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http://time.com/3904588/iggy-izalea-nick-young-engaged-los-angeles-lakers-married/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160625082855id_/http://time.com:80/3904588/iggy-izalea-nick-young-engaged-los-angeles-lakers-married/?iid=sr-link1
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Looks Like Iggy Azalea and Nick Young Are Getting Married
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20160625082855
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Iggy Azalea appeared to walk away from Nick Young’s 30th birthday on Monday night with the nicest gift of the evening — a 10-carat diamond ring and a marriage proposal from the Los Angeles Laker shooting guard.
According to a video posted by hip-hop insider Karen Civil, Young, nicknamed “Swaggy P,” got down on one knee and presented his rap star girlfriend with the enormous rock. She said yes.
Just as recently as Sunday, Young hinted that he may be proposing to Azalea, his girfriend since 2013. When People asked if there would be a wedding in the near future he said “Of course! Of course! But I can’t give you that surprise. You’re gonna ruin that surprise.”
The proposal comes as Azalea has been dealing with the fallout from her decision to cancel her entire “The Great Escape” tour that was set to begin in September.
Oh, by the way, here’s an up-close of the ring only a few could afford.
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That ring. So fancy
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http://time.com/3476241/ted-cruz-constitutional-amendment-same-sex-marriage-laws/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160625092157id_/http://time.com:80/3476241/ted-cruz-constitutional-amendment-same-sex-marriage-laws/
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Sen. Ted Cruz to Introduce Constitutional Amendment on Marriage Rights
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20160625092157
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Senator Ted Cruz (R—Tex.) announced Monday that he will introduce a constitutional amendment barring the federal government and the courts from overturning state marriage laws.
The announcement follows the Supreme Court’s decision Monday to reject the appeals requests of five states seeking to outlaw same-sex marriages, permitting gay unions to go ahead in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.
“By refusing to rule if the States can define marriage, the Supreme Court is abdicating its duty to uphold the Constitution,” Cruz said in a statement. “The fact that the Supreme Court Justices, without providing any explanation whatsoever, have permitted lower courts to strike down so many state marriage laws is astonishing.”
Cruz described the court’s denial of appeals, which paves the away for an expansion of legalized same-sex marriage to as many as 30 states, as “judicial activism at its worst” and “a broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment” guaranteeing equal protection under the law, with “far-reaching consequences.”
The Texas Republican isn’t the first to propose amending the constitution over same-sex marriage. In 2013, following the Supreme Court’s striking down of the Defense of Marriage Act, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R.-Kan.) introduced legislation for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (formerly R-Va.) proposed a similar amendment back in 2006.
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The Texas senator called the Supreme Court's rejection of appeals to uphold same-sex marriage bans in five states "judicial activism at its worst"
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http://fortune.com/2015/06/23/placemeter-smart-cities/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160625182334id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/06/23/placemeter-smart-cities/
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Smart cities are here. Placemeter uses computer vision to count people
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20160625182334
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Understanding how many people cross a stretch of sidewalk each day may seem pretty mundane, but Placemeter, a New York-based startup, has raised a total of $7.8 million from NEA, Qualcomm Ventures and Collaborative Fund to do just that. The company uses a sensor that grabs video of public spaces and then converts that video to data that can be used to count people, cars or other objects passing by. Placemeter is starting with people.
The company is launching Tuesday, and announcing that its people-measuring sensor will be available for pre-order for $99. Placemeter’s founders believe the sensor will be useful for civic hacking projects, municipal governments and for people who own shops or have an interest in foot traffic. They aren’t alone. Fortune recently covered a startup called Density that delivers an ability to count people inside coffee shops, offices or other indoor locations.
Tracking the number of people in a place and converting that information to digital data offers all kinds of benefits, from being able to better use public spaces to figuring out if your favorite restaurant has a table. Only now, thanks to cheaper sensors and—in Placemeter’s case—better computer vision, can we now actually calculate how many people there are in large areas and for a low cost.
The issue is that counting people at scale is difficult. Many methods require everyone on the street to have a phone with Wi-Fi turned on, and satellites don’t offer good enough resolution. From a privacy point of view, it would be even better if Placemeter could guarantee anonymity on its platform, but as you can see from the photo above, the resolution is grainy. Basically it is a cheap eye on the street (or placed in the window of a shop for foot traffic) designed to count things.
The Placemeter platform can work with a user’s own video, or they can deploy the $99 sensor. The company charges a monthly fee based on the number of measurement points it is counting people at. The company’s founders, Florent Peyre, COO and co-founder, and Alexandre Winter, CEO, offered several use cases for the platform during an interview. They ranged from a candy retailer placing a sensor in the window of two storefronts he was considering leasing to measure when people walked by. Based on that data, he chose the location with the best afternoon foot traffic.
Other use cases include researchers using the Placemeter data to create maps of foot traffic and how that correlates to 3-1-1 calls. A municipality might use it to figure out where to put a crosswalk or otherwise optimize future building projects.
The founders plan to open up the data so others can use it to create new research projects or glean more information about city life to help make them more efficient and livable. The company has a distribution model that could make this work, and when paired with the indoor, anonymous counting capabilities of Density, we could soon live in a world where you could see at a glance exactly how many people are in one place at one time. That’s powerful stuff.
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Placemeter wants to help make cities smarter with its sensor and technology platform.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/education/new-rules-for-teacher-gifts-apples-but-perhaps-no-ipods.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160626061611id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2004/12/14/education/new-rules-for-teacher-gifts-apples-but-perhaps-no-ipods.html?
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New Rules for Teacher Gifts: Apples (but Perhaps No IPods)
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20160626061611
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Last year, when it came time to give a holiday gift to his son's kindergarten teacher at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Adam Klein and other parents donated about $20 each, and together they bought the teacher a digital camera.
This year, teachers should not count on such lavish gifts.
New York City parents who want to buy holiday gifts for teachers have a new $5 per student spending limit, according to a rule Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein imposed earlier this year.
The rule falls under the conflict-of-interest section of the Chancellor's Regulations, and was intended to help students who could not afford to contribute money to class gifts, officials said. The regulations also state that individual gifts from students or parents to school employees should be "principally sentimental in nature and of insignificant financial value."
Some parents and teachers are arguing that the rules are examples of micromanagement by the Department of Education and send a message to teachers that they are underappreciated.
"I don't quite see the rationale to denying teachers a gift," said Mr. Klein, whose son is now in first grade. "We're not trying to curry favor with the teacher."
Sandra Arnold, a baby sitter with a daughter in high school, objected to the $5 limit."That's too cheap for a teacher. You can't get anything good for $5, especially for a good teacher. I don't think it's right."
Some teachers said a holiday gift was one of the few perks they could count on.
One teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she wanted students to "give as much as they want to give."
"At lunch, when I was talking to other teachers, some of them were saying things about how nice it is when kids make them something," the teacher said. "I was like, 'Give me the big gift certificate."'
She said she was worth more than a $5 gift, adding "there's been no raise. I'm broke all the time." The teachers' contract expired at the end of May 2003.
"A number of parents had some concerns," he said when asked about the gift cap, which was described in The Daily News yesterday. "They were feeling that they were under pressure and they wanted to know what was expected of them."
Mr. Klein said he "wanted to support the recognition of teachers" while not pressuring parents and students to give more than they comfortably could.
"They pleaded with us to come up with a dollar value," a spokeswoman for the school system, Margie Feinberg, said of parents who contacted the education agency. "And in January, the Department of Education proposed a change in the policy."
Other school districts in the region have similar guidelines. In White Plains, school policy suggests homemade gifts of minimal value. In Scarsdale, individual gifts should be worth no more than $15, a school official said.
When asked how the city schools might go about enforcing the spending limit, Mr. Klein said: "We should try to do this in a way that's sensible. I think we leave it to the judgment of parents."
Mr. Klein said that if everyone used common sense, the holiday gift-giving tradition would "not become some sort of flow of cash or other gifts that could be misconstrued."
Lindsay Hershenhorn, a teacher at P.S. 321, said, "Teachers should be paid enough so that parents don't feel they need to give gifts to teachers and teachers don't feel they need to accept them."
Ann Farmer contributed reporting for this article.
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New York City sets $5 limit on gifts for teachers, stating that they should be principally sentimental in nature and of insignificant financial value; some parents argue that $5 is not enough, but city holds that larger amount could set up conflict of interest and rule will help students whose cannot afford to give more (M)
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http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/the-pound-already-thinks-the-u-k-has-voted-to-stay-in-the-eu/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160626202032id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/06/23/the-pound-already-thinks-the-u-k-has-voted-to-stay-in-the-eu/
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The Pound Already Thinks the U.K. Has Voted to Stay in the E.U.
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20160626202032
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The pound sterling hit a new high for 2016 within minutes of the polls closing Thursday in the U.K.’s referendum on staying in the EU, as leading politicians involved in the campaign appeared to concede a narrow defeat.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-EU U.K. Independence Party whose rise has played a large part in pressuring Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the referendum, said it “looked like ‘Remain’ had edged it,” although he later insisted that he hadn’t formally conceded, and that his comments were based on “what I know from some of my friends in the financial markets who have done some big polling.”
Arriving later at his campaign headquarters, Farage told reporters that “whoever wins this battle, one thing I am completely certain of is that we are winning this war. . .the Euroskeptic genie is out of the bottle and it will not be put back.”
Big banks are reported to have commissioned their own private polls to create the kind of exit poll that isn’t officially available tonight.
The pound has already risen over 6% in the last nine days as fears of a vote in favor of “Brexit” have receded, leaving many in the markets thinking that it’s unlikely to rise much further in the event of a ‘Remain’ vote.
Sterling broke through $1.50 for the first time since last year on Farage’s initial comments, but gave up all of those gains and more in the course of the next hour, as conflicting reports, of whether Brexit was defeated or not, started to come in. As of midnight in Britain, the pound was back at $1.48, below where it was when the polls closed.
“Now we get to see how many people waited to buy until they saw if Remain won. . .and how many held off on selling until we got the pop,” tweeted Michael Aston, head of Enduring Investments, a boutique consulting and investment management company in New York.
The first results from the 382 voting districts across Britain are due imminently. One district has already reported, but it’s unlikely to have any impact on the final count. The tiny British enclave of Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, voted over 95% in favor of Remain, but that is because its daily life depends heavily on Spain keeping open the land border. A total of 19,322 voted for Remain, while 823 voted Leave.
The first, more representative, results from British cities are due around 12:30 local time (19:30 p.m. ET).
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Sterling just hit its highest level this year
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/24/lse-and-deutsche-boerse-face-fresh-calls-to-move-hq-to-frankfurt/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160627072249id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/business/2016/06/24/lse-and-deutsche-boerse-face-fresh-calls-to-move-hq-to-frankfurt/
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LSE and Deutsche Boerse face fresh calls to move HQ to Frankfurt after Brexit vote
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20160627072249
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"The strategic rationale for the deal remains ever more compelling in the wake of the Brexit vote," a Deutsche Boerse spokesman added.
Deutsche Boerse and LSEG have made clear in the past that they regard the London location of the holding company a non-negotiable element of the deal.
A specially formed Referendum Committee, chaired by Mr Faber, "will now examine all the regulatory, legal and jurisdictional implications of the vote for Brexit and the consequences for the ongoing operation of the combined entity in the future", the spokesman added.
Unease in Germany over the merger has reached a head following the UK’s vote to leave the EU. On Friday, a politician in Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party demanded the German government work to ensure the combined company's seat be outside the UK. "Out is out," Michael Fuchs told Reuters. "There cannot be a London base for the merged company after the Brexit."
German regulators were also reported to be scrutinising the deal amid concerns that the holding company of the country’s leading stock exchange could be based in a non-EU country.
LSE shareholders are due to vote on the merger at a general meeting on July 4.
The group’s shares plunged by as much as 15pc in early trade before recovering by mid-afternoon to trade around 8.6pc down, at £24.99, against a 4pc drop in the FTSE 100. Deutsche Boerse shares were down 7.6pc on the DAX in Frankfurt.
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The London Stock Exchange is to press ahead with its £21bn merger with German counterpart Deutsche Boerse, despite renewed calls for the group’s headquarters to move to Frankfurt in the wake of Brexit.
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http://time.com/3642605/why-you-should-be-less-responsible-at-work/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160627132845id_/http://time.com:80/3642605/why-you-should-be-less-responsible-at-work/
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Why You Should Be Less Responsible at Work
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20160627132845
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An overstressed friend told me recently that her boss had counseled her to “be less responsible” at work. On the surface, it’s a ridiculous thing for a supervisor to say. Who would want an employee that overlooks details, or who casually wraps up an assignment because “it’s good enough”? But here’s why her boss is onto something – and maybe you should consider being less responsible at work, too.
You’ll learn to prioritize. Early in our careers, frankly, there’s not that much going on. A CEO might get 500 or 1,000 high-priority emails a day; an assistant who’s a year out of college most certainly won’t. That means you have the ability to get everything done, and leave with a clean slate at the end of the day. Unfortunately, that sets a bad precedent for the rest of your career, because the higher you rise, the less likely you’ll be to finish everything that’s put in front of you. You have to cultivate the perspicacity to understand what’s truly important, and what can be safely ignored. No one wants to be a jerk and take three months to respond to an email, or even never reply at all. But when you reach your human limits of endurance, you have to decide what matters most. As the famous 80/20 Rule has it, only 20% of our activities yield 80% of our results. The secret to professional advancement lies in figuring out which is which.
You’ll learn to procrastinate more strategically. When you’re narrowly focused on a task – you have to write this report, and you won’t leave your desk until it’s done, even if you’re staring at a blank screen for hours – research shows that you’re essentially putting on blinders and diminishing your creativity. Instead of forcing yourself to sit there (and producing crappy work as a result), procrastinate strategically by doing another task that feels more fun. I don’t mean pseudo-productive tasks like surfing the Internet or listening to a podcast; choose another project that also has to get done, but which is more inspriring to you in the moment. In fact, that’s what I’m doing now; I have to submit a list of course readings for an upcoming marketing class I’m teaching, and it’s due today. It’ll get done, but in the interim, writing this article – which is also useful and productive – is a much more attractive option.
You’ll be forced to delegate. For most of us who were brought up to be responsible, that means guaranteeing that the job is finished and the work is done right. Unfortunately, as you ascend the professional ladder, you begin to start supervising employees. There’s a word for someone who checks all their employees’ work all the time: a micromanager. Your staff can’t learn and grow if they’re not permitted to try new things, stretch, and sometimes fail (on tasks that aren’t mission-critical). Recognize the natural tradeoff: that means things won’t be done up to your standards every time. But as long as they’re done well enough, that’s probably OK. And every once in a while, they’ll be done better, and you and the entire organization will learn something. A good starting place for many professionals is tapping into the growing market of virtual assistants, who can handle minor administrative tasks that often require a lot of time to perform. I’ve written previously about how to work well with your virtual assistant, and three mistakes to avoid when working with a virtual assistant.
It can be painful to let go of tasks you know how to do perfectly, but you have to make room for what’s most important – and recognize that the real definition of being “responsible” at work isn’t about getting everything done. It’s about getting the right things done.
Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and the forthcoming Stand Out. You can subscribe to her e-newsletter and follow her on Twitter.
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The secret to professional advancement lies in figuring out which activities actually lead to results
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http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/20/microsoft-beauty-salon-ent-tech-cx_mc_0420fundsalontech.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160627143944id_/http://www.forbes.com:80/2007/04/20/microsoft-beauty-salon-ent-tech-cx_mc_0420fundsalontech.html
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How To Run A Beauty Salon: Technology
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20160627143944
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Every new business owner needs to know the fundamentals. Forbes.com is breaking down those building blocks by answering eight core questions related to a given industry. Taken together, the information will give budding entrepreneurs a head start on making those first critical steps.
What piece of technology can I not do without?
To run a salon, you need more than a good pair of scissors and the gift of gab. You need software to keep those chairs swiveling on time, day in and day out.
The most common salon-management software programs come with appointment books, inventory control, financial reporting capabilities and payroll functions. You can also build a list of clients and track their spending patterns.
All of the programs mentioned here run on Microsoft Windows’ XP or Vista operating systems, and all have similar capabilities, though different pricing structures. For example, some charge a monthly subscription fee, while others require only an upfront purchase.
The Elite Salon & Spa Management program, from Elite Software, offers the standard bells and whistles, plus unlimited training and technical support, for a monthly subscription of $79 (or $948 a year), plus whatever it costs to ship the software. If you just want help handling commissions, hourly wages, health insurance and other salary deductions like federal and state withholding taxes, Elite offers payroll management software for an upfront fee of $249. (These functions are available in the Salon & Spa Management program, too.)
ProSolutions Software’s “Essential” program tracks just one stylist (say, a sole proprietor) for $399; the price climbs with each additional chair. So a beauty salon with, say, seven stylists would pay $399 upfront and an extra $500 for the other six. Users also pay a $29 monthly subscription fee, which covers training and technical support; twice-yearly upgrades are provided gratis.
Software providers Leprechaun Salon & Spa Software and Extended Technologies offer the same basic fare. Leprechaun charges $54 per month for the first computer and $10 per each additional one. The subscription includes a software license as well as free training and tech support over the phone, along with semiannual upgrades.
Extended Technologies’ SalonBiz software sells for $100 a month for the first computer and $25 for each additional one. Subscribers also get 10 hours of online training, unlimited customer support and free upgrades. There is a less expensive model for smaller shops, too.
Big spender? A bundled package from Milano Systems–including a cash drawer, receipt printer, training and a manual–will run you $3,220, all upfront. It is designed for salon owners with a main computer and up to 12 employees, and it includes an optional $49 monthly fee for technical support and annual upgrades.
Comments are turned off for this post.
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You need operations software to keep those chairs swiveling on time.
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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/06/entrepreneurs-met-investors-at-startupbootcamp-fintechs-demo-day.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160628022341id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2015/08/06/entrepreneurs-met-investors-at-startupbootcamp-fintechs-demo-day.html?
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Entrepreneurs met investors at Startupbootcamp FinTech's Demo Day
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20160628022341
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Start-up founders met hundreds of potential investors at Singapore's Demo Day, which was the finale of a three-month "boot camp" designed to help entrepreneurs sharpen their business plans with the help of financial services mentors. Eleven financial technology start-ups made their pitches to possible investors at Demo Day.
—By Pauline Chiou Posted 6 August 2015
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Start-up founders met hundreds of potential investors at Singapore's Demo Day, the finale of a 3-month "boot camp" for new financial technology companies.
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http://nypost.com/2016/04/24/everyones-making-fun-of-espns-chris-broussard/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160628045404id_/http://nypost.com:80/2016/04/24/everyones-making-fun-of-espns-chris-broussard/
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Everyone’s making fun of ESPN’s Chris Broussard
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20160628045404
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Back-to-back internet condemnations for Chris Broussard. It really is playoff season.
The controversial ESPN NBA reporter, who in the past has taken flak for a bizarre Mark Cuban report and for saying gay people are “openly living in unrepentant sin,” first was mocked, then journalistically scolded on a busy Saturday.
The unfortunate night began in Dallas, where Broussard was covering Game 4 between the Mavericks and Thunder. With Rick Carlisle’s Mavs down 89-79 entering the fourth quarter, Broussard had a brief interview with the coach of the losing team. Broussard tried focusing on the positives — that Dallas had shot 70 percent in the third quarter. Carlisle didn’t have such a rosy view about how his team was playing.
“Why do you feel like offensively you guys have had such success against them?” Broussard asked.
“Well, I don’t know how much success. We’re down 10,” Carlisle returned, much to the delight of the laughing internet.
After his reporting tactics were insulted, Broussard’s reporting ethics next were battered.
“Dallas Morning News” sports editor Damon Marx, also at the game, tweeted a picture of Justin Anderson and Kevin Durant shaking hands after the 119-108 Thunder win, two players who had been feuding after Durant was ejected for hitting the Maverick in the face.
Sixteen minutes later, Broussard apparently had the same scoop:
The problem, of course, was Broussard had lifted the picture, simply taking a screenshot of Marx’s snap and letting the audience believe it was his own.
Broussard threw some credit Marx’s way six hours later, but his borrowed picture, racking up more than 300 retweets, still remains.
From irking an NBA head coach to finger-pointing journalists to anonymous Twitter trolls, Saturday night was a rough one for Broussard.
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Back-to-back internet condemnations for Chris Broussard. It really is playoff season. The controversial ESPN NBA reporter, who in the past has taken flak for a bizarre Mark Cuban report and for say…
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/business/media/02TUBE.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160629115330id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2003/05/02/business/media/02TUBE.html?
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`West Wing' Writer Quits
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20160629115330
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One of television's best-known writers, Aaron Sorkin, who has led the NBC series "The West Wing" to three straight Emmy awards for the best drama on television, announced yesterday that he was quitting the show.
Joining him in leaving is his partner in the show, Thomas Schlamme, who, like Mr. Sorkin, is an executive producer and also an Emmy winner as lead director of "The West Wing."
In a statement, Mr. Sorkin said, "I had the best job in show business for four years and I'll never forget that." He did not cite any specific reasons for his decision, though people involved with the show mentioned a number of factors, including the pressure of writing so much of it himself, the increasing budget problems of the series and the show's declining ratings.
The changes are bound to have a significant effect because "The West Wing," which has won numerous other awards, has always been a product of Mr. Sorkin's personal vision. He has written all but one of the episodes in a series that has been consistently characterized by the intricately worked dialogue that Mr. Sorkin is known for.
Mr. Schlamme has also been widely praised for his innovative techniques in the show's look and camera movement. Retaining the show's distinctive voice and look will be a challenge without Mr. Sorkin and Mr. Schlamme, one person involved with the show said yesterday.
The series will be taken over by one of television's most successful producers, John Wells. He is also an executive producer on "The West Wing," but his creative talents have been divided because he also runs two other shows, "E.R." and "Third Watch," also on NBC. NBC executives said they expected that next season Mr. Wells would devote his primary creative energies to "The West Wing."
All sides reported yesterday that Mr. Sorkin's decision to leave was totally his own, though some people involved with the show acknowledged that budget overruns and delays in production had become issues this season.
Because Mr. Sorkin writes so much, the completion of the scripts has often taken longer than on other shows where many writers divide up the work.
Mr. Sorkin had a year remaining on his contract with Warner Brothers, which produces the series. Had he wished to continue, the studio, owned by AOL Time Warner Inc. , and the network would have welcomed him, the people involved with the show said.
This year has been a struggle for "The West Wing," a show once ranked in the top 10. It has been hurt by competition from some overpowering reality shows, like "The Bachelor" on ABC and "American Idol" on Fox.
But the people involved with the show acknowledged yesterday that other factors had come into play, including the changing realities in the actual political world, which may have influenced how viewers have reacted to the parallel political world created by Mr. Sorkin.
When Mr. Sorkin started the show in 1998, it seemed much like the Clinton administration because it dealt with a liberal Democratic president. Now that a conservative Republican administration is in power, some of the show's widely praised verisimilitude has been lost.
"No show on television was more affected by the changes wrought by 9/11," said one executive who has worked with Mr. Sorkin. "It's been a challenge for Aaron to work with the changed zeitgeist. He's a brilliant guy and incredibly gifted, but he's also very sensitive. The falling ratings did upset him. He's been under a tremendous amount of stress. This move makes a lot of sense for him."
"The West Wing" has recently started to revive in the ratings, reaching levels it had not achieved since early February. In the most recent Nielsen weekly ratings, "The West Wing" finished at No. 18. In addition, the show has introduced new plotlines that NBC executives say are promising, including one about an affair involving the vice president and the coming cliffhanger for the season which will involve a kidnapping.
The show's ratings troubles came as its contract with NBC, which is owned by the General Electric Company , was up for renewal.
Despite the slump, NBC remained committed to the show, noting that it still attracted the most affluent and educated audience in television.
Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment, said last fall that "The West Wing" was "still the best series on television."
NBC signed a deal for another two seasons of the series last January, thus guaranteeing that Mr. Sorkin, and all the partners in the show, will see a sizable payday from the future profits of the show in syndication.
ne of television's best-known writers, Aaron Sorkin, who has led the NBC series "The West Wing" to three straight Emmy awards for the best drama on television, announced yesterday that he was quitting the show.
Joining him in leaving is his partner in the show, Thomas Schlamme, who, like Mr. Sorkin, is an executive producer and also an Emmy winner as lead director of "The West Wing."
In a statement, Mr. Sorkin said, "I had the best job in show business for four years and I'll never forget that." He did not cite any specific reasons for his decision, though people involved with the show mentioned a number of factors, including the pressure of writing so much of it himself, the increasing budget problems of the series and the show's declining ratings.
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Aaron Sorkin, who wrote all but one episode of "The West Wing," said that he was leaving the show.
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U.S. HOLDS UP AID FOR SUBWAY WORK
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The Federal Government has suspended payment of $44 million for a subway project in Queens, citing ''concerns with the construction management practices'' of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
The decision was based on an inspector's report that 48,000 cubic yards of concrete had been paid for with no evidence of its ever having been delivered, according to Alfred A. DelliBovi, deputy administrator of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, which sent a letter to the M.T.A. on Friday notifying it of the cutoff.
Mr. DelliBovi also cited findings of deficiency in the pouring and inspection of concrete at the project - a new subway tunnel in Jamaica, Queens, that would run beneath Archer Avenue and would link up with the existing Jamaica elevated and Queens Boulevard lines.
The suspension of Federal funds was the second in less than a month for an M.T.A. construction project. On July 22, the Government announced that it was withholding $31 million for completion of the 63d Street subway tunnel, which had also been found to have deficiencies in its concrete, as well as other flaws, including leaks.
Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato said in an interview yesterday that he had called on the Federal Government to suspend funds for the Archer Avenue project, just as he had done with the 63d Street tunnel.
''There are serious questions about the construction and supervision of this project,'' the Senator said. ''Until independent engineering reviews are conducted, I told officials that they should hold up the funds remaining.''
''I want to make sure these projects continue,'' Mr. D'Amato added. ''But the M.T.A. has projects in disarray. They need better management. There are plenty of critics who would like to cut off all money, and if we don't get these projects cleaned up, it gives people like that an excuse.''
Officials of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration said they would consider restoring Federal funds to both the 63d Street and Archer Avenue projects after an independent consultant hired by the M.T.A. completed studies on the structural integrity of the tunnels. The study is expected to take three months. Asked if there was the possibility of criminal wrongdoing in the Archer Avenue project, Mr. DelliBovi responded: ''I would say that if there is an unsatisfactory explanation as to why there is this discrepancy between the amount of concrete charged to the project and the amount delivered, I would imagine this would be referred to some law-enforcement agency.''
Arthur G. Perfall, a spokesman for the M.T.A., said the agency had not received the letter from the Urban Mass Transit Administration, which was signed by Ralph L. Stanley, its administrator, and therefore could not give a full response.
''We don't know if it's a problem with the record-keeping or what,'' Mr. Perfall said, ''and nobody else does at this point either.''
He said the M.T.A. had informed the Federal Government ''a few months ago'' that ''Archer Avenue appeared to have some of the same problems as 63d Street as far as leakage and record-keeping.''
And he added that the M.T.A. had already asked Construction Technology Laboratories, a private engineering consulting firm based in Skokie, Ill., to conduct the independent study of both projects.
Asked if the Federal suspension of aid meant all work would come to a halt, Mr. Perfall said: ''There's obviously going to be some sort of delay, but not just because of the funding. We don't want any work to go on ourselves until we know what is going on.''
Several concrete suppliers were used for the tunnel sections cited in the inspector's report, Mr. Perfall said, adding that he was unable yesterday to supply their names.
Both the 63d Street and Archer Avenue tunnels are years behind schedule - they were begun in the early 1970's with completion originally scheduled for the mid-70's - and are in the final stages of construction. A total of more than $1 billion has been spent on both of them. Of that amount, the M.T.A. said the Federal Government had provided $530 million for the 63d Street tunnel and $295 million for the Archer Avenue line.
The 63d Street tunnel runs under the East River, linking Manhattan and Queens. The Archer Avenue project, in eastern Queens, has involved removing a portion of the Jamaica Avenue elevated line, between 165th and 127th Streets. It replaces the elevated with a two-level subway line along Archer Avenue, with a station at Sutphin Boulevard and a terminal station at Parsons Boulevard.
In his report, the Federal inspector said the M.T.A. could not document that concrete was being inspected adequately in either project. The American Society for Testing and Materials recommends testing it every 150 cubic yards. But the inspector said documents showed it was being tested every 296 cubic yards in the 63d Street tunnel and every 1,455 cubic yards in the Archer Avenue tunnel.
The report also found that, although industry standards require each class of concrete to be tested every day concrete is delivered, there there was no documentation to prove that had been done on the Archer Avenue project.
Earlier this month, Michael C. Asner, the Transit Authority's chief engineer, acknowledged: ''We've been concerned all along about the lack of documentation on these jobs. That in itself does not prove there is a problem, but we have to take a close look.''
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The Federal Government has suspended payment of $44 million for a subway project in Queens, citing ''concerns with the construction management practices'' of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The decision was based on an inspector's report that 48,000 cubic yards of concrete had been paid for with no evidence of its ever having been delivered, according to Alfred A. DelliBovi, deputy administrator of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, which sent a letter to the M.T.A. on Friday notifying it of the cutoff. Mr. DelliBovi also cited findings of deficiency in the pouring and inspection of concrete at the project - a new subway tunnel in Jamaica, Queens, that would run beneath Archer Avenue and would link up with the existing Jamaica elevated and Queens Boulevard lines. A Second Suspension The suspension of Federal funds was the second in less than a month for an M.T.A. construction project. On July 22, the Government announced that it was withholding $31 million for completion of the 63d Street subway tunnel, which had also been found to have deficiencies in its concrete, as well as other flaws, including leaks.
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'Deadliest Catch' Emergency Call -- CREWMEMBER DOWN!
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TMZ has obtained the emergency radio call made moments after a member of the "
" fishing crew collapsed while at sea Tuesday -- and according to the caller, the man showed "signs of shock and possible convulsions."
During the transmission, the caller says the unidentified crew member is "barely coherent" -- and probably suffering from severe dehydration.
The crew member in question -- who we're told was a novice crab fisherman AKA a "
" -- was airlifted to a nearby hospital in Alaska for treatment.
Sources tell TMZ, he's doing a lot better now -- and a rep for
adds they are "thankful to the Coast Guard and F/V Wizard crew members for their fast action and coordination."
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TMZ has obtained the emergency radio call made moments after a member of the "Deadliest Catch" fishing crew collapsed while at sea Tuesday -- and…
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Landscape Inspires A Clothing Designer
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COLTS NECK— ON the linings of the breast pockets inside of thousands of men's suits in stores throughout the country, the labels read "Allyn Saint George -- American Classic" or "Allyn Saint George -- American Couture."
"The first label is on proper business attire; the second group has a more upscale look," said Allyn St. George, the designer. He draws inspiration for his clothing collections, he said, from the grounds of his 19-acre estate here, called Saintland.
Mr. St. George has licensed his name to eight companies that manufacture and market his designs, including Intercontinental Branded Apparel, a division of the Hartmarx Corporation. In addition to suits and sportswear, he designs overcoats, tuxedos, socks, ties and other small accessories.
Mr. St. George, 52, who is known in the industry as Saint, had his first part-time job in the men's wear industry at 15. Having worked his way up the ranks, he now heads a multimillion-dollar business, Allyn Saint George International Inc., a company he formed 17 years ago. Aiming at Middle America
His aim then and now is to design for middle America, "the businessman who wants to look good in a crowd but not stand out," he said, and to keep his clothing affordable. His suits sell for $275 to $375. They are carried by such retailers as the Hecht department stores in Washington and Maryland, Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago and the May-Robinson Company, which has about 75 stores in California.
While many American designers are firmly rooted in New York City and Los Angeles, Mr. St. George takes great pride that he lives and creates his designs in New Jersey. His estate here is also his company headquarters.
Once he does a design, Mr. St. George goes to manufacturers in New York City and in several states to work with stylists and merchandisers. "No company using my name can make anything without my final approval," he said. "If my name is on it, my concept is in it."
The only thing that identifies Saintland, where he does most of his designing, is a simple black mailbox alongside a road in the midst of horse-breeding country. At the end of a long, narrow private road, edged with dogwood and viburnum, is a massive contemporary Canadian cedar house, which Mr. St. George designed for himself and his wife, Suzanne.
"Welcome to paradise" was his greeting to a recent visitor.
Seeing More Than a Tree
What he sees in this bucolic setting and its three-acre lake, he said, shows up in his collections. Pointing to a maple tree on an island in the lake, its golden leaves reflected in the water, he said, "People see a tree; I see color." The tree served as a catalyst for a long-sleeved sweater, nubby in texture with a lot of fire to it, he said.
Pausing, this time sighting a green maple tree with one splotch of red leaves, he said, "That tree, just starting to turn red, I see possibly as a short-sleeve knit shirt with a small red emblem on it."
Such vision earned Mr. St. George the Outstanding Menswear Designer of the Year Award from the advisory board of the High School of Fashion Industries in New York in 1989. A year earlier, he was one of three nominees selected for the Cutty Sark Menswear Award as the outstanding United States designer. For two years he designed the television wardrobe for the television talk show host Regis Philbin.
Mr. St. George's hat collection, which he says has encouraged men to wear hats, garnered him the Hat Man of the Year Award in 1985. "I was pleased to follow the actor Harrison Ford, who won it the year before," Mr. St. George said. Night Study at Fashion Institute
Mr. St. George studied nights at the Fashion Institute of Technology, earning a degree in fashion merchandising in 1965. Some 22 years later, the institute's alumni association presented him with an award for career achievement. "I stood on the stage at Radio City, the first time I have ever worn a cap and gown," he said.
As for his craft, he said: "I have the gift of my eyes and my sensitivity to touch. I start with my fingers. A fabric can feel too dry or too wet with too much oil in it. I put it to my lips. If it's abrasive, it's not going to make a comfortable pair of slacks."
Designing is time-consuming, he said, because of the logistics. "If I change the width of a lapel, I am thinking in millimeters, narrowing it maybe one-sixteenth of an inch," he said. "This number has to balance with the flap on the pocket and that, in turn, with the width of the trousers."
Blues and grays, the colors that endure the test of time, are currently in fashion for men's suits, he said, while in neckwear the "crazy wild patterns are giving way to updated classic stripes and foulards."
Explaining that he does not design high fashion, which he described as "style with no boundaries," Mr. St. George said: "I design for the businessman who wants to look good in his job and then brings that sense of taste in clothing to his social life. You get one opportunity to make a good first impression. And your attire is part of that impression. You don't have to tell people how successful you are. When you are properly dressed, you simply show that." Providing Place for Animals
The 6,500-square-foot home he designed at Saintland reflects his own success. Even stray cats, some 60 of them over the years, have spacious quarters in one wing of the house, with a screened patio that the cats can gain entry to through special doors.
Preserving a place for nondomestic animals was one reason the St. Georges were attracted to build Saintland in Colts Neck. But it all took some artful planning. The present lake was just a shallow pond. The land had been the site of a nursery, where hardy shrubs were overgrown.
"I told the Colts Neck Planning Board that I would not remove a shovel of dirt off the property," Mr. St. George said. "I wanted to leave it basically in its natural state, a preserve for the animals to come to, like the deer, fox, geese and mallards who come to drink from the lake."
But he did move the dirt around, transforming the pond into a 10-foot-deep lake and using the dredged soil to form a knoll on which the house was built. Wearing the 'Saint Hat'
His usual dress for a hike around the lake hails from his sportswear collection -- khaki slacks and jacket and what he called his Saint hat, a brown fedora.
At the site of an old graveyard, where some of the headstones were in part pulverized by time and weather, Mr. St. George paused and sat down on a tree stump.
"It's full of life here with all the trees and birds around, and yet as close to death as you can get," he said. "I work here; I daydream, too, thinking, 'What will I do next? Where will I go?' Here is where I can be most focused because there's nothing to distract me."
As the trail wound through the woods, the path changed to a powdery burnished brown color. Mr. St. George said he got the inspiration for a collection he is currently working on from the earth tones here.
"The different shades on the ground are beautiful," he said. "People sometimes should look down."
Photo: Allyn St. George, a designer, on the grounds of his 19-acre estate in Colts Neck. (Sam D'Amico for The New York Times)
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ON the linings of the breast pockets inside of thousands of men's suits in stores throughout the country, the labels read "Allyn Saint George -- American Classic" or "Allyn Saint George -- American Couture." "The first label is on proper business attire; the second group has a more upscale look," said Allyn St. George, the designer. He draws inspiration for his clothing collections, he said, from the grounds of his 19-acre estate here, called Saintland.
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Jonah Smith and his band have been touring and recording for close to 15 years. In 2006, Smith released a record and the band played at SXSW, Bonnaroo and other festivals, sharing the stage with legends like Little Feat, Los Lobos and Jonny Lang. His songs went into rotation at radio stations around the country as well as satellite radio, but wider success didn't come. After his record label folded, Jonah found it hard to make a living playing music full-time and began selling insurance to make ends meet. Jonah is thankful for his loyal fan base, which continues to support the band. Jonah and bassist Ben Rubin have been playing music together for 20 years. Guitarist Jacob Deaton rounds out the band, and they hope to find new fans and travel the world playing music for a living.
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Meet Jonah Smith on NBC.com.
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What We Know About Prince's Final Days
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Your browser doesnât support HTML5 video
WATCH: Officials say the music legend was found unresponsive inside an elevator in his Paisley Park home.
The death of pop superstar Prince at the age of 57 shocked the world today.
After the music icon was found dead in his Minnesota compound, Paisley Park, dozens of famous faces and millions of fans took to social media to express grief over the loss of the "Purple Rain" singer.
To many, his death seemed to come out of nowhere; his latest performance was last Saturday night.
Here is a timeline Prince's last days:
Prince performed what would be his final show at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta at 10 p.m.
Singer Janelle Monáe was in the crowd and tweeted praise for the performance after the concert ended.
Hours after the show, Prince was traveling by private jet. The plane had to make an emergency landing in Quad City, Illinois due to his health complication. He was taken to a local hospital by ambulance.
About 8:30 a.m. the following morning, Prince tweeted to a fan that he was still on a "cloud of purple intoxication."
Prince's representative later told People the singer had been battling the flu for weeks and was resting at home.
Prince threw a 10 p.m. dance party at Paisley Park as a thank you for the good weather, love and support, he tweeted. He did not perform, but took to the stage to address his fans and show off his new guitar and piano, both purple.
The icon re-tweeted a fan who said the hospitality was "2nd to none."
After the party, titled "Paisley Park after Dark," Prince posted a candid photos of attendees dancing.
Prince tweeted to a fan who attended his Atlanta concert that he had "barely slept" since that night. In the tweet, he used the hashtag #FeelingRejuvenated.
Prince posted his last tweet on Monday at 3:34 p.m. from Chanhassen, Minnesota. In the tweet, Prince included a promotional photo for his latest tour, "Piano and a Microphone" with a link to an independent music store chain Electric Fetus.
Prince's body was discovered in an elevator at his Paisley Park compound in Chanhassen, Minnesota, the Carver County Sheriff's Office told ABC news in a statement. He was pronounced dead at 10:07 a.m.
His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, released a statement confirming his death:
"It is with profound sadness that I am confirming that the legendary iconic performer, Prince, has died at his Paisley Park residence this morning at the age of 57," Noel-Schure said. "There are no further details as to the cause of his death at this time."
Fans created a makeshift memorial at Paisley Park in Prince's honor.
The sign at the Prince Steet subway station in Manhattan was changed to "Prince RIP."
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The death of pop superstar Prince at the age of 57 shocked the world today.After the music icon was found dead in his Minnesota compound, Paisley Park, dozens of famous faces and millions of fans took to social media to express grief over the loss of the "Purple Rain" singer. To many, his death...
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‘AIRPORT,’ PATTON' TOP OSCAR ENTRIES
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HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 22 (AP)—“Airport” and “Patton” scored top honors in the 43d nomina tions of the Motion Picture Aca demy of Arts and Sciences today with 10 apiece. “Love Story” placed third with seven followed by “M*A*S*H” and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” with five each.
The accent was on youth in nominations for best actress; all were newcomers: Jane Alex ander, “The Great White Hope” Glenda Jackson, “Women in Love”; Ali MacGrew, “Love Story”; Sarah Miles, “Byan's Daughter,” and Carrie Snod grass, “Diary of a Mad House wife.”
Melvyn Douglas, winner for best supporting actor in 1963 in “Hud,” vied with four younger actors for best actor. Mr. Douglas was nominated for “I Never Sang for My Father.” The others were James Earl Jones, “The Great White Hope”; Jack Nicholson, “Five Easy Pieces”; Ryan O'Neil, “Love Story”, and George C. Scott, “Patton.”
[In Spain, Mr. Scott said he refused the nomination, Reuters reported. It quoted him as saying: “I will have nothing to do with the academy."]
Nominees for best motion pic ture of 1970 were “Airport,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Love Story,” “M*A*S*H” and “Pat ton.”
The other top nominations were:
?? Bob Rafelson and Adrien Joyce, screenplay by Adrien Joyce; “Joe,” story and screenplay by Norman Wexler; “Love Story,” story and screenplay by Erich Segal; “My Night at Maud's,” story and screen play by Erich Rohmer, “Patton,” story and screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund North.
Best Song: “For All We Know,” from “Lovers and Other Strangers,” title song of “Pieces of Dreams,” “Thank You Very Much,” from “Scrooge”; “Till Love Touches Your Life,” from “Madron”; “Whistling Away the Dark,” from “Darling Lili.”
Best foreign‐language film: “First Love,” Switzerland; “Hoa‐Binh,” France; “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” Italy; “Paix Sur Les Champs,” Belgium, “Tristana,” Spain.
Best cinematography: Ernest Laszilo, “Airport;” Fred Koene kamp, “Patton;” Fred A. Young “Ryan's Daughter;” Charles F. Wheeler and Osami Furuya, “Sin saku;” Himeda and Masamichi Sapoh, “Tom! Tora! Tora” and Billy Williams, “Women in Love.”
“Airport was also cited for art direction, costume design film editing, original score and sound. “Patton” was nominated also in the categories of art direction, film editing, original score, sound and special visual effects. “Love Story” won a nominatioin also for original score. “M*A*S*H” was named for film editing, and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” was cited for art direction, film editing, sound and special visual effects.
We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports, and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.
A version of this archives appears in print on February 23, 1971, on page 30 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘AIRPORT,’ PATTON' TOP OSCAR ENTRIES. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Acad Award nominations; actor G C Scott refuses best actor nomination; nominations listed
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From Modernism to Communism and Back
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THE Villa Muller, a landmark of early modernist architecture, nearly vanished in the tumult of postwar Czechoslovakia. Its intricate interiors were inaccessible for decades after Prague fell behind the Iron Curtain and the Communist regime seized the property, turning it into a succession of state-controlled offices including the ruling party's ideological institute.
But the villa, designed as an elegant private residence by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, has emerged unscathed. Following a painstaking $1 million restoration, the building has opened to the public for the first time, as a museum.
Commissioned by a wealthy Czechoslovak engineer and building contractor, Frantisek Muller, the villa was completed in 1930, within a year of two other icons of modernism: Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat.
Loos is best remembered for his 1908 essay ''Ornament and Crime,'' which was among the first architectural tracts to idealize undecorated surfaces. Loos even scorned the use of notches on his shoes, preferring that they be made of completely smooth leather. His obsession with pared-down design found its fullest expression in the Villa Muller's unadorned white cubic facade.
But if Loos disdained ornament, he by no means advocated austerity. He furnished the Muller family with Chippendale chairs, ivory doorknobs, mahogany paneling, silver embossed Japanese wallpaper, richly veined marble, Oriental carpets and silk curtains. He also wielded a vibrant color palette, using canary yellow on the exterior window frames and red on the radiators.
Loos's projects, which included a Paris house for the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara and an unbuilt Paris residence for the dancer Josephine Baker, often included a system of interconnected spaces that became known as ''Raumplan,'' or volumetric planning. He perfected the system at the Villa Muller, varying the floor level and ceiling height of the rooms according to their function and significance. Loos aspired to an architectural equivalent of ''playing chess on a three-dimensional board,'' creating a series of multilevel, interlocking chambers with enticing glimpses of adjacent spaces.
The Villa Muller's innovative design provoked a sensation in avant-garde circles. Some 70 years ago, the artist Man Ray invited the French ambassador stationed in Prague to tour the newly completed villa in hopes (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) of securing state funding for a Loos-run architecture school in Paris. The composer Arnold Schonberg likened the design to the ''work of a great sculptor,'' adding, ''everything is thought out, imagined, composed and molded in space.''
About the same time the Mullers moved into the villa, Le Corbusier wrote, ''Loos swept right beneath our feet, and it was a Homeric cleansing -- precise, philosophical and logical. In this Loos has had a decisive influence on the destiny of architecture.''
The Mullers had free rein of Loos's puzzle-like composition for 18 years. As non-Jewish Czechoslovaks, they went unharmed during the Nazi occupation of their country. But when the Communists seized power in 1948, they nationalized Frantisek Muller's vast business holdings. In short order the Mullers' dream house on a hillside overlooking Prague Castle became a storage space for Czechoslovakia's Applied Arts Museum and offices for a state textbook publisher.
The Mullers were allowed to stay on as tenants, but their quarters were reduced to the library and boudoir.
Frantisek Muller died in 1951; his wife lived to witness the 1968 Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring reforms. When she died a few months later, the residence -- where Loos had celebrated his 60th birthday surrounded by aristocrats in white tie and evening gowns -- became the headquarters of the Czechoslovak Communist Party's Marxist-Leninist Institute, an ideological research center and propaganda agency.
Some of the Mullers' artworks ended up at the Czech Museum of Decorative Arts and others at the National Gallery of Art in Prague. Access to the villa was tightly restricted throughout the 1970's and 80's. ''The place was sealed up like Count Dracula's castle,'' said Jan Sapak, a Czech architect who has extensively researched Loos's work. A handful of Loos's admirers managed to visit surreptitiously what architectural historians regarded as his masterpiece. Zdenek Lukes, a preservation adviser to President Vaclav Havel, said that at one point Arab students lived there while being trained in subversive activities. Vladimir Slapeta, an architectural historian who gained entry with a Western architect after giving a custodian the equivalent of a $5 bribe, recalled seeing discarded bottles of vodka and wine alongside volumes of ''Das Kapital'' and the essays of Lenin.
After the Communists were ousted in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the institute vacated the building, by then dilapidated. Coal lay in heaps outside the once pristine entry, and the leather upholstered couches designed by Loos were rotting in the cellar. The bright, Mondrian-inspired colors of the children's rooms were covered by drab institutional hues, and the living and dining rooms were dingy and bare.
But lush expanses of green cipollino marble and rare woods remained intact.
In 1993, ownership was restituted to the Mullers' daughter, Eva Materna-Muller, who was living in England, and she put it up for sale. ''It had lost its magic for the family,'' said George Materna, a grandson of Frantisek Muller. ''It was tainted because it had been ripped away and used by other people.''
Two American architects, Leslie van Duzer and Kent Kleinman, documented the building's origins in a 1994 monograph, which helped draw scholarly attention to its fate. President Havel and his first wife, Olga, briefly considered purchasing the house as their private residence. But the Havels decided not to, and only an international campaign by preservationists thwarted its acquisition by a Prague businessman who, it was feared, might have drastically altered it. Finally, in 1995, the city of Prague bought the house, turning it over to the City of Prague Museum.
Now freshly refurbished with city funds, the house reopened in May for guided tours. Many of the original artworks have been returned. Today, as in 1930, fish swim in the two aquariums Loos recessed into a marble living room wall. The eclectic furnishings have been restored or replicated, including the original mahogany toilet seats and nickel-plated bathroom fixtures.
The former servants' quarters now contain displays devoted to Loos's life and work. ''A work of art is revolutionary, a house is conservative,'' it says on one wall, quoting Loos. ''A work of art points new ways to mankind and thinks of the future. A house refers to the present.''
Photos: THE PRIDE OF PRAGUE -- Clockwise from left, Mrs. Muller's lemon-wood boudoir was inspired by European railway carriages; the look of the children's bedroom was inspired by Mondrian; the villa in a vintage photograph; ivory doorknobs; eclectic furniture in the living room is set off by cipollino marble walls, inset with fish tanks. (Albertina Loos Archive); (Photographs by Michal Krumphanzl/CTK)
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THE Villa Muller, a landmark of early modernist architecture, nearly vanished in the tumult of postwar Czechoslovakia. Its intricate interiors were inaccessible for decades after Prague fell behind the Iron Curtain and the Communist regime seized the property, turning it into a succession of state-controlled offices including the ruling party's ideological institute. But the villa, designed as an elegant private residence by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, has emerged unscathed. Following a painstaking $1 million restoration, the building has opened to the public for the first time, as a museum.
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Terrorism and literature - The Boston Globe
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20160630124029
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In Don DeLillo’s “Mao II,” one of the characters — a reclusive novelist — observes that there’s “a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West, we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.”
With each new burst of terrorist violence, there inevitably follows a spasm of new articles and books. Many of these works, promising to reveal the terrorist mind, are written by sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, psychologists, and sundry social scientists. While the best are weighty and worthy, even they fail to capture what Henry James called the “picture of the exposed and entangled state.” Novelists alone challenge not just popular stereotypes but also scholarly analyses about the world and people.
In a word, novelists make raids on human consciousness, and we would be foolish to ignore the insights they bring to the phenomenon of terrorism in our own age. This was certainly Joseph Conrad’s ambition with his novel “The Secret Agent.” First published in serial form in 1906, Conrad’s story is based on an actual event: the botched bombing in 1894 of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The only victim was the bomber, a misled young man who seemed to be part of London’s anarchist community.
In Conrad’s time, anarchists were not alone in their fascination with the so-called propaganda by deed. The Fenians who, determined to liberate Ireland, unleashed in 1881 a four-year campaign of assassinations and bombings against government, infrastructure, and military targets. In the words of one founder, the Fenian militants were “men who will fly over land and sea like invisible beings” to deliver the grim tidings of terror. Both the Fenians and anarchists exploited recent advances in weapons technology — most important, the invention of dynamite. The novel’s most terrifying character, the Professor, is modeled after a certain Professor Mezzeroff, a failed chemist who advertised bomb-making courses in Fenian newspapers.
While we know little about this shadowy figure, the Professor makes his darkness visible. Walking the streets of London, he constantly caresses a rubber ball with his hand. The slightest pressure on the ball will detonate a flask of nitroglycerin nestled inside his trouser pocket. Not only does the potential suicide bomber have the means to make himself deadly, but he also has the resolve. As the Professor smugly assures a fellow believer, people “believe in my will to use the means. . . . Therefore I am deadly.”
The Victorian media amplified these harrowing impressions, deepening the public’s sense of insecurity and intensifying the power of the terror. We recognize this cycle of reinforcement. When the Professor reminds a colleague “What happens to us as individuals is not of the least consequence,” we are jolted by the familiarity of the mind-set. So, too, when we follow the conversation between Adolf Verloc, the agent provocateur, and the foreign emissaries who give him his marching orders. It is all too easy to imagine an operative of the Islamic State telling a cell in France or Belgium what Verloc’s handlers tell him in London: “What is wished for just now is the accentuation of the unrest — of the fermentation which undoubtedly exists.”
There are, of course, differences. The most public driver of terrorism today — religious faith — is nowhere to be found among Conrad’s terrorists. Instead of drawing their inspiration from the Koran, his fanatics wallow in political tracts — seeking the blessing not of religious leaders but of theorists like Mikhail Bakunin.
Yet the theological justifications for terrorists today are no less self-serving than the ideological claims of those in fin-de-siècle Europe. True believers exist in both the theological and ideological camps. Outnumbering them, however, is a different kind of believer: one who is convinced he was dealt a bad hand by life. Conrad’s terrorists — like many in real life — flourish at the margins of society. They turn to social revolution in order to expiate their personal failures; and they fashion grand narratives to justify their revenge against the institutions and individuals held responsible for their stunted ambitions. “The most ardent of revolutionaries,” he wrote, “are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind — the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.”
While he shared his characters’ contempt for plutocrats and politicians, Conrad was appalled by the desire for indiscriminate destruction. “I have always dreamed of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers,” one erupts at a meeting of revolutionaries. “No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and in the service of humanity.” Replace “humanity” with “Allah” or “unborn babies,” and we find that the century dividing our time from Conrad’s is but a blink of an eye.
Like Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky glommed onto a grisly news item as the inspiration for
his own, earlier exploration of the terrorist mind, “Possessed.” (Intriguingly, Conrad disdained what he called “the convulsed, terror-haunted Dostoevsky.”) In 1869, a group of self-proclaimed nihilists had bundled off a member who had broken with them, strangled him to death, and shoved the corpse through a hole cut into a frozen lake. They were led by Sergey Nechayev, a charismatic youth who then fled abroad to pursue a career of revolutionary agitation that lasted until his death in 1882. Author of the incendiary “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” Nechayev declared that the end — in this case, the destruction of the czarist state — justified any and all means including murder, mayhem, and madness.
Dostoevsky had once been a revolutionary. Imprisoned and sentenced to death with fellow conspirators in 1849, he underwent a mock execution before being exiled to Siberia for several years. This was the formative experience of his life, one that laid the foundations for his Russian Orthodox faith. Dostoevsky took the measure of Nechayev and his followers — the possessed of the book’s title — through the prism of his faith.
Led by Peter Verkhovensky, modeled after Nechayev, the novel’s revolutionaries murder a fellow conspirator; one of them, Kirilov, kills himself as a sign of his free will. Both acts, for Dostoevsky, amount to a revolt against God. By claiming God-like powers, Dostoevsky believed, these apprentice terrorists had sown the seeds of radical evil. No less important, for Dostoevsky, was that the Russian soil had been fertilized by the various isms imported from the West: socialism, liberalism, utilitarianism, skepticism, and, most crucially, atheism. As the novel’s revolutionaries insist, it was not they who had swallowed these ideas; instead, the ideas had swallowed them. Wrenched from their parents’ traditions and religion, handed abstractions in place of revelation, and informed they had absolute freedom to act, these young men chose to destroy.
Having devoted thelast years of his life to a stage adaptation of “The Possessed,” Albert Camus died shortly after its opening in 1959. The adaptation, he insisted, was closer to him than any of his previous works — a stunning claim since those works include “The Stranger,” “The Plague,” and “The Rebel.” Yet Camus shared Dostoevsky’s fascination with the militant mind — a fascination shaped by encounters with his era’s many faces of terrorism. From the state variety exercised by Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to the tactical form practiced by Arab nationalists and French soldiers in the Algerian civil war, Camus explored time and again terrorism’s causes and consequences in his fiction.
French writer and Nobel prize laureate Albert Camus.
In his own play “The Just Assassins,” Camus subjects the moral calculus of terrorists to fierce pressure. He also latches onto a historical event: Ivan Kaliayev’s assassination, in 1905, of the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia. Members of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Kaliayev and his fellow conspirators were exceptional: They agonized and argued over the very nature of terrorism. Rejecting actions that could harm civilians, these young men and women struck only at czarist officials.
Kaliayev obeys this moral limitation in his first assassination attempt, when he rushes to the door of Sergei’s carriage only to discover two children — the duke’s nephew and niece — sitting alongside him. Aborting his effort, Kaliayev returns to his comrades; one of them, Fedorov, promptly lambastes him. Thanks to this misguided effort to distinguish between the guilty and innocent, Fedorov blurts, “thousands of Russian children will go on dying of starvation for years to come.” Only when we stop sentimentalizing children, he shouts, will the revolution succeed. As Kaliayev struggles to find his words, a third comrade, Dora, turns to Fedorov: “When that day comes, the revolution will be loathed by the whole human race.”
Launching himself again at the duke’s carriage a few days later, Kaliayev finds him alone this time. He blows up the carriage and kills its rider; surrendering to the police, he is quickly executed. Did Kaliayev’s scrupulous calculus absolve him of guilt? Of course not, Camus replies. But what is exemplary, Camus suggests, was Kaliayev’s doubt whether the ends justified his means. Our task, he wrote, is to “refute legitimate murder and assign a clear limit to its demented enterprises.”
This task is as pressing for us as it was for Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Camus. These novelists lead us to see a world besieged by terrorism in new ways. Literature’s task, Conrad wrote, is to reveal what is “fundamental, what is enduring and essential . . . and by the
power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.” This is crucial, for most of us resemble Verloc’s wife, Winnie, whose philosophy was “not to take into account the inside of facts.” Through intricate plotting and nuanced description, novelists lead us inside, enabling us to see that political or religious causes driving terrorists to kill not just us but themselves are not the sole motive. There are more base human motivations, from resentment and envy, to hatred for the world and the desire to leave one’s bloody imprint upon it.
Adolf Verloc never grasped, Conrad writes, the enormity of his act “since it was impossible for him to do so without ceasing to be himself.” This applies to the characters in all of these works, as it does to all of us: We can never cease being ourselves. Literature is no more a cure for this state of being than it is for the blight of terrorism. By virtue of its open-ended nature and invitation to interpretation, it does offer a modest lesson: Values like prudence and attentiveness, solitary reflection and civil conversation are even more critical when our enemies seek to destroy them and public figures seem to ignore them. Novelists are still raiding our consciousness; we simply need to let them in.
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Novelists make raids on human consciousness, and we would be foolish to ignore their insights
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2 charged, 1 more held in North Carolina murder, crime spree
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POLK COUNTY, N.C. -Two men have been charged with first degree murder in the March 31 death of a North Carolina truck driver, reportsCBS affiliate WBTW.
Suspects Kwame Fernanders and Quintae Edwards were arrested in the Florida Panhandle on Monday, along with Kayla Black, who is also a person of interest in the shooting death of Destry Horne. The trio are also wanted for a variety of crimes in South Carolina, Florida and North Carolina.
Polk County Sheriff Donald Hill said police believe they know the motive for the murder, but are not ready to make it public. He said the victim did not know the suspects.
Police said a weapon recovered when the group was arrested is believed to be associated with crimes committed in Florida.
The trio is currently in jail in Gainesville, Florida.
They are being held on charges including kidnapping, home invasion and grand theft auto.
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Suspects Kwame Fernander and Quintae Edwards have been charged in the shooting death of Destry Horne; Kayla Black is being held as a person of interest
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Justin Bieber -- My 20th Birthday Really Blows
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-- no longer a teenager -- and to celebrate that he blew out candles on a cake that looks like it was made for child.
Bieber -- or according to the cake, Bizzle -- turned 20 Saturday morning ... and he wasted no time kicking off the celebration.
Wonder if he wished for a better plea deal?
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Justin Bieber -- no longer a teenager -- and to celebrate that he blew out candles on a cake that looks like it was made for child.Bieber -- or according…
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Dick Bingham, Academy of Sciences fundraiser, dies
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W. Richard “Dick” Bingham, former chairman and fundraiser for the California Academy of Sciences, attends the groundbreaking ceremony for the academy’s new museum in Golden Gate Park in 2005.
W. Richard “Dick” Bingham, former chairman and fundraiser for the California Academy of Sciences, attends the groundbreaking ceremony for the academy’s new museum in Golden Gate Park in 2005.
Dick Bingham, Academy of Sciences fundraiser, dies
W. Richard “Dick” Bingham, a force behind the renovation of the California Academy of Sciences, died last week in his New York home. He was 79.
Mr. Bingham was a longtime board member of the California Academy of Sciences, and served as its chairman during a crucial period for the nonprofit, from 1997 to 2007. Mr. Bingham’s leadership was instrumental in helping the academy garner enough financial support to build a newer version of its museum in Golden Gate Park, said Jonathan Foley, the academy’s executive director.
The cost of the project was huge — $488 million — but Mr. Bingham and the academy’s leaders were determined.
“Dick’s visionary leadership attracted key funding from notable Bay Area philanthropists, and provided the rest of the philanthropic community with the confidence needed to propel the campaign forward,” Foley wrote to the academy’s staff.
Mr. Bingham was born in New York City and grew up in Pennsylvania and California. He earned degrees from Stanford University in 1957 and Harvard Business School in 1961.
He loved the ocean, spending two years as a line officer for the Navy on the destroyer Davis. He was known to close remarks with “May fair winds and following seas accompany you.” After serving in the Navy, he started his career on Wall Street, working at investment banking firms and then starting private equity firm, American Industrial Partners, in 1988.
Mr. Bingham was also involved in civic and many nonprofit matters as a past trustee for institutions including the World Affairs Council and CPMC Foundation. Beginning in 1996, he served as honorary consul to the Republic of Lithuania and also on San Francisco’s Committee on Jobs. He continued to support the California Academy of Sciences as founding chair of the new academy from 2008 to 2015.
Mr. Bingham is survived by his wife, Wendy Wasson Bingham; children, Lock, Frances and Grace; and sister, Betsy Bingham Davis.
Wendy Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: wlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thewendylee
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Mr. Bingham was a longtime board member of the California Academy of Sciences, and served as its chairman during a crucial period for the nonprofit, from 1997 to 2007. Mr. Bingham’s leadership was instrumental in helping the academy garner enough financial support to build a newer version of its museum in Golden Gate Park, said Jonathan Foley, the academy’s executive director. “Dick’s visionary leadership attracted key funding from notable Bay Area philanthropists, and provided the rest of the philanthropic community with the confidence needed to propel the campaign forward,” Foley wrote to the academy’s staff. After serving in the Navy, he started his career on Wall Street, working at investment banking firms and then starting private equity firm, American Industrial Partners, in 1988. Mr. Bingham was also involved in civic and many nonprofit matters as a past trustee for institutions including the World Affairs Council and CPMC Foundation.
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BOOKS OF THE TIMES
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The Path to the Quantum Computer
Illustrated. 204 pages. Knopf. $24.
George Johnson's ''Shortcut Through Time'' addresses one of the most excruciatingly complex, mysterious and deeply fascinating topics in modern science, namely quantum computing: the manipulation of quantum states to perform computations far faster than is possible on any conventional computer. The book's remarkable achievement is that it makes this deeply arcane topic accessible and understandable -- even, I think, for the reader unsophisticated in physics or computing. It opens a door to broader understanding of this important field and sets a new standard for science writing.
I was originally reluctant to review this book. I am a computer scientist with a guilty secret: I've never really understood quantum computing. How could I write a review without revealing my ignorance?
However, as I began the preface, I became intrigued and then excited. Mr. Johnson, a contributing science writer for The New York Times, says he wrote the book not to profile the personalities in the field, but to lead the reader toward a tentative understanding of quantum computing. To take the reader along as he, the writer, strains ''to grasp an idea with an imprecise metaphor, only to discard it for another with a tighter fit, closing in on an airy notion from several directions, triangulating on approximate truth.'' And: ''I want the reader to feel that we are both on the same side -- outsiders seeking a foothold on the slippery granite face of a new idea.''
I was hooked. So much of what passes for science writing nowadays is really human-interest journalism, focused on the quirks and conflicts of science's eccentric personalities, and is only incidentally concerned with science itself. Yet here was someone who proposed to take a problem at the forefront of science and address it on its own terms. Perhaps my ignorance was a virtue: I could serve as an experimental subject, reading the book and reporting on whether I arrived at the promised land.
Approached from this perspective, the book took on the allure of a good mystery. Mr. Johnson, like a seasoned crime writer, sets the scene and then introduces a series of increasingly intriguing metaphors, each of which unveils another aspect of Q.C., as I'll call it. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Q.C.'s secret could be revealed at the turn of any page. For me, the initial forays covered familiar ground. But Mr. Johnson soon entered unfamiliar territory, exploring the mysteries of superposition and entanglement.
Along the way, we discover that we are dealing not with an obscure and eccentric academic curiosity, but with a dangerous character. (In addition to mystery, we have drama!) Q.C., it has been shown in the last few years, could defeat some of the fundamental codes that secure many electronic communications. The security of these public key cryptography mechanisms relies on the fact that on even the fastest computers, performing a particular computation -- factoring, or breaking into their constituent pieces, large numbers -- takes an unimaginably long time. Yet in 1994 Peter Shor, a mathematician, showed how Q.C. could do this same operation much faster -- in a few minutes. Q.C. could provide a shortcut through time.
Just why this is possible is at the heart of this concise but dense book. The particulars depend on the clever manipulations of two fundamental properties of the quantum world -- superposition and entanglement. Superposition lets a single quantum switch be on and off at the same time; entanglement allows the state of one quantum switch to be linked with that of another. Set up just right, a collection of such quantum switches can, in principle, be used to build a computer that manipulates many numbers at once -- transforming millions of numbers in one step, or, via mind-numbingly complex manipulations, factoring the numbers that support our financial and national security.
Fortunately for those who use codes to maintain secrets, we also learn that Q.C. does not exist yet, at least not in a useful form. As Mr. Johnson notes, the world record for building a quantum computer involves just seven qubits (quantum switches, pronounced like the word cubits) operating for less than a second. A quantum computer with several thousand qubits and able to run for hours is not expected anytime soon. The problems involved in scaling up are complex and hard to resolve. They relate to the tendency of superposed quantum states to collapse to a single value -- either on or off -- when the real world impinges.
''A Shortcut Through Time'' is not all metaphor. It also touches on the history of this young field, noting a prescient paper by the physicist Richard P. Feynman, who postulated in 1982 that quantum computing might be possible. (Also mentioned is the independent work by a less famous but just as visionary physicist, Paul Benioff, formerly of the Argonne National Laboratory.) But what makes this book a delight and a rare gem of science writing is the science itself, and Mr. Johnson's engagement with that science. He promises that he is not going to cheat by implying omniscience with his subject), and he does not. The result is fascinating and tremendously engaging.
After all this, you may be wondering whether I now understand quantum computing. Well, there are some who argue that quantum physics is so foreign to human experience that no one can truly understand it, only manipulate its mathematical rules. Mr. Johnson does not use mathematics and he skips many details. (''We are operating here on a need-to-know basis,'' he states.) But I found that with him at my side, I could reach that delicate mental state that feels like understanding. Now this state, like a quantum superposition, may collapse to ignorance when I try to explain it to someone, but in the meantime, I feel less guilty.
Photo: George Johnson (Julie Graber)
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A SHORTCUT THROUGH TIME The Path to the Quantum Computer By George Johnson Illustrated. 204 pages. Knopf. $24. George Johnson's ''Shortcut Through Time'' addresses one of the most excruciatingly complex, mysterious and deeply fascinating topics in modern science, namely quantum computing: the manipulation of quantum states to perform computations far faster than is possible on any conventional computer. The book's remarkable achievement is that it makes this deeply arcane topic accessible and understandable -- even, I think, for the reader unsophisticated in physics or computing. It opens a door to broader understanding of this important field and sets a new standard for science writing.
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Sister asks social media to find woman who saved her brother's life
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20160701053530
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Before you go, we thought you'd like these...
A man and his sister from the United Kingdom took to social media asking people to help them find the good samaritan who helped saved his life after it was almost taken in a devastating car accident.
asking if anyone could help find the woman who helped save her brother Christopher's life this week.
After Christopher's car crashed, he was rendered helpless until emergency services arrived. However, a woman approached the car and climbed in to hold his neck straight, fearing he may have broken it.
She reportedly told Christopher that she was on her way to see her child's school play when she saw the crash. Despite Christopher's pleas for her to go see the play, the woman refused to leave his side.
She said that the siblings reached out to the police in hopes of finding her but had no such luck. Since the Boyles posted the appeal on Facebook on Sept. 18, the post has amassed over 60,000 shares.
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The brother almost died in a car accident but a mysterious woman helped him survive
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Apple's Secret App Contract: Developers Pay Apple Even When Users Don't
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Last Updated Mar 10, 2010 12:05 PM EST
made some interesting points, but I think he omitted some additional ones. I've also obtained detailed information on the contract's still-confidential part governing paid apps -- and there are some eyebrow raisers in it as well.
von Lohmann makes some great points:
In addition, there are some other thorny points I found in my reading:
Now on to Apple's schedule 2, a separate, confidential agreement for developers who sell their apps. I won't link to my information sources because I don't want to see anyone get into trouble. As with most Apple agreements, some sections are common and others may be country-specific. I believe I'm focusing only on common terms and conditions, but can't guarantee it. That said, here are some details:
Given Apple's control freak corporate culture, it's hardly surprising that many of the terms keep developers under the company's thumb. Given the ramp-up of Android handsets -- Apple's attempts to
aside -- the question is how long Apple will be able to continue enforcing such relationships when developers might have other viable outlets for their work.
© 2010 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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Apple's iPhone developer contract heavily favors Apple -- and even says that developers owe Apple its cut of app sales even if Apple doesn't collect.
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Jessica Williams leaving as ‘Daily Show’ correspondent
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NEW YORK (AP) — Jessica Williams is leaving as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s ‘‘The Daily Show’’ this week after four years. But she’s not straying far.
The network said Wednesday that Williams will be concentrating on a new scripted show that she’s developing for Comedy Central. That development deal had been announced this spring, for a show that Williams is to both write and star in.
The Los Angeles-bred comic, now 26, was the youngest on-air person at ‘‘The Daily Show’’ when she joined. She worked for the last three years of host Jon Stewart’s reign and most of Trevor Noah’s first year.
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Williams is set to write and star in a new scripted show for Comedy Central.
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CRIME/MYSTERY - THE DEFENSE PLEADED NAGGING - NYTimes.com
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20160701174707
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DEATH OF A ''JEWISH AMERICAN PRINCESS'' The True Story of a Victim on Trial. By Shirley Frondorf. Illustrated. 281 pp. New York: Villard Books. $18.95.
The case that attracted Shirley Frondorf, and whose verdict deeply outraged her, was the slaying of Elana Steinberg, a so-called Jewish American Princess, by her husband. It happened in 1981 in Scottsdale, a flossy, yuppie-filled suburb of Phoenix, and, once the husband dropped his initial tale of burglars, the facts were not disputed. The husband had taken a kitchen knife and stabbed his wife 26 times while she cried out to their children for help.
Steven Steinberg claimed he had done this while sleep-walking - driven temporarily insane by his wife's endless nagging for more money. Nothing unusual, to a crime buff, in any of this - or in what followed. The husband hired a lawyer who specialized in the insanity defense. Inexperienced Scottsdale police did a sloppy job. The prosecuting attorney made a case only for premeditated murder. With just that choice, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
A practicing attorney herself, Ms. Frondorf's outrage stems from the nature of the defense. The husband described his wife as a ''spoiled, over-indulged brat - the stereotypical Jewish American Princess,'' who drove him out of his mind with her spending and her demands that he be more successful. ''The defense strategy played to the jury's worst prejudices,'' the dust jacket states. And the publisher tells reviewers in a publicity release that the author has examined ''anti-Semitic and antifeminist stereotypes in the courtroom.''
But Ms. Frondorf presents no evidence of prejudice. The defendant was, after all, also Jewish. She describes a jury confronted with a reasonable doubt and no options and she overlooks the deeper story behind this odd little tragedy.
Joan Didion noticed a similar case in California in the 1960's and described it in a brief masterpiece called ''Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.'' In a few thousand words, Ms. Didion gave us a memorable look at the tragedy of lives in which the only value is materialism. It takes a poet like Ms. Didion to see the story and tell it. Ms. Frondorf, no poet, gives us a lot of anger but not much point.
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LEAD: DEATH OF A ''JEWISH AMERICAN PRINCESS'' The True Story of a Victim on Trial. By Shirley Frondorf. Illustrated. 281 pp. New York: Villard Books. $18.95.
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5 Social Media Lessons From the Haiti Earthquake Relief Effort
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Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007.
While terrible in scope and nature, catastrophes like the Haiti earthquake bring out the best in people. In the age of social media, we get to witness this firsthand.
With the widespread adoption of social media in the non-profit sector, people's ability to act and support communities in need like Haiti has only been increased. There's no greater example of this than the incredible fundraising job the American Red Cross did with social and mobile channels. With its texting campaign, the American Red Cross raised more than $20 million.
"The speed and quantity with which the American public retweeted and posted to Facebook the need for donations to help with relief efforts in Haiti was (for anything we've seen at the Red Cross) unprecedented," said Wendy Harman, the social media manager at the American Red Cross. "This was the first time I truly felt like people were using these tools to take action for good. They actually texted "Haiti" to 90999, more than 2 million people did it... the impact was huge — that money is right now providing people with basic needs like water. I have no doubt it wouldn't have spread so widely without social media."
Overall, Americans raised more than $200 million to benefit Haiti, roughly the equivalent of what was donated to Thailand after the tsunami in 2004, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Given the population's general migration to social media, giving has simply moved with it. But is there more to learn? Here are five early social media lessons from the Haiti Earthquake relief effort.
The use of mobile media to drive fundraising was unprecedented. Further, on the ground in Haiti, victims and rescue workers used mobile phones to communicate and save lives. Generally speaking, mobile entered a new era in its history, becoming a primary channel for cause-based action.
"The Red Cross has raised $21+ Million in $10 donations via mobile," said Allyson Kapin, editor of Frogloop, a non-profit industry blog. "That’s #MobileFundraisingHistory. According to the Red Cross, in 2009, mobile only raised $4M by all charities. I think that’s the bigger story."
But at the same time, mobile represented a bit of a red herring as workers had a hard time delivering aid to Haitians in need. "Mobile raised tons of money in the world that still had a power grid and IT infrastructure," said Tom Watson, author of CauseWired. "And it failed rather completely in a world devoid of those industrial luxuries. No 'app' was capable of getting anything done in Haiti itself. And we should be up front about that."
People got to experience the disaster and the relief efforts through the eyes of those on the ground, and felt compelled to act. The incredible response was overwhelming.
Many people used social media to create CrisisCamps and organize widespread efforts. For example, BlogWorld's Social Media Director Jim Turner launched a 24 hour fundraising telethon. Online, non-profits and activists scrambled and successfully created many different ways for concerned individuals to act immediately.
The question many activists had revolved around whether the flash flood of concern could be sustained. "We, as a community of non-profit causes using social media, get an A+ for speed and efficiency, and A+ for an outpouring of concern and caring during the immediate impact of this devastating tragedy for one of the poorest countries in the world," added author Allison Fine. "However, those high grades may not hold up during the long, painful process of recovery ahead."
Another big story was the use of social media hand-in-hand with traditional media. Whether it was CNN covering CrisisCamps or the NFL broadcasting how to text donations to the Red Cross, we saw the intersection and integration of multiple media forms. The need to act on behalf of the Haitian people enabled widespread integration on the fly.
"From my view point, there seems to be better coordination between social media efforts and more traditional efforts — in part because social media has been used more by the traditional organizations," said well-known non-profit blogger Beth Kanter
Full disclosure: Beth is a business partner of mine.
One aspect of the story was the immediacy of danger to the people of Haiti. At the same time, tweets, texts and Facebook updates did not tell a larger story — the depth of Haiti's incredible poverty.
The New York Times aptly noted that when a 7.0 earthquake hit San Francisco and the Bay Area in 1989, only 63 people died as opposed to the approximately 50,000 people in Haiti. The difference, of course, is the abject poverty in Haiti, and how it impacts the country's infrastructure, from buildings to water supply.
Online media's ability to create compassion was compelling, but at the same time lacking when it came to the plight of the Haitain people, at least so far. "[Social media] told the light and obvious version — that most people in Haiti are poor, that Haiti has a long and difficult history," said CauseWired's Watson. "Again, I think that social media will begin to tell that story and to involve people closely in the months and years ahead.... I'm hoping it finds some staying power in Haiti."
Traditionally, a crisis of this nature yields an immediate outpouring of humanitarian relief. Then attention moves on to the next news story, and long term impact drops drastically. As time moves on, many pundits fear that our new technology driven media will not be able to change this trend, and that the Haitian people will soon be forgotten.
"I fear that most of the innovative uses of technology that people rushed to deploy either won't help much, or worse, may have been a distraction," said blogger and activist Brian Reich. "But mostly, I just am frustrated that like every other disaster before it, the attention that was so intensely focused on Haiti for a few days last week will fade away as quickly as it came together, and the bigger lessons from this crisis, and bigger opportunities that exist for the future, will never be fully considered."
Whether or not our attention dissipates remains to be seen. Certainly, more people are having conversations about Haiti than ever before. As we move into week two of humanitarian efforts, let's hope new media continues the compelling story of global aid on behalf of the Haitian people.
- How Non-Profits and Activists Can Leverage Location Based Services- 3 Powerful Social Good Trends in 2010- 4 Social Good Trends of 2009- Why Social Media Is Vital to Corporate Social Responsibility- 5 Essential Tips for Promoting Your Charity Using Social Media- 20 Ways to Change the World in Only 15 Minutes a Day
[img credits: United Nations Development Programme, American Red Cross/Talia Frankel, Matthew Marek/American Red Cross]
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Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007. While terrible in scope and nature, cata...
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American dystopia more reality than fiction
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(TomDispatch) When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else's -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.
Some of them -- Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" -- were comically of their time: that novel's vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert's "Dune" had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now. Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.
We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM's fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones. Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that's perfect for this very moment.
Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital
"The Hunger Games", Suzanne Collins's bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it's set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.
That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" website, film, and books aspire to reduce.
But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. "The Hunger Games" reminds us of that. Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins's timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.
Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn't noticed.
In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died. If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.
Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don't forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.
Rebecca Solnit grew up in California public libraries and is thrilled to be revisiting them all over the state as part of the Cal Humanities California Reads project, which is now featuring five books, including her "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster." Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" books remain her favorite young-adult fantasy series, even though she found "The Hunger Games" trilogy irresistible. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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Climate change, massive debt, poverty this May Day make "Hunger Games" sound comparable to modern society, not entertaining fantasy
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60 Minutes viewers inspired by St. Benedict's Prep
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"Whatever hurts my brother hurts me!" That's the motto at St. Benedict's Prep, an inner-city school with a graduation rate of 98 percent.
As Scott Pelley reported on Sunday's 60 Minutes, 85 percent of the school's graduates earn a college degree, but that's not the biggest source of pride for the school's headmaster: it's the kids who come back as grown men and fathers.
"When I get introduced by one of our guys to his son and his daughter, I say 'Wow.' That for me is the most meaningful," Father Leahy told Pelley.
The school -- started in 1868 -- has nearly 150 years of history, and some of its graduates, including many of Father Leahy's students, watched on Sunday. They still refer to themselves as "Gray Bees," the school's mascot:
This Gray Bee, class of '62, is locked in @StBenedictsNJ @60Minutes #SBPon60Min pic.twitter.com/zqIvi4Bppu
Proud to say i'm a Bee. Make sure to tune in. Idk where ill be if it wasnt for @StBenedictsNJ. Tonight at 6! https://t.co/2vrAPU06VN
Looking forward to this story on where my husband went to school. He's a proud Gray Bee. #SBPon60Min @StBenedictsNJ https://t.co/Bm0JuWsuCW
Here's a moving profile of @StBenedicts done by @60Minutes. This is an amazing place & I'm proud to be an alum. https://t.co/gfDE65koeC
Others watching were inspired by the students and the school:
@60Minutes @ScottPelley I absolutely loved this piece as an educator and a citizen! Rev. Leahy is an inspiration!
One viewer encouraged Leahy to open a school for women:
@FrEdwinLeahy @60Minutes @scott Congratulations, Father on your great devotion to your boys-Girls would love to attend & deserve a chance 2
Should any students fail to appreciate all he does, Father Leahy gave them this helpful reminder:
The things I do for these kids. Courage! Watch us on @60Minutes Sunday at 7 p.m. @StBenedictsNJ #SBPon60Min pic.twitter.com/9D9LzhAhwI
© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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"So much hate and violence in the world. Here is a school that promotes love and respect, and its students succeed," one viewer tweeted
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Christy Sheats shooting: Texas mother who shot daughters reloaded gun, cops say
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Jun 27, 2016 5:33 PM EDT Crimesider
By Erin Donaghue / CBS News
FULSHEAR, Texas -- A Texas mother accused of gunning down her two adult daughters opened fire in her home, then reloaded her gun before again shooting one of her daughters in the street, the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office said in a statement Monday.
Police say the shooting happened around 5 p.m. Friday in the family's home outside the Houston suburb of Fulshear. Just before, they say, 42-year-old Christy Sheats had convened a "family meeting" inside their home. Sheats' daughters, Taylor, 22, and Madison, 17, and her husband Jason, 45, had gathered in the living room. During the meeting, Sheats held up a gun and shot both of her daughers, police say.
Sheats had been arguing with her husband about marital issues before she began shooting, Maj. Chad Norvell of the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office tells Crimesider.
"The husband and wife weren't getting along," Norvell said.
According to a police press release, Jason Sheats and both daughters managed to flee through the front door. Madison Sheats, who was shot once, soon collapsed and died.
Taylor Sheats ran into the street and Christy Sheats followed, shooting Taylor again, police say. Jason Sheats ran to the end of a cul-de-sac and was uninjured.
A witness told police Christy Sheats went back inside the home to reload the gun, and then returned and shot Taylor Sheats once more. Taylor Sheats was shot three times, police tell Crimesider. She was airlifted to a hospital, where she died.
Police say a deputy with the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office and an officer from nearby Fulshear Police Department responded. The officers saw the woman shooting one of the girls in the street, police say. They say Christy Shears didn't obey the Fulshear officer's demand to drop the handgun and the officer fired once, killing her.
The sheriff's office has responded to 14 calls for service at the home since January of 2012, police say. Some of those calls were for accidental alarm trips, Norvell told Crimesider, but in five of those instances, someone at the home called for medical response. Norvell couldn't release details about why responders were called in those cases.
During one call, in November of 2015, a third party requested a welfare check and reported that the couple was arguing. Norvell said it was a verbal argument and police determined there hadn't been physical abuse. There were no charges filed.
Police haven't yet determined a motive for the shooting. Jason Sheats gave an initial interview to police, but Norvell said investigators "don't want to push him too much."
"He's in a difficult state right now," Norvell said.
Jezebel reports Christy Sheats had expressed support on Facebook for her right to carry a semi-automatic handgun recently, writing: "It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that's exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semi-automatic handguns."
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Police say 42-year-old Christy Sheats gunned down her two daughters, 17 and 22, after a "family meeting"
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After Another National Failure, Messi Steps Away from Argentina
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Eventually, there had to be breaking point. The greatest player on the planet could only shoulder the weight and the disappointment of a nation for so long.
On Sunday night, after losing the Copa America final in a penalty shootout, Lionel Messi retired from the Argentine national team. His last contribution was blasting his spot kick over the crossbar.
“I was thinking about it in the locker room and that’s it,” Messi, 29, told reporters while Chile celebrated its title. “It’s over with the national team. As I just said, it’s now four finals. Unfortunately I tried and this was want I wanted most.”
One of Argentina’s greatest crop of players is now also its most cursed. La Albiceleste, as the team is known, has lost its last seven major finals, including four in the Copa America, two in the Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup. Messi was on the field for four of those defeats. Argentina still hasn’t won a major trophy since the 1991 Copa.
“I’ve tried many times,” he said. “It hurts me more than to anyone else not being able to be champion with Argentina. But that’s how it is. Unfortunately, I am going if I cannot get it.”
Whether the retirement will stick remains to be seen. A healthy Messi could still have five years at the top of the sport and would be an automatic pick for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. There will also be pressure from the national soccer federation and sponsors for him to reverse his decision. As the most famous soccer player on the planet, he is a 5-foot-6 commercial juggernaut.
But if Messi doesn’t come back for Argentina, it sets a worrying precedent for the sport as a whole. Beyond the remarkable sight of a professional athlete cracking psychologically, the idea of a global star rejecting the international stage in his prime would be a major indictment. European club soccer is the unquestioned financial engine of the sport, but the international game and its major tournaments are the touchpoints for casual fans.
Messi has won everything there is to win with FC Barcelona multiple times, including eight Spanish league titles and four in the Champions League. International soccer hasn’t rewarded him as richly. So, he figures, why does he need it? And what then of players like Cristiano Ronaldo or Gareth Bale, superstars of club soccer? Their national teams of Portugal and Wales, respectively, have even slimmer chances of winning trophies.
This is to say nothing of Messi’s Argentine teammates, who are also considering their national team futures. Reports in Argentina suggest that forwards Sergio Aguero and Gonzalo Higuain are also considering retirement. In one fell swoop, they could cement their legacies as Argentina’s wasted generation.
Of course, Messi’s relationship with his country is more complicated than most. For all of his wizardry, he has never been the most popular figure back home. Argentine fans demand loyalty from their stars. They expect a few years of service at the country’s biggest clubs, Boca Juniors or River Plate, before their stars shoot off to make their fortune in Europe.
Messi left home when he was 13, straight for Barcelona’s academy. By the age of 18, the undersized teenager was a regular in the first team.
Argentina, meanwhile, found other players to call their favorite son. Carlos Tevez is adored in Buenos Aires. He came up through Boca, before graduating to Brazil and Europe, like so many others. But when his contract ran out at Juventus in 2015, he left no doubt about his next move: Tevez was going home to Boca.
Living in the shadow of Diego Maradona, Argentina’s other transcendental No. 10. The difference is that Maradona delivered a World Cup 1986. The closest Messi has come was the 2014 final, when his muted performance barely troubled Germany. In his two previous trips to the tournament, in 2006 and 2010, La Albiceleste was eliminated in the quarterfinals. In 15 World Cup games, Messi has score five goals.
It doesn’t help either when Maradona is actively taking shots at you. Before this Copa America, Maradona said that Messi lacked the leadership skills to carry Argentina to glory. Messi was keenly aware of all of this. “I think [this decision is] for the sake of everybody,” he said inside MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on Sunday night. “I think a lot of people want it. They are obviously not satisfied—and we are not satisfied either—by reaching the final and not winning it.”
There are practical concerns, too. Being a national-team player from South America is one of the most punishing blessings in the game. The World Cup qualifying process is uniquely grueling requiring a minimum of 18 matches, whereas some European nations might only play 10. The travel is excruciating. In a single international break, an Argentine player from a Spanish club might log 18,000 air miles over the course of a week.
All of it added up in Messi’s mind. The pressure, the expectation, the disappointment. And after more than a decade and 113 national team appearances, it broke him.
“I am the one who failed,” he said. “So that’s it.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com
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The world’s best player, Lionel Messi, quits the Argentine national team on heels of missed penalty in Copa America loss to Chile.
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Suspect Slain by Police in Boston Plotted to Kill Officers: Officials
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A man who was under constant surveillance before being fatally shot by authorities in Boston on Tuesday had initially planned to behead a person outside Massachusetts, according to an FBI affidavit filed on Wednesday, but changed his mind to “go after” the “boys in blue” instead.
Authorities say 26-year-old Usaamah Rahim was killed early Tuesday after being approached by law-enforcement officers in the Roslindale neighborhood and taking out a large knife he bought via Amazon.com before moving toward them. Rahim is said in the document to have discussed his plans with at least two people, including David Wright, also 26, who appeared in court on Wednesday. He was charged with conspiring to conceal evidence of Rahim’s plans.
Officials said Rahim was being kept under 24-hour surveillance after they received “terrorist-related information” about him, the Associated Press reports. Texas Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a Wednesday hearing that Rahim was being investigated for “communicating with and spreading ISIS propaganda online,” referencing the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria. McCaul called the case “a reminder of the dangers posed by individuals radicalized through social media.”
Ibrahim Rahim, a brother of the deceased, claimed on his Facebook page that his brother was shot in the back while on the phone. In a rare move, officers showed a video to religious and civil rights leaders in a bid to prove that Rahim had, in fact, moved toward officers with a military-style knife. Authorities shot Rahim three times.
“What the video does reveal to us very clearly is that the individual was not on the cell phone, the individual was not shot in the back and that the information reported by others that that was the case was inaccurate,” Darnell Williams, president of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, said at a news conference, CNN reports. He added that the video “150%” corroborates the police account.
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The man apparently had a large knife bought via Amazon.com.
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How Much Do You Subtract For Clothing When You Weigh Yourself
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As swim suit season gets underway, more of us are probably stepping on the scale and squinting at the number that flashes back at us. Then, we do some quick mental math and adjust for the fact that we’re wearing jeans, maybe a robe, and oh, yes, that heavy sweater. So, minus 5lbs?
It turns out that scientists have actually done a real study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, to figure out how many pounds we should be subtracting for what we wear. Led by a team at University of North Dakota (because it gets really cold there, and they’re probably pretty bundled up when they step on a scale), not only did they set up an experiment to weigh people, both clothed and nearly nude, at various times of the year, they also wanted to answer the critical question of whether weighing yourself in the winter gives you more leeway to do this kind of math than in the summer, when we tend to wear less.
It turns out that, as with so many things, men and women are different when it comes to how much our clothes weigh. Men, it seems, prefer to swathe themselves in heavier garments while women tend to adorn themselves more lightly. Men can lop off nearly 2.5 lbs to account for their clothing while women can only subtract around 2. And this holds true, unfortunately, no matter what the weather outside.
So no more making allowances for that thick wool sweater. Now you know exactly how much your clothes weigh.
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Call it the clothing effect, or the clothing discount – we all do it. We make allowances for the fact our clothes are probably pretty heavy
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MEET LARRY KING JR.
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LARRY King is going public with the news that he has a son — Larry King Jr., no less — he didn’t acknowledge for 33 years.
The son — from a brief, previous marriage to Annette Kaye — appeared for the first time with King on “Larry King Live” this week.
“I knew there was a Larry King Jr. out there, I’d heard that, but I didn’t know he was mine. The marriage was very short and she told me if it’s a boy, I’m gonna name him Larry King Jr.,” King, 75, told The Post yesterday. “Then I never heard again.”
Larry Jr. was born in November 1961.
Why had he never sought out the son? “My life was in a swirl then. I had other children,” he explained, alluding to son Andy and daughter Chaia. “I know there was a doubt in my mind that I had a son.”
King, who’s publicizing his new memoir, “Larry King: My Remarkable Journey,” says he met Larry Jr. 15 years ago, after Annette, who was dying of lung cancer, called and assured him that the young man was indeed his son.
“I didn’t think about it,” he said. “I never heard from him, never heard from his mother. Never heard.
“I sort of put it away until that day [Annette] called,” he said.
Did King feel guilty over not telling anyone about Larry Jr.’s existence all those years?
“In retrospect, I should’ve said to people, ‘You know, there’s a chance there’s a guy out there with my name who’s my son,’ ” he said yesterday.
“I couldn’t call it guilt . . . I don’t know what it is. Maybe a wonderment — but not guilt.”
On the show, he says he told some family and friends about finding Larry Jr. but never publicly acknowledged him before the book was published.
Larry Jr. is married, with three children of his own. He works now as the head of King’s heart disease foundation in California.
King, who’s been married eight times to seven women, also got caught yesterday in a factual discrepancy in his book about winning $8,000 on a horse when he was down on his luck.
He claimed the horse was named Lady Forli and that he saved himself from financial disaster with a timely winning bet at Calder racetrack in 1971.
Turns out Lady Forli wasn’t foaled until 1972.
Blame it on memory, King says.
“I think 1971-72 was right, but the essence of the story, of course, is totally correct,” he said.
“But you can miss a year.”
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LARRY King is going public with the news that he has a son — Larry King Jr., no less — he didn’t acknowledge for 33 years. The son — from a brief, previous marriage to Annet…
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Bruce Jenner -- Lesson Not Learned ... Talking on Cell Phone While Driving
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20160702182803
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Bruce Jenner isn't helping his cause any ... as authorities mull over whether to prosecute him for vehicular manslaughter, he was tooling around L.A. Friday driving around and talking on his phone.
Bruce finished a round of golf, jumped in his Porsche and took off. The later model Porsche's all have built-in bluetooth capabilities, but Bruce had phone to ear ... which is illegal.
Law enforcement has been telling us it's unlikely Jenner will be charged with vehicular manslaughter in the fatal car crash that occurred 3 weeks ago. One of the reasons he might skate -- he wasn't texting when he plowed into the Lexus.
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Bruce Jenner isn't helping his cause any ... as authorities mull over whether to prosecute him for vehicular manslaughter, he was tooling around L.A.…
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Black Chefs' Struggle for the Top
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20160702203241
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"I'd have to have somebody like you," Mr. Knowling recalled the restaurateur's saying. "I couldn't have a black guy or a Latin guy back there, because it would make my customers uncomfortable." When Mr. Knowling said he was black, the restaurateur said, "You're kidding." No, Mr. Knowling said. The conversation grew awkward, and the restaurateur apologized.
Even in questioning a chef's qualifications, employers can reveal their prejudices.
Keith Williams, 47, said that he jumped at an offer last year to be executive chef at the chic restaurant BG at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan, but that job discussions in the past had been less pleasant.
"The first thing they say is, "The only thing you know about is fried chicken and collard greens,' " Mr. Williams said. "And anybody you know that's in this business that's a black chef -- in most cases that's what he's cooking. Even if he came out of a French kitchen, he ends up cooking Southern food."
Mr. Knowling pointed to his own experience: "I'm classically French trained. I wanted to be the French chef, and that's what I studied for years and years, and now I run a barbecue restaurant -- an upscale barbecue restaurant and soul food restaurant."
Black chefs aren't the only workers to deal with insensitivity in restaurant kitchens, where abuse can be freely ladled out when the pressure gets high. Countless numbers of Hispanic workers have advanced through the ranks in top kitchens in the face of slurs and prejudice. And women have braved flagrant sexism that was once endemic in the male-dominated kitchen. But black chefs say the abuse raises especially sensitive questions of respect.
Lloyd Roberts, 31, who is Mr. Williams's executive sous-chef at BG and is Jamaican, said his fellow black graduates of the New York Restaurant School are not comfortable facing that sort of abuse when they are the only blacks. "It's hard for African-Americans who were born here," he said.
"It's as if the chef is picking on them," he added, "when in reality he's not."
That's not much of an issue for restaurants if they've had few black employees.
"We have had very few African-Americans apply for cooking positions over all in the 18 years I've been at Zuni Cafe, out of what I'd guess is thousands of applicants," said Judy Rodgers, the executive chef of the restaurant, in San Francisco.
The chef Tom Colicchio said there were few blacks in his kitchens, including those at Gramercy Tavern and Craft. "Those roles are not being filled," he said, "and we're not getting the applications."
And since many applicants hear of opportunities through word of mouth, the scarcity can be self-perpetuating.
"For you to move up in this world, it's not just talent anymore; it's who you know," said Walter King, 36, a 1990 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who left the professional kitchen in frustration several years ago to work in New York real estate. "And there's not enough of us in high positions to play the 'who you know' game."
One person in a high position who has helped blacks to succeed is Jean-Georges Vongerichten, whose restaurants have been incubators for the careers of several talented black chefs. Sylva Senate and Greg Gourdet are chefs de cuisine at two of Mr. Vongerichten's places, Mercer Kitchen and 66, respectively. Mr. Williams and Mr. Roberts of BG both rose at Vong, as did Charlene Shade, who has just been hired as executive chef at the Morgan Dining Room and the Morgan Cafe, which are to open soon at the Morgan Library. And moving up through the ranks of Jean Georges is Preston Clark, a son of Patrick Clark, who gained famed at Tavern on the Green. Patrick Clark, who died in 1998 at 42, was one of the first bona fide celebrity chefs and a role model for many, black and white.
Even with the difficulty of advancement, some successful black chefs say that, for younger blacks, the rewards are now clearly worth the struggle. As Gerry Garvin, who started as a dishwasher in his hometown, Atlanta, and is now host of the cooking show "Turn Up the Heat With G. Garvin" on the TV One network, put it: "I heard everything you hear when you're a young black child coming into a culinary world where it was 90 percent European and a few white guys from Jersey. You can ride that culinary horror story of racism, and it doesn't go much further. Or you can embrace it, realize it happened and try to make it different for guys who are coming into the business, particularly young black males, and teach them how to get past the things I had to deal with."
Richard Grausman, president and founder of the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, which has headquarters in New York and provides scholarships and guidance for high school students interested in culinary careers, said the new acclaim for chefs in general is helping to breach the barriers.
At first, Mr. Grausman said, "when I saw somebody had talent, they might say, Yes, but my mother doesn't want me to, or my family doesn't want me to."
"That prevailed up until the last few years," he continued, "when the explosion of food and chefs' success has come through the Food Network and other TV shows. So that now I'm not hearing that. I haven't had resistance from family to let their kids pursue a career. The floodgates haven't opened, but that resistance doesn't seem to be there any longer, which is a big, big plus."
As at the Culinary Institute of America, the black enrollment at the French Culinary Institute has risen by about half since 2002. Of the approximately 480 students, 35 to 40 are black, said officials at the school, who attributed much of the increase to scholarships from Mr. Grausman's program.
One of those scholarships was won by Janise Addison, 19, of Corona, Queens, who graduated from the institute last year. She worked first at Town in New York; then, through word of mouth, she found her current job as a pastry chef at the Modern.
"You make it based on what you can do or can't do," she said recently at the restaurant before beginning her shift.
After graduating from Stanford, Beth Setrakian, 49, got her first job as a pastry chef in 1979 for Mark Miller at the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley, Calif., where, she said, "I was definitely the only African-American in the kitchen." She opened her own business, Beth's Fine Desserts, in San Francisco in 1988; she said it now has annual sales of around $8 million.
"There are so many black cooks," she said, adding: "We're on the verge of change. And thank goodness, because the heritage that we bring is a great addition to American cuisine as a whole."
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Black chefs are beginning to make their mark in restaurant business; some say racism has kept them back, while others say there is cultural stigma to working in kitchen; Milton Guzman is firmly entrenched in kitchen of Alinea in Chicago, bringing prestigious degree and sterling recommendation from Per Se in New York; other black chefs noted; photos (M)
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FAA breaks down winners, losers in growing U.S. drone market
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20160703032513
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As of September 1, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had issued 1,407 so-called Section 333 exemptions to U.S. companies, clearing them to operate drones for commercial purposes. Presently the aviation authority issues about 50 Section 333 exemptions per week in an attempt to stay ahead of the thousands of applications it’s received since last year.
In a report issued this week, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) breaks down data surrounding the first 1,000 drone permits by state, offering a far more granular view of the U.S. commercial drone industry than we’ve seen to date.
Their report found that commercial operators now fly in 49 states, using vehicles manufactured in 22 states. An overwhelming 85% of companies holding Section 333 exemptions are small businesses. Applications span a variety of industries, but are largely tied to aerial data gathering. However the states with the most companies operating commercial drones aren’t just the biggest states, but territories with major aerospace and aviation industry hubs, like California, Texas, and Florida.
“It’s encouraging to see the UAS industry benefiting from every corner of the country, with manufacturers located in almost half of the states,” Brian Wynne, AUVSI’s president and CEO, says. “These figures will likely become even more apparent when the FAA finalizes its small UAS rules, which will allow companies to fly without having to go through the exemption process.”
The UAS rules are a set of new FAA commercial drone regulations expected sometime in the first half of next year, which will replace the current case-by-case approval process now under Section 333. While the current Section 333 process may be onerous for the industry, it offers a unique opportunity for the FAA and groups like AUVSI to gather data on how and where commercial drones are being deployed, as well as what kinds of companies are using them.
The big winner in AUVSI’s breakdown of the data is unsurprisingly California, home to 114 approved commercial drone operators. The first six Section 333 exemptions granted last year went to companies in the film and television industry, an industry that accounts for roughly 9% of the first 1,000 exemptions granted nationwide. The Bay Area is home to several of the U.S. drone industry’s most visible players, including Skycatch, DroneDeploy, and 3D Robotics. The state’s vast agriculture industry has also provided a fertile testing ground for many new drone technologies as everyone from almond growers to vineyard owners looks to new means of minimizing water usage while maximizing quality and yield. Agricultural applications account for 164 of the first 1,000 commercial drone permits, and AUVSI expects data-driven farming to be a leading growth driver for the drone industry.
Florida and Texas follow California in number of commercial drone operators, with 97 and 82 Section 333 permits respectively. Like California, Texas is also a big state with lots of real estate to survey, lots of agricultural data to mine and lots of golf courses to advertise. The real estate industry accounts for roughly 35% of the first 1,000 commercial drone permits, followed by “general aerial surveying,” a kind of catch-all category for non-specific aerial inspection of land or property, at 30%.
But more telling than the data surrounding these top three drone states is the relatively wide, relatively even distribution of Section 333 permits across the other 47. Every state in the U.S., with the exception of Delaware, now boasts at least three commercial drone operators, and most are home to a dozen or more. While a dozen operators here and there doesn’t necessarily spell boom times for the commercial drone industry, it’s worth noting that the FAA has more than 1,000 applications it hasn’t even reviewed yet, with more piling up every day.
The most interesting data in AUVSI’s analysis has nothing to do with the state-by-state breakdown and everything to do with the kind of companies applying for commercial drone permits nationwide. “At least 84% and as many as 94.5% of all approved companies are small businesses,” the report says. This is partially a reflection that the majority of businesses in the U.S. are small businesses, Wynne says. But there’s more to it than that.
“Many of the low-risk operational profiles permitted by the exemptions, such as aerial photography, apply well to small businesses, such as real estate and photography,” Wynne says. “In many cases, large companies are testing UAS in countries with more established risk-based, technology-neutral regulations, such as Canada and Australia. Larger businesses are mainly focused on more complex operations than are currently allowed by the exemption process.”
This news is both good for small business operators and a sign of what’s to come for the larger commercial drone industry. AUVSI has previously predicted that drones will generate $82 billion in economic impacts (and 100,000 jobs) in the decade following the implementation of comprehensive commercial drone rules. However, as long as U.S. commercial drone regulations remain in limbo, Wynne says, larger companies like Google GOOGL and Amazon AMZN will continue to develop their drone technology elsewhere.
“In order to continue reaping the economic benefits that [unmanned aerial systems] offer, we need to do all we can to support the growth and development of this industry by providing clear rules for those who want to use UAS,” Wynne says. “But the longer we take, the more our nation risks losing its innovation edge along with the billions of dollars of economic impact.”
Sign up for Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter about the business of technology.
For more about drones, check out the following Fortune video:
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A new state-by-state analysis of the first 1,000 commercial drone permits shows a small, but growing nationwide industry.
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http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/07/movies/mezzos-in-the-middle-of-a-lyric-explosion.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160703084017id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1997/11/07/movies/mezzos-in-the-middle-of-a-lyric-explosion.html?
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Mezzos in the Middle Of a Lyric Explosion
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20160703084017
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Let's face it. One of these days, some enterprising impresario is going to try to pack a stadium for an event called ''The Three Mezzos.'' But when he sets out to do so, he will have the devil's time whittling the candidates down to a short list.
The classical music world is in the throes of mezzomania. It is now harvesting an extraordinary bumper crop of first-class singers billed as lyric mezzo-sopranos, a breed prized for vocal warmth and suppleness, musical taste and sensitivity, rather than for the raw decibels that characterize dramatic mezzos.
This cornucopia is in part the gift of the capricious vocal gods. But it is also the result of a chain reaction that began in the 1950's with renewed interest in the bel canto repertory, works by Rossini and Bellini, for instance, that showcase the lyric mezzo's special attributes. When the bel canto revival catapulted mezzos like Marilyn Horne and Frederica von Stade to stardom, scores of younger singers were inspired to follow their example. And most of the newer ones seem to be converging on New York City this fall.
This weekend alone, the city is a mezzophile's Elysium. Tomorrow afternoon, you can catch Lorraine Hunt's masterly account of the title role in Handel's ''Xerxes'' at the New York City Opera. After the sun sets, a short walk to Carnegie Hall will bring you face to face with the estimable Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter, who will deliver songs by Stenhammar and Copland with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Carnegie's custodians will barely have time to dust off the auditorium before Cecilia Bartoli, in the midst of her run in the Metropolitan Opera's first-ever ''Cenerentola,'' mounted especially for her, takes the stage on Sunday afternoon to sing Handel, Haydn and Gluck arias with the Met Orchestra.
By Thanksgiving, another swarm will have arrived. The much-touted Bulgarian mezzo Vesselina Kasarova will make her New York debut in the title role of Rossini's ''Tancredi'' with the Opera Orchestra of New York at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 23. (She will later take over Rosina in ''Il Barbiere di Siviglia'' at the Met from another recent debutante, the sprightly Italian Sonia Ganassi.) Starting on Nov. 26, Ms. von Otter returns to the Met as Sesto in Mozart's ''Clemenza di Tito,'' alongside the young Austrian mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager, whose Met debut in the smaller role of Annio is heralded by an ever-growing stack of CD's.
This international galaxy skips town by the first of the year, but mezzo withdrawal may be staved off by a healthy brace of gifted Americans. Jennifer Larmore dons Cenerentola's rags at the Met on Jan. 15, and, a fortnight later, morphs into Giulietta in the Met's ''Contes d'Hoffmann.'' In the latter, she will share a gondola with Susanne Mentzer as Nicklausse, alternating with the splendid, underappreciated Jane Bunnell, who will also be heard as Suzuki in April and May performances of ''Madama Butterfly'' at the Met. Ms. Mentzer recently starred in the Met's ''Ariadne auf Naxos.''
Robynne Redmon, a solid City Opera Carmen in recent years, gets a single Met outing as Marina in ''Boris Godunov'' on Jan. 10. And those scouting for ascending stars will surely notice young Kristine Jepson as the cheeky page Stephano in the Met's ''Romeo et Juliette.''
Many of these women are among the industry's most bankable stars. What opera buff has not stumbled over a life-size cutout of the photogenic Ms. Bartoli while rifling the classical bins at HMV or Virgin? She and Ms. von Otter, Ms. Larmore and Ms. Kirchschlager all hold exclusive recording contracts with major labels and, by classical standards, their CD's sell like hot cakes.
Lyric mezzos have not always basked in such glory, though the voice type is among the most common. Most of the earliest operatic roles for women, like the heroine of Monteverdi's ''Incoronazione di Poppea'' (1642), hovered largely in the C to G range currently considered lyric mezzo territory. But the formal differentiation between soprano and mezzo voices emerged only around the mid-18th century, when composers began exploring higher female vocal registers.
Still, the term mezzo-soprano was little used. All of the Mozart roles now sung by lyric mezzos -- Dorabella in ''Cosi Fan Tutte'' and Cherubino in ''Le Nozze di Figaro,'' as well as Sesto in ''Tito'' and Idamante in ''Idomeneo,'' the last two originally written for castrati -- were nominally designated for sopranos by the composer.
But many of the reigning soprano divas of the early 19th century, including Giulia Grisi, Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran, might be more accurately termed lyric mezzos with upper vocal extensions, judging from their repertory lists and contemporary accounts of their singing. It was for Malibran that Bellini lowered the prima donna roles in alternate versions of his operas ''I Puritani'' and ''La Sonnambula.''
The first three decades of the 19th century were mezzo glory days, as the castrati went the way of the dodo, and their flashy lover and hero roles, inherited by the dusky, androgynous voices of mezzos, became the so-called ''pants roles.'' By mid-century, the emerging, more dramatic Verdian tenors had ended the mezzos' hegemony. They were still assigned pants roles, but the characters tended to be more innocuous and less important to the plot, like Siebel in ''Faust'' or Urbain in Meyerbeer's ''Huguenots.''
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Let's face it. One of these days, some enterprising impresario is going to try to pack a stadium for an event called ''The Three Mezzos.'' But when he sets out to do so, he will have the devil's time whittling the candidates down to a short list. The classical music world is in the throes of mezzomania. It is now harvesting an extraordinary bumper crop of first-class singers billed as lyric mezzo-sopranos, a breed prized for vocal warmth and suppleness, musical taste and sensitivity, rather than for the raw decibels that characterize dramatic mezzos.
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http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Zoo-settles-with-brothers-in-tiger-attack-3296975.php
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Zoo settles with brothers in tiger attack
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20160703191122
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* FILE ** This undated file photo provided by the San Francisco Zoo shows Tatiana, a female Siberian tiger. Tatiana, the tiger that mauled a zookeeper last year escaped from its pen at the San Francisco Zoo on Tuesday Dec. 25, 2007, killing one man and injuring two others before police shot it dead, authorities said. (AP Photo/San Francisco Zoo, File)
* FILE ** This undated file photo provided by the San Francisco Zoo shows Tatiana, a female Siberian tiger. Tatiana, the tiger that mauled a zookeeper last year escaped from its pen at the San Francisco Zoo on
Paul Dhaliwal (right) one of the two brothers injured in the tiger attack, leaves the funeral service for 17-year-old Carlos Sousa, Jr. in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008. Sousa was killed in the Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo
Paul Dhaliwal (right) one of the two brothers injured in the tiger attack, leaves the funeral service for 17-year-old Carlos Sousa, Jr. in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008. Sousa was killed in the
**FILE** Kulbir Dhaliwal attends the burial of his friend Carlos Sousa Jr. in San Jose, Calif., in this Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008, file photo. Sousa Jr. was killed by a Siberian tiger that escaped its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo on Dec. 25, 2007. Dhaliwal told police that he, his brother Paul, and Sousa Jr. had smoked pot and had "a couple shots of vodka" before leaving San Jose for the zoo according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
**FILE** Kulbir Dhaliwal attends the burial of his friend Carlos Sousa Jr. in San Jose, Calif., in this Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008, file photo. Sousa Jr. was killed by a Siberian tiger that escaped its enclosure at
Photo provided by the family of Carlos Sousa, Jr. , the 17 year old boy who was fatally mauled by a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas day.
Photo provided by the family of Carlos Sousa, Jr. , the 17 year old boy who was fatally mauled by a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas day.
Zoo settles with brothers in tiger attack
The San Francisco Zoo agreed Thursday to pay $900,000 to two brothers who survived the fatal attack by an escaped tiger on Christmas Day 2007, sources familiar with the case told The Chronicle.
The agreement with Kulbir, 25, and Amritpal "Paul" Dhaliwal, 20, resolves claims the brothers brought in U.S. District Court against the city, zoo and Sam Singer, a crisis public relations consultant the zoo hired after the attack, one source said.
Thursday's settlement comes less than two weeks after attorneys for the brothers filed court documents alleging that police officials had ordered officers to issue arrest warrants for the Dhaliwals, accusing them of manslaughter in the death of their friend, 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. of San Jose, who was killed by the tiger.
Police command staff ordered the arrest warrants to deflect attention from the city's negligence and to intimidate the brothers, "even though they were informed that the investigation could not substantiate involuntary manslaughter charges, or any charges being brought against (the Dhaliwals)," attorneys Mark Geragos and Shelley Kaufman wrote in seeking to update the lawsuit to pursue more damages against the city.
At the time, zoo and city representatives suggested the three must have taunted the tiger before it jumped out of its enclosure. The brothers were never arrested nor charged with wrongdoing in connection with the tiger's escape.
City officials referred questions on the case to the zoo, where officials did not return calls seeking comment.
The Zoological Society earlier this year settled a lawsuit with the Sousa family for an undisclosed amount.
The Dhaliwal brothers' lawsuit alleged the zoo was negligent on multiple fronts, including keeping the 243-pound Siberian tiger named Tatiana in an enclosure that had walls 4 feet lower that what is recommended by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. They also say the zoo ignored workers' warnings about the wall height.
They also contended that Kulbir Dhaliwal wasn't attacked until after an employee refused to allow him into the safety of a zoo cafe. That incident occurred about 20 minutes after the tiger leapt from its grotto and attacked Paul Dhaliwal before turning on Sousa, the lawsuit said.
Kulbir Dhaliwal also argued his federal civil rights were violated because he was deprived the use of his BMW M3, the car the three took to the zoo. Police impounded the car during their investigation but didn't seek a court order to search it until they had had the car for about two weeks, according to the lawsuit.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera's office has said the city is not liable and that its lease with the San Francisco Zoological Society, the nonprofit that operates the zoo, protects it in the lawsuit. The lawsuit also accused Singer of libel and slander for allegedly engaging in a smear campaign to suggest the young men were disreputable and had taunted the tiger. Singer also denied wrongdoing.
At the time of the attack, both brothers were facing charges of public intoxication and resisting arrest after a Sept. 7, 2007, scuffle with San Jose police. They were later convicted.
Paul Dhaliwal also has a series of other criminal convictions, including one for leading police on a 140-mph chase through San Jose in April 2007.
Geragos said the settlement included "an implicit recognition that what Sam Singer did was despicable," saying such recognition is "when somebody writes you a check."
Singer's voice mail message indicated he was out of the country. He could not be reached for comment.
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The agreement with Kulbir, 25, and Amritpal "Paul" Dhaliwal, 20, resolves claims the brothers brought in U.S. District Court against the city, zoo and Sam Singer, a crisis public relations consultant the zoo hired after the attack, one source said. Thursday's settlement comes less than two weeks after attorneys for the brothers filed court documents alleging that police officials had ordered officers to issue arrest warrants for the Dhaliwals, accusing them of manslaughter in the death of their friend, 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. of San Jose, who was killed by the tiger. Police command staff ordered the arrest warrants to deflect attention from the city's negligence and to intimidate the brothers, "even though they were informed that the investigation could not substantiate involuntary manslaughter charges, or any charges being brought against (the Dhaliwals)," attorneys Mark Geragos and Shelley Kaufman wrote in seeking to update the lawsuit to pursue more damages against the city. The Dhaliwal brothers' lawsuit alleged the zoo was negligent on multiple fronts, including keeping the 243-pound Siberian tiger named Tatiana in an enclosure that had walls 4 feet lower that what is recommended by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
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http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/disengaged-transformers-star-megan-fox-brian-austin-green-split-article-1.389892
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160704054635id_/http://www.nydailynews.com:80/entertainment/gossip/disengaged-transformers-star-megan-fox-brian-austin-green-split-article-1.389892
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Disengaged! Megan Fox is single again
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20160704054635
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Look out boys, actress Megan Fox could be on the market for a new man.
The "Transformers" hottie has split with her fiancé Brian Austin Green, according to Us Weekly.
"The relationship had run its course," a source close to the couple told the mag. "It's completely amicable, and they are remaining friends."
According to the insider, Fox and Green "are both focusing on their careers."
The pair met in 2004 and became engaged in November 2006, though Fox raised eyebrows earlier this year when she attended the Golden Globes without her fiancé.
Green, 35, laughed off rumors of a split with Fox, 22, last year, saying, "We usually go have dinner and have a glass of wine and laugh about it."
Fox played down any wedding plans recently, telling the magazine at a GQ bash, "It's not going to be a big wedding. I'm not one of those girls. If it happens, it will be very low-key and quick and unplanned."
She also batted back suggestions that she and the former "Beverly Hills 90210" actor might start a family together anytime soon, saying, "I feel like I need to set my career and do a movie other than 'Transformers.' Then I'll explore family."
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Look out boys, actress Megan Fox could be on the market for a new man. The "Transformers" hottie has reportedly split with her fiancé Brian Austin Green.
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Nancy Grace Is Leaving HLN After 12 years
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20160704071441
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This story originally appeared on Entertainment Weekly.
Nancy Grace, one of cable’s most prominent on-air commentators, is leaving HLN after 12 years with the cable network, EW can confirm.
After hosting her eponymous current events show for more than a decade on the basic cable channel, the 56-year old will leave the program when her contract expires in October. Grace reportedly broke the news to her 18-strong staff at HLN’s CNN Center headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, early Thursday morning. A new, original program is set to replace Nancy Grace in its currently-held 8 p.m. timeslot.
Grace, a former law student, went on to become a prosecutor in Atlanta following the murder of her fiancé when she was just 19 years old. She began a hosting gig on Court TV’s Closing Arguments in 1996 before landing at HLN in 2005.
The final episode of Nancy Grace is set to air Oct. 13 on HLN.
The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news of Grace’s departure.
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Her final episode will air Oct. 13
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How Eagle Scouts Have Left Their Mark on America
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Arthur Eldred might have been a Wolf Scout if leaders of the Boy Scouts of America hadn’t changed their minds about the youth program’s top merit badge. They turned the wolf into an eagle, which seemed more American, according to Scouting magazine, and on this day, Sept. 2, in 1912, 17-year-old Eldred became the nation’s first Eagle Scout.
The Long Island teen demonstrated a wide range of talents, specializing in “handicraft, poultry farming, painting, horsemanship, dairying, bicycling, cooking, chemistry, electricity, gardening, pathfinding, and swimming,” according to the 1912 announcement in the New York Times.
“His left coat sleeve is so covered with medals that there is scarcely room for another one,” the Times noted. “He is, the judges decided, a 100 percent scout.”
The Boy Scouts of America is itself a 100 percent American institution, incorporated in 1916 via Congressional charter, as are a handful of other “patriotic and national organizations,” including the American Legion, Future Farmers of America, Little League Baseball and the Girl Scouts.
And although, 50 years after its founding, TIME noted that “contemporary cynics” regarded scouts as “a rustic army of bug-eyed idealists,” some of those idealists have gone on to make history — especially from among the elite group, who, like Eldred, earned the 21 merit badges required to achieve scouting’s top honor.
Other notable Eagle Scouts have included:
Read a 1937 cover story about the Boy Scouts, here in the TIME archives: Scouts: National Jamboree
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Sept. 2, 1912: Arthur Eldred becomes the first-ever Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America
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Two U.S. Funds Sue Dozens of Banks for Singapore Rate Rigging
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Two U.S.-based investment funds have filed a lawsuit in New York against dozens of banks accusing them of conspiring to rig derivative prices incorporating Singapore interest rate benchmarks, a court filing showed.
The suit was filed by Greenwich, Connecticut-based FrontPoint Asian Event Driven Fund and New York-based Sonterra Capital Master Fund and traces back to the 2013 scandal in Singapore when the central bank found more than 100 traders in the city-state tried to rig key borrowing and currency rates.
Among the banks being sued are Citigroup C , Bank of America BAC , JPMorgan Chase JPM , RBS, UBS UBS , ING ING , BNP Paribas BNP , Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation, Barclays, Credit Agricole, Credit Suisse CS , Standard Chartered, DBS, Mitsubishi Ufj, HSBC HSBC , Macquarie and Commerzbank.
For more on funds and legal action, watch:
A Citigroup spokesman said “it is without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.” Credit Suisse declined to comment. The other banks did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.
In 2013, Singapore’s central bank censured a record 20 banks, saying 133 traders had tried to manipulate the rates, including the benchmark bank-to-bank SIBOR rate, the Swap Offered Rate and derivatives.
It did not fine the banks involved, but instead directed 19 of them to set aside additional reserves for a year and to adopt measures to address deficiencies.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has since returned all of the around $9 billion it took from the banks as penalties, saying they have taken steps to prevent a recurrence of attempts to rig rates.
Singapore Now Owns $1 Billion in Alibaba Stock
Authorities in the United States and Europe have also been investigating rate manipulations, most notably Libor, slapping fines of billions of dollars on banks, including Barclays, RBS and UBS.
FrontPoint said it engaged in transactions from within the U.S. for SIBOR-based derivatives at “artificial prices proximately caused by Defendants’ unlawful manipulation and restraint of trade.”
Sonterra said it engaged in U.S.-based transactions for SIBOR-based derivatives, including Singapore Dollar foreign exchange forwards.
“As a consequence of Defendants’ manipulative conduct, Sonterra was damaged when it was overcharged and/or underpaid in transactions for Singapore Dollar foreign exchange forwards,” the filing said.
The two investment companies seek compensation for “treble the damages” incurred.
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The Monetary Authority of Singapore has a lot to sort out.
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Why Do You Read 1,000 Things About Change and Never Change?
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I post a lot of stuff about getting better at things. A common response to my posts is “I know that.”
Knowing is great for watching Jeopardy. It’s not nearly as good for life.
So why is learning about improvement so easy and actually improving so damn hard?
Most any change that requires a lot of consistent mental effort is going to fail because you spend most of the day on autopilot.
Via Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business:
One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.
Any change has to work when you’re on autopilot. The importance of self-control is one of the biggest myths about improvement.
Almost all the techniques for change that have been shown to work don’t rely on thought or willpower.
If there are no cookies in the house, guess who’s not eating cookies at 3AM? Manipulate your environment so you don’t have to exert self-control.
There’s a great story on NPR that shows just how important context is in maintaining (and ending) bad habits:
According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low.
“I believe the number of people who actually relapsed to heroin use in the first year was about 5 percent,” Jaffe said recently from his suburban Maryland home. In other words, 95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.
You’re often lazy, busy or distracted so most things that are out of sight really are out of mind.
Make the things you want to do take 20 seconds less time to start and the things you want to avoid take 20 seconds longer to get going. Amazon makes a gazillion dollars every year because of that “One Click” button. Before the cash register at a store there’s the “impulse buy” section. Take the same idea, use it to your benefit.
Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work:
Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt, and raise it for habits you want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.
Peer Pressure is a Glorious Thing
Peer pressure helps kids more than it hurts them. And face it, you’re still a big kid, you just have to pretend to be an adult most of the time — and it’s exhausting.
Surround yourself with people you want to be and it’s far less taxing to do what you should be doing.
Via Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business:
In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful, the same way that Dungy’s players watched him struggle.
Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier… When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real.
That’s a fancy way of setting a standard response to a situation so you don’t have to think. When someone asks you to vote for that “other” political party, to inject heroin or consider murder you probably don’t actually consider it. You have a knee jerk script in your head that says “I don’t do that.”
If everything you did required a thoughtful decision, you’d never get out of bed in the morning. Too much of this and you’re a computer. But used deliberately it can be quite powerful.
Via Nine Things Successful People Do Differently:
It’s called if-then planning, and it is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal. Well over a hundred studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific actions to reach your goal (e.g., “If it is 4 p.m., then I will return any phone calls I should return today”) can double or triple your chances for success.
What do they all have in common?
All of these techniques remove mental effort and can easily be incorporated into the routine you already have. That’s their strength.
But they all require a little bit of planning ahead of time. With these systems most people don’t really fail — most people never really start. How do you plan?
Chip and Dan Heath distill effective behavior change down to three simple steps in their well-researched and enjoyable book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.
Pick one of the techniques. Plan for 20 minutes. You might struggle to implement for a couple days, but after that, it’s easier to stay the course than it is to deviate. That’s the secret.
Don’t try to reinvent yourself. You’ll fail. Fit the new into the old. Make the new easier than the old.
You change all the time. The TV shows you watch change, the products you buy change, and the projects at work change. Change is going to happen, no matter what.
The question is, will you be in control of the change or will the change control you?
Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
What 10 things should you do every day to improve your life?
What do people regret the most before they die?
What five things can make sure you never stop growing and learning?
This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.
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Bond actor Christoph Waltz blasts Brexit as ‘breathtakingly stupid’
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Bond actor Christoph Waltz has slammed Britain’s decision to leave the European Union as “breathtakingly stupid”.
The Austrian-German star, who played Blofeld in the James Bond movie Spectre, said he believed the British people had been misled before the referendum.
“I find it insanity, and breathtakingly stupid and it’s really, instead of trying to enlighten and educate people about the advantages, they invest disadvantages that don’t even exist and have no shame in just lying,” he told the Press Association.
“Because lying always implies an intention to mislead and that’s what they did.
“Now the people who have been misled have to pay the bill.”
Waltz made the comments while in London to promote his new film The Legend of Tarzan.
Britain is in turmoil this morning, after leading Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage announced on Monday he would be stepping down as leader of the UK Independence Party.
Mr Farage is the latest in a series of people to resign in the fallout from the referendum, which has also seen Prime Minister David Cameron step down, saying he would leave Britain's exit negotiations to his successor.
READ MORE: Pro-Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage resigns as leader of UK Independence Party
In a pointed reference to leadership contender Theresa May, who wanted Britain to stay in the EU, Mr Farage said Britain's next leader should be a "Brexit prime minister".
Ms May, who had been viewed as a frontrunner in the contest, was dealt a double blow on Monday when a poll showed her slightly behind rival Andrea Leadsom in the race, according to a ConservativeHome survey of party members.
Mr Farage has been widely criticised for the move, which follows former mayor of London Boris Johnson dramatically pulling out of a bid to run himself last week.
Manfred Weber, the German head of the centre-right European People's Party in the European Parliament, called Mr Farage a "coward" for quitting.
"Farage is the latest coward to abandon the chaos he is responsible for," he tweeted. "This shows that he has no credibility at all."
Along with the political turmoil, Brexit has been predicted to hit Britain's economy, and the country last week had its credit rating downgraded.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016
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Bond actor Christoph Waltz has slammed Britain’s decision to leave the European Union as “breathtakingly stupid”.
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SEX CHARGES AGAINST PRIEST EMBROIL LOUISIANA PARENTS
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HENRY, La., June 17— The admission by a Roman Catholic priest that he sexually abused 37 children entrusted to his care has aroused a deep sense of betrayal and shame in this small rural community in southwestern Louisiana.
Altar boys and members of the parish Boy Scout troop were among those molested by the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, 40 years old, according to felony charges of sexual abuse lodged against him by the local authorities.
Father Gauthe, who has been suspended by his Bishop and is currently confined to a private psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to 34 counts of molestation. If convicted, he could face life imprisonment at hard labor.
Assuming that the case reaches the trial stage - no date has yet been set -it may be the first time that a priest has faced such charges in an American court of law, according to The National Catholic Reporter, which has carried a number of articles on the case.
Meanwhile, aggrieved parents are suing the local diocese, seeking compensation and treatment for their abused children. So far the diocese and its insurance companies have paid $4.2 million to the families of nine children. But more than a dozen additional civil suits have been filed as more families overcome their hesitance to seek redress from a church that has been a bedrock of their lives.
He Was a Boy Scout Chaplain
Lawyers for the parents now say that, over several years, as many as 70 children were assaulted by Father Gauthe in hundreds of individual acts of sodomy, rape and the photographing of sexual acts.
Anguish and seething anger have also been directed at the church after it was learned that Father Gauthe had been reassigned to St. John's, the parish church in Henry, after suspicions were raised about his behavior with young boys at two parishes he served previously.
The Rt. Rev. Gerard Frey, Bishop of the Lafayette Diocese, acknowledged in a legal deposition taken in connection with the civil suits that he confronted the priest in 1974.
The priest, according to the Bishop, admitted he was guilty of ''imprudent touches'' with a young man and vowed it was an isolated case that would not recur. The following year the Bishop appointed Father Gauthe chaplain of the diocesan Boy Scouts. In 1977, the year before he was moved to Henry, similar complaints were made by parents to the priest's superiors, and Father Gauthe was directed to seek psychiatric treatment.
A Louisiana judge has ordered the principals in the suits not to comment, and the diocesan office in Lafayette said it had been asked by its insurance companies to remain silent. But the case has stirred national currents of concern within the church.
A Reminder in New Jersey
''We don't want to give the impression that it's a rampant problem for the church, because it is not,'' said the Rev. Kenneth Doyle, a spokesman for the United States Catholic Conference in Washington. ''But even one case is too many.''
Last month the New Jersey Catholic Conference issued guidelines to parochial school principals and teachers, reminding them of the requirement of complying with the state's child abuse reporting law, which charges all citizens with the responsibility of reporting acts of child abuse to the authorities. The guidelines also instructed that similar reports be made to school superintendents or the diocesan office if church ''employees - priests, nuns and lay teachers'' were involved, according to William Bolan, executive director of the state conference.
It is feared by some in the church that publicity over the Louisiana case and the resultant suits may encourage families of child abuse victims elsewhere to seek damages.
Just last week another priest in Lousiana who runs a home for boys returned to Florida to face a felony charge that he sexually assaulted a 10-year-old Tampa boy last year.
''The tragedy and scandal,'' The National Catholic Reporter said in an editorial last week on the Lousiana case, ''is not only with the actions of the individual priests - these are serious enough - but with church structures in which bishops, chanceries and seminaries fail to respond to complaints, or even engage in cover-ups.''
Some of the victims were as young as 7 years, according to parents and investigators.
A lawyer involved in the case, who asked not to be identified, said he hoped the revelations would encourage the church to reconsider periodically the competency of its priests.
''If school boards can recertify teachers after 15 years, why can't the church review the competency of its priests?'' asked the lawyer.
F. Ray Mouton Jr. of Lafayette, the lawyer hired by the church to represent the priest at the upcoming trial, said his client was determined not to do anything that might further damage the children.
''He's going to admit it all,'' Mr. Mouton said. ''We will prove that he did those things. To do otherwise would force all these kids to come into the courtroom and testify.''
Henry, situated on the edge of freshwater marshes and bayous not far from the Gulf of Mexico, is a sparsely settled, French-speaking community connected by road and ferry to the few hundred residents in the hamlet of Esther, who were also served by Father Gauthe.
The disclosures have been devastating for two communities made of hard-working farmers and oilfield workers.
Reaction to the scandal has been deeply divided. Glenn and Faye Gastal, who owned a local feed store, were forced out of business after they were among the first parents to make public the sexual abuse of their son, now 10. Resentment ran high, the Gastals said, among those who felt it wrong to attack the church in public.
''Neighbor have been set against neighbor,'' said one man close to the situation who asked that he not be identified. Like nearly everyone in this corner of Vermillion Parish, speaking out in public on the emotionally charged case is regarded as foolhardy.
''At first everyone wanted to circle the wagons and protect the church,'' he observed. ''Then they were afraid the civil suits would be taking money out of their own pockets because they are the ones who support the diocese. But the mood has changed. Now they want to know what the church has done to make sure this kind of crime doesn't happen again.''
Inevitably, said another resident, ''a big guessing game developed over which kids were involved with the priest,'' and the sense of guilt drove the children to protect their secrets with ever-growing shame.
There is growing concern that the abused children will face psychological problems.
''I think these children are like Humpty Dumpty - they've been broken and to some extent they may not be put back together again,'' said Raul R. Bencomo, one of the lawyers who won the $4.2 million settlement from the church.
''Children who have been abused, particularly by a figure of authority -someone they called father - go through several phases of guilt. A lot of the kids have very deep-rooted guilt feelings.''
One of the abused boys has been sent to a hospital in Texas for treatment of emotional disturbance that his parents say was produced by the trauma of his relations with the priest.
map of Louisiana highlighting Vermillion Parish; photo of Rev. Gilbert Gauthe and F. Ray Mounton Jr. (KLFY-TV Times of Acadiana)
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The admission by a Roman Catholic priest that he sexually abused 37 children entrusted to his care has aroused a deep sense of betrayal and shame in this small rural community in southwestern Louisiana. Altar boys and members of the parish Boy Scout troop were among those molested by the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, 40 years old, according to felony charges of sexual abuse lodged against him by the local authorities. Father Gauthe, who has been suspended by his Bishop and is currently confined to a private psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to 34 counts of molestation. If convicted, he could face life imprisonment at hard labor. Assuming that the case reaches the trial stage - no date has yet been set -it may be the first time that a priest has faced such charges in an American court of law, according to The National Catholic Reporter, which has carried a number of articles on the case.
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Cabin Creek, Colorado, 'Ghost Town,' Is For Sale for $350,000
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This article was originally published on Travel & Leisure.
If you’re looking to get away from it all why rent a cabin in the country when you could own an entire town?
Just 45 minutes from Denver, Colorado, the town of Cabin Creek is up for sale on Craigslist for just $350,000.
“Just under 5 acres of property with the old Gas Station, 8 room Motel, Road Side Restaurant Cafe, 8 space RV Park, 2 Houses, and private shooting range,” reads the listing. “You will have over 500ft of Highway 36 frontage with 4 driveway entrances to draw in customers.”
The town used to be a bustling spot, but became a ghost town in the 1970s after a murder, according to ABC Radio. The current owner has gone to great lengths to insure top-notch security.
More from T+L: • Italians rally to save ‘ghost village’ with a population of 10 • This 61-year-old hotel has never had a single guest • Wal-Mart heiress selling these ‘iconic’ ranches for $48 million
“I have installed 16 high definition Security Surveillance Camera’s covering the entire property,” he said in the post. “I have also installed alarm systems on the buildings and the property calls me when someone pulls off the Highway into the driveway.”
The reason for selling the unique parcel is simple: “We have some traveling we would like to do and this project keeps us here.”
If buying a ghost town isn’t your style, then check out this spot in Nevada that comes complete with a casino, or this English village for sale.
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Advertised on Craigslist.
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Review: 2015 Kia Soul
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You never know what lies around the next curve, and that’s why buying a safe car matters.
A fellow dad that I’ve gotten to know through our kids’ school understands the importance of choosing a vehicle with excellent crash-test ratings better than many people. He’s a police officer, and he works nights. Safety is important to him in part because of what he has witnessed on Southern California highways, but also because he has personal experience with surviving the unexpected.
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Last December, after two consecutive night shifts separated by a day of holiday-related family gatherings, this exhausted husband, father, and public servant fell asleep while driving home in his new Kia Soul, and rolled it on a freeway interchange transition ramp. Having walked away from the wreck with little more than bumps and bruises, he credits the Kia’s top-notch crash-test ratings for his survival.
With a single exception, the Soul earns the highest possible ratings in every single collision-related assessment conducted by the NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
Where does it fall just a bit short? The front passenger seating position earns a 4-star rating instead of 5 stars in the NHTSA’s frontal-impact test. Nevertheless, the Soul’s overall performance is undeniably impressive, especially for a vehicle that costs as little as $16,015 (including the $825 destination charge).
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE KIA SOUL HERE.
My test car, painted Alien green, was a bit pricier than that. Equipped with Exclaim trim (represented with an exclamation mark), a set of floor mats, and “The Whole Shabang Package” (yes, it’s really called this), totaled up to $26,835. Even at that price it’s absolutely worth every penny, because the Soul oozes quality and charm.
From how solid and secure the doors sound when they close to the interior materials and how they’re assembled, the Kia Soul does a lousy impression of bare-bones-basic transportation. Plus, ever since the car’s redesign for the 2014 model year, the Soul seems much larger and more refined than the original.
Upgrades with the Whole Shabang Package include leather upholstery, heated and ventilated front seats, heated rear seats, a heated steering wheel, and automatic climate control with air ionization. A huge panoramic sunroof bathes the cabin in natural light, and Kia’s sophisticated UVO (Your Voice) eServices technology is aboard, and accessed through an 8-inch touchscreen infotainment screen. An Infinity sound system fills the cabin with your favorite music, courtesy of booming front speakers that pulse to the beat with accent lighting. Turn the music down for a second to get your bearings, and the concise navigation system conveniently guides you to your next destination.
A Smart Key passive entry system with push-button ignition means you never need to take the Soul’s key out of your pocket or purse, and HID headlights with LED running lights illuminate the way forward after dark.
Seriously. Somebody needs to call Kia and remind the company that this is not a luxury car.
From the outside, however, nobody will mistake the Soul for an upscale automobile. The styling is funky, toy-like, and loaded with character. Given that it competes against front-drive versions of the cheeky Chevrolet Trax and gregarious Jeep Renegade, this expressive approach to design is aligned with expectations in the class. My loaded Soul rolled on snazzy 18-inch wheels, which definitely impressed in terms of appearance and driving dynamics.
Because Kia doesn’t offer an optional all-wheel-drive system for the Soul, consumers might overlook it when shopping amongst mini-SUVs like the Chevy, Jeep, the new Honda HR-V, and others. That would be a mistake, because the Soul not only belongs on the cute-ute shopping list, it ought to rank right up near the top.
Larger and more substantial than the original version of the Soul, the 2015 model offers plenty of room for four adults. The driver and front passenger sit up high with a commanding view of the road ahead, and tall seating hip-points make it very easy to get into and out of a Soul. All but the tallest of rear passengers will enjoy generous legroom.
Where the stubby Soul falters is with regard to cargo room. With what Kia calls the “Luggage Under Tray” installed and the cargo cover in use, the trunk is cramped, accommodating a full-size suitcase, a compact folding stroller, a large backpack, and little else. Ditch the cover and remove that tray, and space behind the rear seat grows to 24.2 cu.-ft., which is more on par with competitors. Fold the rear seat, and a Soul will swallow up to 61.3 cu.-ft. of cargo, according to Kia.
Up front, Kia supplies numerous bins and crannies into which owners can stash their stuff. The Soul’s control layout is simple and intuitive, and the subscription-free UVO eServices system supplies a range of helpful features, especially if you’re the parent of a teen driver who will be using the car. You can set the Soul up to provide alerts related to speed, curfew times, and geographic boundaries. If a collision occurs, the system automatically notifies emergency rescuers in order to get help to the scene of the accident as soon as possible.
Driving a Soul is fun, too, even if the car isn’t fast. Begging for the same turbocharged, 201-horsepower, 1.6-liter 4-cylinder that Kia uses in the Forte, the Soul delivers adequate acceleration from a 2.0-liter 4-cylinder mustering 164 ponies. When revved, the 2.0-liter generates vociferous thrash but little momentum.
LEARN MORE ABOUT KIA HERE.
Though it’s equipped with Kia’s Active Eco technology, which is designed to maximize fuel economy, the Soul’s mileage is mediocre. The driver can easily override the system by pushing harder on the accelerator pedal, an action that is regularly required in the first place. As a result, and despite keeping the Active Eco system engaged for the majority of the time, I missed the EPA’s 26-mpg combined-driving fuel economy rating by a full 1.4 mpg.
Big wheels and tires, a short wheelbase, and a beam axle rear suspension design contribute to a firm and choppy ride in cities, especially those where winter weather and empty municipal coffers result in cratered road conditions. If you’re disinterested in feeling connected to the pavement 100-percent of the time, downgrade from the Soul Exclaim to the Soul Plus for that trim level’s smaller wheels and thicker tire sidewalls. It’s less outwardly expressive, but the ride is softer.
On the other hand, those 18-inch rims and 235/45 tires help to deliver some engaging handling. Whether zipping around a city garage and whipping into a parking space, or tackling a favorite twisting road, the Soul Exclaim is an eager accomplice. The Soul’s scrappy driving character puts a big, sloppy grin on a driver’s face, quickly endearing itself to its owner.
Got an awful commute? The Soul is great for that, too. Comfortable seats, a variety of entertainment options, and a remarkably quiet and isolated cabin (when the engine isn’t revving hard) make cruising along a freeway more pleasurable. In multiple ways, this Kia demonstrates remarkable refinement for its price.
Speaking of value, from reliability predictions to best-in-class warranty coverage, the Soul nails it. Deals are regularly available for a Soul, and this Kia is expected to be worth a decent amount of money when you sell it. Low costs of ownership help offset the Soul’s middling fuel economy returns. Of course, if that’s a big deal, you could always get the Soul EV, an electric version of the car that provides an estimated 93 miles of driving range per battery charge.
Spend some time with a 2015 Kia Soul, and you’ll find that it consistently impresses in ways big and small. The expressive styling might not be to everyone’s taste, but by nearly every other meaningful measure, the Soul is a zesty multi-purpose tool designed to tackle everyday life with a nod, a wink, and a smile.
Plus, if trouble occurs, this handy driving partner does its best to protect you, too.
Did you find this article helpful? If so, please share it using the "Join the Conversation" buttons below, and thank you for visiting Daily News Autos.
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The 2015 Kia Soul is a multi-purpose tool with loads of personality, lots of features, and high safety ratings.
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Donald Trump is riding high on real estate once again
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As New York City’s preeminent developer, Donald Trump has seen his fortune wax and wane and wax again with the undulating fortunes of the Big Apple’s property market.
Trump suffered a particularly rough patch in the early 1990s, when the value of his holdings fell far below their heavy debt load, forcing him to hand properties over to his lenders. In those dark days, The Donald frequently walked from his offices to lunch nearby at one of his troubled trophy properties, the Plaza Hotel. Many times, he’d invite his top financial specialist, who was then leading thorny negotiations with the banks, to join him. As the finance man tells the story, one day en route to the Plaza, Donald pointed to a homeless person sitting on a cardboard box and quipped, “That guy isn’t worth 10 cents, but he’s got $900 million more than me!”
Today, Trump is benefiting immensely from the soaring prices of New York real estate. Over the past weekend, his privately owned development and brokerage firm, The Trump Organization, announced a sale that underscores the strength of the Manhattan luxury market: $21 million for an apartment in a building Trump transformed from an aging hotel into one of the Upper East Side’s top residential addresses.
In 2002, Trump bought the 1929 Hotel Delmonico, and converted the 35-story building into 119 apartments. Fortune spoke with his daughter Ivanka, who heads development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization (and lives in the building in question), about her father’s strategy. “My father sold most of the units, but he also held back a number of apartments, and rented them,” says Ivanka. “Two of the units brought the first and second highest rental prices in Manhattan, over $100,000 a month.” The apartment that just sold, she adds, had been leased “north of $85,000 a month,” and that the tenants recently departed, making the unit available for sale. “The building sold incredibly well,” she says, “but we have no mortgage, and we’re believers in New York property values. That’s why we held back some units.”
The apartment—Penthouse 24—covers almost 6,200 square feet, boasting five bedrooms and seven-and-a-half baths, not to mention a private elevator. The online video advertising the unit incorporates the kind of verbal bravado Trump is famous for, extolling the “sprawling oasis” that’s “idyllically situated.” The furnishings, not included in the price, demonstrate the preferred Trump staging: ultra-modern décor orchestrated to lend the highest of high glosses to his top offerings. Visitors trod over zebra rugs and around avant-garde abstract brass sculptures.
An even more expensive unit, also owned by Trump, is on the market for the first time. It’s Penthouse 31-32, a duplex featuring about the same interior space as Penthouse 24 and flanked by 2,000 square feet of terraces, a major attraction for the super-rich who covet rare outdoor space. Asking price: $35 million.
Given that Ivanka’s dad is her boss and no one is more familiar with his management style, Fortune asked her what kind of president he’d make. “I think he’s exceptional in all he does, and that would be true of his presidency,” she said. “I’m his biggest advocate and he’s an absolute inspiration to me.”
In real estate, The Donald’s instincts are quicksilver, as this big sale demonstrates. We’ll soon see if he reads the voting public as skillfully as he foresees real estate trends.
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Trump is benefiting immensely from the soaring prices of New York real estate. Case in point: a $21 million apartment sale announced just a few days ago.
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Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and More Unite For Orlando Tribute Song : People.com
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07/06/2016 AT 07:50 AM EDT
Twenty-four of music's biggest stars have lent their voices to a new charity single in memory of
are just a few of the celebrities participating on the track, called "Hands."
The song was conceived by gay songwriter Justin Tranter, who has written hits for Gomez ("Good for You"), Stefani ("Make Me Like You"), DNCE ("Cake by the Ocean"),
The 36-year-old was inspired to write the track while volunteering at Orlando's chief LGBT community center – The Center Orlando – a day after the attack.
"I called them and said, 'If I fly up is there something for me to help with?' "
. "They say, 'We need as many hands as we can possibly get.' "
The June 12 shooting during Latin night at the gay nightclub in Orlando left 49 people dead and injured 53. It's the deadliest shooting in American history.
Proceeds for the single, which is
, will be distributed by Equality Florida Pulse Victims Fund, the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida and GLAAD – going to aid families with medical care, counseling and education.
Among the other stars who appear on the song are
, MNEK, Alex Newell, The Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons, Halsey, Juanes, Nate Ruess, and country star
. The artists recorded their parts from all around the world, Tranter told Billboard.
"Hands" is just one of several charity singles that have appeared in the wake of the Orlando shooting.
released a song called "Change" nearly a week after the attack, with
affected by the massacre. Three days after the attack, the Broadway community
of "What the World Needs Now," proceeds of which are going to the LGBT Center of Central Florida.
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Songwriter Justin Tranter brought together Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and more of music's biggest stars for the new single
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PSA screening for prostate cancer gets thumbs-down from federal panel
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A government panel recommended Monday that healthy men skip a widely used screening test for prostate cancer, concluding the harm caused by the PSA blood test outweighed its benefits in all age groups.
Based on evidence from two large randomized trials, the lifesaving benefits of screening were “at best very small’’ and were offset by overdiagnosis and overtreatment of nonlethal cancers, the US Preventive Services Task Force determined.
“Our most optimistic estimate is that 1 out of 1,000 men screened will avoid dying from prostate cancer’’ because of early detection via the PSA test, said Dr. Michael LeFevre, co-vice chairman of the task force. “We’re not saying it’s zero. We’re leaving the window open for at least a small benefit.’’
That benefit, he added, must be stacked against a near doubling in the likelihood of being diagnosed with prostate cancer and having side effects from radiation or surgical treatments. He said 40 out of 1,000 men screened are left with permanent disabilities from their treatment, such as urinary incontinence or impotence, and almost all have slow-growing cancers that would not have been fatal.
Whether doctors and patients will follow the advice is unclear. Groups representing cancer doctors and patients objected to the recommendation, and a top official of the American Cancer Society said physicians by and large do a poor job of discussing the PSA test’s benefits and risks with patients.
The panel of independent primary care and public health specialists had said in 2008 that PSA testing was not advisable for men 75 and older but that evidence was inconclusive on its merits for younger men. That recommendation has not led to a drop in PSA screening among older men, according to research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Now the panel has extended its recommendation against PSA screening to all ages.
Many of those who treat prostate cancer - or who have had it themselves - argue that comparing a life saved with treatment side effects, however disabling, is like comparing apples with oranges.
“It’s hard to understand where they’re coming from,’’ said Dr. Anthony D’Amico, chief of genitourinary radiation oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In an editorial he coauthored in the Annals of Internal Medicine, where the new recommendations were published, D’Amico argued that the task force relied too heavily on data from a flawed study and failed to consider making separate recommendations for men in high-risk groups, such as those with a family history of prostate cancer and African-Americans, who have a two to three times greater risk of dying of the cancer than white men.
The task force, 16 primary care physicians and public health experts with no financial interests in tests or treatments, issues screening and other preventive health recommendations that tend to be more conservative than those of medical societies - composed mostly of specialists who treat diseases detected through screening - or patient advocacy groups.
In 2009, its expert panel came under a barrage of fire when it veered against nearly every American medical organization and stopped recommending routine mammograms for women in their 40s; the recommendation advised women to speak to their doctors about the risks and benefits before deciding.
The political fallout from that surprise downgrade led to specific language in the federal health care legislation last year mandating free coverage of mammograms in women 40 and older and led Congress to demand more transparency in the task force’s decision-making.
For PSA testing, the panel issued draft recommendations in October and invited comments, though the final language did not change much. (PSA testing is not one of the free preventive services required under the federal health law.)
The American Cancer Society has no plans to alter its advice - advising men to discuss the benefits and risks with their doctors before making a decision - but its chief medical officer, Dr. Otis Brawley, said he agreed with the task force.
“I think their process is exactly where it ought to be,’’ Brawley said. “It removes those people who have emotional, ideological, or financial conflicts of interest’’ from being on the panel. Doctors and hospitals, which get paid for performing follow-up biopsies and treatments that result from screening, have a strong interest in seeing as many men screened as possible, he added.
In Massachusetts, several hospitals offered free PSA tests and digital rectal exams during “prostate cancer awareness week’’ in September. A charity called Zero sends vans throughout the country to offer free screening and says on its website, “110,000 men tested.’’ The American Urological Association, representing urologists who treat prostate cancer, is listed as a partner on Zero’s website.
Jamie Bearse, chief operating officer of Zero, said each van has two doctors who provide educational materials outlining the full risks and benefits of prostate cancer screening; men with elevated PSA levels are referred for follow-up exams to whichever hospital Zero partners with in a particular town.
Former New England Patriots player Mike Haynes, a paid spokesman for the urological association, said he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008, at age 55, after getting a free PSA test at an NFL event sponsored by the urological association. He said he was not told about any of the risks, such as false positive results, unnecessary biopsies, and overtreatment of slow-growing cancers. His elevated PSA and subsequent biopsy revealed a stage 1, slow-growing cancer, and “one of my options was watchful waiting, but my immediate reaction was let’s get it out of my system.’’
He considers himself lucky, however, in that the only side effect of surgery was a few months of urinary incontinence.
The urological association’s president, Dr. Sushil Lacy, said PSA screening has evolved since Haynes was screened and that men are now better educated during free campaigns. But Brawley said it is nearly impossible to have a real discussion about the risks and benefits outside of a physician-patient relationship - and all too often, even within one.
Haynes said his primary care physician had been performing PSA screening on him for years without even telling him.
“I think the task force came down harsh with their new recommendation,’’ said Brawley, “because we have definite evidence that informed decision-making isn’t happening.’’
Dr. Michael Barry, a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and president of the Boston-based Informed Medical Decisions Foundation, said he broaches PSA screening with his patients in their 50s and 60s, discussing the risks and benefits, and will continue to do so. “Although the benefit is small, the magnitude is in the eye of the beholder,’’ he said.
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A government panel on Monday recommended that healthy men skip a widely used screening test for prostate cancer, concluding the harm caused by the PSA blood test outweighed its benefits in all age groups. Based on evidence from two large randomized trials, the lifesaving benefits of screening were “at best very small’’ and were offset by overdiagnosis and overtreatment of non-lethal cancers, the US Preventive Services Task Force determined.
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A BOMBER'S TALE - Decades of Intrigue - Life in the Shadows, Trying to Bring Down Castro - NYTimes.com
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MIAMI— Two years after the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in ignominious failure on the beaches of Cuba, two young Cuban exiles stood next to each other in the spring sun at Fort Benning, Ga., training for the next march on Havana.
It was 1963, a time of feverish American plotting against Fidel Castro's rule. The two men were among the exiles who had survived the bungled operation to overthrow the Cuban leader and had enlisted in the United States Army, confident that President Kennedy would mount another attack that would banish Communism from the hemisphere.
The orders never came, and both men soon quit the Army to begin their own three-decade war against Mr. Castro.
Jorge Mas Canosa, the younger of the two, emerged as the public face of the movement, a successful businessman who as chairman of the powerful Cuban-American National Foundation courted Presidents and politicians, raised money and relentlessly lobbied the White House and Congress to get tough on Cuba. By the time Mr. Mas died of cancer last November, after two decades of denying any direct role in the military operations of exiles seeking to destabilize Cuba, he had become perhaps the most influential voice in tightening America's official policy of economic and political quarantine.
The older man, Luis Posada Carriles, a former sugar chemist, became a leader of the exiles' clandestine military wing, plotting to kill Mr. Castro and planting bombs at Cuban Government installations. As Mr. Mas was building a personal fortune that eventually exceeded $100 million, Mr. Posada remained in the shadows, consorting with intelligence officers, anti-Castro militants and even, declassified documents say, reputed mobsters.
Now, as he nears the end of his career as the most notorious commando in the anti-Castro underground, Mr. Posada has for the first time detailed his 37-year relationship with exile leaders in the United States and with the American authorities.
Supplemented by additional interviews and newly declassified American intelligence reports, Mr. Posada's account is the most detailed to date of the deadly underside of the campaign against Mr. Castro's rule.
In two days of taped interviews at his hideout in the Caribbean, Mr. Posada was by turns proud, bawdy, boastful and evasive about his work as a self-proclaimed freedom fighter, which included a series of hotel bombings last year that plunged Cuba into tumult. He described, sometimes selectively, the role of his sponsors in the ostensibly nonviolent Cuban-American population, and his complicated relationship with American officials who originally trained him but now take a dimmer view of his activities.
''The C.I.A. taught us everything -- everything,'' Mr. Posada said. ''They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage. When the Cubans were working for the C.I.A. they were called patriots. 'Acciones de sabotaje' was the term they used to classify this type of operation,'' he added, using the Spanish for acts of sabotage. ''Now they call it terrorism. The times have changed. We were betrayed because Americans think like Americans.''
It is not clear why Mr. Posada, who has avoided interviews for most of his career, has chosen to speak publicly. Last month, he agreed through an intermediary to talk to a reporter, provided that the location of the interview was described only as ''somewhere in the Caribbean'' and that his current residences were not disclosed. Mr. Posada, who has survived several assassination attempts, recently told a close friend that he feared that he would not live long enough to tell his version of events.
During the interviews Mr. Posada often joked about his outlaw activities. But there was also a wistful, almost melancholic tone to the conversations with a man who has devoted his entire adult life to a not-yet-realized goal that seems as elusive as ever. Communism in Europe has vanished, but the 71-year-old Mr. Castro is still a true believer and still in power, with no signs that he is losing his grip.
No anti-Communist opposition in the world has been more fervent or as well financed as that of Cuban exiles living here. And yet, as Mr. Posada made clear in the interviews, they have little to show for their efforts.
To outsiders, the struggle between the aging leader and the graying commandos who want to displace him seems geriatric, as out of place in the late 1990's as the vintage American cars that still cruise the streets of Havana. But as Mr. Posada emphasized, the hatred of the men on the losing side of Mr. Castro's revolution has not been dimmed by the passing of the years.
''Castro will never change, never,'' he said, adding later, ''Our job is to provide inspiration and explosives to the Cuban people.''
Barely a half-hour into the conversation, Mr. Posada yanked his shirt over his head, displaying a torso ribboned with scars, the legacy of an attempt on his life in Guatemala in 1990. Both his arms showed holes where slugs had entered and exited; across his upper left chest was a 10-inch gash where bullets had grazed his heart.
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Two years after the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in ignominious failure on the beaches of Cuba, two young Cuban exiles stood next to each other in the spring sun at Fort Benning, Ga., training for the next march on Havana. It was 1963, a time of feverish American plotting against Fidel Castro's rule. The two men were among the exiles who had survived the bungled operation to overthrow the Cuban leader and had enlisted in the United States Army, confident that President Kennedy would mount another attack that would banish Communism from the hemisphere.
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Star-Studded "Don't You Need Somebody" Video, Michael Jackson : People.com
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20160710140339
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RedOne might not be the most recognizable name in music – but he's responsible for some of the biggest Top 40 hits of the century.
Born Nadir Khayat in Morocco in 1972, RedOne began producing and songwriting music in 1998. By 2006, he scored
hits like Kat DeLuna's summer jam "Whine Up." But it wasn't until he teamed up with
that he became a go-to hitmaker in Hollywood.
RedOne co-wrote and produced most of Gaga's earliest hits, from breakouts "Just Dance" and "Poker Face" to "LoveGame."
Now 44 and with three Grammys to his name, RedOne has produced hits for everyone in the industry, from J. Lo and Pitbull to The Band Perry – and now he's launching his solo career with new single "
PEOPLE caught up with the musician about his transition to the spotlight, his favorite collaborations and more.
Here are five things to know about RedOne:
RedOne's beachy first single, "Don't You Need Somebody," already features top industry talent:
, R. City and Shaggy each lend their voices.
But when it came time to make its accompanying video, RedOne wanted to make a splash, and a bunch of his pals – from soccer star
and Randy Jackson – made cameos in the clip.
Not that he wanted to ask them.
"I wanted to just start with something organic, with my friends – there's a lot of great friends I've made through the years," RedOne recalls. "Cristiano Ronaldo was the first one to send a video back. Then Ryan Seacrest was like, 'I'm in!' One led to the other – it's just a blessing to have all these friends do this for me."
The musician thinks the message of the song is what sealed the deal getting his pals onboard.
"They're your friends, but some people see it as business or this or that, so you never know how they're going to react," he says. "But everybody told me, 'This is a happy song; it makes you feel good – I wanna be part of it.' It happened organically."
RedOne was in the recording studio with the King of Pop several times before his
and says the experience was like no other.
"The most special one – besides U2, because it's on a personal level – is Michael Jackson. That was out of this world," says the producer. "I could not believe it. It was so beautiful to work with him."
While no songs from their sessions were ever finished, RedOne
And regardless of what came out of the sessions, the producer says he'll always remember the late icon for his human side.
"He was an incredible human being. He wanted to go to Morocco and meet my mom. He was like, 'I wanna meet the mom who raised this kid.' It's crazy. Stuff like that. He was very special," says RedOne.
"Every time I was working with him ... You forget that you're working with him, and then when he starts singing in the microphone, you just get chills, like, 'Oh my God, it's Michael Jackson!' The person that we grew up listening to. That was very, very special."
Growing up in Morocco, RedOne was the youngest of his parents' nine children in a very musical family.
"All my brothers and sister played guitar or sang," he says. "There was a lot of music growing up, from Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder to Led Zeppelin, Moroccan music, Spanish flamenco – everything was in our house."
Today, RedOne's music – whether his own or who he's producing for – crosses genres, and he says that is directly influenced by his siblings' taste.
"All my brothers and sisters wanted to convince me that whatever they liked was the best, so I had to please everybody," he says with a laugh.
From producers like Max Martin and Shellback to breakout artists including Tove Lo, some of the biggest names in pop music hail from Sweden – and RedOne got his start there, too.
Having grown up in Morocco, he moved to Sweden to get his start in producing and songwriting.
"They're not afraid of big pop melodies, choruses and the formula of writing a pop song," says RedOne of Swedish musicians. "And the people are very professional. They're not about the hype. It's almost like Nashville: They work hard and spend hours and years to perfect this craft, but it's not about just wanting to be famous."
RedOne produced the song "Money, Love & Happiness," a track intended Britney Spears' hit album
, but it never made the cut – and as it turns out, he was never in the studio with her.
"We gave her the track, and she recorded it with a songwriter," he says. "I would love to get in the studio with her one day – but I never spent time with her."
: He produced four tracks on her 2012 LP
– hits "Starships" and "Pound the Alarm," as well as standout tracks "Whip It" and "Automatic." But he never was physically in the studio with the rapper.
"There are a lot of other people I never got to get in the studio with for some reason."
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Best known for producing hits for Lady Gaga, Enrique Iglesias and more, RedOne is launching his solo career with new single "Don't You Need Somebody"
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Russell Wilson can finally seal the deal with Ciara
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After nearly a year of dating, God has finally given Russell Wilson and Ciara his blessing.
On Friday, the abstaining couple announced that they had gotten engaged while vacationing in the Seychelles.
With a trip to the altar — and the bedroom — in their near future, let’s look at how far Wilson has come to getting lucky, on a scale from 1 to doing his end zone dance.
Photo: WireImageJust three months after making their public debut at the White House State Dinner, Ciara accompanies Wilson to the Kids’ Choice Sports Awards in July. The couple keep things relatively PG — for the children, of course — as Wilson sweetly kisses his lady love for the cameras.
The pair fled to Mexico for a fun-filled holiday during Seattle’s bye week in November. The duo enjoyed some quality time — Ciara’s son also was in attendance — as they soaked up the sun in their swimsuits.
Though Wilson uses every opportunity available to gush over Ciara, the 26-year-old found himself in a bit of hot water back in January after swiping a message for his beloved from a Google search. Wilson quickly became the laughingstock of the Internet. We could only imagine the riot act Ciara read him that night.
Bedroom meter: Sleepin’ on the couch
Weeks ahead of their engagement, Wilson and Ciara spoiled Future Jr. with a trip to Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. After rounding a few bases, the trio took in the sights of the stadium before calling it a night. Keeping a close watch on his gal pal’s tiny tot, it’s clear that Wilson is more than ready for stepdaddy duty.
Seriously, how could you not answer God’s calling when your boyfriend presents you with a reported seven-figure rock? With some fancy bling on her finger, not to mention a romantic proposal, Ciara and Wilson have all but decided which night will be the night.
Bedroom meter: Off the charts
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After nearly a year of dating, God has finally given Russell Wilson and Ciara his blessing. On Friday, the abstaining couple announced that they had gotten engaged while vacationing in the Seychell…
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Trump Offers Praise For Saddam Hussein: 'He Killed Terrorists. He Did That So Good'
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20160710154138
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When is somebody going to break it to Trump that Saddam Hussein was a Muslim?
Things Paul Ryan disagrees with Trump on:1. The racist thing2. The anti-Semitic thing3. The thing where he praises Saddam
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Don't miss a single story from PEOPLE!
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Hillary Clinton's campaign responded to Trump's statements, blasting the Republican nominee for his positive acknowledgements of Hussein.
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One Website Does Your Resolutions for You ... Almost
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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
Quick Pitch: Dorthy.com lets users create living pages about anything they want to achieve, and connect with others with similar goals.
Genius Idea: Making resolutions at the start of the new year is a practice that dates back long before our time. Of course in recent years numerous websites and applications have popped up to help us stay on track. You can count Dorthy's new alpha service among that group. The site brings with it a convenient twist to make your goals and dreams all the more achievable.Whatever your desired achievement, Dorthy does the dirty work for you. You specify something that you want to accomplish — like gaining muscle or losing 20 pounds — and Dorthy will automatically build a living page replete with resources to help you beat the odds and stay true to your resolutions. These pages are called dreampages and they're composed of two key elements: dynamic video, photos, blog posts and news articles scraped from across the web, and your custom action plan of specific goals, notes, saved items and activity history.
Another interesting tidbit is that Dorthy claims to be user-action-oriented in serving up content, which means that your behaviors and interaction with content on your dreampages will influence future recommendations.
As with most sites these days, Dorthy incorporates a number of different ways to make your dreampages a socially shared experience. Should you keep your pages public, you can share content and on-site activity with Facebook and Twitter. You can also add comments and likes to content entities, which are pooled across the site for a broader look at user reactions to videos and blog posts around dreampage topics. Eventually Dorthy will also have a complimentary iPhone app to make keeping up with your action plan and discovering new tips even easier.
The tricky thing about establishing resolutions or setting your mind on a new goal is that no technology in the world will keep you on track if you're not motivated enough to actually do the work required. If, however, you have the motivation and just need a nudge in the right direction, Dorthy could turn out to be extremely useful in 2010 and beyond.
BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the "new CloudApp()" contest - use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”
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Dorthy.com lets users create living pages about anything they want to achieve, and connect with others with similar goals.
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Sun | Category | Fox News
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If you are hoping to meet an alien then you may be in for a very long wait, according to astronomers at Cornell University.
A 19th-century garden just north of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C., was designed so that its statues align with the rising and setting sun on the summe...
Life on Earth may owe its existence to incredibly powerful storms that erupted on the sun long ago, a new study suggests.
On Monday (May 9), you will have an opportunity to witness one of the rarest astronomical events: a transit of Mercury across the face of the sun.
A supersonic plane recently zoomed past the sun, and its light-bending shock waves were captured in a stunning new image
Photographers turned out in force to capture views of the spectacular total solar eclipse visible from Indonesia and across Southeast Asia Wednesday — and their varied, beautiful i...
The skies went dark over parts of Indonesia and the Pacific Ocean region Tuesday evening (March 8) as the only total solar eclipse of 2016 took hold.
The first and only total solar eclipse of 2016 will roll across the sky this week. Total solar eclipses — when the moon's shadow blocks the sun entirely — are spectacular events, h...
Tuesday seems to be a double-header for cosmic events: A total solar eclipse will shadow Indonesia and the North Pacific Ocean, and a 100-foot-wide asteroid will streak past Earth.
Jay M. Pasachoff has taken off to a tiny island in Indonesia made famous by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace while Mike Kentrianakis is a grabbing a coveted seat aboard an Alaska A...
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Sun news articles and videos from FoxNews.com's Science section.
| 28.727273 | 0.454545 | 0.454545 |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/grand-theft-adult.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711012715id_/http://www.nytimes.com:80/2005/07/22/opinion/grand-theft-adult.html?
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The New York Times
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20160711012715
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Of course, everyone already knew what "hot coffee" meant and what C.J. -- the protagonist of the best-selling video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas -- and his date were up to in the other room. The fact that you couldn't actually see into the room was one of the few moments of coyness in an otherwise explicit game, rather like the fireworks over the Riviera in "To Catch a Thief," if Cary Grant and Grace Kelly had shot up most of a doped-up, gang-ridden Southern France to get there.
But last month, someone found a way to enter that room and watch -- and even control -- the sexual activity that was going on there. A Dutch game-player, Patrick Wildenborg, developed a game modification, a small bit of computer code that changes the game's behavior. He called it the Hot Coffee Mod. Mr. Wildenborg asserts on his Web site what the developers of the video game have finally admitted: that the sex scenes were already present in the game, although the game's designers claim that they were merely relics of the development process.
Naturally, a furor has broken out. The game's rating has been changed from "Mature" to "Adults Only" -- one of only 19 video games with that rating. It has also been pulled from the shelves of nearly all major retailers.
A game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a lot to tell us, most of it unpalatable, about how American culture looks through certain eyes. But so does the reaction to this modification and the scenes it exposes. As always in America, sex and nudity create the scandals, not systemic violence. Without Mr. Wildenborg's mod, all you could do in the fictional territory of San Andreas was engage in explicitly sociopathic -- not to say psychopathic -- criminality. With his mod, you get all that and a little virtual sex as well.
It's proper to worry about what young gamers will see when they stop for hot coffee. But what's more worrying still is what they see on the way.
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Editorial on decision to change rating for latest version of video game Grand Theft Auto to 'Adults Only' because of its sexual content; says what is worrisome is explicitly sociopathic criminality in this video game, not the sex and nudity
| 9.25 | 0.704545 | 1.431818 |
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http://time.com/3935428/this-is-why-gen-x-will-never-be-able-to-retire/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711013915id_/http://time.com:80/3935428/this-is-why-gen-x-will-never-be-able-to-retire/
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Generation X Will Never Be Ready to Retire
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20160711013915
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Gen X claimed the title of the slacker generation back in the day, but it turns out most of these now-middle-aged people will be working well into their golden years and have no expectation of a “traditional” retirement. That might be because some surveys show that a lot of them are just plain clueless about their retirement preparations.
According to Ameriprise’s new Retirement 2.0 study, almost three-quarters of Gen Xers are redefining what we’ve typically thought of as “retirement,” saying they plan to work right through those years. Although about half expect to scale back their hours to part-time, others are leaving their options open, saying they want to consult or work for themselves.
Ameriprise finds that about as many Gen Xers are actively preparing for their retirement as plan to continue working. Although nearly all say they’re confident that they’ll be able to pay for “basic needs,” 75% are worried about healthcare costs, and roughly one in seven aren’t sure they’ll be able to pay off their major debts before they retire — and this is from a survey pool of investors with nest eggs of $100,000 or more. (That’s a lot more than most Americans these days have socked away.)
Other research into this age bracket’s financial readiness also reveals some troubling blind spots. A recent survey by Fidelity Investments of couples in the Gen X age group finds that just over half have “no idea” how much they need to be saving now in order to keep their current lifestyle in retirement. About a third of surveyed couples don’t agree with their partner about how much they’ll need to live on (although, worryingly, close to half of Baby Boomers, many of whom are right on the cusp of retirement if not there already, say they disagree about how much they need).
But while about half of Boomers still don’t know how much they’ll be getting in Social Security, the number jumps to nearly three-quarters for Gen Xers. It’s only fair here to point out that more than 90% of millennials know how much Social Security they’ll get, but there’s one big difference. Gen Y workers still have decades of employment ahead of them, and most are only now getting to the stage where they have to make like choices like deciding to leave the labor market to raise kids, so trying to pin a bead on their eventual Social Security benefits is much more of a moving target.
For the trailing edge of Generation X, this isn’t dire news — not yet. Since they’re still in their mid-to-late 30s, these workers are just now getting into the groove of their peak earning years. But those on the leading edge who are approaching 50, just a few short years from the age of a “traditional” retirement they won’t be taking.
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The "slacker generation" retire? Not so much
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http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Zoo-pulls-Tony-the-tiger-from-moat-3268817.php
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711020947id_/http://www.sfgate.com:80/bayarea/article/S-F-Zoo-pulls-Tony-the-tiger-from-moat-3268817.php
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S.F. Zoo pulls Tony the tiger from moat
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20160711020947
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Photo: Courtesy San Francisco Zoo
Tony the tiger is intubated bySan Francisco Zoo staff after being anesthetized down in the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is intubated bySan Francisco Zoo staff after being anesthetized down in the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the Siberian tiger at the San Francisco Zoo, rests in the Lion House on Tuesday, March 30, 2010, in San Francisco, Calif. Tony had to be rescued after he trapped himself in the moat on the Tiger exhibit on Monday.
Tony the Siberian tiger at the San Francisco Zoo, rests in the Lion House on Tuesday, March 30, 2010, in San Francisco, Calif. Tony had to be rescued after he trapped himself in the moat on the Tiger exhibit on
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
Tony the tiger is rescued by SF firefighters and zoo officials after refusing to leave the moat of his enclosure.
S.F. Zoo pulls Tony the tiger from moat
Tony the tiger was feeling grrrreat, albeit a bit groggy Tuesday, one day after firefighters and San Francisco Zoo officials hit him with tranquilizer darts and pulled him out of a moat where he spent four nights.
The 360-pound Siberian tiger, who is 18 years old, or 90 in cat years, had climbed down Thursday into the dry moat in the tiger enclosure.
The spot is one of his favorite places in the outdoor enclosure, but this time, he refused to leave.
Given his age, zoo officials didn't want to try to starve him out. So they tossed his daily dose of medicine-laced meatballs, other food and buckets of water into the moat. Tony played with the buckets and looked healthy and content in the moat, with no sign he wanted to leave.
"He just was not motivated to climb the steps or rocks to return to his exhibit," said mammal curator Ingrid Russell-White said in a statement.
"He was getting room service," zoo spokeswoman Lora LaMarca said.
On Monday, zoo officials decided enough was enough. The tiger poop in the moat was getting out of control and with rain forecast, they worried the water mixing with his food would draw flies and create a health hazard, LaMarca said.
That's when San Francisco firefighters got the call to help rescue a cat - albeit not one stuck in a tree.
"It's a very unusual call," said Fire Department spokeswoman Mindy Talmadge.
The firefighters set up the kind of rescue used to pull someone up from a cliff.
"The setup is all the same, the equipment is all the same," Talmadge said. "The subject just happened to be a tiger."
Anesthetized and intubated, Tony was loaded onto a board, strapped down and hauled out with a pulley about 8:30 a.m.
It took a little more than two hours to complete the mission, zoo officials said.
On Tuesday, Tony was resting comfortably in his night enclosure and was on exhibit later in the day.
He won't be allowed outside until the curators can figure out how to keep him from getting into the moat again, LaMarca said.
Tony's most recent veterinary review showed him in good health, although showing signs of senility, zoo officials said.
Siberian tigers have a life expectancy of 10 to 15 years in the wild and 14 to 20 years in captivity. The zoo has two other tigers, Leanne, a 7-year-old female Sumatran tiger, and 21-year-old Padang. Tony, at the zoo since 1993, likes to be alone.
"Why he went down and stayed down, who knows," LaMarca said. He is, after all, a cat.
"They've got minds of their own."
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Tony the tiger was feeling grrrreat, albeit a bit groggy Tuesday, one day after firefighters and San Francisco Zoo officials hit him with tranquilizer darts and pulled him out of a moat where he spent four nights. The spot is one of his favorite places in the outdoor enclosure, but this time, he refused to leave. Tony played with the buckets and looked healthy and content in the moat, with no sign he wanted to leave. The tiger poop in the moat was getting out of control and with rain forecast, they worried the water mixing with his food would draw flies and create a health hazard, LaMarca said. Tony's most recent veterinary review showed him in good health, although showing signs of senility, zoo officials said.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/deaf-10-year-old-girl-teaches-her-deaf-puppy-sign-language/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711025631id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/amp/news/deaf-10-year-old-girl-teaches-her-deaf-puppy-sign-language/
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Deaf 10-year-old girl teaches hearing impaired puppy sign language
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20160711025631
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Jul 6, 2016 5:03 PM EDT U.S.
By Jennifer Earl / CBS News
A 10-year-old girl is sharpening her sign language skills with an unusual student -- her 7-month-old puppy named Walter.
The pair, who were both born deaf, became best friends the minute they met back in January.
"They're the same," Julia's mom, Chrissy, explained in a video posted on Pasadena Humane Society & SPCA's Facebook page. "She's learned a whole other kind of love."
And Walter's learning a whole new way to communicate.
So far, the little girl has taught the terrier-chihuahua mix how to sit, ask for food and respond to his name.
"It seems like he's picking it up," Jamie Holeman, community relations associate at Pasadena Humane Society & SPCA, told CBS News.
A video one of Julia's signing lessons went viral on Facebook last week with 10,000 shares and more than 250,000 views.
"It's really amazing to see how this video is affecting and touching people in different ways," Holeman said. "We've noticed among the deaf community this video has struck a particular chord."
Several people were even inspired to share their own personal stories in response.
"Amazing!! This is my dog Wyatt. He is also deaf and he has no idea he is different," one user commented, along with a photo. "He is the sweetest dog I've ever met!"
"I have Pink and Blue -- brother and sister. Both are deaf and vision impaired," another wrote. "They are the best addition to our family/pack. Nothing slows them down. Deafies Rock."
Walter was the last dog of his litter to get adopted, but the animal shelter never gave up hope.
"He was initially overlooked by people who were not looking for a dog that couldn't hear," Holeman explained. "But he was a really cute, outgoing, active puppy."
Luckily, Chrissy jumped at the chance to unite her daughter with a dog just like her.
"When I first held Julia, since she couldn't really hear, she would smell my neck," her mom said. "And when I first held Walter he did almost the same exact thing. I remember just looking at him, and I knew that he was meant to be ours."
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A little girl and her furry best friend are sharing their incredible bond with the world
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/1000-boston-church-abuse-victims/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711030728id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/news/1000-boston-church-abuse-victims/
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1,000 Boston Church Abuse Victims
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20160711030728
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Clergy members and others in the Boston Archdiocese likely sexually abused more than 1,000 people over a period of six decades, Massachusetts' attorney general said Wednesday, calling the scandal so massive it "borders on the unbelievable."The report, the result of a grand jury investigation that explored whether church hierarchy should be charged criminally for turning a blind eye to allegations of abuse, said the archdiocese received complaints from 789 alleged victims, involving more than 250 clergy and other workers.However, when other sources are considered, the attorney general said, the abuse likely affected more than 1,000 victims from 1940 until today.Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned as archbishop last December, "bears the ultimate responsibility for the tragic treatment of children that occurred during his tenure," Attorney General Tom Reilly said in the 91-page report."But by no means does he bear sole responsibility. With rare exception, none of his senior managers advised him to take any of the steps that might have ended the systemic abuse of children."The sheer number of abuse allegations documented by investigators in Boston appears unprecedented, even amid a scandal that has touched dioceses in virtually every state and has prompted about 1,000 people to come forward with new allegations nationwide in the last year."The mistreatment of children was so massive and so prolonged that it borders on the unbelievable," Reilly said in his cover letter to the report.Despite the attorney general's scathing remarks about what he called an "institutional acceptance of abuse," no charges are to be filed because child-protection laws in place while abuses were taking place were too weak.Word had leaked out earlier in the week that church officials were unlikely to be charged, prompting a protest by alleged victims at Reilly's Boston office on Tuesday."How dare there be no indictments," said Kathleen Dwyer, 58, who said she was sexually abused by a priest at her church in Braintree in the early 1950s, when she was 7 years old. She was among two dozen protesters who demonstrated outside the attorney general's office.One protester carried a sign that read, "They let children be raped. Their punishment: NOTHING."The investigation did not uncover any evidence of recent or ongoing sexual abuse of children. But Reilly said the investigation didn't find any information that would explain the drop-off in recent complaints."Given the magnitude of mistreatment and the fact that the archdiocese's response over the past 18 months remains inadequate, it is far too soon to conclude that the abuse has, in fact, stopped or could not reoccur in the future."The report is the culmination of a 16-month investigation into how church leaders handled the scandal."They chose to protect the image and reputation of their institution rather than the safety and well-being of the children entrusted to their care. They acted with a misguided devotion to secrecy," the report says in its conclusion. "And they failed to break their code of silence even when the magnitude of what had occurred would have alerted any reasonable, responsible manager that help was needed."Law resigned in December after nearly a year of criticism over his role in allowing abusive priests to remain in parish work.In addition to Law, at least eight other top officials in the Boston Archdiocese were subpoenaed to answer questions about their handling of complaints against priests, including the Rev. Thomas V. Daily, now a bishop in New York City; the Rev. Robert J. Banks, now bishop in Green Bay, Wis.; and the Rev. John B. McCormack, now bishop in Manchester, N.H.Public outrage over the scandal prompted the state to enact a law making reckless endangerment of children a crime. Under the law, someone who fails to take steps to alleviate a substantial risk of injury or sexual abuse of a child can face criminal charges.But during the time period when much of the abuse took place — from the 1950s through the 1990s — no such laws were on the books, and Reilly has said that prevented him from prosecuting church supervisors.Attorney Roderick MacLeish Jr., who represents more than 200 alleged abuse victims in lawsuits against the archdiocese, said he understands why Reilly concluded his hands were tied."The attorney general has to act within the law, and as disappointed as I am, I truly believe he has tried to do his best. The worst thing for victims would be for him to prosecute someone and have that prosecution fail," he said.The archdiocese is facing about 500 civil suits from alleged victims of clergy sex abuse. Church officials have repeatedly said they remain committed to working toward an out-of-court settlement.A state law passed last year adds members of the clergy to a list of professionals required to inform state officials of suspected child abuse.
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Report Says Sexual Abuse Took Place Over Period Of Six Decades
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http://nypost.com/2016/04/03/next-generation-italian-food-joint-adds-flavor-to-long-island-city/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711051535id_/http://nypost.com:80/2016/04/03/next-generation-italian-food-joint-adds-flavor-to-long-island-city/
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Next Italian restaurant adds flavor to Long Island City
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20160711051535
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Fast-rising Long Island City is getting a next generation Italian joint.
Oro, a new construction restaurant at 41-17 Crescent St., is slated to open later this month from Vlado Celic and his son Mike Celic. Vlado came to New York from Croatia in 1986, and ran restaurant Appetito on W. 39th Street before this.
Chef Tony Cacace will offer classic dishes like baked clams and homemade thin crust pizzas.
The 6,000 square-foot restaurant seats 160 people, with an additional 25 seats at the bar. Oro shares the same address as the Crescent Club, a luxury condo building that opened in 2012.
Aside from more restaurants and condos, expect new hotels in the neighborhood, which is one block from the Queensboro Plaza metro stop. New York City’s tallest residential building outside of Manhattan also will be nearby, at 29-37 41st Ave. Queens Plaza Park is aiming for a 2019 completion date.
The Pavilion Market Cafe returns to Union Square for its third season from April 18 until Oct.15.
The Pavilion is about as close to “farm-to-table” as one can achieve in the heart of the Big Apple: Chef Mario Urgiles says he’ll shop at the Union Square Farmer’s Market.
The cafe — with 90 seats inside and an equal number outdoors — will be open from 9 a.m. until midnight.
“Iron Chef” Marc Forgione marked the opening of his American Cut in Midtown with an Esquire-sponsored launch party. The spacious steakhouse, at 109 East 56th St. in the Lombardy Hotel, boasts 180 seats.
Another American Cut is set to open in Atlanta this summer. The three-story space will have an open air bar on the roof, called the Regent Cocktail Club.
New York’s Scarpetta will open at the Rittenhouse Hotel in a space previously held by Smith & Wollensky. Scarpetta also has outposts in Miami, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and the Hamptons.
We hear … that Jeremiah Stone & Fabián von Hauske of the Lower East Side’s Contra and Wildair, two of Food & Wine Best New Chefs 2016, will celebrate at the Best New Chefs 2016 party Tuesday evening at Event Block.
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Fast-rising Long Island City is getting a next generation Italian joint. Oro, a new construction restaurant at 41-17 Crescent St., is slated to open later this month from Vlado Celic and his son Mi…
| 10.071429 | 0.97619 | 20.785714 |
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http://nypost.com/2015/10/19/obamacare-is-entering-its-dreaded-death-spiral/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711073610id_/http://nypost.com:80/2015/10/19/obamacare-is-entering-its-dreaded-death-spiral/
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ObamaCare is entering its dreaded ‘death spiral’
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20160711073610
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ObamaCare is heading toward a death spiral.
The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.
Last Thursday, the administration predicted enrollment for 2016 will be less than half what the Congressional Budget Office predicted in March.
Despite subsidies to help with premiums and out-of-pocket costs, most of the uninsured who are eligible for ObamaCare are saying “no thanks.” Only one in seven is expected to sign up. That’s despite a hefty increase in the financial penalty next year for not having insurance.
The president sees the writing on the wall. You won’t be seeing the customary nationwide TV campaign to encourage sign-ups, as there were in previous years. Remember the young guy in plaid pajamas — “Pajama Boy,” to conservatives — well, he won’t be back this winter.
Bad enough that healthy people aren’t buying. Worse is that the administration is spending billions of your tax dollars covering up the problem, paying insurers to keep offering the plans, even though they’re losing their shirts. But facts are facts — and there’s no hiding these.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell predicts ObamaCare enrollment will inch up by 1 million or so, to 10 million people — half what the CBO forecasted. Open enrollment for the coming year, which begins Nov. 1, “is going to be a challenge,” she said.
David Wichmann, UnitedHealth Group’s president, announced higher premiums last week because enrollees will “require more medical services than original expectations.”
Many states (though not New York) are looking at premium hikes of 30 percent or more, according to a new Robert Wood Johnson/Urban Institute analysis. The Heritage Foundation estimates that insurers lost 12 percent selling ACA plans in 2014, with more losses this year.
Don’t shed any tears for the insurance companies. Though they’re losing money on exchange plans, overall they’re profitable and their stocks are doing well. It’s John Q. Public who’s bearing the brunt. Just as ObamaCare intended.
If you get insurance at work, you’re paying an extra tax to fund “reinsurance” for ObamaCare plans. It’s a fund to defray the cost of their most expensive enrollees.
So far, insurers have collected about $7.9 billion. Recent congressional testimony shows the payments kept ObamaCare sticker prices about 11 percent lower than they otherwise would have been. In short, you pay a tax to make ObamaCare look more affordable than it is.
But even with these hidden subsidies, ObamaCare isn’t working because the design is fatally flawed. The 5 percent of the population with serious medical conditions consume nearly 50 percent of the health care. When you try to sell insurance to sick and healthy people for the same price, the healthy don’t sign up. It’s too expensive.
New York state learned that in the 1990s, when one-price-for-all insurance laws pushed premiums to the highest in the nation, crushing the individual insurance market here.
ObamaCare repeats that mistake. Despite slapping the uninsured with penalties — which will jump to 2.5 percent of household income in 2016 — they’re not signing up. The need to coerce enrollment with penalties is proof the plans are a bad deal.
How long will big insurers play along? There are political considerations, and for most, ObamaCare losses are still just a dent in their overall business. Not so for the 23 co-op insurers set up under the health law. Eight state plans have already failed, including New York’s Health Republic, and most of the rest are bleeding money.
With ObamaCare enrollment floundering and losses mounting, the nation needs alternatives. The Republicans are coalescing around a reform plan, but Democrats are doubling down. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to burden the existing, unpopular plans with more “free” goodies, and make it harder to dodge the mandate. That won’t work.
A real reform would cover the seriously ill — people with pre-existing conditions — in separate plans with separate pricing and subsidies to make them affordable.
Just like the high-risk pools many states used to maintain. That’s the lesson of the failing ObamaCare scheme.
Betsy McCaughey is the author of “Beating ObamaCare” and a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.
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ObamaCare is heading toward a death spiral. The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, prem…
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http://fortune.com/2016/07/08/vmware-nets-oracle-tech-exec/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711080350id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/07/08/vmware-nets-oracle-tech-exec/
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VMware Nets Oracle Tech Exec For Cloud Management Effort
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20160711080350
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VMware has named Mike Wookey, formerly an Oracle vice president, as the chief technology officer of its cloud management business unit.
Wookey also served as a chief architect for Oracle’s orcl enterprise management group. Prior to that, he was a distinguished engineer and a chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, the respected server-and-software company that Oracle acquired in 2010 for more than $7 billion.
In a statement from VMware exclusive to Fortune, VMware vmw underscored Wookey’s experience in server hardware development, networking, operating systems, virtualization, and business applications. Taken altogether, that’s pretty much soup-to-nuts in the modern software world.
Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology.
VMware’s cloud management group includes the company’s vRealize software, which lets IT professionals deploy and manage computing jobs that run both on internal servers and offsite as needed.
For more on the Dell-EMC merger, watch:
News of this hire comes as Dell and VMware’s parent company, EMC emc , inch closer to finalizing their multi-billion dollar merger later this month.
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He spent years at Sun and Oracle.
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http://www.9news.com.au/World/2016/07/10/09/16/Dallas-police-deploy-SWAT-teams-after-receiving-serious-threat-in-wake-of-fatal-shooting
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160711115808id_/http://www.9news.com.au/World/2016/07/10/09/16/Dallas-police-deploy-SWAT-teams-after-receiving-serious-threat-in-wake-of-fatal-shooting
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Dallas police headquarters locked down after anonymous threat against officers
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20160711115808
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Dallas has been gripped by a new security scare, triggered by an anonymous threat in a city still on edge days after a gunman fatally ambushed five police officers during a peaceful protest.
SWAT teams deployed around the Dallas Police Department headquarters while officers investigated reports of a suspicious person in a parking garage, before finally giving the all-clear around two hours later.
Police took "precautionary" security measures across the city after receiving "an anonymous threat against law enforcement," the Dallas police said in a statement.
The scare came as another night of marches against police brutality was underway in several US cities, a groundswell of protest that shows little sign of abating.
Protesters led by the Black Lives Matter movement are demanding justice for two African-Americans shot dead by police this week - their dying moments captured in viral video footage that stunned the nation.
At the Dallas protest late on Thursday, a 25-year-old black army veteran named Micah Johnson used a rifle to shoot dead five police officers in a sniper attack. Seven other officers were wounded, as well as two civilians.
Johnson told negotiators before police killed him that he wanted to murder white cops in revenge for the black deaths.
Dallas officials believe he was the lone shooter in the incident.
Emergency services respond to the Dallas threat. (9NEWS)
Emergency services respond to the Dallas threat. (9NEWS)
READ MORE: Dallas shooting: Victims identified following deadliest day for US police since 9/11
READ MORE: Police find weapons and bomb equipment at home of lone shooter
IN PICTURES: Tributes flow after Dallas shooting
Police across the country were on edge as it emerged that officers had been targeted in at least two incidents - in Tennessee and Wisconsin - by individuals apparently angered at the recent fatal shootings of black men by police.
Hundreds of people marched peacefully in New York for a third consecutive night, holding up banners bearing the names of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the two men whose deaths, in Louisiana and Minnesota, triggered the latest protests.
In St. Paul, where Mr Castile was killed, several hundred protesters blocked a highway intersection for about three hours and hurled rocks and bottles at police, who were equipped with helmets, clubs and gas masks.
The officers used smoke grenades, pepper spray and tear gas to break up the crowd, and around midnight arrested protesters who refused to move.
In San Francisco, a large force of police swooped in to prevent protesters, who marched for a second day, from blocking a major road intersection.
Dallas gunman Micah Johnson. (Facebook)
Hundreds also marched in Los Angeles, including in South Central, the epicenter of violent 1992 riots following the acquittal of white police officers in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King.
Emergency services respond to the Dallas threat. (9NEWS)
There were nasty scenes late Friday in Phoenix, Arizona, where police used pepper spray to disperse stone-throwing protesters. And in Rochester, New York, 74 people were arrested over a sit-in protest.
But elsewhere - from Atlanta to Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston, Detroit and Baltimore - weekend protests over the fatal shootings have passed off with little trouble.
There has been a huge surge of sympathy for Dallas police after what marked the single biggest loss of life for US law enforcement since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Although the White House has ruled out any link between Johnson and known "terrorist organizations," his Facebook page ties him to radical black movements listed as hate groups.
Police found bomb-making materials and a weapons cache at Johnson's home and were scouring his journal and social media posts to understand what drove him to mass murder.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016
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Dallas police have reportedly locked down their headquarters and closed off nearby streets after receiving a serious anonymous threat, days after five officers were shot dead at a protest.
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What is YOLO? Only teenagers know for sure
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Every now and then, a bit of slang comes along that draws a bright red line between young and old. In 2012, that slang term is YOLO.
If you are over 25, YOLO likely means nothing to you. If you are under 25, you may be so familiar with YOLO that you’re already completely sick of it.
A tip to the oldsters: YOLO is an acronym for “You Only Live Once.” It shot to fame earlier this year thanks to the rapper Drake, whose song “The Motto” has the hook, “You only live once, that’s the motto...YOLO, and we ’bout it every day, every day, every day.” After a video for the song was released in February, the buzzword spread quickly among the high school and college-age set by word of mouth, not just in person but through the turbocharged vehicle of social media.
How quickly? Consider the lists of slang compiled every semester by students of Connie Eble, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. YOLO was entirely absent from the submissions by Eble’s fall 2011 classes. By the spring semester, YOLO had become the most frequently mentioned slang term among the students, just edging out “totes” for “totally” and “cray” (or “cray-cray”) for “crazy.”
What accounts for the meteoric rise of YOLO, and how has it gone virtually unnoticed by nonmillennials? Its appeal to the youthful is self-evident. YOLO as a shorthand mantra defines youth, on a certain level. What is teenagehood if not the adventurous, often foolhardy, desire to test the limits of acceptable behavior—because hey, why not? YOLO!
The carpe diem sentiment of “you only live once” has a long history predating its punchy acronymic clipping. Garson O’Toole, on his Quote Investigator blog, traces variations on the theme back to the 18th century, as in this line from Samuel Richardson’s novel “Clarissa”: “We live but once in this world; and when gone, are gone from it for ever.” The exact wording of “you only live once” begins cropping up in the late 19th century, and by 1937 it was popular enough to be used as the title of a Fritz Lang film noir. One wry elaboration, credited to the comedian Joe E. Lewis in 1952, is “You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.”
Today’s young purveyors of YOLO do indeed appear to be trying to work it right, though what that means is up for debate. Eble’s students illustrate its typical use, as a carefree tag to explain an impulsive choice: “You want to park illegally in this spot? YOLO!” “Should I buy these shoes or pay rent? YOLO!” The word has also found favor as a verb, as in this Yelp review of a Jersey City pizzeria: “All the times I come home after a night of YOLO-ing, I crave a delish slice to soak up the booze and sober me up.”
But as the term has circulated over the past several months, a YOLO backlash has set in. Jason Salcedo, a high school senior from Stuart, Fla., recently blogged that YOLO is now “used by teens only as an absolute justification to do dangerous or harmful things.” As he pointed out, those who use it might not appreciate that you only die once, too.
Even as teenagers argue over the merits of YOLO-ing, their parents and teachers remain largely oblivious. Slang serves a powerful function for marking an “in-group,” as sociologists say, and it’s easy to see how YOLO would be precisely the type of term that its users would want to keep to themselves, away from elders.
One elder who has taken notice is David McCullough Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School (and son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian). “Now, before you dash off and get your YOLO tattoo,” he said in his caustic commencement address for the school in June, “let me point out the illogic of that trendy little expression—because you can and should live not merely once, but every day of your life. Rather than You Only Live Once, it should be You Live Only Once...but because YLOO doesn’t have the same ring, we shrug and decide it doesn’t matter.”
(McCullough’s objection to the placement of “only” in the expression is an old one, but even the great usage writer Henry Fowler thought it was folly to insist on placing “only” nearest to the part of the sentence it qualifies, ridiculing “the modern precisians who have more zeal than discretion.” No one, upon hearing “you only live once,” would would interpret it to mean that living is the only thing you do once—just as “I only have eyes for you” would never be understood to mean that “eyes for you” are the only thing I have.)
If there’s anything that signals the death knell of YOLO, it is that Katie Couric has now latched onto it. In advance of her syndicated talk show, “Katie,” which debuts next month, Couric has announced that the show will have a regular feature called “What’s Your YOLO?”, encouraging viewers to make videos describing things they want to do before they die. After Couric’s use of the term was reported, the writer Greg Campbell tweaked her on Twitter: “Rule of thumb: When @KatieCouric starts using internet acronyms, they’ve jumped the shark months ago.”
It’s true that if Couric and others of her age group start YOLO-ing, making the term synonymous with crossing items off one’s “bucket list,” any generational cachet it might have will be lost. But it would be somehow fitting if an expression encapsulating the joys and perils of youthful indiscretion burns out just as quickly as it blossomed.
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YOLO: Right now, it’s a teen slang craze so hot that the kids themselves are fighting about it. Yet if you're over 25, you’ve probably never even heard the word.
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What Was Your Favorite Gold Medal Moment from London : People.com
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From left: Misty Mae-Treanor, Michael Phelps and Gabby Douglas
08/12/2012 AT 02:50 PM EDT
All that glitters has turned to gold for Team USA – 39 times (
comes to a close, here's a recap of the moments that were just as sweet as the victories.
It was the grand finale for Michael Phelps, who surpassed his title as the most-decorated Olympian of all-time when he scored the
of his career Saturday as part of the American 400M-medley relay team.
led the way last Saturday in the women's swimming medley relay, in which the team – also consisting of Rebecca Soni, Dana Vollmer and Allison Schmitt – took home the gold
set a world record with a time of 3 minutes and 52.05 seconds.
Gabby Douglas, "The Flying Squirrel," earned another nickname when the 16-year-old scored the gymnastics
l last Thursday: America's Sweetheart. The first African-American to take home the top prize,
Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings, who won their third consecutive Olympic gold in the women's beach volleyball finals.
at the 2011 World Cup, Team USA made
when the women's soccer team prevailed 2-1.
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From Michael Phelps's victory to Gabby Douglas's historic win, tell us who inspired you the most
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Hidden Star : People.com
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strode through London's Heathrow Airport one day late last year, it was business as usualâthe business of being a superstar. Bystanders gawked at the tawny 5'9" beauty and offered assessments of her hair, her clothes and the look of consternation darkening her famous features. Paparazzi entreated her to slow down, turn their way, smile. At a moment when the 25-year-old actress wanted only to get back to the tiny West Hollywood duplex that she then shared with actor Jason Patric, 26, Roberts found herself assuming the star positionâskittishly facing a battery of flashbulbs.
A week later, Roberts made news againâfor the way she eats breakfast. A supermarket tabloid reported that while dining one morning with Patric at Farmer's Market in L.A., Roberts was spotted "spiking her OJ with a squirt from a flask." What the tabloid didn't reveal, according to a waitress, was that the mystery liquid was a health-food supplement.
But perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of Roberts's Garbo-like status than the extravagant reception she got from the usually cooler-than-thou David Letterman when she unexpectedly dropped by his show last Oct. 28. It was her first media foray since November 1991, when she had given a magazine interview to refute rumors of drug use. "I don'tânor have I ever done drugs..." she had told ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. "I've got clear skin and clean arms, and I'm just thin. Period. The end. Quit picking on me." Letterman, though, needed no such admonition. "We have a mystery guest," he gushed. "Someone who is like a blockbuster...kind of really big-time movie-star actress...the big-guest star of the day in Hollywood!"
In so many ways she is. This is the incandescent actress who won Oscar nominations for Steel Magnolias (1989) and Pretty Woman (1990) and whose star turn as an improbably naive prostitute made the latter one of the most profitable romantic comedies of all time. By 1991, Roberts was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, commanding a reported $7 million per picture. Her superstar status is beyond question. Just a few weeks ago, Audrey Hepburn, then gravely ill at her home in Switzerland, picked Robertsâwhom she once said would be a perfect Holly Golightly in a remake of Breakfast al Tiffany'sâto accept a lifetime achievement award on her behalf from the Screen Actors Guild in L.A. Reading Hepburn's words, Roberts thanked those who had "guided an unknown, insecure, inexperienced, skinny broad into a marketable commodity."
She could easily have been speaking about herself. Once a nervous young girl from Smyrna, Ga., she is now, according to the Los Angeles Times, one of only two actresses who can "open a film"âdrawing crowds to the theater on name power alone. (The oilier is Barbra Streisand.)
But for a long time now, Roberts hasn't employed that power. Save for a cameo in last year's The Player, she has disappeared from the screen since Hook wrapped in August 1991. That same 18-month span, meanwhile, has been anything but a quiet time in her personal life. She broke her engagement with Kiefer Sutherland, took up with his pal Jason Patric and then, according to a source close to Patric, left him in December for a long-distanceâand possibly nonexclusiveâromance with actor Daniel Day-Lewis. At least four times in recent weeks, she was seen hitting L.A. nightspots with
Roberts's absence from the screen has hardly gone unnoticed in Hollywood, where as Variety editor Peter Bart observes, "The trend is for big stars to make movies more frequently," so that each new part poses less of a career risk. The Jan. 18 issue of Variety ran a story about Roberts in its "Lost and Found column, a department usually reserved for dropouts, comeback-kids and Living Trivia. The actress' publicist was not amused. "We are sick and tired of people saying there is something wrong with her career," she said.
And yet the fact is that fans should not look for Roberts's name on a marquee anytime soon. On Dec. 2 producer Joe Roth announced that she had signed a two-year deal to star in and produce movies for his Caravan Pictures. Roth trumpeted her first projectâthe screen version of a yet-to-be-published thriller called In a Country of Mothersâas "a Fatal Attraction between two women" and said that Susan Sarandon would costar.
"I think America and the whole world would love to see Julia back working," says Roth, who as head of Twentieth Century Fox. worked with Roberts on Dying Young and Sleeping with the Enemy. Still, his announcement hardly means that Roberts's return to the screen is a done deal. The film rights to In a Country of Mothers reportedly are not yet secured, and the screenplay hasn't been written. Even if everything goes without a hitch. it would be virtually impossible for the film to open before early '94, leaving a 2½-year gap in Roberts's résumé.
Moreover, as things turned out, a hitch developed almost immediately, with Robertsâaccording to Daily Varietyâflipping over another film Roth was developing, I Love Trouble, a '50s-style romantic comedy. Roberts's choice for her male lead was Harrison Ford, but he has since passed on the project. Variety editor Bart, for one, sees the Roth-Roberts arrangement as something less than a canny career move. "My skeptical opinion," he says, "is that stars who decide to develop material for themselves usually waste an awful lot of time."
What makes this latest deal seem even more tentative is that Roberts hasn't just stopped making movies, she has even managed to unmake one. Her hike through Heathrow came after she had abruptly left what was supposed to be her next film, Universal's Shakespeare in Love. Sets were being built, costumes fitted. But Roberts had not yet signed a contract, and once Day-Lewis, whom she had hoped would play the title role, opted for another film, she walked off, bringing production to a permanent halt.
"This definitely has gone beyond the range of normal movie-star behavior," says a former studio head. "We've reached the point where a lot of people are wondering just what in the world is going on with her."
, who once turned out 10 movies in just four years? Roberts, speaking through her publicist, Nancy Seltzer, declined several requests to discuss her career with PEOPLE. Seltzer's official statement is that "Julia is considering scripts, and when one seems appropriate, she will proceed." Julia did, in fact, announce during the filming of Hook, in June '91, that she was taking a year off to "refuel and recharge."
It says something about Hollywood, and the press, that almost no one takes that explanation at face value. Other, ruder questions surface: Does Roberts have personal problems that are preventing her from going to work? Has she received poor career advice? Has she stayed so long out of the professional loop that, despite her youth and previous film success, she must now stage a mid-career "comeback" with make-or-break expectations?
One thing that does seem certain is that Roberts was drifting away from the movie business even before Hook's releaseâdreaming, as she has said, "of this nice life where I can run around and laugh and not sit hunched over with a hat over my face." According to the Los Angeles Times, Roberts wavered in her commitment to that film, accepting the small role of Tinkerbell, backing out a few days later, then changing her mind again. Her moodiness continued on the set, where she would sequester herself for hours in her trailer. In a 60 Minutes interview shortly after Hook's release, director Steven Spielberg said, "It was an unfortunate time for us to work together." Asked by Ed Bradley if he would work with Roberts again. Spielberg squirmed a bit, then replied, "This is a 60 Minutes question, isn't it?"
Roberts is by most accounts an intense and highly sensitive actress who admits to being "on the edge" throughout a movie shoot. After the Hook experience, though, she seemed just as emotional roiled off the set. She looked gaunt and pale, her body almost lost in shapeless, oversize clothes. "What we were witnessing," believes Larry Thompson, a personal manager whose clients include Cindy Crawford and Justine Bateman, "was a classic celebrity crisis."
The problem might have gone more or less unnoticed, he adds, if Roberts hadn't carried off even her downslide with flair. "The thing that got everyone's attention," notes Thompson, "was that she didn't just drop out of her career, she dropped out of her life."
Those who know Roberts best say that she sometimes seems to make little distinction between the personal and professional realms. Movie sets are where she seeks the familial bonds that seem so important to her. "That's why you make movies, for the support, to be like a family," she once said.
But Roberts has put such support on the back burner ever since June 11, 1991, the day she canceled her wedding to Sutherland. The $500,000 celebration had been scheduled to take place three days later on the Fox back lot, where carpenters had re-created the set of Steel Magnolias. "Julia thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown when she called everything off," says a friend of the Roberts family. "And she's still not normal. Every time she thinks she is, someone asks for an autograph, and she'll feel herself about to burst into tears."
Roberts, who met Sutherland when they starred together in Flatliners in 1990, has a history of falling hard and fast for her last leading man. When she was 21, she lived with Liam Neeson, then 36, her costar in Satisfaction. Then she became engaged to her Steel Magnolias screen spouse. Dylan McDermott, calling of that engagement around the time that she met the married, though separated, Sutherland. But by May 1991, a Hollywood go-go dancer, Amanda Rice, was publicly claiming to have had a fling with Sutherland and was passing along to tabloids his description of Julia as "an ice princess."
A few days after that story appeared in the National Enquirer, Roberts entered L.A.'s Cedars Sinai Medical Center, battling what her handlers termed "a bad bout of the flu." Five days later, Roberts left the hospital and announced plans to marry Sutherland in four weeks. She then flew off with several female friends for a weekend in Tucson at Canyon Ranch, a posh spa offering treatments from psychotherapy to aroma wraps.
On the plane, though. Roberts chanced to run into Jason Patric, the darkly handsome grandson of comedian Jackie Gleason and son of Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright (That Championship Season) Jason Miller. Patric was also Canyon Ranchâboundâa coincidence that, according to the actress' traveling companions, led to a dissolution of the girls-only plan, with the pair proceeding to a private bungalow. The day after she returned to L.A., she and Sutherland announced that the wedding was off. On what would have been her wedding night, Roberts flew to Ireland with Patric.
He turned out to be very much unlike the hard-partying Sutherland. For the most part, the couple shunned the Hollywood scene, surfacing only occasionallyâat the premiere of Rush in L.A. or at the Hollywood taping of a Bruce Springsteen MTV special. Several times, Julia went home on her own to Smyrna, where her mother, acting teacher Betty Motes, and half sister Nancy, 16, still live. (Her father, Walter Roberts, who ran an acting workshop, died of cancer when Roberts was 10; her sister, Lisa, 27, works in theater production in Manhattan; her brother, actor Eric Roberts, 36, lives in upstate New York.)
It is unclear whether choosing not to deliver on the world's expectations for her has made Roberts any happier. Until now she has seemed neither content to remain on hiatus nor emotionally prepared to return to work. "Every few months," says the former studio chief cited above, "I'd get a call from Julia's agent, Elaine Goldsmith, saying, 'Julia's ready. What have you got for her? A comedy? A drama?' I'd send the scripts, they'd get rejected, then Elaine would call back, and the cycle would start over again."
Even before she signed her deal with Roth, industry trade papers always seemed to contain reports of movies she was about to make: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; The House of the Spirits; John Grisham's best-sellers The Firm and The Pelican Brief. That none of these projects has yet panned out for her only focused attention on her handlers and the fear that seemed to be paralyzing them. Vs one Hollywood insider puts it, "The only way you get a hit is by working. Someone should shake Julia's people until their bonded teeth rattle and tell them that."
A thought that goes unheeded, though, is that in Hollywood a million-dollar dropout may be making a sane response to a system gone mad. Fame has never given Roberts much to smile about. "There are photographers who sit in their cars outside my house all day long who frighten me," she told one reporter. And to another she complained, "It's bizarre to deal with reports in the press about my romantic life.... I've read flat-out lies so hideous they made me cry."
Lately she has proved an elusive target for gossip columnists. A source close to Patric says she abruptly ended their relationship seven weeks ago, leaving the actor so distraught that he slept on the couch for two nights, unable to be alone in the bed they had once shared. Her romance with Daniel Day-Lewis has been kept under wraps. His manager denies reports that the two are involved, and Seltzer would only say that she would neither confirm nor deny the stories.
Roberts's decision to put her career on hold may yet prove to have been a sensible one. "Julia has made a very smart move," said Joel Schumacher, who directed her in Dying Young and Flatliners. "Taking a year off will help her avoid becoming a Hollywood casualty." And yet as the months pass and the projects fall through, Roberts comes closer to losing control of her own destiny. "It's not that the bloom is off
," says a producer involved in one of her first films. "It's just that she's going to have to gain momentum again. This really is a town of who's the flavor of the month."
Does Roberts really want to get back into a business where the prizes and prices are both more than she ever imagined? The decision is still hers. "She has weakened her franchise," Say's one major agent, "but I would still take her in a New York minute. If she gets back and has another hit, she'll have the acceptability in this town of a 2,000-lb. gorilla."
KAREN G. JACKOVICH and JOYCE WAGNER in Los Angeles
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A Fragile Julia Roberts Has Become Hollywood's Most Famous Dropout
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Environment and Cancer: The Links Are Elusive
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Investigators have been asking the farmers what pesticides and herbicides they used, when they used them and how much they used, and have been obtaining information on other risk factors like smoking. Then they use the medical records from tumor registries to determine who developed cancer and what type was developed.
"We're now just in the period of time where we can look at outcomes," Dr. Blair said. So far, the researchers have found a few associations, but nothing that is definitive.
"I would call it, at this stage, interesting leads," Dr. Blair said. "None are large enough for any regulatory agency to take action or to say they are a human carcinogen. They are leads." They include, for example, a slightly higher rate of lung cancer and leukemia in farmers who used the insecticide diazinon and a possible increase in prostate cancer among farmers who used methylbromide to fumigate the soil.
The investigators looked for an association between pesticides and herbicides and breast cancer, but they did not find one, Dr. Blair said, adding that one pesticide, atrazine, was under particular suspicion because it causes breast cancer in rats and has estrogenlike properties.
Even if the study finds that some chemicals have increased farmers' cancer rates, it remains unclear what that means for the general population, where exposures are usually much lower. Also unclear is whether those chemicals should be banned.
Dr. Blair noted that such decisions were difficult because they were, in part, political, balancing the costs of getting rid of the chemical against the benefits. But, he said, regulatory decisions require reliable scientific data. "You can only make a decision if you know something," he said.
So the studies continue. "We want to know what to worry about, so at least we can make rational decisions," Dr. Blair said.
Gerald N. Wogan, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, takes a different approach. He, like most other scientists, worries that the public is overly concerned about cancer risks from the chemicals they are exposed to. But, he says, the question of how environmentally induced cancers arise is a puzzle that he would like to solve.
Dr. Wogan became interested in pollutants and cancer when he began studying the effects of aflatoxin, produced by mold on peanuts. The toxin caused liver cancer in rats and, Dr. Wogan and others showed, it also causes liver cancer in people. But exposure to aflatoxin was just part of the risk.
Dr. Wogan studied men in Shanghai who were eating foods with high doses of the toxic chemical. They ended up with four times the risk of liver cancer. Another cause of liver cancer, hepatitis B infections of the liver, increases the risk by a factor of seven.
Then Dr. Wogan noticed something that astonished him. The risk of liver cancer was increased 70 times in people who met both criteria; they ate contaminated foods and they were infected with hepatitis B.
"It was like a model system forthe environmental causes of cancer," Dr. Wogan said.
The two cancer-causing agents were amplifying each other's effects. He went on to study the mechanisms of cancer causation and discovered that the more he looked at environmental pollutants the more complex and individualistic the biochemical pathways leading to cancer turned out to be.
"People differ very greatly in their response to chemical carcinogens," Dr. Wogan said. "Almost all chemicals, with relatively few exceptions, have to be converted from what they are into something more chemically active to be carcinogenic.
"If you encounter one of these compounds, most of it is converted to less toxic material that is excreted," he continued. "Only a tiny amount is converted to a form that could cause cancer. A small fraction of 1 percent gets converted. And people can differ enormously in their genetic ability to do these metabolic conversions."
Further complicating the issue is that a person's diet, or components of the diet, can increase the activity of enzymes that convert chemicals into carcinogens. And other dietary components can inactivate enzymes that detoxify chemicals.
The calculus grows so complex that it can be virtually impossible to predict what will happen in an individual person exposed to low levels of a possibly toxic chemical. For example, Dr. Wogan said, "The same food, broccoli, can affect both types of enzymes."
Added to this are the effects of chronic infections, like hepatitis B, in which the immune system releases chemicals that can magnify the effects of carcinogens.
In theory, Dr. Wogan said, there is hope for untangling the mess.
"If we knew how to identify exactly which factors or agents or dietary factors were responsible and if we were able to identify their effects in people, then, in principle, cancer is preventable," he said. But, he added: "It's so tough. It's so very tough to do."
In the meantime, he and others say they take comfort in cancer statistics that do not indicate a cancer epidemic. Rates of cancer have been steadily dropping for 50 years, if tobacco-related cancers are taken out of the equation, said Prof. Richard Peto, an epidemiologist and a biostatistician at Oxford University.
What appear as increases in cancers of the breast and prostate, Dr. Peto added, are in fact artifacts of increased screening. When healthy people are screened, the tests find not only cancers that would be deadly if untreated, but also a certain percentage of tumors that would never cause problems if let alone.
His analysis of cancer statistics leads Dr. Peto to this firm conclusion: "Pollution is not a major determinant of U.S. cancer rates."
Advocates for cancer patients, like Ms. Gillick, of Toms River, N.J., do not agree. They say they have heard it all -- scientists' insistence that the risk of cancer from environmental chemicals is very low, that it is almost impossible to ascribe cancer in any individual to an environmental exposure, that most cancers are just a result of unlikely genetic draw or spurious mutation.
But Ms. Gillick and other advocates are not convinced.
Her son Michael, 26, was given a diagnosis of neuroblastoma when he was 3 months old. Ms. Gillick had never heard of that cancer, a pediatric cancer of the sympathetic nervous system. But she soon learned how devastating it could be.
Over the years, as Michael spent time in hospitals in New York and Philadelphia, she noticed something striking. Child after child in those cancer wards came from her town and surrounding Ocean County.
"You start talking to the other parents," Ms. Gillick said. " 'Why? How could that have happened?' "
She found what she thought was the answer: trace levels of industrial chemicals in the drinking water.
But the cancer institute and the E.P.A. investigated and said that they saw no particular danger in the water and that what looked like an increase in childhood cancer was just a statistical fluke.
Dr. Gallo was sent to talk to Toms River residents. Although Ms. Gillick said that she respected him and his views and that she found him likable, she did not like his message.
"Scientists," Ms. Gillick said. "They think it was random bad luck or whatever.
"We can't sit back and say, 'O.K., it happened.' If we could find the cause of a lot of these cancers, we wouldn't have to worry about the cure."
That is also the message of the Breast Cancer Action Coalition. "We think there is something going on, and we'd like to find out what it is," said Ms. Brenner, the executive director. "The scientists who say these kinds of environmental exposure are the smallest contributors, I'd like to know how they know that. If we haven't done the research, how can they say with assurance what is the contributor to anything?"
And, she adds, there are now so many chemicals in the environment that the task of figuring out what effects they might have is dizzying.
"Nobody can keep up," Ms. Brenner said. "And we don't know the health effects. I think it is not an irrational response to say our environment is making us sick."
That is not Dr. Gallo's view. Even though he had cancer, he is not blaming environmental exposures.
"If I were to take that tumor that came out of me and grind it up and run it through a mass spectrometer, I could find every persistent organic chemical I've ever been exposed to," he said. "Is that cause and effect? No, it's an association."
Still, he understands the concerns. "We, the scientific community, should take the blame for this," Dr. Gallo said. "Toxicologists, and I'm one of them, have perpetuated the idea that if 100 molecules are going to kill you, then one molecule is going to kill 1 percent of somebody. And that's the problem. We have a tremendous ability to analyze anything and everything, and the scientific community has said: 'Oh, by the way, we ran this chemical in rodents and found cancer. And therefore .' "
Dr. Gallo added that cancer was a complex disease. "There is a gene and environment interaction, and the environment is much broader than just chemicals," he said. "The challenge is to figure out what is the role of the gene and how does the lifestyle and environment overlay that gene."
And science, he said, is just not there yet.
Previous articles in this series explored whether diet, exercise and stress matter in prevention. A final one will look at the role of genetics. The series remains online, and Gina Kolata discusses cancer and environment in a video feature: nytimes.com/science
Preventing Cancer Correction: December 20, 2005, Tuesday An article in Science Times last Tuesday about the question of links between cancer and the environment misstated the name of an advocacy group in San Francisco whose director urged the use of the least toxic alternatives to chemicals that may cause cancer. It is Breast Cancer Action, not the Breast Cancer Action Coalition.
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Research to find link between cancer and environment fails to provide enough evidence to generate changes in policy or new initiatives to prevent illness; Dr Michael A Gallo, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences Center of Excellence at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and cancer patient with B cell lymphoma, describes his work with dioxin and his belief that it did not cause his cancer; other studies on environmental hazards discussed; many experts agree that host of factors determine who gets cancer and from what source; incidence of cancer not attributable to smoking has been on decline for past 50 years; photos; graph (L)
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https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/07/11/israel-group-families-sue-facebook-over-palestinian-attacks/072Uh8o6po6Zh0qG1I3ENL/story.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160712130831id_/https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/07/11/israel-group-families-sue-facebook-over-palestinian-attacks/072Uh8o6po6Zh0qG1I3ENL/story.html
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Israel group: Families sue Facebook over Palestinian attacks
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20160712130831
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JERUSALEM — Israeli and American families of victims of Palestinian attacks filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Facebook, claiming the social network is providing a platform for militants to spread incitement and violence, their lawyers said Monday.
Shurat Hadin, an Israeli legal advocacy group, filed the suit on behalf of the five families in New York federal court late Sunday, alleging that Facebook is violating US antiterrorism laws by providing a service to militant groups that assists them in ‘‘recruiting, radicalizing, and instructing terrorists, raising funds, creating fear, and carrying out attacks.’’
The lawsuit focuses on the Islamic militant group Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip and which has fought three wars against Israel since the Palestinian group overran the coastal territory in 2007. Hamas, an armed group sworn to Israel’s destruction, has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
The five families in the lawsuit lost relatives in attacks during the last two years. Four were dual Israeli-American citizens while one victim was an American tourist.
‘‘Facebook can’t sit in its stone tower in Palo Alto while blood is being spilled here on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It has a social responsibility. It can’t serve as a social network for Hamas,’’ said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the Israeli lawyer who is representing the families.
The suit comes amid 10 months outburst of Israeli-Palestinian violence that has seen scores of Palestinian attacks targeting Israeli civilians and troops.
Israel says the violence is being fueled by a Palestinian campaign of incitement on social media while the Palestinians see it as the result of frustrations over nearly 50 years of Israeli occupation and a lack of hope for their own state.
Since mid-September, 34 Israelis and two American tourists have been killed in Palestinian attacks. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed during the same time. The majority of the Palestinians are said by Israel to have been attackers. The rest were killed in clashes with Israeli troops.
Facebook had no immediate comment on the lawsuit, saying it had not yet received a copy. But in a statement, it said people need to ‘‘feel safe’’ when using Facebook.
‘‘There is no place for content encouraging violence, direct threats, terrorism, or hate speech on Facebook,’’ it said. ‘‘We have a set of community standards to help people understand what is allowed on Facebook, and we urge people to use our reporting tools if they find content that they believe violates our standards so we can investigate and take swift action.’’
Among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit is the family of Taylor Force, a 28-year-old US veteran who was visiting Israel in March when he was stabbed to death by a Palestinian. Other plaintiffs include the family of Richard Lakin, an educator and coexistence advocate who was shot on a Jerusalem bus last October, and relatives of Naftali Fraenkel, an Israeli teenager who was kidnapped and killed while hitchhiking in the West Bank two years ago.
Lakin’s son, Micah Lakin Avni, said the goal of the lawsuit is to get Facebook and other social media companies to ‘‘take responsibility’’ for the content floating around their sites.
Avni said that his father was hospitalized for two weeks before he died, and during that time, Avni sat by his bedside trying to figure out what had happened. He said that in his research, he was shocked to see how much violent content was on Facebook. He said Hamas-related pages praised the attack and posted a video reenactment. One of the attackers, he said, posted a ‘‘martyr’s’’ last will and testament.
‘‘On Facebook, it’s a free-for-all, because nobody has really called them to task,’’ he said.
The case is among a handful to argue that US antiterrorism laws should take precedence over the provisions of the Communications Decency Act, which normally shield online companies for liability for what their users post.
It is not clear whether the lawsuit will succeed. The court may rule that freedom of expression precedes antiterror laws. Moreover, while the attackers in the five incidents had links to Hamas, the militant group has stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attacks, suggesting the assailants acted on their own.
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said the case ‘‘appears to be a more compelling complaint’’ than other similar suits filed in recent months.
He said the most interesting argument is that beyond saying Facebook served as a conduit for hate speech, it says the service played a role in specific attacks. ‘‘This case will be well worth watching,’’ he said.
But Aaron Mackey, a legal fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US group promoting civil rights in the digital world, said he believes the lawsuit would fail.
He said the plaintiffs would have to prove that Facebook was ‘‘actively participating’’ in terrorist attacks. He also said the Communications Decency Act provides a ‘‘broad shield’’ of protection for online platforms like Facebook.
‘‘What they are really asking for is for Facebook to not provide service to certain individuals or to certain parts of the world because they’re afraid of the speech that might result,’’ he said. Any attempt to impose broad filters on expression would ‘‘sweep up a whole lot of legitimate speech’’ as well, he said.
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The $1 billion lawsuit claims the social network is providing a platform for militants to spread incitement and violence.
| 50.380952 | 0.952381 | 10.190476 |
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http://nypost.com/2016/01/21/manny-pacquiaos-retirement-vow-not-very-convincing/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160712160940id_/http://nypost.com:80/2016/01/21/manny-pacquiaos-retirement-vow-not-very-convincing/
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Manny Pacquiao’s retirement vow not very convincing
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20160712160940
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Manny Pacquiao insists his fight with Timothy Bradley on April 9 in Las Vegas will be the final bout of his career. Maybe. Sort of. Probably. No, really, it is.
“Sad to say after this I’m going to retire and hang up my gloves and focus on my other responsibility in life, to help the people,” Pacquiao said Thursday during a press conference at Madison Square Garden to promote the HBO pay-per-view bout.
Pacquiao, 37, plans to run for a Senate seat in his native Philippines with the election set for May 9. If elected, Pacquiao figures he’ll be too busy fulfilling the duties of his office to continue a professional boxing career that has seen him win a world title in eight different weight divisions.
But what if he loses the election, or someone named Floyd Mayweather comes out of his own self-imposed retirement and wants a rematch of their $400 million fight, which Mayweather won by a unanimous decision? That’s when Pacquiao’s conviction to retire seems less definite.
“I don’t know,” said Pacquiao, who already holds a congressional seat. “At that time, God willing, I’ll be a senator in the Philippines and I’ll ask the people of the Philippines if they’ll allow it. My attention and focus is to serve the people. I’ll ask the people if they agree to that.”
Even Top Rank promoter Bob Arum isn’t certain whether his superstar fighter will retire.
“He’s says this is his last fight, and we have to take him at his word,” Arum said.
This will be Pacquiao’s third fight with Bradley after losing a controversial decision in 2012 and avenging the defeat with a unanimous decision in 2014. Both bouts were in Las Vegas. It will also be Pacquiao’s first fight since losing to Mayweather last May in what was the richest and perhaps most underwhelming fight in boxing history.
Pacquiao revealed after the bout he aggravated a rotator cuff injury in the fourth round of the 12-round fight.
“I felt like I lost my right hand,” he said. “I had no strength in my right hand.”
He has pronounced himself fully recovered after undergoing shoulder surgery following the bout. He was cleared by his surgeon Wednesday to begin training with no restrictions. Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 Kos) said he has been nagged by the injury since 2009.
“The feeling now is good,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about it.”
He does have to worry about Bradley, who now is being trained by Teddy Atlas. The partnership made its debut in November with Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs) scoring a ninth-round TKO over Brandon Rios.
“I don’t know what he wants to fight me, but he’s in trouble,” said Bradley, 32. “I have a completely different mindset going into this third fight. I know him well and he’s not going to change. But I’m going to be a smart monster, solid in every department.”
Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, is not fan of Atlas.
“He’s a good storyteller, but I don’t know what that has to do with boxing though,” Roach said.
The two had some conflict back when Roach trained Michael Moorer after Atlas had served as Moorer’s trainer in guiding him to a world heavyweight championship.
“He’s never impressed me,” Roach said. “I’m not his biggest fan.”
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Manny Pacquiao insists his fight with Timothy Bradley on April 9 in Las Vegas will be the final bout of his career. Maybe. Sort of. Probably. No, really, it is. “Sad to say after this I’m going to …
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2016/06/eu-referendum-polling
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160712173247id_/http://www.economist.com:80/blogs/bagehot/2016/06/eu-referendum-polling
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Beware the “Brintroverts”
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20160712173247
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LAST year’s general election was not a happy experience for British pollsters. Throughout the short campaign, they overwhelmingly claimed the race was very tight. The press dutifully reported this consensus. “Well hung”, ran a Sun headline; “It couldn’t be closer”, asserted the Guardian; it was “neck-and-neck”, I wrote for The Economist. Nonsense, it turned out: on May 7th the country gave the Conservatives their first majority for 23 years.
How had the pollsters got it so wrong? Several explanations have since emerged. The first: there were more “Shy Tories” than had been anticipated. This term, which first arose after another surprise Conservative triumph, in 1992, refers to voters who feel slightly embarrassed at voting for such an untrendy party, so do not admit to pollsters (or perhaps even themselves, until confronted by the ballot paper) that they trust it more than the alternatives.
The second theory is that there were too many online polls. These are cheaper and easier than phone polling—so popular with story-hungry newspapers—and are more likely to elicit a “don’t know” response (talking to an actual person, people feel under more pressure to commit to one side). This can obscure an instinctive inclination towards loss aversion and caution.
The third theory is that pollsters had not sufficiently corrected for the pro-Labour bias of those voters easiest to reach. The sort of younger, more politically active Britons prone to take online polls tended to be left-leaning. Meanwhile Tory voters tended to be busier—out at work or occupied with children—so trickier to pin down over the phone.
What unites these three theories is the observation that certain Tory-inclined voters, for structural or conscious reasons, were political introverts for the purposes of the polling. Which prompts the question: could something similar be happening in the current EU referendum campaign? The recent days have brought some evidence suggesting so; with the introverts, this time, being Remain voters.
Last night, for example, NatCen, a social research body, published an experimental poll designed to avoid the flaws in conventional methods. It used new means: rather than inviting people to volunteer, the pollsters picked respondents at random to curb self-selection bias. Voters who did not respond to initial contact online received follow-up phone calls, to ensure that not just the easiest-to-reach were being polled. Projected propensity to vote based on demographic data—not always the same thing as reported propensity to vote—was factored in. Though the polling was carried out during a period (late May and early June) in which Leave appeared to be storming ahead, it puts Remain on 53% and Leave on 47%.
If, as this indicates, some of the polling over the past months has overstated support for Leave, that is borne out by a study released on June 17th by BMG Research. This suggests that pro-Brexit voters, like Labour supporters in last year’s election, are easier to reach. Among voters who responded to pollsters’ first call, Remain had a lead of 1.1%. Among those who required a second call, it was 5.6%.
One more straw in the wind: the overall trajectory of the polls. In the final week of the campaign there has been a clear, if not overwhelming, tilt towards Remain. The Economist’s poll-of-polls now puts it ahead for the first time since May 23rd. Among voters “certain” to turn out, a poll by ORB this morning has Remain on 53% (up five points) and Leave on 46% (down three). Perhaps most encouraging for the anti-Brexit campaign: YouGov’s polling has seen a sudden jump in the proportion of voters who think Brexit would leave “you personally” worse off.
What these could show is that the “undecided” and “Leave” columns of previous polls contained lurking “Brintroverts”: voters who over the past months would default to a fashionably “common sense” Eurosceptic answer, perhaps based on glimpsed tabloid headlines, when put on the spot by pollsters but now, as polling day nears, are engaging with the choice and breaking towards remain. It is easy for commentators to assume that ordinary folk have, like them, obsessed over every twist and turn of the campaign—and thus to put too much store by polling conducted weeks or months before the actual vote. It may be that warnings, like that by Barack Obama on his visit to London in April, which did not register immediately in the polls, did lodge in voters’ minds and are now coming to the fore.
To be sure, a Leave vote on Thursday is still eminently possible. Remain’s lead in our poll-of-polls is only one point, with 11% of the electorate still undecided. In today’s encouraging ORB poll its seven-point lead falls to two points once all voters (rather than just those certain to cast their ballots) are included. Moreover, for all that they can try to correct for the errors that so embarrassed them last May, pollsters are in uncharted territory. The EU referendum is not a general election; it is just the third nationwide plebiscite Britain has held. Perhaps there are also some “Shy Leavers” out there: well-educated or young folk who do not like to admit they are siding with Nigel Farage. There are many other big, hard-to-predict factors, like differential turnout (will younger voter participate in sufficient numbers?), to take into account. Still, the Brintroverts give Remain campaigners tentative grounds for optimism.
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Have polls putting Leave ahead overlooked shy, indecisive and hard-to-reach voters?
| 65.058824 | 0.823529 | 1.529412 |
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http://fortune.com/2015/08/26/wifi-battle-brewing-cell-phones/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160712194735id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/08/26/wifi-battle-brewing-cell-phones/
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Cell Carriers Want To Use Wi-Fi Airwaves To Manage Surging Demand
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20160712194735
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Verizon VZ and T-Mobile are planning to use Wi-Fi networks to broadcast their cellular signals — a move that could clog up the airwaves and lead to fierce competition, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The two wireless carriers are set to introduce LTE-U, an iteration of the LTE cellular standard that will switch to the least congested channel, which includes Wi-Fi frequencies. It eases the load on the carriers’ networks, but it could also burden Wi-Fi networks, reducing speed and quality. It’s also an inexpensive way to transmit signals, since Wi-Fi uses free, unlicensed airwaves, as detailed in a recent Fortune story.
This should worry companies such as Google GOOG , Cablevision CVC , and Republic Wireless, who use Wi-Fi either as hotspots for users or to offer wireless services of their own. According to the Journal, Google officials recently wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, remarking that LTE-U was “particularly worrisome” because wireless carriers “may view some Wi-Fi providers, such as cable companies offering Wi-Fi hotspots to their customers, as competitors.”
Verizon and T-Mobile are adamant their technology won’t degrade Wi-Fi connections. “Every test that we’ve done shows that LTE-U is as good of a neighbor to Wi-Fi as Wi-Fi is to itself,” Patrick Welsh, director of federal government affairs at Verizon, told the newspaper.
Wi-Fi usage is already growing rapidly among mobile users, and this development could lead to network congestion. In a report last year by Mobidia Technology, those on Android phones consumed 6.8GB and those with iPhones consumed 8.9GB of Wi-Fi data from July to September, 2014. In comparison, 1.8GB of cellular data were used by cellular subscribers over the same period.
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There could be serious traffic congestion over the air.
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http://nypost.com/2010/06/13/why-experts-are-usually-wrong/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160712223322id_/http://nypost.com:80/2010/06/13/why-experts-are-usually-wrong/
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Why experts are usually wrong
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20160712223322
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Every day, expert advice assaults us from newspapers, websites and televisions. But judging by the state of the world and our lives, it doesn’t seem to be doing us much good.
Blame the media (of course), but know that’s only a small part of the problem. Experts — that is, actual scientists, not just Dr. Phil — are often wrong, more often than we might think.
Scientists themselves have examined the reliability of their own findings, and have come to some sobering conclusions. Take medical research, which has been especially well-scrutinized. About two-thirds of the findings published in top medical journals end up being refuted within a few years.
As much as 90% of medical knowledge has been gauged to be substantially or completely wrong. We spend about $95 billion annually on medical research in the US, but average life span here has barely increased since 1978 — and most of the improvement was due to the drop in smoking rates. The picture of expert trustworthiness is no better or even worse in most other fields. One examination of published economics findings concluded that the wrongness rate is essentially 100%. In that light, is it surprising that we weren’t as well-protected as we thought from investment and banking system disasters?
Why all the wrong? Usually because of a hunger for easy answers that you can’t get from chaotic, complicated systems. But that doesn’t stop Oprah — who must feed a daily show — or even scientists, whose careers are tied to making a splash in prestigious research journals.
These journals want the same sorts of exciting, useful findings that we all appreciate. And what do you know? Scientists manage to get these exciting findings, even when they’re wrong or exaggerated. It’s not as hard as you might think to get a desired but wrong result in a scientific study, thanks to how tricky it is to gather good data and properly analyze it, leaving plenty of room for ambiguity and error, honest or otherwise. If you badly want to prove an experimental drug works, you can choose your patients very carefully, and find excuses for tossing out the data that looks bad. If you want to prove that dietary fat is good for you, or that fat is bad for you, you can just keep poring over different patient data until you find a connection that by luck seems to support your theory — which is why studies constantly seem to come to different findings on the same questions.
You might expect that other, more rigorous scientists would catch these sorts of shenanigans, but they often don’t, and in fact the vast majority of published research isn’t even verified. And even when bad research is outed, hardly anyone notices — we’ve all long since moved on to the next exciting finding.
Not that there isn’t some minority of expert advice that’s good, and even critically important. Most people just don’t know how to pick it out from the constant stream of flawed and conflicting findings — the housing market is recovering, the housing market is getting worse, video games deaden children’s brains, video games boost rapid thinking.
That’s why much of the public has simply stopped listening to experts, and sometimes with potentially catastrophic results, as when parents don’t get their children recommended vaccines and treatments, or believe they can eat whatever they want, or invest their savings in whatever stocks seem exciting.
The rest of us often trust experts blindly, because we’re programmed to do so practically from birth. Call it the “Wizard of Oz” effect: first with our parents, then our teachers, and then on to the authoritative voices in our textbooks and on TV news, we’re brought up to believe there are always people whose knowledge and judgment should be taken over our own. Experiments suggest that our brains’ decision-making capabilities get put on hold when we’re presented with what we think is expert advice, regardless of how bad the advice is.
Fortunately, just being aware of the extent to which even gold-plated expert advice tends to go wrong is a big first step towards being able to filter out the worst of it. So you’re already better off than you were a minute ago.
Trust me — I’m an expert on this subject.
David H. Freedman is the author of “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us — and How to Know When Not to Trust Them” (Little, Brown and Company), out this week.
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Every day, expert advice assaults us from newspapers, websites and televisions. But judging by the state of the world and our lives, it doesn’t seem to be doing us much good. Blame the media (of co…
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http://www.cbsnews.com/media/top-10-fastest-growing-states/8/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160713004955id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/media/top-10-fastest-growing-states/8/
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Top 10 fastest-growing states
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20160713004955
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The fastest-growing state in the U.S. isn't one that grabs many headlines. It's not California or Texas or Florida. It's North Dakota.
The huge landmass in the Upper Midwest, with a population smaller than Rhode Island, has seen the highest population growth over the past year, and the highest rate of growth since the 2010 Census, according to the Bureau's recently-released figures.
Although the U.S. Census Bureau hasn't released more specific information detailing whether the population growth among the states is coming from immigration or new births, the growth in North Dakota is obvious.
Its growth has to do with shale deposits, said Lisa Neidert, a data scientist at the Population Studies Center Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
The shale deposits in the West mean booming oil and gas jobs and that is fueling growth not just in North Dakota, but South Dakota and Wyoming, which all cracked the top 20 states in population growth for the first time.
Other states in the top 10 grew for other reasons, Neidert said. For Utah, which trails North Dakota, the growth may be more organic -- there are simply more babies born there than folks who die. Then there are states such as Texas, which has a growing native population and an immigrant population relocating from other states.
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North Dakota's population boomed last year, and Florida is set to pass New York as the third most populous state in the U.S.
| 10.28 | 0.68 | 1.48 |
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http://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/16/executive-compensation-should-you-defercommentary.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160713062644id_/http://www.cnbc.com:80/2013/12/16/executive-compensation-should-you-defercommentary.html
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Executive compensation: Should you defer?
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20160713062644
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Deferral makes sense if you are comfortable with your level of liquidity and do not expect any large outlays such as a child's college education or a second home purchase. Determining liquidity needs often dovetails with consideration of the length of deferral. In general, the longer you defer the better, because you are postponing your tax liability on that compensation and any growth on those assets. A rule of thumb is to defer for at least eight years, but investment alternatives can alter that time.
(Read more: Are you one of the best — or worst — leaders?)
Deferral investment plans may offer choices with higher fixed rates of return that are difficult to match outside the plan. Choices may range from mutual funds to private equity and additional shares of company stock.
The law of compounding makes deferral a good option for many. Consider an executive who receives $100,000 in pre-tax performance-based compensation. By not deferring, he could foresee about $84,000 after 10-years of reinvested after-tax proceeds. If deferred and allowed to grow tax-free for 10 years, the same level of compensation could potentially see closer to $93,000 upon distribution and after taxes are paid, making the value of deferral tangible.
Taking income now can be particularly costly if you live in a high income tax state and city. CEOs considering "retirement migration" to a no-tax or low-tax jurisdiction might wait to take distributions until this time. For example, an executive living in New York City would pay 12.7 percent in city and state taxes on income received in 2013. Or she could elect to receive distributions later, after she has retired and moved to Florida, which has no income tax. It is important to note, however, that for the lower state tax rate to apply, you would have to elect now to receive the distributions in 10 or more annual installments.
(Read more: 2014: The year of the CEO in cuffs?)
If relocation is not in the cards, deferring income to a later date may still prove effective should state and local taxes have sunset clauses. For example, California recently approved a tax increase for those with income of more than $1 million to 13.3 percent through 2018, after which the top rate will revert back to 10.3 percent, making the case for deferring, if you can, at least until then.
Another attractive reason to defer is if a company will match the income. Some do so only if the executive chooses to invest that deferred income in company stock, so it's important to evaluate how you want to hold those assets and think carefully about the company's financial future.
This leads to another consideration. When you defer compensation, you tie your economic future to the company's. Should the company go bankrupt, you would be treated as an unsecured creditor and would have to try to recoup your deferred compensation along with the company's other creditors.
(Read more: Let's have dinner — but don't bring your wife, please)
At the same time an executive decides to defer compensation, he also needs to decide on distribution elections. Do you want it in a lump sum or installments, and when will you begin distributions?
Because regulations around distributions are strict and the ability to make changes limited, deferral elections require careful consideration of future income needs. While you can't receive payments earlier than the deferral date you've chosen, you can choose to receive distributions later than you initially indicated. Choosing to make subsequent deferral elections does leave one open to stringent regulatory conditions, so it is necessary to think well in advance about the potential needs for this money and how it fits into one's overall retirement plan.
The decision to defer compensation can be a key element of a chief executive's overall retirement-planning process. And given the higher tax rates introduced in early 2013, the benefits of allowing assets to grow in a tax-deferred instrument can be compelling. Like any other investment decision, it must take into account income and lifestyle needs, and be part of a holistic tax planning conversation.
(Read more: The top 40% are paying ALL income taxes—plus a tip!)
Compensation, regardless in salary only or salary and bonus, is a point of pride and recognition for CEOs who have helped their companies grow and succeed. Making the most of it requires executive-level thought, analysis and planning.
Robert Barbetti is head of executive compensation advisory at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, advising clients such as public-company executives on issues related to compensation. J.P. Morgan Private Bank delivers customized wealth-management advice and solutions to wealthy individuals and their families. The Private Bank currently oversees $935 billion in assets.
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Executives need to decide if they should defer some of their 2014 compensation. Robert Barbetti of J.P. Morgan Private Bank offers some advice.
| 36.92 | 0.88 | 1.6 |
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/20-percent-of-profitable-u-s-companies-pay-no-federal-income-tax/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160713114306id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/news/20-percent-of-profitable-u-s-companies-pay-no-federal-income-tax/
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1 in 5 big U.S. companies pay no federal income tax
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20160713114306
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Nearly a fifth of profitable U.S. corporations pay no federal income taxes.
That's according to a new analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which was asked to explore the issue of corporate taxes by Sen. Bernie Sanders. In 2012 (the most recent data available), 19.5 percent of larger companies -- defined as those with at least $10 million in assets -- that reported earnings paid no income tax that year, the GAO found.
Overall, including businesses that didn't report a profit, roughly two-thirds of all larger companies in the U.S. had no federal income tax between 2006 and 2012.
"There is something profoundly wrong in America when one out of five profitable corporations pay nothing in federal income taxes," Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a statement. "Large corporations cannot continue to get more tax breaks when children in America go hungry. We need real tax reform to ensure that the most profitable corporations in America pay their fair share in taxes. That means closing corporate tax loopholes to raise the revenue necessary to rebuild America and create millions of jobs."
The GAO said there were several reasons why profitable businesses may not have owed taxes. Companies that lose money one year are allowed to "carry forward" the losses for accounting in future years, reducing their tax liability. A range of tax breaks, such as for R&D and depreciation of equipment, can also help lower the bill.
As a result, big companies, particularly multinationals that do business around the globe, often pay much lower taxes than the statutory rate of 35 percent. From 2008 to 2012, larger U.S. corporations that were profitable over that period paid an "effective" tax rate, as it is known, of 14 percent, according to the GAO.
Businesses must also pay state and local taxes, while companies that operate abroad are on the hook for taxes in those countries. Including those taxes, from 2008 to 2012 profitable corporations paid an average effective rate of 22 percent.
As a share of federal tax revenue in the U.S., corporate taxes have significantly declined over the years (see chart above). Average corporate income tax in the U.S. amounts to about 2.3 percent of gross domestic product, down from about 4 percent in the mid-1960s. Corporate taxes in countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents big market economies, average 2.7 percent of GDP.
In 2012, some four in 10 larger corporations in the U.S. had no federal income tax after accounting for credits, according to the GAO. The 58 percent of big businesses that did pay taxes in 2012 contributed a total of $268 billion.
Although many lawmakers favor corporate tax reform, the devil is in the details. As the presidential race intensifies, experts agree the issue is likely off the table until after the election in November.
© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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Providing tinder for the presidential race, a GAO analysis underscores just how much corporations can lower their tax bills
| 28.3 | 0.7 | 1.2 |
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http://fortune.com/2015/12/22/nike-bigger-bet-jordan/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160713130850id_/http://fortune.com:80/2015/12/22/nike-bigger-bet-jordan/
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Nike is Making a Bigger Bet on Michael Jordan
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20160713130850
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Nike plans to make its Jordan footwear line fly even higher by expanding it internationally and moving it into the apparel aisle. The athletic-gear maker said it hoped to position the brand for a future slam dunk after it showed strong results in the latest quarter.
In a conference call with analysts on Tuesday, Nike NKE said fiscal second quarter sales for the Jordan brand grew in the “strong double digits” versus the “mid single digit” growth for the Nike’s overall basketball business.
The strong quarter for Jordan helps explain why Nike executives in October set a $4.5 billion annual sales target for its Jordan product line by 2020–double where it stands today. Currently, Jordan is a mostly U.S.-centric footwear brand for males.
But Nike wants to make it appeal to both genders and also expand it internationally. It’s a strategy the company has already used in positioning its Converse brand beyond Chuck Taylor shoes to include apparel.
“The power of this brand extends far beyond the game,” Trevor Edwards, Nike’s brand president, told analysts. “This is the start of an exciting new era for Jordan.”
Outside retailers are hoping to get their own lift from the expanding Jordan brand, which first joined forces with Nike in 1984. Foot Locker’s FL Footaction, for example, has opened Flight 23 shops in remodeled stores to give more retail space to Jordan.
Basketball is an important category for Nike, which earlier this month signed a “lifetime” agreement with current NBA star LeBron James. That is a bet that James gear will sell strongly even after he’s no longer playing the sport.
Nike also reported better-than-expected profit growth for the second quarter, news that sent the stock to fresh all-time highs on Tuesday in after-hours trading. Futures orders, a closely watched metric that measures demand for Nike gear from December through April, were also strong.
“We see tremendous opportunity ahead as we enter an Olympic and European Championships year,” said Nike CEO Mark Parker, Fortune’s businessperson of the year.
Nike’s results were impressive across most key markets. Total revenue grew 4% to $7.7 billion, and climbed 13% excluding impacts related to the strong dollar. Some of the most impressive growth came from China, Japan, and across North America.
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Michael Jordan branded gear had a strong quarter.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/battle-bags-fliers-complain-over-arbitrary-carry-rules-n130806
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160713132617id_/http://www.nbcnews.com:80/business/travel/battle-bags-fliers-complain-over-arbitrary-carry-rules-n130806
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Battle of Bags: Fliers Complain Over 'Arbitrary' Carry-On Rules
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20160713132617
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As the battle of the bags gets more competitive at the airports, fliers should be warned that the rules are not always as clear or as fair as they could be.
Veteran flier George Hobica of
recently learned that the hard way when his well-traveled carry-on was rejected at the gate by American Airlines.
While his bag fit in the sizer, it stuck out one inch at the top, he said. Normally the bag is still allowed because the overall size of the bag is 43-linear inches, below the airline's stated 45-inch maximum. He was forced to hoof it back to check in and nearly missed his flight.
"When I got on the plane, there was a woman with my exact same bag in the overhead bin," he told CNBC. "Enforcement can be very arbitrary."
Many of the major airlines limit carry-on bags to 45 linear inches: 14 inches wide by 22 inches long and 9 inches deep. Spokesmen for American, Delta and United Continental on Friday all told CNBC they haven't changed those dimensions in years.
In March, United launched a very public campaign that it would begin better, more consistent enforcement of its existing carry-on limits. That change of enforcement has led to faster boarding of the planes, Charlie Hobart, a United spokesman said.
The request for more enforcement came at the request of fliers who had been complying with the rules all along, he said.
That should come as no surprise to fliers who are still mad about other passengers who try to get away with more than their fair share. A recent social-media campaign to shame the big-bag toters has emerged with the hashtag
, that features images of the alleged offenders.
All those rules about carry on sizes can be slightly different at each airline. Some other U.S.-based airlines, including Spirit, Frontier and the new PEOPLExpress, charge for items that will go in the overhead bins. Each airline proposes rules based in the size of their planes and those rules are then certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, an FAA spokeswoman told CNBC. A local FAA cabin safety inspector may periodically appear at the gate to make sure the airlines are enforcing their own rules, she said.
Some of the rules have exceptions — and possibilities for confusion.
For example, Hobica points to a recent announcement from American that states "you can bring a carry-on bag within 45" combined dimensions (including odd-shaped bags)" which appears to conflict with precise dimensions stated elsewhere on its site: "The maximum dimensions cannot exceed any of the following measurements: 22" long x 14" wide x 9" tall."
One change that American is touting is the addition of allowing garment bags in its cabins. The new policy for American, which recently merged with US Airways, now states: "In lieu of a carry-on bag, you may choose to bring on a soft-sided garment bag of up to 51" in size. You also can bring diaper bags and duty-free items, in addition to a carry-on bag and a personal item, on your flight."
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As the battle of the bags gets more competitive at airports, fliers should be warned that the rules are not always as clear as they could be.
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Donald Trump rally-goer called "my African-American" reacts to presumptive GOP nominee's comment
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Jun 4, 2016 4:30 PM EDT Politics
By Reena Flores / CBS News
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made headlines Friday when, with a racially charged exclamation, the candidate singled out an African-American man at a campaign rally in Redding, California.
"Oh, look at my African-American over here!" Trump had said, interrupting his own winding speech to direct his supporters' attention to a man in the crowd. "Look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I'm talking about, OK?"
But the man called out by Trump -- Gregory Cheadle, a Republican candidate in California's first congressional district -- didn't seem to mind the attention.
"I never, ever sensed any racism on his part," Cheadle told CBS News in a phone interview Saturday. "Looking at it now, I can see on a script -- in a transcript, or even somebody watching the clip -- I can see how they would jump to the conclusion that it was racist. But I never felt anything at all."
Instead, Cheadle took it as a flattering remark.
"It's a compliment to me," said Cheadle, who briefly met Trump when the billionaire waded into the crowd after the event.
Their exchange, reported by the Redding Searchlight, happened after Cheadle had called out, "Uncle Donald, Uncle Donald." Cheadle told the local news outlet that Trump "recognized me as the guy he had called out" and they chatted briefly about job creation.
Cheadle said Saturday that the attention Trump paid him seemed more like a recognition "that my work is paying off, that we as a black people can achieve things."
And he further laughed off the Internet uproar regarding Trump's "my African-American" phrasing: "We are a super-sensitive people now when it comes to race," he said. "I mean, super sensitive. And we're so ready to pull that racist trigger and sometimes unnecessarily so."
"I'm running in a district that's at least 90 percent white. If I wanted to find racism, I could," Cheadle added, but noted that "the prejudice people have against me is dissipating."
Asked why he felt the perception toward him has been less racially tinged, the congressional candidate said it was because he didn't fit "stereotypes."
"I don't wear my pants down to my knees," he said. "I'm not a lover of rap music ... They're seeing a far more positive role model than they've ever seen."
Despite Trump's call out to him, Cheadle has not yet decided who to vote for in November. He said that he attended the Trump rally to keep "an open mind" about the presidential candidates.
"I wanted to see for myself who he was," he said. "I just wanted to hear him. Did he sway my vote one way or the other? No. What he did do was he did inspire me."
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Gregory Cheadle gives his reaction after shout-out at presumptive GOP presidential nominee's California rally
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http://time.com/3967938/criminal-justice-white-supremacy-redemption/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160713141219id_/http://time.com:80/3967938/criminal-justice-white-supremacy-redemption/
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The Path to Redemption for Our Criminal Justice System
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President Barack Obama’s historic visit to a federal detention facility last week focused America’s attention on the brutal realities of our criminal justice system. Yet this broken system is only a symptom of an even more brutal American reality: white supremacy.
Until we accept and address this underlying cause, systemic problems including unfairly long mandatory minimums, racialized police brutality, harsh prison conditions, and unnecessary obstacles upon release, will continue to plague our nation. Like an incessant game of whack-a-mole, addressing one will only cause racism to rear its evil head in another equally pernicious place.
Every one of us needs to look deep into our souls and into our social systems to heal the wounds from our racist culture and fix our criminal justice system. This is slow, hard work—and it’s necessary.
As a Christian minister and president of Union Theological Seminary, I look with great hope to the Christian story as one that, at its heart, is a story of redemption. It’s the promise that even in our brokenness, our sins are forgiven. Why is it then that when it comes to our criminal justice system, we act in punitive ways, never in redemptive ways? Why do we continue to practice retributive justice, when we could move toward restorative justice?
Too often people with a criminal record are never given a second chance after they have paid their debt to society. In many places, returning citizens are unable to register to vote, discriminated against in employment and housing, and given an effective scarlet letter.
We must create a justice system that reflects the God-given dignity of every person and gives everyone a chance to flourish upon return to the larger society—a justice system that looks beyond prison to the active work of redemption in our society. We must eliminate the box on housing and employment forms asking whether someone is a convicted felon. We must ensure quality publicly funded employment and training programs for citizens returning from incarceration. We must eliminate mandatory minimums so that we have a criminal justice system where the punishment fits the crime. And we must ensure that all citizens have the right to vote.
Legislation that accomplishes these goals would be a good start. But ultimately we need not only policy change, but also change of hearts and minds as it relates to the dignity and value of human life. We will never solve the underlying cause of these problems—this generation’s manifestation of racism and bigotry—until we all believe in the equal worth of every human being.
The good news is that our society at large can find redemption, too. In the Christian story, we have a promise from God that we can overcome the viciousness of white supremacy still very much alive in our American democracy.
I applaud Obama for his work on this issue, and I’m hopeful that federal legislation will be passed to create a better criminal justice system. I am also heartened by the growing bi-partisan and cross-religious commitment to this work. But we can’t stop at legislation or we will fail to create the real and necessary change and healing so badly needed in our broken society.
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We must first address the underlying issues
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-agromafia-food-fraud/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160713153759id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/news/60-minutes-agromafia-food-fraud/
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Agromafia - CBS News
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20160713153759
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The following is a script from "Agromafia" which aired on Jan. 3, 2016. Bill Whitaker is the correspondent. Guy Campanile, producer.
When it comes to knock-offs of Italian classics -- you probably think of fake Guccis or Pradas -- not food.
But last month, police in Italy nabbed 7,000 tons of phony olive oil. Much of it was bound for American stores. The oil was from North Africa, deodorized with chemicals and rebranded as more expensive Italian extra virgin. The scam was cooked-up by organized crime.
Mafia copies of fine olive oil, wine and cheese have fueled an explosion of food crime in Italy. It's estimated to be a $16 billion-a-year enterprise. The Italians call it "Agromafia"...and it's a scandal for a people whose cuisine is considered a national treasure.
The image of gangsters in the kitchen was too delicious for us to ignore. So we went to Italy, where we found elite food police hunting wiseguys and signs Agromafia specialties are reaching the United States.
Leave it to the Italians to fight the Mafia with good taste. This panel certifies the authenticity of extra virgin olive oil - a favorite target of the Agromafia.
They can tell at first sip whether extra virgin has been diluted with cheap sunflower oil or canola.
Bill Whitaker and Sergio Tillo
Bill Whitaker: Sergio, why do they make that sound like they are sucking in air?
Sergio Tirro: They need it to mist it in the back of their throats..
Bill Whitaker: They have to suck it in the back of their throats..
Sergio Tirro: They have to suck it in...
Major Sergio Tirro is considered one of the top investigators of food fraud in Europe. Think Elliot Ness - in a uniform designed by Giorgio Armani.
Sergio Tirro: Most of the fraud has been discovered with the expertise like this...
Their skill is so respected, Italian courts will accept taste results as evidence. Tirro has 60 cops trained to do this too and 1,100 more conducting inspections and fraud investigations. On the day we visited headquarters, officers were monitoring wiretaps and live video from hidden cameras placed in suspected warehouses around Italy.
Bill Whitaker: This looks like the FBI...
Sergio Tirro: Yes. We can call ourselves the FBI of food.
In the last two years, they have seized 59,000 tons of food. The Agromafia's ingredients are poor quality and sometimes contaminated with solvents or pesticides.
Bill Whitaker: When I tell somebody that I'm coming to Italy to do a piece about food fraud -- it almost seems unbelievable.
Sergio Tirro: It is a serious problem because it's not only a commercial fraud...if you adulterate an extra virgin olive oil with seed oil and those bottles reach consumers who are allergic to seed oil, you are sending them bombs.
Bill Whitaker: Bombs...on your kitchen shelf.
The Agromafia has also tried to rip-off Italian shoppers with mozzarella whitened with detergent and rotten seafood deodorized with citric acid.
Bill Whitaker: My favorite, Italian wines, how are they adulterated?
Sergio Tirro: They generally use, to mix, poor quality wine and brand it as famous wine.
Bill Whitaker: So you take a cheap table wine and just put a famous stamp on it?
Bill Whitaker: And sell it?
In Tuscany, cops found 42,000 gallons of run-of-the-mill red that was to going to be sold as top-notch Brunello Di Montalcino. The score could have been $5 million.
Bill Whitaker: So this is everything. Olive oil, tomatoes...
Tom Mueller: Milk, butter, bread, a wide range of different foods.
Journalist Tom Mueller has lived in Italy for 20 years and speaks routinely with investigators and food producers.
Bill Whitaker: So where along the food chain does the Mafia get involved?
Tom Mueller: From harvesting...they impose their own workers, they impose prices...to the transportation and there's involvement in-- Mafia involvement in supermarkets as well. So certain areas, they have really infiltrated the entire food chain from the farm to the fork.
Mueller first wrote about olive oil fraud in 2007 for the New Yorker Magazine.
Tom Mueller: You in many cases are getting lower grade olive oil that has been blended with some good extra virgin olive oil...you're sometimes getting deodorized oil. They blend it with some oil that has some character to give it a little color, a little flavor...and they sell that as extra virgin. It's illegal - it happens all the time.
Extra virgin must come from the first press of olives and be free of additives. It's fruity, aromatic and has a spicy finish. The best can sell for $50-a-gallon...but a fake costs just seven dollars to make. The profit margin can be three times better than cocaine.
Sergio Tirro: I would like to show you how easy is to make a genuine fake extra virgin...
Bill Whitaker: Genuine, fake extra virgin olive oil?
Sergio Tirro: Genuine fake extra virgin olive oil...you just need some seed oil.
Bill Whitaker: What kind of seed oil?
Sergio Tirro: It is sunflower oil, no smell at all.
Sergio Tirro: Then we just have to add a few drops of chlorophyll.
Bill Whitaker: ...and it becomes the color of olive oil.
Sergio Tirro: It becomes the color of olive oil.
Eighty percent of Italy's extra virgin comes from the southern part of the country. So we went to Sicily - where the Mafia remains part of daily life in the streets and in the fields. Nicola Clemenza's olive grove is a 90-minute drive south of Palermo. We went to see him because Clemenza is leading a farmer revolt against Mafia control. His olives are hand-combed from the trees onto nets below and immediately sent to be pressed.
Bill Whitaker: Nicola, what role does the Mafia play in olive oil production here?
Nicola Clemenza: "Ma, il ruolo che ha la Mafia nella produzione di olio...
Clemenza told us the Agromafia dilutes the oil and controls prices. He's defied the mob by organizing 200 farmers to skip the Mafia middle men and sell their oil directly to distributors.
Bill Whitaker: When you organized the farmers, the Mafia retaliated against you?
Nicola Clemenza, translator: On the day I started the consortium, they burned my car, they burned down part of my home and I was inside with my wife and my daughter.
Bill Whitaker: They tried to kill you...
No - he said it was a message to stay quiet. This is a police image of the man Clemenza believes ordered the attack. He is Matteo Messina Denaro -- the boss of bosses for the Cosa Nostra. Many believe he's hiding out in the town not far from Clemenza's fields. Denaro built a $41 million olive oil empire.
Tom Mueller: It's very difficult to say in any given case with olive oil exactly how many drops in a given bottle actually have Mafia blood on them to sound dramatic. It is fairly straightforward to say, however, just how much fraudulent oil is in circulation--
Tom Mueller: Easily half of the bottles that are sold as extra virgin in supermarkets in Italy do not meet the legal grades for extra virgin oil.
Bill Whitaker: So half here in Italy, what would it be in the U.S.?
Tom Mueller: Up around 75% to 80%, easily.
Yes, you heard right - he said up to 80 percent.
Food imported into the United States is inspected by Customs and Border Protection. Its New Jersey chemists told us they have detected phony oil imported from Italy improperly labeled as extra virgin.
We were curious about what we'd find in a U.S. supermarket. So we shipped three brands of Italian extra virgin we purchased in New York back to the mother country.
They were included in a blind taste test by those experts in Rome. The process is as tightly orchestrated as a Verdi opera. Blue glass hides the oil's color. Separate cubicles prevent cheating.
The panel would not say they were adulterated - but they agreed two brands we purchased back home did not come within a sniff of extra virgin. They described one as lampante -- the lowest quality olive oil. That brand happens to be one of the best-selling in America.
Sergio Tirro: It's not that bad...
Bill Whitaker: It's not that bad...
Sergio Tirro: Not that bad...but maybe for..
Bill Whitaker: Not that good either?
Sergio Tirro: No -- not for my salads. I would never put this on my salad.
Chances are that salad was picked by migrants controlled by the Agromafia too and served in one of Italy's 5,000 mob-owned restaurants. Last spring, these two tourist spots in Rome -- were temporarily closed for alleged Mafia ties.
And the food businesses not run by gangsters -- often pay them anyway. The extortion is called "pizzo." Refuse -- and you risk broken windows - or worse.
Bill Whitaker: What percentage of the merchants here are paying the pizzo, protection money to the Mafia?
Ermes Riccobono: Actually we cannot know for sure, we could say that a big part of this.
Bill Whitaker: Most of them.
Ermes Riccobono: Most of them, we could say yes.
Ermes Riccobono took us around one of the oldest food markets in Palermo. He works with a group called Addiopizzo, which means "farewell pizzo." It's enlisted 800 stores and restaurants to stop paying the Mafia.
Ermes Riccobono: They've been doing this for so long, generation by generation, that it's normal for them. It's not even a problem.
Bill Whitaker: How much would they be asking of these merchants?
Ermes Riccobono: Might be, I don't know -- 500 Euros, $500 a month or even $5 per week according to the size of the shop.
Add it up and extortion costs Italy at least $6 billion a year.
Bill Whitaker: What makes you think that your young organization is going to stop this?
Ermes Riccobono: Well, it's what we need to do. I mean it's our moral obligation. We are a young generation. And we need to fight.
We were told we could see how the fight has taken root just a short drive from Corleone -- the town made famous by "The Godfather." Over the last decade, cops have taken 3,500 acres away from Mafia owners and given them to the group "Libera Terra" (or "Free Land." These fields confiscated from the mob have created a booming business for farmers.
Pietro D'Aleo: We have around 80 food and beverage products made with raw materials coming from this land.
Marketing manager Pietro D'Aleo gave us a taste of their success.
A wine called Centopassi that's drawn raves from critics.
Bill Whitaker: Smells delicious. Very well balanced - cheers. Thank you.
Libera Terra products are sold in shops across Italy. It turns out "Mafia-free" is a hot seller -- especially if the food is world class.
"They don't look like the olives on your plate..."
Nicola Clemenza hopes he can break the Agromafia's grip where he lives by exporting directly to American customers.
Bill Whitaker: What is your greatest fear now?
Nicola Clemenza, translater: No, I 'm not scared anymore, because fear has turned into anger, it's turned into courage, it's turned into action and now all my free time is dedicated to fight the Mafia...to fight the Mafia with the truth.
He figures his best weapon -- is the liquid gold that tastes as rich as it looks.
Bill Whitaker: You can feel it going all the way down...
© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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In Italy, Bill Whitaker finds out that the long arms of the Mafia extend to agricultural products, especially olive oil, on which the mob makes huge profits by exporting imitations
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http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Jahi-McMath-photo-brain-dead-Facebook-6925986.php
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160714030334id_/http://www.sfgate.com:80/bayarea/article/Jahi-McMath-photo-brain-dead-Facebook-6925986.php?
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Jahi McMath’s family posts new photo of brain-dead teen: ‘As healthy and beautiful as ever’
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20160714030334
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This undated photo provided by the McMath family and Omari Sealey shows Jahi McMath.
This undated photo provided by the McMath family and Omari Sealey shows Jahi McMath.
An image of Jahi McMath taken by her mother, Nailah, on Thursday, October 2, 2014.
An image of Jahi McMath taken by her mother, Nailah, on Thursday, October 2, 2014.
Nailah Winkfield, the mother of brain-dead girl Jahi McMath, embraces her brother Omari Sealey, after they stated that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator has been extended to January 7th 2014.
Nailah Winkfield, the mother of brain-dead girl Jahi McMath, embraces her brother Omari Sealey, after they stated that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator has been extended to January 7th 2014.
This undated file photo provided by the McMath family and Omari Sealey shows Jahi McMath, the 13-year-old girl who was declared brain dead Dec. 12, 2013 after suffering complications from sleep apnea surgery.
This undated file photo provided by the McMath family and Omari Sealey shows Jahi McMath, the 13-year-old girl who was declared brain dead Dec. 12, 2013 after suffering complications from sleep apnea surgery.
Omari Sealey (left), Jahi McMath's uncle, walks back into Children's Hospital with attorney Christopher Dolan after a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013. The family of McMath, the 13-year-old who was declared brain dead after complications developed from tonsil surgery, is threatening legal action if the hospital refused to keep her on life support.
Omari Sealey (left), Jahi McMath's uncle, walks back into Children's Hospital with attorney Christopher Dolan after a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013. The family of McMath, the
With attorney Chris Dolan at her side, Nailah Winkfield mother of Jahi McMath, 13, describes her daughter to journalists during a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery and the family has had to resist attempts by Children's Hospital staff to take her off of life support.
With attorney Chris Dolan at her side, Nailah Winkfield mother of Jahi McMath, 13, describes her daughter to journalists during a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became
Omari Sealey, uncle of Jahi McMath, 13, attends a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery and the family has had to resist attempts by Children's Hospital staff to take her off of life support.
Omari Sealey, uncle of Jahi McMath, 13, attends a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery and the family has had to resist attempts by
Milton McMath, father of Jahi McMath, 13, attends a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery and the family has had to resist attempts by Children's Hospital staff to take her off of life support.
Milton McMath, father of Jahi McMath, 13, attends a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery and the family has had to resist attempts
Nailah Winkfield mother of Jahi McMath, 13, attends a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery and the family has had to resist attempts by Children's Hospital staff to take her off of life support.
Nailah Winkfield mother of Jahi McMath, 13, attends a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery and the family has had to resist attempts
Attoney Chris Dolan, right, talks with journalists as Jahi McMath's father Milton McMath, left, mother Nailah Winkfield, and uncle Omari Sealey stand by during a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013. Jahi McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery.
Attoney Chris Dolan, right, talks with journalists as Jahi McMath's father Milton McMath, left, mother Nailah Winkfield, and uncle Omari Sealey stand by during a news conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday,
Nailah Winkfield, mother of Jahi McMath, gets a hug from a well-wisher after a prayer vigil for her daughter at Paradise Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif. on Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2013. McMath became brain dead after a tonsil surgery that was followed by bleeding and a heart attack while recovering in the hospital.
Nailah Winkfield, mother of Jahi McMath, gets a hug from a well-wisher after a prayer vigil for her daughter at Paradise Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif. on Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2013. McMath became brain dead
Omari Sealey, Jahi McMath's uncle, appears at a news conference in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013.
Omari Sealey, Jahi McMath's uncle, appears at a news conference in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013.
Dr. David J. Durand, chief of pediatrics of Children's Hospital Oakland, left, sits in a court room as Nailah Winkfield, center, shares a photograph with her husband Martin Winkfield, right after a hearing on their 13-year-old daughter Jahi McMath on Monday, Dec. 23, 2013 in Oakland, Calif. McMath remains on life support at the Children's Hospital Oakland after doctors declared her brain dead following a routine tonsillectomy procedure.
Dr. David J. Durand, chief of pediatrics of Children's Hospital Oakland, left, sits in a court room as Nailah Winkfield, center, shares a photograph with her husband Martin Winkfield, right after a hearing on
Nailah Winkfield, mother of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, cries before a court hearing on Monday, Dec. 23, 2013 in Oakland, Calif. McMath remains on life support at the Children's Hospital Oakland after doctors declared her brain dead following a routine tonsillectomy procedure.
Nailah Winkfield, mother of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, cries before a court hearing on Monday, Dec. 23, 2013 in Oakland, Calif. McMath remains on life support at the Children's Hospital Oakland after doctors
LaVonte Thompson, 16, who is a close friend of Jahi McMath marching as he chants,"keep Jahi alive," around the vicinity of the Children's Hospital, Monday December 23, 2013, in Oakland, Calif.
LaVonte Thompson, 16, who is a close friend of Jahi McMath marching as he chants,"keep Jahi alive," around the vicinity of the Children's Hospital, Monday December 23, 2013, in Oakland, Calif.
Jahi McMath's little sister Makhai, McMath, 8, marches with other family members and supporters around the vicinity of the Children's Hospital, chanting, "Keep Jahi alive", Monday December 23, 2013, in Oakland, Calif.
Jahi McMath's little sister Makhai, McMath, 8, marches with other family members and supporters around the vicinity of the Children's Hospital, chanting, "Keep Jahi alive", Monday December 23, 2013, in
Martin Winkfield arrives for a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of his 13-year-old stepdaughter Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Paul Fisher, chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, concurred that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
Martin Winkfield arrives for a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of his 13-year-old stepdaughter Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined
David Durand (left) chief of pediatrics at Children's Hospital, confers with attorney Douglas Straus at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of 13-year-old Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Paul Fisher, chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, concurred that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
David Durand (left) chief of pediatrics at Children's Hospital, confers with attorney Douglas Straus at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of 13-year-old Jahi McMath in
Dr. Paul Fisher (front), chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, emreges from a closed door session in Judge Evilio Grillo's chambers at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of 13-year-old Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Fisher concluded that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
Dr. Paul Fisher (front), chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, emreges from a closed door session in Judge Evilio Grillo's chambers at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to
Alameda County Superior Court judge Evilio Grillo convenes a hearing to determine the condition of 13-year-old Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Paul Fisher, chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, concurred that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
Alameda County Superior Court judge Evilio Grillo convenes a hearing to determine the condition of 13-year-old Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to be clinically
Court-appointed witness Dr. Paul Fisher (left), chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital testifies at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of 13-year-old Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. At right is McMath's family attorney, Christopher Dolan. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Fisher concluded that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
Court-appointed witness Dr. Paul Fisher (left), chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital testifies at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of
Attorney Christopher Dolan (second from right) confers with Martin Winkfiled, Sandra Chatman and Omari Sealey, family members of Jahi McMath, during a hearing to determine the condition of the 13-year-old in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Paul Fisher, chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, concurred that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
Attorney Christopher Dolan (second from right) confers with Martin Winkfiled, Sandra Chatman and Omari Sealey, family members of Jahi McMath, during a hearing to determine the condition of the 13-year-old in
Martin Winkfield, stepfather of Jahi McMath, reacts to testimony at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of the 13-year-old in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. At right is Jahi's grandmother Sandra Chatman. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Paul Fisher, chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, concluded that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
Martin Winkfield, stepfather of Jahi McMath, reacts to testimony at a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of the 13-year-old in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. At
Martin Winkfield attends a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of his 13-year-old stepdaughter Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to be clinically brain dead following complications from a routine tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland. Dr. Paul Fisher, chief of pediatric neurology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, concurred that Jahi meets all the criteria of brain death.
Martin Winkfield attends a hearing in Alameda County Superior Court to determine the condition of his 13-year-old stepdaughter Jahi McMath in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013. McMath was determined to
Sam Singer, the spokesperson for the hospital makes a statement to the news media in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013.
Sam Singer, the spokesperson for the hospital makes a statement to the news media in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013.
Sam Singer, the spokesperson for the hospital makes a statement to the news media in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013 on 13-year-old Jahi McMath.
Sam Singer, the spokesperson for the hospital makes a statement to the news media in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013 on 13-year-old Jahi McMath.
Jahi's Uncle Omari Sealey, (left) listens as Sandra Chatman talks about her grandaughter Jahi McMath while being joined by the family attorney Christopher Dolan, as they speak to the news media about the court ordered extension in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013.
Jahi's Uncle Omari Sealey, (left) listens as Sandra Chatman talks about her grandaughter Jahi McMath while being joined by the family attorney Christopher Dolan, as they speak to the news media about the court
Omari Sealey who is an Uncle to Jahi McMath, reads a statement by the family to the news median in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013.
Omari Sealey who is an Uncle to Jahi McMath, reads a statement by the family to the news median in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013.
The mother of Jahi, Nailah Winkfield speaks to the news media about the court ordered extension while in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013.
The mother of Jahi, Nailah Winkfield speaks to the news media about the court ordered extension while in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca., on Monday Dec. 30, 2013.
Marvin Winkfield places his arm around his wife Nailah Winkfield, mother of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, as they wait outside a courtroom Friday, Jan. 3, 2014, in Oakland, Calif.
Marvin Winkfield places his arm around his wife Nailah Winkfield, mother of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, as they wait outside a courtroom Friday, Jan. 3, 2014, in Oakland, Calif.
The mother of Jahi McMath, Nailah Winkfield embraces her brother Omari Sealey, after they stated that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator has been extended to January 7th 2014. The statement was made by the family to the news media in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland.
The mother of Jahi McMath, Nailah Winkfield embraces her brother Omari Sealey, after they stated that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator has been extended to January 7th 2014. The statement was
Marvin Winkfield, stepfather of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, waits outside a courtroom Friday, Jan. 3, 2014, in Oakland, Calif.
Marvin Winkfield, stepfather of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, waits outside a courtroom Friday, Jan. 3, 2014, in Oakland, Calif.
The mother of Jahi McMath, Nailah Winkfield embraces her brother Omari Sealey, after they stated that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator has been extended to January 7th 2014. The statement was made by the family to the news media in front of Children's Hospital in Oakland, Ca. , on Monday Dec. 30, 2013. McMath is still on a ventilator.
The mother of Jahi McMath, Nailah Winkfield embraces her brother Omari Sealey, after they stated that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator has been extended to January 7th 2014. The statement was
The Uncle of Jahi McMath, Omari Sealey states that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator had been extended to January 7th 2014.
The Uncle of Jahi McMath, Omari Sealey states that the court order to remove Jahi from a ventilator had been extended to January 7th 2014.
Reporters questioned attorney Christopher Dolan and Jahi's uncle Omari Sealey at Dolan's law offices Monday January 6, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. Attorney Christopher Dolan and uncle Omari Sealey announced that Jahi McMath has been moved to another medical facility and is receiving antibiotics and nutrients.
Reporters questioned attorney Christopher Dolan and Jahi's uncle Omari Sealey at Dolan's law offices Monday January 6, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. Attorney Christopher Dolan and uncle Omari Sealey announced
Attorney Chris Dolan looks at an MRI of Jahi McMath at a news conference where he showed video that he says demonstrates that McMath is not brain dead in San Franicisco on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2014.
Attorney Chris Dolan looks at an MRI of Jahi McMath at a news conference where he showed video that he says demonstrates that McMath is not brain dead in San Franicisco on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2014.
Attorney Chris Dolan holds a news conference where he showed evidence that he says demonstrates that Jahi McMath is not brain dead in San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2014.
Attorney Chris Dolan holds a news conference where he showed evidence that he says demonstrates that Jahi McMath is not brain dead in San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2014.
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The mother of an Oakland teen who doctors declared brain-dead in December 2013 shared on Facebook that her daughter is alive and well.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/college-game-plan/ready-college-why-some-students-are-more-prepared-others-n531141
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160714052457id_/http://www.nbcnews.com:80/feature/college-game-plan/ready-college-why-some-students-are-more-prepared-others-n531141
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Ready For College? Why Some Students Are More Prepared Than Others
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20160714052457
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Going to college is a huge transition for anyone. But some high schoolers are more ready than others.
Just because a student graduates from high school doesn't mean he or she is ready for college. Recent retention rates show that over 40 percent of students who start as freshmen will not be students at the same college the following fall. Experts say there are clear signs that parents, high school counselors and teens themselves can look for in assessing college readiness. Here are some of those indicators.
Students who are ready to go to college are ready to apply to college, explains Howard Greene, a nationally known educational placement consultant and the author of many college guides. If a high school student is being dragged by her parents or led by her high school counselor through the admissions maze or is passive or resistant to the process, Greene says this is a cause for real concern about college readiness.
Special report: Get tips and advice about college at College Game Plan
Being able cope with risky situations and exert self-control is a sign of college readiness, according to Lisa Damour, a psychologist, clinical instructor and author of Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood. Students who have gained the maturity to thrive in college are able to assess risk and when faced with it, don't ask themselves, "What are the chances that I get caught?" but rather, "What could go wrong if I do this?"
High school students who are are struggling with self control when exposed to dangerous substances, such as alcohol or drugs, may find these problems trail them into college.
One of the biggest changes between high school and college is the amount of unstructured time students have. When a high school student, still in a more structured environment, struggles to turn in homework on time or manage longer term assignments, they may be unable to manage their own time in college. Julia Routbort, Ph.D. Associate Dean of Students at Skidmore College says that some high school students have time management difficulties but concern should be raised about those students don't learn from their high school mistakes and alter their behavior.
One of the signs of real adult independence, says Routbort, is knowing how, when and who to ask for help. Teens who are ready for college have shown that rather than just running to their parents with every set back, they know how to seek out a teacher, tutor, peer or psychologist (or someone else in a support role) to assist with their problems.
Damour notes that college is a time full of emotional challenges and hard feelings. A student who can handle difficult times, be it a bad grade, bad breakup or bad game by, for example, exercising, listening to music or catching up with friends is displaying emotional readiness. If a teen deals with emotional challenges with drugs, alcohol or needing their parents to solve their problems, red flags should be raised.
Related: Why Students May Not Consider Taking A 'Gap Year,' But Should
Many experts offer a gap year as a way to increase college readiness. Greene notes that parents often worry about their teens taking a year away from their studies, fearful that they may not return to college. His experience suggests opposite. A year of real life leaves most high school graduates more enthusiastic about their studies and more mature and ready to tackle college.
Lisa Heffernan is a writer and cofounder of Grown and Flown, a site for parents of 15 to 25-year-olds.
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Going to college is a huge transition for anyone. But some high schoolers are more ready than others. Experts share signs of college readiness.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/android-apps-that-use-the-most-data-drain-battery-life/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160714053757id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/news/android-apps-that-use-the-most-data-drain-battery-life/
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These apps use the most data and drain battery life
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20160714053757
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Have you been wondering why your phone's battery has been draining so quickly? Related question: Are you always on Snapchat?
The video and photo-messaging app has earned itself the dubious distinction of being the number one performance killer of Android phones in the latest quarterly report from AVG Technologies, an online security company.
Snapchat has unseated past power stealers Spotify and Facebook. The app uses a phone's camera, Wi-Fi and mobile data, and GPS capabilities at the same time.
The AVG study took a look at all the top battery and data-consuming apps running on Android smartphones and tablets, using data from over one million anonymous Android app users. The study used internal metrics and usage logs that are collected by Android's operating system in order to figure out which apps had the most impact on data use, battery life, and storage capacity.
"The goal is these reports is not to alarm smartphone users, but rather to enable them to make informed choices about the apps they run on a daily basis," Tony Anscombe, senior security evangelist at AVG Technologies, said in a press release. "Apps are meant to enhance, not to detract from your smartphone experience, but with so many options, we are in danger of overloading our devices."
Beyond a phone's performance, the study looked at other things, like which were the most data traffic-consuming apps. For this quarter, that was Tumblr. The social blogging platform used more data than Netflix and Spotify combined.
That said, Spotify was the biggest storage hoarder, followed by the Google Chrome browser.
A Samsung app that gives users occasional Wi-Fi-facilitated Samsung updates (com.sec.android.fqupgrade) takes a huge chunk out of a phone or tablet's battery life. Given that nine of the top 10 phones identified by AVG were Samsung, this is pretty significant.
AVG Technologies also made a point to differentiate between apps that automatically run at start-up and those that are turned on by the user. The phone run at start-up that overall used up the most data, drained battery life, and took up the most storage was Facebook, followed by Google Play Services and Facebook Pages Manager. Also making that list was The Weather Channel app and Words With Friends, which don't seem to have a compelling reason to turn themselves on and run in the background.
Out of the apps manually turned on by the user, Snapchat topped Amazon Shopping UK and Spotify Music.
Here's some of AVG's breakdown:
Overall performance impact (auto-run at startup):
Overall performance impact (run by users):
Highest battery drainers (auto-run at startup):
3. Beaming Service for Samsung
4. Samsung Security Policy Updater
Highest battery drainers (run by users):
Highest storage consumption (auto-run at startup):
Highest storage consumption (run by users):
Highest data traffic (auto-run at startup)
Highest data traffic (run by users)
© 2015 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Report reveals the worst Android apps for your phone's performance
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http://www.people.com/article/victorias-secret-model-workout-routine
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160714072635id_/http://www.people.com:80/article/victorias-secret-model-workout-routine
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Victoria's Secret Workout, Fitness Routine : People.com
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20160714072635
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While we're quick to associate
models with lacy lingerie and washboard abs, it's easy to dismiss the hard work that occurs behind-the-scenes. We're treated to the occasional Instagram snapshot of leggy models in different Pilates poses or kickboxing stances – a stark contrast to the on-set and vacation selfies our feeds are normally flooded with. And for the most part, we're quick to solely attribute their frames to extraordinary genetics.
But no – turns out, these models work
hard to achieve such enviable bodies. (Surprise, surprise ⦠but not really.)
I've been on a fitness kick since late January and have been trying my absolute hardest to make it to morning workout classes, which admittedly has become increasingly difficult because of two things: 1) Going to the same type of classes Monday through Friday starts feeling stale after the first three months, and 2) The new seasons of
In an attempt to get excited about fitness again while simultaneously getting a taste of what VS models like
go through to score their svelte physiques, I chatted with Chase Weber, a celebrity trainer who created the 3-3-3 workout plan specifically for his model clients.
"It truly works all phases of training as it's based upon strength power and stability," he tells PEOPLE of his high intensity program, which
is a fan of. "It's a great workout for you to do on a Monday morning or evening since it sets the tone for how you want your week to go."
Since I head to the gym on weekdays and refuse to exercise at night (mostly because I'm tired and can't find an empty locker at the gym at 6 p.m.), I went against Chase's advice and tried out the 3-3-3 workout plan on a Saturday morning in my cluttered Queens, New York, bedroom.
As recommended with many exercise routines, Chase's 3-3-3 workout calls for a half-mile jog to serve as warm up to immediately boost your heart rate. I slipped on my shoes, shorts and tank top, and geared up for a half-mile run around my neighborhood that I was half-dreading, half-hoping I'd slay – considering
After logging about 0.8 miles (the music I was listening to got the best of me), I went back inside my house, eager to take on the rest of Chase's killer routine, which you can find in its entirety at the end of this post.
At first glance, the workout doesn't seem
bad. Each move seemed doable ⦠and they were. That's the beauty of Chase's program. The first round tricks you into thinking it's kind of feasible until you're less than halfway through the second round of moves. I was panting, groaning and taking mini breaks in between each session – all the while thinking I had underestimated Dev Windsor and the VS squad. They worked
and I was finally acknowledging it.
The 3-3-3 workout made me realize how badly I still needed to focus on my arm and abdominal strength (thank you, planks!) and how I needed to invest in heavier weights. I own 7 pound dumbbells, which weren't terrible, but I did find myself needing an extra bit of weight to really feel the burn – so I put on a resistance band above my knees during the squat portion to elevate the feel (or, you know, torture.) Oh, and one very,
important piece of advice for anyone looking to try out Chase's 3-3-3 routine (or any HIIT workout): have an empowering Spotify playlist on hand. I don't think I would have been able to complete the workout without the encouraging lyrics of
Start off with a half-mile jog or set the incline on your treadmill to 10 and walk to really to get your heart rate up.
-100 abs (toe touches 25, situps 25, supermans 25, bosu ball abs 25)
-Step back lunges with a curl (6 on each leg)
-Lying hip thrust with a weighted tricep extension (Lay down on the ground, thrust your hips in the air and hold while doing 20 tricep extensions)
-Elbow plank to push up 12
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And it took under an hour to complete
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http://www.cbsnews.com/media/the-5-best-and-worst-things-to-buy-at-target/8/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160714081536id_/http://www.cbsnews.com:80/media/the-5-best-and-worst-things-to-buy-at-target/8/
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The 5 best and worst things to buy at Target
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20160714081536
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Target (TGT) has gained a loyal following for its combination of low prices and stylish designs, but in some cases shoppers might be better off shopping elsewhere.
There are still plenty of categories where shoppers can find good deals, according to research from Internet shopping site Ben's Bargains. While Target shoppers tend to be wealthier than people who browse at rivals such as Kmart or Walmart, price is still important to many consumers who walk through Target's doors. The popularity of its Cartwheel coupon app illustrates that Target's consumers aren't immune to a good deal.
"For the most part it's not like you're going to get completely ripped off at Target on anything but there are categories where you can definitely find a better deal elsewhere," said Kristin Cook, managing editor of Ben's Bargains.
The typical Target shopper has median household income of $64,000 -- higher than the overall U.S. median household income of $53,657.
Cook added, "It's just being smart about where you buy certain things and knowing that one store isn't going to be best for everything on your list. Target is great for some things and not great for others."
Read on to learn about the 5 best and worst things to buy at Target.
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While the chain has die-hard fans who love its prices and style, some items may be better buys than others
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http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/11/business-government-politics-reform-opinions-contributors-paul-ryan.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160714223636id_/http://www.forbes.com:80/2009/12/11/business-government-politics-reform-opinions-contributors-paul-ryan.html
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Down With Big Business
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20160714223636
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In 1979, Robert Bartley’s editorial writing at the Wall Street Journal not only garnered a Pulitzer Prize, but also exposed a pernicious threat to free enterprise. In a piece titled “Down With Big Business,” which focused on how General Motors was using its muscle and government connections to squeeze out competitors, Bartley concludes we ought not rely on big business to defend free markets. It’s up to the American people–innovators and entrepreneurs, small business owners, Bartley’s “XYZ Bumperlight Lens Company”–to take a stand.
Thirty years later, this crony capitalism is back with a vengeance, accelerated by an aggressive program by President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership. It is wreaking havoc on economic recovery and fueling continued resentment among the American people.
The actions taken at the height of the financial panic last fall, with credit markets frozen, succeeded in preventing a systemic–and catastrophic–collapse. Since bringing us back from the precipice however, the Troubled Asset Relief Program [TARP] has morphed into crony capitalism at its worst. Abandoning its original purpose providing targeted assistance to unlock credit markets, TARP has evolved into an ad hoc, opaque slush fund for large institutions that are able to influence the Treasury Department’s investment decisions behind-the-scenes. No longer concerned with preserving overall financial market stability, Treasury’s walking around money continues to be deployed to reward the market’s Goliaths while letting its Davids suffer.
We were told that the financial giants, most prominently Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, were “too big to fail.” We were given the same slippery justifications in diverting TARP funds beyond their original intent–moving into auto companies and heavy-handed neo-industrial policy. Yet in communities across America, bank regulators are busily shutting down banks that were “too small to succeed.” The disconnect turns to frustration as bailed-out firms Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan announce record profits, while the community bank closes its doors.
With risk aversion preventing small businesses from accessing capital, job losses continue to mount and the engines of economic growth continue to stall. Small firms have to file for real bankruptcy–not the bailout bankruptcy afforded to AIG , Bank of America , GM, Chrysler and others.
Washington is working hard to nationalize other sectors of our economy too. The House Finance Committee is pushing a massive financial “reform” bill, effectively creating banking utility companies. The Treasury Department has effectively nationalized the housing finance sector, with Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac demonstrating how fast big businesses, through a federally blessed and backed oligopoly, can fall. Now, on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, health care and energy lobbyists continue to fall over themselves to cut their deals–knowing that if they aren’t at the table, they’ll be on the menu.
The problem today has escalated far beyond partisan politics. Big businesses’ frenzied political dealings are not driven by party or ideology, but rather by zero-sum thinking in which their gain must come from a competitor’s loss. Erecting barriers to competition is a key to maintaining advantage and market share. With Washington leading the way, it makes sense for the big boys to redirect their resources to their lobbying shop and government affairs office. They’re far less interested in expanding the economic pie than with making certain that they get their slice.
To be clear, the federal government should not stack the deck against big businesses either. The government does not have a stake in the fight between David and Goliath–our only concern is to make certain that it is a fair fight. The government today is far from an unbiased arbitrator, and it is smothering dreams and stifling growth.
We’ve been down this road before. There was a time in this country when the airlines, railroads, the energy sector, trucking and bus industry were all firmly under government control. The problem was not only excessive government meddling, but large established firms cooperating to protect their market share and erect barriers to new entrants.
Some initial progress on breaking up these monopolies began during the Carter administration. Then came the Reagan Revolution, whose key underpinnings were empowering small businesses, lowering the hurdles that keep new entrants out, and unleashing the power of competition, innovation, and the American entrepreneurial spirit. President Reagan, aided by leaders such as my mentor, Congressman Jack Kemp, successfully implemented a comprehensive strategy to reduce marginal tax rates, ease government’s burdens on entrepreneurial activity, restrain non-defense spending, ease trade barriers and tame the scourge of inflation.
The progress continued after the Reagan administration. The most infamous manifestation of crony capitalism during these days was Ma Bell. One company, the former iteration of AT&T , locked arms with the federal government to create a legalized telephone monopoly. Ma Bell was regulated like a utility, and for decades the industry (consisting of one company) languished in mediocrity. Americans were held hostage to lackluster service and even required to rent their phones from the telephone company. These clunky devices only performed analog voice calls and everyone avoided long distance dialing because of its outrageous expense.
Legal action was taken, ultimately leading to the breakup of AT&T/Ma Bell in 1984. While far from perfect, the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed for competition and innovation to be unleashed. The robust technological and digital revolution that followed brought Americans faster voice, video and Internet services at lower costs. These innovations were the result of the interaction of producers and consumers; the work of innovators and entrepreneurs no longer stifled by monopolistic giants and government control.
For every encroachment into the market by the federal government–under the guise of “reform”–there exist pro-market alternatives that Republicans must articulate and passionately defend. University of Chicago’s Luigi Zingales, who has written extensively on the issue of crony capitalism, reminds policymakers that the path forward requires adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach. We must champion an aggressive reform agenda to tackle our outdated financial regulatory structure, the convoluted and anti-competitive tax code, and the looming entitlement crisis, and to fix what’s broken in health care, energy, and more. We should focus on removing the hurdles the government has erected, rather than further centralizing power in Washington. The legislative reform must focus on empowering individuals instead of bureaucrats.
We cannot lose our commitment to individual liberty–a commitment we’ve shed blood to defend in generations past. The American idea cannot be defeated.
This is not a contest for one political party, one sector of our economy, or one segment of the population. We all stand to lose as crony capitalism drains the life from our economy; but we all stand to gain from the fruits that genuine, vigorous, free market competition provides.
Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin’s First Congressional District. He serves as ranking member of the House Budget Committee and senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Read more Forbes opinions here.
Comments are turned off for this post.
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How the government is smothering dreams and stifling growth.
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http://fortune.com/2016/05/26/whole-foods-lionfish/
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160715082401id_/http://fortune.com:80/2016/05/26/whole-foods-lionfish/?iid=sr-link5
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Whole Foods Selfing Invasive Lionfish Species in Florida Locations
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20160715082401
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Whole Foods has started selling a typically poisonous fish to its customers.
The species, an invasive type of lionfish that’s causing problems in Florida, is having its poisonous spines removed by Whole Foods workers and is sold to customers in the region to cook, USA Today reported.
The grocery chain started selling the lionfish for $8.99/lb beginning this past Wednesday and is expected to raise the price to $9.99/lb on June 1.
The move to sell the invasive species at stores follows recommendations by the Florida Wildlife Commission to catch and cook the species which is native to Indo-Pacific waters.
In recent Whole Foods news, the company opened a cheap chain of grocery stores on Thursday called 365, which is debuting in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake.
The company said in a statement to USA Today that the fish has “white, buttery meat [that] lends itself to a number of different recipes.”
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With the blessing of the state of Florida
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/books/03grim.html
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The New York Times
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20160715090116
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When Patrick Henry declared, "Give me liberty or give me death," his ringing proclamation reached unexpected ears. White patriots were not the only ones in Colonial America who thirsted for freedom. Black slaves, as the war for independence broke out, spied their own opportunity to throw off the chains of oppression, and it lay not with George Washington or the founding fathers, but with the British.
In "Rough Crossings," the British historian Simon Schama offers an impassioned account of the war waged by black Americans against their former masters, and, in the aftermath of defeat, their long struggle to obtain justice from the British, who had promised liberty and land. It would take years, and a brutal exodus to Nova Scotia and onward to Sierra Leone, before many of them got either.
The shot heard round the world did not pass unnoticed in Virginia. The smoke had barely cleared in Lexington and Concord when hundreds of slaves presented themselves before the beleaguered British governor, Lord Dunmore, and offered to fight in return for their freedom. Dunmore (a slave owner himself) soon organized more than 300 volunteers into a unit he called the Ethiopian Regiment, whose uniforms carried the motto "Liberty to Slaves."
All over the South blacks fled the plantations in droves. A quarter of South Carolina's slave population and a third of Georgia's left, part of a human tide that reached some 80,000 to 100,000 over the course of the war. Many took up arms and fought for the British. (Curiously, Mr. Schama has virtually nothing to say about black soldiers who fought on the patriot side.)
Some acted as scouts, leading British troops through swamp and wilderness trails, while others worked behind the lines. Still others were employed as drummers, fifers and trumpeters. "The soldiers of the king," Mr. Schama writes, marched to the music of "African-American musicians."
At the battle of Long Island there may have been as many as 800 black soldiers fighting for control of Brooklyn Heights. Three years after the Treaty of Paris was signed, a force of 300 former slaves continued to wage partisan warfare along both sides of the Savannah River in South Carolina and Georgia.
The British of course lost, and here the larger story begins. Uprooted and transported to Nova Scotia, former slaves found themselves at the bottom of the social heap. Some scratched out a living on the worst land set aside for the loyalist exiles, but fewer than half got any land at all. Their plight, however, would capture the imagination of a dedicated band of abolitionists in Britain, led by the unstoppable Granville Sharp.
It was Sharp, a minor official in the royal ordinance office, who would help create a free black colony in Sierra Leone, and whenever he steps onto the stage, "Rough Crossings" picks up speed and gains focus. A fair deal for the former slaves depended largely on moral change in Britain, from indifference to slavery to an abhorrence that would result eventually in its abolition, and the history of this transformation amounts to a book within the book.
The long march, through the courts and into the hearts of individual citizens, engages Mr. Schama's passions and inspires his most gripping chapters. Elsewhere, as is his wont, he can be verbose, digressive and given to extravagant scene painting with a heavily loaded brush. But the abolitionist movement brings out his best writing.
Sharp and his allies mounted public appeals, solicited donations and organized a boycotts of West Indian sugar, the Anti-Saccharine Campaign. They distributed posters showing the interior of a typical slave ship, with shackled human beings wedged side by side. They struck medallions depicting a manacled slave with the inscription "Am I Not a Man and a Brother."
As British sentiment changed, the plight of the black loyalists, many of whom had made their way to England and begged on the streets, captured the public imagination. Private money, and the unstinting efforts of Sharp and his abolitionist allies, supported an ambitious (and utopian) rescue mission, with African freedom its goal.
Sierra Leone was no promised land. Black and white settlers died in alarming numbers, and black self-rule was slow in coming. John Clarkson, a former naval officer who took on the duty of administering the new colony, faced opposition from local slave traders, tribal chieftains and his fellow governing directors. "What he wanted were Plato's Guardians," Mr. Schama writes. "What he had were vain, imperious, disputatious, dissolute popinjays and nonentities, many of whom spent the day drunk."
In a replay of the British experience in America, the former slaves began chafing against limits to their freedom. They drafted petitions, presented grievances and finally issued demands. "We are all willing to be govern by the laws of england in full but we donot Consent to gave it in to your hands with out haven aney of our own Culler in it," one document stated. They made headway. By October 1792 Freetown, the colony's main settlement, was no longer an idea. "It was a place — a place quite unlike any other in the Atlantic world; it was a community of free black British African-Americans," Mr. Schama writes.
History robs "Rough Crossings" of a tidy ending. The colony, beset by political strife, ends as another imperial outpost. There are other loose threads that Mr. Schama ties up in a series of postscripts. It is symptomatic that he begins his narrative with the arrestingly named British Freedom, a former slave who emigrated to Nova Scotia, but whose life in the end defies the kind of closure that a historian might like.
He makes his way to Sierra Leone, and there, like "Rough Crossings," slips into the historical mist. Even half perceived, though, his life, and that of his fellow slaves, makes a story for the ages.
A version of this review appears in print on , on page E6 of the New York edition with the headline: Slaves, Pursuing Liberty, Looked to a King. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Simon Schama offers an account of the war waged by black Americans, with the help of the British, against their former masters.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/25/opinion/editorial-observer-the-mayor-can-defuse-the-dorismond-case.html
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EDITORIAL OBSERVER - The Mayor Can Defuse the Dorismond Case - NYTimes.com
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New Yorkers are especially sensitive to racial tensions and have historically placed great emphasis on how politicians deal with issues of race. In the 1960's, for example, Mayor John Lindsay was hailed as a civic hero for walking the streets of black neighborhoods to head off urban unrest. In more recent years two mayors, Edward Koch and David Dinkins, were sent packing from City Hall at least partly because of public disappointment over how they handled racial conflicts.
Term-limit laws have already put an expiration date on Rudolph Giuliani's service as mayor. But Mr. Giuliani's oral attacks this week on an unarmed black man who was killed by the police may yet harm his chances of winning a Senate seat -- and have created a racial issue every bit as serious as those that dogged his predecessors.
In addition, Mr. Giuliani's strained relationship with black New Yorkers -- and the scanty representation of African-Americans in the upper levels of his administration -- makes the current controversy all the more difficult to defuse. Given the situation, Mr. Giuliani would be wise to admit error in his handling of the Patrick Dorismond case and apologize -- both to the dead man's family and to the voters as a whole.
The death of Mr. Dorismond last week marks the fourth time in little more than a year that the police have killed an unarmed black man on the street. This case was egregious, given that Mr. Dorismond had broken no law and was minding his own business until an undercover officer approached him seeking to buy drugs. The proper thing for the mayor to do was express sympathy for the dead man's family and, at all costs, refrain from divisive rhetoric. Instead Mr. Giuliani labeled Mr. Dorismond a violent man who was less than ''an altar boy'' and whose behavior pattern as a teenager may have contributed to his death. The administration angered many New Yorkers by releasing parts of a sealed record showing that Mr. Dorismond had been convicted of disorderly conduct when a juvenile.
New York's racial tensions, of course, did not begin with Mr. Giuliani. Mayor Koch generated more than his share in the late 1980's when he embarked on a strenuous campaign against the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary, then made a series of tactical missteps following the death of Yusuf K. Hawkins, a 16-year-old African-American who was set upon by a crowd of whites in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Mr. Koch's abrasive style was wearing on voters anyway, but he was mainly driven from office by the sense in the electorate that he was making race relations in the city markedly worse. Voters hoped that David Dinkins would succeed where Mr. Koch had failed. But Mr. Dinkins met a racial debacle of his own when he failed to deal competently with the Crown Heights riot. The riot crystallized the city's worst fears about racial friction and paved Mr. Giuliani's way to City Hall.
Mr. Giuliani arrived in office with almost no black support, and has kept black New Yorkers at a distance ever since. He ignored a plea by former Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew to meet with black citizens about their concerns, simply to hear them out. The stonewalling extended even to the city's highest-ranking black elected official, Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president. She says the mayor declined to meet with her at all until the demonstrations that followed the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man who was shot by the police in the Bronx 13 months ago.
Which brings us back to the Dorismond case. The outrage over Mr. Giuliani's smearing of the dead man began in the black community but has quickly spread, reaching Democrats and Republicans all over the state. As one Republican strategist told The Times's Elisabeth Bumiller, Mr. Giuliani is coming close to crossing a line he ought not to cross. Another G.O.P. strategist, Nelson Warfield, said Mr. Giuliani ''is kind of playing to his two worst qualities: No. 1, he's being divisive, and No. 2, he's refusing to admit that he's made a mistake.''
Mr. Giuliani can allay doubts about his leadership by admitting that defaming the dead man -- and failing to express sympathy to the Dorismond family -- was a mistake. Such an apology would show minority voters that the mayor is not completely insensitive to their fears -- and would remove this issue from the Senate campaign, where Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to use it against him. More important, an apology would disarm the many demagogues who will surely exploit this matter in the long, hot months to come.
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New Yorkers are especially sensitive to racial tensions and have historically placed great emphasis on how politicians deal with issues of race. In the 1960's, for example, Mayor John Lindsay was hailed as a civic hero for walking the streets of black neighborhoods to head off urban unrest. In more recent years two mayors, Edward Koch and David Dinkins, were sent packing from City Hall at least partly because of public disappointment over how they handled racial conflicts. Term-limit laws have already put an expiration date on Rudolph Giuliani's service as mayor. But Mr. Giuliani's oral attacks this week on an unarmed black man who was killed by the police may yet harm his chances of winning a Senate seat -- and have created a racial issue every bit as serious as those that dogged his predecessors.
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F. Lee Bailey Is Sent to Jail On a Charge Of Contempt
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MIAMI, March 6— F. Lee Bailey, a star in the courtroom as a criminal defense lawyer, went to jail today after failing to comply with a judge's order that he turn over millions of dollars in assets that a former client, a drug trafficker, had agreed to forfeit to the Government.
Mr. Bailey turned himself in to Federal marshals in Tallahassee shortly after 4:30 P.M. to begin serving a six-month term on a civil contempt order. Under the terms of the order, Mr. Bailey cannot be released until he serves the six months or produces about $3 million in cash and stock worth about $18 million.
A sullen-looking Mr. Bailey made no comment as he pressed through a crowd of photographers on his way into the Federal courthouse in Tallahassee. An hour later, after being photographed and fingerprinted, he was brought out in handcuffs and ankle shackles, still wearing his dark suit but without his tie or belt, and driven about five miles to the Federal Detention Center, a facility with 197 inmates awaiting trial, sentencing or a prison assignment.
Among the inmates there is Claude L. Duboc, Mr. Bailey's former client, who awaits sentencing on drug conspiracy and money laundering charges in the case that led to Mr. Bailey's troubles.
"We're hopeful Mr. Bailey will be released shortly," said his lawyer, Roger Zuckerman of Washington. "He's in good spirits."
Mr. Bailey's imprisonment came after the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta on Tuesday denied his motion for a temporary stay of the contempt order, accusing him of stalling. The contempt order, issued by Federal District Judge Maurice M. Paul in Gainesville, Fla., last month, had given Mr. Bailey until Feb. 29 to comply.
Mr. Bailey's problems stem from his defense of Mr. Duboc, a drug smuggler who agreed to forfeit more than $100 million in drug-related assets when he pleaded guilty in 1994. Mr. Duboc, who could be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, hoped the forfeiture would result in a shorter prison term.
During the plea negotiations, in an unusual verbal agreement, the United States Attorney's office in Tallahassee allowed Mr. Bailey to hold on to shares in Biochem Pharma Inc., a Canadian pharmaceutical company, that Mr. Duboc had forfeited. Prosecutors said part of the proceeds from the sale of some of the stock could be used to maintain homes and other forfeited property Mr. Duboc owned in France, until they could be sold. Mr. Duboc expected the stock, which was then worth $6 million, to rise sharply in value.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Bailey agreed to liquidate the shares only for maintenance expenses and to return the remaining stock and any gains to the Government.
Last January, however, Mr. Bailey disputed the Government's version of the agreement and said he intended to keep the stock's appreciation, more than $20 million. He argued that since he had assumed the risk for any loss had the stock's price dropped, he was entitled to the gain.
Judge Paul has not settled the dispute over ownership of the stock but he ordered Mr. Bailey to turn over the stock and cash. Mr. Bailey has already spent about $3 million from the stock's profits for his own expenses and liquidated 200,000 of the 602,000 shares. But he needs to repay a loan for which he used the stock as security in order to transfer the remaining shares. His lawyers are trying to raise the money needed to comply with the order.
Criminal defense lawyers say contempt orders against them are relatively rare, but they noted that the orders have become more common in recent years as prosecutors in drug cases seek forfeiture of a defendant's assets or try to use the assets to prove guilt.
Mr. Bailey, 62, who has represented such celebrated defendants as Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson, was previously jailed briefly after a drunk-driving arrest in San Francisco in 1982. He was later acquitted.
In Tallahassee, Mr. Bailey is now in a facility where inmates are housed in two-man cells, wear orange jumpsuits and are allowed visits Thursday through Monday during the day. However, James Lockley, the United States Marshal for the Northern District of Florida, said Mr. Bailey was being segregated for safety reasons.
"He was very cooperative," Mr. Lockley said. "He did what we asked."
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F. Lee Bailey, a star in the courtroom as a criminal defense lawyer, went to jail today after failing to comply with a judge's order that he turn over millions of dollars in assets that a former client, a drug trafficker, had agreed to forfeit to the Government. Mr. Bailey turned himself in to Federal marshals in Tallahassee shortly after 4:30 P.M. to begin serving a six-month term on a civil contempt order. Under the terms of the order, Mr. Bailey cannot be released until he serves the six months or produces about $3 million in cash and stock worth about $18 million.
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Temple Run: Oz Cheats And Tips
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We've just published our review of Disney's brand-new take on classic Temple Run gameplay, Temple Run: Oz. It's the most polished edition of the flagship mobile gaming franchise to date, and impressed us enough to pick up a 4.5 out of 5 score.
If you're looking for a few handy hints and tips, we've got you covered with our in-depth guide to this outstanding mobile game.
- If you want to take part in the balloon flight mini-game, you need to swipe in the correct direction when you come to a crossroads and the balloon becomes visible on the horizon. Once you reach the balloon, swipe upwards to grab onto the rope and crawl inside.
- During the balloon flight, it's essential that you avoid hitting the emerald crystals that sprout from the rocks in the sky. Having said that, you can take a few hits before your balloon is completely destroyed, so don't be afraid to go after some risky coins here.
- You'll occasionally get the chance to switch to an entirely different environment altogether. Follow the correct directions at a crossroad, then survive the run until the new environment meter has filled up completely. It's worth keeping a gem in the back for these occasions, so if you stumble you can finish off the final few meters.
- The environments are a little bit different in this edition of Temple Run. For a start, you'll have to deal with dynamic changes to the road layout, so always keep your eyes on what's happening further ahead. You'll need to jump over any crumbling masonry or tree roots that appear.
- If an enemy swoops at you on the yellow brick road, you need to slide beneath its grasp. Don't do this too early, otherwise you'll stand up straight into it! Wait until the creature is almost touching you before ducking underneath it.
- If you see a key on the road, make sure you jump up to grab it. At the end of the run, you'll be given the chance to pick a music box at random. Depending on which one you select, you could receive a decent points or coin boost.
- Don't forget to upgrade your abilities. You can do this by heading into the game store and spending some of the coins you've collected on power-ups and enhancements.
- The Magic Magnet will attract all coins on the playing field towards you, the Fireworks are good for distracting enemies, the Coin Bonus gives you an instant injection of cash on your run, the Score Bonus improves your score in line with your multiplier, the Shield will save you from one clumsy encounter, and Finley's Boost will race you ahead safely for a period of time.
- If you want to get more coins in Temple Run: Oz, we recommend investing in the Double Coins ability early on. This will cause double-value coins to appear much earlier in each run, ultimately giving you more cash, more quickly, to upgrade other areas of the game.
- Getting bored of the early stages of the game? There are two types of headstart available in Temple Run: Oz, one that gives you a 1,000m boost from the start, and another that gives you a 2,500m boost. These cost coins though, and can only be used once.
- Getting an unbroken run of coins fills up your coin meter. Once it's filled completely, you can double-tap anywhere on the screen to activate a temporary power-up. Don't forget to make use of these power-ups as soon as they become available.
Read our Temple Run: Oz review
Download Temple Run: Oz (iOS)
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We've just published our review of Disney's brand-new take on cla ic Temple Run gameplay, Temple Run: Oz. It's the most polished edition of the flagship mobile gaming franchi
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http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/07/16/17/51/france-attacker-called-volatile
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France attacker called volatile
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The man responsible for turning a night of celebration into one of carnage in the seaside city of Nice was a petty criminal who hadn't been on the radar of French intelligence services before the attack.
As authorities in France frantically search for clues that might indicate a network of supporters of the kind that emerged after the Paris attacks last November, what is known so far about Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel suggests a troubled, angry loner with little interest in Islam.
The 31-year-old was born in Msaken, a town in Tunisia, but moved to France years ago and was living in the country legally, working as a delivery driver.
At an apartment block in the Quartier des Abattoirs, on the outskirts of Nice, neighbours described the father of three as a volatile man, prone to drinking and womanising, and in the process of divorcing his wife.
His father said Bouhlel had violent episodes during which "he broke everything he found around him".
"Each time he had a crisis, we took him to the doctor who gave him medication," Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel told BFM television.
His son hadn't visited Tunisia in four years and hadn't stayed in contact with his family, he said.
"What I know is that he didn't pray, he didn't go to the mosque, he had no ties to religion," said the father, noting that Bouhlel didn't respect the Islamic fasting rituals during the month of Ramadan.
In a news conference Friday, hours after the attack in which 84 people were killed and 202 were wounded, prosecutors said they had found no links to the Islamic State extremist group.
Bouhlel had had a series of run-ins with the law for threatening behaviour, violence and theft over the past six years. In March, he was given a six-month suspended sentence by a Nice court for a road-rage incident.
His court-appointed lawyer, Corentin Delobel, said he observed "no radicalisation whatsoever", and Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Bouhlel was never placed on a watch list for radicals.
Still, Bouhlel could have felt inspired by calls from extremist groups to carry out acts of murder in France, said Molins. Though no group has claimed responsibility for the Nice attack, President Francois Hollande called it "undeniably terrorist in nature" and extended a state of emergency imposed after the November 13 assault on Paris nightspots that claimed 130 lives.
Records show that the 19-tonne truck that was rammed through the seaside crowd in Nice was rented in the outskirts of the city on July 11 and overdue on the night of the attack.
About 25 minutes before the July 14 fireworks show, a popular event that draws hundreds of thousands of people to the Nice seafront each year, Bouhlel climbed into the vehicle and drove toward the city centre.
Shortly after 10.30pm, he drove onto the Promenade des Anglais that had been closed to traffic for the night.
Witnesses described seeing how Bouhlel purposely steered the truck to hit men, women and children as they tried to flee.
"It was such a nice atmosphere before this started," recalled Sanchia Lambert, a tourist from Sweden who had come to visit family in Nice. "There were people playing drums, kids riding their bikes. That makes what happened all the worse."
Her husband, John Lambert, said the couple were almost struck by Bouhlel.
"I saw his face," Lambert told the Associated Press. "He was totally focused."
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What is known so far about Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel suggests a troubled, angry loner with little interest in Islam, authorities say.
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H&M hired Caitlyn Jenner as the face of a huge campaign
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Caitlyn Jenner and H&M are working together.
The pop culture icon is now the face of the fast fashion behemoth's Sport line, Fortune reports.
According to a statement received by Fortune, Jenner was not hired for her recent cultural ascension as a transgender icon, but rather, for her history as an athlete.
She is "one of the world's most celebrated athletes," the statement, via Fortune, said.
H&M shared an Instagram post sharing the news, stating that more of the campaign will be coming soon. H&M referred to Jenner as "strong and beautiful" in the caption.
The response has been mixed. Several Instagram commenters swore off shopping at H&M, though one reminded the naysayers that Jenner is "a gold medal winning, decathlete at that. Probably a fine choice to model sportswear, I'd say."
See more recent photos of Caitlyn Jenner:
H&M hired Caitlyn Jenner as the face of a huge campaign
BEVERLY HILLS, CA - FEBRUARY 28: TV personality Caitlyn Jenner arrives at the 2016 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Graydon Carter at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 28, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images)
BEVERLY HILLS, CA - FEBRUARY 14: Chris Rock, A. J. Calloway and Caitlyn Jenner attend the 2016 Pre-GRAMMY Gala and Salute to Industry Icons honoring Irving Azoff at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 14, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage)
NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 10: Caitlyn Jenner is seen on February 10, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Ignat/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 09: Caitlyn Jenner is seen on the streets of Manhattan on February 9, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Stewart/GC Images)
RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CA - FEBRUARY 02: Executive Producer Caitlyn Jenner speaks at the AOL 2016 MAKERS conference at Terranea Resort on February 2, 2016 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)
PASADENA, CA - JANUARY 14: Tv personality Candis Cayne (L) and executive producer/tv personality Caitlyn Jenner speak onstage during the 'I Am Cait' panel discussion at the NBCUniversal portion of the 2016 Winter TCA Tour at Langham Hotel on January 14, 2016 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 04: Caitlyn Jenner Hosts Special Screening Of 'Tangerine' at Landmark Nuart Theatre on January 4, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage)
Caitlyn Jenner speaks to the Chicago House luncheon at the Hilton Chicago on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015. (Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 09: Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner attends Glamour's 25th Anniversary Women Of The Year Awards at Carnegie Hall on November 9, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)
NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 08: Caitlyn Jenner seen at the Soho House for dinner on November 08, 2015 in New York, New York. (Photo by Josiah Kamau/BuzzFoto via Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 08: Caitlyn Jenner seen leaving 'Therese Raquin' on Broadway in Midtown on November 8, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Robert Kamau/GC Images)
LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 27: Caitlyn Jenner attends Logo TV's 'Beautiful As I Want To Be' web series launch party at The Standard Hotel on October 27, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 27: (L-R) Chandi Moore, Candis Cayne, Caitlyn Jenner and Geena Rocero attend Logo TV's 'Beautiful As I Want To Be' Web Series Launch Party at The Standard Hotel on October 27, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Gabriel Olsen/FilmMagic)
LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 27: Caitlyn Jenner attends Logo TV's 'Beautiful As I Want To Be' Web Series Launch Party at The Standard Hotel on October 27, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Gabriel Olsen/FilmMagic)
LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 03: TV personality and activist Caitlyn Jenner speaks onstage during the Point Foundation's Annual Voices On Point Gala at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on October 3, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images for The Point Foundation)
PACIFIC PALISADES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Caitlyn Jenner attends the 8th Annual Safety Harbor Kids Polo Classic Fundraiser at Will Rogers State Historic Park on September 12, 2015 in Pacific Palisades, California. (Photo by Michael Bezjian/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 03: Caitlyn Jenner is seen on September 03, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by gotpap/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
LOS ANGELES, CA - JULY 24: (EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE) Caitlyn Jenner attends Culture Club's performance at the Greek Theatre on July 24, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Nederlander)
Photo by: Joel Mark/STAR MAX/IPx ©2015 7/16/15 Caitlyn Jenner at The Del Mar Thoroughbred Club. (Del Mar, CA)
LOS ANGELES, CA - JULY 24: Caitlyn Jenner introduces Boy George and Culture Club at The Greek Theatre on July 24, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Tibrina Hobson/WireImage)
Caitlyn Jenner accepts the Arthur Ashe award for courage at the ESPY Awards at the Microsoft Theater on Wednesday, July 15, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 29: Caitlyn Jenner is seen in Tribeca on June 29, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Alo Ceballos/GC Images)
NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 30: Caitlyn Jenner arrives at Patrica Field store in Soho on June 30, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images)
NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 30: Caitlyn Jenner is seen coming out of Patricia Field store in New York City on June 30, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images)
NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 30: Caitlyn Jenner is seen on June 30, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by NCP/Star Max/GC Images)
This comes on the heels of the news that Jenner would be partnering with MAC cosmetics for a new lipstick called Finally Free.
Read the full statement regarding H&M's choice to partner with Jenner, via WWD, below:
"For H&M it is important to show diversity and a range of personalities in everything we do. We have picked Caitlyn Jenner, one of the world's most celebrated athletes, as part of this H&M Sports campaign because we want to illustrate that everything is possible — in sports and in life. It is a collection of performance sportswear made to celebrate individuality and self-belief."
NOW WATCH: We talked to the 'Most Interesting Man in the World' about his retirement — here's what he's most excited about
SEE ALSO: Caitlyn Jenner is starting a brand-new partnership with MAC cosmetics
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According to a statement, Jenner was not hired for her recent cultural ascension as a transgender icon, but rather, for her history as an athlete.
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Hop aboard Hong Kong's wildest ride
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IT'S 3 A.M., you’re drunk, and you’re in Hong Kong’s famous nightlife district, Lan Kwai Fong. You check your pockets: HK$20 (about £2), not even enough for a taxi. How will you get home?
Then, as you stumble down D’Aguilar Street to Queen’s Road, the answer reveals itself: the red minibus. You pile on, sit down and notice a sticker pasted above the driver, warning that you will be charged HK$300 if “your vomitus smears the carriage.” Then you notice the oversized speedometer hanging from the ceiling, next to which is another warning: “The maximum speed of this vehicle is limited to 80 km/h.”
Except it isn’t, as you soon find out when the minibus departs, racing down Connaught Road to the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, its speed soaring above 80 as a warning light flashes and the speedometer squeals. You look around at your fellow passengers perched on padded pleather seats: Chinese bar-goers, Nepalese restaurant workers, European exchange students. There are plastic handles on the back of each seat — useful for when the bus swings around a corner at high speed. There are seatbelts, but few people wear them.
Hong Kong is often said to have one of the best public transport systems in the world. The former British colony has the world’s largest fleet of double-decker buses, 18,000 taxis, and a spotless, efficient subway system known as the MTR. And yet, every day, thousands of people opt to ride one of the 1,138 red-topped, 16-seat Toyota Coaster minibuses that are notorious not only for their speed, but for their eccentric drivers, unregulated fares, and tendency to smash into other vehicles.
According to the Hong Kong Transport Department, between 2005 and 2015, minibuses were involved in 12,237 road accidents, with an average rate of 256 crashes per 1,000 vehicles — nearly 20 times the accident rate of private cars. “Once I was on the bus from Causeway Bay down to Shau Kei Wan [and] the driver was reading a newspaper,” says industrial designer Danny Fang. “Funny, I was the only one who said something about it.”
So why take the minibus if it’s so dangerous? Easy, says one veteran driver, who would only give his name as Mr. Ho. “It’s fast.”
Minibuses exist to plug a gap in the public transport network
It’s also convenient. Uber still isn't dominant here, and unlike other forms of public transport, red minibuses are only loosely regulated, which gives them the ability to run a point-to-point service between destinations, changing the route as necessary to avoid traffic jams or pick up more passengers. Most routes are well-established by tradition, though, so rather than requesting their destination when they board the bus, passengers know where to catch a bus heading in their direction. Minibuses seat a maximum of 16 passengers and all passengers must be seated, so once a bus fills up, it becomes an express service until the first passenger needs to get off, making it a particularly speedy way to travel long distances.
Hong Kong isn’t alone in having a network of informal minibuses. Similar systems exist in Manila, where old military jeeps known as Jeepneys roam the streets, while minibus taxis connect far-flung neighbourhoods in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Even New York has a network of jitneys known as “dollar vans” that connect immigrant enclaves. But in most of these cases, minibuses exist to plug a gap in the public transport network. Only in Hong Kong do they compete directly with such a comprehensive array of buses and trains.
It’s a system that dates back to 1967, when the Cultural Revolution spilled over the border from China. Left-wing agitators were intent on overthrowing the colonial British government, and Hong Kong was crippled by protests, strikes and riots. When drivers from the city’s major bus companies went on strike, shared taxis that had long served the rural New Territories began to illegally pick up passengers in the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. The colonial government decided to legalize this additional service.
Today, the government mandates the number of seats and the type of vehicle that may be used as minibuses, which it refers to officially as “public light buses.” Other than that, drivers are free to determine their own routes and fares. Drivers are free agents who rent the vehicles for a shift — the going rate is HK$800 per day — which gives them extra incentive to drive quickly and pick up as many passengers as possible.
It also leaves them free to personalize their vehicles as they see fit. Some driver keep a potted plant on their front dash, while others glue down anime figurines and other toys. Cantonese opera often plays through the stereo, though late-night drivers prefer something racier – like throbbing techno music.
A distinct culture has developed around the minibuses. Most passengers call out their stops by street name or landmark — “Garbage depot, please!” — while those unfamiliar with the route employ the all-purpose Cantonese phrase yau lok, which simply means “get off.”
“Not only do you have to shout out really loud in the middle of a bus packed with people, but once you do then it'll swerve frighteningly across the road, whatever is around, and skid to a stop,” recalls former Hong Kong resident Nicholas Olczak, who often used minibuses to get around town.
The government has often had a contentious relationship with red minibuses. In the 1980s, it began issuing licenses for green minibuses, which have regulated routes, stops and fares. Green minibuses tend to have more stops, which means they drive more slowly, and drivers earn a salary – which means there is no pressure to complete the route as quickly as possible. “[The] Transport Department has been trying to convert all red minibuses to green minibuses whenever there are new potential profitable routes for them to run,” says Hung Wing-tat, a transportation expert and associate professor at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.
When you’re a red minibus driver, you’re free to do what you want
Minibuses are problematic not only for their high accident rate. Passengers often complain that drivers hike fares on particularly busy nights. In neighbourhoods like Mongkok, entire streets are occupied by idling minibuses, which leads to sky-high levels of nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants. Mafia-like organisations known as triads have also elbowed their way into the industry, shaking drivers down for protection fees. In 2010, police cracked down on a triad racket that controlled three minibus routes and pocketed HK$14 million a year in protection money.
Despite these issues, Hung says the government is reluctant to change the status quo, because red minibuses are useful in soaking up extra demand for public transport during busy times like festivals. But drivers can’t do much about the MTR, which is building several new lines that will compete directly with some of the most popular minibus routes.
In June, Cheung Hon-wah, chairman of the Hong Kong Public Light Bus Owner and Driver Association, called red minibuses a “twilight industry” that will gradually disappear. A new MTR line to the west side of Hong Kong Island has nibbled away at ridership, and more lines are under construction in areas like Kowloon City, which are the bread and butter of many red minibus services. The government estimates about 337,500 people take red minibuses every day, but the informal nature of the industry means it is hard to determine whether this number is growing or shrinking.
Other signs point to a rough road ahead for red minibuses. The South China Morning Post reported in June that the value of a minibus licence has dropped from HK$7.5 million in 2013 to $4.8 million today, a sign that the industry has become less profitable.
Mr. Ho, the minibus driver, isn’t convinced of the gloomy prognosis. “I’ve driven all sorts of things – taxis, green minibuses – and there’s so many rules,” he says. “You work for a boss and you always have a hand on your throat. With us red minibus drivers, if one route doesn’t work anymore, we’ll drive another. When you’re a red minibus driver, you’re free to do what you want.”
Whatever happens, drivers aren’t likely to take it lightly. When a policeman issued a traffic ticket to a minibus driver in Mongkok last summer, dozens of drivers blockaded a major thoroughfare in retaliation, leading to a two-hour standoff with police. Drivers claimed the lack of a suitable bus terminus meant they had to break traffic laws, and the government has suggested building a large new terminus in Mongkok, where most red minibuses congregate.
Even larger changes could be underway. As the MTR opens new lines and ridership continues to drop, the ranks of red minibuses could well thin out. But at least one proposal could save the industry. Drivers and minibus owners have long lobbied the government to allow larger vehicles with room for 20 or more passengers, which owners say could boost revenue by 10 or 20%.
And minibus owners might need that extra cash. Uber is growing in popularity and competes with cabs, but the red buses still offer fares that are less pricy, depending in the route. Will the share economy disrupt the way Hong Kong residents get around — even when they're drunk and looking for the cheapest and fastest ride available?
Maybe. For now, though, red minibuses will keep running as they always have: on the edge.
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In a city with one of the world's best public transport networks, the cheap, fast, accident-prone red minibus survives.
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/21/nicola-sturgeon-jo-cox-death-will-inevitably-affect-eu-referendum
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160721005536id_/http://www.theguardian.com:80/politics/2016/jun/21/nicola-sturgeon-jo-cox-death-will-inevitably-affect-eu-referendum
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Nicola Sturgeon: Jo Cox death will inevitably affect EU referendum
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Nicola Sturgeon believes it is inevitable that the killing of Jo Cox will have an impact on the EU referendum and suggests that voters will be increasingly disgusted at the “poisonous” nature of the campaign after the politician’s death.
Speaking to the Guardian on Monday, as the Westminster parliament paid tribute to the 41-year-old Labour MP who was fatally attacked in her West Yorkshire constituency last Thursday, Sturgeon said: “I think it inevitably will [affect voting decisions]. It’s too early to say whether it will have a direct impact on the result. I think there was a bit of disgust setting in on Thursday morning about the Farage poster. I started to detect a sense of ‘if you’re voting leave, are you associating yourself with that?’.
“Obviously nobody knows whether the debate around the referendum had anything to do with what happened to Jo, but the sense that the debate had become a little bit poisonous and a little bit intolerant and focused on fear of foreigners as opposed to legitimate debate about immigration, I suspect what happened will have intensified those feelings.”
Related: MPs pay tribute to Jo Cox's 'humanity, compassion and irrepressible spirit'
Scotland’s first minister also said that the media’s treatment of Cox’s death risked ignoring the wider politics around the attack, suggesting that it would have been very different had the alleged perpetrator been a Muslim. “The [media] treatment of this event has been very different from the treatment of other attacks that have been equally horrific. I do feel that if the person arrested for this had been Muslim, for example, the treatment would have been very different.”
Describing herself as disappointed by how focused the referendum campaign has become on immigration, the SNP leader accused leading Brexit campaigners of “exploiting and twisting” people’s fears. “The leadership of the leave campaign – and I emphasise leadership because there are lots of people who will be voting leave for reasons that I don’t agree with but nonetheless are legitimate reasons and don’t deserve to be dismissed by calling them racist and intolerant – what the leadership have done, and I’m not just talking about Nigel Farage, but Boris Johnson and others, is to allow themselves to be associated with this view that pressure on our public services is the fault of immigrants, immigrants are the fault of the EU and therefore the answer is to close our borders and pull up the drawbridge. It has been really, really distasteful.
“[It’s] not that I think that people’s concerns should be ignored, but the leave campaign has exploited and tried to twist people’s fears around immigration into something that is really distasteful.” All politicians should draw a lesson from the referendum that there was a “need to change the tone and the narrative around immigration”, she said.
Asked whether there were plans in place to initiate the process for a second Scottish independence referendum should there be a Brexit victory on Thursday, in which the majority of Scots vote to remain but are dragged out of the EU by other parts of the UK, Sturgeon said: “Our manifesto was very clear that the Scottish parliament should in these circumstances have the right to propose another referendum. Even if we don’t take the decision straightaway that it’s definitely happening in a particular timescale, we’ll have to start doing certain things to keep that option open. It takes time to legislate for a referendum. So it’s going to be really important to make sure that every option that is available to Scotland to protect our position is kept open.”
She insisted, however, that she genuinely hoped not to find herself in such a position. “I want there to be another independence referendum at some stage, I want Scotland to be independent, but I wouldn’t choose to have it happen because England votes to come out of the EU.”
Reflecting on the longer term impact of Cox’s death, Sturgeon suggested that politicians needed to counter their critics while leading by example when it came to changing the tone of debate. “Maybe its time for politicians to fight back a little bit in terms of this notion that politicians are all in it for themselves, we’re all the same, we’re not driven by sincere motives. Because the fact of the matter is the vast majority are. Most politicians come into politics because they want to make a difference, we just have different ideas how to do it.
“It’s very much the currency of discourse on social media where political disagreements very quickly become very personalised. It would be naive to think that this tragedy is suddenly going to change all of that, but maybe the next time someone is about to compose a tweet that hurls personal abuse they could think twice. Politicians, while we can’t control the tone of debate on social media completely, we can lead by example.”
She cautioned, however, against forfeiting passion in pursuit of a gentler discourse. “I didn’t know Jo at all, but everything that I’ve read about her in the past few days leads me to believe that the last thing she would want would be for us to stop being really passionate about political debate. When people talk about changing the style of politics it’s important we don’t have that mean politics becomes anodyne.”
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Scotland’s first minister says in Guardian interview that MP’s killing has intensified voters’ distaste for ‘poisonous’ campaign
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-saving-tips/10542468/The-best-apps-to-make-and-save-you-money.html
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http://web.archive.org/web/20160721005732id_/http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/finance/personalfinance/money-saving-tips/10542468/The-best-apps-to-make-and-save-you-money.html
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The best apps to make and save you money
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A tool to help you monitor the energy use of your household. Enter all the data from your paper bills and then tap in meter readings to learn how much energy you’ve used and what it will cost. UK users can compare prices with other energy suppliers in their area.
Debt Manager helps you to organize, track and pay off all your debts. Choose how you pay off your debts and develop repayment strategies.
Calculates take home salary from your annual, hourly, daily, weekly or monthly wage. This calculator also allows you to see the difference between an old salary and a new one, and it takes into account National Insurance contributions, student loan repayments and pension contributions.
Goodbudget (formerly Easy Envelope Budget Aid)
Free; iPhone, iPad and Android
A household budgeting app that syncs between devices so you can budget with friends and family, based on a budgeting method that maps your spending needs into different categories.
An app to help you track all of your investments with personalised portfolio watchlists that can be synchronised across multiple devices.
Useful for business, shoppers and travellers who need to calculate VAT figures. This app works out what VAT to add to a figure as well as the tax already included. It can be used in different countries with adjusted rates.
Free; iPhone, iPad and Android
Vouchercloud uses GPS technology to find deals and discounts nearest to you. Users select the offer they want and the voucher is downloaded straight to your phone. Current offers include 25pc off knitwear in H&M and 25pc off dinner at Strada. Available in the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and Malta.
WhatsApp is one of the fastest growing services on the Internet, with more than 400m monthly users who can send text messages, pictures and video and audio files for free over the internet, bypassing possible network charges.
Designed by Graham Healey, the same developer of Meter Readings, this app is a budgeting tool which helps you track spending and monitor balances across multiple accounts. It can be personalised and comes with handy alerts like bill reminders. There is a free version available to test it out before buying.
Free; iPhone, iPad and Android
It is hard to keep track of how much data we use each month, which can mean unexpected charges, especially on smartphones. Onavo, recently bought by Facebook, is a compression app that minimises how much data your phone uses when not connected to Wi-Fi and displays all your data usage.
If you are saving for a house deposit, a holiday or just looking to put some money aside, this app can help. Users enter a target amount and an optional target date and the app suggests a schedule and tracks your progress.
A shopping price comparison app for Android that helps users find the best bargains available online and on the high street. Users can search for a product, and create lists of items to monitor their prices. It also features a barcode scanner, which will display product information, reviews, and the best web price.
Free; iPhone, iPad and Android
Toshl is an expense and budget tracker. It’s particularly good for travellers as it works with any currency and lets you separate your travel budget from everyday spending. There are bill reminders and you can set up repeat expenses, among other tools, and it syncs across multiple devices.
This app helps you organise and track your personal finances. Users can track their accounts, set budget targets and set alerts when bill payments are due. Password protected and users can backup and restore data over WiFi.
Users can monitor and improve their vehicle’s fuel efficiency to cut costs at the pump. The app can track multiple vehicles and also includes an option to store recommended tire pressures and oil types for each one.
*Share your suggestions in the reader comments below*
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Install the best money apps on your smartphones and tablets - here is Telegraph Money's pick of the bunch
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