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http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/25/11/54/3-found-dead-in-us-home-with-2-kids-alive | http://web.archive.org/web/20160926162719id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/25/11/54/3-found-dead-in-us-home-with-2-kids-alive | Triple homicide: police looking for teen | 20160926162719 | Police investigating a triple homicide inside a Southern California home are searching for a teenage girl who lived there and is considered at-risk.
The probe began on Saturday morning after a child called 911 to report her parents had died.
The child placed the call about 8:20 am and officers were dispatched to a home in Fullerton, 42km southeast of Los Angeles. Inside, first responders discovered two men and a woman dead.
Two children were found unharmed, police said.
``Anytime someone loses their life it's a tragedy,'' police Sgt. Jon Radus said. ``It's even more of a tragedy when children are involved.''
Radus declined to release the children's ages or their relationship to the three adults found inside the home, citing the ongoing investigation. He said detectives spent the day searching for the children's sibling, identified as 17-year-old Katlynn Goodwill Yost.
``We're concerned for her safety because we obviously haven't been able to find her,'' Radus said.
He said there were obvious signs of trauma to the bodies, but he would not release any details on how the adults might have died. Authorities were still working to determine their cause of death and identify them. | Two children have been found unharmed in a US home after a young girl called police to report her parents were dead. | 10.434783 | 0.913043 | 1.782609 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/09/25/massart-posters-one-gallery-science-another/ZejvyFcmaGkoHpVqTQiFcK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20160927124251id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/09/25/massart-posters-one-gallery-science-another/ZejvyFcmaGkoHpVqTQiFcK/story.html | At MassArt, posters in one gallery, science in another | 20160927124251 | Posters in the “Century of Style” show include Richard Avedon’s psychedelic John Lennon.
The two shows at MassArt’s Paine and Bakalar galleries aren’t paired. They do bear a nicely inside-out relation to each other. Applied art, the subject of “A Century of Style: Masterworks of Poster Design,” is about staying on the surface and doing it memorably. Scientific inquiry, which inspires “Encircling the World: Contemporary Art, Science, and the Sublime,” is about going beneath the surface and doing it revealingly. Both shows run through Dec. 3.
“A Century of Style” consists of 131 vintage posters drawn from the collection of Robert Bachelder. Most are European. Three that aren’t are famous: Milton Glaser’s Bob Dylan in psychedelic profile (1966), Richard Avedon’s even more pyschedelic John Lennon (1967), and Paul Rand’s IBM rebus (1981). The Rand poster is the most recent in the show. The earliest is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1893 “Divan Japonais.”
Toulouse-Lautrec is one of several fine artists. Gustav Klimt does something arrestingly non-posterish for the Vienna Secession in 1898. He leaves a large block of surface empty of text or decoration. For once, it’s what’s not in a poster that draws the eye. Otto Baumberger’s “Marque PKZ” (1923) uses absence differently but no less effectively. The collar of a tweed jacket fills the frame, the only text being the label — which is also the company’s name. However unconventionally, both posters meet the requirements of a successful poster: catching the eye, directing the eye, and lodging in the mind’s eye.
Some of the posters look like a fine artist’s work. Franz von Stuck’s staring eyeball, from 1911, could be the missing link between Odile Redon and the Surrealists. Its appearance may not be as surreal as its subject: an international hygiene exhibition, in Dresden. Erik Nitsche would appear to have been channeling Paul Klee in his 1955 poster for General Dynamics.
The posters are grouped by subject, within eras. So we get transportation during the ’20s and ’30s, for example. Other subjects include sports and leisure, nightlife, the London Underground (Alan Rogers makes brilliant use of an archer drawing a bow to indicate velocity), zoos, nightlife, fashion, music, and travel. Politics is nowhere to be seen — except that it is, however inadvertently. A Roger Broders travel poster from 1929 celebrates a spa town called Vichy.
The profusion of differing typographies, colors, styles, and approaches is so much of the pleasure of this very pleasurable show. Yet nearly all the posters do have one thing in common: They’re time capsules. To take a particularly glorious example, the Deco swank of A.M. Cassandre’s “L’Etoile du Nord,” from 1927, conjures up the interwar years with a wayback-machine immediacy. Where fine art aspires to timelessness, applied art seeks a constant contemporaneity. These posters are a succession of previous nows.
“Encircling the World” is a marvelous idea. It takes both title and point of departure from a remark by Einstein: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Art and science are both a kind of magic, aren’t they?
The 14 participating artists draw inspiration from various aspects of scientific inquiry. Rogan Brown, for example, makes highly intricate paper sculptures modeled on forms found in microbiology, meteorology, and topography. Stanton Hunter’s “Migration Grid #26” is a ceramic sculpture derived from butterfly migratory paths. Andy Thomas renders birdsong via digital animations. Vik Muniz makes ceramic plates with designs based on patterns created by bacteria in Petri dishes.
Dishes to plates might seem quite reductive conceptually, but the results are quite handsome aesthetically. That’s what counts. Too often, the works in “Encircling the World” are more interesting in theory than execution. This is the rare show where the wall texts are almost always more stimulating than the art. Talk to scientists, and you’ll be struck by the warmth and vividness with which most describe their work. They rarely emerge here. With a few exceptions, a consistent coldness and lack of sensory appeal mark these works. They make the gallery feel like a laboratory, rather than the other way around.
A CENTURY OF STYLE: Masterworks of Poster Design
ENCIRCLING THE WORLD: Contemporary Art, Science, and the Sublime
At Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Ave., through Dec. 3. 617-879-7337, www.massart.edu/galleries | Applied art and the scientific muse are one display in separate shows. | 70.230769 | 0.769231 | 1.076923 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/29/03/34/rare-hybrid-turtle-to-be-released-in-qld | http://web.archive.org/web/20160929133400id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/09/29/03/34/rare-hybrid-turtle-to-be-released-in-qld | Rare hybrid turtle released on the Great Barrier Reef | 20160929133400 | Summer the hybrid turtle. (AAP)
A rare hybrid turtle has been released back into the wild on the Great Barrier Reef after being nursed back to health at a Townsville aquarium.
The reptile, named Summer, is a cross between a green sea turtle and a hawksbill turtle - the first of its kind recorded in Australia.
Summer has just spent more than six months being cared for at the Reef HQ Great Barrier Reef Aquarium's turtle hospital.
She was nursed back to health after being found at the Port of Townsville with severe injuries from two fishing hooks lodged in her mouth.
Summer, thought to be between 15 and 20 years old, was released into waters at The Strand in Townsville this morning alongside a green turtle named Sofie.
Sofie was taken to the turtle hospital after she was found malnourished and lethargic by researchers at Cockle Bay, Magnetic Island.
Both reptiles recovered after being given a high protein diet, anti-parasite medication and low salinity baths.
Reef HQ Aquarium's director Fred Nucifora said while hybridisation was common in sea turtles, Summer's crossbreed was so rare that she was the only one of her kind recorded in Australian waters.
Despite her uniqueness Summer, like all other turtles cared for at the aquarium, will be released.
"Whilst it is rare and amazing, that's not a reason for wanting to keep her here on display," Mr Nucifora told AAP.
The turtle hospital has cared for more than 200 of the reptiles since opening seven years ago. | A rare hybrid turtle - the first of its kind found in Australian waters - is set to be released into the wild after being nursed back to health in Townsville. | 9.28125 | 0.96875 | 3.65625 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-firsthand-account-of-the-hoboken-train-crash-scene-1475186062 | http://web.archive.org/web/20160930025655id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-firsthand-account-of-the-hoboken-train-crash-scene-1475186062 | A Firsthand Account of the Hoboken Train Crash Scene | 20160930025655 | At first, nothing seemed amiss Thursday morning in Hoboken as I stepped off my Bergen County commuter train.
It was only when I got to the main station area that I saw something blocking my usual way to the PATH train to New York City. It looked as if the roof had caved in.
Then I saw the train under the roof wreckage.
The train from Pascack Valley had crashed into the station just minutes before.
A number of commuters, including me, took out their phones to take pictures. At this point, no sirens could be heard. I looked up to make sure the roof wasn’t going to collapse on me.
An official quickly came and ordered us into the historic beaux-arts style Hoboken Terminal building. “We need to keep you safe,” he said.
Inside, the wooden benches were filled. Early responders had begun to flood the scene, and they were asking people if they were injured or needed help. Several people held their heads, one with blood on his forehead. A number were quietly crying.
Another official told me to move out of the building. I ended outside the terminal in what looked like a triage area. Blood was on the ground. A middle-aged man in a suit with his briefcase next to him was being helped by two men, one holding what appeared to be a cold pack to his head.
Other commuters didn’t appear to be seriously injured, but were clearly shaken. They sat on the curb facing the station as the scene was roped off with yellow tape. They seemed uncertain where to go.
A passenger who said he was in the first car told me the trip had seemed normal, then “everything went dark. The [train] roof collapsed. People screamed and everyone tried to get out. Some of us went out the windows.”
Other commuters described similar scenes: a large noise, darkness and screams. I overheard two people who were on the train say they thought it was a bomb. Another feared for people who were in the path of the train as it overran the end of the tracks.
“It didn’t stop,” she said. “It just kept going.”
—Ann Podd is an editor in the New York office of The Wall Street Journal.
Write to Ann Podd at Ann.Podd@wsj.com | A Wall Street Journal editor who arrived at Hoboken train station right after the crash gives a firsthand account of the confusion and shaken reactions of commuters after the train crash. | 14.375 | 0.65625 | 1.03125 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/29/21/32/plastic-surgeon-filmed-dancing-during-operation | http://web.archive.org/web/20160930165427id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/29/21/32/plastic-surgeon-filmed-dancing-during-operation | Plastic surgeon filmed dancing during operation | 20160930165427 | A Colombian politician is calling for a plastic surgeon to be punished after he was filmed dancing with a nurse during an operation.
The video was provided to Medellin councillor Bernardo Alejandro Guerra, who said it was leaked by a whistleblower unhappy with the surgeon, colombia.com reports.
The video shows a surgeon and nurse performing an operation when music begins to play.
The pair suddenly stop what they are doing and begin dancing in their medical scrubs.
At one point the surgeon appears to grab at the anesthetised patient while he dances.
Mr Guerra has identified the surgeon in the video as Dr David Majana Navarro and the nurse as Angelica Mejia.
He said the doctor's behaviour showed "a lack of ethics and respect for the patient and the profession".
Before the video was published online Dr Navarro told colombia.com the footage was of a tummy tuck he performed on his aunt about three years ago.
He said at no point was the patient's life at risk because the skin tissue to be removed was in his hands while he was dancing.
The doctor accused his former partner Carmen Calderon of leaking the video.
On Tuesday Ms Calderon filed a lawsuit against Dr Navarro, alleging she was the victim of a botched tummy tuck and breast augmentation.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016 | A Colombian politician is calling for a plastic surgeon to be punished after he was filmed dancing with a nurse during an operation. | 10.5 | 1 | 24 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/49ers-Torrey-Smith-has-another-frustrating-game-9561956.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20161003060539id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/49ers-Torrey-Smith-has-another-frustrating-game-9561956.php | 49ers’ Torrey Smith has another frustrating game | 20161003060539 | Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle
Torrey Smith (left), perhaps the 49ers’ best deep threat, has nine receptions for 106 yards through the first four games.
Torrey Smith (left), perhaps the 49ers’ best deep threat, has nine receptions for 106 yards through the first four games.
49ers’ Torrey Smith has another frustrating game
Wide receiver Torrey Smith wasn’t seen in the locker room after a 24-17 loss to Dallas at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday, having made an early exit.
But he made his feelings pretty clear through some nonverbal communication on the field.
On the 49ers’ first possession after they’d fallen behind near the end of the third quarter, Smith ran a deep route on 3rd-and-2. Blaine Gabbert threw an incomplete pass intended for Jeremy Kerley. Coming off the field, Smith punched the air in apparent frustration.
The next time the 49ers had the ball, Gabbert threw a deep pass intended for Smith that was short and behind him and was intercepted by Dallas cornerback Morris Claiborne.
Coming off the field that time, Smith threw his helmet on the sideline. He then walked away from the bench as though he needed to cool down.
“That’s on me,” Gabbert said. “I’ve got to throw it to the middle of the field. To the hash. I just cut it a little too early and missed him wide.
“We’re both frustrated. That’s a huge play in the game. Every game comes down to one or two plays that change the outcome and that definitely had an impact on it. That’s on me.”
It was, perhaps, the biggest play in the game. After the turnover, the Cowboys drove for a field goal, to pad their lead to 24-17.
And that’s where the score would stay. Because on the 49ers’ final drive, on 4th-and-6, Gabbert finally found Smith for his first reception of the day. Unfortunately for San Francisco, it was a 3-yard reception. Dallas took possession and ran out the clock.
Last week in a radio interview, Smith talked about the 49ers’ inability to convert makeable third downs. He can include fourth downs in that scenario as well.
He finished the day having been targeted twice, with one reception for 3 yards, bringing his season total to nine receptions for 106 yards.
That’s really all that needs to be said.
Ann Killion is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. | Wide receiver Torrey Smith wasn’t seen in the locker room after a 24-17 loss to Dallas at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday, having made an early exit. Blaine Gabbert threw an incomplete pass intended for Jeremy Kerley. The next time the 49ers had the ball, Gabbert threw a deep pass intended for Smith that was short and behind him and was intercepted by Dallas cornerback Morris Claiborne. After the turnover, the Cowboys drove for a field goal, to pad their lead to 24-17. [...] that’s where the score would stay. Because on the 49ers’ final drive, on 4th-and-6, Gabbert finally found Smith for his first reception of the day. Dallas took possession and ran out the clock. | 3.275168 | 0.919463 | 17.348993 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/02/10/17/aust-sees-taliban-rise-as-concerning | http://web.archive.org/web/20161003165931id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/02/10/17/aust-sees-taliban-rise-as-concerning | Aust sees Taliban rise as concerning | 20161003165931 | Australian soldiers did not die in vain in Afghanistan's Oruzgan province despite the Taliban now making moves to take back control of the area, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says.
While it was "deeply concerning" the Taliban was running an insurgency to undermine the Afghan government, Australian soldiers had been part of essential efforts to make sure Afghanistan was no longer a safe haven for terrorist organisations, she told ABC TV on Sunday.
"And so that work was successful but the Taliban, who, of course, were in control at the time, are now operating an insurgency, that's what we have to deal with," Ms Bishop said. | Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says it's deeply concerning the Taliban is operating an insurgency to undermine the Afghan government. | 5.952381 | 0.952381 | 3.333333 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Sam-Bradford-Vikings-stay-unbeaten-with-easy-win-9658391.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20161004171730id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Sam-Bradford-Vikings-stay-unbeaten-with-easy-win-9658391.php | Sam Bradford, Vikings stay unbeaten with easy win over Giants | 20161004171730 | Vikings quarterback Sam Bradford, pitching the ball to Cordarrelle Patterson,
Vikings quarterback Sam Bradford, pitching the ball to Cordarrelle Patterson,
Sam Bradford, Vikings stay unbeaten with easy win over Giants
Minnesota’s defense denied Odell Beckham Jr. all night and forced two turnovers that led to 10 points, and the Vikings mystified Eli Manning again during a 24-10 victory Monday over the New York Giants.
Sam Bradford threw a touchdown pass to tight end Kyle Rudolph for the third straight game, helping the host Vikings lead from start to finish after falling behind in each of their first three wins and record their first 4-0 start since 2009. The Vikings, Eagles and Broncos are the only unbeaten teams left in the NFL.
“I think they like to compete. I think they like to go out there and prove to everybody that they can be talked about with other good teams in this league,” Minnesota head coach Mike Zimmer said.
Beckham, who has yet to score this season, was smothered by cornerback Xavier Rhodes and had a career-low 23 yards on three catches.
“It’s not a one-on-one game. It’s 11-on-11, and we got beat 11-on-11 today,” Beckham said.
Victor Cruz and Sterling Shepard were quiet, too, and Manning was erratic while finishing 25-for-45 for 261 yards. Rhodes picked off a Manning pass in the third quarter, the 15th interception for Manning in eight career starts against the Vikings. He’s 2-6 with only five touchdown passes.
Matt Asiata and Jerick McKinnon each ran for a touchdown as the Vikings rushed for a season-high 104 yards to strike their best balance of the season as they continue to craft a post-Adrian Peterson strategy without their injured running back. Bradford went 26-for-36 for 262 yards, thriving with quick-release throws behind a line that protected better than it had in any of the previous three games. He hasn’t thrown an interception this season.
“I didn’t get hit, hardly at all,” Bradford said. “The game ball should go to those guys.”
The Vikings, who have allowed only 50 points in four games and rank second in the league in that category, have an NFL-best turnover margin of plus-10. The Giants (2-2) dropped to minus-8 for the season, including a muffed punt in the first quarter by Dwayne Harris that was forced by Cordarrelle Patterson.
“A good team on the road, especially this team, you can’t give them two possessions,” New York head coach Ben McAdoo said. “The message is getting through. I just think we need to take care of the ball.”
Briefly: Head coach Gary Kubiak said the Broncos hope to have quarterback Trevor Siemian when they host Atlanta. Siemian injured his left, non-throwing shoulder when he was slung to the turf by Tampa Bay defensive tackle Clinton McDonald on Sunday. Rookie Paxton Lynch relieved him and threw for 170 yards and a touchdown in Denver’s 27-7 win. ... Atlanta linebacker Sean Weatherspoon ruptured a right Achilles tendon in Sunday’s win over Carolina, likely ending his season. Weatherspoon’s injury thins out an already depleted linebacker unit. Deion Jones left the game with a calf injury and former starter Paul Worrilow sat out the game with a groin injury. ... Cleveland center Austin Reiter tore a ligament in his left knee against Washington and is out for the season. ... Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis has a mild hamstring strain and his status for Sunday at Pittsburgh is uncertain. ... The Titans fired special-teams coordinator Bobby April, a day after they allowed a 67-yard punt return for the winning touchdown in a 27-20 loss to the Texans. | Sam Bradford threw a touchdown pass to tight end Kyle Rudolph for the third straight game, helping the host Vikings lead from start to finish after falling behind in each of their first three wins and record their first 4-0 start since 2009. The Vikings, Eagles and Broncos are the only unbeaten teams left in the NFL. Rhodes picked off a Manning pass in the third quarter, the 15th interception for Manning in eight career starts against the Vikings. Matt Asiata and Jerick McKinnon each ran for a touchdown as the Vikings rushed for a season-high 104 yards to strike their best balance of the season as they continue to craft a post-Adrian Peterson strategy without their injured running back. The Vikings, who have allowed only 50 points in four games and rank second in the league in that category, have an NFL-best turnover margin of plus-10. Deion Jones left the game with a calf injury and former starter Paul Worrilow sat out the game with a groin injury. ... The Titans fired special-teams coordinator Bobby April, a day after they allowed a 67-yard punt return for the winning touchdown in a 27-20 loss to the Texans. | 3.152174 | 0.965217 | 28.243478 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/11/10/12/morrison-happy-australian-bid-for-kidman | http://web.archive.org/web/20161012143040id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/11/10/12/morrison-happy-australian-bid-for-kidman | Morrison happy Australian bid for Kidman | 20161012143040 | The Kidman land sale to mining boss Gina Rinehart and a Chinese minority partner still needs official approval but Treasurer Scott Morrison is happy Australia's largest private landholding will be substantially in local hands.
The treasurer late last year knocked back a bid from a Chinese investor for the vast Kidman cattle empire on the grounds it wasn't in the national interest .
"I am pleased that an Australian has come forward, I'm very pleased ... I hope that others will follow a similar course in investing in Australian agricultural," Mr Morrison told Ray Hadley on Sydney's 2GB radio. | Treasurer Scott Morrison is pleased an Australian has bid for the Kidman cattle empire and hopes others will invest in Australian agricultural. | 4.869565 | 0.913043 | 2.391304 | low | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2011/05/23/apple-hits-iphone-patent-troll-with-a-cease-and-desist/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161013210501id_/http://fortune.com/2011/05/23/apple-hits-iphone-patent-troll-with-a-cease-and-desist/?section=magazines_fortune | Apple hits iPhone patent troll with a ‘cease and desist’ | 20161013210501 | The company that has been trying to extract tribute from app developers had better lawyer-up
In a contest between Apple’s AAPL legal staff and Lodsys, the tiny Texas-based holding company that has been ordering iPhone developers to pay for technology Apple had already licensed, we’d put our money on team Cupertino.
“Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license,” wrote Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell in a sharply-worded letter to Lodsys CEO Mark Small.
“Thus the technology that is targeted in your notice letters is technology that Apple is expressly licensed under the Lodsys patents to offer to Apple’s App Makers,” Sewell continues, apparently believing that when talking to lawyers you can’t repeat yourself too often. “Because Apple is licensed under Lodsys’ patents to offer such technology to its App Makers, the App Makers are entitled to use this technology free from any infringement claims by Lodsys.”
Citing the doctrines of “patent exhaustion” and “first sale” and quoting a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Sewell rejects Lodsys’ claim that it is entitled to collect again and again on the same patents. He also requests that Small cease making “false assertions” and “cease and desist from any further threats to Apple’s customers and partners.”
Let’s see if that does the trick. FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller has his doubts.
For a backgrounder on the case, see here. The full text of Sewell’s letter is pasted below, courtesy of Macworld.
Mark Small Chief Executive Officer Lodsys, LLC [Address information removed]
I write to you on behalf of Apple Inc. (“Apple”) regarding your recent notice letters to application developers (“App Makers”) alleging infringement of certain patents through the App Makers’ use of Apple products and services for the marketing, sale, and delivery of applications (or “Apps”). Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patent and the Apple App Makers are protected by that license. There is no basis for Lodsys’ infringement allegations against Apple’s App Makers. Apple intends to share this letter and the information set out herein with its App Makers and is fully prepared to defend Apple’s license rights.
Because I believe that your letters are based on a fundamental misapprehension regarding Apple’s license and the way Apple’s products work, I expect that the additional information set out below will be sufficient for you to withdraw your outstanding threats to the App Makers and cease and desist from any further threats to Apple’s customers and partners.
First, Apple is licensed to all four of the patents in the Lodsys portfolio. As Lodsys itself advertises on its website, “Apple is licensed for its nameplate products and services.” See http://www.lodsys.com/blog.html (emphasis in original). Under its license, Apple is entitled to offer these licensed products and services to its customers and business partners, who, in turn, have the right to use them.
Second, while we are not privy to all of Lodsys’s infringement contentions because you have chosen to send letters to Apple’s App Makers rather than to Apple itself, our understanding based on the letters we have reviewed is that Lodsys’s infringement allegations against Apple’s App Makers rest on Apple products and services covered by the license. These Apple products and services are offered by Apple to the App Makers to enable them to interact with the users of Apple products—such as the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and the Apple iOS operating system—through the use or Apple’s App Store, Apple Software Development Kits, and Apple Application Program Interfaces (“APIs”) and Apple servers and other hardware.
The illustrative infringement theory articulated by Lodsys in the letters we have reviewed under Claim 1 of U.S. Patent No. 7,222,078 is based on App Makers’ use of such licensed Apple products and services. Claim 1 claims a user interface that allows two-way local interaction with the user and elicits user feedback. Under your reading of the claim as set out in your letters, the allegedly infringing acts require the use of Apple APIs to provide two-way communication, the transmission of an Apple ID and other services to permit access for the user to the App store, and the use of Apple’s hardware, iOS, and servers.
Claim 1 also claims a memory that stores the results of the user interaction and a communication element to carry those results to a central location. Once again, Apple provides, under the infringement theories set out in your letters, the physical memory in which user feedback is stored and, just as importantly, the APIs that allow transmission of that user feedback to and from the App Store, over an Apple server, using Apple hardware and software. Indeed, in the notice letters to App Makers that we have been privy to, Lodsys itself relies on screenshots of the App Store to purportedly meet this claim element.
Finally, claim 1 claims a component that manages the results from different users and collects those results at the central location. As above, in the notice letters we have seen, Lodsys uses screenshots that expressly identify the App Store as the entity that purportedly collects and manages the results of these user interactions at a central location.
Thus, the technology that is targeted in your notice letters is technology that Apple is expressly licensed under the Lodsys patents to offer to Apple’s App Makers. These licensed products and services enable Apple’s App Makers to communicate with end users through the use of Apple’s own licensed hardware, software, APIs, memory, servers, and interfaces, including Apple’s App Store. Because Apple is licensed under Lodsys’ patents to offer such technology to its App Makers, the App Makers are entitled to use this technology free from any infringement claims by Lodsys.
Through its threatened infringement claims against users of Apple’s licensed technology, Lodsys is invoking patent law to control the post-sale use of these licensed products and methods. Because Lodsys’s threats are based on the purchase or use of Apple products and services licensed under the Agreement, and because those Apple products and services, under the reading articulated in your letters, entirely or substantially embody each of Lodsys’s patents, Lodsys’s threatened claims are barred by the doctrines of patent exhaustion and first sale. As the Supreme Court has made clear, “[t]he authorized sale of an article that substantially embodies a patent exhausts the patent holder’s rights and prevents the patent holder from invoking patent law to control postsale use of the article.” Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Elecs., Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008).
Therefore, Apple requests that Lodsys immediately withdraw all notice letters sent to Apple App Makers and cease its false assertions that the App Makers’ use of licensed Apple products and services in any way constitute infringement of any Lodsys patent.
Bruce Sewell Senior Vice President & General Counsel Apple Inc. | The company that has been trying to extract tribute from app developers had better lawyer-up In a contest between Apple's legal staff and Lodsys, the tiny Texas-based holding company that has been ordering iPhone developers to pay for technology Apple had already licensed, we'd put our money on team Cupertino. “Apple is undisputedly licensed to… | 20.121212 | 0.954545 | 17.924242 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/19/19/20/police-negotiating-with-man-at-gold-coast-home | http://web.archive.org/web/20161020165139id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/19/19/20/police-negotiating-with-man-at-gold-coast-home | Qld siege ends, but man who 'doused home with petrol' missing | 20161020165139 | A emergency situation has been declared on the Gold Coast. (9NEWS)
A lockdown in a Gold Coast suburb is over but police say a man who reportedly threatened to set a home alight is yet to be found.
Police declared an emergency situation in Gaven around 5pm, when a man reportedly doused a property in petrol and threatened to ignite it.
Residents in nearby areas were evacuated as a precaution.
Negotiators were sent in to speak with the man, who had barricaded himself inside the home, but when police entered the house at around 10pm, the man was not there.
Residents were allowed to return to their homes after police entered the property and made sure the area was safe.
Police were called to the Gaven home around 5pm. (9NEWS)
A investigation is now underway.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016 | Police have declared an emergency situation in the Gold Coast suburb of Gaven, where a man has reportedly doused a property in petrol and threatened to ignite it. | 5.6 | 0.9 | 6.233333 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/19/10/28/shorten-favours-labor-preselection-reform | http://web.archive.org/web/20161020171930id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/19/10/28/shorten-favours-labor-preselection-reform | Shorten favours Labor preselection reform | 20161020171930 | Bill Shorten says he supports further reform of the Labor party so more grassroots members are involved in the preselection of parliamentary candidates.
Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese has distanced himself from the Victorian ALP branch's controversial selection of former Health Services Union manager Kimberley Kitching to fill a casual Senate vacancy, arguing the factional deal shows the need for greater democracy within the party.
"The process of change is ongoing. I agree we could look at improving opportunities for people to participate more in the Labor party," Mr Shorten told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday.
The Labor leader said he was pleased the party had preselected another female senator, which would take the proportion of Labor women in parliament to 45 per cent.
Asked about Victorian Labor senator Gavin Marshall's public support for preselection challenges to a number of sitting MP colleagues - part of an internal battle within the Left faction - Mr Shorten said he would encourage all caucus members "not to either on the record or off the record disparage colleagues".
"I expect my MPs to be focused on fighting with the Liberals not amongst ourselves," he said.
Senator Marshall's four-member Left sub-faction - which includes frontbencher Kim Carr - has split with the national Left, with one senior Labor MP describing the bloc to AAP as "now just an arm of the Right".
"When you look at the track record of our party since 2007, I can't, apart from the odd outbreak, totally complain (about disunity)," Mr Shorten said.
"On balance, my team has been more focused and united than Malcolm Turnbull's team." | The federal Labor leader says he has long argued for internal reform, as he responded to criticism of a Victorian Senate preselection. | 13.25 | 0.791667 | 0.958333 | low | medium | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/27/10/22/bandidos-associates-charged-in-qld | http://web.archive.org/web/20161028141206id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/10/27/10/22/bandidos-associates-charged-in-qld | 'Bandidos associates' charged in Qld | 20161028141206 | Queensland police have charged six people, including two alleged Bandidos associates, after an 18-month drug trafficking investigation.
A 35-year-old man and a 32-year-old man, both with alleged links to the Bandidos, were charged after police found drugs, cash and stolen property during searches on a number of Brisbane properties.
The 35-year-old man is due to appear at Wynnum Magistrates Court on November 28, and the 32-year-old man is due to face Brisbane Magistrates Court on November 29. | A pair of alleged Bandidos associates were among six people charged by Queensland police following an 18-month investigation. | 5.052632 | 0.789474 | 1.526316 | low | medium | mixed |
http://people.com/archive/people-picks-vol-82-no-22/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161029213023id_/http://people.com/archive/people-picks-vol-82-no-22/ | People Picks | 20161029213023 | A DOZEN COOL THINGS TO SEE, HEAR, READ AND DOWNLOAD THIS WEEK
FOR ADDITIONAL REVIEWS OF MOVIES, TV SHOWS, MUSIC AND BOOKS, GO TO PEOPLE.COM/PICKS
No. 1 The HomesmanHilary Swank is terrific in a western about women pushed beyond their endurance
MOVIE DRAMA Hilary Swank gives a heartbreaking performance in this harsh western, directed by and costarring Tommy Lee Jones. Swank plays Mary Bee Cuddy, an unmarried farmer who has conquered her plot of land with painstaking care while braving solitude under an immense hollow sky. Many other women in the territory in the 1850s, though, have collapsed into violent madness. Cuddy volunteers to escort three of them back to civilization—a prim Iowa town—helped by Jones, as a low rascal who may have retained a drop of humanity in all this dirt and despair. But their journey strays into an ever more harrowing wilderness. This one will haunt you all the way back to the prairie. (R, in limited release)
No. 2 State of AffairsTV DRAMA For her first post-Grey’s Anatomy vehicle, Katherine Heigl probably should have played someone other than a brilliant blonde CIA analyst. We already have Homeland. But Heigl is an actress of underrated resources—there’s that lovely quiver in her voice—and she’s vibrant and fully in charge here. Glad she’s back. (NBC, Nov. 17, 10 p.m.)
No. 3 Garth Brooks Man Against Machine MUSIC COUNTRY In an era when “crossover” has become more of a rule than the exception, Brooks debuts music that his faithful fans will largely recognize—and rejoice over. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some non-traditional standouts, like the bluesy “Tacoma.” Other highlights include the tear-inducing “Mom,” the romantic “You Wreck Me,” and “Cowboys Forever,” which will leave anyone wistful for wide plains and simpler times.
No. 4 Miss MeadowsShe gardens, she tap-dances, she kills on sight MOVIE DARK COMEDY Katie Holmes goes all out in this twisted fantasy about a sunny suburbanite (and substitute teacher) who fights back when criminals storm her white-picket-fence hamlet. The tale opens with a startling streetside shooting, as Miss Meadows draws a pistol on a creepy dude in a car who won’t stop leering at her sun-dress and patent leather shoes. The cutest criminal you’ll ever meet—just ask the sheriff (James Badge Dale) who can’t stop wooing her—Miss Meadows relishes jumping between her two extreme personae. (Nov. 14, NR)
No. 5 The MissingTV MYSTERY A search for a lost child doubles as a journey back into a shattered past for a married couple (James Nesbitt and Frances O’Connor) whose son disappeared in 2006 during a family holiday in France. Now, eight years later, a retired cop (Tchéky Karyo) aids the inconsolable father in working the cold case, tracking clues that revive hope even as they tear open old wounds. (Starz, Nov. 15, 9 p.m.)
No. 6 Beyond the LightsMOVIE ROMANCE Sexy English pop star Noni Jean (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) seems to be living the dream: hit records, hot rapper boyfriend. But in reality, stardom feels more like a black hole. Enter good cop Kaz (Nate Parker) to the emotional (and literal) rescue. While Lights’ arc may feel familiar, it converts a smart script and strong performances into a moving rendition. (Nov. 14, PG-13)
No. 7 The Real Housewives of Beverly HillsHere come Lisa Rinna and Lisa Rinna’s lips TV REALITY Lisa Rinna, joining the tight-gowned, thin-skinned society of ladies, is the Hillary Clinton of reality TV: No woman has ever been better prepared to rise to the heights of Bravo programming. She’s already starred in her own reality series (with husband and Mad Men star Harry Hamlin) and was a game player on the major reality franchises (The Apprentice, Dancing with the Stars). She has luscious lips and a ready laugh. Perfect! As season 5 starts, Kyle Richards is planning a big dress-in-white party, and everyone is ticked off at Lisa Vanderpump—how is that possible!? (Bravo, Nov. 18, 9 p.m.)
No. 8 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack MUSIC POP You might think Lorde would call it a day after providing the lead single for the soundtrack of one of the most anticipated films of the season, but the “Royals” singer actually curated this entire compilation. Her efforts are equal parts haunting and fun thanks to an intriguing cornucopia of artists including Ariana Grande, Miguel, Duran Duran and Grace Jones. (Nov. 17)
No. 9 Getting OnTV COMEDY All would live long but none would be old. Getting On, just starting season 2, is the Ben Franklin proverb acted out with uneasy but sympathetic laughter. Set in a hospital ward for elderly women, it focuses on the doctors, nurses and aides who would help these patients if only they could first heal themselves of vanity and incompetence. The funniest is Alex Borstein (Family Guy’s Lois Griffin) as a button-eyed nurse who appears to be too stunned to blink, let alone think. (HBO, Sundays, 10:30 p.m.)
No. 10 The Best New Books A fresh adrenaline rush of terror from Stephen King, Anne Lamott’s insights into the heart and the dark tale of a girl with a gift
MB Caschetta Miracle Girls NOVEL Something extraordinary is happening in upstate New York, where 10-year-old Cee-Cee has visions of angels and missing children. But after Cee-Cee performs a miracle, she’s placed under the care of a radical group of nuns. Darkly beautiful, Girls examines how forgiveness and wisdom take hold in the most unexpected places.
Stephen King Revival HORROR When tragedy hits a charismatic preacher, his grief curdles into an obsession with the world beyond. Pulling at the curtain between life and death, he raises hell for a drifting musician-junkie and the other hapless souls he meets. Maine, rock and roll, engaging characters and a pounding build to a grisly end—this is vintage King.
Anne Lamott Small Victories ESSAYS Lamott (Operating Instructions) is beloved by legions for her smart, irreverent take on the human condition, filtered through her unique brand of compassionate Christianity and delivered with delicious, self-deprecating wit. Lamott goes even deeper in these essays. “You can change the world with a hot bath,” she writes, “if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled. Who knew?”
NEW IN NONFICTION George W. Bush 41 What this George H.W. Bush bio lacks in critical distance, it makes up for with a son’s access and warmth. Few shocks, save a blind date Poppy set up for W and Tricia Nixon.
Christopher Andersen The Good Son A juicy Kennedy tell-all in which John Jr.’s string of celebrity girlfriends is eclipsed only by the antics of Jackie and a cross-dressing Aristotle Onassis.
David Ritz Respect Ritz, who cowrote Aretha Franklin’s autobiography From These Roots, offers up a candid, far less sanitized look at the enormously gifted but demanding diva.
Gael García Bernal plays a reporter who’s wrongfully imprisoned in Jon Stewart’s excellent directorial debut MOVIE DRAMA When Jon Stewart took a hiatus from The Daily Show last year to direct a film based on journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came for Me, many wondered whether the comedian had the chops to bring the political drama to life. Turns out Stewart, who also wrote the film, is the right man for the job. Rosewater finds the heart, horror and, yes, humor in the brutal story of Bahari’s 118-day imprisonment and torture by the Iranian government. Stewart’s never been much of an actor (see: Death to Smoochy—or, better yet, don’t), but he has a bright future behind the camera. (Nov. 14, R)
No. 12 Fifth Harmony, ‘Sledgehammer’ MUSIC POP If One Direction were a girl group, they’d be Fifth Harmony. Consider: Both are made up of singers who auditioned for The X Factor as individuals (1D in the U.K. and 5H in the States) and found musical magic by joining forces. And while neither won the competition, they captured the hearts of tween girls everywhere. With their latest single, off their new album Reflection, 5H will get even adults singing into their hairbrushes.
THIS WEEK’S LOSERS & MUST-AVOIDS
AtlantisTV DRAMA Myth, history and fantasy trip over one another in this chaotic, hyper-serious epic that’s caught somewhere between swashbuckling action and political intrigue. (BBC America, Saturdays, 9 p.m.)
The One I LoveDVD DRAMA Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss and The League’s Mark Duplass go on a weekend retreat to revive their relationship—but it all turns creepy and surreal, which is a turnoff.
The McCarthysTV COMEDY Tyler Ritter is sweetly endearing as the gay son in a squabbly Boston family, but this sitcom feels like a visiting relative parked on your sofa. (CBS, Thursdays, 9:30 p.m.) | A DOZEN COOL THINGS TO SEE, HEAR, READ AND DOWNLOAD THIS WEEK FOR ADDITIONAL REVIEWS OF MOVIES, TV SHOWS, MUSIC AND BOOKS, GO TO PEOPLE.COM/PICKS No. 1 The HomesmanHilary Swank is terrific in a wes… | 40.840909 | 0.954545 | 14.090909 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/02/10/52/melb-man-finds-6000-in-op-shop-jacket | http://web.archive.org/web/20161103134952id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/02/10/52/melb-man-finds-6000-in-op-shop-jacket | Melbourne man finds $6000 in op shop jacket | 20161103134952 | If you found $6000 cash in an op shop jacket would you hand it in?
A man in the Melbourne suburb of Mornington was faced with this conundrum recently after feeling something bulky in the trendy brown leather jacket that had caught his eye.
A peek inside a top pocket uncovered an envelope that contained a fat wad of 60 brand new $100 bills.
He faced a few options - including not reporting it to police until he had purchased the jacket and thus taken ownership of its contents.
"I don't know if he still agrees with his decision but he mentioned it to the manager who brought the gear into us," Mornington Police property office manager John Wynn told AAP on Wednesday.
"Whether or not it was drug money or an estate or someone who cleared out a wardrobe for whatever reason, who knows.
"There is no answer because we didn't find the (original) owner."
A name written on the envelope didn't help in their search and after three months holding the cash police wrote a cheque for $6000 to the jacket's new owner - St Vincent de Paul.
It wasn't the only good news Mr Wynn delivered that day.
A "little old lady" received $540 after finding a satchel full of coins on a Mornington street three months earlier.
"She was over the moon with Christmas coming up," Mr Wynn said. | A Vinnies op shop in Melbourne has received $6000 after police were unable to track down who donated a trendy brown jacket with a bundle of $100 notes inside. | 8.65625 | 0.71875 | 0.96875 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/03/05/54/watchdog-calls-for-probe-into-zuma-s-govt | http://web.archive.org/web/20161103135740id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/03/05/54/watchdog-calls-for-probe-into-zuma-s-govt | Watchdog calls for probe into Zuma's govt | 20161103135740 | South Africa's anti-graft watchdog has called for a judge to investigate allegations of influence peddling in President Jacob Zuma's government, in a report released as thousands of protesters called for the president to step down.
The 355-page report, titled State of Capture, stopped short of reaching conclusive findings, but is likely to add to pressure on Zuma by demanding a full inquiry within 30 days into the biggest crisis of his scandal-plagued presidency.
The report was finally released after the president withdrew a court bid earlier on Wednesday that had sought to delay its publication.
Police fired stun grenades and used water cannon to disperse demonstrators who had marched to the Union Buildings, where Zuma's offices are located. Outside the High Court, protesters carried "Zuma must go" placards.
Zuma denies providing special favours for wealthy friends, including three brothers who run a business empire from media to mining and who also deny wrongdoing.
The carefully-worded report stopped short of asserting that crimes had been committed, saying the watchdog lacked the resources to reach such conclusions.
It focused on allegations that the brothers, Ajay, Atul and Rajesh Gupta, influenced the appointment of ministers, and called for an investigation into whether Zuma, some of his cabinet members and some state companies acted improperly.
In one case it cited "extraordinary and unprecedented" government intervention in a private business dispute involving Zuma's friends and his son. This, it said, may have created "a possible conflict of interest between the President as head of state and his private interest as a friend and father".
The release of the report has been a central demand of Zuma's opponents since its publication was suspended on October 14, the day its author, Thuli Madonsela, reached the end of her tenure as public protector, South Africa's anti-graft watchdog.
The presidency said in a statement that Zuma had decided "in the interests of justice" to withdraw his bid to delay it.
Since taking office in 2009, Zuma, 74, has survived several corruption scandals with the backing of top echelons of the ANC.
In March, the Constitutional Court ordered Zuma to repay some of $US16 million ($A21 million) spent on enhancing his Nkandla home in rural KwaZulu-Natal province. Zuma, who weathered a motion of no-confidence in parliament over the cost of the renovations, has since paid back more than $US500,000 as required by the court.
But near record unemployment has exacerbated discontent with his government, which also failed to end weeks of often violent student demonstrations over the cost of university education.
Protesters demanded that state prosecutor Shaun Abrahams be removed from office. Abrahams had pressed charges of fraud against Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, but then dropped them on Monday after popular support for him from the worlds of politics and business. | An investigation into South Africa's President Jacob Zuma has found evidence of possible corruption at the top level of his government. | 23.913043 | 0.826087 | 1.695652 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/04/09/09/uk-voters-would-now-opt-to-stay-in-the-eu | http://web.archive.org/web/20161104152640id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/04/09/09/uk-voters-would-now-opt-to-stay-in-the-eu | UK voters would now opt to stay in the EU | 20161104152640 | The British electorate would now vote narrowly to stay in the European Union, according to a BMG poll.
The United Kingdom voted 51.9 per cent to leave the bloc in a June 23 referendum while 48.1 per cent voted to remain.
A poll by BMG Research, showed that when asked if the United Kingdom should stay or go, 45 per cent opted to remain, 43 per cent opted to leave and 12 per cent did not know.
"Rather than people switching to Remain, it looks as if people are now less decisive about whether it was the right decision to leave," Michael Turner, head of research at BMG, told Reuters.
Excluding "don't knows" puts Remain on 51 per cent and Leave on 49 per cent, according to the poll.
The fieldwork was conducted October 19-24 among 1546 adult UK residents. | Brits are increasingly unsure about the decision to leave the EU, a new poll shows. | 9.823529 | 0.647059 | 1 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.thepostgame.com/raiders-marquette-king-has-punting-celebrations | http://web.archive.org/web/20161108133535id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/raiders-marquette-king-has-punting-celebrations | Raiders' Marquette King Has Punting Celebrations | 20161108133535 | Technically speaking, the NFL's definition of an excessive celebration is not restricted to touchdown dances. But for the most part, any celebration outside of the end zone is considered premature and foolish.
Enter Marquette King, the Raiders' fifth-year punter. Reserved to bad teams in his first four seasons -- the Raiders won 18 games from 2012-2015 -- King entered Sunday as a relatively unknown. But after a stellar performance with both his leg and his dance moves on Sunday Night Football, King made his presence known.
King, who punted just once in the first half against the Broncos, opened the second half with back-to-back punts to the Denver two-yard line. One came from the Denver 39 and one from the Denver 42.
Both times, NBC cameras caught King's celebratory moves.
PUNTING IS FUN. @MarquetteKing https://t.co/FkyuZ3XJYK
— ThePostGame.com (@ThePostGame) November 7, 2016
— ThePostGame.com (@ThePostGame) November 7, 2016
Marquette King pinned the Broncos inside the 5 then did this dance pic.twitter.com/fRqvQzcxn8
— Complex Sports (@ComplexSports) November 7, 2016
— NFL (@NFL) November 7, 2016
It's the @MarquetteKing show. #RaiderNation #DENvsOAK pic.twitter.com/4rzVZ6sGeF
— NFL (@NFL) November 7, 2016
Who says punting is not fun? King clearly had a blast celebrating his Sunday performance, playing at the highest level of his position. As long as the NFL does not consider cracking down on excessive punting celebrations, he is in the clear.
King also may be on the way to his first Pro Bowl. His 21 punts this season inside the 20-yard line are second in the NFL and first in the AFC. King also entered Sunday night's game with an average of 49.0 yards per punt, good for fifth in the NFL and second in the AFC.
On top of that, the Raiders are an AFC West-leading 7-2. So get used to seeing King and his moves in primetime.
-- Follow Jeff Eisenband on Twitter @JeffEisenband. Like Jeff Eisenband on Facebook.
Dancing, Denver Broncos, Excessive Celebration, Football, Marquette King, NFL, nfl rules, Oakland Raiders, Punter, Punting, Punting Dance, Roger Goodell, Sunday Night Football, Touchdown Dance | Raiders punter Marquette King shows off amazing dance moves that may get the NFL after him for excessive celebrations. | 21.9 | 0.8 | 1.1 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/09/13/13/nsw-gp-chose-murder-over-divorce-court | http://web.archive.org/web/20161109061010id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/09/13/13/nsw-gp-chose-murder-over-divorce-court | NSW GP chose murder over divorce: court | 20161109061010 | Dr Brian Kenneth Crickitt (left) arrives with new wife Julie Crickitt to the Supreme Court in Sydney on Wednesday October 26, 2016 (Image: AAP)
Fed up with his marriage and besotted with his lover, Sydney GP Brian Kenneth Crickitt murdered his wife rather than endure a costly and embarrassing divorce, a court has heard.
Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC told the NSW Supreme Court the 63-year-old had emotional and financial motives for injecting wife Christine Crickitt with a lethal dose of insulin on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day in 2010.
Mr Tedeschi said Crickitt's attitude to his 58-year-old wife was clear from his police interview on the day of her death. He complained she was unfair, ungrateful, difficult and volatile.
"The accused was unable to hide his utter disdain and contempt for the deceased," Mr Tedeschi told Justice Clifton Hoeben in his closing submissions on Wednesday.
"Your Honour can deduce that he held a great hatred for her."
In contrast, Mr Tedeschi said, Crickitt was "clearly enamoured" with his lover, meditation teacher Linda Livermore.
He had talked about being with her, and had visited her most nights in the weeks before Mrs Crickitt's death.
"In his mind, the accused was already out of his marriage and had been for at least some weeks," Mr Tedeschi said.
For Crickitt, "a surreptitious murder" was preferable to the shame and financial loss of a public divorce, he said.
The court heard that the Campbelltown GP would have suffered substantial financial loss in a divorce, but stood to gain a considerable amount from his wife's life insurance and her share of their property.
Crickitt has pleaded not guilty to murder and told police he arrived home to find his wife dead.
The defence says postural asphyxiation is a possible cause, but Mr Tedeschi called the suggestion "fanciful".
He pointed to eight key pieces of evidence, including Crickitt's internet searches for "insulin overdose", his issuing of a suspicious prescription for the drug, subsequent altering of medical records, and a bruise on Mrs Crickitt's buttock that looked like an injection site. | Sydney GP Brian Kenneth Crickitt killed his wife and tried to make it look like an accident rather than endure an expensive public divorce, his trial has heard. | 14.133333 | 0.733333 | 2.133333 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/10/06/50/unions-want-plan-for-coal-power-workers | http://web.archive.org/web/20161110162247id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/10/06/50/unions-want-plan-for-coal-power-workers | Unions want plan for coal power workers | 20161110162247 | Unions are calling for a new independent body and a national plan to help workers transition from the coal-fired electricity sector.
Ahead of a conference on the issue in Canberra on Thursday, the ACTU said an independent statutory authority to manage redeployment schemes, pre-closure retraining and early retirement arrangements was urgently needed.
"Either we leave it to the moguls of the market to make decisions about people's lives when closing existing emissions intensive plants, or the Turnbull government can step up to ensure that the challenges and opportunities of transitioning the industry are shared equally across the nation," ACTU president Ged Kearney said. | Unions will push for a national plan and independent body to help workers transition from the coal-fired electricity sector. | 5.409091 | 0.909091 | 7.181818 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/15/08/02/putin-trump-speak-by-phone-for-first-time | http://web.archive.org/web/20161115141132id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/11/15/08/02/putin-trump-speak-by-phone-for-first-time | Putin, Trump pledge cooperation in call | 20161115141132 | Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President-elect Donald Trump have agreed to work towards "constructive cooperation", including on fighting terrorism, the Kremlin said.
In phone call on Monday, the first since Trump won the November 8 election, they agreed to "channel" relations between Russia and the United States and "combine efforts to tackle international terrorism and extremism".
"The importance of creating a solid basis for bilateral ties was underscored, in particularly by developing the trade-economic component," the Kremlin said in its statement.
It added that the countries should "return to pragmatic, mutually beneficial cooperation, which would address the interests of both countries as well as stability and safety the world over."
Trump's team issued a statement saying Putin called to offer congratulations.
The statement said Trump told Putin he was looking forward to a strong and enduring relationship with Russia and its people.
The two men will maintain contact by phone and seek to meet each other in person, the statement said.
Trump will succeed President Barack Obama on January 20.
Obama's relations with Putin have become tense over issues that include Syria and Ukraine. | Donald Trump has had his first telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin since winning the US presidential election last week. | 10.318182 | 0.590909 | 1.227273 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/17/14/02/sa-meningococcal-petition-gathers-pace | http://web.archive.org/web/20161118125052id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/17/14/02/sa-meningococcal-petition-gathers-pace | South Australian government backs meningococcal PBS petition | 20161118125052 | An online petition to have the federal government fund a meningococcal vaccine is gathering momentum after being instigated by South Australian Health Minister Jack Snelling.
The petition has attracted almost 12,000 signatures and calls on the Commonwealth to include the vaccine for the B strain of the disease, which currently costs about $500, on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Mr Snelling says it's unfair that the vaccine is available only to those who can afford to pay for it.
"Therefore, I have called on (Prime Minister) Malcolm Turnbull and the federal Liberal government to urgently add this lifesaving vaccine to the PBS for all Australian children," the minister said.
"They must subsidise the vaccine to prevent unnecessary deaths and heartache."
The petition follows a spate of meningococcal cases in South Australia in recent weeks, with four people currently receiving treatment in hospital.
Earlier this month the disease also claimed the life of 16-month-old Adelaide toddler Charlie Mason with the B strain thought responsible.
A PBS subsidised vaccine is currently available for the C strain. | An online petition calling on the federal government to fund a meningococcal vaccine has attracted almost 12,000 signatures. | 10.684211 | 0.947368 | 3.157895 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/18/20/46/heroic-efforts-applauded-after-bank-attack | http://web.archive.org/web/20161119150303id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/18/20/46/heroic-efforts-applauded-after-bank-attack | Heroic efforts applauded after bank attack | 20161119150303 | The heroic efforts of passers-by who tried to help those trapped inside a Melbourne bank after a man set himself alight have been applauded by emergency services.
An explosion occurred when the 21-year-old man set himself on fire after walking into the bank carrying a container of flammable accelerant at 11.30am on Friday.
Ashley Atkin-Fone was in a lane near the Commonweath Bank in Springvale when he heard a loud blast followed by people screaming.
Mr Atkin-Fone rushed across the road to Optus, grabbed a fire extinguisher and tried to put the fire out.
"This kid comes running out, screaming his head off, with skin hanging off everywhere," he told reporters.
"I was in shock, but then instincts took charge."
He entered the bank but people had already been evacuated from the back exit as the fire alarms ran out.
Junior Dean also went to rescue those inside the building, completely filled with black smoke, and yelled out so they could follow his voice to the exit.
Other shopkeepers and passers-by provided water and ice for those suffering burns until emergency services arrived.
Twenty-seven were taken to hospital - six of them in a critical condition.
CFA operations officer Paul Carrigg described the actions of Mr Atkins-Fone and others as "fantastic".
"They were great, really good - and the combined efforts by civilians, witnesses and emergency services was fantastic," he told reporters at the scene. | The actions of members of the public after a bank explosion that injured 27 people at a bank in Melbourne have been applauded by emergency services. | 10.740741 | 0.814815 | 2.740741 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/11/01/new-multi-use-complex-would-newton-biggest-development-years/XdwIE7IkscTbgsS3HBGOAJ/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20161125201707id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/11/01/new-multi-use-complex-would-newton-biggest-development-years/XdwIE7IkscTbgsS3HBGOAJ/story.html | New multi-use complex would be Newton’s biggest development in years | 20161125201707 | Northland Investment Corp. is unveiling an ambitious plan on Wednesday to remake its properties along Newton’s Needham Street by razing and replacing many of its retail shops there — including the Marshalls plaza and the popular T.J. Maxx store across the street — and adding hundreds of new apartments.
In all, the new development would probably exceed 1 million square feet on 27 acres, with rebuilt structures on both sides of the busy thoroughfare. The Newton firm will tear down the two retail properties, as well as industrial buildings behind them, while keeping the historic mill complex at the corner of Oak and Needham streets.
Northland senior vice president Peter Standish said plans are still in preliminary stages, but the current goal is to build 950 apartments and about 200,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, essentially doubling the amount of retail space there now. In many cases, the apartments would be built above the shops, and many of them would be positioned on a new “Main Street”-style road that would run perpendicular to Needham Street, extending toward the Upper Falls Greenway.
“We really want to bring together complementary uses that will create a real synergy and a vibrancy, to create a real 18-hour environment,” Standish said. “It’s a unique opportunity.”
The mill complex would be renovated but would continue to be used for offices. Shoe company Clarks Americas had occupied the bulk of the 175,000 square feet there before relocating to a new building in Waltham this fall.
Standish said his company will probably submit formal plans to the city in early 2017. While Northland owns the properties, the project will need the City Council’s approval, among other local permits.
Mayor Setti Warren is already signaling his support. This project, he said, fits in with his goals to promote the commercial areas at the Newton-Needham boundary as an innovation district because it adds more rental housing, providing a new place for many of the tech companies’ workers to live.
Warren noted that the project coincides with significant road improvements planned for that area in the next few years, and that it would be built with a “village-like” concept in mind.
Warren said Northland’s proposal could be the biggest development in the city “in a generation” and is certainly the largest since he took office nearly seven years ago. There are no plans to offer local tax breaks for the project, he said.
“We have not seen anything of this size that could have such positive impacts,” Warren said. “This has the possibility of being a real game changer if done the right way.”
Some of the displaced retail tenants could stick around. The T.J. Maxx, for example, is expected to relocate up Needham Street to anchor a new shopping center that Crosspoint Associates is building at the former TripAdvisor headquarters site.
A recent aerial view of Needham Street in Newton. | Northland Investment Corp. is unveiling an ambitious plan on Wednesday to remake its properties along Newton’s Needham Street, with new shops and hundreds of apartments. | 19.857143 | 1 | 13.428571 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater/dance/2016/11/02/every-hours-festival-playwrights-explore-racial-tensions-one-minute-bursts/N2lrSw6TevXFFs1L0sa4pJ/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20161125224955id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater/dance/2016/11/02/every-hours-festival-playwrights-explore-racial-tensions-one-minute-bursts/N2lrSw6TevXFFs1L0sa4pJ/story.html | At ‘Every 28 Hours’ festival, playwrights explore racial tensions in one-minute bursts | 20161125224955 | As a theater that strives to be at the nexus of art and social change, Boston’s Company One Theatre is deeply invested in audience engagement. Recently, it’s placed a new emphasis on “responsive programming” that can tackle hot-button topics or conversations that have erupted in the public sphere.
So when the company was approached about participating in a national play festival dedicated to grappling with issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, it leapt at the opportunity.
Dubbed “The Every 28 Hours Plays,” this festival features 85 one-minute pieces from writers across the country that grapple with police brutality against African-Americans, racial profiling, and systemic bias in the criminal justice system. It takes its name from an oft-repeated yet contested statistic: that every 28 hours in the United States, a black person is killed at the hands of a vigilante, security guard, or police officer.
The plays will be presented in Boston Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts’ Remis Auditorium at 2 p.m. The free event will be followed by a discussion and other post-show programming, including a workshop on one-minute plays led by Obie Award-winning playwright Kirsten Greenidge.
Developed in St. Louis and Ferguson, Mo., the project is the brainchild of Oregon Shakespeare Festival community producer Claudia Alick and One-Minute Play Festival artistic director Dominic D’Andrea. Company One is spearheading the event in Boston alongside four local collaborators — the Central Square Theater, the Theater Offensive, Boston Arts Academy, and the Harvard University black student theater group BlackCAST.
For Shawn LaCount, Company One’s co-artistic director, theater is uniquely qualified to tackle these radioactive issues and to foster a deeper connection among audiences.
“I think it really comes down to empathy. I think we have the opportunity to open fences, open eyes, open ears, connect through multiple entry points in ways that sometimes politics cannot,” LaCount says. “Through art, people have a different way to engage and understand. It’s live performance, so there’s opportunity for setbacks and connections and walkouts and applause and tears.”
Says Phaedra Scott, who’s serving as artistic producer for the Boston edition of the festival, “We really do believe that theater is a medium of communication that can start those tough conversations and create a forum for these important issues.”
Among the dozens of playwrights represented are Greenidge, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Kristoffer Diaz, Neil LaBute, Lynn Nottage, David Henry Hwang, Idris Goodwin, and Robert Schenkkan. The plays capture the perspectives of black youth confronted with police bias; the suffering and fears of black mothers; the hopes and frustrations of protesters on the front line; and the historical perspective of racial injustice. There’s even a short about a police officer having to make a split-second decision between life and death. For the Boston edition, Theater Offensive is contributing five additional gay and lesbian-themed plays.
Alick says “Every 28 Hours” grew out of what is referred to as “the Ferguson Moment.” In the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, she and a group of theater artists from across the country traveled to Ferguson to spend several days listening to artists and members of the community describe oppression, violence, and resistance there.
“I wasn’t trying to co-opt a movement. The movement was already happening,” Alick says. “But I did want to see if there was something we could spark from our own individual organizations. I have a background in short-form theater . . . so I thought, let’s do something that could include the maximum number of voices. Because this isn’t just happening in St. Louis. It isn’t just happening in Baltimore. It’s happening all over the country.”
All 80 plays were staged at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and in St. Louis and Ferguson last month. “Every 28 Hours” is being performed as readings or fully staged productions at dozens of theaters around the country in at least 25 states.
After the performance at the MFA, audiences will be able to choose among various post-show activities, including a discussion led by a facilitator, a wall where guests can draw or paint their feelings, and magnetic poetry. Guests will also be invited to write their own one-minute plays. Actors will be on hand to read them afterward, and they will be published on the Company One website.
The MFA will also allow audience members to walk through its current exhibit “Political Intent,” which showcases how artists use creative expression to explore political and social issues.
“We want to make sure that there’s a life afterward, that people aren’t just doing this just for this one moment and then it disappears forever,” says Scott. “I think sometimes what happens is that people are like, OK, we addressed the problem, but then there’s never a step of, ‘And now what?’ So we’re really trying to develop that ‘And now what?’ step.”
THE Every 28 Hours PLAYS
Presented by Company One in partnership with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the One-Minute Play Festival. Nov. 5 at 2 p.m. At Remis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tickets: Free, 800-440-6975, www.mfa.org | The plays, to be presented at the MFA Saturday, explore issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. | 49.190476 | 1 | 4.142857 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/11/03/celebrating-centenary-two-bandleaders-smooth-and-sharp/b1TipuqI2SWk7C0gYur8RL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20161125225331id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2016/11/03/celebrating-centenary-two-bandleaders-smooth-and-sharp/b1TipuqI2SWk7C0gYur8RL/story.html | Celebrating the centenary of two bandleaders, smooth and sharp | 20161125225331 | This week sees the 100th birthdays of two notable bandleaders: Ray Conniff (1916-2002) and Billy May (1916-2004), born Nov. 6 and 10, respectively. The Attleboro-born Conniff, a big-band trombonist (first in the Army, then with Artie Shaw), eventually became an arranger at Columbia Records. Throughout the 1950s, Conniff, rejecting the complexity of postwar jazz, honed his own easy-listening approach: simple harmonies, bright rhythms, and, crucially, a choir, leavening the sound with vocal cheer. Records featuring the Ray Conniff Singers proliferated — sometimes two or even three a year.
The albums were eerily similar: pre-established, recognizable hits, filtered through Conniff’s chipper style. Conniff occasionally winked at himself (as with a 1973 Conniff-izing of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”). But the sprawling variety of music Conniff’s formula could accommodate — not just Strauss, but also Russian favorites (on 1974’s “Ray Conniff in Moscow”), hits from South America (where Conniff enjoyed late-career popularity), everything from Tin Pan Alley standards to “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Phantom of the Opera” — was both impressive and disorienting. Conniff, throughout a lifelong career, never wavered.
May, too, started in big bands, talking his way into playing trumpet and arranging for Charlie Barnet’s band, then joining up with Glenn Miller. By the 1950s, May was house arranger for Capitol Records, his orchestra backing the likes of Nancy Wilson, Vic Damone, and, especially, Frank Sinatra; May became, alongside Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Don Costa, one of Sinatra’s favorite arrangers. (Where Riddle’s arrangements, for instance, often mirrored Sinatra’s brash, robust attitude, May opted for a crisp, transparent swing that put the singer’s swagger in relief.)
But May’s sardonic side cemented a longstanding collaboration with humorist Stan Freberg, who first gained notoriety with a series of parodistic covers: a “Heartbreak Hotel” that finds Elvis consumed by a vortex of reverberation; a version of Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song” in which the bongo player, disparaging the singer’s “piercing” tone, banishes him down the hall; an anarchic sendup of polka impresario Lawrence Welk’s show, the Astoria Ballroom eventually drifting out to sea on a wave of bubbles.
The mockery seems mild, but the targets were not amused. May’s precision amplified the satiric thrust: stylistically exact, impeccably played, the arrangements, by dint of sheer assurance (May and his players quite possibly did Lawrence Welk better than Welk himself), whetted Freberg’s absurdities. Conniff regarded the churn of popular music as roughness to be smoothed; May, both in earnest and in jest, sharpened his craft on the wheel. | This week sees the 100th birthdays of two notable bandleaders: Attleboro-born Ray Conniff (1916-2002) and Billy May (1916-2004), born Nov. 6 and 10, respectively. | 14.552632 | 1 | 18.578947 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/25/10/52/aust-of-year-should-mark-extraordinary-pm | http://web.archive.org/web/20161126154145id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/25/10/52/aust-of-year-should-mark-extraordinary-pm | Aust of Year should mark extraordinary: PM | 20161126154145 | Malcolm Turnbull wants the Australian of the Year awards honouring people who have gone out of their way to achieve extraordinary things.
The prime minister's comments come amid criticism of the awards by one of last year's finalists, former army officer Catherine McGregor, who says the system is "broken".
"I think it has been hijacked by activists," she told The Australian on Friday.
"It is unrepresentative of middle Australia and I regret profoundly ever being involved with it."
Mr Turnbull didn't want to be drawn on past nominations for the annual awards.
"I'd like to see Australians that have not just done their day job but have done something out of the ordinary, extraordinary," he said.
Mr Turnbull highlighted the work of 2015 winner Rosie Batty, a domestic violence campaigner, and Clean Up Australia founder Ian Kiernan, who was named Australian of the Year in 1994.
Mr Turnbull also talked up the philanthropy and campaigning work of mining magnate Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, who is the West Australian finalist for the 2017 awards. | Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says the Australian of the Year awards should reward people who have done more than just their day job. | 8.75 | 0.833333 | 2.416667 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-double-digit-return-is-hiding-in-plain-sight-at-under-armour-1480273380 | http://web.archive.org/web/20161128073606id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-double-digit-return-is-hiding-in-plain-sight-at-under-armour-1480273380 | A Double-Digit Return Is Hiding in Plain Sight at Under Armour | 20161128073606 | The struggles of hedge funds are creating surprising opportunities in markets. One of surest may be in an unloved class of shares issued by Under Armour.
As the end of the year approaches, hedge funds that might have seized opportunities to profit from gaps between the implied value and market value of certain stocks are instead looking for short-term trades to help them finish the year on stronger footing. Hedge funds are up a modest 3.59% year-to-date through Oct. 31, and merger arbitrage funds have risen only 1.26%, according to HFR. Both underperformed the S&P 500 over the period. Meanwhile, hedge funds experienced net outflows of $51.4 billion.
As a result, shares of some companies trade at sizable discounts to their implied values. Shareholders of Time Warner , for one, would reap a 20% annualized gain if AT&T ’s deal for the media company were to close within a year. That deal faces regulatory hurdles, but the bet in Under Armour is much simpler.
In March, the sportswear company issued shares of a new Class C stock to all existing shareholders. All of the shares have the same economic interest in the company. The difference is voting rights. The new shares have no vote, unlike Under Armour’s Class A shares, which each have one vote, and its Class B shares—owned by the company’s founder, which each have 10. As of Friday, C shares were trading at a 22% discount to A shares—a spread that has widened from 3.7% on Mar. 23, the first day the C shares traded.
Under Armour is clearly concerned about that gap. On Monday it plans to announce it is changing the ticker symbol for its C shares to its traditional “UA,” while renaming the A shares “UAA,” according to people familiar with the matter. The company is worried about the discount in part because it plans to use the C shares for stock-based compensation and executive incentives going forward.
It makes sense that the C shares would trade at some discount to the A shares because of voting rights. But Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank holds all of the B shares, giving him 65.3% of the vote, according to the company’s latest proxy filing. So there is effectively no value to the vote held by owners of A shares.
Other companies with similar share structures don’t suffer from the same problem. For Google-parent Alphabet, which also has nonvoting shares, regular voting shares and supervoting shares, nonvoting shares trade at a discount of only 2% to regular voting shares. That slim margin is reasonable because Alphabet founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin control 52.5% of voting power between the two of them through their supervoting shares. The spread is wider at Viacom , which has just voting and nonvoting shares, but the nonvoting discount has remained relatively steady over time.
A lack of liquidity in Under Armour’s C shares also doesn’t explain the difference. C shares trade about a million shares a day on average, according to John Kernan of Cowen.
So why are the C shares still such laggards? One reason may be the impression that Under Armour created them to allow Mr. Plank to sell without diluting his control over the company. That could have left a bad taste in investors’ mouths, particularly after Under Armour lowered expectations for its long-term growth rate in October. General pessimism about Under Armour—a high-growth stock with a rich valuation that appears to be heading for a slowdown—also could be taking a toll.
But the C shares trade at 35 times 2017 earnings versus 44 times for the A shares, making them an attractive alternative for long-term bulls. Moreover, the classic arbitrage trade—shorting Under Armour’s A shares and building a long position in its C shares—is a wager that the gap between the two share classes will narrow, not that the shares will rise.
The A shares are heavily shorted—27% of the float is held short and it would take eight and a half days to cover short positions, according to FactSet. That makes them more expensive for would-be arbitragers to borrow. Still, the cost isn’t steep enough to account for the discount.
The spread is also evidence of how the fall in assets held by active investors, hedge funds in this case, are playing out for markets and companies. This gap probably wouldn't have appeared a couple of years ago.
Struggling arb traders are likely avoiding this trade for now because it doesn’t have a payoff day, so it won’t help their returns this calendar year. But there is a good chance they will reconsider it starting next year.
Under Armour’s ticker change will take effect Dec. 7. Investors who bet on the Under Armour spread narrowing could be off to the races soon after.
Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com | The yawning gap between Under Armour’s voting and nonvoting shares offers an opportunity for investors. | 55.823529 | 0.823529 | 2 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/28/08/26/asc-workers-to-rally-at-pyne-s-sa-office | http://web.archive.org/web/20161128132729id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/28/08/26/asc-workers-to-rally-at-pyne-s-sa-office | ASC strike continues amid uncertainty | 20161128132729 | Angry ASC shipbuilders have rallied outside Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne's Adelaide office amid five days of industrial action over stalled enterprise agreement negotiations.
But while ASC says government policies are playing a role in the impasse, a spokeswoman for Finance Minister Mathias Cormann says it's up to the government-owned shipbuilder to resolve the issue with its workforce.
As the workers prepare to strike again on Tuesday, it is unclear who can resolve their concerns over proposed revisions to their agreement, which the Australian Manufacturing Union's says could strip back rights and entitlements.
"They're not prepared to cop that," AMWU SA Secretary Peter Bauer told AAP.
Mr Bauer said the rally outside Mr Pyne's office on Monday followed the union writing to the minister asking him to intervene in negotiations, which he did not.
A spokeswoman for Mr Pyne said it was up to Senator Cormann to comment on the matter.
While a spokeswoman for the senator said ASC, as a government business enterprise, was responsible for managing its relations with its employees.
"This is a matter for ASC's management and workforce," she said.
The changes are linked to ASC coming under public service guidelines last year in line with federal coalition policy.
Under the guidelines, workers may lose the right to be consulted on changes on such things as hours of work and their preference for permanent employment over casual or contract work, and may be restricted on wage negotiations.
ASC had previously managed wages and conditions autonomously for 26 years.
In a brief statement on Friday, ASC said it would continue to seek a resolution to the dispute, through constructive negotiations with workers.
But the shipbuilder said it had to implement the public service guidelines.
Mr Bauer said Mr Pyne should play a role in breaking the negotiation impasse.
"Mr Pyne is the Minister for Defence Industry. This is a defence industry issue," he said.
"He should be the one who at least gets involved in the issues confronting the industry at the moment and this is an issue that is confronting workers at ASC."
The workers will strike again on Tuesday, after taking a rostered day off on Friday and not working on Saturday or Sunday because of a ban on overtime. | Shipbuilders at ASC in Adelaide will rally outside Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne's office on Monday as their industrial action continues. | 19.086957 | 0.956522 | 2.782609 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/29/10/26/turnbull-weighs-up-ministry-reshuffle | http://web.archive.org/web/20161129153229id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/29/10/26/turnbull-weighs-up-ministry-reshuffle | Turnbull weighs up ministry reshuffle | 20161129153229 | Malcolm Turnbull has declined to rule out a ministry reshuffle as Labor steps up pressure on Attorney-General George Brandis over the Bell Group legal storm.
The prime minister appeared with Senator Brandis at a media conference in Canberra on Tuesday to announce the appointments of Susan Kiefel as High Court chief justice and new judge James Edelman.
However, behind the scenes there is speculation of a minor frontbench reshuffle, which Mr Turnbull laughed off as a "ritual question" in the final week of parliament each year.
"We have, I have, an excellent ministry," he told reporters.
"I am delighted with the work that my colleagues are undertaking - it is measured by results and the results are building up."
Labor leader Bill Shorten told caucus members at the start of their final meeting for the year the prime minister was under pressure on a number of fronts.
His predecessor Tony Abbott had delivered an "hour-long job interview" on Sky News on Sunday and Senator Brandis had many questions to answer over whether he sought to favour the West Australian Liberal state government over the commonwealth in a court case relating to the Bell Group liquidation, he said.
"As soon as the Christmas turkey goes in the oven, George Brandis will be cooked," Mr Shorten said.
Just under 12 months ago, Mr Turnbull stood down two ministers - Jamie Briggs and Mal Brough - and reshuffled his ministry for the second time, followed by a third reshuffle after the election.
Mr Shorten said a similar theme was emerging.
"We saw it at this time last year - 'do you have confidence in Mal Brough and Jamie Briggs? Absolutely'. Between Christmas and New Year, when no one is watching, out they go with the rest of the Christmas rubbish."
Mr Shorten asked the prime minister in parliament whether he would express full confidence in Senator Brandis.
"Of course I do," Mr Turnbull said.
Asked by Labor in parliament about a possible reshuffle, Senator Brandis said: "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about."
Conservative senator Eric Abetz told Sky News while it was the prime minister's prerogative to choose his ministers, Mr Abbott had a "lot of talent and should be incorporated into the cabinet".
It was important the party shows itself to be a "broad church", he said.
A Nationals MP told a coalition joint party room meeting conservative voters were deserting in droves to One Nation and it was vital to "stay united".
The latest Fairfax and Essential polls give Labor a 51-49 two-party lead, with the coalition narrowing the gap in recent weeks.
Mr Turnbull told his partyroom the government was "defying the critics".
"When we wrap up the parliament this week for the summer vacation, for the Christmas vacation, all of us will be able to go back to our electorates and say: 'We came to you in the election with an economic plan. We laid it out. We sought your support and you returned us to government and we are delivering'," he said. | Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has laughed off talk of a reshuffle as a "ritual question" in the final week of parliament each year. | 23.576923 | 0.961538 | 8.5 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/28/22/20/man-flashes-girl-at-melbourne-tram-stop | http://web.archive.org/web/20161129184713id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/28/22/20/man-flashes-girl-at-melbourne-tram-stop | Man flashes girl at Melbourne tram stop | 20161129184713 | A man has exposed his genitals and performed a lewd act in front of a 10-year-old girl at a Melbourne tram stop.
The girl was walking to the stop on Burwood Highway, Vermont South, about 3.40pm on Monday when a man told her she looked friendly before doing the indecent act, police say.
The girl ran off and the man ran west on the highway to Springvale Road.
He's described as about 60, with mid-length grey frizzy hair and sideburns, large nostrils, with one tooth missing and another blackened, grotty toenails and wearing a black and white horizontal striped jumper, light blue denim shorts and open shoes. | A man who exposed himself to a 10-year-old girl then performed a lewd act at a Melbourne tram stop. | 5.772727 | 0.863636 | 3.772727 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/30/03/33/arrium-work-helps-whyalla-contractors | http://web.archive.org/web/20161130154656id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/11/30/03/33/arrium-work-helps-whyalla-contractors | Arrium work helps Whyalla contractors | 20161130154656 | Steelmaker Arrium is well advanced on construction of new washing plants at the company's South Australian mining operations with the work set to pump $25 million into the local economy.
The plants will allow Arrium to speed up the processing of low-grade iron ore at both its Iron Baron and Iron Knob mining areas, helping it maintain its current export volumes.
The plants themselves are being built in Ireland due to the specialist nature of the equipment but the majority of the on-site work has gone to local contractors.
"This will assist the local economy through everything from electrical and mechanical work, to crane hire and earthworks," the company said.
The Iron Knob plant has already been constructed and tested in Ireland and is expected to arrive in SA in January before being assembled on site and commissioned in April.
Funding for the plants has been provided by the federal government through a $49.2 million loan.
The development at Whyalla comes as Arrium's administrators, who were appointed earlier this year, continue to work with potential buyers with a deal on track to be finalised in the new year. | Steelmaker Arrium says work to build new washing plants at its Whyalla mining operations is helping local contractors. | 11.368421 | 0.894737 | 2.052632 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/01/06/12/hinch-under-fire-for-abcc-delay-deal | http://web.archive.org/web/20161201145140id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/01/06/12/hinch-under-fire-for-abcc-delay-deal | Hinch under fire for ABCC delay deal | 20161201145140 | Derryn Hinch has stared down fierce criticism for striking a deal to delay the implementation of the Turnbull government's building industry reforms.
Construction companies will be given two years to become compliant with the workplace changes, with EBAs to be protected until November 2018, despite a new building code tied to Australian Building and Construction Commission laws which passed parliament on Wednesday.
"It must be a good outcome because the unions don't like me over it, the major builders don't like me over it and I'm very happy, and the government's signed off on it," Senator Hinch told The Australian.
The CFMEU says it's nonsense for the government to claim the cost of building and the price of new homes will be cheaper under the ABCC laws.
"In six months, or 12 months, time the Australian people will be able to examine those propositions that have been put forward by the government and they will be seen to be false and hollow," construction arm national secretary Dave Noonan told ABC radio.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the two-year transition period applied only to enterprise agreements struck before the ABCC laws become operative.
"It means that those companies over the next two years are still able to tender for government work even though their enterprise agreement is not compliant," he told ABC's 7.30 program.
"But they will have to start bringing their arrangements into line with the code from day one." | Crossbench Senator Derryn Hinch has attracted criticism for delaying the implementation of rules tied to the Turnbull government's building industry reforms. | 12.217391 | 0.826087 | 3.956522 | low | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2012/01/02/battle-of-the-market-caps-exxon-beat-apple-by-30b/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161203210141id_/http://fortune.com/2012/01/02/battle-of-the-market-caps-exxon-beat-apple-by-30b/ | Battle of the market caps: Exxon beat Apple by $30B | 20161203210141 | Exxon Mobil finished 2011 where it started: As the world’s most valuable company
It was nip and tuck for more than three months, from that day in early August, when Apple AAPL first overtook Exxon Mobil XOM , to mid November, when Exxon finally pulled away.
At one point in late September, Apple’s market cap (share price times number of outstanding shares) was nearly $36 billion more than Exxon’s.
But though Apple’s shares ended the year having gained more than Exxon’s (25.1% to 15.5%), it was not enough to overtake Exxon’s initial lead. Exxon finished 2011 $30 billion ahead of Apple.
The fact is, the world can live without iPhones and iPads. It still can’t get along without oil. | Exxon Mobil finished 2011 where it started: As the world's most valuable company It was nip and tuck for more than three months, from that day in early August, when Apple first overtook Exxon Mobil , to mid November, when Exxon finally pulled away. At one point in late September, Apple's market cap (share price times… | 2.253731 | 0.940299 | 10.373134 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.foxnews.com/category/health/respiratory-health/sinuses-ent.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20161206133445id_/http://www.foxnews.com/category/health/respiratory-health/sinuses-ent.html | Sinuses ENT | Category | Fox News | 20161206133445 | Chronic sinus infections are common and they can be hard to treat, but nasal irrigation with salt water may help prevent some sinus symptoms, according to a new study in the U.K. I...
Congestion, headaches, and sinus infections burden the lives of nearly 30 million Americans suffering from chronic sinusitis each year. For Lizette Serrano, relentless allergies an...
In the early 1900s German scientist D.P. Hanig had volunteers taste salty, bitter, sour, and sweet foods and tell him where on their tongues they tasted each food most.
A 22-year-old British woman suffering from a life-threatening condition has opted to check off her bucket list instead of remaining on a waiting list for heart and lung transplants...
When Steve Easton was about seven years old, his parents noticed that the suction cup was missing from one of his toy darts, and they were worried he had inhaled or swallowed it.
People who have crooked, or "deviated," noses are more likely to have a face whose two sides don't quite match up either, suggests a new study from South Korea.
Allergies? A cold? Acid reflux? No matter what the cause, there’s a simple reason behind all your hacking
Lying prostrate on the ground with the rifle in his hands, eyes narrowed on his mark, Steve Kardian concentrated on not moving a muscle. | Sinuses and Ear, Nose & Throat (ENT) news articles and videos from FoxNews.com's Health section. | 13.1 | 0.25 | 0.25 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/05/20/40/coalition-nats-don-t-support-carbon-tax | http://web.archive.org/web/20161206163744id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/05/20/40/coalition-nats-don-t-support-carbon-tax | Coalition, Nats don't support carbon tax | 20161206163744 | Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce says the Liberal and Nationals' policy on a carbon tax is quite clear - neither supports it.
He said the government remained committed to reducing carbon emissions and and would exceed the commitments made at the Paris climate conference.
Labor introduced a carbon tax but it was abolished soon after the coalition won the 2013 election.
It now seems to be back on the agenda with Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg announcing a review of climate changes policies.
He said there was potential for a scheme where power generators could pay for emissions above a particular level.
But he said it was a question of waiting to see what the review recommended.
Mr Joyce said he could only say what the position of the coalition is now.
"And I can tell you what the position of the National Party is now - we don't support a carbon tax," he told ABC television.
Mr Joyce said we would know if the Green Army was axed in the mid-year economic forecast.
That was the Abbott government's scheme to use young unemployed on environment projects.
"Let's start from the start. We're in a budgetary position of trying to turn around the books of our nation. If we don't have to turn them around, we'll lose our credit rating and we'll keep going out the back door," Mr Joyce said. | Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce says the nation will know if the Green Army is to be abolished when the mid-year economic review is released later this month. | 8.966667 | 0.8 | 3.2 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.foxnews.com/category/us/us-regions/kansas.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20161206184722id_/http://www.foxnews.com/category/us/us-regions/kansas.html | Kansas | Category | Fox News | 20161206184722 | Police in Kansas City, Missouri, say an officer shot and killed a robbery suspect after the man reached for his gun.
A Topeka man who answered a Craigslist ad to donate sperm so two women could have a baby together is not legally the child's father and isn't required to provide financial support,...
Authorities say a Texas woman accused of faking a pregnancy before killing a mother and kidnapping her newborn daughter is fighting extradition to Kansas.
No injuries or damage were reported after a 4.3 magnitude earthquake struck northern Oklahoma on Friday morning.
A Dallas woman accused of killing a Wichita mother and taking her baby was in the country illegally when she was released from a Kansas jail this summer before immigration official...
An affluent suburban Kansas City woman who admitted shoplifting truckloads of clothing from area retailers last year has been arrested again — this time on suspicion of stealing br...
The owner of a Kansas water park said it will remove a towering waterslide as soon as investigations into the August death of a boy on the ride have concluded.
A northeast Kansas man has been sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping his girlfriend's 5-year-old daughter and shooting the child to death during a 2014 police chase.
A 168-foot-tall Kansas waterslide on which a state lawmaker's 10-year-old son was killed last summer will be demolished once the unfolding investigation of the tragedy is finished,...
The Latest on the Dallas woman accused of killing a friend in Kansas and stealing her newborn daughter (all times local): 10:25 a.m. | Kansas news, local news, news articles, national news. FOXNews.com features local news and national news articles. Plus exclusive Kansas news video clips. | 10.607143 | 0.392857 | 0.392857 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/content/fsdigital/fscom/nfl/story/2016/12/09/nfc-south-race-heats-up-for-buccaneers-saints-down-stretch.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20161209140809id_/http://www.foxsports.com/content/fsdigital/fscom/nfl/story/2016/12/09/nfc-south-race-heats-up-for-buccaneers-saints-down-stretch.html | NFC South race heats up for Buccaneers, Saints down stretch | 20161209140809 | TAMPA, Fla. (AP) Welcome to the NFC South, where two games over .500 gives the Tampa Bay Buccaneers a share of first place, and two under has the New Orleans Saints in position to make up ground in a hurry.
Talk about playing meaningful games in December.
The surging Bucs (7-5), and explosive, but inconsistent Saints (5-7) meet in a key divisional matchup Sunday, then play again in New Orleans in two weeks.
In between, the Bucs travel to Dallas for a prime-time date against the NFL-best Cowboys (11-1). The Saints, meanwhile, visit Arizona (5-6-1), which is trying to stay in playoff contention, too.
Tampa Bay closes the regular season against Carolina (4-8) and New Orleans finishes at NFC South co-leader Atlanta (7-5), meaning the Bucs and Saints both play three of their remaining four games within the division.
''The way our division is so tight right now, these games are huge,'' Tampa Bay coach Dirk Koetter said. ''Us and Atlanta sitting there at 7-5, New Orleans at 5-7. Just do the math for New Orleans, and we're not too far ahead. So, it's going to be huge.''
Part of the challenge for Koetter down the stretch will be keeping one of the NFL's youngest rosters even-keeled.
With second-year quarterback Jameis Winston leading the way, the Bucs have won four straight - six of eight overall - to overcome a slow start. Tampa Bay hasn't made the playoffs since 2007, and the winning streak is the team's longest in four years.
Koetter, who's in his first year as a NFL head coach, said he's not ''100 percent sure'' of the best approach to helping the players cope with the mounting pressure of a playoff chase.
''I'm feeling my way through,'' the coach said, adding that he tries to ''tell it to them straight.''
''They know where they are, they know how important this game is. ... But how you gauge the team and how you feel even-keeled, that's a hard thing to figure exactly,'' Koetter said. ''I also count on the leadership of our players to help out with that.''
The Saints relish the opportunity to get back in the race, though it won't be easy playing three of their final four games on the road. Coach Sean Payton feels it's imperative New Orleans focus on Sunday - nothing beyond.
''We can't play all four'' Payton said. ''We've just got to play this one.''
Some things to know about the Saints and Bucs:
PUT IT ALL OUT THERE: Payton and Koetter both call offensive plays and insist they aren't tempted to hold anything back on Sunday.
''I don't think you'd ever go into a game saying let's hold this for the second game. Certainly we're not in a position to save or hold anything,'' Payton said.
Koetter agreed: ''I've never been like that, I don't believe in that. Shoot. Who knows where we're going to be in two weeks? Our most important game is right now.''
BRINGING PRESSURE: The overlapping returns from injury of linebacker Dannell Ellerbe and defensive tackle Sheldon Rankins have resulted in considerable improvement by the New Orleans defense in quarterback pressure. They've combined for seven sacks in the past four games. Ellerbe, who has been featured in blitz packages, has a sack in each of the Saints' past four games. Rankins, a rookie drafted 12th overall last spring, has three sacks in that span.
FAMOUS JAMEIS: Winston's steady progress has been a big part of Tampa Bay's surge. The first overall pick from last year's draft has thrown 15 touchdown passes versus four interceptions over his past eight games. He's on pace to top 4,000 yards passing again, as well as set a franchise record for TD passes in a season.
CHEMISTRY QUESTIONS: New Orleans' lack of rhythm on offense last weekend against Detroit begged the question whether there was a carry-over from the dissatisfaction receiver Brandin Cooks' expressed after not having a pass thrown to him during a Week 12 win over Los Angeles. Drew Brees threw to Cooks nine times against the Lions, and the third-year receiver had seven catches for 73 yards. Nevertheless, New Orleans struggled to convert third downs - and, ultimately, to score in a 28-13 loss.
GREAT BREES: Brees, who leads the NFL in passing yards, completions, attempts, completion percentage and TD passes, is 87 yards shy of throwing for at least 4,000 yards in 11 consecutive seasons. The Bucs, by comparison, have had just two 4,000-yard seasons (Winston 2015, Josh Freeman 2012) in team history.
AP Sports Writer Brett Martel in New Orleans contributed to this report.
For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP-NFL. | TAMPA, Fla. (AP) Welcome to the NFC South, where two games over .500 gives the Tampa Bay Buccaneers a share of first place, and two under has the New Orleans Saints in position to make up ground in a hurry. | 21.446809 | 0.978723 | 34.808511 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/12/09/15/32/katie-holmes-relates-to-film-of-single-mum | http://web.archive.org/web/20161210142704id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/12/09/15/32/katie-holmes-relates-to-film-of-single-mum | Katie Holmes relates to film of single mum | 20161210142704 | Katie Holmes has described her feature film All We Had, based on the life of a single mum raising a daughter, as "relatable".
The 37-year-old actress stars alongside 18-year-old Stefania Owen in the film about a mother who finds herself living in a car with her daughter and looking for a new start.
"I think the universal theme of that love you have for your daughter and that love you have for your mother is so powerful. And I think that is very relatable wherever you fit in economically," Holmes said.
"And definitely being a daughter and being a mother, I understand that love and that bond."
The movie, based on Annie Weatherwax's novel, is set during the 2007 economic crisis and features Holmes teetering on the edge of poverty.
Holmes, who in real life is raising her daughter Suri, said she has learned how to lead actors on a set by working for directors like Curtis Hanson and Ang Lee.
"I have figured out how I like a set to run and what makes me feel good as an actor," she said.
"Then you just kind of go for it. It's like the starting gun goes off and you're just running."
The film is due to hit cinemas in the US on December 9. | Actress Katie Holmes says she can relate to the subject of her new film All We Had, a story about a single mother teetering on the edge of poverty. | 8.387097 | 0.83871 | 2.967742 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/14/09/39/no-client-data-lost-in-it-glitch-ato | http://web.archive.org/web/20161214202712id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/14/09/39/no-client-data-lost-in-it-glitch-ato | ATO expects more disruptions to come | 20161214202712 | The Australian Taxation Office has had another set back as it tries to restore its online services, warning of further disruptions over coming days.
The ATO insists no data has been lost and its systems have not been compromised after a hardware failure brought down its website and online services on Monday.
ATO acting chief information officer Steve Hamilton says it's experienced further performance issues on Wednesday afternoon, impacting the availability of its website and portals.
Specialist technicians are working "around the clock" to restore the website and portals and once they're back up and running, efforts will be focused on other core services as well as processing payments and refunds, he said.
"We anticipate that there may continue to be intermittent disruptions over the coming days as we continue the process to restore full services," he said.
"The performance of different systems will vary as this restoration process is undertaken.
"This is a complex restoration process requiring significant manual processing which unfortunately is taking longer than we expected to complete."
The ATO says while there had been some "corruption of data", the information was being restored from backup systems.
It said the fault was not due to any external factors, but a type of failure in storage hardware that contractor Hewlett-Packard Enterprises had never encountered anywhere in the world.
It has promised a full investigation into the outage and will try and fast-track any refunds because of it.
"We will work with any client to ensure they are not disadvantaged as a result."
The failure prompted the Institute of Public Accountants to reiterate its call for compensation for lost time and productivity.
The body, which has more than 35,000 members, said the ATO has offered constant reassurances that its systems will be fixed.
"These reassurances are now falling on deaf ears of our members when the portal goes down for two days this week," IPA CEO Andrew Conway said in a statement on Wednesday.
"Our member feedback has consistently stated that the ATO portal, which is an essential tool of trade for practitioners and agents, has been a constant point of frustration due to the portal's instability and unreliability."
It comes a day after the Inspector-General of Taxation found tax practitioners had "met with significant difficulty in seeking compensation for losses" in relation to ATO system outages.
The report, stemming from a review into the taxpayers' charter and taxpayer protections, recommended the ATO provide internal review of compensation decisions where taxpayers can provide "new information or grounds which warrant the decision being reconsidered by a new and independent decision maker".
The ATO agreed to the recommendations in principle. | Client data has been protected as the Australian Taxation Office seeks to put its services back online. | 28.722222 | 0.833333 | 1.833333 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/49ers-LB-Hodges-inactive-for-violating-team-rules-10804650.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20161218221739id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/49ers-LB-Hodges-inactive-for-violating-team-rules-10804650.php | 49ers LB Hodges inactive for violating team rules | 20161218221739 | Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast, Associated Press
49ers LB Hodges inactive for violating team rules
ATLANTA - Niners starting inside linebacker Gerald Hodges is inactive for today’s game against the Falcons because he violated team rules, a team spokesman said.
Hodges has started 10 games this season, including the last seven. Without him, the 49ers only inside linebackers are Nick Bellore and Michael Wilhoite. Hodges ranks third on the team in tackles (66), sacks (3) and has a team-best two interceptions.
The 49ers placed inside linebacker Shayne Skov on injured reserve on Nov. 29 with a knee injury. | ATLANTA - Niners starting inside linebacker Gerald Hodges is inactive for today’s game against the Falcons because he violated team rules, a team spokesman said. Hodges has started 10 games this season, including the last seven. Without him, the 49ers only inside linebackers are Nick Bellore and Michael Wilhoite. Hodges ranks third on the team in tackles (66), sacks (3) and has a team-best two interceptions. The 49ers placed inside linebacker Shayne Skov on injured reserve on Nov. 29 with a knee injury. Twitter: @Eric_Branch | 1.133333 | 0.952381 | 37.314286 | low | high | extractive |
http://people.com/archive/magic-kingdom-vol-57-no-1/amp/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161220074604id_/http://people.com/archive/magic-kingdom-vol-57-no-1/amp/ | Magic Kingdom | 20161220074604 | With Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone conjuring up movie magic around the world, Potter-mad pilgrims are starting to flock to the English landmarks used as locations for some of the film’s supernatural scenes. Expecting an influx of visitors as a result of the film, the British Tourist Authority has issued a Harry Potter movie map (available at http://www.travelbritain. org) detailing the sites open to visitors. Here, then, is a non-wizard’s guide to some of Harry’s favorite haunts.
Alnwick CastleHarry takes his first spin on a broomstick and later stars in a spirited game of Quidditch (think airborne rugby) outside the 140-room Alnwick Castle, home to the family of Ralph Percy, 43, the 12th Duke of Northumberland. Located near the Scottish border, the fortress dates back to 1134; the Percys moved in around 1309. While no interiors were filmed at Alnwick, the castle, which has a bloody history (300 Scots were murdered there in a 16th-century battle), radiates a certain Hogwarts-style spookiness. “There’s something that wanders down the portrait gallery,” says Percy spokesman Philip Gregory. “We don’t know who it is, but the guides often get a feeling that something’s there.”
Gloucester CathedralWidely considered one of the most beautiful cathedrals in England, the 912-year-old Anglican church located in Gloucestershire, 114 miles west of London, was used as the entrance to Gryffindor Hall, Harry’s dormitory, The church’s cameo in Potter upset a few Christians on both sides of the Pond, who complained that the building—which also houses King Edward II’s tomb—should not be used to glorify “witchcraft.” (One Evangelical group threatened to disrupt filming but ultimately backed down.) The cathedral’s dean, the Very Rev. Nicholas Bury, wasn’t concerned. “The book is about love, not magic,” he says. “It is a very good modern morality tale.”
Lacock AbbeyLocated 100 miles west of London, the former medieval nunnery (now a private home and photo museum) served as the sinister Prof. Severus Snape’s dungeon classroom.
King’s Cross StationFans visiting the 150-year-old London rail station have found that Platform 9¾ is as elusive to them as it was to a bewildered Harry, who was instructed to catch the train to Hog warts there. (Platforms 9 and 10 do not border each other at King’s Cross; the movie scene was shot on Platform 4.) Still, new signs—No Spells on Platforms; No Broom Parking; Owls Must Be Caged at All Times—direct visitors to the perfect photo op. “I usually avoid all things hype,” says one vacationing Potter Ian, Chicagoan Anna Batcke, 26. “But now I’m addicted.”
Christ Church CollegePotter’s elaborate banquet scenes, with their floating candles and soaring owls, were filmed on a soundstage just north of London, but the sets were an exact replica of the Great Hall of Oxford University’s largest college, founded in 1525 and located approximately 50 miles northwest of the capital. The 1,400-sq.-ft. hall—still serving its original function as the college’s dining room—is lined with artwork, including portraits of oft-married Henry VIII and six of the 13 British prime ministers who graduated from Christ Church. Another famous alumnus: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, a mathematics don (professor) there in the 19th century.
London Zoo Reptile HouseWhen Harry met Slimy: Early in the film, the boy wizard has a lengthy encounter with a boa constrictor at the 150-year-old Reptile House. It’s not the first time the zoo has provided literary inspiration. More than 85 years ago the author A.A. Milne took his son Christopher Robin to see the Canadian black bear Winnipeg, who became the namesake of Winnie the Pooh. During Potter’s week-long shoot at the zoo, located in London’s Regent’s Park, there was “a great buzz,” says spokeswoman Debbie Curtis. Lots of hissing too.
Australia HouseAustralia’s Beaux Arts-style embassy, built in London in 1918, underwent a reverse face-lift—including draping cobwebs over the exhibition hall’s glittering chandeliers—to become the dusty, goblin-staffed Gringotts Bank. For real-life staffers the transformation was a welcome distraction. “For a working mission to become part of a Hollywood-style film set was exciting, and the guardedness and secrecy [of the shoot] compounded the sense of how big it would be,” says Australia House’s Ann Harrap, who watched the crew prepare. Fans seeking Harry’s fortune are out of luck: Citing post-Sept. 11 security concerns, the embassy stopped conducting tours in the fall and has no plans to resume them. | With Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone conjuring up movie magic around the world, Potter-mad pilgrims are starting to flock to the English landmarks used as locations for some of the film… | 25.027027 | 0.972973 | 35.027027 | medium | high | extractive |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/29/man-90-interviewed-by-police-after-83-year-old-neighbour-found-dead | http://web.archive.org/web/20161220154434id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/29/man-90-interviewed-by-police-after-83-year-old-neighbour-found-dead | Man, 90, interviewed by police after 83-year-old neighbour found dead | 20161220154434 | A 90-year-old Melbourne man interviewed by police after his 83-year-old neighbour was found dead on the footpath outside his home has been released as homicide detectives investigate.
Family members of the dead man say the neighbours had been feuding for nearly 50 years.
The great-grandfather was found dead in Reservoir about 1pm on Monday.
“My father-in-law unfortunately was the victim, very sad when you’ve been telling the police for years to take this situation seriously,” the wife of the victim’s son posted on Facebook. “I used to always say they’d kill each other one day.”
Channel Nine reported there had been numerous restraining orders in place during the pair’s 47-year-long dispute.
“Devastated, absolutely devastated, the whole family is devastated over this – it shouldn’t have gone this far,” the son told reporters outside the home.
Another neighbour told News Corp Australia the two elderly men had argued over plants including roses.
Police say the 90-year-old man was interviewed and has since been released.
“The exact circumstances surrounding the man’s death are yet to be established and investigators will await the results of a post-mortem,” a spokesman said in a statement. | Elderly Melbourne man released by police as homicide detectives continue to investigate death of neighbour found on footpath | 13.611111 | 0.944444 | 1.5 | low | high | abstractive |
http://people.com/archive/forget-macgruder-kathryn-harrold-loves-her-mate-named-mo-vol-23-no-10/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161220193733id_/http://people.com/archive/forget-macgruder-kathryn-harrold-loves-her-mate-named-mo-vol-23-no-10/ | Forget MacGruder-Kathryn Harrold Loves Her Mate Named Mo | 20161220193733 | The lush lower lip still promises pleasure, the tawny mane still has its sun-hued highlights and the body retains its prime-time curves. At 34, however, actress Kathryn Harrold recognizes that her days as a perpetual up-and-comer are numbered. The next few weeks are crucial to her career if she wants out of future membership in the Nancy Davis Reagan “I Could Have Been a Star” Club. Harrold’s hopes hang on MacGruder and Loud, ABC’s new police show which debuted with rock ’em, sock ’em hype immediately after the Super Bowl. John (Blood Simple) Getz and Harrold play secretly married cops who partner each other in the squad car and the bedroom. MacGruder and Loud features shots of L.A.’s figure-eight freeways and shots of Harrold in a pair of police pants so snug that one suspects Erik Estrada’s tailor from CHiPs has a new job.
The beauteous Harrold has always just missed being a star. She originated the role of the slut-vixen Nola Dancy on the soap The Doctors, but had the cold comfort of watching her successor in the role, Kathleen Turner, enjoy the professional warmth of Body Heat. Using her cut-glass cheekbones and green eyes to great effect as Lauren Bacall in the TV movie Bogie, she won praise but the movie didn’t. Her chance as a leading lady in Yes, Giorgio required Harrold to do love scenes with hefty tenor Luciano Pavarotti. Says Harrold: “I tend to blank out on that film.” Alas, the critics didn’t.
On a recent Saturday night Harrold stretched out on the couch at her home in Studio City, Calif. In one hand steamed a big mug of herbal tea and in the other dripped a tattered, wet tennis ball. Harrold’s personal life, she confessed, revolves around the ball’s owner: a 2-year-old yellow Labrador named Mo who accompanies Harrold everywhere—to the studio, to TV locations all over L.A., even on dates. “I have this test for men I go out with,” she says. “If I’m sitting at dinner and start thinking, ‘I wonder what Mo’s doing,’ then I know this is not someone I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
Harrold thought she wanted to spend her life with actor Richard (Cruising) Cox; they lived together for five years. But with his desire to work on the New York stage, “we grew apart emotionally and geographically,” she says, and the couple split in 1980. She later dated her co-star in Modern Romance, Albert Brooks, but professional competition interfered, she says. Since her breakup with Brooks in 1982, boob tubing hasn’t been the same. “He’s the greatest person in the world to watch TV with. He can make you laugh at the cable-TV listing channel.” Because of these affairs, “I’m always saying I won’t get involved with an actor again, but then I realize how silly that is. The men I meet most often are actors.”
Despite professional uncertainties, Harrold doesn’t sit at home training Mo to open her cans of Stroh’s beer while awaiting ratings for MacGruder and Loud. A native of a small town in Appalachia, she hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains and goes white-water rafting. She also contorts herself into various yoga positions, a habit she developed as a student at Mills College.
Otherwise Harrold’s social life is confined to serving Sunday brunch to an eclectic group of pals each week. Harrold says, “They’re all grateful to have a place to go on Sunday morning where they don’t have to stand in line.”
Harrold has a small part in the just released film Into The Night. The role was something of an eye-opener. “I had to do all this running around in a bathing suit,” she says. “In the opening scene, I’m with all these Playboy bunnies. They’re all 20 years old and perfect—with perfect behinds!”
Although doing bikini scenes at 34 gives Harrold pause, she’s confident about making babies in her fifth decade. “I’m not ready for children now,” she says. “But I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink a lot, I eat healthy food. I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t have a child when I’m 40.” With a resolute smile, Harrold extends the same chipper approach to the distant future. “I think,” she announces, “I’m going to end up as one terrific old lady!” So who needs a perfect behind? | The lush lower lip still promises pleasure, the tawny mane still has its sun-hued highlights and the body retains its prime-time curves. At 34, however, actress Kathryn Harrold recognizes that her … | 22.7 | 0.975 | 38.025 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/20/07/41/belt-buckle-may-lead-to-brisbane-attacker | http://web.archive.org/web/20161220215921id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/20/07/41/belt-buckle-may-lead-to-brisbane-attacker | Belt buckle may lead to Brisbane attacker | 20161220215921 | Queensland police hope a distinctive belt buckle will lead them to a man who savagely bashed a Polish au pair while she was out walking in Brisbane.
The 24-year-old woman suffered serious facial and head injuries in the attack at Petrie about 9pm on Friday, November 25.
Police made a fresh appeal for public information on Tuesday and have released images they believe could aid their investigation, including one of a black and silver belt buckle.
The distinctive buckle bears a cross with the Star of David in the middle.
Police are pleading for whoever owns the belt or anyone with information about the belt to contact them.
Detective Acting Senior Sergeant Richard Hoffman said police would set-up a mobile station at the scene of the attack from 4pm on Tuesday.
The station will include a mannequin dressed in similar clothing to the victim in the hope it sparks information from the public.
The young woman has since returned to Poland, where she continues to recover from her injuries.
Det Act Snr Sgt Hoffman said it was a "terrible" crime and hoped the offender would show some remorse and turn themselves in. | Police will make a fresh appeal for help to find a man who attacked a Polish au pair in Brisbane, leaving her with serious facial and head injuries. | 7.333333 | 0.833333 | 2.566667 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/22/02/58/3yo-safe-after-being-taken-in-stolen-car | http://web.archive.org/web/20161222183830id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/22/02/58/3yo-safe-after-being-taken-in-stolen-car | 3yo safe after being taken in stolen car | 20161222183830 | A young girl is safe and sound with her family after she was caught in a carjacking in Queensland's southeast.
A woman and her two daughters, three and 10, were waiting in a Laidley car park on Wednesday night when an unknown man dragged the 41-year-old woman from the driver's seat by her hair.
The mother was able to pull her 10-year-old from the car, but the man sped away with the younger girl still trapped in her car seat.
He stopped the car nearby and left the girl unharmed on the side of the road.
Police are still hunting for the man and the car. | A three-year-old girl is back with her mother and sister after a man allegedly took her when he stole the car she was still in. | 4.133333 | 0.8 | 1.133333 | low | medium | abstractive |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ng-interactive/2015/apr/24/allies-campaign-in-gallipoli-1915-and-now-interactive | http://web.archive.org/web/20161223000824id_/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ng-interactive/2015/apr/24/allies-campaign-in-gallipoli-1915-and-now-interactive | Allies' campaign in Gallipoli 1915 and now - interactive | 20161223000824 | The first ill-fated landings on the Gallipoli peninsula by British, French, Australian and New Zealand forces occurred on 25 April 1915. The Allied forces sought to occupy the peninsula and capture the Dardanelles strait from the Ottoman empire. It is now regarded as one of the Allies’ greatest defeats of the first world war. Sean Gallup has photographed locations from the region to match with archive images from 100 years ago
• See also a video interactive by Guardian photographer Mike Bowers
• More from the first world war Photography then and now series | Sean Gallup has photographed locations around the Gallipoli peninsula to match with archive images from 100 years ago of the ill-fated campaign – now regarded as one of the Allies’ greatest defeats of the first world war | 2.641026 | 0.923077 | 8.307692 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/anglo-american-rethinks-sale-plan-as-commodity-prices-rise-1482434746 | http://web.archive.org/web/20161223043919id_/http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/anglo-american-rethinks-sale-plan-as-commodity-prices-rise-1482434746 | Anglo American Rethinks Sale Plan as Commodity Prices Rise | 20161223043919 | A year after Anglo American PLC announced one of the most dramatic corporate downsizing efforts ever, the company is dialing back its plan to sell off two-thirds of its mines and shed over half its workers, a people familiar with those plans said.
Though Anglo found its cost-cutting plans tangled in South African politics, the delay has helped the company take advantage of a rebound in commodity prices during the second half of this year—especially in coal and iron-ore—that have turned some money-losing mines into cash cows, making it harder to justify their sale.
While U.K.-based Anglo, the world’s eighth-largest mining company by market capitalization, may still look to divest a number of its low-margin mines, the pressure to dispose of a vast chunk of its assets has eased.
After commodity prices plunged last year, Anglo unveiled what it called a “radical” turnaround plan to sell as many as 29 mining assets and an accompanying 85,000 workers over the next several years. So far, it has sold only nine of those mines and hasn’t met the $3 billion to $4 billion target for asset sales that its Chief Executive Mark Cutifani set at the start of this year.
The dialed-back divestment plan highlights how the sharp rebound in commodity prices this year has altered the fortunes of the mining industry. Now, instead of cutting back and hoarding cash, miners could be on the verge of a new wave of expansion, analysts say.
Glencore PLC, that saw its shares plunge last year, recently said it had finished raising cash to stabilize its balance sheet and then announced a big investment in Russian oil giant PAO Rosneft. Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto PLC agreed to a $5.3 billion expansion of a Mongolian copper mine and is moving forward on big ticket bauxite and iron-ore project in Australia.
In 2015, Anglo was among the worst-suffering companies in the global mining industry, which had been racked by almost three years of slumping prices, and was teetering under $12.9 billion of net debt. Anglo posted $5.6 billion in losses that year.
Now, its share price is up nearly 300% in 2016, and it is raking in cash from its coal operations—businesses it had planned to sell.
The price of metallurgical coal, which is used in steelmaking, has risen four times this year. Iron-ore prices are up 99% on the back of stimulus provided by the Chinese government and cutbacks in production in China, which consumes about 40% of the world’s raw materials.
Some analysts have called on Anglo to use money from rising cash flows to pay down its debt instead of selling assets to raise funds. Analysts expect the company to post positive cash flows in 2016, a sharp reversal from a cash outflow of $982 million last year, according to FactSet.
Anglo continues to hold discussions with potential buyers. It successfully sold a few of its assets before the commodity surge, much of which came in the second half of 2016.
In April, it agreed to sell its Brazilian niobium and phosphates businesses to China Molybdenum for $1.5 billion.
But the company is finding it hard to set a price on its assets of late. Anglo was on the verge of selling some prized coal assets in Australia this summer, but then the price of coal surged in a matter of days, prompting Mr. Cutifani to pull back on the deal, a person familiar with the matter said.
Not all buyers are convinced the commodity upturn will last, the person said, and that has made many prospective buyers reluctant to pay the higher prices Anglo is asking for.
“Mark will be looking at me and say, ’Is that the right price for what you are selling?’” said Norman Mbazima, deputy chairman of Anglo American South Africa, in an interview.
Despite their misgivings, “there’s certainly no lessening of pressure because of the price of commodities,” Mr. Mbazima added, referring specifically to Anglo’s operation in South Africa.
Another complicating factor for Anglo is South Africa, where the company had planned to sell as many as 13 of its 23 mining operations.
Anglo is targeting coal mines there, some of which have low profit margins, as well as aging iron-ore operations, which are held in separately listed, majority-owned unit Kumba Iron Ore .
Despite their many ties, the South African government and Anglo have had a strained relationship.
The South African government has made it clear that Anglo should sell to homegrown companies or groups, but few enterprises in the country can afford to buy Anglo’s assets.
The government also has made it difficult for Anglo to cut workers at unproductive mines. South African government officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“When you have to cut costs, it’s not easy, when you have a government that isn’t being helpful and doesn’t appear to like you; you feel a bit lonely, isolated,” said Ian Woodley, an analyst for Old Mutual Equities in Cape Town.
Anglo recently has been involved in a price dispute with the state-run power company, which buys some of its coal used in energy production from the mining company. Eskom Holdings SOC accused Anglo of overcharging for coal; Anglo has responded by saying it charged a fair market price.
The Public Investment Corp., South Africa’s state-run pension fund, has been pushing Mr. Cutifani to spin off Anglo’s assets as a package that includes some coveted platinum mines, a move the CEO has resisted.
The pension fund wields influence as the largest shareholder in Anglo American, Kumba, and Anglo American Platinum , a majority-owned unit of Anglo listed in Johannesburg.
The pension-fund manager declined to comment beyond an August statement saying it was talking with Anglo about finding the “best ways of maximizing value for all the stakeholders.”
Write to Scott Patterson at scott.patterson@wsj.com and Alexandra Wexler at alexandra.wexler@wsj.com | A year after Anglo American announced one of the most dramatic corporate downsizing efforts ever, the company now is rethinking the plan as politics and shifting market conditions alter the company’s status. | 33.314286 | 0.857143 | 5.942857 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2016/11/16/facebook-transparency-video-ad/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161223045738id_/http://fortune.com/2016/11/16/facebook-transparency-video-ad/ | Facebook Aims for More Transparency with Video Ad Data | 20161223045738 | Two months after Facebook admitted it had inflated the average time it told advertisers that users were watching their video ads, the company is promising better data to give ad buyers a clearer picture of how they are spending their money.
The world's biggest online social network on Wednesday launched a new blog on its website called Metrics FYI, where it will share updates and corrections for its data.
"We want to ensure our clients trust and believe in the metrics that we are providing," Carolyn Everson, Facebook's vice president of global market solutions told Reuters.
Getting advertisers to buy more video ads is key to Facebook's continued revenue growth, as they fetch higher rates from advertisers than text or photo-based ads.
Facebook (fb), along with Alphabet Google (goog) and other large digital companies, has been criticized for a lack of transparency in how it measures the performance of videos.
Particularly, the lack of a universally agreed method of calculating how much time people are watching online video has been a sore spot for advertisers.
Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.
In September, Facebook told advertisers that the average time users spent viewing online ads was artificially inflated, because it was only counting videos that were watched for at least three seconds, its benchmark for a "view."
Facebook left out those who watched for less than three seconds, or who did not watch the video at all, which gave advertisers the impression their videos were performing better than they really were.
Since the admission and ensuing criticism from advertisers, Everson said Facebook has been in contact with clients and ad community trade groups, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
Facebook also said on Wednesday it is in the process of forming what it called a 'Measurement Council,' which will include measurement experts from clients and ad agencies.
One of Facebook's prominent advertisers, Swiss food and drink company Nestle SA, is already on board, Everson said, and the council should be up and running by early 2017.
The ANA, which represents Procter & Gable, AT&T and other major advertisers, has called on Facebook to get its metrics accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC), an independent media measurement audit group.
While Facebook's internal metrics are not accredited by that group, it does use MRC-accredited third-party vendors, such as Nielsen and comScore, to help advertisers verify certain data. | New blog will offer clearer metrics, data about what visitors are watching. | 34.5 | 0.785714 | 1.071429 | medium | medium | abstractive |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/14/julie-bishop-says-cabinet-reshuffle-not-needed | http://web.archive.org/web/20161223092812id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/14/julie-bishop-says-cabinet-reshuffle-not-needed | Julie Bishop says cabinet reshuffle not needed | 20161223092812 | The minister for foreign affairs, Julie Bishop, has played down ministerial reshuffle rumours, insisting she will stay in her current portfolio and the whole cabinet is performing well.
Several reports have suggested a reshuffle is on the cards, particularly focusing on defence minister Marise Payne’s absence for surgery and the possibility that the attorney general, George Brandis, may need to be replaced if he is appointed as an ambassador or judge.
On Wednesday, Bishop told Sky News that Payne was back at work although she was still recovering from surgery, and she took part in Tuesday’s cabinet meeting by video conference.
“She’s not able to travel to Japan at present, that’s just on medical advice,” Bishop said. “We’ve rescheduled the meeting with the Japanese foreign and defence ministers, they’re looking forward to the rescheduled meeting in the new year.”
Asked on ABC’s AM about a reshuffle, Bishop said any reshuffle was a matter for the prime minister but “I believe we have a very good cabinet, everybody is doing a great job and working extraordinarily hard in the national interest”.
Addressing speculation she may seek a domestic portfolio, Bishop said she was aware of the report in the Australian but could deal with the claim “very quickly”.
“As the deputy leader of the Liberal party it is convention that I am free to choose my own portfolio, I chose foreign affairs and I intend to remain foreign affairs [minister].”
It is totally within the prime minister’s prerogative to determine a reshuffle but Liberal party sources said it was highly unlikely to move a senior woman member out of cabinet.
The prime minister’s office was not commenting on rumours of the reshuffle, referring Guardian Australia to Turnbull’s previous comments which back in his existing cabinet and ministry.
“Prime ministers are always asked this question at this time of year and I think it’s probably true they always give the same answer too,” Turnbull said at the end of the last parliamentary sitting week.
“But as it happens, I have a fantastic cabinet, a great ministry and we’re delivering.”
But this time last year, Turnbull was also defending his team just weeks before ministers Mal Brough and Jamie Briggs resigned from the ministry, causing a reshuffle.
“We have, I have, an excellent ministry,” he said on November 30 last year. “I am delighted with the work that my colleagues are undertaking. It is measured by results. The results are building up and we are delivering.”
In December 2015, former minister Jamie Briggs had stepped down from the frontbench followed by Mal Brough, necessitating a reshuffle. | Foreign minister responds to media speculation, saying it is up to Malcolm Turnbull but the current cabinet is working well together | 23.727273 | 0.772727 | 0.954545 | medium | low | abstractive |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/01/australia-braces-for-extreme-weather-as-summer-gets-off-to-sweltering-start | http://web.archive.org/web/20161223093132id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/01/australia-braces-for-extreme-weather-as-summer-gets-off-to-sweltering-start | Australia braces for extreme weather as summer gets off to sweltering start | 20161223093132 | Most of Australia can expect a hotter-than-average December, with temperatures being forced up by both regional climate patterns and a global upwards trend.
Temperatures were forecast to peak between 29C and 34C on Thursday, the first day of summer, in all states bar Victoria and Tasmania. Melbourne and Hobart could look forward to highs of 21C and 24C.
Queensland would be the worst affected, with Friday expected to be Brisbane’s hottest December day in 15 years peaking at 38C.
Severe heatwave conditions forecast in southern and central parts of the state were forecast to continue into early next week. The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) warned residents to be mindful of the impact of heat stress.
There were also low- to severe-intensity heatwave conditions across northern Western Australia and the Top End of the Northern Territory.
Almost all of Australia could expect drier-than-average conditions in December, with a 70 to 80% chance of below-average rainfall across most of the eastern part of the country.
Above-average temperatures were forecast for days and nights across eastern and northern Australia for the entire summer through to February.
The higher-than-usual pressures in the short term were the result of a climate driver known as the Southern Annular Mode, typically associated with reduced rainfall and higher temperatures.
It was forcing wind systems further north than normal, holding monsoon weather at bay while moving air far across the continent.
“It acts a bit like a wall that blocks the influence of the tropical wet season,” said Andrew Watkins, the acting head of climate monitoring and prediction at BoM.
The combination has resulted in severe fire danger for parts of NSW, Queensland, WA and ACT, and that risk would persist with the drier and hotter conditions over the summer.
The second-wettest winter on record had encouraged grass growth, prompting concerns about fast-running grass fires, particularly on the urban fringe, said Watkins.
The Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre said the fire risk was predominately in grassland areas of Victoria and NSW.
Cyclone season is not set to begin in earnest until January, but Watkins said an average to above-average season – typically 11 cyclones – was forecast. Last season there were only three, a record low, because of an “exceptionally strong” El Niño.
“We don’t want people to be complacent because not much happened last year ... It was not typical by any means.”
BoM’s seasonal outlook for December to February also warned that “Australian climate patterns were being influenced by the long-term increasing trend in global air and ocean temperatures”.
This year has already been declared the hottest ever recorded.
Watkins said it was difficult to break down the impact of climate change on weather in Australia compared with local patterns and drivers.
“The reality is climate change is playing a role in all of our weather and climate these days,” he said. | More cyclones and severe fire danger expected over summer as above-average temperatures forecast across eastern and northern Australia | 28.75 | 0.95 | 2.85 | medium | high | mixed |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/09/xenophon-criticises-stephen-conroys-new-job-at-gaming-lobbyist | http://web.archive.org/web/20161223093445id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/09/xenophon-criticises-stephen-conroys-new-job-at-gaming-lobbyist | Xenophon criticises Stephen Conroy's new job as gambling lobbyist | 20161223093445 | Former Labor minister and factional powerbroker Stephen Conroy’s new job as the head of gambling lobbyists Responsible Wagering Australia has been criticised by the anti-pokies senator Nick Xenophon.
Conroy has been appointed executive director of the new industry body – backed by James Packer’s CrownBet, Sportsbet, Betfair, Bet365 and Unibet – after resigning from federal politics suddenly in September.
Conroy’s new job was announced in the same week as former NSW premier Barry O’Farrell became head of Racing Australia, replacing former one-time Nationals MP, Peter McGauran.
The former Liberal senator Richard Colbeck will chair the new gambling lobby group.
Xenophon told Guardian Australia he would attempt to pursue changes that would stop former ministers becoming industry lobbyists immediately after leaving politics.
He said it was also reasonable to require disclosure of their remuneration.
“I’m not a fan of Donald Trump but he’s looking at a five-year ban on ministers, ... people in the executive [from becoming lobbyists after leaving office],” Xenophon said on Friday.
“I’ll be looking at moving changes to make the exclusion period much greater and much tighter.”
“I also think there ought to be, if you’re a former MP, whether you’re a minister or not. I think it’s not unreasonable to disclose how much you’re getting paid and how much lobbyists are getting paid for particular jobs.
“I think we need to know that. That’s a level of transparency that I think is essential.”
Xenophon also said the gambling industry professing support for responsible gambling stretched credulity.
“The name Responsible Wagering Council is pretty much an oxymoron due to developments in the industry where we’ve seen an aggressive expansion of the sector and with that a massive increase in problem gambling,” Xenophon said.
“By implication, it blames consumers if they develop a problem with what’s inherently a dangerous product.” | South Australian senator says former minsters should not become industry lobbyists straight after leaving politics | 24.8 | 0.533333 | 1.066667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/National/2016/12/23/18/48/Amber-alert-issued-to-help-locate-newborn-girl-reported-missing-from-Gold-Coast-University-Hospital | http://web.archive.org/web/20161224152504id_/http://www.9news.com.au/National/2016/12/23/18/48/Amber-alert-issued-to-help-locate-newborn-girl-reported-missing-from-Gold-Coast-University-Hospital | Newborn girl taken from Gold Coast University Hospital found safe in NSW | 20161224152504 | The man and woman were spotted on CCTV leaving the hospital. (Queensland Police)
A missing newborn baby girl has been found safe and well in NSW, after she was taken from a Gold Coast hospital.
Police last night issued an Amber alert seeking urgent public assistance to locate the newborn, who was seen leaving the Gold Coast University Hospital with a man, a woman and an eight-year-old girl.
The woman seen taking the baby was believed to be the mother, but Queensland police fear the infant was at "significant risk", disappearing just hours after she was born.
Early this morning police said the baby girl had been found safe and well in Tweed Heads.
Police believe the girl may be in the company of these two people. (Queensland Police)
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016 | An amber alert has been issued to help locate a newborn baby girl who went missing from the Gold Coast University Hospital this afternoon. | 6.48 | 0.88 | 2.24 | low | medium | mixed |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/16/nurofen-makers-fine-for-misleading-consumers-increased-from-17m-to-6m | http://web.archive.org/web/20161225003306id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/16/nurofen-makers-fine-for-misleading-consumers-increased-from-17m-to-6m | Nurofen maker's fine for misleading consumers increased from $1.7m to $6m | 20161225003306 | The manufacturer of Nurofen has been fined $6m for misleading consumers. The federal court increased the penalty from $1.7m to $6m after an appeal by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
In December 2015 the federal court found the British company Reckitt Benckiser, the manufacturer of the painkiller, had engaged in “misleading conduct” by representing that its Nurofen Specific Pain products targeted a type or area of pain despite being identical, and ordered they be removed from supermarket shelves within three months.
Nurofen Back Pain, Nurofen Period Pain, Nurofen Migraine Pain and Nurofen Tension Headache all contain 342mg of ibuprofen lysine, and cost up to twice as much as its regular products.
Lawyers for the ACCC had told the federal court hearing in New South Wales that the company had profited substantially and should be fined accordingly.
The ACCC challenge to the products, which began in March 2015 last year, followed years of criticism by consumer groups. In 2010 the consumer group Choice gave Nurofen’s pain-specific range a Shonky award, saying “the shonkiest aspect of this type of marketing is that the fast-acting painkillers labelled for specific pain types are more expensive – costing almost twice as much in some stores we surveyed.”
Consumer Group Choice welcomed the decision but said consumer laws needed to be changed to increase potential penalties for misleading conduct.
“These companies make huge profits when peddling these deceptive and misleading claims, but the courts’ hands are tied when it comes to handing down an appropriate penalty,” Choice spokesperson, Nicky Breen, said.
“The law needs to be changed so that courts can and will issue penalties that give companies a real headache.
“Reckitt Benckiser used this dodgy marketing for years. Choice first called the company out for its deceptive claims.”
“While we welcome the court’s decision to impose a higher penalty, it’s pocket change compared to the profit Reckitt Benckiser would have made from conning consumers into paying top dollar for products that weren’t any more effective than cheaper generic pain relief pills.” | ACCC succeeds in appeal to increase penalty, claiming manufacturers profited substantially from misleading consumers | 26.6 | 0.8 | 1.333333 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/25/00/03/shorten-s-christmas-penalty-rates-pledge | http://web.archive.org/web/20161225145102id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/25/00/03/shorten-s-christmas-penalty-rates-pledge | Shorten's Christmas penalty rates pledge | 20161225145102 | The Shortens are remembering the "modest heroes" who will be busy working this Christmas and relying on penalty rates while others relax.
The Labor leader has again filmed his annual Christmas message with wife Chloe, with the pair reflecting on those who will be serving others through the break.
Mr Shorten pays tribute to the troops overseas and their loving families back home who also serve, as well as emergency services personnel.
"We think of all those Australians working this holiday season to make our Christmas run smoothly - modest heroes who get up before the sun rises or work through the night," he says.
"Hard-working people, relying on penalty rates to provide for their families - something I'll always fight for."
Christmas is also a time to spare a thought for those doing it tough - the homeless, those battling loneliness and women and children in refuges, they say.
"We're so lucky that many Australians will roll up their sleeves to provide hot meals, secure accommodation and a little bit of Christmas cheer in hard times."
Ms Shorten urges Australians to be careful on the roads and stay safe around the water.
"We hope all of you have a relaxing break, with the people that you love," her husband says.
"From our family to yours, Merry Christmas." | Labor leader Bill Shorten has vowed to keep fighting for penalty rates in his annual Christmas message with wife Chloe. | 12.52381 | 0.809524 | 3 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/26/01/04/newspoll-shows-govt-support-dips-in-qld | http://web.archive.org/web/20161226154947id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/26/01/04/newspoll-shows-govt-support-dips-in-qld | Newspoll shows govt support dips in Qld | 20161226154947 | The Turnbull government has suffered a five per cent swing against it in Queensland in the six months since the election, the latest Newspoll shows.
A demographic analysis of Newspoll surveys taken for The Australian in the December quarter also reveals a sharp swing against the government in Western Australia.
The analysis of 8508 voters in surveys from October to December shows Labor has made smaller gains in NSW and Victoria but lost ground in South Australia.
It shows support for the government in capital cities is unchanged since the election, but support in the rest of the country has fallen 3.7 per cent in two-party terms.
The analysis reveals Labor has jumped ahead of the coalition in Queensland to hold a lead of 51 per cent to 49 per cent in two-party terms, a five per cent swing from the coalition's 54-46 per cent share of the vote in the election.
In WA the analysis shows a 3.7 per cent swing against the coalition in two-party terms, narrowing the government's lead to 51 per cent to Labor's 49 per cent.
Labor's strongest vote is in Victoria where it is ahead by 53 to 47 per cent in two-party terms and it's also ahead in NSW 52 to 48 per cent and in South Australia by 51 to 49 per cent.
While Mr Turnbull's personal ratings were worse than Mr Shorten's in every state and across city and country voters, but he outranked the Labor leader in every jurisdiction as better PM. | The latest Newspoll shows the Turnbull government has suffered a five per cent swing against it in Queensland in the six months since the election. | 11.115385 | 1 | 17.615385 | low | high | extractive |
http://people.com/human-interest/miracle-on-22nd-street-jim-glaub-dylan-parker/cm.peo/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161227091254id_/http://people.com/human-interest/miracle-on-22nd-street-jim-glaub-dylan-parker/cm.peo/ | Couple Turn Mistaken Letters to Santa Claus Into Miracle on 22nd Street | 20161227091254 | Jim Glaub and Dylan Parker were getting ready to spend their first Christmas living together in their Manhattan apartment on 22nd Street when their mailbox started filling up with letters addressed to Santa Claus — letters that would lead to a global giving movement.
Having lived in the Chelsea apartment for nearly three years before Parker moved in, Glaub thought nothing of it when that first letter to little St. Nick arrived. He had been warned by the previous tenants that the address had been mistakenly receiving Santa’s mail for at least five years prior.
“They never answered them because it was only three or four letters a year,” Glaub, 36, tells PEOPLE. “And the first two years I lived there, it was that exact thing. I’d get three letters and I didn’t really think anything of it. I was like, ‘Oh, sorry — wrong number.’ ”
But that year was different. It was 2010, and the couple — who have now been married for four years — watched the letters grow with each visit from the mailman.
By the time Christmas rolled around, nearly 450 letters had arrived at their doorstep.
Neither Glaub nor Parker, 35, had any idea why the number of letters had suddenly spiked or how their address was chosen as the East Coast bureau of the North Pole. But there was a common thread in all the letters — they each came from families in need living in their very city.
“These were our neighbors in the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan… these were our people,” Glaub says. “I just felt this need to help them.”
That year, the two set out on a mission to get every letter filled — taking to social media and spreading the word about the letters amongst their family and friends. Seeing the story, filmmaker-friends Sarah Klein and Tom Mason did a short film on the pair and their cause for her production company, Redglass Pictures. It was picked up by The New York Times.
They were able to get 150 letters fulfilled of the 450 they received in 2010. But for the past six years, the letters haven’t stopped. And even though Glaub and Dylan have long since moved out from their apartment rental, they’ve dedicated each holiday season to making sure the families in need who write to Santa have their wishes granted.
So far, not a single letter has gone unanswered — with people from all over the country and the world swooping in to help.
The letters are mostly assigned via word of mouth — though a “Miracle on 22nd Street” Facebook group set up to help manage the distributions has greatly helped, especially since the pair are now living in London. (Glaub is in touch with the apartment’s current tenant each year to help collect the letters, and a friend locally scans each letter for recording.)
“It’s just so strange! It’s caused this global effort!” Glaub, a marketing executive, says. “We’ve had people from Hawaii to Alaska, Germany to London, Nicaragua, Abu Dhabi, Tokyo — all helping. I guess that’s the power of social media. Why would a woman from Abu Dhabi care about some family from Corona, Queens? It’s amazing.”
“I think that suggests we are all looking for that connection to something bigger,” adds Parker.
The letters range from lighthearted to serious. The majority are handwritten, while others are typed and include playful illustrations. The items requested are practical — winter clothing, toys, blankets and footwear. Occasionally, there’s an ask for a video game console thrown in there. Milk and cookies are often promised to be waiting for Santa on Christmas morning.
One letter in particular has stayed with Glaub over the years. It was from a boy who said he hoped Santa would deliver him a bed. “That was like a punch in the gut,” he recalls.
There’s no rulebook to how one answers each letter. Some participants fulfill all the requests, while others just get what they can. Glaub’s heard stories about in-person bonds formed between families and their letter-answerers. “I have a group of friends who have had their family now for four years or something.” he says. “It’s just nonstop crazy stories.”
This year has brought the couple over 300 letters as of this article’s publication. They have roughly 50 that still need fulfilling.
On years when there weren’t enough letters to go around, the couple pointed friends to Operation Santa — a project run by the United States Postal Service to help letters written to the man in red get answered.
To this day, Glaub and Parker still don’t know how their Chelsea address was picked. Years ago, they explored patterns and connections in the letters — thinking it may have started in a faculty newsletter or church group. There was also speculation that it could be traced back to The Night Before Christmas author Clement Clarke Moore, whose estate was nearby. He had received letters written to Santa after the publication of his classic poem in the 1800s.
While the couple understands the curiosity of knowing how this all began, they have stopped asking those questions themselves.
“When I look back, I am most surprised about how skeptical I was and how narrowly focused I was on myself,” Parker, who works in scientific publishing, admits: “Perhaps it’s just from getting older since the project started, but I’ve learned that contributing to something greater than ourselves — even if it is something unknown — leads to far more happiness and sense of purpose than solely focusing on our own desires.”
He continues: “That’s not exactly a huge revelation, but this optimizes that lesson at a time when people are often the most giving and the most willing to trust that their generosity will help make someone else’s day just a bit better. It requires that we put ourselves second momentarily to help someone unknown to us, and without the usual gratification of seeing the outcome or receiving thanks. The act of giving itself has to be enough.”
One things for sure – as long as letters keep coming, Glaub and Parker will work to get them answered. “Now it’s gotten to the point where we can’t not do it,” Glaub says. “We have to do it. It’s just part of our lives.”
To get involved with Glaub and Parker’s inspiring project, visit the “Miracle on 22nd Street” Facebook group. | Jim Glaub and Dylan Parker have been randomly receiving hundreds letters from needy families addressed to Santa Claus for six years | 60.761905 | 0.857143 | 2.47619 | high | medium | mixed |
http://people.com/celebrity/brittany-daniel-reveals-cancer-battle-with-non-hodgkins-lymphoma/feed/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161227095541id_/http://people.com/celebrity/brittany-daniel-reveals-cancer-battle-with-non-hodgkins-lymphoma/feed/ | Brittany Daniel Reveals Cancer Battle with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma | 20161227095541 | Brittany Daniel knew something wasn’t right. It was the summer of 2011 and the actress was preparing for another season on BET’s The Game and looking forward to moving into a new home. But after experiencing excruciating back pain, night sweats and flu-like symptoms, she decided to see a doctor.
The news the actress received was unexpected and grim: she had stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
In the latest issue of PEOPLE, Daniel, 38, opens up for the first time about her harrowing ordeal, how she fought her way back to health and how her illness changed her outlook on life.
“It happened so suddenly, she tells PEOPLE exclusively. Almost immediately after her diagnosis, Daniel – who starred opposite her twin sister, Cynthia, on the 1994 teen drama Sweet Valley High – started chemotherapy. During her recovery, she and her mom moved into Cynthia’s guest house. The rallying of her inner circle, and the work of her physician Dr. Julie Dunhill, gave Daniel hope and the continued strength to soldier forward.
“There is is no way I would have ever gotten through this without my family,” Daniel says in the exclusive PEOPLE video above. “My family is everything to me and I feel like they saw me through this.”
Though she originally wanted to keep her situation a private matter (she only told a small group of family and friends), Daniel – now healthy and cancer-free – realized her story could help others going through a similar situation.
INSIDE STORY: Spartacus Star Andy Whitfield’s Brave Final Fight Against Cancer
“I want to let people know it is absolutely possible to get through something like this,” she says. “I want people to know they are not alone.”
As for the future, she’s thrilled to be back on The Game (BET, Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT) and possibly starting a family of her own.
Adds Daniel: I am just trying to enjoy every day.
For more on Daniel’s journey back to health, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday. | “I want to let people know it is absolutely possible to get through something like this,” The Game star tells PEOPLE exclusively | 16.68 | 1 | 15 | medium | high | extractive |
http://people.com/human-interest/say-hello-to-the-real-life-mr-and-mrs-clause-oh-and-they-met-online/PEOPLE.com/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161227103108id_/http://people.com/human-interest/say-hello-to-the-real-life-mr-and-mrs-clause-oh-and-they-met-online/PEOPLE.com/ | Mr. and Mrs. Claus Met Online! | 20161227103108 | Ever wonder how the North Pole’s most famous couple met?
“Online!” Carl Vandervoort, who plays Santa Claus at Tom’s Farms in California, tells PEOPLE with a chuckle. “She was perfect.”
Carl and his wife of two years, Alisha Vandervoort, who now plays Mrs. Claus, found each other on Match.com in April 2011 and have been together ever since.
“He had photos of him dressing as Santa on his profile,” Alisha tells PEOPLE. “The first time I saw him as Santa in person, it was like dating a rockstar, all the little kids loved him.
“It was a Christmas miracle!”
The couple, from Corona, California, got married on Halloween in 2014 where Carl dressed as Frankenstein and Alisha dressed as the bride of Frankenstein.
A few months later was the first time Alicia, a 7th grade science teacher, decided to join Carl as Mrs. Claus.
“I made my costume,” she says. “And I’ve actually sewed one of his costumes, he has three.”
Carl says he started dressing as Santa 16 years ago to impress his daughter, Jaime Vandervoort, who is now 20 and in the U.S. Air Force.
“It just made her so happy, it was so funny she’d say, ‘How come when Santa shows up you go away?’ ” says Carl, who works for a California fire support group when he’s not dressing as Santa. “I did it more and more and eventually an agent got a hold of me.
“We just enjoy making kids happy.”
Carl starts growing out his beard in August to get “the full potential” and Alisha has naturally grey hair that is “perfect for Mrs. Claus!”
“We look really real, but at the heart of it, we just enjoy making kids happy and who doesn’t enjoy being the happy couple?” says Carl. “Some of the boys are starstruck, those are my favorites.”
Adds Alisha: “We’re just looking forward to another beautiful Christmas and hopefully we can bring some cheer to the new year.” | Carl and his wife of two years, Alisha Vandervoort, who now plays Mrs. Claus, found each other on Match.com in April 2011 | 16.192308 | 0.961538 | 22.192308 | medium | high | extractive |
http://people.com/home/property-brothers-drew-scott-engaged-to-linda-phan/amp/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161227103732id_/http://people.com/home/property-brothers-drew-scott-engaged-to-linda-phan/amp/ | Property Brothers' Drew Scott Is Engaged to Linda Phan | 20161227103732 | Sorry, ladies, Drew Scott is officially off the market!
The Property Brothers star proposed to longtime girlfriend Linda Phan at the Toronto restaurant Piano Piano, and PEOPLE can exclusively announce the pair are engaged.
“I’ve never met another woman like her and once you do, you want to be with her forever,” Scott, 38, tells PEOPLE of Phan, 31.
Scott has been planning the elaborate surprise for weeks, and was determined to keep his new fiancé off his trail as he coordinated every over-the-top moment. “I’ve had to be as stealthy as a ninja to pull this off,” he says. Scott even admitted he’s been carrying the ring around with him for weeks and has kept all planning offline so Phan couldn’t possibly come across any details accidentally.
The HGTV star, who has released two country singles with brother Jonathan, recently snuck off to New York City to record his own version of the Train song “Marry Me.” During tonight’s dinner, he arranged for the restaurant to play the track while he and Phan were having dinner, which cued the staff to bring out a cake decorated with illustrations from one of Phan’s favorite books, Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go, tweaked to read “Oh the Places We’ll Go,” as a nod to their continuing journey together.
The festivities continued after dinner with a surprise engagement party at a nearby venue that Phan had been led to believe was a company holiday party. Friends and family, including both fiancés’ parents, as well as Scott siblings Jonathan and J.D., were all in attendance.
RELATED: The Property Brothers Have the Most Amazing Holiday Vacation Planned for Their Girlfriends
WATCH THIS: Ever Wonder Where the Property Brothers Live?
RELATED: The Property Brothers Are ‘Good to Do Some Babysitting’ for Chip and Joanna Gaines
Scott and Phan met in 2010 at a Toronto Fashion Week event, and have been dating for six years. Phan serves as the Creative Director for Scott Brothers Entertainment, overseeing multiple projects including digital content, marketing campaigns and philanthropic effort for her new fiancé and his twin brother, Jonathan’s media company.
Now the two can get started on their next big project: wedding planning! Congrats to the happy couple! | The HGTV star has popped the question to longtime girlfriend Linda Phan, PEOPLE confirms | 27.875 | 0.75 | 2.375 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/27/09/15/dog-stuck-at-tasmanian-blow-hole | http://web.archive.org/web/20161227121118id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/27/09/15/dog-stuck-at-tasmanian-blow-hole | Pet dog saved from Tasmanian blow hole | 20161227121118 | The dog, named grace, became trapped on the ledge of the blow hole after wandering away from the family home. (Tasmania Police)
A pooch who bit off more than she could chew has been rescued from a ledge above a blow hole in northern Tasmania.
Grace, 6, a Kelpie spaniel cross got stuck at the Devonport blow hole after wandering from home, prompting the rescue by Tasmania Police and the Devonport Surf Lifesaving Club.
Constable Dave Fitzgerald saved the pup with the help of the Surf Life Saving club. (Tasmania Police)
Constable Dave Fitzgerald rescued Grace about 9.30am on Tuesday and she was returned uninjured to her anxious owner.
It's the second animal operation in as many days for Tasmania's police force.
Grace the spaniel was returned to her owners uninjured. (Tasmania Police)
Boxing Day police helped Parks and Wildlife officers tranquillise and move a large seal wandering the suburban streets of Newstead. | A spaniel has become stuck on a ledge at a blow hole in northern Tasmania, prompting a search and rescue operation. | 7.869565 | 0.913043 | 2.391304 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/27/22/00/search-for-missing-teen-at-sydney-beach | http://web.archive.org/web/20161228134830id_/http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/12/27/22/00/search-for-missing-teen-at-sydney-beach | Search for missing teen at Sydney beach | 20161228134830 | Police and emergency crews scour the water for the missing teenager. (Sage Barreda/Supplied)
A search is under way for a teenage boy missing at Maroubra beach in Sydney's east.
Police and emergency services were called out to the southern end of Maroubra beach just after 8.30pm on Tuesday in response to two people in trouble in the water.
A 14-year-old boy was found unharmed on the beach but rescue services, including a NSW Ambulance helicopter, are searching for another 14-year-old boy still missing.
Officers from Marine Area Command, Ambulance Rescue and Surf Life Savers NSW are carrying out the search.
Emergency services were called to the southern end of Maroubra beach just after 8.30pm. (Sage Barreda/Supplied)
Locals look on as emergency crews attempt to find the missing teen. (Sage Barreda/Supplied) | Police and emergency services are searching the water at Maroubra beach for a 15-year-old boy. | 9.055556 | 0.944444 | 2.611111 | low | high | mixed |
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/missing-in-america/amp/questions-concerns-fueling-search-missing-california-mother-four-cecilia-cabrera-n683731 | http://web.archive.org/web/20161229054726id_/http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/missing-in-america/amp/questions-concerns-fueling-search-missing-california-mother-four-cecilia-cabrera-n683731 | Questions and Concerns Fueling Search for Missing California Mother of Four Cecilia Cabrera | 20161229054726 | It's been nearly five months since California mother-of-four Cecilia Cabrera mysteriously vanished, and those closest to her are still trying to make sense of the shocking situation.
"In my head, there are all these questions. What happened that night? Where is she?" Ariana Flores, a close friend of Cecilia's, told Dateline. "She needs to be home."
The last images of Cecilia were captured on surveillance footage from the Tachi Palace Casino in Lemoore, California. It was just before 1:00 a.m. on June 9, 2016 when the 31-year-old was seen leaving the casino in her dark grey Chevrolet Malibu.
Several hours later, a call came in to the California State Highway Patrol that a burning vehicle had been discovered in an orchard near Goshen, about 30 miles away from the casino.
It was Cecilia's car. But there were no signs of Cecilia.
Things were complex in Cecilia's life and had been for some time. She had been divorced from her first husband, the father of her three oldest children for years, and was married to another man, Francisco Valdivia.
The tricky part was that Valdivia did not live with Cecilia and her four children; he was living with another woman. The relationship was complicated, Ariana told Dateline, but Cecilia had confided in her friend that she had had enough.
"If she did anything wrong, it was being with that man," Ariana said. "She deserved better. But when she talked about leaving him, she would tell me that he would not let her go."
According to Ariana, Cecilia had gone to the casino that night with her husband. It was odd, she said, because the two never went out at night together.
Cecilia had also said she had been receiving threatening phone calls in the weeks before she vanished, which was concerning for her loved ones.
"She didn't really have an enemy in the world outside of this situation," Ariana told Dateline.
Authorities are continuing to investigate Cecilia's disappearance and call the case "active and on-going," Sergeant Joe Torres of the Tulare County Sheriff's Department told Dateline. He added that investigators are still following up on all leads, including the early lead about Cecilia's relationship with her husband, Valdivia.
About a week after Cecilia vanished, Valdivia was arrested on unrelated drug charges for allegedly operating multiple marijuana grow sites, according to police. It was during the investigation into Cecilia's disappearance, that police uncovered the sites.
When asked to comment if there might be a connection between Valdivia and Cecilia's disappearance, Sgt. Torres would only tell Dateline, "I can say that he has not been eliminated in the case."
Valdivia has denied having any involvement in Cecilia' disappearance, according to authorities.
As the official investigation ticks on, Cecilia's loved ones are trying to stay hopeful.
Multiple Facebook groups and pages have been started to spread awareness about the search and to keep people updated on developments. Users on social media have been encouraged to share positive stories or memories of Cecilia. There are so many, Ariana told Dateline, "It wasn't until she disappeared that we realized show much she did for others. These people tell us things and we're, like, "Wow." We knew she was so generous, but had no idea how many people she did something for."
Cecilia's brother, Rigo Cabrera, who is taking care of two of his sister's children in her absence, echoed that sentiment, telling Dateline, "She has such a generous heart. She'd do anything for anyone." The other two children are living with their biological father and his wife, both of whom are actively participating in the search for Cecilia.
"I think they are still in shock. These poor children just want their mom back," Cecilia's friend Ariana said. "We all want her back. She is greatly missed."
Cecilia Cabrera is described as 5'1" tall, weighing 160 lbs. with brown eyes and dyed blonde hair.
Anyone with information regarding her whereabouts is urged to call the Tulare County Sheriff's Department at (559) 735-1880. | Cecilia Cabrera disappeared in the early hours of June 9, 2016. | 63.923077 | 1 | 2.230769 | high | high | mixed |
http://mashable.com/2007/07/02/zoho-facebook-app/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161229152731id_/http://mashable.com/2007/07/02/zoho-facebook-app/ | Zoho Launches Its Facebook Application | 20161229152731 | Zoho has just launched its Facebook application, granting you access to your Zoho Office Suite from within Facebook. You can access it here.
This release gives you an updated list on your documents, spreadsheets and presentations, with quick links to them for editing and viewing purposes. You'll also get a list of your shared documents, and links for the creation of new documents, spreadsheets and presentations. This Facebook application closely mirrors that of Zoho's recent iPhone release (iZoho), which offers access to the same aspects of the Office Suite. While the mobile release also has some editing and document creation features, the Facebook app only offers a view of existing documents, with external links redirecting you to your actual Zoho account for editing, viewing and document creation purposes.
There are also no ways to easily share documents with your existing Facebook friends network. It may be tricky to incorporate that level of integration of Zoho with the Facebook platform, but would take this application from an individual's informational tool to a more collaborative application. You'll need an existing Zoho account to use this Facebook application. | Zoho has just launched its Facebook application, granting you access to your Zoho Office Suite from within Facebook. You can access it here. This release gives you an updated li... | 6.235294 | 0.941176 | 20.941176 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/retirement/amp/are-you-saving-enough-retirement-n557196 | http://web.archive.org/web/20161229165107id_/http://www.nbcnews.com/business/retirement/amp/are-you-saving-enough-retirement-n557196 | Are You Saving Enough for Retirement? | 20161229165107 | Are you on track to actually retire?
Savings benchmarks based on age and income can offer a quick assessment — but you shouldn't entirely base your plan on them.
To pull out a few examples, JPMorgan Asset Management's 2016 Guide to Retirement reports that someone age 40 with an annual household income of $100,000 should have 2.6 times that amount put away for retirement. By age 60, the bank estimates, that multiple should be 7.3. At Fidelity, the latest "savings factors" released in fall 2015 call for a 40-year-old worker to have saved an amount equivalent to three times his salary, and by age 60, eight times salary. (See charts below for others.)
Hitting those multiples can seem like a tall order. Despite swelling ranks of 401(k) millionaires, many people have saved far less. A quarter of workers say their family has less than $1,000 in savings and investments, according to the 2016 Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Greenwald & Associates. Only 14 percent said their family has set aside $250,000 or more.
That's exactly the point of benchmarks, the banks say. Many consumers don't take advantage of more in-depth retirement calculators and other tools, so they don't know just how close or far off they are to meeting their savings goals, said Katherine Roy, chief retirement strategist for JPMorgan Asset Management. Benchmarks offer a quick litmus test.
"It's a great way to create an immediate recognition that you may not be where you need to be, and that you need to sit down and create a more comprehensive plan," she said.
That might mean escalating your contributions, or socking away more of your next raise, said John Sweeney, executive vice president of retirement and investing strategies for Fidelity.
"Think about not expanding your lifestyle to accommodate the new income," he said.
Consumers who are hitting or exceeding benchmarks could take that as an indication it's time to revisit their plan with an eye to funding other life goals, he said.
But advisors caution that benchmarks — like blanket estimates that you might need $1 million, $2.5 million or more for a solid retirement — easily miss the mark. The underlying assumptions about investment returns, income needs and years in retirement aren't one-size-fits-all, said certified financial planner Cathy Seeber, a partner at Wescott Financial Advisory Group in Philadelphia."
The only time they would ever work is if everything else in your life is status quo," she said. "It rarely is.
"Someone's "magic number" is highly personalized, said certified financial planner Clark Randall, founder of Financial Enlightenment in Dallas.
You might need more or less than a benchmark says you do depending on things including your health, anticipated retirement age and lifestyle in retirement. "Your pre-retirement income might have no bearing whatsoever on your post-retirement needs," he said.
If you do consult benchmarks, don't be surprised to see the goal numbers shift.
"The objective is not to try to change the goal posts on folks quarterly," said Sweeney, but to incorporate new trends and data.
RELATED: Is a Mandatory Retirement Plan in Your Future?
Fidelity tweaked its equation last fall to factor in consumers' longer lifespan and the rising full retirement age of 67 for Social Security. The latest version of JPMorgan's assessments lowered pre-retirement return assumptions from 7 percent to 6.5 percent, with the net effect of higher benchmarks.
"If the market won't work as much for you, the one variable you can control is how much you save," Roy said.
Check your retirement savings progress at least on an annual basis and during times of major transition (say, getting married or divorced or switching jobs). "You would drive people crazy if you try to [check in] too often," Seeber said.For example, market volatility might mean you're hitting a benchmark one day, and short the next week.
"It's a trend line you're looking for," she said. | Savings benchmarks based on age and income can offer a quick assessment — but you shouldn't entirely base your plan on them. | 33.791667 | 1 | 24 | medium | high | extractive |
http://nypost.com/2016/12/29/earths-beauty-as-seen-from-space/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161230124231id_/http://nypost.com/2016/12/29/earths-beauty-as-seen-from-space/ | Earth’s beauty as seen from space | 20161230124231 | Astronauts aboard the International Space Station capture the Richat structure, an eroded circular geological structure, in Mauritania, Africa.
The Nile River is illuminated by city street lights and buildings.
The landscape of Yemen emulates tree branches.
The Sao Francisco River winds through Brazil.
Overlapping river channels from the Georgina River and Burke River in Queensland, Australia.
This image was created using composite photographs of the mountain in Mount Brandberg, Nambia.
Center pivot irrigation in Texas
The moon rises over the Earth.
This photo shows high levels of sediment - the pale areas - washed out to sea after an usual rainfall event during the dry season in Traverse Island, Australia.
Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Al Ain are illuminated by building and street lights in the United Arab Emirates.
A weather system forms over the ocean.
Astronauts used composite images to create this photo in Atacama Desert, Chile.
An aerial view of Calgary, Canada
Astronauts capture the stark contrast of water and ice at the Oahe Dam along the Missouri River.
A composite image of the Atlantic Ocean
Intricate cloud formations over Australia
The landscape of Illizi, Algeria
Astronauts look into the heart of a mountain.
A composite photo of Boston
An aurora above the Great Lakes
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{* #tradAuthenticateMergeForm *} {* traditionalSignIn_emailAddress *} {* mergePassword *} | Gaze down at the Earth’s sprawling surface from the International Space Station. Throughout 2016 astronauts aboard the ISS have been documenting the ever-changing face of the Earth, capturing… | 12.205882 | 0.588235 | 1.117647 | low | low | abstractive |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/30/julie-bishop-australia-un-resolution-israel | http://web.archive.org/web/20161230152954id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/30/julie-bishop-australia-un-resolution-israel | Julie Bishop: Australia would not have backed UN resolution on Israel | 20161230152954 | Australia would not have supported a UN resolution condemning Israel’s settlements program in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Julie Bishop has indicated.
The foreign affairs minister said in a statement Australia did not support “one-sided resolutions targeting Israel”, the ABC reported.
The resolution was co-sponsored by New Zealand, which the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said was tantamount to a “declaration of war”.
“If you continue to promote this resolution, from our point of view it will be a declaration of war. It will rupture the relations and there will be consequences,” Netanyahu reportedly told New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister, Murray McCully.
But McCully, insisted: “This resolution conforms to our policy and we will move it forward.”
The US, which has a veto in the UN security council, abstained from the vote, drawing stinging criticism from the Netanyahu government, which accused Barack Obama of orchestrating the vote, a claim the US government strongly denies.
Australia is not currently a member of the UN security council and so was not eligible to vote on the resolution but Bishop indicated the federal government would not have taken the same line as its New Zealand counterpart.
“In voting at the UN, the Coalition government has consistently not supported one-sided resolutions targeting Israel,” the statement read.
Bishop said the Australian government remained “firmly committed to a two-state solution, where Israel and a Palestinian state exist side by side in peace and security, within internationally recognised borders”.
“Australia urges both sides to refrain from steps that damage the prospect for peace and to resume direct negotiations for a two-state solution as soon as possible,” the statement said.
Netanyahu has been invited to visit Australia in the new year and would become the first Israeli prime minister to do so. Issuing the invitation in September, when she was in Israel, Bishop said the Australian public would “warmly embrace you, welcome you”.
The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, has been in Israel in the past week, where he described Netanyahu as “a good friend of Australia”.
Pleasure to meet with the Prime Minister of Israel @netanyahu, a good friend of Australia. pic.twitter.com/Sth7ImfkjF
On Thursday the former Labor foreign affairs minister Bob Carr sounded a dissenting note by saying the election of Donald Trump could “unleash Netanyahu to approve a rash of new settlements and even annex the West Bank … that would destroy a two-state solution”, the Australian reported. | Foreign affairs minister dissents from New Zealand’s position, saying Australia does not support ‘one-sided resolutions targeting Israel’ | 22.363636 | 0.772727 | 2.318182 | medium | low | mixed |
http://people.com/crime/kim-kardashian-wests-lavish-social-media-posts-made-her-robbery-target-expert-2/feed/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161230162320id_/http://people.com/crime/kim-kardashian-wests-lavish-social-media-posts-made-her-robbery-target-expert-2/feed/ | Kim Kardashian West's Lavish Social Media Posts Made Her Robbery Target: Expert | 20161230162320 | ‘s tendency to document everything from her whereabouts to her expensive jewelry on social media made her a
, a security expert tells PEOPLE.
“Obviously she can’t be low-profile where she’s staying if she’s advertising what she’s doing and advertising her wealth,” Christopher Hagon, a managing partner at Incident Management Group, a Florida-based international security consulting firm, tells PEOPLE.
“If you’re constantly putting information out there, keeping your name in the public eye … keeping details of your wealth in the public eye then you are … increasing the chances of a possible attack.”
The 35-year-old reality star was held at gunpoint early Monday morning in her Paris hotel room when five masked men allegedly broke in and tied her up before making off with two cellphones and about $10 million worth of jewelry, including a $4 million ring.
Kim Kardashian WestHagon, a former security officer for the royal family, suspects that the robbery was pre-planned.
“It wasn’t something, like, they were just walking down the street and said, ‘Oh, I heard that Kardashian was here. Let’s just go in and rob her,’ ” Hagon says. “This was an organized attacked based on known information.”
The mom of two was in the French city for the final leg of Paris Fashion Week when the robbers attacked at around 2:30 a.m. A rep for Kardashian West told PEOPLE that the star is “badly shaken but physically unharmed.” The thieves remain at large.
The No Address Hotel in Paris, where Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint on Monday morningHer children, North, 3, and 9-month-old Saint were not involved in the incident, PEOPLE confirmed.
In the days leading up to the attack, Kardashian West’s Instagram and Twitter accounts have been riddled with photos of the star’s lavish outfits and jewelry – including a photo of the $4 million engagement ring that was reportedly one of the pieces that was stolen.
And Hagon says that Kardashian West’s security measures must match her very-active social media presence.
“Her threat level is high because her wealth and activities are well known,” Hagon explains. “If you really are concerned about your personal security then you’ve really got to make it as difficult as possible for people to hone in on you as a possible target.”
Hagon says there is nothing wrong with such a large social media presence, but someone of Kardashian West’s celebrity must “bolster [their] security approach accordingly.”
He suggests making a reservation at a hotel but staying somewhere else at the last minute, having very few people know about the security plans and becoming “as unpredictable as possible.”
“You are soliciting or at least increasing the chances of a possible attack,” he says. “The main goal of [the celebrity] and personal protection is to put as much distance as possible between a possible target and the threat.”
Upon learning of the robbery, Kardashian West’s husband Kanye West abruptly canceled his New York concert mid-performance.
Kardashian West left Paris on a private jet shortly after the incident. | Kim Kardashian West was robbed at gunpoint early Monday in her Paris hotel room | 44.142857 | 1 | 3.571429 | high | high | mixed |
http://abcnews.go.com/amp/Entertainment/prince-releases-new-song-moonbeam-levels/story | http://web.archive.org/web/20161230165909id_/http://abcnews.go.com/amp/Entertainment/prince-releases-new-song-moonbeam-levels/story?id=43705362 | Never-Before-Heard Prince Song 'Moonbeam Levels' Released | 20161230165909 | Never-Before-Heard Prince Song 'Moonbeam Levels' Released
By KELLY MCCARTHY Nov 22, 2016, 7:44 AM ET
WATCH: Here's what you need to know about the music legend.
Prince's Paisley Park estate has released the first new song since the singer passed away in April: "Moonbeam Levels."
An uplifting piano and guitar number, "Moonbeam Levels" was originally recorded in 1982 during the sessions for Prince's "1999" album. Later the track was considered for the never released album "Rave Unto the Joy Fantastic."
"Moonbeam Levels" is included on a new 40-track greatest-hits collection, "Prince 4Ever," which brings together the iconic artist's best-loved songs and top hits like "Kiss," "Little Red Corvette" and "Purple Rain."
Along with the new song, the album includes a booklet of never-before-seen photos of the singer taken by acclaimed photographer Herb Ritts.
Never before seen photos of Prince released with PRINCE 4Ever album.
Never before seen photos of Prince released with PRINCE 4Ever album.
ABC News held a live listening party of the new song for a group of Prince fans at the Cutting Room recording studio in New York City.
While many fans have eagerly awaited new music from the singer since his untimely death earlier this year, the legal battle over his estimated $300 million estate continues. | Prince 4Ever includes "Moonbeam Levels," a previously unreleased song originally recorded in 1982, during the "1999" sessions. | 11.541667 | 0.916667 | 2.166667 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-university-of-chicago-invest-25-million-startups-bsi-20161202-story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20161230214343id_/http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-university-of-chicago-invest-25-million-startups-bsi-20161202-story.html | University of Chicago to invest $25 million in student and faculty startups | 20161230214343 | The University of Chicago will put $25 million of its $7.1 billion endowment into startups over the next decade, it announced Friday. It will be the first time the endowment invests directly in startups.
The announcement came as part of the Innovation Fund finals, an event at the Polsky Exchange where startups from the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab and the Marine Biology Laboratory compete for capital.
The new UChicago Startup Investment Program will invest initially up to $500,000 or 20 percent of the round, whichever is less, in Series A-stage startups with strong connections to the university, it said.
It may invest in startups again in later funding rounds as well, and aims to take stakes in three to four companies per year. The university will require another venture firm to lead any rounds it participates in, and for that firm to get a seat on the startup's board.
John Flavin ⇒, who leads the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, said the investments will signal to the market that the university is excited about the companies it's producing.
"There are great new ideas that are emerging from the university and we're investing heavily in helping innovators … in getting their idea to the marketplace for greater impact on society," Flavin said.
The investments are intended to support startups run by students, faculty, staff or alumni and draw outside investors' attention to them as well, he said. Capital is both essential and hard to get for early stage startups, but being physically close to investors can help.
Flavin said some companies coming out of the university, especially those focused on advanced technologies such as battery storage, will benefit from the proximity and the relationships they share with the Office of Investments, which will oversee the startup investments.
While he hopes the investments will help university startups and that the effect will spill over into the larger Chicago tech community, Flavin said the "clear mandate" of the endowment fund is to generate a return. He acknowledged that investing in startups comes with a high level of risk.
The university has 10 current relationship with venture funds, as well as 10 "legacy" relationships with older funds that are mostly in the process of liquidating assets, a spokeswoman said. She declined to name the funds.
Startups receiving funding from the program will likely be alumni of at least one Polsky program, such as the New Venture Challenge, the Social New Venture Challenge or the Polsky Accelerator, the university said. Past graduates of such programs include GrubHub and Braintree. | The University of Chicago will put $25 million of its $7.1 billion endowment into startups over the next decade, it announced Friday. It will be the first time the endowment invests directly in startups. | 12.820513 | 1 | 39 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/03/28/choosing-paint-open-floor-plan/21334461/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161231035621id_/http://www.aol.com/article/2016/03/28/choosing-paint-open-floor-plan/21334461/ | Choosing paint for an entire open floor plan | 20161231035621 | Before you go, we thought you'd like these...
By: Emily A Clark I recently received an email from a reader who was struggling with choosing paint colors for her very open floor plan. I've been there/done that, and thought I would share what I've learned and a few quick tips. . .STICK TO ONE COLOR. When you're choosing a paint color for an open floor plan, you're usually talking about a good amount of square footage. Even if you're not, it's a safe bet to go with one color overall so that it flows from space to space easily. Want to vary things up a little? Play with shades of the same color, using the same paint card, if there's a place that makes sense to break it up a bit.
NEUTRAL NEVER FAILS. Neutral paint colors almost always make sense in a wide open space. (You can always add color and pattern in other places; keep reading.) And, if you're eyes are going crossed from trying to decide between several different neutral paint swatches, I would recommend erring on the side of lighter than darker. It's nearly impossible to choose the perfect paint color for someone online, but here are a few popular neutrals that you might want to use as a starting point:
(These colors look so much darker on my monitor than in person. . . )
ADD COLOR AND PATTERN IN OTHER PLACES. An open floor plan doesn't have to mean a lack of color. Look for other (smaller) places to use different paint colors: a kitchen island, built-in bookcases, your light fixtures. . . And, sometimes, it might be possible to add a little pattern to visually divide up the space. I used stripes on the two walls around the front door in our last house to separate the entry from the rest of the space.
See the original post on Emily A Clark | When you’re choosing a paint color for an open floor plan, you’re usually talking about a good amount of square footage. | 15.16 | 0.92 | 9 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/10/31/pepsi-sodastream-test-drive-new-relationship/20986546/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161231044259id_/http://www.aol.com/article/2014/10/31/pepsi-sodastream-test-drive-new-relationship/20986546/ | Pepsi and SodaStream Test-Drive a New Relationship | 20161231044259 | Two struggling carbonated beverage companies are coming together in a partnership that should help both. PepsiCo (
) confirmed last week that a limited number of PepsiCo flavors will be made available for a limited time for SodaStream machines.
It's shaping up to be a very limited trial. According to industry watcher Beverage Digest, the 10-week test will feature a half-dozen flavors sold at Bed Bath & Beyond (
) stores in select Florida cities.
Beverage Digest's source claims that the flavors will be exclusive to the SodaStream platform: Pepsi Homemade, Pepsi Homemade Vanilla, Pepsi Homemade Wild Cherry, Sierra Mist Homemade, Sierra Mist Homemade Peach and Sierra Mist Homemade Cranberry. How different Pepsi Homemade will be from Pepsi remains to be seen, but labeling all the products "homemade" is probably so PepsiCo doesn't upset its bottling and retail distribution partners.
Neither company is at its best right now. SodaStream reported horrendous quarterly results on Wednesday morning, particularly in the U.S., where the market's showing signs of tiring of the carbonated beverage maker.
SodaStream's third-quarter revenue declined 13 percent to $125.9 million from the prior year, fueled by a 41 percent plunge in the Americas. The weakness that SodaStream began experiencing late last year has carried over into 2014, and the soda-sipper indifference is starting to accelerate.
PepsiCo is also seeing its pop sales go the wrong way. Its carbonated-soft-drink volume declined 1.5 percent in North America in
. It had posted a somewhat similar year-over-year decline during the previous quarter. Consumers are turning away from sugary sodas, a trend that has been playing out for nine years, according to Beverage Digest.
So PepsiCo is in a bad spot, but the same can't necessarily be said about its bigger rival.
) held up only marginally better than PepsiCo when it comes to soft drink sales in this country. Its volume declined 1 percent in its latest quarter. It was helped by the Share a Coke campaign, which featured cans personalized with first names and terms of endearment.
However, Coca-Cola has also managed to stay ahead of PepsiCo in terms of moves made this year to increase its reach into beverage categories that are holding up better than carbonated soft drinks. It made 10-figure investments for stakes in energy drink speedster Monster (
) and single-serve coffee leader Keurig Green Mountain (
Its deal with Keurig Green Mountain also includes support for the upcoming Keurig Cold machine that will let consumers make carbonated beverages at home. PepsiCo has been slow to embrace the trend, settling for a deal earlier this year with Bevyz, a multidimensional maker of hot and cold beverages that has yet to be introduced in the U.S. market. With SodaStream, PepsiCo latches on to the industry leader in at-home carbonation with deep market penetration in a handful of overseas markets. | PepsiCo and SodaStream are struggling, making a limited partnership that much more important. | 36.866667 | 0.733333 | 1 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/01/07/what-is-the-best-diet-for-you/21293476/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161231051112id_/http://www.aol.com/article/2016/01/07/what-is-the-best-diet-for-you/21293476/ | What is the 'best diet' for you? | 20161231051112 | What makes a diet best? In
, the latest set of exclusive rankings from U.S. News, the
beat out 37 others, including
, to win the "Best Diets Overall" crown. Among the 17 commercial diet programs marketed to the public,
came out on top. (Our
explains how.) We also ranked the diets on likelihood of
, ability to prevent and control
Our analysis puts hard numbers on the common-sense belief that no diet is ideal for everybody.
Take DASH, the Best Diets Overall winner. It wasn't created as a way to drop pounds, but as a means of combating high blood pressure (it stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension). The federal government, which funded the research behind DASH, doesn't even call it a diet – it's an "eating plan." If losing weight is your No. 1 goal, a diet in our
rankings would be a more likely choice. Or if you have diabetes, you might want to look especially hard at
That's why we're giving you lots of tools. Each diet was scored by a panel of experts in short-term and long-term weight loss, on how easy it is to follow, how well it conforms to current nutrition standards and on health risks it may pose – plus its soundness as a diabetes and as a heart diet.
Besides the rankings and data, each diet has a detailed profile that tells you how it works, what evidence supports (or refutes) its claims, a nutritional snapshot – right down to daily milligrams of potassium – and, of course, a close look at the food you'd eat, with photos. All of it is reliable and easy to understand.
These tools will be at least a start at helping you, your mother, your brother – whomever – find that elusive perfect-for-me diet. Once you've whittled down your eligible diets to a few, consider your personality and lifestyle. If you're a foodie, you probably won't be happy with a plan built around frozen dinners, such as
, or mostly just-add-water meals, like
. If cutting carbs will make you cranky and resentful, you'll want to stay away from low-carb diets such as
Then think about what did and didn't work the last time you were on a diet. Was it too restrictive? Lots of diets we covered don't consider any food off-limits. Didn't provide enough structure? Some plans will tell you exactly what to eat and when.
With any diet, ask yourself: How long can I stay on this? No matter how good it looks – or how good it might make you look – if you can't stick with it in the long run, you'll be right back where you started after a couple months.
– an important component of any healthy lifestyle. Does your plan lay out a specific exercise program, or are you on your own?
The questions are endless. Right now, you may have no idea what will or won't work for you. That's what we're here for. We're not going to tell you what diet you should be on, but we can help lead you to a winner – the Best Diet for you.
Here's which diets came out on top in the nine different ranking lists:
Check out 9 simple tricks to eating healthier in the slideshow below:
9 simple tricks to eat healthier from nutritional therapist Amelia Freer (LIFESTYLE/FOOD/WELLNESS)
What is the 'best diet' for you?
Amelia suggests a slow approach to cleaning up your diet. "Sam has been a client of mine, so he has had the personalized approach that I work with, but I took him through all of the steps of the book," Amelia shared. "Chapter one is very clear, it says just give up one thing. Just start gradually. We all know what our one thing is within our diet ... Maybe we feel overwhelmed and try to be perfect, so instead of trying to do everything at once, just [choose] one thing and [start] gradually with that."
2. Cut Down on Sugars
As Amelia points out, studies consistently show that excess sugar is detrimental to all areas of our health. "Very gradually, very subtly, over the last 20 or 30 years, our diets have become higher and higher and higher in hidden sugars, and that really comes from the low-fat, fat-free dieting generation," Amelia shares. "Instead of looking at the sugars that we’re eating, we’ve been focusing on the fats that we’re eating, and science is really starting to show that that’s been a little bit misguided."
However, Amanda recognizes that this doesn't mean all fats are good for you or that everyone should be on a high fat diet. "[It's about] becoming aware of where the hidden sugars are, and just understanding that sugar has many, many different disguises," she suggests. "There [are] artificial sugars, there [are] natural sugars, like fructose for example, found in fruits, and then there [are] the sugars that all carbohydrates get converted into. I think nowadays our diets have just become incredibly high [in] carbohydrates, high [in] natural sugars and high [in] artificial sugars. So we just need to be reducing all of them in all categories."
While you should cut down on excess sugar in your diet, Amelia recommends eating more healthy fats. "When I refer to good fats it’s really just fats that are found naturally in foods," she shares. This includes oily fish, nuts, seeds, avocados and coconuts. "The fats that we really want to be avoiding are factory-made, processed fats. We know that they’re not actually beneficial for our health," Amelia shares.
4. Be Conscious About What You're Eating
Amelia recognized that the foods affecting her consisted of cow's dairy and sugar, so those are the foods she consistently avoids. Doing so has had the biggest impact on her health. So she recommends that people really get in touch with the foods that they're eating, and recognizing where it comes from. Ask yourself: Does this resemble anything like its original source?
"That really goes back to cooking your food from scratch," Amelia shares. "So the more and more that I can encourage people to make their food from scratch, I think generally they’ll be eating healthier foods, and that will be the starting point...I think it has to be a bit of a gradual journey. It certainly was for me."
5. Cut Down on Snacking
"If you remove the snacking, it’s amazing how much you just cut down on what you’re eating overall," Amelia suggests. She says that this can be a gradual journey. So maybe you start off by reducing the amount you're eating hour by hour, and have a snack every three hours. She recommends a healthy snack like a piece of fruit, with maybe five or six nuts.
"It’s a little bit of healthy carbohydrate and a little bit of protein. That’s the ideal...But again, it’s about making sure that the sugar content, even the fruit content, is low. Something that I would occasionally have would be a slice of chicken leftover from the night before with some cherry tomatoes," she shares.
While Amelia says that the general rule would be a little bit of protein and a little bit of healthy carbohydrate when it comes to snacking, your ultimate goal should be to wean yourself off of snacks. "We can train our bodies if we’re eating the right things," she says.
6. Cut Down on Caffeine
Think you can't live without your morning cup of joe? You can, and according to Amelia, it may be a good idea to cut back. However, there are studies that show the benefits of natural caffeine, so the way you approach it should be what works for you personally. Amelia points out that if you know you get addicted to caffeine or that it doesn't agree with you, you may want to consider it as your "one thing" to give up when starting the process of transforming your diet.
"I personally love a good quality cup of black coffee in the morning, but I only have one, and I make sure that I get the best quality coffee I can have...I think it’s an individualized approach because there are benefits to caffeine. I just think [it's okay] as long as people aren’t using it as a prop [or] as a supplement all day long to avoid stresses, or avoid emotions, and they [aren't] using it in an unhealthy way."
If you know you're the kind of person who can consume caffeine without becoming addicted, you should feel fine having a cup of coffee or tea. But if you do, you should keep it clean, Amelia says. "Good coffee shouldn’t need to be sweetened, and it shouldn’t need to have anything added to it like milk. Keeping it clean is having it black," she shares.
We know that exercise is good for us when it comes to everything from our mental health to our energy and our joints as we age. However, Amelia reminds us that over-exercising isn't the way to transform your lifestyle, which is why she always starts her clients with focusing on their diet.
"I don’t believe that you can out train a bad diet," she shares. "I think so many people tend to over-exercise, thinking that it then gives them the green light to eat as much as they want. So I’ll always start with clients [by] saying, 'Look, exercise is going to become very important in your life. It’s essential if you want to be well and healthy, but we’ve got to clean up your diet first.'"
Amelia also points out that if you're going to exercise, you should enjoy it. There's no point in exercising if you're hurting yourself. "It’s about finding something that you enjoy, because you’re more likely to make it a habit if you enjoy it. For example, I can’t stand being in a gym. I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve hated it. For me, I need to be outdoors, I need to make it social, I need to make it fun and I need to make it short so I can fit it into my life.
"Everyone is so different and it has to be a personalized approach. I never want to seem like I’m giving ‘everyone needs to do this, my way or the highway’ advice, because I think that that’s really disempowering and it’s the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve with my book."
8. Start Cooking from Scratch
Part of transforming your diet is learning to make food that's clean. In Amelia's book, she shares recipes that can help you get started. "I absolutely love my chicken nuggets with the mango salsa," she shares. "I created that recipe because my niece and nephew love junk food. Chicken nuggets [are] their favorite, and I thought 'I’ve got to nail this. I’ve got to create a meal that they will actually eat without thinking that it’s healthy.'"
Amelia also loves her beef curry. "I always cook it when I have friends around for dinner. It’s just for me [the] ultimate comfort food, and it feels like you’re having something satisfying and filling, and it almost feels naughty instead of having a takeaway. "
9. The biggest takeaway from her book
If you take one thing from Amelia's book, she'd want it to be that you start to connect more with the food you're eating and become more conscious about it. Instead of having a coffee just because you're bored or having a bagel because it's offered in a meeting, think to yourself, 'Do I need this?' 'Do I want this?' 'How is it making me feel?'
"That’s the sort of umbrella for every single chapter of the book," Amelia says. "It brings people back to those moments, whether it be cooking from scratch or just deciding to start with a healthy breakfast."
Amelia gets emails from readers thanking her for helping them to clean up their diet slowly and gradually and not making it complicated or seem terrifying. For her, receiving these notes is "just a dream come true, because that’s exactly what I set out to start with when writing the book." | We?ve named some standouts, but you have to decide for yourself which of the following diets is the best fit for you. | 105.708333 | 0.791667 | 1.375 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://people.com/music/pete-burns-dead-plastic-surgery-obsession/amp/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20161231165620id_/http://people.com/music/pete-burns-dead-plastic-surgery-obsession/amp/ | His Changing Appearance Through the Years | 20161231165620 | Over 35 years after splashing onto the ’80s British pop scene as the frontman for Dead or Alive, Pete Burns has died at 57 following a heart attack. The band was set to release a new compilation, Sophisticated Boom Box MMXVI, on Oct. 28.
The singer passed suddenly, his management team confirmed, calling the “special star” a “true visionary.”
Burns made his career start crooning hits like “You Spin Me Right Round (Like a Record),” but later, after leaving music behind, became known for reality TV stints and his dramatically changing appearance.
“I hope when I’m 80 — when I get to heaven that God doesn’t recognize me,” Burns said during a 2016 appearance on the U.K.’s Celebrity Botched Up Bodies.
It wasn’t long after Dead or Alive’s aforementioned 1985 single that Burns first began to experiment with plastic surgery. In fact, he said, that as “Right Round” rose up the charts, “I realized I was gonna be a visual entity and I had to look good.”
The first procedure? A fix for an earlier broken nose, decided upon after Burns’ self consciousness escalated with increased camera time and photographers who pointed out his “bump.”
Ultimately, Burns was wildly unhappy with the results, he told Botched Up Bodies, and underwent a corrective procedure — the first of nearly 300, the singer estimated.
After leaving the music industry for good in 2002 — following the release of his greatest hits album — Burns instead began to focus heavily on altering his looks.
“Four times at the nose, two sets of cheekbone implants, and the two out — lip augmentations,” he said, detailing some of his procedures during the Botched Up Bodies sit-down.
During a 2010 ABC interview he explained, “I see myself as my own clay, and I was remodeling it.”
Repeated operations lead to infections in Burns’ face and lips, and ultimately endless more corrective procedures. Further, the medication used in such surgeries led him to develop blood clots in his legs, heart and lungs, Burns told Botched Up Bodies.
Nearly 16 years ago, he was rushed to the hospital after a lip augmentation gone awry. Despite being on his death bed, Burns recovered through a 10-day stay that involved heavy use of blood thinners.
Though he survived, Burns’ teeth were forever damaged from the thinners. He required veneers and ultimately total reconstructive surgery.
“What I’m trying to achieve with my surgery, is my own personal satisfaction. It’s narcissism,” Burns admitted this year of continually going under the knife.
Even with his health in turmoil, Burns insisted he would never stop changing himself.
He asserted during his 2010 ABC interview, though, “What you see on the outside is a complete contradiction to something that’s on the inside.” | “I hope when I’m 80 – when I get to heaven that God doesn’t recognize me,” Pete Burns said during a 2016 interview | 20.178571 | 0.964286 | 8.535714 | medium | high | extractive |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/11/mathias-cormann-refuses-to-express-confidence-in-alan-finkel-after-climate-criticism | http://web.archive.org/web/20161231211816id_/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/11/mathias-cormann-refuses-to-express-confidence-in-alan-finkel-after-climate-criticism | Mathias Cormann refuses to express confidence in Alan Finkel after climate criticism | 20161231211816 | Mathias Cormann has refused to say if the Turnbull government still has confidence in Dr Alan Finkel after the chief scientist warned Australia would not meet its emissions reduction target under the Paris agreement with current federal policy settings.
“Look at our track record,” Cormann told Sky News on Sunday. “People thought that we couldn’t meet the 2020 emissions reduction target based on our policy settings and indeed we are exceeding those targets.
“We are very confident that with our policy settings we are able to meet the 2030 emissions reduction targets.”
Asked if he had lost faith in Finkel, given Finkel warned clearly last week that the government’s policy settings had to change if it wanted to meet its 2030 emissions reduction target under the Paris agreement, Cormann said: “My answer is pretty self-evident.”
The Turnbull government is still reeling from a major policy backdown from the environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, last week, when Frydenberg signalled a review of the government’s Direct Action policy would consider whether an intensity scheme for electricity was an option only for him to fold within 36 hours after an angry backlash from backbench conservatives.
To calm his colleagues, Frydenberg said the Coalition would not contemplate either a carbon tax or carbon trading – comments that pre-empted the findings of his own Direct Action review and the independent Finkel review released later in the week.
Finkel’s report, handed to the prime minister before Friday’s Coag meeting, said investment in Australia’s electricity sector had stalled because of “policy instability and uncertainty”. It also gave implicit endorsement to an emissions intensity trading scheme for the electricity industry to help manage the transition to lower-emissions energy sources.
Following the Coag meeting on Friday, the South Australian premier, Jay Weatherill, who supports an emissions intensity scheme, publicly rebuked the prime minister for pre-emptively killing off the debate.
Cormann said on Sunday the government’s review of its Direct Action policies should only be considered a “housekeeping review” because the Coalition’s climate change policies were settled before the 2013 election.
“Our policy settings in relation to action on climate change have been settled for some time,” he said. “There is a review taking place consistent with the terms of reference that have been released by the minister. This is really, you should be looking at this review as a housekeeping review. This is very much routine.
“This was never designed to be a review to question again, or fundamentally to reopen and revisit, questions that have previously been resettled after very lengthy and intensive debate [inside the Coalition].” | Minister says Direct Action review just ‘housekeeping’ after chief scientist casts doubt on ability to meet emissions target | 26.631579 | 0.631579 | 1.157895 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/arts/02entr.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20060614071442id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/05/02/arts/02entr.html?ex=1304222400&en=3d951b51b620dd85&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss | Entropia Universe Players Can Cash Their Online Earnings at the A.T.M. | 20060614071442 | When you put your card into an automated teller machine, view your balance on the screen and then receive money from the dispenser, you probably understand that a merely electronic notion your bank account is being translated into a physical object with value: greenbacks.
But what if you are at the corner A.T.M. and your net worth is locked up in an imaginary asteroid mining venture?
Until now you would be plumb out of luck. But today the makers of Entropia Universe, a popular online science-fiction game, plan to introduce a real-world A.T.M. card that will allow players instantly to withdraw hard cash automatically converted from their virtual game treasury. So a player with, say, 2,000 spare P.E.D.'s (Project Entropia Dollars) left over after purchasing a new laser rifle in the game could withdraw $200 and take a date to a real-life ballgame.
With around 250,000 players, Entropia is the leader of a small but growing group of online computer games with virtual economies explicitly based on real-world money, and today's announcement is the most ambitious step yet to meld an in-game economy with the real global financial system.
The game's maker, MindArk, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, estimates that Entropia players generated $165 million (or 1.65 billion P.E.D.'s) in total economic activity last year. Since the game's inception in 2003, it has been relatively simple for players to add money to their Entropia accounts via credit card or electronic bank transfer. But until now withdrawing money from the system was a cumbersome affair that could take months, as MindArk employees manually verified that the player's virtual fortune had been earned legitimately (and not by hacking).
"We want this game to be a full second reality," Jan Welter, MindArk's chief executive, said in a telephone interview. "We want you to be able to have fun, make friends, make a business, enjoy music and art and do it in our game. The A.T.M. card is a big step toward bringing people into our world because they can have comfort that they can access their virtual funds immediately."
In most mainstream online games, like the spectacularly popular World of Warcraft, spending real money for virtual items is not only against the rules but also considered the worst sort of louche behavior, like paying for sex. But in Entropia, the entire game system is based on the fact that 10 P.E.D.'s equal a dollar and that the game's virtual items and assets have real-world value.
For instance Jon Jacobs, known online as Neverdie, a 39-year-old Entropia player in Miami Beach, last year sold almost everything he owned (real and virtual) to scratch together $100,000 (1 million P.E.D.'s) to buy a huge space station in the game. By selling apartments and storefronts to other players and by imposing taxes on players' hunting and mining on his real estate, he is now making about $12,000 a month on his investment, he estimates. And his big nightclub is still under construction.
"The A.T.M. card is a huge step forward because it's all about making the experience more immersive, and now that we know we have easy access to our money, it's going to give people even more confidence in the system," Mr. Jacobs said. "Among the higher echelon of players we're moving money around big time. Like when I'm upgrading my resort, and I want to buy a new creature for people to hunt, we're talking about $1,500 or $5,000.
"People are spending $10,000 for land that's not even prime property. Now people are hunting in my resort, and I can take money out and go buy a real dinner. That's fantastic."
Mr. Welter said that MindArk software engineers had been working on the A.T.M. project for years, and that they had finally developed a system secure enough to allow instant verification and cash authorization. He said his company was in contact with the Swedish government, and that systems were in place to prevent money laundering and other potential abuses.
"We have ways of detecting abnormal fluctuations between players and so on, and if this would happen, we would know about it," Mr. Welter said.
He said that MindArk had never been asked about the game by the Internal Revenue Service or United States law-enforcement agencies. | The makers of Entropia Universe plan to introduce a real-world A.T.M. card that will allow players to withdraw hard cash automatically converted from their virtual game treasury. | 28.433333 | 1 | 11.266667 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/world/middleeast/09raid.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20060614071531id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/06/09/world/middleeast/09raid.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5029&en=bd5818ac2cc42034&ex=1150516800&partner=RRSANDIEGO | How Surveillance and Betrayal Led to a Hunt's End | 20060614071531 | In addition to the human source, American officials said they used several different methods to track Mr. Zarqawi and Mr. Rahman: they said they also relied on "electronic signals intelligence," communications intercepts that allowed someone to track the location of, say, the user of a satellite telephone.
For the first time, American officials believed they had located Mr. Zarqawi with absolute certainty.
"There was 100 percent confirmation," General Caldwell said.
In Baghdad, American military officials decided to carry out a military operation. At a stroke, they called in a pair of F-16 fighter jets. Commandos from Task Force 145, the antiterrorist unit, moved into Hibhib and surrounded the grove.
Based in Balad, the secret task force has launched a number of raids in recent weeks that military officials say have been particularly successful in capturing or killing crucial members of Mr. Zarqawi's network, as well as netting documents that provided the basis for more raids.
One raid, carried out in April in Yusufiya, a town south of Baghdad, came especially close to capturing Mr. Zarqawi. According to Pentagon officials, Special Forces commandos detained a handful of his operatives and might have just missed Mr. Zarqawi himself.
In Hibhib, Mr. Ismael, the taxi driver, said American soldiers began swarming the town, seemingly coming from nowhere, with some soldiers sliding down ropes dropped from Black Hawk helicopters. His account largely tracked with the one offered by the American military.
"The entire village was seized," Mr. Ismael said.
As the American commandos took up positions, Mr. Ismael said, someone from inside the house in the date grove began shooting. The Americans returned fire, Mr. Ismael said, but the firefight did not last long.
One of the F-16's, now in position over Hibhib, released a laser-guided 500-pound bomb.
The decision to bomb Mr. Zarqawi was made in large part because military officials feared he might escape again if American and Iraqi forces moved in on the ground, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said during an appearance at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
"They came to the conclusion that they could not really go in on the ground without running the risk of letting him escape," he said. "So they used airpower and attacked a dwelling he was in."
Seconds later, Mr. Ismael said, a second bomb landed on the house.
"The entire village was shaking underneath our feet," Mr. Ismael said.
Video taken by an aircraft above showed a giant explosion that sent plumes of smoke, dust and debris high into the air.
Mr. Zarqawi was dead by the time American commandos got to the house, General Caldwell said.
Five others died in the airstrike: Mr. Rahman, one woman, one child and two other men, General Caldwell said. The identities of the four were not known.
Mr. Zarqawi's body was taken to an undisclosed location where an examination found scars and tattoos that matched those he was known to have. A fingerprint test came back at 3:30 a.m. positively identifying him, and DNA tests should also be returned soon, General Caldwell said.
Pictures of Mr. Zarqawi's body released by the military showed that the top of his shoulders, his neck and his face were intact, with heavy contusions on the left side of his face.
"We had wiped off a lot of the blood and other debris because there was not a need to portray it in any kind of dehumanizing his body," General Caldwell said.
Back in Hibhib, Mr. Ismael said, American and Iraqi soldiers ordered everyone into their homes. There was another airstrike several hours later, he said.
When he awoke Thursday morning, Mr. Ismael said, he could hear the Iraqi police cheering.
"We have killed Zarqawi!" Mr. Ismael recalled them saying. "We have killed Zarqawi!"
Dexter Filkins and Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Baghdad for this article, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Brussels, Mona Mahmood from Baghdad and Souad Mekhennet from Algeria. | An informant inside Al Qaeda provided the critical piece of intelligence that led them to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a Pentagon official. | 29.333333 | 0.62963 | 0.777778 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/arts/design/04ouro.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20060614094226id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/06/04/arts/design/04ouro.html?ei=5090&en=c9269de64924c042&ex=1307073600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all | Skyline for Sale | 20060614094226 | Sketch models depicting the evolution of the Beekman Street Tower, a 75-story apartment building in Lower Manhattan, designed by Frank Gehry, who was commissioned by Bruce Ratner. Seventy proposals were produced before the design was finalized. More Photos »
John Marshall Mantel/Associated Press, top; Angel Franco/The New York Times
Bruce Ratner, right, with Mr. Gehry. The Times tower under construction. More Photos >
If Bruce Ratner's recent embrace of high-end architecture has some New Yorkers rolling their eyes, he can't be all that surprised. Not so long ago this developer's most visible cultural contribution to the city was a few kitschy theaters on 42nd Street. In Brooklyn he is known mainly as the creator of Metrotech, a complex of overblown yet banal office towers that seem to crush the life out of the city around it.
And even Mr. Ratner admits that, as a Brooklyn-based commercial builder, he once ranked at the bottom of the city's architectural food chain.
But in recent years he has sought vigorously to polish that image. His conversion began six years ago, when he joined The New York Times Company in selecting Renzo Piano an architect known for the refinement of his buildings to design a new Times headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. And it gained traction when Mr. Ratner handed Frank Gehry whose celebrity has reached the point where he now has a signature jewelry line at Tiffany the commissions for Atlantic Yards, a 22-acre project involving a basketball arena, hotel, and housing and retail spaces in Brooklyn, and Beekman Street Tower, a 75-story apartment building in Lower Manhattan. Their partnership may soon be one of the most visible on the New York skyline.
But if the Gehry-Ratner lovefest has raised an expectation of innovative design, it has also stirred unease. Few would question Mr. Gehry's talent. The question is whether he has allowed his experimental ethos to be harnessed for the sake of maximizing a developer's profits. It's also fair to ask whether Mr. Gehry and other gifted architects have made a pact with the Devil, compromising their values for the sake of ever bigger commissions. Beyond that, their collaboration points up a major change in the way cities are being built. There was a time when government took an interest in big urban planning projects. Mr. Ratner and Mr. Gehry are operating under a model by which the government plays only a marginal role. Bigger social concerns, like housing for mixed incomes, equal access to parks and transit, and vibrant communal spaces, which were once the public's purview, now increasingly fall to developers to address or not, as they see fit.
The collaboration, along with Mr. Ratner's other high-profile projects, also shows how limited the architect's role remains in such arrangements. Not so long ago American architects complained that they were shut out of the public dialogue. Today they work in a climate in which building is booming, and architecture is revered, but as an aesthetic, not a social, force.
I'm not one of those purists who argue that Mr. Gehry or Mr. Piano should snub commercial developers altogether and limit himself to hammering out projects for, say, art museums or libraries. It is at the intersection between fantasy and practicality that architects are best able to express our civilization's values. But architects will be defined by the clients they choose.
As a young architect working in Los Angeles in the 1960's and 70's, Mr. Gehry has said, he felt imprisoned by his developer clients. "I was constantly pushed around by these guys," he said in an interview. "They had a formula that you had to follow. So you couldn't do things." He found his creative voice in smaller, offbeat projects, like the Danziger Studio (1965) or the Ron Davis House in Malibu, Calif. (1972), for artists whom he knew and liked.
But by 1979 that split between the projects that paid the bills and those that gave satisfaction had become a torture. Working on Santa Monica Place, a low-budget mall for the Maryland-based Rouse Company, Mr. Gehry could only tweak the conventional formulas. Not that far away, he had begun tearing apart and piecing together a plain pink bungalow, remaking it as a violent collage of chain link, corrugated metal and plywood: the house that would announce that he had finally broken free.
The experience led him to lay off most of his firm. From then on he swore he would only work for clients that shared his architectural values.
Some 25 years after Santa Monica Place, Mr. Gehry says his recent decision to embrace big developers does not signal any sort of about-face. He argues that his status puts him in an entirely different position.
"They have to meet me as an equal," Mr. Gehry said simply.
New York has changed too. After trailing their counterparts in Paris and Tokyo for 20 years, the city's cultural institutions have caught on to an international trend in experimental architecture. The result is a flurry of major expansions, from Mr. Piano's addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art to Sanaa's new New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery. Lately commercial developers have been scrambling to find their own star architects. Yet the most visionary designers have tended to focus on personal psychic terrain rather than large-scale development and planning debates. (In Europe, conversely, architects take the lead, from the Barcelona waterfront to housing developments across the Netherlands.)
Few New York residents may remember that Mr. Ratner, 61, began his career as a lawyer in Mayor John V. Lindsay's administration, working in a short-lived Model Cities program and later as commissioner of consumer affairs in the Koch administration.
He started as a developer with commissions like Metrotech, a 6.4- million-square-foot complex that testifies to just how low New York's architecture and urban planning had sunk by the 1980's and 90's. Arranged around amorphous plazas, its monstrous buildings sit on clumsy bases that only draw attention to their scale.
Then there was the Hilton Times Square and the mammoth AMC theater complex on the south side of 42nd Street, which are less about architecture than testing how much visual advertising a human being can tolerate. Not to mention Mr. Ratner's Ridge Hill Village Center in Yonkers (groundbreaking is planned this summer), a crass outdoor mall that functions neither as a Main Street nor as an honest expression of suburban culture.
For the Times tower he selected Mr. Piano's design over more predictable proposals by Cesar Pelli and Norman Foster. (Mr. Gehry withdrew from the competition toward the end.) A soaring glass structure clad in a pattern of delicate ceramic rods, the Times project suggests that the old order that dominated development in New York for so long is finally passing, and with it the argument that only big corporate firms not "dreamers" or "creative types" could get things done.
But Mr. Piano has lost crucial battles along the way. To cut costs Mr. Ratner had him eliminate an elegant rooftop garden that would have been framed by extensions of the building's glass curtain wall. Also abandoned were some of the cantilevered staircases that would have offered a fluid connection between office floors.
More interesting, Mr. Piano had proposed an open, loftlike floor plan, placing elevators along the length of one side of the building rather than arranging them within a central elevator core. That was also jettisoned. Clearly, in a building whose upper floors are being marketed to law firms, he had violated a vital marketing formula: Don't mess with executive offices.
In 2003 Mr. Ratner took another giant step, hiring Mr. Gehry to design Beekman, his first luxury residential tower. Beekman has been an education for Mr. Ratner. Mr. Gehry begins every project by asking questions. Why, for example, do all the apartments have to follow a standard cookie-cutter formula? Do walls have to be flat? Then he churns out dozens of variations on a design before he settles on a final form. Mr. Ratner's team evaluated each one for cost before Mr. Gehry returned to the drawing board. The back-and-forth went on for more than two years and 70-plus versions.
Until recently a developer like Mr. Ratner might have hired a corporate firm like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design the exterior but relied on an in-house architect for the interiors. Mr. Gehry argued that he should mold the inside, too, creating a seamless relationship with the exterior and not incidentally branding the interiors with the Gehry name.
The result is an unusually tough design. The tower rests on a base housing a public elementary school. A series of setbacks give the tower a palpable weight, like building blocks set on top of one another; a narrow vertical slot rises on the main facade, lending the building visual depth.
The massing is a response to the bulky McKim, Mead & White municipal building to the north and the 1913 Woolworth Building, its nearest competitor. In its scale and proportions, it also calls to mind Moscow's so-called wedding cake skyscrapers, a legacy of the Stalinist 1950's. But the titanium cladding will be rippled, as though etched by rivulets of water. As the light moves across the surface, the waves will seem to change form, giving the impression that the tower is quivering. Inside the apartments, those curves will be repeated, giving many of the each apartments distinct identities.
Mr. Gehry obviously focused most of his energy on shaping the tower. Sadly, the elementary school the only truly public-spirited component is a simple rectangular box with a few interior flourishes.
Neither the Beekman nor the Times tower can be considered revolutionary work for Mr. Gehry or Mr. Piano. But they do send a message that serious design can emerge from collaborations with mainstream developers. The Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, Mr. Ratner's bid to join the company of the Rockefellers as a major architectural patron, has proved a far trickier proposition than the Beekman building. It is two distinct projects: the proposed arena for the Nets and a cluster of surrounding towers extending from the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, and the 13.6-acre residential development just beyond it in Prospect Heights.
For both men the territory is relatively uncharted. Neither Mr. Gehry nor Mr. Ratner has built an arena before, and the advantage of breaking with conventional design may not be immediately obvious, or profitable.
When Mr. Ratner approached Mr. Gehry, he told him he wanted an arena with the intimacy of the architect's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, whose concave and convex panels give the performance space a womblike intimacy.
In Brooklyn Mr. Gehry's breakthrough was to nestle the arena in a forest of undulating towers, preventing the surrounding area from being overtaken by urban blight. Between the towers' stocky forms, views will open straight through the ground-level concourse to the scoreboard and screaming fans. A soaring public hall with a cafe, hotel lobby and subway entrance projects out toward the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues like the prow of a ship. The hall's cantilevered floors seem to draw energy from the bustling street level below.
The scale of the towers has sowed fear of a creeping Manhattanism that could destroy Brooklyn's human scale. Some residents have complained that the main tower, called Miss Brooklyn by Mr. Gehry, will dwarf the nearby Williamsburg Savings Bank, which at 34 stories remains the most visible marker in the borough's skyline. But the placement and scale make sense: the skyline's focus shifts to one of the borough's most important intersections.
Alas, Mr. Ratner and the city could not come to an agreement on a proposal to build a public garden on the roof of the arena. Such a space, seemingly floating in the skyline, might have evolved into one of New York's most original public spaces, but it was considered too costly to maintain or secure. Instead the developer decided that the roof would serve as a private garden and a running track for residents of the nearby hotel and apartment towers.
Such decisions could well determine whether Atlantic Yards will feel like a privileged enclave or belong to the community as a whole. One imagines what might have been possible if the city had the resources or the will to support such a vision.
Playing to the architect's strengths, Mr. Ratner has been more than happy to let Mr. Gehry toy with the residential buildings' forms. To relate them to the Brooklyn skyline, the architect creates a hierarchy of scales, with the larger, more sculptural towers anchored by smaller blocky buildings.
He likes to call the latter his "dumb boxes," a backdrop for the wilder, more exuberant forms of the taller buildings. The towers, meanwhile, take their cues from existing buildings in the neighborhood, locking the composition into its context. Heeding local protests, Mr. Ratner has lopped several stories off the biggest towers in negotiations with the city, and their scale could probably be reduced still more.
But the vital question is the experience of the architecture on the ground. The apartment buildings will frame a series of internal courtyard gardens strung out along the length of the residential development, on what is now Pacific Street. Extensions of the surrounding street grid will cut across this main axis, encouraging pedestrians to flow through the site.
The gardens, designed with the landscape architect Laurie Olin, will be open to the public, one of the project's big selling points. But they are surprisingly conservative. Crisscrossed by meandering pedestrian pathways, they feel more like private enclaves than an extension of the city that surrounds them. One problem could be that Mr. Gehry, 76, renowned for his idiosyncratic buildings, came of age professionally during the urban planning debates of the 1970's, when architects were dismantling the planning formulas of late Modernism in favor of patterns of dense urban villages.
Since then, a growing number of architects, mostly European, have challenged that approach. Rather than splitting sprawling developments into more intimate spaces, they deliberately focus on the collision between the two: between the heroic scale of urban infrastructure and the fine-grained texture of the home. Such an architect might have chosen, for example, to create a dialogue between the public zones at ground level and the railroad tracks that run beneath part of the site.
The problem is not that Mr. Gehry's layout won't work, and it is a notch above the conventional. But given the clout he has, he had the opportunity to propose a far bolder design. I still hope he will revise the master plan, which is, after all, in the earliest stages.
For Brooklyn residents who oppose Atlantic Yards, the Gehry-Ratner partnership is a natural target. But much of their anger should focus on the city and federal governments, which are apparently delighted to give developers responsibility for building and maintaining parks and pedestrian thoroughfares. That decision has changed the character of our cities as much as any single event in the past half century. Once commercial forces rule, such spaces are no longer really public.
And local activists will have to keep a close eye on the project's promised balance of low-, moderate- and market-rate housing, as the example of Battery Park City, where such promises were never fulfilled, now prove.
Whatever Mr. Ratner's ambitions, a mainstream developer is not about to promote radical changes in local housing policy. And Mr. Gehry is an architect, not a politician. But he has a public responsibility to put his formidable talents to full use.
If he succeeds, a measure of joy may well return to the New York cityscape. But success can be elusive in a world where so much of the public realm is blatantly for sale.
Correction: June 10, 2006 A picture caption last Sunday with the continuation of a cover article about the developer Bruce Ratner's projects misstated the site of his Atlantic Yards development. It is on rail yards and other land in Prospect Heights and on a block in Park Slope. It is not in Downtown Brooklyn, although it is near that neighborhood. In addition, three credits were omitted. A picture of the New York Times building was by Angel Franco/The New York Times. A picture of Mr. Ratner with Frank Gehry was by John Marshall Mantel/Associated Press. And a picture of a scale model of the development was by Robert Stolarik for The New York Times. | Frank Gehry and Bruce Ratner are proving how much influence architects have with developers, and how troublingly little. | 160.1 | 0.8 | 1.3 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/africa/07somalia.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20060627203915id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/06/07/world/africa/07somalia.html?ex=1307332800&en=418c21f23fb9cf71&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss | Protesters Rally to Challenge Islamists in Somalia | 20060627203915 | NAIROBI, Kenya, June 6 Tensions remained high in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, on Tuesday, as the Islamic militants who seized control of the city the day before vowed to set up a religious state, while thousands of protesters allied with one of the country's largest clans pledged to challenge the effort.
Demonstrators linked to an important Somali clan gathered Tuesday to reject the idea of an Islamic state.
The warlords who have been pushed from their strongholds in Mogadishu said they would fight back against the Islamists, said news agency reports from the capital.
Bashir Rageh, a warlord who lost control of a key airstrip and port in March, and Muse Sudi Yalahow, another important Mogadishu leader who has lost ground to the Islamic militias, joined thousands of their backers from the Abgal clan at a stadium north of the capital to denounce the Islamic courts and militias that have taken the city.
"Our clan has agreed to defend our land, and we will fight the courts hiding under the cloak of Islam and trying to fool our people," said Mr. Rageh, who was protected by heavily armed security men.
As the protesters rallied, the leaders of the alliance of Islamic courts insisted in a letter to American officials and other diplomats that they were not hiding terrorists, as the United States has claimed, and instead were seeking friendly relations with the outside world.
In the letter, Sheik Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, the alliance that control the militias, accused Americans of fueling the fierce fighting in Mogadishu by backing the warlords who he said have terrorized the country for the last 15 years.
An array of Africa analysts, academics and Somali politicians said Washington had made financial payments to the warlords in recent months in an effort to root out members of Al Qaeda who American officials contend are being sheltered inside Mogadishu by the Islamists.
"We categorically deny and reject any accusation that we are harboring any terrorists or supporters of terrorism in the areas where the courts operate," the sheik wrote.
He welcomed visitors to Mogadishu, which has long been considered too unsafe for international diplomats, to see whether terrorists are operating there. "We have nothing to hide from the international community," he said.
In Washington, a senior Bush administration official said the administration was willing to take the letter at face value. "If they're going to be a credible, legitimate political actor, and not support Al Qaeda and terrorism, then we'd encourage the transitional government to work with them," said the official, who could not be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
Some critics argued that American efforts in Somalia did not add up to a coherent policy, and that recent events had caught policy makers off guard. "The problem is that we don't have any strategy at all," said Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who is the Senate's leading expert on Somalia. "We weren't even paying attention."
Sheik Sharif Ahmed mentioned nothing in the letter about his plans for turning Somalia into an Islamic state, but he raised the topic at a gathering of hundreds of supporters in Mogadishu on Tuesday. "Until we get the Islamic state, we will continue with the Islamic struggle in Somalia," he said, according to news agency reports.
Also left unaddressed by the sheik was whether the Islamic court leaders would work with the new transitional government that is operating in Baidoa, 155 miles from Mogadishu.
The counter-rally, which was held about a mile from positions held by Islamic militias, underscored the challenges that the new rulers of the capital would face in consolidating power after 15 years of anarchy there. Clan allegiance has long been the most powerful force in Somalia, trumping religion. By rallying the Abgal clan, opponents of the Islamists have sought to redefine the conflict.
Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington for this article. | The Islamists who seized Mogadishu on Monday vowed to set up a religious state, and protestors vowed to challenge the effort. | 33.304348 | 0.913043 | 4.217391 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/business/yourmoney/26mgmt.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20060707203811id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2006/03/26/business/yourmoney/26mgmt.html?ei=5090&en=0d90ed5116e769d0&ex=1301029200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1150405592-jgoV/b3xWRZv2i3rp16m3w | Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas | 20060707203811 | LIKE many top executives, James R. Lavoie and Joseph M. Marino keep a close eye on the stock market. But the two men, co-founders of Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced and highly classified command-and-control systems for the Navy, don't worry much about Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.
Instead, they focus on an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company's engineers, computer scientists and project managers as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.
"We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here," Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions' headquarters outside Newport, R.I. "At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius."
That's a refreshing dose of humility from a successful C.E.O. with decades of experience in his field. (Mr. Lavoie, 59, is a Vietnam War veteran and an accomplished engineer who has devoted his career to military-oriented technologies.)
Most companies operate under the assumption that big ideas come from a few big brains: the inspired founder, the eccentric inventor, the visionary boss. But there's a fine line between individual genius and know-it-all arrogance. What happens when rivals become so numerous, when technologies move so quickly, that no corporate honcho can think of everything? Then it's time to invent a less top-down approach to innovation, to make it everybody's business to come up with great ideas.
That's a key lesson behind the rise of open source technology, most notably Linux. A ragtag army of programmers organized into groups, wrote computer code, made the code available for anyone to revise and, by competing and cooperating in a global community, reshaped the market for software. The brilliance of Linux as a model of innovation is that it is powered by the grass-roots brilliance of the thousands of programmers who created it.
According to Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media, the computer book publisher, and an evangelist for open source technologies, creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling "architecture of participation." That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products?
At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.
Mr. Marino, 57, president of Rite-Solutions, says the market, which began in January 2005, has already paid big dividends. One of the earliest stocks (ticker symbol: VIEW) was a proposal to apply three-dimensional visualization technology, akin to video games, to help sailors and domestic-security personnel practice making decisions in emergency situations. Initially, Mr. Marino was unenthusiastic about the idea "I'm not a joystick jockey" but support among employees was overwhelming. Today, that product line, called Rite-View, accounts for 30 percent of total sales.
"Would this have happened if it were just up to the guys at the top?" Mr. Marino asked. "Absolutely not. But we could not ignore the fact that so many people were rallying around the idea. This system removes the terrible burden of us always having to be right."
Another virtue of the stock market, Mr. Lavoie added, is that it finds good ideas from unlikely sources. Among Rite-Solutions' core technologies are pattern-recognition algorithms used in military applications, as well as for electronic gambling systems at casinos, a big market for the company. A member of the administrative staff, with no technical expertise, thought that this technology might also be used in educational settings, to create an entertaining way for students to learn history or math.
She started a stock called Win/Play/Learn (symbol: WPL), which attracted a rush of investment from engineers eager to turn her idea into a product. Their enthusiasm led to meetings with Hasbro, up the road in Pawtucket, and Rite-Solutions won a contract to help it build its VuGo multimedia system, introduced last Christmas.
William C. Taylor is a co-founder and founding editor of Fast Company magazine. He lives in Wellesley, Mass. | A Linux-style approach taps masses of people for inspiration. | 85.25 | 0.666667 | 0.666667 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/national/24vote.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20060717233541id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2004/12/24/national/24vote.html?ex=1261544400&en=0e0adbe08ff79c22&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt | Voting Problems in Ohio Spur Call for Overhaul | 20060717233541 | COLUMBUS, Ohio, Dec. 22 - William Shambora, 53, is the kind of diligent voter who once assumed that his ballot always counted. He got a rude awakening this year.
Mr. Shambora, an economics professor at Ohio University, moved during the summer but failed to notify the Athens County Board of Elections until the day before the presidential election. An official told him to use a provisional ballot.
But under Ohio law, provisional ballots are valid only when cast from a voter's correct precinct. Mr. Shambora was given a ballot for the wrong precinct, a fact he did not learn until after the election. Two weeks later, the board discarded his vote, adding him to a list of more than 300 provisional ballots that were rejected in that heavily Democratic county.
"It seems like such a confused system," said Mr. Shambora, a John Kerry supporter who blames himself for the mistake. "Maybe if enough people's votes had counted, the election might have turned out differently."
From seven-hour lines that drove voters away to malfunctioning machines to poorly trained poll workers who directed people to the wrong polling places to uneven policies about the use of provisional ballots, Ohio has become this year's example for every ailment in the United States' electoral process.
With a state recount expected to be completed next week, few experts think the problems were enough to overturn President Bush's victory here. And many of the shortcomings have plagued elections for decades.
But with the 36-day Florida recount of 2000 proving that every vote counts and with the two major parties near parity, the electoral system is being scrutinized more closely than ever. Election lawyers and academics say Ohio is providing a roadmap to a second generation of issues about the way the nation votes.
Congressional passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 - which mandated the provisional ballot as a failsafe and provided states money to update voting technology - was considered a landmark overhaul that would help prevent another Florida.
But an array of voting rights groups contend that Ohio has underscored shortcomings in the law, including one of its centerpieces, the provisional ballot. Now those groups are pushing for a re-examination not only of the law, but also of other voting issues, including the role of partisan secretaries of state in overseeing elections, electronic voting and the elimination of the Electoral College.
"We're in an environment where people believe that even the tiniest number of votes can have a huge impact," said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan clearinghouse for voting information.
Ohio is emblematic of that attitude.
In the two weeks since Mr. Bush was certified the winner here by 118,000 votes out of 5.7 million cast, watchdog groups have filed lawsuits contesting the outcome and questioning the counting of provisional ballots. The state has nearly completed a recount, at the request of the Green and Independent Parties. Liberal Democrats have demanded investigations into whether there was voter fraud, tampering and intimidation in urban districts.
"This has fundamentally shocked people's sense of whether any election can be accurately counted," said Daniel Hoffheimer, counsel to Mr. Kerry's Ohio campaign.
It is far from clear that Republicans in Congress will have any appetite to revisit voting issues, and many Republicans here argue that the system suffered only minor glitches, even with high voter turnout. "There are no error-free elections," said Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican whom Democrats have accused of worsening the state's voting problems in the way he interpreted state law.
But Mr. Blackwell acknowledged that the election spotlighted the state's outdated voting system, with 68 of 88 counties still relying on punch cards. In an interview, he called for updating voting machines, and also for early voting, multiple-day voting and other changes that he said would shorten lines and encourage people to vote.
"I don't think it's wrong to have high expectations," he said.
Certainly there were problems on Election Day. | From malfunctioning machines to poorly trained poll workers, Ohio has become this year's example for electoral flaws. | 38.9 | 0.95 | 6.65 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/18/books/heaney-north.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20060921120957id_/http://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/18/books/heaney-north.html | North - New York Times | 20060921120957 | Seamus Heaney and Howard Moss can stand, almost allegorically, for two kinds of poet. One starts from silence, the other from talk. Heaney's slow, weighted monosyllables are dredged up from darkness; Moss's lines, in their lucidity, give us conversation as it would be in Utopia, all light and feeling. Heaney's best poems go back to riddles, charms and ritual; Moss's to song, letters, social interchange. Heaney, all blind sense, feels the heft and shape of things; Moss clarifies emotions into interpretation. Both poets have, of course, the defects of their virtues: Heaney is least interesting when most explicit, Moss most predictable when he moralizes his apercus.
.Heaney, to my mind the best poet now writing in Ireland, seems the only one of his generation not in some way inhibited by the shadow of Yeats. Though he shares Yeats's love of the archaic, with its combination of the civilized and the stark, he unearths his archaism not in Celtic legends but in the bodies of long-dead Vikings, buried and preserved in Irish and Scandinavian bogs:
As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak the ball of his heel. like a basalt egg.
For Heaney, things in their "opaque repose" can be searched out only by divination, in a "somnambulist process of search and surrender" (as Heaney described it in a lecture to the Royal Society of Literature two years ago). When the diviner has found out, as by instinct, a hoard in the nether darkness, he must then gather words with "a binding secret" between them to lift the treasure into view. The serpentine line of Norse art "like an eel swallowed / in a basket of eels" becomes for Heaney a metaphor for his own intertwining of national and personal truth.
The autobiographical poems closing Heaney's new collection make explicit his meditation on the troubles of Ulster, where he was born, but seem, paradoxically, less deep in their reflections than the poems where meaning resists intellectual reduction. History in these poems is as absorptive, mysterious, and dark as the many-layered bog, where
ferments of husk and leaf deepen their ochres. Mosses come to a head, heather unseeds, brackens deposit their bronze . . . a windfall composing the floor it rots into.
The seedtime of the soul and the dissolution of the flesh melt equally into history, exhumed only temporarily in Heaney's penetrating vision, where gravity and preservation unite.
Howard Moss's ironic and fluent narratives keep up the memorably polished standard of earlier poems like "Menage a Trois." Here is the opening of "Shorelines," a poem about "the dreariness of things gone wrong for good":
Someday I'll wake and hardly think of you; You'll be some abstract deity, a myth -- Say Daphne, if you knew her as a tree. Don't think I won't be grateful. I will be.
This mixture of tartness and pain animates the poem which opens the volume and sets the tone for the whole: it is called "Chekhov," and remarks that under all the Babel of talk, there exists one silent hell -- "to lose the very ground you stand on." This abyss underlies even the most Arcadian of Moss's landscapes, but his genius lies in finding ways to describe it which are instantly recognizable as our modern ways of masking pain: "We hardly see each other any more"; "Not that you loved me. Or I loved you"; "It's fishy here, and an unhappy place/ Or let's say we are." Though Auden is recognizably Moss's master, Moss has none of Auden's preceptorial instructiveness and none of Auden's preoccupation with ideology. For Moss, if affections, attachments and love go, there is no institution or philosophical construct to flee to; instead, there is a soulless desiccation:
Bathed in the acid of truth, all things Become possible: to be a cold snake At an interview to live on scraps of soap To keep oneself warm, to resemble a cat Constantly stalking the Shadow of nothing
In the most remarkable poem in this collection, "Tattoo," the indelible branding of the flesh becomes a grotesque allegory for the soul's yearning for "the ritual scarring/Of the Cupid of wounds," and the tattoo parlor by the docks a modern version of the Spenserian masque of Cupid:
Think of these: rinses, makeup, ampules, A dressing room blooded by Band-Aids of healing, Eye-pencilled alphabets, ink blots of jungle, A gypsy tearoom run by a surgeon,A beaded curtain, a paintbox, a sudden Movement of pain, the animal willfully Formed at the end of a point, a child's stencil . . . All night the dye-needle branding its stories Into the flesh to be told there forever.
When Moss is most absolute, he comes very near the simplicity of song. Intellectuality is still present, in the form of wit, but language empties itself of intellectual reference and of ambiguous or equivocal diction. The course of love, that first love which yields "the clearest of all sleeps, then nothing clear," is traced in Moss's best lyric quatrain in this volume:
Starting out as love, it climbed the stairs,And then came down as something else again; I did not recognize its killing features Until I saw they were my very own.
Both of these volumes by accomplished poets at once put language in relief and, in another sense, make it disappear before our eyes as we are given the illusion of a voice in the air penetrating, without any medium at all, into our consciousness and feelings. Such voices heard make our own voices less anonymous, and compose that floor that Heaney speaks of into which the rest of us, unheard, are destined to dissolve.
Helen Vendler's most recent book is "The Poetry of George Herbert." | Heaney, perhaps best poet now writing in Ireland, seems the only one of his generation not in some way inhibited by the shadow of Yeats. | 42.464286 | 0.964286 | 22.464286 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.foxnews.com/americasnewsroom/kellyscourt/index.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20071215091917id_/http://www.foxnews.com:80/americasnewsroom/kellyscourt/index.html | Kelly's Court - FOXNews.com | 20071215091917 | Friday, December 14: When will the power be restored to areas of the Midwest crippled by this week's ice storm? Plus, is the E.U. picking a fight with the U.S. over climate change? And, we'll get reaction to the Mitchell report on steroid use in baseball
The smartest and dumbest people in Hollywood | America's Newsroom Megyn Kelly Law Kelly's Court | 6.777778 | 0.222222 | 0.222222 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/gossip/2001/12/02/2001-12-02_harrison_s_ties_with_sister_.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20090430075151id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/gossip/2001/12/02/2001-12-02_harrison_s_ties_with_sister_.html | HARRISON'S TIES WITH SISTER FRAYED | 20090430075151 | BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY WITH KASIA ANDERSON
Sunday, December 2th 2001, 2:24AM
He sang about love and forgiveness. But right until the end, George Harrison had trouble making peace with his older sister, Louise.
"He was very clear about what he wanted and what he didn't want," says a friend who saw him in his final month. "He didn't want to see his sister."
The ex-Beatle, who died Thursday at 58, is said to have felt that Louise, 70, traded on his fame. In 1995, she and her neighbors in Benton, Ill., turned her former home, a two-story bungalow where Harrison had slept in 1963, into a bed-and-breakfast called Hard Day's Nite (complete with its own Beatles museum).
She moved to Benton, in the southern end of Illinois, in 1963 with her then-husband, Gordon Caldwell, a mining engineer.
Louise had been one of the Liverpool band's early champions - promoting Beatles' singles to radio stations in Illinois - but her recent behavior "appalled" Harrison, says a friend.
"She adored the adoration of the masses," says the friend. "George didn't want to be a Beatle anymore. His greatest pleasure was planting trees and walking in nature."
Louise told People magazine last year that she hadn't seen her brother in three years but insisted that they were "not estranged. I receive an income from him."
However, Dorothy Schultz, a co-owner of the B&B, says Louise confided that sibling relations were chilly: "She called it their little tiff."
Hoping for a thaw, Louise drove to New York when she heard Harrison had flown in from Switzerland to get treatment in Staten Island for his brain tumor.
"He still didn't want to see her," says a source. "But, finally, probably because his wife, Olivia, encouraged him, they spent a half-hour together. They reconciled."
THEY STILL HAVE IT TOGETHER
Leonardo DiCaprio and Gisele Bundchen are still a couple. Breathless reports last week claimed the Brazilian supermodel had dumped the "Titanic" star because he chose to attend the Lennox Lewis fight in Vegas with his buddies rather than spend a weekend in L.A. with her. Funny, then, that our spies just spotted them in Hawaii, where she's doing a Victoria's Secret shoot.
Ted Turner is feeling the itch for yet another home. The dethroned mogul, who owns ranches around the globe, has filed plans to build a $3 million penthouse atop Atlanta's historic Bona Allen Building. The aerie will afford Turner a magnificent view of the penthouse he already has atop the CNN Center ...
The haunted house where Lyle and Eric Menendez killed their parents, Jose and Kitty, in 1989 has a new owner.
A brave buyer has paid $3 million for the five-bedroom, Mediterranean-style Beverly Hills spread.
A HITCH IN THE ADOPTION?
Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton's dream of adopting a refugee child may have stalled.
We told you recently how the two were spotted in L.A. filling out paperwork with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Last month, they went to Cambodia, where they're said to have fallen in love with an orphaned boy. But now the National Enquirer reports the adoption is tied up in red tape.
Thornton's spokesman will only say: "Just the two of them returned home from Cambodia."
Julia Stiles had better hit those books. The budding star has been trying to balance acting with an Ivy League education - just like Claire Danes (who's at Yale) and Natalie Portman (who's at Harvard). But Stiles, who's at Columbia, admits that showbiz is interfering with her studies.
"I have to meet with the dean tomorrow to talk about why I've been absent from school so much," she told us last week at the premiere of her movie "The Business of Strangers."
"I went for most of the semester, and then I just left to start work, which wasn't supposed to happen. I'm lucky because I enjoy both worlds, but it's hard to balance."
JENNIFER LOPEZ goes from Barcelona, where she just picked up an Onda Award for her work, to Germany to entertain U.S. troops. The hardest-working diva in show business then heads back to L.A. to start shooting "Gigli" with Ben Affleck on Dec. 17. Meanwhile, DreamWorks is said to be courting Lopez and Madonna to give voice to a hippo named Gloria in the computer-animated film "Madagascar" ...
ABOUT THE fashion exec who just married Howard Stern's ex-wife, Alison - the groom's name is David Simon ...
MATT DAMON is not engaged to girlfriend Odessa Whitmire, says his rep, denying a report ...
HILARY SWANK'S husband, Chad Lowe, shrugs off her complaints about the strains acting has put on her body. "I think all of Hilary's health concerns about the damage done to her body by wearing the corsets [in 'The Affair of the Necklace'] or by wrapping her breasts for "Boys Don't Cry" are all in her head," he tells Webster Hall curator Baird Jones. "Hilary gets very caught up in a lot of make-believe sometimes, and she gets carried away. I just ignore it."
TIM ZAGAT sent a dozen copies of his new restaurant guide to Martha Stewart's table while they were each having lunch at Jean Georges. The confused waiter kept asking diners if they were "Mike Stewart," until someone finally pointed out the domestic goddess - who, by the way, will have Isabella Rossellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Helen Mirren and Rosie Perez reminiscing about their childhood Christmas memories on Tuesday night's "Martha Stewart's Home for the Holidays" on CBS ...
ACTOR PAUL Rudd is the host of an evening of cocktails and fun tomorrow night at the 10th St. Lounge benefiting ACCESS and its efforts in response to the events of Sept. 11. Others on the guest list include Linda Fiorentino, "Shape of Things" stars Gretchen Mol and Rachel Weisz and actor Frederick Weller. Tickets can be purchased in advance at www.accesshelp.org ...
MICHAEL EISNER dined with Gov. Pataki at Patroon on Wednesday. The power spot was graced by Michael Milken, Lionel Richie and Vegas mogul Steve Wynn two nights before. | He sang about love and forgiveness. But right until the end, George Harrison had trouble making peace with his older sister, Louise. "He was very clear about what he wanted and what he didn't want,"says a friend who saw him in his final month. "He didn't want to see his sister."The ex-Beatle, who died Thursday at 58, is said to have felt that Louise, 70, traded | 15.592593 | 0.975309 | 20.209877 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/1996/12/08/1996-12-08_20_things_you_never_knew_abo.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20090531082550id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/entertainment/1996/12/08/1996-12-08_20_things_you_never_knew_abo.html | 20 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT OL' TOM JONES 60'S SINGER IS SURPRISE STAR OF MARS ATTACKS! | 20090531082550 | Sunday, December 8th 1996, 2:01AM
After three decades as a global superstar, it's hard to believe that Tom Jones is chalking up a first his big-screen debut!
The Welsh wizard with the whopping voice took a break from his singing duties to try his hand at acting. in the new comedy "Mars Attacks!"
The sci-fi spoof boasts a stellar cast, including Jack Nicholson (as the President), Pierce Brosnan, Annette Bening, Michael J. Fox, Glenn Close and Danny DeVito.
But all Tom had to do was ... act naturally.
As the Martians launch their strike on Earth in Las Vegas, Tom, playing himself, is less than amused when they start zapping his band during a sellout show. On behalf of the threatened human race, the courageous crooner grabs a gun and fights back.
So on the eve of the movie's release next Friday, here are 20 things you never knew about Tinseltown's best-known rookie:
1. Tom's introduction to movie making was not all smooth sailing, especially when the invading aliens in "Mars Attacks!" set off explosions all around him.
"They used real explosives for filming," he says "One bang was more powerful than expected and my hair caught fire. But no one seemed to worry. That's the movies you just get on with it."
2. It was at a 1968 show at New York's Copacabana that the tradition of female fans throwing their panties at him began. Jones recalls: "I was perspiring a lot, and the ladies were handing me table napkins.
"Then one woman took her underwear off and handed it to me. I just sort of wiped my brow and handed them back. But a columnist was there, he put it in the paper, and that was that it's been happening ever since!"
3. Tom is a classic rags-to-riches story. Now a multimillionaire, he was born the son of a dirt-poor Welsh coal miner.
4. His real name is Thomas John Woodward. He chose the snappier surname Jones, because it's the most common one in Wales and he is proud of his roots.
5. Young Tom was unable to follow his dad into the mines because of a two-year bout of tuberculosis in his early teens. He became a construction worker, supplementing his meager income by singing in local pubs, clubs and dance halls.
6. Songwriter Gordon Mills originally wrote Tom's biggest hit, "It's Not Unusual," for the barefoot '60s singer Sandie Shaw. But Jones took it for his debut single.
7. Jones propelled "It's Not Unusual" to the top of the British record charts despite an attempt by the strait laced British Broadcasting Co. to get it banned because it was considered too steamy.
8. More than 30 years later, Tom has sold a staggering 100 million copies of the record.
9. His years as a male sex symbol have made Tom wary about crazed fans. He admits: "I carry a .38 pistol wherever I can.
10. Tom was horrified to learn that cult killer Charles Manson had put him on his hit list. Mad Manson plotted to lure Jones into a honey trap. Tom reveals: "A girl from his gang was supposed to somehow get close to me and then kill me."
11. Not that ladies' man Tom has been particularly difficult to lead into temptation. His womanizing exploits are legendary. The biggest surprise was when former Supreme Mary Wilson admitted she had been one of his sexual conquests. In her autobiography, she wrote: "Tom made a great friend as well as a fine lover. Only later did I discover that he was married!"
12. Jones' marriage to his teenage sweetheart, Linda Trenchard, has survived all his philanderings. Tom wed the pregnant Linda on her 16th birthday.
13. Tom and Linda's 40-year-old son, Mark, is a married father of two making his superstud dad a grandfather twice over.
14. Linda only sees Tom for about eight weeks a year.
15. Through their years as stalwarts of the Vegas show scene, Tom and Elvis Presley became the best of friends. Jones says: " We would sing and jam together ... we had a lot in common."
16. But Presley's increasing addiction to drugs put a strain on the duo's friendship."Elvis got mixed up with the drug situation, which I never did. But he never said anything about it, and we never talked about it," recalls Jones.
17. Mark isn't Tom's only son. DNA experts proved that he is the father of an 8-year-old boy by Katherine Berkery after a 3-day fling in 1987 at New York's Ritz-Carlton Hotel she slapped her former lover with a paternity suit.
18. After the conclusive DNA evidence, Tom agreed to pay Katherine now 33 more than $1 million to bring up their love child, Jonathan.
19. In 1991, the bed-hopping star was still at it romancing a 21-year-old California student, Cindy Montgomery. He presented the young beauty with a gold ring, a diamond and black pearly necklace and flew her all over the world for liaisons in Hawaii, New York and London. But still, Tom says his marriage is steady as a rock. He insists: "As long as I go back to Linda in the end she's Okay."
20. Even a sex-loving, hip-swiveling heartthrob has to take precautions in this day and age. Eight years ago, as the AIDS scare swept the world, Tom announced he was giving up his lifelong practice of kissing female admirers during his steamy stage shows. | After three decades as a global superstar, it's hard to believe that Tom Jones is chalking up a first his big-screen debut! The Welsh wizard with the whopping voice took a break from his singing duties to try his hand at acting. in the new comedy "Mars Attacks!"The sci-fi spoof boasts a stellar cast, including Jack Nicholson (as the President), Pierce Brosnan, Annette Bening, Michael J. Fox, Glenn Close and Danny DeVito. But all | 12.516484 | 0.989011 | 28.769231 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1999/05/21/1999-05-21_the_gunman_ran_like_crazy___.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20090820044046id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/news/1999/05/21/1999-05-21_the_gunman_ran_like_crazy___.html | THE GUNMAN RAN LIKE CRAZY...'AT LEAST THEY DIDN'T DIALLO ME' | 20090820044046 | BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN Daily News Staff Writer
Friday, May 21th 1999, 2:10AM
Gunning his 1992 Ford Taurus, Police Officer Jimmy Kelly drives off at 68 mph under the Jerome Ave. el, screeching past cars and dodging 12-ton cast-iron stanchions.
The 29-year-old Kelly and his 29-year-old partner, Officer Eddie Drum, are hightailing it 35 blocks to help nab a man seen firing his 9-mm. Glock handgun into the air on a crowded streetcorner near Fordham University.
It's 11:24 p.m., adrenaline is pumping, and the first "gun run" of a moonless night is underway for the two cops from the street crime unit.
"Up here, the mutts like to test fire their guns to see how well they work when they go out to do their dirty deeds," says Kelly, a five-year veteran.
"But those bullets all gotta come down somewhere, and every single one of them can endanger an innocent civilian," says Drum, a nine-year veteran.
On this night, Kelly and Drum are out to arrest a pair of gunmen who've been robbing gypsy cab drivers in the chunk of territory between Claremont Park and the Macombs Dam Bridge. They stop eight livery cabs and frisk nearly a dozen passengers who resemble a description of the suspects.
The team pulls over one gypsy cab at the intersection of Valentine Ave. and E. 180th St. While Kelly talks to the driver to make sure he's okay, Drum asks the passenger in the back seat to step out, questioning, "Where you coming from?" and "Where you going to?"
A 15-second patdown follows, starting with the waistband, pants pockets and small of the back, then chest-high to an inside sweatshirt pocket, around the back to the dangling sweatshirt hood and finally down both pant legs to ankle level.
The man is clean, so Drum sends him on his way with an explanation and an apology. "Don't take it personally," he says. "Lots of cabbies are getting robbed and shot, so we're stopping as many cars as we can." The rider nods his head, "No problem, I just wanna go home."
Like legions of police partners, Kelly and Drum often share each other's thoughts - and regularly finish each other's sentences. There's another bond: grammar-school classmates in Rockland County two decades ago, they're still neighbors "north of the TZB," meaning the Tappan Zee Bridge.
But the cops are in the high-crime 52nd Precinct, and right now they share a common fear.
"I wonder how Mike's doing," Kelly says. "Let's hope Mike's not in any trouble," Drum nods.
Mike is Officer Mike Fraterrigo, 27, the first street crime unit cop to race up to the liquor store on Marion Ave. at E. 194th St., where the gunman allegedly fired 15 rounds skyward. Mike has tackled the suspect on a sidewalk two blocks away, injured his leg and recovered the Glock, its clip empty.
"He ran like crazy to get away, but he never threatened me with that gun, thank God," Fraterrigo says.
It has been a supertense 15 minutes, but the eight cops on the scene ease back into discussing the mundane details of the police lifestyle:
Kelly, who manages the Joyce Realty Softball Team in New City, now frets that Fraterrigo, his star center fielder, will miss the next game.
"Stay off that leg, Mike," Kelly advises. "I need you this weekend."
Meanwhile, Lt. John Fichter, 53, the street crime unit supervisor at the arrest scene and a 26-year veteran, beckons a reporter to take a close look at the suspect.
"You want to see the savage?" asks Fichter, who has been assigned to the unit since March 1993. He points to a man seated in the rear of a police car - his arms handcuffed behind his back, eyes glassy, expression vacant - as Fichter repeats the phrase, "There's the savage over there."
The suspect calls himself Joey Brown and acknowledges a long arrest record. Later, he will be identified as Maurice Wood, 19, of Valentine Ave., the Bronx, and charged with reckless endangerment, criminal possession of a deadly weapon and criminal use of a deadly weapon, all felonies.
Asked how he's doing, Wood starts chuckling.
"At least they didn't Diallo me, so I guess I'm okay," he says.
The name Diallo has already become a verb. "To Diallo" is to overkill, to shoot unreasonably and too many times, a reference to the 41 street crime unit bullets fired at un-armed street vendor Amadou Diallo.
But for the 362 cops of the unit, the name of another Bronx shooting victim is always on their lips - Gillespie. And on every 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. tour, they will tell you that slain street crime unit Officer Kevin Gillespie should be remembered in just as many households in Melrose, Morris Heights and Morrisania as Diallo is.
Gillespie was killed in 1996, five days before his 34th birthday, when a 9-mm. slug pierced his neck just above his bulletproof vest during a wild gunfight with three carjackers in a stolen BMW in Fordham. His locker remains exactly as he left it at the street crime unit's base on Randalls Island.
A letter from Danny Gillespie, 7 years old when his father was slain, is taped to the outside of the locker. "The police are cool. I love you guys, I love the police," the letter reads. "I will be one someday."
As they file past for the daily roll call, several street crime unit cops gently touch Gillespie's locker, while others pause to reread Danny's letter one more time. In the Tac Room, the Tactical Meeting Room, Lt. John Feerick repeats a simple message for his troops:
"Be careful, it's starting to get busy out there again. It's getting warmer, too, so be doubly careful  ," he says. "And remember Kevin."
Nobody ever forgets. At 10:18 p.m., Lt. Kevin Cantwell, 36, and Officer Marcela Hernandez, 32, are driving north on the Grand Concourse - "the Conk" - when Hernandez suddenly points to an awning on the west side of the boulevard at E. 183rd St.
"That's where he was killed, and every time I pass the spot, I think of it," he says. "We always drive past, it always reminds us, and it stays with us all through the tour."
Cantwell, a father of two, was raised on Plimpton Ave. in Highbridge, and he still drives past the old house on patrol. His family moved to Rockland County after three burglaries at their home.
Hernandez, a nine-year veteran with 54 medals, grew up on 42nd St. and Ninth Ave. when the only place to hang out was the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He now lives in Suffolk County with his wife and two kids.
It's a partnership that clicks on the city's grittiest streets.
"If a neighborhood goes crazy with guns, shootings and violent crime like in the Wild, Wild West, that's where we come in," Hernandez says.
"The department has taken a lot of hits for its active and aggressive policing, but the bottom line is 5,000 more people are alive and walking around today because of those policies," says Cantwell, a 15-year veteran with 123 decorations. | Gunning his 1992 Ford Taurus, Police Officer Jimmy Kelly drives off at 68 mph under the Jerome Ave. el, screeching past cars and dodging 12-ton cast-iron stanchions. The 29-year-old Kelly and his 29-year-old partner, Officer Eddie Drum, are hightailing it 35 blocks to help nab a man seen firing his 9-mm. Glock handgun into the air on a crowded streetcorner near Fordham University. It's 11:24 p.m., adrenaline is pumping, and the first "gun run"of | 16.369565 | 0.98913 | 35.01087 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2002/10/25/2002-10-25_sniper_cops_bust_vet__teen_t.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20091113121813id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/news/2002/10/25/2002-10-25_sniper_cops_bust_vet__teen_t.html | SNIPER COPS BUST VET, TEEN TRUCKER CALLS IN TIP THAT ENDS HUNT SUSPECTS FOUND ASLEEP IN THEIR CAR VICTIMS WERE SHOT THRU HOLE IN TRUNK | 20091113121813 | By HELEN KENNEDY DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU With Timothy J. Burger and Kenneth R. Bazinet
Friday, October 25th 2002, 8:01AM
WASHINGTON - The Beltway sniper's three-week reign of terror and one of the nation's biggest manhunts ended yesterday with the peaceful arrest of a sleeping ex-soldier and a teenager he called his stepson.
Ballistics tests showed the Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle found in their car fired the bullets that killed the sniper's victims, officials said last night.
"We feel very positive," said Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles Moose at a press conference that turned into a police victory lap. "We have the weapon. It is off the street."
John Allen Muhammad, 41, a Gulf War veteran and Nation of Islam convert with an Army marksmanship award, initially was charged with possessing the rifle in violation of his ex-wife's restraining order.
Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, a Jamaican citizen who was due in court next month on immigration violations, was held as a material witness.
Prosecutors in Maryland and Virginia, who are battling to be the first to try the sniper, said they would announce new charges today. Maryland is likely to win because the men were nabbed at a highway rest stop in Myersville, Md.
As the rampage came to an end, the general sigh of relief was almost audible across the Washington area.
"I'm not looking over my shoulder anymore," said a grinning Dwight Hayes, 34, of suburban Maryland.
Moose shared a bear hug with County Executive Doug Duncan amid a cloud of mylar balloons reading "thank you" - a gift from a high school field hockey team that can practice again.
"We have not given in to the terror," Moose said, his voice shaking with emotion. "Yes, we have all experienced anxiety, but in the end, resiliency has won out."
The odd couple was arrested just after 3 a.m. in a Chevy Caprice that had been rigged as a mobile sniper's nest, with a small hole bored in the trunk through which to fire unseen.
Appearing briefly in federal court in Baltimore, Muhammad was soft-spoken. "I know where I'm at. I know why I'm here," he told the judge.
The motive for the bloody shooting spree that claimed 10 random lives in 13 shootings remained hazy.
The FBI would not discuss it, saying it did not want to taint the prosecution.
Officials said neither Muhammad nor Malvo is connected to any terrorist group.
Muhammad, an auto mechanic who converted to Islam 17 years ago, changed his last name from Williams sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. One neighbor said he had been heard expressing sympathy for Al Qaeda, but family members said they never heard that.
The relationship between Muhammad and Malvo was unclear.
Muhammad, a twice-divorced father of four, introduced the teen he roamed the country with as his stepson, but Malvo was not, officials and family members said. Muhammad may have had a relationship with Malvo's mother, Uma James.
A womanizer with a temper, he had rocky relationships with his two ex-wives, both of whom accused him in court of kidnapping their kids after the marriages broke up.
"I am afraid of John," second wife Mildred Muhammad wrote in a March 2000 complaint. "He's behaving very, very irrational."
In July, Muhammad took Malvo to visit his first wife, Carol Williams, in Baton Rouge, La. The family was shocked at how Muhammad treated the shy, respectful teen, including restricting his diet to crackers and honey. They said Malvo seemed quiet and scared of Muhammad.
As police had expected, the baffling case was broken by a tip - but in a bizarre twist, the tip appears to have come from the sniper himself.
On Oct. 17, a caller claiming to be the sniper referred to a homicide in "Montgomery."
A caller also telephoned a Virginia priest and left a similar message about "Montgomery, Ala.," on his machine, using a code phrase that cops recognized as the sniper's.
Police then found an unsolved ambush shooting Sept. 21 at the ABC liquor store in Montgomery, Ala. The suspect left a fingerprint behind.
The print was Malvo's - the biggest break yet for the task force. They tracked him to Tacoma, Wash., and soon had the name of his apparent guardian, Muhammad.
Now they had names, faces, addresses and license plate numbers - including the Chevy Caprice registered to Muhammad at a Camden, N.J., address Sept. 11.
When police electrified the region Wednesday night with the announcement that they were looking for two suspects, Muhammad and Malvo were asleep at the wheel - literally.
A truck driver pulled into a rest stop on I-70 about 50 miles northwest of Washington, around 3 a.m. and saw the blue Chevy Caprice he had heard about on the radio. He called 911 and was told to lock himself in his vehicle and block a rest stop exit ramp as police quietly swarmed the area.
Wearing night-vision goggles and flak jackets, a growing number of cops laid siege to the rest stop, culminating in an easy arrest at 3:19 a.m.
The suspects awoke in confusion and did not resist when the SWAT team grabbed them - defying widespread expectations that the Beltway sniper would die in a blazing gun battle when finally cornered.
Ironically, the rest stop tipster, Ron Lantz, was in a white truck - the only one so far known to be connected with the case after so many bogus sightings.
Lantz said he would share any reward money with the victims' families.
Cops found the rifle under a seat in the Caprice, as well as a bag of ammunition, a scope and a tripod.
The back seat was rigged to lie flat, so a shooter could lie prone and fire unseen through the hole in the trunk. The rifle's report would be muffled by the trunk, another reason the killers were able to slip away so many times.
CNN reported police found that Malvo had stayed at a motel next door to the Ponderosa steakhouse in Ashland, Va., the night of Oct. 19, when a diner was shot in the stomach in the restaurant parking lot.
Many of the shooting scenes had hotels nearby. If the shooters were staying at the hotels, it might explain how they avoided the massive police dragnets that shut highways for up to 100 miles.
Muhammad had been caught in the dragnet at least once and let go. He was stopped briefly at a Baltimore rest stop Oct. 8 after a burgundy Chevy Caprice was seen leaving the Oct. 3 murder of Pascal Charlot in Washington.
It was a day after the shooting of a Maryland 13-year-old, but Muhammad did not act suspicious. Cops let him go. | WASHINGTON - The Beltway sniper's three-week reign of terror and one of the nation's biggest manhunts ended yesterday with the peaceful arrest of a sleeping ex-soldier and a teenager he called his stepson. Ballistics tests showed the Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle found in their car fired the bullets that killed the sniper's victims, officials said last night. "We feel very positive,"said Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief | 17.025316 | 0.987342 | 30.303797 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/chris-brown-interview-rihanna-robin-roberts/story | http://web.archive.org/web/20091207062632id_/http://www.abcnews.go.com:80/2020/chris-brown-interview-rihanna-robin-roberts/story?id=9216894 | Chris Brown Interview on Rihanna With Robin Roberts | 20091207062632 | Chris Brown apologized and made no excuses for the night he assaulted his former girlfriend, Rihanna.
The R&B singer responds to Rihanna's interview about his violent outburst.
"I was wrong for what I did," Brown told ABC News' Robin Roberts. "And I would definitely say that it's not something that I look past or look over. Something that's really, really touchy. And, and like I said, I'm -- I'm really sorry for -- for what went down. And what happened."
Brown, 20, spoke candidly to Roberts about his year-long relationship with pop sensation Rihanna, which began as a friendship.
Watch the full Chris Brown interview on "20/20" tonight at 10 p.m. ET.
Brown -- then a 15-year-old skinny teen with a winning smile -- had rocketed to the top of the Billboard charts and was hailed as the next Michael Jackson. The prince of R&B and 16-year-old teen pop queen Rihanna had a seemingly fairytale relationship. But something disturbing emerged.
Brown beat Rihanna during an argument after a pre-Grammy Awards party Feb. 8, 2009.
"I never ever had problems with anger. No, no domestic violence with any of my past girlfriends or any altercations," Brown said. "I never was that kind of person. ... I look at it, and it's really, like really difficult. It's like, 'How could I be that person?'"
According to the police affidavit, the argument began when Rihanna read a text message on Brown's phone from another woman. Brown shoved Rihanna into the window of his car, while driving. According to the police report, he punched her several times and said, "I'm going to beat the s**t out of you when we get home." When Rihanna countered by calling her assistant's phone, Brown warned, "You just did the stupidest thing ever. I'm going to kill you," and threw her phone out the window, the report noted.
Brown, who fled the scene, turned himself in to police eight hours later and was charged with two felonies, assault and making criminal threats. He was released after posting $50,000 bail, but faced a firestorm of controversy.
"It was something that -- I really have to really think about it. I was like, 'Man, I let a lot of people down,'" he said.
In the fallout from the assault, advertisers for the Milk Mustache campaign and Wrigley's Doublemint gum dropped the singer. Some music stations across the country also banned Brown's songs.
But it was the public apology he posted on his YouTube page, six months after the assault, which drew some of the sharpest criticism. In a video, Brown apologized to his fans, claimed to have apologized to Rihanna "countless times," and reiterated that he was seeking help.
"I take great pride in me being able to exercise self-control, and what I did was inexcusable. I am very sad and very ashamed of what I've done," he said, speaking directly to the camera. "I intend to live my life so that I am truly worthy of the term 'role model.'"
In Rihanna's exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer, which aired on "20/20," Rihanna said it sounded like Brown "might have been reading off of a teleprompter."
Brown revealed to Roberts that he had been heavily coached.
"I had a week of -- not -- not even a week, maybe three or four days of PR. And they just telling me like, 'OK, don't say this. And don't say it this way, 'cause they're gonna take it this way,'" he said. "So, I had in my -- my head wasn't really giving me a chance to be me. It was just being myself through other people. ... It was genuinely from me, but it wasn't projected genuinely." | Chris Brown speaks candidly about his relationship with ex-girlfriend Rihanna in an interview with ABC News' Robin Roberts to air on "20/20" Friday, Dec. 4, at 10 p.m. ET. | 20.842105 | 0.815789 | 2.236842 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/2005/02/13/2005-02-13_best_in_show___some_of_our_f.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20100406021256id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/entertainment/2005/02/13/2005-02-13_best_in_show___some_of_our_f.html | BEST IN SHOW Some of our favorite moments could be found off the runway | 20100406021256 | Sunday, February 13th 2005, 1:33AM
The lights! The cameras! The fashion!
New York's most stylish week has come to an end, but that doesn't mean we've heard the last of what happened in the tents. The trends set during Fashion Week (on the runways and off) will be hitting the streets before we know it.
Here, some of the week's most memorable moments:
Vincent Gallo at Calvin Klein
This dude (one of the dudes at Benjamin Cho)
Richard Tyler designing uniforms for Delta
Atkins bars handed out to already-emaciated fashionistas in the tent
Your mom (Beyoncé and Tina)
Your dopey dog (Paris & Tinkerbell)
REALITY TV IN THE TENTS
Kara Saun's designs for "Project Runway"
Stacie J. from "The Apprentice" in the front row
Pelts! Fabulous fur at Michael Kors
Pork! Miss Piggy, front row at Heatherette
Karolina Kurkova, partying on her 21st Âbirthday at Duke & Duchess
Potty-mouthed popster JoJo, swearing into her cellphone at Baby Phat | FASHION WEEK FALL 2005 BEST IN SHOW Some of our favorite moments could be found off the runway BY AMY DILUNA The lights! The cameras! The fashion! New York's most stylish week has come to an end, but that doesn't mean we've heard the last of what happened in the tents. The trends set during Fashion Week (on the runways and off) will be hitting the streets before we know it. Here, some of the | 2.425287 | 0.885057 | 32.471264 | low | medium | extractive |
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/International/feds-arrested-van-der-sloot-extortion-peru-muder/story | http://web.archive.org/web/20100608130533id_/http://abcnews.go.com:80/2020/International/feds-arrested-van-der-sloot-extortion-peru-muder/story?id=10828251&cid=ESPNheadline | Could Feds Have Arrested Joran van der Sloot for Extortion Before Peru Murder? | 20100608130533 | Weeks after the FBI monitored the payment of $15,000 to Joran van der Sloot by an alleged extortion victim, the Dutch playboy took a seat at a poker table in a Peruvian casino where he would meet the woman whose battered body would later be found in his blood smeared hotel room.
Dutch national investigated for extortion weeks before Peru murder.
U.S. authorities told ABCNews.com that they launched an extortion investigation of van der Sloot six weeks ago, before Stephany Flores Ramirez, 21, was found beaten and stabbed to death last week.
U.S. investigators said they did not issue a warrant for his arrest until this week because they lacked sufficient evidence.
The federal extortion investigation began in late April, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Birmingham said.
On May 10, $15,000 was wired to a Netherlands bank by someone in Mountain Brook, Ala., allegedly in exchange for a promise by van der Sloot to provide information about what happened to Natalee Holloway and the whereabouts of her remains.
Van der Sloot had for five years been the prime suspect in the disappearance on Holloway, a high school student from Mountain Brook who vanished in Aruba on May 30, 2005.
Van der Sloot, a Dutch national who lives in Aruba, was arrested Thursday in Chile and was extradited today to Peru to face murder charges in Flores' death. He told authorities he met Flores, but denied killing her.
For several weeks van der Sloot had been on the radar of American officials who, in a criminal complaint released Thursday, said he planned to extort $250,000 from the unidentified victim.
When asked why van der Sloot was not arrested following the initial alleged payment, authorities told ABC News.com there was not "sufficient evidence to support the charge."
A criminal complaint alleging the extortion was, however, filed Thursday, just days after Flores was found dead and van der Sloot had fled to Chile.
Authorities said their charges were not the result of the Peru death.
"This was completely separate and before the girl was killed in Peru," said Peggy Sanford, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Birmingham. "This investigation had been going on. It was a complete coincidence and tragedy that the other woman was murdered."
The complaint does not name the person whom van der Sloot was trying to extort, by providing information about Holloway's death, but Sanford suggested, van der Sloot had initiated contact by approaching the alleged victim.
"He extorted, or attempted to extort someone, an individual, in exchange for the location of Natalee Holloway's remains and information about her death. Mr. van der Sloot made efforts to extort someone and get money," said Sanford.
U.S. law enforcement, however, may never get to try van der Sloot for the alleged extortion scam. He arrived in Peru today under armed guard.
Famed criminal defense lawyer Roy Black told ABC's "Good Morning America" that, "The murder case in Peru takes precedence over" the extortion charges, and that the chances of van der Sloot getting extradited to Alabama "are zero."
"He's going to get a very long sentence in Peru," Black said. "By the time he gets out of jail, if he ever does, this would be a footnote in history."
The lawyer said, however, that the Holloway disappearance could be used "as evidence of proof in Peru," and the Holloway family may ask a Peru court "for a longer sentence because of Natalee's murder." | U.S. authorities knew for weeks Dutch murder suspect Joran van der Sloot had received $15,000 in extorted money before he left for Peru where he is accused of killing Stephany Flores Ramirez. | 20.294118 | 0.852941 | 1.558824 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/02/banks-buyers-sellers-markets-equities-kbw.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20100703170130id_/http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/02/banks-buyers-sellers-markets-equities-kbw.html | The Bank Buyers To Watch | 20100703170130 | The wedding stories in the banking sector haven't been typical over the past few years, with an inordinate number of the shotgun and arranged variety, as firms either on the brink of failing or already belly up were acquired by their more surefooted rivals. Even though the FDIC has tallied another 85 bank failures so far in 2010, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods expects consolidation in the sector to keep humming even after the industry shakes off the crisis fallout.
With that in mind, KBW put together a lengthy list of banks that could be buyers, sellers and in between. The firm favors those that are more likely to be buyers than sellers, explains analyst Chris McGratty, who says such firms "have the double benefit of significant growth opportunities in the next five years and then when mergers and acquisitions valuations improve, [potentially] being acquired."
Among the large-cap banks that could be on the prowl for acquisitions, KBW prefers BB&T ( BBT - news - people ), PNC Financial Services and U.S. Bancorp. ( USB - news - people ) McGratty sees First Midwest Bancorp ( FMBI - news - people ) and MB Financial ( MBFI - news - people ) among those that could be actively acquiring in the short-term, and ultimately growing into a target for larger banks. The acquiring banks will let these banks build themselves up and "do all the leg work," McGratty says, before swooping in for a deal.
In Pictures: Bank Buyers That Could Become Sellers
Another bank in that buyer-to-seller category that McGratty highlights is Bryn Mawr Bank ( BMTC - news - people ). He says the conservative bank has plenty of capital, has not cut its dividend and did not receive any Troubled Asset Relief Program funds, putting it in a prime position to grow. The firm is already taken advantage: it closed its acquisition of Media, Penn.-based First Keystone Financial -- with $489 million in assets and more than 331 million in deposits -- Thursday.
KBW has a more cautious view on the banks that it expects to be targets in the near term, but within the group it prefers those that have an attractive footprint, a high proportion of low-cost deposits, above-average normalized earnings power and strong fee-income businesses with high barriers to entry. The banks that fit those criteria: Abington Bancorp ( ABBCD - news - people ), Boston Private Financial Holdings ( BPFH - news - people ), Cardinal Financial ( CFNL - news - people ), Encore Bancshares, Susquehanna Bancshares ( SUSQ - news - people ) and Western Alliance Bancorp.
For investors who want to play dip a diversified toe into the coming wave of mergers and acquisitions, McGratty recommends a basket approach that includes at least 20 banks, but is overweight companies on the hunt for deals and those that are buying now to bulk up and become takeover opportunities for larger rivals.
In Pictures: Bank Buyers That Could Become Sellers | Consolidation will play a big role in the industry's future. Here's how to play it. | 30.052632 | 0.631579 | 0.842105 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/1996/07/09/1996-07-09_when_heroes_go_to_waste_will.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20100904061717id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/entertainment/1996/07/09/1996-07-09_when_heroes_go_to_waste_will.html | WHEN HEROES GO TO WASTE WILL & JEFF SAVE THE WORLD, AND OUR MAYOR WANTS 'INDEPENDENCE' FROM RECYCLING | 20100904061717 | BY DAVID HINCKLEY Critic at Large
Tuesday, July 9th 1996, 2:00AM
SOME CRITICS HAVE dismissed the movie "Independence Day" as a sort of "Airport 1975" with higher stakes. Instead of just Linda Blair, we have to save the whole world.
But the heart of "Independence Day" lies closer to another '70s flick, "Rocky," because it's really telling us we still have heroes. A can-do spirit. Men and women who can stop that murderous alien on the one-yard line.
This appeals to people because so many real-life leaders today just don't seem to have that quality, which is why we frequently sigh for the good old days of, say, the Founding Fathers. Sure, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and Alexander Hamilton thought the masses were morons, but time has a way of softening images that aren't tarnished by questions of the moment. If Benjamin Franklin had to take a position on health-care reform or the gasoline tax, he would doubtless displease many of us. He doesn't, so we all admire him.
In lore, the Founding Fathers have what Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith have in "Independence Day": The will to do what must be done, undeterred by petty bureaucratic constraints or the fears of the timid.
Sort of like Mayor Giuliani and the city's recycling law.
It was lamentably undernoted in the media that the mayor honored the 220th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence last week in an exceptionally appropriate way. The original revolutionaries declared it intolerable to obey the tyrannical colonial laws of King George. Mayor Giuliani declared it intolerable to obey the tyrannical recycling law of the City Council.
"There's a certain theory in the law that says, if a law is impossible, you can't follow it," said the mayor.
Hot dog! That's what everyone who ever fought a traffic ticket has been arguing for years. Not to mention Gandhi, the Chicago Seven, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Next thing you know, the mayor will be running for reelection on a platform of "No Justice, No Peace."
For the record, the law requires the city to recycle 25% of its garbage by next Sunday, about double what was recycled, say, this past Sunday. Can't be done, says Giuliani, so why try? His next budget cuts recycling funds by 40%.
No regrets, either. Besides calling the law absurd, Giuliani called recycling a "craze," thus placing it on the level of teenage boys wearing baseball caps backwards.
Actually, there is the stray bit of evidence that suggests recycling just might be doing a teeny speck of good. But the specifics of recycling, in a way, are less interesting than a mayoral declaration that the law is something to be followed when he likes it and ignored if he finds it "absurd."
"Yes, your honor, my client murdered this woman. But that doesn't matter, because the laws against murder are absurd. Ask any police commissioner his goals for the murder rate and he'll say, 'Zero.' Well, we lost 'zero' when Cain killed Adam. So this law is impossible to follow and I ask that the charges be dismissed."
Another bonus is that this may clarify the administration's popular "quality of life" campaign. Ticketing homeless men for washing windshields addresses our quality of life. Trying to slow the depletion of the Earth's resources does not.
Okay, some snippy tree-huggers may argue that this also reveals the line where Mayor Giuliani switches from can-do to can't-do. The John Gotti fireworks display? Full police deployment. Fight to the finish. Recycling? Sorry, that one's too tough.
But the tree-huggers miss the point, which is that this mayor will not be bound by red tape and gagged by fine print. When the alien ship hovers over your neighborhood, do do you want some ACLU wimp out there reading the spaceship its Miranda rights?
Besides, following the law was probably just a craze anyhow. | SOME CRITICS HAVE dismissed the movie "Independence Day"as a sort of "Airport 1975"with higher stakes. Instead of just Linda Blair, we have to save the whole world. But the heart of "Independence Day"lies closer to another '70s flick, "Rocky,"because it's really telling us we still have heroes. A can-do spirit. Men and women who can stop that murderous alien on the one-yard line. This appeals to people because so | 9.430233 | 0.953488 | 17.883721 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2003/02/16/2003-02-16_hot_on_the_trail_of_city_s_m.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20100915180830id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/news/2003/02/16/2003-02-16_hot_on_the_trail_of_city_s_m.html | HOT ON THE TRAIL OF CITY'S MOST WANTED Help police snare the worst of the worst | 20100915180830 | BY MICHELE McPHEE DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU CHIEF
Sunday, February 16th 2003, 1:41AM
A Bronx building super with a reputation as a ladies man sleeps with his neighbor's wife, then fills the guy full of bullets when the two have it out.
A Brooklyn man murders his own sister one day, then kidnaps and kills his ex-girlfriend the following morning, dumping the college student's body in an abandoned lot.
A Queens card player gets into an argument during a poker game and critically wounds a pal by pelting him with a nail gun.
These men have joined seven others on the list of the NYPD's Most Wanted Violent Felons - a rolling roster of 150 fugitives on the lam after allegedly committing some of the city's most brutal crimes.
"These 10 are our biggest priorities, we do consider them among the worst," said Lt. Bob Tracy, the commanding officer of the Violent Felony Squad.
The Daily News has featured the NYPD's rogues' gallery of most wanted three times, leading to the quick capture of 12 suspects. In 2001, five out of the 10 suspects whose mug shots appeared in The News were captured. Last year, seven of the 10 landed behind bars - all with the help of News readers.
Since the squad's inception, Tracy and his detectives, working with U.S. marshals and precinct investigators, have captured 290 suspects. Anyone with information about these alleged criminals is asked to call CRIMESTOPPERS at (800) 577-TIPS.
Here's the police account of their crimes:
WANTED FOR MURDER IN THE BRONX
SUSPECT: FRANK CEDANO, 58, aka "Ladies Man"
DESCRIPTION: 6-feet-tall, 220 pounds, with thick beard and unruly hair.
Patrick Keneavy may have wanted to kill his building superintendent when he discovered the super was having an affair with his wife.
But the super, Frank Cedano, beat him to it during an argument over the woman on March 10, 1998, in the lobby of their building on Barnes Ave. in Williamsbridge. That day, Cedano and the victim were arguing about the affair when the super pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and squeezed off five rounds, hitting Keneavy in the heart. Keneavy died at the scene and Cedano fled. Police believe he may have traveled to the Dominican Republic hours after the shooting. But in the past, Cedano was more a lover than a fighter, cops said. His record was clean.
WANTED FOR A DOUBLE MURDER IN BROOKLYN
DESCRIPTION: 6-feet-2, 225 pounds, long dreadlocks, full facial hair.
Patricia Neverson was a nursing administrator at New York Methodist Hospital who raised two kids as a single mom. Donna Davis was a promising young college student.
Both women allegedly died at the hands of the same man: Andre Neverson, Patricia's younger brother.
Police say the ex-con shot his sister in July in an argument over money lent. Hours later, he picked up Davis, his former girlfriend, from Aubrey Cohen College in Queens and shot her in the head, then dumped her body in a vacant lot in Brooklyn.
Police believe Neverson may be disguising his appearance with long dreadlocks and living among the homeless on city subways.
There is a $12,000 reward for information leading to his capture and conviction.
WANTED FOR NAIL GUN SHOOTING IN QUEENS
DESCRIPTION: 5-feet-9, 180 pounds, with a short black crew cut, salt-and-pepper mustache, brown eyes.
It was a hell of a poker hand, and Moises Interiano felt flush. That is, until Sergio Archasa showed his cards.
Interiano became so eraged during the card game - in the back of a bodega at 170-24 Jamaica Ave., Jamaica, Queens, last June - that he pulled out a nail gun and fired a 9-incher into Archasa's chest.
Archasa was critically wounded, but survived the attack.
Interiano, who is originally from Estonia, a former republic in the Soviet Union on the Baltic Sea, may have returned to his homeland, cops said.
WANTED FOR THE MURDER OF A 10-YEAR-OLD GIRL IN THE BRONX
SUSPECT: CEASAR ROSAS, 22, aka "Bebe"
DESCRIPTION: 5-feet-6, 150 pounds, short black hair, mustache.
It was a crime that shocked the city.
A little girl leaving a christening party at a Bronx church was shot in the head by a stray bullet fired by members of the St. James gang - all Mexican immigrants.
Malenny Mendez, 10, was murdered in July 2002 when the gang members opened fire during a skirmish outside the church in Parkchester. Another bullet paralyzed a man.
Ceasar Rosas is believed to have been the gunman who fired the bullet that killed the child.
Six other gang members have been arrested in connection with the shooting, but Rosas and two others remain at large. Police believe the suspects are in Mexico.
WANTED FOR MURDER IN BROOKLYN
SUSPECT: JAMES JOHNSON, 32, aka "J.J."
DESCRIPTION: 5-feet-8, 160 pounds, short crew cut.
Andrew Morgan was a respected correction officer, who was grappling with the death of his mother in the World Trade Center attacks even as he was elated about the birth of his first baby.
Then, in April, Morgan was killed visiting a friend in the Red Hook East housing project in Brooklyn.
Cops believe the killer was James Johnson, who had become enraged that Morgan was visiting his estranged wife. Johnson allegedly fired through Morgan's car window, killing him instantly.
WANTED FOR TWO RAPES IN THE BRONX AND A SEPARATE SHOOTING IN THE BRONX
KEVIN JOHNSON, 22, aka "Action"
DESCRIPTION: 5-feet-7, 150 pounds, short brown hair
Kevin Johnson was already wanted for shooting a rival after a dispute in the street on Nov. 11, 2001.
But now his DNA has been linked to two brutal rapes, and the hunt for him has been intensified. On Dec. 8, 2002, he allegedly dragged a woman into an alley on Austin Place in Port Morris.
Then, last month, his DNA matched a sample in another rape in the Bronx committed in 2000. He is also being looked at in connection with a third rape.
Johnson has been on the run since police say he shot Felix Oyola, seriously wounding him. Oyola had allegedly smacked Johnson's mother, so her son shot him, according to authorities.
In the days after the shooting, Johnson fled the state. He has been sighted in Florida and North Carolina.
WANTED FOR GANG-RELATED SHOOTINGS IN THE BRONX
SUSPECT: MARION CAMPBELL, 24, aka "Rooster"
DESCRIPTION: 5-feet-6, 120 pounds, with braids and a slight mustache.
Marion Campbell has made a name for himself in the Bronx.
The alleged member of the Bloods gang has become notorious in the Eastchester section of the Bronx, where he is linked to at least two shootings.
In one incident, on May 30, 2001, Campbell got into an argument with a rival, Alfonso Nelson, and allegedly shot the victim in the leg. Then, on Oct. 24, 2002, Campbell and an accomplice allegedly attacked another man in the lobby of a building on Edson Ave. "We can link Edison to those two crimes, but he is suspected of being involved in many more," said Sgt. Mike White of the Violent Felony Squad.
An alleged drug dealer, Campbell is believed to still be in business in the Bronx, police said.
WANTED FOR MURDER IN BROOKLYN
SUSPECT: Jerome Handy, 44, aka "Red"
DESCRIPTION: 5-feet-7, 174 pounds, red hair, light freckles, brown eyes.
They say three times is the charm.
Jerome Handy had already been convicted of murder - twice - and now cops are looking to lock him up for his third slaying.
The first time Handy took a life came in 1974, when, as a teen, he murdered a man in cold blood then served six years in prison for the crime. He was paroled in 1982 and a year later he struck again, murdering another man during an argument in Brooklyn. Now he is wanted for a third murder, police said.
On July 3, 2001, Handy allegedly pulled up in a car alongside a group of motorcylists at the corner of Park St. and Broadway in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Handy is suspected of killing Edward Warren, who was a passenger aboard one of the motorcycles.
"Here is a guy that committed three murders - that we know of," said Sgt. Brian O'Connor of the Violent Felony Squad. "He is capable of anything."
WANTED FOR MURDER AND DRUG TRAFFICKING IN WASHINGTON HEIGHTS
DESCRIPTION: 5-feet-9, 160 pounds, short brown hair, thickset eyebrows, mustache.
Lincoln Cabrera is the worst kind of criminal, cops say.
The alleged drug kingpin is wanted by the FBI for flooding his Washington Heights neighborhood with kilos of cocaine.
But the NYPD wants him for the bloodshed he allegedly caused on June 28, 1996, when he shot and killed another man in an apparent dispute over drugs.
Cops are unclear what sparked the shootout between Cabrera and his victim, Franklin Rondon. Cabrera may have returned to his native Dominican Republic.
WANTED FOR SHOOTING FIVE PEOPLE IN BROOKLYN
DESCRIPTION: 6-feet-10, 155 pounds, with a diamond earring in right ear.
The Broaster brothers have an unusual distinction: Both siblings have landed themselves on the NYPD's "worst of the worst" list.
In March, Phillip Broaster, 25, a suspected member of the Bloods gang, was featured in the Daily News list of wanted felons after he allegedly fatally shot his childhood friend, Elworth Young.
In April - a month after The News' story was published - Broaster was captured in New Jersey and charged with murder.
Now Broaster's little brother, Kurt, 22, has landed himself on the list for the same crime: murder.
About 4 p.m. on New Year's Eve 2002, the younger Broaster - who had been shot months earlier - ran into the man whom he suspected had shot him. He decided to retaliate. Broaster pulled out his own gun and opened fire, killing an innocent bystander and wounding four others. Gerald Febrille, 19, died at the scene. | HOT ON THE TRAIL OF CITY'S MOST WANTED Help police snare the worst of the worst By MICHELE McPHEE DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU CHIEF A Bronx building super with a reputation as a ladies man sleeps with his neighbor's wife, then fills the guy full of bullets when the two have it out. A Brooklyn man murders his own sister one day, then kidnaps and kills his ex-girlfriend the following morning, dumping the college student's | 23.988095 | 0.964286 | 21.988095 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/03/copenhagen-carbon-climate-business-energy-copenhagen-15_land.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20100926152541id_/http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/03/copenhagen-carbon-climate-business-energy-copenhagen-15_land.html | The Carbon Question | 20100926152541 | Edited by Bruce Upbin and Dan Bigman
The nations of the world have descended on Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss what must be done about climate change. The assumption will be that the problem is at least partially man-made and that dramatic steps should be taken lest the planet fry itself. But Copenhagen will be no more successful than was Kyoto.
What's your expectation for the upcoming Copenhagen conference? Do you think it will make a difference in reducing carbon emissions?
Heres an innovative business model that may be one way to afford the clean coal chimera.
What to do with the world's fossil fuel pollution? Why not feed it to plants?
If you want to cut your output, first you've got to know what it is. A whole new industry is ready to help.
Since nobody can track twigs and cowpats, China's carbon accountants can make its renewable numbers come out anywhere they like.
Fading hopes of a binding treaty at Copenhagen are the best news yet for skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg. | Expect this December's Copenhagen conference to disappoint backers. Maybe they're looking for answers in the wrong places? | 9.571429 | 0.47619 | 0.571429 | low | low | abstractive |
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/TheLaw/reformed-bullies-tolerance-stop/story | http://web.archive.org/web/20101015000109id_/http://abcnews.go.com/2020/TheLaw/reformed-bullies-tolerance-stop/story?id=11873884 | Reformed Bullies Say Zero Tolerance Would Stop Them | 20101015000109 | Kids become bullies for myriad reasons, but it seems as if a single force could have stopped them: zero tolerance for bullying in school.
"If that would have happened, zero tolerance, I would think, I would get sent ... home, get everything taken away from me," said Alex Whirledge of Anaheim, Calif., who was an eighth-grade bully. "It would have stopped."
Alisha Mendez, now a high school senior in Middletown, Pa., said her thirst for attention, which turned her into a middle school bully, would have been quenched faster if her school had had a tough anti-bullying policy and enforced it.
"It would have -- 180, right around," Mendez told "20/20" co-anchor Chris Cuomo.
Watch "Bullied to Death" on a special edition of "20/20" Friday at 9/8c
To date, 45 states have passed laws requiring a range of anti-bullying actions, from implementing prevention programs to reporting incidents to the police. But child behavioral experts say few schools have zero-tolerance policies in place.
"The school needs to be clear about what the ramifications will be for bullying, which most schools are not," said Dr. Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist and author of books about adolescents' thinking.
"There's going to be a price to pay. It's going to be suspension, it's going to be detention, it's going to be something that not only you don't want but your parent [too]."
What drives someone to become a bully in the first place?
"I was a bully because I was being bullied," said Whirledge, now 14 and a high school freshman who plays on the football team.
As a seventh grader, Alex was subjected to the taunting and pushing that seems to be commonplace in schools throughout the United States. Then, in eighth grade, the roles changed. Alex was no longer the victim but the aggressor.
"It felt great," said Alex, adding that being a bully gave him a sense of strength and leadership.
"You taste that powerful feeling of being the one in control. It's very exciting," Saltz explained. "And you can really lose your moral compass."
Alex and his friends were involved in multiple bullying incidents that were never brought to the attention of school officials, mainly because the student victims were afraid of reprisals. | Reformed bullies say zero-tolerance policies in schools would have stopped them. | 34.285714 | 0.928571 | 2.785714 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/2000/11/05/2000-11-05_opening_this_week.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20101028094038id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/entertainment/2000/11/05/2000-11-05_opening_this_week.html | OPENING THIS WEEK | 20101028094038 | Sunday, November 5th 2000, 2:14AM
Suzhou River A lonely videographer wanders the streets of Shanghai thinking about his ex-girlfriend, an aquarium performer. A motorcycle messenger, just released from prison, thinks she's his girlfriend, whom he attempted to kidnap and ransom. This romantic drama by writer-director Lou Ye was based on Hitchcock's "Vertigo." Wednesday.
Wonder Boys Rerelease of Curtis Hanson's comedy-drama about the friendship between a "blocked" creative writing professor (Michael Douglas) and his most gifted student (Tobey Maguire). With Robert Downey Jr., Frances McDormand and Katie Holmes. Wednesday.
Little Nicky Adam Sandler stars as the Devil's son, who is sent on a mission to New York City to stop his disgruntled, bullying brothers from creating Hell on Earth. Friday.
Looking for an Echo Armand Assante stars as a widowed, washed-up doo-wop sensation who is reduced to tending bar and performing at weddings. He gets a second shot at happiness when a new woman enters his life. With Diane Venora and Joe Grifasi. Friday.
Me & Isaac Newton A documentary by director Michael Apted about the creative work of seven distinguished scientists, including Michio Kaku, Steven Pinker and the late Gertrude Elion. Friday.
Men of Honor Cuba Gooding Jr. (see cover story) stars in this fact-based drama about Carl Brashear, the first black master diver in the U.S. Navy, who had to overcome injury and racism. With Robert De Niro. Friday.
Non-Stop One night, a bank robber loses his mask and botches his attempt at shoplifting another, leading to a three-way chase through the streets of Tokyo. A fast-paced adventure from hip Japanese director Sabu. Friday.
Rebels With a Cause Documentary about the student movement of the 1960s. Directed by Helen Garvey. Friday.
Red Planet As hope for life on Earth fades, American astronauts attempt to colonize Mars. Val Kilmer, Simon Baker and Benjamin Bratt star. Friday.
You Can Count on Me The story of a single mom (Laura Linney, see story this page) living in an upstate town whose ordered life with her young son is disrupted when her drifter brother (Mark Ruffalo) comes to stay. With Matthew Broderick. Friday. | OPENING THIS WEEK Suzhou River A lonely videographer wanders the streets of Shanghai thinking about his ex-girlfriend, an aquarium performer. A motorcycle messenger, just released from prison, thinks she's his girlfriend, whom he attempted to kidnap and ransom. This romantic drama by writer-director Lou Ye was based on Hitchcock's "Vertigo."Wednesday. Wonder Boys Rerelease of Curtis Hanson's comedy-drama about the friendship between a "blocked"creative writing professor (Michael Douglas) and his most gifted student (Tobey | 4.734043 | 0.957447 | 41.574468 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/1999/11/27/1999-11-27_gospel_strikes_a_chord__sing.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20101104163736id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/entertainment/1999/11/27/1999-11-27_gospel_strikes_a_chord__sing.html | GOSPEL STRIKES A CHORD SINGER WANTS TO SPREAD THE MUSICAL WORD | 20101104163736 | Saturday, November 27th 1999, 2:11AM
Bill Gaither was in New York this week to make a video with Christian comic Mark Lowry, but fog held up shooting, and inspired a sly one-liner by Lowry.
"Surely, Bill, with your connections," Lowry told the gospel star, "you could get somebody up there to fix the weather."
"Hey," said Gaither, "I'm in sales, not management."
Actually, in this world, he is very much in both, and succeeding to a degree that is startling by any musical measure.
He is the hottest name in any category of gospel music, which ranges from slick contemporary and hip hop to his old-timey, country-tinged, four-part harmony hymns, the particular regional style called Southern gospel.
As he drove into Manhattan the other day from Newark, Gaither passed Giants Stadium. "And I thought, 'Hey, it might work,' " he says, meaning he might book it for one of his enormously successful and lucrative concerts.
Gaither, 63, lives in and runs his publishing, recording, filming, touring and related enterprises from Anderson, Ind., his hometown (population: 6,028), but his stage now is much, much larger.
He is, among other things, founder and bass singer of a gospel quartet called the Gaither Vocal Band, which also features Lowry, doubling as comic and vocalist.
"That's why I'm in New York," Gaither said. "I'm doing a little work on Mark's new video, six seconds here, seven seconds there."
Gaither's name won't mean that much to New Yorkers who aren't gospel music fans, but his "Homecoming" concerts regularly fill arenas. More than 30,000 jammed the Georgia Dome in Atlanta last year, the largest one-day event in gospel history.
Gaither's gospel videos occupied the top four spots on the Billboard magazine best-seller list one month ago. Nobody had ever so dominated the list. (Last week, his "Mountain Homecoming" was No. 1, and "I'll Meet You on the Mountain" was No. 2.)
He has recorded 50 videos, one at the Kennedy Center, and about 35 have sold more than 1 million copies. He also has recorded more than 50 inspirational albums, and one of them, "Alleluia," was the first to sell 500,000 copies.
He has composed more than 500 hymns, and one, "He Touched Me," has been recorded by dozens of artists, most notably Elvis Presley. His songs have gained him three Grammys and placed him in the Gospel Hall of Fame.
His weekly television shows are seen around the world, and in New York are carried by TNN and Odyssey.
The program tonight is a special honoring a gospel group called The Cathedrals, which has worked everywhere from Radio City Music Hall to the London Philharmonic. It is disbanding after 35 years.
One mainstay on the "Homecoming" series is Jake Hess, a colorful gospel veteran who sang at the funerals of Hank Williams Sr. and Elvis. Hess was a member of Elvis' backing group, the Imperials.
It may turn out that Gaither's legacy was saving Southern gospel from extinction. Its glory days were during and just after World War II, but by the '70s, when a more contemporary style took over, the genre was almost obsolete.
Thanks to Gaither, many old groups are back, more popular than ever, and new groups are giving that old-time religion a fresh, hip sound.
"But, listen," says Gaither, "we're not a style, we're a theology."
Southern gospel, as distinguished from bluegrass, country, contemporary, black or alternative Christian music, has an unequivocal message set to a solid beat.
"It's mixing gospel and country," says Gaither. "They're kissing cousins anyway, and that's the way we're going."
He says there are only two authentic sounds in Christian music black harmonies and four-part harmonies and "Homecoming" has plenty of both.
Gaither was a teacher in Alexandria, Ind., when he met his wife, Gloria, a substitute French teacher, and by the early '60s they were two-thirds of a gospel trio.
By the late '60s, he was beginning to win awards for composing. He was named songwriter of the year by the Gospel Music Association for eight consecutive years. A dozen major Christian artists, among them Sandi Patty and Michael English, were members of his group.
He had performed twice at Radio City and was a popular figure on the gospel circuit, but by 1991 he decided to retire after one last song. He rented a Nashville studio and invited some of the old-timers he admired, among them Hess and Hovie Lister, founder of the legendary Statesmen, to join him.
The singing and storytelling went on for three hours, all of it captured on film, which Gaither edited to an hour for TV. It created so much excitement that Gaither inaugurated "Homecoming."
Now, he wants to widen his appeal, which generally is to an older audience so committed to gospel that Gaither sometimes is told he's singing to the choir.
"I think God honors you for what you do for love," says Gaither, who plays about 75 concerts a year. "I'm counting on that."
Old-time gospel is not his only love. He went to Tower Records while in New York, to pick up some old Ink Spots and Mills Brothers albums.
"With the original members," he said. "I'm like that, I prefer the real deal in everything." | Bill Gaither was in New York this week to make a video with Christian comic Mark Lowry, but fog held up shooting, and inspired a sly one-liner by Lowry. "Surely, Bill, with your connections,"Lowry told the gospel star, "you could get somebody up there to fix the weather.""Hey,"said Gaither, "I'm in sales, not management."Actually, in this world, he is very much in both, and succeeding to a degree that is startling | 13.011364 | 0.965909 | 21.715909 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/1997/06/20/1997-06-20_in__bees___society_has_a_swa.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20101212033106id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/entertainment/1997/06/20/1997-06-20_in__bees___society_has_a_swa.html | IN 'BEES,' SOCIETY HAS A SWARM SPOT FOR YOUNG TALENT | 20101212033106 | Friday, June 20th 1997, 2:02AM
AS BEES IN HONEY DROWN. By Douglas Carter Beane. With Josh Hamilton, J. Smith-Cameron, T. Scott Cunningham, Sandra Daley, Cynthia Nixon and Mark Nelson. Sets by Allen Moyer. Costumes by Jonathan Bixby. Lighting by Kenneth Posner. Directed by Mark Brokaw.
IN 'AS BEES IN HONEY DROWN,' DOUGLAS Carter Beane, best known as the scenarist of "To Wong Foo," gives a witty assessment of one of the most active and relentless industries in a consumer society, the creation of (not celebrities, a more involved process) "hot" young things, which the media have learned to mass produce with efficiency and zeal.
In Beane's lively comedy, a young writer is "taken up" by a seemingly wealthy woman who has seen his photograph in a magazine. He sees her as the next step in his progress from a struggling novelist to someone enjoying a life of privilege. She skillfully exploits his assumption that a creative person should be able to live luxuriously.
Among the things Beane plays with are the ways people in the arts fashion their identities ("You're not the person you were born who wonderful is?") and the way their self-creation increases their power.
If the play has a weakness, it is that because virtually everyone is newly minted, virtually no one has any human depth, except perhaps the novelist, who is played with customary grace and charm by Josh Hamilton. Beane does not explore the sadness of these factitious lives, but Hamilton occasionally conveys this in simple, rueful glances.
As the woman who exploits him, J. Smith Cameron exudes constant frenetic energy. In some ways she is at her best in the flashback to her unprepossessing roots, when we see her cultivating her ruthlessness rather than simply deploying it.
T. Scott Cunningham, Sandra Daley, Mark Nelson and Cynthia Nixon play the other parts with gusto and comic skill. (Nixon is particularly funny as several tough broads.) Mark Brokaw's direction realizes the play's giddiness superbly. | AS BEES IN HONEY DROWN. By Douglas Carter Beane. With Josh Hamilton, J. Smith-Cameron, T. Scott Cunningham, Sandra Daley, Cynthia Nixon and Mark Nelson. Sets by Allen Moyer. Costumes by Jonathan Bixby. Lighting by Kenneth Posner. Directed by Mark Brokaw. IN 'AS BEES IN HONEY DROWN,' DOUGLAS Carter Beane, best known as the scenarist of "To Wong Foo,"gives a witty assessment of one of the most active and relentless industries in a consumer society, | 4.322581 | 0.989247 | 38.516129 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/gossip/1995/07/19/1995-07-19_no_buddy_to__extra__crew__bu.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20101229130635id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/archives/gossip/1995/07/19/1995-07-19_no_buddy_to__extra__crew__bu.html | NO BUDDY TO 'EXTRA' CREW, BUSEY HAS BATTERY CHARGED | 20101229130635 | BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY
Wednesday, July 19th 1995, 1:14AM
No sooner does Gary Busey get out of one mess than he finds himself in another.
Monday, the actor was ordered into a two-year rehab program after being charged with cocaine possession. Now a crew member of TV's "Extra" has charged him with battery.
Soundwoman Kerry Runcie has told cops that the star shook her and shouted when she tried to do her job.
"Extra" correspondent Dana Adams tells us that when she sat down to interview Busey last Saturday, Runcie "politely asked him, 'Mr. Busey, may I put this mike on?' He started screaming at her: 'Don't you ever do that to me! Can't you see she's trying to talk to me!' He grabbed her shoulder and gave her a pretty violent shake.
"Kerry apologized profusely. But she was shaking. She's a tiny woman. . . . (Later) I turned around and she in tears."
Adams says she tried to calm Busey down, "but his mood was quite volatile." She says she asked him a few questions about his current movie, "Livers Ain't Cheap."
Then she brought up his recent drug arrest.
"He freaked out. He took off the mike and stormed off. He then came back and started yelling at me. My producer thought he was going to take a swing and stood between us. He was abusive and menancing."
Adams found Busey's behavior odd since "his publicist and his producer told us he wanted to talk about the drug arrest."
The next day, soundwoman Runcie filed criminal charges against police in Vernon, Calif. Cops are now taking statements. Busey's attorney did not return a call.
The casting for choice parts on this fall's "Central Park West" is getting as deliciously bitchy as the show itself.
"CPW" producer Darren Star was doing his damndest to woo Patsy Kensit, who starred in "Lethal Weapon 2," and who most recently played Mia Farrow in TV movie about her. Star wanted her to play a British fashion editor on the order of Anna Wintour or Liz Tilberis.
Kensit wanted piles of money, among other things. After a lot of talk, Star gave in. Still she said she needed another day to think about it. In the meantime, Kylie Travis, the Aussie beauty from "Models, Inc.," said she was interested. Starr told her she could have the part if she decided immediately. Kylie was in; Patsy was out.
Meanwhile, our sneak peak at the first episode of "CPW" had us wondering about Lauren Hutton's ample cleavage. We swear that Hutton, who plays the mother of the show's John Kennedy Jr. clone, used to be more modestly endowed. Could it be she paid a visit to, shall we say, the Silicon Valley?
"Wow," Hutton told us through a spokeswoman. "My Wonderbra's really working!"
"CPW" debuts in September. Night of the premiere, Star may rent Times Square's Jumbotron screen for a simulcast. That would mean that the show's best-known hunk, Michael Bergin, can look at himself from the Calvin Klein billboard he graces across the street. The beefcake actor, who's getting another billboard downtown, will play the bartender at the show's version of the fatally hip Bowery Bar.
Hume Cronyn, who turned 84 yesterday, seems to have a new woman in his life.
Ten months after the death of his wife, Jessica Tandy, the distinguished actor has been spotted around town with a middle-aged woman who seems very affectionate toward him.
Cronyn's publicist Leslee Dart says that must be Susan Cooper, an old friend of Tandy and Cronyn and the co-writer of their movie "To Dance With a White Dog."
Cooper and Cronyn "do have a strong companionship," said Dart. And though she discouraged speculation that romance was in the wind, she added, "At least he's got someone whom he loves."
Clearly, Cronyn isn't slowing down. He's been in East Africa with his daughter, Jesse, retracing a trip he and Tandy took years ago. After that he starts producer Scott Rudin's "Marvin's Room," co-starring Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Glenn Close, Jerry Seinfeld, Jules Feiffer, director John Avildsen and Courtney Lemmon (daughter of Jack) on the Central Park set of the movie version of "I'm Not Rappaport," starring Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis . . .
Ed Koch at One Fifth, eating and commiserating with a friend about his brother, Harold, who is the hospital recovering from surgery.
James Taylor and Carly Simon will perform together for the first time in 16 years. The divorced couple will sing on Martha's Vineyard to benefit the island's Agricultural Society. The reunion, on Aug. 30, will be called "Livestock '95." Taylor's camp hopes to limit the audience to people already on the island, which is still recovering from Fourth of July tourist onslaught . . .
Actor Hugh O'Brien wants to produce a movie about Fidel Castro. He told buddies at the Water Club he wants Brando to star . . .
Lawyers got skewered with song Monday when Citizens for a Sound Economy took up up the cause of Mayor Giuliani. Hizzoner has griped about the cost of frivolous lawsuits against the city. So the group parked an ambulance opposite a bar association convention at the Hilton. Then pinstriped, make-believe lawyers hired by impressario Jerry Kravat started singing (to the tune of "New York, New York"): "Those slip and fall blues/ Neck braces and blame /I've got to be a part of it/ New torts, new torts . . . " Ouch. . . .
Stanley Dancer, the man who's won nearly 4,000 harness races, would like for his 68th birthday next week to do something he's always wanted: drive a hansom cab in Central Park. Dancer is now training his latest protege, Donerail, for the $1.2 million Hambletonian on Aug. 5 at the Meadowlands. . . . | No sooner does Gary Busey get out of one mess than he finds himself in another. Monday, the actor was ordered into a two-year rehab program after being charged with cocaine possession. Now a crew member of TV's "Extra"has charged him with battery. Soundwoman Kerry Runcie has told cops that the star shook her and shouted when she tried to do her job. "Extra"correspondent Dana Adams tells us that | 15.544304 | 0.974684 | 19.810127 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/active/8160294/Matt-Roberts-ski-fitness-tips-introduction.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20110112091937id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/active/8160294/Matt-Roberts-ski-fitness-tips-introduction.html | Matt Roberts' ski fitness tips: introduction | 20110112091937 | The annual skiing holiday is usual short and expensive, and getting fit before you go can make an enormous difference to how enjoyable it is. So we have persuaded the celebrity personal trainer and gym owner, Matt Roberts, to give us some free tips on how to get fit, and stay fit, for skiing.
Here Matt explains just how much difference a fitness regime can make, and why you need to keep it up. | Celebrity personal trainer, Matt Roberts, explains why getting fit stops
skiing being a slippery slope | 4.666667 | 0.722222 | 1.833333 | low | low | mixed |
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