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http://web.archive.org/web/20120604112028id_/http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2012/06/mexico-election-diary

Dear TW: There are serious numerical anomalies in the debate you are moderating.You may want to check it out. I will state no opinion on who should or should not, will or will not become President of Mexico in four weeks´ time. I will nevertheless tell you that there is ample evidence to point out that the vote in this debate has been tampered with. I am sorry and certainly I believe the political operative who quite possibly has been behind this vote-rigging has to be at least privately reprimanded by his party;The Economist´s staff may want to do a quick investigation with the ample means at their disposal and should they conclude that enough evidence supports the proposition that this shameful event has taken place, a disclaimer on the debate should be added.Pulling this under the rug would be quite counter-productive. To many people the world over, myself included, this newspaper is an institution worth preserving.Numbers, facts and balanced, insightful analysis are the reasons we have trusted The Economist for decades. It is totally unacceptable for anyone to tarnish its reputation by using old Mexican small-town vote-rigging tactics either to get back at Mrs Josefina Vazquez´s use of The Economist at the first televised presidential debate against Mr Peña Nieto, or as a propaganda tool in the next debate. Let´s see the numbers.For those unfamiliar with Mexico´s presidential election to be held July 1, 2012,there are four candidates.One of them, from the teacher´s union, has never polled above 5%.The ones with real chances are Mr. Peña Nieto from PRI, who polled formerly as high as 42% and now in the low 30s; Mrs.Josefina Vazquez, from the ruling center-right PAN,now in third and formerly in second place, polling in the high 20s, and Mr. AMLO from the center-left PRD, now in second place, polling in the low 30s but behind Mr Peña Nieto.Some polls speak of a four point spread between the two, others point to a ten point spread. But the essence of the matter is that all parties as well as the voters they represent are united in this: they are all against PRI and Mr. Peña Nieto ever claiming back the presidency they lost in the year 2000.Thus if Mr Peña Nieto has 34% or 42 % of the votes, by definition that means that either 66% or 58% of all voters are opposed to the proposition that "Mexico is better off under the PRI" The fact that your poll shows 30% of the people opposing your motion instead of the 60-70% indicated by all polls conducted in Mexico is a first sign of trouble.Only the staff at The Economist knows how many votes have originated outside Mexico.If the numbers do not change much once these non-Mexico originated votes have been removed, the idea of vote manipulation gathers strength. Now, the people most likely to read this newspaper in Mexico, and thus vote in your debate, are naturally highly educated professionals.But you see, the latest poll gruporeforma.blogs.com/encuestas confirms the well-known fact that this demographic is overwhelmingly against the PRI, and has been so for at least 20 years, if not more.The affluent and well-educated are mostly PRD and to a certain extend PAN.In Mexico City, for example, PRD has a twenty-point lead.The actual numbers nationwide are:For voters with only primary education PRI 41%,PRD 30%, PAN 25%.For voters with college education:PRI 28%, PRD 43%, PAN 21%.Therefore, among the people most likely to read TE less than 30% would agree with your proposition, yet your numbers show just the opposite result. Or do they? Well, actually the opinions stated in your 116 Opening Comments,50 Rebuttal Comments, 541 Opening Recommendations and 286 Rebuttal Recommendations if carefully tabulated and analyzed are totally supportive of those rough numbers of 70% of voter´s negating PRI´s returning to the Presidency and below 30% believing "Mexico is better off under the PRI" The fact that your comments are in statistical agreement with the numbers we would expect from a multitude of polls, while your poll debate numbers are so divergent as to be mirror images of the former is a clear indication of voter fraud. If we read carefully the 116 Opening Comments we see only 105 are real comments, since people sometimes mistakenly click on to post before they have actually written any comment.About 10% of these 105 indicate no decision on the debate´s proposition, but rather speak of various tangential matters such as the convenience for non-Mexicans to abstain from voting(the opinion of that gentleman who wisely retired to sunny Portugal,SaintMartinian),or to buy beach-front property(YukonDave),teachers saying they will use the debate in their classroom...and a funny Mexican who thinks his country would be better served if it were a colony of Sweden or The Netherlands(recommended by 3)...or another one who says Mexico would have been better off if it had not declared independence from Spain.

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WITH a month to go until Mexico’s presidential election, everyone is thinking about politics. Or are they? A new poll asking which news stories have caught people’s attention suggests that campaign hasn’t grabbed everyone.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130712035347id_/http://www.aljazeera.com:80/archive/2003/06/2008491463219614.html

Castao, who leads the Colombian paramilitaries, known by their Spanish acronym AUC, the largest right-wing paramilitary force to ever exist in the western hemisphere reveals that he was trained in the arts of war in Israelas a young man of 18 in the 1980s. He glowingly adds: “I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis,” in his chapter-long account of his Israel experiences. Castao’s right-wing Phalange-like AUC force is now by far the worst human rights violator in all of the Americas, and ties between that organisation and Israel are continually surfacing in the press. The AUC paramilitaries are a fighting force that originally grew out of killers hired to protect drug-running operations and large landowners. They were organised into a cohesive force by Castao in 1997. It exists outside the law but often coordinates its actions with the Colombian military, in a way similar to the relationship of the Lebanese Phalange to the Israeli army throughout the 1980s and 1990s. According to a 1989 Colombian Secret Police intelligence report, apart from training Carlos Castao in 1983, Israeli trainers arrived in Colombia in 1987 to train him and other paramilitaries who would later make up the AUC. Fifty of the paramilitaries’ “best” students were then sent on scholarships to Israel for further training according to a Colombian police intelligence report, and the AUC became the most prominent paramilitary force in the hemisphere, with some 10,000-12,000 men in arms. The Colombian AUC paramilitaries are always in need of arms, and it should come as no surprise that some of their major suppliers are Israeli. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala. In May of last year, GIRSA, an Israeli company associated with the Israeli Defence Forces and based in Guatemala was able to buy 3000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition that were then handed over to AUC paramilitaries in Colombia. Israel’s military relations with right-wing groups and regimes spans Latin America from Mexico to the southernmost tip of Chile, starting just a few years after the Israeli state came into existence. Since then, the list of countries Israel has supplied, trained and advised includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela. But it isn’t only the sales of planes, guns and weapons system deals that characterises the Israeli presence in Latin America. Where Israel has excelled is in advising, training and running intelligence and counter-insurgency operations in the Latin American “dirty war” civil conflicts of Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and now Colombia. In the case of the Salvadoran conflict - a civil war between the right-wing landowning class supported by a particularly violent military pitted against left-wing popular organisations - the Israelis were present from the beginning. Besides arms sales, they helped train ANSESAL, the secret police who were later to form the framework of the infamous death squads that would kill tens of thousands of mostly civilian activists. From 1975 to 1979, 83% of El Salvador's military imports came from Israel, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. By 1981, many of those in the civilian popular political movements who had survived the death squads headed for the hills to become guerrillas. By 1981 there was an open civil war in El Salvador which took over a decade to resolve through negotiations. Even though the US was openly backing the Salvadoran Army by 1981, as late as November 1983 it was asking for more Israeli “practical assistance” there, according to a declassified secret document obtained recently by Aljazeera. Among the assistance asked for were helicopters, trucks, rifles, ammunition, and combat infantry advisors to work at both the “company and battalion level of the Salvadoran Army”. One notable Salvadoran officer trained by the Israelis was Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, who always held a high opinion of the Israelis. It was Major D’Aubuisson who ordered the assassination of El Salvador’s archbishop amongst thousands of other murders. Later he would organise the right-wing National Republican Alliance Party (ARENA) and send his son to study abroad in the relative safety of Israel. Amazingly, while the Israelis were training the El Salvadoran death squads they were also supporting the anti-semitic Argentine military government of the late 1970s and early 1980s - at a time when that government was involvedin another “dirty war” of death squads and disappearances. In 1978, Nicaragua’s dictator Somoza was making his last stand against a general uprising of the Sandinista-led population who were sick of his family’s dynasty which had ruled and monopolised the county for half a century. The Israelis and the US had been supplying Somoza with weapons for years. But when President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976 he ordered a cessation of all US military assistance to Nicaragua. Israel utilised Carter's humanrights policy to its advantage Filling the void, the Israelis immediately increased their weapons supplies to Somoza until he fled the country when the Sandinistas took power. Israeli operatives then helped train right-wing Nicaraguan Contras in Honduran and Costa Rican camps to fight the Sandinista government, according to Colombian police intelligence reports Aljazeerahas obtained. At least some of the same Israeli operatives had also previously trained the nucleus of the paramilitary organisations that would become the AUC in Colombia. But by far the bloodiest case of Israeli involvement in Latin America was its involvement in Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s. As in El Salvador, a civil war pitted a populist but, in this case, mainly Indian left against a mainly European oligarchy protected by a brutal Mestizo Army. As Guatemalan President Carlos Arana said in 1971, "If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so." The Israelis supplied Guatemala with Galil rifles, and built an ammunition factory for them, as well as supplying armoured personnel carriers and Arava planes. Behind the scenes, they were actively involved in the bloodiest counter-insurgency campaign the hemisphere has known since the European conquest, in which at least 200,000 (mostly Indians) were killed. Like Israel’s original occupation of Palestine, several entire Guatemalan Indian villages were razed and a million people displaced. “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea,” said Guatemalan President Rios Montt in 1982. Israeli arms and training fuelledGuatemalan unrest Guatemalan army officers credit Israeli support with turning the tide against the uprising, not only in the countryside where Israeli counter-insurgency techniques and assistance set up strategic-hamlet-like “development poles” along the lines of the Israeli kibbutz, but also in the cities where “Israeli communication technicians and instructors” working through then-sophisticated computers were able to locate and then decimate guerrillas and their supporters in Guatemala City in 1981. From the late 1970s until the 1990s, the US could not overtly support the Guatemalan army because of its horrendous human rights record (although there was some covert support), but many in the US government, especially in the CIA, supported Israel in taking up the slack. But the US grew to regret its actions. On 10 March 1999, US President Bill Clinton issued an apology for US involvement in the war: The “United States... support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression...was wrong.” No similar statement has ever been forthcoming from the Israelis. At the present time, the only major insurgency war in Latin America is in Colombia, where Israel has an overt involvement. Besides the dozen or so Kfir IAI C-7 jet fighters they have sold the Colombian government, and the Galil rifles produced in Bogota under licence, most of the Israeli ties to the government’s counter-insurgency war are closely-guarded secrets. Aljazeera’s attempts to obtain clarification on these and other issues for this story were stonewalled by the Israeli embassy in Washington. Why does Israel continue to provide arms and expertise to the pariahs of the world? Clearly, part of the reason is the revenues produced by arms sales, and part of it has do with keeping up with trends in counter-insurgent war across the globe. But another factor is what is demanded of Israel by the world’s only superpower, the US, in partial exchange for the superpower’s continued support for Israeli dominance in the Middle East. This relationship can be best illustrated by recently declassified 1983 US government documents obtained by the Washington, DC-based National Security Archives through the Freedom of Information Act. One such declassified document is a 1983 memo from the notorious Colonel Oliver North of the Reagan Administration’s National Security Council and reads: “As discussed with you yesterday, I asked CIA, Defense, and State to suggest practical assistance which the Israelis might offer in Guatemala and El Salvador.” Another document, this time a 1983 cable from the US Ambassador in Guatemala to Washington Frederic Chapin shows the money trail. He says that at a time when the US did not want to be seen directly assisting Guatemala, “we have reason to believe that our good friends the Israelis are prepared, or already have, offered substantial amounts of military equipment to the GOG (Government of Guatemala) on credit terms up to 20 years...(I pass over the importance of making huge concessionary loans to Israel so that it can make term loans in our own backyard).” In other words, during civil wars in which the US does not want to be seen getting its hands dirty in Latin America, the superpower loans Israel money at a very good rate, and then Israel uses these funds to do the “dirty work”. In this regard, in Latin America at least, Israel has become the hit-man for the US.

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<P>“I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel, and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements” said Colombian paramilitary leader and indicted drug trafficker Carlos Castao in his ghostwritten autobiography, Mi Confesin.</P>

http://web.archive.org/web/20131021172903id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/china-landscape-painting

A detail from Saying Farewell at Xunyang, by Qiu Ying, c1500-50 Photograph: John Lamberton/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art On 5 August 1473, a young artist drew the first ever landscape. The date is known precisely because Leonardo da Vinci wrote it on the sheet of paper, as if aware of the revolutionary nature of what he was doing. To look at mountains and trees just for themselves was unprecedented. Or was it? The invention of landscape painting is one of the great moments of European art. Painting nature is a way to get inside yourself. To this day, people enjoy doing watercolours in the outdoors as a form of meditation. Leonardo's discovery of the mystery of nature – which you see in all his paintings, with their dreamy rocks and pools – is the invention of a new kind of inner life. Yet it is a lot less original than we might like to think. There is an uncanny likeness between Leonardo's rocks, trees and rivers and the rocks, trees and rivers that Chinese artists were painting centuries before he was born. It is bizarre: that 1473 drawing actually looks like a reworking of classic Chinese paintings such as Li Gongnian's Winter Evening Landscape. When was that painted? I look at the label in the V&A's new exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. It says 1120. That's 353 years before the very similar sketch by Leonardo. It is conventional, nowadays, to pay lip service to the fact that many versions of art exist, that beautiful art comes from all over the world and every way of life. Yet the story of art that most of us absorb – as told in The Story of Art by EH Gombrich, first published in 1950 and still the definitive account of art's progress – puts European innovation at the centre of the action. All peoples make art, but the west takes it forward. Masterpieces of Chinese Painting is the most devastating refutation of such assumptions I have ever seen. It shows that during the Song dynasty, at a time when Europeans were fighting barbaric crusades and had long forgotten the creativity that flourished in ancient Greece, artists in China were taking painting to heights of sensitivity and poetry that would not be attained elsewhere until the ages of Leonardo – or for that matter, when you look at the most radical Chinese touches, Van Gogh. I'd go further. Looking at this show being installed and talking to its curator Zhang Hongxing, I can't resist airing the theory that Leonardo stole the idea of landscape painting from China. Could he somehow have seen Chinese paintings? Might something have reached the west along the Silk Road? Excitedly, I get Leonardo's 1473 drawing up on my iPad and hold it among the 12th-century Chinese landscapes for comparison. The shapes of the hills and trees in Leonardo's sketch perfectly mirror the sugar-loaf peaks and willowy trees in 900-year-old Chinese paintings. Zhang's well aware of this idea: it was raised very seriously in the 1950s, he says, but there is no proof. It's a mystery. Nor is Leonardo the only European pioneer of landscape who looks "Chinese". Zhang points out that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is also very "Chinese" looking. This is true. Bruegel's much-loved Hunters in the Snow has all the elements that delighted medieval Chinese landscape painters, including all that snow. But why did China invent landscape art in the first place? Why did artists begin to depict, not gods and battles as elsewhere, but the grandeur of nature? It has something to do with Buddhism, which spread to China before AD1,000 and inspired a culture of contemplation. It also has to do with the technical achievements of the Song era. The scientific mind that perfected porcelain also looked at nature with a new clarity. One of the first things you see in the show was actually painted by a Song emperor – though it comes with a warning to rulers, for Emperor Huizong's dreamy fascination with art helped to lose him his throne. Indeed, as the curator explains, painting in China has always been associated with retreat and escapism. Not all the works in this exhibition are landscapes. There are pictures of courtesans and the tremendous Nine Dragons, a dazzling mythic vision painted by Chen Rong in 1244. Yet for me, the escapist pursuit of pastoral in China's pioneering landscapes is utterly beguiling. After the Mongols conquered China there was a clear association of art with the rejection of power. Turning their backs on the court, intellectuals created gardens, wrote poetry and painted expressive scenes of wintry trees. They rendered nature in a free, subjective style that anticipated – and of course, influenced – Van Gogh. Personally, I am convinced that Leonardo must have got access to the art of China. He was fascinated by the east and once applied for a job in Istanbul, offering to serve the Ottoman empire and praising Allah in a letter that survives. Did all this interest in Asia lead him to some hushed library where he unrolled a silk scroll and saw mountains, cherry blossoms and water? One thing is certain. Zhang's great exhibition turns the story of art upside down.

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The history books say that western Renaissance artists invented landscape painting. Not if you believe a new V&A exhibition of Chinese art, writes Jonathan Jones

http://web.archive.org/web/20141011151523id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/10/09/ben-rhodes-deputy-national-security-adviser/

You’re one of the last charter Team Obama guys still on the job. What’s keeping you around? I never set out to work in the White House. What drew me to the campaign was really the opportunity to work for Barack Obama. I don’t necessarily see this as a situation where I’m going to be going through the revolving door, in and out of administrations. I happen to have found somebody who I really love to work for, who I have a really good relationship with, and it’s hard to walk away from that. Do you ever feel envious of friends you started with, who’re out now and setting their hours? Anybody who leaves here, you see them a couple months later and they look a lot better. They look 20 pounds lighter and five years younger. So it does give you some envy, because you see the physical toll the job takes on you. You see everybody moving, some in Washington, some out to California, and you realize there are many green pastures out there. I still come to work in a windowless office in the basement of the White House. But the other side of the coin is that there’s no other job like this. When you walk out that door for the last time here, you realize your ability to be at the center of events and decision-making on momentous things that are changing the course of history, that goes away. It cuts both ways. You had a choice when you entered public life between this and pursuing a career as an author. Is that still the plan when you leave? I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction. When I leave here, I would certainly want to do my own writing, but more in the non-fiction realm — books, long-form journalism, and related opportunities. So I haven’t given it much thought beyond that. But after writing for somebody else for so many years, it will be interesting to pivot back to doing things in my own voice. What advice would you give to somebody who wants to follow your path, about the most relevant experience you had to land you this job? People make a mistake when they think that if you just accumulate a set number of things on your resume, it’s going to lead you to a particular place — the pattern of essentially compiling credentials to climb your way up a ladder. That may work, but that’s not at all what happened to me. I found people I really wanted to work for; I made myself available to do whatever I could with the skills I had; I took some risk, packing up and moving to Chicago; and I looked for the opportunities that fit for me. So I think the biggest advice is to find people you love to work for who you’re going to learn from. You and the President obviously spend a lot of time together. Do you have any travel rituals? What do you do on the plane? He’s a card player, I’m not. But I’ve gone on all of his foreign trips. We’ll have very intense schedules. One ritual is he likes to find little pockets of down time in the day to just unwind, talk about other things, to be relaxed. But the one ritual that’s always the case is that on speeches, he works very late, so he’ll constantly be making line edits and fiddling with text up until the last minute. So you get a lot of late nights, especially on the big speeches. So you have to kind of pace yourself with the expectation you’re not going to get a lot of sleep, that you’ve got to find ways to relax over the course of the day and that you need to have a reserve of mental energy that you can draw from. That’s the rhythm that you get into on these foreign trips that can be quite a grind. When you’re actually in the White House, how long is your typical day? Can you characterize it? I’ll get in around 8 and get an intelligence briefing at the beginning of the day, and then go into a series of morning meetings that are about figuring out what we need in place for that day. The afternoons tend to be meetings or work on what policies are running through a process, what are the next big things we’re getting ready for, the next big trip, the next big speech, the next big rollout of a policy. And I’ll tend to be at work from 8 to 8. But the thing about this job, it’s not so much the hours in the office—it’s that you’re always on call. So you’ll end up having to answer email and do things up until you go to bed at 12 or 1 in the morning. So even when you’re home, you’re still working. That’s particularly true in foreign policy. The other day, when we launched airstrikes in Syria, we obviously knew that was going to happen, but that happens overnight, so you basically end up being up all night. You don’t get to control the timing of when things happen in foreign policy like you do in other areas. If something happens in North Korea, or the Middle East or Ukraine, you have to respond to it no matter what time of day it is. So it ends up making you essentially on call 24 hours a day. What’s the most important speech you’ve worked on so far? I’m wondering where the UN speech ranks. The UN speech is definitely one of the most important, because it’s intended to set the tone for the next year or so going forward, here in the United States but also globally. It’s the roadmap for we’re doing, where we’re trying to go, what we expect of others. There have been a handful of speeches like that. The Cairo speech in 2009, in some ways the Nobel speech he gave, which in some ways was a window into his view of the world that endures well. They break through in a way because they’re bigger than the precise moment we’re in. They’re about laying down markers for what’s going to define the U.S. role in the world for a period of time to come. Ben Rhodes, left with President Obama and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough on Air Force OnePhoto: Pete Souza—The White House/Getty Images Did you revisit the Cairo and Nobel speeches in writing this one? How’d they inform it? I actually find the two things I always try to do before working on a big speech are to go back and read relevant speeches by President Obama and by other presidents. It’s interesting to see how other presidents deal with similar moments in time. How did other Presidents speak at the UN at times of significant international turmoil or the beginning of a military action? For President Obama, I often try to go back and look at the foundational speeches. So, what did we say at the UN in previous years? What’s in Cairo speech, what’s in the Nobel speech, even going back to the campaign. And you try to find a thread you can pull forward and update. Even sometimes there’s specific language that you seek to use again to make sure there’s a thread of consistency to the message. Are there speeches by other presidents you referenced specifically for his latest UN address? I looked at the 1961 speech to the General Assembly by John F. Kennedy, and I actually ended up putting a quote from that speech in this one. There, too, the theme was essentially a world at a crossroads and having to make a choice between different paths. And so that ended up impacting how we framed this speech. We looked at others, too, and it’s interesting to see how different presidents make use of that particular world stage. Looking past the current military campaign, how hopeful are you about a lasting peace, in whatever way you want to define that, presiding in the Middle East in the mid- to long-term? Some people are seeing nothing less than a civilizational collapse that’s not fixable in our lifetimes. The reason I have to optimistic is that it’s the one thing everybody in the region seems to agree on–that this is such a shocking organization that it’s stirred people out of complacency and opened the doors to alliances that weren’t previously possible. We had the Iraqi prime minister in a meeting with the five Arab nations in our coalition, who have Sunni-led governments. That would not have been thinkable even six months ago. If everybody maintains the current sense of urgency, you can see a pathway for this group to be steadily eroded, but also something better taking its place in terms of a new approach to regional stability. And the other thing I’d say is we can fall into a trap of making these groups and threats out to be more resilient than they really are. With Al Qaeda, we’ve shown that if we just keep the pressure on and have a consensus against an organization, the organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan for intents and purposes is at best a shadow of its former self. The challenge is now doing that in the heart of the Middle East with this group and other extremist satellite. But part of the reason the President gave the speech that he gave is to make clear this can’t just be us launching a bunch of airstrikes. This has to be a much broader effort. Most of our readers would agree with the assessment behind the rebalance to Asia, that economically the center of gravity in the world is shifting there. It also seems unavoidable with ISIS, and Israel, and Ukraine, and Ebola, that your focus is directed elsewhere right now. How do you deal with that? You have to be very disciplined to make sure that even as you’re working the urgent issues, you’re not neglecting what I’d say are the opportunity pieces of your agenda. And the rebalance to Asia is certainly part of that. So for instance, when I went up to the UN with the President, even as we had to work on the speech and all the elements of the coalition building, I carved out two hours for a meeting with the presidential advisor from Burma to talk about the President’s upcoming trip there. It would have been easier to just scrap something like that and focus on ISIL. But you have to be disciplined and remember that you have to focus on the opportunities in the world and not just the threats. The fact is in the long run those may end up making a bigger difference, because there you can make progress and you can build new ways of doing things. The key to it is looking at your schedule at the beginning of the week, and saying to yourself, As easy as it would be to only do the Middle East this week, I have to set aside some time for Africa, for Asia, for Latin America—which we generally define as the opportunity regions—and be sure we’re hitting our marks on them. You’re part of the first brother team to make this list. What was your dynamic with [older brother David, president of CBS News] growing up? Did you argue politics over the dinner table? We always got along very well. We definitely had different political perspectives. But in my family we were encouraged to argue about everything over the dinner table. And I think since then, we’ve never been competitive, in part because we’re in different fields. He’s in media, I’m in politics and foreign policy and that makes it easier for us to root for each other without competing in the same territory. Does knowing him make you more or less cynical about media? Seeing his perspective about what people are interested in over the years definitely helped me understand that the media is in a high pressure business of their own and they have to find ways in a crowded information environment to report the news in a way that gets peoples attention. It gives me an understanding of the dynamic on the other end of the phone when I’m talking to a reporter, which I have to do a fair amount of. This story is from the October 27, 2014 issue of Fortune.

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As Deputy National Security Adviser, he helps guide the president's words and thinking on foreign policy at a precarious time.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141111183510id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/08/francis-bedford-royal-tour-middle-east-first-official-photographer

Six Egyptians – possibly attendants of the Victorian photographer Francis Bedford and his companions – are arranged in a receding zigzag across the rough, uneven floor, dwarfed by walls, pillars and doorjambs in an austere, finely detailed 1862 image of the Ptolemaic Temple of Horus. Bedford must have insisted on between 10 and 12 seconds of complete stillness from the human figures in this majestic work, fully consonant with the 19th-century vogue for the timeless, immovable east – except for one deliberate anachronism. Between two of the pillars stands a white canvas hut. Here is Bedford’s portable darkroom, scene of minute struggles with the collodion process for making glass negatives. Thus an art form barely 20 years old breaks the repose of Ozymandias. The photograph is one of around 190 that Bedford took when he accompanied the 20-year-old Prince of Wales, Albert Edward (“Bertie”), on a four-month tour of the Middle East in 1862, and which entered the Royal Collection after his return. They are currently on display at the Queen’s Gallery in London, in a handsome exhibition that does not, however, fully explore all the possibilities of its subject. The Prince of Wales, as we are not told in the Queen’s Gallery, was under a cloud. The previous summer he had been initiated into the pleasures of the flesh by an Irish girl named Nellie, and it was from such beginnings that his scandalised father, Prince Albert, hit on the idea of an improving tour of the Ottoman dominions, focusing on the Holy Lands. But Albert had since died, his decline accelerated by his son’s “fall”, and this made Bertie doubly odious to the grief-stricken Queen, who insisted that the trip go ahead while she plotted to marry him off. The prince, enjoying a gentle degree at Cambridge, and evincing no wanderlust, was powerless to resist. Setting off from Venice in February 1862, the smallish royal party (the principals consisted of Bertie, his governor, General Robert Bruce, and a handful of other, carefully selected, male companions) steamed down the Dalmatian coast and crossed the Mediterranean to Alexandria. From Egypt they went on to explore Palestine and Syria, living in tents and escorted by Ottoman cavalrymen, before sailing back to Europe via Constantinople. The trip took four and a half months, with Bedford as official photographer. His task was to immortalise scenes that were, as the Photographic News put it, “fraught with historic and sacred associations”. Bedford was an experienced architectural and topographical photographer, with royal commissions already behind him, and he fulfilled his brief brilliantly. His harmonious, granular studies of the Egyptian temples and the Roman ruins at Baalbek, in Lebanon, accentuate the neglected, yet romantic, character of these places, with locals used for scale or foreground interest but offering no serious counterweight to the ruins among which they graze their goats or (in the case of Coptic Christians, appropriating part of a Pharoanic complex) come to pray. The biblical sites as depicted by Bedford seem virtually unchanged since the Saviour’s time. His Sea of Galilee, for instance, shimmers softly in a landscape that is empty but for the ruins of Tiberias – where the royal party took Easter communion. And there is little in his image of Jerusalem from Mount of Olives to suggest that these are not the very trees among which Jesus wept the night before his crucifixion. It would have been helpful, in the sumptuously illustrated catalogue by Sophie Gordon, to have learned more about the religious importance of these places, which is so vividly evoked in contemporary pilgrims’ accounts. Among these accounts are the entertaining letters of the liberal churchman Arthur Stanley, who was on the tour as Bertie’s spiritual chaperone. Artists and even photographers had trodden the same paths before (the Englishman Francis Frith as recently as 1860), but each year, as the photo-historian Badr El Hage notes in his useful catalogue essay, brought more pilgrims, scholars and diplomats to a region that had seen few westerners since the Crusades. Passenger steamships (P&O began plying the eastern Mediterranean in 1835), guidebooks and the first Thomas Cook package tour gave notice of a harder, more permanent intrusion, with western museums filling up with Mediterranean fragments, the great powers using their concern for the Holy Places and religious minorities as a pretext for elbowing into Ottoman affairs, and, already, those mellow voids inspiring thoughts of a Jewish state. The Tsar’s brother had made his tearful pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre three years before, the Russian foreign ministry minuting that “Jerusalem is the centre of the world and our mission must be there”. The British and French felt the same. Of the historical aspects of the itinerary, the Prince of Wales was indefatigably ignorant – as we know from Arthur Stanley, who felt affection for his boyish, good-humoured charge, but there was no denying that the young man was less moved by the scene of Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel than the prospect of shooting quail on the same slopes, and if he wasn’t complaining about all the “tumbledown” temples, he spent his time testing his travel companions on the plot of a recent potboiler. Bertie was a keen souvenir hunter, acquiring, among other things, a mummy whose excavation he had witnessed, a papyrus funerary text and a beautiful scarab made of glazed, blue-green soapstone, which he had mounted on tiny gold python heads, as a brooch. (Except for the mummy, which has disappeared, these objects have been included in the exhibition.) For the more thoughtful members of the party, there were considerable advantages to be gained from travelling with the heir to a quarter of the globe, not least permissions to visit the sepulchre of the Patriarchs at Hebron, hitherto inaccessible to Christians, and Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, whose dilapidated dignity (it has since been lavishly restored) Bedford was one of the earliest photographers to record. “The prince entered the mosque,” crowed the Illustrated London News, “standing where no infidel has stood since the Crusades.” In Jerusalem, Bertie was tattooed with the Crusaders’ Jerusalem Cross on his forearm. Along with the great Umayyad Mosque at Damascus, also somewhat shabby through Bedford’s lens, the Dome of the Rock is one of the few subjects that look better now than a century and a half ago. The pyramids have been all but consumed by Cairo’s sprawl, and the then-sleepy Lebanese port of Tripoli, also photographed by Bedford, by Sunni-Shia conflict. Religious bloodshed was indeed a theme of the later stages of the tour, from visits to Crusader castles to the aftermath of a rankling three-way enmity between Christians, Sunnis and Druze. In 1860, Druze bands had laid waste to hundreds of Christian settlements in Lebanon – including the village of Hasbiya, which Bedford photographed. Most affecting, however, are his images of Christian Damascus, annihilated in the same year, with the buildings reduced to carcasses and not a soul in sight. Also in Damascus, Bedford made a rare portrait of an exiled Algerian nationalist leader who had given Christians sanctuary in his home. Nowadays it is tempting to see communal conflict as endemic in the Levant and Mesopotamia, but the pogroms, whose effects the royal party witnessed had been notably rare until the 1840s. Bertie waxed indignant at Ottoman misrule, but Europe’s sponsorship of local clients (for years Britain had supported the Druze, while the French backed the Maronites) had helped upset the old religious balances in the first place, foreshowing the cataclysmic communal violence of the final decades of the Ottoman empire. Even the cheapness of English cloth had sharpened resentments between the various groups, enriching the Christian agents of the Manchester houses and impoverishing Muslim weavers – unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution and globalisation. In June 1862, the tourists went their separate ways – Stanley nursing a mix of pilgrim’s joy and filial sadness, for his mother had died in his absence, and Bruce a violent fever that would quickly kill him. Bedford got to work printing and exhibiting; his technique was commended by the cognoscenti and his images snapped up by the pious. As Gordon’s biographical essay tells us, he went on to become a much-respected (and wealthy) photographer, and left “an extraordinary photographic legacy, much of which remains to be discovered”. Queen Victoria found Bertie “much improved” by his travels, and “ready to do everything as I wish”. Stanley was less sanguine, writing of “the difficulty of producing any impression on a mind with no previous knowledge or interest to be awakened”. For all that, seven years later the prince would be drawn back to the Holy Land, this time in the company of his wife, the former Princess Alexandra of Denmark – and the recipient, as it turned out, of that beautiful, blue-green, python-mounted scarab. • Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1A, until 22 February

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When the Prince of Wales was sent away on a trip to the Middle East to prevent him behaving badly, Francis Bedford went with him – the pictures he took captured famous sites unchanged for thousands of years. By Christopher de Bellaigue

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However, analysts remain unconvinced that the share purchases will be enough to help the company fight off short-sellers. According to data by Jefferies, the outstanding shares held by short sellers on Noble Group increased from 50 million shares in April to around 400 million now. "[Despite the third buyback,] we continue to see the possibility of a dead cat bounce in Noble's shares. Near-term oscillators continue to point to the bearish side, with the 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) still capped below 50 and the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD) line remaining under the signal and zero line," IG's market strategist Bernard Aw wrote in a note released Tuesday, adding that the 50-day moving average at S$0.828 will act as a "formidable barrier" for the stock. A dead cat bounce is a short-lived rally, often caused by short-covering, in a stock suffering from a prolonged decline. Most importantly, Aw said that weak underlying fundamentals remained the key obstacles for a recovery in the battered stock. "The reality is that Noble is under pressure from several fronts, including a falling profit margin, a slowdown in commodity trading as well as issues relating to corporate governance and transparency. Piecemeal measures such as share buybacks are unlikely to relieve the downward pressure as long as the backdrop does not improve substantially," Aw said. For CMC Markets' Nicholas Teo, the sustainability of the rebound depends on how aggressive Noble Group is with their share purchases. "The rebound is relative on how much more the company wants to buy since they have in their authority to buy up to 673 million shares based on their filing. The shares they have bought thus far, with no pun intended, is only the tip of the iceberg," the Singapore-based analyst told CNBC by phone. Noble Group now holds more than 62 million shares by way of market acquisition. "The aggressive buying has shown a floor in the share price and markets recognize that, regardless of whether the rebound is sustainable or not, so short sellers may not be so keen now. But the rebound above S$0.70 may also allow short sellers to have the opportunity to have another kick in the can," Teo added. Shares of Noble Group have lost about 40 percent since February when anonymous group Iceberg Research released a series of critical reports on the Hong Kong trader's accounting practices. U.S. short seller Muddy Waters dealt another blow to the company in April after saying it had taken a short position on the stock. Last week, S&P downgraded the company's rating outlook to negative from stable, citing that the higher risk nature of Noble's trading positions could result in more volatile earnings and profitability for the company.

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A fresh round of stock buyback put some color back into shares of Noble Group, but analysts warn that the upside may be just a "dead cat bounce."

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FedEx's numbers are the first real look at the impact the brutal winter had on the shipping industry. Temperatures across a vast area of the United States, from the Great Plains through the Midwest and into the northern Appalachians, ran 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (3.3 to 5.5 degrees Celsius) below normal for 2-1/2 months straight. Companies across the board have been talking about how the weather hurt their quarterly results. McDonald's partly blamed a fall in January sales at its established U.S. restaurants on the frigid cold and snow, while vitamin and nutritional supplements retailer GNC Holdings warned that its first-quarter results would miss expectations for that reason. Ford Motor, railroad operator CSX and air carrier United Continental Holdings have also said the weather was affecting operations in the first quarter. During the third quarter, FedEx entered into an accelerated share repurchase agreement to buy back an aggregate of $2 billion of common stock. The third-quarter results benefited from Cyber Week, a heavy online shopping period that had fallen in the second quarter last year, as well as from one additional operating day, the company said. However, problems stemming from the harsh winter overshadowed those benefits. (Read more: Adobe forecast tops estimates as subscriptions rise) Apart from bad weather, FedEx, like bigger rival United Parcel Service, was also hit by an unprecedented surge in online holiday shipping volumes. Typically, a rise in online sales is good news for companies like these because it means more demand for their services. But this time, UPS said it had been overwhelmed by the volume of holiday packages. The arrival of Christmas presents around the globe was delayed, and angry customers took to social websites to complain.

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FedEx reported lower-than-expected results for the holiday quarter and gave a fiscal-year profit forecast below Wall Street estimates.

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"It's just drifting higher," said one U.S. trader, adding that end-of-the-week short-covering combined with a lack of offers as the end of the quarter approaches, helped prices turn slightly higher. Signs of possible agreement soon between Greece and its creditors steadied world stock markets and sent U.S. bond yields to nine-month highs by curbing demand for safe-haven U.S. debt. Expectations that U.S. interest rates will rise for the first time in nearly a decade this year, lifting the U.S. currency and boosting the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding bullion, have pressured gold, keeping it in a range. Gold has held largely between $1,160 and $1,230 since mid-March, struggling to break higher despite an ostensibly bullish rise in tensions over Greece. It has drawn some support from a rise in holdings of gold-backed exchange-traded funds, which issue securities backed by physical metal, this week after outflows earlier this year. Read MoreHere's why gold will rally: RBC's Gero Holdings of the biggest gold ETF, SPDR Gold Shares, rose 6.9 tons on Thursday, their biggest one-day increase since Feb. 2. Silver was down 0.6 percent at $15.77 an ounce, having briefly touched a three-month low of $15.50. Platinum was down 0.5 percent at $1,075.99 an ounce, while palladium was up 0.1 percent at $678.22 an ounce. "The industrial demand is light and there's a lot of recycling," the U.S. trader said, noting chart-based weakness as well. Palladium fell to a two-year low at $666.82 in earlier trade and fell for the seventh straight week. "While short-term moves are driven by many factors and the metal faces a number of challenges, we think the underlying weakness is due to a sharp slowdown in global auto sales growth," Macquarie said in a note.

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Gold was little changed on Friday, after falling to a three-week low, on caution ahead of crunch talks on Greece.

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While it's clear rate expectations are slightly higher for 2015, with the Fed expected to raise rates, Goncalves said the market could be positioning for other events as well, such as European Central Bank easing. "We've got the ECB meeting Jan. 22. The first week of January we get all of the European inflation data. That's going to really set the tone," he said. The market sees a chance that the ECB could announce a quantitative easing-stylebond buying program, but weak inflation data would reinforce that notion. Read MoreBuying stocks now: The world's easiest trade? Goncalves said a QE announcement could actually drive yields higher, since the expectations for deflation diminish. The 10-year yield rose after Federal Reserve QE announcements, he said. Bond yields move opposite prices. Yields have defied expectations all year, with rates at the long end of the curve near the lower end of the 2014 range in recent sessions. The 10-year Wednesday was at 2.26 percent, just below 2.28 percent, a support level traders have been watching. Read MoreExpect another good year for stocks in 2015: Darst Goncalves said the market has been building in expectations for a Fed hike in short-term rates. The yield curve has been flattening as yields rose at the shorter end of the curve, particularly the 2-year. Hedging for that trade could be part of the increase in shorts, he said. "The bond market is increasingly building in a more aggressive Fed," said Adrian Miller, director of fixed income strategy at GMP Securities. He said the Commodities Futures Trading Commission data on Dec. 16 showed net short positions on 10-year futures totaled 258,000 contracts, the second largest ever behind May, 2010 when there were 275,000.

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Some investors this holiday season have been busily building what some say could be the biggest short position ever in Treasury futures.

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"I heard from others that employers do not like graduates. They ask at interviews what you did after graduation," Lee said. Two-thirds of South Koreans aged 25-34 have a college degree, the highest proportion in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a developed nations' club among whom the average is just below 40 percent. Government efforts in recent years to encourage young people to pursue necessarily require a university degree have had limited success in a country obsessed with education. The high rate of graduates means many ambitious young people feel overqualified for the jobs that are available to them, and figure it's better to have no job than one below their expectations. South Korea's labor market is divided between permanent jobs with a high degree of security and temporary positions that end after two years, a split that makes it harder for young people to get on a career track. In 2012, 24 percent of workers in South Korea were temporary, double the OECD average. In November, Finance Minister Choi Kyung-hwan suggested measures to make the labor market more flexible by easing rules on lay-offs and pay. While employers supported the proposals, labor groups and many students did not. Read MoreForget exams, jobs a bigger worry for Korean youth A hand-written letter to Choi by a group calling itself "the Misfits" took issue with his ideas and went viral on social networks after it was posted on walls at Korea University and Yonsei University, two of the country's top colleges. "We are not angry because the regular workers are overly protected. We are angry because temporary workers are not ensured the benefits regular workers receive," it said. Kim Jong-jin, a research fellow at the Korea Labor and Society Institute, said many young people in highly educated South Korea were unwilling to take temporary jobs. "People in their mid-20s are supposed to be active in the labor market, but the market cannot exploit them as they keep on studying and preparing themselves for more stable jobs."

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With South Korea's youth unemployment at a 14-year high and hiring sluggish, thousands of students due to graduate are likely to instead stay on campus.

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The cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) was an intrepid performer who was central to avant-garde culture in New York during the 1960s and ’70s—the “Jeanne d’Arc of New Music,” the composer Edgard Varèse dubbed her—even if many weren’t sure how to evaluate her talents. Was she advancing the cause of free expression when she played on stage in the nude or wore a bra of televisions or was attached to a flight of balloons or let herself be covered in 20 pounds of chocolate fudge? Or did some of her antics become an excuse for men to ogle her and for the public to dismiss all unconventional art as a put-on? Was she, as well as being collaborator and muse for Nam June Paik in his revolutionary mixed-media pieces, also his stooge? These questions were debated in New York’s downtown artistic circles (especially by feminists) when she was alive. And they are quietly raised again in the celebratory exhibition and catalog “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s” at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, as well as in Joan Rothfuss ’s entertaining new biography, “Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman.” According to Ms. Rothfuss’s research, Moorman could have enjoyed a normal middle-class American life. Growing up in Little Rock, Ark., an only child who studied music and won the “Miss City Beautiful” contest at age 19, she was not a born rebel. Even after her move in 1957 to New York, where she attended the Juilliard School for a year and married a double-bassist, she envisioned herself playing cello in an orchestra or string ensemble. But performing the classics, Moorman decided, was a bore compared to the offerings in New York’s experimental music and art scene during the ’60s. Her marriage annulled, she took up with a series of male mentors. (She ended up happily paired with the visual artist Frank Pileggi. ) An eccentric who never threw anything away, Moorman has left the show’s six curators—one of whom is Ms. Rothfuss—with almost too much material to sift in presenting her flamboyant life. (Northwestern bought the artist’s archive and has been organizing it since 2001.) In addition to photographs of her in many productions, the exhibition has museum loans of Paik’s video sculptures and a program of films and videos that shows her playing works by Paik (“Sonata for Adults Only”) and others. There are cellos that Moorman fashioned, in neon or from syringes (used for her cancer treatments), as well as the felt-covered instrument that Joseph Beuys made for her to use in one of his works. Annotated scores of music she performed by New York’s avant-garde ( John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Paik) are here, along with her copy of Karlheinz Stockhausen ’s “Originale (Originals),” a piece from 1964 in which she played the part of the “String Player,” wearing only gauze. Moorman was a key figure in helping these composers to introduce unpredictability, spectacle, danger and humor into the rarefied air of the classical music concert. One way to liberate the audience, Paik believed, was to add nudity. In 1967 Moorman performed half-naked in his “Opera Sextronique” at a theater near Times Square. Arrested for indecent exposure, she spent the night in jail. The tabloid reporting on her trial, which resulted in a suspended sentence, defined her ever after in the public’s mind as the “Topless Cellist,” a label she resented when she wasn’t capitalizing on it. Moorman’s packrat habits have proved invaluable in reconstructing a less well-documented phase of her career: her role as an impresario. In 1963 she founded an annual Festival of the Avant Garde in New York. With almost no resources except her own vivaciousness, she produced it for 15 years, moving it around the city into nontraditional arenas for art and music—Grand Central Terminal, Shea Stadium, Floyd Bennett Field, and the World Trade Center. The walls and cases in the exhibition’s second half are papered with her ads and programs for the festivals, supplemented by the photographs of Peter Moore, one of the few who attended all of these ephemeral events. Dozens of composers (Varèse, Cage, Morton Feldman, Luciano Berio ), filmmakers ( Bruce Conner, Jack Smith ), performance artists and dancers ( Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Lucinda Childs ) participated because Moorman cajoled them. She had “a flair for getting EVERYBODY involved, including the more sophisticated who think Charlotte is silly; and she always somehow pulled it off,” wrote the critic Jill Johnston in the Village Voice after one of these festivals. Some feminist artists in the ’60s and ’70s were wary of Moorman. Carolee Schneemann thought her a “narcissist,” and the roster of her festivals was overwhelmingly male. The public was more flummoxed. In a clip here from the Merv Griffin TV show, the studio audience laughs nervously as she holds a string down the back of Jerry Lewis and uses him to perform Paik’s “Human Cello.” A comedian in her own right, whose friendly smile and Southern accent could disarm most hostile crowds, Moorman knew that just because you weren’t afraid to look ridiculous didn’t mean you weren’t serious. Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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Cellist Charlotte Moorman’s work divided opinion, but one thing’s for certain: She was deeply serious about her artistic projects.

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Before you go, we thought you'd like these... Ronda Rousey is down, but won't be out for long. According to UFC president Dana White, Rousey and Holly Holm will face off in a rematch some time in 2016 -- possibly as early as July. that her next fight will come against Rousey, whether she likes it or not. Holm became a nationwide celebrity when she took Rousey down via knockout in November, leaving her with several serious facial injuries. White made sure to express that he wasn't concerned with Fresquez's opinion. "Ronda's never lost a fight," White said. "She will overcome it and be back." July 9 is the reported target date for the fight in the new Las Vegas arena. "She got clipped, stayed in there and tried to fight through it. She told me she was in there, she was rocked, and she'd never been rocked like that before. And the things that were going on in her head – what she was doing – she'd never been in that situation." Ronda Rousey, Holly Holm set to fight again next year SAN JOSE, CA - JUNE 5: Ronda Rousey (in blue) competes with Grace Jividen in their 63 kg match during the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Judo on June 5, 2004 at the San Jose State University Event Center in San Jose, California. In winning Rousey made the US Olympic team. (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images) BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND - APRIL 01: Ronda Rousey of the USA happily displays her first World Cup gold medal during the Fighting Films Birmingham Women's World Cup on Saturday, April 01, 2006 at the National Indoor Arena, Birmingham, England, UK. (Photo by David Finch/Getty Images) CHICAGO - APRIL 14: Martial artist Ronda Rousey poses for a portrait during the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Media Summitt at the Palmer House Hilton on April 14, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images) United States Ronda Rousey (blue) and Germany's Annett Boehm compete in their women's -70kg judo bronze medal match of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on August 13, 2008 in Beijing. US Ronda Rousey won the bronze medal. AFP PHOTO / OLIVIER MORIN (Photo credit should read OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/Getty Images) US Ronda Rousey poses with her bronze medal on the podium for the women's -70kg judo competition of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on August 13, 2008 in Beijing. Japan's Masae Ueno won the gold, Cuba's Anaysi Hernandez won the silver, US Ronda Rousey and Netherlands Edith Bosch won the bronze medals. AFP PHOTO / OLIVIER MORIN (Photo credit should read OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/Getty Images) LAS VEGAS, NV - AUGUST 11: Ronda Rousey poses for a portrait on August 11, 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Kari Hubert/Zuffa LLC/Forza LLC via Getty Images) ANAHEIM, CA - NOVEMBER 12: Fighter Ronda Rousey attends the UFC On FOX: Live Heavyweight Championship held at the Honda Center on November 12, 2011 in Anaheim, California. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images) COLUMBUS, OHIO - MARCH 2, 2012: Ronda Rousey weighs in during the Strikeforce Tate v Rousey official weigh in at Columbus Convention Center on March 2, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. (David Dermer/Diamond Images/Getty Images) COLUMBUS, OH - MARCH 03: Ronda Rousey prepares to walk to the cage for her bantamweight championship fight with Miesha Tate during the Strikeforce event at Nationwide Arena on March 3, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Esther Lin/Forza LLC/Forza LLC via Getty Images) COLUMBUS, OH - MARCH 03: Ronda Rousey stands in her corner before facing Miesha Tate during their bantamweight championship fight during the Strikeforce event at Nationwide Arena on March 3, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Esther Lin/Forza LLC/Forza LLC via Getty Images) Ronda Rousey arrives at the 2013 Maxim Hot 100 celebration at Vanguard on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP) Ronda Rousey, left, of Venice, Calif., punches Miesha Tate of Yakima, Wash., during the UFC 168 mixed martial arts women's bantamweight title fight on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2013, in Las Vegas. Rousey won by a third round tap out. (AP Photo/David Becker) FILE - In this Feb. 22, 2014, file photo, Ronda Rousey looks around after defeating Sara McMann in a UFC 170 mixed martial arts women's bantamweight title bout in Las Vegas. Gina Carano was scheduled to meet with UFC President Dana White on Wednesday April 9, to discuss a return to mixed martial arts for a potential bout with bantamweight champion Rousey. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken, File) Ronda Rousey smiles at a weigh-in for the UFC 175 mixed martial arts event at the Mandalay Bay, Friday, July 4, 2014, in Las Vegas. Rousey is scheduled to fight Alexis Davis in a women's bantamweight title fight on Saturday in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher) Ronda Rousey, celebrates after defeating Cat Zingano in a UFC 184 mixed martial arts bantamweight title bout, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015, in Los Angeles. Rousey won after Zingano tapped out 14 seconds into the first round. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) Ronda Rousey arrives at the premiere of "Furious 7" at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on Wednesday, April 1, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP) Mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey removes tape after her workout at Glendale Fighting Club, Wednesday, July 15, 2015, in Glendale, Calif. Rousey, the UFC bantamweight champion, will return to the octagon against Brazilâs unbeaten Bethe Correia at UFC 190 in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 1. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) UFC fighter Ronda Rousey accepts the best female athlete award at the ESPY Awards at the Microsoft Theater on Wednesday, July 15, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP) MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 12: UFC women's bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey of the United States holds an open workout for fans and media at Federation Square on November 12, 2015 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images) Ronda Rousey, left, and Holly Holm fight during their UFC 193 bantamweight title bout in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left, punches Ronda Rousey during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left wrestles Ronda Rousey during thier UFC 193 Bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left, and Ronda Rousey exchange their punches during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm celebrates after defeating Ronda Rousey during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Ronda Rousey is treated by a medical staff member after being knocked out by Holly Holm in their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Holly Holm, left, watches Ronda Rousey, right, being tended after knocking her out during their UFC 193 bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. Holm pulled off a stunning upset victory over Rousey in the fight, knocking out the women's bantamweight champion in the second round with a powerful kick to the head Sunday. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill) Ronda Rousey is hugged by her coach Edmond Tarverdy after being defeated by Holly Holm after their UFC 193 Bantamweight title fight in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)

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After suffering her first loss last month, Ronda Rousey is reportedly ready to get back in the octagon with Holly Holm once again.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160607161122id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/amp/news/louvre-closed-masterpieces-moved-amid-paris-river-seine-flooding/

Jun 3, 2016 7:26 AM EDT World PARIS -- The swollen Seine River kept rising Friday, spilling out across its banks and onto some streets in Paris as curators at the Louvre closed its doors to the public and scrambled to protect a huge trove of art from the museum's priceless collection from the flooding. The Seine, which officials said was at its highest level in nearly 35 years, was expected to peak sometime later Friday. Nearly a week of heavy rain has led to serious flooding across a swathe of Europe, where 14 people have died and more are missing. Although the rain has tapered off in some areas, floodwaters are still climbing up over scores of river banks. Traffic in the French capital was snarled as flooding choked roads, and several Paris railway stations were shut. While the Louvre's most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," was safe on an upper floor, officials said about 250,000 artworks were located in flood-risk areas, mostly in basement storerooms. The art was hastily being moved upstairs -- a move officials described as precautionary. The Orsay museum, on the left bank of the Seine, was also closed Friday to prepare for possible flooding. A spokeswoman at the Louvre said museum had not taken such precautions in its modern history - since its 1993 renovation at the very least. She spoke on condition of anonymity in line with the museum's policy. At the Louvre, disappointed tourists were being turned away. "I am really sorry, but we're closed today," one staffer told visitors. "We have to evacuate masterpieces from the basement." Elsewhere in Europe, authorities were counting the cost of the floods as they waded through muddy streets and waterlogged homes. German authorities said the body of a 65-year-old man was found overnight in the town of Simbach am Inn, bringing the country's death toll to 10. France's Interior Ministry also reported the death of a 74-year-old man who fell from his horse and drowned in a river in the Seine-et-Marne region east of Paris, the second death in France. In eastern Romania, two people died and 200 people were evacuated from their homes as floods swept the area, including one man who was ripped from his bicycle by a torrent of water in the eastern village of Ruginesti. Several other people in Europe were missing Friday, including a Belgian beekeeper who was swept away by the current while trying to save his hives from rising waters in the eastern village of Harsin. The foul weather has compounded the travel disruptions in France, which is already dealing with the fallout from weeks of strikes and other industrial actions by workers upset over the government's proposed labor reforms. French rail company SNCF said the strikes had led to the cancellation of some 40 percent of the country's high-speed trains. In addition, French energy company Enedis says that more than 20,000 customers are without power to the east and south of Paris. Outside the Louvre, tourists expressed understanding over the museum's closure. "It's good that they are evacuating the paintings. It's a shame that we couldn't see them today, but it's right that they do these things," said Carlos Santiago, who was visiting from Mexico.

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Workers scramble to move priceless artwork to upper floors as Seine River overflows banks, keeps rising; more than dozen dead in European floods

http://web.archive.org/web/20160611160752id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2015/01/29/1040-1040a-1040ez-which-form/21134017/?

Choosing which 1040 tax form you need to file your return on can be a lot harder to figure out than you'd think, but answering just a few basic questions will lead you to the right version. First of all, if you use tax software to prepare your return, then it will generally take the decision of which tax form to file out of your hands. Instead, the software will evaluate the answers you provide to its list of questions and then select the most appropriate form for your needs. For those who prepare their own returns, though, the basic Internal Revenue Service rule is that the best form to file is the simplest one that addresses all of your needs. The 1040EZ is the easiest form to fill out, with the 1040A being more complicated but still less difficult than the full 1040 form. Form 1040EZ is designed for the simplest returns. In order to use it, you have to meet several requirements. First of all, Form 1040EZ is only available for filing status of single or married filing jointly, and those who have dependents to claim can't use the form. Taxpayers have to be under age 65 and ineligible for higher standard deductions for the blind. In addition, there are income-related restrictions. You can't have more than $100,000 in taxable income, and in general, it can only come from wages, salaries, tips, unemployment compensation and taxable scholarship and fellowship grants. Some taxable interest is allowed, but only if it's less than $1,500 for the year. Alaska residents are also allowed to use 1040EZ even if they receive Permanent Fund dividends from the state. Finally, the only credit you can claim on the 1040EZ is the Earned Income Credit, and you can't itemize deductions or make any other adjustments to income. Those who received advance payments of premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act aren't eligible to file Form 1040EZ. Those who hire household employees like babysitters or nannies for whom they have to pay employment taxes also can't file 1040EZ, as well as those who are debtors in bankruptcy filings after Oct. 16, 2005. Form 1040A has some of the same restrictions as 1040EZ. Income has to be less than $100,000, and you still can't itemize deductions. But it's more flexible in other areas. For instance, heads of household, qualifying widows and widowers, and married people filing separately can use Form 1040A. Form 1040A allows you to include more types of income. In addition to those allowed on 1040EZ, you can have ordinary dividends, capital gains distributions from mutual funds, pension and annuity income, IRA distributions, and taxable Social Security benefits and still file a 1040A. You can also claim deductions for IRA contributions, student loan interest, tuition and fee payments, and expenses that educators pay for supplies for their own classrooms. You can also claim more credits on a 1040A. Those seeking credits for child and dependent care expenses, education expenses, and retirement savings contributions can use the form, as can those claiming credits for the elderly or disabled. Both the child tax credit and the additional child tax credit are available to 1040A filers. Lastly, you can handle a limited number of special situations on 1040A. Those receiving dependent care benefits from work can use the form, as can those who have to pay taxes due to having past educational credits recaptured. Even some people who owe alternative minimum taxes can use Form 1040A. If you don't qualify for 1040EZ or 1040A treatment, then your only choice is the long Form 1040. Most notably, that includes taxpayers who want to itemize deductions. For those who want it, the IRS has developed a tool to help you figure out which form is the simplest available for your needs. You can access it at , and it will take information from the tax forms you've received from your employer, financial institutions, and other sources to make a recommendation. Filing your taxes can seem complicated. But by starting with the right form, you'll be able to keep things as simple as possible and avoid biting off more than you need to chew at tax time.

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Make sure you choose the federal tax form that best reflects your income, credits, deductions and breaks: 1040, 1040A or 1040EZ.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160621031235id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/uknews/law-and-order/12182229/Golfer-sues-Haverhill-Golf-Club-after-winning-car-and-real-prize-is-actually-worth-half-money.html

He refused to accept the car - or £7,000 in cash - and took the club to Cambridge County Court, but lost his case in January due to what he claims was a "legal loophole". Mr Warner received £7,500 in an out-of-court settlement, but was ordered to pay his and the club's legal costs, amounting to £10,000 - leaving him £3,500 out of pocket. The sales manager has now left the £750-a-year club and claims that up to 12 friends and family have also done so in protest over his treatment. He said: "It has all been a bit of a nightmare. I got lucky and hit a hole in one, it's the first one I'd ever hit and I couldn't believe it when it landed on the green. "I was elated to win the car, but it turned out to something altogether different to what they advertised. They put a high spec car on the tee which was worth £14,000 new but when I went to collect my prize the offered me a £6,500 1.0 basic model. "It didn't have alloy wheels, air conditioning and was the most basic model. I was really disappointed. I was elated on the day and then I was devastated when I found out I wasn't going to have the car they'd advertised." Mr Warner with the brand new five door 1.6TDi Vauxhall Corsa Mr Warner said the debt forced him to remortgage his house to pay for his wedding to 25-year-old fiancée Kirsty Dolby. He said: "I had to borrow some money to get ourselves out of debt. We had to take £10,000 out of the mortgage to pay for it. It was a worrying time and at one point it looked like we wouldn't be able to pay for our wedding. "Thankfully it never came to that, but we had to waste a lot of the money we'd saved to pay for the wedding on legal bills." Before the court case, Mr Warner tried to compromise with the club and asked for £8,000 plus a few years free membership with the club. But they rejected that and said it was only insured to offer a car up to the value of £8,000. As no settlement between the two could be reached, it went to court and Mr Warner was told by a solicitor he had a "very good case". However, he said he lost the court battle because he had not seen the car before the tournament. He added: "Our argument was that the car was on the tee, written the way that it was. There's no real hiding from that. We were forced to go to court. I was told I could not have had that car purely and simply because I didn't see it before I started the round." Mr Warner lost his case on January 14 at Cambridge County Court. Immediately after the hearing, the club and its insurance company offered him a pre-registered Vauxhall Viva non air-conditioned car worth £8,300. He rejected the car, but agreed in an out-of-court settlement to accept £7,500, which he used to pay his legal fees. This meant he had to find another £3,500 to cover all his legal costs. Mr Warner was ordered to pay costs amounting to ?10,000 Haverhill Golf Club issued a statement which said they behaved entirely properly throughout and that Mr Warner's claim was bound to fail. It read: "The club never disputed that Jake Warner had won a car and made a very generous offer to settle the matter which Jake chose to reject. "The club behaved entirely properly throughout and were fully vindicated by the court's decision to throw out the claim. The club very much regrets that Jake chose to pursue a claim that had no merit and was bound to fail." After losing the battle, Mr Warner has been left driving a 10-year-old Ford Focus Zetec worth £1,500. • Tiger Woods is beaten at golf by an 11-year-old

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Man poses for photo with what he thought was his prize before arriving to collect his car and discovering model on offer was actually worth &pound;7,000 less

http://web.archive.org/web/20160808090031id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/culture/books/bookreviews/11166607/jerry-lee-lewis-his-own-story-by-rick-bragg.html

There are two great themes running through this book. One is Jerry Lee’s love-hate relationship with Elvis; the other is his struggle with the Devil. Lewis arrived at Sun determined to topple Elvis from his throne as the king of rock ’n’ roll – and for a brief while he did. Shortly before departing for army service in Germany, Lewis claims, a tearful Presley bequeathed him his crown, saying, “You got it. Take it. Take the whole damn thing.” While Elvis meekly allowed himself to be tamed and neutered by the egregious Colonel Tom Parker, Lewis – whom nobody ever described as “meek” – remained the authentic article. In 1977, the day after Elvis died, Lewis was asked by a reporter what he felt on hearing the news. He replied: “Glad. Just another one out of the way. I mean, Elvis this, Elvis that. All we hear is Elvis. What the s--- did Elvis ever do except take dope I couldn’t get a hold of?” He now explains that he was drunk, “and hurting and angry”. The truth is “I loved Elvis”. But not so much as to hand him back the crown. Pondering how they rank in the pantheon of music, Lewis remains unbowed: “After me was Elvis.” Lewis’s upbringing was Pentecostal Christian – of the vengeful Jehovah rather than the gentle Jesus school. The fear of divine retribution did not, as Bragg delicately puts it, mean that he would grow up to adhere to the teachings, “just that he knew in his heart when he did wrong”. Which was frequently. The question that seems to have most tormented him, however, was whether you could play rock ’n’ roll and still go to heaven. When a troubled Lewis asked Elvis, who had come from an identical background, the question, Elvis's face, he claims, “turned blood red” and he snapped back: “Don’t you never ask me that again.” It behoves any writer contemplating the state of Lewis’s soul to write in cadences pitched somewhere between southern-fried folk wisdom and the Book of Revelation – and Bragg rises manfully to the challenge. “The demons even outran the music, and he found he could not run fast enough to beat them and still hold the road,” he writes. Even allowing for the fact that an authorised biography will err towards generosity, this book is hardly a character reference. Lewis emerges as cantankerous, boastful, threatening, possibly sociopathic. But Bragg remains ever-understanding. One can well recognise, as Bragg puts it, that “as a southern man”, Lewis required guns “in the same way other men require a pocket watch and suspenders”; and shooting his bass player might well have been an accident. But still, one can’t help thinking there was something decidedly careless in his handling of firearms. Having passed the time one night by shooting at random into a wall of his office, he awoke, hung-over, the next day to discover that the bullets had destroyed a display case of antique dentures in the dental practice next door. “He was relieved to find they were not actually in someone’s mouth.” His greatest violence, however, was reserved for himself. Much of this book has all the appalling, rubbernecking fascination of a car crash – something with which Lewis, a man who “had never seen anything wrong with going out and driving off a good drunk”, was all too familiar. His drug consumption reads like a pharmaceutical manual: biphetamines, Placidyls, Desbutal. The litany of tragedy is similarly stupefying. One son died in a swimming pool. So did his fourth wife. Another son died in a road accident. By way of consolation, the women (countless) “were always sympathetic with me”. At the age of 47, he married a 25-year-old, Shawn Stephens, who two months later was found dead in her bed. An autopsy revealed the painkiller methadone in her system at 10 times the normal dose. A grand jury reviewed the case but could find no grounds for indictment. In 1984, doctors cut away a third of Lewis’s stomach after he was diagnosed with perforated ulcers. In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, looking “like a man who had walked through a fire and been put out just in time”. Miraculously, in 2008, he returned to the Top 30 with an album featuring guest artists including Keith Richards, B B King and Bruce Springsteen. At the age of 79, having finally kicked his addiction to pills and whatever else, “The Killer” now passes much of his time in repose, lying in bed at his ranch, with his guns on the dressing table and an ill-tempered chihuahua named Topaz Junior on the quilt between his feet. Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story by Rick Bragg 512pp, Canongate, Telegraph offer price: £17 (PLUS £1.95 p&p) (RRP £20, ebook £8.54) . Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk

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Jerry Lee Lewis, the piano-pounding father of rock &rsquo;n&rsquo; roll, struggled with two great rivals throughout his life, says Mick Brown. One was Elvis. The other was the Devil

http://web.archive.org/web/20160903171840id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/02/11/09/not-guilty-pleas-in-coorong-attack-case

A 60-year-old man will go to trial over an alleged sex attack on two backpackers at a remote beach southeast of Adelaide. The man, whose identity is concealed by suppression orders, pleaded not guilty in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Friday to seven offences including attempted murder and indecent assault. The charges, which include allegations he used a hammer, relate to an attack on two women at Salt Creek, in the Coorong National Park, in February. The man appeared by video link and was remanded in custody to appear in the Supreme Court on September 26. He is also charged with detaining a person, causing harm with intent, assault and endangering life, including an allegation he drove at or over one of the backpackers in his car. In a previous appearance the court was told extensive material had been recovered from a mobile phone and two laptop computers seized from a man. Prosecutor Sarah Attar described the material extracted as "voluminous" and indicated it would be handed over to defence counsel. At that stage the only outstanding material was a medical report from a doctor at the Flinders Medical Centre. With the man's committal for trial, statutory suppression orders on his identity lapsed. But Ms Attar successfully applied for his identity to remain concealed in the "interests of the proper administration of justice". Magistrate Brett Dixon suppressed the man's name and image and anything else that might identify him. But he lifted a suppression order on the details of the car the man was driving at the time of the alleged attack, a four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was previously revealed the man met his alleged victims over the internet after the two women used a popular website to seek a ride from Adelaide to Melbourne.

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A man has entered not guilty pleas to all offences related to the alleged attack on two backpackers southeast of Adelaide earlier this year.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161019174844id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/trevor-bauer-trolls-blue-jays-fans-bloody-cleat

Trevor Bauer had his baseball horror story Monday night. After needing ten stitches to repair a cut on his pinky suffered while repairing a drone, Bauer's ALCS start was pushed from Game 2 to Game 3. Before taking the mound in Toronto, Bauer insisted he was ready to go. He wasn't. He needed to be taken out after two-thirds of an inning when his cut reopened and bled all over the field. Drone 1 Trevor Bauer 0 #ALCS https://t.co/voD3yjPqSB — ThePostGame.com (@ThePostGame) October 18, 2016 Bauer received a standing ovation from the Rogers Centre crowd, as Blue Jays fans thought they had the game in the books. Down 0-2 in the series, Toronto had Marcus Stroman on the hill with its monster lineup hitting against the Indians' bullpen for eight-plus innings. But Cleveland persevered. The Indians tagged Stroman for four runs to win 4-2 and go up 3-0 in the series. Cleveland last won a pennant in 1997, but the franchise has not won a World Series since 1948. After getting pulled from the game, Bauer turned into one of the Indians' loudest cheerleaders. He then joked on Twitter. 1) what a W!! 2) my cleats got a bit dirty. 3) loudest standing ovation I've gotten walking off the mound. ... pic.twitter.com/1VUozRBSaG — Trevor Bauer (@BauerOutage) October 18, 2016 Someone please crying Jordan the vine of the blood dripping from my finger — Trevor Bauer (@BauerOutage) October 18, 2016 — Jose Ramirez (@MrLapara) October 18, 2016 — José Rivera (@whoisjoserivera) October 18, 2016 Bauer engaged with a handful of fans on Twitter late Monday night and Tuesday morning. Right now, the thinks he is on track for a return in the World Series. @TripleH2413 2/5. I'm not out. I'll be fine — Trevor Bauer (@BauerOutage) October 18, 2016 Kids, if there is any takeaway from this, it's that you need to be careful when fixing your drone during the MLB Postseason. Oh, also, obviously people made Curt Schilling-bloody sock references. Schilling wasn't about it. Please don't tweet at me about Bauer.He cost himself a start, likely more, AND his teammates, and fans, dicking around with a drone. #stupid — Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) October 18, 2016 The Indians will attempt to close out the Blue Jays Tuesday night in Toronto. -- Follow Jeffrey Eisenband on Twitter @JeffEisenband. Baseball, Bloody Hand, Cleveland Indians, Curt Schilling, cut, Drone, Marcus stroman, MLB, MLB Postseason, Toronto Blue Jays, Trevor Bauer

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Trevor Bauer left the ALCS with a cut finger from a drone, but he still trolled the Blue Jays with a bloody cleat tweet.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161027133037id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/26/03/33/subdued-price-pressures-likely-to-continue

Economists doubt there will be an interest rate cut when the Reserve Bank board meets on Melbourne Cup Day after new inflation figures showed slightly higher price pressures than expected. This was the result of a sharp jump in fruit and vegetable prices, followed by rising electricity costs during the September quarter. The consumer price index rose 0.7 per cent in the quarter, almost double the growth of the previous three months, but still left the annual rate at a meagre 1.3 per cent. The annual rate, and the more interest-rate-sensitive underlying measures of inflation, remain comfortably below the central bank's two to three per cent target band, suggesting the cash rate won't be rising anytime soon. Financial markets wound back any thought of a cut in the cash rate when the central bank board meets on Tuesday, following the data. "The risk of a surprise Melbourne Cup day rate cut looks to have passed," Macquarie Research economist James McIntyre said. The Reserve Bank had cut the cash rate in May and August after the previous quarterly inflation readings, and the rate now stands at a record low 1.5 per cent. Fruit prices soared 19.5 per cent in the quarter, followed by vegetables up 5.9 per cent and electricity increasing by 5.4 per cent. South Australia saw the largest proportional increase in electricity prices, a major concern for business, SA senator Nick Xenophon says. "Energy costs ... are worth a lot more than any tax cut that is being offered by the federal government," Senator Xenophon told reporters in Canberra. He said Treasury's own modelling shows the company cuts will have a minuscule impact in terms of economic growth. Treasurer Scott Morrison was in SA on Wednesday for a business roundtable. He took the opportunity to gee-up Senator Xenophon and his team to support the government's 10-year business tax plan and back improvements to the budget. "When the Labor Party is going to vote against improving the budget ... (the Xenophon team) sit in the box seat here and they can't squib it," Mr Morrison told 5AA Adelaide radio. Senator Xenophon said "megaphone negotiations" are not the best way of doing things. "I'm happy to do that - the next time I'm here I'll bring my megaphone," Senator Xenophon said. He described it as a "very big Rubic's cube" because the government also wants to have $6 billion of welfare cuts and says the impact of those could be quite severe among the disadvantaged. If successful, the company tax rate will be cut to 25 per cent from 30 per cent for all businesses by 2026/27. In the interim, it would be lowered to 27.5 per cent for business earning under $10 million now, for those with a $25 million turnover in 2017/18 and then to $$50 million in 2018/19. The Xenophon team supports only the initial tranche of tax cuts, while Labor wants a cut limited to companies with an annual turnover of up to $2 million.

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Economists expect official inflation figures will show continued subdued price pressures, but probably not benign enough for the RBA to cut the cash rate.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161229164919id_/http://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/oil-falls-oversupply-still-weighs-market-n620696

U.S. crude prices on Monday broke below $40 a barrel for the first time since April, weighed by a survey showing output in OPEC reached record highs last month amid the biggest addition of U.S. oil rigs in two years. Production in July by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries likely rose to its highest in recent history, a Reuters survey found on Friday, as Iraq pumped more and Nigeria squeezed out additional crude exports despite militant attacks on oil installations. A gas station attendant pumps fuel into a customer's car at PetroChina's petrol station in Beijing, China, March 21, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon Top OPEC exporter Saudi Arabia also kept output close to a record high, the survey found, as it met seasonally higher domestic demand and focused on maintaining market share instead of trimming supply to boost prices. U.S. oil drillers, meanwhile, added 44 rigs in July, the most in a month since April 2014, data from oil services company Baker Hughes showed. "Sentiment remains quite negative following the price slump recently. It is negative because rebalancing takes longer than some market participants thought before," said Eugen Weinberg at Commerzbank. On Monday, Iraqi oil officials said oil exports from Iraq's southern ports rose to 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) on average in July, up from 3.175 million bpd in June, as the OPEC nation increased crude production. Also on Monday, Iran's oil minister said the oil market was oversupplied but said balance between demand and supply will be restored, Iranian state television reported. "Prices remain under pressure but we think they are likely to find a floor at around $40 and increase to $50 by the year end," Weinberg said. French bank Societe Generale said that the global oil market has shifted from massive oversupply to broadly balanced in the second half of this year and first half of next year. Analysts at the bank expect crude prices to bottom out in the high $30s and should not return to lows of $26-27 seen in the first quarter of this year. Earlier on Monday, Barclays said Brent crude has averaged $46.50 in the third quarter so far and could fall further from current price levels. The global glut of oil still weighs on the market and even though summer is a good time to make supply adjustments, it is already halfway over, the bank said in a research note. "Demand growth remains lackluster and has not made significant inroads to clear the inventory overhang for oil," Barclays said. "With the macroeconomic picture worsening and Saudi Arabia unlikely to exhibit much restraint as Iran seeks incremental market share, refineries are going to find themselves in the line of fire," Barclays added.

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Oil fell on Monday morning, reversing earlier gains, as increases in OPEC production and U.S. oil rig additions continued to weigh on the market.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140917004027id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/boxing/story/juan-manuel-lopez-looking-to-cement-legacy-in-showdown-with-jesus-cuellar-091114

Updated SEP 11, 2014 1:56p ET When it comes to legacy, Juan Manuel Lopez is slightly uncomfortable with where he stands. Lopez was a decorated amateur boxer, who went to the 2004 Summer Olympics for Puerto Rico. He's a former two-division champion as a professional. But all anyone wants to talk about with "JuanMa" is how entertaining he is in the ring. One of his bouts hasn't gone to a decision since 2009 -- a pretty ridiculous feat considering the competition level he has faced. In all, Lopez, 31, has only gone the distance three times in his nine-year pro career. Of his 34 wins, 31 have come by way of knockout. But Lopez is concerned that's all he'll be remembered for. "When I retire, I want people to talk about how good I was, not just how exciting I was," Lopez told FOX Sports. It's for that reason you might see a more conservative "JuanMa" against Jesus Cuellar on Thursday night at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas (FOX Sports 1, 9:30 p.m. ET) -- at least as conservative as Lopez can possibly get. He is coming off a loss to Fernando Vargas in July and admitted to contemplating retirement. When this co-main event fight came up, though, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. "This is very, very important," Lopez (34-4) said. "Probably the most important of my career. I can't afford a loss. This fight here gets me into the bigger fights down the road." Cuellar (24-1) will come in as the favorite. He's the reigning interim WBA featherweight champion and, at 27, four years younger. In the narrative, he's the young, hungry lion trying to make his name off the more well-known boxer. It's combat sports booking 101. "I know that this is going to be a hard fight," said Cuellar, an Argentinean. "I've been training hard for it in an intense camp and I'm here to do my job and take the victory home." Lopez has other plans. He knows with the way the sport works, he can notch just one or two wins and get right back into more marquee fights. "Boxing is like that," Lopez said. "The landscape is always changing. It's constantly changing in boxing. I know a victory here is a step in the right direction. A huge fight." "JuanMa," though, admitted to thinking about retirement after the loss to Vargas. He has been through an incredible amount of wars. But he said he's reinvigorated by the prospect of fighting Cuellar. Lopez's body feels good and he's excited about the possibility of getting back on track. "JuanMa" might be known for his unabashedly crowd-pleasing style, but that's secondary Thursday night. His career -- his legacy -- comes first. "Forget about looking good," he said. "I need to win."

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Juan Manuel Lopez is known for his flash. But in Thursday's showdown with Jesus Cuellar, he's out to prove he's pretty darn good too.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140917063947id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/nov/17/art

For its annual art exhibition, Discerning Eye chose six selectors: two artists, Anita Taylor and sculptor Peter Randall-Page; two critics, Mark Lawson and Norbert Lynton; and two collectors, Alan Grieve, who runs the Jerwood Foundation, and me. I am an enthusiastic private collector, mainly of mid-20th-century British art; it has been one of the great joys of the past 10 years for me. But in the end, Discerning Eye needed a bit of crumpet, however old, and I suspect more people will come to see my facelift than anything else. In past years the panel has included Brian Sewell, Lord Palumbo, Lord Gowrie and the Prince of Wales. We six selectors met on a cold, wet day last September. We were positioned behind two trestle tables in a grim basement and asked what tickled our fancies. The works, a staggering 2,400 of them, were presented to us by half a dozen quite dazzling young men, all artists themselves. The bonus of male beauty apart, much of the art was a joy and quite often two or three of us would be trying to bag the same picture. Mark mainly wanted what I wanted. It was quite comforting to find Peter Randall-Page and Norbert Lynton wanted the same as me. And I almost never wanted anything that Mark wanted. When Mark absented himself for a couple of hours to do an interview, I helpfully chose a photograph of a fish on a women's backside on his behalf. Sadly, he was having none of it when he returned. So the lady and the trout do not appear in his list. The exhibition opens tomorrow at the Mall Galleries in London (020-7930 6844), and of the 500 works of art on display, my collection is the largest. I've made a selection of 90, mostly by young artists. I've got a couple of installation pieces that are fantastically eclectic, by really interesting young graduates. One of my favourites is a portrait of James Lloyd by Brendan Kelly. And I've discovered Matthew Webber, who is wonderful. Two things struck me: first, what a vast amount of unsung talent there is out there; and second, to this trader's daughter, how sweetly uncommercial the youngsters were. "Call it Notting Hill," I urged one of the young artists with an untitled work, "it will walk out the door in seconds." I want to insist that anyone going to art college must attend a three-month marketing course, preferably taught by me. It is all about getting your work known, circulated and hung.

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Art: Anne Robinson discovers unsung talent for the annual Discerning Eye exhibition - and is surprised at how uncommercial young artists are.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150506212215id_/http://www.people.com/article/davion-only-adopted-by-case-worker-connie-going

Davion Only and his new adoptive brother, Taylor Going throughout his life, but now the 17-year-old doesn't just have a permanent home with his new mother and former case worker, Connie Going, he has three siblings to go along with it. Davion sits on a comfortable leather couch in the living room of his St. Petersburg, Florida, home, and looks over at one of those siblings, 15-year-old Taylor. "I'm pretty lucky. How often does your best friend become your brother?" he tells PEOPLE. "We have been through a lot together." It's what they have been through that makes this ordinary day a special one. Davion made national headlines in 2013 when, at 15-years-old, he made a for someone to adopt him. "My name is Davion and I've been in foster care since I was born," he told the congregation. "I know God hasn't given up on me. So I'm not giving up either." Ten thousand families came forward asking to adopt him, and he flew to Ohio and lived with a minister, but just months later, was back in the Florida system after getting into a physical fight with the man and another child. He then called Going and asked her how she felt about adopting him. "I grew up spending time with Connie," he says. "I always cared about her a lot. She was this stable person in my life." The same went for Going, 52, who officially adopted Davion on April 22. Going already had two biological daughters of her own – Carley, 17, and Sydney, 21 – when she adopted another son, Taylor, a couple years ago. He had also spent his life in and out of foster care homes. In December 2012, Taylor saw a picture of Davion on a table in their house. "He told me that was his best friend," Going says. "I said, 'We all love Davion.' " From that day on, Davion was able to leave his group home and spend weekends with Going and her children. "It was crazy that we were able to do things like water activities," Taylor says. "It wasn't always like that. We were so used to seeing barbed wire in the distance, and now we have green grass in our backyard and a swimming pool." When they were 9-years-old, Taylor and Davion lived in the same group home. The two boys formed a friendship and always had each other's back. "I liked him a lot. We were partners. You go through stuff together as a team," Davion says. "You don't forget these kids. They're in your memories for the rest of your life." Davion and Taylor couldn't be happier that they don't have to just live in each other's memories anymore – they get to see each other every day. "I think it was a blessing Taylor was adopted by Connie and that he was able to recognize the picture of me," Davion says. "I think that was God's work." From left: Carley Going, Connie Going, Davion Only and Taylor Going In addition to a new brother, Davion has found a sister in Carley, who couldn't be happier about her growing family. "My mom always talked about him, and after a while, it just felt right for him to be with us permanently," she says. "Davion is special." Davion admits he used to sleep on the top bunk and close to the wall at the group home so he could avoid conflict and trouble. "Those days are in the past," he says. "I have my mom, my siblings, my dogs, my video games. I'm good."

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"Everyone always gave up on me, but now I know I'm here to stay," Davion Only tells PEOPLE

http://web.archive.org/web/20150820031244id_/http://fortune.com/2013/03/21/can-time-inc-make-it-alone/

When Time Warner announced in early March its plan to spin off the Time Inc. magazine unit by the end of 2013, financial analysts and the business press expressed broad agreement on the prospects for the two future entities. For the new Time Warner, the prevailing view was highly positive: The split is the next logical step in solidifying a pure-play television and motion picture colossus after the spinoffs of AOL and Time Warner Cable four years ago, and with CEO Jeff Bewkes shedding the drag of magazines and sharpening his focus on a stable of growing businesses, his record of enriching shareholders seems bound to keep rolling. For a newly independent Time Inc., the 91-year-old publisher of Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and dozens of other titles, including Fortune, the general opinion was downbeat: Unlike Time Warner, which grew operating earnings in its nonpublishing businesses by 4.7% last year, the magazine business needs radical change. Put simply, revenues and profits for Time Inc. and the magazine industry as a whole are shrinking. It’s unclear what strategy will reverse that decline. But industry experts and analysts agree that it might require daring bets — new digital platforms, alliances with tech-savvy partners, and even shrewd acquisitions. “Magazines could have a strong digital model, better than most media companies,” says Neil Begley, a fixed-income analyst at Moody’s Investors Service. “But for magazines to have a fighting chance, they will need financial flexibility, meaning the freedom to invest heavily to revive their businesses.” To get a dispassionate view of our parent company’s prospects as a spinoff, we talked to Begley and other analysts, along with portfolio managers and investment bankers, for their views on how Time Warner should proceed. By and large, they endorsed Begley’s view that Time Inc. would perform best with low leverage and the ability to be financially agile. It is certainly in the interest of Time Warner for the new Time Inc. to find favor with investors. The parent company’s shareholders will receive stock in the new company — shares representing roughly 5%, or 1/20, of the value of a Time Warner share. Since Time Warner spun off AOL and Time Warner Cable in 2009, the stocks of those two companies have easily outperformed the broader market. And shares of Time Warner itself have nearly doubled. For Time Inc., however, the path to revival could be blocked even before the spinoff happens. The crucial issue, analysts agree, is the amount of debt that Time Warner will place on Time Inc. If the magazine company is saddled with excessive leverage, it will lack what it needs to grow again: ample cash for big investments. It’s tough to be innovative when your main concern is paying down debt. Diverting too much cash flow to debt payment could also stifle Time Inc.’s ability to pay a dividend. Another factor is that Time Inc. must replace outgoing CEO Laura Lang. Attracting a star to the job will be a lot easier if the company isn’t overleveraged. So how much debt is the new Time Inc. likely to carry? The most common measure for leverage is the ratio of debt to Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — essentially the cache of profits available for making interest payments. Time Inc.’s Ebitda has been falling sharply since 2007. According to projections by Morgan Stanley, its Ebitda will reach $524 million by 2014, its first year as an independent company. That’s a 15% drop from 2012. Time Warner hasn’t given a specific number yet for what the debt load will be. Nor has it said whether it will pitch Time Inc. as a stock that pays a dividend at the outset. (Analysts believe that asking the fledgling company to pay a dividend and service debt could stunt its prospects.) On Wall Street predictions range widely, from $500 million to $2 billion. But an individual familiar with Time Warner’s thinking told Fortune that the company “plans to put on a level of leverage consistent with the ratios followed at Time Warner.” Time Warner has a current debt-to-Ebitda ratio of 2.6, close to its stated goal of 2.5. Let’s assume that Bewkes plans to base the spinoff company’s ratio on Time Inc.’s 2013 Ebitda of close to $600 million. In that scenario Time Inc.’s debt would approach $1.5 billion. The 2.5-times-Ebitda number may be right for Time Warner, but Begley and others think the ratio is excessive for Time Inc., which does not boast the same credit quality or diversified revenue sources as its parent. Consider that entertainment and publishing conglomerate News Corp. plans to shed its publishing assets this year — as the new News Corp. — with no debt. Here’s how piling on excessive debt could choke off the new Time Inc.’s investment capital. Afoccording to Begley, Time Inc. cannot afford to let its interest costs absorb a bigger and bigger share of its cash flow. To reassure investors, it should hold constant the cents in interest that it pays on each dollar of Ebitda. Ebitda has been shrinking at over 7% a year for five years, and most analysts expect the trend to continue. So Time Inc., from 2014 to 2018, would need to pay down an average of $95 million in principal on its $1.5 billion in borrowings to hold its interest payments constant at 19¢, or 19% of Ebitda. The crucial number is what’s left over after Time Inc. pays its taxes and interest. That’s the free cash that it can lavish on digital publishing technology or acquisitions. From 2014 to 2019 it would be forced to spend over a third of its cash flow on debt repayments, lowering the amount available for investments to around $180 million a year. But a bigger number would generate higher earnings and also make the company far safer in the eyes of lenders and shareholders. So let’s consider a second scenario: Time Warner structures the independent Time Inc. with a relatively light debt-to-Ebitda ratio of 1 to 1. That’s the amount of leverage that Begley recommends. Based on its 2013 Ebitda, Time Inc. would then carry about $600 million in debt. To be prudent, it would still pay down principal each year to keep debt service at a constant portion of its Ebitda. But since both its interest and principal payments would be lower, Time Inc. would generate more cash each year. Layer on a second set of assumptions: Let’s forecast that Time Inc. spins off with a 1-to-1 ratio and invests aggressively, and that those investments are successful. As a result, cash flows keep dropping in 2014 and 2015, then embark on modest growth of 3% a year through 2019. From then on, they simply rise with inflation at around 2%. In this projection, the cash flow available for investment would average about $320 million, almost 80% higher than under the $1.5 billion debt load scenario. The rising cash flows would create a virtuous cycle of ever lower debt and stable earnings. That kind of turnaround will prove a tough challenge. But if Time Inc. can generate any kind of growth — and again, low leverage is key — its stock could actually be quite attractive to investors. Most analysts predict that after the spinoff Time Inc. will have an enterprise value — debt plus equity, minus cash — of around $4 billion. If that proves true and that the company takes on the more manageable $600 million debt load, Time Inc. will have an equity value of $3.8 billion. If Time Inc. can indeed restore growth by 2016, it could potentially boast a market cap of $6.3 billion by the end of 2019 — meaning annual returns of 9% for five years starting in 2014. That would be more than enough to turn a struggling magazine company into an unexpected Wall Street success story. This story is from the April 08, 2013 issue of Fortune.

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The spinoff of Time Warner's magazine business has a chance to succeed -- if it's not overloaded with debt.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150925032028id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/27/david-armstrong-photographer-outsiders-fashion/amp

David Armstrong, who has died at age 60 from liver cancer, never achieved the kind of recognition afforded his best friend, Nan Goldin, but his influence was acknowledged of late by a younger generation of photographers, including Ryan McGinley. “He has a specific style and owns it,” McGinley told the New York Times in 2011, when Armstrong’s book, 615 Jefferson Avenue, was published. “It’s almost like Vermeer, using only sunlight to illuminate uni-directionally. His photographs are about desire and despair. These are qualities he looks for in the boys’ eyes.” The boys in question were the male models that Armstrong had been photographing between 2001 and 2011, making the beautiful young men seem both timeless and out-of-time in his curiously classical and unapologetically romantic portraits. Armstrong had come to fashion photography relatively late, having been commissioned by the young designer Hedi Slimane to shoot backstage at a Dior catwalk show in 2001. Suddenly, in middle age, he was hip again and also ubiquitous, shooting editorials for the likes Vogue Homme and Purple magazine. It was an unexpected – and, one could say, unrepresentative – coda to a remarkable life lived, in the main, on the margins amid fellow freaks and outsiders. Born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1954, Armstrong befriended Nan Goldin when he was 14. He later said: “All the cool kids who met in the morning to eat hash brownies talked about this legend, Nan Goldin, who got kicked out of school the year before.” He was the first person she photographed and they remained close throughout their teenage years and into their early twenties, both attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he studied painting before switching to photography. Alongside the likes of Jack Pierson, Philip-Lorca di Corcia and Mark Morrisroe, they became part of “the Boston School”, unified by their shared approach to the making of arrestingly intimate images of their often dissolute everyday lives. In Boston, and later in New York’s Lower East Side, they both shot the same subjects – the drag queens and druggies that they hung out with. “We both delved in different ways with things available to us and didn’t consider going outside our worlds,” he told the New York Times. Like Goldin, Armstrong also became enmeshed in the hard drug culture he portrayed. His first boyfriend died of Aids in 1983 and, the following year, he went home to Boston to come off heroin. He stayed clean for 17 years, but began using again in 2002 describing himself wryly as “functioning enough”. In 1994, Armstrong collaborated with Goldin on a photobook called A Double Life, which showed in their dramatically contrasting styles just how much their lives had intertwined. Armstrong’s formally austere style and monochrome tones make his images seem, if anything more haunting than Goldin’s. “I used to think Nan and I were complete opposites and it was all about the complement,” he noted at the time. “But it’s different from that. At the same time we’re identical - like our pictures. At first they seem to come from different planets but finally they arrive at the same place.” In 2012, Morel Books published Night and Day, a selection of Kodachromes from Armstrong’s extensive New York archive from the late 1970s and early 1980s. A tale of drug-taking, partying and comedowns from an already long-lost time, it includes portraits of artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Di Corcia alongside shots of beautiful young people at play in the early hours. “He was such a cool cat – cultured in that old-school way,” says Aron Morel, who got to know him over the past few years. “He reminded me a bit of Boris Mikhailov: two guys that worked because they loved it. Artists without the art market. The first time I met him, he sent me back to London with over 300 ‘chromes’ of the Night and Day series. Just like that – with complete trust. He was such a poetic guy. He had recently moved to a house in upstate New York and he said he was going to live his last days like Mrs Haversham in her mansion.” Sadly, that was not to be.

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The photographer, who has died aged 60, had a dramatically contrasting style to his great friend Nan Goldin, but their subjects were intertwined, writes Sean O’Hagan

http://web.archive.org/web/20151003003645id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/21/the-perch-of-materiality-in-misappropriation-cases.html

For those of you just joining us at home, the other day shares of a company with the ticker symbol NEST soared 1,900 percent after Google announced the acquisition of Nest Labs. This was incredibly stupid because Nest Labs has nothing at all to do with NEST. It seems like a case of mistaken identity. So the question Levine raised is whether trading in shares of NEST would be insider trading if you had advanced knowledge of the Google deal? Does the law prohibit you from using non-public information about a deal to profit off of people stupidly buying a different stock altogether? In my earlier piece, I argued that insider trading law does say you can't do this. If you got the information because you were, say, a guy making deal toys for the people involved, you aren't allowed to take the information that you were entrusted with and that belongs to others, in this case Google and Nest, and use it to trade for yourself. And if you got the information from your buddy who was involved in the deal somehow, then you inherit his breach of fiduciary duty and so you're in trouble. Not so fast, says Levine. To give rise to insider trading liability, information must not only be non-public. It must also be "material." And, to make a long Levine post short, since Nest Labs has no relationship to NEST, information about Nest Labs cannot be material to NEST. That seems rather straight forward and smart. But it's wrong. Here's how the judge instructed the jury in the recent case against Mark Cuban: "Materiality depends on the significance the reasonable investor would place on the withheld or misrepresented information. Materiality is not judged in the abstract, but in light of the surrounding circumstances. Information is material if there is a substantial likelihood that, under all the circumstances, the information would have assumed actual significance in the deliberations of the reasonable shareholder." So here's something both the federal courts and the SEC consider to be an important factor when considering materiality: The effect on the stock's price. As the Third Circuit put it in Oran v. Stafford, "when a stock is traded in an efficient market, the materiality of disclosed information may be measured post hoc by looking to the movement, in the period immediately following disclosure, of the price of the firm's stock." The price of NEST shares rose 1,900 percent when the deal was disclosed. That pretty much screams materiality. Levine says that the information isn't material because the connection just isn't "reasonable." Or, rather, that no reasonable investor in NEST would care about the acquisition of Nest Labs. Sure the stock price moved, but that was unreasonable. And stupid. So it's not material. The problem with this line of argument is that in Levine's scenario, the investor with inside information buys shares of NEST as part of a scheme to trade from a mistake he anticipates occurring when the deal is announced. And then that mistake happened. That may be stupid but it's not unreasonable Let's put it this way. Would knowledge of the Google deal have played a part in the decision of owners of NEST to sell their shares the day before the deal was announced? It may not have been decisive but surely it would have played some part. I mean, you own shares of worthless stock that could have value tomorrow based on investor error. Why not hold it an extra day? More importantly, I think Levine is wrong about the touch point of materiality. He assume that the information needs to be material about the company in which the shares actually were traded. That's incorrect, in my opinion. Keep in mind that in a misappropriation case, the duty breached that gives rise to illegality is not owed to the person on the other side of the trade. It's owed to the person who is the source of the information. The line of materiality should also connect not to the investors in NEST but back to the investors in the source of the information, Google. And for Google investors, the multi-billion acquisition almost certainly was material. Misappropriation is about using the information that belongs to others for your own benefit, in breach of a duty of loyalty and confidentiality toward them. When judging materiality, it only makes sense that the correct place to look is to the owners of the information.

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Another foray into the great debate about hypothetical insider trading in a penny-stock that soared when Google announced it was buying Nest Labs.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160227105719id_/http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2006/09/20084915589199285.html

Joseph Kabila's Alliance of the Presidential Majority bloc has emerged as the biggest single political force in the country, capturing more than 200 of the 500 seats in the new National Assembly in elections held on July 30. An alliance of parties led by Kabila's arch rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba, the Rally of Congolese Nationalists (RCN), took second place with around 100 seats. The remaining seats were shared among independents and smaller political groupings, including the Coalition of Congolese Democrats (CCD) led by Pierre Pay Pay, who served as governor of the country's central bank when DRC was ruled by Sese Seko Mobutu. The results were compiled from provisional figures that were released by the Independent Electoral Commission on Friday, and mirror those of the country's first-round presidential election, in which Kabila won the most votes with Jean-Pierre Bemba, the vice president, in second place. Jean-Pierre Bemba, Kabila's rival,took second place with 100 seatsThe results complete a three-year period of political transition that followed the vast central African country's five-year civil war from 1998 to 2003, which drew in six foreign armies and claimed more than three million lives. Jean-Pierre Bemba, Kabila's rival,took second place with 100 seats Jan Egeland, UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said this week that he remained "very concerned" by the situation in DRC, parts of which were still violent. The situation in the capital, where the UN and EU peacekeepers are patrolling the streets, remained calm after the final results were announced. Deputies are due to take up their seats in parliament in 15 days. Kabila and Bemba are to face each other in a second round run-off that is scheduled to take place on October 29.  The elections are to be followed by local polls, and are intended ultimately to lead to the re-building of the war-ravaged central African country.

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A bloc led by the country's president has won the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) first free multi-party legislative elections in over 40 years, but failed to secure an absolute majority.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160427013157id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-masterclass-in-unpredictable-decor-1461699143

OUR DESIGN ASSESSMENT: This vignette—part of a larger study in a contemporary Houston home—is all about deadpan juxtapositions. Starkness collides with splendor, masculinity with femininity, 90-degree angles with coy curves. Houston designer Richard Holley made such unexpected choices: The looming, brooding 2005 canvas (by painter Nancy Nye ) should be bullying the slight, impish Regency settee, but the two bring out the best in each other. In case you don’t get the joke, the concrete floor, as blank and brusque as the painting, also highlights the cheeky ornateness of the settee, ottoman and pillow. (Plopping the furniture on an equally florid rug would be far less modern.) Our favorite bit of visual wit: How the splaying lines of the camera’s tripod echo the pillow’s sunburst pattern. Only criticism? The seating looks rather uncomfortable. THE DESIGNER’S RESPONSE: “This is a disorienting conversation to have,” said Mr. Holley. “You’ve put in words things I just did intuitively.” A blockier sofa might have matched the décor’s squared-off elements, he said on reflection, but “this project was all about a client who is eccentric and unpredictable. She’s an artist and a beekeeper and a Buddhist. I wanted to amuse her eye.” He deliberately skipped a rug—“it would have confused the simplicity”—but didn’t consciously orchestrate the tripod-sunburst echoes. As for the comfort factor, “The room also contains an overscale chaise and an overstuffed chair,” he said in his defense. This arrangement, designed to lure the eye down a hallway and into the room, “is more decorative than functional.”

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A Masterclass in Unpredictable DécorWe pit our aesthetic assessment of a study in a Houston home—full of opposites that attract—against the intent of the designer, Richard Holley

http://web.archive.org/web/20160604030152id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/blindspot/episode-guide/season-blindspot-season-1/a-stray-howl/102

With Jane (Jaimie Alexander) in a state of near-constant panic over her identity, Dr. Borden (Ukweli Roach) administers a Rorschach test. But all Jane's got is the memory of weapons training in the woods with the ruggedly handsome man. Meanwhile, Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) has breakfast with his sister Sarah and her son Sawyer, who have moved in while looking for an apartment. Sarah mentions their father called to ask if they're attending Taylor's yearly memorial? Weller is definitely not interested. At work, he tells Patterson (Ashley Johnson) that he noticed a scar on the back of Jane's neck. Then he runs Jane through more weapons training, hoping to trigger another memory. One thing's for sure: Jane knows her guns, and she now remembers shooting a nun in the back of the head. Stunned, she refrains from telling Weller, just as word arrives that Chao is dead of a massive stroke. Surveillance footage shows a man walking away from Chao's room as everyone else rushes toward it... Suddenly, Patterson announces that she's decoded a Vigenère cipher on Jane's neck: Maj. Arthur Gibson - a Silver Star-awarded pilot, who once injured, left a desk job in Nevada to work for the Air Force in New York. Convinced Gibson may know something about her, Jane insists on accompanying the team to his home in Brooklyn. Refusing to talk, Gibson orders the team off his property. As they head back to their SUV, Gibson's house explodes. The only thing that survives the explosion is a wall safe - no sign of Gibson. The team questions Air Force Colonel Margaret Powers, who explains that after experiencing collateral damage on a mission, Gibson's increasing paranoia and PTSD earned him a desk job and, ultimately, a discharge. But after reviewing Gibson's files, Patterson finds that not only did the Air Force not fire Gibson, they promoted him - and gave him top security clearance. Weller figures the Air Force made Gibson a drone pilot, which means there must be a drone program in New York. Meanwhile, Gibson kidnaps Emily, the six-year-old daughter of his co-worker Alex, in order to force his assistance in launching an armed drone. Moments later, the drone drops a missile on Colonel Powers as she's getting into her SUV. Frustrated, Reade (Rob Brown) wonders whether Jane and her tattoos are to blame. Weller insists it's not Jane's fault; they need to focus on finding Gibson. Furious, Mayfair (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) calls General Fitzmorris, who admits Gibson worked for a secret domestic drone surveillance program, and the drone he now controls is armed with two more missiles. Distraught over the general's disregard for Emily's welfare, Weller blows up, so Mayfair orders him to stand down. While Reade speculates that whoever tattooed Jane knew about the drone program, Jane flashes back to shooting the nun. Maybe her tattoos are some kind of penance? Mayfair pulls Weller aside, to chastise him for yelling at Fitzmorris. Weller admits he's been thinking about Taylor, who went missing 25 years ago when he was 10. In his last memory of her, Taylor fell while climbing a tree, leaving a scar on the back of her neck - the same scar as Jane's. Weller knows why his name is on Jane's back: Jane Doe is Taylor Shaw. Paterson cracks Gibson's safe, finding an air-gapped laptop with a list of five seemingly unrelated domestic accidents - yet the victims of each incident were all from the Middle East. Gibson's initials are associated with three, the initials I.M. with the other two. Patterson thinks I.M. is Major Ivon Musgrave, so the team scrambles to his Brooklyn apartment. When Musgrave runs, Jane gives chase. An intense fight ensues, until Weller intervenes, hauling Musgrave onto the street. Musgrave demands to talk to Colonel Powers, just as Jane spies the man from her memory. That's when the second missile hits, blowing the team back into the apartment building. Jane rushes to help an injured Reade, then stumbles back to the street, but the man from her flashback is gone. Back at HQ, Musgrave explains that Gibson wanted to expose the drone program, which was rife with collateral damage. When he asked for help, Musgrave turned him in, then helped the Air Force destroy Gibson's life. Since Gibson has one missile left and is dead set on destroying the program, Weller asks Fitzmorris where the drone pilots work from... and it's the top three floors of the building they're in. Twice a day, every pilot is in the building for a shift change, which is in one hour. As the building evacuation begins, Patterson narrows Gibson's location to one of two construction sites in Brooklyn. On the way, Jane tells Weller that she did remember something... what if she's a terrible person? Insisting Jane has a good heart, Weller leaves her in the car, then runs to check the roof. After a firefight, Gibson takes the elevator down as Weller tries and fails to warn Jane. Gibson open fires on the SUV, then drives off, so Jane decides to follow, forcing a crash and rolling her own car, which brings on another flashback. The nun is actually a soldier in disguise. After the shooting, Jane pulls a coded USB fob from around his neck. After pulling a woozy Jane out of the SUV, Weller extracts Emily's location from Gibson and returns the little girl to her father. Back at HQ, the team argues about the day's events. The Air Force has already come up with a cover story for the press, and Reade isn't convinced Jane's tattoo saved thousands of lives. Mayfair pulls Weller aside to advise that Patterson is running DNA tests to confirm whether Jane truly is Taylor. But Weller doesn't need test results - even if he's not ready to tell Jane. That night, he runs his theory by his sister. Stunned, Sarah reviews how this could change all their lives: their father was accused of kidnapping and killing Taylor, causing their mother to leave. Weller has spent the last 25 years believing his father murdered Taylor... and now their father is dying of pancreatic cancer. Soon. Across town, Jane is surveying the dismal contents of her safe house refrigerator when someone grabs her from behind... the ruggedly handsome man.

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While a tattoo sends the team after a drone pilot gone crazy, Weller seeks to confirm that Jane Doe is a missing person from his childhood.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160610204110id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/06/02/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-foreign-policy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region%C2%AEion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Mrs. Clinton will deliver the address on her final campaign swing before California holds its Democratic primary on Tuesday, when she is widely expected to reach the threshold of delegates needed to secure her party’s nomination. But in choosing to raise concerns about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy stances, she will be speaking to swing voters in general election battleground states who have doubts about a Trump presidency. While Mrs. Clinton must be cautious not to alienate liberal Democrats who oppose some of her hawkish foreign policy stances, her campaign says national security could be the catalyst that drives independents and wavering Republicans to support her this fall. Roughly 21 percent of independent voters and 32 percent of Republican voters said the most important issue this election was terrorism and national security, compared with 16 percent of Democrats, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted last month. At the same time, 61 percent of registered voters said a Trump presidency would make America’s image in the world worse, according to the latest New York Times-CBS News poll. “There are many Republicans concerned about this,” R. Nicholas Burns, an American ambassador to NATO during the George W. Bush administration who also served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, said of Mr. Trump. “They find his policy positions beyond the pale, and they’re also turned off by his vulgarity.” To that end, the Clinton campaign and its outside advisers have embarked on an effort to reach out to prominent moderate Republicans who could endorse Mrs. Clinton, largely making the case for foreign policy sure-footedness. Those calls have included to an aide of the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and to Nicholas F. Brady, who served as secretary of the Treasury under Mr. Reagan and the elder Mr. Bush, with plans to reach out to James A. Baker III, a White House chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and secretary of state under President George Bush. In her debates with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton has defended her foreign policy decisions, including urging the Obama administration to join a NATO-led coalition to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, which she later said was a mistake. Donald J. Trump told a crowd in Sacramento that NATO states and other allies should be paying the United States compensation for all the U.S. has done for them. In an interview Wednesday night, Mr. Trump criticized Mrs. Clinton’s early support for the Iraq war, which he said he opposed, and questioned her judgment in Libya. “Bernie Sanders said it and I’m going to use it all over the place because it’s true,” Mr. Trump said. “She is a woman who is ill-suited to be president because she has bad judgment.” As each candidate argues the other is unfit to occupy the Oval Office, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers are preparing to make a case against Mr. Trump that will be jarringly different from the sparring of past presidential campaigns over foreign policy. “It’s not like the campaign against McCain or Romney, which was two competing visions,” said Derek Chollet, a former White House and Pentagon official under President Obama. Instead, he said, Mrs. Clinton will remind voters that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean government of Kim Jong-un have expressed support for Mr. Trump, who has suggested a willingness to talk directly with Mr. Kim, a pariah worldwide. Mrs. Clinton will also accuse Mr. Trump of bluster and oratory that is in direct opposition to the bipartisan pillars of American diplomacy that every president has adhered to since World War II. Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., pointed to Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the United States rethink its involvement in NATO, the Brussels-based coalition of European nations. Mrs. Clinton, she added, needed to explain to voters that “every single president over the last couple decades has understood the value of alliances” and that “playing by the rules makes sense for all of us.” Mr. Trump said Mrs. Clinton was “fraudulent” in her misrepresentation of his foreign policy positions, explaining that he supported global alliances, but believed that the United States should shoulder less of the financial burden. “Our country can’t afford to protect the world anymore, and at least not get reimbursed for it,” he said. Mrs. Clinton has delivered a series of foreign policy speeches over the course of the nominating fight that included calling for accelerating the American-led operation to defeat the Islamic State, ending the economic embargo against Cuba, and pledging unwavering support of Israel. And she had already begun to lay the groundwork against what she called Mr. Trump’s “reckless actions” on foreign policy. The San Diego speech, to be delivered in a city known for its military presence at a time when Mr. Trump is facing scrutiny over his donations to veterans’ groups, will present a more sweeping — and fearsome — portrayal of Mr. Trump, one that the Clinton campaign will deliver like a drumbeat to voters in the coming months. “There’s not a lot of room left in terms of new proposals,” Mr. Sullivan said. “This is a speech about a vision and principle and purpose, not individual policy proposals.” The prospect of a foreign policy debate not centered on policy differences has confounded Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, who in a more traditional election would be facing questions about Mrs. Clinton’s call for a no-fly zone with coalition forces to protect Syrians or how she would handle the flood of migrants to Europe. But Mr. Trump, in addressing foreign policy, has largely relied on gut instinct and appealing to voters’ emotional concerns that America has lost its standing in the world. “You do get the sense that he’s in a dialogue with a part of the electorate — and I consider it a minority — that couldn’t be less interested in facts or realities,” said Daniel Benjamin, coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department under Mrs. Clinton. “That’s a really challenging task that most of us were unprepared for in many ways.”

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A speech will cast her likely Republican rival as a threat to bipartisan tenets of American diplomacy and declare him unfit for the presidency.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160701024815id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/news/2016-race-donald-trump-ted-cruz-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-tax-plans-impact/

Before making your final presidential candidate pick, be aware that it can have a direct impact on your wallet. In the International Business Times, personal finance editor Lauren Lyons Cole explains how the tax plans of leading presidential candidates could have a "lasting impact on the American economy as well as your future paycheck," based on research from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Perhaps the most surprising finding from Cole's research was that Donald Trump would put the most money back into your paycheck. The GOP front-runner proposes tax cuts across all income levels, and slashing taxes for those making up to $50,000. "With Trump, of course, it's going to benefit the wealthy the most, so as you go up, your paycheck will increase drastically, which would benefit him as well," Cole explained on "CBS This Morning" Friday. But this comes at a cost -- a $9.5 trillion federal deficit over the next decade, which would require drastic reductions in federal spending to help pay for the tax breaks. Republican rival Ted Cruz's tax plan would also result in an enormous federal deficit: an estimated $8.6 trillion over the next decade. Cruz's plan is the "most creative," Cole said, and would reform the current 750,000-page tax code for a flat tax rate of 10 percent across all incomes. Cruz's plan would also benefit the wealthy most, even more so than Trump's, Cole said. As for the middle class, paychecks may increase by about 50 dollars, according to the International Business Times analysis. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders would also raise the federal deficit with his tax plan, which Cole said was "more extreme" than Trump's. The senator vows to raise taxes regardless of your income, with the highest earners paying over 40 percent, for a "trade off" for funding free government programs, including college and health care. "Unless you need health care, then Bernie Sanders is not going to do a lot for you," Cole said. But if you want to keep things as they are, Cole said Clinton is your choice. Most Americans can expect the same taxes, and only those making over one million dollars would face an increase. For those making $5 million and over, Clinton plans to add a four percent surtax. "Hillary Clinton is very status quo. Her plan is very similar to what we have with President Obama," Cole said. © 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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International Business Times' Lauren Lyons Cole shows how each candidate's tax plan could have lasting impacts on your paycheck and taxes

http://web.archive.org/web/20160717153549id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/07/17/02/59/police-arrest-3-in-nice-is-claims-attack

The man behind the Bastille Day truck attack that killed at least 84 people in Nice had recently been radicalised, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says. Thursday night's attack in the Riviera city of Nice plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism. Authorities are yet to produce evidence 31-year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any links to Islamic State, which claimed the attack, but Valls said there was no doubt on the assailant's motives. "The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly," Valls said in an interview with Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. "The claim on Saturday morning by Islamic State and the fast radicalisation of the killer confirms the Islamist nature of this attack." Officials said on Saturday that people questioned by police had indicated that he had undergone a rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion. Relatives and friends interviewed in Nice painted a picture of a man who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and according to French media even ate pork, behaviour that would be unlikely in a devout Muslim. Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel's sister told Reuters he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005 and had sought medical treatment. As authorities were trying to better understand his motives, two more people, a man and a woman close to Bouhlel, were arrested in Nice early on Sunday, bringing the number of people in detention over the killings to seven. The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said that Bouhlel "was one of the soldiers of Islamic State". Valls, who said security services had prevented 16 attacks over three years, indicated that at play on Thursday was the group's modus operandi of cajoling unstable individuals into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible. "Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts ... this is probably what happened in Nice's case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. The group, which is under military pressure from forces opposed to it, considers France its main target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States, which is leading a coalition against it. Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and far right over how President Francois Hollande's Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no risk zero and new attacks would occur. "I've always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It's difficult to say, but other lives will be lost." With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, French opposition politicians are increasing pressure and seizing on what they described as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2km through large crowds before it was finally halted. After Thursday's attack, a state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris was extended by three months.

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The family of the man who killed 84 people in Nice doubt his Islamic State links, but French authorities say he may have been radicalised very quickly.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160722193239id_/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/mar/30/constructive-criticism-women-in-architecture?CMP=twt_gu

It's been a good week for women in architecture in general, except for one female architect in particular. In the first instance, the Architect's Journal announced the finalists for its inaugural Women in Architecture awards. The magazine's recent championing of female architects, and highlighting of inequalities within the profession, is commendable. Among its findings was that the proportion of female architectural staff in the UK has actually declined since 2009, from 28% to 21% – this despite the proportion of female architecture students being roughly 50%. That work-life balance is evidently hard to strike in a profession many say is still inherently masculine, with its long apprenticeship, long working hours, and emphasis on competition rather than collaboration. No wonder they've called it the WAA – it sounds like a cry of despair, doesn't it? The shortlists aren't too depressing, though. Eight women are up for the award, including Amanda Levete (formerly of Future Systems, doing well on her own), Roisin Heneghan (of Heneghan Peng, designers of the new London Olympics footbridge) and Sarah Wigglesworth (whose fine Sandal Magna primary school gained her a lot of attention last year). There's also an award for emerging woman architect of the year. The prizes are announced on 20 April. There's a nice (if confusingly Anglo-American) infographic on women in architecture here, by the way. The woman for whom it has not been such a great week is the first female architect most people would name: Zaha Hadid. She's up for the WAA as well, but first she lost out on the competition to design the prestigious new Bauhaus Museum in Weimer, Germany, for which she was the only British architect in contention. Her absence was conspicuous, too, when it came to another architecture award: the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) announced the 23-strong shortlist for its inaugural national awards this week, and Zaha's Glasgow Riverside Museum for Transport isn't on it, despite being surely the highest-profile new building in Scotland of the past year. It wasn't a unanimously popular project, but its omission has baffled even its critics. Was it because Zaha has won the Stirling prize for two years running? Has she just become too big? Hadid can at least take consolation from her inclusion in the V&A's new exhibition on British design, which opens today. The exhibition's architecture component includes a model of her Aquatics Centre, the only female-designed building in the show, as far as I could see. There are plenty of the usual architectural suspects here: the postwar Festival of Britain generation; Basil Spence; Denys Lasdun; big models of Foster's Gherkin and Rogers's Lloyds building. One discovery for me was John Prizeman, about whom I'd known very little. He was an accomplished writer, and his work mainly focused on domestic interiors, particularly kitchens. There are illustrations of two small designs by him that caught my eye. One was his "Soft-Tech House for the 1980s" – an evocative, late-70s vision of "the future" that looks like a cross between Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House and a sort of Hobbit-style eco-dwelling. It's somehow simultaneously quaint and ahead of its time. The other, particularly pertinent in the context of women in architecture, is a cutaway illustration of a neat, compact family home Prizeman designed in 1959. It's bracingly modern, with fitted kitchens, free-flowing living areas and a new Mini in the garage, though its name wasn't exactly progressive: it's called Her House. It says it all that the woman in Prizeman's dream home is depicted bustling around indoors; the man is lounging on the back terrace. Finally, another new discovery this week was Architects of Invention, a practice that not only has one of the best names in the business but looks to be living up to it. It is headed by Niko Japaridze, a former senior architect at Rem Koolhaas's OMA, who has worked in the UK and also has offices in his native Georgia. Last year, the firm wove a snaking wooden staircase through the new headquarters it designed for Georgia's National Olympic Committee, and has recently finished an imposing new building in Tbilisi with an imposing name: The Prosecutor's Office. It looks like a giant black filing cabinet, with square, glass rooms projecting out like half-opened drawers. Seventy per cent of the building is hung off the ground. The interior is just as startling – its long central staircase with green glass walls looks like something out of The Matrix. Japaridze has a host of other promising-looking buildings going up in Georgia. He also claims to be Tbilisi's one millionth citizen. One to watch. • This article was amended on 4 April 2012. The original misspelled the names of Roisin Heneghan and Heneghan Peng architects as Roisin Peneghan of Peneghan Heng. This has been corrected.

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It was a good week for women architects – except for the most famous one – while the British design exhibition reveals a couple of gems

http://web.archive.org/web/20160723065050id_/http://time.com:80/money/3419105/kids-marketing-adults-disney-vitamins-cereal/?

It’s hard to remember a time when video games and comic books were enjoyed almost exclusively by people under the age of 18. But that was the case a mere couple of decades ago, before both began featuring violence, profanity, sex, and other material not appropriate for young children. Along the same lines, in recent times many other things long associated with kids are now being marketed to adult consumers. Here are a dozen examples: Gummy Vitamins. A string of studies indicating that vitamins appear to be largely a waste of money has resulted in flat sales for the once sizzling vitamin market. It looks like consumers are getting the messages spread by researchers in the field, who point out that while vitamin supplements are correlated with better health, there is little proof of causality because the people taking vitamins tend to healthier and take better care of themselves in the first place. But if consumers are dubious about the benefits of boring old-fashioned vitamins, they appear less skeptical about vitamins “disguised as candy,” a.k.a. gummy vitamins. Once popular only with children, colorful, chewable, sweet-tasting vitamins are now ubiquitous in stores’ adult vitamin sections, and makers of such adult vitamins say that the category has been enjoying “explosive growth” of late. Walt Disney World. In some ways, Disney World has always been marketed to adults—who often say they enjoy “feeling like a kid” while touring the theme parks sans children. Some even wish Disney would host child-free days when adults could hit the rides without having to deal with the young whippersnappers clogging up the parks. While that’s highly unlikely to ever take place, Disney has taken several steps over the years to appeal to adult-only clientele, including the introduction of booze for sale at the Magic Kingdom, as well as special events like $35 “After Hours” party with alcohol and tasting menus, and, most recently, a $79 “Food & Wine Late Night” at EPCOT. Pop Tarts. While interest in breakfast cereal has collapsed in recent years, sales of another kid favorite at the breakfast table, Pop Tarts, have risen each and every year for more than three decades straight. The Wall Street Journal noted that while Pop Tarts are most popular with teens and younger children, “adults reach for them as a retro snack.” It’s not just nostalgia that’s drawing adults to Pop Tarts, but that, “Shoppers increasingly want quick breakfasts they can eat with one hand on the go.” Over the years, Pop Tarts and its imitators have periodically tried out products more directly marketed to adults and foodies, such as “Toaster Pastries” in flavors like Cherry Pomegranate from Nature’s Path. Happy Meals. McDonald’s briefly tried to market a “Go Active Happy Meal” for adults a decade ago, with a salad and an exercise booklet instead of chicken nuggets and a plastic toy. It obviously didn’t catch on—very few healthy fast food items are successful—but this fall, the Happy Meal for Adults concept is back, bizarrely, in the world of high fashion. Nordstrom is selling a series of pop culture-themed items from Moschino, including an iPhone case that looks like a McDonald’s French fry container ($85) and a Happy Meal lookalike shoulder bag that retails for over $1,000. Backpacks. In what could be considered a sign that adults really don’t want to grow up, backpack sales are up dramatically among consumers ages 18 and up—including a 48% rise in backpack purchases by female adults over a recent time span. Valentino, Alexander McQueen, and Fendi are among the many fashion designers to feature posh leather and camouflage versions of the bag normally associated with high school and college kids, only theirs sometimes cost $2,000. Lunchables. OK, so neither Kraft nor its Oscar Mayer brand actually markets Lunchables to adults. But the Adult Lunch Combos look eerily like Lunchables only without Oreos or Capri Sun, and everyone is referring to the new protein-packed prepared lunches as “Lunchables for Adults” even though the real name is the Portable Protein Pack. Obstacle Courses. Kids have playgrounds in town parks and schools. What do adults have to help keep them in shape while also having fun? The gym doesn’t qualify because, for most people, working out is work, not fun. The exception is when the workout allows adults to swing, jump, get dirty, and challenge themselves on courses made specifically for them, like those on the popular TV show “American Ninja Warrior” and on Tough Mudder and other extreme obstacle course races. This fall, Las Vegas is even hosting an “Adult-Themed” course where the obstacles have names like the Dominatrix Dungeon and the Blue Balls Dash. Sugary Cereals. A big reason that cereal sales have dropped is that fewer kids are eating them for breakfast. Yet as parents try to sub in healthier fare as a replacement for kid-favorite sugary cereals, the cereal giants appear to be having some success reaching a different audience—the parents themselves. Baby Boomers and Gen X, who grew up craving the sugar rush provided by a bowl of neon-colored goodies on Saturday mornings, are now being fed heaping doses of nostalgia, in the form of cartoon-character cereals brought back from the dead and other adult-focused marketing efforts. The fastest-growing consumers of Trix and Lucky Charms are, in fact, older adults. Legos. “The Lego Movie” was certainly clever and entertaining enough to warrant an adult audience, especially among those who grew up building with the bricks. Lately, Lego has been making another appeal to adults. Several Legoland Discovery Centers—which normally attract families with children under the age of 10 or 12—have been offering special Adult Nights, where all visitors must be 18 or over. Fruit Roll-Ups. Many adults would probably be embarrassed if they were caught eating Fruit Roll-Ups, delicious though they may be. How can you avoid being kidded about your preference for what is a quintessential kid snack? Easy. Call them something more adult-sounding, such as Fruit Strips or Fruit Leather. Hot Pockets. Last year, Nestle attempted to broaden the Hot Pocket demographic—typically, teen boys and slacker college kids who don’t want to cook or even order pizza—by introducing gourmet versions featuring angus beef, hickory ham to appeal to adult foodies. Halloween. October 31 used to be about children trick-or-treating door to door in their neighborhoods. Now it’s the centerpiece of a whole Halloween season where the kids are invited to enjoy only some—but by no means all—of the fun. A year ago, adults spent roughly $1.2 billion on costumes, compared to $1 billion spent on costumes for kids. Roughly 7 out of 10 college-aged adults plan on dressing up for Halloween, which explains the sales success of oddly “sexy” costumes of pizza slices or corn fields. Or sexy nuns. Adults also tend to spend more on their costumes than they do on Halloween outfits for kids. So that explains why companies are marketing the holiday to adults more and more. Still, it’s hard to come up with a good explanation for the existence of the Sexy Pizza Costume.

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Who says kids should get to have all the fun? Not the forces behind a wide range of seemingly juvenile foods, products, and places that are increasingly being sold to adults—plenty of whom are happy to play along.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160725140431id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/07/25/04/11/munich-shooter-was-bullied-loner

The teenager behind the deadly shooting rampage in Munich was a withdrawn loner investigators say, adding that he had planned the attack for a year. Law enforcement officials said on Sunday 18-year-old David Ali Sonboly was obsessed with playing "killer" video games in his bedroom and a victim of bullying who suffered from panic attacks set off by contact with other people. The German-Iranian was seeing a doctor up to last month for treatment of depression and psychiatric problems that began in 2015 with inpatient hospital care and then was followed up with outpatient visits. Medication for his problems had been found his room but toxicological and autopsy results aren't yet available, so it's not yet clear whether he was taking the medicine when he went on his shooting spree on Friday, killing nine people and leaving dozens wounded. The attack came on the fifth anniversary of the killing of 77 people by Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, whose victims included dozens of young people. Investigators said the Munich shooter had researched that slaughter online and had visited the site of a previous school shooting in the German town of Winnenden last year. "He had been planning this crime since last summer," said Robert Heimberger, Bavaria's top official, citing a "manifesto" linked to the shooting found in the gunman's locked room in the apartment he shared with his parents and brother. Heimberger said he could not reveal details of the document yet because there were "many more terabytes" of information to evaluate, but described the gunman as a "devoted player" of group internet "killer games" pitting virtual shooters against each other. Weapons are strictly controlled in Germany and police are still trying to determine exactly how the shooter obtained the Glock 17 used in the attack. Heimberger said it's "very likely" the suspect purchased the weapon illegally online on the "darknet". The shooter's father saw a video of the start of his son's rampage on social media and went to police as it was taking place, Heimberger said, adding that the family was still emotionally not up to questioning by police. Witnesses say the gunman shouted slurs against foreigners, even though he himself was the German-born son of Iranian asylum-seekers Heimberger said the McDonald's restaurant were most of the victims died was a hangout for youths of immigrant backgrounds, and the dead included victims of Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, and Kosovo Albanian backgrounds and a stateless person. In the aftermath of the attack, Bavaria's top security official urged the government to allow the country's military to be deployed in support of police during attacks. Because of the excesses of the Nazi era, Germany's post-war constitution only allows the military, known as the Bundeswehr, to be deployed domestically in cases of national emergency. Munich deployed 2300 police officers to lock down the city Friday night, calling in elite SWAT teams from around the country and neighbouring Austria.

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As German investigators piece together what was behind the Munich shooting, a picture of a withdrawn teenage loner, obsessed with violence, emerges.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160805183559id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/01/business/media/whats-next-at-fox-news-with-ailes-out-and-murdoch-in.html?_r=0

The Murdochs are still in crisis mode at Fox News. The network was rocked yet again on Friday, this time by a devastating article in New York magazine by Gabriel Sherman, who reported that Fox News paid a $3 million settlement to a booker who said Mr. Ailes carried on an abusive 20-year relationship with her — at times using company resources and personnel to facilitate it. Mr. Ailes denied the charges through his lawyer. It immediately raised new questions about whether the Murdochs would be forced into a bigger house cleaning of Mr. Ailes’s remaining team of lieutenants at Fox News, where, it seems, sexual harassment payouts were not followed by the recognition that there just might be a problem, let alone by any obvious attempts to aggressively address the corporate culture that facilitated the behavior in the first place. Mr. Ailes’s departure from the network leaves a huge vacuum in its own right. He drove it to pursue the stories that helped define the strife of the Clinton, Bush (No. 43) and Obama eras. He made it a TV headquarters for the patriotism-infused Bush war marketing effort; the false accusations that Mr. Obama was a “socialist” of dubious citizenship, and, most recently, the Trump movement. Mr. Murdoch abided by it all, even when it conflicted with some of his own views, such as his support for a path to citizenship for certain undocumented immigrants. But as often as not he seemed to be in line with Mr. Ailes, at least based on how he portrayed himself on Twitter — as a “climate change skeptic”; as a fan of Dr. Ben Carson, “a real black president who can properly address the racial divide”; and as one who believes: “Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.” Though executives who have worked with Lachlan Murdoch say they assume he shares some of his father’s conservatism, they also say he does not readily advertise his views, which is in itself a major departure from the elder Murdoch. As for James Murdoch, his leanings are in plainer view than his brother’s, and they are decidedly different from his father’s (with an important exception, friends say: free-market fiscal policy). James Murdoch’s wife, Kathryn, is a trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund and a former director at the Clinton Climate Initiative. The couple started Quadrivium, a foundation that focuses on the “sustainable use of resources” and “scientific understanding.” James has spearheaded initiatives to make the company “carbon neutral.” In an essay in Time magazine in December, he wrote, “Entrenched and compromised interests spin the fiction that science is more divided than united, and they sow seeds of uncertainty on issues of unquestionable priority: namely, the survival of our species on this planet.” His views have heartened producers and executives at National Geographic, which 21st Century Fox took greater control of last year. Fox News’s reporting often tells a much different story. Its hosts don’t hesitate to report that “the science is still in question,” as Heather Childers recently did, or that warnings about climate change are emanating from “people aligned with the political left in the scientific community,” as the host Steve Doocy said in April while promoting a film purporting to debunk climate change. Even before Mr. Ailes’s ouster, climate activists were hopeful that James Murdoch would force changes to skeptical coverage of climate change at Fox News, as well as its corporate cousin The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has great sway with congressional Republicans. To nudge it along, one group, Partnership for Responsible Growth, has run ads with both outlets reminding Republicans that their leaders used to support market-based solutions to climate change — and calling on The Journal’s editorial page to acknowledge humankind’s role. David Fenton, a longtime strategist for progressive causes whose agency, Fenton, made the ads, said its main goal was to push a bipartisan solution in the form of a carbon pricing system. The Murdoch outlets have been standing in the way, he said, by creating a “false reality bubble denying science” that scares amenable Republican politicians away from the cause. “James knows better, and there’s no way that someone like that could be happy with the terribly negative role the Murdoch properties have played in slowing bipartisan action on climate,” Mr. Fenton said. None of the Murdochs would comment for this column. But it’s impossible to talk about the intersection of their political and business interests without lingering for a moment on the latter. Even if some of Fox News’s programming drives one or both of the brothers bananas, it is still a major cash generator for 21st Century Fox, with $1.6 billion in operating profit in fiscal 2015, according to Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. Fox News’s raison d’être was to fill a void that conservative-leaning viewers sensed in the mainstream media. That guiding philosophy has provided a steady compass, and a lucrative revenue stream, as its competitors have struggled with their own paths. That could provide a strong argument against drastic change, especially for the elder Mr. Murdoch, who is by all accounts enjoying his new role running the network and is saying he won’t rush into picking a successor to Mr. Ailes. It seems a near certainty that he will stay through the election. With Mr. Murdoch at the helm, the network covered Hillary Clinton’s convention in Philadelphia with all the skepticism you’d expect. It didn’t show the speech of Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of a fallen American soldier. Then, there was Bill O’Reilly’s aside that the slaves who built the White House, whom Michelle Obama referred to in her prime-time address, were “well fed” and adequately housed. That said, Fox News’s audience tends to be older, which is why executives there indicate that the family views its younger prime-time star, Megyn Kelly, as an important part of its future. Her appeal extends to the core Fox News viewer as well as to those with more mainstream news tastes. Ms. Kelly’s contract, like Mr. O’Reilly’s, comes up for renewal next year. Before Mr. Ailes left, Ms. Kelly seemed certain to leave. Now it’s a given that her decision will depend on how the Murdochs decide to proceed — as will so, so much else. A version of this article appears in print on August 1, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: With Ailes Out, and Murdoch In, What’s Next at Fox News?. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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Rupert Murdoch as the network’s interim chief after Roger Ailes’s ouster is a smart move, but Mr. Murdoch’s sons may have a hand in the direction of the empire.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161117092715id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/03/29/concord-maker-fivefingers-running-shoe-faces-suit-over-health-claims/cLiXKQaDLsAQONwyQnHVOK/story.html

Another Massachusetts shoemaker is being challenged for making health claims about its footwear. A Florida woman, Valerie Bezdek, has sued Vibram USA Inc., based in Concord, accusing the maker of the FiveFingers running shoe of making misleading claims about health benefits. Designed to mimic the act of barefoot running, the minimalist running shoe has a shaped sole and a mesh top, with individual sleeves for each toe. In its advertising, Vibram says the shoe improves posture and strengthens leg muscles. But the lawsuit says that using FiveFingers may be risky for runners. “Indeed, running in FiveFingers may increase injury risk as compared to running in conventional running shoes, and even when compared to running barefoot,’’ according to a copy of the suit, filed in US District Court in Boston. Get Business Headlines in your inbox: The Globe's latest business headlines delivered every morning, Monday through Friday. The Vibram suit follows several recent cases against Massachusetts shoe companies about how they market sneakers. Last year, Canton-based Reebok International Ltd. refunded $25 million to customers after the Federal Trade Commission found it made deceptive claims that its toning shoes improved muscle tone. A suit filed in January 2011 alleged that New Balance, of Boston, also overstated the benefits of its toning shoes. FiveFingers shoes have gained in popularity. Still, according to SportsOne Source, which tracks the sporting goods industry, barefoot-style footwear represents only 8 percent of the $6.5 billion running shoe market in the United States. “This is a totally different manner of running,’’ said Matt Powell, an analyst with SportsOne Source, “and you need to be pretty dedicated to it.’’ There are similarities between the Vibram lawsuit and the Reebok case, but the Vibram claims differ, he said. While Reebok promised firmer butts and toned legs as a result of wearing its toning shoes, he said the Vibram claims are more about the benefits of barefoot running, which Vibram claims are supported by scientific evidence. “And there is ample evidence that training without shoes allows you to run faster and farther with fewer injuries,’’ the company says on its website. Vibram, with corporate headquarters in Italy, is a 70-year-old company known for pioneering the use of rubber soles for footwear. It introduced its line of FiveFinger shoes in 2005. Janine Pollack, one of the lawyers who filed the suit against Vibram, would not comment on the case. She was also involved in the case against Reebok. Vibram did not return a call for comment.

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Vibram USA Inc., which is based in Concord, is facing a class action lawsuit that challenges the company’s health claims about its minimalist FiveFinger running shoes. sneakers have grown in popularity along with the recent rise in “barefoot’’ running. The lawsuit challenges the shoemaker’s claim that its footwear helps reduce risk of injuries, improves posture, and strengthen leg muscles. The lawsuit follows a record-setting settlement paid by Reebok after the Federal Trade Commission complained that it was making false assertions about a brand of its shoes.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161209170132id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/08/15/34/peter-overton-pays-tribute-to-ken-sutcliffe

Peter Overton has penned a personal tribute to friend and legendary sports broadcaster, Ken Sutcliffe. (9NEWS) Ken Sutcliffe came from the bush and after 37 years at the Nine Network returns to the bush to enjoy his retirement. What I love and admire so much about Ken, is those authentic bush values have never left him in the nearly four decades he has reigned supreme as the voice, the face, the fabric of sports broadcasting in this country. Since announcing his retirement, I have been bowled over by complete strangers all wanting to tell me how much they will miss Ken. It’s his voice, his sparkling eyes, his familiarity, his realness...that’s what they have told me in the supermarket aisle, car line at school, on the street. You see, strangers feel completely comfortable with Kenny coming into their lounge rooms every night. He is like a friend or a family member and that recognition doesn’t come easily in this game. And let me tell you, that’s the Ken that lights up our newsroom every day. Away from the studio lights and cameras he is a mentor, a friend, an advisor and one of the hardest working journos you could meet. When it comes to work ethic, Ken sets the gold standard. None of us - viewers and workmates - want him to go, but he is and we wish him happiness, health and bucket loads of good times exploring the world with his wife Anne and cheering on his grand kids in life. Every night when Ken throws back to me on the Sydney 6pm news desk I respond with “see you tomorrow” ... And now I won’t. I am going to miss him, and so are you. Sydney viewers can watch 9NEWS at 6PM tonight as we farewell Ken Sutcliffe. © Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016

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9NEWS Sydney anchor Peter Overton has penned a touching tribute to &ldquo;his mate&rdquo; and beloved sports presenter Ken Sutcliffe, who retires tonight.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130302215159id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/autos/story/20130227-mclaren-supercar-in-focus

Want to know how fast the 903bhp supercar will go/cost? Step this way. Plus, first official production pics. This is the moment quite literally some of you have been waiting for. You've seen the camouflage development mules. You've seen the interior. You've learned about its hybrid drivetrain and how much power its packing. Today, you will learn that the McLaren P1 supercar will accelerate from 0-62mph in "less than three seconds" and on to a limited top speed of 218mph. Fast, no? That's not all. McLaren has revealed more acceleration details with which you can arm yourself in the inevitable Discussing Which Supercar Is Best In The Pub On Friday Night With Friends game (deluxe edition). The P1 will sprint from 0-124mph (0-200km/h) in less than seven seconds, and go from 0-186mph (0-300km/h) in 17 seconds. McLaren rightly informs us that last benchmark is some nine seconds quicker than the old McLaren F1. To provide you with some perspective, the Porsche 918 Spyder is estimated to hit 62mph in under three seconds and 124mph in around eight seconds, while a Bugatti Veyron SS – the 1,183bhp orange merchant of speed – hits 124mph from rest in 7.3 seconds and 186mph in 15 seconds dead. So despite McLaren's claims that the P1 was never meant to be the fastest outright, it's clearly no slouch. Production is limited to 375 models only, combining – as you know – a 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 to an electric motor to provide 903bhp. And because it's a hybrid, emissions (combined) sit below 200g/km of CO2. There are also DRS and IPAS technologies on board to ally it closely with the company's Formula 1 activity. This is good. Pirelli has been working with McLaren on the tires too, and has developed a special compound for the P1, probably something a little bit less rubbish than the F1 tire TopGear.com made in Turkey. Ahem. And here's one of the best bits about the P1. We're told the brakes are akin to those on a GT3 racer, developed by Akebono and featuring a new kind of carbon ceramic disc, previously used in space. Space! Sadly, for us mere mortals, the price is equally cosmic. Because McLaren has confirmed that this limited run, 903bhp rear-wheel-drive hypercar that we estimate will weigh around 1,500kg (3,305lbs), will cost £866,000 ($1.3 million). That's quite a chunk of change, but then the upcoming Porsche 918 Spyder and new Ferrari Enzo aren't going to be cheap. This story originally appeared on TopGear.com.

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A week before its formal unveiling at the Geneva motor show, the British manufacturer’s hybrid hypercar comes, finally, into focus.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130803181233id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/active/recreational-cycling/10213508/Should-cyclists-be-forced-to-wear-helmets.html

So if they can help reduce injury, shouldn’t they be mandatory, just like motorbike helmets? Australia tried it in the early 90s and the result was a 15 to 20 per cent drop in the number of hospital admissions for head injuries. That would have been great, but it also reduced the number of cyclists by around 35 per cent. The hassle and, for teenagers, embarrassment of wearing one steered people away from bikes and towards public transport and cars. And that, counter-intuitively, could have been bad news for their health. A recent study in the British Medical Journal showed that cycling has a positive health impact around 77 times larger than the potential for serious injury; essentially, there’s a small chance that you’ll come a cropper, but a very large chance that you’ll reduce your likelihood of suffering mental illness, heart disease and obesity. That means the laws were hugely counterproductive; they reduced cycling injuries, but only by reducing the number of cyclists, and those people then became more likely to come to some other kind of less-dramatic and tangible harm. Clearly, if this was an acceptable approach then we could easily slash injuries by 100 per cent simply by banning bicycles. The CTC, the UK’s largest cycling charity, has long argued against mandatory helmet laws for a similar reason. It claims they would make cycling seem more dangerous than it actually is, putting people off. “The evidence on this question is complex and contradictory, providing as much support for those who are deeply sceptical of helmets as for those who swear by them,” it says. Then there’s the problem of enforcing new laws. In the first year after the Australian State of Victoria made helmets mandatory there were 19,229 Bicycle Offence Penalty Notices issued. Do we want to tie up that much police time on a crime which has no negative impact on a third party? South Africa made helmets mandatory, then couldn’t agree on exactly how to enforce it, so never did. There's even evidence that wearing a helmet can put you at more risk. A 2006 study by Jeff Brewster from the University of Bath found that drivers passed closer to cyclists wearing a helmet when overtaking than they did those without them. The driver's subconscious sees them as less vulnerable and therefore less worthy of a wide berth. It’s undeniable that mandatory safety devices such as motorbike helmets and seatbelts in cars have been lifesavers on a huge scale. But neither had the same potential for harmful side-effects: dissuade motorcyclists from riding and they’ll buy a car, which is actually far safer (if less fun). Meanwhile, there is virtually nothing that will discourage drivers. Personally, I believe that wearing a helmet has more pros than cons, even though cycling is not as risky as many would have you believe. But there are those out there who would rather not ride than be made to wear a helmet, and for that reason the idea is a non-starter.

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Bare-headed cyclists are often branded reckless and there are regular calls for helmets to be compulsory, as politicians in Jersey are currently demanding. But is it a practical way to keep riders safe?

http://web.archive.org/web/20140510014244id_/http://time.com/13564/feedback-sensitivity-brain-wiring/

We swim in an ocean of feedback. It’s not just those performance reviews at work. It’s your reflection in the mirror, the comment your spouse made at breakfast, or the accusatory note you just found in your mailbox from your neighbor. Recent research that suggests that how you react to that feedback — whether you take it in stride or get flattened by it — is due at least in part to your wiring. When it comes to sensitivity to feedback, individuals can vary up to three thousand percent in terms of how far they swing, emotionally, and how long it takes them to recover. And that has profound implications for their ability to hear the feedback they get, and to learn anything from it. Take Alita. She has been highly sensitive to criticism since she was a child. Now an accomplished obstetrician, her skills and confidence have matured, yet her sensitivity to feedback is just as strong as it was when she was young. “Three years ago we did patient satisfaction surveys,” Alita explains. “My patients love the attention I give them, and my reviews were largely positive. Yet there were a few comments from patients frustrated that I sometimes run late.” She adds, “I haven’t felt the same way about my practice since.” While Alita knows intellectually that these are a few negative comments among many, and that, in fact, it’s the attention that she gives each patient that causes her to run late, this doesn’t change her emotional reaction to the feedback itself. Sound familiar? If you’re like Alita, you’ve probably been hearing the same advice for much of your life: “Don’t be so sensitive,” “You’re overreacting.” “You need to get a thicker skin.” Yet new research suggests that this is far harder for some than others. Three factors can be used to measure our sensitivity to feedback. The first is Baseline, which measures your general state of happiness or contentment. In the wake of positive or negative events (or feedback), we all tend to gravitate back toward our baseline. Some people have a relatively high baseline – like Elaine in the next cubicle who always seems so (gratingly) cheerful no matter how much pressure the team is under. Others — like Mortimer down in purchasing — may have a relatively low happiness baseline, perpetually dissatisfied with their lives (and with you), regardless of how well things may be going. The second variable is Swing — how far up or down you go as a result of positive or negative feedback. Someone with small swing is “even keeled”: Nothing excites them much, and few things really get them too upset. If you swing wider emotionally, your ups and downs will be more intense and you’ll require less stimulation to move you off your baseline. And finally, Sustain or Recovery, which measures how long it takes you to return to your baseline. How long do you sustain a bounce in your step in the wake of an appreciative email from an important customer? How long does it take you to recover from the public dressing down you got from your boss on the newsroom floor? Recent findings from neuro-imaging show that positive and negative swing and recovery can operate independently. If you have small swing and short sustain on positive feedback, and wide swing and long recovery on the negatives, that’s a tough combination. Positive feedback disappears quickly, while negative feedback hits you hard and keeps you down for a good long while. This is Alita’s profile, and it’s why she finds critical feedback – even well-intended “suggestions” from patients about how to better manage her time – so upsetting. Rather than prompting her to improve service or better manage her appointments, it paralyzes and demotivates her. Her head delivery nurse, Toni, has the opposite profile; she’s unflappable in the face of stressful events, and she can shrug off even angry attacks within minutes. The good news for Alita is that wiring is only part of the equation. Researchers estimate that it accounts for about 40% of how we react, and whether it’s a little more or a little less doesn’t matter. The bigger point is that a significant part of how we react to negative feedback is not from wiring, but rather, results from the story we tell ourselves about what the feedback means. In other words, our own upset can cause us to distort the feedback we receive. For example, say someone tells you that you were singing off-key — it’s about your singing, of this song, this time. But through the lens of upset, the feedback is supersized: “I must always sing off key and no one tells me. I can never do anything right. I’m a loser and everyone knows it.” Alita is doing a version of this when she dwells on the one or two complaints about keeping patients waiting and ignores all the comments from patients who adore her. Given her wiring, she is easily upset, but she’s compounding the problem by telling a story that incapacitates her. Her reaction to the feedback is blocking her ability to learn from it. We can all learn to manage feedback more skillfully by learning how to see the feedback at “actual size.” Feedback should be bound in time (feedback about right now is not about the future) and by specificity (feedback about one thing is not about everything) and by size (needing to improve by 10% is different from needing to improve by 80%). Understanding our own triggered reactions to feedback can help us all regain our footing, and turn even upsetting feedback into something we can work with, and use to grow.

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Your emotional wiring plays a critical role in how you react to feedback -- both good and bad -- from others. But you can override those instincts by learning how to frame the input you receive.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140516180208id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/16/bring-women-artists-out-of-storage

Detail from Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders (1610). Click for full image Revealing the history of female artists on television may sound an easy project, a delightful exercise in heritage tourism. Haven't we moved beyond a worthy roundup of forgotten heroines, hidden from history? After all, feminist art history has been investigating the female gaze since Linda Nochlin asked "Why have there been no great women artists?" in 1971. Magisterial surveys and text books have come since, from Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race (1979) to Griselda Pollock and Rozika Parker's Old Mistresses (1991), enabling art history degrees to offer courses on gender and "ways of seeing" for the last 20 years or so. Engaging TV on the subject of this debate would be easy, I blithely presumed, until I embarked on the simple but fundamental task of seeing female art for myself. Is art male? Most institutions would have us think so. The disparities are startling. In 1989 the feminist Guerrilla Girls discovered that fewer than 5% of the modern works in the Metropolitan Museum in New York were by women, but 85% of the nudes were female. It is usually possible to see works by one or two women in an entire museum, but you could spend hours looking. I was relieved to find Judith Leyster's tiny but spell-binding Proposition (1631) and Clara Peeters' genre-defining Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels (1621) in the Hague's Gemeentemuseum. Even Artemisia Gentileschi's masterpiece Judith Beheading Holofernes (1620) has only been exhibited in the Uffizi since 2000. A Medici duchess had banished Gentileschi's assassination scene to a dark corridor, finding her "blood work" too grisly for display. Weeks of negotiation and an Italian fixer got me into the Vasari corridor to film. This kilometre walkway snakes from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Pitti Palace, crossing the Arno over the Ponte Vecchio. Built in 1564, it allowed the Medici to travel unmolested between their palace and government offices. It is lined with self-portraits by artists, a pantheon of art history from the 16th century onwards. But of the 1,700 self-portraits only 7% are by women. Did women not paint, sculpt or craft? Or were female efforts so third-rate they did not earn the wall space? The absence of a celebrated female pantheon contrasts starkly with women's success in literature. But the requirements of authorship were far easier to fulfil than the demands of art. Writing required only literacy, access to a library and a desk. Even the risky exposure of publication could be offset by anonymity. By contrast, art demanded complex training, public production and was enmeshed in a well-guarded infrastructure. Unyielding social prejudices, prohibitions on formal training and legal restrictions on female commerce hobbled the woman artist. I was prepared for a hunt, but nevertheless the near invisibility of women's art was shocking: I was forced into storage facilities and basements. The Advancing Women Artists Foundation estimates that 1,500 works by women are currently stored in Florence's various deposits, most of which have not been on public view for centuries. To the question "Are all of these works of a high artistic standard?" Jane Fortune, head of the foundation, answers: "We'll never know unless they are seen." Public galleries seem tacitly to endorse the conservative view, exemplified by Brian Sewell's assertion that "only men are capable of aesthetic greatness". But painters and sculptors were artisans working within family-based workshops, just like tailors, locksmiths, goldsmiths and cabinetmakers. Art was a trade. Few paintings were the product of a single hand – only the face and hands might be the work of the "master". The male artist's brand was a fiction. Marietta Tintoretto worked alongside her father in Venice, Barbara Longhi beside her brother in Ravenna, their labour a vital constituent of the family economy, but unrecognised outside the workshop. A deep belief in the impossibility of female genius is at work. Many of Leyster's sunny canvases celebrating the social life of the Dutch golden age were so skilful they were attributed to Frans Hals, despite her signature. The Bolognese Elisabetta Sirani produced more than 200 pieces in a 13-year career, garnering international acclaim for her smooth religious art. She ran the family workshop that embraced her sisters, supported her father when he could no longer paint and established an art school for young girls. The very accomplishment, speed and fluency of her art, however, laid her open to the accusation that she could not have created it – a man must have helped her – an accusation she saw off by staging live demonstrations of her painting. Gentileschi could match the men of counter-reformation art, but chose to dramatise the struggles of women. She depicted the same heroines, even repeating the scenes of her father Orazio, but she charged hers with a pungent critique of male possession of women. The violence of voyeurism is palpable in her Susanna and the Elders (1610), when the cowering woman is victim to the lecherous gaze of two old men. They will accuse her of the capital crime of adultery unless she agrees to sleep with them. Her strong twisting body is displayed, but her horror is uppermost, and her arms are raised in resistance. "What are YOU looking at?" the painting says to us. Compare this with Tintoretto's titillating version in which Susanna seems to know she is being watched and exhibits her white nakedness in an obliging soft performance. The episode becomes a pretext for erotica, and as the woman is complicit in her own subjugation, the dirt of sexual oppression is whitewashed away. Gentileschi will have none of it. It is not my purpose to suggest that we have yet to discover a female Michelangelo, but it is misleading to look at the past through the eyes of men alone. What women saw was different. Let's remember that. • The Story of Women and Art continues on BBC2 on 23 and 30 May.

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Why are there so few paintings by women in public galleries? Amanda Vickery goes on a shocking hunt to unearth more masterpieces

http://web.archive.org/web/20150113062814id_/http://fortune.com/2011/12/13/investing-after-the-arab-spring-unfinished-business/

A few investors look at the Arab Spring — the wave of protest and revolution that began last December when a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire to protest his harassment by police — and don’t see a particularly big deal. Franklin Templeton emerging markets guru Mark Mobius, a longtime bull on the economies of the Middle East, has called the tumult just a “bump” in the road towards more democracy and freer markets in the area. The rest of the investing world is not so sure. Khaled Abdel Majeed runs a small London-based hedge fund that invests in the countries of North Africa, and he says his clients, mostly U.S. and European pension funds and endowments with plenty of trouble in their home economies, are nervous. These institutional investors worry about what kind of post-Qaddafi government might emerge in Libya and about the elections and ongoing violence in Egypt. They worry about tensions between Muslims and Coptic Christians in Egypt and between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia. They worry about the how long the brutal Assad government can hang on in Syria and at what cost. They worry about a nuclear Iran and what Israel may decide to do about it. “There is no appetite for risk and we are in a part of the world that has historically been thought of as risky,” Majeed says. Majeed started his MENA Admiral fund in 2004 with $22 million and then built it up to $120 million by June 2008. Now he’s down to $15 million. “It’s been a round trip and then some,” he says. Indeed, foreign capital has been fleeing the region since December 2010 when protests began in Tunisia. The Dow Jones MENA index (“MENA” is an acronym for Middle East-North Africa and usually means the Arab countries and sometimes Turkey) plummeted from 558 in late 2010 to a low of 460 in March. Lately it’s been around 470. The S&P Pan Arab Composite Index is down about 13% on the year. The stock market of Egypt, the region’s most populous country, was closed for 55 days during tumult there early this year. The EGX 30 stock index has fallen about 40% on the year from about 7000 to 4000 currently. The index had stabilized around 4500 before crowds returned to Tahrir Square late in November to protest moves by the Egyptian army to consolidate its control in advance of the first round of parliamentary elections. Roubini Global Economics estimates foreign direct investment in Egypt, only about $6 billion in the 2009-2010 fiscal year, has dropped by 68%. A bet on oil or on people? For the hardy investors who have stayed in the region, their investments in MENA countries boil down to either a bet on the price of oil and natural gas produced mainly by the Persian Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates), or a bet on the demographics of the more densely populated countries of north Africa – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, several of which (Egypt, for instance) are net oil importers. The World Bank expects the MENA region to grow 3.6% in 2011, mostly from gains by big oil producers of the Gulf. (Before the fall of longtime governments in Tunisia and Egypt the World Bank had predicted 5% growth.) Javier Cervino, a partner in Isthmus Partners, a financial consultancy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, says the Gulf economy has stabilized over the last year or so. Real estate investment in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. has stabilized and telecoms like Saudi Arabia’s Mobily and Qatar’s Qtel have done well lately. “From our point of view the events in Syria and Egypt seem as far away as they would to someone in New York,” Cervino adds. Less explosive but still simmering political conflict in Bahrain, he says, was more urgent to Gulf investors. Oil roars back to $100, but does anybody care? The investment argument for the North African countries is based on their large, youthful and in many places well-educated populations. This huge pool of workers, consumers and entrepreneurs wants jobs and income to spend on themselves and their families. That means economic growth and thus opportunity for investors who can supply the capital — and are willing to take the risks that come with investing in “frontier” markets, many of which lack stock exchanges or trustworthy legal systems. The big problem is that the despots and monarchs who have long dominated Arab politics (recent moves toward economic liberalization over the last few years aside) don’t want to give up either political or economic control of their countries. Neither do the countless bureaucrats and officials who rely on payoffs and kickbacks from business people. One of the initial sparks for the Arab Spring was the leak of a cable in which a U.S. diplomat commented that “seemingly half “ the business elite of Tunisia were members of President Ben Ali’s family. The Arab Spring began in earnest when the old politics of governments being able to buy off their populations with public sector jobs and subsidies finally collapsed. Egypt is the test case for the Arab Spring, politically and economically. It is the Arab world’s most populous country and it has the most diversified economy and most mature financial institutions. Other North African economies that have had their own revolutions this year are either too small (Tunisia) or too badly damaged (Libya) to be candidates for much outside investment any time soon. Egypt is the largest Middle Eastern economy where it is comparatively easy for outsiders to invest; in Saudi Arabia, by contrast, foreigners from outside the Gulf cannot directly own publically traded Saudi equities. Not that the Egyptian stock exchange is anywhere as large or liquid as London or Tokyo’s. Brian Bandsma, a senior analyst with the investment management firm Vontobel, went to Cairo to scope out possible investments in 2010. He saw a few public companies that impressed him but the firm decided not to buy any of them because they were too thinly traded. Ali Tarhouni: A Libyan leader speaks out Western investors, who cheered the revolution, have yet to embrace Egypt as an investment opportunity, largely because of political uncertainty that is, in turn, paralyzing the country’s economy. Even before clashes between protestors and the army broke out in November, tourism, a crucial industry, had ground to a halt. When revolution broke out in neighboring Libya, the many Egyptians who worked in that country’s oil industry either came home or stopped sending money to their families. Egyptian unemployment, already high before the Arab Spring, has risen to about 40%. Efforts by the Egyptian Central Bank to support the Egyptian pound and head off inflation had the side effect of making it possible for skittish investors to liquidate their Egyptian investments and take their money out of the country without getting killed on the exchange rate. Meanwhile, the bank’s reserves have been nearly depleted and it was widely expected that Egypt, which rejected an International Monetary Fund loan in June, would have to make some kind of deal with the IMF within the next few months. And those are the things investors know about; what’s really keeping institutions out of Egypt are countless unknown factors: What role will the military, which controls a sizable chunk of the country’s real estate, ultimately play in the governing of Egypt? How will the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and other parties fare in major elections? (Elections for the lower house of parliament began in late November to be followed by elections for the upper house and for a new president in spring 2012.) Michael Daoud, head of Middle East equities at Auerbach Grayson, a New York brokerage specializing in the Middle East, says given all the uncertainty there’s just no way to know when foreign capital will return to Egypt and other parts of the region that have been thrust into turmoil by the Arab Spring. He’s more bullish on Egypt than many: he is tracking stable companies such as Juhayna Food Industries, which dominates the Egyptian market for milk and dairy products; energy products and services supplier Elsewedy Electric, and Cairo-based CIB Bank. Still, he can’t recommend that an interested foreign investor rush out and buy stakes in those companies. Not now, Daoud says. Things won’t start to get clearer until the election returns start to come in. “I’d rather be a little late,” he says, “than too early.” More Fortune Investor’s Guide 2012 10 best stocks for 2012 The triumph of Blackstone on Wall Street New global hot spots for investors Ramit Sethi: The new finance guru on the block Where to put your money now The best and worst of Wall Street 2011 Being a boring investor … and loving it Can Wall Street thrive again?

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The ongoing revolutions across the Middle East would seem to be good news for markets. But so far they’ve scared most foreign investors away.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150807022150id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/12/19/david-charles-koch/

The headquarters of Koch Industries isn’t exactly the first place you’d expect to find an information technology evangelist. It’s about 1,600 miles away from Silicon Valley and even more distant culturally and politically. Located on the northeast fringe of Wichita, where the city streets give way to open expanses of prairie grass, the campus of one of America’s largest private companies has grown over the years to support an expanding oil and gas empire. But when Koch CFO Steve Feilmeier was asked recently about the future of the U.S. economy, he launched into a spirited monologue about the bright prospects for the nation’s high-tech industry. “It’s the little things, like these BlackBerrys that didn’t exist eight or 10 years ago,” said Feilmeier, holding up his distinctly last-century smartphone and growing animated in his modest office along executive row. “These technologies have improved the quality of our lives tremendously. That’s going to continue, very rapidly.” In early December, Koch Industries put some serious money behind that belief when it closed on its $7.2 billion acquisition of Molex, a global electronic components manufacturer headquartered in Lisle, Ill. Molex makes parts for a wide variety of gadgets, including iPhones, and was traded on Nasdaq before the buyout. Koch sees huge potential for Molex to benefit from the so-called Internet of Things revolution that’s on the horizon. (See “Everything Is Connected.”) “Think about sensors and connectors and how [they’re] proliferating right now,” says Feilmeier, a stout 52-year-old who has the rah-rah intensity of a high school football coach. “As technology becomes more user-friendly and machines become wired to be more proactive — whether that be industrial robotics and automation, or you have automobiles doing more for you and telling you more and keeping you out of accidents — we think Molex is really well positioned to capture that growth.” Feilmeier envisions Molex growing from today’s $3.6 billion in revenue to $10 billion within a decade and says there are hundreds of smaller tech companies that could be acquisition targets. “They just weren’t out acquiring those companies or those technologies to enter new markets, and we’ll really be able to help them with that,” he says. To the degree that most people have heard of Koch (pronounced “coke”), it is likely because of the political activities of the company’s primary shareholders — the brothers Charles and David Koch. Thanks to the tremendous growth of the family company founded by their father, Fred, more than 70 years ago, the Kochs are among the very wealthiest people in the world today. Each brother has a net worth estimated at $36 billion or more, and as their fortunes have grown, they have been aggressive about using their money to influence the political conversation in the U.S. The Kochs are staunch libertarians — David ran for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket back in 1980 — with a distaste for big government and, some would argue, regulation that might infringe on the profitability of their businesses. Money from the Koch brothers helped fund groups that spawned the Tea Party movement. One of the prime vehicles for their efforts is the Koch-sponsored political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which has taken on an array of political fights — from repealing Obamacare to fighting the power of public sector unions in Wisconsin. According to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity, AFP spent $122 million in 2012 alone. But that is hardly the extent of the Kochs’ political spending. They have given tens of millions to help support a network of other conservative organizations. As a result, the brothers have become outsize figures in America’s partisan political narrative — all-purpose bogeymen to those on the left. All the attention on the Koch brothers’ politics, however, obscures the story of how their sprawling conglomerate has become one of the most important companies in America. If Koch Industries were eligible, its $115 billion in revenues would be enough for it to rank No. 17 on the Fortune 500, with sales larger than those of Google, Goldman Sachs, and Kraft Foods combined. It has doubled in size in the past decade. But Koch isn’t important just because it’s big. As Koch grows, it is reaching into new areas of business and becoming more closely entwined with more consumers. Koch owns well-known brands such as Stainmaster carpet and, thanks to its $22 billion purchase of Georgia-Pacific in 2005, Quilted Northern toilet paper, Brawny paper towels, and Dixie cups. While it began as an oil company, Koch today operates more like a giant private equity fund. It is essentially a massive pool of cash that is looking to invest wherever it sees the potential for long-term profits. When the company moves into a new industry, it does so strategically and patiently. Just 10 years ago, for example, Koch was a minor player in the fertilizer business. Then it made a series of quiet investments that turned it into the third-largest maker and distributor of fertilizer products in the U.S. Now Koch occupies a crucial role in the world’s food system — a position that the company is using as a beachhead for further investments in agribusiness. To better understand Koch’s strategy and its methodology, Fortune spent months interviewing current and former executives of the company, poring over available documents on the private company, and talking to competitors. What emerged was a picture of a highly disciplined organization that plans to play a critical and growing role in delivering electricity, food, technology, and, one day, maybe even tap water. It all revolves around the mind of one man: Charles Koch. People tend to refer to the Koch brothers as a single entity, but David, 73, the younger of the two, is clearly the junior partner inside the company. David retains the title of executive vice president, but he has long lived in New York City and spends much of his time involved in public-facing roles like philanthropic giving. In 2008 he pledged $100 million to Lincoln Center and got a theater named after him. Charles, 78, lives in Wichita and has held the titles of CEO and chairman since his father, Fred Koch, died in 1967. Charles and David Koch declined to be interviewed for this article. Based on Koch’s growth, there is a strong case to be made for Charles as one of the elite business executives of the past half-century. When he took the reins of the company nearly 50 years ago, Koch had around $200 million in revenues (vs. $115 billion today). He has steadily built on the foundation left by his father. Fred Koch, the son of a Dutch immigrant, studied engineering at MIT and invented a new method of converting oil to gasoline in the late 1920s. He worked in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin for a time before returning to the U.S. to found his own refining company in 1940. One of the original members of the John Birch Society, Fred imparted his conservative values to his four sons. Yes, four. David’s twin, Bill, is a businessman and sailor who won the America’s Cup back in 1992 and more recently made news by leading the fight against wind turbines off the coast of Cape Cod. The eldest Koch brother, Frederick, 80, is a collector and philanthropist. In 1983, Charles and David bought out Bill’s and Frederick’s shares in the company for just over $1 billion — spurring a long-running family feud that in the 1990s led to a contentious lawsuit by Bill and Frederick claiming that they had been underpaid and ended in 2001 with an undisclosed settlement. The structure of Koch Industries today would probably be unrecognizable to Fred. There is a central group, officially called Koch Equity Development, which reports directly to Charles and other senior executives and which operates like a high-level think tank, evaluating potential deals, sometimes on a 10- to 15-year horizon. The company also has smaller development groups in its different divisions, such as Koch Fertilizer and Koch Minerals. These groups constantly scan the landscape of their respective industries for potential deals, feeding information back to the central group. Koch spends roughly $100 million a year to fund the research in its development groups, according to Feilmeier. The company also leverages other means of intelligence gathering — for instance, its massive commodities trading operation. Koch is the world’s fourth-largest commodities trader, according to a 2011 ranking by Reuters, with trading floors in Houston, New York, Geneva, Singapore, and Wichita. Koch’s traders buy and sell contracts on a wide range of commodities, from oil to silver to orange juice. In addition to generating profits, Koch’s traders act as scouts in the marketplace, according to current and former senior employees in the trading division. This helps Koch as it looks for new deals and new companies to buy. For example, Koch’s trading unit began buying and selling petrochemicals called olefins in the late 1990s because the market was undertraded and attractive, according to a former senior trader. In 2007, Koch bought a group of olefin plants from Huntsman Corp. as part of a $770 million transaction. The deal relied, at least somewhat, on analysis of the olefin market developed by the traders. Each of Koch’s major divisions reports to Charles Koch and other top executives at least every quarter with an update on their business. These meetings are not perfunctory. Every business unit of Koch is potentially up for sale all the time, and executives know it. They don’t dare fudge numbers or gloss over shortcomings when they stand in front of Charles Koch. He is known to pierce weak arguments with a single question. “It is intense,” said Jeremy Jones, who from 2007 until 2009 was vice president of Koch’s internal venture capital fund, which worked closely with Koch’s central development group. Jones learned the hard way when he pitched an investment in biofuels to Charles. After Jones made his case, Charles began grilling him in his no-nonsense style. Had Jones considered the fact that ethanol delivers only 66.7% of the energy of gasoline? Did his forecasts incorporate the fact that there was a government mandate for ethanol use, which could change? “My analysis was built on faulty assumptions,” Jones recalls. “He was really quick to figure that out. If you don’t know something, you’d better say you don’t know. Do not try to dance.” Once Koch commits to an investment, the company employs a rigorous approach to running the business that Charles has refined over decades. He has codified this approach into a philosophy that he calls Market-Based Management®. (Yes, he uses the registered symbol when writing about it.) In 2007, Charles published a book called The Science of Success, explaining how the system works at Koch. MBM, as Koch employees call it, lies at the heart of how Koch operates every day. There isn’t a lot of art on the walls in Koch’s headquarters, but everywhere you turn there is a copy of MBM’s 10 guiding principles hanging from the wall. When employees get a free cup of Starbucks coffee in the break room, the principles are printed on the disposable cup. The influence MBM has on Koch employees cannot be overstated. “It’s your life, man,” says one former senior Koch executive who worked closely with Charles Koch for many years. This executive said that the importance of MBM doesn’t lie just in its concrete advice. MBM is critical because it unites Koch’s employees, giving them a common language and a common goal. It can be maddening to try to understand MBM from the outside. The belief system can seem like little more than a grab bag of management consulting clichés. For example, the 10 guiding principles of MBM include malleable terms such as value creation, integrity, change, and principled entrepreneurship. But there is something very real at the heart of MBM, and in turn at the heart of Koch Industries’ corporate culture. And the only way to understand how Koch really works is to delve into specifics. There is no better case study for this than Koch’s fertilizer business. In 2002 a company named Farmland Industries, which owned a network of nitrogen fertilizer plants, was forced to declare bankruptcy and began selling off its divisions. The following year Farmland held an auction for its fertilizer plants in a conference room at its headquarters in Kansas City, Mo. The room was lined with glossy posterboard photos of the plants, designed to entice a bidding war. But only two companies showed up: the fertilizer giant Agrium and Koch Industries. Koch’s presence was puzzling to outsiders. Why was an oil company interested in buying fertilizer factories, at the very moment when those factories were least profitable? What outsiders didn’t know at the time was that Koch had been studying Farmland for years, in just the same way that Koch is studying other industries and companies today. This kind of analysis happens inside Koch’s central development group. When evaluating a deal, Koch executives focus on three key criteria: 1. The business in question must be in trouble. When a company is humming along, there’s not a lot of upside. If it has some sort of huge problem, there’s a better chance that Koch can reap profits from its recovery. 2. The deal must be a long-term play. Most public companies need to show good results on a quarterly basis. Even private equity funds need to show their senior investors that investments are paying off in at least a few years. Koch doesn’t. Being privately held means the company can think in terms of decades. 3. Koch needs to have key skills (or “core capabilities” in MBM lingo) that will benefit the company. Koch doesn’t just bring money to the table. It brings knowledge. And if Koch doesn’t already know something important about running the business in question, it will pass on the investment. Koch’s development group pores over the details of any possible deal and conducts a series of futures studies, gaming out what might happen in any given industry over the next 10 to 15 years, according to current and former Koch executives, including Brad Hall, who ran the group in the late 1990s. The development group then charts out the possible outcomes into a kind of bell curve, with highly likely scenarios in the middle and unlikely, “black swan” scenarios on the edges. If a deal is profitable under enough of the likely outcomes, Koch will make a move. In the early 2000s Koch’s small fertilizer business was doing just this kind of analysis. Steve Packebush, a young employee in the unit, was on the team that started analyzing global supply and demand trends for fertilizer. At the time Koch owned only a small plant and some pipelines that transported fertilizer ingredients. Then, in 2002, natural-gas prices shot up, dramatically increasing the manufacturing costs for nitrogen fertilizer makers and putting companies like Farmland under duress. Nitrogen fertilizer may sound like an agricultural commodity, but it’s actually an energy product because the main input in the manufacturing of nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas. Packebush’s group saw an opportunity in the price spike and recommended that Koch take advantage of the market turmoil and buy more fertilizer factories. At the time the U.S. fertilizer industry was in a deep hole, and about 40% of U.S. production had been knocked out of business. That meant the surviving factories were the most efficient and would benefit when the industry rebounded, Packebush said. Farmland’s fertilizer plants were particularly attractive because they were located in the U.S. Cornbelt, stretching from Oklahoma to Iowa. That gave the plants a slight price advantage over imported fertilizer, which had to be shipped in from the Gulf Coast. Charles Koch and the board gave their approval for the fertilizer business to invest when the right opportunity appeared. So in 2003, Packebush went to the auction at Farmland’s headquarters and outbid Agrium. Koch walked away with the fertilizer plants for pennies on the dollar in a deal valued at $293 million. Koch soon began applying its “core capabilities” to the business by investing about $500 million over a decade to upgrade the fertilizer plants and other infrastructure, running the operation with the same eye for efficiency Koch uses at its oil refineries. Then Koch Fertilizer was given a big boost by a scenario that almost no one saw coming. Beginning around 2008, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” technology opened up enormous reserves of natural gas in the U.S. Supplies jumped and prices plummeted. Koch was suddenly buying its primary feedstock at about half the cost that Farmland paid when it went bankrupt. But retail fertilizer prices remained high, because record-high corn prices incentivized farmers to buy as much fertilizer as they could use. The spread between cheap natural gas and expensive fertilizer translated into pure profit for Koch. The mix of luck and skill has made Koch Fertilizer one of the company’s largest divisions, and one of its most important. Koch CFO Feilmeier said agribusiness is one of the top areas where Koch will be looking to expand in coming years, and many of the deals could be made through the fertilizer unit. “The fertilizer business is right in the center of agriculture,” Feilmeier says. “Here’s the problem the world has: We’re at [a population of] 7 billion people today, 9 billion by the year 2030, okay? How are we going to feed them?” Koch is not particularly bullish about the economy right now. Feilmeier says the company is expecting sluggish growth in the near future. But there will be bright spots. Constant innovation in electronic devices will boost demand for high-tech manufacturing. The Molex deal, of course, is a means of capitalizing on that trend. Another long-term trend that Koch has identified is the need for utility companies to reinvest in the electricity grid. One surprising way Koch plans to benefit from this is by entering the steel business. It recently invested in a $1.1 billion mill being built in Osceola, Ark., by Big River Steel. Koch won’t say how much money it invested, but steelmaker Nucor estimates that Koch is getting a 40% equity stake in the plant by putting in a mere $125 million. The investment is relatively small for Koch, but that’s how the company often enters a market — making small deals at first, the kind of low-stakes experiments that allow it to learn and fail on the cheap. For example, Koch got into the forest products business cautiously in 2004 when it bought pulp mills and other holdings for $610 million from the timber company Georgia-Pacific. After briefly operating those mills, Koch suddenly bought all of Georgia-Pacific the following year. Feilmeier said Koch was attracted to the Big River Steel deal because the mill will be the only large-scale producer in the U.S. of electrical-grade steel used to make transformers, power lines, and other equipment used in the specialty grids of tomorrow. “What we see is an opportunity to help the U.S. retool itself on the electrical grid, and this plant is being positioned to do that,” says Feilmeier. “So we learn a lot. We bring a lot. And it potentially puts us into new markets 10 and 20 years from now that we’re not in today.” Does that mean that Koch could eventually make a multibillion-dollar bid to take a steelmaker like Nucor private, as it did with Georgia-Pacific? “Maybe so, if they have a problem that we can help them solve!” says Feilmeier. Koch’s investments in steel and electronics are plainly visible. But the company is also making quieter deals in the background. One of the most intriguing of these investments has to do with the most precious natural resource on the planet — water. Koch is among a handful of companies that are building the foundation of a privatized water industry. The investment thesis is simple: Fresh, clean water is increasingly scarce, and demand is growing. Booming populations in the developing world are outstripping freshwater supplies, creating strong demand for machines that can desalinize seawater or purify polluted streams. The market to desalinate water is expected to grow 9.5% year over year between 2012 and 2016, according to the market research firm TechNavio. “I think it could be a great business,” says Jones, the former vice president at Koch’s venture capital fund. He says he pushed water investments during his time there. “Fresh water, pure water, usable water: It’s not an asset that’s growing right now.” Koch is making a quiet push into the water business through a unit called Koch Membrane Systems, based in Wilmington, Mass. The division was originally founded to sell equipment that purified wastewater at industrial sites like Koch’s oil refineries. Scientists at Koch Membrane Systems became experts at making high-tech water plants that could fit in a small amount of space. In the 1990s the group started buying technology that opened the door to purifying water supplies for consumers rather than oil refineries, says Steven Iannelli, who worked for Koch Membrane Systems from 1991 until 2000 and left as vice president of the division’s development group. Today Koch offers a range of water products and services. It is selling its water-purifying systems to U.S. cities like Franklin, Mass., and pushing to expand overseas. Koch has sold desalination systems to a power plant in China and a mine in Chile. It has also supplied, to U.S. Department of Defense contractors, technology for portable water plants that can make drinking water out of saltwater or other sources that are polluted by chemicals and even nuclear waste. Then there is Koch’s Puron Plus system, a prefabricated water plant that can be made to order for cities or factories to install. Koch makes Puron “packaged plants” that can be quickly built to order, with the filtration systems set up in different floor plans designed to fit into small spaces. Products like this could help overcrowded cities that need new wastewater-treatment plants but don’t have a lot of space to house them. Koch’s water business is still tiny compared with the company’s oil refineries and fertilizer plants. But the company sees potentially huge profits down the road. Feilmeier says that Koch has been offered “many hundreds of millions of dollars” for the group of patents it has developed around water technology. “We’re not willing to do it, because we think we can take that technology and get it commercialized in the markets,” he says. One aspect of Koch’s long game that remains unclear is who will run the company after Charles Koch. The energetic 78-year-old doesn’t seem ready for retirement anytime soon, but succession plans are important for a company that invests with 20-year horizons. Nobody interviewed for this story suggested that David Koch would take over the company. Speculation tends to focus on the small coterie of lieutenants who work closely with Charles, including CFO Feilmeier and the company president, 51-year-old David Robertson. But there is one young up-and-comer at Koch who generates more speculation than anybody: Charles Chase Koch. Charles Koch’s son, known as Chase, inherited his father’s sense of fierce competition, say those who know him, and was a nationally ranked tennis player by the time he was 12. Now 36, Chase studied business at Texas A&M and joined Koch Industries in his mid-twenties. It appears that he is being groomed for leadership. Chase has shadowed senior executives and other employees in different divisions of Koch since being hired. He is now a vice president of Koch’s agronomics division, and in early 2014 he will be promoted to president of Koch Fertilizer, helping to guide the company’s expansion efforts. The company declined to make Chase available for an interview for this story. Whoever becomes the next CEO of Koch Industries must prove that the company is more than just the product of Charles Koch’s business acumen — in some ways similar to the challenge handed to Apple CEO Tim Cook and his executive team after Steve Jobs’ death. And the next leader of the company will be working with a transformed portfolio of businesses. As Feilmeier puts it, “When we buy something, it’s with an intention of holding it forever.” Someday, maybe people will talk about Koch Industries as a tech company. This story is from the January 13, 2014 issue of Fortune. Update 12/20/13 — Response from Charles Koch: Your story “The New Koch” (Jan. 13) was overall an accurate and honest portrayal of our company but one aspect of it fell far short of being accurate — that is your characterization of my brother David Koch’s role in Koch Industries, Inc. David has played and continues to play an active and significant role in governing and leading Koch Industries. He is an equal shareholder in Koch Industries with me. He serves as an executive vice president of the company and has been a member of its board of directors since 1967. David also serves as chairman and CEO of Koch Chemical Technology Group. Since joining KCTG in 1970, he has led and built that company to record levels, far beyond what was ever imagined. Steve Feilmeier’s quote in the story that we have been offered “many hundreds of millions of dollars” for Koch Membrane’s valuable water technology patents is just one piece of evidence of how significant David’s leadership has been. Charles G. Koch Chairman of the Board & CEO Koch Industries, Inc.

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Koch Industries may be known as an oil company. But the vast private business empire run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch is expanding into vital industries like food, water, and personal technology.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150825012131id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/27/investing-in-the-worlds-water-crisis-commentary.html

A few companies and their peers are leading the way in solving the world's water crisis, while focusing on their bottom line. Consolidated Water has created a profitable business with its industry-leading technology for desalinated water. The company is experiencing exciting growth in the Caribbean and has made great traction in Mexico. MagneGas Corporation has focused on the sterilization of waste water while producing a usable gas by-product. Through their patented Plasma Arc Flow technology, the company is able to completely sanitize waste water by reaching flame temperatures of over 10,000 degrees. The company is currently pursuing numerous global contracts focused in the emerging markets. Abtech Holdings has had success in sterilizing flood waters and other contaminated water sources in the U.S. The company has a patented filtration technology with numerous applications. Read MoreWhy Matt Damon went on a toilet strike The world finds itself in a promising situation with the traditional methods of addressing its water being outdated in the wake of an ever-expanding population and shift in climate. New innovations as to how we are accessing and treating water are leading the way for how we will progress and thrive as a global society. Failing to adapt and embrace these new technologies will only leave us in a weakened position. It has been estimated by the WHO that, for every US$1 invested in providing clean water and sanitation, an economic return of between US$3 and US$34 would be achieved, depending on the region. The benefits would also include an average global reduction of diarrheal episodes of 10 percent and a total annual economic benefit of US$84 billion. Now that is a real return on investment that goes beyond the bottom line. Commentary by Jack Brewer, a former NFL safety who played for the Vikings, Giants, Eagles and Cardinals. He is also the founder and CEO of the Brewer Group. He has a master's degree in sports management from the University of Minnesota. He serves as an ambassador for peace and sport for the United States Federation of Middle East Peace at the United Nations. Follow him on Twitter@JackBrewerBSI. Disclosure: Jack Brewer and the Brewer Group have invested in MagneGas. Read MoreMarket correction coming? Ask these college kids

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The world is facing a serious water crisis. Former NFL star Jack Brewer highlights a couple of companies investing in solutions.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150905222719id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/04/obamacare-reduces-maximum-out-of-pocket-costs-but-not-enough-for-some.html

Out-of-pocket maximums include deductibles as well as co-pays and co-insurance, but not premiums or cost-sharing when you get care out of network. Maximums for private plans are often lower than $6,600—sometimes by a lot—they just can't be higher. Christian and Jaycee Garcia of Silver Spring, Md., have been hard hit by medical bills, even with their out-of-pocket maximum of $6,350 a year for each family member. Their 20-month-old son, CJ, was born with the rare genetic disorder Eagle Barrett Syndrome and severe scoliosis. He will have his 13th surgery in August, with two more to follow in September, all to rebuild his digestive system and urinary tract and to insert metal rods next to his spine so he can sit up without a brace. Read MoreObamacare prices kept in check in 2015: HHS Although Christian Garcia earns $60,000 a year as a restaurant manager, the more than $700 monthly insurance premiums for his work plan and another privately purchased plan for his wife and kids plus other monthly bills make paying the family's share of the hospital bills impossible. The couple have $11,000 in medical bills they are paying $270 a month on, and bills from two other hospitals have gone to collections. Monthly expenses, including the payment on his medical bills, are about equal to his take-home pay of about $3,000 a month. They have sold their wedding rings and moved out of their apartment into Christian's stepfather's home, where they pay $500 a month for rent and share a bedroom with CJ and their baby, Jeremiah, who is 5 months old.

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Despite a $6,600 per-person, per-year cap on out-of-pocket health costs, Obamacare might not be doing enough, reports USA Today.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150923072942id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/02/gchq-we-dont-have-the-manpower-to-spy-on-you.html

GCHQ's involvement in the mass collection of citizens' data was revealed when former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked explosive top secret documents to the media in 2013. A steady stream of those files has continued to leak. Snowden's revelations sparked a fierce debate in Britain and the U.S. about the legality of the activities carried out by the countries' spy agencies. In February, the U.K.'s Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that the laws around the sharing of electronic communications between GCHQ and the NSA collected as part of the mass surveillance programs of both agencies breaches human rights regulations. But another inquiry in March by the U.K. parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) found that the bulk collection of communications by GCHQ "do not seem to circumvent the law" but are "unnecessarily complicated" and "lacks transparency". The U.K. is looking to strengthen the powers of security agencies through a new communications bill - labelled by critics as as the "snooper's charter" - which would require internet and mobile phone companies to keep data such as a call and text message history for a year. In the U.S., the Patriot Act which was passed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and allows the collection of Americans' phone data, expired on Sunday. But many of the rules allowing this surveillance could be retained in the Freedom Act which will be voted on in Senate on Tuesday. But two British companies – privacy app ind.ie and software company Eris Industries – have said they would leave the country because of GCHQ's mass surveillance and the proposed extension of powers in the latest bill. However, Martin denied that GCHQ's policies were driving firms out of the U.K, when asked about the topic. Skirting around the question, Martin referred to an answer given by BT Group chairman Mike Rake last year which was supportive of the intelligence agency. "It was put to Sir Mike Rake...whether he thought the government and GCHQ in particular...was having any impact on U.K. tech and the answer was no," GCHQ's cyber chief said.

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The U.K.'s top intelligence agency doesn't have enough people to carry out mass surveillance, its cyber chief claimed.

http://web.archive.org/web/20151021052523id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/nov/24/paul-hamlyn-award-turner-prize

On the living room mantelpiece of Yinka Shonibare's house in east London sits another house. It is a scale, doll-sized model, although the décor - diminutive dining table and chairs, four-poster bed, and a framed print of an old master painting – differs from the real version, which Shonibare has filled with works by fellow artists. A painted sign by Bob and Roberta Smith hangs on one wall, alongside a work by Hew Locke – a sinister, floor-length photograph of what looks like a south-east Asian tribesman wielding an array of knives. Shonibare has more in common with Locke than simply owning his work. Both artists are previous recipients of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for visual arts. The awards carry big money – currently £45,000, spread over three years – significant enough to change the lives of its recipients. Yet, compared with higher-profile, headline-grabbing prizes such as the Turner (this year's winners of which will be announced a week today), the Paul Hamlyn - named after the late publisher and philanthropist - is barely ever talked about outside the art world. The awards were originally set up in 1994 to provide composers with enough cash to allow them to concentrate on developing their ideas over a three-year period. They were expanded in 1998 – the year Shonibare was a winner – to include those working in the visual arts. Since then, they have been awarded to some of the best-known artists around today, from Shonibare and Locke to Jeremy Deller, Gustav Metzger, Mike Nelson and Tomma Abts. The Turner, for which Shonibare was himself nominated in 2004, may exceed the Paul Hamlyn in terms of sheer, brassy glamour, but those who have benefited from the Paul Hamlyn are almost evangelical about its value to their career and confidence. In 1998, Shonibare was working three days a week as a development officer for the disability arts organisation, Shape; the rest of his time was devoted to delivering a rapidly increasing number of commissions, and demands for shows. He felt, he says, "that it was a sort of catch-22 thing. If you still have a part-time job you can't really throw yourself in fully. While I liked the job, my art career was also building. So it was really hard - like pulling myself between the two things." When he won the award, however, Shonibare was able to resign and concentrate on his art full-time. It was in the very fact of being able to stop worrying about money that, somewhat ironically, he began to make some. "Not only did the award give me confidence," he says, "it just took away the worry of money, because that can be very distracting. And actually, being able to switch to the [art] work then subsequently produced more money." Performance artist Rose English, who won a Paul Hamlyn award the year after Shonibare, agrees. Her multidisciplinary work is difficult to quantify, which meant she had, she says, been finding it very difficult to secure funding – especially to work on ideas. Public funding tends to require the applicant to create a particular, tangible project (such as a stage show or exhibition), while an award such as the Turner retrospectively recognises a successful show or body of work; the aim of the Paul Hamlyn is to give the artist the breathing space to develop fresh ideas. "The fact that there were no strings attached was very valuable," English says. "There was no specific play or performance to get together." English did, nonetheless, use the three years financed by the award both to stage a musical performance, Standing Room Only, in London (she had been planning it for years, but had not yet secured funding); and to research a longer-term project. Called Lost in Music, it's a performance piece using acrobatics, singing, fire, and, intriguingly, glass, and it will be produced and performed next year in China. "I was able to just batten down the hatches," English says of those three years, "and get on with it." English also found her confidence boosted by the knowledge that other artists had been involved in making the decision, rather than the distant, grey-suited bureaucrats more readily associated with public funding. This year among the art world luminaries who helped to choose the shortlist were artist Rachel Whiteread, Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Oberst, and Whitechapel Gallery curator Anthony Spira. The winners are then chosen by a smaller team of judges (this year, the Guardian's Adrian Searle; Paul Hamlyn's daughter, gallery owner and chair of the foundation Jane Hamlyn; and Baltic director Godfrey Worsdale). To win, therefore, is to gain a vote of confidence from the people whose opinion matters most – curators, gallerists and, most importantly, other artists. "To know that these people whose opinion I valued had actually chosen me," English says, "made me feel such a connection with them." Shonibare goes even further: "Paul Hamlyn has something that the Turner doesn't have … It has peer respect." Where Hamlyn also differs from the Turner is in age criteria: the Turner is only open to artists under the age of 50, but artists of any age are eligible for the Paul Hamlyn. Gustav Metzger was 80 when he won the award in 2006; the film-maker and photographer Horace Ové was 69. The Trinidadian-born Ové is using his award to transfer his career-long archive of works between the Caribbean and the UK, and to focus on his photography (planned projects include a trip to Congo). "Winning the Paul Hamlyn has been very, very helpful to me," he says. For Shonibare, there is nonetheless a tangible correlation, at least among the younger artists, between Paul Hamlyn winners and Turner prize nominees. "If you look up all the artists who've been nominated for the Turner in the last 10 years," he says, "you will find that prior to the Turner nomination, a lot of them actually received the Paul Hamlyn." So did Shonibare actually find winning the Paul Hamlyn as significant as being nominated for the Turner? "They're two very different things," he says tactfully. "Paul Hamlyn is very low-key; it's very discreet, publicity-wise. You have to have really thick skin when you do the Turner, because people will just hurl abuse at you from every corner. Even cab drivers have an opinion. You wouldn't get into a cab and find the driver discussing the Paul Hamlyn." Although Shonibare won the popular vote at the time of his nomination (64% of visitors to the BBC website said they wanted him to win), he says he still suffered his fair share of abuse. "The Turner is great," he says, "but it has all other kinds of agendas attached to it. It's more about popular culture, more about the media opportunity to dislike contemporary art. The press love to rubbish art - with the Turner they do it every year. The Paul Hamlyn doesn't get into any of that. It's a serious award. It's not being dragged into the gutter." • This article was amended on Tuesday November 25 2008. We confused Paul Hamlyn's daughter Jane with the potter Jane Hamlyn. This has been corrected.

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The glamorous Turner prize may catapult artists into the spotlight, but the Paul Hamlyn award is equally life-changing. Laura Barnett talks to former winners

http://web.archive.org/web/20151108143323id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/12/why-twitters-stock-soared-75-on-analyst-day.html

The company plans to add significant functionality to private messaging: The company is calling it key to long-term growth. It sounds like Twitter wants to take the fact that people text each other all the time and bring that texting communication inside its system. Plus, it's making it easier to share Tweets privately, rather than having to send an email when you want to share a tweet with someone. Read More One year after IPO, Twitter investors are wary Twitter's working to launch a range of new services and apps: For developers, that means new tools like its 'Fabric' developer toolkit. For users, that means totally stand-alone apps like 'Vine.' (Here Twitter seems to be taking a page of Mark Zuckerberg's strategy to build out a portfolio of apps around Facebook). The more tools it gives developers, the more distribution its ads and Tweets will get. The more apps it offers, the more opportunity to generate ad revenue. Expect a range of improvements to the product: Twitter will make it easier to watch video on Twitter. Users will be able to record, edit and share video within Twitter. It's investing in improving search and new location-specific experiences. Plus, Twitter's working on some curation—so when you come back to the app after being away, instead of seeing just the latest tweets, it'll feature the most important tweets from "While you're away." Why? If every time you open Twitter you see something really great, rather than just the latest, you'll be more likely to share it. Read MoreTeen: Facebook isn't cool but we still use it CFO Anthony Noto is bullish on revenue growth: Noto admitted that his plans are "aspirational," but he laid out a couple of scenarios that would enable the company to scale to the kind of revenue that the largest Internet companies have.

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CEO Dick Costolo provided a clear picture of his vision for Twitter, and the company's stock soared following his presentation.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160119145132id_/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/12/manet-portraits-artist-photography-royal-academy/amp

Manet was the last French painter to love black for a very long time. The museum habit of placing him among the Impressionists has a curious effect. In New York's Metropolitan Museum, stepping from the interminable Renoir rooms into the Manet room produces a shock; stepping back produces another one, not quite in reverse. Renoir, who believed and said that black did not exist, that all shadows had a colour, apparently succeeded a painter who loved the knife-edge contrasts of black. The intense matadors of Manet give way to the smiling pastel matrons of Renoir; dramatic costumes, as if for a stage performance or a last appearance in the arena, are succeeded by a natural sincerity. Black disappeared after Manet, not to reappear until Matisse. Pleasingly, the aged Renoir lived to be deeply shocked by the black horizontal bar in Matisse's Intérieur à Nice, now in Philadelphia. Visitors to the Royal Academy's new blockbuster Manet exhibition will be immediately struck by the glowering, Spanish-flavoured black, which separates him so strongly from the next generation. But on the other hand, there are aspects of Manet's painterly practice that root him powerfully in his own time, and strongly influenced the generations that followed – not just in painting. The age was one that was fascinated by what Gerard Manley Hopkins was to call "dappled things" – the effect of coupled light and dark in flecks and movement under trees and in urban shade. "All things counter, original, spare, strange; whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim"; Hopkins' catalogue starts to surface elsewhere, in Manet's first mature paintings, and maintains a powerful presence in the art, music and above all painting of the rest of the century. Dapplement surfaces in the great Musique dans les Jardins des Tuileries of 1862, somehow both epic and domestic in scale, and is the thing that saves it from direct comparison with the social panoramas of William Powell Frith, across the Channel. An all-enveloping rippling light turns it into a study of atmosphere. Dapplement, with its unpredictable emphases and shadows, its world of half-glimpses and dramatic clarity, determines what meaning Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe might possess. Dapplement had occasionally interested earlier painters, and Le Linge of 1875 pays some homage to the great series of laundress paintings of Fragonard, a century before, where the figures are almost lost in bursts of light falling on steam. A subsequent generation, including Renoir in the Bal du Moulin de la Galette, which recapitulates Musique dans les Jardins des Tuileries, used dapplement to create a rippling uniformity in a diverse scene. Manet's fascination was rather different. It is used to demonstrate the unpredictable object, the startling contrast, the grotesque event with the unexpected fall of direct light amid shade. It combines the detailed passage with a grand sweep of crepuscular shade, the closely observed with the mysteriously vague. Dapplement was a tool for him, like the sudden emergence of a social group into the light from deep shade, like the curious group in Le Balcon at the Musée d'Orsay, or the great Dejeuner dans l'Atelier in Munich. It froze a moment in all its curious combinations, as photography was one day to do. Dapplement in Manet is much more like the dappled observations of his friend Chabrier's piano piece "Sous-bois" – a work so strange I remember repeatedly stopping while learning it as a boy, unable to believe that a composer of the 1870s could intend these sounds. Manet's late Un Bar aux Folies Bergère hung over Chabrier's piano; it is nice to think of the mercurial musician looking up as he played. Manet's dapplement resembles the gorgeous and unpredictable shifts between soloist, septet, chorus and orchestra, between foreground and sweeping backdrop, which Berlioz found for the end of the fourth act of Les Troyens in the late 1850s. It resembles, too, the bizarre juxtapositions in Madame Bovary, such as the declarations of love against the cries of an agricultural auction, and, much later, the freakish shifts of direction in the poetry of Manet's friend Mallarmé – his early "L'Après-midi d'un Faune", like the Debussy orchestral prelude, is an ode to dappled light and the bizarre, erotic contrasts it produces. Manet's art is devoted to the wrong thing in the wrong place, unpredictably caught out and spotlit by the fall of light or the pitiless gaze. Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, with its outrageous combination of clothed male figures and nude, or deshabillé women, was defended by Zola on the grounds of classical precedent. (Not quite as much as Zola claims, however.) There are Giorgione landscapes and Titian interiors that exploit the same contrast. But Manet's point is the indecency of the contrast in a contemporary context – the very fashionable little tassled cap on the head of one of the men is the most obscene thing in the painting. Similarly, in the sumptuous Olympia, what turns the nude into a shocking study of a prostitute? It is the clothes – the clothes the maid wears, the orchid in the hair, the black ribbon about the neck, the pearl earrings and the bracelet, and above all, the slippers – that transform the nude. There are franker 19th-century studies of the female form, such as Courbet's Origine du Monde, but none so ingeniously obscene. Dressing up is the source of much joy and bizarre contrast in Manet. Go back to the incomparable Manet room in the Metropolitan, and look around. The beautiful Mlle V en Costume d'Espada has the face of a handsome boy, and would pass as a matador but for one thing – the painter's voluptuous enjoyment of her unmistakably feminine bottom and swelling belly. Next to that, an absurdly upright 1866 matador with showy, excessive sideburns seems to be dressing up as a man, too, as does the little boy with a serious expression carrying a sword that is far too big for him. And then the limp Christ with the angels, their expressions not sweet and generalised, but very much studies of hard-faced Parisian women, perhaps women whose trade is the laying out of corpses – what to make of that? Was Manet quite serious? Manet retained a detached relationship to the subject matter of paintings that challenged even the most sympathetically inclined of his contemporaries. Gautier was alarmed by the combination of realism and topic in Le Christ Mort et les Anges. Zola, in the course of his spirited defence of Manet, was not quite right to say:"Feeling that he was making no progress by copying the masters, or by painting Nature as seen through the eyes of individuals who differed in character from himself," Manet "came to understand, quite naturally, one fine day, that it only remained to him to see Nature as it really is, without looking at the works or studying the opinions of others." The detachment from artistic tradition comes not through complete freedom, but from a willingness to examine and break the rules of presentation. This urge has, it turns out, resulted in a series of cunning traps laid for the oversophisticated. There is a large body of critical work about Manet's last major painting, Un Bar aux Folies Bergère, either decrying its impossible depiction of a reflection, or talking about the subtle fantasy that results from this impossibility. It took until 2001, and the reconstruction of the image by an Australian art historian, Malcolm Park, before the scene was shown to be perfectly plausible. Manet had just taken the greatest care to make the scene look as impossible, and indeed ineptly constructed, as he knew how. Portraiture, which is the focus of the Royal Academy's show, had become still more hidebound by the advent and influence of photography. As one of the great early photographers, Nadar, remarked in his autobiography, the advent of the carte de visite type of photographic portrait "spelled disaster. Either you had to succumb – that is, follow the trend – or resign." Carol M Armstrong reminds us in the RA catalogue that Manet's friend Baudelaire had been similarly scathing about photography's impact on society in his Salon of 1859, speaking of the moment when "our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal". Manet's portraiture is devoted to the image that is controlled not by the conventions of the form, still less of the acceptable conventions of emerging photography portraiture, but by the gaze of the artist. If some of the portraits, such as the famous one of Zola, follow the conventional format established by Ingrès, others, such as the portrait of Mallarmé or La Dame aux Eventails in the Musée d'Orsay, return to the fantasy portraits of Fragonard, and seem to draw inspiration from a blurred photographic print. Others revel in the momentary impression, even of a face glimpsed in the street in a dumpy, unconsidered posture in mid-movement, as if thinking that painting could achieve through imaginative action what photography, as yet, was not technically capable of. In the portrait Berthe Morisot au Bouquet de Violettes she is caught between poses, slowly moving into an amused smile. There are curious urban scenes to make Diane Arbus wonder; the grouping of the balcony, or the marvellously awkward and grumpy mother and daughter against the strangest of geometric backdrops in Le Chemin de Fer, now in Washington DC. These are moments that might have been glimpsed in the street, from the window of a moving hansom cab, by a device not yet perfected. Or alternatively, by an unresting and ceaselessly inventive eye, with a perfect visual memory, apparently in need of little mechanical help. It is difficult to tell. Zola was quite right to base his defence of Manet on the painter's perfect eye. It was an eye of great purity, and one that came to an ironic and undermining position after the long years of argumentative apprenticeship in the studio of Manet's master, the salon painter Thomas Couture. (The scholar Beatrice Farwell remarks, surprisingly, that Manet was "the last great French painter to receive a long and academic training".) What the eye saw, however, was not completely unprejudiced. It was the observation of the visual moments that would most offend, most alarm, most bewilder; a face in a street, a line of railings and a suggestion of rising steam, a momentary pattern of dappled light that reveals, of all things, a naked woman sitting with two well-off young men in a forest glade, turning and smiling. What do these things mean? The startled eye closes; turns away; turns to something else, with amusement, but no certain claim to be making any kind of statement about anything but the fall of light.

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With his snatched street scenes and glimpses of private moments, Manet's portraits are snapshots seen through the gaze of the artist, as a new exhibition at London's Royal Academy reveals. By Philip Hensher

http://web.archive.org/web/20160702045855id_/http://time.com:80/3002240/right-to-be-forgotten-2/

Ever since the European Union’s top court ruled in May that individuals have a “right to be forgotten,” Google has been working to abide by the new rules. The company has received over 70,000 takedown requests from individuals who want 250,000 webpages removed from Google’s search results. Google’s team individually reviews each application, and the company plans to hire more employees to handle the extra workload. Changing the way people think about the Internet is an overwhelming task. But Google is not the only company scrambling in the wake of the E.U.’s decision. As Internet users begin requesting that unsavory parts of their pasts or personal contact information be erased from Google’s search results, so-called reputation management companies are seeing a flood of new business. Traditionally confined to creating new web content about their clients—laudatory blog posts, celebratory articles, swooning social media updates—these companies are now trying to help their clients erase content as well. “Online image management has long been in the business of producing new content so you have a better persona online,” says Cayce Myers, a professor at Virginia Tech and legal research editor for the Institute for Public Relations. “Here they’re doing the reverse.” Online reputation management is a growing business that is now being boosted by the E.U. ruling. For a fee that can amount to thousands of dollars a month, companies take on clients and scrub clean their search results by creating search engine-optimized content that hog up the first few pages of search results on Google. Clients ranging from CEOs, major corporations, celebrities down to doctors and restaurateurs who use the services to whitewash their online presence. Media consultant BIA/Kelsey forecasts that small and medium-size businesses will spend $3.5 billion managing their online reputations in 2014. Now, the E.U.’s court ruling has changed the dynamics of the industry, expanding these businesses’ client base and making it easier for them to delete content rather than just create it. “The number of our inbound leads”—new referrals—“has gone up about 50 percent since the beginning of May,” says Simon Wadsworth, managing director of the U.K.-based online reputation management firm Igniyte. The E.U. ruling “has raised awareness of the industry. You can change how you do things online.” Bertrand Girin, the founder of a France-based reputation management company, Reputation VIP, has created a spin-off service that specifically to designed to help people make “right to be forgotten” requests to Google. Aptly named Forget.Me, it lets users choose from one of 40 boilerplate requests in nine separate categories in order to send Google a pre-formulated request. The service, which is free, allows users to bypass some of the thorny legal questions and the difficulty of properly structuring a request. “When Google put its form online, we looked at the demand from the public and we saw a gap,” says Girin. “We said, ‘let’s help people understand what their problem is.’” Forget.me has 17,000 registered users who have submitted over 2,500 applications to Google. The boilerplate response responses, which were written by lawyers, can be modified by users to address more specific claims. Girin is promoting the service as one that makes it easy for regular people to be forgotten on the internet. Dealing with Google is a “bureaucratic hassle,” says Myers, the legal research editor for the Institute for Public Relations.”You can technically do it yourself for free, but navigating the bureaucracy is in a state of flux.” “I can see where it could be cumbersome,” he adds. The buzz around right to be forgotten has given these companies much-wanted attention. Andy Donaldson, the CEO of the reputation management company Hit Search, has invested heavily in building and marketing a search software that allowed users to monitor their own online personas over multiple platforms. But Donaldson said that since the E.U. ruling, the number of his company’s new client leads has increased by “upwards of three or four hundred.” “We invested in post-graduate doctors in computer science and mathematics to help us build our algorithm,” Donaldson said, “But it ends up being something like this that triggers the market that’s really totally out of our control.” Donaldson gave an example of how the E.U. ruling has been a boon for business. (He couldn’t disclose the names of his clients.) The CEO of a large U.K.-based company was involved in a dispute during a friendly rugby match with a well-known journalist. The journalist wrote a damning story about the incident, blaming the CEO. The CEO’s wife, having just read about the E.U. ruling, sought out Hit Search to get the story removed from Google’s search results. The request is unlikely to be successful—Google is reticent about removing news stories on public persons—but Donaldson won a client lead. Google has taken a hard-nosed stance toward many of the requests reputation management firms have made, with the overwhelming number of takedown requests coming back with refusals. Donaldson said he has sent hundreds of requests for his clients to Google; of the requests Google has responded to, under ten percent have been accepted, he says. That’s because Google isn’t likely to take down a search result like a newspaper story about a public figure, for instance, or a negative review about a roofing company. “People think we’ve got some magic button in Google and we press delete,” says Wadsworth, the CEO of Igniyte. His clients often ask for links to be removed that won’t pass Google’s bar. “We’re telling the majority of people, ‘you’ve got no chance,’” Wadsworth says. Their success rates aside, the right to be forgotten ruling is going to drive business growth for some time to come. “This is a first step into a general public market. It’s a big market,” said Girin. “I think there’s a real demand here.”

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The E.U.'s decision requiring search engines to remove some links from search results has spawned a nascent market

http://web.archive.org/web/20160810152041id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/tim-tebow-move-mlb-could-happen

Tim Tebow is finally hanging up the football cleats, only to dust off his baseball spikes. ESPN's Adam Schefter reported this week that the former professional quarterback, who has not played in an NFL regular-season game since 2012, is set to attempt a second pro sports career in baseball. Tebow, who turns 29 this month, has been refining his outfield skills for the past year. He worked with former MLB catcher Chad Moeller, who said in a statement: "I am beyond impressed with Tim's athleticism and swing, and it goes without saying that he has shown a high level of discipline and strong work ethic. … I truly believe Tim has the skill set and potential to achieve his goal of playing in the major leagues. … It could happen relatively quickly." Tebow last played organized baseball in 2005 as a high school junior. He hit .494 with four home runs, earning All-State recognition in Florida. He was pursued heavily by scouts and could have been drafted had he not quit baseball to focus on football. "This may sound like a publicity stunt, but nothing could be further from the truth," says CAA baseball agent Brodie Van Wagenen, who will represent Tebow in his MLB pursuits. "I have seen Tim's workouts, and people inside and outside the industry--scouts, executives, players and fans--will be impressed by his talent." All 30 MLB teams have been invited to a workout Tebow is hosting at the end of the month. The Yankees have a roster spot opening up this week, so who knows what could happen. More MLB: -- Chris Sale: How Tony Gwynn Inspired Me To Quit Chewing Tobacco -- 12 Athletes Who Look Like Pokémon Characters -- Wrigley Field To Clog Arteries With 'Deep Dish Pizza' Hot Dog Follow Jack Minton on Twitter @jackminton95. Alex Rodriguez, Baseball, Catcher, Chad Moeller, Florida Gators, Football, MLB, New York Yankees, NFL, Quarterback, Tim Tebow

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Tim Tebow says he wants to play baseball and former MLB player Chad Moeller says he can make it.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160819014746id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/10/sports/olympics/doping-swimming-russia-lilly-king-yulia-efimova.html?WT.mc_id=2016-KWP-AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&kwp_0=198755&kwp_4=780634&kwp_1=391972&_r=0

On Saturday, the Australian freestyler Mack Horton was in the warm-down pool before the competition when Sun, his main rival, vigorously splashed him, as if to get his attention. Sun served a three-month suspension in 2014 for taking a banned stimulant. “I ignored him,” Horton, 20, said, “because I don’t have time or respect for drug cheats.” That night, Horton out-touched Sun for the gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle. Horton did not acknowledge him in the water and later called it “a win for the good guys,” although he and Sun did shake hands during the medal ceremony. Members of the Chinese swimming team expressed outrage about Horton’s actions, with the team manager Xu Qi calling for an apology. None has been forthcoming. “Mack obviously has very strong views about the need for clean sport, as every single one of us does,” said the Australian delegation’s chef de mission, Kitty Chiller. “He has every right to express his views and his displeasure in that sense.” The current Olympians Dana Vollmer and Cody Miller and past winners weighed in on the doping controversy at the Rio Games that has resulted in tiffs between Lilly King and Russian swimmers who were booed. Sun went on to win the gold medal in the 200-meter freestyle Monday night. “They don’t belong in a sport,” Camille Lacourt, a star French swimmer, said Monday night in comments reported by the French newspaper L’Équipe. “They should make up their federation of dopers and have fun among themselves. It disgusts me to see people who’ve cheated standing on podiums. Sun Yang, in the 200 free, he pees purple.” That night, the American swimmer Lilly King, 19, cited Horton as an influence when she spoke out about Efimova. King entered the Rio Games with the top time in the world this year in the women’s 100-meter breaststroke. The next-fastest swimmer in the lead-up to the competition was Efimova, a 24-year-old Russian whose place at these Olympics was not confirmed until Saturday. Efimova, the reigning world champion, had served a 16-month doping suspension handed down by swimming’s global governing body, known as FINA, a ban that ended in early 2015. Early this year, Efimova failed a test for the newly banned drug meldonium, but the result was overturned when she appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, arguing that she had already served her penalty. Every time Efimova has raced inside the Olympic Aquatics Stadium, she has been booed. King demonstrated her disapproval in another way. After posting the fastest time in qualifying on Sunday afternoon, King wagged her finger to remind everyone who was No. 1. As King looked on from the ready room, where swimmers gather before they race, Efimova won the first semifinal and mimicked King’s move. King went out and won the second semifinal and shook her finger again. A spokesman for the International Olympic Committee said that fans want “fair play” from athletes amid tensions over doping and that the I.O.C. president, Thomas Bach, wants a life ban for serious doping. In a postrace interview with NBC, King said, “You wave your finger No. 1, and you’ve been caught drug cheating?” She added, “I’m not a fan.” In a group interview in the mixed zone, King defended her actions. “I’m not this sweet little girl,” she said. “That’s not who I am.” All the finger wagging set the stage for the final on Monday night, when their score was settled in the pool. King occupied Lane 4. Efimova was in Lane 5. It was a duel at 100 meters. King turned first at the 50 and hung on to win with a time of 1 minute 4.93 seconds. It was her best time and an Olympic record. Efimova was second in 1:05.50, 19-hundredths of a second ahead of King’s American teammate Katie Meili. After the race, King hung on the lane line that separated her from Efimova and splashed twice in Efimova’s lane. King said she had not done it on purpose. But she also studiously avoided contact with Efimova. “I don’t think she really wants to be congratulated by me,” King said. The news conference featuring the medal winners felt more like a trial than a triumphant review. King sat at the opposite end of the table from Efimova. Meili was in the middle seat, normally reserved for the gold medalist. Neither King nor Meili looked at Efimova, who was on the verge of tears from the opening question about the boos directed at her. “I’m just happy I’m here and racing,” said Efimova, who looked miserable. She appealed to people “to try to understand me,” but King, who sat stone-faced through Efimova’s answers, did not appear moved. Sam Manchester will guide you through the 2016 summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Hey. It’s Sam from the NYT Sports desk. I’m at the Olympics in Rio (so you don’t have to be :)). Grab a limited spot and I’ll text you updates, answer your questions and share the behind-the-scenes stuff nobody else gets. Thanks! Talk to you soon. U.S. numbers only. Standard messaging rates may apply. Your information is used only to deliver messages about the Rio 2016 Olympics. At one point, Efimova switched from English to Russian. The moderator nudged a pair of headphones toward King and told her she could use them to listen to the English translation. King declined, as did Meili. What is striking is that the antidoping chorus in Rio has consisted of newcomers and veterans alike, with Olympic rookies like Horton, of Australia, and King joining the 31-year-old Lacourt and Michael Phelps, who is also 31 and is the most decorated athlete in Olympic history. “I think what you’re seeing is the desire of Olympic athletes to uphold the values of the Olympic Games without exception,” Adam Nelson, an American shot-putter and activist for athletes’ rights, said in an email Monday. Nelson was named the winner of the 2004 Olympic shot-put competition eight years after it was contested when the original champion, Yuriy Bilonog of Ukraine, retroactively tested positive for a banned substance. “These athletes know, when an athlete cheats, he or she will experience a residual physical benefit for many years,” Nelson added. “But there’s also a residual sentiment that negatively impacts the sport moving forward. The clouds of suspicion that linger over doped athletes who return to competition continue to take a toll on the value of the clean athlete.” There is not yet conclusive evidence on the long-term benefits to performance for athletes who took banned substances earlier in their careers. And as Thomas Bach, the I.O.C.’s president, has repeatedly pointed out, lifetime bans from sports for doping offenses have not proved legally defensible. In the cases of men like Sun and Justin Gatlin, the once-barred American sprinter who has been another target of athletes’ criticism since his return, they are being called out even though the system in place gives them every right to resume competing. King said Monday night that she believed any athlete with a doping offense — including Gatlin — should not be allowed to compete. The national governing body for track and field, U.S.A. Track & Field, issued a statement on Tuesday rejecting that notion. “The WADA code indicates that when an individual has completed their suspension, they are eligible to re-engage in the sport,” the statement said. “The Amateur Sports Act stipulates that if an athlete is eligible to compete, they cannot be prevented from being on a national team. So in the United States, it is a matter of law. If you are not under a ban, regardless of what you may have served in the past, you are fully eligible to be on the team.” Still, Nelson defended the right of athletes to criticize once-barred competitors. “It’s not undermining the system,” he said. “It highlights a major flaw in the system. Ms. King could have lost out on an Olympic gold medal future had the events turned out differently yesterday, and she would have had to accept the fact that a known doper beat her. Where’s the spirit of Olympism in that outcome?” A version of this article appears in print on August 10, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Rio Pool, Disdain for Dopers Is Bubbling Over. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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Swimmers at the Rio Games who once served suspensions for doping have been openly vilified by their rivals, creating plenty of awkwardness.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160930033414id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/vin-scully-chinese-radio-broadcast-dodger-stadium

Vin Scully was impressed with me as a broadcaster … at least that's what he told me. It has been 23 years since I shared a booth with the Dodgers' legendary broadcaster, who's calling it a career this week after 67 years on the job. But when you were in the presence of greatness, you tend to remember all the details. On May 19, 1993, I was part of a team that delivered the first Mandarin Chinese broadcast from a Major League Baseball game. When the Dodgers faced the Cincinnati Reds that day at Dodger Stadium, four radio booths were occupied to air the game -- in English, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. I was just out of college at the time, working at the Pasadena Star-News. When a press release announcing the game would be broadcast in Chinese made its way to our newsroom, I jumped at the chance. I lobbied the radio station to bring me on (pro bono, of course) to be part of the announcing team, selling my ability as a fluent speaker of both English and Chinese as well as my "expertise" in baseball. It worked. Thomas Kao, the original announcer who was a local talk show host, graciously asked me to be his sidekick. I bounded into Dodger Stadium that afternoon with unbridled enthusiasm. It wasn't that I hadn't covered a Dodgers game before, but this occasion was much different. It was historic, and I knew I'd get to share a booth with the Hall of Fame voice of the Dodgers. As the game went on, I took over more of the play-by-play duties as Kao did the scene-setting. S.C. Chao and Jerry Sung, famous baseball players from Taiwan, were also in the booth as our color analysts. For a first-time group that's never worked together before, I thought we had pretty decent chemistry. Then Scully walked in at the end of the third inning. The way the Dodgers radio broadcasts were set up at the time, Vin did the first and last three innings of the game, with him taking a break in the middle innings. He'd spend the fourth inning with us. I was thrilled and nervous at the same time. I remember telling myself: "Do not stutter!" But Scully was as gregarious and gracious in person as his listeners have come to know during a career that began in Brooklyn in 1950. He sat down between Kao and me and immediately put us at ease. He asked us some questions (with me translating for our Chinese audience) and I did some in return. At one point, I asked him to call a few pitches and plays for our listeners, and he happily obliged. As the inning went on, I had the occasion to describe a near double-play ball started by Reds shortstop Barry Larkin. When I finished, Vin was effusive in his praise, telling me my call was "terrific," even though he didn't speak Mandarin and probably didn't understand what I said besides "Larkin." But his reaction was so enthusiastic and genuine, if I had died at that moment it would've been a life well lived. That call ended up on an NBC News feature and was part of the highlights package on that night's ESPN SportsCenter. We also were visited in the booth by then-Dodgers owner Peter O'Malley. The team was delighted with the broadcast and invited us back for a few more that season. I returned for five more games, doing the broadcasts solo, including the season finale in which the Dodgers denied the 103-win San Francisco Giants a postseason berth with a 12-1 victory. My radio broadcast career ended after that season, though I had agreed to a deal to do both Dodgers and Lakers games in Mandarin Chinese in 1994, even appearing at a joint press conference attended by both franchises. The radio station I worked for folded a few months later, and I took a newspaper job in San Francisco and headed north. But I'll always have the rare honor of having shared a booth with the great Vin Scully, with memories flooding back as he wraps up his incomparable career this weekend in San Francisco. I've probably heard thousands of his broadcasts in my life, but of course I'll treasure that one inning while he sat side-by-side with me above all others. As Scully was departing the booth after that inning, he flashed his familiar toothy grin and said to me, "Mr. Chi, it's been a pleasure!" No, Mr. Scully, the pleasure was all mine. -- Samuel Chi is the managing editor of RealClearSports.com and proprietor of College Football Exchange. Follow him on Twitter at @ThePlayoffGuru. Baseball, chinese, Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles Dodgers, MLB, Radio, Vin Scully

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Columnist Sam Chi remembers the time he worked a broadcast at Dodger Stadium and got ultimate compliment from Vin Scully.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161112201340id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/11/18/40/wa-euthanased-greyhound-figures-revealed

Western Australia's greyhound industry regulator says it is focused on increasing adoptions, with revelations in state parliament that 371 animals were put down in the past year. The greyhounds were euthanised for several reasons - 96 because they were not suitable for racing, 88 because they were deemed unfit for re-homing and 187 due to training or track injuries. Racing and Wagering WA said on Friday their focus was on "investing in strategies and programs to further improve rates of re-homing and continue to reduce euthanasia rates of the industry". "When a greyhound retires from the racing industry, at any age, RWWA will aim to achieve every healthy and behaviourally sound greyhound being rehomed," the statement said. More than 600 greyhounds were rehomed in the past year and RWWA said it had increased its investment in the Greyhound as Pets adoption program from $120,000 in 2014-2015 to almost $500,000 this year. Greens MLC Lynn MacLaren said the industry remained cruel, with 860 greyhounds dying between 2013-2015. She said the only change in the past two years was that inhumane practices were exposed by whistleblowers. "This kind of dismissive response to the outrage people feel when they learn the numbers of animals killed as 'wastage' of the sport or after incurring painful track injuries is precisely why the investigation in NSW concluded that greyhound racing must be stopped," Ms MacLaren said. "The industry claims it can do better but what happens when the whistleblowers aren't there or the media turn to another hot topic? "Business as usual in the greyhound racing industry is no longer acceptable."

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It has been revealed in WA Parliament that 371 greyhounds were euthanased in the past year, prompting the industry regulator to note the need for improvement.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130904043040id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/nov/25/war-afghanistan-health

05.25: Waiting in departure lounge of RAF Brize Norton. After wake up call at 04.00, breakfast at 04.30, I have successfully checked in for my C17 transporter flight to Kandahar. I am the only passenger. Dressed in combat trousers, desert boots, body armour and with a 20kg bag as hand-luggage, I am relieved to be ready and in the right place. [...] At 06.30, I am called to board the RAF C17. A small woman appears, looking flustered, and suggests I follow her ... The crew are already aboard. I am led up the steps of the squat plane and motioned toward one of the canvas jump seats fixed to the side of the fuselage ... Half a million rounds of palletised ammunition is cargo netted around me. 04/11/07 Arrival at Camp Bastion I find myself sitting among a squad of Royal Marine Commandos. They appear incredibly young. One of them, who looks like a teenager, is wearing a commando knife in his chest webbing. It is hard to reconcile my recognition of this student-aged man with the 8in blade fastened at the ready on his armour. After a strange, propeller-powered 45 minutes I wake to realise that we had all been lulled into a fitful sleep by the drone of the engines. [...] The ramp opens to reveal the orange light of Bastion. The sun is setting and vast amounts of dust have been thrown into the air by the landing. The diffused glow of the sun appears to ignite the sky. In the distance I see a burning plume of smoke (apparently the 24-hour waste fires). At 07.00, the lights in the tent crackle to life. I am surrounded by activity. The shower block "ablutions", like everything else, are semi-communal. I feel conspicuously unfit and I try to pretend that my ponytail is not noticeable. [...] I have an invitation to attend the "ops" briefing at the MED GRP CP. Acronyms describe all units, events and places. I imagine the briefing is confidential, but even if it weren't, I would need a code book to decipher the language of common usage. "Enhanced threat of VBIED reported by RC FOB Delhi" = Enhanced threat of vehicle-bourne improvised explosive device reported by regional command, forward operating base Delhi. [...] An insurgent has been captured and MERT [the medical emergency response team] have brought him for treatment. It seems that he was a suspected mortar commander and has been shot in the leg. We photograph the helicopter approaching and find ourselves coated in dust as the Chinook "wheels down" (WD). The suspected Taliban fighter is blindfolded and searched carefully with metal detectors before being allowed entrance. A team of about 10 people is waiting. Notes are taken in triplicate as x-rays are taken digitally and he is stripped and prepared for surgery. The wound is not life-threatening and within 10 minutes he is being wheeled, already sedated, into theatre. The MASH-style theatre is an amazing venue. Under canvas like the rest of the hospital, the theatrical lighting of the operating spotlights adds to the incongruity of surgeons with blue gowns over Disruptive Pattern Material (DPM) camouflage uniforms. We stand well back beyond a striped line on the floor, attempting to understand from a distance what is happening in the bubble of intensity at the far end of the dome tent.06/11/07 First operation At 10.00, a nine-liner starts to come through the "Jchat" system: a T1 casualty (meaning evacuation needed within an hour or less - life threatened). I rush to my tent to assemble a selection of lenses. I feel a little vulgar; my role is sinister, an ambulance chaser with a camera. I am here [sent by the Wellcome Collection] to consider "War and Medicine" - the role of healthcare in combat. I have never been in the military and have never seen an operation. I am a trauma tourist desperately trying to justify my role - to others but, more difficultly, to myself. By 11.00, the helicopter has not returned. I begin to hear little bits of news. The casualty may be in a minefield. It will take at least another hour for the other soldiers and engineers to inch their way toward him. He has self-administered morphine and is conscious. I find it impossible to imagine: two hours with a mine injury awake and unable to move. At 13.00, the Chinook finally arrives. As it swings on to the HLS [helicopter landing strip], the sand washes over the waiting Land Rover ambulances, and medics run from both vehicles to meet and make the exchange. The soldier is wheeled across. I watch from a distance with a telephoto lens. By the time I have walked past the quartermaster's office to the entrance, the ambulances have arrived. As always, a crowd of some of the NHS's most highly paid and skilled consultants are waiting in DPM clothing. He is taken to Resus. Awake, in pain and bloody. The doctors adopt varying roles. One doctor stands with a nurse and an administrator at a lectern taking notes of every observation. Others direct the x-ray team, manage the unwrapping of the field dressings, check the vital signs, look for internal bleeding and try to calm the soldier. He is young; I suspect, a Commando. His right leg has been bandaged in three field dressings - each one can absorb a litre of blood. His foot is unwrapped and clothes are cut away. It strikes me that all the kit fetish that follows the FOB [forward operating base] postings is discarded. The boots, the webbing, holsters and DPM are cut into pieces, and deposited into a black plastic bag for incineration. The most obvious injury is to his foot. Bone and flesh hang from its centre. The heel protrudes about 2in below the base of his sole. The x-ray explains. There are no fragments of shrapnel. The force of the blast has travelled through the armoured vehicle into his foot and, with devastating effect, has forced the bones from the base of the foot upwards. The neat lattice of bone and tendon has been rotated and pushed away from his heel. The anaesthetist is beginning his work. The soldier keeps shouting "Sir!" as he deliriously looks around "Don't take my legs," he appeals. "Have I got my legs?" He doesn't believe the doctor who reassures him. I find myself cold and sweating profusely. I struggle to stop myself fainting. I must not faint. His right leg has multiple fractures and the knee is crushed. His left leg is also broken. He is still conscious as they wheel him to theatre. The surgeons wear gowns over their DPM and plastic covers over their desert boots. The soldier is put to sleep, and intense but unhurried activity takes place to untangle the mess of bone and skin. Pieces of bone come off the base of his feet in the surgeon's hands. He cuts away the last bits of muscle and skin symbolically attaching the bone fragments to the soldier and places them in a steel tray. The foot is emptied of dead tissue and takes on the form of a near empty bag of skin. The toes are still attached and have the appearance of some remaining circulation. I pray that the surgeons will decide that the foot will survive. Despite their appearance, the surgeon suspects that they are no longer salvageable. One of the doctors suggests to me that the best case for him will be to lose the lower part of his right leg. I listen quietly but am horrified. By 15.30, the operation is nearly complete; the wounds are left open and packed with gauze. No amputation will happen here. They will allow the soldier to return to Britain as he is. The decision will be made in Selly Oak. Two more injured patients are waiting for theatre. I feel dislocated and aimless. I am not certain if my anxiety comes from my ethical fears of delivering a facile response or from the thwarting of adolescent fantasies. I am not certain of my own intentions.08/11/07 Two Afghan children and their dignified elderly-looking father appear from the ambulances. I am struck by how beautiful they are. The son has shrapnel to his face and is in pain. The daughter has a wound to her leg and looks like aliens have abducted her. She is wide-eyed and confused. All three are covered in a thick layer of desert dust. I leave them as they are stabilised in Resus, unable to face another operation so soon. At about 16.00, the hospital fills. Clerks are rushing to don surgical gowns. Rumours are spreading. Hell at Inkerman (commonly renamed as "Incoming"): 2 T1s, 2 T2s + 1 T3. A "major" incident is declared. Eight more wounded may also be on their way. There are only two theatre teams. This is the first major incident "mass casualty" for the hospital squadron. It is what they have trained for, but there is some uncertainty as to the point at which capacity will be reached. In Inkerman, the landing zone is still hot. The Apaches have spent 20 minutes attacking fire points before the Chinooks can land. Eventually, we hear the sound of the helicopters and in less than a minute, ambulances begin ferrying patients. Leg and chest wounds. I notice two men's chests displaying the flutter of Asherman chest seals rhythmically rising as air escapes their collapsed lungs. One of the soldiers is wearing two CAT (combat application) tourniquets and has had his boots tied together, trapping an improvised splint. The beds in Resus fill. X-rays, clothes cut away. Cleaning away the dirt of battle and consultants comparing notes. MERT medics arrive, covered in dust and in full body armour, to brief the Resus staff. They appear as if parachuted into A&E. Periodically, the senior medics pause and convene to compare priorities. I am impressed by this restraint. A scene of violent injuries is dealt with in a strange, professional way. Any one of the cases would be life-threatening. Here they seem to be received as routine. The first priority becomes visible. As the clothes are cut away, the bizarre and gory scene is unwrapped. There is a gap in his legs. His thighs appear missing. I feel sick, as I mistakenly fear his groin may have also been destroyed. Bloody rags and gauze are piled around his legs and in the distance I see figures frantically attending to his mangled body. I withdraw to meet the surgeons grabbing one last cigarette before the casualties become their charge. Captain Paul Britton is scheduled [for surgery] later that morning. He was wounded at Inkerman and evacuated with shrapnel embedded in his shoulder and hand. He had been injured at the same time as last night's casualties, but had refused to leave his squad. A fire-support commander, he had been in charge of a small (now depleted) team controlling mortars, air-strikes, artillery and Javelin surface-to-air missiles. Britton has a shaved head and full beard. [The surgeon] asks him if he minds being filmed. The response causes hilarity among the nurses: "Just make sure he gets my good side." I set up the camera and step back. I can't face another operation and leave as the camera observes for me. I pass the tent chapel and a padre jumps out. "I've been looking for you," he says. "I believe you came to see me earlier when I was out." It is true that I had found myself wandering in to the church a few hours earlier. In a slightly maudlin moment I had heard music and followed it inside. It is a cliche to seek redemption and faith in times of fear or trauma. I was feeling both and had found myself enacting the stereotypical route to religion. The mass of lines and tubes almost conceals the mummified soldier. The bulk of the equipment fights against the confined space of the ambulance. Five medics gingerly slide Fletcher's life-support equipment past the snags and handles of the Land Rover ambulance. I sit in the front and we move off at the regulation 15mph. [...] During take-off and the flight, I am struck by the kindness displayed by the nurses in armour. Even Fletcher is reassured and comforted in his fitful sleep. We descend in darkness to Kandahar and as the ramp opens we feel the aircraft spinning around. A majestic sight comes into view. The open ramp of a C17 is waiting, framing an illuminated strategic team. The C130 backs up to its larger sibling until 50 yards of ashphalt separates the two worlds of tactical and strategic care. [...] Standing on the runway between these two great transport aircraft, I watch the stretchers being ferried across, illuminated by an honour guard of ambulances and Toyota pick-up trucks. I feel a strange sense of calm as the patients, strapped into the stretchers and protected by an assortment of Day-Glo equipment, are received by the C17 strategic CCAST [combat medical technician] team. I feel that some of the tension has passed away. They are crossing a threshold on the runway between combat and care. Their guilt about leaving the friends and duty, which appears so present at Bastion, seems to be left in the Hercules. As the stretcher crosses the halfway point between craft, it crosses a threshold. The gravitational pull of home overtakes the longing for the immersive FOB community. Powerless to resist, there is no shame for the soldiers. Their injuries answer any inquiries. The comfort, care and cleanliness of the civilian world beckons. The CCAST envoys welcome their cargo, outnumbering the patients three to one, and envelop them in the warm light of the C17 cathedral. During my month-long stay in Helmand, two British soldiers died, 29 were wounded in action and there were 74 admissions to the field hospital. Seventy-one Aeromed evacuations were recorded and an undisclosed number of civilian, insurgent and Afghan National Army soldiers were treated. I arrived back in Britain feeling a great sense of anger. I was frustrated by my previous ignorance of the frequency of injury. Soldiers are surviving wounds that would often have been fatal in previous conflicts. Body armour, medical training and the proximity of advanced surgery to the front line have led to a "disproportionate" number of casualties surviving. In the media, we hear only about the deaths, with occasional reference to the wounded. I came home assuming the violence I had witnessed in Afghanistan would be the focus of the news. But reality television, local politics and other less dramatic events occupied the headlines. For me, the incongruity between what I had seen and what was presented as the public face of conflict was, and continues to be, profound and irreconcilable. • War and Medicine is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 until February 15. Details: www.wellcomecollection.org

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Artist David Cotterrell's diary of his visit to a military field hospital in Afghanistan are a harrowing reminder of the cost of war

http://web.archive.org/web/20140502005552id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1964/06/28/birch-society-believed-on-road-to-moderation-minister-expects-welch-to-revise-his-interests-money-woes-cited.html?

BY JOHN H. FENTON; SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMESJUNE 28, 1964 BOSTON, June 27—A Metho­dist minister from Boothbay Harbor, Me., has suggested that the John Birch Society may well be “on the road to respect­ability if its money holds out.” The minister is the Rev. Dr. J. Allen Broyles. He said, how­ever, that such “respectability” tvas “still quite a distance clown the street.” In the meantime, he said, others might just as well learn to manage the prob­lem of coexistence with the ul­tra‐conservative organization. The minister expressed his views in “The John Birch So­ciety; Anatomy of a Protest,” ($4.50), recently published by the Beacon Press. It was a re­vision of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the department of sociology and social ethics of the Boston University Graduate School. In defining respectability, Dr. Broyles said that Robert H. W. Welch Jr., the founder of the society, had always maintained that his members were made up of “real, solid citizens.” The minister did not interview Mr. Welch in compiling his mate­rial. “Most of the members I in­terviewed were in the middle or upper‐middle class, but most of them were ‘fringe’ within their communities, due partly, of course, to their outlandish views which are part and par­cel of the ideology of the socie­ty,” said Dr. Broyles. “Their socio‐economic status qualified them for ‘respectability,’ but their politics did not.” The minister saw the soci­ty's executive council exerting a continuing moderating in­fluence on Mr. Welch. He ex­pected that this would lead to Mr. Welch's views and interests becoming “somewhat more re­strained and conventional.” The Birch Society, Dr. Broy­les contended, would begin a “rapid downward spiral” if a An Arizona member told the minister that he thought the conservative movement, of which the Birch Society was a part, “is basically a protest by people over the loss of individ­uality.” In addition to its purported mission of fighting Communists, the Birch Society also professes to fight “big government.” About the time Dr. Broyles's book was being displayed in book stores, a report filed with the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General, Edward W. Brooke, showed the society had ended 1963 with a deficit of $210.952. The report, required by law, showed gross income of $1,043,­656 and expenses of $1,169,997 in 1963. There also was a carry­over deficit of $84,612 from 1962. The membership of the Birch Society remains a secret. When he organized it, Mr. Welch set a goal of 1 million members. Some estimates have placed the mem­bership at about 100,000 at the most. Twice in recent years, Mr. Welch has acknowledged that attacks on the society have slowed its growth. But he has vigorously disputed any sug­gestion that the slowing rate indicated a substantial loss of membership. Dr. Broyles found that the average distribution rate of American Opinion, the society's monthly magazine, was 27,000 copies. Dr. Broyles said that most of the society members he in‐ Since attempts to reform the society from the outside were “fore‐doomed,” Dr. Broyles said. that coexistence with such ex­tremist groups had to be faced. In the process, responsible citi­zens should not let inflamma­tory charges by the extremists go unchallenged. he asserted. Members of the Birch Society, saki Dr. Broyles, “do not spend all their time making accusa­tions against uersons.” “Some of them touch upon real issues and problems in many areas of our national life,” he declared, “but the most that could be said for the great majority of the members and leaders would be that where they are scratching there was an itch, but that their scratch­ing was only broadening the inflammation.” Dr. Broyles saidhe had talked with a member of the Birch staff in the Belmont na­tional headquarters about two weeks after President Ken­nedy's assassination. And while there had been no “dropouts” from the society as a result, Dr. Broyles said he found the atmosphere of the place more restrained. The staff inembers, said Dr. Broyles, commented that it seemed “a time when people need to speak the truth with prudence.” Calling for a spirit of ra­tionality, Dr. Broyles com­mented: “It is sobering to remind our­selves and to remind even the Birchers that, if we do not de­fend freedom and rationality as the norms of political conflict, we ought not to be surprised to find ourselves caught in a to­talitarianism not only from the left or from the right, but per­haps even from the center.” This article can be viewed in its original form. Please send comments, questions and feedback to [email protected]

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Rev Dr J A Broyles's book John Birch Society: Anatomy of Protest discussed; he finds exec council continuing to exert moderating influence on Welch; holds efforts to reform soc from outside are 'fore-doomed' because of 'logic-tight and closed-mind ideology' of soc; advises coexistence; soc's money difficulties noted

http://web.archive.org/web/20140829101859id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/d-backs-didi-does-it-all-082314

PHOENIX -- When the Diamondbacks acquired shortstop Didi Gregorius, general manager Kevin Towers compared Gregorius' defense to that of "a young Derek Jeter." It might have been an undersell. D-backs bench coach and four-time Gold Glove winner Alan Trammell is not given to hyperbole, but he could not help but rave about Gregorius' scoop and throw from deep in the hole in the seventh inning of a 5-1 victory Friday. To balance things, Gregorius used his bat to make a difference Saturday. His three-run home run broke a 2-2 tie in the last of the eighth inning, giving the D-backs' a 5-2 victory over San Diego and assuring a series victory against a team they could catch for third place in the NL West. Gregorius drove an 0-2 fastball into the front row of the right field seats to break a 2-for-39 slump. As his fielding play Friday showed, Gregorius has no trouble separating his offense from his defense. As his homer Saturday showed, his constant work in the batting cage can have its rewards. Gregorius has been retooling his swing since spring training, and the process has included the expected stops and starts. At the same time, he has been an eager, attentive student. There were Gregorius and Jake Lamb, who hit his first major league homer Saturday, taking extra batting practice with hitting coach Turner Ward hours four hours before the game Saturday. "I would say, about time," Gregorius said of his home run. "I've been working, getting better, going down in the cage every day, just trying to make improvements. Luckily, I got one right there." He has not let the dry spell bring him down. "Just go at-bat by at-bat, don't worry about it. I can't change it. I don't really think about it. Just go out and play the game. Don't drag one at-bat to the next one," Gregorius said. His perseverance has not gone unnoticed, so much so that the shortstop battle won by Chris Owings last spring is beginning to look like another open competition entering the 2015 season. "He's worked very hard. He hasn't had instant gratification or instant results, and it is good to see that happened to him tonight," Arizona manager Kirk Gibson said. "He's made some changes and he hasn't been rewarded much, but tonight it came through for him." One of Gregorius' major selling points is his glove, the part of his game that was evident when he was promoted to the D-backs early last season after a hand injury sidelined second baseman Aaron Hill for 10 weeks. It is one of the reasons the Yankees, among many others, have had scouts watching him this season as Jeter finishes up. Gregorius is most proud of the diving, full-extension stop and throw from his backside to start a double play against Tampa Bay here last season, and those who saw that still smile when they remember it. "Everybody in the bullpen jumped out of their chairs, screaming and going nuts. It was unbelievable," D-backs reliever Brad Ziegler said. The play Friday was similar. Gregorius went far into the hole at shortstop, almost behind third baseman Lamb, to field a sharp grounder by Jedd Gyorko. Gregorius gloved the ball and in one motion, without stopping or planting his feet, whipped a throw to that hit first baseman Mark Trumbo's glove chest-high. "I was astonished," Trumbo said. When looking at the 6-foot-2, 205-pound Gregorius, Trammell sees the evolution of the position. "These guys, including Didi, it's a different breed now," said Trammell, who won who Gold Gloves in Detroit in 1980-81 and 1983-84. "They're better. They're more athletic. The plays on the run that we are seeing like Didi's, that's definitely one of the best plays I've ever seen, especially with the amount of velocity (on the throw). It wasn't a balloon over there. He is going full speed the opposite direction, not stopping, throwing the ball on the run, on a line. It was an incredible play. "I don't know if I've ever seen one better." When Gregorius was a teenager at a tryout camp in the Dominican Republic, his velocity was registered at 94-95 mph on a throw from right field to third base. When he saw the throw heading right at Trumbo's mitt Friday, he just kept running toward the D-backs' dugout. When he got to the dugout, his teammates made jokes. "The guys say funny things. Yesterday they told me at least make it look a little bit harder," Gregorius said. It has been that kind of weekend. The D-backs dugout gave rookie Jake Lamb a 45-second silent treatment following his first major league home run in the second inning. Lamb played along with it nicely, putting up some air high-fives as he entered the dugout and made his way to a seat at the far end of the bench. "I went in there and saw nobody was around," Lamb said. "I like to have fun. I started giving high fives to nobody." A short while later, everyone on the bench crowded around him to celebrate. 99 -- Career saves by Addison Reed *Again, Vidal Nuno deserved better. He allowed five players to reach base in 7 1/3 innings -- two singles, two walks and a hit batsman -- but was left with a no-decision when two of his inherited runners scored in the top of the eighth inning to tie the game at 2. Despite a 3.54 ERA, he is 0-3 and winless in nine D-backs' starts, extending a franchise record for starters. "It's part of the game. I just try to go deep in ball games. I've just been unlucky," Nuno said. "I'll keep on fighting, and one day I'll get it." *Chris Owings started at second in his rehab game at Triple-A Reno on Saturday and will see occasional time at second base when he returns to the major leagues in a week or so, manager Kirk Gibson said. "I just have a curiosity," Gibson said. "I know he can play short. We have some games left here in the last month. Why not put him over there at second as well? We played him over there in spring training as well. You're looking ahead at who might be where (in 2015). It is a possibility." Owings, Gregorius, Aaron Hill, Cliff Pennington and minor leaguer Nick Ahmed give the D-backs deep depth in the middle infield, furthering the notion that an offseason trade with come from there. *Addison Reed pitched a 1-2-3 ninth inning for his 30th save and is on a good run. He has converted his last 10 save attempts, tying a career high set with the Chicago White Sox from Aug. 6-27, 2013. The D-backs seem more and more likely to go to a six-man rotation in September, and Randall Delgado could make some starts down the stretch, Gibson said. Delgado has made progress on his third pitch, a breaking ball, and has shown flashes. "If you gave him a chance to start, would it help him be able to work his way through and have more consistency?" Gibson said. "That question hasn't been answered yet. but those are things we think about." Follow Jack Magruder on Twitter

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Diamondbacks shortstop Didi Gregorius hits a key three-run homer Saturday one night after making a breathtaking play in the field that left former Gold Glove shortstop Alan Trammell astonished.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150425193755id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/04/22/walmart-samsclub-lendingclub/

Sam’s Club is offering a new service to help its small business members gain access to loans of up to $350,000 — its latest effort to shore up business from a key constituency for the warehouse club operator. Working with partners such as loan marketplace Lending Club and SmartBiz Small Business Administration, Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart Stores WMT will launch the online service it’s calling a “business lending center” in two weeks. Sam’s Club members will get a 20% discount on fees related to the loans, and executives said that discount, coupled with other new services that will soon be introduced, could save members up to $2,300 a year. The lending service is one of five new ones the company is offering to better serve its business members, which account for as much as one-third of Sam’s Club’s membership, according to Kantar Retail estimates, but who have proven to be a softer part of its business compared to non-business members of late. The services range from helping to protect members’ personal data to offering access to a network of accountants. The new services “are not aimed primarily at generating revenue for Sam’s Club,” said CEO Rosalind Brewer on a media call Wednesday. “We’re focused on increasing the value of Sam’s Club membership.” And that is important, given the ongoing challenges of that part of the Sam’s Club business. In its most recent fiscal quarter, Brewer said she saw “continued shortfalls in our business member segment, driven primarily by convenience store consolidation and a declining tobacco business” leading to a drop in the number of visits by business customers. Sam’s Club, which generates about 12% of Wal-Mart’s revenue, had sales of $58 billion last year, enough to be the 8th largest U.S. retailer. But its comparable sales were unchanged last fiscal year, compared to 5% growth at larger rival Costco Wholesale’s COST U.S. stores. Brewer had told Fortune in November that rather than diminish its exposure to its business members, Sam’s Club planned to redouble its efforts to cater to them. Recent efforts have included a pilot of a curbside order pick-up service, help providing small business owners’ employees with discounted health insurance, and offering services such as helping to submit a patent application.

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The Wal-Mart-owned warehouse club operator has added a suite of new services aimed at small businesses, a major part of its membership, but one which has been soft for Sam's Club for some time.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150824000942id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/05/oil-prices-crude-will-go-to-40-or-lower-oil-trader-hall.html

Crude has been on a volatile streak in recent days, and fell nearly 9 percent Wednesday amid reports of a multi-decade high in U.S. oil supplies. Just the day before, oil had experienced a huge rally, leading some traders and analysts to think that the bear market was fizzling. And on Thursday, the domestic oil market rallied again, crossing the psychologically significant $50 mark. Brent crude, the global benchmark, closed at near $57. Read MoreOil expert: This is a 'dead cat bounce' Oil traders and analysts have differed on where crude is likely to go this year, with some saying price could fall substantially further as the global markets face considerable oversupply in the first half of the year. The London-based Merchant Commodity Fund co-founder Doug King, for instance, told CNBC recently that oil prices could pierce the $30 floor and trade into the high $20s before recovering. Even so, exchange-traded funds that track the West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude markets have seen money pile in so far this year, suggesting that smaller investors are betting on a nascent recovery. Oil-related stocks, like drillers and oilfield equipment companies, have suffered huge declines since last summer. But, like current market commodity prices, those stocks could be close to their nadir, Hall wrote in his investor letter. "Oil-related equities have been trying to find a bottom," he stated. "It's not clear whether they have found it yet, but we think it's probably close…. Well-positioned shale oil operators and other domestic producers could prove to be attractive investments."

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Oil could bottom around $40 a barrel but if it does, it won't linger there long, oil trader Andrew Hall said in an investor letter.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150908030528id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/10/taxes-are-bill-and-hillary-clinton-paying-too-much-commentary.html

Investment tips: Why not look into New York state muni bonds? They are exempt from federal and New York state income tax and pay pretty competitive rates for high-income earners. Why not invest some of the money in dividend-producing stocks? The S&P 500 has a yield of 2.01 percent and that yield is taxed at capital-gains rates vs. ordinary income. What this means is that their tax rate would drop to 32.62 percent from 52.22 percent. That is a significant reduction in their tax liability, plus the yield is four times what they're getting on their cash! Business income: In reviewing the Schedule C (which reports business income) there are a few things that could have a big impact on their income. Read MoreWhen to file for Social Security retirement benefits early Charitable contributions: Cash is probably the least effective asset to give to charity and they gave around $3 million last year. So this is how it works using the $3 million that they gave to their foundation in 2014. To give away $3 million, they would've had to have earned at least $6 million —and pay taxes on that, which we've already established is at a rate of almost 50 percent for the Clintons. Sure, they can deduct the charitable donation, but that would only save them about $1.5 million. If they'd used appreciated securities, they would not have to pay capital gains on the gain and would get the same tax deduction on the value of the gift. That would save them around 33 percent, or $2 million, on the gain in their investments. With some proactive planning, the Clintons could save hundreds of thousands of dollars. For most people, tax planning is collecting receipts, putting them in a shoe box and giving them to their CPA. If they get money back, their CPA is great. If they have to pay, they yell at their CPA and threaten to fire them. That is not tax planning…that is scorekeeping. Proactive tax planning means that you review your tax situation today, and develop plans to be proactive, during the tax year. You have 5 months left in the tax year. What is your proactive tax strategy? Read MoreWhy taxing Wall Street won't work Commentary by Jerry Lynch, a certified financial planner, chartered underwriter and chartered financial consultant (CFP, CLU, ChFC). He is president of JFL Total Wealth Management, a registered investment-advisory firm. Follow him on Twitter @JFLJerry.

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Financial advisor Jerry Lynch took a deeper look at the Clintons' recently released tax return and found several ways to save them money.

http://web.archive.org/web/20151004224446id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/24/how-to-find-an-active-manager-in-an-unsafe-bull-market.html

1. Follow the flows.New research from Stanford Graduate School of Business found evidence that many mutual managers were skilled, but highlighted the importance of finding low-fee active managers. Professors Jonathan Berk and Jules H. van Binsbergen, who has since moved to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, looked at a universe of 5,974 mutual funds from 1969 to 2011 and compared the funds' results to comparable Vanguard index funds. They found evidence of skill—outperformers continued outperforming over time. The researchers also found that the skilled managers attracted more assets—and, in fact, very quickly. If you have a pot of money to invest and are seeking an actively managed fund, one basis you could use to pick is the fund flows, if you're on top of the latest data on at least a quarterly basis, said Berk. 2. Look for fees under 1 percent on actively managed U.S. equity funds. The research also showed that one of the reasons it's been so difficult for experts and investing services to find skilled mutual fund managers is that they charge so much in fees. But at least you know they're out there. On average, actively managed equity funds charged investors 1.37 percent in expense ratios in 2013, according to the Investment Company Institute. That's down from 1.6 percent in 2000. On an asset-weighted basis, the decline has been even more significant, because investors have been pouring money into the lowest-priced funds. It is possible to find good money managers charging less than 1 percent. In fact, that's what individual investors should look for, suggested Ram Lee, president at New York City-based Seven Bridges Advisors, which has $3.8 billion in assets and offers CIO services to institutions, individuals and families. A lower fee gives you a much better chance of beating the market and is also a sign that a fund company and a manager are aware of the way the wind is blowing: toward lower-priced funds. Rekenthaler's list of five active funds worth a look (included below) all have expense ratios substantially under 1 percent, except for the American Funds' New World Fund, which comes in right above 1 percent. 3. Understand that it's progressively harder for good managers to deliver good returns. In his first five years managing Fidelity's Magellan Fund, according to Berk's paper, famous fund manager Peter Lynch had a 2 percent monthly gross alpha on average assets of about $40 million. In his last five years, his outperformance was only 20 basis points per month on assets that ultimately grew to more than $10 billion. Lynch still had the same level of skill; he just was spreading it thinner. "As the capital flows in, the alpha goes down," said Berk. As their funds become larger, managers cannot always find the amount of stock they need in all the right companies to build stellar portfolios for all their clients. That leads to the next idea: You need to know how much money the manager is managing. The prospectus will include the total in the fund in which you're investing. But according to Lee, many managers use the same strategy to invest assets outside the fund. So you'll probably want to email the mutual fund company and ask if the manager is also managing assets for institutions. "Anything above $25 billion is a lot," he said. 4. Don't expect the game to be easy. Investors such as Lee personally interview managers and hone their analysis and instincts. Lee, for instance, looks for managers who try to beat the market by understanding downside risk and those who have a system for how they pick the companies they invest in. "We focus a lot on repeatability of their process," Lee said. You won't be able to interview managers, but you can look for detailed letters that describe fund holdings and the manager's strategy. Rekenthaler said it's only in some bear markets that active managers ability to control downside risk has a benefits. "In 2008, active managers did not do better than indexes. But in 2000 to 2002, the market dropped a lot, led by high-priced tech stocks. A lot of active managers that outperformed substantially avoided the one big market sector, technology." One thing Lee doesn't look at: labels, like growth vs.value. Those labels are determined by a fund's holdings and thus can easily change even within a year. 5. Finally, don't forget the taxes. Many professional investors look for managers who aim to buy and hold companies for the long term, so take a look at the fund turnover, too. "On taxable portfolios, the tax consequences of a high-turnover approach" could erase any of the returns you've earned above the market, said Jonathan Blau, CEO of Fusion Family Wealth.

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This bull market run has been great for index funds but terrible for active managers trying to beat them. That trend may soon change.

http://web.archive.org/web/20151209125621id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/06/az-defense-against-pfizer-boosted-by-fda-approval.html

Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, said in a statement: "AstraZeneca is completing its transformation, and now has the right size, focus and team to deliver on one of the most exciting pipelines in the pharmaceutical industry." On Tuesday morning, AZ announced that Epanova, which treats a condition called hypertriglyceridaemia that involves having high levels of fatty molecules in your blood, had been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Read MoreWhy Pfizer is intent on another dose of AstraZeneca Epanova is unlikely to be the only shot in the arm AZ needs to fend off Pfizer. The drug is forecast to have annual sales of $200 million in 2018 by Deutsche Bank analysts, a respectable figure but far below the $1 billion annual sales commanded by some "blockbuster" drugs. This is reflected in the U.K. company's share price, which fell in early London trading. Read MoreWhy Pfizer's bid is 'inadequate': AstraZeneca AZ has also released an update on its pipeline, focusing on development of immuno-oncology drugs, a relatively new way of treating cancer. While medicines from this pipeline are not forecast to become part of AZ revenues until 2017 or later, they are expected to deliver even more in sales than analysts forecast, according to AZ. For example, MEDI4736, one of the drugs bought when AZ acquired MedImmune in 2007, is now expected to fetch around $6.5 billion annually, compared to analyst estimates of $2-$7 billion. The announcement came after Pfizer Chief Executive Ian Read said he was "very disappointed" by the AstraZeneca board's refusal to engage with Pfizer over its improved $106.5 billion bid for the company. Last Friday, the U.S. company raised its January offer of £46.61 a share to £50 and increased the cash component to around 32 percent from 30 percent earlier. Read MorePfizer sales way off mark as company pursues AstraZeneca Pfizer now has less than three weeks to come back with a higher offer. Read and Soriot are both expected to be grilled by U.K. lawmakers next week over the potential takeover and its consequences for U.K. science jobs.

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AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company fighting off repeated approaches from larger rival Pfizer, has boosted its defense against the raid.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160522125004id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/05/21/09/43/debris-from-egyptair-crash-found-at-sea

New images have emerged of shattered parts of the EgyptAir plane recovered from the crash site in the Mediterranean. The Egyptian military released photographs of the debris including fragments of seats, passenger belongings and a life vest featuring the airline's logo as a major search continued. The development came after reports suggested smoke was detected in parts of the plane before it disappeared from radar and plummeted into the water early on Thursday. Flight MS804 - carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew members from Paris to Cairo - went down about halfway between the Greek island of Crete and Egypt's coastline, or around 280km offshore, after take-off from Charles de Gaulle Airport. Before it disappeared from radar screens around 2.45am Cairo time, the plane spun all the way around and suddenly lost altitude. What caused the Airbus A320 to crash remains a mystery as authorities scramble to recover the aircraft's black boxes. French air accident investigation agency spokesman Sebastien Barthe told the Associated Press (AP) that the plane's automatic detection system sent messages indicating smoke a few minutes before it disappeared from radar. The messages "generally mean the start of a fire", he said, but added: "We are drawing no conclusions from this. Everything else is pure conjecture." Egypt's army spokesman said debris and passenger belongings had been located 290km off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt. Airport officials in Egypt said investigators will inspect the debris and personal belongings that have been recovered. Egyptian and Russian officials have said the plane may have been brought down by terrorists, and there are no signs of survivors. Among the passengers was Briton Richard Osman, a 40-year-old father-of-two who was described by his younger brother Alastair as a workaholic and a very admirable person who "never deviated from the straight path". The Airbus A320 was built in 2003 and was flying at 37,000ft, the airline said on Twitter. It tweeted that the pilot had logged 6275 flying hours, including 2101 hours on the A320, and the co-pilot had logged 2766 hours.

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Egyptian President Sisi offers condolences, confirming those aboard EgyptAir jet 804 have died, but there is still no explanation of why it crashed.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160525220720id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/10/30/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-board-lawsuit/

If you own even just one share in Facebook FB , a Delaware court judge wants you to know you have rights. In an opinion published on Thursday, Delaware Chancellor Andre G. Bouchard ruled that the social network’s minority shareholders are entitled to their day in court over the salaries that Facebook’s directors received. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the company’s board are being sued because a shareholder thinks the pay the directors were awarded in 2013 was too high. Board members decide their own pay, but in this case, the dispute is over whether it was excessive and whether the board acted in shareholders’ interests. After the lawsuit was filed, Zuckerberg, who owns a majority of Facebook’s shares, signed an affidavit saying he approved the pay. In a deposition related to the case, he said: “These are the people who I want and—and who I think will serve the company best, and I think that the compensation plan that we have is doing its job of attracting and retaining them over the long term.” Zuckerberg’s lawyers claimed that was enough under Delaware law to conclude the majority of shareholders had approved the director pay packages. That matters under Delaware law (where Facebook and many large corporations are incorporated), because unless shareholders have approved the directors’ pay, the Facebook board has to show the pay was fair. But if shareholders approved board members’ pay, they could rely on a presumption that they exercised sound business judgement. The judge said not so fast. Just because Zuckerberg signed an affidavit and spoke in a deposition doesn’t mean Facebook is entitled to an easier case. Delaware law is pretty loose when it comes to shareholder approval. It can be done at a shareholder meeting, by unanimous consent of shareholders, or even by majority shareholder consent “without a meeting, without prior notice and without a vote,” Bouchard wrote. But Bouchard said protocols under the law on when Zuckerberg was speaking for shareholders matter. To use the majority shareholder consent provision, Zuckerberg not only had to make it clear for whom he was speaking and that he was entitled to speak for the majority, he also had to disclose his action to shareholders following his decision. “In the case of action taken by written consent, [shareholders are entitled] to receive prompt notice after the fact of the action taken,” the judge wrote. According to the judge, these requirements protect the corporation and its shareholders. The rights of minority shareholders are critical to corporate governance. In fact, it’s one area of governance that countries across the globe have been able to agree on. It’s that basic. So because minority shareholders did not get their due, including receiving notice of Zuckerberg’s actions, this case is going forward, as it should. Eleanor Bloxham is CEO of The Value Alliance and Corporate Governance Alliance (http://www.thevaluealliance.com), an independent board education and advisory firm she founded in 1999. She has been a regular contributor to Fortune since April 2010 and is the author of two books on corporate governance and valuation, Economic Value Management: Applications and Techniques and Value-led Organizations.

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A Delaware judge ruled that Zuckerberg and Facebook's board will have to answer to minority shareholders on director pay.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160604014723id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2005/12/27/world/asia/what-japans-aiko-lacks-the-royal-y-chromosome.html

Princess Masako gave birth to Princess Aiko in 2001, after which the pressure to have a boy only increased. That is believed to have caused what the Imperial Household Agency said last year was the princess's depression and anxiety. The princess, who has received therapy, has rarely been seen in public since the end of 2003. Under the current system, a son from Emperor Akihito's other son, Prince Akishino, 40, could ascend. But Prince Akishino and his wife, Princess Kiko, have two daughters, and, despite prodding from the Imperial Household Agency, are not believed to be trying for a third child. Recent opinion polls show that most Japanese overwhelmingly back the idea of an empress, though support dips for a female line. According to Japanese myth, the first emperor, Jimmu, a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, began his reign 2,665 years ago; historians, though, trace the start of Japan's imperial system to the fourth or fifth century. Some opponents of establishing a female imperial line cite that ancient precedent. Tsuneyasu Takeda, 30, a member of a former imperial family branch, said Japan should no more alter Horyu Temple, its oldest wooden building, than interfere with the throne's unbroken male bloodline. "Why not rebuild Horyu Temple as a concrete building?" said Mr. Takeda, author of the recently published book "The Truth About the Imperial Family." He answered himself: "If you did, it would be something completely different." The emperor, Mr. Takeda said, was valued "not because he is intelligent or handsome." "It's because he is the inheritor of the blood that has been preserved for 2,000 years," he said. Other opponents add genetics to their argument. Since women have two X chromosomes while men have an X and a Y, the imperial throne's male line has preserved its Y chromosome intact. "Maintaining the male line is the condition to preserving that Y chromosome," said Hakubun Shimomura, a lawmaker for the governing Liberal Democratic Party, who is one of the leaders of a campaign to reject the panel's recommendation. "The bloodline is important for the emperor to be a symbol of the nation and the unity of the people," Mr. Shimomura added. "This symbolic imperial throne preserves Japan's culture and tradition in total. The imperial throne is Japan itself." Like many other opponents, Mr. Shimomura does not oppose Princess Aiko's ascension to the throne, as long as a male with the right Y chromosome will succeed her. Princess Aiko would be a "pinch hitter," he added, the same way the previous eight empresses had been. But where to find the right Y? During the American postwar occupation, two groups that had ensured male heirs over the centuries were abolished: other imperial branch families, like Mr. Takeda's, and concubines, who are said to have given birth to about half of past emperors. Reacting against the panel, a cousin of the current emperor, Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, 59, wrote that those two groups should be resurrected to maintain the throne's male lineage. "I wholeheartedly support it," the prince wrote about a revival of the concubine system, "but I think that the social mood inside and outside the country may make it a little difficult." "Unless we carefully hold and express opinions regarding 2,665 years of history and tradition, we'll move in the direction of changing Japan's 'national essence,' " the prince wrote. "Furthermore, one day, arguments that the imperial system is not needed will even emerge." But some supporters of the panel's recommendations say that a female line would bring badly needed equality to a society where a woman is still expected to join a man's family upon marriage, take his family name and be buried in his family's grave. For most of the throne's history, emperors lived quietly in Kyoto. But during the Meiji Restoration of the late 1800's, as Japan tried to modernize and catch up with the West, Emperor Meiji was brought to the forefront to try to unify Japan; his grandson, Emperor Hirohito, who died in 1989, was considered divine until Japan's defeat in World War II. Mikiyo Kano, a professor of women's history at Keiwa College, said that after Meiji, the emperor and his wife were held up as models for the Japanese. Starting with Meiji and until Japan's defeat, emperors dressed in military uniforms, while their wives promoted the Red Cross and patriotic associations. "I think the male succession system in the imperial family has led to the discrimination and oppression of women in general in Japan," Ms. Kano said. A female line would make a woman the symbolic leader of the nation and show a man deferring to her, as wives of emperors do, she said. "If Princess Aiko became empress, it might be a little better for the realization of the equality of men and women, rather than clinging to the male line," Ms. Kano said. "I'm basically for ending this system where wives always stand back while the emperor speaks, or walk behind him. That kind of image says a lot to ordinary people."

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Government panel in Japan recommends that American-imposed Imperial Household Law of 1947 be revised to allow female line to hold throne; although neither of current emperor's two sons is likely to produce male heir, suggestion by panel ignites furious debate over imperial system and its significance to Japan, and over topics as varied as status of Japanese women, merits of concubine system and purity of imperial Y chromosome; panel's recommendation, if adopted by Parliament, would clear way for Princess Aiko, emperor's 4-year-old granddaughter, to one day ascend to throne and have her own firstborn succeed her; recent opinion polls show most Japanese back idea of empress, though support dips for female line; photo (M)

http://web.archive.org/web/20160804024237id_/http://www.people.com/article/ashley-graham-shamed-too-skinny-lenny-letter

08/02/2016 AT 12:15 PM EDT for being "too curvy" and "promoting obesity." Now, after posting where she worked her angles and thought she looked "damn good!" people are . In response, Graham penned an essay in this week's "I am more than my measurements. I'm not Ashley Graham just because I'm curvy," she writes. "For the past sixteen years, my body has been picked apart, manipulated, and controlled by others who don't understand it. But now my career has given me a platform to use my voice to make a difference." Graham says she embraced that opportunity to be a for women, especially on social media where she grew the #BeautyBeyondSize community. "I know the comments won't all be positive," she says. "I'm a confident woman with thick skin, and as a model in the public eye, I'm conditioned to accept criticism. But last week, I admit that I had a tougher time brushing off the haters." Graham says the photo of her in a white skirt and crop top with a leather jacket is what set everyone off, with things like, "You don't make plus-size dollars anymore, you make backstabbing dollars." Or "Fake fat person." But they're all wrong, says Graham. She – she's a model, and she knows how to look good. "The reality is I haven't lost a pound this year," Graham says. "In fact, I'm actually heavier than I was three years ago, but I accept my body as it is today. I work out not to lose weight but to maintain "I refuse to let others dictate how I live my life and what my body should look like for their own comfort. And neither should you," she says. "Let's worry about our own bodies. My body is MY body. I'll call the shots."

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Ashley Graham fights back against the people who body shamed her for looking slimmer in this week's Lenny Letter

http://web.archive.org/web/20161027123019id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/26/21/09/wa-poles-and-wires-sale-could-net-16b

The debate in WA about whether to privatise its poles and wires network is shaping as the most important issue in next year's state election, with Treasurer Mike Nahan saying the economy won't grow unless Western Power is sold. The treasurer helped launched a report on Wednesday by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry that predicted a full sale would command up to $16 billion for the state's coffers. Using that windfall to pay down debt and for new assets and projects was the next step in the massive economic development Perth had enjoyed in the past decade due to the once-in-a-generation mining boom, the report argues. However, going to the March state election with the policy of privatising the electricity utility carries risk, with a recent poll of Dr Nahan's own Perth seat finding more than 62 per cent of voters against the sale. But Dr Nahan believes that by the time he announces the Liberal National government's plans for privatising Western Power, it will resolve the public's concerns that it will send their power bills up and service levels down. "We have a system/structure now, an approach that we are about ready to make a decision on and bring to the public that resolves all the issues and all the concerns that people legitimately have on the transition from public to private ownership," he told reporters. He promised electricity prices would not go up due to privatisation, as the Labor opposition claims, because pricing and expenditure would continue to be independently regulated by the Economic Regulation Authority. "The difference will be the future growth of Western Australia or just standing back and letting life go by, no investment, increasing deficit and debt, that's going to be the difference," Dr Nahan said. WA's treasury has record debt of more than $27 billion, 25-30 per cent of which is tied up in Western Power, Dr Nahan says. WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Deidre Willmott said the report debunked damaging myths about privatisation around security of supply, safety and prices that misled the public and had not occurred in Victoria and South Australia. "Without this we are facing increased debt and where are the funds for future investment going to come? ... It doesn't make sense to hold on to old assets and established assets the government doesn't need to own," she told reporters. Labor leader Mark McGowan says WA is too remote to risk supply by selling Western Power because it is not part of the electrically connected National Electricity Market.

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The privatisation of WA's Western Power poles and wires would fetch $16 billion, says a new report, with the issue set to be crucial in next year's election.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161122203816id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/21/13/52/lnp-flags-qld-plastic-bags-reef-policies

Queensland's opposition has made an overture for green votes, announcing two environmental policies, but the Labor government say they are playing catch-up on conservation issues. Liberal National Party Leader Tim Nicholls on Monday announced plans to phase out single-use plastic bags and also $300,000 in funding for the Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef initiative if the LNP won the next state election. Mr Nicholls told reporters in Cairns single-use plastic bags did enormous damage to the environment. "They are used on average for about 12 minutes, but they can take up to a thousand years to disintegrate in the environment," Mr Nicholls said. "In that time they cause untold damage to marine life, to turtles and to dugongs." Currently plastic bags are banned in Tasmania, South Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT, and Mr Nicholls said Queensland should join them. "The original agreement was to phase out the bags from 2008, and yet eight years later we're still waiting," he said. But the Labor government has accused the LNP of hypocrisy, with Environment Minister Steven Miles pointing out the previous Newman government announced a plastic bag ban in 2013, before backing down on the measure the next day. "Since May last year, we've been investigating a ban on single-use plastic bags and it looks like the LNP have finally caught up," Dr Miles said in a statement. Dr Miles also took aim at the LNP's reef announcement, claiming the LNP's vegetation management policies had been very damaging to the reef. "Not only has the LNP's reckless approach to tree-clearing put at risk our beloved Great Barrier Reef, but also the livelihoods of so many Queenslanders who depend on it," he said.

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Queensland's Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls has announced policies to ban plastic bags in the state as well as pledging money for a Great Barrier Reef fund.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150727050210id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/23/trouble-unplugging-from-work-join-the-crowd.html

There are benefits to remote work, of course. Working from home can relieve the stress of a commute. Parents of young children can leave the office early, pick up the kids at day care and then finish their tasks after a family dinner. "Moving away from a 9-to-5 workweek may not be possible for some companies ... but if done right, allowing employees more freedom and flexibility with their schedules can improve morale, boost productivity and increase retention rates," said Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder. But blending these worlds together brings all sorts of well-known hazards. Overwork brings with it increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and depression, according to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, while "binge" working has even killed workers in extreme cases. Overwork isn't great for employers, either. Tests show workers have impaired cognitive skills when working nine- to 12-hour days, and worker effectiveness falls off the cliff after 50 hours of work during the week. Working outside of traditional hours or offices can also interfere with personal relationships. "I spoke recently with a gentleman who works for a state government agency and he told me that he is constantly on Twitter on his phone after normal work hours," said Russell Clayton, a management professor at St. Leo University. "He told me that in the evening he will use one hand to catch a ball thrown by his toddler son and use his other hand to scroll through Twitter." While it's possible to tweet and play catch—at least, if you're well-coordinated—most people wildly overestimate their ability to multitask. Stanford University research found that folks who described themselves as expert multitaskers actually performed worse on cognitive tests than the general population. Most experts agree that, with rare exceptions, "multitasking" is really just rapid toggling between tasks, which brings with it switching costs ("Now where were we?") that make the whole affair much less efficient. Read MoreWhy you should never work more than 50 hours a week

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A new CareerBuilder survey finds workers are having an increasingly hard time separating their professional and personal lives.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150823161812id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/27/strong-dollar-great-for-domestic-retailers-target-wal-mart-costco-expert.html

Despite the beating several market sectors have taken because of the rising U.S. dollar, there is one sector that has benefited greatly from it. That sector is the retail sector, according to Jan Rogers Kniffen, CEO of J. Rogers Kniffen Worldwide and a CNBC contributor. "It's a great thing if you're a domestic retailer that sells almost everything you sell inside the [U.S.] and buys almost everything you buy outside the [U.S.]," he said on CNBC's "Street Signs" on Tuesday. "Who is that? It's Target, it's Macy's, it's Kohl's." Read More Retail risk factor: Storm hit these stores hardest The S&P retail index is up about 16 percent from last year, while the dollar has also risen approximately 17 percent in the same period. Read MoreWeak retail business in Europe hits Seagate revenue Kniffen added that retailers with a large sum of their business coming from overseas do not benefit as much from the rising dollar as truly domestic retailers. "It's not as good if you're Coach and one-third of your business is outside the U.S. and all your growth is [outside of the U.S., for example]," he said. "It's really good if you're just this dopey, domestic, 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust kind of American retailer." Retailers such as Costco and Wal-Mart are less attractive investments right now because of their exposure to international currencies, Kniffen added. Nevertheless, he does not expect either retailer to stop doing sound business. "It doesn't mean great retailers aren't going to do well," he said. "I don't think Costco is going to have any problems just because currencies are a problem."

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While many U.S. business sectors are being hurt by the rising dollar, there's one that is reaping its benefits.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150906101332id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/christie-says-criticism-of-fedex-like-immigrant-tracking-is-ridiculous.html

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as he appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box," Thursday, August 27, 2015. Christie said on Saturday that if elected president, he would use a FedEx-like system to make sure visitors who enter the United States legally on visas depart the country when their time is up. He maintains that 40 percent of illegal immigrants with visas overstay their visits. The governor, who is running well behind among the 17 contenders in the Republican White House race, sought to draw a distinction between his proposal and what he called Republican frontrunner Donald Trump's "simplistic" idea on how to deal with an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Trump, who has a 21-point lead over his closest Republican rival, Mike Huckabee, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey , has said he would deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall between the United States and Mexico. Read MoreHas Donald Trump forced Jeb Bush to change his tune? "I've put forward a much more detailed proposal than that," said Christie, adding that the presidential race was "not only about personality. It's also about ideas. And it's about who can get it done." Christie has said he would ask FedEx Chief Executive Officer Fred Smith to devise the tracking system. A FedEx spokeswoman declined to comment on his remarks. Trump's railing about illegal immigrants has prompted other Republicans to talk tougher on immigration but has also rattled Republican Party leaders who are desperate to attract support from Latino voters who have Democrat Hillary Clinton's pledge to seek citizenship for illegal immigrants if elected in 2016. On NBC's "Meet the Press" program, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said he would be open to building a wall along the U.S. border with Canada—not just the southern border with Mexico. "Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire. They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at," he said.

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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie pushed back against "ridiculous" criticism of his proposal to track foreign visitors the way FedEx tracks packages.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150925012245id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/07/this-groups-chart-stars-have-aligned-for-success.html

Since then, the stock has had a tremendous run, and Lang pointed out that whenever this stock pulls back, that is an amazing buying opportunity. Lang thinks the uptrend of the stock will continue, especially with Peltz putting the heat on management to produce additional value. Next up is Dow Chemical, which recently spun off its commodity business so it could focus on higher-margin proprietary business. Lang pointed out that the stock has been consistently making higher highs and lower lows lately, which is exactly what a technician wants to see in a healthy chart. The consistent call buying on Dow shows that Wall Street folks think that this stock is headed higher. Additionally, the Dow chart shows that it just finished a cup-and-handle pattern, which set the stock roaring. Lang added that Dow is his favorite stock to buy in the group right now. LyondellBasell is another high-quality chemical company that has had some wild moves. Since 2011 this stock is up nearly tenfold. It pulled back 50 percent in 2012, which turned out to be an excellent time to buy it. In the past few months it has pulled back again, leading Lang to believe that this is a great time to buy it. Last, there is Cramer-fave PPG. ---------------------------------------------------------- Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer Cramer Remix: How to benefit off the Fed Cramer: Einhorn was dead wrong on EOG Cramer: Thanks for nothing, Janet Yellen! ---------------------------------------------------------- "I adore PPG, both the company and the stock, but according to Lang this is actually the weakest of the chemical charts," Cramer added. PPG has been giving off a W-pattern since March, and the charts indicate it is about to have a bullish crossover. If that happens, then Lang thinks the stock will break out of its current patterns and go back to $237. In the end, the market is confusing and at least investors can have some sense of comfort by looking at the charts to see what looks good. Lang sees that the chemical stocks are in a great position right now, especially Dow.

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Jim Cramer sees the market is unpredictable, so he went off the charts to reveal one group that has all the stars aligned for success.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150927081946id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/27/the-russian-billionaires-hit-hard-by-oil-plunge.html

"(However), the Russian billionaire whose fortune took the biggest hit in 2014 was Leonid Mikhelson, chairman and CEO of gas firm Novatek, who lost U$7 billion – over 40 percent of his net worth," according to the census, Schneider said. Other members of the exclusive billionaire's club who have seen their fortunes slashed are Vladimir Lisin, chairman and largest shareholder of Novolipetsk Steel; Andrey Melnichenko, who has interests in mining and fertilizer and Sergey Galitsky, founder and owner of food retailer Magnit, although the losses they have seen were not documented by Schneider. Read MoreRussia needs oil at$102 to survive: Strategist In addition, German Khan, executive director at oil firm TNK and Mikhail Prokhorov, owner of both the investment fund ONEXIM Group and the National Basketball Association's Brooklyn Nets, have also seen their fortunes reduced. Although Russia's billionaires may provide the most prominent examples of fortunes diminished by plunging oil prices, the trend is not entirely a Russian phenomenon, Wealth-X's analyst said. In December 2014, Harold Hamm, chief executive of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources, claimed (during divorce proceedings) that the slide in oil prices had knocked $10 billion off his net worth. Read MoreHow sanctions are hurting Russia's energy sector Oil prices have rebounded of late to currently trade around $64 a barrel for benchmark Brent crude and around $59 for U.S. crude. But should prices stay low for a while, Russian billionaires could face more losses, Schneider warned. "A prolonged period of low oil prices will likely lead to a continued contraction of the country's economy and low or negative growth in industries beyond the oil patch such as banking, credit cards and others. For those billionaires remaining in Russia, this may well translate to rougher waters (and more potential losses) ahead."

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The sharp fall in global oil prices has had a deep impact not only on the global economy, but on the fortunes of Russian billionaires.

http://web.archive.org/web/20151114223610id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2015/11/12/fuzz-guitarist-charles-moonhart-five-key-projects/2k0vdq0UFe7UR0UqsGuQ1I/story.html

Fuzz, a garage-rock-tinged metal band, has been around for about four years, but guitarist Charles Moothart (left) has been playing since high school with Ty Segall (right), a high-profile bandmate whose solo work is characterized by distorted vocals, psychedelic guitar riffs, and a sound melding garage, glam, and surf rock. “We all love different types of music, from Motorhead to Brian Eno to Muddy Waters, but we are meant to be a pretty high-energy rock ’n’ roll band,” Moothart says by telephone from his Los Angeles home. Alongside Moothart and bassist Chad Ubovich (center), Segall sings and plays drums. “Ty is an amazing drummer,” Moothart says. “When I met him, he was a drummer in a band, and he had said he’d wanted to play the drums again.” Asked whether he might work again with fellow traveler Mikal Cronin, he offers, “We all do our thing — we are all pretty focused on what’s in front of us right now. We will all always make music together, but we are all focused on the projects we are doing.” With Fuzz headed for a show at the Sinclair on Monday, we asked Moothart to describe five key projects he’s been involved with. Culture Kids: I played for a while in an ’80s hard-core band, Culture Kids. Charlie & The Moonhearts: I played drums in Moonhearts, which was kind of like garage-punk. I started that when I was 16; we stopped playing a few years ago. It was me and Mikal Cronin . . . we played up until I was 23 or something. We did a couple tours with Ty [Segall] before we joined the band; it was just part of the collective. Ty Segall Band: I played in Ty’s band for five years — it was just that we’d all been doing it for a while, so it was time to switch things up. It was amazing; I love everyone in that group. Fuzz: I know there are garage elements to what we do, but we definitely don’t identify as a garage band. It’s different than Ty’s music; this is a band where we write together, we constantly try to keep things different. The band started because one day I was home and bored, and was sitting there wondering if I could record a song or just a couple riffs that sound like Black Sabbath. So I tried it, and it was really fun. I recorded it and brought it to Ty and I said, I’ve got these ideas, I don’t know how you feel about them. He thought they were rad, so we played them together. We were going at something with a specific direction. TOAD: There is a band called TOAD — me, Ty, and Mikal Cronin — that is some ridiculous punk [expletive] I can’t even explain. We definitely consider ourselves lucky. It’s been really fun. I don’t know how it all happened. Fuzz plays with WALTER and Zip-Tie Handcuffs at the Sinclair in Cambridge on Monday at 8 p.m. Tickets $20, advance $17. 617-547-5200, www.sinclaircambridge.com

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Charles Moonhart, multifarious guitarist for garage-metal outfit Fuzz, talks about five key projects in which he’s played, including work with Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160201062114id_/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/may/13/robert-capa-gerda-taro-relationship/amp

It begins with a photograph. In 1934 a struggling Hungarian photographer, André Friedmann, living in exile in Paris, is commissioned to take publicity pictures for a Swiss life insurance company's advertising brochure. On the lookout for potential models, he approaches a young Swiss refugee, Ruth Cerf, in a café on the Left Bank and convinces her to pose for him in a Montparnasse park. Because she does not entirely trust the scruffy young charmer, Ruth brings along her friend Gerta Pohorylle, a petite redhead with a winning smile and a confident manner. So begins the most iconic relationship in the history of photography, and an intertwined and complex story of radical politics, bohemianism and bravery that, in the intervening years, has taken on the shadings of a modern myth. Together, André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle would change their names and their destiny, becoming Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the most celebrated visual chroniclers of the Spanish civil war. Together, too, they would change the nature of war photography, reinventing the form in a way that resonates to this day. Capa went on to become the most famous of the two, and arguably the most famous war photographer of the 20th century due to his visceral images of the D-day landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy. His most famous quote would become a dictum by which ensuing generations of war photographers worked: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." This brave, but cavalier, approach to getting pictures of the action from within the action would cost both Gerda Taro and Robert Capa their lives – the former killed on the frontline of the Spanish civil war in 1937; the latter blown up by a land mine in Indochina in 1954. The myth of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro continues apace today with the British publication of a novel called Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes, a Spanish novelist and teacher. The book won the coveted Premio Fernando Lara in Spain on its initial publication in 2009 and has since been translated into 20 languages; the film rights have been bought by Michael Mann, the award-winning director of Heat (1995), The Insider (1999) and Public Enemies (2009). Fortes's short novel is essentially a historical romance that concentrates on the relationship between Capa and Taro. While the historical settings are accurate, Fortes literally puts words into each of their mouths, imagining conversations, thoughts and debates as well as accentuating both the doomed romance and the reckless bohemianism of the times. With the Spanish civil war as its main backdrop, the narrative is an uneasy, sometimes awkward, merging of fact and fiction, and will almost certainly offend the many guardians of both Capa and Taro's reputations just as it will no doubt entrance the mainstream cinema-going audience should it be made into a Hollywood film. "I tried to be very respectful of the facts – the biographical data, the locations etc," says Fortes when I contact her in Spain, where she is on a book publicity tour. "I went through everything I could find: letters, memories, biographies… But for a novel to breathe, you have to build souls for your characters. This is reflected in the dialogue, the literary tension, the humour, the fights, the passion, the sex, the mixed feelings. In other words, life. That's part of the novelist's job. One always writes with one foot on the ground and the other in the air. It is the only way to walk the path." However, when I mention the book to Jimmy Fox – veteran photographic historian and erstwhile director of the famous Magnum agency, which Capa co-founded with Henri Cartier-Bresson – he says: "I was dismayed by the novel. It was so fluttery and sugary. I think it is wrong to elevate the romance in that way. Capa was a flamboyant guy, a great drinker and a womaniser who had so many lovers, including Ingrid Bergman. Taro found the love of her life in Ted Allan, the man who was with her when she was fatally wounded. But of course that does not fit the big simplified romantic version so neatly." The independent filmmaker Trisha Ziff, who directed The Mexican Suitcase (2010) about the discovery of a hoard of unseen negatives by Capa, Taro and David "Chim" Seymour, concurs. "Waiting for Robert Capa is a fiction based on a romance, but it is also a romance based on a fiction. If it becomes a Hollywood film, the myth will no doubt take over." If there is one thing all the experts agree on, it is that nothing was straightforward about Robert Capa and Gerda Taro's relationship. Shortly after their first meeting, the young André Friedmann was sent to Spain on an assignment for a Berlin-based photo magazine. He subsequently photographed the Holy Week procession in Seville and described the festivities to Gerta Pohorylle in a letter that also mentioned how much he was thinking about her. On his return, he spent the summer holidaying in the south of France with Gerta and her friends. According to Ruth Cerf, quoted in Alex Kershaw's book Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, the pair "fell in love in the south of France" despite her suspicion that he was "a rogue and a womaniser". If the young Gerta was fascinated by his waywardness, he in turn was taken by her independent spirit. "Here was a woman," writes Kershaw, "who didn't suffocate him with affection, and who was as unashamed by her sexuality as she was conscious of her outsider status in Paris as a German Jew." This gets to the heart of the couple's mutual attraction: their shared radicalism and acute sense of exile. Friedmann had departed his native Hungary for Berlin in 1931 soon after his arrest by the secret police for leftist student activism. In February 1933, aged 19, he had fled Berlin when Hitler assumed power, travelling to Vienna, then back home to Budapest, before departing Hungary for good in September to live in penury in Paris, where he met Pohorylle on that fateful day in 1934. By then, she too had experienced radical politics, arrest and flight. Born to bourgeois parents in Stuttgart in 1910, Pohorylle joined a young communist organisation and, around the time Friedmann was fleeing Berlin, was distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and putting up communist propaganda posters on walls under cover of darkness. She was arrested by the Nazis on 19 March 1933 and interrogated about a supposed Bolshevik plot to overthrow Hitler. On her release, she used a fake passport to travel overland to Paris, where she was looked after by a communist network. Both André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle, though still young, were already seasoned activists and exiles when they met, intent on forging new lives for themselves while also staying loyal to their radical leftist roots. Though Friedmann could seldom afford to buy film and often had to pawn his camera to survive in Paris, he schooled Pohorylle in the rudiments of photography and found her a job in the newly formed Alliance Photo picture agency. And she, it seemed, anchored him – at least for a while. "Without Gerta, André would not have made it," the late Eva Besnyö, another Hungarian photographer who mixed in the same bohemian circles in Berlin, told Kershaw. "She picked him up, gave him direction. He had never wanted an ordinary life, and so when things didn't go well, he drank and gambled. He was in a bad way when they met, and maybe without her it would have been the end for him." As Friedmann's photographic career tentatively took off in Paris, his younger brother Cornell joined him, developing the photographs taken by André as well as those of his friends, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David "Chim" Seymour, in a darkened bathroom in a hotel that overlooked the famous Café du Dôme. It was there that the three photographers mingled with philosophers, writers and artists, drinking and dreaming of better times. It was around this time also that André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle became Robert Capa and Gerda Taro in a shared act of self-reinvention that still seems daring today. The first anyone else heard of Robert Capa was when the couple turned up at the offices of Alliance Photo and announced they had discovered a famous American photographer of that name. The pair soon found they could sell photographs attributed to the fictitious Capa to French photographic agencies for three times the price of Friedmann's, such was the status accorded visiting American photographers. Their joint ruse was soon discovered, but the pseudonyms remained in place. In her essay for the exhibition catalogue Gerda Taro: Archive, published in 2007, Irme Schaber notes: "Taro and Capa were not merely reacting to their precarious economic situation. They were responding as well to the antisemitism of Germany and the increasing antipathy towards foreigners in France. And to elude the stigma attached to being refugees, they spurned every ethnic or religious label." If their joint self-reinvention was the first significant factor in the dramatic trajectory of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the second was their decision to go together to Spain in 1936 to cover the republican resistance to Franco's fascist rebels. Like many writers and artists, including George Orwell and André Malraux, they went there out of political conviction and scorned any notion of journalistic detachment. The fight against fascism was, in a very real and personal way, their fight, given their history as exiles and refugees, and the Spanish civil war was the literal and metaphorical frontline of that battle. It was an adventure, though, that almost ended as soon as it had begun, when the plane hired by the French magazine Vu to take them to Barcelona crash-landed in a field on the outskirts of the city. The pair limped into Barcelona to find scenes of ferment and disorder as anarchist forces took over the city. There, they photographed young republicans leaving Barcelona for the frontlines. Then in September they travelled together to the front themselves, arriving in the village of Cerro Muriano near Córdoba, where they found, and photographed, crowds of villagers fleeing their homes as the fascists rained shells down on the village. In one famous series of pictures, Capa captured Taro crouched, camera in hand, behind a wall beside a republican soldier. In another even more famous picture, perhaps the most well-known war photograph ever, Capa caught a militiaman at the very moment of his death from a sniper's bullet. In that split second, the legend of Robert Capa, war photographer, was born, and decades later that same image would become the centre of a debate that still simmers over the ethics and veracity of war photography. In Waiting for Robert Capa, Fortes writes: "Death of a Loyalist Militiaman contained all the drama of Goya's Third of May 1808 painting, all the rage that Guernica would later show… Its strength, like all symbols, didn't lie in just the image, but in what it was representing." Fortes also imagines Taro gently probing Capa for the story of what really happened that day, and him replying: "We were just fooling around, that's all. Perhaps I complained that everything was far too calm and that there wasn't anything interesting to photograph. Then some of the men started to run down the slope and I joined in as well. We went up and down the hill several times. We were all feeling good. Laughing. They shot in the air. I took several photographs…" Though the context of the photograph is still contested, the imagined conversation does describe what probably happened that day just before a Francoist sniper returned fire from across the hills, killing the militiaman who was running down the hill for Capa's camera. "People want the truth from war photography more than they do from any other kind of photography," says Jimmy Fox, the Magnum picture editor who has worked with the likes of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, "but a flat surface of an image is not the reality and never can be." In Spain, Capa soon developed a reputation for taking photographs whatever the risk, setting the tone for war reportage as we now know it. Taro, too, was often seen running across the battle lines with her camera, her bravery matched by her recklessness. She travelled back and forth to the frontlines, shooting what she saw, often driven by a mixture of humanity, political commitment and a shrewd understanding of the power of the photograph to shape public opinion. Throughout 1937, Taro visited several frontlines, either with Capa or on her own. They managed to return to Paris for a short vacation in July that year, celebrating Bastille Day by dancing in the streets below Sacre Coeur and, according to Schaber, hatching "great plans for the future". Taro then returned to Spain alone, despite the growing concerns of her friends who, having seen her recent photographs of the fighting, feared for her safety. Defying a ban on journalists travelling to the front, she once again made her way to Brunete with the Canadian journalist Ted Allan, her close friend, travelling companion and soon-to-be lover. According to Allan's diaries, written later, they spent "mornings afternoons and evenings together chasing stories... For three or four weeks we were constant companions. And finally, one afternoon, we ended up in her hotel room." She told Allan: "Capa is my friend, my copain," and said she might be travelling to China with him. "Nothing was settled," wrote Allan. "Everything was possible." On Sunday 25July, the pair found themselves trapped in a foxhole near Brunete as bombs fell around them relentlessly. Taro kept on photographing, often holding her camera high above her head to capture the carnage. Allan protected her with a film camera as shrapnel and rocks fell around them. Then, as republican troops began pulling out of the area, Taro and Allan ran out of the foxhole and hitched a ride on the running board of a car while the planes continued to strafe the retreating convoy. In the chaos, the car was then rammed by an out-of-control republican tank and the couple were thrown into the dirt. Transported to a nearby field hospital, Taro died from her injuries in the early hours of the following morning. She was 26. The injured Allan did not get to see her again. According to Irene Golden, the nurse who was on duty, her last words were: "Did they take care of my camera?" Gerda Taro's funeral in Paris was attended by tens of thousands of mourners, including Capa, Chim and Ted Allan. Orchestrated by the French communist party, which claimed her as one of its own, it became, as Schaber puts it, "a spectacular manifestation of international solidarity with the Spanish republic". In death, Gerda Taro became a hero. Robert Capa went on to become the most celebrated and mythologised war photographer of the century until he, too, died in action in Indochina in 1954 at the age of 40. "He never talked about her," says the photographer Ata Kandó in The Mexican Suitcase. Gerda Taro has now fully emerged from the shadow of Capa as an important photographer in her own right. Many photographs attributed to him – they initially shared the byline CAPA – have now been identified as hers. "She was a pioneering woman both as a photographer and a political activist," says Ziff. "She was very liberated for her time, putting her work before any more traditional female role. She had reinvented herself – but the Capa myth was so strong that, even when she died, some newspapers described her as Robert Capa's wife. Their lives were entwined, but she was very much her own woman, and he knew that. They both believed that their photographs could change the world and change the way people think. And their photographs did." For details of The Mexican Suitcase, go to themexicansuitcase.com. Robert Capa: The Paris Years 1933-54 by Bernard Lebrun, featuring pictures by the photographer, is published by Abrams, £24.99; and Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes is published by HarperPress

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Capa and Taro lived, loved and died on the frontline, becoming the most famous war photographers of their time. As a new novel about them is published, Sean O'Hagan explores the real nature of their relationship

http://web.archive.org/web/20160526132943id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/australia-news/2016/apr/17/edward-snowden-on-police-pursuing-journalist-data-the-scandal-is-what-the-law-allows?

Edward Snowden has condemned Australian law enforcement for collecting the communications records of a Guardian journalist without a warrant. The world’s most prominent whistleblower, who disclosed dragnet surveillance unprecedented in its scale by the National Security Agency and its allies, singled out for critique the Australian government’s contention that it broke no laws in its leak investigation of Paul Farrell, a Guardian reporter who in 2014 exposed the inner workings of Australia’s maritime interception of asylum seekers. Related: Australia's attacks on journalists' sources are about politics, not national security “Police in developed democracies don’t pore over journalists’ private activities to hunt down confidential sources,” Snowden told the Guardian. “The Australian federal police are defending such operations as perfectly legal, but that’s really the problem, isn’t it? Sometimes the scandal is not what law was broken, but what the law allows.” Throughout 2015 the Australian parliament enacted a series of controversial laws that curbed privacy and freedom of expression rights. Geoffrey King, director of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Technology Program, said the AFP’s actions were “obviously outrageous”. “This should not be happening. But it is the inevitable result of mandatory data retention and mass surveillance, which is neither necessary nor proportional to any threat,” King said. “It doesn’t line up with the values that we all adhere to, to good counter-terrorism strategy, and it certainly doesn’t line up with a free and open society where journalists can do their jobs.” In March 2015 the Australian Senate passed legislation requiring internet and mobile phone companies to retain customer metadata for 24 months. The bill was vehemently opposed by the Australian Greens, whose communications spokesman, Senator Scott Ludlam, called its new provisions a “form of mass surveillance”. Although a last-minute amendment obliged security agencies to get a warrant before accessing a journalist’s metadata, the law essentially expands the Australian government’s ability to conduct dragnet surveillance. Australia, along with the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, is part of the Five Eyes signals-intelligence sharing network. Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that Australian spying authorities had offered to share bulk metadata of ordinary Australian citizens with their partners in the Five Eyes network. Other documents Snowden leaked revealed Australian spies had attempted to listen in to the phone calls of former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his inner circle, causing an extended diplomatic rift between the two countries. The investigation into Farrell’s sources, for a story relating to the activities of an Australian customs vessel and a controversial operation to turn back a boat carrying asylum seekers from Indonesia, was conducted in 2014, before the amendment passed parliament. Law enforcement did not need a warrant for accessing the information at the time. The case marks the first time the AFP has confirmed seeking access to a journalist’s metadata in a specific case, although the agency has admitted to investigating several journalists reporting on Australian immigration. The acknowledgement that authorities had sought access to Farrell’s records was only divulged after the reporter lodged a complaint with Australia’s privacy commissioner under the country’s Privacy Act. Related: The AFP and me: how one of my asylum stories sparked a 200-page police investigation In July 2015, the Australian government passed the Border Force Act, which criminalises whistleblowing from within Australia’s hardline immigration detention network, making it an offense punishable with up to two years in prison. The country’s “Operation Sovereign Borders”, a harsh, military-led crackdown on asylum seekers who attempt to enter Australia by boat, includes a policy of turning back boats carrying migrants and deporting every arrival including children to harsh, offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea and the tiny Pacific island state of Nauru, for permanent resettlement.

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NSA whistleblower responds to admission by Australian federal police that it investigated leaks to a Guardian journalist by requesting his metadata

http://web.archive.org/web/20160527074348id_/http://time.com:80/3635722/friends-viewing-guide-for-newbies/

Every Friday for four years, my friends and I would pop one bowl of popcorn and watch an episode of Friends from my “best of” DVD box set. The concept of binge watching had yet to be invented, so we consumed the show in small bites—two each week—and in a haphazard order (I calculated which season it was based on haircuts). If I wanted to know why Ross and Rachel were together one episode and apart the next, I had to go buy another set of DVDs or beg my friends to re-enact episodes. But now that Friends is hitting Netflix on Jan. 1, no child will ever have to wonder whether Ross and Rachel really were “on a break.” Anyone with the time should watch every episode of this show. Even if the laugh track feels dated and the jokes a little less edgy than Seinfeld, Friends is worth revisiting as a cultural artifact: Its final episode in 2004 was watched by 52.5 million people, a number that has yet to be topped by any show since. But for those who don’t have the time to watch 10 whole seasons and just want to skim, here are the character backgrounds and the episodes you ought to watch. Who Are the Eponymous “Friends?” Monica Geller (Courtney Cox): Ross’ sister, Phoebe’s old roommate, Chandler and Monica’s neighbor and Rachel’s best friend from high school, Monica was conceived as the lynchpin of the group. Though she’s a neat freak and a bit bossy, she acts as the de facto mom to the rest of the friends. At the beginning of the show, she takes Rachel in as her new roommate. Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston): At the beginning of the show, Rachel runs away from her wedding in order to try to forge a life of her own. A bit of a spoiled brat, she moves in with Monica and takes a job as a waitress at Central Perk (the coffee shop where the group spends most of its time) though she aspires to work in fashion. Rachel dates Ross on-again and off-again throughout the entire series. Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow): The oddball of the group, Phoebe is a professional masseuse and amateur musician. (Her claim to fame is the song “Smelly Cat.”) Though she has a bleak past—Phoebe was homeless after her father abandoned the family and her mother committed suicide—she is relentlessly optimistic. Phoebe and Monica used to live together, but Phoebe has moved out by the time the show starts. Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry): Chandler first met Ross in college when the two were roommates. When he moved to New York, he became roommates with Joey across the hall from Monica and Phoebe. None of the friends know what Chandler does for a living—something with numbers, maybe? Scarred by his parents’ divorce, Chandler has major commitment issues. The self-described “funny one,” he cracks jokes and makes sarcastic observations whenever the friends are hanging out. Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc): Though Joey isn’t the smartest of the gang—in fact, he’s incredibly dumb—he does do well with the ladies, wooing a new woman almost every episode. An aspiring actor, he relies on best friend and roommate Chandler financially until he gets his big break on a soap opera. Ross Geller (David Schwimmer): Ross is probably the nerdiest of the group. A paleontologist, he obsesses over dinosaurs, grammar and documentaries. Yet since high school, Ross has had a crush on the popular Rachel (his sister’s best friend). But when Rachel reunites with the friends in the first episode, Ross’ life is a bit complicated: His pregnant wife has just left him for a woman. Ross and Rachel’s “will they or won’t they?” chemistry drives much of the show. Who Are the Recurring Characters? Gunther: Gunther works at Central Perk and has a not-so-secret crush on Rachel. Richard: Dr. Richard Burke is a friend of Monica and Ross’ parents. He and Monica date seriously on-and-off throughout the series. Eventually their age difference causes problems in the relationship. Janice: The friends are always running into Chandler’s ex with an unbearable voice and a penchant for yelling, “Oh. My. Gawd” Mike: In the later seasons, Phoebe meets and dates Mike (played by Paul Rudd!), a corporate lawyer-turned-musician who falls for her quirks Ursula: Ursula is Phoebe’s twin sister (also played by Kudrow) who may be even crazier than Phoebe. The two have a rocky relationship. Carol: Carol is Ross’ lesbian ex-wife and the father of his child, Ben. Carol and her wife, Susan, share custody of Ben with Ross. Frank Jr.: Phoebe eventually finds out that she has a half-brother. When he falls in love and marries his much older teacher, Phoebe acts as their surrogate. Emily: Ross gets engaged to Emily, a British woman, after a very short courtship. The One With the Blackout (Season 1): When all of New York goes dark, the friends get to know each other a little better. The One With the Poker (Season 1): The girls try to beat the boys at poker. The One With the Prom Video (Season 2): The gang watches an old video of Rachel and Monica getting ready for prom and finds out romantic secrets about some of the friends’ pasts. The One Where Ross Finds Out (Season 2): Ross realizes that Rachel used to like him back in the day, after all. The One Where No One’s Ready (Season 3): Ross starts to lose it when everyone is late for his big event. The One With the Football (Season 3): After the gang finds out Ross and Monica used to compete for the Geller Cup (a.k.a. a troll doll stapled to a 2×4) in a football game every Thanksgiving, they play each other in a game themselves. The One With All the Embryos (Season 4): While Phoebe is examined for the implantation of embryos, Rachel and Monica compete against Joey and Chandler in a quiz game to see which pair knows the other better. The One With Chandler in a Box (Season 4): Joey punishes Chandler for kissing his girlfriend by making him spend Thanksgiving in a box. The One With Ross’ Wedding (Season 4): Rachel rushes to London to stop Ross’ wedding to Emily. The One With All the Thanksgivings (Season 5): The friends share their worst Thanksgivings. We flashback to when the friends were in high school. The One Where Everybody Finds Out (Season 5): Monica and Chandler go to extreme lengths to try to hide a secret. The One in Las Vegas (Season 5): The friends head to Vegas and make some impulse decisions. The One Where Ross Got High (Season 6): Chandler tries to ingratiate himself with Monica’s parents only to find out that they think he, not Ross, was the one smoking pot in their house during college. The One With the Proposal (Season 6): Chandler pops the question. The One With All the Cheesecakes (Season 7): Chandler and Rachel can’t stop eating the cheesecake that’s mistakenly delivered to their floor. The One With Monica and Chandler’s Wedding (Season 7): Monica and Chandler get married with Joey officiating. The One With the Rumor (Season 8): Brad Pitt guest stars as Ross’ high school friend who hates Rachel (note: Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were married at the time). The One With the Male Nanny (Season 9): Freddie Prinze Jr. guest stars as a manny with a sensitive streak that babysits Emma. The One With Princess Conseula (Season 10): Phoebe discovers that when you get married, you can change your name to anything. The Last One (Season 10): By the time you reach the final episode, you should be crying that this amazing show is ending. Every year, the Friends gang gathered together for Thanksgiving. Some of these episodes involved guest stars (hey, Brad Pitt), others troll trophies handed out to whoever won a football game. But the Thanksgiving episodes were wonderful because they often involved flashbacks to the friends’ high school and college years when Monica was fat, Rachel had yet to have her nose job and Ross and Chandler rocked ridiculous haircuts. Here they all are: Season 1: The One Where Underdog Gets Away Season 2: The One With the List Season 3: The One With the Football Season 4: The One With Chandler in a Box Season 5: The One With All The Thanksgivings Season 6: The One Where Ross Got High Season 7: The One Where Chandler Doesn’t Like Dogs Season 8: The One With the Rumor Season 9: The One With Rachel’s Other Sister Season 10: The One With the Late Thanksgiving

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Here's everything you need to know about the iconic show, which started streaming on Netflix for the first time just in time for the New Year

http://web.archive.org/web/20160630135215id_/http://www.people.com:80/people/article/0,,20416347,00.html

Halle Berry, Gabriel Aubry and Nahla in London on Aug. 26 08/27/2010 AT 05:30 PM EDT and her model ex Gabriel Aubry sure have been spending a lot of time together – and with their 2-year-old daughter Nahla. Just don't confuse the closeness for a romantic reconciliation. "They are great parents and they want the best for Nahla," a source close to Berry tells PEOPLE. "She is their priority. They love that little girl a lot." And their love of their daughter is global in scope. In recent months, the three have spent time together in California, South Africa and England. After going public with their breakup in June, the family was spotted at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. Weeks later, they flew from L.A. to South Africa, where Berry, 44, began When Berry wasn't filming, she and Nahla were busy sightseeing at Cape Town's Table Mountain, one of the city's top tourist spots thanks to its views. The next day, the ladies teamed up with Aubry, 33, for a visit to Two Oceans Aquarium, where Berry told staff she was researching sharks for her movie. According to an onlooker in the aquarium's gift shop, the parents "were together but distant," shopping separately, while Aubry also spent some time with Nahla outside. "They didn't behave as if they were a couple in love," the onlooker says. "He did his thing and she did hers." Before leaving South Africa, Berry and her costars also toured Monwabisi Park, a poor district in nearby Khayelitsha township. The actress and the crew paid a visit to the Indlovu Project, a community development initiative that includes a clinic, youth center and community hall. Halle Berry, Gabriel Aubry and Nahla at Disneyland in June Next on the global itinerary: London, where the three set up shop at a luxury hotel in the tony Kensington neighborhood and were on Aug. 26, making stops at the London Eye, Harrods and Buckingham Palace, where the family watched the changing of the guard. Also on the itinerary? A stroll through Hyde Park. Berry also spent a day alone in the city with her daughter. "They're going to co-parent and go on with their lives," the source says. "They will be in each other's lives forever."

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Berry and Aubry are co-parenting their daughter and spending time with each other from California to South Africa

http://web.archive.org/web/20160715131132id_/http://www.sfgate.com:80/bayarea/article/Depression-era-San-Francisco-Haunting-images-6571326.php

"Scene along 'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Scene along 'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Men pause a moment to watch, and then pass on." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Men pause a moment to watch, and then pass on." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Soldier: 'I go panhandling every night at bars and places. You wouldn't want a picture of that, it's just beggin'.'" "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Soldier: 'I go panhandling every night at bars and places. You wouldn't want a picture of that, it's just beggin'.'" "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. In the neighborhood where the Salvation Army operates. Breakfast for his pal, bummed from a restaurant." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. In the neighborhood where the Salvation Army operates. Breakfast for his pal, bummed from a restaurant." April 1939 "Mission District. San Francisco, California. Rent twenty to twenty-two dollars a month for three or four rooms." February 1936 "Mission District. San Francisco, California. Rent twenty to twenty-two dollars a month for three or four rooms." February 1936 "Longshoremen's lunch hour. San Francisco waterfront. California." February 1937 "Longshoremen's lunch hour. San Francisco waterfront. California." February 1937 "California shipyard workers. En route to the shipyards across the bay, tin-hatted San Francisco war workers have time for relaxation and discussion on the fourty-five minute ferry ride to the Richmond Shipbuilding Company yards." February 1943 "California shipyard workers. En route to the shipyards across the bay, tin-hatted San Francisco war workers have time for relaxation and discussion on the fourty-five minute ferry ride to the Richmond "War housing needs. Crowds of homeseekers wait in line for housing information in every "boom town" war housing center. Like millions of Americans who have migrated to busy industrial areas, these newcomers to San Francisco are hoping for news that a house, a room, or even a bed will be made available for them before the day is over." February 1943 "War housing needs. Crowds of homeseekers wait in line for housing information in every "boom town" war housing center. Like millions of Americans who have migrated to busy industrial areas, these newcomers to "War housing needs. Crowds of homeseekers wait in line for housing information in every "boom town" war housing center. Like millions of Americans who have migrated to busy industrial areas, these newcomers to San Francisco are hoping for news that a house, a room, or even a bed will be made available for them before the day is over." February 1943 "War housing needs. Crowds of homeseekers wait in line for housing information in every "boom town" war housing center. Like millions of Americans who have migrated to busy industrial areas, these newcomers to "San Francisco, California. The Bank of America." May 1943 "San Francisco, California. The Bank of America." May 1943 "Women in essential services. Two women railroad workers enjoy a moment of relaxation from their new job in the yards of the Southern Pacific Company in San Francisco." February 1943 "Women in essential services. Two women railroad workers enjoy a moment of relaxation from their new job in the yards of the Southern Pacific Company in San Francisco." February 1943 "California shipyard workers. Eight hours of work in a Richmond, California shipyard find these two workers grateful for the calm and quiet of the ferry trip back to San Francisco." February 1943 "California shipyard workers. Eight hours of work in a Richmond, California shipyard find these two workers grateful for the calm and quiet of the ferry trip back to San Francisco." February 1943 "California shipyard workers. These shipbuilders enjoy a scenic ride to work every day aboard a special ferry going from San Francisco to the giant shipyards across the bay." February 1943 "California shipyard workers. These shipbuilders enjoy a scenic ride to work every day aboard a special ferry going from San Francisco to the giant shipyards across the bay." February 1943 "San Francisco, California. Bank of America victory bond ad." May 1943 "San Francisco, California. Bank of America victory bond ad." May 1943 "Women in essential services. Ruth Anderson, San Francisco's only woman radio news reporter, has entered a field formerly open only to men. A graduate of radio soap operas, Miss Anderson began her newscasts last October on a probational basis and has been editing, preparing and broadcasting reports on world news ever since." February 1943 "Women in essential services. Ruth Anderson, San Francisco's only woman radio news reporter, has entered a field formerly open only to men. A graduate of radio soap operas, Miss Anderson began her newscasts "Victory Gardens--for family and country. Hopscotch has been supplanted by a new and serious game for these Girl Scouts--it's called Plant the Victory Garden. Like thousands of other school-age youngsters, Pat Nelson, Doris Laclair and Barbara Redford, all of San Francisco, are enthusiastic participants in the nation-wide Food for Victory campaign. Doris seems to be jumping the gun slightly, but at this stage cookies are more palatable than embryonic cabbages." March 1943 "Victory Gardens--for family and country. Hopscotch has been supplanted by a new and serious game for these Girl Scouts--it's called Plant the Victory Garden. Like thousands of other school-age youngsters, Pat "Victory Gardens--for family and country. Guiding hand behind the establishment of many West coast Victory Gardens, Professor Harry Nelson of San Francisco's Junior College still finds time to give his ten-year-old daughter Pat (left) and her Girl Scout friends some pointers in transplanting young vegetables." March 1943 "Victory Gardens--for family and country. Guiding hand behind the establishment of many West coast Victory Gardens, Professor Harry Nelson of San Francisco's Junior College still finds time to give his "San Francisco, California. Fisherman's wharf." March 1943 "San Francisco, California. Fisherman's wharf." March 1943 "Women in essential services. Women are employed as railroad workers by the Southern Pacific Company in San Francisco. With increasing numbers of men leaving their jobs for the armed forces, women are stepping into new and essential work vital to civilian life." February 1943 "Women in essential services. Women are employed as railroad workers by the Southern Pacific Company in San Francisco. With increasing numbers of men leaving their jobs for the armed forces, women are stepping "Women in essential services. Formerly a salesgirl, librarian, and sixth-grade school teacher, Grace Northrup, of San Francisco, has been repairing and serving cars for the past six months. She's becoming an expert in this field once open only to men." February 1943 "Women in essential services. Formerly a salesgirl, librarian, and sixth-grade school teacher, Grace Northrup, of San Francisco, has been repairing and serving cars for the past six months. She's becoming an "Waiting to enlist at recruiting headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Waiting to enlist at recruiting headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Stewardess aboard American airliner, making up an "upper" bunk. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Stewardess aboard American airliner, making up an "upper" bunk. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Chef in North Beach Italian restaurant. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Chef in North Beach Italian restaurant. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Sentry on guard at the Army transport dock. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Sentry on guard at the Army transport dock. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Red Cross headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Red Cross headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Red Cross headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Red Cross headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "USO (United Service Organizations) servicemen's club. Civic Center, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Red Cross headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Red Cross headquarters. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Servicemen writing letters in reading room of USO (United Service Organizations) club. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Servicemen writing letters in reading room of USO (United Service Organizations) club. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Enlisting in the Marines. Recruiting office. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Enlisting in the Marines. Recruiting office. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "War poster on wall in Chinatown. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "War poster on wall in Chinatown. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Officer of transport searching for his identification. Transport dock, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Officer of transport searching for his identification. Transport dock, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Stewardess making up bunk aboard American airliner. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Stewardess making up bunk aboard American airliner. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Corner of Montgomery and Market Streets, Monday morning, December 8, 1941, after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Corner of Montgomery and Market Streets, Monday morning, December 8, 1941, after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Corner of Montgomery and Market Streets, Monday morning, December 8, 1941, after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Corner of Montgomery and Market Streets, Monday morning, December 8, 1941, after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Reading war news aboard streetcar. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Reading war news aboard streetcar. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Reading war news aboard streetcar. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Reading war news aboard streetcar. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Charcoal broiling steaks. North Beach Italian restaurant, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Charcoal broiling steaks. North Beach Italian restaurant, San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Fishermen gathered on 'Fisherman's Wharf.' San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Fishermen gathered on 'Fisherman's Wharf.' San Francisco, California." December 1941 "The shiftless and the curious came down on Monday morning after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to see the loading of an Army transport bound for the Orient. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "The shiftless and the curious came down on Monday morning after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to see the loading of an Army transport bound for the Orient. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army transport loading at Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army transport loading at Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army transport loading at Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army transport loading at Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army transport loading at Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army transport loading at Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Fishermen gathered on Fisherman's Wharf, on December 8th, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Fishermen gathered on Fisherman's Wharf, on December 8th, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Corner of Montgomery and Market Streets, San Francisco, California. Monday morning December 8, 1941, day after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." December 1941 "Corner of Montgomery and Market Streets, San Francisco, California. Monday morning December 8, 1941, day after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." December 1941 "Army sentries standing guard at transport dock one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army sentries standing guard at transport dock one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army sentries standing guard at transport dock one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Army sentries standing guard at transport dock one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "One man tin can band during blackout. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "One man tin can band during blackout. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Italian "North Beach" restaurant during blackout. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "Italian "North Beach" restaurant during blackout. San Francisco, California." December 1941 "San Francisco, California." April 1939 "San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Architecture in the Potrero district. San Francisco, California." August 1939 "Architecture in the Potrero district. San Francisco, California." August 1939 "The city of San Francisco, California. Seen from the first street ramp of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge." April 1939 "The city of San Francisco, California. Seen from the first street ramp of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge." April 1939 "Architecture in the Potrero district. San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Architecture in the Potrero district. San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Church in Potrero district where there is a 'Russian-White' colony. San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Church in Potrero district where there is a 'Russian-White' colony. San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Note on modern architecture and home building. San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Note on modern architecture and home building. San Francisco, California." April 1939 "San Francisco, California." April 1939 "San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. At Minna Street the army forms a semi-circle and sings to attract a crowd." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. At Minna Street the army forms a semi-circle and sings to attract a crowd." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Return of the army seen through the lobby of a low-class hotel. Causes slight attention." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Return of the army seen through the lobby of a low-class hotel. Causes slight attention." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Street scene as the army began to sing." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Street scene as the army began to sing." April 1939 "At Minna Street the army forms a semi-circle and sings to attract a crowd. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "At Minna Street the army forms a semi-circle and sings to attract a crowd. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Girls' Sunday school class sings between preaching." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Girls' Sunday school class sings between preaching." April 1939 "'Power of the Lord' preaching by a 'soldier' saved twelve years before, and with army ever since. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "'Power of the Lord' preaching by a 'soldier' saved twelve years before, and with army ever since. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. In the neighborhood where the Salvation Army operates. Breakfast for his pal, bummed from a restaurant." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. In the neighborhood where the Salvation Army operates. Breakfast for his pal, bummed from a restaurant." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Unemployed young men pause a moment to loiter and watch, and then pass on." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Unemployed young men pause a moment to loiter and watch, and then pass on." April 1939 "April. The city of San Francisco, California. Seen from the first street ramp of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge." April 1939 "April. The city of San Francisco, California. Seen from the first street ramp of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge." April 1939 "Adjutant and his wife sing. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Adjutant and his wife sing. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Solo. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Solo. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. In the neighborhood where the Salvation Army operates. Sedan service to Los Angeles on share the expense basis." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. In the neighborhood where the Salvation Army operates. Sedan service to Los Angeles on share the expense basis." April 1939 "Solo. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Solo. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Exhortation." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Exhortation." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Army contributes first to the tambourine (two dollars), outside contribution about seventy-five cents, all from drunks and the like." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Army contributes first to the tambourine (two dollars), outside contribution about seventy-five cents, all from drunks and the like." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Preaching Salvation. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Preaching Salvation. Salvation Army, San Francisco, California." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Self-denial. Each member of the army is a quota, and chooses means of self-denial by which he saves his quota." April 1939 "Salvation Army, San Francisco, California. Self-denial. Each member of the army is a quota, and chooses means of self-denial by which he saves his quota." April 1939 "San Francisco, California. After forty-four years of Republican administration, California gets a Democratic administration. The California 'New Deal' faces same opposition as the national 'New Deal.'" January 1939 "San Francisco, California. After forty-four years of Republican administration, California gets a Democratic administration. The California 'New Deal' faces same opposition as the national 'New Deal.'" January "In front of city hall, San Francisco, California. The Worker's Alliance, Works Progress Administration (WPA) organize simultaneous demonstrations in the large cities of the nation cut in the relief appropriation by the United States Congress." February 1939 "In front of city hall, San Francisco, California. The Worker's Alliance, Works Progress Administration (WPA) organize simultaneous demonstrations in the large cities of the nation cut in the relief "Listening to speeches at mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers protesting congressional cut of relief appropriations. San Francisco, California." February 1939 "Listening to speeches at mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers protesting congressional cut of relief appropriations. San Francisco, California." February 1939 "City officials hear the speeches made at mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers protesting cut in relief appropriation. In front of city hall, San Francisco, California." February 1939 "City officials hear the speeches made at mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers protesting cut in relief appropriation. In front of city hall, San Francisco, California." February 1939 "Mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers parading up Market Street. San Francisco, California. The meeting was held in protest to cuts make by Congress in relief appropriations." February 1939 "Mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers parading up Market Street. San Francisco, California. The meeting was held in protest to cuts make by Congress in relief appropriations." February "Mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers parading up Market Street. San Francisco, California. The meeting was held in protest to cuts make by Congress in relief appropriations." February 1939 "Mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers parading up Market Street. San Francisco, California. The meeting was held in protest to cuts make by Congress in relief appropriations." February "Unemployment benefits aid begins. Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for benefits on one of the first days the office was open. They will receive from six to fifteen dollars per week for up to sixteen weeks. Coincidental with the announcement that the federal unemployment census showed close to ten million persons out of work, twenty-two states begin paying unemployment compensation." January 1938 "Unemployment benefits aid begins. Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for benefits on one of the first days the office "Unemployment benefits aid begins. Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for benefits on one of the first days the office was open. They will receive from six to fifteen dollars per week for up to sixteen weeks. Coincidental with the announcement that the federal unemployment census showed close to ten million persons out of work, twenty-two states begin paying unemployment compensation." January 1938 "Unemployment benefits aid begins. Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for benefits on one of the first days the office "Unemployment benefits aid begins. Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for benefits on one of the first days the office was open. They will receive from six to fifteen dollars per week for up to sixteen weeks. Coincidental with the announcement that the federal unemployment census showed close to ten million persons out of work, twenty-two states begin paying unemployment compensation." January 1938 "Unemployment benefits aid begins. Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for benefits on one of the first days the office "Lilac Street, Mission District. Rent fifteen dollars a month for three rooms. San Francisco, California." February 1938 "Lilac Street, Mission District. Rent fifteen dollars a month for three rooms. San Francisco, California." February 1938 "News of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. San Francisco, California." November 1938 "News of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. San Francisco, California." November 1938 San Francisco man reading news of surrender of Canton to Japanese. San Francisco, California. November 1938 San Francisco man reading news of surrender of Canton to Japanese. San Francisco, California. November 1938 In front of the local paper of San Francisco's Chinatown, men read news of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. November 1938 In front of the local paper of San Francisco's Chinatown, men read news of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. November 1938 In front of the local paper of San Francisco's Chinatown, men read news of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. November 1938 In front of the local paper of San Francisco's Chinatown, men read news of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. November 1938 In front of the local paper of San Francisco's Chinatown, people read news of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. November 1938 In front of the local paper of San Francisco's Chinatown, people read news of the surrender of Canton to the Japanese. November 1938 "Unemployed men on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Unemployed men on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Unemployed men on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Unemployed men on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Howard Street in San Francisco, known as "Skid Row," the district of the unemployed." February 1937 "Howard Street in San Francisco, known as "Skid Row," the district of the unemployed." February 1937 "Striking longshoremen during the waterfront strike in San Francisco, California." March 1937 "Striking longshoremen during the waterfront strike in San Francisco, California." March 1937 "A political problem before the voters of San Francisco, California." March 1937 "A political problem before the voters of San Francisco, California." March 1937 "Signboards in San Francisco, California." March 1937 "Signboards in San Francisco, California." March 1937 "The interview for unemployment compensation. San Francisco, California." January 1938 "The interview for unemployment compensation. San Francisco, California." January 1938 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Employment office on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Employment office on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Howard Street, called 'Skid Row,' the street of the unemployed in San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Howard Street, called 'Skid Row,' the street of the unemployed in San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Employment agency on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Employment agency on Howard Street. San Francisco, California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, the street of the unemployed in San Francisco, California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, the street of the unemployed in San Francisco, California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California." February 1937 "Slums of San Francisco, California." June 1935 "Slums of San Francisco, California." June 1935 "Card Alley. North Beach District (Italians). San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Card Alley. North Beach District (Italians). San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Mission District. San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Mission District. San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Mission District. San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Mission District. San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Backyard. North Beach District (Italians). San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Backyard. North Beach District (Italians). San Francisco, California." February 1936 "Street meeting. San Francisco, California." August 1936 "Street meeting. San Francisco, California." August 1936 "Employment agency. San Francisco." February 1937 "Employment agency. San Francisco." February 1937 "Unemployed men sitting on the sunny side of the San Francisco Public Library. California." February 1937 "Unemployed men sitting on the sunny side of the San Francisco Public Library. California." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California. The hock shop." February 1937 "'Skid Row.' Howard Street, San Francisco, California. The hock shop." February 1937 "On the sun side of the shed. Transient men, San Francisco, California." "On the sun side of the shed. Transient men, San Francisco, California." "San Francisco, California. Entrance to the Bank of America." May 1943 "San Francisco, California. Entrance to the Bank of America." May 1943 "San Francisco, California. Inside view of the Bank of America." May 1943 "San Francisco, California. Inside view of the Bank of America." May 1943

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The Great Depression was a dark chapter in American history for many. After the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing bank runs and cutoffs in investment, unemployment reached a peak of 25 percent, upending the lives of many and turning stable families into roving migrant workers.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160723171611id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/uknews/defence/11482597/Royal-Navys-cool-new-uniform-will-leave-British-sailors-looking-like-garage-mechanics-critics-say.html

Jamie Frost, a seaman who trains at the University Royal Naval Unit, said: "The new Navy No4s look horrendous. They still can't issue a uniform that fits and it reduces RN personnel to looking like garage mechanics." The new Navy No4s look horrendous. They still can't issue a uniform that fits and it reduces RN personnel to looking like garage mechanics.. According to the navy, however, feedback from sailors so far has been "mostly positive". The crew of the Portsmouth-based HMS Lancaster, which will head out to the South Atlantic on Saturday on a nine-month deployment, will be the first to wear the new No4s. New and old Navy uniforms compared It has several layers, including a t-shirt, top and thermals, and will offer more protection from fires. Badges denoting rank will also be worn on the front, instead of on the shoulders. Officially called the Royal Navy Personal Clothing System (RNPCS), the new design has been tested on several ships and submarines. It is only to be worn during operational duties and will not replace more formal uniforms or the berets and old caps seen by families when sailors return home from deployment. @BBCNews Oh dear, a fire retardent bin liner look! :( @thinkdefence @seapowerthinker Cdr Peter Laughton, commanding officer of HMS Lancaster, said: "We are extremely proud and genuinely delighted to be the first ship to wear the Royal Navy's new uniform. "It is a really practical, smart and modern uniform, and the extra branding allows us to much better represent our service. "This will most certainly be the case during our current deployment where we are due to transit in excess of 30,000 nautical miles and visit up to 18 different countries." In the initial rollout about 22,000 sets of the uniform are being issued to sea-going ships. Vice Admiral Sir David Steel, who led the changes while in his previous post of Second Sea Lord, said the old look was "a bit out of date". He added: "This is a modern uniform which suits a modern Navy. "But the most important thing is that it is comfortable to wear in the extremes of climate in which the Royal Navy operates - from the Antarctic to the Gulf." Ew ew ew. The new Navy working uniform is disgusting, glad I don't ever see M in his

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The new design will replace the light blue shirts and trousers worn by sailors for the last 70 years, but has been likened to a 'fire retardant bin liner'

http://web.archive.org/web/20160802150003id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/politics/2016/jun/29/senior-labour-figures-warn-of-party-breakup-and-urge-corbyn-to-go?

Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, has called for Jeremy Corbyn to resign, saying he has lost the confidence of the party’s MPs in parliament and his position has become untenable. Miliband, who introduced the leadership election process that helped Corbyn sweep to power last September, and whom some MPs blamed for dragging the party to the left, had previously supported Corbyn. But after rolling mass resignations from the shadow cabinet, which have continued into Tuesday with Pat Glass resigning as shadow education secretary just two days after being appointed, Milband said it was time for Labour to unite around an alternative candidate. “We in the Labour party need to think about the country. I’ve supported Jeremy Corbyn all the way along, from the moment he was elected. It was the right thing to do.,” Miliband told the BBC. “I think a lot of what he stands for is very important for us going forward. But I’ve reluctantly reached a conclusion that his position is untenable.” Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, is seeking urgent talks with Corbyn in an attempt to broker a compromise that would prevent the party plunging into a snap leadership contest, as Angela Eagle prepares to launch a challenge by the end of the day. Sources close to Watson – who as Corbyn’s deputy would become caretaker leader if he chooses to resign – said: “Everyone needs to calm down and try and prevent a civil war in the Labour party. We should not rush into a leadership contest that would be irreversible.” Glass, who had already decided to step down from parliament at the next general election, tweeted: “It is with a heavy heart that I have today resigned as Shadow SoS Education. My dream job but the situation is untenable.” Related: What are the rules for a Labour leadership race? Emma Lewell-Buck has stepped down as a shadow communities and local government minister, and 77 Labour councillors have signed a letter saying Corbyn should go. All of Labour’s 20 MEPs published a statement withdrawing their support from the leader. One senior party source said: “It’s not a coup, it’s a riot.” Eagle is gathering support among MPs and is expected to launch a fomal challenge if Corbyn does not resign. She and Watson are both regarded as contenders, but others including the shadow work and pensions secretary, Owen Smith, could also run if a contest is triggered. One Labour MP backing Eagle said there was “a lot of satellite traffic” between her camp and Watson’s – and said they were likely to regard any attempt to persuade Corbyn to step aside as manoeuvring by the deputy leader. Corbyn’s allies have made clear that he has no intention of stepping aside, and members of his team are readying themselves for a contest. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has told MPs seeking to overthrow Corbyn that they must accept his leadership if he sees off the challenge. He also called for an end to “nastiness”. A defiant Corbyn has vowed to fight on despite an overwhelming vote of no confidence by his own MPs, who declared their wish to see him gone by a margin of more than four to one. But while his Westminster colleagues are lined up against him, the leader appears confident he still commands sufficient support among the wider membership to emerge victorious once again. Crucially, he also appears to enjoy the support of trade union chiefs. McDonnell, Corbyn’s closest ally, told reporters as he left his home on Wednesday morning that he accepted there would be a leadership challenge, but urged Labour MPs to calm down. He said: “It looks as though we will have a leadership election now … All we are saying to Labour MPs is play by the rules, play by the rules of our party, and if there is to be a democratic election, respect the wishes of our members.” Related: This is not Labour MPs vs Corbyn. They’re at war with party members | Diane Abbott In other developments on Wednesday, Margaret Beckett, one of Labour’s most senior figures, said the party risked breaking up unless Corbyn stepped down. A tearful Beckett, a former acting leader and former foreign secretary, said that “never in my wildest dreams” had she envisaged voting for a motion of no confidence in a Labour leader until Tuesday. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, she accused Corbyn’s leadership team of acting “like a separate unit from the Labour party”. Beckett has already described herself as a “moron” for having nominated Corbyn in the last Labour leadership contest. “Part of what came out of the turbulence of the last day or so is a realisation there are people around Jeremy who are prepared to see the Labour party split rather than for him to go, and that is anathema to everybody who thinks that we need to get rid of this government and the damage that they are doing and the further damage that a rightwing – even more rightwing – Tory government would do,” she said. In further pressure from the Labour hierarchy, Tessa Jowell issued a direct plea on TV to Corbyn to stand down. The former culture secretary told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that the Labour leader was putting the party’s future in jeopardy. She described the leadership crisis as a “complete shambles” and said it was a “statement of the obvious” that Corbyn had to go. Speaking directly to the camera on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, she said: “Jeremy, you love the Labour party like I do and the Labour party has given you every opportunity that you have been able to exercise to make life for your constituents better. You and I are in the same position in relation to that but it is absolutely clear that your continued leadership is putting the Labour party’s future in jeopardy … so I ask you to follow the strongest possible view of the parliamentary party and stand down.” More than 230,000 people have signed an online 38 Degrees petition expressing confidence in Corbyn. Over 230,000 sign a vote of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn compared to 172 Labour MPs who oppose him.https://t.co/B8VLsrqsCI Lisa Nandy, who stepped down as shadow energy secretary on Tuesday, said bullying, intimidation, harassment and death threats had been “unleashed against MPs from the right to the left of the party”. Writing for the Guardian, she warned against her party being “smashed apart by a polarised, toxic, angry battle that is silencing the sensible majority”.

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Former Labour leader says Corbyn’s position is untenable, while party’s deputy Tom Watson seeks talks to avoid ‘civil war’

http://web.archive.org/web/20160807202519id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/technology/microsoft/windows/11768202/Windows-10-preview.html

The removal of the Start menu in Windows 8 prompted a public outcry. Previously used by millions of users as their first point of access to all software, the Start button was replaced with a shortcut to Microsoft's mobile interface, featuring 'live tiles' optimised for touch-based computing. With Windows 10, Microsoft has brought back the Start menu, featuring a list of most-used applications and some shortcuts to settings and power functions. By clicking on 'All Programs,' users can browse the full list of applications stored on their PC or device, just as they can on Windows 7. It is now possible to navigate using a letter grid. Users can click on a letter to jump to a list of applications beginning with that letter, rather than trawling through the whole list. Also included on the right hand side of the Start menu is a customisable panel featuring live tiles. These tiles can be repositioned, resized, pinned and unpinned, just as they could in Windows 8. The advantage of this panel, according to Microsoft, is that users can create shortcuts to applications dowloaded from the Windows Store. They can also get a snapshot of what is going on inside any app. For example, a calendar live tile might show your next appointment, and a Facebook live tile might show the latest photo you shared. In all likelihood, the applications that appear on this panel will overlap with the automatically-generated list of most-used applications that appears on the left hand side of the Start menu, but there are arguably some instances when the two will differ. If having live tiles in the Start menu seems a bit pointless, you can just delete them all and reduce the size of the Start menu so that it appears just as it would in Windows 7. With Windows 8, if you launch an app from the Windows Store while you are in desktop mode, it automatically goes full-screen and switches to mobile mode. Many users have complained that this is confusing and irritating, and that it is not clear how to get back to desktop mode. With Windows 10, clicking on one of the live tiles in the Start menu does not take you into the mobile interface. Rather, it launches the application within the desktop environment, in a window that can be resized, maximised, minimised and closed, just like any other Windows program. From the user's point of view, this is much more intuitive, and means you no longer have to think about whether the program you are running is a traditional program or a Windows Store application – they all run the same way. Under the hood, Microsoft points out that improvements in Windows 10 mean apps start faster, run faster, are significantly more secure and help to extend battery life. However, from a consumer point of view, the most important thing is that they work the way you expect. For 20 years, Microsoft has been offering the same web browser, called Internet Explorer. Over that time, numerous updates have been made and features added that primarily serve the needs of business customers – such as group policy settings and line-of-business app compatibility – that most consumers don’t need and don't care about. With Windows 10, Microsoft is introducing a new browser called Edge, which is aimed squarely at consumers. The focus is on speed and ease of use, stripping out things like ActiveX controls and essentially making the internet a less stressful place to be. Edge includes a number of nice features like a button that allows you to convert any web page into an easy-to-read format, removing adverts and sidebars and allowing you to focus on the core content such as text and pictures. Users can also customise the colour of the background and the size of the font to improve the reading experience. If you bookmark a web page in Edge it will automatically cache the page so that you can read it offline. There is also a tool called Web Note that allows you circle things on the page, make notes and highlight passages of text. You can then take a screenshot and share the image via email or a social network. Windows 10 will also come with Internet Explorer pre-installed, for people who want access to a richer set of web tools. However, Edge will become the default browser on Windows 10, and Microsoft believes that it will provide more than enough functionality for the average web user. Microsoft has long supported keyboard shortcuts to allow people to manage multiple apps running on their desktop, such as alt-tab to cycle between apps, and the Windows and arrow keys to split the screen, but they are not well known. In Windows 10, it is more obvious how to issue these commands. For example, there is now a button on the taskbar that gives you a zoomed-out view of all the apps running, and lets you select the one you want. It is also possible to create multiple virtual desktops and choose which apps to run on which desktop. Microsoft said this could be useful if you are working on several projects and want to create a virtual desktop with all the relevant apps for each project. Then if you wanted to share your desktop with a colleague over Skype, for example, you could just share the appropriate desktop. It also lets you keep your work apps and personal apps separate. Apps can easily be dragged between different virtual desktops, and if you close one desktop, all the apps that are open will automatically transfer to a different desktop. It is also possible to 'snap' apps to different parts of the screen simply by dragging them into the appropriate place. So if you drag a window to the top right corner, for instance, it will automatically adjust its size to fill exactly a quarter of the screen. Other windows can then be snapped to the other three corners to present a neat split-screen view. While none of these features are exactly Earth-shattering, they do help to make some of the less-well-known functions in Windows more easily accessible and consumer-friendly. Cortana is one of the more innovative features of Windows 10. Already available on Windows Phone, Cortana is Microsoft's answer to Apple's Siri and Google Now. While many people think of it purely in terms of issuing voice commands, it is actually much more than that. Cortana uses artifical intelligence to learn about the user and provide personalised information. The digital personal assistant is integrated into the desktop, Microsoft applications and the Edge browser, and works across PCs, tablets and mobile platforms, including iOS and Android. You can interact with Cortana either by speaking, or by typing queries, and she will respond in the same way. On the desktop, Cortana appears as a search field in the taskbar. This can be used to search across documents, folders, settings, apps, photos, videos and music stored on the computer or device, as well as on the web using Bing search. Over time, Cortana learns more about you, such as bands you like and sports teams you support, and proactively highlights relevant news and information from the web. With your permission, it can also use location technology to learn where you live and work, and identify other important places, to better tailor its responses This means that, as well as typing or dictating standard search queries like "How old is Harrison Ford?" or "How do I get to Buckingham Palace?" which will provide responses from Bing search, you can also ask "How long will it take me to get home?" or issue a command like "Remind me to put the bins out," and it will understand and respond appropriately. Thanks to integration with Microsoft's email and calendar clients, Cortana can extract relevant information and issue prompts. For example, if you have been discussing a particular airline flight in an email, and that flight is delayed, Cortana will alert you about the delay. Or of you have a meeting across town and there is heavy traffic, it will tell you when you need to leave to avoid being late. Thanks to integration with the Edge browser, users can also use Cortana to pull up extra information on places, people, restaurants or individual words without having to leave the web page they're on, by simply right-clicking on the words and selecting "Ask Cortana". Although digital personal assistants are becoming more commonplace, some people will find some of these features a bit creepy or invasive. Microsoft stresses that Cortana will only access the information you give it permission to access, so if you would rather she kept out of your email and calendar, you can block her from seeing that information. People have become fairly used to having notifications popping up on their smartphones and tablets, but Windows 10 also brings them to the desktop. If you are using a keyboard and mouse, an icon will appear on the taskbar to alert you to messages and events you haven't seen. Clicking on the icon will bring up a notification centre with more information, as well as shortcuts to the relevant apps. Users can also turn WiFi on or off from within the notification centre, or adjust 'quiet hours' and battery saver. If you’re using a touch interface, you can just swipe from the side to bring up the notification centre. Windows 10 includes a range a new security features, including support for biometrics. A new feature called Windows Hello allows you to unlock your desktop either by looking at the screen or using your fingerprint. The facial recognition feature requires an infrared camera like Intel's RealSense. The camera scans your face in 3D and compares it with data stored on the computer to determine whether or not you are the validated user. Microsoft said that Windows 10 does not store an image of your face on the computer, merely a data representation of that image, so if the data got into the wrong hands, it would not be possible to reconstruct the image. Microsoft is killing off of Windows Media Center – its software for recording and playing TV, music and video – in Windows 10, and replacing it with modified versions of Xbox Music and Xbox Video, which have been renamed as 'Groove' and 'Movies & TV' respectively. Groove users can upload all their MP3s (including those purchased from iTunes) to Microsoft's cloud service, OneDrive, and access them using the Groove app on any Windows device, Xbox, or via a web browser. Microsoft said that the Groove app will also be available on Android phones and iPhones soon. On the Windows 10 desktop, users can drag individual tracks into playlists, hover over the taskbar icon for playback controls, or right click to pin an album to the Start menu. They can also sign up for a Groove Music Pass subscription (previously Xbox Music Pass) for £8.99 per month, which allows them to stream and download music from the Windows Store and create custom radio stations based on their favourite songs, albums and artists – a bit like Spotify. Meanwhile, the Movies & TV app in Windows 10 lets users import their personal video collection, buy or rent films and TV shows from the Windows Store, and drag and drop videos between different collections. One nice feature of the Movies & TV app is that users can start watching a video on one Windows 10 device, and then pick up where they left off on another device. Unlike with previous versions of the operating system, Windows 10 works across all Microsoft devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones – as well as the Xbox games console and HoloLens, Microsoft's new wireless holographic headset. This means that any device can theoretically run Windows 10 in any mode, but practically it works by detecting the status of the device it is on and automatically choosing the most appropriate mode. For example, when a Surface Pro 3 tablet is plugged into a keyboard it will be in desktop mode, but when the keyboard is unplugged a notification pops up asking the user if they want to switch to tablet mode. If the user agrees, the live tiles will become full screen, and it will feel more like Windows 8 – but with some improvements. For example, there is now a button on the taskbar that lets you see all your frequently used apps, as well as date, time, network and power levels at a glance. Cortana is also integrated into the tablet and mobile mode, and draws data from all the same apps. Users can choose to manually switch to desktop mode, even on small tablets and smartphones. However, if you open an app it will switch back to mobile mode and run full-screen, unless there is a keyboard attached. This is because Microsoft claims that most users prefer to use live tiles if they have a touchscreen. If you hated Windows 8 in tablet mode, you'll probably hate Windows 10 in tablet mode as well. However, this is Microsoft's best attempt yet at making its core applications work on a touchscreen interface. Microsoft will begin rolling out Windows 10 in 190 countries and 111 languages on 29 July. Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users can pre-register for their free Windows 10 upgrade by clicking the Windows logo that will have appeared on the right-hand side of their taskbar. However, this does not necessarily mean they will get Windows 10 on 29 July. The update will first be rolled out to the 4.4 million people who have taken part in the Windows Insider programme. Microsoft will then begin notifying people who have reserved their copy of Windows 10 in waves, slowly scaling up after 29 July. Once a copy becomes available, Microsoft will scan the user's computer to check it is compatible, and then download Windows 10 automatically. If the user's system is not yet ready to be upgraded to Windows 10, Microsoft will provide more details during the upgrade experience. In some cases, users will need to contact an application provider or device manufacturer to learn more. The update is free to anyone with a registered version of Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 who opts in within a year. After this time, Microsoft will charge a fee. Anyone using an older version of Windows, or buying a new computer with Windows 10 installed on it, will also have to pay. Windows 10 for desktop is a massive improvement over Windows 8. It builds on the more intuitive aspects of Windows 7 and Windows 8, combining the familiarity of the Start menu with a number of new features that genuinely seem to improve user experience, such as Edge and Cortana. Microsoft appears to have learnt from the success of Google's Chromebooks that most consumers would choose a clean interface and the ability to access the web instantly over a complex system with lots of heavy-duty tools. These tools are still available if you dig down but, crucially, they don't get in the way. Although live tiles are still a feature of Windows 10, they are much less intrusive than in Windows 8. They can be as much or as little of a feature as the user wants, and can even be removed altogether. With this new level of control, users may feel more inclined to explore the utility of live tiles in a desktop environment without feeling like they're being forced upon them. When used on a tablet or smartphone, Windows 10 is not hugely different from Windows 8; most of the changes are under the hood. However, small improvements in usability should make learning the system less of a chore for the uninitiated. Ultimately, Windows 10 seems like an operating system that both Windows 7 and Windows 8 users can upgrade to with confidence. For Windows 7 users, some elements will still feel alien, but unlike with Windows 8, there is enough that is familiar to make the transition relatively painless. Windows 8 users, meanwhile, will find a lot to like in Windows 10. Many of the rougher edges of Windows 8 have been smoothed over, making the whole experience feel slicker and more like what its predecessor should have been. Some may choose to wait and hear what friends and family have to say about Windows 10 before taking the plunge. However, with the ongoing investment in this version of the platform from both Microsoft and the millions of Insiders who will continue to provide feedback after launch, Windows 10 may prove to be not only the last but also the best version of Windows.

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Is Windows 10 any good? Find out with our preview ahead of Microsoft's new release on 29 July

http://web.archive.org/web/20161012152424id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/11/18/17/most-don-t-blame-renewables-for-blackout

Almost two thirds of voters believe a statewide blackout in South Australia was not caused by a reliance on renewable energy, a new poll has found. And the same amount believe renewable energy is the solution to Australia's future power needs. An Essential poll released on Tuesday found 60 per cent of voters think the blackout during damaging storms two weeks ago would have occurred regardless of how much power was produced by renewables. Just 17 per cent believe the state's reliance on clean energy caused the outage. The poll also found 60 per cent of voters believe renewable energy is "the solution to our energy needs" while 16 per cent believe it's a threat to future power supply. A political blame game erupted over the blackout, with federal government figures questioning the nation's energy security and accusing state governments of setting unrealistic renewable targets. Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg called his state and territory counterparts to an emergency COAG meeting in Melbourne last week to discuss energy security. He wants states to "harmonise" their targets and work towards a national uniform goal. Mr Frydenberg insists "keeping the lights on" is the government's highest priority and believes some states have ignored energy security in setting politically-motivated targets. The federal government has a target of about 23 per cent renewables by 2020, while SA already produces more than 40 per cent. Victoria wants 40 per cent by 2025 and Queensland is aiming for 50 per cent - up from seven per cent now - by 2030. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews accused the prime minister of spouting ignorant rubbish by questioning Labor states' targets. The COAG energy council meeting agreed to an independent review of the nation's electricity grid.

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A new poll shows most voters believe South Australia's reliance on renewable energy did not cause the recent statewide blackout.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161101123400id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/31/15/46/matthew-leveson-disappearance-key-events

TIMELINE OF MATTHEW LEVESON'S DISAPPEARANCE, INVESTIGATIONS AND COURT HEARINGS September 23 - Video footage shows Mr Leveson, 20, and partner Michael Atkins, 44, leaving Darlinghurst's ARQ nightclub in the early hours September 25 - Mr Atkins and Mr Leveson's parents, Mark and Faye, report him missing after he failed to turn up for work September 27 - His car is found at a Sutherland reserve, near his home, with a Bunnings receipt found in the boot for the purchase of a mattock and gaffer tape - Police interview Mr Atkins and search his unit, telling him they had watched CCTV footage showing him buying the mattock and gaffer tape - despite his denial January 29 - Mr and Mrs Leveson visit Mr Atkins' unit wearing a police listening device; he admits lying about going to Bunnings and says the mattock was bought to plant zucchinis in a garden at the unit block August 5 - Mr Atkins charged with murder August 15 - A coroner formally finds Mr Leveson died on or about September 23, 2007 at Cronulla, before suspending his inquest August 29 - Mr Atkins goes on trial and exercises his right to silence October 20 - He's acquitted of murder and manslaughter January 15 - State Coroner Michael Barnes decides to resume the inquest. May 20 - NSW Deputy State Coroner Elaine Truscott says Mr Atkins, as the last person to see Mr Leveson alive, held vital answers and she compelled him to give evidence at the inquest September 5 - Mr Atkins' lawyers argue in the Supreme Court that the inquest had been unlawfully reopened and Ms Truscott had no jurisdiction to continue with it October 12 - The court rejects Mr Atkins' challenge; Mr and Mrs Leveson welcome the chance to hear evidence from him for the first time October 31 - Inquest resumes.

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For the first time since his partner disappeared nine years ago, Michael Atkins is giving evidence in a court.

http://web.archive.org/web/20091212162926id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/active/6761071/The-Noughties-a-decade-of-adventure.html

By Tarquin Cooper Published: 7:00AM GMT 09 Dec 2009 Rolling back the years: in 2003, Pen Hadow became the first person to complete a solo and unsupported trek to the North Pole Photo: MARTIN HARTLEY/PA Jane Tomlinson undertook many endurance events to raise money for charity before succumbing to cancer in 2007 Photo: REUTERS Dee Caffari embarked on a voyage to sail single-handed the wrong way around the world Tom Avery retraced the steps of Admiral Peary Sir Ranulph Fiennes Photo: PA As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, today’s adventurers have discovered that there are still plenty of firsts left in the world, whether they are unclimbed mountains, rivers that haven’t been run – or by pushing the boundaries of human possibility. If the decade has shown anything, it is that adventure and exploration are no longer the preserve of hardened men but the young and old of both sexes. Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston have shown that it is still possible to get out there, whatever your age. At the other end of the age range, teenagers have climbed Everest and sailed around the world suggesting that, these days, you can’t be too young either. Meanwhile, some of the most inspiring endeavours were achieved by the disabled. Even celebrities have got in on the act. Their high-profile endeavours have included David Walliams swimming the channel, Cheryl Cole climbing Kilimanjaro and Eddie Izzard running the length of Britain. As the decade closes with fears of retreating glaciers and melting icecaps, old-school explorers seeking scientific knowledge have found themselves suddenly relevant again. What clearer way to prove that there is still very much a point to exploration in the 21st century. On this page and overleaf, we look back and celebrate the best action-packed adventures of the decade, from the bold and brave, to the frankly crazy, but courageous. Who better to kick-start the decade than Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who came back from personal and physical misfortune to make the decade his own? He began the new millennium by attempting to become the first person to ski unsupported and alone to the North Pole. It ended in disaster when, just days into the journey, his 300lb sledge fell through the ice and he put his left hand in the water to retrieve it. The subsequent frostbite ended his polar ambitions and he later famously sawed the blackened fingertips off himself. The incident could have finished the explorer’s career. Instead he took up climbing, proving that they just don’t make people like that anymore. Except perhaps in the case of Jason Lewis. During the summer of 2000, the army officer’s son became the first person to pedal across the Pacific Ocean as part of his epic circumnavigation of the globe. During the 178-day journey he developed septicaemia, nearly went mad and had to fight off a huge saltwater crocodile before he could beach safely in Australia. He wasn’t the only circumnavigator. On September 6, 60-year-old grandmother Jennifer Murray flew around the world, solo, in a helicopter. The 25,000-mile journey lasted 99 days. Circumnavigations were still the big theme for 2001. In August, 24-year-old Alastair Humphreys set out on his bicycle from his home in Yorkshire, on what Fiennes called “the first great adventure of the 21st century”. Humphreys pedalled south across Europe and had reached Egypt by the year’s end. He would eventually return four years later having cycled around the world via Africa and the Americas. In the mountains, the climbing community was set abuzz by the stunning ascent of Ama Dablam’s north-west ridge by two young British alpinists, Rich Cross and the late Jules Cartwright. In a 10-day epic, they made the first ascent of this coveted line up the 6,812m mountain without oxygen or Sherpa support. The ascent involved more than 5,000m of climbing that had previously defeated 11 teams. Nearby, a guided American schoolteacher called Eric Weihenmeyer climbed Mt Everest. Nothing extraordinary about that – except that Weihenmeyer was blind. On the oceans, the most spectacular feat was the first crossing of the 3,000-mile Atlantic by kayak. The man who achieved it was Welshman and former SAS soldier Peter Bray. He arrived on Ireland’s west coast on September 5, after a journey of 75 days. The winter of 2002 will not be forgotten easily by Ann Daniels, Caroline Hamilton and Pom Oliver. During their attempt to ski to the North Pole, they were hit by a three-day storm. Unable to put up their tent, all they could do was huddle under a tarpaulin as temperatures dipped below -58F (-50C). The team suffered frostbite, back problems and carbon monoxide poisoning. After 47 days Oliver was evacuated with wet gangrene, leaving Hamilton and Daniels to battle the remaining 300 miles to the Pole, which they reached on June 1. Conditions were similarly uncomfortable for the alpinists Paul Ramsden and Mick Fowler who, in April, made the first ascent of Siguniang’s north face in China. The 1,500m ascent, much of it on vertical ice and at altitude, took seven days to climb and two to descend. Bad weather put paid to another climbing adventure in the autumn. French “Spiderman” Alain Robert attempted to climb Canary Wharf in East London but was thwarted by the notorious British drizzle. But the weather wasn’t all bad. In the tropical paradise of the Turks and Caicos islands, freediver Tanya Streeter plunged to a depth of 161m on a weighted sled to break the outright “no limits” record. This was the year one of the last great polar firsts fell — the goal to reach the North Pole solo and unsupported from Canada. Pen Hadow, 41, had failed twice, but he’d made a vow on his father’s deathbed and wasn’t going to give up easily. He set off on the 500-mile journey on March 17. Despite losing a ski one month in, he reached the Pole on May 19. It was another first for Devonian explorers when Hadow’s Dartmoor neighbour Simon Chalk rowed the Indian Ocean solo. He covered the distance of 4,027 miles in This was also a year in which Exmoor’s resident explorer, Sir Ranulph, hit the headlines again. First he suffered a massive heart attack that nearly killed him, then he ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents as if nothing had happened. His exploits prompted the London Marathon’s medical director to warn cardiac patients: “Running a marathon causes much greater stress to a normal mortal than to Sir Ranulph.” On November 6, British alpinists Ian Parnell, Kenton Cool and American John Varco completed the first ascent of the south-west ridge of Annapurna III - 7,555m in a 10-day push. Two years later, Cool would be the man charged with teaching Sir Ranulph to climb. This year saw adventurers push the frontier across oceans, mountains, the atmosphere and on two wheels. In April, Ewan McGregor and sidekick Charley Boorman set off to motorcycle the “Long Way Round” the world. Earlier, Jamie Andrew, who lost both hands and feet to frostbite, was part of an all-disabled ascent of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, together with Paul Pritchard, who suffers from severe paralysis, and two others. In the Arctic, 26-year-old Ben Saunders became the third person to trek solo to the North Pole. At 640 miles, it was the longest solo Arctic journey yet undertaken by a Briton. Meanwhile, in May, British climber Paul Deegan was breathing heavily on the final summit slopes of Mt Everest when something caught his disbelieving eye – a microlight buzzing overhead. Its pilot was Richard Meredith-Hardy on his way to becoming the first – and only – person to fly an open cockpit, soft-winged plane over the mountain. Considering the cold, lack of oxygen and winds that exceeded his airspeed, it was a phenomenal feat. The year closed with another aviation record falling. The prolific adventurer David Hempleman-Adams set a world altitude record for an open basket hot-air balloon, flying to 21,830ft. In February, adventurer Tom Avery set off to “put right one of the great injustices in polar history” by retracing Admiral Peary’s disputed 1909 journey to the North Pole. Using dogs and replica sledges, the team, led by a Canadian guide, raced the 500 miles to the Pole in a record 37 days. But far from settling the dispute, the polar establishment claimed it didn’t prove anything. On May 30, after a brutally exhausting 18-hour slog through avalanche-prone fresh snow, Alan Hinkes stood on the summit of Kanchenjunga, at 8,586m. For the 51-year-old Yorkshireman, it was the end of an 18-year odyssey to climb all 14 of the world’s highest mountains over 8,000m. “The final summit push was without a doubt the hardest climb of my life,” Hinkes reported. On November 20, 32-year-old Dee Caffari set off on her attempt to sail single-handed the wrong way around the world, against the prevailing winds and currents. She would complete the voyage on May 18 the following year. Hers wasn’t the only record-breaking round-the-world voyage to leave British waters. The previous month, Adrian Flanagan had set off on a “vertical circumnavigation” via Russia’s Arctic, but he wouldn’t complete his voyage for another 30 months. One was an amiable BBC presenter most likely to appear on children’s animal programmes, the other was a former Olympic gold medallist rower. Yes, this was the year Ben Fogle and James Cracknell became Britain’s best-known double act by rowing the Atlantic – naked. (See page 3.) They weren’t the only celebrities taking to water. In July, the comedian David Walliams swam the English Channel, raising more than £1 million for charity. But the headlines were dominated by another fund-raiser – Jane Tomlinson. In July and August, she cycled 3,800 miles across the United States, raising £250,000. Often in excruciating pain, it was her last challenge before losing her fight against cancer the following year. Someone else who showed that you can overcome adversity was Karen Darke. Despite being paralysed from the chest down, she traversed the 400 miles across Greenland on a sit-ski. Earlier in the year, Rob Gauntlett and James Hooper officially became the youngest Britons to summit Mt Everest, at the age of 19. Meanwhile, closer to home, the world finally caught up with the Peak District caver Dave Nixon. Despite discovering a 140m-deep chamber called Titan in 1999, it took until November of this year for the publicity shy pot-holer to tell the rest of us. On January 20, a remarkable discovery was made by the most unlikeliest of explorers – country boys Rory Sweet, Rupert Longsdon and Henry Cookson. More used to tweed than Gore-Tex and Gloucestershire to uncharted glaciers, the hard-living trio walked and kite-skied 1,000 miles to Antarctica’s Pole of Inaccessibility – the furthest point from land. En route, they unearthed a bust of Vladimir Lenin poking out of the snow which had lain untouched since the Russians left it in 1958. In the jungles of Venezuela, the BBC raised the bar of exploratory adventure to new heights by dispatching wildlife presenter Steve Backshall up the unclimbed tabletop mountain, Upuigma, where he discovered some frogs unknown to science. Elsewhere, Sara Campbell stunned the freediving world by breaking three world records in three days. Blind British adventurer Miles Hilton-Barber flew from London to Sydney in a microlight (helped by sighted co-pilots). It was also a good year for sexagenarians with Sir Ranulph Fiennes climbing the north face of the Eiger at 62 and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston completing his second solo circumnavigation of the world in a yacht at 68. In October, Jason Lewis rolled into London after 13 years and 46,505 miles around the world by bike, pedal boat, roller blades and kayak. On February 13, the Swiss climbing phenomenon Ueli Steck stunned the mountaineering world with an astonishing speed ascent of the north face of the Eiger. While most parties allow five days, Steck soloed it in less than three hours. Two days later another record fell – Scotsman Mark Beaumont rolled into Paris after cycling 18,297 miles around the world in a record 194 days. But the year belonged to three truly epic voyages. In March, Ed Stafford set off to walk the entire length of the Amazon. Almost two years on he’s lost his partner and his sponsor, he’s been accused of murder, run out of food – and he’s currently about halfway. On May 15, former Royal Marine Phil Harwood began his odyssey to canoe the entire length of the Congo River from source to sea. He encountered rapids, swamps, crocodiles, malaria and rebel soldiers before emerging in the Atlantic, 2,900 miles later, in November. And Rosie Swale-Pope achieved a remarkable feat of endurance. After losing her husband to prostate cancer, she set off to run around the world, aged 57, in 2003. She finally arrived back on August 25 after clocking up 20,000 miles and going through 53 pairs of trainers. The decade of adventure went out with a bang. The year kicked off with Pen Hadow’s Catlin Arctic Survey, which measured the sea ice. Down Under, Sarah Outen became the first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean at just 24, while 17-year-old Michael Perham completed the youngest single-handed sail around the world. Brazilian extreme kayaker Pedro Olivia raised the bar for loony antics by paddling off a 127ft waterfall. Elsewhere, British engineer Richard Jenkins smashed the world land-speed record for wind-powered vehicles, clocking 126.2mph in Greenbird. The paraplegic sailor Hilary Lister, who controls her yacht by breathing through straws, sailed alone around Britain. And the indomitable Iraq War veteran Major Phil Packer ran the London Marathon, rowed the Channel and climbed El Capitan, despite severe injuries. Even celebrities showed they’re made of sterner stuff. Cheryl Cole, Ronan Keating and Alesha Dixon all climbed Kilimanjaro for charity, while Eddie Izzard ran a seven-week, 1,100-mile marathon around Britain. The daredevil rock climber Leo Houlding took adventure to new heights by parachuting into the Arctic, climbing Mt Asgard and then BASE-jumping off the summit. While on Everest it was finally third time lucky for Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who started the decade staring at defeat but ends it with a resounding triumph, proving that nothing brings success like perseverance. Disasters, tragedy and controversy – when expeditions didn’t quite go to plan. 2000 Peter Bray’s first attempt to cross the Atlantic in a 27ft kayak ends after he capsizes off Canada. 2001 Brian Milton’s attempt to recreate Alcock and Brown’s 1,800m direct flight across the Atlantic in a microlight crashes on take-off. 2002 A few days into their bid to row the Indian Ocean, Simon Chalk and Bill Greaves are shipwrecked after hitting a submerged object. 2003 Jennifer Murray, 63, and Colin Bodill, 54, narrowly escape death after crashing their helicopter in Antarctica. 2004 Frenchwoman Dominick Arduin disappears a day into her attempt to become the first woman to ski solo to the North Pole. 2005 Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s first attempt on Mt Everest fails after he suffers an angina attack, 300m from the summit. 2006 Huge controversy on Mt Everest as climbers are accused of walking past the dying climber, David Sharp. 2007 Roz Savage gives up her Pacific rowing attempt 10 days in, after stormy weather causes her boat to capsize three times in 24 hours, losing vital equipment. 2008 The British-built Vestas Sail Rocket becomes the fastest boat on water after nudging 50 knots, but then spectacularly crashes. 2009 Olly Hicks sets off from Tasmania to row around the world, but gives up three months later, after getting no further than New Zealand.

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Tarquin Cooper charts the daredevils, never-say-die attitudes and disasters that came to define the people who pushed themselves to their limits and beyond during the past 10 years.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130904043025id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/nov/20/carsten-holler-art-adrian-searle

Shall it be the Congolese goat stew or the Scottish red-legged partridge? The yam leaves in peanut paste with salted fish, or the wild rabbit terrine? We decide to go for a bit of everything. I'm having dinner with the artist Carsten Höller in his latest project, the Double Club. This is a bar, restaurant and dance club where the Democratic Republic of Congo meets the west, and the west meets Congo. At least, that's the idea. The club is up an alley beside Angel tube station in Islington, London, and we seem to be neither here nor there. I am confused. We drift between continents, choosing from two simultaneous menus. The most expensive dish on tonight's western menu is cote de boeuf, at £42 for two, while the liboke na mbisi (conger eel in marantaceae leaves) is only £11. The conger is very good, but my favourite is the goat. This is not, Höller says, some misplaced collision of world cuisines. "There's no fusion here!" he insists, and wants everything to be as authentic as possible. Nor has he suddenly decided to become a chef. The restaurant - overseen by Mourad Mazouz, founder of London restaurants Momo and Sketch - is learning to cope; in another part of the club, a man in a boiler suit is still tinkering with the as-yet-unfinished dancefloor. Tomorrow, when the club opens, this will rotate, at one revolution per hour, turning between the Congolese and western sides of the club. The DJs will sit on the revolving platform, playing Congolese music or western dance, depending on which side of an invisible international divide they find themselves. So far, the only concession to Africa in the dance hall is a gaudy, kitsch plastic palm tree. The ceiling bristles with disco lighting equipment, which also rotates. But tonight it all feels far away. Höller is best known in the UK for the slides he installed in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2006. They were enormously popular with the public, which deflected any doubts about their status as art - which, in any case, is an ever more complicated question. Höller currently has a revolving hotel bedroom, where visitors can book a night between satin sheets, in the group show theanyspacewhatever, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It's booked out for the entire duration of the exhibition, even though you must spend the night watched over by a museum guard. Sponsored by the Fondazione Prada in Italy, the Double Club will stay open for the next six months. When Höller suggested the idea, he was convinced Prada would turn it down. Not only did they say yes, they insisted on London as a venue. Now he's trying to encourage the Congolese community to come, as well as the regular club scene, plus the foodies, the art crowd, and an inquisitive public. Week one, and the atmosphere hasn't quite kicked in yet. The cooking has yet to hit its stride, though the barbecue was firing up nicely out in the big open space where the western and Congolese bars collide: swanky lights, serious cocktails and high bar-stools on one side; a knocked-together wooden bar, a big Primus Bière sign on the wall and plastic garden furniture on the other. On good-weather nights, the roof opens up. The whole place is a cultural mash-up, in what feels like a good way. In the restaurant, there are paintings by Andy Warhol and Italian artists Alighiero e Boetti and Carla Accardi. A big wall-relief by Louise Nevelson is due to arrive. The decor is still being tinkered with. Out in the bar there's a huge portrait by Kinshasa-based painter Chéri Samba, and in a corner a seating area of Portuguese tiles, which continue up the wall, their glazed surfaces depicting the utopian, sci-fi apartment blocks of 1920s Russian architect Georgi Krutikow. Sometimes, it is hard to penetrate the logic. As if this weren't confusing enough, there are three Congos, Höller tells me. There's the former Belgian colony of DRC on one side of the river, and the much smaller former French colony of Congo-Brazzaville on the other. A third Congo exists entirely in the European mind, a mentality and a false memory that has at its core Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. What about today's civil war? It is far from Kinshasa, Höller, a frequent visitor, tells me. He has been visiting the DRC, a place as big as western Europe, since around 2000, having first travelled to Benin in the mid-1990s. He fell in love with the music, the vitality and complexity of Congo's culture. Höller himself is German, although born and brought up in Belgium. He now lives in Stockholm. Before becoming an artist, he was a biologist. I ask him what led him away from science: was it the nerdiness of science types, all those beards? The beards were definitely a problem, he says; scientists are so nervous of being regarded as charlatans, they don't want people to think they care what they look like. But aren't people suspicious about art and artists, I ask - and is the Double Club an art work? Half art, half not, he tells me, like the slides. For a lot of people, especially the kids who used them, the slides were just a playground. Niceties about what might be art don't appear to worry Höller. Not so long ago, he installed a carousel with chairs in chains in London's Gagosian gallery. He seems to like things that go round and round. The club, he says, is also here for people who are hungry, and people who want to drink, dance and meet their friends. Höller admits he doesn't party much these days. He likes to spend his evenings at home, beside a lake near Stockholm, where he breeds nightingales for a hobby. I ask him if he's ever eaten one. Only the tongues, he tells me. This could be a wind-up, but there is something entirely genuine about the artist. Earlier this year, Höller and I took part in a discussion about art and food at Ferran Adrià's world-famous El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia. During the discussion, chef Heston Blumenthal was wary of describing what he did as art, and Höller also expressed doubts about his own status as an artist. "I just want to play out some things in my life," he now says. Höller is, I think, simply curious about the world. Just as the Double Club is intended to be two places at once, he likes the idea of spending half the year in Sweden, half in Africa. Like the nightingales, he says, on their annual migrations. This sounds magical, but the logistics come down to hard reality. As well as having Mazouz on board, the project has been overseen by Jan Kennedy, who opened the restaurant Quo Vadis with Marco Pierre White back in the 1990s. Design studios and architects have also played their part. Höller is the impresario of all this. Describing the fear, pleasure and out-of-control screaming abdabs some participants experienced as they sped earthward on his Tate slides, Höller has talked about people as "pleasure bundles", and the effect his art has on us as bodies in space. Space is not just physical. And we are not only bodies in space, but minds, too. Höller, I think, wants to take us out of ourselves and re-find some pleasure in the world. That includes eating, drinking and having fun. Does this make him an artist or just an entertainer? After a certain point in the evening, the question no longer seems interesting. Instead, we toy with our northern European winter comfort food, and the Congolese stews and barbecues, having our rumbles in the disco jungle, and following the footsteps of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness ("The horror! The horror!") as we spill out into the cold glare of the credit crunch, the 5am Islington morning. The Double Club, at 7 Torrens Street, London EC1, opens tomorrow. Details: thedoubleclub.co.uk

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Carsten Höller was the man behind the Tate's slides. How do you top that? By opening a Congolese nightclub in London. He explains all to Adrian Searle

http://web.archive.org/web/20140919091036id_/http://fortune.com/2014/09/19/banks-risky-again/

Welcome to the post, post-Lehman era. Earlier this week, the nation’s largest banks reported the results of self-administered stress tests. The results do not hold as much significance as the ones administered later this year by the Federal Reserve, but they were notable. For the first time since the financial crisis, the stress tests showed that, at a number of banks, a key measure of readiness for the next crisis had dropped. Citigroup C , for instance, said its tier one capital ratio—the amount of money a bank has on hand to cover loan and investment losses—would drop to 8.4% in another severe downturn. That’s down from 9.1% a year ago. At Morgan Stanley MS , capital levels could fall to 8.9%, down from 9.5% a year ago. Wells Fargo WFC dipped to 9.6% from 9.9%. And JPMorgan Chase JPM said it would have enough capital after a stress scenario to cover losses on 8.4% of its remaining risky assets, down from 8.5% a year ago. Goldman Sachs GS was the only bank that came out looking better than it did last year, 10.4% versus 8.9%. Bank of America’s BAC results were the same as they were last year. The drops are relatively small. And the banks are still far more prepared for a downturn than they were before the last recession. But the banks have spent much of the past six years socking away extra cash to make them look as safe as possible. Now, the pendulum is swinging back. But there were signs of that already. About a month ago, the FDIC reported that, as of mid-year, banks had boosted lending by nearly $400 billion in the past 12 months, the biggest jump since late 2008. Also, at the end of the second quarter, JPMorgan reported that it was taking increased risk on its trading desk. It appeared to be one of the few banks to do so. But the others are likely to follow. The banks will report new risk numbers a few weeks from now, along with their earnings reports. Already, some regulators are getting nervous. Bank regulators have warned a number of banks about a return to risky lending. And the Fed is contemplating new rules that would require the big banks to continue to add to their capital piles. Remember, though, all of this renewed risk is good for the economy. While the Fed is telling banks not to take too much risk, its low interest rate policy is intended to get banks to lend more and, well, take more risk. And the fact that banks are lending more means the Fed’s efforts have been, at least partly, a success. Regulators and the rest of us should not want the risk-taking pendulum to swing in just one direction. The question is whether the rules passed in the wake of the financial crisis will stop it from swinging too far back in the wrong direction.

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They're not back to slinging synthetic mortgage swaps. But a test shows that the pendulum is swinging back toward more risk-taking on Wall Street.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141120152850id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/20/-sp-out-of-the-phone-the-worlds-first-instagram-photobook

Social media continues to explode with photography, with an average of 60m photos posted every day on Instagram (that’s nearly 700 per second). Now, four years since its inception, Instagram has given birth to the first printed book of art photography. Out of the Phone is a new collection of exclusively mobile photography, all submitted on the site using the hashtag #outofthephone. Pierre Legovic, who masterminded the project, says: “I had this ‘best of mobile’ photobook idea for a while. A few years ago, I created the Emotion Daily blog to show off pictures I liked and support emerging talent. Then I came up with the idea of a publishing house dedicated entirely to mobile photography – a way to extract instant art from the overwhelming digital flow.” Seven weeks ago, he posted a shout-out for submissions that read: “1 hashtag/10 days/100 photographs”. Legovic was keen to collate the best Instagram images of 2014, but only wanted to give people a short amount of time to instinctively decide on their favourites. “I liked the idea of building a book in weeks, but covering a year of observation,” he says. Submissions came from established photographers such as Dan Cristea, Richard Koci Hernandez, Benjamin Lowy, Q Sakamaki and Ako Salemi, as well as lesser-known contributors. “It’s so satisfying that we received a good mix of professional photographers and beginners who may have discovered photography with the iPhone but have a great eye,” says Legovic. “The democratic aspect of mobile – its ability to let photographers share, connect and learn from each other – is so interesting, and so important.” He’s very quick to point out that Out of the Phone was not a contest, and that it was absolutely open to all: “The final selection was made based on our sensibility and our editorial guidelines, nothing else.” After 10 days of hashtag discoveries, here are the best of the 100 images chosen, which span generations and continents and take in everything from Batman to Benidorm, Iran to Istanbul.

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Out of the Phone, the first book of its kind, compiles inspiring moments from 2014 taken by 100 photographers all over the world on Instagram. Meet the man who made it happen – and see the stunning results

http://web.archive.org/web/20150427195230id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/saturday-best-playoffs-jimmy-butler-bucks-buzzer-beater-derrick-rose-hawks-nets-stephen-curry-golden-state-warriors-new-orleans-pelicans-anthony-davis-042615

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

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20150623215835id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/03/15/the-quietest-device-in-the-room/

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

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20150825164025id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/09/cruises-property-set-for-uk-silver-spending-spree.html

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

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20150916121334id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/22/lucian-freud-death-best-web/amp

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

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20150925024113id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jan/24/london-2030-future-predictions/amp

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

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20151001181129id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/12/did-taylor-swifts-op-ed-hit-a-flat-note.html

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

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20151003142853id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/12/cramer-remix-this-us-stock-is-a-winner.html

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

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20151009112343id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/06/license-to-drive-james-bond-gets-a-new-car-you-cant-buy.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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