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Bernie Ecclestone made Formula One what it is today, and he rules the sport through a mixture of fear, respect and acute business acumen.
The one-time motorcyle salesman can claim pretty much all the credit for transforming the sport into the huge global brand it is today.
It was Ecclestone who started the F1 revolution in the 1980s by persuading team owners that he should negotiate on their behalf for television and marketing rights.
As a result, he is now an extremely wealthy man.
Reputed to be worth £2.3bn, Ecclestone and his family occupied eighth position on the Sunday Times Rich List for 2004.
His love of motor racing began in the 1950s, but a crash ended his career as a driver.
He then moved into management. His first client was Stuart Lewis-Evans, who was killed in a crash.
Ecclestone then managed the Austrian Jochen Rindt, who also died in a crash but became the first driver to be posthumously named world champion.
In the 1970s, Ecclestone bought the Brabham team.
He sold the company in the late 1980s, and then launched his bid to overhaul F1's commercial arrangements.
Ecclestone now owns a network of companies which have the exclusive right to sell and market the International Automobile Federation's (FIA) TV rights.
In 2000, the FIA agreed to lease him the rights for 100 years, which further increased his position.
In March 2000, he sold 50% of one of his companies, Slec Holdings, to German broadcaster EM.TV.
The shares then passed to media giant Kirch, which acquired another 25% of the business, leaving Ecclestone with 25%.
Kirch collapsed in 2002, with three banks - Bayerische Landesbank, Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan - taking over its stake in F1.
While talks go on about the sale of the banks' shares, Ecclestone's grip on the sport remains is undiminished.
Now 73, he has often said that the pursuit of wealth is no longer the main driving force in his life.
But, as the dispute over the future of Silverstone has shown, Ecclestone will never allow himself to come off second best in any deal.
Mosley is the son of controversial MP Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.
At one time he considered a career in politics, but was advised against it because it was thought his family background would count against him.
The qualified barrister has, however, used his skills to good effect as president of motorsport's governing body the FIA.
While Ecclestone has a reputation as a streetwise wheeler-dealer, Mosley is seen as a cerebral operator, responsible for implementing a raft of changes to the way the sport is run.
His involvement with motor racing began in the late 1960s when he co-founded March - a racing car manufacturer.
The company then moved into building F1 cars and built up a dominant position in American Indy Car racing in the 1980s.
Mosley, however, extricated himself from March to concentrate on F1 politics.
He was Ecclestone's lawyer during a bitter dispute within the sport in the early 1980s, and played a key role in drafting the Concorde Agreement which settled the issue and still governs F1 today.
By 1991, Mosley had become president of the sporting arm of the FIA. Two years later, he was elected president of the whole federation.
Through the FIA, he has involved himself in road safety, and takes pride in the part he played in the introduction of the Euro NCAP crash test standards.
Over the years, Mosley has had a number of spats with F1 car makers over his plans for the sport.
He announced in July that he intended to quit his FIA role at the end of the season, saying that he found discussions with team owners increasingly tedious.
But he subsequently decided to stay on until at least October 2005 after the FIA senate asked him not to step down.
Mosley has also had public rows with Ecclestone.
But many F1 insiders believe these are just part of a well crafted plan to strengthen their control over the sport.
Whatever team owners, manufacturers and F1 fans may think of them, few would dispute that the pair form a brilliant and powerful double act.
LIVERPOOL boss Brendan Rodgers hailed Raheem Sterling for getting Liverpool's Premier League season back on track.
And the Reds' striker certainly deserved top marks after pouncing on his only chance of the game to leave Burnley boss Sean Dyche claiming his side's pockets had been picked.
Sterling bagged a couple of goals at Bournemouth to take Liverpool in the semi-finals of the Capital One Cup earlier this month but hadn't scored a Premier League goal since September.
Three games ago he was left heart-broken by Manchester United goalkeeper David de Gea after a hatful of chances went begging in Liverpool's 3-0 defeat at Old Trafford.
But Rodgers insisted the 20-year-old had learned from that experience as he raced onto Philippe Coutinho's pass to coolly round Tom Heaton and slot home the 62nd-minute winner which gave Liverpool their first victory in four League games.
Rodgers said: "It showed what a great learner he is.
"He is in a position now where he will receive a lot of opportunities in that kind of situation because of his pace which.
"Since that game (United) he has gone away with the coaches and worked on that type of finish, both left side and right side.
"He showed great composure to beat the keeper and finished it really well.
"His development and ability to want to be better has got us the three points."
Liverpool certainly needed the flash of magic from Sterling, who is being asked to carry the Reds' attack until Daniel Sturridge returns from his rehabilitation in the United States.
Mario Balotelli was back from injury and suspension yesterday but never made it beyond the bench after Rodgers admitted his style may not suit the high tempo way he wants his frontmen to play.
Ironically, it was Burnley who operated in that manner, never giving Liverpool's uncertain looking three-man defence a moment's peace in the first half.
Critically, though, they couldn't score before being caught by Sterling's classic counter-punch as a first defeat in five home games left the Clarets in the bottom three.
Dyche said: "You can never guarantee what you should get from a performance but we have had our pocket pinched today with how they got away with a win.
"But we have had to do it and we did it at Stoke. That's sometimes the way it is.
"It's a marvel the strides we have made as a group. A year ago people were talking about the threat of relegation.
"Now we are playing Liverpool and dominating for long spells in the game.
"I thought we were excellent in the first half but the challenge is not to be excellent but to win.
"We have done it before and we have to do it again."
Burnley went closest when the impressive Danny Ings hit the post before Brad Jones limped off with a thigh injury to be replaced in goal by Simon Mignolet after only 16 minutes.
Three games after getting axed, Mignolet looked far from convincing but Liverpool survived as Ashley Barnes, George Boyd and Scott Arfield all went close.
Burnley threw Sam Vokes into the fray for his first outing since March after a knee injury but there was to be no fairytale ending for the striker as Liverpool held on to escape with the points.
Burnley (4-4-2): Heaton 6; Trippier 7, Keane 7, Shackell 7, Mee 5 (Jutkiewicz 90); Boyd 8, Marney 7, Jones 6 (Wallace 83), Arfield 6; Ings 8, Barnes 6 (Vokes 79). Subs: Kightly, Reid, Gilks, Long.
Liverpool (3-4-2-1): Jones 5 (Mignolet 16); Toure 5 (Can 45), Skrtel 6, Sakho 5; Henderson 6, Gerrard 6, Lucas 6, Markovic 5; Coutinho 7 (Lambert 73); Lallana 7; Sterling 8. Subs: Moreno, Manquillo, Balotelli, Ojo.
We recently looked at a partnership between MerchantCircle and Demand Media’s AnswerBag that presented some interesting opportunities for local businesses. However, a representative for MerchantCircle tells WebProNews the AnswerBag partnership "will not be live with international releases at this time. We need to build up our network of merchants internationally to help answer consumer questions."
Still, MerchantCircle was already getting a great deal of use before that partnership came along, and it will be interesting to see how it does in new territory.
"Our long term vision is to provide as many small businesses as possible worldwide, the same tools that millions of U.S. based merchants have been able to leverage," says chairman and co-founder Ben Smith. "Mom and pop businesses in other countries struggle with online marketing and its associated costs the same way American small business owners do. We have received a number of requests to expand MerchantCircle’s offering internationally, and we see significant potential to form partnerships in each country."
MerchantCircle helps small businesses network with one another and market their businesses with various tools. They must be doing something right, because they’re the largest local business social network in the U.S.
It was a blunt, personal comment -- the kind of intellectual elbow in the ribs that scholars share in the faculty lounge.
The Jewish sociologist of religion Will Herberg asked his Drew University colleague Tom Oden how he could call himself a theologian if he kept focusing his work on modern trends -- period. Herberg told Oden that "he was a parasite on the ancient Christian tradition" who had "never taken seriously the great Christian minds of the past," said theologian Stephen Seamands, who studied under Oden and uses many of his works while teaching at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.
This Herberg challenge radically affected Oden's work in the 1970s, as he evolved from backing an edgy liberalism to spreading an ecumenical approach to orthodoxy in shelves of books. Oden kept publishing into the final years of his life, until his Dec. 8 death at the age of 85. "Here was a guy who -- until his mid-40s -- had been a success on that career track in the contemporary academy," said Seamands. Oden had a Yale University doctorate and thrived in an era "built on the idea that new is better and that you looked down on anything old. You were supposed to idealize whatever people called the latest thing. That's how you got ahead."
In the 1950s, Oden embraced Marxism, existentialism and the demythologization of Scripture. He was an early leader among Christians supporting abortion rights. In the 1960s he plunged into transactional analysis, Gestalt therapy, parapsychology and what, in one of my first encounters with him, he called "mild forms of the occult."
As he dug into early church writings from the ancient East and West, Oden came to the conclusion that "I had been in love with heresy." In a 2012 interview with Good News magazine, Oden explained: "My basic question early on in the 1970s was, is the Resurrection really just an idea or is it a fact of history? ... Did this Jesus rise from the dead? Not symbolically, not just as a fragile memory of the earliest Christian rememberers, not just as an ever-questionable matter of fallible human remembering, but did Jesus actually rise from the dead. And finally, I did believe. And that changed my life."
At that point, he decided that to move forward, he would have to go backwards and start over. In an interview I did with Oden in 1994, he referred to a passage in the book "The Great Divorce" by the famous Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. "I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road," wrote Lewis. "A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on."
By encountering the saints and martyrs of the first five centuries of Christianity, Oden told me, "I met God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit." This shift in perspective led to the three volumes of his 1,400-page "Systematic Theology," four volumes on the teachings of Methodist founder John Wesley, several books on early African Christianity and, producing howls of protest on the Methodist left, a manifesto on modern seminaries and ecclesiastical bureaucracies called "Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements."
Among his many other works, he served as editor of "The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture," a 29-volume set introducing modern readers to writers in the early church. On many occasions after his intellectual conversion, Oden described a pleasant dream in which he saw his own tombstone and the inscription read: "He made no new contribution to theology."
This was the central irony of Oden's life, stated Seamands. While many academic colleagues believed that he had "committed academic suicide," Oden went on to become a key player in global dialogues among traditional Protestants, Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. One strategic partner was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI.
"We can safely say that Oden's books will never go out of date -- because they already are, from a modern point of view," said Seamands. "His works are timeless, because of his conviction that he should focus on truths that were ancient and eternal."
Oct. 28 - Banks take centre stage in a busy week for European earnings, and the numbers may show they’re not out of the woods yet, says Hargreaves Lansdown head of equities Richard Hunter.
Coming up the Rockwell says good bye to a legend. And did Obama tell -- the whole truth and nothing but when they discussed US spying on the German leader. Plus our top stories this week the countdown is on to another fed policy decision this week or the best thing. Is that the bank will stay the course on bond buying from now. Here in Europe it's another huge week for earnings banks taking center stage -- numbers due for many of the key lenders to -- shot Lloyds Barclays BNP Paribas. Just a few of the names -- -- Big oil the other sectors -- what's with the results to come from BP. And show that quiet start -- the earnings weeks so far Monday that bank he had the one big name to report so far. The -- -- Spanish -- to beating full cost of net profit. A 362. Million euros. Net lending income so down on a year ago that later on in the US keep an -- from Imus from apple. Analysts watching for any signs that sales of its new lower cost by -- -- short of expectations that sort of our list. And everything else Bridget comes out of equities are -- -- -- joins us now from London's oysters. One of food I guess we get to put this down to the these massive storm that's answering. Southeast England Richard I'm I guess pressure -- focus off politics focus off the shenanigans in Washington. A very much from corporate side right now. It brought the critic who -- standing in spite of all. The way I. And even by George how old they shall I -- -- will wrap it. What what -- -- -- we got -- coach -- fundamental. The US. Clerical child -- season starts to preach -- out next week it just about the same time you kites picking up. So it will we will now start ticket is a much clearer picture what's actually happening on the ground an eagle summit and always it would be hearing a politically. -- -- -- -- -- -- I mentioned some of the big runs coming our problem. Credit Suisse last week struggling on fixing comes drug known investment banking you think that do we gonna -- the same sort of -- -- Saudi government has. Yeah and I don't -- -- you're. -- that should narcotic. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Some problems might -- LP shall we spent a standard shots to. Right. In the end they pretty much companies that you guys can't be a -- Barrels. Outlook sent at them up by the patriarch but so. Much better position. -- -- -- -- -- Our -- -- gonna start this week. Chris. Oh and caring about the continuing press all the stops it. We -- -- Just help eight page with -- Which fall yet. It's -- Provisions. So I shut the senate -- shell there's been some check its -- -- like Nigeria which I want. Ideology or eight might. Stop collection of course but -- -- -- -- -- -- All right particularly to that thanks a lot. And world -- the -- of the US eavesdropping on European leaders shows that signs of getting -- the German newspaper saying Sunday that US president Barack Obama. Knew as early as 2010 that is fire agencies were listening in on Angela Merkel. If confirm outlook contradictory reports he had told the German leader he knew nothing about a spine. That is they'll leave you with some sounds of the tanks from the threat -- -- Lou Reed died yesterday of course aged 71. Some problems but it's.
NEW YORK – Roger Clemens said former trainer Brian McNamee injected him with the painkiller lidocaine and the vitamin B-12, not performance-enhancing drugs.
In the first excerpts released from the pitcher’s interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” which is to be broadcast Sunday night, Clemens maintained the denials he has issued since McNamee implicated him in the Mitchell report on doping in baseball, which was released Dec. 13.
McNamee, a former strength coach for the Blue Jays and Yankees, told Mitchell he personally injected Clemens with steroids in 1998 while they were with Toronto, and with steroids and human growth hormone in 2000 and 2001 while with New York.
“Roger took bunches of his shots over his career, much the way racehorses do, unfortunately,” Clemens’ lawyer, Rusty Hardin, said after the excepts were released Thursday.
Clemens issued a video statement on Dec. 23 denying McNamee’s accusations and plans to hold a news conference Monday. Clemens did not mention injections of painkillers or vitamins.
“That short statement didn’t go into any details and simply told the public at large he did not take steroids or any other performance-enhancing drugs. That’s never been a contention of his,” Hardin said.
During the CBS interview, recorded last Friday at Clemens’ home in Katy, Texas, Clemens was asked whether McNamee had injected him with any drugs.
Lidocaine is a local anesthetic that can be used by dentists and in minor surgery. It also is available as part of ointments used to treat skin inflammation.
Billy Beane went into the offseason believing his Oakland Athletics could compete in the AL West again if they just stayed healthier than last year.
Six weeks before spring training opens, the general manager has changed his stance and is beginning a rebuilding project in Oakland.
The Athletics made their second major trade in three weeks, sending outfielder and fan favorite Nick Swisher to the Chicago White Sox for three minor leaguers on Thursday.
The A’s – who dealt ace Dan Haren to Arizona on Dec. 14 – received left-hander Gio Gonzalez and right-hander Fautino De Los Santos, along with outfielder Ryan Sweeney.
Matt Clement and St. Louis agreed to a $1.5 million, one-year contract on Thursday with a club option for 2009.
Clement missed last season while recovering from shoulder surgery. He last pitched for the Boston Red Sox in 2006.
The 33-year-old right-hander is 87-86 with a 4.47 ERA in nine major league seasons with San Diego, Florida, the Chicago Cubs and Boston.
Catcher Robert Fick, outfielder Jeff DaVanon and left-hander Mike Megrew agreed to minor league contracts and were invited to spring training.
Never mind the huge buildup of clandestine operatives and secret warriors since 9/11. Rep. Mike Rogers says we need more. Much more.
More spies and more paramilitaries with greater freedom to operate—that’s what outgoing House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers is calling for to defeat al Qaeda and its ilk.
The Republican-lawmaker-turned-newbie-talk-show host is warning of “off the charts” threats to the U.S., and calling on the Obama administration to unleash more clandestine forces in Syria and beyond, while claiming the White House’s tight control of counterterrorism has made America less safe.
“We have this big, growing problem, and we have handcuffed our capabilities, one-arm behind our back,” the Michigan Republican said in an exit interview in the waning days of his 14 years as a congressman, including serving as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
But his solution to this metastasizing threat is, in some ways, counterintuitive. America doesn’t exactly have a shortage of secret warriors and special operators; their ranks have bulged over the past 13 years, as the U.S. fights a series of clandestine conflicts around the globe. And Rogers’ timing is at odds with public sentiment, coming on the heels of the so-called CIA torture report, and calls for more, not less oversight, of America’s clandestine forces.
Rogers, 50, announced he would leave office at the end of 2014 to try his hand as a D.C.-based talk-show host for the Cumulus Radio Group—in large part because he feels Congress will remain in a gridlocked death spiral with the White House during the last two years of President Barack Obama’s administration.
The Republican and former FBI agent spoke of his pride over his committee’s triumph over such sniping, an oasis of bipartisanship in a torrent of political gridlock thanks to a “see-no-politics” mantra by Rogers’ and ranking committee member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD).
He said he hopes that as a newly minted talk-show host, he’ll inspire other lawmakers to similarly leave politics at the water’s edge when it comes to the terror fight.
Yet with no trace of irony, he then took aim at the Obama administration’s initially tepid intervention in Syria, and what he described as Vietnam-era micromanagement of the war, harking back to the tight tactical control exercised by the Johnson administration, where individual strikes were coordinated by the White House.