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New US military guidelines have opened the way for service members to wear religious clothing such as turbans or skullcaps while on duty, the Department of Defense has announced.
The guidelines, published on Wednesday, also allow for facial hair, body art and other expressions of religious belief. It is not a blanket permission, however; requests for dispensation from stated uniform policy are to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
The military counts thousands of Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Wiccans and members of other religious groups among its ranks. The groups have protested against the exclusion of religious apparel, saying it forces them to choose between their religious beliefs and a desire to serve.
To be approved, changes in apparel or presentation must not impair the operation of weapons, pose a health or safety hazard or interfere with other military equipment such as helmets, flak jackets or wetsuits, according to the guidelines.
“The new policy states that military departments will accommodate religious requests of service members, unless a request would have an adverse effect on military readiness, mission accomplishment, unit cohesion and good order and discipline,” said Pentagon spokesman Lt Cmdr Nathan J Christensen.
The Sikh American Legal Defence and Education Fund said the rules did not go far enough.
“This is an expansion of the waiver policy that is decided person by person,” its director, Jasjit Singh, told the Washington Post. “It does not open doors and say you can apply as a Sikh American and serve your country fully.”
The Sikh Coalition collects the stories of Sikhs who have won the right to wear turbans and beards on duty. The first was Major Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a doctor and Afghanistan combat veteran who was granted a religious accommodation by the US army in October 2009. | Guidelines also allow for facial hair, body art and other expressions of religious belief |
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting draws some of the richest and most influential people in the world. In fact, close to 70 billionaires from 20 countries were expected to attend the invitation only event this year.
Forbes editor Luisa Kroll wrote in a blog post Tuesday that the event “may well be the greatest concentration of wealth in any one place” (see: Where The (Big) Money Is).
While Luisa’s group of almost 70 billionaires includes only those who have appeared on Forbes’ wealth lists, Kroll said that there are others in attendance who are expected to debut on the annual Forbes World’s Billionaires list in March.
We found out which of the wealthiest billionaires made it to the Swiss Alps for the elite conference, and we’ve compiled a list of the 14 richest men in Davos. (We are still waiting on confirmation of the attendance of 4 of these billionaires).
Click here for the complete photo gallery of The Richest Men In Davos.
With a net worth of approximately $54 billion, the richest man at the notable conference, according to Forbes’ wealth lists, is tech geek turned billionaire Bill Gates.
The billionaire offered his two cents in a discussion panel about sustainable development today in Davos. He said cutting energy isn’t the solution to sustainable growth, but rather maximizing and fostering innovation, specifically through investments in health should be the focus.
Gates and British Prime Minister David Cameron also announced in Davos that they will contribute $130 million to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
Gates and his wife Melinda founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, and have since been considered two of America’s most generous philanthropists.
Last year, Gates and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett initiated The Giving Pledge, which is a campaign to encourage the wealthiest people in the U.S. to commit to donating a majority of their wealth to charity. Gates is extending his efforts to leaders all over the world this week. His mission in Davos is to persuade other billionaires to donate a chunk of their fortunes to charitable causes.
Another business tycoon who made billions in the technology industry is India’s Azim Premji. As the chairman of Wipro, one of India’s largest software development companies, Premji is worth an estimated $17.6 billion – making him the fourth richest man in Davos.
Premji, who was awarded the Padma Vibhushan this year, took over the family business at the age of 21 when his father suddenly died. Over time, Premji transformed Wipro from a toiletries and lighting company to a software giant. Like Gates, Premji is dedicated to charitable giving, and has recently pledged to donate $2 billion for improving education in India.
These men aren’t the only philanthropic billionaires in Davos.
Swiss entrepreneur Ernesto Bertarelli became CEO and co-owner of his father’s company, Serono, in the 1990s. Like Premji, he shifted the company’s focus, and saw sales tripple over the next 10 years. In the late 1990s, the billionaire established a foundation that encourages and supports infertility research – exactly what helped his company gain recognition just a few years earlier.
The father of three, who’s also an avid sailor, is worth an estimated $10 billion.
Bertarelli is the only Swiss billionaire to make the list of the top 14 richest people in Davos. The rest of the group is made up of five Indians, four Americans, and four Russians. | The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting draws some of the richest and most influential people in the world. Here are the 15 richest billionaires in Davos this year, based on Forbes’ wealth lists. |
The Pulp Fiction star, 57, parked his 1970 Mercedes-Benz 280SL outside a Jaguar dealership for just ten minutes and when he returned it was gone.
The theft was reported to cops in Santa Monica, California, but it is understood there were no witnesses.
Travolta's Merc is part of a car collection that includes a Rolls Royce, a Jaguar XJ6 and a Ford Thunderbird similar to the one featured in his 1978 hit musical film Grease. | SCREEN icon’s £65k motor is nicked – as he looks at new cars in a California showroom |
Elon Musk laid out his long-promised vision for building a self-sustaining city on Mars, saying the next giant leap for humanity will require full rocket reusability, refueling the spacecraft in orbit and propellant production on the Red Planet.
“Refueling in orbit is one of the essential elements,” Musk told scientists, engineers and government officials gathered Tuesday at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in a presentation called “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species.” Musk went on to say that producing propellant on Mars was key to driving down the cost, which he estimated one day could cost roughly $200,000 per ticket.
The gathering, which included Apollo-era astronaut Buzz Aldrin, drew men and women who have spent lifetimes studying our solar system, the galaxies beyond, and how to get there one day. Musk’s comments hold sway because of his rocket-launch company’s success and the steps he’s already taking toward the goal of helping humans move beyond Earth.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company he founded in 2002 with that intent, is already flying satellites into orbit and scheduling “Red Dragon” missions to explore the planet. Those missions will inform the design of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System, a larger craft to ferry people to Mars and beyond.
SpaceX released an four-minute animated video shortly before Musk’s speech that revealed how the Interplanetary Transport System would work. The video begins with more than a dozen people walking into the spacecraft perched atop a rocket booster that lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Once in space, the spacecraft sits in a parking orbit while the booster returns to Earth to get a propellant tank. The rocket then reflies and refuels the spacecraft in orbit. With the additional fuel, the spacecraft then blasts off toward Mars thanks, in part, to solar arrays that deploy. At midjourney, it’s traveling at almost 62,700 mph toward the planet. | Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, laid out his long-promised vision for building a self-sustaining city on Mars. |
Updated SEP 15, 2014 1:30p ET
After taking its share of criticism for moving too slowly to discipline Ray Rice, the NFL is acting quickly to do some damage control and strengthen its programs for domestic violence and other social issues going forward.
In a memo to teams and staff this morning that was obtained by FOX Sports, commissioner Roger Goodell announced the addition of several staffers and advisors who will help shape programs, sharpen education and provide support for players and employees.
The moves come as criticism has mounted for the league's bungling of the Rice situation, as well as the controversies surrounding the Carolina Panthers' Greg Hardy, the San Francisco 49ers' Ray McDonald and the Minnesota Vikings' Adrian Peterson.
"Last month, I wrote to you and our staff that our organization will continue to evolve and meet our challenges and opportunities," Goodell wrote. "We are committed to developing our talent and putting the best people behind our most important priorities."
Goodell promoted Anna Isaacson to a new, expanded role of vice president of social responsibility. Isaacson, currently the league's vice president of community affairs and philanthropy, will "oversee the development of the full range of education, training and support programs relating to domestic violence, sexual assault and matters of respect."
Goodell also announced the league has retained three senior advisors -- Lisa Friel, Jane Randel and Rita Smith -- "to help lead and shape the NFL's policies and programs relating to domestic violence and sexual assault."
Friel was the head of the sex crimes prosecution unit in the New York City DA's office; Randel is the co-founder of No More, a national initiative to raise awareness regarding domestic violence and sexual assault; and Smith is the former executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
The league will also continue its work with two programs -- Coach For America and A Call To Men -- to educate players and coaches "about character, respect and professionalism," according to Goodell.
"We are continuing to develop our organization to strengthen our ability to address the wide range of issues we face and other changes in our office will be announced soon," Goodell said. "Our goal is to make a real difference on these and other issues. We know that we will be judged by our actions and their effectiveness."
Though many might continue to judge the league by its actions in the past few months, it's clear the NFL is trying to address the problem with these programs and its ongoing investigation into whether someone in the league office saw the video of Rice hitting his wife in an Atlantic City elevator.
While Goodell and other executives are expecting a thorough independent investigation from Robert Mueller, it has become clear they want the investigation completed as quickly as possible. Adding owners John Mara and Art Rooney II as overseers of the investigation was designed to help streamline the process.
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This will not be like last year when the investigation into the Jonathan Martin-Richie Incognito bullying scandal dragged out for months, with the findings being released after the Super Bowl. The NFL wants to get Mueller's findings into the hands of owners and fans as quickly as possible.
A source also told FOX Sports if Mueller uncovers evidence that reveals a high-ranking executive was negligent and/or viewed the Rice video, that information will be brought to Mara and Rooney immediately and Mueller won't wait until the end of the investigation to reveal it.
The NFL has surely noted October is just a few months away. That's when the players and coaches will wear pink to support breast cancer awareness. The investigation and the appointments Goodell has made come in advance of the expected criticism the league will receive for supporting women on the field despite recent events off it. | Women hired to strengthen NFL's domestic violence awareness, social programs |
Check out Bieber doing some pretty impressive solo juggling -- complete with a few spin moves ... NOT BAD!!!
Turns out, Bieber's actually a pretty impressive athlete ... he can play hockey, he boxes with Mayweather, he can skate ... and he can hoop (sorta).
Gotta respect it ... right? | Justin Bieber got skills!!! Check out Bieber doing some pretty impressive solo juggling -- complete with a few spin moves ... NOT BAD!!! Turns out,… |
Irene Rosenfeld, chief executive officer of Kraft, outlines her company's plan for the next few years.
Steve Forbes: And when you get a setback, I mean you had one in 2003, you left the company and then came back. Would you advise younger people, "Be prepared, you may have to move and see what turns up?"
Irene Rosenfeld: Yes. I think that at the root of that is you need to be happy, you need to feel you're making a difference. And if that's not playing out, you need to make a change. And I would stand behind that advice. My hope and my expectation is that at Kraft Foods ( KFT - news - people ) we are working hard to make sure that we are listening to employees, that we are encouraging them to speak up about what their career aspirations are, what they're looking for. Because I would hope that we can accommodate some of their needs without them having to leave.
But I certainly would advise that, if you've tried all that and it's not happening the way you need it to, you need to make a change.
Forbes: And in terms of shareholders, obviously, the stock market's not been conducive to any company, most of them, doing well. How would you tell investors, "Yes, Kraft is a big company, it's in certain categories, but here's what makes us top of the breed." You mentioned 44%, 70%.
Forbes: What else would you tell them?
Rosenfeld: Well, I think I've laid out our strategy for the next three years. What I've said is our first focus is to delight global snacks consumers. It's a growing category around the world. It's got very attractive margins. And we're advantaged within that category. Seventy percent of our business outside the U.S. is in snacks. Over half or our business globally is in snacks. So I feel good about the portfolio. I like the geographic footprint. We've doubled our position in developing markets and I think if we look out over the next three years, about close to a third of our business will be in the developing markets. And I like our position from a channel perspective.
The immediate consumption channels, where we've doubled our presence, is a fast-growing channel with very attractive margins. And all of that together are what give me great confidence that we will be able to deliver revenue in the top tier of our peer group in excess of 5% and EPS growth of nine to 11%. And I think that will be fairly strong performance by any standard. | CEO Irene Rosenfeld lays out her company's goals and gives advice to other businesspeople on when to make a change. |
Consider a few videos as Mitt Romney tries, in the last weeks of the campaign, to appear vaguely moderate.
The first shows Mr. Romney at CPAC calling himself “severely conservative.” The second, an Obama campaign ad from April, amounts to a greatest hits of his severely conservative statements. The third, from Daily Kos, compares what Mr. Romney said at last week’s debate with previous comments.
It’s impossible to say which Mitt Romney is the “real” Mitt Romney. But what we don’t know about Mr. Romney seems secondary to what we do know: He doesn’t think authenticity or consistency or conviction matter. It’s not just that he tweaks his message to suit his audience; he’s willing to change his message for his audience. (And if he’s president, his audience will be the Republican-dominated, Tea-Party-influenced House.)
It must be the case that many Americans recognize his contortions, and will vote for him regardless because they don’t like the president. That’s their right. But if Mr. Romney wins, he’ll set a nasty precedent. Candidates will be justified in assuming not only that they can lie, but that they can tell different lies to different audiences from week to week, and voters will actually reward them. | If Mitt Romney wins, candidates will be justified in assuming that they can tell different lies to different audiences, and that voters will actually reward them for it. |
Talk about big productions: the annual ''Messiah Sing-In'' of the National Choral Council, ringing out for the 14th year tonight at 8 P.M. in Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, comes closest to a vocal version of an old-time Hollywood backlot.
The sing-in lends itself to exclamation points. Three thousand singers! That includes you in the audience, with your choice of section according to your voice or sociability. Directed by Martin Josman and 19 guest conductors! Kenneth Bowen, organist, in thunderous accompaniment! Plus soloists! Those are Lucy Shelton, soprano, and Ray De Voll, tenor, who come in to upstage the masses at regular intervals.
Did Handel ever envision such a massive execution of his mighty work? Possibly not, because he wrote it for a chorus of about 20 voices.
Admission: $9, for general seating in which you can take a seat anywhere in the house; $13.50 for reserved seats. You can bring your own ''Messiah'' score or buy one at the door. Information: 869-0970. SESAME OPEN
This is a reason for television watchers to go out and look at a tribute to what they may have been looking at at home since 1969. It is a photographic show called ''13 Years of Sesame Street'' in the Nikon House, 620 Fifth Avenue, along the Channel Garden mall that leads into Rockefeller Center between 49th and 50th Streets.
This exhibition is felicitously sited for the delectation of youngsters, what with the big Rockefeller Center tree in view above the skating pond, the angel-lined mall and the big tableaux in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue across the street.
Nikon House has a two-level gallery and its exhibitions usually represent camera work that is unusual in content and technique. In this show, the photos are the work of freelance and staff photographers and is the first such exhibition of scenes from the long-running children's program.
On the walls are seen Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, the Count, Oscar the Grouch, Kermit the Frog. If you have not had occasion to catch ''Sesame Street,'' faces that have made guest shots on the show may be more familiar to you: Lena Horne, Lily Tomlin, Dick Cavett, James Earl Jones, James Galway, Judy Collins, Itzhak Perlman and Cab Calloway. It is an easy and quick exhibition to breeze through on the gallery's two levels.
Open free, through Dec. 30, from 10 A.M. to 5:45 P.M. except for Thursday, Christmas Day and Saturday and next Monday. OPERA BENEFIT
The Israel National Opera was founded 33 years ago and has helped start the careers of many young singers from many places, among them Placido Domingo, Mignon Dunn and Joann Grillo. The Israel Opera, not too different from many opera companies elsewhere, may be in good artistic form but it is in bad financial shape, which is why there will be a benefit for it tonight at 8 in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall.
The threat of closure has been brought on by a cutback in the Israeli Government's subsidy. In an attempt to ameliorate the loss, singers of the Israeli company and of our own Metropolitan Opera will offer a program of operatic and musical-comedy songs. Among the 18 singers will be Miss Grillo, Atarah Hazzan, Nedda Casei, Richard Kness, John Durrenkamp and Nico Castel, all from the Met. In addition, Herman Malamood, also of the Met, will light the second candle of Hanukkah during the performance and will sing the traditional ''Ma'oz Tzur.''
Admission: $10. Information: 998-1061. ONE NIGHT STAND
John Monteith and Suzanne Rand are a comedy team who worked their way from clubs to Broadway and back to clubs, to wherever someone is in search of comedy. Monteith and Rand came out of Chicago's Second City, and they say their provenance lies in the turbulent era of social upheaval rather than the earlier one of neurotic introspection.
Their improvisitational wit, with planned material, too, will be the attraction, tonight only, at 8:30 and 11:30 P.M. at the Bottom Line, the club at 15 West Fourth Street (228-6300). The Bottom Line, where the team has visited before, is one of the longer-lived clubs in a business where easy-come, easy-go is a fact of life. It apparently plans to be around for some time longer: the place has been given a fresh painting and new carpeting. Otherwise, everything is the same.
Admission: $8. No cover or minimum at the tables. Drinks, $2.20 and up; menu items, $3.50 to $7.
For today's Entertainment Events, listing see page C16. For Sports Today, see page B14. Richard F. Shepard | BIG SING Talk about big productions: the annual ''Messiah Sing-In'' of the National Choral Council, ringing out for the 14th year tonight at 8 P.M. in Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, comes closest to a vocal version of an old-time Hollywood backlot. The sing-in lends itself to exclamation points. Three thousand singers! That includes you in the audience, with your choice of section according to your voice or sociability. Directed by Martin Josman and 19 guest conductors! Kenneth Bowen, organist, in thunderous accompaniment! Plus soloists! Those are Lucy Shelton, soprano, and Ray De Voll, tenor, who come in to upstage the masses at regular intervals. |
She was the fastest rabbit in town, taking just 11 seconds to jump all the hurdles in the round. Cherie, a 2-year-old Swedish bunny, left the competition in the dust at the U.K.'s Rabbit Grand National, held in the dignified Yorkshire town of Harrogate in late January.
The lop-eared speed demon, who also won the competition last year, elicited gasps from the audience as she jumped hurdles close to 28 inches high. But she faced no competition from upstart locals. While the British bunnies were invited to "showcase" their skills, they didn't compete in the main event because the organizers felt the Swedes were in a league of their own. "It's like the English Premier League versus L.A. Galaxy," says Jason Madeley, one of the promoters of the event, finding a soccer analogy.
See the bunnies of Britain compete with champion Swedish jumping rabbits. Javier Espinoza reports from the Rabbit Grand National in Harrogate, England.
"It's really new in England and they can't jump as high as we can," says 24-year-old nursery-school teacher Magdalena Åhsblom, owner of the champion. "I don't think they can compete against us yet."
The competition is run along the lines of an equine show-jumping contest. The rabbits enter the ring one by one and try to jump every obstacle with as few mishaps as possible. Each time a rabbit knocks over or dislodges a bar on a hurdle, it gets a time penalty. Also frowned upon are a crooked liftoff, crawling between the bars and, for the trainers, walking ahead of the rabbit, jerking its leash or lifting it over the jump. The fastest rabbit wins.
Local bunny jumpers are well aware of their limitations. After all, most of the British owners—exclusively female—are still at school and train their rabbits in their spare time. "We are only 15 or 16 and we are doing it as a hobby. But we hope it gets bigger here," says 16-year-old Charlotte McLatchey, as she clutched her brown-and-white Dutch rabbit, Russell. Female rabbits compete along with males.
Cherie, a two-year-old Swedish bunny, and owner Magdalena Åhsblom competed at the Rabbit Grand National Jan. 28 in Harrogate, England.
She is full of admiration for the visitors. "The Swedes are amazing. They have done it more and have better facilities," says Ms. McLatchey, who keeps her four rabbits in a hutch in the back garden. She is keen to emulate the Swedes' success. "I started training Russell when he was 10 weeks old. I put him in a harness and started playing with him so he would associate wearing the harness with having fun."
"After a small jump, I would give him a stroke or give him a treat like a bit of cabbage or carrot, which he loves," she says. On a good day, she says, Russell can now jump up to 50 centimeters, or about 20 inches. But today, he has stopped at one of the jumps and doesn't seem interested in moving.
"Bunny jumping in the U.K. looks like when it started in Sweden," says Mathilda Hedlund, who has been training rabbits for 13 years and whose bunny, Dilba, has taken part in major international competitions.
But there are some promising rabbits rising through the British ranks. Nicole Barratt, owner of Rukia, says her rabbit is catching up. "We are hoping he will jump higher, but we can't push him," she says.
The odds were always going to favor the Swedes; after all, the sport originated in the small southern town of Varalov in the 1970s, and Swedes have been breeding show-jumping rabbits since the 1980s. Today, close to 1,000 active bunny jumpers can find at least one competition somewhere in the country most weekends, and there are two national championships a year. The U.K., on the other hand, hosts just a handful of competitions a year and is home to only about 10 rabbit jumpers.
In Sweden, where the fluffy competitors train for up to two hours a day, there is an established network of breeders who are always looking for talent. "Our bunnies are so used to competing, so they know what to do," Ms. Hedlund says.
Choosing the right breed of rabbit is also important. Sweden's 200 or so breeders are experimenting widely, and charge more—up to 1,500 kronor ($225)—for a rabbit with prizewinning parentage.
"You want mini lop for the cool and positive attitude and hare for the bigger size and long back legs," Ms. Hedlund says. "But you don't want too much temperament; you'd want a mix of a cool and a competitive attitude."
Years ago, the Swedish sport consisted mostly of kids and teenagers jumping pets in their backyards. But owners soon organized local clubs that arranged competitions using small, homemade hurdles. In 1994, these clubs—about 20 nationwide today—were affiliated under the Swedish Rabbit Jumping Federation, a move that allowed them to organize at a national level and establish common rules. The federation even trains its judges. The sport also has a small following in other Nordic countries, the U.S., Germany and France. In the U.K., there is just one, recently formed club.
Bunny-jumping enthusiasts say it is good for the rabbits. A domestic rabbit that is allowed to exercise can live 10 or 12 years, compared with five years at most if kept in a cage, says Lisbeth Jansson, who has written two books on rabbit jumping and, with her husband, Lars, runs Libra Arctic, the world's only professional maker of rabbit jumps.
"These bunnies develop psyche, heart, lungs and muscles, so they live longer and the vets have more to do," she says. "Some [owners] even take out life insurance on renowned jumping rabbits."
At Agria Djurförsäkring, one of Sweden's biggest pet insurers, the number of rabbit insurance policies—the majority of which are intended to cover veterinary bills—has soared.
Trainers say Libra Arctic's tailor-made jumps, which range in price from 500 to 5,000 kronor, have set the standard for the sport. This year, the Harrogate organizers spent about 10,000 kronor on a complete set of jumps to pimp up the Rabbit Grand National. "You could say we own this market," Ms. Jansson says.
Despite their dominance of the sport, Swedish bunnies are bested by their Danish neighbors when it comes to world records. In 1999, a Danish rabbit called Yaboo set the world long-jump record when he flew over a three-meter, or nearly 10-feet, hurdle, while his compatriot Tösen bounced 99.5 centimeter, or about 40 inches, to nab the high-jump record in 1997.
So, how will the British bunnies fare in future? Ms. Hedlund, the owner of Swedish veteran Dilba, says she was disappointed the Brits couldn't compete against the Swedes this year. "It would be really fun if they started breeding proper rabbits, too. But they are getting better and better with more training."
Write to Javier Espinoza at javier.espinoza@wsj.com and Anna Molin at anna.molin@dowjones.com | Rabbit jumping is a new hobby among young women in England, but they are no match for the Swedes, who are champions at the sport. |
Talk about a long download time. Scientists on Earth have finally received the last data package from the New Horizons spacecraft’s Pluto flyby last year, NASA reported on Thursday.
The data had to travel an astounding 3.4 billion miles, taking over five hours to cover the distance between the craft and Earth before being received at a Deep Space Network site in Australia. The space agency said that it took so long for them to receive all of the data from Pluto because the probe was designed to collect as much information as possible during its flyby, then transmit it back by priority level.
SCIENTISTS TO STUDY STRANGE STAR FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE
“The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons,” Alan Stern, the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission, said in a statement. “There’s a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth.”
First launched in 2006, New Horizons was designed to study Pluto and its moons, which it did during a historic flyby on July 14 of last year. Its discoveries on Pluto include a huge nitrogen glacier, a giant mountain range, and the reason the dwarf planet’s moon Charon has a red patch on it.
Scientists will erase the data on New Horizons to make space to gather more information as it continues zooming away from Earth, NASA said. Its next destination is a distant object called 2014 MU69, and the probe’s scheduled arrival there is January 1, 2019.
Follow Rob Verger on Twitter: @robverger | Talk about a long download time. |
Defense attorneys for accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan are racing to collect evidence that could show their client is insane before a psychiatric evaluation is completed.
Accused Fort Hood killer Nidal Malik Hasan, in a 2007 photo.
The Army on Wednesday evening told Maj. Hasan's defense lawyers that it had convened a so-called sanity board to evaluate whether Maj. Hasan is fit to stand trial. The three-person panel is expected to make a recommendation by the end of February, a timeline that has defense attorneys frustrated.
Maj. Hasan is accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian in a Nov. 5 rampage at the Texas Army base. Prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty.
Maj. Hasan's mental status is shaping up to be a central issue in the case. John P. Galligan, the retired Army colonel leading the defense team, has said he was considering pursuing an insanity defense, and the Army has appointed a prosecutor with experience in such cases.
Legal experts said an insanity defense could be Mr. Galligan's best chance of winning an acquittal for his client, or at least avoiding the death penalty. But it wouldn't be easy. Defendants, both in civilian and military trials, rarely are found not guilty on the basis of their mental state. A 2006 study by three Army psychiatrists found that in the more than 21,000 courts-martial between 1990 and 2006, only six defendants were found not guilty by reason of insanity.
"It's just a hard sell," said Hugh Overholt, a North Carolina attorney specializing in defending military clients. "I've had a case where I was absolutely convinced the guy was nuts," and still couldn't win an acquittal, he said.
When Maj. Robert Martin, an Army attorney, got caught passing bad checks and defrauding his clients of about $100,000, the evidence against him was overwhelming. Mr. Martin's lawyers argued that he was insane.
The attorneys brought in mental-health experts, including the chairman of Duke University's Psychiatry Department, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. They dug up evidence of his erratic behavior, including a bizarre get-rich-quick scheme involving selling honey-baked hams in Mexico. They argued their client committed his crimes while in a manic state during which he didn't know the difference between right and wrong.
The strategy didn't work. Mr. Martin was convicted, kicked out of the Army and sentenced to two years' confinement. "To this day I'm satisfied that all of his misconduct occurred during his manic states," said Mark Waple, the lead defense attorney in the case. Mr. Martin couldn't be reached for comment.
Defense attorneys faced a similar challenge in the case of Hasan Akbar, an Army sergeant accused of killing two U.S. soldiers in a grenade attack in the early days of the Iraq war. Sgt. Akbar's lawyers argued he had a history of depression and was too mentally ill to be capable of premeditation.
In 2005, an Army jury found Sgt. Akbar guilty and sentenced him to death. The defense is appealing the verdict. Col. Michael Mulligan, the officer who prosecuted Sgt. Akbar, recently joined the team that will prosecute Maj. Hasan.
In the case of Maj. Hasan, former colleagues and others who knew him have said he acted oddly in the months leading up to the shootings. While posted at the Fort Hood Army base, he lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, a place far smaller than he could have afforded on his salary. In the days before the shootings, he gave away many of his belongings.
Mr. Galligan said he was looking into such reports for evidence that his client was mentally unstable. But he said he hasn't yet been given access to reports or records from before the Nov. 5 shooting, and the Army's investigation into that period isn't completed.
The legal standards for an insanity defense are similar for civilian and military courts. In both, defendants can't be held responsible for their actions if mental illness prevented them from knowing the difference between right and wrong. They also can't be forced to stand trial if mental illness prevents them from participating in their defense.
The major difference between the civilian and military systems is the sanity board. This ad hoc panel, which generally includes at least one psychiatrist or psychologist, evaluates the defendant, looks at past behavior and makes a recommendation.
If the board rules the man is fit to stand trial, the defense can still introduce evidence of insanity. However, experts say that it is then difficult to get an acquittal, because the board's findings can be introduced at trial.
Mr. Galligan, Maj. Hasan's lawyer, accused the Army of rushing to evaluate his client before he has had time to do the necessary research to show "clear and convincing evidence" of insanity. He said he was looking into ways of appealing the decision to convene this board now.
Fort Hood spokesman Tyler Broadway wrote in an email to The Wall Street Journal that there was "no intent on the part of the government to 'rush' the sanity board process."
Adding to the complexity of the Fort Hood case is the fact that Maj. Hasan is a psychiatrist and may have had contact with the sanity-board members. Neither the Army nor Mr. Galligan would release the names or backgrounds of the people appointed to the board, but all of them are military medical professionals. Mr. Galligan had asked for civilian experts to serve on the board to avoid such conflicts.
"I remain very, very skeptical that he could ever get a fair sanity hearing if the board is composed of Department of Defense members," Mr. Galligan said.
Military justice experts said that even if Mr. Galligan can't get an acquittal for his client on insanity grounds, evidence of mental illness can help win defendants a reduced sentence.
Write to Ben Casselman at ben.casselman@wsj.com | Accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan's defense attorneys are racing to collect evidence to show their client is insane before a psychiatric evaluation is completed. |
Voltron, the massive robot warrior who remains a pillar of 1980s kids-cartoon nostalgia, is coming back, albeit in a thoroughly 21st century format.
“Voltron Legendary Defender,” an all-new series created by DreamWorks Animation, is coming to Netflix, where the show’s creative overseers hope it will appeal not only to its young target audience but also to adults who grew up on the 1980s cartoon.
“We’re absolutely making a show we think they can appreciate,” Joaquim Dos Santos, one of the showrunners, says about adult audiences.
But Dos Santos and fellow showrunner Lauren Montgomery, who previously worked together on “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and several other animated projects, aren’t interested in creating a simple remake of the original “Voltron: Defender of the Universe.” They wanted to keep certain things like the teamwork theme (five people piloting five different robots to form one giant robot warrior) and the basic look.
“Beyond that, we just wanted to start this show over anew and really expand upon all the lore and stories and the things we felt didn’t get a fair shake in the original,” says Montgomery.
The show so many American kids watched in the mid to late 1980s — particularly the episodes that featured five lion robots combining to form a huge, sword-wielding anthropomorphic robot — wasn’t even the original version. Rather, it was the product of producers cobbling together parts of a Japanese cartoon called “Beast King GoLion” while slapping together a story to make it all fit. There have been other “Voltron” series along the way, too, including a syndicated late 1990s computer-animated series and 2011′s “Voltron Force,” which aired on Nicktoons, an offshoot of the Nickelodeon cable channel.
With “Voltron Legendary Defender,” Montgomery and Dos Santos are looking to tell a richer, more detailed story than the original. The setup goes like this: Five teenagers from Earth find themselves on the trail of a mysterious power source, and they end up transported to the distant planet Arus, where they encounter Princess Allura, a character from the original series, and discover they are the chosen ones who will pilot Voltron amid an intergalactic war.
The exclusive clip above features Allura (veteran voice performer Kimberly Brooks) piloting a castle-like spaceship off Arus as the Voltron team prepares to defend the universe from villainous King Zarkon.
As the clip demonstrates, the animation style of “Voltron Legendary Defender” is very much in the spirit of the original and anime in general. It’s intentional, but not because the show’s animators are merely copying from their predecessors, the showrunners say. They grew up on anime and shows like “Voltron,” so it’s in their DNA. Much of the look of the show stems from design supervisor and artist Christie Tseng (“The Legend of Korra”), who brought her personal style to “Voltron Legendary Defender.”
“Since it feels genuine to her, it feels genuine to the show,” Montgomery says.
The first season of “Voltron Legendary Defender” premieres Friday, June 10, on Netflix. The first installment is about an hour long, while the remaining 10Â are about a half-hour long. | "Voltron Legendary Defender" updates the 1980s cartoon classic for the 21st century. |
No major American cultural force is more opposed to examination and more active in suppressing it today than Silicon Valley. So when it was revealed this week that Facebook board member Peter Thiel had been secretly bankrolling a lawsuit to inflict financial ruin on the news and gossip site Gawker, Silicon Valley cheered.
The investor Vinod Khosla wrote on Twitter that the “press gets very uppity when challenged”. And that these bad journalists need “to be taught lessons”.
Khosla has suffered a great deal of negative press since buying a beachfront community and blocking off public access to the historic surfing beach, an illegal move that has garnered him unflattering stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times – a news organization that Khosla says also does “clickbait journalism” and deserves some “lessons” as well.
Investor and bellicose Silicon Valley personality Jason Calacanis wrote that, though he disagrees with Thiel on some things, in this fight against Gawker, Thiel “is a hero, 100% in the right fighting against evil”.
Shark Tank TV show host and Twitter investor Chris Sacca wrote: “My one regret is that [a Valleywag writer at the time] isn’t personally liable for any of that money owed.”
Each of these investors – and many of those writing in a wave of local support for Thiel – add caveats that they’re happy to see “clickbait” or “gossip” journalists suffer but that they fully support “real” journalists. As Khosla made clear by putting the New York Times on the side of clickbait, many Silicon Valley investors see most press as suspect.
After six years as a reporter in Silicon Valley, I’ve found that a tech mogul will generally call anything unflattering I write “clickbait” and anything flattering “finally some real journalism”.
A macabre parlor game among reporters here now is to guess which billionaire will, as Thiel did, wait 10 years with a grudge before seizing an opportunity to bankrupt you and exact maximum revenge. It’s a paranoia that seems more fitting for reporters covering characters like Vladimir Putin than the latest startup.
In America today, almost no one wields the concentrated wealth and power that the new rulers of Silicon Valley have. As the prodigies grow up, they’re realizing just how much they can flex that power.
To be fair, by no means is everyone supporting Thiel. Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder, is now backing Gawker’s appeal, launching what looks like will become a proxy war. “First Look Media is looking into organizing amicus support for Gawker in its legal fight and appeal against Hulk Hogan,” Lynn Oberlander, First Look’s general counsel, told the New York Post.
Jason Mandell, co-founder of the startup PR firm LaunchSquad, whose client list includes Facebook, Coursera and Munchery, said he thought Silicon Valley generally had a healthy relationship with the tech press, less so with the broader press.
“People like Peter Thiel are used to being able to tell an engineer ‘this is broken – fix it’,” Mandell said. “They don’t understand the unique dynamic between the press and the public. They don’t understand the first amendment and free speech as it relates to the media.”
“Tech guys love tech reporters because they’re often rooting for them to succeed but when reporters go off that script and do something that’s more combative I think it’s jarring.”
Mandell said there’s a “unique relationship” between tech entrepreneurs and the press because while other industries might be doing bad things, Silicon Valley thinks it is doing good for the world.
“Everybody here is part of this revolution and everyone agrees it’s a good thing in general. People want Tesla to succeed,” he said. “If you’re covering finance you can’t be enamored with the CEO with Bank of America … But aside from companies like Uber, what companies in our world are doing bad things?” | Some in Silicon Valley have been threatening the ‘uppity’ press with rhetoric about journalists needing ‘to be taught lessons’. That’s not how it works |
There are two kinds of people in Burlington, Vermont: those who believe there are no Hillary supporters here, and those who believe there must be, somewhere, but that they’re all in hiding.
Inside Dobra Tea Parlor yesterday, incense was burning at the foot of a bronze bodhisattva. Two customers were drinking tea and writing somberly in their journals. In a corner, a pair of young women discussed alternative high schools. I leaned across the counter and asked, softly, where I might be able to find someone who was voting for Clinton.
The tea barista, Sam Hughes, looked shocked. “I don’t know anyone who would admit to being a Hillary supporter,” the 25-year-old told me, as I paid for a gluten-free tea cake.
Burlington is where Bernie started his political career, as a socialist mayor who wrote strongly worded dispatches to world leaders about the importance of military disarmament, and it’s still his home base. In the downtown shopping district, where insistent classical music is piped out over the street, passers-by laughed or stared when I asked about Hillary Clinton. Where could I find a Hillary supporter? “Try Georgia,” said a white-bearded man in a fleece vest.
In The Bern Gallery, a smoke shop that had not been named in honor of the Vermont senator, 24-year-old Molly Rhoads shook her head. She pulled up her sleeve to bare her elbow, which sported a Bernie tattoo. She had gotten it at a local parlor that has been giving away free tattoos in support of the candidate. “He has started a revolution for sure,” she said.
Several Burlingtonians told me they believed local Hillary supporters existed. They just didn’t know where to find them.
Outside of city hall, I thought I had finally struck gold. Seventy-six-year-old Sunny Long told me she was a Hillary supporter. “We all love Bernie, but we think Clinton has the global experience that’s lacking in Bernie,” she said.
I asked her how long she had lived in Burlington. “Ten days,” she said. She had just moved here from Florida.
Feeling discouraged, I headed to the town’s independent bookstore, the Phoenix. Maybe the booksellers would have a deeper network of sources. At first, Phil Clingenpeel was stumped. By a Hillary supporter, he asked, did I mean someone who liked Hillary, or someone who supports her more than Bernie?
The latter, I told him.
He thought for a while. He did know someone who knew someone who supported Hillary, but he wasn’t sure if that person actually lived in Burlington. His coworker had a better idea: she had a friend who had actually hosted a Hillary event at his house last week.
“I’ve sort of come out of the closet, as it were, within the past month,” Nate Orshan told me, when I drove out to the renovated woolen mill where he works to interview him.
Orshan, 48, is a web analyst who has lived in Burlington most of his life. “I think I’ve voted for [Bernie] every singe election I could up until now,” he said.
Being a Hillary supporter here is “tough,” he told me. “Sometimes I feel like that boy in the story, ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes.’” There’s a lot of love for Bernie, and and I understand it, and I feel it, too…I just feel that he doesn’t have the support nationally that he’s going to need.”
Many Bernie supporters, he said, “fail to see that a lot of the country is indeed very conservative, and, in fact, very religious. It’s not a question of his Judaism, it’s a question of his secularism, that I think is going to be such a nonstarter for so many voters across the country.”
Orshan promised to put me in touch with his small network of local Hillary fans.
Burlington is “a lonely place” for them right now, his friend Mattison told me, when I met her later that afternoon at a local brewery.
“It’s interesting, being out, having friends who aren’t, who are closeted Hillary supporters, who will message me on Facebook, or text me or email me, to say, ‘Thank you.’ Well, yeah, we have to speak up.”
The 50-year-old believes Hillary is the politician who will actually be able to move a progressive agenda forward.
Bernie “definitely speaks to the truth that the system is rigged, but I also think the truth of the matter is, Vermont is a very special place, and Bernie has never had to work through complicated changes in a complicated political sphere,” she said.
“When you see the people who are coming to [Trump’s] rallies, and the things that they’re saying—that’s the real America.”
While she loves living here, she said, “I know it’s not real.” | Five Republicans and two Democrats await the verdict of voters in a dozen states (and one territory) – with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton leading the polls |
Dramatic videos have emerged from the torrential downpour in Louisiana where more than 20,000 people have been rescued from floodwaters that are expected to continue rising in some areas of the state. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
Southern Louisiana is under water after three days of record-breaking rain. The historic and deadly flooding began to take shape Friday and continued through the weekend as wave after wave of moisture pummeled the Baton Rouge region.
The disaster was caused by two weather-related features — extreme humidity and near-stationary low pressure that hovered over the Gulf Coast for days.
Precipitable water — a measure of how much moisture is in the air over a certain location — was off the charts. Day after day, weather balloons relayed precipitable-water data that came close to or exceeded any other weather event on record in the region. On Friday morning, the precipitable-water reading was 2.8 inches.
[The news: Six killed, thousands displaced]
“Obviously we are in record territory,” the National Weather Service wrote.
Moisture values this large increase the likelihood of major flooding when there’s a sufficient trigger mechanism, like a low pressure cyclone. However, much more water vapor can be injected into the air when the flow converges. This is why rainfall totals can be far greater than the total precipitable water measured by weather balloons.
The low pressure system that triggered the storms was not particularly strong, but it was more than enough to scour the moisture from the overly saturated atmosphere. The system had many of the same atmospheric features seen in tropical storms, and it sprawled across the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle.
[‘Oh my god, I’m drowning': Video captures woman’s rescue]
Satellite imagery depicts how thunderstorms blossomed day after day, pulsing as the sun came up and fading as it sank below the horizon. The massive area of low pressure crawled west and then seemed to stop and linger over Louisiana for three days.
5-day GOES-13 water vapor loop showing day after day of convection resulting in #laflood pic.twitter.com/IK8UYlOhXe
— Dan Lindsey (@DanLindsey77) August 14, 2016
All-told, over 20 inches of rain fell in less than 72 hours around Baton Rouge. Rainfall rates peaked at six inches per hour. A flood warning remains in effect for the rivers around Baton Rouge.
72-hour preliminary rainfall totals. (National Weather Service)
Nine rivers crested at record levels as the water drained into the Louisiana Delta, but river height readings will be difficult to carry out amid the flooding. Many locations along the Amite River are measured manually, and the observers are likely to have evacuated. The National Weather Service is warning that rivers will experience a “long crest,” meaning they will stay in flood stage for days, not hours.
A Louisiana family is pulled to safety after rising flood waters nearly submerged their home. Gov. John Bel Edwards said Monday, Aug. 15 that at least 20,000 people have been rescued from unprecedented flooding and at least 10,000 people have been moved to shelters. (Reuters)
The Amite River levee system was built after the historic floods of April 1983. Now that system is being inundated with much more water than it was designed to withstand.
“The flood control system was designed to handle a recurrence of the 14.6-foot crest observed in that record [1983] event,” Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters wrote. As of Monday morning, the Amite River at Port Vincent was at 17.5 feet.
East of Baton Rouge, the Amite River at Denham Springs crested at 46.2 feet on Sunday, which breaks the record of 41.5 feet on March 8, 1983. Records at this location date back to 1921.
950a- Amite @ Denham Springs officially above 1983 record, still rising. #Flood pic.twitter.com/8o5XeweUiF
— NWS New Orleans (@NWSNewOrleans) August 13, 2016
The rain has tapered off since the weekend in southern Louisiana, but the flooding will continue for days. Backwater flooding, which occurs when water backs upstream because of blockage downstream, could occur well away fay from the main rivers.
“This event remains in full swing,” the National Weather Service wrote on Monday morning. | All-told, over 20 inches of rain fell in less than 72 hours around Baton Rouge. |
BALTIMORE—President Barack Obama Thursday night worked to fire up Democrats for the coming elections, punctuating his calls for an emphasis on the party’s values with a pointed shot at Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump.
“Democrats will win in November,” Mr. Obama told House Democrats at their annual retreat. “The reason I can say that with confidence is because we focus on the things that matter in the lives of the... | President Barack Obama worked to fire up House Democrats for the coming elections, punctuating his calls for an emphasis on the party’s values with a pointed shot at Republican Donald Trump. |
A 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit the central Philippines on Tuesday, causing roofs and buildings to collapse.
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A 7.2-magnitude earthquake collapsed buildings, cracked roads and toppled the bell tower of the Philippines' oldest church Tuesday morning, killing at least 20 people across the central region.
The quake sent people rushing out of homes and buildings, including hospitals, as aftershocks continued. At least five died in a stampede in Cebu, said Neil Sanchez, provincial disaster management officer.
Offices and schools were closed for a national holiday, which may have saved lives.
The temblor, which struck at 8:12 a.m., was centered about 33 kilometers (20 miles) below Carmen town on Bohol Island and did not cause a tsunami.
RELATED: LARGE EARTHQUAKE ROCKS PAKISTAN DAYS AFTER OTHER DEADLY QUAKE
Four people were killed in Bohol and 15 died in Cebu province, a more urban and densely populated region across the strait from the earthquake's epicenter, said Civil defense spokesman Maj. Reynaldo Balido. Another person died on Siquijor Island, southwest of Bohol. A total of 33 were injured.
In Cebu, a boat ride from Bohol, five were killed when a fishing port collapsed. Two more people died and 19 were injured when the roof of a market in Mandaue in Cebu province fell on them. Elsewhere in the city, a woman died after being hit on the head when the quake toppled a building.
Photos from Cebu broadcast on TV stations showed a fallen concrete 2-story building, and reports said an 8-month-old baby and a second person were pulled out alive.
"It's fortunate that many offices and schools are closed due to the holiday," said Jade Ponce, the Cebu mayor's assistant.
RELATED: PAKISTAN EARTHQUAKE DEATH TOLL HITS 348, WITH 552 INJURED
He said patients at the city's hospitals were evacuated to basketball courts and other open spaces "but we'll move them back as soon as the buildings are declared safe."
Historic churches suffered the most damage, including the country's oldest, the Basilica of the Holy Child in Cebu, which lost its bell tower.
A 17th-century limestone church in Loboc town, southwest of Carmen, crumbled to pieces, with nearly half of it reduced to rubble. Other old churches dating from the Spanish colonial period, which are common in the central region, also reported damage.
Cebu province, about 570 kilometers (350 miles) south of Manila, has a population of more than 2.6 million people. Nearby Bohol has 1.2 million people and is popular among foreigners because of its beach and island resorts and the Chocolate Hills.
RELATED: LARGE EARTHQUAKE STRIKES FUKUSHIMA IN JAPAN
Vilma Yorong, a Bohol provincial government employee, said she was in a village hall in Maribojoc town when "the lights suddenly went out and we felt the earthquake."
"We ran out of the building, and outside, we hugged trees because the tremors were so strong," she told The Associated Press by phone. "When the shaking stopped, I ran to the street and there I saw several injured people. Some were saying their church has collapsed."
She said that she and the others ran up a mountain fearing a tsunami would follow the quake. "Minutes after the earthquake, people were pushing each other to go up the hill," she said.
Tuesday is a national holiday for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, and that may have reduced casualties. The earthquake also was deeper below the surface than the 6.9-magnitude temblor last year in waters near Negros Island, also in the central Philippines, that killed nearly 100 people.
Regional military commander Lt. Gen. Roy Deveraturda said that he recalled soldiers from the holiday furlough to respond to the quake. He said it damaged the pier in Tagbilaran and caused some cracks at Cebu's international airport but that navy ships and air force planes could use alternative ports to help out.
Passenger flights were put on hold until officials check runways and buildings for damage.
Earthquakes are common in the Philippines, which lies along the Pacific "Ring of Fire." | The earthquake struck the central Philippines on Tuesday, collapsing roofs and cracking walls and roads. An 8-month-old baby was one the people pulled out alive from a fallen building. |
The summer job of a second-year law student has traditionally been one of the cushiest around. The associates hired by corporate firms for the season between their second and third years of law school could depend on being wined and dined at the fanciest restaurants, taken to concerts and ballgames and invited to schmooze with partners at lavish cocktail parties. Many days, the hardest part of the job would be choosing what five-star restaurant to go to for lunch.
All this at the salary of a first-year attorney, the equivalent of more than $100,000 a year.
This was always done in the name of wooing top-performing law students to say yes to the job offer they were almost sure to receive at the end of the summer. The top law firms competed so hard to land the best and the brightest that they'd pull stunts like renting out Fenway Park so attorneys and summer associates could play a friendly game of baseball. That's an actual annual event at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray.
This summer will look very different. More than 2,200 attorneys have been laid off since last fall. Some firms are asking their lawyers to take pay cuts while doing pro bono work for a year instead of coming into the office. The lavish life of the summer associate is a thing of the past--at least for now.
Some firms have canceled their summer associate programs altogether, while others have hired smaller classes or shortened the season. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld had to rescind some of its offer letters this year.
Spokespeople for all the law firms contacted for this article declined to comment. But career center directors at law schools and legal recruiters say they're all hearing the same thing: The party is over.
"Firms have been up front about the fact that it's not summer camp anymore," says Abbie Willard, associate dean for career services and policy initiatives the University of Chicago Law School. "The emphasis will be on the work and productivity. Not that they don't want them to enjoy their summer, but it will be more like the real life of a first-year employee." Or maybe not. How can there be that much for interns to do when many first- and second-year attorneys are themselves fighting to get enough work to make their required billable hours?
Law firms do need to keep up at least some hiring, since they, like other corporations, need to have a certain number of lower-, middle- and senior-level employees to do the work, particularly once the economy bounces back.
In years past, the job offer was the summer associate's to lose. Virtually every summer intern was offered a full-time job unless he or she was clearly a poor fit or screwed up. This year, not everyone will get an offer. That means that showing you're a quality employee is the only way to stand out from the crowd.
But that can be a problem.
"Firms don't even have work for their associates, let alone for their summer associates," says T.J. Duane, a principal at the legal recruiting firm Lateral Link. "They have partners who aren't giving work to senior associates, so that they themselves have work. There's a trickle-down effect." And if the interns at a firm don't do much actual work, Duane says, the partners might resort to looking at their schools and grade-point averages to decide who to offer a real job to.
Meanwhile, law schools are teaching their students to take responsibility. Stanford Law School holds an annual seminar on how to make the transition from student to associate, and this year's was more serious than before. The students were instructed to volunteer for work instead of waiting for it to fall into their laps. They were advised about law-firm etiquette, like not signing up for social events and then failing to show up.
"We wanted to make clear that regardless of what the firm told them, it would be a very competitive summer," says Susan C. Robinson, the school's associate dean for career services. "In past years, firms' partners would put up with behavior they might not tolerate from their own kids, because they wanted to get those top students. This year, the students need to earn their offers."
Robinson says firms are being explicit about what they won't tolerate now. "One complaint firms had in the past two years was that the students had a sense of entitlement," she says. "Around lunchtime, they would start trolling for associates to take them out to eat. I tell the students that should be the least of their worries. In no way, shape or form should they focus on lunch." | All of a sudden, it's not just wining and dining and going to ballgames. |
UNITED NATIONS — U.N. inspectors said Monday there is “clear and convincing evidence” that chemical weapons were used on a relatively large scale in an attack last month in Syria that killed hundreds of people.
The findings represent the first official confirmation by scientific experts that chemical weapons were used in Syria’s civil war, but the report left the key question of who launched the attack unanswered. The rebels and their U.S. and Western supporters have said the regime of President Bashar Assad was behind the Aug. 21 attack, while the Syrian government and its closest ally, Russia, blame the rebels.
Secretary of State John Kerry briefed U.S. allies on a broad agreement reached over the weekend with Russia to end Syria’s chemical weapons program, pressing for broad support for the plan that averted U.S. military strikes. Kerry met in Paris with his counterparts from France, Britain, Turkey and Saudi Arabia before seeking a U.N. resolution that would detail how the international community can secure and destroy Syria’s stockpile and precursor chemicals.
As a sign of possible difficulties ahead, Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sparred Monday over possible military action if Syria doesn’t abandon its chemical weapons.
And in Geneva, the chairman of a U.N. war crimes panel said it is investigating 14 suspected chemical attacks in Syria, dramatically escalating the stakes. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said the panel had not pinpointed the chemical used or who is responsible.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented the U.N. inspectors’ report to a closed meeting of the U.N. Security Council before its release.
“This is a war crime and a grave violation of … international law,” Ban told the council in remarks distributed to the press. “The results are overwhelming and indisputable. The facts speak for themselves.”
The inspectors’ report said “the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were used … in the Ghouta area of Damascus” on Aug. 21.
“The conclusion is that chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale,” the inspectors said in their report to Ban.
“This result leaves us with the deepest concern,” the inspectors said.
The inspectors were mandated to report on whether chemical weapons were used and if so which ones — not on who was responsible.
The rebels and their Western and Arab supporters blame President Bashar Assad’s regime for the attack in the rebel-controlled area of Ghouta. The Assad regime insists that the attack was carried out by rebels. The U.N. report mentions the Ghouta areas of Ein Tarma, Moadamiyeh and Zamalka, all of which were featured in the videos of victims that emerged shortly after the attack.
The report cited a number of facts supporting its conclusion:
— Rocket fragments were found to contain sarin.
— Close to the impact sites, in the area were people were affected, “the environment was found to be contaminated by sarin.”
— Blood, urine and hair samples from 34 patients who had signs of “intoxication” by a chemical compound provided “definitive evidence of exposure to sarin by almost all of the survivors assessed.”
— More than 50 interviews with survivors and health care workers “provided ample corroboration of the medical and scientific results.”
The inspectors described the rockets used to disperse the sarin as a variant of an M14 artillery rocket, with either an original or an improvised warhead. The report said the origin of the rockets was from the northwest, but gave no specific location and didn’t point a finger at the perpetrator.
The inspectors cautioned that the five sites they investigated had been “well traveled by other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission.”
“During the time spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated,” the report said. The areas were under rebel control, but the report did not elaborate on who the individuals were.
The Aug. 21 chemical attack unfolded as the U.N. inspection team was in Syria to investigate earlier reported attacks. After days of delays, the inspectors were allowed access to victims, doctors and others in the Damascus suburbs.
In the report, chief weapons inspector Ake Sellstrom said the team was issuing the findings on the Ghouta attacks “without prejudice” to its continuing investigation and final report on the alleged use of chemical weapons in three other areas. The letter said it hoped to produce that report as soon as possible.
Under an Aug. 13 agreement between the U.N. and the Syrian government, Sellstrom’s team was scheduled to investigate an alleged chemical weapons attack on March 19 on the village of Khan al Assal outside Aleppo and alleged attacks on two other sites which were kept secret for security reasons.
The inspectors’ report for the first time identified the two sites still to be investigated as Sheik Maqsood and Saraqueb.
The report also thanked the four laboratories designated by the Office for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to examine the samples from Syria, disclosing their locations for the first time — in Finland, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland.
Kerry and his French and British counterparts worked on a two-pronged approach to Syria. They called for enforceable U.N. benchmarks for eradicating the chemical weapons program and an international conference bolstering the moderate opposition.
An ambitious agreement reached with the Russians calls for an inventory of Syria’s chemical weapons program within one week, with all components of the program out of the country or destroyed by mid-2014.
France and the U.S. insisted that a military response to the Aug. 21 attack remained on the table, and were pressing for a U.N. resolution reflecting that in coming days.
“It has to be strong, it has to be forceful, it has to be real, it has to be accountable, it has to be transparent, it has to be timely. All of those things are critical. And it has to be enforced,” Kerry said. “We will not tolerate avoidance or anything less than full compliance by the Assad regime.”
Kerry said the agreement “fully commits the United States and Russia to impose measures under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter in the event of non-compliance.” Chapter 7 resolutions allow for military enforcement.
Russia’s Lavrov said Chapter 7 was the subject of “fierce debate” during the U.S.-Russia talks but stressed that “the final document … doesn’t mention it” and that the Security Council resolution being negotiated will not be under Chapter 7. He said if Syria fails to cooperate, the Security Council can pass an entirely different resolution “which may employ Chapter 7.”
Lavrov stressed that ongoing attempts to threaten the use of force against Syria would provoke the opposition and disrupt a chance for peace negotiations in Geneva that the U.S. and Russia have been trying to organize.
In London, Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi said Syria will comply with all Security Council resolutions and will facilitate the mission of the U.N. inspectors in line with the Russian-U.S. agreement. The comments were carried by state-run SANA news agency, which said al-Zoubi made the comments in an interview with Britain-based ITN TV on Sunday.
Meanwhile, invitations were going out Monday to top members of the Syrian National Coalition — the main umbrella opposition group — for an international conference in New York timed to coincide with next week’s U.N. General Assembly meeting, French officials said. | UNITED NATIONS — U.N. inspectors said Monday there is "clear and convincing evidence" that chemical weapons were used on a relatively large scale in an attack last month in Syria… |
This photograph may seem to show President Harry Truman, behind closed doors, playing poker while pondering the future of the Cold War world.
But in fact, as president, Truman almost never let himself be photographed during poker. The Truman in this picture is several years beyond his 1953 retirement.
Unaware of the photographer, Truman is playing his regular game at Kansas City’s exclusive 822 Club; his partners are mostly Republican businessmen. (With his old instinct for constructing ethnically balanced political tickets, Truman also played poker with friends at a predominantly Jewish country club.)
Truman was not the only president who loved poker. Warren Harding convened his “poker cabinet” twice a week over cigars and bootlegged whisky, in defiance of Prohibition, sparking rumors that he once gambled away some of the White House china. (One of Harding’s poker chums, Albert Fall, secretary of the interior, went to prison in the Teapot Dome scandal.)
Franklin Roosevelt employed poker varieties like nickel-ante stud to take the measure of appointed officials and members of Congress. One participant noticed that Roosevelt “studied the players as much as he did the cards.”
One night upstairs at the Executive Mansion, when the Senate and the House were about to adjourn — or so legend has it — F.D.R. ordained that whichever player was on top when it happened would be victorious. But when the call from Capitol Hill came, around 9:30 p.m., Roosevelt was behind and was said to conceal the news until he could take the lead.
Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, dismissed poker as unseemly for a president (he had taken up bridge), but in the Army, he played such an effective game — he called poker his “favorite indoor sport” — that his winnings paid for his dress uniform and an engagement ring for the woman who became his wife, Mamie. In time Ike spurned poker because he felt he was taking so much of his fellow officers’ cash.
During World War II, although he belonged to the Society of Friends, which opposed gambling, Richard Nixon cleaned up in five-card stud and other forms of poker while serving in the Navy in the South Pacific, reputedly earning the king’s ransom of about $8,000 (nearly $98,000 today).
Sporting a pith helmet, Nixon observed that “whoever is talking the loudest is pretty sure to be bluffing.” Still, one Navy friend watched the quiet player they called “Nick” relieve a senior officer of $1,500 (almost $20,000 now) with only two deuces.
Harry Truman was the president most publicly identified with poker, which seemed natural for a product of the Kansas City political machine led by the back-room Democratic boss Tom Pendergast.
Truman preferred what was described as a “frantic” high-low poker, which he called Vinson, after his favorite partner, Fred Vinson of Kentucky (whom he later named chief justice), playing with poker chips he had ordered specially embossed with the presidential seal. Truman’s famous motto, “The Buck Stops Here,” which was emblazoned on a sign atop his Oval Office desk, was a poker expression.
In March 1946, on the night before the Cold War started in earnest, Truman sat down to poker with Winston Churchill, who was wearing his zippered siren suit. The two men were riding aboard the presidential train, which was rushing across Missouri.
Churchill had played poker for decades. “This man is cagey and is probably an excellent player,” Truman had quietly warned his advisers. “The reputation of American poker is at stake, and I expect every man to do his duty.”
“Boss, this guy’s a pigeon,” scoffed Truman’s roguish aide (and World War I Army pal) Gen. Harry Vaughan, who added, “If you want us to give it our best, we’ll have his underwear.” By the time the game stopped at 2:30 a.m., the former British prime minister had indeed lost about $250.
Later that day, in a milestone address in Fulton, Mo., Churchill declared that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across Europe. Had there been any question before, Harry Truman was now the first Cold War president.
As the confrontation with Moscow accelerated, it was only partly by coincidence that the language of Truman’s beloved pastime — bluff, gamble, hidden cards, showdown — was adopted by political leaders, generals and strategists.
The metaphor of poker ran through Cold War history. For instance, in 1953, President Eisenhower deliberately bluffed his way toward an armistice in the Korean War, which remains in force today, by sending a message, through channels intended to be intercepted by the enemy, that he was weighing the imminent use of nuclear weapons.
When President John F. Kennedy, in 1962, faced down the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who thereupon reluctantly agreed to remove missiles from Cuba, Vice President Lyndon Johnson privately summarized J.F.K.’s performance by saying, “He plays a damn good hand of poker.”
In 1971, President Nixon sought to end the American estrangement from China, hoping that this gamble would unnerve the Soviets into pressuring the North Vietnamese to end the Southeast Asia war. Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, boasted to a reporter that his boss “wasn’t the best poker player in the Pacific for nothing.”
But the shrewdest player of all may have been a president who had never especially favored poker. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan upped the ante against the Soviets by increasing defense spending and devising his Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.), both of which, he hoped, would spur the Kremlin, feeling outgunned, to sue for peace.
Historians will argue for decades over how much Reagan’s strategy encouraged it, but on a weekend in November 1986, inside a little house in Reykjavik, Iceland, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed to destroy both countries’ nuclear arsenals if Reagan would pledge to shut down S.D.I. and trim the United States defense budget.
At that moment, the end of the Cold War came into view. Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, pronounced the private bargaining “the highest stakes poker game ever played.” As both poker aficionado and champion of freedom, Harry Truman would have been delighted.
Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author of nine books and a contributor to NBC News and “PBS NewsHour.” Follow him on Twitter at @BeschlossDC.
The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
A version of this web log appears in print on September 20, 2014, on page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Presidents, Poker and the Cold War. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe | The metaphor of poker was used by many presidents, but Truman was the one most publicly identified with the game. |
KABUL — Combat operations in the province of Helmand officially ended on Sunday for the American Marines and British troops stationed there, bringing an end to a decade-long struggle to keep a major Taliban stronghold and the region’s vast opium production in check.
Officials commemorated the handover during simultaneous ceremonies at Camp Leatherneck for the Marines and Camp Bastion for the British forces, conjoined bases that made up the coalition headquarters for the region.
The Afghan Army’s 215th Corps will assume full control of the camps, a 6,500-acre parcel of desert scrubland in Southwest Afghanistan — and with it responsibility for securing one of the most violent provinces in the country.
While some American combat troops will remain in Afghanistan through the end of the year, the closing of Camp Bastion signified the end of all British operations in the country. During the nation’s long tenure in Helmand, which began in 2006, British forces lost 453 servicemen in the conflict.
The handover came amid the deadliest period on record for Afghan forces. In the six months since March, more soldiers and police officers have died than any period since the start of the war, evidence of the fact that the Afghan forces are truly in the lead, and of the grinding battle that lies ahead. Played out this summer, areas once deemed relatively secure grew problematic, while trouble spots became engulfed in violence.
Nowhere has that fight been more apparent — or deadly — than in Helmand.
Helmand was the first site of the United States’ 2010 troop surge, when thousands of military personnel were dispatched into Afghanistan to beat back a resurgent Taliban. Hundreds of coalition troops lost their lives to ambushes and roadside bombs in the bleak deserts and verdant valleys of Helmand.
Districts like Sangin and Marja, home to some of the most violent fighting of the past 13 years, became household names as the United States wound down its war in Iraq and accelerated its involvement in Afghanistan.
For the British forces, Helmand was the centerpiece of a multiyear counternarcotics effort that largely failed to stem poppy cultivation. The province, which is home to more than 80 percent of the nation’s opium production, remains the heart of the illicit drug trade. According to a United Nations report, 2013 saw more land used to cultivate the crop than any year since the international community began recording the figure.
Still, officials on Sunday expressed cautious optimism that the Afghans would be ready to handle the fight on their own. While the Taliban tested districts throughout northern Helmand, claiming checkpoints, causing hundreds of casualties and sowing fear into the local population, the movement failed to claim any district centers from the government.
“Because of the competence, resolve and combined skills of the A.N.S.F., insurgent networks have become ineffective in Helmand Province,” said a statement from the International Security Assistance Force, referring to the Afghan National Security Forces.
In reality, locals say, the Taliban have never been stronger in the province. In the face of Western assertions, they added, the Taliban have claimed stretches of area surrounding the government centers and have dominated rural areas, as well as the flourishing drug trade.
Perhaps more worrisome are the trends that developed in northern Helmand over the past five months. Unlike years past, the Taliban massed in large groups to contest government forces, a previously unthinkable dynamic given the presence of coalition air support.
“Their departure will have an impact on people’s lives and security in Helmand,” said Muhammud Fahim Musazai, the governor of Helmand’s Greskh district. “We will face some problems, like other areas of Afghanistan where the foreigners have left and the Taliban entered afterward.”
Sangin district, in particular, became a weather vane of the changing war. Reports of hundreds of Taliban attacking police check points surfaced early in the district. Whispers of cease-fire deals between local army commanders and Taliban militants also emerged in Sangin, causing a stir in Kabul, where officials denied the accounts and doubled efforts to quell the insurgency.
“The bases that are closing down in Helmand Province will definitely pave the ground for the Taliban to hold the power in the area,” said Haji Ibrahim, a tribal elder from Sangin. “Our security forces are not able to kick out the Taliban.” | The handover signified the end of all British operations in the country, and the Afghan Army assumed full control of the camps, bringing an end to a long struggle to keep a Taliban stronghold in check. |
The emotional storyline was too much for audiences so Channel 4 cut the scenes from the popular TV fly-on-the-wall show
PRODUCERS of the popular Channel 4 TV show Gogglebox cut Peggy Mitchell’s suicide scenes from the show after families were left traumatised.
Millions of viewers tuned into watch the uncomfortable exit of the nation’s favourite landlady as she bid goodbye to years of traumatic drama in Albert Square.
But the storyline involving Peggy’s overdose after learning she had terminal cancer was too much for some of the families.
In the show Peggy, played by Barbara Windsor, had an emotional discussion with her son Grant, in which he begged his mother not to take her own life. But the intervention was futile and the story played out.
Now Gogglebox cast members have revealed the whole concept was too much for them.
And that it hit close to home.
Foster carer Lynne McGarry who is a regular on the show with her husband Pete and her son George Gilbey has revealed the family’s reaction to the harrowing scenes was not shown to audiences.
Lynne told the Daily Star: “Pete broke down because he thought of how him and his brother felt when they lost their mum.
“The producers said it was too sad to show.
“He said to me, ‘When that happens you don’t want to accept it. You want to hold on for as long as you can. You don’t want them to go.
“All three of us were sitting there and one by one we broke down.”
Each of the families who signed up to appear on Gogglebox watch a mandated amount of television every week and their reactions to the show are recorded and aired on television.
But an insider said the reaction to Peggy’s suicide was deemed to be too much.
The source said: “But the reactions to Peggy committing suicide were really raw.
“It felt like their responses were too personal to be aired so the decision was made to cut them from the edit.” | PRODUCERS of the popular Channel 4 TV show Gogglebox cut Peggy Mitchell’s suicide scenes from the show after families were left traumatised. Millions of viewers tuned into watch the uncomfort… |
Japan Airlines planes park on tarmac of Tokyo's Haneda Airport.
Japan Airlines planes park on tarmac of Tokyo's Haneda Airport.
TOKYO -- Japan Airlines is raising 663 billion yen ($8.5 billion) in its initial public offering, pricing its shares at the top of its range at 3,790 yen ($48 a share). That makes it the world's second biggest IPO this year after Facebook.
The Tokyo-based carrier, which went bankrupt in 2010, will be nearly doubling the money the government-backed bailout body pumped in. It announced the pricing Monday, the highest in a range that started from 3,500 yen ($45), underlining healthy investor demand for the shares.
The company posted a profit 187 billion yen ($2.4 billion) profit for the fiscal year ended March 2012, an impressive feat considering the beating that global carriers have taken with price competition and surging oil prices.
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Six rivals to Apple's 'iWatch'
(CNN) -- It's been a while since we've heard anything concrete on Apple's rumored "iWatch" device, but Bloomberg now reports that Apple has filed on June 3 to trademark that name in Japan.
This doesn't necessarily mean anything -- companies file for protective trademarks all the time -- but it's one more indication that Apple is dabbling in wearable computing.
iWatch rumors have been flying for most of the year, but we still don't have a clear idea of what the gadget might look like (or what it would do) if it ever comes to market.
One report said that the watch would run a version of iOS but suggested that battery life issues could be holding it back. The watch might also include a pedometer and other sensors to help it compete with fitness gadgets like Nike's FuelBand and the Fitbit.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has previously said that "amazing new hardware" would be coming out this fall and throughout 2014, but whether he meant new product categories like an iWatch or simply refreshes of Apple's existing products (like the new Mac Pro) is anyone's guess.
Either way, there's no need to worry if the iWatch doesn't pan out -- you can always rely on the Pebble watch or the rumored devices from Samsung, Google, or Microsoft to cover your unsightly naked wrists. | Bloomberg now reports that Apple has filed on June 3 to trademark the name "iWatch" in Japan. |
''Congress shall make no law,'' says the First Amendment, ''abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.'' But an angry, flag-waving Congress is making it a crime to print names the Government doesn't want published, even when they are derived from public sources. Last week the Senate refused to be outdone by the House in making the Intelligence Identities Protection Act offensive to the Bill of Rights.
We understand, indeed share, much of the anger. It is engendered by Philip Agee, a former C.I.A. agent, and Louis Wolf, an ally who never worked for the Government. They have published lists of covert agents in efforts to hobble American intelligence. They claim a journalistic mission but their listings, about as journalistic as a phone book, expose the nation's undercover agents with little regard for possible illegalities.
Some response to such irresponsibility was warranted. Congress properly set out to declare it a crime for Mr. Agee to misuse information acquired in his work for the Government. But despite warnings that it would be constitutionally impossible to prohibit the activities of Mr. Wolf, a private citizen, the House tried anyway last fall and the Senate has now followed suit.
The results are bills that would remedy irresponsibility of one sort with irresponsibility of another. Any legislation aimed at Mr. Wolf was fraught with danger for all journalists, but the Senate and House rejected measures that were at least arguably closer to constitutional standards. They refused to require strict proof of deliberate intent to impair or impede American intelligence through exposure of agents' identities. Without that, they leave no room for important journalism that necessarily names names.
The C.I.A. held out for an easier burden for prosecutors, proof only of a ''reason to believe'' the exposure would harm intelligence. The Reagan Administration went so far as to make this relaxed rule a test of loyalty; fearing that they would be called soft, many senators melted.
''Reason to believe'' that a published fact will somehow damage Government is too easily charged. It amounts to saying a reporter should have known that some official would think an article harmful, as some official always does. It's a standard better suited to negligence cases than criminal law. Indeed, Senator Chafee of Rhode Island, a leading advocate of reason-to-believe for news organizations, persuaded the Senate last year that reason-to-know was too tough a test in prosecuting corporate officials for tolerating bribery abroad.
What happens when Congress thus ignores the Constitution? Courageous members will continue to fight the issue in House-Senate conference. Resourceful journalists will maintain their vigilance against official secrecy. Government can forbear and use its illegitimate power sparingly. All should hope the courts will wipe the law from the books. | ''Congress shall make no law,'' says the First Amendment, ''abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.'' But an angry, flag-waving Congress is making it a crime to print names the Government doesn't want published, even when they are derived from public sources. Last week the Senate refused to be outdone by the House in making the Intelligence Identities Protection Act offensive to the Bill of Rights. |
The Obamas will move to a nine-bedroom home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington D.C. after leaving the White House in 2017, according to reports.
The family will rent the 8,200-square-foot home while President Obama’s daughter Sasha finishes high school in the nation’s capitol. The home is owned by Joe Lockhart, a Democratic Party insider who now serves as an executive at the National Football League, and his wife Giovanna Gray Lockhart, a Glamour editor.
The location in Kalorama is a popular spot for many of the city’s wealthy and already features a large security presence to protect the many diplomats who call it home.
The news, first reported by Politico, comes less than a month after the White House announced that the Obama’s oldest daughter Malia will attend Harvard University in the fall after taking a gap year. | They're staying in Washington so Sasha can finish high school |
Dear Annie: Help! One of our top IT people just left to go work for a competitor, giving us only a week’s notice, and we just realized that we never asked him to sign anything regarding the proprietary information he has had access to for the past several years. We don’t use non-compete agreements because they’re illegal here, but ordinarily we do ask senior people to sign a document promising that they won’t reveal confidential data.
This person—who knows so much it’s making us frantic, frankly—never signed anything because he started from a lower-level job and then, when he got promoted (twice), nobody thought about it. Is there anything we can do now to make sure he doesn’t spill the beans to his new employer, or is it too late? — Kicking Ourselves in California
Dear K.O.C.: Yikes. It’s easy to see why you’re in a tizzy about this. For companies built on proprietary intellectual property, “the thought of losing employees who have access to those assets is an absolute nightmare,” says Silicon Valley IP attorney and author James Pooley. “After all, HR can take back a departing employee’s keys and company laptop, but how do you erase the valuable knowledge in his or her head?”
You can’t, of course, but take a deep breath and relax. Pooley thinks you may be able to contain the damage. Pooley recently finished a five-year stint as deputy director general at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, where he was in charge of the international patent system. He is also the author of a new book, Secrets: Managing Information Assets in the Age of Cyberespionage.
The main thing working in your favor is that you ordinarily ask people with access to company secrets to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). “If you have taken formal steps to protect information, including things like training employees in security procedures, most courts will back you up” if a dispute over confidential data ever gets that far, Pooley says. “A judge is unlikely to find against you based on this one oversight.”
More to the point, you can probably avoid a courtroom altogether. “In my experience, it’s usually enough to remind the person who quit that he is under an obligation not to reveal trade secrets, which are protected by law in most states, as well as by your company policy,” says Pooley.
“Have a lawyer write a letter emphasizing that you expect your former employee to abide by that,” he suggests. “Then send a letter to his new employer, saying essentially the same thing. You do have rights here, and you can often get the result you want just by asserting them.” Since your competitor is, without doubt, well aware that you could sue them for making commercial use of anything confidential your ex-employee may reveal, a little bit of legal saber-rattling usually works.
The larger question, of course, is how you’re going to stop anything like this from keeping you up at night in the future. It’s probably no consolation, but you’re far from alone in having promoted your ex-employee without considering how much you were increasing his exposure to trade secrets. Most employers don’t think about asking people to sign NDAs when they move up the chain and into sensitive jobs, notes Pooley.
“It’s a hassle to make an NDA part of your checklist every time you’re thinking about promoting someone,” he says. “The easier way is to have everyone in the whole company sign one.” After all, even the most junior staffers might come across proprietary information, perhaps by accident, while doing their jobs.
What’s more, Pooley adds, employers should ask everyone to sign another document, called an assignment of invention, which clearly states that the company owns any new intellectual property someone creates using company resources.
Why? “Let’s say you hire someone who is not a programmer and whose job doesn’t include writing code,” says Pooley, who has seen this situation more than once. “Nonetheless, he or she writes a valuable piece of software. Without a written invention-assignment agreement, a court may well question who owns it, the company or the employee.” If the latter, there’s nothing you can do to stop him or her from taking it elsewhere or selling it to the highest bidder.
One more way to increase the chances that confidential information stays safely locked up in departing employees’ heads, Pooley says, is to “never skip an exit interview. Even if there’s no reason to believe that the departing employee has any plans to breach company confidentiality, an exit interview is a good opportunity to reiterate your concerns, and emphasize that you’re determined to protect the company’s intellectual property.”
This conversation should include a review of what exactly the employee knows that you consider off-limits to outsiders, since “the potential for harm isn’t limited to deliberately stolen data,” observes Pooley. “Simple misunderstandings about what’s confidential or proprietary, and what isn’t, can also lead to distracting, expensive litigation.” And nobody wants that. Good luck.
Talkback: Would you sign a nondisclosure agreement if your employer requested it? What about an invention-assignment agreement? Leave a comment below.
Have a career question for Anne Fisher? Email askannie@fortune.com. | Maybe. But without a written nondisclosure agreement, it's dicey. |
A cruise ship with thousands of passengers safely docked in Sydney Harbor on Wednesday morning after suffering damage in 40-foot seas during a dangerous storm that caused officials to close the area’s commercial shipping wharfs, according to the Port Authority of New South Wales.
The Carnival Spirit ship arrived in the overseas passenger terminal at around 9:30 a.m. local time, roughly 24 hours after its originally scheduled arrival, officials said. Harbour Master Captain Phil Holliday had shut down the ports just before 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning due to winds of around 57 mph and waves approaching heights of 42 feet, he noted in an announcement.
The ship’s 2,500 passengers and 1,500 crew members remained offshore on Tuesday at the end of a 12-day tour of New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji, Carnival officials told ABC News.
The ship took on water on a fourth-level deck and elsewhere and the squall shattered glass panels during the trying ordeal, Fairfax Media reporter and happenstance passenger Rachel Browne reported in an eyewitness account in the Sydney Morning Herald. Teacups and other drinking vessels in Browne’s quarters fell to pieces when they “blew off the table and hit the wall,” she wrote.
But there were no reported injuries when passengers disembarked Wednesday morning, other than a few cases of seasickness, 9 News reported.
Carnival representatives didn’t immediately respond to request for the extent of the damages on the massive ship.
One relieved passenger, however, noted that patio furniture outside her room had smashed through a glass partition and closet doors in her cabin had rocked off their hinges in an interview with 9 News at the port on Wednesday.
“It was scary, there wasn’t a lot of sleep the past two nights,” she told the TV channel, while praising the crew. “They probably have a lot of work to do but the staff was awesome.”
The Carnival Spirit ship may have escaped the worst of the storm, though. Three people reportedly died and at least one home washed away in floods in the hard-hit town of Dungog about 125 miles to the north of Sydney, the Associated Press reported. Around 200,000 homes and businesses lost power as the storm pummeled New South Wales with over a foot of rain and gusts up to 60 m.p.h., according to AP.
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With With News Wire Reports | The cruise ship with thousands of passengers survived 40-foot seas and storm damage off the Sydney coast, officials said. |
Why is it that whenever a politician is found guilty of corruption, liberals use it as an excuse to reduce everyone else’s freedom? Friday’s conviction of former New York Senate leader Dean Skelos and his son had barely been announced when the Brennan Center declared that the verdict “isn’t a permanent solution to Albany’s systemic rot.”
A jury took only eight hours to convict Skelos, a Republican, and son Adam on all eight counts of... | Another guilty politician in Albany is not an excuse to limit political speech, writes the Wall Street Journal in an editorial. |
"The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" came in first place, but far behind expectations.
(EW.com) -- Well, that didn't go as planned. Two high-profile films, the 3-D fantasy epic "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and the romantic thriller "The Tourist," registered inauspicious openings as the overall box office trailed last year for the fifth weekend in a row.
Fox's "Dawn Treader," the third film in the franchise based on C.S. Lewis' beloved children's novels, led with $24.5 million, according to studio estimates.
That's a disappointing opening for a series whose first two entries, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Prince Caspian," debuted to $65.6 million and $55 million, respectively. "Dawn Treader's" opening gross puts it in a league that includes such other fantasy clunkers as "Eragon" and "The Golden Compass."
While box-office prognosticators were predicting a decline from prior "Narnia" movies, no one foresaw "Dawn Treader" stumbling this much. It's hard to decipher what went wrong.
According to a rep for a rival studio, Fox's marketing sold the $140 million movie as more of the same, instead of as a fresh take on the "Narnia" universe. But the film's outlook may not be as dreary as it initially seems.
For one thing, "Dawn Treader" scored an encouraging "A-" from CinemaScore audiences. And with the holiday season, Fox is quick to point out that the film is positioned for a marathon, not a sprint. "Its best days are ahead of us," says a studio rep.
"The Tourist" arrived via a Venetian gondola instead of a speeding water taxi.
Despite the star presence of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, this remake of the 2005 French movie opened to a modest $17 million. With a budget north of $100 million, Sony now must hope the PG-13 thriller performs significantly better overseas.
In third place, Disney's animated musical "Tangled" slipped only 33 percent for $14.6 million, bringing its domestic total to $115.6 million.
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 1" didn't hold up as well, dropping 50 percent for $8.5 million. The PG-13 fantasy film has grossed a potent $257.7 million to date, although it trails all other Potter entries in estimated attendance. And the Denzel Washington runaway-train thriller "Unstoppable" dipped 37 percent for $3.8 million.
While many of the major Hollywood films were floundering, the indie scene thrived this weekend.
Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" expanded to 90 theaters and leaped to sixth place with $3.3 million, for an astounding per-theater average of $37,000. The psychological thriller starring Natalie Portman will expand to at least 800 theaters next weekend.
And the boxing drama "The Fighter," starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, slugged $320,000 from four theaters. That's an $80,000 per-theater average. Julie Taymor's "The Tempest," however, stirred as much interest in the moviegoing public as the Shakespearean play commonly stirs in ninth-graders. It took in just $45,000 from five theaters.
Check back next weekend as three new films -- "TRON: Legacy," "How Do You Know" and best picture-contender "Yogi Bear" -- open nationwide for your moviegoing consideration.
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© 2010 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved. | Well, that didn't go as planned. Two high-profile films, the 3-D fantasy epic "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and the romantic thriller "The Tourist," registered inauspicious openings as the overall box office trailed last year for the fifth weekend in a row. |
MEXICO CITY — A missing Honduran beauty queen, María José Alvarado, and her older sister, Sofía, have been found dead, their bodies buried in the sand of a riverbank near where they disappeared, the police in Honduras said on Wednesday.
The sisters had not been seen since Thursday, after they attended a birthday party for Sofía Alvarado’s boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz, at a resort near their home in western Honduras. He was arrested Tuesday, and the police told local news media that he was the leading suspect in their investigation.
The search for the missing sisters had riveted Honduras, the small Central American country that has the highest peacetime murder rate in the world. Their mother, Teresa Muñoz, made daily televised appeals for their safe return this week from her home in the western region of Santa Barbara.
María José Alvarado, 19, had been scheduled to leave for London on Wednesday to compete in the Miss World contest. She had worked as a hostess on a popular television variety show and was finishing a technical degree in computing.
Sofía, 23, was a teacher and had been dating Mr. Ruiz for about three months, according to Ms. Muñoz.
A second man, Aris Maldonado, was also arrested on Tuesday, and the police said they expected to make additional arrests.
The director of the National Police, Gen. Ramón Sabillón, said during a news conference that Mr. Ruiz had shot Sofía during an argument after she danced with another man at the party.
María José was shot twice in the back as she tried to flee, said General Sabillón, according to The Associated Press.
Leandro Osorio, the director of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, told local news media that the police had found a gun they suspect was used in the shooting in Mr. Ruiz’s possession. His white Toyota pickup truck had been used to move the women’s bodies and then sent to a nearby garage to be painted, Mr. Osorio said. | The Honduran police said María José Alvarado and her older sister, Sofía, had been shot and buried on a riverbank. |
To help decorate our younger daughter’s new apartment, my husband and I offered any item in our basement. She took a painting. A few days later, she phoned to say that she had researched the artist, and his work averages $11,000 at auction.
We had no idea! Now she plans to sell the painting. Our older daughter is upset and has urged her to return it. My husband and I have remained silent. What should we do?
It’s just like that song by Irving Berlin: “Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister, and Lord help the sister who comes between me and my Man(et)!”
We all know clans who have waged the Wars of Inheritance. And while their squabbles over the silver service may look mercenary from the outside, to the family, all that stuff represents love and acceptance — not to mention cold, hard cash.
So take the bull by the horns (and the painting by the frame) and speak to your girls. Try: “We had no idea the painting was so valuable. You’re welcome to hang it at your place, Susie, but you may not skip off to Sotheby’s with it.”
From the sound of it, both daughters could use a gentle reminder that their parents are still alive — thank you very much! — and they needn’t worry about Mommy’s and Daddy’s assets until the day you keel over. Assure them that you will be fair with them, and with any other children or charities close to your hearts.
Then get some estate-planning advice — and an appraiser into that basement!
A friend is having terrific success in a career that is beneath her intellect and doing more harm than good to society. Worse, she revels in others’ misfortunes when it translates to an opportunity for her employer. She doesn’t seem aware of her personality change. May I express my misgivings?
Problem is, careers in the Mother Teresa trade are not terribly lucrative. So we start walking down a rent-paying road, and the next thing you know, we’re the chairman of Goldman Sachs, doing “God’s work” and making friends queasy with our good fortune (and indoor swimming pool).
But even ugly jobs need someone to do them. So, just how is your pal “reveling” in others’ misfortune? If she’s a foreclosure agent, gleefully tossing people out of their homes, chime in, “Wow, Janie, you’re enjoying this too much.”
If she’s an editor for TMZ, poring over failed romances of movie stars and pro athletes, let it slide. She’s more likely to pick up the tab that way.
Mind It? I Certainly Do
Am I wrong to blanch when strangers in coffee shops ask me to watch their laptops while they step away? When I say I am uncomfortable taking responsibility for their things, they are offended. Often, the favor is an opening for further conversation, and I must do my work. How do I politely turn them down?
Well, blanching seems a bit much, Blanche. Annoyed? Sure. Blood rushing from your face? Not so much.
Many times, folks just want to nip into the restroom or buy another scone without lugging their stuff or losing their seats. It doesn’t bother me, as it affords an excellent opportunity to rifle through their bags. But if minding a laptop feels like too much responsibility or unleashes a prolix Pandora from her box, just say: “Gosh, I was about to leave myself.”
Be prepared for an icy glare or stony silence when your neighbor returns and finds you still sitting there. But that’s almost what you were after in the first place, right?
Two Legs, Yes. Four, No.
I’m not sure how to handle houseguests who bring their dogs. Allergies are a factor, but we also would rather not have animals indoors. What to do?
Dogs are beasts — unless we’re speaking of mine, who is more refined than Lady Astor and better company than the Lifetime Movie Network when you’re at home with the flu.
I think most people feel this way, so tread lightly. People’s pooches are members of the family, and you don’t want to offend them with your perfectly reasonable preference. Lay it on thick with the allergies: ka-choo! For guests on extended travels, book space at your local vet — or on a featherbed at an overpriced doggie spa on which your friends will probably be all too happy to splurge.
For help with an awkward social situation, send queries to socialq@nytimes.com or Social Qâs, The New York Times Style Department, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Please include a daytime telephone number. | This week, answers to readersâ questions about what happens when daughters fight over heirlooms, houseguests who bring their dogs and other issues. |
The Marine Corps’ long, sometimes twisted, relationship with the M16 rifle is slowly coming to an end.
On Monday, the Marine Corps Times reported that the rifle is only a few signatures away from being phased out from front-line units and relegated to a support role. The move, which follows a similar one by the Army, comes as the Marine Corps implements its new small-arms modernization strategy.
“The proposal to replace the M16A4 with the M4 within infantry battalions is currently under consideration at Headquarters Marine Corps,” Maj. Anton Semelroth, a Marine spokesman, told the Marine Corps Times in an e-mail.
The weapon replacing the M16, the M4, is a smaller, carbine variant of the M16. Aesthetically the M4 looks only slightly different, with a collapsible stock and shorter barrel. And while the M4 also shoots the same sized bullet as the M16 — 5.56mm — the real benefits come from its reduced weight and portability.
[Why the Marines are looking at a new sniper rifle]
At 7.5 pounds — a pound lighter than the M16 — the M4 fits nicely with the age-old infantry adage: “ounces equal pounds, pounds equal pain.” Additionally, the M4’s smaller size is ideal for close quarters combat and vehicle operations.
U.S. Marines with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit's Maritime Raid Force advance on their targets while firing M4 carbine rifles on the flight deck of the USS Essex during training off the coast of San Diego in February 2015. (U.S. Marine Corps)
The Marine infantry’s adoption of the M4, however, is not completely new. The weapon has been fielded for quite some time, just not every Marine has been lucky enough to have one. In the past M4’s were generally issued to leadership while the average rifleman carried an M16.
Issuing the remaining Marine infantrymen with M4s will not cost the Marines a dime, as the Marines have the needed 17,000 M4s in stock, according to the Marine Corps Times.
The only drawback to using a M4 over the M16 is that the M4’s shorter barrel sacrifices accuracy out towards the maximum effective range of the rifle—500 meters. That is largely a moot point because at 500 meters the 5.56mm bullet fired by both the M16 and M4 is next to useless.
U.S. Marines from the Black Sea Rotational Force run a small arms range with Georgian Armed Forces using the M4 carbine rifle during Exercise Agile Spirit 15 at Vaziani Training Area, Georgia, July 10, 2015. (U.S. Army)
During the Vietnam war, when the M16 was first issued to U.S. troops, the Marines were some of the late adopters. In the early part of the war, Marine grunts hefted the M14, a grandson of sorts of the M1 Garand that was used in World War II and Korea.
The M16 of the Vietnam-era, though aesthetically similar, is not the M16 of today. The rifle of the 1960s was plagued with malfunctions due to issues with ammunition, corrosion resistance and other factors, as detailed in this excerpt from the book “The Gun.” Today, the M16 is not without its skeptics, however after various upgrades and modifications it is vastly more reliable and generally well-liked among current troops.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a staff writer and a former Marine infantryman. | Marine infantryman likely will soon carry only the M4 carbine. |
As Rick Santorum fights off efforts to label him extreme or "ultraconservative" for discussing faith and family on the campaign trail, the White House is taking a new tack against the Republican candidate and his presidential primary rival Mitt Romney -- accusing them both of driving up the deficit in their budget proposals.
In a memo on the "deficit-exploding budget and tax plans" by Romney and Santorum, Obama campaign Policy Director James Kvaal argues that while both candidates "champion spending cuts deep enough to cut taxes and balance the budget," they have, in fact, "proposed irresponsible and reckless tax plans that would drive up the deficit by trillions of dollars."
Saying their claims to balance the budget through spending cuts "are completely unrealistic," Kvaal argues that Romney's plan "would increase the deficit by at least $175 billion a year." That's in contrast to the president's plan released last week that doesn't see less than $600 billion in deficits for nine of the next 10 years.
"In total, Romney's tax plan would increase the deficit by $188 billion in 2016. The tax cuts are worth $146,000 a year to individuals earning more than $1 million a year. A typical middle-class family with children would actually pay $34 more," Kvaal wrote.
"Romney's budget would require cutting all non-defense spending by nearly 25 percent in 2016, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and by 48 percent if Social Security and Medicare are spared. Santorum's claims are even less realistic," he continued.
The Obama team's focus on both candidates suggests a shift in approach as Santorum gains nationally on Romney in polls ahead of the Arizona and Michigan primaries next Tuesday. The two candidates, as well as Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, are expected to debate Wednesday night in Arizona. The votes in those two states are followed by Super Tuesday on March 6.
But the redirect toward economic issues come after days of sniping over Santorum's comments about Obama's energy policy, in which Santorum referenced the "phony theology" of radical environmentalists that he says Obama has embraced.
While the language used by Santorum is similar to that long purveyed by conservatives to label believers of global warming and other environmentalist movements as wing-nuts, the president's campaign called it an attack on Obama's Christian faith and said Santorum was "over the line."
On Monday, Santorum defended his remarks, saying that he's being attacked because he has moral values, not because he wants to impose them on anyone else.
"This makes it, you know, really a war on people of faith, particularly the Catholic faith, which again, I mean, it's very clear what the Obama administration is doing on that front," Santorum told Fox News. "For them to continually distort -- this is the kind of stuff that I think is actually, I think, one of the reasons we're doing well in the polls because people see it for what it is. They see a national media trying to destroy conservatives."
A Real Clear Politics average of polling shows Santorum is up in the polls, with 33.8 percent on average compared to Romney's 28 percent.
University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato said that Santorum winning three contests in early February pushed the headlines toward him, but his success isn't based just on buzz.
The way he speaks "is coming across as authentic," Sabato told Fox News. "He's very blunt, he's very forthright. He speaks as though he doesn't care about the political consequences."
But Santorum is walking a fine line. While he tries to focus on topics like Iran, budgets and energy policy, he has also questioned the usefulness of public schools, criticized prenatal testing and doubted whether women are physically able to keep up in combat.
That contrasts sharply with Romney, who has avoided social issues for the most part, and has been accused of not being passionate enough or conveying a reason for his being in the race. Instead, the former Massachusetts governor sells himself as the efficient CEO who will fix the economy.
A Mormon, Romney speaks about ensuring "religious liberty" and preventing a contraception mandate being imposed by the Obama administration on insurers, including those morally opposed to birth control, but his target audience is largely fiscal hawks.
"One of the people I'm running against, Senator Santorum, goes to Washington, calls himself a budget hawk then, after he's been there a while, says he's no longer a budget hawk. Well, I am a budget hawk," Romney said Monday.
"When Republicans go to Washington and spend like Democrats, you're going to have a lot of spending, and that's what we've seen over the last several years," Romney added.
With the primary race unlikely to wrap up soon, the two candidates offer a stark choice to represent the GOP in the November election against Obama. Romney maintains a massive organizational and fundraising advantage over all his rivals, while Santorum gets to the social soul of the conservative wing of the party.
A pro-Santorum PAC, the Red, White & Blue Fund, announced Tuesday it's all-in in Michigan, as Romney closes the gap in his home state. The super PAC is pouring $600,000 into Michigan for a statewide ad buy in the week ahead of the Republican presidential primary, a sum that the Romney team could easily match and best. | As Rick Santorum fights off efforts to label him extreme or ultraconservative for discussing faith and family on the campaign trail, the White House is taking a new tack against the Republican presidential primary candidate and his rival Mitt Romney, accusing them of driving up the deficit in their budget proposals. |
By Jeff Leeson2015-04-02 00:19:13 UTC
Photographer Seph Lawless has been traveling around the U.S. photographing abandoned race tracks and other sites of urban decay. He recently traveled to northeast Ohio for his latest project, which centers around the deserted Variety Theater. Closed in 1986, the theater was originally one of the first single screen movie theaters in the country, and later became an iconic venue for some of rock and roll's biggest names.
With the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony right around the corner, it's a nice ode to the venues that helped bring music stars to fame.
In his photo series book, Lawless remembers one of the historic theater's final shows:
"During a performance by Motörhead on December 2, 1984, the music was so loud it actually cracked the theater ceiling and plaster fell down on the crowd. The power was cut off to stop the band from playing. A judge ordered the theater closed in 1986."
The theater had kept its vintage style for decades and left everything untouched when it was sealed up in 1986.
"The most interesting thing I saw was just how original everything was ... everything was [virtually] the same as when it was built. The ornate ceilings and the architecture is just so beautiful even after all these years. There was art everywhere you looked. It was hauntingly beautiful to witness," Lawless writes.
To see more of Seph Lawless's work, check out his Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr pages. | Photographer Seph Lawless, known for his urban decay photo series, received access to shoot the Variety Theater which has sat abandoned for more than 30 years. |
A 101-year-old man has been pulled alive from the rubble of his house in Nepal seven days after an earthquake hit the country, police said on Sunday.
Related: ‘No one has come’: one week on, Nepal quake victims help themselves
Funchu Tamang was rescued on Saturday with only minor injuries and airlifted to a district hospital in Nuwakot district around 50 miles north-west of Kathmandu, said a local police officer, Arun Kumar Singh.
“He was brought to the district hospital in a helicopter. His condition is stable,” said Singh.
“He has injuries on his left ankle and hand. His family is with him.”
Police also rescued three women from beneath rubble on Sunday in Sindhupalchowk, one of the districts worst hit by the quake, although it was not immediately known how long they had been trapped.
One had been buried by a landslide while the other two were under the rubble of a collapsed house.
“They are being taken to hospital for treatment,” said Suraj Khadka, an officer with the Armed Police Force in Kathmandu.
Nepal’s government had on Saturday ruled out finding more survivors buried in the ruins of the capital, Kathmandu.
Teams of rescuers from more than 20 countries have been using sniffer dogs and heat-seeking equipment to find survivors in the rubble.
But outside the city search and rescue work has largely been carried out by local police and troops. | Man found with minor injuries in collapsed home seven days after earthquake, as government rules out finding more survivors in Kathmandu |
When jewelry designer Stacey Papp learned that some of her closest friends from the fashion world were among those killed and injured in the
she immediately wanted to help their families.
Her longtime friend, Javier Jorge-Reyes, was murdered that night. Another longtime friend, Leonel Melendez, is in a coma fighting for his life. Says Papp, who owns the Orlando-based Bay Hill Jewelers: "I kept calling their best friend, saying, 'What can I do?'"
As a jewelry designer and a philanthropist who started the
in 2004 to help at-risk children and foster kids, Papp became friends with the two men because they worked at Gucci, with whom she has longstanding ties. "We have a very tight community here," she says.
The day after the shooting, Papp and other like-minded friends in the fashion and jewelry industry gathered together at the Orlando home of philanthropist Sam Azar of Azar Diamonds to start raising awareness that the victims' families needed everything from help with funeral planning to food and water.
A dedicated group of industry professionals who knew some of the victims "ended up pulling together this sort of command station," Papp says. (The group included Azar; Jorge Cruz of Longines Swiss, who worked with the victims for ten years at Gucci; Amy Figueroa of the Longines Watch Company; Jason Hoskinson of David Yurman; Ben Arroyo of Wells Fargo Bank; Beatrice Carmen Miranda of Metro City Realty and Edith Colon from Mainframe Real Estate.)
"Everybody had their Smart phones and computers and we sat around a table and just made a list of what needed to be done immediately for the victims and their families," Papp says.
After they put the word out on social media, they were flooded with do-gooders who provided the victims' families and close friends with items ranging from gift cards to food.
"Everyone was willing to donate blood," she says. "Restaurants jumped on board and said, 'What can we do?' They each chose a night to feed a family involved in the tragedy. Other people were running around making deliveries.
"It was just the most unbelievably cohesive thing that happened so effortlessly and so quickly."
Papp adds, "At the end of the day, we felt like we accomplished something."
Melendez is the father to a six-year-old girl, Bella. When the group began discussing who wanted to take Melendez's six-year-old daughter out for a special day at Universal Studios or Walt Disney World while her dad remains in a coma, fighting for his life, "a light bulb clicked," Papp says.
They started talking about other children who had lost parents in the attack, including children of
who left behind his five-year-old son, Kelvyn, and
49, a mother of 11, who died after getting shot, telling her 21-year-old son, who was with her that night, "Run, just go."
Says Papp, "What struck me about all of this is: What are we doing for the children? These children are the ones who are going to be forgotten."
In the aftermath of the shooting, she says that "everyone has been so generous and wants to help so badly, but I thought, there is maybe a missing component for follow-ups for the future."
Since she had already founded a successful charity for children and youth, she decided to set up a fund to raise money for educational expenses and college tuition for the victims' children: the
"We already work with at-risk, homeless and foster youth in our community and have been doing that for years," she says, explaining that the foundation pays for tutoring and focuses on one-on-one attention.
"When we give them a glimpse of what life could be like and show them what's out there, they soar. Education is what we live at Bridges of Life, so this made so much sense," she says.
Papp set up a team to manage the funds, with the president of Wells Fargo Bank, whom she knows, offering to open up bank accounts for the funds within hours: "Everyone has just been doing what they could to make it happen," she says.
Papp's goal, she says, is "to ensure the bright educational future of the children who were affected by this tragedy. We will not allow their futures to become another casualty in this time of suffering and grief."
The fund is also working toward partnering with Florida Pre-Paid, which provides tuition at many local colleges.
"Our goal is to raise a full four years of college tuition for each child, through generous donations from our local, national and global community," she says. Papp also wants to raise money to pay for room and board for each student.
"We know of 14 children in need so far, but are hoping that other families will reach out to us," she says.
Like other victims' families, Melendez's relatives are grateful for what Papp and her friends have done for the future of the victims' children.
"When she told us about the scholarship, I got the chills because I thought it was so amazing," says Melendez's brother-in-law, Rudy Garay, who has been helping to care for Bella, while her father is in the hospital.
"Her foundation is really going to benefit all the kids directly. It will be one less thing for the parents or whoever is taking care of the kids."
Papp is happy to help – "I am super-passionate about helping children," she says – and she encourages others to help if they can.
"We hope that everyone, including corporations who haven't yet decided where to donate for the victims and might want to partner with Bridges of Light, can give whatever is comfortable and put it towards this unbelievable fund to make a difference for the future of these children. It would mean so much," she says.
She adds: "I just know that when you do good things, good things happen."
To donate, please visit the | 'When you do good things, good things happen,' says Stacey Papp Bridges of Light Foundation Education Fund founder Stacey Papp |
05/22/2016 AT 09:35 PM EDT
made a statement in more ways than one during her performance at the
Taking the stage to perform her 2015 hit "
," the 23-year-old wore a T-shirt with an inclusive bathroom symbol, taking a stand against North Carolina's controversial HB2,
that bans cities and local governments from passing rules to allow transgender people to use public bathrooms that match their gender identity.
The special T-shirt will be available for Lovato's fans during she and
' Honda Civic Tour: Future Now, with the proceeds going to LGBT organizations in North Carolina, GLAAD said in a statement on Sunday.
"Demi Lovato continues to be a fearless ally for LGBT equality and acceptance," GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in the statement. "By wearing her support for the transgender community, Lovato is raising critical visibility for vulnerable LGBT North Carolinians and sending an invaluable message of support to transgender people everywhere."
in Raleigh and Charlotte last month in support of the LGBT community.
"It's incredibly difficult for everybody and the situation there is unfortunate," Jonas told PEOPLE in April. "But Demi and I and our team, we talked about how we could make the biggest impact. We felt that this was the right choice." | Lovato wore a T-shirt featuring an inclusive bathroom symbol during her Billboard Music Awards performance |
MOSCOW — The retribution against one of Russia’s most popular independent online news organizations, Lenta.ru, was as swift as it was unexpected. And to many it served as an ominous warning about the state of the media today as the conflict over Ukraine deepens.
On Tuesday morning, the country’s media watchdog formally cautioned the website after it published an interview with the leader of a Ukrainian nationalist organization that Russia has denounced as fascist. By afternoon, the site’s editor for the last decade was ousted and replaced by another editor viewed as more loyal to the Kremlin.
Lenta.ru, known for aggressive coverage in a media dominated by state-owned or controlled news outlets, announced the departure of its editor, Galina Timchenko, without explanation, but it soon posted a letter of protest signed by 79 members of the site’s staff, blaming “direct pressure” from the Kremlin for her dismissal.
“Over the past couple of years the space for free journalism in Russia has decreased dramatically,” the statement said. “Some publications are controlled directly from the Kremlin, others through curators, still others by editors who fear losing their jobs. Some media outlets were closed. Others will be closed in the coming weeks.”
The statement read like a mass resignation, though it remained unclear how the organization’s staff — or its editorial policy — would be affected.
Lenta.ru is owned by a media company called Afisha-Rambler-SUP, controlled in part by Aleksandr Mamut, a Russian billionaire. The company also owns the country’s most popular blogging site, LiveJournal, which was soon filled with laments about the editorial shake-up. An official at the company declined to comment.
The government’s efforts to control the media under President Vladimir V. Putin are hardly new, but as the turmoil in Ukraine unfolded in recent months, a series of decisions have raised fears that the Kremlin intends to tighten its grip beyond the dominant television networks that shape its message.
In December, Mr. Putin dissolved the official state news agency, RIA Novosti, and now is reorganizing a new one under a television executive and host, Dmitry K. Kiselyov, who is best known for virulent commentary on various foreign conspiracies he and others say are threatening Russia.
In January, the independent online television network, Dozhd, or Rain, was dropped by most of the country’s cable providers, ostensibly for conducting a poll that asked if the Soviet Union would have been better off surrendering Leningrad during World War II, rather than enduring the siege by Nazi Germany. It is now struggling to survive.
A month later, the long-serving executive director of the radio station Ekho Moskvy, perhaps the most prominent opposition news outlet, was replaced by a senior editor of the state radio network, Voice of Russia.
“The problem is not that we have nowhere to work,” the statement by Lenta.ru’s staff said. “The problem is that it seems you have nothing more to read.”
Russia’s media watchdog, known as Roskomnadzor, warned Lenta.ru that it had violated Russia’s laws against promoting extremism in the media. Two warnings are grounds for repealing its license. It cited an interview with Andriy Tarasenko, the leader in Kiev of the nationalist coalition, Right Sector, which played a prominent and, some have charged, violent role in the protests against the government of Viktor F. Yanukovych.
The interview, published Monday, carried the headline “We are Not Armed Forces.” It has since been removed from the site. The reporter who conducted the interview, Ilya Azar, said a telephone interview that he intended to quit rather than to work under the new editor.
Lenta.ru was also warned for linking to remarks by the group’s leader Dmitro Yarosh. A court here effectively indicted him in absentia on Wednesday for promoting extremism in Russia itself and said it would seek an international arrest warrant.
Mr. Yarosh and others have been denounced as fascists, radicals and anti-Semites by a relentless media campaign on state television networks that has sought, in keeping with Kremlin policy, to discredit the new government in Ukraine. | A popular independent online news site, Lenta.ru, got a warning from the government about its Ukraine coverage, and then a new editor. |
Fishing oysters and lobsters is hardwired into the Hardy bloodline. Leslie Hardy, owner of Leslie Hardy and Sons Oysters, his father, brothers, four sons and one of his daughters are hooked on the family business, established over four generations on Lennox Bay in East Bideford, Prince Edward Island. Many of Hardy’s 36 grandchildren are also involved in the farming of Malpeque oysters, some of the most sought after PEI oysters.
“My father passed the farm onto my older brother. But after a while he wasn’t interested in it anymore, so I bought it from him,” recalled Hardy. “I was a school teacher once, and so was Shirley [his wife], but I gave it all up for this, the adventure of being on the water, the freedom of doing my own thing.”
In this age of automation and mechanically-processed foods, oysters are still a hands-on operation (albeit gloved hands). For the Hardy family, there is no “tonging,” a method of scooping oysters from the bay floor with a hand-operated dredging basket. Instead, the Hardys sort each and every oyster by hand.
The family has also have developed a method for raising higher-quality oysters in less time. The traditional ready-for-market oyster matures at seven years, but the Hardys can grow them to full size in three years and with a rounder shape, which is an attractive quality for raw bars. Their oysters are shipped all over North America, from PEI to Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, Montreal and Maryland.
Gordon Hardy is the youngest of Leslie’s eight grown children who, in addition to being an integral part of the oyster business, also farms mussels on the other side of the bridge that divides the bay. “On this side we kill the mussels, and [we] grow them on the other,” explains Gordon. In discussing his life as an oyster farmer he says: “[I] never did anything else; only made it to the 10th grade, but I like [farming oysters]. Some folk ’round here go out west, Alberta ways, working oil. I wouldn’t want to be that far from home. This is where I want to be, with my family.”
— Text by European Press Agency
Nicole Crowder is the photo editor for the Washington Post’s photography blog, In Sight. | Off Lennox Bay on Prince Edward Island, a small family operation has been farming oysters for over four generations. |
Woodrow Wilson, who enjoyed moralizing about the mundane, called paying taxes a “glorious privilege.” In 1865, when there was a Civil War income tax, one taxpayer shared this sensibility, sort of. Mark Twain said that his tax bill of $36.82 (including a $3.12 fine for filing late) made him feel “important” because the government was paying attention to him. Today, Rep. Kevin Brady wants to change the way government pays attention to taxpayers.
Congress is like a Calder mobile: Something jiggled here causes things to wiggle over there. When conservatives toppled House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), they inadvertently propelled Brady into the House’s most important chairmanship, that of the Ways and Means Committee. Because revenue bills must originate in the House, Brady now wields Congress’s most important gavel, all because the committee’s previous chairman, Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), now sits in Boehner’s chair.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming.
If there is going to be growth-igniting tax reform — and if there isn’t, American politics will sink deeper into distributional strife — Brady will begin it. Fortunately, the Houston congressman is focused on this simple arithmetic: Three percent growth is not 1 percent better than 2 percent growth, it is 50 percent better.
If the Obama era’s average annual growth of 2.2 percent becomes the “new normal,” over the next 50 years real gross domestic product will grow from today’s $16.3 trillion (in 2009 dollars) to $48.3 trillion. If, however, growth averages 3.2 percent, real GDP in 2065 will be $78.6 trillion. At 2.2 percent growth, the cumulative lost wealth would be $521 trillion.
Brady, however, would like to start with the approximately $2 trillion that U.S. corporations have parked overseas. Having already paid taxes on it where it was earned, the corporations sensibly resist having it taxed again by the United States’ corporate tax, the highest in the industrial world. “[The $2 trillion] won’t just naturally fly back to us,” Brady says. Measures should be taken to make it rational for corporations to bring money home. And to make it rational for corporations such as Pfizer, which recently moved its headquarters to Ireland for tax purposes, to remain here.
In the past 30 years, Brady says, more and more taxes have been paid by fewer and fewer people. And fewer and fewer businesses have been organized as corporations: Three-quarters of job-creating entities are not paying corporate taxes.
“You can’t,” Brady says, “ask people to make big changes, leapfrogging our global competitors, just to get to average.” But making big changes “is why we all came to Congress.” And the benefit that comes from something unfortunate — the fact that there are so few (perhaps fewer than 40) competitive House seats — is that members can take risks. Presidential engagement is necessary for tax reform, and Brady says that will require a new president who understands that “just a little respect goes a long way up here [on Capitol Hill].”
All Republican presidential candidates have tax reform proposals, but only one candidate proposes increasing the cost of government for every American. Here, at last, Donald Trump actually resembles a Republican. Unfortunately, it is a Republican from 125 years ago, when the party stood for big government serving crony capitalism with high tariffs.
As Steven R. Weisman demonstrates in his splendid history of American taxation, “The Great Tax Wars,” the GOP’s tariffs were indirect, hidden sales taxes that crimped consumption by Americans with small incomes. In 1913, the first year of Wilson’s presidency and the year the 16th Amendment and the income tax arrived, the glorious privilege of paying taxes was enjoyed primarily through tariffs: They provided nearly half of federal revenues, with most of the rest coming from tobacco and liquor taxes, which also were hardest on people of modest means.
Trump, who works himself into a lather because Nabisco is making some Oreo cookies outside the country, is obsessed with the United States’ trade with China. “We’re going to get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country,” he says, aiming to raise the price Americans pay for Apple products that today are assembled in China, which, according to trade attorney Scott Lincicome, makes about $6 by assembling an iPhone from parts (many of which China has imported).
Trump favors a 45 percent tariff to protect customers of Walmart and similar retailers from the onslaught of inexpensive Chinese apparel, appliances and food. He can explain the glorious privilege of paying taxes-as-tariffs when he makes his next visit to a Walmart, perhaps the one in Secaucus, N.J., just seven miles from his Fifth Avenue penthouse.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook. | Seemingly small differences in annual growth add up to hundreds of trillions of dollars. |
The Afghan capital Kabul has suffered a series of attacks this month that have left dozens of people dead.
The Taliban says it is behind most of the violence, and it is believed to be linked to the current splits within the group after the death of their leader Mullah Omar.
The violence has raised questions about the ability of Afghan security forces to stop such attacks after the majority of coalition forces withdrew last year.
The BBC's Shaimaa Khalil met the people affected by the recent bloodshed. | Shaimaa Khalil meets Afghans trying to lead "a normal life" in Afghanistan where a series of attacks this month has left dozens of people dead. |
While there are undoubtedly strong political (and financial) reasons for U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to set a firmer timetable for a change in mission of US forces in Afghanistan, they are probably not the whole story behind NATO’s evolving “end-game.”
French President Nicholas Sarkozy has already announced that his country's 3,600 troops deployed in Afghanistan will leave by the end of 2013 - a year early. That may have something to do with the fact that he is trailing badly in the polls ahead of presidential elections in April. But he is not alone. In Washington, London and Paris, Afghanistan is an unpopular war.
Panetta's suggestion that Afghan security forces can be capped now at just over 300,000 rather than the 350,000 target originally set is another indication of the prevailing mood. Money and popular support for the Afghan mission are in short supply. There's also an air of exasperation with Afghan President Hamid Karzai creeping in.
Sarkozy expressed it when he announced his sudden decision to get French troops out early - following the killing by an Afghan soldier of four French servicemen two weeks ago. The United States, too, has plenty of frustrations with Karzai, not least his recent attempts to stifle Washington's efforts to engage the Taliban in talks.
U.S. diplomats have long been criticized for not standing up to what are perceived as Karzai's wrong-headed policies, as well as his tantrums and whims. His latest plan to ignore the U.S. track for talks with the Taliban in Qatar and develop his own Saudi-hosted path is an effective slap in the face for President Barack Obama.
The United States wants many things out of these talks, not least a stable Afghanistan allowing an honorable exit for combat forces. But it also needs to set the conditions for what it was unable to agree to in Iraq - and that is to maintain a strategic regional foothold with large airbases and a troop presence. Iran is on one side of Afghanistan, Pakistan the other; and resource-hungry China also shares a border with Afghanistan.
So talks with the Taliban are not just about ending the war, they are about recognizing the Taliban's future political influence. They are, if the right conditions are set, about accepting the Taliban as political representatives of at least part of Afghanistan's majority Pashtoon population.
When Panetta talks about transitioning from combat to training operations by the end of 2013 he is also signaling to the Taliban U.S. combat forces will leave, and soon. For a long time the Taliban demanded foreign troops leave as a precondition for talks, a goal that is now in sight.
Panetta may be lowering other hurdles to a political settlement - although one at least appears inviolable: that the Taliban must renounce ties to al Qaeda.
Last year after much consideration, Obama signed off on exploring talks with the Taliban. Mullah Omar signed off on his side. A serious commitment had been made although there was (and still is) absolutely no guarantee of the outcome.
Now Karzai appears set to pursue his "alternate" Taliban talks track - at the very least, to muddy the waters and slow the talks process, and at worse scupper it altogether. If he successfully sabotages U.S.-Taliban talks, Washington can forget long-term strategic bases. The Taliban will make them unviable.
When NATO's combat forces pull out, the Taliban will, by talks or by fighting, expand their influence. Without some sort of political understanding, the Taliban will be able to obstruct resupply and every other part of the remaining U.S. and NATO mission.
A recently leaked NATO intelligence estimate that the Taliban are waiting to take power by force begins to look like a well-timed effort to undermine the transition that Panetta is in Brussels to discuss.
A western diplomat who talks directly to the Taliban told me recently "they [the Taliban] haven't made up their mind yet" whether to go for the "grand [political] bargain" or wait and "fight for control of the country." That view is echoed by Sherard Cowper Coles, the former British ambassador to Kabul.
The reason the Taliban may not want to fight for power could be pragmatic. When they took control of 95% of Afghanistan in the 90's they did it as much with Pakistani money - buying off enemy commanders - as they did in battle.
Mullah Omar's Taliban, the largest Taliban group also known as the Quetta Shura, the former Afghan government, the ones talking to the United States will not get that money now because Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI, does not trust them.
Sources say the ISI trusts and prefers to fund the much smaller Haqqani Taliban force. The Haqqanis have pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar publicly - but would likely be an adversary were he ever back in government.
Also the Taliban's ethnic foes in the North are far richer, better equipped and trained than the last time they fought, thanks to the North's close ties to the U.S. military. They pose a bigger challenge to Taliban (Pashton) hegemony than before.
So the question for these aging gray haired leaders who have been at war in some cases for up to 30 years is: Can they get better terms at the negotiating table?
Part of that calculation will be based on their assessment of the sincerity of the people sitting across the table from them.
Karzai may have cut across U.S. interests one time too many. Tough love is what some diplomats have advocated for his intransigence. An end to combat missions in 2013 will certainly be that, and the great unanswered question is: Will that be a bone the Taliban prefer to chew or bury? | By Nic Robertson While there are undoubtedly strong political (and financial) reasons for U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to set a firmer timetable for a change in mission of US forces in Afghanistan, they are probably not the whole story behind NATO’s evolving “end-game. |
Israel has responded furiously to a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, recalling two of its ambassadors to countries that voted for the motion and threatening to cut aid.
The security council adopted the landmark resolution demanding Israel halt all settlement building and expansion in the occupied territories after Barack Obama’s administration refused to veto the resolution on Friday.
A White House official said Obama had taken the decision to abstain in the absence of any meaningful peace process. The resolution, which passed by a 14-0 vote, was met with loud applause in the packed chamber when the US ambassador, Samantha Power, abstained.
The move was immediately condemned by the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as “shameful”. A spokesman pointedly referred to Israel’s expectation of working more closely with the US president-elect, Donald Trump.
The security council last adopted a resolution critical of settlements in 1979, with the United States also abstaining. The United States vetoed a similar resolution in 2011, which was the sole veto cast by the Obama administration at the security council.
Amid emerging criticism of the handling of the vote by Netanyahu, whose manoeuvres were seen as an attempt to sideline Obama and his administration, Israel ordered steps against a number of countries.
Those steps included the recall of the Israeli ambassadors to New Zealand and Senegal, who voted for the resolution, cancelling a planned visit by the Senegalese foreign minister to Israel in three weeks and cancelling all aid programmes to the African country.
The two countries voted along with the UK, France, Russia and China in favour of the resolution describing Israeli settlement building as a “flagrant violation” of international law.
Responding to the Israeli moves, New Zealand’s foreign minister, Murray McCully, said the decision should have been no surprise to Israel, which knew Wellington’s position long before the UN vote.
“We have been very open about our view that the [security council] should be doing more to support the Middle East peace process and the position we adopted today is totally in line with our long-established policy on the Palestinian question.”
The vote has sharply underlined the extent of Israel’s international isolation under Nentayahu.
In particular the vote – in which 14 of the 15 countries on the Security Council vote in favour – dramatised the hollowness of Netayahu’s boast at the UN general assembly in the autumn over Israel’s purported diplomatic advances at the UN, not least among African members.
Russia and China too, both permanent members of the security council with veto rights who have been heavily courted by Israel, also voted in favour.
While Israel may expect a much easier ride after the inauguration of Donald Trump, support of the motion from countries like the UK and France underlines the deep frustration in Europe with the policies of Netanyahu’s rightwing coalition over settlements and the moribund peace process.
For its part the Obama administration made clear that the US decision to abstain was in direct response to choice made by Netanyahu on settlements.
The resolution also serves as a warning to the incoming Trump administration over its policies following the appointment by Trump of a far right pro-settler ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.
While the US and EU have worked closely together in coordinating foreign policy on the Israel-Palestine question, there has been growing support among European governments for tougher steps against Israel, which has already resulted in a directive on the labelling of settlement products.
The strength of the language in the resolution reiterating the illegality of Jewish settlements built on land intended for a Palestinian state, occupied by Israel in 1967, is also likely to have an impact on multinational companies operating in the occupied territories or working with Israeli enterprises with links to the occupied territories, underlining the risk of legal action against them.
While the resolution is not binding in legal terms it will, however, have other practical impacts, not least in the impact it may have on the Palestinian complaint to the international criminal court, which includes Israeli settlement.
The resolution also includes language calling for differential treatment of Israel within the pre-1967 borders, calling on states to “distinguish[ing], in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”, which could potentially pave the way for future sanctions.
Israeli supporters in the US – both senators and lobby groups – used even stronger language. Morton Klein, president of the right wing Zionist Organization of America, railed in unequivocal terms: “Obama has made it clear that he’s a Jew hating, antisemite.”
Leading pro-Israel Republicans also weighed in including House Speaker Paul D Ryan, who denounced the US abstention as “absolutely shameful,” and promised that “our unified Republican government will work to reverse the damage done by this administration, and rebuild our alliance with Israel”.
In Israel, however, questions were already being asked about Netanyahu’s handling of the vote. Writing in Haaretz, columnist Chemi Shalev was particularly scathing about Netanyahu’s diplomatic failure.
“Resolution 2334 shatters the [Israeli] government-induced illusion that the settlement project has been normalised, that it passed the point of no return, that it is now a fait accompli that will remain unchallenged.
“In recent years, after President Obama desisted from efforts to advance the peace process, Netanyahu, his ministers and settler leaders had behaved as if the battle was over: Israel built and built, the White House objected and condemned, the facts on the ground were cemented in stone.
“You can have your cake and eat it too, the government implied: thumb your nose at Washington and the international community, build in the West Bank as if there’s no tomorrow and still get $38bn in unprecedented [US] military aid.” | Israel orders steps against a number of countries that backed motion calling for halt to building of settlements in occupied territories |
Safety officials on Cape Cod want you to think of caution, not "Jaws" music when you visit their famous beaches.
Several Massachusetts towns are taking steps to beef up their protocol to inform lifeguards and protect swimmers against possible shark attacks on their shores, the Cape Cod Times reports.
The Cape Cod National Seashore officials met last week with local police, fire and beach department representatives from the Massachusetts towns of Provincetown, Wellfleet, Eastham and Truro to discuss beach safety after a shark bit a man in the leg at a Truro beach.
Denver resident Christopher Myers, 50, was released Friday from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston after receiving 47 stitches for bites on his legs, from what might have been a great white shark. Myers was swimming at Ballston Beach in Truro, which has no lifeguards and had no shark warning signs. Witnesses said they saw a large, black dorsal fin emerge near Myers, according to the paper.
Although it's been nearly 80 years since the last confirmed great white shark attack on a human, the possibility of an attack along the Cape's Atlantic coastline has increased with the growing seal population. In Truro, seals gather along sandbars near Ballston Beach.
The Cape Cod towns responded quickly to the incident, coming up with several strategies to inform beachgoers and promote safe swimming practices on their beaches. One tool is a marine animal picture book, filled with photos and information from the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game's Division of Marine Fisheries. The books -- available at lifeguard stands -- aim to help lifeguards and witnesses identify sea animals when they see them in the water.
The Cape Cod Times reports there also will be a shark witness questionnaire to keep track of beachgoers' incident accounts. Witnesses can provide details about shark fins or other physical characteristics, as well as the location of the sighting.
Improved communication also will be key in coordinated shark response on the Cape. There will be immediate email notification among the town beach officials when a shark incident occurs. The seashore also has posted warning signs alerting beachgoers to recent shark sightings, asking them to be cautious.
A Truro town meeting is expected this week to discuss adding lifeguards at Ballston Beach for the last weeks of summer. The town eliminated guards during budget cuts in the early 1980s.
Click for more from the Cape Cod Times. | Several Cape Cod, Massachusetts towns are taking steps to beef up their protocol to inform lifeguards and protect swimmers against possible shark attacks on their shores. |
These stars make 40 (and even 50!) look like the new 20. Check out who's been drinking from Hollywood's fountain of youth.
They grew up on screen, but sometimes fall off the map. See what your favorite pint-sized celebs look like as adults.
Think the stars are just like us? Guess again! It's always sunny in Hollywood, and these celebs love flaunting their picture-perfect beach bodies almost as much as they love getting all dressed up for...
Axel Foley means business when he sets out to avenge his best friends murder. Catch back up with the stars of 'Beverly Hills Cop'. | Hot air balloons are taking over the skies in New Jersey. The QuickChek New Jersey Festival of Ballooning swings into full gear in Readington, N.J. from July 26-28. Take a ride with the Daily News high above the festival ... Here, Horton the Elephant (in balloon form) sits face first in the grass alongside other amazing hot air balloons, like Humpty Dumpty. |
Many experts, analysts and venture capitalists have largely exaggerated the possibility that a valuation bubble exists among today's start-ups, Y Combinator's President Sam Altman said Wednesday.
"I think people talk about a bubble because it's an easy way to get on TV, … but I think these companies are doing incredible work, and by and large the valuations are reasonable," Altman said in an interview with CNBC's "Squawk Alley."
"I don't think most VCs believe we're in a bubble. ... If they do, then they shouldn't invest in start-ups," said Altman, whose company provides seed money to start-ups like Airbnb, Twitch and Disqus.
Several start-ups now have multibillion-dollar valuations, including Uber, valued at over $40 billion, and Snapchat, which was valued at about $10 billion last August.
Altman said some of the venture capitalists who have made the most noise regarding these high valuations are also the ones who are pumping the most money into them. "The VCs that are investing the most money ever in start-ups, at least in the last 10 years, are the ones that are saying there's a bubble."
He also said these venture capitalists are exaggerating the possibility of a bubble because of their lack of control over the companies. "I think what's going on is that VCs have sort of less and less of the power in this sort of company dynamic, and so, people are like, 'Oh, [start-ups] are hugely overinflated.'"
Read More Pessimism reigns as investors weigh valuations
Another reason start-up valuations are this high is because of the a long-standing low interest rate environment, Altman said.
"Yeah, valuations are high, and interest rates are zero, so that's to be expected, but I don't think valuations have become wildly disconnected from [actual values]." | Sam Altman, Y Combinator's president, says the recent talks of a bubble forming has been overblown. |
And it was a day, of course, when the Belgian capital -- indeed, the European capital -- was more than ever acutely aware of its vulnerability.
Two explosions Tuesday at the city's main airport, and then another at a downtown subway station, killed 31 people and injured 270 others.
"You can feel the fear on the streets today," said Souheil, 21, who was taking the train Wednesday morning to his internship at the European Commission, near where the explosion at the Maelbeek metro station detonated Tuesday. "But you can also see that people want to fight it. It's a good thing."
"We know these things can happen," she said, "but we must go on."
Both commuters declined to give their last names.
As Belgium mourned and Brussels struggled back toward some semblance of normality, new details emerged about the attacks.
as one of the airport suicide bombers, and his brother, Khalid El Bakraoui, as the man behind the suicide blast near the metro station.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the Brussels and Paris attacks -- raising concerns that the terrorist group is gaining more traction in Europe.
Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz was moments from boarding a plane to New York, where she and her family were looking forward to reuniting for Easter.
Her husband and 3-year-old twin girls had just stepped away from the boarding area at the Brussels Airport. Then an explosion ripped the family apart, Peruvian state media said.
Ruiz, a Peruvian living in Brussels, was killed, reported Andin, a Pervian news agency. Her husband and daughters escaped serious injury.
The 36-year-old mother was one of at least 10 people killed at the airport. About an hour later, 20 people were killed at the Maelbeek subway station.
"We were fearing terrorist attacks," Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said Tuesday. "And that has now happened."
The Bakraoui brothers are suspected of having ties to
, which left 130 people dead. Khalid El Bakraoui rented a Brussels apartment that was raided last week, a senior Belgian security source told CNN.
The brothers were known to police for involvement in organized crime but not for terrorism, Belgian state broadcaster RTBF reported.
As officials try to learn more about the Bakraoui brothers, investigators are scrambling to find a third suspect believed to be at large.
That man, shown in surveillance footage wearing a light-colored jacket and black hat, was seen pushing a luggage cart along with Ibrahim El Bakraoui and another apparent suicide bomber.
"The third left a bomb in the airport but it didn't explode," Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon said. "We are now looking for this guy."
Two people were arrested Tuesday in connection with the attacks -- one in Schaerbeek and the other in Haren -- though one of them was released later that day, Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said. Another person was detained Wednesday, according to Belgian state broadcaster RTBF.
Despite the determination to carry on, train platforms remained largely empty Wednesday save for a smattering of soldiers. People who did venture forth felt an eerie calm.
"Like walking through a ghost town," said 28-year-old Apelonia.
And as she rode the nearly empty metro into central Brussels, she kept imagining the train exploding and herself dying.
On the trains and in the streets, Brussels appears to be a city shaken yet defiant.
Lynn, who works at a communications firm, passed by Maelbeek station 30 minutes before the Tuesday's explosion.
"It's tough, but we knew it would happen," she said as she rode a replacement bus to work Wednesday.
"We have to go on," she said. "We can't stay home. We have to hope security can protect us."
About an hour after the explosion in the subway station, the city was virtually paralyzed, with most public transport shut down and residents terrified of more attacks.
Some metro lines partially reopened Wednesday, but the city's transit system announced that subway stations would be closed and the trains wouldn't be running from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Outside those hours, security forces are controlling all access to the stations.
Some cafes and shops in surrounding streets are still closed.
Military personnel, carrying automatic weapons and wearing scarves against the early morning chill stood guard in the area, where many European Union institutions are based.
The airport remained closed and will be shut down Thursday as well.
The country will observe three days of mourning, the Prime Minister announced.
And King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium will visit the Erasme Hospital in Anderlecht and the military hospital Reine Astrid on Wednesday, the royal household said in a statement.
Belgium has been a concern for counter-terrorism officials for years because of the large number of Belgian fighters who have traveled to join ISIS and other terror groups in Syria and Iraq. Many have later returned home.
"The Belgians have been sitting on a ticking time bomb," a U.S. counterterrorism official said.
A Twitter post circulated by prominent ISIS backers Tuesday said, "What will be coming is worse."
The notion that the two suspected suicide bombers were known to authorities yet still carried out attacks shows how thinly spread intelligence authorities are, said CNN producer Tim Lister, who has reported extensively about terrorism.
"Even people like these brothers, who have criminal records, who have fired AK-47s at police, are still out there pretty much undetected," Lister said.
"It's estimated that just to follow one person 24/7 requires 25 officers or agents. There are just too many suspects to follow."
But the interior minister said Belgians refuse to be defeated.
"Our police services and our investigation services are very professional people, but we are also convinced that also the terrorists ... are professionals too -- and well-trained and well-formed," Jambon said.
"So it's a difficult battle against them. But I'm convinced that we will win."
CNN's Frederik Pleitgen reported from Brussels; Holly Yan and Catherine E. Shoichet wrote from Atlanta. CNN's Max Foster, Nima Elbagir, Joshua Berlinger, Nick Thompson, Arthur Brice, Evan Perez, Pamela Brown and Shimon Prokupecz contributed to this report. | Day broke Wednesday on a Brussels facing a new reality, and a new identity as a city contorted by grief but sustained by a shared determination to carry on. |
Editor's note: Roland Martin is a syndicated columnist and author of "The First: President Barack Obama's Road to the White House." He is a commentator for the TV One cable network and host/managing editor of its Sunday morning news show, "Washington Watch with Roland Martin."
(CNN) -- When was the last time you heard someone say it's important to hire a qualified white person for a job? No, seriously, I really want you to think about that question.
Whenever there is a discussion about diversity, inclusion or affirmative action, we always hear folks say, "We do a great job of trying to find qualified minorities."
That always tickles me, because when it comes to hiring whites, the assumption is that all are qualified, so there's no need for the qualifier "qualified."
That was the first thing that came to mind when former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu gave his opinion on "Piers Morgan Tonight" on Thursday regarding Gen. Colin Powell's endorsement of President Barack Obama.
Booker: Sununu's comment was 'unfortunate'
"Frankly, when you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that's an endorsement based on issues or whether he's got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama," Sununu said.
When Morgan asked him what that reason is, Sununu said, "Well, I think when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him."
Oh, John, you're such a charmer to say you applaud Colin Powell for being a righteous brother and supporting his brother from another mother.
All I could do was laugh at how incredibly stupid and asinine Sununu's remark was.
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But Sununu isn't alone. He's like the many idiots who have e-mailed and tweeted me over the years, suggesting that comments perceived as favorable to Obama boil down to our skin color. Accomplishments? Oh, no. Intellect? Forget about it. It's always a black thing.
News: Obama and the white vote
See, I'm not one of these black folks who are quick to deny that anyone voted for Obama because he's black. Actor Samuel L. Jackson has made it clear that he backs Obama because he's black, and he doesn't give a damn what any white person thinks.
But it really is Sam's responsibility to tell us exactly why he supports the president. It's not our job to automatically assume that skin color is the reason during this season.
For instance, in 2004, the Rev. Al Sharpton ran for president of the United States. Now, we know he's black, but a ton of black folks didn't even think of supporting him during his run or send him a dime. I recall betting a black New York media executive a big steak dinner that Sharpton would not win the primary in South Carolina, where nearly half of the voters are black. He was adamant it would happen, citing the Rev. Jesse Jackson's win there in 1988. Sharpton didn't win.
During that same primary, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun also ran for the Democratic nomination. Her campaign was about as ineffectual as Sharpton's, and few people, even black folks, backed her.
Opinion: Why isn't Colin Powell a Democrat?
Amazing. Two black folks running for president -- one a prominent civil rights activist and the other a former U.S. senator -- and black America as a whole didn't even give their candidacies a thought.
So if in Sununu's mind a Powell endorsement comes down to race, how does he explain the many times a black candidate runs for office, and black support isn't guaranteed? What about all of the years black folks voted for white candidates? Was one whiter than the other?
Since Sununu thinks it's about race, I need him to explain to me how Mitt Romney's whiteness has been the deciding factor behind his being a major surrogate for the Romney campaign.
Please tell us, John, why you think Romney is the Great White Hope who will take down Soul Brother No. 1 at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Turnabout is fair play, right? If Powell is backing Obama because he's black, I need all of Romney's white supporters who are backing him because of the color of his skin to step forward. Please, don't hold back.
Powell is an American hero. He has served as national security adviser, head of the U.S. Army Forces Command, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state.
Opinion: Both parties have a huge race problem
As a distinguished military man who has worked for four U.S. presidents, he has witnessed up close and personal what it takes to be president of the United States and commander in chief. It is ridiculous to assume Powell would be so shallow as to think race is the only determinant for him. The suggestion is beneath him.
So, why did Sununu say it? Because it's easy to dismiss an accomplished black man who just praised another accomplished black man. By boiling it down to race, it's easy for others who think such a thing to say, "Oh, that's it!"
Unfortunately, we see this type of thinking in America all of the time.
I crack up when someone white e-mails me, saying I owe my job to affirmative action. Their bigotry and racial animus is obvious, and I e-mail them back saying, I'm laughing at them. Why? Because it must hurt more to have a black man they can't stand laugh at them.
My accomplishments are clear and many. I owe no one an explanation for my success, and Powell owes Sununu and no one else an explanation other that what he said on CBS's morning show, citing Romney's confusing foreign policy views and Obama's steady leadership.
"When he took over, the country was in very, very difficult straits. We were in one of the worst recessions we had seen in recent times, close to a depression," Powell said. "We were in real trouble.
"I saw over the next several years stabilization come back in the financial community. Housing is now starting to pick up after four years. It's starting to pick up. Consumer confidence is rising. So I think generally, we've come out of the dive, and we're starting to gain altitude. It doesn't mean we are problem solved. There are lots of problems still out there. The unemployment rate is too high. People are still hurting in housing. But I see that we are starting to rise up."
Ain't nothing like a critically thinking brother, right, John?
This issue will not get a rise out of President Obama or Gen. Colin Powell. They won't even dignify Sununu and others who think like them. They'll just keep laughing all the way up the ladder to the next successful step, marveling at the childishness of some whites to reduce black support of another African-American to just the color of their skin and not the content of their character.
The opinions expressed in this country are solely those of Roland Martin. | Roland Martin says Sununu's suggestion that Powell backs Obama because of race implies that blacks don't critically evaluate candidates on content of character. |
Update at 10:49 p.m. ET
Rep. Michele Bachmann took aim at President Obama after his State of the Union Address, chiding him for failing to find solutions to help the ailing economy.
Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican thinking about running for president, delivered her own response to Obama's speech to the Tea Party Express, one of the more active small-government groups in the 2010 elections.
Armed with statistics, Bachmann said there was "an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt" during Obama's first two years in the White House.
She called on Obama to sign a balanced-budget amendment, create an "all of the above" energy policy to reduce dependence on foreign oil, and not enact legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions, known as "cap and trade."
Bachmann also urged Obama to turn back "132 regulations put in place in the last two years" and to support "free market" solutions to the nation's rising health care costs.
"Thanks to all of you, there's reason to hope that real spending cuts are coming," the congresswoman said. "I believe that we are in the early days of a history-making turn here in the House of Representatives."
She delivered her speech in front of a screen showing pictures of the Constitution and of American flags being raised at Iwo Jima during World War II.
Bachmann told reporters on Monday that she's not in "competition" with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who was officially tapped to speak to a national televised audience after Obama's address.
A lawmaker in her third term, Bachmann has also released her own proposed list of $430 million in budget cuts. She was defended earlier today by another Tea Party favorite: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Paul, speaking on CNN this morning, said Bachmann's speech isn't any different from other Republicans who will give their opinions when Obama steps away from the microphone in the House chambers.
"I think one main Republican message, but other voices as well," he said.
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ACWORTH, Ga. – Divers have been searching for a 68-year-old man in a wheelchair who fell into a north Georgia lake while getting off a boat.
Authorities told Atlanta TV station Fox 5 that rescue crews have been searching Lake Allatoona since Saturday, when the man fell into the water.
Authorities say Tommy Moore of Plainfield, Ind., was at the lake to attend a family reunion when he fell in.
Sgt. Mike Barr of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources says he was getting off a large boat to return to a dock and the boat separated from the dock.
Barr says there were about 20 people on the boat, and two of them jumped in immediately but weren't able to find Moore. | Divers have been searching for a 68-year-old man in a wheelchair who fell into a north Georgia lake while getting off a boat. |
Fox News hosted a town hall with Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Detroit on March 7. The candidates were asked questions about abortion, poverty and trade policy. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)
Hillary Clinton never looked comfortable at Monday’s town hall event in Detroit, her first appearance on the Fox News Channel in almost two years. She stood ramrod-straight through much of her half-hour session with moderator Bret Baier, and her exclamation at the end — “Oh, my gosh, it went by so fast!” — was thoroughly unconvincing. It had clearly been a grind.
But the Democratic presidential front-runner and her supporters should be glad she participated for what I assume is the very reason she was reluctant to do so: Fox pressed Clinton on issues that are important to many conservatives and managed to throw her off-script. That might sound like a bad thing for her, but the results were actually some of her best, most substantive responses of the campaign.
Baier challenged Clinton to explain her position on abortion, something no moderator in any of the seven Democratic debates has done.
[Marco Rubio is right: The media should scrutinize Democrats' abortion stances, too]
Baier: I want to ask you about a question I asked Senator Sanders. Do you think a child should have any legal rights or protections before it’s born? Or do you think there should not be any restrictions on any abortions at any stage in a pregnancy?
Clinton: Well, again, let me put this in context because it's an important question. Right now, the Supreme Court is considering a decision that would shut down a lot of the options for women in Texas, and there have been other legislatures that have taken similar steps to try to restrict a woman's right to obtain an abortion.
The Supreme Court case, while topical, had little to do with the question. Clinton went on to talk about defending Planned Parenthood — another tangent. These were talking points, not answers, so Baier tried again.
[Supreme Court hears arguments on Texas abortion-clinics case]
Baier: Just to be clear, there's no — without any exceptions?
Clinton: No. I have been on record in favor of a late-pregnancy regulation that would have exceptions for the life and health of the mother. I object to the recent effort in Congress to pass a law saying after 20 weeks, you know, no such exceptions, because although these are rare, Bret, they sometimes arise in the most complex, difficult medical situations.
Baier: Fetal malformities and ...
Clinton: ... And threats to the woman's health.
Clinton: And so I think it is — under Roe v. Wade — it is appropriate to say, in these circumstances, so long as there's an exception for the life and health of the mother.
Now we're getting somewhere. Clinton didn't want to mention her support for late-term abortion restrictions, but Baier forced her hand with his follow-up. And she ought to be happy that he did. When Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) complained in a February debate that Democrats haven't been pressed on their abortion stances, he also said Clinton "believes that all abortion should be legal, even on the due date of that unborn child." That's not accurate, but Clinton can't debunk that kind of false attack if she never talks about the abortion restrictions she favors.
Later in the town hall, Baier raised the issue of Clinton's private email use as secretary of state. When he did, Clinton reverted to one of her favorite arguments: "Nothing I sent was marked classified or that I received was marked classified."
If only it were that simple. Any voter who has followed the story knows that the State Department, as it released Clinton's emails in batches, redacted more than 2,000 messages because they contained classified material. Without further explanation, Clinton's response looks like an outright lie. Baier pushed for a clarification.
[State Department releases final batch of Clinton emails]
Clinton: Well, what I'm saying is, it wasn't [classified] at the time. Now, if you — let's take Mary Smith who has some information in the government. And she is FOIAed — Freedom of Information Act — give us your information, your memos, your emails, whatever it might have been. That then goes through a process. So even though the agency she works in has none of this as classified, others start to have a chance to weigh in. So others might say, you know, that wasn't at the time, but now with circumstances, we don't want to release it, so, therefore, we have to classify it.
It wasn't a perfectly smooth answer, but it conveyed a point Clinton should make more often: Yes, many of the emails on her private server are now classified, but they were not at the time she sent or received them.
Clinton might prefer to say "nothing was classified" and have the argument end right there. But that's just not realistic. Forced to provide a more nuanced answer, she might have actually delivered an explanation that will satisfy some Fox News viewers who view her skeptically.
Clinton probably didn't win hordes of conservative converts Monday, but she answered tough questions in a way that might at least make some temper their disdain and that might appeal to independents. That's worthwhile. That's why she should do this more often.
Callum Borchers covers the intersection of politics and media. | Her answers in Monday’s town hall were some of the most substantive of her campaign. |
Authorities are looking for a skateboarder who fatally stabbed a passenger of the Red Line subway Friday evening.
The suspect was described as Asian in his 20s with an acne-scarred face, wearing a blue T-shirt. He was carrying two skateboards, authorities said.
Sheriff's Lt. John Hocking said it was too early in the investigation to say whether the stabbing was in self-defense, as witnesses say the suspect claimed.
"Investigators want to talk to anybody who witnessed the stabbing or can help with the investigation in any way," Hocking said. Anyone with information is asked to contact the homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500.
Los Angeles Times music writer Todd Martens, who was taking the subway home from work, said the young man and Garay were standing near a door on the crowded, rush-hour train. An argument broke out, he said, and the older man began flailing a chain attached to a jacket or bag.
"He wasn't hitting [the young man], he wasn't punching or fighting, he was waving his arms in a really fast motion," Martens said. "It just wasn't a normal way to fight somebody .... He seemed a little left of center."
The young man took a few steps backward and pulled a knife from inside his jacket, Martens said. Authorities allege that he hit Garay in the head with a skateboard and then stabbed him in the chest. Passengers, including a father and his crying son, rushed to the back of the train as blood began running down the center aisle, Martens said.
"He said, 'I can't believe he made me do that,' " Martens said. " 'Everybody saw it, it was self-defense right?' "
When none of the passengers answered, the young man began lamenting that there was no way to elude capture because police would be waiting when the train pulled in to the station. Two young women said otherwise, Martens recalled.
" 'You don't know that,' " Martens quoted the women as saying. " 'Keep it together, you have to be ready.' ... They were giving him a pep talk."
At the women's suggestion, the assailant pulled a bright blue T-shirt out of his canvas bag and exchanged it for his bloodied gray one, Martens said. There were no officers waiting when the train stopped, he said. The young man ran west on Hollywood Boulevard, authorities said.
Videotape might help solve subway stabbing
2 shot after Raiders-49ers game at Candlestick Park
Rep. Maxine Waters: 'The tea party can go straight to hell'
Photo: Scene outside subway station Friday. Credit: KTLA News | Skateboarder sought in L.A. subway stabbing |
updated 8:58 PM EDT, Tue April 23, 2013
John Galliano is pictured at London Fashion Week on September 18, 2010.
Editor's note: This article contains offensive language.
New York (CNN) -- Controversial fashion designer John Galliano -- fired and convicted over anti-Semitic comments in 2011 -- is heading to a New York design classroom this spring.
The former chief designer for Christian Dior will teach a three-day master class at Parsons The New School for Design.
The class will give Parsons students an opportunity to learn from "an immensely talented designer," according to a statement from the school.
Galliano was fired from the fashion giant in March 2011 after making anti-Semitic remarks in Paris. Later that year, a French court found him guilty for making public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity.
"I love Hitler," Galliano said in a video obtained by Britain's Sun newspaper. "Your mother, your forefathers would be f---ing gassed and f---ing dead."
In his trial, he said that alcohol and drugs were major factors, which he realized during a stint in rehab after he was fired. Galliano apologized, saying, "Anti-Semitism and racism have no part in our society."
He added: "I only have myself to blame and I know that I must face up to my own failures and that I must work hard to gain people's understanding and compassion."
Abraham Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League, said Tuesday in a statement, "I think it's time that John Galliano be evaluated on his skills."
"He apologized, he repaired, he reached out. We should just move on. I think that's the fair thing to do. I'm delighted for Parsons and I'm delighted for him," Foxman added.
Parsons acknowledged the controversy in its statement, saying, "We believe that over the past two years, Mr. Galliano has demonstrated a serious intent to make amends for his past actions."
CNN's Sheila Steffen contributed to this report.
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Most popular stories right now | Controversial fashion designer John Galliano -- fired and convicted over anti-Semitic comments in 2011 -- is heading to a New York design classroom this spring. |
Updated JAN 11, 2015 9:47p ET
Former New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan is working out the final details to become the Buffalo Bills' new head coach, according FOX Sports NFL Insider Alex Marvez.
In addition, 49ers offensive Greg Roman is going for a second meeting with Buffalo to finalize a deal to take the same position with the Bills under Rex Ryan, a source told Marvez.
Ryan reportedly interviewed with the Bills on both Thursday and Saturday. The Associated Press reported Sunday that Ryan has accepted the job.
Bills players were already expressing their support for Ryan in posts made on their Twitter accounts.
Excited about the hire of Rex!! Great coach to come in and keep us moving in the right direction!
Ryan, 52, was fired from the Jets one day after the team finished the 2014 season with a 4-12 record. In six seasons with New York, Ryan had overall 46-50 record.
"We're in the win business, and we're not winning," Jets owners Woody Johnson said at a news conference at the team's facility at the time. "So, I thought this was something I had to do."
The Jets failed to make the postseason for the fourth consecutive season and Ryan was 4-2 in the postseason during his tenure with the team. He did reach the AFC title game twice during his tenure with the team.
It was a tough season for the Jets. After winning the season opener against Oakland, they lost eight in a row and eventually benched starting quarterback Geno Smith for a period as they worked to get back on track. Ultimately, they fell out of playoff contention and opted to make a coaching change.
The Bills opening came late in 2014, when head coach Doug Marrone decided to exercise the opt-out clause in his contract.
The second-year coach was the sixth Buffalo coach since Wade Phillips was fired following the 2000 season. Marrone's announcement came as a surprise after the Bills’ 9-7 season, their first winning season since 2004. However, the team held on to the longest active postseason drought, at 15 years.
The opt-out clause in Marrone's contract went into effect after Terry and Kim Pegula bought the team in October.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. | Former New York Jets head coach is reportedly working out the final details to become the Buffalo Bills new coach. |
AutoTrader.com has agreed to acquire VinSolutions, a provider of auto dealer solutions, including CRM, Internet lead management and inventory management. No financial terms were disclosed.
Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Nasdaq: DECK) has agreed to acquire Sanuck, an Irvine, Calif.-based shoe and sandal brand, for $120 million from Sanuk USA and C&C Companies.
Sophia, an online social teaching and learning platform, has acquired Guaranteach, a Baltimore-based online provider of short-form tutorials. No financial terms were disclosed. Guaranteach had been sponsored by Innosight Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. www.guaranteach.com
Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) has agreed to acquire Clearwell Systems Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based e-discovery management platform for the enterprise. The deal is valued at approximately $390 million, net of Clearwell’s $20 million existing cash balance. Clearwell has raised around $30 million in VC funding, from firms like DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital. www.symantec.com
Emcor Group (NYSE: EME) has agreed to acquire USM Services Holdings, a Norristown, Penn.-based provider of facilities maintenance services, from Australia’s Transfield Services LTd. (ASA: TSE). The deal is valued at $255 million in cash.
Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group Inc. (NYSE: DTG) said that it has adopted a “poison pill,” which could slow down a proposed $2.08 billion buyout offer from Hertz Global Holdings.
Glencore, a Swiss commodities trader, raised $10 billion in a London IPO, selling 1.14 billion shares at $8.60 per share. It is the largest IPO so far this year. www.glencore.com
Histogenics Corp., a Waltham, Mass.-based regenerative medicine company focused on cartilage, has acquired Israeli regenerative medicine company ProChon Biotech Ltd. No financial terms were disclosed. Boston Equity Advisors managed the process. Histogenics shareholders include Boston Millennia Partners, Foundation Medical Partners, Altima Partners and Inflection Point Partners. www.histogenics.com
Thermo-Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) has emerged as a bidder for Phadia AB, an allergy-testing company owned by Cinven, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal could be valued at upwards of $3 billion. Thermo-Fisher also is a reported bidder for Gen-Probe Inc. (Nasdaq: GPRO), which has a market cap of around $3.8 billion. www.thermofisher.com
Takeda Pharmaceutical Corp. (Tokyo: 4502) has agreed to acquire Swiss drug-maker Nycomed for €9.6 billion in cash. Sellers include Nordic Capital, DLJ Merchant Partners, Coller Capital and Avista Capital Partners. www.nycomed.com
Abertis (Madrid: ABE) has sold its car parking and logistics businesses to an investment group led by Torreal for €400 million.
Allstate Corp. (NYSE: ALL) has agreed to acquire Esurance and Answer Financial for approximately $1 billion from White Mountains Insurance Group (NYSE: WTM). The deal value includes $700 million in cash, plus the book value of acquired assets. www.allstate.com
South Korea has restarted the sale process of a 57% stake in the nation’s largest bank by assets, Woori Financial Group.
Toshiba is expected to acquire Landis+Gyr, a Swiss maker of smart meters, for approximately $2 billion after two private equity firms dropped out of the process, according to the FT. Current Landis&Gyr shareholders include Australia’s Bayard Capital. www.landisgyr.com
Skyworks Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: SWKS) has agreed to acquire SiGe Semiconductor Inc., an Ottawa-based supplier of RF front-end solutions for wireless systems. The deal is valued at up to $275 million, including a $210 million up-front cash payment and $65 million in potential milestone patyments. SiGe is currently in registration for a $143.75 million IPO, and has raised around $132 million in VC funding since 1999. Current shareholders include Prism VentureWorks (19.8% stake), VenGrowth (15.5%), W Capital Partners (11.2%), TD Capital and Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec. www.sige.com
Publicis (Paris: PUBP) has agreed to acquire Rosetta Marketing Group, a Hamilton, N.J.-based digital marketing agency. The deal is valued at $525 million in cash, plus the possibility of future earnouts. www.publicis.com
Vietcombank, a state-owned bank in Vietnam, has hired Credit Suisse to manage the sale of a 20% ownership stake to foreign investors. Credit Suisse had a similar mandate in 2007, but the deal never went through.
Autonomy Corp. (LSE: AU) has agreed to acquire certain digital division assets from Iron Mountain Inc. (NYSE: IRM), including archiving, eDiscovery and online backup. The deal is valued at $380 million in cash. www.autonomy.com
Daimler AG and Rolls-Royce Group PLC have sweetened their offer to acquire German engine-maker Tognum AG to €2.4 billion, according to Bloomberg. This is an 8.3% increase from an earlier bid.
Joy Global (Nasdaq: JOYG), has agreed to acquire LeTourneau Technologies Inc., the mining equipment making unit of Rowan Companies Inc. (NYSE: RDC), for $1.1 billion in cash. www.rowancompanies.com
Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., a Vancouver-based firm and television studio, is seeking buyers for Carl Icahn’s 33% stake in the company, according to Bloomberg.
Stryker Corp. (NYSE: SYK) has agreed to acquire bio-surgery products maker Orthovita Inc. (Nasdaq: VITA) for around $316 million in cash. The $3.85 per share deal represents a 41% premium to Friday’s closing price for Orthovita shares.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has agreed to acquire a minority stake in Yihaodian, a Chinese e-commerce company whose offerings include groceries and electronics. No financial terms were disclosed. | AutoTrader.com has agreed to acquire VinSolutions, a provider of auto dealer solutions, including CRM, Internet lead management and inventory management. No financial terms were disclosed. Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Nasdaq: DECK) has agreed to acquire Sanuck, an Irvine, Calif.-based shoe and sandal brand, for $120 million from Sanuk USA and C&C Companies. Sophia, an online social… |
A top health official has voiced concern that too little money is available to house the unexpectedly high numbers of unaccompanied children crossing the US-Mexico border.
In a letter obtained by the Associated Press, Sylvia Burwell, health and human and services secretary, told members of Congress’s appropriations committee Friday that the agency “may face serious funding challenges in meeting the costs of accommodating the increased number of children”.
The agency hopes to avoid a repeat of the summer of 2014, when tens of thousands of children and families overcrowded border patrol shelters.
Agency spokesman Mark Weber says the letter doesn’t ask for additional funds beyond the president’s budget request.
A total of 10,588 unaccompanied children crossed the border in October and November, prompting the agency to open new shelters in Texas and California. | Health and human services secretary voices concerns to Congress over money available to house high numbers of unaccompanied children crossing border |
In the land of the pusillanimous, the ambivalent speaker is king.
So House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is being heaped with praise for saying, on the matter of supporting his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, that he is “just not ready to do that at this point,” “not there right now” and “not there yet.”
Ryan’s comments, to CNN’s Jake Tapper, represented “an extraordinary rebuke” of Donald Trump, in the phrasing of The Washington Post and the New York Times. So it was. “Wish more @GOP leaders had his courage,” John Kasich’s chief strategist, John Weaver, tweeted of Ryan.
Watching these supposed leaders, I agree. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), up for reelection, attempted an unconvincing distinction between supporting Trump (she will) and endorsing him (she won’t). Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), in what he has said “may be the race of my life,” said he planned to “support the nominee of the party,” despite what he said were “significant disagreements that I have with Mr. Trump.”
So kudos to Ryan for not falling in this disappointing line. But might I also suggest that we are defining courage down here?
Trump has said enough — more, more than enough — for the proper, principled Republican response to him to be “never Trump,” rather than “not yet Trump.” His comments about Muslims and his proposal to bar them — temporarily, as if that makes his position somehow more palatable — from entering the United States. His false claims that thousands of American Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks. His reference to Mexican “rapists” entering the country illegally and his plan to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. His mocking of a New York Times reporter with a disability; his misogynistic comments about Carly Fiorina, Megyn Kelly et al.
These are not positions and statements that can, or should, be airbrushed away, excused or forgotten. They are, or should be, disqualifying. Yet that is not Ryan’s assessment. “I hope to support our nominee,” he told Tapper. “I hope to support his candidacy fully.”
In Ryan’s view, Trump simply needs to moderate his tone going forward, to bring the party together and to reassure Republicans like Ryan that he is a true conservative. “The question is, can our presumptive nominee turn things around, unify and have a different kind of cadence going forward?” Ryan said. “It’s time to go to from tapping anger to channeling that anger into solutions. It’s time to set aside bullying, to set aside belittlement.”
Actually, that time was months ago, when Trump first launched his divisive, ugly candidacy. Ryan’s courage is relative to the predictable but disappointing baseline of his peers. The speaker finds himself in a difficult position, but his expressed hope to ultimately be able to support Trump is an exercise in self-delusion.
Some Republicans in Congress could be at risk of losing seats, in part because of the party's controversial presidential candidate Donald Trump. These are some the Republicans who are feeling the "Trump effect" the most. (Deirdra O'Regan/The Washington Post) | Trump has said more than enough for the proper GOP response to him to be "never Trump," rather than "not yet Trump." |
TOKYO -- Japanese voters are on the brink of doing something they have not been willing to do in more than half a century: throw the bums out.
The opposition Democratic Party is surging toward what polls predict will be a landslide victory Sunday. It would end 54 years of near-continuous rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which led Japan to stupendous postwar wealth but in recent years has become stagnant, sclerotic and poisonously unpopular.
The opposition party's leader, Yukio Hatoyama, 62, an elegantly attired, Stanford-educated engineer, seems to derive much of his popularity from the simple act of being a sentient replacement for Prime Minister Taro Aso, whose tone-deaf leadership over the past year has made him an object of derision, even in his own party.
In the election's final week, Hatoyama is drawing big crowds for his signature stump speech, which savages "the long-term reign of one party gone rotten."
Although voters seem energized by the opportunity to flush the LDP down the drain of history, they are much less certain about what will replace it.
"I am not sure of what the Democratic Party is saying or what it will do, but there has to be a change in power," said Hideo Enomoto, 58, who sells industrial machines and who listened this week as Hatoyama spoke outside a commuter train station during the evening rush hour.
Senior LDP leaders acknowledged this week that the Democratic Party is on the verge of a historic win that may provide it with a commanding two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament and the ability to decide policy all by itself. The Democratic Party already controls the less powerful upper house.
The prospect of tossing the LDP out of power has created the highest level of voter interest in a general election to date, according to a survey by the Yomiuri newspaper. In the poll, 89 percent of respondents indicated interest in the vote.
As its marquee incentive for dumping the LDP, the Democratic Party is promising that it will pay parents as much as $276 a month to raise a child until he or she graduates from junior high.
Japan has the world's lowest percentage of children and highest percentage of elderly. It's a slow-motion demographic disaster that the LDP has long ignored and that the Democratic Party hopes to turn into electoral gold.
"If that money is going to come, then it is well worth voting for the Democratic Party," said Aya Koike, a 20-year-old who came with her two infant children to listen to Hatoyama's speech. She works nights in a Tokyo restaurant but could quit if the government began paying her $552 a month to look after her kids.
Many young women in Japan are reluctant to have children because of the lack of affordable day care. Promising to "take the anxiety out of child rearing," the Democratic Party has said that it will eliminate waiting lists for cheap public day care and remove tuition fees for high school. | TOKYO -- Japanese voters are on the brink of doing something they have not been willing to do in more than half a century: throw the bums out. |
(Adds comments by CEO, analyst; more details, background)
LONDON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Demand for designer clothes in larger sizes is helping British home shopping firm N Brown (BWNG.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) to defy a downturn in consumer spending, it said on Tuesday, as it beat first-half profit forecasts.
Chief Executive Alan White said the firm's average customer, a 57 year old woman, was more financially resilient than the typical shopper and was flocking to new designer ranges such as corsetry by fashion guru Gok Wan and dresses by Caryn Franklin, a presenter on television programme "The Clothes Show."
"These are people who have been almost disenfranchised by the High Street in terms of the clothes they can buy. Having it in their size is a big tick. Then being able to find some upmarket clothing, and some designer ranges, in their size is a double tick," he said in a telephone interview.
But White said external events, like the global banking crisis, were making him more cautious about prospects.
N Brown, whose catalogues include Simple Be and Oxendales, said pretax profit rose 20 percent to 40.8 million pounds ($71.7 million) in the 26 weeks to Aug. 30, above an average forecast of 37.6 million in a company poll of five analysts.
Sales rose 12.6 percent to 322.8 million pounds, and had stayed robust, up 11.8 percent, in the five weeks to Oct. 4.
White said sales growth was likely to moderate over the second half and that he expected analysts' full-year profit forecast to stay around 83 million pounds.
Gross margins, a measure of profitability, fell 80 basis points in the first half, due to increased sales from newly recruited and younger customers, who have a higher credit risk. Continued... | (Adds comments by CEO, analyst; more details, background)
LONDON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Demand for designer clothes in
larger sizes is helping British home shopping firm N Brown
<BWNG.L> to defy a |
Kia has released another teaser image of the upcoming GT4 Stinger Concept, prior to the car's Detroit debut.
Slowly but surely, Kia Motors is giving us more of a sneak peek regarding at what the automaker has in store for the 2014 Detroit Auto Show.
A 315-hp turbocharged 4-cylinder engine powers this 2-door sports coupe and, judging from the teaser images, it shares a lot of its mechanical DNA with the existing Hyundai Veloster.
RELATED: 2014 DETROIT AUTO SHOW: THESE 14 CARS ARE GOING TO ROCK THE MOTOR CITY!
In fact, come to think of it, the Veloster sports a unique 3-door body – there are two doors on the passenger’s side, and one longer one on the driver’s.
Will this style be transposed to the Kia GT4 Stinger?
RELATED: KIA SOUL EV GETS CHARGED UP FOR ITS LAUNCH IN 2014
It’s impossible to tell at this point, but we’ll know for certain when the car is unveiled on January 13, at the Detroit show. | The Korean automaker wants to be seen as more than a budget ride, and the proof is coming to the Detroit Auto Show. |
By Philip Aldrick and Angela Monaghan Published: 7:16PM BST 04 Sep 2009
Protestors demonstrate in central London ahead of the G20 finance ministers meeting, Photo: AFP
The Chancellor will make his recommendations at the London meeting of G20 finance ministers in an attempt to strike a global agreement on bonuses. His plans go far further than the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which recommends three-year deferrals, but stop short of endorsing French demands for a bonus cap.
Bonuses have thrust their way to the top of the finance ministers' agenda due to mounting evidence that banks are reverting to old habits with multi-million pound deals.
Alongside pay, the UK and US will urge other nations to accept tougher capital and liquidity requirements to prevent a repeat of past excesses. However, in a sign that discussions will not be easy, French finance minister Christine Lagarde yesterday said minor revisions to the current regime should be sufficient.
Mr Darling will be hoping to bridge the difference in policy on City pay with a range of strict new proposals, including:
- five-year deferrals on a portion of all bonuses
- clawbacks if long-term performance plummets
- a ban on all guaranteed bonuses
- clearer disclosure of sums and individuals who receive big pay-outs
He is expected to argue that caps on either individual bonuses or pay pools are "unenforceable" but he wants to go further than the FSA by demanding the rules be made "mandatory", not mere guidelines. The FSA also stopped short of imposing clawbacks and allows banks to pay one-year guaranteed bonuses to attract staff who are on course to hit their targets at their current employer.
The ministers will also debate whether to publish the names of all high-paid bankers alongside their income, not merely the pay bands as recommended in the draft Walker Review. At Royal Bank of Scotland, 200 staff were on bigger packages than chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin.
However, Mr Darling will stress that the UK will not press ahead unilaterally with the measures. If an agreement is not reached, there will be no change to the FSA guidelines.
Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers' Association, expressed concerns. "Many people move jobs more frequently than five years and clawbacks can result in very differential application," she said. "The G20 not only needs to agree a sensible regulatory framework but an implementation timetable. So far, the UK is the only country to have put proper risk and long-term requirements into remuneration."
Other issues on today's G20 agenda include the role and funding of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). There will be pressure on countries to deliver the total $500bn (£306bn) of extra funding for the IMF which was agreed at the London Summit in April.
If all current pledges were honoured, there would still be a shortfall of $13.5bn and the Chancellor is pushing for full delivery in time for the Pittsburgh Summit at the end of this month. The UK is also keen to secure an agreement from other finance ministers that policy measures taken to deal with the crisis will be unwound with a level of co-ordination.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, said during a speech in Berlin: "I see a real danger that policy makers may jeopardise the recovery by exiting from crisis measures too soon."
He added that the global efforts to reform the financial system were not progressing as quickly as necessary. | Alistair Darling is to call on banks to defer bonuses for five years as the
centre piece of sweeping new proposals on City pay. |
Despite dismal attendance figures, Hollywood is cranking out plenty of films for November and December.
Last year, five out of the 10 best-picture nominees benefited from festival word of mouth.
The Harlem drama Precious won five prizes Friday at the Spirit Awards honoring independent film, including best picture and trophies for stars Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique and director Lee Daniels.
Learn more about the nominees, vote for your favorites, read critic Claudia Puig's take on who will win and who should (which are often the same folks this year) and then proceed to win your Oscar pool!
Adam Shankman teams with Bill Mechanic to build a better awards show. And it has been "a very happy partnership."
A Serious Man is this week's platinum pick. Also new this week: I Hate Valentine's Day, Couples Retreat, The Time Traveler's Wife.
Oscar watchers were blindsided by the surprise best-picture nomination for the box-office sleeper hit The Blind Side.
With 10 best-picture nominations at its disposal, Oscar managed to spread the wealth among Everyman films while maintaining much of its blueblood taste.
The science-fiction sensation Avatar and the war-on-terror thriller The Hurt Locker lead the Academy Awards with nine nominations each, including best picture and director for James Cameron and ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow.
The science-fiction tales Avatar,Star Trek and District 9 have grabbed three of the five nominations for top dramatic honors from the American Cinema Editors. | Collection of all USATODAY.com coverage of A Serious Man., including articles, videos, photos, and quotes. |
U.S. stocks dropped after weakness in U.S. jobs figures and in European economic data knocked the market into the red for the second straight session.
Michael Casey tells why problems in Europe played a key role in pushing U.S. stocks lower today.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 76.89 points, or 0.7%, at 10662.42, as a late swoon pushed the index lower after spending much of the day between gains and losses. Walt Disney fell 2.2%, while General Electric lost 2.2% and J.P. Morgan Chase slid 2.1%.
The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell 9.45, or 0.8%, to 1124.83, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 7.47, or 0.3%, to 2327.08.
The Dow had been on a roll for September, easily outpacing what had been expected to be a weak month, and analysts said it was likely due to come back a bit before the month ended. Despite the two straight sessions of declines, the Dow remains up 6.5% for the month.
Andrew Fitzpatrick, director of investments at Hinsdale Associates, said the losses were likely warranted as the market approached the high end of a recent range. With only a week left in the month and the quarter, investors aren't likely to make any moves to break that range, Mr. Fitzpatrick added, so he isn't expecting any sharp moves in either direction.
Varying sets of data had lead to the back and forth trading Thursday, as the morning's report on jobless claims was worse than expected and data on the pace of growth in the euro zone was disappointing. A stronger-than-expected gain in existing home sales last month never proved quite strong enough to push the fears aside.
The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose by more than economists expected last week. Above, a jobs sign is seen on the front of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce building.
Mr. Fitzpatrick said the mixed bag of data reinforced that it would be a slow-moving recovery, adding, "I'm finding a little comfort in the market isn't lower than it is."
Overseas, Ireland posted a surprise decline in second-quarter gross domestic product and surveys raised concerns about economic strength in Europe.
The Irish economy's contraction in the three months to June fueled worries across Europe and beyond about the efficacy of austerity measures in tackling the high levels of public-sector debt that many governments have incurred during the financial crisis and the recession that followed.
Meanwhile, Germany's private sector expanded at a much slower pace this month, and the euro-zone PMI data suggested the area's economy is slowing down even more rapidly than had been forecast.
Stocks in the US and Europe are struggling today, after economic numbers on both sides of the pond paint a picture of tepid economies. Kathleen Madigan, Michael Casey and Paul Vigna discuss.
The euro fell against the dollar, slipping to $1.3318 from $1.3393 late Wednesday.
Demand for U.S. Treasuries rose, pressuring the yield on the 10-year note down slightly to 2.55%. Gold prices ended at another record settlement after a slim 0.3% gain. Crude settled up as well, rising 47 cents to $75.18.
George Stahl takes a look at what's moving markets before the opening bell, including a dividend hike from McDonald's and weak data in Europe.
Among stocks in focus, Red Hat's fiscal second-quarter earnings dropped 18% as foreign-exchange headwinds ate into strong sales, but the bottom line fell less than expected. Shares rose 9%, helping lead a big gain in tech stocks.
Bed Bath & Beyond's fiscal second-quarter earnings climbed 34% as the housewares retailer posted its fourth straight quarter of double-digit percentage sales growth. Shares gained 3.2% as the company hoisted its earnings outlook for the year.
Write to David Benoit at david.benoit@dowjones.com | U.S. stocks dropped in late trading as weakness in U.S. jobs figures and in European economic data knocked the market into the red for the second straight session. The Dow industrials fell 76.89 points. |
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A new set of before and after satellite images released by Amnesty International shows two towns in Nigeria’s restive northeast were hit hard by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in a days-long attack earlier this month.
Images provided by DigitalGlobe from Jan. 2 show Baga and Doron Baga before the assault. Ones from Jan. 7 then show, according to the international watchdog, that more than 3,700 buildings in both towns had been damaged or destroyed by fire since the pictures five days before. (Healthy vegetation is shown in red; and destroyed buildings are in yellow.)
MORE: 5 Facts That Explain the Threat From Nigeria’s Boko Haram
“These detailed images show devastation of catastrophic proportions in two towns, one of which was almost wiped off the map in the space of four days,” said Daniel Eyre, an Amnesty researcher on Nigeria. “Of all Boko Haram assaults analyzed by Amnesty International, this is the largest and most destructive yet.”
The death toll remains unclear, hovering between 150 and up to 2,000. An uptick in attacks by Boko Haram has cast a shadow over the country’s elections planned for next month. | Amnesty International says 3,700 structures destroyed in early January |
The Federal Communications Commission wants some local TV broadcasters to sell back their airwaves so the government can auction them to telecommunications companies for better mobile phone service. This sale could earn broadcasters billions of dollars for something the government first licensed to them for free, but could signal the end of many local TV stations.
What could be lost as cable and telecom giants gain even greater dominance over the airwaves? Do we still need broadcast TV? | Does a federal plan to buy local airwaves and sell them to telecom companies for cell service make sense? |
Brake problems. A fuel leak. A cracked windshield. One electrical fire. Then another. An emergency landing in Japan. A safety investigation imposed by the FAA. Then two premier customers—Japan’s two main airlines, ANA and JAL, ground their fleet of Boeing [BA] 787s. Then the FAA grounds all 787s used by the only American carrier. Now other regulators around the world follow suit, grounding all 50 of the 787s delivered so far. The regulatory grounding of an entire fleet is unusual—the first since 1979—and relates to a key to the plane’s claimed energy-efficiency: the novel use of lithium ion batteries, which have shown a propensity to overheat and lead to fires—fires that generate oxygen and hence are difficult to put out.
And keep in mind: Boeing’s 787 project is already billions of dollars over budget. The delivery schedule has been pushed back at least seven times. The first planes were delivered over three years late. In fact, out of a total of 848 planes sold, only 6 percent have been delivered.
Yet grave as these issues seem, they are merely symptoms of a deeper disease that has been gnawing at the US economy for decades: flawed offshoring decisions by the C-suite. Offshoring is not some menial matter to be left to accountants in the backroom or high-priced consultants armed with spreadsheets, promising quick profits. It raises mission-critical issues potentially affecting the survival of entire firms, whole industries and ultimately the economy.
Thus Boeing is hardly alone in making flawed offshoring decisions. Boeing is just the latest and most spectacular example of an economy-wide problem.
“Many companies that offshored manufacturing didn’t really do the math,” Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer and founder of the Reshoring Initiative told me. As many as 60 percent of the decisions were based on miscalculations.
As noted by Gary Pisano and Willy Shih in their classic article, “Restoring American Competitiveness” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009), offshoring has been devastating whole US industries, stunting innovation, and crippling capacity to compete long-term.
Pisano and Shih write: “The decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.”
Pisano and Shih have a frighteningly long list of industries that are “already lost” to the USA, including: compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs and handheld devices like mobile phones; electrophoretic displays; lithium ion, lithium polymer and NiMH batteries; advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters and power semiconductors for solar panels; desktop, notebook and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard-disk drives; consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes; advanced composite used in sporting goods and other consumer gear; advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.
The list of industries “at risk” is even longer and more worrisome.
Now unless Boeing can quickly fix the technical issues afflicting the 787, its entire airline business will also be “at risk”. Manufacturing airplanes could even become an addition to the list of industries “already lost.”
These issues are a wakeup call not just to Boeing but to every CEO whose firm or whose suppliers have been or will be involved in offshoring. Every CEO must learn seven lessons.
In analyzing offshoring, firms must get beyond rudimentary cost calculations focused on short-term profit,, such as the cost of labor or the ex-factory cost and incorporate the total cost and risk of extended international supply chains. This is easily done with the help of the Reshoring Initiative, whose website includes an analytical tool enabling companies to calculate the full risks and costs of offshoring. It’s called the Total Cost of Ownership Estimator[TM]. And the price is right. It doesn’t require hiring high-priced consultants: it’s free.
The Estimator poses a series of questions. What’s the price of the part from each of the destinations? How far is it away? How often are you going to travel to see the supplier? How much intellectual property risk is there? How long do you think you are going to make it? It uses the answers to calculate twenty-five different costs. When they are added up, that’s the Total Cost of Ownership.
Most companies have tended to make their sourcing decisions based on the wage rate or the ex-works price or the landed cost, and leave out another twenty cost categories. The Estimator makes it easy for the company to calculate the other twenty costs.
“Often what firms find,” says Moser, “is that whereas the offshoring price is perhaps 30 percent less than the US price, all these other costs add up to more than 30 percent. If they are willing to recognize all of them, then they can see that it may be profitable to bring the work back.”
“For instance,” says Moser, “I took the last 27 cases where users compared China to the US. On average, the US price was 69 percent higher than the production price in China. It turned out that the US total cost of ownership was 4 percent lower. So it made a huge difference to make that calculation. That’s an indication that a substantial portion of the work that has been offshored would come back if people would use the right metrics.”
Let’s back up a bit and note that Boeing’s problems have been visible for some time. In August 2011, my article drew attention to the perilous offshoring course on which Boeing was embarked.
In December 2012, fellow Forbes contributor Jonathan Salem Baskin wrote: “The company was convinced by one or more management consulting firms to outsource design and production of the 787’s components. While this idea might make sense for sourcing coffeemakers, it was a nonsense approach to assembling perhaps the most complicated and potentially dangerous machines shy of nuclear reactors. I’m sure blather from Harvard Business Review supported the idea that distances between factories in Seattle and Outer Mongolia were no farther than a VOIP chat, but the reality was a mess. Parts didn’t fit together with others. Some suppliers subcontracted work to their suppliers and then shrugged at problems with assembly. When one part wasn’t available, the next one that depended on it couldn’t be attached and the global supply chain all but seized up. Boeing had to spend $1 billion in 2009 to buy one of the worst offenders and bring the work back in-house.”
“The grounding — an unusual action for a new plane — focuses on one of the more risky design choices made by Boeing, namely to make extensive use of lithium ion batteries aboard its airplanes for the first time,” write Christopher Drew, Jad Mouawad and Matthew Wald in the New York Times: “The 787’s problems could jeopardize one of its major features, its ability to fly long distances at a cheaper cost… The maker of the 787’s batteries, Japan’s GS Yuasa, has declined to comment on the problems so far. “
What was Boeing thinking when they opted to embrace such extensive offshoring? Moser believes the error lay in using the wrong measure of the impact of offshoring on earnings. “Many companies that offshored manufacturing didn’t really do the math,” Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer and founder of the Reshoring Initiative told me. “A study the consulting company, Archstone, showed that 60 percent of offshoring decisions used only rudimentary cost calculations, maybe just price or labor costs rather than something holistic like total cost. Most of the true risks and cost of offshoring were hidden.”
For many companies, it’s time to redo the math, and then verify whether they still have the expertise to bring manufacturing back.
“Boeing has acknowledged, says Moser, “that its biggest problem was in outsourcing not only manufacturing but also a lot of the engineering. There were multiple tiers of outsourced companies who were supposed to be making their designs consistent so that the parts fit together. And they didn’t fit together. If Boeing had taken full responsibility for the engineering and then had jobbed the parts out and gotten them made to print, their problems would have been a lot less severe. It seems like they had this brilliant idea of outsourcing a lot of engineering with the manufacturing. There’s almost nothing as complicated as a Dreamliner.
“For example, an iPhone isn’t nearly as complicated. The downside risk isn’t as great. Apple has succeeded with outsourcing almost everything to Foxconn, mainly because they first completely manufacture the new product in the US. They make sure it’s right, while Foxconn is working in parallel with them, developing their tooling and whatever. So Apple has a finished product and they say to Foxconn: make it just like this! What Apple has done has worked amazingly well, because they have the capability to do the perfect prototype here, before it gets offshored to Foxconn. Most companies don’t have that.
“Thus Boeing didn’t have a finished product. So there were all kinds of risks of things not coming together. The tendency is too often for companies to try to do the engineering over here and the manufacturing over there. Eventually the innovation declines and the risk increases, as outlined by Pisano and Shih.”
Moser estimates that when the total costs are included, around 25 percent of manufacturing that is currently outsourced could be profitably brought home, if the manufacturing expertise still exists. Looking ahead, changes in relative economics are likely to increase that percentage.
It is important to take into account rapid changes in relative costs. Oil prices are three times what they were in 2000. Natural gas in the US is a quarter of what it is in Asia. Chinese wages are five times what they were in 2000 and are expected to keep rising rapidly. And in any event labor is a steadily decreasing percentage of the cost of manufacturing.
Reshoring is already happening to a limited extent. Apple [AAPL] announced recently that it will resume manufacturing of one of the existing Mac lines in the US next year. GE [GE] is spending some $800 million to re-establish manufacturing in its giant facility—until recently, almost defunct—at Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky. Whirlpool [WHR] is bringing mixer-making back from China to Ohio. Otis is bringing elevator production back from Mexico to South Carolina. And Wham-O Toys is bringing Frisbee-molding back from China to California. Based on the reshoring articles in the ReshoreNow Library, Moser calculates that at least 50,000 manufacturing jobs have recently been reshored in the last three years.
Where companies see that it could be profitable to bring manufacturing back, they will need to ensure that they either have or can rebuild the necessary expertise—sometimes a daunting challenge.
In Boeing’s case, as Jonathan Salem Baskin notes: “It didn’t help that the outsourcing plan included skipping the detailed blueprints the company would have normally prepared, and allowing vendors to come up with their own. Delivered components arrived with instructions and notes written in Chinese, Italian, and other languages. Oh, and they decided to build the airplane out of plastic along with other novel materials and technologies, so it would have been a big experiment even if Boeing approached manufacturing like it always had.”
Clearly firms have underestimated the risk of having extended international supply chains. I asked Moser whether Total Cost of Ownership Estimator can help firms get a better handle on that risk.
“The TCO Estimator assigns no factor values apart from freight,” says Moser. “The user assigns all the factors. The user answers questions about the delivery time, and the price. That enables the Estimator’s algorithm to assess the inventory and the inventory carrying costs. There’s a section on opportunity cost. If the firm will lose orders because it can’t deliver, then put a value on that. There are sections on natural disaster risk and political risk. “
If Boeing had been using this earlier what would be the implications? If they underestimated the delay risk or the technical risk as low, the Estimator would have reflected the underestimation of the risk.
“The Estimator would have encouraged them to try to estimate each of the risks,” says Moser. “When you have twenty-five of them, you only have to put in 1 percent in each to balance the savings you might get from going offshore.
“If you are buying pencils, not much intellectual property risk; if you can’t get it from this source, you can get it from somewhere else. The margins aren’t big, so you don’t lose so much. You don’t have much image to lose. But when you are making airplanes, there’s a lot of risk. Instead of having one size fit all, the Estimator lets you adapt for each product, each market, and make a more holistic and informed decision.
“The Reshoring Initiative site also offers resources. Library contains articles about transportation industry and equipment, and firms can understand where production was reshored and why. They might conclude: ‘Looks like a lot of companies are having problems with these things. Maybe we should increase our risk levels?’
“The Initiative also has information on what other users have found on the distribution of average costs. If they look at that, they might realize that some costs and risks have been underestimated. So the Estimator can help them make better decisions.”
Much of the offshoring that has taken place has assumed that the outsourced items are “little do-hickeys” with low value and so didn’t really matter much in the overall scheme of things. The little do-hickeys are worth pennies or less and have next-to-no margin. While those “little do-hickeys” might seem cheap in themselves, the lessons to be learned in improving their manufacture in the end can turn out to be highly valuable. (In cost accounting and economics, which usually don’t explicitly value knowledge, this loss is invisible and so doesn’t get taken into account.)
Firms often haven’t thought through how often they are going to redesign this product. “If it’s a bracket and you’re not going to redesign it for 30 years, it doesn’t matter very much,” says Moser. These days however there are very few components that are good for another thirty years. “If it is something that you are updating every six months or every year, then that becomes a lot more important. It’s the difference between a commodity and something that’s design-driven. The result of answering those questions is an ‘innovation cost of being at a distance.’ The Reshoring Initiative has resources so that firms can develop the understanding to make better decisions.“
The opportunity cost of lost innovation can be significant. Thus when GE decided to bring manufacturing of its innovative GeoSpring water heater back from the “cheap” Chinese factory to the “expensive” Kentucky factory, the cost of production went down. “The material cost went down. The labor required to make it went down. The quality went up. Even the energy efficiency went up. GE wasn’t just able to hold the retail sticker to the ‘China price.’ It beat that price by nearly 20 percent. The China-made GeoSpring retailed for $1,599. The Louisville-made GeoSpring retails for $1,299.
GE’s water heater as originally designed for manufacture in China had a tangle of copper tubing that was difficult to weld together. In the past, GE had been shipping the design to China and telling them to “make it”. Confronted with making the water heater themselves, they discovered that “in terms of manufacturability, it was terrible.” So GE’s designers got together with the welders and redesigned the heater so that it was easier and cheaper to make. They eliminated the tangle of tubing that couldn’t be easily welded. By having those workers right at the table with the designers, the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater went from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.
“For years,” Charles Fishman writes in a great article in The Atlantic, “too many American companies have treated the actual manufacturing of their products as incidental—a generic, interchangeable, relatively low-value part of their business. If you spec’d the item closely enough—if you created a good design, and your drawings had precision; if you hired a cheap factory and inspected for quality—who cared what language the factory workers spoke? … It was like writing a cookbook without ever cooking…. there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”
What is only now dawning on the smart American companies, Lou Lenzi, head of design for GE appliances says, is that when you outsource the making of the products, “your whole business goes with the outsourcing.”
While several decades of outsourcing were under way, why didn’t these smart managers think about the importance of innovating and protecting intellectual property? Why didn’t these well-educated managers realize that it was important to have designers, engineers, and assembly-line workers talk to each other? Why didn’t these MBA graduates realize that outsourcing might be mortgaging the future of their firms?
“There was a herd mentality to the offshoring,” John Shook, the CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And there was some bullshit. But it was also the inability to see the total costs—the engineers in the U.S. and factory managers in China who can’t talk to each other; the management hours and money flying to Asia to find out why the quality they wanted wasn’t being delivered. The cost of all that is huge.”
When managers manage with a spreadsheet rather than real-world knowledge about what is actually going on in the factory and what were its possibilities, they overlook hidden costs of the erosion of skills, the loss of quality and constraints on innovation. They also missed the potential added value to customers that could be generated by designing and manufacturing things differently. They also missed the costs and risks of an international supply chain, which is increasingly out of step with the shorter, faster product cycles.
Why did all these smart, highly educated people make all these mistakes? The root cause of these errors is a focus on the dumbest idea in the world: maximizing shareholder value. Focusing on short-term shareholder value ended up destroying vast quantities of long-term shareholder value.
A focus on maximizing shareholder value leads the firm to do things that detract from maximizing long-term shareholder value, such as offshoring, favoring cost-cutting over innovation, and pursuit of “corner cutting” and “bad profits” that destroy brand equity. The net result can be seen in the disastrously declining ROA and ROIC over the last four decades in large US firms as documented by Deloitte’s Shift Index.
The errors of offshoring are thus not isolated events. They are the result of the underlying philosophy of shareholder value, rather than the true purpose of every firm: create value for customers. The resurrection of American manufacturing will require more than simply bringing back production to America. Global manufacturing is at the cusp of a massive transformation as the new economics of energy and labor plays out and a set of new technologies—robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and nanotechnology—are advancing rapidly. Together these developments will spark a radical transformation of manufacturing around the world over the next decade. The winners in the rapidly changing world of manufacturing will be those firms that have mastered the agility needed to generate rapid and continuous customer-based innovation.
Success in this new world of manufacturing will require a radically different kind of management from the hierarchical bureaucracy focused on shareholder value that is now prevalent. It will require a different goal (adding value for customers), a different role for managers (enabling self-organizing teams), a different way of coordinating work (dynamic linking), different values (continuous improvement and radical transparency) and different communications (horizontal conversations). Merely shifting the locus of production is not enough. Companies need systemic change—a new management paradigm.
Pursuit of maximizing shareholder value at Boeing led to offshoring that has caused massive damage to shareholder value. The eventual scale of the damage can only be guessed at today. The remedy lies not in pointing fingers at Boeing’s management, but rather in treating the economy-wide disease that caused the problem.
Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In The USA
Dont’s Diss The Paradigm Shift In Management
How Manufacturing Can Learn from Software To Become Agile
The dumbest idea in the world: maximizing shareholder value
The five big surprises of radical management
Steve Denning’s most recent book is: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Follow Steve Denning on Twitter @stevedenning | Seven Lessons That All CEOs Must Learn From The Boeing Debacle: The Follies of Offshoring |
NEWARK — The cold rain had been pouring for several hours by the time the Olympian Tim Morehouse exited a cab in front of Vailsburg Elementary School. Over his shoulder, he carried a large black duffel bag filled with plastic foils and fencing masks. Despite the gray skies, he seemed giddy.
“It’s a great day for fencing!” he said, making a charge toward the door. Morehouse, 36, clad in red, white and blue, was there to demonstrate his sport to more than 100 third and fourth graders. It was one of hundreds of assemblies Morehouse has conducted with Fencing in the Schools, the educational nonprofit group he founded in 2011.
His mission: to introduce one of the most historically aristocratic sports to the most financially disadvantaged youths nationwide, involving a million children in 10 years.
The task may be more daunting than defeating the French or the Italians in an Olympic final. To most children (and adults, for that matter), foil is usually found in a kitchen drawer. Largely the sport of private schools and elite clubs, fencing is practiced by about 4,000 boys and girls in high school, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, making it about as common as riflery or drill team. It has yet to receive the kind of pop culture boost that “The Hunger Games” gave archery. Among fencing’s most noted enthusiasts have been the Three Musketeers, Winston Churchill and Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden.
But the greater barrier has been financial. Competing in junior fencing requires lessons, equipment and travel that may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, keeping talented athletes from wielding sabers or masks. Vailsburg Elementary is in one of Newark’s poorest neighborhoods, and 83 percent of its students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches.
“We thought that once people starting winning medals in fencing, things would change,” said Morehouse, who made his first Olympic team in 2004 and won a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Games. “We won six of them in Beijing, but the promise of people fencing in the streets didn’t materialize.”
Morehouse grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, attended school in East Harlem and was introduced to the sport as a seventh grader. In some ways he is bringing the sport back to its urban roots. As a child, Morehouse attended Saturday morning fencing sessions at the nearby Peter Westbrook Foundation, started by a bronze medalist from the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
“Tim has done an amazing job by trying to expand fencing in inner cities,” Westbrook said. “Whenever someone wants to do that, I welcome it. The exposure is better than when I was a kid, but it’s still not popular.”
Westbrook, a Newark native, said he paid for lessons at a local Catholic school and for years was among a handful of black athletes in the sport.
“There’s a huge talent pool in low-income neighborhoods, and it can capture kids,” he said. “Everybody has a little bit of Zorro in them.”
Working out of a corner of Teach for America’s offices in Midtown Manhattan with a fencing mask near his MacBook, Morehouse and his team, including his Olympic teammate Jeff Spear and the Olympic speedskater Maria Cruz Garcia, list their target schools on a dry-erase board. Since Fencing in the Schools was founded, Morehouse estimated that it had reached more than 10,000 children in seven states. He has also invited elite fencers to the United States for events like this weekend’s showcase in Brooklyn so youngsters from his programs can attend.
“A lot of people in the sports world don’t think of us as a serious sport,” he said.
The Fencing in the Schools model aims to teach on a large scale rather than relying only on private instruction. Instead of holding one-off assemblies, the group tries to instruct teachers on the basics of the sport so they can conduct classes on their own. Morehouse and his team have worked with manufacturers to develop more child-friendly introductory equipment than the metal weaponry used by professionals. “Pirates of the Caribbean” references are welcome.
“The kids know they need to put their masks on unless they want to poke an eye out,” said Dennis Wolfe, the athletic director at Democracy Prep Public Schools in New York, which were among the first to adopt Morehouse’s curriculum.
Installing a fencing program costs about $6,000 per school for the first year, and $3,000 or less after that if equipment is shared. Through sponsorships, students can take part for little or no cost.
In some cases, Morehouse cold-calls schools to introduce his plan, often with a donor attached.
“I say, ‘Hey, I’m an Olympian and we have a fencing program someone wants to bring to your school,’ ” Morehouse said. “And they usually think it’s some kind of scam.”
That was not the case at Vailsburg Elementary, where Morehouse’s laptop was soon projecting photographs of him at schools and of President Obama wielding a lightsaber on the White House lawn. The John Williams “Olympic Fanfare” played on a loop. Morehouse tucked his silver medal into the pocket of his track suit “for the reveal” at the presentation’s conclusion. The boys and girls filed into the cafeteria one by one, navy polo shirts tucked into khakis.
Morehouse opened with an image of Yoda brandishing his green lightsaber. The audience responded with a collective “Whoa!”
He told the students of his unlikely rise in the sport. He had fun fencing in high school and college, but was not a champion.
After graduating from Brandeis, Morehouse returned to Washington Heights to teach seventh grade through Teach for America, then decided to also pursue an Olympic berth. For three years, he said, he lost most of his matches.
“I was losing to countries I hadn’t even heard of,” he said, and accumulated $30,000 in debt.
Morehouse flashed a black-and-white image of an Errol Flynn-era fencer, pointing out the crisp lines and clean form.
“This is how you’re supposed to fence,” he said. Then he showed a picture of himself, saber flailing, a leg in the air. “They said I looked like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant.”
That remark drew raucous laughter, but Morehouse said it made him realize “this is how I am.”
He guided the children through a lesson in basic fencing terms and moves, a chorus of “en garde,” “retreat” and “advance” and a climactic face-off between the gym teacher and the school principal. “It was perfect for the message our kids need,” Yasmin Vargas, the principal, said.
The fencing curriculum for the elementary school students, which will begin next month, was the subject of much analysis among the students.
“I’ve seen the Olympics on TV,” Salma Ibrahim said. “I would like to do that.”
Precious Brown liked the presentation, which was the first time she had seen fencing.
Morehouse received a compliment from Mark Marotta, who said, “I liked when he said people might be able to do it their own way.”
Aaron Aryee may have said it best. “Who doesn’t love sword fighting?”
A version of this article appears in print on December 14, 2014, on page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Education With a Dose of Zorro. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | Tim Morehouse is on a mission to introduce fencing, a historically aristocratic sport, to financially disadvantaged youths in the United States. |
One of China’s richest property developers topped a new list of China’s top philanthropists published in the latest issue of Forbes China, the licensed Chinese-language edition of Forbes.
Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, donated some 1.28 billion yuan, or $197 million, in cash to philanthropic causes last year, the magazine said, notably for the reconstruction of a historic temple in the eastern provincial capital of Nanjing. Wanda has more than 30 “Wanda Plazas” across China, making it one of the country’s commercial property developers. Wang ranked no. 232 on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List with wealth of $4.6 billion. Wanda’s China business partners include Wal-Mart and Starwood Hotels.
Ranking second was Cho Tak Wong, chairman of Fuyao Glass Industry Group, who gave away a way a total of 1.03 billion yuan, or $158 million, according to the magazine. He can afford it. The auto glass maker had wealth of $1.8 billion on our latest billionaires list. His customers include Audi, Ford, Fiat and Nissan. Cho’s hobbies include golf and art collecting.
Coming in third was Lu Zhiqiang, the chairman of the China Oceanwide Group in Beijing, which in turn is part owner of Chinese computer-maker Lenovo . The billionaire – Lu ranked no. 564 on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List with wealth of $2.1 billion – donated 550 million to causes that included disaster relief.
Rounding out the top five were: Chu Mang Yee, chairman of Hong Kong-listed property developer Hopson Development, and Huang Rulun, chairman of Beijing-based Century Golden Resources Group, which has interests in financial services and real estate, including six shopping malls and 16 five-star hotels. Chu ranked no. 1,140 on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List with wealth of $1 billion, and Huang was no. 938 with wealth of $1.3 billion.
Click here for the full Chinese-language report. | One of China’s richest property developers topped a new list of China’s top philanthropists published in the latest issue of Forbes China, the licensed Chinese-language edition of Forbes. Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, donated some 1.28 billion yuan, or $197 million, in cash to philanthropic causes last year, the [...] |
Baubax, one of the top crowdfunding projects of all time, is finally shipping the last batch of jackets to backers. But some backers who've anticipated delivery for months are already fed up.
The company, which launched in Chicago in 2015 and has since moved to Seattle, billed itself the maker of the "world's best travel jacket."
Baubax raised more than $11.3 million on crowdfunding sites in 2015, with more than 40,000 backers ordering the company's hoodies, jackets and blazers. The multi-featured products were often likened to a wearable Swiss Army Knife.
But shipping delays and communication problems frustrated many once-loyal customers, and when Baubax began selling jackets on third-party sites before delivering to crowdfunding backers, some lost patience.
More than 75 percent of crowdfunded projects are delayed, according to research by University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick. And projects that far exceed their funding goals are more likely to be delayed. As orders grow, founders can lose sight of the costs and production demands of filling them.
In updates to backers, Baubax CEO and co-founder Hiral Sanghavi shifted blame to third-party shipping partners. Now, Rakuten Super Logistics, Baubax's North American shipping provider, says all remaining inventory was scheduled to be sent out by Friday, April 15.
Kickstarter backers started receiving their jackets — which include travel-friendly features such as an eye mask and passport pocket — in mid-February, Sanghavi told Blue Sky. Some who placed pre-orders on Indiegogo, where Baubax also began offering its products after becoming one of the biggest Kickstarter campaigns of all time, have not yet received anything. (It now ranks fourth on Kickstarter's most-funded projects page.) Shoppers continue to order jackets through the Indiegogo platform.
In late January, e-commerce site Touch of Modern began selling the jackets with no reported shipping delays. When crowdfunding backers started noticing the sales on Touch of Modern, Baubax assured them they would receive their orders first.
Sanghavi said Baubax has two accounts with Rakuten: one for crowdfunding orders and another for traditional online sales. The crowdfunding shipments, which outnumbered the e-commerce orders and often included more items, went out more slowly than the Touch of Modern orders, angering some waiting backers.
In retrospect, Sanghavi wishes he'd waited to launch on Touch of Modern, he said.
At the time, he felt it was necessary because Baubax had only about three months of cash to run the business and no additional funding on top of its crowdfunding war chest.
"I didn't know it would create such a backlash, because shipments had started already back then," Sanghavi said.
He blamed Rakuten for overpromising how many North American shipments it could process in a given day.
Baubax's international shipping partner, Floship, also made mistakes, Sanghavi said, including mislabeling nearly 1,000 customers' orders with a higher price, resulting in additional fees for international recipients. A Floship spokesman confirmed that error and others.
Rakuten Super Logistics CEO Joe DiSorbo confirmed that his company shipped fewer of the 35,000 crowdfunding orders per day than originally promised, but he attributed that to orders being more complicated than anticipated. He said it also took time for Baubax to provide his company order information in the right format, another hurdle.
Sanghavi said more than 75 percent of North American orders have been delivered to crowdfunding backers. Still, a vocal minority are attempting to take the company to task through social media.
Leading the charge is Kat Dawson, a retiree who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She said she spent $790 on six Baubax jackets and a travel blanket on the company's Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns but hasn't received anything.
"I really drank the Kool-Aid," said Dawson, who said she has backed more than a dozen other crowdfunding campaigns. She said she requested a refund through her credit card company.
In March, Dawson created a Facebook group where Baubax backers can commiserate about their experiences. She said she create it in response to having comments deleted on Facebook, marked as spam on Indiegogo and being blocked on Twitter. The group has attracted 565 members, or about 1 percent of Baubax's more than 54,200 crowdfunding backers.
"We needed somewhere to provide unbiased reviews — good, bad, ugly, indifferent — where they had no control over taking out the negatives," Dawson said. She said she posted comments frequently on Indiegogo, but that platform allows creators to mark repeated or abusive messages as spam.
Sanghavi said his team removed comments that were abusive, threatening or that asked questions already addressed in updates.
Joseph Brassard, of Cambridge, Mass., said he got a refund from Baubax after requesting it through his credit card company. After he received the money, he also got a tracking number for his shipment.
"It's indicative that they really are not in control of their whole channel export business," Brassard said.
Lance Hicks, of Newport Beach, Calif., had ordered a Baubax blazer for his son, and received it in early April. He said he understood the delays were a result of being overwhelmed by orders.
"I'm thinking about getting one for myself for travel," Hick said. "Now, I'm assuming, their production time is up and running and they're going to be more much responsive."
This summer, Baubax may attempt another Kickstarter campaign for another travel product, Sanghavi said. He's hired a team of contractors to develop the new item, and said Baubax's 11 full-time employees are working on fulfilling jacket orders.
"Our goal is not to take people's money and ship them a product which doesn't help them," Sanghavi said. "Our goal is to build a brand."
Next time around, he said, he plans to put policies in place that will allow Baubax to offer easier returns and exchanges, like e-commerce sites do.
Sanghavi, who started Baubax while an MBA candidate at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, acknowledged he made many mistakes throughout the campaign and said he took full responsibility.
He said he hopes to go back to school to finish his MBA, admitting the Baubax experience has shown him he has room to improve.
"I still have a lot to learn," he said.
This story has been updated. | Baubax, one of the top crowdfunding projects of all time, is finally shipping the last batch of jackets to backers. But some backers who've anticipated delivery for months are already fed up. |
The U.S. Border Patrol is under fire for allegedly ordering its elite, SWAT-style units to use non-lethal bean bag ammunition before responding with deadly force – even against suspects armed with high-powered semi-automatic and automatic weapons like AK-47s.
The controversy over the agency’s “bean bag” policy began in the days following the Dec. 14 killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and has escalated recently as more information is uncovered in the investigation of the fatal shooting.
"When the suspected aliens did not drop their weapons, two Border Patrol agents deployed ‘less than lethal' beanbags at the suspected aliens,” according to a FBI search warrant request filed in the U.S. District Court in Tucson on Dec. 29. “At this time, at least one of the suspected aliens fired at the Border Patbrol agents. Two Border Patrol agents returned fire, one with his long gun and one with his pistol. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot with one bullet and died shortly after.”
The warrant appears to support claims made by Terry’s brother, Kent, and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo that Terry’s team -- part of the U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit, also known as BORTAC -- was under standing orders to always use bean-bag rounds first before using live ammunition.
"There was a group of four guys with my brother and two had lethal and two had non-lethal weapons there," Kent Terry told Fox News Friday.
Tancredo wrote about the issue in a Dec. 18 op-ed article.
Although it’s not clear how many, if any, border patrol units were ordered to carry the non-lethal beanbag ammunition, one expert insists the order has been applied to at least all BORTAC teams in Arizona – if not the entire Border Patrol.
“That order stemmed from the incident on the El Paso-Juarez border in which an agent discharged a sidearm to defend himself from rock throwers,” said Andy Ramirez, founder of the advocacy group Friends of the Border Patrol. Ramirez was referring to a June shooting that left a 15-year-old Mexican boy dead.
Mexico was outraged at the incident, so Victor Manjarrez Jr., then chief of Border Patrol’s Tuscon sector, “acquiesced by ordering agents to use non-lethal loads,” Ramirez said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman, Agent Mark Qualia, said at the very least, "every law enforcement personnel within CBP has a sidearm which is fully loaded, along with two additional magazines,” and denied that units were ordered to use non-lethal bean bag ammunition first.
“There was no order given to any CBP law enforcement personel – now or in the past – that indicates the use of less lethal devices before using deadly force,”Qualia, told FoxNews.com.
But T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the border agents’ union, said there are “conflicting statements” as to whether the agents were under such orders. “Because of the ongoing nature of the investigation, the people who know best aren’t talking.”
Ramirez said regardless of whether the men were ordered to use the bean bags, the simple fact that a Border Patrol tactical team was armed with bean bag ammunition at all was “asinine.”
“BORTAC is like a SWAT unit; they’re our most highly trained, specialized unit of agents. These guys go in when we have a serious problem. It would be like sending a SWAT team into a bust with bean bags. ... They were outgunned by far.”
Asked why a BORTAC team would carry guns armed with bean bags, Qualia said, “Why do law enforcement personnel carry Taser guns? If you’re in a confrontational situation where you do not need to use lethal force.”
If the officers did need to use lethal force, Qualia said, they had the freedom to make that decision and the equipment to execute it.
"So I’m not going to Monday morning quarterback a situation where an agent in that heat of the situation has to make that decision...I wasn't there."
Bonner stressed he also "didn’t know all the facts of the case," but said “given the intelligence they had, a number of agents I spoke with question the wisdom of having less than lethal weapons in that situation."
Qualia said the CBP is fully cooperating with the FBI in their continued investigation. “As soon as something's been published, we’ll be able to follow up.” | A report on the death of U.S. border agent is raising concerns that the border patrol’s elite are being forced to use non-lethal bean bag ammunition against suspects armed with automatic and semiautomatic weapons. |
Jamie Parker, Sam Clemmett and Poppy Miller in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
05/31/2016 AT 01:00 PM EDT
Just weeks ahead of the first previews of
, the London stage production has released the first look at the characters in costume, starting with the Potter family: Harry, Ginny and their son, Albus Severus Potter.
The character portraits, which debuted on
, marks the first time actor Jamie Parker has been seen as Potter, complete with the infamous scar jetting across his forehead, and his round-frame glasses.
Jamie Parker as Harry Potter
The pictures also revealed actress Poppy Miller as the role of Potter's wife Ginny (née Weasley) and Sam Clemmett as their son Albus.
Poppy Miller as Ginny (Weasley) Potter
picks up 19 years after the final
book, with Potter now working in the Ministry of Magic. And much like his father once did, Albus is struggling "with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted."
Sam Clemmett as Albus Severus Potter
"There's much I could say about Sam-as-Albus, but we'd be into spoiler territory, so quickly I'll just say we couldn't has cast it better," author
said of the young actor.
And while she's staying mum about Albus, she couldn't help but gush about Parker's transformation into an all-grown-up version of the boy wizard.
"He simply is Harry now," she said. "There's a kind of relief in watching him, he gets it so right."
Previews begin at the Palace Theatre on June 7. | Cursed Child picks up 19 years after the final Harry Potter book |
Anders Behring Breivik pictured in court in Oslo in February.
(CNN) -- Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing of 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in Norway last summer, was formally charged Wednesday with committing acts of terror and voluntary homicide, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors say he was psychotic at the time of the killings and should be transferred to "compulsory mental health care."
A fierce debate has raged over whether Breivik is mentally competent to face criminal punishment.
The mass killing on July 22 was the single largest loss of life in Norway since World War II.
Breivik is accused of killing eight people in a bomb attack in Oslo, then going to Utoya island outside the city and systematically gunning down 69 more people, many of them teens and young adults.
Breivik has pleaded not guilty, though he has admitted carried out the attacks, the judge handling his case said previously.
His trial is due to start April 16 and is expected to last 10 weeks.
The court case is designed to demonstrate his guilt or innocence. His punishment, if he is found guilty, will then be based on the determination of his sanity.
Last month, a court ordered him to undergo a fresh round of psychiatric evaluation as experts seek to determine his mental state ahead of a trial.
Two court-appointed psychiatric experts recommended that he spend four weeks under 24-hour psychiatric monitoring so the court can get the fullest possible picture of his behavior, court documents released February 10 said.
The two experts were appointed to evaluate his mental state after the court requested a second opinion because of the importance of the question of sanity to Breivik's trial.
In November, prosecutors said psychiatrists had determined Breivik was paranoid and schizophrenic at the time of the attacks and during 13 interviews experts conducted with him afterward.
It may not be possible for him to be sentenced to the maximum punishment for the crimes if he's deemed insane.
Breivik reiterated some of his extremist views during a hearing last month, which began with him entering with a smile and offering up a raised, clenched-fist salute.
He insists nobody could believe that he was insane, and describes questions about his mental condition as ridiculous, his lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told the court.
Breivik claims the shooting rampage was a matter of self-defense, meant to save Norway from being taken over by multicultural forces and to prevent ethnic cleansing of Norwegians, Lippestad said.
Authorities have described him as a right-wing Christian extremist. A 1,500-page manifesto attributed to Breivik posted on the Internet is critical of Muslim immigration and European liberalism, including Norway's Labour Party.
The victims on Utoya Island were among 700 mostly young people attending a Labour Party camp on Utoya island.
Journalist Olav Mellingsaeter in Oslo and CNN's Laura Perez Maestro contributed to this report | Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing of 77 people in Norway last summer, was charged Wednesday with committing terror and homicide, prosecutors said. |
The Metropolitan Opera’s coming season — and the livelihoods of its workers — continued to hang in the balance on Friday, as the company continued labor talks with two of its biggest unions and a federal mediator in an effort to make progress before a Sunday night deadline.
But the talks with the unions representing the Met’s orchestra and chorus did not go late into the night; they broke up for the day on Friday evening, with plans to resume on Saturday.
Inside the opera house, there was at least a semblance of normalcy, as stagehands returned to work for technical rehearsals of a new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and members of the chorus rehearsed the coming season. Whether they would be back at work on Monday was unclear, though.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, had postponed the lockout he had threatened for midnight on Thursday, when most of the Met’s union contracts expired, for 72 hours, creating a new deadline of midnight on Sunday. That left alive the possibility that the Met could lock out its workers on Monday, less than two months before the opening of the season on Sept. 22.
Outside the opera house on Friday, the day began with about 150 singers and musicians from the Met’s chorus and orchestra holding a demonstration, with a melodious score, in Dante Park, a small park opposite Lincoln Center.
So far, the Met has come to terms with only three of its unions, those representing ushers, ticket takers, cleaning staff, security guards, building engineers and call center workers. Contracts for 12 unions, including those of the choristers, orchestra players and stagehands, remain unresolved and in some cases seem far from resolution.
Still, there was a palpable sense of relief, however wary, among the choristers and players at the rally on Friday morning. Most wore black T-shirts that read “United — Metropolitan Opera” on the front, with the symbols of the various unions on the back.
A brass nonet from the orchestra played music by Monteverdi, Bizet, Borodin, Verdi and Handel, and union officers, members of the negotiating teams and several elected officials — including Gale A. Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, and Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal — spoke of the Met’s stature and the importance of reaching an agreement.
The only bellicose moment — a chant of “Gelb’s got to go,” led by Ray Hair, president of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra — quickly changed course when Mr. Hair said, “But it doesn’t have to be that way” and urged the Met to acknowledge the musicians’ importance to the company’s operation.
The Met said in a statement that it was hopeful that the 72-hour extension of the negotiating period would “allow productive talks with the unions who have not yet reached agreement with the Met.”
Mr. Gelb said in a statement: “We want to work together with union representatives and do everything we can to achieve new contracts, which is why we’ve agreed to an extension.”
James Odom, the president of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the chorus, stage directors, soloists and others, said before the rally, “We’re ready to work out an agreement, but we have to address the real issues.” He was referring to the expansion of the Met’s budget to more than $300 million a year during Mr. Gelb’s tenure. “There are problems that go far deeper than just cutting union wages.”
Jessica Phillips Rieske, a clarinetist in the Met orchestra and a member of the orchestra’s negotiating team, also expressed guarded hope that Allison Beck, the federal mediator who joined the talks on Thursday, would be able to bring the sides together.
“I thought she was very professional, very reasonable,” Ms. Phillips Rieske said. “But we haven’t had negotiations in the mediation process yet, so we’re taking it one day at a time.”
There were indications that Ms. Beck had her work cut out for her. One union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which had not opted for mediation, partly because both sides had believed its talks were further along, said late on Thursday night that its negotiations had stalled.
And in his first public statement after the lockout was postponed, Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, continued to question the need for significant cost savings at the Met and said it would take more than 72 hours to reach an agreement.
“It is our hope that the mediated negotiations will finally yield transparency on the part of Met management, requiring it to prove why it needs upwards of $30 million in cuts to address a deficit of $2.8 million,” he said.
Mr. Gelb has said that the deficit was kept that low only by record fund-raising in recent years, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, and by dipping into the Met’s endowment, which is no longer large enough to cover the expenses of a single season — a traditional red flag for a performing arts organization. He has said that donors would be willing to double the endowment if they did not fear that the money would be used to plug annual deficits.
In addition, box office revenues are down, and in 2012 the Met took the unusual step of selling $100 million worth of bonds to see it through its financial problems.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the avenue upon which Dante Park is located. The park, across from Lincoln Center, is on Columbus Avenue (at West 63rd Street), not Amsterdam Avenue.
A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2014, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: First Extended Talks at Met End Without a Labor Deal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe | Singers and musicians held a rally on Friday morning, as other Metropolitan Opera workers rehearsed and union leaders prepared for federal mediation. |
StumbleUpon set a record for mobile stumbles during the Super Bowl, a phenomenon that may have been caused by consumers’ lack of access to their PCs.
Roberto Sanabria, the StumbleStats Ninja for the company, detailed the activity of StumbleUpon users on the company’s blog Tuesday. According to Sanabria, mobile stumbles hit a record around 6:50 p.m. PT, right before the Super Bowl ended. At that point, mobile stumbles hit a rate of 41 stumbles per second, which was 10% higher than the company’s previous peak. But overall, the vast majority of stumbles during the entire game were via desktops and laptops.
On the blog, Sanabria speculated that users may have been stuck in their living rooms and away from their computers, accounting for the relatively high number of mobile stumbles.
StumbleUpon launched an iPhone app last August. Mike Mayzel, a spokesman for StumbleUpon, says that mobile traffic for the site grows 30-40% a month, but overall mobile still accounts for a relatively small amount of overall stumbles — in the single digits, percentage-wise.
Elsewhere, users’ activity during the game appeared to be what you might expect: People stumbled less during the game, especially towards the end and during the halftime show.
Image courtesy of iStock, FuatKose. | Mobile stumbles on StumbleUpon hit record during the Super Bowl. |
Ninety minutes later, the Bounty finally lost its battle with 40 mph winds and 18-foot seas. Its captain ordered all hands to abandon the sinking ship, a shocking demise for a celebrity vessel built for the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty.”
The ship, which had been trying to make its way around Hurricane Sandy, carried a crew of 16. When the rescue operation ended about 10 a.m. Monday, 14 of the crew members had been saved by Coast Guard helicopters. Two people, Capt. Robin Walbridge, 63, and Claudene Christian, 42, were missing.
Christian’s body was recovered Monday night, but Walbridge remained unaccounted for.
The HMS Bounty, owned by New York businessman Robert Hansen, began its journey Thursday, departing from New London, Conn., for St. Petersburg, Fla., where the ship has docked for years. In addition to its star turns in the 2006 “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel and other Hollywood movies, the ship was used to teach the “nearly lost arts of square rigged sailing and seamanship,” its Web site said. It also offered sailing, teamwork and leadership classes for the general public.
On Saturday, Walbridge reported that he expected to face the hurricane’s brunt that night, according to the ship’s Facebook page. The HMS Bounty Organization, which ran the ship, knew its tall-ship devotees might be skeptical of the vessel’s path, so it tried to reassure its 8,000 Facebook followers.
“Rest assured that the Bounty is safe and in very capable hands,” the Facebook page’s administrator wrote. “Bounty’s current voyage is a calculated decision . . . NOT AT ALL . . . irresponsible or with a lack of foresight as some have suggested. The fact of the matter is . . . A SHIP IS SAFER AT SEA THAN IN PORT!”
But Sunday night, the hurricane was proving too much for the Bounty. The ship sent out a distress signal at 9 p.m., according to the Coast Guard. Two hours later, the HMS organization called the Coast Guard, confirming that it had lost radio contact with the vessel.
A Coast Guard C-130 aircraft arrived at the scene an hour later to make direct contact with the Bounty and survey the scene, about 90 miles off Cape Hatteras.
When the captain ordered everyone off the ship about 4:30 a.m., three people struggled to climb into the two lifeboats and were smacked by a wave, the Coast Guard said. One man fell into the water, but others pulled him into one of the boats. Walbridge and Christian were thrown into the water and disappeared.
While the HMS Bounty and its crew foundered in the dark, Steve Bonn was woken from a sound sleep in Camden, N.C., about 4:15 a.m. by his ringing cellphone. The 44-year-old Coast Guard helicopter pilot was needed for a mission: A big boat was sinking. | The Coast Guard rescued 14 crew members as the storm-hit boat sank, but one died and the ship’s captain is missing. |
While the skies in Singapore has remained smog-free one month into its annual haze season, its tourism sector is bracing itself for a recurrence of last year's severe air pollution, with precautionary measures already in place island-wide.
Drifting smoke from neighboring Indonesia is an annual affair during the dry months of June to September due to the agricultural slash-and-burn practices during harvesting, but many Singaporeans and businesses were caught unprepared when smog pollution reached hazardous level last June, hitting a 16-year high.
Read MoreAnalysts slash forecasts for Singapore 2014 growth
With Indonesia's disaster agency issuing recent warnings of a surge in forest fires in western Sumatra and amid forecasts that this year's haze could be exacerbated by the El Nino effect, industry players tell CNBC that they are taking no chances. Many have put in place contingency plans to combat potential pollution-related disruptions.
Aside from alternative work arrangements, travel agency Dynasty Travel said they have a variety of indoor itineraries to fall back on in the event of hazardous air conditions.
"Last year, we had a tour group who had to cancel a trip to the Singapore flyer so this year if the same happens, we'll make arrangements to [restaurant and bar] '1-Altitude' which is indoors and they can still view the city scenery," said Alicia Seah, director of Marketing Communications at Dynasty Travel.
Read MoreSingapore zoo CEO takes a leap into the wild
"For our M.I.C.E groups, we have in place art and craft, baking classes and inspirational talks if outdoor team games which require physical exertion need to be canceled," Seah added.
While Dynasty Travel saw minimal cancellations last year, it suffered a significant slowdown in bookings for nearly a month at the onset of haze. "If we had 20 calls per week, during the haze it dropped to five," Seah noted. | While the skies in Singapore has been smog-free thus far, its tourism sector is bracing itself for a recurrence of last year's severe air pollution. |
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park
Are you affected by the fire? Please share your images and footage if you can do so safely.
(CNN) -- It was a rare bright spot on an otherwise hazy, smoke-filled horizon.
As firefighters worked to get a grip on one of the largest wildfires in California's history, an evacuation advisory was lifted Thursday for residents in Tuolumne City, a picturesque community threatened by the blaze.
In a further sign of progress, authorities also withdrew similar advisories for two other northern California communities close to the flames, Soulsbyville and Willow Springs.
Known as the Rim Fire, the conflagration has charred nearly 200,000 acres, cost the state more than $39 million to date and is threatening 5,500 structures, of which 4,500 are residences.
It's the fifth-largest wildfire in California history. On Thursday, it was in its 12th day and it had only been contained 32%, according to Cal Fire. That's a slight improvement from the 30% containment the day before.
Because of the approaching flames, officials have shut down electricity generators, and San Francisco -- more than 120 miles to the west -- is temporarily getting power from elsewhere.
5,000 firefighters battle the blaze
While the Yosemite Conservancy says the Rim Fire has consumed tens of thousands of acres inside Yosemite National Park, it has so far had little or no direct impact on Yosemite Valley, a popular spot for tourists and home to many of the park's iconic attractions, including the El Capitan rock formation.
What you need to know about wildfires
Firefighters hope to keep it that way. Nearly 5,000 people have been assigned to tackling the blaze.
"This is going to be a tough fire," said Tom Tidwell, chief of the U.S. Forest Service. "It's going to continue for a few more weeks."
The blaze has created challenges not only for utility providers, but also for local firefighters, who fill in for state and federal fire teams.
"It makes more work for us. Everybody has to work more, whether they are up there or not," Art Ray, chief operator for the Stockton Fire Department, told CNN affiliate KCRA.
Some firefighters get little sleep, working four straight days, he said.
"We have to work 72 or 96 hours in a row, and being away from your family with little sleep and physically demanding takes a toll," Ray said.
'A lot of work to be done'
Authorities say the Rim Fire started on August 17. The cause is under investigation.
"There's a lot of concern, and there's a lot of work to be done," Forest Service spokesman Lee Bentley said.
Firefighters have been able to build fire lines in several locations, officials say.
The forecast is looking favorable as daytime highs sink into the 60s in Yosemite National Park over the Labor Day weekend, a break from the temperatures in the 80s firefighters were facing earlier in the week.
More than 20 helicopters and air tankers were aiding the efforts.
Firefighters battle blaze near Yosemite
CNN's Dana Ford, Gary Tuchman and David Simpson contributed to this report. | It was a rare bright spot on an otherwise hazy, smoke-filled horizon. An evacuation advisory was lifted Thursday for residents in Tuolumne City, California. |
CHICAGO – Joakim Noah had 20 points and 12 rebounds, D.J. Augustin scored 22 and the Chicago Bulls beat the Miami Heat 95-88 in overtime Sunday after Jimmy Butler blocked LeBron James at the end of regulation.
Dwyane Wade scored 25 for Miami, but with James struggling again, the Heat dropped their third straight to match their longest losing streak of the season.
James scored 17 points on 8-of-23 shooting and couldn't come through after Miami blew a 12-point lead down the stretch. With a chance to win it at the end of regulation, he got stripped by Butler on a layup.
In overtime, it was all Bulls.
Chicago outscored Miami 9-2, starting with Augustin's 3 just under a minute in. Butler added a jumper from the wing, Noah scored on a putback and Butler added two free throws to make it 95-86 with 1:33 left before James made a layup. | Joakim Noah and Jimmy Butler understand it. |
The research was conducted by Frank J. Infurna and Suniya S. Luthar, psychologists at Arizona State University, Tempe, who took advantage of a unique data set gathered annually for 13 years in Australia. It is called the Household Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia Study, conducted from 2001 through 2013 among a nationally representative sample of Australians aged 15 and older who responded via a combination of face-to-face and telephone interviews and self-completed questionnaires.
During the study, 421 participants lost a spouse. The Arizona psychologists analyzed five specific aspects of how they were faring for each of the five years before and five years after they became widowed. Sixty-six percent returned to their pre-loss level of life satisfaction within a year, whereas 34 percent experienced a precipitous decline after the death and had not returned to their prior level even five years later.
When responses to questions about positive feelings like “Did you feel full of life?” “Have you felt calm and peaceful?” “Did you have a lot of energy?” were assessed, only 26 percent had returned to their previous level; 74 percent, who had started at a lower level before their loss, sank even lower at the time of death and never bounced back fully.
With regard to negative feelings like “Have you been a nervous person?” “Have you felt so down in the dumps nothing could cheer you up?” “Did you feel worn out?,” only 19 percent were found to be resilient, no worse off after than before their loss.
The participants also reported on their general health and whether they had trouble performing daily activities like carrying groceries, climbing stairs, walking several blocks, bathing and dressing. Thirty-seven percent were resilient in terms of general health, but for 63 percent health was poor to begin with and sank lower with time. Physical functioning declined as well for 55 percent, with only 29 percent showing resilience.
Of the entire group, only 8 percent of the bereaved individuals were in good shape for all five indicators of resilience studied, while 20 percent were not resilient in any of them.
Given that 92 percent of participants experienced declines in one or more areas of functioning, the researchers concluded that it is wrong to define resilience “based on a limited set of measured outcomes.” In fact, they added, people who lost a spouse may have difficulties beyond those assessed in this study, like problems at work or general feelings of loneliness.
All told, the findings showed pronounced differences from what has been generally believed about how resilient people are to the loss of a spouse. It depends on the particular aspect of life in question.
Most important to resilience in the face of bereavement were how vulnerable or protected surviving spouses felt and how well they functioned in their everyday roles, Dr. Infurna said in an interview.
He and Dr. Luthar described three factors that influenced overall resilience: 1) Reliable comfort – having someone to confide in or lean on in times of trouble, and being able to get help from other people when needed; 2) Social connectedness – whether their physical health or emotional problems interfered with social activities like visiting friends and relatives and interacting socially with neighbors or groups, and 3) Daily functioning – having difficulties with their normal activities because of emotional problems like depression or anxiety.
Based on their data, the researchers concluded that “it can take two to three years or even longer for some to recover from bereavement” and return “to their pre-loss levels of functioning.”
What they found to help most was remaining socially connected and engaged in the usual activities of everyday life and knowing where they could turn for help and comfort and receiving support when they needed it. | Even those who seem fine often experience significant declines in specific aspects of physical and emotional health. |
View of Scheveningen Sands by Hendrick van Anthonissen after restoration, showing the whale. Photograph: Fitzwilliam Museum
It was always a bit of a puzzle what the people clustered on the sands, or peering down from the dunes, were actually looking at on a bleak stretch of windswept Dutch beach. The startling truth has just been revealed, after the conservator Shan Kuang took a delicate scalpel to a painting which has been in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for the past 140 years.
She first uncovered a baffling figure of man apparently standing in mid air, and then gradually revealed that he was standing on the great hillock of a beached whale, washed up on the shallows.
The 1641 landscape, View of Scheveningen Sands by Hendrick van Anthonissen, was very nicely painted, but perhaps one of the less exciting paintings in the museum's Dutch Golden Age collection.
There was certainly no whale when it came to the museum in 1873, bequeathed by Edward Kerrich, a clergyman, artist, and collector; the museum was probably much more excited by his oil sketches by Rubens, and drawings by masters including Albrecht Dürer.
Neither the curators nor Kuang have been able to trace any earlier reference to the whale, or to the overpainting that sank it. Kuang can't date the extra layer of paint, much more crudely applied than the original, though she suspects it may be 18th century and done because an owner thought the subject matter repellent, or a dealer thought the picture would sell better without a great dead animal taking up the middle ground.
"Today we treat works of art as entities, but in the previous centuries paintings were often elements of interior design that were adapted to fit certain spaces – or adjusted to suit changing tastes," she said.
The painting only came to her at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, a division of the museum renowned for paintings research and conservation, because the Dutch Golden Age gallery, which reopens to the public this week, was being renovated.
The varnish of the beach scene had yellowed and become unsightly, but as she removed it the mid-air man appeared, beside what appeared to be a sail. She could also see that a stretch of the sea was clearly a later addition. There was a long debate among the experts about the potential risk of damaging the painting before she proceeded to remove the overpainting, using a scalpel and solvents, working on tiny areas under a microscope.
The whale was a complete surprise – they thought the little man, who may actually have been depicted measuring the great creature, might have been standing in the rigging of a boat.
The curators were interested that unlike contemporary prints showing whales as terrifying monsters and omens of disaster, Anthonissen had depicted one in a real event. Records show there were many reports of beaching whales in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, prompting a surge of public interest in the creatures.
Such strandings, being studied by scientists all over the world, still cause great excitement, attracting crowds and often doomed attempts to refloat them. Huge crowds turned out to watch the Thames whale, which got as far upstream as Battersea in January 2006, but died during a rescue attempt. The skeleton is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum.
There were fears six weeks ago that the bloated carcass of a dead blue whale which washed up near the Newfoundland town of Trout River, swollen to twice its normal size, could explode. It deflated naturally, but was followed a few weeks later by a second even larger dead whale at nearby Rocky Harbour. Scientists believe both animals, from an endangered species, may have died trapped under thicker-than-usual Arctic pack ice. | Mysterious artwork at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum showing people clustered on beach had huge creature painted over |
Andrew Hammond is Ottawa’s biggest sports celebrity these days.
A win streak, plus a cheeky moniker will do that for a fella.
The 27-year-old rookie goaltender is on quite a roll. Known as "the Hamburglar” — a take on the old McDonald’s character — Hammond is 10-0-1 in his first NHL starts, including a sparkling 1.39 goals-against average and a pair of shutouts.
In doing so, Hammond has kept the Senators in the playoff race as the team is five points behind the Boston Bruins for the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference.
Will his play catapult the Sens into the playoffs? That will be revealed in less than a month.
For now, he has galvanized a city with his stellar play. He's also reportedly set to receive a special card that will allow him to eat for free for life at several McDonald’s franchises in the Ottawa area.
Here are five other things to know about Ottawa’s new hockey hero:
Born in White Rock, B.C., Hammond played junior in the BCHL with the Alberni Valley Bulldogs and Vernon Vipers from 2006-09. He played the next four years at the NCAA level at Bowling Green University. Hammond, who posted a 30-68-13 record in college, was twice named the Falcons’ MVP.
He went undrafted, but was signed by the Senators to a two-year contract in 2013. Last season, he played for the team’s AHL affiliate, the Binghamton Senators, where he went 25-19-3.
Like many nicknames, Hammond’s Hamburglar moniker didn’t happen overnight. While he was “stealing” wins for Bowling Green, teammate Wade Finegan told the National Post that he initially started calling Hammond Robber, then Burglar, then Burgs. The Hamburglar stuck about a week later.
"For me, it was kind of like he would rob you and he was a big guy, so he’s hungry,” Finegan told the paper. “We throw around so much B.S., as you know. You throw enough at the wall some of it is going to stick.”
Andrew Hammond features a Hamburglar-themed goalie mask. (Twitter)
Now in Ottawa, Hammond, as part of some creative art work, has the McDonald’s mascot painted on his goalie mask.
His play has also caught the attention of an Ottawa radio station, which wrote a song called Ballad of the Hamburglar to the music of Billy Idol’s White Wedding.
Hammond’s journey to the Senators wasn’t easy. In fact, it took two injuries for him to crack the Ottawa lineup. First, starter Craig Anderson suffered a bruised hand on his blocker side just before the all-star break. Backup Robin Lehner then sustained a concussion on Feb. 16 against the Carolina Hurricanes.
Hammond didn’t take long to make an impact in his pro debut, starting against the Montreal Canadiens on Feb. 15 at the Canadian Tire Centre. Hammond was spectacular, making 42 saves in a 4-2 win over the Canadiens, and was named the game’s first star. His latest win — a 2-1 shootout victory over Philadelphia on Sunday — drew a burger celebration from the Ottawa fans.
After his latest victory, Hammond has earned at least a point in each of his first 11 NHL starts, becoming the fifth goaltender in history to reach that milestone, according to Elias Sports Bureau. He joins Patrick Lalime (10-0-1 with Pittsburgh in 1996-97), Bob Froese (10-0-1 with Philadelphia in 1982-83), Ross Brooks (8-0-3 with Boston in 1972-73) and Bill Durnan (9-0-2 with the Montreal Canadiens in 1943-44).
Hammond can make more history with his next start, presumably on Tuesday night in a road game against the Carolina Hurricanes. Currently, the Senators goaltender has allowed two goals or fewer in his first 11 starts. Should he continue that feat in his next game, Hammond would equal Frank Brimsek's NHL record of 12 that the Bruins netminder set from Nov. 3 to Dec. 27, 1938, according to Elias. | Andrew Hammond has posted a 10-0-1 record in his first 11 NHL starts for the Ottawa Senators. In doing so, the 27-year-old netminder has galvanized a team and become the city's newest hockey hero. |
BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY WITH MARCUS BARAM AND K.C. BAKER
Wednesday, October 28th 1998, 2:05AM
New York's upper East Side seems to be turning into Splitsville. All at once, the marriages of three power couples appear to be shorting out.
Ken Lipper, the hotshot investment banker who served as a deputy mayor for Ed Koch and went on to write and produce the Al Pacino movie "City Hall," may separate from Dr. Evelyn Gruss, the child-development specialist who is his wife of 32 years, friends say.
Lipper and Gruss, who have four daughters, didn't return calls. But word is there'll be no fighting over marital assets.
Lipper, the Bronx-born son of a shoe salesman, made a fortune on Wall Street. But his bank account is dwarfed by what Gruss inherited when her financier father, Joseph, died in 1993. Shortly before his death, Forbes magazine pegged the Gruss family wealth at over $500 million. Sources say that Ken, who started a foundation with Evelyn it made the Holocaust documentary "The Last Days" plans to let her keep her inheritance.
Social couple Dixon and Pauline Boardman are also said to be parting.
Dixon's Optima Fund Management handles some of the smartest money on Wall Street. He's also rumored to have been the model for Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities."
Pauline, the mother of their two gorgeous daughters, is a hot decorator and a member of the international best-dressed set. In spite of all this apparent perfection, the couple's marriage of 31 years has ruptured, say friends. FYI, their formerly happy home at on E. 72nd St. may soon go on the market, for $5.5 million.
Media darlings Terry and Joanie McDonell are also said to be living apart. Novelist Joanie wouldn't confirm or deny that Terry has moved out of their Gracie Square pad. "Why don't you call Terry?" she suggested.
Her husband, former editor of Esquire and currently top man at Men's Journal, didn't call back. Joanie did offer that she's editing a collection of thoughts on "melancholy," but added, "It's not therapeutic."
Princess Diana wasn't ready to go Hollywood when Kevin Costner came calling.
Diana was unimpressed by Costner's plea that she take a starring role in the sequel to his movie "The Bodyguard," writes royal biographer Anthony Holden. The writer lunched with her at Kensington Palace 10 months before her death.
In fact, the princess was quite miffed by the proposal, which made headlines around the world. "She spoke with distaste of Kevin Costner, who had just been on the phone, trying to persuade her to appear with him in a movie," writes Holden in his new book, "Charles at 50."
Holly Hunter, who co-stars with Danny DeVito and Queen Latifah in the romantic comedy "Living Out Loud," expertly evaded questions at the premiere about how she got on with Richard LaGravenese, who wrote and directed the flick.
In a recent New York magazine article, LaGravenese called his relationship with the actress "challenging," saying that he has a nasty habit of idealizing women and giving his power over to them, which makes him start "resenting and punishing them."
Others weren't so tight-lipped. DeVito told us he enjoyed playing the romantic lead for the first time because he "got to kiss the girl. Michael Douglas always gets to do that," said DeVito.
Referring to his character's comically steamy elevator scene, the diminuitive actor said, "Douglas always has these really bizarre elevator scenes, and I had one, too, now."
Liv Tyler stepped out with her new man, Royston Langdon, at Monday night's premiere of the new glam-rock movie, "Velvet Goldmine."
The actress, who recently split with long-time beau Joaquin Phoenix, is dating the 26-year-old Spacehog bassist. During the screening, the couple cuddled, held hands, kissed and shared a large Coke.
Tyler and Langdon weren't saying much about about their new romance. Contrary to another report she's not dating Royston's brother, Antony. "I'm always getting confused with Antony, even though we don't look the same," Royston told us. Antony is one of Phoenix' pals and has been dating his sister, Summer. "We're all friends," claims Royston.
Some of the other glitterati roaming the Bowery Ballroom were Claudia Schiffer and her sister Carolin, Gina Gershon, Sandra Bernhard, Stanley Tucci, Taylor Dayne, Donovan Leitch and Kirsty Hume.
LEONARDO DICAPRIO, Mike Tyson and Kevin Costner partied Monday at Lot 61. DiCaprio had some fun with one beauty at the club attaching a "Models Suck" bumper sticker to the brunette, a little below her waist. . . .
NO ONE WAS MIA when Barry Diller and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter tossed a party for Diane von Furstenberg's new book, "Diane: A Signature Life." Among the A-listers who flooded into Elaine's were Henry Kissinger, Walter Cronkite, Charlie Rose, Edgar Bronfman Jr., Anne Bass, Marisa Berenson, David Brown, Helen Gurley Brown, Don Hewitt and Steven Rattner . . .
OPRAH WINFREY's on-air relationship guru, Iyanla Vanzant, is in town this week for her induction into ASCAP. The author of the mega-selling "In the Meantime" is talking with songwriters about setting her inspirational words to music.
'X-FILES' STAR David Duchovny likes his films X-rated. "I think porn is fine," he says in the December issue of Playboy. "I like to watch people f-. My big porn years were the '80s." The expectant father admits that Alicia Monet was his favorite skin-flick star. "If anything good can happen from this interview, it's that Alicia would contact me for lunch," he kidded. . . .
ARTIST FERNANDO BOTERO's works will be shown at a $1,000-a-ticket cocktail party benefiting the U.S. Equestrian Team and the Developing Show Jumping Rider's Fund at the Marlborough Gallery on Tuesday. | New York's upper East Side seems to be turning into Splitsville. All at once, the marriages of three power couples appear to be shorting out. Ken Lipper, the hotshot investment banker who served as a deputy mayor for Ed Koch and went on to write and produce the Al Pacino movie "City Hall,"may separate from Dr. Evelyn Gruss, the child-development specialist who is his wife of 32 years, friends say. Lipper and Gruss, who |
Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Image 1 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
"Boyhood" lost to BIRDMAN last year. It shouldn't have.
Image 1 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
"Boyhood" lost to BIRDMAN last year. It shouldn't have.
"Boyhood" lost to BIRDMAN last year. It shouldn't have.
Image 2 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
"Lincoln" lost in the year that ARGO won. That was mistake.
Image 2 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
"Lincoln" lost in the year that ARGO won. That was mistake.
"Lincoln" lost in the year that ARGO won. That was mistake.
Image 3 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR -- the best film of 2013, not even nominated.
Image 3 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR -- the best film of 2013, not even nominated.
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR -- the best film of 2013, not even...nominated.
Image 4 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Scarface: Not nominated, but better than "Terms of Endearment" (which I like) -- in fact, better than anything in 1983.
Image 4 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Scarface: Not nominated, but better than "Terms of Endearment" (which I like) -- in fact, better than anything in 1983.
Scarface: Not nominated, but better than "Terms of Endearment"...(which I like) -- in fact, better than anything in 1983.
Image 5 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
25TH HOUR: Spike Lee's best film, and one of the best American films of the decade. Not even nominated.
Image 5 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
25TH HOUR: Spike Lee's best film, and one of the best American films of the decade. Not even nominated.
25TH HOUR: Spike Lee's best film, and one of the best American films...of the decade. Not even nominated.
Image 6 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
A Hard Day's Night: On the cutting edge of music AND filmmaking in 1964.
Image 6 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
A Hard Day's Night: On the cutting edge of music AND filmmaking in 1964.
A Hard Day's Night: On the cutting edge of music AND filmmaking in...1964.
Image 7 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
A PLACE IN THE SUN: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.
Image 7 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
A PLACE IN THE SUN: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.
A PLACE IN THE SUN: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.
Image 8 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.
Image 8 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: Better than AN AMERICAN IN PARIS in 1951.
Image 9 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Raging Bull: Lost to "Ordinary People."
Image 9 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Raging Bull: Lost to "Ordinary People."
Raging Bull: Lost to "Ordinary People."
Image 10 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES: One of the classic westerns, and few even saw it.
Image 10 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES: One of the classic westerns, and few even saw it.
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES: One of the classic westerns, and...few even saw it.
Image 11 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BEFORE SUNRISE: The true best film of 1995 -- and it has gotten even better with time.
Image 11 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BEFORE SUNRISE: The true best film of 1995 -- and it has gotten even better with time.
BEFORE SUNRISE: The true best film of 1995 -- and it has gotten even...better with time.
Image 12 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BOOGIE NIGHTS: The best film of 1997 (co-starring Heather Graham).
Image 12 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BOOGIE NIGHTS: The best film of 1997 (co-starring Heather Graham).
BOOGIE NIGHTS: The best film of 1997 (co-starring Heather Graham).
Image 13 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Years later, the Academy's mistake is more obvious than it even was at the time. "Crash" won that year.
Image 13 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Years later, the Academy's mistake is more obvious than it even was at the time. "Crash" won that year.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Years later, the Academy's mistake is more...obvious than it even was at the time. "Crash" won that year.
Image 14 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
CITIZEN KANE: Yes, it lost, too.
Image 14 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
CITIZEN KANE: Yes, it lost, too.
CITIZEN KANE: Yes, it lost, too.
Image 15 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
MODERN TIMES: Lost to THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. Come on.
Image 15 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
MODERN TIMES: Lost to THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. Come on.
MODERN TIMES: Lost to THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. Come on.
Image 16 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE GREAT DICTATOR: Lost to "Rebecca."
Image 16 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE GREAT DICTATOR: Lost to "Rebecca."
THE GREAT DICTATOR: Lost to "Rebecca."
Image 17 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
DO THE RIGHT THING: In the year that DRIVING MISS DAISY won . . . not even nominated.
Image 17 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
DO THE RIGHT THING: In the year that DRIVING MISS DAISY won . . . not even nominated.
DO THE RIGHT THING: In the year that DRIVING MISS DAISY won . . . not...even nominated.
Image 18 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Face in the Crowd: Also not nominated in 1957.
Image 18 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Face in the Crowd: Also not nominated in 1957.
Face in the Crowd: Also not nominated in 1957.
Image 19 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
FARGO lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT.
Image 19 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
FARGO lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT.
FARGO lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT.
Image 20 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
ROMEO AND JULIET: Lost to "Oliver!"
Image 20 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
ROMEO AND JULIET: Lost to "Oliver!"
ROMEO AND JULIET: Lost to "Oliver!"
Image 21 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
GOODFELLAS: Lost to "Dances With Wolves."
Image 21 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
GOODFELLAS: Lost to "Dances With Wolves."
GOODFELLAS: Lost to "Dances With Wolves."
Image 22 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS lost to THE HURT LOCKER.
Image 22 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS lost to THE HURT LOCKER.
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS lost to THE HURT LOCKER.
Image 23 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
JFK: The best movie of 1991 -- one of the best of the decade -- it could never have won because people felt so threatened by it.
Image 23 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
JFK: The best movie of 1991 -- one of the best of the decade -- it could never have won because people felt so threatened by it.
JFK: The best movie of 1991 -- one of the best of the decade -- it...could never have won because people felt so threatened by it.
Image 24 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Malcolm X: "Unforgiven" was a worthy choice, but 20 years later this Spike Lee film has only gotten better.
Image 24 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Malcolm X: "Unforgiven" was a worthy choice, but 20 years later this Spike Lee film has only gotten better.
Malcolm X: "Unforgiven" was a worthy choice, but 20 years later this...Spike Lee film has only gotten better.
Image 25 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
MILK lost to SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. That really happened.
Image 25 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
MILK lost to SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. That really happened.
MILK lost to SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. That really happened.
Image 26 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
OUT OF THE PAST: Captured the dark side of the period.
Image 26 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
OUT OF THE PAST: Captured the dark side of the period.
OUT OF THE PAST: Captured the dark side of the period.
Image 27 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
CITY LIGHTS: Exactly the kind of singular masterpiece the Academy prefers to ignore.
Image 27 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
CITY LIGHTS: Exactly the kind of singular masterpiece the Academy prefers to ignore.
CITY LIGHTS: Exactly the kind of singular masterpiece the Academy...prefers to ignore.
Image 28 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Broadcast News: Even better than "The Last Emperor."
Image 28 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Broadcast News: Even better than "The Last Emperor."
Broadcast News: Even better than "The Last Emperor."
Image 29 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
PULP FICTION: Lost to "Forrest Gump." Really.
Image 29 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
PULP FICTION: Lost to "Forrest Gump." Really.
PULP FICTION: Lost to "Forrest Gump." Really.
Image 30 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
REDS: Lost to "Chariots of Fire."
Image 30 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
REDS: Lost to "Chariots of Fire."
REDS: Lost to "Chariots of Fire."
Image 31 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Revolutionary Road: Best film of 2008, not even nominated in the year that "Slumdog Millionaire" won.
Image 31 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Revolutionary Road: Best film of 2008, not even nominated in the year that "Slumdog Millionaire" won.
Revolutionary Road: Best film of 2008, not even nominated in the year...that "Slumdog Millionaire" won.
Image 32 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Lost to "Shakespeare in Love."
Image 32 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Lost to "Shakespeare in Love."
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Lost to "Shakespeare in Love."
Image 33 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
sex, lies and videotape (by Steven Soderbergh), not even nominated in the year that "Driving Miss Daisy" won.
Image 33 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
sex, lies and videotape (by Steven Soderbergh), not even nominated in the year that "Driving Miss Daisy" won.
sex, lies and videotape (by Steven Soderbergh), not even nominated in...the year that "Driving Miss Daisy" won.
Image 34 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
The Divorcee: Not necessarily better but as good as "All Quiet On the Western Front" and a more forward-looking choice.
Image 34 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
The Divorcee: Not necessarily better but as good as "All Quiet On the Western Front" and a more forward-looking choice.
The Divorcee: Not necessarily better but as good as "All Quiet On...the Western Front" and a more forward-looking choice.
Image 35 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE NEW WORLD: Not even nominated.
Image 35 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE NEW WORLD: Not even nominated.
THE NEW WORLD: Not even nominated.
Image 36 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Thelma and Louise: Lost to "The Silence of the Lambs."
Image 36 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Thelma and Louise: Lost to "The Silence of the Lambs."
Thelma and Louise: Lost to "The Silence of the Lambs."
Image 37 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE THIN RED LINE: Lost to "Shakespeare in Love."
Image 37 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THE THIN RED LINE: Lost to "Shakespeare in Love."
THE THIN RED LINE: Lost to "Shakespeare in Love."
Image 38 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR: Not recognized as a classic in its time, one of the most prescient films of the 1970s.
Image 38 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR: Not recognized as a classic in its time, one of the most prescient films of the 1970s.
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR: Not recognized as a classic in its time,...one of the most prescient films of the 1970s.
Image 39 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Image 39 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
Image 40 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
V for Vendetta: Not even nominated.
Image 40 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
V for Vendetta: Not even nominated.
V for Vendetta: Not even nominated.
Image 41 of 41 | Best Picture: What Should Have Won
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: Lost to "A Man for All Seasons."
Image 41 of 41 - Best Picture: What Should Have Won
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: Lost to "A Man for All Seasons."
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: Lost to "A Man for All Seasons." | The Motion Picture Academy gets abuse from all sides, and the abuse never stops -- down through history everyone has an opinion as to who should have won in this or that category in this or that ye... |
JOAQUIN AND VIRGINIA FOLCH have skied virgin powder through the fjordlands of remote eastern Greenland and forged trails at altitudes of over 13,000 feet in the Rohtang Pass in the Indian Himalayas. Heli-skiing with a group of experts, Mr. Folch opened a route on Mount Elbrus in Russia near the Georgian border, where they heard the sounds of guns and explosives in the distance. “And we were going into the helicopter each morning surrounded by Army people,” Mr. Folch said. “It was a little scary.”
You might assume that the Folches are stunt professionals or accomplished members of the Explorers Club. But Mr. Folch is a 56-year-old businessman, chief executive of a Spanish paint manufacturer, and Mrs. Folch, 50, is an interior designer albeit a very athletic one.
“We were in a completely unexplored area,” said Mr. Folch, describing his adventures in Russia. “One day the conditions were magnificent: bluebird-colored skies and 30 centimeters fresh powder snow. There wasn’t one person for miles around, and as we skied down we had Mount Elbrus the highest peak in Europe always in front of us.”
Until recently it was generally only hard-core professionals and guides who would dare to go on exploratory trail-breaking trips in locations like Greenland; daring skiers like the Folches would have been limited to heli-skiing in Canada or off-piste skiing in the Alps. But recently, thanks to the efforts of some intrepid entrepreneurs, extreme ski touring has hit the mainstream.
“The market for big mountain skiing in remote locations is growing in a big way,” said Chris Owens, one of the owners of EpicQuest (888-983-3742; www.epicquest.com), an adventure tour company focusing on heli-skiing trips that began last year, the result of a merger of two existent outfits.
“People are just starting to realize that you don’t have to be a professional athlete to do it,” Mr. Owens said.
Mr. Owen stressed that most experienced skiers would qualify for one of EpicQuest’s trips. “If you can ski the blues and blacks at your resorts, you can ski remote backcountry,” he said. “We can serve everyone from an advanced intermediate to a super-duper expert.”
For a price (around $9,500 a person for a weeklong trip) EpicQuest can fly a small group up into the isolated Tordrillo Mountains in Alaska with the two-time Olympic medalist Tommy Moe as one of the guides.
The cost of such trips are steep, but skiers willing to embark on trips like this aren’t just taking some physical risks, they are willing to pay a premium to do it. (Meals and rental equipment are usually included in the package prices.)
John Falkiner (41-27-776-1307; johnfalkiner.com), a professional ski and mountain guide from Australia who has lived in Verbier, Switzerland, since the late ’70s, has developed a growing reputation on the so-called “ski safari” circuit. Nicknamed the Powder Hunter, Mr. Falkiner, 54, has performed in James Bond films, skied off cliffs with only the light of the full moon to guide him and starred in extreme-skiing documentaries. A few years ago he realized that some of his clients wanted to join him on his wilder ski adventures and would pay for the privilege. “What’s happening is that people are being introduced to ski touring and then discover that they like getting away from the crowds at the ski resorts,” he said.
Most winters you can find him guiding regular clients on custom backcountry trips through the Alps. The trips use a combination of lifts, skins (strips of nylon strapped to the bottom of skis to aid climbing steep hills), and sometimes helicopters to get skiers to the top of isolated peaks. Then the group cuts fresh tracks into valleys of untouched powder, taking breaks in mountain huts or tiny secluded villages.
But what Mr. Falkiner really loves to do is take a few of his most venturesome clients to places like Lebanon or Kashmir. “The North America experience is too slick and smooth,” he said. “Skilled skiers are beginning to look for something a little bit different, something outside the normal ski holiday box. I’ll take them ski touring from central Lebanon all the way to the Syrian border. Sometimes we sleep in a five-star hotel and sometimes a snow cave. You ski into isolated villages where they rarely see Westerners. There is a great sense of exoticness.”
Beyond this remoteness, part of the appeal of these trips is spontaneity. As Hans Solmssen (41-79-446-2289; www.swissguides.com), another Verbier-based ski safari guide, described it: “The final details of where we are going are frequently not decided upon until the last minute, which allows us to chase the best possible conditions. This is what my clients enjoy the most: that I take them to places I myself have not been and that we are flexible enough to change the itinerary at the last minute.”
Over the last few years, technological advances in both remote communication and ski equipment have made these kinds of trips safer and easier.
Beat Steiner, a founder of Bella Coola Heli Sports (604-932-3000; www.bellacoolahelisports.com), which offers ski safaris in the far-flung Bella Coola Valley in British Columbia, said: “You’ve got satellite phones, so there’s more security even if you are in really remote areas. All our helicopters are tracked by satellite, and our dispatcher tracks helicopters on Google Earth.” (Mr. Steiner’s company has exclusive access to an area that is 2.64 million acres, with descents up to 5,500 feet more than 300 times the size of Whistler-Blackcomb and about one and a half times the height of Vail.)
“Recent ski technology makes it easier to ski powder,” Mr. Steiner continued. “The latest are the reverse camber or rocker skis Shane McConkey invented, which are the complete opposite of traditional skis. They are narrow at the tip and wider under the foot and they work absolutely fantastically in power snow. You can ski longer and not get tired.”
Stephen Drake, author of “The Powder Road,” a memoir of deep-powder skiing in Alaska and elsewhere, and a founder of DPS Skis (www.dpsskis.com), a small four-year-old company that manufactures custom-made skis for deep powder and big mountain skiing, said that while ski sales in general were flat, “the market for free-ride and powder skis has been growing every year.”
The last six or seven years have shown dramatic growth,” he continued.
Mr. Drake described the exhilaration of skiing an area no one has ever been on: “You look out 360 degrees over a landscape where there are no tracks and nothing made by man. It could be a million years ago.” He paused and added, “Those are the moments that give you a sense of complete freedom.” | Extreme ski touring has recently hit the mainstream thanks to the efforts of some intrepid entrepreneurs. |
When people ask us, “What’s the most frightening thing you’ve done while travelling the world?”, they often expect a story from Iran, Kazakhstan or Rwanda. Yet while we have encountered plenty of challenges during our travels, many of which have been fodder for stories on our blog, our most difficult moment came before all that. It was when in 2006, as mid-career professionals, my wife and I handed in our resignation letters, setting aside the security of one life for the uncertain opportunities of another – together.
Both of us are American, but we were working in Prague at that time. Audrey, my wife, managed tax and legal issues for US media organisation Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I was a management consultant for the mobile phone provider Vodafone. After five years in Prague, and a combined 20 years of professional experience, we both had begun to feel as though our careers no longer challenged us. We needed a professional and creative re-boot.
Travelling together wasn’t new to us, having followed our simple 25-person wedding in Pienza, Italy with a five-month backpacking trip across Europe. But it was a trip to Thailand over Christmas 2004 that truly illuminated how we could make long-term travel a reality. Even though we could have budgeted for a pricier hotel, it was a 400 baht per night bungalow that brought us joy and satisfaction.
Back home, intrigued by the idea of acquiring life experiences over objects, we found other ways to adjust our spending habits. We cut back on items for our apartment, clothes and eating and drinking out. Our goal: to save up for a 12- to 18-month sabbatical that would let us both travel the world and develop skills that could transition us each into alternate professions – and into the next stage of our lives together.
The major mitigating factor? We are two people. When you act alone, you can just pick up and go. As a couple you must constantly communicate to make sure you’re still aligned in your goals and needs. It’s something we call “checking in”, a process we’d used somewhat informally in our daily lives, but now approached more deliberately given the major life decisions ahead of us. The decisive check-in happened one night as we sat together at the edge of our bed in Prague, probing possible reasons for making the leap – or not.
“Are we really ready to do this?” I asked.
“Well… maybe we can put it off just a little while longer?” Audrey responded, echoing my own ambivalence.
“But one year becomes five, five becomes 10. The next thing you know you are looking back and wondering ‘What if?’” I said. We looked at one another, knowing what we were about to do.
Granted, our decision seemed a little unhinged, especially to those close to us. Luckily, we had prior experience with the challenging conversations and puzzled looks, having set off five years earlier from San Francisco to Prague in the mid-winter – with no jobs lined up. It was a decision that perplexed our friends and family, but also satisfied the nagging curiosity that we both had.
And so in December 2006, two years after our fateful Thailand trip, we handed in our resignation letters, sold everything except what we could cram into our backpacks and departed with two one-way tickets to Bangkok.
Over the next eight years, we travelled the Silk Road overland from the Republic of Georgia to China, climbed to the top of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, took a 60-hour train from Iran to Istanbul, witnessed the sun rise over the salt flats in Bolivia, followed penguins in Antarctica, trekked in the Himalayas, tracked tigers in Bangladesh and were continually humbled by the prevailing kindness shown to us by people we met.
That one-year sabbatical? It became a new lifestyle – and it did lead to different professions. | Quitting your job to travel is not only an option for those who go solo. Here is how one couple did it â and how they have stayed on the road, and together, ever since. |
The Texas state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland after a confrontation that began with a traffic stop was cautioned about “unprofessional conduct” in a 2014 incident while he was still a probationary trooper, according to documents released on Friday.
Related: Sandra Bland: suspicion and mistrust flourish amid official inconsistencies
Bland, a 28-year-old Chicago-area woman, was found dead in her Waller County jail cell in Hempstead, about 200 miles south of Dallas, on 13 July, three days after her arrest. Officials say she used a plastic bag to hang herself, a finding her family has questioned. Bland’s family and others also have criticized trooper Brian Encinia, who stopped Bland for failing to signal a lane change.
The Texas Department of Public Safety released Encinia’s personnel file in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Encinia had been with the department for a little over a year. For the most part, his file was unremarkable. He received “competent” ratings in all of the evaluations that were released.
However, in an evaluation that covered September and October 2014, his supervisor noted that Encinia “was given a written counseling for unprofessional conduct … for an incident occurring while at a school in Austin”. The documents provided no additional details and a department of public safety official did not return a phone call seeking comment.
The evaluation goes on to say: “In the future, Trooper Encinia should conduct himself at all times in a manner that will reflect well upon himself, the department, and the State of Texas. This supervisor will ensure that this is done by meeting periodically with Trooper Encinia.”
Under the category of “stress tolerance” in the same evaluation, his supervisor remarked that Encinia “performed effectively and rationally while involved in a pursuit resulting in a firearms discharge during the reporting period”. The document did not provide additional details about that incident.
The documents also do not include any information about Encinia’s interaction with Bland. That is still under investigation, though the director of the department of public safety, Steve McCraw, has said Encinia violated internal policies of professionalism and courtesy.
Dashcam video shows the confrontation between Bland and Encinia swiftly escalated after she objected to being told to put out her cigarette. Encinia at one point is seen holding a stun gun as he says “I will light you up!” after Bland refuses to get out of her car. Bland, who was black, eventually was arrested for allegedly assaulting the white trooper.
Bland’s death came after nearly a year of heightened national scrutiny of police and their dealings with black suspects, especially those who have been killed by officers or die in police custody.
According to his personnel file, Encinia was selected for the trooper trainee academy in December 2013, joined the department of public safety in June 2014 as a probationary trooper and completed his probation in June 2015, becoming a highway patrol trooper.
Related: Sandra Bland's death in police custody puts spotlight on Texas jail standards
Encinia’s most recent performance evaluation was for November and December 2014. Among the remarks were that Encinia “appears to operate effectively under stress”, “continues to use good problem solving skills and judgment while working patrol” and “appears to treat others in a respectful manner”.
Before applying for trooper training, Encinia was a volunteer firefighter in Brenham, where he was a supervisor at Blue Bell Creameries. Brenham fire chief Ricky Boeker remembered Encinia as a “stand-up kind of guy” popular with the people he worked with.
Encinia, a 2008 graduate of Texas A&M University, was elected as a district chief, Boeker said.
“He was a smart individual, very detail-oriented and he was just well liked by all of our members,” he said. | Brian Encinia given written counseling while a probationary trooper.Texas officials say Encinia violated internal policies during traffic stop |
The Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1944 has been brought to life in a riveting new film.  Cinematographers have added color and sound to black and white film taken by the Polish Resistance during the revolt against the Nazis.  The filmmakers hope it will help trace some of the heroes caught on camera.  ITV's Neil Connery reports.Â
By Monika Scislowska, Associated Press
WARSAW, Poland -- Rebels crouch behind barricades, dodging enemy fire. Rivers of fire belch from flamethrowers. Women and children dash across bombed-out ruins. Men pull a corpse out of rubble.
The scenes are as riveting as any Hollywood war movie. But they are snippets of historical footage from the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, enhanced by modern coloring and sound techniques — and turned into a film.
The only purely fictional elements are voiceovers presenting an imagined narrative that stitches together the footage: Two brothers scour the streets of the Polish city tasked with filming the 1944 rebellion of Warsaw residents against their Nazi occupiers, commenting on what they witness, from soup kitchens to scenes of destruction.
It makes for a mesmerizing account of the fierce house-to-house fighting against the German army that began on Aug. 1 and ended 63 days later with the insurgents surrendering, following the deaths of some 200,000 rebels and residents. "Warsaw Rising" is cobbled together from black-and-white silent footage of crews that the Polish resistance Home Army sent fanning through the city to chronicle the uprising. Cinematographers hired by the Warsaw Rising Museum added coloration and sound that give a real-life feel, while modern editing techniques provide a polished, fast-paced narrative.
The museum released the trailer of the film last month as part of the observances of the anniversary of the launch of the doomed struggle. The movie hits cinemas —in Poland and abroad — next year, before the uprising's 70th anniversary.
Meanwhile, the museum has posted the trailer on its website in an effort to identify people in the movie. Some have already been found, still living. One is a smiling fighter filmed in a trophy German helmet and uniform, toting a captured machine gun and ammunition: Witold Kiezun, now 91, remains active in Warsaw as a professor of economics and management.
"I was going back to base when the chronicle people stopped me and filmed me," Kiezun, a former U.N. worker in Burundi, told The Associated Press. "I smiled at them because I was madly happy that we won (a battle) and that we had captured this machine gun, a precious trophy. My bag is filled with hand grenades."
Museum historians and film experts spent two years creating the 90-minute movie. Film director Jan Komasa produced the story line, while sound director Bartosz Putkiewicz oversaw the brothers' dialogue and the matching sound and music.
Authenticity was paramount. Filmmakers recorded sound at a firing range shooting from the same kinds of weapons seen in the film. Lip-reading experts studied the footage, allowing actors to give people in the movie a voice. Historians consulted surviving fighters and pored through thousands of old pictures to get the right color and shade in every garment, object and place.
The faces in the movie are hauntingly poignant.
A woman with a soot-smudged face and disheveled hair stands stunned. A man swathed in bandages looks into the camera with a look of inexpressible sadness. Amid the death and chaos, rebels enjoy laughter and camaraderie: One spreads his arms in apparent mock despair over the state of his socks; another waves a sword with childlike, swashbuckling glee.
The Home Army footage was captured to document history but also for political reasons: to rally the nation and to show the Allies Poland's bravery against Hitler's army. Museum director Jan Oldakowski concedes that some scenes of fierce fighting were re-enactments by insurgents of action they had taken part in. It's also possible that the camera crews gave some direction to the rebels and Warsaw residents captured in the movie.
Despite all of this, museum historian Piotr Sliwowski said the footage is pretty much as real as things can get.
"When someone cries in the film, he cried for real," said Sliwowski. "When someone is happy, he was happy for real. If someone dies, he really died."
At the time of the uprising the Nazis had been occupying Poland for five years. Thousands of poorly-armed young Warsaw residents, members of the clandestine Home Army, wanted to gain control of the capital before the advancing Soviet Red Army reached it and put the city under an equally hated regime. Without reinforcements or supplies, the insurgents gave in after two months. The punishment was ferocious: The Nazis sent survivors to death camps, including Auschwitz, and razed most of the city.
The idea for the movie came from Oldakowski, whose young son asked why people in black-and-white uprising documentaries are dark-faced.
"It was an insane idea," Oldakowski said, "but we decided to tell the truth and make it contemporary by removing this black-and-white color barrier." | By Monika Scislowska, Associated Press WARSAW, Poland -- Rebels crouch behind barricades, dodging enemy fire. Rivers of fire belch from flamethrowers. Women and children dash across bombed-out ruins. Men pull a corpse out of rubble. The scenes are as riveting as any … |
Latin America may be the most murderous continent on Earth, but huge improvements in public safety have been achieved in several major cities, according to a new homicide map of the world that is being launched this week.
Related: Ten murders in five hours: one deadly night in São Paulo's dangerous triangle
Several metropolises that were once bywords for violent death – such as Medellín, Bogotá, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – have seen murder rate declines of more than 60% over the past two decades thanks to improved living standards, better education, decelerating urbanisation and more effective policing, say the researchers behind the Homicide Monitor.
But while overall figures are falling, the map reveals that murders are stubbornly concentrated in poor communities, and the victims are mostly young – usually black or mixed-race – men.
The Monitor is an interactive online world map with data on the distribution of murder by country, year, age of victim and – where figures are available – gender and type of weapon. Drawing on statistics from the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, government offices, health institutes and police records, the authors also include a detailed city- and state-level breakdown for Latin America, the worst-affected region.
It has been compiled as a tool for policymakers and researchers by the Igarapé Institute, a Rio thinktank with funding from the Open Society Foundation and Peace Research Institute Oslo.
The map reveals that a third of the world’s 450,000 murders each year occur in Central and South America and the Caribbean, though the region is home to less than a tenth of the population. Fourteen of the top 20 countries in a ranking of murder rates are in Latin America.
The countries with highest death rates in relation to number of inhabitants are Honduras, El Salvador and Venezuela. Excluding war zones, Brazil has the most murders overall, with 56,337 homicides in 2012, the most recent year with figures for all countries.
While the figures theoretically means a person is 25 times more likely to be murdered in Brazil than in the UK, the detailed mapping of trends and murder “hot spots” shows the risks for most people are falling.
Media reports ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympics have made much of Brazil’s deadly crime problem.
But according to Robert Muggah, the Canadian founder of the Igarapé Institute, the data shows that murder victims in Brazil are more likely to be young black men than rich foreign tourists.
“Violence is not evenly distributed around the world, much less in Brazil. It tends to be highly concentrated,” said Muggah. “The perception in many cities that everyone is equally at risk is flat-out wrong. In many US cities, for example, less than 5% of street addresses account for 75% of violence. In Bogotá, just 2% of street addresses are where 98% of homicides occur.”
He noted that the urban zones most susceptible to sudden outbreaks of violence are usually fast-growing, poorly regulated areas, often with high population densities and large numbers of new arrivals. Unlike longer-established downtown neighbourhoods, these communities are often a low priority for local governments and police chiefs.
The Homicide Monitor plans to include essays from leading criminologists and other experts on the methods that have been most effective in reducing killings. High among them is “hot spot” policing – the deployment of large numbers of officers to areas with high murder rates. Thanks to this and greater efforts to involve local communities in public security decision-making, São Paulo saw its homicide rate fall dramatically from 42.2 per 100,000 people in 2000 to 13.9 per 100,000 in 2010.
Problems remain, however. Police killings are still alarmingly high and there is pressure from influential commercial districts and wealthy neighbourhoods to have more police protection. Similar “enclave mentalities” are undermining efforts to “pacify” favelas in Rio because elites in the most upmarket communities would rather have police protecting their homes than reducing crime at its source. Contrarily, in poorer regions of Brazil, particularly the north-east, resources are low and homicide rates continue to be alarmingly high.
The national government has been slow to act. Although murder is the leading cause of death for Brazilians between the ages of 15 and 29, national funding for reducing homicide and violent crime has plummeted since 2011 and there is no federal programme to support the most-affected states.
“In Brazil there is no national homicide strategy, which is not what you would expect considering 56,000 people are dying violently every year,” said Muggah. “It is a disproportionately modest response to an enormous problem.”
While the trend in wealthy countries and cities is for a steady fall in murder rates, the map illustrates the considerable challenges that remain in many parts of the world. The Homicide Monitor database will be expanded to include more detailed figures from Africa. The authors also plan to launch public media campaigns in countries such as Honduras with high levels of homicide. | Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela and Brazil earn unwanted distinction but homicides are concentrated among young male poor and policing can slash rates |
Donald Trump’s self-deportation from the pre-Iowa Republican primary debate allowed a return to temporary political normalcy. Mr. Trump’s out-sized persona, joined to his blunt talk, surely has contributed to his remarkable rise. But without the businessman gripping the center-stage tiller Thursday evening, voters got a better chance to navigate issues along with the personalities. | The non-Trumps had a chance to define their political appeal. |
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 5:15 PM EST, Thu December 22, 2011
(CNN) -- Attorneys for John Edwards asked again Thursday to delay his criminal trial, saying the former presidential candidate and U.S. senator has an unspecified medical issue.
In June, the Justice Department charged Edwards with conspiracy, issuing false statements and violating campaign contribution laws. He has pleaded not guilty.
In September, the trial was delayed until January 30 after Edwards' attorneys said he needed more time, in part due to his position as the sole caretaker of his two youngest children, ages 11 and 13, after his wife, Elizabeth, passed away in December 2010.
The motion to continue the trial for 60 days filed Thursday says Edwards' "unexpected" medical issue is explained in a sealed exhibit. The issue will "prevent a trial of this matter during the January 2012 criminal term," according to the motion, and cannot be resolved before the end of the term.
Attorneys for Edwards, who was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2004 alongside John Kerry, also say in the motion a January trial would not give them enough time to prepare, especially given the "unusual and complex" prosecution.
"Since this trial date was set, the government has produced as part of the discovery process an additional 103,102 pages of material including more than 91,000 e-mails as well as 26 voice mails received by cooperating witnesses between 2007 and 2010," the motion says. In addition, both the government and Edwards are seeking evidence from North Carolina state courts.
"Absent a continuance, Mr. Edwards' counsel will not be able to effectively use the evidence the government was obligated to provide him ... and this, in turn, threatens Mr. Edwards' right to effective counsel and a fair trial," according to the motion.
"This is not hyperbole. Mr. Edwards' counsel are experienced trial lawyers and they are and have been working hard -- long hours, late nights and weekends -- and they have not made it their practice to seek unwarranted continuances."
A chief issue in the upcoming trial is whether money given to support Edwards' mistress, Rielle Hunter, by the then-candidate's benefactors should have been considered campaign donations, a contention Edwards' team has disputed. They maintain the money was a gift to Hunter.
If convicted on all counts, Edwards could face 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $1.5 million.
Most popular stories right now | Attorneys for John Edwards asked again Thursday to delay his criminal trial, saying he has an unspecified medical issue. |
A former member of Hosni Mubarak's political party has been appointed as Egypt's new prime minister, a day after the cabinet announced its shock resignation, vowing to crack down on the militant violence that has blighted Egypt since the overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.
Ibrahim Mahlab spoke after his appointment by Adly Mansour – the army-appointed president who has been in office since Morsi's removal in July – and said he hoped to form his government within three or four days.
"We will work together to restore security and safety to Egypt and crush terrorism in all corners of the country," he said. "Security and stability in the entire country and crushing terrorism will pave the way for investment."
Mahlab, who was housing minister in the previous administration, will head Egypt's sixth government since the 2011 uprising that toppled the autocratic Mubarak, beginning yet another chapter in the chaotic post-Mubarak era.
Mahlab once belonged to Mubarak's National Democratic party, and is the former CEO of Arab Contractors, one of the region's largest construction firms.
He is expected to lead an interim government at least until the election of a new president – likely to be army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – and perhaps even until the installation of a new parliament.
Egypt's media and political class are largely supportive of Mahlab, who is seen as a man of action compared with his predecessor, 77-year-old Hazem al-Beblawy.
Both men are white-haired, but on Tuesday pro-regime newspaper al-Watan printed a caricature of a brown-haired Mahlab standing next to a white-haired Beblawy to emphasise the former's comparative youthfulness.
"He gets things done," Samir Radwan, Egypt's former finance minister, told the Guardian on Monday. "He is a doer, a man of action. I've never seen him in an office. I've only ever seen him on a building site."
Opponents of the government criticised Mahlab's appointment because of his connection to the Mubarak era, and to business elites. Under his watch as housing minister last week, 1,200 families were forcibly evicted from their Cairo homes, and their houses demolished, Amnesty International reported.
Beblawy was blamed for failing to dealing with a rise in the number of workers' strikes, electricity shortages and a spiralling economy – problems that have blighted Egypt for years and which the new government is unlikely to solve. It is unclear how much say he or his ministers had in their departure from government, and how many of them will be reappointed. At least two ministers had no prior knowledge of their 'resignation'. | Former housing minister and Mubarak party member pledges to 'crush terrorism' and crack down on rise in violence |
WASHINGTON | Tue Jan 6, 2009 10:21am EST
WASHINGTON Jan 6 (Reuters) - Older Americans are spending less on entertainment and restaurant meals as the recession forces them to focus on paying for essentials such as food, gas and medicine, a survey released on Tuesday said.
A survey of Americans aged 45 and older conducted for the AARP, an influential advocacy group for people over 50, found many had suffered savings and investment losses and planned to postpone retirement.
About 57 percent of people aged 45-54 and about 63 percent aged 55 to 64 who suffered investment setbacks said they expected to work longer because of their losses.
The survey of 1,097 people aged 45 and older was conducted in December by Woelfel Research. About 91 percent of those surveyed said the U.S. economy was in bad shape, compared to 81 percent the previous April. The recession officially began in December 2007.
About 68 percent of those surveyed last month had cut entertainment spending and 64 percent were eating out less.
About 52 percent had difficulty covering basic expenses like food, gas and medicine last year.
"However, reports of such challenges were less common in December than in April, which most likely reflects the recent slowdown in inflation, including declining energy prices, during the second half of 2008," AARP said.
Thirty six percent of those surveyed stopped putting money into a 401K or other retirement saving account while 17 percent prematurely withdrew retirement funds.
(Reporting by Donna Smith, editing by Alan Elsner) | WASHINGTON, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Older Americans are spendingless on entertainment and restaurant meals as the recessionforces them to focus on paying for essentials such as food, gasand medicine, a survey |
The results were virtually the same for men and women, according to the survey of about 1,000 working parents with at least one child under age 18. The survey was conducted on behalf of Bright Horizons, a for-profit child-care chain, and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
It found that about 29 percent of all working parents surveyed worried that they could get fired because of family responsibilities.
Read MoreWork-life balance increasingly important for dads
Among a smaller group of parents who said they already had at least one worry about work-life conflict, close to half said they feared getting fired.
Getting the ax was the most common fear, but many parents also fretted about things like not getting promoted, not getting a raise or not getting choice projects because of family responsibilities.
About 31 percent said they had faked being sick because of family responsibilities, and about 23 percent said they had lied or bent the truth about family responsibilities that got in the way of work.
Read MoreMore dads stay at home, not necessarily by choice | Nearly three in 10 working parents fear that they could get fired because of their family responsibilities, according to a new survey. |
Don Cherry has a message for new Leaf president Brendan Shanahan: draft Canadians and players from the OHL if you ever want to challenge for a Stanley Cup.
During his first Coach’s Corner segment of the Hockey Night in Canada season, Cherry ripped the Leafs' brass for picking European and U.S. college players at the 2014 NHL draft, while the Stanley Cup champion Los Angeles Kings filled their draft with Canadian players.
“We have the Stanley Cup champions, who have won two out of three Stanley Cups, right? Their [roster is] full of Canadians, full of guys from the OHL and they win two out of three," said Cherry. "How many Canadians did the Leafs draft? Zero. No stars will every come here to Toronto. Why would you? You have to go through the draft. They have not had an impact guy since Wendel Clark [drafted first overall in 1985].
Cherry’s biggest beef was Toronto passing on Peterborough Petes winger Nick Ritchie in the first round in favour of Swedish William Nylander at No. 8. The Ducks scooped up Ritchie two picks later.
“They passed on a guy, Nick Ritchie, who is 6-foot-3, 230 pounds [and had] 100 minutes in penalties. Oh, you’re going to say he’s a dummy. Only three guys in the whole draft scored more goals than this guy. And guess who picked him up right after that… Anaheim.”
Watch Don let the Leafs have it.
It was a subtle, subdued suit for Don Cherry's season debut on Coach's Corner... (Yeah, right) http://t.co/sTRGVT4DxD pic.twitter.com/11llevl54x
Cherry didn't get a lot of backing on Twitter.
Don Cherry says the Leafs should've picked Ritchie, and that Nylander was sent back to Sweden "to save his life". Starts Rogers era strong..
Don Cherry just laying into William Nylander because Sweden
What Don Cherry forgot: Slovenian is Kings best C. Quick is American. Gaborik, Voynov aren't Canadian.
for all the Don Cherry haters out there..he's been involved with hockey for over 6 decades. Let me know when you have a comparable pedigree | During his first Coach’s Corner segment of the Hockey Night in Canada season, Don Cherry ripped the Toronto Leafs for filling their 2014 draft with European and U.S. college players instead of Canadians. |
Military chaplains and service members opposed to same-sex marriage are coming under attack in the military, according to Republican lawmakers and a chaplain advocacy group.
The Chaplain Alliance For Religious Liberty said there is an effort under way to silence, and in some cases punish, those opposed to gay marriage. The allegations surfaced after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
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“If you are supportive of same sex marriage, you can speak boldly,” said Ron Crews, executive director of the Chaplain Alliance. “But if you are opposed, you are silenced.”
Crews is one of 19 individuals to write a letter to the House Armed Services Committee urging lawmakers to protect the religious liberties of chaplains and service members.
“Until Congress acts decisively, efforts to silence the voices of our military chaplains of all faiths and backgrounds will likely continue well into the future,” the letter read. “It is time that Congress secures the rights of all chaplains, once and for all, instead of allowing those that do not subscribe to the orthodoxy of the day to be unconstitutionally silenced.”
The Pentagon disputed those assertions. In a statement to Fox News they said chaplains are not required to participate or officiate in any private ceremony that might conflict with their religious or personal beliefs. They also denied any service members have been punished for opposing gay marriage.
“In general, as we have reinforced in training across the force, DADT Repeal is not about changing attitudes but rather about reinforcing behavior that treats everyone with dignity and respect,” the spokesman said.
George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said in a statement to Fox News “the religious freedoms of Army chaplains are already well protected in Army policy and regulations.”
Crews said they know of dozens of instances where military personnel have come under fire. He said one chaplain was told that if he could not support DADT he should resign his commission.
“Some of these chaplains have in fact had their careers impacted,” he told Fox News. “They’ve been punished. Right now, if you are opposed to this policy you’re not seen as a team player.
An amendment to the 2013 defense authorization bill could change that. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), protects religious freedom of military chaplains and service members opposed to same-sex marriage.
Akin said he’s received a number of complaints about people of religious faith concerned about what they perceive to be attacks on Christianity.
“There is a war on religious belief in the military,” Akin told Fox News.
Akin said he was aware of chaplains who’ve come under fire for their opposition.
“That’s the point (of the amendment),” he said. “To prevent further reprisals in the future.”
“It’s frightening,” Crews said. “This is just another example of this administration’s push against religious liberty.” | By Todd Starnes
Military chaplains and service members opposed to same-sex marriage are coming under attack in the military, according to Republican lawmakers and a chaplain advocacy group.
The Chaplain Alliance For Religious Liberty said there is an effort under way to silence, and in some ca |
About the Fort Dearborn Massacre, which happened 200 years ago this month, the historian Ann Durkin Keating wants to make two things clear: It didn't happen at Fort Dearborn, and it wasn't a massacre. But that's surely what you were expecting to hear. When it comes to American history, myth-busting revisionism remains the order of the day. You can hardly pick up a book about Paul Revere's ride without bracing yourself for the news that it was some other guy and he took the bus.
To be fair, Ms. Keating doesn't go all the way to the postmodern extreme and deny that something actually took place near Lake Michigan on Aug. 15, 1812—maybe it wasn't at Fort Dearborn (a site now swallowed up by downtown Chicago), but it was at least in the neighborhood. Nor does she claim that the event wasn't deeply unpleasant. She'd just really rather you didn't call it a massacre.
By Ann Durkin Keating Chicago, 294 pages, $30
Frontispiece from 'Black Partridge, or, The Fall of Fort Dearborn' (1906) by Edward S. Ellis. The Potawatomi chief entered lore for saving the life of settler Margaret Helm during the 1812 battle in what is now Chicago.
So what happened? Here is the gist: Fort Dearborn was an isolated frontier garrison in a region then generally known as Indian Country, or else just "the Country." At the outbreak of the War of 1812, the fort was surrounded by several hundred Potawatomi warriors who were allies of the British. The American commander, Nathan Heald, received orders to evacuate—he would have been smarter to disobey and ride out the siege, but he seems to have believed that he had a tacit understanding for safe conduct. He, his troops—more than 50 of them—and a few dozen white settlers made their way from the fort down the Lake Michigan shore. After they had gone about a mile and a half, they were attacked. The fighting was short-lived and brutal. Inside of an hour, more than half of Heald's soldiers were killed; Heald himself, and almost all the survivors, were badly wounded. Many settlers were dead as well, including most of the children; some of the women had been taken captive. Several severely wounded soldiers were tortured to death that night.
This was the Massacre—or, as Ms. Keating prefers, the Battle. She would rather not say anything bad about any Indians who took part, and the word "massacre," I think we can all agree, has negative connotations. So Ms. Keating nitpicks at the word relentlessly. In a massacre, she notes, the killings are "indiscriminate"; that can't apply here, because the Indians had reasons. The targeting of the women and children, for instance, was perfectly logical: "From the perspective of the Potawatomis," she writes, "these women and children represented an advance guard of American settlers who challenged the bounds of Indian Country." Once this is understood, we can fix blame for what happened where it really belongs: "squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. government." Of course; where else?
It would be a pity if this kind of nonsense distracted readers from what is novel and valuable in Ms. Keating's book. Its exploration of the back story to the—well, perhaps we should just call it the "event"—opens up a fascinating vista of lost American history. The Country was not, as historical studies of the region usually picture it, a timeless domain of isolated villages among trackless forests; it was a place with its own tangled and difficult heritage. Since the 17th century it had been an ambiguous border region—the kind sometimes called a "shatter zone"—crowded with refugees, exiles and renegades on the run from the great Iroquois wars of the Northeast. By the time the main line of Ms. Keating's story begins, the Country had achieved a certain fragile balance, where the people of several ordinarily hostile tribes, together with a large number of white traders who had married Indian women, all mingled.
But by the early 19th century, this peace had started to unravel. Large numbers of white settlers were pushing into the frontier, with the backing of the American government. Their presence prompted the first major nativist political movement among the Indians, led by a mysterious figure known as the "Shawnee prophet." The prophet believed that settlers wanted the Country for themselves and that the treaties offered by the white government were nothing more than empty exercises in chicanery. It would be hard to argue that he was wrong there. But he went further and called for Indians of all nations to cleanse themselves of white influence altogether: no intermarriage, no trading for white goods, no alcohol. Even some of his most militant followers thought this was excessive.
Fort Dearborn, which was both a garrison and a trading post, became the center of growing unrest. Ms. Keating takes us through the inner workings of the fort from a unique vantage: a white trader named John Kinzie who had spent most of his life in the Country. Kinzie understood the anger of the local population, because he shared it: He wanted the newcomers to stay out and leave the Country the way it had been. On the other hand, he didn't have any use for the Shawnee prophet and his followers either—after all, if they succeeded, he would be out of business.
Much of the entertainment of "Rising Up From Indian Country" comes from watching Kinzie dealing and double-dealing with both sides in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep afloat as the situation deteriorated. As always seems to happen with people whose only interest is to stay neutral and make money, he found himself inexorably drawn further in—until, when everything at Fort Dearborn finally imploded, he was stuck precisely at ground zero.
It's a great story, and Ms. Keating's neutral, unemphatic prose makes it register all the more clearly. There are downsides: She summarizes the prophet's views lucidly enough but entirely misses the galvanic excitement he stirred up in the Country and throughout the Midwest (which contemporary accounts describe vividly). What does come through, however, is a sense of how complex and murky the issues were becoming and how tough it ultimately became to sort out the rights and wrongs.
Did the Indian warriors really kill the settler children because they were concerned with long-term demographic trends in the Country? Maybe, but elsewhere Ms. Keating argues plausibly that the children just had the bad luck to get between a band of warriors and the supply wagons, which were the real prize. How much did the occurrences of that day ultimately affect the fate of the Country? Ms. Keating would like them to be seen as decisive: White reprisals for it were what destroyed the Country, and this was the "foundational event" that led to the birth of Chicago and the creation of the modern Midwest. But her narrative strongly suggests otherwise: The event was ultimately an irrelevance—the prophet had been right, and whites had been determined to take the Country all along.
Ms. Keating frames her narrative with the odd story of a sculpture commissioned late in the 19th century as a commemoration of the event. It shows an Indian warrior rescuing a female settler from another Indian with a raised tomahawk. Commissioned by George Pullman, the sculpture stood for decades on the site of Fort Dearborn; then it was moved to the Chicago Historical Society; then out to a public park; then into storage—bounced around the city endlessly because nobody much likes it. It's too gruesome, too politically incorrect and too sheerly ugly to make for comfortable public viewing. But it does depict something that actually happened: The Potowatomi warrior Black Partridge rescued John Kinzie's stepdaughter. Many of the Potowatomi present that day objected strongly to the attack and did intervene to save settlers' lives. (Kinzie too was among those rescued—even in the midst of the bloodshed, he had managed to cut another deal.)
What the incident says about the larger issues of American colonization and the expulsion of the Indians isn't even remotely straightforward, but that's the point. As Ms. Keating's book shows, the more confused, violent, chaotic, ambiguous and ugly your image of a historical event becomes, the closer you may be getting to the truth.
A version of this article appeared August 11, 2012, on page C8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: What Happened at Fort Dearborn. | Lee Sandlin reviews Rising Up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago by Ann Durkin Keating. |
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
Candy corn: Ick or treat?
(CNN) -- Yes, there's actually corn in it. Corn syrup, if that counts.
Each kernel has three colors, about 7 calories and a lot of sugar. Many people, including comedian Lewis Black, can't stand it.
And yet every October, it fills candy bowls, trick-or-treat bags and the mouths of sweet-toothed snackers everywhere.
For millions, it wouldn't be Halloween without candy corn.
Manufacturers will produce more than 35 million pounds of the humble tricolored candy this year. That's almost 9 billion pieces.
With National Candy Corn Day approaching on Thursday, here are some things you may not know about the polarizing confection.
People love it or hate it
For an innocuous little treat, candy corn sure sparks strong opinions. When CNN polled people on Facebook last year about it, we got more than 1,200 comments.
"It is a serious weakness. I'm sick from eating it all night," one woman said.
"HATE it and I cannot emphasize the word hate enough," said another.
Roughly three-quarters of the people surveyed on Facebook said they liked the stuff.
"For me, October's candy gauntlet arrives in the form of a little tri-colored mellocreme known as candy corn," wrote Samira Kawash in The Atlantic. "I can pass by the Hershey's Kisses and the mini-Snickers. But when I get to the bowl of candy corn, all bets are off."
You can count Black among the haters, though. In one of his stand-up bits, the comic jokes that manufacturers just collect and resell the same candy kernels year after year, because nobody actually eats the stuff.
"All the candy corn that's ever been made was made in 1911," he says.
It used to be made by hand in large kettles
Candy corn seems like a relatively modern invention, but it dates to the 1880s, before the automobile and the commercial telephone. The Goelitz Candy Co. began making it in 1900 before the family-run operation changed its name to the Jelly Belly Candy Co., which still produces candy corn today.
In the early days of the 20th century, workers cooked sugar, corn syrup, marshmallow and other ingredients into a slurry in large kettles and then poured the warm mixture by hand into cornstarch trays imprinted with the kernel shape.
Today, of course, machines do almost all the work.
There's a proper way to eat it
OK, not really. But many people believe that candy corn, like Oreos, should be nibbled in a certain manner.
While almost half of candy corn consumers gobble the whole piece at once, 43% start with the narrow white end, according to a survey by the National Confectioners Association.
Another 10% -- the true renegades -- begin eating the wider yellow end first.
Of course it can. This month, Amy Erickson posted a recipe on her food blog, Oh Bite It!, that involves rolling three or four candy corn kernels in a ball of dough and then frying them in hot oil.
"What do we do to things we don't need/want/like?" she wrote. "We fry it ... that's what! Frying makes everything better ..."
The sugary, waxy taste of candy corn has also inspired smoothies, cocktails and even Jell-O shots.
There are versions for other holidays
It's not just for Halloween any more. Manufacturers now produce "Indian corn" (with a brown end instead of yellow) for Thanksgiving, "Reindeer corn" (red and green) for Christmas, "Cupid corn" (red and pink) for Valentine's Day, "Bunny corn" (white and various bright colors) for Easter and "Freedom corn" (red, white and blue) for July 4.
Can green "St. Paddy's corn" be far behind? | This year, manufacturers will produce almost 9 billion kernels of candy corn, the polarizing Halloween treat. |
Subsets and Splits