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http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/08/05/market-basket-workers-holding-another-rally-tewksbury/7bB9X7qoaGhv5rTJAD4elK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140808043126id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/08/05/market-basket-workers-holding-another-rally-tewksbury/7bB9X7qoaGhv5rTJAD4elK/story.html | At Market Basket rally, workers keep up support | 20140808043126 | TEWKSBURY — Thousands of protesters packed another rally at a Market Basket here to show their support — again — for ousted president Arthur T. Demoulas as negotiations over control of the family-owned supermarket chain appeared no closer to a deal.
Organizers estimated the rally attracted about 10,000 people, more than the 6,000 to 7,000 who attended the previous rally on July 25, but less than the 15,000 that organizers had predicted.
The standoff between Market Basket employees and the company has stretched for nearly three weeks.
In the hot, humid weather that had people stripping off sticky layers ofclothing, protest leaders urged the employees to remain strong and resolute in their efforts to restore Demoulas to the leadership of the company.
Steve Paulenka, who was recently fired after 40 years at the company, blamed the impasse on Arthur S. Demoulas, and Felicia Thornton and James Gooch, the co-chief executives selected to replace Arthur T. The company’s board of directors, which made the moves, is controlled by Arthur S. and his side of the family.
“It’s the co-CEOs fault,” Paulenka told the crowd. “It’s Arthur S. Demoulas’s fault. They could have ended this.”
A spokesman for Market Basket’s management said allegations that the company’s chief executives were responsible for its troubles were baseless.
Employees have placed themselves in the middle of a decadeslong battle between two sides of the Demoulas family over control of the company, valued at up to $3.5 billion.
As the fight drags on, many analysts say it could threaten the future of the company, its 71 stores, and approximately 25,000 employees.
Since delivery drivers and warehouse workers walked off their jobs on July 18, deliveries to stores have been sporadic, and customer traffic has dropped precipitously, costing the chain millions of dollars.
“I didn’t think it would go on this long,” said Katrina Kennedy, a bakery worker at a Market Basket in Haverhill who attended the rally. But, she said defiantly of the company’s new management, “They didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. We don’t back down.”
About two weeks ago, Arthur T. offered to buy out the family of Arthur S., and the two sides have been locked in negotiations, although few details have emerged. In statements, the board said it is considering Arthur T.’s offer along with others.
There were no signs Tuesday that negotiations were making progress.
Some Market Basket employees said the standoff is squeezing them financially.
Bob Smart, 48, a warehouse worker from Lowell, hasn’t been paid since he joined other warehouse workers who walked off the job.
He said he is unable to pay bills and recently received a note that his cable television service would be cut off.
But Smart said he’d sooner end up on the street than go back to work before Arthur T. was reinstated.
“I’ll go homeless,” he said. “I don’t care. But with the [Market Basket] family we have, nobody will go homeless.”
Jen Canning of Billerica, a seafood and deli associate at Market Basket, said her hours have been cut as a result of fewer customers and less work. “Just a little bit of a cut makes a big difference,” she said.
The rally was the fourth by Market Basket workers. Working the rally crowd were vendors selling T-shirts with such messages as “Market Basket Strong” and “We Believe in ATD” — Arthur T. Demoulas.
Smaller groups of workers have also held daily protests at stores and company headquarters.
On Monday, about 60 demonstrated at a job fair aimed at finding replacements for protesting managers and other employees. Few applicants showed up.
On Monday, some employees expressed concern about how long the protests can continue.
“I’m not hurting yet,” said Gary Liles, a warehouse employee from Salem, N.H., at the job fair protest. “I could go for another week, and I’m hoping it’s done this week.” | Thousands of protesters attended a just-concluded rally at a Market Basket in Tewksbury as workers showed their support for ousted president Arthur T. Demoulas. | 29.444444 | 0.962963 | 3.111111 | medium | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/08/12/math-error-in-apples-favor-its-all-time-high-was-110-not-100/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140812090000id_/http://fortune.com/2014/08/12/math-error-in-apples-favor-its-all-time-high-was-110-not-100/ | Math error in Apple’s favor: Its all-time high is $110, not $100 | 20140812090000 | Several readers have asked about the effect of Apple’s repurchase program on its earnings per share.
It’s a good question, given how closely technical traders follow a company’s EPS and PE (price per earnings) ratios.
I may not be the best person to ask, however, given my track record on tricky math problems. Which is why I’m happy that a SeekingAlpha contributor named Gary Morton has taken on the task.
In a note published Saturday, Morton points out that the 12-month trailing (TTM) numbers most traders use are calculated by simply adding together the reported EPS for the most recent four quarters.
That’s fine when the number of shares outstanding doesn’t vary much from one quarter to the next.
But Apple is in the midst of the largest dollar volume stock repurchase in history, one that has reduced its outstanding share count (the denominator in EPS) from nearly a billion shares two years ago to less than 600 million today.
The result is a material discrepancy between Apple’s key statistics as they are commonly reported and what those number actually are. I’ve summarized Morton’s adjustments in the table below:
The opinion of valuation experts might change, says Morton, if they knew that Apple was about to begin a massive roll out of new products with a PE ratio below 15. (The S&P 500 average, by contrast, is currently 19.21.)
What does this mean for the average investor?
“At the least,” writes Morton, “you can conclude that Apple is a stronger valuation play than most believe. At the most, if you believe in the company’s future, you may conclude that Apple is a screaming buy.”
LINK: Apple’s EPS And All-Time High Are Higher Than You Think
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed. | Wall Street doesn't seem to have taken into account the largest dollar volume stock repurchase in history. | 19.631579 | 0.684211 | 3.631579 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/courtney-stodden-doug-hutchison-marriage | http://web.archive.org/web/20140813212052id_/http://www.people.com/article/courtney-stodden-doug-hutchison-marriage | Courtney Stodden and Doug Hutchison Are Back Together - and Renewing Their Vows | 20140813212052 | Doug Hutchison and Courtney Stodden
Late last year, Courtney Stodden was
But just nine months after filing for legal separation from former
star Doug Hutchison, 54, it seems the
star, 19, is ready to settle back into married life.
"She got a taste of being single when she went to the
house in the U.K.," her mom and manager Krista Keller tells PEOPLE. "She did date, but she found out that she really, really loves Doug and he's the one she wants to spend the rest of her life with."
The controversial couple shocked the nation when at 16-years-old,
, who is 35 years her senior.
They separated after just two-and-a-half years of marriage.
"She jumped into a marriage, but she's come full circle and decided she made the right choice the first time," says Keller. "She realized what a wonderful man she really had."
The two are now planning to renew their vows later this year. | The controversial couple are back together, Stodden's mother tells PEOPLE | 17.083333 | 0.833333 | 1.5 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2011/08/09/keys-to-success-from-avons-top-boss/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140815111635id_/http://fortune.com/2011/08/09/keys-to-success-from-avons-top-boss/ | Keys to success from Avon’s top boss | 20140815111635 | In every successful career there is a moment: You could quit. But you resist, wisely.
For Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of Avon Products AVP , this moment happened right after college, when she was in the management training program at Bloomingdale’s. All day everyday, there she was in the stockroom, switching vendor hangers for store hangers on thousands of pieces of clothes. “I remember calling my parents around Thanksgiving and saying, ‘You paid for me to have a great education and this is really not that meaningful…Maybe I will quit.’”
Jung, who grew up in a traditional Chinese-American family with a tremendous amount of discipline, had made her way to Princeton and wanted to go into the Peace Corps. But her parents didn’t have a lot of money, so they insisted she take a more conventional path. When Jung called them about quitting that first job at Bloomingdale’s, “the reaction was fast and furious,” she recalls. Her parents told her: “You are not quitting. You start at the bottom and you work your way to the top.”
“So, I didn’t quit,” Jung says. “I persevered, and it ended up being a really terrific run in retail.”
She traded retail–Bloomingdale’s M and then Neiman Marcus–for the beauty industry, moving to Avon in 1994. Jung was assigned to create a global Avon brand and did that so impressively that she was considered for the top job three years later. But she got passed over. And though she felt tempted to quit, she stayed. Two years later, she got the CEO job and became the youngest female chief executive in the Fortune 500.
“Bloom where you’re planted,” says Jung. “And follow your compass, not your clock,” she adds, preaching patience in any career. She has certainly demonstrated that. Now at the helm for 12 years, Jung is No. 5 on the 2010 Fortune Most Powerful Women list and the longest-serving among the female Fortune 500 CEOs. “I feel like the wise old woman CEO, trying to pave the path for a lot more after me,” she says.
Jung is on the boards of Apple Computer APLL and General Electric GE , as well as Avon. And as a single mother of a daughter, 21, and a 12-year-old son, she has learned plenty about juggling work and family. “You can’t, in my experience, necessarily have it all in one day,” she says. “But you’ve got to make those choices.” Now 52, she could well go and run another big global company after Avon, which had revenue of $10.9 billion last year. But she says, “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that yet.”
Right now, she is focused on Avon’s longevity. As part of the company’s 125th anniversary celebration this year, she has traveled to 15 cities around the globe and met with some 5,000 Avon representatives at each stop. The greatest satisfaction of leading Avon, she says, is helping 6.5 million representatives—entrepreneurs in 105 countries—build businesses from the ground up. By providing the money and products for reps to get started, “we’re one of the largest micro-lenders in the world today,” Jung notes. “Yes, we are a beauty company, but we do more than just sell beauty.”
This is the fourth interview in Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women series in partnership with Yahoo . See more at Yahoo Shine’s “Power Your Future.” | In every successful career there is a moment: You could quit. But you resist, wisely. For Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of Avon Products , this moment happened right after college, when she was in the management training program at Bloomingdale’s. All day everyday, there she was in the stockroom, switching vendor hangers for… | 10.727273 | 1 | 25.878788 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/06/09/state-rejects-plans-increase-high-risk-insurance-premiums-percent/GjEJJlRZ5UA4ZtjMgulEYJ/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140817211859id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/06/09/state-rejects-plans-increase-high-risk-insurance-premiums-percent/GjEJJlRZ5UA4ZtjMgulEYJ/story.html | State rejects plans to increase high-risk insurance premiums by 7 percent | 20140817211859 | The Massachusetts insurance commissioner on Monday rejected plans by a consortium of high-risk insurers to raise rates by almost 7 percent, a move that state officials estimate could save consumers at least $16 million in premiums.
The Massachusetts Property Insurance Underwriting Association, known as Fair Plan, provides coverage to homeowners, typically in coastal areas and urban neighborhoods, who can’t get insurance on the open market. Fair Plan, which covers more than 130,000 homeowners statewide, holds the largest share of the home insurance market in Massachusetts.
State insurance officials said Fair Plan failed to show that a premium increase was needed. “They simply didn’t make their case,” Commissioner Joseph Murphy said in a statement.
The last time Fair Plan sought an increase, an average of more than 7 percent in 2011, Murphy rejected that proposal, too.
Attorney General Martha Coakley, who acts as ratepayer advocate, praised Murphy’s decision. She noted that Fair Plan has made an average profit of $40 million a year recently and did not need higher premiums to remain solvent.
“Homeowners should not be required to pour their money right into the pockets of insurers,” Coakley said. “We are pleased that [state insurance officials] recognized that the insurers’ proposal was excessive and would significantly harm Massachusetts ratepayers.”
Because Fair Plan consumers cannot buy home insurance in the traditional marketplace, state regulators set the rates in a complex process that includes hearings throughout Massachusetts and testimony from outside experts.
Regulators also review rate proposals from marketplace insurers, but the scrutiny is less extensive, since consumers can switch to a competitor.
Robert Tommasino, general counsel for Fair Plan, said he was disappointed by the state’s decision. He said the rate request was reasonable and necessary to keep the insurers solvent over the long term and able to pay claims should a major natural disaster hit the state.
He said Fair Plan will probably file another rate request next year, when a new governor and administration are in place. The bar for rate increases, he said, is currently set too high under Murphy, who was appointed by Governor Deval Patrick. Patrick is not seeking reelection. “I believe we need a hurricane before we can [meet] this commissioner’s standards,” Tommasino said.
State officials questioned the computer models Fair Plan used to project losses from hurricanes. Regulators also raised concerns about how Fair Plan determines its reinsurance costs, or the cost of buying its own insurance. Tommasino said Fair Plan uses the same models as every other insurer.
Barbara Anthony, the undersecretary of consumer affairs and business regulation, defended the decision to reject the rate increase and hailed it was good news for consumers. “It was a very rigorous process,” she said. The insurers “just didn’t meet their burden of proof.” | The Massachusetts insurance commissioner rejected plans on Monday by a consortium of high-risk insurers to raise rates by almost 7 percent, a move that state officials estimate could save consumers $16 million in premiums. | 14.051282 | 1 | 17.564103 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/04/12/common-fixes-for-house-you-age/KXC5A2T3AXAAI4J05gQY2K/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140818010854id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/04/12/common-fixes-for-house-you-age/KXC5A2T3AXAAI4J05gQY2K/story.html | Common fixes for the house as you age | 20140818010854 | Doorways can be widened to 34 inches, or even 36, to make it easier and safer for residents to easily navigate throughout the house. Wider doorways are also helpful for those with wheelchairs and walkers. Costs can range from $300 to $800 for each doorway.
The first-floor bathroom will need to be renovated into a full bath if you plan on relocating the bedroom from the second floor. Additions can include step-in showers, smaller vanities, new toilets, wider doors, and even a washer-dryer set. Renovations are costly, easily running into the thousands of dollars.
Mechanical stair climbers can be added for those who will continue with second-floor living. The sitdown types are costly to install, though: anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000, even more.
Entrance ramps outside the home make it much easier to get in and out once the stairs become too much work. One thing to keep in mind: The height off the ground of entrance doors can make a big difference in the length and cost of those ramps, as well as the location of doorways. | A few ways to make your home safer for later years. | 17.916667 | 0.583333 | 0.916667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/05/02/despite-risks-businesses-store-sensitive-data-in-the-cloud-unprotected/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140820134353id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/05/02/despite-risks-businesses-store-sensitive-data-in-the-cloud-unprotected/ | Despite risks, businesses store sensitive data in the cloud unprotected | 20140820134353 | FORTUNE — Last spring, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the agency’s use of secret “backdoor” vulnerabilities, setting off a string of international goose chases. In January, Target revealed that thieves stole credit and debit card information for millions of its customers. In March, Google announced that it would encrypt data between its data centers. In April, a bug called Heartbleed shook the foundations of the World Wide Web.
It’s fair to say that cybersecurity is high priority.
Yet most businesses are transferring confidential information to public cloud services without the safeguard of encryption, a new study reveals. Data stored without encryption are “readable,” meaning they aren’t concealed or coded. In other words, they’re as legible as this text.
“You would think that a higher percent of companies would have data encryption or a similar form of protection, because it does present a risk,” said Larry Ponemon, lead author on the study and founder of the Ponemon Institute, which conducted the research. “Especially if the data sent to them is confidential, as we found.”
The study, which surveyed more than 4,000 businesses in eight countries, indicates that the rate at which businesses are transitioning to the cloud has accelerated over the past few years. For them, the cost, ease of management, and scalability of cloud computing outweigh other concerns.
MORE: Kill the password. And the PIN number. And the car key.
“There’s a huge economic incentive to use the cloud, and it’s now at the point where people are sending even sensitive applications through the cloud even though they know that it makes them less secure,” said Richard Moulds, vice president of strategy at Thales e-Security, the company that commissioned the study. “That’s not a great to place to be.”
Holdouts against cloud adoption are rapidly diminishing. The percentage of organizations that said they have no plans to use the cloud for sensitive operations nearly halved to 11% from 19% two years ago, according to the study.
Roughly a third of respondents admitted that they believe their use of the cloud hurts their overall security. Just half that believe that outsourcing data to the cloud has improved their security. (The rest believe their transition to the cloud has had no impact on their security.)
George Kurtz, chief executive officer and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a security technology company, is one who believes that a cloud environment can improve a company’s cybersecurity protections. “If you outsource it to the right cloud provider, you can in many cases have greater security than you would have doing it yourself,” he said, “because you’ve got an army of people that are focused on the security of that property.”
Proper certifications and security standards can help businesses find the right provider, he said. With regard to encryption, corporations should “understand the sensitivity of the data and classify the data before they put it out in a cloud provider.” Such triage can help businesses determine what information should be encrypted vs. what need not be.
The study found, however, that the transparency of the cloud and use of encryption are on the rise. Thirty-five percent of study participants consider themselves to be knowledgeable about the security practices of their cloud providers, up from 29% two years ago. Similarly, encryption use for software-as-a-service (SaaS) users has increased to 39% from 32% during the same period of time, while encryption use for infrastructure-as-a-service/platform-as-a-service (IaaS/PaaS) users has increased to 26% from 17% during the same period.
MORE: It’s time for corporate boards to tackle cybersecurity. Here’s why
“I think the report shows that the trends are all pointing in the right direction,” said Moulds. “But there’s still a long way to go in terms of visibility and confidence about security.”
According to the study, uncertainties remain about who is primarily responsible for protecting data in the cloud: the service provider that stores them or the business that owns them? In SaaS environments, for example, more than half the respondents put the onus on the cloud provider to handle security responsibilities. In IaaS/PaaS environments, in contrast, almost half of respondents believed it’s a mutual duty.
Security is a shared responsibility, Ponemon said. “It is really incumbent upon the user of the services as well as the provider of the services to join forces,” he said. “You can’t just rely on one side or the other.”
The current state of security and encryption in the cloud, Ponemon added, is not yet fully mature. “These companies should seriously think about how [data] could be protected instead of leaving it in clear text,” he said. “It is a vulnerability that can be resolved.” | A new study suggests that corporations' rush to use cloud services has left security concerns a bit muddied. | 46.095238 | 0.666667 | 1.142857 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/08/18/berkshire-hatful-rain-relic-another-time/ssqb0Hcvrz9P50FV1w1Z7M/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140821140345id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/theater-art/2014/08/18/berkshire-hatful-rain-relic-another-time/ssqb0Hcvrz9P50FV1w1Z7M/story.html | Berkshire’s ‘Hatful of Rain’ a relic of another time | 20140821140345 | STOCKBRIDGE — There are some plays about social issues that stay sharp for years, speaking across the decades with their power intact. “A Hatful of Rain” is not one of them.
It has seldom been revived since its 1955 premiere, and for good reason. The play’s edge has been softened, retroactively, by several decades’ worth of theater, film, television, and literature that explores similar territory but with more realism and depth.
A production with a firm point of view just might find something fresh here still. Yet the blandly earnest one now onstage at Berkshire Theatre Group feels far beyond its expiration date.
Written by the late Michael V. Gazzo, an actor and sometime playwright/screenwriter, the play depicts a Korean War veteran who brought a morphine addiction back home after a long recuperation from his wartime injuries. With scandals now afoot about the health care provided to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a growing epidemic of opioid addiction, just maybe there is enough stuff in here for an enterprising director to tease out a biting contemporary statement.
Gazzo stuffed the play with writerly conceits; assorted themes are gestured at but not developed. One is that protagonist, Johnny Pope, was let down by the system he believed in, from a superior officer who apparently abandoned him, leaving him to be captured (and tortured) during the war, to a doctor who shot him full of morphine and then left him to become an addict. (The oddly regressive ending, in which legal and familial power structures are reasserted, also puts the play out of step with what was to come in American society.)
The depiction of drug culture may have been a topical breakthrough in 1955 but seems out of touch today. Johnny’s twice-a-day habit makes minimal impact on his appearance or behavior; he needs a fix but refuses even to pawn an electric juicer to get money for more. Fortunately, his dealer helpfully supplies doses on credit for weeks at a time.
When the play opens in the cramped Lower East Side apartment where Johnny lives with wife Celia and brother Polo — in the midst of what is supposed to be an awkward visit from the brothers’ father — everybody banters amiably, and we wonder if Donna Reed is about to step through the door. Unlike, for instance, “Far From Heaven” — either the Todd Haynes film or the musical based on it, first seen at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2012 and included in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s upcoming season — this production doesn’t establish a hollow veneer of 1950s complacency only to subvert it.
Instead, director Greg Naughton has everybody play it straight, taking each moment at face value. Megan Ketch’shyperliteral rendering of Celia is illustrative. Her performance, like the production itself, desperately needs an injection of subtext, some point of view, some decisions by the actor or director that could potentially craft a coherent character from amid the stiff melodrama Gazzo leaves on the page.
Tommy Schrider, as Johnny, spends too much time speaking in a breathless, isn’t-this-dramatic cadence. As Father, Stephen Mendillo had a rough opening night on Saturday, straining to remember some lines and delivering most in a rushed monotone.
Greg Keller’s scene-stealing performance as Polo is the best thing here. (Keller’s interactions with Ketch’s Celia are her strongest moments.) His is the only role among the family quartet that feels truly lived in. Polo is deeply conflicted about his brother, sopping up most of the intrafamily ridicule while keeping Johnny’s secret. When he finally urges Johnny to come clean, it’s a betrayal and romantic power play as much as a gesture of fraternal love, and you can read this pained ambivalence in Keller’s face and hear it in his voice.
Playing the drug dealer’s sidekick, Apples, Chris Bannow is wholly convincing as a wayward teen who just may have a nagging notion he’s making some poor life choices.
Things finally click in one late scene, as Polo and Celia make nervous conversation with Father. Celia’s face blanches while she silently works out the implications of news she’s just heard. It’s a glimpse of a richer production that might have been.
Kudos to Berkshire Theatre Group for programming a show about substance abuse. Ultimately, this one relies for its impact on shocking subject matter that isn’t shocking anymore. Naughton has assembled a faithful recitation of Gazzo’s play. But for a production of this work in 2014, face value doesn’t go deep enough. | STOCKBRIDGE — There are some plays about social issues that stay sharp for years, speaking across the decades with their power intact. “A Hatful of Rain” at Berkshire Theatre Group is not one of them. | 21.95 | 1 | 23.8 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/07/09/new-site-peddles-high-end-apparel-benefit-charities/GYTwy7NRSJ7t7ozkdhCMaP/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140822110350id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/07/09/new-site-peddles-high-end-apparel-benefit-charities/GYTwy7NRSJ7t7ozkdhCMaP/story.html | New site peddles high-end apparel to benefit charities | 20140822110350 | When secondhand jeans made by The Gap and Roberto Cavalli wind up sharing a thrift store rack, it’s a good bet that the Cavalli’s — which can retail for north of $1,000 — may not fetch their optimal price. That’s the simple premise behind Fashion Project, a new Boston-based site that collects and sells donated high-end apparel and accessories. The sales help support charities like Dress for Success and the March of Dimes, and the donations are tax deductible.
“Not every charity runs its own thrift stores, and the ones that do can get more value for an item by selling it through us,” said Christine Rizk, Fashion Project’s cofounder and chief operating officer. “We tell people that we want stuff that would resell for $40 or more.”
Nonprofits can sign up to have their supporters send in merchandise. And individuals can request a postage-paid donation bag, fill it with items, and designate a charity that will benefit from their sale. Donors can see a tally of how much they’ve raised on Fashion Project. “Your closet can make a huge impact,” said Fashion Project chief executive Anna Palmer.
The site has collected about $17,000 in inventory, though today it only features women’s apparel and accessories. Palmer said it will eventually add men’s merchandise. Fashion Project takes 40 percent of the sale price, and passes along 60 percent to the charity.
Rizk and Palmer met while earning their law degrees at Harvard; both graduated in 2011. The company has five employees and offices in the Leather District. Fashion Project has raised $200,000 from individuals, and the founders hope to raise another $200,000 to $250,000 later this year.
Greentown Labs cofounder Jason Hanna tells me that the energy-oriented workshop space for start-ups is growing this summer, adding about 3,200 square feet on a second floor of its building. Another 10 companies will join the 13 already housed at Greentown, which may now be the biggest collection of clean-tech companies under one roof in the region. Greentown moved into a former textile warehouse in Fort Point Channel in May of last year, after getting started in East Cambridge. With the expansion, it will grow to 17,500 square feet.
Among the new tenants are Divya Energy, which is developing a website to help consumers evaluate various home solar systems; Vecarius, which aims to capture waste heat from automobile engines and generators; and Pika Energy, which advocates installing both solar panels and wind turbines on homes.
Renting a single desk on Greentown’s grungier first floor starts at $275 a month; the nicer upstairs space is $450 a month. But seven of the 10 new tenants, Hanna explains, will enjoy four months of free space, courtesy of the U-Launch grant program for clean-tech entrepreneurs that is partially funded by the US Department of Energy.
In today’s cloud-oriented technology world, everyone expects that applications, servers, and storage have become on-demand resources. You should be able to use them like a Slurpee machine, turning them on or off at will, and choosing an extra-large or a small.
And yet, said Plexxi cofounder Mat Matthews, the communication networks that move all that data around are “still really rigid. Applications have become fluid, but networks haven’t really adapted to that.”
The company is developing new software and hardware that can help networks adapt to the demands of the applications their users are running.
Plexxi announced a new infusion of venture capital funding late last month: $20.1 million, bringing the total the start-up has raised to just more than $48 million. This third round of funding came from North Bridge Venture Partners and Matrix Partners in Waltham, as well as Lightspeed Venture Partners in Silicon Valley.
This month, Matthews said, the company plans to start its first wave of beta tests, “starting first with cloud providers and also some financial customers, like big banks and hedge funds.” Plexxi’s product should be commercially available later this year or in early 2013, he said.
The company has 30 employees split between offices in Cambridge and Nashua and expects to be at about 45 by the end of the year. | Fashion Project collects and sells donated high-end apparel and accessories to support organizations like the March of Dimes. | 39.428571 | 0.952381 | 5.904762 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/21/books/books-of-the-times-021275.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140824134711id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1981/09/21/books/books-of-the-times-021275.html | Books Of The Times | 20140824134711 | By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt RICHARD NIXON. The Shaping of His Character. By Fawn M. Brodie. Norton. 574 pages. Illustrated. $18.95.
The late Fawn M. Brodie was something of a psychohistorian - or so one would have to conclude from passages in the two books that she published prior to the present one, ''The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton'' and the controversial ''Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.''
So there were almost bound to be in her final biographical study, ''Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character,'' at least a few of those psychoanalytic passages that make a reader flinch with their simplistic presumptuousness. For example: ''Did Frank Nixon kick his sons? The theme of kicking, and of being kicked, appears early in Nixon's life, and surfaces repeatedly.'' ''His statement to the press in 1962, after the defeat by Pat Brown, became famous: 'You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.' Less widely known were private comments such as 'We'll kick their toes off in 1968.' and 'Kick the weirdos and beardos on the college campuses.' '' ''Whether Frank Nixon kicked his son or not is not as certain as that Nixon felt himself to be kicked around by his father.'' Or - apropos of his famous Moscow confrontation with Nikita S. Khrushchev - ''But Nixon turned the shouting aside with a soft word, as he had done in countless kitchen debates in his youth, and the confrontation ended amicably.'' Shifting Gears
Yet such shots from the hip are few and far between in Professor Brodie's biography, which, though written in the perspective of the catastrophic end of the Nixon Presidency, concentrates its details on the years before his 1968 election. Indeed one wonders at times whether the book was really intended to be a psychological study. For after starting off with an intense examination of Mr. Nixon's childhood and youth in which Professor Brodie looks at ''The Punishing Father,'' ''The Saintly Mother,'' ''The Unsmiling Child'' and ''Death and Two Brothers,'' the book seems to shift gears and become a straightforward reconstruction of a career that is already too familiar to readers.
Eventually, though, we come across a particularly striking example of what makes Professor Brodie different and more challenging as a psychohistorian. She has been discussing the role of accidents in Mr. Nixon's career. This of course brings up the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This in turn raises what Professor Brodie sees as the connected subjects of Fidel Castro and Mr. Nixon's attempts to blame Mr. Kennedy for Ngo Dinh Diem's assassination, which Professor Brodie introduces by writing, somewhat cryptically, ''The Diem story, also essential in illuminating the theme of fratricide in Nixon's life, we shall tell only briefly.''
Fratricide? we wonder. What does the death of Diem have to do with the ''theme of fratricide in Nixon's life.'' Then we recall Professor Brodie's early point that Mr. Nixon must have felt enormous guilt about surviving, and even prospering from, the deaths of two of his brothers, Edw ard and Arthur. And we realize that much of what she hasbeen discussi ng in apparently neutral terms really has to do with this theme of fratricide.
This point she clinches in her final chapter, ''The Nixon Character,'' when after recalling all the brother-rivals Mr. Nixon has contended with during his career (Gerhart and Hanns Eisler, Alger and Donald Hiss, Fidel and Raul Castro, John and Robert Kennedy), she concludes: ''The pains to which Nixon went to prove that John Kennedy had connived in the assassination of the brothers Diem would seem to have been one more attempt to say, 'Someone else is guilty, not I.' '' A Too Familiar Story
The big drawback to Professor Brodie's painstaking, overarching approach is that it involves so much recapitulation of the sordid and, for the time being, too familiar, Nixon story. The only incidental compensation of hearing it all again is that by reviewing all the vast research that has been done on Mr. Nixon's career, the author is able to introduce certain details we may not have heard before, such as Leonard Garment's speculation to Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein that the real reason Mr. Nixon failed to destroy his office tapes was because he ''wanted the world to see him go to the bathroom,'' which Professor Brodie takes to mean he wanted to reveal ''his ineffable dirtiness.''
But the advantages to her leisurely rehashing approach far outweigh the disadvantages. By compiling so much evidence for her insights, Professor Brodie not only avoids (mostly) the glib insights that psychohistorians are so inclined to toss off, she also succeeds in creating a weighty portrait of Mr. Nixon as a remarkable man undone by forces that shaped his parents and his childhood. That he had a dimension of tragedy may be hard to imagine for many who have had to live through the p ast three decades. But as t he sound of his voice fades and the hidden sides of his character a re unearthed, one suspects he will emerge as a more tragic figu re than many of us would begrudge. This process of excavation Pr ofessor Brodie's study has begun. Y Names Horowitz Editor
Joseph Horowitz has been appointed program editor for concerts presented by the 92d Street Y. The appointment entails a commitment to expanded, more specifically appropriate program notes for 80 musical events to be offered this season. Mr. Horowitz, who wrote music reviews for The New York Times from 1976 to 1980, will write notes for some 50 concerts and commission the rest from others. Complete texts and translations will be provided for all vocal works.
Illustrations: photo of Fawn M. Brodie | By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt RICHARD NIXON. The Shaping of His Character. By Fawn M. Brodie. Norton. 574 pages. Illustrated. $18.95. The late Fawn M. Brodie was something of a psychohistorian - or so one would have to conclude from passages in the two books that she published prior to the present one, ''The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton'' and the controversial ''Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.'' | 12.555556 | 0.977778 | 44.288889 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Replaced-Levi-s-Stadium-field-holds-up-for-the-5709698.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20140825122850id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Replaced-Levi-s-Stadium-field-holds-up-for-the-5709698.php | Replaced Levi's Stadium field holds up - for the most part | 20140825122850 | Well, the field didn't fall apart.
That was welcome news for the 49ers, who beat the Chargers 21-7 on Sunday on a field installed two days earlier.
The surface at Levi's Stadium was dotted with divots after the game, but footing didn't appear to be a significant issue. That wasn't the case Wednesday when the 49ers ended practice early because sod came up in large chunks.
"I'm just amazed it was that playable given that it was put in" Friday, kicker Phil Dawson said.
Said tight end Vance McDonald: "It was much better than Wednesday. Of course, all the guys were worried going out, but I think they did a great job preparing for today. It held up really nice."
Not that everything went smoothly.
Dawson came up limping late in the second quarter when his plant foot slipped on an extra-point attempt. Dawson, who made 39- and 28-yard field goals, wasn't eager to assign blame to the new field for his shaky footing.
"They weren't all perfectly clean," said Dawson. "But when you're 39 everything hurts anyway."
Niners running back LaMichael James appeared to be the only player to have serious problems with footing. James slipped as he readied to field the opening kickoff, and fullback Bruce Miller returned the kick. James also slipped on an 11-yard kickoff return, and landed on his backside while moving to field a punt.
James, who said he twisted his ankle on the opening kickoff, also didn't point fingers.
"I should have had better cleats, to be honest," he said. "I should have known the situation coming in here. I'll take the blame on that."
The 49ers probably will remove Sunday's sod and install a new surface that will have time to take root before the next event at Levi's Stadium, a Mexico vs. Chile soccer match Sept. 6. The 49ers' next home game will come against the Bears on Sept. 14.
"We'll have a couple weeks here where they can figure out exactly what they want to do," Dawson said. "And I expect it will be even better when we come back for Chicago."
Rookie standouts: Three draft picks - cornerback/safety Jimmie Ward, outside linebacker Aaron Lynch and inside linebacker Chris Borland - played roles in limiting the Chargers to 119 yards and zero points in the second half.
Ward made a diving interception of a pass from backup quarterback Chad Sorensen that was tipped by fellow rookie cornerback Dontae Johnson. Borland had a third-quarter sack among a team-high six tackles. Lynch had a sack and tipped two passes.
Too excited: Wide receiver Quinton Patton took a hit that sent his helmet flying on a 10-yard catch in the second quarter. Patton, known for enthusiasm, bounced up, beat his chest and gestured to the crowd.
In head coach Jim Harbaugh's estimation, Patton went overboard.
"We don't want to see that," Harbaugh said. "I talked to him about it."
Injury report: Rookie center Marcus Martin, a third-round pick, was carted off the field in the fourth quarter with a knee injury. Fullback Will Tukuafu (concussion) and safety Bubba Ventrone (hamstring) didn't finish the game.
Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. | Dawson, who made 39- and 28-yard field goals, wasn't eager to assign blame to the new field for his shaky footing. James slipped as he readied to field the opening kickoff, and fullback Bruce Miller returned the kick. James, who said he twisted his ankle on the opening kickoff, also didn't point fingers. Three draft picks - cornerback/safety Jimmie Ward, outside linebacker Aaron Lynch and inside linebacker Chris Borland - played roles in limiting the Chargers to 119 yards and zero points in the second half. Ward made a diving interception of a pass from backup quarterback Chad Sorensen that was tipped by fellow rookie cornerback Dontae Johnson. Wide receiver Quinton Patton took a hit that sent his helmet flying on a 10-yard catch in the second quarter. Rookie center Marcus Martin, a third-round pick, was carted off the field in the fourth quarter with a knee injury. | 3.811429 | 0.965714 | 24.634286 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/08/27/america-debt-generation-x/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140827212234id_/http://fortune.com/2014/08/27/america-debt-generation-x/ | America’s most indebted generation? Gen X | 20140827212234 | Millennials may owe more in student loans than any American generation, but their Generation X elders are actually the most in debt.
That’s according to a study released Wednesday by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis economists William Emmons and Bryan Noeth. The study showed that the single most indebted birth cohort in the nation are 44 year olds, who owe on average $142,077, most of that composed of mortgage debt.
This figure is actually a marked improvement, as every generation, including Generation X, has made progress paying down or discharging debt. For its part, Gen X has reduced what it owes by between 10% and 15% since 2008. But even on this score, they were beaten out by the much-maligned Millennial generation. These folks, also known as Generation Y, reduced debt even more aggressively than Gen Xers, discharging or paying down upwards of 25% of what they owed in 2008. Emmons and Noeth point out that “millennials were very young during the housing boom and presumably had more limited access to borrowing than members of Gen X.”
But the most striking aspect of the report is just how much more in debt Gen X is than previous generations are now or were when they were the same age that Gen Xers are today. Write Emmons and Noeth:
The average household debt of the 1970 Gen X cohort was $142,077 in the first quarter of 2014 (that is, approximately at age 44), while the average household debt of the 1956 baby-boomer cohort was $88,553, adjusted for inflation, in the first quarter of 2000 (when this cohort would also have been age 44). This represents about 60 percent more debt for the 1970 cohort compared to the 1956 cohort. Meanwhile, average real household income of the 1970 cohort was only about 5 percent higher than that of the 1956 cohort in the most recent data.
So, while Gen Xers aren’t making much more money than the generation that preceded them, they have taken out way more debt and are reducing it at a slower pace than any other generation. These trends likely reflect just as much about the broader economy than they do about Generation X itself. With incomes rising much more slowly over the past 20 years than at any time since the end of World War II, the average earner needs to borrow if she wants to replicate the steadily increasing standards of living that her parents enjoyed.
But the fact that Generation Y has successfully discharged or paid down debt faster than Gen X suggests that despite the Millennials’ reputation for being vapid and materialistic, today’s young adults may have taken the lessons of the Great Recession more to heart than Gen X, which came of age during the prosperous 1990s and were nearing middle age as the real estate bubble hit its peak. | Gen Xers aren't making much more than their elders, and they have taken out way more debt and are reducing it at a slower pace than any other generation. | 16.8125 | 0.96875 | 13.21875 | medium | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2011/09/12/meet-ted-weschler-buffett-auction-winner-berkshires-new-hire/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140828213257id_/http://fortune.com:80/2011/09/12/meet-ted-weschler-buffett-auction-winner-berkshires-new-hire/ | Meet Ted Weschler: Buffett auction winner, Berkshire’s new hire | 20140828213257 | FORTUNE — It is surely unprecedented for a person to spend $5,252,722 to get a job, but in a funny way, that is precisely what Ted Weschler, of Charlottesville, Virginia, did. The details, in all their improbability:
Warren Buffett announced this morning that Weschler, 50, the highly successful managing partner of hedge fund Peninsula Capital Advisors, will soon join Berkshire Hathaway to run a portion of its investments. That move, added to the hiring of Todd Combs last year, is aimed at preparing investment-rich Berkshire for a day when Buffett, who just turned 81, will no longer be running the company’s investments.
And how did Buffett get to know Weschler? It’s here that fact becomes stranger than fiction.
Every year, Glide, a San Francisco church and mission, is the beneficiary of an auction in which the prize for the top bidder is a private lunch with Buffett.
In the first year of the lunch, 2000, the winner donated $25,000 to Glide. The auction price then proceeded to skyrocket, and in 2010, an anonymous bidder won with an amazing $2,626,311 bid.
Then, this year, a bidder also wishing to be anonymous won by upping that bid by $100, to $2,626,411.
So here, in a state of affairs being disclosed publicly for the first time, is the fact: Weschler was the winning bidder in both years.
In neither year, since he was trying to stay under the radar, did he wish to have lunch in New York, whose Smith & Wollensky steakhouse has usually hosted the lunch — and given generously to Glide itself.
The lunch (or dinners, as they turned out to be) were instead held in both years, at Weschler’s request, in Omaha. Buffett picked the site, one of his favorite restaurants, Piccolo’s (whose ambiance is pervasively casual).
Meeting in July, 2010 for the $2,626,311 dinner, the two men liked each other right away. Buffett learned about Weschler’s investment success and how he achieved it—the ‘how’ being as important to Buffett as the gains themselves.
At Buffett’s invitation, Weschler later came to the 2011 Berkshire Hathaway brk.a annual meeting, held last spring. At a large private dinner on the night of the meeting, he introduced himself to this reporter, made an impression as smart and friendly, and described himself as having a great time.
And then, at this year’s Glide dinner, held July 26th, Buffett almost apologetically sounded out Weschler about the possibility of his joining Berkshire. “I very much wanted him to do it, but I didn’t expect to get very far with the idea,” Buffett told Fortune. “Ted will no doubt make a lot of money at Berkshire. But he was already making a lot of money with his fund — you can get an idea of that from the size of his Glide bids — so money wasn’t a reason for him to come.”
Even so, Weschler said right away he’d think it over — and within weeks came to the conclusion that he wanted to accept Buffett’s offer. For the moment, Weschler isn’t explaining his reasons to the press. But this reporter can speculate that Weschler’s long-time admiration for Buffett made this an offer he just couldn’t refuse.
Certainly his saying yes has rocked many a boat. He is closing his fund, and that, for a lot of happy partners in it, cannot be good news.
Weschler started his fund 12 years ago after getting an undergraduate degree from Wharton, working for six years at W.R. Grace, and helping to start a Virginia private equity fund, Quad-C. While that fund worked its way toward buyouts, it held the cash of its partners, and Weschler invested it, doing well in the job.
Deciding in 1999 to strike out on his own, he started Peninsula. The fund’s first 13F filing with the SEC, for yearend 2000 — Weschler had by then opened the fund twice to investments — shows it owned about $150 million of stocks.
His latest filing, for the second quarter of 2011, gives his long position in stocks as almost $2 billion. (That amount would no doubt be higher, were it not that Weschler closed the fund to new money in the 2004-2005 period).
But that $2 billion in long positions only partly tells the story, because in true hedge-fund style, Weschler shorts stocks (positions that do not have to be reported in 13Fs) and also borrows money to leverage the fund’s capital.
At Berkshire, Weschler’s shorting is likely to cease and certainly leveraging will. Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s vice-chairman, has long said that most of the world’s ills are caused by “liquor and leverage.”
In any case, Weschler has in Peninsula’s history produced a dazzling record, which in his letters to partners he compares to four benchmarks — not only to the standard comparatives like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500, but also to none other than Berkshire B stock.
For partners who invested with Peninsula in early 2000, the fund at the end of 2011’s first quarter had delivered a total gain of 1236% (a percentage so large it looks like a typo, but isn’t). In contrast, Berkshire B had gained a mere 146%.
Weschler’s investment style has been to own only a few stocks and to stay with them — a modus operandi sure to have endeared him to Buffett, whose style is the same. Peninsula’s latest 13F filing, for the quarter ended in June, showed the fund holding 9 stocks.
The three biggest positions were W.R. Grace GRA ($412 million), DaVita DVA ($368 million), and DirectTV DTV ($328 million). DaVita runs kidney dialysis centers. W.R. Grace is in bankruptcy, but its stock trades actively in the market.
The parameters of Weschler’s about-to-be position at Berkshire were in effect spelled out in Buffett’s letter in this year’s annual report. Weschler (as is the case with Todd Combs) will have the opportunity to invest $1 billion to $3 billion of Berkshire’s money. Buffett, meanwhile, will continue to be Berkshire’s major domo investor.
Buffett expects Weschler to begin working at Berkshire in several months, perhaps in February. Weschler has told Buffett he will keep his home (just built) in Charlottesville, but will secure an apartment in Omaha and plan to to be at Berkshire several days a week.
So private meetings with Buffett are likely to be the new norm for Weschler. Maybe that means he won’t be bidding this year in the Glide auction — or does it?
The writer of this article, a FORTUNE senior editor-at-large, is a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder, a long-time friend of Warren Buffett’s and the pro bono editor of his annual chairman’s letter. | The newest addition to the Berkshire Hathaway investing team came to Warren Buffett's attention in a surprising way. | 68.5 | 0.65 | 1.15 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/boxing/story/ex-boxing-champ-jermain-taylor-arrested-shooting-at-home-082614 | http://web.archive.org/web/20140830033056id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/boxing/story/ex-boxing-champ-jermain-taylor-arrested-shooting-at-home-082614 | Shooting reported at home of ex-champ Jermain Taylor | 20140830033056 | Updated AUG 27, 2014 5:45p ET
Boxer Jermain Taylor was freed on $25,000 bond Wednesday after police detained the former middleweight champion in the shooting of his cousin at Taylor's suburban Little Rock home.
Taylor appeared via video from the Pulaski County jail for his initial court appearance Wednesday. A not-guilty plea was entered on his behalf. Taylor faces preliminary charges of domestic battery and aggravated assault in the late Tuesday shooting of Tyrone Hinton.
Taylor didn't speak when he left the jail in Little Rock, accompanied by a bail bondsman. His attorney, Allison Allred of North Little Rock, didn't immediately return an Associated Press call for comment.
Pulaski County Sheriff's Lt. Carl Minden said a fight broke out between Taylor, Hinton and another man at Taylor's home in Maumelle on Tuesday.
"He (Taylor) grabbed a weapon and opened fire," Minden said.
Hinton was hospitalized in serious condition and the other man was not hurt, he said.
Minden said the nature of the altercation was still under investigation and that Taylor was arrested without incident. Only one gun was involved, he said.
"He was very calm and very cooperative with our investigators," Minden said.
District Judge Wayne Gruber also granted a request from Taylor's lawyer to let the athlete travel out of state to train and compete in a bout against Sam Soliman to be broadcast live on ESPN on Oct. 8.
The network had yet to decide whether that will go ahead as planned.
"ESPN had committed to carry the fight and was working towards a contractual agreement. We are now reviewing the situation and will make a decision once more details emerge," the network said in a statement Wednesday.
Taylor was the professional middleweight boxing champion from 2005 until 2007 when he lost the title to Kelly Pavlik. Taylor also won a bronze medal in boxing at the 2000 Olympics.
In 2010, Taylor was hospitalized after being knocked out by Arthur Abraham in a fight in Germany, after which Taylor complained of short-term memory loss. | Shooting reported at home of Jermain Taylor | 57.285714 | 0.857143 | 1.142857 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2012/11/27/5-silver-linings-in-egypts-turmoil/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140830071603id_/http://fortune.com/2012/11/27/5-silver-linings-in-egypts-turmoil/ | 5 silver linings in Egypt’s turmoil | 20140830071603 | FORTUNE — The very last thing a struggling Egyptian economy needed is a domestic political crisis that divides its leading personalities, pits the judicial branch against the executive, and ignites street protests. Yet this is exactly where the country finds itself following Thursday’s decree that grants more power to the president.
The result is greater anxiety, both within and outside Egypt – so much so that more people seem to be giving up on the country’s ability to complete its bumpy multi-year transition from dictatorship to greater democracy and respect for human rights. Moreover, in the short term, widespread global admiration for President Morsi’s crucial role in brokering a ceasefire in Gaza between Israeli and Palestinian officials has given way to concern about an internal grab for power.
These concerns are understandable. They are intrinsically related to the delicate conditions under which Egypt is navigating its historic revolutionary transition. But even this new cloud now hanging over the country’s already-difficult multi-year journey could end up having a silver lining.
The conventional summary narrative is well known by now. Egypt’s grassroots revolution, led by courageous youth movements, overthrew President Mubarak in a quick and relatively peaceful manner. Thereafter, the country has had a challenging time navigating the trickiest revolutionary pivot of all: from dismantling the past and its deeply-entrenched remnants, to building a better future that commands broad-based popular buy-in.
Egypt has lacked both the institutions and the leaders for a rapid and orderly transition.
Apart from the armed forces, virtually all public institutions (and several private ones) were coopted over many years to serve narrow interests. Re-orienting them to enable and support the greater good, and to do so with acceptance across Egyptian society, is inherently challenging and time consuming.
The one institution that commanded broad admiration at the outset of revolution in 2011 – Egypt’s armed forces – failed to build on its widespread credibility and support.
The armed forces brilliantly avoided the tragic trap of fueling a civil war, as subsequently happened in Libya and is now occurring in Syria with horrid human casualties. But they stumbled when it came to the delicate task of handling well the immediate and complicated aftermath of Mubarak’s overthrow.
Egypt was also short of a Mandela type leader who could credibly and rapidly move the nation forward by “forgiving but not forgetting the past.”
The sudden grassroots revolution lacked well-recognized revolutionaries. And those who aspired to this role tripped in positioning themselves properly during the initial political vacuum.
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New secular political parties scrambled desperately to organize in time for what turned out to be relatively fair and free elections for both the presidency and parliament. In the vast majority of cases they started from scratch. And they were competing with Islamic parties – particularly the Muslim Brotherhood – with well-structured local networks and highly-effective messaging.
There were also no external anchors to speak of. Egypt’s friends and allies were just as surprised as its citizens by the Mubarak overthrow. And their credibility among some domestic constituencies was undermined by the support that they had provided Mubarak over the nearly 30 years of his uncontested rule.
These initial conditions virtually guaranteed what has proven to be a very messy transition – one dominated by two visible and recurrent characteristics: clumsy decision-making by those in positions of power; and street protests that sometimes succumb to violence.
The internal dynamic is not helped by Egypt’s struggling economy. Employment and activity have yet to regain fully pre-revolutionary levels. The budget deficit remains under pressure. Foreign exchange reserves have declined. And both domestic and foreign investors are hesitant to engage fully.
All of this has convinced the government to turn to the International Monetary Fund for help, culminating last week in an initial agreement. In addition to contributing to a framework for an Egyptian-owned reform program, the IMF can provide significant quick-disbursing financial assistance and help mobilize additional funding from other official sources. Yet many in Egypt worry that the IMF’s involvement could signal the return to the old days of external financial dependency.
All this speaks to concern among Egyptians eager to harvest the revolution’s quest for widespread economic well-being and greater social justice. Concern, mixed with disappointment, also dominates conversations among the country’s external friends and allies.
MORE: Wall Street isn’t backing Jack Lew for Treasury
Yet it is too early to give up yet on Egypt’s democratic transition.
Rather than be discouraged by recurrent potholes, stakeholders should recognize the inevitable bumpiness of the journey and work hard to maintain momentum. In this regard, there are five silver linings in the new political cloud that now hangs over Egypt.
Egypt’s immediate political and economic future is challenging, and for understandable reasons; and the latest internal political controversy adds to the anxiety associated with a tricky revolutionary pivot.
Yet it is too early to give up on the country. Indeed, if properly handled, even this latest controversy – and the internal responses it has already triggered – could end up helping Egypt course correct in a constructive, timely and durable fashion.
Mohamed El-Erian is the CEO and co-chief investment officer of PIMCO. | Egypt’s political and economic future is challenging, and for understandable reasons. But it is too early to give up on the country. | 39.115385 | 1 | 9.615385 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/lumberjacks-open-at-san-diego-state-082914 | http://web.archive.org/web/20140831003456id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/lumberjacks-open-at-san-diego-state-082914 | Lumberjacks open at San Diego State | 20140831003456 | Updated AUG 29, 2014 4:07p ET
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- The Northern Arizona football team opens the 2014 season on the road at San Diego State. Kickoff at Qualcomm Stadium is set for 4 p.m. Saturday.
The Lumberjacks enter the season ranked No. 23 in The Sports Network Preseason Poll, and No. 25 in the FCS Coaches' Preseason Poll. The College Sports Madness Preseason Poll has NAU ranked 24th.
The Aztecs are on a two-game win streak at home, as they are coming off a Famous Idaho Potato Bowl Championship victory. San Diego State is led by fourth-year head coach Rocky Long. The Aztecs played eight games that were decided by seven points or less last season, and finished second place in the West Division of the Mountain West.
NAU has 10 starters returning from a year ago. Leading the way is junior quarterback Kyren Poe and senior linebacker Austin Hasquet.
Poe completed 163 passes on 270 attempts for a total of 1,602 yards and six touchdowns during his sophomore season. Hasquet led the team with 91 tackles and tied for a team-high three interceptions. The Lumberjacks led the FCS in defensive touchdowns in 2013, while finishing first in the Big Sky in total defense (348.3), pass defense (190.8), passing efficiency defense (107.7), opponent first downs (17.7), opponent third-down conversions (34.9) and opponent fourth-down conversions (29.4). | Lumberjacks open the 2014 football season Saturday at San Diego State. | 23.083333 | 0.916667 | 2.75 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/World/2014/08/29/02/26/Jihadists-post-grisly-video-of-captives | http://web.archive.org/web/20140831005625id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/World/2014/08/29/02/26/Jihadists-post-grisly-video-of-captives | Number of Syrian refugees rises to three million as US admits it has no strategy | 20140831005625 | Graphic video has been released of Islamic State fighters executing Syrian soldiers.
The number of refugees from the conflict in Syria now tops three million and US President Barack Obama admits he still has no strategy to tackle advancing jihadists.
UN refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres said on Friday that Syria now constituted the "biggest humanitarian emergency of our era," after a million people joined the exodus in the past year alone, as fighters of the Islamic State seized swathes of the northeast.
The jihadists have sown panic with a spate of atrocities, executing more than 160 captured Syrian soldiers and an Iraqi Kurdish fighter in the past few days, following its brutal beheading of US journalist James Foley earlier this month.
Stills from a graphic video of Syrian soldiers being executed.
The scale of the crisis facing the international community was further highlighted by the seizure by rival Islamists led by Al-Qaeda of 43 UN peacekeepers on the Golan Heights.
The militants also surrounded another 75 peacekeepers from the Philippines, triggering a tense standoff for the UN mission that has monitored an armistice between Syrian and Israeli troops on the strategic plateau for decades.
Dampening hopes of imminent air strikes in Syria, Obama said he was still developing a comprehensive plan to defeat IS, which has also overrun large swathes of neighbouring Iraq.
A fighter believed to be from the Islamic State group looks over captured Syrian army soldiers. (AP Photo/Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group)
The civil war in Syria has killed some 191,000 people since it erupted in March 2011 with President Bashar al-Assad's bloody effort to put down an uprising.
But it has taken on another dimension as IS jihadists exploited the power vacuum to move in, unleashing a series of atrocities that have shocked the world.
US President Barack Obama addresses the media about air strikes on IS positions in Syria. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
"We don't have a strategy yet," Obama said ahead of a meeting with security chiefs.
But he said he was dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to the Middle East to build support in the region against IS.
Graphic video has emerged of Syrian soldiers being executed by Islamic State fighters.
An Islamic State group fighter waves their flag from inside a captured government fighter jet following the battle for the Tabqa air base, in Raqqa, Syria. (AP Photo/ Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group)
Washington has carried out air strikes in neighbouring Iraq that have helped Kurdish forces to claw back some of the territory they lost to a renewed offensive by the jihadists earlier this month.
The Iraqi Kurdish leadership's military co-operation with the United States has infuriated the jihadists who posted grisly video footage on Thursday of their execution of a Kurdish fighter outside a mosque.
The video comes hot on the heels of footage of scores of bodies heaped in the desert that IS boasted were those of Syrian soldiers it captured and killed following its seizure of a key air base last weekend.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that at least four Western hostages held by the Islamic State in Syria, including the murdered Foley, were waterboarded in the early part of their captivity.
Waterboarding, which was used by the CIA during interrogations of suspected terrorists after the September 11, 2001 attacks, is a widely condemned form of torture that simulates drowning.
The jihadists have also carried out a spate of executions of civilians from religious minority groups in northern Iraq.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon added his voice Friday to a chorus of international condemnation.
"Whole communities that had lived for generations in northern Iraq are being forced to flee or face death just for their religious beliefs," he said.
A UN-mandated probe has charged that public executions, amputations, lashings and mock crucifixions have also become a regular fixture in jihadist-controlled areas of Syria.
The Damascus government launched air strikes of its own against IS on Thursday, killing six of its leaders, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
But Washington has baulked at co-operating with President Bashar al-Assad's regime against the group.
Obama reiterated that position on Thursday.
Rival jihadists of Al-Nusra Front, backed by other rebels, detained 43 UN peacekeepers on the Golan on Thursday, a day after their capture of the sole crossing over the UN-patrolled armistice line to the Israeli-occupied sector of the plateau.
The 43 peacekeepers from Fiji were forced to surrender their weapons and taken hostage, but 81 Filipino blue helmets "held their ground" and refused to disarm, the Philippine defence department said.
The commander of the Philippines' peacekeeping operations division, Colonel Roberto Ancan, said no shots had been fired but his troops were prepared to engage in combat.
The UN Security Council condemned the action and demanded the "unconditional and immediate release" of the peacekeepers.
Peacekeepers were detained twice last year before being released safely.
The Philippines has said it will repatriate its 331-strong contingent, for security reasons, mirroring previous moves by Australia, Croatia and Japan.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Islamic State jihadists have posted grisly video footage of scores of bodies heaped in the desert they boasted were those of captured Syrian soldiers. | 39.88 | 1 | 4.6 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/Technology/2014/09/03/14/10/Apple-iPhone6-video-leaked | http://web.archive.org/web/20140905144321id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/Technology/2014/09/03/14/10/Apple-iPhone6-video-leaked | Apple iPhone 6 'video' leaked | 20140905144321 | Video claiming to reveal the design of Apple’s iPhone 6 has been leaked from Russia less than a week before its rumoured launch.
Moscow-based tech review site, Rozetked, released the video on Monday and it has already gone viral with more than 1.8 million views.
The video compares the iPhone6 with the iPhone5 and offers detail about new features, including Apple’s decision to move its power button from the top of the phone to the side and its FaceTime camera.
A side-to-side comparison of the phones shows that when it comes to the iPhone6, size does matter.
The iPhone 6 is noticeably larger than the iPhone5 in both height and width of screen though it is much slender than its predecessor.
The video claims the iPhone 6 is made from liquid metal making it difficult to scratch and longer lasting.
As a means to convince viewers the video, and more importantly, the iPhone shown is the real deal an examination of the internal workings of the new phone is also shown.
“…on closer examination it can be seen that the iPhone 6 is working on Apple A8 chip, module NFC is also found on the system board,” the reviewer can be heard saying.
“The front part of the body is kinda rounded at the edges of the screen, it is incredibly beautiful. By the way, this is not the sapphire.
“Sapphire crystal is technologically very difficult and very expensive to do, it is another glass. It might be sandwich sapphire or tempered glass. But it’s even nicer to fall and more transparent.”
In terms of the touch or home button, it is smaller in size on the iPhone 6 with the area of the sensor now larger, he said.
Apple is set to launch its iPhone 6 on September 9.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Video claiming to reveal the design of Apple’s iPhone 6 has been leaked from Russia less than a week before its rumoured launch. | 15.166667 | 0.958333 | 12.708333 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/12/05/the-trouble-at-bloomberg/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140905200316id_/http://fortune.com/2013/12/05/the-trouble-at-bloomberg/ | The trouble at Bloomberg | 20140905200316 | When Michael Bloomberg returns to Bloomberg LP after Jan. 1, he’ll find an enterprise that has thrived in his absence. Revenues at the data and media powerhouse that he founded have tripled during his 12 years as mayor of New York City. Last year it moved ahead of archrival Thomson Reuters to become the largest financial data provider on earth. Bloomberg is on track for record revenues of $8.3 billion in 2013 and profits of about $2.7 billion, according to Douglas Taylor of Burton-Taylor International Consulting.
By any measure Bloomberg is a staggering success. And yet there’s a palpable sense of anxiety inside its gleaming Manhattan headquarters tower. After three decades of full-throttle ascent, sales of its data terminals have flattened, and an organization that has never known anything but maximum velocity is now grappling with what it means to face limits.
The result is a traumatic identity crisis. This is a story about a company that has been so successful with one product — and with its uniquely dysfunctional way of doing things — that it has resisted attempts to prepare for the future or modify its methods. Those tensions have emerged in attempts by CEO Dan Doctoroff, who arrived in 2008, to diversify the business and impose professional order on a chaotic enterprise where screaming and infighting have long passed for management. (Says a former high-level company executive of Mike, as he’s known inside Bloomberg and as we’ll refer to him to avoid confusion: “Mike’s management philosophy is five cats in a bag fighting.”)
Doctoroff has recharted Bloomberg’s strategy. The terminal has always been the company’s alpha and omega, a totem fetishized and worshipped, the source of 85% of its revenue — and virtually all its profits. Almost any spending on ancillary businesses could be justified in the vague but potent name of selling terminals. Doctoroff has endeavored to introduce a discipline that would seem rudimentary in most companies but has been treated as heresy inside Bloomberg. His wild idea? Businesses other than the terminal need to make money.
But as we’ll see, even when Doctoroff has had the explicit backing of Mike — and the mayor speaks to the CEO every week, according to Doctoroff — he has been subverted by internal resistance and the occasional stumble. As a result, Bloomberg has sunk more than $2 billion into its diversification efforts with little to show for it so far.
That’s just the beginning of the recent travails, interviews with 82 current and former Bloomberg executives and journalists reveal. Its giant news service is in retreat from a once-proclaimed goal to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” Its reputation has been sullied by two episodes that raise questions about Bloomberg’s dysfunction and ethics. In one, its reporters acknowledged using the terminal to snoop on customers; in the second, the news division was accused of canceling an article about a Chinese billionaire to avoid antagonizing authorities, a charge the company disputes. (Fortune, it should be noted, is a competitor of Bloomberg News and its magazines. The chief content officer of Time Inc., Fortune’s parent, is Norman Pearlstine, who returned to Time Inc. in November after five years at Bloomberg. At that point Pearlstine recused himself from any involvement with this article. For more, see Editor’s Desk.)
As if there weren’t enough roiling the company, it will have to contend with the return early next year of its 71-year-old founder, who owns 85% of the business. Mike’s mayoralty will conclude when the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve, and he’ll have a desk back at company headquarters. He insists he’s not going to run the business, and he appears uncertain about his future. Whatever his role, Mike — who is now worth a jaw-dropping $31 billion, according to Forbes — will probably focus more on boosting his influence than on making money.
It all makes for a management nightmare for Doctoroff, whose power is hemmed in from every side. He has been forced to operate like a prime minister in a coalition government, pleading for consensus from powerful ministers — such as combustible news head Matt Winkler and terminal boss Tom Secunda — who control resources and decide whether they’ll allow anything to get done.
In lengthy conversations with Fortune, Doctoroff describes his relationship with Mike as “spectacular” and professes to look forward to his return. As Doctoroff puts it, “We’ve been overwhelmingly in sync on everything.” (Mike declined requests for an interview.) But beneath his self-assurance and the organization’s bluster is a vulnerability both profound and unspoken: Bloomberg’s epic multidecade run — the equivalent of a few centuries in the fast-moving technology sphere — has rested on a single product. What if another company invents a better terminal? It seems improbable. Yet the proof that it can happen is embedded in Bloomberg’s very existence: It, too, was once the upstart that toppled a seemingly invincible titan.
Dan Doctoroff displays a toy near his spotless desk on the open floor of Bloomberg’s headquarters (not even the CEO has a private office). It’s a plastic model of the solar system, with tiny colored planets orbiting a giant sun. Atop the sun is a small icon with two flat screens — a Bloomberg terminal in miniature. Doctoroff has steered the company into costly new ventures (those tiny planets). But the terminal remains the center of the Bloomberg universe — “the giver of life,” he calls it. He’s astute enough to know he must pay homage.
Doctoroff, 55, has experience grappling with tribal politics. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, he made a fortune running private equity firm Oak Hill Capital. Doctoroff then served for six years as deputy mayor under Mike. His ambitious plans to remake New York after 9/11 provoked comparisons to the city’s controversial 20th-century master builder, Robert Moses.
Tall and curly-haired, with considerable charm and a passion for metrics, Doctoroff can tell you precisely how many meetings he held last quarter (727). During his time at City Hall, where he sat back to back with the mayor, he says, they discussed the company for a total of perhaps one hour before Mike asked him to run it. Hizzoner’s invocation when Doctoroff left for Bloomberg: “Don’t fuck it up.”
Bloomberg’s creation story is well known. A former trader and IT chief fired from Salomon Brothers in 1981, Mike used his $10 million severance, with Secunda and a few friends, to build a machine that reported and analyzed bond data. Over the years they added oceans of information and analytical tools on stocks, commodities, energy, options, real estate, currencies — you name it. When Bloomberg started, it was an ant compared to the established players. By 1996 it had reached No. 2.
Bloomberg has prospered on the back of this single remarkable product. Once delivered to traders through a desktop terminal, it’s still referred to as a “terminal” (or “the Bloomberg”) even though it arrives today, to 318,000 customers, via the Internet. It retains a 1980s-style, command-driven interface, making it difficult to learn and clunky-looking. But it’s lightning fast, and it now has 15,000 functions, covering everything from SEC filings to golf scores to horoscopes. (The average customer uses 29, according to a 2010 company analysis.)
A single terminal subscription costs $24,000 a year. Those with two or more pay $21,000 for each; there’s no additional discounting, even for giant customers that have thousands. Unlike its competitors — such as Thomson Reuters and (far behind it) S&P Capital IQ — Bloomberg has never offered cheaper, à la carte purchase options.
The company touts the terminal as a Stradivarius for the beautiful music of making money, and as a status symbol. It has a system — first offered in 1991, before most people had email — that allows Bloomberg customers to send electronic messages to one another. That system provided entrée to an exclusive Wall Street social network, making the Bloomberg even more addictive.
Under Mike, the company flourished with a hard-driving, macho sales culture. Bells rang when terminals sold. The hours were long, the pay and perks generous. To Mike, loyalty was paramount. The company never laid anyone off. But people who defected to a rival were escorted out and never allowed back. As he saw it, they were “traitors,” trying “to take the food from our children’s mouths.”
Part of the package was delivering market news that could make traders money. At first Mike bought rights to offer the Dow Jones newswire. But since that company also owned Telerate, then the biggest data provider, Mike feared the day when his giant rival would wise up and cut him off. In the late 1980s he decided to go into the news business.
The terminal and Matt Winkler were made for each other. It’s not just that, as he puts it, “I can’t imagine my life without a Bloomberg terminal.” Or that, as a person who fixates on details and numbers, he reveres its endless data. More than that, Winkler exhibits the sort of binary thinking you’d expect from a computer. He craves and perpetuates rules and seems to lack an ability to distinguish among levels of transgression when they’re broken. You get the impression that if he could replace his staff with a team of robo-journalists, he’d do it in a second.
Winkler, 58, has a reputation as a sort of adulte terrible, known in business journalism circles for his volcanic temper and his fondness for bow ties. He’s third-generation Wall Street: His grandfather founded a brokerage firm; his dad was a stockbroker. Winkler was a 34-year-old bond reporter for the Wall Street Journal when Bloomberg recruited him in 1990 to start a financial newswire.
Winkler’s achievements are considerable. He has built a formidable operation that goes toe to toe with the Journal on breaking business news. Today, with 2,400 journalists operating from 150 bureaus in 73 countries (the company has 15,500 employees overall), Bloomberg ranks as the third-largest independent news organization on the planet. Only Reuters and the Associated Press are bigger.
But Bloomberg News is fundamentally different from other media organizations. It wasn’t even designed to generate income. It was created to help the company sell more terminals by furthering the moneymaking goals of those who lease them. (Customers’ average income: $438,000.)
Winkler embraces the mission, telling his team that they write for “the people with the most at stake.” Bill McQuillen, a reporter who left in 2012, puts it another way: “I used to say my job at Bloomberg was to help rich people get richer.”
To be sure, there’s tension between business and journalism in every media organization. What’s unusual about Bloomberg is the alliance that has existed from the outset. In his autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg (whose cover cites Winkler’s “invaluable help”), Mike recalls spelling out the role of news in the Bloomberg universe on Winkler’s first day of work. “Our purpose was to do more than just collect and relay news; it should also, ethically, advertise the analytical and computational powers of the Bloomberg terminal by highlighting its capabilities in each news story. This would make each story better and, at the same time, make it easier to rent more terminals …” He continued, “Most news organizations never connect reporters and commerce. At Bloomberg, they’re as close to seamless as it can get.” The company instructs bureau chiefs to visit customers weekly; journalists regularly go along on sales calls. Over 23 years Winkler has built and enforced this system. Throughout he has been a fearsome defender of Mike and has been repaid with unstinting loyalty in return.
Winkler spells out his philosophy in his 376-page guidebook, The Bloomberg Way. It contains dictates for everything from his ingredients for a four-paragraph lead (“a structure as immutable as the rules that govern sonnets and symphonies”) to rewriting press releases (“the bread and butter of financial news organizations”). Winkler scorns writerly characterizations as offering “subjective judgments we shouldn’t make.” He rejects adjectives and adverbs as “imprecise” and bans some words and phrases, including “but” (the latter on the grounds that having to process contradictory ideas close together confuses readers).
He has a distinctive approach to headlines. They should always deliver surprise, which he defines as “a combination of words [readers] can’t remember seeing before.” At Bloomberg, where Winkler still writes many headlines himself, this often produced head-scratchers, such as: “Mizuho $7 Billion Loss Turned on Toxic Aardvark Made in America.” The phrases spawned a Tumblr blog called strangebloombergheadlines.
Winkler polices his empire tirelessly — he rises at 4 a.m. and reads 150 articles a day — wielding the Bloomberg Way like a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher clutching the Good Book. In calls, in person, and in “Matt’s Notes,” a weekly internal newsletter, he bludgeons anyone he catches violating its smallest dictate. He’s been known to call reporters in the middle of the night, demanding a response to a competitor’s scoop or an explanation for some offense buried deep in a story: “Why is there an adjective there?”
Winkler’s temper has long been an occupational hazard at Bloomberg News. He’ll explode in red-faced rages, which some reporters call “seizures.” It might be for a serious screwup; Winkler has a sharp eye for holes in a story. But something trivial can trigger an eruption, often in public and humiliating: “How stupid are you?”
His outbursts are so infamous that the gossip website Gawker has a page largely devoted to them. It includes an audiotape of Winkler screaming at a female editor who was trying to explain away the mistake of a reporter he’d fired. “The enemy that day was the computer,” she tells Winkler.
“Wrong!” Winkler explodes. “It’s not the computer! It’s not the computer! It’s the HUMAN!”
Being a journalist at Bloomberg was “infantilizing,” says Tony Spaeth, a Hong Kong-based editor for Bloomberg who left in 2008. “It’s like having two hands tied to your ankles.” Even halfway around the world, he says, everyone lived in “weird fear” of Winkler’s wrath.
Employees mostly endured the abuse. But now and again there’d be signs of subversion or resistance. After being fired in 1994, a reporter in London snuck back into the empty newsroom at night and posted a “red” headline alert on the terminal: WINKLER WANKER WINKLER WANKER. Bloomberg responded by pressing charges under a British computer-misuse law. (Winkler’s two sons engaged in their own form of rebellion. Both shed their secular brand of Judaism in favor of orthodoxy and found wives through a matchmaker. His oldest, Jacob Max Winkler, now has a website, glorytothehighest.com, where he has promoted himself as “Shaman and Spiritual Advisor for Those With the Most at Stake.”)
During an hourlong interview, Winkler repeatedly declined to describe his temper as a problem, noting that many employees have remained happily at Bloomberg News for years. A day later he sent me an email: “While I can’t please everybody and you can always find people who will criticize you, I’m passionate about news, and yes, at times I’ve lost my cool in the context of trying to get things right. Any other suggestion isn’t true.”
Winkler’s rages meant that for years word would be passed, in newsroom code, that “the bow tie is spinning.” That has been upgraded to a more formalized early-warning and mitigation system. Senior executives — including Doctoroff — have worked to head off outbursts. “There were a lot of people who put their foot down to be sure [Matt] was isolated when he was having a bad day,” says former HR chief Melinda Wolfe, who left in September for a similar role at Pearson. She says she sought to be ” really proactive … If someone was worried or if Matt looked agitated, I would make sure I kept an eye on things. Dan spoke to him a lot, and I do think he made progress. But he made progress because he made the effort, and he was surrounded by resources that helped him create stability.”
For a long time at Bloomberg News, anything seemed possible. Just as Mike had envisioned, the news budget soared with the growth in terminals. As print publications slashed staff, Bloomberg kept hiring, collecting big names from places like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times — unthinkable just a few years earlier.
In a heady moment around 2009, executives began declaring their ambition to make Bloomberg “the world’s most influential news organization.” Winkler extended coverage to nonfinancial topics such as sports, culture, and tech gadgets. Bloomberg teams began long investigations bent on making waves and winning prizes — especially a Pulitzer, which has so far eluded Winkler’s grasp.
There was always a frustrating reality for reporters: They worked for a giant global news organization, but few people read their work. Says Janine Zacharia, who covered the State Department for four years until 2009: “Sometimes you’d be sad if you only got seven hits on a story.”
Bloomberg News’ real focus is speedy and “actionable” market news, aimed at giving subscribers a split-second trading edge. Of the 5,000 dispatches it spits out daily, the vast majority amount to rapid-fire digests of press releases, SEC filings, and government announcements. Some don’t even require humans — they’re auto-generated by computer algorithms that scrape details from PR wires and reports. More still are “flashes” produced by hyperkinetic (human) specialists manning the company’s “speed desk.” The fastest can generate a headline from an incoming release in “a shade under 4.5 seconds,” says executive editor Kevin Reynolds, who built the operation.
In 2010, Reynolds launched First Word, which boils market news down to a few bullet points, so frantic traders don’t have to read entire articles. This new product has been wildly successful, typically drawing more than half the terminal page views generated by all of Bloomberg News.
When Dan Doctoroff landed at Bloomberg in January 2008, he showed every sign of taking charge. But he quickly learned that the raucous culture makes it hard for any leader — particularly a newcomer — to wield power. As he puts it, “There’s much more collaboration that’s required here. In order to get things done with speed, you have to work with people from a lot of different groups.” Doctoroff would find that certain groups — and individuals — could prove very recalcitrant indeed.
At the outset he plunged into data-gathering, meeting with 300 employees and 200 customers, and hiring McKinsey consultants. He wanted to transform the company into a rational modern business and create profitable new ventures that would diversify it beyond the terminal.
In July 2008, Doctoroff announced his bid to whip Bloomberg into shape. Before a companywide gathering with skits and a marching band — to the Beatles song “Revolution” — he unveiled “Plan B.” It included 47 initiatives. It split Bloomberg into separate units, each with its own chief and sales force; shuffled the jobs of 42 top managers; and established a formal strategic-planning process. Doctoroff announced he would consider major acquisitions.
Much of that was apostasy at Bloomberg, which treated its founder’s views as gospel. “People live there in the shadow of Mike,” says former HR chief Wolfe. “There’s a constant questioning: What would Mike do?” Mike had always believed in a single, unified business. Mike didn’t care for strategic planning, diversification, or acquisitions. And Mike didn’t think much of consultants: “Generally speaking,” he said in a 1998 interview, “our experience is they ain’t as smart as they think they are.”
But Doctoroff wrapped his plan with a giant sweetener: If Bloomberg, which then had $6.1 billion in revenues, reached $10 billion by 2013, everyone in the company would get a bonus equaling 70% of their annual pay.
It was a hugely ambitious goal. The timing, of course, couldn’t have been worse: The Wall Street meltdown was already under way. In 2009, for the first time, Bloomberg ended the year with fewer terminals rented than the year before. Although price hikes kept revenues rising, the $10 billion goal was far beyond reach.
Still, Doctoroff charged forward — “Our whole strategy is to invest countercyclically,” he says — remaking existing businesses while pouring money into others. Since he took over, Bloomberg’s headcount has grown by more than 50%.
Officially the company was Doctoroff’s to run. Mike agreed with a city ethics board that he’d have no involvement in Bloomberg’s day-to-day operations, limiting his input to major decisions that “significantly” affect his ownership stake. “I’ve recused myself from anything to do with the company,” Mike said at a press conference in November.
In truth, Mike was considerably more involved than that statement would suggest. He monitored the business from his Bloomberg terminal at City Hall and, as noted, spoke to Doctoroff every week. On occasion — including twice in one week as New York grappled with a blizzard dubbed “snowpocalypse” in February 2010 — Mike turned up at Bloomberg headquarters after-hours for meetings. (One of those sessions, during the blizzard week, concerned a redesign of Bloomberg’s website.) In other cases, he was briefed down at City Hall. Mike stayed on top of what was happening at his company, but he didn’t want to act as the decider after he left. And so a series of internal struggles played out, with Bloomberg playing only an occasional, oblique role.
Early on Doctoroff hired Pearlstine, formerly the top editor at Time Inc. and the Wall Street Journal, as chief content officer, reporting directly to him. That gave Bloomberg a senior editorial figure poised as a credible alternative to Winkler. For his part, Winkler, who craves respect for his operation, relished the symbolism of a former Journal executive editor (who had hired Winkler at that paper) coming to Bloomberg.
Pearlstine’s arrival spurred talk that Winkler’s days were numbered. As part of Plan B, he had already lost control of Bloomberg’s TV, radio, and web operations. Two months later he announced he’d be pulling back from day-to-day news meetings and story editing to focus on “the big picture” and training. Pearlstine figured prominently in a December 2008 Vanity Fair article that read like Winkler’s obituary. It appeared, the article stated, that Winkler was “being written out of his own masterpiece.”
But in the course of a weekend in May 2009, that was suddenly reversed. Mike Bloomberg and Winkler were both in Washington for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. People familiar with the situation say Mike told Winkler he believed in him; he wasn’t going to let anyone push him out. (Winkler comments: “I never had a discussion at any WHCD with Mike Bloomberg about anyone’s role at Bloomberg.”) “Rather than stepping back, he stepped up even more,” says Ed Chen, Bloomberg’s White House correspondent at the time. That ended talk of Winkler’s imminent demise.
No longer viewed as Winkler’s potential replacement, Pearlstine increasingly was thrown into the role of trying to smooth over the conflicts the editor-in-chief left in his wake. Some started to call him “the Matt whisperer.”
About that time, the mayor tossed a grenade into Doctoroff’s plans to establish a bottom-line sensibility: He decided to buy BusinessWeek. Doctoroff, company chairman Peter Grauer, and Pearlstine all opposed the idea, viewing the magazine, headed for a $62 million loss in 2009, as a money pit. But Mike relished getting his hands on a big consumer publication, circulating 900,000 copies a week. It would extend his influence, and, at $5 million, he could pick it up for a song. Bloomberg hired a dynamic young editor, Josh Tyrangiel, to take charge, and the rebranded Bloomberg Businessweek has emerged as better and buzzier. But it continues to lose about $30 million a year.
In 2011 the mayor launched a second venture aimed at amplifying his voice: Bloomberg View, an online opinion page featuring editorials and marquee columnists. An open checkbook attracted a roster of stars, including Michael Lewis and Jeffrey Goldberg. Michael Kinsley, who recently left, says Bloomberg paid him twice what he’s now making at the New Republic. He adds, “It’s probably what a journalist could have made at the peak of the golden age.”
In Doctoroff’s crusade to make sense of Bloomberg’s operations, its TV business was a natural target. It lost $196 million in 2008. Its screen was cluttered with info boxes and stock tickers, and its programs had all the panache of C-SPAN. In addition to the U.S. broadcast, Bloomberg operated six foreign-language channels. Each drew a meager audience. The company justified the losses as helping to market terminals and boosting access to newsmakers.
“It was not rational,” says former NBC News chief Andy Lack, another high-profile Doctoroff hire, who arrived in 2008 to fix the multimedia operations. “The cost made no sense and had no revenue against it to speak of. They were spending a lot of money that wasn’t bringing them additional influence or a better-quality product.”
Eager to shake things up, Lack contemplated launching an evening comedy program, to be called None of Your Business. A co-creator of the Daily Show made a 22-minute pilot during the summer of 2010. The pilot featured a former Miss USA as co-host and a stock-picking tarantula named Ivan. Lack quickly pulled the plug.
In 2009 he shut down the foreign-language channels, firing about 140 staffers, in the first layoffs in Bloomberg’s history. To run U.S. television he hired a young Fox News executive named David Rhodes. Bloomberg TV quickly became more watchable, with new on-air talent, better visuals, and a fresh program lineup. But the TV team soon ran afoul of Winkler. Even though TV was no longer officially under his control, he wasn’t about to give up that role. Winkler battered the new TV managers with complaints that their efforts to brighten the broadcast violated the Bloomberg Way. The criticism ranged from the selection of guests to onscreen punctuation.
In mid-2010, “Matt’s Notes” blasted Bloomberg TV. “Readers, listeners and viewers rely on Bloomberg News to give them facts, not glib labels, clichés or gossip,” he wrote. A teaser referring to Japanese politician Naoto Kan as “Kan the Man” was “puerile, obscure and uninformative.” Bloomberg TV producers had “compromised our integrity” with real-time tweets from a congressional hearing on Goldman Sachs. One tweet observed that CEO Lloyd Blankfein was “working hard not to start the head-bobbing thing.” Such messages, Winkler wrote, were “assertion/opinion and therefore inaccurate.” After two years of Winkler’s meddling, Rhodes left in 2011 to become president of CBS News. His replacement has since departed too.
Bloomberg is still losing $100 million a year on TV. The business has shifted strategies, abandoning the hopeless TV ratings race to redefine itself as a producer of digital video for Bloomberg’s websites, tablets, and smartphones. Shepherding this approach is Justin Smith, hired from Atlantic Media. Lack, who’s been bumped upstairs to chairman, says he doesn’t even like to talk about TV anymore: “The future is on those platforms.”
Doctoroff’s attempts to change Bloomberg often met resistance from Tom Secunda, the company’s co-founder and head of its terminal business. He was every bit as ferocious as Winkler when it came to protecting his domain and the company’s long-established ways. More than a few people view Secunda, a gruff 59-year-old trained as a mathematician, as the mad genius behind the terminal, a wizard at connecting the worlds of technology and finance. Secunda is worth $1.5 billion, mostly due to his equity in the company, according to Forbes.
Secunda opposes anything he thinks might cannibalize or compete with the terminal business and disagrees that the company needs to diversify. “I’m a contrarian on this,” he says. “There’s a million — or 2 million — people that can buy a Bloomberg terminal. We know who they are.”
Secunda identifies with the terminal so completely that he sometimes speaks of it in the first person. To wit: “There are certainly places where I can still be a more important product, where I can still make my product more valuable so that people buy me.” When Bloomberg does start new ventures, Secunda has been loath to permit anything that varies from its historical business model.
The first such effort came in a venture called Bloomberg Law, which aimed to do for attorneys what the terminal does for Wall Street traders. That wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. The legal-research market has two dominant, entrenched players: Westlaw, owned by Thomson Reuters, and LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier. Both have databases of statutes, case law, court dockets, legal articles, and other materials built up over decades. That would be exceedingly difficult and expensive to match.
But who better suited to do that than Bloomberg? Mike himself promoted the idea even before he left for City Hall in 2002. Still, his successors were terrified that offering any kind of data on a different, cheaper platform would make their cash cow less unique and desirable. They decided that BLAW, as they called it, would be available only as part of a terminal subscription. To get Bloomberg’s untested new legal product, customers had to pay $18,000 a year for a Wall Street data service — most of which the average law firm didn’t want. By contrast, Westlaw and Lexis offer a more appealing model for law firms: They charge for each search, making it easier to pass the cost on to their clients.
Sure enough, BLAW’s debut was a flop. In 2006, Bloomberg set up sales teams around the world, with a goal of selling 3,000 terminal subscriptions to law firms. Instead they sold about 300, says a person involved in the project.
When Doctoroff arrived in 2008, he quickly approved offering BLAW on a separate website — a first for Bloomberg. But years of high-level debate about the strategy dragged on. McKinsey was hired to study pricing options. Secunda grumbled about how much Bloomberg was spending to break into the new market in a big way, rather than targeting a small niche. “You guys are trying to boil the ocean,” he complained.
Bloomberg kept tripping up. It initially built the BLAW website on a Flash software platform, which crashed computers and didn’t work well on mobile devices, forcing the company to rebuild it on a new platform. Worried about lawyers sharing passwords, BLAW required them to use a fingerprint reader, just like terminal customers. Lawyers hated it, and the idea was dropped.
Secunda had insisted that anything with the Bloomberg name be sold as a flat-fee “premium” product to avoid damaging its brand. So the new web version of BLAW carried a public sticker price of $5,400 a year — a lot less than the terminal, but still pricey for such a product — while also privately offering discounts to many firms.
For the 2009 relaunch of BLAW as a website, Bloomberg once again aimed for 3,000 subscribers — and once again fell short: 1,000 this time. BLAW is now generating yearly revenue of about $20 million. Since the beginning of 2010, it has had three CEOs. Over a decade, BLAW has cost Bloomberg about $1 billion. Inside the company some refer to it as “Bloomberg’s Vietnam.”
In September 2011, Doctoroff doubled down, buying the Bureau of National Affairs, which publishes newsletters and reports on business, law, and government, for $992 million. A big reason for the purchase was to serve as a sort of “accelerator” for BLAW. This year Doctoroff announced that he is consolidating BLAW with BNA, resulting in the loss of 80 jobs. In the meantime, BLAW has gained market share, though it remains far behind Lexis and Westlaw. According to Doctoroff, the business is now “modestly” short of Bloomberg’s latest expectations.
But it isn’t likely to make money anytime soon. “The beauty of our company,” chairman Grauer observes, “is that as a private business with essentially one shareholder, we can take a very long-term view about these opportunities,” tolerating a “slow ramp-up to profitability.” How long term? “The way we look at things,” he says, it’s “10 to 15 years.”
Even as BLAW struggled, Doctoroff was preparing a second, equally ambitious attempt to replicate the terminal’s success. Bloomberg Government, or BGOV, was aimed at providing news and data for anyone with business in Washington — while hoping to avoid BLAW’s problems by maintaining distance from the Bloomberg mothership.
BGOV was conceived as a nimble startup that could operate independently. Its head was former McKinsey partner Chris Walters, Doctoroff’s internal strategy chief. Since it was focused on government, not Wall Street, BGOV would be based in Washington rather than New York. It would be offered on its own website, not the terminal, and use separate email and customer-relations-management systems. BGOV was even to have its own staff of 150 journalists and policy wonks — separate from the Bloomberg News operation — to write articles, reports, and analyses.
Priced at $5,700 per year, BGOV took aim at such well-established rivals as Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, budgeting up to $100 million for the first 18 months. Bloomberg’s swagger, and the massive sum it was investing in a media startup, would prompt Washingtonian magazine to dub it “Bloomberg’s Death Star.”
BGOV quickly collided with Winkler. He wasn’t about to countenance an operation that he couldn’t control involving journalists. Never mind that the reporters were on BGOV’s payroll. He insisted that News approve every hire — and that each report to Winkler’s own Washington editors.
Next Winkler began criticizing BGOV’s content, insisting that its stories — aimed at a Washington audience — follow the strictures of the Bloomberg Way. After BGOV’s launch in January 2011, he began holding daily 2 p.m. headline clinics by conference call. BGOV’s veteran editors would gather and roll their eyes as Winkler, on the line from New York, tore apart each headline and made them rewrite it in Bloomberg-ese. “You could hear his screams,” recalls one attendee: “What’s the surprise? I don’t know what the surprise is!” He went so far as to prohibit use of the standard policy term “white paper.”
Internal critics derided Walters and his deputy as “the McKinsey boys,” blasting them as callow consultants with no appreciation for Bloomberg’s methods. Secunda failed to provide engineering support BGOV needed to make its site even close to fully functional on the promised schedule.
By late 2011, BGOV was far behind its lofty projections of 5,400 subscriptions. It had sold fewer than 2,000. Now BGOV’s executives, who viewed Winkler and Secunda as undercutting the project, would have to explain themselves in a company budget meeting — to Secunda and Winkler, among others. Sure enough, in front of some 50 people, Secunda tore into Walters. Why did you spend so much on the launch? Why didn’t you start small? That’s how we built Bloomberg!
As Doctoroff looked on uncomfortably, Walters tried to placate the old guard for two hours. He admitted being too optimistic in his forecasts and said he had learned from his errors. Walters proposed trimming BGOV’s budget by laying off journalists (whose oversight he had lost to Winkler). That comment only set off Winkler, who exploded: We’ve never talked about these cuts! How can you cut journalists without talking to me?
Battered, Walters left a few months later to become COO of the Weather Channel Cos. BGOV’s budget was cut. Some 40 staffers were laid off, and the operation was brought back under New York’s control.
Today BGOV’s business is inching upward. It has about 4,200 subscribers, still well below its original 2011 target. Doctoroff puts the cumulative losses at “less than $200 million.” People familiar with the situation say BGOV is now on a trajectory to break even on an operating basis — by 2018. When it might be able to pay back the initial investment is anybody’s guess. But more important, BGOV is now being run the Bloomberg Way.
The scandal that rattled the Bloomberg empire in 2013 began with an alarm two years earlier. On Sept. 15, 2011, the financial press was buzzing about a rogue UBS trader who had racked up a multibillion-dollar loss. At 7:29 a.m., Bloomberg TV anchor Erik Schatzker went on the air and noted a special advantage enjoyed by his organization. “We have been using the Bloomberg terminal, one of the unique tools that we have at our disposal, to find out a little bit about [the trader],” he explained. A recent log-in by the trader suggested that perhaps UBS “did not know about this trading loss until very recently.”
The inadvertent confession attracted no outside attention (perhaps because it occurred on the little-watched Bloomberg network). Schatzker was immediately reprimanded — for revealing the practice, not for engaging in it. Indeed, it was a routine part of the Bloomberg Way. The company had always given reporters access to data showing when users had last logged on, what terminal functions they used most, even transcripts of their chats with the Bloomberg customer help desk. It was just one piece of the perpetual sales effort, in which journalists were viewed as partners. Bloomberg’s sales reps had even more data. It allowed them to study customers’ usage, then meet with them to point out unused functions that might make the terminal more indispensable. “The level of information about customers is mind-boggling,” says a former senior sales rep.
After the on-air disclosure in 2011, Doctoroff convened a senior management meeting. He ordered that journalists’ access to customer data be shut down immediately. But as would later become clear, no one carried out the order.
The problem reemerged in the spring of 2013. A Hong Kong reporter was chasing a scooplet about a departing Goldman Sachs partner. She called Goldman’s local PR officer on April 16 to verify the tidbit. When the press rep declined to confirm the departure, she informed the rep that her terminal revealed that the partner hadn’t logged on to his Bloomberg for two weeks. News of the exchange quickly reached Goldman headquarters in Manhattan, where PR chief Jake Siewert began quizzing Bloomberg reporters he knew. He also called his counterpart at J.P. Morgan Chase; as it turned out, J.P. Morgan had fielded similarly prescient queries from Bloomberg reporters.
Both banks harbored assorted resentments toward Bloomberg, starting with its lofty prices. (Goldman’s annual bill is about $100 million.) At an April 29 meeting with Goldman, Doctoroff confirmed that for years Bloomberg reporters had special access to customer data. Doctoroff assured Goldman president Gary Cohn that reporters’ access had been terminated, and promised to gather more information. He hoped that would be the end of it.
It wasn’t. The New York Post broke the story 11 days later with the headline GOLDMAN OUTS BLOOMBERG SNOOPS. Bloomberg’s customers were livid. They demanded answers: Exactly what customer secrets had reporters seen? The company had a crisis on its hands.
Doctoroff shifted into damage-control mode. He contacted hundreds of customers, assuring them that what mattered most — their trading secrets — had never been monitored. He commissioned not one but two reviews of Bloomberg’s practices. The first, conducted by an outside law firm and a consulting group, focused on the snooping. It concluded that Bloomberg now had “appropriate” privacy controls in place — and that reporters never gained access to sensitive trading, portfolio, or messaging data. The 102-page report blamed the failure to follow Doctoroff’s 2011 instructions on “misunderstandings” but offered no details about who failed to act or why no one made sure that reporters could no longer gain access to customer data.
Doctoroff also commissioned a second review that examined Bloomberg News’ practices — essentially an examination of Winkler’s methods. It was conducted by Clark Hoyt, a respected Bloomberg editor and a former ombudsman at the New York Times. At the Times, no one but a copyeditor saw his critiques before they appeared in print. In contrast, his Bloomberg report was delivered first to management for consideration of what to make public.
In some ways, the public report was remarkable for Bloomberg. It offered an array of criticisms. Hoyt urged steps to separate the company’s business from its journalism. He criticized the “tonality” of Winkler-style headlines. He urged increased ethics training. The company says it has begun implementing the recommendations.
But the tone of what Bloomberg released publicly — which it refers to as a summary — differed conspicuously from Hoyt’s detailed, warts-and-all appraisals at the Times. The culpable were not identified, and key details were lacking. An organization that excoriates reporters for grammatical errors would not identify those responsible for policies that allowed employees to spy on customers.
Whatever their merits, the two reports paid off for Bloomberg. Customers seemed appeased; the storm had passed. For his part, Winkler appeared unscathed. In a May 12 column on Bloomberg’s website headlined HOLDING OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE, he apologized for the “error,” but minimized its significance and said nothing about his own knowledge or accountability. In an interview with Fortune, Winkler repeatedly dodged the question of his own role, saying, “The permissioning of it didn’t come from Bloomberg News,” and “the access to the function was not determined by anybody in News, ever.” At the end of the interview Winkler finally stated it flat out: He had known about it for years.
Bloomberg’s journalism has attracted notice of late, but not in a good way. Last month — a year after a tough series on the Chinese government won plaudits — Bloomberg reporters anonymously told the New York Times that Winkler had abruptly canceled a nearly yearlong investigative project out of fear that it would infuriate the Chinese government. Winkler publicly insisted the project was merely delayed because it was “not ready.” Leaked internal emails in which two senior Bloomberg editors praised the China work as “terrific” and “almost there” then appeared in the media. According to the press accounts, Winkler justified his decision by comparing it to self-censorship in Nazi-era Germany, saying it would allow Bloomberg to continue to report on China by avoiding expulsion.
The episode cemented the impression that the terminal remained king and that journalism would be sacrificed if it threatened the business. Soon after, Mike Forsythe, the project’s award-winning lead reporter and suspected leaker, departed suddenly, prompting fury among Bloomberg alumni. “I am ashamed of my alma mater,” former White House reporter Dick Keil posted on Facebook. Other alums expressed similar sentiments.
Meanwhile, in the last days of November the company’s news bureaus in Shanghai and Beijing received unscheduled “inspections” by Chinese regulators, at least one of whom requested that Winkler apologize for his Nazi comparison. (A Bloomberg spokesperson declines to comment.)
All this occurred just as the first-ever layoffs at Bloomberg News were announced. The number is relatively small — 35 — but it was startling in an organization that seemed to have no limits. The ax fell in the realms of sports, the arts, and investigative reporting, all elements of the plan to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” Bloomberg’s scaled-back ambition: to become “the world’s most influential business and financial news organization.”
Doctoroff has already abandoned two of his ventures: a real estate unit and a personal-finance website. He seems ready to cut his losses in two more: BGOV and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a data provider on the clean-energy industry. The company is pondering merging one or both with BNA. Either move would surely involve more job cuts.
Indeed, all the units that have been the source of so much investment, conflict, and attention — TV, news, BGOV, and BLAW — are now expected to generate less than 5% of company revenues. So far rivals have not shown an ability to take advantage of Bloomberg’s missteps; the company has continued to eke out additional market share even as its terminal sales have slowed to 1% annual growth the past two years. But Bloomberg faces the same threats as every other tech company: ever more options, many of them low-cost, for its customers. It also faces some less common threats: Some eight major Wall Street firms — customers — are collaborating on an instant-messaging system that could compete with the terminal’s popular IM system and thus reduce its allure.
There’s one area of good news: success in a business line that comes closest to Bloomberg’s original mission — providing technology services to the financial industry. The “enterprise business” seeks to exploit Bloomberg’s tech muscle and Wall Street presence to offer such products as portfolio risk analytics, order management systems, and message storage and retrieval. Just three years old as a separate entity, it’s growing at a 16% clip, with projected 2013 revenues of nearly $1 billion, according to Doctoroff.
The CEO shows signs of slowly consolidating power, and the organization is restraining its spending for the first time. But that could quickly go out the window in the face of the ultimate X factor: Mike’s reappearance, unfettered by any mayoral restrictions, in January. Inside the company, contradictory rumors swirl. They predict everything from layoffs in the company’s unprofitable TV and magazines units to the acquisition of the New York Times Co. Whatever happens, entropy will likely reign. It seems Mike wouldn’t have it any other way.
This story is from the December 23, 2013 issue of Fortune. | The company is still a profit machine, but its growth is slowing, and its reputation has been singed by a snooping scandal and questions about its journalistic independence. With an internal war raging between old and new factions, and founder Mike Bloomberg set to return next month, can the company figure out what it wants… | 150.311475 | 0.852459 | 1.377049 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/may/15/artsfeatures.art | http://web.archive.org/web/20140909130654id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/may/15/artsfeatures.art | What's all the fuss about The Osbournes? | 20140909130654 | An American magazine recently asked Ozzy Osbourne to explain the success of the docusoap that bears his family's name, currently matching the audience figures of Sex and the City in the US. "I haven't got a fucking clue," he replied. "I don't try to be funny. It's just the way I am, but people think I'm hysterical."
That remark sums up The Osbournes' considerable appeal. Ozzy may profess bewilderment at the ratings, but then bewilderment, the programme reveals, is his thing. The cameras reveal him not as the mythic bat-biting diabolist of rock legend, but as a middle-aged man thrown into a state of confusion by the most mundane domestic arrangement. He cannot discipline the family's menagerie of pets nor work the remote control. He gawps at a mobile phone as if examining an extra-terrestrial life-form. Osbourne would be exactly like your average fiftysomething parent, were it not for his mythic past, his extravagant collection of tattoos and, especially, a voice formed by a combination of substance abuse and years performing in ferociously amplified rock bands.
Already blessed with an accent that resides uncomfortably between the west coast of America and the west Midlands, his career choice has apparently rendered Ozzy incapable of speaking at a volume below deafening. His legendary excesses have left him with a case of the shakes, which adds a curious vibrato to his voice. He may be the only man in the world who roars tremulously. "WHY IS IT STOOK ON THE WEATHER CHANNEL?" he moans, simultaneously thunderous and helpless. "WHY CAN'T WE GERRA NORMAL FOOKIN' TV?"
But then The Osbournes is about amplification of ordinary emotion. The children squabble, complain when their parents kiss in public and remain stony-faced while their father chuckles at his own jokes. Mum Sharon is worried that Jack, 16, is considered "an oddball" at school and he certainly seems to spend a lot of time stabbing a cardboard box with a bayonet. That aside, they are a perfectly recognisable family, albeit one who live in a crucifix- festooned gothic mansion in Beverly Hills and swear, according to MTV, every 19 seconds.
While the Osbournes are certainly funny, it is their evident love for each other that shines through. "I love you all more than life itself," bellows Ozzy during a family row, "but you're all fucking mental." It is impossible not to warm to them. The success of The Osbournes may have less to do with Ozzy's stardom and the show's admirable expletive count than the fact that it is a reality-television series with, uniquely, an interesting and empathetic set of characters at its core. It is a formula simple enough for even Ozzy to understand. | Alexis Petridis tunes in to The Osbournes to see what all the fuss is about | 36 | 0.6 | 0.866667 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/08/consumer-borrowing-jumps-most-years/aRULMqmIh164Cd14ylJSgK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140910203152id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/08/consumer-borrowing-jumps-most-years/aRULMqmIh164Cd14ylJSgK/story.html | US consumer borrowing jumps by most in 3 years | 20140910203152 | WASHINGTON — US consumers stepped up their borrowing in July, led by rising auto loans and higher credit card balances.
The Federal Reserve said Monday overall consumer borrowing jumped $26 billion in July to $3.24 trillion. The 9.7 percent increase matches April’s gain as the largest in three years.
The figures add to a mixed picture for consumers in recent weeks. A healthy increase in credit usually indicates that consumers are shedding some caution about spending, which would boost economic growth. Rising debt loads are generally a sign of greater confidence in the economy.
But other data have not been as positive. Overall spending fell in July for the first time since January, the government said last month. And consumer confidence, as measured by the University of Michigan, has barely budged in the past year.
Auto and student loans jumped 10.6 percent to $2.36 trillion, fueled by strong auto sales. Automakers in July reported their best figures for that month in eight years. Credit card debt, meanwhile, rose 7.4 percent to $880.5 billion.
Student loans have soared since the recession ended, topping $1.1 trillion by the second quarter of this year. That’s up from $700 billion in 2009. | WASHINGTON — US consumers stepped up their borrowing in July, led by rising auto loans and higher credit card balances. The Federal Reserve said Monday that overall consumer borrowing jumped $26 billion in July to $3.24 trillion. The 9.7 percent increase matches April’s gain as the largest in three years. | 4.105263 | 1 | 23.701754 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/nov/01/20yearsoftheturnerprize.turnerprize4 | http://web.archive.org/web/20140912134906id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/nov/01/20yearsoftheturnerprize.turnerprize4 | Painters suffer anxiety of influence | 20140912134906 | British painting in the 20th century was exceptional. The three great schools of painting after 1940 were in Germany, America and Britain. The postwar London painters - Bacon, Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff - were singularly authoritative. They were real painters, anxious, desperate, difficult. Because they were committed to a modern and alienated form of realism, they have remained contemporary.
These painters are a hard act to follow. Younger painters in Britain today either try to reinvent Freudian and Baconian figurative violence or go the opposite way, taking Andy Warhol as their parent and making paintings whose images come from the culture rather than the body of the artist.
Gary Hume, Chris Ofili and Glenn Brown have all been shortlisted for the Turner prize with paintings in this mode. Ofili won in 1998,the first painter to do so since Howard Hodgkin in 1985. Hume and Ofili are very characterful and imaginative artists. But they have yet to rival Freud and Bacon. Perhaps a way forward is represented by the more introspective landscape dream paintings of Peter Doig and George Shaw. Private fantasy needs to make a comeback in British painting.
Contemporary artists achieve the effects of great painting most convincingly through other means than painting. The most powerful abstract art of today will be found in the flat, haunted surfaces of Rachel Whiteread's casts. This was most of all true of her demolished Turner prize-winning House (1993) and has returned in her recent large-scale works. Painting survives, but it has moved house. | The weariest accusation against contemporary art and the Turner prize is that painting is systematically downtrodden. The weakness of British painters, however, has more to do with what the critic Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence" than with some conspiracy against painting. | 5.897959 | 0.591837 | 0.877551 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/feb/01/architecture.regeneration | http://web.archive.org/web/20140912215138id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/feb/01/architecture.regeneration | Deyan Sudjic on architectural divorces | 20140912215138 | Norman Foster has seen partners come and go before. He himself walked out of Team Four - albeit amicably - the practice he started with Richard Rogers. And Michael Hopkins in turn left Foster to set up on his own. But none of those splits attracted anything like as much attention outside the narrow world of the architectural ghetto as the press release issued by Foster and Partners just before Christmas announcing that Ken Shuttleworth would be leaving the firm after 30 years.
What got the move noticed was the breathlessly ill-judged interview Shuttleworth gave a year ago to a national newspaper when he was still Foster's loyal and anonymous lieutenant. Shuttleworth was portrayed as a boyish genius with a pen in each hand who could design entire cities before breakfast and was the true author of three of London's most conspicuous new landmarks - Swiss Re (the 'gherkin'), the Greater London Authority building and the wobbly bridge - which had been seen as Foster's own designs.
And that wasn't all. Hong Kong's airport, the Barcelona communications tower and even Foster's immensely detailed plans for New York's Ground Zero competition were appar ently also all the product of this diffident 50-year-old graduate of Leicester Polytechnic.
Even when his entire staff could still fit on a single office floor, nobody would have attributed such powers to Foster himself, least of all the notion that it was possible to design the GLA building in 10 minutes. There would still have been a ritual nod to the idea of teamwork, and all the physical evidence of the mountains of models and prototypes to demonstrate that it took a long time to design architecture as well-crafted as Foster's. But here it seemed was the unknown fifth Beatle coming forward to claim the credit for the entire Lennon/McCartney back catalogue and having the neck to claim that it came so easily that he did it all in a morning.
What, London's architectural world asked itself, was Shuttleworth thinking of? Why had it taken so long for him to discover his ego - and when was he going to be found floating face down in the Thames for this unparalleled act of lèse-majesté? The disciplined, highly controlled and enormously successful Foster machine, in which every one of its almost 500 architects ends up adopting its founder's personal handwriting, drawing technique and habit of using hardback sketchbooks, simply didn't allow for individuals breaking ranks in this destabilising way. It might be frustrating for some, but for 20 years it delivered reliably elegant buildings to the kind of clients who would otherwise be deeply sceptical about architects.
The trouble with architects is that they talk so much about teamwork, but actually believe that architectural practice revolves around the cult of personality. When I edited an architecture magazine, we had the deranged idea of photographing architects and putting them on the cover. The theory was to show there were actually people behind all those tower blocks. It didn't do that much for the circulation, but we had invented our own version of the curse of Hello!.
No sooner had we photographed a partnership than the bespectacled heroes in black would be changing the locks on their studios to keep each other out, calling in the lawyers, claiming custody of all the clients and copyrighting the photographs of completed buildings. David Chipperfield's one- time partner actually rang before the issue had even come out to complain he had been pictured standing behind his seated former colleague. It was, he felt, not a pose that adequately represented the nature of their relationship.
Given that almost all architects have a way of seeing any job they lose to a competitor - no matter how small - as bread snatched from the mouths of their hungry children, relations between former partners inevitably become strained. Sometimes entertainingly so. The ugliest architectural divorce of all was when that bright young duo Terry Farrell and Nicholas Grimshaw fell out in the most spectacular fashion.
It wasn't that they simply stopped speaking to each other, their wives stopped speaking to each other as well. And Farrell set out to distance himself as far as possible from the hi-tech aesthetic of Grimshaw, to the extent of becoming an enthusiastic postmodernist. Even now they never speak and when Grimshaw appeared on Desert Island Discs last year, he made no mention of Farrell.
Was it possible that the same was going to happen between Foster and Shuttleworth? Everybody loves a good feud and Britain's best-known, biggest and most influential architectural office seemed to be in the middle of a particularly promising one. The Daily Telegraph's diary column seemed to think so, and was looking forward to reporting the battle. It wasn't only a question of architectural attribution that was opening up the cracks. There were also lurid rumours about the division of profits within Foster and Partners.
The story has now gathered pace with the news that, rather than joining another practice, Shuttleworth is going to set up on his own and has been joined by a group of former colleagues from Foster's office. How many more defectors will there be from the Foster camp? And how will Foster himself manage without the help of his brilliant former collaborator? The architecture trade magazines have been full of it.
Shuttleworth and Foster have both been careful about what they say about each other in public; after all, they are grown-up architects, not advertising creatives or drummers from prog rock bands. Foster pays tribute to Shuttleworth's exceptional contribution, and Shuttleworth simply says that after 30 happy years it was time for a change. But sitting in his office, the first words he uses to account for his decision to call his new practice Make seem to be a carefully pointed gesture: 'Not using your own name makes the succession much easier.'
With Foster, now in his late sixties, still presiding over an office that carries his own name, the implication is clear. As Shuttleworth explains: 'The approach is different. All the shares are held in trust, so they won't have to buy me out. There are points for contributions, for age, for qualifications, for charity work and for bringing in a job. I want people to feel they are rewarded for their efforts and are fully involved in the office. I want to attract great people and do great buildings.'
Then there is the question of exactly what kind of architecture Shuttleworth - who is clearly determined to create a studio that will match Foster's in its ambition - will build if he gets the chance. 'I think it is going to be more expressive,' he says. And indeed pinned up on the wall of his office is a photocopy of Herzog and de Meuron's latest art gallery (the Schaulager in Basel) and Future Systems' flying saucer-like media centre at Lords. Ask which buildings from his days with Foster he is most proud of and Shuttleworth points to Swiss Re - the most successful of the new wave of curvaceous Foster architecture.
While Foster privately questions the extent of Shuttleworth's contribution to the design of the tower, the question remains: has Shuttleworth already reshaped what we think of as Foster's buildings? Certainly something did happen to the Foster output 10 years ago, when the curve suddenly appeared. Or perhaps reappeared; his first great building, Willis Faber in Ipswich, was like a black glass grand piano.
According to Shuttleworth, 'the City of London planning chief, Peter Rees, says that the curved buildings came from me throwing away my set square'. The unkind are saying that with Shuttleworth's departure, Foster can go back to doing real architecture again.
Most partnerships which work well depend on the partners not wanting to do the same thing. Typically, there is a designer and a builder, or a designer and a business brain. But build a partnership around two designers and it all ends in tears.
Norman Foster, who it has to be said shows not the slightest sign of running out of energy, has built an office which has created a model for architecture of impeccable quality, even if its once infallible touch has started to falter. The fact that he has held it together for so long is a tribute to his personal architectural gifts and remarkable charisma. But there is always a tension between team spirit and individual ego - and sometimes the tension is exacerbated by the rhetoric of partnership.
There are great precedents for architects such as Shuttleworth starting independent careers at 50 - Frank Gehry for one - but outside the Foster machine he will have done remarkably well even if he can establish himself as no more than a just a good architect in his own right. | When Norman Foster's right-hand man walked out after 30 years it wasn't just a question of who got the CDs. Deyan Sudjic on the personal and professional fallout of architectural divorces. | 44.864865 | 0.810811 | 1.513514 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/mar/15/heritage.museums | http://web.archive.org/web/20140912234106id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/mar/15/heritage.museums | Find a pittance for Pollock's | 20140912234106 | The British Museum, Gershwin laments, has lost its charm. Pollock's Toy Museum (a few hundred metres away) hasn't. The establishment nestles in Scala Street, behind the bustle of Tottenham Court Road. Loomed over by modern concrete, Pollock's is a rickety Georgian and Victorian structure of crumbling brick. It's tiny. A toy museum in every sense. All it needs is gingerbread window frames. Smallness is part of its charm - one can't look at it without thinking of Dickens' little Jenny Wren, doll dressmaker.
Inside, the museum resembles a half-tidied, half-jumbled toy cupboard. It's dusty, faded, and full of faintly heard children's laughter. "Great place for a horror movie," said a hulking young American behind me; "No, it's cute," retorted his mother. Both were right.
Technically, the museum is an educational trust. They take the mission seriously. Corkscrewing themself up the one-at-a-time stairs to the attic galleries, the visitor passes a display of boardgames explaining that Ludo was, 100 years ago, called India - where it has been played for millennia. Something else the Victorians stole. The Indian word for it, pachisi, became the American children's game parcheesi. The game, one learns, was played by despots, with slave girls for counters, before the enlightened British took over the subcontinent.
Pollock's supplies rich pickings for postcolonial theorists. "Bricks of the Empire" taught young John Bull to spell on the "A for Australia", "B for Bechuanaland", "C for Canada" principle. Golliwogs are prominent. The museum is notably thin on toy weapons - although it has a token armoury of peashooters, popguns, potato-guns and water pistols. Victorian and Edwardian toys were, one perceives, insistently ideological. Meccano was labelled by its maker: "Engineering for Boys". Girls had dolls. Punch battered Judy. As the twig was bent, so the tree was shaped.
The core specialism of the theatre, originating with the man after whom it is named, Benjamin Pollock, are the cardboard-cutout toy theatres. You bought them as printed pattern books. Scissors and paste transformed them into three dimensional models. They range from such Regency crowd pleasers as The Corsican Brothers to J Arthur Rank's Hamlet (1948), with a midget Laurence Olivier pondering whether to be or not to be.
Pollock's does not attempt any comprehensive survey. What its display reconstructs is the spirit of childhoods past. As with Peter and Iona Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, one is struck by how little children have changed in their playthings and activities through the ages and across class and culture.
The history of the museum is one of disasters narrowly averted. It is the relic of Mr Pollock's Victorian toy-theatre manufactory in Hoxton, and its little hoard of treasures was rescued from bankruptcy and the saleroom by Marguerite Fawdry in 1955. Thereafter it moved to its current address where, with the aid of a modest entrance fee (currently £3), it has supported itself, in shabby gentility, for four decades.
No, Pollock's has not lost its charm. What it will lose, in a fortnight's time, is the roof over its head. On March 31 its building lease runs out. The trustees can't renew it. Surrounded by towering office and apartment blocks, fly-by-night electronic goods suppliers and Fitzrovia's knocking shops, one can see why. They have nowhere to go. They could, presumably, be absorbed into the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green. But the character of Pollock's would be overwhelmed in that large place.
If Britain can afford to build the Millennium Dome at vast cost, run it for a year at a crippling loss, and let it rot - at public expense - for years on end, cannot a pittance be found for Pollock's? If you ever shouted for Tinkerbell, email your support. | John Sutherland: Pollock's Toy Museum captures the spirit of childhoods past - and we must keep it open for future generations. | 32.791667 | 0.666667 | 2 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jun/23/art1 | http://web.archive.org/web/20140914002026id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jun/23/art1 | Boudin, Monet and the Sea Painters of Normandy | 20140914002026 | Monet may have been one of the first to paint the transient effects of light, but he wasn't the first to set up his easel on a beach. Even geniuses need mentors, and as Monet readily acknowledged: "If I became a painter it was thanks to Boudin."
In 1857, Boudin was struggling to make a living selling breezy sketches of the beau monde floating across the Normandy sands. Monet, aged 17, was selling caricatures. This exhibition includes one - a pencil sketch of some fishing boats. You could stare long and hard at this for signs of genius and still not find any.
Boudin saw something, however, and taught Monet the plein air doctrine that prefigured Impressionism: "Three brush strokes from nature are worth two days in the studio."
But if this show proves anything, it is that Boudin was not an Impressionist. The catalogue features plenty of close examples of feathery, gestural brush work that seem 20 years ahead of their time - but on the walls they're tiny. His sketches are astonishing, his completed compositions less so. It was the bold step of Monet and others to transfer the flickering, freestyle approach to full-sized canvases and call it a finished painting.
Compositionally, the two painters are also aeons apart. Boudin placed his fashion parades in the middle distance against lots of sky (he was, it has to be said, very good at skies). Monet zoomed in, filling the frame, with the almost arbitary effect of a snapshot.
This is the Bowes's first major lending exhibition, despite lending its incredible collection worldwide. As an entree to the international art circuit, it is a creditable toe in the water.
· Until August 30. Details: 01833 690606. | Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle | 68.4 | 0.4 | 0.4 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/13/the-biggest-challenge-for-advanced-prosthetics-may-getting-people-who-need-them/uRnjueXxHGX1c1kDOAxFUL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140915085934id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/13/the-biggest-challenge-for-advanced-prosthetics-may-getting-people-who-need-them/uRnjueXxHGX1c1kDOAxFUL/story.html | The biggest challenge for advanced prosthetics may be getting to people who need them | 20140915085934 | For the past eight years, in an old mill building in Manchester, N.H., a team of engineers has been developing what you might call the Tesla of artificial limbs. The DEKA Arm System, about the same size and weight of an adult’s arm, can pick up an egg from a carton or a credit card from a desk.
And when three dozen military veterans participating in a clinical trial used the arm — also known as the “Luke” arm, after the Star Wars character — 90 percent were able to do things they couldn’t do with a less-sophisticated artificial limb, like using a key, putting food in their mouths, or zipping up a pair of pants.
You may have seen the Luke arm on “60 Minutes,” a recent Katie Couric segment for Yahoo, or a TED Talk by DEKA founder Dean Kamen in 2007, the year I got an in-person demo of an early prototype. It won the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration in May.
But it just may be too sophisticated to reach the people it can help the most. Medicare and most private insurers are not yet persuaded of the merits of paying for the most advanced prosthetic you can get.
“We’re looking at all this new technology,” says Rose Bissonette, founder of the New England Amputee Association, “but it’s hard for a lot of people just to get a basic prosthetic covered. It’s a struggle.”
Kamen, also the inventor of the Segway and iBot, a robotic wheelchair, says he was challenged by the Defense Department (which gave the project $40 million) to design a prosthetic arm that would restore as much of the natural limb’s capabilities — from opening doors to tying shoes — as possible.
The movements of “Luke” are controlled in two different ways. One is by attaching sensors to remaining muscles on the wearer’s body. When the sensors detect electrical activity in the muscles, they send that signal to the Luke arm, which can do things like change its grip or open or close the hand.
The other relies on wireless sensors affixed to the outside of each shoe. Those sensors, explains DEKA engineer Tom Doyon, “detect tilt, much like your smartphone does when you rotate it, basically allowing your foot to act like a joystick,” telling the arm to move up, down, left, or right. The arm and attached hand have 800 components.
There is an immense difference in the interpersonal interaction with someone wearing the Luke arm compared to, say, someone using a metal hook. You want to reach out and shake hands with the five-fingered hand that DEKA has designed (it even has plastic fingernails). When someone is wearing a hook, you are not sure what to do.
When I spoke with Kamen late last month, he told me it wasn’t yet clear how the Luke arm will reach the market. “The military wants them and they want them now,” for injured soldiers, “and we’ve been looking for manufacturing partners. But you can’t get people to agree to make stuff unless someone agrees to buy it.”
Kamen says he hopes to get a purchase commitment from the Pentagon or Veterans Administration “that I can wave in front of these big guys, and we’ll be off and running.” By “big guys,” he means large companies that already make medical devices or prosthetics. If he’s unable to cajole another company to do that, “yes, we’ll make them,” he says. “It’s my least favorite outcome.”
As for the price of the arm, Kamen says it depends on volume: “If you want one, it’s $10 million, but two is $5 million, and 100 would be much less.” William Hanson, president of Liberating Technologies, a prosthetics maker in Holliston, estimates the price of a Luke arm at “well north of $100,000.”
Hanson observes that if amputees are active duty members of the military, or were injured at work, they’ve got the best chances of getting a high-end artificial limb paid for. But Medicare and private insurers can be reluctant in most other cases.
“Our prosthetics are a fraction of the price of these new systems,” Hanson says, “and we still have trouble getting reimbursed.”
Other companies are running into the same issues. More than 2 million people have seen the video of Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombings, dancing on stage while wearing a prosthetic device from BiOM, a Bedford company founded in 2006 by an MIT professor. The company’s $40,000 “powered” ankle (it has microchips, a motor, and battery inside) helps amputees walk with a more normal gait and less effort.
About 1,000 patients use the ankle, says chief executive Charles Carignan. But it is not routinely covered by government or private insurers. The Catch-22 is that to bring the price down, BiOM needs to make more ankles — which would require more people getting covered by insurance.
When someone has lost a limb, Medicare and private insurers would prefer to buy the Kia, not the Tesla, an electric car that sells for $70,000 and up. But Carignan contends that advanced prosthetics can keep people more mobile, healthier, and leading more productive lives. “Unfortunately,” he says, “the technology to do that is more expensive, just like new drugs that can extend your life are more expensive.”
Will the market support continued innovation in prosthetics, and enable these companies to keep investing in new products? For now, that’s a question without an answer. | The DEKA Arm System can pick up an egg from a carton or a credit card from a desk. But it just may be too sophisticated to reach the people it can help the most | 31.027778 | 1 | 14.666667 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/wildcats-hold-off-wolf-pack-091414 | http://web.archive.org/web/20140917003317id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/wildcats-hold-off-wolf-pack-091414 | Wildcats hold off Wolf Pack | 20140917003317 | Updated SEP 14, 2014 3:36a ET
TUCSON, Ariz. -- Anu Solomon threw for 278 yards and three touchdowns, Nick Wilson ran for 171 yards and Arizona held off Nevada 35-28 Saturday night.
Arizona (3-0) came into the game with the nation's fifth-best offense and had another big night against the Wolf Pack, rolling up 507 yards.
Wilson ran for a pair of touchdowns and gave Arizona a 100-yard rusher for the 20th straight game, tied for longest in the FBS since 1996. Solomon finished 22-of-26 passing and threw two second-half touchdown passes to Cayleb Jones, who had nine catches for 116 yards.
Cody Fajardo kept Nevada (2-1) in it, throwing for 321 yards and three touchdowns, but the Wolf Pack turned the ball over on downs their last drive.
Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez said after the 2012 New Mexico Bowl that he hoped to never face Fajardo again. The Wolfpack quarterback lit up the Wildcats in that game, throwing for 256 yards and three touchdowns while rushing for 140 and another score.
Fajardo, on the other hand, was looking forward to facing Arizona again. Despite having what may have been the best game of his career in the bowl game, Nevada lost the game 49-48 after the Wildcats scored two touchdowns in the final minute.
Fajardo had some success against Arizona early as the Wolf Pack picked their way down the field.
Nevada held the ball for the game's opening 9:33 and had another scoring drive that lasted 6:08.
The problem for the Wolf Pack was how both ended: in field goals.
Thirty-two plays, 141 yards and more than 15 minutes resulting in just six points -- a dangerous game against an explosive offense like Arizona's.
The Wildcats needed just 1:50 to score their first touchdown, a 2-yard run by Wilson. The freshman scored the next one, too, bursting off left tackle for a 28-yard score.
Solomon, who threw an ill-advised interception early in the second quarter, showed off his athletic ability just before halftime, rolling to the left and throwing off his back foot to hit Tyrell Johnson perfectly in stride for a 35-yard touchdown.
Fajardo finally got the Wolf Pack into the endzone after that, orchestrating a quick 75-yard drive capped by his 7-yard touchdown pass to Jarred Gipson that cut Arizona's halftime lead to 21-13.
The confidence of seeing six points go up on the board instead of three carried over into the third quarter, when Fajardo opened with a 6-yard touchdown pass to Hasaan Henderson.
Arizona had an answer. Two, in fact.
Solomon threw another touchdown on the run, this one going the other way, this one a 22-yarder to Jones. The Solomon-Jones connection worked again on the first play of the fourth quarter, a 24-yarder that put the Wildcats up 35-21.
Nevada and Fajardo still weren't done.
He found Jarred Gipson on a 6-yard touchdown pass that cut Arizona's lead to 35-28 and the Wolf Pack got the ball back at its 17-yard line with 3:04 left.
Fajardo took Nevada to near midfield, but his fourth-down attempt was just out of Jericho Richardson's reach. | Anu Solomon threw for 278 yards and three touchdowns, Nick Wilson ran for 171 yards and Arizona got a late stop to beat Nevada 35-28. | 21.62069 | 0.896552 | 11.862069 | medium | medium | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/05/06/jack-ma-alibabas-founder-in-the-ipo-spotlight/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140919091117id_/http://fortune.com/2014/05/06/jack-ma-alibabas-founder-in-the-ipo-spotlight/ | Jack Ma, Alibaba's founder, in the IPO spotlight | 20140919091117 | FORTUNE — Jack Ma, co-founder of Chinese online retailer Alibaba Group, likes to tell anyone listening that his company faced slim odds as a startup.
“We are a very lucky company,” he recalled during a talk at Stanford University in 2011. “There was no chance that we would survive. I don’t have any background, rich father, or strong uncles.”
Today, Alibaba is an e-commerce colossus that is roughly the equivalent of eBay EBAY , PayPal, and Amazon.com AMZN combined. On Tuesday, it filed for an initial public offering that could be the largest in U.S. history. Ma, a former school teacher and English translator, stepped down as Alibaba’s chief executive last year to, as he put it, leave room for younger talent that is more in tune with today’s Internet. However, as executive chairman, he still casts a long shadow over the company as its strategist and philosopher-in-chief.
MORE: Alibaba files for $1 billion IPO
“He’s clearly a pioneer and a visionary,” said Victor Koo, chief executive of Youku, a Chinese online television site in which Alibaba recently led a $1.2 billion investment.
The two men first met 15 years ago when Koo tried to recruit Ma for a job just before Alibaba’s birth. At the time, Ma would only reveal the name of his brainchild but not its business plan. “I can’t tell you what it is – it’s a secret,” Koo recalled Ma saying during their talk. They crossed paths yet again during the recent negotiations for Alibaba’s stake in Youku. As usual, Ma was quite involved during meetings despite officially withdrawing from Alibaba’s day-to-day management and leaving the CEO job to his lieutenant, Jonathan Lu.
“It’s a very engaged retirement,” Koo said.
In China, Ma is a celebrity in the mold of Apple AAPL co-founder Steve Jobs. Legions of customers and employees packed a soccer stadium last year to see his goodbye speech as CEO. In his typical bombastic style, Ma preceded the talk by belting out a Chinese pop song on stage while wearing a gaudy silver suit and hat. The crowd roared its approval.
Ma, with the help of a group of 17 friends, started Alibaba out of his apartment in 1999 just as the Internet started to take hold in China. It began as a site for small and medium-sized businesses to buy and sell goods online. Later, he created a sister site, Taobao, that is focused on the consumer market.
Despite intense competition from eBay, Alibaba’s websites quickly gained users. Many analysts credit the company’s rise to initially offering free listings to attract users and its appeal to Chinese tastes.
“He’s someone who thinks very long term — which is something that isn’t very common these days,” Scott Kessler, an analyst with S&P Capital IQ, said of Ma. “He was true to his vision and bold as appropriate.”
Indeed, Ma does not shy from tussles. Although impish, he has taken pot shots at a number of U.S. executives and their companies over the years. Ma repeatedly declared eBay’s demise in China before it actually happened. He’s also frequently feuded with Yahoo YHOO , a big investor in Alibaba, although they’ve since patched up their differences.
MORE: IPO time for Alibaba
In recent years, Ma has pushed Alibaba beyond its roots into online payments, banking, and cloud storage. He’s also championed investments in China and, to the surprise of many, in the United States. Last year, Alibaba led a $200 million investment in ShopRunner, a delivery service for online retailers. Last month, Alibaba followed up by joining a group that invested $250 million in Lyft, the ride-sharing service.
Ma’s plan is to expand Alibaba outside outside of China, Kessler said. Lenovo LNVGY , the computer maker, is one of the few Chinese companies to have actually made inroads in the West.
“They see themselves as one of the first Chinese companies to go global,” Kessler said. “There really aren’t a lot of examples.”
Alibaba had revenue of $6.5 billion and profit of $2.8 billion in the nine months ending Dec. 31., according to its IPO filing Tuesday. The vast majority of the revenue — $4.7 billion — originated from China.
Filing for a U.S. IPO could very well be one more sign of Alibaba’s global ambitions. Other Chinese companies like Baidu BIDU , the Chinese search engine, have sold shares here, but it was more because of financial realities than part of an effort to crack the U.S. market.
In any case, Ma, 49, is among China’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. He owns 8.% of Alibaba and, on paper, at least, is worth several billion dollars. It’s just one of the eye-popping numbers associated with Ma and the business he founded. Alibaba’s market capitalization after the IPO will exceed $200 billion, according to many analysts.
MORE: Can Lenovo do it?
Still the pioneer, Ma, is now trying to bring philanthropy and environmentalism to China. Both are foreign ideas for the country, where pollution and social inequality are facts of life.
Last month, Ma and Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, promised to set up charitable trusts potentially valued at around $3 billion. They plan to donate shares representing a nearly 2% stake in Alibaba. Ma said that his trust would be devoted to health care, the environment, and education. Alibaba already contributes 0.3% of its annual revenue to its own foundation, which was established in 2010.
Additionally, Ma sits on the global board of The Nature Conservancy, a U.S. environmental group, and also chairs its China program. Mark Tercek, The Nature Conservancy’s chief executive, said Ma is very active in raising money and has helped to create a privately funded 27,000-acre nature reserve in China. Ma’s environmental awakening came when a member of his wife’s family fell ill, Tercek said. Ma suspected pollution played a role.
“Sometimes biz leaders can be a little bossy,” Tercek said. “He’s shown great respect for what we’ve done.”
Koo, Ma’s longtime acquaintance, said that Ma’s success is his ability to know his limits. He surrounds himself with people who can handle the product details while he thinks up strategy. In the same vein, he kept Alibaba focused on e-commerce. Only recently has its focus wandered.
“Chinese companies have a habit of wanting to do everything,” Koo said. “You have to diversify. But literally, for the first 15 years, they stayed to their knitting.” | He's still Alibaba's visionary-in-chief. | 120.636364 | 0.818182 | 2.636364 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/19/rose-wylie-winner-john-moores-prize | http://web.archive.org/web/20140920223940id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/19/rose-wylie-winner-john-moores-prize | 'Fresh and cutting edge' Rose Wylie, 80, wins John Moores painting prize | 20140920223940 | Rose Wylie's painting, called PV Windows and Floorboards, has won the John Moores prize. Photograph: Walker Art Gallery
One of the UK's most important art awards, the John Moores painting prize, has been won by Rose Wylie.
Wylie, 80, was named the 29th winner of the biennial prize at a ceremony at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, following in the footsteps of painters including Patrick Heron (1959), David Hockney (1967), Peter Doig (1993) and Sarah Pickstone (2012). She is the oldest recipient of the award.
Wylie's painting is called PV Windows and Floorboards and shows four female characters sitting and standing in a white gallery space. Sandra Penketh, director of Liverpool's art galleries, said it was "a striking painting and a worthy winner". She added: "Rose's work instantly demanded attention when it entered the judging room and it was clear from the start it would be one of the highlights of this year's exhibition.
"The painting achieves an interesting balance; containing bold colours and form but also a sense of mystery and an unfinished story.
"Her style is fresh, unpredictable and cutting edge and is everything we've come to expect from the winner of the John Moores."
Wylie wins £25,000 while four other shortlisted artists – Rae Hicks, Juliette Losq, Alessandro Raho and Mandy Payne – receive £2,500 each.
The judges this year were Tim Marlow, the director of programmes at the Royal Academy and artists Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Zeng Fanzhi, Chantal Joffe and Tom Benson.
The John Moores prize is Britain's biggest painting prize, created in 1957 at the suggestion of John Moores, founder of Liverpool-based Littlewoods. It is awarded every two years and is now part of the Liverpool Biennial, a contemporary visual arts jamboree which runs until 26 October | Wylie named 29th winner at Walker Gallery, Liverpool, following in footsteps of painters such as David Hockney | 19.105263 | 0.894737 | 2.052632 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/retirement-stock-picks/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140921183138id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/06/12/retirement-stock-picks/ | How 5 pros are investing for retirement | 20140921183138 | Jim Oberweis isn’t big on thinking about retirement. At least not his own. The 68-year-old Illinois state senator and founder of the Chicago-area fund firm Oberweis Asset Management is still taking on new challenges. He recently won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate and will run against incumbent Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in the general election in November.
It would be yet another chapter in Oberweis’s diverse career, which began with a job teaching junior high but took off when he launched an investment newsletter, the Oberweis Report, then a brokerage, and then his investment company, which includes seven mutual funds and manages roughly $1.5 billion. Along the way Oberweis also took charge of his family’s small legacy dairy business in the late ’80s and grew it sizably. The company now has a network of 43 “ice cream and dairy” retail stores across the Midwest churning out $70 million in annual sales, and it also delivers bottled milk the old-fashioned way to doorsteps as far away as Virginia.
When Oberweis first vied for the U.S. Senate seat more than a decade ago, he didn’t intend to leave his day job. The emerging growth and micro-cap funds he ran continued to outperform their peers even as he hit the campaign trail. “I truly expected to do that for as long as I was alive,” he says.
After losing in the primaries twice, though, the father of five did his own sort of rebalancing. He turned the “all-consuming experience” of running mutual fund portfolios over to his son Jim, 40, and pitched in on the dairy business, run by his other son. He bought a condo in Florida. But then he won his state senate seat in 2012 and never really slowed down. “I don’t think he actually plans on retiring,” says the younger Oberweis of his father.
Retirement, however, is a major topic for Oberweis the politician. Illinois has botched its pension planning, falling roughly $100 billion short in its savings funds, and Oberweis has been working on bills to fix the system. The state’s best bet, he believes, is to switch to 401(k) plans for state employees, which would at least give them control over their own investments.
However, if you ask Oberweis about his own retirement portfolio, he cautions that he would not recommend his strategy to clients. For example, he doesn’t own a single bond, despite being at an age where capital preservation and income are supposed to be a priority. “None at all,” he says confidently. Why? He thinks interest rates are likely to rise substantially in the next two to four years, driving down the price of bonds. Given that risk, Oberweis is willing to shun the conventional wisdom and bet heavily on equities.
Research by Morningstar says that funds whose managers invest most heavily in them perform better than others. That makes sense: The managers follow the investment ideas in which they believe the most to greater returns. But, to an extent, managers have their hands tied when investing clients’ money. They are typically bound by their funds’ objectives as defined in the prospectus and limited in what they can buy. Their personal portfolios, however, aren’t limited by those constraints.
So Fortune decided to ask some of the most successful money managers around how they’re investing for their own retirement. Then we put them on the spot with this question: If you were forced to invest all your retirement savings in a single stock, what would it be? Of course, no stock by itself can ever replace a diversified portfolio. But sometimes it takes an impossible choice to unearth the deepest convictions.
One common theme among the investors we surveyed was that there was little enthusiasm for owning traditional bonds. (For more on fixed-income strategies, see “An oasis for yield seekers?”) Can the rest of us afford to bet our retirement on just stocks? Almost any financial adviser would tell you it’s a mistake to try. But the idea has rarely been more tempting or seemed more rational. Oberweis prefers to generate income from high-yielding stocks. He says he has 5% of his retirement portfolio in shares of dividend-paying gold miners like Freeport McMoRan and Barrick Gold. Playing the politician, Oberweis said he couldn’t pick just one stock to own.
When asked for his top pick, the younger Jim Oberweis turns the conversation to China. Since taking the helm at Oberweis Funds–where he has led the funds to best-in-class records–Jim has begun teaching his eldest teenage son the investment business. That includes taking him on trips to China to meet companies whose stocks are owned by the Oberweis China Opportunities Fund, which Jim co-manages. He likes a number of small companies. But when pressed to choose one, Jim mentions Baidu, the Chinese web search giant, as a long-term bet on China’s continued growth. “One of the biggest mistakes that people make who have 20 years until they retire is not owning China,” he says.
Here’s what our other investors had to say about their retirement investing: | We asked five top money managers to share their strategy--and their single favorite stock. | 59.411765 | 0.823529 | 0.941176 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/10/23/fidelity-charitable-customers-directed-million-ebola-aid/PgfRrceEbD12TXdd6Yi16J/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141026085007id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/10/23/fidelity-charitable-customers-directed-million-ebola-aid/PgfRrceEbD12TXdd6Yi16J/story.html | Fidelity Charitable customers directed $3.8 million to Ebola aid | 20141026085007 | Fidelity Charitable said it saw a $3 million increase in donations going to Ebola relief efforts over the past three weeks, as the crisis has surged and awareness of the disease spread.
The charitable arm of Boston-based Fidelity Investments first noted customers directing gifts to Ebola aid as early as April, according to Amy Danforth, president of Fidelity Charitable. But the activity has since jumped, and donations of $875,000 through Sept. 30 soared to $3.8 million through October.
“This is a humanitarian disaster. It’s got a different pace and timing to it” than hurricanes and other event-related emergencies, Danforth said. “What we see is a slower build as people become aware of the enormity of it.”
Some philanthropists may still be sorting out which Ebola initiatives to support, and whether to send money for immediate medical needs or for longer-term efforts to develop drugs to combat the disease.
In scenarios like this, Danforth said, large donations like the $25 milion one made recently by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to combat Ebola, can inspire others to act.
The number of grants earmarked for Ebola-related causes nearly doubled to more than 500 this month, Fidelity said. That was in addition to ongoing support by donors who were already recommending grants for health care improvements in West Africa, prior to the epidemic, Fidelity said.
Overall, Fidelity Charitable said the first nine months of the year set a record for donations. Clintes directed $1.6 billion to thousands of charities, up 27 percent from the same period in 2013. | Fidelity Charitable said it saw a $3 million increase in gifts going to Ebola relief efforts over the past three weeks, as the crisis has surged and awareness of the disease spread. | 8.685714 | 1 | 18.6 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/11/04/stop-playing-games-with-health-care/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141026093028id_/http://fortune.com/2013/11/04/stop-playing-games-with-health-care/ | Stop playing games with health care | 20141026093028 | FORTUNE — Several months ago, I sat in on a case competition at Boston University’s School of Management. The event played out over two days, during which 15 teams of five students from B-schools all over the world — India, South Korea, Canada, but mostly the U.S. — pitched their ideas for a company, one that would revolutionize health care (the stated goal was particularly jargon filled: “to leverage information technology to transform global health care and create value”).
The competition was sponsored by Merck MRK and Microsoft MSFT ; both companies sent representatives to judge the teams. Real money was on the line, too: The team with the best idea received a check for $22,500, plus the blessings and support of two multinational corporations to start up their startup. I was interested in seeing what bright MBAs-to-be were dreaming up as viable business solutions to different health care crises, and what a huge pharmaceutical and tech company thought of the ideas.
Immediately, a theme emerged, and the theme was games. “How do we gamify health care?” a presenter on one team asked, rhetorically, after listing off the growing toll chronic diseases take in both developed and developing nations (one shocking diabetes statistic she mentioned was that, in India, “only 50% are aware they have the disease, 50% of that group have access to treatment, and just 50% again adhere to their treatment, which means that about 50% again — or less than 3% — achieve some kind of normalized life”). One of the many difficulties in treating chronic diseases is that one must adhere to a strict medical regimen and see it through to the end of its prescription. Chronic disease demands chronic medication. Taking medication is no fun, but the idea that it might be made a game is, at least, as old as Mary Poppins. The cost of not adhering to the full prescription of drugs is hundreds of billions of dollars in ongoing medical expenses, to say nothing of all the money lost by a drug manufacturer like Merck. At the BU case competition, the solution to patient recidivism wasn’t a spoonful of sugar but an app on your smartphone, an app that was, without fail, some kind of a game.
MORE: Bringing financial inclusion to the Horn of Africa
As the day wore on, one of the Merck representatives finally asked, in exasperation, “Why would you make a game out of taking a pill? This will never be fun,” which is true. When the goal is good health, the “upshot should simply be getting well,” she added. Smartphone drug regimen apps seem to help the most tech-savvy and pliable group of all: children (I wrote about one such study, and the dearth of good data on health apps, a few months ago). Other teams argued that the data gleaned from users playing games, competing for arbitrary points to improve their diets or take their drugs, would help pharmaceutical companies design better drugs. “I don’t see that happening,” another Merck rep said, flatly.
The goal, the Microsoft and Merck judges all agreed, was to create an experience that requires as little input from the patient as possible. If a user must list their meal, or record what they take, when they take it, well, all of this is an opportunity to lie to your phone, or simply skip one of many steps the app demanded. Just because it’s called a game and looks like a game does not guarantee that it will be any fun.
A winner had to be announced by the end of day two, though I was growing weary and skeptical. How refreshing, then, when a team presented an idea startlingly different from all the others. It wasn’t a piece of software at all, but a backpack, filled with durable hardware (solar powered battery charger, lensless microscope, blood diagnostic tests, pulse oximeter) for collecting vital, and valuable, health data. The team was focused on collecting data from the developing world, where much of the population goes unrecorded, but the concept would work in the U.S., too, or anywhere else with people who have limited access to health services.
Do I even need to say it? The clinic in a bag won the case competition. Not only was it the most tangible solution to a real problem, but it was the most serious. Sometimes, when there’s a job to be done, trying to find that element of fun can get in the way of real, boots on the ground work. | Gamification is a buzzy word, not a real fix. | 81.818182 | 0.636364 | 0.818182 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/10/30/small-business-manufacturing-usa/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141030150344id_/http://fortune.com/2014/10/30/small-business-manufacturing-usa/ | Smaller businesses struggle to make it in the U.S.A. | 20141030150344 | In recent years U.S. manufacturing has shown hints of a comeback. In October, for example, Boston Consulting Group reported that companies with annual sales of $1 billion expect to make 47% of their products in the U.S. in five years, up from 44% last year.
For companies whose revenues don’t approach $1 billion, however, the reality has been trickier. Consider Martin Keen. Stiff competition forced him to move production of his shoe company, Keen Footwear, to China a decade ago. So in 2012, when he started his latest enterprise, Focal Upright, a maker of standup workstations, he made it a top priority to manufacture them in the U.S.
His intentions were noble—but the reality was brutal. The North Kingstown, R.I., entrepreneur struggled to find American contract factories that could produce parts for his desks. When he did find facilities, they were slow to respond to inquiries, took months to return bids, and were largely unwilling to make investments to manufacture the parts he needed. “I thought people would be chomping at the bit to build components for us,” says Keen. “But there was a lackadaisical attitude. It was very discouraging.”
The tale is a familiar one for small companies that want to manufacture in the U.S. Everyone agrees it’s a laudable, even patriotic, ideal. But modest-size businesses that rely on outsourced factories describe frustrating searches, unreturned phone calls, and prohibitive costs.
Take Boulder inventor Scott Rodwin. He found a manufacturer in Colorado Springs to make his product, the Loop, a plastic doughnut that keeps earbud cords from getting tangled. The factory made mistakes, caused shipment delays, and was slow to respond. “They often don’t even answer their phone,” he says. (The factory’s owner says he’s trying to hire new people and add more equipment and space to meet demand. “Things are a little chaotic for us as companies reshore,” he says. “I turn away work almost every day.”)
Manufacturing has succumbed to a destructive cycle: Reduced demand has led to the closing of 63,000 U.S. factories since 2000. But now that demand is returning, it seems the contract factories can’t handle it—which only encourages more foreign production. “The No. 1 reaction people have when looking into the U.S. is surprise and dissatisfaction about how few options there are,” says Josh Green, CEO of Panjiva, an online directory for manufacturing suppliers.
Closing Time The number of U.S. factories has dropped more than 15% since 2001Graphic Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Entrepreneurs aren’t a priority for contract manufacturers, which don’t want to invest time and effort in projects for shaky startups, says Harry Moser, president of the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit that encourages domestic manufacturing. Moreover, Chinese facilities often offer advantages over U.S. ones. American factories tend to focus on narrow areas, such as electrical assemblies, machine parts, or fabricated metal. China, by contrast, built up plants that can make components, assemble finished products, and ship them, all in one place. “We don’t have many companies here that you can say, ‘Here’s a design for a bicycle or a refrigerator. Go make it,’” Moser says. “Skilled labor is also a problem. Chinese people are still hungry enough to do these jobs.”
Ironically, China’s outsize success—which has caused wages to rise—now offers opportunity for U.S. contract factories. If you include transportation, the cost to manufacture in China has more than doubled since 2000, and wages are expected to leap by 10% or more, according to a recent report by Bank of America. By making products at home, U.S. companies contend, they can carry smaller inventory and deal with fewer language barriers, travel hassles, and worries that their products will be counterfeited. Moreover, the phrase “made in America” has a golden marketing glow: 90% of consumers say they have a favorable opinion of domestically manufactured products, according to a survey by Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research.
All that makes America look a lot more attractive. Behemoths like Ford, Apple, Whirlpool, and Toyota are already bringing manufacturing jobs back. Wal-Mart, once vilified for killing U.S. manufacturing jobs by stocking ultra-cheap goods, is attempting to support the reshoring trend by pledging to buy an additional $250 billion worth of American-made products over 10 years. In the past 18 months Wal-Mart stocked shelves with hundreds of U.S. products, from Lincoln Logs made in Maine to candles melted in Arkansas.
Still, the retailer’s demand for both domestic production and low prices can become a catch-22. Rodwin says a buyer from Wal-Mart wanted to carry his earbud loop in stores as part of its made in the U.S.A. initiative, but the talks fizzled because he wanted a price that could be achieved only if the Loop were manufactured in China. “There would have been no profit and no money for our overhead,” says Rodwin. He eventually moved production to China.
“The No. 1 reaction people have when looking into the U.S. is surprise and dissatisfaction about how few options there are.”—Josh Green, CEO of Panjiva
Entrepreneurs committed to domestic production must get creative. Alexandra Ferguson, for example, got her start in her living room six years ago, making pillows with sassy phrases that she sold on Etsy. When she couldn’t find a U.S. factory that could die-cut, letter, and sew her pillows at a high quality in one place, she got a bank loan to open her own tiny factory in Brooklyn. Ferguson now has an agile and expert six-person operation that can produce pillows quickly, in small batches, which lets her avoid unsold inventory. “I can make five of something or 10 of something,” she says. “I can take a custom order and get it out the door in two hours.”
Three tips FOR MANUFACTURING IT IN THE U.S. Make it easy to make: To ensure your product can be constructed at the right price, consider the manufacturing process when designing it. That may mean eliminating unused features or using a design that eliminates time-consuming labor.
The more local the better: Using nearby factories makes it easier to monitor work, reducing the risk of costly mistakes. It also makes it easier to regulate inventory.
Use a matchmaker: A cottage industry of resources to help small enterprises has emerged in recent years. State and local nonprofits, including UtahCan.net, MadeinNYC.org, and MadeinChicago.org, offer help on prototyping, design, and production, as does for-profit MakersRow.com. The Manufacturing Extension Partnership offers a matching service, while MFG.com and Fabricating.com let you get bids from suppliers.
With overhead high, Ferguson must sell her pillows at a premium price of $100 apiece. But so far the cost doesn’t appear to deter the niche of customers who covet a U.S. artisanal style. With $1 million in sales, Ferguson also hopes to boost revenue this year by sewing products for other companies too.
Keen has taken the long view. Because Focal Upright couldn’t find factories here, he initially started making parts overseas in Asia and Germany. The company has gradually started moving production to the U.S., finding suppliers in four states with a goal of buying 60% of its parts in America by the end of the year. Finally, in September, Focal Upright opened its own factory to assemble the workstations. “So much manufacturing has left the country, it has almost forced me to be a manufacturer,” says Keen. “But I am determined to do the right thing.”
This story appears in the November 17, 2014 issue of Fortune. | Domestic manufacturing remains a challenge for even the most patriotic modest-size enterprises. | 100.266667 | 0.8 | 1.333333 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/04/26/apple-proves-that-a-lower-corporate-tax-rate-wont-matter/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141104093626id_/http://fortune.com/2013/04/26/apple-proves-that-a-lower-corporate-tax-rate-wont-matter/ | Apple proves that a lower corporate tax rate won’t matter | 20141104093626 | FORTUNE — There’s a widely shared idea that if the U.S. reduced its corporate income tax rate to 25% from the current 35%, big corporations would stop playing tax games. They would then pour all their attention into profit-making rather than allocating a ton of talent to tax avoidance, and we would all be richer and happier as a result.
Apple’s recent plan to supposedly return a big part of its company’s cash hoard to investors shows how naïve that kind of thinking is. And, by the way, it also shows that Apple AAPL is actually more into playing tax and accounting games than it is into returning cash.
As you likely know, about two-thirds of the $145 billion of cash on Apple’s books is held in overseas subsidiaries, and Apple would have to pay U.S. income tax if it used that money in the U.S. So instead of bringing in money from overseas to pay for its stepped-up stock buybacks and higher cash dividend, Apple will borrow money instead.
It’s a perfect tax arbitrage. Let’s say Apple borrows money at an interest cost of 3% a year (which is more than it would likely pay), and uses it to buy back stock at the current price of about $410 a share. Each share that Apple buys back will reduce its annual dividend obligation by $12.20 a share, at the company’s current dividend rate. The interest on the borrowed money would be $12.30 a share — about the same as the dividend. But interest is tax deductible, and dividends aren’t.
MORE: Apple’s iCar is finally here
At a 35% tax rate, the borrowed money would cost Apple $8 after taxes for each share it bought back. That’s significantly less than the $12.20 after-tax cost of its $12.20 dividend. At a 25% tax rate, the borrowing would cost $9.23 after taxes — but that’s still less than $12.20. So lowering the tax rate to 25% from 35% doesn’t remove Apple’s incentive to play the deduct-interest-to-retire-stock tax game. It would be less lucrative than it is at 35% — but it’s still lucrative. And, by the way, the borrowing-to-buy back maneuver would not only reduce Apple’s taxes, it would increase its earnings per share.
With tax rates at 35%, it’s considerably cheaper for Apple to borrow money in the U.S. than it would be for it to repatriate cash held in foreign subsidiaries. But even if the tax rate were only 25%, it would still be cheaper for it to borrow than to repatriate.
Besides, history shows that lowering the corporate tax rate doesn’t reduce companies’ desires to play games. The 1986 tax reform act reduced the corporate rate to 34% from the previous 46%. So what happened? After a brief period, probably measured in nanoseconds, companies began trying to get around the 34% (now 35%) rate the same way they had tried to get around the 46% rate.
There’s a wonderful series that Reuters published last year detailing the efforts made by European subsidiaries of U.S. multinationals like Starbucks SBUX and Amazon AMZN and eBay EBAY to move taxable income out of places like England, Germany, and France, which have corporate rates in the mid-20s, to places like Luxembourg, where rates are considerably lower.
MORE: 22 analysts cut their Apple price targets
These games are familiar to those of us who follow U.S. tax policy, such as it is. You set up a subsidiary in a low-tax area that owns “intellectual property,” and that collects royalties that subsidiaries in higher-tax areas get to deduct. You have all sorts of intra-corporate loans, with tax-deductible interest paid in higher-tax areas and collected in low-tax and no-tax areas. And on and on and on. Except that instead of moving income from the U.S. to low-tax places, you move income from higher-tax European countries to lower-tax European countries.
The bottom line: Even if Washington gridlock is broken long enough to cut the corporate rate to 25%, there will always be a Luxembourg or a Cayman Islands, or some other low-tax Shangri-la that will offer rates low enough to keep tax lawyers gainfully employed. You can take it to the bank. An offshore bank, of course. | A lower corporate tax rate won't deter companies from playing tax and accounting games. Just look at Apple's math. | 37.826087 | 0.695652 | 1.826087 | high | low | mixed |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Michael-Crabtree-won-t-blame-injuries-for-so-so-5876776.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20141107051910id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Michael-Crabtree-won-t-blame-injuries-for-so-so-5876776.php | Michael Crabtree won’t blame injuries for so-so season | 20141107051910 | Eric Branc, San Francisco Chronicle
Photo: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images
Michael Crabtree (right) hasn’t been on injury reports, yet has only 13 catches for 132 yards and one TD in his past four games.
Michael Crabtree (right) hasn’t been on injury reports, yet has...
Michael Crabtree won’t blame injuries for so-so season
Niners wide receiver Michael Crabtree acknowledged his 2014 season has been below his expectations, but he wanted to make one thing abundantly clear Thursday: His so-so campaign is not connected to another injury to his left foot, which has undergone two surgeries since 2009.
In a win against the Eagles on Sept. 28, Crabtree briefly left the game and the medical staff examined his left foot before he retreated to the locker room. He came back to finish the game and hasn’t appeared on the injury report since Oct. 3. He was listed as probable before a win against the Chiefs on Oct. 5.
Crabtree, who is in the final year of his contract, was asked if his left foot has hindered him this season. He sounded like a pending free agent who wanted to shake a reputation for being injury prone. Crabtree tore his right Achilles tendon last year.
“What are you talking about about a foot?” Crabtree said. “I’ve played eight games since then and you’re talking about my foot? We’re good, man. That ain’t even a question to even ask me.”
Crabtree has actually played four games since exiting against the Eagles. In that period, he has 13 catches for 132 yards and a touchdown. In the three contests before the Eagles game, he had 19 catches for 187 yards and two touchdowns.
Crabtree ranks 66th in the NFL in receiving yards (362) and is averaging just 9.8 yards a catch. He averaged 14.9 yards a reception last year in the five regular-season games he played after his Achilles surgery. His seven drops are tied for second-most among receivers, according to Pro Football Focus.
His assessment of his season?
“I always have high expectations for myself,” he said. “It ain’t where I want it to be. That’s why I work hard every day. That’s why I try to catch every pass. Whatever they give me, I just try my hardest to work with it. I’ve been here before. You guys see what you see.”
Willis likely sidelined: Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio didn’t rule Patrick Willis out of Sunday’s game at New Orleans, but he also wasn’t brimming with optimism when asked about the inside linebacker’s availability.
“It’s questionable,” Fangio said. “As the week rolls on, and if he doesn’t start practicing at some point, it starts moving to doubtful.”
Two hours after Fangio met with the media, Willis (sprained toe) sat out practice for the second straight day. Last week, Willis was limited in practice — he went through individual drills — which raised the question if he’s had a setback.
“I don’t think he suffered a setback,” Fangio said. “It just hasn’t gotten much better.”
Rookie Chris Borland would make his third career start if Willis is inactive Sunday.
Dorsey could debut: Nose tackle Glenn Dorsey could make his 2014 debut Sunday after tearing his biceps in training camp. Dorsey, who returned to practice last week, could fill the currently open roster spot if he’s activated this week. Fangio said Dorsey’s chances of playing are “50-50.”
Rookie’s role: Outside linebacker Aldon Smith will return from his nine-game suspension next week, but his presence isn’t likely to send rookie Aaron Lynch to the bench.
Lynch has been a pass-rusher in the nickel defense while Dan Skuta has played base downs. Fangio suggested Lynch would retain his same role when Smith returns, meaning he would cut into Ahmad Brooks’ playing time at the other outside linebacker spot.
“As long as Aaron keeps playing the way he’s playing right now, as far as in the nickel stuff, he’ll be in there,” Fangio said.
Lynch could make his first career start Sunday with Skuta dealing with an ankle injury. Skuta hasn’t practiced this week.
Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @Eric_Branch | Niners wide receiver Michael Crabtree acknowledged his 2014 season has been below his expectations, but he wanted to make one thing abundantly clear Thursday: In a win against the Eagles on Sept. 28, Crabtree briefly left the game and the medical staff examined his left foot before he retreated to the locker room. In the three contests before the Eagles game, he had 19 catches for 187 yards and two touchdowns. Crabtree ranks 66th in the NFL in receiving yards (362) and is averaging just 9.8 yards a catch. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio didnât rule Patrick Willis out of Sundayâs game at New Orleans, but he also wasnât brimming with optimism when asked about the inside linebackerâs availability. Two hours after Fangio met with the media, Willis (sprained toe) sat out practice for the second straight day. Nose tackle Glenn Dorsey could make his 2014 debut Sunday after tearing his biceps in training camp. Fangio suggested Lynch would retain his same role when Smith returns, meaning he would cut into Ahmad Brooksâ playing time at the other outside linebacker spot. | 4.229268 | 0.941463 | 19.068293 | low | medium | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/11/08/eddie-bauers-path/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141108165335id_/http://fortune.com/2014/11/08/eddie-bauers-path/ | Does Eddie Bauer’s path to growth lead through urban areas? | 20141108165335 | Eddie Bauer’s outwear is meant for active enthusiasts to pursue the great, open outdoors. But the company’s future growth may rest on the shoulders of urban dwellers.
The outerwear and apparel maker, with about 300 stores in North America today, says it sees a clear path to open an additional 200 locations. That expansion can be partly fueled by new locations in major cities where it doesn’t currently have a presence, including New York City and Los Angeles.
Eddie Bauer recently opened a Manhattan store — a fairly small pop-up location that the retailer intends to fully renovate next year. It will be the brand’s first location in the city since 2007.
“We know we have a lot of customers in the area,” Eddie Bauer Chief Executive Mike Egeck told Fortune. He said the company crunched data gleaned from its online business shows the retailer has “at least 20,000” customers in Manhattan, and some 250,000 Eddie Bauer shoppers in New York.
Eddie Bauer’s roots can be traced to 1936, when the company’s namesake founder developed the first quilted goose down jacket in North America. The company’s heritage is a “great American authentic outdoor brand,” according to Egeck, and the company has worked hard to reestablish that image after landing in bankruptcy in 2009.
Over the past few years, Eddie Bauer has focused more on designing technical outdoor products, introducing a line of shoes for the first time ever this year, and the retailer has also developed more gear for the warmer months. Today Eddie Bauer is more like The North Face and Columbia Sportswear, and less like Ann Taylor and Talbots — two chains it found itself competing with at a dark time for the apparel maker.
“There are 45 million outdoor enthusiasts in the U.S.,” said Egeck, in a nod to the customer base Eddie Bauer hopes to tap. Egeck, a retail executive with years of experience in the outwear and denim industries, is an avid hiker.
The adult activewear market is worth over $30 billion in the U.S., according to research firm NPD Group. Though Eddie Bauer, owned by private-equity firm Golden Gate Capital, won’t disclose annual sales, it is fair to assume the brand is pretty tiny. The company was nearly acquired earlier this year for $825 million, a deal with Jos. A. Bank Clothiers that was terminated after Men’s Wearhouse MW bought Jos.
Beyond store expansion, Eddie Bauer is also focused on diversifying its apparel line. The company generates 65% of annual sales in the fourth quarter, so it is highly exposed to the cold weather months. And while last year was particularly cold in North America, not every winter will be that severe.
“They can’t just be cold weather gear,” said Ron Friedman, a retail consultant for accounting and advisory firm Marcum LLP. “That’s only good for six to eight months maximum. Diversification of products should be important to them.”
Egeck says those efforts are already underway. The company’s shoe business is meant to be a year-round offering. It also has a travel line meant for the spring and summer months, and sells a new line of lighter, reversible jackets that feature bright colors on one side (for visibility on the mountain) and more muted colors for around town.
“What we find in the outdoor market is there are a ton of people that may only go hiking two or three times a year, or ski four or five times a year, but they still define themselves as a hiker or skier,” Egeck said. “But then they’ll also wear [the clothes] day to day as an identifying badge that says, ‘I am an outdoor customer.'”
And those potential customers are also walking around the streets of Manhattan. | Outerwear and apparel maker says it sees a clear path to open an additional 200 locations. | 43.588235 | 1 | 10.882353 | high | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2012/07/22/groupthink-fortune-1952/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141109023928id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/07/22/groupthink-fortune-1952/ | Groupthink, (Fortune 1952) | 20141109023928 | Editor’s note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite story from our magazine archives. The Penn State abuse scandal has rekindled interest in the term “groupthink,” one that was coined in the pages of this magazine in 1952. What follows is the original article on Groupthink, which was part of the magazine’s Communication series.
FORTUNE — A very curious thing has been taking place in this country — and almost without our knowing it. In a country where “individualism” — independence and self-reliance — was the watchword for three centuries, the view is now coming to be accepted that the individual himself has no meaning — except, that is, as a member of a group. “Group integration,” “group equilibrimn,” “interpersonal relations,” “training for group living,” “group dynamics,” “social interaction,” “social physics”; more and more the notes are sounded — each innocuous or legitimate in itself, but together a theme that has become unmistakable.
In a sense, this emphasis is a measure of success. We have had to learn how to get along in groups. With the evolution of today’s giant organizations — in business, in government, in labor, in education, in big cities-we have created a whole new social structure for ourselves, and one so complex that we’re still trying to figure out just what happened. But the American genius for cooperative action has served us well “Human relations” may not be an American invention, but in no country have people turned so wholeheartedly to the job of mastering the group skills on which our industrial society places such a premium.
But the pendulum has swung too far. Take, for example, the growing popularity of “social engineering” (FORTUNE, January, 1952) with its emphasis on the planned manipulation of the individual into the group role. Or, even more striking, the extraordinary efforts of some corporations to encompass the executive’s wife in the organization–often with the willing acquiescence of the wife in the merger (FORTUNE, October, 1951). And these, as we hope to demonstrate, are no isolated phenomena; recent public-opinion polls, slick-magazine fiction, current best-sellers, all document the same trend. Groupthink is becoming a national philosophy.
Groupthink being a coinage — and, admittedly, a loaded one — a working definition is in order. We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity — it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity- an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well. Three mutually supporting ideas form the underpinning: (1) that moral values and ethics are relative; (2) that what is important is the kind of behavior and attitudes that makes for the harmonious functioning of the group; (3) that the best way to achieve this is through the application of “scientific” techniques.
Once grasped, as the work of the social engineers makes clear, these principles lead us to an entirely new view of man. And what a dismal fellow he is ! For the man we are now presented with is Social Man — completely a creature of his environment, guided almost totally by the whims and prejudices of the group, and incapable of any real self-determination of his destiny. Only through social engineeringi. e., applied groupthink–can he be saved. The path to salvation, social engineers explain, lies in a trained elite that will benevolently manipiilate us into group harmony. And who’s to be the elite? Social engineers modestly clear their throats.
This vision of a new elite guiding us to the integrated life has inspired some interesting speculations (e.g., Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). The real danger, however, is something else again. It is not that the layman will be pushed around by the social engineers: it is that he will become one himself. Rather than the pawn of the experts, he will be the willing apprentice-and embrace groupthink as the road to security.
Is this coming to pass? Let’s look for a moment at the direction American values are taking among the oncoming generations. There has been a rather disturbing amount of evidence that they are changing rapidly-and in a way that must warm social engineers’ hearts. Every study made of the younger generation, every portrayal they make of themselves-from their dating habits to their artistic inclinations uncovers one clear fact: our youth is the most group-minded we have ever had. Gregariousness, Time’s recent study indicated (November 5, 1951), has become a necessity. “They are parts of groups,” one girl shrewdly appraises her contemporaries. “When they are alone they are bored with themselves.”
While youngsters are not inclined to philosophize, their attitude toward life adds up to a fairly discernible set of values. It could be described as a “practical” relativism. The old absolute moral values are disappearing. There is still black and white, to be sure, but it is no longer determined by fixed precepts; it is determined rather by what the group thinks is black and white — and if someone does things the way his group does, well, who is to censure him for his loyalty?
The colleges furnish documentation of the drift. If recent surveys are any indication (FORTUNE, June, 1949), a startling swing has taken place among students to the twin ideals of group harmony and expertism. “These men,” one of their mentors says in praise, “don’t question the . system. Their main aim is to make it work better-to get in there and lubricate the machinery. They’re not rebels; they’ll be social technicians for a better society.”
The registrar’s records bear him out. Along with a concurrent drift from the humanities, there has been a tremendous increase in specialized courses — and of specialization within specialties. Significantly, the courses that enjoyed the most phenomenal popularity among postwar classes were those connected with personnel work. “I like people ” became a universal cry, and in droves students aiming for business turned thumbs down on the idea of general, executive apprenticeship in favor of personnel work; here, with stop watch and slip stick in hand, they could measure away, safe from the doubts and intangibles of the world without. The picture was a mirage, of course, but it was only by the most strenuous efforts of placement officers and corporation personnel people that students gave it up.
Does entry into business life transform these values? Apparently not. Talk with members of the younger generation of management-and we speak not of the disaffected but of the successful-and one is struck by a curious strain of resignation that often runs through their discussion. Like the heroes of J. P. Marquand’s perceptive novels, they are disturbed by a sense of individual impotence. Dispassionately, they describe themselves primarily as members of their environment-men more acted upon than acting. They are neither angry nor cynical about it; they are caught on a “treadmill” from which they will never escape, perhaps-but the treadmill is pleasant enough, they explain, and in the group role they find the emotional security they want so very badly.
So with their wives (FORTUNE, October and November, 1951). No matter what problem they are discussing — from the possibility of advancement to the style of their living-they instinctively phrase their problems in terms of their relations with the group. The relations, they concede, are not simple-there are the girls, the gang on Ferncrest Road, Charlie’s people at the office, and a host of lesser constellations to conjure with. Tough as the job may be, however, it is a job to which they have dedicated themselves.
Turn to the image of the good life in popular cultures and you find the same phenomenon at work. Slick-magazine fiction tells the story. It has never, of course, exactly called for a rebellion against the status quo, but back in the thirties it did present heroes and heroines who engaged in some kind of mild strife with their environment, told the boss off, or did something equally contentious. No longer. A FORTUNE analysis of 1935-36 plots and 1950-51 plots indicates that heroes and heroines have been growing remarkably submissive. Not only is the system they abide by-be it an Army camp, a business office, or a small-town environment-shown as more benevolent; in some cases the system itself becomes the deus ex machina that solves the problem.
So in serious fiction. More and more, writers are concerning themselves with the relationship of the individual to the group, and more and more resolving it in favor of the latter. The system — and they don’t mean God or the universe — is eventually revealed to the hero as bigger than any of us, and thus it is not only foolish but wrong for him not to reconcile himself to it. From the extreme of the angry, to-hell-with-the-whole-lousy-setup tracts of the 1930’s we seem to be going whole hog in the opposite direction.
Let us have a look at the current bestseller, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Since it is about the Navy, the system shown has some aspects peculiar to service life. The basic question posed, however the individual’s place in the system, has great universality, and in an excitingly told tale Wouk sketches one point of view with such striking overtones that the book could almost go down as a landmark in the shift of American values.
The story tells of the terrible dilemma facing the officers of a mine sweeper; their captain, one Queeg, is a neurotic, cowardly incompetent. A typhoon brings the problem to the breaking point. Through hysteria and cowardice, Queeg is about to sink the ship. In vain, Maryk, the stolid, conventional executive officer, tries to get him to keep the ship headed into the wind. Queeg refuses. In the nick of time, Maryk makes his decision. Under Article 184 of Navy Regulations, he relieves Queeg of his command. The ship is saved.
What is the moral? Maryk, we find, shouldn’t have done it. Says the author’s protagonist, Lieutenant Willy Keith in a letter to his girl (p. 463) : ” … I see that we were in the wrong … The idea is, once you get an incompetent ass of a skipper and it’s a chance of war — there’s nothing to do but serve him as though he were the wisest and the best, cover his mistakes, keep the ship going, and bear up. So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood’s barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up.”
In other times, perhaps, this definition of maturity might have been regarded as downright parody. Obedience and discipline few could have caviled at. But would they have applauded the counseling of an obedience, so abject, so unquestioning, that we are asked, in effect, not only to put up with the evils of a system but to regard them as a right — to reach out, as Norbert Weiner’s phrase goes, and kiss the whip that lashes us? Would they have joined in censuring an act to which the only logical alternative is the passive sacrifice of several hundred lives? Hardly. The executive officer’s action might well have been seen as an act of great moral courage-and one, furthermore, in true allegiance to the service; it did, after all, save the ship. The other byproduct, the withdrawal of Queeg from line command, might also have been interpreted as something less than a disaster to the system.
Not so A.D. 1952. The moral, to judge from what critics and readers have been saying about it, has struck exactly the right chord. The exec, as the dust jacket has it, was merely a well-meaning man “beyond his depth,” and more to be pitied than censured. It is not for the individual to question the competence of the Queegs a system may contain. Queeg was a teacher. Queegs are necessary. We needed Queegs to win the war. So goes the assent. “It is about time that more books of this sort were written,” says J. P. Marquand. “The lesson the newcomer must learn is in many ways the antithesis of democracy. It is essentially a final acceptance of the doctrine that full and unquestioning obedience must be accorded a superior officer, no matter how personally odious or stupid this individual may be — and that without this individual surrender we can never win a war.”
What makes this wave of the present particularly unsettling is the surprising fact that it is in rhythm with one of the dominant currents in contemporary American academic thought. It would be a mistake, of course, to treat the connection as cause and effect; groupthink’s roots go too deep to be so summarily explained. But it would be just as much of an error to dismiss the academic underpinnings, as the layman is so tempted to do, as mere ivory tower mumbo jumbo. The ideology of groupthink is often incomprehensible to the uninitiated, but it is of great power nonetheless. Translated by its disciples in hundreds of lecture halls and papers, and by their disciples in turn, it has given a purpose and direction to the groupthink movement that it would otherwise lack.
The movement, in a sense, is an offshoot of the great academic revolt at the turn of the century against formalism. To Young Turks of the day the individualistic tradition of American thought needed redefinition. Too much attention, they felt, had been concentrated on the lone individual; as a consequence, the rigid values built up for his protection were inapplicable to the great social upheavals that were taking place. What was needed was a social view of man — man as a unit of the group — and a willingness to adapt society to his needs.
Most of the credit generally goes to John Dewey, who, with William Kilpatrick, gave “progressive” education its impetus. But there were many others — Veblen in economics, for example, and Roscoe Pound in the law (“The law is social engineering”). Like a fresh breeze, through almost every field of American thought, the new concepts swept, as converts enthusiastically fell to whacking away at the restrictions of the old absolutes. Social Man was coming of age.
When the cultural anthropologists got to work on him, his final link to the old moral absolutes was severed. From their comparisons of primitive cultures, and, later, our own, many anthropologists came to the view that the ethics of a people are relative. By this they do not mean that ethics are unimportant, but rather that they are not to be judged by any abstract conceptions of “right” or “wrong.” For if we realize that other cultures and ethics are “equally valid,” to use Ruth Benedict’s phrase, then we will be jogged into giving up all the more readily our outworn traditions and our illusions of individual autonomy. “It is not any particular set of values,” another anthropologist explains, “but a way of looking at them that is important.”
A half-century has gone by and the relativistic, social view of man idea is still gaining. The appetite for cultural anthropology, for example, has been growing at such a rate that Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, first published in 1931, has reached, after a phenomenal newsstand sale, the No. 1 best-seller spot in the Mentor paper-book series.
In several essentials, however, the nature of the movement against formalism has changed drastically. What started as a healthy revolt against dogmatism has produced an offshoot that has succeeded in becoming the new dogmatism itself. And since, like all dogmatisms, it promises respite from uncertainty, a society still shell-shocked by the upheavals of the twentieth century hasn’t bothered yet to question its effects too closely. To be sure, those of the groupthink leaning customarily speak of themselves as rebels fighting an uphill battle against the enemy (“medievalists,” “academicians,” “absolutists”) but the dog they are kicking is practically dead. They won that battle long ago.
Certainly so in one sector of education. Thanks to a strenuous academic controversy, the momentum of the militantly “progressive” brand was slowed down some time back. Groupthink, however, cannot be contained by a label, and to a formidable body of educators the basic ideal of adjustment to group values is so taken for granted that the only remaining job would appear to be working up better ways of bringing it about. “The American educator,” writes one of them, Professor Stewart Cole, “[must] treat pupils as persons-in-groups-in-American-culture at every stage of their social learning.” To do this the teacher should borrow from such disciplines as anthropology, the social sciences, psychology, and group dynamics. “The social interactions” of teachers and pupils should be “the primary channel of learning the good life for America.”*
*Educators of this bent cannot be accused of swimming against the current. As a recent Elmo Roper poll indicates, most Americans now feel the second most important reason for sending children to high school is “to teach them to get along better with other people.” (No.1: to get them ready for a job.)
In this free, permissive atmosphere, the idea that the individual should be regarded as personally accountable for the way he behaves is, of course, old hat. And in the popular view as well. “If your young son sticks his tongue out at you and calls you a nasty old stinkpot,” an article in American Magazine good-humoredly, but approvingly, counsels, “just ignore the insult and rejoice secretly that you have such a fine normal child. He is simply channeling his aggressive, aggrieved feelings harmlessly by verbal projection.”
Where “social interaction” is the watchword, the attitude conditioning is left, in large part, to the child’s peers. Even more than their elders, they are quick to reward deviance with hefty interaction; and thus in the natural distaste of the crowd for the individualist we now have a social tool. And this, the child learns from the books written for him, is as it should be. In these tales of fire engines and trains, as David Riesman has documented in his disturbing study, The Lonely Crowd, the neophyte. groupthinker is taught that one wins by being directed by others — and that the most important thing in the world is to be a team player.
To further ensure that the child need never be a person-not-in-groups, the necessity for little groupthinkers to think as individuals all by themselves may soon be obviated altogether. Individual homework is now to be eliminated. Writes Amy Selwyn in the Reader’s Digest,“Now authorities generally agree that children learn best if they do their learning in groups and talk out loud about lessons as they work.
‘No homework’ spokesmen also say if children were not required to spend their leisure studying they would not develop the resentment against study which often kills all incentive to learn anything . . .”
Lest the layman presume to question the drift, groupthinkers explain that their work is rooted in the Scientific Method, and that now being a holy phrase, it is made plain that the debate is closed to outsiders — if indeed any grounds for debate exist at all.* “Because this new ‘doctrine’ has for its base objective findings in anthropology, social psychology, mental hygiene, and scientific child study,” Professor Alain Locke of Howard University says, “there is an authoritative consensus back of these newer educational procedures that few would care to challenge.
*”I should like to see teachers and professors as sure of themselves, as confident in their training and experience, as surgeons are, and as impatient of lay advice”-Margaret B. Pickel, Dean of Women, Columbia University; New York Times Magazine, June 3, 1951.
On the brink of nonsense
He is right. Many educators have seriously questioned the excesses of educational groupthink, but a large proportion of them are curiously loath to do it out loud right now. Criticism of the misapplications of science, they know, will be quickly seized as an attack on science itself. To muddy matters even more, those of the extremist fringe (notably Allen Zoll) have succeeded in putting something of the kiss of death on public discussion by their attacks on “progressive” education. They are really attacking something else, of course; their reasoning is erroneous and their motives suspect. Nevertheless, many people who have a respectable argument to make hesitate for fear they will lose their standing as liberals. The debate, however, cannot long be deferred — certainly so when it can be said, with some justification, that the best friend progressive education has today is Allen Zoll.
There are some signs that the wider implications of the groupthink movement may at last provoke a counterrevolution. Significantly, some of the most astringent critiques of groupthink are coming from the ranks of the sociologists (cf. “The Image of Man in the Social Sciences”Reinhard Bendix in Commentary,February, 1951). In its application to the law, Roscoe Pound himself has been led to protest the degree to which the social-utility concept has supplanted firm values. Similarly, in England — which suffers groupthink too –educator Sir Walter Moberly has been stirring the universities to a reexaminationof the British variant.
But the best hope may well lie in the ambitions of the groupthinkers themselves. They stand poised, finally, on the threshold of pure nonsense. For a long time they have been growing uncomfortable over their apparent denial of ethical relevance. As the anthropologists themselves point out, man does need a firm sense of right and wrong, and an excessively relative view destroys the old firmness.
This does not mean, however, that the groupthinkers are chastened. Quite the contrary. They now propose to cure this pitfall’ of scientism with more scientism. Ethics are to be made “a matter of scientific investigation.” To some, this merely means an objective study of ethics — certainly a proper enough task. To the groupthinker, however, it means nothing less than a theoretical apparatus for the scientific determination of what is “good” or “bad.” And thus “to the innermost citadel of dogmatic thinking, the realm of values,” they hopefully turn. “The conquest of the field of values,” as one sounds the call, “would be almost the concluding triumph.” He couldn’t be more correct.
Why should so despairing an ideology be so popularly contagious? In a society where the old family and community ties that so long cemented it have broken down, the impulse for association is an instinctive and healthy response. But a sense of “belonging,” a sense of meaningful association with others, has never required that one sacrifice his individuality as part of the bargain. Why, then, do so many rush to embrace a philosophy that tells them it is necessary? Why, like the moth, do we fly to the one thing that will consume us? Why, in a country with the sort of healthy political and economic base that has historically nourished individualism, are we so pathetically eager to join up in flatulent brotherhood?
To explain this impulse is to explain our blind faith in scientism as well. For their appeal is common, and many as the variations may be, they come back, eventually, to one simple, compelling theme.
They offer us freedom from moral choice.
Through the deification of group harmony, buck-passing a moral decision becomes itself a moral act; the system-as The Caine Mutiny advocates-attends to these things so much better than the individual, and he might just as well relax and enjoy it.
And there is freedom in another sense as well. Moral dilemmas exist because there is uncertainty. If we can now abstract a few parts from the whole of human nature and by analysis predict objectively what will make for group harmony, the intangibles that make individual decisions so poignant may be obviated altogether. Like a general who is blessed with perfect intelligence of the enemy, we will have only one valid course of action before us. We will have finally latched on to certainty.
Once this denial of moral relevance is made, folly must be the consequence. For groupthinkers go on to assure themselves that in groupthink itself one finds moral fulfillment. It is not put this crudely, of course; by what has now become a ritualistic explanation, our eyes are directed upward to the goal of harmony, group integration, dynamic equilibrium; upward to a golden mean in which everyone will finally attain the blessed state of-grace? No, the state of “participation.”
But participation for what? As a fundamental of the democratic process, as a means of self-expression and development, participation is abundantly desirable. In this sense, FORTUNE has argued strongly for participation; it has reported its application to the problems of management and will continue to. But the word, like its blood brothers “communication” and “adjust,” is assuming a sort of end-all quality. So let us put the question: Why participate?
In the litany of groupthink the answers describe a complete circle. One participates for the end of “social integration,” for “community-centered cohesion,” for better “interpersonal relations,” for “group harmony,” for the reduction of “social tensions,” for adjustment to the environment. One participates, in other words, that he may participate. And so the end is really only a means after all. Good means, yes, but as an encompassing philosophy, somewhat less than complete.
Even as a means, participation can be a tricky concept. It is easily confused with getting a number of people to do what one did before. And in this aspect, unfortunately, it provides the resolutely pedestrian with a way of cutting down to size their up-and-coming brethren. Similarly it offers the faint of heart an alibi for ducking responsibility-if a broth is to be spoiled, it’s convenient to have too many cooks participate.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of groupthink is the success with which its double-talk has used the old concepts of individualism to justify their opposite. By letting others decide, one decides. By submitting oneself to the group, one becomes an individual. “It is precisely this gradual change in our mental horizon-new assumptions and hypotheses taken as factual description — that is sinister,” says Lincoln Reis, professor of philosophy at Bard College. “So that while we are presented with a logical horror, we find it established and accepted widely as a fact. Nowhere vulnerable to intelligence, it is as impervious as a nightmare.”
It is impervious because the ideal of unity it holds out obscures for us some disagreeable facts of life — and the necessity for facing them on moral grounds. “Communication” is a term in point. As used in its cult sense, it implies the facile premise that the conflicts that plague us are due simply to “blocks” in the communication flow, and that if we get the technical hang of it, all will be well. Up to a point this is true. But people do not always argue because they misunderstand one another; they argue because they hold different goals. These will always be a matter of debate, and attempts to evade. it through “nonpartisan” communication or “education” programs simply beg the question.
“Unity” is a double-edged sword. As our young corporation wife is witness, group harmony is not an unmixed blessing; conversely, neither are frustrations and tensions necessarily bad. They can be fruitful; indeed, progress is often dependent on producing rather than mitigating them. In large part, also, they stem from the scores of conflicting loyalties and allegiances we enjoy in a fluid society. Unless we forswear . these in complete fealty to one embracing organization, there is no easy way to escape the moral decisions they force upon us. Nor should there be. The danger, as Clark Kerr points out, “is not that loyalties are divided today, but that they may beco. me undivided tomorrow.”
It is precisely this smothering of the individual that the drift to groupthink seems to be making more and more imminent. Few groupthinkers, to be sure, believe themselves against the individual. But in looking so intently at man as a member of the group, they have made man seem important in this role only. There is the frequent explanation, of course, that only by group participation is the individual’s potential realized. But this is only a half-truth. Individual excellence must involve something more than a respect for the group and a skill in working with it. “The sphere of individual action,” writes Bertrand Russell, “is not to be regarded as ethically inferior to that of social duty. On the contrary, some of the best of human activities are, at least in feeling, rather personal than social. . . Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers, are men whose lives are dominated by a vision. ..It . . .is such men who put into the world the things that we most value.”
Few of us are potential geniuses, but the constant admonition to harmonize and integrate affects us nonetheless. Each day we are faced with a multitude of decisions. Should we trust our own judgment? Or does the group’s view have an inherent rightness we cannot match?
The new values would incline us to the easy harmony of the group view, for they would have us suppose that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; that the system has a wisdom beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. But this is not necessarily so. Man can be greater than the group, and his lone imagination worth a thousand graphs.
He is not often a creator, but even as spectator as “the common man,” he can rise in way his past performance would not predict. To aim at his common denominators in the name of ultimate democracy is to despise him, to perpetuate his mediocrities, and to conceive him incapable of responding to anything better than the echo of his prejudices. The “equilibrium” that is the compact to be made with this boor is inevitably static, and the trouble is not solved by sticking the adjective dynamic in front of it.
Has the individual reached a low enough estate for us to become concerned? When the nation’s best-selling novel advocates his abject submission without raising eyebrows; when some corporations make it policy not to hire honor graduates for fear they might not be good mixers; when it is seriously stated that “natural leaders” can be made obsolete, the time has come at least to think about the matter. For if the drift continues, man may soon case to fret over such things at all. He will finally have engineered for himself that equilibrious society. Gelded into harmonious integration, he will be free from tensions and frustrations, content in the certainties of his special function, no longer tantalized by the sense of infinity. He will at last have become a complete bore.
The answer is not a return to a “rugged individualism” that never was. Nor is it a slackened interest in social science and “human relations.” We need, certainly, to fin ways of making this bewildering society of ours run more smoothly and we need all the illumination science can give us to do it. But we need something more. Lest man become an ethical eunuch, his autonomy sacrificed for the harmony of the group, a new respect for the individual must be kindled. A revival of the humanities, perhaps, a conscious, deliberate effort by the corporation not only to accommodate dissent but to encourage it — possible approaches to a problem so fundamental cannot easily be spelled out.
Only individuals can do it. | The U.S. businessman has long kept a suspicious eye on what's been going on in Washington. Meantime some surprising things have been happening in his own backyard -- subtle but pervasive changes in American ideas that ultimately may prove more decisive than anything that has occurred in politics or economics. | 119.113208 | 0.641509 | 0.792453 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/11/10/is-the-deflation-bug-spreading-to-china/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141112101631id_/http://fortune.com/2014/11/10/is-the-deflation-bug-spreading-to-china/ | Is the deflation bug spreading to China? | 20141112101631 | China’s economy gave another cough and splutter Monday, with a couple of price reports suggesting that it may not be immune to the deflation bug that has spooked Europe and Japan this year.
The National Bureau of Statistics said consumer prices stagnated in October after rising 0.5% in September, while factory gate prices fell for the 32nd month in a row, and are now down 2.2% on the year. Consumer inflation is now running at an annual 1.6%, its lowest since early 2010.
The figures come on the heels of others released Friday that showed almost all of China’s regions showing a slowdown in growth and missing their own targets.
The world’s second-largest economy is already growing at its slowest rate since 2009, with gross domestic product up “only” 7.3% in the year through the second quarter.
At the weekend, Chinese President Xi Jinping added to speculation that Beijing may formally lower its growth target for next year to 7%, telling an audience of business leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing not to worry at the prospect of a slowdown.
“Some people are worried about a further slowdown in economic growth. They wonder if the economy would face a bumpy road ahead. Such risks indeed exist, but they aren’t so scary,” the South China Morning Post reported Xi as saying. “Even growth of around 7% would make China a leading economy in the world – in terms of either speed or size.”
Analysts at ANZ bank in Hong Kong said the risk of deflation, driven by the collapse of a housing boom and widespread over-capacity in industry after years of state-directed investment, has risen significantly.
China’s financial markets were unfazed by the news though. They were more focused on the announcement that a long-awaited link between the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges will go live November 17, effectively creating the world’s third-biggest stock market after the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ with a total capitalization of $5.6 trillion.
The link is the first scheme to allow institutional investors into mainland markets without having to get individual approval from regulators.
The scheme was first announced in April, but has been delayed for a number of reasons, most recently the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
The Shanghai market rose 2.3% on the news, while the Hong Kong market rose 0.8%. | Economy still slowing, but markets take cheer from link-up between Shanghai and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges. | 23.45 | 0.8 | 1.1 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/25/boston-scientific-will-seek-overturn-judgment-patent-dispute/8Nz8QxMve3VOJJcNpKXdhI/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141112115010id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/25/boston-scientific-will-seek-overturn-judgment-patent-dispute/8Nz8QxMve3VOJJcNpKXdhI/story.html | Boston Scientific will seek to overturn a $309m judgment in patent dispute | 20141112115010 | Boston Scientific Corp., the Marlborough-based medical device company, said Thursday that it will seek to overturn a court ruling in a patent dispute that ordered the company to pay $309 million in damages to the family of the doctor who helped invent an implantable cardioverter defibrillator.
A jury in Maryland’s Montgomery County Circuit Court awarded the damages to Mirowski Family Ventures, according to a report from MassDevice.com, an online journal that covers the medical device industry. Dr. Michel Mirowski, who died in 1990, helped invent this type of defibrillator.
The Mirowski Family Ventures originally sued Boston Scientific and a subsidiary over a secret deal with a rival medical technology company, St. Jude Medical, that allegedly cut Mirowski out of millions of dollars in royalties, MassDevice.com reported.
In a statement e-mailed to the Globe, Boston Scientific said: “We believe the facts and the law do not support the jury’s findings or the amount of the damages. We plan to seek to overturn the judgment in post-trial motions with the circuit court and, if necessary, through the appeals process.” | Boston Scientific Corp., the Marlborough-based medical device company, will seek to overturn a court ruling in a patent dispute that ordered the company to pay $309 million in damages. | 6 | 1 | 17.971429 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/11/12/poodle-bug/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141112183140id_/http://fortune.com/2014/11/12/poodle-bug/ | How the Poodle computer bug impacts business | 20141112183140 | By now you’ve probably heard of a new computer bug called Poodle. Sure, the name is adorable. (It really stands for the far less cute “Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption.”) It was discovered by Google researchers two months ago. And, most importantly, cyber security researchers have determined that it’s less serious than the Heartbleed (from April) and Shellshock/Bash (from September) bugs.
But “less” is a relative term. The flaw demands a fix.
Here’s the download if you’re willing to get a bit technical. If the web browsers on your machines still support the long since deprecated encryption protocol Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0, which is intended to securely connect computers and web servers, disable it yourself. It’s 15 years out of date.
As for which browsers: If you’re using Google Chrome version 40, you’re in good shape—SSL 3.0 is disabled by default. Mozilla will disable the protocol by default in the next version of its browser, Firefox 34, which is due later this month. All versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer support SSL 3.0; that support needs to be disabled through the Options menu. And as for Apple’s Safari, the company’s security update 2014-005 mitigates the vulnerability while still allowing SSL 3.0.
Until you deactivate SSL 3.0, you might want to avoid connecting to public Wi-Fi networks. Otherwise sophisticated attackers occupying a privileged position on your network may be able to intercept your data, steal your passwords and browser cookies, and masquerade as you on websites, allowing them to hijack your accounts.
“In terms of security, when a protocol becomes deprecated that’s about the time you say we need to get off this and get off this soon,” says Waylon Grange, a senior malware researcher at Blue Coat, a Sunnyvale, Calif. cyber security firm. “It means a vulnerability or weakness has been found and people know it can be attacked.”
In the world of encryption, a newer, more secure protocol, Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0, replaced SSL 3.0 in 1999. Since then, there have been two updates—TLS 1.1 in 2006 and TLS 1.2 in 2008. Another, TLS 1.3, is in the works.
“This is almost four versions now,” Grange adds, “at some point you need to say, ‘Let’s move up.’”
Some businesses may not wish to retire older protocols like SSL 3.0 since they want to ensure they can connect with every last potential customer. That means accommodating people who have not updated their browsers in eight years, when Internet Explorer 7 enabled TLS 1.0 support by default. “Do you really want those guys still on your networks?” Grange asks, noting that their machines are likely vulnerable to a host of other flaws—and adding that SSL 3.0 transactions represent less than one percent of all web traffic.
“If a machine is vulnerable with this, it’s likely to have other vulnerabilities because it’s that old,” Grange says. “It’s putting your whole network at risk because of this ancient technology.”
Then again, retaining older protocols like SSL 3.0 also provides a fallback option for browsers should connection attempts by newer protocols not work, for whatever reason—an if-all-else-fails approach. The problem is that savvy hackers can sit on a network, scramble communications, and frustrate a machine’s attempts to connect with a server, forcing it to fall back on an outdated protocol. The hackers perpetuating this type of attacks, referred to as man-in-the-middle, can then implement Poodle and steadily decrypt transacted sensitive information.
Hugh Thompson, chief security strategist at Blue Coat, says companies should retire SSL 3.0 as soon as possible, even if they’re unsure what old devices relying on it may still be connected to their networks. If a browser embedded in a printer has no update option, “it may just be time to get rid of that printer,” he says.
Forgotten, outdated devices are bound to have issues, he says. “Almost certainly something will stop working.” Nevertheless, “You should definitely deprecate it,” he says. “It’s definitely worth it.”
Disabling SSL 3.0 is not the only lesson to be learned from Poodle. Consider the bigger picture: In the past year, three high-profile bugs have rocked the business world.
In April, the web was hit by Heartbleed, a frighteningly pervasive encryption vulnerability. Five months later we were shocked by Shellshock, a slightly less worrisome bug (because it poses more of a technical challenge to hackers) yet one that bore grave implications (like the ability of a hacker to take over machines). Now we have Poodle—and more bugs are bound to surface.
As Internet companies begin to encrypt more traffic across the web, attackers are going to become even more interested in finding cryptographic weaknesses. Businesses must learn to cope, Thompson says.
“If you thought Heartbleed was the equivalent of a meteorite hitting a data center,” Thompson says, “you would do everything you could to clean up from the meteorite. But you wouldn’t have set up some big meteorite cleaning processes. These three signal that this is not a rare event. If that’s the case, there is a need to be able to build up a set of competencies around failure.”
That means putting in place agile response teams, building network forensic capabilities and updating to new versions of software and protocols in a timely manner. It’s a matter of setting up the right processes and practicing good network hygiene, Thompson says. There is no excuse to be caught unaware–especially if, in the end, it appears your company is more concerned with backward compatibility than security.
Next, read: “How Home Depot CEO Frank Blake kept his legacy from being hacked” by Jennifer Reingold. | Poodle, the web’s latest high profile encryption flaw, isn't terribly worrisome. But the trend it represents is. | 50.565217 | 0.782609 | 1.217391 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/11/10/forget-rising-beef-prices-why-arbys-is-placing-all-bets-on-meat/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141113013816id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/11/10/forget-rising-beef-prices-why-arbys-is-placing-all-bets-on-meat/? | Forget rising beef prices: Why Arby's is placing all bets on meat | 20141113013816 | Arby’s new motto is “We have the meats.” And, the sandwich chain believes these meats are enough to revamp the brand.
2014 has been a year of new beginnings for the 50-year-old fast-food chain. Along with a new tagline, the company has launched a major restaurant remodeling program, a revamped approach to marketing and a number of new sandwiches. Even better, the chain just celebrated 16 consecutive quarters of same-store sales growth, with 2.8 percent growth in 2013.
Of course, any growth beats being at rock bottom. In 2011, Wendy’s sold Arby’s to Roark Group for $130 million, after years of decline at the sandwich chain. Slightly more expensive than the typical fast-food restaurant, but lacking the trendiness and the millennial-appeal of the rising fast-casuals, Arby’s was floundering.
Then, two things happened. Under Roark’s ownership, Arby’s got new leadership, hiring CEO Paul Brown in April 2013 and CMO Rob Lynch a few months later. And, even as vegetarian options proliferated, meat became trendy –”quality” meat, that is.
“We use the word deli-inspired,” says Brown. “If you think about delis… you think about high-quality proteins, high-quality meats, you think about combinations of those types of ingredients in places and ways that you can’t necessarily do at home.”
This “fast-crafted” meat is key to Arby’s plan to gain support from the market of meat lovers. Paleo and other protein-heavy diets have exploded in the past three years, turning meat from the enemy of healthy eaters into a brand to be embraced. Bacon has been an ironic icon for what feels like forever, and BBQ has turned into the hipster bait of choice in places like Austin, Texas.
Plenty of fast-casual restaurants have cashed in on sustainable and veggie-heavy quality foods, including Chipotle, Sweetgreens and Panera. Arby’s wants to prove that, if the spotlight is placed on high-quality meat, the sandwich chain can do the same.
“Our advertising guys say, ‘meat is having a moment,'” says Arby’s vice president of brand and corporate communications, Chris Fuller. “There was that Food & Wine festival in New York a few weeks ago, and it culminated in this event called ‘Meatopia.’ There are Carnivores Balls that are happening in Austin, there’s these barbeque events happening with meatings – m-e-a-t-i-n-g-s – that are happening across the country. Meats are front and center.”
So, hoping to attract new, younger customers (the chain currently has one of the oldest customer bases in the business), Arby’s went whole hog on meat. The tagline “We have the meats” launched in July, replacing ‘Slicing up Freshness,’ a motto only introduced in 2012. The ad debuting the tagline is essentially 60 seconds of nothing but meat, a white room, a pair of hands and a bass voice breaking down steak, beef, turkey and brisket.
The meat-heavy marketing plan had been in the works for months. In May, the chain broke the world’s record for the longest television commercial, with a 13-hour ad of slow smoking brisket to promote a new brisket sandwich. About 50,000 customers have ordered the “Meat Mountain,” or every meat on the menu sandwiched between two buns, since it premiered on Arby’s “secret menu” in August. For Halloween, customers could ask for “Trick-or-Meat” at the chain and receive a free piece of bacon with any item (the most popular was bacon in a milkshake).
Unfortunately, Arby’s began advertising “fast-crafted meat” – or “#meatcraft” — just as meat prices skyrocketed. Beef and pork prices are nearing all-time highs, due to drought-induced high feed costs and increasing global demand. Even chicken, which has become a hot item for fast-food chains this year in part due to the high cost of beef and pork, is getting pricier, as farmers struggle to keep up with demand.
“We keep getting challenged with the cost increases. It’s like, ‘Well, should we be changing the beef, should we be looking at a different content of fat?'” says Lynch. “Our point of view is if we have to, we’d rather take a little bit of pricing rather than degrade the quality of our protein.”
The threat to raise prices is a risky one in the fast-food business, where Arby’s is already on the higher end of the price range. However, it’s right on target for the fast-casual industry, an arena in which Arby’s is angling to compete.
With new store designs that borrow from fast-casual restaurants set to roll out in 200 restaurants next year and the emphasis on the “crafted” aspects of sandwiches, Arby’s is gunning for meaty sandwiches to find a place between fast-casual and fast-food. It’s something that Chick-fil-A has managed for chicken, becoming the largest quick-service chicken chain this year as it rolls out specialty-grade coffee and moves to expand to more urban areas.
Arby’s is also expanding, focusing on coastal and urban expansion next year. Hopefully for the sandwich chain, the moment of meat will continue into 2015 — without prices continuing to rise.
For America’s No. 5 Pizza Chain, Moms Are the Secret Sauce
McDonald’s Tries to Tell Haters That ‘Lovin’ Beats Hatin”
Chipotle Employees Claim the Chain Isn’t as Worker-Friendly as You Think | Arby's has a new motto and new sandwiches. The chain hopes it'll be enough to revamp the brand. | 50.909091 | 0.863636 | 2.681818 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/03/18/fidelity-advice-for-pre-retirees-amp-savings-and-join-gym/rZ2HpgrIGerCA6VZjn83jI/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141114225017id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/03/18/fidelity-advice-for-pre-retirees-amp-savings-and-join-gym/rZ2HpgrIGerCA6VZjn83jI/story.html? | Fidelity advice for pre-retirees: Amp up the savings --- and join a gym | 20141114225017 | Many Americans greatly underestimate the amount of savings they may need to cover health care costs in retirement, according to a new study from Fidelity Investments, a Boston-based financial-service firm that offers an array of retirement savings plans.
In a recent survey of people between the ages of 55 and 64, nearly half of respondents said they believe they will need about $50,000 to pay for their individual health care costs in retirement. But based on Fidelity’s annual Retiree Health Care Cost Estimate, the average couple can expect to spend more than $220,000 in health care expenses over the course of their retirement.
Keeping fit helps to keep retirement health care costs down. And large health care costs can quickly eat into retirement savings. So watching your weight and staying active can be a good way to protect retirement income, Fidelity suggests.
Or as Fidelity executive vice president John Sweeney noted, “Not only can an apple a day keep the doctor away, it can very well help to protect your nest egg too.”
Fidelity ran some numbers based on a person with a pre-retirement income of about $80,000. If that person is in poor health, he or she may need an income replacement ratio as high 96 percent of their pre-retirement income to cover additional medical expenses. In contrast, a person in excellent health might be able to get by with just a 77 percent replacement ratio.
“Making smarter decisions about your health means you’re making smarter financial decisions, particularly when it comes to retirement,” Sweeney said in a statement. | Many Americans greatly underestimate the amount of savings they may need to cover health care costs in retirement, according to a new study from Fidelity Investments, a Boston-based financial-service firm. In a recent survey of people between the ages of 55 and 64, nearly half of respondents said they believe they will need about $50,000 to pay for their individual health care costs in retirement. But based on Fidelity’s annual Retiree Health Care Cost Estimate, the average couple can expect to spend more than $220,000 in health care expenses. Keeping fit helps to keep retirement health care costs down. Or as Fidelity executive vice president John Sweeney noted, “Not only can an apple a day keep the doctor away, it can very well help to protect your nest egg too.” | 2.026667 | 1 | 45.426667 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2012/07/03/is-this-what-a-focused-google-looks-like/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141116095647id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/07/03/is-this-what-a-focused-google-looks-like/ | Is this what a “focused” Google looks like? | 20141116095647 | Last year, Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, responded to criticism that his company had lost focus by promising to put “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Translation: Google would cull its bloated list of products so that engineers could attend to bigger priorities.
To show that he was serious about focus, Page killed off Google Health, an online locker for digital health records, and PowerMeter, a little known service for tracking home utility consumption.
But staying focused is hard to do, as Google GOOG showed last week when it introduced a series of new products including a tablet computer, a home entertainment hub and a corporate computing service. As if that was not enough, Google previewed futuristic Internet-enabled eye glasses that are supposed to make smartphones obsolete. “Google is focused. On everything,” Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, an online file storage service, joked in a post on Twitter.
Questions about Google’s focus echo across Silicon Valley, where Apple’s AAPL keep-it-simple business strategy is often lauded as the ideal. A limited number of products make it easier to sweat the details that make a computer, tablet or smartphone better than a rival’s — or so Apple’s philosophy goes.
MORE: Does Apple have anything that can match Google Glass?
For most of its history, Google’s strategy has been likened to throwing spaghetti on a wall to see what sticks. For years, it seemed like engineers could get any pet project approved for a splashy public premiere.
Dozens of services vie for attention alongside Google’s core search and online advertising business. Remembering all of the products is nearly impossible, even for someone who follows the company closely. Sometimes, it seems like Google’s services are forgotten internally as well given how long some of them go without being updated.
To be sure, the company has occasionally killed duds or those that fell out of favor. But since Page returned to the role of chief executive last year, the pace of executions has seemed to be on an upswing. In addition to Google Health and PowerMeter, he eliminated Slide, an online slideshow; Buzz, a social networking service; and Labs, a test bed for some of the company’s not-quite-ready for primetime products. Knol, a Wikipedia clone, is scheduled to be shut down in October.
Google declined to comment. But in a series of blog posts since last year, its executives have repeatedly mentioned focus as the rationale behind closing more than 30 products or features, and redirecting resources to others that can create a higher impact. “We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product for Google’s social network, Google +. “To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on.”
In another effort to bring more focus, Page reorganized the company into seven groups shortly after retaking the chief executive role last year. Now top leaders oversee specific areas — advertising, social networking, Android, Chrome, YouTube, and local mobile commerce — instead of broad portfolios that diluted accountability and slowed decision-making.
MORE: Silicon Valley’s new fashion: The stock dividend
Still, Mr. Levie, from Box, said in an interview that Google will have a hard time competing against companies focused on just a few things. He pointed to online file storage, which his company has focused on exclusively for seven years. Google introduced a competing product three months ago. Can corporate customers really be confident about Google’s commitment to the space and its willingness to innovate when it has dozens of other competing initiatives, he asked?
In the end, Mr. Levie said that Google’s “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy has become “more wood and more arrows.”
Mr. Levie applauded Google for its experimentation with gee-whiz technology like Google Glass, which brings the Internet to people wearing eyeglasses via their lenses. Such products help inspire innovation industry-wide, regardless of whether Google’s glasses ultimately succeed after they go on sale to consumers, perhaps in 2014 (developers, however, can get them next year).
Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W Baird & Co., was more supportive of Google’s expanding product portfolio. Yes, Google has a lot on its plate, he said. But “competing on the Internet requires constant change.”
For Google, that means placing a big bet on its new Nexus 7 tablet and Nexus Q home entertainment hub along with its latest phone, the Nexus Galaxy. It’s not Google’s first time selling hardware. But it is its most ambitious. In the end, selling hardware has become critical to competing against Apple and Amazon AMZN , Mr. Sebastian said.
MORE: As Google launches products, regulatory woes linger
Google’s new corporate computing service, Compute Engine, is another matter, he said. Companies would use the service to take care of their data crunching. All Google is doing is leveraging its existing infrastructure that is uses for its computing needs, Mr. Sebastian said. No significant investment is necessary except for marketing.
Broadly speaking, though, taking a company into a new direction is never made easily. Google’s latest push into hardware was a particularly big gamble considering it came only after acquiring Motorola for $12.5 billion, the most Google has ever paid for a company. “To his credit, I do think Larry Page has focused the company,” Mr. Sebastian said. “He’s not afraid to make the big decisions.” | Larry Page promised to slim down the company's portfolio of far-flung projects. He did. But now it seems like the company may be losing it focus again. | 33.606061 | 0.69697 | 1.181818 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/11/21/barbara-bush-how-corporate-america-can-mold-global-health-leaders/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141121171905id_/http://fortune.com/2014/11/21/barbara-bush-how-corporate-america-can-mold-global-health-leaders/ | Barbara Bush: How corporate America can mold global health leaders | 20141121171905 | In 2008, Barbara Bush launched Global Health Corp., a nonprofit that matches young people with health and development organizations in the U.S. and Africa for a year-long fellowship. At the time, she was 26 and had just quit her job at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City.
Though she had artistic aspirations, Bush had been struck by what she saw more than a decade ago on a visit to Africa. Her father, then-President George W. Bush, unveiled a plan to combat AIDS on the continent; there were chaotic lines of people waiting in the streets for antiretroviral drugs that were readily available in the U.S. She wanted to help.
In five years, Global Health Corp has recruited nearly 500 fellows and has sent another 128 off to Africa. It is currently recruiting its seventh class of fellows. In particular, Bush says there’s a need to find candidates with expertise beyond health care, such as business, engineering, and communications.
Earlier this week, I caught up with Bush in New York City after she gave a talk with philanthropist Melinda Gates on global health. We chatted about gender issues and corporate America’s role in helping to solve some of the most pressing health care issues today.
The following is an edited transcript of our discussion.
Fortune: What’s one piece of advice you would give to any young person starting their own nonprofit or business?
Barbara Bush: First, talk to as many people as you can. You want to make sure what you’re creating is filling a gap and doesn’t already exist.
I never intended to start a nonprofit. Initially, we assumed there was already an organization like Global Health Corps. During the first few months, my co-founders and I met with everyone willing to meet with us who worked in the global health space, the development space, as well as the for-profit and non-profit space.
We met with whoever would sit down with us, partly to do our due diligence and figure out what existed. As we met with more and more people, everyone kept validating the need for an organization that would invest in leaders looking to change global health. After a few months, we thought, ‘well, if nobody is doing this, are we going to let this be on our to-do list forever?’
Secondly, it’s scary to start something. Where we learned most was from our first fellows. Once we had our first class in the field, we told them, “you are co-founders with us.” We wanted to learn from what they were seeing on the ground — what information they needed, what training did they need. So by creating that feedback loop, we learned so much and we’ve kept that as part of the culture of Global Health Corps.
Globally, you’ve mentioned that maternal mortality is one of the biggest health challenges for women today. What’s the biggest challenge for women in the U.S.?
We have Global Health Corps fellows working in Newark, Boston, Washington D.C., and New York.
The biggest challenges are not disease-specific, but rather it’s navigating a complicated health care system. We often work with women living in poverty whose first language is unlikely English. They don’t know what benefits they have. So our fellows are working with them everyday, particularly with women expecting children, to understand the opportunities that exist within the U.S. health care system.
What can U.S. corporations do?
There’s a huge role corporations can play. They can reach so many more people, and their employees have skill sets so necessary for global health, such as in IT, supply chain management, and communications—if you’re trying to reach half a million women in rural areas, you need someone who understands communications.
For example, there was a fellow named Ameet Salvi who graduated from UC Berkeley with an engineering degree and worked for The Gap. While there, he was helping transport Gap clothing from warehouses to Gap stores across the country. At Global Health Corps, he ended up working on Zanzibar’s drug supply chain, helping distribute drugs from warehouses in Tanzania to clinics and, more importantly, to patients. He had an amazing skill set that he had refined in the private sector to a space that needs a lot more solutions.
One thing we’ve done, and this is just scratching the surface, is work with Hewlett-Packard HP . Their employees serve as mentors to our fellows throughout the year. So, for instance, if a fellow were working on the drug supply chain in Malawi, he would be partnered with a supply chain expert at HP.
Global Health Corps is entering is fifth year and has grown so much. Career-wise, would you say it’s better to be smart or confident?
I would say you need to be both. I think when you’re starting your own initiative, you have to have a certain amount of confidence. When I started Global Health Corps, I started it with two guys that were at Google GOOG and two guys that were running an advocacy organization called FACE AIDS. I think because I had partners, we had some shared confidence, which was critical, because it’s sort of audacious to think you can start an organization and work in six countries as a 26-year-old.
We had huge aspirations. The confidence was critical for us in getting started, but we researched like crazy and we honestly did as much homework as we could to make sure we were creating a model that was smart and that would be effective.
So, I don’t think you can have one without the other. | The Global Health Corps co-founder argues that the nonprofit health care world needs workers with expertise in business, engineering, and communications. | 42.538462 | 0.846154 | 2.923077 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/georgia-okeeffe-painting-sells-for-44-million | http://web.archive.org/web/20141123195419id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/georgia-okeeffe-painting-sells-for-44-million | Georgia O'Keeffe Painting Breaks Record, Sells for $44.4 Million | 20141123195419 | Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1
11/21/2014 AT 01:05 PM EST
A Georgia O'Keeffe painting of a simple white flower has sold for $44.4 million, more than triple the previous auction record for a work by a female artist.
Sotheby's New York says the 1932 painting, "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," sold Thursday during the auction house's sale of American art.
The painting was sold by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to benefit its acquisitions fund. The buyer bid by telephone. Sotheby's isn't disclosing the buyer's identity.
The previous world auction record for any work by a female artist was $11.9 million. That was the price for Joan Mitchell's "Untitled" at Christie's New York in May.
The previous auction record for an O'Keeffe work was $6.2 million, set at Christie's New York in 2001. | "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1" sold for more than triple the previous auction record for a work by a female artist | 6.807692 | 1 | 10.846154 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/pit-bull-parade-after-ban-lifted | http://web.archive.org/web/20141123223627id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/pit-bull-parade-after-ban-lifted | Group to Hold Pit Bull Parade After Ban Dropped : People.com | 20141123223627 | updated 11/21/2014 AT 05:45 PM EST
•originally published 11/20/2014 AT 05:30 PM EST
A group of pit bull lovers plans to hold a pit bull parade to celebrate after a judge threw out a 10-year-old ban on the dogs in a Rhode Island city.
plans to hold the parade on Sunday in Pawtucket.
A Superior Court judge on Tuesday found a city ordinance that had banned pit bulls since 2004 was invalid. The ruling follows a 2013 state law that prohibits cities and towns from banning specific dog breeds.
The parade will start at a dog park and then loop through the neighborhood. It will end with a free dog training session.
Pit Bulls for PTSD trains pit bulls to become service dogs for people with post-traumatic stress disorder and children with autism. | Pit Bulls for PTSD is planning to hold a parade in Rhode Island to celebrate the acceptance of the breed | 7.5 | 0.8 | 1.9 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/angelina-jolie-visits-house-of-lords | http://web.archive.org/web/20141127222538id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/angelina-jolie-visits-house-of-lords | Angelina Jolie Visits Britain's House of Lords | 20141127222538 | 11/25/2014 AT 05:25 PM EST
by Queen Elizabeth II. Now,
has dived even further into British life by paying a visit to the House of Lords.
Though Jolie recently admitted that she was "open" to running for office, her trip to the heart of British politics wasn't the first step on a new career path.
Instead, Jolie was at Parliament's upper house Monday to see her close friend Arminka Helic, 46, become a member of the 1,000-year-old institution.
Watching from the gallery alongside Sir Nicholas Soames – grandson of Sir Winston Churchill – Angelina told the
that she was "extremely proud of her."
"She's been in many ways a mentor to me and she's an extraordinary woman and I'm very, very honored to be here today," Jolie said of Helic.
After the ceremony, Angelina joined Helic's friends and colleagues for tea in the House of Lords' dining room where, in true British style, they were served cucumber sandwiches, cakes and scones.
Soames, who has followed in the vast footsteps of his grandfather to become an MP, said Jolie was "everything I was told she was – wonderful, clever."
He also described Bosnian-born Helic's life as "a great triumph of the human story."
The political advisor fled to Britain from the Yugoslav war in 1992 with her younger sister and has worked very closely with Jolie on her campaign to prevent sexual violence in conflict.
The new Baroness Helic is also responsible for persuading the British government to take up the campaign – starting when she handed ex-Foreign Secretary William Hague a DVD of Jolie's 2011 film
"She came here with nothing and rose to a peer ... It just shows what a marvelous country this is," Soames added.
Jolie's second turn in the director's chair, the World War II movie
, has its London premiere in Leicester Square on Tuesday night. | The star supported a friend just elected to Parliament | 42.555556 | 0.666667 | 0.666667 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/24/world/soviet-concedes-81-output-lag-is-silent-on-crop.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141128213936id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1982/01/24/world/soviet-concedes-81-output-lag-is-silent-on-crop.html | SOVIET CONCEDES '81 OUTPUT LAG | 20141128213936 | MOSCOW, Jan. 23— The Soviet Government issued its annual economic report for 1981 today and it confirmed previous indications of a gloomy year on most fronts.
In a break with precedent, the report, issued by the Government's Central Statistical Administration, omitted altogether the size of last year's grain harvest, suggesting that the figure is so low as to be politically embarrassing.
The report merely said that farmers had struggled with ''extremely unfavorable conditions'' and that ''state resources of grain will insure a full supply of bread and bread products.'' Crisis Over Poland May Be Factor
Among explanations put forward by Western diplomats for the omission of the grain figures was a reluctance to give the United States a propaganda lever at a time of tension, particularly in view of the threat of a new grain embargo in retaliation for Moscow's purported role in Poland's military crackdown.
In the generally mediocre economic performance in 1981, the production of natural gas seemed to offer some consolation to Soviet planners, particularly in view of an expected increase in lucrative gas sales to Western Europe in the 1980's.
Gas production, for which growth is now coming almost entirely from the huge Arctic fields in northwest Siberia, reached 465 billion cubic meters, seven billion more than planned.
The output of oil, which is also being supplied increasingly by West Siberia, was almost on target, with 609 million tons instead of the projected 610 million. After having risen rapidly through the 1970's, oil production has now begun to level off.
But coal continued the steady decline that began after it had reached a high point of 723.6 million tons in 1978. The slow development of new mines in eastern regions has not managed to keep up with depletion in older coal basins. Coal output last year was 704 million tons, compared with a 1981 goal of 738 million. In apparent awareness of the problems of recovery, planners have set this year's mine output at 721 million.
The 1981 economic report did not address the main problem caused by the third poor grain crop in a row, a shortage of feed grains for cattle. Statistics in the report showing an increase in the number of cows, but a decline in milk production suggested that a shortage of high-grade feed was affecting productivity.
The omission of a grain crop figure underscored Leonid I. Brezhnev's statement in November that food was ''economically and politically the central problem of the five-year plan.'' U.S. Estimate Was 175 Million
Soviet planners have projected an average annual grain crop of 239 million tons in the current plan, running to 1985, and the issue gained political sensitivity after the temporary American embargo on grain exports ordered after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
The United States Department of Agriculture estimated the Soviet grain crop of 1981 at 175 million tons, the lowest figure since 1975. The omission of an official Soviet figure suggested that it might be even lower. The crop achieved a record of 237 million tons in 1978; it was 179 million in 1979 and 189 million in 1980.
The poor harvests in recent years are believed to be especially painful because the crisis in Poland has placed new strains on Soviet resources of food and of convertible currencies. Western experts expect Moscow to spend $6 billion this year buying grain abroad.
In 1975, when the harvest was only 140 million tons, the annual economic report published the figure with a note explaining that the weather had been exceptionally poor. 5-Year Plan Believed Set Back
The generally poor performance in 1981 suggested that some of the goals of the 1981-85 five-year plan had been put effectively out of reach. Nation al income in 1981, an indicator of overall growth, rose by 3.2 percen t, less than the 3.4 percent projected for the year.
The 1981 plan called for a 4.1 percent increase in industrial production, the lowest goal for any year since World War II, and the final result was 3.4 percent. Consumer goods, which Soviet leaders have promised their citizenry for so long, had been scheduled to grow by 4.2 percent, but achieved an increase of 3.6 percent.
Labor productivity, on which planners have placed the burden for 90 percent of projected industrial growth, climbed by 2.7 percent compared with a planned 3.6 percent. Scarcity in Stores Is Noted
Most of the bad news, however, was in food, confirming what Russians have known for some time about growi ng scarcities in their stores. Supplies of meat increased marginally , by 100,000 tons, whilemilk production dropped by two million tons t o 88.5 million tons, thelowest figure since 1973, despite an increase in the number of cows.
The only bright spot in agriculture was egg production, which has been increasing for years. But sugar beets, a key crop, fell far below even the dismal forecasts of Western experts. Izvestia put the figure at 60.6 million tons, the lowest figure in 19 years and 40 million tons below plan. | The Soviet Government issued its annual economic report for 1981 today and it confirmed previous indications of a gloomy year on most fronts. In a break with precedent, the report, issued by the Government's Central Statistical Administration, omitted altogether the size of last year's grain harvest, suggesting that the figure is so low as to be politically embarrassing. The report merely said that farmers had struggled with ''extremely unfavorable conditions'' and that ''state resources of grain will insure a full supply of bread and bread products.'' Crisis Over Poland May Be Factor Among explanations put forward by Western diplomats for the omission of the grain figures was a reluctance to give the United States a propaganda lever at a time of tension, particularly in view of the threat of a new grain embargo in retaliation for Moscow's purported role in Poland's military crackdown. | 5.793939 | 0.981818 | 42.70303 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/jane-fonda-documentary-sundance | http://web.archive.org/web/20141203145859id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/jane-fonda-documentary-sundance | Watch a Pre-Fame Jane Fonda Tackle Broadway in Jane : People.com | 20141203145859 | 12/01/2014 AT 09:30 AM EST
She was 24, impossibly gorgeous, and nervous about one of her first big roles on Broadway.
And it was a disaster.
appeared in a comedy called
– which took a critical drubbing and closed after three performances.
Famed director D.A. Pennebaker followed the young actress from the start of rehearsals for his documentary
, which premieres Monday on the streaming video service
Little-seen since its 1962 release, the documentary shows Fonda striving to escape the shadow of her iconic father, Henry Fonda – and being coached by the play's director and her then-boyfriend Andréas Voutsinas.
Fonda, now 76, got the last laugh, of course: She went on to become a screen superstar, with seven Oscar nominations and two wins. The documentary has "always been sort of a sore point for her," Pennebaker told
in 2011. "But she's finally decided she rather likes it." | Jane debuts on the SundanceNow Doc Club more than 50 years after its initial release | 12.266667 | 0.333333 | 0.466667 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/12/02/04/51/rolf-harris-drops-appeal-bid | http://web.archive.org/web/20141204074119id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2014/12/02/04/51/rolf-harris-drops-appeal-bid | Disgraced entertainer Rolf Harris drops conviction appeal bid | 20141204074119 | Jailed pedophile Rolf Harris has abandoned his push to appeal 12 convictions for sexually assaulting four girls in the United Kingdom.
Harris's initial application was refused by a single Court of Appeal judge in late October and the disgraced entertainer is now out of time to ask the court to revisit the issue.
A Judicial Office spokesman on Monday confirmed to AAP that Harris hadn't renewed his application to appeal "and he is now out of time".
The 84-year-old Australian had 28 days to ask for a hearing before three Appeal Court judges but chose not to.
Harris was sentenced in July to five years and nine months' jail for indecently assaulting four girls in Britain between 1968 and 1986.
However he's expected to serve less than three years behind bars.
During his lengthy trial another six women gave supporting evidence that Harris abused them in Australia, New Zealand and Malta between 1969 and 1991.
Harris wasn't charged over those alleged incidents because they occurred outside the UK.
In mid-October a British newspaper reported Harris could face fresh charges as a result of more than 10 new victims claiming they were abused by the disgraced artist and singer.
It was claimed Operation Yewtree officers were looking at the British cases while any assaults that took place in Australia or New Zealand would be handled by local police.
The Metropolitan police have refused to comment on the possibility of further charges being laid.
It was also reported in mid-October that Harris had to be moved to a new prison for his own safety after being bullied by inmates.
The convicted sex offender was moved from HMP Bullingdon in Oxfordshire to Stafford jail after being taunted by fellow prisoners.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Rolf Harris has dropped his bid to appeal 12 sex assault convictions meaning he'll be spending at least another two and a half years behind bars. | 12 | 0.678571 | 1.535714 | low | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/12/05/prada-warns-tough-times-for-luxury-goods-arent-over/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141205170133id_/http://fortune.com/2014/12/05/prada-warns-tough-times-for-luxury-goods-arent-over/ | Prada warns tough times for luxury goods aren’t over | 20141205170133 | Prada SpA PRDSY warned that the luxury goods sector’s poor run isn’t over, as it announced third-quarter profits well below expectations.
The Milan-based group, whose fiscal third quarter ended in October, said its sales fell 6% from the previous quarter, due largely to disruptions to its business from the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, where its stock is listed. That left net profit for the first nine months of the fiscal year down 28% from a year earlier at €319 million ($392 million).
“The difficult economic and political conditions that have adversely impacted the consumer’s attitude are not easing,” the group said in a presentation of its results, in a reference not only to the Occupy Central protests, but also to the nationwide crackdown on corruption by President Xi Jinping’s government.
That campaign has led to a sharp drop in excessive consumption, particularly by officials and their families. Prada also noted a sharp drop in sales in Macau, home to China’s increasingly empty casinos.
“The luxury market is undergoing a reshaping phase, the extent and nature of which is not yet entirely clear,” the company said, hinting at problems even beyond China.
Sales in Greater China so far this year are down 4% from a year earlier, while those in Prada’s home market of Europe are down 2%, suffering from depressed domestic consumption and from lower spending by tourists (notably the once free-spending Russians). Sales in the Americas are up 6%, meanwhile, while the Middle East generated a 10% increase, but even together, those regions generate barely half of the money that Prada gets from Greater China. | Sales tumble in China as Occupy protests amplify the effect of Xi's crackdown on excessive spending. | 18.333333 | 0.777778 | 0.888889 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/11/21/finding-retirement-haven-suit-you/0B255T5fotcXWxCjdZvqrK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141205233012id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/11/21/finding-retirement-haven-suit-you/0B255T5fotcXWxCjdZvqrK/story.html | Finding a retirement haven to suit you | 20141205233012 | More than 10 years ago, Barbara Zierten and her husband retired to a small town in California’s scenic “gold country,” in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
“It’s beautiful here,” said Zierten, 73, explaining the attraction of the area east of San Francisco. They also were on a tight budget and reasoned that a small town would be cheaper.
But as time has passed, they have decided the area isn’t an ideal fit. For one thing, the library is open only part time. “I’m a reader,” she said. “So it’s frustrating.” And a bad experience with a hospital has led her to seek treatment for health concerns in San Francisco, a two- to three-hour drive.
Perhaps most dispiriting to Zierten, a liberal who closely follows politics, is that the population’s views tend to be much more conservative than her own. Particularly irksome is one resident who often puts up large signs critical of Barack Obama: “The latest said, ‘President Ebola.’”
“I didn’t do my research,” she conceded. The couple is now contemplating relocating to Sacramento.
As Zierten learned, shopping for a retirement community should ideally involve more than a perusal of real estate circulars, a check of local tax rates, and a glance at the average temperature. When choosing a place to live for two decades or more, retirees also should consider whether a community reflects their values and if the place can truly meet their needs for health care, as well as social and cultural activities, as they grow older.
Much research, including a recent report from AARP, suggests that most people over age 50 would prefer to stay put as they age. But sometimes, particularly for those who have spent their working lives in expensive urban areas, the need to live on a fixed income pushes retirees to seek locales that are more affordable. Others simply relish a change of pace.
Thinking through what they want, and then taking time to research communities that seem to be a good fit, can help retirees avoid disappointment and potentially costly financial mistakes, Jane Bryant Quinn, a personal finance journalist, advises. “If you’re going to move, start years in advance,” she said.
Catherine Frank, director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, urges retirees to visit a prospective community and live there as they would expect to on a daily basis. Pay attention to how you will shop, how you will get around, how you will occupy your time, and be specific with your requirements. “Do you have heart problems, so you need good cardiac care?” Frank presses. “Can you live a healthy lifestyle there by going walking or biking?”
One obvious approach is to subscribe to the local newspaper or peruse it online. Catherine Moore, 65, who is retiring in Temple, N.H., early next year after a career at an outdoor equipment retailer, went further than that. Before choosing the place, she read the minutes from its Town Meeting, a uniquely New England form of government, to find out what sort of issues the population was facing and how it handled them — “a capsule view of what people value and how they compromise or agree to disagree,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Town Meeting notes can often be found online, she said, and can give insight into whether the community is likely to offer friends and neighbors who help one another. “I don’t have to agree with my neighbor’s political views to know that he will be over with his chain saw to clear my drive after an ice storm,” she said.
The Milken Institute, a nonprofit research firm that studies aging, among other subjects, ranks communities based on attributes that it determined were desirable for older Americans. The “Best Cities for Successful Aging” initiative is meant to spur communities to adapt to aging populations.
The list, updated Tuesday, includes many cities and towns — like Madison, Wis., and Iowa City — that aren’t necessarily thought of as traditional retirement destinations. Its top locations offer strong economies with employment options, since many people of retirement age want to work at least part time; opportunities for learning and cultural engagement; access to quality health care; and good transportation.
The report developed an index using 78 criteria, based on publicly available data, to rank more than 350 communities. It does include data on the weather and golf courses but goes further. For instance, a town’s “wellness” rank factors in the number of fast-food restaurants per capita and rates of diabetes, as well as the percentage of hospitals offering geriatric services. Its “community engagement” rank reflects the number of libraries and YMCAs, as well as the level of senior volunteerism.
College towns appear often on the Milken list, which comes as no surprise to Marilyn and Richard Frey, who settled in Oxford, Miss. It’s not on the list but is home to the University of Mississippi.
The Freys, in their 70s, spent much of their lives as teachers, then had second careers working as managers for the La Quinta hotel chain. While working in El Paso, Texas, they bought land for a home in the New Mexico mountains, but then worried the location might be too remote. “We began to rethink the whole thing,” Marilyn Frey said.
They settled on new criteria: affordability, airport proximity for international travel, and access to arts and entertainment options. Richard Frey retired first and took charge of the relocation effort. He attended a conference hosted by the State of Mississippi, and returned home with a stack of packets about various communities. “I put them in three piles: yes, no, and maybe,” he recalled. He then rented a car and drove across the state, visiting 10 promising locations. “I drove the neighborhoods,” he said. “I visited supermarkets.”
A spring trip to Mississippi with his wife led them to focus on Oxford: “I remember the daffodils,” she said. They moved there in early 2002. They like that the downtown square has three bookstores that host talks by visiting authors. They attend theater productions and can take classes and attend sporting events at Ole Miss.
Deeper reconnaissance is now a priority for Zierten, the California retiree. She has subscribed to Sacramento Magazine, partly to learn about goings-on in the city, where she and her husband, John Dahlen, hope to move. And she plans to spend time at local breakfast haunts, “eavesdropping” on conversations.
“If everyone’s talking about death panels,” she said, referring to a term that conservatives use to argue against the Affordable Care Act, she will probably look elsewhere. She doesn’t mind opposing viewpoints, but “you want to find a comfort level.” | Shopping for a retirement community should ideally involve more than a perusal of real estate circulars, a check of local tax rates, and a glance at the average temperature. When choosing a place to live for two decades or more, retirees also should consider whether a community reflects their values and if the place can truly meet their needs for health care, as well as social and cultural activities, as they grow older. | 16.85 | 1 | 80 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/active/11306781/Cairns-killings-Mother-charged-with-murder-over-deaths-of-her-seven-children-and-niece-in-Australia.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141221221827id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/active/11306781/Cairns-killings-Mother-charged-with-murder-over-deaths-of-her-seven-children-and-niece-in-Australia.html | Cairns killings: Mother charged with murder over deaths of her seven children and niece in Australia | 20141221221827 | Officials were still trying to determine exactly what happened inside the house, and had collected more than 100 witness statements, he said. A coroner was conducting autopsies, but police would not be releasing the results as the case was now a matter for the courts, he said.
The children, four girls and four boys, ranged in age from 2 to 14.
Police were not looking for any other suspects, Mr Asnicar said. A hearing was scheduled for Monday, but Warria was excused from attending. Police planned to oppose any request for bail, Mr Ascinar said.
"This is very raw and it is a very emotive time for everybody," he said. "The family is deeply upset but the community is pulling together. "
Asked how the children's five fathers were coping with the tragedy, Mr Ascinar replied: "I don't think we need much imagination to understand how they are feeling."
Dozens of weeping mourners visited a makeshift memorial of flowers, stuffed animals and candles set up in a park next to the family's home. "My babies, my babies," one man wailed.
A church service was held on Sunday morning to honor the children and a candlelit vigil was scheduled for the evening.
Australia was already suffering the shock of a fatal siege in a Sydney cafe. Last week, a gunman burst into the cafe in the heart of the city and took 18 hostages, two of whom were killed along with the gunman after police stormed in 16 hours later to end the standoff.
"The news out of Cairns is heartbreaking," the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said in a statement. "All parents would feel a gut-wrenching sadness at what has happened. This is an unspeakable crime. These are trying days for our country." | "These are trying days for our country" says Prime Minister Tony Abbott | 25.285714 | 0.928571 | 4.214286 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/12/19/sony-hacking-fallout-puts-all-companies-alert/K2kDhbcQT4K0fkBGytrq8K/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141224231812id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/12/19/sony-hacking-fallout-puts-all-companies-alert/K2kDhbcQT4K0fkBGytrq8K/story.html | Sony hacking fallout puts all companies on alert | 20141224231812 | ATLANTA — Companies across the globe are on high alert to tighten up network security to avoid being the next company brought to its knees by hackers like those that executed the dramatic cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The hack, which a US official has said investigators believe is linked to North Korea, culminated in the cancellation of a Sony film and ultimately could cost the movie studio hundreds of millions of dollars. That the hack included terrorist threats and was focused on causing major corporate damage, rather than on stealing customer information for fraud like in the breaches at Home Depot and Target, indicates a whole new frontier has emerged in cybersecurity. Suddenly every major company could be the target of cyberextortion.
‘‘The Sony breach is a real wake-up call even after the year of mega-breaches we’ve seen,’’ says Lee Weiner, Boston security firm Rapid7’s senior vice president of products and engineering. ‘‘This is a completely different type of data stolen with the aim to harm the company.’’
This should signal to all US businesses that they need to ‘‘take cybersecurity as serious as physical security of their employees or security of their physical facilities,’’ says Cynthia Larose, chair of the privacy and security practice at the law firm Mintz Levin in Boston.
The breach is particularly troubling in Hollywood, where secrecy is supposed to be paramount to insure that movie secrets worth millions don’t get leaked.
‘‘Movie studios have, by and large, behaved as high-security intellectual property purveyors; prints have been tightly controlled, screeners are watermarked, and bootleggers are prosecuted wherever possible,’’ says Seth Shapiro, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He said that’s what makes it so surprising that email leaks showed that Sony executives apparently gave out passwords in unencrypted emails and made other security blunders.
‘‘The apparently laxity of Sony IT security — given the history of prior hacks — is unprecedented in the history of media technology,’’ he says. Sony Corp.’s PlayStation network was hacked in 2011.
Studios are trying to tighten up procedures in the wake of the Sony attack. Warner Bros. executives earlier this week ordered a company-wide password reset and sent a five-point security checklist to employees advising them to purge their computers of any unnecessary data, in an email seen by The Associated Press. ‘‘Keep only what you need for business purposes,’’ the message said.
Even so, some say there is little that corporations can do to prevent such a sophisticated cyberattack. The key may lie more in detection and limiting damage.
‘‘There are very few companies that can withstand that kind of large assault,’’ says Rich Mogull, an analyst with security firm Securosis in Phoenix. ‘‘But a lot of companies do need to improve what they’re doing on security, I see it every day with companies I work with.’’
Companies also need to invest in identifying vulnerabilities on their networks and work quickly to address them. Jonathan Sander, strategy and research officer at data security firm Stealthbits in Hawthorne, N.J., recommends undertaking a comprehensive review to ensure outdated files, such as digital copies of old contracts and electronic conversations that occurred years ago, are no longer being stored on the corporate networks.
‘‘There is a lot of stuff just sitting there waiting to be taken and used for the kind of thing that has happened at Sony right now,’’ Sander says.
He says the Sony breach has been coming up in every customer meeting that Stealthbits Technologies had held since the stolen information began leaking out and making international headlines earlier this month.
‘‘We used to have to lead people to the idea that you need to protect this kind of data,’’ he said. ‘‘Now we walk in and they’re asking, ‘How can I keep my data from ending up on the Internet like Sony’s did?’’
Some customers have been wondering if they should reduce their reliance on email and switch over to other digital forms of communication, such as messaging systems that don’t store the data. Sander doesn’t believe that provides as much protection as making a telephone call to share passwords and other sensitive information.
Most importantly, companies need to focus on the ability to detect hacks quickly and limit them as fast as possible. Currently, the average amount of time it takes a company to detect a breach is 200 to 230 days, Rapid7’s Weiner said. ‘‘That allows the attacker time to gain a lot of knowledge and do a lot of damage,’’ he said.
While none of Weiner’s clients have made large-scale changes to their security in reaction to the Sony attack specifically, cybersecurity is becoming a bigger focus in general. ‘‘There has been increased investment in information security and increased awareness of the risk and threats of these kind of attacks,’’ he says. ‘‘We’re starting to see information security as a boardroom issue, it’s getting much more attention.’’
One example companies could follow is in the technology sector, where most firms have been tightening their security measures during the past 18 months in response to revelations about the digital spying tactics of the US government.
Documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the US government had been tapping into the computer networks of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other technology companies in search of emails and other electronic communications that might uncover terrorist plots and other illegal activity. The US government has maintained that it has never collected the kind of highly personal details stolen in the Sony Pictures breach. But tech companies being targeted by the NSA have since tried to thwart the surveillance by encrypting their internal email systems as well as the free accounts available to the general public. Both Google and Apple, the makers of the world’s leading software for mobile devices, also are automatically encrypting the data stored on smartphones so the information is indecipherable to unauthorized users, including government authorities.
General Motors says it has bolstered cybersecurity in the past two years by bringing information technology in-house from outside vendors. The auto giant has a cybersecurity chief on staff to prevent hackers from getting into GM vehicle computers and has consolidated electronic data storage from 23 centers worldwide into two located near Detroit.
‘‘I would say we have a higher level (of security) than some other companies do,’’ says spokeswoman Jennie Ecclestone.
A key to thwarting attacks is knowing your enemy and figuring out exactly who might want to hurt your company, adds Tom Chapman, head of cyber-operations at EdgeWave Security in San Diego.
‘‘In the past people were looking for a firewall or an individual product,’’ for protection, says Chapman, a retired Navy intelligence officer who specialized in hunting down hackers. ‘‘Now, they’re realizing there is a human element. They need to understand who might be after them. By better understanding your likely adversaries, you can better craft your defense.’’ | Companies across the globe are on high alert to tighten up network security to avoid being the next company brought to its knees by hackers like those that executed the dramatic cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment. | 36.783784 | 1 | 37 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/12/14/kirsner/Wekkp9vInpqniDRRtXUsOP/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20141229005132id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/12/14/kirsner/Wekkp9vInpqniDRRtXUsOP/story.html | Mobile pay not yet ready for primetime | 20141229005132 | Someday, a driven entrepreneur will devise the perfect mobile payment technology. You won’t need to charge it up, and it won’t require a companion app. You’ll be able to use it to purchase things from a chain store, independent boutique, vending machine, or food truck. You might even be able to fold it so that it fits into any pocket.
Until that fantastical day, we’ve got smartphone apps and accompanying devices that work at one retail chain or a bunch — but nothing yet that’s universal.
Apple launched Apple Pay with characteristic fanfare in October, Google has been promoting its Wallet since 2011, and Coin, a credit-card-like device that can “act like” any of your cards, will be available next year. It obviates the need to carry a collection of cards with you, but the $100 device will purportedly work in only 85 percent of all credit card terminals. And once its internal battery runs out, you’ll need to buy a new Coin.
I’ve been testing some of the locally developed products and services and talking to the people behind them. One of Coin’s rivals is the LoopPay CardCase, made by a Burlington startup. It costs $50 and is available for several iPhone models. If you feel like paying for stuff with cash or a card is too predictable, this might be just the holiday gift for you.
First, you download LoopPay’s app, create a password, plug a LoopPay accessory into your phone’s headphone jack, and swipe in some of your credit cards, debit cards, or even store gift cards. (Some take a few tries to successfully swipe.) Then, you put your phone in a specially designed case that has a slide-out “virtual credit card” on the back. Then, you charge up the virtual credit card with its own charging cable. Then you link the card with your smartphone via a Bluetooth connection. (Also takes a few tries.) Then you are ready to go on a spree!
LoopPay executive Damien Balsan, behind the register, tries to figure out why none of his three LoopPay devices are working as FroyoWorld co-owner Ariel Strauss looks on.
The LoopPay app lets you pick from the list of cards you’ve loaded onto it, and then relays that card data to the virtual credit card, so that when you slide it out, it can be your Barnes & Noble gift card or your work AmEx. You hold the card near any magnetic stripe reader, press a button on the back, and hope. My success rate so far is 53 percent. It purchased some gifts at a Michaels craft store in Cambridge and a tea at one Panera Bread, but it didn’t work at a different Panera, a taco shop, or a Peet’s Coffee. Often, a clerk would apologize for an “old” register system, and I would default to using paper money (first used in the 11th century in China) or a credit card (which dates back to the 1920s.)
I’ve long used an app from Boston-based LevelUp for payments at cafés, pizzerias, and food trucks. It lets a clerk scan a special code on your phone’s screen to charge a credit card, but what’s better is that it keeps track of how much you’ve spent with a merchant. Often, there are rewards once you hit a certain spending threshold, or special offers to get you in the door the first time. But while LevelUp is quite reliable, most of its merchants are lower-end dining establishments.
The recently launched Apple Pay technology is similar — just tap your phone at a terminal to pay — but it doesn’t keep track of your spending for a store rewards program, and it is mainly accepted at big chains like Panera, Toys R Us, and Macy’s. It also requires that you have the latest iPhone 6. Blaine Hurst, executive vice president of technology at Needham-based Panera, says that the initial usage numbers are strongest on the West Coast and other “tech-savvy areas.” “It will take time to grow,” Hurst says.
A mobile payment system that hopes to give Apple a run for its money is being built in Needham by Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX. MCX is a coalition of a couple dozen companies you might have heard of, including Target, Walmart, 7-Eleven, Dunkin’ Donuts, and CVS. The system, called CurrentC, is being tested quietly by employees of several of the companies, and the public launch will take place “probably in the first half” of 2015, chief operating officer Scott Rankin said. All of MCX’s participants have agreed not to deploy Apple Pay until a few months after MCX launches — and some, like Rite Aid, drew unwanted publicity when they first turned on Apple Pay in October, only to shut it off a few days later.
Rankin says that paying for stuff is “arguably the least-broken part of the system today. Consumers don’t care about tapping your phone versus swiping a credit card.” So CurrentC will allow customers not only to pay with their phones but to receive digital receipts, coupons, and loyalty credit through the app. It won’t require any accessories, and apps will be available for both iPhone and Android, Rankin says. MCX has been developing CurrentC in collaboration with a Newton startup called Paydiant.
One key aspect of CurrentC, says Robert McCarthy, a technical adviser at the mobile software development firm Mobi-quity, is that it will help retailers reduce credit card fees by debiting money directly from users’ bank accounts. But it remains to be seen whether CurrentC will be simple to set up and use. McCarthy says CurrentC might be targeting “a different, broader customer base than people who can afford new iPhone 6s” and says the big retailers behind MCX will no doubt give it a promotional push next year. But McCarthy says, “I’m really disappointed that they weren’t able to roll it out for the Christmas season.”
Earlier this month, after I’d blogged about my hit-or-miss experience using LoopPay, a senior executive at the company asked if he could join me as we revisited a few of the places where I had problems. It felt a little like Martha Stewart showing up in your kitchen asking you to re-make your Christmas ham under her supervision.
Using his device, we were able to buy some nacho chips at a taco shop where mine hadn’t worked. But I’m not sure I’ll ever forget the scene at FroyoWorld in Allston, when the executive, Damien Balsan, tried three different LoopPay devices to purchase a cup of frozen yogurt. When none worked, and as the yogurt sat on a scale getting soft, Balsan asked the shop’s co-owner if he could step behind the counter and try a few times from the cashier’s side of the register. Still no luck.
Eventually, the mobile phone will be a great way to pay. But my impulse at that moment: to take out a five-spot — not a shabby invention in its own right — and buy the yogurt. | We’ve got smartphone apps and accompanying devices that work at one retail chain or a bunch — but nothing yet that’s universal. | 56.08 | 1 | 25 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/canucks-clobber-coyotes-7-1-122214 | http://web.archive.org/web/20141229030529id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/canucks-clobber-coyotes-7-1-122214 | Canucks clobber Coyotes, 7-1 | 20141229030529 | Updated DEC 23, 2014 3:50a ET
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Alex Burrows' two goals were more about grit than style. No matter, they helped add up to the Vancouver Canucks' one-sided win over the Arizona Coyotes.
Burrows scored a pair of deflected goals while crashing the net, and Ryan Miller made 38 saves as the Canucks hammered the Coyotes 7-1 on Monday night.
Using his imposing presence around the crease, Burrows scored his first off starter Mike Smith in the first period and his second off backup Devan Dubnyk. They were first goals in 10 games and both were banked off an Arizona defenseman.
"I got a few whacks at a few pucks around the net, and that's how I score my goals," Burrows said. "Tonight they were two really greasy, greasy goals."
Daniel Sedin, Kevin Bieksa, Brad Richardson, Chris Higgins and Shawn Matthias also scored for Vancouver (20-11-2), which won its second straight. Miller improved to 18-7.
After facing his highest shot total of the season, Miller said he felt good about his game going into the holiday break.
"If you told me you are going to reach Christmas, and the team is going to have 20 wins, I would have been really happy," Miller said. "I still have a long way to go building my game to a consistent level, where I want to be, but I'm happy with the progress I am making."
Defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson scored the lone goal for the reeling Coyotes (11-18-4), who have one win in eight games.
Smith, who entered with one win in his last 12 starts, struggled and was replaced early in the second after giving up four goals on 11 shots.
Dubnyk came on in relief and made 26 saves for Arizona.
"Everybody feels for what Smitty went through tonight," Coyotes captain Shane Doan said. "We know what he's done for us and everything he's done for this group. We were going to try to help him out, but obviously we didn't."
Despite making a save on Derek Dorsett, who was in all alone early in the game, Smith had a tough first period.
Burrows worked the puck from the corner boards and banked it in off Coyotes defenseman Michael Stone to open the scoring at 6:34. The Canucks made it 2-0 at 17:17 when Henrik Sedin found Bieksa alone, and the defenseman put an easy one past Smith.
The lead grew to three goals two minutes later when Smith gave up a rebound off Radim Vrbata's long shot, and Daniel Sedin swooped in front to bat the puck in for his eighth goal of the season.
Less than two minutes into the second, on Vancouver's first shot of the period, Richardson carried the puck down the ice and fired it past Smith on the glove side to make it 4-0.
"The Richardson goal was a huge goal for us," Canucks coach Willie Desjardins said. "They looked like they were turning it a bit (early in the second). That was a timely goal by Richardson."
Richardson agreed his team eased up early in the second.
"We didn't start great in that period," he said. "It was probably good timing for the goal. We have a tendency sometimes ... we get up to set back.
"It's something we are trying to break for sure."
That brought in Dubnyk, who beat the Canucks 5-0 in the last meeting between the teams on Nov. 14. He was immediately put to work with Vancouver getting two power play. The second was converted at 12:19 when Burrows scored another goal by banking the puck off an Arizona defenseman standing in front.
The Coyotes got on the board soon after when Ryan Stanton was off for high-sticking. Ekman-Larsson wristed a shot past Miller at 15:03 for his eighth goal.
The Canucks were back on the man advantage six minutes into the third when Higgins took a pass from Linden Vey from behind the net and scored at 7:09 for a 6-1 lead. Matthias added another power-play goal just over two minutes later.
Vancouver went 3-for-6 on the power play.
Coyotes coach Dave Tippett wasn't impressed with his team's parade to the penalty box.
"That's trying too hard," he said. "Trying to make something out of a bad situation."
NOTES: Canucks RW Jannik Hansen, who collapsed on the bench Saturday after taking a big hit during the second period of Vancouver's win over Calgary, was expected to play against Arizona, but he was pulled before the game for further medical evaluation. ... The Canucks and Coyotes will meet three more times this season. | Alex Burrows scored twice and Ryan Miller made 38 saves as Vancouver Canucks hammered Arizona on Monday night. | 50 | 0.947368 | 4 | high | high | mixed |
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150102-painless-ways-to-spend-less | http://web.archive.org/web/20150104032245id_/http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150102-painless-ways-to-spend-less | Money hacks: Painless ways to spend less now | 20150104032245 | With the holiday buzz over, Jenny Jervis suggests a good dose of sobriety to make you smarter about your purchases.
“When you are thinking of buying something, no matter what it is (it could be the DVD for the latest film, a new sofa, or a car) instead of looking at the price as a value, look at it as an amount of hours you have to work to achieve that amount of money,” she wrote. “Let's say you want to buy a new phone that costs £100 ($155.50) and you earn £10 ($15.55) an hour, ask yourself if you would be happy with being given a phone after 10 hours work, or would you rather be given £100? Comparing your potential purchases with how much real-time work it would take to buy it often makes you take a second look at your purchases and may make you ask yourself if you really need it.”
Controlling your impulse to shop is key, according to Divya Bhargavi, a self-professed “cured” shopaholic. It’s easy to think you “absolutely positively need that thing for your life to function normally,” she wrote. “The next thing you know, you're shopping online — click, click — or you are at the mall buying that and a few other useless things.”
The solution, she wrote: “Next time you want something so badly, write it down. ... Look at it after a week or 10 days. I am 100% sure that you will not have the same feeling towards it. You will find out that you don't really need it so much.”
Pretending to earn less money than you actually do also has its benefits, according to Thaís Freitas, another respondent. “Live a little under your possibilities (for example, buying cheaper clothes than the ones you could actually afford),” she wrote. “That way you will always save money by not spending all that you make.”
Cash may be king, and only spending what you have may be a good rule to live by. But cash in your wallet can also be cash out the window. Instead, track your spending and set up your accounting electronically.
“Track your expenses to the point where you have a general idea of what percent of your income goes to housing/food/transportation/medical/bills,” wrote Alexander Yuan. “If you see big changes month to month or year to year, ask yourself why. If you don't like keeping track of money, try to automate it as much of it as possible using automatic transfers.”
Setting up a standing order with your bank to transfer a small amount each day — roughly £2 - £5 ($3.15-$7.75) into your savings adds up, Jervis recommends. “It's not much to miss each day, and you may not even notice it, but at the end of the month you could potentially have between £60 and £150 ($93 and $233) saved,” Jervis said.
A sale sounds like a good deal but do you really need all that’s on offer? Carlos Torres cites economics and its law of diminishing marginal utility as a guide.
To illustrate how this works, Torres uses fruit. “Let's say you find a super sale on oranges — 5lbs for a $1,” he wrote. “You spend $10 to buy 50lbs.”
Here’s how his scenario unfolds:
1. You're eating oranges like crazy
2. You're spending hours making orange juice
3. You’re taking them to work and trying to give them away
4. You spend gas to drive 15 miles to give them to family
5. You never want to see another orange again.
“The point is if you only eat three to four oranges a week, just spend 20 cents on 1lb. That is the savings point — what you regularly use,” he continued. “The fifth orange is starting to overdo it and the 10th orange has no value at all.”
According to Yuan, a lot of hacks for saving money won't work if you don’t develop good habits. “For anything on the list, try to think of a creative way to achieve the same goal in a sustainable way that fits with your personality.”
Among Yuan’s own 10 saving hacks are:
Don’t sweat the small stuff
Don't waste your valuable time trying to scrimp and save every penny as and there are more productive things to do than analyse the contents of your waste bin, according to Johnathan Law, who says savings need to be put in perspective, like whether you’re paying too much on your mortgage or rent and should downsize to a more affordable property.
“It's true that wastefulness is a sin,” he wrote. “But sometimes, and many people don't realise this, it is cheaper to waste than to save. Rather than spending an hour sorting through recyclables and selling it at the center for maybe 1-2 bucks, you could be doing something more productive with your time, like either learning or working.”
“Long story short,” he continued. “It's the big ticket items that save you money. Don't pinch pennies when you could cut dollars. … People sweat the small stuff because it's easier to do that than to make the big changes.”
Share your thoughts and experiences on BBC Capital's Facebook page or message us on Twitter @BBC_Capital.
Quora respondents are required to use their true names under the site’s Real Names policy. To help ensure legitimacy and quality, Quora asks some individuals, such as doctors and lawyers, to confirm their expertise. | Did you overspend in December? Donât despair. There are easy and painless ways to make up for that exuberance now. | 49.304348 | 0.608696 | 0.782609 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/12/12/11/47/the-worlds-most-expensive-photographs | http://web.archive.org/web/20150104203956id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2014/12/12/11/47/the-worlds-most-expensive-photographs | Melbourne-born photographer sells most expensive photo of all time | 20150104203956 | 'Phantom' by Peter Lik sold in November 2014 for US$6.5 million in a private sale, making it the most expensive photograph ever. (Supplied)
Melbourne-born photographer Peter Lik has made history by selling his photograph Phantom for US$6.5 million (AU$7.8 million), the highest amount ever paid for a photograph.
The pricey black and white shot was taken at Antelope Canyon in Arizona, in the US south-west, carved out by millions of years of erosion mainly caused by flash flooding.
IN PICTURES: The world's most expensive photographs
Melbourne-born photographer Peter Lik. (Getty)
His photograph Illusion also sold to the same private collector for US$2.4 million, making it the eighth most expensive photograph of all time.
Lik, who is based in the US, has four photographs in the list of the 20 most expensive shots with Eternal Moods and One the sixteenth and eighteenth most expensive respectively.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Melbourne-born photographer Peter Lik has made history by selling his photograph Phantom for US$6.5 million (AU$7.8 million), the highest amount ever paid for a photograph. His photograph Illusion also sold for US$2.4 million, making it the eighth most expensive photograph of all time. Eternal Moods and One are the sixteenth and eighteenth most expensive photographs respectively. | 2.865672 | 0.985075 | 20.328358 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/arizona-loses-fiesta-bowl-anu-solomon-shoulders-blame-123114 | http://web.archive.org/web/20150105001239id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/arizona-loses-fiesta-bowl-anu-solomon-shoulders-blame-123114 | Solomon shoulders blame as time runs out on Arizona | 20150105001239 | Updated JAN 01, 2015 11:12a ET
GLENDALE, Ariz. -- Arizona redshirt freshman quarterback Anu Solomon, down and dejected, put the game, and Arizona's 38-30 Fiesta Bowl loss to Boise State, on his shoulders.
It came down to the decisions he made, and didn't make.
"I just got carried away, thinking I could do this all by myself," said Solomon, who threw for 335 yards and one touchdown. He also ran for a touchdown. "It's a team game."
In a season of magical moments in huge comeback wins and improbable finishes, Solomon couldn't come up with one final last-minute miracle as the Wildcats finished their season with two consecutive losses and a 10-4 record.
He did move Arizona 70 yards in its final drive -- the bulk of those coming on a fantastic 43-yard catch by Cayleb Jones -- to put the Wildcats within eight yards of a potentially tying score, but they would get no closer over the final 20 seconds.
"We had 20 seconds," Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez said. "I thought we could get off three plays. You normally could get off three plays in 20 seconds. But we weren't able to do that."
With no timeouts left, Solomon spiked the ball to kill the clock on first down, threw incomplete to David Richards on second down, then took a sack on third down rather than throw the ball away -- allowing the final seconds to tick off.
"We've got to finish better than that," Rodriguez said. "But we competed till the end.
Arizona wanted to compete for one more snap, and for that failure, Solomon took the blame.
"Of course," he said. "I tried to put everything on my shoulders, thinking I could do everything by myself. I failed."
That was the theme for Solomon, who was as tough on himself as Boise State's defense was.
"As a leader, I failed," he said. "I gotta do better, put my team in better situations."
The final play was the one that lingered on most everyone's minds, but Solomon also threw a pair of bad interceptions -- one that set up Boise State's fourth touchdown after the Wildcats had crept within 21-7, and a pick-six that Donte Deayon returned 16 yards for Boise State's only touchdown of the second half.
That gave Boise a 38-20 lead, but Arizona's defense gave Solomon a chance to redeem himself. He connected with Samajie Grant on a 51-yard scoring pass to keep the Cats within reach, Casey Skowron's third field goal made it a one possession game, and the defense held one final time to give Arizona the ball back for one last shot with 2:53 left but no timeouts.
Arizona had been here before, pulling out victories in the final seconds.
"You have to have confidence as an offense," said senior receiver Austin Hill said. "I guess it wasn't meant to happen today. I think we could have played a little bit better, consistently making plays. But, it didn't happen."
Solomon, who battled a bad ankle for much of the second half of the season, said that was on him. He didn't make some of the best reads or put the right zip on the ball.
What did he learn from this?
"I'm never going to make these kinds of mistakes (again)," he said. "I'm going to work every day starting tomorrow. I'm going to get ready for next season put my team in better situations."
Senior running back Terris Jones-Grigsby, who handled most of the running duties after freshman starter Nick Wilson was knocked out of the game with an injury, credited Solomon for hanging in there after the big early deficit.
"We started off slow, but he didn't let that bother him," Jones-Grigsby said. "He's always been a poised quarterback. He took control. That's what we needed.
"But this is a team effort. You can't put that all on Anu. I'm just glad he took it this far. I'm glad he was my quarterback."
Senior center Steven Gurrola summed up the game and the season thusly: "Every dog has his day. Everybody has to come to play. It's football and stuff happens."
Follow Steve Rivera on Twitter | Freshman quarterback Anu Solomon says his poor decisions cost Arizona an opportunity to win the Fiesta Bowl. | 49.277778 | 0.722222 | 1.5 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2015/01/06/08/36/jesus-trial-site-found-in-jerusalem-old-city | http://web.archive.org/web/20150108080224id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2015/01/06/08/36/jesus-trial-site-found-in-jerusalem-old-city | Jesus trial site 'found' amid remains of Herod's Palace in Jerusalem | 20150108080224 | Citadel and Tower of David (founded in 2nd century BC), Old City of Jerusalem. Archaeologists believe Herod's palace stood in this location during the first century AD. (Getty)
Archaeologists in Jerusalem say they have found King Herod's palace in Jerusalem — and with it the site where Jesus was sentenced to death.
The trial of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of John is one of the more famous scenes of the New Testament.
It describes the trial taking place near a gate and on a bumpy stone pavement.
Those details fit the description of a site uncovered beneath the layers of an old abandoned building in Jerusalem's Old City near the Tower of David Museum, the Washington Post reports.
Archaeologists such as Shimon Gibson, a professor at the University of North Carolina in the United States, believe it to be the place of Jesus's pivotal trial.
"There is, of course, no inscription stating it happened here, but everything — archaeological, historical and gospel accounts — all falls into place and makes sense," he said.
Scholars agree that Herod's palace stood in the west of Jerusalem's Old City.
However, whether Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate inside it is the subject of much debate.
The gospels describe how Jesus was brought before Pilate in the "praetorium," a Latin term for a Roman general's tent.
Some say Pilate's praetorium would have been within military barracks in the Antonia Fortress, which lies in the northeastern part of the Old City, near Temple Mount.
Others say Pilate would have been a guest in the palace built by Herod.
The new find is now being shown to the public through tours organised by the museum.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Archaeologists in Jerusalem say they have found King Herod's palace in Jerusalem — and with it the site where Jesus was sentenced to death. | 12.428571 | 0.892857 | 11.178571 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Warner-to-work-with-Kaepernick-on-game-s-mental-6002913.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20150109162904id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Warner-to-work-with-Kaepernick-on-game-s-mental-6002913.php | Warner to work with 49ers’ Kaepernick on game’s mental aspects | 20150109162904 | Eric Branc, San Francisco Chronicle
Photo: PAUL CONNORS / Associated Press
FILE - In this Aug. 13, 2005, file photo, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner looks for an open receiver in the first quarter against the Dallas Cowboys in Tempe, Ariz. Warner, Junior Seau and Orlando Pace are first year eligible nominees among the 15 Modern-Era Finalists that will be considered for election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame when the Hall's Selection Committee meets in Phoenix on Saturday, Jan. 31, 2015. (AP Photo/Paul Connors, File)
FILE - In this Aug. 13, 2005, file photo, Arizona Cardinals...
Warner to work with 49ers’ Kaepernick on game’s mental aspects
Colin Kaepernick has a bazooka arm and sprinter’s speed.
Now Kurt Warner is hoping he can help the 49ers quarterback develop a football mind to match his jaw-dropping physical skills.
Warner, 43, a two-time NFL MVP, will work with Kaepernick, 27, this offseason at Exos training facility in Phoenix and the focus of their time together will be on the mental aspects of the position.
“It’s really going to be about seeing where he’s at as a quarterback,” Warner said Thursday on CBS Radio. “And seeing how far we can push it to teach him how you play the game with your mind as opposed to your arm and your legs.”
In 2014, Kaepernick made a series of highlight-reel plays, most notably a 55-yard, across-the-field touchdown pass to running back Frank Gore that he fired off his back foot in a win over the Eagles. Warner, however, wants Kaepernick to become more adept at identifying routine throws that are available, such as short, underneath tosses.
“I’m just a firm believer that, regardless of how talented you are physically, you have to be able to make the easy plays at the quarterback position to be successful,” Warner said. “You have to know what you are seeing. When a defense gives you an easy read, you have to be able to make that read and make that throw 90 percent of the time. Because you don’t get that all the time and it’s hard enough to play the position.”
Unlike Kaepernick, Warner lacked mobility. He had 286 rushing yards in his 11-year career, but was a classic pocket passer who ranks ninth in NFL history in passer rating (93.7), one spot ahead of Joe Montana. Warner hopes to help Kaepernick see what is possible if he becomes less reliant on his legs.
“He’s gotten by on athleticism and he’s made some great plays and had some great games,” Warner said. “But I think the goal is, in the time that I’m going to have with him, just to see where he’s at. What he knows about the position. And then how far we can push the envelope as far as helping him develop as a pocket passer.”
In his second full season as a starter, Kaepernick ranked 20th in the NFL in passer rating (86.4), 22nd in yards per attempt (7.0) and 24th in completion percentage (60.5).
Thinning staff: Assistant secondary coach Greg Jackson, one of the 49ers’ six defensive coaches, has joined former 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh at the University of Michigan, according to multiple reports.
Jackson, 48, had been with the 49ers since 2011 when he reconnected with Harbaugh, his teammate for two seasons with the Chargers. Niners wide receivers coach John Morton has also traveled to Ann Arbor with Harbaugh. In addition, 49ers assistant strength coach Kevin Tolbert will go to Michigan, Fox Sports reported.
The only other coach known to have left the 49ers is co-offensive line coach Reggie Davis, who is the running backs coach at Nebraska.
Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch | [...] Kurt Warner is hoping he can help the 49ers quarterback develop a football mind to match his jaw-dropping physical skills. In 2014, Kaepernick made a series of highlight-reel plays, most notably a 55-yard, across-the-field touchdown pass to running back Frank Gore that he fired off his back foot in a win over the Eagles. “I’m just a firm believer that, regardless of how talented you are physically, you have to be able to make the easy plays at the quarterback position to be successful,” Warner said. When a defense gives you an easy read, you have to be able to make that read and make that throw 90 percent of the time. Because you don’t get that all the time and it’s hard enough to play the position. Assistant secondary coach Greg Jackson, one of the 49ers’ six defensive coaches, has joined former 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh at the University of Michigan, according to multiple reports. Niners wide receivers coach John Morton has also traveled to Ann Arbor with Harbaugh. | 3.657143 | 0.961905 | 30.695238 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.nbc.com/about-a-boy/episode-guide/season-2/about-a-manniversary/209 | http://web.archive.org/web/20150109223608id_/http://www.nbc.com:80/about-a-boy/episode-guide/season-2/about-a-manniversary/209 | About a Manniversary | 20150109223608 | Mr. Chris and Fiona stroll home after a romantic date, but when he asks to come in, she panics, taps him on the nose and says, "Boop!" Even more embarrassing - Will watches the whole thing from behind a tree. Once Mr. Chris is gone, Will ridicules Fiona. She admits she's nervous because she hasn't slept with Mr. Chris yet. In fact it's been years since she's done IT, and she's out of practice. Will has a warning for Fiona. If she doesn't get over this hurdle, she might just lose Mr. Chris for good.
The next morning, Will returns home from a jog and gets the scare of his life when he finds a strange homemade Marcus/Will Frankenstein sculpture, complete with Will's actual human hair. Marcus made the monument to their friendship to commemorate their upcoming "manniversary." Will, unaware of their manniversary - and the very existence of manniversaries in general - lies and says he got Marcus exactly what he wanted, which leads Marcus to believe Will purchased tickets to the Golden Gate Femme Fest, a folk festival of iconic female singers! What? Will commits to the lie, boasting that he got VIP tickets. Now Marcus is convinced he's going to meet his favorite singer, Lisa Loeb. Ecstatic, he runs off to find something to wear. Will isn't sure exactly what just happened, but now has to deliver or face Fiona's wrath.
Turns out, Andy has tickets to the sold-out show but he refuses to give them to Will - the show is too important to Laurie, plus folk music makes her freaky in a good way. This is TMI for Will, who heads off to hit up a connection for tickets. Meanwhile Fiona goes to Marcus' school to invite Mr. Chris over for a second chance at the sex. He takes her awkward hints and accepts.
Before her big night, Dakota gives Fiona a sexy makeover, complete with Brazilian wax, lingerie and super-sexy stilettos. Between the wax burn and the too-tight boots, Fiona can barely walk. By the time Mr. Chris arrives, she's hobbling around, chugging Chardonnay to ease the pain. Meanwhile Will gets Marcus into the folk festival where Andy and Laurie are enjoying a variety of pot-laced baked goods. After paying off the bouncer to get Marcus into the VIP section, Will suggests trying to sneak into Lisa Loeb's trailer - which is when the guys get caught by security. Will admits he never had VIP tickets. Marcus relays Fiona's advice: never meet your idol because it could only be disappointing. Besides, Will has become his idol.
Back at the house, Fiona's charade is also failing. When Mr. Chris attempts to take off one of her boots, it pops off like a cork, the stiletto heel stabbing him in the face. Blood everywhere. Not hot. Fiona comes clean; she's out of practice, a bundle of nerves. Mr. Chris assures her that he's looking for more than casual sex. He's serious about her, and he can wait. But after his sweet words, Fiona can't. It's on.
At the Femme Fest, Will and Marcus are about to call it a day when Lisa Loeb suddenly appears. Will begs her to talk to Marcus, but when she realizes they were the guys trying to get into her trailer, she calls them perverts. Fortunately, Marcus is impressed Lisa Loeb called them anything at all. All and all, it's a successful night and everyone goes home happy, until the next morning when Fiona disgusts Will with her post-sex victory dance. | While Fiona tries to break her chastity streak, the guys celebrate their "manniversary" by stalking Marcus' idol, Lisa Loeb. | 28.52 | 0.72 | 1.44 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/01/02/coffee-prices-percolated/wBSm2QM7sqH8lXatmKXEeL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150111232501id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2015/01/02/coffee-prices-percolated/wBSm2QM7sqH8lXatmKXEeL/story.html | In 2014, coffee prices percolated | 20150111232501 | WASHINGTON — Sellers of America’s favorite energy source, crude oil, had a rough year, with prices falling off a cliff. But the nation’s second-favorite energy source — coffee — has seen prices jump, making it the best-performing commodity of 2014. Droughts that hit the coffee belts sent the price of beans soaring: bad news for drinkers and diners but great news for investors, according to data from the financial-visualization service FinViz. The benchmark contract for 37,500 pounds of Arabica beans traded for about $1.68 a pound Wednesday, up from about $1.20 at the start of the year, according to ICE Futures. For futures traders, coffee was a better bet than gold, silver, or platinum — and far more energizing than crude, heating oil, and natural gas, which rounded out the three worst-performing commodities of the year. So why was coffee priced so high? Drought in Brazil and a fungus in Central America crimped the world’s supplies for much of the year. But rainfall returned to Brazil last month, raising expectations for this year’s crop. — Washington Post | Tthe nation’s second-favorite energy source after crude oil — coffee — has seen prices jump, making it the best-performing commodity of 2014. | 7.37931 | 0.931034 | 13 | low | medium | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/01/12/apple-overtakes-nikon-on-flickr/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150112140720id_/http://fortune.com/2015/01/12/apple-overtakes-nikon-on-flickr/ | Apple overtakes Nikon on Flickr | 20150112140720 | The best camera, as Chase Davis put it, is the one that’s with you when there’s a photo to be taken.
By that measure, Canon is still the best — at least on Flickr, the granddaddy of photo-sharing sites.
But the iPhone is closing the gap. With 9.6% of photos posted in 2014, it overtook Nikon (9.3%) and drew within a few percentage points of Canon (13.4%).
In terms of cameras owned by Flickr members, iPhones are the most popular by far.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL -0.95% coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed. | Canon was still No. 1 in 2014 with 13.4% of photos posted. Apple was No. 2 at 9.6%. | 5.583333 | 0.75 | 1.25 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/jk-simmons-host-saturday-night-live-snl | http://web.archive.org/web/20150120171517id_/http://www.people.com/article/jk-simmons-host-saturday-night-live-snl | J.K. Simmons to Host Saturday Night Live | 20150120171517 | 01/20/2015 AT 09:45 AM EST
Live from New York, it's J.K. Simmons!
After 20 years as a character actor in films like
, Simmons is finally hitting it big with the critically acclaimed
, which just earned him a
Next up, PEOPLE has learned exclusively that he'll be taking on the hilarious and challenging world of
, hosting the Jan. 31 show.
, Simmons plays a troubled and deeply troubling jazz instructor.
"I got to go to Cannes for the first time," Simmons
of his movie's debut, which garnered standing ovations and rave reviews. "I mean it really was crazy."
If he thinks that's crazy, wait until he sees what sketches the
has in store for him.
As for the night's musical guest, D'Angelo and his band The Vanguard will take the stage. The singer recently ended his 14-year hiatus with the new album
will air Jan. 31 at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC. | Hint: He really knows how to jazz up a place | 17.272727 | 0.545455 | 0.545455 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/aman-tokyo/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150122183420id_/http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/aman-tokyo/ | Aman Resorts: New Tokyo hotel offers relaxation atop the skyline | 20150122183420 | You might not think something as simple as taking a bath would require instructions, but Aman Tokyo, Aman Resorts’ month-old hotel on the top six floors of the Otemachi Tower, doesn’t want Western guests to get the furo wrong. These oversized, square-sided soaking tubs are a traditional part of Japanese culture; they anchor the cypress-perfumed slate bathroom in each of the 84 guest rooms and suites.
Bathing in a furo is less about hygiene than it is about ritual, health and relaxation, as the illustrated guide explains. Step 1: Using the traditional oke bucket, scoop hot water (scented with yuzu salt) from the bath and rinse your body in the shower while seated on a cypress stool, starting with the feet and working your way up. Step 2: Soak in the furo, warming the body to improve blood circulation and unwind muscles. Step 3: Get back in the shower and lather up. Step 4: Return to the furo to soak again. Step 5: Rinse off in the shower. Step 6: Dry off, dress and take the lift to the Lounge on the 33rd floor for Champagne cocktails, Japanese whiskey and Mount Fuji views. [Ed. Note: Not a traditional part of the furo ritual, though it should be.]
The thoughtful Eastern luxuries go on at this vertical resort: books on Japanese culture in the library, rock gardens in the lobby, A4 Kobe beef and Hokkaido scallops in the restaurant. At ground level, more than 700 trees of 36 different species create the vivid 38,000-square-foot Otemachi Forest. “It is not an actual forest,” Olivier Jolivet, Aman’s CEO, clarifies. “It is a largely green space depicting the spirit of engawa, the design aesthetic which represents the area in Japanese traditional homes between the garden and the living space, where families and friends gather to enjoy time being a part of nature.” Inspired by the gardens and woodlands surrounding the Imperial Palace, the Forest was raised off-site for three years, then transplanted to the base of the Otemachi Tower. Thick with Japanese maples, Konara oaks, rhododendrons, beautyberries and dogtooth violets, the landscape is a shock of nature in the dense, digitized Ginza district.
Aman has clearly done its homework for its first Japanese resort. According to Jolivet, the country has been on Aman’s radar for a long time. “Japan is one of the most sophisticated countries in the world,” he said. “There is an element of Japanese DNA within Aman, which to me is defined by simple design, classy elegance and impeccable service.”
Those tenets are well represented in the understated guestrooms, which start at 760 square-feet and feature long, lean lines and black accents that pop against neutral tones of cream and sand. Natural materials (camphor wood, washi paper, stone) and low-slung furniture fall back to the views through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Some look out onto the Tokyo SkyTree, the tallest building in Japan, but up here in Aman’s cloud sanctuary, it’s hard to imagine getting any higher. | Aman Resorts' Tokyo hotel takes luxury to new heights—atop the Otemachi Tower. | 37.9375 | 0.5 | 1.25 | high | low | abstractive |
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/01/26/medtronic-expects-complete-covidien-purchase-today/MDYwCynq793y4zwLXZmz3J/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150127082537id_/https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/01/26/medtronic-expects-complete-covidien-purchase-today/MDYwCynq793y4zwLXZmz3J/story.html | Medtronic expects to complete $43b Covidien purchase today | 20150127082537 | Medtronic Inc. completed its $42.9 billion takeover of Covidien PLC on Monday, outlining plans to run the Massachusetts company as a separate business unit focused on surgical tools and hospital supplies while retaining the vast majority of Covidien’s employees.
Reiterating his company’s plans to invest $10 billion in medical technology research and development over the coming decade, Omar Ishrak, Medtronic’s chief executive for the past 3½ years, said that much of the spending will be in Massachusetts, Minneapolis, and on the West Coast.
“It’s very likely that a lot of this investment will go in the Boston area,” Ishrak said Monday.
The buyout is one of the largest ever in the medical technology sector, joining two industry titans that Ishrak said share “a strong alignment in our values and our mission.”
It took effect after the Irish High Court earlier in the day approved an arrangement that would allow Minneapolis-based Medtronic, one of the world’s biggest medical device makers, to shift its global headquarters to Ireland to reduce corporate taxes.
Ireland maintains a corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent, compared with a rate of 35 percent in the United States, one of the highest rates in the world.
Under the arrangement, called an inversion, Medtronic will set up a holding company incorported in Ireland and called Medtronic PLC. It will own both companies. Covidien, which is already technically based in Ireland, kept its management team and US headquarters in Mansfield. The companies together have about 4,000 employees in Ireland.
Medtronic’s management and operational headquarters will remain in Minneapolis.
Executives at Medtronic, which has been pursuing a strategy of innovation, expanding globally, and offering more products and services to its customers, said there is relatively little overlap between its own product offerings and those of Covidien.
Formerly known as Tyco HealthCare, Covidien has about 38,000 workers globally, including 1,800 in Massachusetts.
Before the acquisition was consummated, Medtronic had about 49,000 employees globally. But outside of an operation in Portsmouth, N.H., that makes electrosurgical products, it has had a relatively small presence in New England. The purchase of Covidien, which operates the former US Surgical business in New Haven, will make it a much larger player.
Medtronic currently runs three divisions. Its cardiac and vascular group, which competes with Natick-based Boston Scientific Corp., sells products such as defibrillators, heart valves, and stents. Its restorative therapies business sells a range of products including pacemakers and replacement discs for spinal procedures. And its diabetes group sells products ranging from insulin pumps to glucose monitoring systems.
Regulators forced Covidien to divest a drug-coated balloon it was developing because it overlapped with an existing Medtronic product.
But although some other Covidien products will be merged into Medtronic’s existing business groups, most will remain in the new surgical tool and hospital supplies group being created from the Covidien buyout.
The new division will be based in New Haven but have a large presence in Mansfield, Ishrak said. He added that several Covidien executives will remain with Medtronic, though most will leave.
Medtronic has established a target of reducing its overall operating costs by $850 million over the next three years through a variety of steps that may include the closing of some sites and elimination of some jobs. But the company is not specifying how many jobs might be cut at Covidien. | Medtronic Inc. completed its $42.9 billion takeover of Covidien plc Monday, outlining plans to run the company as a separate business unit while retaining the vast majority of Covidien employees. | 19.727273 | 1 | 7.848485 | medium | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/01/27/square-tries-to-make-open-source-welcoming-and-inspiring-to-women/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150127192129id_/http://fortune.com/2015/01/27/square-tries-to-make-open-source-welcoming-and-inspiring-to-women/ | Square's new code of conduct: Make open source more open to women | 20150127192129 | At most companies, most tech jobs are held by men. But the proportion of open source developers who are female is almost infinitesimal: Just 1.5%, by some estimates.
Square, a San Francisco-based mobile payments company founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, says it wants to change that. To make the open source community more friendly and accessible to women, the company disclosed that it is publishing an open source code of conduct that it hopes will help provide a “welcoming and inspiring environment for all.”
What is open source? Simply put, it is source code (used to develop software programs) that is freely available and modifiable on the Internet. Open source developers from all over the world contribute to various projects, which are hosted on various websites—GitHub, a popular code hosting site, has over 8 million users and over 19 million code “repositories.”
This community isn’t made up of just one-person coders in their basements (a popular misconception). Developers from tech companies large and small—from Microsoft and Google to pretty much every startup in Silicon Valley and beyond—are involved, using the available code source for various software projects. In other words, opening open source is a big deal. And, not many women are involved.
Some of the guidelines included in Square’s code of conduct, published earlier today, seem better-suited to kindergartners than humans capable of developing complex code. For example, they include “be respectful,” “be considerate” and “be collaborative.” But the company’s diversity programs lead, Vanessa Slavich, says having general guidelines—especially when it comes to how to report infractions—can go a long way in making women feel more comfortable in open source circles.
“If you’re new to soccer or baseball, you have a rulebook and you know what is allowed and what is not allowed,” says Slavich. “So we’re encouraging diversity in this space by having a guidebook that says this how it works, and if you ever feel uncomfortable, this is how you can report it.”
Indeed, included in Square’s new code of conduct includes an email address that community members can use to file complaints if they experience or witness “unacceptable behavior.” According to the company, once a report is made they will respond within two days and evaluate the complaint. If the allegation is serious enough the offending party could be permanently banned from contributing to Square’s open source code. (The complaints will be processed case-by-case, by an internal committee.)
To be sure, Square isn’t the first company to publish an open source code of conduct. Twitter, for example, has very similar guidelines for its contributors. But as yet another high-profile startup, Square could help draw more attention to the need to make the open source community more open and inclusive to women.
“There’s harassment and unconscious bias [within open source communities],” says Slavich. “Online, people are anonymous, so it’s a lot easier to say things that you normally wouldn’t say.”
As we saw in last fall’s Gamergate controversy, in which hard-core gamers threatened and intimated female video game developers, there is a dangerous element to these kinds of anonymous communities, where derogatory and even threatening language can quickly escalate.
There’s another advantage to getting more women involved in open source communities—it can be good for women’s job prospects. Why? Employers often look up candidates’ lines of code on online, open source repositories. So if a female candidate isn’t on GitHub or other websites, it’s akin to not being on LinkedIn.
“Open source is a great thing for technology,” says Slavich. “But women aren’t really a part of the conversation.” | The startup publishes a new code of conduct for developers. The goal is to make the open source community more "welcoming and inspiring" to women. | 25.965517 | 0.862069 | 3.137931 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/01/25/weight-loss-shortcuts-the-truth-behind-hype/7Ca8ippQGwdHOQHilhCdML/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150128064231id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2015/01/25/weight-loss-shortcuts-the-truth-behind-hype/7Ca8ippQGwdHOQHilhCdML/story.html | Weight-loss shortcuts: The truth behind the hype | 20150128064231 | Admit it: When it comes to weight loss, we all want a shortcut, anything easier than good old-fashioned diet and exercise.
And thanks to medical advances, lots of tempting new options are available. You may have heard about the new prescription medication Contrave, which the Food and Drug Administration approved in September. Another drug might be available soon; an FDA advisory committee has recommended the approval of an injectable medication called Saxenda.
The problems with those drugs and other medical options is they might not live up to the hype and they can have some scary side effects. Read on to learn the truth behind the hype around weight-loss supplements, drugs, and surgeries.
The hype: Supplements can help you lose weight naturally
The truth: They don’t work — and they might actually be harmful. “There’s no natural herb that leads to weight loss,” says Pieter Cohen, a physician at Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts. “And of all dietary supplements, the ones for weight loss seem to cause the most harm, sometimes liver failure and even death.”
In Consumer Reports’ recent survey of almost 3,000 Americans, about half of supplement users said they experienced at least one side effect — most often a faster heart rate, jitters, digestive problems, or dry mouth. Even supplements that contain only plants may not be safe. For instance, yohimbe, an African tree bark extract marketed as a dietary supplement, can cause elevated blood pressure or panic attacks.
The FDA has recalled hundreds of supplements that have contained drugs. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers tested easily purchased supplements that had been recalled between 2009 and 2012. The study (financed in part by a grant from Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports’ parent company) found that two-thirds contained banned drugs.
What you should do: Avoid them all. Supplements aren’t tested for safety. They don’t have to be proved effective or even safe, unlike over-the-counter drugs.
The hype: Pop a pill and watch the pounds melt off
The truth: Weight-loss drugs aren’t very effective and have some scary side effects. And none of them work well without lifestyle changes, including exercising and dieting.
What you should do: “It’s hard to be enthusiastic about weight-loss drugs,” says Steven Woloshin, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice. Although they’re FDA-approved, many of the meds have side effects that can be life threatening. So, yes, they can help you lose a few extra pounds, but why take that kind of risk?
The hype: Weight-loss surgery can give you a new lease on life.
The truth: Although surgery might improve quality of life, the risks are serious. Death rates are less than 1 percent, but the overall complication rate is 17 percent, and the reoperation rate is 7 percent, according to a study review published in JAMA Surgery.
What you should do: Surgery might make sense if you’re obese and young because the health benefits add up over time. Most procedures require just a small incision. The newest one, endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty, doesn’t involve any incision. The procedures have been found to improve or even resolve type 2 diabetes in 85 percent of patients and high blood pressure and cholesterol abnormalities in up to 95 percent. Medicare, Medicaid, and most private insurers cover some of the surgeries, but less than half of state health plans do. | The problems with weight-loss drugs and other medical options is they might not live up to the hype and have some scary side effects. | 26 | 1 | 9.518519 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/kim-kardashian-bruce-jenner-his-mood | http://web.archive.org/web/20150130043507id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/kim-kardashian-bruce-jenner-his-mood | Kim Kardashian: Bruce Jenner is the Happiest I've Ever Seen Him | 20150130043507 | 01/26/2015 AT 10:00 AM EST
If Bruce Jenner has anything to say about his personal life, he'll do it in his own time.
seems to be saying in light of continued speculation over
While promoting her T-Mobile commercial that will air Sunday during Super Bowl XLIX,
about the family photo that she and her sisters
– and where he is emotionally these days.
"We support Bruce no matter what, so we were just at his house hanging out and we wanted to take a picture," said Kardashian. "That was not like a secret message ⦠Of course we support Bruce 100 percent."
"I will say that I think Bruce should tell his story his way," she continued. "I think everyone goes through things in life, and I think that story and what Bruce is going through, I think he'll share whenever the time is right ⦠I think Bruce is very happy, the happiest I've ever seen him."
She added: "He's our dad, so we support him no matter what. And I think when the time is right, he'll talk about whatever he wants to talk about. I guess I'll kind of let everyone be curious, and I feel like that's his journey to talk about."
Kardashian's interview will air Tuesday night on | Kim Kardashian addresses Bruce Jenner's mood in light of recent speculation about his appearance | 17.666667 | 0.666667 | 1.333333 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/12/05/the-daily-business-agenda/k1OjW3NR4p2hxa1UfXhyzN/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150130125512id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/12/05/the-daily-business-agenda/k1OjW3NR4p2hxa1UfXhyzN/story.html | The daily business agenda | 20150130125512 | The US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases November’s employment report at 8:30 a.m. In October, the economy added 214,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate stood at 5.8 percent. The consensus forecast is that the job market picked up slightly in November, with 235,000 jobs expected to be added and an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent.
Walter Isaacson, chief executive of the Aspen Institute and biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin, speaks today at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce’s Innovation Forum at the Westin Copley Place Hotel. Isaacson's latest book is “The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.” Registration is at 11:45 a.m. Price is $75 for members, $120 for nonmembers.
The New England-Canada Business Council hosts a luncheon featuring Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil, who will talk about the province’s efforts to foster innovation, as well as its ongoing energy projects. Registration at 11:30 a.m. and luncheon begins at 12:10 p.m. at the Hampshire House in Boston. $40.
The MMMMaven Project hosts a workshop to learn how to earn a living from creative endeavors. 7 p.m., 614 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge. $30.
The Cambridge Innovation Center hosts IdeaStrike, the Young Entrepreneur Challenge, for high school students on Saturday. Participants compete in teams, game-show style. The best business idea receives a $1,000 grant for everyone on the team. 1 p.m., 1 Broadway, Cambridge. Free. | The US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases November’s employment report, and more notable events and things to know. | 13.227273 | 0.727273 | 5.818182 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/World/2015/01/28/01/27/Bali-Nine-lawyers-mercy-dash-to-courts | http://web.archive.org/web/20150131013637id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/World/2015/01/28/01/27/Bali-Nine-lawyers-mercy-dash-to-courts | Australians next in line for executions, Indonesia's attorney-general says | 20150131013637 | Australians Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan are among the death row prisoners Indonesia plans to execute next, making legal efforts to save them even more urgent.
Indonesia's attorney-general HM Prasetyo says the first round of executions, in which six death row drug offenders went to the firing squad last week, are under evaluation.
He hasn't revealed the names of the next prisoners, however Chan and Sukumaran are the only Australians on death row in Indonesia, and he has said previously they will be dealt with together.
"We are still finding the right time for the next executions of citizens of France, Ghana, Cordova, Brazil, The Philippines, Australia and one Indonesian," he told a parliamentary committee, as quoted by local news website detik.com.
Australian death-row prisoners Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. (AAP)
As Mr Prasetyo spoke in parliament on Wednesday, lawyers for the two Bali Nine members met on the island to finish a final legal effort to save them.
Jakarta-based lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis says President Joko Widodo rejected clemency for Chan, 31, and Sukumaran, 33, based on advice that hadn't evaluated the change they have achieved since their 2005 drug trafficking arrest.
Mr Lubis will also argue there was a misapplication of the law, and "serious mistakes by previous judges".
But there are hurdles to getting his case heard.
First, the applicants are supposed to go to court in person to register their application for a judicial review, known as a PK.
Permission for Chan and Sukumaran to leave Kerobokan has been denied, so it's hoped a court registrar will go to them.
Second, is a legal argument over whether a second PK can be heard.
Mr Lubis says that shouldn't be an issue in death penalty cases.
Victorian Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry and barrister Julian McMahon visited the men at Kerobokan jail on Wednesday, along with family.
Chan's mother Helen joined his brother Michael, while Sukumaran's mother and siblings also visited.
Diplomatic efforts also continue for the pair, however in an interview with CNN this week, Mr Joko said there would be "no compromise" for drug dealers sentenced to death.
Mr Prasetyo said the next executions would likely again be held on the Central Java prison island of Nusakambangan, but there were issues to consider.
"There were obstacles," he told the committee.
"The intrusion of human rights activists, the efforts of our electronic media reporters, trying to disguise themselves as fishermen.
"We can prevent them from getting close to the execution location."
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Lawyers for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are heading to Bali to make a final court bid to challenge the Australians' death sentences. | 20.8 | 0.76 | 1.72 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2015/01/27/12/36/kale-shortage-in-new-york | http://web.archive.org/web/20150131085611id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/world/2015/01/27/12/36/kale-shortage-in-new-york | New Yorkers whine over kale, quinoa shortages as super storm looms | 20150131085611 | Shelves have been cleared of kale in New York. (Twitter)
As a blizzard descends on America's north-east, New Yorkers have taken to social media to bemoan a lack of available groceries as they prepare to be housebound for several days.
Posts on social media show the hipsters and the health-conscious in Brooklyn have swept the stores clean of 2014's breakout superfood, kale, as a huge snowstorm edges closer.
Residents are stocking up on goods with almost a metre of snow forecast for parts of New York and Boston.
READ MORE: 'Tidal wave of snow' heading for New York
New York's roads will be closed to all but emergency traffic, prompting residents to build up a bunker's worth of supplies.
But latecomers to whole food and health food stores were no doubt disappointed to be confronted with shelves completely empty of fresh vegetables.
Others have also reported trouble finding quinoa, kale's elder sibling in the superfood popularity stakes.
Long queues have been experienced at food stores, book shops and bottle shops.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | The hipsters and the health-conscious in New York have swept the stores clean of 2014's breakout superfood, kale, as a huge snowstorm edges closer. | 7.2 | 1 | 15.6 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/empire-season-1-episode-4-recap-hakeem-caught-cheating | http://web.archive.org/web/20150131184759id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/empire-season-1-episode-4-recap-hakeem-caught-cheating | Hakeem Gets Caught Cheating : People.com | 20150131184759 | saw a kinder, gentler Cookie (
) – but only because she was successfully playing with everyone's strings like the leopard print-wearing puppet master she is.
While youngest son Hakeem (Bryshere Gray) still won't give her the time of day, Cookie managed to gain one more client in Tiana (Serayah McNeill) Hakeem's kind-of girlfriend, and orchestrate another in jailed rapper Titan (Jim Beans).
) old boss, Billy Beretti (Judd Nelson) threatened to bring Empire down should they go through with going public.
Bryshere Grey (as Hakeem) on Empire
Oh, Hakeem. So spoiled. So simple. So Oedipal. Having been raised in the lap of luxury for his entire life, totally alienated from the culture that inspired his parents to make meaningful music, he's still having difficulty writing anything worth anything.
However, when Cookie took on Tiana as a client, she convinced her to have Hakeem rap a verse on Tiana's "
", which had been missing something.
Before they could perform it at the Teen Choice Awards nominations concert (apparently that's a thing), Tiana caught him cheating with Camille (Naomi Campbell), the woman onto whom he is projecting all of his very many mommy issues.
When Tiana's voice rang out through Hakeem's apartment while he and Camille were in the bath, we were kind of hoping for a
-type scenario, where Camille would hold her breath and hide under the water. Alas, Naomi Campbell gets her hair wet for no TV show.
In the end, they managed to pull off performing "Keep It Movin," because Tiana doesn't care about Hakeem nearly as much she cares about music. "What I'm not cool with is you dissing your mother and showing up to soundcheck late," she scolded him. Good girl.
Grace Gealey (as Anika) and Terrence Howard (as Lucious) on Empire
After dropping Kid FoFo last week, Lucious needed a new act. Becky (
) suggested Titan just before he landed himself in jail by shooting a drug dealer.
Anika (Grace Gealey) was insistent that she could get Titan signed while he sat in jail, but that wasn't really the job for a "bougie debutante," as Cookie so lovingly referred to her.
Complicating matters further was the fact that Titan was signed under Beretti, who picked up Kid FoFo once Empire dropped him and who was the first to sign Lucious so many years ago. However, their working relationship did not end amicably – Beretti took credit for Lucious's work, and Lucious left the label before it could ruin him. Baretti promised Lucious that if Empire ever goes public, he will bring him down.
Later, we learn that Titan was raised in the Nation of Islam, and that the drug dealer he shot had burned down a community center.
Wholly undeterred by Baretti's threats, Lucious visited Titan in prison and promised to pay the $1.7 million to repair the community center – all Titan had to do was start recording for Empire on a phone that Lucious gave him. And he did.
Also, Lucious finally revealed to Anika that he has ALS – and that the doctors told him that he has three years, at best.
Bryshere Gray (as Hakeem) and Jussie Smollett (as Jamal) on Empire
After cutting himself off from his father, Jamal is now living in a craphole in Bushwick.
Jamal continued to have more spine than sense, giving back the paycheck he earned performing with Hakeem.
He, too, was having inspiration problems throughout most of the episode – to which Cookie told him, basically, to stop being so precious about his living situation – but by the end of the episode he managed to turn the sounds of the streets into music.
It was like watching a hip-hop version of
Cookie's relationship with Lucious was surprisingly non-contentious this week. Instead of threats, non-disclosure agreements and shoe-throwing, the two actually enjoyed a reasonably respectful working relationship. There was even flirting!
In convincing Lucious to sign Titan from prison, Cookie told him: "You lose your soul when you feel like the world's forgotten you." Of course, Lucious insisted that he stayed away in order to build his empire, to give her everything she deserved. She was, rightfully, unimpressed, gesturing at her jewelry, asking, "Things? These material things?"
Clearly, she'd have preferred an actual relationship with her family. That feeling had been present in the first few episodes of
, but now that Cookie's rage has simmered (albeit slightly), she has emerged more sympathetic, more emotionally vulnerable and more honest – though still a hard-ass, master manipulator focused on the music and insistent on taking back what's hers.
We're not too worried about Cookie.
airs Wednesdays (9 p.m. ET) on FOX. | Also, Jamal gets inspired by the streets of Bushwick in what ends up being a hip-hop version of Stomp | 44.136364 | 0.909091 | 2.454545 | high | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/02/05/creative-slump-solutions/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150205172043id_/http://fortune.com/2015/02/05/creative-slump-solutions/ | Creative slumps: 5 ways to snap out of it | 20150205172043 | Dear Annie: What can you do if your job depends on coming up with a steady stream of fresh ideas, but you hit a wall where you just can’t seem to come up with anything new? I’m working for a design firm where I got hired because, as an intern for two summers in college, I always thought of original ways to approach the challenges clients had brought to us. But lately I’m just not feeling it. Even worse, the harder I try, the more my mind seems to go blank. It’s what I imagine writer’s block to be like, except that I’m not a writer. This can’t be that unusual, but I don’t see any way past it. Do you have any suggestions? — Sleepless in Soho
Dear Sleepless: “We’ve all been there,” says Cassie Hughes, co-founder of Grow Marketing, a San Francisco firm that counts Google, The Gap, PepsiCo, Levi’s, and Lincoln among its clients. “It can be startling and unsettling. You feel like a starting pitcher with a bad case of the yips.”
Gabrey Means, Grow Marketing’s other co-founder, agrees that, now and then, “the creative juices seem to flow more like a slow trickle than like a river.”
The best way to end a creative rut is to change your routine. “It makes perfect sense if you think about it,” Hughes says. “Human nature pulls us toward predictability, but habit is the enemy of creativity. You need to shake things up.
“If you always lead certain meetings, turn the reins over to someone else on your team. Ask people from other departments to join in, and ask the opinion of the quietest person first,” says Hughes. “Whatever you usually do, try doing the opposite.”
Here are four more ways to snap out of a slump:
Luckily, dry spells are almost always temporary. Here’s hoping yours is, too.
Talkback: If you’ve ever experienced a creative dry spell, how did you get out of it? Leave a comment below.
Have a career question for Anne Fisher? Email askannie@fortune.com. | Everybody hits a dry spell now and then. Here's how to get the ideas flowing again. | 22.789474 | 0.736842 | 1.263158 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/02/06/turbotax-intuit-tax-filings-halt/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150207094507id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/02/06/turbotax-intuit-tax-filings-halt/ | TurboTax maker Intuit resumes state tax filings after earlier halt | 20150207094507 | (Reuters) – Intuit said its tax-preparation software TurboTax had resumed electronic filing of state tax returns late Friday following a temporary halt after noticing attempts to use stolen identity information to file fraudulent returns and claim refunds.
After an investigation by a third-party security expert, the company said the fraudulent returns did not result from a breach of its own systems and that it was adding additional security measures to combat fraudulent activities.
The filing of federal returns had not been affected, Intuit said.
Early on Friday, the company said the information used to file fraudulent returns was obtained from outside sources.
Intuit said it had turned off the e-filing of state tax returns on Thursday.
Minnesota’s revenue department said on Friday it had stopped accepting tax returns submitted via TurboTax, but would continue to accept those filed through Intuit’s professional tax preparation products such as Lacerte, Intuit Tax Online and ProSeries. (http://bit.ly/1v5OHUj)
The department said some taxpayers found that a return had already been filed when they logged in to submit their returns using TurboTax.
Intuit’s shares INTU closed down 4.2 percent at $87.83 on the Nasdaq on Friday, having gained 23.7 percent in the last 12 months. | Company had halted electronic filing of state tax returns after learning about attempts to file returns with stolen information. | 11.7 | 0.8 | 2.4 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/aaron-hernandez-murder-trial-another-juror-dismissed | http://web.archive.org/web/20150212224618id_/http://www.people.com/article/aaron-hernandez-murder-trial-another-juror-dismissed | Another Juror Dismissed in Aaron Hernandez Trial : People.com | 20150212224618 | 02/12/2015 AT 10:00 AM EST
Another juror was kicked off the Aaron Hernandez murder trial on Wednesday.
At the start of the day's session, Judge E. Susan Garsh told jurors that they may have noticed another one of their colleagues missing,
"That was for reasons that were entirely personal to that juror," Garsh said. "It has nothing to do with this case."
after evidence emerged that the juror had discussed the case in previous years.
"Over the last few years, the juror has expressed an interest in serving on this particular jury," Garsh said last week. "There is credible evidence that the juror has attended more Patriots games than were disclosed on the questionnaire."
The panel is now made up of 16 jurors. Twelve of them will ultimately decide Hernandez's fate.
The former New England Patriots player, 25,
in June 2013 for allegedly killing 27-year-old Odin Lloyd, a semi-professional football player who was dating the sister of Hernandez's fiancé, Shayanna Jenkins, at the time of the murder.
Hernandez has pleaded not guilty to murder and weapons charges.
Jenkins was granted immunity on Tuesday afternoon, but it remains unclear what, if anything, she will tell prosecutors if she is called to the stand, according to the
Hernandez has pleaded not guilty to murder and weapons charges. | The former New England Patriots player is charged with killing 27-year-old Odin Lloyd | 17.8 | 0.933333 | 4.933333 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/02/12/women-shouldnt-have-to-lead-like-men-to-be-successful/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150214092246id_/http://fortune.com/2015/02/12/women-shouldnt-have-to-lead-like-men-to-be-successful/ | Women shouldn't have to lead like men to be successful | 20150214092246 | When we talk about feminism in the workplace, we generally discuss the importance of empowering women. When we say empowerment, what we are really suggesting is that women act more like those who have long been historically empowered—men. We ask women to embody the characteristics we often attribute to men in the workplace—aggression, boldness, forthrightness, risk taking—as if these are the only characteristics that can contribute to professional success.
I have always appreciated Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Though the book has its flaws, it offers keen insight into how success, for women, can be fostered in the workplace. Sandberg demonstrates the importance of cultivating a career over time and she openly embraces ambition. When I first read Lean In, I was intrigued. As a ferociously ambitious woman there was so much that resonated with me, particularly in the discussions of impostor syndrome and how to be more aware and take advantage of opportunity.
When I first reviewed Lean In, I noted, “Professional women are largely defined in relation to professional men; Lean In‘s loudest unspoken advice seems to dictate that women should embrace masculine qualities (self-confidence, risk-taking, aggression, etc.). Occasionally, this advice backfires, because it seems as if Sandberg is advocating, ‘If you want to succeed, be an asshole.’” Certainly, the book has much more to offer but that sentiment lingers.
Sandberg’s continued her crusade. In January, she released a New York Times column—written with Wharton professor Adam Grant—about why women stay quiet at work. Women fear backlash, the duo wrote, and ingrained gender biases ground that anxiety. Their longterm solution? More women leaders, who will make women more comfortable with speaking up.
Sandberg is not the only workplace feminist who espouses such thinking. Claire Shipman and Katty Kay’s The Confidence Code, for instance, encourages women to cut out upspeak and advocate more for themselves and their value in the workplace.
When we discuss women in the workplace, we’re all too often talking about a style that embraces noticeable zeal and force. We’re asking women to conform to a workplace environment without considering that it is the workplace environment itself that could stand to conform to a broader range of personality types and leadership styles.
How can we encourage feminism in the workplace and cultivate a corporate culture where women can be ambitious regardless of their personalities? How do you create a space in the workplace for more subtle forms of power and negotiation? How do you create such spaces without condescension or treating women as less capable than their male counterparts?
Answering these questions, so long as we believe men and women have innate, gendered characteristics, would be nearly impossible. Instead of making this merely an issue of girls versus guys, we should consider this a way of thinking about how to more fully embrace the diversity of personality types in the workplace.
There is value in bold, loud leadership but more workplaces need to recognize that there is more than one way for employees to contribute effectively. With the corporate focus on teams and prioritizing collective effort over individual contribution, the merits of the reserved employee or the person who works more effectively alone, rather than with coworkers, have been overlooked.
Consider the introvert, who is generally considered shy, quiet, socially incapable. Jennifer Kahnweiler, who wrote The Introverted Leader: Building On Your Quiet Strength, asserts that introversion is, in fact, none of these things. Psychology Today used Kahnweiler’s work to cite the five key characteristics of the introverted leader: thinking before speaking, focusing on depth, exuding calm, a preference for writing over speaking and a tendency toward solitude.
How can such characteristics be noticed when only one leadership style is privileged?
Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., author of Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing noted, in an interview, “You also end up defining quiet leaders almost through a series of negatives. They’re not making high-stakes decisions. They’re often not at the top of organizations. They don’t have the spotlight and publicity on them. They think of themselves modestly; they often don’t even think of themselves as leaders. But they are acting quietly, effectively, with political astuteness, to basically make things somewhat better, sometimes much better than they would otherwise be.”
How do we create workplaces that consider introverted or quiet leadership as equally valuable?
Put another way, whether we’re considering how to make workplaces more feminist, or how to encourage embracing a range of personality types, it comes back to diversity.
In 2003, the New London Group released Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Academic in focus, each chapter outlined ways of better preparing college students for entering diverse work and social environments. Instead of seeing difference as an obstacle, the book treats difference as a starting point for productive learning. Difference is an opportunity. The New London Group created their pedagogy of multiliteracies not only as a response to the changing workplace but also as a response to a world where students can have membership in more than one discourse community. Just as academics cannot see students as singular entities, managers cannot see their employees as singular entities.
In the first chapter, scholar James Paul Gee suggests that what the “new capitalism requires is that people see and define themselves as a flexibly rearrangeable portfolio of the skills, experiences, and achievements they have acquired through their trajectory through project space as team members of communities of practice.”
Managers must also be able to recognize their employees as possessing this flexible and rearrangeable portfolio of skills, experiences, and achievements. We have to abandon old ways of thinking.
Instead of telling women to lean in, or quiet people to speak up, we need to suggest that managers wake up and open their eyes and minds. These same managers need to pay attention to those not leaning in, those hovering on the periphery of the boardroom, and find ways for them to feel included and valued for what they contribute. Making that kind of effort will not only help those employees perform more effectively, it will introduce managers to a deep well of genuine, untapped talent.
Roxane Gay is an English professor at Purdue University and a New York Times best-selling author. She’s written Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and the forthcomingHunger. She is also editor of The Butter. Roxane’s column for Fortune, “Beyond the Workplace,” will delve into why corporate America should care about the social issues happening outside of the office. Follow her at @rgay. | Bold, loud leadership may be valuable, but organizations need to recognize that there is more than one way for employees to contribute effectively. | 49.346154 | 0.961538 | 10.653846 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/lisa-vanderpump-sounds-off-castmates-real-housewives-beverly-hills | http://web.archive.org/web/20150214222320id_/http://www.people.com/article/lisa-vanderpump-sounds-off-castmates-real-housewives-beverly-hills | I Had a Horrible Season on RHOBH Last Year : People.com | 20150214222320 | 02/14/2015 AT 01:25 PM EST
says she and her fellow Housewives have "turned a corner," but that doesn't mean
star has forgotten what happened last year.
"I had a horrible season last year," the veteran reality star, 54, tells PEOPLE at the launch of EVINE Live Friday in New York City. "They threw everything at me last year, the other women. It was nasty and it was mean-spirited."
Specifically, Vanderpump had a falling out with former friend
, who helped turn the rest of the cast against Vanderpump at the end of last season.
"I don't have any understanding of her motives in any situation ever. I thought the only way for me to really sustain any kind of relationship was to give her the kind of credibility she deserves, which is little to nothing," the tough Brit says bluntly about Glanville.
But she doesn't have hard feelings toward the entire cast.
Vanderpump says she recently reached out to Kim Richards, who is shown struggling with her sobriety on during the current season of
"We're not that close, we work together and we're friendly," Vanderpump says. "But I did text her and said, 'it must be very difficult to see this play out on television.' I think that must be. I am not somebody that wants people to fail."
The restauranteur and supporter of causes including GLAAD also offered a bit of a spoiler alert for next season.
"I shouldn't tell you, [but] I officiate a gay wedding on
, so that's gonna be on the show," she says. "I'm sure I'll get some crap for that from people who don't support it, but I don't care. I am going to stand up for what I believe in."
Of course, her line, Estate Jewelry, with new digital commerce company EVINE Live, will also be keeping her busy – so busy, the
den mother might have to scale back her restaurant work.
"I think I would cut down with the restaurants," she says. "I think that I've maxed out by now. I have about 29Â restaurants. That's a lot of work!" | The star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills sounds off on her castmates | 31.928571 | 0.571429 | 0.714286 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/02/11/jetblue-ceo-reflects-years-boston/hPfqcV69JwfsZOk88oY9uI/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150215044405id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/02/11/jetblue-ceo-reflects-years-boston/hPfqcV69JwfsZOk88oY9uI/story.html | JetBlue CEO reflects on 10 years in Boston | 20150215044405 | Ten years after taking its first flight out of Boston, JetBlue Airways has gone from “Jet who,” as chief executive Dave Barger puts it, to the dominant airline at Logan International Airport.
The airline flew nearly 8 million customers out of Boston last year and is adding its 50th destination out of Logan this week. By comparison, the second-biggest carrier at Logan, the now-merged American Airlines and US Airways, carried 6.8 million passengers out of Boston last year.
This summer, JetBlue will take over all 24 gates in Terminal C. But being a major carrier in the Northeast means dealing with congested airspace and winter storms, and JetBlue took a beating during the storms in early January.
The airline canceled 1,800 flights over a six-day period and eventually shut down its New York and Boston operations for 17 hours, leaving thousands of people stranded for up to a week.
“We absolutely had our nose bloodied,” said Barger, who was at Blu restaurant near the Theater District — yes, chosen for the name — on Monday, his 56th birthday, to promote the airline’s decade in Boston.
The problems caused by the winter weather, including pilots exceeding regulatory limits on working hours while they waited to take off, will probably lead to more aggressive “pre-cancellations,” or cutting flights before a storm hits, Barger said.
JetBlue, founded in 1999, launched Boston service in January 2004, with one gate serving five cities. The airline expanded quickly, capitalizing on Logan’s lack of low-cost carriers and passengers’ love of seat-back TVs.
Over its 15 years, JetBlue learned that to be competitive, it couldn’t remain the no-frills, economy-only domestic carrier it set out to be. The carrier has added dozens of international destinations, mainly in the Caribbean. This summer, it will add a premium cabin with lie-flat seats on its New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco flights. JetBlue is also rolling out WiFi on its planes, one of the last carriers to do so.
“You had two choices: Get in big, or get out. So we made the decision to get in big,” said Barger, adding that lie-flat seats will likely be added to Boston flights as well.
JetBlue partners with a number of international airlines, including Japan Airlines, Turkish Airlines, and Hainan Airlines, which recently started or plan to start service in Boston.
In conjunction with the upcoming Emirates flight from Boston to Dubai, starting March 10, JetBlue is launching service from Boston to Detroit — Barger’s hometown and home to a thriving Middle Eastern population — which will help fill the Emirates flight out of Logan.
When JetBlue takes over Terminal C (continuing to rent out one gate to Cape Air), the airline plans to redesign the check-in area, removing the old United counter and wall in front of the security lanes. The airline also plans to install self-service baggage check machines that allow passengers to weigh their own suitcases and print their own tags.
JetBlue has also expanded its presence elsewhere in New England in recent years, adding service in Providence in 2012 and Worcester last year. The airline flies out of eight New England airports in all, including seasonal service to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
The Manchester, N.H., airport, however, is “not on our short-term list right now,” Barger said.
The growth hasn’t all gone smoothly. In the airline’s first month of service in Worcester, JetBlue canceled nearly 15 percent of its flights and diverted five planes to Logan, mostly due to the Worcester airport’s infamous fog. Massport plans to install navigational equipment that will allow planes to land in lower visibility conditions, but this would not happen for several years.
The Worcester service remains challenging, Barger said, but the airline probably won’t assess the route’s profitability until it’s been flying it for at least two years. Barger is confident that JetBlue can succeed where others haven’t, but he knows there are limits.
“The number one lesson we learned” over the years, he said: “Mother Nature, she’ll win.” | Ten years after taking its first flight out of Boston, JetBlue Airways has gone from “Jet who,” as chief executive Dave Barger puts it, to the dominant airline at Logan International Airport. The airline flew nearly 8 million customers out of Boston last year and is adding its 50th destination out of Logan this week. By comparison, the second biggest carrier at Logan, the now-merged American Airlines and US Airways, carried 6.8 million passengers out of Boston last year. This summer, JetBlue will take over all 24 gates in Terminal C. But being a major carrier in the Northeast means dealing with congested airspace and winter storms, and JetBlue took a beating during the storms in early January. The airline canceled 1,800 flights over a six days. | 5.708333 | 0.993056 | 32.909722 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/american-sniper-taya-kyle-valentines-message | http://web.archive.org/web/20150217063733id_/http://www.people.com/article/american-sniper-taya-kyle-valentines-message | American Sniper Widow Taya Kyle Shares Valentine's Message About Late Husband : People.com | 20150217063733 | 02/16/2015 AT 08:00 PM EST
She lost her own Valentine when he was murdered two years ago, but is hoping that others will find theirs.
broke down on the stand while
, the former Marine charged with fatally shooting her husband, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, she posted a heartrending but uplifting message on
on Valentine's Day, expressing gratitude and hope.
"We all suffer," she wrote on the official Chris Kyle Facebook page. "It's part of life. The blessing is – while evil exists, Divinity does too and it is stronger.
"This weekend, I feel blessed to know that I will see Chris again someday," she wrote. "I feel blessed I had the opportunity to be his wife, to learn from him and love him. I feel blessed to know the support of many and the ignorance of few."
Chris, who was known as the most lethal sniper in U.S. history, survived four tours of duty in Iraq but was fatally shot on a Texas gun range on Feb. 2, 2013, at age 38, while trying to help Routh, a fellow veteran allegedly suffering from PTSD.
Routh, 27, was charged with
Chris and his friend, Chad Littlefield. His trial began on Feb. 11 – at the same time
movie about Chris's life, based on his bestselling 2012 autobiography, is being shown in theaters.
After an emotionally challenging week in court, Taya wrote that while things have been difficult, she is grateful for all the good in her life.
"Today I sit on this beautiful porch on a ranch a friend has generously allowed us to find respite in," she wrote. "With a warm drink, in a rocking chair and family and friends around, I am working on finding peace and joy in the moments we have been given. It doesn't have to all make sense. I don't have all the answers."
Weeks before she and Chris met in 2001, she says she prayed to God "for a genuine, NICE man," she wrote. "For any of you who are lonely today, I encourage you to pray. Pray for the woman or man who has a particular quality you feel you need more than anything else and watch God bring him or her in His time. Have faith."
"My heart may be broken and my spirit tired, but today I thank God for sending
when I needed him the most," she also wrote. "I thank God for the time we had, the children we share, the promise of seeing each other again, and the friends and family who stay with me today. I am forever changed and forever grateful."
She ended her post by saying, "God Bless you friends, Taya." | Chris Kyle's widow expresses gratitude for her late husband and the blessings in her life | 34.3125 | 0.75 | 1.375 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/07/11/losers-in-the-unions-vs-wal-mart-game-d-c-s-poor/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150217165322id_/http://fortune.com/2013/07/11/losers-in-the-unions-vs-wal-mart-game-d-c-s-poor/ | Losers in the unions vs. Wal-Mart game: D.C.’s poor | 20150217165322 | FORTUNE — Tug on the stem of any anti-corporate protest these days, and you’re likely to find the same root — unions more attuned to their own self-interest than the futures of low-income workers.
Just take a look at what happened to Wal-Mart Stores WMT , which had the audacity to make plans to bring six stores and 1,800 jobs to Washington, D.C. — catering to parts of the city where unemployment rates are among the highest in the nation. After the city council voted to single out the giant retailer with a requirement to pay workers 50% above minimum wage, Wal-Mart iced at least part–and possibly all–of those plans.
Wal-Mart, a nonunion shop, has been in crosshairs of labor leaders for years. So it was no surprise when its initial interest in building stores in D.C. neighborhoods long-ago written off by retailers drew street protests under the guise of “Occupy D.C.” — including a protest-visit to the home of a real estate developer involved in the deal.
MORE: Six reasons men are falling behind women
But the No. 1 company on the Fortune 500 list, no stranger to setting up shop in union-strangleholds, plowed on. Wal-Mart regional general manager Alex Barron noted in the Washington Post this week that store officials engaged “in an open dialogue with residents, stakeholders, critics, and elected officials” and became sufficiently confident of local support that plans were made to increase the investment from four to six stores and 1,200 to 1,800 jobs.
The company’s charitable foundation doled out $3.8 million last year to poverty-fighting organizations like D.C. Central Kitchen and Capitol Area Food Bank.
Local officials, including the mayor, quickly recognized the importance not only of jobs, but of providing low-cost groceries, clothes, and other consumer products to residents who must take public transportation for miles to find retail outlets.
MORE: Meet the CEO of the biggest company on earth
Then, at the 11th hour, with two stores slated to open this fall, organized labor struck. The D.C. council took up union-backed legislation, called the Large Retailer Accountability Act, that would force giant box stores — i.e. Wal-Mart — to pay workers $12.50 an hour instead of the $8.25 minimum wage. (The measure applies to retailers over 75,000 square feet and with a parent company gross revenues of more than $1 billion. Existing stores are exempt.)
This week Wal-Mart publicly threatened to pull out, even on the three stores already under construction. But last night the council voted 5-3 to pass the law–despite support from Mayor Vincent Gray, who derided the measure for producing “lost jobs and retail opportunities.” Gray told a local TV reporter he has not decided whether to sign or veto the law.
Nevertheless, today Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo issued a statement saying the store will not pursue three stores in the planning stages and “will start to review the financial and legal implications on the three stores already under construction.” He added: “This was a difficult decision for us—and unfortunate news for most D.C. residents—but the council has forced our hand,” he said.
The proponents of this “living wage” measure describe Wal-Mart’s pullout as a victory for income equality and low-income workers. Really? Let’s look at some facts. Washington, D.C.’s 68 square miles feature one of the widest income chasms in the country. The overall unemployment rate is about 8.5%, but Ward 7 — which will lose two major Wal-Mart facilities — has an unemployment rate that hovers at seven to eight times that of the mostly white, upper middle class Ward 3 in Northwest Washington.
No wonder Ward 7 council member Yvette M. Alexander described Wal-Mart’s threatened pullout as “her worst nightmare” and called the legislation “a development killer … a jobs killer.” Her constituents are coping with a 15% unemployment rate.
Ward 8 is even worse, with a 23% unemployment rate. A 2012 Department of Employment Services report stressed that “wards with the highest poverty need access to resources that break the poverty cycle such as transportation to outlying areas where much of the economic growth is occurring and will grow.”
Without Wal-Mart and related retailers it supports around, the residents can continue their long treks to Maryland and Virginia for jobs and affordable shopping.
Some victory for the poor. | The retailer is dropping planned stores in Washington, DC, in face of a new wage law. | 46.210526 | 0.736842 | 1.157895 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/02/19/chinas-electric-car-boom-should-tesla-motors-worry/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150219165145id_/http://fortune.com/2015/02/19/chinas-electric-car-boom-should-tesla-motors-worry/ | China’s electric car boom: should Tesla Motors worry? | 20150219165145 | Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has threatened to fire key executives from his China team after weak sales of the automaker’s luxury electric cars. And last week, the company’s chief marketing officer in China resigned. Although the media widely covered the management shakeup, the press has largely ignored the context: a massive boom in China’s market for electric cars. For after years of lackluster growth, electric vehicle sales in the world’s second largest economy are surging – and they are leaving Tesla TSLA behind. This represents a striking change of pace for China’s electric vehicle industry, and is likely a key reason that Musk is flustered.
Growth in China’s electric vehicle industry has been a long time coming. Starting in the early 2000s, China made a lofty goal to leapfrog the West in automotive technology by becoming a world leader in electric cars. The government declared it would have around 500,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2011. That didn’t happen. In fact, China sold fewer than 6,000 that year. Even as electric vehicle sales have swelled in America and Japan, China’s attempt to surpass the U.S. in automotive technology has sputtered.
Until recently, China’s lagging electric vehicle industry stood in sharp contrast to its overall auto industry. From 2000 through 2014, China’s auto market expanded at an astonishing rate. In 2000, the country produced fewer passenger cars than Spain – about 2 million, according to statistics from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers. However, China’s Association of Automobile Manufacturers reported last month that 2014 automotive sales surpassed 23 million – making China by far the largest auto market in the world. In 2011, the World Bank estimated per capita vehicle ownership in China at only 69 per thousand people, compared to about 800 per thousand people in the U.S. So China’s industry has significant room for growth.
The rise of China’s auto industry has been fueled by foreign investment, oil and technology – and it has brought with it a suffocating smog epidemic in China’s largest cities that is driving away wealthy Chinese and foreign expats. China’s Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang has long been working on a plan to replace foreign energy, innovation and capital with domestic resources. He is a former Audi engineer and over more than a decade, his goal has been to overtake the West in automotive technology by pushing China past the era of internal combustion engines and toward electric vehicles – thus setting the stage for China to dominate the $2 trillion-plus global auto market. Wan Gang also sees electric vehicles as one partial solution to China’s sooty air.
My book, The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future, tells how up until recently that project has been a series of ambitious failures. As late as January 2014, China was selling only about 600 electric cars per month – that same month the U.S. sold over 6,000.
But during the last four months of 2014, China’s electric vehicle sales skyrocketed. In December alone, monthly sales of passenger and commercial electric vehicles hit 27,000. According to data from the China Automotive Technology Research Center and the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, sales of electric cars in China surpassed sales of electric cars in the U.S. for the first time. In fact, China’s electric vehicle sales in December 2014 were almost 30 times higher than January 2014 sales.
Many analysts say that the last four months of 2014 will be remembered as the stretch when China’s electric vehicle market finally turned a corner. If this growth continues, China may surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest market for electric vehicles in 2015.
All this raises a number of questions: First, are these sales figures reliable? Statistics on China’s automotive market are often vague and unreliable. But statistics from the China Automotive Technology Research Center – a massive technical body responsible for everything from crash testing to vehicle battery standards — tend to be good. Some would say they are the gold standard in Chinese automotive data. The website EV-sales.blogspot.com essentially confirmed the 2014 numbers – supported by sales numbers for individual models. EV-salesblogspot.com reported that Tesla was outsold by five domestic manufacturers in China: BYD, Kandi, Chery Zotye and BAIC.
That leads to a second question: why are sales booming? An analyst from the China Automotive Technology Research Center attributed the jump to the elimination of the vehicle tax on Chinese electric vehicles (until September 2014, buyers were taxed at 10% of the purchase price). But is it really possible that lifting a 10% tax could cause such a massive surge in sales? Perhaps. Policy-led price adjustments have sometimes had spectacular results in China’s auto market. For instance, when the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it lowered import tariffs on foreign automobiles. That year, China’s auto market grew by 37%, as some domestic producers were forced to lower prices to remain competitive. When Chinese automaker First Automotive Works Tianjin reduced its sticker price for one model by 20%, sales shot up 900%, according to one study on the Chinese auto market.
More recently, when China’s auto market started to slow in February 2008 – together with the rest of the world – the country sought to stimulate automotive sales and encourage its citizens to buy cleaner cars by cutting taxes on small displacement gasoline engines. In March, 2008 the central government cut taxes on these small cars to 5% from 10%. Auto sales jumped by 22% in April, and grew by 49% annually in 2009. That was the year China became the largest auto market in the world.
It’s still far from clear what factors are driving China’s recent electric vehicle boom – and why Tesla was left out. It’s possible that year-end government procurement led to unusually strong numbers in December. Another possibility is that China’s policies to promote electric vehicles have finally reached a tipping point. For instance, to deal with traffic congestion in major Chinese cities, many municipal governments – including Beijing – have limited the number of new vehicle registrations. In Beijing, electric vehicles are exempt from this quota system. The central government has also instituted a new set of policies to encourage competition among domestic manufacturers — competitive pressure that was woefully lacking during the early years of China’s electric vehicle program. Perhaps locally produced vehicles have finally reached a quality threshold that make them attractive to Chinese buyers.
Whatever the reason, just as China’s electric vehicle market is taking off, Tesla is facing new competitive challenges at home and abroad. Traditional automakers like BMW, Volkswagen VOW3 and General Motors GM are developing electric vehicles that are faster, cheaper, and boast better range than before. In fact, in October 2014, Volkswagen’s CEO Jochem Heizmann announced the company was developing more than 20 electric vehicles for the Chinese market. Then there is also the prospect of competition from newcomers like tech giant Apple AAPL – which is hiring away Tesla’s engineers for princely sums and is rumored to be developing its own electric car. At the same time, Tesla is struggling to establish its brand in the world’s key emerging market at what may be a critical inflection point. That is a huge problem.
Perhaps that explains why Musk is losing his cool over weak China sales. Up until recently, China has been an underperforming electric vehicle market, and Tesla has been an over-achieving electric vehicle company. Suddenly, that equation has flipped.
Levi Tillemann is the Jeff and Cal Leonard Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future, which chronicles the rise of electric cars and China’s messy attempt to leapfrog the West in automotive technology. Previously, he served a two-year presidential appointment advising the U.S. Department of Energy on domestic and international policy. | Up until recently, China has been an underperforming electric vehicle market, while Tesla has been an over-achieving electric vehicle company. | 60.6 | 0.96 | 11.6 | high | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/02/19/lingerie-fredericks-hollywood-closing-stores/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150221024631id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/02/19/lingerie-fredericks-hollywood-closing-stores/ | Lingerie retailer Frederick's of Hollywood is shedding ... stores | 20150221024631 | Frederick’s of Hollywood, a purveyor of racy women’s lingerie for almost seven decades, is reportedly shedding one-third of its 93 stores.
The Los Angeles-based retailer has hired liquidators the Great American Group to help wind down operations for at least 31 of its stores, which will close in the coming months, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
Bill Soncini, Frederick’s COO, told WSJ that the number of store closings could increase slightly. The company will shutter its flagship store in Hollywood in April.
“We’re in the process of re-engineering the whole business,” Soncini told WSJ. “Landlords have been very, very agreeable of letting us out of some very unprofitable locations…. These stores should have been closed years ago.”
Buyers led by the Harbinger Group took the retailer private in 2013 as part of a deal that valued Frederick’s at roughly $11 million. Even then, the company had been struggling to compete with top-selling lingerie brands such as Victoria’s Secret, which led to a string of quarterly losses. WSJ notes that the going-private deal did not work out all that well for Harbinger, which recently said it wrote off more than $60 million on the transaction.
Now, Frederick’s is attempting to avoid its second bankruptcy in less than two decades. The company filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2000. It emerged from bankruptcy three years later and went public in 2006. As part of its exit from bankruptcy, Frederick’s outlined a turnaround plan that included revamping its website and opening or remodeling more than 20 stores. | The retailer will shutter 31 locations, including its flagship Hollywood store. | 24.076923 | 0.923077 | 1.384615 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2015/02/19/third-rock-ventures-giving-birth-to-a-new-generation-of-biotechs/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150221184424id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/02/19/third-rock-ventures-giving-birth-to-a-new-generation-of-biotechs/ | Third Rock Ventures biotechs | 20150221184424 | When Foundation Medicine, a young company that performs genetically targeted cancer tests, announced in January that Roche would buy a $1 billion stake, Foundation’s stock price quickly doubled. Inside the Boston offices of Third Rock Ventures, the partners felt the warm glow of parental pride.
Third Rock calls itself a venture capital firm, but it provides much more than funding and guidance for new enterprises. Third Rock hatched the idea for Foundation Medicine in 2008. Third Rock’s team of 50 scientists and technologists designed the company’s service. Third Rock drafted its business plan. The firm then infused the startup with $25 million and picked a CEO to launch it and usher it to an IPO.
Third Rock has taken this approach with nearly all of its 36 portfolio companies since its founding in 2007, and it has enjoyed other hits: Agios, which makes drugs to treat genetic disorders and cancer, and BlueBird Bio, which uses gene therapy to treat rare diseases, were among the top four biotech stocks in 2014, with 300% ascents.
Third Rock’s strategy has been “brilliant,” says VC Bill Helman of Greylock Partners. “They’re one of the few firms I’ve seen in 30 years that have reinvented the model of venture capital.”
The firm wouldn’t exist were it not for a visit to the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. The story sounds like the setup to a cheesy joke: A finance executive and a biochemical engineer walk into a casino … In this case the two men, who had grown close while working to market the multiple myeloma drug Velcade at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, were making their annual gambling pilgrimage in 2006. They commiserated over the drug industry and its loathed reputation for valuing profits over patients.
“The patients are getting screwed,” Kevin Starr said. “We need to do something.” Now 52, Starr is a finance executive who rides a motorcycle and favors skull rings. Next to him sat Mark Levin, now 62, a biochemical engineer who worked at Eli Lilly and Genentech before joining Millennium. They soon expanded the discussion to include Robert Tepper, 59, a former oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who headed R&D at Millennium.
After the three left the company, they explored new ideas. They toured academic research facilities and found what Starr calls “jaw-dropping innovation.” But the ideas rarely progressed beyond scholarly journals. “We said, ‘Why is this sitting here in academia?’ ” he says.
Money was the reason. Biotech had a hot run in the 1990s. But by the early 2000s the costs of taking a drug to market had grown prohibitive, the odds slim. VCs mostly focused on later-stage companies or fled biotech altogether.
Tepper, Starr, and Levin decided to create a firm that would conceive and build businesses from scratch. (The name was inspired by a news report that discussed the changes on Earth, the third rock from the sun—not by the TV show of that name.) The trio started hiring Ph.D.s and MDs from Harvard and MIT. Many VCs scoffed, the Third Rock partners say. But by 10 weeks in, the firm had raised its first fund, $378 million. To stay focused on patients, the firm instituted a quarterly practice of inviting them to come talk about living with a rare disease or cancer. “We always cry our eyes out and get fired up to go back to the office,” Starr says.
Foundation Medicine was one of the first ideas to get traction. The concept was based on research by Eric Lander, a leader in the Human Genome Project and founder of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. They wondered, what if they could sell a diagnostic test that uses DNA sequencing to help determine which cancer drugs could best fight a particular patient’s tumor?
Third Rock invited Lander to weekly brainstorming sessions along with Alexis Borisy, then CEO of CombinatoRx, which uses software to match combinations of cancer drugs to treat certain tumor cells. They discussed how to scale up testing and make it affordable.
“It was going to be hard to do,” says Borisy, who later joined Third Rock. A sequencing test then cost tens of thousands of dollars. They needed the price to sink to $2,000—and they needed to persuade insurers to pay for it. For 18 months, teams from Third Rock and the Broad Institute met with experts in gene sequencing and with diagnostic companies. They talked to pharma companies, met with cancer doctors and insurers, and worked with regulators. They built models for DNA testing. “It was group genius,” says Borisy.
When Foundation finally launched in 2010, Third Rock backed it with $25 million. Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins later kicked in too. The total, $40 million, far exceeded the typical $5 million to $8 million Series A biotech round. The goal: Allow the CEO to focus on growth rather than the next investor.
By 2012, Borisy decided it was time for Foundation to leave the nest. He hired a CEO, and over the next two years the company rolled out two DNA-based cancer tests, collaborated with cancer centers and drug companies, and landed a $56 million investment from Bill Gates and others. In September 2013, Foundation went public.
Third Rock won’t disclose its returns. But according to the website of one of its investors, Calpers, its 2007 fund has generated an internal rate of return of 25.7%. That puts it well into the top performance quartile, according to alternative-investment tracker Preqin.
Meanwhile the hot IPO market, along with FDA efforts to accelerate approvals for breakthrough drugs, has helped rekindle VC interest in early-stage biotech. For Starr, the goal is to reach more cancer patients. “For us, these aren’t investments,” he says. “It’s validation that our babies are coming into adolescence.”
This story is from the March 1, 2015 issue of Fortune. | Third Rock is more than a venture capital firm. It actually creates companies. | 77.733333 | 0.866667 | 2.066667 | high | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2013/02/26/ex-square-executive-keith-rabois-joining-khosla-ventures/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150222124742id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/02/26/ex-square-executive-keith-rabois-joining-khosla-ventures/ | Ex-Square executive Keith Rabois joining Khosla Ventures | 20150222124742 | FORTUNE — Keith Rabois, who resigned from mobile payments startup Square last month amid accusations of sexual harassment, is joining Khosla Ventures.
As a senior investment professional at the firm, Rabois, a well-respected startup executive and successful angel investor, will help to select investments and to advise entrepreneurs in the firm’s portfolio.
Vinod Khosla, the firm’s founder, said Rabois is one of the most sought out startup advisors in Silicon Valley, and his experience running companies would be an asset to Khosla’s portfolio companies. “He’s gone through the process of seeing companies scale and become significant,” Khosla told Fortune. “He’s earned the right to advise entrepreneurs.”
A lawyer by training, Rabois has held operating roles at companies like PayPal EBAY , LinkedIn LNKD and Slide, which was acquired by Google GOOG . He joined Square as chief operating officer in 2010 and helped grow the company from a fledgling startup into a fast-growing mobile payments powerhouse.
MORE: The 6 worst kinds of computer hackers
Rabois resigned from Square unexpectedly in January, after an employee with whom he had an intimate relationship claimed the relationship was unwanted. According to Square and Rabois, the employee threatened to file a sexual harassment lawsuit unless he was paid “millions of dollars.” Rabois acknowledged he had a relationship with the unnamed employee but said it was consensual. He said he resigned from Square so as not to cause a distraction for the company. As of now, no lawsuit has been filed.
Square said it investigated the matter and found no evidence to support any claims of misconduct.
Khosla said that as a board member of Square, he has had full access to the results of the investigation and that he felt comfortable with Square’s conclusion that Rabois had made nothing more than an error in judgment.
As an angel investor, Rabois made early investments in companies like YouTube, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Eventbrite. He will now make investments only on behalf of the firm.
MORE: Investment advice from Conway, Horowitz and Rose
In an interview, Rabois said that he had long considered becoming a professional investor. But that the opportunity to work with the likes of Max Levchin, a PayPal founder who later founded Slide, and Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Square, kept him in the world of startups until now. Khosla Ventures invested in both Slide and Square, and held board seats at both companies.
After his resignation, Rabois was approached by scores of venture capitalists and companies about potential jobs. He said he chose Khosla Ventures because the company’s mission and focus on helping entrepreneurs suited his interests.
The least interesting part of the venture business, Rabois said, is writing a check. “The most interesting part is sitting down with entrepreneurs and working with them closely.” | Keith Rabois says he had long considered becoming a professional investor. Now he will at Khosla Ventures. | 26.047619 | 0.857143 | 4.666667 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2013/03/01/warren-buffett-defends-his-investments-in-newspapers/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150227082629id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/03/01/warren-buffett-defends-his-investments-in-newspapers/ | Warren Buffett defends his investments in newspapers | 20150227082629 | FORTUNE — When Warren Buffett, the famous and legendarily thrifty investor, bought his first private jet more than 20 years ago, he named it “The Indefensible.” Recently, Buffett has made a sizable investment in a bunch of companies that might fly under the same label.
Last year at Berkshire’s annual meeting, Buffett surprised many when he said he was interested in buying up small newspapers. Buffett has long proclaimed his love for newspapers, but he publicly swore off them in 2009, calling them essentially money pits.
So the announcement seemed odd for someone who’s self proclaimed rule of investing is not to lose money. As a result, Buffett has spent the past year trying to explain his investment thesis.
In his letter this year to shareholders, which was released on Friday afternoon along with Berkshire’s annual report, Buffett takes another crack at it, and he has some new details about his paper buying spree, which kicked off more than a year ago when he bought his hometown paper the Omaha World-Herald.
RELATED: Buffett underperformed the S&P last year
In all, Berkshire brk.a has purchased 28 dailies in the past 15 months. Buffett says the cost for the acquisitions was $344 million, but that includes a bunch of weeklies that Berkshire also got in its May acquisition of Media General, which had 63 papers in all. And for the first time he has included a list of nearly all the daily papers Berkshire now owns. (Tulsa World, which Berkshire announced it was buying in late February, is not on the list.)
Most of the papers are pretty small. The York News-Times, for instance in York, Neb. has 3,253 weekday subscribers. And they come off as a little bit sleepy. A story on bird watching was recently leading the website of the Jackson County Floridan in Marianna, Fl., another paper Buffett has bought in the past year.
Buffett’s investment thesis is that while the Internet has dented their business, newspapers still have an advantage in local news. And he thinks for that reason a “significant percentage of the population” will continue to want them. He says that will be enough to make them viable businesses for a long time.
What’s worrisome, though, is that Buffett admits he still doesn’t have an answer for what is perhaps the biggest business question facing most papers: Should they charge online or not?
What’s more, it’s very hard to tell whether the acquisitions are working out. Berkshire doesn’t offer a lot of financial details on his newspaper unit. Berkshire groups the unit into a sub-category called “other services.” In the notes to its financial statements, Berkshire says the acquisitions added about $350 million in revenue, and that the newspapers as a group were profitable, but probably not very. The profits of the “other services” group fell from a year ago, so whatever profits the newspaper group added were more than offset by losses elsewhere.
RELATED: Warren Buffett may be souring on stocks
Buffett reportedly paid two times cashflow when he bought the Media General group of papers back in May. The New York Times NYT trades at nearly eight times cashflow. So it sounds like Buffett got a good deal. But only if that cashflow sticks around. And Buffett has said he expects the sales and profits of Berkshire’s news group to shrink overtime.
And that’s just one acquisition. As a group, the Buffett’s newspapers (excluding the Tulsa paper) now have a daily circulation of nearly 700,000, meaning Buffett has paid $500 per customer. That doesn’t seem bad considering it appears most of the papers charge about $150 for an annual subscription. Add on top of that advertising revenue and whatever Buffett is getting from the weeklies.
But put another way, Buffett appears to be paying about one times sales. That seems like too much. Shares of the New York Times currently fetch about 60% of that company’s sales.
RELATED: Buffett stays mum on successor
But whether Buffett is underpaying or overpaying might not be the right question anyway. Buffett says he doesn’t think the newspaper group will ever be big enough to give a meaningful boost to Berkshire’s revenue or earnings. So why do it? Buffett has said that he and Charlie Munger, his long-time second-in-charge, like newspapers.
With a society that still values journalism (I hope), it’s nice to know that the world’s greatest investor thinks there is a future for newspapers. But as a shareholder, is it really a great thing to have your CEO spending time a lot of time doing acquisitions that by his own admission won’t make a heck of a lot of difference?
And you can have the attitude that as long as he doesn’t lose money, allowing Buffett to buy newspapers is the cost of keeping the world’s greatest investor engaged. But Buffett has never seemed to be the type who was unhappy at his job. Fortune Senior Editor-at-Large Carol Loomis’ recent book on Buffett is titled Tap Dancing to Work.
Of course, lots of CEOs use shareholders money to indulge their hobbies. And in Buffett’s case, as a large Berkshire shareholder, a good bit of that money is his own. Still, I’m not sure that makes it defensible. | It's nice to know that the world's greatest investor still likes newspapers, but it's not clear Berkshire Hathaway shareholders should stand up and cheer. | 35.862069 | 0.724138 | 2.034483 | high | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2012/01/18/apple-hits-a-new-all-time-high-3/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150305060719id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/01/18/apple-hits-a-new-all-time-high-3/ | Apple hits a new all-time high | 20150305060719 | Breaks through previous intraday record of $427.75 set last week
UPDATE: Apple closed Wednesday up $4.41 (1.04%), to hit a new all-time high of $429.11. At one point in afternoon training it hit $429.47.
Apple AAPL quickly set a new intraday high Wednesday and kept climbing in early morning trading, although it’s not clear why.
It could be that investors are moving into the stock ahead of next week’s quarterly earnings report. Or because analysts have been raising their price targets (Wednesday it was Mike Abramsky’s turn, upping RBC’s target to $525 from $500). Or in response to reports of strong iPhone sales and rumors of an iPad 3 coming in March.
Or maybe just because the whole market was up. | Breaks through previous intraday record of $427.75 set last week UPDATE: Apple closed Wednesday up $4.41 (1.04%), to hit a new all-time high of $429.11. At one point in afternoon training it hit $429.47. - - - Apple quickly set a new intraday high Wednesday and kept climbing in early morning trading, although it's not… | 2.15493 | 0.971831 | 24.098592 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2011/07/21/dont-be-fooled-by-calls-for-apple-to-declare-a-dividend/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150311171422id_/http://fortune.com/2011/07/21/dont-be-fooled-by-calls-for-apple-to-declare-a-dividend/ | Don’t be fooled by calls for Apple to declare a dividend | 20150311171422 | Apple’s $76 billion cash stockpile is burning a hole in Wall Street’s pockets
It happens every quarter. Apple AAPL reports blowout sales and earnings. Its holdings in cash and marketable securities swell by billions of dollars — by $10.7 billion, to be specific, in the past 90 days. And analysts come out of the woodwork to demand that the company spend some of those billions buying back shares or issuing dividends or, preferably, both.
Last year, when Apple’s cash holdings reached $46 billion, Sanford Bernstein and Sons’ Toni Sacconaghi wrote an open letter to Apple’s board of directors reporting that investor frustration over all that wasted cash was “bordering on exasperation.” (See here.) Now that those $46 billion have grown to more than $76 billion — greater than the GDP of 126 nations, as Newser’s Mark Russell helpfully points out — Sacconaghi is set to burst.
“We’re talking about a level of cash that’s preposterous by any metric,” he told the Wall Street Journal .
“It’s going to become truly untenable,” the New York Times quoted Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner in April. “At some point something will need to get done.”
What these men want done is for Apple to give the money to “the stockholders.” What they don’t say is that they are the stockholders. Institutions own more than 70% of Apple’s shares and would be the primary beneficiaries of any buyback or dividend.
Nobody should be fooled by these demands. Matt Richman, a 16-year-old who just finished his sophomore year in high school, isn’t. In an impressively level-head blog post he points out that Microsoft MSFT has spent $170 billion in stock buybacks and dividends over the past 10 years only to see its stock drop nearly 20%. Apple may not create instant shareholder value the way Toni Sacconaghi would like, but Steve Jobs’ way is working just fine for Matt Richman. “I’m more than happy,” he writes, “with the performance of my 8 shares.”
For readers interested in what Apple should and shouldn’t be doing with its cash, I recommend what may be the definitive word on the subject: The 57-minute seminar that Asymco’s Horace Dediu delivered in his third Critical Path podcast, “It’s Good to Be King,” on Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 Network. His conclusion: Apple’s problem is not too much cash. It’s building iPhones and iPads fast enough to meet demand. | Apple's $76 billion cash stockpile is burning a hole in Wall Street's pockets It happens every quarter. Apple reports blowout sales and earnings. Its holdings in cash and marketable securities swell by billions of dollars -- by $10.7 billion, to be specific, in the past 90 days. And analysts come out of the woodwork to… | 7.523077 | 0.938462 | 15.923077 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/phil-collins-honorary-texas-alamo-donation | http://web.archive.org/web/20150313113839id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/phil-collins-honorary-texas-alamo-donation | Phil Collins Named Honorary Texan for Donating Artifacts to the Alamo : People.com | 20150313113839 | Phil Collins (center) being honored in the Texas Capitol building Wednesday
03/12/2015 AT 12:00 PM EDT
's heart now officially resides deep in the heart of Texas.
The Texas state legislature named the British-born musician, 64, an honorary Texan Wednesday as a thank-you for donating his expansive collection of Alamo and Texas Revolution-related artifacts to the Alamo last year.
"I think no one could ever imagine that someone from England could do this, much less from Texas," State Rep. Lyle Larson told the
Wednesday. "The generosity that he's demonstrated will have a profound impact on telling the story."
Larson said he spoke to Collins Wednesday before the musician was honored at the Texas Capitol building, and the former Genesis member told him his passion for the state's history began when he watched
on television as a boy in England.
Collins, who now resides in Switzerland, held the largest known private collection of artifacts from the Texas Revolution and the Battle of the Alamo, according to an
. In 2012, Collins also released
, a book documenting his collection.
Donated items include a rifle and leather shot pouch once owned by Crockett, as well as the knife owned by Jim Bowie, who played a prominent role in the Texas Revolution.
"I am enormously pleased and proud to have my collection going home to the Alamo," Collins said in the Alamo statement following his donation last June. "It has been, and will continue to be my passion, and I shall continue to gather relics and documents, and forward them so they can be enjoyed."
Collins apparently continued feeling generous on Wednesday, per the
, offering up a donation to one Texas legislator that was more apropos with his rise to fame.
"Phil Collins gave me his sticks!" Rep. Joe Pickett said with a grin as he held the drumsticks in the air. | The British musician became enamored with the state ever since watching Davy Crockett as a boy | 23.3125 | 0.6875 | 1.3125 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2015/03/14/sean-penn-taken-new-genre-the-gunman/denbQTh9WEBvpCa1JO2mwO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150314115229id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/movies/2015/03/14/sean-penn-taken-new-genre-the-gunman/denbQTh9WEBvpCa1JO2mwO/story.html | Sean Penn is taken by a new genre in ‘The Gunman’ | 20150314115229 | Contrary to common knowledge, Sean Penn had already played an action hero on the screen before “The Gunman” (opening Friday). In the Barry Levinson spoof “What Just Happened” (2008), he appears briefly as an agent pursued by hit men in a preview screening of the movie-within-the-movie called “Fiercely.” It ends badly.
So why has Penn decided to take up the role he once lampooned and play it straight?
“I think typically you can mark through a script and say, here’s an act of violence — now, where’s the consequence?” he says on the phone from a hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he and director Pierre Morel are promoting the film. “If it has a scene and there’s not a consequence then probably I’m not interested. The idea of making violence cute — I’ve never been interested as an actor in those things. But when I read this I thought there were a lot of real-world parallels to it. It was clearly principally an entertainment, but it had a few thoughts in it. And I thought this would be interesting and exciting to do.”
Based on the 1981 novel “The Prone Gunman” by hard-boiled French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, the story has been updated from the Cold War era to the ongoing strife in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Penn plays Jim Terrier, a mercenary ostensibly hired to protect an NGO (nongovernmental organization) medical facility, but who is in fact working for a mining company to ensure that their interests in the DRC are safeguarded. As such, Terrier finds himself literally triggering a genocidal civil war. Years later he is still trying to redeem himself by doing humanitarian work, but, as Penn has pointed out, violence has its consequences.
Despite its themes of Western guilt and personal conscience, it might be hard for some to distinguish “The Gunman’’ from another action thriller featuring an operative, played by Liam Neeson, with a very particular set of skills and a deadly mission: “Taken” (2008), now a franchise with two sequels. Especially since Pierre Morel directed both.
“I personally don’t see any similarities apart from the age of the protagonist [Penn is 54, Neeson 62],” says Morel. “The structure is different. ‘Taken’ is straightforward: You follow one man and that’s it. This one has more players. It has more of an ensemble and more twists. In ‘Taken’ you know who are the good guys and the bad guys from the get-go. In this one they’re a bit more gray.”
The movie also differs significantly from the novel, and not just in time and place. The protagonist in Manchette’s bleak and brutal tale has neither a conscience nor much in the way of self-awareness. “We have moved the original’s cynicism into the other characters,” Morel explains. “Here he’s had that moment of understanding that he’s done wrong. The others keep doing wrong, but they justify it.”
To research his part, Penn had the benefit of his experience providing humanitarian aid to such stricken places as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and South Sudan during the ongoing internecine violence. He also had access to some “gray” characters not unlike Jim Terrier.
“I would say they were more like the character played by Mark Rylance,” says Penn, referring to a sinister associate of Terrier who may know more than he lets on. “I already had a lot of familiarity with the world in this movie and what I wasn’t familiar with I could learn from people who were. They work for the military or are former US or British military and some are from South America. But they are principally private contractors who are former military.”
Judging from the private contractors depicted in the film, they don’t seem like nice people. Did Penn ever feel uneasy hobnobbing with paid killers and covert agents of corporate greed?
“I’ve been working in Hollywood for 35 years,” he says. “I’m used to it.”
His next Hollywood project is “The Last Face,” which takes place in a setting similar to that of “The Gunman.” The cast includes “Gunman” costar Javier Bardem, and Penn’s real-life girlfriend, Charlize Theron.
Penn (right) with Ray Winstone.
“It’s a very different kind of movie,” Penn says of “Last Face.” “It’s a love story set during an 11-year period beginning in Liberia in 2003 and ending in the South Sudan and Geneva in 2014. It does involve the NGO world, but other than that there is no relationship between the films. ‘The Gunman’ is not intended to enlighten people politically. The other one I also don’t think of as a polemic, but it is immersed in a world where there are more displaced people from conflict and other reasons than ever before.”
Penn’s own humanitarian work has earned him numerous awards and a lot of satisfaction. But it has its discouraging moments, too.
“I’d been in Haiti for three months,” he recalls. “I was on the ground. You’re looking at most at four city blocks of devastation and you’re thinking to yourself, we can fix this. Then I went up with the 82d Airborne in a helicopter. We were delivering some medical supplies on the other side of the country. It was the first time I was seeing the size of the devastation. That got me. You feel like it’s futile — which it is not — but for a brief moment there is that thought.”
Did he ever think he might give up Hollywood and do humanitarian work full time?
“My guess is that I will continue to balance the two,” he says. But he gives himself a Hollywood out, in case the scales should ever tip dramatically. “I’m a day-to-day player,” he adds. | Contrary to common knowledge, Sean Penn had already played an action hero on the screen before “The Gunman” (opening Friday). In the Barry Levinson spoof “What Just Happened” (2008), he appears briefly as an agent pursued by hit men in a preview screening of the movie-within-the-movie called “Fiercely.” It ends badly. | 16.569444 | 1 | 72 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2015/03/14/for-gardner-museum-director-art-heist-set-off-year-odyssey-false-leads-and-loss/FksnFccbQiNonVdYrlOF2K/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150315151408id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/theater-art/2015/03/14/for-gardner-museum-director-art-heist-set-off-year-odyssey-false-leads-and-loss/FksnFccbQiNonVdYrlOF2K/story.html | For Gardner Museum director, art heist set off 25-year odyssey of false leads and loss | 20150315151408 | Why was William Youngworth so restless?
Maybe it was nerves. The ex-con already had an illegal weapons charge hanging over his head, and the FBI had grown skeptical of his claims that he could facilitate the return of 13 prized works of art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
But museum director Anne Hawley held out hope. The missing works, including masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt, were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And Hawley, who had arrived as director just six months before the 1990 heist, would do almost anything to get them back.
Hawley, accompanied by museum board member Arnold Hiatt, agreed to a back-channel meeting, negotiating with Youngworth at a tony New York hotel in September 1997. “We tried to do it under the radar,” Hawley explained in a recent interview.
The discussion lasted hours, after which Hiatt agreed to personally loan Youngworth $10,000 to aid the recovery.
RELATED: An open letter: Please return Gardner Museum treasures
Globe critic Sebastian Smee delves into the significance of each missing piece of art.
That meeting, like so many other efforts, would ultimately prove fruitless — a dead end on a 25-year odyssey for the Gardner and the FBI that has spawned thousands of false leads, prompting investigators to hunt the art from Boston to Japan, Ireland to France. For Hawley, who recently announced plans to retire at the end of the year, the loss has been both professional and deeply personal. A shadow across her largely sunny tenure, the case remains unsolved.
When Hawley arrived at the Gardner on the morning of March 18, 1990, she found her museum violated, gilded frames and glass smashed on the floor. Staff members were in shock. “People were angry at the museum. Some of the press was antagonistic,” Hawley recalled. “It was devastating, but what happens is, you really fight. I was just not going to be defeated by that.”
Hawley endured death threats in the months immediately following the robbery. She twice evacuated the museum after bomb scares, and the FBI instructed her to take a different route home each night from work.
“They scared me,” said Hawley. “I wouldn’t go out of my house alone at night.”
Anne Hawley, then the new museum director, spoke to reporters after the Gardner theft in 1990.
Meanwhile, she was also the museum’s main liaison with the FBI, a role that only steepened the theft’s emotional toll as they sought to retrieve the coveted works.
“Some of the leads were so compelling, you thought you were almost there,” she said. “You’d get emotionally caught up in it, then you’re overlooking a chasm.”
Although she was hired with a mandate to revive the museum, the theft, which the FBI still lists as the largest property crime in US history, threw Hawley and her staff into a world few museums are prepared to inhabit.
“It really tests every part of you,” said Sandy Nairne, former director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, who oversaw the recovery of two stolen J.M.W. Turner paintings when he was director of programs at the Tate.
“It is incredibly difficult,” he said. “Not only is it an intrusion in every sense, but it also breaks all the ordinary expectations of running an institution.”
Susan Hartnett, now executive director at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, came in to assist Hawley shortly after the robbery. She remembers that she arrived to find the Gardner staff traumatized.
A photo of the stolen Rembrandt “Storm on the Sea of Galilee.”
“There were literally staff members collapsing,” said Hartnett. “All we had was the trace of the paintings, where people were touching the silk [wallcoverings]. That to me demonstrated the depth of the attachment people had to them. There was disbelief this was happening. They needed to touch it themselves.”
The theft even invaded Hawley’s dreams: She once imagined that two spaces in the Gardner Museum — the Chinese Loggia and Spanish Cloister — had been turned into a Gap store.
“It was like ‘What next?’,” Hawley said. “I’m dealing with the netherworld.”
Hiatt, who in the days after the theft organized a reward, said that though Hawley was deeply involved in the paintings’ recovery, it didn’t take away from her duties as director. “I don’t think it slowed her down,” he said. “It hurt her deeply, and she wanted to follow up on the leads, which we did together.”
But if the robbery caused Hawley nightmares, her mornings brought little relief. Arriving at the museum early one day, she recalls, a security guard told her there was a woman on the phone for her. When Hawley picked up, the voice on the other end was desperate, calling from a parking lot in Walpole.
“She’d had her leg broken because she said she knew too much about our investigation and that people were trying to kill her,” Hawley recounted. “I’m saying, ‘How do we find you? Where’s the car?’ ”
The FBI eventually located the woman. She apparently did have information, according to Hawley, but as has so often happened in this case, it wasn’t very useful to investigators.
Another early tip led to Japan in 1992, after a US teacher visited the home of a wealthy Japanese businessman. As they toured his private gallery, Hawley said, the host walked his guest past canvases by van Gogh and Monet.
“Then he pointed to the ceiling and said, ‘Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” ’ ” said Hawley, recalling that the teacher called the Cleveland Museum of Art, which in turn contacted the Gardner.
Hawley alerted the FBI, which launched an investigation that involved Interpol and the Japanese authorities.
With so many moving parts, Hawley tried to accelerate matters by reaching out to Joan Mondale, whose husband, former vice president Walter Mondale, was appointed US ambassador to Japan in 1993.
When investigators finally received permission to enter the house, Hawley dispatched the museum’s chief conservator to Japan to analyze the painting.
The businessman was horrified, recalled Hawley. “He had fakes. The whole collection was fakes.”
Hawley may laugh about it now, but at the time she was crushed.
“So much energy had been expended on it,” she said. “At a certain point I developed this distancing capacity. I wouldn’t believe in anything. I would just be clinical about it.”
The 1997 meeting in New York would mark the last time Hawley became personally involved in the theft investigation.
William Youngworth during a 1997 Norfolk Superior Court appearance in Dedham on charges unrelated to the Gardner heist.
At that point, Youngworth had a sheen of credibility: One month earlier, the ex-con had arranged for a Boston Herald reporter to see what was purportedly Rembrandt’s stolen seascape.
“The FBI didn’t seem to follow up on it,” said Hiatt, now a board member emeritus. “He kind of sold me the Brooklyn Bridge. He was very convincing.”
Yet Hawley found Youngworth’s behavior strange, recalling that he would excuse himself every 15 minutes or so to use the bathroom.
“It turns out he was wearing a wire,” Hawley said — a charge Youngworth later denied. When they emerged, “TV crews were there,” Hawley said. “That’s what happens when you try to take it into your own hands. We were on ABC news.”
Hawley has since handed over the investigation’s day-to-day operations to the museum’s security director, Anthony Amore, who arrived in 2005.
Amore, a former senior Homeland Security official, has compiled a vast database about the Gardner and other art thefts. He remains hopeful the works will be recovered.
“People think that 25 years on might be a reason to give up hope, but it’s not,” said Amore. “When masterpieces are stolen, they’re typically recovered either right away or a generation later. We’re at that generation-later phase.”
That’s a comfort to Hawley.
“Maybe it’s a fool’s paradise, but I just don’t believe that we won’t get them back,” she said. “He has the data. I’m living on hope.” | The infamous 1990 art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum set the museum and the FBI on a 25-year odyssey to retrieve the work — a journey that over the years would spawn thousands of false leads. For museum director Anne Hawley, who recently announced her intention to retire at the end of the year, the loss has been both professional and deeply personal. | 24.217391 | 0.927536 | 7.072464 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/03/19/the-downsides-of-cheaper-gas/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150319101938id_/http://fortune.com/2015/03/19/the-downsides-of-cheaper-gas/ | The downside of cheaper gas | 20150319101938 | Let’s be clear about this: commodity prices do not drive economic growth; economic growth drives commodity prices.
Keep this in mind the next time a talking head claims that the ongoing purge in oil is a “good thing.”
Oil prices have been slashed in half since the summer. This is undoubtedly known, but do you also know that lumber and copper prices are down by 25% or that aluminum prices are down by nearly 20%?
Now ask yourself, when has a fire-sale in the four most important industrial commodities ever been a sign of a growing economy? Here’s a hint: the next time will be the first time. After all, in spite of all of the hyperventilating by media-economists on how U.S. economic growth is set to surge thanks to the “tax cut” at the pump, it is important to keep in mind that a cut in the price of a good is not economic growth.
For every penny drop in the board foot of lumber, ounce of metal or gallon of gasoline, there is a penny that will be spent elsewhere. This sounds great, until you realize that the amount of pennies being spent are not increasing. That is to say, it is a zero-sum game, a transfer of pennies within an economy is not an expansion of spending in that economy.
After all, the plunge in gasoline prices over the last six months did not prevent the circulation of cash through the economy from stalling at a 40-year low. What’s more, the declines have yet to pull the U.S.’ smokestack economy off of the ledge.
For instance, earlier this week the Federal Reserve Bank reported that goods and services produced in the manufacturing industry for February fell 0.2%, its third consecutive monthly decline. The rates of change for the total index in January, and for manufacturing in both December and January, were lower than previously reported. In fact, the January index was revised from a 0.2% rise to a 0.3% decline!
Over the last three months, retail gasoline prices averaged a six-year low of $2.282 per gallon, according to AAA. For comparison sake, at the end of February 2014, the three-month average was higher at $3.301. In fact, real gasoline prices are cheaper today than in 1974!
Be that as it may, consumers refuse to spend their gasoline savings elsewhere in the economy.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a third straight sharp drop in retail sales. The headline number for February dropped 0.6%, as opposed to market expectations of a 0.3% rise.
The average drop in retail sales of 0.8% over the last three months is the largest decline since the three months following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Just as important, retail sales in the control group (which the Bureau of Economic Analysis uses to calculate GDP) has not risen since the plunge in gasoline began.
The control group factors out sales of food, autos, building materials and gas stations and therefore provides a good barometer on consumer spending exclusive of purchases vulnerable to fluctuating energy and commodity costs. This allows us to arrive at a more accurate picture of consumer behavior.
Unfortunately, the current picture of the U.S. consumer is not pretty. Yet oddly enough, Sheep on the Street continue to bleat that lower oil prices are good for the economy. Intuitively, the Street’s canard makes sense, but as we have seen throughout the extant plunge in oil, consumers refuse to follow Wall Street’s script.
Given that consumer spending drives more than two-thirds of the economy, you would think that Wall Street would stop rejoicing cheap gas (as well as cheap lumber, copper and aluminum), and concern itself with the economic forces pulling commodity prices lower.
Stephen Schork is the founder and editor of The Schork Report, a daily subscription newsletter providing daily views of the energy, cash and financial markets. | While gasoline today is cheaper than it was in 1974, it has fallen short of giving the U.S. an economic boost. | 33.347826 | 0.782609 | 1.043478 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/04/10/liberty-mutual-chairman-edmund-ted-kelly-earned-nearly-million-year/rffC5G4qHpWwXGUJOpTP0L/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20150322065027id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2012/04/10/liberty-mutual-chairman-edmund-ted-kelly-earned-nearly-million-year/rffC5G4qHpWwXGUJOpTP0L/story.html | Liberty Mutual chairman Edmund F. “Ted’’ Kelly earned nearly $50 million a year | 20150322065027 | Even by the generous standards of executive pay, Edmund F. “Ted’’ Kelly’s paycheck looms large.
Liberty Mutual’s longtime chief earned an average of nearly $50 million a year from 2008 to 2010, making him one of the highest-paid corporate executives in the country, according to state insurance filings reviewed by the Globe.
But the Boston insurance giant has declined to say how much Kelly earned in 2011, when he retired as chief executive, or how much he continues to be paid as chairman of the board. The company omitted Kelly’s compensation from its latest annual financial report, filed with state regulators last month.
Liberty Mutual chairman Edmund F. “Ted” Kelly’s compensation increased dramatically starting in 2003.
The decision raises new questions over Kelly’s pay package as the company holds its annual meeting Wednesday in Boston and shines a spotlight on how mutual insurance companies handle executive pay.
“The lack of transparency is a major issue,’’ said Joseph M. Belth, editor of The Insurance Forum, an independent publication that follows the insurance industry, and a professor emeritus of insurance at Indiana University.
Kelly helped the company grow through a series of acquisitions during his 13-year reign. Kelly, 66, has been richly rewarded, earning far more than the CEOs of every public company in Massachusetts and most of his peers across the country from 2008 to 2010.
For instance, the top executive at MetLife, the country’s largest life insurance company, earned an average of $16 million, a third of what Kelly collected, during the period. The head of Allstate Corp., which is similar in size to Liberty Mutual, earned an average of $9.2 million during that span.
Kelly out-earned almost all of the CEOs at S&P 500 companies, including iconic corporate giants like General Electric Co. and Walmart Stores Inc.
A Liberty Mutual spokesman, John Cusolito, said Kelly’s pay was based on an analysis by an executive compensation firm and included long-term incentive awards earned during his long career with the company.
“Although Liberty Mutual Holding Co. Inc. is not a publicly traded company, we emulate many of the best practices used by public companies,’’ he said.
The spokesman suggested the company did not include Kelly’s compensation in the 2011 annual report because he retired as CEO in June. Liberty Mutual did disclose the pay for his successor, David H. Long, the former president; he earned $5.3 million last year.
Because it is not publicly traded, Liberty Mutual is not required to report executive pay to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Its insurance subsidiaries are required to disclose the pay for their CEOs and other top paid executives to regulators in several states, including Massachusetts, which in turn make the data public.
According to state insurance filings, Kelly earned an average of $8.5 million a year in salary and bonuses from 2008 to 2010, plus $40.8 million a year in “all other compensation.’’
The filings do not provide details on the “other compensation,’’ but Cusolito said it consisted of long-term deferred compensation, modeled after the stock awards public companies use.
Some observers say Kelly’s pay package is notable because Liberty Mutual was founded in 1912 as a mutual insurance company owned by its customers, rather than by shareholders - a tradition it says continues. Any extra money it earns is supposed to go back to policyholders, not executives.
“It’s really outrageous,’’ said J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America in Washington, D.C. “Mutual companies should be run for the benefit of the policyholders.’’
Massachusetts regulators have asked Liberty Mutual why it did not report Kelly’s pay and could order the company to do so.
Insurance Commissioner Joseph Murphy said the state has the authority to take action against the company if it determines Kelly’s pay was excessive, hurt the company’s financial condition, or forced it to charge policyholders higher rates.
As at other companies, Liberty Mutual’s directors are charged with setting chief executive pay. Board members include NStar chief executive Thomas J. May, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Inc. chairman William C. Van Faasen, and former Sovereign chairman John P. Hamill. None could be reached for comment. Liberty Mutual does not disclose how much it pays directors.
In theory, policyholders elect board members. In practice, board members are typically picked by other directors and executives, limiting customers’ influence, critics say.
“The problem with mutuals is there is no way for policyholders to exercise any control,’’ said Hunter, the consumer advocate. “It is run by management.’’
Kelly, who came to the United States from Ireland to earn his doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has long been the public face of the company. After 18 years with Aetna Life and Casualty Co., he became Liberty Mutual’s president in 1992 and chief executive in 1998.
A Weston resident, he also serves on at least two other corporate boards and is chairman of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s board of trustees.
Under Kelly’s tenure, Liberty Mutual grew significantly through acquisitions, including buying Safeco of Seattle for $6.2 billion in 2008.
Liberty Mutual reported $34.7 billion in revenue last year, triple the tally when he became CEO, and has remained profitable.
Kelly’s most controversial move was creating a holding company for Liberty Mutual a decade ago, paving the way for the company to sell a minority stake in the subsidiaries to outside investors, without compensating policyholders.
The change also made it more difficult to track Liberty Mutual’s pay. Its insurance units file annual reports with state regulators detailing executive pay, but the holding company does not.
“There is no disclosure for mutual holding companies,’’ said Belth, the publisher. “It’s not just a lack of transparency. It’s invisible.’’
Kelly’s pay began to skyrocket shortly after the company set up the holding company in 2002. It climbed from $3 million that year to $53 million in 2008, Belth said. In 2010, the latest year for which data are available, Kelly earned $45 million in total.
“Those are very big numbers,’’ said Fred Whittlesey of Compensation Venture Group, a Seattle-area consulting firm.
Still, Whittlesey said, it is difficult to say whether the pay was justified without knowing details about how Kelly’s pay was structured and how the company performed, compared to its peers - something that is harder to measure because Liberty Mutual is not publicly traded. | Edmund F. “Ted’’ Kelly’s pay package made him one of the highest-paid corporate executives in the country. | 55.521739 | 1 | 8.652174 | high | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/05/23/6-things-you-dont-know-about-the-xbox-one-really/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150325064507id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/05/23/6-things-you-dont-know-about-the-xbox-one-really/ | 6 things you don’t know about the Xbox One. (Really) | 20150325064507 | FORTUNE — By now, gamers around the world know just as much about Microsoft’s new video game console, the Xbox One, as they do Sony’s SNE recently announced PlayStation 4. Like its next-generation counterpart, the Xbox One will rely on an 8-core processor, supported by 8 gigabytes of RAM, a Blu-ray disc drive, a non-removable 500 gigabyte hard drive, three USB 3.0 ports, and WiFi capability.
The Xbox One will also be packaged with an advanced version of Kinect, which Microsoft MSFT says is so sensitive now it can track your pulse. At the unveiling this week, the company did not announce a price, nor did it set a launch date, other than to say gamers can expect it by the end of the year. Which is to say, there’s much more to the Xbox One than what the company just unveiled. For more answers, Fortune sought out Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, for more answers. Here’s what we learned:
It won’t be streaming full games any time soon. Though companies like OnLive are pioneering games processed in the cloud — and the PlayStation 4 will initially let players demo portions of games via the cloud-based Gaikai service — no such game-streaming capability will be available on the Xbox One for the foreseeable future. “If you’re talking about full game streaming, the technical reality of that is that that’s multiple years off in terms of having a complete system that people will really look at and say, hey, that actually works for me in terms of latency and performance,” explains Mehdi. Instead, the Xbox One will use its cloud computing services to augment games.
MORE: The Xbox One has one major problem
No TV DVR for you. Want to record game play? That’s no problem for the Xbox One. But, athough Microsoft is positioning the console as an “all-in-one entertainment service for the living room,” it won’t be capable of recording TV programming on its own. For that, you’ll still have to rely on an old-school DVR box from your existing cable or satellite provider. Mehdi remains mum on whether such a feature could eventually become part of the Xbox One itself.
The Xbox One was meant to blend in (and lay horizontally). You may not have agreed with the design sensibility of previous Xbox consoles, but one thing is for certain: They stood out. The Xbox One was created from the get-go to do the opposite. “In particular in this release, we’re really embracing games and TV,” explains Mehdi. “And so the form factor has a 16 by 9 aspect ratio, which is kind of the aspect ratio for high-definition television. So when you look at the box and the angular, rectangular nature of it — even the way we do the two-tone split with the grill — all of that was about being the one device that can power all of your entertainment in the living room.” Also, if you were wondering if you could stand the Xbox One up on its side, you can’t — or at least shouldn’t. Users will want to keep it horizontal to keep things cool and quiet.
All games will be saved to the Xbox One. It doesn’t matter which game you buy, it will be downloaded and installed in its entirety to the console’s 500-gigabyte hard drive, which Mehdi says is partly so the game can better take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud computing services. And if 500 gigs of space isn’t enough, users can hook up an external hard drive via any one of its USB 3.0 ports.
The infamous “red ring of death” is no more. Defective Xbox 360 units quickly became known for the “red ring of death,” a ring that lit red around the power button if the console experienced a hardware failure, among other problems. The notorious indicator is no more. Instead, console issues will be displayed via onscreen messages.
There’s another reason for that x86 processor. The switch to a more accessible 8-core x86 PC-style processor is a big change for Microsoft, which has in the past preferred more customized chips for its game consoles. Part of that has to do with making it easier for outside developers to create games. But the other reason? So the Xbox One can run Windows 8 apps when needed. Indeed, the console will run three operating systems side-by-side: a streamlined version of Windows acting as the main OS to run non-gaming apps like Skype, an “Xbox OS” that kicks in when a player starts a game, and a small third OS that runs behind the scenes to sort of bridge the two. | We looked to Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi to learn more about what the company's new videogame console can and can't do. | 35.923077 | 0.807692 | 1.346154 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/jeremy-renner-divorce-roommate-reveals-shocking-details | http://web.archive.org/web/20150326235441id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/jeremy-renner-divorce-roommate-reveals-shocking-details | Jeremy Renner's Roomate Kristoffer Winters Reveals Details in Divorce Filing : People.com | 20150326235441 | Sonni Pacheco and Jeremy Renner
03/26/2015 AT 12:20 AM EDT
battle heats up, one of his closest friends is rallying to his side – claiming the actor's estranged wife is an extortionist who only married him for a green card.
Kristoffer Winters, 41, who considers himself like a brother to Renner after their 20 years of friendship, says they were living as roommates during much of Renner's 11-month-long
to Sonni Pacheco, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE.
During that time, Winters alleges he witnessed multiple examples of Pacheco's negligent parenting – both during her pregnancy and after the birth of her and Renner's now 2-year-old daughter,
Winters believes Pacheco – who was born in Canada – only married Renner to help her gain U.S. citizenship.
He also claims she made multiple appointments to have an abortion during her pregnancy – but ultimately decided against it because "a marriage to Renner would improve her financial situation."
Winters also claims Pacheco has made threats to extort Renner with an embarrassing video she possesses.
"I heard Sonni say at least five or six times ... that Jeremy should be nice to her and not fight her on green card or money issues or else she would release intimate videos of him to TMZ," Winters says in the papers.
ever being offered such a video.
Winters also says he saw Pacheco smoking up to five cigarettes and drinking "one or two large glasses of wine" every day during her pregnancy, while he was living in their guest house.
After Ava was born in March 2013, Winters claims Pacheco drank "about a bottle of wine per day" while breastfeeding. He says she stopped breastfeeding Ava after six weeks because she felt "guilty" about drinking alcohol.
Winters goes on to accuse Renner's estranged wife of multiple examples of neglectful parenting – including an incident in which she left the child home alone at night to go partying with friends. Ava, who was 18-months-old at the time, was allegedly by herself for 15 minutes before Winters made it back to the house.
For her part, Pacheco vehemently denied most of Winters's claims to
on Wednesday and is continuing to pursue full custody of Ava and additional child support from Renner.
Pacheco's attorney could not be reached for comment. | The actor's friend and roommate claims Pacheco is a bad mother who threatened to extort the actor | 24.888889 | 0.722222 | 1.388889 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/bigger-more-rugged-suns-will-look-to-ease-knight-back-in-032415 | http://web.archive.org/web/20150327194144id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/bigger-more-rugged-suns-will-look-to-ease-knight-back-in-032415 | Bigger, more rugged Suns will look to ease Knight back in | 20150327194144 | PHOENIX -- Even when things are going well, an NBA coach usually can run into a predicament around the next corner.
For Jeff Hornacek -- whose Suns have won four in a row -- an extended run of better days may be on the cusp of colliding with another adjustment-related issue.
But before digging into that, let's start with the impetus for those recent better days.
The Suns are playing much better defense.
Still sitting at 17th in defensive efficiency (points allowed per possession) among NBA teams for the entire season, Phoenix is sixth in that category since the All-Star break and first over its last three games.
So, tactics and effort have risen exponentially, right? Actually, the code may be far easier to decipher.
"Well, we're bigger," Hornacek said after Tuesday's practice.
Have key Suns players physically grown over the last few weeks? Not exactly. But, due to circumstances, the starting cast has. In the absence of injured 6-foot-3 guard Brandon Knight (ankle), 6-9 Marcus Morris has opened games, sharing wing-area duties with usual starter P.J. Tucker.
"Between Alex (Len) and Markieff (Morris), Marcus and P.J. . . . obviously, Eric's (Bledsoe) long and an elite defender," Hornacek said, "it's more of a defensive team out there than the offensive squad we had prior."
Right, bigger players can translate to more consistency in rebounding and turning foes away at the rim. This additional size also has enabled the Suns to streamline certain concepts.
"We've done some different things," Hornacek said. "Also it's because of being bigger that when we're in trouble, we can switch a little more, too. If Marcus has to step off on P.J.'s man, it's not a big difference, so we've able to do that a few times, too. You know, even if it's just five or 10 possessions a game, that can make a difference.
"Because of that group that's out there, they feel very confident that they're going to be able to get stops. Right now, they're in a mindset that when it comes down to that last five or six minutes in a game, that they're pretty confident that they can stop guys. That's a big deal."
Here's what some observers might consider a potentially bigger deal: Knight, whose teammates have won five of six in his absence, could be able to play in Wednesday's home date with the Sacramento Kings.
Before exploring the ramifications of reinserting Knight back into the rotation, let's check in with the troublesome left ankle of the player in question.
"Felt a lot better," Knight said after Tuesday's workout. "So, hopefully, it feels good tomorrow."
As for lingering issues, the 23-year-old playmaker had a response similar to what we hear during the recovery phase of most ankle injuries.
"Just explosion . . . explosion and landing," Knight said. "The biggest thing is getting back comfortable with the everyday motions in basketball."
And if the Suns were one day away from an actual playoff game, the restricted-free-agent-to-be still would be in a wait-and-see situation.
"Tough to say," Knight said. "If you're out there and can't make regular basketball motions, you're putting yourself at risk."
Speaking of risk, Hornacek isn't worried about how Knight's return might affect chemistry in general . . . and, in particular, that livin'-larger defensive presence.
"He practiced today," the coach said. "What level he can actually play the games in, I guess we'll see more tomorrow."
Regardless of how frisky Knight appears to be Wednesday, the Kings should expect to see the Suns' jumbo lineup when the game begins.
"Right now, I'm leaning to leaving it the way it is," Hornacek said. "Just because (Knight) hasn't played in two or three weeks, to throw him out there . . . might be better to get him a few minutes here and there to get back acclimated.
"Either way, if he's back it just gives us another weapon. We can always go to the big lineup later on. He'll be a big part of what we do moving forward. There's times when we can spread it out on teams, too. We need to get him back as soon as we can."
Knight, whose numbers with the Milwaukee Bucks (17.8 points, 44 percent shooting overall, 41 from 3-point range) this season have dipped in 10 games as a Sun (14.4, 37 and 34), being eased back into the fold is understandable.
"The team's playing well," Knight said, "so for myself, it's about being able to help the team and make sure I'm protecting myself at the same time."
And what has he witnessed from his new teammates over the last six games?
"(They're) just playing hard," he said. "You know, guys have a will to win right now. That's the biggest thing. Guys have a will. They're believing and it's showing in our play and in our efforts."
Tucker, Phoenix's designated stopper on the defensive of the floor, has some theories on why this improvement has occurred.
"Our communication is better," Tucker said. "(Center) Brandan (Wright) has been really good on the weak side. He's been awesome, weak side, helping out. I really like our lineup with me and Marcus (Morris) at the two and three.
"I don't think we've lost a rebound battle against any team since we went to that lineup. We communicate better, so I really like that lineup."
Archie Goodwin inspired considerable goodwill by providing five clutch points in Sunday's triumph over Dallas.
But his work on defense seems like the main reason why he received that fourth-quarter burn.
"Defensively, I thought he was good," Hornacek said. "He battled Chandler Parsons, didn't let him score there at the end. He challenged shots . . . that was huge for us."
Follow Randy Hill on Twitter | A bigger lineup with more defensive might has helped the Suns win five of six games without injured Brandon Knight, who could be ready to return for Wednesday's game vs. Sacramento. | 37.411765 | 0.852941 | 1.323529 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.foxsports.com/arizona/story/game-report-diamondbacks-10-white-sox-2-040215 | http://web.archive.org/web/20150407024724id_/http://www.foxsports.com:80/arizona/story/game-report-diamondbacks-10-white-sox-2-040215 | Game report: Diamondbacks 10, White Sox 2 | 20150407024724 | Updated APR 02, 2015 8:56p ET
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- The Diamondbacks finished the Salt River Fields portion of spring training on a three-game winning streak, outscoring opponents 21-9 after a 10-2 romp over the Chicago White Sox on Thursday.
Paul Goldschmidt had a pair of RBI doubles, Chris Owings had two doubles and an RBI and Tuffy Gosewisch had four singles and an RBI, raising his spring average to .357.
The D-backs scored six runs in the first two innings off left-hander Jose Quintana.
"When spring training ends, you hope guys are starting to feel good and seeing the ball well," D-backs manager Chip Hale said. "That's one of their starters, and our guys handled him well. He made some good pitches and we hit him."
The good numbers are virtually team wide. A.J. Pollock had two singles and an RBI and is hitting .369 this spring. Mark Trumbo had a double and an RBI and is hitting .385. Nick Ahmed had two singles and two RBI and is hitting .328. Ender Inciarte had a double and is hitting .365.
"It's great to see the guys feeling good about their swings right now," Hale said.
Right-hander Rubby De La Rosa gave up one run and struck out four in six innings, his final spring start. He struck out reigning AL Rookie of the Year Jose Abreu on a breaking ball in the first inning, and got another of his strikeouts on a breaking pitch.
"As we started spring training, we talked about him being more aggressive with it," Hale said of "I think he has confidence in it now, which gives him a third pitch, which is harder to game-plan for as a hitter. Hopefully it continues on during the season."
Rubby De La Rosa: He saved his best for last, giving up one run and four hits in six innings in his final tuneup for a start against San Francisco in the second game of the regular season April 7.
De La Rosa struck out four and walked one, the first batter of the game. The White Sox scored on three singles in the fourth inning. De la Rosa threw 82 pitches, 54 strikes, in his longest outing of the spring. He went 5-2/3 innings in a minor league game March 24.
"Right now I feel good. My four pitches are working good," De La Rosa said. Of his breaking ball, he said: "I have confidence to throw it in any count."
Hale outlined his outfield plan for the regular season: Mark Trumbo in right field, A.J. Pollock in center, David Peralta in left field against right-handers, Ender Inciarte in reserve, mostly in left and center, and Cody Ross playing left against "tough left-handers," Hale said. "Ender seems to be the guy who is going to be floating around a lot, but he's going to get a lot of at-bats. He is a very useable piece. He could be starting for other clubs in center field. Ender has made it very difficult. He deserves every day at-bats. I have to figure out how to balance that." . . . Closer Addison Reed pitched a scoreless ninth inning, giving up a hit and a walk before closing it out with a strikeout. He has made four scoreless appearances this spring and is expected to pitch again Friday, his first back-to-back outings of the spring. . . . Enrique Burgos, a candidate for the final bullpen spot, struck out two and walked one in a scoreless inning and also is scheduled to pitch Friday, which would be his first back-to-back games.
Diamondbacks vs. Chicago Cubs, 6:40 pm, Chase Field
Probable pitchers: Diamondbacks -- RHP Jeremy Hellickson, RHP Daniel Hudson, RHP Enrique Burgos, LHP Vidal Nuno, LHP Andrew Chafin. Cubs -- RHP Edwin Jackson. | Rubby De La Rosa has a strong outing and the bats stay hot as Diamondbacks wallop White Sox in Salt River Fields finale. | 32.5 | 0.791667 | 1.625 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2015/04/08/fatherly-millennial-dads/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150411171259id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/04/08/fatherly-millennial-dads/ | How Fatherly plans to corner the market on millennial dads | 20150411171259 | For expectant moms, there’s no shortage of places to find advice. The web is crawling with mommy bloggers and parenting sites dedicated to helping women become the best mother they can be.
But what about dads? That’s the question Simon Isaacs asked himself when he learned that his wife was pregnant with their first child. Isaacs went online and started checking out parenting sites, but “none one of them spoke to me,” he says. “Everything out there seemed to be pink and purple.”
Isaacs is betting that he isn’t the only young father who’s unhappy with the current offerings. He and co-founder Michael Rothman created Fatherly, a new content site aimed at millennial dads. The site, which launched on Wednesday, is a mix of parenting advice, product recommendations and dad-centric news. The content has a definite hipster vibe, assuring men that they can be a good dad without sacrificing their coolness quotient.
The Godfather of Crossfit on How to Stay in Shape with Kids (and Other Distractions)
Jay-Z’s Right Hand Man On The Changing Roll Of Fathers In Hip-Hop
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A Navy SEAL’s Tips on How to Dominate Hide-and-Seek
The bro-ish tone is no accident. Rothman was a founding employee at Thrillist Media, a men’s lifestyle site that features articles like “9 Fool-proof pick-up techniques that will make your waitress swoon.” After seven years at the company, Rothman says he was “aging out” of Thrillist’s core demo, and began noticing how many of his male friends and acquaintances where starting to become dads. It didn’t take long for him and Isaacs, whose background is in nonprofit marketing, to see this baby boom as an opportunity.
Having kids launches people into an “acquisitive and inquisitive” stage of life, says Rothman. The founders think there are plenty of other young dads like Isaacs: “Type A guys” who want youthful but dad-oriented information about products, relationships, kids’ development, and more. Some investors seem to agree. Fatherly has raised $2 million in seed funding, led by SoftTech. Other investors include Lerer Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and the Knight Foundation.
Targeting millennials makes sense. There are now 75.3 million people between the ages of 18 and 34, making them the largest living generation. Plus, men in this cohort see fatherhood differently than previous generations did, says Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family. “They want to play a more active roll in the life of their kids,” says Harrington. Meanwhile, much of the media and information aimed at men still projects an outdated image of dads, he says.
That said, while some millennials are entering prime parenting age, it’s not clear that they will follow in the childbearing footsteps of previous generations. In 1992, Stewart Friedman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, polled Gen X students at Wharton, finding that 78% said they planned to have children. When he repeated that survey 20 years later, only 42% of millennial students gave the same response. What’s more, the birth rate is falling, and is currently at its lowest point in 35 years. While these trends may certainly shift, it seems a bit premature to call millennial dads a major market.
And for those millennials who do decide to have children, will Fatherly earn a place in their bookmark bar? The founders hope so. “We think there’s a massive interest in this content,” says Isaacs. “We also recognize that parents have a lot on their plate.” To make Fatherly easy to access, the company has focused on making the site mobile-friendly, and looks for ways to keep the content short and sweet. For instance, Rothman notes that some topics might be better served by a how-to Vine, rather than an actual article. What’s more millennial than that?
To subscribe to Kristen Bellstrom’s daily newsletter on the world’s most powerful women, go to www.getbroadsheet.com. | The new lifestyle site hopes to woo young fathers with content aimed at cool dads. | 50.625 | 0.8125 | 1.1875 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2011/09/13/what-happens-after-a-greek-default/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20150415103307id_/http://fortune.com/2011/09/13/what-happens-after-a-greek-default/ | What happens after a Greek default | 20150415103307 | A Greek default has already occurred in the eyes of investors, even though it technically hasn’t happened yet. The market is now forcing European leaders to quickly decide how they want the rest of the sovereign debt crisis to play out. While the technical default of Greece — inevitable as it is — took around 18 months, similar defaults in other peripheral eurozone members will probably come much faster.
A lack of leadership on the part of the core members of the eurozone, namely Germany, could very well bring a swift end to the common currency, setting off an economic meltdown that few would want to imagine. The time has now come for Europeans to either move much closer or break apart.
Tomorrow is the deadline for owners of Greek debt to agree to a haircut on their debt by extending the repayment schedule out a few years. The plan required 90% of existing bondholders to sign on to the plan. But traders say that only 50% to 70% have signed on, complicating Greece’s attempts to head off a default.
The restructuring of Greek debt may still occur by the deadline, but the market seems to be fed up with all the dancing around. Even if Greece is able to convince debt holders to effectively take a large haircut on their debt, the country would still ultimately have to pay back, or refinance, 135 billion euro by 2020. To do that, Greece needs to take in more money than it spends – a lot more money.
That will be a problem, considering that all the austerity cuts the government has been forced to make have decimated Greece’s fragile economy. The country’s GDP contracted 7.3% in the second quarter of the year, far worse than expected. The resulting decrease in tax revenue caused the country’s budget deficit to widen to around 10% of GDP. Greece would need to run a primary surplus of around 5% of GDP to stabilize its debt burden at 180% of GDP by 2014 and would have to run almost a 9% primary surplus to reduce its debt to 90% by 2031, according to Citigroup.
Will Europe come tumbling down?
Running those kinds of surpluses is almost impossible for Greece given its economic outlook. So instead of waiting for Greece to miss a payment in the coming years, the market took matters into its own hands over the last few days. Credit default swaps on five-year Greek bonds this morning were trading at rates implying a nearly 100% chance of default by the government. French banks that hold Greek debt have seen their market values fall in the last few days, which imply a total loss on all their Greek debt holdings.
Score one for the market. Unfortunately, the market has a habit of going overboard. Panic is spreading across trading desks at speeds not seen since the dark days of 2008. The European slow motion crisis has now moved into overdrive, threatening to take down banks, businesses, nations and the European common currency. This is the contagion the media has warned about for months – it is already here.
While the technical Greek default isn’t causing fireworks like the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the flames are growing. To be sure, this crisis was never really all about Greece’s current debt woes anyway. The amount it owed was always too small to move the needle, accounting for just 3% of eurozone’s total debt load. The real trouble comes after the default, when Greece has to make a choice about whether it stays in the euro or it takes its chances and moves back to the drachma.
Moving back to its former currency would allow Greek exports to be competitive again with its neighbors, especially those that cater to tourists. Across the Aegean in Turkey, GDP grew by 8.8% in the second quarter. There is no reason why Greece couldn’t capture some of that tourist market if it returns to a cheap currency.
But leaving the common currency would also lead to some nasty results. It would force Greece to raise cash to plug its budget shortfall and potentially pay yields that could run as high as 25% over German bonds, something that would probably be impossible. That would force Greece to make even larger cuts in government spending, further exacerbating its economic woes. The Greek banking system would almost certainly collapse in the changeover as the ECB would stop payments currently keeping them afloat. Without that cash infusion from the ECB, the Greek banks would be left with a massive funding gap equal to around 20% of their assets or 100 billion euros, according to an analysis by Citigroup.
A run on the Greek banking sector would result bringing economic activity in the country to a grinding halt. Imported products would be in short supply, creating serious political and social unrest throughout the country. The ensuing collapse in the Greek banking system would send shockwaves throughout Europe. Goldman Sachs GS estimates that banks in the peripheral eurozone would be hit the hardest, resulting in 38 banks requiring between 30 billion and 92 billion euros. Citigroup C estimates that losses in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain would trigger direct and indirect losses of $480 billion.
By then, the ECB would need to make a hard decision. Would it wait for the politicians to get their act together or would it be the lender of last resort to all of Europe? The last time the euro debt crisis flared up earlier in the summer, threatening Italy’s 1.9 trillion euro debt market, the ECB stepped in and started buying Italian and Spanish bonds. So far the purchases have been moderate, not enough to bring Italian bond yields down to where they were before the latest crisis. The ensuing melee will force the ECB to buy a massive amount of bonds to stabilize the market, tying the fate of the peripheral countries with that of the richer core members.
This is, of course, what the core members were hoping to avoid all along. But if the euro is to survive it is clear that it needs to have a more unified economic policy. Much of the cost of this closer union will be borne by Germany, where the current government seems reluctant to take charge. That will need to change if it hopes to finally put a lid on this long-running sovereign debt crisis and move forward. | As Greece falls, many are wondering how the rest of the European sovereign debt crisis will play out. For the euro to survive, it needs to have a more unified economic policy behind it. | 31.921053 | 0.894737 | 3.526316 | medium | medium | mixed |
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