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http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/07/20084915515783521.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130416045745id_/http://www.aljazeera.com:80/archive/2005/07/20084915515783521.html | Iraqi Sunnis urged over political input | 20130416045745 | The chairman of the Sunni Endowment in Iraq has, for the first time, urged all Iraqi Sunni Muslims to participate in shaping the country's new constitution.
At a press conference at his headquarters in Baghdad, Adnan al-Dulaimi, a notable Iraqi figure, condemned foreign parties who "want to change Iraq's Arab-Muslim identity".
"Sunni Arabs are responsible for this country's history, unity and identity," he said.
He said Sunni religious leaders would urge Arab Sunni Muslims to participate in the coming elections later this year.
Meanwhile, new Sunni delegates are expected to meet later on Tuesday with the parliamentary committee that is drafting a new constitution.
Washington and Baghdad are trying to use diplomacy and politics to defuse an uprising that has grown much more violent since the government took power in April after a January election in which few Sunnis took part. The committee was expanded to include extra Sunni Arabs Iraq's parliament formally welcomed on Tuesday 15 new Sunni Arab members to the committee tasked with writing a constitution, making it the first national political body to include significant representation from Saddam Hussein's formerly dominant minority since the election.
The committee was expanded to include extra Sunni Arabs
The committee was expanded to 71 members to include more Sunni Arabs. Previously there were just two.
The committee, which must agree on a draft constitution by 15 August ahead of an October referendum and December election, will have its first full meeting on Wednesday, committee chairman Humam Hamoudi said.
He said the main points of contention would probably be the extent to which the constitution described Iraq as an Arab state, and the boundaries and degree of autonomy of federal regions, such as the mainly Kurdish north.
Western diplomats observing the process have said arguments over the structure of government - expected to be broadly a parliamentary rather than presidential system - may be extensive, as may any clause on the rights of women.
"The really hard bargaining hasn't started yet," one Western diplomat said last week. "It'll get into the really heavy-duty horse-trading at the end of the month." | The chairman of the Sunni Endowment in Iraq has, for the first time, urged all Iraqi Sunni Muslims to participate in shaping the country's new constitution. | 14.75 | 0.964286 | 13.035714 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/20/wine-wholesaler-brings-sunny-italy-boston/q1k1BSlUkFxbJ9uUhlnJxK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130422063441id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/20/wine-wholesaler-brings-sunny-italy-boston/q1k1BSlUkFxbJ9uUhlnJxK/story.html | Wine wholesaler brings sunny Italy to Boston | 20130422063441 | “Wine is Sunlight, held together by water” — this is the e-mail signature used by Judith F. McDonough, a Boston wine wholesaler who last year founded Mariposa Fine Wine and Spirits.
Specializing in Italian wines, McDonough is one of the few female wine wholesalers in the state. “With the state’s byzantine regulations, it hasn’t been an easy road, but I’ve persevered,” said McDonough, a former national sales rep for gourmet food products who decided to expand her portfolio to include wine.
What type of wines from Italy do you represent?
Italy has 3,000 indigenous grapes, and many of these regions are identified with specific wines. I represent award-winning wines from small vineyards, elegant boutique wines of great value not previously sold in the US. My niche is currently five Italian regions: Friuli, Lombardy, Calabria, Piedmont, and Puglia.
What do you do as a wine wholesaler?
Massachusetts is the fourth-largest consumer of Italian wines in the US. I’m sanctioned by the Commonwealth with a license to sell wine — not directly to consumers, but to hotels, restaurants, convenience stores, specialty grocery stores, and caterers. I get my wine from the winery, supplier, or vendor and then call on sommeliers, chefs, managers, and other distributors. It’s hard work, but I also get to taste wine and talk about it for a living.
Describe a typical sales call.
I carry a segmented tote bag that holds 12 bottles of wine and I am also permitted to transport up to 10 cases in my vehicle. I’ll recommend wines that best enhance a client’s menu. When we begin tasting, I uncork the wine and am the first to sample. I’ll make sure the wine is showing and tasting properly.
How does one get a license to sell wine?
The Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission requires a copious amount of documentation to be filed, as well as an interview, financial review, criminal background check, and necessary fees.
Why has wine wholesaling been male-dominated?
A lot of businesses are very loyal to their current distributor and won’t consider a new face. It’s very difficult as a female to bring in wines that have never been tried before. But you have to be tough, and you can’t take “no” for an answer.
I love Old World wines that have a varied character, balance of components, complexity, and a sense of place, such as Ugo Lequio, Barbaresco, Chiaromonte, and Riserva.
What’s your go-to sales outfit?
Always an elegant dress and great shoes. If I’m delivering wine, I’ll wear leggings or jeans, a great shirt, and leather jacket and boots. | “Wine is Sunlight, held together by water” — this is the e-mail signature used by Judith F. McDonough, a Boston wine wholesaler who last year founded Mariposa Fine Wine and Spirits. Specializing in Italian wines, McDonough is one of the few female wine wholesalers in the state. “With the state’s byzantine regulations, it hasn’t been an easy road but I’ve persevered,” said McDonough, a former national sales rep for gourmet food products who decided to expand her portfolio to include wine. Q. What type of wines from Italy do you represent? A. Italy has 3,000 indigenous grapes and many of these regions are identified with specific wines. My niche is currently five Italian regions, Friuli, Lombardy, Calabria, Piedmont, and Puglia. | 3.705479 | 0.979452 | 19.760274 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2013/04/20/one-man-iliad-contemplating-war-and-destruction-comes-artsemerson/4WpDGKZVj7HPfLr1DSAtHP/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130424014321id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/theater-art/2013/04/20/one-man-iliad-contemplating-war-and-destruction-comes-artsemerson/4WpDGKZVj7HPfLr1DSAtHP/story.html | A one-man ‘Iliad,’ contemplating war and destruction, comes to ArtsEmerson | 20130424014321 | NEW YORK — When actor Denis O’Hare and director Lisa Peterson began developing their theatrical adaptation of Homer’s “The Iliad” in 2005, the United States was embroiled in two simultaneous wars halfway around the world.
Yet the duo never intended their update of Homer’s ancient epic poem, about the brutality of the Trojan War, to be an antiwar jeremiad. Indeed, the collaborators came to the project, “An Iliad,” with differing passions and perspectives about the seemingly insatiable human thirst for violence and destruction.
“I think war is a waste. It is always a waste,” O’Hare says over coffee at a Manhattan cafe, Peterson seated across from him. “I think that our play shows clearly the devastation of war. But that’s never stopped anybody from going into war. Lisa’s point of view is a little different. What she was fascinated by was: What is it in human nature that drives us to violence? Is violence part of our nature? Why do we have this desire for violence inside of us? Is it impossible to get rid of?”
Their idea was to create a solo performance piece that condensed the sprawl of the poem into an intimate, primal work that would use contemporary vernacular spiced with translated poetic verse. The production, directed by Peterson and starring O’Hare, comes to the Paramount Center Mainstage for four performances beginning Saturday, presented by ArtsEmerson and Homer’s Coat, Peterson and O’Hare’s “creative collective.”
“For me, [the play is] not antiwar,” Peterson says. “It’s really an investigation of the human ability and proclivity to fight and the different ways that one is asked to do that. . . . A lot of it is about rage, but it’s not a critique necessarily. It’s just an examination of where rage comes from, and how it acts within us, and how does one deal with it.”
O’Hare is well known for his Tony Award-winning role as the nebbishy accountant who falls in love with baseball in Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” and for playing the foppish lunatic vampire Russell Edgington on HBO’s “True Blood.” In last year’s Obie Award-winning New York Theatre Workshop production of “An Iliad,” O’Hare alternated performances with actor Stephen Spinella.
While O’Hare jokingly calls himself a “scattershot activist,” Peterson knows him to be fiercely outspoken and politically engaged — the kind of guy who, before and after the invasion of Iraq, would make his own incendiary antiwar stickers and plaster them around Times Square on his way to perform on Broadway in “Take Me Out.”
“An Iliad,” culled from a touchstone contemporary translation by Robert Fagles, pares back the sweeping story to focus on the battle between rageful, grief-stricken warrior Achilles and prideful Trojan hero Hector, who slays Achilles’s companion, Patroclus. But the 100-minute play, which features a score performed by an onstage bassist, also incorporates the smack-talking showdown between the Greek king Agamemnon and the recalcitrant warrior Achilles; the tragic death of Patroclus, who volunteers to take Achilles’s place in battle and loses his life; and the elderly Priam’s journey across smoldering battlefields to plead with Achilles for his son Hector’s rotting corpse, in order to to give him a proper funeral. Hector’s devoted wife, Andromache, and Helen, the woman whose capture sparked the war, also make appearances.
As Homer does, Peterson and O’Hare use metaphor to convey the emotions and mindsets of these jealous, prideful warriors and hubristic leaders. To help us identify with the rival Greeks and Trojans, who battled to a stalemate during nine years of fruitless fighting, they invoke a prosaic scenario: the stubborn refusal to switch to a faster-moving supermarket checkout line after you’ve been waiting patiently in another line for 20 minutes. The frustration of changing course is too much to bear.
“We want the audience to go, ‘Ah, I know exactly what you’re talking about! I’ve been there. I know what that feels like.’ That’s the key: what it feels like,” says O’Hare. “So when we talk about rage, about being in a car and wanting to smash the car in front of you — someone cuts you off in traffic. That rage — everyone has experienced [that]. We have that in us. That’s not that different from the rage that overtakes a soldier and compels him to kill somebody.”
As a starting point in creating the piece, Peterson and O’Hare videotaped themselves improvising key sections of Fagles’s “Iliad” translation, putting the action into their own words. Other times, Peterson would interview O’Hare as the narrator and ask him questions about different characters in the play. They transcribed those sessions and then rewrote and edited the material.
More than anything, O’Hare says, “An Iliad” raises hard-to-reconcile questions about human nature and the human experience.
Director Lisa Peterson and actor Denis O’Hare accepting a 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding solo show for their off-Broadway production of “An Iliad,” a piece they also wrote.
“Why are we at war? Why do we fight?” he asks. “What do you do when you are Achilles, and Agamemnon publicly shames you and unjustly takes from you something that you want? What do you do when you are Achilles and your only reason for existence is to achieve glory? From the day you were born, the prophecy has been that you will die young and you will die in glory. So if Achilles doesn’t go out and fight, what is his life for? . . . What do you do as Hector when your city is besieged, but the people besieging you have a right to besiege you? Because your idiot brother stole the wife of one of these people and brought her into your kingdom.”
As O’Hare sees it, we don’t have to look any farther than our own personal and professional lives to understand these larger-scale conflicts.
“If you think about any small fight or feud that you’ve had in your life — how it started and how hard it is to back down from that,” he says. “When you’ve fallen out with a friend, let’s say, and it’s sort of irreparable. If you go back and dissect how it happened, it always seems inevitable that you got to the split that you ultimately arrived at. So if you go back to the core insult and dissect it, could you have diffused it?”
There is, Peterson says, a somberness at the heart of Homer’s swaggering yet mournful epic, which understands the destruction and loss war inflicts on civilizations.
“I guess if there’s any antiwar sentiment,” she says, “it’s an acknowledgment of the cost of war — both in individual human life and also, in a much bigger way, within a culture.” | NEW YORK — When actor Denis O’Hare and director Lisa Peterson began developing their theatrical adaptation of Homer’s “The Iliad” in 2005, the US was embroiled in two simultaneous wars halfway around the world. Yet the duo never intended their update of Homer’s ancient epic poem, about the brutality of the Trojan War, to be an antiwar jeremiad. Indeed, the collaborators came to the project, “An Iliad,” with differing passions and perspectives about the seemingly insatiable human thirst for violence and destruction. Their idea was to create a solo performance piece that condensed the sprawl of the poem into an intimate, primal work that would use contemporary vernacular spiced with translated poetic verse. ArtsEmerson brings the production to town for four performances beginning Saturday. | 9.496503 | 0.979021 | 37.314685 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2013/05/02/movie-review-kon-tiki/5nJuhjBypenQZ4NzT7FJsM/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130505192730id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/movies/2013/05/02/movie-review-kon-tiki/5nJuhjBypenQZ4NzT7FJsM/story.html | ‘Kon-Tiki’ - Movies - The Boston Globe | 20130505192730 | “Kon-Tiki,” a movie that re-creates Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 1947 crossing of the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft, is caught halfway between a Boy’s Own Adventure and a character study of a charming monomaniac. Pål Sverre Hagen, who plays Heyerdahl, is tall, trim, and impossibly blond, and he has penetrating blue eyes that almost — but not quite — shade into madness. If they’d gone all the way, it might have made for a more interesting movie: “Tintin Goes Bananas.”
The movie we’ve got is rousing and beautiful to look at and undercut by compromises onscreen and off. For one thing, this Norwegian production (nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar that it rightly lost to “Amour”) was shot twice, once in Heyerdahl’s native tongue and once in English, and it’s the latter that’s getting released here, in a version 17 minutes shorter than the Norwegian cut. The actors’ English is crisp but stiff, and there are moments you can sense the missing footage like a phantom limb.
The idealistic young Heyerdahl is seen early on in Polynesia with his anthropologist wife, Liv (Agnes Kittelsen), theorizing in excitably square fashion that the Pacific Islands may have been settled not by Asians from the west, as most experts believed, but by South Americans from the east. (Despite the hero’s successful voyage — 4,300 miles in 101 days — many experts still believe migration came from the west, although recent genetic research has indicated some influx from South America as well.)
There are a few amusing scenes in New York as the hero comes up against the fuddy-duddies of the National Geographic Society and other establishment bodies, but soon he’s in Peru, ready to cast off the Kon-Tiki with five crew members. The raft was built scrupulously to ancient specifications, which entailed lashings made of vines rather than the solid modern wire some of the company had hoped for.
From there, the film plays out as a less eventful “Life of Pi,” lighter on the CGI but also on the drama. This version of “Kon-Tiki” — as opposed to Heyerdahl’s own 1950 documentary, which did win an Oscar — invents action scenes to get us over the long haul of 101 days on a raft without a whole heck of a lot happening. That results in the movie’s undeniable highlight, an extended scene involving the barehanded capture of a massive shark and a white-knuckle dip in the ocean on the part of Heyerdahl’s engineer Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), who is made out to look like the soft-bellied sissy of the crew.
By all accounts except this one, Watzinger was as hardy as the others: philosopher/photographer Bengt Danielssen (a very likable Gustaf Skarsgard), troubled Knut Haugland (Tobias Santelmann), and the less-defined Erik Hesselberg (Odd-Magnus Williamson) and Torstein Raaby (Jakob Oftebro). But the filmmakers feel the need for drama, or the right kind of drama, as they hint at Heyerdahl’s less salutary leadership qualities (impulsiveness, manipulativeness, an inability to listen) without bothering to explore them.
It takes a very special kind of person to embark on a project this deranged — especially when he can’t swim — and the movie only seems to give us half of him. “Kon-Tiki” represents the official story — you sense there’s a lot of national pride riding on the movie — but it also wants to be the most dramatic version of the story, and while the contradictions don’t sink the film, they certainly rob it of impact.
“Kon-Tiki” is stalwart and uplifting and there are passing moments of wonder. And, yes, Heyerdahl pulled off an astonishing accomplishment, no matter what he did or didn’t prove. The movie is suitable entertainment for 12-year-old kids of all ages, so ignore some of us if we wish for a deeper, weirder version of this story — maybe one directed by Werner Herzog and starring the late Klaus Kinski. | “Kon-Tiki,” a movie that re-creates Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 1947 crossing of the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft, is caught halfway between a Boy’s Own Adventure and a character study of a charming monomaniac. Pål Sverre Hagen, who plays Heyerdahl, is tall, trim, and impossibly blond, and he has penetrating blue eyes that almost — but not quite — shade into madness. If they had, it might have made for a more interesting movie: “Tintin Goes Bananas.” The movie we’ve got is rousing and beautiful to look at and undercut by compromises onscreen and off. The movie plays out as a rather less eventful “Life of Pi,” lighter on the CGI but also on the drama, and the filmmakers hint at Heyerdahl’s less salutary qualities without bothering to explore them. | 4.937888 | 1 | 48.490683 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2013/05/04/improvboston-changes-shake-comedy-scene/JJwfb9xCrMo9QsGaycgPLI/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130508150057id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/theater-art/2013/05/04/improvboston-changes-shake-comedy-scene/JJwfb9xCrMo9QsGaycgPLI/story.html | ImprovBoston’s changes shake up comedy scene | 20130508150057 | A comic improviser can handle just about any change, as long as it happens onstage. But lately, the ImprovBoston community is finding change much harder to handle offstage. Miscommunication and a struggle over intellectual property have prompted improv, sketch, and stand-up performers to choose sides as the 30-year-old Cambridge comedy theater’s leadership has become embroiled in a flame war with comedians and a battle over the popular Geek Week festival.
Change has been the norm at ImprovBoston for the past five years, ever since the theater moved from its cozy hideaway in Inman Square to a bigger, higher-profile storefront space in Central Square in 2008. Zach Ward took over as managing director in June 2011, and Mike Descoteaux came on as artistic director last January, replacing Will Luera, the face of ImprovBoston for more than a decade.
Now there is a sense among some that not all of the change has been good, and Ward has had to battle a perception among some regular performers that the soul of the place is not what it used to be.
“There was something that was going on before that was very magical and running on its own that seems to have gummed up,” says veteran improviser Harry Gordon, who came to ImprovBoston from Improv Asylum in 2007 and recalls quickly feeling a sense of family. Ward has tightened up the organization, Gordon says, but something hard to define yet important was lost in the process. “I think the sense of ownership that a lot of people have had at the theater has really dissipated,” he says. “And I see people doing things in a way that was relatively inconceivable not that long ago: auditioning for other theaters and opening their own spaces.”
During his short tenure, Ward has overseen an increase in both audiences and the number of people taking the theater’s comedy classes, now totaling 1,700 students a year. But he acknowledges that change has been tough.
“Coming in, there was a lot to wrap your head around,” says Ward, who’s had to navigate what he calls “the cult of personality that exists deep within a comedy theater” even as he’s sought to “get buy-in from the majority” and “make it so that everyone can realize the ultimate goal of the theater.” Mainly, that means providing performers with a place to play and to develop their work, and giving audiences an affordable place to see live comedy.
ImprovBoston’s home on Prospect Street in Central Square, where it moved from Inman Square in 2008. In the past five years, change has been the norm at the Cambridge theater.
ImprovBoston first got into stand-up a decade ago, but, as its name suggests, that’s never been what it’s known for. Its problems with the stand-up community — a different crowd from the core set of improvisers who perform on many of its shows — began last August. At a Sunday night stand-up showcase called “The People’s Show,” the comics were told that the theater would be videotaping sets that night. Some of them objected. Ward, who was teaching a class in the building, stepped in and briefly tried to explain the underlying intention, mentioning what the stand-up site RooftopComedy.com does: films short sets by local and national comics and puts them online. This did not smooth things over. Heated discussions ensued on social media, such as the private Boston Comedians group on Facebook.
Raj Sivaraman, then a sketch instructor at ImprovBoston’s comedy school, was one of the stand-up comedians on the show. He was confused by the theater’s intentions and posted a question to the wider community on the Facebook group — somewhat lightheartedly, in his characterization. “It’s like, ‘Controversy of the Week: ImprovBoston’s now taping stand-up sets, what do you guys think about it?’ ” he says. “I just sort of opened it up. And certain people just sort of got very upset about it and started venting their frustrations towards ImprovBoston.”
Ward says the taping was meant to be a test of the theater’s recording equipment for a future project, and the intention was never to use that evening’s material. “The issue was the communication of that to the comics that night,” says Ward. “An intern delivered the message because we believed we should notify people if we were recording them. The message that the intern at the time delivered was not clear.” Ward’s attempt to address the problem that evening “was not effective,” he says, and what followed was “a really large blow-up and disagreement over facts and communication of that.”
JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Mehran (left, with comic Dave Walsh), has recently been one of the more vocal comedians criticizing ImprovBoston.
Sivaraman eventually called for a boycott of the theater on the Kvetch Board, the public forum on the website of the Comedy Studio, the club in Harvard Square. That boycott never fully materialized, but it was enough to keep the controversy going, and to cause more problems between Sivaraman and ImprovBoston. Sivaraman says that he was banned from the theater and not allowed to return to teach. Ward and Blair Howell, chair of ImprovBoston’s board of directors, say that Sivaraman’s move to New York had more to do with his dismissal. But Sivaraman counters that the theater didn’t know of his move before deciding not to ask him back.
“I would say if someone is very actively flaming ImprovBoston online,” says Howell, “common sense says that it’s pretty inappropriate. There’s nobody that’s been banned for life here, but at a certain point we need to have a chat, a discussion, openly about what’s happened and then come to a resolution.”
Local comic Mehran had long been suspicious of ImprovBoston’s connections to the stand-up community. He has been the most active voice among comedians opposing ImprovBoston. “Everything from their side was so corporate,” he says. “I worked at Harvard for 4½ years. I know a corporate missive when I read one. With dodgy language, and they’re just constantly avoiding responsibility.” That he wasn’t a part of the show that was to be taped last August has not stopped him from criticizing the theater’s handling of its troubles. “It was so offensive to me, their response,” Mehran says.
ImprovBoston has been dealing with another public relations problem, too: an intellectual property dispute over the Geek Week festival between the theater and Kevin Harrington, who produced Geek Week at ImprovBoston for six years, until 2012. After a rocky festival in spring 2012, during which Harrington sparred with management over the budget and other details, he took his connections and the Geek Week name and, last September, started his own comedy night at the Comicazi comic book shop in Davis Square. He also locked ImprovBoston management out of Geek Week social media and the Geek Week website, which he had set up and paid for himself.
ImprovBoston management says that Don Schuerman, its director of programming at the time of the first Geek Week, came up with the name and that he and Luera created the festival before asking Harrington to produce it. Harrington contends that he thought of the name while he, Luera, and Schuerman were discussing the possibility of bringing back his geek-oriented improv show, “In the Garage,” with other geek-oriented shows for a theme night. The argument comes down to who owns the name now.
“The person who came up with the name is Don Schuerman,” says Luera. “He came up with the name Geek Week. That was his job as director of programming, and in fact, many of the things named in our schedule came right from Don Schuerman’s mouth and brain. And as artistic director, I approved it.”
“They didn’t create the name and they didn’t create the festival,” Harrington responds. “We may have talked about it. But they did not create the name.”
Kevin Harrington, who produced Geek Week at ImprovBoston for six years until leaving after last year’s festival, is in a legal tussle with the theater over use of the Geek Week name.
In October, after Harrington’s second show at Comicazi under the Geek Week banner, he received a cease-and-desist letter from ImprovBoston, which had trademarked the name “Geek Week.” A second cease-and-desist letter went out in November, addressed to Comicazi. Ward explains: “ImprovBoston made the decision that, in the interest of maintaining this brand, which we believe we own the rights to, we need to put this out there to at least have an active defense of that brand.”
Harrington responded with his own cease-and-desist letter in November. It has been a standoff since then, with hurt feelings on both sides. ImprovBoston canceled its own Geek Week festival this year, citing stage renovations that are part of ongoing improvements to the facility. Harrington has renamed the monthly show at Comicazi “Geek Comedy Night,” but he plans to continue to use the phrase “Geek Week Comedy.” Meanwhile, ImprovBoston is developing an intellectual property policy meant to protect what the theater wants to own, such as regular, repeated shows, and what artists and creators own. The intent is to avoid problems like this one.
Deana Criess, director of ImprovBoston’s anti-bullying program, is also a member of the theater’s main stage and touring companies. She has been with ImprovBoston since its Inman Square days and says the theater is headed in the right direction, largely because of Ward’s efforts. “He had to take a clubhouse mentality and turn it into a positive, professional theater company,” she says. “That’s no easy feat. He did it with the help of community members who believe in our theater and our mission, community members who believe in his leadership.”
And ImprovBoston continues to work on its relationship with the comedy community. It holds regular “town halls” to discuss issues with performers, and it addressed the stand-up and Geek Week issues at its April meeting. Al Park, a relative newcomer to stand-up, attended that town hall and asked Ward and Descoteaux about both issues. Park says he believes there is a good-faith effort on behalf of ImprovBoston to resolve the problems, but that there is a disconnect between the theater and stand-up comedians. The theater “cannot be an island,” he says. “They need to interact more regularly with the stand-up community. That includes the director; that includes the other people who teach stand-up there. IfImprovBoston wants to be taken seriously as a stand-up venue, they should be more involved in the overall stand-up community.”
Improv veteran Harry Gordon is rooting for resolution, but he sounds uncertain of the odds. “What we do is hard enough,” he says. “I think there’s a road ahead of us in terms of the theater ImprovBoston and in terms of the stand-up community and so forth. Which means that we have to kind of work this out. I don’t know as if I see that that’s on the table for a lot of people.” | A comic improviser can handle just about any change, as long as it happens onstage. But lately, the ImprovBoston community is finding change much harder to handle offstage. Miscommunication and a struggle over intellectual property have prompted improv, sketch, and stand-up performers to choose choosing sides as the 30-year-old Cambridge comedy theater’s leadership has become embroiled in a flame war with comedians and a battle over the popularGeek Week festival. Change has been the norm at ImprovBoston for the past five years, ever since the theater moved from its cozy hideaway in Inman Square to a higher-profile storefront space in Central Square in 2008. Now there is a sense among some that not all of the change has been good, and a perception among some regular performers that the soul of the place is not what it used to be. | 13.943396 | 0.981132 | 30.893082 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20130605-lexus-ls-splendid-isolation | http://web.archive.org/web/20130609011328id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/autos/story/20130605-lexus-ls-splendid-isolation | Lexus LS 460L, splendid isolation | 20130609011328 | What superlatives remain, 24 years after the debut of the Lexus LS, to describe the finer features of this famously fine sedan?
“Creamy” and “silken” are played out, as are references to bank vaults, magic carpets and sensory deprivation tanks. Truth told, when it comes to refinement and build quality, the LS name has become superlative in its own right. That said, if supreme isolation from noise, vibration and harshness is not your top road-going priority, the revised-for-2013 LS is bound to anesthetise. The flagship Lexus sedan has never been a particularly engaging drive on more technical roads, and the new model is unlikely to alter that perception.
The tested long-wheelbase LS 460L belied its enormity with brisk acceleration (5.4 seconds to 60mph, claims Lexus). Matched to an eight-speed automatic transmission, the car’s 4.6-litre V8 delivers 386 horsepower and 367 pound-feet of torque (with rear-wheel drive; 360hp and 347lb-ft with the optional all-wheel-drive system – a drop that Lexus attributes to a re-routed exhaust system in AWD models). Braking is quick, confident and fade-free. And handling... Well, the LS doesn’t handle, per se. It changes direction, yes, but it does so with a sort of regal languor. Approach a tight corner too quickly and the big sedan will simply roll its eyes and invite its fastidious stability control system to step in and complete the turning process. Silly driver. The car lopes along twisty roads in a way that feels entirely safe, if not exactly titillating. It is confident, but never hurried.
In fairness, new this year is a more athletically inclined LS, the LS 460 F Sport, which boasts a host of racier exterior and interior trimmings, a lowered suspension, Brembo brakes and 19in forged alloy wheels. The car brings some edginess to the LS’s otherwise downy ride, albeit no additional power.
Back to that regal languor, however: what can be a buzzkill on serpentine back roads is, in fact, the very essence of the LS’s greatness on city streets and open interstates. Particularly in the long-wheelbase model, which is stretched five inches beyond the already ample standard-length LS, pavement imperfections simply cease to exist. You see the pothole coming, and then… nothing. Ditto noise. Calling the LS quiet seems completely insufficient. The LS is not merely quiet, it is six-feet-under quiet; it is deep-space quiet; it is, well, LS quiet. Some cars invite the driver to shut off the stereo to listen to the yowl of the engine or the squealing of the tires. The LS invites its driver to shut off the stereo to listen to nothing. Silence is the novelty, and it is addictive.
Lexus has given the new LS a healthy application of advanced technology — including the 12.3in split-screen, high-definition display that dominates the dashboard – to keep pace with the car’s gadget-laden German rivals. Unlike the Germans, however, whose infotainment systems require intimacy with a labyrinth of menus and sub-menus, the LS setup’s user-friendliness remains above reproach. Of course, the truly tech-inept are welcome to refer to the car’s 1,200-page, multi-volume owner’s manual, a leather-bound bundle so large it is forced to reside in the trunk.
For 2013, the LS lineup has grown to seven models, including the standard- and long-wheelbase LS 460 and LS 460L, and the LS 460 F Sport, all available with rear- or all-wheel drive; and the all-wheel-drive LS 600hL hybrid. Long-wheelbase models offer a four-passenger seating configuration with rear-seat audio- and climate-control hub and a La-Z-Boy-style reclining right-rear seat with built-in Shiatsu massage function. Norma Desmond would approve.
So as it wafts toward its next quarter century, the premier sedan from Toyota’s premier division remains true to its raison d’etre. It is the perfect conveyance for buyers (those who drive and those who are driven) who believe an automobile’s highest calling is to protect its occupants from life’s little imperfections.
Vital stats: 2013 Lexus LS 460L | Nearing the quarter-century mark, the luxury marque's flagship sedan is still relentlessly â and quietly â pursuing perfection. | 36.608696 | 0.478261 | 0.565217 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Ready-for-some-fashioooooon-2329345.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20130619060807id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Ready-for-some-fashioooooon-2329345.php | Ready for some fashioooooon? | 20130619060807 | The National Football League hopes to score some points with female fans with a series of new, more fashionable fan gear and a new ad campaign featuring wives and daughters of team execs and coaches reveling in their rivalries. In one, Sarah Harbaugh (on the left, married to San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh) is seen alongside her sister-in-law, Ingrid Harbaugh (married to Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, brother of Jim).
With these rings, you declare your eternal love - for your team. The stainless steel band features the team name, the crystal bands feature the colors. Add a matching manicure and you're fit to dazzle. $99, nflshop.com.
Can you hear us now? These iHip mini earbuds are as adorable as M&Ms, but much longer lasting. $9.99, ihipus.com.
The San Francisco 49ers Devotee Boot from Cuce Shoes, $145, are made with faux fur and faux suede exterior.
Oakland Raiders Enthusiast neoprene rain boots, also from Cuce Shoes, $95, will keep your feet dry - if not your eyes - no matter the game's outcome. | The National Football League hopes to score some points with female fans with a series of new, more fashionable fan gear and a new ad campaign featuring wives and daughters of team execs and coaches reveling in their rivalries. In one, Sarah Harbaugh (on the left, married to San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh) is seen alongside her sister-in-law, Ingrid Harbaugh (married to Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, brother of Jim). Oakland Raiders Enthusiast neoprene rain boots, also from Cuce Shoes, $95, will keep your feet dry - if not your eyes - no matter the game's outcome. | 1.788618 | 0.98374 | 40.479675 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2013/06/20/critic-corner-friday-june/3hrV3ayNdHfFskOGmikN7L/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130628010457id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/television/2013/06/20/critic-corner-friday-june/3hrV3ayNdHfFskOGmikN7L/story.html | Critic’s Corner: Friday, June 21 | 20130628010457 | The Searchers Saturday at 8 p.m., TCM
They don’t make ’em like this anymore. And they don’t say that anymore, but who cares. This John Ford western from 1956 is about two men, a Civil War veteran played by John Wayne (pictured) and his nephew, who are out looking for his abducted niece. It’s a classic and perfect for a Saturday night, with Vera Miles and Natalie Wood.
Magic City 10 p.m., Starz
The second episode of this gorgeously designed 1950s-set series introduces James Caan (left) as — you guessed it — a mobster. He’s a Chicago boss named Sy Berman who makes Miami boss Ben Diamond — a very creepy Danny Huston (right) — look like a puppy dog. And Ben is pretty horrible, which is loud and clear at the end of this hour when he — oh, you have to see it. Huston has toned down Ben this season, but he’s still a big bundle of crazy.
Madonna: The MDNA Tour Saturday at 8 p.m., Epix
Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret Saturday at 8 p.m., Lifetime
Could it possibly be better than Nancy Grace’s version?
Mad Men Sunday at 10 p.m., AMC
The season’s jumping off point. | The Searchers Saturday at 8 p.m., TCM They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. And they don’t say that anymore, but who cares. This John Ford western from 1956 is about two men, a Civil War veteran played by John Wayne and his nephew, who are out looking for his abducted niece. It’s a classic and perfect for a Saturday night, with Vera Miles and Natalie Wood. Magic City 10 p.m., Starz The second episode of this gorgeously designed 1950s-set series introduces James Caan as – you guessed it – a mobster. He’s a Chicago boss named Sy Berman who makes Miami boss Ben Diamond – a very creepy Danny Huston – look like a puppy dog. And Ben is pretty horrible, which is loud and clear at the end of this hour when he – oh, you have to see it. | 1.49697 | 0.951515 | 21.278788 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130628-how-companies-avoid-currency-risk | http://web.archive.org/web/20130702044711id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/capital/story/20130628-how-companies-avoid-currency-risk | How companies avoid currency risk | 20130702044711 | It pays for ordinary investors to understand them so they can look for these in a company’s filings and choose the right investments for their risk profile.
Companies try to hedge against fluctuations in currency rates by locking in exchange rates to avoid an unexpected increase in their liabilities or debt.
An American company looking to expand overseas might borrow a loan denominated in US dollars. If, say, the revenue earned from the venture is in Swedish krona and the exchange rate collapses because the value of the krona falls, the company still has to maintain its loan repayment in US dollars. A 50% decrease in that local currency’s value turns a $100 million payment into a $200 million obligation.
“The payment skyrockets if it’s not hedged,” said Rimkus. “Eventually, a company will be forced to deal with the change in the price. Hedging simply buys them time to adjust their operations, product pricing, raw material sourcing, shipping (and) manufacturing strategy.”
If exchange rates move in the other direction, the company’s investment in Sweden just got cheaper.
When revenues are collected and expenses are paid in different currencies, a stronger US dollar presents a different sort of problem.
“If the expenses are in euros and the product is sold in US dollars, the profit margin could get squeezed by a loss because of exchange rates,” Rimkus said.
Look to see if companies you invest in use one of these revenue and expense hedging strategies.
Companies use different strategies to minimize profit margin squeeze. Among them: actively hedging cash flow by using forward contracts to lock in exchange rates or avoiding the mismatch by keeping expenses and revenues for an operation in the same currency. | It pays for investors to understand the ways American multinationals try to hedge currency risks. | 20.875 | 0.8125 | 1.9375 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/08/06/gearing-for-back-school-staples-introduces-custom-supply-lists-for-teachers/3j2WHx0XTWlx0lDqrsKWtL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130809100300id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2013/08/06/gearing-for-back-school-staples-introduces-custom-supply-lists-for-teachers/3j2WHx0XTWlx0lDqrsKWtL/story.html | Gearing up for back-to-school, Staples introduces custom supply lists for teachers | 20130809100300 | Looking to take some of the hassle out of back-to-school shopping --- and boost sales as well --- office-supplies giant
is introducing custom supply lists for teachers on its website. According to Framingham-based Staples, one goal of the initiative is to help make it easy for teachers to keep classrooms stocked all year. Under this program, teachers create custom supply lists and share them with their students and parents. Parents can access their child’s back-to-school needs by visiting
and searching by the teacher’s name and city. Parents can print out the supply list and bring it to a Staples store or they can order directly from staples.com and have the supplies shipped for free if they are a Staples Rewards customer, the company said
Monday-Friday 6:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m.
Saturday, Sunday and Holidays 7:30 a.m.- 12:00 noon
Monday-Sunday 8:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m. | Looking to take some of the hassle out of back-to-school shopping --- and boost sales as well --- office-supplies giant Staples Inc. is introducing custom supply lists for teachers on its website. According to Framingham-based Staples, one goal of the initiative is to help make it easy for teachers to keep classrooms stocked all year. Under this program, teachers create custom supply lists and share them with their students and parents. Parents can access their child’s back-to-school needs by visiting www.staples.com/rewardaclassroom and searching by the teacher’s name and city. Parents can print out the supply list and bring it to a Staples store or they can order directly from staples.com and have the supplies shipped for free if they are a Staples Rewards customer, the company said | 1.168919 | 0.986486 | 53.905405 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/05/art.gender | http://web.archive.org/web/20130830000350id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/05/art.gender | Why can't our women artists earn as much as the men? | 20130830000350 | Only rarely does television do visual art justice. Art is about looking, mostly, and this is a quiet, contemplative activity that sits uneasily with words, music and the hullabaloo that a camera crew involves. Oh, it likes artists, of course, but they must have a good back story: alcoholism, preferably, or an early death by burning. Artists talking about their work? Very good - except that the wise keep their counsel. 'Artists should have their tongues cut out,' said Matisse. 'The picture,' says Hodgkin, 'is instead of what happened. The more people want to know the story, the less they'll look at the picture.'
What the TV producer needs, then, is someone who likes talking as much as looking, who connects their work to themselves in as visceral and straightforward a way as possible, and who worries not about hullabaloo. What it needs, in other words, is Tracey Emin.
As it happens, Tracey Emin is presenting one of four films in a new series called Art Shock, which begins on Channel 4 next week. Emin's film is entitled What Price Art? and takes as its inspiration the fact that, of a recent list of the 30 most important people in the art world, only one was a woman. Emin wants to know why work by women artists still achieves lower prices than that by men. Is this because it is inferior art? Certainly not. It has to do with something else - something she can't quite put her finger on. So she embarks on a somewhat predictable quest for answers. She meets Maggi Hambling and Rachel Whiteread; she visits the Frida Kahlo show at Tate Modern; and she heads to St Ives, to Barbara Hepworth's studio. Her conclusion? Unfortunately, in Tracey World, all roads lead back to Tracey. She is at a crossroads, she tells us at the end of her film. What she must do now is work out if the art is really worth the sacrifices she has made in her personal life.
Perhaps my tone suggests this is a silly film. Well, it is in some ways. But it is also thought-provoking. The opening shot is of Tracey, outside Tate Britain, asking visitors to name three artists. No one mentions a woman. Ha! I thought. What a feeble bit of research. But my own efforts only replicated it. I leafed through a few books. First, The Observer's Book of Modern Art (don't laugh: it's pleasingly compact). Not a single woman artist listed. It was, though, published in 1964. So I tried Robert Hughes's Nothing If Not Critical, from 1987. Number of women artists? Four. Finally, a volume that is really cutting edge: Art Now, a directory of 136 artists, published last year. It includes just 39 females. I was starting to panic. Look to the first half of the last century or before, and you can put an absence of women in art, as you can in literature, down to history. Any later, and you begin to worry.
What is going on? One of the problems, surely, is that these days, successful artists, as Emin knows better than most, are required to be good at self-promotion, at making noise. Women are not necessarily interested in, or good at, making a noise. At the 2005 Turner Prize show, three of the four artists shortlisted were men, and they could all be seen talking about their work in a series of films shown in the final gallery. But, in a move that would have pleased Matisse, the only woman shortlisted, Gillian Carnegie, refused to make such a film.
Why do women dislike making a noise? Because when they do, men tend to stick their fingers in their ears. A Catch 22 situation for women, then. The other problem is that collectors of modern art are, by necessity, rich. They're alpha males, and I guess they like buying work by alpha males (Jackson Pollock has a lot to answer for in this respect). Tastes will only change when women are making as much money in the City as men.
Emin makes both these points, in her fuzzy manner. Then she loses her way. She is far too obsessed with auction prices. Of course I believe in equal pay for equal work; but being an artist is not the same as being, say, an accountant. Art and artist are in a dialogue, and neither party will - can - shut up, ever. Income has little effect on this.
Far worse, however, is her commitment to the idea that 'women's' art is different to 'men's', and that this is the real reason why they make less money. There she stands, mesmerised, in front of Kahlo's My Birth, in which the artist lies on a mattress stained red with blood, begging it to prove her point. But it doesn't. You might as well say the early novels of Margaret Drabble prove that women writers can only do hormonal and domestic.
What the woman artist hopes for, surely, is to be judged on the same terms as the men. Putting her in some menstrual ghetto is not much help so far as this goes.
Last week, I saw Americans in Paris at the National Gallery. I hope Emin sees it, too, because in this show I do not believe that you could slip a paper between the men and the women in terms of subject matter or even style. Mary Cassatt's paintings seem to me to have a far more butch quality to them than those by, say, John Singer Sargent. Or look at Ellen Day Hale's self-portrait from 1885. It's tough, muscular; impossible to tell the sex of the person who painted it until you look it up. How ironic that, in the end, the most troublesome part of Emin's argument can be all but snuffed out by a bunch of pioneering women from another age.
· Art Shock runs for four consecutive nights on C4 at 11pm from 13 March. Emin's film is on 15 March
An interview in London's Time Out with Robert Altman, whose production of Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues opened last week at the Old Vic: first, the producer snaffles the journalist's copy of the script that he'd picked up in a bookshop. He then refuses to return it, saying Altman gets touchy if anyone mentions the first production of the play, in Minneapolis. When the interviewer brings this up with Altman, he replies first that such a thing (a copy of the script) doesn't exist, and then that he didn't 'know there was a published version'. He seems to prefer the idea that he is directing a premiere.
I can't tell you how cheered I was by this. I was beginning to think it was just me. Luvvies are becoming increasingly tricky to interview, to the point where you think you might be going bonkers. I interviewed Richard Gere, and it was like talking to the Scottish man in Little Britain who speaks in riddles and plays a recorder. Then I interviewed Rowan Atkinson, who refused to talk about an issue against which he has vocally campaigned - the government's religious hatred bill.
Last week I met Christian Slater, who gave me the same answer to virtually every question, be it about his private life, other actors, or even politics. He was just having a 'great time' rehearsing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (soon to return to London). When I kept going he laughed and told me I was the 'weirdest' interviewer he had ever met.
· Are women artists undervalued? review@observer.co.uk | Rachel Cooke: Emin wants to know why work by women artists still achieves lower prices than that by men. Is this because it is inferior art? Certainly not. | 47.71875 | 0.96875 | 26.34375 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/09/books/four-novels.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20130904193558id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1981/08/09/books/four-novels.html | FOUR NOVELS - NYTimes.com | 20130904193558 | SONS OF EARTH By Richard Rhodes. 238 pp. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $13.95. SHAME THE DEVIL By Philip Appleman. 152 pp. New York: Herbert Michelman/Crown Publishers. $10. MINOTAUR By Benjamin Tammuz. Translated by Kim Parfitt and Mildred Budny. 210 pp. New York: New American Library. $11.95. MORGANA'S FAULT By Susan Lukas. 200 pp. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. $10.95.
THE most remarkable thing about Richard Rhodes's ''Sons of Earth'' - an intelligent, suspenseful novel about a renowned astronaut whose son is kidnapped by a sociopathic creep - is what might be called the informed coincidence of its good timing. As a conventional cliffhanger and as a systematic contemplation of the uses and costs of fame in our idolatrous society, ''Sons of Earth'' succeeds respectably; but what is most compelling about the book is its ghoulish and timely portrait of the villain, a fame-starved misfit named Karl Loring Grabka. Although Mr. Rhodes finished writing ''Sons of Earth'' in August of 1980, he created a villain who calls to mind that particular sort of covetous predation which apparently brought Mark David Chapman out of the darkness toward John Lennon last December, and John Warnock Hinckley toward, first, actress Jodie Foster and then Ronald Reagan last March.
The book's hero is Reeve Wainwright, a retired astronaut who, in Mr. Rhodes's rewrite of manned space ---------------------------------------------------------------------
David Quammen is a novelist and freelance journalist living in Montana. flight history, flew one of the early Apollo missions, walked on the moon, limped back to earth in an explosion-crippled spacecraft (this part based loosely on the Apollo 13 debacle) and eventually capitalized on his celebrity with a best-selling book about solar energy. His son is Chris Wainwright, a 16-year-old of average adolescent foibles and above-average moxie, who dreams of stardom as a rock-and-roll drummer. One of the novel's many carefully contrived ironies is that Chris hopes to convert the terrifying experience he suffers as a consequence of his father's fame into an occasion that will propel him to fame in the music world.
Chris is abducted by Karl Grabka and buried alive in a coffin-like box equipped with apparatus to give him fresh air and water; the ransom demanded from Reeve Wainwright is a half million dollars in gold and, thereby, Grabka's own imagined elevation as a pop culture idol, Another of the insistent ironies of ''Sons of the Earth'' is - as the narrator-astronaut himself repeatedly notes - that Chris's underground cell is a perverse parody of the broken spacecraft in which his father had straggled home from the moon to a tickertape welcome. This parallel, which seems promising at first, is milked dry well before Mr. Rhodes lets go of it. But the actions and motivations of Karl Grabka throughout this tale, his febrile fantasies, the texture of his tawdry and disconnected life, are portrayed in a chillingly convincing and concrete way.
As an imaginative, almost prophetic case study of that illness shared by Grabka and Bremer and Chapman and Hinckley, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald, and who knows how many to come, how soon, ''Sons of the Earth'' has great worth.
In his blurb for ''Shame the Devil,'' John Gardner heartily recommends Philip Appleman's novel ''to anyone who has ever liked any two of the following: the Hardy Boys, the King James Bible, 'The Hobbit,' or 'Fritz the Cat.' '' Perhaps he has reasons, but judging from my experience, the King James alone is insufficient; and I suspect that Mr. Gardner may be doing some injustice to Fritz.
''Shame the Devil'' is a cartoon without comedy, a satire without bite, a riddle that doesn't provoke much curiosity. The best that can be said of Philip Appleman's novel is that it doesn't take itself seriously, but that doesn't leave much incentive to take it at all.
The setting is small-town Indiana and the premise is that two New York con men, Frank and Julian, have stumbled upon an insular community of closet Vikings, men and women descended with undiluted blood from Norse raiders who somehow hove to in the Hoosier state a millennium ago. Frank and Julian arrive just in time for the community's midsummer fair, get into various kinds of trouble, explore a few caves and treasure chambers, solve a few puzzles, fondle a few women. Mr. Appleman decorates this framework with considerable Norse and Persian legendry, astrological mumbo jumbo, runic inscriptions, clumsily expository dialogue that strains to pass as snappy patter and a proliferation of bad baseball metaphors. To his credit, the author maintains a tone of jaunty self-mockery throughout, but tone is not enough to make a feeble performance entertaining.
''Shame the Devil'' reads like a novel written very quickly and without much authorial conviction about the value of the enterprise. Some gifted writers can toss off delightful baubles on those terms. But Philip Appleman is evidently not one of them. Late in the story Julian says: ''We've stepped right into a B-movie thriller. Worse than that, even. Into the third verse of some god-awful country music.'' Worse than that, even. * | SONS OF EARTH By Richard Rhodes. 238 pp. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $13.95. SHAME THE DEVIL By Philip Appleman. 152 pp. New York: Herbert Michelman/Crown Publishers. $10. MINOTAUR By Benjamin Tammuz. Translated by Kim Parfitt and Mildred Budny. 210 pp. New York: New American Library. $11.95. MORGANA'S FAULT By Susan Lukas. 200 pp. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. $10.95. | 10.802083 | 0.947917 | 16.59375 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/feb/09/meresamun-remains-scan | http://web.archive.org/web/20130906031223id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/feb/09/meresamun-remains-scan | Mummy mia! Scans reveal Egyptian secrets | 20130906031223 | Meresamun, a woman believed to have been a singer-priestess at a temple in Thebes in 800 BC, inside a coffin. The skeleton was scanned at the University of Chicago using a hi-tech hospital scanner. Photograph: Philips Healthcare and University/PA
New hospital scanning techniques have revealed details about the mummified corpse of a 3,000-year Egyptian female singer, without opening her casket.
The images, which go on display for the first time today at Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum, show the remains of Meresamun - a singer priestess at a temple in Thebes in 800BC. The scans may help settle a debate among Egyptologists about the sex lives of such singers.
Meresamun was buried in an elaborately decorated casket which has never been opened. It bears her name, her role as a singer and the inscription "she lives for Amun" (an Egyptian god).
Dr Emily Teeter, from the museum, said: "There is ongoing scholarly debate about whether women who held the title Singer in the Interior of the Temple were, on account of their temple duties, celibate. One specific goal of the most recent CT examination was to determine whether Meresamun had given birth. The evidence was inconclusive."
Dr Michael Vannier, professor of radiology at the University of Chicago, who examined the scans, said they reveal "no convincing evidence of child bearing". He added: "There is no evidence of pre-mortem bony trauma."
In the first ever use of a 256-slice scanner on a mummy, the scans show that Meresamun's eyes were decorated with jewels or pottery. They also reveal that her teeth, though worn down, show no sign of decay. "Remarkably all the teeth are present. [There is] no evidence of tooth decay or periodontal disease (the principal cause of tooth loss in modern humans)," Vannier wrote.
Earlier attempts to carry out scans of Meresamun's caskets in 1989 and 1991 produced only blurry images. It was thought they showed what could have been a tumour on her throat that may have killed her. The new images suggest that swelling around the neck was resin used by the funeral embalmers. The cause of her death, at about the age of 30, remains unknown. | Details revealed about mummified remains of singer priestess at temple in Thebes in 800BC | 31.071429 | 1 | 3 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20130909-mini-yodels-in-the-key-of-d/2 | http://web.archive.org/web/20130912062051id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/autos/story/20130909-mini-yodels-in-the-key-of-d/2 | An alpine Mini Paceman, yodeling in the key of âDâ | 20130912062051 | In an email exchange, Segler wrote that Mini is still considering the prospect of diesels in the US, although he qualified the statement carefully.
“It is not entirely clear if our owners are asking for a 47mpg gasoline car or a diesel-powered car,” he wrote. “What is clear is that our owners want highly efficient cars. We will have highly efficient gasoline engines and are looking at the option of including diesel as well.”
After a long, twisty descent from the pass’s apex, downshifting this time for a bit of engine braking, it was back on the Weinstrasse/Via del Vino. This seemed a perfect moment for reflection, to take in the verdant Gewürztraminer Plateau. But on cresting a small hill, the Paceman came grille to grille with a tractor driven by a farmer engaged in an important phone call. For a moment, sheer terror mingled with feelings of kinship towards a man who no doubt had a much deeper appreciation of diesel-engine physics than this American driver would ever have. The Paceman swerved right, the tractor swerved left. With oblivion avoided by mere centimetres, the two machines clattered merrily along, in their own way.
Vital stats: 2013 Mini Cooper All4 SD Paceman | The Cooper Paceman SD brings Miniâs go-kart handling to the Alps, but with a distinctive diesel soundtrack. | 11.380952 | 0.619048 | 0.714286 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/may/05/picasso-painting-christies-record | http://web.archive.org/web/20130914192649id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/may/05/picasso-painting-christies-record | Picasso painting sets world record price at auction | 20130914192649 | Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust has sold for $106m (£70m) at Christie's in New York on Tuesday, setting a new world record for a work of art sold at auction.
The vibrant large-scale depiction of Picasso's mistress and frequent subject, Marie-Therese Walter, was the highlight of a world-class collection assembled by the late Los Angeles art patrons Frances and Sidney Brody.
It had been estimated to sell for more than $80m, but many art experts predicted in recent weeks it would ride growing confidence in a recovering art market and break the previous record of $104.3m set in February by Giacometti's Walking Man I at Sotheby's in London.
More than half a dozen people bid on the 1932 canvas, which the Brodys acquired in the 1950s from Picasso's dealers, with the winning bid taken by a Christie's executive via telephone. The final price of $106,482,500 included the auction's house's commission. | 1932 canvas entitled Nude, Green Leaves and Bust sold for $106m (£70m) at Christie's in New York, a record for a work of art sold at auction | 5.333333 | 0.972222 | 10.527778 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20131008-us-shutdown-ripple-effects | http://web.archive.org/web/20131010044057id_/http://www.bbc.com:80/capital/story/20131008-us-shutdown-ripple-effects | Shutdown shudders: Paycheck turmoil, lessons to learn | 20131010044057 | Raising a family on one salary is getting tougher, no matter where you live. The cost of living is rising in many countries and having one parent stay home is either increasingly becoming a luxury, or a forced choice due to divorce or unemployment. Nonetheless, if it's something you want to do â or need to do â there are ways to make it happen.
The US government shutdown is suddenly forcing some people to consider whether they, too, could live on one salary.
If you have time to prepare for a one-income life, start building an emergency fund of six-to-12 months of living expenses. For those suddenly thrown into a one-income situation, there are some small changes that can help ease the financial pain.
Discover more ways to prepare for life on a single salary. | The US government shutdown has left workers furloughed and government functions shuttered. A roundup of consequencesâand tips for surviving a temporary pay cut. | 6.4 | 0.48 | 0.96 | low | low | abstractive |
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/fiance-hide-20619710%26flashvars | http://web.archive.org/web/20131025061527id_/http://abcnews.go.com:80/2020/video/fiance-hide-20619710%26flashvars | A Fiance With Nothing to Hide | 20131025061527 | Reporter: Tonight, as some of florida's top investigators take another look at the mysterious death of sheena morris, found dead in that hotel shower. The man she was getting ready to marry, who...
Reporter: Tonight, as some of florida's top investigators take another look at the mysterious death of sheena morris, found dead in that hotel shower. The man she was getting ready to marry, who failed that polygraph, has decided to sit down with "20/20." Good to meet you. Nearly five years after he lost his fiancee, joe says he's a victim too. So why sit down with me? Because I have to tell you my side of the story. I'm being victimized cause i cared about someone. I was there for her, when her family a lot of times wasn't. Reporter: Put under the microscope he says by a mother determined to prove her daughter did not commit suicide. The story we've been following for years. Joe says the portrait painted of his relationship with sheena is not a true one. A domestic dispute. We've interviewed a lot of sheena's friends. Many of her friends say that this was a tumultuous relationship. I just don't understand where they're gettin' at. You know -- Reporter: There wasn't any fighting? Well, in a relationship, there's always -- there's always arguments and stuff. Reporter: It was never physical? No. I mean, there was never anything normal -- you know, in a normal relationship, there -- there was fights, there was, you know, back and forths. But there was no -- never any violence, no. Reporter: Nor was there ever any violence with his ex-wife according to joe when we asked him about those battery charges that were dropped. It was a push back and forth. She pushed me, I pushed her back, and then she looked at me and says, "now you're goin' to jail." Reporter: And he points out, his ex wife dropped it all, and he says his fights with sheena, including that one new year's night, were often caused by her jealousy of the family he already had. And he says she was often depressed. Remember that christmas morning video, where kelly sees her daughter smiling and laughing. He sees something else. Remembering the fiancee who couldn't get out of bed that morning, who didn't want to spend christmas, he says, with her family. Reporter: So she -- she wouldn't get out of bed? No. She -- she told me -- she -- she wasn't out of bed for two days, hadn't eaten anything in two days. And she -- Reporter: Was she depressed? I guess she was upset with the fact, or depressed with the fact that -- I was spendin' time with my kids over the holidays. Reporter: And joe says that surprise new year's trip was out of concern for sheena - because she'd been down. I said to myself, maybe we'll just go down there for new year's eve, since we had a crappy new year -- christmas. Reporter: He says she was happy that new years eve night. He remembers too, when she sat there texting her friends from the dinner table. We went out to dinner at the place we were gonna get married at. She was -- with -- talkin' with her family, most -- textin' and talkin' with her family most of the night. Reporter: And he remembers their kiss at midnight. And -- and then new years -- 12:00 came. And we went out on the balcony, and fireworks went off, and you know, we celebrated new years. Reporter: A new year's kiss? Yeah. Exactly, yeah. Everything was great. Reporter: Great, he says. Until he went back inside that hotel room to call his children. To wish them a happy new year, too. And that was it. It lasted all about 15, 20 seconds that I was on the phone. And as I turned back around, she was right there and at that point, she just looked at me and said, "you just up the whole night." Reporter: Why did she have such a big problem with you calling your kids? I don't know. She just didn't want me involved with my children. It was, like, another family to her. And she started getting really upset, screamin' and yellin'. And then she started punchin' the wall. Reporter: Joe says initially it was sheena's idea to leave the hotel but that she suddenly changed her mind. Refusing to go. She actually at one point tried to grab the money that i had on the bureau so and she said that I wasn't leavin'. And I told her, "i am leavin'. We're leavin'." Because at that point, I -- you know, she -- from her punchin' the wall, and screamin' and yellin' the way she did, I -- i was afraid that, you know, cops were gonna come. Reporter: But guests were already placing that call to 911. There's two people over there, just screaming and yelling, a woman and a man, at each other. Reporter: And joe told us what police say he's always told them. And where did you go? Home. Straight home. Straight to my townhouse where there were people there, they were havin' a party, and at least five or six people saw me. Reporter: On the drive home, joe says sheena was on the phone with him suddenly sinking into that depression. What was she saying to you? There was one thing that she did say, and I've made mention in a somber note, if I can't have you to myself, I don't wanna be here. Reporter: Had she ever said that before? Not -- no. Reporter: As for that 911 call sheena made just after 2am -- he just made me bleed and left claw marks all over me and stuff. The scrape on her -- on her finger, we know that came from her punchin' the wall. And the scrape on her neck a small scrape was when she went to grab the money off of the bureau, and -- I grabbed her by her -- shirt, and it -- and it got her necklace. And it -- and left a little scratch on her neck. That's -- that's it. Reporter: He said he was devastated on that new year's day when they all learned sheena was dead. I walk up and I look, what's going on? He looked at me and said I'm sorry for your loss. I just looked at him, I couldn't believe what he said to me. Can we cut? Reporter: When he was rdy to continue. She was a beautiful girl. She was a beautiful girl. I -- this is a tragedy in everybody's lives, you know? Reporter: For you too? Absolutely. I was engaged to her. Reporter: Do you think everybody's forgotten that you felt this way too? No, I just think that they -- they're on the kelley train, and if you go against what kelley says, then you're not an advocate of sheena. Reporter: A grieving mother out for answers no matter the cost? Refusing to accept the possibility that her daughter could have taken her own life? Or a fiance covering his tracks? We've talked to sheena's mother, her family, her friends, and they all categorically say she never would have taken her own life. My personal opinion is nobody ever thinks they're gonna take their own life. Does anybody presume that somebody's gonna take their own life? Reporter: Did she ever say to you that she was depressed, or -- or having suicidal thoughts? She told me she tried to commit suicide when she was 15 years old. Took a bottle of pills. Reporter: In fact that's the same story police say sheena's mother told them the day her body was found. Had there ever been suicidal thoughts before? She had gotten in some trouble with her dad. And, um, and she kinda like said to her father that she took some pills. They checked everything out. She really didn't take anything. It was a false alarm. Reporter: Joe says he understands kelly's need for answers. But says she's looking in the wrong place. But how does he explain the mountain of evidence? The sand on sheena's feet, but no sand in the shower -- her perfect appearance. Her hair, her clothes, and that diamond bracelet on the wrong wrist. I let that the -- professionals deal with that, the investigators and everything else. Reporter: He welcomes this new investigation because he insists he still has nothing to hide. Reporter: And once and for all, did you kill sheena? Absolutely not. And what -- what -- what would be my motive, for god sake? I'm 50 years old. I have three children. Reporter: But what about the polygraph? Why take the test? Because I had nothin' to hide Reporter: How do you explain those test results? Well, I don't. I was uneasy with a lot of the questions he asked first of all. Second of all I was told by a professional the questions that he asked should have never been asked. They were set up questions. But now for joe, there are new questions to answer -- this time from those investigators taking a fresh look at the case, with the real possibility that someone could be charged with murder. Reporter: When was the last time you talked to the investigators on the team? Three weeks ago. Reporter: Were you nervous? Of course I'm nervous. I mean, who wouldn't be nervous?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate. | Act 5: The last person to see Sheena alive, her fiance Joe Genoese, speaks with 2020's David Muir. | 85.478261 | 0.565217 | 0.73913 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/dish/201310/matt-hollidays-special-connection-john-farrell | http://web.archive.org/web/20131026133439id_/http://www.thepostgame.com:80/blog/dish/201310/matt-hollidays-special-connection-john-farrell | Matt Holliday's Special Tie To John Farrell | 20131026133439 | Few people are as conflicted during this World Series as Tom Holliday.
Holliday, the father of St. Louis slugger Matt Holliday, coached Red Sox manager Tom Farrell during his playing days at Oklahoma State. Farrell starred in Stillwater, Okla., from 1981 to 1984. During his time there he became close with the Hollidays, and he even babysat Matt and his siblings.
Well, perhaps Farrell wasn't a "baby" sitter, but you get the idea.
“I wasn't a little baby, or anything like that,” Holliday said this week. “I mean, he wasn't changing diapers. This was just one of those things where my parents wanted to go out for a while, so let's get a baseball player over here to keep an eye on the kids. They probably gave him some good pizza.”
After Farrell's MLB career, he returned to Stillwater and served as an assistant coach under Tom Holliday, who by that time had been promoted from pitching coach to head coach. In a recent interview the elder Holliday vouched for Farrell's baseball brilliance.
"If I had a baseball team and I had to have somebody to run it and I had my life savings in it," he told the Providence Journal, "I would trust John Farrell as my general manager."
While Tom Holliday does have strong ties to both sides, at the end of the day his rooting interest are clear.
"I had this same feeling when he was with the Red Sox and Matt was playing for the Rockies. It's kind of fun, but it creates a mixed emotion," he told the Providence Journal. "I wish the Cardinals were playing somebody else, and I wish the Red Sox were playing somebody else, so I could root for John to win a championship. But it's kind of hard to root against your son's team."
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Few people are as conflicted during this World Series as Tom Holliday.
Holliday, the father of St. Louis slugge... | 12.967742 | 0.741935 | 7.129032 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/10/architecture | http://web.archive.org/web/20131031060748id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/10/architecture | Obituary: Rodney Gordon | 20131031060748 | Dramatic, sculptural and enormous, the brutalist buildings designed by Rodney Gordon, who has died aged 75, are among the most iconic of the second half of the 20th century. Despised by many as concrete monstrosities, with some now demolished, they sought to bring what he saw as the logic and reason of Modernist interwar architecture to an invigorated postwar world of expanded opportunities - "the age of the people", where, as he recalled, "feelings of egalitarianism and concern for all was the norm".
However, while most of his successful contemporaries worked in the public sector, or for traditional prestige clients such as universities, Gordon was to build his reputation in a very different, new environment - that of commercial architecture and, especially, the developer-led shopping centre.
As the leading designer at the Owen Luder Partnership, he was responsible for the Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth (1966) - which, in 2001, BBC Radio 4 listeners voted the most hated building in the UK. It was demolished three years later, despite a campaign to save it.
He also designed the Trinity Centre, Gateshead, which became known to a wider audience as the carpark from whose roof mobster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) threw the corrupt councillor Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley) in the 1971 cult film Get Carter. Loved and loathed, but never unnoticed, Gordon's audacious designs marked him out as a seminal figure in English brutalist architecture.
He was born in Wanstead, east London, to a Polish-Russian father and a Chilean mother. While Gordon was a boy, the family moved to High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and later to Chelsea. A gifted scholar, he went to University College hospital medical school, London, at 16. But, two years later, he moved to the Hammersmith School of Building and later studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, under the Bauhaus architect Arthur Korn.
On qualifying in 1957, he got a job in the general division at the London county council (LCC) - "the place to be for a young architect". While there he was responsible for designing the Michael Faraday Memorial, the elegant stainless-steel box that sits in the middle of the Elephant and Castle roundabout, housing a transformer for London's tube system. This structure was listed in 1996 as "a building of architectural quality and panache", and a precursor to "high-tech" architecture of the 1970s and 80s.
In 1959, an LCC colleague, Dennis Drawbridge, introduced Gordon to Owen Luder. By the end of the year he had joined the Owen Luder Partnership and drawn up Eros House, in Catford, south-east London, while sitting in bed recovering from jaundice. Realising that the budget was insufficient for high-quality concrete, he deliberately detailed the exposed beams, columns and floor slabs to make what he described as "a convoluted sculptural form" which would dominate and distract from the poor surface finishes. The building won the Riba bronze medal for London in 1962.
Although speed was as crucial as economy, Gordon felt in control of the end product. But this was not to last. Luder proved extraordinarily good as job-getter and business manager. Office blocks and shopping centres in Bromley, Hayes, Hounslow, Hammersmith, Coalville and Leicester, as well as the better-known examples in Portsmouth and Gateshead, followed and the office rapidly expanded. There was critical recognition and acclaim, with Ian Nairn, in an Observer article entitled Flamboyance in Concrete, describing the Tricorn as "an animal, various and cranky, capable of inspiring recognition and affection ... the first no-holds barred explosion" of a new architecture. It also won a Civic Trust award.
Gordon was design director, with Drawbridge leading on working drawings and site works. Luder never interfered in the design process directly, and Gordon was never to object to his name being attached to the buildings. But Gordon was demoralised when Luder started to accept invitations to represent the firm giving talks to architectural students - a role for which Gordon felt he was much better qualified. Developing tensions were exacerbated when offices in Harrogate and Newcastle were set up to interpret Gordon's designs and, as he later recounted: "Continuity of design was all but cut off, and I had begun to cringe ... at what was being built". He refused to visit Gateshead, not wanting to see it close up. It all ended acrimoniously, with Gordon leaving the firm after only seven years - followed shortly afterwards by the rest of his design team.
Gordon did not always design in concrete: as well as the Faraday Memorial, his 1961 house for his own family (in Burwood Park, Surrey) is a steel-framed structure, clad with diagonal timber boarding. It has triangular windows, and steel chains rather than down pipes to channel rainwater to the ground. He countered suggestions that it was unrelated to the famous projects by explaining that it shares an external expression of structure. This house survives, although the one built next door for a neighbour was recently replaced.
On returning to London after only a few years, Gordon settled in Kensington. Behind a conventional mews facade he constructed a multi-level open-plan space, with exposed concrete finishes.
In the 1970s he worked with Abbott Howard before founding Batir International Architects with Ray Baum and Larry Abbot - this became Tripos Architects in the early 1980s. In 1979, Batir designed one building with extraordinary panache, a bronze anodised aluminum-clad combination of shops, offices and flats on St James's Street, London. Its rocket-like corner turret is a nod towards the Edwardian listed building it replaced, and it was a controversial intervention in a highly sensitive area.
Gordon knew how to enjoy life and had a reputation for fashionable partying and fast cars. He survived a heart attack at 42, and even when wheelchair bound towards the end of his life was irrepressibly entertaining. His early buildings began to attract new fans, lured by their sense of bold confidence, and Gordon clearly enjoyed being asked to talk about them.
Sadly, this recent growing appreciation has had little effect on the owners of his work. Eros House has been altered out of recognition, Tricorn has gone, and Gateshead is set to follow. The Faraday Memorial stands in the way of the Elephant and Castle regeneration.
With Gordon's encouragement, The Twentieth Century Society has put the St James's building forward for listing. He is survived by his partner, Sonia Power, his former wife, Janet, and his son, Hugo.
· Rodney Gordon, architect, born February 2 1933; died May 30 2008 | Obituary: Brutalist architect whose futuristic buildings have not all stood the test of time | 86.2 | 0.6 | 0.6 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2013/10/27/album-review-robert-glasper-experiment-black-radio/oI07EKCyhjIOLoiKhRf9hK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20131108123337id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2013/10/27/album-review-robert-glasper-experiment-black-radio/oI07EKCyhjIOLoiKhRf9hK/story.html | Robert Glasper Experiment, ‘Black Radio 2’ | 20131108123337 | The follow-up to Robert Glasper’s Grammy-winning breakthrough builds on its predecessor by reframing the sound of contemporary urban music. Glasper reconnects hip-hop with its humanity, eliminates its self-mythologizing cliches, and injects the warmth and individuality back into R&B. As on volume one, the jazz pianist collaborates with a variety of vocalists and MCs by utilizing their strengths in imaginative ways or placing them in different environments to coax out new shades of their talents. The latter is most evident on the revelatory “Let It Ride” where Norah Jones is recontextualized with a drum and bass vibe. On “What Are We Doing” Brandy, stripped of processed beats, flourishes amid the languid groove. The Experiment ensemble is fluid and, at times, bold. Jill Scott delivers a playful vocal on “Calls” and the underrated Marsha Ambrosius brings sensuality to a pensive “Trust.” The hip-hop tracks meander but that doesn’t dilute this worthy sequel. (Out Tuesday) Ken Capobianco | The follow-up to Robert Glasper’s Grammy-winning breakthrough builds on its predecessor’s foundation by defying genre limitations and reframing the sound of contemporary urban music. Glasper reconnects hip-hop with its humanity, eliminates its self-mythologizing cliches and injects the warmth and individuality back into R&B. As on volume one, the jazz pianist collaborates with a variety of vocalists and MCs by utilizing their strengths in imaginative ways or placing them in different environments to coax out new shades of their talents. | 2.043011 | 0.956989 | 32.225806 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/11/06/greek-bailout-creditors-get-earful-athens/syYP8KMJmihqR0axcpt4tL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20131123191742id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2013/11/06/greek-bailout-creditors-get-earful-athens/syYP8KMJmihqR0axcpt4tL/story.html | Greek bailout creditors get an earful in Athens | 20131123191742 | ATHENS — Representatives of Greece’s bailout creditors received an earful on the first day of new talks to potentially add to the financially battered country’s austerity burden.
Armed with a bullhorn, a few dozen civil servants chanted anti-austerity slogans Tuesday outside the room where the officials were meeting Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras. The protesters later blocked the lifts and main entrance, forcing police to spirit representatives of the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund out by an emergency exit.
Greece has survived on international loans since 2010. Dismal financial stewardship, loss of investor confidence, and the global recession brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. Successive governments have passed deeply resented spending cuts and tax hikes to secure loans totaling $324 billion. The protest came a day before the two largest labor unions are planning a general strike.
The ongoing talks with EU and IMF officials are focused on Greece’s 2014 budget gap. While Stournaras has said the shortfall will be around $675 million, he conceded creditors expect it to be five times as big. At stake is the next installment of rescue loans of $1.35 billion.
The conservative-led government insists it will not agree to new across-the-board spending cuts. The 17-month-old coalition already faces a possible revolt by its own lawmakers over a proposed new property tax and argues it cannot inflict more pain on a population that has suffered an average 40 percent loss in disposable income since 2009 and seen unemployment spike to 28 percent. | ATHENS — Representatives of Greece’s bailout creditors received an earful on the first day of new talks to potentially add to the financially battered country’s austerity burden. Armed with a bullhorn, a few dozen civil servants chanted anti-austerity slogans Tuesday outside the room where the officials were meeting with Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras. The Though they were prevented from entering the room, theprotesters later blocked the lifts and main entrance, forcing police to spirit representatives of the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund out by an emergency exit. Meanwhile, scores of ministry cleaners who face dismissal protested outside the finance ministry in central Athens. | 2.452991 | 0.863248 | 19.769231 | low | medium | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/11/06/michelle-singletary-column-veterans-can-maximize-social-security-benefits/8szMmEKRKpWv7RoeBPgQMO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20131123191747id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2013/11/06/michelle-singletary-column-veterans-can-maximize-social-security-benefits/8szMmEKRKpWv7RoeBPgQMO/story.html | Michelle Singletary column: Veterans can maximize Social Security benefits | 20131123191747 | You’ve heard of Veterans Day deals. Well, there’s one special offer — access to an online tool to help the nation’s military maximize their Social Security benefits — that could put more money in the pockets of veterans. But it’s free on Nov. 11 only.
The Social Security Administration’s website is user-friendly, with a lot of free information about the options for collecting benefits. You won’t, however, get specific advice on what you should do.
So on Veterans Day, Kiplinger Washington Editors (which publishes Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine), Social Security Solutions, and Wells Fargo are partnering to offer one-day free access to an online retirement planning tool for all active duty and retired military members and their widows or widowers. Military families will get recommended strategies for claiming Social Security benefits and explanations about how the choices affect what they’ll get.
Social Security is a key part of most Americans’ retirement income. But when should you start collecting it? If you choose to take it early, at 62, you get less. But do you know how much less, compared to waiting until your full retirement age? Can you afford to wait to collect at 70, when your amount will be even higher?
The free online tool for military folks will be available only on Monday at www.SocialSecurityforVeterans.com.
But there are a number of free Social Security calculators online. I like AARP’s (www.aarp.org/socialsecuritybenefits). AARP’s tool also provides advice on when to claim benefits. Additionally, it includes a feature that estimates what percentage of your Social Security benefits would cover some basic monthly expenses.
But since it’s free for a day, it doesn’t hurt to try out the Kiplinger’s Social Security Solutions tool.
It’s tailored to help retired and current military members and spouses figure out the best strategy to maximize their lifetime, inflation-adjusted Social Security benefits, said Kevin McCormally, editorial director of Kiplinger Washington Editors. The tool includes information on certain years of active-duty military service that may result in special credits to boost Social Security payments.
The online software, created by Social Security Solutions, produces a personalized, downloadable 23-page report. Kiplinger sells its branded version of the tool for $49.95. Wells Fargo is underwriting the cost to provide the report for veterans.
Kiplinger has commissioned a survey to gauge what veterans know about collecting Social Security benefits.
More than seven in 10 veterans “didn’t know” or “underestimated” how much monthly benefits are reduced if they claim benefits at 62.
Nearly nine in 10 did not realize how much benefits would increase if they wait until age 70. The survey found that 80 percent of vets who were collecting benefits had claimed them at 62.
Let’s put a figure on the cost of knowing, as Kiplinger points out. A retiree is due to collect $1,200 a month at 66, his full retirement age. But if he decides to start collecting early at 62, he instead gets $900 a month. If he waits until 70, he’ll collect $1,584.
To use the tool, you’ll need to divulge some personal information, such as age and marital status. You’ll also need to know the estimated monthly Social Security benefit you’ll receive if you start collecting benefits at your full retirement age. It is information you’ll find on your Social Security statement.
You can get your statement online at www.socialsecurity.gov/myaccount. Please be careful about typing in the Web address.
To create an account, you’ll have to answer some personal questions to verify your identity. It doesn’t take long to go through the verification process and set up a username and password. Once you’ve created an account, you can view your report, download it, and print it.
Because the rules for when you can claim Social Security can be complicated, take advantage of this customized tool, says Don Blandin, chief executive of the Investor Protection Trust, which is collaborating with Kiplinger’s on this outreach effort. The trust has been involved in a number of projects to help military families prepare for their long term financial security, Blandin says.
“Military families have sacrificed much for our freedoms,” he says. “Most of them are not eligible for military retirement pay. Many of them have not been able to save as much as they had hoped for retirement.
“Maximizing Social Security retirement benefits means that veterans can have higher benefits later in life, when their other resources may be running short, and it can mean the maximum in survivor benefits after the first spouse dies.” | You’ve heard of Veterans Day deals. Well, there’s one special offer — access to an online tool to help the nation’s military maximize their Social Security benefits — that could put more money in the pockets of veterans. But it’s free on Nov. 11 only. The Social Security Administration’s website is pretty user-friendly, with and you can get a lot of free information about the options for collecting benefits. You won’t, however, get specific advice. So on Veterans Day, Kiplinger Washington Editors (which publishes Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine), Social Security Solutions, and Wells Fargo are partnering to offer one-day free access to an online retirement planning tool for all active duty and retired military members and their widows or widowers. With this report, Military families will get recommended strategies for claiming Social Security benefits. | 5.537037 | 0.987654 | 30.938272 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2006/02/20084916260799585.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20131224152436id_/http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2006/02/20084916260799585.html | Ismail Haniya - Archive - Al Jazeera English | 20131224152436 | The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has chosen Ismail Haniya as the Palestinian Authority's new prime minister.
It is widely believed that Haniya was chosen for the prime ministerial position because he is regarded as a good communicator and is based in Gaza, which is not directly controlled by the Israeli army, giving him freedom of movement, including the ability to travel abroad.
Palestinians in the West Bank have limited freedom of movement, the area continuing to be tightly controlled by the Israeli occupation army.
Haniya was born in 1962 to a poor refugee family at the Shati refugee camp, just outside Gaza City, where his family - like almost 70% of Gazans - lived on monthly stipends provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
In 1983 he joined the Islamic University of Gaza, where he soon joined the Islamic Student Bloc, a precursor to Hamas.
In 1987 he graduated with a BA in Arabic literature. In December that year he joined the intifada (uprising), which began when an Israeli truck ran over six Gaza labourers.
It was at this time that Hamas, an acronym for Harakatu al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded by a group of Muslim Palestinian intellectuals and activists affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood and led by Shaikh Ahmad Yasin.
Haniya was arrested for a short time in 1987, and again in 1988, on charges of involvement in the uprising and resisting the Israeli occupation.
In 1989, Haniya was re-arrested and sentenced to three years in jail in connection with his role in the resistance.
On his release in 1992, Haniya was deported to Marj al-Zuhur in southern Lebanon along with more than 400 Muslim activists from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In 1997, Haniya became a closeaide to Shaikh Yasin (above)After the creation of the PA, Haniya and other Hamas leaders were arrested by PA security agencies.
In 1997, Haniya became a closeaide to Shaikh Yasin (above)
The PA saw Hamas' often violent opposition to the Oslo Accords as a direct threat to a "national scheme".
In 1997, following the release of Yasin from an Israeli jail, and the failed Mossad assassination attempt in Amman on Khalid Meshaal, a Hamas leader, Haniya became a close aide and confidante of Yasin.
In 2001, a few months into al-Aqsa Intifada, Haniya consolidated his position and became one of Hamas' political leaders, probably occupying the third place after Yasin and Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi. Al-Rantisi was assassinated by Israel in March 2003.
In September 2003, Haniya and Yasin were slightly wounded when an Israeli warplane bombed a house where the two had been dining in downtown Gaza.
Yasin was assassinated by Israel in a missile attack in April 2004.
Calm and soft-spoken, Haniya is considered among the more pragmatic figures in Hamas. According to Atif Udwan, professor of political science at the Islamic University in Gaza, Haniya is a good listener.
"He respects his interlocutors and doesn't like static attitudes. He is a very approachable person."
The fact that Hamas has chosen him as the next Palestinian prime minister may suggest that the movement is edging towards moderation.
Haniya is a strong proponent of Palestinian national unity. He reportedly played a main role in preventing a brief showdown between Fatah and Hamas in 2005 from getting out of control.
"What we've got instead are more settlements, more occupation, more roadblocks, more poverty and more repression"Ismail Haniya,Speaking on the Oslo AccordsHaniya, unlike some other Hamas leaders, has avoided suggesting "the destruction of Israel".
"What we've got instead are more settlements, more occupation, more roadblocks, more poverty and more repression"Ismail Haniya,Speaking on the Oslo Accords
He said in Gaza a few days after Hamas' electoral victory that Hamas would seek a modus vivendi with Israel if it recognised a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
Haniya has also voiced a willingness to abandon violent resistance if Israel reciprocated by stopping violence and repression against Palestinians.
One of Haniya's main objections to the Oslo accords, reached by Israel and the PLO in 1993, is that the PLO granted Israel a "free" recognition without a reciprocal Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state.
In an interview last year, he said the US and the international community duped the Palestinians by telling them that the Oslo Accords would end the Israeli occupation and give them an independent state.
"What we've got instead are more settlements, more occupation, more roadblocks, more poverty and more repression," he said. | <P class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; DIRECTION: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed; TEXT-ALIGN: left">The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has chosen Ismail Haniya as the Palestinian Authority's new prime minister.</P> | 18.9375 | 0.479167 | 6.854167 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jul/03/performance-art-abramovic-tate-modern | http://web.archive.org/web/20131227150232id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jul/03/performance-art-abramovic-tate-modern | How performance art took over | 20131227150232 | Occupational hazards … II, by Ryan McNamara, 2011. Photograph: Elizabeth Dee, New York
If you were one of the lucky ones who sat face to face with Marina Abramović during her marathon sittings – some 10 hours long – at New York's MoMA in 2010, you might now find yourself in The Artist Is Present: a documentary by Matthew Akers which opens in the UK this week. People smiled and cried and stared; so did Abramović. "The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing," says the film poster, quoting the artist.
I have had my own encounters with Abramović in the past, and once took part in a workshop she directed. We all wore white coats. There were slow walks, breathing lessons and therapeutic exercises. At the end, I wondered if a light colonic cleansing might be afoot. Last year, at the Manchester international festival, I watched her life retold in Robert Wilson's epic theatrical extravaganza, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, starring the artist herself, and now set to go on a European tour. Marina suffers at the hands of her mother, and seems to die not once but three times.
Whatever extremes Abramović has gone to in her art, sometimes whipping and cutting herself, others have travelled further. There have been the extremes of 1960s Viennese Actionism, with its blood orgies and dead cows and sexual excess; and the silliness and self-indulgences of 1970s California performance art. Both movements predated and inspired Abramović's outre, alarming and sometimes gruelling performances. In 1971, the US artist Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm by a friend; the following year, in Deadman, he lay under a tarpaulin on the highway, illuminated by flares, as the night-time traffic roared by. Artists have had themselves suspended from the ceiling by fish hooks and stood naked in the filthiest of Chinese public toilets. They have cut, burned and excoriated themselves with no less vigour than medieval saints and penitents.
Suffering for your art is one thing; suffering as your art is another. When artist Ryan McNamara and collaborator Sam Roeck buried themselves up to the neck in the grounds of Robert Wilson's Watermill Performance Center in upstate New York last year, and sang love duets to one another (Tonight from West Side Story and Dolly Parton numbers featured on the playlist), they were both accidentally trodden on and kicked in the head by a clumsy audience member. This much-reported incident became an inadvertent part of the performance (performed as part of Wilson's 70th birthday bash), and it is difficult to see their pain as anything other than comedy. Samuel Beckett would have laughed, even if McNamara's performance hardly ranked alongside Billie Whitelaw's Happy Days. At least no one gave her a good kicking for her trouble, buried up to her neck in a mound of earth.
Performance art no longer looks like a gallery sideshow, an add-on to the museum experience. In two weeks' time, Tate Modern will launch its new Tanks space with a 15-week festival of live performance, installation and film and video works; meanwhile British-German artist Tino Sehgal, who has worked with singing gallery attendants and performing children, is the next to take on the gallery's Turbine Hall. Tate describes the Tanks as "the world's first museum galleries permanently dedicated to exhibiting live art, performance, installation and film works"; but the institution is only catching up with what artists have been doing for a very long time. Performance, in fact, is now where it's at; it's hard to think of much recent art that isn't, at some level, performative.
And who cares about genre any more, anyway? The collaborations between artists and dancers and composers that made New York so vital in the 1960s were no mere historical blip. Younger generations of artists have taken their cues from the freedoms and opportunities different media, and different disciplines, have afforded them.
The proliferation of performance in museums has a lot to do with both art itself and the changing role of these institutions, as well as the demands of an audience that wants to feel empowered, engaged and participatory. Today's spectators demand a role, whether they are inventing their own performances in the gallery (both Olafur Eliasson's and Ai Weiwei's Tate Modern installations seemed to invite all kinds of unexpected audience behaviour), or clamouring to take part in artist-led workshops such as the Hayward Gallery's on-going Wide Open School. We want to be active, rather than passive spectators. Perhaps this is merely fashion, but I suspect not.
Wander any "immersive installation", and you feel like an actor. Walking through the nether regions of an Elmgreen & Dragset installation, or one of Gregor Schneider's haunted houses, or a show by Anri Sala, you are not always sure if some of the people you meet aren't paid plants.
This doesn't mean you can't just go and look at a painting or a sculpture any more; it does mean that you frequently find yourself surrounded by objects that are themselves the residue of some kind of performance. This is as true of a Jackson Pollock painting as it is of the little brown miseries contained in Joseph Beuys's vitrines (which were often the tokens of his earlier performances). It is true of the props and stages left in a gallery after a Spartacus Chetwynd performance, and of the movie-set scaled environments of Paul McCarthy that we wander, looking for a story.
Most art, in any case, is the result of some kind of studio-bound, solitary performance. It doesn't matter whether that performance involved wearing a hat and holding a palette and brushes (Goya, in his 1790-95 self-portrait), or, as in a performance by Simon Fujiwara about his dawning sexuality in Cornwall, getting an erection in front of an abstract painting by (St Ives-based artist) Patrick Heron. The presentation of art works, of history, is always a kind of staging. There's an element of the theatrical in the hang of every museum, however dead the display. Sexing things up too much usually says more about the curators than it does about the art they are meant to care and be responsible for.
Performance can be mystifying and magical, troubling and captivating. Tino Sehgal's performances, or those of Sharon Hayes, make us think; Hayes's confrontational performances sometimes mimic political demonstrations, a mix of theatre and protest. The rhyming couplets and video-plays of Mary Reid Kelley, with their daft costumes and makeup, are as much performances as stories on film. Somewhere in there is a kind of truth. Artists have backed into the theatrical, and into performance, into dance and play-writing while attempting to do other things.
One might talk of a choreography of objects and spaces as much as of people in Martin Creed's work, and even Roman Ondak's queues and crowds of the performing public become dance-like in their utter simplicity: people form a queue, or fill a room and then leave again.
A couple of weeks ago, at Documenta in Kassel, I was disarmed and disturbed watching Belgian choreographer Jerome Bel direct a troupe of actors – all of whom are mentally challenged in one way or another – step to the front of the stage, one by one, and stand there in silence for a minute. Time lengthened and contracted, for the audience as well as the performers. Later, among other requests, Bel got each of them to name their disability, as best they could. Then they sang, they danced, they said what they thought about Bel's piece.
Was this theatre, art, a "freak show" (as one performer reported her sister saying after watching one performance), or something else? It was an exercise in real presence, of difficulty and empathy, focus and lapse. It was very moving. Private rituals and public acts, catharsis and confrontation are the central strands of art as performance. The work is the beginning of a dialogue, not an end. It is something shared. We are all performers, even when we are playing at being spectators.
• The Tanks open at Tate Modern, London SE1, on 18 July. Details: tate.org.uk. | Marina Abramović's head-to-heads with her audience have been captured in a new film, while The Tanks, the world's first gallery dedicated to performance artists, is opening at London's Tate Modern. Adrian Searle reports on the boom in live art | 32.44 | 0.86 | 1.46 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/mar/13/watteau-drawings-paintings-wallace-review | http://web.archive.org/web/20140214185620id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/mar/13/watteau-drawings-paintings-wallace-review | Watteau: The Drawings; Esprit et Vérité: Watteau and His Circle - review | 20140214185620 | There is a painting by Watteau, that most elusive of artists, that shows a young girl in silver-blue satin dancing pensively in a glade. Her partner is a fat man in oriental costume who doesn't seem to meet her gaze. In the background, another man (a rival?) is storming off into the shadows. A faint breeze sighs among the trees.
A dozen or so beautiful people are also present at this queer and unresolved scene. But they are too busy whispering and flirting to notice what's going on. The only person with eyes for the ill-matched protagonists, if that is what they are, is the pale and sickly musician on the right. Watchful, wistful, very nearly in the wings and yet calling the tune: a portrait of the artist himself.
About Jean-Antoine Watteau, it is said, very little is known. He was born in Valenciennes, possibly in 1684. He probably moved to Paris in 1702, making an early living painting copies and theatrical backdrops. Success, when it came, was remote from the usual circles of Court and Academy. The small group of patrons who bought his works supported him to an uncommon degree as he drifted between their homes, moving "a hundred times" according to his first biographer. There was never a fixed abode.
There are no letters, no artistic statements, no known relationships with either sex. Many of his works have disappeared and Watteau apparently destroyed others he considered too risqué before his premature death. Even the fatal illness is uncertain, some lifelong weakness of the lungs that carried him off before he was 37. He is said to have painted feverishly in the air as he died.
Portrayed this way, Watteau becomes another Vermeer: the sphinx of Valenciennes, conjuror of mysterious tableaux, silent music, frozen time, hidden behind his own pictorial magic. But is that really the case? Two galleries in London are bringing Watteau into focus for the first time since the great exhibition of 1984, and for those of us who never saw that show the experience may be revelatory – the opening of a locked door.
Chiefly, this is the effect of seeing more than 100 of Watteau's drawings at the Royal Academy. This is the place to start. These people – dancers, actors, wanderers – are his intimate circle. Airy, deft and graceful, the wiry line moving nimbly across the page, these chalk drawings are more than just private handwriting, a noting down of provisional ideas for later paintings. They are public performances in themselves. Watteau kept them in volumes, took them wherever he went. They were coveted, and sold, during his lifetime.
Straight away you see the distinctive Watteau look: the pronounced tapering of fingers and faces; the eyebrows slanting up at acute angles; the lithe bodies, draped in rippling silk, turning, pointing, dancing, embracing, moving in the white space of the page. Models recline, performers pose, but no matter how immobile the ostensible subject, the drawing always feels alive, quick with its maker's mark.
Watteau uses chalk as finely as others use pen and ink, to detail the glint in an eye, the rib of a fan, the length of a child's eyelash. And then he plays this amazing sharpness off against chalk's infinitely smooth gradations of tone. Precise tendrils of hair cast a soft shadow on the nape of a girl's neck. The faces of two flute players appear quite distinct and yet they merge on the page: separate notes blending into one harmonious air.
Figures recur: commedia dell'arte performers, dancers, mercenaries, itinerant Savoyards carrying curiosity boxes, tinkers, shoeshine boys. A shifting world for the restless Watteau, who is always someplace just long enough to sketch the travelling player or the Persian ambassador – some place, but precisely where?
What is so striking is the complete absence of location. A figure is sketched in a few brief lines on the page, white chalk indicating satin or greasepaint or something like limelight. Heads are often lit from the side or below. Watteau is right there at the scene, the rehearsal, observing these people: that is what the drawings testify. But he removes them from their ordinary surroundings, frees them from the limitations of here and now.
Which might be described as the very essence of Watteau's paintings.
The organic connection between the two becomes dramatically apparent at the Royal Academy, where a detail from one of the paintings has been magnified to the scale of an entire wall. Figures from the drawings in the same gallery now reappear, scarcely altered, in one of those shimmering, melting landscapes with spectral statues and fading sunlight known as the fêtes galantes. Life's a dream, a trance state.
And the astonishing fact is that even on this scale the painting suffers no loss of power. Watteau's ephemeral vision doesn't wane, as you might expect. On the contrary, the painting looks strongly continuous with the drawings: soft and hazy, yet highly detailed, the subtle nuances of chalk effortlessly translated into diaphanous oil paint.
The Wallace Collection is celebrating Watteau with two shows. Upstairs, 10 paintings are gathered in one gallery so that you are surrounded by this fugitive world. Downstairs, a compact display examines Watteau's immense influence on his contemporaries. He emerges as prickly, shy, acute, a canny borrower of past art, sought after and self-contained. You see him gazing obliquely from three different images, including the tiny self-portrait as musician.
For even when the paintings are comparatively large, Watteau's figures are rarely more than a few inches tall. One sees that they have migrated here directly from the drawings; that Watteau reassembles the same figures over and again, dreaming up each new scenario as he paints (there are no preparatory compositions). Real people, some of the faces discernibly portraits, are reunited in another world.
It is a closed circle observed from within. The drawings, with their backstage, off-duty figures, turn out to be free of the melancholy that tinges the paintings, so that one recognises the significance of these outdoor stagings. Ringlets flutter, leaves rustle, ribbons lift in the breeze. The surfaces are never still. People have come out to play, but there is always a presentiment of the end of summer.
In the Wallace Collection's The Halt on the Hunt, some riders are dismounting while others are already leaving: arrival and departure all at once. In the distance is that ethereal glow at the centre of so many of Watteau's paintings: a vignette, as it seems, of the afterlife.
Sing those songs, gather those rosebuds, keep on dancing, for too soon the day will end. This is the mortal knowledge of Watteau's life and art. | The Royal Academy and Wallace Collection promise to shed new light on the mysterious paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau | 66.45 | 0.85 | 1.95 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/jun/11/my-best-shot-thomas-ruff | http://web.archive.org/web/20140219025314id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/jun/11/my-best-shot-thomas-ruff | Thomas Ruff's best shot | 20140219025314 | One day in 2000 I was downloading pictures from the internet to use in my work, and I noticed some of them were broken up into little squares. It created quite a painterly, impressionistic structure, and rendered parts of what was often an ugly image very beautiful. I looked into it, and found the Jpeg file-compression software was responsible.
I started experimenting to see if I could create whole images like this myself. I found that when you blow them up to about 2.5 metres by 1.8 metres, it creates a nice effect: when you see it from about 10 or 15 metres away, you think you are looking at a precise photograph, but if you go closer, to within about five metres, you recognise the image for what it is. Then if you go really close, you can't recognise anything at all: you're just standing in front of thousands of pixels.
For this picture, I used a shot I took from a hotel room in Kyoto, Japan, in 2002. I was staying in a ryokan, one of those old-fashioned hotels where you sleep on a futon surrounded by traditional furniture. They also had a nice garden around the building, which was in the centre of the city - that's why you can see this big office building behind it.
I was just looking out of the window, and I saw the scene as a symbol of how mankind changes his environment: the traditional way of living with nature, juxtaposed with modern life. I took the picture through the curtain, as a tourist, without thinking what I would do with it. Only later did I realise it would fit in perfectly with the Jpeg idea, in which a pixellated square is ugly, but if you present it in the right context it can become beautiful.
Born: Zell, southern Germany, 1958.
Inspirations: "My teacher Bernd Becher, who showed us photographs by Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and the new American colour photographers."
High point: "My portraits series in the mid-1980s: it made collectors who normally buy paintings become interested in photography."
Low point: "My political collages at the end of the 1990s . I liked them, but other people didn't."
Dream subject: "I would like to go into space and travel to all the wonderful nebulas, moons and planets that the Hubble space telescope takes pictures of. I'd get a bit closer and take the pictures myself." | 'Pixellated images can be beautiful. I took this in Japan - through a hotel curtain' | 26.888889 | 0.833333 | 1.277778 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/23/calvin-russell-obituary | http://web.archive.org/web/20140306211744id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/23/calvin-russell-obituary | Calvin Russell obituary | 20140306211744 | My friend the sculptor Calvin Russell, who has died aged 49 of cancer, had a maverick streak that encouraged him to embark upon a series of art stunts in the late 1990s.
It had been his ambition to exhibit at the Tate, and in 1997 he managed to get past security with a small bronze sculpture, titled Iron Man, tucked into his coat along with a plinth disguised as an easel. He had planned the operation with the bravado of a bank heist, practising until he could assemble the whole thing in less than 20 seconds. He set up the piece alongside works by Rodin and other great masters, where it remained on display for around half an hour before it was discovered.
Calvin was banned from the Tate thereafter, but took great joy from the experience, merrily conducting interviews with a succession of journalists from the national press in his local pub afterwards.
For his next trick he filled a row of parking spaces on a street in Mayfair with sculptures and created his own private view complete with wine, canapes, a bustling crowd of art enthusiasts and toy cars parked in each space. Again the media took notice.
Calvin was born in Thurso, in the north of Scotland, but grew up in East Sussex and in Valencia, Spain. He was gifted and entirely without pretension – the visual arts were second nature to him. He studied sculpture at the City & Guilds of London Art School, graduating with first class honours and effortlessly producing exquisite pieces with a confidence that other artists could only wish for.
He was influenced by Dalí, baroque sculpture, and the surrealists. His work was primarily figurative, with a strong tendency towards abstraction and often with an acerbic sense of humour. Calvin was eccentric, witty, always charming, and the beating heart of any social occasion. He did not seek popularity but was loved by many. He was also a wonderful father to our son, Clay.
Calvin lived for many years in Spain, and relished the relaxed lifestyle. Sadly, in 2005, his promising career was thwarted when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. His talent was not given the recognition it deserved during his lifetime, but he was a legend among those who knew him.
He is survived by Clay and by his mother Marion, father JV (James) and three brothers, Sean, Alan and Cesar. | Other lives: Sculptor who masterminded an art stunt at the Tate gallery in London | 30.4 | 0.666667 | 1.066667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/11465/retirement-savings/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140307002253id_/http://time.com/11465/retirement-savings/ | Retirement Planning’s “Conventional Wisdom” Needs Rethinking | 20140307002253 | Projecting how much money you’ll need in retirement isn’t as easy as it used to be. Longer lifespans, the rising cost of healthcare and a market pushing investors into more lucrative but riskier investments all combine to throw the old stalwarts out the window.
Here are some “common sense” retirement-planning beliefs that experts say you shouldn’t rely on, along with what you should be looking at instead. The 20-year, 70% rule: “The longer life expectancies we now enjoy have basically made any traditional retirement models obsolete,” says Mitchell Goldberg, an investment professional with ClientFirst Strategy, Inc. People planning for retirement today should plan on making their nest eggs last for 30 years rather than 20. Even with a million-dollar portfolio, Goldberg says, dividing that into a 30-year rather than a 20-year horizon means cutting your annual income from $50,000 to $30,000 — a big drop.
And with retirees living more active lives, assumption that you’ll need 70% percent of your pre-retirement income in your golden years is both outdated and based on a flawed metric, to boot, says Rich Arzaga, founder and CEO Cornerstone Wealth Management, Inc.
“Most retirees actually spend 117% of their current expenses, not 70% of their income. This is a sizable gap, and can have a dramatic impact on financial independence goals,” he says.
“Income and expenses are two different metrics,” Arzaga points out. “And there can be a big difference between the two.” Especially early on, new retirees might overspend on travel, hobbies or other pursuits they finally have the time to undertake. “When you take [assets] out upfront, you start to draw capital very quickly,” he says. A better alternative is looking at your current and projected spending, factoring in your preferred retirement lifestyle and goals.
The linear-growth, steady rate-of-return model: A lot of plug-and-play retirement calculators assume linear growth. But in real life, things don’t always work out like that (as anyone nearing retirement when the 2008 financial crisis hit can attest).
Models that assume a year-over-year 8% or 10% rate-of-return might be simple, but they hide the truth, Goldberg says. “I’ve seen many models from various constituencies in the financial services industry with their models and their expected rates of return. These might work well for the financial services salesmen, but I think the models I see put in front of consumers are overly optimistic. I can’t stand it.”
“One cannot assume that there won’t be market corrections and negative returns,” says Debra A. Neiman, principal and founder of Neiman & Associates Financial Services, LLC. “It is better to incorporate negative market returns into the mix to give people a better sense of the parameters in the form of average case and worst case scenarios,” she says. Neiman says Monte Carlo simulations, which take both good and bad market swings into account, come closer to approximating what a retiree can expect (although even they can’t predict the future).
Personal finance expert Peter Dunn has a table on his blog that shows the difference between a 12% annual return and a 12% average return over 10 years. They might sound like they’d be the same, but a steady rate of return — which is much less likely to happen, given the typical market volatility — yields 7% more at the end of a decade.
And long-term bonds aren’t a panacea. Today, they’re attractive because cash equivalents earn so little interest, but when interest rates go up — as they inevitably will — that dynamic is going to change.”With a 1% increase in the prime rate, a 30-year bond can go down by as much as 17%,” Arzaga says. Intermediate bonds with 20-year terms will be impacted about half as much, he says. “The longer the hold, the bigger the drop.”
The 4% withdrawal and 3% inflation assumptions: “Advisors tend to use a 4% draw rate to achieve success, but studies show it could be as low as 2.75% for the calculation to work,” Argaza says. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, which is why that 4% assumption can fail.”
How the market performs overall, especially early in your retirement, has a greater impact on your nest egg over the long term. If you have the bad luck reach retirement age in a downturn, consider reining in your spending, withdrawing less or just putting off retirement for a few years.
And although the core Consumer Price Index is a widely-used metric for inflation, Goldberg says it’s a flawed barometer because it doesn’t include volatile food and energy costs. “The issues is food and energy are very big components” of many retirees’ budgets, he says. Healthcare costs — which seniors tend to incur to a disproportionate degree — are also rising faster than the overall rate of inflation.
“$50,000 today with even a little bit of inflation is going to be like $40,000 in the next seven or eight years,” Goldberg says.
The other mistake is in using net work, rather than liquid assets, as your baseline for withdrawal, Arzaga says. Yes, you may have equity in your home, but unless you get a reverse mortgage — a step that isn’t a good idea for everybody — there’s no way to tap that equity without finding another place to live. | Projecting how much money you'll need in retirement isn't as easy as it used to be. Longer lifespans, the rising cost of healthcare and a market pushing investors into more lucrative but riskier investments all combine to throw the old stalwarts out the window. | 22.265306 | 0.959184 | 30.306122 | medium | high | extractive |
http://time.com/11680/crimea-russia-putin-night-wolves/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140307012817id_/http://time.com/11680/crimea-russia-putin-night-wolves/ | Ukraine: Russia Ups the Ante in Crimea | 20140307012817 | On Friday afternoon, the regular flight from Moscow touched down in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, in the south of Ukraine, carrying the leader of a Russian motorcycle gang known as the Night Wolves. Alexander Zaldostanov, an old friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was wearing his usual get-up – a flaming wolf’s head stenciled onto his black leather vest – but for once he was not the most intimidating figure on the scene. Since the morning, dozens of masked troops had been sauntering around Crimea’s main airport, armed to the teeth but refusing to identify themselves. In some ways, they seemed to have the same goal as Zaldostanov, who goes by the nickname The Surgeon. They were sending a signal to the revolutionary government in Ukraine that it was no longer in charge on this peninsula.
Who exactly was in charge remained a mystery throughout the day, and a source of international alarm, as the United Nations Security Council prepared to convene an emergency meeting to discuss the tensions in Crimea. That morning, the new Crimean Parliament convened, still occupied by the masked and heavily armed men who had seized the building before dawn the previous day. Those men, also brandishing assault rifles, had at least identified themselves: They said they were the self-defense forces of the ethnic Russian majority in the Crimea. Under their watch on Friday, the parliament voted in a new Crimean government, one that was stacked to the hilt with pro-Russian hardliners intent on breaking their region away from Ukraine. But they, too, were not in charge.
(MORE: In Crimea and Kiev, men with guns dominate.)
The troops in green uniforms were in charge, whoever they were. By Friday evening, they had set up patrols around the Crimean capital. They put up checkpoints on the roads leading to the Russian military base, the home of the Black Sea Fleet, on the southern tip of the peninsula. Sometimes the troops seemed almost benign, sitting down at a cafe inside the airport and calmly looking around, their grenade launchers and automatic weapons by their side. At other times, as when they set up a cordon around the Crimean TV tower, they looked like an occupying force.
That, at least, is what they looked like to Ukraine’s new leadership, which was vaulted to power only a week ago after overthrowing President Viktor Yanukovych. In a statement posted on his Facebook page, Ukraine’s acting Interior Minister, Arsen Avakov, called the presence of these troops a “military invasion and occupation,” claiming the troops were part of a Russian military force. But Moscow refused to confirm or deny that. In a statement Friday evening, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that it had informed the Ukrainian authorities that Russian military vehicles and troops would be moving around the Crimea “to ensure the security of the presence of the Black Sea Fleet on the territory of Ukraine.” The statement added that Russia saw no need to consult further with Ukrainian authorities about the movement of its military assets in the Crimea, which usually houses at least 13,000 troops and dozens of ships at the base in Sevastopol. Beyond that base, however, they normally need the permission of Ukrainian authorities to move around.
Because their uniforms and vehicles had no identifying markers of any kind, the troops patrolling the streets, highways and airports of the Crimea could at least plausibly have been part of irregular militia forces, which locals have been forming to defend against the revolution. Moscow was therefore able to deny any knowledge as to which troops were part of the regular movements of the Black Sea Fleet and which ones weren’t. This meant that on Friday, the only identifiably Russian force descending on the Crimea were the Night Wolves.
Since 2009, they have been one of the defining elements of Russian soft power in Eastern Europe. Their biker rallies and mass rides through countries like Ukraine, Estonia, Serbia, Romania and Bosnia serve to promote Slavic pride and Russian patriotism in Moscow’s former Soviet dominions. President Putin has often joined them on these rides, although he usually plays it safe by choosing a three-wheeler.
In 2012, when he came to Ukraine on an official visit, he spent several hours riding around the Crimea with Zaldostanov and the Night Wolves while President Yanukovych was kept waiting for him in Kiev. (Since his ouster, Yanukovych has clearly not won any more respect from the Russian President. At a press conference on Friday in the Russian city of Rostov, where he has fled to escape charges of mass murder in Ukraine, Yanukovych said that Putin has so far refused to meet with him. He expressed surprise that the Russian President was “remaining silent” on the crisis in Ukraine.)
(MORE: Inside Crimea, pro-Russian stronghold in Ukraine.)
Putin’s ride with the Night Wolves in 2012 took him to the city of Sevastopol, which many Russians consider holy ground. Along with the Russian city of Volgograd (known as Stalingrad in Soviet times), Sevastopol saw some of the most intense battles between the Red Army and the forces of Nazi Germany during World War II. “Every cobblestone in this city is covered in the blood of our fathers and grandfathers,” Galina Reznik, the wife of a Russian marine in Sevastopol, told TIME last week during a pro-Russian rally in the central square. Among Russian veterans and, more broadly, for the Russian state, that history has bestowed a special status on the city, one that goes a long way toward explaining the ferocity of Russia’s defense of Sevastopol throughout the years, and most recently during this year’s revolution in Ukraine. It is not only the home of a strategic military base, but a memorial to an earlier generation’s sacrifice and a site of potent Russian nationalism.
“So whatever happens, we cannot give up this city,” says Anatoly Ponomaryov, a retired vice admiral of the Soviet air force and a Sevastopol native who fought in World War II. “These new leaders who have come to power, some of them have threatened to put us on our knees and seal us off with razor wire.” Such concerns seemed badly overblown. Though the revolutionary government in Kiev does include nationalist forces who are against the Russian military presence in Ukraine, the new Prime Minister has pledged to guarantee the rights of all Crimean residents. “I want to appeal to the people of Crimea,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk said in his first speech to parliament as Prime Minister on Thursday. “We will ensure stability, and no one will ever divide Ukraine.”
But that was not enough to calm the region’s ethnic Russians, nor certainly to calm the Night Wolves. “We have one goal here,” Zaldostanov tells TIME on Friday night, a few hours after arriving in Sevastopol. “We are here to defend our country, or at least the parts of it that remains ours. We will defend it from the fascists who have come to power. So let it be known to all of them. Wherever we are, wherever the Night Wolves are, that should be considered Russia.”
In his view, “Russia” would include a swathe of Ukraine reaching far beyond the Crimea. On Saturday morning, the Night Wolves are organizing a massive motorcycle column that will ride from the northeast of Ukraine all the way along its eastern edge, covering nearly all of the Russian-speaking regions of the country. By evening, they will end up in Crimea, where they plan to deliver various supplies, including “means of self-defense,” to the ethnic Russian militias on the peninsula. Although Zaldostanov declined to elaborate on what these items would be, he said “they will be enough to make the Russian people here believe that the motherland has not forgotten them.”
And what about the troops now patrolling Crimea? Are they not enough to calm the local Russians? Zaldostanov, like the Kremlin, pleads ignorance over the troops’ identity, insisting that the real threat comes from the nationalists who have come to power in Kiev. “I don’t know who those troops are,” he says. “If they are fascist troops, then we have to think about how we are going to defend ourselves against them. If they are not, then I don’t see anything bad about them being here for the sake of stability.” His understanding of stability is clearly not shared by Ukraine’s new leaders. For them, the Night Wolves’ version of stability would mean a nation torn in half. | The leader of Russia's favored nationalist biker gang lands in Crimea amid rumors of a Russian takeover of this autonomous Ukrainian republic | 71.73913 | 0.652174 | 1.26087 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/nov/04/photography-tom-hunter-best-shot/print | http://web.archive.org/web/20140307062732id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/nov/04/photography-tom-hunter-best-shot/print | Photographer Tom Hunter's best shot | 20140307062732 | 'I wanted to show the dignity of squatter life' ... Tom Hunter's Woman Reading a Possession Order. Photograph: V&A Images/Tom Hunter
I was living in Hackney in London, in a whole street of squats, having spent two years travelling around Europe in a doubledecker bus. Everyone got a letter addressed to "persons unknown". The council wanted to knock down the street and build warehouses. The Tories had brought in the Criminal Justice Act, which was designed to stop parties. Every time you saw a picture of a squatter or a traveller, it was to go with a story about how antisocial they were. I just wanted to take a picture showing the dignity of squatter life – a piece of propaganda to save my neighbourhood.
I took this in 1997, for my master's degree show at the Royal College of Art. The 17th-century golden age of Dutch painting had had a massive impact on me: the way they dealt with ordinary people, not kings, queens and generals. I thought if I could borrow their style for squatters and travellers, it would elevate their status. In this shot, inspired by Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, my next-door neighbour is reading the possession order.
Filipa had just had her first baby. We spent the whole day trying things out: we had a bowl of fruit, then we tried some curtains, then incorporated the baby. The light was perfect, a late winter sun coming through the window, really low, like the northern European light.
I used a large-format camera, which really captures that light. And I used the Supachrome process to print it – old-fashioned even then. The exposure was about a second, so it was like sitting for a painting: she had to stand still. I was waiting for the light to pour into the lens, rather than snapping at something.
I phoned her up last week and she's still happy with the picture. It's a record of her, her child and her home at the time. The great thing is, the picture got a dialogue going with the council – and we managed to save the houses.
Studied: Royal College of Art, London.
Influences: "Painters inspire me most – Caravaggio, Vermeer – but I also like Dorothea Lange and Sally Mann."
High point: "Graduating from the RCA. I never thought I'd have an A-level, let alone an MA."
Top tip: "Find something that drives you on. Being threatened with eviction was a real spur for me." | Tom Hunter: It's inspired by Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter – except she's a squatter reading a possession order | 22.347826 | 0.956522 | 4.26087 | medium | high | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/03/16/new-mass-tech-chief-bill-oates-has-long-list-problem-contracts/TdG7DXMxp0dVPs8mRr7qtN/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140321193704id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/03/16/new-mass-tech-chief-bill-oates-has-long-list-problem-contracts/TdG7DXMxp0dVPs8mRr7qtN/story.html | New Mass. tech chief Bill Oates has long list of problem contracts | 20140321193704 | Just weeks into his new job as head of technology for the Commonwealth, Bill Oates was called to a State House hearing to examine the problems bedeviling a number of high-profile systems projects over the past year.
Oates seemed to barely break a sweat.
The former chief information officer for the City of Boston knew what he was getting into. After seven years in the Menino administration, Oates assumed his new statewide role at a time of heightened scrutiny on projects worth tens of millions of dollars.
Three major information technology contracts at big agencies have run into serious trouble. The problems have cast a cloud over Governor Deval Patrick’s record of modernizing the state’s outdated systems. And the governor, who hopes to spend nearly $1 billion more on updating technology, is counting on Oates to right the ship.
Former colleagues call Oates a skilled manager with a vision for cutting through complexity.
“He has an ability to marshal folks moving in his direction, said Justin Holmes, who succeeded Oates as Boston’s interim CIO. “He’s also someone who just knows how to get things done.”
There is a lot to do.
The Health Connector website may be the governor’s greatest IT embarrassment, frustrating thousands of people who are trying to sign up for insurance. The Labor Department’s unemployment site arrived two years late and full of errors that clogged the system. And the Department of Revenue fired the same firm that built Labor’s system, Deloitte Consulting, after paying it $54 million for another troubled project.
Deloitte executives defend their work, saying the claims system is working for a majority of people who file for benefits. They also say the Revenue Department contract broke down after state officials wanted to change direction.
Wendy Maeda / Globe Staff
Under Bill Oates’s direction, Boston won awards.
But the problems have revealed layers of dysfunction in the way the state awards contracts and then monitors the progress of projects.
For one thing, state officials acknowledge that too few companies bid to work on these large and complex technology contracts. Deloitte recently won yet another project, to update the Registry of Motor Vehicles licensing system. It got the $77 million job despite its issues with other agencies and was chosen over just one rival bidder.
In the past, agencies often negotiated and oversaw technology contracts on their own. With regular turnover, government officials responsible for contracts are often gone before systems are implemented. At the hearing last month, a string of officials testified that they had no direct knowledge about what went wrong with projects or any idea how to manage them better in the future.
Oates pledged that his office would take a much more active role in the state’s big IT contracts. “There needs to be meaningful involvement from my office in all of these projects,” he told lawmakers.
The administration is betting that centralizing oversight will help keep projects from running off the rails. For that strategy to succeed, Oates needs to fill a lot of jobs in a technology department ravaged by employee departures.
At the end of 2013, half of the 20 senior staff jobs at the state’s Information Technology Division were vacant. Many of the jobs pay $90,000 or more a year, but the state competes with a private sector that needs lots of tech talent and pays far more.
The state’s former technology chief, John Letchford, left in December for a job at Tufts University. His predecessor now holds the top technology position at Harvard. Another ranking member of the department landed at Wellington Management, an elite Boston investment firm.
“The fact is that IT unemployment in our area is almost zero and the state doesn’t pay close to competitive levels,” said Anne Margulies, the former state chief information officer who works at Harvard.
Oates, 57, has spent much of his own career in the private sector. He served as chief information officer for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. of Stamford, Conn., and Sheraton Hotels before that. He is a Boston College graduate with a law degree from Suffolk University in Boston.
On Oates’s watch at City Hall, Boston won awards for its digital initiatives. He oversaw a staff of 130 and helped usher in programs to improve citizen access to government.
In one example, his department implemented a $6 million system to better handle resident complaints. Then it added smartphone apps like Citizens Connect, which anyone can use to report potholes or darkened street lights, simply by snapping a photo. The app records the location via GPS, routes the information to repair workers, and then follows up with a confirmation when the job is done.
Oates renamed the city’s old systems group the Department of Innovation and Technology. “That’s the culture he created in this department,’’ Holmes said. “He really in many ways made it much easier to recruit and retain talent.’’
Now with a state staff of 350, Oates is working to fill several top jobs in the department, including computer security and legal staff. He has a new chief engineer on the way, too, and must still recruit a new chief technology officer and a deputy CIO.
“IT recruitment and retention in state government is a challenge,’’ Oates said. “We have challenges here. But I would also say we’re doing things about that — we want this to be an attractive place for IT professionals to work.’’
Oates recently hired a chief operating officer, a new position created by an executive order from the governor to handle many of the department’s internal responsibilities. Oates’s predecessor was often mired in work tending to e-mail systems and making sure data centers were operational. Even a basic government spending website languished in disrepair for months.
Oates has spent his first weeks on the job focused on areas needing urgent attention, like the Connector site. Still other important projects, which have received less public notice, will probably move onto his radar soon.
The Massachusetts State Retirement Board, for instance, is responsible for paying pension benefits to 55,000 retirees. Executive director Nick Favorito said the board’s computer system is so old it uses COBOL code dating back to the 1970s.
Favorito compares the system to a big calculator: It’s not interactive or adaptive; information cannot be shared with other agencies; and, perhaps most importantly, retirees cannot access accounts online, so they have to call in for information.
“It’s not a very efficient way to run an agency that pays out $1.4 billion in benefits a year,’’ Favorito said.
A new system is more than a year late, due to changes in the law that developer Sagitec Solutions of St. Paul, Minn., needed time to address, Favorito said. It is now expected by summer, at a cost of $11 million, up from the original $9.8 million.
Having seen the difficulties unfold with other new systems, Favorito wants to make sure his is not launched until it is ready. If checks are “off by a day, or off a penny, we get phone calls,’’ he said. “We want to make sure that we get it right.’’ | Just weeks into his new job as head of technology for the Commonwealth, Bill Oates was called to a State House hearing examining the problems bedeviling a number of high-profile systems projects over the past year. Oates seemed to barely break a sweat. The former chief information officer for the city of Boston knew what he was getting into when he took the new job. After seven years in the Menino administration, Oates assumed his new statewide role at a time of heightened scrutiny on projects worth tens of millions of dollars. Three major information technology contracts at big agencies have run into serious trouble. The problems have cast a cloud over Governor Deval Patrick’s record of modernizing the state’s outdated systems. | 10.447761 | 0.985075 | 23.641791 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/daily-take/201403/northwestern-players-win-first-chapter-union-battle-open-floodgate-ncaa | http://web.archive.org/web/20140329222416id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/daily-take/201403/northwestern-players-win-first-chapter-union-battle-open-floodgate-ncaa | Northwestern Players Win First Chapter Of Unionization Battle, Open Floodgates | 20140329222416 | On Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago district of the National Labor Relations Board ruled Northwestern football players qualify as employees of the university and can unionize.
The decision came just shy of two months since former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter took the podium at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Just two months ago, Colter became the inaugural spokesman for the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA). Just two months ago, Colter said an "overwhelming majority" of Northwestern Wildcats football players signed cards in support of CAPA.
And in just two months, CAPA, Colter and the United Steelworkers have achieved a drastic victory for NCAA athlete benefits.
It's taking the NCAA nearly 3 years to pass basic athlete benefits like stipends. It took 2 months for Northwestern fball to unionize.
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) March 26, 2014
That is Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel, a Northwestern alum.
The Northwestern unionization saga is far from over. Northwestern's Vice President for University Relations Alan K. Cubbage released a statement that the university is "disappointed" by the ruling and "Northwestern believes strongly that our student-athletes are not employees, but students. Unionization and collective bargaining are not the appropriate methods to address the concerns raised by student-athletes. Northwestern plans to appeal to labor authorities in Washington D.C."
It gets more interesting. The current National Labor Relations Board in Washington D.C. includes five members appointed by President Barack Obama, which ESPN's Lester Munson and Tom Farrey note is "more pro-union" than the board appointed by George W. Bush.
According to Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, two of the members are recess appointees by Obama who may not be able to vote (he says both would vote in favor of unionization).
CAPA and Colter won the first battle. They have the inside leg. The appeals could push the final verdict for an extended period of time. For now, player have the upper hand.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence. Although the general opinion was the Northwestern players would not win, they did. And they did it ridiculously fast.
While Ed O'Bannon v. NCAA drags on and many former and current NCAA athletes toss around the "pay-for-play" argument, Colter and Northwestern did not. The picture continues to get jumbled. Northwestern players are not asking to get paid for their football skills.
They are asking for two changes. First, the players want a seat at the table. They want to have a union. They want to have some sort of say in where the millions of dollars in football revenue is delegated. Second, from this union, they want to gain a form of insurance or trust fund for their post-playing days.
On Sept. 25, four days after he wore a simple "All Players United" wristband against Maine, Colter said:
"There needs to be a guarantee that players aren't stuck with medical bills after they leave with long-lasting injuries that they suffer from football. Essentially, they’re hurt on the job and then they're stuck with the medical bills if they do need a surgery down the line. That's one of the biggest things. With the TV revenue being generated, they could use a portion of that to help out the players in some way. I feel like there needs to be a trust fund generated. I don't feel like there needs to be a direct compensation, but there needs to a trust fund generated somehow that players can access after they graduate. I feel like that would put incentive for graduation rates to rise."
So proud of my teammates, Ramogi, lawyers, and supporters around the nation! This is a HUGE win for ALL college athletes! #APU
— Kain Colter (@KainColter_2) March 26, 2014
At the end of the day, when Colter and CAPA put their arguments against Northwestern's, the debate turned.
The players' issues were laid out. College football players put their bodies and time on the line for their school. Although they get a scholarship, most of their academic studies are challenged by the time commitment to football. Much of this time commitment is "mandatory" and part of the scholarship.
TV, merchandise and other forms of revenue have made the college football industry a money machine. When the NCAA started dishing out scholarships, this concept was not put into the equation.
There are six subsections of the "Statement of Facts" section of the Chicago NLRB decision, signed by regional director Peter Sung Ohr. After "Background," the next five subsections are: "The Employer's Football staff and Grant-in-Aid Scholarship Players, "The Employer's Football Players are Subject to Different Rules," "Football Players' Time Commitment to the Sport," "The Recruitment and Academic Life of the Employer's Grant-in-Aid Scholarship Players" and "The Revenues and Expenses Generated by the Employer's Football Program."
That gives those who have not been in the courtroom an idea of what the board saw as important issue. This is especially true for the "Football Players' Time Commitment to the Sport" section, the longest in "The Statement of Facts."
One interesting portion of this section includes an entire breakdown of one particular game weekend. The game in question is a 2012 game at Michigan. Northwestern lost in heartbreaking fashion, 38-31 in overtime. The decision maps out the entire weekend, which started in the early morning that Friday, and ended with a Sunday commitment:
"About half of the games require the players to travel to another university, either by bus or airplane. In the case of an away game against the University of Michigan football team on November 9, 2012, the majority of players were required to report to the N Club by 8:20 a.m. for breakfast. At 8:45 a.m., the offensive and defensive coaches directed a walk-thru for their respective squads.
The team then boarded their buses at 10:00 a.m. and traveled about five hours to Ann Arbor, Michigan. At 4:30 p.m. (EST), after arriving at Michigan's campus, the players did a stadium walk-thru and then had position meetings from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. The coaches thereafter had the team follow a similar schedule as the home games with a team dinner, optional chapel, and a team movie. The players were once again expected to be in bed by 10:30 p.m.
On Saturday, the day of the Michigan game, the players received a wake-up call at 7:30 a.m. and were required to meet for breakfast in a coat and tie by no later than 8:05 a.m. The team then had 20 minutes of meetings before boarding a bus and departing for the stadium at 8:45 a.m. Upon arriving at the stadium, the players changed into their workout clothes and stretched for a period of time.
They afterwards headed to the training room to get taped up, receive any medical treatment, and put on their football gear. About 65 minutes before kickoff, the players took the field and did additional stretches and otherwise warmed-up for the game. At noon, the game kicked off and Head Coach Fitzgerald, in consultation with his assistant coaches, was responsible for determining the starting lineup and which substitutions would be made during the course of the game. While most games normally last about three hours, this one lasted about four hours since it went into overtime. Following the game, the coaches met with the players, and some of those individuals were made available to the media for post-game interviews by the Employer's athletic department staff. Other players had to receive medical treatment and eventually everyone on the roster changed back into their travel clothes before getting on the bus for the five hour drive back to the Evanston campus. At around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., the players arrived at the campus.
Although no mandatory practices are scheduled on Sunday following that week's football game, the players are required to report to the team's athletic trainers for a mandatory injury check. Those players who sustained injuries in the game will receive medical treatment at the football facility."
Whether people agree or not, the NLRB in the third-largest city in the country says issues like this warrant the right to unionization. People are not going to be happy, but a precedent has been set. Players do not just get a scholarship and call it a day anymore. Their right to have a voice is coming.
The floodgates are open. Northwestern just won in its region. The local precedent has been set. Who is to say that other schools will not do the same?
The rest of the NCAA world has awaited the Northwestern verdict. Most players likely expected the discussion to table for a longer period of time, but it did not. The first chapter is over, the decision came quickly, and the evidence was strong.
Now NCAA players know they can win. On Wednesday, every NCAA private school football player's eyes lit up. If they feared fighting a losing battle, they have no excuse. In the fight for unionization, the scoreboard reads: Players 1, Universities 0.
The NCAA world may be on the eve of a domino effect. The door is open for more players to join in with confidence. If every player starts his (or her) argument with the Northwestern angle, he or she starts with the upperhand. Plus, the more NCAA athletes that push the issue, the more likely their voices will drive change in NCAA sports.
If the NLRB in Washington, the dominos will fall ever faster. And if this case makes it to the Supreme Court, and SCOTUS votes pro-unionization, the floodgates may burst.
Many people have made the argument Northwestern is a bad place to start the unionization conversation. The players are academically-driven and the coaching staff is not overbearing. This makes it a bad template for the problems in college sports.
This is true. However, Northwestern is also the strongest base to start college football unionization. Northwestern's 996 football APR is No. 1 in the nation. Northwestern football players leave practice before media availability to get to class on time. If these players, can unionize, imagine how helpless other universities will be in the courtroom. Northwestern University should have a better defense than almost any NCAA program, yet it lost.
No matter what happens, Northwestern is still going to continue its spring practices and Coach Pat Fitzgerald will lead the Wildcats on the gridiron come fall. Fans will flock to Ryan Field in Evanston and subject to the players' on-the-field execution, Northwestern will compete for a Big Ten title.
Fitzgerald, who had to testify in the case, tweeted this back on Jan. 28:
Kain and our student-athletes have followed their beliefs with great passion and courage. I'm incredibly proud of our young men! GO CATS!
— Pat Fitzgerald (@coachfitz51) January 28, 2014
Fitzgerald, in his Feb. 21 testimony, said college football is not a job and he insisted students can major in whatever subject they choose, despite their football commitment. Northwestern players made a statement the day of the hearing asserting their respect for the school and football program.
As I have ALWAYS stated, I have nothing but LOVE for @coachfitz51 and Northwestern. Best coach in college football #B1GCats
— Kain Colter (@KainColter_2) March 26, 2014
Of course the university is ticked they will have to pay for more lawyers to go to Washington. Right now, Northwestern is legally getting torn to pieces for a "wrongdoing" it does do as poorly as most (if not all) other NCAA football programs.
But it will not be long before unionization is not just viewed as a Players vs. Northwestern issue.
The floodgates are open and they tide has only led to success thus far. Players have dipped their feet in. Now, the water is safe to swim in.
As for the argument of schools cutting football at the initiation of unionization or pay-for-play, NCAA football is an all-or-nothing industry. With the floodgates open, if unionization is upheld, everyone is joining in.
Then the NCAA will have no option. Then the players will have a seat at the table in one of the country's most popular sports.
-- Follow Jeffrey Eisenband on Twitter @JeffEisenband.
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VIDEO OF THE DAY:One Shining (Office) Moment
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On Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago district of the National Labor Relations Board ruled Northwestern football players qualify as employ... | 87.428571 | 0.821429 | 13.035714 | high | medium | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/01/lucas-foglia-american-west-photography | http://web.archive.org/web/20140402035157id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/01/lucas-foglia-american-west-photography | Call of the wild: photographer Lucas Foglia beds down in the American west | 20140402035157 | Dakota, Michael and Jesse. Photograph: Lucas Foglia. Click on image for full version.
Between 2006 and 2013, Lucas Foglia journeyed through the vast open spaces of Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming. It was a trip that challenged all his preconceptions about the American west. "When I first travelled there, the communities I encountered felt small and the land felt bigger, harsher and more remote than anything I had experienced. And in the midst of the global economic recession, the mining industry was booming."
The end result is a book called Frontcountry, in which the 60,000 photographs he took over those seven years are distilled to a mere 60. In them, the contradictions of the contemporary American west are palpable. His is a style that merges landscape photography and heightened portraiture, familiar from his previous book A Natural Order. An exhibition of his new work is also on at Michael Hoppen gallery in London.
Whereas A Natural Order looked at people who lived off the grid in the American backwoods – drifters, Christian communities, back-to-the-land hippies, survivalists – Frontcountry illuminates the stark contrast between, as Foglia puts it, "two very different lifestyles – ranching and mining – that share and depend on the same landscape". Foglia's book begins as an evocation of a way of life that still endures: contemporary cowboys on horseback or waiting to perform in a rodeo; ranchers who patrol their vast tracts of land in pickup trucks. In one striking image, a rancher steps out of his vehicle to stare at what looks like a billowing cloud but is, in fact, an approaching firestorm.
Foglia deftly plays with our – and his – preconceived ideas of the west as an almost mythic place, where cowboys have made certain accommodations to the present, but are still essentially cowboys at heart – macho, hard-working, Stetson-wearing frontiersmen who have remained faithful to a steadfastly old-fashioned, and essentially American, way of life.
When I first met Foglia, he described himself as a documentary photographer collaborating with his subjects to search for some essential truth about their lives. His working method relies on befriending one or two people, who then give him an "in" to a community. He is not averse to instructing subjects about what he needs before he shoots, hence the almost symbolic nature of some portraits – a trio of cowboys stretching before a rodeo like extras from Brokeback Mountain; a beautiful girl washing her hair outdoors with a hose; a man aiming a rifle at a cow's head. The warm natural light of the American west bathes these images in an almost unreal glow that heightens the cinematic sense of place. In another evocative image, a man leans out of his Jeep, surveying two lines of cattle that stretch single-file to the horizon along a straight highway.
In the bridging shots between the first and second halves of the book, one senses other forces at play: economic as well as elemental. My eye was arrested by an image of a gaggle of young men in soccer strips awaiting a crossed football that has yet to enter the frame, the pristine turf of their pitch in Afton, Wyoming at odds with the snowy mountains in the background. Elsewhere, the white winter wilderness is stained with the blood of slaughtered livestock or newborn calves. Tradition and modernity are in conflict here and suddenly, joltingly, in the turn of a page, you are looking at a different landscape – scarred, contaminated, defiled.
If the ranching communities have made a living from this harsh landscape by adapting to it, the mining industry is, by definition, a more destructive force. In the context of what has gone before, Foglia's images of powerplants nestling amid small mountains of coal, huge swathes of land rendered bare and unsustainable and a spill of toxic water flowing from newly fracked rocks are shocking in the extreme.
"Mining concentrates jobs, and helps to pay for towns for the miners to live in," says Foglia. "And with modern technology, from the use of fracking fluids to extract natural gas and oil, to the use of cyanide to separate gold from rock, land that wasn't valuable a few decades ago is now being mined."
Inevitably, there are landscapes in these wildernesses that are being altered beyond recognition, not least because mining of this kind is a nomadic profession. "In Nevada, whole towns are built or abandoned in response to fluctuations in the price of gold," says Foglia. "All mines have a life cycle. They close once the valuable minerals are extracted, or in response to declines in the price of those minerals. Either way, miners have to move, following jobs across the country."
Frontcountry, then, is a book of two halves, but taken together, they illustrate the dilemmas of survival for these communities. As well as attracting nomadic workers from all over, the mining industry has provided work for locals, many of whom come from ranching families. The tension between their traditional, more sustainable way of life and a newer, harsher, more exploitative one is at the heart of Foglia's book – and he is content to raise more questions than he answers with these images that play with, and undercut, our notions of contemporary America.
Foglia's photographs may, in time, attest to the passing of an older way of life and the landscape that sustained it. The day after we meet, he sends me a quote from a cattle herder called Randy Stowell, who works on the Big Springs Ranch near Oasis, Nevada. It comes close to the heart of the matter. "This little town has nothing. It's dying on the vine. But when the company opens a mine here, it'll bring jobs and make everything in town bigger and better. There are people who want that boost to the community. I'm not one of them. The mine will ruin this mountain and you'll never find land this beautiful anywhere else." | Cowboys stretching before a rodeo, toxic water flowing from fracked rocks ... ranchers and miners go head to head in Foglia's vast, cinematic photographs of the wild west that challenge all our notions of the US today, writes Sean O'Hagan | 26.613636 | 0.795455 | 1.795455 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/04/03/couple-bend-elements-theater-and-dance-into-shape/6JrCqCDceR6kKApjr6TadO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140404135041id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/04/03/couple-bend-elements-theater-and-dance-into-shape/6JrCqCDceR6kKApjr6TadO/story.html | Couple bend elements of theater and dance into ‘Shape’ | 20140404135041 | CAMBRIDGE — While the digs of Zero Church Street Performance Space are drab and dingy, the energy inside is bright and upbeat as the 10 cast members of “The Shape She Makes” rehearse for the work’s world premiere Saturday at Oberon. Two weeks before opening, there is collegiality and laughter as characters double-check dance moves and dialogue with creators Susan Misner and Jonathan Bernstein, as the couple’s dog, Bailey, casually wanders about. “The mantra for today is ‘Let’s get loud,’ ” Misner says, and an impromptu song and boogie break out in response.
But moments later, the tone gets serious, and a pivotal scene in the work is so wrenching it leaves at least two in the cast dabbing their eyes. Stage manager Taylor Adamik distributes tissues. It’s a testament to the engagement and investment the cast has in this collaborative work, which explores how childhood experiences and memories shape adult lives.
Nearly four years in gestation and preparation, “The Shape She Makes” is a theatrical hybrid that fuses movement, music, and dialogue. The script by Bernstein revolves around two main characters — 11-year-old Quincy (played by 13-year-old Needham actress Sydney K. Penny), who tries to piece together details about her long-absent father, and a substitute schoolteacher named Ms. Calvin, who grapples with the strictures of caring for her aging mother.
“At the core, it’s about reliability, the ways we rely upon our perceptions of ourselves and each other, and how we rely on our need for each other,” Bernstein says. “I’m a believer in the Transcendentalist idea that everything is connected, and there’s a gravitational pull to habits and patterns that we allow to impact our behavior.”
For Misner, who not only conceived and choreographed the work but also performs the role of Quincy’s mother, Louise, the work is all about change. “I’m obsessed with: Can people change, or are they only replacing one habit or way of doing things with another?” she says. “Why can some of us step out of our boxes and others can’t?”
Misner, 43, warm and voluble with a quick smile and intense gaze, is currently on hiatus from filming the FX series “The Americans,” in which she plays Sandra Beeman. She has had dozens of dramatic roles in film and television, but she began her performing career as a dancer and didn’t try her hand at acting until she was 26. She was featured in a range of Broadway musicals and played Liz in the film adaptation of “Chicago.”
“I took acting class because Bob Fosse thought being an actor would make you a better dancer, to find a way to tell stories,” she says. “Then I fell in love with acting.”
In order to be taken seriously as an actor, “I kind of amputated the dancer in me,” she says, “but I always felt I left something behind. Now I’m trying to figure out how to bridge these two worlds, and I love coming back to dance as an actor because I’ve lost the perfectionism, which I think is the death of art.”
“The Shape She Makes” is Misner’s first attempt at combining dance, music, and theater in a full-evening piece. But make no mistake, this is not music theater. Though there is music, there are no songs, and the movement is fluidly integrated into the narrative flow. Everyday gestures and pedestrian moves segue into liquid swoops and sweeping lifts. A trio weaving together awkward embraces and convoluted turns seems a natural reflection of the push/pull in the characters’ relationships. “It’s not a musical, all sparkle and showmanship. The movement comes from literal gestures, then gets abstract, but I try to ground it in the storytelling,” Misner says.
A professor in the MFA Musical Theater Writing Program at New York University, Bernstein, 42, is directing the production. While he has had musicals and plays produced around the country, this creative collaboration with his partner of 15 years is special, evolving through the continual give and take of a 24/7 relationship.
Misner says, “We continue to go back to the drawing board and we’re still learning as we go. We rely tremendously on the actors and designers. I’m so grateful for this group of people. It’s a dream come true.”
“The Shape She Makes” unfolds with the audience ringing the performance space on three sides, spitting distance behind chairs the actors use at key moments. “Because we’ve been so focused on the process, we don’t have a lot of time to think about what the audience might take away from this, but I want to challenge them in how they view this because they’re sitting right there,” Misner says. “Being an actor is all guts, so I want them to be on board. I want people to attach to the lead character’s journey and go on it with her.” | While the digs of Zero Church Street Performance Space are drab and dingy, the energy inside is bright and upbeat as the 10 cast members of “The Shape She Makes” rehearse for the work’s world premiere Saturday at Oberon. Two weeks before opening, there is collegiality and laughter as characters double-check dance moves and dialogue with creators Susan Misner and Jonathan Bernstein, as the couple’s dog, Bailey, casually wanders about. “The mantra for today is ‘Let’s get loud,’ ” Misner says, and an impromptu song and boogie break out in response. But just moments later, the tone gets serious, and one pivotal scene in the work is so wrenching it leaves at least two in the cast dabbing their eyes. It’s a testament to the engagement and investment the cast has in this collaborative work, which explores how childhood experiences and memories shape our adult lives. Nearly four years in gestation and preparation, “The Shape She Makes” is a theatrical hybrid that fuses movement, music, and dialogue. | 5.005076 | 0.994924 | 69.685279 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jul/05/family-of-man-photography-edward-steichen | http://web.archive.org/web/20140417073825id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jul/05/family-of-man-photography-edward-steichen | Double exposure: photography's biggest ever show comes back to life | 20140417073825 | Universal message … Garry Winogrand shot of Coney Island bathers, New York, 1952, from Edward Steichen's groundbreaking exhibition, The Family of Man. Photograph: Fraenkel Gallery/Garry Winogrand
In 1955, Edward Steichen changed the world of photography forever. When the visionary curator and photographer decided to mount an exhibition to promote world peace and equality after two world wars, he was breaking the mould. He gathered 503 photographs of people from around the world, taken by 273 different (often unknown) photographers, and grouped them by theme. That exhibition, The Family of Man, opened in January 1955 at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where the Luxembourg-born Steichen was director of photography from 1947 to 1961. It went on to tour the world and become the most successful photography exhibition of all time – more than 10 million people have seen it. It will go back on show this weekend in a castle in Luxembourg, after renovation work that has taken three years.
"Family of Man changed the way we view photographs today, and how we think about exhibitions," says Anke Reitz, conservator of The Family of Man in Luxembourg, where the collection has been since 1994. "It is a milestone in the history of photography." Steichen chose images grouped by themes intended to be so universal that anyone in any culture could identify with them: birth, fathers and sons, mothers and children, education, love, work, death and religion. The images were hung in particular formations, some dangling from wires overhead or attached to poles. The birth photos were arranged inside an intimate circular structure, while theatrical lighting created further drama and atmosphere. Steichen hung the photos without captions. "The exhibition was meant to be understood around the world without the need for words," says Reitz.
Now, in its renovated setting in Luxembourg, The Family of Man is just as striking, dynamic and emotional as it must have been all those decades ago. The photographs are laid out precisely as in the original MoMA exhibition; only the lighting has been altered, for conservation reasons. Images of children playing and crying, men and women marrying, dreamily staring into space, dancing or fighting – including work by Dorothea Lange, Bill Brandt and Elliott Erwitt – are beautiful or intriguing. Others appear more as historic documents, such as the photo of crowds gathered in London for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip's wedding in 1947, or the image by Henri Cartier-Bresson of Gandhi lying in state in Delhi after his assassination in 1948.
Sections of the show are now dated and gendered, and there is no doubt that the main worldview being expounded was white, western and male. One theme, "household and office work", shows only women cooking and cleaning, while the predominance of the nuclear family in many photographs, themes and arrangements feels reactionary and simplistic (as if the family could conquer all – even issues such as racism or social inequality).
For Reitz, such criticisms are founded, but are "part of the history of the exhibition". The Family of Man is very much a product of its time and its creator, she says. As a contemporary viewer, it is hard to appreciate quite what an impact this anthropological photographic survey must have had, nearrly 60 years ago, when viewed in places as culturally diverse as Indonesia, Russia, Japan, Italy and Laos. "For many people, it was like seeing the world for the first time," says Reitz. "A lot of them didn't have TVs or access to magazines."
The Family of Man has stood the test of time because of how innovative Steichen was as a curator. He displayed photos without frames and blew them up into lifesize formats; he took images away from museum walls and into the centre of rooms where visitors could interact with them. Not long before dying, Steichen said: "The function and mission of photography is to explain man to man and man to himself." That is the reason The Family of Man continues to capture our imaginations. | The Family of Man, a groundbreaking post-war exhibition seen by more than 10 million people, can be seen once more | 32.916667 | 0.833333 | 2.5 | medium | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2014/04/24/other-woman-you-girl-but-where-exactly/xRxRhDwr1Te5m0t8WIibxJ/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140425022447id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2014/04/24/other-woman-you-girl-but-where-exactly/xRxRhDwr1Te5m0t8WIibxJ/story.html | In 'Other Woman,' you go, girl | 20140425022447 | ‘The Other Woman” is one of those loud, cringe-y female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women. It’s about a trio of heroines who free themselves from their three-timing man by obsessing about him constantly and plotting revenge with laxatives in his cocktails and Nair in his shampoo. That the object of their ire is a stick-figure cad will probably add to the movie’s success: Audiences up for an evening of brain-dead entertainment can fill in the blank with whichever man they’re mad at. Better they should get mad at the movie, which paints women as dingbats, dummies, and scolds incapable of drawing a breath without a guy to validate them.
Granted, one of the characters, Carly Whitten (Cameron Diaz), is a power-lawyer of some kind — the camera keeps cutting to her firm’s nameplate — but we never see her do any work. She’s used to playing the field but as she explains to her secretary (pop-rapper Nicky Minaj, having some fun in the sarcastic-best-friend role), her hot and heavy romance with Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has Carly convinced she has found the one.
Unfortunately, Mark has found two, or maybe more. Trying to surprise him at his suburban home, Carly meets his wife, Kate (Leslie Mann), whose emotions are as needy and splattery as Carly’s are controlled. Against all odds of logic or sanity, these two become best gal-pals, and when it’s revealed that Mark has yet another girlfriend, the bodacious young Amber (supermodel Kate Upton, looking awed to be in an actual movie with actual actors), Carly and Kate invite her into the wrecking crew.
It’s “The First Wives Club” rewritten for younger, less demanding audiences, or a “9 to 5” with absolutely nothing at stake. Coster-Waldau, who nuances the complexities of Jaime Lannister on “Game of Thrones,” doesn’t even get a part to play, since Mark is a generic smoothie who’s hardly worth the trouble. “The Other Woman” exists mostly to let steely Diaz and ditsy Mann go up against each other in labored slapstick drunk scenes, catfights, and boilerplate you-go-girl speechifying. Some of their revenge tactics have promise, like the female hormones Kate puts in Mark’s juice until he starts to grow breasts, but the movie quickly backs off from that before things get interestingly weird. Meanwhile Kate has a giant Great Dane she brings everywhere. It takes a poo on Carly’s floor. After a while, you feel like the movie’s taking a poo on your head.
For all the talk of independence and presence of Cyndi Lauper oldies on the soundtrack, “The Other Woman” seems terrified of sending its characters out on their own. Kate has a dreamy, sensitive construction worker brother (Taylor Kinney) to romance Carly, and Carly’s dad (Don Johnson) is an old horndog with eyes for Amber. The scene in which he takes them all to a restaurant where sultry Chinese waitresses massage their backs and feed them by hand will be hard to beat as the creepiest movie moment of 2014.
Yeah, a woman wrote it: Melissa Stack, whose unproduced script “I Want to [Expletive] Your Sister” was on the film industry’s must-read Black List back in 2007. And a woman produced it: Julie Yorn, who gave us the equally mean-spirited “Bride Wars.” What on earth do these two have against their own gender? It’s as though they conspired to come up with a movie specifically designed to flunk the Bechdel Test: 109 minutes in which the women do nothing but talk about a man.
For what it’s worth, a man directed: Nick Cassavetes, whose late father, John, made with Nick’s mother, actress Gena Rowlands, 1974’s “A Woman Under the Influence,” still one of the most devastating accounts of the pressures a woman, wife, and mother contends with. “The Other Woman,” by contrast, wants to be light comic entertainment — nothing wrong with that in theory but a humiliation for all concerned in the playing. You wish Cassavetes had figured out a way to write his mother in, as a voice of hard-won experience. Except then the story would implode from its own contradictions. Forget “The Other Woman” — find another movie. | “The Other Woman” is one of those female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women. | 34.92 | 1 | 11.88 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/naya-rivera-glee-controversy | http://web.archive.org/web/20140502235002id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/naya-rivera-glee-controversy | Naya Rivera Denies Glee Fired Her Amid Rumors of Bad Behavior | 20140502235002 | 04/30/2014 at 01:30 PM EDT
's Naya Rivera singing the blues?
Just a couple weeks after her
, the actress, 27, reportedly is in trouble with producers of the hit show over her behavior on set.
But despite a flurry of rumors that include everything from a nasty feud with star
to a meltdown that got her written off the remaining shows, her rep says the actress remains gainfully employed.
"Rumors that Naya was let go or fired are false," her rep tells PEOPLE.
source also denies a clash with Michele. "There was no feud with Lea – that was made up," says the source.
And the reports certainly haven't stopped Rivera from expressing her love for the show.
A rep for 20th Century Fox has "no comment."
Big Sean And Naya Rivera End Engagement | "Any reports or rumors circulating that Naya Rivera was let go or fired from Glee are absolutely untrue. End of story," her rep says | 5.892857 | 0.785714 | 2 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/04/26/the-finest-victorian-was-not-fine-after-all/ZtLeGzAJXiPfsSt0x2djqL/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140504055811id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/04/26/the-finest-victorian-was-not-fine-after-all/ZtLeGzAJXiPfsSt0x2djqL/story.html | ‘The finest Victorian’ was not so fine after all | 20140504055811 | “The finest Victorian on the North Shore” is how we remember the 1983 Globe ad that described a 20th-century, shingle-style house in Wakefield. Hyperbole aside, the price, features, and location were exactly what Jim and I were looking for in our first house. We made an appointment.
From the foyer we could see the dining room with its leaded glass, built-in mahogany china cabinet, and fireplace. We were so smitten that we could almost ignore the room’s hideous foil wallpaper covered with bamboo trees. And so smitten that when the broker wouldn’t show us a locked room on the second floor, it wasn’t a deal breaker. The story went that the owner hid his collection of nude paintings in the room while the house was on the market. (After we passed papers we saw the room without any paintings, but with its ugly paneling, uglier carpet, and a ceiling with more cracks than the San Andreas Fault.)
Our offer was accepted, and the bank appraiser came to look at this finest Victorian on the North Shore. Then his foot went through the floorboards on the backyard deck. Yet we still got our mortgage.
Ah, the quiet suburbs. We looked forward to trading South End sirens for chirping birds, but soon found out that our corner was a shortcut to Route 128. One Easter morning we woke up and saw that a car had careened across our front lawn, landing under our bedroom window.
The house came with a handmade, cinder block, in-ground pool that one contractor called “a hole in the ground.” The pool at the finest Victorian on the North Shore attracted slugs, squirrels, and a barking dog that fell into the giant hole and couldn’t get out. We filled in the pool.
In the winter, the kitchen became so cold we defrosted meat near the dining room radiator while we were at work. When Jim’s family visited for Christmas, his brother’s wife arrived with a portable heater, and Jim’s sister from Kentucky made a grand entrance down the stairs in her floor-length, warm, pink bathrobe . . . and pearls.
We eventually had the house insulated by a contractor who made our original bead-board porch ceiling look like it had been riddled with bullet holes. His solution to our chill was to drill holes in the ceiling, blow in insulation, and plug the holes with wooden disks that took about 15 years to blend in. (Hello, small claims court.) The good news was that frozen meat — and relatives — no longer stayed frozen.
We had many wonderful neighbors during our 27 years in Wakefield, but there were a few pips. I wouldn’t wish one couple on my worst enemy. This duo had the assumption that they knew what was best for their property, and for everyone else’s. They recommended a contractor for our bathroom renovation, and when we later mentioned the ensuing disaster, they casually admitted he was terrible. Years later, my husband noticed that a piece of granite from our property was used for our neighbor’s landscape project. He explained that the granite was originally part of his property, but he didn’t want it, so years ago he threw it onto what became our property. He was simply reclaiming it.
The final encounter was a few years ago when we put our house and an attached buildable lot on the market. We voluntarily met with neighbors to show them a drawing of our proposed division (except the granite poachers, who declined). Except they showed up at the Board of Appeals meeting with a posse of folks and went on a tirade. The moderator explained to them that we didn’t need permission to sell the lot.
Our finest Victorian on the North Shore is now home to a lovely family that is making it their finest. We wish them no rotten floorboards, no cold rooms, and lots of warm neighbors. | We were so smitten that we could almost ignore the room’s hideous foil wallpaper... and a multitude of other problems. | 33.391304 | 0.782609 | 6.695652 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2001/may/31/art.artsfeatures | http://web.archive.org/web/20140509171344id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2001/may/31/art.artsfeatures | I'm a Stranger Here Myself | 20140509171344 | The title may allude to the trauma of otherness, but no such linking theme unites the work of the 15 artists in this exhibition. Instead, only the loosest of connections - each has made use of the gallery's technical resources, having responded to an open invitation - shapes the show, a rather sprawling affair with few highlights.
Most affecting is Nicky Bird's project that takes inspiration from portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron. Using relatives of the original sitters and retaking the photographs in the same sites, this is an eerie updating of Cameron's vision. Best of all, the two sets of images, Cameron's and Bird's, are encased in green archive boxes, to be handled only with the soft white gloves provided. The ghostly connections that link them are teased out rather than thrown away by side-by-side displays on the gallery walls.
Paul Gray's equally intriguing Sandblast Prototype is more epic in scale, with the artist leaving a piece of glass in the Sahara to be gradually turned opaque by a sandstorm. Beagles & Ramsay continue their antics with a box of tricks that includes miniature doll versions of the artists, packets of meat seasoning, cutlery and a plastic donkey.
This display offers the exhibition's best gags, making a joke of the it'll-do-for-the-group-show feeling that pervades too much work here. Angus Hood shows two series of slick digital prints, all saturated colour and glossy allure, alongside blocks of wood painted in the same range of shades that feature in the prints. It is seductive work, but almost identical to the exhibits he showed two years ago at Edinburgh College of Art.
Other work feels just as familiar even if you haven't see it before. There's a fatigue about the whole show, not helped by blank video monitors and, in one case, work peeling off the walls. Most worrying of all, it never makes the viewer feel a stranger here themselves: too little disrupts expectation, startles or unnerves.
Until June 16. Details: 0131-622 6200. | Stills Gallery, Edinburgh Rating: ** | 44.666667 | 0.444444 | 0.444444 | high | low | abstractive |
http://time.com/102575/nigerian-president-abducted-girls/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140517114526id_/http://time.com/102575/nigerian-president-abducted-girls/ | Nigerian President Cancels Trip to Town Where Girls Abducted | 20140517114526 | Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan canceled a planned visit Friday to the town where more than 200 schoolgirls were abducted last month by Islamist militant group Boko Haram. Jonathan cited security concerns after news of the trip leaked to the media.
The route from the capital of Abuja to the town of Chibok would have taken Jonathan’s convoy through disputed and dangerous territory, the Associated Press reports.
Reports of disgruntled under-fed and outgunned Nigerian troops have stoked fears of mutiny. The AP reports that soldiers have told the news service some in their ranks fight alongside Boko Haram.
This year alone, 1,500 civilians have been killed amid fighting between government soldiers and insurgents from the country’s Muslim north. The trip would have been a first for Jonathan, a southern Christian who has been accused of not doing enough for the country’s violence-wracked and predominantly Muslim north. | It would have been the president’s first visit to the traumatized town | 12.692308 | 0.846154 | 1.461538 | low | medium | abstractive |
http://time.com/104765/quinnipiac-university-graduation-bomb-threat/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140519151923id_/http://time.com/104765/quinnipiac-university-graduation-bomb-threat/ | Quinnipiac University Student Calls Bomb Threat to Cancel Graduation | 20140519151923 | A 22-year-old woman who failed to mention to her parents that she’d dropped out of Quinnipiac University did what many of us would do: she panicked. Then, she called in two bomb threats Sunday to try and cancel the university’s commencement ceremonies, the Associated Press reports.
Danielle Shea had not been attending the school all year, but her mother had been sending her thousands of dollars to fund her education. About 20 minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, police say Shea called the university’s public safety department to report a “bomb in the library.” Then she called again to say, “Several bombs are on campus,” adding, “You haven’t cleared out graduation. That’s not a good idea.”
Police soon managed to trace the calls back to Shea, who has been charged with first degree threatening and falsely reporting an incident. She is being held on $20,000 bond and is scheduled for a May 30 court appearance.
The university’s College of Arts and Sciences commencement ceremony was delayed for an hour and a half as a result of the bomb threats.
Further proof that honesty — probably not bomb threats — is the best policy. | Danielle Shea hadn't actually attended Quinnipiac University all year | 23.3 | 0.7 | 1.7 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/19/art | http://web.archive.org/web/20140524070018id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/19/art | The colour code | Artanddesign | The Guardian | 20140524070018 | Paul Jenkins, aged 82 and now working with acrylic on very large canvasses, has outlived many of his close friends and colleagues, including De Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner and Michaux. All of them treated Jenkins as a peer and equal, yet he has not so far achieved comparable fame or market status. I doubt if this worries him, for he will surely know that recognition, which cannot be quantified into dollars or a number of entrance tickets, is something different. Nevertheless, I can't help wondering why.
It may be because his work makes fewer references than that of his friends to the history of European painting. He is not so much a rebel artist as a foreign one. And this could mean that institutional acceptance takes longer. In any case, the proletarian city of Lille is currently offering him a magnificent exhibition in its Palais des Beaux Arts. The Redfern Gallery in London is also holding a show of his work.
Why do I say foreign? In the immense entrance hall to the Palais, four 10-metre high canvases are hanging. They are as tall and vertical as the architectural columns. Each one is an articulated presence, twisting upon itself, rising up as if it had limbs although its limbs are neither human nor animal. Impossible to think of them as abstract - a European art-historical term. These presences are totemic. You look up at each one and feel how in that thin hanging strip a specific place is towering above you. The places are silent, knowing that their colours are strident and can speak for themselves.
Downstairs are 50 more of Jenkins' paintings, hung on black walls and artificially lit. One watches them; one doesn't look at them. (Maybe this is why all his titles include the word phenomena.) One watches them as one watches flames flickering at night in a fire, which abruptly stops for an instant (an aeon) and then imperturbably continues. And here it becomes even more evident how closely his work is linked to Native American beliefs, secrets and vision.
The so-called "non-figurative" canvases are full of a nomadic sense of place. They present real forms that simply have no address, and which can't be given a sedentary name. This is how they are foreign. For example, a large four-metre long painting entitled Phenomena Astral Tundra. It is divided into two halves; on the right hang "folds" such as cloth or canvas make with a tent; and on the left extend distant, endless folds of land. In both halves the colours are of the same family, or, if you wish, have the same inheritance. Colours are the essence of his work. Not as a means to an end - although he is a master at handling paint - but as protagonists, agents, within what he paints.
What do they look like, these colours? If considered alone, each colour is strong, decisive (no gradation for doubts, no tentativeness) yet at the same time never crude. Each one is a colour that carries far, the opposite of intimate. When seen together (and his paintings are about their encounters) they acquire the special lustre - or what I would prefer to call the "speed" - of synthetic colours, like polyester or epoxy resins. Go to the back of any large supermarket, where the damaged, perished goods and their ripped packaging have been dumped for collection, and you will find the palette of colours from which Jenkins works to make something utterly different; hydrocarbonate colours that didn't exist before the late petroleum age.
Maybe we are now approaching the originality of his achievement. On the one hand he is inspired by the vision of the indigenous nomadic peoples of North America, and on the other he finds and uses colours and colour-combinations that belong to the age of modern plastics. Thus he steps over - which doesn't mean to say he's ignorant of - the four centuries of white art that separate these two periods. And this allows his very act of painting to play with and refer to other more intuitive, less cartesian branches of knowledge and perception.
In a painting such as Phenomena Navigator to the Four Winds, the colours - the protagonists - inherit a knowledge of plants that has nothing to do with the botany of Linnaeus, a knowledge of water close to the knowledge of beavers, a reaction to air such as is traced on the surface of waters, or an awareness of redness that can immediately distinguish without any explanation between danger, pain, desire and strength.
It's worth noticing here that there may be a parallel between Jenkins' development as a painter and some ongoing global political initiatives. In the face of the destruction of the planet under the tyranny of profit, many people are associating themselves with threatened indigenous peoples and with their earlier experience of surviving and maintaining a dialogue with nature, and these initiatives are made more possible thanks to the latest communication technology. There's a similar leap over the same four centuries. Paul Jenkins' work of the past 20 years is probably prophetic.
Yet this is not its secret. Return to his unique use of colour. He often refers to the prism because it demonstrates scientifically how colours are born not in, but from, light. And light is the precondition for life. So, as a painter, he treats colours as if they were the heralds of life. Painting with them, he imagines them at the moment when, for the first time, they are being reflected from a substance, when their accommodation (as it were) is far from sure, for nothing, not even them, has yet been named.
At such a moment colours are messages for what is about to begin, like the messages of a DNA code. And it is the colours that promise a continuity from mineral to vegetable to animal to soulful. One looks at his painted blues, reds, greens, blacks, yellows and they persuade us that they are our earliest ancestors. This is the secret of his work · Paul Jenkins: Major Works is at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille (33 3 20 06 78 00), until November 20, and the Redfern Gallery, London W1 (020-7734 1732), from October 25 until November 24. | Rothko, Pollock and De Kooning regarded him as their equal. So why isn't Paul Jenkins' work celebrated? By John Berger. | 47.346154 | 0.846154 | 1.692308 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/maya-angelou-bill-clinton-inaugural-poem | http://web.archive.org/web/20140531233911id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/maya-angelou-bill-clinton-inaugural-poem | Maya Angelou Recites 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Clinton Inauguration : People.com | 20140531233911 | . Angelou had an incredibly varied life and career – aside from her autobiographical writing and poetry, she worked as a journalist in Egypt and Ghana, and at one point was a cast member in a touring production of the opera
In 1993, already well known as a poet and autobiographer,
was selected to read a poem at President Bill Clinton's first inaugural address. She was the first poet to read at an inauguration since Robert Frost read for JFK's 1961 ceremony, and both the first African-American and woman to read.
Angelou wrote the poem, "On the Pulse of Morning,"
: She rented a hotel room, shut herself in from early morning to afternoon, and wrote on legal pads.
, Mary Jane Lupton said that "Angelou's ultimate greatness will be attributed" to "On the Pulse of Morning." Angelou's moving recitation of the poem – aided by her background in theater – introduced her work to a whole new swath of Americans:
Watch the full video of Angelou reciting "On the Pulse of Morning" above, and read the full text of the poem below.
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no more hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
The River sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
Today, the first and last of every Tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers – desperate for gain,
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot ...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree I am yours – your Passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Each new hour holds new chances
Do not be wedded forever
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country | Sales of Angelou's poetry jumped 600 percent following her recitation | 90.727273 | 0.545455 | 0.727273 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/colin-davidson-jerusalem-portraits-dublin | http://web.archive.org/web/20140621035922id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/colin-davidson-jerusalem-portraits-dublin | Cohabiting with conflict: Colin Davidson's 12 faces of Jerusalem | 20140621035922 | Jerusalem: the word rings like a gong. This divided city has been coveted by worldly powers for millennia – and by the three Abrahamic faiths, whose great shrines nestle inside the Old City like antagonistic magnets. Modern west Jerusalem is a sprawling metropolis. East Jerusalem, home to those shrines and most of the city's 350,000 Palestinian Arabs, is occupied territory under international law, claimed by the Palestinians as their capital, yet patrolled by heavily armed Israeli soldiers. Slicing through it is the separation wall, which physically excludes an estimated 55,000 Palestinians from the city centre.
It seems an extraordinary place from which to distil a hope in common humanity, yet this is the appeal behind an ambitious collaboration between Belfast artist Colin Davidson and his Dublin gallerist, Oliver Sears, who travelled through the city to portray a biblical total of 12 Jerusalemites.
Davidson, born in 1968 into a Protestant community in south Belfast, is a genial if cautious presence, president of the Royal Ulster Academy since 2012. He has painted many fine bird's-eye views of Belfast (occasionally featuring its peace wall, which weaves along sectarian interfaces), before embarking on his award-winning monumental portraits of friends, musicians, actors and writers such as Seamus Heaney. In 2012, his show at Belfast's Lyric theatre became the backdrop for the first private handshake between the Queen and Martin McGuinness, after which Davidson talked the unlikely couple around his exhibition.
Sears, meanwhile, lost a grandfather and countless members of his extended family to the Holocaust. His mother, who was flung from a train bound for Auschwitz in 1943, has published a peculiarly enchanted child's memoir of those days, and Sears himself has written many haunting vignettes of his family history.
Davidson is a gifted and accomplished painter: sharply realist, quite academic, yet highly expressive. There is a rough-hewn psychology to his likenesses – not a million miles from Lucian Freud, with their often flayed, anatomical look.
Here, Sears and Davidson shy away from politics or stated history: each painting is titled only by the sitter's first name. In a catalogue essay, Philippe Sands QC, the international human-rights lawyer, frames the principle in terms of the United Nations Charter of April 1945, which affirmed "the dignity and worth of the human person". But the sitters' identities are no secret, and under the surface their political views crackle. One, a devout peacenik, almost pulled out once he learned of the involvement of the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat. Another, German-born Robert Aumann, a maths professor at the Hebrew University, bagged the 2005 Nobel prize in economics for his work on game theory, which models situations involving competing interests and has been applied to conflicts ranging from segregated populations to wars of attrition. Linking Aumann's work to his hawkish attitude towards Palestinians, 1,000 academics worldwide, including many Israelis, signed a petition protesting against his prize. Aumann appears here as a rueful Methuselah; it's chastening to realise he lost a son in the 1982 Israeli invasion of south Lebanon.
Other subjects are Arabs: the wistful melancholy of Samer, a hotel worker; or the aristocratic fugue of Halima, a doctor. There are Christians, long drawn to the streets trodden by Jesus's feet: the charmed serenity of Veronica, a young Catholic doctor from Costa Rica; Joyce, an Armenian evangelical looking skyward as though beholding a vision; and the abbot of the Dormition monastery on Mount Zion, Gregory Collins, coincidentally from Belfast's Falls Road.
Shadows of history flicker across other Israeli portraits: the radiant moon-face of Lia van Leer, a nonagenarian giant of Israeli cinema, evacuated to Palestine in 1940, her family later extinguished in a Transnistrian concentration camp; or the dignified Uri Orlev, a children's author, some of whose books relate in compelling simplicity a child's experience of Nazi-occupied Europe. After escaping the Warsaw ghetto, he and his brother endured two years in Bergen-Belsen until its liberation in April 1945.
Orlev's wife Ya'ara now works with the charity Checkpoint, bringing Palestinians across border posts to Israeli hospitals, while another sitter, anaesthetist Yael Stein, works with Arab charities helping Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, Amiram Goldblum, a professor and drug designer at the Hebrew University, was a longtime Peace Now spokesman against illegal Israeli settlements, and still campaigns against apartheid tendencies in Israeli policy. He made the commitment as a platoon commander during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, looking up into the faces of Libyan fighter pilots as they strafed his position in the Sinai.
Across the separation barrier at the Arab Al-Quds University, Amiram's former student and co-worker, Palestinian chemist Yousef Najajreh, is dean of scientific research. Born just before the 1967 war, he has seen the mushrooming of a broad belt of settlements ringing east Jerusalem, and eating into the West Bank where he lives in Beit Jala. His own house has been hit by stray bullets in nightly firefights with the nearby settlement of Gilo. Despite his collaborations with Israeli scientists, Najajreh has no permit to drive into Jerusalem, and on his daily bus journeys he faces the vexations experienced by most Palestinians: stopped on sight at overcrowded Israel Defense Forces checkpoints and barrier crossings, and subjected to endless ID checks, searches and body scans.
While Najajreh aches for recognition of his scientific work, he says he was moved to be included in this exhibition "because my life is associated with Jerusalem. This is among the few situations where people of different nationalities, religions, affiliations are treated as equal: young equal to old, females to male, Jews, Christians and Muslims, occupied and occupier, Israelis and Palestinians." However, he adds, "In a way, it is just an illusory scene. None of us is really equal. Behind this equality, there is a lot of conflicted history and geography."
• Jerusalem is at the Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, until 26 June. | From a Christian monk to an Arab hotel worker to a Holocaust survivor, this exhibition of portraiture highlights the diversity of Jerusalem's residents, writes Mic Moroney | 39.896552 | 0.655172 | 0.931034 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/futuresport/201406/fifa-world-cup-twitter-hashtag-hashflag-cameroon-spain-belgium-nigeria-japan | http://web.archive.org/web/20140622024817id_/http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/futuresport/201406/fifa-world-cup-twitter-hashtag-hashflag-cameroon-spain-belgium-nigeria-japan | Why World Cup Hashflags For Some Nations Aren't Displaying On Twitter | 20140622024817 | If you have been on Twitter in the past week, you have probably seen a lot of flags. You may recognize this has to do with the World Cup, but you may wonder how everyone got the memo to post flags. Are they just emojis that are becoming a trend?
Nope. It is all Twitter. Before the World Cup, Twitter reintroduced hashflags, a social media attribute applied during the 2010 World Cup. Every time, a Twitter user types in a three-letter hashtag affiliated with the nation of choice, the flag pops up along with it. The three-letter hashtags are the FIFA abbreviations of the countries.
That will all mean something soon. Bear with me.
— Jeffrey Eisenband (@JeffEisenband) June 20, 2014
Unless the hashtag is used with the exact three letter, the flag does does not appear. Qasim Zaib of TechEclipse displayed the result of such an error in a series of tweets he made regarding hashflags.
The code #BEH did not trigger a hashflag. The hashflag code for Belgium (missing nation in Group H) is #BEL.
This is far from the only example of a wrong hashtag. More than a week into the World Cup, social media users are unknowingly leaving themselves empty-handed.
Belgium is not one of the common hashflags mistaken. According to Twitter data published on The Wall Street Journal, Cameroon is the most commonly missed hashflag, with 13.8 percent of hashtag attempters punching in the wrong hashtag. While the correct hashtag is #CMR, the most common wrong hashtag is #CAM.
Following Cameroon is Nigeria (#NGA) with 7.2 percent using the incorrect hashtag #NIG. Bosnia and Herzegovina (#BIH) is a near third with 6.3 percent going with #BOS.
Rounding out the top seven missed hashflags are Japan/#JPN (incorrect: #JAP, 4.6 percent), Spain/#ESP (incorrect: #SPA, 4.3 percent), Iran/#IRN (incorrect: #IRA, 3.5 percent) and Switzerland/#SUI (incorrect: #SWI, 3.2 percent).
If it is any consolation prize for Spain getting eliminated from the World Cup, the incorrect hashtag percentage should lower. This summer may feel a little different than the two Euro Championships and One World Cup Championship won in the past six years.
-- Follow Jeffrey Eisenband on Twitter @JeffEisenband.
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VIDEO OF THE DAY:How UFC Added Bruce Lee To Video Game | If you have been on Twitter in the past week, you have probably seen a lot of flags. You may recognize this has to do with the World Cup, but you may ... | 13.472222 | 0.972222 | 34.027778 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/marlins-boy-fan-dance-vine | http://web.archive.org/web/20140629223504id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/marlins-boy-fan-dance-vine | Vine of Kid Going Crazy at Miami Marlins Game : People.com | 20140629223504 | UPDATED 06/27/2014 at 08:30 PM EDT • Originally published 06/27/2014 at 05:15 PM EDT
Summer is here! Can you feel it? This little boy certainly can.
bestowed upon the world an extra special gift when she posted the clip below. In the midst of scanning a recent Miami Marlins baseball game she found this particularly excited fan. Riled up by America's favorite pastime and the chance to be on television, this rambunctious child doesn't hold back.
Once he sees himself on the big screen, he goes from relaxed to shirt-raising berserk in just under 5 seconds. There's screaming, chest-pounding, hip shaking and enough enthusiasm to make anyone smile.
The Vine became so popular that
from the Marlins's fan cam. Which leaves us with one question: Why hasn't this child been promoted to the Marlins's bat boy or mascot yet?
The young fan hands over what appears to be a foul ball | Probably not | 91 | 0 | 0 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/06/23/nurses-union-airs-that-attacks-hospital-chief-executives/7QirSMK4tKg6N9UpMip5YI/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140704184009id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/06/23/nurses-union-airs-that-attacks-hospital-chief-executives/7QirSMK4tKg6N9UpMip5YI/story.html | Nurses union airs ad that attacks hospital chief executives | 20140704184009 | The Massachusetts Nurses Association, a union with 23,000 members, said Monday that it is airing a TV ad that shows two hospital chief executives “clicking glasses of champagne on a beach in the Cayman Islands and enjoying a lavish taxpayer subsidized lifestyle.”
The Massachusetts Hospital Association, a hospital industry trade group, countered that the ad is “misleading and irresponsible.”
The nurses union described the ad in a press release.
“The voiceover describes the billion dollars in profits Massachusetts hospitals enjoy, the millions in tax dollars they receive (more than 50 percent comes from taxpayer-funded government sources), the exorbitant salaries they pay their CEOs, and the refusal by hospitals to disclose how much money they store in the Caymans or how they spend the millions of tax dollars they’re given each year,” the union said.
The ad campaign, which includes a radio component, is intended to urge legislators to pass the Hospital Profit Transparency and Fairness Act. The bill would require that hospitals receiving tax dollars disclose in a timely and fully transparent manner how large their profit margins are, how much money they hold in offshore accounts, and how much compensation they pay their chief executives. If the measure does not pass by July 2, the association said it will move to have the proposal appear as a ballot measure this November.
In addressing the claims made in the ad, the Massachusetts Hospital Association noted that many large hospitals use offshore entities for self-insurance purposes.
In an e-mailed statement, the Massachusetts Hospital Association described the nurses association as “a union that represents a minority of registered nurses.”
The association “has aired misleading and irresponsible advertising concerning how hospitals in Massachusetts purchase medical malpractice and general liability insurance,” the Massachusetts Hospital Association said. “The advertising does a disservice to those who lead hospitals, to nurses, physicians, and others who benefit from the cost efficient use of health care resources, and to those interested in responsible public policies.” | A nurses union is airing a TV ad that shows two hospital chief executives “enjoying a lavish taxpayer subsidized lifestyle.” | 16.73913 | 1 | 9.26087 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/06/28/greenfield-sense-uncertainty-accompanies-growing-optimism/15wrqffTOMLBXfxVgU5s1M/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140708053623id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/06/28/greenfield-sense-uncertainty-accompanies-growing-optimism/15wrqffTOMLBXfxVgU5s1M/story.html | In Greenfield, a sense of uncertainty accompanies growing optimism | 20140708053623 | GREENFIELD — Two years after opening her shop in the downtown of this Western Massachusetts city, Stella Corso is making ends meet. Tourists and locals have found their way to the Pale Circus to peruse its eclectic offerings of vintage clothing and locally designed jewelry.
But every once in a while, Corso catches a glimpse of the “For Rent” signs in the vacant storefronts across the street, a reminder of the uncertainty always at hand in this part of the state. As an insurance policy, she recently took a second job bartending at night at a downtown pub.
Corso in many ways captures the outlook of this city of about 18,000, one that is increasingly optimistic as the economy continues its slow improvement, but also aware that bad times might not be far off. Like many communities that once depended on manufacturing, Greenfield has struggled for decades with an eroding economic base, as its tap and die industry — the manufacture of nuts, bolts, and other threaded machine parts — faded from prominence. The impact of the recession was felt keenly, driving many of the remaining manufacturers to slice their workforces or shut downaltogether.
Those effects still linger five years later. Median household income in the city, at just over $48,000, remains well below the statewide median of $67,000, according to the Census. The percentage of households in Greenfield using food stamp benefits is nearly twice the statewide rate.
Demand at the local food pantry has not diminished since the recession started, and the number of households requesting fuel assistance has remained generally steady, said Clare Higgins, executive director of social services agency Community Action of the Franklin, Hampshire, and North Quabbin Regions.
“I would say that the recovery hasn’t reached people who live with low income,” she said.
But many residents, civic leaders, and business owners sense the economy has turned around.
Unemployment, which peaked above 9 percent during the recession, has fallen to just over 5 percent, below the Massachusetts average, according to state data. Home prices have rebounded and at the end of last year were just 7 percent below the pre-recession peak, according to the Warren Group, a real estate tracking firm in Boston.
Manufacturers that survived the downturn are hiring again. Greenfield Community College and local technical schools are working with companies to train workers in the math and machine operation skills needed in modern precision manufacturing.
For much of the past few years, every job opening would attract 20 qualified applicants, making it hard for even experienced workers to find employment, said Patricia Crosby, executive director of the Franklin Hampshire Regional Employment Board, the area’s workforce development agency. But earlier this year, she noticed a shift.
More clients were receiving not just one, but multiple job offers, and more job postings sought permanent rather than temporary workers.
“If you’d asked me six months ago, I would say we’ve seen no sign the recession has ended,” Crosby said. “Then, things started to feel better.”
In January, the city released a plan to revitalize vacant commercial buildings, lend money to growing businesses, and market the area as a tourism and recreation destination. The strategy calls for shaping Greenfield’s picturesque brick-and-stone downtown into a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood that includes a variety of businesses and market-rate rental housing.
Also driving optimism is a plan for restored train service to Greenfield, making the city more easily accessible and bolstering its tourism efforts. The project, partially funded by federal stimulus money, will connect southern Vermont to New York through Greenfield and Springfield. Construction has already begun.
About 30 businesses, including restaurants, bars, boutiques, and music stores, have opened in the downtown since the economic downturn was at its worst.
Scott Seward opened his used record shop, John Doe Jr., in 2009 and said his business has increased steadily since then.
He added that he’s noticed a distinct change in the downtown vibe over the past five years as more young people — the core of his customer base — have moved into town.
“It just feels like there’s more buzz,” he said. “There’s definitely been a turnaround.”
Jessica Rinaldi for the Boston Globe
The window of Matt Kim’s Academy of Rock reflects a downtown streetscape of Greenfield. | The outlook of this city is increasingly optimistic as the economy continues its slow improvement, but also aware that bad times might not be far off. | 29.137931 | 0.965517 | 19.103448 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/cory-monteith-death-anniversary-glee-lea-michele | http://web.archive.org/web/20140713211602id_/http://www.people.com/article/cory-monteith-death-anniversary-glee-lea-michele | Lea Michele, Glee Costars Remember Cory Monteith on Anniversary of His Death | 20140713211602 | 07/13/2014 at 04:30 PM EDT
costars are sharing memories of their friend over social media.
Monteith was found dead July 13, 2013, after
in his Vancouver hotel room. He was 31.
On Sunday, on- and off-screen girlfriend
posted photos in the late actorâs honor.
"We hold you in our hearts today, and every day we remember your smile. We will love you and miss you always," she wrote on Twitter in a message retweeted by
are all remembering Monteith through Instagram pictures and Tweets. | Monteith died of a drug overdose one year ago Sunday | 10.6 | 0.4 | 0.4 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/medal-of-honor-president-barack-obama-afganistan | http://web.archive.org/web/20140722231115id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/medal-of-honor-president-barack-obama-afganistan | Staff Sgt. Ryan M. Pitts Receives Congressional Medal of Honor : People.com | 20140722231115 | 07/21/2014 at 06:10 PM EDT
Staff Sgt. Ryan M. Pitts and President Barack Obama
Staff Sgt. Ryan M. Pitts was 17 years old when he enlisted in the Army and just 22 when, with a tourniquet on his own badly injured right leg, he found himself hurling grenade after grenade to defend his platoon in one of the bloodiest battles of
On Monday, Pitts, now 28, received the nation's highest award for military bravery, the
, as Pitts stood at attention and visibly swallowed several times, Obama detailed the young soldier's bravery in the Battle of Wanat and lauded all of the American men and women in uniform for serving with integrity, humility and courage.
"Ryan represents the very best of that tradition and we are very, very proud of him," the president said. "So God bless you, Ryan."
Pitts, who joined the Army right out of high school in Amherst, New Hampshire, was manning Observation Post Topside in the Waygal Valley of Afghanistan when, just after 4 a.m. on July 13, 2008, he and his platoon were attacked with machine gun fire, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades. Even while critically wounded, Pitts fought back with hand grenades and a machine gun until help could arrive. He is credited with keeping the base from enemy takeover.
Pitts said that, in the heat of the battle as his friends were killed around him, he didn't "dwell too much" on whether he might die, too. "It kinda went to, 'Just have to keep on fighting,' " Pitts told
, Boston's public radio station. "That's all I tried to do."
Now, six years later, Pitts says he was initially unhappy to be singled out for the medal. "Didn't really feel like I deserved it," he told
. "But time has allowed me to process it. And this was a team effort. It belongs to every man there that day and I'll accept it on behalf of the team. It's not mine."
Pitts's own shrapnel injuries to both legs and one arm were so extensive that he was not released from Walter Reed Army Medical Center until October 2009. From there, he went to college, started a new career in computer-software business development, got married and settled in Nashua, New Hampshire, with his wife, Amy, and their young son, Lucas.
Pitts said he still thinks about his nine fellow soldiers – all of them in their 20s – who died in that battle. He recites their names and titles from memory. "I've never forgotten them," he told
. "I owe it to them to enjoy my life – the gift they gave me and the rest of us." | Staff Sgt. Ryan M. Pitts accepted the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Obama for his fallen 'brothers' | 26.047619 | 0.761905 | 2.190476 | medium | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/07/21/four-years-on-dodd-frank-is-still-unfinished/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140724010600id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/07/21/four-years-on-dodd-frank-is-still-unfinished/? | Dodd Frank Anniversary: Law still missing deadlines at four years | 20140724010600 | Happy Birthday, Dodd-Frank! You’ve made it to four years, and most of the country still isn’t entirely sure what it is you do.
Monday marks the four-year anniversary of the passing of the Dodd-Frank bill, the one designed to fix the problems that led to the credit crisis late last decade.
It hasn’t exactly been a cakewalk to get here, though. According to a progress report from the law firm Davis Polk, 280 of the 398 rulemaking requirement deadlines have passed. Of those, nearly half, 127 deadlines, have been missed. Rules haven’t even been proposed in 24% of the total rulemaking requirements.
The most progress has been made in finalizing rules at the Commodities Future Trading Commission, where 50 out of 60 rules have been finalized. Things are not so good at bank regulators, or the Securities and Exchange Commission where 70 out of 135 rules, and 42 out of 95 rules, have been finalized, respectively.
Created as a result of the financial crisis of 2007-2009, Dodd-Frank was supposed to address calls for reforms on Wall Street and make sure another similar crisis doesn’t happen.
Things could get interesting again this week as the always entertaining Barney Frank (D-Mass.) will be returning to the Hill on Wednesday to testify about the law that will almost certainly be in the first paragraph of his obituary. | Bill was designed to fix the problems that led to the credit crisis late last decade. | 16.176471 | 1 | 13.352941 | medium | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2012/12/12/alexandra-lebenthal-the-new-queen-of-wall-street/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140726230409id_/http://fortune.com/2012/12/12/alexandra-lebenthal-the-new-queen-of-wall-street/ | Alexandra Lebenthal: The new queen of Wall Street | 20140726230409 | FORTUNE — The history of Wall Street is marked by the rise and disappearance of famous firms and the loss of their proud traditions. In the past two decades Salomon Brothers, E.F. Hutton, and Paine Webber, to name a few, were absorbed by megabanks that retired their names. The trend quickened in the financial crisis as the likes of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns collapsed. And just this year, Morgan Stanley ended the half-century-old Smith Barney brand.
The legendary municipal bond franchise Lebenthal & Co. suffered the same fate when Merrill Lynch bought the firm in 2005. And that appeared to be the end of the story for one of the quirkiest, most colorful brands in the annals of finance. If you’re close to middle age (or older), you may remember the parade of TV ads featuring tweedy pitchman Jim “Built-by-Bonds” Lebenthal, who for decades lectured America’s investors from landfills and subways in his clipped, staccato tone, announcing that “bonds are my babies!”
But — in a remarkable, odds-defying turn of events — Lebenthal & Co. has recently been reborn as a thriving independent firm. The CEO and principal owner is Alexandra Lebenthal, 48, Jim’s daughter and the third generation to head the firm founded by her grandparents in 1925. She’s now arguably the highest-profile woman on Wall Street. And a typically sober-suited, buttoned-up female financial executive she is not.
Lebenthal (pronounced Lay-ben-tholl) is an extraordinary networker and a fixture in the Manhattan society pages who counts as clients or mentors the likes of J.P. Morgan Chase JPM bond king Jimmy Lee, Morgan Stanley MS brokerage chief Greg Fleming, and former Oxygen Media CEO Geraldine Laybourne. Lebenthal is also the unofficial matriarch and lead recruiter for a rowdy secret society called Kappa Beta Phi, whose members make up a who’s who of the financial world. And she has assumed the family mantle as a leading spokesperson and champion of the municipal bond industry.
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As an entrepreneur, Lebenthal has overcome the financial crisis to build a money management and capital markets boutique from scratch at a time when small players have been vanishing. To do so, she has shrewdly exploited a lucrative area of opportunity on Wall Street — the trend of awarding part of the underwriting business for new issues of stocks or bonds to “diversity” businesses, including woman-owned firms.
The proof that she is good, not merely entitled, is that she’s outpacing all her rivals. Since she relaunched Lebenthal & Co. in late 2007, it has grown into the largest underwriter of both equity and corporate debt of any woman-owned firm in the U.S., handling some $1 billion in securities in 2012. For Lebenthal, that’s just the start. “The opportunities in this niche are huge, because issuers want to sell to woman-owned firms, and few have stepped up or performed well,” she says. “It’s one of the few fast-growing businesses on Wall Street, and we intend to dominate it.”
The original Lebenthal & Co. was founded 87 years ago in a two-room office on lower Broadway. Louis and Sayra Lebenthal helped democratize muni bonds, which had long been almost an exclusive province of the insurers and the rich. Louis died in 1951, but Sayra kept working until her retirement at age 93 in 1992. The 4-foot-11 Sayra was a dynamo who peered over a giant, horseshoe-shaped cherry desk that Alexandra uses to this day. She’d spend her days calling storeowners, Florida retirees, and dentists to sell $20,000 or $30,000 “odd-lot” batches of muni bonds.
Jim Lebenthal spent his early career on a quest for glamour and adventure — determined, it seemed, to escape the family business. He first worked as a Hollywood correspondent for Life magazine in the 1950s, then as a Mad Men-era Madison Avenue advertising copywriter. A wiry 137 pounds, Jim, now 84, still exudes manic energy and humor, regaling visitors with stories about being thrown off a movie set by Frank Sinatra or lunching with Humphrey Bogart.
When Lebenthal joined his parents’ firm for good in 1967, the former copywriter deployed highly creative campaigns to get the phones ringing with new orders. His ads were a study in constantly risking the ridiculous to reach the sublime. In one 30-second spot, he declared, “Munis are a cash cow.” Then he said, “I was weaned on munis, not milk,” while brandishing a bond certificate molded to the shape of a miniature cow. Later, Alexandra would star in her own TV spots.
Alexandra inherited a passion for the family business, though she would shape it to a new vision. As a student at Princeton (class of ’86), she met her future husband, Jay Diamond, in a congressional politics class. Diamond still marvels at what he calls his wife’s force of will. “Her leverage isn’t that she runs a big company, but that you don’t want to say no to her,” says Diamond, chief of research at Annaly Capital NLY , a real estate investment trust. (The couple have three children, ages 8 to 19.) She joined Lebenthal & Co. in 1988 at age 24, working as an assistant to her irascible grandmother and as a salesperson on commission. Her father handed her the reins in 1995, but six years later the family accepted a $25 million offer from brokerage firm AdVest, a unit of insurer the MONY Group.
After running her own shop, Alexandra was miserable as part of a brokerage bureaucracy. “It was as if I’d been put in a little box,” she recalls. “I was pulled away from the revenue-generating businesses I was supposed to be running, and pushed into typical ‘girlie’ roles in human resources and marketing.” In 2005, Merrill Lynch bought AdVest to expand its ranks of financial advisers. Alexandra departed the day the deal closed.
MORE: Municipal bonds: A train wreck waiting to happen
Her dream was to build a business, but on a model far different from the old family specialty of selling munis to retail customers. Alexandra wanted a much more institutional firm that managed money for wealthy families and participated in underwritings not just for munis but for all types of stocks and bonds. Her reasoning was basic: The new firm wouldn’t be dependent on large numbers of brokers vulnerable to leaving for larger players, and the capital markets arm would expand enormously with a relatively small staff, creating a highly profitable franchise.
As part of the AdVest deal, Merrill kept the rights to the Lebenthal name, even though Merrill wasn’t using it. So when Alexandra created her new firm in late 2006 she called it Alexandra & James for herself and her father. “If I couldn’t use our last name, at least I could invoke the family tradition,” she says. But she was also determined to regain the old Lebenthal & Co. brand. Her first attempts went nowhere. Then she called her friend Greg Fleming, at the time the firm’s co-president, who wasn’t even aware Merrill owned the Lebenthal brand. To her delight, he saw no reason to mothball a venerable Wall Street name. Alexandra proposed a token price of $1,000, and Merrill accepted. The check is now framed in her office.
Though she’d won back the family name, the business she’d created came nowhere near matching Lebenthal & Co.’s former glory. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, the firm had just 10 employees and had exhausted its startup capital. For months Alexandra covered salaries from her own checking account, taking extra shares in exchange.
As markets rebounded, a new crisis erupted for Lebenthal’s signature product. In a 60 Minutes interview in late 2010, Meredith Whitney, the analyst who’d gained fame by correctly predicting the rash of banking failures, forecast a big wave of defaults in the traditionally sleepy but safe muni markets. Muni bond prices tanked. Alexandra stepped in as the industry’s defender, a role once occupied by her father, who’d championed munis after New York City’s financial crisis in 1975 tarnished their image.
In interviews on CNBC and other networks, Alexandra energetically explained that most munis are backed by dedicated revenues from tolls, subway fares, and landing fees, or have first claim on all state or local taxes and hence remain safe even if states and cities encounter budget shortfalls. In time, the panic passed. Muni prices rebounded sharply in mid-to-late 2011, and have continued their strong performance.
Lebenthal stands out in the still largely male world of Wall Street by embracing — in fact, reveling in — her femininity. Her pet hobby is managing the guest lists for galas honoring New York charities, among them the Rita Hayworth Gala for the Alzheimer’s Association and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her wardrobe at such events is always couture. She loves recounting how she wore an antique Valentino dress to the New York City Ballet gala, and the great designer instantly recognized his creation, shouting, “The Patmos Ball, 1968!” Her business wardrobe consists of wild plaid suits and chunky costume jewelry, concocted to distinguish herself in a roomful of male bankers. “Accessories are my armor,” she declares.
She is not afraid to speak her mind — or to share her observations in print. Two years ago she published The Recessionistas, a satirical novel chronicling how the financial crisis had upended the lives of egomaniacal bankers and their trophy wives. The book, which sold a respectable 13,000 copies, is distinct in the chick-lit genre for having no sex scenes but providing detailed descriptions of the anatomy of such financial products as CDOs.
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A natural networker, Lebenthal has made the most of membership in the secret society Kappa Beta Phi. Established just before the 1929 crash, the Wall Street mock fraternity was for decades an all-male organization. Lebenthal was inducted in the second group to include female members, in 1990, and became the first woman to run the society a few years ago. Its roster comprises the financial power elite, from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to AIG AIG CEO Robert Benmosche. Lebenthal declines to comment on Kappa Beta Phi. But several members who spoke on background confirmed that absolutely no one mines the organization for contacts more energetically and effectively than Alexandra Lebenthal. Buyout billionaire Wilbur Ross did speak to Fortune about how he met Alexandra through Kappa Beta Phi. “I headed it a couple of years ago, and Alexandra has been instrumental in bringing in many of the best new members,” he says. Since then, “I’ve done lots of business with her,” says Ross, who regularly purchases new issues of muni bonds for his personal account from Lebenthal & Co.
Today, Lebenthal & Co. stands on two sturdy legs, just as Lebenthal envisioned. The first is asset and wealth management. The firm acts as a “multi-family” office, providing both money management and additional services to a clientele she calls “the lost affluent.” That group is composed of families and individuals with investments ranging from $2 million to $20 million. The major high-net-worth managers, such as U.S. Trust, aim for bigger numbers, especially if those rich folks want extra help with tax preparation and estate planning. Lebenthal has concocted an original approach in which the firm provides extra “concierge services” and bills for time — $95 an hour for bill paying, for example, and $450 an hour for tax work — instead of relying on asset management fees to cover the cost.
The firm offers two in-house portfolios to its clients — an equity fund and a tailored choice of muni bonds. Overall, Lebenthal & Co. oversees $500 million in its managed accounts. Running the stock portfolio is Alexandra’s brother James, known as Jimmy. He’s a quiet, analytical type who’s the antithesis of his dashing sister. A former lieutenant on nuclear submarines, Jimmy is a value-oriented manager who relishes tearing apart balance sheets. He runs a portfolio of 20 stocks of all sizes. In the difficult years since the start of 2008, his fund has returned 3% annually after fees, two points better than the S&P SPX .
The bulk of client assets is placed in the firm’s traditional specialty, munis. Each client gets a customized portfolio orchestrated by Greg Serbe, a veteran of the old Lebenthal. A main reason clients need different parcels of munis is that New York State residents, for instance, must pay state and local tax on most out-of-state issues, and hence should own mainly in-state or, even better, locally issued munis. The firm’s fees are low by industry standards: 0.5% for portfolios from $500,000 to $2 million. Once again, the results are strong. Serbe’s picks have produced annualized returns of 4.5% over the past five years, compared with 3.8% for the Barcap index of bonds of comparable ratings and maturities.
The second leg, and Alexandra’s new passion, is capital markets. Lebenthal & Co. is registered as a MWBE (for Minority and Women Owned Business Enterprise) firm with the licensing authorities in several states, including New York, New Jersey, and California. “It’s enormously helpful, and it’s our niche in the capital markets,” she says. The reason is that more and more corporate issuers of both stocks and bonds reserve a portion of their offerings (frequently as much as 5%) for diversity firms that hold the MWBE designation. Today, two-thirds of the Fortune 100, including companies like McDonald’s MCD , Kraft KFT , and AT&T T , mandate that diversity firms participate in their new issues. Traditionally, “minority firms,” typically those owned by African Americans, totally dominated the diversity universe.
But that’s changing — in part because Lebenthal & Co. is exploiting the “woman-owned” label so skillfully. In 2010, Lebenthal & Co. participated in the Treasury’s sales of its stakes in General Motors GM and AIG, deals that were co-managed by J.P. Morgan’s Jimmy Lee. The firm has also joined in a dozen debt deals managed by J.P. Morgan, including several by America’s largest issuer of fixed income, General Electric GE . It was also the sole woman-owned firm included earlier this year in the sale of real estate brokerage firm Realogy RLGY by the private equity group Apollo.
The firm appeals to issuers and investment banks for two special capabilities. First, it targets a group of investors that issuers covet but normally have problems reaching: “family offices” that manage money for America’s wealthiest clans. Since Lebenthal & Co. keeps a “Chinese wall” between its capital markets and asset management sides, it typically doesn’t sell the shares or bonds that it underwrites to its own family office clients. But Lebenthal has nurtured her relationships with other asset managers. “The issuers want diversity not just in the underwriters, but who buys the shares,” she explains. “We bring in orders from investors that never before bought GE debt, from wealthy families. That’s what differentiates us.”
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The second edge is the firm’s record of reliably placing absolutely all the shares or bonds in its allocation. For an underwriter, the most difficult part of managing an issue is making sure that the smaller firms that sell to individual investors don’t get more shares than they can sell. “The smaller firms often exaggerate the demand for the shares,” says Timothy Main, an investment banker at Evercore Partners, and an old friend of Lebenthal’s from their Princeton days. “Then they can’t sell enough shares, so their managers call a big institution and say, ‘I can get you 100,000 more shares.’ That’s a problem for an IPO.” When that happens, the big institutions doubt the quality of the deal, and the stock often falls after the opening, as the firms dump their excess shares. “Alexandra stands out because she never overestimates her demand for an offering,” says Main. “That’s the way you build a franchise on Wall Street.”
It also helps to have her endless enthusiasm. Earlier this year Lebenthal visited her old Princeton classmate Lisa Podos in San Francisco. As Lebenthal was hailing a cab, her cellphone buzzed with the news that Lebenthal & Co. had been chosen to participate in the IPO of fashion outfit Michael Kors KORS . “Alexandra starts jumping up and down and shrieking with joy,” recalls her pal. For Alexandra Lebenthal, scoring a new deal never loses its thrill.
This story is from the December 24, 2012 issue of Fortune. | Irrepressible muni bond scion Alexandra Lebenthal is building a thriving new family firm. | 234.714286 | 0.785714 | 1.357143 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/07/28/san-francisco-mayor-ive-always-felt-ashamed-of-market-st/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140729130115id_/http://fortune.com/2014/07/28/san-francisco-mayor-ive-always-felt-ashamed-of-market-st/ | San Francisco’s Mayor: ‘I’ve always felt a bit ashamed’ of Market St. | 20140729130115 | Ask San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee about Market St., particularly that gritty stretch of his city’s main thoroughfare dubbed “mid-Market,” and even he will say it needs work — a lot of work.
“I’ve always felt a bit ashamed, as a department head, as a city administrator, that Market St. wasn’t our best street — that we had to point to Embarcadero or places afar, and yet it was here that commerce largely originated with the excitement of San Francisco during the gold rush,” Mayor Lee told Fortune earlier this month.
It’s fair to say Mayor Lee knows San Francisco more than the majority of twenty-something tech employees who in recent years have flocked to the city for work. During Mayor Lee’s 25-year political career, San Francisco has become such a congested tech hub that finding a decent place to live can seem a Sisyphean task given the city’s 7 mile-by-7 mile footprint. As a result, a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood like SoMa, the epicenter of the start-up boom, costs north of $3,000 a month.
To combat San Francisco’s housing shortage, as well as rising real estate and rental prices, Mayor Lee introduced a housing plan this January. Among his goals for 2020: Streamline the bureaucratic process for building condos, protect residents from eviction, and add 30,000 new homes. Many of those new units will be too pricey for locals who don’t work at places like Twitter TWTR , Google GOOG , Facebook FB , and countless other local tech companies and start-ups. But Mayor Lee has previously said he’ll issue building permits for affordable housing more quickly and that he’s pushing for one-third of those 30,000 new units to be in the price-range of non-techies like teachers, bus drivers and small store owners.
Where Market St. is concerned, city officials have offered tax incentives to businesses like Twitter and more recently, Zendesk, a start-up that makes business software for handling customer service, which have set up shop on mid-Market. Earlier this month, Zendesk’s 360 San Francisco employees moved into their new headquarters, a six-floor, 70,000 square-foot office that cost well over $10 million to renovate, according to a commercial developer. On one hand, such rapidly growing businesses on mid-Market should go a long way to gentrifying the area, previously know for homeless encampments, drug dealing and litter.
But some residents have criticized the tax incentives aimed at cash-laden tech companies as being unfair when more cash-strapped residents and non-profits find themselves pushed out by higher rents across the Bay to Oakland or beyond. It’s a problem that has sparked a series of protests against techies over evictions, corporate buses and the rising cost of living.
Mayor Lee concedes there’s much more work to be done on that front, as well. “I think this is the right time to create even more public and private partnerships, to have more meetings between non-profits and the tech community … to introduce them and create relationships,” he explained. “As businesses and communications move faster, we need to move faster also in making those relationships and not simply just wait for them to happen.” | The city's 43rd mayor tells Fortune about ongoing gentrification efforts. | 53 | 0.5 | 0.666667 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/07/22/gay-rights-obama/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140729152430id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/07/22/gay-rights-obama/ | Can faith groups get around Obama’s gay rights order? | 20140729152430 | On Monday, President Barack Obama signed an executive order banning companies under contract with the government from discriminating against employees on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
While that seems cut-and-dry, the order is in fact chock full of ambiguity.
That uncertainty lands right at the intersection of religious freedom and government oversight—a space already charged by a June Supreme Court decision that recognized the religious right of corporations to withhold contraception insurance coverage from employees, striking down an Obamacare mandate.
Monday’s executive order prohibits federal contractors from discriminating against employees based on their sexual orientation and gender identity—a directive that will affect 24,000 companies and 28 million workers, who account for one-fifth of the nation’s workforce. The order also protects transgender federal employees from discrimination, a safeguard that’s already been extended to the government’s LGBT workers.
While President Obama has been dead set on instituting such guidelines since the 2008 campaign, the specifics of how the rules would be applied had long been up in the air. For months, faith groups have been pleading with President Obama to make a specific exemption so that religious organizations wouldn’t lose government funding if they failed to abide by the new LGBT and gender identity directive. But when the president signed the order on Monday, it lacked such an exclusion.
Gay rights advocates praised the move, while religious groups like the National Association of Evangelicals said that they “regret” it. But just because President Obama failed to officially exempt religious organizations from the executive order doesn’t mean they are bound to it.
In addition to not excusing faith groups, the executive order also didn’t touch a 2002 executive order by President George W. Bush that allows religious contractors to consider their religious beliefs in employment decisions.
On the surface, that 2002 directive seems to say that—for instance—a Catholic organization has the right to hire only workers who follow the Catholic faith. But both the Bush-era order and Monday’s order leave enough wiggle room for a religious group to discriminate against employees who identify as LGBT if that organization’s faith condemns homosexuality. Now, both sides of the debate are demanding that the administration clear up that fuzziness.
“Without clarity on how the 2002 protection will apply to this new executive order, we risk opening up the doors for litigation that leaves both LGBT Americans and religious organizations uncertain and unprotected,” said Michael Wear, who used to serve as President Obama’s liaison to the evangelical community.
Based on past gender discrimination cases, religious organizations should not be able to discriminate based on sexual orientation, says Jennifer Pizer, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, an LGBT civil rights organization. But the order is brand new, she says, so it’s uncertain how courts will interpret it. “It will be easier if [President Obama] gives internal direction to his lawyers that religious groups do not have special permission to use their religion against LGBT people,” she says.
By leaving the vagueness of the 2002 religious exemption intact, the executive order that could have closed the book on a large chunk of LGBT discrimination has merely extended the discussion even further. | An executive order that could have closed the book on a large chunk of LGBT discrimination has merely extended the debate even further. | 25.458333 | 1 | 12.833333 | medium | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/03/25/dmi-acquires-knowledgepath-for-22-million/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140729161659id_/http://fortune.com/2014/03/25/dmi-acquires-knowledgepath-for-22-million/ | DMI acquires KnowledgePath for $22 million | 20140729161659 | FORTUNE — You probably haven’t heard of DMI, but it’s likely that you’ve used one of its creations.
The Bethesda, Md.-based enterprise mobility company has developed mobile sites and apps for some of the biggest and highest-profile companies in the world, from Abercrombie & Fitch ANF and Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD to ESPN and Unilever UN . It manages mobile devices for several Fortune 500 stalwarts, including BP BP , Johnson & Johnson JNJ , and Sears. And it makes big data analytics tools and cybersecurity defenses for 40 different U.S. government agencies.
What DMI does — live in a world where stylesheets, algorithms, and logistics rule — isn’t very sexy. But the company literally has its hands in the pockets of some of business’ biggest players.
Over the last 18 months, DMI’s chief executive, Jay Sunny Bajaj, has carefully been assembling the parts needed for the company to offer a full suite of enterprise mobility services. In January, the company acquired its fifth company in that period: KnowledgePath, a Boston-based firm that focuses on integrating companies’ e-commerce storefronts with the back-end systems — financials, warehouse management, CRM, inventory, ERP — used to run the business. The purchase price was $22 million, in a mix of cash and equity.
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Of interest to DMI is KnowledgePath’s existing customer base — it serves American Eagle Outfitters AEO , Bed Bath & Beyond BBBY , Brookstone, J.C. Penney JCP , and TJX TJX , among others — and its role in what Bajaj estimates is a $31 billion mobile commerce market.
“We realized a year and a half ago that this was going to be an emerging space,” Bajaj says “We saw Sephora and Apple have global point-of-sale systems in the hands of sales people. We realized that mobile commerce and omnichannel commerce would be the way of the future. For us, [the acquisition] was not to take out a competitor but augment a capability — buy the technology and talent and add it to the suite of services and customers. It was all part of the master plan.”
KnowledgePath began in 2010 as a self-funded merger of three small consulting companies. Four years later, the company has 90 employees in offices located near Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. and about $15 million in annual revenue.
“We see more and more the need for strong mobile capabilities,” KnowledgePath CEO Marc Irish says. “Mobile is really becoming the linchpin for omnichannel commerce — you can’t really do it without it. When we talked to DMI, we thought, ‘Wow, these guys are ahead of the game. Let’s see where we plug in.’ So we went down for a visit and were immediately attracted. The ability for them to deliver strategy, user experience, big data analytics, mobile device management … all of these things are needed by our clients down the road. We had been approached over the previous year a few times. We resisted — it wasn’t a good fit, we could do a better job on our own, let’s keep going on our trajectory. But sometimes you get the call that pricks your ears up a little bit more.”
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The smaller company will remain a wholly owned subsidiary of DMI in the near future, but “over time we’ll be fully integrated,” Bajaj says. “We have 1,800 people now. We don’t have the luxury to make mistakes and play high-stakes poker; we do things for the love of the game. We’re pretty high-touch, hands on. We’re not a small business, but we still have that fabric that keeps us together. We’re making sure the companies we acquire have some commonality. You do whatever it takes to make sure you honor your commitments.”
Eric Singleton, the chief information officer for the clothing retailer Chico’s, says the move to mobile and omnichannel commerce is a major trend affecting retail companies. Chico’s, which also owns the White House Black Market brand, contracted KnowledgePath to link its Oracle ATG system with an external application it developed so that it could process transactions.
“We have meaningful continual relationships with our customer base and we’ve established a high degree of trust with them,” he says. “These apps and technologies that we’ve laid out are based on a belief that if we can be easily available and accessible throughout the day — but not invasive — than we’re accommodating the person’s daily life far more than just in the store at one moment, or a promotional e-mail. It’s an endless experience.”
One that Bajaj sees as a major opportunity.
“It’s not just about mobile devices and tablets as it is getting the end business result,” he says, before adding: “We want to be the world’s largest pure-play integrated mobile enterprise solutions company.” | Exclusive: Mobile commerce is the name of the game for DMI, the quiet giant that is carefully building an enterprise mobility empire. | 38.230769 | 0.730769 | 1.192308 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/07/30/study-finds-a-diverse-corporate-boards-rein-in-risk-good-for-shareholders/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140730100304id_/http://fortune.com/2014/07/30/study-finds-a-diverse-corporate-boards-rein-in-risk-good-for-shareholders/ | tudy finds a diverse corporate board reigns in risk, good for shareholders | 20140730100304 | A diverse corporate board isn’t just good public relations, it can be mean a bigger payoff for shareholders.
That is the finding of a study by a team of university researchers who examined the performance of more than 2,000 companies from 1998 to 2011.
The researchers found that diverse corporate board of directors – in terms of gender, race, age experience, tenure and expertise – were more likely to pay dividends to stockholders and were less prone to take risk than those boards which are more homogenous.
“We find that firms with more diverse boards are more risk averse, spending less on capital expenditure, R&D, and acquisitions, and exhibiting lower volatilities of stock returns than those with less diverse boards,” said Ya-wen Yang, an assistant professor of accounting at Wake Forest University’s business school and the study’s co-author.
The findings,which are being considered for publication in academic journals and will be presented Monday at American Accounting Association annual meeting, comes at a time when there is growing pressure for boards to diversify. Yang noted the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved rules in 2009 requiring companies to disclose in proxy statements whether and how they consider diversity in evaluating director candidates.
Clothing retailer American Apparel, for example, just named its first female board member last week. Colleen Brown, a former CEO at media firm Fisher Communications, will join American Apparel’s board following the ouster of CEO Dov Charney amid allegations of sexual harassment.
The study also adds to a growing debate on the benefits of moving away from board compromised solely of white men. Several studies have found that adding women to boards improves corporate governance. Female directors “pursue less aggressive acquisition strategies, suggesting that gender diverse boards are more risk averse,” Yang said.
“The differences between male and female executives and directors in their decision-making process can be explained by the differences in, among other things, their level of overconfidence, risk tolerance, diligence and monitoring,” according to the study.
Compared to diverse boards, homogenous boards may come to a consensus quicker and take a “let’s try it mentality,” Yang wrote. A more diverse board faces “greater challenges in communicating and accepting one shared decision,” so are likely to shy away from risks.
The study’s other co-authors are Rini Laksmana, associate professor of accounting at Kent State University, and Agus Harjoto, associate professor of finance at Pepperdine University.
When it comes to firm performance and diversity, the results are mixed. Oklahoma State’s David Carter found a correlation between the two when he and several other researchers examined all Fortune 500 firms from 1998 to 2002. But a study by Harvard University’s Frank Dobbin and several others found no linkage.
In their study, Yang and her colleagues found that firms with more diverse boards spend less on capital expenditure, research and development and acquisitions and exhibit lower volatilities in stock returns and accounting returns.
The upside is that “firms with more diverse boards are more likely to pay dividends as well as pay greater amount of dividend per share than those with less diverse boards.” But those same boards may miss out on a risky venture that could reap long-term benefits.
“One the one hand, diverse boards could reduce the level of corporate risk taking, discouraging innovative and risky projects,” Yang said. “On the other hand, if firm management is overly aggressive in its use of corporate funds for investing in risky projects, our results suggest that more diverse boards could perform better oversight of corporate risk taking than less diverse boards.” | A board that is more diverse can help a company avoid risky projects and leads to greater dividends for shareholders | 34.95 | 0.8 | 1.2 | medium | medium | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/04/22/apple-analysts-rush-to-make-last-minute-revisions-updated/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140730142826id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/04/22/apple-analysts-rush-to-make-last-minute-revisions-updated/ | Apple analysts rush to make last-minute revisions - updated | 20140730142826 | Below: Excerpts from the analysts’ notes we’ve seen today. More as they come in, newest on top.
BGC’s Colin Gillis: Jump in the fire, as any Apple good news could boost up the stock. “We are taking advantage of the weakness in AAPL shares to upgrade our rating to BUY from HOLD… We do not expect that shares of Apple return to its lifetime high of $705.07 this year, and it is possible that Apple may never again revisit those levels. Our upgrade is based on the following: 1) The company has not negatively preannounced March quarter results so we expect revenue and earnings in the guidance range provided on January 23. 2) June quarter guidance is likely to be tepid, but we believe this is already widely expected. We model 3% YoY revenue growth for the June quarter. 3) There could be upside to earnings if the company is able to produce leverage on its gross margin. Our March quarter EPS is above consensus. 4) A revamp of the iOS operating system by designer Jony Ive may drive interest in an iPhone 5S by providing a fresh look to the software even though the hardware may retain the same form factor. 5) A dividend increase may serve to draw in new investors seeking yield. 6) The smart phone market, while showing signs of slowing growth, remains one of the most lucrative markets with close to 1 billion units expected to ship in 2013. Raises price target to $550 from $500 and rating to Buy from Hold.
UBS’ Steven Milunovich: Looking past the earnings call. “Survey work by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners of 500 US-based consumers suggests some improvement in iPhone storage capacity demand, which could help ASPs in the March quarter. In addition, more respondents are replacing Android phones and the proportion of first-time smartphone buyers is healthy at about one-third. Still, the mix of iPhone 5 vs. iPhone 4/4S remains near 50/50 as confirmed by Verizon’s recent iPhone activation numbers… Although near-term fundamentals are weak, the stock is close to capitulation, in our view. Maintains $560 price target and Buy rating.
Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu: Anticipate Slight March Quarter Miss But Guidance May Not Be As Conservative as Expected. “We continue to believe AAPL will likely hit the lower-end of its guidance meaning consensus estimates may still be a little high. However, we believe expectations for the June quarter have come down adequately to reflect an inventory drawdown and pause ahead of 2H refreshes. The good news is that data points appear to be hitting a bottom… A key question many investors are asking is whether AAPL’s comment that its new guidance is more realistic than it has historically been will ring true… For the June quarter, we continue to pick up build plan cuts in our supplier checks but believe expectations have come down adequately enough. Lowers price target to $610 from $630. Maintains Buy rating.
Citi’s Glen Yeung: Miss & Lower Well Contemplated, but Delayed 5S Could Extend Weakness. “We expect Apple to report at the low-end of their range of guidance (revenue range $41B-$43B, Citi $40.5B, consensus $42.6B), reflecting softer-than-expected demand for both iPhone5 and 10” iPad. Recall on 3/6/13, we lowered our already below consensus estimates for Apple, based on indications of continuing cuts to Apple’s supply chain. And while we have seen steady EPS reductions from our peers since that time, we nonetheless expect Apple to guide 3Q13(Jun) well below current consensus. Although it is fair to say much has been built into the shares, in our view, we see little from upcoming results to warrant buying the shares: We remain in the minority by NOT recommending Apple shares.” Maintains $480 price target and Neutral rating.
BMO Capital’s Keith Bachman: Another bite out of Apple. “Based primarily on Verizon’s earnings report, we are once again lowering our estimates for Apple. We had previously assumed 70% high-end iPhone 5s and 30% lower-end iPhone 4S/4 units in the remaining three months of FY2013 and 50% high-end iPhone 5/5S and 50% lower-end iPhones in FY2014. However, we are changing our mix assumptions to 55% high-end iPhones in the remaining three months of FY2013 and 45% in FY2014… Given the changes mentioned, we are lowering our FY2013 EPS estimate to $39.26 from $41.24 and our FY2014 estimate to $42.00 from $45.00. We are materially below consensus estimates, but we believe that most investors place little weight on current sell-side estimates. Lowers price target to $440 from $460. Maintains Outperform.
CLSA’s Avi Silver: Moment of Truth. “Apple’s brand remains intact, but it has not reacted to important trends quickly enough; including a larger screen (not expected in 2013) and lower-end iPhone (expected in C4Q13), updating its iOS user interface (expected mid-year), and improving its services capabilities. While Apple is facing weak fundamental trends heading into the Jun-Q lull (we lowered our estimates and rating on Mar-11th based on a weaker Jun-Q outlook and no larger screen iPhone in 2013), its share price seems to be discounting far worse. In addition to addressing the aforementioned issues, Apple also needs to demonstrate crisper execution with its new products for C2H13.” Maintains $505 price target and Outperform.
Crowell, Weedon’s James Ragan: Low Expectations Prevalent. “We have lowered our fiscal Q2 and Q3 revenue and EPS estimate to reflect 1) recent comments from AAPL component suppliers suggesting slowing orders in advance of a potential product transition and, 2) the lack of a formal iPhone agreement in China with China Mobile… However, we continue to believe multiple catalysts exist after the Q2 report. Potential catalysts include 1) a substantial dividend increase and share repurchase program, 2) new products for the iPhone, iPad, and others, 3) a formal agreement to sell iPhones to China Mobile subscribers. While AAPL fear and uncertainty remains at high levels, we believe owners of the shares will be rewarded from current levels. Lowers price target to $625 from $725. Maintains Buy. | Monday morning quarterbacking before Apple's Tuesday afternoon earnings call. | 110 | 0.363636 | 0.909091 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/07/19/garry-winogrand-new-look-great-photographer/oc9ffaKyDPDIFLI7ZSfHrN/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140804060855id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/theater-art/2014/07/19/garry-winogrand-new-look-great-photographer/oc9ffaKyDPDIFLI7ZSfHrN/story.html | ‘Garry Winogrand’: a new look at a great photographer | 20140804060855 | NEW YORK — Other photographers’ images can recall aspects of Garry Winogrand’s: the improvisatory, agnostic spirit; the braiding together of velocity and curiosity; the gravitational pull of the street. Certainly there are other photographers whose images resonate with his and share a sensibility: Robert Frank, whose book “The Americans” greatly influenced Winogrand; his friends Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, both of whose work appeared with Winogrand’s in the landmark 1967 Museum of Modern Art show, “New Documents”; the young Joel Meyerowitz and Tod Papageorge, both his students. Winogrand was part of a brilliant, fearless, subversive generation; and MoMA’s John Szarkowski called him its “central photographer.”
Centrality doesn’t preclude singularity, perhaps even requiring it. No photographer — not one, zip, zero, nada — has ever been quite like Garry Winogrand. He was unique the way a hurricane is. He was Hurricane Garry. He’s been dead for 30 years, but his gale force can be felt throughout “Garry Winogrand,” the very large and absorbing retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Running through Sept. 21, it includes more than 175 Winogrand images, along with contact sheets, family photographs, magazine spreads, and a quite-captivating video of a talk he gave at Rice University, in 1977. Roughly half of the images are either little known or have not previously been shown.
Winogrand was born in the Bronx, in 1928. Three years earlier, another Jewish kid had been born there. Bernard Schwartz grew up to be Tony Curtis. Curtis’s most searching performance comes as Sidney Falco, in “Sweet Smell of Success.” A low-rent press agent, Falco’s the sort of dubious character Winogrand delighted in photographing as he prowled midtown Manhattan with his camera. Falco’s girlfriend wonders if he’s listening to her. “Avidly, avidly,” he says.
That twice-said adverb might be the simplest, most accurate — and expressive — description of how Winogrand photographed. His artistic avidity was awe-inspiring. “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs,” he famously said. Photography was a means to its own end.
Leo Rubinfien, who helped curate the show, writes in its outstanding catalog that Winogrand “sought not to control photography but to submit to it.” That description applies wonderfully well to the close-to-collapse compositions found in numerous of Winogrand’s best pictures. So many Winogrand images seem to be teetering on the edge of formlessness. Life is about the dominance of content over form. Life just happens . Art is about the sovereignty of form. Nothing in art just happens. The fascination of Winogrand’s work is its consistent ability to record the formlessness of the one using the formal control of the other.
Rubinfien’s words apply even better to the compulsiveness of Winogrand’s photographic procedure. Over the course of 34 years, he exposed 26,000 rolls of film. Some 2,500 had been exposed but never developed at the time of his death. Another 4,100 had been developed, but not contact printed.
For the MoMA retrospective after Winogrand’s death, Szarkowski chose to include very few of these photographs, the vast preponderance of which come from Winogrand’s final years. The new exhibition includes more than 100. This decision has drawn criticism. If Winogrand didn’t choose to print a photograph, this line of reasoning goes, then it shouldn’t be exhibited. The curators note that for much of his career Winogrand delegated printing to others — he was anything but a darkroom devotee — and even delegated the selection of images for several of his books. To criticize the inclusion of photographs he didn’t choose to have printed, or didn’t himself see, seems to be observing the letter of the law to an absurd degree. Winogrand was a great and essential photographer. Exhibiting a selection of these images is both sensible and justified. Getting to see them is a gift.
The question becomes: Are they good? Sure. A photographer doesn’t lose his eye, and Winogrand’s was amazing. Are they as good as his work from the ’60s and early ’70s? Rarely. Winogrand had changed, as any person getting older does. So had the times. The ’60s brought out the best in him, as they did in one of his favorite writers, Norman Mailer. Political demonstrations, media events, affluence on the hoof: Winogrand was born to shoot them. Most important, Winogrand’s locus had changed. He owned midtown Manhattan (Central Park, too) as much as Joe DiMaggio had center field at Yankee Stadium. Winogrand moved to Los Angeles in 1978. LA is contradictory in so many ways. Not least among its contradictions is that a city so visually alluring — how can a garden in the desert not be? — is only marginally photogenic. LA lacks the density of visual information that New York has coming out of its pores. (Instead of pores, LA has cars.)
The exhibition is divided into three sections: “Down From the Bronx,” the early years; “A Student of America,” on Winogrand’s heyday, from the late ’50s to the early ’70s; and “Boom and Bust.”
Various early pictures could have been taken by Weegee or Lisette Model or even Atget. They’re good, but they’re not yet recognizably Winogrand. A marvelous photograph from 1952 shows a swimmer at Coney Island happily tossing his girlfriend into the surf. It’s nearly sculptural in its sense of solidity and vigorously arrested motion. Atypical in setting, the image is nonetheless a precursor. A sculptor sees possibility in a piece of stone. Stone just sits there while the sculptor studies it. A photographer — specifically, Winogrand — sees possibilities in a dynamic arrangement of people in space. His camera carves a stone even as that stone is being hurled at him.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A swimmer at Coney Island tosses his girlfriend into the water in this 1952 shot by Garry Winogrand.
The dynamic arrangement of people — a phrase that describes both society as a whole and the sidewalk groupings Winogrand so often captured in his pictures — is the heart of what he did. “A Student of America” demonstrates this again and again. Stillness held little interest for Winogrand. Even with just a single person within the frame, his photographs seem almost always to teem. A toddler, standing in a New Mexico driveway, is dwarfed by the black space of the garage behind her and immensity of sky above. Yet even amid such emptiness she seems to be dancing. John F. Kennedy, photographed at the 1960 Democratic convention, looks waxworks-unreal; but the quartet of people around him are a study in animation. The fact that all five of them, as well as two others in the background, are looking in different directions adds an element in optical hilarity. The convention’s gone slightly Cubist.
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona/Estate of Garry Winogrand
John F. Kennedy is surrounded by convention attendees in Garry Winogrand’s photo from the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
Winogrand is becoming Winogrand. The settings and subjects he most loved to photograph — zoos, airports, sidewalks, Texas, attractive women, cars — keep recurring. A woman in a sleeveless white dress strides down the street. The camera’s at an acute angle to her. The wind whips her hair. Two men behind her grin. The light has an almost-furious radiance. A memorable composition is a version of geometry. This is geometric, yes, but Winogrand prefers another kind of mathematics: irrational numbers.
Arbus, writing to support Winogrand’s application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, described him as “an instinctive, nearly primitive ironist.” He had a genius for incongruous juxtaposition (the squeegee being used on the glass in front of a whale at the aquarium, the mannequin staring over the shoulder of a laughing woman holding an ice cream cone). The street is to incongruous juxtaposition what Holland is to tulips. But Winogrand lacked the ironist’s presumption of superiority. Avidity is inherently democratic.
Grotesque people appear with some frequency in Winogrand pictures: a man selling JFK souvenirs at Dealey Plaza less than a year after the president’s assassination; another man in Dallas wearing a cowboy hat that looks as though it could hold 20 gallons, not 10; a woman with a rictus grin (and painted nails like bloody thimble daggers) dancing at a swanky nightclub. Winogrand presents none of them as freaks. Freakishness assumes some kind of larger order, a non-freakish context, which renders the individual an outcast. So much of the force of Arbus’s work owes to her being a moralist at heart and the phenomenal tension this lends her work. “A picture is a secret about a secret,” she said. Secrecy is an irrelevant concept for someone uninterested in morality, and that was Winogrand. For him, it was the context that was freakish, not the people in it.
In 1962, Arbus took a photo of the Disneyland castle that makes it look as dark, dank, and dangerous as anything in the Brothers Grimm. Two years later, Winogrand took a photo of a mother and son walking through Forest Lawn, the Los Angeles cemetery, and the boy wears Mickey Mouse ears. What could be more freakish? Yet Winogrand, in his eager-appetite way, just takes it in. He offers no judgment. Instead, you can all but feel his happiness at finding so striking a sight — and being able to capture it.
“Capture” is an interesting word for a photographer, especially one so partial to zoos. In Philip Roth’s novel “The Anatomy Lesson” Roth’s literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman confesses to revulsion with the act of writing. “It isn’t life and it isn’t you. It’s ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters. Some animal carrying on in the zoo like that and you’d think it was horrifying.” The title of Winogrand’s first book was “The Animals.” No, photography isn’t life, and Winogrand would acknowledge that. But photography is who he was, and “clawing at it” suggests how violently he was attracted to the camera. What those words leave out is the volatile elegance of the resulting images. And Winogrand did it with just a single talon, the one to click the shutter release.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly listed the number of Winogrand images in the exhibit. The retrospective includes more than 175 Winogrand images, along with contact sheets, family photographs, magazine spreads, and a video of a talk he gave at Rice University, in 1977. | “Garry Winogrand,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers a new look at a great photographer. | 99.285714 | 1 | 3.666667 | high | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/08/04/square-confirms-food-delivery-caviar-acquisition/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140804185554id_/http://fortune.com/2014/08/04/square-confirms-food-delivery-caviar-acquisition/ | Square confirms purchase of food-delivery startup Caviar | 20140804185554 | Square, the mobile payments startup founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, confirmed it’s making a move into the food-delivery market by announcing the acquisition of startup Caviar on Monday.
The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but The New York Times cited anonymous sources last week pegging the price at roughly $90 million after Tech Crunch first reported on talks between the two San Francisco-based companies in early July.
Caviar, launched in 2012, describes itself as a “premium delivery” service. The startup, which partners with highly-rated restaurants that don’t normally offer delivery, is available in seven cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Caviar’s order volume has grown more than 500% year over year and 80% of the company’s deliveries go to repeat customers, Square said in a blog post announcing the deal.
“Caviar’s curated, seamless delivery experience is exactly the kind of service we want to provide buyers and sellers,” Square CEO Dorsey, who is also a cofounder of Twitter, said in a statement. Meanwhile, Caviar cofounder and CEO Jason Wang said teaming up with Square would offer his company’s customers access to a wider selection of restaurants “while helping restaurants reach new customers and simplify their operations.”
Founded five years ago by Dorsey, Square provides point of sale systems to small merchants, such as bookstores and food trucks. The company had been pegged for an initial public offering at some point last year, but postponed those plans indefinitely earlier this year after the market for tech IPOs dried up. In December, Dorsey voluntarily returned 10% of his 30% stake in Square back to the company in order to free up as much as $150 million in equity for the company’s employees and for possible acquisitions.
Square says more than 50,000 restaurants are currently using its complete register service, which includes tools for accepting credit cards as well as tracking inventory and sales. The company also recently launched a new app, Square Order, which allows users to pre-order food from participating restaurants. | Deal for ‘premium delivery’ service worth roughly $90 million, report says. | 27 | 0.733333 | 1.533333 | medium | low | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/30/hackers-tap-corporate-systems-report-says/fQZ7txO5rIm1t8iYiy9YLJ/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140805055641id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/business/2014/07/30/hackers-tap-corporate-systems-report-says/fQZ7txO5rIm1t8iYiy9YLJ/story.html | Hackers tap corporate systems, report says | 20140805055641 | SAN FRANCISCO — The same tools that help millions of Americans work from home are being exploited by cybercriminals to break into the computer networks of retailers like Target and Neiman Marcus.
The Homeland Security Department warns that hackers are scanning corporate systems for remote access software — made by companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft — that allows outside contractors and employees to tap into computer networks over the Internet.
When the hackers discover such software, they deploy high-speed programs that guess login credentials until they hit the right one, offering a hard-to-detect entry point into computer systems.
The report, which Homeland Security produced with the Secret Service, Trustwave SpiderLabs, an online security firm based in Chicago, and other industry partners, is expected to be released on Thursday. It provides insight into what retailers are up against as hackers find ways into computer networks without tripping security systems.
It is also a reminder that a typical network is more a sprawl of loosely connected computers than a walled fortress, providing plenty of vulnerabilities — and easily duped humans — for determined hackers.
Once inside the network, the hackers deploy malicious software called “Backoff” that is devised to steal payment card data off the memory of in-store cash register systems, the report says. After that information is captured, the hackers send it back to their computers and eventually sell it on the black market, where a single credit card number can go for $100.
In each case, criminals used computer connections that would normally be trusted to gain their initial foothold. In the Target breach, for example, hackers zeroed in on the remote access granted through the retailer’s computerized heating and cooling software, two people with knowledge of the inquiry said.
In an interview, Brad Maiorino, recently hired as Target’s chief information security officer, said a top priority was what he called “attack surface reduction.”
“You don’t need military-grade defense capabilities to figure out that you have too many connections,” Maiorino said. “You have to simplify and consolidate those as much as possible.”
Homeland Security first discovered the Backoff malware (named for a word in its code) in October 2013. In the last few weeks, the agency said that it had come across the malware in three separate investigations. Most troubling, the agency said that even fully updated antivirus systems were failing to catch it.
Low detection rates meant that “fully updated antivirus engines on fully patched computers could not identify the malware as malicious,” the report concluded.
Backoff and its variants all perform four functions. First, they scrape the memory of in-store payment systems for credit and debit card “track” data, which can include an account number, expiration dates, and personal identification numbers, or PINs.
The malware logs keystrokes, like when a customer manually enters her PIN, and communicates back to the attackers’ computers so they can remove payment data, update the malware, or delete it to escape detection.
The hackers also install a so-called backdoor into in-store payment machines, ensuring a foothold even if the machines crash or are reset. And they continue to tweak the malware to add functions and make it less detectable to security researchers.
Law enforcement officials say antivirus software alone will not prevent these attacks. They recommend companies take what is called a “defense in depth” approach, layering different technologies and empowering security professionals to monitor systems for unusual behavior.
Among the report’s recommendations: Companies should limit the number of people with access to its systems; require long, complex passwords that cannot be easily cracked; and lock accounts after repeated login requests.
The report also suggests segregating crucial systems like in-store payment systems from the corporate network and making “two factor authentication”— a process by which employees must enter a second, one-time password in addition to their usual credentials — the status quo.
The report also recommends encrypting customers’ payment data from the moment their cards are swiped at the store, logging all network activity, and deploying security systems that can alert staff to unusual behavior, like a server communicating with a strange computer in Russia. | The Homeland Security Department, in a new report, warns that hackers are scanning corporate systems for remote access software — made by companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft — that allows outside contractors and employees to tap into computer networks over an Internet connection. | 16.958333 | 0.958333 | 12.75 | medium | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/08/05/ceo-exit-pay-under-attack-among-fortune-500/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140805154411id_/http://fortune.com/2014/08/05/ceo-exit-pay-under-attack-among-fortune-500/ | CEO exit pay under attack among Fortune 500 | 20140805154411 | John Hammergren, CEO of McKesson MCK , narrowly avoided a $140 million cut to his $182.6 million severance pay package. He would have probably been able to get by just fine on the remaining $42 million, which includes more than $2.2 million for the provision of an office and secretary, but that would have been a big haircut for any CEO exit payout.
Forty-four percent of shareholders who voted at McKesson’s annual meeting last Wednesday supported a resolution calling for the company to prevent what is known as “accelerated vesting” of outstanding equity pay. Often, when a CEO or other executive is fired, the stock options and restricted stock that would vest slowly over time vest all at once, resulting in a pay windfall called a golden parachute.
The health care service company’s vote is one in a long series of both successful and unsuccessful resolutions addressing this issue. Like Hammergren’s, most CEO golden parachutes are made up of between 75% and 80% equity pay. Eliminating those payments would save shareholders a lot of money when they fire the CEO. That’s exactly what happened earlier this year at Valero Energy, Gannett, and Boston Properties. For example, if Gannett CEO Gracia Martore were to lose her job as a result of the spin-off announced Tuesday, she would receive $23 million less in severance as a result of the changes at the company.
McKesson’s resolution refers to a number of other companies—including Apple, Chevron, ExxonMobil, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Occidental Petroleum—that have imposed limitations on accelerated vesting of unearned equity pay. It also quotes research from pay consultant James Reda & Associates that found that over one-third of the largest 200 companies in the U.S. have adopted roughly similar policies.
Resolutions to limit CEO golden parachutes were pioneered by a number of institutional investors, including Amalgamated Bank and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “Accelerated vesting inherently severs pay from performance, and shareholders are becoming much more surgical in their analysis of whether executive pay is related to actual performance,” says Scott Zdrazil, director of corporate governance at Amalgamated. “Shareholders are concerned about the likelihood of pay for failure, which is what happens if stock compensation is automatically triggered on a termination regardless of performance. We don’t have a problem with equity pay, but only if it is justified by the performance of the executive.”
Like McKesson’s case, though, not all resolutions calling for exit pay reductions were successful this year. At Avon, which held its annual shareholders meeting on May 6, slightly less than a third of shareholders supported the move.
McKesson, of course, is no stranger to pay controversy. Hammergren has been one of the highest paid CEOs in the U.S. for several years, and 78% of shareholders voted against the company’s executive pay policies last year. This led to policy changes that resulted in what the company claims is a reduction in CEO pay of 26%, though Hammergren still earned $66.3 million in 2013.
Then there was the news last year that Hammergren was in line for the highest pension ever paid to a U.S. CEO—$159 million. The figure was reduced by $45 million to a fixed maximum of $114 million. But he’s also due for another $30 million from his super-sized 401(k) plan on retirement. This doesn’t even include Hammergren’s exit pay, giving him a total farewell payout of almost $300 million.
Hammergren vested in almost 500,000 shares last year in stock and options, but he directly owns only around 4,000 shares in McKesson. He has another 500,000 shares in a family trust. Bear in mind, the CEO has received plenty of shares over the years, most of which must have been disposed of. And now he will receive many more, whether or not he is fired. | The latest example: McKesson shareholders narrowly failed to pass a resolution calling for the company to sharply reduce the massive exit pay package in store for its handsomely compensated CEO. | 23.25 | 0.6875 | 2.125 | medium | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/08/06/bank-of-america-reportedly-near-16-or-17-billion-settlement/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140806210546id_/http://fortune.com/2014/08/06/bank-of-america-reportedly-near-16-or-17-billion-settlement/ | Bank of America reportedly near settlement of up to $17 billion | 20140806210546 | Bank of America and the Justice Department are reportedly getting close to finishing a record settlement in which the bank will pay anywhere from $16 billion to $17 billion as a result of alleged mortgage-related misconduct ahead of the financial crisis, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing individuals familiar with the matter.
Previously, the most money paid by a bank to the Justice Department was JP Morgan’s JPM $13 billion fine in November over similar charges. Citigroup C , meanwhile, paid $7 billion to settle claims much like those faced by Bank of America BAC .
From Bank of America’s settlement, $9 billion is reportedly going to the Justice Department, states and the other government agencies, according to The Wall Street Journal. The rest of the sum is expected to go to consumer relief.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that there has been some friction between the government and Bank of America over its efforts to hold firm at a $13 billion settlement. The Justice Department, however, remained steadfast, according to the article.
No final decision is expected this week. Additionally, the deal may still fall apart as details of the settlement are still reportedly being negotiated, according to anonymous sources cited in the article. | Bank of America may pay the largest fine ever to the Justice Department due to mortgage-related problems leading up to the financial crisis. | 9.269231 | 0.769231 | 1.846154 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2014/08/05/critic-corner-for-aug/RWXmm46ckriLzXDqdioVBO/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140810112950id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/television/2014/08/05/critic-corner-for-aug/RWXmm46ckriLzXDqdioVBO/story.html | TV Critic’s Corner for Aug. 6 | 20140810112950 | “I make gloves, they sell shoes,” director Robert Altman once said about the movie industry. So true. But still Altman’s work found a way to the public, and it became hugely influential on younger directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Richard Linklater. Altman’s movies left a mark on TV shows, too. When I think of “Deadwood,” I think of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” When I think of “Downton Abbey,” I think of “Gosford Park.” When I think of “M*A*S*H,” I think of . . . yeah, you get it. Altman’s “Nashville” (“Treme”?) is among my all-time favorite movies, a brilliant puzzle about America, fame, politics, consumerism, and disconnection, and “The Player,” and “Short Cuts” aren’t too far behind. Also: “Thieves Like Us” and “The Long Goodbye,” which Epix is airing at 9:45 p.m. So yes, I will be watching this documentary by Ron Mann about the great, subversive director, which features clips, home videos, and interviews with Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, Elliott Gould, Bruce Willis, and Sally Kellerman.
My Grandmother’s Ravioli 8 p.m., Cooking
Wait, wait, don’t tell me Mo’s hanging with the nanas.
Sex in the Wild 10 p.m., PBS
Got breast-feeding underwater if you want it.
The validity of the pregnancy is questioned. Sounds hysterical. | “I make gloves, they sell shoes,” Robert Altman once said about the movie industry. So true. The director of such films as “M*A*S*H,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” and “Nashville” is the subject of a documentary on Epix Wednesday night. | 5.444444 | 0.925926 | 5.888889 | low | medium | mixed |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/02/state-panel-deals-setback-another-partners-hospital-merger/xcIHi4AcnZANcJfx7jq0jK/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140811041533id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/02/state-panel-deals-setback-another-partners-hospital-merger/xcIHi4AcnZANcJfx7jq0jK/story.html | State panel deals setback to another Partners hospital merger | 20140811041533 | A key state board on Wednesday dealt another challenge to the quest of the state’s biggest health system to become even bigger.
The Health Policy Commission found that Partners HealthCare’s proposed takeover of Hallmark Health System, which runs two hospitals north of Boston, would reinforce Partners’ market power, raise spending on medical care by $15.5 million to $23 million per year, and increase premiums for employers and consumers.
Partners operates Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General hospitals, as well as several community hospitals, health centers, and a health plan. It wants to absorb Hallmark’s Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Medford and Melrose-Wakefield Hospital in Melrose. It plans to convert the Medford hospital to a short-stay facility, while renovating the Melrose facility.
The Hallmark hospitals already are affiliated with Partners.
“It is unclear how this merger is necessary to improve clinical quality in ways the parties’ longstanding affiliation has not,” the commission’s report said. The panel asked Partners and Hallmark to submit more information.
The Health Policy Commission also had big concerns about Partners’ controversial bid to acquire South Shore Hospital in Weymouth and referred that merger to Attorney General Martha Coakley. Coakley brokered a deal with Partners that would allow it to complete the acquisition of South Shore, as well as the two Hallmark hospitals.
That deal blunts the impact of the commission’s findings on Hallmark. The commission cannot block mergers but can refer deals it determines are bad for consumers to the attorney general, who in turn can investigate and go to court to stop them. In the Hallmark case, Coakley has essentially approved the acquisition as part of the settlement with Partners.
The settlement, which must be approved by a judge, allows the Hallmark terms to be modified based on the findings of commission. Coakley’s spokesman, Brad Puffer, said the attorney general “will seriously factor this latest report into further discussions with Partners.”
On Monday, a state judge set a three-week comment period before ruling on the Coakley-Partners deal, delaying the resolution of a five-year state and federal investigation into Partners’ market power and contracting practices. Coakley, a Democratic candidate for governor, has said her deal puts sufficient limits on Partners and forces changes to the company’s contracting practices.
The Health Policy Commission used Wednesday’s hearing to raise concerns about the proposed Hallmark merger, suggesting it is a deal that should go to the attorney general for further investigation. Members voted to send a summary of their reports to the court as part of the public comments allowed by the judge.
“Here we go again,” said Dr. Paul Hattis, a member of the commission. “The numbers aren’t quite as bad as the South Shore transaction,” which was more obviously a “money grab,” he added.
Partners’ size already has provided the market power to become the state’s highest-paid health care system. Partners’ competitors, including Atrius Health, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cambridge Health Alliance, Lahey Health, and Tufts Medical Center, have been vocal in their opposition, claiming Coakley’s settlement will allow Partners to gain even more clout and push prices higher.
Dr. Guy Spinelli, chairman of Atrius Health, a physicians group, asked the Health Policy Commission to actively monitor Partners, particularly if the Coakley deal is ultimately approved by the court.
State law is meant to ensure that complex health care transactions be “fully transparent and thoroughly and thoughtfully reviewed,” Spinelli said. “The proposed settlement agreement undermines that goal.”
But Brent Henry, general counsel at Partners, countered: “If this consent judgment gets approved by the court, Partners will become the most heavily regulated health system in the state.”
Partners argues the acquisition of Hallmark would allow it to provide better care in lower-cost community settings. Partners spokesman Rich Copp dismissed rivals’ concerns. “They are not advocating the public interest,” he said. “They are advocating their private interests.”
Alan Macdonald, Hallmark Health’s executive vice president for strategy and external affairs, told commissioners that the quality of care will decline without help from Partners.
“We actually lost money on operations last year,” he said. “We can’t do it alone.” | The commission said Partners HealthCare’s proposed takeover of Hallmark Health System, which runs two hospitals north of Boston, would increase premiums for employers and consumers. | 28.551724 | 1 | 14.310345 | medium | high | extractive |
http://www.people.com/article/amy-poehler-mini-mean-girls-reunion | http://web.archive.org/web/20140813081007id_/http://www.people.com/article/amy-poehler-mini-mean-girls-reunion | Mean Girls Reunion with Lizzy Caplan and Amy Poehler : People.com | 20140813081007 | Amy Poehler, Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese
A party at Los Angeles's Chateau Marmont for Lizzy Caplan turned into a mini
The Sunday soiree to celebrate Caplan's
(and her belated June 30 birthday), saw some familiar North Shore faces. Both Amy Poehler and Daniel Franzese showed up to the bash to support their former costar – and "one of the greatest people you will ever meet," according to Franzese.
Franzese, who played Damien in the 2004 teen film, posted several selfies with
's Janice Ian and resident "cool mom" Poehler
"Pretty smiles. Fun times. Good vibez," Franzese wrote along with one of the photos from the night. If only Glen Coco could've been there, too.
Lindsay Lohan in 1998 and 2014
Photos Provided by Getty and REX USA; Photo Illustration by Tiffany Hagler-Geard | Mean Girls cast members attended a party at Chateau Marmont for Lizzy Caplan | 12.923077 | 0.615385 | 2.615385 | low | low | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/jessa-duggar-fiance-ben-seewald-engaged | http://web.archive.org/web/20140817152458id_/http://www.people.com/article/jessa-duggar-fiance-ben-seewald-engaged | Jessa Duggar's New Fiancé Ben Seewald : People.com | 20140817152458 | Jessa Duggar and Ben Seewald
Millions of fans have watched Jessa Duggar, of the supersized Duggar family, grow up on camera. But her new fiancé, Ben Seewald, just joined the show when the
So what's this new addition to the family like?
– whose courtship will be featured in the new season of
kicking off Sept. 2 at 9 p.m. – first started their relationship, Seewald's parents, Michael and Guinn, shared insights about their son, 19, and his relationship with Jessa, 21.
"When Michael and I had Ben, he was a great baby, but he was a real handful as a toddler," Guinn, 40, told PEOPLE. "He was very adventurous. He was a very opinionated kid."
Ben, who is the oldest of seven children and lives in Hot Springs, Arkansas, is now a full-time college student studying business. He also works in auto glass replacement and repair like his dad.
"He is mature and always has been," his father, Michael, 39, said. "We have tried to treat him like an adult growing up. He did kid things, but with adulthood in view. He has had that his whole life."
As the first of their children to enter into a "courtship" – a more serious relationship than traditional dating, with marriage as its goal – his parents say they have tried to give him a good foundation for becoming a good husband and father someday.
"He is in full-time college, full-time work, and doing well," Guinn said. "He is handling a full plate right now."
In their courtship before becoming engaged, Jessa and Ben decided to wait to hold hands until their engagement and save their first kiss until their wedding day, as Jessa's older sister Jill did when she
"There is nothing in the Bible that says 'thou shalt court,' " Guinn said. "But we have raised our kids to know that someone else's heart is like a treasure, and you want to be careful with that other person and treat them with great respect. There is no perfect pattern. Treat other people as a gift. Honor God and your relationship."
When courting couples go out together, a chaperone goes along, and Ben shared that getting one of his new fiancée's younger siblings to agree to chaperone isn't always easy.
"Jessa and I found out that Jill and Derick were bribing the younger Duggar kids with Skittles payment to be chaperones for them," Ben told PEOPLE this summer. "We had no idea that's why they had such an easier time of getting chaperones."
Though Ben's parents have fewer kids than Jim Bob, 48, and Michelle, 47, they say that Jessa and Ben's decisions about parenthood are up to the young couple themselves.
"How many kids they have is Ben and Jessa's decision, and they can figure that out," Michael said.
And though their son is young, both his parents say he's mature enough to handle this relationship.
"I was the same age as Ben when I was going through the same thing," Michael said. "For me, it helped to mature me. A committed relationship does a lot to mature a young man. It does make them grow up a little bit. I can see that happening to Ben already."
And how do Jessa's new in-laws-to-be feel about their new future daughter-in-law?
"She is very strong," Guinn said. "She is very intelligent. She has a lot to offer to a conversation. She has great ideas – I have enjoyed getting to know her."
Michael agrees: "She is exactly who we would want our son to have a relationship with." | The oldest of seven kids, Seewald is engaged to 19 Kids & Counting star Duggar | 47.6875 | 0.8125 | 1.6875 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Blaine-Gabbert-still-2nd-on-49ers-QB-depth-chart-5693427.php | http://web.archive.org/web/20140817172943id_/http://www.sfgate.com/49ers/article/Blaine-Gabbert-still-2nd-on-49ers-QB-depth-chart-5693427.php | Blaine Gabbert still 2nd on 49ers' QB depth chart | 20140817172943 | Even after a 1.7, he's still No. 2.
On the heels of an abysmal performance in the preseason opener Aug. 7, Blaine Gabbert will remain the first quarterback off the bench Sunday when the 49ers host the Broncos in the first game at Levi's Stadium.
Gabbert, who is earning a $2.1 million base salary, entered the preseason as the unquestioned backup to Colin Kaepernick after he was acquired from Jacksonville for a sixth-round pick in March. However, Gabbert posted a 1.7 passer rating in his 49ers' debut, which at least raised the possibility of a quarterback shuffle.
Head coach Jim Harbaugh, who has rarely met a player he couldn't publicly praise, said that wasn't in the plans because, well, he's encouraged by Gabbert's progress.
"Very pleased with the job Blaine Gabbert's doing," Harbaugh said.
Gabbert didn't speak with local reporters in the past week, but a few fans made their voices heard during the 49ers' practice at Levi's Stadium on Friday night. Gabbert opened with a series of errant passes, most notably airmailing a midrange throw intended for Brandon Lloyd, and drew some scattered boos.
Gabbert, the No. 10 pick in 2011, became accustomed to criticism in his three-season stint with the Jaguars, which included a 5-22 record as a starter, a 53.3 completion percentage and more interceptions (24) than touchdown passes (22).
The criticism continued after he completed 3 of 11 passes for 20 yards and tossed an interception against Baltimore on Aug. 7. Harbaugh's assessment?
"He had a couple of very good throws," Harbaugh said. "Missed a couple, as we said right after the game. I think it was a good first step and he's continued to compete well. I thought he did in the game and he's continued to do that in the process of the preseason, of the training camp. Feel good about the way he's coming along."
Harbaugh has skirted the issue when asked if the backup quarterback spot is up for grabs, saying Friday that "there are a lot of jobs up for grabs. Nothing is set in stone."
Josh Johnson, the Bengals' backup last year, and San Francisco native McLeod Bethel-Thompson are the other quarterbacks on the roster. Johnson, Gabbert's primary competition for the No. 2 spot, shares Kaepernick's running ability but hasn't been consistently accurate during training camp. He completed 6 of 8 passes for 63 yards (97.4 rating) against Baltimore, but also fumbled a snap the Ravens recovered.
It appears Gabbert and Johnson will get a chance to play plenty Sunday, which could add clarity to the 49ers' backup plan. Kaepernick played only one series in the opener and Harbaugh isn't anticipating a significant increase in his playing time.
"It's ... the same plan going into this game," Harbaugh said.
TV/Radio: Channel: 5 Channel: 13 /810, 107.7
Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch | On the heels of an abysmal performance in the preseason opener Aug. 7, Blaine Gabbert will remain the first quarterback off the bench Sunday when the 49ers host the Broncos in the first game at Levi's Stadium. Gabbert, who is earning a $2.1 million base salary, entered the preseason as the unquestioned backup to Colin Kaepernick after he was acquired from Jacksonville for a sixth-round pick in March. [...] Gabbert posted a 1.7 passer rating in his 49ers' debut, which at least raised the possibility of a quarterback shuffle. Gabbert, the No. 10 pick in 2011, became accustomed to criticism in his three-season stint with the Jaguars, which included a 5-22 record as a starter, a 53.3 completion percentage and more interceptions (24) than touchdown passes (22). Harbaugh has skirted the issue when asked if the backup quarterback spot is up for grabs, saying Friday that there are a lot of jobs up for grabs. Johnson, Gabbert's primary competition for the No. 2 spot, shares Kaepernick's running ability but hasn't been consistently accurate during training camp. | 2.784404 | 0.96789 | 34.344037 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2012/09/20/what-does-power-really-mean-to-women/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140818045309id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/09/20/what-does-power-really-mean-to-women/ | What does power really mean to women? | 20140818045309 | FORTUNE — Here is what I learned from being present at the creation of Fortune Most Powerful Women in 1998 and helping to produce the annual MPW list 15 times.
Power is what you make it.
And Power, in the minds of the Fortune MPW, has changed greatly.
Let me explain, by taking you back to MPW’s beginnings. MPW started, actually, with a trip to New Jersey in the summer of 1998. I visited Lucent Technologies, then a red-hot telecom giant, to interview the two most senior women there. One was a well-known executive who had turned around businesses inside AT&T : Lucent EVP Pat Russo. The other was a woman few people outside of telecom had heard of. Her name was Carly Fiorina.
When the 44-year-old group president of Lucent’s Global Services Provider business told me her story that day, I was beyond impressed. Fiorina had dropped out of law school, started as a secretary, and risen to head Lucent’s largest division. By Fortune’s criteria — the size and importance of the woman’s business in the global economy, the health and direction of the business, the arc of the women’s career, social and cultural influence — Fiorina possessed more power than Oprah Winfrey. We named Oprah No. 2 that first year. We made Carly No. 1 and put her on Fortune’s cover.
When she scored the CEO job at Hewlett-Packard the following summer, it was a stunning advance for women, but Fiorina felt anxiety about her power. “My strength is my strength, but it also can be a weakness,” she later told me, as she struggled to hold on at HP. Her leadership style came across as too aggressive to many. In 2005, the board fired her.
The band of acceptable behavior for women leaders was, back then, even narrower than it is today. No question, aggressive women are judged more harshly than men tend to be. To deal with that reality, many women succeed by deploying a gentler brand of power.
Meg Whitman, as CEO of eBay (Fiorina’s successor at No. 1 on the MPW list), was nicknamed “mom” by her senior team. Later, running for governor of California and taking charge at troubled HP, she necessarily toughened.
Anne Mulcahy, who saved Xerox from bankruptcy, used to define power as “influence” — “so it doesn’t feel like power. It feels like consensus,” she said. It took a years of being in charge, but “I’ve learned that a decision needs to be made. A call needs to be made…I’m still learning.”
And then there is Oprah. When I interviewed her for a Fortune cover story, Oprah Inc., in 2002, she disliked the word “power” and refused to call herself a businesswoman. (“If I’m a businesswoman and a brand, where is my authentic self?” she asked.) Eight years later, when I returned to Chicago to talk with her about launching her cable TV network, OWN, she told me, “I accept that I’m a brand” — and owned her “power.”
Own your power. That’s what I told Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg the first time I met her, when she was the top woman at Google. Ken Auletta captured the moment in his 2011 profile of Sandberg in The New Yorker :
“Sandberg says that she had an “Aha!” moment in 2005, when Pattie Sellers, an editor at large at Fortune, invited her to the magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit, an annual gathering of several hundred women. Sandberg attended, but she thought the title was embarrassing, and refused to list it on the Web-based calendar that she shared with her colleagues. She says that Sellers later chided her for being timid [and asked] ‘What’s wrong with owning your power?'”
Sandberg urged young women to own their power in her 2009 essay for Fortune: “Don’t Leave Before You Leave.” Today, she is the world’s most visible cheerleader for aspiring women, challenging them to take risks and “lean in” to their careers.
This year, the spotlight shines on two MPW who also have learned to own their power. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, Fortune’s new No. 1 on the list, admitted at last year’s Most Powerful Women Summit that early in her career when a boss offered her a promotion, she told him that she didn’t feel ready. Actually, her husband gave her the “aha moment”: “Do you think a man would have ever answered that question that way?” he asked her. Rometty accepted the promotion.
And vaulting up this year’s Fortune MPW rankings, to No. 14: Marissa Mayer. In July, after accepting the CEO job at Yahoo , the former Google executive revealed to Fortune: “I’m pregnant.” A self-described shy “nerd” from Wausau, Wisconsin, Mayer is not only the youngest woman ever to make the MPW list. At 37, she is also the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the first to assume that top job pregnant.
The fact that the Yahoo board — and the world, which reacted mostly positively –welcomes a female chief with a complicated life is progress.
Yes, Power is evolving. Mayer’s story evokes the definition of power that I’ve come to embrace: Real power is personal power. It’s what you do and what you have beyond your job description and your tenure. Real power is what you do with your full life. | Looking back on 15 Most Powerful Women lists and the shifting definition of "power." | 65.058824 | 0.705882 | 1.411765 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/08/20/buffett-berkshire-pay-896000-reporting-violation/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140820183228id_/http://fortune.com/2014/08/20/buffett-berkshire-pay-896000-reporting-violation/ | Warren Buffett’s Berkshire to pay $896,000 over reporting violation | 20140820183228 | Berkshire Hathaway has agreed to pay a $896,000 civil penalty in order to settle charges that it failed to give federal regulators advance notice before significantly increasing its stake in Chicago-based drywall maker USG last year.
Both the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission announced the settlement with billionaire Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle on Wednesday. The regulators said that Berkshire violated pre-merger reporting laws in December when it failed to provide advance notice before it exchanged $243.8 million of USG USG convertible notes for 21.39 million common shares, increasing Berkshire’s stake in USG to roughly 28% from about 15%. Regulators say the size of Berkshire’s increased stake was more than three times the minimum to require pre-transaction reporting.
What’s more, the FTC says the alleged violation came just a few months after Berkshire produced a similar violation when it increased its stake in financial services company Symetra Financial. The FTC chose not to punish Berkshire for that alleged violation, with the commission instead deciding to take Buffett’s firm on its word that it would comply with the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act’s filing requirements going forward.
“Although we may not seek penalties for every inadvertent error, we will enforce the rules when the same party makes additional mistakes after promises of improved oversight,” Deborah Feinstein, director of the FTC’s competition bureau, said in a statement. “Companies and individual investors alike should ensure that they have an effective program in place to monitor compliance with HSR filing requirements.”
Of course, the civil penalty amounts to little more than a slap on the wrist for Berkshire, which ranks fourth on the Fortune 500 list with more than $182 billion in revenue last year. | Regulators say the investment firm failed to give advance notice before significantly increasing its stake in drywall company USG. | 16.4 | 1 | 4.4 | medium | high | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2013/09/09/behind-the-ouster-of-george-washingtons-b-school-dean/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140821052538id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/09/09/behind-the-ouster-of-george-washingtons-b-school-dean/ | Behind the ouster of George Washington’s B-school dean | 20140821052538 | (Poets&Quants) — For Doug Guthrie, dean of George Washington University’s business school, August 22 was like most work days. It was to start off with a meeting.
On his calendar was an early morning session with University President Steven Knapp to discuss the business school’s budget. Guthrie wasn’t expecting it to be all that pleasant. After all, the university had asked him to cut the school’s budget by $7 million to $57 million this year and he had been resisting.
However, Guthrie would never see Knapp — and there would be no budget meeting that morning. Instead, the dean was called aside by Provost Steven Lerman and asked to follow him to his office. “As we walked back to his office, I realized something more serious was afoot,” recalls Guthrie.
Moments after sitting down, Lerman announced: “We’re firing you.”
“I was quite stunned,” says Guthrie, 44, who had been recruited from New York University’s Stern School to become dean in 2010. “I had thought a possible outcome [of the budget issues] would be they would say we can’t get this to work and we need you to help us with the transition. But the provost said, ‘it seems to us that we’ve reached a point where there is a lack of trust and a lack of ability for us to work together.’”
Guthrie asked about the university’s plans for China, an expansion area he had led for the university as its vice president for China, and about the business school’s upcoming re-accreditation plans. The replies were terse, leading Guthrie to believe his firing was given little forethought. Within 15 minutes, he was ushered out of the office, without his job as dean.
Guthrie’s abrupt ouster shocked faculty and students alike, but what truly surprised them was the public nature of the dismissal. At 11:30 a.m. on the day of his firing, Provost Lerman issued a statement to the GW community in which he noted that “fundamental differences about financial and operational performance were significant enough to warrant a change in leadership.” The following day, in an interview with the student newspaper, Lerman made clear that Guthrie was fired over a spending spree that resulted in the dean going over his school’s budget by $13 million in the fiscal year ended June 30.
But there may be more to the dean’s dismissal than that. For one thing, the overspending was hardly a surprise to the administration, which had approved the dean’s plans for growth along with the investments required to increase the school’s revenues and stature. In fact, Guthrie had been hired with a mandate to turn George Washington’s business school into an elite player.
While it’s true that spending was higher than expected, the administration had been prepared for a significant overruns — every contract the business school had was approved by the university administration — but not $13 million. On April 22, at one of the dean’s regular check-in meetings with the administration, Guthrie told the university that he expected to overspend his budgeted expenses by about $8 million. But he could cover the full amount of overspending with reserve funds and higher-than-expected revenues. The overage was largely attributed to the costs to launch and market several new online degree programs and executive education programs.
By the time the fiscal year closed, the overrun ballooned to $13 million. Even so, the business school was able to cover most of the additional expenses with its own reserves, except for about $2.5 million out of a total budget of $64 million.
When Guthrie, a professor at NYU Stern, came to GWU in 2010, the university wanted to put its business school on the map. The management professor-turned-dean aggressively raised standards for faculty and put in place more competitive packages to retain the school’s best professors and recruit better talent. He also increased spending on marketing to give the school greater visibility.
An expert on China who speaks fluent Mandarin, Guthrie launched two new degree programs in China, a master’s of finance, a master’s of accounting, and he was working on a new program, a master’s in business analytics. He also revamped the GW’s undergraduate business curriculum and started a new B.S. in finance, requiring a double major with the liberal arts. And Guthrie plowed ahead in online education, signing a deal with Pearson PSO to launch an online MBA program, revamp the school’s existing online programs in project management and information systems technology, and a healthcare MBA.
The new programs helped Guthrie exceed his annual revenue targets. In the year ended June 30, the school’s revenue came in at $106 million against a target of $102 million. When Guthrie started three years ago, the school’s annual revenue was $83 million. The new dean had increased revenue by 27% at a time when many business schools were retrenching.
This year, however, the university expected to keep $51 million of the school’s projected $102 million in revenue. Guthrie could retain the rest — some $51 million — to run the school. Instead, Guthrie spent $64 million and had only $42 million to hand over.
Guthrie argues that the additional investments were crucial to the school’s transformation. “There is one statistic that is a perfect correlation with top 20 rankings,” says Guthrie. “It is expenditure per faculty member. The Top 20 schools are spending on average about $450,000 per faculty member, on everything from research to career services. We were at $220,000. The agreement was that they wouldn’t completely change our budgeted expenses, but they would move them up gradually and I would pay for them from reserve funds.”
In the first year of his deanship, the university invested $7.5 million. In the second, Guthrie tapped into reserves for nearly $6 million more. But the following year, the administration wanted to pull back on the expansion plans. “We had an agreement and they wanted to cut way back,” explains Guthrie. “I said, ‘We already [are] not where we need to be. If we have to give the university more money, I don’t think I’m the right person for this. I didn’t come here to be the steward of a cash cow. I came here to build programs and make investments.’”
That conversation happened this past summer. “I was feeling like I could maintain quality and run a school with a $60 million budget,” recalls Guthrie. “When I came in, the budget was $40 million and that was low for an elite school. They agreed to an ambitious plan and investment. Each year we knew we were going to be overspending but we would do that through a combination of reserve funds and university investment.”
He says the administration wanted his 2014 fiscal budget to be $57 million, some $7 million less than the school spent last year, and its net contribution to the university to rise substantially. Guthrie figures he would have had to cut research funds for faculty, summer salaries for junior faculty, and other expenses. “I didn’t think this was the right way to go,” he says.
The business school, moreover, was in the middle of an accreditation review that required additional spending on faculty. A written report to the accreditation review committee is due in early September, while a site visit to the school is expected in December.
Guthrie made his case in a memo that he shared with the deans of several of other schools at the university — a move that, in retrospect, hurt his standing with the administration. “I knew that the stand I was taking made it a pretty good chance they would say this isn’t working and let’s see it through accreditation. I decided I would be fine with it because I disagreed with the suggested budget cuts.”
GW takes issue with Guthrie’s take. “The university strongly disagrees with Doug Guthrie’s characterization of the events that led to his departure,” says Candace Smith, a university spokesperson. Smith says that the university did not back away from an agreement to invest in its business school. “On the contrary, in a meeting earlier this summer, the provost and the treasurer invited Dean Guthrie to submit a proposal for an additional university investment in the School of Business. That proposal was never received.”
Guthrie suspects there was a personality clash with President Knapp, a mercurial leader who prefers that administrators toe the line. “They think I am a little bit uncontrollable,” says Guthrie. “And I understand how that makes them uncomfortable. We tried a lot of things here, and maybe it was too much too quickly. I do have a lot of passion for this school, though, and that has made me a successful fundraiser. In the end, I have enjoyed my time here, and I wish the school and the students the best.”
For now, the former dean will remain at GW as a tenured professor. But he didn’t come to George Washington merely to teach. | Amid clashes with university administration over spending measures, Doug Guthrie was abruptly fired from his post as dean of George Washington University's business school. Guthrie discusses the events that led to his dismissal. | 48.27027 | 0.810811 | 2.324324 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/World/2014/08/21/01/33/US-knew-about-threat-to-behead-journalist | http://web.archive.org/web/20140821175721id_/http://www.9news.com.au:80/World/2014/08/21/01/33/US-knew-about-threat-to-behead-journalist | US knew of threats to behead reporter James Foley | 20140821175721 | The US government reportedly knew about the threat to behead reporter James Foley ahead of time.
The US government reportedly knew about the Islamic State's threat to behead journalist James Foley some time before the video of his execution emerged.
A senior government official told ABC that the jihadist militants had recently told the White House they would kill the reporter, who had been held captive since 2012.
The video showing Foley's execution was released by the Islamic State yesterday.
The militants also threatened to kill another American journalist, Steven Sotloff, unless air strikes against the Islamic State ceased.
However, some analysts believe the horrendous executions are an attempt to provoke a US ground invasion of Iraq, in order to provoke sympathy for the Islamic State among the local population.
US President Barack Obama has not yet responded to the horrific video, but Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott labelled it "pure evil".
A White House spokeswoman said security agencies were working on authenticating the video, and expressed "deepest condolences" to Foley's family and friends.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | The US government reportedly knew about the Islamic State's threat to behead journalist James Foley for some time before the video of his execution emerged. | 7.888889 | 1 | 13.222222 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/sep/30/thomas-schutte-faces-figures-serpentine | http://web.archive.org/web/20140829015022id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/sep/30/thomas-schutte-faces-figures-serpentine | Thomas Schütte: Faces & Figures - review | 20140829015022 | In Kensington Gardens, two gigantic figures struggle to stay upright in the rain. Roped together, they look at first like outsize entrants in some three-legged race. But they are by no means a team, these muckle men, with their proud and resentful expressions. Their heads face in different directions, and they could never get far because their legs are no more than thin poles.
You might argue that, being statues, they could not move in any case. But these big bronze figures have as an attribute this sense of thwarted motion, of busy minds trapped in static forms. They are stuck with each other, these two, and stuck in their weird heavy-metal bodies, trying to rise above this outrageous pairing.
United Enemies is by the German artist Thomas Schütte. The title suggests politics, and the faces of another two bruisers, lashed together nearby, seem to conflate hints of the Communist leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker. But these statues resist easy reading, and though they are not much more than heads on sticks – no torsos, no arms – each has real force of personality. This comes as much from the gnarled and knuckled faces as from the strenuous stand-off between them.
At 57, Schütte is one of Germany's most prominent artists, almost as famous as his former teacher Gerhard Richter. Indeed, the photo-real self-portrait painted in black and white that opens this show speaks directly to those years as Richter's student. But Schütte soon began working in all sorts of other media – models, sculptures, banners, architectural installations, ceramics – and is generally lauded for his no-logo versatility.
Shows of his work tend to sprawl in many different directions as a consequence, so that one often ends up searching for some constant vision. But this one is different. It puts the focus very directly on what was surely Schütte's great strength from the start – the human portrait, real or imaginary.
A portrait gallery-within-a-gallery has been installed at the Serpentine, a room of disquieting busts in blackened bronze. They are not on plinths or pedestals but stuck up high on the wall as if they were part of the architecture: heads on ceremonial shelves. Out of reach and out of touch, they appear paradoxically familiar and alien. There are heads with gaping mouths and horror-shop eyes; heads that appear as sightless as those late self-portraits of Bonnard as a blind monk; and heads as bockled as any face by Soutine. Brilliantly modelled in every way – gouged, slit, plumped, indented – and registering all kinds of inner struggles, they also irresistibly recall Messerschmidt's eerie bronze heads in the Belvedere. But they are quite distinct in their air of hermetic defensiveness. Even with their eyes tight shut they express a strong consciousness of the watching world out there.
As works of old-fashioned skill and power these heads are tremendous, but who or what they are is not declared. They are imaginary portraits, I suppose, occupying the same no-man's-land as Messerschmidt's heads, though similarly based on the sculptor himself on occasion. One sequence looks remarkably like Schütte in disintegrating emotional states.
There is an expressly fictional head in this show: a wife for the Swiss-born writer Robert Walser. She is beautiful, something like a delicate geisha with luscious hair, but cast in steel and given an iridescent lacquer that removes her even further from reality. A dream, a figment of silent beauty, a futile gift for one of the loneliest figures in modern literature.
Hapless, hopeless, elusive: these seem to be aspects of the artist as well as the art. One of the many self-portraits in this show is entitled Me? Surely Not, as if mocking the whole idea of summing oneself up. Schütte has drawn himself repeatedly in a shaving mirror, seeing only a stranger like so many other artists before him – but in his case a badly-drawn bloke who never gets any closer to his subject.
These sketches, like those of his family, make a point of uncertainty, but it's never enough of a point. Frail, skittery, varying widely in their register and tone, they remain unresistingly conventional. The Serpentine show has too few sculptures by comparison.
But with Schütte, a little goes a long way. The wax heads of the Innocenti – magnified in photographic close-up – are a terrific carnival of anti-heroes and curmudgeons, somewhere between caricature and full personality. Their status is unfixed, for though each could so easily be real in all his individuality, together they are close to mutants, halfway-men out of Daumier or Giacometti, bastards from the history of art.
The original Innocenti were tiny men trapped under glass domes; photography has made them appear massively alive. Scale games have always been a forte, and the figure at the heart of this show is so huge it takes one's breath away. An effect, once achieved, that Schütte rapidly sweeps away. Father State is a colossal monument, dictator-sized and fully as bombastic. But he is also fragile, and armless in his old garments. Go round the back and you discover that only these clothes are keeping him upright: Father is a hollow man.
Best of all is Memorial for Unknown Artist: a long-haired Messiah raising his hands like a surgeon for the gloves, or for the commencement of some miraculous new sculpture. It is a strong and mordant vision, a satire upon the artist who thinks he conjures miracles out of nowhere but who is locked – like Thomas Schütte – in the past, stuck forever in a rusting metal plinth. | The Serpentine showcases Schütte's great strength – the human portrait, writes Laura Cumming | 74 | 0.733333 | 3 | high | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2012/02/23/private-equity/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140830064052id_/http://fortune.com:80/2012/02/23/private-equity/ | Private equity - Fortune | 20140830064052 | Blue Wolf Capital Partners has agreed to acquire the Air Distribution Products group of Standex International Corp. (NYSE: SXI). No financial terms were disclosed for the deal, which is expected to close within the next 30 days. www.standex.com
HCP & Co., a Chicago-based private equity firm, has acquired Career Training Academy, a healthcare-focused career school with three campuses in the Pittsburgh area. No pricing terms were disclosed. www.hcpcompany.com
Health Evolution Partners has acquired a majority interest in Freedom Innovations LLC, an Irvine, Calif.-based provider of high-tech prosthetic devices for individuals with lower limb amputations. No financial terms were disclosed. www.healthevolutionpartners.com
Quadrant Private Equity has acquired a 50% stake in the outdoor advertising business of APN News & Media, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, for approximately A$190 million. www.quadrantpe.com.au
Resilience Capital Partners has acquired the Heavy Duty unit of Vista-Pro Automotive. No financial terms were disclosed, except that $22.5 million in debt financing was provided by Monroe Capital. The division has been renamed Thermal Solutions Manufacturing, and is a Nashville, Tenn.-based maker and distributor of heat exchange and temperature control products to the North American heavy duty aftermarket. www.vistaproauto.com
Sun Capital Partners has acquired Bonmarché, a UK-based retailer of affordable clothes to women over 45 years old. No pricing terms were disclosed for the deal, which was done via an administration process. www.suncappart.com USI Insurance Services, a portfolio company of GS Capital Partners, has acquired most of the assets of The Pinnacle Group, a Virginia Beach, Va.-based employee benefits consulting firm specializing in middle-market businesses. No financial terms were disclosed. www.usi.biz
ZS Fund has sponsored a recapitalization of ECS Refining LLC, a Santa Clara, Calif.–based electronic waste recycler. No pricing terms were disclosed. Brown Gibbons Lang & Co. managed the process. www.ecsrefining.com
Want deal news in your inbox each morning? Then get Term Sheet! | Blue Wolf Capital Partners has agreed to acquire the Air Distribution Products group of Standex International Corp. (NYSE: SXI). No financial terms were disclosed for the deal, which is expected to close within the next 30 days. www.standex.com HCP & Co., a Chicago-based private equity firm, has acquired Career Training Academy, a healthcare-focused career school… | 5.434783 | 0.985507 | 36.405797 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/07/19/chevron-is-making-a-mistake-in-argentina/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140903102408id_/http://fortune.com/2013/07/19/chevron-is-making-a-mistake-in-argentina/ | Chevron is making a mistake in Argentina | 20140903102408 | Chevron is taking quite a gamble snuggling up with Argentina. The U.S. oil giant confirmed this week it is officially partnering up with Argentina’s (now) state-controlled energy company, YPF, in a bid to help the firm develop the South American nation’s potentially vast deposits of oil shale, which, according to some estimates, could have the third-largest such reserves in the world.
But while the potential payout from the field could mean huge profits for Chevron CVX down the road, it may not be worth all the accompanying drama. That’s because the fields in question are currently subject to a nasty ownership dispute between Argentina and Repsol, the Spanish energy firm. By essentially siding with Argentina, Chevron is not only alienating itself from the other energy companies, it is also potentially putting billions of dollars in future revenue up in jeopardy.
There is an unwritten code among the big energy companies — “It’s always us vs. them.” In this case, “us” refers to the large privately controlled energy companies, such as BP BP , Chevron, ExxonMobil XOM , and Repsol, while “them” refers to the energy-rich nation-states and their state-controlled energy companies. In practice, the saying means that if a privately controlled energy company is screwed over by a nation in some way, be it by expropriation, the ripping up of contractual agreements, or through a surprise hike in royalty rates, the other energy firms promise not to try and capitalize on the others’ misfortunes. This has helped the privately controlled energy companies retain their dominance amid a tricky political economic backdrop.
So it came as a bit of a shock to the industry when Chevron announced last fall that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with YPF to hunt for oil shale in Argentina’s energy-rich province of Neuquen. That’s because only a few months prior, the Argentine government, under the direction of President Cristina Fernandez, “renationalized” YPF, which at the time was controlled by the Spanish energy giant, Repsol, and known as Repsol YPF. The grounds for the expropriation were dubious, but Argentina isn’t really known for its adherence to international law — or to contractual agreements of pretty much any kind. This is the nation that, after all, has defaulted on its debt seven times, three of which occurred in the last 30 years.
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Repsol had thought suing Chevron would have been enough to make the U.S. energy firm back off. The firm even used peer pressure as a tactic, quoting Christophe de Margerie, chief executive of French energy giant Total in its suit saying that he was “not going to take advantage of Repsol and leap at assets that may well be cheaper given the situation,” noting further, “that’s not our style.”
But after months of negotiation with the Argentine government, Chevron announced this week that it was making its relationship official with the new YPF and investing $1.24 billion to drill some 100 wells with the company in Argentina’s “Muerta Vaca” field. Chevron could potentially spend up to $15 billion over the lifetime of the project, making it one of the largest investments in the country by a foreign company.
Now, the fact that the field’s name translates to “dead cow” is just the first odd thing about this deal. Indeed, the terms of the agreement hark back to the time when the privately controlled oil firms ruled the world, as in, before OPEC came on the scene in the 1970s. A spokesman for Chevron confirms that the company would be splitting both the expenses and the profits with YPF right down the middle. That could be considered a very generous agreement. Indeed, an oil company in negotiations with a state-controlled entity would be ecstatic in reaping a fraction of that amount and would be expected to front most, if not all, of the expenses.
Argentina would have probably promised the moon to any energy firm willing to enter into a new contract with YPF at this point. Argentina’s reputation is already in the dumps and has proved time and again that it is willing to forgo international law to get what it wants. For example, if the ruling Peronist party falls out of power, the next government may use that as a justification to “renegotiate” all oil contracts signed with the previous government.
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What is so troubling is that Chevron knows firsthand the political risks here. Last November, an Argentine judge froze the assets and future income of Chevron’s Argentine business unit after Chevron “lost” a $19 billion drumhead trial in Ecuador over an oil spill, which allegedly occurred in the country over 20 years ago by Texaco (absorbed by Chevron in 2001). Miraculously, though, last month, an Argentine appeals court overturned the ruling, saying that Chevron’s Argentine affiliate was a legally distinct operating unit from Chevron corporate, and therefore the lower court erred in freezing its cash.
Chevron is using pretty much the same argument to have Repsol’s case against it thrown out in the U.S. and EU. It argues that Chevron Argentina is a legally distinct operating unit, which means any lawsuit dealing with its operations needs to not only list Chevron Argentina as a defendant but also needs to be filed in an Argentine court as it only has operations in Argentina. Chevron is playing with fire here as it is setting a precedent by which any “dispute” that may come up between Argentina and Chevron in the future must be handled by the Argentine court system.
The political and legal risks seem clear here but there are business risks, too. It is doubtful that courts in the EU will stand back and allow Chevron to take advantage of Repsol’s misfortune. As such, Repsol could seek retribution by targeting Chevron’s operations in the EU. Chevron has recently moved into Eastern Europe, with shale oil and gas operations launched in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland. While currently small, Chevron’s Eastern European operations are expected to ramp up production in the very near future. Chevron is also in the U.K., producing some 46,000 barrels a day of oil and 122 million cubic feet of gas from its operations in the North Sea. The company also operates several marketing agreements with refiners and retail stations across the European Union.
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Additionally, Chevron may have a harder time finding a partner for some new ventures now that they have broken the “us vs. them” code. Energy companies almost always these days partner up with other major oil companies to share in the risks associated with large projects, so Chevron needs to maintain good relations with its fellow energy companies to grow. While the industry probably won’t shun Chevron altogether, as the company is much too big to ignore, some companies may be less accommodating when negotiating future agreements.
Some may even decide to pull their money out of joint ventures already in progress. For example, Repsol is a junior partner on several Chevron-led projects, including at least one in Canada and another in the Gulf of Mexico. A Chevron spokesman says that Repsol is a junior partner in another Chevron-led venture in offshore West Africa. Junior partners provide cash and support, so if Repsol chooses to withdraw due to its lawsuit, then those projects that are ramping up could be derailed, permanently.
But despite all the legal, political, and business risks, Chevron has unapologetically doubled down on Argentina. It is doing so not because of a lack of other opportunities, as there are shale basins all over the globe waiting to be tapped. Rather, it is doing so because the terms offered up by Argentina were just too good to pass up. For Chevron’s sake, hopefully the deal doesn’t turn out to be too good to be true. | Despite all the legal, political, and business risks, Chevron has unapologetically doubled down on Argentina with a partnership with the state-controlled energy company YPF. | 50.966667 | 0.966667 | 12.033333 | high | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/04/15/did-china-steal-japans-high-speed-train/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140905011521id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/04/15/did-china-steal-japans-high-speed-train/ | Did China steal Japan’s high-speed train? | 20140905011521 | FORTUNE — One China defender recently claimed his countryman’s “bandit innovators” could be good for the world. That was small consolation for the Japanese, who say that China pirated their world-famous bullet train technology.
“Don’t worry too much about Chinese companies imitating you, they are creating value for you down the road,” said Li Daokui, a leading Chinese economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s conference. Such “bandit innovators,” he expanded, would eventually grow the market, leading to benefits for everybody.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI), maker of Japan’s legendary Shinkansen bullet trains, bitterly disagrees. After signing technology transfers with CSR Sifang, the builder of China’s impressive, new high-speed rail, KHI says it deeply regrets its now-dissolved partnership. It planned to sue its previously junior partner for patent infringement, but it backed down recently.
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Risk analyst Michal Meidan of Eurasia Group believes KHI is wise to drop the IP suit and stay out of China. “Every firm working in the high-tech space in China should be aware of the risks related to weak IP protection in the country but often has few choices but to go into these agreements if it wants to gain market share there,” she says. “The intense competition prompts companies to make concessions on technology transfers, as the Chinese are very good at playing off the competition.”
What could drive the normally unlitigious Japanese into such a frenzy? Not only did China copy their technology, say the Japanese, after patenting remarkably similar high-speed-rail (HSR) tech, CSR now wants to sell it to the rest of the world — as Chinese made. Both Japanese and European rail firms now find themselves frozen out and competing with their former Chinese collaborators for new contracts, inside and outside China.
With a diminishing domestic market, Japan’s train industry is hoping to pick up orders abroad for its HSR. Before China stepped in, undercutting Japanese offers by about half, Japan looked very attractive to foreign buyers with its record for fast, reliable train systems.
With more than 300 million annual riders, Japan’s Shinkansen — 50 years old next year — trains carry more passengers than those of any other HSR system. It has suffered no fatal accidents. The U.K. was impressed enough to complete a 540 billion yen deal with Hitachi, which also builds Shinkansen, to supply bullet trains by 2016.
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The Motherland of train travel is not alone. Everyone is shopping around for high-speed solutions including the U.S., as the $180 billion global rail industry continues to boom.
Outside of Britain, Japan could easily find itself edged out by the Chinese competition. This makes KHI’s Harada Takuma, who worked on the Chinese collaboration, very angry. Under the licensing agreements with KHI, China’s use of the expertise and blueprints to develop high-speed railway cars was to be limited to domestic application, he explains. “We didn’t think it was not risky. But we took on the project because terms and conditions under the tech transfer should have been binding. We had a legal agreement; we felt safe.”
The Chinese authorities, for their part, see no problem. As Beijing busies itself filing for HSR patents abroad, it claims China developed her own HSR based on Japanese and German technologies which it claims were merely “digested.” When it was suggested that China trains were mere knockoffs at a press conference in China recently, the Ministry of Railways spokesman asserted that China’s HSR was far superior to Japan’s Shinkansen, and that the two “cannot be mentioned in the same breath.”
Others, such as a few Chinese engineers, have admitted no real innovation. That they were “just standing on the shoulders of giants” as one rail technician put it. Wherever the truth lies exactly, KHI’s train technology transfer saga is unlikely to be over soon. | The company that makes Japan’s legendary Shinkansen bullet trains certainly regrets working in China. | 49.125 | 0.875 | 3 | high | medium | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2012/05/06/how-top-executives-live-fortune-1955/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140905074856id_/http://fortune.com/2012/05/06/how-top-executives-live-fortune-1955/ | How top executives live (Fortune, 1955) | 20140905074856 | Editor’s note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a story from our magazine archives. With the annual Fortune 500 list ready to be revealed tomorrow, turn this week to our inaugural Fortune 500 list, in July, 1955. General Motors topped the list that year, and writer Duncan Norton-Taylor took an inside look into the lives of America’s top executives. What does the boss do with his spare hours–if any? How do vice presidents spend their money, and their time away from the office? Here, some glimpses into the private lives of executives in 1955 who earned more than $50,000.
The American executive in his office is a familiar figure; he is, typically, decisive, somewhat aloof, and generally regarded by his employees with a certain awe. In the life he leads outside his office, however, he is a much less familiar character; the occasional pictures painted of him by fiction writers tend to be romantic, or even lurid, and with the possible exception of John Marquand’s heroes, the fictional executive is rarely a man you have met. Yet millions of Americans diligently aspire to the life of a top executive, coveting his opportunities for pleasure while, actually, they have only the faintest notion of what his life is really like or of what he does when he goes home.
There are in the U.S. approximately 30,000 executives, with incomes of $50,000 or more. These men sit on the top-most rungs of the business ladder either as managers or as owners of their own businesses. Obviously there is no “average” executive among them (they are all singular men). But their lives do have certain common characteristics, and there is visible a kind of composite way of executive life.
The successful American executive, for example, gets up early–about 7:00 A.M.–eats a large breakfast, and rushes to his office by train or auto. It is not unusual for him, after spending from 9:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. in his office, to hurry home, eat dinner, and crawl into bed with a briefcase full of homework. He is constantly pressed for time, and a great deal of the time he spends in his office is extraneous to his business. He gets himself involved in all kinds of community work, either because he wants to or because he figures he has to for the sake of public relations.
If he is a top executive he lives on an economic scale not too different from that of the man on the next-lower income rung. He surrenders around 40 per cent of his salary to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (he may cough up as much as 75 per cent) but still manages to put a little of his income in stocks, bonds, life insurance. He owns two cars, and gets along with one or two servants. What time he has left from his work–on weekends and brief vacations–he spends exercising, preferably outdoors, and usually at golf. Next to golf, fishing is the most popular executive diversion.
He spends almost no time on politics. He entertains often because he must (i.e., for business reasons or on account of his wife) and, under much the same compulsion, he attends cultural events. He does little reading outside of newspapers, newsmagazines, reports, and trade papers. (For a notable exception, see “Texas Eastern’s Naff,” page 108.) He drinks, if he drinks at all, moderately and on a schedule. Alcoholism, it is clear, does not go with success and is to be found only among some executives’ bored wives. Extramarital relations in the top American business world are not important enough to discuss.
Gone with the income tax
Twenty-five years have altered the executive way of life noticeably; in 1930 the average businessman had been buffeted by the economic storms but he had not yet been battered by the income tax. The executive still led a life ornamented by expensive adjuncts that other men could not begin to afford, a life attended by a formality that other men did not have time for. In Boston, which set the highest tone if not the fastest pace, the archetype of the high-salaried executive of 1930 arrived at his office in his chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow, uncompromisingly attired in dark suit and detachable stiff collar. For weekend lounging white flannels were de rigueur.
Today an executive, outside of Boston at least, may arrive at his office in tan shoes, sometimes in a tweed jacket with side vents. And he may well do his weekending in shorts–pink ones this year. Today’s executive still pays plenty for his clothes, however; in New York, tailor-made suits at Twyeffort’s will run $265; custom-made shoes, $80.
Among other things that have changed in the executive’s life has been the ritual connected with city club life. Ceremony has all but vanished with the migration to the suburbs. Executives now use town clubs merely for lunching or having a fast drink at the end of the day before catching their commuting trains. The old, annual club dinner with its solemnities and reports, its printed menus, elaborate dishes, and long cigars, has deteriorated into a gobbling of commonplace steak by members numbed by martinis. The passing of formal club life has also meant the end of a good deal of stag conviviality. One Boston executive complains that he hasn’t seen a poker game or crap game in the Union Club in ten years.
The executive’s home today is likely to be unpretentious and relatively small–perhaps seven rooms and two and a half baths. (Servants are hard to come by and many a vice president’s wife gets along with part-time help. So many have done so for so long, in fact, that they no longer complain much about it.) The executive who feels, as apparently Robert R. Young does, that to be completely happy he needs a forty-room “cottage” in Newport and a thirty-one-room oceanside villa in Palm Beach is a rare bird these days. The fact that Young paid only $38,000 for his Newport place, Fairholme, which cost Philadelphia banker John R. Drexel nearly a quarter of a million dollars to build in 1905, demonstrates the decline in the market for such outsize mansions.
Forty feet, four people, $40,000
As executives’ homes have dwindled in size, so have their parties. Frederick J. Thibold, catering manager at Sherry’s in New York, can remember dances for 2,000 with a “sumptuous supper” twenty-five years ago. A big dance today is one for 400, and at some of these, Thibold confides in a whisper, Sherry’s has served hot dogs and hamburgers. Today’s executive entertains at his country club, or at small dinner parties at home. The New York executive who entertains at smart restaurants, where a dinner party for six may cost $125, usually does so on an expense account.
The large yacht has also foundered in the sea of progressive taxation. In 1930, Fred Fisher (Bodies), Walter Briggs, and Alfred P. Sloan cruised around in vessels 235 feet long; J. P. Morgan had just built his fourth Corsair (343 feet). Today, seventy-five feet is considered a lot of yacht. One of the biggest yachts launched in the past five years is the ninety-six-foot Rhonda III, built and owned by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp., of Birmingham, Alabama. The Rhonda III cost half a million dollars to build, and the annual bill for keeping a crew aboard her, stocking her, and fueling her runs to around $130,000. As Chairman Robert I. Ingalls Jr. says, only corporations today can own even so comparatively modest a craft. The specifications of the boat that interests the great majority of seagoing executives today are “forty feet, four people, $40,000.” In this tidy vessel the businessman of 1955 is quite happily sea-borne.
Nobody likes to sit still
But if some stateliness has gone out of the lives of successful businessmen, it has been replaced by a new scope. No executive, twenty-five years ago, could whisk himself and his golf clubs 1,000 miles away just for a weekend. Today a New York executive can play weekend golf regularly all through the winter in Florida or Bermuda, and follow the season north through Georgia and North Carolina. In 1930 the private plane was a dubious adventure, advertised chiefly as something for “sportsmen.” Flying is still done by some as a sport; Stanly Donogh, a Sears, Roebuck division manager in Seattle, last winter took his wife on an 18,000-mile flight by small plane around South America. But for the most part the private plane, like the commercial airliner, is just a routine means of getting swiftly away from, and back to, the office.
The modern executive’s leisure pursuits may be specialized or varied but his relaxation is usually concentrated, and, as might be expected, well organized. Ed Quinn, head of the Chrysler division of Chrysler Corp., for example, spends his weekends like thousands of other big and little businessmen, fishing–in his case for muskellunge off Grosse Pointe on Lake St. Clair. Quinn’s thirty-foot, twin-engine boat is equipped not only for fishing but for any foreseeable emergency. Her gear includes special chromium brackets designed by Quinn to hold half a dozen trolling rods, an echo sounder, an electronic amplifier, and a ship-to-shore radiotelephone. The businesslike Quinn keeps a detailed record of the circumstances attending the boating of every muskellunge. Other executives, like Crawford Greenewalt, president of du Pont, take a lick at just about everything. Over the years Greenewalt has involved himself in a home machine shop, goggle fishing off his Bermuda home, tennis, the clarinet, classical recordings, the photography of birds, and the cultivation of orchids.
But what Quinn and Greenewalt and most other executives seem to have in common is a dislike for spending their time off in repose; sedentary diversions bore them. A case in point is the Alabama broker who had the impulse to learn to play the piano. He did in fact master 0 Sole Mio and Carry Me Back to Old Virginny before he thought to ask his teacher how many chords there were to learn. Told there must be several thousand, he abandoned the piano, deciding he preferred to concentrate on his fine tennis game; when it was raining he could spend his time keeping fit by exercising with his barbells.
From the Pacific to the Warrior
The differences in executives’ lives–and despite the obvious generalizations they are numerous–stem principally from differences in financial status, personal inclinations, and geographic location. Those executives who own their businesses enjoy certain obvious advantages over salaried executives. Similarly, those who were fortunate enough to inherit wealth, or who enjoyed high incomes before incomes were whittled down by the federal income tax, may have an amount of capital that few younger executives can hope to accumulate. The lives of such men are likely to have considerable sweep and élan.
Take Richard S. Rheem, fifty-one, who is an entrepreneur (president of Rheem Manufacturing Co. of Richmond, California) and a son of the late William S. Rheem, president of Standard Oil of California. Rheem makes his home formally in two cities but spends most of his time in a blur of motion–he estimates that he never stays put anywhere longer than three weeks. One of his two residences is a luxurious apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street, New York, staffed by four servants; the other is a house on Vallejo Street in San Francisco, staffed by four more servants. He recently bought an estate, La Dolphine, in Hillsborough, California (down the peninsula from San Francisco), which was modeled after the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and which Rheem picked up for $150,000. He spends his vacations either in a cabin in the vastness of Montana, where he enjoys “the dimensions,” or in the vastness of the Pacific, aboard his ninety-eight-foot ketch, the Morning Star. Rheem enjoys a life with sweep.
Jonathan W. Warner, thirty-seven, is an entrepreneur of more modest dimensions. Warner is executive vice president and operating boss of Gulf States Paper Corp., which was founded by his grandfather. In a $40-million plant alongside the Warrior River, in Alabama, Gulf States turned out five billion paper sacks last year, one-fifth of all the grocery bags sold in the U.S.
Boyish-looking Jack Warner lives in an unpretentious brick house on a 120-foot plot in Tuscaloosa, near the University of Alabama campus. He bought the house, which has five bedrooms, for $18,000 after World War II. He and his wife are enthusiastic collectors of antiques and their rooms are decorated with crystal chandeliers and filled with Chinese Chippendale furniture, lacquer chests, and Dresden china.
Warner’s home is only fifteen minutes from his plant. This is pretty much the orbit of his life, although he does go to three conventions a year and takes a couple of weeks’ vacation in Florida. His diversions are hunting and fishing on the Tombigbee River, swimming at the Tuscaloosa Country Club, and watching University of Alabama football and basketball games. He did back flips on a trampoline in his back yard until he got a crick in his neck recently; he now leaves that activity to the elder of his two small sons. Warner believes in healthy living and is now heading a drive to raise money for a new Tuscaloosa Y.M.C.A.
The Warners entertain by inviting a dozen friends to their house for drinks, which may have to be limited to two so that they can all rush off to the University Club before the dining room is closed. Warner is perfectly content to go on making paper bags, raising camellias, and collecting original Audubon prints. Especially, he wouldn’t change places with any of “those fellows in New York who have two cocktails before lunch and then can’t do anything the rest of the afternoon.” From Warner’s observation, “They’re always going to psychiatrists, having nervous breakdowns, and spending most of their time on commuting trains.”
We don’t get off the beam
The lives of executives do vary considerably according to where they make their living. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, a businessman can live very simply and pleasantly. As a Seattle minister observed, after noting that only 30 per cent of Seattle’s population are affiliated with churches: “There are so many wonderful things to do outdoors.”
It takes Horace W. McCurdy, president of the Puget Sound Bridge & Dredging Co., less than half an hour to drive from his Seattle office to his mansion on Mercer Island by way of the Lake Washington Bridge, which his company built. Paul B. McKee, president of Pacific Power & Light Co. in Portland, takes only twenty minutes to get to his home, located on seven and a half acres of farmland.
There are few extremes of wealth in the Northwest. This fact in itself imposes a certain moderation on those who do have large incomes. Two years ago, at sixty, C.B. (“Bill”) Stephenson, of Portland, was made president of the First National Bank, the largest banking chain in the Northwest, and he suddenly found himself projected into the $50,000-and-up class. It made no perceptible difference to Bill Stephenson, who changed his living habits scarcely at all. He bought a new Ford, which he still drives; Mrs. Stephenson drives a three-year-old Buick. The Stephensons were obliged to do a little more entertaining, but they stayed right on in their seven-room house, and continued to get along quite satisfactorily with a part-time cleaning woman.
Stephenson likes to putter around his flower beds, and on Saturday afternoon he may drift over to the Waverley Country Club with a set of rusty and nondescript clubs and play some rusty but not too nondescript golf. Last winter he took the longest vacation he had ever had: three and a half weeks in Hawaii. “Top executives here are not expected to get off the beam,” he says, meaning they are not expected to emerge obtrusively from the background.
Clay Brown, also of Portland, is the fifty-two-year-old president of the M and M Wood Working Co., one of the biggest plywood manufacturers in the world. A onetime professional baseball player, Brown heads the newly organized Portland Beavers, but what with selling stock in the club and tending to his own business, he has scarcely had time to see his team play in a Coast League game. He hasn’t taken a vacation in two years. He spends six days a week in his office and the seventh wandering anxiously around his plants.
He lives in an expensive apartment in the city, but “we don’t buy any extra high-priced fancy stuff,” he says. “Not with two youngsters in school and taxes what they are.” On the subject of savings, “We’ve always made a habit of saving money,” Brown states in the manner of a man who thinks any other policy folly.
San Francisco’s business leaders are an unusually sophisticated group. They live graciously. They reside on Russian Hill or Pacific Heights, with a splendid view of the bay, or in the sunny suburbs surrounding San Francisco. J.D. Zellerbach buys a Van Gogh or a Cezanne at the drop of an auctioneer’s hammer. Charles de Bretteville, president of Spreckels Sugar, lives a strenuously athletic life in the horsy suburb of Woodside on the peninsula. Henry J. Kaiser goes speedboating on Lake Tahoe, and Richard Rheem races off to Honolulu in his yacht. But the men in the upper brackets are also expected to underwrite the opera’s annual losses and contribute to museums and other cultural enterprises and support the city’s charities–all of which they do, handsomely and with urbanity.
The life of San Francisco’s executives is illustrated by the activities of Jerd F. Sullivan, sixty-four-year-old president of the old and conservative Crocker First National Bank. Sullivan’s numerous civic involvements include the Boy Scouts, the Salvation Army, serving as president of the Light Opera Association and the United Negro College Fund. A big, hearty man who once worked on a Nevada ranch, he paces himself carefully. He plays golf and bridge, but really prefers dominoes noontimes at the Pacific Union Club.
The Sullivans live on Russian Hill, have dinner with friends two or three evenings a week, and about once a month throw a large party in their old-fashioned pink house. On weekends they retire to a small house set in eighteen acres of orchards and wild land, fifty miles from the city, where the only company they have is their Weimaraner dog. Sullivan believes in “commuting to your recreation once a week instead of commuting to your work five times a week.”
It is clear that flamboyant living is not characteristic of top U.S. businessmen; it is not even characteristic of Texans.
A few, like D. Harold Byrd, fifty-five-year-old president of Byrd-Frost, Inc. (oil), still do manage to give the scene some splashes of color. Byrd’s parties may include 1,000 guests who disport themselves at his estate on the edge of Dallas, swimming and boating or pedaling around on water bicycles on his lake, or bowling or dancing in front of his band shell. Byrd pilots his own twin-engined airplane. He flies to Wyoming to hunt (“the deer are too small in Texas,” he says with remarkable candor for a Texan) and flies to football games at the University of Texas. He has put up some $150,000 to finance students through the university. He has also given $15,000 to the college band.
James Keenan, vice president and general manager of Joske’s home-furnishings store in Houston, is more typical of Texas’ salaried executives, however. He likes to go home after work and spend the evening quietly with Mrs. Keenan and their children, read some magazines, and go to bed.
Fun, among most Texas executives, is family fun. A common practice is for a company president, on his way to New York in the company plane, to fill the empty seats with family and friends. The return trip may include a detour into Canada for some fishing.
D. A. Hulcy, chairman and president of the Lone Star Gas Co. in Dallas, has acquired a sensible attitude toward life, although he acquired it the hard way. About four years ago, at fifty-nine, Hulcy was finishing out terms as president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and as president of the American Gas Association. “I just couldn’t find any leisure time. There was the regular day at the office, plus outside meetings. When I went home I carried a full briefcase. There were speeches to be written. I was on a treadmill and always about three jumps behind.” Hulcy, meanwhile, had given up golf, fishing, hunting. His vacations were business trips, and about the only leisure he got “was an hour or so at dinner.” Then he suffered a heart attack.
He recovered. But after that, a scared and chastened man, he put himself on a five-day-work schedule. He bought a cottage on Lake Whitney and spent almost every weekend there fishing. He now takes regular vacations. “I’m learning to relax,” says Hulcy, who once thought he could only “thrive mentally on a diet of work and more work … I was just a damn fool.”
Hulcy’s story might, but probably won’t, be studied by executives like Wallace R. Persons, president of Emerson Electric Manufacturing Co., of St. Louis, who thinks that his life is little different from that of most executives in manufacturing companies. “Ninety per cent of them,” he says, “are so fascinated by the game of business that they don’t care very much about anything else.” Persons is lean, tense, and forty-five; he has had his present job a little over a year.
He drives to work from suburban Ladue in a three-year-old Oldsmobile and is in his office by eight-thirty. Lunch for Persons is a matter of taking on food, like a bomber refueling in mid-air, while he goes on working. He gets home around six-thirty, “always with a few little things I want to think about.” By nine he is in bed with the few little things; he finds bed is the only place where he can cope with “a problem requiring a thoughtful decision.” Saturday afternoon he may bring a vice president home to go for a swim at the Bellerive Country Club and then talk business. About one-third of Persons’ time is spent on business trips, during which his program is even more concentrated. He never takes his wife on such trips for the sensible reason that he doesn’t want to have to fit his schedule to someone else’s whims.
Persons’ life differs in one important respect from the life that put Hulcy in a hospital: Persons spasmodically takes time off to play golf and hunt, occasionally rushes off on a vacation “to recharge.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s fun,” Persons says of his life. “But it’s a schedule of consuming interest. My wife says I’ll do it until I’m dead.”
Manifestly, sheer physical survival is a problem with many executives–staying at the top, that is, and not cracking under the strain. “What you ought to ask me,” one New York executive said only half jokingly, “is not how I live but how I stay alive.”
The South provides a commentary on the question of survival–and some interesting contrasts in executive living within its own geographical limits. Greenville, in the Mississippi Delta (population: 30,000), which has recently seen the arrival of big Alexander Smith, Inc. (carpets), still presents a kind of Old South idyl–with modern air conditioning.
Cotton brokers, planters, merchants, bankers, drift out of their offices for mid-morning coffee, drive home for lunch, and get home again for dinner well before the sun has disappeared behind the levee. Weekends they play golf, fish for bream and channel cat, or stalk the country’s abundant game birds. They travel a lot for business and pleasure, but they are always glad to get back to Greenville to live.
Alexander Gallatin Paxton, fifty-eight, is the state’s biggest cotton broker. He lives part of the time in a house in Greenville, part of the time in a luxurious lodge built among the willows beside an oxbow of the Mississippi River, where he keeps a speedboat and a Tennessee walking horse. Living practically simultaneously in two houses, eight miles apart, drives Mrs. Paxton crazy, she says. But she likes the town house and Paxton likes the lodge, and that’s that.
Paxton’s big side interest in life is soldiering. He commanded an artillery battery in ‘World War I, stayed in the National Guard, and in World War II commanded the 33rd Division artillery in New Guinea and Luzon. He calls his lodge “New Guinea.”
“One reason Mrs. Paxton and I have gotten along so well,” he explains, “is that we each have our hobbies. I have my military and she has her Bible studies.”
Times are changing in Greenville, but the pace hasn’t changed much yet, and staying alive is no problem.
“We get too damn tired”
In Atlanta, however, the pace has changed a lot, and is creating a problem for businessmen. They like the prosperity but not all are sure they like the new speed of life.
Executives of an older generation, like sixty-seven-year-old John Sibley, can afford to jog along evenly; they have already been around the course. But an in-between generation is having some difficulty finding its gait. John O. Chiles, who is fifty-three, belongs to that generation. He is head of the Adams-Cates Co., one of the biggest real-estate firms in the Southeast.
The company, he reports with a troubled look, just finished the biggest quarter in its fifty years in business. Chiles has become a seven-fifteen riser. He has to entertain two or three nights a week; otherwise he likes to be in bed by nine o’clock. He thinks he and his friends are trying to do too much. Collapsing back in his desk chair on a Saturday morning, before going out and playing thirty-six holes of golf, Chiles comments on the new rush: “Nobody wants to quit, it gets in your blood, like dope. But we get too damn tired.”
Mills B. Lane Jr., however, is young enough (forty-three) to have grown into his executive responsibilities as the boom was developing; he belongs to a new generation of southern businessmen. Lane is president of the Citizens & Southern National Bank, biggest bank in the Southeast, with headquarters in Atlanta.
He is up at five-thirty, when he fixes himself some coffee before the cook arrives. “That’s when I do my reflectin’ and thinkin’.” He gets to his office by seven-thirty, driving whichever of three cars he happens to jump into–a Corvette, a Cadillac, or a Chevrolet sedan; the Lanes’ fourth car, a station wagon, is reserved for domestic chores. At eight-fifteen he holds a meeting of his staff and puts in a full, slam-bang day. “Hi-yuh, Billy boy,” or “It’s a wonderful world,” he may be heard shouting into his telephone in his dignified inner office. He gets home anywhere between four-thirty and six. “Then I take a coupla knocks,” he says, meaning a couple of highballs, “have dinner and fall into bed.”
Once in a while he gets down to Florida or over to Savannah for a sortie along the coast in his small cruiser. Or he will spend his weekends just lounging around his backyard swimming pool. (Large backyard swimming pools have become a conventional feature of, many executives’ homes. Lane’s neighbor, Richard Rich, head of Rich’s department store, gave up golf and completely rebuilt his off-hours life around a tennis court, a garden house, and a $12,000, fifty-foot swimming pool.)
Lane’s life actually has some very earliest aspects. His daughter was a victim of cerebral palsy, a misfortune that turned Lane’s and his wife’s attention to work in that field. They started the Cerebral Palsy School Clinic of Atlanta, which cares for seventy-five afflicted girls, and which Mrs. Lane supervises. Lane’s dream is to establish a large rehabilitation school in Atlanta for Georgia children, and he tirelessly runs money-raising campaigns for such work. His latest scheme was to order 18,000 sets of Menaboni bird plates, which Lane sells to anyone he can buttonhole for $25 a set (four dinner plates). He expects to make $100,000 for his philanthropy out of this project.
Adaptation is one explanation of how a lot of executives stay alive. As the fish in the Silurian rivers began to develop swim bladders in order to live in shoal waters, so American executives have developed certain compensating features. The process can be observed particularly in the big cities where conditions are the most trying. Executives have developed an insensitivity to noise, an uncanny time sense (needed in commuting), and an attunement to the city’s terrifying rhythms. Instead of trying to escape the phenomenon of modern life they fling themselves at it. John C. Sharp’s method of finding daily refreshment is an example. Sharp, fifty-four, is president of the Hotpoint division of General Electric and his office is in Chicago. At the end of the day he gets into his Ford, and eagerly plunges into the brawling stream of homebound traffic. Some thirty-five minutes later, when he turns into his driveway in Glen Ellyn, “I’m as relaxed,” says Sharp, “as a wet noddle.”
Sharp makes this analysis of the jittery executive: “If a man is nervous in his job it is probably because he can’t handle it or he doesn’t like it. In either instance it’s the wrong job for him.”
In New York City, John Cunningham also flings himself at his environment. Cunningham, who is fifty-seven, leaves his home in Riverdale, New York, at eight-fifteen in his Cadillac Eldorado, and, according to his own description, drives “wildly” into the city, threads his way through the morning chaos of Madison Avenue, parks his car in a garage, and arrives at his advertising office (Cunningham & Walsh) thoroughly stimulated.
Cunningham’s life, which is one of continuous compulsions with occasional and expensive pleasure, mirrors the daily lives of thousands of other New York executives. Cunningham enjoys it. He plays hard–when he gets the chance–and works hard and doesn’t have to worry about his health; he is a tough and conditioned city man.
He lives in a vast house built shortly after the turn of the century. As a boy growing up in Medford, Massachusetts, Cunningham, one of seven children, always had to share a room with a brother; one of the rewards of success, he feels, is to have plenty of large bedrooms. Since 1946 he has owned a house in Bermuda; he had another big house on Cape Cod, until Hurricane Carol demolished it. He also owns about two miles of Nantucket Island waterfront.
Not many men possess so many facilities for pleasure. The Cunninghams, who are childless, manage to enjoy their Bermuda home on Thanksgiving weekends. Otherwise they have stayed in the place once, and for only two weeks. Cunningham keeps a small schooner off Cape Cod, but he has never been aboard her for more than a weekend. He plays golf but only for business reasons (“too slow”). He does enjoy tennis. He once played duplicate bridge on both the Harvard and Union League clubs bridge teams. But he quit because once he got started he couldn’t stop: he went on playing in his sleep.
Cunningham’s adaptations have involved some atrophy. “What’s tragic about me,” he confides, “is that I have all this equipment and desire for play–but I love this other woman, this agency.”
A possibly better adapted executive is Don Mitchell, chairman and president of Sylvania Electric Products Co., New York City. Indeed, Mitchell has apparently mastered most of the executive’s problems.
He still lives in the eleven-room brick house in suburban Summit, New Jersey, that be bought in 1938 for $17,000.
Commuting to his office takes him a little over an hour, and he doesn’t particularly enjoy it. But he has worked out the problem very nicely. If he can leave his office on upper Broadway at four-forty-five, he can avoid the subway rush and get into a club car at Hoboken on the Lackawanna’s five-fifteen. In more dignified surroundings than the regular coaches, and impervious as he is to idle chatting, he can get some work done during the thirty-minute ride to Summit. If he has to stay in town for dinner or a meeting, as he does two or three times a week, he stays at the Savoy-Plaza.
Mitchell planned his life from its beginning. His first twenty-five years were to be spent in preparation (it may be presumed that he did not actually make this decision until sometime in his adolescence). The second twenty-five years were to be spent in providing financially for himself and his family. The next twenty-five years were to be spent in serving society. Since Mitchell became president of Sylvania at forty-one, nine years ago, he has covered phase two of his career well within his schedule. His salary today is $120,000, which, of course, does not count income from investments.
He has never overextended himself financially–a dangerous and foolish practice, he observes, of many young businessmen, who apparently think they can project themselves into a higher economic level by spending in such a way as to suggest they are already up there.
Now, at fifty, he already is in phase three, devoting more and more of his time to serving society. “My hobby,” he says, “is the American Management Association.” He also lends his energy to at least a dozen other organizations ranging from the Council for Economic Development to the Crusade for Freedom. His presence is required at luncheon meetings, Mitchell says, every business day in the week for three months in advance.
The Mitchells’ social life he describes as “limited.” “I get stimulation from business. “Mama,” he says, referring to Mrs. Mitchell, “probably finds the life boring.” But as he explains: “Her job is to bring up the children [there are three, two of them by now grown], and keep my health reasonably good.”
His health appears to be excellent. His relaxation is gardening. The only thing that worries Mitchell is the thought of retirement. He reads–he has a library of some 2,000 biographies–but chiefly he reads “everything that’s been printed about retirement.” He believes he would have the inner resources to keep himself occupied; this is not what worries him. Mitchell explains it this way: he would be afraid, he says, that after he retired he might call up an old friend who was still active in business, and be told his friend was too busy to see him. “My ego would be hurt,” he says with a fleeting smile. He plans to spend more time, after a few years, in foreign countries, at the offices of Sylvania’s affiliates, and hopes thus to retire so gradually no one will notice, and no one will be too busy to see him when he calls. | Editor's note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a story from our magazine archives. With the annual Fortune 500 list ready to be revealed tomorrow, turn this week to our inaugural Fortune 500 list, in July, 1955. General Motors topped the list that year, and writer Duncan Norton-Taylor took an inside look into the lives of America's top… | 101.357143 | 0.957143 | 44.414286 | high | high | extractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2013/09/23/michaela-watkins-wife-material/SqsgPoPDb0F56TEp2aKMbP/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140907052034id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2013/09/23/michaela-watkins-wife-material/SqsgPoPDb0F56TEp2aKMbP/story.html | Michaela Watkins is ‘Wife’ material | 20140907052034 | BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Michaela Watkins isn’t the “Trophy Wife” in the title of the new ABC sitcom, premiering Tuesday at 9:30 p.m., but she definitely feels like she’s won a prize.
The Wellesley-bred, Boston University-educated actress gets to play with an accomplished ensemble cast that includes Emmy winner Bradley Whitford (“The West Wing”) and Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden (“Pollock”).
Watkins costars as Jackie, the flaky second ex-wife of Whitford’s character.
“I think that Jackie is sort of the antidote to the first wife,” she says of the more rigid Harden character. “The first wife was all business and all serious. Then comes Jackie, who is all heart. And you can see how he overcorrected a little bit maybe, and then came back to the middle with [the title character, played by Malin Akerman].”
Since her 2008-09 stint on “Saturday Night Live,” Watkins has been busy both onstage with the Los Angeles improv troupe The Groundlings and onscreen, doing guest appearances on such series as “New Girl," “Anger Management,” and “The New Adventures of Old Christine” as well as the recent films “In a World” and “Afternoon Delight.” We had a chance to chat with Watkins — who had just become a wife herself the previous weekend — at the recent Television Critics Association press tour.
“Trophy Wife” isn’t flat-out awful, which, in this network television fall season of mediocrity, is saying something.
Q. Jackie is pretty wacky in the pilot. Will you sustain that level?
A. As the show continues and we see more of her, we have to ground her down, otherwise she’s going to take off into space. Even reading the next episode I see there’s definite grounding to her . She’s not just cuckoo, banana, cracker nuts.
Q. But it’s fun playing cuckoo, banana, cracker nuts, right?
A. Oh, it is amazing, especially with my background in sketch comedy and improv, but I’m also an actor so I feel like if it’s not a five-minute sketch we have to believe her, we have to feel for her. It has to be a real person. And I do know people who live sort of in the clouds but have very real wants and needs and fears, but the way they express themselves is just a little off.
Q. Just guessing that it’s not that difficult to play once being in love with Bradley Whitford?
A. No, he’s so charming. The funny thing is how disarming he is because I just think of “West Wing” Bradley Whitford and it’s like, “Oh my god!” But he is so funny. He is constantly telling stories and sharing about his whole life in these ways where it’s like I’ve known him for a long time in a very short amount of time.
Q. You had a memorable guest shot on the HBO series “Hung” that ended up with your presented-as-straight character getting frisky with Arden Myrin from “MadTV.” How was that?
A. Um, interesting. It was a lot of pasties. (Laughs). It was sort of like comedy nerds had something just for them — “MadTV” and “SNL”! She’s hilarious. Those are amazing actors. I was really blown away by them. When you watch something like that you think there’s a lot of editing happening, but they were really in the moment.
Q. As someone with an improv background, are you given latitude to try different things on the show?
A. I am. We’ll see how long that lasts. (Laughs.) But [the producers have] really loosened the reins to really let me go. The fact is, their script is so funny, I think everything you’re seeing is pretty much the script but sometimes they do give me leeway. They’ll do a take where they’ll go, “Hey Michaela, just go crazy.” (Laughs.) | BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Michaela Watkins isn’t the “Trophy Wife” in the title of the new ABC sitcom, premiering Tuesday at 9:30 p.m., but she definitely feels like she’s won a prize. The Wellesley-bred, Boston University-educated actress gets to play with an accomplished ensemble cast that includes Emmy winner Bradley Whitford (“The West Wing”) and Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden (“Pollock”). Watkins costars as Jackie, the flaky second ex-wife of Whitford’s character. “I think that Jackie is sort of the antidote to the first wife,” she says of the more rigid Gay Harden character. “The first wife was all business and all serious. Then comes Jackie, who is all heart.” | 5.449664 | 0.979866 | 31.395973 | low | high | extractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/12/04/vcs-and-angels-take-aim-entrepreneurs-caught-in-crosshairs/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140907225222id_/http://fortune.com/2013/12/04/vcs-and-angels-take-aim-entrepreneurs-caught-in-crosshairs/ | VCs and angels take aim, entrepreneurs caught in crosshairs | 20140907225222 | FORTUNE — No topic fuels more discussion and debate within the early-stage investment community than the dynamics between VC and angel investors. Are they natural enemies or complementary players in an increasingly diverse funding ecosystem? Or both?
AngelList’s introduction of syndicates has added several new twists to this debate—the notion of angel as lead investor, the potential to crowdfund Series A rounds and implications for subsequent VC rounds. In the back-and-forth over which funding routes are most advantageous to startups, some investors and pundits are going so far as to suggest one model will flourish while the other fades.
As a serial entrepreneur turned VC, my position on syndicates is somewhere near the middle of the spectrum—but certain aspects concern me deeply, particularly VCs who are peeling away from proven strategies, and the unfounded claims of signaling risk with VC seed investing.
AngelList’s syndicate platform is an innovation on the VC model, but one with many parallels to traditional venture. In this scenario, the lead angel is essentially a micro VC, playing the part of an active fund manager, similar to VCs managing capital invested by limited partners. The primary difference here—and it’s a big one—is that the traditional VC model operates on a fund basis, while an angel syndicate has a deal-by-deal carry for fund managers. Angels can make a profit off of one deal, and a loss off another.
Angels stand to benefit from increased access to deals and decreased risk, but the angel-entrepreneur dynamics shift dramatically from the pre-syndicate model. With more dollars in play and one angel acting as lead investor, the entrepreneur will have to take a leap of faith. As an entrepreneur, I’d want to know whether the angel has experience as a lead investor. How many syndicates will this angel form, and how many deals will he/she do? In a scenario where the angel’s risk is largely mitigated by the syndicate and there are any number of shots on goal, how sure can I be of getting—and keeping—their attention? Another very real risk is artificially high valuations, inflated by an exuberant syndicate, that could all but cut off access to VC funding in future rounds.
At this point, there are more questions than answers. Ultimately, I don’t think angel syndicates will succeed or fail. Rather, I think some will succeed and others will fail. Those that succeed will probably become… VCs.
While angels are acting as micro-VCs, there are plenty of VCs being lured by the capital-light, spray-and-pray approach favored by certain angel investors. Capital constraints, coupled with early successes for a handful of ‘super angels,’ have created a tendency for some VCs to move away from the storied business model of funding disruptive innovation in favor of the path of least resistance, in the form of a larger number of small, capital-efficient investments—usually consumer internet or software. Unfortunately, this overcapitalizes one sector at the expense of others, and to the detriment of innovation. Me-too deals for a quick turn is not what our industry or our economy needs. This risk-averse approach is a departure from what works best about the traditional VC model: Partnering with entrepreneurs to fund disruption.
The final point I’d like to get across is not based on a new claim or trend, but rather the perpetuation of a dangerous myth: Taking (seed) money from a VC is a kiss of death. NEA has always done seed investments, among them breakout successes like Data Domain (IPO in 2007, acquired by EMC for $2.4B in 2009), Tivo (IPO in 1999) and The Climate Corporation (to be acquired by Monsanto for $1.1B). But setting aside the outliers, our most recent class of seed investments demonstrates an equally important point. On the tech side of our business alone, we look at over 300 seed companies each quarter, and to date we’ve invested in over 50 of them. Based on the 35 seed rounds we participated in from March 2011-July 2012, more than 50% have gone on to raise Series A rounds either from NEA or other firms.
In most cases where a VC does not participate in a subsequent round, it is most often because the company has pivoted in a way that either no longer fits with the original investment thesis or is directly competitive with other companies in the portfolio. In these situations, others firms may be a better fit to fund the Series A. If a company takes a seed investment and cannot raise an additional round, that company (and any doubtful angels) must look inward for the explanation before looking outward.
As the debate continues over angel vs. VC funding, we need to remember that these are two sides of the same coin. It’s unfortunate that some of the discussion has taken on an adversarial tone. The right outcome here is for angels and VCs to partner in a way that enables entrepreneurs to get the most out of the network and resources each brings—both in the early stages of company formation, and later when capital needs intensify. The truly successful VCs and angels (and maybe even syndicates) will always be the ones who stay focused on the values and actions that continue to foster innovation and disruption.
Kittu Kolluri (@kittukolluri) is a general partner with venture capital firm NEA, where he focuses on IT and energy tech investments. | It's time for VCs and angels to set aside their differences, in part because they are largely cosmetic. | 50.333333 | 0.761905 | 1.142857 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2013/03/13/judge-rules-in-private-equity-conspiracy-case/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140908073036id_/http://fortune.com:80/2013/03/13/judge-rules-in-private-equity-conspiracy-case/ | Judge rules in private equity conspiracy case | 20140908073036 | FORTUNE — The landmark private equity conspiracy lawsuit will carry on, albeit in a more limited form.
A Boston judge today denied a defendant motion to dismiss the entire class-action suit, which had accused 10 private equity firms of conspiring on 19 buyout transactions that occurred before the financial crisis.
The original complaint argued that the firms had organized an overarching conspiracy to fix prices, partially evidenced by how losing bidders occasionally were added to the winning consortium. The plaintiffs also alleged that personal friendships between private equity executives at competing firms led to impropriety.
Judge Edward Harrington, however, sided with the private equity firms on this central charge, seeming to blame the plaintiff attorneys for focusing on the forest rather than the trees. From his ruling: “Plaintiffs persistent hesitance to narrow their claim to something cognizable and supported by the evidence has made this matter unnecessarily complex and nearly warranted its dismissal.”
What Harrington allowed to stand was a specific charge that the private equity firms had a tacit agreement not to jump each other’s proprietary deals. In other words, once a PE firm reached agreement to acquire a company — none of the other private equity firms would offer a superior price during the “go-shop” process.
The only defendant exempted from this continuing charge was JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM , because “the evidence does not establish that JP Morgan was in the business of bidding on Target Companies and does not otherwise support its participation in the narrowed overarching conspiracy.”
What also goes forward is a secondary claim that four firms — The Blackstone Group BX , The Carlyle Group CG , Goldman Sachs GS and TPG Capital — agreed to “stand down” on the auction for hospital chain HCA HCA . The firms that ultimately purchased HCA — Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. — were released from this claim by Harrington.
In explaining his decision on HCA, Harrington pointed to two statements:
Harrington basically is telling all parties that the plaintiffs overreached with their original complaint, but that there is enough smoke on deal-jumping (particularly in regards to HCA) that it’s worth investigating to see if there’s an actual fire.
Not surprisingly, a number of the private equity defendants are focusing on the positive. For example, a Blackstone spokeswoman writes: “We are pleased the court saw through the absurdity of a ’vast overarching conspiracy’ involving 27 deals and will allow us and the other defendants to demonstrate to the court that even the modified claims should not go to a jury.” We received similar statements from KKR and TPG Capital.
Other private equity firms named in the complaint are: Apollo Global Management, Providence Equity Partners, Silver Lake Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners. The lead plaintiff on the class action is someone named Kirk Dahl, who was a shareholder in Freescale Semiconductor and Univision.
Harrington’s entire ruling is below:
Sign up for my daily email newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com | Private equity firms off the hook for bid-rigging, but still accused of refusing to jump each other's deals. | 24.782609 | 0.695652 | 1.652174 | medium | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/09/08/twitter-launches-new-buy-button-to-connect-shoppers-and-products/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140908140633id_/http://fortune.com/2014/09/08/twitter-launches-new-buy-button-to-connect-shoppers-and-products/ | Twitter launches new “Buy” button to connect shoppers and products | 20140908140633 | Twitter is jumping into the e-commerce market.
The social website is testing a new “Buy” button that will allow users to purchase an item directly from a tweet, the company announced Monday. The option will be open to a small percentage of U.S. users, and Twitter plans to expand the availability over time.
“This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy,” the company wrote on its blog. “Sellers will gain a new way to turn the direct relationship they build with their followers into sales.”
Twitter teamed-up with 28 brands, musicians and companies for the initial launch, including Burberry BRBY , Home Depot HD and musician Pharrell. More artists and brands will be added in coming weeks.
Starting Monday, an entire purchase can be completed within the Twitter interface. After tapping the “Buy” button, a user will get additional product details and be able to enter shipping and payment information to complete the order.
In the wake of recent security concerns, such as the Home Depot and Target credit card breaches, the company confirmed that it has taken precautions to ensure that all payment and shipping information is encrypted and safely stored. User information will be saved to make future purchases seamless, though it can be manually deleted. | Twitter launches a new "Buy" button that allows users to directly purchase a product from a brand or artist's tweet. | 10.75 | 0.666667 | 1 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/mariah-carey-tour-nick-cannon-breakup | http://web.archive.org/web/20140908222808id_/http://www.people.com/article/mariah-carey-tour-nick-cannon-breakup | Mariah Carey Focuses on Tour During Split from Nick Cannon | 20140908222808 | Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon
09/08/2014 AT 04:00 PM EDT
figures the best way to handle a stressful breakup is to stay busy.
The mom of two has been doing just that, sticking to her plan to
Saturday night, showing rehearsals for her upcoming "The Elusive Chanteuse Tour."
The show, which kicks off in Japan in October, marks Carey's first major world tour since "The Adventures of Mimi" in 2006.
"I want to experience the spontaneity and emotion that I put into this album on stage with my fans," Carey wrote about the tour
"I can't stop writing songs so don't be surprised if you hear a brand new song that I just wrote the night before the show in your city!"
Meanwhile, Cannon, 33, was in
hosting a Pepsi Pop Up concert featuring Kreesha Turner and 4Count.
A few days earlier, the
addressing his relationship with Carey and calling this period a "challenging" one for the family.
"What infuriates me most is to hear people slander @MariahCarey. I will forever be in debted to her for blessing me with our children," he wrote. "I will always love her unconditionally for this and so much more. @MariahCarey is an amazing Mother and I trust her wholeheartedly." | The singer prepares for her upcoming tour while estranged husband Nick Cannon performs in Toronto | 17 | 0.533333 | 1.066667 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/sep/30/wondersandblunders.architecture | http://web.archive.org/web/20140909193411id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/sep/30/wondersandblunders.architecture | Paul Wombell: Doncaster Co-op/ Sangatte Hangar | 20140909193411 | Built in 1938-40, the Co-op department store looks like a cruise liner that found its way up the river Don. When I left school it was the most modernist-looking structure in central Doncaster. At that time Doncaster felt connected to the wider world. The A1 still ran through it, and once a year the world came to the town for the St Leger race. Today the A1 bypasses Doncaster and the race has been overshadowed by the Arc, but this building is still there. Buildings are more than bricks and mortar, they are also memories and fantasies.
In southern Europe, I have often come across plastic tents on the edges of towns where Gypsies and migrants have built temporary homes for themselves. The materials they use are freely available locally. You could call this vernacular architecture, but a more fitting term would be the architecture of racism. In northern Europe, some asylum seekers are housed in more permanent buildings: industrial warehouses, also isolated on the edge of towns, such as "The Hangar" in Sangatte, France.
Creating temporary spaces that cater for the migration of people is an issue for architects as well as politicians - a much more pressing one than the rebuilding on the site of the World Trade Centre.
· Paul Wombell is director of the Photographers' Gallery, London. | Wonder: Doncaster Co-op Blunder: Sangatte Hangar | 19.769231 | 0.615385 | 1.076923 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/advertisingsummit/speaker-interview-amanda-mackenzie | http://web.archive.org/web/20140910104531id_/http://www.theguardian.com/advertisingsummit/speaker-interview-amanda-mackenzie | Changing Advertising summit 2011: Speaker interview Amanda Mackenzie | 20140910104531 | @amandamack6In 30 words or less tell us who you work for and what you do:
I work for Aviva and am responsible for all Aviva group marketing, communications and public policy.
Website you can't live without?
What are the guiding principles that dictate your marketing message at Aviva?
Recognition is at the heart of everything we do. We aim to combine our expertise with empathy to treat our customers as people, not as policies.
This translates through our marketing campaigns across the world in different ways. Our global marketing campaign 'You are the Big Picture', features portraits and stories of the people most important to us – our customers, employees, business partners and communities – and really brings to life individual recognition. It has a number of elements - public projections, digital innovation and a renewed pledge to keep raising funds to help street children in India through people's participation in the campaign. The campaign in the US is about 'youmanity'.
How would you judge the success of the well publicised re-brand of the company? What lessons did you learn from that process?
We are more than two years into the re-branding journey now and I'm relieved and pleased to say we have enjoyed a lot of success and recognition along the way. Positive chatter about Aviva quadrupled following the rebrand and our customer satisfaction ratings have since doubled. We worked very hard to communicate the vision of a more united, customer focused organisation to our people first. The extensive discussion and engagement that helped us get it right inside the organisation, gave us a great platform to market the re-brand to the world, helping people to understand its benefits. While we of course embrace this success – our customer numbers are higher than ever before – we are all still very aware that the job is by no means complete.
I think almost everything in 2012 will be focused on the Olympics and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and rightly so – the limelight and fanfare the events will bring presents an enormous opportunity for brands to really engage people and to be proud as a nation. We have been supporting British athletics for over ten years now so we're looking forward to seeing British success at the Olympics. Of course, the celebrations will also come against the backdrop of the global economy continuing to fluctuate. The financial services industry needs to continue to focus on rebuilding faith among those who felt they had lost trust in financial services companies during the financial crisis. Financial markets need to be less volatile and as a nation we need to come to terms with and accept several years of slow down and economic austerity.
And finally, what can we expect from you at the Guardian Changing Advertising Summit?
I'm really looking forward to the Summit; it has a great line-up. I will be focusing on issues close to my heart – examining how financial services brands can engage with customers, drawing on the success of 'You are the big picture'. We launched the original campaign across multiple markets in October 2010 and it's a fantastic example of how our recognition-based strategy allows consistent messages to filter through all of our communications and marketing activity. I'm very happy to answer any questions, which usually makes things more interesting.
Amanda Mackenzie speaks at the Changing Advertsing Summit on 20 October 2011. | Amanda Mackenzie shares her guiding principles in marketing and communications in this interview with the Guardian ahead of CAS 2011 | 32.2 | 0.75 | 1.05 | medium | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/09/11/video-a-musical-tribute-to-the-apple-watch/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140911175206id_/http://fortune.com/2014/09/11/video-a-musical-tribute-to-the-apple-watch/ | Video: A musical tribute to the Apple Watch | 20140911175206 | Jonathan Mann has written and recorded an original song every day since January 2009. According to his Wikipedia entry:
Song number 2,078 is devoted to Apple’s 9/9 event. It’s final refrain, speculating about what guys are likely to draw on their Apple Watches, is not entirely safe for office viewing.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed. | Apple's next big thing is the subject of the song-a-day guy's 2,078th ditty. | 4.2 | 0.35 | 0.35 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/aug/19/heritage | http://web.archive.org/web/20140911210739id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/aug/19/heritage | Leader: An iconic ship | 20140911210739 | The final pieces in one of history's most alluring jigsaw puzzles may soon be in place following yesterday's announcement of the discovery of the missing front section of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship that sank in 1545.
Alex Hildred, the project manager for the dive said it was the most important maritime archaeology find in England for 20 years. It is more than that. It is history coming alive before our eyes. Built between 1509 and 1511, the Mary Rose was the toast of the Tudor fleet and one of the first warships to be able to fire a broadside. In an important sense it is one of the precursors of today's fighting ships and it is ironic that the latest dive was prompted by the need to dredge the channel in which the Mary Rose rested to make way for the next generation of bigger aircraft carriers due to enter service in 2012.
Even at a time when searching for sunken wrecks has become a trophy hunter's growth industry, the Mary Rose stands proud. She is the only 16th-century warship on view anywhere in the world and has already attracted millions of visitors to attest to the allure that made her Henry's favourite vessel.
The ship, after 34 years service, sank as the king watched it engage in battle with the French. Whether it went down as a result of being overloaded or because it suffered a hit from the French navy is not completely clear. If the latter explanation is correct, then it adds another poignant irony because the ship is believed to have been named after Henry's youngest sister Mary, a daughter of Henry VII, who some years earlier had married Louis XII of France at Abbeville (at Henry's behest).
It will take many millions of pounds to raise the latest discovery and to restore it to the state where it can join the rest of the ship on public display. So far, the Mary Rose Trust has proved highly successful in raising funds. Raising the rest of the money will test its pioneering spirit to the core. | The Mary Rose is history in the making. | 43.555556 | 0.888889 | 2 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/08/31/20/36/iceland-issues-red-alert-after-new-eruption-near-volcano | http://web.archive.org/web/20140912024135id_/http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/08/31/20/36/iceland-issues-red-alert-after-new-eruption-near-volcano | Iceland issues red alert for third time after new eruption near volcano | 20140912024135 | An aerial view of white clouds of smoke and steam rising from a fissure eruption taken during a flight over the Holuhraun lava field north of the Vatnajokull glacier in Iceland. (AAP)
Iceland today raised its aviation alert over its largest volcano to the highest level of red after a new eruption nearby.
The alert entails a ban on all flights below 6,000 feet (1.8 kilometres) within a radius of 10 nautical miles (18.5 kilometres, 11.5 miles) of Bardarbunga.
"All airports are open. The area has no effect on any airports," the Civil Protection Office said in a statement.
Today was the third time in a week that Iceland issued a red alert for aviation due to seismic activity near Bardarbunga.
The latest eruption happened roughly in the same area of another eruption on Friday, the authorities said.
Bardarbunga, in the southeast of the country, is Iceland's second-highest peak.
A major explosion at Bardarbunga, located under Europe's largest glacier, could signal a replay of the global travel chaos triggered when another Icelandic peak blew four years ago, unleashing a massive ash cloud across Europe.
The eruption of Eyjafjoell, a smaller volcano, in April 2010 left more than eight million people stranded in the widest airspace shutdown since World War II.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Iceland raised its aviation alert over its largest volcano to the highest level of red for a third time today after a new eruption nearby. | 10 | 1 | 9.230769 | low | high | extractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/dec/30/art | http://web.archive.org/web/20140912175356id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/dec/30/art | Hung out to dry by the sponsors | 20140912175356 | Too 'harsh' for Christmas: Peter Kennard's Peace on Earth Banned, which was rejected by Orange for its Brightening Up London campaign
Five weeks ago I was asked, along with the artist Banksy, by Damon Albarn to produce an image symbolising peace and Christmas, to be projected on Trinity House in the City of London as part of the Brighten Up London campaign. I was told it was a project organised by Bob Geldof and sponsored by Orange. There were expenses but no fee. To make a public artwork was my spur, to make an image of hope after a year of war.
It was a chance to use a public place to make an iconic image that would reflect the hopes of millions. I tried to visualise the phrase "peace on Earth" by using a painting of the Virgin Mary, replacing her face with an image of the Earth and turning her halo into a peace symbol - a simple juxtaposition creating a photomontage that does not contradict Christian belief but interprets it for a world in danger.
After this - silence. The day for the projection came and went with no projection, followed by a series of confused messages about problems with the image. Eventually, Niamh Byrne, head of media relations at Orange, told the Guardian on December 24 that even though she found the image "absolutely fantastic ... what we were looking for was something that people from little children to grandparents could appreciate". My picture did not, apparently, fall into this category.
I will leave it to the grandmothers who recently risked their lives disarming nuclear submarines in Scotland, and to the many thousands of elderly people and children who went on peace marches in 2003, to respond to the condescension of that remark. I will turn instead to the mission statement on the Orange website: "We are ready to push the boundaries and take risks; we are always open and honest; we say what we do and we do what we say; we want to make a difference to people's lives."
I read on and find that Orange linked up with Index on Censorship this year to launch the Orange/Index debates to discuss issues of free expression, aimed particularly at university students (one hopes no little children or grandparents unwittingly attended). I hereby award the Orange prize for fiction to Orange.
Orange have created a lot of publicity for themselves by sponsoring the Brighten Up London campaign. We Londoners have been lucky enough to see images of mince pies freshly baked by Nigella projected on to one building, and hearts projected on to another. (You guessed it, Heart 106.2 is one of the project's sponsors.) In all, nine buildings were used as screens for a variety of Christmas-type baubles that did not even reach the aesthetic levels of the cheapest Christmas cards.
The patrons of contemporary art, the Medicis of today, are the corporations. They give the impression of supporting dissident views and freedom of expression, but if there is any danger that your sponsored work encourages even a modicum of critical debate, you're out the door. The sponsors are in it to ratchet up "the buying mood".
Censorship of culture is something one does not speak of in the free market - it brings back images of Lady Chatterley and the Lord Chamberlain. But in the visual arts it is an increasing determinant of what people are allowed to see in public spaces. Exhibitions cannot take place if they are not sponsored. A few years ago, the Tate even had trouble finding a sponsor for a Francis Bacon show, as the work appeared a bit too visceral for shareholders to support.
In the case of an exhibition of my own work, entitled Images against War, at the Barbican Centre in 1985, two of the works were censored at the last minute. One was hastily unscrewed from the wall and the other, which could not be moved quickly enough, was covered with an old grey blanket. The censorship of these two works only lasted for one morning. It was the morning a high-ranking Chilean official was scheduled to address a group of bankers at the Barbican. The directors of the Barbican thought that he might be offended by two of my paintings, which were symbolic representations of the barbarism that had taken place directly after the military coup of 1973. Q. Who finances the Barbican? A. The Corporation of London.
Artists are being hung out to dry. Don't take my word for it - go and see the illuminated buildings for yourselves. Tomorrow, they will all have a special New Year celebration stamp projected on to them. Can't wait.
· Peter Kennard's most recent publication is Dispatches from an Unofficial War Artist (Lund Humphries) | Peter Kennard: Art's corporate backers decide what we can see in public spaces. | 56.9375 | 0.8125 | 2.3125 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.people.com/article/chelsea-clinton-baby-pregnancy-hillary-clinton | http://web.archive.org/web/20140916031245id_/http://www.people.com/article/chelsea-clinton-baby-pregnancy-hillary-clinton | I'm on 'Constant Grandchild Watch" : People.com | 20140916031245 | 09/15/2014 AT 04:20 PM EDT
, but eager grandmother-in-waiting Hillary Clinton says it could be any day now.
"Bill and I are on constant grandchild watch," the former secretary of state told the crowd Sunday at political steak fry in Indianola, Iowa. "So don't be surprised if we suddenly go sprinting off the stage."
As for what she called "that other thing" – feverish speculation on whether she'll run for president in 2016 – Clinton stuck to the same "thinking about it" answer she
back in June. But that wasn't the only red meat she served up to the crowd of supporters.
Clinton, who flipped steaks on the grill beside her husband, said with a grin, "I'm here for the steak! For years I was more likely to be eating yak meat in Mongolia and enjoying it, but thinking a lot of being back home." | The couple's daughter, Chelsea Clinton, is expecting her first child | 13.923077 | 0.384615 | 0.538462 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/oct/09/art | http://web.archive.org/web/20140917044453id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/oct/09/art | Is Raphael's art too perfect? | 20140917044453 | JMW Turner's painting, laboriously entitled Rome, From the Vatican, Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia, looks out from the Vatican palace - over Bernini's colonnades, past the mausoleum of Hadrian, over the Tiber, on to a golden vagueness that is Rome. In the foreground, Turner depicts a love story he knew would be familiar to his public at the 1820 Royal Academy Exhibition.
The High Renaissance master Raphael is preparing an exhibition of his canvases. At his side, a woman in a silvery silk dress turns away from us, examining her jewellery laid out on the parapet. She is La Fornarina, "the baker's daughter", the lover with whom Raphael was so obsessed that - as his 16th-century biographer Vasari claimed - he insisted she be permitted to live with him in a palace he was frescoing. Not only could Raphael not work unless his mistress was with him but, claims Vasari, he was so addicted to sex that one night or morning, "having... indulged in more than his usual excess, he returned to his house in a violent fever". The physicians bled him, which just made things worse. Raphael died in 1520 at the age of just 37.
Who today cares about La Fornarina, or the passionate love life of Raphael? In the Romantic age, everyone did. It was part of the folklore of art. Ingres, as well as Turner, painted Raphael with La Fornarina. Two hundred years later, the story is all but forgotten.
So much about Raphael is forgotten. His place as one of the three definitive masters of the highest stage of Renaissance art is unquestionable. But while Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo leap out of the past as living men - their lives intense and fascinating, their works disturbingly immediate - Raphael has become remote. The recent fuss over the National Gallery's bid to buy his Madonna of the Pinks revealed just how distant we are from him. No one could say why he is so special. Nor did anyone feel confident enough to point out that this, while worth having, is a minor work.
The National Gallery now offers the chance to look at Raphael more broadly with its exhibition Raphael From Urbino to Rome. People will certainly go. But will we just be paying our respects?
It is easy to explain why the artist is so much less popular today than he was in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Raphael is the greatest exemplar of classicism in painting. The one thing everyone knows about the Renaissance is that it dreamt of reviving the lost perfection of ancient Greece and Rome. This is a cliche. Italian Renaissance art would not be very interesting if all it did was repeat a past model to chilly perfection. The classical past obsessed the Renaissance, but it was always in tension with the forceful emotions of 15th- and 16th-century Italians: their colossal personalities, violent feuds and raw ambition.
Raphael was different. He loved and understood ancient Roman art and architecture more thoroughly than any other Renaissance artist. He assimilated it naturally and deeply. Classical art imposes order on chaos. Greco-Roman temples have perfect proportions and harmonious design that reveal a simple, calm grace beyond the mess of everyday life.
Raphael saw this from a very young age. In 1504, when he was 21, he painted a visionary manifesto for classical harmony. The Marriage of the Virgin, today in the Brera art gallery in Milan, depicts Joseph being betrothed to Mary in front of the temple in Jerusalem. What takes your breath away is the temple: a domed, multi-sided structure with slender colonnades, scrolled buttresses and a view straight through it to the clear sky beyond. Raphael's imaginary architecture is utopian. It is a dream of a perfect place, peaceful and graceful on its piazza.
It is not pure fantasy. Raphael discussed such buildings with his friend, the architect Bramante, who probably told him about similar-looking buildings that were designed but never built by his friend Leonardo da Vinci.
In 1502, Bramante got a commission from Isabella and Ferdinand, monarchs of Spain, to build a monumental structure on the spot on the Janiculum Hill in Rome where St Peter was said to have been crucified. He built the Tempietto, a circular domed temple. It powerfully resembles Raphael's painted architecture. This is classicism at its most idealistic. For Raphael and Bramante, the ancient world was a dream-like utopia that could actually be rebuilt.
Pope Leo X later appointed Raphael overseer of antiquities for the city of Rome. He succeeded Bramante as architect of the new St Peter's, and wrote to his friend Baldessare Castiglione that he wanted to "renew the beautiful forms of ancient buildings".
Raphael does this not just in his architecture - little of which was ever completed - but in his paintings. When he studied Da Vinci's paintings in Florence in the 1500s, he took from them an idea of classical harmony: you see it in paintings such as The Madonna of the Goldfinch (1506), with its beautifully balanced group of the encircling mother and the two nude children, Jesus and St John, the three of them together forming a gold, red and blue pyramid.
The reason Raphael's star has waned is simple enough. The cult of classical antiquity no longer dominates western culture; we don't find perfection as seductive as we once did. This is truer of tastes in art than in, say, classical music. Bach and Mozart resemble Raphael in order and perfection. We like them. So why is it so difficult to love Raphael? I don't mean respect - I mean love.
In the 1770s, Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, demonstrated an almost insane adoration for Raphael. She ordered her artists to re-create, in exact and meticulous detail, the loggias decorated by Raphael and his assistants in the Vatican palace. These are the most perfect examples of Renaissance "grotesques", imitations of the frescos found in Nero's palace in Rome. Raphael's loggia designs in the Vatican are not on public view. But you can walk down the perfect reproduction in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
Catherine the Great shared the aesthetic values of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Raphael was loved in the 18th century because he was so classically perfect. And he was loved by Ingres for the same reason. Ingres is his closest rival as a classical painter; they even drew similarly, with clear, rational lines.
The last person to love Raphael like this was Pablo Picasso. "Leonardo da Vinci promises us heaven," said Picasso. "Raphael gives it us." Picasso drew like Raphael and Ingres, with a panoptic, all-conquering line. He saw the beauty in Raphael's grace. He also saw that Raphael's dignity was hard won.
The greatest painting of the 20th century is deeply and overtly indebted to Raphael. Picasso quotes him in Guernica. The entire setting of the right-hand part of the painting, which Picasso made in 1937 to protest at the fascist bombing of the Basque town, is explicitly based on a Raphael fresco in the Vatican. In The Fire in the Borgo, Raphael is suddenly not celebrating harmony. He is, shockingly, mourning its absence. As a building burns, a woman hands her baby down. In Guernica, Picasso shows the same burning building, a woman screaming in the flames.
It's tempting to turn this argument around at this point, to say - with a sigh of relief - that Raphael is not the high priest of harmony, after all. His paintings are full of violence and drama. The Fire in the Borgo is a moving image of catastrophe. Just as emotional is his Entombment from 1507, inspired by the feuding factions of Perugia, with its swooning Mary and its tragic Christ. This is one of the great representations of lamentation in art. But these images of pain succeed because they, too, are ordered - organised, like classical theatre. The figures are artfully balanced in their distress.
Raphael's classicism is not cold. From his very first paintings, he reveals a need to believe there was order in the universe.
There were very good reasons in Italy, 500 years ago, to look for a vision of harmony. The world was violent, disease-ridden, unpredictable. Raphael, who was orphaned at 11, was taught by Perugino in Perugia, a particularly nasty place whose feuding clans turned everyday life into a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Beauty became the only stability, the only protection that he knew. And for us, if we are honest, Raphael's utopian visions of round temples and blue skies have an enchantment that is unique because these happy pictures are serious, they are authentic.
If we still find Raphael distant, there is one way in which he is more alive and immediate than any Renaissance painter. He left us the story of his love life. The tale of La Fornarina is true.
Her portrait by Raphael is in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Perhaps finished by assistants, perhaps restored later, this is nevertheless Raphael's picture of his lover. Her breasts are naked, her tummy covered by a translucent veil. She looks to the side and smiles quietly, as in the painting Raphael was one of the first to appreciate, Leonardo's Mona Lisa. But this woman is Raphael's. She wears a blue and gold armband to prove it, with his name, Raphael Urbinis.
The portrait of his mistress is one of Raphael's very last paintings. He left her enough money to live honourably, according to Vasari. He is buried - along with a different, more respectable woman to whom he was officially betrothed - in the place he wanted to rest: under the ancient Roman dome of the Pantheon, where a divine ray of sunlight comes through the oculus in the roof and moves round the walls, like a sundial registering the harmony of the universe.
· Raphael: from Urbino to Rome is at the National Gallery, London WC2, from October 20. Details: 020-7747 2885 | In his paintings, Raphael created a utopia of classical beauty. Yet we've fallen out of love with him. Is it because his art is so perfect, asks Jonathan Jones. | 56.314286 | 0.8 | 1.314286 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/feb/20/art1 | http://web.archive.org/web/20140917183435id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/feb/20/art1 | Strife on the ocean wave | 20140917183435 | August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer Tate Modern, London SE1, until 15 May
It seems that August Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist, author of such tormented plays as Easter and Miss Julie, was a painter during his down times. When he couldn't write he picked up a paintbrush. And since it is hardly to be expected that such a dark and knotted mind, prevented from writing, would find sunshine in the outer world, it is not surprising that in Strindberg's landscapes, as he himself said with no small understatement, 'the sky was usually overcast'.
Not so much overcast as gloweringly heavy, pitch-grey, often raging and storm-tossed. On the Swedish coast Strindberg never sees dawn or direct sunlight or glitter on the waves because all are blotted out by thickening clouds. The beach is his perennial subject, almost his only subject, in fact, a refuge from the loathed conventions of Stockholm life. If he saw a lone buoy cast up on the sand he inevitably saw (and painted) himself - a radical on the outermost edges of society.
Strindberg is a figure almost beyond parody when it comes to self-dramatisation. He threatened suicide to punish various friends and lovers more than 70 times. He stormed off into year-long exiles whenever he felt insufficiently appreciated. He had a tendency to rage around the streets, to turn on former friends - the painter Carl Larsson once hunted him with a knife through Stockholm after one particularly savage disloyalty - and to marry (many) women who divorced him in quick succession, usually after having one or more children by him.
His hunger for experiment lead him to try spiritualism, Swedenborg, Nietzsche, Catholicism, atheism, even to practising alchemy - with much chemical damage to himself - centuries after others had given up trying. When he turned to painting it was without training and without much discipline other than a zeal to get things down and a satisfaction in doing so, he wrote, that was something like taking hashish.
The earliest works in this huge show are quite unexpected - small and very beautiful. A tree on a strand, waves ravelled by wind, evening light falling on a copse, they look almost like silvery Corots. But he soon finds form and very sculptural it is too - big pictures heavily worked with a palette knife in claggy smears and crusts, a recognisable expressionism of sorts. Every picture is decisively bisected by a horizon line, with the sky above and the sea rearing up like a cliff below it.
These can be very powerful. There is a painting called The Wave in which a sliver of sky is trapped between inky clouds and a massive black wave far out at sea, just on the crest, the gap narrowing claustrophobically by the moment. (Although, typically, Strindberg overdoes it, producing nearly a dozen versions.) There are vulnerable buoys tossed on menacing tides. But generally every painting is curiously underpowered and weakened further by an prodigious attachment to symbolism.
Strindberg claimed to be the first painter of symbolic landscapes. Clearly he was overlooking, at the very least, the whole of German Romanticism. But his ambition is hard to ignore - the battered tree, the lone lighthouse, the windswept beach, the buoy washed up on the shore. It wouldn't take much for the audience in his day or ours to infer the agonies of solitude, divorce, persecution, madness.
Strindberg doesn't even scruple to insert a self-portrait in the outline of a cliff. But it can be quite a business decoding all the emblems in a full-scale allegory such as Golgotha.
I couldn't, for example, make out the likeness of Rembrandt in the tumultuous clouds above the foaming waves that look like monsters, or easily see 'the man in the billowing raincoat ... with the slouch hat like Wotan or Buddha'. But I could spot the 'three white-painted, unrigged masts of a stranded bark' far out in the darkness, 'their cross-bars looking like Golgotha'.
The problem, though it is also the advantage, of an exhibition like this is that Strindberg's much-quoted words are almost always stronger than his pictures. For all his bluster as a painter - reminiscent of late Lovis Corinth, or watered-down Courbet - his writing is infinitely more potent; even to the point where the pictures seem to stand as illustrations. Take the opening to his novel By the Open Sea, which appears to have The Wave in mind: ' ... the sight of this breaker affected the inspector as the sight of the coffin in which his body will lie affects a man condemned to death, and in the moment of apprehension he experienced a mortal dread both of cold and suffocation.'
Strindberg wrote many brilliantly apt captions to his copious flow of photographs, including the so-called 'celestographs' - in which he laid photographic plates directly beneath the night skies and let the stars etch their own blurred impressions on the film - and his life-sized portraits of family and friends. There are some particularly stunning self-portraits - 'Come on, you bastards, let's fight!' in which he wields a whip; and, hands deep in pockets, 'Thank God the damned summer is over. I'd be happy for it to be winter all year round.'
The effect of words and pictures beautifully arranged together, as here, is to create a kind of biopic or memento of the life. Which is no doubt the more fascinating if you happen to be seeing any of the Strindberg plays on across Britain this season. But for art per se, Strindberg's sheer force of personality comes out much more in the tremendous portraits made by fellow Swedish artists which are the strong-point of this show - Strindberg scowling in Munch's famous painting, turning a wild eye in Carl Larsson's lithograph, furrowing his colossal brow beneath that shock of hair in Carl Eldh's deathless memorial bust. Strindberg, it turns out, was much more the star of other people's art - and this show isn't likely to change that.
Turks Royal Academy, London W1, to 12 April 1,000 years of magnificent objects. Turner Whistler Monet Tate Britain, London SW1, to 15 May Unbeatable combination of three of the most popular artists of the 19th century plus plenty of sun-dappled water. Richard Wentworth Tate Liverpool, to 24 April Great and small epiphanies from Make-Do British sculptor. | Art: Laura Cumming on August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer | 96.615385 | 0.846154 | 5.153846 | high | medium | mixed |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/aug/06/architecture1 | http://web.archive.org/web/20140919085712id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/aug/06/architecture1 | Pleasure palaces | 20140919085712 | To find one of the great buildings of international modernism in England is surprising. To come upon it in Bexhill-on-Sea is sheer astonishment. Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff's De La Warr Pavilion, built in 1935, rose as a vision of the future in its setting of south-coast architectural timidity and seaside tackiness. This sleek white beauty of a building, now in the final stages of an £8m restoration, is still a showstopper. So many lost hopes later, it's a deeply moving sight.
It was built when the modern was only just beginning to be the accepted architectural style of social progress. Modernism was the language of the lidos and the health centres, the beach cafes and yacht clubs at a time when sun, sea and stripping off was acquiring its own morality. So it was at Bexhill-on-Sea where Earl De La Warr, the socialist mayor, drew up a brief for a building simple in design, light in appearance, with large window spaces, sunbathing terraces, a restaurant, a reading room, a multi-purpose entertainments hall. In other words, a modernist dream building by the seaside. The De La Warr Pavilion was to be the first large-scale welded steel-framed building in this country, technically as well as socially advanced.
The competition announced by Bexhill Corporation attracted 230 entries. It was a quirk of fate that this contest for an arts and entertainment pavilion in a middling resort on the English south coast was won by one of the giants of European architecture, a revolutionary and visionary, famous for his expressionist Einstein Tower in Potsdam and his Schocken department store in Stuttgart.
The Jewish Erich Mendelsohn, who had a large practice in Berlin, was one of a number of leading German architects who sought refuge in England in the mid-1930s, as Hitler came to power. As an émigré architect he could not work in England without a local partner. Mendelsohn joined Serge Chermayeff's London office. He had only been in England for two months when the Bexhill competition was announced. Mendelsohn, intensely musical, sketched out new architectural visions of the English seashore while 78rpm records of Bach played endlessly on the office gramophone.
The exodus from Germany produced some surprising architectural partnerships. When he arrived in London, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, paired up with Maxwell Fry; his Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer joined FRG Yorke. Perhaps the least likely of these architectural team-ups was that of the revered European Mendelsohn and the younger, much less experienced Chermayeff, then the glamour boy of English architecture with his high-society connections and his prowess on the dance floor. (He had won the International Tango Competition at the London Palladium in 1927.)
The partnership had tensions, but proved perfect for Bexhill, balancing Mendelsohn's genius with concept and Chermayeff's modernist elegance of interior design. By the time I met Chermayeff in the late 1980s, the once twinkling toes were heading for the Zimmer frame, but there were still signs of the temperamental charmer with a perfect sense of style.
When the competition results were announced in 1934 a bitter row arose. The employment of refugee architects was a sensitive issue at a time of slump, when work for British architects was scarce. The British Union of Fascists's newspaper, Fascist Week, launched an attack on "the contemptible and despicable betrayal of our own country" by the Royal Institute of British Architects in encouraging "those aliens who have found it advisable to flee from their own land". The furore partially died down when it was pointed out that Chermayeff, although born in Chechnya, was an old Harrovian and had been a British citizen since 1928. But to fascist commentators, modernism itself was suspect, self-indulgent: the rampant "aggrandisement of individual liberty".
Mendelsohn and Chermayeff's first model for Bexhill, now in the Architecture Gallery at the V&A, shows the scope of a plan that was almost a sea city, including a swimming pool and pier. Though these schemes for a De La Warr Cure Resort were modified on grounds of cost, the building still has a wonderful expansiveness. Mendelsohn himself describes it as "a horizontal skyscraper which starts its development from the auditorium". The brilliant interaction of spaces makes the building seem alive with possibilities, expressing modernist tenets of perpetual momentum in a world untrammelled by possessions or outdated obligations to family and home. Leaning over the rails of one of the Pavilion's seductive curving terraces, the feeling is of being on board an ocean liner, sailing luxuriously to unknown destinations. This is the architecture of modernist adventure, a 1930s fantasy of the freedom of the seas.
Mendelsohn and Chermayeff had a shared love of illusion. Mendelsohn's Woga Complex for the city of Berlin was not just large-scale provision of housing for the workers but included a theatre and cabaret and the futuristic Universum cinema. Chermayeff's early career as a stage designer, mainly of drawing-room comedies, included the 1925 production of The Last of Mrs Cheney starring Gerald du Maurier and Gladys Cooper and, in 1930, he designed the svelte art-deco foyer and auditorium for the new Cambridge Theatre at Seven Dials.
The De La Warr Pavilion is forcefully theatrical, not just in its provision of a beautiful and versatile 1,000 seater performance space, but in the unfolding dramas of the building as a whole. The curved chrome-steel stairway, the dominant internal feature, creates balletic scenes of ascending and descending, arriving and regrouping. The building is ever changing, constantly revitalised by the extraordinary play of light.
It was formally opened in December 1935 by the Duke and Duchess of York, soon to be King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Speeches were made against a backdrop of enormous Union Jacks. The royal visitors were evidently not converted to the modernist agenda. But there was huge press coverage and public interest in a project optimistically welcomed by De La Warr as "a modernist building of world renown which will become a crucible for creating a new model of culture provision in an English seaside town". The traditional seaside of rock, whelks and ukeleles was challenged by a programme of cultural uplift, evident as the Pavilion's resident orchestra played the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger on opening night.
In that very early era of destination architecture Bexhill's ambitious modernism influenced developments in other seaside towns. Between 1935 and 1939 Joseph Emberton's commission to redesign the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool in "a unified modern style" brought a sophistication to George Formbyland. The pièce de résistance was the Casino, a multi-level restaurant with its tall slim spiral tower following the form of a fairground helter-skelter in elegant cast concrete. On the south coast near Brighton the curvaceous Saltdean Lido by RWH Jones was one of many cut-price versions of Mendelsohn and Chermayeff's Bexhill masterpiece. By 1940, seaside modernism was in decline. The foreign maestros had by then left England, disillusioned by the innate visual conservatism of this country; Mendelsohn worked mainly in Palestine before following Gropius and Breuer to the US.
The idea of coastal pleasure palaces became redundant. Little point in seaview terraces designed for sipping cocktails once the English Channel became turbulent with war, and even once peace came the bracing socialist programme of fresh air, high culture and the baring of the body was less and less enticing. Such ideals seemed all too prissy in the Costa Brava years. The sea itself took a cruel revenge on modernism as the salt in the atmosphere turned once white, inviting buildings into shabby desolations of rusting steel work and discoloured flaking paint. By the 1980s the De La Warr Pavilion was a heartbreaking sight.
But there is now new consciousness of the importance of these rare heroic buildings of English modernism, as much for their courage in providing the setting for experiments in living as for their inherent visual aplomb. Wells Coates' Lawn Road Flats, built in Hampstead in 1934, was an apartment block designed for "minimal" living and the earliest large-scale reinforced concrete building in Britain. The tiny flats were designed to give their childless residents freedom from onerous domestic responsibilities, their meals being provided from a central kitchen. This building, like the De La Warr, is strongly nautical, in spite of its siting on the edge of Hampstead Heath. The social and sexual liberations of life on board ship are implicit in its abstract geometry of cantilevered walkways and escape stairs.
To Agatha Christie, an early resident, the building loomed up in the street like "a giant ocean liner that ought to have had a couple of funnels". Lawn Road Flats, the most poetic architectural expression of prewar progressive Hampstead aspirations, was restored at the end of 2004.
Further north, another ocean liner of a building, the Midland Hotel in Morecambe, a crumbling hulk for many years, is about to be revived. Though less architecturally pure than the De La Warr Pavilion this building too was once a beacon of the modern, designed by Oliver Hill for LMS Railways, spectacularly placed overlooking Morecambe Bay. Trainloads came from the south for the Midland's then so fashionable seaside combination of health, glamour and culture. Hill had commissioned special textiles from Marion Dorn, murals from Eric Ravilious, carvings from Eric Gill. Plans for the Midland's comprehensive restoration, by the northern developers Urban Splash, include the repainting of Gill's sculptures of seahorses flanking the main entrance - seahorses with the tails of Morecambe Bay shrimps.
In the 1930s, building modern was seen as a feasible route out of the depression. History repeats itself and 70 years later the restoration of key modernist buildings of that period is a hoped-for means of finding a new role for ailing English coastal towns. The resurrection of the De La Warr has had powerful support from more recent generations of British architects. For the late Denys Lasdun, architect of the National Theatre, as well as Richard Rogers, the building has been an emotional reminder of their own modernist architectural roots. John McAslan's careful restoration is true to the spirit of the original, though alas the shoreside reading room has long since gone.
"The interior is truly music," as the Earl said to the architect during the final stages of the De La Warr's construction. Externally too, with its everchanging background of sun, cloud and south-coast drizzle, this is just the most enjoyable building in the world. The restored De La Warr Pavilion opens on September 17 as a national centre for contemporary art. | They are the elegant relics of Britain's 1930s seaside heyday. Now the coast's modernist masterpieces are receiving a new lease of life, says Fiona MacCarthy. | 67.366667 | 0.7 | 0.9 | high | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/09/19/alibaba-ipo-profits/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140919183023id_/http://fortune.com/2014/09/19/alibaba-ipo-profits/ | Ali-Nada: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba not as profitable as it seems | 20140919183023 | Shares of Alibaba BABA began trading on Friday at $92, up nearly 35% from the offering price.
Investors have been so excited about the Chinese e-commerce giant primarily because of its perceived profits. Aswath Damodaran, a New York University professor and an expert on corporate valuation, cited Alibaba’s high profit margins—how much of its sales make it to the bottom line—when he argued that Alibaba, unlike nearly every other hot IPO, was not overpriced.
The problem is that Alibaba’s high profit margins are actually a mirage.
When it records sales, Alibaba only counts the commissions it receives for completing transactions between buyers and sellers on its website. As a result, the company’s operating margins (operating profits as a percentage of sales) come to 51%. Wal-Mart WMT and Amazon AMZN , however, report sales as the total dollar volume of goods sold in their stores (for Wal-Mart) or on their site (for Amazon, and Wal-Mart). Compute Alibaba’s operating profits that way and, alakazam, the e-commerce company’s profitability doesn’t look so hot. Its operating profit shrinks to an unimpressive 1.4% over the past 12 months. Even compared to Wal-Mart’s just over 5%, that doesn’t look so hot. | Calculate Alibaba's sales like other retailers do and the hot IPO's profits don't look all that sizzling. | 12.142857 | 0.52381 | 0.619048 | low | low | abstractive |
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2014/09/18/spreads-girl-power-tells-her-five-favorite-women/9laMP4Yvi94WZTmZkBxPYN/story.html | http://web.archive.org/web/20140921012022id_/http://www.bostonglobe.com:80/arts/music/2014/09/18/spreads-girl-power-tells-her-five-favorite-women/9laMP4Yvi94WZTmZkBxPYN/story.html | MØ spreads girl power, tells us her five favorite women | 20140921012022 | If MØ’s debut album, “No Mythologies to Follow,” hints at the future of pop music, then sign us up. The Danish singer-songwriter, born Karen Marie Orsted, croons over hip-hop influenced electronica and the occasional heavy hitting beat (courtesy of superstar producer Diplo), but has enough presence to avoid being swallowed by them. MØ will perform at the Paradise Rock Club on Sept. 24; prior to hitting the road, she filled us in on five influential women artists.
1. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth
“She was my teenage role model at every point. When I heard her sing for the first time I was so amazed that I tried to convince my ex-boyfriend that it was me singing when I played it for him. . . . I’ve never heard anyone sing with so much attitude and still be sexy and true in a way. . . . She’s still my biggest role model.”
2. Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs
“The energy and everything she stands for is super cool, I think. She sings like a wild animal, like nothing can control her. . . . When I was a teenager she was one of the singers that inspired me.”
“She comes from a punk background like myself, and I can really relate to her stuff and her personality and her political views. She was one of the first, in contemporary music, of female artists to shake the borders.”
“I really think she’s a cool woman, and she says some very cool things. Her whole thing about pushing borders all the time and how darkness moves you as a person — like you should always push yourself and challenge yourself.”
“She was one of the first black women to really do something different in music. The thing I admire her most for is when you hear her sing, you can really really really feel her. There’s no filter, its pure emotion and feeling and life.” | WHAT COUNTS IN MUSIC TODAY | 78.4 | 0.4 | 0.8 | high | low | abstractive |
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/aug/19/photography | http://web.archive.org/web/20140925080609id_/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/aug/19/photography | Giacomo Papi: The art of the mugshot | 20140925080609 | Arresting pictures ... sometimes police photographers indulged their imaginations: an early 20th century Hamburg dominatrix is depicted with the tools of her trade. (Right) Joseph Stalin, 1913. He was repeatedly arrested and deported to Siberia for revolutionary activities. More
In 1848, just nine years after Louis Daguerre discovered a way to create photographic images, Birmingham police began filing daguerreotypes of thieves and prostitutes - the first mugshots. By the 1880s, small and handy "detective" cameras flooded the market (often the brand used by Sherlock Holmes or Scotland Yard), invariably advertised with a picture of a robbery victim, who made sure his assailant was captured by taking his picture. In fact, mugshots and wanted posters rarely led to arrests, but they created an impression that the police were abreast of new discoveries and were successfully fighting crime.
The first attempt at mass documentation began in 1914: it helped identify corpses in the carnage of the first world war. Photographic records of prisoners were routine at Auschwitz and later in Stalin's gulags - and still are in US police stations, no matter how trivial the offence and regardless of whether the accused is eventually convicted. Everyone falls into the net of American mugshots: future Microsoft magnates, relatives of presidents, singers, actors, drunks and killers. In a country where 12 million people are arrested every year, the mugshot truly comes to be a photograph of the entire society.
And in these police portraits one can follow how people's poses in front of the lens have changed in the past 150 years. The mugshot becomes an opportunity to carve out one's identity. Steve McQueen raises his hand in a peace sign. Jane Fonda holds up a fist. Michael Jackson's face is a Peter Pan mask. Frank Sinatra poses like a model.
In the Iraq war there's been an orgy of mugshot-like images - Saddam with mouth agape, but also kidnapped westerners, and prisoners at Abu Ghraib tortured by US soldiers. Here the mugshot shifts from the face of the accused to that of the accuser.
Photographs: © Seven Stories Press 2006. This is an edited extract from Under Arrest: A History of the Twentieth Century in Mugshots by Giacomo Papi. | Mugshots were invented in Britain in the 1840s as a weapon against crime, but they were taken up most enthusiastically in the United States, where the compulsory police portrait is almost a rite of passage. Giacomo Papi presents villains, stars and victims who have faced the lens. | 8.173077 | 0.596154 | 0.865385 | low | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/03/19/ad-agency-rga-launches-venture-capital-arm/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20140925110120id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/03/19/ad-agency-rga-launches-venture-capital-arm/ | Ad agency R/GA launches venture capital arm | 20140925110120 | FORTUNE — Ad agency R/GA is in the process of launching a fund to invest in startups, the agency’s COO Stephen Plumlee said last night, during a demo day for R/GA and Techstars’ Connected Device accelerator.
In an interview, Plumlee said the size of the fund can’t yet be announced as it is not yet closed. The fund will include capital from R/GA’s parent company, ad holding company IPG, IPG , as well as from outside investors. It would includes fund future accelerator classes of ten companies, which each receive a convertible note worth up to $120,000 from R/GA.
The fund, run by Plumlee, will give R/GA the opportunity to do follow-on deals when appropriate and invest in a small handful of startups unrelated to the accelerator program. R/GA already done three such deals from the fund, which have not yet been announced.
R/GA isn’t the first ad agency to be lured into the venture capital game. The trend started a few years ago, as I wrote in 2011:
There’s the recently launched Rockfish Brand Ventures and Redscout Ventures. Consigliere, started last year by former Deutsch Inc. chief strategy officer Mike Duda and Phoenix Suns star Steve Nash, is marketing a $20 million fund. Last month Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners launched KBS+P Ventures. Bartle Bogle Hegarty is raising $16 million through its newly formed Black Sheep Fund. And Method Inc. is rounding up $30 million for Method Ventures.
(Notably Black Sheep fund has been quiet since Publicis announced it would acquire BBH in 2012. Mike Duda of Consigliere has since taken a full-time role as CEO of Johannes Leonardo. Darren Herman of KPS+B has taken a new role at the Mozilla Project. And it’s not clear whether or not Method Ventures ever closed its fund.)
Meanwhile, holding company WPP has remained an active investor, backing ad-tech startups like Buddy Media, Facebook FB , Say Media, Jumptap and Omniture. After it acquired creative agency AKQA, the holding company formalized its venture arm, investing most recently in strategic deals for Fullscreen, Muzy and Percolate .
MORE: Big money for content marketing: Sequoia pours $24 million into Percolate
Agency-style investments aren’t really motivated by money the same way pure play venture capital firms are. Sure, it would be nice to mint a return on the deals (which WPP certainly did with Buddy Media’s $745 sale to Salesforce). But even more valuable is the intrinsic feeling of being innovative by working with startups. It provides a “cool factor” for an agency’s employees and clients.
That cool factor is why R/GA won’t seek out ad-tech deals like some of its agency-investor peers have. Rather, it will invest in startups that have little to do with advertising, Plumlee says. R/GA itself has built products like the Nike Fuelband, and the agency’s 1300 employees include some 200 programmers, 200 visual designers and 100 UX designers.
The sweet nectar of “innovation” is attractive to any big corporation, so R/GA’s new startup family can share its learnings with clients like Nike NKE , Beats Electronics, Samsung, Capital One and L’Oreal. Likewise, those clients might be able to help the startups. At the demo day, several R/GA clients, including Mastercard MA and Equinox, showed up in the pitch decks of startup presentations as early customers or partners. | Ad agency hopes to increase its cool factor by backing innovative startups. | 52.230769 | 0.846154 | 1.307692 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.people.com/article/ben-affleck-son-samuel-let-it-go-jimmy-fallon | http://web.archive.org/web/20141002010133id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/ben-affleck-son-samuel-let-it-go-jimmy-fallon | Ben Affleck's Son Prefers Jimmy Fallon's Version of 'Let It Go' to His Dad's (VIDEO) | 20141002010133 | 09/30/2014 AT 04:25 PM EDT
might be Batman, and he might have a hotly anticipated movie coming out Friday (that would be
). But when it comes to his kids, all that matters is that Affleck can't sing "Let It Go."
"You can't tell your son – 'cause you're supposed to be his hero – that you can't sing," Affleck told Jimmy Fallon Monday on
before launching into a warbled, off-key version of the hit
song that he belts out to his son,
In fact, Affleck added, Samuel actually loves Fallon's Roots-accompanied rendition of "Let It Go" better than his pop's.
"And now he's started being like, 'No, Papa. Do it like the man,' " Affleck said of the tyke's preference for Fallon's version.
Affleck headlines David Fincher's adaptation of
, which is sure to feature a paucity of musical numbers, and in a little over a year, you can see him don the Batsuit in Zack Snyder's
Plenty of time to work on his own version of "Let It Go." | The Gone Girl star's vocal chops face some tough scrutiny from this 2-year-old son, Samuel | 11.894737 | 0.315789 | 0.421053 | low | low | abstractive |
http://fortune.com/2014/10/01/sheryl-sandbergs-ello-contradiction/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141002211958id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/10/01/sheryl-sandbergs-ello-contradiction/ | Sheryl Sandberg's Ello contradiction | 20141002211958 | Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is a phenomenal public speaker, as she showed again last night during a Fortune Brainstorm Tech interview in New York City. Smooth, funny, self-deprecating, funny and able to deftly sidestep thorny questions. So perhaps I’m just an incurable critic, but it was strange to hear her cognitive dissonance when asked about competition.
First came a question about Ello, the upstart social network that seems to be billing itself as the anti-Facebook. No ads, no selling of user data. Sandberg’s reply was so dismissive that I almost expected her to throw in a pffft or pretend to brush dust off her shoulder. Take a look:
That’s right, Sandberg has so little concern about Ello — and is so focused on Facebook’s core mission — that she hasn’t even looked at it. Okay, but how does that square with what she said just a short time later, when asked about competition:
“The Silicon Valley answer is always the person in the garage you haven’t met yet who’s building something new.”
Well, couldn’t Ello be that garage-dweller? And, if so, shouldn’t Facebook’s FB COO at least have taken a cursory glance by now?
To be clear, I’m not saying Ello is or isn’t a legitimate Facebook rival. But I do know that I’ve already taken a look, and I have much less reason to do so than does Sandberg…
Sign up for Dan’s newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com | Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg isn't worried about the very type of startup she claims to be worried about. | 15.1 | 0.6 | 1 | low | low | abstractive |
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/2020-man-prison-teens-murder-innocent-25959467 | http://web.archive.org/web/20141004083301id_/http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/2020-man-prison-teens-murder-innocent-25959467 | Man in Prison for Teen's Murder Says He's Innocent | 20141004083301 | Reporter: Tonight, Mario casciaro sits inside one of the toughest maximum security prisons in the country, Menard. Over a century oldothe norious and the deadly have been held here. Remember him? The...
Reporter: Tonight, Mario casciaro sits inside one of the toughest maximum security prisons in the country, Menard. Over a century oldothe norious and the deadly have been held here. Remember him? The serial killer clown, John Wayne gay? He did his time here. And now, it's home for Mario casciaro, which is where William Carrick believes he belongs. Everything I heard about these maximum security prisons is bad. He's earned his place. Reporter: The college graduate and budding grocery store magnate now a convicted murderer shackled and chained to the floor. Brian Carrick's family believes that you belong here. If allegations are repeated over, and over, and over again for, say, seven years, you begin to believe that it's a fact. Reporter: The carricks believe that you know where Brian's body is. It's sad that they think that. It's sad that they would ever think something like that. And I really hope that we find Brian. Reporter: A toast to Mario before every family meal. I'm not a criminal. Nobody in my family's ever even been in handcuffs. I'm the first. And that includes extended family as well. Reporter: Mario says Brian Carrick was a loyal employee and they had a good relationship. He was a good guy. Good family. He worked hard. One of my favorite co-workers. Reporter: 12 year later and Mario still remembers December 20th, 2002. Just five days before Christmas. The store packed with shoppers filling their carts with all the makings of Christmas dinner. It was Brian's day off but he showed up that evening, around 6:30, asking for another 6:30, asking for another stock boy Robert render. Brian was looking for rob render and had asked me if I'd seen him. And, "Hey, where is this guy?" And I -- I paged him, and that was the last time I seen him. Reporter: After seeing Brian, Mario says he picked up a pizza nearby, sharing it with employees in the break room clear across the other side of the store from the produce cooler, that's his alibi. Mario says he helped close the store, as usual, at 8:00. Both the defense and prosecutors believe Brian was murdered before closing time. Did you kill Brian Carrick? Absolutely not. Reporter: Are you responsible in any way for his death? No. Reporter: As for the prosecution's claims that the man who put him in prison with his testimony, Shane lamb, was called to the store that night to talk to Brian? So this is important because police believed at some time you call Shane lamb, did you ever call him? No. We actually gave my phone records and showed them that there was no call. Reporter: On your urging of, "Talk to him," has an altercation with Brian Carrick, punches him a few times, lays him out. You tell Shane, "Go. I'll take care of this." Any truth to that? Not at all. Didn't even see Shane in the building that evening. Why would I say, "Yeah, buddy. Let me take care of this for you." I don't even know that kid. "Let me just take care of a murder for you." Be serious, you know what I mean. Reporter: He questions why anyone would believe he'd take a murder rap for Shane lamb who'd only worked at the store for a few months after a two-year stint in juvie for attempted murder. But what about the witnesses, did you ever sell drugs? There were times that -- when I was smoking pot, that I would, I guess, sell people pot out of my personal stash. It wasn't, like, a criminal enterprise. Reporter: Did Brian ever sell pot for you? No. Reporter: Did Brian ever owe you money for selling pot? No. No. Reporter: So this claim about him owing you $400-500, and that's why you had Shane talk to him? It's all made up. They took something that was very small, small amounts of marijuana and made it seem like it was a huge criminal enterprise. They actually went so far as to say I was a drug cartel and kingpin. That's significantly different than smoking some weed with your friends. Reporter: Former local reporter Sarah strzalka agrees. There were multiple people who got up on the stand and said that they had bought, you know, pot from Brian or bought pot from Mario, or whatever it may have been. But, this wasn't a cartel. It wasn't some big drug empire, it was high school kids buying little pot here and there. Reporter: You didn't testify at your trial. How do you feel about that decision now? I think it was the wrong decision. I wanted to do it at the time. I was just advised not to. Reporter: His future was in the jury's hands, they never heard from him, that may have cost him. The verdict. What's going through your mind as you're waiting for that verdict in the second trial? "What is taking so long? What are they thinking about? What could they possibly have found to be credible that they've seen?" Reporter: Did you think, at that point, you were going home with your family? Yeah. Sure did. Reporter: How firm was your belief that you were going home? 99. Reporter: Going home wouldn't be in the cards. A guilty verdict, Mario's mother's outrage caught by local news cameras. This is a cover up, big time. His family sobbed. His father wailed. Mario was confident the whole time, his head was up. And then he just drops his head. He was shocked. Thought he would never be convicted. There's no physical evidence. It was heart-wrenching. It was -- it was if Mario had died. Reporter: Can you make it I don't want to. If I have to, I will find a way. But I don't want to sit here every day thinking about how did I get here. I don't have any answers. You know what I mean. Reporter: Enter this woman. She's uncovered a detail never brought to trial, something hidden behind a ceiling tile. What do you think of Mario's story. We're on Twitter tonight. Ryan answering your questions as his report unfolds here tonight.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate. | Part 3: Mario Casciaro says he is in no way responsible for his co-worker Brian Carrick's death or disappearance. | 55.75 | 0.833333 | 1.416667 | high | medium | abstractive |
http://www.9news.com.au/technology/2014/09/10/04/23/citizen-oceanographers-could-map-oceans | http://web.archive.org/web/20141004084405id_/http://www.9news.com.au/technology/2014/09/10/04/23/citizen-oceanographers-could-map-oceans | Citizen oceanographers could map oceans | 20141004084405 | Every year ships founder or disappear on the Earth's largely unexplored and hazardous oceans.
Even with sophisticated technology a Malaysian Airlines passenger plane has disappeared, so far without a trace in the southern Indian Ocean.
Now some scientists want to fill fundamental gaps in ocean knowledge by recruiting thousands of recreational sailors to form a global monitoring network, collecting temperature and conductivity measurements, monitoring the weather and recording sightings of debris.
A UNSW-led "proof of concept" voyage, from South Africa to Singapore, has shown that data on marine micro-organisms can be collected cheaply and easily using small instruments fitted to yachts at a fraction of the cost of running specialised research vessels.
In an article in the journal PLOS Biology, UNSW microbiologist Federico Lauro says there is a shortage of oceanographic data because it is financially and logistically impractical for scientists to sample such vast areas.
"These missing data hamper out ability to make basic predictions about ocean weather, narrow the trajectories of floating objects, or estimate he impact of ocean acidification and other physical, biological and chemical characteristics of the world's oceans," the paper says.
But with the right equipment, citizen oceanographers could gather large quantities of information as they sail around the world, Professor Lauro says.
"We were able to run an entire scientific expedition across never before sampled waters for less than what it costs to run an oceanographic vessel for one day," he said.
Participating cruisers would also collect samples of the tiny marine microbes, including bacteria and plankton, which are the foundation of the food web and vital indicators of the health of the oceans.
Do you have any news photos or videos? | Scientists believe recreational sailors could be recruited to help deepen knowledge about the world's oceans. | 19.058824 | 0.764706 | 1.588235 | medium | low | mixed |
http://fortune.com/2014/10/03/gm-issues-two-more-recalls-for-trucks-small-cars/ | http://web.archive.org/web/20141005184030id_/http://fortune.com:80/2014/10/03/gm-issues-two-more-recalls-for-trucks-small-cars/ | GM issues two more recalls for trucks, small cars | 20141005184030 | Just days after GM GM CEO Mary Barra described a strategic plan to make a fresh start after the recall crisis that has engulfed the automaker for much of 2014, the company has had to recall and stop sales on a number of cars and trucks.
The latest, announced this morning, is a delivery halt on 2015 Chevrolet Colorados and GMC Canyons, both midsize pickup trucks. The trucks “contain driver airbag connections that were wired incorrectly during the manufacturing process,” according to a company release. This could cause the driver airbags not to function.
Most of these trucks are either still at the factory, in transit to consumers, or sitting at a dealership. Only a small number of the trucks have been sold. Those customers who purchased them will receive notification, and the repairs will be done free of charge, GM said.
Another recall was announced earlier today, involving 524,384 cars and SUVs worldwide in two separate actions, according to a company release.
The reason for the first is a loose joint and loose threads that could cause wandering when the car is driven at highway speeds. The affected vehicles have so far been linked to three crashes and two injuries. This recall applies to 290,107 Cadillac SRX and Saab 9-4X SUVs in the U.S. only. The second is for 89.294 Chevrolet Sparks in the U.S. because of corrosion affecting the hood latch, which could lead to the hood unexpectedly opening during driving. GM is not aware of any crashes from this defect.
Yesterday, GM recalled 117,651 cars because of a potential electrical issue, according to Reuters. | Move comes days after CEO Mary Barra described a strategic plan to make a fresh start. | 17.882353 | 0.882353 | 8.764706 | medium | medium | extractive |
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