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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/motoring/diesel-performance/12106534/diesel-car-performance.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160803160907id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/sponsored/motoring/diesel-performance/12106534/diesel-car-performance.html | Get the best performance from your diesel car | 20160803160907 | The engine will produce enough low-down grunt to power the wheels without you putting too much on the throttle. That makes for a more measured manoeuvre, thereby avoiding a wheel spin and reducing the risk of getting stuck or, worse still, losing control.
Meanwhile, on the open road, the extra torque means you don’t need to change gear so regularly, because the engine will pull at lower revs. This minimises wear and tear on the power plant, transmission and running gear, and enables you to adopt a more relaxed driving style.
“The latest common-rail direct-injection turbo diesel engines are capable of being driven at very high speeds,” remarks Martin Randall, a technical author and diesel specialist at car manual publisher Haynes. “But they aren’t quite as reliable as the more basic naturally-aspirated units they’ve replaced.”
As a result, even though modern diesel lumps can easily be driven much more enthusiastically than their wheezy antecedents, it’s not clever to rag them hard.
For a start, says Mr Randall, diesel engines rattle a lot more than petrol units, and equipment such as the electronic wizardry controlling the supply of fuel to the injectors is likely to rebel if pushed to extremes on a regular basis.
Take things steady, using the ample torque and zippy acceleration only when necessary, and you’ll most likely prolong the life of your motor, as well as the cleanliness of your driving licence.
Anyone who’s driven a turbo diesel car will know this feeling: you’re revving hard to accelerate from a junction, or to carry out an overtaking manoeuvre, and suddenly the engine goes completely flat.
That’s because the power range in a turbo diesel is narrower than on a petrol car, meaning you can’t rev it so hard for so long. More often than not, diesels are fitted with a limiter to prevent them being revved too much, and when that kicks in it’s a bit like hitting a brick wall.
But there’s another good reason not to thrash your turbo diesel lump, especially when it’s cold. If the engine hasn’t heated up sufficiently, the oil that lubricates the turbo charger won’t do its job properly.
Make a habit of forcing it to spin under duress and you’ll almost certainly be faced with a blown turbo. And the upshot of that is a hefty repair bill.
4 Enjoy a regular spin
That said, there’s no harm in giving your diesel car a good run out on a regular basis, especially if you tend to use it for mainly urban journeys.
Go easy: diesel engines should not be over-revved Photo: © Michael Bodmann / Getty
Mr Randall from Haynes explains: “Modern diesel engines are fitted with particulate filters to trap harmful emissions. These are designed to self-clean, or regenerate, at high speeds.”
If you don’t regularly drive your car fast enough to clean its diesel particulate filter (DPF), it will become clogged with soot. That can prevent the engine from running properly, and necessitate installation of a replacement DPF. The cost of this could be as much as £1,000.
5 Keep up to date with maintenance
As Mr Randall says, modern turbo diesel engines are far more complex than the rather more unrefined units they replaced. In consequence, it is important to maintain them on a regular basis.
That includes replacing oil and filters in line with manufacturer guidelines – something that is crucial to preserving the life of your car’s turbo.
Old lubricant won’t work effectively, and could impair your car’s performance, as well as storing up mechanical problems for the future.
Moreover, it is worth paying attention to cambelt (sometimes called timing belt) service intervals and any particular instructions regarding DPFs. Some vehicles utilise an additive to clean the DPF, and this needs topping up once the car has covered a set mileage.
By ignoring such milestones, you’ll seriously curtail your car’s ability to achieve its potential, resulting in a disappointing driving experience and a much higher risk of large-scale repairs.
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* Actual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle, age of vehicle, driving conditions and driving style. Corrosion protection based on laboratory tests carried out according to ASTM D665A. For more information on Shell V-Power Nitro+, please see shell.co.uk/vpower »
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• Five of the best car cleaning tips | Five of the best ways to get the most from your diesel car, and prolong its life, from regular maintenance to filling up with high-performance fuel | 34.833333 | 0.9 | 1.566667 | medium | medium | mixed |
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/02/baker-administration-prepares-for-governor-overseas-trade-mission-israel/Q7ew0dCH9Ctp0bLUEz1UOO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160804211905id_/https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/02/baker-administration-prepares-for-governor-overseas-trade-mission-israel/Q7ew0dCH9Ctp0bLUEz1UOO/story.html | Baker administration prepares for governor’s overseas trade mission to Israel | 20160804211905 | After steering clear of overseas trade missions in his first 18 months on the job, Governor Charlie Baker now appears poised to travel to Israel with business leaders later this year.
Israel’s population isn’t much bigger than that of Massachusetts, and the country doesn’t rank in the state’s top 20 markets for exports.
But proponents say Israel, like Massachusetts, punches above its weight class, the two places’ world-renowned startup sectors are natural matches, and this state has much to gain from Israel’s expertise in cybersecurity. There’s a common language and, to a significant extent, a shared heritage.
Governor Deval Patrick made Israel a priority during his tenure, leading two entourages there, in 2011 and 2014, among his 10 overseas trade missions.
Six Baker aides trekked to Israel in June, on a visit particularly focused on cybersecurity. Baker didn’t attend. But the June trip could help lay important groundwork for when Baker does go, likely on the administration’s next scheduled trip there in December.
“There’s a really strong case to be made for why it’s so economically important,” said MassChallenge chief executive John Harthorne, who hopes to join the trip. “They create this opportunity to interact with high-level leaders on the other side that I wouldn’t get at a tiny nonprofit startup. I just don’t have the access. . . . The governor’s presence makes a difference.”
Baker’s staff still won’t confirm whether the December trip is on his calendar, although the governor’s attendance is widely expected. Spokesman Tim Buckley would only say that the administration is studying a potential trade mission to Israel and that any such trip would not be taxpayer-funded.
Patrick’s trips to Israel were credited with spurring the arrival of El Al’s nonstop flights between Boston and Tel Aviv. And his 2011 trade mission was considered instrumental in the decision by Israeli water purification company Desalitech to open a headquarters in Newton, as well as Israeli digital health firm EarlySense’s choice of Waltham over Ohio for its main US office.
Andrew Cassey, an economics professor at Washington State University, said it can be difficult to calculate the long-term benefits of these missions. That’s largely because it’s hard to know whether a subsequent business deal or corporate expansion would have happened anyway.
These sojourns certainly are not unusual: Cassey studied a decade-long period starting in the mid-1990s and found about 500 trade missions led by governors nationwide, with more than 40 states launching at least one.
“Governors tend to go to the places where there are already strong relationships,” Cassey said.
Business leaders say it’s particularly important that the governor personally participate in the trips, rather than send emissaries.
A governor’s trade mission can close deals and open doors. These trips create deadlines to finalize a business deal or an expansion plan, to ensure the politicians have success stories to unveil during their tour. And a governor, as the state’s most prominent elected official, can line up in-person meetings with hard-to-get political officials and business executives.
“When the governor goes, it frees up officials on the Israel side,” said Udi Mokady, chief executive of CyberArk Software, an Israeli cybersecurity business with a headquarters in Newton. “It creates a more impactful image.”
Mokady cochaired the June mission to Israel. He said CyberArk picked the Boston area for its overseas expansion in 2001, in part because of the density of talent here, the proximity to investment firms, and the quality schools. Time-zone proximity gave Massachusetts the edge over Silicon Valley. The company employs nearly 200 people here today.
And Harthorne had Israel in mind almost from the inception of MassChallenge, the Boston-based startup accelerator. The reason? Israel’s startup ecosystem is one of the strongest in the world, Harthorne said, and the startups there are eager to find a way into the US market. MassChallenge recently opened a new Jerusalem office, with enough room to eventually accommodate up to 100 startups.
The New England-Israel Business Council has played a key role in building these business connections and playing them up in the public eye.
Board member David Goodtree sees important similarities between the innovation economies in the two places: diverse sectors that include life sciences, information technology, and data storage. He said some of the Boston area’s biggest companies, including Akamai Technologies and EMC Corp., contain some Israeli DNA, either passed on from a cofounder or through intellectual property.
Yehuda Yaakov, consul general of Israel to New England, said Patrick’s trips strengthened those ties. He’s hopeful that Baker’s trip can build on that groundwork.
“He has said he’s going to Israel sooner rather than later so I’m confident it’s going to happen,” Yaakov said. “We’re a small country, [but] we’re bursting at the seams with talent. That talent is looking to expand all the time.”
Baker’s approach to funding is different from Patrick’s: The former governor relied heavily on funds from quasi-public agencies, such as the Massachusetts Port Authority, for his two trips to Israel. The 2011 trip cost $194,000, although a significant portion also involved a visit to the United Kingdom, according to figures provided by the Baker administration. And Patrick’s trade mission in 2014 cost $185,000, but also included the United Arab Emirates. (Businesses usually pay for their executives who join state officials on these trips.)
In total, Patrick’s 10 overseas trade trips during his eight-year term added up to nearly $1.6 million, almost entirely funded by quasi-public agencies.
In the case of the Baker administration’s June excursion, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, not a state agency, picked up the $25,000 tab for five of the six Baker aides who attended. Among those in attendance were Assistant Economic Development Secretary Katie Stebbins, Deputy Economic Development Secretary Carolyn Kirk, and Information Technology Office Director Mark Nunnelly. (Nunnelly paid his own way.)
Combined Jewish Philanthropies also helped fund a trip led by Senate President Stanley Rosenberg in December.
From a good governance perspective, Common Cause Massachusetts executive director Pam Wilmot said it’s usually better for these trade missions to be funded through the state budget and not an outside source, to avoid the potential for a conflict of interest. “The danger when you have third parties paying is that they may want something in return,” Wilmot said, “or that’s the appearance that is given.” | Israel has become an in-demand destination for the state’s governors. Governor Charlie Baker’s administration is preparing to make it the focal point of his first trade mission. | 38.757576 | 0.787879 | 1.393939 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/sports/soccer/bayern-munich-carlo-ancelotti-coaching-job-security.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160804223045id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/03/sports/soccer/bayern-munich-carlo-ancelotti-coaching-job-security.html | At Soccer’s Coaching Summit, Job Security Is a Relative Term | 20160804223045 | HOBOKEN, N.J. — Javier Martínez is about to begin his fifth season with Bayern Munich, the German juggernaut that has won 26 Bundesliga titles, 18 German Cup titles and five European titles. In every one of his first four seasons, Martínez helped the club raise the German league trophy.
Despite that success, Martínez will soon play for his third different manager at Munich. He is hardly alone in arriving at a top club and having to endure an immediate (and ongoing) round of manager roulette. Gareth Bale joined Real Madrid in 2013, has won two Champions League trophies since then and is playing for his third manager. Eden Hazard signed with Chelsea in 2012 and is on his fifth manager. Marouane Fellaini moved to Manchester United in 2013 and is on his fourth (Ryan Giggs being a monthlong interim).
While continuity is often held as a critical component of success at the highest levels of soccer — continuity of lineup, continuity of tactics, continuity of training techniques — there seems to be little hesitation among the biggest clubs when it comes to making changes to their primary leaders. So when Carlo Ancelotti shakes hands with Zinedine Zidane after Wednesday’s match at the Meadowlands between Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, it will be Zidane — who won the Champions League with Madrid last season despite having taken over the team as late as January — who will be the longer tenured among the pair.
Ancelotti, meanwhile, who also won a Champions League title with Madrid (in 2014, only to be fired a year later), is trying to feel his way through a fractured preseason with Munich after taking over for Pep Guardiola, who departed for Manchester City.
Sitting at the team’s hotel before a training session, Martínez, a tough defensive midfielder, considered the challenge that a new coach faces and the difficulty it raises for players who, like many professional athletes, crave routine.
“This is like the mode now, it’s more often and everywhere — lots of changes,” he said. “In many cases, I think it is because there are a lot of younger coaches, maybe younger than coaches were years ago. And so clubs are more concerned with being right, and also the coaches want to move more quickly, too. They want to have experiences in different places to help them grow faster.”
Guardiola, 45, seems to fit that model. Generally regarded as one of the best managers in the sport, he left Barcelona after a stunning four-year run, took over Bayern Munich for three seasons and, after having domestic success but failing to win the Champions League, moved in July to Manchester City, where he is testing the rigors of the English Premier League.
José Mourinho, 53, has not been as fortunate in terms of willfully leaving each of his clubs. He has been fired plenty of times, but the self-described “Special One” spent two years at Porto, three years at Chelsea, two years at Inter Milan, three years at Real Madrid, two more years at Chelsea, and is about to begin what should be a fascinating stretch of soccer in northern England as he takes over across town from Guardiola at Manchester United.
Antonio Conte, 47, replaces Mourinho in the full-time job at Chelsea, and while his résumé is not nearly as illustrious as Mourinho’s, it is similarly spaced: two years at Bari, one at Atalanta, one at Siena, three at Juventus, two as coach of Italy’s national team and, now, Chelsea.
Job security is a relative term when it comes to soccer managers. More and more, it has become clear that tenures such as Alex Ferguson’s (28 years at Manchester United) are a thing of the past. Presumably every club would love to have the success that Ferguson brought to United — the team was, in every sense, a dynasty — but it is difficult to imagine any owner or club board of directors offering a manager the necessary rope (if the manager even wanted to stay put himself).
Arsène Wenger, who became Arsenal’s manager in 1996, is by far the longest-serving coach at a club in one of Europe’s top leagues; Christophe Galtier, who is second, has been with the French club St.-Étienne since 2009.
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“I think in this time, the most difficult thing for a football manager is to keep the hunger of the players,” Martínez said. “It is not as much about tactics and style; it is about making sure that the players have that passion and drive. Players today don’t want to do the same thing every training session or play the same way in every game. They don’t respond.”
That, of course, is what club executives often point to when managerial changes are made. In the big-money world of top-level soccer, the anxiety that players feel when confronted with a new person charged with determining their playing time is, perhaps more than anything else, a powerful catalyst.
Building (and rebuilding) chemistry, however, is the attendant challenge. While some coaches opt for organized activities to foster relationships — Rafa Benítez, who is trying to bring Newcastle back to the Premier League, took his players rock-climbing — Ancelotti has tried to be more organic with Bayern Munich.
Martínez recalled going rafting in the Spanish mountains with his former club, Athletic Bilbao, but said he also respected Ancelotti’s approach. With Munich on a preseason tour in the United States (it played in Chicago and in Charlotte before coming here), Ancelotti has given the team more free time instead of structuring something organized.
Part of that approach may also be due to the fact that Bayern Munich, like other top clubs, is missing many of its best players because the summer’s European Championship extended the season for international players. For Bayern Munich, players such as Manuel Neuer and Thomas Müller have been on vacation during this tour and will rejoin the team when it returns to Germany.
“It would be easier if we were all together,” Martínez said. “But this is the way it is and Carlo has to handle it.”
“It is one of the things that makes being a manager so hard,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2016, on page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: In the Top Ranks of Coaching, Job Security Is a Relative Term. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | Carlo Ancelotti is adjusting to life as Bayern Munich’s new manager after a short tenure with Real Madrid. | 64.3 | 0.8 | 1.2 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/magazine/10dinner-t.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805041400id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2010/10/10/magazine/10dinner-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 | The New York Times | 20160805041400 | HERE’S THE CONCEIT: Build a single wood fire and, over the course of 30-plus hours, use it to roast, braise, bake, simmer and grill as many different dishes as possible — for lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again. The main ingredients: one whole goat from the McCormack Ranch in Rio Vista, Calif.; several crates of seasonal produce (and a case of olive oil) from Hudson Ranch in Napa; a basket of morels and porcini gathered near Mount Shasta; an assortment of spices from Boulettes Larder in San Francisco; and a couple of cases of wine from Kermit Lynch in Berkeley. The setting: a shady backyard in Napa (but picture suburban subdivision, not vineyard estate), where a big country table stretches out beneath the canopy of a mulberry tree. The cast: three accomplished Bay Area chefs (Mike and Jenny Emanuel — whose kitchen and backyard we’ve commandeered for the weekend — and Melissa Fernandez), one gifted baker (Chad Robertson), one jack of all culinary trades (Anthony Tassinello) and two amateurs (me and my 17-year-old son, Isaac). The guests: all of the above, plus a rotating crew of spouses, children, friends and neighbors. The fire: almond, oak and mulberry logs burning in a cob oven that Mike Emanuel built with the help of some friends in 2006. A cob, or earth, oven is a primitive, domed cooking device that can be made from layers of mud, clay, straw, stucco, even manure; the earthy mixture, the cob, can endure much higher heat, and hold it much longer, than an indoor oven can. Emanuel’s incarnation, which he built “to bring together family and friends for extended feasts,” stands 5 feet tall with a 30-inch hearth and looks like a cartoon character: a visitor from a planet of chubby, eyeless, big-mouthed monsters.
The inspiration for this pyro-gastronomical experiment was the communal ovens still found burning in some towns around the Mediterranean, centers of social gravity where, each morning, people bring their proofed, or risen, loaves to be baked. (Each loaf bears a signature slash so you can be sure the one you get back is your own.) But after the bread is out of the oven, people show up with a variety of other dishes to wring every last B.T.U. from the day’s fire: pizzas while the oven is still blazing and then, as the day goes on, gentle braises or even pots of yogurt to capture the last heat and flavors of the dying embers.
The idea is to make the most efficient use of precious firewood and to keep the heat (and the danger) of the cook fire some distance from everybody’s homes. But what appeals to me about the tradition is how the communal oven also becomes a focus for social life (“focus” is Latin for “hearth”), a place to gather and gossip and escape the solitude of cooking at home. Shared meals have always been about community, about what happens among family and friends — even enemies — when they gather around a table to eat; but once upon a time, before every family had its own kitchen in which Mom labored more or less alone, cooking was itself a social activity, one that fostered community and conversation around the chopping board or cook fire long before the meal was served.
Our own backyard experiment with a communal oven, which unfolded last June over the first weekend of summer, was in spirit obviously more playful than practical. But when Mike offered to organize and host what amounted to a 36-hour dinner party, I was immediately intrigued: could an around-the-clock cook fire still exert the same social force? I barely knew most of the people with whom I’d be spending the weekend, and I wondered how well two days of working side by side and eating at the same table would wear on everyone. I also wondered about the food — whether four meals teased from a single fire, three of them from one goat, would get a little monotonous. But then, my previous experience of cooking with fire was pretty much limited to grilling slabs of meat on a Weber. I had no idea just how many different things one fire could do.
SATURDAY9:22 a.m. Mike has laid the fire in the mouth of the oven: a tidy pyramid of crumpled newspaper, kindling and split logs. He waited for Isaac and me to show up before lighting it. Isaac lets Mike’s 12-year-old son, Will, do the honors. The oven’s draft must be good, because the fire leaps to life almost instantly. The shape of the oven and the size of its single opening are designed to draw in air along the floor, then conduct it around the curving back and roof of the dome before exhausting it at the top of the opening. Within minutes, fat tongues of flame are licking at the top of its mouth, reaching out. This fire will burn straight through the weekend, though not always in this oven: to bake bread, we’ll need to remove the burning logs and embers to a fire pit nearby — a concrete ring of partly buried sewer pipe — and then transfer them back. The most important cooking implement of the weekend will turn out to be a shovel.
10 a.m. While we wait for the oven to become hot enough to fire pizzas, Mike and Melissa break down the goat on the table outside. The rest of us mostly watch, lending a steadying hand from time to time. Ten days ago, Mike and I drove to the ranch to choose our animal and watch an itinerant butcher slaughter and dress it; Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible. Melissa is small but strong and has a sure hand with the hacksaw and the butcher knife; within 20 minutes the goat is transformed into considerably more appetizing cuts of meat: the baron, or hindquarters, and the saddle (both to be roasted for tonight’s dinner); two racks of ribs (for tomorrow’s lunch); the shoulders (destined for an overnight braise); and the scraps, which Anthony collects to make a sugo — a slow-cooked Italian meat sauce — for tonight’s first course and to make sausage for the pizzas. Mike cuts a few slivers from the loin and passes them around; a ceremonial tasting of the uncooked animal is, he explains, “a butcher’s privilege.” The raw meat is surprisingly sweet and tender. It’s so good, in fact, that we decide to make some crudo, or goat tartare, for an appetizer.
11 a.m. We break into small groups to prep for lunch, some of us working inside in the kitchen, others outside at the big table. Everybody is chopping and chatting — those of us who know one another, catching up; those of us who don’t, getting acquainted. My lunchtime job is to assemble, with Isaac’s help, a shaved vegetable salad — a julienne of everything that the farmer at Hudson Ranch, Scott Boggs, picked for us: fennel, carrots, radishes, cabbage, summer squash and green beans, all tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, pounded garlic, fresh herbs and salt. Over the top, I shave a few papery slices of fresh porcini and Parmesan. In the kitchen, Melissa is simmering a stock made from the goat’s head, organs and bones while Anthony is grinding meat for sausage, sprinkling it with fennel pollen. Out by the fire, Chad, the baker, is starting to stretch his pizza dough, which he mixed last night.
1 p.m. Using a thermometer gun, which measures the temperature wherever you aim its infrared beam, Chad has determined that the floor of the oven is between 700 and 900 degrees, hot enough to cook a pizza in four or five minutes. He invites people over to make their pizzas from a variety of toppings that Melissa, Anthony and Mike prepared: sautéed squid, several kinds of cheese, goat sausage, morels, porcini, chopped herbs and green and yellow coins of summer squash. Chad shows us how to stretch a ball of dough over our fists and rotate it until it is paper thin. After we decorate our pies, Melissa, who ran the pizza oven at Chez Panisse for six years, shows us how to use the long-handled paddle to quarter-turn the pie in the oven as soon as the section of crust nearest the burning logs begins to balloon and blister. I think of professional chefs as control freaks, but Melissa and Chad are happy to let go and let everyone try their hand. So what if some of the pizzas aren’t perfect circles? Isaac makes a goat-sausage-and-mushroom pizza that he declares the best he’s ever tasted. I have to agree: Chad’s crust is crisp but with a chewy interior, and all the toppings are nicely inflected by wood smoke.
3 p.m. After a leisurely lunch well oiled by a few bottles of rosé, everyone is ready for a snooze, but Mike reminds us that there’s dinner to prep and bread to bake and a fire that needs our attention. Chad has proofed several loaves of his big country bread. (This may be the most coveted loaf in the Bay Area, selling out every evening at Tartine, his bakery in the Mission.) Mike helps him shovel all the burning logs and embers out of the oven and into the fire pit to even out the heat in the oven and eliminate the smoke. Even without a fire in it, the oven holds heat remarkably well: the gun clocks the back of the oven at 550 degrees, perfect for bread. But the floor must be hotter, because the bottom of the first loaf blackens before it has fully risen and crusted. Chad slides in a “sacrificial loaf” — one he bakes solely to cool the oven floor. By the time he slides in the next one, conditions are good though still not ideal. Chad says the dome of the oven is too high to give the tops of the loaves the hard, dark crust he’s aiming for. Everyone else thinks the bread came out wonderfully moist and chewy, but Chad is not thrilled, and his relationship with the oven will remain testy all weekend.
6 p.m. Once all the loaves are out, we shovel the fire back into the oven and add logs to build up heat for the roast. I hold back some of the burning embers in the fire pit, where I plan to roast the root vegetables in a bed of ashes. Called rescoldo, this is a method described by the Argentine chef Francis Mallmann in his book “Seven Fires”: bury whole beets, turnips, carrots and any other root vegetables in the ashes of a dying fire; dig them out a couple of hours later, dust off the ashes (or peel the vegetables, if you don’t like eating a little ash) and serve. Immediately I face my first fire-management challenge: the dying fire is a little too dead, so I have to add kindling and resuscitate it by blowing through a four-foot-long steel straw that Mike has for just this purpose. Soon, however, the fire is blazing and threatens to burn my vegetables beyond a crisp, so I now have to stifle it by shoveling in more ash. My first lesson about cooking with live fire: at any given moment, there is either too much of it or not quite enough; the sweet spot is hard to find and fleeting.
6:50 p.m. While I was worrying my fire and root vegetables, Mike and Melissa, who have emerged as something of a leadership team, were prepping the roasts, giving the baron and the saddle a deep-tissue massage with a mixture of pounded herbs and garlic and then wrapping them in a beautiful white lace of caul fat, the sort of item professional chefs just seem to have around. I’m beginning to appreciate Mike’s genius for what chefs call the mise en place: making certain everything we could possibly need is at hand; never once have we had to run out to the store for a missing ingredient. Another lesson. I’m also impressed by the ease with which these cooks collaborate, how they can go back and forth from taking the lead on a dish to playing sous chef. These meals are a group endeavor, and everyone seems happy to share authorship. Except, that is, for the two bakers — Anthony and Chad — who occupy their own private bubbles of activity. Not sure why, but perhaps because baking demands more precision and therefore tighter control.
The oven is hovering between 450 and 500 degrees when Mike slides in the roasting pan. In the kitchen, meanwhile, Melissa is stirring a big pot of extremely slow-cooked polenta and tending to the goat sugo, while Anthony is whipping eggs for his dessert. He’s assembling individual pots with slabs of spongecake soaked in sparkling wine and topped by wedges of fresh apricots and a sabayon: an airy custard of whipped eggs and cream tinted with saffron threads. The dessert needs to be ready to go into the oven when the roast comes out; oven traffic is building.
7:30 p.m. While we wait for the roasts to finish, Anthony brings out a platter of one of the few dishes untouched by our fire, his crudo: a rough dice of raw goat tenderloin with lemon juice, olive oil and a drizzle of raw egg yolk, served on a bed of rocket (a k a arugula) and shaved raw porcini. Federal food-safety authorities would not approve of Anthony’s dish, but spooned onto toasts made over the fire pit, the crudo is luscious: lemony, silky and cool.
7:45 p.m. The captivating scents emanating from the oven are drawing people outside and into its orbit. A few neighbors magically appear through an opening in the back fence, wondering what’s cooking. Unidentified children and puppies are suddenly underfoot. The gravitational field of the cook fire seems to have enlarged our little community, so Jenny sets a few more places at the big table.
8 p.m. When Mike and Melissa pull the roasts from the oven, putting them on the lip to rest, I set about retrieving the fire-roasted root vegetables, which requires a treasure hunt. The beets and turnips I can find, excavating among the ashes with a long pair of tongs, but the carrots have vaporized: the fire seems to have eaten them. I dust off as much ash as possible and put the vegetables, which are nicely charred and smell fantastic, on a platter. Isaac voices skepticism.
8:30 p.m. We sit down to dinner at last, starting with Melissa’s sugo over polenta. The dish is unbelievably rich, owing no doubt to the goat-head stock, the organ meats in the sugo and the long, slow cooking of the polenta. (Melissa also soaked it overnight, “blooming” and slightly fermenting the corn meal.) Mike carves the roasts; the meat, which is mild and sweet, has a perfect ratio of deeply browned, smoky crust to pink interior. To accompany it, Anthony has chopped a salsa verde, made extra-astringent by the addition of fresh grape leaves. Opinion is divided on my roasted root vegetables, with Isaac firmly in the rejectionist camp. The beets and turnips are nicely caramelized and aromatic, but the ash coating takes some mental adjustment that not everyone can manage.
It is a long, loquacious and delicious dinner, made more special by the fact that virtually everyone at the table had a hand in preparing it. I feel as if I’ve already learned a lot cooking with this crew, especially about working together and trading ideas. Each dish might have a lead cook, but other cooks will contribute a technique or flavoring — dozens of tasting spoons have been passed around — so that the final product becomes something more or less new, even to its author. Already I’m better acquainted with everyone in the easy way that seems to happen when people work together, especially at tasks, like kitchen prep, that leave plenty of mental space for talking. The flow of conversation has been desultory, drifting from summer plans to the World Cup (playing earlier in the living room), kids, other meals, the work at hand. But it is the working together at less-than-all-consuming tasks that seems to be forging our motley crew (far flung in age and background) into something that feels like a community. Sometimes getting to know people is easier done side by side than it is face to face.
9:45 p.m. Anthony has left us to tend to his apricots, which emerge from the oven fragrant and caramelized with perfect black tips. Their sabayon blanket is blazingly bright yellow-orange from the saffron — apricot on apricot — and the flavor is as intensely layered as the color: honeyed ripe fruit, sweet spices, wine and wood smoke. | One fire, one goat, many cooks. A pyro-gastronomical experiment. | 220.2 | 1 | 2.333333 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/opinion/africa-and-the-power-of-the-pivot.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805065726id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2012/05/15/opinion/africa-and-the-power-of-the-pivot.html?ref=global | Africa and the Power of the Pivot | 20160805065726 | By now, nearly everyone has heard of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Less known are the CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) and MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey).
These acronyms are the product of brilliant branding, but with all due respect to those who coined them, they tell us nothing about why these countries were chosen as the ones best built to last.
There are so many crucial differences in their circumstances, strengths and weaknesses that they can’t possibly be expected to maintain similar paths. Some will rise, and others may fall.
With so much volatility in today’s world and so many domestic distractions for the Western governments that have traditionally done so much to contain it, individual emerging markets will need more than strength if they are to fully emerge. They’ll need resilience. And that will depend on their ability to give themselves a wide range of options, particularly in the political and trade ties they forge.
In fact, with so many uncertainties these days in international politics — from Europe’s crisis of confidence to long-term U.S. fiscal woes to Arab world upheaval and a leadership change in China — a developing country’s ability to avoid dependence for security and prosperity on a single dominant ally has become more important than at any time in decades.
Some of the states listed above — Brazil and Turkey, in particular — provide excellent examples of what we might call pivot states, those with the flexibility to pivot among potential partners. But there are other countries and regions that will profit from their ability to pivot.
That brings us to Africa, a continent widely associated in the Western imagination with poverty, corruption, conflict and disease. Yet Africa has become the world’s most underrated growth story — in part because many of its governments have developed the resilience that comes with the ability to pivot.
You may have heard that Africa’s population surpassed one billion people in 2010, but did you know that though Africa and India have similar populations, Africans spent 35 percent more on goods and services in 2008 than Indians did. The percentage of Africans who live in cities is now comparable to that in China. By the end of this year, the number of mobile phones across the continent is expected to reach 735 million.
Total foreign direct investment in Africa grew from $9.4 billion in 2000 to more than $60 billion in 2011. In addition, though many think of Africa’s wealth primarily in terms of oil and metals production, urbanization across the continent and growing middle classes in many countries ensure that African economies that don’t export huge quantities of commodities have grown almost as quickly as those that do.
Africa has achieved this success in part because many of its governments can now pivot. For decades, African states were forced to turn almost exclusively to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Western governments for aid and investment, and the money often came with conditions — like democratic reforms and greater openness to Western investment.
Things have changed. Over the past decade, China has sharply increased its investment in Africa, and state-owned companies have worked alongside the state-backed China Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank to secure access to oil, gas, metals, minerals and farmland across the continent. In 2010 alone, China’s trade with Africa expanded by more than 43 percent, and the country replaced the United States as Africa’s largest trade partner.
China and other emerging markets seem quicker than developed states to recognize the value of closer ties with Africa. That’s why the BRIC countries invited South Africa to join their club in December 2010, adding the S. By traditional measures, South Africa’s economy can’t compete with those of the other BRICS. The I.M.F. estimated in 2010 that its economy was less than one quarter the size of Russia’s, the smallest of the original four BRICS. But South Africa is a member of the Southern African Development Community, a collection of emerging states that includes Angola, Africa’s second-largest oil producer, Botswana, the world’s largest diamond producer, Zambia, the continent’s biggest copper producer, and Mozambique, with enormous untapped reserves of coal.
But this is not a story of emerging market triumph or of Western decline. In fact, as East African countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda discover new deposits of oil and gas, and as they work to develop energy alternatives like hydropower, geothermal energy and wind power, Western companies like Total, Statoil, Eni and others continue to outmaneuver less nimble Chinese competitors.
In addition, though Chinese companies have made friends within African governments by bankrolling large infrastructure projects, they have also alienated local communities by insisting that much of the materials used in these projects come from China — and that roads, bridges, port facilities and airports are built by Chinese workers.
This problem has already aroused anger in several African countries, where Chinese workers deprive locals of jobs. There is no reason why Western-based companies can’t exploit these vulnerabilities and compete more effectively with Chinese companies.
But the real winner in this story is Africa, where dozens of governments now have choices and can expect multinational and state-owned companies from the developed and developing worlds to compete for access to local consumers and favorable investment terms. This is the power of the pivot.
Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of “Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 15, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune. Today's Paper|Subscribe | Developing countries must avoid depending on one ally for security and prosperity. Africa shows the power of such resilience. | 52.666667 | 0.809524 | 1.761905 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lim.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805074447id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lim.html | The New York Times | 20160805074447 | AT the Sundance Film Festival, where the writer-director Tamara Jenkins’s second feature, “The Savages,” had its premiere in January, dysfunctional families are, to an exhausting degree, the norm.
But Ms. Jenkins’s film, which stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as bickering siblings forced to care for their semi-estranged, dementia-stricken father (Philip Bosco), stood out for its wit and maturity. Devoid of the quirks and sappiness that increasingly typify American indie cinema, the film captures the sorrow, anxiety and sheer disruptive tumult involved in dealing with aging, dying parents — a subject at once universal and vaguely taboo.
“It’s something that everybody feels or that everybody thinks about,” Ms. Jenkins said recently, sitting in a cafe near her East Village apartment. But in her experience “it sort of happens outside the community, off the grid,” she said. “You go off and deal with this death thing, or this nursing-home-transition thing.”
In a typical office environment, she added, “sometimes someone will just disappear for two weeks, and when they come back everyone’s like, ‘Oh ... ’” — she assumed an expression of exaggerated sympathy — “and that’s it, but meanwhile their whole world has changed.”
It’s an experience that Ms. Jenkins, 45, went through in her mid-30s, when her father was admitted to a nursing home at the end of his life. “My father was 20 years older than my mother, so I was relatively young,” she said. “None of my peers had really been through that. Their parents weren’t that old.”
This was 10 years ago, before the demographic of aging boomers led to the growth of advice on the care of their parents. “I remember it being kind of isolating,” she said. But as a writer who gravitates to “primal situations where you’re unafraid of etiquette, because there is none,” she also recognized a subject matter that was “this great laboratory for human behavior.”
“There’s no rule book,” she continued, “on how to behave when confronted with death.” It irks her that films often presume there is one. “You see movies with tragic death scenes where everyone’s sort of noble and can handle it, and I just don’t buy it,” she said.
Jon and Wendy Savage, the film’s combative siblings, are both far from noble. They’re petty, self-absorbed, infinitely fallible. Confronting the mortality of a parent has only made their own creeping midlife disappointments harder to ignore. He’s a drama professor in Buffalo; she’s a struggling playwright in Manhattan. That they work in the same field only brings a competitive prickliness to their interactions.
For her first feature, “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998), a darkly funny account of growing up broke and nomadic on the fringes of moneyed Los Angeles, Ms. Jenkins mined her teenage years. (After her parents divorced, her father, a car salesman and former nightclub owner, took custody of her and her three brothers.)
For “The Savages,” which opens on Nov. 28, she drew again on her family. One of her brothers, Ron Jenkins, is a professor of theater at Wesleyan University; Ms. Jenkins got her start in the downtown New York theater world. “I feel kind of greedy when I’m writing, just searching for stuff,” she said. “But it’s not truly autobiographical. It’s sort of an inverted version. I remember thinking: ‘My brother and I, we’re the lucky ones. But what if we were unlucky and turned ourselves inside out and were these warring siblings?’” In a wince-inducing moment in “The Savages” Wendy lies to Jon about having won a Guggenheim fellowship. Both Ms. Jenkins and her brother have in fact been awarded Guggenheims.
“It was a wonderfully demanding part,” Ms. Linney said of Wendy, whom she called “spastic and yet capable of great stealth” and who suggests a less stable version of the tightly wound sister she played in another indie drama, Kenneth Lonergan’s “You Can Count on Me.” “The extremes of the character are very far apart, which gave me a lot of room in between.”
As for the irascible father, played with a remarkable lack of vanity by Mr. Bosco, the theater veteran, he’s hardly a paternal figure. “He’s not a grouch with a twinkle in his eye,” Ms. Jenkins said. “I couldn’t have handled a cute old man.”
Besides a contempt for sentimentality, the most notable characteristic of Ms. Jenkins’s writing is its blend of poignancy and mortifying comedy, both of which she locates in her characters’ foibles. She explained: “Someone asked me at a film festival, ‘Your screenplay is funny and sad, so do you do a sad pass and then go back and do the funny?’ And I was, like, ‘I don’t think it works that way.’”
The bittersweet voice may come naturally to Ms. Jenkins, but in the case of this film it didn’t come quickly. In the nine-year gap between her features — “It’s like Terrence Malick without the masterpieces,” she joked — she put in some time on an eventually abandoned screenplay about Diane Arbus. She also took on rewrite jobs, published essays about art and worked on sex-education films and public-service announcements.
Intermittently she took notes for “The Savages,” observing the goings-on at a nursing home down the street from her apartment and consulting “the elder-care section at Barnes & Noble.”
In 2002 Ms. Jenkins married Jim Taylor, the writing and producing partner of the director Alexander Payne (they shared a screenwriting Oscar for the 2004 critics’ favorite “Sideways”). But in lieu of a honeymoon she went straight to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., hoping to turn her notebooks into a screenplay.
Most of the other fellows at Yaddo were novelists, which imposed a certain kind of pressure. “As a screenwriter you feel like you’re not a real writer,” she said. “Real writers write novels, and you’re just this hacky person.” But being in a community of fiction writers, she said, ultimately helped: “When I’d get stuck in the haiku-ness of screenplay writing, where you’re distilling as it’s coming out of you, I would just pretend it was a novel — just go for prose and write the hell out of it.” Her first draft was 200 pages, unfilmable but filled with a sense of interior life that scripts typically leave out. “It was like I wrote a novel, which I then had to adapt into a screenplay,” she said.
Before making her first feature, Ms. Jenkins recalled, “I had never interacted with the world of commerce.” A stage actor and a performance artist in the ’80s, she enrolled at New York University’s graduate film school in the ’90s. Working on “Slums of Beverly Hills,” she realized that “the business of moviemaking is not a natural thing for me.” Developing “The Savages” only confirmed that. | With “The Savages,” Tamara Jenkins creates an unsentimental portrait of competitive siblings facing a parent’s decline. | 68.285714 | 0.761905 | 1.904762 | high | low | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/travel/destination-weddings-denmark.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805075831id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/07/31/travel/destination-weddings-denmark.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2FHeads+Up | Denmark: Where It Is Always Wedding Season | 20160805075831 | The brides were everywhere — they floated like flower petals on the constant wind that wafted across the isle of Aero in Denmark. White dresses billowing, they ran into the red brick building of the municipal registry in Aeroskobing; they alighted before the landmark Old Merchant’s Court, one of Aero’s historic attractions.
Look closely at any location, sea or beachscape, and a wedding couple will pop up — brides and bridegrooms in mixed and matched pairs: opposite sex, same sex, varied races and nationalities. Nuptials are held all over the island, airborne in helicopters, or afloat, on the ferries that import the marriage-bound.
Why has this island in the Baltic Sea’s South Funen Archipelago lured the hugging masses, yearning to be wed?
In recent years, Aero has gained a reputation as the go-to place for mixed-nationality and same-sex couples and many prospective spouses with document-approval issues. As one private wedding provider put it, the island, a scenic four-hour journey from Copenhagen, has become a “challenge-solving” wedding destination site.
Weddings of foreigners on Aero have increased more than tenfold in the last seven years, from 236 in 2008 to 2,832 in 2015, according to Aero government figures, and now outnumber those of locals.
“Last year, only 50 weddings were of Danes,” said Joan Lykke Ammersboll, a registrar at the Aero Kommune, the government agency where wedding applications are filed and approved and where registry weddings are held. Indeed, for the last three years, the number of marriages of foreigners registered at the Town Hall outnumbers the population of the main town, Aeroskobing (937).
Nuptials on Aero have all the advantages of the quickie Las Vegas marriage mill — fast service and little bureaucracy — yet are stylistically the opposite, set in this charming 17th-century village, whose cobblestone streets are lined with marzipan-colored tiny houses on an island with stunning beaches. Aeroskobing was given the prestigious Europa Nostra Award for its outstanding state of preservation.
There are two types of wedding services available on Aero: the Town Hall ceremonies, which cost 500 Danish krone ($75), and the more costly, personalized weddings provided by private agencies. There are four such agencies on the island, and five more in Germany that funnel couples over to the ferry at Svendborg, the most popular departure point. Danish Island Weddings (getmarriedindenmark.com), a family-operated agency, pioneered the wedding business on Aero and has the highest profile, offering full-out frills for fees starting at 990 euros ($1,094).
John Moloney, a former British air force pilot who runs Danish Island Weddings with his wife, Louise, an Aero native, said the spirit of love and celebration never fails to boost his spirits. “We see people at the happiest moments of their lives.”
At Aeroskobing’s Aero Kommune Municipal Hall (aeroekommune.dk) where the registry marriage ceremonies are performed, couples recite their vows at a dizzying rate. Often, registrars conduct over 40 ceremonies a day. To keep up with the hectic pace in recent years, the office increased its staff to the current five registrars.
Even the civil ceremony features candlelight and a toast of muscat wine, and the registrars have performed special marriage services when emergency strikes: “When one man’s mother died and he had to leave, we rushed to the ferry and married him there,” said Ms. Ammersboll.
Mr. Moloney of Danish Island Weddings said his wife even comforted a jittery bride who almost backed out. Their service provides custom cakes, professional hair styling, horse-drawn buggies and vintage cars. Most accommodations and facilities for weddings are within walking distance.
The fact that the idyllic island offers a legal solution for couples from countries with problematic document issues is a big lure when obstacles seem insurmountable. “Throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, different countries require different documents and types of notarization, often of original birth and citizenship certificates, and waiting periods to qualify for a legal wedding,” Mr. Moloney explained. “This can stall or even stop a marriage from taking place. Germany has some of the most restrictive rules: The couples must meet not only German laws but also follow the other partner’s native country’s rules.”
It is possible for prospective spouses to apply directly to AeroKommune.com to complete applications by email and mail and receive an approval within six months, generally, if their documents are in order. Even so, many foreigners, wishing to avoid any mishaps or language barriers, choose private agencies to navigate approval of their paperwork even before they arrive on the island. The agencies can often expedite the process and get the approval in 24 hours if documents are in order, sometimes achieving an exceptionally fast 36-hour turnaround from first phone call to ceremony. The residency requirement is only 24 hours before a couple can marry.
The hope is, of course, that the nuptial bliss found on Aero will never fade. For one pair of newlyweds, the honeymoon lives on in Aero. They just bought a house there.
A version of this article appears in print on July 31, 2016, on page TR4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Danish Isle That Welcomes Weddings. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | In recent years, the island of Aero has gained a reputation as the go-to wedding destination for mixed-nationality and same-sex couples. | 35.413793 | 1 | 6.793103 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ant-financial-close-to-hiring-former-goldman-sachs-banker-feagin-1462256460 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805114850id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/ant-financial-close-to-hiring-former-goldman-sachs-banker-feagin-1462256460? | The New Qualification for China’s Tech Elite: Goldman Sachs | 20160805114850 | HONG KONG—“Former Goldman Sachs banker” is fast becoming a common line on résumés in the Chinese tech sector’s senior ranks.
The financial affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is close to announcing the hiring of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker Douglas Feagin to help its global push, according to people familiar with the situation.
Ant Financial Services Group, China’s most valuable financial-technology... | “Former Goldman Sachs banker” is fast becoming a staple line of résumes in the Chinese tech sector’s senior ranks. The latest example: Douglas Feagin, whose hiring by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial may be announced as early as this week. | 1.695652 | 0.630435 | 3.5 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/03/local-control-line-amid-biogen-takeover-speculation/gTgF2qX8zSV2qxtQMAunuL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805172154id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/03/local-control-line-amid-biogen-takeover-speculation/gTgF2qX8zSV2qxtQMAunuL/story.html | Local control on the line amid Biogen takeover speculation | 20160805172154 | For many in the Massachusetts biotech community, the buyout buzz surrounding Biogen Inc. has revived vivid memories of other homegrown heavyweights, notably Genzyme Corp. and Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., being snapped up by out-of-state pharmaceutical giants.
A purchase of Biogen — which was approached by Merck & Co. and Allergan PLC, according to The Wall Street Journal — would likely mean the loss of local control for the state’s largest remaining biotech and most valuable public company.
“It would be the end of an era,” said life sciences adviser Leora Schiff, principal at Altius Strategy Consulting in Somerville. “Biogen is the last of the industry’s early trailblazers. Genzyme is no longer independent, Millennium is no longer independent. We could be losing that culture of entrepreneurial risk-taking. Control over the company’s direction would shift out of state, and that could have an impact on workforce levels and where research is done.”
Biogen’s stock climbed 9.3 percent to a 2016 high on Tuesday after the Journal reported the takeover overtures. The shares gave back 2.7 percent on Wednesday to $321, as analysts debated the likelihood that an offer would be made.
The importance of corporate headquarters to Massachusetts was highlighted by the successful pursuit of General Electric Co. by the Baker and Walsh administrations, said economist Barry Bluestone, director of Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.
“I would expect whoever acquired Biogen would continue to have a large presence in Massachusetts because this is a major research center,” Bluestone said. “But there would be less loyalty to the community, and when decisions are made on where to locate operations, they would be made somewhere else.”
For now, there is only speculation on Biogen’s fate. The company has yet to receive a formal offer, and some analysts have suggested its recent stock run-up and its market value of more than $70 billion make it an expensive takeover candidate.
“It may be wise to be skeptical,” Edison Investment Research analysts Max Jacobs wrote in a note to investors on Wednesday. “While a takeout could happen for strategic reasons, Biogen offers neither company growth nor synergies, and in the case of Allergan, an acquisition would practically be a merger of equals when taking into account a takeover premium.”
But others contend Biogen’s recent announcement that longtime chief executive George Scangos will step down in the coming months was read by some in Big Pharma as effectively putting a “For Sale” sign on the Cambridge company. Any candidates to succeed Scangos will have to gauge the Biogen board’s thinking on how to approach would-be buyers.
In another investors’ note, Geoffrey Porges, biotech analyst for Leerink Partners in Boston, wrote that “Biogen is the most likely of the large cap biotechs to be sold in the immediate future” at a time when the pace of mergers and acquisitions is slowing globally.
“Biogen faces significant strategic challenges,” Porges said in an interview. “Its multiple sclerosis business, which makes up the vast majority of its revenue, faces increased competition. But its recurring revenue still makes it attractive to a buyer who could make it even more profitable.”
The primary draw of Biogen is its experimental neurodegenerative disease therapies that treat unmet medical needs, such as Alzheimer’s and spinal muscular atrophy, Porges said.
“Alzheimer’s is literally the biggest unmet need in our society, and Biogen appears to be making some headway” in its drug development, he said. “It’s hard to believe that if this succeeds, it won’t be one of the biggest drugs in the industry. There aren’t many opportunities like that.”
Not everyone thinks an acquisition of Biogen, the world’s leading maker of multiple sclerosis treatments, would hurt the state’s biopharma cluster. The industry is centered in Cambridge, home to Biogen, Genzyme, and Millennium, which remains chockablock with biotech startups, academic labs, and research centers operated by global drug companies.
“The sector here is mature enough and has gained such a critical mass that I don’t see this [potential takeover] affecting it that much,” said Glenn Giovannetti, the Boston-based global biotech sector leader at consulting firm Ernst & Young. “The science will stay here, and those buildings in Kendall Square are still going to be occupied by smart people.”
But if Biogen is bought, the ranks of independent biotechs with more than one product on the market would further shrink. Merck, one of the companies pursuing Biogen, last year paid $9.5 billion for Lexington antibiotics maker Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc., the latest in a long string of takeovers of state biotechs dating back to Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s buyout of Cambridge-based Genetics Institute Inc. in 2000.
After Biogen, the largest Massachusetts biotech by revenue is Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Boston, which markets two approved cystic fibrosis drugs. Cambridge’s Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., which ranks third by market value, doesn’t even make the top 10 by revenue. It is working on more than a dozen gene-silencing drugs but has yet to win its first regulatory approval. Dozens of smaller companies with a single approved drug or a pipeline of drug candidates could eventually anchor the next generation of state biotechs, but they’re at least as likely to be acquired.
Back in 2008, when Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. bought Millennium for $8.8 billion, it was the biggest takeover ever of a Bay State biotech. That was dwarfed by French drug maker Sanofi SA’s blockbuster $20.1 billion acquisition of Genzyme in 2011.
Takeda and Sanofi have retained their Cambridge operations, continuing to maintain a large research footprint here, though both have cut jobs selectively and dozens of executives have departed — many starting or taking the helm at early-stage biotechs. | Buyout buzz surrounding the Cambridge biotech has revived vivid memories of other homegrown heavyweights being snapped up by out-of-state acquirers. | 44.96 | 0.96 | 6.4 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/04/redstone-family-fires-another-shot-dauman/sz5HalBHW6fiM3lGHLzyZP/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805212011id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/04/redstone-family-fires-another-shot-dauman/sz5HalBHW6fiM3lGHLzyZP/story.html | Redstone family fires another shot at Dauman | 20160805212011 | The Redstone family has launched another salvo at Phillipe Dauman, once among its most trusted lieutenants.
After Viacom Inc., the media company headed by Dauman, released a third-quarter earnings report Thursday morning showing declining profits, National Amusements, the Redstone company that controls Viacom, issued a scathing statement on Dauman.
“It is National Amusement’s view that the current Viacom leadership has failed to articulate a credible long-term plan to reverse the company’s decline,” National Amusements said in a statement released several hours after Viacom reported its results.
The media conglomerate, which owns Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, reported a 27-percent drop in fiscal third quarter profits to $432 million. It blamed the slump on declining television ratings and higher programming and marketing costs. But the results nevertheless beat Wall Street’s modest expectations of Viacom.
The Redstones and Dauman are locked in an ugly dispute over the direction of Viacom and the future of the ailing mogul’s media empire.
National Amusements Inc. is the Norwood-based theater chain and holding company owned by Sumner Redstone that controls 80 percent of the voting stock in Viacom and CBS Inc. His daughter Shari is National Amusements’ chief executive.
Redstone has taken steps to undermine Dauman in recent months, including replacing Viacom board members and changing company bylaws to prevent him from selling off Paramount Pictures.
Dauman responded by suing Shari Redstone, alleging she took advantage of her father’s deteriorating condition in May to remove Dauman from a trust that will control National Amusements — and, therefore, Viacom and CBS Corp. — upon Redstone’s death or incapacity.
The dramatic and complex court case, in which numerous family members and former business associates of Redstone are fighting to secure a slice of his $40 billion fortune, has played out over the past month in the modest Norfolk County Probate and Family Court in Canton.
In late July, the judge hearing the case denied a motion by Redstone and Shari Redstone’s lawyers to dismiss it, and called for the defendants to produce records detailing Sumner Redstone’s health and capacity to make decisions.
Dauman and Viacom have characterized that ruling, along with a similar decision in a parallel case in Delaware, as giving credence to their claims that Shari Redstone is manipulating her father to seize control of the company. On Thursday, Viacom said in a statement that it would continue to move forward, including with the sale of Paramount, despite the controversy.
“Viacom continues to execute on its strategic plan, which is supported by a majority of its independent board,” the statement said. “We are looking to the future and executing on the significant growth opportunities we see around the world. In contrast, it is unfortunate that one of our directors feels the need to try to damage the company in response to losses in the courtroom.”
The Redstone company responded by calling on Viacom’s board of directors — to which it recently appointed five new directors — to crack down on Dauman.
“National Amusements believes that it is time for Viacom’s current directors to stop supporting failed management and start representing shareholders, by allowing the new board to take the reins, and return the company to its position as an industry leader,” the company said. | Both sides in a bitter fight over Sumner Redstone’s billions sought to spin Viacom’s financial results to their benefit. | 28.545455 | 0.590909 | 1.136364 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/uber-china-internet.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805212546id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/02/technology/uber-china-internet.html | Even Uber Couldn’t Bridge the China Divide | 20160805212546 | Entrepreneurs across the globe can choose to win in China or the rest of the world. You can be Alibaba or you can be Amazon. You can be Uber or you can be Didi. But you can’t be both. Given the rising Chinese market and increasing tension over the role of American tech firms in the rest of the globe, the gulf between the two sides promises to become one of the most important factors in determining the shape of global tech innovation.
How exactly might the war play out? In some ways, being at the mercy of two poles of internet leadership could be good for citizens of planet Earth. In emerging markets like India, the Middle East and parts of Africa and South America, the giants of China and the United States are increasingly investing billions to compete for local customers in e-commerce, social networking, ride sharing and other markets.
For instance, Duncan Clark, an investment adviser in China who wrote “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built,” pointed to the way Amazon and Alibaba act as foils for one another.
“Amazon is increasingly making its own branded products, taking on Procter & Gamble and others, and also getting into the logistics business, and shipping, and everything else,” Mr. Clark said. “But Alibaba is a marketplace that doesn’t hold inventory and describes themselves as helping local merchants — so maybe there’s some argument that Alibaba could serve as a counter globally to Amazon.”
But Uber’s deal with Didi — in which Uber will take an 18 percent stake in the combined company, which is certain to become the monopolistic player in the Chinese ride-hailing market — points to another potential outcome: A series of accommodationist deals in which giants cede large parts of the world to one another, pragmatically carving out their spheres of influence like players in The Great Game.
“In that way it could be like the Yalta Conference,” said Mr. Clark, referring to the 1945 meeting in which the victors of World War II determined the postwar geopolitical order.
However the global order shakes out, each side’s home territory seems safe from invasion by the other. Uber’s retreat in China was preceded by a parade of failures by earlier American tech firms. Some fell short for obvious political reasons — companies that traffic in information, like Google, Facebook and Twitter, were essentially stymied from the start by the Chinese censorship regime. Others, like Amazon and eBay, failed to appreciate some of the differences in how business got done in China, especially the importance of personal connections.
Of all American tech firms, Apple has achieved the biggest success in China — about 25 percent of its sales occurred in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2015. But in recent months, it, too, has been running into political hurdles in the region.
“The barrels that will be thrown at you when you’re trying to do business in China will just never stop,” said Mark Natkin, the managing director of Marbridge Consulting, an advisory firm based in Beijing. “You’ll constantly be above one barrel or recovering from jumping one, and as you’re dusting yourself off you look down the road and here comes the next one.”
Compared with previous failures, Uber seemed to do everything right in China. It set up a separate company, Uber China, which had a buy-in from local investors, including from a local giant, Baidu. It hired many local experts, and worked closely with the national government to foster friendly relations.
Insiders say Mr. Kalanick was also personally invested in the deal. He visited China eight times in the last year and a half, and became something of a tech star in the Chinese media.
Publicly Mr. Kalanick had insisted he was fighting for total victory in China. But he must have known that Uber would always struggle to achieve dominance, given the emerging centrality of ride-sharing to the future of infrastructure in China. Still, even if he failed to win everything in China, investing early in the country seemed too big to skip.
“The ride-sharing opportunity in China is basically as big as the rest of the world combined, if not bigger,” said Ben Thompson, an analyst based in Taiwan who writes the tech newsletter Stratechery. “For Uber, China was basically frosting on the cake.”
For now, it’s especially delicious frosting. The $2 billion Uber spent tackling China is now worth about $7 billion in the new merged entity; if Didi does become one of China’s largest tech companies, the value of Uber’s stake in China could rise geometrically, making the firm much more attractive in a potential initial public offering. Pulling out of China also frees up Uber to invest more in other markets — India and Indonesia are big targets — as well as expand its expertise in core technological initiatives like mapping data and self-driving cars.
But if spending big to tackle China ultimately works out for Uber, it will be an anomaly, and certainly not a model for other American tech giants.
“The ride-sharing market is one the few markets where the upside is big enough to justify going in,” Mr. Thompson said. “For most other companies, going into China is still going to be nothing but pain.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Even Uber Couldn’t Bridge the China Divide . Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | The ride-hailing company joins the top tech giants in failing to overcome the enormous and varied barriers to competing effectively in China. | 43.12 | 0.64 | 1.2 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/us/politics/us-conducts-airstrikes-against-isis-in-libya.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160805221552id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/02/us/politics/us-conducts-airstrikes-against-isis-in-libya.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news | U.S. Conducts Airstrikes Against ISIS in Libya | 20160805221552 | WASHINGTON — The United States escalated its war against the Islamic State in Libya on Monday, conducting airstrikes in the coastal city of Surt as part of a new military campaign against the extremist Sunni terrorist group’s stronghold in North Africa.
President Obama approved the strikes last week after Libya’s fragile United Nations-backed unity government asked for help in its fight against the Islamic State, administration officials said.
The strikes, which American officials have forecast for months, are intended to help break an impasse between Libyan militias and the Islamic State fighters they have cornered in a grinding urban battle in Surt’s downtown.
American officials, who estimate that there are fewer than 1,000 Islamic State fighters in Surt, say that American warplanes could provide a decisive advantage to the attackers and help break the stalemate along the fighting fronts in the southern and western part of the city. But they also say that the Islamic State’s modest numbers in Surt belie their determination, if not desperation, and that with escape routes from Surt largely cut off, the Islamic State fighters may fight to the death.
American warplanes conducted only two airstrikes on Monday, but officials said there would be a steady series of strikes in coming weeks. The Monday strikes, by both drones and manned warplanes, hit a tank and troop supply and transport vehicles, military officials said. Reconnaissance drones, flown in from Italy, were also used in the operation.
The Obama administration has been negotiating for weeks with the Libyan government on how to use American airstrikes to support the limited capability of Libyan warplanes to hit targets in Surt. The American military brings the ability to strike in a dense urban area more precisely — whether by drones or manned warplanes — and thus reduce civilian casualties.
Although there have been American Special Operations forces on the ground in Libya for several months, American spotters did not call in the airstrikes, military officials said. Instead the Pentagon used the same model it has with some Syrian rebel groups: Libyan ground forces, who were given rudimentary instruction by American Special Operations trainers on the ground, provided basic identification and targeting information for the warplanes.
Fayez Serraj, the head of Libya’s unity government, said in a televised statement that no American ground forces would be deployed to aid the effort, and that Monday’s airstrikes caused “major casualties.” But Pentagon officials said they did not know how many Islamic State fighters may have been killed.
Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in January that the United States planned to take “decisive military action” against the Islamic State in Libya. Since then, United States and British special operations teams have been conducting clandestine reconnaissance missions in Libya to identify militant leaders and map out their networks.
Separate teams of American Special Operations forces have also been trying to court allies from a patchwork of Libyan militias that remain unreliable, unaccountable, poorly managed and divided by region and tribe.
In March, American military planners had concluded that airstrikes against up to 40 targets in four different areas of the country would have crippled the group’s Libya affiliate, opening the door for Western-backed Libyan militias to fight Islamic State fighters on the ground. That same month, the Pentagon presented the White House with a detailed set of military options for attacking what was then a growing Islamic State threat in Libya, including a range of strikes against training camps, command centers, munitions depots and other militant targets. The plans were centered around Surt.
But the plan was abandoned because administration officials concluded that the political process in Libya, particularly regarding the talks surrounding the establishment of the government of national accord, was too fragile. Administration officials feared that the strikes would undercut the political process that had produced the government.
The American intervention poses significant political risks for Mr. Serraj, who is already fending off accusations from Islamist critics that his unity government is little more than a proxy for Western interests.
Those sensitivities were revived last month after three French Special Forces soldiers died in a helicopter crash near the eastern city of Benghazi. The French government attributed the crash to an accident. A local militia, not aligned with Mr. Serraj, claimed to have shot down the aircraft.
Jonathan Winer, the American special envoy for Libya, said on his Twitter account that the airstrikes on Monday reinforced “our call for all parties in Libya to work through the GNA” referring to the Government of National Accord, the official title for unity government.
Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, said the legal authorization for the Surt strikes — like the legal authorization for strikes against other militant Islamic groups like the Shabab in East Africa — came from the Authorization for Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks enacted by Congress.
By linking the Libya action to the authorization for force, the administration will not have to officially notify Congress. That means that the campaign in Libya can continue indefinitely, or until the administration concludes that the airstrikes have accomplished their objective.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, Declan Walsh from New York, and Suliman Ali Zway from Berlin.
A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2016, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Stepping Up the Fight Against ISIS, U.S. Conducts Airstrikes in Libya. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | The strikes in Surt were part of a new military campaign against the Sunni terrorist group’s stronghold in North Africa, the Pentagon said. | 40 | 1 | 5.769231 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/05/10/15/act-resident-35-million-lottery-winner | http://web.archive.org/web/20160806174558id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/05/10/15/act-resident-35-million-lottery-winner | ACT resident $35 million lottery winner | 20160806174558 | A Canberran has woken up $35 million richer after scooping up Thursday night's entire Powerball prize pool.
But the winner, who purchased the unregistered ticket in the ACT, is still unknown and NSW Lotteries is urging locals to check their tickets and contact them soon.
"It's not a bad way to wake up on a Friday - someone has a ticket worth $35 million in their pocket," spokeswoman Belinda McDougall told AAP. | A ticket holder in the ACT has won $35 million in the latest Powerball lottery draw. | 4.777778 | 0.722222 | 1.833333 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/jay-mcinerney-on-monogamy-drugs-and-his-new-novel-1470069249 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160807101609id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/amp/articles/jay-mcinerney-on-monogamy-drugs-and-his-new-novel-1470069249 | Jay McInerney on Monogamy, Drugs and His New Novel | 20160807101609 | The drugs of choice have changed for Jay McInerney. Bolivian marching powder has been replaced in his books by rare French wines and erectile-dysfunction treatments. But the setting remains Manhattan, where his restless characters are uneasily yielding to middle age amid the runup to the 2008 economic meltdown.
“Bright, Precious Days,” out Aug. 2, is his third novel in a trilogy chronicling the marriage of Russell and Corrine Calloway and the changing city where they live. In the new novel, which begins in 2006, they have 11-year-old twins and find themselves priced out of New York real estate, racked by infidelity and out of step with their extremely prosperous friends. Mr. McInerney says that Russell, who runs a small publishing house, is his alter ego, pursuing a career he likely would have if he hadn’t become a writer.
More: Read an excerpt from “Bright, Precious Days.”
Mr. McInerney shot to fame with his 1984 debut “Bright Lights, Big City.” Composed in a six-week sprint, the novel captures a fledgling writer’s star-crossed stint as a magazine fact-checker by day and foot soldier in a drug-spangled club scene by night. More than 30 years later, the 61-year-old author is the father of 21-year-old twins, and an avid cook. November marks the 10th anniversary of his fourth marriage. He remains in Gotham’s thrall and says he is “still a hedonist”—though he now works out, in part to allow for great meals and wine.
A scene in “Bright, Precious Days”—where financiers vying to show off their palates order up ever-more-costly vintages—is taken from real life, Mr. McInerney says. He recalls evenings at two erstwhile restaurants in Manhattan that catered to connoisseurs: Cru, not far from where he lives, and Veritas. He has sampled the most expensive wine in “Bright, Precious Days”—a 1982 Pétrus, which retails for about $5,000 a bottle.
Mr. McInerney has published eight novels, a collection of short stories and three books on wine. He caught the bug while a grad student apprenticing with Raymond Carver, when he worked at the Westcott Cordial Shop in Syracuse, N.Y. For four years, he wrote a column about wine for The Wall Street Journal; since 2014, he has been Town & Country magazine’s wine critic. Edited from an interview.
You’ve described your job as “making fun of New Yorkers behaving badly.” Do your friends worry they will end up in a book?
I think people joke about it and talk about it more than it actually happens. There is a tendency for people to think they’re more interesting than they are. But sometimes when I really have based a character on someone they don’t notice it. And I find people claiming characters! There are several women who think they’re the model for Corrine…People probably should worry more about what they say in front of me.
There are certain courtesies that you try to observe, but at the same time, as a writer, you have to be willing to tell unpleasant truths. I wrote a nonfiction piece years ago about my mother in the New Yorker after she and my father had died. And it was about an affair that she had that she told me about on her deathbed…My brothers basically didn’t speak to me for quite a while. But I felt like I had to write it.
Any books or short stories that you wish you could take back, either because you’re dissatisfied with the writing or because they hurt someone?
There are two novels that I finished but I didn’t publish. One would have been my third novel. And another one that I wrote in 2010-2011, before I wrote this book. I showed an early draft to my agent and my editor. My editor basically said he didn’t think I’d gotten the ending right.
How did you know that novel wasn’t working?
As I was finishing it, I just didn’t feel that usual sense of excitement and sleeplessness. I realize now the main character was kind of flawed because he was based half on me and half on this other guy—and I didn’t really integrate them that well.
In “Bright, Precious Days,” affairs are passionate but marriage isn’t. Is that your view?
There isn’t a story until there’s yearning and betrayal and passion. These characters have reached middle age and then some and I think it’s very hard to sustain passion for 25 years. I wouldn’t know because I haven’t been married that long. But, obviously, this is the perspective of a guy who’s been married four times. One of the reasons I’m so fascinated by Russell and Corrine and people like them is I believe that there are many, many compensations and rewards and a special place in heaven for people who manage to make monogamy work. I think it’s human nature that the unpossessed object always has a special glow that the familiar does not.
When’s the last time you did cocaine?
I don’t know—three or four years ago. Not recently, but not that long ago. It’s still everywhere. Every new generation keeps discovering it, as if it was their own invention. I’m a parent, so I have some access to what young people are doing. I have some sense of what’s going on, even if I don’t go out at night as much as I used to.
Some of your characters take Cialis, not illegal drugs. Do you hear more talk about erectile-dysfunction treatments?
I do! Yeah, it is something that comes up among older guys. Viagra just became something of a cliché so that’s probably why I mentioned the less-common one. I think it’s probably changed behavior—the availability of these drugs over the past 15 years or so. I suspect that it’s emboldened older men who maybe previously would have been less bold.
It’s almost the 15th anniversary of 9/11. Do you see any lasting effects on the city?
I think for people who were here, it’s sort of part of our psyche. Loud noises and low-flying planes still kind of bring out a shudder of fear…Some people really did change their lives…but, collectively, there’s a kind of amnesia, I think. New York has never been oriented toward the past…The past is if you can remember what you ate yesterday or who you slept with. And the future is, “Where are we going tonight?”
Write to Brenda Cronin at brenda.cronin@wsj.com | Jay McInerney talks about his new novel, “Bright, Precious Days” as well as cocaine, 9/11 and monogamy. | 56.478261 | 0.956522 | 2.173913 | high | high | mixed |
http://time.com/money/4066429/password-sharing-theft-millennials/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160807182942id_/http://time.com:80/money/4066429/password-sharing-theft-millennials/ | Password Sharing is Theft and It's Killing Cable TV | 20160807182942 | It’s no secret that young people like to consume entertainment they don’t necessarily pay for.
But when business and tech types talk about this reality, they tend to use neutral or even flattering language: Millennials, they say, like to “swap” files and “share” subscription passwords. After all, super-earnest, bike-commuting, coffee-sipping twenty-somethings don’t look like dangerous criminals. And let’s face it, no business wants to alienate the work-force’s largest generational cohort, with billions, if not trillions, worth of spending ahead of it.
But now some Wall Street analysts have decided to come right out and use another S word—steal—in discussing the problems facing some traditional media enterprises.
“The millennials are a generation that grew up (and will likely grow old) ‘sharing’ (read stealing) passwords for access to content if it continues to be ignored,” wrote analysts Mike McCormack, Scott Goldman, and Tudor Mustata in a note to clients Tuesday. “We believe it is the most significant cause of the declining pay TV subscriber base.”
Read Next: How to Watch All the TV You Want Without Paying for Cable
The problem, the analysts suggest, is that all this sharing/stealing could quickly destroy the cable TV business. That’s hardly a far-fetched argument. Similar trends have already gutted the music and news industries.
The Jefferies analysts argue password sharing is already “the most significant cause of the declining pay TV subscriber base.” They compare the current situation to a time when people jury-rigged access to cable with “illegal cable drops, third-party set tops and reprogrammed satellite cards.” Revenues returned only when the industry cracked down.
Of course, no one likes to be called a crook. Millennials might counter that the situation isn’t totally black and white. The music industry has evolved. And sharing streaming TV passwords isn’t clearly against the rules. Passwords for the streaming service HBO Now, for instance, are limited to a household, but the company has been vague (presumably on purpose) about what that means. Netflix, Amazon, and others all have policies that similarly attempt to both acknowledge and limit sharing.
Read Next: The Real Rules for Sharing Passwords for HBO Now, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu
The solution? The analysts call for companies to adopt tougher rules with emphasis on “authentication limits”—essentially limits on how many people can use a log in at the same time, which some sites like Netflix and Hulu already employ. But they also acknowledge the scope of the problem—and the fact that, let’s face it, it’s not just millennials. “It is difficult to meet someone (of any age demo) that hasn’t used or allowed another to use content passwords,” they lament.
Read Next: Netflix Is Getting More Expensive | Whatever you call it, it's killing the cable TV business | 47.25 | 0.75 | 2.25 | high | low | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/10031095/Sex-What-Muslim-women-really-want-in-the-bedroom.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160807190253id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/women/sex/10031095/Sex-What-Muslim-women-really-want-in-the-bedroom.html | What Muslim women really want in the bedroom | 20160807190253 | There are stories about how Prophet Muhammad would be approached in the mosque by women and men asking open questions about sexuality. In one famous tale, a woman came to see him on her wedding night, to complain her husband was too busy praying and hadn't come near her. The Prophet went to see the husband, admonished him for being too engrossed in religious prayer and instructed him to, erm, pay more attention to his bride.
This openness has been lost over time, and discussions about sex have become taboo. However, things are slowly changing.
Wedad Lootah is a UAE marriage counsellor who published an Arabic sex guide, Top Secret: Sexual Guidance for Married Couples, on how to achieve sexual intimacy with your partner, stating couples needed the advice. Her book was blessed by the mufti of the UAE. But she received intense criticism.
Whilst engaged, my now husband and I attended a ‘pre-marriage’ seminar, one of the first of its kind in the UK. The one day training included an hour about sex. It wasn’t very good, but nonetheless, I was pleased that the subject was raised and the taboo broken.
Jenny is an Irish Muslim organising a similar two part seminar for young women only, the first on marriage, the second on intimacy. “The girls don’t know what should be happening in their intimate lives,” she explains. “The men tell them to do X or Y, and they don’t know any better.” Jenny understands that her seminar is unusual, but her primary concern is that the young women receive this education, and criticism is kept at bay. For this reason, she asks I don’t quote her real name: “I’m sticking my neck out here.”
It’s not a sex instruction class that she’ll be hosting. “We’re not telling them what goes where!” laughs Jenny. “But these girls need to know their rights in the bedroom.”
In the USA, controversial Muslim activist Asra Nomani has written an “Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Bedroom.” to ‘uphold women’s right to pleasure”. Nomani says she received negative feedback about the bill. But when I read about it I remember thinking, this is not in the least controversial or new for Islam. If anything it shows how little Muslims - even vocal ones - have knowledge about Islam's un-guilty approach to sex, or understand that Islam has always been extremely open about sexual pleasure, and in particular women’s pleasure.
Yet, it’s undeniable that to talk about sexuality, especially as a woman, is difficult, and as a consequence I’m genuinely apprehensive about publishing this piece. But push on I will.
It’s a subject that needs to be openly addressed, precisely so that these contradictions can be unravelled.
There is a lack of research about the existing levels of sexual knowledge among Muslims. How much do they know? Where do they gain their knowledge? And perhaps the most difficult to ask: what is the reality of how they conduct their sexual lives?
A new chick-lit novel about to be published in the UK is called No Sex and The City and features a Muslim heroine. And last year in the US, an anthology of true courtship stories written by Muslim women was published delightfully entitled Love, Inshallah (God willing). Amongst the narratives there were those that were sexually explicit and spoke about sex both inside and outside marriage. Whilst the book itself was extremely popular, its comparatively graphic nature drew positive feedback as well as criticism. But the more important point of both books is that Muslim women themselves are trying to open a discussion about sexuality, its role in their identity, and their fears and aspirations.
For those Muslims who want to live a chaste life, the pressures are immense. Our surroundings are notoriously sexualised. Virginity is seen as freakish. And rejection of ‘sexual liberation’ is seen as backward. For teen Muslims, these challenges must be particularly difficult.
If contextually appropriate teachings are not available – whether at home, in the mosque or in other social settings – then the taboos about sexuality become entrenched, lead to diminished knowledge, and pleasure or even negativity about sex.
So where should a young (or even old!) Muslim turn to for sexual teachings that they feel are in line with an Islamic perspective. Courses like the one being run by Jenny are few and far between. And those willing to discuss matters openly are equally rare.
And to even begin such discussions, what is needed is a healthy dose of facing up to the fact that how Muslims live their lives is not necessarily the same as the Islamic ideals they aspire to.
A famous Islamic traditional teaching about sexual pleasure says that when God created desire, He made it into ten parts. He gave nine parts to women, and just one to men. So it’s no wonder women are leaving men behind when it comes to trying to better understand their sexuality, as well as the relationship between their sexuality and their faith.
Shelina Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf - Muslim Woman Seeks the One. She can be found tweeting here. She is the Vice President of Ogilvy Noor, the world's first branding agency for Muslim consumers, and one of 'Britain's Future female leaders of the advertising industry' according to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. | Sex is taboo subject for most Muslims. However, a growing number of young Muslim women are talking about what they really want when in the bedroom. Shelina Janmohamed, author of Love in a Headscarf, explains how women are leading the way in her faith when it comes to understanding sexuality. | 17.983051 | 0.830508 | 1.915254 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-health/11552359/Diet-pills-I-know-the-danger-but-I-want-them-anyway.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160807190334id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/women/womens-health/11552359/Diet-pills-I-know-the-danger-but-I-want-them-anyway.html | Diet pills: 'I know the danger but I want them anyway' | 20160807190334 | “DNP is not a miracle slimming pill. It is a deadly toxin. It's similar to TNT in structure. TNT is an explosive. DNP causes your metabolism to run at an explosive level, with potentially fatal consequences."
The cause of Eloise’s death will be confirmed by a coroner at a later date, but police are investigating where she bought the pills, which cost around £70 for 100 capsules.
Eloise Aimee Parry who died after taking "diet pills" thought to contain a highly toxic chemical
DNP is dangerous. Back in 2013, Sarah Houston, a 23-year-old medical student, died after taking a combination of antidepressants and DNP, which she had bought online. Eighteen-year-old student and bodybuilder Sarmad Alladin died the same year after taking DNP, as did 18-year-old rugby player Chris Mapletoft.
The full scale of the drug’s damage has not been reported. But a 2011 study published in the American College of Medical Toxicology found 62 deaths attributed to the drug. It also found that deaths increased from 2001 to 2010, which it claims may be due to: "increased availability of DNP over the internet, marketed particularly towards bodybuilders."
In the UK, it is illegal to sell DNP as a weight loss product, and it is banned for human consumption.
There have been repeated warnings from the NHS and Food Standards Authority (FSA) against using it for weight loss. But the problem is that it’s still sold illegally online, and in the UK it is actually available to buy as a pesticide.
Sarah’s father, amongst other campaigners, has called for DNP to be made illegal to sell in any format – even if it’s not being advertised for weight loss.
“It's going to be a slow process but hopefully approaching the Home Office to begin with will be the right step and hopefully it will be made illegal,” he said in 2013.
This has not yet happened, and worryingly, the problem seems to be growing.
Professor Jayne Lawrence, chief scientist at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, says: “I think the scale is very large at the moment. You just put ‘weight loss’ into Google and these sites come up. It’s very freely available and that’s why it’s such a problem.”
She explains the particular appeal with DNP is that, unfortunately, it actually works: “The problem is that it’s very effective, because if you take them for eight days, people talk about losing 12 to 14 pounds of weight.
“But it’s also very dangerous and toxic. First of all you feel very warm because your metabolism has increased. It’s very uncomfortable and people report feeling horrible, very quickly feeling sick. They can cause death quite quickly.”
Sarah Houston died after taking a combination of DNP and antidepressants (Ross Parry)
The drug is a fat burner, and works by accelerating the metabolism to a dangerously fast level. It can cause many side effects such as fever, dehydration, nausea, vomiting, restlessness, flushed skin, excessive sweating, dizziness, abnormally fast heart beat, rapid breathing and possibly death.
In 1933, it was considered as a weight loss drug but was quickly withdrawn from the market in America after these side effects and some deaths were reported.
But DNP isn’t even the only ‘fat burner’ available online – according to Lawrence, other compounds reported to have similar effects are ephedrine, caffeine in high doses, capsaicin (found in cayenne pepper) and the amino acids - L-carnitine and L-tyrosine.
“None of these compounds have been proven to work nor indeed have they been safety tested for this use,” explains Professor Lawrence.
At the moment, the only weight loss drug that is classified as a medicine and available on prescription is Orlistat – often sold by brand name Alli. It is a licensed product that has been tested. Unlike fat burners, it works by stopping the fat from being absorbed by the body and is known as a ‘fat binder’.
But there are other products available to buy in the UK in health shops and online, which can contain some of those compounds reported to be dangerous. These products aren’t categorised as medicines, so are not regulated by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. And, as long as they aren’t advertised with the promise to lose weight, they can be legally sold.
“It’s a bit of a loophole,” says Lawrence. “But herbal ones can be just as dangerous. People think they’re safer but that’s not always the case. Especially if people mix it with other medicine, it can be very dangerous.”
An example of this is raspberry ketone, a ‘natural’ supplement that contains extremely high doses of caffeine and is available in health shops. Last year, 24-year-old Cara Reynolds died after taking an overdose of the pills.
But they are still incredibly popular.
Rebecca Edwards, 30, has spent the last year or so taking Xenical – a prescription medicine containing Orlistat – but now wants to move on to raspberry ketone. She found that Orlistat helped her drop from a size 14 to a 10, but as soon as she stopped taking it, the weight came back on. She also struggled with the side effects, which can include diarrhoea.
It’s why she’s buying raspberry ketone online.
“I have looked into the side effects but it gets to the point where you’re so unhappy in your own body that you’ll try anything," she tells me. "I have a degree in science and a masters in cellular pathology – I know the consequences. But, at the same time, I’m very unhappy with the way I am and would go for anything."
Has she thought about Cara Reynolds's overdose?
“That does scare me. But I wouldn’t say it changes my mind. If you take normal dosage I don’t think it would as bad as that. People need to understand how unhappy we are. I don’t want to see myself like that. I hate mirrors because as soon as I see myself, all I see is disappointment.”
This seems to capture the mood of most people turning to the internet to buy weight loss drugs. It's particularly worrying in light of a report this week that found more young girls than ever before have emotional and body image issues.
“There’s an obsession particularly among the young with having a beautiful body,” agrees Lawrence. “When you’re younger, you don’t really think these things are going to happen to you. On forums people say, yes you feel s*** taking it - but look at my body.”
So serious are their body confidence issues that not even the very real risk of these drugs can put them off. It’s why Lawrence says she wouldn’t be averse to seeing a legitimate fat burner on sale in the UK, which would help weight loss through an increased metabolism, but would be medically tested and regulated.
“Nothing’s licensed in the UK to burn fat at the moment but I wouldn't be averse to finding one without side effects - though it would have to be used under controlled conditions and with medical supervision. But if there’s something proven to be safe that will help, then I’d rather people took that then played Russian roulette with their lives.”
Though, of course, the ideal solution would be if people followed official guidelines to lose weight gradually – ideally one to two pounds a week – through a balanced diet and regular exercise.
“The bottom line is everyone wants a shortcut and easy solution,” says Subodh Gupta, founder of Obesity Campaign UK. “But the only way to reduce your weight is a balanced diet and moderate exercise. That’s what will really work in the long term.” | A 21-year-old student has died after taking diet pills she bought online in order to lose weight. Radhika Sanghani reports on this dangerous trend | 53.413793 | 0.724138 | 1.482759 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/10659567/Turkey-PM-says-incriminating-tapes-are-fake-amid-growing-phone-tapping-scandal.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160807215648id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/10659567/Turkey-PM-says-incriminating-tapes-are-fake-amid-growing-phone-tapping-scandal.html | Turkey PM says incriminating tapes are fake amid growing phone-tapping scandal | 20160807215648 | The office of Turkey's prime minister has said that recordings of allegedly wiretapped conversations between the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son - leaked onto the internet and suggesting corruption - were fabricated.
In recent weeks, several voice recordings of conversations allegedly involving MrErdogan, his children, aides or businessmen have been circulating on the internet.
In the latest recordings leaked on Monday, two people alleged to be Mr Erdogan and his son are heard discussing means of getting rid of large amounts of cash from their home. The conversations allegedly took place Dec. 17, the day that sons of three Cabinet ministers were detained as part of a vast corruption investigation.
Media reports said Mr Erdogan met with Turkey's intelligence chief soon after that tape began to circulate on the internet and that his office later issued a statement saying that the recordings were "immorally" fabricated and "totally unreal." It said the prime minister would take legal action against the recordings.
Turkey's main opposition party held an emergency meeting to discuss the latest leaked recording and called on Mr Erdogan to resign, insisting that his government had lost its legitimacy.
Mr Erdogan insists that the corruption probe which forced him in December to dismiss four Cabinet ministers is a conspiracy to discredit his government before local elections in March and a presidential election in August. He says the investigations were orchestrated by followers of a moderate Islamic movement led by US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who have allegedly infiltrated Turkey's police and judiciary.
Last month, the leader's 33 year-old son, Bilal Erdogan, was questioned by prosecutors investigating the allegations. | In the recordings two people alleged to be Mr Erdogan and his son are heard discussing means of getting rid of large amounts of cash | 12.36 | 1 | 19.56 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/20/eu-exit-damage-uk-special-relationship-with-us-larry-summrers | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808035425id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/politics/2016/apr/20/eu-exit-damage-uk-special-relationship-with-us-larry-summrers | EU exit 'would damage UK's special relationship with US' | 20160808035425 | Britain’s special relationship with the US would be significantly damaged if Britain leaves the EU, according to a former US Treasury secretary, who says Brexit would be unfortunate for the British economy, Europe, the US and the world.
In a strongly worded intervention, Larry Summers, who served under president Bill Clinton, said the move would represent the “most isolationist deed in the last century”, inflicting serious damage on the City of London.
He said the US saw the UK as its “bridge” to the EU, and warned that it would become a “less relevant and less significant economy” if it opted for Brexit.
Speaking before Barack Obama’s visit to Britain, during which thepresident is expected to support David Cameron’s battle to stay in the EU, he said: “It would reduce Britain’s very positive influence as an ally of the United States and a strong participant in the G7 and in the G20. It would be a step towards a more closed, more protectionist, less effective and less prosperous global economy.”
Summers is one of eight former US Treasury secretaries, spanning Republican and Democrat presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, who have written an article warning about the impact of a vote to leave the EU.
“Brexit could call into question London’s role as a global financial centre. While Britain will remain an attractive centre for finance even if Britain exits, it should not take for granted its global primacy when it is no longer the gateway to Europe,” they write in the Times.
The group claims that the US holds a “critical interest” in the outcome of the referendum on 23 June.
Summers told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that it was up to British voters to make the decision, but said it was right for people to know how the US felt about it. He said there were sharp partisan divisions in the US so it was worth “pondering” that this issue had united Republicans and Democrats.
“Britain would continue to be involved in global affairs but its role without its anchor to Europe would truly be diminished,” he said in the interview.
Summers said he believed the pound would come under pressure and lead to a contraction in the British economy.
He also predicted that the special relationship between the US and Britain would be affected by a decision to leave the EU.
“I don’t want to say that the United States and Britain wouldn’t continue to have the close ties that come from history but I think the special relationship would translate much less into prosperity for both our countries, and I think the special relationship would have much less influence on the broad world,” he said.
“Much would be lost by the kind of split in the west that a British withdrawal would represent.”
The attack drew an immediate response from the former cabinet minister, and leading Brexit advocate, Dr Liam Fox, who said Summers was wrong to suggest that leaving the EU would be an isolationist move. Instead, he argued that the motivation was to separate from a struggling economy and open Britain up to the rest of the world. He said the “old men of Brussels” were still operating under a 1950s model.
Fox also warned President Obama not to intervene in the referendum question. He told the Guardian the US would accept neither having “enforced open borders decided by a foreign power” nor hand budgetary control to unelected bureaucrats.
“The president, is of course, welcome to his view when the US has an open border with Mexico, a supreme court in Toronto and the US budget set by a pan-American committee,” he said. “Then his views might hold greater weight when he urges the European equivalent on the British people.”
Fox had previously organised a letter from 100 MPs to the US ambassador, Matthew Barzun, urging the president not to intervene in the British referendum debate.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of Vote Leave said: “These US politicians wouldn’t dream of agreeing to give Nafta [the North American Free Trade agreement] £350m a week, or handing power over to Mexican judges over which criminals they can deport or opening up the US border to Mexican migrants. They would have been laughed out the building if they suggested it. So why do they think that we should do the same with the EU?” | Former US Treasury chief Larry Summers says Britain would become a ‘less relevant and less significant economy’ if it left EU | 38.772727 | 0.863636 | 2.409091 | high | medium | mixed |
http://time.com/4242732/billionaires-forbes-richest-people/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808041601id_/http://time.com:80/4242732/billionaires-forbes-richest-people/ | The Richest People in the World | 20160808041601 | Bill Gates is still the richest man in the world, Forbes found in its annual listing of billionaires.
Gates, with a net worth of $75 billion, has held the top spot for three years. He’s followed on this year’s list by the Spanish businessman Amancio Ortega ($67 billion) and investor Warren Buffett ($60.8 billion). According to Forbes, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had the best year, adding $11.2 billion to his personal wealth and moving up from No. 16 to 6 on the list.
In all, Forbes found that there are 1,810 billionaires in the world, 16 fewer than last year. There are 190 women on this year’s list, down from 197 in 2015. And the U.S. still leads the globe with 540 billionaires, followed by China, with 251, and 120 in Germany.
See the full list here. | The U.S. has more billionaires than any other country | 19 | 0.555556 | 0.777778 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/deadpool-dominates-box-office-globally-1455563246 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808071356id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/deadpool-dominates-box-office-globally-1455563246? | ‘Deadpool’ Slays Box-Office Records | 20160808071356 | Upending everything Hollywood studio executives thought they knew about the superhero genre, a hard-R rated, modestly budgeted movie that made few allowances for non-fanboys destroyed records at the box office.
“Deadpool,” from 21st Century Fox Inc.’s Twentieth Century Fox, opened to an estimated $150 million in the U.S. and Canada over the four-day holiday weekend. The prior Presidents Day weekend record was $93 million for “Fifty Shades of Grey” last year. Through Sunday, “Deadpool” grossed $132.8 million, surpassing... | “Deadpool” opened to an estimated $150 million in the U.S. and Canada over the four-day holiday weekend, destroying records at the box office. | 3.5 | 0.966667 | 13.566667 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11522968/Five-facts-that-show-the-dramatic-changes-in-the-supermarket-industry.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808093016id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11522968/Five-facts-that-show-the-dramatic-changes-in-the-supermarket-industry.html | Five facts that illustrate the dramatic changes in the supermarket industry | 20160808093016 | Britain's "big four" supermarket chains - Tesco, Asda, J Sainsbury and Wm Morrison - are suffering from falling sales as they are squeezed by Aldi and Lidl at one end of the market and upmarket Waitrose and Marks & Spencer at the other. This is underlined by the latest figures from Kantar Worldpanel which show that the "big four's" share of how much consumers spend on groceries in the UK is the lowest for a decade. Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons account for 72.8pc of grocery sales, down from a peak of almost 80pc.
Aldi's rapid sales growth is set to continue because the German discounter is opening far more new shops than its rivals. While the "big four" have scrapped new store openings to save money, Aldi is accelerating its plans. In 2015, Aldi intends to open 1.02m sq ft of shop space, compared with just 450,000 sq ft for Sainsbury’s, 220,000 sq ft for Morrisons, and 170,000 sq ft for Tesco. Aldi's expansion plan is equal to roughly 60 to 80 new shops. It wants to double in size in the UK to 1,000 shops by 2022.
Consumers are suspicious of supermarkets talking about a "price war", but industry data suggest it is real. According to Kantar, which measures spending at all the grocery retailers, the average basket of goods is 2pc cheaper than a year ago. This is the largest decline in prices since records began in 2006. This reflects price cuts by the major supermarkets as they try to fight back, but also the growing market share of discounters Aldi and Lidl.
As struggling retailers battle against falling sales and profits they are trying to cut costs to shore up their balance sheet. Tesco has said it will close 43 stores and scrap plans to build a further 49, causing outcry in the local communities where the shops were planned, while Morrisons has said it will close 33 shops and Sainsbury's has abandoned proposals to build 40 new supermarkets.
The pressure on supermarkets is not just from Aldi and Lidl, but the rise of convenience shopping and online. According to industry body IGD, by April 2019 sales from convenience stores, discounters and the internet will overtake superstores and hypermarkets for the first time. Sales from superstores and hypermarkets will fall by 4pc despite a 16pc rise in overall grocery sales, reducing their share of grocery sales from 42.2pc to 34.9pc. They will still be the biggest single source of sales, but online, convenience stores and the discounters will grow 56pc during the same period.
Source: CBRE, PMA, Retail Locations
WATCH: Three ways your Tesco supermarket is going to change | As Aldi overtakes Waitrose to become Britain's sixth biggest supermarket, a look at the facts that underline the turmoil in the grocery sector | 19.576923 | 0.653846 | 0.884615 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/9462180/Goran-Tomasevics-dramatic-photos-of-the-fighting-around-Aleppo-in-Syria.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808103440id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/9462180/Goran-Tomasevics-dramatic-photos-of-the-fighting-around-Aleppo-in-Syria.html | Goran Tomasevic's dramatic photos of the fighting around Aleppo in Syria | 20160808103440 | Serbian-born Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic has captured the fighting between rebel fighters and forces loyal to Assad in and around Aleppo. In this gallery, we look at the fight for Syria as captured by one photographer. Warning: this gallery contains photos of injury and death.
16 August 2012: A Free Syrian Army fighter carries the body of a fellow fighter during clashes in Aleppo | Goran Tomasevic's dramatic photos of the fighting around Aleppo in Syria. | 5.615385 | 0.846154 | 1.461538 | low | medium | abstractive |
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36854293 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808130826id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/news/business-36854293 | Are smart city transport systems vulnerable to hackers? | 20160808130826 | One word. Four letters. "Poop."
It wasn't so much the word, but its position that caused New Jersey photojournalist Lori Nichols to turn her car around on a highway near Atlantic City close to midnight to snap a photo.
The word was lit up in bulbs on a freestanding temporary sign - the type that normally says "road work ahead" or "slow down".
The NJ.com reporter wrote a story about it the next day.
The sign stayed that way for several hours, she says. "When I had a chance to call the local police department, Hamilton Township in Atlantic County, it was around noon or 1pm, a person I spoke to did chuckle a little bit when I asked about the sign.
"He said that a few people had called in the morning about it, so I would feel comfortable saying the sign remained that way for at least eight hours but probably more like 10 or 12," she says.
Yet, the prankster who seemingly gained easy access to an unlocked panel at the back of the sign could have typed out "mass shooting ahead" or "terrorist threat in area", and produced an entirely different outcome.
And this was just one sign without any connectivity to the cloud. Imagine if hundreds of signs controlled centrally had been compromised. That could have created large-scale chaos.
Cybersecurity experts say we won't have to imagine for much longer. It's only a matter of time before hackers become interested in smart city transportation clouds.
Taking control of parking, traffic lights, signage, street lighting, automated bus stops and many other systems could be appealing to bad guys from many walks of life including political activists and terrorists.
Moscow has already experienced its first major transportation hack, albeit to make a serious point about security.
Denis Legezo, a researcher with Kaspersky Lab, was able to manipulate traffic sensors and capture data simply by looking up a hardware user manual that was readily available online from the sensor manufacturer.
A similar story comes from Cesar Cerrudo, the chief technology officer at security company IOActive Labs, who found vulnerabilities in systems used in the US, UK, France, Australia and China.
There's a scene in Die Hard 4 where hackers create chaos by manipulating traffic signals with a few keystrokes. It's not that easy, Mr Cerrudo wrote in a blog in 2014.
Even so, he discovered that it would have been possible to create havoc using cheap computer hardware.
Mr Cerrudo says: "I don't think now we are seeing many attacks, maybe some isolated attacks on lower maintained systems. But everything indicates that in the future they will become common because cyber threats are continually evolving.
"As technology gets widely adopted, cybercriminals get more familiar with it and get more resources. Maybe they attack transportation systems and say, 'If you want to keep running the system you have to pay up.'"
Since his "experiment" more than two years ago, there has been a huge investment in expanding smart city transportation technology around the world. America is no exception.
Columbus, in Ohio, was the recent winner of a $50m (£37.5m) prize offered by the US Department of Transportation. Prepaid cards and apps could allow residents to commute via bus and then arrange car and bicycle-sharing rides if needed.
The groundwork has already started, says Jeff Ortega, a spokesman for Columbus: "The city recently completed construction of the Traffic Management Center, which is a high-tech area that can manage and monitor traffic signals around the city together with a $76m upgrade of traffic signals."
It is hoped emergency vehicles will be able to speed though intersections unhindered in the event of a major incident, and that more specialised bus routes can be offered to help low-income families get easier access to healthcare facilities.
Ultimately, it will mean a complex mix of new hardware and software that is secure enough to please city officials and the public.
Columbus has already been offered software from Sidewalk Labs, which shares the same parent company as Google, Alphabet.
But in return for top-notch security, it's possible the "FLOW" transportation planning platform could have conditions attached, for instance an agreement that Sidewalk Labs share ownership of the data generated by the city and the right to process every transaction though its own payment system.
That idea raises many questions about the future control of cloud-based systems. Neither party would comment directly on the issue, pointing out that no contracts have been signed.
In Kansas City, Missouri, the new RideKC Streetcar runs 2.2 miles and is free to use.
The Smart City project also includes in-street parking sensors, which allow car owners to find spaces near the streetcar route, and cameras placed on lamp posts that monitor traffic conditions and trigger brightness controls on nearby lights if a pedestrian enters the area.
Kansas City made a conscious decision to make as much data as possible public. However, that doesn't mean everything has to be stored in one location in cyberspace, says Tom Gerend, executive director at Kansas City Streetcar Authority and chairman of the Smart City Advisory Board.
"The cloud is used to store data from the Smart City installation [camera data, streetlights, and so on] but not for streetcar vehicle specific systems. Generally, we have separate services for the individual sub-systems and then aggregate and pool data that we want to make publicly accessible."
But Von Welch, director of Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, says there will be a bumpy road ahead as transportation hardware manufacturers start incorporating security measures into their products, often for the first time.
"We have a lot of companies making new devices for the [urban] Internet of Things that have not made computers or written software before. They are having to re-learn a lot of the lessons that the rest of the information technology industry learned over the past 20 years," Mr Welch says.
This includes how to respond promptly to security threats and gather information about bugs that the public may report.
And IOActive's Cesar Cerrudo says cities and governments around the world have to get their act together as well, particularly when it comes to the cloud and building systems that are multi-layered and supposedly strong enough to keep all but the most determined intruders out.
He says: "Governments are not enforcing cybersecurity in many ways. Vendors don't have any reason to provide more secure solutions because governments do not test the security. They just have a checklist and believe whatever the vendors say."
Mr Cerrudo warns that there is nothing smart about building a city that has the latest transportation technology, but leaving the infrastructure wide open to anyone who fancies a quick snoop around - or worse.
Follow Technology of Business editor @matthew_wall on Twitter
Click here for more Technology of Business features | The internet of things is integral to smart urban transport systems, but all this data needs to be stored in the cloud. What are the security implications? | 45.266667 | 0.8 | 1.733333 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/advice/11201699/How-do-I-restore-my-Windows-XP-computer-to-factory-condition.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808135343id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/technology/advice/11201699/How-do-I-restore-my-Windows-XP-computer-to-factory-condition.html | How do I restore my Windows XP computer to factory condition? | 20160808135343 | I am running an old PC with XP, purely as a backup machine, however the hard drive is full and ideally I would like to take the computer back to its factory condition; I know that I would lose all of the data currently stored on the drive. The problem is XP won't allow me to format the disk, can this be overridden?
Windows has a self-defence mechanism that stops users formatting the primary drive, whilst it is running. Before we get to the workaround, as you know XP is no longer supported, and although you can still download security updates issued prior to April 2014, there will be no more. It will also become increasingly difficult to find drivers for peripherals, programs written for XP will not be updated and you won’t be able to install newer versions. This would be a good opportunity to give it a new lease of life either by installing Linux, or if it is less than 5 or 6 years old, it should be capable of running Windows 7.
If you want to format the drive and reinstall XP you will either to have to boot the PC from the Windows installation disc that came with it; this option is on the Repair menu that appears when you put the CD in the drive and restart the computer. If Windows was pre-installed it should have a Recovery Partition, containing all of the files necessary to restore the computer to its factory condition. The combination of keys needed to begin the restoration process will be in the user manual, or in the support section of the manufacturer’s web site. | Try booting the PC from the Windows installation disc that came with it, says Rick Maybury | 17.055556 | 0.666667 | 6.777778 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-36986145 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808142437id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/news/uk-england-london-36986145 | Westfield White City shopping centre stabbing: Two arrested | 20160808142437 | A man in his 20s has been stabbed in a shopping centre in west London.
Two men have been arrested following the stabbing just before 14:00 BST at Westfield Shopping Centre in White City.
An initial hospital assessment suggests that the victim's injuries are not life threatening.
The mall was partly cordoned off following the incident, which is not terror related, police confirmed.
Alessandro Mascellino, who works for Nomination Italy jewellery store, saw a group of policemen run past.
"I didn't see the attacker," he said.
"I was then told to stay outside and they shut the doors. I asked a policeman if my friends inside would be OK and they told me there was no risk whatsoever, it was just closed as it's a crime scene.
"I've worked here for three years and I have never seen so many police here. They're continuing to shut down sections of the mall."
Anyone with information was asked to contact Hammersmith and Fulham police. | A man in his 20s is stabbed in a shopping centre in west London. | 13.133333 | 1 | 7.133333 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/sports/olympics/united-states-womens-soccer-begins-olympics-with-win.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160808181102id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/04/sports/olympics/united-states-womens-soccer-begins-olympics-with-win.html | Jeers Don’t Bother Hope Solo as United States Wins Rio Opener | 20160808181102 | RIO DE JANEIRO — Just nine minutes into the United States women’s soccer team’s Olympic opener Wednesday night, Carli Lloyd headed in an arcing shot that eluded the New Zealand goalkeeper and gave the United States a 1-0 lead.
It was an immediate echo from last year’s World Cup final, in which Lloyd scored in the third, fifth and 16th minutes as part of a four-goal onslaught that helped produce a 5-2 victory over Japan, as well as national acclaim and a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan.
But on Wednesday, not much happened after Lloyd scored. The Americans dominated play, but except for a nice passing sequence that set up Alex Morgan for the second and final goal of the game early in the second half, they had trouble creating a sustained offense.
USA vs. New Zealand - Women's First Round - Group G
Instead, what was most notable about the 2-0 victory was the vociferous jeering that the American goalie Hope Solo received when she handled the ball or kicked it. Solo was apparently paying the price for the public comments and Twitter posts she has made in connection with the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which has plagued Brazil.
Earlier this year, Solo said she might not take part in the Olympics because of the virus. She ultimately decided that she would, but more recently she put up a couple of Twitter posts that seemed to take a flippant attitude toward the problem. One post showed a picture of Solo in what looked like a beekeeper’s mask. Another showed an assortment of repellents spread out on a bed.
Not sharing this!!! Get your own! #zikaproof #RoadToRio pic.twitter.com/y3d8hnuEjk
If anyone in the village forgets to pack repellent, come and see me...#DeptOfDefense #zikaproof pic.twitter.com/x8RdUV6M7c
And while Solo took a much different tone before Wednesday’s game, expressing sympathy for the people of Brazil and saying she would not want to offend anyone who lives there, the modest-size crowd in the Mineirão in Belo Horizonte let her have it anyway, even eventually yelling “Zika!” when she would kick the ball downfield.
Afterward, Solo, who has had a controversial career and is still involved in a domestic violence case, tried to shrug off the treatment she had just received.
“They’re having fun,” she told NBC when asked about the fans. “At least it’s loud in the stadium. I’d rather have that than hear a needle drop.”
Get daily updates during the Olympics as well as a weekly roundup of sports news.
Solo, herself, did not have all that much to do in the game. New Zealand had some corner kicks but never a moment when it had a dangerous shot on net.
Instead, Solo spent most of the game observing an American team that took the field with a lot of familiar faces from last year’s World Cup, but with some new players, too — midfielder Allie Long and forward Mallory Pugh, 18.
Pugh, however, had trouble generating scoring threats and eventually was replaced up front by another newcomer — Crystal Dunn, who had a more significant impact on the game.
Megan Rapinoe, who has yet to play since ripping up her right knee in December, did not get on the field. The veteran Rapinoe is the most creative playmaker on the American team, and her absence seemed to be felt in those extended moments when the United States had trouble launching a coherent attack. At some point, Coach Jill Ellis will presumably need her, but not yet, it appears.
Next up for the United States, meanwhile, is a game on Saturday against France, a tough opponent. Then comes their final game of the first round, against Colombia, on Aug. 9, in the Amazon. It’s possible the jeers might follow Solo all the way there.
OTHER GROUPS In Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Stadium, the Brazilian women’s team eased to a 3-0 victory over China. Headers from Monica and Cristiane on each side of a 59th-minute strike by Andressa Alves secured the Brazilians’ win.
Earlier, Sweden edged South Africa, 1-0, in another Group E game, but most of the seats did not appear to be filled. Nilla Fischer scored the only goal of that game.
In a Group F game at Arena Corinthians in São Paulo, Janine Beckie of Canada took only 20 seconds to make a mark on her third Summer Games, scoring the fastest goal ever at the Olympics in a 2-0 victory over Australia. It was nine seconds faster than Oribe Peralta’s strike for Mexico in the men’s gold medal match against Brazil four years ago in London.
Canada had to play with only 10 women after Shelina Zadorsky was sent off in the 19th minute for dragging down Michelle Heyman as Heyman was headed toward the goal.
In a later Group F match, Melanie Behringer scored twice as the three-time bronze medalist Germany routed Zimbabwe, 6-1. (AP)
A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2016, on page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Crowd Jeers Goalkeeper as Americans Win Opener. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | Carli Loyd scored nine minutes into the first half, and Alex Morgan added a second-half goal as the United States beat New Zealand in a first-round game. | 30.818182 | 0.909091 | 1.69697 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-saving-tips/jessicainvestigates/10990784/Nationwide-refuses-insurance-claim-for-couples-Moroccan-holiday.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809005014id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/finance/personalfinance/money-saving-tips/jessicainvestigates/10990784/Nationwide-refuses-insurance-claim-for-couples-Moroccan-holiday.html | Nationwide refuses insurance claim for couple's Moroccan holiday | 20160809005014 | Can you help get a refund?
The insurance was free except for a £25 loading cost in respect of your medical history.
When you spoke to Nationwide’s underwriter, UK Insurance, on the telephone, you found it difficult to understand what was being said.
Then a form came for your GP to fill in. This posed many questions, some of which seemed quite intrusive, about your husband’s health. The surgery apparently took a dim view of the form-filling asked for, given the amount of work this would involve.
I spoke to Nationwide, which said that it was reasonable to assume that the heavy fall and leg injury was not a pre-existing condition. It now accepted that a letter from the treating hospital or your GP would be sufficient.
More: Ten reasons why your travel insurance won't pay out
Nationwide has listened to the call you refer to in your letter. It appreciates that the explanation provided could have been clearer. As the service did not live up to what Nationwide describe as its usual high standards, it is offering you £50 compensation.
You provided the appropriate evidence for the claim. Nationwide has now paid for both holidays. The calculation works out as £319 per person deducting £100 for two excesses and £26 for air passenger tax. So you have £512 and are understandably delighted with this result.
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Follow Telegraph Money on Facebook | A trip to Marrakesh was put on hold for a couple when one of them fell ill before departing. Trying to claim back on insurance with Nationwide proved difficult for the pair | 8.4 | 0.514286 | 0.628571 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/activity-and-adventure/The-best-rucksacks-for-women-Action-Packed/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809031440id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/travel/activity-and-adventure/The-best-rucksacks-for-women-Action-Packed/ | The best rucksacks for women: Action Packed | 20160809031440 | Think about the length of the trip and the season of travel (cold, wet weather will require a bigger pack to accommodate bulkier clothing). If you’re looking for an all-purpose rucksack, then 40-50 litres is a good catch-all size, depending on how you pack.
The best way to find a good fit is to test out different packs at an outdoor store with a professional on hand to make technical adjustments. It is important to load a pack to see how weight is distributed. It is torso length, not overall height, that is the most important factor in finding a good fit – and the measurement that manufacturers use. That is the distance from your C7 vertebra (the most noticeable protrusion near the top of your spine) and the “shelf” of your hips, which can be measured with a soft tape.
For Osprey pack users, the free “Osprey PackSizer” app can analyse your full-length photo and match your frame to an ideal rucksack. Women-specific backpacks conform to a classic female frame with shorter and narrower torso dimensions, which work well for some figures. Other women may prefer a men’s backpack, especially as some men’s packs have better features.
Waist size is also important because the bulk of a pack’s weight, up to 80 per cent, is supported by the hips. The key measurement is around the top of the hips. Find a pack with a waistbelt that contours to your individual dimensions and form.
This is down to personal preference. Some prefer a streamlined pack while others like numerous pockets, tool loops and fixing points. Some like hydration packs (in an internal or external sleeve) and others prefer to use water bottles, best stored in easy-to-grab side pockets.
Some rucksacks come with an integrated rain cover but these are often not as sturdy as those you can buy separately. Arc’teryx make a cover with an elastic drawcord and compression straps which still provides easy top access (£25).
That said, I use the cheap, effective alternative of a black bin bag with strategically torn holes to pass the straps through.
My four recommended packs vary in size from 40 to 50 litres, and in price from £95 to £180. Brand is probably the most important influence on price but size, material and finish also have a bearing. The best deals may be found online but the benefit of buying in store is that a professional can fit the pack to your frame.
Osprey Tempest 40 Weight: 1kg Price: £100 ospreyeurope.com
A neatly shaped lightweight pack with great support and suspension, thanks to multiple adjustment devices and a big Velcro pad to fine-tune torso fit. The articulated harness and waistbelt are comfortable but not bulky and keep the load close to your body yet it maintains good ventilation with its mesh back panel. There is traditional top access to the main compartment as well as zippered access at the base, plus a stretchy mesh kangaroo pocket for a wet jacket. The hydration pack sleeve is sensibly external. The dual mesh side pockets are very deep, so items will be secure but may also be tricky to access. There are also dual mesh zipped pockets on the waistbelt, and a smart but simple system for attaching trekking poles using two elasticated loops.
Fit 5 Functionality 4 Durability 4 Value 5 Overall 5
This well-priced, well-thought-out pack is my favourite of the ones tested and works perfectly for efficient packers.
Haglofs Matrix Q50 Weight: 1.55kg Price: £130 haglofs.com
A classic high-quality trekking pack with an aluminium frame distributing the load well. The Velcro-adjustable system accurately tunes to torso length and a well-cut waistbelt takes the weight off the shoulders. The harness is cleverly designed to curve around a woman’s chest area (instead of squashing it) but some may find the thick foam to be bulky. A drawcord collar expands the pack significantly and there is a zippable compartment for your sleeping bag. The detachable top lid has pockets on the inside and outside but this section is awkward to fill because of its snug fit over the pack. On the front is an elastic cord system for a wet jacket and multiple lashing points. The hydration pack sleeve is external, which separates it from the rest of your gear in case of leakage. The stretchy side pockets offer “grab-and-go” access from the top and side of the rucksack.
Fit 4 Functionality 3 Durability 4 Value 3 Overall 3
A conventional design that feels strong, durable and roomy, but it is also the heaviest pack among the rucksacks tested.
Arc’teryx Altra 48 Weight: 1.4kg Price: £180 arcteryx.com
A well-planned pear-shaped women’s rucksack with twin aluminium stays on its back that keep the pack close to the body, minimising load movement and backward pull. It has multiple adjustable features, from a contoured harness and waistbelt to a removable sternum strap, to change the fit. This pack feels spacious with its extendable drawcord collar. The main compartment of the rucksack can also be accessed from a zipper on both the left and right sides. There is a large internal security pocket and a kangaroo pocket for wet weather gear. The removable top lid has two zippered compartments accessed from the top (a good design, as it would be awkward to have one on the inside). Unusually, the dual side pockets are zippered, which may not suit everyone, especially those who like to grab a water bottle in one simple move. The hydration pack sleeve is internal which does pose a risk of leakage into the main compartment.
Fit 4 Functionality 4 Durability 4 Value 3 Overall 4
This is a comfortable pack with smart suspension and attention to detail – but it is expensive.
Gregory Maya 42 Weight: 1.15kg Price: £95 gregorypacks.com
The women-specific sculpted design of this rucksack features a wishbone internal wire frame which is flexible yet remarkably sturdy, and it also comes with a ventilated back panel. This brand goes its own quirky way and for the most part succeeds. For example, the lid has a single anodised aluminium hook instead of the more typical pair of plastic clips. There are unusual features such as the internal hydration pack sleeve which is accessed externally behind the back panel. The top-loading main compartment has front zipper access on one side; there are dual side pockets and dual waistbelt pockets; a kangaroo pocket can stretch to store a bike helmet, and stuffed behind this is an integrated rain cover.
Fit 3 Functionality 3 Durability 3 Value 4 Overall 3
This is a pioneering pack with some unique designs from pockets to fastenings, which some may find refreshing and others may resist.
As the lucky child of an airline pilot, Michelle embarked on adventures overseas from a young age, including camping in the Australian outback, volcano-trekking in Hawaii and driving across Tsavo National Park in Kenya. Her wanderlust and spirit of adventure has never waned. She loves nothing more than feeling the grit and fear when pushing herself to the limit, whether that’s in climbing Mont Blanc, swimming with whale sharks in Mexico, or flying, diving, sailing or rally driving.
She is motivated by sport and extreme adventure to keep fit and feed her competitive spirit but not least because she believes there are too few women in the public eye who are willing to show themselves at rock- bottom. “I’ve always preferred mud and sweat to make-up,” she says. She swears by reliable equipment, which has made her toughest challenges more comfortable at the very least and at other times has saved her life. She is a self-confessed gear addict and would love to hear from readers about any equipment that they love or loathe. Follow her on Twitter: @michellejchan
The best rucksacks for men The best waterproof jackets for men The best tents The best lightweight walking shoes for men The best hiking boots for men The best lightweight warm jackets for men The best fleece jackets for men The best softshell jackets for men | Our women's gear and kit expert, Michelle Jana Chan, puts four of the best rucksacks for women to the test | 68.130435 | 0.695652 | 1.217391 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/keeping-up-with-joan-davidson-1445940000 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809032330id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/keeping-up-with-joan-davidson-1445940000 | Keeping Up With Joan Davidson | 20160809032330 | I know where philanthropist Joan Davidson was scheduled to be at 7 p.m. Tuesday. She would be awarding “The Alice,” an annual prize named after her mother, Alice Kaplan, an art collector and painter, for a distinguished illustrated book. The event was at the Frick Collection.
What I don’t know is what she planned to do before and after the Frick celebration of this year’s winner, David Campany, for his book “The Open Road” (Aperture) about photography and the American road trip.
There had to be something else. Ms. Davidson rarely limits herself to one event a day.
She responded somewhat sheepishly, over lunch at her art-filled Upper East Side apartment last week, when I asked whether she goes out every night when she’s in the city.
On weekends, she is at Midwood, her 85-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River a couple of hours north of the city. There her schedule is hardly less strenuous, though she denies it.
“Sometimes I step out early and come home,” she confided.
Presumably, that didn’t happen a couple of nights before our meeting. She was being honored as the founding chair of the Gracie Mansion Conservancy and seated at the mansion between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and first lady Chirlane McCray.
Mr. de Blasio presented her with the key to the city.
Not letting an opportunity go to waste, Ms. Davidson lobbied the mayor on behalf of Westbeth, artist housing in Greenwich Village for which her family’s philanthropy, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, provided seed money in the late ’60s.
Such a packed schedule would be exhausting for someone half her age. But Ms. Davidson is how old?
I couldn’t guess, even though I’ve known her for more than a decade. I assumed she was in her early 80s, only because that’s what I’d heard. She looks like she’s in her early 70s and acts like she’s in her 30s.
“Eighty-eight,” she said. “It happens. Just wait.”
One resists the temptation to describe Ms. Davidson as a grande dame. She doesn’t dress the part—preferring casual elegance to designer dresses, and artistic jewelry to diamonds. But it dawned on me, over a lunch of chicken salad and asparagus spears, with Tate’s chocolate chip cookies for dessert, that she’s among the last of the breed.
These are philanthropists in the mold of the late Brooke Astor who come to personify New York City. Who combine wealth with smarts and personal charisma to leverage the impact of their good deeds.
The J.M. Kaplan Fund—where Ms. Davidson was president from 1977 to 1993, until she became New York state’s Commissioner of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation under Gov. Mario Cuomo and handed over the reins to her children—began in 1945 with $10 million from her father, a self-made financier who reorganized and led the Welch’s Grape Juice company.
The fund has since grown to about $150 million, a significant amount but hardly exceptional in a city of billionaires writing hundred-million-dollar checks to get their names chiseled onto public institutions.
“I loved Mario Cuomo,” Ms. Davidson remembered of her time in state government. “He was the most wonderful boss. He gave you all the money you asked for. He never interfered. He approved of everything. But the state was pretty rich in those days.”
Ms. Davidson appears more hands-on than the former governor was with her. She also created Furthermore, the grants in publishing program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. It has helped fund more than a thousand books, including Kenneth Jackson’s “The Encyclopedia of New York City” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gotham,” by Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace.
“We kept those guys going for years,” Ms. Davidson said of the “Gotham” authors in characteristically unembellished fashion.
“We don’t have that much money and the grants are pretty dinky,” she added modestly. “They’re in the $5,000 range. Once in a great while $10,000.”
“The Alice” is a more substantial $25,000.
As I was leaving Ms. Davidson handed me a press kit for the S.S. Columbia, a National Historic Landmark steam vessel whose restoration she’s championing. She hopes it will eventually ply the Hudson, uniting communities along the river and educating the public about their cultural heritage.
It could also travel directly below her Hudson River mansion, providing an apt coda to a career that seems to link New York City, Albany and the mountains and valleys in between. | One resists the temptation to describe Joan Davidson as a grande dame. But it dawned on Ralph Gardner Jr. over lunch with her that she is among the last of a breed of philanthropists who come to personify New York City. | 21.255814 | 0.930233 | 4.139535 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/borrowing/mortgages/10698333/Landlords-to-sue-West-Brom-for-breaking-tracker-promise.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809044848id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/finance/personalfinance/borrowing/mortgages/10698333/Landlords-to-sue-West-Brom-for-breaking-tracker-promise.html | Landlords to sue West Brom for breaking tracker 'promise' | 20160809044848 | Mark Smith, a barrister at Cotswold Barristers who is representing the borrowers, said the lender was justifying the move by relying on the small print in its terms and conditions that said it could vary borrowers’ interest rates to reflect market conditions. However, individual loan offers given to borrowers clearly say the rate tracks Bank Rate.
“The terms and conditions state that if there is any variance between the standard terms and the specific terms in any offers given to individual borrowers, the specific terms take precedence. We believe West Brom has acted unlawfully and that we have a very strong case,” Mr Smith said.
He added that West Brom had rejected the chance to arbitrate – where a binding and confidential decision is made outside court.
A West Brom spokesman said the financial ombudsman already served this role. The ombudsman has received a large number of complaints from West Brom customers but has not yet issued any final decisions.
Emma Hughes, 42, and her husband David, 44, of Huddersfield, are members of the Property118.com action. They are professional landlords with 12 buy-to-let properties, 11 in Huddersfield and one in Leeds. They have three tracker mortgages with West Brom and their repayments have more than doubled on all three properties. Overall they are paying £500 a month more than before. On one loan the rate rose from 1.39pc to 3.29pc, which boosted the payments from £104 a month to £246.
The couple, who have two children, Martha, 13, and Gwen, 11, are worried they could be forced to sell some properties to cover their extra costs. Mrs Hughes said: “We have had enough, and some of us stand to lose our properties because of it. This is not about the big fish with hundreds of houses, this is about our livelihood. We do not have another source of income to fall back on – this puts food on the table.”
They also have mortgages with the Bank of Scotland subsidiary Birmingham Midshires, the Co-operative Bank subsidiary Platform, specialist buy-to-let lender CHL and Bank of Ireland. Their biggest concern is that other lenders will follow suit if West Brom gets away with its rate rise.
“We always knew that interest rates would rise and we have always had plans for that, but this was such a shock because there was no reason to expect it, with the mortgages tracking Base Rate,” Mrs Hughes said.
“The West Bromwich is now reneging on its part of that bargain and we feel cheated. This could affect so many people over the long-term, landlords and tenants alike. We provide social housing and private rentals and would be forced to put the rents up significantly if lenders get away with this.”
Last year the Bank of Ireland made similar changes for tracker customers, which has stoked fears that other lenders might follow. Many are believed to be scrutinising their small print to see if they can increase their margins.
The City watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, is investigating whether mortgage lenders should be allowed to change borrowers’ contract terms. A letter to lenders in November showed that a number had contacted the regulator about changing their mortgage contracts. It warned such changes could breach consumer law. It will publish a discussion paper in the summer.
Property118.com’s legal action will go ahead only if at least 250 affected mortgages are represented. So far, 39 people with 72 affected mortgages have fully committed themselves to the action and more than 400 have signalled their intention to join.
For new members, the cost of joining is £1,500 per mortgage. People who have already contributed to the fighting fund will pay less. You can download a form to instruct Mark Smith via Property118.com and all forms and money must be received by March 28.
The group has so far raised more than £100,000 to fund the court case and will use the additional money raised to demonstrate to the judge that it has sufficient funds to pay the other side’s costs if it loses the case.
Property118.com said members would get £1,000 back if the case was won, plus a percentage of legal costs and a refund of overpayments to the mortgage company since the rate rise took effect in December. If the case is lost, members could lose their whole contribution.
Property118.com founder Mark Alexander said he expected the case, including any appeal, to be concluded by Christmas.
Sign up to our weekly newsletter for all the latest mortgage and property news | The case will look at whether lenders can vary their mortgage contracts, with potentially huge implications for all borrowers | 41.428571 | 0.761905 | 1.333333 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/new-york-lottery-video-gaming-revenues-continue-climb-blog-entry-1.1818625 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809082909id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/blogs/dailypolitics/new-york-lottery-video-gaming-revenues-continue-climb-blog-entry-1.1818625 | New York's lottery and video gaming revenues continue to climb | 20160809082909 | Lottery tickets and video gaming facilities produced another record haul of cash for state coffers last year.
State gaming officials reported Thursday that total lottery sales and winnings from racetrack-based video gaming facilities reached $9.23 billion during the 2013-14 fiscal year which ended March 31. The figures marked an increase of $292.2 million or 3.3% from the previous year and the 14th consecutive year of revenue growth for the state Lottery.
The haul translated into $3.17 billion in profits, which, under state law, must be directed toward education aid.
“We are proud of the significant contribution the Lottery makes to support New York’s schools and we are very pleased to have set yet another sales record for the past fiscal year,” said Robert Williams, Acting Executive Director of the New York State Gaming Commission. “We look forward to continuing this record of success in the future.”
Education aid generated by the lottery and gaming facilities increased 4.2% or $127.2 million from the prior fiscal year.
Traditional lottery games, including instant scratch off tickets, generated $7.31 billion in total sales, of which $4.3 billion was given back in prizes and $2.26 billion went to education aid. The Mega Millions game was among the biggest gainers, with tickets sales soaring from $254 million a year ago to more than $400 million thanks to some hefty jackpots that drew in more players.
Sales for Lotto, meanwhile, declined 14.1% to $94.6 million.
The state’s nine video gaming parlors - known as racinos - generated a net win of $1.9 billion out of $32.3 billion in total bets. The racinos generated $870 million for education aid.
Aqueduct’s Resorts World racino continued to be the state’s biggest money maker, generating a net win of $793 million, up from $696.6 million the year before.
Of New York’s nine racinos, four had lower net wins than the prior year, which state gaming officials blamed on the harsh winter and “a variety of factors.”
The new figures comes as New York prepares for the further expansion of legalized gambling. The state’s first four commercially operated casinos are set to open as early as next year in three upstate regions. | State gaming officials reported Wednesday that total lottery sales and the net wins at the racetrack-based video gaming facilities reached $9.23 billion during the 2013-14 fiscal year that ended March 31, an increase of $292.2 million or 3.3% from the previous year. | 8.529412 | 0.960784 | 10.137255 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/36929932 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809091055id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/sport/football/36929932 | Millwall 3-0 Oldham Athletic | 20160809091055 | Millwall put last season's play-off final disappointment behind them with a routine home win over Oldham, thanks to goals from Lee Gregory, Aiden O'Brien and Byron Webster.
The Lions took the lead after 13 minutes. Cameron Burgess was slow to react to a loose ball in the area, and as Ben Thompson nipped in to flick it past him, a crude lunge brought the inevitable spot-kick.
That was tucked away into the bottom-right corner with minimal fuss by Gregory, and Josh Law went close with a free-kick for the visitors before the Lions doubled the lead shortly before half-time.
A corner kick from David Worrall was not cleared initially and O'Brien reacted first to smash the loose ball past Connor Ripley.
And just 49 seconds in to the second half, another corner by Worrall was not cleared and Webster slid in at the far post to prod home.
Oldham's best effort after the break was a Marc Klok free-kick that narrowly missed the target, while visiting forward Darius Osei slid a shot wide.
Report supplied by the Press Association. | Millwall put last season's League One play-off final disappointment behind them with a routine home win over Oldham. | 9.727273 | 0.909091 | 10.090909 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/08/05/jack-grealish-drunk-holiday-pictures-were-a-painful-lesson/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809112852id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/football/2016/08/05/jack-grealish-drunk-holiday-pictures-were-a-painful-lesson/? | Jack Grealish: Drunk holiday pictures were a painful lesson | 20160809112852 | Grealish is only focusing on the future now. He was not even born the last time Villa operated in the second tier but it already feels like a fresh start under new ownership, following Dr Tony Xia’s takeover.
The departure of Randy Lerner and the appointment of Roberto Di Matteo, plus the £12million signing of Ross McCormack, suggests there could be better times ahead.
“It’s a huge season for me and the club. I’m so determined to prove people wrong this season, and do it for myself. I want to get this club back where it belongs,” said Grealish.
“I look back on that Liverpool game and I’m hoping for more times like that. That was by far the best day of my life. There was no pressure on us and I felt like a little kid going to play on a park that day. This season it’s all going to be about hard work.
“A few days after the new manager was appointed he rang me while I was on my holiday. For him to call me and have a positive chat gave me a really good feeling.”
Grealish’s summer holidays this year could not have been more different to 12 months before. “I went away to Dubai and Santorini with my girlfriend [Sasha] and was running on the beaches in the morning. I had a personal trainer with me. I was also going to the gym in the evenings at 7pm when she wanted to go out for dinner so I wasn’t too popular!” | Aston Villa will officially begin life as a Championship club this weekend with one of their own, Jack Grealish, vowing it is payback time. | 11.111111 | 0.518519 | 0.518519 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/02/nigel-farage-shows-ed-miliband-how-to-eat-a-bacon-sandwich | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809122423id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/politics/2014/oct/02/nigel-farage-shows-ed-miliband-how-to-eat-a-bacon-sandwich | Nigel Farage shows Ed Miliband how to eat a bacon sandwich | 20160809122423 | It may be more than four months since Ed Miliband’s much-ridiculed attempt to to eat a bacon sandwich made the headlines, but while out canvassing in Middleton, Ukip leader Nigel Farage couldn’t miss an opportunity to show him how it’s done.
Farage tucked into a bacon sandwich bought from a stall outside Middleton shopping centre, where Ukip is fighting the Heywood and Middleton byelection called following the death of sitting Labour MP Jim Dobbin.
Keen observers will notice the sliced bread of the Farage sandwich arguably makes it an easier handful than Miliband’s roll. The Guardian’s Christopher Thomond caught the moment on camera. | Posing for a bacon butty shot has become the fastest way for a politician to earn his everyman credentials. So, how did the Ukip leader do? | 4.103448 | 0.37931 | 0.517241 | low | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/money/4394578/mega-millions-jackpot/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809133932id_/http://time.com:80/money/4394578/mega-millions-jackpot/? | Mega Millions Prize reaches $508 Million | 20160809133932 | The Mega Millions jackpot has grown to $508 million after a drawing on Tuesday produced no winning ticket for the multi-state lottery prize, which now ranks as the seventh largest ever in the United States, officials said.
The lottery is played in 44 states, Washington D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Before Tuesday night’s drawing, the Mega Millions jackpot of $449 million would have been the seventh-largest lottery prize in U.S. history, including other games such as Powerball, lottery officials have said.
The numbers from the drawing on Tuesday were: 29, 46, 53, 64, 73 and 10, according to the Mega Millions website. There were seven million-dollar Match 5 tickets from that drawing. There was one million-dollar winning ticket each sold in California, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas.
Friday’s jackpot remains the third largest Mega Millions jackpot in the game’s history, behind a $648 million drawing in 2013. But the $508 million prize would make it the seventh largest jackpot in U.S. history, according to figures from lottery officials.
The odds of winning the jackpot in Mega Millions are one in nearly 259 million.
The current $508 million jackpot is worth $357 million if a winner chooses an immediate cash payout instead of an initial payment and then 29 annual payments, according to the Mega Millions website.
The Mega Millions jackpot has been growing since the last winning ticket was sold in Washington state in March, earning the winner $157 million.
In January, three winning Powerball tickets were sold in Florida, Tennessee and California to claim a share of nearly $1.6 billion, the largest prize to have been won on a single lottery game anywhere in the world. | That's the 7th largest jackpot in history. | 38.222222 | 0.777778 | 1.444444 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/09/03/33/staffy-killer-on-run-in-melbourne | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809134247id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/09/03/33/staffy-killer-on-run-in-melbourne | Staffy killer on run in Melbourne | 20160809134247 | A killer who cruelly suffocated a beloved pet dog in Melbourne by taping its head is still on the run.
Nine-year-old Toby, a Staffordshire bull terrier cross, died in the backyard of his 71-year-old owner's Craigieburn home last Tuesday.
She found him with duct tape wrapped around his head in what police have described as a "horrific" act of cruelty.
Police are treating the sickening incident as a random attack and say there had been no reports of Toby being a nuisance.
Anyone who saw someone acting suspiciously near the Abercarn Avenue Reserve in Craigieburn on Tuesday night is being urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. | A Staffordshire bull terrier cross owned by an elderly woman has been killed after an intruder broke into a Melbourne backyard and duct-taped its head. | 4.607143 | 0.571429 | 1.357143 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/realestate/compare-homes-in-keauhou-hawaii-austerlitz-new-york-and-indianapolis-indiana.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160809140802id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/07/realestate/compare-homes-in-keauhou-hawaii-austerlitz-new-york-and-indianapolis-indiana.html?ref=realestate | $1,250,000 Homes in Hawaii, New York and Indiana | 20160809140802 | PRICE PER SQUARE FOOT: $307
SETTING: The church sits at a triangular intersection in Fletcher Place, a neighborhood and historic district at the southeast edge of downtown. Architecturally, the area is mixed, with brick commercial buildings, schools, churches and mid- and late-Victorian architecture. Independently owned shops, restaurants, tap rooms and cafes along Virginia Avenue and Fountain Square are within a few blocks, part of a general resurgence of the neighborhoods around downtown. (Chefs at two of the restaurants, Milktooth and Bluebeard, were nominated for James Beard Awards this year.) The Indianapolis Cultural Trail, a bike and pedestrian path, passes nearby and winds for eight miles through and around downtown.
INDOORS: The two-story unit is one of four in the church, which dates to the mid-1870s. It was converted to residences in 2012. Though sleek and contemporary, the renovation retains many of the original features, including elaborate dark wood ceiling beams and stained-glass windows, some of which are inscribed with the names of the donors. This unit has half of the building’s massive central stained-glass medallion window.
The front door opens to a living area with a ceiling reaching to the roofline, nearly 35 feet. A built-in 75-inch television is next to a sleek gas fireplace, both of which are set into a wall of unusual dimpled white tile. The space has a Dolby surround sound system with a built-in wall subwoofer. The rest of the unit is wired for sound, too.
The floor plan is open, leading from living area to dining area and the kitchen. The kitchen is anchored by a 15-foot island with a Caesarstone countertop. The fire-engine red cabinets are finished with Thermofoil, a heat-sealed plastic with a metallic sheen. The stainless-steel appliances include a Sub-Zero refrigerator, an Asko dishwasher and twin Bosch ovens. There are also an icemaker and a Marvel beverage cooler.
Two of the bedrooms are at the back of the first floor. One, used as an office, is partitioned by a sliding-glass door, and has a built-in 55-inch television wired to double as a computer monitor.
On the second floor is a skylit loft with a pitched ceiling girded by the original beams and trusses. The room, used as a den, is enclosed by a stainless-steel banister continued from the stairs, and overlooks the living room.
The upstairs master bedroom has a 20-foot-tall pitched ceiling, also with original beams and trusses. There are two closets, one with an island of built-in storage. The en-suite bathroom has a heated tile floor and a large tiled alcove with a stainless-steel tub.
Stairs in the loft lead to a tower, used as a reading room, overlooking downtown and Lucas Oil Stadium.
OUTDOOR SPACE: Shared patios in front and back of the building
TAXES: Approximately $8,400 a year, plus $760 a month in condo fees
CONTACT: Joe Everhart, Everhart Studio, (317) 716-5236; everhartlistings.com
WHAT: A contemporary with three bedrooms and three full and two half bathrooms, plus a one-bedroom, one-bath guesthouse, on nearly 20 acres
PRICE PER SQUARE FOOT: $273
SETTING: Austerlitz is a rural town of fewer than 2,000 people in Columbia County in upstate New York, on the Massachusetts border. This contemporary is off a winding country road, near properties that range from about 20 to 40 acres. Hiking and outdoor recreation in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts are within about 20 miles, as is Hudson, N.Y., where there is an Amtrak stop. By car, Austerlitz is about 130 miles from New York City and 140 miles from Boston.
INDOORS: The house was designed by Parker Bloser, an architect. The exterior is Ground Face concrete, with copper roofing. Set on a hillside with broad views of the Berkshires, it was built in 1988 and updated in the late 1990s. The house was a longtime home of Arthur T. Hadley, a journalist and author known for his military critiques, who died in 2015.
The interior has radiant-heated bluestone floors, vaulted pine-paneled ceilings and clean-lined wood built-ins throughout. The two-story structure has an entry level with a spacious dining area, a kitchen and a pantry, while the living room and the bedrooms are on a lower level that follows the grade of the land.
The kitchen has been updated with a Gaggenau range and Sub-Zero refrigerator. The pantry opens to the courtyard so as to make the kitchen easily accessible to caterers.
The living room has a pine-paneled ceiling that pitches up to about 20 feet, with walls of glass and porthole windows. Glass doors open to a large wraparound stone patio and gunite pool.
Each bedroom has a fireplace. The master has a full wall of glass doors opening to the patio and pool, as well as two en-suite bathrooms.
The guesthouse is across the courtyard from the main house. It has its own kitchen and a bedroom with a fireplace. A breezeway leads to a media room with a full-wall wine refrigerator.
OUTDOOR SPACE: A few of the property’s acres are cleared, while the balance is mostly wooded, with two ponds, one overlooked by the patio.
TAXES: Approximately $25,000 a year
CONTACT: Deborah Kinney, Beach & Bartolo Realtors, (518) 929-5422; beachandbartolo.com | A house in Keauhou, Hawaii, a condo in an Indianapolis church and a contemporary in Austerlitz, N.Y. | 53.6 | 0.9 | 1.2 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/katie-ledecky-wins-gold-in-400-meter-freestyle-1470624671 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160810053529id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/katie-ledecky-wins-gold-in-400-meter-freestyle-1470624671 | Katie Ledecky Wins Gold in 400-Meter Freestyle at the Rio Olympics | 20160810053529 | RIO DE JANEIRO—Coming into the Rio Olympics, Katie Ledecky had left a swim platform a dozen times in finals races at major international meets. Every time she touched the wall first.
Sunday night at Estadio Olympico, Ledecky made it 13 for 13, dominating the women’s 400-meter freestyle as everyone who has paid swimming a moment’s notice the past year knew she would. After breaking the Olympic record in her afternoon heat, the 19-year-old Ledecky put her first exclamation point on these Olympics, winning gold in a world record time of 3:56:46, nearly two seconds better than her previous mark. Silver medalist Carlin Jazz of Great Britain was nearly five seconds and some 10 meters behind Ledecky, finishing in 4:01.23. Leah Smith of the U.S. took the bronze in 4:01.92.
Ledecky’s win was just one highlight of a thrilling night in the pool that included three world records and Michael Phelps’s Olympic return in a battle for the ages in the most competitive men’s 4x100 freestyle relay ever.
With Phelps powering through a blistering second leg in 47.12, the U.S. topped France to reclaim one of swimming’s glamour titles in 3:09.92, .61 ahead of the French. Australia took the bronze.
For Phelps, the relay win give him his 19th gold medal and a 23rd overall. When Phelps hit the water the U.S. men were .02 out of the lead after Caleb Dressel’s opening leg.
When Phelps touched the wall the U.S. men were more than a second ahead and never looked back with defending 100-meter champion Nathan Adrian swimming the anchor.
Phelps isn’t swimming the 100 free later this week. Perhaps he should. His 47.12 would be one of the fastest at that distance all year.
Phelps noted it was the fastest 100-meter freestyle of his career. He said before the race he told his teammates, “It’s OK to sing and it’s OK to cry,” on the podium.
It was the second medal in 24 hours for Ledecky, who won a silver in the 4x100 freestyle relay Saturday night, swimming a distance that she has barely competed at internationally.
After that race, which began at 11:30 p.m. Ledecky ate, warmed down, and got a massage before leaving the stadium to head back to the Olympic Village. Despite the pressure that swimmers often feel swimming as part of a team, Ledecky said beginning the meet with a relay set her ease and somehow made her more relaxed heading into her individual races. She said she fell asleep around 2:45 a.m.
Twelve hours later, she re-started her quest for five medals. After a quick reminder from coach Bruce Gemmell to adjust her stroke rate for a longer race, she hit the water again just before 3 p.m. for her heat in the 400 freestyle. When she finished, she said it was the easiest sub-four minute 400 she has ever experienced.
“I’m just trying to get into the right tempo,” Ledecky said.
She did that and more Saturday night, leading wire-to-wire and charging for the finish like she wanted to demolish her previous mark.
Indeed it is Ledecky’s ability to adjust her tempo that separates her from every other female swimmer on the planet. No one else wins medals as part of a sprint relay team and holds world records at 800 and 1,500 meters, a distance women don’t even race in the Olympic meet and one where she would surely win another medal if they did.
In swimming circles, all distance champions are considered freaks, because anyone with enough lung capacity to tear through a substance 800-times more dense than air at roughly 100-meters per minute is by definition abnormal. But someone who can do that and also drop down and hold her own against the fastest female swimmers in the world is almost alien.
U.S. coach Dave Marsh Saturday said Ledecky was just a notch below super-hero status, and Ledecky did little to change his mind Sunday night. Ledecky has been scaring her two-year-old 400-record for more than a year. She set it in August 2014, swimming 3:58.37. Ledecky’s task is made even harder because she is so much better than everyone else that no one is ever pushing her down the stretch in a distance race.
Her strokes won’t win any awards for aesthetics. She is all power, churning her hips as her left arm shoots forward like a spring and her right arm and shoulder fly out the water like a galloping horse. Of course, no one cares what it looks like and she is only concerned with what it produces, which is likely to be much, much more.
“I know what my best times are, and I have my goals,” Ledecky said Sunday.
There will likely be plenty more hardware in the coming days. Ledecky is the favorite to win 200 and 800 freestyle and anchor the favored U.S. women in the 4x200 freestyle relay.
Sarah Sjostrom of Sweden crushed the field in the 100 meter butterfly with a world record time of 55.48. Sjostrom, who took control of the race after the turn, was nearly a full second faster than silver medalist, Penny Oleksiak of Canada, a remarkable gap for such a short race. American Dana Vollmer took the bronze.
Though not unexpected, the outcome was a bittersweet Vollmer, the defending Olympic champion. Vollmer retired after the London Games and had a baby. Then, when her baby was just an infant, she began to feel the itch to race again and came out of retirement to give the Olympics another shot.
“I just don’t want it to be automatic for Sjostrom,” Vollmer said recently.
It looked that way, but that Vollmer got to the podium as a mother is remarkable accomplishment in a sport dominated by youth.
Sjostrom had set an Olympic record in the event Sunday in the qualifying heat, then did herself one better by breaking her own world record in the final.
In the 100-meter breaststroke, Adam Peaty of Great Britain broke his world record for the second time in two days, winning in 57.13. Cameron van der Burgh of South Africa took the silver and American Cody Miller picked up the bronze.
Peaty, who led wire-to wire, set the world record of 57.55 in his qualifying heat Saturday.
Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com and Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com | Katie Ledecky broke the world record in the 400-meter freestyle with a time of 3:56:46, giving the 19-year-old American her first gold medal of the Rio Games, while Michael Phelps and the U.S. Men won gold for the 4x100 freestyle relay. | 26.630435 | 0.956522 | 2.26087 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/08/put-away-your-keyboard-its-time-to-talk-to-our-computers/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160810060901id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/technology/2016/04/08/put-away-your-keyboard-its-time-to-talk-to-our-computers/ | Put away your keyboard: It’s time to talk to our computers | 20160810060901 | But while the last 40 years have been good to it, a replacement for the graphical user interface could be just around the corner. In the same way that the mouse and colour screens replaced keyboard-controlled commands, something most of us own and use every day could come to rule computing: our voices.
A computer that we can talk to has been the stuff of science-fiction for decades, and something of a novelty in our gadgets more recently – we can ask our phones for the time or to play music – but the stars now appear to be aligning in a way that could, potentially, make voice the next computing paradigm.
A crucial advance has simply been in the ability of computers to understand our voices. With a few exceptions (thick accents being one) software is now very capable of interpreting our speech as coherent sentences, rather than jumbles of unconnected words. So when I ask a computer “Will it rain on Thursday?”, it now almost never hears “Wheel it running thirsty”.
But the real difficult challenge has been building software that can actually respond to sentences in a useful way.
While pointing and clicking at menus is not open to interpretation, computers have historically been very poor at understanding the nuances of language, for all their their number-crunching prowess.
But the advent of machine learning has turned this on its head: in a short space of time, machines have become a lot better at grasping what sentences mean, and what the best way to respond to a command or question is.
These two developments – the ability to turn sounds into text and then to understand it – mean we are now able to hold conversations with computers; and the world’s tech giants are now taking a bet that people will increasingly want to do so. | For decades, every major computer has employed what is known as a graphical user interface: | 20.705882 | 0.823529 | 1.529412 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/joe-paterno-knew-sandusky-abuse-allegations-early-1976-insurance-company-claims | http://web.archive.org/web/20160810081759id_/http://www.msnbc.com:80/msnbc/joe-paterno-knew-sandusky-abuse-allegations-early-1976-insurance-company-claims | Joe Paterno knew of Sandusky abuse allegations as early as 1976, insurance company claims | 20160810081759 | The late Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno knew about sexual abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky as early as 1976, according to an assertion in a Philadelphia court order made public Thursday.
The claim emerged in a dispute over who should pay Penn State’s share of about $60 million in settlements with 26 men who say Sandusky abused them when they were children — the university or its insurance company.
Previously, the abuse was widely thought to have occurred from 1994 through 2008, when Sandusky ran a youth charity called Second Mile.
But in the new order, dated Wednesday, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary S. Glazer wrote in passing that the insurance company, Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association Insurance, had claimed that “in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU’s Head Coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky.”
The order was first reported by the Patriot-News of Harrisburg. The Paterno family and Penn State didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to the order, the insurance company further claims that in 1987 and 1988, other assistant coaches witnessed “inappropriate” or “sexual” conduct between Sandusky and children, and that in 1988, a similar allegation was referred to Penn State’s athletic director.
Glazer was careful to note that the claims are allegations, not proven facts, and that “since this is obviously not a criminal matter, this court is not governed by the higher standards of proof required in criminal prosecutions.”
On the larger question, the judge ruled that both sides could still be on the hook for paying judgments in various cases depending on when they occurred.
NBC News has previously reported that Penn State could still face legal action by at least six other alleged victims not included in the settlement agreement. And it has also reported that some allegations against Sandusky date to the early 1990s and perhaps even the late 1980s, raising questions about what Penn State knew and when it knew it when it came to Sandusky’s abuses.
Sandusky was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison in October 2012 for abusing 10 boys he met through Second Mile. He filed a petition this week for a new trial.
Paterno, a revered figure who many proclaimed represented integrity in college football, was fired amid allegations that he didn’t properly report concerns about Sandusky to authorities. He died in January 2012 at age 85 and was never charged with any crimes.
At the time the criminal charges were filed against Sandusky in 2011, Paterno told reporters, “In hindsight, I wish I had done more.”
University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President Gary Schultz were all forced out of their jobs. They still face charges that they failed to report one of the allegations.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com. | A court order made public Thursday contains an assertion that late Penn State coach Joe Paterno knew about allegations against Jerry Sandusky as early as 1976. | 20.444444 | 0.962963 | 3.925926 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/hanzals-torrid-start-continues-in-coyotes-win-111613 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160810101210id_/http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/hanzals-torrid-start-continues-in-coyotes-win-111613 | hanzals-torrid-start-continues-in-coyotes-win | FOX Sports | 20160810101210 | Whenever Coyotes coach Dave Tippett talks about
, he notes just how many ways his big center impacts the game. But when you think of Hanzal, you don’t think point-a-game guy.
At least you didn't until now.
Hanzal matched a career high with four points in Saturday's 6-3 win over the Lightning, scoring a goal and adding three assists while continuing his season-long trend of parking in the offensive crease and screening goalies to distraction.
With Saturday's performance, Hanzal has six goals and 18 points in 18 games, which is more than halfway to his career high of 35 points set in his rookie season in 2007-08.
"He's our most valuable forward, and it's not even close," Coyotes captain Shane Doan said. "He's the guy that makes everything go for us up front, and tonight was a perfect example. He just does all the little things right."
The Coyotes needed a big effort from Hanzal on Saturday with veteran defensemen Derek Morris and Zbynek Michalek out of the lineup. The Phoenix defensive corps featured four players 24 or younger and Keith Yandle (27) as the elder statesman, as Tippett opted to go younger and faster in an attempt to defend less and try to limit the massive amount of shots the Coyotes had allowed over their past 10 games.
Hanzal helped matters greatly when he set up a screen on a first-period power play that Michael Stone used to put the Coyotes up 1-0 on a one-timer of a cross-ice feed from Mike Ribeiro. Hanzal got into the scoring action just 57 seconds later, when he banked a centering pass off Tampa Bay goalie Ben Bishop's left skate, but his greatest contributions came in front of the goal.
"I'm trying to be better right in front of the net, just be in the way so the goalie can't see," Hanzal said. "It's part of my job right now, so I'm trying to use my body and make sure I'm in the best spot."
Hanzal was a prolific point producer in the minors. He had 26 goals and 85 points in 60 games with Red Deer of the WHL in 2006-07. For whatever reason, he hadn't been able to translate that to the NHL until this season.
"Players mature, they find opportunities," said Tippett, who joked that his team could have had two more goals if pucks hadn't hit Hanzal in front. "We always talk about the guy in front has got to be a bad goalie. He wasn't as bad tonight. He needed to be worse."
It's hard to imagine the Coyotes playing much better on home ice. Phoenix improved to 9-0-1 at home with Saturday's win while handing Tampa Bay its first loss (7-1-0) against a Western Conference opponent this season.
The Coyotes even got NHL goal No. 1 from defenseman Connor Murphy, their 2012 first-round pick (20th overall) who was recalled Friday due to the injury issues on the blue line. Murphy blew a shot through another Hanzal screen to push the lead to 4-1 in the second period.
"Obviously you dream about that moment, and I haven't actually scored a goal all year in the minors, so it was good to get it out of the way," said Murphy, who admitted to a case of the jitters before the game. "Yands pulled me aside right before we went out and said in his first game, they lost 9-1. That kind of calmed me right away."
The game got mildly interesting in the closing minutes when the Lightning's Alex Killorn scored to slice the lead to 5-3. But Hanzal won a key defensive-zone faceoff to set up Lauri Korpikoski's empty-net goal with 19 seconds left.
"You have to make sure you play better and better every single night and every single shift. That's how the average players become great players," Hanzal said. "Maybe that's what's happening with me this season; I don't know. But that is what I want to be: a great player."
LOOSE PUCKS: Defenseman Rusty Klesla was a healthy scratch Saturday after a minus-3 performance Thursday in Chicago. … Defensemen Derek Morris and Zbynek Michalek both missed the game with lower body injuries. They are day to day. … The Coyotes will take two days off before resuming practice on Tuesday. The team doesn't play again until Thursday against the surprising but recently slumping Colorado Avalanche. … Hanzal wasn't the only player to tie career-highs in a statistical category. Linemate Radim Vrbata tied his career high with three assists and linemate Lauri Korpikoski had a goal and two assists to tie a career-high of three points. | With four more points in Coyotes' win, torrid start for Hanzal (18 points in 18 games) continues. | 43.318182 | 0.818182 | 1.909091 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-should-listen-to-kaine-on-vocational-schools-1470698401 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160810204100id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/clinton-should-listen-to-kaine-on-vocational-schools-1470698401 | Clinton Should Listen to Kaine on Vocational Schools | 20160810204100 | Before he was Hillary Clinton’s running mate Sen. Tim Kaine introduced a bill this spring that would provide more funding for career and technical education. A high-school diploma should not only prepare students for college, he said, but also for “getting a high-skilled job after graduation.” Mr. Kaine, the son of an ironworker and a home-economics teacher, knows the value of learning a trade. But the idea that not everyone should go to college puts him at odds with his new boss.
Mrs. Clinton says that “every student should be able to graduate from a public college or university in their state without taking on any student debt.” In addition to refinancing the loans of existing borrowers, the former secretary of state promises that community college will be free, that historically black colleges and other minority-serving institutions will get another $25 billion in public funds to help them out of financial trouble, and that child care will be subsidized for parents in school. This plan would cost about $350 billion, but that figure doesn’t include the additional funds state governments will be required to provide to qualify for federal grants. And this money is in addition to the roughly $75 billion that the federal government already provides to support higher education.
No doubt the Democratic ticket would say that college and technical education aren’t mutually exclusive—that every student can choose whichever path best suits his aspirations. But in reality, government has stressed college as the path all students should follow, much to the detriment of vocational and technical education. The U.S.’s drive toward universal higher education has mainly succeeded in dumbing down high-school curricula, creating useless college degrees, indebting students, and leaving far too many young people unprepared for the jobs already available to them.
The high dropout rate is one sign that too many people attend higher-education institutions. Only 56% of college students completed four-year degrees within six years, according to a 2011 report from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Less than 30% completed a two-year degree in three years. Many of the students surveyed reported that cost influenced their decision to leave, while others simply prefer to start working.
Even if they complete college, many graduates won’t find jobs—at least not right away. A 2016 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that most companies are looking for graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as well as business-related fields. Only seven of the 201 employers surveyed wanted to hire people who had majored in “area or gender studies.”
Those with degrees in these politically correct subjects were most likely to be working at age 25 in a job that didn’t require a college degree, according to an analysis of 2009 Labor Department data. These facts expose a great myth of this era: A college education is the only path to a decent job.
Mike Rowe, host of the show “Dirty Jobs,” recently explained the problem to Forbes magazine. The interviewer asked about unemployed college graduates who say “there are no good jobs left.” Mr. Rowe responded that one problem “is the constantly evolving definition of what a ‘good’ job actually is. Collectively, we’ve discouraged our kids from pursuing a whole category of perfectly good jobs, because we don’t see them as aspirational.”
The bias against vocations, from carpentry and welding to the maintenance of high-tech machinery and computer repair, means that discussions of higher education typically neglect these paths. Philanthropists are more likely to fund scholarships for a few poor students to attend elite colleges, even if the same amount of money would allow dozens of young people to gain certification as electricians, mechanics and computer technicians—fields in which jobs go unfilled thanks to a shortage of qualified applicants.
Mrs. Clinton’s proposals would also benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. While she claims that debt relief will help the working class, the truth is that high-income borrowers have taken on the most government debt. They assume these risks to pursue careers in high-paying fields like law or medicine. They are also more likely to borrow to pay for room and board while poorer students commute to local schools.
“The richest 25 percent of families hold 40 percent of the student loans, so would receive roughly 40 percent of the benefits of a proposal that allowed all loan debt to be refinanced at lower rates,” noted Matthew M. Chingos and Beth Akers of the Brookings Institution. “On the other side of the income spectrum, the poorest quarter of households would receive less than one-fifth of the benefits of such a proposal.”
For those worried about income inequality, technical and vocational education should receive more emphasis as a path to upward mobility. As Mike Rowe says, “Learning how to weld, or how to run electric, or how to install a toilet—these skills can and often do lead to fulfilling careers, balanced lives, and better than average pay. Even if you don’t spend the rest of your life working in the trades, there’s simply no downside to learning a skill.” Perhaps Mr. Kaine can point this out to his running mate.
Mr. Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. | The Manhattan Institute’s James Piereson writes that Hillary Clinton’s proposals on debt-free college education would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. | 35.344828 | 0.931034 | 4.517241 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://time.com/money/3746873/retirement-empty-nest-spending/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160811135523id_/http://time.com:80/money/3746873/retirement-empty-nest-spending/ | Why Your Empty Nest May Be Hazardous to Your Financial Goals | 20160811135523 | How well prepared you are for retirement may come down to one simple question: what do you do with money that once would have been spent on your kids?
In recent years, two common models of retirement preparedness in America have begun to draw vastly different pictures. The optimal savings model, which looks at accumulated savings, concludes that only 8% of pre-retirees have insufficient resources to retire comfortably. The income replacement model, which looks at the level of income that savings will generate, concludes half the working age population is in deep trouble.
These two models incorporate many different assumptions, which is why they can reach contradictory conclusions. For one thing, the optimal savings model assumes savings are held in something like a 401(k) plan and drawn down over time. The income replacement model assumes savings are converted to lifetime income through an annuity at retirement.
Accounting for these and many other differences, researchers at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College have concluded that the key variable in retirement readiness is empty nest spending patterns. “If households consume less once their kids leave home, they have a more modest target to replace and they save more between the emptying of the nest and retirement,” the authors write. This creates a financial comfort level that those who spend the same amount—most likely on themselves—have greater difficulty achieving.
When the more conservative empty nest spending assumptions of the optimal savings model are applied to the income replacement model, the level of retirement preparedness is similarly optimistic. What the paper cannot answer, however, is which model accurately reflects the way empty nesters behave.
“Do parents cut back on consumption when kids leave, or do they spend the slack in their budgets?” the authors write. “No one really knows the answers.” How households react when kids leave the fold is not well understood, they say.
Yet that’s a problem for academics. You can control the way you act. The upshot is that if you resist the temptation to spend instead of save the money your kids were costing you, retirement readiness may be at your fingertips.
Read next: 5 Ways to Know If You’re on Track to Retire Early | You may want to live a little when your kids leave home. But what you do with that money can make or break your retirement, a new study finds. | 13.375 | 0.71875 | 1.09375 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.thepostgame.com/gymnastics-team-gold-sets-simone-biles-glory | http://web.archive.org/web/20160811141002id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/gymnastics-team-gold-sets-simone-biles-glory | Gymnastics Team Gold Sets Simone Biles For Glory | 20160811141002 | A female gymnast has never won five gold medals in a single Olympics. Simone Biles has the potential to do just that in Rio. After one event, she is one-fifth of the way there.
Biles, competing in her first Olympics as a 19-year-old, led the U.S. to gold in the all-around team competition Tuesday. She was the only team member to participate in all four events, posting the team's best score in vault, balance beam and floor exercise.
The U.S. edged Russia, which settled for silver for the second straight Olympics. China, the 2008 gold medalist, pulled in bronze to return to the podium. Romania, which medaled every year from 1976-2012, was absent from competition after failing to qualify. The U.S. now has the longest-standing team medal streak, dating back to 1992.
All those crystals and they still can't outshine @Simone_Biles.https://t.co/8UlQsUiW6F https://t.co/aAsfnjv6R2
— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) August 10, 2016
Gabby Douglas and Aly Raisman became the first two American gymnasts to ever win three gold medals. Both were part of the team competition in London, where Douglas won the all-around and Raisman the floor exercise. But the story is still about Biles. Biles still has four events to compete in, more than any of her teammates. She can be seen in the all-around Thursday, vault Sunday, balance beam Monday and floor exercise next Tuesday. On Tuesday, she posted the best score of any competitor in those three events.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the 4’8” giant, @Simone_Biles. https://t.co/8UlQsUiW6F https://t.co/hPrWj8g10W
— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) August 10, 2016
Much like Michael Phelps in 2008, Biles is chasing a perfect Olympics, winning gold in a variety of events. And unlike Phelps, she does not have to rely on teammates like Jason Lezak the rest of the way. The next four events are all in Simone's hands.
More Olympics: -- 7 Sports You Probably Don't Know Are Olympic Events -- Best U.S. Olympic Athletes To Follow On Instagram -- Lilly King And America Celebrate 'Clean' Gold Medal
Follow Jack Minton on Twitter @jackminton95.
2008 Olympics, 2016 Olympics, Aly Raisman, China, Gabby Douglas, Gold Medal, Gymnastics, Laurie Hernandez, Madison Kocian, Michael Phelps, Olympics, Rio Olympics, Romania, Russia, Simone Biles | The U.S. Women's Gymnastics Team won the team competition, which means its Simone Biles' responsibility to complete her five-gold glory. | 17.5 | 0.769231 | 1.153846 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/11/03/33/nsw-homeowner-grants-increase-11-per-cent | http://web.archive.org/web/20160811153108id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/11/03/33/nsw-homeowner-grants-increase-11-per-cent | NSW homeowner grants increase 11 per cent | 20160811153108 | New homeowners are on the rise in NSW with latest figures showing an 11 per cent increase in first homeowner grants over the last financial year.
The NSW government made the announcement on Thursday with Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian attributing the rise to an increase in supply in houses and apartments.
"We have consistently said that supply is the key to putting downward pressure on prices," she said.
"Our policies to encourage the construction of new homes are clearly bearing fruit, with residential building approvals soaring by 10.5 per cent over 2015-16."
There were about 900 more first homeowner grants issued in the last financial year than the previous year, with the dollar value of the grants rising by 12 per cent to $138 million, Ms Berejiklian said.
"This is by far the strongest result among the states, with more than 70,000 NSW homes given the green light for construction last financial year."
The first homeowner grant scheme aims to encourage increased housing supply, with $10,000 provided towards the construction or purchase of newly-built homes valued up to $750,000.
Eligible purchasers buying a vacant block of residential land to build their first home are also not required to pay stamp duty on land valued up to $350,000.
Stamp duty concessions are awarded for land valued between $350,000 and $450,000. | NSW Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian has announced an 11 per cent rise in first homeowner grants awarded in the 2015/2016 financial year. | 11.681818 | 0.863636 | 2.409091 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/usain-bolt-worlds-fastest-man/2016/08/09/i-still-have-the-hat---its-on-my-wall-the-lucky-volunteers-who-m/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160812005509id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/usain-bolt-worlds-fastest-man/2016/08/09/i-still-have-the-hat---its-on-my-wall-the-lucky-volunteers-who-m/ | 'I still have the hat - it's on my wall': The lucky volunteers who met Usain Bolt | 20160812005509 | The physical proximity is exciting enough in itself, but - with such a consummate showman and larger-than-life personality - there’s always the chance of a fist bump, an exchanged joke, or - if you’re George Hoy, whose rota happened to place him at the men’s 200 metre heats - a wooly hat.
‘I was volunteering during the 2012 Games, something I’d secured through the athletics’ club I was a member of at the time - one of my main jobs was carrying equipment boxes for the athletes. On my second or third day, I saw that we were involved with the men’s 200 metre qualifiers, and - of course - everyone knew Bolt would be in one of those. We had to wait to be allocated a race, before each picking a lane number. We quickly realised we’d been lucky enough to get Bolt’s heat, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw Bolt was in my lane.
‘We were walking towards the start line when the athletes emerged, and I remember seeing Bolt walking over - he’s huge in real life - and he just said ‘what’s up’, as he put his shoes and bag in the box. He was doing a few strides, taking his tracksuit off, and getting ready to race, when he stuck his fist out and we fist bumped.
‘The last thing he took off was his hat, and - because we’d spoken briefly - I told him I liked it. Next thing I knew, he was going ‘oh, here’, and handing it over. The crowd went crazy, and he ran off smiling towards the blocks. I still have the hat: it’s on my wall.' | Ever since the London Olympics of 2012, the nation has been gripped by 'Games Maker Envy'. | 16.8 | 0.5 | 0.5 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/08/09/intel-machine-learning-nervana/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160812044151id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/08/09/intel-machine-learning-nervana/?iid=recirc_f500landing-zone2 | Why Intel Bought Artificial Intelligence Startup Nervana Systems | 20160812044151 | Intel is bolstering its artificial intelligence efforts by acquiring Nervana Systems, a two-year-old startup considered among the leaders in developing machine learning technology.
Nervana has built an extensive machine learning system, which runs the gamut from an open-sourced software platform all the way down to an upcoming customized computer chip. The platform is used for everything from analyzing seismic data to find promising places to drill for oil to looking at plant genomes in search of new hybrids.
Intel intc declined to disclose the purchase price for the deal, which is expected to close in about one month.
After transitioning from mainframes to PCs to servers to cloud-based data centers, computing is about to make another transition, says Intel vice president Jason Waxman, who runs the data center solutions group. “Right now, we’re on the precipice of the next big wave, artificial intelligence,” he tells Fortune. “We’re already seeing real deployments.”
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Most of Intel’s efforts so far have focused on adapting its popular line of Xeon general purpose computing chips for use in machine learning and artificial intelligence deployments. Last year, it released a specialized version of the chip, dubbed the Xeon Phi, which had more cores for more processing in parallel. That’s intended to beat out graphics chips from Nvidia nvda and others that also have large-scale parallel processing capabilities.
Nervana brings expertise on the software side that can be used right away as well as designs for specialized chips that can be accelerated with Intel’s chipmaking know-how.
The startup’s chip design “slots in perfectly with this Intel acquisition,” says CEO Naveen Rao, who worked on developing neural networks inspired by biological brains at Qualcomm qcom before co-founding Nervana in 2014. Customers will be able to try the first Nervana chip designs early next year, he says.
Nervana’s platform had been running on Nvidia chips previously. Rao says that was to get to market quickly with its software before the customized chips were ready.
A higher rate of data flow will be among the key differences between the upcoming specialized chips and the general purpose and both the graphics chips widely in use today.
Machine learning systems work more like a brain, which has billions of neurons each linked to thousands of synapses all working in parallel. The systems need to read and write data from storage, sharing that data internally among chips very quickly in order to mimic the parallel operation of the neurons and synapses.
The new Nervana chips will be able to transfer data in and out at 2.4 terabytes per second, and with very low latency at a rate five to 10 times faster than the fastest input-output interfaces for traditional chips, Rao says.
For more on the future of AI, watch:
Initially, the new chips will be aimed at cloud data centers, where big companies are making extensive use of machine learning, Intel’s Waxman says. But eventually the technology will wind its way into smart devices such as self-driving cars and wearables to fuel the growth of the Internet of things, he says.
Still, there’s plenty of competition in the race to offer the fastest and most efficient machine learning platform. The field ranges from from giants like IBM ibm , with its Watson effort, and Google’s goog DeepMind to startups like Osaro and Skymind. Intel is hoping its acquisition of Nervana will help it lead the way. | San Diego startup makes learning systems inspired by the brain | 67.2 | 0.7 | 1.1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/01/lib-dem-revival-gove-for-pm-what-readers-want-to-see-now | http://web.archive.org/web/20160812071623id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/politics/2016/jul/01/lib-dem-revival-gove-for-pm-what-readers-want-to-see-now? | Lib Dem revival? Gove for PM? What readers want to see now | 20160812071623 | The Brexit vote has sent shockwaves through Britain, with the pound tumbling, reports of racist abuse and political parties in turmoil. While the latter is no surprise, no one could have predicted the chaos that has ensued: we’ve seen a leader toppled, political alliances broken, and votes of no confidence.
So, what do people now want to see from Britain’s main parties? We asked supporters of different political parties to tell us what they want to see next and how their party can get their act together enough to make it happen.
Related: We cannot succumb to inevitable disaster. It’s time to campaign to save our future | Owen Jones
As soon as the win for leave was announced, David Cameron stepped down as prime minister and colleagues began lining up to be his successor. Boris Johnson, who fronted the leave campaign, announced on Thursday that he wasn’t going to run, but Michael Gove – also in the leave camp – is. There are four other people in contention for leader: Theresa May, Stephen Crabb, Andrea Leadsom and Liam Fox.
Michael, Cheltenham: There is no question in my mind that Theresa May should be the next leader
The Conservatives are in total disarray. I thought David Cameron was an excellent leader – a cool-headed and eloquent speaker – but I think it was the decent thing to step down Corbyn has also been a strong figurehead, and it’s good to see the Labour party with a strong stance, but he needs to leave before his party completely falls apart. The Lib Dems ignored the referendum and it seems like a cheap trick to use it now to get people to vote for them. Promising to take us back into the EU also seems to be something that they wouldn’t be able to do if in power.
I think the Conservatives are the only party who can successfully negotiate us through Brexit without completely bankrupting the country or cutting us off from European trade.
There is no question in my mind that Theresa May should be the next leader. She is the most experienced and sensible candidate, and the only one who has the diplomacy and poise to be prime minister, in my opinion.
Amy Goodwill, Milton Keynes: Boris has spent the last nine months lying
I feel betrayed by the Conservatives right now. Rather than running a campaign about what we get from the EU and what it really means to be part of it, they tried to scare people about the consequences of leaving. As true as those warnings may have been, we’re a nation of stubborn people who hate being told what to do. It was always going to be the wrong approach and I can’t believe how lackadaisical they were about it all.
Our current political leaders arrogantly assumed they didn’t have to try that hard, and now we’re reaping what they’ve sown. I have no confidence in any of them to clean up the mess that is left.
I am glad Boris will not be the next leader – he has spent the last nine months lying to people, and now he’s freaking out because he actually won and he didn’t expect that.
The Tories have lost all authority now. This referendum has torn away the illusion that they had any command, and they need to find a way to make people believe that they can be effective and productive instead of backstabbing and fighting each other. It’s clear that the majority of people in this country feel disenfranchised, and there’s a long way to go before the Tories will be able to make people trust them again.
Lucy Howard, Carlisle: It’s time to be proactive and stop firefighting
I am shocked and saddened by the total ineptness that the different parties have displayed. It’s the final proof that they are in it for themselves and now the British people have spoken, they cannot deal with running a nation without Europe telling them what to do.
What we have to do now is elect the correct team to take us out of Europe and reassure the country, including all European nationals that live here, that we will get through this together. We are open for business so why is there no trade team in place ready to start making calls and building contacts for the weeks and months ahead? We need to be proactive and stop firefighting.
The Green party leaders loudly backed the remain camp, saying staying in Europe was vital for the environment. They have now called upon Labour, the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru to work together to challenge the Tories at the next election.
Mike, Teesside: I am happy with the leadership of the Greens
I’m happy with the Green party leader, Natalie Bennett, and Green MP, Caroline Lucas. Jeremy Corbyn is also a decent, wise individual, capable of being a good leader if the mainstream media would just give him a break and stop their sustained vicious campaign against him. Bennett and Corbyn may or may not have charisma but that doesn’t mean they cannot achieve great things.
Bell, London: Corbyn and Lucas were the only politicians who dealt with the referendum honestly
Related: Family rifts over Brexit: ‘I can barely look at my parents’
Politicians are mostly untrustworthy. I appreciate it is hard to lead a large political party but most of the leaders seem like image-conscious self-caricatures, more worried about their vacuous soundbites than about any sort of dialogue with the electorate. The exceptions are Caroline Lucas and Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn was the only leader (apart from Lucas) who dealt with the referendum question with apparent honesty – making it clear that it was a complex question about which it was OK to have some ambivalence. It’s no good pretending to be and think what you aren’t, people see through that. The Labour party were sidelined by the media who seemed only interested in Tory infighting.
The Labour party has been in disarray since the EU referendum result, with an overwhelming vote of no confidence in its leader Jeremy Corbyn. This comes despite the fact that he still has support from a lot of members. Now other MPs, such as Angela Eagle, the former shadow business secretary, and the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, are considering whether to contest the leadership.
Mike, 45, Tonbridge: Labour isn’t electable at the moment
We need a credible, electable opposition to win the inevitable snap election that will come. The Conservatives had a slim majority and it’s going to be fun watching them fight.
The only issue is that Labour isn’t electable at present, the leadership needs to appeal to the disenfranchised centre-ground, not just the hardcore left.
Robert Norman, Cambridge: The Labour party needs to unite immediately
The knives have been out for Corbyn since his election (by I should say 60% of the Labour membership) and they would have used any excuse to attack him at this point. I believe Corbyn did the best he could in an impossible situation; he couldn’t campaign out as he would leave the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) in more of a rage than they are now, and he couldn’t more forcefully campaign in because of his personal beliefs and accusations he was disingenuous.
I generally agreed with his stance; I’m no fervent supporter of Europe but leaving during one of the worst Conservative governments, letting them dictate our “new place in the world” is very worrying. The Labour party needs to unite immediately or the Conservatives (who are much better at seeming united) will whisk through all their pet projects (completing the privatisation of the NHS, passing through TTIP and other damaging trade agreements, the snooper’s charter).
It is incredible to me that the PLP cannot recognise that Blairite politics have not worked. Aping the Tories has delivered us two election defeats (one we ought easily to have won) and a decline in party membership since Blair.
Labour needs unity. The Blairites must recognise that nobody wants another Tory lookalike. Labour is in more of an important place than ever, needing to curtail the more rightwing tendencies of the Tories during the negotiations. If Corbyn hadn’t been attacked at every turn by insubordinate MPs (and worse, shadow cabinet ministers – Hilary Benn was rightly kicked out) we would be in a better position.
Paul Dennett, 51, West Yorkshire: I don’t expect my support for Labour to be long term
Jeremy Corbyn has failed. He has next to no support in the PLP and apparently no plan for getting any. The situation is untenable, therefore I support a leadership election. That said, Corbyn only won in the first place because of the revulsion against the other candidates. The only other Labour figure to really impress has been Sadiq Khan, who is unavailable.
The Labour establishment master plan seems to be: one, ditch Corbyn; and, two, take a hard right turn, especially on immigration. On this basis I don’t expect my support for Labour to be long term. I see no realistic cause for optimism.
The best situation to come from this would be independence for Scotland and also Northern Ireland (which is unlikely), while England and Wales try to forge a new identity from scratch. The UK is on its last legs and needs to be put out of its misery.
The Lib Dems are the only party to say they will campaign for Britain to rejoin the EU at the next general election. Since that announcement by the leader, Tim Farron, 10,000 people have joined the party. However, the Lib Dems were relatively quiet during the EU referendum campaign, leaving some skeptical.
Jean Lavarenne, 25, Cambridgeshire: The party’s greatest challenge is to show it still exists
I am an economic and social liberal supporting the remain camp. I agree with the statement I saw: “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.” This question should never have been asked, the issues are far too complex to be decided directly by the people. Cameron made a catastrophic decision to put Brexit to a vote.
The Liberal Democrats were completely absent from the debate, which is a shame. I agree they’ve lost a lot of political clout since the elections but it was their job to argue a positive case for Europe. The Labour leader was completely absent from the debate too, which is utterly shameful.
I’m hoping the Lib Dems will experience a resurgence in popularity following this vote, as 48% feel cheated by the results. Pro-EU Tories and Labour supporters might [switch to us if there is] a pro-Brexit prime minister and an incompetent opposition leader respectively. For the Lib Dems, the greatest challenge is to show that they still exist and they are a real alternative to the Conservative and Labour parties.
Matthew King, London: The centre-left needs to to reform and realign
David Cameron gambled and lost badly for us all, and I am heartbroken. But I understand why he did it – he was trying to modernise the party. With a few percentage difference we would now be talking about the success of his project – as it is, the opposite has happened. I am most angry with Corbyn. He said it best in response to a heckle – “I did all I could”. He shows no enthusiasm for his own job, no capacity to engage let alone lead, and was particularly useless during the referendum.
The Lib Dems have had their voice drowned out since 2015 because of the general election result. Think how much Cameron must now regret the electoral strategy against them that delivered his majority. The biggest challenge now is for the centre-left to reform and realign. If the Labour party is no longer a vehicle for centre-left views, maybe it should be abandoned to Corbyn and a new alliance formed.
Christopher Tanner, South Wales: I like Farron but at the moment he lacks gravitas
Getting airtime on TV is the biggest challenge for the Lib Dems, and getting our view out to the public. I like our leader but at the moment he lacks gravitas – that will come with time, but right now we do not have time. We have to run a stay-in-the-EU campaign now. We, and our centrist allies in the Tories, Labour and the Greens, have to unite under a strong and charismatic and honest leader. I wish I could say Tim Farron was the man but sadly I don’t. The best Lib Dems who have that gravitas were voted out at the last general election. We need to change our constitution to allow them to run as leader, or find a way to give them a role in a new pro-EU and reformed UK/reformed EU future.
Ukip’s leader Nigel Farage campaigned tirelessly to get Britain out of the EU, and it’s always been a primary aim of the party. He has appeared in Brussels – giving a post-referendum speech – and is now deciding where to take the party next and who he will work alongside.
Roger Peach, Bury: Ukip should become a new third party for the people
Ukip technically has accomplished its aim, which was to get the UK out of the EU. They could still remain a mainstream political party if they wish and change their manifesto to rightly represent the people of this country and force a wedge between the Conservative and Labour parties, both of whom are not recognising, let alone attending to, the needs of the people. Nigel Farage clearly recognises that the work put into the leave campaign and the achievement of the Ukip aim was for the people of this country, for the real people, for the poor people, the disabled and sick people and the homeless and unemployed. I believe that the party should take up that banner and become a new third party for the people.
Tim: It would be better if Farage now stepped down
Cameron was probably the best for a while. If he had led a vote to leave (because he could not get the EU to accept any meaningful reform), then he would still be prime minister. The vote would have gone 70/30 for leave and the current market volatility would have been avoided. I think he succumbed to the lobby from the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and multinational corporations.
Jeremy Corbyn can never be PM. Nigel Farage is tainted (but unfairly so). I now want Boris Johnson to be the next prime minister.
The biggest challenge for Ukip is overcoming the negative attitude that Farage generates as leader of the party. It would be better if he now stepped down, and a more acceptable, less contentious person took over. If, as is likely, the Tory or Labour party row back on the key items of the leave mandate, then the Ukip vote will surge in the next general election.
The SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, campaigned for the remain camp, and a spokesman for Sturgeon said the party was preparing to hold a referendum on Scottish independence before the UK leaves. It has also demanded to be installed as the official opposition in the House of Commons, saying Labour is a “crisis-ridden shambles”.
Bertie, Glasgow: I now hope for a second referendum on Scottish independence
I have a bleak view of most political leaders except Nicola Sturgeon. The referendum ought to have required a stronger majority than a simple one, given the volume of conflated issues and the permanence of the actual act.
And the amount of misunderstanding, misinformation was really astounding. That was not a debate worthy of casting a vote on. Because of the leave vote being such a disaster I now do hope for a second referendum on Scottish independence.
Kirsty, Edinburgh: Nicola Sturgeon is becoming an iconic leader
My view is that political leaders are strong and stable in Scotland, but the opposite is true in Westminster. I worry about how much the parties are in disarray and I am genuinely concerned about the far-right sentiment rising.
I definitely don’t think Corbyn did enough to strengthen the remain campaign in the referendum but I am unsure about a leadership challenge. I like his proactive stance on things such as the environment.
The biggest challenge for my party is building confidence in those who were unsure about independence in 2014. The SNP need to prove to voters that we can be a strong independent country in a united Europe and involve EU leaders in the campaign to reassure previous no voters.
Nicola Sturgeon is becoming an iconic leader, and an inspiration for all, but particularly for women. With a sustainable development goal being about gender equality and the aim for more women to hold positions of power she is doing a fantastic job. | We asked supporters of political parties, from the Greens to Ukip, to tell us what they want to happen post-referendum | 135.458333 | 1 | 3.666667 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/08/10/trumps-tax-plan-sounds-populist-but-it-aims-its-key-benefits-a/21449128/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160812121343id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2016/08/10/trumps-tax-plan-sounds-populist-but-it-aims-its-key-benefits-a/21449128/ | Trump's tax plan sounds populist, but it aims its key benefits at the rich | 20160812121343 | Donald Trump's policy proposals tend to be nearly impossible to analyze, because they are vague and their content often shifts. But I want to talk about one consistent feature of his vague and shifting tax plan: The idea of a maximum tax rate of 15% on all kinds of business income, whether earned by traditional corporations or by individuals.
This is the plank of the plan that gives up the game. Trump wraps his tax plan in populist rhetoric, and his headline maximum tax rate (33%) is higher than in some other Republican tax plans. But the benefits of Trump's tax cut would still be aimed squarely at the top of the income distribution.
SEE MORE: How much Hillary's campaign is outspending Trump's on TV ads
This is because, while Trump proposes a top income tax rate of 33%, high earners would get to take much more advantage of the preferential 15% "business income" rate than most middle-income people would.
Let's look at how the income of the rich differs from the middle class.
In 2013 (the most recent year for which IRS data are available), 5.6 million individuals and married couples filed tax returns reflecting at least $200,000 in adjusted gross income. These high earners made up 6% of all tax filers with at least $1 in income.* But their income profile, on average, looks quite different from the average taxpayer.
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ABC NEWS - 7/20/16 - Coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention from the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, which airs on all ABC News programs and platforms. (Photo by Ida Mae Astute/ABC via Getty Images) SEN. TED CRUZ
Former Republican U.S. presidential nominee Mitt Romney speaks critically about current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and the state of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign during a speech at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah March 3, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
Former President George W. Bush campaigns for his brother Republican presidential candidate, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush Monday, Feb. 15, 2016, in North Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida and 2016 Republican presidential candidate, listens to an audience question during a town hall event hosted by CNN at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina, U.S., on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016. Donald Trump remains the front-runner in South Carolina, where Republican voters head to the polls on Saturday. According to a survey released Monday by Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling, Trump holds a 17-point lead over Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who are tied for second place. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
ROCKVILLE, MD - APRIL 25: Republican presidential candidate and Ohio Governor John Kasich speaks during a campaign event April 25, 2016 in Rockville, Maryland. Governor Kasich continued to seek for his party's nomination for the general election. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 10: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks with reporters before a weekly policy meeting with Senate Republicans, at the U.S. Capitol, May 10, 2016, in Washington, DC. Presidential candidate Donald Trump is scheduled meet with Republican House and Senate leadership on Thursday. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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Those 5.6 million high-earning filers earned only 23% of the income Trump would tax at regular rates: mostly salaries and wages, but also things like alimony and pension payments.
They earned 68% of the income that Trump would tax at the new, favorable 15% rate: income from pass-through corporations and partnerships, and other business income.
Currently, business income and wage income reported on an individual tax return are taxed at the same rates. If widely diverging rates were imposed as proposed under Trump's plan, wealthy people could reorganize their affairs to take advantage of the difference.
This is because, in some cases, the difference between business income and wage income is essentially arbitrary.
Business Insider pays me a salary, so my compensation for writing this article is wage income that Trump would tax at up to 33%. But if I sold a freelance article to another publication, my fee for writing that piece would be business income taxed at only 15% under Trump's plan. If Trump's plan became law, I would likely switch to a freelance arrangement.
SEE ALSO: Delta's horrible week is getting even worse You wouldn't have to be rich to game Trump's system by converting your ordinary income into business income, but it helps, since wealthier people tend to have more flexible financial arrangements. It's hard for a retail clerk or a schoolteacher or a factory worker to go freelance.
The special business tax rate would be an even bigger sop to private equity and hedge fund managers than the "carried interest" loophole Trump brags he would abolish, since 15% is lower than the preferential rate fund managers currently pay on carried-interest income. It would also be lower than the tax rate typical fund employees would pay under his plan.
But wait, there's more: Because they disproportionately own stock, high earners would also disproportionately benefit from Trump's proposal to reduce the corporate income tax rate to 15%.
Currently, federal corporate income tax applies at rates up to 35%. In practice, effective rates are often lower due to tax preferences, and Trump might or might not repeal some of those tax preferences as part of an overall tax reform. But eliminating such preferences could not fully offset the cost of such a reduction in the tax rate, because federal corporate taxes paid accounted for 20% of corporate profits in 2015, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
It's true, Trump's plan also has tax reductions aimed at the middle class, though we don't know exactly how large they are because he hasn't specified what income levels his three tax rates of 12%, 25%, and 33% would apply to.
His last tax plan, released last September and withdrawn from his website in advance of Monday's economic policy speech, would have cost nearly $10 trillion over a decade, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
This is an implausibly large cut, reducing federal revenues by about one-quarter, with no offsetting plan to cut spending. (And at the same time, Trump says he would protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid from cuts and grow the military.)
But suspend disbelief for a moment and suppose the plan were implemented anyway. Middle-income taxpayers would have received a tax cut of $2,700, raising their after-tax income by about 5%. The highest 0.1% of taxpayers would have received tax cuts of $1.3 million each, raising their after tax incomes by 19%.
Trump's new plan calls for higher tax rates on regular income than his last plan did, but it maintains the 15% rate on individual business income and corporate income, showing who comes first when a budget constraint must be imposed. It also creates some sort of tax deduction for child care — details will come, allegedly.
There isn't enough detail yet on the new plan to calculate its exact effects, but you should expect the benefits once again to be sharply tilted toward the elites Trump claims to intend to hold accountable.
*In this analysis, I have excluded the 2.1 million tax filers with zero or negative income. Some of these tax filers are poor, while others are wealthy people who experienced a significant business loss in 2013. On average, tax filers not reporting positive income reported a negative income of $94,000.
This is an editorial. The opinions and conclusions expressed above are those of the author.
SEE ALSO: Donald Trump is making 2 big changes to his economic platform NOW WATCH: 'I don't even really know where to start on answering this question': Watch President Obama respond to Trump's claim that the election will be rigged
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More from Business Insider: Delta just revealed what caused its computers to shutdown Here's how to get the most money back if your Delta flight was cancelled The airline industry has a massive problem — and there's no real fix | Trump wraps his tax plan in populist rhetoric, but the benefits of Trump's tax cut would still be aimed squarely at the top of the income distribution. | 60.533333 | 1 | 17.4 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/11780411/Burma-floods-Heavy-monsoon-rain-causes-widespread-flooding-in-pictures.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160812125220id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/11780411/Burma-floods-Heavy-monsoon-rain-causes-widespread-flooding-in-pictures.html?frame=3398541 | Burma floods: Heavy monsoon rain causes widespread flooding, in pictures | 20160812125220 | In Burma the belt of heavy seasonal rains - augmented by Cyclone Komen - have killed 69 people so far and affected more than 260,000 with much of the country languishing under rooftop-high floods.
Above: A local resident sitting on a chair looks at his house damaged by the floods in Myauk U, Rakhine state | Heavy monsoon rains caused floods around Myanmar with dozens of deaths being reported as thousands are fleeing their homes in several regions across the country. In Myanmar monsoon starts at the beginning of June and ends in September. | 1.418605 | 0.372093 | 0.372093 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/06/02/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-dollar-store-as/21388383/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160812201219id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2016/06/02/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-dollar-store-as/21388383/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00001392%23slide=3820958 | Everything you've ever wanted to know about the dollar store, as told by a store manager | 20160812201219 | Before you go, we thought you'd like these...
Whether you like the thrill of finding a killer bargain or need to reign in your spending and your budget, the dollar store is one of those places that has something for everyone.
It's also one of those places that raises a lot of questions about the quality, price and manufacturing of all the items.
Nothing's better than an amazing deal, and it's important to know where the items that you're purchasing are coming from and whether or not they're truly safe to use or consume.
SEE ALSO: Budget Better: 9 things you should never buy at the dollar store
Luckily for all of us curious deal hunters, Reddit hosted an AMA with a manager of a local Dollar General who addressed some of the questions we've always wanted to ask.
Here were the top five pieces of information we learned from him:
How the products are actually sold for such a low price:
Where most dollar stores find the generic $1 priced items:
Whether or not the food is safe to consume:
The specific items that are the best deals:
Brand name items that you can find at a dollar store for cheaper than a regular store:
You can view the full AMA here.
Now, check out our roundup of the 17 items you should always buy at a dollar store:
Everything you've ever wanted to know about the dollar store, as told by a store manager
Aluminium foil, plastic wrap and plastic bags
Hair accessories - Hair elastics - Hair clips - Headbands - Hair brushes
More on AOL.com: Save More: Buy these 16 items at Walmart not the dollar store Aldi is shockingly cheaper than Dollar General How to save when you live paycheck to paycheck | Whether you like the thrill of a bargain or need to reign in your spending, the dollar store is one of those places that has something for everyone. | 11.533333 | 1 | 10.866667 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/advocates-want-more-from-mta-during-tunnel-shutdown-1469576171 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160812202810id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/advocates-want-more-from-mta-during-tunnel-shutdown-1469576171 | Advocates Want More From MTA During Tunnel Shutdown | 20160812202810 | When the L train’s East River tunnel reopens in 2020, transit officials say New York City subway riders will enjoy more trains, reduced crowding and, at two stations, new entrances and elevators.
But some transportation experts question whether the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is missing an opportunity to bring part of the New York City subway into the modern era, ready to handle future capacity.
Five of the L train’s...
When the L train’s East River tunnel reopens in 2020, transit officials say New York City subway riders will enjoy more trains, reduced crowding and, at two stations, new entrances and elevators.
But some transportation experts question whether the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is missing an opportunity to bring part of the New York City subway into the modern era, ready to handle future capacity.
Five of the L train’s stations in Manhattan would be shut down as part of the expected 18-month project scheduled to begin in January 2019. Free of passengers, the stations presumably could be transformed by construction crews.
The Regional Plan Association, a civic group focused on urban planning in the New York City area, has called for more upgrades to those stations as the MTA rebuilds the L train’s tunnel.
The association’s proposed fixes include widening waiting areas at Union Square, adding platform doors to keep people from falling or jumping in front of trains and extending tracks at the line’s Manhattan terminus to boost service frequencies. “It’s a rare opportunity to really transform the L,” said Richard Barone, the association’s vice president for transportation.
An MTA spokesman said the authority’s plan was forward-thinking, and would result in improved service and stations that are easier to get in and out of. “We right now have a project that has been fully [planned] with funding identified, and it’s our goal to get the work inside the Canarsie tube and the station work done as quickly as possible,” the spokesman said.
The MTA plans to add three power substations along the L line. That will allow it to run two additional trains in each direction every hour, up from the current 20.
The MTA spokesman said the expected 22 trains an hour in each direction will help the MTA meet projected demand it expects to face in the foreseeable future.
Mr. Barone said the MTA should be planning work that would allow up to 30 or more trains an hour. In addition to the new power stations and additional subway cars, the MTA would need to extend stub-end tracks at Eighth Avenue to 10th Avenue. That would allow for more space so trains can turn around or remain for storage.
The MTA spokesman said the tracks could be extended in the future as part of a separate project while the station remained open.
Opened in 1924, the L train tunnel—also known as the Canarsie tunnel—sustained saltwater damage from superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Robert Puentes, who previously served on a “reinvention commission” aimed at improving the MTA, said the authority faced financial constraints similar to other U.S. transit operators. “It’s not about lack of vision or lack of ideas for what we can do,” said Mr. Puentes, who is now chief executive of the Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Write to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com | The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is planning to close the L train’s East River tunnel for an expected 18-month project, but some say it is missing an opportunity to bring part of the subway into the modern era. | 16.1 | 0.975 | 5.025 | medium | high | mixed |
http://time.com/4362068/prosthetic-arm-deus-ex/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160813115037id_/http://time.com:80/4362068/prosthetic-arm-deus-ex/?xid=time_socialflow_facebook | These Cyberpunk Prosthetic Arms Are Inspired by 'Deus Ex' | 20160813115037 | Video game publisher Square Enix has teamed up with a leading bionics company to create prosthetic arms inspired by the Deus Ex series.
Open Bionics, which has built Star Wars and Marvel-themed prosthetic limbs for children, is now working on two designs based on the cyberpunk-centric gaming franchise.
One (above) will be based on Adam Jensen, the protagonist from the forthcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided game. The other (below) is described as a Deus Ex Universe arm.
“We wanted something to touch upon high fashion… something that looks very slick and you could be very proud to wear it,” said André Vu, Deus Ex’s Executive Brand Director (via Engadget).
Open Bionics says the prosthetic limbs will be available by the end of 2017. Final design files will be released into the open source community, making it possible for folks to 3D print them at home. More designs are also on the way.
The group will show off two working prototypes at E3 and Gamescom, while they continue to work to perfect details like grasping objects.
The demonstrations will feature an assist from Razer’s Stargazer webcam, which will track movements and give test subjects an idea of what it would be like to wear a prosthetic.
This article originally appeared on Trusted Reviews | They're based on a video game series | 31.625 | 0.875 | 1.375 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://time.com/4400148/dallas-police-chief-bomb-robot/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160813122012id_/http://time.com:80/4400148/dallas-police-chief-bomb-robot/? | Dallas Police Chief Defends Use of 'Bomb Robot' on Suspect | 20160813122012 | Dallas Police Chief David Brown on Sunday defended his department’s decision to use a robot rigged with a bomb to take down a suspected sniper believed to have shot dead at least five police officers last Thursday.
During an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, the police chief addressed criticism his department has been facing for using the controversial technology, which ended a two-hour long standoff with Micah Johnson. “I approved it,” Brown said. “And I’ll do it again if presented with the same circumstances.”
Dallas police detonated an explosive device known as a “bomb-disposal robot,” while Johnson was holed up on the second floor of a building, laughing and taunting negotiators, Brown said Sunday. The 25-year-old gunman—an Army veteran who acted alone—was killed on the spot.
“He just basically lied to us, playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many did he get and that he wanted to kill some more and that there were bombs there so there was no progress on the negotiation,” the police chief said. “And I began to feel that it was only at a split second he would charge us and take out many more before we would kill him.”
Read More: When Can Police Use a ‘Bomb Robot’ to Kill a Suspect?
Brown then told his officers to use “your creativeness to come up with a plan to do it,” he recalled on CNN. The robot, which was attached to about a pound of C4 explosive, likely saved more police officers from being killed, Brown said.
Johnson was “clear of mind, determined to hurt more officers,” the police chief said. “Without our actions, he would have hurt more officers. We had no choice, in my mind, but to use all tools necessary.”
Brown slammed critics, saying he doesn’t “give any quarter to critics who ask these types of questions from the comforts and safety away from the incident.” “I’ve got former SWAT experience here in Dallas, and you have to trust your people to make the calls necessary to save their lives,” he said. “It’s their lives that are at stake, not these critics’ lives who are in the comforts of their homes or offices.”
The suspected sniper appeared to have been planning a larger attack and left a message written in his own blood on a building before being killed, Brown revealed Sunday. Johnson scrawled the initials “RB,” which authorities are working to decipher.
Police also found evidence of bomb-making material “large enough to have devastating effects throughout” Texas and a journal full of “ramblings” during a search of the suspect’s home in Mesquite, according to Brown.
“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous,” Brown said, adding that Johnson believed he was going to “make law enforcement pay for what he sees as law enforcements’ efforts to punish people of color.”
The police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota “sparked his delusion” to fast track his plans of “wreaking havoc” on police officers, Brown said. | "I approved it, and I'll do it again if presented with the same circumstances" | 35.111111 | 0.833333 | 5.611111 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/08/12/18/03/cardboard-coffins-venezuelans-bear-high-cost-of-dying | http://web.archive.org/web/20160813141000id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/08/12/18/03/cardboard-coffins-venezuelans-bear-high-cost-of-dying | Cardboard coffins: Venezuelans bear high cost of dying | 20160813141000 | People line up outside a supermarket in Caracas on June 3rd (Image: Newzulu via AAP)
With food and medicine in short supply, life is hard in Venezuela - and death is hard too.
The country's situation is so acute that families are burying their loved ones in cardboard coffins.
The more well-off ones can hire a casket for a few hours, just for the funeral.
A lack of materials and soaring inflation fueled by an economic crisis are making funerals a costly business.
"It is more expensive to die here than to stay alive," says funeral director Ronald Martinez, in the northern city of Maracay.
Miriam Navarro had to borrow money from her neighbors after her brother died a month ago.
More than 80 percent of basic consumer products including food and medicine are now in short supply in Venezuela, a poll says (Image: Newzulu via AAP)
"I felt so depressed. I didn't have all the money the funeral parlor was asking for," she says.
"If it hadn't been for people in my community, I would have had to bury him in the yard."
The 66-year old housewife spoke to AFP in the half-built home where she lives in the northeastern town of Maracay.
With the help from neighbors, she bought a cheap fiberboard coffin from Martinez.
Sobbing, she remembers having the same difficulties six years ago, when one of her sons was shot.
"I couldn't afford to bury him either," she says.
People line up to donate medical supplies and diapers during the "Rescue Venezuela" campaign lead by Lilian Tintori, wife of Venezuela's jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, in Bogota, Colombia (Image: AP Photo via AAP)
"Even if the funeral home trusts you, you have to have the cash ready to pay straight away or they'll take the body out and keep the box."
Venezuelans used to favor brass coffins as a cheaper alternative to wood.
But the current crisis changed that. Two years ago the price of oil -- Venezuela's crucial export -- collapsed.
Factories in the country were previously turning out hundreds of tonnes of brass every month.
That has now fallen to as little as 60 tonnes, says Juan Carlos Fernandez, director of the National Chamber of Funeral Businesses.
"We have had to resort to secondary markets and that drives up costs," he says.
The cost of the cheapest funeral service has increased by about 60 times, to some 280,000 bolivars.
The minimum wage in Venezuela is 33,000 bolivars -- about $50 by the official exchange rate.
Five years ago a coffin cost 720 bolivars. Now that is the price of a loaf of bread.
For no less than 55,000 bolivars a family can buy a fiberboard coffin. Or they can rent one for 25,000.
"This kind is cheaper and no one notices that it is not made of wood or is second-hand," Martinez says.
"I change the interior and sometimes I repaint it."
Elio Angulo reckons renting out coffins breaches hygiene regulations. He makes "bio-urns" out of corrugated cardboard in the northeastern town of Barquisimeto.
These biodegradable containers can hold a body, or ashes for the many families who opt for cremation to avoid the cost of a cemetery plot.
He has seen families bring bodies in bags to the crematorium because they cannot afford a casket.
That is another humiliation for citizens who are already suffering the daily grind of queuing for hours to buy food.
President Nicolas Maduro's opponents blame his economic management for the crisis. He says it is a capitalist conspiracy.
Angulo's cardboard coffin costs 50,000 bolivars. He says it can hold up to 125 kilos (275 pounds) and is stronger than the medium-density fiberboard used for other cheap coffins.
"It is meant for cremation but can also be used for burials. It offers a solution for a country in crisis," he says.
"It is economical and accessible to Venezuelans who do not have enough money to get by" when a relative passes away, he adds.
"Nowadays, dying is making a lot of people poor." | With food and medicine short, life is hard in Venezuela -- and death is hard too. | 46.222222 | 1 | 5 | high | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/11/02/dead-unicorns-fail/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160813215446id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/11/02/dead-unicorns-fail/ | Dead Unicorns: What's the worst case scenario? | 20160813215446 | It’s conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that none of the so-called unicorn startups, valued at $1 billion and up, are actually worth their $1 billion (and up) valuations. They will be, but they’re not right now.
That sounds crazy to an outsider, but it’s how venture capital investing works. High-growth, high-risk tech startups are given astronomical valuations based entirely on the promise of future growth. Venture capital is a high-risk asset class, so it’s supposed to be a stretch.
Snapchat’s venture investors say it’s worth $16 billion. But if the company went public today, Wall Street traders wouldn’t be so generous to a company with a target of $50 million in annual revenue and zero profits.
The company’s investors expect it to grow fast enough that eventually, Wall Street will believe it is worth $20 billion, or $30 billion (or $32 billion, if anyone in the latest round plans to double their money).
But not every unicorn is going to live up to its potential. Investors have warned of “dead unicorns” and “unicorpses” all year, and we’re already seeing the cracks: commentators say $10 billion Dropbox is increasingly looking like a “feature not a service,” $9 billion Theranos is battling a wave of questions about its technology, $1 billion Evernote has experienced executive turnover as it prepares to go public, $800 million Flipboard lost its top executives after several acquisition talks fell through, according to Bloomberg.
The closer we examine the country’s most valuable startups, the more flaws we see. The more flaws we see, the more we wonder whether any of the most successful startups aren’t masking ugly dysfunction just beneath the surface.
The number one reason venture capitalists say the current tech boom is nothing like the dotcom bubble of the late ‘90s is that today’s highly valued startups are real businesses. The money-burning dotcoms from the last go-around went public with little or no revenue, so when it all collapsed, they went down to zero. But this wave of startups, they have revenue. They are building real businesses, disrupting hotels, taxis, housecleaning, and data storage. If it all collapses, they won’t go down to zero, because “there’s a there there.”
Rather, the worst case scenario is that the unicorns, which have created $500 billion in value to date, don’t live up to their valuations. All of them have to exit at some point; that’s how venture capital works. For most, that means an IPO. Only a select handful of acquirers can afford to spend $1 billion or $10 billion on a startup acquisition, and odds are Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple already had the chance to buy the most attractive startups before they got this expensive.
But the IPO market is just as challenging as the M&A market. Fortune’s Steve Gandel recently crunched the numbers: If all 90 of the U.S.-based unicorns to went public, selling a standard 35% of their shares at a 20% premium to their last valuation, IPO investors would have to buy $131 billion worth of newly issued shares. Even spread over several years, that’s more than a stretch. Last year, only 22 tech companies went public, raising just $7.6 billion. The market for all IPOs this year so far is only $35 billion, down from the $56 billion average over the last 20 years.
When unicorns go public at lower valuations than their last round of funding, a few things happen. For one, “rachets” and other investor guarantees kick in. Many startups pay for their high valuations with lopsided terms that favor the latest investors. Some guarantee that the late stage investors get paid out before any other shareholders. Others issue more shares to late stage investors in the event of a lower valuation. In most cases, this hurts employees, founders and early stage investors the most. (Some early stage investors don’t know their shares were diluted by a rachet until after the IPO.)
Second, public market investors get skittish. The narrative of a high-growth rocketship becomes a story of a battered, challenged question mark. CEOs lose the benefit of the doubt. Top employees leave. Competitors move in.
If this begins to happen more frequently than not, it will become difficult for any startup unicorn to go public.
When we put a unicorn on the cover of Fortune last January, I thought it might signal a peak. I was wrong – funding, especially at the late stage, only accelerated. For visual proof, check out this CB Insights chart:
As we enter the next phase of “The Age of Unicorns,” many highly valued companies will struggle to live up to their valuations, meeting harsh scrutiny from the press, regulators, and future public market investors. Becoming a unicorn, it turns out, was the easy part. | There will be a lot of sad unicorns. | 109 | 0.777778 | 1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/11/nigeria-reports-two-new-polio-cases-the-first-since-2014/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160814080240id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/news/2016/08/11/nigeria-reports-two-new-polio-cases-the-first-since-2014/ | Nigeria reports two new polio cases, the first since 2014 | 20160814080240 | The state is also facing a food crisis with UNICEF warning in July that some 50,000 Nigerian children risk starving to death.
"The confirmation of a wild poliovirus outbreak in northeast Nigeria underlines the emergency facing children in conflict-affected Borno state, where children are already facing dangerously high levels of malnutrition," Doune Porter, UNICEF Nigeria communications officer, said in a statement sent to AFP.
Nigeria had struggled to contain the virus after some northern states imposed a ban on vaccinations in 2003 with parents fearing that the vaccine wasn't safe.
But the government has been working to eradicate the disease, with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari pledging to work with international partners "to ensure that this disease is wiped off the face of the earth for good".
Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that mainly affects young children and can result in permanent paralysis, according to WHO. There is no cure and it can be only prevented through immunisation. | The Nigerian government has reported two new polio cases in the first re-emergence of the disease since 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday. | 5.6875 | 0.53125 | 0.65625 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/nyregion/new-york-citys-medical-schools-will-stop-using-unclaimed-bodies.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160814095906id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2016/08/11/nyregion/new-york-citys-medical-schools-will-stop-using-unclaimed-bodies.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=N.Y.+/+Region®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article | New York City’s Medical Schools Will Stop Using Unclaimed Bodies | 20160814095906 | The eight medical schools in New York City will no longer accept the city’s unclaimed bodies as cadavers, forswearing a practice that dates back to the 19th century, the schools announced on Wednesday. And a group representing the 16 medical schools in the state is withdrawing its opposition to a recently passed bill that would end the educational use of bodies with no known survivors.
The announcements, made in a statement by the Associated Medical Schools of New York, reflect the changing politics and practicalities of acquiring bodies for dissection in a time of public sensitivity to inequality and informed consent.
New York-based medical schools, which train more students than those in any other state, have had a dwindling need for unclaimed bodies in recent years as their body donation programs grew. Still, the association strongly opposed a bill this year that would require written consent from a spouse or next of kin before city officials could release an unclaimed body to a school, unless the deceased had already registered as a body donor. It cited a current shortfall of 38 cadavers out of about 800 typically used to teach future doctors each year.
But the bill passed both houses overwhelmingly in June, a month after a New York Times investigation highlighted provisions in the current law that give families as little as 48 hours to claim a relative’s body before the city must make it available for dissection or embalming practice.
That bill is awaiting the signature of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, to become law, but officials at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, one of the few medical schools that have continued to rely on significant numbers of unclaimed cadavers, decided to stop the practice after The Times’s article was published.
Now, the association says that medical schools can make up any shortfall by promoting their body donation programs. The two schools without such a program — CUNY College of Medicine and Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine — have both begun developing them, the association said. Traditionally, medical schools share donated cadavers with schools that run short.
“Donating your body to science is the ultimate gift a person can make,” Jo Wiederhorn, president of the medical schools association, said. “We can’t train future doctors without these donations and, in many cases, we can’t make medical discoveries that lead to cures and life improvements without them.”
The announcement leaves the only mortuary school in the city, the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Services, pressing for a veto.
when we publish other stories on education in New York City.
“McAllister is recommending and pleading with the governor to not sign the bill,” said Brian Sokoloff, the lawyer who represents the mortuary school. He said it had trained most of the funeral directors and embalmers in the city and many throughout the United States.
“Those who support this bill should explain how they expect people to be able to do the practice embalmings that they’re required to do to get a license,” Mr. Sokoloff said, calling the proposed law “a terrible idea.”
“Anybody with any degree of foresight could see that this could in future create a shortage of funeral directors and embalmers,” he added.
The city temporarily stopped supplying unclaimed bodies to medical schools and to the mortuary school in 2014, after a series of scandals at the medical examiner’s office involving mixed-up bodies and lawsuits by distressed relatives. But the medical examiner’s office was forced to resume the flow of corpses after the century-old McAllister institute successfully sued the city under current state law.
When the practice resumed, the city lent 145 bodies it considered unclaimed to McAllister in April and May 2015 alone, according to records obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. The bodies were driven from the city morgue in Queens to the school’s Midtown Manhattan classrooms in the morning and returned the same evening after students practiced incisions, drainage of bodily fluids and injection of embalming fluid.
The city has offered at least 4,000 bodies to medical or mortuary programs in the past decade, records show. Among these, more than 1,877 were selected for use before burial in mass graves on Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field.
Practices in the United States regarding the unclaimed dead vary widely from state to state and even from county to county, experts say, with many jurisdictions still governed by laws rooted, like New York’s, in 19th-century efforts to curtail grave robbery.
Dr. John Prescott, the chief academic officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, said the association had no policy regarding the use of unclaimed bodies versus donated ones., He added that the group did not track the numbers used nationally as cadavers by its members, which include 145 medical schools in the United States and 17 in Canada.
“Just about every medical school in the United States uses cadavers,” Dr. Prescott said. “We do believe the use of cadavers is critical for training.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2016, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: City’s 8 Medical Schools Will Stop Using Unclaimed Bodies. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe | It was also announced that a group representing the state’s 16 medical schools was withdrawing its opposition to a bill that would end the educational use of bodies with no known survivors. | 29.617647 | 0.970588 | 7.5 | medium | high | mixed |
http://time.com/4449766/ecuador-julian-assange-sweden-wikileaks-embassy/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160814163526id_/http://time.com:80/4449766/ecuador-julian-assange-sweden-wikileaks-embassy/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true | Ecuador to Set Date for Julian Assange to Be Questioned | 20160814163526 | LONDON (AP) — Ecuador said Thursday that it is ready to set a date for Swedish prosecutors to question Julian Assange inside its London embassy — a potential breakthrough in the years-long international impasse over the WikiLeaks founder.
Assange is wanted for questioning by Swedish police over a rape allegation stemming from his visit to the country in 2010. He has not been charged and denies the rape claim and other allegations made against him by two women. In June 2012, he sought shelter in Ecuador’s embassy in the British capital and has been holed up there ever since.
Ecuador announced last year that it had agreed to a Swedish proposal to interview Assange at the embassy, but no interview has taken place.
Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that a date for the questioning in the embassy would be set “in the coming weeks.”
Swedish Prosecution Authority spokeswoman Karin Rosander said Sweden handed over a formal request to interview Assange in January, and a reminder in June, and received Ecuador’s reply on Tuesday.
“It means that a questioning can make the case go forward,” Rosander told The Associated Press. “This is decisive to be able to take a decision whether to formally charge him or not.”
Rosander said the Swedish prosecutor is on vacation and no date has been set for the trip to London.
In a statement late Thursday, the office of Ecuador’s chief prosecutor said Ecuadorean officials would handle the questioning under an accord signed with Sweden in December. The statement said chief prosecutor Galo Chiriboga would in the coming days designate a team to “receive” the testimony from Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
Assange’s defense team said in a statement that it welcomed the steps to take the WikiLeaks founder’s statement, which it said “comes after six years of complete inaction on the part of the Swedish prosecutor.”
Sweden wants to question Assange about a rape claim, one of several allegations made against him by two women he met in 2010. Last year Swedish prosecutors dropped investigations into claims of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion because their five-year statues of limitations were expiring.
Assange, 45, fears that if he is extradited to Sweden he will be sent to the United States to be prosecuted for WikiLeaks’ publication of secret documents, including reams of U.S. diplomatic cables.
Chelsea Manning, an American soldier who passed secret military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, is serving a 35-year sentence in a military prison.
Assange faces arrest by British police if he leaves the building and, with the exception of occasional trips to the embassy balcony, has not been outside for years.
In February, a United Nations panel said Assange’s stay at the embassy constituted arbitrary detention and he should be freed. The British and Swedish governments have rejected the non-binding findings of the U.N’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
In its statement, Ecuador said it stands by its 2012 commitment to grant Assange asylum due to “fears of political persecution.”
Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Frank Jordans in Berlin and Gonzalo Solano in Quito contributed to this story. | Ecuador's Foreign Ministry said that a date would be set "in the coming weeks" | 35.705882 | 0.823529 | 2.588235 | high | medium | mixed |
http://time.com/4365973/europe-poll-european-union-active/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160814214302id_/http://time.com:80/4365973/europe-poll-european-union-active/ | Europeans Want a More Active European Union | 20160814214302 | Despite their dissatisfaction with the way the E.U. has handled key problems like the refugee crisis and the economy, a solid majority of Europeans want the Brussels-based institution to take a more active role in world affairs.
According to a new results released by Pew Research Center, an average of 74% across 10 countries surveyed (Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Netherlands and the U.K.) want the E.U. to take a more active international stance. This is in spite of an average of 47% of Europeans in the same countries reporting unfavorable views of the institution, and an average of 56% preferring their countries to handle their own problems.
ISIS and climate change are seen by Europeans as the most serious threats to the continent, the poll found. Nine out of 10 countries and an average of 76% of those surveyed view ISIS as their greatest threat — unsurprising, given less than a year has passed since deadly terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Paris and Brussels.
Two-thirds of Europeans say climate change is the biggest threat to their respective countries. Only 49% across Europe view the large number of refugees leaving Syria and Iraq as the greatest problem. But, in Poland and Hungary, 73% and 69% respectively consider refugees a major threat.
The survey found that European countries are afflicted with waning international confidence, with 65% in Greece, 52% in Italy and 50% in Spain saying their countries are less prominent today compared to a decade ago.
Pew’s survey was conducted between April and May 2016 and had more than 10,000 respondents in telephone and face-to-face interviews. | ISIS and climate change are also seen by Europeans as their most serious threats according to a new Pew poll | 16.15 | 0.95 | 3.45 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/faye-sultans-improbable-journey-and-personal-best-1471038575 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160814224316id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/faye-sultans-improbable-journey-and-personal-best-1471038575 | Faye Sultan’s Improbable Journey, and Personal Best | 20160814224316 | Here’s an obvious but overlooked truth about athletes at the Olympics: Before anything else, they’re athletes. There are astonishing stories of individual perseverance, and obstacles overcome both personal and political, but at each athlete’s core is an undeniable drive to…well, only a lucky few will win, or medal, but every last one of them wants to do something indelible and memorable that makes the experience worth it. They want to do their absolute best. We like to wrap the Olympics up in all kinds of nationalistic and existential meaning, but for an athlete, doing his or her absolute best is pretty much the... | Rio 2016: Kuwaiti swimmer Faye Sultan from Williams College competed under the IOC flag because her country was banned from Rio. | 5.26087 | 0.173913 | 0.173913 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/12/24/if-you-want-to-work-for-airbnb-get-ready-to-answer-these-27-rid/21288013/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160814225016id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2015/12/24/if-you-want-to-work-for-airbnb-get-ready-to-answer-these-27-rid/21288013/ | If you want to work for Airbnb, get ready to answer these 27 ridiculous interview questions | 20160814225016 | Airbnb is the third-most valuable private tech company in the world — it has a $25.5 billion valuation.
If you want to work there, you might have to answer some tricky questions first.
Using Glassdoor's information about Airbnb, we've compiled some of the most ridiculous questions that people say they've been asked while interviewing for the company.
No matter if you're looking for a customer service job or a more technical position, Airbnb's interview questions will give you a run for your money.
1. "If you had to teach or give a TED talk, what subject would you talk about?" - Customer Experience Specialist candidate
2. "What would you say at Airbnb's funeral?" - Marketing candidate
3. "What position am I interviewing you for?" - Engineer candidate
4. "What impact has the internet had on the world? Positive or negative?" - Account Manager candidate
5. "What do you do if a guest is kicked out by a host and need to retrieve her belongings?" - Trust and Safety Manager candidate
6. "Have you ever developed a meaningful or lasting friendship with someone who you met briefly in an informal setting, like riding on the bus?" - Customer Experience Specialist candidate
7. "The host's dog defecates in the guest's suitcase on a dress/suit. What do you say?" - Customer Experience Specialist candidate
8. "If you could pick one public person to embody who you stand for, who would that be?" - Junior Account Executive candidate
9. "Given a dictionary, and a matrix of letters, find all the words in the matrix that are in the dictionary." - Software Engineer candidate
10. "Don't you think I'd be a great Airbnb host?" - Community Manager candidate
11. "When you walk into a room, what would be your theme song?" - Marketing candidate
12. "Please address entire company in an email and let them know why we are discontinuing ordering Unicorn from the menu." - Food and Beverage Manager candidate
13. "A customer calls and says there is almost pornographic photos in their host's home. They feel very uncomfortable and these photos were not represented in the Airbnb listing. How can you help the guest?" Customer Experience Specialist candidate
14. "What would your peers/ex-coworkers say is the biggest misconception about you?" - Country Manager candidate
15. "What would you write on the tombstone of the current hotel industry?" - IT candidate
16. "What can you teach me in a few minutes?" - Software Engineer candidate
17. "Describe what happens when you enter a URL in the web browser." - Software Engineer candidate
18. "How do you cut a round cake into 8 equal pieces using just 3 strokes of a knife?" - Customer Experience Representative candidate
19. "How lucky are you and why?" - Content Manager candidate
20. "Tell me something extraordinary you did in the past month." - Customer Experience Specialist candidate
21. "How would you be able to survive a plane crash?" Trust and Safety Investigator candidate
22. "What is the craziest idea you've ever had?" - Accounting candidate
23. "How would you explain Airbnb to your grandmother?" - Customer Service Representative candidate
24. "Tell me a joke." - Customer experience lead candidate
25. "If you were a gerbil, which gerbil would you be?" - Software engineer candidate
26. "What would you do with a million dollars?" - Recruiting coordinator candidate
27. "What was the last gift you gave to someone?" - Designer candidateClick through for photos of Airbnb rentals on wheels:
If you want to work for Airbnb, get ready to answer these 27 ridiculous interview questions
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Jonathan Powley, who rents parked vehicles on Airbnb, prepares a 1995 Chevrolet conversion van, one of his offerings, in the Queens borough of New York. While parked vehicles make up only a fraction of the thousands of Airbnb listings in New York City, they provide an option for adventurous, budget-minded visitors seeking a place for far less than the $200-and-up most hotels charge. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Jonathan Powley, who rents parked vehicles on Airbnb, sweeps out a 1995 Chevrolet conversion van, one of his offerings, in the Queens borough of New York. While parked vehicles make up only a fraction of the thousands of Airbnb listings in New York City, they provide an option for adventurous, budget-minded visitors seeking a place for far less than the $200-and-up most hotels charge. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Airbnb renters Michael and Tabitha Akins, and their dog Bagheera, check their accommodations in a decommissioned 2002 Honda Odyssey yellow taxi, in the Queens borough of New York. Their view includes the Empire State Building, background left. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Airbnb renters Michael and Tabitha Akins, and their dog Bagheera, check their accommodations in a decommissioned 2002 Honda Odyssey yellow taxi, in the Queens borough of New York. While parked vehicles make up only a fraction of the thousands of Airbnb listings in New York City, they provide an option for adventurous, budget-minded visitors seeking a place for far less than the $200-and-up most hotels charge. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Jonathan Powley, who rents parked vehicles on Airbnb, prepares a 1995 Chevrolet conversion van, one of his offerings, in the Queens borough of New York. While parked vehicles make up only a fraction of the thousands of Airbnb listings in New York City, they provide an option for adventurous, budget-minded visitors seeking a place for far less than the $200-and-up most hotels charge. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Airbnb renters Michael and Tabitha Akins, walk by their accommodations, a decommissioned 2002 Honda Odyssey yellow taxi, in the Queens borough of New York. Their view includes the Empire State Building, background center, and the Chrysler Building, background right. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Jonathan Powley holds the keys to the vehicles he rents on Airbnb, including a decommissioned New York City taxi, in the Queens borough of New York. While parked vehicles make up only a fraction of the thousands of Airbnb listings in New York City, they provide an option for adventurous, budget-minded visitors seeking a place for far less than the $200-and-up most hotels charge. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Airbnb renters Michael and Tabitha Akins eat a meal at the 51st Bakery and Cafe, in the Queens borough of New York. People who rent from Jonathan Powley's mobile accommodations can use the bathroom facilities at the cafe. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In this Monday, Aug. 3, 2015, photo, Jonathan Powley, left, walks with Airbnb renters Tabitha and Michael Akins, with their dog Bagheera, to their taxi dwelling in the Queens borough of New York. While parked vehicles make up only a fraction of the thousands of Airbnb listings in New York City, they provide an option for adventurous, budget-minded visitors seeking a place for far less than the $200-and-up most hotels charge. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) | No matter if you're looking for a customer service job or a more technical position, Airbnb's interview questions will give you a run for your money. | 51.266667 | 1 | 30 | high | high | extractive |
http://time.com/4401591/postmates-on-demand-delivery/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160815050431id_/http://time.com:80/4401591/postmates-on-demand-delivery/? | How Postmates Survived and Thrived Despite the Naysayers | 20160815050431 | Imitation may be a form of flattery, but in the world of tech startups, it can also be deadly. Solve a common problem and copycats are sure to emerge, often undercutting you with lower prices even at the risk of burning through the piles of cash they have raised.
Not long ago, it seemed like this was the fate facing Postmates. The San Francisco-based company built an app that wants to be nothing less than a remote control for your city, with food and other goods delivered to your doorstep an hour after you ordered them from your phone. Other similar startups quickly appeared. Just as quickly, some of them began to shut down (SpoonRocket) or face funding problems (DoorDash). Venture capital luminaries like Bill Gurley predicted a shakeout, with Postmates among the likely casualties.
Such a shakeout in the on-demand delivery space may indeed be coming. But it’s looking more like Postmates is among those positioned to survive — and even benefit. In April, the (private) company’s financials were leaked, showing revenues grew sixfold last year and would rise 450% this year. Even better, gross margins will double to 24% this year from 12% in 2014. The numbers bolstered CEO Bastian Lehmann’s view that Postmates would be profitable by 2017.
Rather than being one more on-demand startup burning through venture capital, Postmates resembles the kind of young company investors want delivered to their portfolios: a fast-growing firm that can make a credible case for imminent profitability. To understand why, it helps to look at Postmates’ history — as well as its plans for growth.
Postmates was founded five years ago, but the idea originated another five years before that: a logistics company for the mobile age, a courier service that connects local retailers and their customers in a way that never existed before. But it wasn’t until the smartphone arrived that the idea gained traction. “Postmates needed the penetration of the iPhone and the technology it unlocked to be successful,” says Lehmann.
Before Postmates, Lehmann worked for mobile companies like 12snap, which pioneered consumer marketing campaigns on older, simpler mobile phones. Lehmann, along with co-founders Sean Plaice and Sam Street, initially designed the app for merchants to deliver, say, furniture or bikes to customers. To grow its audience, Postmates began to build an interface for consumers as well. It soon became clear consumers were using it to order food from restaurants.
Today, many people lump Postmates in with food-delivery companies like Grubhub. But that’s not necessarily how Postmates sees itself. “Food is for us what books were for Amazon,” Lehmann says. “If we didn’t need food deliveries, Postmates would probably provide only commerce, because that’s the idea down the road. We’ve built the largest on-demand logistics platform, while a lot of people looked at us and thought we were an overpriced food delivery company.”
Today, Postmates relies on 25,000 couriers to make 1.3 million deliveries a month in 40 cities. And as you enjoy the Chipotle burrito that a Postmates courier just delivered, you might also chew on Lehmann’s view of what the company really is: a node connecting the mobile economy and old school brick-and-mortar commerce.
“We wanted to make sure that Postmates is an anywhere product. You can literally point this at any place you can imagine in your city and we would get that item, even a very difficult product to fulfill,” Lehmann says. “And this fits 100% with my experience with how much of a personal device the smartphone is and how much customers are attached to it.”
This gets at why Postmates has defied its naysayers. The people who have discovered this aspect of the app have become loyalists, shunning Grubhub and the legion of Postmates copycats. The reality, though, was that many of those also-rans were undercutting Postmates’ “anywhere” delivery fee of $9.99. So the company got creative about how to match them on price without burning through the money it had raised.
In 2015, Postmates introduced its Plus feature, a flat $3.99 delivery fee for “preferred merchants,” that is, merchants who agreed to cover a portion of the delivery fee in exchange for prominent screen placement whenever a user opened up the app. Anywhere users come to Postmates knowing what they’re looking for. Plus users want some suggestions. And that $6 discount on delivery is appealing.
By sharing delivery costs with merchants, Postmates was able to grow revenue without weighing down its gross profit margin. That made it less reliant on recurring rounds of fundraising. According to Crunchbase, Postmates has raised $138 million in total, with the most recent round occurring a year ago.
Postmates’ plan is to continue growth that doesn’t turn those gross margins negative. In the coming weeks, Lehmann says, the Postmates app will introduce a new (non-food) segment that users have indicated interest in. He won’t specify what it is, but hints it is related to the health-care and beauty segment of the consumer market.
More boldly, Postmates has introduced Unlimited, an Amazon Prime-like subscription service that, for $9.99 a month, will make as many deliveries as you like from its Plus merchants, as long as each order exceeds $30. This is a high-risk, high-reward bet. Amazon Prime cut into profits for years, but over time Amazon won a larger share of its loyal users’ wallets.
Unlimited is the kind of strategic left turn that make potential investors uneasy. In 2012, investors were skeptical about Postmates’ unproven business model. Back then, its only historical antecedent was Kozmo.com, a mascot of the dot-com bust. Three years later, Postmates’ space was so crowded it was figured to be a goner. It has survived, in part, by placing bets on what’s coming next.
“There are a lot of things that are undefined, and capital doesn’t like undefined things,” Lehmann says. But Postmates does, so much so it lists “eccentric” among its core values. “We want to embrace that a little bit,” he adds. “I think it’s good to be a little eccentric. It’s good to do things that are against the grain. Because I feel like ever since I arrived in San Francisco, it’s gotten a little bit too much with the grain, too brushed into this one beautiful direction where everything is the same.”
The company’s contrarian streak may be what preserves it. Rather than an Uber-like strategy of spending to grow in all markets at all costs, Postmates saw its rivals spending on delivery discounts and found a way to get its merchants to share in the discounts.
“Growth just for growth sake is just a drug, but it can very quickly swing out of control,” Lehmann says. “It never surprised me when someone asked us how we made money. But we lived through a while when nobody asked us how we were going to make money. And that made us always believe the pendulum was going to swing into the other direction.” | The everything-on-demand company is delivering solid results | 127.454545 | 0.727273 | 1.272727 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/gop-leader-americans-probably-better-obama-era | http://web.archive.org/web/20160815131548id_/http://www.msnbc.com:80/rachel-maddow-show/gop-leader-americans-probably-better-obama-era | GOP leader: Americans 'probably' better off in Obama era | 20160815131548 | McConnell acknowledged that Americans are “probably” better off than they were when Obama took office in January 2009 – an unusual concession by a leading Republican at a time when the party’s presidential candidates sound like they aren’t sure the country will still be standing by Election Day. But he quickly added the caveat that “that’s not the way to measure it” because the Democrat took office in the middle of a devastating global financial meltdown. […]
[McConnell] predicted that it will be “a really tough sell” for the Democratic presidential nominee “to make the argument that we want four more years just like the last eight.”
The good news is, this is marginally less silly than Paul Ryan’s response. The bad news is, it’s still awfully difficult to take his assessment seriously.
First, let’s dispatch with “probably.” By literally every metric, the United States is in vastly better shape than when President Obama was first inaugurated. To believe otherwise is obvious insanity.
Second, it’s rather amusing to see McConnell say economic progress doesn’t really count because “that’s not the way to measure it.” No? Pray tell, if we overlook progress on jobs, economic growth, wages, manufacturing, and the stock market, what is the way to measure it?
I suspect what the GOP Senate leader means is that, given where Obama started, we had nowhere to go but up. There’s some truth to that, but the argument is still deeply flawed, in part because Republicans said the president’s policies wouldn’t rescue the economy from the Great Recession (and they did), and in part because the circumstances still don’t work in Republicans’ favor.
In effect, McConnell is arguing, “Obama’s Republican predecessor left him an economic catastrophe, and the president succeeded in cleaning up the mess, but that’s not the way to measure his record.”
I suspect the White House would disagree.
As for the 2016 cycle, I can’t speak to what the American mainstream may or may not want, but to hear McConnell tell it, voters won’t want “four more years just like the last eight.” Perhaps the senator could be more specific. Does he think Americans want higher unemployment? Fewer families with health insurance? A higher deficit?
What is it about the last eight years that we’re supposed to want less of? | Are Americans better off since President Obama took office? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn't seem eager to answer the question, but he did. | 16.964286 | 0.714286 | 1 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2016/08/10/jill-stein-bernie-sanders/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160815144946id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/08/10/jill-stein-bernie-sanders/ | Jill Stein Is Sounding a Lot Like Bernie Sanders | 20160815144946 | Bernie Sanders’ campaign may have ended, but his platform seems to live on in Jill Stein.
The Green Party candidate outlined what she would want to accomplish as president in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box saying, “As the only candidate that is not poisoned by corporate money, lobbyists, or Super PACs, I can actually stand up for what it is that we need.”
That sentiment—and several of Stein’s proposals—were recurring themes during Sanders’ run. In the SquawkBox interview, Stein promised free higher education, universal health care, and an aggressive push against climate change.
Stein also proposed a New Deal-like emergency jobs program as well as a “Green New Deal that also solves the emergency of climate change.” She argued that abolishing the use of fossil fuels and developing a healthier food supply would make people healthier, thereby reducing health care costs. Additionally, she says she wants to implement a Medicare-for-all system saying, as Sanders has, that health care is a right rather than a privilege.
Green Party Candidate Jill Stein Courts Bernie Sanders’ Backers
Stein showed some policy differences with Sanders, however. While Sanders had planned to refinance student debt, Stein wants to cancel it. She says she’d do this through quantitative easing—similar to the process the government used to bail out Wall Street—by asking the Federal Reserve to buy the debt and agree not to collect on it.
As CNBC notes, the Fed is an independent government agency, and therefore the president does not have the authority to direct its asset-buying programs. But in Stein’s view, student loan asset buying would fulfill one of the Fed’s stated objectives: maximizing employment. Stein says she believes that canceling student debt would unleash enormous productivity and be “the stimulus package of our dreams.”
The Green Party candidate also wants to move the U.S. military away from wars that she says are bankrupting the country and “arguably making us less secure,” and instead focus on increasing domestic security. She proposes cutting military spending, which she says currently takes up more than 50% of our discretionary budget.
Though Hillary Clinton has adopted some of Sanders’ platform into her own, Stein’s beliefs seem to line up closer with those of the Vermont senator, and she has been courting his supporters.
Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson: Corporate America’s Best Bet for President?
In recent poll data collected by RealClearPolitics, about 4% of voters said that they plan to support Stein in the upcoming election. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received about 9% of the vote. | She outlined her campaign platform in a recent interview. | 50.5 | 1 | 1 | high | high | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/08/14/14/43/kurdish-forces-in-fresh-push-on-mosul | http://web.archive.org/web/20160815153636id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/08/14/14/43/kurdish-forces-in-fresh-push-on-mosul | Kurdish forces in fresh push on Mosul | 20160815153636 | Kurdish Peshmerga forces backed by US-led coalition airstrikes have launched a fresh attack on Islamic State militants in northern Iraq, as part of a plan to close in on their de facto capital Mosul, a Kurdish official said.
The offensive began in the early hours of Sunday after heavy shelling and several airstrikes, a Reuters correspondent reported from Wardak, 30km southeast of Mosul, where some of the Peshmerga forces are deployed.
Clouds of black smoke could be seen at a distance, possibly tyres or other items set on fire by the militants to obstruct the planes' visibility.
The Iraqi army and the Peshmerga forces of the Kurdish self-rule region are gradually taking up positions around Mosul, 400km north of Baghdad, from whose Grand Mosque in 2014 Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate spanning regions of Iraq and Syria.
Mosul is the largest urban centre under the militants' control, with a pre-war population of nearly two million.
Its fall would mark their effective defeat in Iraq, according to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has said he aims to retake the city this year.
The operation that started Sunday is part of the "shaping operations" to prepare for an offensive on the city itself, said a Kurdish official who declined to be identified.
The Iraqi army is trying to advance from the south. In July it captured the Qayyara airfield, 60km south of Mosul, which will serve as the main staging post for the expected offensive on the city. | Kurdish foreces have started a fresh push on Islamic State-held Mosul, after heavy shelling and several airstrikes. | 14.190476 | 0.857143 | 2.761905 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/14/14/40/worlds-biggest-wooden-tall-ship-rounds-out-nine-month-world-voyage-in-port-phillip-bay | http://web.archive.org/web/20160815155016id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/14/14/40/worlds-biggest-wooden-tall-ship-rounds-out-nine-month-world-voyage-in-port-phillip-bay | World’s biggest wooden tall ship rounds out nine month world voyage in Port Phillip Bay | 20160815155016 | Tenacious has been travelling for nine months around the world. (9NEWS)
A crew of 40 sailors, around half of whom have a disability, have rounded out an 18,000 mile worldwide voyage in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay earlier today.
The crew on board Tenacious started their nine-month journey in November 2015, venturing across the Atlantic via Antigua, the Panama Canal and passing through the South Pacific, including Tahiti and Fiji, before passing through Sydney Harbour last month.
The enormous vessel was built in 2000 by charity Jubilee Sailing Trust Victoria using 1,500 volunteers – many with a disability. It is the largest operative wooden ship in the world.
The ship is 65m, and has a mast height of 42m. (9NEWS)
Chairman of Jubilee Sailing Trust Australia, Harry Cator, said their charity’s mission was a simple one of inclusiveness.
“Our mission it to provide people living with disability and able-bodies people to come together to achieve the unthinkable, sailing a tall ship as equal members of the crew,” Mr Cator said.
The ship will spend at least 10 months in Australia. (9NEWS)
The 65m-long ship is fitted out with special features like joystick controls for people with limited mobility, platforms for wheelchair accessibility including platforms up to the mast, and speaking compasses for the visually impaired.
The ship will be a regular visitor to Seaworks in Williamstown, and will spend at least the next 10 months in Australia making small trips to Adelaide, Hobart and Geelong.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016 | A crew of 40 sailors, around half of whom have a disability, have rounded out an 18,000 worldwide voyage from the UK to Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay earlier today. | 9.5 | 0.90625 | 12.59375 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/2602883/Beijing-Olympics-What-lessons-can-we-learn-from-Britains-gold-rush.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160815211245id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/sport/olympics/2602883/Beijing-Olympics-What-lessons-can-we-learn-from-Britains-gold-rush.html | Beijing Olympics: What lessons can we learn from Britain's gold rush? | 20160815211245 | But there has been one major surprise: against all expectation, the British have shown themselves to be rather good at sport. It has taken everyone aback. I have been interviewed by a Danish journalist who asked me just one question: “How the hell did this happen?”
It began on the second day of competition. The very day The Observer rashly published a column in which the writer asked whether the reader was already as bored of the Olympics as she, the women’s cycling road race took place. Held in conditions familiar to anyone who has taken a camping holiday in the Lake District in May, it was won by Nicole Cooke. While her rivals had prepared for searing heat and humidity, Cooke knew all about the driving squall into which the competitors raced. She comes from Wales. She has rain in her veins.
From Tiananmen Square to the base of the Great Wall, Cooke cycled as if on a training run through the Valleys, and Britain’s first gold was soon being placed around her dripping wet neck. From there on, it hardly stopped. Through a miserable August back home, with credit crunching, house prices tumbling and the Met Office nightly issuing severe weather warnings, British competitors kept delivering good news. Morning after morning people woke to hear of yet more glory. Front pages were filled with pictures of smiley young Britons abroad, swathed in the Union Jack. The medal table became compulsive reading: so elevated was our position that the entire country was in urgent need of oxygen.
It was not just those watching who seemed surprised. When Rebecca Adlington won her first gold in the swimming pool, she could not stop smiling on the medal podium. Up there, even the granite-jawed Azerbaijanis or Ukrainians with shoulders the size of Ben Nevis lose control of their bottom lip. But Adlington grinned and waved and had the time of her life.
Afterwards, in the bowels of the magnificent Beijing Water Cube, the 19-year-old freestyle champion told a group of journalists who had not even heard of her a couple of hours before that she was smiling because it was all so ridiculous – she couldn’t really believe it. Her, a lass from Mansfield, winning a gold medal at the Olympics? Come on, you’re having a laugh. Then she won another, in the process breaking a world record that had stood almost as long as she had been alive. And people began to talk of serious elevation: arise, Dame Becky.
“I’m not going to do anything that affects my swimming,” she said of the many offers suddenly flying her way. “All that matters is doing well at London, that’s always been my goal. Hey, that’s going to be awesome isn’t it?”
Fame? She wasn’t interested. Charming, guileless, a delightful ambassador for her sport and her family, she said that all she wanted was the achievement that came as the reward for hard graft. That, and a pair of Jimmy Choos. Here was a coruscating antidote to the corrosive quest for instant celebrity that has ensnared so many of her contemporaries.
Meanwhile, at the velodrome, Britain’s cyclists won seven golds – enough, if they were a separate nation, to put them ninth in the medals table, ahead of France, Spain and Italy. There, too, success was realised in a manner that has implications far beyond the pedal. Generously funded through the Lottery, to the tune of some £5 million a year, the British cycling team has become a byword for thoroughness. Dave Brailsford, the performance director, is obsessive in ensuring that everything is done to give his riders the maximum chance. Before these games, he invited China’s cycling administrators to his headquarters in Manchester. He wined them, he dined them, he oozed Mancunian hospitality. The Chinese were overwhelmed: was there anything they could do when Brailsford came to China for the Games? As a matter of fact, there was. And thus the British technicians enjoyed the prime pit position in the velodrome, the spot everyone wanted.
Watching the cyclists prepare before their races, you might be forgiven for thinking them absurdly pampered. Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Bradley Wiggins did nothing for themselves as they waited for their turn to compete. They were helped into their kit by one of the dozen uniformed technicians, had their helmets adjusted for them, even their bananas peeled.
This is Brailsford’s psychology at work: give the riders the perfect preparation and then, when they go out on the track, let them know it is up to them to do their part. He calls it taking ownership of performance. There is no excuse for the rider, no blame to hide behind. Compare that to the mentality of the English professional footballer, for whom an excuse is never more than a whinge away. Watch Match of the Day tonight and you will learn that failure was the fault of the ref, the manager, the pitch. Never the player. Remind me: how is English football doing right now?
In the British cycling team, the rider accepts blame and immediately seeks to rectify the problem. Strive only for the best, leave no stone unturned, never shirk responsibility: you could run a business the Brailsford way. Actually, you could run a country. “Put down your knives and guns and take to your bikes,” was Brailsford’s message to his countrymen this week, as he suggested that a national cycling revolution in the wake of Beijing triumph could solve everything from youth crime through family breakdown to the obesity crisis. Look out Gordon and Dave: it sounded like some manifesto.
And still the successes came. Christine Ohuruogu, the rowers, the sailors – each had their stories of work and effort, of striving to achieve excellence, of the beauty of true elitism. This weekend, their heroic performances will inspire many of their fellow citizens to put the cross-trainer up a notch, jog that extra few yards, swim another length. It might even encourage some off their sofa. Which would be a nicely ironic consequence of what is now almost exclusively a television experience.
This is the wider value of these Olympians. The price of each British cycling gold medal was £625,000, or roughly the cost of keeping a couple of lifelong smokers on breathing apparatus for a year. As poster boys and girls for a healthy lifestyle, they would come cheap at ten times that.
And they have done something else too, our glorious Olympians. Boris Johnson alluded to it when he finally disentangled himself from Beijing’s traffic and breezed into London House. Watching the last fortnight unfold from a distance, he said he had seen the wider view of 2102 being transformed. What he called “the Olympo-sceptics” had been largely converted. Doubt had taken flight. Cynicism was silenced.
He has a point. We have long been told that the £9.3 billion budget for 2012 will buy us a new East End. We have heard from Lord Coe that the London Games will be a showcase for the best kind of Britishness. And we will get a glimpse of a relaxed, humorous response to the sterile conformity of Beijing in the closing ceremony. When Jimmy Page cranks out the first bars of “Whole Lotta Love”, it will begin to make sense: the next Games will take place in the most fun city on earth.
But what nobody had ever dared to suggest before Beijing was the most startling thing of all: that London might also provide us with a celebration of British sporting achievement. Now we have experienced the spring such a success can put in the collective step, we suddenly can’t wait for London. The athletes, swimmers, sailors, rowers, gymnasts and riders have handed a golden baton to the politicians and administrators charged with delivering 2012: prepare for glory. Here’s hoping they don’t drop it. | Jim White asks what British success in the Beijing Olympics means for London 2012. | 102.333333 | 0.733333 | 1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/15/16/07/commission-investigates-detention-abuse | http://web.archive.org/web/20160816120142id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/15/16/07/commission-investigates-detention-abuse | Detention abuse response investigated | 20160816120142 | The Immigration Department's handling of allegations of sex abuse against asylum seeker children in detention centres is being investigated by the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse.
But it's not yet clear if there will be public hearings into the department's response to abuse allegations.
The Royal Commission on Tuesday confirmed the "ongoing" investigation, after a recent push by human rights groups to include the department in the inquiry.
The push by three groups headed by the Human Rights Law Centre follows the leaking of thousands of incident reports from a detention centre in Nauru to the Guardian.
The commission last year ruled it could not investigate events in another country and it's not clear if offshore detention is included in the inquiry.
In a rare statement about operational matters, the commission said the level of public discussion relating to detention prompted the confirmation.
The commission is expecting a report by a child protection panel within the Immigration Department and will consider that report in its investigation.
"The Royal Commission anticipates that the report will deal with the department's response to, among other matters, allegations of child abuse in detention centres," the statement said.
The 2000 incident reports detail abuse, self harm and neglect claims by asylum seekers.
Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs backed the call to extend the commission to Australia's management of the entire Nauru process.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton maintains the most serious claims will be examined by his department but it was up to Nauru to investigate the cases.
He believes there are incidents of false claims by asylum seekers. | The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse has confirmed an investigation into the Immigration Department's response to child abuse allegations in detention. | 12.791667 | 0.916667 | 2.25 | low | medium | mixed |
http://time.com/4366120/olympics-brazil-torch-relay-nazi-roots/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817020205id_/http://time.com:80/4366120/olympics-brazil-torch-relay-nazi-roots/ | The Nazi Roots of the Modern Olympic Torch Relay | 20160817020205 | Fire has always been part of the Olympics. During ancient Games, which date back to 776 B.C., the Greeks lit flames outside temples and sanctuaries in Olympia to honor the gods.
The origins of the modern torch relay, however, trace back to Nazi Germany. For the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 3,422 torchbearers each ran 0.6 miles along a route from the site of the ancient Olympics in Olympia, Greece, to Berlin. Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party reportedly created the relay to link Germany to ancient empires.
Modern Olympic organizers have carried on the torch tradition. The flame is reignited in Olympia, and relayed across Greece to Athens, where it’s then handed over to the host country’s organizers, who transport the flame to the site of the Games. Thousands of runners are now carrying the torch more than 12,000 miles on a 95-day tour through 329 cities and towns in Brazil. As the country is embroiled in deep political crisis, the relay ceremony has become a platform for support, or protest, of the potential impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.
The torch relay will conclude in Rio De Janeiro on Aug. 5 with the Summer Games’ opening ceremonies and lighting of the Olympic cauldron. | The tradition dates back to the 1936 Berlin Olympics | 25.555556 | 0.888889 | 2.444444 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://time.com/money/4448134/donald-trump-ok-losing-election/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817021908id_/http://time.com:80/money/4448134/donald-trump-ok-losing-election/ | Donald Trump Says He's OK Losing the Election | 20160817021908 | On Thursday while calling in to CNBC’s “Squawk Box” morning show, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said he’s “ok” with losing the election.
“All I do is tell the truth, and if at the end of 90 days I’ve fallen short because I’m somewhat politically correct, even though I’m supposed to be the smart one, and even though I’m supposed to have a lot of good ideas, it’s ok, you know, I go back to a, a very good way of life. It’s not what I’m looking to do I think we’re going to have a victory, but we’ll see.”
The most recent Real Clear Politics poll shows Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump by almost eight points, echoing Trump’s implication: He may very well lose. Of course, the poll numbers follow a series of gaffes the GOP nominee has made in the last few weeks, including making off-kilter comments on sexual harassment and insulting a Gold Star military family. Consistent with his past behavior, Trump hasn’t apologized for the political missteps, either.
So, what would Trump do after the election? He could go back to managing his real estate business, though he’s not hurting for work (even though Trump-branded businesses have suffered.) He’s currently worth about $4.5 billion — or $10 billion, according to him.
But Trump is far from giving up on the campaign. He’s in Florida this week after unveiling a long-awaited list of economic policies and his team of deal-making economic advisers. | Is he shorting his bet? | 52.333333 | 0.666667 | 0.666667 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444100404577643483508244436 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817120226id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/SB10000872396390444100404577643483508244436 | The Best Luxury Car-Camping Gear: Tame the Wild | 20160817120226 | You may think that camping is all about sleeping on the ground, rubbing sticks together to start a fire and eating worms. Even car camping—the time-honored tradition of pulling up to a campsite in a vehicle packed with gear—can feel like an exercise in austerity. But the right equipment makes the endeavor a more easygoing affair, which means you can spend your vacation enjoying the beauty that surrounds you rather than wondering if the nearest Motel 6 has any vacancies.
To find out just how snug sleeping in the woods can be, I brought the best gear I could find on a four-day car-camping trip. My expedition party included two families: four adults with a 2-, 3-, 4- and 7-year-old in tow. Could we survive sleeping fewer than 50 feet from our cars, the nearest grocery store a 10-minute drive away?
The answer is yes, definitely. Car camping is a ton of work, but so is any vacation with young children. And instead of the adults being trapped in a hotel room at night with sleeping kids, we could gather around the campfire.
The key to not feeling like you're roughing it, I discovered, is to go easy on the hard-core camping gear, most of which is designed to be transported by foot rather than combustion engine. Instead, bring along a few luxurious items that can withstand the abuse of the outdoors. Best of all, you can put goods like these to use the rest of the year.
While the summer camping trip may be a seasonal rite of passage, autumn is another great time to head to the woods. There are fewer bugs, the days are more temperate, the foliage breathtaking. So brush up on your fire-building skills (check out the videos on YouTube) and pry your kids away from their iPads. The comfort of the great outdoors awaits.
The Camp Light: Tulip Lantern
Every detail of the Tulip's glow—intensity, direction, throw—is fully adjustable. Hung upside down from the ceiling of a tent, the Tulip casts a focused light that you can point where needed (the stem is pliable). When set on its base with the diffuser pointing up, the Tulip widens its beam to emit an ambient glow. The Tulip can light the far corners of a tent—or you can dial it down to the intensity of a distant star. All of which makes it as suitable for curling up with a Kindle as for finding the bug spray at the bottom of a duffel. $150, snowpeak.com
Big camping chairs may be comfortable on a flat lawn or field, but they can get tripped up on more rugged terrain. The Mantis keeps its center of gravity low and tight with four squat, compactly spaced legs to prevent teetering on uneven or sloped ground. Sitting in the chair requires engaging your leg muscles a bit, but its ripstop nylon seat (quick to dry, easy to clean) has a nice way of cradling you. $120, alitedesigns.com
The Cooler: YETI Roadie 20
Camping with this compact cooler is like taking a mini-fridge into the woods. Its extra-thick walls are pressure-injected with 2 inches of insulation, and a freezer-grade gasket around the lid seals in the cold. I loaded one with a five-pound bag of ice; more than 48 hours later, some was still frozen solid. The YETI Roadie 20 is a substantial 16 pounds, but there are full-size refrigerators that feel less solidly built. Slap a cushion on one and you can leave a camping chair at home. $200, yeticoolers.com
The Cookware: Yanagi Iron Deep Pan
Nambu Tekki iron pots are thick-walled and heavy, which makes them slow to heat up but good at tempering the myriad heat sources you may encounter in the wild—whether the roar of a wood fire or the whisper of a propane camp stove. This Sori Yanagi design has a tapered rim, which facilitates clean pouring, and a tool for safely lifting its heavy lid. The 9-inch cooking surface is perfect for oatmeal in the morning and a stew at night. $260, tortoisegeneralstore.com
Don't kid yourself: You won't be chopping down any trees car camping. But this 8-inch hatchet is ideal for splitting your store-bought firewood into kindling. And you can still shout "Tiiiiimber!" while you swing. $33, fiskars.com
The Towel: Flax Line Organics
Flax Line towels may seem to belong in a spa, but they're everything you want in a camping towel: highly absorbent, lightweight and fast-drying. The towels are made using an old-fashioned Japanese shuttle weaving machine so that one side has a smooth, tight weave, the other a loosely looped terry-cloth finish. Unlike "quick-dry" camping towels, which are made of synthetic materials, these are woven from organic cotton. $12-$64, rikumo.com
I had high hopes for the queen-size inflatable mattress we brought along, but it was too springy and took up too much tent space. In contrast, the much slimmer Therm-a-Rest DreamTime pad, which sleeps one (couples can snap two together), was like kicking back at a five-star hotel. It wraps a 1-inch Isotonic memory-foam top and a 2½-inch self-inflating pad in a machine-washable cover. (Pairing it with Therm-a-Rest's LuxuryLite Mesh Cot, $240, lifts it about 4 inches off the ground for a bed-like experience.) Deflated and rolled up, the DreamTime was bigger than our tent when packed—but the bulk is well worth a perfect night's sleep. $190, thermarest.com | Living comfortably in the woods requires a few key amenities. | 101.090909 | 0.727273 | 1.454545 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-29631353 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817121259id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/news/uk-england-29631353 | 'Do not resuscitate' patient controversy | 20160817121259 | Many of us will end up in hospital at the end of our lives, but would we want doctors to attempt to resuscitate or let us pass away peacefully if we suffer a heart attack or stop breathing?
'Do Not Resuscitate' orders are common in hospitals but a recent landmark judgement by the High Court is starting to have profound effects on patient care.
Under the ruling doctors must ask patients and/or their relatives whether they want to be resuscitated.
BBC Inside Out's Chris Jackson talks to doctors at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle about their concerns over patient resuscitation.
He also asks Dr Claud Regnard, a consultant in palliative care, about the implications of the ruling and how it can be "traumatic" for patients and their relatives.
BBC Inside Out is broadcast on BBC One North East & Cumbria on Monday, 20 October at 19:30 BST and nationwide on the iPlayer for 30 days thereafter. | BBC Inside Out looks at the High Court ruling that doctors must ask patients or their relatives whether they want to be resuscitated. | 7.375 | 0.916667 | 4.833333 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15746900 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817121849id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/news/world-europe-15746900 | Yellow Sun-Drop diamond goes for $10.9m at Sotheby's | 20160817121849 | An extremely rare yellow diamond known as the Sun-Drop has sold at auction in Geneva for just over $10.9m (£6.8m).
Sotheby's auctioneer David Bennett said the sum - paid by a telephone bidder who preferred to stay anonymous - set a world record for a yellow diamond.
The 110.3 carat pear-shaped diamond is said to be one of the largest diamonds ever to appear at auction.
Discovered in South Africa last year, it was sold by New York-based Cora International.
The diamond was certified by gemologists as "fancy vivid yellow", the rarest and most desirable colour for a yellow diamond, Sotheby's had said.
The colour is the result of traces of nitrogen trapped within carbon molecules and hardened over the course of millions of years.
The diamond had a pre-sale estimate of $11-15m. With commission and taxes, the buyer paid out $12.36m.
"It sold for a record for a yellow diamond... It was exactly within our expectation for this spectacular stone," Mr Bennett told reporters after the sale. | An extremely rare yellow diamond known as the Sun-Drop - thought to be one of the largest to appear at auction - is sold in Geneva for $10.9m (£6.8m). | 5.684211 | 0.973684 | 7.026316 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903327904576524671643378078 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817154953id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/SB10001424053111903327904576524671643378078 | This U.S. Manufacturing Industry Maintains a Steady Clip | 20160817154953 | LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill.—The basic paper clip, a simple twist of steel wire typically retailing for about a penny, has dominated its market for more than a century.
Now ACCO Brands Corp., based in this Chicago suburb and dubbing itself a "global powerhouse of leading office-products brands," hopes Americans will embrace a snazzier clip costing more than 16 times as much.
"This is our reinvention of the paper clip," says Carol Lucarelli, a brand manager at ACCO, as she hands a visitor a sheaf of paper held together by stainless steel clamps called Klix in shiny hues of red, purple, green, blue and "classic silver." Klix, resembling small hair barrettes, make a snapping sound when closed. "It's very fun," says Ms. Lucarelli. "It's this clickiness."
Though the U.S. long ago ceded manufacturing of such items as cellphones and computers to lower-cost producers, it still prevails in paper clips. Most of the estimated 11 billion sold each year in the U.S. are made domestically. But innovation has become rare.
Klix went on sale in June at certain office-supply stores. ACCO declined to disclose sales but says the product is "ramping up nicely."
Standard clips "don't actually do the job they're supposed to do," says Julian Peck, a Newcastle, England-based engineer who invented Klix. "They ping off. You can't rely on them."
Desmond LaPlace, however, has his doubts about the chances of anything eclipsing the standard clip. "If there is ultimately a commodity product, it's paper clips," says Mr. LaPlace, who retired 15 years ago from ACCO after serving as president.
Many tinkerers have offered variations over the years, says Mr. LaPlace, whose wife still calls him the "paper-clip king" and has threatened to put that phrase into his obituary, but "we never saw anything that performed better and could be made economically."
ACCO executives acknowledge that customers weren't clamoring for a better clip. Emily Ford, a manager who orders supplies in the Atlanta office of consulting firm Kurt Salmon, says some people can be very picky about pens or notebooks. But paper clips? "I've done this job for 17 years, and no one has ever expressed an opinion on paper clips," she says. "It's really a price decision."
Given the simplicity of the product, many people are surprised to learn that most paper clips used in the U.S. are manufactured domestically.
The two main U.S. makers—ACCO and Officemate International Corp. of Edison, N.J.—have survived in that business mainly because, since 1994, import tariffs ranging up to 127% of the base price have protected U.S. clip makers from what the federal government deemed unfair Chinese competition. In June, the U.S. government renewed those tariffs for another five years. ACCO and Officemate also have kept costs low through automation.
A bigger mystery is what Americans do with the estimated 11 billion clips sold annually in the U.S. That works out to about 35 per American. "We actually can't understand how the U.S. consumption can be so huge," says Martin Yang, a senior vice president at Officemate.
Many, of course, "are used to hold papers together temporarily," as the International Trade Commission, a U.S. agency, helpfully explained in a July report on the clip trade. That isn't the full story, though.
"I use them a lot," says William Zamstein, a 23-year-old Penn State student who worked as an intern at the U.S. Department of Labor this summer. "Staples are totally permanent, and they leave marks," he says. Mr. Zamstein also has used paper clips to clean his fingernails.
Others report using clips to hang Christmas tree ornaments, clean pipes and unclog tubes of glue. Some bend clips while talking on the phone, then flip them into the trash. Certain types of shredders have been made tough enough to digest all the clips office workers toss out with stacks of old paper.
ACCO, the No. 1 U.S. clip maker, once known as American Clip Co., traces its history to 1903, when Fred J. Kline began making paper clips on Long Island, N.Y. ACCO now makes far more money from other products, including staplers and binding equipment, and says clips account for less than 1% of annual sales.
Still, ACCO isn't complacent about its original product. At a steel-walled ACCO clip factory in Pleasant Prairie, Wis., posters exhort workers to slay "the seven deadly wastes," including excessive inventory and "doing more 'work' to an order than is required by the customer." ACCO's 38 clip-making machines, some more than 50 years old, cut wire and bend it into clips at a rate of 1,600 a minute.
The machines then spit finished clips into cardboard boxes. Though the boxes promise 100 clips, ACCO for years has put 102 into each to prevent customers from being shorted if one or two bounce out. (Some customers do count the clips, ACCO says.) Now, to cut costs, ACCO is tweaking its machinery to weigh boxes more precisely, ensuring they contain exactly 100 clips. That eliminates the need for spares.
"It's actually a major project we're working on," Ted Keriazakos, a production manager, says over the roar of machinery.
The ACCO and Officemate paper clip plants make only the plain steel variety. Plastic-coated clips, which aren't subject to import tariffs, mostly come from China. These coated clips come in a profusion of shapes, some resembling feet, flowers or rubber duckies. But those novelties are only a sliver of the market.
ACCO marketing executives say they haven't done market research on paper clips for years. The company wasn't looking for the next big thing in paper fasteners until Mr. Peck, the inventor, came knocking a few years ago, says Tim Machin, a product manager at ACCO's European head office in Aylesbury, England.
Mr. Machin says he and his colleagues showed the Klix prototypes to 20 or 30 people, drawn from the ACCO staff and friends of employees. "Some really got it," Mr. Machin says. "Some didn't get it."
—Yoli Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com | Given the simplicity of the product, many people are surprised to learn that most paper clips used in the U.S. are manufactured domestically. Some 11 billion clips are sold each year. Now one maker hopes Americans will embrace a new model that costs far more. | 25.530612 | 0.959184 | 13.897959 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/state-streets-bankruptcy-plans-fail-federal-scrutiny-1460548810 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817161616id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/state-streets-bankruptcy-plans-fail-federal-scrutiny-1460548810 | State Street’s Bankruptcy Plans Fail Federal Scrutiny | 20160817161616 | Regulators told State Street Corp. to make significant revisions to its plan detailing how it would go through a potential bankruptcy.
The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Wednesday that they don’t think the bank’s so-called living will meets the requirements of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, a rebuke that could eventually impose higher capital requirements or other regulatory sanctions on the bank. | Regulators told State Street to make significant revisions to its plan detailing how it would go through a potential bankruptcy. | 3.571429 | 1 | 14.52381 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/ashley-olsen-george-condo-lunch | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817185647id_/http://www.people.com/article/ashley-olsen-george-condo-lunch | Ashley Olsen Seen Lunching with 59-Year-Old Artist George Condo | 20160817185647 | Ashley Olsen and George Condo
08/16/2016 AT 02:35 PM EDT
was spotted grabbing lunch with renowned artist George Condo in New York City over the weekend, PEOPLE confirms.
Olsen, 30, and Condo, 59, "sat in one of the nice corner booths usually more 'romantic' for couples because it's a cozy little spot," a source shares, adding, "They were definitely close but not touchy feely."
Skarstedt Gallery, who represents Condo, declined to comment.
Condo, who split from his wife of 26 years in 2015, has previously worked with Olsen's fashion house,
. Earlier this year, Condo sketched The Row's New York store, artwork which was debuted on the brand's Instagram.
previously reported that Olsen and Condo were seen together at the Mercer Hotel earlier this summer, but reps for both said it was a business meeting.
Condo, who shares two adult daughters with his ex, has been a fixture on the contemporary art scene for decades. He famously painted the album artwork for
, as well as the
commissioned by the rapper as a 2013 Christmas gift for wife
Olsen was last linked to director | George Condo and Ashley Olsen were reportedly "holding hands" at New York City's Balthazar over the weekend | 11.45 | 0.8 | 1.6 | low | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/08/01/celgene-kickback-whistleblower-suit/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160817211251id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/08/01/celgene-kickback-whistleblower-suit/?xid=yahoo_fortune | Whistleblower Suit Says Celgene Colluded With Charities to Drive Sales | 20160817211251 | Biotech giant Celgene is being accused of celg illegally colluding with medical charities to boost sales of its pricey cancer drugs.
The allegations are made in a whistleblower suit by former Celgene sales rep Beverly Brown and detailed in documents filed in federal court last week, according to Bloomberg. They claim that the company donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charities like the Patient Access Network (PAN) Foundation and the Chronic Disease Fund (CDF) “as part of a core business scheme to gain billions” from government health programs. The charities assist patients with accessing expensive blood cancer medications like Celgene’s Revlimid by helping them afford their drug co-pays. Annual out-of-pocket costs for the drug can exceed $10,000 for patients and had sales of $1.7 billion in the second quarter of 2016, the company announced last week.
Brown and her lawyers say that Celgene ran afoul of anti-kickback statutes by coordinating with the charities. Companies aren’t supposed to know exactly how their donated money is being spent and are barred from giving money directly to patients covered by Medicare prescription drug plans.
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But an expert witness hired by Brown’s legal team says that Celgene’s arrangements with the charities in question include significant requirements for the nonprofits to disclose detailed information like how many patients had applied for co-pay assistance and how much of Celgene’s donations were still remaining. That “strongly indicates that CDF and PAN Foundation provided Celgene with the information it needed to be sure it would fully fund all co-pays needed for its products and that it successfully aligned its funding to achieve this goal,” wrote the expert witness, University of Southern California pharmaceutical economics professor Joel Hay.
“Ms. Brown is wrong and her allegations are baseless,” a Celgene spokesperson told Fortune in an emailed statement. “[The government] has issued guidance related to donations by medical innovators to charitable patient assistance programs. Celgene complies with that guidance with respect to its donations to patient assistance programs.” The two charities mentioned in the case are not named as co-defendants.
Celgene has also received a subpoena from the Department of Justice regarding its patient assistance programs and how closely it works with medical charities. The Justice Department’s investigation is separate from Brown’s whistleblower case, which the DoJ has declined to join so far.
And the biotech isn’t the first to be scrutinized over its practices. Amid a maelstrom of criticism against biopharmaceutical companies for high drug costs and price hikes, major industry players have pointed to patient assistance programs, arguing that people who need the treatments would never have to pay the full list price. Still, that does little to help insurers and public health plans that must still pay exorbitant amounts of money for the medications.
Valeant Pharmaceuticals vrx is also being investigated for its drug pricing and patient assistance programs, and biotechs Gilead gild and Biogen biib have received similar federal subpoenas regarding patient assistance charities. | The biotech giant has denied any impropriety. | 71.875 | 0.625 | 0.875 | high | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/4373379/oneplus-3-review-specs-release/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160818022732id_/http://time.com:80/4373379/oneplus-3-review-specs-release/ | The Best Android Phone For the Price | 20160818022732 | The good: Beautiful and sleek design, Clean user interface that’s easy to navigate, Affordably priced, Fast fingerprint scanner The bad: Sometimes difficult to grip, Camera suffers in low light, No expandable storage Who should buy: Anyone looking for an affordable and reliable Android phone
Chinese startup OnePlus has been billing itself as the “flagship killer” ever since the company released its first smartphone, called the One, in 2014. The slogan is meant as a swipe at companies like Apple and Samsung, which charge upwards of $600 without a carrier agreement for their new smartphones. OnePlus claims its smartphones offer an experience that’s just as good — if not better — for a far cheaper price.
After testing the OnePlus One two years ago, many critics agreed with that assessment. Now, the company’s new phone is even better equipped to take on its rivals. The $399 OnePlus 3 is a noticeable improvement on last year’s OnePlus 2. The design feels slimmer and more polished, the battery charges faster, and it now includes NFC for mobile payments. Overall, it’s an excellent and affordable choice for Android fans that want a reliable phone that covers all the basics.
The OnePlus 3 is the first phone from the company to be completely made of metal and glass, giving the phone a more premium feel that helps justify its higher price tag (last year’s model started at $329 at launch). The new model feels like a cross between an iPhone 6s Plus and an HTC 10 in terms of design, although OnePlus’ device is more flat and rectangular than HTC’s phone (I prefer the OnePlus to HTC’s handset.)
The most noticeable physical difference between the third generation OnePlus and its predecessor is its aluminum back. In the past, OnePlus used a coarse sandstone panel for the back of its phones, which gave them a distinctive feel. The new design is more attractive, but it also makes the OnePlus 3 look more like lots of other phones on the market. The slick aluminum feels a bit slippery as well, sometimes making it difficult to grip the phone without using a case.
The phone’s home button also includes a fingerprint sensor that unlocks the device as soon as your finger touches the scanner — it’s among the speediest fingerprint readers I’ve ever used. Since the home button is flush with the device’s body, it cuts out the need to depress the button to wake up the phone’s screen and rest your finger for an additional second. In addition to featuring the standard volume controls and power button along the side of the phone, the OnePlus 3 comes with a slider just for managing notifications, making it easier to switch to silent mode without unlocking the phone.
OnePlus, unlike some phone manufacturers and carriers, doesn’t heavily modify Android by adding its own apps and services. On Samsung phones, for example, you might find two different apps that do the same thing, such as Samsung’s email app and Google’s Gmail — not to mention the apps and widgets some carriers add to Android phones. (The version of Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge I reviewed included a whole folder of Verizon apps.)
The lack of extra apps — “bloatware” — makes the overall experience feel cleaner and more enjoyable. Among the few modifications is what OnePlus calls its Memo Shelf, which is a home screen for keeping notes and finding things like the weather and frequently used apps. Although I didn’t use the Memo Shelf too often, I appreciate its slick interface that doesn’t stray too far from the plain version of Android.
The software does support some optional shortcuts, like the ability to launch the camera by drawing an O on the phone’s screen even when the display is turned off. This is optional, though, and doesn’t interfere with the general experience when not in use.
The OnePlus 3’s camera captures clear, bright images in ideal conditions, like daylight or a well-lit room. But it suffers in low-light performance compared to its competitors. The phone comes with a 16-megapixel camera with optical image stabilization, a standard feature on today’s flagship phones that accounts for the blurriness that may occur from shaky hands. Those who shoot video on their phones will benefit from the additional electronic stabilization on the OnePlus 3, which eliminates wobbling from the captured footage.
To test the OnePlus 3’s camera, I compared it against images from the Galaxy S7 Edge, iPhone 6s Plus, and Nexus 6P. The photos below, which were taken at the same location during the same time, show little difference. The most noticeable discrepancy is in the iPhone 6s Plus’ photo, which shows deeper greens. When examining the image closely, however, I did notice that the white flowers in OnePlus 3’s picture looked slightly yellowish compared to those in the other photos. Despite the subtle color differences, the OnePlus 3’s camera was generally reliable.
You can really see how these cameras differ by testing them in low-light situations. I snapped these photos of my cat in a dimly lit room with no flash, and he’s barely visible in the image taken on the OnePlus 3.
Battery life isn’t a problem for the OnePlus 3; I was able to churn through roughly a day and a half without having to plug it in. This is about the same battery life I’ve been seeing from other similarly-sized phones, like the iPhone 6s Plus and Galaxy S7 Edge. Battery life always varies depending on what the device is being used for (Turning up the screen’s brightness, using your phone as a hotspot, and turning on Bluetooth are known to be battery drainers), but the phone lasted for more than a day when used for basic tasks. For those instances when you do need to plug in the OnePlus 3, you won’t have to do so for long. The phone comes with fast-charging tech that the company claims can replenish the battery by 60% in 30 minutes. In my own testing, I found that the battery did indeed charge quickly: it jumped from 19% to 70% in about 25 minutes.
The OnePlus 3’s gorgeous design, affordable price, smooth performance, generally good camera make it among the best smartphones I’ve used this year. With the OnePlus 3, it’s clear the company emphasized the points that matter most to the general smartphone shopper, like the way the phone looks, how long its battery lasts, and how easy it is to use. It doesn’t check all the boxes (there’s no wireless charging or expandable storage), but for $400, I didn’t expect it to. In a lower-end market that’s increasingly competitive, with even companies like Apple making more affordable smartphones, OnePlus’ latest effort delivers.
4 out of 5 stars | What it's like to use the OnePlus 3 | 147.222222 | 0.888889 | 1.777778 | high | medium | mixed |
http://time.com/4409879/republican-convention-peter-thiel-gay/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160818022953id_/http://time.com:80/4409879/republican-convention-peter-thiel-gay/ | Trump Campaign Downplays Peter Thiel | 20160818022953 | Correction appended, July 18, 2016
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel will be a rare openly gay person to speak at a Republican National Convention, but Donald Trump’s campaign downplayed any significance.
Speaking at a press conference before the convention opens, Trump’s convention manager, Paul Manafort, said that Thiel was invited to speak simply because he’s a friend of Trump who can speak credibly about business.
“He’ll be talking about Donald Trump the man he knows and as a successful entrepreneur,” Manafort said.
“People are going to be speaking at this convention based on what they want to say, not on any particular sexual preference or things like that, so I don’t think that’s the basis for why he’s on the program,” he added.
The Republican platform approved last week by a committee includes provisions opposing same-sex marriage and transgender protections pushed by the Obama Administration and embracing the controversial practice of conversion therapy.
But Manafort cited Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus in arguing that the GOP is “an open-tent party” in which people with different views could come together.
Thiel is one of the cofounders of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is known for libertarian views on politics and donated to Carly Fiorina’s super PAC before backing Trump.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the number of openly gay speakers at Republican conventions. Thiel is the third. | They say Peter Thiel will be speaking about business. | 28.1 | 1 | 2.8 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/03/serb-leader-karadzic-guilty-bosnia-genocide-160324143936393.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160818100503id_/http://www.aljazeera.com:80/news/2016/03/serb-leader-karadzic-guilty-bosnia-genocide-160324143936393.html | Ex-Serb leader Karadzic guilty of Srebrenica genocide | 20160818100503 | Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was found guilty of genocide on Thursday over the Srebrenica massacre and crimes against humanity committed during the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia.
United Nations judges at the international tribunal in The Hague said Karadzic was guilty of 10 of the 11 counts brought against him during the five-year trial, and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.Â
Karadzic, 70, is the highest-ranking person to face a reckoning before the UN tribunal over a war two decades ago in which 100,000 people were killed as rival armies carved up Bosnia along ethnic lines.
Presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon said Karadzic was criminally responsible for extermination, murder, attacking civilians, and terror for overseeing the deadly 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, during the 1992-95 war.
Karadzic used a campaign of sniping and shelling, targeting the city's civilians as a way of furthering his political goals, Kwon said.
Karadzic's lawyer, Peter Robinson, said his client was "astonished" by the ruling.
"President Karadzic was disappointed. He doesn't feel he is legally responsible for any crimes. Nobody has really won from today's judgment," Robinson said. Â
Karadzic will appeal against the convictions, a process that could take up to three years, he said.
Satko Mujagic, a former prisoner held by Serb forces for more than 200 days, told Al Jazeera that Karadzic was responsible for "ethnic cleansing and blood".
"I'm very glad that this man finally got what he deserved," he said.
Mujagic said the verdict should also have a broader effect on Bosnia's Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. Â
"Honestly, I hope this sentence will mean something for people in Bosnia, because many people deny what has happened - people deny war crimes. I hope this means something for reconciliation in the country," Mujagic said.
About 100 survivors gathered outside the UN tribunal as judges inside read out verdicts on some of the worst atrocities committed in Europe since World War II.
READ MORE: Sarajevo - memories of war
One banner read: "Srebrenica, we remember the 8,372 victims of genocide."
Karadzic had long been accused of orchestrating the 1995 slaughter after Serb forces seized the UN's Srebrenica "safe area" in eastern Bosnia.
Al Jazeera's Emma Hayward, reporting from The Hague, said the pain of some survivors hadn't gone away, but added that there was a sense of relief among the families and victims after the verdict.
"When we heard about Srebrenica, we heard about the Muslim men and boys who were taken away from their families and systematically killed," said Hayward.
Some Bosnians outside the tribunal denounced the 40-year sentence saying it was grossly inadequate for the mass crimes committed.
"For me as a victim of genocide, I'm afraid this is some political game," said Munira Subasic. "But I still believe in this court's prosecutors, probably they'll prepare more evidence for the appeals process so we hope to be satisfied at the very end."
Karadzic was also acquitted on another genocide charge relating to events in 1992, a move that angered some Bosnians.
"Genocide didn't only happen in Srebrenica but across all of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as persecution, suffering and everything we lived through," said Zumra Sehumirovic outside the court.Â
A psychiatrist by vocation, Karadzic emerged as the Bosnian Serb political leader shortly before Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a series of wars in 1991. His military chief, general Ratko Mladic, is still on trial on similar charges.
Karadzic protested his innocence in a rare interview published by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network on Wednesday.
"I know what I wanted, what I did, even what I dreamed of, and there is no reasonable court that would convict me," he told the website in an email interview.
"The unnecessary killing of a single man is horrifying, let alone certainly several hundred at least ... Those who did it are the enemies of the Serbs first, then enemies of those families, then of the Muslim community," Karadzic said.
To Bosnian Muslims and Croats, Karadzic is synonymous with war, death, and destruction.
Bosnian Serbs, however, view him as a national hero who created a Serb Republic - a state within a state, which survived under the 1995 Dayton peace agreement.
Such sentiments are widely shared across the border in Serbia.Â
Some residents of Belgrade criticised Thursday's verdict. "This is a fascist decision, there is no justice and he was convicted for nothing," said Bosko Solic. | UN judges rule Karadzic is guilty of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre and crimes against humanity in Bosnian war. | 43.333333 | 0.904762 | 2.428571 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-designer-who-is-dominating-the-tonys-1430257636 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160818141220id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/the-designer-who-is-dominating-the-tonys-1430257636 | The Designer Who Is Dominating the Tonys | 20160818141220 | It would be unusual for an actor to get nominated for four Oscars in one year. In a remarkable achievement, set and costume designer Bob Crowley on Tuesday received four Tony nominations for work on three current Broadway productions. Tony officials say that Mr. Crowley is the first nonproducer to receive four nods in a single year.
“It’s quite a moment,” said Mr. Crowley, calling from his studio in London. “I’ve been lucky to work... | In a remarkable achievement, set and costume designer Bob Crowley received four Tony nominations—the first nonproducer to receive four nods in a single year. A look at the man and his methods. | 2.405405 | 0.864865 | 7.72973 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hackers-show-they-can-take-control-of-moving-jeep-cherokee-1437522078 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160818145109id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/hackers-show-they-can-take-control-of-moving-jeep-cherokee-1437522078 | Hackers Show They Can Take Control of Moving Jeep Cherokee | 20160818145109 | Two computer-security researchers demonstrated they could take control of a moving Jeep Cherokee using the vehicle’s wireless communications system, raising new questions about the safety of Internet-connected cars.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles FCAU -0.07 % NV, owner of the Jeep brand, on Tuesday blasted the researchers for disclosing their ability to hack into the sport-utility vehicle’s software and manipulate its air conditioning, stereo controls and control its speed by disabling the transmission from a laptop many miles away.
The hackers, one of whom works for Twitter Inc. TWTR -3.39 % and is a former analyst for the National Security Agency, counter they are bringing attention to an issue auto makers have for too long ignored.
Nearly all modern automobiles, not just those manufactured by Fiat Chrysler, feature computer controls that are potential targets for hackers.
The problem has caught the attention of most major car companies. General Motors Co. GM -0.60 % , for example, has been working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on ways to protect the loads of data that a vehicle carries, and fortify a car’s control system from outside tampering.
Auto executives generally admit the industry is behind in tackling car cybersecurity. Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton is pushing them to develop common security measures.
The Jeep manufacturer, in touch with the hackers for months, released a software patch last week that it said can fix the security flaw. Consumers must either take their vehicle to a dealership or use a USB stick to obtain the update.
The cyberattack demonstration comes amid concerns over how susceptible U.S. automobiles are to hackers taking control of vehicles or accessing motorists’ private information. Other researchers next month plan to show how they can hack a Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA 0.79 % vehicle.
Tesla said members of its security team would attend a conference in Las Vegas to discuss its security, but it isn’t making a vehicle available to hackers. Last year, it sent a manager to the Def Con hacker convention in Las Vegas to recruit hackers to test its vehicles.
It isn’t clear how many vehicles are affected by the Jeep security flaw. Fiat Chrysler this year through June 30 sold more than 105,000 Jeep Cherokees, according to Autodata Corp. The researchers believe their hack would work on any late 2013, 2014 or early 2015 vehicle with Fiat Chrysler’s Uconnect system.
“Under no circumstances does FCA condone or believe it’s appropriate to disclose ‘how-to information’ that would potentially encourage, or help enable hackers to gain unauthorized and unlawful access to vehicle systems,” the auto maker said in a statement.
The two hackers, Charlie Miller, a Twitter employee based in St. Louis, and Chris Valasek, a director at the security firm IOActive, demonstrated in an article and video published in technology magazine Wired their ability to wirelessly access a vehicle’s systems. The researchers, who have been probing vulnerabilities in connected automobiles for years, previously could only take over a car by hacking from a laptop connected by cable to a moving vehicle.
Mr. Miller defended releasing the information, arguing he is improving auto safety by drawing attention to the issue. “We both want the same thing, to keep drivers safe from a cyberattack,” said Mr. Miller, who used to work on hacking tools for the NSA. “All I can do is point out flaws in their vehicles, get other researchers working on this issue and make suggestions.”
Messrs. Miller and Valasek have kept some of the flaws they uncovered under wraps to prevent copy cats from wreaking havoc on the highway. But they do show in a video that they can effectively disengage a car’s transmission or, when it is moving at slower speeds, its brakes. The two researchers say they will show more details during a talk at the Black Hat hacker conference next month.
In February, staff for Sen. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) released a report claiming that nearly all cars and trucks on U.S. roads feature wireless technology prone to hacking or privacy intrusions. The report queried more than a dozen manufacturers in light of studies demonstrating how hackers can infiltrate vehicles to gain control of steering, braking and other functions. The report also raised concerns about companies sweeping up information from navigation systems and storing data with third parties.
Sens. Markey and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) on Tuesday introduced legislation that would require NHTSA officials and the Federal Trade Commission to develop standards for securing vehicles and protecting consumers’ privacy.
The legislation would also create a “cyber dashboard” ratings system to inform consumers how well a vehicle protects against hackers.
“Drivers shouldn’t have to choose between being connected and being protected,” Sen. Markey said in a statement. “We need clear rules of the road that protect cars from hackers and American families from data trackers.”
—Mike Ramsey contributed to this article.
Write to Danny Yadron at danny.yadron@wsj.com and Mike Spector at mike.spector@wsj.com | Two computer-security researchers demonstrated they could take control of a moving Jeep Cherokee using the vehicle’s wireless communications system, raising new questions about the safety of Internet-connected cars. | 26.942857 | 1 | 35 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.wsj.com/articles/think-you-have-the-drive-of-an-olympian-think-again-1471215255 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160818152305id_/http://www.wsj.com:80/articles/think-you-have-the-drive-of-an-olympian-think-again-1471215255 | Think You Have the Drive of an Olympian? Think Again | 20160818152305 | Until I noticed that Robert Scheidt is still competing for the Brazilian team in Rio, I felt too old to harbor regrets about trading my Olympic-sailing dream for a newsroom keyboard. But here’s the thing: Scheidt is 43. I’m only 42.
It’s not that I now imagine myself a potential Olympian; my primary exercise these days comes from a standing desk. I’m certainly not spinning any fantasies about prevailing against Scheidt, scheduled to compete in the medal race for the men’s Laser on Monday. One of the greatest sailors of... | The idea of somebody in their 40s competing in these Olympics has resurrected a question for the author: Could he have done it? | 4.32 | 0.44 | 0.52 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/08/16/diaper-wearing-monkey-attacked-a-wal-mart-employee-in-a-parking/21452928/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20160818181605id_/http://www.aol.com:80/article/2016/08/16/diaper-wearing-monkey-attacked-a-wal-mart-employee-in-a-parking/21452928/ | Diaper-wearing monkey attacked a Wal-Mart employee in a parking lot | 20160818181605 | Never underestimate the power of a monkey in a disposable baby diaper.
In a Walmart parking lot in Lancaster, Ohio, on Sunday, a pet monkey wearing a diaper escaped from a parked recreational vehicle. A Walmart employee proceeded to try and corral the monkey near the carts, only to be attacked.
In a video taken by customer Richelle Stewart, the employee struggles to keep the monkey in control.
"Let him go, let him go, let him go," a woman, presumed to be the monkey's owner, yells at the Walmart employee. "If he bites you, they will put him down."
Here's full video of the incident.
"I saw the monkey and he was just standing on the carts," Stewart later told local news station NBC4. "The monkey had escaped from a nearby camper. And we saw the cart guy from Walmart coming over to help her."
A spokesperson for Walmart later said that the employee, while attacked, was not bitten by the monkey. The monkey's owner appears to have pushed the monkey quickly out of the way.
The Department of Agriculture is currently investigating whether or not the owner purchased the monkey legally. The internet is now researching why the monkey was wearing a diaper.
It's been a hard month for Walmart parking lots. Just last week, a swarm of 30,000-60,000 bees attacked random customers in a Walmart parking lot.
Customer savings comes at a cost.
RELATED: Cute monkey sings and dances: | Never underestimate the power of a monkey in a disposable baby diaper. Especially if you are in a Wal-Mart parking lot, apparently. | 10.678571 | 0.785714 | 6.5 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/amy-schumer-kurt-metzger-charlie-rose-interview | http://web.archive.org/web/20160820190844id_/http://www.people.com/article/amy-schumer-kurt-metzger-charlie-rose-interview | Amy Schumer on Kurt Metzger's Rape Rants : People.com | 20160820190844 | 08/18/2016 AT 09:30 PM EDT
has expressed her disappointment in friend and
Though Schumer explained that Metzger's "out-there male perspective" is a "great" contribution to her Comedy Central show, she wants "online trollers" and fans to not "attach" her to his
In a recent statement posted to
, Metzger clarified his earlier comments. "My point, which I could have made more tactfully, was this: Why did the story of what actually happened come out AFTER this guy is declared a rapist?" he wrote. "I will listen to ANY victim's account. All that was given initially is 'psssst Aaron's a rapist pass it on.' My point was that no one seems disturbed by this. No one sees that down the road, next time we might get it wrong."
Earlier, Schumer told Charlie Rose about being associated with Metzger's rant, "That is not representative of me at all." She added, "I've asked him, 'Can you just stop?' Because it comes back to me. Because he writes for the show, it's a bigger story, because of our connection."
Adding, "Whatever tangent he's gone off on, I have not agreed, and it's been really upsetting to me seeing someone that I care about hurt themselves like this."
, and that Metzger has not been fired amid the backlash of his Facebook post.
"Right now there are no plans for the TV show to come back in the near future, so nobody is on my staff," Schumer shared. "There are no writers. People, they want his head; they want to burn him at the stake. I want them to not attach me to what he's writing."
Rather, Schumer urges everyone to focus on "the real problem, which is people understanding about rape. What's consensual and what's not."
She concluded: "Let's focus on actually getting the problem done. I was sexually assaulted. I have encouraged women to come out... I want men to hear what happened so that there's no confusion, because people have different understandings of what sexual assault is, what rape is. Let's all get on the same page so that it happens less."
Schumer's full interview with Charlie Rose airs on PBS Aug. 19. | "I've asked him, 'Can you just stop?' Because it comes back to me," Schumer told Charlie Rose | 18.68 | 1 | 15.16 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/24/19/49/bad-poll-puts-heat-on-wa-govt-barnett | http://web.archive.org/web/20160825184432id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/24/19/49/bad-poll-puts-heat-on-wa-govt-barnett | Bad poll puts heat on WA govt, Barnett | 20160825184432 | The WA government is on track to lose the 2017 election under premier Colin Barnett, according to a private poll involving nearly 11,000 people and commissioned by Perth businessmen.
The poll by ReachTel found swings against the Liberal-National government and that Labor's Mark McGowan was a more popular leader than Mr Barnett, raising speculation his eight-year stint as premier will come under more pressure, according to News Limited.
The poll reportedly shows the government could win the election if it changed leaders, with some prominent businessmen wanting Transport Minister Dean Nalder to replace Mr Barnett.
Prominent investment banker John Poynton was among the Perth businessmen who paid thousands of dollars for the poll of more than 11 safe and marginal WA electorates. | New polling puts WA's Liberal National government under Premier Colin Barnett on track to lose the state election. | 6.9 | 0.8 | 2.5 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/jimmy-kimmel-offers-protection-new-neighbor-kendall-jenner | http://web.archive.org/web/20160826202712id_/http://www.people.com/article/jimmy-kimmel-offers-protection-new-neighbor-kendall-jenner | Jimmy Kimmel Offers to Protect New Neighbor Kendall Jenner : People.com | 20160826202712 | 08/25/2016 AT 12:20 PM EDT
recently moved into her own home, and it just so happens that
However, the late show host revealed that not everyone was excited about the A-list addition to the neighborhood.
"Our neighbors were up in arms when you moved onto the block," Kimmel told the model on
Wednesday. "There was a whole thing with emails that went on."
They weren't the only ones concerned with the move. The reality star's mother,
also had reservations about the 20-year-old living on her own. But the model used the late show host to comfort her worried parent.
"I was like, 'You know what? No, it's okay because Jimmy Kimmel lives right across the street,' " Jenner told him. "Like, I don't know him, but maybe if anything goes down, he'll save my life."
Kimmel was happy to oblige.
"Yeah! I'm the captain of the neighborhood watch," he said. "If you have any trouble, don't worry – I will shuffle down in my underpants and take care of whatever is going on."
Jenner recently opened up about
and opting to upgrade to her new Hollywood Hills digs, which was formerly owned by
"I wanted to entertain properly; I wanted to go outside; I wanted to be able to walk places; I really wanted a pool," she shared. "I've now swam almost every day I've been here – and at night, too (THE best!!!)."
But with a bigger home comes unexpected challenges, as Jenner quickly discovered while decking out the 6-bedroom, 4.5-bath space.
"I have SO much to do!" she wrote. "You don't realize all of the little things when you come from a smaller space – like guest bathrooms, lol!" | The late night host also revealed other neighbors were "up in arms" before her move | 22.058824 | 0.882353 | 1.470588 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/28/10/52/dastyari-gives-turnbull-18-months-as-pm | http://web.archive.org/web/20160829122334id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/28/10/52/dastyari-gives-turnbull-18-months-as-pm | Dastyari gives Turnbull 18 months as PM | 20160829122334 | Labor frontbencher Sam Dastyari will be surprised if Malcolm Turnbull lasts longer than 18 months, let alone a three-year parliamentary term.
In particular, the Labor senator says former Liberal leader Tony Abbott is out and about running his own campaign.
"You don't suddenly start going around the country giving speeches on the economy as a backbencher from Waringah," Senator Dastyari told Sky News on Sunday. | Labor senator Sam Dastyari does not expect Malcolm Turnbull to last more than 18 months as prime minister with Tony Abbott lurking in the wings. | 3 | 0.576923 | 1.115385 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/07/03/34/australia-to-clock-up-25-years-of-growth | http://web.archive.org/web/20160907141319id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/07/03/34/australia-to-clock-up-25-years-of-growth | Australia aiming for world record growth | 20160907141319 | Australia has clocked up 25 years of uninterrupted growth and could well break the world record held by the Netherlands.
The Dutch chalked up the longest ever growth run at 26 and a half years between 1981 and 2008.
"We have a good chance of overtaking them," Commonwealth Bank chief economist Michael Blythe says.
Treasurer Scott Morrison applauded the achievement, but said this was not the time to be complacent.
The latest national accounts released on Wednesday show the economy grew at an upbeat annual pace of 3.3 per cent in the 2015/16 financial year, the fastest clip in four years.
"The result today once again shows the Australian economy is taking ground, we continue to fight for every inch of growth in a very difficult and challenging global economy," Mr Morrison told reporters in Canberra.
The economy is growing faster than every G7 economy, well over twice as fast as the United States and Canada and well above the OECD average.
Mr Morrison said the result was a tribute to every Australian who has gone out there and got a job, that is running or has started a small business.
Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen also welcomed the figures, saying it was a result of reforms of past governments and the Rudd Labor government for steering the economy through the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
However, he said there are elements of the report which were concerning.
The accounts showed growth halved to 0.5 per cent in the June quarter, down from a perky, but downwardly, revised 1.0 per cent in the previous three months.
This was partly the result of exports detracting 0.2 percentage points from GDP in the quarter after an exceptionally strong result in the previous three months, but government spending contributed 0.5 percentage points.
"The only reason we have a positive quarter of growth is a surge in government spending ... which is ironic for a government that lectures people of the need to reduce expenditure," Mr Bowen told reporters in Sydney.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry boss James Pearson said while a rise in profits also supported growth in the quarter, business investment remains the weakest area of the Australian economy.
"So the parliament needs to take action to boost our international competitiveness, through workplace relations reform, budget repair and cutting the company tax rate," Mr Pearson told AAP.
The nation's terms of trade did manage to rise 2.3 per cent in the quarter, the first increase in over two years, reflecting the resilience of commodity prices in the quarter.
However, this gauge of national income was still 34 per cent below the peak seen during the mining boom. | The national accounts will confirm the Australian economy has clocked up a quarter of a century of uninterrupted economic growth. | 24.238095 | 0.809524 | 1.666667 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.thepostgame.com/angelique-kerber-legit-rival-serena-williams | http://web.archive.org/web/20160908162215id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/angelique-kerber-legit-rival-serena-williams | Angelique Kerber, Legit Rival To Serena Williams | 20160908162215 | Angelique Kerber made her U.S. Open debut in 2007 as a 19-year-old. The big-swinging, left-handed German's first opponent was two-time champion Serena Williams at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Williams handled Kerber, 6-3, 7-5, and they have not met at the U.S. Open since, but if they do face off this year, it will be in the final as the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the world, respectively.
Obviously, matches need to be played in the meantime, but as the tournament inches toward its final weekend -- Kerber won her quarterfinal Tuesday against 2015 runner-up Roberta Vinci, 7-5,6-0 -- the stars are aligning for a Williams-Kerber title match.
And that would be good for the sport, considering Kerber, now 28, is Williams' first legitimate rival in nearly a decade.
Garbiñe Muguruza beat Williams in the French Open final. Vinci upset her in last year's U.S. Open semifinals. Sloane Stephens took down Williams in the Australian Open quarterfinals three years ago. Samantha Stosur beat her in the 2011 U.S. Open final.
But those were all one-time deals.
What about Maria Sharapova, Victoria Azarenka, Agnieszka Radwanska and Caroline Wozniacki, who have all been among the top players in the world for the last half decade? Nope. None of these players has ever given Williams consistent adversity. Williams has not had consistent rivals since Justin Henin and sister Venus were in their primes. From 2003-2007, Henin was 5-2 against Williams. Through 2008, Venus was 8-10 versus Serena (she is 3-6 since).
So what makes Kerber different from recent failed rivals? Well, for starters, she has already accomplished task one: Beating Williams in a Grand Slam. Kerber won a three-set affair in the Australian Open final this year.
Second, she fights fire with fire in a way Williams has only seen from Venus. Kerber is listed at 5-8 and 150 pounds, nearly identical to Serena's 5-9 and 155 pounds. Although she lacks height, Kerber, like Williams, relies on fierce groundstrokes to wear down opponents. On top of that, she comes from the left side. Challenging the Williams sisters on hard court or grass has been a death wish for the better part of the past decade. But Kerber is a European constructed for fast play.
In 2016, Kerber's confidence is through the roof. She has two titles this year, including the Australian Open, and she has reached four other tour finals. She fell to Williams in two sets at the Wimbledon final and she earned a silver medal in Rio, losing to Monica Puig in three sets in the gold medal match.
"I'm not thinking about quarters, semis or whatever," Kerber said after beating Vinci. "I'm just going there to play a good match and to win the match. I know that I can beat everybody, and this is what also gives me a lot of confidence and motivation for going out there and playing with a lot of emotion."
Kerber started the year ranked No. 10 in the world and jumped up to No. 2 after Wimbledon. If she wins the U.S. Open and Williams fails to make the final, Kerber would become the No. 1 player in the world. Williams has held the top spot since Feb. 18, 2013. No German woman has led the rankings since Steffi Graf on March 30, 1997.
Graf's 377 total weeks as No. 1 are the most all-time, although, at 309 weeks, Serena is closing in. Her 186 consecutive weeks right now are tied with Graf for the most in one stretch.
"This would mean a lot to me," Kerber says of being world No. 1. "I mean, when I was a kid I was always dreaming to be No. 1. Let's see. I mean, there are still matches to go. Serena has to play, as well."
Even if both make the final and Williams preserves her ranking, a Kerber title would inch her closer to snatching the crown from Serena before year's end.
"It's always an honor for me to play [at the #usopen]. @AngeliqueKerber is back in the final four. @chase https://t.co/z8w1uxhI8j
— US Open Tennis (@usopen) September 6, 2016
Kerber is humble and charming off the court. She is talented but not arrogant. She knows she can be a dominant player. She knows she can beat Williams in the American's own building. But she is not about to start a war of words.
Five years ago, Kerber actually made her first Grand Slam semifinal in Flushing, charging through the draw as an unranked 23-year-old before losing to eventual champion Samantha Stosur.
"I had nothing to lose," Kerber remembers. "I came here. I just played great tennis. I think a lot of things [changed] since then. Now I'm a completely different player, I think. I have a lot of confidence. I know how to win big matches. I know how it feels playing on the stadium.
"I'm also enjoying it more than years ago. I'm trying to go there and enjoy the atmosphere and also win the matches. Years ago, I came here and I had nothing to lose and my goal was playing good, and now my goal is winning the matches."
Other players can say what they want, but only two players could legitimately say they arrived in Queens with the feeling of championship or bust: Williams and Kerber.
This is so special for me... I'm back in the @usopen semi-finals where it all started in 2011! #TeamAngie #NYC pic.twitter.com/W2ZbwZ7WCt
— Angelique Kerber (@AngeliqueKerber) September 6, 2016
Kerber has a semifinal match looming against either two-time finalist Caroline Wozniacki or No. 48 Anastasija Sevastova. Meanwhile, Williams has a challenging quarterfinal matchup against No. 5 seed Simona Halep. After that, it would be No. 92 Ana Konjuh or No. 10 seed Karolina Pliskovain the semis. If Kerber and Williams do their job, the top two players will meet in the final Saturday.
And then we will really see what this rivalry is made of.
Angelique Kerber, Arthur Ashe Stadium, Australian Open, Caroline Wozniacki, french open, Germany, Justine Henin, Maria Sharapova, Roberta Vinci, Serena Williams, Steffi Graf, Tennis, US Open, USA, Venus Williams, Wimbledon, World No. 1, WTA Tour | German lefty Angelique Kerber is establishing herself as a formidable rival to Serena Williams at the U.S. Open. | 68.157895 | 0.789474 | 1.526316 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.thepostgame.com/ray-lewis-colin-kaepernick-take-flag-out | http://web.archive.org/web/20160910125100id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/ray-lewis-colin-kaepernick-take-flag-out | Ray Lewis On Colin Kaepernick: Take Flag Out | 20160910125100 | Ray Lewis experienced a fair amount of controversy in his career. So of course he is not going to shy away from addressing Colin Kaepernick's national-anthem protest.
Speaking on Undisputed -- Fox Sports 1's new show featuring Skip Bayless, Shannon Sharpe and Joy Taylor -- Lewis, who played in the NFL from 1996-2012, offered some constructive criticism for Kaepernick:
"My only advice to Colin Kaepernick is this, listen: I understand what you're trying to do, but take the flag out of it," Lewis says. "I have uncles, I have brothers who walked out of my house going into the military that said 'I will never see you again.' To understand that, I will always respect that part of what our patriotism should be and that's the side, I think if Colin really just steps back, because to affect change, if you don't have a real solution, if you ain't seen as a true activist to go into these hoods and do these things on a daily basis and not just jump up and protest because you're sick of this one thing … we've been sick of racism for 400 plus years."
“I understand what you're trying to do…take the flag out of it.” — @raylewis to Colin Kaepernick pic.twitter.com/XPYpJ9L3mE
— UNDISPUTED (@undisputed) September 8, 2016
Lewis, 41, is 13 years older than Kaepernick, but they faced off in Super Bowl XLVII when the Ravens beat 49ers.
While other athletes and public figures such as Stephen Curry, Megan Rapinoe and Barack Obama have come to Kaepernick's defense, Lewis opted to support his cause but disagree with his method.
The 49ers open the season on Monday Night Football, with Kaepernick listed as the backup quarterback to Blaine Gabbert.
Here is the full clip of Lewis' appearance on FS1:
-- Follow Jeffrey Eisenband on Twitter @JeffEisenband.
american flag, Baltimore Ravens, Colin Kaepernick, Flag, Football, Military, National Anthem, NFL, Ray Lewis, respect, San Francisco 49ers, Sitting, undisputed | Ray Lewis bashes Colin Kaepernick for national anthem protest and disrespect of American flag. | 26.933333 | 0.866667 | 1.4 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/13/00/42/david-cameron-resigns-as-mp | http://web.archive.org/web/20160913154708id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/13/00/42/david-cameron-resigns-as-mp | David Cameron resigns, ponders future | 20160913154708 | David Cameron has so far made "no firm decisions" about his future career after leaving Westminster, aides say.
Sources close to the former prime minister - who quit as MP for Witney on Monday - said he had not signed any contracts or made any agreements about future jobs.
But speculation is buzzing that, after leaving the Commons aged just 49, Mr Cameron will take the opportunity to capitalise on lucrative opportunities now likely to be available in business, speech-making and authorship.
Most tantalising to Westminster-watchers is the prospect of a memoir giving Mr Cameron's version of life within the Tory-Lib Dem coalition and inside the unsuccessful campaign to keep Britain in the EU.
But after a shorter and less controversial premiership than his predecessor Tony Blair, Mr Cameron may struggle to match the PS4.6 million ($A8.1 million) advance reportedly given to the Labour PM - money which was anyway donated to the Royal British Legion.
More profitable routes to pursue may include consultancies, directorships or advisory roles with major firms which are ready to pay generously for the experience, contacts and gravitas offered by senior former politicians.
And Mr Cameron could doubtless command high fees for appearances on the lucrative after-dinner speech circuit.
However, with his wife Samantha's family background providing substantial independent wealth, Mr Cameron may judge it preferable to steer clear of the reputational risks involved in the kind of money-making ventures that have characterised Mr Blair's post-Downing Street career.
There was some speculation that he might instead opt for high-profile charitable roles.
Announcing his decision to quit the Commons, Mr Cameron said only that he hoped to "still contribute in terms of public service and to the country". | Former British prime minister David Cameron has stood down from his role as MP for Witney. | 19.705882 | 0.764706 | 1.941176 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/15/08/09/police-hunt-bmw-stalker-in-melbourne | http://web.archive.org/web/20160916194025id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/15/08/09/police-hunt-bmw-stalker-in-melbourne | Police hunt BMW stalker in Melbourne | 20160916194025 | A BMW driver believed to be in his 30s is wanted by police after stalking an 18-year-old woman in Melbourne's north.
Police say the man of African appearance has, on two separate occasions, pulled up alongside the woman in Wollert and demanded she "get in the car".
In the first incident the man initially drove past "smiling and waving at her and pushing the car horn" but later got out of his car before the 18-year-old screamed and fled. | Victoria Police are searching for a man in a black BMW who has been stalking an 18-year-old woman in Melbourne. | 4.130435 | 0.695652 | 3.130435 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/15/08/44/mps-take-hanson-to-task-over-speech | http://web.archive.org/web/20160916195001id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/15/08/44/mps-take-hanson-to-task-over-speech | MPs take Hanson to task over speech | 20160916195001 | Pauline Hanson has been labelled a "one-trick pony" as federal MPs react to the One Nation leader's explosive first speech to the Senate in which she warned Australia is being swamped by Muslims.
Labor backbencher Graham Perrett condemned the senator for peddling division and fear.
"She's a one-trick pony, and that trick is fear and division," he told reporters in Canberra on Thursday.
Senator Hanson called for a ban on Muslim immigration, as well as a halt to all immigration.
"We are in danger of being swamped by Muslims who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own," she told parliament
"If we don't make changes now there will be no hope in the future.
"Have no doubt we will be living under Sharia law and treated as second-class citizens with second-class rights if we keep heading down the path with the attitude 'she'll be right mate'."
Labor frontbencher Linda Burney said Senator Hanson's speech was "outdated, outmoded, inaccurate and pretty outrageous".
She condemned the senator for blaming domestic violence victims for their plight.
"We will not tolerate hate speech, we will not tolerate racism and we certainly will not ever endorse the idea that family violence is acceptable," Ms Burney said.
Liberal frontbencher Craig Laundy, who represents the multicultural Sydney seat of Reid, reminded people that parliament was a contest of ideas and acknowledged some people would take exception to what Senator Hanson said.
The best way to combat such views was to "continue to live shoulder to shoulder" in harmony.
"You're entitled to an opinion in Australia - that's freedom of speech," he said.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale defended his party's walkout during what he called a "vulgar speech".
"We wouldn't dignify it by staying in there," he told Sky News.
Labor frontbencher Tony Burke says the silliest argument anyone could make about Senator Hanson was to claim she was stupid.
"She is smart. She is strategic. She is calculating," he said.
"Pauline Hanson wanted the exact conversation across Australia that we're having now, that the media is running now."
Labor colleague Penny Wong said prejudice and fear could tear a community apart, but it could never build one.
"Which country in the world has ever become stronger and safer through targeting a group of people because of their ethnicity or their religion? None," she told reporters.
Independent senator Derryn Hinch called the Greens' walk-out "disgusting" despite strongly disagreeing with Senator Hanson's comments on Muslims.
"We didn't ban all Catholics when the IRA was blowing up restaurants in London," he said.
Another independent, Nick Xenophon, hoped it wouldn't take 20 years for Senator Hanson to again admit she'd been wrong about minorities.
"Pauline Hanson, years after making her 1996 maiden speech in the House of Representatives, said that she was wrong about Australian being swamped by Asians," he said.
"She regretted those remarks. I just hope that it won't take 20 years for her to regret her remarks about Muslim Australians." | Federal MPs have condemned Pauline Hanson for peddling fear and creating community division over Muslims and immigration. | 35.222222 | 0.888889 | 1.444444 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/20/05/05/syria-calls-ceasefire-end-aleppo-bombed | http://web.archive.org/web/20160920124114id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/20/05/05/syria-calls-ceasefire-end-aleppo-bombed | Air strikes mark end of Syria ceasefire | 20160920124114 | Syrian or Russian aircraft have struck an aid convoy near Aleppo killing 12 people, according to a war monitor, as the Syrian military declared a one-week truce brokered by the United States and Russia over.
The United Nations confirmed the convoy was hit but gave no details on who carried out the attack or how many died as world leaders converged on New York for their annual UN gathering under the shadow of fresh violence in the Syrian civil war.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the attacks were carried out by either Syrian or Russian aircraft, adding that there had been 35 strikes in and around Aleppo since the truce ended.
A humanitarian aid group said the death toll was higher. Fourteen Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers were killed, Elhadj As Sy, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told a UN summit.
At least 18 of 31 trucks in a UN and Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) convoy were hit along with an SARC warehouse, said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
The convoy was delivering aid for 78,000 people in the hard-to-reach town of Urm al-Kubra in Aleppo Governorate, he said.
"Our outrage at this attack is enormous," UN. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said in a statement emailed by his spokeswoman.
The developments appeared to signal that the latest effort by the United States and Russia to halt Syria's 5-1/2-year-old civil war was close to collapse.
"We don't know if it can be salvaged," said a senior Obama administration official of the effort by the United States and Russia, which back opposite sides in the conflict.
"At this point the Russians have to demonstrate very quickly their seriousness of purpose because otherwise there will be nothing to extend and nothing to salvage," the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, added.
Syria's army said the seven-day truce period had ended.
It accused "terrorist groups", a term the government uses for all insurgents, of exploiting the calm to rearm while violating the ceasefire 300 times, and vowed to "continue fulfilling its national duties in fighting terrorism in order to bring back security and stability". | Despite US and Russian attempts to extend a ceasefire in Syria, the country's military has declared the week-long truce over. | 17.56 | 0.76 | 0.92 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/20/04/16/three-men-stuck-atop-uluru | http://web.archive.org/web/20160920124246id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/20/04/16/three-men-stuck-atop-uluru | Three men stranded on Uluru rescued | 20160920124246 | Specialist climbers have rescued three men who became stuck atop Uluru after climbing the Australian landmark.
The Northern Territory emergency services team reached the men before midnight and were able to get them down by 3.30am on Tuesday.
It's believed the men climbed the rock on Monday and got stuck in a gap after straying off a path way.
An NT police spokeswoman said the traditional Anangu people who live near Uluru request that tourists don't climb the rock, but don't ban it outright.
"They have a sign at the bottom of the rock, saying for cultural reasons we ask that you don't climb the rock, but people just climb it anyway," she said.
NTES volunteer Alan Leahy said the men were brought down one at a time in what proved to be a challenging rescue.
"Due to the fading light and lack of anchors, the rescue effort was slow and methodical," he said.
"We abseiled about 320m to the stranded men. There were very strong winds that kept on tangling the rope.
"The team of six volunteers did an amazing job. No rescue team in the world could have done better." | Three men are reportedly stuck atop Australian landmark Uluru. | 22.9 | 0.8 | 1.4 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2016/09/18/academy-confuses-cuba-gooding-and-terrence-howard/kv827J1iVCbBZaltCwkJFK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160920182957id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2016/09/18/academy-confuses-cuba-gooding-and-terrence-howard/kv827J1iVCbBZaltCwkJFK/story.html | Academy confuses Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard | 20160920182957 | Though this year’s crop of Emmy nominees includes 21 actors of color (marking the award show’s most racially inclusive array of stars to date), the ceremony itself got off to a dismaying start by misidentifying actor (and Emmy presenter) Terrence Howard as Cuba Gooding Jr.
In a tweet that has since been deleted, the Television Academy stated that Gooding, who’s nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series tonight for his turn in FX’s “American Crime Story: The People V. O.J. Simpson,” was arriving at the red carpet when it was in fact Howard, the star of “Empire.”
The Television Academy quickly fixed the mistake and provided correct identification, but it has not yet addressed the blunder.
This is just the latest instance of actors of color being misidentified by the media.
Last year, the Golden Globes’ official Twitter account misidentified “Superstore” actress America Ferrera as “Jane the Virgin” star Gina Rodriguez, ultimately issuing an apology for mixing up the two Latina actresses.
Read all about who’s nominated, who’s won, and more.
Ferrera tackled the issue head-on while presenting at that year’s ceremony with Eva Longoria, with the pair referencing the incident and also noting that “neither one of us are Rosario Dawson.”
In a 2014 incident that went viral, “The Hateful Eight” actor Samuel L. Jackson took an L.A. newscaster to task for confusing him with another black actor, Laurence Fishburne. “I’m not Laurence Fishburne,” he fired back at the time. “We don’t all look alike. We may be all black and famous but we don’t all look alike.”
.@terrencehoward is here at the #Emmys red carpet! pic.twitter.com/mE4VYerugE | In a tweet, the Television Academy stated that Gooding was arriving at the red carpet when it was in fact Howard, the star of “Empire.” | 11.233333 | 1 | 15.266667 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/24/14/10/uk-nightclub-attendance-slumps-in-5-years | http://web.archive.org/web/20160925142718id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/24/14/10/uk-nightclub-attendance-slumps-in-5-years | UK nightclub attendance slumps in 5 years | 20160925142718 | Annual admissions to UK nightclubs have fallen 23 per cent in the past five years as customers baulk at high admission and drinks prices, figures suggest.
Just 8 per cent of Britons describe themselves as regular clubbers now, almost three in 10 avoid the dance scene entirely and up to 27 per cent claim to have never visited a nightclub, Mintel analysts said.
The top three issues most likely to put clubbers off were expensive door entry (46 per cent), expensive drinks (46 per cent), and crowding (43 per cent).
Mintel found that annual admissions for the UK nightclubs industry fell by 34 million in five years to 115 million last year.
Revenue for nightclubs had declined by 21 per cent from STG1.49 billion ($A2.53 billion) in 2010 to STG1.18 billion in 2015, and was set to decline a further 16 per cent to STG982 million in 2020.
Meanwhile, Mintel forecast yearly admissions figures would fall a further 14 per cent by 2020 to 99 million.
Less than half of visitors (46 per cent) bought more than one alcoholic drink during their nightclub visit, while 43 per cent of Britons who had been to a nightclub said they preferred to go to bars with dancing areas. | High prices for entry, expensive drinks and crowds are being blamed for big drops in the number of people going to UK nightclubs in recent years. | 8.5 | 0.642857 | 1.142857 | low | low | abstractive |
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