But when they do, it’s usually in epic fashion, and can potentially leave you stranded. It’s a relatively easy fix though.

While there are few signs of impending failure, you want to make sure you don’t hurt your fuel pump at the gas station. Always make sure you are putting the right octane fuel in your car, according to your owner’s manual. Some people make the mistake of putting in a higher or lower octane because they don’t read the owner’s manual. You also want to make sure that you’re going to a reputable gas station because if you don’t, they may actually sell a lower quality fuel than advertised. In other words, it may be a name brand gas station, but what they are selling, in reality, is an off-brand.

Cars have come a long way over the years when it comes to fuel pump technology. Basically, there are two different types of pumps, electric or manual. Electric fuel pumps are the latest technology, have the gas line connected and are fairly straightforward. Then you have the older ones, which are manual and actually have a lever connected to the pump – sort of like a well, pushing up and down, pumpin g the fuel. You also had carburetors back then, a totally different situation from what you see today. Many of these pumps are as old as 25 years. But one thing is for sure, safety has always been an important component.

Click here for videos and more from Joe on Speed.com

Manufacturers do a lot to insure that there are no issues with pumps exploding, creating fires or anything like that. Many of these pumps have toggle (cut-off) switches, so if you get into an accident, it cuts the fuel off to prevent a fire. If these switches weren’t there, the line could break during an accident, and gasoline would pump out. It’s basically like spraying fuel everywhere through a hose… really dangerous stuff.

When purchasing a fuel pump, you want to make sure you stick with name brands such as Carter or Airtex. I also recommend the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) fuel pumps as well, like AC Delco or Bosch, but it really depends on your car. Another issue is whether or not you have to replace just the fuel pump itself, or do you also have to replace the sending unit.

You may need to replace both in certain situations. It’s also important to note that misdiagnosing fuel pump issues is a common problem, as an inexperienced shop, for instance, may mistake a faulty relay switch.

If you know your mechanic, they're certified and trustworthy, always look their direction for this fix.

Joe Ferrer, is the owner of BS&F Auto Parts in New York City and host of the SPEED original series ""Hard Parts: South Bronx "" Tuesday nights at 9pm ET on SPEED",Fuel pumps are the unsung heroes for your vehicles.
"Martin Bureau | AFP | Getty Images

A student works on an Apple computer at a computer programming school in Paris.

While Apple's cash flow didn't help the stock in mid-2013, Reitzes said things are different this time.

Read MoreCan Apple give Tesla a 'run for its money'?

Back then, Samsung had the momentum, and some doomsday scenarios had Apple generating a fraction of the cash flow it has now, he said.

""Now I think the big surprise over the last year is that Apple … is really beating Android to the punch, and that changes the game completely.""

For Reitzes it all comes down to the numbers, and with a ""staggering"" 12 percent enterprise value to cash flow yield, Apple is cheaper than Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and ""anybody in the mega cap range,"" he said.

Read More4 Internet stocks too rich to keep hoarding cash

He also believes CEO Tim Cook and chief financial officer Luca Maestri have come of age in the past year.

""[They] really show they care about the stock in addition to products,"" he said. ""They are shepherding a story now better than they ever have.""

Disclosure: Reitzes and Barclays do not own Apple. Apple is an investment banking client.","Apple's free cash flow is ""mind-blowing"" and can propel the stock to $150, Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes tells CNBC."
"A teenager has been seriously injured after he was attacked and beaten in Omagh, County Tyrone.

It happened at about 03:00 BST on Saturday. The 18 year old was walking along Hospital Road when a number of men got out of a black car.

They hit him with a club or bat and he suffered injuries to his head and body. He was taken to hospital.

Another 18 year old, arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm, has been freed unconditionally.

Police have appealed for witnesses.

A spokesperson for the Western Health Trust said the teenager was in a serious but stable condition in hospital.","A teenager is in a serious but stable condition after he was attacked and beaten in Omagh, County Tyrone."
"He has told aides that he hopes the trip, which includes a stop in Aberdeen on Saturday, will provide a much-needed “reset” for his campaign. But some of the aides have said privately that they wished he would cancel it.

Mr. Trump’s self-image as a successful businessman is important to him, and, even though he has said publicly that he is relying more on his children to run the Trump Organization nowadays, he remains closely tied to it. He also believes that many of his supporters are drawn to his persona of a brash billionaire, born out of his decades in the business world.

He does not like to be away from his business operations for long. Save for just over a dozen nights during the primaries, he has returned to one of his homes at the end of each day, usually to his New York City apartment, which allows him access to his 26th-floor office in Trump Tower, where he works and takes part in interviews.

And he tends to rely on Trump-connected businesses while he is campaigning, further bringing together the two worlds in which he operates.

Perhaps the most stark example of his business empire intruding on his political career came late last month. Mr. Trump delivered scathing criticism of Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel — first at a San Diego rally and then again in interviews — that was less a result of a politically strategic calculation than of Mr. Trump’s concerns about rulings the judge made in a federal lawsuit against his now defunct Trump University.

Mr. Trump accused the Indiana-born judge of being unable to render fair rulings because of his “Mexican heritage.’’ The political backlash was swift, with many of Mr. Trump’s supporters distancing themselves from him and calling his comments racist.

What’s next for a campaign with a big fund-raising gap.

The Scotland trip, too, is potentially fraught. Since clinching the Republican nomination, Mr. Trump has squandered numerous opportunities to unify the Republican Party behind him, or exhibit the discipline party leaders and donors are eager to see.

When Barack Obama headed to Europe as a presidential candidate in 2008, and Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, traveled to England, Israel and Poland during his campaign, both men went to demonstrate their global savvy and stature, in meticulously planned visits. (Mr. Romney’s trip, nonetheless, was a gaffe-ridden disaster and many of his aides later said they wished he had stayed home.)

“Foreign trips are an inherently risky endeavor,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution who advised Mr. Romney in 2012. “Ideally, they will boost a candidate’s credibility on and familiarity with the geopolitical issues of the region they visit. But they require a lot of planning and logistical coordination. Seems to me that a foreign trip driven solely by personal financial interests — as Trump seems to be planning later this week — would be unprecedented.”

Showing up right after the Brexit vote, in the middle of a tumultuous time, is leaving Mr. Trump especially vulnerable to criticism, as well as creating the potential for an international blunder.

When asked about the vote in an interview this month with The Hollywood Reporter, Mr. Trump seemed not to be familiar with Britain’s referendum, first answering, “Huh?” and then, “Hmm.” Finally, after the Brexit vote was explained to him, Mr. Trump answered with his trademark decisiveness: “Oh yeah, I think they should leave,” he said, a sentiment he has since repeated. On Wednesday morning, however, Mr. Trump told Fox Business that his opinion on the issue was not significant since he had not followed it closely.

But business has always been inextricably bound with politics for Mr. Trump, dating back to his previous flirtations with presidential bids, which served largely to elevate his public profile and business interests.

The latest documents submitted to the Federal Election Commission, for instance, show that Mr. Trump paid at least $1.1 million in May to his business and family members for campaign-related expenses. The largest payment, for $423,000, went to his Mar-a-Lago Club, for the use of that private Florida resort, but he also reimbursed costs associated with his private airplanes, Trump Restaurants, and even Trump Tower, which houses his campaign headquarters on the fifth floor.

“Why would I use someone else’s properties?” Mr. Trump said, through Hope Hicks, a campaign spokeswoman, in response to a question about why he had hosted campaign events at his properties.

“Mr. Trump owns some of the finest properties anywhere in the world and he has to host events, news conferences, etc. which might as well be hosted at those properties,” Ms. Hicks added, in an email statement. “They are paid, in accordance with F.E.C. regulations, their approximate fair market value for goods and services.”

Mr. Trump also sometimes reserves the front rows at his news conferences for members of his private clubs, almost as a membership perk.

And at a primary election event in March at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Trump spoke flanked by bottles (and cases) of Trump-branded wine, Trump-branded water, and a mound of raw steaks, which he tried to pass off as his brand.

Even Mr. Trump’s private 757, emblazoned with his name across the side and a tool for his businesses, now occupies a central role in his campaign imagery, rolling up to airport hangars during primary rallies as a symbol of power and success. People in the crowd gawk in awe, pointing to the plane, unprompted, as a reason they believe in Mr. Trump.

Yet some Republicans still think Mr. Trump should simply disentangle the personal (and business) from the political.

Mr. Chen, for instance, had a suggestion for Mr. Trump’s trip: “If he’s going to Europe anyway,” he asked, “why not take some time to visit with the NATO allies that would be affected by his plan to pull back on the U.S. commitment to the organization?”",Presidential contenders usually try to burnish their foreign policy credentials when abroad. Mr. Trump plans no meetings with government or political leaders.
"Noor Ellis is escorted to her trial. (AAP)

The Australian family of murdered businessman Robert Ellis is in shock at the 12-year sentence handed down to his wife, who ordered the Bali hit.

Perth students John and Peter Ellis had prepared themselves for their mother Noor Ellis, 45, to go to prison for 15 years as prosecutors had recommended, for planning the murder of Robert Ellis.

But today, the court handed down a 12-year term in recognition of her remorse and ""prolonged mental pressure"".

She could have received a maximum penalty of death.

Peter Ellis told reporters his father's death had left a huge hole in his life and John's, as well as for Mr Ellis' older children Kelvin and Christina.

""We as a family are extremely disappointed by the outcome of 12 years,"" he said.

""We would have expected a sentence of at least 20 for the brutal, premeditated murder of our father.

""For the verdict to be a sentence of only 12 years is unjust not only for us as a family, but Indonesia in general.""

The prosecutor said he was considering an appeal.

The body of Mr Ellis was found wrapped in plastic in a rice field last October.

The popular expat, who had made his wealth in telecommunications, aviation and property, had been set upon in his own villa, held down on the kitchen floor and his throat slashed with a knife.

His wife had been sitting in the next room. She helped dispose of the body and ordered her two maids to clean the bloody kitchen.

She initially reported Mr Ellis missing and lied to her sons about their father's whereabouts.

When she did confess to orchestrating the crime, she claimed she was desperate after years of neglect and being denied a divorce.

The Ellis family claims she was not neglected, and that her manipulation extended to submitting to the court a false statement purportedly signed by John Ellis, asking for a lenient sentence.

""We are very upset about the accusations against our father which Noor has fabricated in order to defend herself,"" Peter Ellis said outside court.

""We are also still in disbelief over the falsified statement, which is now being used as evidence to support Noor, and would have thought such forgery was both a crime in itself and further evidence of guilt of Noor and other accomplices.""

Ellis' story changed a number of times after her arrest.

She first claimed she only wanted to teach her husband a lesson, and was shocked to find the five men she paid $14,000 had killed him.

Later, she admitted she had ordered Mr Ellis killed, but ""not sadistically"" - a deal she had sealed with a pinky swear.

Judge Wirakanta said he accepted Ellis ordered the murder because she felt hurt.

She had enough time to change her mind, but didn't, he said.

""It's true the defendant and the victim have not lived harmoniously for about 11 years and the defendant wasn't given adequate mental and physical care,"" he said.

Two of the five men involved, known as Urbanus and Yohannes, were also sentenced to 12 years' jail today.

The others as well as two maids are expected to be sentenced soon for their roles.

Mr Ellis has been laid to rest in New Zealand.

Do you have any news photos or videos?",The family of Australian businessman Robert Ellis will be in court when his wife of 25 years is sentenced for arranging his brutal murder in Bali.
"MIAMI – In the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Pembroke Pines, students returning to school this year are being greeted not only by their teachers and principal. They're also meeting the armed school resource officer who will be stationed permanently on campus.

Crime in this middle-class community has been on a steady decline, but city officials decided to place a school police officer at every elementary, middle and high school after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., last year.

""It is a relief to have them here,"" Lakeside Elementary School Principal Linda Pazos said Monday, on the first day of school.

In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook, many districts across the nation are increasing the number of school resource officers on campus and, in a few cases, permitting teachers to carry concealed weapons themselves.

An armed security presence is now standard in many of the nation's middle and high schools, but it has been rarity at elementary schools. Few districts can afford to place a school resource officer at every elementary school, because there are so many and they tend to have fewer incidents requiring a police response than middle and high schools.

Lawmakers in every state in the nation introduced school safety legislation this year, and in at least 20 states those proposals became law, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The new laws range from one authorizing a volunteer, emergency security force at schools in Franklin County, Ala., to one allowing Missouri state employees to keep firearms in a vehicle on state property, if the car is locked and the weapon is approved by authorities and not visible.

Bernard James, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., said one clear trend among legislation introduced since Newtown has been assessing the security of elementary school campuses.

Past efforts to prevent school violence had not focused on elementary schools, James said, ""and that lack of dedicating resources is what was under examination.""

There are more than 67,000 elementary schools nationwide, more than twice the number of middle and high schools combined.

Sandy Hook Elementary had all the standard safeguards and more, including a locked, video-monitored front door. It did not have a school resource officer. Instead, like most districts, there were police officers at nearby middle and high schools.

There are many advantages to having an officer stationed at school: Students who see or hear something suspicious immediately know who to tell; the mere presence of an officer can deter would-be attackers; and if a gunman does attack, a school resource officer is already there to respond, saving critical minutes between a 911 call and dispatchers mobilizing police.

""That first, immediate shot, chances are nobody is going to be able to stop,"" Kevin Quinn, president of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said. ""The difference is going to be responding to it.""

Quinn said his group has trained twice as many new officers as last year, more than 90 since January.

While some question the need for an armed presence on campus, arming teachers and others when a school resource officer can't be hired is even more controversial. At least three states have passed laws allowing teachers to be carry handguns on campus.

State Rep. Brett Hildabrand supported one such law in Kansas. It would allow teachers and staff with concealed carry permits to bring guns to school. He said the law has been misperceived as requiring teachers to carry, rather than letting districts determine their own policy.

""If a district doesn't want to adopt, then they don't have to,"" he said.

Few if any districts in the state have adopted the law as local policy. A major reason is that Kansas' main school insurer, EMC Insurance Cos., has said it won't renew coverage for schools that allow teachers and other staff to carry concealed weapons.

""We've been writing school business for almost 40 years, and one of the underwriting guidelines we follow for schools is that any onsite armed security should be provided by uniformed, qualified law enforcement officers,"" said Mick Lovell, vice president of business development for the company. ""Our guidelines have not recently changed.""

Quinn and others worry that an armed teacher may actually put kids more at risk, rather than protect them. If a shooter did come on campus, for example, teachers might have to choose between safeguarding students and leaving them to respond to an incident. Having an armed teacher on campus also could complicate matters for a responding officer who doesn't know if the teacher is an employee or the shooter, Quinn said.

""Who's the bad guy?"" he said. ""Who's the teacher with the gun?""

Christine Aron, a speech and language pathologist at Pines Lakes Elementary in Pembroke Pines, Fla., said she would not feel safer taking a handgun to school.

""I just think there's the potential for further injury, unnecessary injury, should God forbid a student get ahold of a weapon,"" Aron said. ""It happens all the time that kids get ahold of guns in their own homes that belong to their parents.""

Parents, for their part, have mixed feelings about having an armed presence on campus. Renee Lindberg has three children in Pembroke Pines schools, each now staffed with a full-time school resource officer.

""If it were 20, 30 years ago, you might go, `Is that really necessary?""' she said. But after shootings like Sandy Hook, ""It does bring a little peace of mind.""

Dara Van Antwerp, the school resource officer at Panther Run Elementary, the school one of Lindberg's children attends, said she used to have to monitor three or four schools at once. Having just one school, she said, lets her focus completely on campus security and better watch for suspicious activity.

""I'm not en route to another school and have a call come out at the one I just left,"" she said.",Students returning to school this fall are being greeted not only by their teachers and principal.
"The arrest of Gavrilo Princip. 'If there is one single historical figure who still provokes controversy, it is without doubt the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.' Photograph: Popperfoto

As the date approaches when all countries will mark 100 years since the ""shot heard around the world"", it gives rise to more discussions about the meaning of the first world war. If there is one single historical figure who still provokes controversy, it is without doubt the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. His shot led directly to the first world war when the Austro-Hungarian empire issued an ultimatum against Serbia and then declared war. Russia and France mobilised their armies, followed by Germany, and soon all the great powers had gone to battle.

Never before had a 19-year-old man provoked so much trouble: at the end of the four years of war, four powerful empires – the Austro-Hungarian, German, Turkish and Russian – disappeared from the world map, 16 million people were dead and 20 million wounded, and in 1917 the Bolsheviks came to power. These things may have happened at some point anyway, but it was Gavrilo Princip who sparked it all off.

The Wall Street Journal recently compared him to Osama Bin Laden, and reviewing Christopher Clark's bestseller The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, one author goes so far as to state that Princip ""did a great deal to make the Holocaust possible"". Not only was the second world war a consequence of the first world war, but in an irony only history can invent, the young terrorist died miserably in April 1918 in the same prison that later became the concentration camp of Theresienstadt.

Although blaming a single person for the Holocaust is similar to the controversial theory in The Jew of Linz – which claims that the incident responsible for Adolf Hitler becoming antisemitic was a schoolboy interaction in Linz in 1904 with the Jewish philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein – for the first time a Serbian weekly recently published a picture that proves how important Princip was to Hitler. It shows Hitler being given a memorial stone that commemorated Princip, taken by the Nazis from the Sarajevo street where Princip opened fire on Ferdinand. The weekly paper Vreme says the memorial was presented as a gift to Hitler by German officers during the second world war as he celebrated his 52nd birthday on 20 April 1941. Three days earlier Yugoslavia had capitulated after being invaded by Nazi Germany and its allies.

About the same time as this picture was published in Serbia, neighbouring Bosnia – where the ""Sarajevo, the heart of Europe"" celebration will take place on 28 June – announced a new monument to Ferdinand. A few months later the Serbian government announced that it will build a big monument to Princip.

So who was the hero and who was the victim? It seems the old formula could be applied once again: ""One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."" In the case of Princip, which side should we choose? The answer is clear: both are wrong.

What is missing here is the third option. None of the above monuments gets the picture right; both represent historical revisionism at its worst. According to the historical archives, during the hearing of Princip on 12 October 1914, when asked by the judge what kind of idea stood behind the assassination, the young terrorist answered plainly: ""I believe in the unification of all south Slavs."" Although he was surely used by the Serbian ultra-nationalist organisation Black Hand, Gavrilo and his comrades were not nationalists. This can also be proved by the books they had read: the evening before the assassination, Gavrilo was reading Peter Kropotkin's ""Memoirs of a Revolutionist"", while on the same evening another member of their revolutionary organisation Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), Danilo Ilić – only three years older than Princip and already a translator of Kierkegaard, Ibsen and Edgar Allan Poe – was translating Oscar Wilde. Another member of Young Bosnia and its main ideologist, Vladimir Gaćinović, was a friend of Victor Serge, Julius Martov and Leon Trotsky.

If we want to explain the shot that was heard around the world, we should first explain its historical context. It was not Princip but imperialism that drove us to the first world war. And contrary to the current trend for historical revisionism – be it the Serbian version of Princip as a ""nationalist hero"" or the Bosnian obsequiousness to Ferdinand – those young people were primarily political romantics and anti-imperialists.

So why does Princip still matter? Usually we think 100 years is a long period, sufficient to learn some lessons from history, but if anything, it is exactly the first world war centenary that proves again that maybe the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from it at all. As long as the worldwide competition for the best commemoration of 28th June remains a self-congratulatory spectacle, European nations might be sleepwalking into war again.",Srećko Horvat: It was not the 'shot heard around the world' that caused the 1914-18 war but imperialism – anything else is revisionism
"Foxconn announced a third employee has died as a result of injuries sustained in that explosion on May 20 inside the factory that makes iPads. In a statement, Foxconn revealed that 15 others were injured in the accident, and six of the injured had been treated in a hospital and released.

The explosion originated in “one of the polishing workshops at our company’s Hongfujin Precision Electronics (Chengdu) Co. Ltd. facility in Chengdu,” according to the Foxconn statement. The company is still investigating the cause of the accident, but said the initial findings show “the accident was caused by an explosion of combustible dust in a duct.”

All production at the factory has been halted, but the company expects to resume operations on Tuesday, according to M.I.C. Gadget. The site reports that the Chinese government in Chengdu has taken over the plant, censoring the information flow to the extent that local newspapers aren’t reporting about it.

With numerous workers committing suicide at the company’s Shenzhen-based iPad plant last year, Foxconn attempted to remedy the situation by giving them raises, but still needed to increase the production capacity to meet increasing demand. As a result, the new factory was built, an enormous eight-building complex hastily constructed in a record-breaking 70 days to accommodate the voracious demand for the iPad 2.

Soon after the factory was built, according to M.I.C. Gadget’s Star Chang, Apple’s inspection team visited the facility, taking two days to inspect the buildings, production lines and “especially the workers’ dormitories.” After its inspection, Apple approved the plant for manufacturing iPads.

So is this what it takes to bring a $499 iPad to our doorsteps? What are the limits of human costs that consumers are willing to accept in the manufacturing of their electronics products? Would you be willing to pay, say, an extra $100 for an iPad if you could be assured that those workers who manufactured it were toiling in safe conditions, paid fair wages and not driven to suicide?","Foxconn announced a third employee has died as a result of injuries sustained in that explosion on May 20 inside the factory that makes iPads. In a statement, Foxconn revealed that 15 others were inj"
"8/2/2010 3:40 PM PDT by TMZ Staff

TMZ has learned Charlie Sheen's actual ""jail"" sentence will last only seconds. TMZ broke the story ... under the plea deal just approved by the court, Charlie will get a 30-day sentence which will be ""administered and executed"" at Promises rehab facility in Malibu -- where Charlie stayed either full or part-time for more than a month earlier this year. Sources connected with the case tell TMZ that Charlie will receive credit for ""time served"" ... translation, we're told Charlie will check into Promises on August 23 and immediately leave.And it gets even better for Sheen -- he's already completed his 36 hours of anger management, another element of the plea deal. The plea bargain is a victory for Yale Galanter, who shockingly represents the alleged victim in the case -- Brooke Mueller. Galanter ended up negotiating the plea with the Pitkin County DA.

Tags: Charlie Sheen, Brooke Mueller, Celebrity Justice","TMZ has learned Charlie Sheen 's actual ""jail"" sentence will last only seconds. TMZ broke the story ... under the plea deal just approved by the court,…"