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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/12/18/death-dignity-and-calling-funeral-director/EBzyz6gBDuZZScD3oBB54L/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20151223070108id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2015/12/18/death-dignity-and-calling-funeral-director/EBzyz6gBDuZZScD3oBB54L/story.html | Death, dignity, and a calling to be funeral director | 20151223070108 | The death industry is an extremely stressful undertaking. At Mount Ida College in Newton, mortuary school instructor Sarah Stopyra said she can teach students about pathology, embalming, and regulatory compliance. But it’s difficult to convey to aspiring morticians how all-consuming the funeral profession is. “It’s not just the long and often erratic hours,” said Stopyra, 34. “The deep sorrow of others takes an emotional toll as well.” Stopyra spoke about the “calling” to be a mortician.
“I don’t look like the typical undertaker stereotype — I’m young and female. When I first started 14 years ago, people were taken aback when they saw me. One even asked, ‘Do you actually move the bodies?’ Yes.
“I had little experience on a personal level with death care — I had only attended one or two funerals in my life — but I felt strongly this was something I had to do. Part of this job is technical, needing to know how to deal with human remains in a kind and respectful manner. Other aspects require interpersonal skills, such as dealing with not just the bereaved, but also clergymen, medical professionals, and attorneys.
“The curriculum is broken down into classes characterized as either arts or sciences. The first contact with the deceased is during an embalming clinical course, which takes place at an off-campus funeral home or our campus embalming facility. Some are very nervous, but we teach that it’s an honor to do death care.
“Other courses include a restorative arts class, which shows how to recreate a face with mortuary wax. Some students are more artistic and make faces of famous people. Others just try to learn the basics. Ultimately the most important aspect of the funeral business is being on your ‘A’ game all the time.
“I may not always be in a black suit, but I am always cognizant of what I represent, whether I’m in the funeral parlor or the community. Being a funeral director is not a career, but a lifestyle.” | Sarah Stopyra, a mortuary instructor, says it’s difficult to convey how all-consuming the funeral profession is. | 18.272727 | 0.954545 | 5.227273 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/lea-michele-holiday-gift-for-boyfriend-matthew-paetz | http://web.archive.org/web/20151224205102id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/lea-michele-holiday-gift-for-boyfriend-matthew-paetz | Lea Michele on Holiday Gift for Boyfriend Matthew Paetz : People.com | 20151224205102 | By Mariah Haas and Nicole Sands
12/22/2015 AT 02:15 PM EST
With the holidays right around the corner,
is still unsure about what to give
"Last year, [my boyfriend and I] treated each other to tattoos," the actress told PEOPLE during a recent #ActuallySheCan campaign event. "I surprised him with a session with Dr. Woo, who is the best, so I don't know how I'm going to top that."
"I might just have to call Woo again and be like, 'Can you do it again?' " continued Michele, who got a small arrow on the inside of her finger. "But I don't know anyone else that gives his or her boyfriend a tattoo. We each got them. Like who does that?!"
Now Michele, 29, says she has "to think of another surprise." "Maybe we'll just go get each other more tattoos," she added with a laugh.
As for the couple's alone time that
involve getting inked, Michele – who began
Paetz last summer after the two
of her "On My Way" music video in April 2014 – says their go-to is ordering food and watching a movie except for when Paetz, 30, occasionally "falls asleep watching 10 minutes of a movie that [Michele] was really excited to see."
"Staying home and watching a movie is like date night," Michele says. "That's it for me and [it's] the best night ever."
alum also plans to stay
"I've been traveling so much – seven months in New Orleans [while filming
] – so all I want to do is be home," Michele explains. "I usually take a little trip. We're going to do something for New Year's, but nothing far. Just try to stay local and just be home and mellow."
And although it's been a busy year for Michele, the star says that 2015 was "really fantastic."
"I was able to wrap up
, my second book came out – it was a really wonderful year," Michele says. "I had great times with my family and my friends, great trips ... I really work very well when I have a lot going on."
Moving into the new year, Michele – who has her second album coming out and hopes
will get to come back for another season – says, "I want to just keep going for it [at work] and keep pushing myself."
"I've had a great year, but I'm also really excited for 2016," the actress adds. "It's really the first year that I don't have many plans."
As for how she maintains a good work-life balance, Michele credits her "really small circle."
"It's not like I'm juggling a thousand friends," she explains. "I'd rather have a strong, very small intimate group of people that I can really spend my time with, so I'm always making sure to have that time with my boyfriend, even if it's just ordering in food and watching a movie."
"Those are the things that are really important like making time for my friends, and I'm going to see my mom right after this, so it's having that balance," Michele continues. "Sometimes it does take a lot of work, but at the end of the day it gives me the energy to then continue to live that good life."
For a chance to win a signed T-shirt, submit your #ActuallySheCan Less/More mantra at
to hear more about the campaign. | "Last year, we treated each other to tattoos," the Scream Queens actress told PEOPLE | 41.055556 | 0.888889 | 5 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/eva-longoria-consciously-took-break-post-desperate-housewives | http://web.archive.org/web/20151224212735id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/eva-longoria-consciously-took-break-post-desperate-housewives | Why She Took A Break Before Telenovela : People.com | 20151224212735 | 12/21/2015 AT 03:15 PM EST
needed to take a break.
Not to say she looks back on her years on the ABC hit with any negativity. In fact, she still has a picture of her with costars
"I hit the lottery with
," the actress, 40, says in the current issue of PEOPLE. "But when it was over, I made a conscious decision to not jump to another show right away. I wanted to cleanse America's palate of Gabrielle Solis."
Longoria dove into producing and directing projects like Lifetime's
Even when developing her new NBC comedy
, Longoria originally was only going to serve as producer.
"But when I read the script, I knew I had to do it," the former real-life soap actress says of playing over-the-top Spanish soap star Ana Sofia Calderon, a performance that is drawing comparisons to the likes of
. "It was so fresh and fun. It was the comedy I'd always wanted to do. It's my love letter to telenovelas."
premieres Jan. 4 at 8:30 p.m. ET on NBC. | "I hit the lottery with Housewives," Longoria says in the current issue of PEOPLE | 12.941176 | 0.941176 | 5.294118 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/heidi-klum-unicef-india | http://web.archive.org/web/20151229211211id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/heidi-klum-unicef-india | Heidi Klum's Photos From Her India Trip with UNICEF : People.com | 20151229211211 | 12/14/2015 AT 05:30 PM EST
has been to India two times before but her most recent trip was extra special.
The supermodel visited India in September as part of a field visit with
. Now, Klum is sharing exclusive photos of her time there.
During her stay, Klum made many stops around the country including to a UNICEF-supported school in Mirzapur where she bonded with schoolgirls and learned about their water, sanitation and hygiene program.
She witnessed sick, underweight and premature babies being treated at a sick newborn care unit at a hospital in Varanasi and visited a nutrition rehab center in the same city.
In addition, the mom of four helped administer polio immunization drops – which you can now also give from home this holiday season through UNICEF's
Klum told Ellen DeGeneres in October that she wanted to share the stunning photos to spread awareness about the "amazing work" the organization is doing in India.
"You have to think about no borders," she said. "We're all people, we all live on this planet together and we all have to help each other." | "We're all people, we all live on this planet together and we all have to help each other," said of her recent trip to India | 7.2 | 1 | 15.266667 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/18/us-stocks.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160103042527id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/18/us-stocks.html | Nasdaq ends at 14-year high as global worries abate | 20160103042527 | U.S. stocks jumped on Monday, with the Nasdaq Composite rising to its highest level since March 2000 and the price of oil falling to its lowest in more than a year, as geopolitical tensions eased.
Dollar General jumped after the discount retailer offered $8.95 billion for Family Dollar Stores, challenging a bid from Dollar Tree.Monster Beverage fell after Jefferies Group downgraded the stock to hold from buy. Shares of Urban Outfitters advanced ahead of the retailer's earnings release after Monday's close.
The CBOE Volatility Index, a measure of investor uncertainty, fell 6.3 percent to 12.32.
Russia said a dispute over its convoy of humanitarian aid to Ukraine had been settled, and a Ukrainian official said more than five hours of discussions in Berlin had brought about "moderate progress," according to media reports.
The development "points to some degree of cooperation, which is probably a constructive environment for global and domestic equities," said Jim Russell, senior equity strategist for US Bank Wealth Management.
The Federal Open Market Committee meeting in the middle of September is the "next really big capital-markets event, until then, geopolitical events will have a heavy influence, especially the Russia and Ukraine conflict, when something happens, that seems to really be lighter fluid, today being a good example," Russell added.
Read MoreS&P 500 back on course to target 2,000
And, Iraqi and Kurdish troops reportedly reclaimed control of the Mosul Dam after increased U.S. airstrikes aimed to help them during the weekend.
"It appears the Kurds are making progress in taking back the dam in Mosul, so the Iraq story too is playing a role here," Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities, said of OPEC's second-largest producer of crude.
Sensata Technologies Holding said it would pay $1 billion to acquire the Schrader group of companies, and Ingersoll-Rand said it would purchase Cameron International's centrifugal compression business for $850 million.
The National Association of Home Builders reported its month index of confidence among those building single-family homes rose 2 points to 55, coming in better than expected.
"It's a forward looking survey, and we've seen that move in a positive direction for three months in a row. But it's a B-list piece of economic data, more important are housing-start numbers later in the week," said Hogan. | Stocks rose on Monday as Ukraine and Russia talked about a potential truce and a round of M&A bolstered sentiment. | 22.095238 | 0.666667 | 0.857143 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/chloe-grace-moretz-on-dating-and-her-parents-divorce | http://web.archive.org/web/20160108180145id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/chloe-grace-moretz-on-dating-and-her-parents-divorce | Chloe Grace Moretz on Her Parents' Divorce, Why She Won't Date Older People : People.com | 20160108180145 | 01/07/2016 AT 02:40 PM EST
has tackled more than most at age 18 – and not just onscreen.
for its February cover story that she was "toughened up a lot" when her parents divorced when she was younger.
"It made me harder on myself," Moretz explains of the split. "[It] was as heavy as you can get to dismantle a family, for sure."
Moretz's father "just left," in her words, leaving her, her mother and four brothers to fend for themselves.
"When you're betrayed by someone that is a bloodline, you start to beware trusting people and to protect yourself at all costs," Moretz says. "For a long time, I did that too much. I wasn't letting people in."
The fear of letting people in might also have an impact on Moretz's dating life – the teen is hesitant to get into any sort of serious relationship.
"I don't want to date older people, because I'm 18 and older people are more serious," she tells
. "Then I kind of realized, I'll go on dates, why not? And that's kind of how I am right now."
Moretz insists that she's "not looking for a while" – well, at least until she's "like 23."
It helps that she's more comfortable in her body these days. Moretz says that when she was filming
two years ago at age 16, she was filled with self-doubt, egged on by online criticisms.
"I felt fat; I felt not pretty," she says. "I felt like I didn't really know who I was. I was so confused; I was scared. I had bad acne. I felt incredibly insecure."
But growing up changed her mindset.
"I'm so free now. I don't know what happened, but when I turned 17, this huge weight was lifted off my shoulders," Moretz says. "I don't worry about what people say about me. I know who I am, who I want to be, what I want to portray myself as, what I want people to think of me."
Which can only help her blossoming career – Moretz was just
's iconic shoes – err, fins. | "[It] was as heavy as you can get to dismantle a family," says Moretz | 24.473684 | 1 | 13.631579 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/01/11/18/50/tributes-pour-in-for-extraordinary-bowie | http://web.archive.org/web/20160112005555id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2016/01/11/18/50/tributes-pour-in-for-extraordinary-bowie | Tributes pour in for 'extraordinary' Bowie | 20160112005555 | Stars from the world of showbiz and entertainment have summoned the words of David Bowie to pay tribute to the rock star.
The 69-year-old - known for hits such as Changes, Ashes To Ashes and Starman - left a legacy created by pioneering musicianship and ground-breaking lyrics dating back almost half a century.
He died on Sunday after suffering from cancer for 18 months.
Australian actor Russell Crowe, referencing one of Bowie's better known singles which featured on covers album Pin Ups 1973, wrote: "RIP David. I loved your music. I loved you. One of the greatest performance artists to have ever lived. #sorrow"
Rock guitarist Joel Madden, quoting Changes, simply added: "Turn and face the strange."
Actor Mark Ruffalo wrote: "Rip Father of all us freaks. Sad sad day. Love always Legendary singer David Bowie dies at 69."
While comedian and writer Eddie Izzard said: "Very sad to hear about the death of David Bowie but through his music he will live forever."
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby told the BBC Radio 4 Today program he became a Bowie fan during the singer's early rise to prominence.
He said: "I'm very, very saddened to hear of his death.
"I remember sitting listening to his songs endlessly in the '70s particularly and always really relishing what he was, what he did, the impact he had.
And Prime Minister David Cameron, whose musical tastes are well documented, also offered his condolences.
He said: "I grew up listening to and watching the pop genius David Bowie. He was a master of re-invention, who kept getting it right. A huge loss." | Tributes from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the UK prime minister and stars of showbiz and entertainment have flowed at the death of David Bowie. | 13 | 0.884615 | 2.884615 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/01/12/18/41/man-robs-pet-store-by-shoving-python-down-his-pants | http://web.archive.org/web/20160113182859id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2016/01/12/18/41/man-robs-pet-store-by-shoving-python-down-his-pants | Man robs US pet store by shoving python down his pants | 20160113182859 | A man in the US has managed to walk out of a pet store with a stolen snake by stuffing it down the front of his slacks.
Surveillance footage shows the man entering "A to Z" pet store in Portland, Oregon, and walking over to a snake cage.
He then places the $285 black pastel ball python down his pants, passing the cage's keys to a woman standing nearby - believed to be his girlfriend, who is an alleged accomplice to the theft.
No arrests have been made as a result of Friday's theft, but store co-owner Christin Bjugan said a suspect has been identified.
"We know where he lives, we know where he works, we know all about him and his girlfriend. We're just waiting to get our snake back," Ms Bjugan told KOMO News.
Ms Bjugan admits that although the man was "pretty gutsy", the typically docile snake is known to like warm, dark places. | A man in the US has managed to walk out of a US pet store with a stolen snake by stuffing it down the front of his slacks. | 6.586207 | 1 | 13.827586 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/picabo-street-charged-with-assault | http://web.archive.org/web/20160115080023id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/picabo-street-charged-with-assault | Olympic Skier Picabo Street Charged With Assault : People.com | 20160115080023 | 01/13/2016 AT 12:10 AM EST
has been charged with assault and domestic violence after a fight with her father allegedly got physical, according to a report.
The Olympic gold-medalist told authorities that she had pushed her father, 76, down a flight of stairs and then locked him in the basement, following a physical encounter between the two, in which he allegedly pulled her hair,
The incident, which occurred on Dec. 23 at a home in Park City, Utah, reportedly stemmed from a verbal dispute that began after her father bumped the house with his car while leaving.
According to ABC, the 44-year-old skier was taken into custody and later released after posting bail. Two weeks after the incident, she was reportedly charged with three counts of misdemeanor domestic violence in the presence of a child and one count of misdemeanor assault.
Although Street's lawyer told ABC that his client denies any wrongdoing, the Summit County prosecutor, Ivy Telles, told the network that Street is open to discussing a potential plea deal, however, negotiations between the two parties have not yet begun.
They're reportedly scheduled to return to court on Feb. 16. | The gold-medalist allegedly pushed her father down a flight of stairs after a verbal dispute escalated | 12.5 | 0.944444 | 2.944444 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/family-friends-abc7-coworkers-remember-killed-producer-anne-swaney | http://web.archive.org/web/20160119081128id_/http://www.people.com/article/family-friends-abc7-coworkers-remember-killed-producer-anne-swaney | Family, Friends Remember Slain Chicago ABC Producer Anne Swaney : People.com | 20160119081128 | It was just a year or two ago that
proved again why she was beloved.
Her close friend and coworker, Holly Grisham Conroy, was burying her father in a service about three hours from Chicago, and a blizzard was raging – so bad, in fact, that it had deterred others from going to Conroy's side.
But as she stood beside her father's grave, Conroy looked up and through the snow to see Swaney coming toward her, there from Chicago to provide comfort. Later that same day, Swaney drove back through the blizzard to her job at WLS in Chicago, where she worked for 16 years.
"She didn't want to miss work," station spokeswoman Jayme Nicholas tells PEOPLE, relaying that anecdote.
That's the kind of person Swaney was, according to her friends, family and coworkers. Together, they paint a portrait of a vivacious woman, a "true blue" friend, and a "trailblazer" as a journalist who possessed a sharp intellect and an unwavering commitment to the truth.
But now, after Swaney's trip to Belize for vacation, the truth her friends face is horribly painful.
The 39-year-old, an executive producer of online operations at WLS, was found dead Friday morning in a river near the Nabatunich Farm, in San Jose Succotz, where she had been staying.
Local officials said her body was bruised,
. She had been strangled, according to an autopsy.
A man has been questioned in her death and described as "a person of interest," said Rafael Martinez, a spokesman for the Belize Ministry of National Security,
. "He is a person who the police believe can assist in the investigation."
PEOPLE was not immediately able to reach either local authorities or the Ministry of National Security for comment.
"I can assure you no stone will remain unturned. We are aggressively pursuing this case," Martinez said,
. "And we are trying our utmost best to bring somebody to justice for this heinous crime."
An avid horseback rider and world traveler, Swaney had planned to head out on a group excursion Thursday, according to WLS, but hung back when there were not enough horses for the riders.
Instead, she planned to do yoga by the water.
Hours later, they found her body.
"Anne Elizabeth had a very short life. She had a very full life," her father, Jack Swaney, said in
after her passing. "It hasn't sunk in, what we've lost."
News of Swaney's death broke Friday: Jack called the station himself, spreading shock and disbelief to her coworkers, some of whom were also her friends.
As they processed their grief, the WLS team also had to report on Swaney's death – and the search for her killer.
Nicholas described it this way to PEOPLE: "You're in disbelief. You have to do your job and move forward, and then it just hits you like a wave."
From left: Anne Swaney with Holly Grisham Conroy, circa 2003
After airing one story on Swaney's death, an anchor got choked up, Nicholas says.
"She had a lot of friends here," she added. "Everyone did rally and had a sense of purpose of doing right by Anne," Nicholas says.
In a series of anecdotes and written remembrances to PEOPLE, Swaney's friends and colleagues memorialized her warmth, energy and open heart.
Conroy wrote of Swaney's "wicked" intelligence and humor.
She shared stories of Swaney's unflagging support during moments of personal hardship, such as when Conroy's twins were born prematurely and when "sorrow surrounding my mother's terminal illness overcame my whole family on my wedding day."
"It was my faithful friend Anne who stood up before all those people [that day], to speak of her happiness and love for me. Anne just always went 'above and beyond' to show you how very much she cared," Conroy wrote.
"We have all lost a wonderful soul," Conroy wrote, "and I have lost one of the few true friends I was blessed with in this life."
Swaney's boss at WLS, Kevin Carpenter, shared with Nicholas the story of how Swaney was so touched by letters sent by underprivileged kids to Santa Claus each Christmas that she made it a tradition to go to the post office, pick up some of those letters and wrap gifts for the children.
Dena Serpico, a close friend and former WLS coworker, described Swaney as "one of my 'people'" – "the ones that you know you can call and they will show up and buy you a drink, no questions asked," she wrote.
"She was an intelligent, sophisticated woman completely unaware of her own true beauty," Serpico wrote, adding that she was "full of laughter as well as tears."
"We just 'got' each other," Serpico wrote. "I will miss her dearly and the world is a smaller place without her."
Swaney's travels took her to Costa Rica, Greece and Turkey, and France, Germany and Italy, according to her obituary. She was bitten by the travel bug at age 11, when she won a trip to Boston.
"She spent the rest of her life seeking new experiences," according to her obituary.
"Like all victims, she deserved better. She deserved the chance to take more trips, ride more horses, bike more places – live more life," her obituary reads. "But it was not to be." | As they worked to process their own grief, the WLS team just as quickly worked to report on Swaney's death – and the search for her killer | 38.482759 | 0.931034 | 7.068966 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/kaine-horman-responds-ex-wifes-first-interview-since-sons-disappearance | http://web.archive.org/web/20160122091826id_/http://www.people.com/article/kaine-horman-responds-ex-wifes-first-interview-since-sons-disappearance | Kaine Horman Responds to Ex-Wife's First Interview Since Son's Disappearance : People.com | 20160122091826 | By Elaine Aradillas and Tara Fowler
01/20/2016 AT 02:10 PM EST
Kyron Horman's father has broken his silence following his ex-wife Terri's
with PEOPLE about her stepson's disappearance.
Kyron, then 7, was last seen on June 4, 2010, when Terri dropped him off at a science fair at his school in Portland, Oregon. She took photos with her digital camera, toured his classmates' projects, and then said good-bye. Kyron has been missing ever since.
"I am encouraged that Ms. Horman is now willing to make public statements about the events that occurred on June 4, 2010," Kaine Horman, who officially divorced Terri in late 2013, tells PEOPLE.
He adds: "I hope that Ms. Horman will now cooperate with law enforcement to provide additional information that might lead to the discovery of Kyron."
A cloud of suspicion has followed Terri since Kyron's disappearance, though she has never been named a suspect or a person of interest in the case. (Officials for the Multnomah County Sheriff's Department say it is an "ongoing investigation.")
To this day, however, Terri
she did not harm or kill Kyron and has no idea what happened to him or where he is.
"What if? All those what-ifs. What if I had gotten ready faster? What if we had done something sooner? What if I had stayed for the whole fair and not left early?" she wonders. "I wish I could go back to that day and do something different."
Anyone with any information about Kyron's disappearance, call 1-800-843-5678. | Kyron Horman hasn't been seen since June 4, 2010 | 29.636364 | 0.909091 | 2.181818 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/jk-rowling-calls-out-donald-trump-spokeswoman | http://web.archive.org/web/20160126015658id_/http://www.people.com/article/jk-rowling-calls-out-donald-trump-spokeswoman | J.K. Rowling Calls Out Trump Spokeswoman for 'Pure Breed' Comment : People.com | 20160126015658 | 01/24/2016 AT 05:50 PM EST
may be a British citizen but she's still making her opinions about American politics known – with a little help from Hogwarts.
The author made a quip about presidential candidate
's campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson on Twitter, Sunday.
Rowling re-shared a 2012 tweet from Pierson that read, "Perfect Obama's dad born in Africa, Mitt Romney's dad born in Mexico. Any pure breeds left? #CNNDebate."
the author added, simply, "Death Eaters walk among us."
Death Eaters walk among us. https://t.co/tqKq1anHpf
Perfect Obama's dad born in Africa, Mitt Romney's dad born in Mexico. Any pure breeds left? #CNNDebate
fans, the dig is obvious – Death Eaters are a group of radicals that follow the evil Lord Voldemort and wish to eliminate anyone who is not a pureblood from the magical society.
Rowling previously shared her disdain for Trump, linking to a BBC story on Twitter about the candidate being likened to the series' antagonist.
"How horrible," Rowling wrote in response. "Voldemort was nowhere near as bad."
How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad. https://t.co/hFO0XmOpPH
, has a history of making polarizing comments himself.
Just this week the businessman
at an Iowa speech that his supporters are so loyal that he could "shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." | Rowling referred to Katrina Pierson as a Death Eater | 30.555556 | 0.777778 | 1 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/16/while-markets-sell-off-this-is-barely-moving.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160127070626id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/16/while-markets-sell-off-this-is-barely-moving.html | While markets sell off, this is barely moving | 20160127070626 | While U.S. equities markets tank, and gold is hanging near a one-month high, one famously volatile currency is roughly flat on the week.
Bitcoin, which made news when it dipped to an 11-month low earlier in October, is up about 1.6 percent since Monday morning, according to CoinDesk's price index. While this may be a big move for some currencies, the relatively illiquid cryptocurrency routinely sees $20 swings in a day: It has moved from about $371 to roughly $377 since Monday.
In fact, the digital currency's volatility is still near all-time lows despite the major changes experience by other markets this week, according to the Bitcoin Volatility Index.
Read MoreCramer: Why Ebola is behind the selloff
Bitcoin did see a spike on Tuesday to above $400, but its drop back to nearly even with Monday may suggest the computerized asset is not acting as a safe haven investment—as some have suggested it would.
Instead of acting like gold 2.0, bitcoin may be responding to its own set of headlines: On Tuesday New York state made a fresh set of announcements regarding an impending "BitLicense." While the state said it would not require software developers to get a license, some worry that the new law will require bitcoin services to spy on their users. | Bitcoin did see a spike on Tuesday, but its drop back to nearly even with Monday suggests its not acting as a safe haven. | 9.769231 | 0.961538 | 7.192308 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/01/25/kids-would-rather-play-xbox-than-make-money-shoveling/GVR2tp7ytXXpQB54M39dYP/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160129083848id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2016/01/25/kids-would-rather-play-xbox-than-make-money-shoveling/GVR2tp7ytXXpQB54M39dYP/story.html? | Kids would rather play Xbox than make money shoveling | 20160129083848 | WASHINGTON — Snowzilla has gone, leaving behind confused snowfall estimates, regrettable junk-food decisions, an incubating October baby boom, and a lingering sense of dread for many parents.
The work ethic of our youngsters: Where is it? Where are the entrepreneurial snow shovelers?
For generations of enterprising children, snowflakes may as well have been dollar bills falling from the sky.
Youths jostled to be the first to ring the doorbells of the snowed-in, the $5 driveways added up, and that new Atari Defender game cartridge, those rainbow Vans — yours and yours.
But in 2016? Not so much.
‘‘3 ft of snow and NO kids knocking on doors to make money shoveling on a Sunday! What does that tell you? Sad state of affairs,’’ tweeted CNN analyst and retired New York police detective Harry Houck.
‘‘By the way, where are all the neighborhood kids wanting to make money shoveling snow?’’ bemoaned Roberta Rinker, who had had zero doorbell rings from children in her neighborhood in Silver Spring, Md., and a huge shoveling job ahead of her.
All over social media, folks were telling kids to get off their Xboxes and get to work.
‘‘Man where the young bucks at . . . all this snow. Kids ain’t makin no money,’’ tweeted Real Talk N’ Sports, a local sports podcast.
A few folks were praising their hard-working children.
At BWI Airport, Luis Ramirez, a 16-year-old from Glen Burnie, Md., was earning $20 an hour shoveling out dozens of cars in Long Term Parking Lot A.
Luis, a Glen Burnie High School junior who wants to run his own business someday, said that he has been working 15- to 17-hour days.
‘‘I don’t want to be lazy at home on my iPhone,’’ Luis said. ‘‘I check my Snapchat, and everyone is having a lazy day.’’
It’s great to see that kind of drive and ambition in a teenager.
But on one Capitol Hill street, it was only the grown-up hustlers peddling their shoveling.
What happened to all the neighborhood children?
‘‘I got them outside to help me shovel, but then they just ended up playing in the back yard,’’ said one of the toughest dads on the block, a square-jawed guy who manages construction sites.
‘‘It was such a rare storm,’’ he explained. ‘‘I had to let them play.’’
In some places, kids were even discouraged from turning their hard work into cash.
A couple of teens going door to door in New Jersey last year were stopped by police for operating without a license, just like the summertime lemonade-stand crackdown.
Politicians actually debated whether youths should have to get a $450 business license to shovel a neighbor’s walk down the street before passing a bill giving them special permission to shovel.
Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey signed it into law last week, just in time for the snow. | The work ethic of our kids: Where is it? Where are the entrepreneurial snow shovelers? | 33.611111 | 1 | 9.444444 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/01/25/more-critics-for-ban-fantasy-sports-under-age/aHlmZ1kaScTEnvYo5zs3PL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160129172650id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2016/01/25/more-critics-for-ban-fantasy-sports-under-age/aHlmZ1kaScTEnvYo5zs3PL/story.html | More critics for A.G.’s ban on fantasy sports under age 21 | 20160129172650 | In an unusual break among state officials, the chairman of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission is opposing Attorney General Maura Healey’s plan to ban people between the ages of 18 and 21 from playing daily fantasy sports.
Stephen Crosby’s comments were in response to a proposed raft of regulations that Healey is preparing to impose on fantasy sports companies. The deadline for submitting comments was last Friday and his submission was recently posted online on Healey’s website, along with those of other interested parties.
Crosby said he was making suggestions “solely as an individual” and not on behalf of the commission, although the letter was on Gaming Commission letterhead. He specifically took issue with the age ban proposed by Healey, along with suggestions for more technical changes.
Crosby noted that while Massachusetts law bans players under 21 from casinos, that largely is because alcohol is served in casinos. That same age limit simply doesn’t make sense in the online-only realm of daily fantasy, he wrote, since 18-year-olds are otherwise considered adults.
“I have a hard time understanding the logic of considering people old enough to join the military, to vote, to get married and to live alone and yet consider them insufficiently responsible to play daily fantasy sports,” Crosby wrote.
The Gaming Commission has separately studied the daily fantasy sports industry. Like Healey, it concluded that Massachusetts laws don’t explicitly make winning cash prizes in those games illegal. The commission has suggested state lawmakers consider additional regulations for the industry.
In a statement, a spokeswoman said Healey expects to implement the under-21 age restriction.
“The focus of our draft regulations has always been about protecting consumers, and in particular on ensuring that young people are not accessing these sites,” the spokeswoman said.
Yahoo Inc., which also operates fantasy sports properties, also took issue with the under-21 ban. Limiting games to players who are 21 presents difficult new verification problems for companies, wrote Yahoo, which began offering daily fantasy contests last year.
Yahoo said it restricts paid daily fantasy contests to players 18 and older. Verifying the ages of those players is relatively easy, Yahoo wrote, because it is done when the players submit their payment information.
Changing the age limit to 21 and requiring age verification of players in free games “could create additional security risks for our users,” Yahoo said, because it requires the company to collect more personal data about its players.
“As such, we look forward to discussing with your office ways to address concerns regarding access to games by underage players,” Yahoo wrote.
The industry’s top daily fantasy sports operators, Boston-based DraftKings Inc. and New York-based FanDuel Inc., also oppose a 21-year-old age limit.
Eighteen-year-olds, Draft-Kings wrote in submitted comments, “have jobs, pay taxes, marry, and raise children,” and should be trusted to win money in fantasy sports contests. FanDuel noted that 18-year-olds are allowed to purchase lottery tickets.
The companies also are suggesting changes to several other more technical parts of Healey’s proposal, such as a $1,000 monthly limit on player deposits and the rules for deciding if a player is a beginner or labeled as “highly experienced.”
Other commentators, however, support the age limit.
“It is well established that rates of problem gambling peak between age 18 and 21 and that those who develop gambling problems at a younger age are more likely to be problem gamblers as adults,” wrote Lia Nower, director of the Rutgers Center for Gambling Studies.
Healey’s proposed rules would make Massachusetts the first state to set up a detailed regulatory regime allowing daily fantasy sports contests. The regulations are expected to be finalized in the next few weeks. | The chairman of the state Gaming Commission and Yahoo are adding to the criticism of Attorney General Maura Healey’s propsed ban on daily fantasy sports for players under 21. | 23.612903 | 0.903226 | 2.387097 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/01/29/wentworth-wins-grant-benefit-female-students/ONbehxQHnT1z6oppl2ypwN/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160130085806id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/01/29/wentworth-wins-grant-benefit-female-students/ONbehxQHnT1z6oppl2ypwN/story.html | Wentworth wins grant to benefit female students | 20160130085806 | Boston’s Wentworth Institute of Technology is getting a $100,000 grant from New York-based Turner Construction Co. in a bid to increase the school’s roster of female students, and the number of women in the construction industry.
“This is an industry-university partnership that can really serve as a model,” said the school’s president, Zorica Pantić.
Wentworth’s entering class this year is just 22 percent female.
The two-year program will provide scholarships for up to eight juniors and seniors, and at least two freshmen or sophomores. Turner, one of the nation’s largest construction companies, will also provide paid internships in Massachusetts, Connecticut or New York.
Wentworth awards degrees in a number of construction-related fields, including architecture, civil engineering and construction management, but female students in other technical fields will also be eligible.
The plan emerged last year, after Turner’s president, Wentworth graduate Peter Davoren, spoke at the school’s summer commencement ceremony. “He talked about the need for more women in the construction industry,” said Karen Sweeney. Turner’s senior vice president of diversity, inclusion and community. “Peter put his money where his mouth is.”
“There is a dearth of female engineers, construction managers and so forth,” said Pantić. “I don’t think it’s a lack of abilities, but it’s a lack of role models.”
As of the 2014-15 school year, 19 percent of approximately 3,800 undergraduates was female. The National Science Foundation estimates that women get only 18 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in engineering and 19 percent of those awarded in computer science. | Boston’s Wentworth Institute of Technology is getting a $100,000 grant from New York-based Turner Construction Co. in a bid to up the school’s roster of female students. | 9.787879 | 1 | 19 | low | high | extractive |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/nov/13/simon-schama-photograph-decade/amp | http://web.archive.org/web/20160131190910id_/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/nov/13/simon-schama-photograph-decade/amp | Simon Schama's photograph of the decade | 20160131190910 | Just occasionally, photojournalism rises to the level of great art. When that happens, its subject is most often anonymous rather than famous, an Everyman embodying something tragic about the human condition.
Just such a picture of elemental ordeal was caught on 26 December 2006. Boxing Day, we would call it, but in Lagos it was an inferno, the fires of hell risen to earth in the densely peopled district of Abule Egba. Thieves, attempting to siphon oil from one of the many pipelines that travel through city districts, had ruptured a pipe, triggering an explosion. At the time the photo was taken it looks as though it has been burning for many hours. The cityscape is a medieval apocalypse of horror and filth: the sky pitchy with fumes; shanty huts already smouldering charcoal; beams and struts stand against the stinking, bituminous sky; a scrawny thorn tree is blown by the fumes but refuses to break; the corrugated remnants of roofs are so much smouldering trash lying on the cinder-waste.
But what makes the image profound, almost redemptive, is its foreground figure, our Everyman, standing amid the remains of some burnt-out vehicle, the spokes of wheels and steering wheels enduring in the debris. The only thing not consumed by the incineration is his defiantly beautiful djellaba-like robe, patterned in brilliant scarlet and lapis blue. That startling blue, the blue of a tropic sky, is echoed in the plastic bucket he holds in his left hand, empty of the water he has just thrown over himself, drops of which have been caught by the camera falling from his face. His right hand is raised to his brow to wipe the cooling water, and enough of his face is exposed to reveal the kind of beauty seen on the finest Benin sculpture heads.
Thus: the human condition in the age of planetary calamity; a solitary figure risen above the horror and misery, not in theatrical heroics but in an act of simple, instinctive desperation. Oil, the emperor-element of our modern wasteland, monstrous in its victimisation, yet yielding for a split second to the mercy of water, the element from which we, and what is left of our planet, remain constituted. | Simon Schama: Occasionally, photojournalism rises to the level of great art, as in this image of a Kenyan rinsing soot from his face | 16.423077 | 0.769231 | 4.538462 | medium | low | mixed |
http://time.com/3079245/ukraine-trauma-counselors-battle-info-intoxication/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160201095133id_/http://time.com/3079245/ukraine-trauma-counselors-battle-info-intoxication/ | Ukraine Trauma Counselors Battle 'Info-Intoxication' | 20160201095133 | In the middle of summer, as the fighting in eastern Ukraine receded toward the Russian border, psychiatrists working in the area began to notice a strange affliction among the people caught up in the conflict. Its symptoms were hard to discern at first from the more typical psychological damage the war was inflicting on local people—anxiety, insomnia, depression—but they were distinct enough for the doctors to start giving the malady names: “info-intoxication,” they called it, or more simply, “Ukrainian syndrome.” The difficulties of treating it became clear to Dr. Yuri Fisun in early July, when the pro-Russian rebel militias retreated from his hometown of Slavyansk, and he was finally able to see patients again, working as a volunteer at a makeshift counseling center set up inside the separatists’ former headquarters in the local City Hall. He never took sides in the conflict, but like many of the people who lived through it, he came away shell-shocked and suspicious of both sides. The Ukrainian military had bombarded this key rebel stronghold with heavy artillery for weeks, depriving it of water and power as they encircled it with military hardware. “The people who stayed during the fighting had trouble sleeping once the sound of explosions had stopped,” he says. “They had gotten so used to them.” But the town has slowly started coming back to life as the government retakes control. Pension payments have resumed, the people who fled the fighting are returning home, a couple of cafes have reopened, and in City Hall, a group of trauma therapists is trying to treat a community that seems to be suffering from a collective case of post-traumatic stress. The therapists don’t see their work as merely a source of comfort for the locals. It is rather a test of whether the deeper tensions of this conflict can be resolved, or whether they are bound to bubble up again with another round of violence. What Fisun and his colleagues noticed was that the forces feeding the hatred in Slavyansk survived even after the fighting stopped. Mixed in among the signs of trauma was a great deal of aggression and paranoia, usually expressed with peculiar phrases that Fisun sensed his patients were not coming up with on their own. He eventually found their source: television. A slight man with a lulling timbre to his voice, Fisun did not own a TV himself, so he got into the habit of watching the news every evening online and taking notes in preparation for his patients the next day. He focused on the Russian state-run networks, which many of the locals still get through satellite dishes or the Internet, and he found a pattern. “Overnight they had internalized the latest propaganda,” he tells TIME. “And it was surprisingly hard to dislodge.” Ever since the Ukrainian forces took back control of Slavyansk, Russian state media has insisted that wholesale purges of the population had ensued. There were mass arrests, “execution lists” and bounties for the bodies of civilians, according to Kremlin-run TV broadcasts. A particularly sickening report on Channel One, the Kremlin’s main network, claimed that Ukrainian soldiers had crucified a three-year-old boy on a bulletin board in the central square of Slavyansk and made his mother watch him bleed to death. None of this had any basis in fact, as TIME confirmed through two weeks of reporting in the former rebel strongholds. These towns and villages have indeed suffered extensive damage from the Ukrainian bombardment, and the U.N. estimates that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the conflict so far, many from the impact of shelling. But once the army moves in to retake control, they have so far made few discernible attempts to weed out the remaining separatists, many of whom have melted back into these communities. “They came once in the beginning, checked my papers to make sure I’m local, and I haven’t seen them since then,” says Alexei, a 34-year-old lumberjack in the war-ravaged village of Semyonovka, declining to give his surname. “I haven’t even heard of anybody getting arrested or interrogated,” says Sergei, a 38-year-old mechanic in the town of Debaltsevo, who also declined to be named, citing a distrust of journalists. Both of them said they had not joined the separatist militias themselves. But while Slavyansk was in rebel control, many if not most of the men in the area provided at least some help to the pro-Russian cause. Failing to do so would have drawn the suspicion of, if not also reprisals from, the rebels and their supporters. These days armed soldiers are rarely seen patrolling the streets of Slavyansk, and state security agents identifiable by their bullet proof vests and sidearms seem to go out of their way to interact politely with locals while standing in line at a pizzeria or grocery store. “Don’t get me wrong, there is a desire among some of the boys to go in and raise hell,” says Taras Katsuba, a Ukrainian lieutenant colonel, standing with a group of soldiers outside town of Debaltsevo on August 1, the day after government forces took control of it. “They’ve seen their buddies get killed. But we know the situation is overheated right now. Folks are scared, and if we go in and start arresting people or whatever, it’ll only make things worse.” Yet the rumors of Ukrainian death squads and “cleanup operations” have nevertheless persisted in these towns, and Fisun says it is the goal of mental health professionals to counteract them one by one. Armed with his notes on the latest Russian news broadcasts, he goes into therapy sessions with an aim to persuade patients that they are false, that they have nothing to fear from the Ukrainian government. “This is a top priority for us right now,” he says. “It is the main thing driving the neuroses and the social aggression.” His colleagues have taken a more direct approach. Tatyana Aslanyan, a psychiatrist who is coordinating teams of trauma counselors working around Slavyansk, usually sits and listens quietly to the people who come for her therapy sessions. These sessions are open to the public, organized by civil society groups and run by local volunteers. But the mistrust in the city is so pervasive, Aslanyan says, “many people still see us as some kind of filtration center; they’re scared we’ll hand them over to the security services.” So it’s no surprise that turnout is usually modest, and men are rare among the people seeking help. During a recent group session in the village of Semyonovka, about a dozen local women sat around in a circle at the village congress hall, whose roof had been blown open with a mortar during the fighting in May and June. Semyonovka has suffered more physical damage than perhaps any other place in the war. “It was better when we didn’t have electricity,” said one of the locals taking part in the session, a young mother of three. (The therapists asked TIME not to print their names.) “But now we can turn on the TV and get depressed again.” For the first time Aslanyan interjected sharply: “No television!” she shouted. “Listen to me, turn it off, throw it away.” The woman began to cry. The source of distress is not only the Russian media, Aslanyan says in an interview the previous day. Though most of Ukraine’s news networks are privately owned, they have often sought to fight fire with fire in the propaganda war, denouncing the separatist rebels as terrorists and their sympathizers as traitors. Numerous reports have accused the rebel fighters of “kidnapping” dozens of children when they were, in fact, apparently just trying to evacuate them from the warzone. In May, separatist fighters helped evacuate the mental hospital outside Slavyansk where Fisun has worked for 35 years. It had been hit by a number of mortars by then, he says, and the rebels “brought buses around” to drive the patients to safety. “As I understand, these were the local boys,” says Fisun, “not Russians but men from Slavyansk who had joined the rebel militias.” He has no sympathy for their cause, but the depictions of them as terrorists on Ukrainian television have simply mirrored the warped picture available on the Russian airwaves. “As a result you hear people demanding more of a purge in their own communities,” says Aslanyan. “Many of them feel the Ukrainian forces have been too soft, that they have not done enough to punish people.” Olga Kadysheva, another psychiatrist working as a volunteer in the warzone, also believes that what she calls the “info-intoxication” is coming from all sides, with television and online news reports feeding rumors that get spread by word of mouth. “The treatment is diet: cut off the intake of information, all of it, Ukrainian, Russian, it doesn’t matter.” But the deeper concern among the therapists is that the rumor mill is only feeding fears and prejudices that existed long before the conflict, and could persist long after the fighting stops. The ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, who make up a majority in many towns across the region, have long felt like outsiders in their own country, in part because Ukrainian is the only official language. “The polarization of society is what deepens the break in the psyche,” says Kadysheva, who came from the city of Kharkiv, outside the warzone, to help coordinate and train therapists in Slavyansk. “Am I Russian or am I Ukrainian? Am I a separatist or am I not?” As the rebels retreat from their strongholds deeper into southern and eastern Ukraine, the rifts in society that their war has left behind have looked more like a shattered mirror than any clean split down the middle. Those who stayed in bomb shelters throughout the fighting condemn those who fled the warzone. Those who did not support the separatists condemn those two did, and vice versa. The dividing lines now seem to form a tapestry of mistrust and mutual reprobation, the local psychiatrists say, and mending them up again will take years. In the meantime, the propaganda outlets on both sides will be able to play on these divisions, making it harder for the communities to get on with their lives. —With additional video reporting Maxim Dondyuk | With both Russian and Ukrainian propaganda outlets fanning divisions in conflict-ridden eastern Ukraine, local communities are struggling to move on | 86.782609 | 0.826087 | 1.173913 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/jordan-fisher-grease-live | http://web.archive.org/web/20160202110932id_/http://www.people.com/article/jordan-fisher-grease-live | Five Things to Know : People.com | 20160202110932 | 02/01/2016 AT 11:30 AM EST
on Sunday night, we feel bad for you. Not only because the entire production was magical (here are
as proof), but also because you didn't get to experience the wonder that is 21-year-old
, who played Doody in the production.
Fisher, who hails from Birmingham, Alabama, is your new crush, whether or not you know it yet. Here are five things to know about him:
at Birmingham's Red Mountain Theatre Company, though was first introduced to the stage at Paine Intermediate School in nearby Trussville.
"I was his fifth grade drama teacher and cast him in his first show,
. "He blew the roof off with 'Conjuction Junction.' It was then I realized he needed more than I could give him, so I hooked him up with Red Mountain Theatre Company's youth program where he was spotted by a talent scout which led to [a] contract with Disney!"
He also had roles on the original cable film
. He currently stars on
Despite all his recent success, Fisher is staying grounded.
"Prioritize your family. Find community. Let love come naturally and on its own time," he
when asked about the best advice ever given to him. "Never find yourself bored at work. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind."
In 2015, he signed a record deal with Hollywood Records, and his debut album will be released this spring. He's already recorded three singles – and his voice is, as the young people say,
And looks phenomenal in glasses.
A video posted by Jordan Fisher (@jordan_fisher) on Dec 24, 2015 at 1:44am PST
He's amazing at piano, too.
: piano, guitar, bass, harmonica, French horn and drums.
First of all, his celebrity crushes are on point.
"Emma Watson, Chloë Grace Moretz and Kristen Bell are the loves of my life. They just don't know it yet," Fisher said in a 2015
Second, he isn't afraid to admit he has an anime obsession. ("This goes back to Pokemon/Dragon Ball Z days, which I haven't grown out of ⦠shhhh.") | For starters, Fisher, who played Doody in the Fox production, is from Birmingham, Alabama | 24.666667 | 0.888889 | 3.444444 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/02/03/thursday-business-agenda/qgjwfn1wrzsLvr3LHBK66L/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160204105258id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/02/03/thursday-business-agenda/qgjwfn1wrzsLvr3LHBK66L/story.html | Thursday’s business agenda | 20160204105258 | Dunkin’ Brands Group Inc., athenahealth Inc., Boston Scientific Corp., and Carbonite, Inc. are expected to release earnings reports for the fiscal year that ended in December.
New numbers for the average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage will be released Thursday. Last week, Freddie Mac reported the average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage fell to 3.79 percent from 3.81 percent the week before.
The New England Employee Benefits Council, a trade group for benefits practitioners, is having an event to discuss current trends in health care. Representatives from insurance companies such as Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA, and CIGNA will be presenting. Thursday, 8:30 a.m., Newton Marriott, 2345 Commonwealth Ave., Newton. $210 for members, $285 for non-members.
Law firm Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton is hosting an informational event for entrepreneurs wishing to learn more about venture capital funding. Attendees will hear from a panel of venture capitalists as they discuss startup trends and must-know terminology. Thursday, 4 to 5:30 p.m., Cambridge Innovation Center, 1 Broadway, Havana Room, Fifth Floor, Cambridge. Free.
ShareDynamics, a management consulting group, is having a workshop for product and program managers on strategic program design. The event will touch on topics such as resource planning and value map development. Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., 404 Wyman St., Waltham. | Earnings reports, mortgage rates, and more notable things to know. | 20.692308 | 0.769231 | 1.076923 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/girl-jump-burning-building-new-jersey-fire | http://web.archive.org/web/20160205094707id_/http://www.people.com/article/girl-jump-burning-building-new-jersey-fire | Girl, 9, Jumps Three Floors from Burning Building : People.com | 20160205094707 | 02/03/2016 AT 09:15 PM EST
One 9-year-old girl in New Jersey took a leap of faith – literally.
Sofya Doroshenko was alone in her family's condo complex on Tuesday in Mahwah when a fire broke out across the hall,
reports. With smoke and flames blocking every exit, there was only one thing for the little girl to do.
"We called out to her to jump, and she did!" Lt. Jeffrey Dino told the
, noting that Doroshenko fell backward into officers' arms. "Not a scratch on her. She's the bravest little kid I've ever seen."
One officer told the Voice that three officers stood underneath the third-floor balcony and told the little girl to climb over the railing and jump – the officer said she didn't take much persuading.
Doroshenko told ABC that she was scared to jump, but didn't know what else to do.
"I just listened to [the officers]," she said. "I just jumped because it was no chance."
Sgt. Brendan Mullin, with the Mahwah Police Department, told ABC that burning buildings are usually evacuated before officers arrive. However, Doroshenko was standing on a third-floor balcony when authorities got to the scene.
Burning building in Mahwah, New Jersey
Mullin noted that there was no way for Doroshenko to get out the front door.
Another officer, Thomas Solimano, told ABC that Doroshenko's bravery was "just tremendous."
The fire destroyed six condos and damaged several others, ABC reports. Doroshenko and her family lost nearly everything in the blaze.
But Doroshenko's family is grateful to the officers.
"I want to thank them. I didn't believe this could happen, but it happened and thank you for saving my child," Doroshenko's mother, Yulia, told ABC. | Police say there was only one thing for Sofya Doroshenko to do as flames surrounded her family's condo | 19.210526 | 0.842105 | 3.263158 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/gwyneth-paltrow-sex-beauty-aging-turning-40 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160211090142id_/http://www.people.com/article/gwyneth-paltrow-sex-beauty-aging-turning-40 | Gwyneth Paltrow on Sex, Beauty and Aging : People.com | 20160211090142 | By Jackie Fields and Char Adams
02/10/2016 AT 02:00 PM EST
is feeling beautiful and it's no accident.
The 43-year-old star tells PEOPLE in this week's issue that she relies on balance in her life to keep her feeling her best.
"I think it's really important to be happy, and I think women get happy by being authentic," she says. "But I also believe in exercise, eating well, drinking lots of water, sex, sleeping and being around people who make you feel good.
"And I think that glow that you get in life comes from a combination of all those things."
guru is taking her love for all things green to the next level with her very own skin care line in collaboration with
. Launching March 1, the non-toxic collection comes on the heels of a her recent
says that she created the line because she feels that "women deserve to have a really effective, beautifully made product that's non toxic and organic."
and GOOP under her belt, Paltrow says aging doesn't faze her one bit.
"I earned these gray hairs," Paltrow declares. "I really am not afraid of getting older." | "Turning 40 was so incredible," Gwyneth Paltrow gushes | 21.909091 | 0.363636 | 0.545455 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/fugitive-shoots-two-maryland-deputies-panera-bread | http://web.archive.org/web/20160212083632id_/http://www.people.com/article/fugitive-shoots-two-maryland-deputies-panera-bread | Fugitive Shoots Two Maryland Sheriff's Deputies in Panera Bread : People.com | 20160212083632 | Hartford County Sheriff's Office (2)
02/11/2016 AT 05:35 PM EST
Two sheriff's deputies were fatally shot in the line of duty on Wednesday while responding to a call at a Panera Bread restaurant in Abingdon, Maryland, PEOPLE confirms.
After the shooting, the alleged perpetrator was tracked down by authorities and killed, a news release from the Harford County Sheriff's Office says.
Senior Deputy Patrick Dailey and Senior Deputy Mark Logsdon of the Harford County Sheriff's Office responded to a call regarding a "suspicious circumstance, indicating a wanted person," according to the news release.
Dailey and Logsdon were shot by David Brian Evans, 68, who was wanted in Florida for assaulting an officer, and who was subsequently located and shot dead by authorities.
On Wednesday morning, during lunchtime rush, a Panera Bread customer called the Harford County Sheriffs Office to report a suspicious circumstance, the news release states. At around 11:46am, Dailey arrived to the popular food-chain and approached Evans, who was sitting alone and fit the description. Evans shot Dailey while Dailey was questioning him and then ran away, the release states.
Soon after, Logsdon arrived on the scene with backup and located Evans in a parked car. When Logsdon approached, Evans shot him multiple times, the release states.
Other deputies on the scene began firing at Evans and killed him.
The wounded deputies were immediately transported to local hospitals but died from their injuries.
Dailey, a father of three and former Marine, had served Harford County for 30 years and was "a lifelong member of the Joppa Magnolia Volunteer Fire Company," according to the news release.
Logsdon had been with the Harford Sheriff's Office for 16 years and had served in the United States Army. He was also a father of three.
In a separate news release, Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler said, "Today is a sad day for the Harford County Sheriffâs Office, and the citizens of Harford County who we are sworn to serve."
"The outpouring of support from the community and businesses has been truly humbling." Gahler added. "I continue to be proud of the men and women of the Harford County Sheriffâs Office and the community we serve." | Senior Deputy Patrick Dailey and Senior Deputy Mark Logsdon of the Hartford County Sheriff's Office responded to a call regarding a "suspicious circumstance," police say | 14.533333 | 0.9 | 6.633333 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/kendall-jenner-hands-out-pizzas-at-fashion-week | http://web.archive.org/web/20160215180834id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/kendall-jenner-hands-out-pizzas-at-fashion-week | Kendall Jenner Hands Out Pizza at Fashion Week Party : People.com | 20160215180834 | 02/14/2016 AT 05:30 PM EST
You get a pizza, and you get a pizza and you get a pizza!
fed the crowd on Saturday night as she celebrated a successful
at New York City's Up&Down night club.
The 20-year-old model handed out pies from the famed Joe's Pizza while dancing to sets by DJs the Pizza Boys. Partying alongside
– who also helped out with the pizza – Jenner posed in a branded hat and t-shirt.
Gigi Hadid (left) and Kendall Jenner
Justine Skye and Vic Mensa performed during the evening while Jenner and company danced alongside the club's owner Richie Akiva.
The reality star also shared a photo of the Pizza Boys crew wearing the same, heart-covered sweatshirts to Instagram.
A photo posted by Kendall Jenner (@kendalljenner) on Feb 13, 2016 at 7:56pm PST
The night before, Jenner's youngest sister
, following the rapper's performance at 1 Oak.
The two men made a joint appearance at 1 Oak, with Kylie tagging along in a jumpsuit and a bright red trench coat. | Kylie Jenner, Tyga and Scott Disick were spotted at the same NYC club the night before | 12.470588 | 0.647059 | 1.117647 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/02/15/pharma-fights-efforts-peek-behind-curtain/qTPXKj2cQa59JYiZyQFrpI/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160217093400id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/02/15/pharma-fights-efforts-peek-behind-curtain/qTPXKj2cQa59JYiZyQFrpI/story.html | Pharma fights efforts to peek behind R&D curtain | 20160217093400 | For years, drug makers have argued that the rising prices of prescription medicines reflect, in part, the rising costs of discovery and development. Now, President Obama wants to peek behind the pharmaceutical curtain to see for himself.
Buried inside the White House budget proposal released last week is language that would require drug makers to publicly disclose various data, including research and development costs. The administration hopes to use the information as part of a plan to negotiate lower prices for the Medicare drug program, known as Part D.
In doing so, Obama joins a growing list of lawmakers seeking transparency in order to understand drug pricing.
From California to Massachusetts, state legislators have proposed bills that would force drug companies to open their books so the public can see how much is spent to develop, manufacture, and market medicines. Just last month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo included a disclosure demand in his state budget proposal.
Whether these efforts will succeed is unclear. Drug makers have lobbied aggressively to defeat the bills and, indeed, in many states the legislation has stalled — although not yet in Massachusetts, where a bill introduced last year by State Senator Mark Montigny, Democrat of New Bedford, will be discussed at a hearing of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing next month.
Not surprisingly, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America has been the most vocal opponent of these sorts of measures. Last week, only hours after Obama outlined his plans, the industry group issued a statement criticizing the president’s budget proposal, arguing that it would stifle innovation and that it did not take into account the cost of R&D failures and the long-term value that medicines provide.
To some extent, these are legitimate points. Just the same, drug companies have no one to blame but themselves for the increasing demands for openness.
Year after year, the pharmaceutical industry has maintained that advancing a drug to market is an expensive proposition. This is certainly true. But getting a handle on the true cost can be tricky.
The most recent figure stands at $2.6 billion, thanks to calculations released in late 2014 by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. Yet the estimate relies on a small data sample of just 106 drugs that was provided by manufacturers.
This is a rather limited and selective approach to gauging average expenses. Moreover, the per-drug total included $1.1 billion in so-called opportunity costs, which refers to the profits that companies might have made if they used the funds for other purposes.
This opaque approach to budgeting explains the demands for transparency and the growing cynicism that drugs cost as much as the companies insist.
At an industry conference last week, one executive lamented that the industry ever walked down this path.
“It is absolutely right that, because we made an argument, society is coming back now and very rightfully holding us to account for the argument,” said Ron Cohen, chief executive of Acorda Therapeutics Inc., which is headquartered in Ardsley, N.Y., but has offices in Chelsea.
“It was always the wrong argument,” he added. “But we made our own bed and people are asking us to lie in it.”
Drug makers also maintain that cost information is proprietary, but the industry could lose this argument. The Sunshine Act provision of the Affordable Care Act requires companies to provide data on payments made to doctors, which appear in a publicly accessible federal database. This means a precedent exists for disclosing proprietary information.
Since the pharmaceutical industry conceded that data are available under the Sunshine Act, “they can hardly claim that these R&D bills aren’t fair political game,” said Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration official who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
In effect, the call for cost transparency amounts to a “show me” moment for the pharmaceutical industry. Drug makers can’t have it both ways. If costs really can be justified, then expenses should be disclosed. If not, then the industry will have to come up with another explanation for its approach to pricing — and that explanation will have to be transparent. | For years, drug makers have argued that the rising prices of prescription medicines reflect rising costs of discovery and development. | 36.863636 | 1 | 12.454545 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-rising-playwright-goes-to-broadway-1455589637 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160219160935id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-rising-playwright-goes-to-broadway-1455589637 | A Rising Playwright Goes to Broadway | 20160219160935 | Stephen Karam had hoped to write a thriller.
Instead, in his tragicomic play “The Humans,” already garnering Tony Award buzz, some of the biggest “action” comes in the form of mysterious ceiling thumps and a grandmother wandering from her seat on the couch.
Not that “The Humans,” chronicling the Thanksgiving-day gathering of an Irish-American clan from Scranton, Pa., isn’t gripping. In the tradition of classic American family stage dramas, it lures audiences with sharp humor and unpretentious, ripped-from-the-dinner-table dialogue. Before long, simmering tensions and resentments start seeping out. Ultimately, shameful secrets are revealed and broader existential terrors unleashed. It is territory trod by giants of the genre, such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson.
Mr. Karam, who at 36 makes his Broadway debut with the play on Thursday, isn’t entirely comfortable with the comparison.
“I think I and virtually every playwright has been deeply influenced by ‘Long Day’s Journey’ and ‘Death of a Salesman’ and ‘Glass Menagerie’ and ‘Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘The Piano Lesson,’ etc.,” he said. “They are a part of our consciousness. There’s no not being influenced by them.”
What sparked his writing “The Humans,” now in previews at the Helen Hayes Theatre after a successful run off-Broadway last fall, wasn’t the classic family plays, he said.
Rather, it was an interest in the experimental contemporary works by playwrights Caryl Churchill and María Irene Fornés —specifically Ms. Churchill’s facility with language involving large groups of people and Ms. Fornés’s innovations with staging plays in real time.
He also drew inspiration from a 1919 essay by Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” wherein the famed founder of psychoanalysis explores, in his words, “in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening.”
“I thought the play would be far stranger and more experimental,” he said, and more in the thriller mode. “The influence of classic family dramas crept in slowly until it took a hold of the piece, almost in spite of myself.”
In “The Humans,” which takes place in a single scene over 95 minutes, the Blake family convenes for Thanksgiving in the basement Chinatown apartment of the youngest sibling, Brigid ( Sarah Steele ), and her boyfriend Rich ( Arian Moayed ). The couple is hosting Brigid’s mother Deirdre ( Jayne Houdyshell ) and father (Reed Birney ), as well as her sister Aimee ( Cassie Beck ) and grandmother Momo ( Lauren Klein ).
These people seem to like each other more than usual for family dramas. Their fights lack the hysteria and vitriol customary to the form. Their secrets are rather ordinary. And their anxieties—about old age, ill health, heartbreak and money—are the inevitable worries of almost any family around any table.
“I seem to be interested in the dark underbelly of even functional families,” said Mr. Karam, “instead of capital-D dysfunctional drama.”
Mr. Karam, raised in Scranton, Pa., comes from an enormous, close-knit Lebanese-American clan: At last count, he had more than 40 cousins. He said his plays, which include “Speech and Debate” and “Sons of the Prophet,” a Pulitzer finalist, are all works of “emotional autobiography.”
Between laughs, “Humans” quietly packs a wallop, tapping into deep human anxieties: the lingering terror of having been an up-close witness to 9/11, the dread and confusion of dementia or finding oneself suddenly on the precipice of retirement, without savings.
“I still don’t know how Stephen does this, because in a sense it’s all incredibly mundane, and the play seems so effortless and without any obvious machinations,” said Mr. Birney. “But it gets under your skin. That’s very difficult to achieve.”
He said he was an “interesting and not obvious choice” to play the patriarch, Erik Blake, a janitor at a private Catholic school. “Usually I’m playing teachers, suits, upper-middle-class types. I think perhaps I bring a more obvious vulnerability.”
Ms. Houdyshell estimated she has played a mother in family dramas more than 30 times across her 40-year career. “Each and every one of them is an individual in her own right.”
She characterized Mr. Karam’s writing as some of the most delicate and hyper-natural she has ever performed. “And in this day and age, I think we are especially responsive to more nuanced realities than in other eras when sentiment, or larger emotional dynamics prevailed.”
A new work by a relatively unknown playwright performed by an ensemble of noncelebrities isn’t an alluring commercial prospect. And yet producer Scott Rudin quickly negotiated the Broadway transfer after attending an early preview at the Roundabout before the reviews were even in.
“It’s a beautiful production of a profound and personal play that takes remarkably everyday events and makes them somehow huge and haunting,” said Mr. Rudin, who saw parallels between “The Humans” and the family dramas of Arthur Miller. “Who could say no to that?”
Particularly compelling to him was the interplay of financial and existential issues bearing down on Mr. and Mrs. Blake, who represent many middle-class Americans feeling disenfranchised and disempowered.
“I felt that this was a subject that very few new plays of breadth and scale have tackled in a long time, and it felt like a subject with which many theatergoers might have a personal relationship.”
Mr. Karam said the arrival of his play on Broadway feels like something of a miracle.
The Helen Hayes is located across the street from “Phantom of the Opera,” the first Broadway show he saw as a 12-year-old on a school trip from Scranton. “I’m in awe of the fact that we’re here. There’s something otherworldly about it.” | ‘The Humans,’ by Stephen Karam, goes to Broadway already generating Tony Award buzz | 78.333333 | 0.8 | 1.466667 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/04/12/wells-fargo-beats-expectations-even-as-home-lending-slows/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160220055007id_/http://fortune.com/2013/04/12/wells-fargo-beats-expectations-even-as-home-lending-slows/ | Wells Fargo beats expectations even as home lending slows | 20160220055007 | FORTUNE — The Wells Fargo wagon may be in for some bumps ahead.
On Friday, the nation’s third-largest bank reported that its earnings had come in better than expected. Wells WFC earned $5.2 billion in the first three months of the year, up 22% from same quarter a year ago. That translated to per-share earnings of $0.92. Analysts had predicted $0.88.
That profit growth was less than at rival JPMorgan Chase JPM , which also reported earnings on Friday morning. JPMorgan’s bottom line rose by 33% in the first quarter from a year ago.
MORE: Should Wells Fargo have failed the stress test?
What’s more, much of Wells’ earnings growth came from the fact that the bank put less money away for future loan losses, not a jump in actual business. Profit at its huge mortgage unit dropped. All told, Wells Fargo’s revenue came in at $21.3 billion, which was less than expected.
There were other signs of problems ahead. Analysts expect banks had a harder time finding borrowers in the first quarter, and are expecting loan growth, which has picked up recently, to drop off. Wells bucked that trend but only slightly. Lending rose but only by about $500 million, which was much less than it has in recent quarters.
But low interest rates means that Wells is making less money from those new loans. In all, the company said its net interest margin — a closely watched measure of profitability for banks that tracks loan profitability — dropped to 3.48% from 3.56% in the last quarter of 2012.
MORE: Investor frenzy over housing may be coming to an end
But perhaps the biggest disappointment was in Wells’ mortgage unit. It has bulked up its mortgage unit in the past few years as other big banks have retreated from the home lending business. Wells now makes nearly one-in-three new home loans in the U.S. It benefited last year from a huge boom in refinancing, as home owners sought to take advantage of lower rates. Now that boom appears to be ending. The bank made $16 billion fewer new home loans compared to the last three months of 2012. What’s more, profits from selling the loans it made to mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dropped by $274 million.
Despite the jump in earnings, investors reacted with caution. Shares of Wells were down $0.54 to $36.97 shortly after the market opened. | Mortgage loans and profits fell at the nation's largest home lender. | 36.769231 | 0.769231 | 0.923077 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/02/20/16/38/asylum-seekers-weep-as-german-hate-mob-shouts-go-home | http://web.archive.org/web/20160221093755id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/02/20/16/38/asylum-seekers-weep-as-german-hate-mob-shouts-go-home | 'Shameful' video shows German anti-refugee mob surround migrants' bus | 20160221093755 | Refugees wept as they were confronted by a hate mob in Germany shouting “go home” in a display labelled “shameful” by one of the country's politicians.
A video circulating online shows protesters block the path of a bus carrying the asylum seekers and their children, some of whom appear to be crying, the BBC reports.
Men, women and children can be seen huddled inside the bus, some hugging each other, while a boy in a blue jacket appears distressed.
Around 100 anti-refugee protesters are reported to have used cars to block the asylum seekers’ access to their hotel in the village of Clausnitz on Thursday local time.
The mob chanted “we are the people” and “go home” with a police report claiming one protester giving the refugees a cut-throat gesture.
Those on board the bus were the first refugees to be settled in the village, which is 30km from Dresden.
German talk show host Jan Bohmermann tweeted the video, saying it showed “the German mob of fear greeting those who have cheated death”.
Politicians from Angela Merkel’s party have also condemned the intimidation tactics used by the protesters.
“As much need for a discussion there may be over the refugee question, I find it deeply shameful to see how people are being treated here,” Christian Democratic Party member Markus Ulbig said.
Up to 30 police were on the scene during the protest and no injuries or arrests were reported.
However Saxony police have come under fire after a second video emerged of a young migrant boy being roughly dragged through the mob by an officer.
Hours after the video was taken, the refugees were settled in their accommodation. | Refugees wept as they were confronted in Germany by a hate mob shouting “go home” in a display German politicians have called “shameful”.
| 11 | 0.633333 | 2.3 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/arizona-climbs-back-top-10-ap-basketball-rankings-022216 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160223034308id_/http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/arizona-climbs-back-top-10-ap-basketball-rankings-022216 | Arizona climbs back into college basketball top 10 | 20160223034308 | Arizona has made its way back into The Associated Press college basketball Top 10, moving up from 12th to ninth in this week's rankings. The Wildcats (22-5) have rattled off six consecutive wins following two straight losses to California and Oregon and are now tied with the Ducks atop the Pac-12 conference.
Arizona played only once last week, routing Arizona State 99-61.
Arizona concludes its conference road schedule this week with games at Colorado on Wednesday and Utah on Saturday. The Utes (21-7) are back in the Top 25 at No. 22 following a road sweep of UCLA and USC. Oregon (21-6) is ranked 13th.
Villanova remains No. 1, holding its comfortable lead over Kansas.
Villanova (24-3) received 45 first-place votes from the 65-member national media panel on Monday for its third week on top of the poll. Kansas (23-4) was No. 1 on 20 ballots to hold second.
Villanova will have its toughest test yet as the top-ranked team when the Wildcats travel to No. 5 Xavier on Wednesday.
Oklahoma and Virginia are tied for third and are followed in the top 10 by Xavier, Michigan State, North Carolina, Iowa, Arizona and Maryland.
No. 21 Texas A&M joins Utah as newcomers to the top 25 this week, replacing Dayton, which dropped out from 15th, and Providence, which was 23rd. | Wildcats jump to 9th after stretching winning streak to six. | 25.636364 | 0.454545 | 0.454545 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/how-to-take-a-selfie | http://web.archive.org/web/20160225100054id_/http://www.people.com/article/how-to-take-a-selfie | PEOPLE Natural Beauty Contest, How to Take a Selfie : People.com | 20160225100054 | 02/24/2016 AT 10:00 AM EST
How does one take the perfect selfie?
Sure, the right lighting is important – as Kim Kardashian West, Hillary Clinton and one PEOPLE staffer
– but what really makes a selfie totally memorable is how it's executed, technicalities (lighting and contouring) aside.
Keep scrolling to see how your favorite celebs have perfected their au natural selfie game, then put your skills to the test by posting your own pic with
for a chance to be featured in PEOPLE's World's Most Beautiful Issue.
Kendall Jenner knows how to flaunt 'em.
A bright smile goes a long way.
Like Tyra Banks did when she snapped a pic right before bed.
Two is always better than one.
Just put a beanie on it.
to learn more about the #PeopleNaturalBeautyContest, sponsored by Aveeno, and how you can enter for a chance to win a spot in PEOPLE's World's Most Beautiful issue! | Think of this as "How to Take a Selfie 101" | 15.5 | 0.5 | 0.833333 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/abe-u-s-japan-close-to-tpp-trade-deal-1429536390 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160227011105id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/abe-u-s-japan-close-to-tpp-trade-deal-1429536390 | Abe: U.S., Japan Close to TPP Trade Deal | 20160227011105 | TOKYO—Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Tokyo and Washington are near an agreement on a major Pacific free-trade pact, a deal that would help advance President Barack Obama ’s economic agenda and tighten ties between the two allies as they seek to counter China’s growing influence.
“We think that an agreement between Japan and the U.S. is close, but we’re hoping that even more progress will be made,” Mr. Abe said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday. He added that he wants to share an understanding with Mr. Obama that the trade deal is “extremely beneficial for both countries” when he visits Washington on April 28. Mr. Abe said the two nations must use their leadership to conclude the 12-nation deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Early Tuesday in Tokyo, U.S. and Japanese negotiators concluded a marathon session and said they had significantly closed the remaining gaps between the two sides, a critical step for the broader TPP group to reach an agreement.
“It would be good if I could reach an agreement during my meeting with the president, but when you climb a mountain, the last step is always the hardest,” Mr. Abe said as the talks were under way. “Ultimately, what needs to happen is for both countries to make a political decision” to address these sensitive areas.
Japan’s chief negotiator, Akira Amari, said Tuesday that rice and autos were “major challenges,” but he said the talks were in the “final stage.”
“The progress that has been made thus far is substantial, and the leaders of the two countries will welcome it,” Mr. Amari said, without giving details of the progress. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, his counterpart in the talks, said: “The gap between the two sides has been substantially narrowed, but continued work is needed.”
Mr. Abe spoke to the Journal ahead of his trip to the U.S., from April 26 to May 3. In addition to meetings with the president, Mr. Abe will give a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first time a Japanese prime minister will address U.S. lawmakers in more than five decades. In addition to the TPP, other major topics on Mr. Abe’s agenda include beefing up the bilateral security alliance with a new set of defense guidelines and expanding bilateral cooperation on regional security issues in Asia. The prime minister is also scheduled to visit Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Regarding the TPP, officials from the two nations say that on the negotiating table this week are Washington’s demand that Japan substantially increase imports of rice for consumer use and Tokyo’s demand that the U.S. eliminate immediately its 2.5% tariff on auto-parts imports.
Mr. Abe’s push for an early agreement gives a further boost to the trade pact, coming days after leaders in the U.S. Congress agreed to advance so-called fast-track legislation to ease ultimate passage of the trade bill. But the fast-track measure and the pact itself still face stiff resistance in Washington from lawmakers who remain skeptical of benefits for U.S. workers and the economy.
Tokyo and Washington tried to reach a deal on the TPP in April last year ahead of President Obama’s visit to Japan, holding similar marathon talks, but they failed to come to a final agreement. Japan is reluctant to commit to politically difficult concessions on rice without some assurance that Congress will ultimately approve the deal, while the U.S. side would like to get the concessions first and use them to persuade congressional skeptics.
For Mr. Abe, the TPP is a top priority in his agenda to restructure Japan’s economy and boost efficiency, particularly in areas like agriculture. Its success is essential at a time when his broader economic revival package, known as Abenomics, faces widespread skepticism and some big challenges two years after its launch.
Among the challenges: a loss of momentum in his campaign to end the country’s long bout of debilitating deflation. To try to stop the cycle of falling prices and wages, Mr. Abe’s choice for Bank of Japan governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, dramatically expanded the central bank’s monetary-stimulus program. He managed to end years of falling prices and push inflation to about 1% last year. But then Japan’s most closely watched inflation measure fell to zero in February, and may have turned negative in March. That is far below the BOJ’s target of 2%, which Mr. Kuroda had originally pledged to reach by this spring.
“Deflation continued for 15 years, and I can’t say that it’s ended for good, but we have created a situation that is no longer deflation,” Mr. Abe said.
He attributed the weakness in the consumer-price index to sharp declines in oil prices, which hadn’t been anticipated when the government and the central bank agreed on the 2% target in 2013.
“In that sense, I want to recognize Mr. Kuroda’s efforts, and I trust him to make the right monetary policy toward the 2% goal,” Mr. Abe said.
As inflation has lost its momentum, some of Mr. Abe’s policy aides have hinted lately that achieving the 2% goal wasn’t essential, as long as the economy continues to grow and the unemployment is at its lowest level in two decades.
Mr. Abe seemed to concur. “Exiting deflation and setting the 2% price-stability target is about making the economy steadily and healthily grow, and for people to get wealthier year after year,” Mr. Abe said. His advisers, he added, meant that creating growth and wealth “is the goal and 2% is simply a means.”
Mr. Abe defended his broader effort to revive the economy, as he pointed to solid economic growth in nominal terms and strong jobs data. “The jobs market is tight, and wages are rising the most in 15 years,” he said.
—Mitsuru Obe contributed to this article.
Write to Yuka Hayashi at yuka.hayashi@wsj.com | U.S. and Japan Close to TPP Trade Deal, Abe Says | 105.545455 | 0.909091 | 1.272727 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/affordable-rents-arent-just-for-the-poor-1454983111 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160227041534id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/affordable-rents-arent-just-for-the-poor-1454983111 | ‘Affordable’ Rents Aren’t Just for the Poor | 20160227041534 | At the 52-story tower at 250 Ashland Place, even affluent Brooklyn hipsters may qualify for the ultimate New York amenity: a so-called affordable apartment available for below-market rents.
The 568-foot-high building, the first new tower in the cultural district around the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is about to open a lottery for nearly half of its 586 apartments designated as affordable, including 33 two- and three-bedroom units available to a family of four with incomes up to $172,600 a year.
That income is more than three times the 2014 U.S. median income of $53,657, and in the top 6% of income of rental households in Brooklyn, according to census figures.
But the lottery, developed under Bloomberg-era programs to encourage the development of affordable housing, may be last of its kind, city officials say. Mayor Bill de Blasio has set lower maximum income limits for projects—typically $142,400 for a family of four.
The lottery for 250 Ashland Place—the building is named for its address—is set to open Tuesday and will remain open for two months. Online applications are at www.nyc.gov/housingconnect and www.ashlandlottery.com.
Eight three-bedroom apartments will be available to a household of six with a combined household income of up to $200,400.
The definition of “affordable” in affordable housing has been a contentious issue among housing experts and advocates in New York. Even Mr. de Blasio’s plan to require developers to provide affordable housing after zoning changes is facing opposition from many groups that want the zoning plan to provide housing for very low-income New Yorkers.
The project at 250 Ashland Place “is not providing any meaningful affordability,” said Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, which represents neighborhood affordable-housing groups. “There are a lot of benefits this developer got in return for not enough affordability.”
But Jerilyn Perine, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, said there was big push to keep neighborhoods economically integrated “especially in neighborhoods where renters could have incomes of a million dollars.” She said a family with just under $200,000 in income could be a family of two schoolteachers, she said.
“I wouldn’t say that on the face of it that is necessarily a bad idea,” she said. “One could always argue that the needs at every income band is so great,” she said.
Gary Rodney, president of the city’s Housing Development Corp., said “to enable us to reach the neediest families,” the city now used lower income restrictions than 250 Ashland Place did when the deal closed in 2013.
Still, he said, the project would bring a mix of families, with different incomes together in a building in an affluent neighborhood. “We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this new development permanently caps rents at prices within reach of low- and middle- income families, bringing lasting affordability to a neighborhood commanding top dollar,” he said.
The developer Gotham Organization won the right to build on the city-owned site in exchange for providing permanently affordable housing in half the building along with space for cultural groups. It received a property tax exemption and received limited tax-exempt financing.
In 2014, another Bloomberg-era development, Hunters Point South Living, by the Related Cos., held a lottery for all of its 924 units, with even higher maximum rents than allowed at 250 Ashland Place in its highest income band.
All apartments in the building were filled by a single lottery, with 93,000 applicants. Related had “no problem filling the larger apartments at higher income bands, since they were at a “significant discount to market,” a spokeswoman said.
Melissa Pianko, Gotham’s executive vice president of development, said she expected tens of thousands of people to enter the lottery for apartments at 250 Ashland Place at each of three income levels—including 82 apartments at the highest income category of up to 200% of the area median income by household size.
Ms. Pianko said when previous lotteries were held for similar income bands for affordable apartments, demand was strong. “It shows what a need there is for this kind of housing in this kind of project,” she said.
The building, on the edge of the Fort Greene neighborhood, may be in high demand, too. It is next to a theater and includes office space for cultural organizations. All its apartments come with central air conditioning, granite counters and plank-wood flooring.
Many have skyscraper views from floor-to-ceiling windows of New York skyline to far into Long Island. All two and three bedroom apartment will have washers and dryers.
Market rents are due to start at $2,800 for a studio to $6,500 for a three- bedroom apartment. Affordable rents start at $801 for studios for the lowest income band, up to $3,649 for three-bedroom apartments in the highest band. The median Brooklyn rent is $2,899, according to Miller Samuel Inc. and the Elliman report.
The plan for 250 Ashland Place calls for 118 apartments for households at 60% of area median income for each household size; 82 for 135%; and 82 at 165%. The rest are market rate.
But the city set a range of incomes around each figure. For the highest income group that brings to permitted rent to 200% of area median income. | At a 52-story tower in Brooklyn, even affluent hipsters may qualify for the ultimate New York amenity: a so-called affordable apartment available for below-market rents. A lottery opens Tuesday for nearly half of the 586 apartments at 250 Ashland Place designated as affordable. | 20.705882 | 0.980392 | 11.803922 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2003/11/2008410101747632507.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160227183726id_/http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2003/11/2008410101747632507.html | US choppers downed in Iraq | 20160227183726 | The casualty toll makes this the deadliest single strike on US forces since the war began. One soldier remains unaccounted for, the US military said.
An occupation force spokesman has confirmed that two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters had come down. There was no word on possible Iraqi casualties on the ground.
One of the helicopters that crashed on Saturday was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), a US officer at the scene said.
"I know one of the helicopters was hit by an RPG on the tail wing," said the officer who declined to be identified.
An Iraqi police officer said that he saw assailants ambushing a US foot patrol in the area, prompting the intervention of a Black Hawk helicopter.
A missile was then fired towards the chopper, which crashed into a second Black Hawk as it tried to dodge the missile, he said.
American soldiers have sealed off the crash site in a residential neighbourhood in Mosul. A rapid reaction force was securing the area and investigating.
Saturday's double crash brings to five the number of US helicopters downed in Iraq since the beginning of November.
On 2 November, a US Chinook helicopter was shot down west of Baghdad, killing 16 soldiers. Just five days later, a Black Hawk was shot down in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, killing all six people aboard.
Another Black Hawk was forced down near Tikrit, but there were no casualties.
The Black Hawk is the US army's frontline utility helicopter, designed to carry 11 combat-ready troops. It is also used for medical evacuations. | <P>Seventen soldiers have been killed and five others wounded when two US military helicopters crashed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.</P> | 11.178571 | 0.464286 | 0.678571 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/01/beer-distributor-pay-record-setting-million-fine-pay-play-case/RKbBsKp5GC4bpZrxS3l8xL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160302215146id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2016/03/01/beer-distributor-pay-record-setting-million-fine-pay-play-case/RKbBsKp5GC4bpZrxS3l8xL/story.html | Beer distributor to pay record-setting $2.6 million fine in pay-to-play case | 20160302215146 | The largest distributor of craft beers in Massachusetts will pay a fine of millions of dollars to avoid a 90-day suspension of its liquor license, a record-setting penalty imposed after the company was caught paying Boston bars to stock its brews, state regulators said Tuesday.
An investigation by the MassachusettsAlcoholic Beverages Control Commission, or ABCC, found that the distributor, Craft Brewers Guild of Everett, for years ran a so-called “pay-to-play” scheme in violation of state alcohol rules. Its sales representatives and managers routinely gave bars and restaurant companies in Boston thousands of dollars in exchange for stocking beers from Craft Brewers Guild and freezing out products from competing wholesalers.
As punishment, the ABCC in February slapped Craft Brewers Guild with an unprecedented 90-day license suspension. The company had the option of paying a fine instead, and a spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that the ABCC had quickly accepted a fine Craft Brewers Guild proposed in a so-called “letter of compromise” submitted to the state earlier in the day.
A person familiar with Craft Brewers Guild’s operations said the fine totaled around $2.6 million.
Tom Schreibel, the company’s vice president of industry, community, and government affairs, said in an interview that Craft Brewers Guild decided to pay the fine to avoid disruptions to its employees and its approximately 4,000 retail customers.
The state’s largest distributor of craft beers has been slapped with an unprecedented 90-day license suspension.
“This is an unfortunate circumstance we’re in, but this was the way to move forward,” Schreibel said. “We want to give our customers, our brewer partners, and ultimately the consumers of the greater Boston area the great beer we deliver.”
Schreibel added that Craft Brewers Guild cooperated fully with the ABCC and insisted the company no longer offered inducements to retailers. He said the company would pay the fine within seven days.
Importantly for the ABCC, Craft Brewers Guild will not appeal the suspension in state court, avoiding what could have been a protracted legal battle over longstanding but largely untested alcohol laws.
Generally, the ABCC allows companies whose licenses have been suspended to avoid shutting down by paying a fine equal to about half the profits they would have made during their suspensions. Officials declined to confirm the exact amount of the fine but agreed it would total millions of dollars — easily the largest ever collected by the ABCC.
The pay-to-play scheme was discovered by ABCC investigators after a brewer whose beer is distributed by Craft Brewers Guild complained about the practice on Twitter in 2014. Using subpoenas, they soon obtained financial records showing the distributor had paid at least $120,000 to Boston bars and shell “marketing” companies set up by Boston restaurant groups for the purpose of accepting the money.
Craft Brewers Guild is owned by the Sheehan Family Companies, which is based in Massachusetts and operates 19 beer distributors in 13 states. The company is one of the nation’s largest beer wholesalers, according to the trade publication Beer Business Daily.
The company’s lawyer complained at an ABCC hearing last year that pay-to-play was common at Craft Brewers’ Guild’s competitors and that the state’s beer industry had “run amok.” The ABCC now says it’s investigating several other allegations of pay-to-play.
Paying for product placement is common in other retail sectors, such as grocery stores, where big manufacturers and distributors compete for prime shelf space. But the practice was banned in the alcohol industry by most states decades ago, to keep large national brands from dominating local markets.
Critics have long complained the practice is rampant in the US beer industry but seldom punished. The ABCC’s harsh penalty for Craft Brewers Guild is its first-ever enforcement of the pay-to-play ban, and seemed intended to send a message to the industry.
“The members of the alcoholic beverages industry in Massachusetts are hereby admonished that if, for any reason [they] engage in similar conduct that creates a systemic illegality, this commission shall take similar, severe enforcement action,” the commission wrote in its decision in February. The commission also pointedly noted that Craft Brewers Guild “went to great lengths to hide its knowingly unlawful conduct.”
The message apparently reverberated throughout the industry: Beer trade publication Brewbound reported last week that Reyes Beverage Group, which owns beer distributors in several states, sent a letter after the ABCC decision telling its employees and suppliers not to offer illegal incentives to customers, while acknowledging pay-to-play was likely “prevalent in many of our territories.”
The ABCC has also charged five bars with violating pay-to-play regulations for improperly accepting payments from Craft Brewers Guild. The bars had been due to argue their case before the ABCC commissioners in February but successfully petitioned to delay the hearings until May. Possible punishments include fines or the suspension or revocation of their licenses.
No brewers have yet been cited in the investigation. | Craft Brewers Guild has opted to pay the state a record $2.6 million fine rather than shut down for 90 days. | 41.652174 | 0.782609 | 1.73913 | high | low | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/katy-perry-orlando-bloom-hawaii-vacation-photos | http://web.archive.org/web/20160303105226id_/http://www.people.com/article/katy-perry-orlando-bloom-hawaii-vacation-photos | They 'Seem Very Serious,' Says Source : People.com | 20160303105226 | 03/02/2016 AT 05:10 PM EST
's romance continues to heat up.
"Orlando and Katy seem very serious," says a source in the new issue of PEOPLE. "They have a give-and-take relationship."
Sure enough, she's spending time with his 5-year-old son Flynn (with
, they're introducing each other into their friend groups – and now they're vacationing together.
The singer, 31, and actor, 39, jetted off to Hawaii to escape the winter blues. On the island of Kauai – a favorite destination for Perry, an insider says – the couple enjoyed paradise, taking a helicopter ride and, on Feb. 24, hitting the trails for a hike.
Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom
Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani on the cover of PEOPLE
"Katy hasn't looked happier. She always has the biggest smile when she is around Orlando," adds the source, who says Bloom – who was snapped shirtless and looking buff – "is a gentleman and dotes on her."
were first linked when they
at a Golden Globes afterparty in January.
Within a month after romance rumors made the rounds, Bloom had
, accompanying the father-son duo to
's son's birthday in February.
and Jason Bateman, while "Orlando attends events and parties that are important to Katy," says the source. | The pair jetted off for a romantic vacay | 34 | 0.625 | 1.125 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/marc-buoniconti-paralyzed-30-years-ago-football-accident | http://web.archive.org/web/20160305101650id_/http://www.people.com/article/marc-buoniconti-paralyzed-30-years-ago-football-accident | Paralyzed 30 Years Ago, Marc Buoniconti Turns Tragedy Into Purpose : People.com | 20160305101650 | Despite the tragic football accident 30 years ago that damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed, Marc Buoniconti believes he is a lucky man.
While confined to a wheelchair, he is still alive because the money raised by
and its fundraising arm, The Buoniconti Fund, has allowed him to receive the best medical care in the world.
"I would not be here today without the great treatment I have received here in Miami," Marc, 49, president of The Miami Project, tells PEOPLE.
A patient of renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Barth Green, who specializes in spinal cord injuries, Marc knows the money raised over the years for research and experimentation has helped keep his condition stable.
"I have been fortunate to have the care that others didn't," he tells PEOPLE. "When we started, we had nothing but hope and maybe a 20-year life expectancy. Now we have 12+ active clinical trials targeting both spinal cord and brain injuries. I am involved in the research and still hopeful."
In October 1985, the handsome 19-year-old Citadel linebacker, who a week earlier had been voted the team's most valuable player, saw his life take a tragic turn after he tackled a runner. The son of NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Nick Buoniconti, Marc crushed his spinal cord and knew he had broken his neck.
Lying on the ground barely breathing, he felt like he was suffocating and could barely utter a sound. He was gently placed on a stretcher and taken to the hospital where doctors shoved a painful tube down his throat and put him on a respirator, the machine that kept him alive.
Marc Buoniconti and his father, Nick Buoniconti, before Marc's accident
The young athlete was told that he would have no use of his body from the shoulders down, rendering him a quadriplegic.
"When they told me I would have to spend the rest of my life on a respirator, I was devastated," he told PEOPLE at the time. "And my dad broke down and cried."
But with his family's support and Dr. Green's encouragement, Marc learned to breathe on his own in just five months.
"It was a terrible process that I dreaded every day," Marc said. "But slowly my diaphragm started functioning. And by mid-1986, I was out of the intensive care section of the hospital and into the rehab facility."
Buoyed by his son's progress, Nick vowed "to never give up hope that Marc would walk again."
With Dr. Green, he immediately founded The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. In 1992, he added The Buoniconti Fund, a non-profit, fundraising organization dedicated to assisting The Miami Project in achieving its goals.
National celebrity-filled fundraisers – and the out-of-the-box Miami Beach-based Destination Fashion events, which began in 2004 (they take place every 2-3 years) that mix fashion, sports and A-list celebrities with top notch entertainment – have created awareness and helped raise $400 million.
On Saturday, the progressive Fashion Destination dinner party will be emceed by
's Savannah Guthrie. Held at Bal Harbour Shops, the multi-faceted event celebrates The Miami Project's 30th anniversary and the open air shopping mall's 50th anniversary.
Honorary celebrity co-chairpersons Brittany and Christian Slater, Dawn and Tommy Lee Jones and Gloria and Emilio Estefan will also be in attendance.
"Having experienced first hand what it feels like to hear the words, 'You may never walk again,' I vowed I would do whatever was in my power to help change the prognosis for people in wheelchairs,"
, tells PEOPLE, referring to the 1990 accident in a tour bus that left her with a broken vertebra.
"I felt incredibly fortunate to be invited to join forces with the Miami Project/The Buoniconti Fund and their inspirational and tireless leader, Marc Buoniconti. Being part of this awe-inspiring endeavor has been one of the most fulfilling challenges that I have undertaken, and I will continue to do whatever I can to be of help until the cure for paralysis is a reality for everyone who has lost the ability to walk."
The gala, which this year has attracted 2,000 people who pay from $300-$1000 per ticket, features the theme of fashion trends, movies, TV and entertainment from the 1960s--2000s.
The evening also offers a performance by
, designer Brunello Cucinelli's spring fashion show presented by Neiman Marcus, an auction, program of community philanthropy awards, and a chance for guests to shop privately in the Bal Harbour stores, which are closed to the public during the evening event.
The success of Fashion Destination and other fundraising events for The Miami Project has changed the lives of the Buoniconti family.
"We have put The Miami Project in the fast lane and are determined not to let up the accelerator until we get Marc and millions of others in wheelchairs up and walking again," Nick tells PEOPLE of the research money raised from these events and from other granting organizations, corporations and private philanthropy.
Marc Buoniconti and his father, Nick Buoniconti, before his accident
"We are taking advantage of the groundbreaking research of our incredible scientists. It has been 30 years since Marc was able to move his arms and legs. Our time is coming and the paralyzed community's time is coming because of the work of The Miami Project."
Indeed, The Miami Project, which costs $30 million a year to operate, is on the cutting edge of science. It is the world's most comprehensive spinal cord research center housed in the Lois Pope LIFE Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The team of 300 international scientists, researchers and clinicians take innovative approaches to the spinal cord challenge and collaborate on their findings.
"We get calls from all over the world, and people fly here to get involved in our human clinical trials," says Stephanie Sayfie Aagaard, the hard-working Miami Project/Buoniconti Fund's events and marketing director, who heads Destination Fashion.
"Our work with hypothermia has helped many, including another football player who was injured and is now walking again. We have seen some dramatic changes thanks to the money we have raised for this research."
The Miami Project is also involved with cell transplants. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration gave them permission to continue the Phase 1 clinical trial to evaluate the safety of transplanting human Schwann cells in patients with acute (recent) spinal cord injuries to include those with chronic injuries.
These cells are found mainly in the peripheral nervous system and are essential to sending appropriate electrical signals through the nervous system.
"Our scientists believe they are key to finding cures for paralysis," Marc explains. "There are millions of people living with chronic spinal cord injury paralysis that will benefit from this experimental procedure. Never in the history of spinal cord injury research has the prospects of finding a cure for paralysis been better."
Marc finds this research so rewarding that its "revs up his engine." It gives him hope. He has lost a great deal of weight. He exercises, has a regular fitness regimen and does yoga to stay limber. Eschewing meat, he eats mainly chicken, turkey and fish.
"I give speeches, I am on the phone daily and am part of everything first-hand," he says. "Every day I wake up excited to move further."
Marc also believes that work on The Miami Project has brought the Buoniconti family closer together.
"Dad was a beaten man when I got hurt, but he put his passion for football into The Miami Project," he says. "Together we have been part of a positive force for change in the prognosis for paralysis."
While Marc has missed being on his feet and playing football – even though he warns younger players of its danger and to avoid head injuries – he is convinced that raising money and working on The Miami Project has been a blessing. He has been given an opportunity to be part of something vitally important to him and to others with paralysis.
"I have lived a better life than I would have before the accident," Marc tells PEOPLE.
"I had 19 years on my feet followed by 30 years in a chair. In my third phase of life, I hope to have the physicality of my first 19 years and wisdom of what I have learned for the past three decades. I want to put it to good use during the rest of my life." | "Every day I wake up excited to move further," Marc Buoniconti tells PEOPLE | 105 | 1 | 7.125 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/jennifer-garner-dubs-ben-affleck-dressing-batman-sam-birthday-part-best-dad-moment- | http://web.archive.org/web/20160306120742id_/http://www.people.com/article/jennifer-garner-dubs-ben-affleck-dressing-batman-sam-birthday-part-best-dad-moment- | Jennifer Garner Praises Ben Affleck Dressing as Batman for Son's Birthday : People.com | 20160306120742 | 03/04/2016 AT 09:20 PM EST
has no problem giving her ex-husband props for being a great dad.
delighted 4-year-old Sam by appearing in costume as Batman from his upcoming film,
"We all dressed up, I dressed up as a ninja and Ben dressed up as Batman for Sam," Garner explained while promoting her new film
Friday, adding that it âwas the best dad moment in history."
Asked if her son is excited about his dad playing Batman, Garner gushed, "He kind of is losing it, it's really sweet."
The reunion came on the heels of Garner's bombshell interview with
, in which she spoke candidly about her separation from Affleck, and admitted the actor is the "love of my life."
After Sam's party, Affleck and Garner were spotted taking their children out to dinner at Art's Table in Santa Monica.
"Jen and Ben seemed fine, you would never think that they are divorcing," a source at the restaurant told PEOPLE. "They had a fun dinner with their kids and were both laughing a lot."
Just the next day, the former couple
. When they initially arrived, the amicable exes were seen standing a few feet away from each other as they chatted with fellow party guests.
Later in the evening, Affleck and Garner shared a friendly hug and a kiss, and at one point Garner held his lapels as she appeared to compliment his look. The two later parted ways, with Garner staying toward the back of the room with close friends Victor Garber and J.J. Abrams.
"They had a nice moment where they caught up and a lot of their friends were there – and they chatted and then they left," a source tells PEOPLE of the former couple. | Jennifer Garner tells Extra Ben Affleck pulled off "the best dad moment in history" by dressing as Batman for their son's birthday | 14.08 | 0.76 | 2.2 | low | low | mixed |
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/actor-admits-killing-student-cover-veterans-murder-part-37416765 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160306144743id_/http://abcnews.go.com:80/2020/video/actor-admits-killing-student-cover-veterans-murder-part-37416765 | Actor Admits to Killing Student to Cover Up Veteran's Murder: Part 5 | 20160306144743 | Now Playing: Update on the San Bernardino Shooting Victims
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Now Playing: Watch Killer's Performance in Musical Hours After Murdering Two People | Daniel Wozniak said he killed Julie Kibuishi to make it look like Sam Herr murdered her and was on the run. | 15 | 0.409091 | 0.681818 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/06/turned-symbol-into-mainstay-our-electronic-lives/ghgySih4PCLtxt4hEz5FpL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160308100110id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2016/03/06/turned-symbol-into-mainstay-our-electronic-lives/ghgySih4PCLtxt4hEz5FpL/story.html | Ray Tomlinson turned @ symbol into a mainstay of our electronic lives | 20160308100110 | He transformed the once-obscure “@” symbol into one that has become instantly familiar around the world. Ray Tomlinson, who with his engineering colleagues gave the world electronic mail, died on Saturday.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tomlinson helped Bolt, Beranek and Newman lay the groundwork for ARPANET, the federally-funded data network that would eventually morph into the Internet.
He and many of his colleagues at the Cambridge company worked on minicomputers — refrigerator-sized machines that could be used by several people working at video terminals. Such computers had long allowed users to send electronic messages to different users. But these messages were contained within a single computer.
In 1971, Tomlinson was working on a program to transfer data files between two or more computers. He realized that he could modify this program to transmit messages from one computer to another. “It remained to provide a way to distinguish local mail from network mail,” Tomlinson later wrote.
Tomlinson needed, however, to decide how to label the destination address. “The @ sign seemed to make sense,” he decided, because it implied that the recipient of the message was “at” a remote computer rather than a local one.
Tomlinson, who lived in Lincoln, was 74. He worked for Raytheon, which bought BBN in 2009.
“A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us e-mail in the early days of networked computers,” said a statement issued by Raytheon. “His work changed the way the world communicates and yet, for all his accomplishments, he remained humble, kind, and generous with his time and talents.” | Ray Tomlinson, who with his engineering colleagues at BBN gave the world electronic mail, died on Saturday. | 16.2 | 1 | 8.3 | medium | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/01/06/uber-new-york-settlement/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160308152853id_/http://fortune.com/2016/01/06/uber-new-york-settlement/ | Uber Settles With New York Attorney General Over Privacy Breach | 20160308152853 | After a 14-month long investigation, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is expected to announce on Thursday a settlement involving ride-hailing app Uber’s privacy practices, according to a report from BuzzFeed.
The inquiry began after a series of BuzzFeed reports that revealed that Uber’s New York manager, Josh Mohrer, had accessed information about reporters’ use of the service without their permission, including through the company’s “God View” tool. The tool shows an aerial view of all passengers and drivers in a particular area.
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Around the time of of the Uber dust-up, rival Lyft also updated its privacy policy and practices following a report from Re/code that a Lyft executive had accessed one of its own journalists’ data.
As part of the settlement, Uber will pay $20,000 in fines for failing to report unauthorized third-party access to drivers’ personal information until months after discovering it. This is related to a data breach that occurred in May 2014, after an Uber engineer unknowingly posted online login information for a private database containing driver information. Uber discovered this a few months later, in September, when a former employee from a competitor revealed the problem, according to the report.
WATCH: For more on Uber’s data breach, watch this Fortune video:
As part of the planned settlement, Uber has also agreed to make changes to its privacy and security practices, according to Buzzfeed. This would include password-protection and encryption for the location data of passengers and drivers, limiting employee access to the data, and adding more security tools to protect personal information. As BuzzFeed notes, much of Uber’s new policy on accessing passenger data was included in an update to the company’s privacy policy issued a day after reports of an Uber executive’s comments about doing research on journalists.
Uber also agreed to notify the Attorney General’s office if it begins to collect GPS data from customers’ smartphones when they’re not using the app, something the company claims it doesn’t do, according to BuzzFeed. | After a 14-month long investigation, the ride-hailing company will have to pay $20,000 in fines. | 20.4 | 0.95 | 3.75 | medium | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2010/03/11/thought-equity-motion-and-the-ncaa-give-old-highlights-new-life-on-the-web/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160309075823id_/http://fortune.com/2010/03/11/thought-equity-motion-and-the-ncaa-give-old-highlights-new-life-on-the-web/ | Thought Equity Motion and the NCAA give old highlights new life on the Web | 20160309075823 | The NCAA and digital video partner Thought Equity Motion are testing whether March Madness fans will want to watch old highlights on the web.
Most people are glad to see March arrive. For some it’s the start of spring and warmer weather; for others, it’s the month-long celebration of college basketball called March Madness.
The NCAA has little control over the temperature, but it did turn up the heat for basketball fans last week with the launch of the NCAA Vault, a user-friendly archive of video highlights from March Madness tournaments over the past decade.
Fans can search for plays by teams, players, or games; or scan highlights of dunks, blocks, or shots. They can share their favorite moments via Twitter or Facebook. The site even has an open application programming interface (API) that allows for the clips to be published on other sites or plugged into apps built by third-party developers.
It’s all possible thanks to the NCAA’s partnership with Thought Equity Motion, which specializes in digitizing video footage and helping the rights-owners to cash in on it.
Thought Equity Motion claims to have 10.5 million hours of content under management through partners like the NCAA, NBC News and Paramount Pictures.
In July 2009, the NCAA was facing a conundrum. Despite the exuberance around March Madness, the tournament’s website wasn’t getting equal play.
“I noted that ‘We seem to have a lot of visitors come to the site, but they don’t stick around that long’,” explains Greg Weitekamp, director of broadcasting for the NCAA.
Weitekamp mentioned this to Kevin Schaff, CEO of Thought Equity Motion, which has represented the rights to the league’s archive of tournament footage since 2005. “I said, ‘We think it’s an asset that’s been underdeveloped — there’s more that can be done with it.’”
Schaff and his team came back with the idea for the “NCAA Vault,” believing that the league’s archival footage was an underleveraged asset. Prior to the launch of the Vault, fans could only watch a small selection of past tournament games on a CBS site that linked to NCAA.com.
“The competitive advantage of sports and news rights is going to come out of the archive,” Schaff says, pointing out the value of rapidly inserting historic footage of relevant events into live broadcasts to provide context.
An offer they couldn’t refuse
Thought Equity Motion was already charged with preserving the NCAA’s footage by digitizing it, and was managing to pull in some revenue by selling memorable games to cable channels like ESPN Classic.
But by breaking the games up into bite-size chunks and assigning each clip a URL, the footage could become even more valuable. Viewers could share clips, bloggers could link to them, and most important for new ad revenue, marketers could advertise against them more easily.
“Dunkin’ Donuts could buy the word ‘dunk’,” Schaff suggests, meaning that any video tagged with that word — presumably because the clip shows a player dunking the ball — could be paired with an ad for the donut purveyor.
Plus, Thought Equity Motion had insight into what footage was most searched for.
“We run algorithms to look at where conversations are, what teams, what games are in demand,” explains Schaff, who compares his model to that of web startup Demand Media. Meanwhile some have questioned Demand Media’s assembly-line approach to churning out content based on algorithms that determine which topics will garner the most traffic and ad revenue.
Finally, there was the reality that the Web is a different medium than broadcast; people don’t want to watch entire games when they already know the final score, but would rather to jump in at the most memorable points.
“We’re embracing the fact that consumers want to consume media on their own time in a way that fits them,” says Thought Equity Motion’s VP of marketing and products, Dan Weiner.
Still early in the game
Thanks to Thought Equity Motion’s technology platform that digitizes and dices video, the company says the NCAA Vault was created at a much lower cost than what the league would have paid to go it alone.
Still, it will be a while before the NCAA knows if the Vault will provide a return on the investment. While it expects site traffic to be high during the tournament, the hope is that viewers will continue to visit year-round.
The NCAA is using its most popular event as a test case, but would eventually like to expand the Vault to include other sports like women’s basketball, and men’s baseball.
But, Weitekamp says, “Nothing like this has ever been done before. We didn’t want to be out there with 10,000 hours of content without the business model proving itself first.”
At press time, no ads have appeared on the Vault, other than banners promoting live streaming of March Madness games on CBSSports.com. CBS has the rights to the live NCAA games; Thought Equity Motion licenses the non-live content on the NCAA Vault for CBS to sell and receives a cut of the revenue.
The result of this experiment may be even more crucial for Thought Equity Motion, which, having established itself as a source for stock footage, is now increasingly focused on how to syndicate the non-live content in its library to drive ad revenue.
“We have the content partners we want,” says Schaff, adding that the venture-backed company continued to grow during the recent downturn and predicts 50-70% growth in 2010. “But right now, even if you digitize it, video content needs to be broken down and curated to connect to the demand.”
Schaff believes the value of the non-live rights to the NCAA’s footage could be 10% of the live rights. “Access creates demand,” he says. | The NCAA and digital video partner Thought Equity Motion are testing whether March Madness fans will want to watch old highlights on the web. Most people are glad to see March arrive. For some it’s the start of spring and warmer weather; for others, it’s the month-long celebration of college basketball called March Madness. The… | 17.738462 | 0.984615 | 31.846154 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/06/2008410112820545467.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160311045810id_/http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/06/2008410112820545467.html | Iraqi leader demands role for militia | 20160311045810 | "In gratitude to the efforts, sacrifices and heroic positions of our brothers and brave sons from the Badr Organisation... we must give them the priority in bearing administrative and government responsibilities especially in the security field," Abdul Aziz al-Hakim told a conference held in Baghdad on Wednesday to honour Badr.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a key member of the Shia-dominated government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Badr Organisation replaced the Badr Brigade, which was formed by the former boss of SCIRI and al-Hakim's brother Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim in the 1980s to fight Saddam Hussein with backing and funding from Iran.
"The forces of evil are trying very hard to sully the reputation of nationalist movements like Badr so that they can achieve goals that do not serve the interests of the Iraqi people," al-Hakim said at the gathering, which was attended by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
SCIRI has made such calls for Badr to be involved in security before.
"May those who describe the heroes of Badr and their Kurdish brothers as militia be doomed to failure," Talabani said.
"You and your [Kurdish] brothers are the heroes of liberating Iraq.
Al-Hakim's SCIRI has severalministers in the ruling coalition"You, my brothers, march on without paying attention to the enemies' claims because you and the [Kurdish] peshmerga are faithful sons of this country," he added.
Al-Hakim's SCIRI has severalministers in the ruling coalition
Talabani's remarks come amid calls for the disbanding of Iraq's militias, which were mostly formed as part of the struggle by exiled anti-Saddam Hussein opposition leaders prior to the April 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
The head of Iraq's influential Sunni group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, accused Badr in mid May of killing members of the once-dominant community.
"It is the Badr Brigades which is responsible for these killings. I take responsibility for what I am saying," Harith al-Dhari had said.
In Wednesday's other developments, leaders of Iraq's Sunni Arabs set terms for their involvement in drafting a constitution, indicating they wanted about a third of the seats on the body that is supposed to propose a new text by August.
"May those who describe the heroes of Badr and their Kurdish brothersas militia be doomedto failure. You andyour [Kurdish] brothers are the heroes of liberating Iraq"Jalal Talabani,Iraqi PresidentAn alliance grouping most of the main Sunni Arab groups, representing the 20% minority that dominated Iraq for much of the past century, resolved at a conference to seek 25 seats on the parliamentary committee drafting a constitution.
"May those who describe the heroes of Badr and their Kurdish brothersas militia be doomedto failure. You andyour [Kurdish] brothers are the heroes of liberating Iraq"Jalal Talabani,Iraqi President
Because most Sunnis took no part in the January election, few sit in parliament and so only two are on the committee.
Shias, who now dominate parliament along with the Kurdish minority, say they are keen to draw Sunnis into the process and some officials have said they could expand the number of seats on the committee.
Adding 20-odd Sunni members could take the total size of the body to about 75 or 80.
"The number of our representatives must be 25 so that we have fair rights," the Gathering of the Sunni People said in a resolution approved by delegates to the conference in Baghdad.
Sunni leaders want a third of theseats on a key parliament bodyIn the rebel stronghold of Ramadi, however, a group calling itself the General Command for Military Forces in Iraq circulated leaflets threatening prominent Sunni leaders from the Muslim Clerics Association and Iraqi Islamic Party if they agreed to take part in writing the new constitution.
Sunni leaders want a third of theseats on a key parliament body
Sunni Arabs have a potential veto under a rule written in to the UN-sponsored interim constitution that stipulates at least 16 of 18 provinces must support the new text in a referendum.
Iraqi officials have said the constitution will be ready by a 15 August deadline. Under a political timetable drafted under US occupation, once written it must be approved by referendum before an election at the end of the year."If the National Assembly ... stick to their position we suggest suspending our participation."
Among attacks across Iraq on Wednesday, rebels ambushed the motorcade of a Kurdish parliamentarian on the constitutional committee, killing two of his bodyguards in Baghdad.
And police said 22 soldiers from Shia southern Iraq were kidnapped in the rebel Sunni heartlands of the western desert.
Rebels killed two bodyguards of aKurdish deputy on WednesdaySecurity officials said two carloads of armed men fired on a vehicle carrying Industry Ministry officials Zaki Jawad and Muhammed Haider, killing both.
Rebels killed two bodyguards of aKurdish deputy on Wednesday
An Iraqi translator working for the US military was slain north of the capital. Fighters Mustafa Ashraf as he was driving between the towns of Khalis and Baquba, 60km northeast of Baghdad.
Also in Baquba, a car bomb exploded at 10.15am (0615 GMT) near a petrol station where cars were waiting for fuel, killing two civilians and destroying five vehicles.
Three US soldiers were killed in two attacks in Iraq late on Tuesday.
The US military said in a statement on Wednesday that a mortar attack on a base at Tikrit killed two soldiers of the 42nd Infantry Division.
A soldier from the 1st Corps Support Command was killed when a roadside bomb blasted his vehicle just north of Baghdad, the statement added.
Many of the highways and roadsremain too dangerous to useThe deaths take to 1679 the number of US troops killed since the March 2003 invasion and to more than 870 people in total, including US military personnel, since Iraq's new government was announced on 28 April.
Many of the highways and roadsremain too dangerous to use
Meanwhile, Iraqi soldiers backed by US forces continued their military operation in the northern town of Tal Afar in search of what they called terrorists.
An Iraqi journalist in the town told Aljazeera that hundreds of people were arrested in the operation.
Nasir Ali said the arrested were civilians who had no links with any group and denied the existence of foreign fighters in the town as claimed by the US forces.
He added that the arrests were based on false information and were concentrated on certain areas in the town. On Wednesday a main oil pipelinein northern Iraq was blown up
On Wednesday a main oil pipelinein northern Iraq was blown up
In another development, a main oil pipeline in northern Iraq was blown up early on Wednesday.
An official at the Northern Oil company said the line affected was used to export oil to Turkey from Iraq's vast northern oil fields around Kirkuk.
The company official said there had been no exports at the time because of repeated attacks.
"This isn't the first time. They've targeted oil for a long time even when there is no exporting," he said on condition of anonymity.
Iraq says 95% of its national income comes from crude oil exports and says it aims to lessen its dependency on them. | <P>One of Iraq's top Shia leaders has renewed calls for a greater security role for the armed wing of his party, the Badr Organisation.</P> | 46.6 | 0.633333 | 1.1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/dancing-with-the-stars-season-22-cast-revealed | http://web.archive.org/web/20160311071040id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/dancing-with-the-stars-season-22-cast-revealed | Season 22 Cast Revealed : People.com | 20160311071040 | Don Arnold/WireImage; Paras Griffin/WireImage; George Pimentel/WireImage
03/08/2016 AT 08:25 AM EST
A whole new crop of stars are getting ready to put on their dancing shoes.
will be competing on the upcoming season of
. But now fans can start picking their favorites from the entire roster of season 22 competitors.
Tuesday that Zee and Sweetin will be joined on the dance floor by
, Denver Broncos linebacker (and recent Super Bowl MVP)
, UFC Fighter Paige VanZant,
's Wanya Morris, former NFL quarterback
, Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown and actress (and ex-wife of
] will push me to my limits, both emotionally and physically," Barton, 30, says in the current issue of PEOPLE. "You always learn something about yourself by doing that."
Season 22 of the ABC reality dance competition also marks the return of some fan-favorite professional dancers.
Here is the full list of stars and their pro dancer partners:
premieres March 21 on ABC. | Mischa Barton, Kim Fields, Jodie Sweetin and more will compete on season 22 of the ABC reality dance competition | 9.666667 | 0.714286 | 3.47619 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/01/grand-theft-auto-could-crash-when-launched-online-creators-warn.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160311230031id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/01/grand-theft-auto-could-crash-when-launched-online-creators-warn.html | 'Grand Theft Auto' could crash when launched online | 20160311230031 | As the video game 'Grand Theft Auto' prepares to launch online for the first time on Tuesday, its creators warned that gamers could face technical difficulties accessing the game due to unprecedented global demand.
The creators of the video game, Rockstar North, warned gamers that "plenty of issues were bound to occur" when "Grand Theft Auto Online" (GTA Online) -- the online version of the best-selling video game -- is launched online on Tuesday.
Writing on their online blog last week, the creators of the violent crime game series, which launched its latest version late last month, said that they expected "crashes, glitches, crazy bugs, gameplay modes and mechanics that need re-balancing and other surprises" to be among the possible technical problems experienced by gamers when they try to access GTA for the first time online.
(Read more: 'Grand Theft Auto V' stands ready to break records)
"One thing we are already aware of, and are trying to alleviate as fast as we can, is the unanticipated additional pressure on the servers due to a significantly higher number of players than we were anticipating at this point," the blog warned last week ahead of the launch today at 7am ET (12pm London time).
"We are working around the clock to buy and add more servers, but this increased scale is only going to make the first few days even more temperamental than such things usually are…We hope it will all run incredibly smoothly, but please bear with us if it doesn't, and help us fix any and all problems!," the post published last Friday read.
The pressure is certainly on the makers of the game to match the runaway success of the launch of the latest version of the violent crime game franchise, "Grand Theft Auto V," which took $1 billion within three days of going on sale last month, with $800 million of that coming on the first day alone.
(Read more: 'Grand Theft Auto V' tops $800 million first day)
Those sales figures made it the fastest ever selling video game, film or entertainment product, By launching it online, the creators of the game hope to expand and "evolve" the game from the single-player model to a wider, multi-player global design where other blockbuster video games, such as "Call of Duty", have gone before them. The move online is part of a larger plan to further monetize on the game's success through the sale of in-game items.
(Read more: 'Grand Theft Auto V' seen driving to $1 billion in revenue)
No one at Rockstar North was available for comment when contacted by CNBC Tuesday morning but on its blog Rockstar's said the problems it foresaw were "typical growing pains for an online game."
With the online version, up to 16 players "can enter the world of Los Santos" (where GTA is set) to partake in "open-world crime and chaos" but to access the online version, gamers need to have already purchased the physical version which costs $60.
(Read more: Grand Theft Auto controversies)
When launched in September, GTA V met the approval of fans and reviewers but was not without controversy as it allows players to "torture" virtual characters within the story and a man was stabbed in London shortly after purchasing his copy of the game.
- By CNBC's Holly Ellyatt, follow her on Twitter @HollyEllyatt | As "Grand Theft Auto" prepares to launch online Tuesday, creators warned that of glitches in accessing because of global demand. | 28.708333 | 0.958333 | 2.375 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160311-which-banknote-has-sex-secretly-written-on-it | http://web.archive.org/web/20160313104406id_/http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160311-which-banknote-has-sex-secretly-written-on-it | Which banknote has ‘sex’ secretly written on it? | 20160313104406 | One day in 1967, 12-year-old Rezwan Razack was nosing through his grandfather’s iron safe in Bengaluru, India, when something unusual caught his eye. It was a wad of banknotes with the word ‘cancelled’ stamped on each.
Amongst the bundle were a few Reserve Bank of India notes with a portrait of King George VI on the front. They had been cancelled with a rubber stamp reading “Pakistan Note Payment Refused”. The little boy’s find triggered a lasting curiosity about paper money that couldn’t be used as legal tender.
The current market value of notes in (Razack’s) collection range in value from $100 to $50,000.
“I always used to wonder how Reserve Bank of India notes could be Pakistan money,” said Razack, who later learned that India’s central bank printed money on behalf of Pakistan for some time after Partition cleaved British India in to two countries.
Soon after, while visiting his cousin’s house, he found some British India banknotes, India’s pre-independence currency. These became Razack’s starter collection and sparked a lifelong passion.
“I pestered my grandfather to give me the antique banknotes that were in his safe,” he said. “Sensing my enthusiasm, he readily parted with his treasure.”
As time passed, Razack’s love of rare banknotes blossomed, leading him to become a researcher and scholar. After 10 years of dedicated research, Razack, who now runs a successful construction business in Bengaluru and also serves as chairman of the Indian chapter of the International Bank Notes Society, published a revised edition of The Standard Reference Guide to Indian Paper Money.
Razack’s personal collection has a specimen of every type of Indian paper currency issued since 3 September 1812, when the Bank of Bengal issued Sicca rupees, the earliest Indian banknotes. The current market value of notes in his collection range in value from $100 to $50,000, said Razack who declined to reveal his collection’s total worth.
These notes can be worth $20,000 to $35,000 each.
But collections don’t need to focus on just one country’s currency. With globalisation, the ease of travel and greater access to traders and foreign currency markets, collectors can now track down gems a lot more quickly. The market is flooded with banknotes consigned to history due to political, security, fiscal and technical reasons. The question is: which ones are worthy or worthless?
Apart from various governments’ decisions to discontinue certain banknotes or stop issuing higher denominations to combat counterfeiting, banknotes are pulled out of circulation typically due to printing errors — wrong signature, numerical inaccuracy, misprints, misspellings and misrepresentations.
The Seychelles banknote of 50 rupees has the word ‘sex’ written secretly in palm trees.
Truly rare and historically significant banknotes are the most desirable specimens and tend to command a market price that far exceeds their face value.
For instance, the most sought-after US error notes are double denomination bills, which means the front shows a $10 note, and the back shows a $20 note, said California-based Fred Weinberg, a dealer in major error coins and paper currency. “These notes can be worth $20,000 to $35,000 each, depending on the series and the condition of the note,” he said.
Even though the world’s economy is in a state of uncertainty, rare banknotes are still selling for top dollar.
Similarly, rare specimens of pre-Euro, old European currencies that were phased out since the formation of the single-currency European Union in 2002 can now be worth a pretty penny. A report in the Irish Independent pegged the value of old Irish banknotes from the “Ploughman” or “Lady Lavery” series, for instance, as high as 5,000 euros ($5,430) each.
The global market is growing for rare banknotes in good condition, said Jared Stapleton, director at Toronto Coin Expo, Canada’s premier coin and banknote show. “Even though the world’s economy is in a state of uncertainty, rare banknotes are still selling for top dollar,” he said.
In the Indian market, some of the hardest to find, and most valuable, currency notes are those that were printed during the French, Portuguese and British rules in India. Also rare and sought-after are the rupee bills that the Government of India issued in 1959 for exclusive use in the Persian Gulf countries by the Haj pilgrims from India. “These notes were issued only once,” said Razack and can now command as much as $30,000, for a 100 rupee bill on the open market. “The most remarkable feature is the colour of these notes, which is different from the existing notes in circulation in India at the time. The colour differentiation was to identify that these notes were not considered legal tender in India.”
John Millensted, currency specialist at the British auction house Bonhams, said the rarest pieces tend to be specimens or trial pieces which aren’t necessarily taken up as a design for a banknote. “Most banknotes with over 40 years of age hold their value,” he said.
Sometimes it’s the simplest notes that can become most collectable. For example, a £1 ($1.44) note from World War I with an overprint in Arabic, used by British forces in Turkey in 1915, can fetch up to £8,000 ($11,549), even though the note is quite plain, Millensted said.
Apart from good condition and limited print runs, a note’s quirkiness has appeal. One such example is the Seychelles banknote of 50 rupees that has the word “sex” written secretly in palm trees. Another is the Canadian $2 bill which was sold at a public auction for Canadian $13,000 ($9,336) because it had the signature of the wrong official on it, said Stapleton who also runs his own store, Metro Coin & Banknote Company, in Toronto. “During the printing process, a few sheets with the wrong official’s signature got into the serial numbering process out of sequence, creating rare signature notes,” he said.
Apart from good condition and limited print runs, a note’s quirkiness has appeal.
However, it’s the 1954 “Devil’s Head” series, which was only produced for about a year and a half, that remains the most coveted of obsolete Canadian banknotes. One of those, a Canadian $2 bill, was sold at an auction for a staggering $10,000 Canadian dollars ($7,410) a few years ago, Stapleton said. The series triggered controversy because in the engraving of the portrait an area of the Queen's hair gives the illusion of a grinning devil. “The Devil’s Head notes remained in circulation to wear out, but are highly desirable as they were only produced for a short time,” Stapleton said.
The series triggered controversy because... an area of the Queen's hair gives the illusion of a grinning devil.
If you are able to put a few perfect uncirculated notes — newly minted, crisp and clean bills — of a current series aside for face value, they may have the potential to be collectable eventually, said Stapleton.
Amongst British paper money, said Millensted, early British Provincial banknotes still represent a good investment. “These will have a good age to them already — about 200 years old — and can still be picked up reasonably cheaply,” he said.
Those into colonial paper currency may find a treasure in the bills issued by Presidency Banks of colonial India — Bank of Bengal, Bank of Madras and Bank of Bombay — and the portrait notes of Queen Victoria, King George V and VI, which, said Razack, will soon be extinct. “An avid collector should buy right now as these would be treasured pieces in the years to come,” he said.
Where to buy and sell
“The best sites for people to learn about demonetised banknotes are auction websites such as Baldwin’s (UK), Lyn Knight Currency Auctions (USA), Noble Numismatics (Australia) and Todywalla Auctions (India),” Razack said.
Online retailers (eBay, Amazon, and German trader Banknoten), currency dealers and galleries (Certified Coin Exchange, Inc., Metro Coin and Banknote, George LaBarre), and numismatic shows (Toronto Coin Expo in Canada, ANDA Money Expo in Australia and UK Coin Fairs) are other useful sources.
There’s no shortage of stories where people discovered highly valuable collectibles... in attics, books, dressers and photo frames of old or deceased family members.
Also, never underestimate the power of word of mouth. Friends, acquaintances and relatives all contributed to Razack’s collection. “There wasn’t a person that I wouldn’t ask if they had by any chance old paper money lying around in their cupboards,” he said.
Sometimes it’s sheer serendipity. There’s no shortage of stories where people discovered highly valuable collectibles, including dated currency bills, in attics, books, dressers and photo frames of old or deceased family members.
How to care for them
Regardless of their age or rarity, banknotes that are damaged — torn and tatty, or frayed and faded — aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. “They need to be stored in special holders made by companies like Lindner or Lighthouse and protect them from humidity and human handling,” Razack said.
These plastic holders that cost less than $50 “protect the note from fingerprints, folding, and stains,” said Weinberg. “Once placed in the holder, you shouldn’t handle the note too often.” Banknotes that are damaged — torn and tatty, or frayed and faded — aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.
Handling a banknote too much can transfer the dirt and oil from your hands onto the note and can cause folds and creases that trap gunk.
Stapleton cautioned against the classic rookie mistake: treating and tampering with a banknote. “Don’t wash or press a banknote, or try to erase any marks on the note, or trim the edges off,” he said noting doing so takes away the note’s original sheen, which is detrimental to both its grade and value.
Although it’s a passion project, Millensted said “serious collectors want to make sure they have bought wisely and that there is a hope of a profit when the time comes to sell.”
The good news, said Stapleton, is that “over the last quarter century, your average return on investment has been ten times.”
And while Razack said his collection would never be up for sale, he admitted: “Over time this has the potential for value growth, which is far greater than any other asset.”
To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. | Don’t be too quick to part with your old banknotes they could be collectors’ items. Some are worth $50,000 each. | 88.375 | 0.833333 | 1.166667 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/23/mexicos-economy-may-surprise-you.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160316231624id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2013/12/23/mexicos-economy-may-surprise-you.html | Mexico's economy may surprise you | 20160316231624 | Duncan Chard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Molten gold pours from a crucible into a heated mold after refining at the Kaloti Jewellery LLC factory in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Before I get to my prediction, can we all just agree to end this notion of so-called 'cloud' computing. A few years ago the idea of running software from a remote computer was new and novel. Now it simply is computing. With the exception of some specialized software I use to analyze my race car, I can't think of any programs I run natively on the hard drive. Perhaps we in the media should start referring to old-school software as "ground" computing instead, because that seems to be the anomaly rather than the norm.
Rant over, my prediction: Be careful of any tech company that's gotten a boost simply because of the "cloud" story. Many of these companies are trading at earnings multiples in the high double or even triple digits (if they have any earnings to make a multiple at all). Can a company truly grow into a valuation of more than 10 times sales? We'll see. And that's not to say there aren't some spectacular companies doing innovative things, but any company that is not running software as a service seems antiquated. Just as all things "dot com" captured the attention and stretched multiples in the late '90s, so too is this notion of the cloud today. I would not be surprised to see some of the multiples contract on the "pure play cloud"–type companies.
Gold = Tired Old Mule
For the record, I like mules. A noble pack animal that serves a purpose, it doesn't need much affection and gets the job done. So perhaps I should not compare gold to mules, because I feel that gold will continue to be the opposite: serve no purpose, needs love and doesn't get much done. It's a boring prediction for me, as my loyal viewers and readers know: I have been negative on gold for more than three years. The reasons I was negative then are the same reasons I am still negative now—a recovering global economy, lack of inflation, currency stability and less need for central banks to purchase gold because of currency stability. Boring or no, people love gold; thus, my need to address my views heading into next year.
(More predictions: Your software is going to get smarter)
I'll add this to the gold story: One thing that has me nervous and could prove me wrong is supply. If prices keep falling, some of the higher-cost gold producers may take production off-line. That could put a floor under the price. By the way, for anybody interested in gold, its history, some of the horror stories involved in mining the middle, and just a great understanding of how the gold market works, I highly recommend Matthew Hart's new book, simply entitled "Gold." It's well worth a read.
—By Brian Sullivan, co-anchor of CNBC's "Street Signs." Follow him on Twitter @SullyCNBC. | CNBC's Brian Sullivan predicts a lackluster year for the Dow but has his eye on Mexico's stock market. | 29.095238 | 0.666667 | 0.952381 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/03/21/resilient-nature-spiritual-echoes-new-shows/ZjJr07lVnrU9TK8IyOlIeO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160323052411id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/03/21/resilient-nature-spiritual-echoes-new-shows/ZjJr07lVnrU9TK8IyOlIeO/story.html | Resilient nature, spiritual echoes in new shows | 20160323052411 | Blame René Descartes: “I think, therefore I am” set us human thinkers up as separate from, and ultimately superior to, other creatures. Indigenous societies don’t share the paradigm.
In “Theories of the Earth: Beth Lipman and Lauren Fensterstock,” at Wheaton College’s Beard and Weil Galleries, two artists interrogate the nature/culture schism through a historical frame. Both use intensive processes to craft dauntingly dense, monochromatic 3-D pieces. Both make work rooted in Dutch still-life paintings, jewels of the Enlightenment in their loving attention to details of nature domesticated and arrayed in a pleasingly cultural fashion.
The show is stunning; the artists couldn’t make a better pair. But might they be stuck in the same dichotomy that has enthralled us for centuries, producing a hubris that has led to incalculable damage?
Lipman’s sweeping, all-glass installation “Laid (Time-) Table With Cycads” takes after the so-called vanitas still lifes, in which plump fruit puckers and rots, and flies set in on half-eaten feasts. The message: Nothing lasts. We are all mortal. Ultimately, nature wins. True enough.
She gives us a picture of exorbitance: The table overflows with food, drink, musical instruments, a pistol, and more. A mirrored orb reflects it all, amplifying the effect. There’s more beneath the table, including a jungle of bounteous plants.
The cycads — ancient, unchanging trees that look like palms — rise from the floor, burst through the tabletop, and spread their ferny leaves. This, of course, is nature’s persistence in the face of culture. Nature is long; culture is fleeting.
Fensterstock builds stalactites and stalagmites, mostly out of shells, which she colors black. In “The Order of Things,” stalactites bloom and droop from a series of hutches, recalling Enlightenment-era cabinets of curiosities also often seen in still life paintings. Like Lipman’s table, Fensterstock’s cabinets are overrun with nature — in this case, dark and foreboding cornucopia.
Despite the beauty and ambition of these works, and the lovely way they fit together, isn’t it time contemporary artists aspire to a larger idea? Instead of simply critiquing this notion of an opposition, why not move toward a new paradigm — one that sees culture as a part of nature, not its adversary.
Theaster Gates’s melancholic video “Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr,” on view at Rosebud, the Rose Art Museum’s satellite gallery in Waltham, takes place amid the dust and rubble of a half-demolished church. St. Laurence Catholic Church in Chicago was once home to a largely African-American congregation.
Here, it’s inhabited by memory and spirit, as conveyed by the Black Monks of Mississippi, an experimental gospel choir. As a cellist wanders the cavernous space playing mournful notes, a few voices sing out a spiritual: “I’ve been working in the fields a long time.” The camera follows two men as they lift and drop heavy wooden doors on the floor. It’s too effortful to be rhythmic, but the thunderous, percussive crashes tie the music to the demolition, heightening the atmosphere of destruction and loss.
As the video concludes, the camera points us at the door. Above it, there’s a simplified, colorful rendering of the Last Supper, in which Jesus spreads his arms, welcoming his disciples to the feast.
Gates created an installation around this video for the 2015 Venice Biennale; it screened in a room filled with rubble, inviting the viewer deeper into the experience. There’s no debris here, just the video, but the imagery and the echoes of the old spiritual evoke lifetimes of community, faith, labor, and loss.
Maria Molteni’s bouncy new show at How’s Howard, a comic and subversive take on tennis, dallies in sexual innuendo and plunges into notions of painting and perception. The show ricochets around the gallery; paintings are hung everywhere, with references flying: abstraction, spirituality, three-dimensionality.
The exhibit revolves around technology that monitors whether tennis shots are out of bounds: Several cameras follow the ball, and the combined image determines the point of impact.
When the ball hits the court, it compresses briefly into an egg shape; Molteni often calls such ovals “yoni,” the Sanskrit word for vagina, and a Hindu symbol of the divine mother.
They appear in paintings such as “Hawkeye Simulation 1 of 4, OUT (Venus Challenges Serena, Women’s Quarterfinal, US Open 2015),” in which a double disc of tennis-ball yellow and blue flies over a cosmically speckled ground toward a vertical white line — the boundary line on a tennis court. We already knew Venus and Serena are goddesses; Molteni underlines the mystical heft of that.
“Untitled (Painted tennis net)” is a painting out of bounds; it’s 3-D. But it has a ground: a painted net strung from the ceiling. The painterly gestures are several tennis panties, a garment that has side pockets for tennis balls. The panties stuffed with balls have their own not-so-veiled meaning, but Molteni’s work isn’t simply saucy. It’s venturous and sly.
Theories of the Earth: Beth Lipman and Lauren Fensterstock
At Beard and Weil Galleries, Wheaton College, through April 9. 508-286-3364, www.wheatoncollege.edu/gallery
Theaster Gates: Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr
At Rosebud, 683 Main St., Waltham, through April 3. 781-736-3434, www.brandeis.edu/rose/
Maria Molteni: L’oeuf et l’oeil (The Egg and the Eye)
At How’s Howard, 450 Harrison Ave., through March 29. 603-498-7736, www.howshoward.com | Beth Lipman and Lauren Fensterstock evoke nature’s resilience, Theaster Gates summons spiritual ghosts, and Maria Molteni plays with perception. | 48.869565 | 0.826087 | 2.130435 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/03/21/04/30/abdeslam-lawyer-to-sue-french-prosecutor | http://web.archive.org/web/20160325151626id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2016/03/21/04/30/abdeslam-lawyer-to-sue-french-prosecutor | Abdeslam 'worth his weight in gold' | 20160325151626 | The only suspected participant in the November 13 Paris attacks to be captured alive has been co-operating with police investigators and is "worth his weight in gold", his lawyer says.
Belgium's Interior Minister Jan Jambon said the country was on high alert for a possible revenge attack following the capture of 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam in a flat in Brussels on Friday.
"We know that stopping one cell can ... push others into action. We are aware of it in this case," he told public radio.
French investigator Francois Molins told a news conference in Paris on Saturday Abdeslam had admitted to investigators he had wanted to blow himself up along with others at the Stade de France on the night of the attack claimed by Islamic State - but he later backed out.
Abdeslam's lawyer Sven Mary said he would sue Molins for making the comment public, calling it a violation of judicial confidentiality.
Mary said Abdeslam was now fully co-operating with investigators.
"I think that Salah Abdeslam is of prime importance for this investigation. I would even say he is worth his weight in gold.
"He is collaborating. He is communicating. He is not maintaining his right to remain silent," Mary told Belgian public broadcaster RTBF on Monday.
As the only suspected participant or planner of the Paris attack in police custody, Abdeslam would be seen by investigators as a possible major source of information on others involved, in support networks, finance and links with Islamic State in Syria. There would also be urgent interest in finding out what further attacks might be planned.
Belgian prosecutors said in a statement they were looking for Najim Laachraoui, 25, using the false name of Soufiane Kayal. His DNA had been found in houses in Belgium used by the Paris attackers.
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said on Sunday that Abdeslam may have been plotting more operations drawing on weapons discovered in the Forest district of Brussels and a network of associates.
Jambon said he could not confirm that, but it was a possibility.
"After 18 months of dealing with this terrorist issue, I have learned that when the terrorists and weapons are in the same place, and that's what we saw in Forest, we are close to an attack. I'm not saying it is evidence. But yes, there are indications," he said.
Reynders said Belgium and France had so far found around 30 people involved in the gun and bomb attacks on bars, a sports stadium and a concert hall in the French capital. | The lawyer for captured Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam says a French prosecutor has violated judicial confidentiality and he plans to sue him | 21.434783 | 0.782609 | 1.043478 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/01/silicon-valley-now-no-1-luxury-home-market-coldwell-banker.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160325190536id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2014/04/01/silicon-valley-now-no-1-luxury-home-market-coldwell-banker.html | Silicon Valley now No. 1 luxury home market: Coldwell Banker | 20160325190536 | Woodside, Calif., is one of the hottest real estate markets. This home is currently for sale there for $12.5 million.
Indeed, there is such a shortage of homes to sell in the Valley that bidding wars have become fast and furious. Dancer said that he recently had a listing for $5.8 million home in Woodside. It listed on a Tuesday. By Friday, he had five competing bids. It was sold a few days later for $7.26 million. Dancer said the buyer was a 30-year-old financial executive.
Read MoreWhere in the world are the millionaires going?
Of course, if the tech boom starts to fizzle, so would the Silicon Valley real estate market. But for now, even modest homes in the area have become real estate gold.
One of the cheapest homes for sale right now in Woodside is a little red cottage on less than an acre. The home has two bedrooms, one bath and a fireplace. Price tag? $949,000.
Perhaps anything under $1 million in Woodside is now considered affordable housing. | The Coldwell Banker Previews International survey ranked Woodside, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, as the nation's top luxury market. | 8 | 0.538462 | 1.230769 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/estranged-wife-pianist-texas-pleads-not-guilty-murder-two-daughters | http://web.archive.org/web/20160325192313id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/estranged-wife-pianist-texas-pleads-not-guilty-murder-two-daughters | Estranged Wife of Pianist Pleads Not Guilty to Murder : People.com | 20160325192313 | 03/24/2016 AT 01:40 PM EDT
Sofya Tsygankova, the Texas mother
, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday, PEOPLE confirms.
Tsygankova, 31, is the estranged wife of renowned Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko, 29. The bodies of the young girls, 5 and 1, were
when he went to pick them up the morning of March 16 at her suburban Fort Worth home.
Kholodenko found his daughters dead in their beds while Tsygankova was covered in blood with
and rocking back and forth, an arrest affidavit obtained by PEOPLE states.
According to the affidavit, Kholodenko called police to report the murder and described his estranged wife as "going crazy."
Nika Kholodenko (left) and Michela Kholodenko
Police evidence allegedly suggests the girls were smothered with pillows.
When policed questioned Tsygankova, police say she seemed to have no memory of her alleged actions: According to the affidavit, she allegedly asked police, "Did I do anything bad to my kids?"
The affidavit states that the day before her daughters were found dead, Tsygankova visited a local mental-health facility. The 31-year-old mother allegedly has a history of mental health illness, the affidavit states.
According to the affidavit, police allegedly found medication for depression and anxiety as well as an empty bottle of Quetiapine, an anti-psychotic drug.
Tsygankova was taken to the John Peter Smith Hospital before she was moved to the Tarrant County Jail on Tuesday, where she awaits trial.
The girls' father, who won gold medal at the 2013 Cliburn International Piano Competition, issued a statement on Friday saying, "The loss of my children will be with me forever," he said. "But I would like to say that I feel the support of the Fort Worth community and all people who are sending me messages all over the world. Wherever I go after this tragedy, my heart will stay with the people here of Fort Worth and my daughters will rest in this soil."
Tsygankova's lawyer, Joetta Keene, told PEOPLE she has no comment at this time.
In 2008, Keene represented Texas mom Valeria Maxon, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the drowning death of her 1-year-old son. | The pianist, Vadym Kholodenko, allegedly told police that his estranged wife was "going crazy" | 24.111111 | 1 | 2 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/25/business-gets-serious-inside-shark-tank/lTUWYfC9zzPLdigWifnyeO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160327202120id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2016/03/25/business-gets-serious-inside-shark-tank/lTUWYfC9zzPLdigWifnyeO/story.html | Business gets serious inside Shark Tank | 20160327202120 | Desiree Stolar and Nate Barbera needed to practice the pitch for their startup company, but they couldn’t tell people why. So when they invited a group of investors, consultants, and product design experts to a conference room last May at Harvard’s Innovation Lab, they concocted a ruse.
“We told them that we had a meeting coming up with a Chicago venture capital firm, and we wanted to practice answering the questions they might ask,” Stolar says. In fact, her company, Unshrinkit, had landed a coveted invitation to appear on the ABC reality show “Shark Tank,” and a confidentiality agreement prevented them from telling anyone.
It wasn’t until the episode featuring Unshrinkit aired in November that Stolar could divulge the secret.
“I got text messages and e-mails saying, ‘Hey, was that rehearsal for ‘Shark Tank,’ or was it for a legitimate venture capital firm?’ I told them the truth then,” she says. The company, founded on the campus of Harvard Business School but now based in Arlington, Va., sells a solution that purports to reverse shrinkage of sweaters and other wool products.
Unshrinkit is one of a handful of companies with Boston ties that have appeared on “Shark Tank,” which wraps up its seventh season in May, and “Beyond the Tank,” a spinoff that follows companies after they’ve secured an investment from the panel of investors.
The premise of the show is simple. The “sharks,” as the panelists are known, evaluate a handful of deals on each episode, deciding either to put money in or pass. But there’s much more happening than most viewers realize, both before and after entrepreneurs step onto the show’s famous red Persian rug to pitch the sharks.
The first is just how tough it is to get on the show.
Tracey Noonan says that when she applied in 2012, there were about 35,000 applicants hoping for a spot; a casting director recently told her the number has now surpassed 100,000. “They take 120, and anywhere between 80 and 100 of the pitches air per season,” she says.
Noonan’s Cohasset business, Wicked Good Cupcakes, sells cupcakes packaged in glass jars. What was a small retail bakery with a handful of part-time employees has since ballooned into a company with 25 full-time employees, and Noonan says they will be hiring more soon for a new production facility in Hanover.
Stolar says it was “absolutely” harder to get on the show than it was to get into Harvard Business School — “and there is no guarantee of a positive experience when you get on ‘Shark Tank,’ ” she adds, while the career effect of obtaining an MBA is more predictable.
Once you’re picked, the producers mandate complete secrecy with a “detailed confidentiality package,” Stolar says. And every e-mail they send includes a note at the bottom that cautions that, at any point, they could decide not to film your segment — or decide not to broadcast it after it has been shot.
Though it began airing in 2009, the hourlong show has begun attracting more serious entrepreneurs in recent years. In part, that’s because of a change that took place around 2012, when the sharks persuaded the companies that produce the show, including ABC and Mark Burnett Productions, to nix a condition that required everyone appearing on the show to give them 5 percent of the company’s equity or 2 percent of future profits— regardless of whether they landed a deal.
“All we were getting were people with ideas on a piece of paper,” says Kevin O’Leary, one of the sharks, mentioning an entrepreneur who appeared on an early episode with a battery-powered turkey baster. Once that contractual change was made, the show “exploded from there,” O’Leary says.
Rob Go, a Boston venture capitalist, says that with more than 6 million people watching each episode of the show, according to Nielsen ratings, “Shark Tank” offers companies trying to target consumers a great launch pad. The value of the show to entrepreneurs “has almost nothing to do with the actual financing deals that get discussed on the show, but the reach of their audience,” Go says, noting that several startups have gone on to raise venture capital after appearing on “Shark Tank.”
Stolar confesses that when she was on the set waiting for stagehands to open the two large wooden doors that lead into the sharks’ chamber, “my hands were shaking. You walk down and stop at your place in front of the sharks. There’s this huge camera. It’s the culmination of months of work. Even though we’d done a lot of practicing, you still don’t know what mood they’re going to be in.”
John Wise, cofounder of the greeting card startup Lovepop, adds, “Half of the companies on the show are not portrayed as favorably as you would hope. You could be made a fool of if you don’t do a good job.”
Entrepreneurs have 90 seconds to pitch — but the questions from the investment panel can last an hour or more.
Stolar says she was on the soundstage for a little over two hours; the segment was edited down to 10 minutes. Wise says that much of the discussion at his shoot drilled deep into “boring financials” — things like rent for retail locations and sales trends that didn’t wind up in the final segment. It’s an intense grilling, and one that Wise says is very different from the meetings, coffees, and “get to know you” lunches an entrepreneur would typically have with a venture capitalist or an individual investor evaluating a startup deal.
Wise and his cofounder, Wombi Rose, left the set with a deal in hand: O’Leary offered to put $300,000 into the company in return for a 15 percent ownership stake. That was part of a larger $700,000 funding round the Boston company raised last summer.
Not surprisingly, Lovepop saw a huge boost to its business after its episode aired in December. Rose says the company had done about $1 million in revenue in about 20 months of operations to that point.
O’Leary says the show’s producers have gotten good at sniffing out entrepreneurs who are only looking for publicity and don’t actually want to land a deal.
Ryan Moore, a venture capitalist at the Cambridge firm Accomplice, concurs. “My hunch is the producers have improved [the] vetting and selection process,” Moore says. His firm put money into Lovepop before its “Shark Tank” episode aired.
Of course, some entrepreneurs appear on the show only to walk off without a deal.
John Radosta, an alumnus of Northeastern University who lives in Florida, spent seven months last year preparing for “Shark Tank.” He felt, he says, supremely prepared.
“I had watched every episode and seen what entrepreneurs had done right, what they’d done wrong, and how to negotiate.”
His pitch was for a franchising business built on the game of bubble soccer, which involves playing soccer while each player is protected by a large inflatable plastic sphere. (Bumping one another is a big part of the strategy.)
“I still don’t understand what happened. I had a ton of sales, was profitable, and the business was all bootstrapped,” he says. But no one offered a deal, and the sharks criticized him for not being clear enough about his business model and financials.
Radosta says he booked an additional $16,000 in sales from the publicity he got from appearing on the show, “but it didn’t send us on a rocket ship.”
And even some of the deals that seem to get sealed on the show don’t lead to money in the company’s bank account. A lengthy due-diligence process follows the agreement you see on the show. “It is intensive,” says O’Leary, the shark known for his cutting questions and his competitiveness with the other investors. “We want to know more about the people, know more about the business, what the company owns and what its intellectual property is. Very often, they leave out some critical facts around ownership or debt.”
O’Leary says he has a core team of six people who help him vet the companies he has agreed to invest in; when “Shark Tank” is filming new episodes in June and September, the team expands to a dozen. He estimates that slightly more than half of the handshake deals that happen on the set actually come together.
Mark Cuban, perhaps the best-known investor on the show, says via e-mail that 25 to 30 percent of his deals “don’t pass due diligence for any number of reasons.”
That was the case with Unshrinkit, whose founders left the soundstage having agreed to sell Cuban 15 percent of the company for $150,000.
But after several months of negotiations, Stolar says, “Mark loved us as founders, but had concerns about taking the product forward,” as well as about how a laundry-related product would fit with the rest of his portfolio of companies. Stolar and Barbera felt as if they had enough money to produce enough Unshrinkit to fill all the orders the show’s broadcast spurred. They agreed to walk away from the investment.
Since her segment aired, Stolar says, the company has gotten its product into several retail chains, including Bed, Bath & Beyond, and her plan is to begin meeting with investors again this summer.
This time, with no cameras in the room, she expects it to be substantially less nerve-wracking. | Entrepreneurs with ties to Boston reveal what it’s like to seek financing on the ABC reality TV show. | 94.15 | 0.85 | 1.65 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/09/29/the-biggest-coffee-markets-in-the-world-are.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160329034142id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2014/09/29/the-biggest-coffee-markets-in-the-world-are.html | The biggest coffee markets in the world are... | 20160329034142 | Last year, Americans bought 797,000 tons of coffee, followed by Brazil at nearly 676,000 tons and Germany at 375,000 tons. On a per-capita basis, Brazil is tops since its population is smaller.
At the other end, China, the world's most populous country, bought just 44,000 tons of coffee.
Read MoreCraft coffee isbrewing up market share
Within the coffee market, pod sales have surged. As of the year ended Aug. 23, they now account for 33.9 percent of U.S. coffee sales in all measured retail channels, up from just 9.5 percent, according to Nielsen data, which does not include restaurants or Costco.
"This is the first year that it's outsold other types of coffee," Nielsen's Meg Chari said.
"If it's coffee or other things, they're looking for convenience," Chari said. "That's why we've seen the growth of all sorts of convenience breakfast products." | The world's biggest market for java is seeing a surge in pod sales and upswing at restaurants. | 9.684211 | 0.736842 | 1.157895 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/ariana-grande-fans-tongues-donut-gate | http://web.archive.org/web/20160401045338id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/ariana-grande-fans-tongues-donut-gate | Ariana Grande Nearly Touches Tongue with Fan : People.com | 20160401045338 | 03/30/2016 AT 03:55 PM EDT
is giving fans some serious déjá vu.
On Wednesday, one young woman got a bit of tongue action â akin to Grande's move at a doughnut shop that led to
last year â when the 22-year-old mingled with fans in London following an appearance on BBC Radio 1's
. Grande stood among a crowd of fans, separated by a gate, and appeared to have her eyes closed when she and the supporter nearly touched tongues. Meanwhile, the Grande fan appeared to snap a photo of the moment with her phone. The pop star's act was reminiscent of Grande's doughnut shop controversy last year, when a surveillance camera captured video of her licking a pastry in the shop and saying "I hate America."
singer issued an apology after the incident, and later told
that her "behavior was very offensive."
"There's no excuse, or there's nothing to justify it, but I think that as human beings we all say and do things that we don't mean at all sometimes, and we have to learn from it," she explained.
Grande added: "I think one of the biggest things I learned from that was what it feels like to disappoint so many people who love and believe in you. And that's an excruciating feeling." | The pop star made a memorable exit from BBC Radio 1's studios on Wednesday | 17.333333 | 0.733333 | 2.066667 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/04/22/linkedin-find-job-postings/20873196/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160405153604id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2014/04/22/linkedin-find-job-postings/20873196/? | 3 Places To Find Job Postings On LinkedIn | 20160405153604 | When you first login, click on the "Home" menu choice at the top of the page. This feed will take up the left two-thirds of your window. Here, among other things, you'll find the posts that everyone in your network has made recently.
Therefore, you'll have to check back with frequency or else you'll miss many of them. Unfortunately, LinkedIn discontinued its signal functionality, which used to allow you to search this feed for items posted within the last two weeks.
For example, the following updates recently appeared close to the top of this author's feed:
"I am working with a firm that is growing over 90 percent next year, need a strong accountant assistant controller 120-130K." A recruiter's email address and phone number followed this.
"XXX is hiring an Executive Director! $30k/yr. Apply by [date]." This was followed by a link to the full position description.
What's also great about this is that when you find something of interest you'll know who posted it, and can contact that person directly to find out more. If he or she happens to work at the company, you can often get a direct in, rather than simply applying online.
Build a large network of people with your skills and/or who work in industries of interest to you. That way, you will increase the probability of finding a job of interest on your Activity/Updates feed.
Any company can pay to post a job on LinkedIn, making it now among the largest of job boards. Access the these ads either by selecting "Jobs" on the main menu, or by selecting "Jobs" on the drop down menu for the search function at the top of your home screen.
For example, in the main search bar, you can go broad by simply inputting a job title like "engineer," or you can create a more complex, targeted search by adding multiple terms. For example, you might alternatively search for "project engineer greater Boston area."
By clicking on "Advanced" just to the right of the search bar, you'll be presented with an array of search filtering options, including keywords, company, title and location. In addition, you can limit the search to any combination of first, second or third degree connections plus everyone else, the date the job was posted, job function, industry and experience level.
The different levels of paid LinkedIn accounts provide various other premium search filters, such as one for salary.
Don't search on job titles, because the nature and level of responsibilities of the same-titled position will vary by company. For example, a vice president of human resources at a Fortune 500 company will differ greatly from a VP of HR at a company with 150 employees. And the opposite is also true: The same role will also be given different titles at various companies. At one place you might be a
, but you might have similar responsibilities and compensation as a software architect or programmer at other companies.
While you may have a pretty good idea of the nature of the job you're searching, it is wise to begin with a broad search, then gradually narrow your criterion until you get to a manageable number of results.
When you're viewing any search result, you'll see how many people have applied to the same ad and who in your network works at the company. It is always a good idea to network yourself into companies through your connections before applying directly.
With premium accounts, you'll also get a variety of other insights, including: a graph of the number of applications over time, the anticipated salary range, seniority, top skills and more.
You can be a member of
at any one time, and when you're within any of them you'll see menus for discussions, promotions, jobs, members and search. You might think that the jobs listed here are the same as the "Jobs" on the higher level, but this is not so.
This menu will reveal both job discussions and jobs. These can be posted by anyone in the group for free, and these jobs likely won't show up in the general job board unless they have been posted there also.
Don't limit yourself to just viewing the jobs within groups, because often the job discussions will also provide valuable information and links to position openings that are not widely known about.
Internal and external recruiters advertise positions they seek to fill in industry, job type, skill or location-based groups to produce a small, highly targeted and quality pool of candidates. The response to ads within groups is such that they can often take the time to carefully review each applicant's profile and qualifications.
, join many groups and look within each of them on a regular basis for positions that may be a good fit for you. Be sure to include groups within your industry, your skill sets, colleges you've attended and general location-based groups.
Bear in mind, LinkedIn is constantly changing. When it rolls out new features or formats it does so gradually to the overall network over a period of weeks. What you see on your screen may differ from one time to the next. And at the same moment, you may see things differently than someone else. | Getty Images By Arnie Fertig Over the course of the last few years, the value of traditional job boards has declined, while LinkedIn is now often thought of a | 32.8125 | 0.625 | 0.875 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/feb/27/abstract-artist-john-cecil-stephenson-show | http://web.archive.org/web/20160407082232id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/feb/27/abstract-artist-john-cecil-stephenson-show | Pioneering British abstract artist finally gets recognition with retrospective | 20160407082232 | He is one of the earliest and most accomplished of all British abstract artists, but also one of the least known and most overlooked.
Until last weekend, John Cecil Stephenson had been largely neglected with no public gallery or museum staging any exhibition of his work in almost 40 years – an injustice finally righted by Durham Art Gallery, 47 years after his death.
More than 50 works have now been gathered for a show given the title Pioneer of Modernism, which opened to the public on Saturday. Curator Conor Mullan said Stephenson worked in undeserved obscurity for most of his life. There were two reasons, his background and his personality.
"He just didn't play the game enough," Mullan said. "He didn't compromise and he just was not in to the politics of art, he couldn't deal with it."
The exhibition celebrates probably the most important 20th-century artist to come from County Durham. Born in Bishop Auckland in 1889, Stephenson had a tough working-class background that, Mullan argues, had a profound effect.
"He felt unsure of himself. He wasn't very good in highbrow, intellectual, bohemian circles. They were the people you had to deal with to climb up the ladder in London and he just wasn't very good at it. He did not do the networking.
"Much like today, if you're not in to marketing yourself as much as the art then it's a hard life."
Stephenson, however, did manage to make a living from his work. He was also head of art at the Northern Polytechnic in north London, now London Metropolitan University, but never achieved the fame of his friends and peers such as Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian, whose friendship is explored by a show running at the Courtauld Institute, London.
Stephenson was one of Mondrian's closest friends in London. They were a similar age and had a lot in common. Mullan said: "Stephenson was a very reserved man and very precise. Everything had to be perfect and Mondrian was very much the same. They were interested in work and pushing forward in art."
Stephenson was part of what the poet and critic Herbert Read called "a nest of gentle artists".
Encouraged by the painter Walter Sickert, he took on a studio in north London in 1914 and lived there for the rest of his life. His near neighbours over the years included Read, Nicholson and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Naum Gabo.
The Durham exhibition focuses on Stephenson's progression through the 1930s at the forefront of modernist and constructivist art.
By the late 1930s a lot of British artists were looking at abstraction, but Stephenson was already there. Some of his work has an optical element that pre-dates op art and the work of artists such as Bridget Riley by around 30 years.
But for all his talent and his friends, Stephenson was always something of an outsider. A natural reserve probably held him back. "He was an important guy, he just didn't know it," said Mullan. He was acutely conscious of his working-class roots, but distant from them.
During the first world war he was assigned back to County Durham where he worked in the production of munitions.
Stephenson was treated badly by locals who saw him as a dandified student. "All his life he felt a distance from the working class, he felt a distance from the middle class and he felt a distance from the upper class," Mullan said.
"He basically kept himself to himself. He was a silent man, he did not say a lot."
Stephenson was overlooked during his life as well as after it and he did not have a solo show until he was 71. The next year, he had the first of a series of strokes and never worked again.
Loans for the Durham show have included works lent by the British Museum, the V&A, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Government Art Collection.
But there have been works that the exhibition has been unable to show, not least Stephenson's most famous work Painting 1937 which is owned by Tate.
Mullan hopes this show will help bring him to a wider audience and encourage others to think about mounting a proper retrospective – perhaps in 2015, 50 years after his death.
• John Cecil Stephenson, Pioneer of Modernism is at Durham Art Gallery until 29 April | John Cecil Stephenson's work, overlooked in part because of poor self-promotion, celebrated in Durham exhibition | 43.3 | 0.75 | 1.15 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/18/gm-hit-with-10-billion-lawsuit-saying-recalls-damaged-brand.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160409140027id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2014/06/18/gm-hit-with-10-billion-lawsuit-saying-recalls-damaged-brand.html | GM hit with $10 billion lawsuit saying recalls damaged brand | 20160409140027 | A new lawsuit says General Motors should compensate millions of car and truck owners for lost resale value, potentially exceeding $10 billion, because a slew of recalls and a deadly delay in recalling cars with defective ignition switches has damaged its brand.
According to a complaint filed on Wednesday with the federal court in Riverside, California, GM hurt customers by concealing known defects and valuing cost-cutting over safety, leading to roughly 40 recalls covering more than 20 million vehicles this year alone.
It said this has caused a variety of late-model vehicles to lose roughly $500 to $2,600 in resale value.
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which filed the lawsuit, said the case could be worth more than $10 billion, and is the first seeking to force GM to pay a potential 15 million car and truck owners, not just those whose vehicles were recalled, for damage to its brand and reputation.
Read More Investors shrug shoulders at GM's latest recall
A GM spokesman, Greg Martin, declined to comment on the lawsuit. He said that many customers and analysts recognized the strength of the GM brand and that the market recognition has resulted in increased sales, transaction prices and residual values.
The lawsuit painted a "disturbing picture" of GM's approach to safety, including how "in truly Orwellian fashion" the largest U.S. automaker would encourage employees to avoid words such as "bad" and "failed,"and use euphemisms such as "issue" or "condition" rather than "problem"when discussing defects.
"GM's egregious and widely publicized conduct and the never-ending and piecemeal nature of GM's recalls has so tarnished the affected vehicles that no reasonable consumer would have paid the price they did when the GM brand meant safety and success," the complaint said.
Read MoreWe can't just take GM's word for it: GOP lawmaker | A new lawsuit says GM should compensate millions of car and truck owners for lost resale value. | 20 | 1 | 9 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/04/06/andrew-bird-gets-atypically-personal-are-you-serious/NxO26ktUjZshIec7yKwnZM/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160410052229id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2016/04/06/andrew-bird-gets-atypically-personal-are-you-serious/NxO26ktUjZshIec7yKwnZM/story.html | Andrew Bird gets atypically personal on ‘Are You Serious’ | 20160410052229 | “It has many layers,” says Andrew Bird of his new album, “Are You Serious.”
Andrew Bird has always been serious. Now, he’s getting personal, too.
The title of his new album, “Are You Serious,” is a wry bit of self-deprecation. Written largely as a cathartic response to a series of deeply trying episodes for him and his family, the new songs sound, at first blush, of a piece with Bird’s hyper-literate body of work. But they’re a much less guarded view of his thoughts and feelings than he’s allowed the world to glimpse before, he says in a telephone interview from the road.
“It has many layers,” says Bird, 42, of the album title, “but what it means to me is poking fun at the irony of the situation — that I started out not really being able to identify with the kind of songwriter that said, ‘Here’s my pain and my suffering, it’s a song.’ I always think, you’re just going to blurt it out like that? Are you serious? Immediately there’s a certain cynicism. I would question the sincerity. How do you do that every night? How do you keep reliving it?”
Yet that’s the position he’s put himself in on the tour that lands at Citi Wang Theatre on Saturday.
The new stuff isn’t exactly heart-on-sleeve coffeehouse folk. A song like “Left Handed Kisses” — a duet with Fiona Apple — still gets typically artful and meta, with lyrics like “You got me writing love longs, with a common refrain like this one here, baby.” (In character, Apple responds that he should “risk more than a few 50-cent words” in his “backhanded love song.”) But if there’s still a funhouse-mirror aspect to some of Bird’s constructions, the intent now is unusually personal.
Much of the album was written on a visit to the Illinois farm where he spent time as a teenager and wrote his first song. He was with his wife, fashion designer Katherine Tsina, and their young son. They were in the process of escaping from New York City, where they’d lived for nearly four years. The time there included the birth of their son, but also Tsina’s diagnosis with and treatment for thyroid cancer. Superstorm Sandy caused them to evacuate their apartment. It was time to get out — yet they hung around, waiting for the Affordable Care Act and its protections for patients with preexisting conditions to kick in. (They now live in the Los Angeles area.)
“Life is a bit different and things are a little more real, more visceral, and so that’s going to affect how I write,” Bird says. “It’s just causing me to lose some patience with some of the poetics.”
His tuneful but intricate sound is typically described with some combination of the words indie, rock, chamber and folk. His violin playing is a big part of it, as is his oft-noted facility for whistling. Bird’s distinctive singing voice can sound earnestly invested, yet somehow over it, like a thoughtful pessimist who’s willing to entertain your enthusiastic worldview but is pretty sure he’ll wind up disappointed.
“Are You Serious” is his first solo album with an outside producer credited: Tony Berg, who was something of an in-house adviser on 2005 breakthrough, “Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs.” Bird and Berg both say the new record is an effort to reach a wider audience, though by no means an overt lurch toward the commercial.
The artist’s newfound willingness to expose himself emotionally is congruent with the goal of appealing to new listeners, the producer says. “Isn’t that what people have always wanted to hear? Isn’t that what distinguishes one artist from another, his or her willingness to be candid? And he certainly is that on this album,” Berg says. “He’s one of the few guys making music today with an identifiable lyric voice. His lyrics are often enigmatic, but if you really dig deep you see he’s describing the contemporary human condition, the battle of soul and science, and whether or not one can reconcile those two things.”
Bird says crafting an album that “could play at a public pool or an ice skating rink, that could really cut through and become something that had a unifying effect” was his goal.
“I get these grand notions in my head that I can infiltrate the mainstream sometimes,” he says, though it’s worth noting that 2012 release “Break It Yourself” cracked the top 10 on the Billboard 200 album chart. “The idea was to go for the jugular as much as I can, but still on my terms. So we’ll see how far I can go. I definitely went to the edge of my comfort zone. Some drum stuff got a little more masculine than I generally like to go.”
“But,” he adds, “it was the right move.”
With Boogarins. At Citi Wang Theatre, April 9. Tickets: $36-$46. 800-982-2787, www.citicenter.org | Andrew Bird, a singer-songwriter whose multi-hyphenate style has always included a touch of whimsy, ventures a deeper emotional dig on his latest album. | 34.3 | 0.633333 | 0.766667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/04/06/plants-mit-scientist-hopes-harvest-new-medicines/PQvxrAm3KDLnR5SV0Bk6XM/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160412073137id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2016/04/06/plants-mit-scientist-hopes-harvest-new-medicines/PQvxrAm3KDLnR5SV0Bk6XM/story.html | In plants, MIT scientist hopes to harvest new medicines | 20160412073137 | The liquid under the lab bench looks like leaf litter soup. Vials of brown, ochre, and reddish dust, extracted from pollen, clutter the surface above. Beside them, a foil-covered beaker contains a cloudy goo derived from horny goat weed.
To biologist Jing-Ke Weng, that mess is a rich source of new medicines: drugs to treat cancer, perhaps, or blood ailments.
Many drug discovery experts would warn him away from such dreams. They’d point out that the biggest pharma companies in the world have spent decades, and millions, trying to make drugs from plants. They’d tell him it’s just too hard.
Weng, though, isn’t worried. At 34, he’s already helped map the molecular factories that produce some of the most important plant chemicals around. And now that he’s working at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, he’s determined to harness peanut skins and Kava Kava root — and the other strange vegetation in his seventh-floor greenhouse — to treat human disease.
The idea is not new. Some of our best-selling commercial drugs come from plants: aspirin from willow bark, the cancer drug Taxol from the Pacific yew tree, the leukemia medication vincristine from a pinkish jungle flower called the rosy periwinkle. And last year, Chinese chemist Tu Youyou shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her research on artemisinin, a malaria drug extracted from a bush called sweet wormwood.
But this type of botanical sleuthing is an anomaly in the biotech hotbed of Kendall Square.
Most large pharmaceutical companies phased out their screening of natural products in the 1980s. It was expensive, and eureka moments often turned sour: The researchers kept rediscovering molecules that had already been commercialized.
Academic labs and small startups have taken over some of that research, but they’ve focused mostly on bacteria and fungi, because in those microorganisms, the genes that code for medicinal compounds tend to stick together.
Not so with plants, said Gregory Verdine, a chemist at Harvard and founder of the natural products company Warp Drive Bio. “If you go into plants, you add another layer of complexity to what’s already incredibly complex,” he said.
Weng, though, finds the complex fascinating. Most scientists are loath to use the word “magical”— but that is Weng’s go-to adjective when describing his plants.
The conviction began when he was a kid in Hangzhou, China. If he got sick, his mother would walk out of their first-floor apartment to collect a potful of what he translates as “fishy-tasting grass.” In those days, it grew everywhere, like a weed. His mother would bring it to a boil on the stove for 20 minutes, and then scoop out the soggy blades, serving him the blackish, smelly liquid that remained.
“It doesn’t look good and it doesn’t taste good, but I like it, because it really helps when you feel bad,” he said.
As an undergraduate, Weng focused on neuroscience research. But he didn’t like having to kill mice for work. And so, for his PhD at Purdue, he returned to his love of plants and began to work on the chemistry of wood.
“He was the most creative student I have ever had and probably will ever have,” said Clint Chapple, his PhD supervisor. “Most PhD students graduate with one, two, three scientific papers that they’ve led. Jing-Ke published 13 papers out of his PhD.”
Weng may have been a superstar of a student, but the job offer from the Whitehead Institute surprised him. It’s a biomedical center full of cancer biologists; he studied how plants made rigid cell walls.
But he was unfazed. He knew how to break apart assembly lines of enzymes — and those cellular factories produced an almost infinite catalogue of strange chemicals, many of them medicinal.
He began to seek them out.
From a lecturer at a natural history museum, he learned that Micronesian tribes used the calming Kava Kava root for rituals. Soon after, he was unpacking live plants from a nursery in Hawaii. At a high school science fair, Weng’s father saw an experiment suggesting that peanut skins could help patients with low platelet counts. He mentioned it to his son; Weng bought 11 pounds of peanut skins from China that are now soaking in ethanol under a lab bench.
One of his post-docs — a surfer — pulled a wrack of red algae from a tide pool in California, having heard it harbored cancer-fighting compounds. Now they’re preparing to sequence it.
When he gets a plant, the first thing Weng does is to destroy it. He separates leaf from stem from root. Then each part is mashed up. The genetic material is extracted and sequenced, while another machine identifies the plant’s chemicals, so that he can link up those “magical” molecules to the genes that code for them — and hopefully mass-produce them in genetically engineered microbes.
Weng at times uses Amazon.com to initially gauge the potency of a plant, looking at the comments from people who have ordered herbal supplements. “People actually are [reporting] the type of response they’ve observed from their own body. It’s free information,” he explained.
It’s hard to say whether any of the shoots in his greenhouse — the tiny reddish green plant, or the flower that looks like the frilly hem of a flamenco dress — will yield an FDA-approved drug.
But as Weng walks among his beakers clouded with bacteria and his vials of pollen, he doesn’t look nervous. | Big pharmaceutical companies gave up on the idea decades ago, but not Jing-Ke Weng. | 61.388889 | 0.833333 | 1.833333 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/22/why-marijuana-investments-may-go-up-in-smoke.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160413030627id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/22/why-marijuana-investments-may-go-up-in-smoke.html | Why marijuana investments may go up in smoke | 20160413030627 | "Many investors have made a quick buck betting on legalization via marijuana stocks over the past year," said Alyssa Oursler, assistant editor at InvestorPlace.com, in a recent report. "Still others, though, have watched their investment fall flat following a big-time February spike."
Fraud alert: The scams are coming
Like many other scams, pitches for bogus marijuana investment opportunities will be made in a variety of ways, Finra said. These include email, tweets, blog posts, faxes, webinars, infomercials and invitations to attend a presentation in your area.
"People get burned when they act solely on some stock tip they hear about from a source they don't know," said Finra President Gerri Walsh. "Such wide solicitations, where a large number of people are being invited to get in on the ground floor, that's the hallmark of a scam."
Her advice: Stop and ask yourself, "Why me?" Why is a total stranger telling you about this really great investment opportunity?
"Con artists sometimes use false and misleading information to create unwarranted demand for shares of small, thinly traded companies that often have little or no history of financial success," Finra warns.
Once the stock rises, those behind these "pump-and-dump" schemes sell off their shares, and those who bought later in the game are left with worthless shares.
(Read more: Obamacare is coming, and so are the con artists)
One company highlighted in Finra's Marijuana Stock Scams alert issued more than 30 press releases during the first half of this year. It also used sponsored links and spam email to promote its entry into the medical marijuana business. The company said its stock was "poised to light up the chart!" and that it "could double its price SOON."
Finra found that the company had just started to formulate a business plan and had nothing but losses on its balance sheet.
"Beware of any sort of guaranteed yield or return on investment, because no one knows how successful these companies are going to be. And beware of anyone who promises there's no risk," said Colorado Securities Commissioner Fred Joseph.
Be cautious. Don't be rushed or high-pressured into something, and don't get greedy. Investigate before you invest. Check with your state's regulatory agencies, and make sure the promoter is licensed in your state using Finra's BrokerCheck. You can check on the investment using the SEC's EDGAR database.
Remember, any investment in the marijuana business, no matter how legitimate, is risky because cannabis is still viewed as illegal by the federal government, which could decide to shut down a company at any time.
—By CNBC contributor Herb Weisbaum. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter @TheConsumerman or visit The ConsumerMan website. | Some investors believe legal pot will be the next big thing. This "green rush" mentality is custom-made for scammers. | 22.08 | 0.6 | 0.68 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/04/13/esperanza-spalding-stages-adventurous-pop-coup-shubert/rUp3jLRgqNnnFliaWvLeFM/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160414121339id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/04/13/esperanza-spalding-stages-adventurous-pop-coup-shubert/rUp3jLRgqNnnFliaWvLeFM/story.html | Esperanza Spalding stages adventurous pop coup at Shubert | 20160414121339 | Esperanza Spalding may be physically svelte, but her soul is large and, like Whitman’s, contains multitudes. That much was clear Tuesday at the Citi Shubert Theatre, where Spalding performed songs of herself — or rather of her alter ego, Emily (her real-life middle name) — from her wildly inventive recent album, “Emily’s D+Evolution.”
Spalding had field-tested this material at the Paradise last year, and it was evident even then that the four-time Grammy winner’s pop powers continue to grow. Her singing and songwriting have gained force and confidence. The new project adds a gratifying layer of theatricality to live performances, while the stripped-down backing band keeps a tight focus on Spalding’s considerable, wide-ranging talents.
The Shubert set opened with backup singers Emily Elbert, Shawna Corso, and Corey King — all attired in white with yellow neckties — filing robotlike onto the right side of the stage, and drummer Justin Tyson and guitarist Matthew Stevens taking their places on the left. Spalding, decked out in dark gray dress, red pants, and black crown, and electric bass in hand, made a dramatic entrance climbing over a curtain, and launched into “Good Lava,” the album-opening celebration of uninhibited creativity.
All 12 tunes from the recording got an airing, but their sequence was shuffled, enhancing a narrative arc while also withholding hook-oriented potential hits “Funk the Fear” and “Unconditional Love” until toward the end. The most theatrical pieces came early; backing vocalists recited lyrics in rapid-fire unison with the leader on “Ebony and Ivy,” during which Spalding pored through books from an onstage bookcase and received her own yellow necktie in a graduation ceremony. Elbert played with puppets while Spalding sang at an upright piano on “Elevate or Operate,” and King and Corso took turns being comforted for romantic disappointment on “Rest in Pleasure,” “Judas,” and “Farewell Dolly.”
Spalding’s singing and writing called to mind Joni Mitchell’s sophistication on “Noble Nobles,” “One,” and “Judas,” and her prominent bass was reminiscent of Mitchell’s onetime collaborator Jaco Pastorius. The night’s highlight was the closing “Unconditional Love,” with Stevens and Tyson, joined by Spalding, climactically unleashing their instrumental chops.
“Emily’s D+Evolution” takes the experimental ideals that she learned as a student of jazz into new directions.
Encore covers included Anthony Newley’s “I Want It Now” (from her album) and David Bowie’s “If You Can See Me” (from his 2013 album “The Next Day”). The latter offered sly tribute to Bowie’s longtime associate Tony Visconti, who helped produce Spalding’s album, while paying overt homage to another bold explorer whose artistry contained multitudes.
At Citi Shubert Theatre, April 12
photos by Ben Stas for The Boston Globe | Focusing on her newest album during a show at the Citi Shubert Theatre, singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding enhanced her show with theatrical flair. | 21.730769 | 0.692308 | 1.923077 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/04/19/00/57/ecuador-quake-death-toll-rises-to-350 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160419175330id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/04/19/00/57/ecuador-quake-death-toll-rises-to-350 | Hopes for survivors dwindle in Ecuador | 20160419175330 | Earthquake-stricken Ecuador faces the grim reality of recovering more bodies than survivors as rescue efforts moved into a third day and the death toll climbed over 400 in the poor South American country.
Praying for miracles, desperate family members beseeched rescue teams to find their missing loved ones as they dug through the debris of flattened homes, hotels, and stores in the hardest-hit Pacific coastal region.
In Pedernales, a devastated rustic beach town, crowds gathered behind yellow tape to watch firemen and police sift through rubble into the night. The town's soccer stadium was serving as a makeshift relief centre and a morgue.
"Find my brother! Please!" shouted Manuel, 17, throwing his arms up to the sky in front of a small corner store where his younger brother had been working when the quake struck on Saturday night.
When an onlooker said recovering a body would at least give him the comfort of burying his sibling, Manuel yelled: "Don't say that!"
But for Manuel and hundreds of other anxious Ecuadorians with relatives missing, time was running out after Saturday's magnitude 7.8 quake.
As of Tuesday, rescue efforts would become more of a search for corpses, Interior Minister Jose Serrano told Reuters. The death toll stood at 413, but was expected to rise.
The quake has injured at least 2600 people, damaged more than 1500 buildings, and left 18,000 people spending the night in shelters, according to the leftist government.
Visiting the disaster zone on Monday, a moved President Rafael Correa said rebuilding would cost billions of dollars and may inflict a "huge" economic toll on the OPEC nation of 16 million people.
In many isolated villages or towns struck by the quake, survivors struggled without water, power, or transport. Rescue operations continued, but the sickly, sweet stench of death told them what they were most likely to find.
"There are bodies crushed in the wreckage and from the smell it's obvious they are dead," said army captain Marco Borja in the small tourist village of Canoa.
"Today we brought out between seven and eight bodies."
Nearly 400 rescue workers flew in from various Latin American neighbours, along with 83 specialists from Switzerland and Spain, to boost rescue efforts.
The US said it would dispatch a team of disaster experts while Cuba was sending a team of doctors.
To finance the costs of the emergency, about $US600 million ($A774.74 million) in credit from multilateral lenders was immediately activated, the government said.
Ecuador also announced late on Monday that it had signed off on a credit line for $US2 billion from the China Development Bank to finance public investment.
China has been the largest financier of Ecuador since 2009 and the credit had been under negotiation before the quake. | At least 350 people have lost their lives in Ecuador's worst earthquake in decades and more than 2,000 others have been injured. | 22.708333 | 0.625 | 0.791667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/02/09/cybersecurity-challenges/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160419223518id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/02/09/cybersecurity-challenges/ | Cybersecurity: What It Takes to Protect Data and Identities | 20160419223518 | Judging by the defeatist stance of the security industry in reaction to high profile breaches of just about everything and everyone, and the billions lost every year by banks, credit card companies and brokerages, you might think that this whole cybersecurity thing is way beyond us. The experts claim the bad guys are unstoppable, that prevention is impossible, that it’s so complicated and so hard that the best we can do is buy cyber insurance and go hide under the bed. It’s as though, when it comes to protecting our data, identities and money, we’ve fallen and can’t get up.
Let’s talk about that moonshot we pulled off. The computer in that capsule that transported three men—sitting on top of a Saturn V rocket, standing 363 feet in height and producing a ludicrous 7.68 million pounds (34 meganewtons) of thrust from five monstrous kerosene-gulping engines—to the moon, 233,455 miles away, where two of them landed, and brought them all back safely, mind you? That little gadget had less computing power than those learning toys for preschoolers.
Too extreme of an example? How about something we did a really long time ago? Like the discovery of germs. Try convincing a venture capitalist to give you funding for this: “So, yeah, we discovered these little invisible creatures that live in our food, air and water and sometimes they make us sick.” Or even better, the cure for those diseases: “Hi, we’re back. Now we need more funding because we figured out we can grow other invisible creatures from mold and garbage to cure the diseases the first creatures caused.” Of course. To whom do I make out the check?
Here are a few more things that are harder than cybersecurity: Flight. The automobile. The Internet. The Eiffel Tower. In fact, any modern skyscraper and everything in it.
You get the idea. We have this almost limitless track record of astounding accomplishment and yet, we seem to be willing to write off security online as something completely mysterious and beyond our abilities. Worse, we seem to be willing to accept defeat in this area, as if that were the best available option.
Just last summer in one of the largest and most stunning breaches of government, nearly 21.5 million people at the Office of Personnel Management lost their personal information, including Social Security numbers and even fingerprints. In the story, The New York Times reports, “[The breaches] seemed certain to intensify debate in Washington over what the government must do to address its substantial weaknesses in cybersecurity, long the subject of dire warnings but seldom acted upon by agencies, Congress or the White House.”
Yes, intensifying the debate would be nice, but a bit late. Perhaps it would be a good idea to intensify the debate after we get those vulnerabilities, which are apparently rampant, fixed.
But no, because it gets better.
In the same article, The New York Times quoted Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, who said, “This incident that we are talking about today is unfortunately not without precedent. We have to raise our level of cybersecurity in both the private sector and the public sector.”
If it’s not without precedent, then what happened after all those other breaches? And by the way, this guy leads the league with his capacity for stating the obvious by saying we need to raise our level of cybersecurity. How about actually having some cybersecurity, because apparently, we have none.
But here’s the best part. Katherine Archuleta, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, held a conference call to explain the extent of the damage and the agency’s planned response. She said, “I am committed to the work that I am doing at O.P.M. We are working very hard, not only at O.P.M. but across government, to ensure the cybersecurity of all our systems, and I will continue to do so.”
She also announced that the O.P.M would be implementing some new security measures—how’s that for timing—and that the victims of the breach would receive, you guessed it, free credit and identity theft monitoring.
She also said she would not resign, despite members of Congress from both parties calling for her head.
She resigned the next day.
The people who created these attacks are not superhuman. They succeed because we help them. They work with what we give them, in almost every instance. We know better, but we don’t do better, and so our systems are full of security holes, inadequate safeguards and lots of information worth stealing.
Instead of waiting until there’s been an attack and then cleaning it up, we need to shift our angle of vision and our attention to the source of the attacks. This requires that we shift our focus from breach discovery and incident response, to anticipation and prevention. In other words, our security efforts need to work more like a bodyguard and less like a police force. If we can catch threats while they’re still just threats, we’ll have far fewer incidents to explain and apologize for.
Finally, it’s also important that we shift from trying to detect anomalies in big data, and looking instead at “small data” and the patterns hacker create therein. On the Internet, packets move from one place to another and everything leaves a trail. Send out enough attacks and you’re not creating anomalies, you’re creating a signature. Pick up that signature and you’ll find it leads right to the attacker.
We can have cybersecurity that’s worthy of the name, if we’re willing to change our approach. But it is doable and it’s certainly worth doing. And it’s not even as hard as sticking a bit of cotton to both ends of a little paper stick.
Oren J. Falkowitz is the co-founder and CEO at Area 1 Security | Here's what it takes to protect our data, identities and money. | 82.428571 | 0.785714 | 2.928571 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/3-foundations-for-beautiful-skin-1461248591 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160421203945id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/3-foundations-for-beautiful-skin-1461248591 | 3 Foundations for Beautiful Skin | 20160421203945 | A host of factors (stress, pollution, age, etc.) can conspire against a luminous, lit-from-within complexion. Three new foundations offer lightweight coverage free of opacifying fillers to help produce radiant skin. Building on its cult-favorite Touche Éclat highlighter pen, Yves Saint Laurent introduces Touche Éclat Foundation, which contains stimulating plant extracts that improve brightness. To guard against environmental aggressors while providing a virtually poreless finish, there’s Chanel Les Beiges Healthy Glow Foundation. Finally, Giorgio Armani Beauty Maestro Glow eschews water as a main ingredient in favor of nourishing oils that, together with finely milled pigments, create a supple, flawless texture. All allow you to glow forth and conquer. | Three new foundations from Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel and Giorgio Armani. | 10.307692 | 1 | 2.076923 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2016/04/14/some-family-worthy-arrivals-disc/nIUDH2OXk4MSjZEmpgEQhK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160421222833id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/movies/2016/04/14/some-family-worthy-arrivals-disc/nIUDH2OXk4MSjZEmpgEQhK/story.html | Some family-worthy arrivals on disc | 20160421222833 | It certainly seems that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015) worked just as intended by J.J. Abrams and the franchise’s other new stewards. You dutifully brought your kids to the local multiplex to indoctrinate them in the legacy of Luke and Vader and Han and Leia. But by the time John Williams’s exit music played, these young padawans were likely the ones helping you tell your Kylo Rens from your Kylie Minogues. As Abrams sums up in a well-done production documentary, “The fun of celebrating the return of these characters that we know is certainly a part of this movie. [But] it felt like a story about a generational handoff, that this was really a story about Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo Ren.” If the hour-plus feature isn’t brisk enough for your crew, there’s always the deleted-scenes gallery, which includes a must-see snowspeeder chase. But there should be a little something for everyone in the overview, from cast members at work to others at play. John Boyega, who plays good-guy stormtrooper Finn, ecstatically lets his fanboy flag fly when he first sees the Millennium Falcon set, while Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) dons an out-there getup in real life for her motion-capture turn as Maz Katana, the film’s diminutive watering-hole matriarch. Abrams is all good humor discussing Maz’s scenes, admitting, “Basically you go, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to do the cantina again.’ But on the other hand, it’s ‘Star Wars,’ and if you don’t have a version of [the cantina], I would leave feeling like, Well, where was that?” (Disney, digital HD $19.99, DVD $22.98, Blu-ray $29.98)
NORM OF THE NORTH (2016)
Sorry, Judy Hopps fans, no word just yet on a home entertainment release for “Zootopia.” But there’s always this month’s other story about an animal with gumption migrating to the big city to see justice served. Here it’s oddball polar bear Norm (Rob Schneider) heading to New York to stop a nominally human developer (Ken Jeong) from encroaching on the wilderness. Oh, and to bust a few moves to “The Arctic Shake” — which is featured in a bonus singalong, naturally. Other extras include a trivia segment and outtakes. (Lionsgate, digital HD $14.99, DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $34.99, available Tuesday)
WABBIT. SEASON ONE, PART ONE (2015-16)
Call us Elmer Fuddy-duddies, but we were never huge fans of “The Looney Tunes Hour,” Cartoon Network’s “hip” Bugs-and-Daffy makeover from a few years back. If anything, we’ve got even bigger reservations about this latest series, which none too subtly alters the ’toons classic visual style. (What’s up with the Twittery handle, BTW — something they brainstormed watching “Frozen”?) Still, it’s always interesting to see how and where an update like this connects with our kids, and whether that translates into curiosity about the vintage stuff. Includes 26 episodes altogether. (Warner, DVD $19.97, April 26)
LEGO SCOOBY-DOO!: HAUNTED HOLLYWOOD (2016)
Think we’re throwing grown-up shade on “Wabbit”? Don’t get us started on Cartoon Network’s “Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!,” which for whatever reason feels the need to make Scoob, Shaggy, and the gang look like Seth MacFarlane doodles. On a less curmudgeonly note, we can’t wait to see our favorite meddling kids and their dog get the Lego treatment. Comes with a miniature figurine. (Warner, digital HD $14.99, available now; DVD $19.98, Blu-ray $24.98, May 10)
KUNG FU PANDA 3 (2016)
A story that builds toward Po (Jack Black) training an army of his panda brethren is agreeable enough, even if the fun isn’t exponentially greater. Cast newcomers include Bryan Cranston, as Po’s long-lost birth dad, and J.K. Simmons, as a villainous, chi-stealing bull. (Fox, digital HD $14.99, DVD $19.99, Blu-ray $24.99; May)
LEGO DC COMICS SUPERHEROES: JUSTICE LEAGUE — COSMIC CLASH (2016)
Maybe you’re among those who caught “Batman v Superman” and got a bigger charge out of the preview trailer for “The Lego Batman Movie.” If so, there’s a whole universe of plastic-brick superheroics you can check out already, including this recent made-for-DVD feature. (Warner, digital HD $19.99, DVD $19.98, Blu-ray $24.98)
ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: THE ROAD CHIP (2015)
When the Chipmunks become convinced that beleaguered father figure Dave (Jason Lee) is going to marry his kindly new girlfriend and dump them, they follow him on a trip to Miami to thwart the proposal. Not the freshest, but worth it for an energetic New Orleans jazz parade rendition of “Uptown Funk.” And still superior to those visually creepy Chipmunks your kids are watching on Nick Jr. (Fox, digital HD $14.99, DVD $29.98, Blu-ray $39.99)
MICKEY MOUSE CLUBHOUSE: MICKEY’S SPORT-Y-THON (2016)
Soccer and T-ball rained out? You might try passing the time with this Olympics-style (or Laff-a-Lympics-style?) diversion. Your future all-stars might learn a few things about teamwork and sportsmanship, to boot. (Disney, DVD $19.99, May 24)
OPEN SEASON: SCARED SILLY (2016)
It’s more high jinks with Elliot the deer and Boog the bear in this made-for-video sequel. (Sony, DVD $25.99, Blu-ray $30.99)
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: HALF-SHELL HEROES — BLAST TO THE PAST (2016)
The Turtles + dinosaurs — something to appease your crew if they’re already dreaming about this summer’s TMNT big-screen sequel. (Or if those freakishly realistic movie iterations are still giving them nightmares.) And next month, the intrepid terrapins go futuristic in another DVD release, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Beyond the Known Universe.” (Paramount, DVD $19.99)
As a resilient teen heroine facing an escalating alien invasion, Chloë Grace Moretz (“Hugo”) performs quite capably — until she finds emotional connection amid the chaos and the tone turns soapy. Still, the target audience might be fine seeing melodrama mingled with intriguing themes about humans being robbed of their humanity. Violent on a par with “The Hunger Games” at points. (Sony, digital HD $14.99, DVD $26.99, Blu-ray $34.99, May 3)
“Expendable” is right: Dolph Lundgren subs for Arnold Schwarzenegger in this sequel to the unfathomably ridiculous 1990 comedy. Because you, um, demanded it? (Universal, DVD $19.98, May 17) | Upcoming discs for kids of all ages. | 173.5 | 0.625 | 0.625 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/arizona-cardinals-wr-larry-fitzgerald-piling-up-the-numbers-in-12th-nfl-season-120415 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160422114457id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/arizona-cardinals-wr-larry-fitzgerald-piling-up-the-numbers-in-12th-nfl-season-120415 | Fitzgerald piling up the numbers in 12th NFL season | 20160422114457 | TEMPE, Ariz. -- Statistically at least, Larry Fitzgerald's 12th NFL season is his best.
As he piles up the numbers, he approaches more career milestones that push his name up with some of the game's best.
The 32-year-old Arizona Cardinals receiver needs eight catches to have 1,000 for his career. Another 56 yards receiving and he passes Hall of Famer Andre Reed into 15th place on the career list.
With an eight-yard catch, he would hit 1,000 yards receiving in a season for the seventh time in his career, but first since 2011.
And there is still a month to go.
As usual, Fitzgerald brushed aside his career numbers.
"It's not time to start smelling the roses now," he said after Thursday's practice. "We're in the midst of something special here. Every single week is a work in progress to try to help ourselves reach our goals. So for individuals to start looking at personal things, this is not the time for that. Ten years from now when we're sitting at the bar together we can talk about it. But right now, it's not the time to reflect."
Fitzgerald is on pace to pass his single-season bests in receptions (103 set in 2005, his second NFL season) and yards receiving (1,431 at the end of Kurt Warner's passes in the Super Bowl season of 2008).
It would be his fifth season of at least 1,400 yards receiving. Only Jerry Rice has more with six.
But Fitzgerald said this year's numbers don't mean that he's a better receiver than he was back then. He's playing a different position. When coach Bruce Arians took over in 2013, he moved Fitzgerald from wideout to the slot.
"I played a much different role early in my career -- outside the numbers," Fitzgerald said. "Now I'm inside. It's much easier to get catches inside because you're so much closer to the quarterback. The distance is much smaller, so it's much easier to get them. It's just the game's a little faster, but football is football -- be in the right place, catch the football and do what you're asked to do. It kind of works like that."
It's rough work. His chores include blocking some big, tough players. Quarterback Carson Palmer has called Fitzgerald "the best blocking wide receiver in the league."
The position change didn't drive him out of Arizona, which at 9-2 has the second-best record in the NFC this season. Last offseason he signed a two-year, $22 million contract, all of it guaranteed. He could spend his entire career on one team.
Offensive coordinator Harold Goodwin said Fitzgerald consistently works hard.
"He always wants to be accountable to his teammates, accountable to himself," Goodwin said. "He works his butt off. No matter what we ask him to do, he's doing it and he's doing it at a high level."
In their third season together, Palmer and Fitzgerald are comfortable in Arians' intricate system.
"I've always felt like I've had a great rapport with Carson since Day 1," Fitzgerald said. "I mean, you don't really need much work with a guy that's that accurate and has that much experience. You just need to be where you're supposed to be and he has to trust you as opposed to you trusting him, because he's very accurate and he knows what he's doing."
After some leaner years, Fitzgerald finds his name among the best in the NFL again. He is third in the league in receptions with 83 and fifth in yards receiving with 992. He has caught a pass in 174 consecutive games, by far the longest active streak in the NFL, and he has far surpassed the statistics he accumulated all of last season.
Fitzgerald was asked how he stays in such good shape after playing so long in the league.
"The biggest thing that I tell young guys is, 'Get your rest,'" he said. "I'm one of those guys, I'm in bed by nine o'clock. I always get nine hours of sleep every night. I'm constantly staying hydrated and I stay off my feet when I'm home for the most part, unless I'm chasing my kids around."
But was he that way when he broke into the league at barely 21 years old?
"When I was younger," he said with a big smile, "no, I wasn't like that." | The 32-year-old Cardinals receiver needs eight catches to have 1,000 for his career. Another 56 yards receiving and he passes Hall of Famer Andre Reed into 15th place on the career list. | 25.388889 | 1 | 28.888889 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/beyonce-lemonade-twitter-reactions | http://web.archive.org/web/20160424195254id_/http://www.people.com/article/beyonce-lemonade-twitter-reactions | Twitter Reactions : People.com | 20160424195254 | 04/23/2016 AT 10:20 PM EDT
debuted on HBO on Saturday and #BeyHive fans went crazy for the latest video which featured Serena Williams, Zendaya and husband Jay Z.
After teasing the secret project for a week, the singer's deeply personal one-hour film set fire to social media where fans suggested a possible break up may be in the works.
"Looking at my watch he should have been home. I regret the day I put that ring on," Bey said during the video, prompting a flurry of reaction.
"Looking at my watch he should have been home. I regret the day I put that ring on."#LEMONADE pic.twitter.com/tC68vhx0Kb
"Jay-Z hiding from the beyhive after #Lemonade ends"
Jay-Z hiding from the beyhive after #Lemonade ends. pic.twitter.com/j2qjnaTqBa
Before the big show went off in between the TV premiere of
and a boxing special, loyal fans of Bey eagerly waited in anticipation.
Though she kept her cameo a secret, Serena Williams showed Beyoncé'
"Me getting ready to watch @beyonce#lemonade premiere on HBO. A birdie wants me to tell you all you EVERYONE to tune in. I have a feeling it will be AMAZING.... Trust me..."
The highly anticipated musical event comes just days before the singer kicks off her Formation World Tour.
star Aidy Bryant tweeted: "SAY MY NAME, SAY MY NAME #LEMONADE
SAY MY NAME, SAY MY NAME #LEMONADE
While fans were left with mixed feelings, one things for sure:
There are no words for what we all collectively experienced. Seriously, lack of words. #LEMONADE
There are no words for what we all collectively experienced. Seriously, lack of words. #LEMONADE
premiered on HBO on Saturday. Her new album, also called
was released on Saturday at 10 p.m. ET. | The singer unveiled her deeply personal secret project on HBO Saturday | 32.454545 | 0.909091 | 1.636364 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/04/26/20/39/96-fans-unlawfully-killed-in-uk-disaster | http://web.archive.org/web/20160427115541id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/04/26/20/39/96-fans-unlawfully-killed-in-uk-disaster | 96 fans 'unlawfully killed' in UK stadium | 20160427115541 | The 96 Liverpool soccer fans who were crushed to death in overcrowded sections at Hillsborough Stadium in 1989 were "unlawfully killed" in a disaster caused by police actions, a jury has concluded.
The police force responsible for the stadium in the northern English city of Sheffield on Tuesday said "we unequivocally accept the verdict," while apologising for their failings to families who have spent 27 years campaigning for the police to be officially blamed.
Relatives of the victims of the disaster chanted "Justice for the 96" and sang the Liverpool club anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone, outside a specially-built courtroom after the conclusion of two years of fresh inquests into Britain's worst sporting disaster.
By the end of the year, police plan to conclude a separate criminal investigation into wrongdoing by authorities at the April 1989 FA Cup semifinal match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at the stadium where second-tier English club Sheffield Wednesday still plays.
The Crown Prosecution Service said it will then "formally consider whether any criminal charges should be brought against any individual or corporate body."
British Prime Minister David Cameron paid tribute to the courage displayed by the victims' families, tweeting that "long overdue justice" had been provided by the jury.
Families have fought to ensure authorities were held to account after being angered by the verdicts of accidental death at the original inquests.
Those verdicts were overturned in 2012 following a far-reaching inquiry into the disaster that examined previously secret documents and exposed the wrongdoing and mistakes by police.
New hearings held in Warrington, close to Liverpool in northwest England, required a jury for the longest time in British legal history.
Relatives leapt to their feet, cheering and weeping, as the jury gave its answer to the most significant of the 14 questions set by the coroner, reaching the verdict of unlawful killing by a 7-2 majority.
That finding meant the jury was convinced David Duckenfield, the then-South Yorkshire Police chief superintendent in charge of policing the game, was in breach of his duty of care to fans and his actions amounted to "gross negligence."
Duckenfield told the inquests that he told a "terrible lie" by saying fans had rushed through gates at the Leppings Lane turnstiles eight minutes before kickoff rather than admitting to authorising for the gates to be opened.
The order allowed more than 2000 fans to flood into a standing-room section behind a goal with the 54,000-capacity stadium already nearly full.
Inside the stadium, five minutes after kickoff, a surge of people pushed hundreds of spectators against a steel mesh fence that soon collapsed. A police officer ran onto the field and asked the referee to halt the game, which was abandoned after six minutes at 3.06pm
Fans and rescue workers ripped up advertising boards and used them as makeshift stretchers as police and first aid workers treated victims on the field.
"The police delayed calling a major incident so the appropriate emergency response was delayed," the jury concluded. "There was a lack of co-ordination, command and control which delayed or prevented appropriate responses." | Jury verdicts mark the conclusion of inquests that lasted more than two years into Britain's worst sporting disaster. | 29.9 | 0.9 | 3.6 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/netflix-orders-more-wet-hot-american-summer-10-years-later | http://web.archive.org/web/20160428003344id_/http://www.people.com/article/netflix-orders-more-wet-hot-american-summer-10-years-later | Ten Years Later Set for 2017 : People.com | 20160428003344 | 04/27/2016 AT 02:45 PM EDT
You may want to make it your beeswax to tune in for this.
The Camp Firewood counselors are finally making good on a promise they made in the 2001 cult-classic comedy
That's right, Netflix has announced that there will be an eight-episode series entitled
The series comes after 2015's star-studded prequel series
has yet to be announced, but, like the original film and prequel series, it will be written by
is slated to premiere on Netflix in 2017. | The new series follows the 2015 prequel series, which also streamed on Netflix | 7.357143 | 0.642857 | 1.214286 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.cnbc.com/2013/11/06/phablet-sales-soar-amid-smartphone-screen-wars.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160429084704id_/http://www.cnbc.com/2013/11/06/phablet-sales-soar-amid-smartphone-screen-wars.html | 'Phablet' sales soar amid smartphone screen wars | 20160429084704 | It's been one of the tech buzzwords of 2013, and now fresh research has revealed that sales of "phablets" - oversized smartphone handsets that are a cross between a phone and tablet - have surged this year.
A quarter of a billion smartphones were shipped in the third quarter of 2013, with 22 percent of these featuring a screen size of 5 inches of more, according to a report by Canalys research firm published late Tuesday.
Some 56 million of the larger-screen devices were shipped over the three months, compared to 45 million in the previous quarter - a 24 percent rise.
(Read More: Hottest mobile trends)
Breaking this down further, 66 percent of these phablets had a 5 inch display, 31 percent had screens of between 5 and 6 inches, whilst just 3 percent had 6 inch or larger screens.
"This trend continues to be driven mainly by Samsung, which dominates the large-screen segment," Canalys said in a press release. The Korean company has continued to update its popular Galaxy Note and Mega ranges, but rivals Sony, Huawei and HTC have all "gone big" in 2013, bringing larger-screen models to the market.
Jingwen Wang, a research analyst from Canalys said the 6 inch-plus segment would be boosted next quarter by Nokia's arrival in the market, but warned it would not develop quickly unless Samsung invested in marketing strategies to promote its Galaxy Mega range.
"Over the next year, Asia Pacific is expected to continue to lead the demand for large-screen smartphones due to the nature of emerging markets there. Low PC and home broadband penetration, a high level of mobile network use, and low Wi-Fi network penetration in these countries limit the presence and functionality of Wi-Fi tablets," she said in the press release.
(Read More: 'Selfie' and 'phablet' added to the English dictionary) | Fresh research has revealed that sales of "phablets" - oversized smartphone handsets - have surged this year. | 18.7 | 1 | 11.6 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/04/27/campussims-phone-plans-cater-boston-area-international-students/74FqgUr0OptVJn3XA3wDhO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160429122508id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/04/27/campussims-phone-plans-cater-boston-area-international-students/74FqgUr0OptVJn3XA3wDhO/story.html | CampusSIMs’ phone plans cater to Boston area’s international students | 20160429122508 | Fangzheng Guo, from Shandong province in China, came to the United States two years ago to attend graduate school at Tufts University. At the top of his to-do list upon touching down in Boston: Get an American cellphone.
“Your parents, they want to know you got there safely,” Guo said.
The next day, he went to a T-Mobile store and purchased a prepaid monthly plan for $40. But he said he was dissatisfied with T-Mobile’s customer service and sometimes had problems making international calls.
So when his friend told him about CampusSIMs, another prepaid plan that caters to international students, he was on board.
“It was more convenient,” said Guo, who felt at ease after reaching a customer-service representative who spoke Chinese.
Guo is a member of a growing and increasingly important population for businesses in Boston: international students.
Of the approximately 250,000 students at institutions of higher education in Greater Boston, 47,895 of them, or nearly 20 percent, are foreign nationals.
Foreign students in Greater Boston spent about $120 million here on non-college-related expenses like phone plans in 2014, according to the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau.
CampusSIMs is getting a chunk of that money. The growing startup has partnered with international student offices at 250 universities — including Harvard, Northeastern, and New York University — that distribute SIM cards to students who have purchased one of three plans offered by CampusSIMs.
The Boston-based mobile provider raised $2.5 million from investors this month in a funding round led by Nauta Capital, an international investing firm with offices in Boston.
CampusSIMs founder and chief executive Scott Pirrello, 27, is a Weston native who started the company in 2011. Pirrello said it has thousands of customers in all 50 states.
Pirrello’s company follows much the same model as Boost Mobile, TracFone, Virgin Mobile USA, and Cricket Wireless. Instead of owning and operating cell towers and satellites, CampusSIMs and companies like it buy minutes and data in bulk from the four big telecoms — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — and resell them. Its customers access the cellular network via SIM cards.
These resellers are called Mobile Virtual Network Operators, or MVNOs. Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, a consulting firm in Brookline, said customers who choose MVNOs are often looking for something different than the American standard of signing a contract that locks you in for a few years.
And MVNOs often serve specialized markets, he said, such as ethnic groups or millennials. They want services such as unlimited international calling that “a big carrier, like an AT&T or Verizon, who have 100 million-plus subscribers, aren’t focused on.”
Pirrello said he concentrates on integrating features that matter to international students, such as plans that offer up to 500 minutes of international calling and the ability to freeze an account for the summer, when many international students return home.
CampusSIMs customers activate and manage their accounts through a smartphone app that works in English and Mandarin.
Pirrello said CampusSIMs’ cheapest plan is its most popular: $25 a month for unlimited text, 1,000 minutes of talk, and 500 MB (0.5 GB) of data.
The average American smartphone user burned through 1.6 GB of data each month in the first half of 2015, according to Strategy Analytics. But Pirrello said his customers spend most of their time on campuses and are never far from free Wi-Fi. And CampusSIMs signed a deal in April that will let customers connect to Wi-Fi hot spots of “two major cable providers.” | The mobile provider raised $2.5 million from investors this month. | 59.25 | 1 | 8.5 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160502-andrew-mccarthys-irish-quests-irelands-ireland | http://web.archive.org/web/20160503123822id_/http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160502-andrew-mccarthys-irish-quests-irelands-ireland | Andrew McCarthy's Irish quests: Ireland's Ireland | 20160503123822 | Driving distance in Ireland is misleading — and irrelevant. You can cross the entire country, east to west, along the M4 and M6 motorways in three hours. But a drive of less than 77km from Galway to Clifden in Connemara can take twice that, especially along the coast roads.
The bustle of the university town is left suddenly behind on R336, and within ten miles you’re deep into Gaeltacht (Irish speaking) country. Inside Tigh Hughes pub in the insular town of Spiddal you’ll hear little but Irish Gaelic spoken. By the time you get past Cashel, the R342 is being pushed around like a piece of string along the filigreed coast. Unexpected bays reveal themselves when you thought you were miles from the sea. Roads are often unmarked out here. You will get lost. A desire for order needs to be reconsidered and the road simply followed. Inland, rough, unmanicured tundra rises up into the mountains of the Twelve Bens. This is Connemara — Ireland’s Ireland.
Somehow you’ll find yourself in Roundstone on the R341 at some point, and you’ll be glad you did. The view out to sea is postcard-ready and the people welcoming. Eventually all roads west lead to Clifden, the furthest outpost in County Galway. Luckily, the bustling market town has several decent pubs.
If you would like to comment on this or anything else you have seen on BBC Autos, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And while you're at it, join the BBC Autos community on Instagram.
And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Autos, Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. | BBC Autos invited the actor, director, travel writer and Ireland devotee to pick his favourite Emerald Isle road trips. | 16.181818 | 0.5 | 0.590909 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/05/03/13/53/trump-looks-to-indiana-to-trounce-cruz | http://web.archive.org/web/20160504133446id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/05/03/13/53/trump-looks-to-indiana-to-trounce-cruz | Trump looks to Indiana to trounce Cruz | 20160504133446 | The Republican primary in the Midwestern state of Indiana could be decisive in the showdown between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for the conservative party's nomination in the US presidential elections in November.
"If we win Indiana, it's over," Trump declared at a rally in the state on Tuesday as he hopes to notch a victory to buttress growing expectations that he is the centre-right party's inevitable nominee.
Cruz meanwhile has been painting Indiana as a battleground for the soul of the party and denouncing Trump's style and substance.
"The people of Indiana are the heartland of this country, and we have a choice - we have a choice about our national character; who we will be," Cruz told reporters.
The state would seem to be fertile ground for Cruz, who has received good results in other Midwestern states, and the Texas senator had at one point pulled close to Trump in Indiana polling.
But now Trump leads by more than 9 percentage points in an average of opinion surveys by website Real Clear Politics.
Some surveys give him a double-digit lead, with an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll giving the billionaire businessman an edge of 15 percentage points.
The populist Trump has turned his very wealth into a selling point with many voters.
"He is funding himself [in the campaign], no one can buy him," Indiana resident Debbie Parson, 62, told DPA. "He doesn't have to sell himself out to corporate businesses."
The third remaining Republican presidential candidate, Ohio Governor John Kasich, agreed last month not to invest resources in the state in what was touted at the time as an agreement between Cruz and Kasich to better take on Trump.
Trump had declared himself the "presumptive nominee" after winning primaries last week in five northeastern states. Despite a strong plurality, he remains well short of the majority - 1237 delegates - needed to win the nomination at the party's July convention.
Cruz and Kasich are counting on keeping Trump short of that magic number to force a so-called contested convention, in which delegates are free to pick any candidate they chose if no one earns the majority of the delegates outright.
Trump has 956 pledged delegates to Cruz's 546 and Kasich's 153, according to a tally by The New York Times.
Trump is a political novice, which his supporters now hail.
"I think the American people are sick and tired of lying politicians, and he is not a politician," Indiana voters Bill Parson, 46, said.
"The problem with politicians in the US is that once they get elected, their whole goal in life is to get re-elected."
Commentators Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, using Indiana's esoteric nickname, wrote last week: "The Hoosier State primary on May 3 is ground zero for the anti-Trump forces."
If Trump wins Indiana, he could be on pace to achieve a majority of delegates, they said.
Cruz however has vowed to stay in the race even if he falls short in Indiana, where 57 delegates are up for grabs.
"I am in for the distance, as long as we have a viable path to victory, I am competing to the end," he said.
Cruz last week named former Hewlett-Packard boss Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate, in an unusual move designed to widen his support. He also secured the coveted endorsement of Indiana Governor Mike Pence. | US Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is hoping to force his rival Ted Cruz out of the race with a resounding win in the Indiana primary. | 23.62069 | 0.827586 | 1.241379 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/john-slattery-veep-julia-louis-dreyfus-father-hearing-loss | http://web.archive.org/web/20160505045529id_/http://www.people.com/article/john-slattery-veep-julia-louis-dreyfus-father-hearing-loss | John Slattery Talks Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Veep, His Father's Hearing Loss : People.com | 20160505045529 | 05/04/2016 AT 12:30 PM EDT
is opening up about his father's hearing loss and how it has affected the family.
alum helped Duracell launch its new "Stay Connected" initiative, which to bring more attention to the issue of hearing impairment and encourage people to get tested and get a hearing aid if they suffer from loss.
Of his own father Jack Slattery's struggle with his hearing loss, the actor told PEOPLE: "He was disconnected from the every day events in his life and our life."
Slattery and his five siblings, started noticing something wasn't right because they would have to explain things to their father a second time. Eventually, he agreed to get his hearing checked and has been wearing a hearing aid for five years.
"It changed his life," said Slattery, 54. "We get together a lot. We sit at the dinner table. We play cards. Everything is just easier for him."
"Everything is better," Slattery continued, noting that now Jack can now enjoy his son's work on screen.
Slattery made his debut on HBO's
' new love interest Charlie Baird, a Wall Street banker who hits off immediately with
"She's just a brilliant comedian and actress," said Slattery about working with the
. "I was a huge fan of the show before I went on, and I was glad to be asked. I had a great time."
airs Sundays (10:30 p.m. ET) on HBO. | "She's just a brilliant comedian and actress," Slattery told PEOPLE about working with Dreyfus | 16.388889 | 0.944444 | 7.5 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/kim-kardashian-says-lamar-odom-confused-caitlyn-jenner-transition | http://web.archive.org/web/20160505105706id_/http://www.people.com/article/kim-kardashian-says-lamar-odom-confused-caitlyn-jenner-transition | Kim Kardashian Reveals Lamar Odom's Confusion Over Caitlyn Jenner Transition : People.com | 20160505105706 | 05/04/2016 AT 01:15 PM EDT
Every member of the Kardashian-Jenner family encountered major change last year, and the family's process of reconciling several life-changing events is still playing out in a very real way.
In a sneak peek at Sunday's
remained unclear about the details of her transition long after the rest of the family began to accept Jenner's new identity as a woman.
As Jenner, 66, introduced her new, authentic self to the world late last year, Odom was struggling with personal issues that ultimately led to a
both physically, mentally and emotionally.
And in the clip, Kardashian West reveals she had to explain Jenner's transition to Odom, 36, before they attended her husband
in New York City this past February.
"He saw something on the news about you, and he was a little confused, so I had to like explain it to him," Kardashian West, 35, tells Jenner. "I was like, 'Well, it's Caitlyn now.' And he was like, 'What?' "
tried to explain it to him a couple of times, but at that point I don't think he was getting anything," Jenner says, before revealing that she and Kardashian, 31, are still not speaking. (In last week's episode, the pair got into a
Kardashian West then says in an interview, filmed before the Yeezy show, that the event would be Odom's first big public appearance as well as his first time meting Jenner (formerly known as
airs Sundays (9 p.m. ET) on E! | Kardashian West explains on Keeping Up with the Kardashians that Odom was confused about Jenner's transition in the wake of his near-fatal overdose last October | 11.25 | 0.678571 | 1.107143 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/04/28/encountering-politics-personality-beethoven-polonaise/5NCzqtGfmcz7PMVjWCQZbN/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160506022001id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2016/04/28/encountering-politics-personality-beethoven-polonaise/5NCzqtGfmcz7PMVjWCQZbN/story.html | Encountering politics, personality in Beethoven’s Polonaise | 20160506022001 | On May 1, pianist Emanuel Ax performs an all-Beethoven recital at Jordan Hall including the composer’s Op. 89 Polonaise — which was also a souvenir of the era’s most consequential political summit. The 1814 Treaty of Paris, seemingly ending the Napoleonic Wars (which Waterloo would finally finish the following summer), called for a conference to broker a final agreement. The Congress of Vienna convened that September under the auspices (and machinations) of Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister.
Vienna was Beethoven’s home base, and soon after the army of monarchs and ministers descended, most of them turned up at the opera house for a performance of his opera “Fidelio.” Ever on the prowl for patronage, Beethoven invited the potentates to a self-produced concert in November, but by that time, factional divisions had erupted, even among the potential audience. Beethoven’s perceived Russian sponsorship (via his longtime supporter Count Razumovsky) kept Austrian and English contingents away; Prussian financial appreciation was disappointingly frugal.
The Russian Tsarina Elizabeth Alexeievna, however, gifted Beethoven 200 guilders. She was in Vienna with her husband, Alexander I — and her onetime lover, the Polish prince Adam Czartoryski. (The imperial marriage was parabolic: utterly devoted at the beginning and end, persistently adulterous in the middle.) Czartoryski, Alexander’s former foreign minister, became an unofficial point person regarding the Congress’s most vexing question: what to do about Poland. (It ended up partitioned, an all-too-familiar fate.)
Such was the atmosphere in which Beethoven wrote and dedicated his Polonaise to Elizabeth. But what from a historical distance seems subversive was actually pure courtiership. The polonaise was then still associated with Imperial Russia, de rigueur at Russian balls, and the Tsarina enjoyed hearing newly composed polonaises on her birthday. (The dance only took on more exclusively Polish nationalistic overtones after the November Uprising of 1830, which installed none other than Czartoryski as head of a brief-lived Polish government.)
What Elizabeth really wanted was a piano recital, but Beethoven’s well-advanced deafness made him reluctant to perform. That, perhaps, influenced the Polonaise’s unusual structure, which repeatedly interrupts the dance with seemingly improvisatory, fantasia-like passages. Musicologist Birgit Lodes has argued that it was Beethoven’s way of compensating: The work impersonated his playing style without him having to play. Then again, Beethoven showed up at the Tsarina’s birthday concert, and ended up accompanying one of his songs; he might have played the Polonaise as well. It was the last time he played piano in public.
Emanuel Ax performs music of Beethoven at Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, on May 1 at 3 p.m. Tickets: $35-$90. 617-482-6661; www.celebrityseries.org | Composed as a courtly gift for a Russian czarina, Beethoven’s Op. 89 Polonaise seems to adopt the composer’s own personal performing style. | 19.925926 | 0.740741 | 1.851852 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/kanye-west-kids-apology-steve-harvey | http://web.archive.org/web/20160506205919id_/http://www.people.com/article/kanye-west-kids-apology-steve-harvey | Kanye West Apologizes (Again) for Mentioning Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose's Son During Twitter Feud: Every Day I Feel 'More Deeply Apologetic' | 20160506205919 | 05/03/2016 AT 08:00 PM EDT
is expressing his heartfelt apologies –
, the rapper acknowledged that it was wrong of him to bring Khalifa's 3-year-old  son, Sebastian – whom he shares with ex
"I really want to stress the amount of respect that I have for parents," West, who is
North and Saint with wife
, told Harvey. "There is no concept of anyone beating up on someone else's child or that type of concept. So every day I feel more deeply, deeply, deeply apologetic about that concept, because I only want to put out positive, positive, positive concepts."
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West
During the rant in January, West mentioned Khalifa and Rose's son, writing, "You wouldn't have a child if it wasn't for me," and "You own waves???? I own your child!!!!"Â
, tweeting, "You let a stripper trap you" at Khalifa before apologizing.
"You know how you would feel if someone was talking about your wife?â West asked Harvey. "Did I take it too far? You know what? I'm from 79th Street Chicago. I can't say that if someone says 'F you,' I can't say I'm not gonna say the exact same thing back."
West, 38, later decided to delete the series of tweets,
, "Ima take these down cause it's all about positive energy blessings blessings positive energy blessings." He later added, "God's dream... Never speak on kids again... all love ... all blessingsâ¦." | "There is no concept of anyone beating up on someone else's child or that type of concept," the rapper told Steve Harvey while on his morning radio show on Tuesday | 9.323529 | 0.823529 | 11 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/nick-jonas-out-magazine-cover | http://web.archive.org/web/20160511135612id_/http://www.people.com/article/nick-jonas-out-magazine-cover | Nick Jonas' New Album Was Inspired by His Split : People.com | 20160511135612 | 05/10/2016 AT 03:10 PM EDT
Breakups are never easy, and
isn't shying away from writing about it.
The singer and actor covers the
and opens up about the inspiration behind
Doug Inglish / OUT Magazine
"With this one I made a real point to tell stories as honestly as I could," says Jonas. "It became very clear what it was going to be about, after the breakup."
The star "just dove in headfirst and wrote about all of it," he says, adding that his time
was "the most meaningful relationship I've ever been in, and it was the longest."
Jonas has a more surprising A-lister to thank for
"When I was working on this album,
asked me what it was about," he shares. "I said it was about the past year of my life, and that year was complicated. Jay Z said, 'That's the name of your album:
Doug Inglish / OUT Magazine
He's also become more accustomed
. "The fact that people were intrigued by a 14-or-15-year-old's relationships was strange to me," he says. "Now I think it makes a bit more sense. I think it's kind of amusing, people's interests."
But even so, "it definitely sucks," he adds of the spotlight on his relationships. "It sort of feels like, on top of dealing with the situation with the person, you have to be thinking about other people's opinions about it, and without all the information." | "I made a real point to tell stories as honestly as I could," he tells the new issue of OUT | 13.608696 | 0.869565 | 8.869565 | low | medium | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/09/20/does-pope-francis-hate-capitalism/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160514131722id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/09/20/does-pope-francis-hate-capitalism/ | The Pope and Capitalism: Francis' Problems With Free Markets | 20160514131722 | It’s a credit to Pope Francis’ charisma and hold on the public imagination that American non-Catholics like Rush Limbaugh have spent so much energy dissecting his views on the environment and the economy.
Francis has long had a reputation for the work he has done on behalf of the world’s impoverished. When he ascended to the Papacy, he took the name Francis, after the famous 12th century friend of the poor. But Francis has used unusually colorful language in his exhortations against global poverty and “unfettered capitalism,” which has rankled Americans of a free-market bent. Take for instance, the following passage from a 2013 papal exhortation:
Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “Thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?
Such rhetoric would not be out of place at an Occupy Wall Street rally, nor would the following:
The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything that stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.
It’s unsurprising, then, that commentators like Limbaugh would classify Francis’ ideology as, “pure Marxism.” The Pope has also made a number of Republican presidential candidates uncomfortable with his recent encyclical on the environment, which argues forcefully for immediate and significant action on climate change at a scale that couldn’t be achieved without government intervention and binding treaties.
So, what should we make of this sort of rhetoric? First, Pope Francis has never disavowed the right to private property, nor has he argued for the collective control of the means of production, which at the very least puts him outside the Marxist mainstream. And many high-ranking officials in the church, like Cardinal Timothy Dolan, argue that one can’t focus on a few of the Pope’s more flowery passages and presume to understand the totality of the church’s ideology.
Dolan has written that the “principal focus of Pope Francis’ economic teaching” is “that economic and social activity must be based on the virtues of compassion and generosity.”
Squaring that statement with the fiery rhetoric above might seem like a difficult task for many Americans, but as Brian Porter-Szucs, professor of history at the University of Michigan, has written, that is because Catholic conservatism doesn’t fit neatly into American ideas of what constitutes the right and the left. According to Porter-Szucs:
Many Americans, who tend to associate capitalism with the right and anti-capitalism with the left, are unaware that many of the earliest attacks on laissez faire economics came from conservatives, and that the Catholic Church has been a key player in developing a conservative rebuttal to liberal capitalism.
Catholic conservatives, like Francis, want to conserve harmonious social relations and a Christian understanding of economic justice, just as they want to conserve what the church takes to be traditional family values. Free-market capitalism, in contrast, is all about change: the change that comes when massive retail chains undermine family shops, when agribusinesses destroy small farms, and when financial consultants “downsize” a corporation and wipe out a community’s economic foundation.
In other words, it’s not so much that Francis opposes capitalism or markets as he wishes for people to live a life centered on the teachings of Jesus and the gospels, rather than economic progress and material gain. This, however, doesn’t mean that he will be able to convince American Catholics that free-market fundamentalism is incompatible with their religious beliefs.
Religion means very different things to different people. Even in a hierarchical system like Catholicism, there is room for conflicting interpretations. And Pope Francis may not convince a significant number of American Catholics to change their opinions on the free market. A recent poll of American Catholics by the Associated Press showed that 40% were unaware of Francis’ recent encylical on the environment, which criticizes capitalism and the market in harsh terms, while just 23% of Catholics heard the Pope’s views expressed by their priests at mass.
Meanwhile, a majority of white Catholics lean Republican today, and the overall Catholic vote has been, for years now, trending towards a Republican Party that has only grown more opposed to wealth redistribution. Despite Francis’ eloquence, and the media attention he garners, it’s unlikely he’ll change the opinions of American Catholics any time soon. | The pope's fiery rhetoric has free market lovers in America wondering. | 70.461538 | 0.692308 | 1.153846 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/first-ever-us-penis-transplant | http://web.archive.org/web/20160517095055id_/http://www.people.com/article/first-ever-us-penis-transplant | Man Receives First-Ever U.S. Performed Penis Transplant : People.com | 20160517095055 | Sam Riley/Mass General Hospital via AP
05/16/2016 AT 11:55 AM EDT
Boston surgeons successfully performed the first-ever penis transplant in the U.S. earlier this month, according to
Thomas Manning lost his penis to cancer, and the Halifax, Massachusetts, bank courier underwent a 15-hour transplant operation over May 8 and 9, receiving the penis from a deceased male.
Dr. Curtis L. Cetrulo, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who served as the Massachusetts General Hospital surgical team's leader, told the
that they're "cautiously optmistic," calling the experimental procedure "uncharted waters."
"I want to go back to being who I was," Manning told the
from his hospital room, noting that he was comfortable speaking publicly about the transplant in hopes that it would quell the stigma around genital cancer. Though he told the
he wasn't quite ready to look at his new organ yet.
Manning's penile cancer was discovered in 2012, and he underwent a partial penectomy, which left him with what the
called "a stump about an inch long." The physical change made life difficult for Manning: "I couldn't have a relationship with anybody."
Previous penis transplants in other countries have been both successful and unsuccessful, with a South African university operation giving a man not only a new organ last year, but also the ability to father a child, according to
. China also reported a transplant – though unsuccessful – in 2006.
that Manning should be able to urinate normally in just a few weeks, and will have sexual function in his penis within a few months. Manning has only had one serious complication, hemorrhaging the day after his surgery. After another stint in the operating room, though, Manning told the
that recovery has been smooth sailing. | The 64-year-old man lost his penis to cancer | 35 | 0.8 | 2.8 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/04/give-christie-benefit-of-the-doubt-tim-pawlenty.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160522005918id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2014/02/04/give-christie-benefit-of-the-doubt-tim-pawlenty.html | Give Christie benefit of the doubt: Tim Pawlenty | 20160522005918 | A letter released Friday from a lawyer for former Port Authority official David Wildstein says "evidence exists" tying Christie to the lane closure decision.
(Read more: Christie knew about bridge lane closings, ex-ally says)
"If there is such evidence, put it on the table, put it out in front of the media, put it in front of the judicial process or the legislative review process so people can kick the tires and see if it's real or not," Pawlenty says. "Until then it really just looks like a game."
(Watch: What did Christie know?)
Turning to the 2014 midterm election cycle, Pawlenty, now CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, said he thinks odds favor the GOP to win back a Senate majority.
"The Republicans have a very good chance actually of taking the Senate, although it's going to be close," Pawlenty said. "The message needs to be jobs and economic growth," said the former two-term Minnesota governor.
"What do you need to do to get jobs growing and get this economy ignited. Get the message around that and by the way be on the side of small businesses and entrepreneurs and I think that's the winning message." | Tim Pawlenty says N.J. Gov. Chris Christie deserves the benefit of the doubt regarding the "Bridgegate" scandal. | 12.4 | 0.5 | 0.7 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/body-found-costa-rica-could-be-cody-dial-missing | http://web.archive.org/web/20160522134611id_/http://www.people.com/article/body-found-costa-rica-could-be-cody-dial-missing | Could Belong to Missing Explorer Cody Dial : People.com | 20160522134611 | On Thursday, just three days before the premiere of the National Geographic Channel's new true-crime series,
, Roman and Peggy Dial got word that authorities had found human remains in the Costa Rican jungle, near where they believe their 27-year-old son, Cody, went missing in 2014.
Now they may finally get the answers about their son's mysterious disappearance they have waited for all this time – answers they never hoped they would have to hear.
"It is with profound sadness and incredibly mixed emotions that I can say my sonâs remains have likely been found," Roman tells PEOPLE exclusively. "I am on my way to Costa Rica, where Peggy will join me shortly to identify what appears to be Codyâs body. The FBI and the OIJ are continuing their investigation, though no arrest has been made at this point."
The National Geographic Channel's New True-Crime Series,
, which is directed and executive produced by Aengus James, details the Dial's exhaustive search for the son they love so much, after he vanished in Costa Rica's lush but treacherous Corcovado National Park.
The six-part documentary series, which debuts Sunday at 10/9c, chronicles their despair over not knowing what happened to Cody and the shocking discoveries they make along the way.
"Roman and Peggy agreed to allow us to film their search for their son in the hope it would help lead to answers," James tells PEOPLE. "It's something we've hoped for, but also have dreaded. There have been so many twists and turns with this investigation that I'm just waiting to have confirmation before jumping to any conclusions."
National Geographic, he adds, "is helping to bring justice to the son of National Geographic Explorer, Roman Dial, and his wife, Peggy. Their commitment to Roman and Peggy in seeing that their story has been told has been constant throughout."
The Dials first learned that human remains had been found in the national park on Thursday. "But only today did they learn it was likely Cody," says James.
in Costa Rica that it is "very likely" the human remains belong to Cody, though authorities have yet to confirm that.
The director of the Judicial Investigation Police, the OIJ, said that national park rangers and local residents notified police Friday morning that human remains had been found inside the vast reserve, according to the Times.
The remains were found outside the areas where the Red Cross and Costa Rican authorities had searched for Cody, the Times reports.
Sneakers, camping gear and other items were found near the remains. The OIJ director said these items matched descriptions Cody's parents had given police. The director said he could not comment on the cause of death until forensic experts review the remains, according to the Times.
On July 10, 2014, Cody, an experienced outdoorsman, set out on a solo trek through the jungle in the sprawling park. The day before he left, he sent an email to his parents from an Internet café, joking that since he would be hiking between the park's main trail and the coastline, that, "It should be difficult to get lost forever."
That was the last time Roman and Peggy, ever heard from their son again.
"He is on our minds 24 hours a day," says Peggy. "The only time we get any relief is when we are sleeping."
Cody, whose parents call him Roman, had the skills and knowledge to trek through the dense rainforest alone. As a teenager, he had visited the Costa Rican jungle with his father, a famed National Geographic Explorer and adventurer who taught his son everything he knew about mountain climbing, rafting and survivalist skills. Cody grew up learning how to navigate the Alaskan wilderness with his father, who took him on many of his explorations, including to Borneo and Australia.
In October 2013, Cody had taken a break from pursuing a Masters degree in Environmental Science at Alaska Pacific University to travel. He started out in January 2014 in Mexico with his girlfriend and was later joined by his father. In February 2014, he set off on his own for a tour of Central America – including the park.
Even though tourists are required to hire a guide under Costa Rican law, Cody chose not to use one and decided to hike off the permitted trails.
Cody always emailed his parents, telling them where he was traveling, in case anything ever happened to him. When the Dials didnât hear anything from their son for ten days after he first emailed them about his five-day trek into the jungle, they knew something was wrong.
"I felt nauseated and kind of light-headed," Roman says. "I was in emotional shock, like, 'Oh, no. Oh my God. This is bad because no matter what's happened, if he is ten days overdue, it's not good."
On July 23, 2014, Roman, 55, who has a Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford and teaches math and biology at the Alaska Pacific University said he and Peggy, 54, an elementary school teacher, reported their son missing. The next day, he was on a plane to Costa Rica on a mission to find Cody.
"I had a lot of emotional angst and pain but I funneled that into what I had to do. I had to go down there."
When Roman arrived in Costa Rica, the government and the Red Cross were already searching for Cody, but didnât want him helping, he says. "They were doing a great job, but I wanted to do a more focused search in the area," he says. "I wanted to check the areas where he said he would be. They forbade me from going in the jungle because they were concerned about my emotional state. But I could not sit by the sidelines."
Especially since he wasnât getting any answers. "The official narrative was, 'Your son went into the jungle without a guide and probably got bitten by a snake,'" says James, who spent more than seven months with Roman as he searched for Cody.
After Roman's extensive search, says James, "he was left with a real conviction that his son did not die at the hands of the jungle. He thought, 'There is foul play here.'"
When the Costa Rican government and the Red Cross stopped searching for Cody in early August, Roman pushed to get official permission to look for his son. Roman and Peggy continued to search the area while asking the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica for help, getting few answers.
Undeterred, they began a new search in July 2015, this time with the help of Carson Ulrich, a former DEA special agent and Ken Fournier, a retired Air Force Pararescue Jumper – and a documentary film crew.
"I hoped private investigators and the presence of a film crew would add urgency and momentum in the search," says Roman. "I was right. Within a week we received a significant break in the case."
The series follows Roman and Peggy for more than seven months as they navigate the jungle's rough terrain, searching for their son, who they initially thought might have gotten hurt by falling into a canyon or being bitten by a snake.
But as their travels unfold, they begin to suspect something far more sinister has happened to Cody – including the possibility that he was kidnapped or murdered.
"We just want answers to our questions about what happened to our son," says Roman. "I go to bed wondering and I wake up wondering."
On Thursday, Roman and Peggy met for the first time with the FBI, which has now joined the missing persons investigation.
"We're really appreciative of all the help we have gotten from the Costa Rican authorities and the embassy and the FBI. I know this is one of many cases they have to work on but I feel like I have to do something about it because he is my son."
Early on Friday, he told PEOPLE that he and his wife are still holding out hope that their son is alive. "It seems unlikely but weird things can happen. You never know.
will air Sunday nights at 10/9c on the National Geographic Channel. Episodes will be available the day after each episode airs on Hulu.com. | 'It is with profound sadness and incredibly mixed emotions that I can say my sonâs remains have likely been found,' his father, famed explorer Roman Dial, tells PEOPLE exclusively. | 47.142857 | 1 | 13.685714 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/08/homemade-chicken-noodle-soup/21309688/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523005536id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2016/02/08/homemade-chicken-noodle-soup/21309688/ | Homemade chicken noodle soup | 20160523005536 | Before you go, we thought you'd like these...
A bowl of hot chicken soup is a soul-satisfying treat no matter what the season. We've been making this chicken noodle soup recipe for years and it's a family favorite thanks to the rich flavor we get from roasting our chicken thighs and drumsticks before simmering them with aromatics to make the stock. For the finished soup, we add a fresh batch of vegetables along with diced tomatoes and broad egg noodles.
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Brining the lamb before it is slowly braised results in flavorful meat. | A bowl of chicken soup is a treat no matter what the season. Try this family favorite recipe with a rich flavor from roasting chicken to make the stock. | 34.935484 | 0.967742 | 3.806452 | medium | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/20/donald-trump-apple-stock/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523045036id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/20/donald-trump-apple-stock/ | Donald Trump Owns Apple Stock, Despite Calls for iPhone Boycott | 20160523045036 | Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has attacked Apple on a number of fronts, going to far as to call for a boycott Apple’s products after it refused to help law enforcement unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists.
But it turns out that the billionaire is perfectly happy with Apple on one front: Its stock. He owns $1.1 million to $2.25 million of shares in the tech giant, according to a personal financial report Trump filed with the Federal Election Commission and reported on by CNET.
Whether Trump even knows that he owns Apple stock is unknown, since many in his position use financial advisers who make certain investment decisions on their clients’ behalf. However, it illustrates one of many conflicts about Trump since his presidential bid started last year.
On one hand, as an Apple shareholder, he would seemingly want to see Apple succeed. But on the other, he’s called on people to stop using the company’s products.
In February, during the height of the legal face off between Apple and the FBI, Trump started a tweet tirade against Apple, a seemingly favorite tactic of his. He acknowledged that he used the iPhone, but warned that he could change his mind if Apple didn’t back down (which, of course, it didn’t).
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“I use both iPhone and Samsung,” Trump tweeted. “If Apple doesn’t give info to authorities on the terrorists I’ll only be using Samsung until they give info.”
His tweets came after Trump said in a speech at Liberty University in January that he would get Apple to move its production from China to the U.S.
“We’re going to get Apple to build their damn computers in this country instead of other countries,” he said at the time, according to the Huffington Post. The issue, however, is that Apple already builds some of its computers in the U.S., including all of its Mac Pro desktops, and says it will continue to bring back more manufacturing jobs to the country.
For more about iPhone, watch:
That said, he did say that he’d go back to Apple products after the San Bernardino row was over, so perhaps his troubles with Apple AAPL have been set aside. Now, he’s now just a loyal shareholder and perhaps a happy iPhone owner. | Millions in stock, in fact. | 66.142857 | 0.714286 | 0.714286 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/05/20/donald-trump-chris-christie-campaign-debt/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523045041id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/20/donald-trump-chris-christie-campaign-debt/ | Donald Trump Just Helped Chris Christie Pay Off His Campaign Debt | 20160523045041 | Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, delivered a thank-you gift Thursday to the man who arguably risked the most to endorse him: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Trump held a fundraiser that he claimed would pay off the entirety of Christie’s debt from his presidential campaign.
The fundraiser, held at the National Guard Armory in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, had all the trappings of a typical Donald Trump rally: big flags, barricades to corral the press, a soundtrack filled with Elton John and the Rolling Stones. The only thing missing was Trump’s usual overflow crowd.
Christie, flanked by his wife and three of his four children, said he hoped the state’s June 7 primary would provide the votes and delegates to put Trump “officially over the top as the Republican nominee for president of the United States.”
Christie noted the two had once been rivals, but said he’d decided to endorse the business mogul because of their personal friendship. He said he told his wife: “We never ever make a mistake by standing with your friend. And Donald Trump is my friend.”
Christie ended his presidential bid after a disappointing showing in New Hampshire and became one of Trump’s highest-profile backers with a surprise endorsement in February. Trump has appointed Christie to chair his White House transition efforts and his name is often raised as a potential vice presidential pick.
Trump took the stage after Christie and announced that the event—a $200-per-head fundraiser that attracted about 1,000 people—had retired the bulk of Christie’s roughly $250,000 presidential campaign debt.
“You know, Chris paid off his entire campaign debt tonight, right? His entire debt,” said Trump.
“And Chris, you can’t even give him a table and a seat? That’s terrible,” he joked. Trump turned his head back as if to acknowledge Christie, but the governor—who was mercilessly mocked once for his expression while standing behind Trump—had already left the stage.
Trump delivered his usual stump speech, with some local flourishes thrown in. While Trump usually reads off negative statistics on the economy of the place he’s visiting, his stats Thursday sounded like Christie talking points, touting the state’s economic improvements.
He also recounted a debate in which Christie had put Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in his place. “He looked like Perry Mason that evening,” Trump recalled.
At one point, though, Trump made a joke that appeared to be at Christie’s expense when he noted that he is boycotting Nabisco for offshoring jobs.
“I’m not eating Oreos anymore. Neither is Chris. You’re not eating Oreos, are you? It’s for either of us,” he said, drawing loud laughs from the crowd.
Trump also noted the crash of an EgyptAir jet in the Mediterranean Sea early Thursday: “What just happened about 12 hours ago? A plane got blown out of the sky. And if anybody thinks it wasn’t blown out of the sky, you’re 100% wrong.”
Egyptian and Russian officials have said the plane may have been brought down by terrorists, but an investigation is only just beginning, with no cause yet identified.
The event also included a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for the state GOP to help it pay off about $500,000 incurred in legal fees responding to legislative subpoenas in the 2013 George Washington Bridge scandal. State party officials said they didn’t immediately have a tally of how much either event had raised.
Earlier Thursday, Trump’s campaign announced the promotion of senior campaign aide Paul Manafort.
Manafort, who was brought on by Trump at the end of March to serve as convention manager, will now hold the title of campaign chairman and chief strategist, spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed Thursday. | And mocked the New Jersey governor's weight in the process. | 62 | 0.75 | 1.083333 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.tmz.com/2016/05/20/uma-thurman-kiss-auction-amfar | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523084028id_/http://www.tmz.com:80/2016/05/20/uma-thurman-kiss-auction-amfar | Uma Thurman: Kiss Auction Winner Ate Her Face ... and It Was 'Not Consensual' | 20160523084028 | Uma Thurman helped haul in $196,000 during an amfAR auction in Cannes, which is great -- but she's pissed about the extra-aggressive kiss the auction winner put on her.
Uma was hosting the auction when Italian entrepreneur Lapo Elkann bucked up the HUGE amount of cash for a Victoria's Secret Fashion show package -- and then celebrated by practically devouring Uma's face.
Seriously, he basically French kissed her entire head -- while gripping his ciggie -- and Uma felt violated, according to her camp.
Her rep called it "opportunism at its worst. She wasn't complicit in it."
Although Uma posed for pics with Elkann right after ... the rep says, "It looks like she was happy to have it happen, but it was not consensual." | Uma Thurman helped haul in $196,000 during an amfAR auction in Cannes, which is great -- but she's pissed about the extra-aggressive kiss the auction… | 4.71875 | 0.9375 | 24.625 | low | medium | extractive |
http://time.com/3719341/peanut-allergy-cure-treatment/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523111451id_/http://time.com:80/3719341/peanut-allergy-cure-treatment/ | Peanut Allergies May be Prevented With Peanuts | 20160523111451 | More studies hint that it’s possible to “train” the immune system to tolerate peanuts even if it doesn’t want to by giving children with peanut allergies small amounts of peanuts over a period of time. But researchers now report that it may be possible to prevent peanut allergies altogether. In a study published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers led by Gideon Lack, a professor of pediatric allergy at King’s College London and Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital, found that non-allergic young infants who ate small amounts of peanuts at an early age had a much lower rate of peanut allergy than those who avoided nuts altogether for five years.
MORE This ‘Peanut Patch’ Could Protect Against Peanut Allergies
“We are actually preventing the immune response from going along a pathway that leads to clinical reactivity, and it’s like, wow,” says Dr. Rebecca Gruchalla, professor of medicine and pediatrics at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who wrote an accompanying editorial. “It’s pretty cool to actually divert and keep the immune system from developing along a pathway that we don’t want it to go.”
Lack and his senior co-investigator George Du Toit, a pediatric allergy consultant at the College, conducted their study on 640 infants with severe eczema or egg allergy. These babies were chosen because of their increased risk of developing other food allergies, including to peanuts, and were enrolled when they were between four months and 11 months old. That’s an important window of opportunity, says Lack, to intervene and retrain the immune system to become tolerant to peanuts.
MORE The Bacteria That May One Day Cure Food Allergies
The group was divided into babies who showed a positive skin prick test to peanuts, and another who were negative. Each group was then randomly divided into those who were given to small amounts of peanuts to eat and those who were told to avoid it for five years. (Those with positive skin tests were given smaller amounts in gradually increasing doses if they could safely tolerate them, while those who were negative for peanut allergies were given larger doses.) Because the babies started out with varying levels of egg allergy and eczema, they also had differing levels of antibodies against peanuts; some had higher levels indicating they were already on the path toward developing allergic reactions to peanuts, even if they hadn’t tested positive and weren’t already allergic.
What’s noteworthy about the findings are that all groups that ate the peanuts, regardless of how far along they were toward developing peanut allergies, showed lower rates of peanut allergy when they were 5 compared to the babies who didn’t eat peanuts at all. The fact that even babies who were negative for peanut allergies at the start of the study, but who might go on to develop them, could prevent the allergy is a potentially game-changing idea.
“In primary prevention we can halt the process before the disease starts,” says Lack. “In secondary prevention, in the babies who already were positive for peanut allergy, the ball is already rolling downhill, but we can still prevent it, and push it back up the hill. We showed both primary prevention and secondary prevention were effective.” Overall, only 2% of the babies who ate peanuts were allergic to peanuts when they were 5, compared to nearly 14% of those who didn’t eat any peanuts during that time. For those who were already positive for peanut allergies at the start of the study, nearly 11% of those who ate small amounts of peanuts ended up getting a peanut allergy compared to 35% of those who avoided them.
MORE Why We’re Going Nuts Over Nut Allergies
It’s not clear how long the protection from peanut allergies lasts; other studies that used similar food exposure strategies in children with egg and milk allergies showed that as soon as the exposure to the allergy-causing food was stopped, the tolerance waned and the allergic reaction returned. Lack and his colleagues are continuing their study by asking all of the participants to avoid eating peanuts for one year and then giving them peanuts to see whether the peanut-consuming group remain non-allergic. “That will tell us whether we truly prevented peanut allergy in the long run or just put the brake on the development of peanut allergy,” he says.
Whether the approach will work on other food allergies, or even other allergies to cats, dogs or pollen, isn’t clear. Lack and his team have not, for example, fully analyzed the data on whether the peanuts helped the babies’ eczema or egg allergies to abate. But the results hint that the immune response may be redirected, at least for some allergens, toward a non-allergic response.
MORE Can Peanut Allergies Develop in the Womb?
It also hints that the rise in peanut allergies, especially in the U.S., may be in part of our own making. For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), for example, advised parents to avoid giving their babies peanuts in order to protect them from develop allergic reactions. Mothers-to-be were even advised to avoid eating peanuts during pregnancy to reduce their babies’ chances of becoming allergic. But recent studies in animals show that the immune system’s response to things like peanuts, egg, milk and other allergens may be a balance between exposure through the gut and exposure through the skin. Skin exposure tends to trigger aggressive immune responses that treat most new objects, including peanut protein, as foreign, and therefore sensitizes the body to recognize the food as foreign and dangerous. Eating such proteins, on the other hand, presents them in a different way to the immune system that recognizes their nutritious value. When these two routes are in balance, the gut-based system overrides the skin-based signals and the body sees peanuts as friend rather than foe.
But if babies aren’t eating peanuts, then the signals about peanut proteins entering via the skin become dominant, and nuts become an unwanted intruder rather than a welcome source of food. That’s why, for example, Lack and others believe that rates of peanut allergy are higher in countries like the U.S. where parents have been advised to avoid feeding their babies peanuts, compared to countries like Israel, where infants are given peanuts early on.
Based on recent findings, the AAP in 2008 changed its advice and now does not say parents should avoid feeding their babies peanuts. They haven’t concluded yet whether giving peanuts to infants early in life is a better choice, but given their latest data, Lack ,Du Toit and Gruchalla believe that it’s something that parents should discuss with their pediatricians and allergy specialists. We recommend that peanut be introduced very early on once weaning has been established,” says Du Toit. “Our study demonstrated that it’s safe as long as whole nuts are avoided for their choking hazard.” For children who come from families with no history of food allergies and whose parents or siblings don’t have other food allergies, peanuts can be started right away. For those who have a family history of food reactions, parents should consult with an allergist to get a skin prick test and then work with the specialist to determine the safest way to gradually introduce peanuts into their babies’ diet.
Such exposure to possible food allergens “is not part of clinical practice yet, but I think it will be likely that there are going to be experts who are going to get together and revise the guidelines to make it more common,” says Gruchalla. And hopefully lower rates of food allergies in coming years.
Read next: New Guidelines Help Doctors Diagnose Food Allergy
Listen to the most important stories of the day. | In a breakthrough study, researchers show that it’s not only possible to tamp down allergic reactions to peanuts, but by eating small amounts of them infants can avoid getting allergic in the first place | 40.162162 | 0.864865 | 2 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/01/20/david-bowie-petitions-for-kanye-west-not-to-record-tribute-album/21300022/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523120353id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2016/01/20/david-bowie-petitions-for-kanye-west-not-to-record-tribute-album/21300022/ | David Bowie fans petition for Kanye West not to record tribute album | 20160523120353 | Before you go, we thought you'd like these...
Thousands of David Bowie fans are so opposed to Kanye West recording a tribute album to the late singer, they've signed a formal petition to try to prevent that from happening. Ever.
Kanye hasn't even officially announced plans for the album, but that hasn't stopped more than 8,000 people from signing a petition on
to stop the rapper from recording any Bowie covers.
The rumor stems from a
article in which anonymous sources say he's recorded a few songs, singing straight covers on some and adding raps to others.
David Bowie fans petition for Kanye West not to record tribute album
I just lost a hero. RIP David Bowie.
David Bowie was one of my most important inspirations, so fearless, so creative, he gave us magic for a lifetime.
David Bowie. 💔 rip - you rock our souls https://t.co/xCt8GrStsP
RIP. There will only ever be 1 David Bowie. We love you. 🙏🏼⚡️ https://t.co/P9KfRmj7yZ
deeply sad to hear about david bowie / his work means more to me than I can express. what incredible things he did that last forever
Such shocking, awful news. RIP David Bowie.
R.I.P. David Bowie. You were an icon, you changed the idea of what a man should be, your musical genius will live on https://t.co/29ijZOh6Kp
Just hearing about #DavidBowie! My condolences to his family and love ones! Your music will remain with this always!🙏
RIP David Bowie. When he said he didn't like children & I told him he was once one, he said, No, I was born a Rock God. 😜Rock 'em in heaven!
Songwriting, music owes David Bowie a great debt. Such sad sad news. RIP Bowie.
Oh God, rest in peace the genius that was David Bowie.
RIP David Bowie :( this was taken last night at my gig.. He was such an icon.. There is no other like him and there likely never will be. Big inspiration for me growing up.
He never seemed of this earth. Now he's left it. He bent rules, gender, genres, and our minds. RIP David Bowie. One. Of. A. Kind.
Find it hard to believe David Bowie has died. What an incredible life
Very saddened to hear about David Bowie. Timeless music by a fearless artist...thank you.-RP
Hoping this news about #DavidBowie isn't true
2016 is off to a bad start. Another one of my musical idols gone, may his legacy live on forever… https://t.co/7HxhAL7HV4
Devastated to hear about David Bowie. A true legend who will live forever in his cultural impact. Wow.
What a great loss... I was fortunate to work with a genius on "Cat People." #DavidBowie 💔 https://t.co/uWCTrJSs69
#davidBowie R.I.P you were one of the great ones! Glad I got to host you on yahoo awards first show!
RIP #DavidBowie you taught me it was okay to be different. https://t.co/xRwQIvg0hG
Damn. Will miss #DavidBowie he was already eternally cool. Thx for the music and style. https://t.co/EfrMgWbMbr
You were my all time. You were the greatest. We'll miss you more than you'll ever know. #DavidBowie We're all Aladdin Sane
DEVASTATED...💔 A LEGEND IS GONE✨🌟✨
Rip Father of all us freaks. Sad sad day. Love always Legendary singer David Bowie dies at 69 https://t.co/ezRx7NVhSC # via HuffPostEnt
The entirety of my David Bowie gestalt begins and ends with this movie right here. Peace Out! https://t.co/g8pfQvFEeD
I grew up listening to and watching the pop genius David Bowie. He was a master of re-invention, who kept getting it right. A huge loss.
Never imagined a world without him. He has ascended into the cosmos from whence he came. Farewell, David Bowie
David Has Gone To Mars. Earth Thanks You https://t.co/r37aKrZQCH
David Bowie, you will be sorely missed. Bowie's “Changes” and the Ziggy story songs were a major influence for me. https://t.co/N1nkD9h82W
Thank you for everything. R.I.P. https://t.co/sxtGpAS0Ok
Rest in peace David Bowie... Universe traveler dream bringer song singer... I'm glad you were here and will keep listening, as always...❤️
As I get older my respect 4 Bowie grows.He transcended every genre & generation during his career-We lost a good one https://t.co/WcuyypsOGc
I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me - I was not ready for this. RIP Bowie.
RIP David . I loved your music. I loved you. One of the greatest performance artists to have ever lived. #sorrow
Time may change me But I can't trace time. #RIPDavidBowie
NO NO NO! Not David Bowie! No! Hero, kind, funny, awesome, groundbreaking legend. No! Not David Bowie! No!
Our world just became a little less colorful. Wherever you are, the excitement is. Rest in Peace David Bowie ❤️ https://t.co/KhXmiymOe6
David Bowie has been my musical north star my entire life. This hurts even more for people close to me. He will NEVER be surpassed, never.
Rest In Song David Bowie.
Deeply saddened. We've lost one of the greatest artists that's ever lived. My love for all you've created is immeasurable. RIP David Bowie.
Deeply saddened to hear of David Bowie's passing. What an artist, an inspiration. I'd like to think the lights shone bright for him tonight✨
Very sad to hear about the death of David Bowie but through his music he will live forever
"Time may change me. But you can't trace time." Gosh. David Bowie. One of the greats. Thank you. https://t.co/dJgnDoi1Ua
Kanye has made it well known on
that Bowie inspired him -- but fans may be right to be so protective of the rock star's legacy.
how Bowie turned them down for a collaboration. Drummer Will Champion told
, "He was very discerning — he wouldn't just put his name to anything."
Kanye's no stranger to petitions, though, like the
calling for the Glastonbury Festival to replace his headlining slot with a rock band. It got over 130,000 signatures. | Kanye hasn't even officially announced plans for the album, but that hasn't stopped more than 8,000 people from signing a petition against it. | 45.444444 | 0.962963 | 21.481481 | high | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/09/02/jimmy-kimmel-youtube-gaming/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523142443id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/09/02/jimmy-kimmel-youtube-gaming/ | YouTube Gaming: Jimmy Kimmel Made Fun Of It And People Are Going Crazy | 20160523142443 | The Internet is going crazy over a Jimmy Kimmel episode that made fun of YouTube Gaming, a recently launched platform where you can watch people play video games.
Kimmel began the skit by admitting that he “must be getting old” because he simply doesn’t understand the phenomenon. He then proceeded to make jokes, as a late night talk show host tends to do.
In introducing the skit he joked that the gaming channel should be called the “We Should All Be Very Ashamed of Ourselves for Failing as Parents” channel, and compared watching other people play video games to “going to a restaurant and having someone eat your food for you.” The skit featured a God character who reacts to this gaming platform with: “I’ve created a race of idiots!”
The gaming community did not take this well. Kimmel’s video, which has been posted on YouTube, is nearing 100,000 dislikes, and some of the comments are brutal. More level-headed commenters likened watching video games to watching sports; others called him an “irrelevant old man” and told him to “get cancer.” Some of them were almost impressively creative and included words I probably shouldn’t repeat here, so find the best ones here.
Kimmel responded to commenters in a more recent episode with the following:
I have been approached, and I’m gonna sit down with people who care very much about this topic and I’m gonna be open-minded. I’ll give these gamers an opportunity to show me what is fun about watching other people play video games. | The gaming community was extremely offended, and vocal about it. | 25.583333 | 0.583333 | 1.25 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/04/19/stephen-colbert-hillary-clinton-donald-trump/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523150621id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/04/19/stephen-colbert-hillary-clinton-donald-trump/? | Stephen Colbert Quizzes Hillary Clinton on Similarities With Trump | 20160523150621 | As she continues to woo New York voters ahead of the state’s primary on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton visited a New York City institution with comedian Stephen Colbert in appearance on the Late Show Monday night.
Their lighthearted conversation at Manhattan’s Carnegie Deli that repeatedly focused on Clinton’s eating habits—she got flack last week for turning down a bite at Junior’s Cheesecake, a Brooklyn staple—took only one serious turn when Colbert asked the Democratic frontrunner what she has in common with Donald Trump, who’s the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.
“What do you have in common with your likely opponent Donald Trump. Other than the fact you both have beautiful daughters and you were both at his wedding,” Colbert said.
Clinton replied, “I’m just not sure yet. I’m just not sure what I have in common with him.”
She then segued into how she would broker compromise on Capitol Hill. “[W]hen you are President and you’re working with the Congress, there are lots of opportunities to find common ground.” She said that if she wins the general election, she won’t be intimidated by Congressional Republicans who, Colbert said, will be waiting for her with a “meat slicer.”
“When I actually have a job as opposed to run for a job, I actually get things done with the Republicans. I did, as First Lady, as Senator, as Secretary of State,” she said. “This is just one of those efforts you just have to get up and work on every single day. You have to be willing to find whatever common ground exists and try to make something happen.”
The battle between Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for a victory in the New York primary has been especially fierce since the state is familiar turf for both politicians. Sanders was born in Brooklyn and Clinton represented the state in the Senate, prompting many comparisons of their New York-ness.
Regardless of which candidate has the most authentic New York accent (Sanders) or who’s the most adept at navigating New York City’s public transportation (Clinton, just barely), the former Secretary of State is projected to win the primary Tuesday—by a long shot. | The TV host interviewed the former Secretary of State a famous New York City deli. | 27.1875 | 0.75 | 2.375 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.tmz.com/2013/07/13/50-cent-baby-mama-second-child-birth-certificate | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523151328id_/http://www.tmz.com:80/2013/07/13/50-cent-baby-mama-second-child-birth-certificate | 50 Cent -- NOT THE FATHER Of Baby #2 ... At Least On Birth Certificate | 20160523151328 | didn't father a child with ex-GF
-- the woman he allegedly attacked during a
last month -- at least according to the child's birth certificate ... but the document doesn't rule out 50 either. Not even close.
TMZ obtained the certificate -- which shows Daphne is the mom -- but it doesn't list a father. The daddy field is blank, which means one of two things ... A) Daphne didn't know who the dad was, or B) she didn't want to say.
But all clues still point to 50 being the dad -- namely, the child's last name is listed as Jackson ... as in Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent.
As we reported, neither 50 nor Daphne have ever acknowledged the child is his ... but the L.A. City Attorney's Office kinda let the cat out of the bag when it announced the domestic violence charges against 50, saying he and Daphne had a "child in common."
FYI, 50 Cent does have another child, officially on the books, with another ex-GF named | 50 Cent didn't father a child with ex-GF Daphne Joy -- the woman he allegedly attacked during a domestic violence incident last month -- at least… | 6.966667 | 0.9 | 5.966667 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/22/autos-quality-jd-power-business-autos-quality.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160523233225id_/http://www.forbes.com:80/2009/06/22/autos-quality-jd-power-business-autos-quality.html | Study: U.S. And Foreign Cars Now Equal In Quality | 20160523233225 | Finally, some good news for Detroit. The quality of new vehicles sold by General Motors , Ford Motor and Chrysler Group improved by an average of 10% during 2008, despite unprecedented challenges that pushed GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy.
Domestic passenger cars are now equal in quality to foreign brand cars, and domestic trucks are slightly better, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2009 Initial Quality Survey. Among crossovers, foreign brands retain a substantial lead. Overall, domestic brands closed the quality gap with foreign brands to just 5%, the survey found. (For the best model in each segment, see “In Depth: 2009′s Highest-Quality Cars.”)
Speaking to the Automotive Press Association in Detroit Wednesday, J.D. Power’s vice president of automotive research David Sargent said it’s too early to know whether the current financial crisis is causing carmakers to cut corners in development. In the 2009 survey, “there really is no correlation between what’s happened in the industry and their quality performance,” Sargent said. “If anything, they’ve intensified their focus in this area because they know they won’t survive if they don’t built good quality.”
J.D. Power’s survey measures new-vehicle quality during the first 90 days of ownership. Problems can be defects (a feature doesn’t work) or design-related (the customer doesn’t like the way it works). Initial quality is often a good predictor of long-term durability.
Toyota’s Lexus brand finished tops in the survey, with 84 problems per 100 vehicles. The industry average was 108 problems, down from 118 last year. Cadillac moved up from 10th place to third, with 91 problems per 100 vehicles, just behind Porsche , thanks to its new Cadillac CTS sedan. Hyundai, once a laughingstock, continued its impressive quality march, improving from 13th place to fourth. The biggest gainer was Suzuki , which jumped from 32nd place to ninth, with 49 fewer problems per 100 vehicles. Mass-market brands Toyota, Ford and Chevrolet were neck-and-neck on quality, with 101, 102 and 103 problems were 100 vehicles, respectively.
Newly launched and redesigned models did well, contrary to past trends when first-year models were often plagued with quality problems. “Achieving high levels of initial quality in all-new models is one of the greatest challenges for manufacturers,” said Sargent. “Now that more manufacturers are getting their launch quality right straight out of the gate, consumers can expect the quality of new vehicles to continue to rise.”
Brands that had the lowest quality were BMW’s Mini (165 problems per 100 vehicles), Land Rover (150), Smart and Saab (138 each), and Jeep (137).
Comments are turned off for this post. | The American auto industry may be falling apart, but at least their cars aren't. | 32 | 0.470588 | 0.588235 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/3103537/kurds-iraq-erbil-barzani-isis/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160524023441id_/http://time.com:80/3103537/kurds-iraq-erbil-barzani-isis/?iid=sr-link2 | Kurds Welcome U.S. Assitance, Though Many Fear It Won't Last | 20160524023441 | For a few hours, the city of Erbil was in a state of panic. Word came that Gwar, just 30 minutes from the Kurdish capital, had been taken by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Kurds and ex-pats alike were packing up, trying to book airline tickets or, in a worse case scenario, preparing to drive to Turkey. But then American war planes swooped in and began bombing and President Obama pledged to defend Erbil.
Kurds breathed a sigh of relief. “The most important development was the decision by the United States to save lives,” says Hoshyar Zebari, a former Iraqi foreign minister and a prominent Kurd. “U.S. help is deeply appreciated.” Dr. Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdish President Masoud Barzani, welcomed the UN resolution condemning ISIS, and praised coalition forces for their technical and humanitarian assistance. He noted that the U.S. had co-ordinated tactical efforts with Peshmerga forces, allowing the Kurdish fighters to prepare to go on the offensive. “We used to say Kurds don’t have any friends but the mountains. But that doesn’t ring true anymore,” he said.
That said, many Kurds still carry lingering worries that the U.S. will betray them once again. “There’s a history of contact and betrayal with the U.S. and the Kurds where the U.S. made contact and helped but never jumped in with both feet,” says Quil Lawrence, author of The Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East, and a correspondent with NPR. “The Kurds have been very frustrated with a lot of the stages long the way,” he says. “But certainly these airstrikes would restore some of that trust. I feel like I’ve had many Kurds quote Churchill to me in the past week: ‘Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.’”
Finally, it seems, the U.S. has exhausted all other possibilities in Iraq and all that’s left is to rely upon the Kurds. It’s only taken a century.
Nearly a hundred years ago, the Kurdish rebel leader Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji carried around in his pocket a copy of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, so inspired was he by American self-determination. And yet it would be the Americans who would help deny the Kurds the same right at nearly every turn. Two years after Wilson delivered that speech, the Allies agreed to an independent Kurdistan in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. But by 1923, in the Treaty of Lausanne that recognized Kemal Attaturk’s Turkey, the international community abandoned the Kurds and the referendum promised in the Treaty of Sevres was never realized. Thus began the Kurdish struggle for independence.
After several thwarted attempts to break away from Iraq, the Kurds finally got their first indirect aid from the U.S. in the early 1970s, more thanks to the Shah of Iran than anything else. In 1972, Iraq aligned with the Soviet Union and the Shah pushed the U.S. to arm the Kurds by selling them Soviet weapons seized in Egypt. By 1974, the Kurds were in open rebellion led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani, of the same tribe Barzanji was from. But by 1975, Iran and Iraq made peace under the Algiers Accords. Iranian support for the Kurdish uprising abruptly came to a halt and the rebellion collapsed.
Barzani fled to Iran and then America, where he died in 1979, the same year of the Iranian Revolution, where yet again U.S. allegiances shifted. And, yet, again, the Kurds were the unwitting victim.
Towards the end of the First Gulf War, the Kurds saw a window for independence. Encouraged by the Americans, they rose up against Hussein for the third time. Hussein sent in the army and rolled over the Kurds, slaughtering thousands of villagers as they passed through. More than 1.5 million Kurds fled through the mountains to Turkey. American troops and arms never materialized, though they eventually sent in air support, which helped the Kurds push Hussein back to Kirkuk. In order to protect the Kurds, a no-fly zone was formed that lasted nearly a decade, until the Second Gulf War.
By the time the Turks refused America passage for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Kurds were in a position to offer themselves as a viable alternative. Fighting side-by-side with American special forces, the Kurds believed that their day had finally come: independence couldn’t be far away. But in the aftermath of the invasion, the Kurds were taken aback when the U.S. tried to disarm them and insisted they join the new government. Warily, the did so, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has not been the partner they’d hoped for.
Maliki warned repeatedly that the Kurds did not have the authority to drill and export their own oil, and that empowering them would lead to the end of Iraq. By late 2011 some 60,000 Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi forces were at a stand off near Kirkuk over the oil dispute. But, then, in 2013, Fallujah fell to Sunni extremists and then in the summer of 2014, Mosul and Tikrit fell to ISIS. The Iraqi Army retreated back to Baghdad. The Kurds took full control of Kirkuk and its refinery.
But U.S. refusal to equip the Kurds, and Baghdad’s refusal to share U.S. arms with the peshmerga, left Kurdish forces weakened, low on ammunition and unable to defend a 600-mile border border. ISIS advanced within 30 minutes of the Kurdish capital of Erbil as panicked Kurds and foreign workers began packing and fleeing to the airport or north towards Turkey. Last week, the U.S. stepped in and bombed ISIS and President Obama pledged to defend Erbil. For the first time ever, the U.S. said it would directly arm Kurdish troops. It’s not exactly self-determination — but it’s a start. | A brief history of the Kurdish/U.S. relationship shows why | 103.272727 | 0.545455 | 0.909091 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.tmz.com/2012/11/06/phillip-phillips-family-pawn-shop-video | http://web.archive.org/web/20160524084318id_/http://www.tmz.com:80/2012/11/06/phillip-phillips-family-pawn-shop-video | Phillip Phillips -- I Love My Family, BUT ... | 20160524084318 | might consider a career in boxing ... 'cause when we asked about the rift in his family yesterday, the "American Idol" champ bobbed and weaved like he was Mike friggin' Tyson.
Phillips had just arrived at LAX yesterday when we asked him why he's
his financially-struggling family ... which has been forced to sell the family pawn shop.
Phillips couldn't have been nicer when we asked the question ... but did everything he could to deflect.
For example -- "I have no comment ... but my album's coming out soon."
Ultimately, Phillip told us he loves his family, but wouldn't get into details about the situation on the home front.
But seriously ... INCREDIBLE deflection job. | Phillip Phillips might consider a career in boxing ... 'cause when we asked about the rift in his family yesterday, the "American Idol" champ bobbed and… | 4.733333 | 0.966667 | 24.366667 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/14/travel/journeys-36-hours-charlotte-nc.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160524114346id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2003/11/14/travel/journeys-36-hours-charlotte-nc.html | JOURNEYS - 36 Hours - Charlotte, N.C. - NYTimes.com | 20160524114346 | OVER the last 20 years, Charlotte, North Carolina's biggest city, has remade itself from a textiles town into an investment and banking center, the nation's second-largest financial-services hub after New York City (and about to become bigger if the proposed merger of Bank of America and Fleet goes through). The moderate Carolina weather makes the city a pleasant place to stroll in winter, while museums and hip shops are also a draw. And though the city has a thriving historic-preservation movement, you get the unmistakable feeling that Charlotte sees itself as a city of the future -- and it has the new skyscrapers to prove it. LOUIS JACOBSON
1. Beyond Gritty, and Grits
When the Pewter Rose Bistro (1820 South Boulevard; 704-332-8149) moved to the South End section of Charlotte 15 years ago, the neighborhood was scruffy and all but abandoned at night. But its building, a onetime industrial site, had 30-foot ceilings, great light and enough room for a big kitchen. Now the South End is gentrified, and Pewter Rose remains one of the city's most eclectic restaurants. The executive chef, Blake Dewey, prepares appetizers like fried chevre and chipotle and tiny tacos filled with tuna sushi smothered in a creamy sauce ($8.95 to $10.95), and entrees like salt-fried duck for wrapping in lettuce leaves and Indonesian chicken and shrimp ($15.95 to $16.95).
Luckily, you don't have to waddle far from a table at Pewter Rose to the comfortable couches of Tutto Mondo (704-332-5142), the nightclub that shares owners -- and the second floor of the former industrial building -- with Pewter Rose. The club says it caters to 30-something professionals, and it starts most weekend nights with mellow jazz by local musicians and becomes more lively as the night goes on. Behind the bar are almost 50 vodkas, from Karl Marx to ruby-red grapefruit Charbay, so make your choice and settle in with a cocktail.
Downtown Charlotte -- actually called Uptown -- is eminently walkable, with sidewalk benches and marble plazas scattered among the cluster of postmodern skyscrapers. At 60 stories, the Bank of America Corporate Center (100 North Tryon Street), designed by Cesar Pelli, towers over Independence Square -- the crossroads that gave birth to Charlotte -- with its crown of icicle-sharp points. One block north is the new 47-story Hearst Tower; finished in 2002, it bows outward as it rises, ending in an angular neo-Deco cap reminiscent of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. The retro lobby includes the Bank of America Gallery (214 North Tryon Street; 704-388-3104), which holds exhibitions from the bank's collection. The current show is ''The Photo League: Photographs of Urban Life in American From the 1930's and 1940's.''
Recharge yourself at Reid's Fine Foods (Seventh Street between College and Brevard Streets; 704-377-1312), an upscale grocery store that has been in business since 1928. On Saturday mornings, the store's bakery turns out croissants filled with cream cheese or jam ($1.29), apple and cherry strudel ($1.29) and almost a dozen kinds of muffins ($1.59). From the coffee bar you can get espressos, lattes or cappuccinos. For a real taste of the Carolinas, pick up a fiery Blenheim Ginger Ale (99 cents), which has achieved cult status. Carry your haul a few blocks away, to the Fourth Ward Park, a patch of greenery just beyond the skyscrapers. Then wander the narrow streets of the Fourth Ward, a leafy neighborhood of quiet fountains, aromatic wildflowers and charmingly restored Victorian homes.
5. A Quilt of Garbage
Backtrack a few blocks and visit the Mint Museum of Craft and Design (220 North Tryon Street; 704-337-2000), occupying a renovated department store among the Uptown towers. Don't expect to find only folksy, backwoods creations: the museum's vibe is avant-garde, stylish and contemporary. You'll find fanciful animals made from beer cans by an anonymous South African artist; a quilt made from garbage discarded along a trail in New Mexico; and a pair of bracelets that turn tiny glass beads into Warhol-style portraits of the Dalai Lama and the Mulder and Scully characters from the ''X-Files.'' Save your ticket stub ($6 adults); it allows admission to the Mint Museum of Art (2730 Randolph Road; 704-337-2000), the craft museum's older sibling.
6. Meet the New South
Just a few blocks from the craft museum, the Levine Museum of the New South, (200 East Seventh Street; 704-333-1887) offers a hard-hitting social history of Charlotte and the South, beginning just after the Civil War. The exhibition includes a reproduction of a tenant farmer's house and ''white'' and ''colored'' water-fountain signs from Charlotte City Hall. The story concludes with discussions of suburban sprawl, economic growth, ethnic diversity -- and Nascar. Visitors are encouraged to express themselves by posting notes, which recently ranged from ''this kind of stuff is so cool!'' to ''I think is boring.'' Admission is $6. | OVER the last 20 years, Charlotte, North Carolina's biggest city, has remade itself from a textiles town into an investment and banking center, the nation's second-largest financial-services hub after New York City (and about to become bigger if the proposed merger of Bank of America and Fleet goes through). The moderate Carolina weather makes the city a pleasant place to stroll in winter, while museums and hip shops are also a draw. And though the city has a thriving historic-preservation movement, you get the unmistakable feeling that Charlotte sees itself as a city of the future -- and it has the new skyscrapers to prove it. LOUIS JACOBSON Friday | 7.915385 | 0.976923 | 120.223077 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/05/23/09/41/bindi-irwin-holds-steve-irwin-gala-in-la-to-raise-money-for-the-cause-closest-to-her-heart | http://web.archive.org/web/20160524135417id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/05/23/09/41/bindi-irwin-holds-steve-irwin-gala-in-la-to-raise-money-for-the-cause-closest-to-her-heart | Bindi Irwin holds Steve Irwin Gala in LA to raise money for the cause closest to her heart | 20160524135417 | Wildlife Warrior Bindi Irwin has taken the annual Steve Irwin Gala Dinner to Los Angeles to raise money for the Wildlife Warriors’ global conservation program.
The Irwin’s hope the LA event will run in conjunction with the original Brisbane event to raise funds for wild tigers, crocodiles, elephants and native Australian animals.
The event was held at the LA LIVE centre on Olympic Boulevard, and cost US$500 per ticket.
“Tonight is that celebration of everything he worked so hard for,” she said.
Bindi auctioned off one of her well-known glittering dresses from her performance to Roses & Violets on Dancing With the Stars at the event.
Other auctioned items included swimming lessons with the USA Olympic coach, a guitar signed by Taylor Swift and an Australia Zoo adventure package for overseas visitors.
She was accompanied by her professional dancing partner, Derek Hough, who took the reigning champion for a twirl on the red carpet.
The khaki crew from Australia Zoo also allowed guests to get up close and personal with Australian wildlife.
Irwin told USA Today that her father “always wanted people to remember his message and legacy.”
“We want to make sure all his Wildlife Warriors work carries on.”
The Wildlife Warriors was established in 2002 by Steve and Terri Irwin in conjunction with Australia Zoo as a way to involve people in supporting “the protection of injured, threatened or endangered wildlife.”
The Gala dinner will go ahead in Brisbane later in the year. | Wildlife campaigner Bindi Irwin has taken the annual Steve Irwin Gala Dinner to Los Angeles to raise money for the Wildlife Warriors’ global conservation program. | 10.666667 | 0.888889 | 14 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/maria-shriver/life-ed-helping-teen-sons-deal-anger-n166596 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160524142153id_/http://www.nbcnews.com:80/feature/maria-shriver/life-ed-helping-teen-sons-deal-anger-n166596 | Life Ed: Helping Teen Sons Deal With Anger | 20160524142153 | Parenting teenagers can be a challenging and stressful time; it’s a period when boundaries are tested, doors are slammed, and voices often raised. When teenage boys express their frustrations in anger, that anger can be unsettling.
Here to provide guidance on handling that anger, is Dr. Meg Meeker, a pediatrician who has practiced pediatric and adolescent medicine for 25 years, an author of six parenting books including the recently released “Strong Mothers, Strong Sons,” and a mom to four grown children.
Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images file
Moodiness and anger in teenage boys is a common issue that parents deal with. Here, we will look at “normal” teenage anger and moodiness, caused by hormonal and psychological changes, and then we will address some behaviors parents should look out for which might indicate something more serious is going on, such as depression or oppositional defiant disorder.
“Normal” anger appears shortly after puberty begins. It often stems from a teen’s desire to be more independent from his parents and his frustration that he can’t yet enjoy the freedoms of an adult. That frustration is sometimes expressed in anger and striking out verbally at parents. Teenage boys are also contending with peer pressure which is pushing them to rebel by drinking or smoking, taking drugs or being sexually active; this can intensify a boy’s anger. Teenage boys struggling with these issues can be mouthy and angry one day and then completely upbeat the next. They will teeter between being engaged with the family and wanting to retreat by themselves or with friends for several hours at a time.
Here are some tools that parents can use to dissipate this kind anger. And following, I’ll address warning signs parents should look out for which might indicate that something more is going on.
1. Address his anger in a non-accusatory manner. In other words, address his anger as though it were a broken leg. Rather than using a tone implying that he is a bad kid, use a tone that says, he is struggling with anger and this needs to be addressed and dealt with.
2. Set clear rules for his anger. Parents are often afraid of their son’s anger, especially single moms who are physically smaller than sons. So rules are extremely important. Tell your son that he is free to express his anger by talking about it, but he is never allowed to: use foul language, call names, become physical or hurt anyone or anything in the home. If he crosses these boundaries, let him know the consequences.
3. Don’t take his anger personally. Mothers in particular become emotionally entangled with sons when they are angry. We subconsciously believe that the boys’ anger is our fault. Don’t do this. Treat your son like he is someone else’s so that you can stay emotionally separate. Becoming tangled in his emotions fuels the anger.
4. Communicate to him that he is in charge of what he does with his anger. At the heart of many issues for teen boys is a desire to be more in charge. As they become men and leave boyhood behind, they sense that they need to take more control. This is a great way to “empower” a son and at the same time help him resolve his anger.
5. Don’t allow excuses. One of the worst things that we mothers can do is excuse bad behavior because a son is depressed, sad, lonely, etc. We must teach our sons that feelings are simply that; they are not behaviors. That means that temper tantrums or yelling at mom or others is never acceptable. Teaching sons to separate their feelings from their behaviors is critical to healthy maturity.
6. Let him know that you aren’t the enemy. Parents of teens often believe that what kids need is more time with peers and less time with parents. In fact, studies show that the opposite is true. Teens need parent time and most want more, not less of it. So take advantage of this and tell him that you are his ally in this growing-up journey. Just showing him this will dissipate some of his anger.
7. Train yourself to be a better listener. Sometimes boys just need to be heard. Most parents need practice when it comes to listening because we are busy and frustrated ourselves. When your son is agitated, sit down, look him in the eye and give him permission to say what he needs to say (as long as he follows the rules for anger), and don’t interrupt him. This will go a long way in helping him manage his anger and frustrations.
8. Minimize violent video games. While video games may not cause boys to act out, studies show that boys who play them repeatedly are more aggressive in their twenties. If a teenage boy has anger issues, watching violence and controlling it on a screen does NOT help a boy dissipate his anger. In fact, the opposite is true: they can become more agitated.
Signs to Watch Out For
It is NOT normal for boys to withdraw completely from their parents and siblings. If a teen is volatile, hostile, has repeated verbal (screaming) or physical (hitting) anger outbursts, it is important for parents to look for reasons why a teen feels such intense anger. He could either have depression or have experienced a deep loss which must be resolved. Anger is sadness coming out sideways, so beneath every angry outburst is a sadness or loss that the boy either doesn’t want to confront or isn’t able to identify. If a boy withdraws from his family, never shows any levity or happiness for a period longer than two weeks, then parents need to decide if he may be depressed.
A major depressive episode is identified as an individual having five of the following symptoms for at least two weeks in a row:
1. Irritable or depressed mood every day.
2. Decreased interest or pleasure in activities normally enjoyed.
3. Change in appetite or weight loss /gain without clear cause.
4. Insomnia or hypersomnia (sleeping too much).
5. Psychomotor retardation (slowing down) or agitation (hyperactivity).
6. Fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt.
7. Decreased ability to think or concentrate.
8. Recurrent thoughts of death or suicide.
If a parent recognizes these behaviors, it is important to get the teen help as soon as possible, and consulting your son’s primary care doctor is a great place to begin.
For more information and inspiration visit MariaShriver.com | Dr. Meg Meeker provides expert guidance on parenting teenage sons through the anger and frustration that can accompany adolescence. | 64 | 0.75 | 1.35 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/18/julius-caesar-ambition-leadership-forbes.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160524200408id_/http://www.forbes.com:80/2009/06/18/julius-caesar-ambition-leadership-forbes.html | Ego And Ambition | 20160524200408 | The following is excerpted from Power Ambition Glory: The Stunning Parallels between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today…and the Lessons You Can Learn by Steve Forbes and John Prevas (Crown Business, 2009).
“When the gods wish to take vengeance on a man for his crimes they usually grant him considerable success and a period of impunity, so that when his fortune is reversed he will feel it all the more bitterly.“
Ambition is among the strongest and most creative forces in the arsenal of human psychology and frequently the reason things get done. It also is one of the most dangerous–that drive to grab the biggest slice of the pie before anyone else and sometimes even the entire pie. Julius Caesar (101-44 BC) had plenty of ambition. Early in his career he happened upon a bust of Alexander the Great. Comparing himself to the great king, Caesar lamented that he was the same age as Alexander had been when he died but that by age thirty-two Alexander had conquered a world and so far he had done practically nothing. Vowing that would change, Caesar entered the Roman political arena and the rest is history.
The world for “king” in German is kaiser, and the word for “supreme ruler” in Russian is czar. Both come from the Latin word caesar, confirmation of this ancient leader’s profound impact on history. In today’s communications age, Julius Caesar would be a highly effective CEO. He was a superb orator who could appeal to a wide array of constituents, from the common citizens to soldiers to officers to aristocrats to merchants to foreign leaders and women. He was an excellent writer and an amazingly capable executive, who successfully undertook enormous endeavors fraught with risk. Caesar had a natural talent for sizing up situations, knowing when to push and when to hold back. Throughout his career, he learned from his mistakes. Only at the end of his life, at the height of his success and power, did hubris, ego, and the daggers of his assassins converge to destroy him.
Ambition is not all bad. Healthy doses can pay off. The trick to mastering ambition is recognizing the rewards when they come your way and then deciding when enough is enough. Left unchecked, ambition can cross the line, mutating into arrogance and avarice, two of the most destructive human impulses. When ambition crosses that line, the result, as we will see in Caesar’s case, can be a compulsiveness that leads to self-destruction.
Interestingly enough, it seems that for every person driven by ambition, a hundred seem content or complacent enough to accept what they have and walk away. Take, for example, Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer. At age thirty-four, Wozniak chose to take his profits in 1985 and walk. Today, his partner, Steve Jobs, is still at it, the innovative force behind exciting products such as the iPod and the iPhone. What makes a Wozniak walk and a Jobs stay on the treadmill? Successful ambition, as Jobs demonstrates, seems to be a healthy mix of energy and determination, well-defined goals, and an ethical framework to keep within honest parameters.
Julius Caesar was the consummate politician of his time, a gifted writer, and one of history’s great military commanders. He was a man of action–equally skilled with the persuasive word, the pen, or the sword–yet also a tragic example of the consequences of unchecked ambition. Although Caesar set standards for success and leadership that continue into our own age, he also shows us–like Alexander before him–that unbridled ambition is capable of turning on and destroying anyone, no matter how powerful and seemingly untouchable.
Caesar projected a sense of sovereign self-assurance. There was no question that he was the boss and considered himself the only man for the job. Of course, Caesar was not the first person to live with the delusion that he alone could handle the top job. But in his case, that sense of self-worth turned out to be a double-edged sword. It mesmerized his followers and galvanized his enemies. Throughout his career, Caesar gave the impression that he always knew where he was going and what he was going to do when he got there. That impression eventually proved to be his undoing as it mutated into an imperious arrogance that cost him his life.
A recent example of an executive who let ambition warp his sense of judgment and perspective is Edward Finkelstein, a highly respected and successful retailer who shocked the corporate world by presiding over Macy’s bankruptcy in 1992. When Finkelstein joined R. H. Macy & Company as a young management trainee in 1948, the company was one of several nationally known department store chains, its most famous rival being Gimbels.
By the 1960s, Macy’s had become stagnant, but its bright star was Finkelstein, who was proving to be a superb retailer through his management of the company’s Bamberger’s stores in New Jersey. Finkelstein transformed dowdy, uninteresting Bamberger’s into a place to shop where consumers were eager to spend their time and money. He spiffed up the facilities and offered attractive merchandise, soon gaining a reputation in the retail world as a wunderkind. It was no surprise in 1980 when Finkelstein took the helm at Macy’s.
Macy’s did well until 1985, when Finkelstein decided to take the company private through a leveraged buyout. The company would borrow massive amounts of money to buy out existing public shareholders, leaving as owners a handful of Macy’s managers along with private equity funds that invested in the business. Eventually the company would go public again by selling its stock, and the managers and private equity funds would reap huge profits. At least that was the plan.
Thanks to his success, Finkelstein was revered by Macy’s managers. That intense admiration deepened when he allowed hundreds of them to buy stock in the recapitalized company; significantly profitable participation in such deals was usually reserved for a handful of top executives. The devotees of this retailing Caesar believed that in just a few years, the value of their investment would increase sixty to ninetyfold. But that did not happen. Intoxicated by his success, Finkelstein started making mistakes.
To boost profits, Macy’s began pushing its own private labels despite the fact that customers still wanted traditional brands. Consumers preferred prestigious labels or at least merchandise with names they recognized. Private labels in department stores often connote “cheap.” But Finkelstein kept the prices on Macy’s private labels so high that even customers who, to save some money, might have overlooked the stigma of in-house brands chose not to buy them.
Even though Macy’s was heavily in debt from the initial stock buyout, Finkelstein tried to buy Federated, a collection of department stores that included Bloomingdale’s and I. Magnin. Finkelstein lost that battle in 1988 to Robert Campeau, a leverage-buyout artist from Quebec; but as part of an agreement with Campeau, Macy’s did get to purchase Bullock’s and I. Magnin. Macy’s debt, already extremely high, ballooned even more. The new debt schedule that resulted from the acquisitions meant that absolutely everything had to go right, there was no margin for error. But the 1989 Christmas season was disappointing, losses mounted, a national recession occurred in 1990-1991, and the red ink became a flood.
Finkelstein enjoyed playing his executives off against each other, and as conditions worsened, he behaved as if temper tantrums and bellowing would make Macy’s debts disappear. Company morale suffered as a result, and Finkelstein’s image tarnished. He aggressively promoted two of his sons, and some of his key executives began leaving. Finkelstein became increasingly aloof, even watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in his private viewing stand instead of with his top executives.
After another disastrous Christmas retail season and crushed by debt, Macy’s filed for bankruptcy in early 1992. Instead of listening to any criticism of his stewardship or suggestions for improving the situation, Finkelstein shouted his critics down and refused to take any responsibility. He blamed forces beyond his control since his ego would not allow him to admit that he bore even marginal responsibility for the bankruptcy.
Macy’s creditors finally did to Finkelstein what the senate did to Caesar. They finished him off. But, Finkelstein’s story, unlike Caesar’s, has a relatively happy ending. Federated, which Finkelstein had tried to gobble up only a few years before, bought Macy’s in 1994, and a considerably humbled Finkelstein became a well-paid consultant to the new enterprise.
If You Are Going to Cross the Rubicon, Make Sure You Know What You’re Doing and Where You’re Going
Much of Julius Caesar’s success can be attributed to the fact that he was focused and decisive and knew how to get things done quickly. Nothing illustrates the interaction of these qualities more forcefully than Caesar’s decision to lead Roman legions under his command across the Rubicon River in 49 BC. It was a defining moment not only for Caesar but for history. By crossing the Rubicon, he not only defied Roman law but began a civil war that transformed Rome and changed the ancient world.
As Caesar prepared to cross the river on the night of January 10 in 49 BC, he reflected in solitude for a while, then turned to his commanders and gave the order. When they reached the other side, his first words were Alea iacta est (the dice have been thrown). Since that fateful night, the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” has come to mean willingness to undertake a major and risky course of action from which there is no turning back. It is a move that requires foresight, strength of character, and willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions, both good and bad. Caesar knew that he was about to plunge Rome into civil war and that as a result he would either become master of the ancient world or be killed. He was willing to accept either outcome.
“Crossing the Rubicon” means embarking on a course of action from which you cannot turn back. What is the lesson here? Be sure to think before you act and to understand fully the implications of what you are about to do–the rewards as well as the costs for yourself and others. Once you decide on your plan and take action, don’t look back or second-guess yourself. Execute your plan to the best of your ability and let the chips–or dice–fall where they may. When Caesar crossed that river in 49 BC, he released the dogs of war, and once out they could not be restrained but had to run their course.
Read more about leadership in the ancient and modern worlds in our special report on Power Ambition Glory.
Comments are turned off for this post. | Successful ambition is a healthy mix of energy and determination, well-defined goals and an ethical framework. | 104.95 | 1 | 7.3 | high | high | mixed |
http://time.com/3626632/madoff-where-are-they-now/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160524214655id_/http://time.com:80/3626632/madoff-where-are-they-now/ | Where Are He and His Inner Circle Now? | 20160524214655 | Bernard “Bernie” Madoff, the most extraordinary swindler of the heady pre-recession years, was arrested six years ago on Thursday, but the distrust that his dealings directed toward the financial system is indelible. Many people know a friend, relative or school acquaintance whose college savings or retirement fund was pillaged by Madoff’s gargantuan Ponzi scheme. The Occupy movement, the Heartland’s vitriolic anger towards bankers, and the proverbial Main Street-Wall Street divide are all linked to the mess Madoff sank himself into. His loss of $65 billion in Americans’ savings rattled what little confidence many Americans still had in Wall Street and the finance industry.
The well-known director Michael Moore wrote a commentary on the scammer for TIME in the Spring of 2009, shortly before Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison. Moore proclaimed him the incorrigible tip of the iceberg:
If Ponzi schemes are such a bad thing, then why have we allowed all of our top banks to deal in credit default swaps and other make-believe rackets? Why did we allow those same banks to create the scam of a sub-prime mortgage? And instead of putting the people responsible in the cell block in Lower Manhattan, where Bernie now resides, why did we give them huge sums of our hard-earned tax dollars to bail them out of their self-inflicted troubles? Bernard Madoff is nothing more than the scab on the wound. He’s also a most-needed and convenient distraction. Where’s the photo on this list of the ex-chairmen of AIG, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup? Where’s the mug shot of Phil Gramm, the senator who wrote the bill to strip the system of its regulations, or of the President who signed that bill?
Moore’s is a sentiment that still rings true years after the depth of the financial crisis: Where is the retribution?
In fact, Madoff’s circle of friends and family bore much of it. Ruth Madoff, disgraced after her husband’s fall, endured a series of public shamings in the year after Bernie’s sentencing, including being stripped of $80 million in assets. She cut off contact with her husband and moved to son Andrew’s house in Connecticut. Madoff’s eldest son, Mark Madoff, committed suicide in 2010, and his younger son, Andrew, died this year of lymphoma. Madoff’s long time assistant, 66-year-old Annette Bongiorno, was sentenced just this week to a six-year prison term, and Jerome O’Hara, a computer programmer for Madoff, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years. Brother Peter Madoff is serving a 10-year sentence in federal prison and forfeited all his personal assets.
Madoff himself has shown a measure of remorse, though it’s not likely to be enough for the people whose savings disappeared. He told Politico earlier this year that he has not changed: “There’s nothing for me to change from. It’s not like I ever considered myself a bad person. I made a horrible mistake and I’m sorry.” | Madoff brought his family down with him | 84 | 0.714286 | 0.714286 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/04/16/get-date-take-space/fqhU9S9ykWEJEc1mFO9s0O/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160525040258id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/ideas/2016/04/16/get-date-take-space/fqhU9S9ykWEJEc1mFO9s0O/story.html? | To get a date, take up space | 20160525040258 | Manspreading may be a socially distasteful posture that’s subject to Internet ridicule, but it turns out it’s also a good way to get a date.
A new study, published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that when people strike an expansive posture, thereby taking up more room, they’re more attractive to others.
“[Being] expansive signals a lot of good things that are desirable in a partner, like access to resources and mate value,” says Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley and coauthor of the paper.
Expansive postures include wide-legging on the subway and also stretching the torso, puffing out the chest, and tilting up the head. Such displays are common in the animal world, like with male peacocks that double or triple their size by strutting their feathers. Human beings seem similarly hard-wired to like those kinds of poses.
“These displays are incredibly powerful in interpersonal communications. You can’t help but have this automatic association in your head between them and higher status and higher rank,” says Jessica Tracy, director of the Emotion and Self Lab at the University of British Columbia.
Researchers have been interested in nonverbal communication at least as far back as Darwin. This new report is one of the first to extend that analysis into the fast-paced world of modern dating. The authors conducted two studies. In the first, they looked at video footage of a speed-dating event in which participants spent a few minutes getting to know each other and afterward indicated whether they’d like to meet again. People who presented themselves in an expansive way were almost twice as likely to get a “yes” response.
In the second study, the authors posted staged photographs to a dating app. The photographs featured the same person in either an expansive (arms outspread) or a contractive (arms and legs crossed) posture. The expansive photographs generated far more inquiries. All told, the researchers found that expansiveness was even more powerfully attractive than other positive nonverbal behaviors.
“With smiling, laughing, head-knodding, we find those predict good mates and that you’re perceived to be friendly and warm,” says Vacharkulksemsuk. “But if you think about what a successful speed date is, the signal that I want to see this person again, postural expansiveness was the one that predicted that outcome.”
Other research on the subject has found that expansive postures make men more attractive, but not women (though the Berkeley study found benefits for both men and women). And previous work by Tracy found that when people are asking for help, like for financial aid, holding an expansive posture can make them appear insufficiently grateful and hurts their case.
More generally, with your legs splayed, there’s a thin line between confident and jerk. “We like people more who suppress it a little bit,” says Tracy. “These displays send two messages at once. They say: ‘I’m great and deserve high status,’ and they say: ‘I think I’m great,’ and that sends the message of arrogance.” | An expansive posture pays dividends in the dating world. | 61.1 | 0.8 | 1.6 | high | medium | mixed |
http://nypost.com/2016/04/20/queen-elizabeth-ii-wants-to-hire-a-social-media-star/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160525041938id_/http://nypost.com:80/2016/04/20/queen-elizabeth-ii-wants-to-hire-a-social-media-star/ | Queen Elizabeth II wants to hire a social media star | 20160525041938 | Queen Elizabeth II is looking for Twitter royalty — a well-seasoned social media star to expand her online reign.
The British Monarchy is hoping the right candidate for the new $71,000 a year gig will grow the queen’s Internet footprint as its new Head of Digital Engagement, according to a job posting on the royal website.
“Whether you’re covering a state visit, award ceremony or royal engagement, you’ll make sure our digital channels consistently spark interest and reach a range of audiences,” the listing said. “With an eye to the future, you’ll work to hone and shape our digital communications through sharing best practice, understanding new technologies and stimulating creativity.”
Applications for the job– described as “fast paced” and “deadline driven” are due Sunday,
“The reaction to our work is always high-profile, and so reputation, brand and impact will be at the forefront of all you do,” the description reads.
The queen, who turns 90 Thursday, also threw in a few royal perks including free lunch, a complete benefits package and 33 days of vacation for the position, which only requires 37.5 hours of work a week.
But the job description says the biggest reward is “having your work shared around the world.”
Her Majesty made her Twitter debut back in Oct. 2014 when she tweeted from the London Science Museum.
“It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.,” she wrote.
Since then, the @BritishMonarchy account has accrued more than two million followers and sent out more than 22,500 tweets with the most recent celebrating her milestone birthday.
“.@RoyalMail celebrates #Queenat90 with a specially commissioned Stamp Sheet of 4 generations of the Royal Family,” it said along with a photo of the Queen and her husband, Charles, alongside Prince William and his adorable son George.
And while she doesn’t have nearly as many followers as Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian, the Queen beats out her grandkids by a long shot.
Kensington Palace’s online audience — the account for Prince William and Kate Middleton as well as Prince Harry — only has 629,000 followers. | Queen Elizabeth II is looking for Twitter royalty — a well-seasoned social media star to expand her online reign. The British Monarchy is hoping the right candidate for the new $71,000 a year… | 11.368421 | 0.973684 | 18.657895 | low | high | extractive |
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