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On month-on-month basis, the urban index rose by 0.85 per cent in November, up by 0.03 from 0.82 per cent recorded in October, while the rural index rose by 0.724 per cent in November, up by 0.009 when compared with 0.715 per cent in October.
The corresponding 12-month year-on-year average percentage change for the urban index is 17.26 per cent in November. This is less than 17.57 per cent reported in October 2017, while the corresponding rural inflation rate in November is 16.29 per cent compared to 16.41 per cent recorded in October 2017.
High year-on-year food prices and food price pressure continued into November though consistently at a slower pace month on month. The Food Index increased by 20.30 per cent (year-on-year) in November, down marginally by 0.01 per cent points from the rate recorded in October (20.31 per cent).
On a month-on-month basis, the Food sub-index increased by 0.88 per cent in November, up by 0.03 per cent from 0.85 per cent recorded in October. This represents the first rise in month-on-month rise following five consecutive disinflation in month-on-month inflation since a 2017 high of 2.57 per cent in May 2017.
The average annual rate of change of the Food sub-index for the 12-month period ending in November 2017 over the previous 12-month average was 19.39 per cent, 0.25 per cent points from the average annual rate of change recorded in October (19.14) per cent.
The rise in the index was caused by increases in prices of bread and cereal, milk, cheese, eggs, coffee, tea, cocoa, fish and Oil and fats.
The ‘’All Items less Farm Produce’’ or Core sub-index, which excludes the prices of volatile agricultural, stood during the month of November at 12.20 per cent points, up from 12.14 per cent recorded in October as all key divisions which contributes to the index increased.
On a month-on-month basis, the Core sub-index increased by 0.77 per cent in November, higher from 0.76 per cent recorded in October.
The average 12-month annual rate of change of the index was 13.93 per cent for the 12-month period ending in November 2017; this is 0.48 per cent points lower than 14.41 per cent recorded in October.
The highest increases were recorded in prices of motorcycles, bicycles, glassware and tableware, hospital and medical services, spirits, household textiles, insurance, accommodation services, maintenance and repair of personal transport equipment, vehicle spare parts, other services in respect of personal transport equipment, and fuel and lubricants for personal transport equipment.
Capstone Equities and The Carlyle Group bought 14 Wall St. for $325 million in 2007 when the market was booming.
An owner of 14 Wall St. is desperately seeking a cash infusion for the property so it can repay a $145 million first mortgage by its maturity date in May.
Real estate sources say that owner Capstone Equities has reached out to various brokers, owners and financiers about investing in the 37-story, 1 million-square-foot property that's across Wall Street from the New York Stock Exchange. These sources said that if it doesn't find a partner, it's likely Shorenstein Properties, which holds a portion of the mezzanine debt, would use that position to take over the property.
Capstone and partner The Carlyle Group paid $325 million for the property that was formerly known as the Bankers Trust Building in 2007 when the market was booming. However, sources say that Carlyle has written off the investment and is not helping in the quest to find another partner. Real estate sources say the problem is that Capstone is valuing the building at around $300 million, a third more than many others believe it is only worth.
Like many others, Capstone and Carlyle bought the building, hoping to capitalize on soaring rents. However, overall rents peaked in the third quarter of 2008, according to Cushman & Wakefield Inc. Since then, average rents in lower Manhattan have sunk 22% to roughly $49 a square foot. Meanwhile leasing activity has dimmed because of the weak economy, upcoming presidential election and tumult in Europe.
Brokers say that because of the big debt on the building, Capstone hasn't been able to lower rents sufficiently to lure tenants. For example, activity has been bustling at nearby 40 Wall St, a tower which Donald Trump bought years ago when prices were much lower. That gives him the ability to be more flexible on rents. For example, there have been some deals done at 40 Wall St. at rents in the high $20s a square foot, a price range that sources say Capstone cannot touch.
Spokespeople for Capstone and Carlyle didn't return calls while Shorenstein executives didn't return calls.
Capstone's problems are also being exacerbated by the fact that while overall activity rose 16% last year, the amount of space leased in the second half of the year fell by 31% from the first half of 2011—and was down nearly 10% from the corresponding period in 2010.
The company, however, is unlikely to be the only owner looking for financial help this year. A tremendous amount of loans were written during the boom that come due this year. About $6 billion in commercial mortgages on New York City buildings that were bundled and sold as bonds mature in 2012, according to Trepp, which tracks real estate debt. That figure is a combination of five-, seven- and 10-year loans.
Americans are taking to the city lifestyle more and more, and while the suburbs are gaining traction as millennials reach the peak age to start a family, urban living doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
Zillow released a report measuring home value trends in urban settings versus suburban settings, finding that city home values are outpacing those in the suburbs.
The analysis was based on a survey Zillow conducted to determine how people define the communities in which they live– rural, suburban or urban. By using characteristics of those places and defining ZIP codes, Zillow broke down the shifting of home values over one and five years.
“This trend, in part, reflects home buyers’ changing preferences, as they seek amenity-rich, dense and walkable areas that are often closer to their workplace,” said Zillow chief economist Dr. Svenja Gudell, in a statement.
The average home in the city is worth 2 percent more than the average suburban home. Compare this to 2015 when the average urban home was worth 1.2 percent less than the average suburban home.
The trend is particularly prominent in big cities with young populations, like Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
The data show changing demographics within urban settings and shifting preferences for a different lifestyle as well as the higher cost of urban development.
In the nation, the 2015 urban Zillow Home Value Index was $269,036, which is an annual change of 7.5 percent and a 28.4 percent five-year uptick. This is compared to $263,987, the ZHVI of houses for sale in the suburbs, which marks a 5.9 percent annual increase and a 21.1 percent five-year increase.
In Los Angeles, the Zillow Home Value Index in 2015 was $604,006.
The urban one-year ZHVI change was 7.6 percent and the five-year increase was 42.1 percent.
In Los Angeles suburbs, the 2015 Zillow Home Value Index was $706,925.
The ZHVI increased 7.2 percent annually in the suburbs and 33.9 percent on a five-year basis.
How do home values near the proposed LA stadium compare?
Spain refused to apologize to Mexico today for the abuses and human rights violations committed during its colonization of the country in the 16th century.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) wrote to Spanish King Felipe VI and Pope Francis earlier this week demanding an apology for the atrocities committed by Spain during the conquest and its aftermath.
“I have sent a letter to the king of Spain and another to the Pope, calling for a full account of the abuses and urging them to apologize to the indigenous peoples [of Mexico] for the violations of what we now call their human rights,” AMLO said.
“There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the [indigenous] temples.
“The time has come to reconcile. But let us ask forgiveness first,” AMLO said in a video posted on social media.
The Spanish conquest of Mexico began in 1519 when a small army led by Hernán Cortés landed in the modern-day state of Veracruz.
Within two years, the Spaniards had wiped out the once powerful Aztec empire.
Cortés built alliances with tributaries and city-states of the Aztec empire along with its political rivals, particularly the Tlaxcalteca and Texcocanos to give the Spaniards superiority.
Large numbers of indigenous people were massacred with many more dying as a result of diseases — including smallpox — which were brought to Mexico from Spain.
AMLO was speaking during a visit to the Mayan pyramids in the state of Tabasco in southern Mexico. He later traveled to Centla, the site of the first battle between Cortés’s army and the indigenous people on March 14, 1519.
“Thousands of people were murdered during this period,” AMLO said. “One culture and civilization imposed itself on another.
However, Madrid moved quickly to “firmly reject” AMLO’s request.
“The arrival, 500 years ago, of Spaniards to present Mexican territory cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations,” the government said in a statement.
This is why. An Object Lesson.
Cheap, plastic mechanical pencils; expensive polycarbonate mechanical pencils; tiny, slim aluminum mechanical pencils; and finely-engineered mechanical drafting pencils: I have them all. I use them to write in my notebooks, in the margins of printed books, and on manuscript paper for musical composition. I am an incorrigible mechanical penciler. I will never have enough mechanical pencils.
A good mechanical pencil is a beautifully-made object. Architects have long sworn by the original German model of my prized Rotring 600, now manufactured in Japan: Its all-metal barrel is hexagonal, so that it doesn’t roll down the drawing-board, and it is an instrument of exquisite heft and balance. (The tactile positivity of its lead-advance button mechanism is a perpetual delight. This pencil is, quite literally, clickbait.) But a mechanical pencil is also, simply, more practical. The existence of pencil sharpeners or pencils shrunk to tiny stumps through long use are just foolish rumors of a bygone age. The ordinary, dumb wooden pencil is, in the poetic words of Henry Petroski—author of The Pencil: A History (1989)—“designed to be destroyed.” A mechanical pencil doesn’t require sharpening and is always the same length, so that its weight and handfeel remain constant. It is obviously an improvement, a superior piece of gear.
When you look into the matter, though, you discover a curious fact: The first known illustration of any pencil depicts something that resembles a mechanical pencil as much as it does the wood-cased kind, in which the lead is permanently bonded to the wood that encloses it. In 1565, the naturalist Konrad Gesner published a book about fossils that featured a drawing of a new kind of writing implement for taking notes in the field, apparently of the author’s own invention. “The stylus shown below,” the accompanying text explains, “is made for writing, from a sort of lead (which I have heard some call English antimony), shaved to a point and inserted in a wooden handle.” So the “lead” (actually graphite) is separable from the handle. But there is no clever mechanism to advance the lead, as one finds in a modern mechanical pencil, so it remains a primitive device.
While the wood-cased pencil soon became commonplace, more sophisticated versions of a rigid sleeve in which the lead could move independently took longer to appear. In one 1636 example, a brass holder used a spring to push out the lead. Henry Petroski thinks this may deserve the title of “the first propelling pencil.” But mechanical pencils really took off only in the 19th century. An English engineer named Sampson Mordan patented his “ever-pointed” pencil in 1822, and the American watchmaker James Bogardus patented his own “forever pointed” pencil in 1833. By the late Victorian era there was a craze for “magic” pencils in brass or gold, disguised as lucky charms and sometimes sold along with matching toothpicks and ear spoons. Such pencils, though, had thick leads, and slack machining tolerances meant that there was a disturbing amount of play in their tips. They were not yet reliable tools for serious writing or drawing.
We still await an ear-spoon revival, but the mechanical pencil enjoyed a second, and permanent, revolution in 1915. In Japan, Tokuji Hayakawa produced a nickel-bodied device, the “Hayakawa Mechanical Pencil," with an internal lead-propelling mechanism of brass and a rifled shaft. Later iterations were christened the “Ever-Ready Sharp Pencil” and then simply the “Ever-Sharp Pencil.” It was such a success that Hayakawa eventually renamed his corporation Sharp—the same company that today is known mainly for its electronics. Similar improvements were made by the American Eversharp pencil, introduced in 1916. Within five years, 12 million Eversharps had been distributed throughout the U.S. The mechanical pencil was promoted as a cost-saving and efficiency-improving measure for office work, since no time was wasted in sharpening it. With advances made by manufacturers in Germany and Japan, it was later enthusiastically adopted by engineers and architects, especially once very fine lead (the now-familiar 0.5-millimeter diameter) became available in specialist drafting pencils in 1961. By the 1970s, more than 60 million mechanical pencils were sold worldwide every year.
In an early example of how office work can be made to sound more exciting by likening it to military adventure, one early-20th-century advertisement boasted: “Eversharp leads are smooth, strong, and fit Eversharp like ammunition fits a gun.” Yet even a premium metal-jacketed mechanical pencil, for all its military-tool bravado, has a crucial weakness. For the mechanical pencil is an exoskeletal organism. Its epidermis provides the structural rigidity within which the vital organ, the lead, is protected. And yet at the same time this thin spindle of graphite must protrude from the body to enable the user to make a mark with it, creating a point of extreme vulnerability.
If the mechanical pencil were a videogame boss, this extrusion of its intestine would be the weak spot the player should target. Here is where the lead so often breaks. This breakpoint has even been subjected to physical analysis by Henry Petroski in another of his books, Invention by Design. Consider the protruding lead, he suggests, as a Galilean cantilever beam. Assuming no flaws or nicks in the lead, it will break precisely at its junction with the pencil’s metal tip.
Many mechanical pencils have another vulnerable part. If the barrel has a clip, it is usually designated a “pocket clip.” But I for one don’t limit my pencil-clipping to pockets. I clip a mechanical pencil to the inside pages of a book I am reading, where it acts as a bookmark as well as a handy instrument of marginalia. I clip mechanical pencils to the rigid covers of Moleskine notebooks. The clips usually tear a few of the inside pages. But it is worth it, to have a notebook with a pencil always attached.
Always, that is, until the clip fails. And it always does. I have many mechanical pencils with broken-off clips. They haunt my desk, mute witnesses to my abuse. Moleskine itself makes a mechanical pencil designed to be attached to its notebooks, with an apparently sturdier clip. But this pencil has a rectangular cross-section. Perhaps it feels comfortable to the notebook, lying flat to its cover. But it is certainly not made for human hands.
Yet other ingenious enhancements have appeared. You can now buy several models of mechanical pencil known as the “Kuru-Toga,” invented by Uniball. The problem its designers noticed was this: If you don’t hold your pencil exactly perpendicular to the page but at an angle, like most people do, then even the fine lead of a mechanical pencil will wear down more quickly on one side. This results in a softer, chisel-shaped point that draws a thicker line. So Uniball’s engineers dreamed up a pencil with an internal geared mechanism that rotates the lead slightly every time it is lifted off the paper. Now the lead is worn down equally on all sides and the chisel-point never appears.
It was only on first trying a Kuru-Toga that I realized I had for decades been unconsciously compensating for the chisel effect myself by turning the mechanical pencil in my fingertips every so often. That there was now no need to do so felt like a weird shift of perspective, a tiny Copernican revolution in my mechanical penciling. A Kuru-Toga, whether in smoky gunmetal plastic or aluminum, feels special enough that when someone in the library walks off accidentally with your branded transparent library bag instead of their own, you feel sad when you remember that you had a Kuru-Toga in that bag.
But this is a general truth: The better your mechanical pencil, the more forlorn you feel when you lose it, as you will inevitably do, for pencils of any kind fall into that class of objects—along with umbrellas, cigarette lighters, and, perhaps, sunglasses—that are somehow more often lost than found, and so never quite permanently the property of any one individual. To spend tens of dollars, then, on a single pencil, let alone hundreds or even thousands (which is eminently possible, should you require a barrel of solid silver or a more precious metal), might seem a quixotic form of tool fetishism. Yet by the same token it is also an act of aesthetic defiance, in the face of the pencil-swallowing Absurd.
Whatever finessings of stationery engineering remain to be dreamed up for the mechanical pencil, you might wonder whether it is already an archaic instrument, suitable only for those with a dissident mania for the physical. Who needs a mechanical pencil, after all, in an age where writing and drawing increasingly take place in frictionless electronic media, where no substance rubs off on another in the way that graphite flakes off onto paper? (Unless we consider flakes of human skin rubbing off onto laptop keyboards and touchscreens.) In apparent response to such a challenge, the newest model by Rotring, the 800+, attempts to live in both worlds simultaneously: to be both old-fashioned mechanical pencil and newfangled electronic accessory.
To extend the writing tip, you twist the top of the barrel below the red ring. The metal is knurled here, like the cylindrical grip section of the barrel, to signal that it is a control surface. When the tip is retracted, however, the rubberized black end of the barrel becomes a “stylus,” designed to operate the touchscreen of a tablet or other touch-sensitive device. Thus the semantic atavism, or perhaps nostalgia, of the modern age: Just as a “tablet” was once made of stone or clay, a “stylus” was once just a pointed object used to gouge meaningful trenches in a yielding substance.
The Rotring stylus-pencil represents an ambitious and even witty mashup of functions. And yet, to operate an iPad using the 800+’s fat rubber stylus, which is essentially a prosthetic fingertip, feels more like being a child or a caveman than like living in the future. It mainly helps you to appreciate anew the delightful precision of the pencil’s traditional mode, when you twist the barrel to unsheathe the fine metal writing tip and click the button—once? twice?—to advance the nano-engineered rod of graphite by a millimeter or two. This is a little ritual of sensual mechanics, repeatable dozens of times a day without risk of boredom; an act of prologue and preparation, like a martial artist saluting the judges before his demonstration or a concert pianist adjusting his stool and flicking his coat-tails behind him; a micro-play of reassuringly predictable physics that signals both to the pencil and to its thinking operator that now, yes now, it is time to begin writing again.
Steven Poole is a writer based in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Unspeak.
Two former auditors of Parmalat SpA agreed to pay $15 million to settle a class-action lawsuit by U.S. equity investors over their roles in the Italian dairy company’s 2003 collapse.
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu will pay $8.5 million and Grant Thornton International will pay $6.5 million to settle, documents filed Thursday with in Manhattan federal court show.
The case was brought by several funds on behalf of thousands of investors who said they lost money from Parmalat’s multi-billion-dollar fraud.
“It is very rare that worldwide coordinating audit networks enter into settlements like what we have,” said James Sabella, a lawyer at Grant & Eisenhofer PA in New York representing the investors, in an interview.
Lead plaintiffs include Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe Ltd, Cattolica Partecipazioni SpA, Capital & Finance Asset Management, Societe Moderne des Terrassements Parisiens and Solotrat, court documents show.
Deloitte and Grant Thornton did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
The settlement requires approval by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who has overseen much of the Parmalat-related litigation in the United States. Sabella said approval could come in the first quarter of 2010.
Parmalat’s collapse sparked litigation worldwide against dozens of banks, including Bank of America Corp and Citigroup Inc, by current Parmalat management and by investors.
Deloitte agreed in January 2007 to pay $149 million to settle with Parmalat itself. Parmalat has appealed Kaplan’s dismissal in September of its lawsuit against Grant Thornton.
Burdened by about 14 billion euros ($20.9 billion) of debt, Parmalat filed for insolvency protection in Italy in December 2003, after uncovering a 4 billion euro ($6 billion) hole in its balance sheet. Parmalat was restructured and relisted on the Milan bourse in 2005.
Domestic Travel Doldrums - Last week's decision by People Express to sell its Frontier Airlines was in part caused by People's inability to attract enough summer travelers. And People is not alone - many airlines are experiencing this somewhat surprising problem.
Indeed, despite predictions earlier this year that a weaker dollar and fears about terrorism would lure foreign tourists and keep Americans home, domestic traffic growth has already slowed. In the second quarter, it was up only 7 percent over a year earlier, compared with a 15 percent jump last year.
''It will be a good year for moves,'' said Chris Callie of the Employee Relocation Council in Washington. Employee transfers will be up 5 percent to 10 percent over last year, he says, to top 250,000.
The reason: Lower interest rates reduce the cost for companies installing employees in new homes. This year, the average transfer cost will fall 4 percent from last year's $32,000, says Robert E. Head, president of RELO/Intercity Relocations Service in Chicago.
Milling & Baking News, published by Morton I. Sosland in Kansas City, Kan., merged with Fieldmark Media, a New York publisher of Supermarket Business and other retail-oriented publications.
Mr. Sosland expects the trend to continue, and to cross international borders. ''We will see more foreign takeovers - particularly by Canadians and West Europeans,'' he said. Canada's International Thomson group already owns 12 American companies that put out a variety of trade publications.
According to the Census Bureau, about 400,000 women in managerial and professional positions will have babies this year. And their desire to dress for success is fueling the maternity-fashion business. ''Ten years ago, there were not enough women in business to create a demand for executive maternity clothes,'' said Rebecca Matthias, president of Mothers Work, a Philadelphia maternity clothes business. Today, she says, professional women who make at least $30,000 annually will together spend about $100 million for tailored maternity suits and dresses.
And those women who want to spend less on such temporary wardrobes can now rent the fashionable frocks. ''People lease furniture and aquariums full of fish, so why not maternity clothes?'' said Donna Smith, president of Pro Creations Maternity Leasewear in Portland, Ore. Her company - which plans to go national next year - does just that, leasing its $400 maternity suits, for example, for $6.95 a week.
Most images of entrepreneurship tend to focus on the vision and guts involved in getting ventures off the ground. Like the test pilots in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, the entrepreneur is often portrayed as someone resembling Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to shatter the sound barrier, with a spreadsheet. But at a recent panel discussion at the Lauder Institute Alumni Association Global Business Forum in New York, a group of entrepreneurs – some just a few years into their venture, and at least one with decades of experience – offered a portrait of the entrepreneur that seldom makes it onto the cover of Business Week: The entrepreneur as mensch.
Panelists emphasized less the solitary aspects of the entrepreneurial life than the social ones. Forget genius, they said; what really counts most is building a strong network to turn to for help and advice, treating people with dignity, and serving your customers well.
Chaired by Lauder Institute governor Edgar Bronfman Jr., the chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group, the panel featured Tom Bendheim, the CEO of Rheingold Brewing Co.; George Bennett, the chairman and CEO of Health Dialog; Luis Gonzales, COO and founder of Vidalink, a Brazilian pharmaceutical supply company; Charles Rashall, president and founder of brandadvisors; and Diane Ty, chairman and co-founder of YouthNOISE.
A gambler’s daring is also not required. Although entrepreneurs are generally perceived as risk-takers, at least one panelist seems to have learned the value of caution in the course of his experience. As the leader of a dot-com that had to shut down several years ago, he said he’d had to fire many people he and his partner had hired. “The first time we had to lay people off, it really hurt. The lesson was, I don’t ever want to do that again,” he said. Today, he says, he hires much more slowly.
Manners, however, may be an underrated asset. “Friends come and go,” said one panelist. “Enemies accumulate. My ability to recruit in 2004 has everything to do with how I treated my partners in 2003, in 2002 – and in 1976,” he explained. In his experience, every action with every human – how you fire them, how fair you were, how much dignity you gave them, circulates. Those people “talk and talk and talk, and they’ll bring traffic in,” he said.
Some said they enjoyed the sense of control that they gained by working on their own venture. As one entrepreneur said, he liked to control “what I do, where I do it, when I do it and who I do it for.” But other panelists weren’t sure whether that sense of control held true for all kinds or sizes of organizations. One said he often felt he actually had very few choices in a given day as he responded to events around him. Another panelist said he thought that as a business grows, it’s easy to get pulled in various directions and lose day-to-day control, but when it comes to life-changing decisions about the firm’s future, the entrepreneur does maintain more control than an employee might.
And what happens if the venture doesn’t work out? Is it possible to go back to corporate life? Yes and no, the panelists said. One advised that while some businesses such as utility companies might not value entrepreneurial experience, such a background may be just what’s needed for a business that must reinvent itself. “It’s only after pursuing 16 initiatives that were wrong will you find the 17th that was right, and that’s very hard to create in a corporate culture,” he said.
In the spring of 1915, explorer Ernest Shackleton was trapped when his ship, Endurance, was frozen in ice during an expedition to the Antarctic. In sub-zero weather, and with only a few instruments for navigation, he successfully led a small party 800 miles to summon help for the rest of his crew, which had been stranded on a remote island.
Over the course of his long expedition, Shackleton formulated a few simple but enduring principles of leadership. These include listening carefully to the concerns of his crew, flexibility (the willingness to abandon a plan that isn’t working), and the power of example — Shackleton would often help out with tasks such as scrubbing the decks or making repairs.
Judging from a panel discussion on “Leadership in a Global Organization” at the Global Forum, Shackleton’s vision of the humble leader is making a comeback. “It’s not a new idea,” said one panelist, “but in the late 1990s there was so much focus on the star power of executives that many CEOs forgot the power of benevolent leadership.” The panelists included Paul J. Fribourg, Chairman and CEO, ContiGroup; Leonard Lauder, chairman, The Estee Lauder Companies; Bruce Simpson, Managing Partner, McKinsey & Co.; and Rick Smith, Author and CEO, World Executive Group.
This changed attitude needs to extend to company operations abroad, said the other panelists. “As businesses, and as a country, arrogance is the challenge we have to deal with,” said one. “The U.S. is at the top in many respects. But we’re seeing that we’ll fail on our own if we can’t put ourselves in the shoes of other people.” For companies operating abroad, he said, this means taking the time to understand the unique conditions of each market, and the desires of its consumers.
The panelists also explored a question from the audience: where should young managers look for “high leverage” opportunities? “There are a lot of small ideas that don’t have a voice,” responded one speaker. By seeking out those ideas, and finding innovative ways of applying your resources to them, you may be surprised at the effect you can have.
Another panelist agreed. “The best opportunities usually aren’t on the traditional career path. Take the jobs no one wants.” He recalled accepting an assignment to run a joint venture for his company in the Middle East. It was an unpopular assignment, but one that — when it succeeded — put him in a strong position to gain other opportunities.
Be careful how you measure success, said a third panelist. When you attend retirement parties, you’ll find that the most meaningful aren’t for those who made the most money or rose to the highest rank. Instead, they are for those who had the most positive effect on the people around them, through mentorship or by example. In other words, it’s better to be a Shackleton than a Skilling.
Charlotte has announced the promotion of Kevin Langan as the new soccer coach.
Langan replaces Jeremy Gunn, who resigned to become head coach at Stanford after leading Charlotte to the NCAA tournament's College Cup. Charlotte lost 1-0 to rival North Carolina in the championship game.
Langan says he's "extremely excited and honored to become the head coach," calling it "quite humbling."
This will be Langan's first college head coaching job. He spent four years as the head boys' coach of the Classics Elite Soccer Academy in San Antonio before coming to Charlotte in 2009. Langan came to the United States in 2004 from the University of Bath in England.
Rugby 08 has secured an impressive spread of licenses.
With the Rugby World Cup looming and England's hopes of retaining it looking decidedly unconvincing, here's a chance to intervene, and give them a leg up (or crush them, depending on your persuasion). Released later this month on PC and PlayStation 2, EA have secured an impressive spread of licences for Rugby 08, from the World Cup to the Six Nations, Tri Nations and even the English Premiership, guaranteeing plenty of challenges in this highly anticipated release.